Sunday's sermon may arrive with a changelog

A church district would issue practical guidance to its ministers on preparing sermons with machine assistance. The guidance would not settle whether they should. It takes as read that some already would, and moves briskly on to the part institutions are genuinely good at: documentation. Under the draft, a sermon would carry a version number, a list of sources consulted, and a box confirming human review.

The visible half would be the projector. Bottom right corner, in small type: v1.4. Paragraphs marked in two shades — grey for generated and approved unchanged, dark for rewritten by hand. A member of the working group would propose a third shade for passages rewritten during the service itself. It would be rejected as unverifiable, which is the most honest sentence in the annex.

“We are not asking whether a machine can write a sermon,” a spokesperson for the district would say. “It can, and several have been read. We are asking whether a congregation is entitled to know. Our answer is that if the question has to be argued, the answer is already yes.”

The first awkwardness would arrive with the colour coding, which makes visible how much of any sermon was ever new. The borrowed commentary, the illustration lifted from a book of illustrations, the story told in four parishes before this one. A congregation shown the grey might discover that the proportion sits closer to the historical average than anyone intended to raise.

The second awkwardness is attention. A congregation given a changelog will read the changelog. The eye goes to the corner where the numbers change, and nothing in the liturgy competes with a number that moves. One long-serving elder would note, without drama, that he always knew which parts were not the minister's. He simply never had a colour for it before.

The deeper problem would be raised by an older minister during the consultation, and would not be resolvable by template. The authority of a sermon never rested on originality. It rested on the same person being there on Tuesday, having believed it when nobody was watching. There is no field for that, and a review checkbox is a thin substitute for the thing it stands in for.

Nothing has been adopted. The guidance remains a draft with an annex of example templates, one of which contains the word deployment in the sense the software industry uses it, apparently without anyone in the working group stopping to look at it twice.