ChatGPT runs a 40-minute church service in Germany

Imagine lining up outside a 19th-century neo-Gothic church on a Friday morning, only to find the pulpit replaced by a giant screen showing a deadpan avatar reciting scripture. That is exactly what happened at St. Paul’s church in the Bavarian town of Fuerth, Germany, where over 300 people packed the pews for an experimental service run almost entirely by artificial intelligence.

The 40-minute service included prayers, music, sermons, and blessings. Jonas Simmerlein, a 29-year-old theologian and philosopher from the University of Vienna, created the event using ChatGPT. Simmerlein noted that he merely guided the process, estimating that about 98% of the service came directly from the machine. He fed the bot the convention slogan, "Now is the time," told it to act as a preacher at the church congress, and asked for psalms, prayers, and a final blessing.

A sermon without a soul

Four different avatars—two young women and two young men, including a bearded Black man projected above the altar—took turns leading the congregation. The bot preached about leaving the past behind, confronting the challenges of the present, overcoming the fear of death, and trusting in Jesus Christ.

Yet the delivery felt distinctly synthetic. The avatars spoke in monotonous voices with flat expressions and zero body language. When an avatar solemnly declared that believers must pray and go to church regularly to keep their faith, laughter rippled through the room. While some attendees eagerly filmed the novelty on their phones, others looked on skeptically and refused to recite the Lord's Prayer along with the screen.

Reactions were sharply divided. Heiderose Schmidt, a 54-year-old IT worker, found the experience off-putting, remarking that it had neither heart nor soul and that the robotic pacing made it hard to concentrate. Marc Jansen, a 31-year-old Lutheran pastor, was pleasantly surprised by how coherent the text was, though he pointed out that it entirely lacked the emotional and spiritual depth required for genuine ministry.

Why it matters

This experiment highlights both the practical reach and the hard limits of generative models in high-empathy spaces. For church administrators, AI can certainly churn out boilerplate sermon drafts, structure liturgical readings, or assist solo pastors drowning in weekly prep. Anna Puzio, a technology ethics researcher at the University of Twente, noted that such tools could make religious services more accessible to people unable to attend in person.

However, turning a chatbot into a priest exposes an obvious flaw. Religious leadership is fundamentally relational. As Simmerlein observed, a real pastor lives alongside the community, knows their personal grief, and buries their dead. An algorithm cannot read room dynamics, comfort a crying parishioner, or pivot when an audience reacts. Furthermore, as Puzio warned, compressing diverse theological traditions into a single synthetic voice carries risks of flattening complex beliefs.

We think this trial proves AI can easily mimic the formal structure of sacred rites, but structure is not connection. As an administrative assistant for scriptural research, it works fine; as a spiritual guide, it quickly feels hollow.