The worst thing that has ever happened to serious Bible reading is the daily devotional.
I don't mean that unkindly. I mean it descriptively. The daily devotional industrialized something that is by nature irregular, personal, and resistant to packaging. It turned an encounter — with an ancient, demanding, deeply strange library of texts — into a product. A morning routine. Two minutes of Scripture plus an uplifting paragraph plus a boxed prayer and a send-off into your day.
It works for some people in some seasons. For a great many others, it produces the slow accumulation of texts that no longer land, reflections that feel written for someone generically spiritual rather than specifically you, and an eventual quiet conviction that whatever this is, it is not feeding you.
Key facts
- 01AI tools like ChatGPT can be prompted with personal context — career, relationships, life stage, theological questions — to surface Scripture passages and reflections that are genuinely relevant rather than generic.
- 02Conor Grennan describes treating the Bible as a personalized experience by sharing his current situation with AI and asking it to find passages that speak directly to it.
- 03Adding background knowledge — church tradition, theological framework, personal history — dramatically improves the quality and relevance of AI-generated spiritual reflection.
- 04The episode closes with a reminder that personalization through AI is a starting point, not a substitute for the Spirit's work of applying Scripture to a life.
The failure is structural. Devotionals are written for the average believer, and no one is average. Your life is in a particular place. Your theological questions are specific. The things you are carrying — the relationship that is breaking, the work that has stopped making sense, the doubt that shows up in the small hours — are not the same as what anyone else is carrying. And the Bible is not a generic book. It is an enormous, varied, sometimes contradictory collection of texts that speak with different voices to different situations. Finding the voice that speaks to yours has always required either a great deal of time or a great deal of help.
“The more honest you are with the model about where you actually are, the less it sounds like a devotional app and the more it sounds like it knows you.”— Jaeden Schafer
AI is the first technology capable of providing that help at scale. That is not a small claim.
Here is what it looks like in practice. Instead of opening a devotional app, you open a conversation. You tell the model where you actually are — not a polite summary, but the honest version. You are in your early forties and you have been going through the motions at church for two years. You grew up evangelical but something shifted and you're not sure what. You keep coming back to the Psalms even though you can't fully articulate why. What passages might be worth spending time with? What questions has the tradition found useful in a season like this?
What you get back is not a devotional. It is a starting place that is calibrated to you, assembled from a tradition far broader and deeper than any single devotional author could represent. And because you can keep talking — can push back, ask for something different, say "that's not quite it" — the conversation can actually track to where you are rather than where the product assumes you are.
Conor Grennan described this as reclaiming the Bible as a personalized experience, and I think that framing is right. The tradition has always insisted that Scripture speaks to the individual. The practice of Scripture reading has often made that claim harder to experience. AI doesn't change what Scripture is. It changes your access to the parts of it that are actually for you, right now.
There is a real caveat, and it deserves more than a sentence. AI is drawing on the written tradition — the commentaries, the theological writing, the vast library of human reflection on Scripture — and that tradition, for all its depth, has gaps. It over-represents certain voices. It under-represents others. If you come from a tradition that is not well-documented in Western academic theology, you will need to push the model explicitly toward your framework, or it will default toward frameworks that aren't yours.
That is worth knowing. It is not a reason to stop.
The thing I return to is this: the Christian tradition makes a claim that God is interested in the particular. Not in believers in the aggregate, but in the specific person, in the specific moment, with the specific question. Our spiritual infrastructure has rarely risen to that claim. For the first time, something exists that might.
That is either a profound gift or an irony so large it loops back around to something useful. I keep landing on the gift.
Jaeden Schafer is the host of AI in Faith, a podcast about artificial intelligence, faith, and the future of human purpose.
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