Thirty-two thousand nine hundred people have put down a deposit on a ring that detects stress and delivers scripture.
The ring knows your heart rate. It vibrates when you're anxious. It has a cross on it that glows.
It's called the Elah Ring. The website says the valley of Elah is where David faced Goliath. "God was already there," it says. Thirty-two thousand nine hundred people found that compelling enough to hand over nine dollars and a credit card number.
I posted about SermonCoach in a United Methodist Clergy Facebook group last week. 161 comments.
The word "godless" came up. So did "lazy." One person posted a cartoon comparing AI to the Atlantic Slave Trade. Three people said "No." One said "Nopers."
Nobody in that thread mentioned the Elah Ring.
I want to be fair here. Some of the pushback was legitimate. One pastor asked about environmental costs — water usage, data centers, energy. That's a real question. I wrote about it a different way: the BCS tiller on our flower farm, the soil carbon I disrupted every spring, the microbiome I killed by turning the ground over. I knew the cost. I did it anyway. I believed in what we were growing.
I lost the farm. I sold the plow.
I'm making the same kind of trade-off now. I can't tell you it has no cost. I can tell you I believe the work warrants it.
But the cartoon. The word "godless." The assumption that a pastor who uses a tool to help them think is somehow degrading their congregation.
That's not a cost argument. That's a category argument. AI belongs to a different category than sacred work. It doesn't belong in the room.
Thirty-two thousand nine hundred congregants disagree.
They're not buying a Bible app. They're not downloading YouVersion. They're putting a ring on their finger that monitors their nervous system and pushes scripture at them when they're stressed. They want to be interrupted by God in a way that their phone can sense coming.
Some of those people are in the pews of the pastors who told me "no."
I don't know what to do with that except to say it out loud.
The category argument doesn't hold. Technology has been in the room for a long time. The electric organ was technology. The overhead projector was technology. The podcast of the sermon is technology. The Elah Ring is just more personal about it.
What the category argument is actually protecting is something worth protecting: the conviction that the sermon belongs to the preacher, not the machine. That the word of God through a pastor is irreducibly human. That you can't outsource it without losing something essential.
I agree.
SermonCoach doesn't write the sermon. It asks questions until the pastor gets there themselves. The draft unlocks in their voice, from their preparation, through their encounter with the text. The tool stays outside.
Whether that changes the category concern or not — I don't know. Some people will always say no, and I respect that.
But the 32,900 people waiting for the ring to arrive suggest the congregation has already decided. They want God delivered to their wrist.
The question isn't whether technology belongs in faith formation. It does. It always has.
The question is who gets to use it, and what for.
SermonCoach is free for pastors at UMC North Alabama Annual Conference with code UMCNA26. Try it at sermoncoach.app/umcna26