AI Lesson Planning for LDS Teachers, an Honest Take

I want to talk about something that makes some members uncomfortable, and honestly, I understand why. Using AI to help prepare a gospel lesson feels strange the first time you consider it. Teaching in the Church is supposed to be about the Spirit, about testimony, about knowing the people in your class. And a computer has none of those things.

Personally, I think that discomfort is worth taking seriously instead of brushing past. So let me make the honest case, including the limits.

What AI Is Actually Good At

Here is the thing about lesson preparation that nobody says out loud: most of the time we spend preparing is not spiritual work. It is logistics. Finding the week's reading, outlining a structure, thinking up an activity that fits the age group, guessing how long each part takes, making a handout. It is not uncommon to spend two hours on a lesson and realize that maybe twenty minutes of it was actual pondering.

AI is genuinely good at the logistics. It can take the week's scripture block and give you a structure: an opening question, a few sections with rough timing, discussion questions that are not yes or no questions, an activity with a materials list. It can size a lesson to the time you actually have. It can give a Primary version and an Elders Quorum version of the same chapter that look nothing alike, because those classes need nothing alike.

That is the part of preparation that was eating your Saturday night. And I have no guilt about handing it off.

What AI Can Never Do

Now the other side, because it matters more. AI does not have a testimony. It has never felt the Spirit confirm something true. It does not know that Brother Jensen just lost his job, or that the girl in the back row has been sitting alone for three weeks. It cannot look at a room and feel that the lesson needs to go a different direction than the plan.

That is the actual teaching, and it was never in danger of being replaced. A lesson plan, whether it came from an AI, a manual, or a napkin, is just paper until a teacher with a testimony walks into the room and pays attention to the people in it.

As members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we already understand this distinction, because we have always used tools. The manual is a tool. A commentary is a tool. The lesson your friend taught in another ward and told you about is a tool. The question was never whether we use helps. The question is whether we show up prepared enough that the Spirit has something to work with.

How to Use It Responsibly

With that, here is how I would draw the lines.

Read everything before you teach it. An AI draft is a starting point, and you are responsible for what comes out of your mouth in that classroom. If a quote or a reference matters to your lesson, check it against the scriptures and the official materials at ChurchofJesusChrist.org. Cut anything that does not sound like you, because your class came to hear you, not a template. And do your own pondering. The tool can hand you a structure, but the moment in the lesson that actually lands will almost always be the thing you added because you know your class.

That is the philosophy we built ComeFollowMe.io around. It generates the baseline, the structure, the questions, the timing, and it stays out of the way of the parts that belong to you. It even tells you in the lesson itself that it is a supplement to the official curriculum, because it is.

The Real Question

But I think the real question is not whether AI belongs in lesson prep. It is what you do with the time it gives back. If a tool saves you ninety minutes on a Saturday and you spend ten of those minutes actually pondering the principle and praying about your class, your lesson got better and your Saturday got better. That trade is not a compromise of the calling. That is magnifying it.

The Spirit was never in the formatting anyway.