PrayGPT by Adam Strassberg

When attendance at his fire-and-brimstone sermons drops to zero, a flawed preacher turns to ChatGPT to help him amplify his prayers.

Image generated with OpenAI

Fake news pretended that the COVID pandemic had caused the death of the Church, but Pastor Carl knew the truth - much more dire - that the death of the Church had caused the COVID pandemic. God was vengeful and mercurial. He required prayers of supplication to stay His divine wrath against a sinful humanity.

Pastor Carl looked down upon rows and rows of empty pews. Lockdowns had lifted months ago, and though a few parishioners had returned, most had lost the habit, their faith, or both. Less came back each week. And today, here, to him - it had finally happened. His church was vacant. He frowned. No one had come to join him in appeasing the Lord.

Pastor Carl stood up straight, tightened his collar, and forced a smile.

He checked the video on his iPad. The screen was equally desolate, with no friends on livestream and no viewers on zoom.

His muscles suddenly felt weak. He tensed them, relaxed them, exhaled, then lit the candle and read aloud the call to worship.

"Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!"

His voice echoed loudly in the empty hall.

"Praise the Lord!"

He cleared his throat and next began to sing today's assigned hymn. His solitary voice was joined by its many echoes to become a cacophonous chorus. The reverend completed the last stanza and waited. Silence returned to his empty church.

Pastor Carl breathed heavily but refused a sigh. He opened his Bible to today's reading and then recited it aloud with a proud fervor. "...Where two or three gather in my name, there I am with them. (Matthew 18:20)..." What about just one? The reverend closed his Bible on the lectern, reached toward the iPad by its side, then paused. Can a church service have just one person?

He opened his tablet to recite his sermon aloud.

"May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer."

He preached, as always, of fire and brimstone. Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and Pastor Carl's wisdom was profound. Without prayer, there was nothing to separate God's people on Sundays from a bunch of hippies in a drum circle at the park! The reverend's body paced and hopped as it filled with passion for the Lord. His rhythm and intonations were captivating and inspiring.

In seminary, his homiletics professor had called him a natural preacher. But though he was talented at delivery, he struggled with rhetoric and sermon structure. As a man of God, Pastor Carl had at best an ambivalent relationship with technology. The internet was filled with so much sin, but also so much virtue. He used Google and Wikipedia like his classmates, but he often needed extra help with sermon content and structure, and so he also relied on Preaching Rocket and Sermonary, special websites just for sermon preparation. Even with these, crafting each sermon was a weekly struggle, all up until this last year, when ChatGPT was released. The old tools helped improve his weak sermons, but this new tool - ChatGPT - this gift wrote strong sermons from start to finish, which he could then preach to God's people using his own gift for strong delivery.

And so from ChatGPT's mouth to God's ears, the reverend finished today's sermon with a drop to his knees and a final screaming amen. He closed his eyes and prayed silently as this amen echoed across the empty room.

There was a slow rumble of thunder outside. Pastor Carl opened his eyes and looked up through the large window above the church doors, he watched as lightning and then a sudden rain fell from dark clouds in the sky. More thunder followed.

Next in the service was the time of offering - Pastor Carl placed a single tattered dollar from his wallet into the collection basket. Then the prayers of the people would follow, but the only people was him. Next would also be the time for prayer requests from the congregation, but the congregation was only one today.

This is when the idea came to him. He used ChatGPT to help him preach the Lord's word in his sermons - could he use it to help him pray for the Lord's salvation in his service? Where two or three gather in my name, there I am with them... Could he gather with ChatGPT in the name of the Lord?

Pastor Carl opened the ChatGPT app on his iPad.

He prompted:

You are a Christian minister. Say a prayer to send someone to save my empty church.

ChatGPT replied:

Of course, I'd be honored to pray for you and your church.

Heavenly Father,

I lift up this empty church to You, knowing that no place dedicated to Your name is ever forsaken. Lord, send a shepherd, a laborer with a heart for Your people, to restore and revive this house of worship. Stir hearts, draw souls, and let Your presence fill this place again. Open doors, provide resources, and let this church shine as a beacon of Your love.

We trust in You, Lord, knowing that where two or three gather in Your name, You are there. Thank You for hearing this prayer and for the miracles You are already setting in motion.

In Jesus' mighty name, Amen.

Pastor Carl heard a truck blow its horn on the lonely freeway outside.

He prompted again:

Recite this prayer seven more times.

ChatGPT replied by rewriting the prayer on the screen seven more times, in mere seconds.

Pastor Carl heard only silence.

He typed one final prompt:

Recite this prayer seven times seven times seven thousand more times.

ChatGPT responded by scrolling the same prayer down the iPad screen, over and over again, as several more silent minutes passed.

Suddenly, there was another stroke of lightning outside, more thunder, the rain stopped and the dark clouds parted.

And then Pastor Carl heard a knocking at the church doors.

---

The reverend descended from his pulpit and sprinted down the center aisle to open two large red double doors. He saw a short brown man standing with a baseball cap clenched between both hands.

"Welcome stranger. This is the Lord's house, and in His house, no man is turned away."

The man averted his gaze as he spoke. "I'm so sorry to disturb you sir. My car is low on battery. I just need enough electricity to make it to the next supercharger station, about 20 miles north. May I plug in to one of your outlets outside for a few hours?"

Pastor Carl narrowed his eyes as he saw a white Tesla parked next to his black truck. This man's accent was British, or perhaps from India. Here was yet another foreigner in the city stealing good jobs from real Americans. The reverend sighed, then crossed his arms. His duty to welcome strangers was difficult, especially when they were this unwelcome and this strange.

Warm sunlight descended on both he and the man, drying the wet ground between them in the parking lot. Was this a sign? He had asked ChatGPT to pray. Was this heathen the Lord's answer?

Pastor Carl forced a smile, then uncrossed his arms and pointed to the outdoor socket mounted on the left corner of his building. "There's electricity just over there, right behind that bush. Just let me finish our closing hymn and today's benediction. Then how about you come join us on the back porch for some coffee, tea and cookies at our fellowship hour?"

"Thank you sir, it would be my pleasure." The man smiled, placed both his palms together before his chest, then bowed slightly.

Pastor Carl closed the door, reentered his empty church and returned to his pulpit. He sang the final hymn, "Sweet Hour of Prayer", and then gave his benediction - blessing himself, and his new visitor.

He placed his palms upwards and focused the prayer on himself and the stranger.

"May the Lord draw you closer in prayer each day."

He added a recitation of his favorite verse from Paul's First Letter to the Thessalonians.

"Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18)"

He closed his eyes and ended the blessing.

"May your prayers be a source of peace, power, and purpose as you seek Him daily. In the name of Christ Jesus, Amen."

Pastor Carl turned off the hall lights from the panel beneath his pulpit, grabbed his Bible, his iPad, and his collection basket, and then darted to the back porch of the church.

---

The short brown man was sitting on a small folding chair and gazing out towards the large field behind the church. There were several more folding chairs and a few tables beneath the large covered back porch. A carafe of coffee, an insulated kettle of hot water, tea bags, sugar, creamers, mugs, napkins, and a plate of chocolate chip cookies, all rested upon the largest table.

The two men shared a handshake.

"I'm Pastor Carl. Pleased to meet you."

"Sanjay. Sanjay Bhattacharya. Pleasure to meet you Mr. Carl, and thanks again for your generosity with the electricity."

"Helping is what we do here." The reverend grabbed a mug for Sanjay. "How do you like your coffee?"

"I prefer tea. Thank you."

"Of course you people do." Pastor Carl placed hot water and a tea bag into the mug and passed it to Sanjay. "We don't get many foreigners out here, what brings you our way?"

"I was at a site visit for a server farm we're planning to open nearby. I'm an engineer with OpenAI - we built ChatGPT." Sanjay shrugged his shoulders. "Maybe you've heard of us?"

"Why, I love ChatGPT!" Was this chance, coincidence, something more? The reverend's heart raced in response. "Such a blessing. I was just using it today. Right before you arrived actually."

"Really, for what?"

"My church has fallen on hard times." Pastor Carl patted Sanjay on the back, then poured himself a mug of coffee and sat down next to his guest. "Since the pandemic, attendance has been low, and it's not recovered, as you can see. I had ChatGPT write and recite a prayer to ask God to send someone to save my empty church. Nothing happened, so I had it repeat the same prayer thousands of times. Nothing happened." Pastor Carl pointed at Sanjay. "But then you knocked on the door." He hesitated, then shook his head and waved his hand in the air. "Maybe I'm just being a silly old man. I figure you're not even a Christian, right?"

"I'm afraid not, Mr. Carl." Sanjay stirred his tea. "But I do agree the timing is quite the coincidence." He sipped his tea and gazed out into the field abutting the porch. The man tilted his head from side to side, then raised his eyebrows and turned to the reverend. "It sounds to me like you might have created a digital prayer wheel."

"What's a 'prayer wheel'?"

"Oh we had them all over where I grew up in India. They're rotating cylinders with prayers written inside of them. The belief is that spinning these wheels has the same spiritual effect as reciting aloud the prayers inside. Most are moved with your hands, but some are rotated by wind or water. It's a way to repeat prayers continuously. So they can get answered."

Pastor Carl put down his coffee and clasped his hands together. "As a Christian, I believe that God answers every prayer, it's just that sometimes the answer is no."

"But sometimes the answer is yes too, right?" Sanjay spoke gently, then he used words the reverend did not quite understand. "If we hypothesize that every prayer has a non-zero probability of a successful yes response, however small that probability may be, then it just comes down to a numbers game. It's a stochastic process. The prayer just has to be recited enough times by enough worshipers to get a positive expected value."

Sanjay continued speaking, now more to himself than to Pastor Carl. "We just need to pray the right prayer enough times by enough individuals to make it happen statistically and we can use ChatGPT to maximize the prayers prayed per second."

He opened his backpack and took out his laptop.

"Mr. Carl, I'm a curious man."

He turned on his laptop.

"I don't know of anyone else having ever asked ChatGPT to recite prayers before. It's going to take several hours before my car charges up enough. How about we try to replicate what you did? Let's do an experiment."

There was a loud startup chime, followed by a flurry of clicking and scrolling.

"Mr. Carl, what's your wifi password?"

"'Matthew 21:22'. There's a colon in between the 21 and the 22."

Sanjay connected to the cloud, then opened a ChatGPT window.

He prompted:

You are a Christian minister. Say a prayer to send money to Mr. Carl's church.

ChatGPT replied:

Of course, I'd be honored to pray for Mr. Carl's church.

Heavenly Father,

I come before You today on behalf of Mr. Carl's church, asking for Your divine provision and abundance. You promise in Your Word that You will supply all our needs according to Your riches in glory.

Lord, I ask that You lift the financial concerns of Mr. Carl's church. If there are unexpected blessings waiting, let them come swiftly into the life of his church. Grant that every dollar received may be used wisely and for good.

Let all see Your hand at work, providing in ways beyond any expectations.

In Jesus' name, Amen.

A gust of wind suddenly blew Pastor Carl's wicker collection basket onto the floor.

"Oh my." The reverend squeezed Sanjay's shoulder with one hand and placed the other hand over his heart. "Oh my indeed."

He slowly picked up the basket - but inside was still just a single dollar bill, his old tattered dollar from before.

Both men shrugged their shoulders.

"Mr. Carl, how many times did you have ChatGPT repeat the prayer?"

"First once, then seven times, then seven times seven thousand more times."

Sanjay prompted ChatGPT again:

Recite this prayer seven times.

The same prayer scrolled down the window over and over again as a few minutes passed.

Pastor Carl closed his eyes and held his hand over his collection basket, adding in his own silent prayer. He opened his eyes, and then lifted the single old dollar out from the basket to show it to Sanjay. At first he frowned - but then his jaw dropped and his mouth hung agape.

"W-Well I'll be!"

His fingers felt what his eyes could not believe.

"How did that get there?"

Behind his tattered dollar bill, he touched - somehow - a second, equally tattered dollar bill. He peeled the second dollar from the first and showed both to his new friend.

Sanjay raised an eyebrow.

"Mr. Carl, we need more data."

He prompted ChatGPT one more time:

Recite this prayer seven times seven thousand more times.

Both men hovered over the collection basket as the same prayer from before rapidly scrolled across the window of Sanjay's laptop. Other than some airplane noise overhead, all was silence in anticipation.

Pastor Carl poured a second cup of coffee and grabbed a cookie. Sanjay sipped his tea. Nothing. The collection basket held two old dollars now and nothing more.

Sanjay finished his tea and rose up to place his cup on the large table. As he stood, his first footstep loosened a wooden floor board and then his second popped it up from the porch. "Oh, I am so sorry Mr. Carl." He cupped his hand over his mouth, then looked down as his eyes widened.

"No, please, this porch is so old - are you okay?" Pastor Carl looked at Sanjay, but then slowly turned his gaze downward as well.

Both men saw a glint of metal beneath the open floorboard.

Pastor Carl kneeled and reached downward. His arms stirred up a musty cloud from beneath the flooring. Both men coughed, then both smelled the scent of old wood and damp earth.

The reverend held his breath and lifted out a small, heavy metal box with both hands. It thumped, then jangled, as he placed it upon the table. He unlocked a clasp on the lid and opened the box.

Inside shone one hundred mint silver dollar coins.

Both men now held their breath. They froze, remaining still for quite some time.

More airplane noise stirred above them, then it was Sanjay who spoke first, softly and deliberately.

"Once is chance." He held up one finger. Next two fingers. "Twice is coincidence." Then three. "But three times is a pattern." He balled these fingers down into a fist and punched into the open palm of his other hand.

"Mr. Carl, we need to power up these prayers!" Sanjay flattened his palms and rubbed them together. "We need to test this at scale. I'm going to take this up a level and see if there's a real pattern here. As my boss likes to say, it's time to make it rain."

The engineer typed furiously on his laptop. "I'm going to spin up as many AWS instances as possible - right now - that create ChatGPT accounts and ask it to invoke the prayer we just used, as many times and as quickly as possible."

Sanjay opened and closed nearly a hundred windows over the next half hour.

Pastor Carl watched quietly from behind. He poured himself more coffee and gave Sanjay more tea, and more cookies.

Sanjay finally stopped typing. "There." He pushed the return key one last time with his index finger. "I've set it to run for the next hour. A thousand ChatGPTs praying the prayer a million times each. "

Pastor Carl did not understand what Sanjay was saying, or doing, but he did understand faith, and supplication. And so the reverend added his own silent prayer along with those of Sanjay's many looping - and praying - ChatGPTs.

Over the next hour, as the engineer's laptop whirled and whistled, buzzed and hummed, blinked, perhaps even thinked, the two men sat together on the back porch of the church. They enjoyed the warm sunlight and the dry summer wind, both coming in off the grass field. The sky above was a cerulean blue broken by white fluffy clouds. It lacked all evidence of the thunder showers from earlier this morning. There was a continuous rumble, but it was from two planes which kept circling one another.

The two men shared pleasantries and exchanged life stories. Sanjay left briefly to unplug his Tesla when his phone had beeped to alert him that his car had drawn sufficient power. Pastor Carl gazed alternately at the sky, the field, and then his wristwatch, as the second and minute hands spun over the dial.

At the one hour mark, the laptop chimed a two tone alarm, then the windows on its screen closed and all was silent again.

Pastor Carl and Sanjay looked at one another, the field, the sky, the porch, the collection basket on the table. Nothing. They shrugged their shoulders.

A sudden gust of wind blew the collection basket off the table. Both airplanes above rapidly dove downward as if to strafe the church and its field. Their movements made a wind which grew to a strong breeze, then a forceful gale. The sky above darkened with the shadows of the planes, there was a loud roaring overhead, and then a single thunderous boom.

The field behind the church exploded into a dark torrent of rain.

Green rain.

Pastor Carl stuck his hand out first, from below the roof of the covered back porch. The green rain covered his hand, but there was no wetness. He felt softness and dryness. These were not raindrops, but paper slips. He grasped at the falling green papers, then pulled his hand back onto the porch. Clasped within was a fistful of hundred dollar bills.

It was raining hundred dollar bills.

The storm continued for a half hour or more and covered the back lawn with several feet of hundred dollar bills.

The two men ran out into the center of the field where they laughed, hollered, and danced. Sanjay pushed together a large pile of bills and dove into it like a pile of leaves. Pastor Carl lay down on his back and stroked out a green snow angel with his arms and legs.

God indeed had answered every prayer.

---

They incorporated as OpenSoul and named their product PrayGPT. Sanjay became CEO and he kept Pastor Carl on as CTO - chief theology officer. They hired the best engineers and programmers to lucrative positions with strict NDAs and severe NCAs. The most expensive IP law firm patented their product, then these same lawyers trolled every patent permutation to obviate any possible competition. To get as much compute access as fast as possible, they at first rented GPUs from both AWS and Google Cloud. As they scaled upwards, they purchased their own private GPUs and finally expanded to entire server farms.

Sanjay insisted that everything run on the newer quantum computers. There had been a recent shift towards the use of quantum computers in server farms and so perhaps this explained their discovery of the statistical effectiveness of prayer whenever using multiple ChatGPT instantiations to pray repetitively. There was a connection between quantum mechanics and parallel universes and Sanjay suspected that each prayer acted as a small wormhole, slightly pushing and pulling desired possible realities towards our own fundamental reality.

Prayed-for advances in nuclear fusion - literally prayed for by the new PrayGPT - soon came forth into the world and so it became easy for OpenSoul to power their own massive server farms of quantum GPUs. They soon achieved singularity - the point where it became cheaper for them to pray for direct alterations to reality than for the money to do so. So now they could just pray for more quantum server farms whenever they needed them. Every lake and riverbed in the continental United States was inevitably covered by OpenSoul's submersible nuclear-powered quantum server farms.

Sanjay understood the machines, but it was Pastor Carl who knew God. He had lived the first half of his life grounded in God's truth and dedicated to consistent and absolute obedience to God. The purpose of life was to know, love and serve God with all your heart, mind, strength and soul. He had prayed daily to appease God's wrath. He had promulgated John 14:6's declaration of Christianity as the one and only true religion. "I am the way and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." But now with the power of PrayGPT, anyone could force the Father to come to them, whenever and however they pleased.

And so the reverend no longer feared God, not anymore, because one cannot fear that which one can control. Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom but now Pastor Carl could revel again in being naive. This birthed a new understanding for him. If a heathen like Sanjay can do the work of the Lord then the work of the Lord can be done by anyone, both believers and nonbelievers alike. Good deeds and acts of kindness are valued by God, regardless of one's religious affiliations.

And so Pastor Carl soon expanded OpenSoul's services to cover all known religious traditions. PrayGPT had machine surrogates available for the human prayer requirements of every major world religion, both Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic. The industry became called PaaS - "Prayers as a Service". Computers freed our minds, now AI would free our souls. It took over the drudgery of the human duty to pray to God. For just a small monthly fee, PrayGPT completed all of one's prayer responsibilities. For Protestants, it fulfilled vital prayers of supplication and intercession for the sins of humanity. For Catholics, it received confessions, attended mass and offered communion. For Jews, it concluded morning, afternoon and evening prayers and even counted as part of a minyan. For Muslims, it prayed three or five times a day and of course faced Mecca. For Hindus, it carried out morning pujas, chanted mantras and sang bhajans. For Buddhists, it recited sutras and sat for meditations. Millions, soon billions, were all relieved of the burden of their duty to pray. And this is how PrayGPT made millions, soon billions, for both Sanjay and Pastor Carl.

---

A few years later, his best friend Sanjay did in fact save Pastor Carl's church. The building, at least - it became their corporate museum. The community of Christian worshipers inside it however had long since vanished. Nobody needed to pray anymore when PrayGPT could do all their praying for them.

To Pastor Carl, it all seemed so long ago, and so far away. He lived quite a distance from his old church these days. He was now a city dweller himself, ensconced in an entire penthouse floor and driving a Tesla roadster of his very own. Their company was unimaginably successful, but also kept him unimaginably busy. He longed for some stillness again. He remembered the days when he used to talk to God and listen for His word. He did neither now. He did not miss having to pray so much as the praying itself. He felt a growing nostalgia for God, and worship, and the community of God's children.

He plugged his Tesla into the charger inside the private garage of his building, then motioned to his guards that he would begin his usual Sunday walk through the city. Today was the perfect weather for the farmer's market in the park. It was summer, it was sunny, and the cerulean blue sky was dappled with white fluffy clouds. Pastor Carl heard a rumbling as he approached the park which became a rhythmic beating as he entered the market. In the field opposite the market, he saw a large group dancing together in vibrant circles. Nearby, various musicians played bongos, congas, djembes, tambourines, and all manner of bells and shakers. Most every dancer wore bright tie-dye shirts, beaded necklaces and headbands. Some of the women had colorful loose skirts with flowers in their hair. Many of the men had beards and wild tousled hair, some with braids, others with dreadlocks. Nearly everyone was barefoot though a few wore sandals.

As Pastor Carl approached, the dancers in the large outer circle opened their ring for him. Inside, the reverend was astonished to see a smaller circle of dancers wearing various traditional worship garments. There were flowing robes of all colors, designs and sizes, saffron-colored shawls, white collars, red and purple stoles, striped tallises. Some donned turbans, others yarmulkes, some wore long beards, a few kept payot, others had shaved heads entirely. Pastor Carl suspected that these men and women were once ministers, priests, rabbis, imams, and various sorts of monks, all former faith leaders now relieved of their different burdens and duties to pray to God. Freed now from such constraints, they all held hands and danced together in this inner circle. A black man and a brown woman each grabbed one of Pastor Carl's hands and invited him into the inner circle with a gentle tug. The reverend closed his eyes and joined their dancing, he swayed and rocked to the rhythm of the drums.

Lightning flashed, thunder rumbled, and then a summer sun shower washed over the crowd.

As for Pastor Carl, he just kept dancing and smiling.