The Art of Being Slow and Manual

Slow and Manual: why more resources and faster tools have not made the work better, and what God taking six days suggests about craft.

The times we are living in are both exciting and terrifying.

Let me explain what I mean.

When I first started writing my own sermons, I only had the Bible (in various translations), Strong’s Concordance, and a few commentaries.

That’s basically all I had.

Back then, that was enough—more than enough.

I produced many sermons, teaching notes, and essays with just those.

Back then, I didn’t have a lot of books. But whatever book I had, I read and finished. And it seemed I could easily remember and summarize what I read.

Fast-forward to now.

Again, it’s exciting—the sheer amount of resources we have.

Today, I own a Logos Bible Library. I have a decent number of resources in there—currently 3,221: Bibles, Bible commentaries, lexicons, books, courses, and a whole lot more!

Today, I can get all the books I want on Kindle—read and highlight without worrying about compiling them, because I have an automated service that does it for me.

But for some reason… my output is much slower than when I was younger.

Perhaps it’s because I’m more aware of the complexity of the issues than before, and that makes me more careful with what I say. Reading enough books should solve that problem, right? But it doesn’t seem to.

Adding to this conundrum is the rise of AI.

To be clear, I am not someone who is skeptical of AI.

On the contrary, I’m ecstatic about it. I love it. I use it almost every day.

But since its recent resurgence, countless knowledge workers and I have been seeing a trend:

• AI-produced output lacks emotional connection. We are not proud of it. We don’t have that sense of accomplishment when we showcase it to others. The lack of slowness and manual labor in an output gives no satisfaction.
• AI-reliant output is not easily remembered. With chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and others, the things we usually store in our long-term memory are now kept in the short-term—or not stored at all. Who needs to remember all this information when you can just ask ChatGPT, right? But overreliance on AI makes our memory and analysis weaker—and, frankly, dumber.

As I see it now, the solution is not to do away with AI. AI is here to stay. AI is what the internet was 20 years ago. It revolutionizes how we do life and work and, yes, ministry.

But while AI is here to stay, we should balance fast-paced, automated answers with a slow and manual approach to work and creativity.

In contrast with AI-produced and AI-reliant output, slow and manual work gives us:

• Emotional connection with our work. When we put thought and effort into our work, we’re proud of it. It may not be the best or the most thorough and groundbreaking, but you’re proud of it. It has a deep emotional connection to you—because at some point that was you at your best.
• Work that’s easily remembered. I started writing my own sermons way back in high school. Some of them are good—I still preach them to this day. Some of them are bad. But even with the passing of time, I can still recall the structure and the content. I think part of the reason is that I produced everything slowly and manually back then. No resource overload. No ChatGPT. Reading and thinking were the top resources I used to produce each one.

While I’m still working through the practical implications, I’ve realized that one must balance using AI to be on par with the times with doing slow, manual work to produce quality output. I believe God gave these fast tools because He knows that time is short. At the same time, we want slow, manual work because we want quality.

God created in an instant—He said the word, and it was so. But though creation was fast and instant, He also took His time. What could have been done in one day, since nothing is impossible with Him, took six days to create the world and everything in it, and God rested (literally, “bask”). He rested in His creation—meaning He found fulfillment in what He had created, especially mankind. He Himself manually formed man out of the dust and created a masterpiece. God employed a balance of fast and instant creation with slow and manual work—and that gave Him satisfaction.

Study guide: questions and related reading

Prepared as a study aid to accompany the article. It is not part of the original piece.

One practical note before the questions. Being slow and manual is not a rule about tools, it is a decision about which parts of the work you refuse to outsource, and slow work is the name for whatever survives that decision. For me that line falls at the thinking. I will let a tool find the reference, format the notes, and check the citation. I will not let it decide what the passage means, because that decision is the part I need to still be carrying six months later when someone asks me about it in a corridor.

Questions on being Slow and Manual

For your own thinking, or for a team wrestling with the same trade-off between speed and slow work.

1. Which part of your work still gets done slow and manual, and would you notice if it stopped?

2. Name something you produced years ago that you can still recall in detail. What was different about how you made it?

3. Where is the tool genuinely saving you time, and where is it quietly saving you the effort that was the point?

4. If God took six days for what could have taken an instant, what does that suggest about the relationship between speed and satisfaction in your own work?

More on slow work and manual work

This piece sits alongside other writing on craft, ministry and attention, and on why manual work still earns its place.

Read Going Beyond Labels or Going Beyond Why, browse the sermon archive, or see Letters to a Young Pastor, which makes a similar case for unhurried pastoral work. Genesis 2:7 is worth rereading slowly at Bible Gateway. More about Arnold Famini.