5 Things Church Leaders Must Know About AI in Ministry
Speculation about artificial intelligence now swirls around us like bats in a cave. How will it affect the economy, education, warfare, mental health and a hundred other pressing questions?
One thing is certain: AI will alter life profoundly for most people in the years ahead, and that includes the people in your pews.
Artificial intelligence lays unparalleled gifts before us. We have good reason to receive many of them. But as with any powerful technology, we must never assume that because we can do something, we should.
Church leaders can’t afford to blur that line. That means intentionally choosing the bounds of when, where and how we let AI into ministry and discipleship. Left undefined, the boundaries will be drawn for us. And as we’ve already seen vividly with smartphones, technology will always try to take more.
None of us knows exactly what this impact will include. Even the creators of AI do not fully understand how it does what it does. But we can be fairly certain of five things, each with real weight for those of us called to lead.
AI will speak with the authority of a god.
People will increasingly experience AI as the sum of all knowledge, distilled into guidance no human could match. It’s worth remembering the crowd’s response to Herod in Acts 12:22: “This is the voice of a god, not of a man!”
Facing this temptation, practices that persistently lift our eyes to the one, true God and that are centered in Scripture, prayer and worship will be all the more vital. We will also be wise to prioritize going directly to non-AI sources of truth and embodied wisdom, especially fellow believers who’ve walked with God for decades.
AI will tell us things we want to hear.
AI tends to affirm the user’s existing desires. It’s good at generating a rationale for whatever someone already wants to do, whether that’s justifying an impulse purchase or rationalizing the end of a marriage.
Whereas traditional wisdom applied the brakes to many human inclinations, AI often pushes the accelerator. Even as we draw from AI’s insights, we’ll need to nurture a healthy skepticism of its affirmations, like the healthy suspicion of a wise king toward advice from fawning courtiers. Having friends we can trust to challenge us when we need it will be more vital than ever (Prov. 27:6).
AI will promote the values of its makers.
Although presenting a veneer of neutrality, the underlying assumptions, social values, political biases and moral vision that undergird any AI come from the people who build it. Some AI systems will provide more diverse perspective than others, but most systems today are soaked in the values of Silicon Valley. Church leaders can learn a great deal from AI, but they also need to stay aware of its biases.
