Artificial Intelligence in the Church: A Call for Real Wisdom

Artificial intelligence (AI) is crashing into the church. Should pastors, church workers and Christians in general use it? Is it a phenomenally positive tool, or does it pose a serious threat to humanity and to the church?

These are just two of the pressing questions facing us today. But, first, what are we even talking about when we say “artificial intelligence”? Most people think of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or any of the other popular large language models (LLMs)/ chatbots. These bots are the “Hungry, Hungry Hippos ” of the computer programming world. Their creators have essentially placed these hungry hippos in a box filled with mind-bogglingly large amounts of text (books and articles), images (artwork and photos) and videos. These serve as “food” for the bot. The bot devours everything in the box and then regurgitates it in intelligible sentences (or images) according to the rules of probability.

When discussing whether Christians should use AI, we need to specify which type of AI we’re considering. Beyond LLMs, AI is also being used in medical research and diagnosis, security and surveillance, warfare, data processing, customer service, process automation and supply chain optimization, marketing and content creation, image and music generation, financial fraud detection, autonomous vehicles and more. This brief article, then, will be limited to the popular LLMs/chatbots most people interact with regularly. Its goal is to encourage wisdom and initiate a conversation that needs to be taken up across our church body.

Tools, including technology, change the way we see the world. Technology changes what we believe is possible, even what we believe is reasonable. Too many people have simplistically concluded that the concerns surrounding AI are merely a matter of how we use it, for good or ill, as if the tool itself were neutral. There are no neutral tools. That doesn’t mean tools are necessarily bad (though some may be); it simply means tools change us.

While AI has had many positive impacts, it is also leading to detrimental changes not only in the workplace, but also in the church and among church workers. AI is changing expectations for worker productivity. Workers have bodies. Bodies get tired. They need to eat, sleep and take breaks. AI doesn’t. AI tempts us to believe that we can — and should — transcend our bodies. This is affecting and will affect church workers and church members. Church members may, probably unintentionally, expect greater productivity, greater efficiency and greater content generation from church workers — and church workers will feel the pressure.

AI is currently being marketed heavily to pastors like me. We’re being offered AI tools to “repurpose” our sermons into Bible studies, articles, small-group discussion guides and social-media-ready, cut-and-curated sermon clips to be posted strategically throughout the week so as to “maximize impact” and to “extend the reach” of the Gospel. Doesn’t that sound amazing? Who doesn’t want to extend the reach of the Gospel?

But such uses of AI raise questions about the incarnational nature of the sermon given by the called and ordained representative of Jesus. Is the sermon merely “content”? Is there really no substantial difference between creating content (what humans do) and generating it (what AI bots do)?

Yet despite serious questions like these, AI tools are already being incorporated in our church body and across wider Christendom, creating a cult of content generation and efficiency that has huge implications for the church and her workers.

The principle insightfully expressed by the economist Thomas Sowell applies here: There are no solutions, only tradeoffs. In this case, a wholesale prioritization of content generation and efficiency requires trading away deep thinking. When efficiency becomes the ultimate standard, deep thought dies. Deep thought does not move at the pace of AI; it moves at the pace of wisdom. There is nothing artificial about wisdom. Wisdom is gained slowly, through meditation and reflection (some may recall Luther’s exhortation to oratio, meditatio, tentatio — prayer, meditation, trial). As Christians, we understand that wisdom is found in a source beyond us, from without: from the Word of God (see Psalm 1 for a fantastic expression of this).

In the church, we need to regain a necessary truth: Thinking is useful work. The cult of content generation and efficiency devalues thinking. There’s no time for it. I often wonder how our church would change if we valued thinking, both for our laity and our church workers — if one day of our church workers’ week, for instance, could be set aside for deep thinking, for meditating deeply on God’s Word.

Does this mean AI has no place in the church? Not necessarily. It does offer certain benefits, despite the risks and tradeoffs. Here are four ways AI is being used in ministry, along with a few questions and admonitions drawn from biblical wisdom.

AI as research assistant

Let’s say your pastor is preparing a Bible study on eschatology and wants to get a basic overview of the major views. AI can provide this for him — and do it exceptionally well — but a caveat is in order: Your pastor must come to the AI assistant with a working knowledge of the subject matter. AI makes mistakes. Remember, it’s a probability machine. It is not sentient. It doesn’t have any idea what it’s doing. It’s really, really good, but it gets things wrong. It can be a helpful research assistant, but the researcher (whether pastor, church worker or church secretary) bears responsibility for the research.

When it comes to AI, it’s critical that we remember this truth: If you don’t bring wisdom to AI, it will make you the fool. If we haven’t done the slow, hard work of gaining wisdom (through focused study of God’s Word), AI may improve our efficiency and increase the content we generate, but it may also end up revealing us to be prolific and efficient fools.

AI as copy editor

Let’s consider AI as a copy editor. Your pastor, church worker or secretary can upload his or her document to AI and ask it to find run-on sentences, cliches, unsupported assumptions, etc., and make suggestions on how to tighten and clarify the arguments and sentences. Is this acceptable? You’re probably torn. Good. You’re exercising wisdom. Catching run-ons and suggesting clearer wording is one thing, but what if it suggests a change that alters the meaning? Again, wisdom is required — the wisdom that comes from outside us, from deep study of the source of wisdom, God’s Word. AI could suggest a right and proper change; it could also suggest grammatically correct falsehoods.

AI as doctrinal reviewer

As you may know, AI bots are trainable. Let’s say we trained our bot to be “Lutheran” (even saying this is deceptive, because machines don’t have confessional subscriptions!), feeding it our confessional documents and Synod convention resolutions. And let’s say your church worker wanted to see if his paper or sermon had any theological red flags in it. Could he use AI as a doctrinal reviewer? The answer isn’t easy, is it? You may argue that this is better done in person with fellow church workers. But time and distance war against this ideal. AI bots are always available and never distant. If AI is to be used for doctrinal review (a question we need to debate thoroughly), wisdom demands faithful attention to God’s Word to sort out whether AI recommendations are truly in line with our confession.

AI as ghost writer

AI can research, edit and review. It can also generate content. Do you need a Bible study? AI can generate one according to your specifications. Do you need to write an overture for a convention? AI can generate one for you. Do you need it to review a book for you? It will. Do you want it to write a sermon for you? It will. Do you want it to write prayers, a kyrie, even a hymn for you? It will. Most of us (including me!) are quick to cry foul here, but those who are using AI for these purposes argue that they review the final product. They argue that their oversight of the AI-generated content is the important thing, not whether they actually wrote it. What do you think?

What makes this more difficult to parse is that we use machines to do our work for us all the time: calculators to compute for us, forklifts to lift for us, robots to build for us, elevators to carry us, etc. This is part of the dominion God has given us. Critiquing AI as ghost writer will require deeper thinking. There is the question of honesty, if we claim AI-generated content as our own, and the question of plagiarism (AI’s content has been pilfered from across the internet and reassembled, leaving no way to know from whom it was taken).

A deeper response requires us to reflect on what it means to be human and on how the reality of the body and incarnational theology affect the way we do ministry. It requires us to come to grips with the Office of the Ministry and what it is. A pastor is more than a content generator. He is a human being — body and soul — baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection, filled with the Holy Spirit and ordained by the church to preach the inspired Word of God and call sinners to penitent saving faith. A bot has no body, no soul, no Baptism, no Spirit, no ordination, no penitence, no faith.

Personally, I think there is a place for AI if we come to it with wisdom, but I have grave reservations about how it could change us and the church. My hope is that our interactions with AI will expose the cult of content generation and efficiency and move us to turn to a deep, “Psalm 1” meditation on the Word — slowing us down to go deeper into the Word to find wisdom. My fear is that AI will make us shallow and burn out our workers at alarming rates.

The question of AI cannot be resolved in one issue of a magazine (let alone in one article). It must be addressed across our Synod — in classrooms, at circuit meetings, in council meetings, in conferences, and in journals and podcasts. Now, more than ever, we need real wisdom in the face of an ever-spreading artificial intelligence. Now is the time to slow down and go deep down into the Word, as we bring wisdom to bear on these and many, many more AI-related questions facing our church today.