In my last post on AI, we traced its history, considered what AI is and isn’t, how it is already everywhere, its future and a general Christian perspective on AI. This time I want to home in on the usage of AI in a church context.

Church and politics don’t mix, they say, but what about the church and artificial intelligence (AI)? The church today isn’t generally reckoned to be an early adopter of technology, instead Christians are often parodied as being behind the times.

However, that hasn’t always been the case. The printing press was put to effective use for the Reformation to spread at such speed across Europe. In the twentieth century, missionary pioneers like Jim Elliot and Nate Saint flew aircraft to visit uncontacted tribes in Ecuador, and evangelists such as Billy Graham made extensive use of television and radio broadcasting to reach millions with the Gospel.

Could it be that AI is another such enabling innovation? Or have these inventions gone too far and instead should we take a Luddite axe to this new-fangled technology? Do we need to follow Joshua’s lead (if you’ll excuse the pun!)?

So Joshua burned Ai and made it forever a heap of ruins, as it is to this day.

Joshua 8:28

You’ve probably seen headlines like, ‘Swiss church installs AI-powered Jesus’ or ‘What one Finnish church learned from creating a service almost entirely with AI’. Obviously, these are extreme examples, but it’s undeniable that AI is beginning to make its presence felt in practical tasks such as sermon preparation, service planning, church administration, pastoral care and various education and content creation contexts. Any suggestion of these in a church setting might provoke a strong negative Joshua-like reaction. But churches should not be behind the times for the sake of it, though we must ‘be wise as serpents and innocent as doves’ (Matthew 10:16) when it comes to technology, especially something as nascent and volatile as AI.

AI can make us lazy

The internet—through platforms like Logos—makes many Bible resources available at the merest click of a button. However, in many senses, software can’t ever replace hardware; physical books have lasted centuries, the same may not necessarily be said of digital formats. AI may well be able to assist in a Christian context in a ‘weak AI’ sense. AI chatbots are useful in a similar fashion to how you might use a search engine. For example, you could look up Bible verses like in a concordance. Concordances, search engines and AI are definitely useful tools, but over-dependence on them can lead to losing the ability to remember where particular verses are. Similarly, an over-reliance on study notes or commentaries can lead to losing the ability to think things through yourself. Those in Christian ministry, and indeed all Christians, should learn their way around the Bible without any helps or tools, just like children should still be taught foundational handwriting skills with a pen and paper, rather than moving on directly to touch-typing using a computer keyboard.

The Reinaissance-era abbot Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516) made extensive use of the invention of the printing press, yet warned that this was not an excuse for laziness:

He who gives up copying because of the invention of printing is no genuine friend of Holy Scripture, he seizes on what is and contributes nothing to the edification of future generations. But we, beloved brothers, shall keep in mind the reward of this sacred occupation and not slack in our efforts even if we were to own many thousands of books. Printed books will never be the equivalent of hand-written codices, especially considering the printed books are often deficient in spelling and appearance. The simple reason is that copying by hand involves more diligence and industry.

At first glance, AI-generated sermons or spiritual content may seem extremely impressive. And they really are, to be fair! However, a vital principle when using AI—or indeed any resource—is to verify everything it produces. This is especially important in theology, where accuracy is not just academic but spiritual and potentially dangerous. The Bible exhorts us to ‘test everything’ (1 Thessalonians 5:20-21) and to ‘test the spirits’ (1 John 4:1).

AI has a well-documented tendency to generate false or fabricated content—a phenomenon known (anthropomorphically) as ‘hallucination’—and is therefore often confidently wrong in its assertions. It’s often ‘truth mixed with untruth’. One study across a range of LLMs found ‘about 46.4% of the texts generated presented factual errors’. Given that AI, quite literally, does not know what it is talking about perhaps this is hardly surprising!

The following exchange with ChatGPT demonstrates AI’s tendency to hallucinate and make up information.

A screenshot of a black screen AI-generated content may be incorrect.
Quotes generated by ChatGPT

On first glance this seems a remarkable list of well-sourced quotes. However, checking them reveals a different story—all six are made up! Eagle-eyed Owen fanboys will also notice that ChatGPT gets confused between volumes six and nine of the legendary Puritan’s works.

AI can make us less reliant on the Spirit

But there are deeper, theological considerations for Christians contemplating using AI tools in church contexts. It is the Holy Spirit who inspires and equips the church, not ChatGPT (John 16:13). The danger is that the more man-made tools Christians use for kingdom purposes, the less dependent we are on the Holy Spirit.

Take sermon preparation, like much in the life of a pastor, it can be a thankless and laborious task. The spiritual meals that most nourish a congregation are the ones that the preacher has worked hardest to prepare, not the microwave ready meals. Timothy was told to ‘preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching’ (2 Timothy 4:2-3).

A good pastor knows his congregation and understands their needs (Nehemiah 8:8). This will be reflected in his preaching week in, week out. He preaches heart to heart in a manner that AI can never match. Before preaching on a text, the preacher must prayerfully wrestle with it himself.

First, the truth of God’s word has to move the preacher himself, if he is to have any hope that others will be moved by it. Lloyd-Jones declares that ‘more important [than the sermon itself] is the preparation of the preacher himself’ (Preaching and Preachers, p. 166). Olyott insists on the need to do everything ‘in an attitude of prayer’, and to ‘[stay] on your knees until the passage enflames your soul—until the fire burns’ (Preaching Pure and Simple, pp. 191, 193). The pastor who uses AI as a hermeneutical shortcut will not feed his flock deeply. Ezekiel accuses such of shirking their responsibilities (Ezekiel 34:4). AI is no replacement for ‘rightly handling the word of truth’ (2 Timothy 2:15). To paraphrase Paul, ‘[AI] is not able to understand [the things of the Spirit of God] because they are spiritually discerned’ (1 Corinthians 2:14).

AI is not the imago Dei, we are

Whatever we might thoughtfully and carefully use AI for, Christians must remember that AI is not the imago Dei (‘image of God’) which is creatio ex nihilo (‘created from nothing’). We are the ones who are made in God’s image, not AI (Genesis 1:26-27). Anything we create is the imago hominis (‘image of man’) which, we might add, is creatio ex materia (‘created from something’):

human beings as the imago Dei cannot reproduce full equivalents for the imago Dei. From this it follows that AI is created in the imago hominis.

Ximian Xu, The Digitalised Image of God: Artificial Intelligence, Liturgy, and Ethics

That’s the Latin. To put it another way using the Greek, in the language of archetype-ectype theology, which similarly highlights the Creator-creature distinction, Ximian Xu writes again:

by virtue of the ontological chasm between an ectype and an archetype, AI as the ectype of the imago Dei implies that there is an insurmountable ontological gap between humans and AI.

This distinction is important, because weak AI as a tool serving a specific assigned task is vastly different to the sentient agent which strong AI evangelists dream of. Frankly, they can dream on!

Even if somehow artificial general intelligence (AGI) is achieved, it will never be the imago Dei, but some set it up as such and almost ascribe to it the powers of a god. AI coupled with modern animatronics might be more technically advanced and mimic life externally better than gods of wood and stone, but just like those idols, they are fundamentally dead inside (see Isaiah 44:9-20). One writer issues the challenge:

insofar as we allow computers to shape our lives we have made them into gods of silicon

Noreen Herzfeld

Closing thoughts

We mustn’t just blindly reject something because it’s new or because we don’t understand it. Though it’s currently extremely inefficient (especially when compared with the human brain) and has a long way to go, AI is already changing the world just as the smartphone or the steam engine or the printing press did. Christians should redeem and claim AI for Christ and His kingdom work, but we should be very much aware of its dangers, especially in church contexts. There is much about AI that Christians should rightly be concerned about at a deeper level than media sensationalism.

Right now AI still has the air of a novelty but some big use-cases for AI include surveillance, facial recognition, drone warfare and data collection, making Orwell’s dystopian ‘Big Brother’ technocracy a step closer to reality. Technological development in the last century or so may have been used to help raise the average life expectancy, raise the quality of life for many people, give us all our mod-cons et cetera—but it’s also been used to blow up, kill and maim more people than in most of the previous centuries put together. Technology is not the problem per se, human beings are.

The news is an ever-present reminder of how fickle human beings are. Civilisation is fragile. The same goes for the church; we are not called sheep for nothing (Acts 20:28-30). I spoke earlier about verifying things. The source of truth we use to verify everything is the word of God. ‘On Christ, the solid Rock, I stand; all other ground is sinking sand.’ Anything not built on the Lord Jesus will not stand (Matthew 7:24-27).

In his letter to the Romans, Paul issues some damning words for those who don’t build themselves on God’s word:

Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

Romans 1:22-23

We must fight against anything that would stop us from the pure and holy worship of God. AI, and technology in general, already controls so many aspects of our lives. It’s high time we seriously reviewed and reset our relationship with it, but we can only effectively do that and arrive at a biblical balance by God’s help.