Should We Embrace or Evict AI in Churches?
By Patrick Miller, TGC.
It took Twitter two years to reach 1 million users. Spotify? 5 months. Instagram? 2.5 months.
ChatGPT? Five days.
In the span of five days, AI broke into the conscious awareness of everyday people. For the first time, people played ChatGPT’s linguistic slot machine: tough questions in, surprisingly good answers out. White-collar workers experienced exactly what blue-collar workers did decades earlier: Here’s a machine that can do what I can do at a fraction of the cost.
Alarm bells clanged across culture with a ferocity that, in some cases, bordered on panic. Serious thinkers who knew nothing about AI before ChatGPT felt a sudden need to share their hot takes on social media and podcasts. But another set of thinkers took a different tack: they relished the generative possibility of AI, launching a cottage industry of new AI products promising to change the world.
In the span of a few months, Christians have divided mostly into two camps about the place of AI in the church: (1) critics who fear generative AI will take jobs and sabotage spiritual formation and (2) pragmatists who hope AI will free ministry leaders to do more.
The rapid technological polarization didn’t surprise me, but I didn’t find it helpful. After several years of writing about AI, I struck a mostly cautious tone. Yet, despite my fears, I became increasingly convinced that generative AI—used ethically—could serve kingdom ends.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
