God, AI And The Question The Church Keeps Avoiding

What happens when artificial intelligence collides with faith, ministry, and biblical truth? In Chapter One of Faith Forward: The Artificial Intelligence Series, we explore the questions many churches are avoiding—how AI is reshaping culture, communication, discipleship, and the future of ministry. This episode challenges believers to approach technology with wisdom, discernment, and faith instead of fear. 

Transcript

Why The Church Feels Afraid

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Hey, welcome back to Compass Chronicles, I'm JM, and today we are kicking off something I have been wanting to do for a while now. This is the first episode of a brand new series we are calling Faith Forward, the Artificial Intelligence Series, and over the next several episodes we are going to go deep on something the church has been dancing around for way too long. Now, before you go anywhere, just give me a few minutes because I know this topic lands differently for different people. Some of you heard artificial intelligence and you're already curious, already leaning in, maybe already using some of these tools and wondering whether that is okay. Some of you heard it and something in you tensed up a little. Maybe you're not sure why. Maybe you have heard things that made you uncomfortable. Maybe it just feels like something that does not belong in the same sentence as faith. Wherever you are with this, I want you to know you're in the right place. Because this series is not here to sell you on anything, and it is not here to scare you away from anything. It is here to have the honest conversation that I think the church actually needs right now. And I want to start that conversation today with just one question. Not what is artificial intelligence. Not should Christians use it, not is it dangerous, just one question that I think gets to the heart of why this topic makes so many believers uncomfortable. Why is the church so afraid? That is where we are starting today. And I think by the time we finish this episode, you're going to see this whole conversation a little differently. Not because I'm going to talk you into anything, but because I believe that once we name the fear honestly and really look at it together, we can start to figure out whether it is the Holy Spirit warning us or whether it is just the very human discomfort of something new and unfamiliar showing up in our world. So let us go there together. So let us talk about fear for a minute. Real fear. Not the kind you brush off or pretend is not there, the kind that actually sits with you when you hear something and you're not quite sure what to do with it. Because when I talk to Christians about artificial intelligence, that is what I keep running into. Fear. And I want to be really clear that I'm not saying that to be dismissive. I'm not standing here telling you the fear is wrong or that you should just get over it. Fear is information, it tells us something. The question is always, what exactly is it telling us, and is that the whole story? When I dig into what people are actually afraid of, it usually comes down to a few things. Some people are afraid that artificial intelligence is going to replace human connection. That we are going to end up in a world where people stop talking to each other and start talking to machines instead. And honestly, I think that is a legitimate concern worth paying attention to. Some people are afraid it is going to be used to spread lies and deception on a scale we have never seen before. And again, I think that concern has real substance to it. We have already seen how quickly false information travels online, and artificial intelligence does make that easier. In some ways, some people are afraid that it is going to replace genuine creativity and genuine thought, that we are going to stop thinking for ourselves because we have a machine that will think for us. And I understand that one too. But here's what I want us to sit with for a minute. Every single one of those fears is really a fear about people, about what people will do with a tool, about how people will choose to use or misuse something that is available to them. And that is a very different thing from the tool itself being the problem. Because if the fear is about what people will do with artificial intelligence, then the answer is not to avoid the tool. The answer is to be the kind of person who uses it differently, to be the kind of believer who brings wisdom and discernment and integrity to every tool they pick up. To be the example of what faithful engagement actually looks like, and that is exactly what this series is about. Now I want to ask you something, and I want you to really sit with it for a second. When you feel that discomfort around artificial intelligence, when that tension shows up, how do you know whether it is the Holy Spirit, warning you away from something genuinely dangerous or whether it is just the natural human resistance to something new and unfamiliar? Because those two things can feel exactly the same in the moment, and I think that is one of the most important questions a believer can learn to ask themselves, not just about artificial intelligence, about anything. The Holy Spirit does warn us. Scripture is full of examples of God directing his people away from things that would harm them or compromise their integrity or pull them off the path he had for them. That is real, and I take it seriously. If you have prayed about this and genuinely feel like God is telling you to keep your distance from these tools, then I respect that and I'm not here to talk you out of it. But I also know this the Holy Spirit produces specific fruit. Galatians 5 tells us what that looks like: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And fear is not on that list. Fear that paralyzes, fear that shuts down conversation, fear that keeps us from engaging wisely with the world around us. That is not the fruit of the spirit, that is something else. And I think a lot of what the church is experiencing right now around artificial intelligence is not Holy Spirit discernment. It is cultural anxiety dressed up in spiritual language. It is the discomfort of rapid change showing up in a community that values tradition and stability. And those are not bad values, but they can sometimes lead us to call something spiritually dangerous when really it is just unfamiliar. I want to give you a way to test that in your own heart. Next time you feel that tension around artificial intelligence, ask yourself these questions. Have I actually spent time learning what this is, or am I reacting to what I have heard from others? Have I brought this to God in prayer specifically, or am I just carrying a general unease? And is my resistance based on something Scripture actually speaks to, or is it based on the feeling that this is too new, too different, too much like the world? Those questions will not give you all the answers, but they will help you figure out whether what you are feeling is discernment or just discomfort, and that distinction matters a lot for where we go from here. Before we go any further, I want to take a step back and just explain what artificial intelligence actually is. Because I think a lot of the confusion and a lot of the fear comes from not really understanding what we are dealing with, and you cannot make a wise decision about something you do not understand. So let me break this down in plain language. No technical jargon, no computer science degree required. Artificial intelligence is basically a system that has been trained to recognize patterns. That is really the core of it. You take an enormous amount of information, text, images, data, conversations, books, articles, websites, and you feed it into a system, and that system learns to recognize patterns, in all of that information. Then when you give it something new, it uses those patterns to generate a response. Now, the specific kind of artificial intelligence that most people are using right now when they talk about tools like ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini is called a large language model. You might see that written as the letters LLM. A large language model is a system that has been trained specifically on language, on text, on the way human beings write and speak and communicate, and it has gotten very good at generating text that sounds like a person wrote it because it has learned from billions of examples of how people actually write and speak. When you type a question into one of these tools, what happens is the system looks at what you wrote and tries to figure out what the most helpful and relevant response would be, based on everything it has learned. It is not thinking the way you think, it is not reasoning the way you reason, it is not drawing on life experience or faith or relationship with God, it is matching patterns and generating text that fits those patterns. Now here's why that matters for this conversation. A large language model has no soul, it has no conscience, it has no faith, it has no spiritual discernment, it cannot pray, it cannot hear from God, it cannot be filled with the Holy Spirit. It is a very sophisticated text-generating system that has learned to sound remarkably human because it has consumed so much human language, that does not make it evil, but it does make it limited in ways that matter deeply for believers, and understanding those limitations is actually what frees you to use it wisely. Because once you know what it can and cannot do, you stop being afraid of it doing things it actually cannot do, and you start being thoughtful about how to use what it genuinely can do. Think of it like this: a calculator is very good at math, better than any human being, but nobody is afraid that a calculator is going to replace wisdom or replace faith or replace the living-breathing relationship between a believer and God. Because we understand what a calculator is and what it is not. Artificial intelligence is more complex than a calculator. It can do things that feel a lot more human because it has learned from human language, but the underlying reality is the same. It is a tool, and like every tool it does exactly what it is built to do and nothing more. So now that we have a clearer picture of what artificial intelligence actually is, I want to come back to the church for a minute, because I think there is something important we need to name out loud. The church is not just afraid of artificial intelligence, the church has been here before, and I mean that literally, this is not the first time believers have stood at the edge of something new and felt this exact same tension, this exact same pull between fear and possibility. Between protecting what is sacred and engaging with what is new, when the printing press arrived in the 1400s, it did not feel like a blessing to everyone. For centuries the church had been the keeper of scripture, the gatekeeper of who had access to the Word of God and how it was interpreted. The printing press blew that wide open almost overnight. Suddenly, ordinary people could read the Bible for themselves. Suddenly information could travel faster than anyone could control, and that terrified a lot of people who were used to the way things worked. But there were believers who looked at that same tool and saw something different. They saw an opportunity to put scripture into the hands of people who had never held it before, to spread the gospel further and faster than any previous generation had been able to. And the ones who engaged with wisdom and discernment ended up changing the course of Christian history. Then came the microphone, then radio, then television, then the internet. And every single time the same pattern played out, fear first, debate second, adoption third, and then eventually the church looked back and said, Imagine if we had never used that. Imagine how many people we would have never reached. Now I'm not telling you that pattern means every new technology is automatically good, or that we should adopt everything without thinking. That is not the point I'm making. The point is that fear of something new is not the same as discernment about something new, and the church has a long history of confusing those two things. So here's the question I want to sit with as we keep going. If the church has navigated every major technological shift before and come out the other side, still standing, still spreading the gospel, still reaching people, what is it that actually made the difference each time? What separated the believers who engaged wisely from the ones who either retreated in fear or rushed in without thinking? I think the answer comes down to one word. Wisdom. And that is exactly where I want to go. Wisdom is one of those words we throw around a lot in church circles. We talk about praying for wisdom, walking in wisdom, seeking wisdom, but I think sometimes we use it without really unpacking what it actually means in practice. Because wisdom is not just a feeling, it is not just a vague sense that something is right or wrong. It is something much more specific and much more actionable than that. Proverbs 4.7 says wisdom is the principal thing. And then it says something that I think we often skip over. It says, in all you're getting, get understanding. Not in all you're getting, get comfort. Not in all you're getting avoid what makes you uneasy. Get understanding. That word understanding implies engagement, it implies leaning in. It implies doing the work of actually learning about something before you make a decision about it. And I think that is where a lot of Christians are falling short right now with artificial intelligence. Not because they are bad believers or because their hearts are not in the right place, but because they are making decisions about something they have not yet taken the time to understand. And you cannot walk in wisdom about something you do not understand. You can only react to it. So what does it actually look like to pursue wisdom around artificial intelligence as a believer? I want to give you something practical here because I think we need to move from the theoretical to the real. The first thing it looks like is asking better questions. Instead of asking, is artificial intelligence good or bad, ask what is this tool actually capable of and what are its limitations. Instead of asking, should Christians use it, ask what would faithful use of this tool look like for someone with my specific calling and convictions. Those are harder questions, but they are the ones that actually lead somewhere useful. The second thing it looks like is bringing it to Scripture. Not looking for a verse that mentions artificial intelligence because you're not going to find one, but looking at the principles Scripture gives us for how to engage with the world around us. Principles about wisdom, about integrity, about stewardship, about using what is in our hands to serve God and serve others. Those principles apply to every tool in every generation, including this one. The third thing wisdom looks like here is staying in community, not making these decisions alone. Talking to other believers you trust, listening to voices that are further along in thinking through this than you are, asking your pastor, reading what thoughtful Christian thinkers are writing about this moment. The body of Christ is designed to navigate new and difficult territory together, and isolation and discernment is always a setup for error. And the fourth thing wisdom looks like is being willing to change your mind in both directions. If you started out afraid and you do the work of understanding and prayer and community and you land somewhere different than where you started, that is not weakness. That is wisdom doing its job. And if you started out enthusiastic and that same process leads you to pull back in certain areas, that is wisdom doing its job too. Now I want to talk about something that I think sits underneath all of this and does not get named enough, and that is the idea of stewardship. We talk about stewardship in church mostly in the context of money, giving your tithe, managing your finances, being responsible with what God has entrusted to you financially, but stewardship is a much bigger concept than that. It covers everything God has placed in your hands, your time, your gifts, your relationships, your platform, your influence, and yes, the tools available to you in the moment God has placed you in. Matthew 25 gives us the parable of the talents, and I think it speaks directly to this conversation. A master leaves three servants with different amounts of money and goes away on a journey. When he comes back, two of the servants have taken what they were given and multiplied it. They engaged, they worked, they took a risk with what was in their hands, and the master calls them good and faithful. But the third servant buried what he was given. He was afraid, he played it safe, he did nothing, and the master was not pleased. Now I'm not saying that parable is specifically about artificial intelligence, it is not, but the principle it teaches is directly relevant to this conversation. God is not honored by what we bury out of fear. He is honored by what we steward faithfully with what is available to us in the time he has placed us in. You are alive right now, in this moment, in this generation, at a time when tools exist that no previous generation of believers had access to. Tools that can help you reach people faster, communicate more clearly, serve your community more effectively, and spread the gospel further than you could on your own. That is not an accident. God is not surprised by any of this, and I think the question he is asking his church right now is the same question the master asked when he came back from his journey. What did you do with what I gave you? Did you engage with wisdom and multiply the impact? Or did you bury it because you were afraid? I want to be someone who engages. I want to be someone who takes what is available in this moment and uses it faithfully for the kingdom. Not recklessly, not without discernment, not without prayer and community and the constant anchor of scripture, but faithfully, actively. With my eyes open and my heart surrendered to what God wants to do through it, and I believe that is what God is calling his church to in this moment too. So let us get really practical for a minute, because I think this conversation needs to land somewhere concrete before we go any further. When I talk to Christian creators, ministry leaders, pastors, and believers who are using artificial intelligence in their work, the ones who are doing it well have a few things in common. And I want to walk you through what I have noticed because I think it will help you see what faithful engagement actually looks like on the ground, not just in theory. The first thing they have in common is they are clear about what they are using it for. They are not using artificial intelligence for everything, they are using it for specific tasks where it genuinely helps them do what they are called to do more effectively. A pastor who uses it to research cross-references for a sermon so he can spend more time in prayer and pastoral care. A worship leader who uses it to explore chord progressions and lyrical ideas as a starting point for songs she then writes herself. A ministry administrator who uses it to draft communications and free up time for direct ministry work, specific intentional, purposeful use. The second thing they have in common is they always bring their own voice and their own discernment to whatever comes out. They never just copy and paste, they never publish something. An artificial intelligence generated without reading it carefully, filtering it through their own knowledge of scripture, and making sure it actually sounds like them and reflects what they actually believe. The tool is a starting point, not a finishing point. The third thing they have in common is they are honest about it. They are not hiding the fact that they use these tools. They are not pretending that every word they produce comes entirely from their own mind without any assistance. They are transparent with their communities about how they work and why. And that transparency actually builds trust rather than undermining it. And the fourth thing they have in common is they pray over their work. Even the work that started with an artificial intelligence prompt, they bring it before God, they ask for discernment. They invite the Holy Spirit into the process. They treat their creative and ministry work as sacred, regardless of what tools they use to get there. Because the work is still theirs, the calling is still theirs, the anointing is still theirs, the tool just helped them get there faster. That is the model I want to hold up for this conversation. Not perfection, not a rigid set of rules that works exactly the same for every believer in every context, but a posture, a way of approaching this that keeps God at the center, keeps scripture as the anchor, and keeps the believer in the driver's seat rather than the passenger seat. I want to address something directly that I know is on some of your minds, because it comes up every single time I have this conversation with believers. What about integrity? What about authenticity? If I use artificial intelligence to help me write something, am I being dishonest? Am I presenting something as mine that is not really mine? Am I deceiving the people who follow me and trust me? These are serious questions and they deserve a serious answer. So let me give you one. There is a difference between using a tool to help you produce your work and misrepresenting where your work came from. Those are two very different things. And I think we sometimes collapse them into one when they need to stay separate. If you use artificial intelligence to help you research a topic, organize your thoughts, find the right words when yours are slow, generate a first draft that you then rewrite in your own voice, and you are transparent about your process when asked, that is not deception, that is using a tool. Writers have always used tools, researchers have always used tools, ministers have always used commentaries and concordances and sermon prep resources created by other people. Using a tool to help you do your work better is not the same as lying about your work. Where it becomes an integrity issue is when you pass off something, an artificial intelligence generated as entirely your own original thought without any engagement or filtering or transformation on your part. When you let it speak for you instead of helping you speak better, when you hide the fact that you used it because you know your audience would feel deceived if they found out. That is where the line is. And that line is actually pretty clear once you name it, your voice is yours, your calling is yours, your relationship with your community is yours, your faith is yours. Artificial intelligence cannot generate any of those things. What it can do is help you express them more clearly, more consistently, and more effectively. And there is nothing dishonest about that as long as you stay in the driver's seat and stay honest with the people who trust you. I think the enemy wants us to feel guilty about using tools that could actually multiply our impact for the kingdom. I think the shame around this topic is keeping some very gifted believers from showing up as consistently and as powerfully as they could be. And I want to call that out for what it is. Guilt that keeps you small is not holiness. It is just smallness. Let me talk for a minute about something I experienced personally that I think a lot of you are going to relate to. There was a season in my life and my ministry where I felt completely stuck. I had things to say. I had content I wanted to create, episodes I wanted to record, words I wanted to write, but every time I sat down to do the work, something would happen. The words would not come. I would stare at a blank page or a blank screen and feel like everything inside me had dried up, and the more I pushed, the worse it got. Now some of that was spiritual, some of it was the kind of dry season that every believer goes through, and the answer to it is prayer and scripture and waiting on God. I know that. I believe that, and I did that. But some of it was also just the very practical reality of being a creative person who was overextended, running on empty, carrying too many responsibilities, and trying to produce at a level that my capacity could not sustain. And no amount of prayer was going to change the fact that I only had so many hours in a day and so much energy in my body. When I started using artificial intelligence tools, it did not replace my creativity, it did not replace my voice, it did not replace the anointing on my work or the relationship I have with my community. What it did was clear enough of the practical burden that I could actually show up for the work that only I could do. It handled some of the heavy lifting so I could focus on what actually required me specifically. And I want to say something about that experience that I think is important. Using a tool to help you show up more consistently for your calling is not laziness. It is not compromise, it is stewardship. It is taking what God has given you, your time, your energy, your gifts, and managing it wisely so you can sustain the work over the long haul instead of burning out trying to do everything by hand. The most faithful thing I can do with my calling is not to make it harder than it has to be. It is to show up consistently, stay true to my voice, keep God at the center, and use every wise tool available to me to reach as many people as possible with something that actually matters. That is what I'm trying to do. And artificial intelligence has been a part of how I do that faithfully. I want to spend a few minutes on something that I think is one of the most important practical questions in this whole conversation, and that is the question of your voice. Because here is what I have noticed: the believers who struggle most with artificial intelligence tools are often the ones who are most afraid of losing themselves in the process. Afraid that if they use these tools long enough, they will start to sound like everyone else, that their specific perspective, their hard-won wisdom, their unique way of seeing the world and communicating about faith will get smoothed out and flattened into something generic. And I want to tell you that fear is worth paying attention to, because it can happen. Not because artificial intelligence takes your voice from you, but because if you're not intentional, it is easy to stop developing your voice and start relying on the tool to do that work for you. And that is a real danger. Your voice as a communicator is not just about the words you use, it is about the specific combination of your life experience, your theology, your personality, your sense of humor, your grief, your faith, your doubts, your convictions. None of that is in the training data of any artificial intelligence system. None of that can be generated by a pattern-matching algorithm, no matter how sophisticated it gets. That is yours, it came from your life, and the only way to lose it is to stop feeding it. So here's what I want to encourage you to do. Use the tools. Use them wisely and intentionally. But never stop doing the things that develop your voice independently of those tools. Keep reading, keep praying, keep having real conversations with real people, keep sitting with scripture and letting it shape how you think and how you speak. Keep writing things that never get published, just to stay in practice. Keep doing the inner work that produces the outer voice. Artificial intelligence can help you express your voice more efficiently. It cannot build your voice for you. That is your job. And as long as you know that and stay committed to it, you have nothing to fear from the tool. You're always going to be the most important ingredient in anything you create. I want to take a moment and speak specifically to the pastors and ministry leaders who might be listening to this, because I know your situation is a little different from the average Christian creator, and I think you deserve a direct word. You carry a weight that most people do not fully understand. You are responsible not just for producing content but for the spiritual health and growth of real people who trust you with some of the most important questions of their lives. That is a sacred responsibility, and it shapes how you have to think about every tool you use in your ministry. I'm not going to stand here and tell you to use artificial intelligence to write your sermons. That is not what I'm saying, and it is not what I believe. Your sermons come from your prayer life, your study of scripture, your knowledge of your specific congregation, the specific word God has given you for a specific moment. No tool can replicate that. No algorithm has sat with your people through their hardest seasons the way you have. No language model carries the anointing that comes from a life surrendered to God and shaped by years of faithful ministry. But here's what I do want to say to you. There are parts of your work that do not require anointing. They require time. Drafting the weekly bulletin, writing the email to your congregation, putting together discussion questions for small groups, researching background information on a passage you're going to preach, creating social media posts that communicate what is happening in your church. Those tasks take real time that you could be spending on the things that only you can do. And if a tool can help you do those tasks faster and free up more of your limited time for prayer, for pastoral care, for the preparation that actually requires you specifically, then using that tool is not compromise. It is wisdom. It is stewardship of the time and energy God has given you to serve your community. The question for you as a pastor is not whether to use artificial intelligence, the question is where in your workflow, does this tool serve the ministry, and where does it need to stay out of the way? And that is a question you can answer with prayer, with discernment, and with the knowledge of your own calling that nobody else has. We are getting close to the end of this first episode, and before I close, I want to address one more thing that comes up constantly in this conversation, and that is the question of what to do when the people around you do not agree with how you're engaging with this. Because here's the reality, if you start using artificial intelligence in your ministry work or your creative work, at some point someone is going to have a problem with it. Maybe it is a member of your congregation, maybe it is a fellow ministry leader, maybe it is someone in your family, maybe it is your pastor, and that conversation can feel really uncomfortable, especially when your faith and your integrity are part of what is being questioned. So let me give you a few things to hold on to when that happens. First, lead with humility. You do not need to be defensive about how you work. You do not need to justify yourself aggressively or make the other person feel small for asking the question. Just be honest and calm and let your integrity speak for itself. Explain what you use it for, how you use it, and why you believe. That is consistent with your faith and your values. A calm, honest answer goes a lot further than a defensive one. Second, acknowledge the legitimate concerns, because there are some. The concerns about integrity, about authenticity, about the potential for these tools to be misused. Those are real and worth taking seriously. You do not have to agree with every conclusion someone draws, but you can acknowledge that they are asking important questions. That kind of intellectual honesty actually builds trust rather than eroding it. Third, give people time. Some people need to sit with new information before they can receive it. If someone in your community pushes back on how you're using these tools, plant the seed of a better framework, and then give them space to process it. You're not going to change every mind in one conversation, and you do not need to. Just stay consistent, stay honest, and let your fruit speak over time. And fourth, stay grounded in your own discernment. At the end of the day, you have to answer to God for how you steward your calling. Not to every person who has an opinion about it. Do the work of prayer and scripture and community. Get clear on where you stand and why. And then hold that with both confidence and humility. Confidence because you have done the work of discernment. Humility because none of us has this perfectly figured out. So here we are at the end of episode one of Faith Forward, the Artificial Intelligence series, and I want to close this the same way I opened it. With honesty, I do not have all the answers on this, nobody does. This technology is moving fast and the church is still catching up, and that means all of us are navigating this in real time without a perfect map, and that is okay. That is actually the normal Christian experience, walking by faith in the middle of something you do not fully understand yet, trusting that the God who called you is also the God who will guide you. What I do know is this the fear is real, but it is not the whole story. The potential is real but it needs wisdom to be realized. The risks are real, but they are navigable by a believer who stays anchored in Scripture, stays connected to community, stays surrendered to God, and stays honest with the people they serve. That is the foundation I want to build this whole series on. Not hype and not fear, but honest, faithful wisdom, seeking engagement with one of the most significant technological shifts our generation has ever seen. Next episode, we are going deep into the history of the church and technology. Because I think when you see the full picture of how believers have navigated these moments before, from the printing press to the internet, it is going to change how you think about where we are right now and what God might be doing in the middle of it. I'm JM, this is Compass Chronicles. Faith Forward, the Artificial Intelligence Series. Episode one is done, and I will see you in the next one.