Why Church Leaders Don’t Need to Be Afraid of AI
Movieguide® Contributor
At Gloo’s second “AI and the Church Hackathon” last weekend, AI industry leaders shared why it’s important that pastors aren’t afraid of AI.
“AI is going to dramatically increase the spread of the gospel if we think about it within the right architectures,” Steele Billings, Gloo’s Director of AI Initiatives, wants pastors to know. “It can also expose people to harm…And so the right guidelines and guardrails need to be put around things.”
Gloo reports that 34% of pastors say AI is scary, and another 32% are concerned that it’s biased. Almost three-quarters believe that its “concerning.” Some have written it off altogether.
Movieguide® recently reported:
Aside from mundane tasks… fewer pastors were confident in engaging [with AI]. Less than half (43%) would use the technology for sermon prep despite AI tools that compile multiple sources into succinct summaries. Even less (39%) would use AI to create study tools, while 12% would be willing to use the technology to assist in writing the sermons they preach.
“The resistance to AI is fully understandable. I mean, we need to be really careful when we’re dealing with people’s lives, God’s Word, and everything in between,” Gloo CEO and cofounder Scott Beck said. “I think it really is about having good diligence [and] making sure that we’re really thinking it through.”
“Every church is already using AI in spell check,” Beck said. “… So now it’s a question of how do we start applying it to more and more use cases administratively to make it easier to connect to people, making it easier to be able to build certain assets and resources and content. And in that, we have to be careful with every one of those use cases. We just have to say, ‘Ok, how do we do this in a safe, ethical, constructive manner?’”
Dr. Ed Stetzer, dean of Talbot School of Theology at Biola University and editor-in-chief of Outreach Magazine, points out that one of the largest concerns among the church at the onset of VHS tapes and the internet was pornography. At those times, Christians were on the ball and active in preventing the spread of pornography through those methods. He believes the same active approach should be taken with AI.
Stetzer said, “I think it’s better for Christians to be involved and engaged at the front end to help steer some of the conversation.”
Church Leaders said, “The questions that AI raises are very similar to questions Christians faced at the dawn of the internet. The internet has contributed to the spread of the gospel in many ways, and Billings believes that AI has the potential to do the same on a significantly greater scale.”
Trevor Sutton, author of “Redeeming Technology,” wrote, “It won’t be long before generative AI technology is woven into the background of our church lives.”
Kenny Jahng, founder of AiForChurchLeaders.com and editor-in-chief of ChurchTechToday.com, believes that AI has the potential to have a tremendous positive impact.
It will compare “the level of disruption of what the internet and websites have done — this is even larger than that in my mind,” he said. “The relevance that a church has is going to be so decimated if we don’t embrace AI at some point.”
When social media first came out, Christian initiatives were too far behind to make a wave. Jahng notes that some made efforts to create Christian Facebooks, but they couldn’t compete with what was already out there.
“I think society and culture, for the most part, has understood that social media and the evolution of social media platforms probably wasn’t net positive for all of us, right?” he said. “We know the algorithms are profit-motivated. It’s not for human flourishing. We look at that in hindsight now because it’s too late.”
“Those hard questions are being asked about AI much earlier in this technology innovation front than most others that have preceded it,” said Jahng.
Gloo announced a few AI alternatives at the hackathon. One of them is the Christian Align Large Language Model (CALLM). It offers practical help but also aligns with Christians’ core values. It’s designed to be transparent and clear.
In contrast, “ChatGPT is a closed environment…started by a company called OpenAI, but so much of their architecture is actually closed off,” Billings said. “You don’t have transparency to it. You don’t know what goes into it. You don’t understand the biases that are in it.”
“When you ask a Christian question, you [wonder], what data related to Christianity do you [OpenAI] have that you’re going to use to answer my question? And then they’re not citing and sourcing.”
OpenAI did not make its codes and models transparent or available to the public. It could have underlying biases written in, and users would not know. But with CALLM, everything will be completely open and transparent.
“Lower levels of trust will result in lower levels of adoption, and lower levels of adoption will result in lower levels of impact,” Billings said, which he knows based on data retrieved through an initiative called Flourishing AI. “And so we see the first problem to solve is to increase trust.”
“We have to do exactly what we’re saying that we’re doing,” he continued. “And there will be an open source community that’s formed around it, [a] very similar approach to what Meta has done with their Llama model.”
“And so we hope that that results in higher trust, higher adoption,” Billings said, “which will then serve the church leader.”
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