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We all woke up in the most technologically advanced era in human history. Never before has technology shaped every aspect of life like it does today. We communicate primarily through electronic means, which is the same way we consume entertainment, search for inspiration, and find community. Online personas allow us to explore different personalities, expressing ourselves in different flavors, sometimes totally anonymously. And yet, just like every other era of human history, people are hungry, thirsty, unhoused, sick, and imprisoned.

AI tools promise to further optimize our lives, offering extreme efficiency in thought, speech, writing, research, and art; accordingly, as reported many times this spring and summer by the Religious and Presbyterian News Services, pastors and church leaders also are increasingly turning to AI to help catalyze their work. In a May article from the latter organization that asks, “Can AI Deliver the Word of God?” a pastor declares that AI can be used in “creating intergenerational games for VBS, liturgy and lesson plans.” The PC(USA) office on innovationcontains a large graphic on its site that is titled “How GenAI Will Augment Leaders,” which defines augmentation as granting “a new superpower.”  Scrolling down, one might note that a takeaway from the 2024 AI & the Church Summit is to create a group called “AI for Good,” to advocate for “Just AI on behalf of our denominations,” complete with collaboration from Microsoft itself. Things certainly appear to be moving quickly.

What, exactly, about your church or pastor cries out for optimization? Will sermons, liturgies, and educational resources be stronger (holier?) simply because they use twice or ten times as many sources as “analog?” Are we optimizing our leaders by providing them a biblical interpretation cheat code, an unimaginative, mimetic answer-grabber that we will then put a human stamp on and put before our congregation as they reflect on their mistakes, doubts, despairs, and listen carefully for a word of insight or inspiration? Perhaps we can optimize the experience by cutting out the middle man—load Barth, Tillich, Richard Rohr, Desmond Tutu, and Barbara Brown Taylor into a proprietary model, give each church goer (or church at-homer) a tablet, and let the divine-digital mystery spit out lines of transformation right before their eyes, which can be read in whatever human-sounding voice they choose.

God is not an optimizer, and optimization is not a virtue. Optimization and efficiency are tools for wealth generation and management. Optimization and efficiency have brought us quite a lot—when I finish this blog post, for instance, I will be happy to email it, rather than send it in an envelope (and ask someone to read my handwriting). Optimization and efficiency have allowed for things like vegetarianism to be much more accessible, since I can search recipes on my computer and access foods from all over the globe.  Yet optimization and efficiency have razed forests, polluted rivers, bleached coral reefs, and in any age, treated human beings like grist for the mill. Many people are sounding that alarm alongside the rise of AI, although concern over these tools has so far received only a light touch in certain PC(USA) circles.

If your church needs your pastor to move faster, that is not a technology problem. That is a theology problem. It declares that ministries operate first on culture, and secondarily what we believe about God. Discovering a shortcut for portions of their role so they can spend more time on others sounds nice, but without discernment and sacrifice somewhere, this will merely move the goalposts a bit farther until there is some other reason your pastor is stressed about not having enough time for visits, committee meetings, worship preparation, or to find sabbath.

There is an argument to be made that efficiency allows stewardship dollars to go farther, and sustainability to be reached in ways that perhaps it could not be otherwise. I wonder in this area, as well, if the problem is a particular problem about money, or a general problem regarding the immense pressure of capitalism on the church. Stewardship as a theological virtue or form of capitalist accommodation demands its own focus, but as relates to the discussion on AI, the short version is: if the church is having a problem with relevancy and connecting to people outside its comfortable group, is it serving its purpose? Asking AI to write liturgy, sermons, or educational materials because you do not have the people power to do it is not augmenting or optimizing leadership, it is asking Chat to help perpetuate a dysfunctional family system.

The discussion of AI concern as reported in Presbyterian media has been fairly limited to the world of plagiarism (meaning, how much editing must one do of a chat-generated something to say it represents their own work) and a bit to ecological concerns. In the above cited article, the same pastor says that he is mindful of water usage by only using the amount of prompts daily to equal ten water bottles worth. Such ideas are part of our disconnected, neoliberal system, that facelessly takes from some people over here to grant others over there a magic computer experience. But everything has a cost. Virginia, where I live, has long been a home to data: Northern Virginia is estimated to process a quarter of the internet traffic of the whole world. Even so, we are becoming inundated with data centers that are approved by local bodies with no eye towards the impact on the state as a whole.The results? Power bills for families are set to go up by 15%, and the former site of a coal ash power plant is being proposed as the new site of a gas power plant to help fuel the data center boom not far from where I live.[1] (). Will church leaders turn the lights off for an hour per day so cash-strapped families don’t have another rising cost in the 2020s? Will church leaders save 10 albuterol inhaler puffs per day for the asthmatics like me who will suffer more and even be generated alongside fossil fuels we know are harmful to use for energy (and let’s not forget the “least of these,” as asthma is securely correlated with poverty)? Will the water-bottle tally have a few lines for the fish we can no longer safely eat from the Chesapeake Bay due to upstream pollution?

In addition to distinct ecological concerns, there is another cost, too: the cost of our changing theology. By using AI tools, we help fund the project of the very people fueling the social stratification and increased polarization of our country. We pray to thought-leaders and tech-visionaries who tell us they—not God—are shepherding us into our future flourishing, heralding a new kingdom of a new earth where they shape reality and decide morality. Let AI write your lesson plans, your liturgies, and your sermons. Trust a computer to shape worship services that, in some PC(USA) churches, have never been led by a woman or a queer person. Augment your church and church leaders to a stronger affiliation with the immaterial-disreality that techno-capitalism promises in the name of the incarnated, crucified, and bodily resurrected Lord, the same Lord who was born in a barn, baptized in clean water, had his feet washed, felt the power go out of him when touched, wrote in the dust, packed mud on the eyes of the blind, wept, ate and drank with his closest friends, was betrayed with a kiss, and bled.

New technologies always force us to make choices. Surely, AI, like many of the advents before it, has utility and can benefit human beings in a variety of ways. But, those proponents of AI in the church seem predisposed to want to use AI because it is the shiny new thing.

“AI is cool” is not an appropriate theology. Churches have not been clamoring for “augmented” leaders to this point, and the people who aren’t coming to church have not been either. Simply put, while people go homeless, without health care, or simply without food and water, the move of the church towards augmentation is a move towards abdication of responsibility and faith—not because technology is necessarily bad, but because human beings have never solved the collateral damage of technology before putting it to use.

We haven’t invented our way out of hunger, poverty, or climate change, and we won’t. We also won’t invent our way to a better church—but we will continue to invent new reasons why we cannotmove towards being who we say we are.

Augmented leadership, indeed.

Tommy Campbell, M.Div, is a Th.M student at Union Presbyterian Seminary studying pastoral care as an aspect or expectation of faith-based professional workplaces. 

[1] https://www.vpm.org/news/2024-08-21/dominion-energy-gas-plant-chesterfield-power-station