AI Use in the Church

Introduction

Various forms of artificial intelligence have shaped commerce and communication for decades. When a Google search surfaces a product or a social‑media feed suggests a song, machine‑learning algorithms are already at work. Yet the public release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 thrust AI into daily consciousness and accelerated innovation. That acceleration has awakened pastors and mission leaders to fresh questions: How might these tools aid the church’s participation in God’s mission? Where do they press against its core convictions? What kind of community might we become if we do not discern carefully?

Christian Perspectives on AI in the Church

Much of the early conversation has centered on generative AI in the sermon‑writing process or worship planning. There is legitimate worry that pastors might outsource their labors to a machine, producing sermons that sound polished but lack pastoral listening and spiritual discernment. Yet the data suggests that most pastors treat AI as a tool, not a surrogate preacher.

In a 2024 Barna study, 88 % of pastors expressed comfort using AI for tasks like graphic design, 78 % for marketing and 70 % for tracking attendance. ¹ Yet, fewer than half were comfortable using AI in sermon research and only twelve percent would use it to write a sermon.² The creation of the worship service (eg planning or writing musical worship, crafting the liturgical order or prayers, or AI characters featured on video, such as what churches have done in Finland³ and Germany,⁴ or with applications like Virbo AI to create Bible character ‘influencers’⁵) did not present as a trend among pastors at all.

While headline-grabbing ministry AI experiments have generated attention online, these do not seem to be much more than exercises in novel experimentation. Rather than signaling the end of human-led preaching and worship, these events highlight how novelty attracts headlines while congregations and pastors alike remain cautious. ⁶ This doesn’t mean the church can ignore AI. The technology is rapidly permeating administration, communication, and discipleship. Because AI touches deeply human domains, it invites ethical reflection grounded in the gospel.

Ethical Dilemmas for the Church in the Age of AI

Bias and Inclusion

The data from which AI feeds is not only prone to have false or incomplete information. Online data typically underrepresents those regions and people groups with less reliable (or slower) access to the web. This often includes majority world cultures, the poor, ethnic minority groups, the disabled, and more.⁷ AI is integrated into administrative solutions for churches, allowing them to assess depth of church engagement, spiritual formation journeys, make recommendations for discipleship content and small groups based on member profiles, and more. While this has enormous positive potential, church leaders must wrestle with how to account for the imperfect nature of insights and recommendations gained by these tools and how trends and recommendations may overlook those who may be underrepresented in the data but whose presence in the congregation and the broader community is still treasured.

The Idolatry of Utilitarianism and Pragmatism

AI, like other digital technologies, risks the perpetuation of congregants as users and consumers, communities as market shares, and church life as a web of systems. While AI can aid in Christian discipleship, it can also relegate a person’s spiritual formation to the consumption of content without a more holistic theology of formation promoted by local church leadership. AI can aid in helping seekers online find connection to the local church, but it can also unintentionally cultivate a mindset wherein mission is reduced to marketing. And while AI can improve scalability, efficiency, and expediency, these pragmatic considerations do not account for what we might leave behind by uncritically adopting AI—irreplicable distinctives such as connection, meaning, wisdom, and reflection. Church leaders must assess both what is gained as well as what is lost in AI adoption, prioritizing those benefits that promote congregational flourishing and communion with God.

The Paradox of Toil⁸

As Genesis 3 describes, one of the painful results of human rebellion is toil. Throughout history humans have created technology in order to alleviate the burden of toil, understanding at an innate level that the results of sin are not God’s perfect design for his creation. But like a dog returning to its vomit (Prov 26:11), humans have historically filled the margin technology creates in our lives with more toil. So, while more modern technologies like email or the smartphone promised to allow us to do things faster, the result has been that we fill up the time saved with more, thereby making us busier than before. As with technologies of the past, AI promises to automate the boring bits of human existence so we can find more time and meaning. But if we are undiscerning, we will simply make our lives more fast-paced and busy than before. The question before church leaders is, how do we disciple the congregations entrusted to us in a way that takes the margin of time AI returns to us, and invest it in meaning-making and value in the communities around us?

AI and the Mission of God

AI’s missional potential is vast. Machine translation accelerates Bible distribution into minority languages. Chatbots can engage seekers online where human missionaries cannot go. Automated systems can identify needs within a community and connect volunteers to serve. Yet these opportunities do not remove the church’s call to make disciples through embodied presence and relational witness. They invite the church to steward technology wisely, ensuring that AI enhances rather than replaces human agency.

Mission leaders are called to act prophetically. They can advocate for AI development that honors human dignity and reflects the justice of God. They can resist technologies that amplify injustice or entrench bias. They can collaborate across traditions and disciplines to craft ethical frameworks rooted in the love commandment. They can disciple congregations to be non‑anxious, wise presences in a culture of rapid change, pointing always to Christ who is the same yesterday, today and forever. In an age of AI, the local church can become a beacon of stability and hope, demonstrating what it means to love God and neighbor with heart, soul, mind, and strength.

Endnotes

1. Barna Group. “‘Three Takeaways on How Pastors Can Use AI,’” Barna Group, February 22, 2024. https://www.barna.com/research/pastors-use-ai/.
2. Barna Group. “‘Three Takeaways on How Pastors Can Use AI,’” Barna Group, February 22, 2024. https://www.barna.com/research/pastors-use-ai/.
3. Dasha Litvinova and Kostya Manenkov. “What One Finnish Church Learned from Creating a Service Almost Entirely with AI,” Associated Press. March 8, 2024. https://apnews.com/article/finland-lutheran-church-artificial-intelligence-64135cc5e58578a89dcbaf0c227d9e3e.
4. Evangelical Focus. “‘First Artificial Intelligence led worship service tested in Germany,’” Evangelical Focus, June 13, 2023. https://evangelicalfocus.com/life-tech/22376/first-ai-led-worship-service-tested-in germany#:~:text=Around%20300%20people%20joined%20an,created%20and%20performed%20by%20machines.&text=A%20moment%20of%20the%20AI,Photo%3A%20Deutscher%20Evangelischer%20Kirchentag%20Nürnberg.
5. Wondershare. “Bible Influencer Generator,” n.d. https://virbo.wondershare.com/ai-bible-influencer.html.
6. Barna Group. “‘How U.S. Christians Feel about AI & the Church,’” Barna Group, November 8, 2023. https://www.barna.com/research/christians-ai-church/.
7. Korpi, Todd. AI Goes to Church: Pastoral Wisdom for Artificial Intelligence. (Lisle, IL: IVP, 2025),166-22; cf. AI: The Next Culture Shift – Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions – ALSBOM. AI. July 3, 2025. https://alsbom.org/ai-the-next-culture-shift/.
8. Korpi, AI Goes to Church, 140-44.