By Jessica Lea — Originally published in ChurchLeaders
Pastors and church leaders who are fearful about artificial intelligence (AI) have good reason to be. But they should not let their valid concerns prevent them from missing the opportunity the Church has to shape the cultural conversation on AI.
Such was the consensus of the ministry and technological leaders ChurchLeaders spoke to at Gloo’s second annual AI and the Church Hackathon that took place in Boulder, Colorado, on Sept. 13-15.
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“They feel like AI is going to take over the world. It’s going to take their job,” said Kenny Jahng, founder of AiForChurchLeaders.com and editor-in-chief of ChurchTechToday.com. Jahng often speaks at conferences geared toward building resources for pastors and churches. He said church leaders will sit through his entire talk only to tell him during the Q & A session that they are “totally against AI” and “are not going to change their mind”.
The fear that AI will take their jobs is one of the top fears Jahng hears from church leaders. “They also have a fear that it’s not just taking their job personally,” he said, “but it’s going to take over what the church should be.”
What church leaders need to understand, however, is that because AI has been released to the public while in its early stages of development, believers have an opportunity (one the church missed with social media) to address the very dangers about which church leaders are concerned.
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Artificial Intelligence: The Church has a chance to influence culture
Gloo is a leading tech company whose mission is to “release the collective might of the faith ecosystem.” The theme of this year’s hackathon was “Redemptive Technology.” More than 200 attendees from the US and other countries came together on 40 teams to compete for cash prizes by creating AI solutions that will support human flourishing and thriving churches.
During the hackathon, leaders acknowledged to attendees and to ChurchLeaders that there are very real problems that exist when it comes to AI, including issues with copyright and intellectual property (IP).
Another obvious danger is the creation of deepfakes. These can be insidious, such as when images of real people are superimposed on pornographic content. Or they can be less malicious but still deceptive, such as the example of a recent music video for a song called Dear Christ that was supposedly released by Justin Bieber but was actually created by means of AI.
The leaders ChurchLeaders spoke to did not downplay the fears pastors have about AI. Dr Ed Stetzer, dean of Talbot School of Theology at Biola University and editor-in-chief of Outreach Magazine, said: “I think concerns can be real, but simultaneously, our concern is not going to stop the advancement of AI. So the question is, will we be engaged in that?”
“For example, the earliest and biggest use of the internet was pornography, and the earliest and biggest use of VHS was pornography,” Stetzer continued. “And then Christians said, ‘We’re going to be engaged and involved with it.’ I think it’s better for Christians to be involved and engaged at the front end to help steer some of the conversation.”
“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,” said Gloo CEO and cofounder Scott Beck. “I think it really is about having good diligence [and] making sure that we’re really thinking it through.”
However, churches should recognise that, whether or not they realise it, they are already using AI in many ways. “Every church is already using AI in spell check,” Beck pointed out. “So AI exists…this is not a new thing.”
“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,” he said. “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?’”
When asked about the concerns church leaders have about AI, Gloo’s Director of AI Initiatives Steele Billings acknowledged: “AI is scary.” He had joined Stetzer earlier that day on the radio show Ed Stetzer Live and said a listener had called in and essentially said: “I’m against AI in the church, and I believe that AI is going to be used by the Antichrist to accelerate the persecution of Christians.”
Billings understands the fears people have but notes that God is sovereign and “we know how the end of the book is written”. And while “the concerns around artificial intelligence are legitimate,” 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.
“AI is going to dramatically increase the spread of the Gospel if we think about it within the right architectures,” he said. “It can also expose people to harm…And so the right guidelines and guardrails need to be put around things.”
Jahng believes the impact of AI on society will be extraordinary. Compared to “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.”
There is a lesson Jahng believes we can learn from the development of social media. “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.”
“You saw late in the game there were entrepreneurial efforts to create Christian Facebooks,” Jahng said. “But in my mind, that was way too late, right? Facebook, Twitter, Instagram — They had mass audiences by that time.”
However, said Jahng, as the CEO of Microsoft has pointed out, “This innovation front is much earlier. The public has gotten hold of it much earlier than others.”
“For example, ChatGPT…has hallucinations,” he explained, meaning that AI at times presents false information. “It’s broken. It’s not perfect. Like, Apple would not release ChatGPT itself. Right? Because Apple needs to make everything perfect.”
“Those hard questions are being asked about AI much earlier in this technology innovation front than most others that have preceded it,” said Jahng, and that is why events like the AI and the Church Hackathon are so important.
The hackathon is an example of the Church coming together “to ask those questions very early on. How might we…influence the public, secular, large language models that are being built and used by corporations?” Jahng asked. “But also how might we develop alternatives that might play well with them or clear alternatives for faith-based Christian worldview audiences?”
One of the alternatives that Gloo announced at the hackathon is the Christian Align Large Language Model (CALLM), “which is completely based on the principles of transparency and clarity”, Billings explained.
“ChatGPT is a closed environment…started by a company called OpenAI, but so much of their architecture is actually closed off,” he 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.”
For example, “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, at least initially, “scraped content that was publicly accessible without the consent of the original creator of that content. They did not cite and source things correctly,” said Billings. “They did not provide enough clarity into how they were training their models and what biases maybe they were giving their models to use to respond to certain questions.”
Through a research initiative called Flourishing AI, Gloo has learned that people have a lack of trust in large AI models. “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. “And so we see the first problem to solve is to increase trust.”
In contrast to some other models, CALLM will be open source, “which means,” said Billings, “that we will take the entire code base starting in 2025, and we’ll put it online, and anybody can download the code base, and they can see every line of code that they want. They can inspect it; they can use it to hold us accountable.”
“We have to do exactly what we’re saying that we’re doing,” he added. “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.”
Jahng emphasised the unique moment the Church is in. “I think in the last quarter, over 1 000 dedicated AI apps were launched,” he said. “That does not include existing services that are starting to integrate AI…so if you have a thousand standalone AI apps that have launched by itself, they can’t all win.”
The Church consequently has a peculiar opportunity to influence what happens. “It’s going to shake out,” he said. “There’s going to be winners and losers. We are way too early in that innovation front.”
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