What church leaders get wrong about artificial intelligence
What church leaders get wrong about artificial intelligence
Publish Date: 2026-02-28 00:28:00
Source Domain: www.christianpost.com
By Christopher Benek, CP Op-Ed Contributor Saturday, February 28, 2026iStock/Chor muang
Most church leaders approach artificial intelligence with a mixture of anxiety and dismissal.
Some fear it as a dehumanizing force that will hollow out ministry and replace pastoral presence. Others shrug it off as just another neutral tool — no different from email, projectors, or livestreaming software. Both instincts are understandable. Both are also incomplete. Each assumes AI belongs at the edges of church life, when in reality it has already moved to the center of ordinary human experience.
Artificial intelligence is not a future problem for the Church. It is already shaping the lives of the people sitting in our pews.
Before the first cup of coffee on a Monday morning, AI has already mediated a congregant’s world. A teenager wakes to an algorithm-curated feed that decides what counts as important. A job seeker’s résumé is filtered before a human being ever sees it. A church leader drafts a difficult email with the assistance of a machine. A member asks private questions of a chatbot they are afraid to ask a pastor. By Sunday, people arrive carrying a week’s worth of formation — anxieties shaped by feeds, decisions nudged by recommendations, and questions quietly formed by systems they rarely notice but constantly trust.
This reality reveals the first major misunderstanding: many church leaders treat AI as a tool problem. Tools extend human capacity; they help us accomplish what we already intend to do. Artificial intelligence, however, increasingly shapes human judgment. When a technology begins influencing what people see, what they believe, and what they choose, it is no longer simply instrumental. It becomes formative. And anything formative belongs squarely within the Church’s theological and pastoral responsibility.
A second mistake follows closely behind the first: the assumption that AI is neutral. Because AI systems produce outputs through…
