#291 | Navigating AI: The Intersection of Faith and Technology with Todd Korpi

Today's episode is brought to you by Eugene Tkatch. May the Lord bless your family and business.

As Christians, we need to be prepared for more than just kind of pointing to a Bible verse and hoping that the conversation goes away, but really kind of be prepared to have a rich theological discussion and have well formed answers of a rich theology of the imago dei of the image of God in an age of AI. What does it mean to be human? That's a designation that God in Genesis gives. Gives specifically to us and not to anything else.

What happens when artificial intelligence walks through the church doors? Is AI really a help to your ministry or is it a threat? Could it be one of the greatest opportunities that the church has ever faced?

Today on Ministry Deep Dive, we're talking with Dr. Todd Korpi, author of AI Goes to Church, and how pastors and ministry leaders can navigate the rapidly changing world of AI without hype, fear or confusion. After all, can AI write your sermons? Should churches use ChatGPT?

And what does all of this mean for discipleship, authenticity, and the future of ministry today? You're going to want to stay for this entire conversation. So welcome, Todd, to Ministry Deep Dive.

Hey, thanks for having me.

Are you ready for the fast five?

Let's do it.

Here we go. What's the most churchy thing you've ever seen someone try to use chat GPT for or AI for?

Oh, gosh, I think generating Christian clip art. You know, we have a rich tradition of cheesy clip art and I've seen a few circulating the social media that is just chat GPT carrying on the.

The rich tradition of. Of cheesy Christian clip art. Definitely.

I hate the fact that you said we have a tradition of cheesy like it's its own theological category handed down.

To us from the Sunday school flannel graph to everyone's Facebook feed.

Yeah. All right, number two, if Chad GPT became a church staff member, what role would it accidentally get hired for?

Probably worship pastor.

Why? Why the worship pastor?

I don't know, I just feel, I feel like that's low hanging fruit kind of punching bad. The worship pastor or the youth pastor always get the, you know, they're the subject of the jokes and everything.

So, you know, there's a lot of jokes around chatgpt and whatnot. And so I feel like that would be an easy kind of segue into, into full time ministry.

All right, how about this one? Number three, what's one tech fail you've personally had in ministry that still makes you laugh?

Oh, gosh well, when we were church planters in Flint, Michigan, we rented out a theater. And without fail, every single week we would set up, we would have some sort of catastrophe. So there's. There's always the. The trauma of that.

But my favorite tech fail was actually when I was a child. So I grew up in a Pentecostal church. And we in the winter in Michigan, showed up to church and the power was out.

And so we decided we were just going to sing a cappella. And so as we were sing singing the old song, oh Lord, send the power, just now the power came back on.

And you want to talk about the roof being blown off the place? That was my favorite tech fail slash holy ghost moment.

How about this question then? Number four, if Jesus told parables today, would one of them involve bad WI fi?

Oh, undoubtedly. I think most of his parables, I mean, he met people where they were teaching through agricultural metaphors and stuff like that.

I think we'd see a host of tech metaphors of bad WI fi signal or hallucinations with an LLM, all sorts of stuff.

All right, but number five, if AI wrote a worship song based entirely on common church phrases, what would the chorus probably include?

We would definitely mention ourselves and probably praise in an abstract sense. So, you know, I'm going to praise my praise. Get my praise on that sort of.

A. I'm going to praise my praise.

Yeah, that would definitely be the centerpiece. I'm sorry. Any songwriters out there?

Oh, no. I mean, there. It's an easy. Unfortunately, today we get a lot of that just.

I mean, we've all been a part of that where you have these songs you just beat up because you hear the. Again the Jesus is my boyfriend songs. But. But I think there's also reasons why those things come up. And I think sometimes we go too far.

But it's just the way that it is. No matter what you do today, it's going to get criticized. There would be an online petition against Jesus for saying stuff. Did you hear him say that?

He would.

He said, eat my flesh and drink my blood. People would be freaked out about all that anyway.

I think it was Stephen King who said in his book on writing that any.

The.

The best that any creative can hope for is that their good feedback outweighs their criticisms throughout the. By the end of their career. So I think that that applies to all of us.

That's actually really good advice. Yeah. Especially with today, though. It's like you just. You can't win. Doesn't matter what you do. If Somebody's going to critique you.

September 25th?

Yep, September 25th. So it wasn't that long ago what first sparked your interest in this intersection of AI and ministry.

So I was, I lead a research initiative out of the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center. It's a collection of ministries that function in digital space. So youversion 1, Hope Alpha Crew, et cetera are all a part of this.

And at that point ChatGPT was just starting to gain traction and kind of enter the public conversation. So it was still very much one of those like, you know, hey, this might be something we want to pay attention to kind of things.

And not long after that it, I really started to see kind of the conversation surface among ministry leaders, among friends, online, in the news.

And as it pertained to Christian conversation on this subject, a lot of it kind of stopped short at some of the short, like the short term questions of should I use AI in my. In sermon prep and that sort of a thing.

And all the while as I'm doing research on the side, I'm beginning to realize there's some pretty existential questions, long term questions about what it means to live faithfully as a Christian in a future which is going to be increasingly saturated, directed, kind of curated by artificial intelligence. And so my hope was to really kind of write toward that future in mind of these are some of the things that we need to be paying attention to.

Even if you disagree with my conclusions, at least we can begin to have that conversation.

And so that's the hope was really kind of that this would be a primer of conversation that would carry us over the next few years is really, we're kind of trying to figure out what this, this looks like.

And for Christians to kind of take a prophetic role in shaping the public conversation on the subject and not just stopping short of, you know, should I use chat GPT check yes or no kind of stuff.

Okay, well, as we're talking then about Christians using this, especially ministry leaders out there, what do you find that the biggest misconceptions that ministry leaders have of artificial intelligence, right, the biggest one is.

That you have a choice in whether or not you use it. I talk to a lot of ministry leaders that will say, well, I don't use, you know, AI or whatever.

And usually when people in popular conversation and those kind of conversations say AI, they're referring to a large language model like ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude. But AI has actually been around for a long time.

The term artificial intelligence was coined back in the 50s and we've had various kind of iterations of AI kind of evolution over the course of time.

And if you've even chosen from the section in your favorite streaming platform of shows, we think you might like the we there is the robots. It's not like a team at Netflix, you know, looking over your watch history and making hand selected options for you.

And so that really the reason that's important is it because it begins to shift the conversation from should I use it or not to recognizing I live in a world that's increasingly shaped by AI and now that I'm aware of that, how can I engage it faithfully and be and be aware of the discipleship and spiritual formation questions?

That, that really brings into mind something as simple as AI algorithms determining what people see in social media feeds has enormous spiritual formation implications. And pastors need to be aware of that.

That that's actually something that is, that stands to actually in many ways compete with the task of spiritual formation over a congregation.

Which is really freaky when you start thinking about it. Like, even when you're talking just about what your, what your newsfeed is giving you, it's based upon all your other past likes.

It's not giving you necessarily health, it's just giving you what you like. You like candy, it's going to give you more candy.

It's never going to give you the vegetables that you need to have a balanced perspective on what's going on. And I find so many people coming to me, they're saying, I don't even read the news anymore. I don't like the fact that this is going on.

And someone even said the other day they said we used to go, you know, we, we used to go online to escape reality. And now we're going to, we're escaping, we're going to reality to escape, escape online or AI.

And it's true to that because you actually mention in the book you're talking about a better humanity or what should this new humanity be like? Why is it so important for us to keep the conversation in this understanding of humanity when we're talking about AI?

Yeah, well, two implications.

One is related to the way that the information that AI presents us, whether it's in a chat, like with a large language model, or whether it's on social media or whatever, it is essentially curating. It's short circuiting. The task that used to be having to go search for information and evaluate it and all of that.

Now it's simply generating a response and in some ways kind of short circuiting that, that process of excavating for information.

That convenience is great, but it also has some drawbacks as well, of kind of the ability to critically evaluate the information that we have presented to us. So there's a worldview shaping component that especially as it relates to scripture, to theology, that we really need to be aware of.

But on kind of a more existential level, there's two significantly and rapidly developing kind of subsections of the artificial intelligence race right now.

One is in the area of relationship bots, of developing bots like Replica and Wobot and others for the purpose of being companions, whether that be to walk someone through basic cognitive behavior, behavioral therapy, being a friend, or even being a romantic partner. And people note and report having very strong feelings.

The New Yorker actually did a piece a few months ago of people with relationship bots where some had even considered themselves married to that bot or being a partner with that bot. And that has significant implications because all of those relationships are frictionless.

It's a partner or a friend that never disagrees with you is always available. There's no conflict.

And how that impacts specifically the next generation and their ability to develop relationship that necessarily requires friction. We need friction in relationship to develop intimacy, and it is significant.

The other area of development, though, we have, you know, with these relationship bots, AI that increasingly feels and empathizes and seems human.

But the other area is cybernetics of embodied forms of artificial intelligence that are designed to do everything from move boxes in a warehouse to eventually be your household maid that can do your laundry and mow your grass and whatnot.

And it doesn't take much imagination to see as those two converge and you have embodied forms of AI that can empathize, that are, you know, that have the ability to project this semblance of friendship, it's going to really begin to kind of call into question of what even is a human. And, and how can we.

So as Christians, we need to be prepared for more than just kind of pointing to a Bible verse and hoping that the conversation goes away, but really kind of be, be prepared to have a rich theological discussion and have well formed answers of the, of a rich theology of the imago dei, of the image of God in an age of AI. What does it mean to be human? That's a designation that God in Genesis gives specifically to, to us and not to anything else.

And I talk about in the book how our ability or our calling to image God is actually isn't a, that's a designation that God himself has the authority to give. We don't have that authority to pass on to another, another being or object that we fashion with our own hands.

That's really what the prohibition in the Ten Commandments against creating a graven image is functionally about is. God has already chosen who, what his image is and it's us and not something made by our hands.

So those are the kind of, kind of questions that we really need to begin to talk about, to wrestle with and to.

And it presents us really with an opportunity to engage in the public conversation as people are searching for some of those answers either now or in the very short term future.

Do you find that as you're interacting with ministry leaders that they are thinking critically about AI or are they simply just adopting it uncritically because they see it as such an, a cultural tool? Do you see that?

I've actually found that most of the ministry leaders I've encountered, I definitely encountered some kind of enthusiastic kind of uncritical adopters. But most I've encountered approach the subject with a lot of trepidation or concern.

And studies from Barna and others among church leaders have mirrored that kind of anecdotal experience that I have, that there's a lot of pastors that understand, even if they don't really kind of understand the complexities of AI because it's vast and an immense topic. They understand the gravity of the potential that it has to do profound good, but also profound harm.

And so what I've seen is there's a lot of questions that pastors have of how do I navigate this faithfully, how do I empower my youth and the people in my congregation to handle this tool faithfully.

Where I have seen a dramatic shift over the last nine months or so that I've been traveling and talking on this subject after the release of the book is a lot of that conversation is shifting beyond just kind of application oriented stuff. There's definitely a hunger to see kind of how to do that well within, like automating within a church context.

But a lot of it has shifted to some of the kind of significant questions that I bring up in the book and then some.

After the Charlie Kirk death, there were a number of churches that had done like kind of deep faked video tributes of Charlie Kirk speaking to the congregation. And regardless of the politics of that, the phenomenon of using AI in accordance with one's grieving rituals is something that we're not going.

That's not the last we're going to see of that, that we'll have families that have a loved one that they want to, you know, have, you know, kind of a deep faked, sort of artificial, you know, presentation at the funeral and stuff. And how do we navigate those kind of conversations?

So some of those conversations have come to me from pastors of things that they're experiencing or have noticed. So I find actually the way that the conversation has shifted in churches over the last year or so to be really encouraging.

I think we're well on our way to not necessarily having answers, but at least having the conversation.

Do you think guys like Jacques Elul, of course, they were way ahead of their time and their perception of just understanding how these new tools become kind of become overlords and thinking back to Neil Postman, you know, amusing ourselves to death. And now we've got these tools. But in some respect it's become like technocracy. We don't have the opportunity to say no anymore.

Meaning that they're right in front of us all the time. Like you said, whatever we. Unless we become Amish. And even then, I know Amish people with cell phones.

So just because they're driving, you know, a horse and buggy and they don't have electricity doesn't mean that they don't have phones for their work or whatever it is.

How do we then maintain our humanity in a proper perspective on our interaction or relationship with AI when it doesn't really feel like we have a choice?

Yeah, I do think that there is, there is an advocacy piece. And unfortunately, in US politics, I'll just speak kind of frankly.

We're very much behind the times of even understanding what this technology is kind of at like a federal level. And you see that anytime like a tech guru goes before Congress, it's, it's, it's really scary how ill informed some of our elected leaders are.

And I think that that's changing.

I think as, especially as young millennials, gen zers who have grown up as digital natives, you know, over the years, assume positions of leadership, we'll see a lot of that change.

But I think that there is, there's an opportunity really to demand conversation and even regulation or governance that we see in other ways in other parts of the world. In the Netherlands and Australia, at various state levels, there's a lot of protections that are being raised.

Whether it's reverting back to chronologically curated feeds within social media instead of AI generated ones. Whether that's in.

I think it was in Denmark, they recently passed a law, it was Denmark or the, the Netherlands that guarantees people a right to their own likeness. So similar to like copyright law, you actually have a right to sue if someone deep fakes you or something like that.

So I think that there's, and there's, there's some movements toward kind of gaining some ownership over that that I think as Christians, we need to lean into as kind of a matter of justice. I do think also though, it calls us to, to have kind of almost like a practice of developing digital liturgies.

Whether that is a consciousness that we have when we engage the Internet, when we hop online, paying attention to the way that it unsettles us or provokes us in certain ways, and then responding to that through periods of withdrawal. Whether that is developing practices of leveraging the technology.

Like, I think about kind of the universe that Gene Roddenberry envisioned in Star Trek, where you had a world that was very technologically advanced, but people leveraged the technology in a way that actually permitted them to make music and write poetry and pretend to be Sherlock Holmes on the holodeck and stuff like that.

I think that while that's fiction, I think it presents us kind of at least a vision of something to aspire to, that my use personally of Claude has made me a better gardener and has allowed me to be able to learn how to steward what I've cultivated. So I actually spend more time in the dirt because of AI.

And I think looking for ways to kind of pair that together to ground us is really, really important. So I think that there's kind of a think big kind of advocacy piece, but also what went to riff off of Wendell Berry's so named essay, Think Little.

I think There's a think little piece of my three foot world.

How do I, how do I leverage this in a way that promotes connectedness but creates margin for a relationship, but then also paying attention to when I am feeling unsettled or stirred in my soul in a way that requires some withdrawal and retreat and prayer.

It's so hard to hold those two in tension.

I think about Harmut Rosa's social acceleration theory out of Germany which says of course we have, the more technology we add, the faster that it goes and rather than actually save time, we're losing it. But it seems like we're trying to have one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake simultaneously. And it just, I mean it's.

Whether it makes sense or not, it doesn't matter because it's happening.

But even for us that are a little bit older, like you were mentioning before, getting online seeing it, and it's affecting our formation, yet we have the younger generation that's coming up that Gen Z, Gen Alpha, that are the digital natives.

I don't find though that they have the critical thinking skills that those who come from that are a little bit older might have because they have a little bit of the cumulative wisdom.

So like if when I ever go on to chat GPT, I know that chat jet GPT to me is like a drunk professor, like I'm gonna get half or he's got maybe dementia, like I get half of what he gets and then I'm like, yeah, that's not right. And it'll give me stuff. But it's funny.

Sometimes I laugh and other times I'm like, you know, other people don't have the, the basis of knowledge and they don't, they're taking everything as complete truth. And this is not an infallible creature or that we're talking about. I mean this entity of artificial intelligence, not infallible.

So what I guess my question is is number one, how do we maintain wisdom and a right perspective in doing it? And not only that, how do we then look at the next generation that doesn't seem to have the wisdom that seems to be necessary to navigate?

Yeah, that's a good. I think to some extent we need, I think we need to recover the kind of the function of wisdom in Christian formation.

We are a very, especially in the west, especially in the States, we're a very kind of content as discipleship sort of in that kind of space. So if I want to form someone that I'm discipling, I get the right information to them, not not recognizing that.

You know, when I look at, I have three daughters and it's very rare that I sit them down and you know, have an intentional kind of formation kind of conversation that happens. But 90% of their learning from me is caught. It's through time and proximity and repetition.

And that's how we learn to talk, that's how we learn to walk. That's how we grow as humans. And so we need that kind of proximity to one another as the community of faith that is multi generational.

I think there's, there's truth to what you said in the like a need for that wisdom that is often gained from life experience. The, you know, the church mothers and fathers talked about the role of suffering in cultivating intimacy and wisdom with God.

And so we, we need that and that often it's not a guarantee that it happens with the passing of time. But if we pursue wisdom, it does accumulate over the course of time.

And I think there's actually a really crucial role that are the elders in our communities can play in instructing young people. I have found young people, gen Zers, gen Alpha are not averse to having father and mother figures in their life.

It often just takes a willingness on and a proactivity on the part of, of older people.

I will say there is a natural discernment I think that does develop among digital natives or as, or among those who grow up with a new technology as kind of native.

And so I grew up, I kind of came of age in my late teens and early twenties in, in a kind of social media, normal sort of environment and kind of naturally learned how to discern false information from real information. You know, my parents generation, not so much.

You know, there's studies that have shown that in the past, you know, baby boomers have been kind of the, the most easily hoodwinked by misinformation on online. Now that being said, before the baby boomer listeners come at me, I'll give a personal, personal example of where I failed.

Recently I sent my daughter, who's a teenager, a reel on Instagram of a cat and thought it was funny. So I passed it on to her. I was like, can't believe this happened, yada yada.

And she responded, you, you realize that's a deep fake or that's A fake AI generated video. Right.

And I had no idea, but she already, and, and in her generation coming up, having to navigate what is real and what is fake in relation to video is developing the same kind of natural aptitude that I developed in my late teens and early 20s for, you know, blogs and news sources. And so there, I think there's, there's a way in which we can learn from one another as it pertains to navigating that space with discernment.

We need each other, young and old, where that kind of savvy and knowledge that younger generations have us, that are increasingly, apparently aging a lot faster than we realize can benefit from, but also vice versa.

For older generations to be those sources of wisdom, to navigate the complexities of how to apply, to discern truth from error and apply knowledge to our lives.

I mean, in some respect it's kind of the opposite in that it's not.

Yes, we have the older people teaching the younger, but as you just mentioned, the younger people are also teaching the older the more because they're the ones that adopt technology faster. So I find that they're the ones that are looking at us going, you just don't get it yet, do you?

Like, I mean, especially with my kids, they're like, dad, you're so old. So I feel like I've lost the wisdom part somewhere.

And now I'm just this naive old bumpkin that my kids are like, you know, they're talking about putting me in a retirement home. I mean, that's where it feels like it's going to be. There's this like, take the phone away from dad, please.

You know, so how do we, how do we navigate that? Where these younger people are being empowered with these technological tools that far outstrip in many respect their wisdom.

However, they do have a wisdom that we have to learn from. How do we navigate that?

I mean, for me, I feel like the local church is an ideal place for that to happen.

And I think developing avenues of digital ministry that involve both generations, I think of, you know, Calvary Church, Fort Lauderdale, launched a VR campus several years ago and opened it up as an opportunity to serve in, in the, in their church. And it was actually senior citizen women that were the number, like number one demographic that signed up to serve.

And it provided an opportunity where kind of tech savvy younger people were able to help train them in how to do it, but they were able to sit with people in those virtual spaces and have conversations. If you browse, at least my, my Instagram algo has been curated by, you know, a lot of cooking videos and like gardening videos and stuff like that.

But a lot of that space is as a result of a young person partnering with their grandfather, grandmother and they provide all the, the tech support. They provide that this is what I cooked during the war kind of content or this is how you fix this kind of thing.

Those are really great opportunities. Yes, to kind of put something out into the world that's interesting.

But also what happens in the actual creation of that kind of content is really powerful and it creates opportunities for conversation, for proximity that I think enriches our churches. But it, it forces us to do a couple things. One, we have to move to toward a more gifts based approach to serving within the church.

Meaning that, you know, in a lot of churches, if I want to get involved, there's a list of ministries I can choose to get involved with.

And so a lot of times if you have, you know, this Gen zer that's got 400,000 followers on TikTok and they're serving coffee on Sunday mornings in the cafe, there's nothing wrong with serving coffee, but maybe there are other ways to employ and empower that gift that that person has to be able to do some good. And the other is this is, that is we need to begin to broaden our understanding of what is a gospel presentation.

Meaning that often at the far reaches of someone that the light coming on and a curiosity being sparked. It's not an explicit John 3:16 kind of exposure to the gospel.

It's often the incarnated living of the gospel and being exposed in the life of a Christian to that person. And what I mean by that is it's actually a form of evangelism for a church to do.

What I said of, you know, taking the wisdom of an older person, pairing it with the knowledge of a younger person and developing, let's say a series, a playlist that's on the church's YouTube page of basic car maintenance. That's 90% of what YouTube traffic is. Is us going to YouTube to figure out how to fix something. What if the church was the house space for that?

Because inevitably the algorithm then recommends content on the side of not only similar videos, but also other videos that are posted by that, by that account holder. So they're getting, yeah, this is how you fix a carburetor. Next up, this is pastor's sermon from Easter. That sort of a thing.

Beginning to think through kind of a broader view of how we reach people and, and allow kind of the Spirit to, to encounter them in a way that, that eases them into more explicit gospel conversations is a great way to involve generations and to learn from one another.

If we take technology like you're talking about and going to those digital spaces, and I know of so many student pastors that are like, hey, I want this app to be able to help curate this and that. I go back to Jonathan Haidt's thesis, though.

In the anxious generation now, we can see that these devices are in many respect the cause of so much alienation and isolation. Is it too much to say we're trying to have our cake needed too, or should we try to. I mean, how do we navigate this?

Every parent I know out there, how do we navigate screen time? I mean, and again, height. We're overprotected in the outside world and under protected online. And so how do we then navigate this?

Because I know some parents are like, I just want to throw it out the door. Even when I drive to work, every kid waiting on the bus, every single one is on their phone.

Are we catering to that by saying, hey, we want to use it as a gospel presentation and that we're actually, I don't want to say uncritically accepting certain cultural idolatries that are implicit within them and that we're allowing that to form, or do we need to be countercultural in how we go about this and I mean, not do it or what do you think? I know it's not easy and we're trying to navigate this, but any advice to us on that?

I think first, acknowledging that it's an extraordinarily complex topic, and I think recognizing that forces us to also recognize there are no easy answers. Like we could devote a whole series of episodes just to talking on this subject.

As a parent of a teenager, I think one of the things that has been convicting to me of as I've tried to ease my, my oldest into life online is I have.

It's been, it's forced me to re examine my own digital engagement rhythms of how much I am using the phone and how much of a barrier it can be at times to like face to face kind of conversation because I can't reasonably ask her to do something that I myself am not doing.

And so I think there's a dynamic there that a lot, a lot of the behavior that we see in the next generation is modeled to, to them by the, by their elders. Um, there is also the reality.

And this is as I've been working through and discerning through with my wife about how to engage our children, whether it's mobile phone technology, the Internet, AI, et cetera, is. I have to prepare them for a world in which that technology is ubiquitous. It's. It's there.

And so I have to, I have to engage them in a way that prepares them for that future when. So I, I grew up in what. Which was at the time one of America's most violent cities.

And so there were things that my parents had to raise me to have kind of street smarts and practices that were very odd to. To my wife, who grew up in a rural community where everybody left their doors unlocked all the time and everybody knew each other.

And I think that if we begin to see digital environments more like context of ministry and less simply of just a cultural tools one, because digital anthropologists have done studies of digital environments for years now. And we develop rituals and sort of hierarchies and behaviors in digital environments just like we do in offline spaces.

But when we begin to see it that way, we can begin to develop kind of mental frameworks of how to engage that well, of recognizing just as we would prepare to do missionary work in a restricted access or hostile nation, there are certain aptitudes, certain precautions that need to be put in place for missionaries to do that kind of ministry. Well, I think we need to be aware of the implicit idols that are within certain digital environments.

We need to be aware of the dangers and do our best to engage the. To engage it in a way that minimizes the kind of uncritical adoption or engagement with those idols and even at times resist them.

So I think that all of that to say that's not an easy thing to simply kind of. Well, this is the answer. But I think it forces us to kind of.

That paradigm forces us to see it less like just a place that we go to get entertained or to get information even, but when we begin to think more with kind of a missionary mindset, there's a consciousness that it forces us to have when we engage those environments, which does create a little bit of distance between kind of our appetites and the. The idols that want to form those appetites.

There's so much, so much in what you just said, it's really hard to digest it all honestly.

There's just so much that's coming at us day to day as we're examining new technology interest, still trying to understand it, and, and the ethics of it, and not necessarily looking or understanding that it's actually forming us in the process, that our digital formation or the lives that we have online are. I mean, really are forming us in a variety of different ways. Our conversation, our categories.

I like how you mentioned the hierarchies, all the different aspects to it. I know that we're. We're coming to the end of our time today.

My question for you is for those ministry leaders that are out there, what is one kind of word of hope that you want to leave them with, that they might be able to nourish them as they're trying to figure out how to navigate this really chaotic digital world in which we find ourselves?

Yeah, there. I think, at risk of sounding too simplistic, I think what I'm about to say bears just kind of an unshakable truth to it. And that is when.

When we look at the words of the Nicene Creed at the very end, the. It encapsulates early Christian eschatology, which wasn't about timelines and, you know, whatever gets put on Christian television or whatever now.

But it was a simple words. We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.

The nature of Christian hope is not like a hope like, I hope my Detroit Lions win the super bowl this year.

Sorry, I'm a Bears fan, so you had to just bring that up. Sorry. There you go. But anyway, go ahead, finish it up.

But instead, it's rooted in the. The unchanging character of God.

It's this understanding that just as God has been faithful to generations past and throughout the course of my life, he'll continue to be faithful right up until the. The time that that trumpet sounds and the dead in Christ are raised.

And so that that hopeful kind of eschatology reminds us that like 1 Corinthians 15 says. Says that all. All things will be put under submission to Christ, that in. In the end, Jesus really does reign over all of creation.

Whether that involves a sort of renewed form of artificial intelligence in the process, I don't know. But what I do know is that the. The fears that it's going to destroy humanity and, and those sorts of things, I think our understanding.

But at the same time, from a Christian perspective, we know how the story ends, and we're called to work into labor with that vision in mind.

So I think it gives us an opportunity not to give in to kind of the doomsday sort of, you know, destruction of the human race conversation, but instead to enter into the public conversation with a hope that is rooted not only in the race reign of Christ, but in the physical resurrection of our body. Like a flesh and blood kind of hope that, that we have and can anchor ourselves to.

And, and so that's, that's, that would be my encouragement is as you do, as you as, as you think about this as you wrestle with this, hold fast to that unchanging hope that's been passed down to us from, from the testimony of the apostles and, and through the great saints of history.

Oh, I mean, hopes.

It sounds weird, but hope is, it's looking to the future and getting energy for the present, knowing that it's all been settled, it'll all be renewed and we get to be with him forever.

Well, thank you Todd, for joining us on Ministry Deep Dive- AI Goes to Church is an important conversation for every pastor, ministry leader and believer trying to faithfully navigate the future without losing losing sight of the mission and everyone out there listening.

If this episode encouraged you or challenged the way that you think about AI and ministry, make sure to subscribe to Ministry Deep Dive wherever you listen to podcasts so you never miss an episode. You can also find more of these conversations, articles, resources and tools for leaders apolloswatered.org that's 1P and 2L's.

And if you haven't yet, be sure to pick up a couple copy of AI Goes to Church by Todd Korpi. Until next time, stay curious, stay grounded, and keep pursuing deeper conversations that help us follow Jesus more faithfully in a changing world.

This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollo's Watered.

Stay Watered, everybody.