Last week, I had the privilege of being at the South Pacific for Christ Launch at the Watson Park Campground in South Queensland. Being in a room full of ministry leaders from across the South Pacific who are leaning into the same mission with the same conviction is one of those experiences that reminds you why you do what you do.
During the event, at meals and between sessions, after all the Kia ora’s and G’days, I found myself in a series of conversations that I have continued to think about. The questions came from different people, different roles, different corners of the South Pacific, but they were all circling a similar thing.
“What you guys do is really cool, but what does it even look like now? With AI able to do so much, are people just doing it themselves?”
“As a ministry leader, how should I be thinking about AI? What’s responsible? What’s effective?”
“Is there a right and a wrong way to use AI for ministry?”
These are good questions. They’re well-motivated questions, asked by people who genuinely want to steward their ministries well amid rapid change. And I want to reflect on them here, because I think they point to something much deeper than a conversation about technology.
Let me be upfront, I am not a guru on this subject. If you had asked me these same questions six months ago, I would have given you very different answers. The tools are changing every few weeks. The capabilities of AI are expanding in ways that even the people building them did not fully predict. And our team at Blue Vineyard is learning in real time, alongside the ministries we serve.
What I can tell you is that we are investing everything we have in being at the cutting edge of this conversation. Not to be impressive. But because we believe the Adventist ecosystem deserves a technology partner who is paying attention, learning, and genuinely motivated by the mission of this church.
Everything I’m going to say about AI is what I believe to be true today. And I’m sharing it as someone who is in the middle of learning it, not as someone who has figured it all out.
Here is what keeps coming back to me.
In Exodus 25, God has just done something extraordinary. He has broken the chains of the most powerful empire in the ancient world to liberate his people. He could have sent them on their way with a set of instructions and left them to get on with it. Instead, he asks for something else
“Let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell with them.”
Not for them. Not near them. But with them.
That Word carries the whole weight of the story that follows. The prophets long for it. The covenant language of Jeremiah and Ezekiel reinforces it again and again. And then the New Testament opens with it exploding into history in a form nobody expected. The Word became flesh. God in a human body, walking in the dust of Galilee, eating at people’s tables, touching the untouchable, weeping at the grave of a friend.
The letter to the Hebrews describes the new covenant as a relationship. “I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” Connection isn’t just a side hustle for God, it is the point!
And then, as John is writing the final words of the canon of scripture, he closes with this extraordinary image: a new heaven, a new earth, and a voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.”
The sanctuary in Exodus. The incarnation. The new covenant. The new Jerusalem.
Every one of those moments is a movement toward the same thing. Toward with.
Connection is not a feature of the biblical story. It is the backbone of it. It is what God has been doing since the garden. It is what the plan of salvation exists to restore. And it is, therefore, the most important thing that ministry of any kind must be oriented toward.
Which brings me back to AI.
When people ask whether AI is good or bad for ministry, I think they’re often really asking a different question.
They’re asking, “Will using AI make us more connected to the people we serve, or less?”
And the honest answer is: it depends entirely on how you use it.
AI is extraordinary. For the first time in history, a small ministry with a modest budget can produce resources, communications, and tools that would previously have required a large team and a significant investment. The gap between what a large, well-resourced organisation can do and what a small, mission-driven ministry can do has never been narrower. That is worth celebrating. That is a real gift in the hands of people who use it wisely.
But AI also leaves gaps. Significant ones. And the gaps it leaves are precisely where ministry matters most.
AI can generate words, but it cannot understand the specific person in front of you. It can produce content, but it cannot feel the weight of the story behind the person who will receive it. It can build something that sounds right, that ticks every technical box, that passes every readability test and still lands with all the warmth of a letter from the tax office.
The problem isn’t the technology. The problem is when the technology is treated as sufficient on its own.
This is what the tech industry calls “the human in the loop.” Every sophisticated AI system acknowledges that human oversight, human input, and human judgment are essential to producing genuinely useful outputs. But I want to go further than that. For ministry, it is not enough to have a human in the loop. You need the right human in the loop.
Here is what I mean.
AI is only as connected as the person operating it. If the person operating it does not understand your community, your language, your culture, your theology, your audience, your story – then the AI technology they produce will not connect with your audience either. It will be technically competent and spiritually hollow. It will look like ministry without its heart.
This is why I kept finding myself saying, in those conversations at Watson Park, something like this: the technology is not the variable. The people leveraging it are the variable.
The ministries that are going to thrive in the next decade are not the ones that adopt AI fastest. They are the ones who pair the power of AI with people who genuinely understand the ecosystem they serve. People who know the difference between an Adventist audience and a general Christian audience. Who understand the prophetic framework that shapes how this community sees the world. Who can hear the difference between language that connects and language that merely communicates.
At Blue Vineyard, this conviction shapes everything we do. We are not just a technology company that happens to serve Adventist clients. We are a team that has grown up in this movement, that believes in this mission, that reads the same books, sits in the same pews, and feels the same urgency. And that means that when we bring technology to bear on a ministry challenge, we do not just build something that works. We build something that connects.
I can say this about my team with genuine confidence: these are people who are hungry to serve Adventist mission through technology. Not for career advancement. Not because the market is good. Because they believe it matters.
I’m sure there are others out there with the same motivation and the same skill set, and I am glad they exist. But I can speak only about the team I work with every day. And when I look around that team, I see people who are investing their professional lives in sitting at this very intersection. The intersection between what the technology can do and what the mission requires.
There is one more thing I want to say, and I want to say it plainly because I think the urgency of it tends to get lost in the noise.
The window of opportunity in front of us right now is narrow.
We are at the beginning of a moment when the tools to scale ministry have never been more accessible, the cost to do so has never been more affordable, and the potential reach has never been broader. A ministry that invests now in building the right systems, with the right partners, around the right strategy, has the potential to multiply its impact in ways that would have been unimaginable five years ago. Not just incrementally. Exponentially.
But the window will not stay open forever. Other voices are already moving into the digital space. Some of them are doing extraordinary work for the gospel. Many of them are building compelling, well-resourced, attractively packaged digital presences that will connect with the same people we are trying to reach. But we have a unique message for this time in history.
The question is not whether the digital mission field will be occupied. It will be. The question is whether we will show up first, show up well, and show up with something that has the depth, the truth, and the connection that the gospel deserves.
The Adventist church has a role to play in this moment that nobody else can do in the same way. We have a message, a community, a framework, and a history of mission that gives us something genuine to offer. But that will mean nothing if we do not communicate it in ways that actually connect with people. And that is where technology, used well, by people who understand what they are doing and why, becomes one of the most powerful tools for mission that God has placed in our hands.
I have been using the word “connection” throughout this piece deliberately, because I believe it is the integrating concept.
God has always been moving toward connection. That is what the sanctuary was about. That is what the incarnation was about. That is what the new covenant is about. That is what Revelation 21 is about. And that, at its core, is what gospel ministry has always been about, long before any of us had a smartphone.
Technology, at its best, is not a replacement for that impulse. It is a multiplier of it. It is the thing that allows a ministry with a small team and a liberating message to reach ten times the people they could reach otherwise. That lets a church in a regional town maintain a meaningful relationship with members who have moved away. That lets an evangelistic organisation present the gospel to someone at 2 in the morning when no pastor is available. That lets an Adventist school communicate with its parent community in a way that feels personal rather than institutional.
But only if the technology has been built with connection in mind. Only if the humans who built it understand the community they are building for. Only if the story that the technology is meant to tell is actually the story of real people, real faith, and a God who has always been moving toward us.
This is what we are trying to do at Blue Vineyard.
If you are a ministry leader grappling with how to navigate AI or technology well in your ministry, we would love to talk! Not because we have all the answers. We are learning every day, just like you. But because this is the conversation we exist to have, and we would rather have it with you than watch the opportunity pass by.