Part Three Will AI Change How We Do Ministry?

one thought I was like, could AI pray for me? What would that be like if you asked it to pray? I've never tried that. That's an interesting experiment.

Does God listen to AI's prayers? Yeah, lots more to think about on this topic. Wait a second. Was that yes that God listens to the prayers of AI or was that yes like, yes, let's move on?

Let's move on because I don't know. That's not for me to answer that question because man, my goodness, that sounds like a... That's an interesting topic. Hi everybody.

Welcome back to the BlueVignette Podcast. My name is Luke Farooja and I'm here with my co-host Adam Weeks. Hi Adam. Hey, Luke.

Ah, it's good to see you again. I am excited about this topic. This is this is going to be good. Yeah, absolutely.

It's going to be great. So we started this series looking at how Christianity is affected in this age of AI. It feels like things are constantly changing. New news comes out about AI all the time.

And I want to ask you, Luke, our question today is Will AI change how we do ministry? And before we get to our guests and the people we've interviewed, I'm curious, what do you think? How will AI change how we do ministry? So AI, it's been really interesting, right?

Because we've both been going out and talking to people and learning how it's being used out in the wild, so to speak. And so as I've been hearing some of the thoughts that there's been quite a wide range. If you're asking for for how I would think about it, what my basic hypothesis is, I think it is going to change dramatically, fairly dramatically, how ministry takes place as a tool. But I don't think it's going to change why ministry takes place.

And so I think that there's a really a really important line that we need to draw. And I think some of the places that we're going to go in this conversation will detail that. But I'm going to lean on the side of as long as we're using it in the right places, it will definitely change the how, but not the why. So what about you?

What is your hypothesis on how this is going to come out? You know, it is ever-changing. And the reason why I say that is I think that we have this AI, this incredible technology kind of got dropped on the world. And it is iterating.

It is getting better over time. But it was this big, huge shift. And just now we are still figuring out like, oh, how can we use it? I know in my life, I'll go and do something the way I've always done it.

And I like, oh, wait, maybe I can have Claude help me with that. And that's not always my first thought. And I'm using this a lot more than a lot of people. So I think that's going to be happening with ministry as well.

Kind of my analogy is when the light bulb was first invented that was a huge step forward because in a glass You put a source of light that wouldn't burn down your house That was that was amazing and for a little while is kind of just a sort of trick look I can turn this thing on and off and we're still figuring out new ways to use light, you know so much So much longer since the invention of it That's how I think we're going to be using AI in ministry is that there's an iterative process of, oh, we can use it for that. And also the iterative process of like, maybe we shouldn't use it for that. And I'm always going to come back to human first wins out every time human connection. Yeah.

So I know we've both spoken to a few people on this topic. Are there any particular use cases that you would like that you'd highlight? Yeah. So I talked to Patrick Pulliam.

He's out over at the Hope Channel. And before I talked to him about this, we were talking about the interview. He's like, you know, Adam, why are you interviewing me? I'm not really an AI expert or anything.

I was like, that's actually why I'm talking to you, because the Hope Channel, there's so much happening over there, some exciting things, and they are having to sort through a ton of just data that comes through them, and in this case, kind of through social media. And one thing that AI does well is it takes complicated stuff and it source it. And Pastor Puglia talks about how they're using it in relation with social media, which I think is really interesting. I'd love to hear him now.

Will AI, do you feel like it'll change how we do ministry? It is already changing how we do ministry, I would say. For example, in our few Hope Channel network, we are using AI to be able to triage some audience engagement, because we receive thousands of comments and inbox messages from all sorts of people. Many times we receive very Let me start with the good side We receive really good inbox messages or comments who are asking for additional Bible study or wanting to learn more but at the same time we receive You know comments or messages to our inbox that are just messages that you don't want to read hate hateful messages with you know bad words involved and it's all sorts of like messages coming in and So we are now starting to use AI to filter those bad words out.

And so we're able to see, OK, filter out and then focus on the ones who are actually looking for additional Bible studies. A quick example I could give you is in South America, in Novo Tempo, our hook channel in Brazil, they've already used AI as a as a Bible study tool where they built this AI system that they train with Adventist Bible study material from that, you know, Adventist Christian worldview. And when people are wanting to learn more about the Bible, they have this chatbot that they can chat directly from their WhatsApp, you know, from people from their WhatsApp, they're able to chat with this AI chatbot that is guiding them with that Adventist Christian worldview. And at some point, the AI chat would ask, would you like to be connected with a real mentor, a pastor, or an evangelist?

And then if they say yes, then they're connected. And it's very effective as they are seeing the results of that AI tool being able to guide a number of people on that journey. You know, Adam, I'm sure you have heard of the problems that we often face in our evangelistic meetings is when we ask people, would you like to study more about the Bible? And if they answer yes, where does that paper go?

Right. Many times it goes to the conference office or to the church office. And if they don't have an active Bible worker somewhere along the line, those interests, you know, they fall through the cracks. And so I think in some ways, AI tools can become really good at bridging that gap that even in the absence, in the in the absence of a physical or a human mentor, Bible worker immediately, AI can bridge that gap initially.

Yeah, I think that Pastor Puglia brings in kind of this interesting perspective on ministry at scale. There's very few of us that are doing ministry that that big. And when it comes to so much, so many people that you're working with, there's an efficiency because, yeah, you've been doing a lot of filtering of both the good and the bad. Yeah.

One of the things that he said that really stood out to me was I know it might seem fairly simple, but when he was talking about the amount of comments and messages that they get and how they're starting to use AI to filter that to filter out the noise so they can stick to the signal. I find that really interesting because from my perspective, I think that's one of the most powerful uses of AI, not specifically in messages, but in categorizing information because we've been through this information revolution. Data is now abundant. At the beginning of what happened with the Internet, all of a sudden it was, oh, wow, we have access to all of this information.

And now we have access to so much information that we have no idea how to compress it into something that's useful to the human mind. And so I think curation is compression and curation, I'll say, are two of the core things that I think AI is very, very important for in in how we do ministry, especially as you said, Adam, when we're doing it at scale. So like, do you I don't know, I'm sure there's many other things that we could think of that could be compressed or filtered, but I think that is a foundational aspect of AI that could be applied, not just to comments and DMs, but to any place where we have an abundance of information that we don't have usable insights from. AI is really good at helping extend what we're already doing, and so definitely at scale, but I think even to a similar degree, a pastor at any church probably already feels like they're stretched thin, that they don't have enough time to do all of those different things that they're trying to do.

I'm curious, when it comes to like the local church, what are your thoughts of like how a local church might be able to do this? I know that you kind of had some conversations along this. Yeah. So in a sort of a similar frame of mind, some of the churches are thinking about integrating AI into chatbots and in church websites.

Now, I think it's a really important point that Craig Young brings out. for indoor and outdoor is communicating and you know following up and consistency in communication and this is something where I can you know see the loss of time and work method with planning with timetabling with making sure everybody not no one is missed in the communication loop and these things must be yours and then I have been talking about how do we when we call But church, church usually are not open seven days a week. If we call, make a call, we should have 24, within 24 hour a response, whether it's text, email or something. But no, we are at a stage where you call and you have to wait until the Sabbath before you get the response. So yeah, or they say, come to church to get the response.

No, it shouldn't be like that. It should be, you know, within 24 hours you get. updates and response and the AI built into your website built into your system should be able to do a lot of the answer a lot of the queries that probably people are asking and that's how we can use it for ministry and again once you take that work administrative workload off then you have time to do personal one-to-one human touch, love, care, mentorship all those things that Yeah, I cannot. You say that having a chatbot within the church's website can help to improve the human element. Have you got any examples of a church that may have used that yet?

No, I have not seen that, but you know, I've been doing some research and doing some writing around that because I'm trying to see how I can put together something that will help church to make a blueprint to help church to see how they need to improve. There that access to using the technology. So the thing that stood out to me about that is that if we, if we have a way, you know, what he was saying is people will often have to wait for the next Sabbath before they can connect or whatever that might look like. I know at my, at my church, uh, I don't know if this is the same way now, but I know at least a few years ago. there was a phone at the church that people would ring and if the pastor didn't just happen to be in the building which you know through the week doesn't happen that often that wasn't going anywhere and so anyway obviously there are ways and means you can you know redirect phone numbers and all of those sorts of things but i think the important thing here is that we are in a place that's accessible that people can find information in an accessible way and if it if we do it poorly, I think it can reflect badly on the church.

And so I appreciate his perspective. But my personal caution is that if we are going to do that, we have to be really careful to make sure it's a good experience that is representative of the message in the church so that we're not losing people that we would have otherwise had a good experience with. Yeah, I think I'll echo that caution or continue on with that caution. I think being careful and understanding like what is the purpose of this chatbot?

And I would say it's in service of helping people understand maybe some of the facts about the church, where it's located, when the services are, are there different types of meetings coming up, or what's happening at the church that they're not, hey, I'm calling and I'm in crisis and I need to talk to a pastor right now. If that's the case, if we can use the chatbot to say, All right, let me send you to the pastor right away. And if we can do that in a way that I would say in the chat bot, those that outreach isn't happening there, it's quickly get people the answers that they need to the questions that they have. But if it is something deeper, that is where it needs that human connection, that it facilitates that happening, because you're right. you know, a lot of churches, someone could be calling for different reasons, you know, on a Wednesday.

And maybe that Wednesday is one of the worst days of their life, and they need to talk to a pastor, and it just rings and rings and rings, and that pastor doesn't get it until they come in later on Friday or something. Or they just need to know, like, hey, when's the Christmas concert happening? And, you know, it depends on the reason why they're calling it, that chat box does its job well. it will help them reach those people. Do you think that there is a use case for this?

And if so, what kinds of churches do you think this would be useful for? Is this something that you think is useful across the board? Or is there places that this makes sense and other places where it's it's not as useful? I think if done well, I could see it being at any church.

People are getting used to I guess chat bots for so many years have been terrible. And they I'll see a chat bot and like, I don't want to touch it. No. And then recently, I've been like, maybe it actually can answer my question.

And sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised other times like nope, still terrible, still did not answer my question, I need to talk to a person. So I think that it depends. But if done well, I can see it being used at pretty much any church, honestly. I like what you just said there, by the way, just about in the past, you would have just discounted it immediately.

But now you're you're a little bit more open. I really resonate with that. And I think because people are getting so accustomed to, you know, Claude and chat, GPT and Gemini, they're accustomed to getting more useful answers when I see a when I see a chat bot in a website now. I do the same.

I'm like, Oh, I'll ask. And if I, if I ask one question, you can generally tell if you're getting a canned response or you're getting a, an LLM response. As soon as I see that I'm getting an LLM response, I'm like, Oh, okay. Like I can expect that this is going to be useful, but if I see that it's a, it's a canned response, like auto responder, then I, yeah. discounted immediately.

It's like, I'm going to be able to do what I wanted to do. Because I think it depends on like what I'm going there for. And maybe if it's like my personal account information. And if I'm just visiting the website, like it's my bank or something.

Yeah, that chat bot isn't going to know unless I'm logged in. And so yeah, we're getting mixed. But it is getting better. And so I wouldn't say hey, churches, go get chat bots right now.

But Maybe start thinking about how that could benefit your church. Yeah, and I think as it gets more sophisticated, like as an example, us as an organization, we're working on Uh, not just a chat bot, but we're working on like an, an agentic Bible study tool. We're working on this with amazing facts and the, the value, the value differential between a basic chat bot experience and a fully integrated experience is very large. And I think, I think that experience, that agentic experience is actually what Craig is talking about because he, if you noticed at the beginning of his video, he was saying that, uh, historically as a church, we don't do follow up.

Well, we don't have consistent communications and that is the business of agentic, uh, chat bots and communication because they're following up. They're saying, how long has this taken place? How do I make sure that this person gets responded to? How do, how do we meet these needs?

And I think that becomes really useful because then that is effectively the, if we applied this in the local church setting, like he's suggesting, that is then the equivalent of the pastor having a personal assistant that they don't have to pay for. And that is a valuable thing. Exactly, because so many times right now, pastors are depending on their memory to give back to someone. Someone walks up to them, hey, pastor, would you mind something, something, something?

And in that moment, very agreeable, absolutely. And then 10 other things happen and that pastor has, you know, still trying to do a good job, but has missed that thing. And something has fallen through the cracks, whereas computers are very good at making sure things don't fall through the cracks. Yes.

So we've been talking, you're talking about how AI can help with outreach. type things, whether it's filtering or maybe how an individual church uses a chat bot. What are your thoughts on an AI and ministry where it can actually help the pastor do their job of preaching and some of those things? What are your thoughts on that part of AI changing ministry. This, I think, comes down to how it's being used, because I can absolutely see... there was someone I was talking to just recently, and they were saying, you know, can the Holy Spirit influence, you know, chat GPT?

Right? So the question is, is this being used as a tool to extend your own ability? And in... collaboration with the Holy Spirit? Or is this a tool that you are outsourcing your intelligence to and you're effectively allowing a large language model to speak to the congregation?

And I think that's a that's a very different thing. In your experience for the people that you've been talking to, Adam, did you have any input on this? That is a really good point. And I got to talk to.

Pastor John, he's from Amazing Facts and he has a really interesting take on this. I'm curious if more and more pastors are using AI. So yeah, let's listen to Pastor John on his take on how he uses AI as he prepares for ministry. Will AI change how we do ministry?

And what are some of those practical ways that you see those changes happening? Well, the answer is yes and AI is already changing how we do ministry I know just from a pastoral position when it comes to sermon preparation or preparing slides for a presentation or even doing research on Different topics might be in the Bible or references to other material AI has become a tool that I think just about every pastor that's connected to the internet users in somewhere or another to help organize and then also present the message There's always a balance. You don't want AI to be the sole Provider of sermon content you need to have you know The Holy Spirit guide you when you pick a topic and as you research and gather information and utilize the Bible as the final word and authority But I think again AI is a tool that can be used It already is being used in a very practical sense a number of our slides that be used to illustrate our various Bible truths are generated a lot quicker now with AI than they used to be. We had to go find the illustration.

It took a lot longer to try and build, you know, a slide or a picture related to your sermon. So the amount of time needed to prepare a good presentation has really been reduced by AI. Also research. I remember the days of where I wanted to look up a commentary on a verse and I would have to Go find my Bible concordance and find where it's mentioned and then get out the Bible commentaries and go through that I remember when software was developed that you can put on your computer that would speed up Finding various Bible verses and commentaries on those verses It already helped right there in speeding things up.

And of course AI is just the next step in helping to be more productive in preparing the gospel. So again, it's a tool that can be used, but it needs to be controlled. And I think, well, we'll get to that maybe in a little bit, but there is a degree of credibility that could be lost if you just let AI run without any guidance, so to speak. So it could be used, but you rarely need a person behind it to guide it as to what you're trying to do.

I like how Pastor John kind of walked us through. that we have always had this time where tools have gotten better. For many people, preaching before there was a good concordance, you know, like, oh, wow, now I have access to this incredible actual library of content. And then, like you mentioned, then software. I don't know if you remember this, but I remember as a kid when some of the software was coming out, there's a number of sermons that felt like they were like, oh, I can count how many times the word love is used in the Bible.

And the pastor would, there is this many times of the, it was just this like, because they couldn't do that before. But now they could count how many times a specific word was used and they were using it to different effect. And this is another iteration of a tool that is potentially helping pastors. Get access to information, filter things very quickly.

But like you said, there is maybe some risk there. I don't know. What do you think about the pros and cons and some of the risks of outsourcing your sermon prep? Well, the first thing, what I was thinking just when I was listening to Pastor John was that he was saying you don't want to have the I'm trying to think of the word he's I think he said unguided.

You don't want to have the AI, you know, unguided. you know, doing this preparation, I was thinking if my pastor stood up to the front of church and he delivered a word for word presentation that was fully AI in its processing, even if I didn't know that, if I were to find that out later, I would devalue the presentation, not because the information was wrong, maybe the information would have been right, but because it didn't come from his own experience and his own relationship with God, I would question its value. And so I think it is a very helpful study partner, but a very unhelpful architect, if that makes sense. And so I would say that the risks involved, because yes, there's the hallucination risk. There are those things.

You need a person there. But to go all the way back to the start of the process, How do you know what to preach? When you're preparing a sermon, you've preached many, many times. When you're doing that, how do you choose what to preach?

Do you just pick a random topic and hope for the best? Like, how do you choose what to preach? It's a good question. And it often depends if I'm going to do a series.

Yeah. But there is. And so you can stick with that series. But there's another part that something's tugging on my heart.

And I feel like I need to share this thing that's on my heart. I can't wait till the next time I get to preach because I have this thing that I, human, Adam Weeks, I have this thing to share. And I think where you're getting at is that that can't, LLMs do a great job of taking all the information. that is online that it has access to and synthesizing it. We have the knowledge of 1000 pastors who have preached 1000 sermons like that's pretty good.

But they can't feel what I'm feeling. And that's pretty unique to me. Yeah. And so one of the just to give a concrete example, I was asked to share a series of devotionals this week, you know, one each day.

And in preparation, I was given a particular uh, topics that, that were to be covered. And so as I've been preparing for that, my, how I prepared was I, I sat down with the list of topics and with each topic, I, in my mind, I'm like, okay, what I want to do with this topic is I want to share something from my experience. I want to go somewhere in scripture and I, and I want to like share the lesson that comes out of that. Like they're the, that's like the structure I wanted to follow.

And so I just from my own mind went, okay, Here are the things that I think. And then I asked the AI that I was using, can you give me any other examples or hard data that I could point to as illustrations? And then, oh, you could use this, this, this, this, this. Would you prefer this or this?

And so then I could pick and choose. I'm like, I think this is the direction I want to go with this. This is where I want to go with that. Can you please now take this and put it into a document for me so I have notes that I can then edit?

That just sped the process up. The ideas were mine. The inspiration that I had was still mine, right? And so I think we can use it responsibly, but it's the wholesale outsourcing that is where the damage is.

And I had an interesting conversation with Pastor Russ Wilcox, and I think he gave a really helpful model for thinking about how ministry changes and how that outsourcing should and shouldn't occur. Well, ministry, I think, Obviously ministry is a very diverse landscape as well, but there's a very important relational and incarnation aspect to ministry. Technology is really not designed to do that space. It can't genuinely love people, pray for people.

It can't show concern for people. It doesn't exercise spiritual discernment, can't help alleviate someone's suffering. you know, through empathy, like there's so much that technology can do, but there's a whole lot of spaces that it really can't do. And it's not designed to do. I think of the work that technology does, it isn't the ministry.

I think technology is designed to help us with ministry, to be more efficient, to scale, to empower people in ways that couldn't before. And, you know, to use a biblical story on this one. And I'm thinking of it. Moses back in the book of Exodus where he early morning to late at night helping judge the people's concerns and you know his father-in-law Jethro comes along and he says what are you doing and Moses is like well people need me you know why I sit here and I pass on information that they don't understand things and I decide between things and I'm and you know Who else can do this but me?" sort of thing.

Jethro makes a statement. He says, Moses, the thing that you're doing is not good. I think technology helps us with that thing. Moses needed to pass on information.

He needed to scale and empower others for ministry. I think these are the things that technology does, but we still need Moses. We still need people that Moses empowered to do the ministry. That's kind of my view on technology.

It's a great tool to aid ministry, but it certainly isn't the ministry. So I love that illustration at the end of, you know, Moses, you shouldn't be doing the busy work, right? And just like I was saying in one of the previous examples, if done well, AI can be a great personal assistant for a pastor, but also as Pastor Russ was just sharing. It can't have empathy.

It can't, it can't pray for somebody. It can't. So our humanity is absolutely necessary. And it's up to us to figure out how AI can be the tool to leverage that humanity.

So how does that, how does that strike for you? Does that, does that align with your thoughts? It does. I was one thought I was like, Could AI pray for me?

What would that be like if you asked it to pray? I've never tried that. That's an interesting experiment. Does God listen to AI's prayers?

Yeah. Lots more to think about on this topic. Wait a second. Was that yes that God listens to the prayers of AI or was that yes like, yes, let's move on?

Let's move on, because I don't know, that's not for me to answer that question, because man, my goodness, that's an interesting topic. Going back to, yeah, leveraging AI to help us do ministry. And there's like we've talked about, there's so many things that it can do. It can be our assistant.

It can help us like Pastor John was talking about, be our researcher. I was mentioning when I have done a sermon series, I was doing the fruit of the spirits, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. And each one of those was an entire sermon. And I would use it like, hey, Give me an example of someone in the Bible that exhibited gentleness.

Because I can't remember all of the entirety of the Bible and all of the every single story, and it was a good way to have a dialogue back and forth, help us do research, help us have that assistant, these different things. At the end, yeah, it can't have empathy. It is still a human first work that we have to do. Yeah, I would agree.

And I think if we were to just to sort of pull some of the threads together from what we've heard in this part of the exploration, and that is AI is very good at doing some of these tasks, right? AI is very good at condensing information. filtering out noise. It's very good at being a thinking partner. It's very good at assisting with research, but it cannot like have empathy, pray, do ministry, love.

It can't do any of those things that actually are what keep the people. Keep is probably not the right word, but it might allow us to do our work more efficiently, but it can't do the work itself. And I think while ever we consider that to Well, if we keep it in its appropriate role, it can ramp up what we can achieve, but it will always be it will always be secondary to the human element. As we're wrapping up this episode, if you've made it this far, I think you are really enjoying what we're talking about in this series.

And I would love for you to go back to our last episode if you if you missed it. What is? our church's future in this current state of AI going back and watch that one or listen to that one. And then I'm really excited about this next episode, Luke, where we asked people if you could push a button, I kind of vision this big red button, that if you push it, no more AI, it's gone, it's done. Would you push that button?

We're going to explore that more. Another thing I'd like you to do is I'd like you to subscribe so that you don't miss that. that very important discussion that we're going to have very soon. And then please, if you could drop a comment. I'm curious on this topic of does God listen to prayers from an AI?

That's something I would love to discuss. I'd love to hear what you have to say on that topic. And last but certainly not least, actually most important, please pray for us as we continue this topic. AI. is a tool, either good nor bad, but it's what it is done, how it's used in the hands of people that I believe makes it good or bad.

And we could use all the prayers we can get on this topic. So until next time, please be safe and we can't wait to see you very, very soon.