Ministry in the age of AI - 1
From a webinar by Barna and RightNow Media
A recent webinar, which featured speakers such as David Kinnaman from Barna, Nona Jones, chief content and partnerships officer at YouVersion and Kenny Jahng, Editor-in-Chief of ChurchTechToday.com, discussed the implications and opportunities of AI for the Christian church and ministry. Here is a very abridged summary (part 1):
Barna has some brand new research on AI and the Church - what pastors think and what Christians as a whole think. AI isn't brand new but generative AI is and in the last 12 months, we've seen and talked so much about artificial intelligence, where we are and where we're heading.
Barna has seen that Christians aren't very comfortable with AI church. Half of Christians think that AI is not good for the Christian church, and 59% of Christians are concerned about their churches using AI. 47% of Christians say they would be uncomfortable if they knew their pastor was using AI in sermon preparation. 31% of Christians say they want to hear from the pastor explaining when and how AI is used in their church.
So there's a lot of hesitation around whether AI is good for ministry, is good for the Church and that maybe is generally tied to how people respond to new technology - an apprehension about what seems to be new. However, a lot of people don't understand how they're already using AI in apps and services such as Siri, Alexa, Google Maps, Spotify, Netflix, etc.
But how are congregants using AI in their faith development? One in four adults say that in matters of spirituality, they would trust an AI response if they asked it questions about Christian teachings and beliefs. That rises to 4 in 10 for Gen Z and Millennials. Young Christians are the most open to using AI to help them in their faith development.
We're at the forefront of some really interesting new questions around how to do ministry. AI is the next wave of a transformational experience of what it means for humans to interact with technology, so the Church really has a responsibility to have a theology here. The great opportunity is that people are learning in all sorts of ways - Bible and faith driven content apps, YouTube channels. This age of ministry in era of technology can be really rich and profound. The questions are, how do we really do it and in what way and can we partner with younger generations who are more adept and more native to these technologies?
Recognise that AI is here. It is a part of our society now in a very present way. Younger generations are using it. They have a lot of facility with it. There's a lot of expectation to use it and use it well. They're looking to the Church for answers on how to think about this.
Nona Jones wrote the book, From Social Media to Social Ministry, which offers churches and leaders a framework about how to think about social technology and the content that we share on these platforms. Many times we focus on getting followers, getting likes on posts, but the true deep transformational life happens when we shift from thinking about content as the end to content as a springboard to conversation. Nona believes that social ministry absolutely still applies in the case of AI because it is a tool that can be used to generate incredibly rich content. But the challenge to leaders is to go beyond generating content to actually having conversations and building community and that is the heart of social ministry. Delivery systems can be now highly personalised and that gives you an opportunity to connect with your audience at a much more individual level than just broadcast of previous social media days.
As a leader, we need to talk about AI. We need to talk about it with our teams, with our people, with our communities. We just need to start processing, what is it mean? And what are the questions that we actually have to wrestle with theologically, ethically, morally, etc. This generation do not know what it's like not to have social technology. They don't know what it's like to live in a world where you have to pick up a phone and call somebody or you can't immediately find out what's happening on the other side of the world.
In the near future, there is also AGI - Artificial General Intelligence - when the machine is smarter than us. When it can actually make decisions without us, it can learn and figure out things without us. What happens when we're not the smartest, we're not the most intelligent thing here? What does that do to our identity? What does it do to when we are not needed for many jobs in terms of our significance and our meaning? And so for congregations, there's going to be a lot of things that are coming down the line in terms of our own identity or our purpose and meaning, and we, as churches, need to help our people wrestle with these things.
Also we have to discipline ourselves to see these tools as supplements to our calling, not replacements for our calling because there is a danger that we have outsourced our intelligence to technology.
Part 2 which discusses some of the adoptions of AI by churches is here.
You can listen to the 57 minute webinar here.
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From a webinar by Barna and RightNow Media, 16/04/2024