The Church in age of AI: Who will preach to man when machines begin to think? (2)

Stanford’s 2025 AI Index likewise reported that documented AI-related incidents rose to 233 in 2024, a 56.4 per cent increase from the previous year. These concerns have direct implications for the Church. What happens when someone uses AI to manufacture a fake prophecy? What happens when an artificial voice is used to imitate a pastor? What happens when fabricated images appear to show a miracle that never occurred? What happens when someone receives dangerous spiritual advice from an AI system and assumes that because the machine speaks confidently, its answer must be true? The Church must teach digital discernment as seriously as it teaches biblical discernment.

There is another danger that may be even more subtle: the automation of human relationships. Christianity is not simply a system for transmitting information. At its heart are relationships—between God and humanity and among human beings. Jesus did not merely distribute information; he encountered people. He touched the sick, listened to the broken, ate with people, confronted hypocrisy, comforted mourners and formed communities of disciples. A machine can assist communication, but it cannot automatically reproduce the depth of embodied human relationship.

A grieving person may receive a perfectly worded response from an AI system, but the pastoral meaning of another human being sitting beside that person in silence is something more than information. The Church must therefore ask whether technological convenience can sometimes produce spiritual loneliness. If Christians gradually substitute algorithms for pastors, screens for communities and automated responses for genuine human companionship, the Church may gain efficiency while losing something essential about Christian fellowship.

The problem of truth is equally serious. The Church has always had to distinguish truth from falsehood, but AI intensifies the problem because convincing falsehood can now be produced at extraordinary speed and scale. A fabricated sermon can sound biblical. A false quotation can appear scholarly. A synthetic image can appear authentic. A machine-generated theological argument can contain impressive language while quietly resting upon an incorrect premise. UNESCO therefore emphasises transparency, accountability, explainability, fairness and human oversight as essential principles for responsible AI. The modern preacher and Christian scholar must consequently become more—not less—committed to verification. The age of AI cannot be an age in which Christians believe something merely because a machine says it. Indeed, the opposite should happen: the more powerful our technological tools become, the stronger our commitment to truth must become.

The Church must also confront the economic and social consequences of AI. Technology can create opportunities, but it can also deepen inequalities between those who possess technological resources and those who do not. UNESCO has warned that AI can reproduce social biases and deepen existing inequalities if ethical safeguards are absent.

For a Church that speaks about justice, human dignity and concern for the vulnerable, this cannot be treated as somebody else’s problem. What happens to workers whose occupations are transformed by automation? What happens to young people who cannot access quality digital education? What happens to poorer countries that become dependent upon technologies designed elsewhere? What happens when a handful of corporations possess enormous computational and informational power? These are not merely economic questions. They are questions about human dignity, justice and the distribution of power—and therefore questions to which the Church has a moral responsibility to respond.

Perhaps the greatest challenge AI presents to Christianity is not that machines may become too intelligent, but that human beings may become too dependent upon them. There is a difference between using a tool and surrendering one’s judgment to a tool. The Church must encourage believers to use AI without allowing AI to become an unquestioned authority.

Pope Francis has argued that technological development must remain accompanied by ethical responsibility and that technological progress should serve human dignity, peace and the common good. This principle is remarkably relevant to the Church. The question should not simply be, “What can AI do?” but, “What should human beings allow AI to do?” Technology can answer the first question; moral wisdom must answer the second. And if Christianity still has something distinctive to contribute to civilisation, it is precisely this insistence that human power must always be accompanied by moral responsibility.

The Church, therefore, should not enter the age of artificial intelligence as a frightened institution hiding from the future. Neither should it enter as an institution blindly celebrating every technological development. It should enter as a community capable of asking the deepest questions about the human person. The Church should train pastors and theologians in AI literacy. Seminaries should discuss artificial intelligence, ethics, consciousness, technology and theology.

Christian universities should establish serious programmes in AI ethics and philosophy of technology. Churches should teach their members how to identify manipulated information, synthetic media and false religious content. The Christian intellectual tradition has spent centuries asking what it means to know, believe, reason and exist; AI gives that tradition a new arena in which those questions must be asked again.

And so, who will preach to man when machines begin to think? The answer may be more profound than we initially imagine. Machines may eventually become extraordinary communicators, researchers, translators, assistants and generators of information. They may help the Church reach places that were previously difficult to reach. They may sit beside the modern believer through a screen and answer questions about Scripture at any hour of the day. But the Church must remind humanity that intelligence is not the whole of existence.

The human being is not merely a processor of information. Humanity is a moral, relational and spiritual reality. The machine may tell us what the Bible says; the Church must continue wrestling with what the Gospel demands of our lives. The machine may produce words about God; the Church must continue calling human beings into a living relationship with God and with one another.

The age of artificial intelligence may therefore become one of the greatest tests of the modern Church. It will test whether Christianity can engage new knowledge without abandoning its foundations; whether theology can speak meaningfully to technological civilisation; whether pastors can use new tools without becoming dependent upon them; and whether Christians can distinguish information from wisdom. The future may not belong to a Church that rejects AI, nor to one that worships technology, but to one that understands how to place technology within a larger moral and spiritual vision of humanity. When machines begin to think, the Church must help humanity remember how to think about meaning. When machines begin to speak, the Church must help humanity distinguish information from truth. When machines begin to imitate human intelligence, the Church must challenge humanity to rediscover human dignity. And when machines begin to answer questions about God, perhaps the most important question will still remain: What does it mean for a human being—not a machine—to stand before God?