Should Christians use AI?

Question 60033.

Whether a Christian should be using AI is now a live question in ordinary church life rather than a theoretical one. Students are using it for essays, employers are requiring it, and preachers are quietly wondering whether the sermon outline that appeared in thirty seconds counts as their own work. The unease is real and it deserves a better answer than either enthusiasm or suspicion.

Let me be open about where I stand. I use these tools myself, for research, for tidying my own prose, and for the tedious end of administration. I am not a technophobe and I do not think the church is served by pretending the technology will go away. But how we use it turns out to matter a great deal.

Tools are not the problem

Scripture treats human making as part of bearing God’s image. We are told to work and to keep, and within a few chapters of Genesis we meet those who work metal and make music. When the tabernacle was to be built, God filled Bezalel with the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence and knowledge and all craftsmanship. Skill and tool making are not a grubby concession to a fallen world.

The printing press put Bibles into ordinary hands. The microphone, the recording and the internet have each carried the gospel further than the previous generation imagined. A tool is not to be feared simply because it is new, and the believer who refuses every innovation on principle has confused caution with faithfulness.

Where using AI is straightforwardly fine

A great deal of what these systems do is the modern equivalent of a concordance, a filing clerk and a proofreader. Summarising a long document, drafting a rota, checking spelling and grammar, translating, transcribing a talk, finding where a subject appears across a body of material, producing the first version of an email nobody enjoys writing. None of that raises a moral question.

There are also uses that are plainly good. Translation work that would take years can be accelerated. Blind and deaf believers have access they did not have. Tedious labour that wears people down can be lifted. Using AI to give a hard pressed volunteer his Saturday back is a kindness rather than a compromise.

Where it starts to go wrong

The first line is honesty. Presenting generated work as your own, whether it is a student essay, a job application or a sermon, is a lie regardless of how convenient it is. The technology did not invent that temptation but it has made it frictionless, and the believer’s answer is the same as it has always been: we do not deal in false weights.

The second line is the pulpit. Preaching is not the transmission of information; it is a man who has been with God bringing the word to people he knows and loves. A model can produce a competent outline, and it cannot pray, cannot weep over a congregation, and does not know that the woman in the third row buried her husband in March. Using AI to check a reference is one thing. Using AI to supply what only prayer and study can give you is theft from the people you serve.

The third line is pastoral care. There is something badly wrong with putting a grieving person’s situation into a machine and reading back the output. Comfort is not a text; it is a person present with you. Paul told the Romans to weep with those who weep, and there is no way to delegate that.

The formation question

Here is the argument I find most persuasive and least discussed. The labour is often the point. You do not write an essay simply to produce an essay; you write it to become someone who can think. You do not study a passage only to get a sermon; the wrestling is where God does something to the preacher. Using AI to skip the struggle can deliver the product and quietly rob you of the person you would have become.

This applies well beyond ministry. A young Christian who never has to sit with a hard question, never forms an argument, never has to find the right words for a difficult letter, is being deprived of something. The tool is not sinful. What it costs you may still be too high, and that is a judgement each of us has to make honestly rather than conveniently.

Fluency is not truth

These systems are designed to produce plausible text, and plausibility is not the same as accuracy. They invent references, misattribute quotations and state falsehoods in exactly the same confident tone they use for facts. I have caught them putting words into the mouths of theologians who never said them and citing verses that do not say what is claimed.

So whatever else you do, check. If you are using AI for anything to do with Scripture, open the Bible and read the passage in its own context. The Bereans examined the Scriptures daily to see whether what an apostle said was so, and a language model has considerably less authority than Paul.

Being open about it

My own rule is simple. If someone would feel misled to discover how the thing was produced, then it needs to be said up front. That is not a technology rule, it is just honesty applied to a new situation, and it saves an enormous amount of trouble later. Churches would do well to agree openly on where these tools are and are not used, rather than leaving each person to guess.

There is also a question of trust that leaders should think about carefully. A congregation that discovers its pastor’s letters, prayers and sermons were generated will not be reassured by an explanation about efficiency. What is at stake is whether the words they were given were actually his.

A working rule

Use these tools where they save labour that never formed anybody, and refuse them where the labour was the formation. Use them to prepare material, never to replace prayer. Use them to serve people, never to simulate presence with people. And whatever you produce, own it, because whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, and that includes the work you did with a machine.

Keep an eye on the habit as well as the act. Notice if you have stopped being able to start anything without it, or if your prayer life has quietly become shorter since your study got faster. Those are the signs worth watching, and they are the ones nobody else can see. The wider questions about the technology are in is artificial intelligence a threat to humanity.

Using AI without losing your voice

One quiet cost is worth naming. These systems produce a smooth, plausible, faintly corporate style, and the more you lean on them the more your own writing drifts toward it. Anyone who has read a great deal of generated prose can spot the rhythm, and it has a way of flattening the particular voice God gave a particular person.

That matters more in ministry than in most work. A church knows its pastor’s turn of phrase, his habits, the illustrations he goes back to, the things he always says at a funeral. When that begins to be replaced by something generically competent, something real is lost even if nobody can put a finger on what has changed.

So if you are using AI regularly, keep writing things by hand as well. Write the difficult letter yourself. Draft the sermon before you look at anything. Read good writers, including old ones, so that your ear is trained by something other than a machine. A voice is formed slowly and it can be lost without any single decision to give it up.

And do keep reading Scripture itself rather than summaries of it. There is no shortcut to a mind soaked in the Bible, and a machine cannot do that soaking on your behalf any more than it can pray for you. If you want the wider questions behind all this, I have set them out in how we recognise false teachers, because discernment about tools and discernment about teachers draw on the same habits.

So, now what?

Decide your lines before you are under pressure, because that is when they get crossed. Write down what you will use these tools for and what you will not, tell somebody, and revisit it in six months. If you lead a church, have the conversation with your leadership team now rather than after an awkward discovery.

And keep the main thing in view. No amount of using AI will make you wiser, holier or more useful to God. Those come from the Spirit, from Scripture and from time spent with people, and none of them can be automated. Use the tool for what it is good for, and give the hours it saves you back to the things it can never do.

And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

Colossians 3:17 (ESV)