AI Winter Coming? Good News for the Church?
Predictions of an AI Bubble bursting could mean that Doomsday Predictions are Premature
Lately, multiple journalists writing in the finance space are starting to talk about an AI Bubble. Not unlike the 2000 dot com bubble, this one would see sky-high stock valuations for AI companies come crashing back to earth as they fail to meet unrealistic expectations. What does this mean for the rise of AI, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI)? How does this impact the church?
Many Futurists have been predicting the imminent appearance of AGI followed quickly by ASI. These same experts are predicting massive job losses, societal upheaval, and possibly even a Terminator kind of dystopian outcome. I recently wrote about Preparing the Church for the Great Unemployment Wave.
Are all these doomsday predictions blown out of proportion?
The vast majority of the people working on AI are not Christians and do not have a Christian worldview. They generally believe that human beings, like all living things, came to be by chance and have evolved slowly over millions or billions of years. I believe this cognitive bias on their part downplays the miracle and complexity of life.
Consider that scientists have been unable to create life from non-life despite working on it for over 70 years. The mainstream explanation for the origin of life has been shown conclusively to be pure fiction. Scientists currently have no plausible working model for how life came to be.
Against this backdrop then, it isn’t hard to understand why scientists are often so optimistic about the emergence of a new man-made lifeform created via AGI. It turns out that creating life from nothing is incredibly hard. For Christians, this shouldn’t really surprise us. After all, God is super intelligent as evidenced by the diversity and unbelievable complexity in even the simplest forms of life like the individual cell.
Darwin and other 19th century Evolutionists expected the cell to be a simple blog. None of them knew just how absolutely complex a single cell really is. Scientists now know that a living cell is as complex as any machine humans build today. Each cell is like a little city of activity accomplishing tasks on the microscopic level that was unimaginable 125 years ago.
I write all of this to point out that building an independent, conscious being that is able to independently think and act on its environment is still beyond the smartest human minds today. This is despite the trillions of dollars that have been poured into AI Research to date.
AI Winter Coming: Lack of Progress is Becoming Evident
It is the lack of progress towards AGI and ASI that is starting to become evident to many scientists and business people. OpenAI promised a massive leap forward with their GPT-5 version but instead, we got only an incremental update. Even Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI which owns ChatGPT is starting to tamp down future expectations of AI in the near-term. Some AI researchers like Meta’s Yann LeCun have stated publicly that we won’t reach AGI by scaling up current Large Language Models like ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini.
Finance journalists are starting to write about a coming AI Winter. As people temper their expectations about AI’s future, high stock valuations are set to come crashing back down to earth in a major way. This crash will cause a cooling down of investments in AI for the short-term, hence the winter analogy.
Is AI Winter Good News for the Church?
I believe an AI Winter is good news at least for the short-term. It means that AI won’t be as devastating to our membership as it could have otherwise been. Who knows what an independent artificial being would have been capable of doing. Certainly, given that it is being created in the image of human beings, an AGI or ASI will reflect natural, sinful, fallen humanity. It would reflect the values and priorities of sinful humanity. Its persuasive powers would be almost supernatural. Its ability to be controlled by the supernatural without human detection would have been great.
I would not say that human beings will never create an AGI or ASI. When humans put their minds together, God himself said in Genesis 11 that nothing would be impossible for them. It simply means we have more time before AGI becomes a major threat to Christians and Christian Ministries. It gives leaders more time to adapt, more time to prepare ourselves and our people for the future. I don’t believe we can fully avoid a future AGI but we have more time to adapt.
Do we reject all AI in Church Ministry?
The current Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini have multiple uses within the context of Christian Ministry. Like the Internet before it, it can be used in good ways and bad. As a tool for creative thinking, research, brainstorming and the like, LLMs are a major plus. As a means of being intellectually lazy and just relying on the information LLMs provide, it can be a negative. How it is used matters and makes the difference as to whether AI is ultimately beneficial or harmful.
Ethics Still Matter
Regardless of how you use AI, it matters what we do with it. If we are using it as a research tool in preparation for our talks, sermons, or presentations, we don’t necessarily need to disclose our use of AI. If we use AI to actually write our presentations or sermons, ethically, this must be disclosed. I wouldn’t recommend you use AI in this manner. There are a number of reasons for it but bottom line, it is dishonest to use someone or something else to write your content and then claim it is yours. Worldly people might do it but Christians should not, even less Christian leaders.
Your people expect you to have been impacted, molded, and shaped by your time in the Word, your time talking to God, and your time wrestling with the creation of your sermon. AI robs you of the mental, emotional, spiritual growth that comes with the struggle of creation. Sure, AI might write a better sermon manuscript than you can. It can even copy your writing style and make it appear like you wrote it. Either way, because you didn’t write it, when you present it like you did up front, you become a fraud and a hypocrite.
There is lots you can do with AI without resorting to having it do the final draft for you. You can have it generate ideas for you. It can push back on some of the points in your sermon. It can help you discover what others are saying on the same topic. It can help you put together the order of your slides. It can help you discover bible passages you may have previously overlooked. It can be used to generate discussion questions or suggest group activities and events. All of these are good uses of AI. What they don’t do is cross an ethical red line into plagiarism or fraudulent behavior.
Doomsday will come but not yet
The end of the world is still coming. Jesus will be coming back soon to end evil on this earth once and for all. AGI and ASI may very well be used by Satan and evil people to hasten the end of the world. Thankfully though, the end isn’t yet. That doesn’t mean we should be complacent. It just means that we don’t need to be guided by fear. Let’s use AI responsibly in our ministries and let’s consider the long term impacts of AI but let’s not lose our heads.
Instead, let’s use AI as a tool like other tools in our arsenal and let’s continue trusting in God, the leading of the Holy Spirit, and in the use of our God-given brain power.
Joseph Duchesne is the creator of The Church AI Guy, a space where faith meets innovation while discussing the long-term impact of AI. A pastor, autodidact, and author of two books—The Last Crisis and Discover the One—he’s passionate about showing how Jesus-centered discipleship can thrive in a digital world. When he’s not experimenting with the latest tech, he’s reading theology, building church community, or spending time with his wife.