How Artificial Intelligence Could Further Erode Trust in Clergy
There was a time when the minister was a respected member of the community and often one of the most educated. Members of the community would come to the minister for counsel and clergy because their counsel was valued. It has been a long time since this has been the case. With every passing decade, those who claim to have no religion keep climbing and churches keep declining. How will Artificial Intelligence help or hurt this slow decline in Clergy trust and respect?
When AI gives better answers…
With the advent of the internet, it became much easier for people to do their own research and uncover any dirt against an organization or denomination. In the information age, it has been a lot harder to convince people of spiritual truth than previous generations. The massive amount of information available has also made it difficult to discern what is true and what is false. Most people are lazy by nature and settle for the quickest, easiest answer that makes sense to them.
AI multiplies this tendency one hundred times or more. Anyone can query their favorite Large Language Model (LLM) like ChatGPT and get a beautiful answer in seconds. Not only will it spit out an answer but it has been learning about your preferences, beliefs, and biases and will tailor its answer to match them. LLMs do not produce the same answer to everyone who ask the very same thing because they are constantly learning and adapting to their users. The AI will seek to give a correct answer for you.
At first glance, this is great for the person using the LLM. You get good, quality answers to your questions at whatever level of knowledge you seek. If you are happy with surface answers, it will give good surface answers. If you want an academic answer, depending on the LLM you use, it will spit out excellent academic answers complete with source references and even accurate bibliographies in minutes.
Where Does that Leave the Minister?
There is no human on earth that can compete with AI in the width, depth, and breadth of response that a typical LLM can provide. The direct result of access to this kind of level of interactive knowledge will absolutely lead to less need to go to the minister for answers to their biblical questions. To many LLM users, they will get better quality answers from their favorite AI than what they can get from any Clergy.
What is the value of a minister in the Age of Artificial Intelligence?
While AI can provide excellent answers to almost any kind of knowledge request, it lacks a soul and it lacks emotions. Yes, it can simulate emotions but it isn’t alive. It does not have access to God. AI cannot hear directly from God. All it can do is assimilate Christian writings and spit out something that sounds really good. If we don’t value the mystery of God and the intangibles of a Holy Life walking with God, that may very well be enough. For the one who seeks to know and be known by God, knowledge alone isn’t enough.
How Has Truth Changed You?
While AI can produce good content, its results are generally flat and unimaginative. It isn’t speaking from experience. AI is not alive therefore it has had no struggle. AI isn’t a person so it has never had a conversion experience. It can describe one well but it hasn’t lived through one. Who would you rather talk to, someone who is capable of memorizing whole books word for word or one who has a story of how a book has had a profound impact on their life?
What makes us unique as human beings? Is it our ability to spit out facts? What gives us value as Christians or as preachers? Is it our ability to put together excellent answers or good content? What good is all of that if we don’t have a personal experience with God?
I’ve heard someone say, “I can’t hear what you are saying because your actions are speaking too loudly.” This saying implies that what matters most is that we are practicing what we are preaching. Truth that has been lived out is far more interesting than truth for the sake of truth. A person can give a technically excellent talk but if you know they aren’t real, they haven’t lived out what they are teaching, it has far less impact on you as a result.
Too many are satisfied with a surface relationship with God. They give pat answers and know the basics but they haven’t made truth their own. They haven’t struggled with truth and its implications on their life. They are more like a person who has taken out a fire insurance policy cause they are afraid of having their life go up in smoke than they are in love with God. The sinners prayer has been prayed, fire insurance has been secured, now they can move on to other things.
You know what we call people like that? A hypocrite. The word for hypocrite in the Greek is the same word used for actor. You claim to believe God and believe the Word of God but you are just going through the motions. You don’t really believe it.
The Danger of AI is it promotes a surface religion
We must guard against quick, easy answers. AI specializes in those. You have a question, ask the LLM that question, it spits out a decent answer, and your curiosity and inquiry end. You move on to other things. That’s fine if this is done only once in a while. The problem comes if this is what we do regularly and often. There is no sacrifice for that knowledge. We haven’t struggled with it, turned it around in our heads, considered different viewpoints or approaches. We haven’t taken the time to find out what others think about it and interact with their views. We haven’t spent time with God to seek out His understanding nor thought critically about the information we have just received. If it sounds good, if it seems like a good answer, we say good enough and count ourselves lucky that we can move on to other tasks.
LLMs are capable of being tools used for deep research. Recently, I’ve taken to using Perplexity AI for this. Perplexity is really good at providing you with academic quality sources. Once it produces these sources, what now? Do you look them up? Do you verify the quality of the information? Do you read what you find and then allow those sources to lead to new ideas and new thoughts? Given that all LLMs currently produce hallucinations, false content, you still need to verify what it produces.
The results LLMs give you are only as good as your prompting skills. It is possible to use them like you use a search engine and just ask it simple stuff. You can even ask it to produce essays, articles, sermons with a few sentences of text. The results it produces are good enough that you could take it and use it and most people would not realize that it isn’t coming straight from you. The problem though, is that you will have been unchanged by this process. The information came so quickly and so effortlessly that it cost you nothing.
Too Busy to Study Hard
Quality research is hard work. Any original writing will take time and effort. It will cost the author something. The more costly to the author, the more valuable the information is to the reader. I’d suggest the same is true for the preacher or anyone doing oral presentations. The more information has shaped us and the more we have asked questions, looked for answers, dug deeper, then reworked the results in our own words and filtered through our own experiences and personality, the more value it will have for others.
Most people don’t like hard work. Hard work requires discipline. It requires us to set aside other things to do it well. It is costly in some fashion. Whether wasted time, money or an inability to recall what we learned cause we took shortcuts. Those who discipline themselves to do the hard work will reap the rewards of that work.
With the advent of A-eye, many are now selling A-eye tools that can write whole books for you in a matter of hours. They promote getting rich quick. You’ll have the computer write this book and you can have it put together and making sales in hours or at most a few days. This quick approach always appeals to some but it is never a good approach. No matter how good AI gets, it will never replace the uniqueness that is you. It will never develop a soul and it will never be alive in the sense that it communicates directly with God. Furthermore, anyone else will be able to reproduce pretty much the same content via their favourite LLM making the content cheap because it is not rare but common.
We Must Remind Others of the Actual Cost of AI
AI has its uses. I use LLMs almost everyday. It is an amazing tool for research and for everyday common language tasks. It is not a substitute for hard work. Take a University degree as an example, if it was easy to graduate from University with a Bachelor’s degree, say in 6 months, would it be as valuable? If anyone could earn a PhD in a year and the majority of people who undertook to earn the PhD achieved it, would it be valuable? If you could learn to be a surgeon in a year of study, would surgeons earn much money?
We need to be intentional about calling people to go deeper. Yes, you can get a quick answer from an LLM about Bible truths. You can use LLMs as spiritual counsellors. You need to remind people that these LLMs are a simulation. They are not alive. They have no soul. They will give you decent responses but the responses it gives are not inspired. A-eye content is not Holy Spirit inspired because it is generated from human content and not from a real person.
Let us encourage young people to be more curious. To dig deeper when looking for answers to their questions. Let us encourage them not to be satisfied with easy answers. Bias is real and it exists in LLMs as much as any human being. Young people need to be made aware to look for these biases and consider them as they examine and consider the answers that are being spit out by their favorite LLM.
Are Pastors going to be in less demand?
Pastors have value to the degree that they have been transformed by their walk with God. They have value to the degree that they have struggled with their questions and found satisfying answers. Having good answers without having done the hard work of understanding the foundations of that answer won’t help the preacher and by extension, it won’t help the members being served by that preacher.
The New Testament teaches that God comes to live inside of human beings who believe in Jesus Christ. That incarnational work is what makes a preacher valuable. If ministers have become less respected and valued by members and society in general, maybe it is because these same ministers have failed to be transformed by what they preach. They have failed to put it into action in their personal lives and it shows through in what they say and do.
Going forward, I believe that some will continue to value what a good gospel minister brings to the church. As long as the preacher doesn’t treat their members as simpletons and take too many shortcuts in their preaching and teaching, they’ll come out just fine. Pastor, you are unique and hopefully, you have something unique to share with the world.
At the same time, let us sound the warning far and wide about the dangers of easy knowledge. After all, Adam and Eve fell in Genesis 3 at the promise of easy knowledge. Instead, let us encourage people to dig deep into their Bibles and to not be satisfied with quick answers but to do the hard work to make their biblical knowledge a part of who they are.
Joseph Duchesne is the creator of The Church AI Guy, a space where faith meets innovation. 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.
PAID Subscribers get benefits like Audio versions of articles and other resources like case studies, reports, and other useful resources. Upgrade Today!