This pastor is engaging with AI faithfully to help the Christian cause

We might think of churches as the farthest thing from the high tech world of AI. But AI is already everywhere in our lives. And Todd Korpi said pastors shouldn’t run away from it.

Korpi is a pastor and missiologist who wrote a whole book about how. It’s called "AI Goes to Church: Pastoral Wisdom for Artificial Intelligence" — and he’ll be speaking at Redemption Tempe about it next week.

The Show spoke with him more about a pastor’s approach to using AI — and how it’s already helping the Christian cause.

Full conversation

TODD KORPHI: There's a lot of ways in which AI is already being used. to do all sorts of things, whether that's in the area of Bible translation, shortening the remaining time to translate the scriptures into the heart language of every person in the world. That's been taken down from about a century. I was the forecast kind of before this AI revolution to closer to just a matter of a couple of decades.

And so there's all sorts of ways. But I think one of the crucial considerations that pastors have to undertake. And when I speak to pastors a lot, I begin by talking about, regardless of whether or not you think, well, I don't use AI, and when they say, when people say that generally, they mean I don't use ChatGPT or Gemini, kind of the popular apps out there. But in reality, we actually do use AI. Anytime that you've looked up directions on Google Maps or selected a show to watch from your favorite streaming platform, or even opened up social media and read your timeline, you've engaged with a form of artificial intelligence.

So recognizing that helps us reframe the question. The question is not whether or not as a pastor or as a church, as a Christian, I'm going to engage with AI. It's, I live in a world that's already being shaped by AI. So the question is, how do I engage it faithfully? And I think that reframing helps us position it away from just how does this make my life more productive? How does it make it easier? How does it make our ministry workflows and all of that sort of stuff better?

And it moves it into a question, less of productivity and more of fruitfulness. How is this creating margin in my life that I can use to spend time in physical presence with people? How can I automate the boring bits of ministry if it's, you know, creating a slide deck for a Sunday sermon or some administrative tasks or what have you, in order to then spend more time making meaning in the community and in prayer and in relationship with one another, actually doing a lot of the things that pastors got into ministry to do in the first place.

LAUREN GILGER: I guess that does make sense. You also asked the question, though, and I think this sounds like it's always a question in your work, about how this kind of technology or how whatever it is you're doing is going to also impact the marginalized, right, the vulnerable. Are there moral considerations there when it comes to AI in particular?

KORPHI: Yeah probably one of the most obvious is its relationship to creation. AI consumes an enormous amount of energy, so it has the potential to further contribute to greenhouse gases and carbon emissions and these sorts of things. There's also, to the point of the marginalized and the poor and under-resourced communities, there's a lot of potential to spike electric rates and to create situations in which the ultra wealthy get wealthier and the under-resourced and impoverished to widen that economic gap.

And so I think there's a responsibility that we have as Christians to advocate for the use of AI that does good to creation, that does minimal harm to the vulnerable within our communities.

GILGER: OK, so then let's, Todd, talk about some of the kind of science fiction type questions and scenarios that come up with AI and ChatGPT. And I think you have an interesting approach to them and how you might address them from a Christian point of view. Do you think at some point that AI will be sentient, considered a being, a human, something that needs to be respected and maybe even has rights.

KORPHI: I actually think that we're probably a lot closer to that moment, maybe not of sentience, but of the conversation around artificial intelligence and rights than maybe we anticipate. And some of that is because as AI is increasingly automated, so it's doing things without human intervention, from driving a car to performing a task, what happens when, you know, a law is broken or who's liable if a self-driving car, you know, crashes into somebody and injures them and things of that sort.

There was a case that went into the courts in Florida where the defense argued it was a situation in which a chatbot had coached a young person to commit suicide. And in creating the defense, the legal team argued that the chatbot's responses constituted free speech. And that was kind of dismissed out of hand. But the fact that argument was even considered is something to take note of.

So I do think that there is a dynamic of, we are going to have questions of AI rights, and especially when it comes into the form of robotics, the AI bot that's doing our laundry at home, that I think that we're going to need to pay careful attention to. And Christians are going to have to have a good, robust understanding of what it means to be made in the image of God, kind of the dignity of humankind, in order to be ready to respond to that moment.

GILGER: Right, so I wonder this because in Christianity you're talking about that, you hear that phrase all the time, right, like made in the image of God. If we're talking about rights for artificial intelligence and sort of considering something that has been created by humanity as something that might almost have a soul, what do you think that does to sort of the idea of humanity and what that means? Does it make us more human? Does it make us more in the image of God? Does it make us less? What do you think?

KORPHI: Yeah, so we see a lot of the questions of, you know, can something artificial reach kind of a human-like status in the cultural imagination going back as far as, you know, "Star Trek: The Next Generation," Lieutenant Commander Data and stuff. And so there's that kind of unconscious wondering in us, but when we look at, from a Christian perspective, that designation of being created in God's image is actually a designation, not of any particular characteristics or attributes. It's not tied to our sentience. It's actually a designation of purpose.

So regardless, in my view, regardless of how sophisticated a particular AI bot or some sort of being in the future could potentially be thinking through our science fiction imaginations, it never arises to the point where it bears that same status.

The human, to be human is something entirely different because to be human is to be formed by God's hands himself. You know, Scripture tells us that God bent down into the dirt and formed humankind. From the dust, he breathed his own breath into our lungs. And that's a special designation that I believe we need to advocate to retain, that to be human is something entirely different and very, very special.

GILGER: All right, we'll leave it there. Todd Korphi joining us. He is a missiologist, writer, pastor, director of the Digital Mission Consortia at the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center and associate professor at the Fuller Theological Seminary. He will be here on Feb. 4 talking about these issues of AI and the church.