AI Technology in Church Ministry: Wisdom Required

AI Technology in Church Ministry: Wisdom Required

September 18, 2025

Host: Hon. Sam Rohrer

Guest: Patricia Engler

Note: This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program aired on 9/18/25. To listen to the podcast, click HERE.

Disclaimer: While reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate transcription, the following is a representation of a mechanical transcription and as such, may not be a word for word transcript. Please listen to the audio version for any questions concerning the following dialogue.

Sam Rohrer:

Hello and welcome to this Thursday edition of Stand In the Gap Today. And it’s also our monthly focus on apologetics creation and biblical worldview. Now today I’m also very glad to invite back with me Patricia Engler. She’s been with me a number of times on this program. She’s a Christian apologetic speaker for Anders and Genesis. She hosts her own podcast at Zero Compromise, even at her young age. Already authored two books, prepare to Thrive, a Survival Guide for Christian Students and Modern Marxism, A Guide for Christians in a Woke New World. And I’m going to say even though I have not met Patricia directly, we have communicated a lot on this program and elsewhere. And from my perspective, I think I found Patricia to be very gifted. She’s young wise, beyond her years and well versed, I’m going to say in both biblical understanding as well as reflective of the thinking of our younger generation, while at the same time still maintaining the wisdom of the honoring of the wisdom of the older generation.

And that’s quite a combination. When we do what the Lord tells us to do, that is the result that balance comes predictably. It’s not an accident, but it is certainly something that God desires for all of his children that in fact, that would be how we are actually end up walking worthy as the Apostle Paul instructed the early church in Colossi and other places to do. Now, one of the most challenging issues I think confronting and changing the world and lightning speed is technology as represented in well, computers, the internet, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, now general intelligence and so much more. But you get my idea, that area it’s big. The extent in the speed by which this technology though is reordering our entire globe into a single digital system is literally staggering. And I’m going to say Prophetical now at the flip of a switch, well, I’m going to say perhaps precipitated by some globally impacting event like a monetary collapse, which is hanging right out there.

Or in my opinion, perhaps the rapture itself, the people will find their lives digitally controlled almost overnight. That’s how far things are, 24 7. From finances to transportation to health, and literally all buying and selling. Now, while I’ve talked about the broader use of technology and AI in particular in previous programs, Patricia and I are going to want to focus our conversation today on this theme as it relates to the church and specifically the use of AI technology in church ministry from a theological and ethical perspective. Analyze it from that perspective. It really needed, and it’s nothing out there really that people are striving for, but it’s not really been done. So stay with us the entire program, I think it’ll be helpful. No, what your age or your activity. Now the title I’ve chosen to frame today’s conversation is this, AI Technology and Church Ministry: Wisdom Required. And with that, Patricia, welcome to the program. So good to have you back.

Patricia Engler:

Thank you. Great to be here again.

Sam Rohrer:

Patricia, you’ve recently written an in-depth examination of this issue we’re going to be discussing today from a theological and ethical perspective, and it’s available at answersingenesis.org. But in that you wisely identify and started out by saying, all right, let’s get ourselves on the right track. And you identified four foundational components of church ministry. So let’s start there with the first of the four, you identified as the ministerial context of the church. Take and begin to lay these four things out, please for us.

Patricia Engler:

Absolutely. So yeah, to draw biblical boundaries for using AI in the church, we need to start by asking what does God’s word say about the church? And the New Testament word for the church, as a lot of people will know is Ecclesia. And the Greek translation of the Old Testament uses that same word to translate to the Hebrew word al, which always refers to the embodied physical assembly or congregation of God’s covenant people. So similarly in the New Testament, we’re talking about Ecclesia as the embodied community of God’s people, but now it’s under the new covenant in Christ. So the New Testament calls the church God’s flock, Jesus’s body, his bride. And then we see in revelation this final fulfillment of the universal church is all God’s redeemed people in heaven and ultimately in the new heavens and earth. So then meanwhile, in our fallen world, the church gathers in local congregations that function as sort of embassies of that heavenly kingdom pointing to those heaven realities. So that’s the nature of the church and its purpose and structure on earth reflects that. So we see an Ephesians tour that the church works to make, to edify believers, to equip and mobilize believers, those various offices of church leadership that we see in that passage, including shepherds and teachers who we’d call pastors that God ordains to build up the body of Christ under Christ as the head. So that’s the first concept of the church.

Sam Rohrer:

Okay, so you have that and then you go into, I’m just going to lay them out. So just connect them together. You’ve got the pastor you mentioned, you have what his purpose is, that’s delivering of a message, preach the word. So that’s a part obviously, of the church. And then you have this mechanism of how you do it. What do you use the technology part? Blend all these together and lay them out for us as we proceed.

Patricia Engler:

Sure thing. So starting with the pastor, Scripture refers to pastors as shepherds of God’s flock. So what does the shepherd do? We can find scripture references for all of this in the article, but briefly, the shepherd feeds the sheep by preaching God’s word, leads the sheep by personal example, modeled after Christ, protects the sheep by defending against false doctrine, corrects the sheep through exhortation, and rebuke and appropriate discipline. The sheep we’re talking pastoral care. And in all this, the pastor answers to chief shepherd Jesus for these responsibilities. And these responsibilities then reflect the pastor’s habits and hallmarks and heart as a shepherd. So his habits include personal Scripture, study, meditation, accountability, prayer, pursuit of godliness. We see that all over Timothy one and two Timothy. We also see in those books the hallmarks of the pastor, including personal diligence, integrity, perseverance, faithfulness and his heart.

And all this is being driven by love for Christ and for his flock. So that’s the pastor as portrayed in scripture. Then the sermon portrayed both in the old and the New Testament or preaching. This is God’s messenger faithfully communicating God’s word to God’s people in a particular time and at a particular place. So the purpose of preaching in the local church setting is to proclaim and explain God’s word with an emphasis on sound doctrine. That’s all over one Timothy as well to specific groups of God’s people with specific needs in specific locations at this chapter of history. So pastors will tell you that discerning God’s heart for specific congregations requires a lot of personal prayer, scripture, study, reflection, relational reliance on Jesus, the guidance of the Holy Spirit. And in all of us, scripture calls teaching a labor. So there’s a lot of personal responsibility and diligence and perseverance involved. And then turning finally to the mechanism technology. This is one way that we can use technology as a tool for advancing God’s message to God’s people. So we can think of technology biblically as a gift from God that we can steward for the good of his creation and his people. It’s a tool, but it’s not for sure completely a neutral tool because technology always reflects the values of its users and developers. And even our best intended uses of it can lead to unexpected consequences for good or bad.

So to steward this gift, well, we need to use it biblically.

Sam Rohrer:

Alright, amen to that. And ladies and gentlemen, that’s what we’re talking about technology to accomplish the purposes of what Patricia just laid out for a minister. But I’m going to say this is not just to the pastor minister as parents, you are in this same responsibility. You and I are a minister of God in government. Romans 13 has the same duties. So this really is for everyone. Stay tuned. We’ll be back as we begin to walk through this. Well, if you’re just joining us today, this is what we generally do once a month and that is focused on apologetics creation. Bring that into it somehow, some way everything comes into that and biblical worldview. And my guest today is Patricia Engler. She is a young lady, she’s a Christian apologetic speaker for interest in Genesis. Written a number of books and that kind of thing already at her age.

And she recently put together for a part of her doctorate program, she’s involved in a study on looking at the inclusion or the incorporation of technology and specifically artificial intelligence as it relates specifically within the church. And then how those who lead the church, pastors, other church leaders, anyone who’s in a position of a ministerial purpose. But looking at the church. And at the end of the last segment, I broaden in the idea of minister because every one of us who know the Lord is in fact a minister of God. The capacity we fill is a little different. The office we may fill is different, but as adults, as parents, we have the same responsibilities that a pastor in a pulpit has protect and lead and feed and all of that same thing for a minister of God in government is what I learned when I served time in office, was that a minister of God in government as identically the same obligations that Patricia just laid out the duties save one.

And the pastor specifically has the one additional requirement and that is to preach the word. And you’ll find that as you go through scripture. So this application of a minister caring for protecting, guiding, all of that, we all want to do our job better, do we not we should. Anyway, so that comes down to this aspect of technology and specifically now artificial intelligence. So when it comes to the communication of the gospel and the fulfilling of the great commission, which has been laid down upon all people for the last 2000 years in this church age, the means of communication though have dramatically changed. The commission remained the same. The tools, as Patricia said in the last segment, the tools to do so, they have changed. I mean it began with a one-on-one witness. You talk to your neighbor, a one-on-one, but there’s always been a one to many communication.

Jesus did that when he would speak to thousands on a hillside as an example. So one to many physically, although present. But as time progressed, the technology, for instance of the printing press came along, then there’s a telegraph, then there’s radio and tv to now the internet and the communication of the gospel has just increased beyond imagination, right? The same message. But now you’ve got a different tool, but the increased use of artificial intelligence and generative ai, which we’re going to define here in just a moment, is threatening to literally on some cases, replace people themselves. Because now some aspects of artificial intelligence is actually creating material and content. So alright, now therein is where some of the danger resides in great wisdom is required. So Patricia, let’s get into that now, add any comments to what I just said if you need to, but to make sure we’re on the same page, I’d like for you to define artificial intelligence and now generative AI as we’ll discuss it because that’s specifically what you were doing your analysis on. And I think that’s where we really are as a society.

Patricia Engler:

Yeah. So for defining AI, I find just a good, helpful, user-friendly definition is actually just in the Merriam Webster dictionary talking about how AI is the capability of a computer system to imitate intelligent human behavior, imitate, it’s not the same as human intelligence, or it can refer to the computer scientists or the science that develops them. So the generative AI we’re talking about is a type of AI that works by the computer analyzing massive sets of what we call training data. So images, words, or videos. And then it uses knowledge, it gains from that analysis to create new materials when prompted, as you were saying. So that’s why the generative AI is fundamentally different to all those other technologies we talked about, the radio, the printing press, all of those other communication technologies relied on human words and human thoughts. It amplified and broadcasted those thoughts.

But AI is in a sense making its own thoughts. They’re not the same as human thoughts, but it’s computer programs putting language and information and concepts together in a way that kind of maps onto human language and therefore has the illusion of mapping onto reality. It uses human types of sounding words that can reflect human emotion, but it doesn’t actually come from a human heart, for example. So that’s a little bit about what we’re talking about when we are referring to generative ai. It’s something that it’s just a machine, it’s not made in God’s image, it’s not a living self-aware spiritual being. It doesn’t understand its own actions and responses. It can’t spiritually comprehend God’s word relate to God or humans. So it’s really important to understand the differences between AI humans and the capacities and limitations of AI in that respect.

Sam Rohrer:

And I know that in your study and ladies and gentlemen, you can get that. I would encourage you to go to the Andrews and genesis.org site and look up that well, where would they go? What would they look for if they go to the AIG G website? Where would they go to find this?

Patricia Engler:

Yep. If you go to answersingenesis.org, it should be close to the homepage now, but otherwise we can just type in AI and pastors and it should be one of the first articles to pop up.

Sam Rohrer:

Okay, excellent. Alright, now before I get into having you share some examples of where people may already be seeing generative AI crop up, just interesting in that before this program I was doing some other work investigation and I heard a promotion and it’s from a company who is actually now producing podcasts of various sorts, totally made up by AI, 100%. And it’s designed on video so people can watch it on the digital medias, the pictures that are behind it, the words that are being said, the voice that is actually coming out of it, all of it is 100% created by generative artificial intelligence. So when people go to their digital website or however they’re doing it, they’re finding things that will come up. And if they like this artificial intelligence and directing them more things like it, and they’re looking at it and they’re looking at it and saying, wow, isn’t this something? And it’s none of it’s real meaning a person did not actually do it. So I’m just put that out there. But from your perspective and your research and personal observation, where have you found AI and generative AI being used today? Generally like what I just said or something else. And then specifically have you found it and where is it being perhaps already used in churches and church ministry specifically?

Patricia Engler:

Yeah, overall generative AI, we’re already seeing it revolutionize a lot of fears of society, whether that’s healthcare, education, research, science, militaries, different industry. We’re seeing individual consumers also look to these generative chatbots for everything from life advice to romantic relationships. There’s already some serious consequences in people’s lives as a result of that. And then as for the church, there’s not a ton of research yet that I could find on how churches are using AI, but there have already been some studies that have surveyed pastors about this and pastors use AI for different tasks. You can kind of roughly categorize them into content and non-content producing tasks. So ones that do and don’t produce new materials. So non-content producing tasks might be using AI to organize a church calendar or maybe locate specific information within a larger document or using it for those research purposes. But then content producing, we’re talking about maybe using AI to write emails or generate an entire sermon or even maybe lead an entire church service.

We’ve seen some churches do that. There’s a pastor who made an AI replica of himself to pray with people. There’s a website that has entire AI pastors that it’s promising that people will be able to virtually interact with and be virtually discipled by. And there’s even sermon generation software for pastors, one of which encourages pastors to copy, paste and preach AI generated messages. So this is something very active in the church right now. And I break down in the article some more examples of how we can discern between those types of tasks. For example, for the content producing ones, we can ask, is the AI feeding the sheep by producing actually something that’s theologically instructed for the congregation? So as an example, just generating a sermon point from a scripture passage that actually contributes to the congregation spiritual formation. Whereas if you just maybe make an AI generated image for a sermon PowerPoint that illustrates a point that the pastor has already selected and it’s not quite discipling the congregation in the same sense even though it’s still creating new content. So you can ask, is this participating in the discipleship of the congregation? Is it taking over an activity that normally involves human interaction, like personal correspondence, and is it being applied as though it can do something that machines actually can’t do, like prayer or worship or caring and loving? So all these questions can help us gauge these appropriate and inappropriate

Sam Rohrer:

Uses. Right? I think that that is excellent. Ladies and gentlemen, get the idea. Did you hear what Patricia said? And I’m going to build on it. There are actually locations churches that are, well, it’s not actually the pastor’s preaching the sermon, he doesn’t come up with AI can come up with a sermon. AI can have a voice that sounds good and that can deliver it. It can be like what the pastor who is there, maybe it can sound like him, maybe it can sound like somebody else. But with generative ai, why not? Well, you can come up with the songs to sing, you can come up with the sermon to present, you can come up with the plans for the week. Now doesn’t that sound problematic? It is, but what you say that could really help me. So in the next segment we’re going to look at some argumentation or the arguments for using ai.

Where can it be used legitimately in a church ministry and where should it not be? We’ll talk about that in more detail in the next segment. We’re talking about artificial intelligence today, technology modern technology, and specifically the focus today with my guest Patricia Engler from Answers in Genesis. And this is our monthly emphasis on what we try to pick out a theme that connects to apologetics, to creation. And of course the reason everything connects to that because everything goes back to the beginning and that’s why that’s in there. Sometimes we on the program will talk specific things related to, it may be archeology and creation, but in reality because the word of God is from God himself and he starts at the beginning. That’s why we say you got to start at the beginning. So that’s why there’s always a connection to creation and the beginning, but then that’s all a part of a biblical worldview.

So we put these things together and what we’re talking about today is what is this increasingly advancing matter of technology and artificial intelligence and looking how it applies to and how it should be used or not used within the setting of ministry, ministry within the church to be sure. But I’m broadening it to say, as ministers of God, true believers, fathers and mothers are ministers in their home. In Romans 13 where the scripture lays out how God has ranked authority, most people go and they will use that as specific references to civil government. And it does speak about that. And they are termed ministers of God, servants God. But every believer is a servant of God. Every parent is a servant of God. Every employer is a servant of God if they know the Lord and they have certain duties that are like the pastor in the pulpit except that the pastor in the pulpit in the church is given the command to preach the word.

So I just want to put that together so we understand that this discussion applies to all of us. Alright? Now the fact that artificial intelligence and technology, AI technology has found its way into communication cannot be disputed. We’ve already talked about that a bit, but in a very short period of time of months, it seems AI’s involvement in digital communication because that’s how AI is there is in digital communication, internet and website and social media, that kind of thing, video, anything of that flavor, it’s there, but it’s involvement in digital communications of all types has grown so fast that it’s already nearing the point of I’m actually finding it very difficult to find any place where it’s not used and it’s become embedded. If you use a cell phone, it’s already on your phone, you’re already being asked to use it. When I sit down and I do research, it’s all right there.

It’s coming up automatically, it’s embedded. Everything that you look at on social media has already been flavored by artificial intelligence. Alright? Now that’s how embedded, so the impact that’s there, it is here and herein is the dilemma because it’s come into the church and as Patricia and I were talking, AI and technology did not come from the church into the culture. It’s really become this aspect of the culture has come into the church and now the church is reacting but far, and I’m going to say significantly, those who are within the setting of the church haven’t thought through exactly what do we do with this? And this is where biblical wisdom is needed and that’s why we’re doing this program today. So in your research, Patricia, you’ve carefully considered both the arguments for and against the use of AI in this area of ministry focusing on the church. So I just want to go, let’s just try in this segment here to split it up like half and half or however we want to do it, but what you consider to be the strongest leading arguments for pastors and church leaders and church people and all that I’ve put in that broader category ministers for using generative AI in the church or AI or generative AI in church ministry functions.

Patricia Engler:

Well, I can tell you for sure the most common arguments I’ve found first is that, well, if you use AI for content production in the church, that saves pastor’s times for other things engaging with the community. And then second, people say that using AI it churches from getting left behind in our digital culture, it helps churches relate better to young people using it for sermon generation, they might say it’s just the next stage and the church adapting to changing technologies like the printing press and that it’s no different. Some people will tell you from just consulting books and online resources and commentaries, there are some pretty major differences in those things. For example, is it your words as with the printing press just broadcasting them or is it the AI’s words and using it for using AI for human generation is a lot different from just consulting books and commentaries because now again, it’s the computer program doing the actual research study thinking, putting those thoughts together and wording them as opposed to you.

So there’s problems with these arguments, but they do bring up some important things to consider. And we want to be good stewards. We want to be creative and flexible and innovative and reach today’s culture. But the thing is we need to do all of that faithfully. So we can’t cause biblical boundaries. We want to guard against using AI in ways that don’t line up with God’s word. So none of these five arguments that I’ve mentioned can actually justify using AI in the church in ways that go against what God’s word says about the ministry and preaching and pastors as we’ve talked about. So I respond to all of them in the article, but to just talk about the first one, just that idea that AI saves pastors time through community engagement doesn’t line up. The Bible talks about the importance of feeding God’s word to the sheep as the shepherd’s primary responsibility. So that’s just a quick example of how we need to make sure that God’s word not culture is driving our approach to AI.

Sam Rohrer:

Okay, let’s do this as I’m looking here to time. So there are clearly the idea of stewardship of time, who would not want to be well more efficient in the time that they spent. That’s an appealing one. And in reality, AI can be very, very hopeful in that the production of slides, for instance, that would be up on a screen or that kind of thing that also can be done mean. But you’re talking about now getting into content and perhaps trying to use AI to replace what God designed only a human being to do. Perhaps maybe that walks into some of the arguments for not using AI technology. So what are some of those?

Patricia Engler:

Yeah, exactly. So it’s really the main arguments are against using it for those content producing pastoral tasks like sermon preparation. So two main reasons we don’t want to do that is because pastors need to personally stay close to God, obey scripture and cultivate that biblical literacy and then model that for the church, which if you outsource your scripture study and serve in preparation to ai, you lose your grasp on the sword of the spirit in that sense and become weaker for the spiritual war zone that ministry is. And then there’s the issue of the more we outsource the thinking to AI, the less we can think for ourselves. There was a recent study just from this summer that talked about how using chat GPT to write essays negatively impacts the brains that God gave us for discerning and communicating truth. So that’s an issue. And then I unpack at least seven other specific problems in the article with using AI for sermon preparation.

So just to list them briefly, first, Christians want to lead the way in modeling intellectual integrity, which doesn’t line up with just passing off AI generated wording as their own. We can talk about that more later. Pastors as well, just honesty and transparency is in indispensable for maintaining trust with your congregants. Pastors that I’ve read have also acknowledged that AI just brings the temptation to be lazy instead of diligent in preaching as God’s word direct. We also see in Timothy third that Paul’s called Timothy to set the believers an example in speech. So God calls pastors to lead by personal example in their speech, but then that means their words have to be their own. And then fourth, then the sermon’s purpose, as we talked about earlier, is to communicate God’s word to specific congregations, but it’s the pastor, not the chatbot who knows that congregation and can actually relate to them humanly.

And then fifth, not preaching AI generated sermons helps pastors resist dehumanization in the discipleship process which are already starting to see with AI. Six, preaching your own diligently prepared sermon appropriately reflects the value of the Bible of the church and of the ministry itself. And then lastly, while chatbots can speak the truth, only a pastor and only a human can speak the truth in love as all Christians are called to do. Paul talks about speaking with the tongues of men and of angels, or in this case chatbots. But he said if it’s without love, it doesn’t count. It doesn’t profit. So efficiency is nice, but efficiency can’t replace love without love. We fail at our most important job no matter how efficiently we worked. So those are some of the main reasons I’d caution against.

Sam Rohrer:

Alright, and those are excellent and ladies and gentlemen, again, we’re just touching on the top line reasons, argumentation things about which to be concerned and AI and it does come down a lot to the content. Some of what I had done before, anything that results in making an analysis of truth, a decision about what to do using AI cuts out the work of the Holy Spirit to help direct us. So why pray for wisdom and discernment if you can just flip on and see what AI tells you to do. We’re literally at the end of this segment here, Patricia, so I’m not going to go any further on it. But at ladies and gentlemen, as we’ve talked to some other programs, when the actual designers and those who promoted and came up with a concept of AI and are promoting its heavy use into the culture which is happening out of our government here with the AI data centers and linking health and finance and transportation and surveillance and all of that together, their goal, as they have said in their own words, some of them we actually can duplicate God here, this becomes God and herein is the problem.

That’s why wisdom is so greatly needed. So when we come back, we’re going to conclude, I’m going to talk to Patricia about her thoughts on some guiding wisdom principles in this whole area as we go to our final segment here, again, the theme which I tried to do on all of our programs, choose a theme, a title, and then try to make sure that every part within the program ties in with and supports that which is in the title. We do that to help me in putting together programs, but also at the same time because this is only an hour program, not a three hour program, we can’t waste time and stay right on point, and that helps to do that as well. That’s for me part of a stewardship aspect and it’s also an aspect that I feel there’s a duty to all of you who listen so that if you listen to the program, you’re not going to get a bunch of junk and a bunch of opinions, but you’re going to get things that are relevant that pertain to things that are actually happening today that are confronting us in our lives, always anchored then to what does the Bible say about it.

And we say that often. I hope you believe it because part of the problem in our syncretist society today where 94% of Americans identify as being syncretist, that mean they believe a little bit of God, they believe some of the Bible, but they don’t believe all of it. And the result of it is they’ve kind of made up their own religion 94%. That’s what the George Barn and numbers are, and it’s amazing. But if we who are true believers believe that the word of God is sufficient, totally accurate, speaks to all issues of life, then we ought to, and we must go always to the word of God when new things come up, like technology, like artificial intelligence. Because if we believe the Bible speaks to it and it does, then we need to spend the time to go there and find out, well, what do we do about this?

Do we just embrace it and hope everything turns out right? I hope not. Better not. So anyway, that’s the reason for that. Now, Patricia, just before I ask you to go and identify certain basic principles, in the last segment I gave just a couple of ideas about a cautionary things to AI generally. And one of them is that the designers of it actually themselves are thinking and that they have actually created a duplicate God because now with this thing called ai, we can change DNA and we correct deficiencies as they would term it into human body and all of that kind of thing. There is a risk there. What other temptations, fundamental temptations would you want to suggest here? That we need to be careful in the overall approach to this thing called AI and AI generative that can create content almost for which a true believer should be cautious?

Patricia Engler:

Yes, as you were explaining, AI is so embedded in so many aspects of culture and it speaks very confidently. And I think there’s a tendency here, a broader temptation to make this AI the authority for truth instead of God, even though we know it’s not all knowing, it can be very deceptive. Play off our sin nature. It feeds people’s pride with flattery because these chatbots, especially chat, GPT and so on, are often designed to be affirming. So there’s a temptation to worship ourselves through AI and even to worship AI itself. So it’s showing a lot of potential to become one of his history’s most compelling idols. And the problem with this is we’re basically getting this embedded truth machine quote truth that people are looking to as the authority for truth, not doing their own thinking. And that really sets up society for totalitarianism as well, because we’re not thinking for ourselves, we’re downloading the truth from something else. There’s a lot of connections to various kind of organizations that I read about in the modern Marxism book that are worth knowing a little bit more about. But that’s a whole other conversation.

Sam Rohrer:

Yes, indeed. But I think what you did there helps to really put that together. Okay, the final minutes here. Now, some basic principles that you could identify that should be embraced by definitely God fearing believers who say, no, no, I want to worship God only. I believe the Bible. Now the world has gone all in on AI because it is providing a substitute almost for God, the things you just talked about. But for true believers, God fearing, what are some guiding principles you can offer?

Patricia Engler:

Yeah, the ultimate principle we’ve talked about is to be biblical. So whatever use of AI we’re considering, we want to take time to ask how does God’s word speak to the topics that are relevant to this usage like we’ve been doing looking at the church and pastors. And then within that biblical starting point, there’s three other principles I can briefly mention. So first, be honest, just by using disclaimers to clarify what role AI played in a project, because that maintains trust and transparency and help keep the lines clear between humans and machines. So I work hard to do this in my own ministry as well. For instance, if I use an AI generated label and one of my apologetics presentations, I’ll label it as ai. If I write something like a book, I’ll have a disclaimer at the beginning say, this is human authored apart from minor word process or suggestions.

This wasn’t AI generated, but maybe for the research process I might’ve consulted AI models and then looked at to find specific information and then personally verified it, right? So I try to be very clear with that type of disclaimer. And then even in the church context, imagine walking into a church where the pastor in the name of honesty though, is like, just so you know, about 40% of this messages AI generated because it gives me more time. Now let’s open God’s word too at the algorithm has to say it’s not the same, even with that honesty. So along with being honest, the second point is we need to be human. Even though our words aren’t as nice and eloquent as ai, they come from a human heart, even if they’re imperfectly phrased. So I remember reading an author one time who said that when he speaks to audiences, he’s asked him if you hear a song or a poem or a novel that you really connected with, and then imagine you find out it’s AI generated.

How many of you would feel cheated? Everyone raised their hands, right? God designed this for human connection. So we want to be beating hearts in a world of robots. I like to say that’s the kind of world we want to live in. So honest, be human. And third, be sober minded. As we’ve talked about, there can be this tendency to want to take mental shortcuts, that AI do our thinking, research, writing, decision making, communication for us that dumbs us down as a society and puts us in a very dangerous place. We can’t afford to lose those abilities, so we don’t want to outsource those things to ai. So be honest, be sober minded, be human, be biblical. Those are the main principles we can apply here.

Sam Rohrer:

And those are excellent because all the way through scripture, again, what you’re saying is biblical principles, but being honest, being human remaining, sober minded, those are excellent. And ladies and gentlemen, who’s a believer can refute those. The tendency in our society, as we’ve known we’ve talked about in other programs so much, is that everybody wants to take shortcut. There is no shortcut to the Christian life. There is no shortcut to spiritual maturity. There is no shortcut to spending time in God’s word and meditating. AI can’t do that for you. Now, it can give you some things to read, but that’s different than the Holy Spirit responding and coming into your heart and putting those thoughts in your mind. And that’s what Patricia, you’re talking about these things. That’s the honesty, the integrity part of the equation, being sober minded. Okay, we’re about at the end, there’s a whole lot more we can say. One more opportunity, Patricia, any final words that you want to put in there and then give a website where people can find this article and other things.

Patricia Engler:

Yes. The final thing, of course, is to keep God’s where does the authority for truth and not be tempted to outsource that to AI and to, of course, do a technology well and use it to support but not supplant what God has called us to do. And then you can find more about that at answersingenesis.org. I have a whole presentation on AI that you can find for free on YouTube as well. If you look at Answers in Genesis, YouTube and then the AI angler, it should pop up there for you.

Sam Rohrer:

Alright, very good. We’re at the end of the program. Patricia, thank you so much for being on here again. Again, well done, well written. And ladies and gentlemen, I hope that as we’ve taken this thought and all we’ve talked about is not all in what Patricia wrote, we blended some things, but the principles are, and the importance of knowing what God’s word says about technology and artificial intelligence, we must know because we are being impacted by it in ways already that we do not know. And with that, thanks for being with us today. God bless you all and join us tomorrow. Isaac will be leading this program tomorrow, and I know that you will find that program to be of great benefit.