Artificial intelligence in its various forms has been shaping commerce and communication for decades.
When a product shows up in a Google search or a song is suggested in your social media feed, machine learning algorithms are already at work. However, the public availability of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 pushed AI into everyday consciousness and accelerated innovation.
All Evangelical Focus news and opinion, on WhatsApp.
This acceleration has awakened pastors and missionary leaders to new questions. How do these tools help the church participate in God’s mission? Where do they contradict its core beliefs? If we don’t look carefully, what kind of community will we become?
Many of the early conversations centered around generative AI in the sermon writing process and worship planning.
There are legitimate concerns that pastors will outsource their labor to machines and produce sermons that sound sophisticated. However, the data suggests that most pastors treat AI as a tool rather than a substitute preacher.
A 2024 Barna survey found that 88% of pastors are comfortable using AI for tasks such as graphic design, 78% for marketing, and 70% for tracking attendance. 1 However, less than half of people would be comfortable using AI to research sermons, and only 12 percent would use AI to write sermons. 2
Data shows most pastors treat AI as a tool rather than a substitute preacher
Worship creation (e.g., planning and writing musical services, creating liturgical orders and prayers, or applications such as Virbo AI for creating AI characters that appear in videos, or Biblical character “influencers,” such as what churches have done in Finland 3 and Germany 5 ) has never existed as a trend among pastors.
The government’s AI experiments that have made headlines have garnered attention online, but they appear to be little more than exercises in new experiments.
Far from heralding the end of human-driven preaching and worship, these events highlight how novelty can attract headlines while congregations and pastors alike remain wary. 6
This does not mean the church can ignore AI. This technology is rapidly permeating management, communication, and discipleship. As AI touches deeply on the human realm, it prompts gospel-based ethical considerations.
bias and inclusion
The data that AI feeds is not only prone to containing incorrect or incomplete information; Online data typically underestimate regions and groups of people with unreliable (or slow) access to the web.
This often includes the world’s majority cultures, the poor, ethnic minority groups, people with disabilities, etc. 7
AI is integrated into church management solutions, allowing churches to assess depth of church engagement, spiritual formation journeys, and recommend discipleship content and small groups based on member profiles.
While this has great positive potential, church leaders must grapple with how to account for the incomplete nature of the insights and recommendations provided by these tools, and how trends and recommendations may overlook people who are underrepresented in the data but whose presence in the congregation and broader community is still valued.
The idolatry of utilitarianism and realism
AI, like other digital technologies, risks perpetuating congregations as users and consumers, community as market share, and church life as a web of systems.
Church leaders must evaluate what is gained and what is lost by implementing AI, prioritizing benefits that will foster congregational prosperity and communion with God.
AI can support Christian discipleship, but without a more holistic formative theology promoted by local church leaders, it can also relegate personal spiritual formation to content consumption alone.
While AI can help online seekers find connections to local churches, it can also inadvertently foster a mindset where mission is reduced to marketing.
And while AI can improve scalability, efficiency, and convenience, these practical considerations do not take into account what uncritically adopting AI may leave us with: irreproducible characteristics such as connection, meaning, wisdom, and reflection.
Church leaders must evaluate both the gains and losses of implementing AI and prioritize benefits that foster congregational prosperity and communion with God.
paradox of toil 8
As recorded in Genesis 3, one of the painful consequences of human rebellion is toil. Throughout history, humans have created technology to ease the burden of toil, understanding at an innate level that the consequences of sin are not God’s perfect plan for creation.
But like a dog that returns to its vomit (Proverbs 26:11), humans have historically filled the void that technology has created in our lives with more effort. So while modern technologies such as email and smartphones promised to allow us to do things faster, they also filled the time saved with more things, and as a result, we were busier than before.
Like past technologies, AI promises to automate the boring parts of human existence, allowing us to find more time and meaning. But without sense, our lives will only become faster-paced and busier than before.
The question before church leaders is how to use the time available until AI returns to us to train the congregations entrusted to us and invest them in meaning-making and value in the communities around us.
The mission potential of AI is vast. Machine translation accelerates the distribution of the Bible into minority languages. Chatbots can engage with seekers online in places human missionaries cannot go. Automated systems can identify needs within the community and connect volunteers to serve.
But these opportunities do not remove the church’s call to make disciples through concrete presence and relational witness. They urge the church to manage technology wisely so that AI enhances human agency rather than replacing it.
Missionary leaders are called to act prophetically. They can advocate for AI development that respects human dignity and reflects divine justice.
They can resist technologies that amplify injustice and perpetuate prejudice. They can work together across traditions and disciplines to create an ethical framework rooted in the commandment of love.
They can train their congregations to be fearless and wise in a rapidly changing culture, always pointing to Christ who is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
In the age of AI, local churches can be a beacon of stability and hope, demonstrating what it means to love God and neighbor with heart, soul, mind, and strength.
tod corppi She is the resident missiologist at One Hope and leads the Digital Mission Consortium at Wheaton College’s Billy Graham Center. He teaches missiology at Fuller Theological Seminary, Ascent University, and Southeastern University.
This article was originally published in the November issue 2025 edition of the Lausanne Global Analysis, published here with permission. To receive this free bimonthly publication from the Lausanne Movement, subscribe online at www.lausanne.org/analysis.
Endnotes
1. Burna Group. “3 Points on How Pastors Can Use AI” burner groupFebruary 22, 2024.
2. Burna Group. “3 Points on How Pastors Can Use AI”burner groupFebruary 22, 2024.
3. Dasha Litvinova and Kostya Manenkov. “What a church in Finland learned from creating a service almost entirely powered by AI.” Associated Press. March 8, 2024.
4. Evangelical focus. “First artificial intelligence-driven worship service tested in Germany” evangelical focusJune 13, 2023.
5. Wonder Share. “Bible Influencer Generator”.
6. Burna Group. “How do American Christians feel about AI and the church?” burner groupNovember 8, 2023.
7. Korpi, Todd. AI to the Church: Pastoral Wisdom for Artificial Intelligence. (Lisle, IL: IVP, 2025), 166-22; see. AI: The Next Culture Change – Alabama Baptist State Mission Board – ALSBOM. love. July 3, 2025.
8. Korpi, AI goes to church140-44.
