Discerning AI Together: Resources for Churches and Church Leaders

Equipping ourselves for faithfulness in this crucial moment

Artificial Intelligence has been around for decades (and in a distant era of my life, I worked on the cutting edge of this emerging technology), but its acceleration and mass availability over the last two or three years has brought us to a crucial moment. This is a time in which we need discernment, reflecting together on what this technology is and on how we will use it—personally and as churches—and why we might draw the particular boundaries we choose. This moment highlights the need for churches to be the deeply-rooted sort that we are working toward here at Cultivating Communities: churches with the capacity to think and talk together carefully and, as a result, ones that are increasingly able to navigate challenging times.

If you’re new here, I’d recommend this introduction to our work, and if these themes resonate, I encourage you to subscribe.

Use of Electricity during the Siege of Pyongyang by Kobayashi Kiyochika, 1894 (via The Met)

Several weeks ago, a friend reached out to me for some thoughts on how to get students in his campus ministry thinking and talking about Artificial Intelligence, its effects, and what all that means for us as Christians.

I planned to share a revised version of the notes that I recommended to my friend, and then in the intervening weeks, Pope Leo XIV released his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, which addresses AI and questions of what it means to be human. And so, I also wanted to encourage church leaders (yes, even Protestant ones!) to be reading and discussing it.

This post includes links to read, videos to watch, and other resources. They interrelate in many ways and certainly can inform one another. There are many entry points into this conversation for Christians and churches, and these are just a few.

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DELTA from Notre Dame

Some of the best thinking about AI and human culture that I’m aware of is coming from the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good at Notre Dame. They have created DELTA: A Faith-Based Framework for AI Ethics, an acronym of five virtues that need our consideration as we reflect on AI or other technologies.

D -Dignity

E - Embodiment

L - Love

T- Transcendence

A- Agency

Here’s a very brief video introducing DELTA:

Notre Dame’s newspaper also published a brief series of articles that begin to flesh out each facet of the DELTA acronym:

INTRO | DIGNITY | EMBODIMENT |
LOVE | TRANSCENDENCE | AGENCY

And lastly, consider watching this video of a longer talk (just under an hour) that explores this framework.

I’ve just found out this project is also now on Substack, The Human Delta, so subscribe there to keep up with their work.

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Community Discernment

In addition to familiarizing yourself with the DELTA framework, I’d encourage church leaders to consider the virtues of reflecting and discerning in communities (not just personally) about if/how particular technologies should be used by that community. Some imagination for this might come from the ways Amish communities have traditionally reflected on technology. (It’s more nuanced than just condemning certain technologies!) This video is a helpful introduction:

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Magnifica Humanitas

I highly recommend that any Christian who wants to think carefully about AI read Pope Leo’s new encyclical: Magnifica Humanitas (Online here: HTML | Printable PDF)

The pope begins with this insight:

[We] must ask God for the wisdom to interpret the great trends of our time, particularly technological advances. In recent years, it has become increasingly evident how rapidly and profoundly digitalization, artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics are transforming our world. Technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity. On the contrary, it has formed part of our history since the beginning as “a profoundly human reality, linked to the autonomy and freedom of man.” Over the centuries, technological development has significantly improved the living conditions of humanity. At the same time, each phase of progress has also revealed the ambiguity of tools that can cause harm when not oriented toward the good. Today, however, we find ourselves facing a new situation. The power and prevalence of emerging technologies are interwoven into the fabric of daily life, shaping decision-making processes and deeply affecting the collective imagination: “Never has humanity had such power over itself.” New technologies open up a horizon extending in directions that are imaginable but not yet fully predictable. This complicates the assessment of their potential impact and the long-term effects they may have on both the dignity of individuals and the common good.

If you want an overview of this encyclical, here are two really helpful ones on Substack:

1. First, from the aforementioned DELTA project at Notre Dame:

AI Gets Religion

Here’s a snippet:

We need to take a global perspective on this technology and we have to resist the shallow realpolitik which has taken hold among world leaders. While global leaders like Donald Trump and Xi Jinping frame these debates about who will “win”, the US or China, there are 6.5 billion other people on planet earth whose lives are being upended by this technology. Pope Leo argues that the Church must be a voice for them, especially the poor, who are increasingly excluded from the benefits of this technology and forced into desperate situations, to mine the rare earths we need for computer chips, to devote their days to manually filtering the (often horrifying) visual data used to train machines, and to allow large, extractive data centres to be built near their homes.

[ Read the full post ]

2. And second, this intro to Magnifica Humanitas from my friend, Myles Werntz:

AI Is a Question About Everything

A snippet from Myles:

Ultimately, this [encyclical] is not a document laying out a vision for the use of technology, but a document which establishes what humans are and need, and only then, asks what it means for technology to be a part of that world. It’s remarkably refreshing in this way. Frequently, before technologists create a new technology, they build an inevitability machine, that whatever is created not only should but will be adopted. But Leo will have none of that: humanity will go on, regardless of whether Anthropic goes bankrupt, and we have to recover that more fundamental vision first of what it means to be a human in God’s world.

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The Fruits of the Spirit

Another potential road into this discernment process is to consider what virtues or fruits are being supported by our use of AI and which are being diminished or hampered.

For example, Christopher Miller (a philosophy professor at Wake Forest) wrote an article for The Conversation in which he explores the ways patience is eroded by the use of AI.

Eroding a virtue: AI trains people to expect instant answers – and that’s bad news for patience.

For those of us who think that patience, slowness, and attentiveness are at the heart of the way of Jesus ( John Pattison, Drew Brown, and many others), this article highlights a real threat that AI poses to our Christian faithfulness.

If the fruits of the spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, we would do well to consider how we are or are not cooperating with the work of the Spirit in our lives as we use technology (AI or otherwise).

I encourage you to give Miller’s article a read and discuss it with others in your congregation.

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I hope you find the resources helpful as you think about how you will use AI — personally and as a church. Gather some folks in your congregations who will read some of these resources and talk together with them about AI and its effects on humanity. We are at a crucial moment, and churches must be able to articulate what they think about AI and why.