What is the difference between worship or a Vacation Bible School curriculum planned by AI and one written by your ministry team? What ethical and environmental concerns should play a role in when and how you use AI in your ministry? AI may be able to predict the next best word or phrase in a pastoral prayer, but can it really pray for a congregation?
Questions about what artificial intelligence can and can’t do permeate our current culture. and recently, Office of Christian Formation hosted a community circle called “AI-Powered Ministry,” led by the Rev. Dr. Andy Morgan, director of family faith formation at First Presbyterian Church in Knoxville, Tennessee. During this 90-minute webinar, a group of 30 Christian formation leaders considered how AI could power their ministries and when AI could or should not. After providing a helpful handout that included a taxonomy of AI terms, Morgan explained the current landscape of AI models and how he evaluates them through his faith and moral commitments as a disciple of Christ.
Since attending the first “AI and Church Summit” in Seattle last August, Morgan has offered his presentation in multiple church contexts. Since AI is already permeating lives and ministries, he encouraged webinar attendees to be informed and thoughtful about using it. He highly recommended that people virtually attend the second ecumenical “AI and the Church Summit,” set for September. Registration is available here.
As an introduction, webinar participants identified where AI was operating in their lives and what they hoped it could do. Morgan suggested practical examples of using AI for ministry tasks, such as creating intergenerational games for VBS, liturgy and lesson plans. He explained which current programs could best be tailored to specific needs, like leveraging Google’s NotebookLM for precise information retrieval to better capture one’s own voice based on previous personal content.
“Processing a prompt on a large language model like ChatGPT is equivalent to wasting about a bottle of water due to the significant energy consumption and cooling requirements of its server farms,” said Morgan, highlighting the concept of digital citizenship and the need to balance AI's efficiency with the unique concerns of human relationships, especially in regard to environmental impact. As a personal practice, Morgan limits his ChatGPT use to 10 times per day.
Large language models like ChatGPT provide unique output to specific inputs. Because of that, under copyright law, those who send the prompts own the copyrights to its results. Because of this permissive gray area, and because AI is still generally misunderstood and anxiety-provoking, Morgan doesn’t cite ChatGPT when he uses it in worship materials, as he would another copyrighted source like “Feasting on the Word” published by Westminster John Knox Press. He admitted to using ChatGPT for liturgy, such as calls to confession based on the original prayers of confession that he writes. Morgan believes only those who love the people can pray for them, so he won’t let AI write his prayer. “ChatGPT does not love my people,” he said.
Morgan was candid that his theology and ethics around AI are personal, and he encouraged others to develop their own boundaries through the same discipleship and discernment their faith leads them to engage the world. There are times when the efficiency of AI and its access to information can benefit others, like when Morgan asks it to adapt his weekly lesson plan to the specific individualized education plan accommodations of a certain young person in his Christian formation program.
Because large language models were “initially trained on uncurated data scraped from the internet from sources like Reddit comments, Quora forums, Facebook comments, and other open internet blogs and social media platforms,” Morgan emphasized how AI is not value-neutral and needs a discerning mind to know when and how to use it. When these AI models began, according to Morgan, “the goal was to gather the largest possible dataset to help the AI learn statistical patterns of language and predict the most probable next word in a sentence.” This training approach means the models inherently carry biases “present in online comments, including racial, gender and Western biases,” he said.
Beth Waltemath, Communications Strategist, Interim Unified Agency (Click here to read original PNS Story)
Let us join in prayer for:
Cuong Tran, Mail/Print Clerk, Mail/Print Center, Administrative Services Group (A Corp)
Tonia Trice, HR Generalist III, Human Resources, Administrative Services Group (A Corp)
Let us pray:
Dear God, as our friends and partners embark on new tasks, give them the strength and courage. May your hand guide them and lead them, and may your arms be wrapped around them each step of the way. Amen.
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