Mission Yearbook: Author discusses charting faithful future for AI

The “Faithful Futures: Guiding AI with Wisdom and Witness” gathering recently took place at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis. Before the gathering, Dr. Bob Johansen, an author and futurist who spoke at the inaugural conference in 2024, offered a talk designed to help people of faith to use artificial intelligence to humanize and re-enchant leadership.

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Photo by Igor Omilaev via Unsplash

Along with Jeremy Kirshbaum and Gabe Cervantes, Johansen wrote “Leaders Make the Future: 10 New Skills to Humanize Leadership with Generative AI,” an updated book being distributed to those attending the conference in person. Together with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s Office of Innovation, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the United Methodist Church and The Episcopal Church sponsored last year’s gathering.

“I’m a humble futurist, but I’m also aware this is a troubling time, but it’s also hopeful,” Johansen said. “People of faith have a role to play in [the use of generative AI] but it will require us to reimagine what we’re all about.”

Johansen used to talk about a VUCA world, for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Now he and others foresee a BANI future, for brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible.

Johansen interspersed his talk with three rounds of questions from online viewers. The first round dealt with how do we frame the BANI future with faith? The second was on how you and the people can you serve cope with and be resilient in an increasingly BANI future. The third was how do you want to be augmented for the future?

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Dr. Bob Johansen (Contributed photo)

The term “VUCA” was framed at the Army War College where Johansen continues to teach. Author Jamais Cascio coined the BANI acronym to describe a world “that will be fraught with tenson,” Johansen said. “How can you have faith in a BANI future?”

He offered examples of brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible reactions. That last one includes voters across the political spectrum who “cannot comprehend why the other side behaves, believes and votes as they do.”

Flipping it over, Johansen explored the manifestations of faith that will be effective in the future of BANI. People of faith can combat brittleness with “a bendable faith, with resilient clarity stories, but nobody can have certainty,” Johansen said. An attentive faith, “with active empathy and kindness for people and communities,” is the antidote for anxiety. Johansen said a neuroflexible faith can overcome nonlinear thinking. He calls that “teaching our brains new tricks,” and said that most leadership teams he works with take improv courses “in a world where you can’t know a definitive way.” Finally, an interconnected faith is an answer in an incomprehensible world. He said his “signature line” is this: “The future will reward clarity, but punish certainty.”

“There’s no certainty in the BANI future. Faith is a lot like clarity, and certainty is a lot like extreme belief,” Johansen said, reminding viewers of Paul Tillich’s quote: “The opposite of faith is not doubt; the opposite of faith is certainty.”

“Faith will be a competitive advantage in this BANI future,” he said, and it ought to be “kind and calm, inspiring trust and courage.”

During the first question-and-answer session, Johansen said the most important strategy for change in the BANI world is cross-generational work. “If you can’t work with kids, you’re going to be out of the game,” he said. “I’m not saying, ‘Just run a better Sunday school.’ I’m saying, ‘Share leadership.’ Create situations where young people, including teenagers, are involved in the leadership of the church and get involved in things more directly.” One advantage to that approach is that many young people grew up with gaming, “which is the learning medium of the future,” he said.

“I am really optimistic about young people if they have hope,” he said.

For the past two years, Johansen said he’s used generative AI on a daily basis. He calls his customized version of ChatGPT “Stretch” “because I want it to stretch my thinking.”

“I don’t use it for answers, for finals or for efficiency, and I don’t trust it,” he said.

But “we can’t just walk away from it,” Johansen said. “We have to learn from it and use it for better purposes.”

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS Story)

Let us join in prayer for:

Yun Kyoung Yang, Editorial Assistant, Korean, Growing Faith Resources, Presbyterian Publishing Corporation
Andrew Yeager-Buckley, Project Manager II, President’s Office, Administrative Services Group

Let us pray:

Lord, give us the willingness to love others to the point of sharing our faith intimately with them in deed and in words. Help us to appreciate the least of these in our midst. Amen.

Mission Yearbook: Doctoral student discusses how preachers can use AI

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Alison Gerber (Screenshot)

Alison Gerber, a doctoral student in homiletics at Baylor University, recently delivered an insightful talk on “Preaching and Artificial Intelligence” as part of the Synod of the Covenant’s Cultivating the Gift of Preaching program. Listen to her conversation with the synod’s executive, the Rev. Dr. Chip Hardwick, here.

For understanding more about ChatGPT and other Large Language Models, Gerber recommends Ethan Mollick’s book, “Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI.”

Preachers, journalists and others use AI to help them perform mundane tasks. “The way ChatGPT works is it is a program that is fed a ton of text … hundreds of billions of words,” Gerber explained. “For a long time — months — it trains on this text and tries to create text using trial and error.”

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The Rev. Dr. Chip Hardwick

Eventually, it provides the next most likely token — a word or part of a word — by working on “statistical probabilities and patterns it has observed in the human language it’s been given. That’s all it’s doing,” Gerber told Hardwick. “It’s not talking in the way we talk. It’s thinking about what’s the next statistically likely bit that I need to output in response to the input it’s been given.”

Hardwick asked: “How do you think about ChatGPT and the struggle preachers need to go through?”

“One of the major features of AI is the quest for efficiency,” Gerber said. “That’s been part of the long tradition of teaching machines to do the work that we do. We’re looking to share the boring tasks we have, the tedious tasks that we have, to be more efficient.”

Gerber cited a study in which preachers claimed it took them 10–15 hours each week to write their sermon. “That’s pretty inefficient work,” she said. But “what if the struggle of writing a sermon, the inefficiency of writing a sermon by a human, is part of the essential nature of preaching?”

Preachers spend “hours and hours” completing their exegesis each week, Hardwick noted, “and maybe 10% is going to make its way into your sermon. The problem is, you don’t know which 10%. God uses that inefficiency not just to craft a sermon, but to craft us so the Word becomes embedded in our lives.”

Some people worry about plagiarism when using ChatGPT as a sermon aid, Gerber said. “Technically, it’s not taking chunks from famous sermons. It’s creating something new,” and thus is not plagiarism.

“But there is the issue of our honesty and integrity as preachers,” Gerber said. Do you just get up and preach that sermon without telling everybody that ChatGPT wrote it?” Gerber asked. “To me, that’s an issue of your honesty and integrity.”

But if the preacher goes to the senior pastor or the session and asks how they’d feel about such a choice during an especially difficult week, “I cannot imagine a session that wouldn’t say, ‘Absolutely!’”

Another ChatGPT caveat is that preachers who study their texts at length are “bursting at the seams with information and joy about this passage from Scripture. Some of that does come out after you preach,” Gerber said. The preacher might continue the conversation over the sermon during coffee hour and Bible study. “I don’t think the sermon really ends when the preacher steps down from the pulpit … When those echoes are going on, I want to bring God’s Word in those moments. I want it to live inside me,” a difficult ask when ChatGPT has crafted the sermon.

ChatGPT also doesn’t know the congregation in the same way the preacher does, and so it may not select biblical texts as well as the preacher can. In fact, ChatGPT sermons selected by AI would rely overwhelmingly on popular Scriptures including John 3:16 and Psalm 23, according to Gerber.

“I think of ChatGPT as an eager but sometimes mistaken intern in my office,” Gerber said. “It’s a collaborator, but one I am thinking cautiously about the information given to me.” Gerber will enter a paragraph into ChatGPT with a blank, then ask it to provide 10 options. “It always gives me the word I have been trying to think of,” she said.

“If ChatGPT can help me get from here to there, more power to it,” Hardwick said.

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service, Communications (Click here to read original PNS Story)

Let us join in prayer for:

Aniria Williams, Administrative Support, Annual Giving, Administrative Services Group
Kaden Wood, Business Analyst, Operations, The Presbyterian Foundation

Let us pray:

Gracious God, please keep before us the vision of what it means to be disciples. Generations before us have followed your light. May we continue to show love and compassion to people whose voices have long been silent. Amen.

Mission Yearbook: AI and the church are subjects of Office of Innovation gathering

An ecumenical group of several dozen Christians recently gathered in Minneapolis to engage in conversation about the present and future of Artificial Intelligence and the church. The event, called “Faithful Futures: Guiding AI with Wisdom and Witness,” also took place online.

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Photo by Igor Omilaev via Unsplash

Artificial Intelligence — or AI — is increasingly prevalent in society, particularly with the rise of Large Language Models (LMM) like ChatGPT and other forms of generative AI. While traditional AI focuses on analysis and prediction, generative AI produces new content, including text, images, video and audio. The rapidly expanding access to and use of generative AI by the general public has led to a number of questions about the ethical implications of such technology, including environmental impact and intellectual property rights. In addition to ethical questions, the introduction of generative AI also catalyzes theological questions about creativity, intelligence, love, truth, sin and what it means to be human.

The Office of Innovation within the Interim Unified Agency of the PC(USA) is committed to helping navigate the transformative landscape of Generative Artificial Intelligence by prioritizing Christian ethics and issues of justice, access, and equity in the use of AI tools alongside the faithful, innovative uses of AI technology.

This work included participation in the organization and implementation of the “AI and the Church Summit,” which took place in Seattle last August and convened leaders of the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) and the PC(USA). The summit took place both at Epiphany Parish and Microsoft’s campus and included a keynote from Father Paolo Benanti, an Italian Catholic priest who advised Pope Francis on ethical issues around technology and who helped write A Rome Call for AI Ethics. Benanti’s talk emphasized the church’s responsibility to question how technology like AI shapes society and demonstrate what ethical stewardship of such technology looks like.

Faithful Futures continued this exploration of “how the Church can help shape the future of artificial intelligence with theological depth, ethical clarity and practical innovation.” The event was organized by the Office of Innovation in collaboration with TryTank Research Institute, a project of Virginia Theological Seminary, the ELCA Innovation Lab, and the United Methodist Church’s Discipleship Ministries. In addition, Benanti participated along with several colleagues from the Catholic Church.

The event featured four speakers: Dr. Philip Butler, Dr. Jane McGonigal, Jovonia Taylor and Dr. Miguel De La Torre.

Butler is a scholar specializing in the intersection of neuroscience, technology, spirituality and Blackness. He serves as the director of the Iliff School of Theology’s AI Institute and is the founder of the Seekr Project, which explores the iterative connections between generative AI, mental health and critical Black consciousness.

McGonigal specializes in developing games that simulate and predict the future. She is the author of several books, most recently including “Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything, Even Things That Seem Impossible Today.”

Taylor is one of Amazon’s Business Technology executives and has more than 20 years of expertise in designing solutions across engineering, marketing, operations, information technology, merchandising, and supplier management.

De La Torre, who offered a charge to close the gathering, is Professor of Social Ethics and Latine Studies at the Iliff School of Theology and focuses on social ethics within contemporary U.S. thought, specifically how religion affects race, class and gender oppression.

In addition to the work of the Office of Innovation, the PC(USA) is responding to questions around the ethics of AI and how the church engages with such technology in other ways. In 2024, the 226th General Assembly directed the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy to develop of a new social witness policy and conduct a study on the responsible use of AI. The office of Research Services is also currently conducting a survey to “help gauge the perception of the wider church on Artificial Intelligence.”

Layton Williams Berkes, Communications Strategist, Interim Unified Agency (Click here to read original PNS Story)

Let us join in prayer for:

Ashley Gibson, HR Assistant, Human Resources, Administrative Services Group
Sharon Dunne Gillies, Managing Editor, Presbyterian Women

Let us pray:

You who are the Word made flesh, we thank you for the many ways we have to spread your good news. May the presence of your churches reach many who are in need of ministry and the news of your living presence in our midst. Amen.