AI x Responsibility

What does faithfulness look like in this moment?

From sermon preparation to student engagement to administrative tasks, artificial intelligence is quietly becoming part of everyday ministry. 

Todd Korpi, author of AI Goes to Church, designed it for pastors, campus ministry leaders, lay leaders, and all who care about the future of the Church. Together, we’ll explore how AI can serve ministry practically—while helping leaders navigate technology responsibly and faithfully.

This event invites consideration of the opportunities and limitations of emerging technologies, as well as the spiritual guardrails that should guide their use, and how AI may shape our call to form people in the way of Christ.

Todd Korpi (DMiss, Fuller Theological Seminary) is a pastor, missiologist, and church consultant. He is dean of digital ministry programs at Ascent College, assistant professor of Christian leadership at Fuller Theological Seminary, and works in several capacities at OneHope. He also serves as the lead researcher of the Digital Mission Consortia, a collaborative research initiative exploring the frontier of digital ministry.

This event was recorded live at Upper House at our AI x Summit on March 11, 2026.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Uh it's it was great to uh to be able to come up here and join all of you and to engage in this conversation. And I want to kind of uh highlight the dynamic and answer kind of the question of AI and responsibility uh from the get-go. And that is our responsibility as the people of God in the age of AI, I would classify as faithful engagement. Faithful engagement, neither just rushing headlong into adopting every new uh bell and whistle that comes out, but nor just kind of tucking our heads in the sand and hoping this whole thing blows away. If you remember when the internet really began to reach uh the uh every person's home in the late 90s, early 2000s, a lot of churches kind of responded with that kind of dynamic of let's just hope this internet fad goes away. And I understand that to some extent, I have been a pastor myself. My wife and I planted a church, and there's a dynamic where uh Sundays come around with an alarming regularity, right? And there's only so much that you can devote what feels like sideways energy to. But my hope in this conversation today would be to help paint a picture and cast a vision for the reality that the topic of AI as we talk about artificial intelligence is not simply a topic of application of how to use this, how to hack our productivity scale systems in our ministry or in our life, but is also one of theological reflection. It's one of how do we be human, how do we be Christian faithfully in a time in which this technology stands to change a dramatic part of just about every facet of our lives. And so I want to begin by kind of setting the groundwork because generally in any kind of group like this, there are kind of two polar opposites. There are those that are kind of the AI curmudgeons of it's the robots are coming to take us away, kind of thing. And then there's the the AI enthusiasts of I want to automate every facet of my life. And my hope is to kind of set the groundwork and kind of reframe out of that false binary a bit. And that's to paint the picture that AI is actually something that's been around and in our lives for quite some time. So the question is not, will I use artificial intelligence or not? Because if you have, since about 2010 or so, browsed your news feed on social media, that content has been delivered to you based on an algorithm that is referencing data points that Meta or X or whoever else has accumulated on you, in some ways knowing you better than maybe you even know yourself. If you have ever chosen from the list on your favorite streaming platform, Netflix or whatever, that says shows we think you'll love, the we are not the execs at Netflix, right? It's the robots, right? They're choosing that selection for you. If you coming here today or the last time you went on a trip, looked up directions on Apple Maps or Google Maps, the route that's being directed for you is not being plotted by cartographers in Silicon Valley just for you. It is the robots. So we live in this world where many times our engagement of artificial intelligence happens at such a ubiquitous, kind of everyday sort of way, it barely escapes our notice. But interf or it dramatically impacts the way that we uh uh see content and therefore the shaping of our ideologies, the way that our uh purchases are made. How many of you, by a show of hands, have ever uh been talking to someone in person, your spouse or otherwise, and said, you know, I really need to get, you know, I need to pick up some paper towel. And then suddenly in your Instagram feed, lo and behold, the powers that be have have recommended paper towel to you. We've all had that kind of experience at one point or another. And so it the question then becomes if we are already being shaped by AI, how do we uh faithfully engage it? How do we respond to it? And how do we uh consider its use while still being remain remaining faithful to the great tradition that has been handed down to us from through the testimony of the apostles? I want to uh reference a very recent, similar sort of moment, which was the emergence of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is a term used by technologists, if you're not familiar, to refer to kind of the emergence of social media and mobile phone technology in the mid to late 2000s. So we see the kind of this dramatic uh shifting from when I started using uh Facebook in 2005 in my dorm room, where I had to go online on my desktop computer in my dorm and poke all my friends. Anyone remember Facebook's poke feature? The OGs remember. But the uh to uh but fast forward just a few years later, and suddenly all of that's in my pocket. And it we immediately kind of jumped into the convenience of it all. Never really, as a culture, stopped to think about what it would uh stand to uh impact in terms of our understanding of something as friend, uh something as simple as friendship, when all of your friends can range from uh your best friend that you've known all your life to that random acquaintance you've met at a picnic one time. Our understanding of community, when much of the relationships and engagement that we do with others is increasingly disembodied. And even something as simple as identity, what it means when you wake up in the morning and open up your Instagram feed while the toothbrush is still hanging out of your mouth and your hair's a mess, and you're seeing all those beautifully curated photos of your friend that's in Cancun or something like that, what those kind of contrasts do to our understanding of identity. And so now we're in a place, and thankfully, people like Jonathan Hayde and others are releasing research and recommending best practices of how do we kind of reverse engineer this or build the ship better as we go along. But we stand at an opportunity with the emergence of Web 3.0, of which artificial intelligence is one of those emerging technologies, to not simply be kind of passive or uh reactive, but instead recognize that the church has an opportunity to enter into this conversation in its infancy, in its formation, where it's not just us asking, oh, how do I use this right? What is how do I cite my use of AI or when should I cite it and all of that kind of stuff? What does it mean for a robot in the future to potentially possess rights or should they possess rights? Those are questions coming to our doorstep. And I believe wholeheartedly we have a prophetic responsibility as the people of God to participate in shaping those conversations proactively rather than reactively. If I have any Pentecostal fellow Pentecostals in the room, if I can get an amen and those kind of things, that'd be great. So faithfulness is no longer a question of if we use AI, but how we engage it, both as uh in our personal use, in our how it affects our family, our ministries, and our own participation in the mission of God while preserving our unique human calling. There's a few recommendations that I want to just breeze through, and then we can have more time. Obviously, you have that polling feature if you want to ask more questions. One of the principles that I recommend comes from a Finnish philosopher by the name of Pekka Hemenan, and he recommends this uh what he refers to as automating the boring bits of life, of leveraging technology. He's speaking uh in his book, The Hacker Ethic of Technology in General. But I believe uh AI is an especially important uh application of this principle of using it to automate those bits that are cumbersome, that take us away from the things that we do. How many pastors are in the room? Keep your hand up, raise it high, come on, be proud. Now, keep your hand up if you enjoy putting together slide decks for your sermons. One, one, two, we got two. Most of us did not get into ministry like I can put together a great slide deck, right? No, we got in ministry because we love people, we want to impact lives. We uh perhaps we enjoy the art of homiletics, we enjoy preaching and delivering uh and expounding on the word of God. But the idea of spending hours or however long it takes you to craft a slide deck is not usually among the top of the list of reasons that you got into it. I created this slide deck using Notebook LM. So I crafted the outline for the conversation that I was going to have today. Put that outline in along with a copy of my book that I have in Notebook LM, which is like a closed version of uh a large language model. If you have Google Workspace with your church or your ministry, you probably already have access to Notebook LM for free if you don't use it or if you haven't used it yet. It's a great tool, especially when you're concerned about AI sourcing from random unsighted bits of the internet, and you want to kind of protect the integrity of the information. So I gave it this outline, and within a matter of moments, it gave me this slide deck. So it took me all of a grand total of about five seconds of investment and time in the creation of the slide deck. I was able to invest my time in the actual content of uh this conversation instead. And then I went and I spent time with my kids because they were off school for the day. So it's this idea of taking the bits of life that actually take us away from people, the administrative tasks, and minutia of life, and allowing and prioritizing uses of artificial intelligence that automate that so that we can do the important things. Next, when it comes to this question that a lot of pastors, a lot of people who create content or uh or synthesize information and deliver information on a regular basis, ask of can my pastor or can I or to what extent can I use AI and sermon writing? And what I recommend is looking at AI in this particular use case as an opportunity to be a whiteboard, not a ghostwriter. So actually moving where AI exists in the workflow of creating something as a check, not as the genesis. So if because uh there is this dynamic, and I I I've been preaching for 25 years now. I preached my first sermon at 14 years old. God bless the congregation that had to endure that. But in all of that time, there's something special about the art of preaching and the experience of wrestling with the text and wrestling with prayer and wrestling in the research of a topic that that is something that comes from the soul, I believe. Outsourcing that to AI is a poor use of that. However, using AI to ensure that your communication is clear, that your points are going to be well understood, that you're not talking above people's heads or below is a proper use, an adequate use of artificial intelligence in the crafting and delivery of content. Next, multiplying engagement and practice translation as hospitality. One of the dynamics that is a great use of artificial intelligence, again, with any sort of content delivery or preparation, is not necessarily even in crafting what uh what you build to deliver a sermon or a speech or a lecture, but what you do with that recording or that information after the fact. There are tools like pulpit AI, sermon shots, and others that will actually take that video content, uh, the uh outline and turn it into discussion guides for small groups and chop it up into reels that you can post online. Again, automating some of the administrative minutiae so that the human component in the conversation can emphasize what is uh what is most human, which is face-to-face interaction. Probably one of the biggest passion points of mine, we'll highlight a little bit of this in Ryan's in my QA, but it is the dynamic of translation, especially when we're talking translation into the romance languages, the Latin derivative languages, AI is able to uh translate with almost flawless uh uh dependability. So being able to bridge a language barrier with something as simple as the content that you create or a sermon that you give, there are apps that will actually uh change the video and audio or even the amateur of your voice as you speak or of your mouth as you speak to be able to uh bridge that language gap. Next, I want to talk about the dynamic that when we talk about artificial intelligence, we're referring to not necessarily that the AI is in itself intelligent, but instead is something that is mirroring human intelligence. So we're not uh dealing with a robot that knows it's a robot, at least at this point, but instead something that is a reflection of human intelligence. That's important for us to understand is because what AI sources information from, which is the web, contains the vast uh uh breadth of human knowledge, but also its biases, its prejudices, its ethnic and gender-based stereotypes, and it possesses the capacity. I talk about this a lot in my book, the capacity to replicate those in ways that we need to be aware of as we uh desire to form people into a Christ-like image that embodies uh the dignity of humankind. Next, AI has the ability to synthesize facts. So we're talking its ability to steward and traffic and knowledge, but a unique capacity and calling, I believe, that we have as leaders in the body of Christ in the 21st century is to recover the function of wisdom in Christian leadership, both in embodying that, but in recognizing its place in what we have to offer the world. We have this uh this ability now, with the advent of the internet, to have the access to inf all the information that we could possibly want or ever read within the course of our lifetime. AI gives us the ability to synthesize that information. I can have Chat GPT teach me quantum physics, like I'm a five-year-old, and it'll do that. And that's very beneficial in some circumstances, not necessarily the quantum physics one for me, but it's enormously beneficial to be able to teach that kind of information. But few of us can really reasonably say that we live in a society which is uh which is chuck full of wisdom at the same time. Because there's a difference between knowledge and wisdom, right? Wisdom is the right application of knowledge. As Christians, we believe that's intimately tied with the direction of the Holy Spirit, with uh the personhood of God, that our ability to be those sources of wisdom in people's lives, those guides on the side to help them discern the right application of knowledge is an indispensable uh component of the pastorate. Finally, and I'll end with this and we'll we'll uh move on to our time together with Ryan, uh, is this dynamic of recognizing the bias of algorithms? And this it goes beyond artificial intelligence and rep or and is common in uh uh all digital technologies, but AI has the ability to amplify this. And this is all digital technologies source information, right? Our ability to use uh uh a digital platform, we create what's called digital exhaust, our usage patterns and things of that sort. The the West, and uh especially uh affluent communities which have higher internet speeds, more available and consistent internet, are disproportionately represented within that digital exhaust that our artificial intelligence uh pulls from. So we have this ability and this uh dilemma that's before us. Whereas the church, the 21st century is going to be shaped primarily by African uh Christianity and Christianity in the global east. The church planting movements just in sub-Saharan Africa alone over the next 10 years are absolutely extraordinary. Just the assemblies of God is looking to plant some 300,000 churches across Sub-Saharan Africa in the next 10 years. And yet, if we depend on artificial intelligence indiscriminately of representing the whole of human knowledge, we stand to miss this great disparity between huge representations of Western perspectives because of our availability of the internet and what's actually happening on the ground where the spirit is moving in the global south. So I want with that, I'll uh invite Ryan to come up and we'll do some QA.

SPEAKER_00 17:35

Includes not just what he makes, what he creates, but also what his creatures create.

SPEAKER_01 17:41

Can you can you give us a Yeah? So this kind of broadly applies to digital uh technology more generally. I believe we need to think of the uh the digital space as uh essentially a multitude of contexts, um, digital worlds, if you were. Because what we really have is not the internet, we have internets. Um, and each uh anthropologists have who have studied digital environments show how they uh unique cultural dynamics emerge within virtual worlds and social media platforms. We extend and participate as human beings in those spaces. And we also have come to develop ethics and senses of virtue and vice and right and wrong that we extend into those spaces as well. We extend our humanity into those spaces. And now you can get, you know, fired for things that you say were due on the internet, you can get arrested for things. So the the idea kind of this old 1998, you've got mail, you know, online, offline kind of binary, just doesn't exist anymore. And so we need to think in similar terms and take seriously the fact that not only do we live as humans in kind of this online, offline space all the time, but God works in those spaces as well. Hearts are consistently turned toward him in online spaces. One of the ministries that I work for, One Hope, engages in digital evangelism and currently has a list of some 50 people that are it currently in an online only community because of the restricted geographic context in which they live. And that's that is church for them. And we need to think about that seriously. If that's the lifeline that they have, because it's dangerous for them to get baptized, it's dangerous for church communities to receive them. How do we think about what how do we take that seriously and and see that very much as real and and honor what the Holy Spirit's doing in those in those spaces? Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 19:42

Uh so that's kind of a good segue to um you you you make a case for six kind of core uh theological principles that guide uh you know the way we engage with AI, uh, which are all phenomenal and really helpful. Uh one of those made me scratch my head a little bit. Uh you you said is the paraphrase is um human connection and culture care is one of those kind of theological uh pillars and that we should use it to foster more human connection and not less. Now, I just I just want to be the curmudgeon in the room to say, um, is that possible? Like, is it even possible for AI to add that incarnational kind of aspect to humanity? Can so push against that.

SPEAKER_01 20:30

Yeah, if we ascribe AI the agency in that process, no. But it can facilitate the goings-on of our lives, of our ministries, of different aspects of our family life that give us margin, that then we are responsible for what we do with that margin. You know, there's this human kind of component. I talk about this in in uh in one of the chapters of the book, that we every technology promises to alleviate the burden of toil that we find pronounced over humankind in Genesis three. But like Proverbs says, a dog as a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool returns to its folly. And we all end up filling up that that empty space, that margin with more stuff to do. Our lives become faster and you know, scaled at a higher level. Email, believe it or not, at one point promised to give us back time in our day. Right. And I've I I have met just one or two people in my travels that have said, yeah, email's done that for me. Most of us would feel like, no, I I love when I can put away or disengage or turn off my email. It's probably Charles who also loves to does like this. Uh but so it so it it's it's difficult because it resists uh this urge in our fallen humanity to return to our toil. But if we can make the willful choice, and I'm gonna go real uh controversial for you a minute, uh, for you on a minute, what if the 40 hour work week, the eight to five, is not In scripture. It's not. What if we took this industrial revolution era uh framework of what constitutes a good day's work and we rethought it for an information age so that we can not just, you know, you know, blissfully, you know, lay around all day binge watching Netflix, but to apply it to meaning making, to do the instead of, you know, filling up margin with another ministry initiative or another this or another event or this or that, what if we spent more time in our community? What if we pieced out of work at noon and invested in the people in our in our church? Did what if we return to making house visits and things of that sort? There's uh there's whole church spending movements now that are prioritizing one-on-one, like house visit first approaches to uh to building church communities. I think there's a hunger for that. It's just a question of if we'll kind of break the current schemas to allow our ecclesiology to be driven by our missiology and not the other way around. Yeah. Good.

SPEAKER_00 23:05

Uh boy, I have so many more questions, but I you guys are going to ask better questions than I will. Well, um in the book, you mentioned uh you advocate for this idea of algorithmic discipleship. That was a totally new phrase to me. And I think it'd be really valuable if you could just advocate for that here.

SPEAKER_01 23:26

So it's algorithmic discipleship uh discipleship with little asterisks. So when I refer to algorithmic discipleship, I think of um organizations like Jesus.net. Jesus.net is an online-only discipleship platform that uses uh Salesforce as its back-end kind of CRM to manage its its users. That is uh they availed themselves of Salesforce's AI kind of platform. So they've created instead of uh using AI to make sales, they use it to, they developed a framework of what they call spiritual KPIs that then the AI through benchmark uh uh data gathering with the end users will recommend content based on where the person is perceived as weak in their spiritual uh journey. I think there's opportunity for more of that to hand tailor uh discipleship-oriented content for people. I think the di the kind of the where the asterisk is is resisting the urge to relegate formation to content dissemination and and assimilation. That if I just get people the right information, I'm forming them. Formation happens in a larger ecosystem of the relationships and actually encountering the presence of God and the rituals, habitus that make up a person's life. And so it's a broader ecosystem that holistically forms somebody. But this content piece, I think AI has an opportunity to enhance some of that from a ministry systems perspective to really kind of get to the nitty-gritty of what a person needs, not just what they think that they need. Because all of y'all who have led people know that there's a difference, right? There's what a person really needs, and then there's what they think that they need. And those don't always line up. And AI can help kind of thread the needle in some of that.

SPEAKER_00 25:12

So if we went to Jesus.net, for example, I think you mentioned that on the book. Would that be a good potential model for us to to look at? Okay. Yeah. So Jesus.net, check it out. Yep. Uh, two more questions, kind of rapid fire. Uh, these are my favorite kind of questions. Uh so magic wand. You got a magic wand, uh, and you can you can convince the enthusiasts in the room of one thing. What are you gonna convince them of?

SPEAKER_01 25:41

Walk slowly and reflectively, walk at the pace of Jesus for your the sake of your own mental health. The CBS just did an article not too long ago this week that was talking about like the fatigue and burnout people feel from feeling the need to keep up with the the stuff that AI produces and walk slowly and then reflect on what am I losing in addition to what I'm gaining by using this? Where are the parts of me that are anxious and unsettled? Where are the parts of me that the Holy Spirit wants to refine and speak to me and convict me, etc.? Good.

SPEAKER_00 26:16

Yeah, that's wise. Uh and now for the curmudgeons in the room. So you got a magic wand. What's one thing you'd want to get across?

SPEAKER_01 26:24

Yeah, I would say uh even if you don't personally use it, which I respect that that choice, take seriously the fact that you live in a world that's shaped by it and participate in the conversation, even if you don't adopt a particular application. It may be helpful to at least explore one on a uh to familiarize yourself with, you know, Chat GPT or something like that. But even if you don't do that, take seriously the fact that the people in your church and your ministry are being shaped by it, uh, young and old. And and so it's up to us to kind of participate in shaping that conversation prophetically. Good.

SPEAKER_00 27:03

Uh and I should add, when I say curmudgeon, I mean I'm totally tongue in cheek because I consider my lead pastor in that camp very much and part of me in that camp. So thank you. That was that was really helpful. Uh so uh let's just give another round of applause for Todd. Yeah, thank you so much.