Who's Not in the Room

Every few months, someone sends me a video of a pastor explaining AI to their congregation. The format is always the same. A tech-adjacent speaker walks through the basics. Binary code. Neural networks. Large language models. Then someone connects it to Revelation, or the mark of the beast, or the end of human agency. The room gets quiet. People leave a little more afraid than when they arrived.

I get it. I understand the instinct. Something this powerful, this fast, this disorienting deserves scrutiny. It deserves theological reflection. But what I keep noticing is what's missing from the conversation.

Not information. Not scripture references. Not concern.

What's missing is practitioners.

The people talking about AI in churches are almost always observers. They've read about it. They've watched demos. They've seen the headlines. But they're not building with it. They're not in the room where the architecture decisions get made. They're not writing the training data or designing the interfaces or deciding what gets optimized and what gets ignored.

And that absence is the actual problem.

If the people who care most about truth, wisdom, and human dignity refuse to touch the most powerful tool of a generation, then that tool gets shaped by people who don't think about any of those things.

That's not an AI problem. That's a church problem.

I build AI systems. I also lead a Wednesday Bible study. Those two facts exist in the same life without contradiction, and I think more people need to hear that combination spoken out loud. Because right now the dominant narrative is binary: either AI is going to save us, or AI is the infrastructure of the antichrist. Both positions make the same mistake. They treat AI as an actor with its own will instead of what it actually is.

A mirror.

AI is trained on human output. Human books. Human conversations. Human biases. Human brilliance. Human cruelty. It doesn't generate anything from nothing. It reflects what we've already said and done, at scale, at speed, with math underneath. Which means AI doesn't have a morality problem. Humanity has a morality problem. AI just makes it louder.

This shouldn't be new territory for anyone who reads Scripture. We've always had this conversation. We just called it something else.

Is television evil? Or is it what you watch?

Is money evil? Or is it what you serve?

Is sex evil? Or is it the context you engage it in?

Is a sword evil? Or does it depend on the hand holding it?

The pattern is always the same. The medium is not the sin. The heart behind it determines everything.

Cars kill more people annually than most diseases. We didn't go back to horses. We built seatbelts and traffic laws and airbags. We made the tool safer by staying in the room with it, not by walking away.

AI will cause real damage. It already has. Deepfakes. Manipulation at scale. Surveillance infrastructure. Bias encoded into systems that affect millions of people who never consented to be measured. I'm not naive about this. The capacity for harm is enormous.

But here's what I can't get past: Jesus said He's coming back. That's settled. The end of the story is written. So the argument that we should avoid AI because it might accelerate end-times conditions doesn't hold. He's returning whether we build with AI or not. The question was never "can we prevent what's coming?" The question has always been "what do we do with what we've been given while we're here?"

That's stewardship. That's the parable of the talents. That's the whole thing.

I think AI, at its best, is a reflection of the creative impulse God put in image-bearers. Humans create because we were made by a Creator. We build systems because we were designed by a systems architect. We seek patterns because we were formed by the One who holds all patterns together. None of that makes AI sacred. But it means the act of building isn't inherently profane either.

What concerns me is the growing divide. On one side, technologists building without any framework for wisdom, virtue, or human flourishing. On the other, believers who've decided the whole category is suspicious and refuse to engage. Each side reinforces the other's worst instincts. The builders get more reckless because nobody with a moral vocabulary is at the table. The believers get more afraid because everything coming out of the industry confirms their suspicion that this is all headed somewhere dark.

Someone has to break that cycle.

Not by baptizing AI. Not by slapping a Bible verse on a chatbot and calling it ministry. But by being the kind of person who can hold both realities at once: this is powerful, and this requires wisdom. This is a tool, and tools shape the people who use them. This can serve human flourishing, and it can be weaponized against it.

The church doesn't need more AI explainers. It needs more AI practitioners who pray. Who study. Who build with conviction and not just capability. Who understand that the most dangerous version of AI isn't the one that's too smart. It's the one built by people who never asked what it should be used for.

The genie is out of the bottle. It's not going back in.

The question is whether the people who follow the Author of wisdom are going to help write the next chapter, or just critique it from the audience.