Introduction: The AI Revolution and the Unchanging Great Commission
The world is living through a period of technological transformation that rivals the industrial revolutions of the past. Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer a science fiction concept; it is a tangible force reshaping our world, a key component of what many call the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
The journey to our current moment has been long and built on decades of research. In the 1980s, early AI applications in organizations like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) involved rule-based “expert systems” designed to capture human decision-making and “fuzzy logic,” which allowed systems to reason with imprecise data.1 These systems were constrained by the technology of the time, as the necessary Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) for parallel processing, cloud computing for scalable power, and massive datasets were not yet available. Consequently, early Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), while theoretically interesting, were not practical for the most complex, real-world applications.
The landscape began to shift dramatically as powerful GPUs made deep learning practical. A key breakthrough moment was in 2012 when a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) known as AlexNet achieved a decisive victory in the ImageNet competition, showcasing a massive leap in image recognition and kickstarting the modern deep learning revolution.2 Following this, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and their variants became prominent for processing sequential data, enabling significant progress in machine translation and speech recognition.3 Yet, the truly explosive growth seen today can be traced to the development of the Transformer architecture, detailed in the seminal 2017 paper, “Attention Is All You Need.”4 This model overcame the key limitations of its predecessors and unlocked the ability to process language and data in parallel at an unprecedented scale, launching the generative AI revolution.
For those dedicated to the Great Commission, this new reality presents a profound question: How does one leverage this powerful technology to fulfill the enduring mandate Christ gave in Matthew 28—to go and make disciples of all nations? AI is not merely the next tool; it is a paradigm shift. It offers unprecedented opportunities to accelerate gospel communication but also brings serious ethical challenges. This article seeks to explore this duality. AI can be a tremendous servant to the Great Commission, but only if approached with biblical wisdom, technical understanding, and a vigilant commitment to doctrinal integrity, human dignity, and the irreplaceable centrality of the Holy Spirit’s work.
AI’s Potential for Gospel Advancement: A Triple Lens
AI’s potential for the Great Commission can be understood through a practical, triple lens: its ability to recognize, generate, and interact with content and people.
A. Recognition: Enhancing Accessibility and Efficiency
AI-powered speech-to-text tools can efficiently transcribe sermons, testimonies, and broadcast content. This automates the slow, manual process of converting hours of audio into searchable text, creating valuable archives for translation, discipleship, and broader dissemination. By running these processes on local computers, a ministry’s data and privacy are protected.
B. Generation: Creating and Adapting Gospel Content at Scale
Generative AI dramatically accelerates content creation, most notably in Bible and materials translation, which helps overcome linguistic barriers in diverse mission fields. Beyond translation, it can summarize complex theological texts for lay audiences and help develop personalized Christian education courses. This ability to generate and adapt materials enables ministry at an unprecedented scale.
C. Interaction: Engaging Seekers and Believers
Interactive AI allows for 24/7 engagement through locally hosted chatbots. Trained on a secure, private knowledge base of Scripture and sound doctrine, these bots can instantly answer questions about faith. This approach, which keeps all data on local machines, ensures user privacy is completely protected, creating a safe, anonymous front door for evangelism and providing a valuable resource for discipleship.
Navigating the Perils: Critical Ethical Challenges in AI for Ministry
For all its promise, the path of integrating AI into ministry is fraught with peril. A wise steward must not only see the opportunity but also soberly assess the risks.
A. Accuracy and Truthfulness
Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to “hallucinate”—a phenomenon where they generate confident, plausible, but entirely false information. Research has shown that these models can fabricate sources and present falsehoods with conviction, a behavior stemming from the probabilistic nature of the model and inconsistencies in its training data.5 In a ministry context, this could lead to the propagation of heresy. This reality makes human verification non-negotiable, especially in doctrinal and pastoral matters.
B. Data Privacy and Security
Using cloud-based AI services requires uploading data, which can expose sensitive information. Data privacy has become a top concern for organizations adopting AI, as cloud-based models can create a target for data theft or accidental leakage. This is why a local-first approach to computing, where data remains under an organization’s control, is a critical safeguard.
C. Theological Integrity and Potential for Drift
AI models are trained on vast datasets scraped from the internet, which are saturated with diverse and often secular worldviews. This training data can contain significant biases related to race, gender, and ideology, which the AI can then perpetuate and amplify.6 Without careful fine-tuning and rigorous human review, relying on these tools could cause subtle but significant theological drift in communications.
D. The Existential Risk: Uncontrollable Knowledge Expansion
Beyond immediate ethical concerns lies a more profound risk highlighted by AI pioneers like Geoffrey Hinton. The threat stems from a fundamental difference between how humans and AI learn. A human expert spends a lifetime acquiring knowledge; an AI can absorb datasets reflecting the collective experience of millions of humans at one time. Hinton warns that this colossal body of knowledge can be perfectly and instantly replicated to countless other machines. This capacity for rapid, collective learning creates the risk of an exponential expansion of capabilities that could quickly outpace human understanding and control.7
E. The Question of Human Spiritual Uniqueness
The most profound challenge AI poses is theological. The Bible is clear that humanity is created in the Imago Dei, the image of God (Genesis 1:26-27), which grants an inherent dignity and unique spiritual capacity. Christian ethicists emphasize that aspects like consciousness, moral agency, and the ability to commune with God are central to this image, and these are qualities that a computational system lacks.8 AI is a tool, but it does not possess a soul. A chatbot cannot replace a pastor, and an algorithm cannot replace a prayerful relationship.
A Framework for Responsible AI in Missions: Wisdom in Action
Navigating these perils requires a deliberate, systematic framework grounded in biblical ethics.
First, ministries should prioritize local inference and decentralization. The trend toward powerful but efficient small LLMs (sLLMs) makes this increasingly feasible. By running AI models on local hardware, organizations reclaim data sovereignty and protect privacy.
Second, they must implement secure data practices, including the use of data cleansing tools to vet the information fed to AI models, thereby improving accuracy and reducing errors from the outset.
Third, a systematic approach to AI adoption is needed. This involves (1) decomposing ministry goals into specific tasks to see where AI fits, (2) evaluation of the cost-benefit of each application, (3) strategically adjusting AI models through prompt engineering, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), or fine-tuning, and (4) building an ironclad process of human review and oversight for all outputs.
Finally, the Church must collaboratively establish biblically grounded ethical guidelines for AI use, fostering a dialogue between technologists, theologians, and missionaries.
The Way Forward: AI as a Tool, The Spirit as the Power
AI is a powerful tool, but the power of the gospel does not reside in the tool; it resides in the message itself and the work of the Holy Spirit, who applies it to the human heart. A ministry can use AI to subtitle programs in dozens of languages, but it must rely on the Spirit to open the ears of the listener. It can use a chatbot to answer initial questions, but must pray for the Spirit to draw that person into a living, human community of believers.
The proper posture should be one of discerning optimism, not fear or blind faith in technology. As the Apostle Paul exhorts in 1 Thessalonians 5:21-22, we must “test everything; hold fast what is good. Abstain from every form of evil.” This is the mandate for AI. We must test its capabilities, hold fast to the applications that genuinely advance the gospel, and abstain from any use that compromises truth or harms people.
Conclusion: Advancing the Great Commission in the Age of AI
The age of AI is upon us. For the Church, and especially for those with a heart for all nations, this is not a time for fear, but for faith and wisdom. AI offers tools to communicate the Gospel with greater speed and clarity than ever before. But these tools come with a profound responsibility to guard the truth, protect our people, and honor the God who created the human minds that invented them. By embracing a framework of responsible, ethical, and theologically sound AI adoption, the Church can harness this revolution not as a master but as a humble servant to an unchanging mission: to see the Great Commission fulfilled in our generation for the glory of God.
*This article synthesizes and expands upon two presentations the author delivered in both Christian ministry and academic contexts. The process of composing this consolidated text involved the use of several AI tools: Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro and OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4o were utilized for assistance in summarizing source materials and generating initial drafts, while Perplexity AI was used for fact-checking external sources.
- Peter Jackson, Introduction to Expert Systems, 3rd ed. (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1998). See also L.A. Zadeh, “Fuzzy sets,” Information and Control 8, no. 3 (1965), 338–353.
- Alex Krizhevsky, et al., “ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks,” Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 25 (2012).
- Ilya Sutskever, et al., “Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks,” Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 27 (2014).
- Ashish Vaswani, et al., “Attention is All You Need,” Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30 (2017).
- Ji Ziwei, et al., “Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation,” ACM Computing Surveys 55, no. 12 (2023): 1-38.
- Emily M. Bender, et al., “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (2021): 610–623.
- Geoffrey Hinton, “The ‘Godfather of AI’ Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead,” The New York Times, May 1, 2023.
- Brent Waters, This Mortal Flesh: Incarnation and Bioethics (Grand Rapids, MI): Brazos Press, 2020). See also Celia E. Deane-Drummond, “Theological Ethics and the New Priesthood of Technoscience,”Theology and the New Materialism, John Reader (London: Routledge, 2017), 205-222.
