An Artificial Intelligence Pastor?

 

                                        

                                            Justin Lester preaching at a Sunday service in June.

 He himself granted that some are apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers  to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. 

We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming;  but speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ,  from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.

                                            Ephesians 4: 11-16 NRSVue 

During my very busy years of ministry serving a congregation in Sudbury, Ontario, the chairperson of our Ministry and Personnel Committee advised me, wisely, that I could clone myself and still have enough work for the second person, so I needed to pace myself.  This was true, although he didn't suggest how I was supposed to develop a work/personal life balance when the pastoral needs of a large congregations were often overwhelming. 

Enter Justin Lester, a 30-something pastor in California who has been instrumental in resurrecting am older, staid congregation using technology as his BFF. According to the New York Times: 

 Now the church was using artificial intelligence to answer emails and plan Bible studies. It had doors equipped with facial recognition, podcasts with A.I.-generated biblical figures, and a robot dog named Theo who talked to children and recited sermons.

The latest frontier for this Pastor Tech is the creation of an Artificial Intelligence twin who can "chat" with parishioners and anyone else at any time of the day or night, no appointment necessary:  

Lester cloned his voice and trained his digital twin using almost two million words of his sermons, podcasts, books, text messages and emails. For the last several months, it had been publicly available on his website and Facebook page for online chats or phone calls. It had learned to mimic his bent toward optimism, his obsession with the Green Bay Packers and his casual slang, but it did more than just regurgitate what he had already said. It mapped his thinking onto new conversations to provide advice around the clock for people he’d never met who had questions he’d never been asked.

At the risk of sounding like a Luddite, this creeps me out. What is this guy's trained and accredited skill set to be doing this? Where is the follow-up and the professional accountability? 

 I see the value of AI in many settings, including the church. Son Isaac uses it for practical applications including writing minutes for meetings in this day when no one wants to be a committee secretary. He just makes sure that the chairs agree on content. He employs it for images on Sundays as well.

 I imagine that there are unscrupulous clergy who are using Chat GPT to write sermons, since there is a sorry history of pastor plagarism. 

I have the feeling that Lester may be suffering from an advanced case of Messiah Syndrome, a condition that can be fatal to ministries. There are concerns that AI therapy can either lean toward the wishes of the client or, worse, go rogue and counsel them toward self-harm. Who's to say that this can't happen with priests and pastors? How do we "build up the body of Christ", develop the authentic connective tissue of a healthy congregation through A!? What about those shifting winds of trickery and craftiness and scheming? 

I listened to a CBC Radio The Current interview with deepfake expert Hany Farid who says that if you think you can still spot AI-generated images and video, you're kidding yourself. He went so far as to say that the negatives of social media now outweigh the positives. He's convinced that it's eroding our common bonds and democracy, although he believes we can still fight back. Shouldn't the Christian community be at the forefront of that resistance, or at least of sober second thought, rather that leaping in without serious and prayerful conversation?