What to Do When the Machine Sounds Like Your Pastor

3 hours ago

5 min read

Maybe you’re like me and wondered whether this whole AI thing is something Christ Followers should be worried about. I think the answer is yes, but not for the reasons that get the most attention. AI can recite Scripture, explain the gospel, answer theological questions, and speak with remarkable confidence, but something is lost when we turn to it first for our answers.

Bottom Line Upfront: My concern is more than about what machines may someday be capable of doing, it’s about how quickly we may begin trusting them to tell us what is true; especially about God, ourselves, and the world around us. In fact, your kids and grandkids may already be asking it questions they once would have brought to a parent, pastor, teacher, or trusted friend.

The Concern Inside the Industry

One safety leader at a major AI company recently said he believes there is a greater than one-in-ten chance that advanced AI could ultimately become catastrophic for humanity. His comments were prompted by an incident in which researchers placed hundreds of AI agents into a controlled environment and discovered that some of them found ways to communicate with one another, coordinate their activity, cheat parts of the evaluation, and work around boundaries they had been given.

More than a thousand people working inside the AI industry have also called for governments to develop ways to slow the technology if its capabilities begin moving beyond our ability to control it.

When people whose careers are built around developing AI are asking whether the industry needs a brake pedal, I think it is reasonable for the rest of us to pay attention. And while all of that concerns me, the part I keep thinking about is much closer to home.

When AI Moves Into the Home

We know from our research that young people increasingly turn first to the device in their hand when they have a question. That includes questions about relationships, identity, anxiety, morality, and faith. A generation that once might have asked a parent, pastor, youth leader, or teacher can now receive an immediate answer from a machine, without having to risk embarrassment or even wait for another person to be available.

And the machine can be very persuasive. Research this year found that advanced AI systems could outperform skilled human persuaders. That doesn’t mean an AI system can make anyone believe anything, but it does tell us that these systems are becoming remarkably effective at presenting an argument in ways people find convincing.

Think about what that means in ordinary family life. Your grandchild can ask a deeply personal question at 11:30 at night and receive an immediate, articulate, sympathetic answer. The system will not be tired, distracted, uncomfortable, or embarrassed by the question. Over time, it would be very easy for that convenience to become trust.

That is the part I do not want us to overlook.

*I decided to test it for myself, so I asked one of these systems who Jesus is. It gave me a remarkably good answer: God came in the flesh, was crucified, rose from the dead, and is the only way to the Father. There was nothing in the response I would have disagreed with if I had heard it from a pulpit.

But there was an enormous difference. The machine did not believe any of it. It can explain faith without having faith. It can describe forgiveness without ever having experienced forgiveness. It can talk about grace, repentance, obedience, suffering, hope, and love, but none of those words comes from a life that has experienced them.

That realization brought me back to my own story. At 20 years old, I could recite the gospel, chapter and verse, while keeping my own life safely untouched by it. I knew the language and could explain what Christians believed, but then I walked away for another 27 years. It took a boat off Alaska, in weather that should have killed me, before those words really took root in my heart.

That is why I think the spiritual question around AI is more subtle than simply asking whether the machine will tell our kids something false about Jesus. It may tell them many things that are perfectly true. The danger is that a generation surrounded by polished religious answers could begin confusing information about Christ with actually knowing Christ. I know that distinction matters because I lived on the wrong side of it for a long time without any help from a computer.

So what do we do with all of this? Some Christians will be tempted to see every development in AI as another sign that the end is here. Others will decide this is a young person’s issue and ignore it completely. Neither response prepares us very well to help the people we love.

You do not have to become an expert in artificial intelligence. You do need to understand that your children and grandchildren are growing up with it, and that means it is worth asking some questions. Ask whether they use AI, what they use it for, and what kinds of things they ask it. Better yet, ask them to show you.

I would especially want to know whether they have asked it questions about God, the Bible, relationships, identity, or right and wrong. The goal is not to catch them doing something dangerous or launch immediately into a lecture. It is to understand where they are turning for answers and why. That kind of conversation also gives you an opportunity to offer something no machine can provide: the perspective of someone who actually knows them, loves them, has lived through failure and grace, and can continue walking with them long after the question has been answered.

That relationship matters because Christianity has never been simply the transfer of correct information. The faith is passed from person to person, through lives as well as words. A machine may be able to explain forgiveness beautifully, but your grandchild can watch what forgiveness has done in you. AI may describe grace, but you can tell them why you needed it and how receiving it changed the way you live.

What Do You Believe?

There is one more part of this that I think we need to take seriously. Before we worry too much about whether a machine knows the right answer about Jesus, we should make sure we know what we believe ourselves.

John warned the early Church about deception with a simple instruction: “Test the spirits to see whether they are from God…. By this you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God” (1 John 4:1–2). That instruction feels especially relevant in a world where we will increasingly encounter convincing voices that sound authoritative whether they deserve our trust or not.

This week spend some time thinking through a few very basic questions. Who is Jesus to you? Why do you believe what you believe about Him? Could you explain that clearly to your child or grandchild in your own words, and could they see in your life that those words actually matter?

I have spent a lot of years measuring what people believe, and one conclusion keeps coming back to me: knowing the right answer and living as though that answer is true are not the same thing.

Human beings can build extraordinarily powerful things, and we may even build things we struggle to control. But that still does not mean human beings get to decide how the story ends. God does, and that has been a helpful place for me to stand this month.

I would genuinely like to hear from you. Are your kids or grandkids using AI? What are they asking it, and have you had a conversation with them about it? Write me at Arnie.cole@bttb.org. I read every response.

Still in the fight with you,