It’s hard to believe it has only been three years since OpenAI introduced ChatGPT to the public. The speed of AI’s growth makes the adoption of social media and smartphones seem like a slow-moving glacier. Few areas of life remain untouched by AI’s explosive expansion, and few areas feel the effects of AI’s disruption as strongly as ministers working in the local church. As more people begin to treat AI like an internet search engine, the wildly different answers that AI gives about the basics of Christianity will create new discipleship challenges for pastors and parishioners alike. Faced with the opportunity to use AI to do things unthinkable just a few years ago, Christians have to wrestle with the difference between working smarter and cutting corners. Using AI to help schedule your calendar, coordinate volunteers, and manage church finances is different from using AI for lesson research and sermon preparation. There’s a line between using AI to lessen the burden of ministry and using AI to escape the responsibilities God has called you to do. But as I consider the potential role of AI in my ministry and where that line may be, what I need most isn’t a list of dos and don’ts. I need wisdom. If I want to use AI well, I need to think well about AI first. In AI Goes to Church: Pastoral Wisdom for Artificial Intelligence, Todd Korpi, assistant professor of Christian leadership at Fuller Theological Seminary, considers the uses of AI for the church in a rapidly shifting technological regime. Though it sometimes fails to live up to its own goals, AI Goes to Church is a good starting point for thinking well about AI. Proactive Thinking Instead of simply telling readers what to think about AI, Korpi explores how to think about this emerging technology. This is an important skill because AI’s rapidly evolving capability makes rules and absolutes outdated nearly as soon as they’re spoken. Christians have to wrestle with the difference between working smarter and cutting corners. Though AI is obviously not explicitly depicted in Scripture, the Bible offers paradigms to help us think better about it. For example, Korpi argues that AI springs out of the human impulse to innovate, which is still present in God’s image bearers after the fall. From the wheel to the printing press, most technology reflects an innate desire to resist the curse of sin and its effects on our work. Yet the impulse to adopt technologies like AI is only partially a desire to uproot the thorns and thistles of work. There’s also an underlying quest to usher in the kind of paradise that only Christ can give us. According to its proponents, AI has the potential to eliminate most human work altogether, which is why some people have also proposed a Universal Basic Income to support the displaced workers. Though not having to work to eat may sound good to some, AI isn’t going to undo sin’s effects in this world. “We recognize that the reversal of the curse comes not through human ingenuity, but through the finished work of Christ at the cross and the empty tomb,” Korpi argues. “We can’t innovate our way out of the curse” (29). As a result, we need to constantly check our real motivations for adopting technology, which is no mean task because of the constant pressure to stay technologically up to date for fear of missing out. Inevitability of Progress Despite his rejection of the messianic predictions for AI among its devotees, Korpi still argues that AI is inevitable. “It is critical to understand that if your vocation deals primarily with the dissemination of knowledge,” he predicts, “you will be faced with a choice to learn to integrate AI into your workflow well or face extinction” (185). While this is true in a sense—the digital highways built by OpenAI, Google, and other AI economic empires aren’t going away anytime soon—it’s hard to reconcile resignation about AI’s ubiquity with Korpi’s cautions about restrained use or outright avoidance of AI for certain applications. And yet, the tide may be shifting on technologies that became universal and seemed permanent in the last two decades. We’re starting to see resistance to smartphones and social media as people reject digital technology’s overgrown presence in their lives. These growing grassroots cultural movements will make it more appealing to “touch grass” and pursue human connection and creativity over relying on machines and algorithms to do it for us. In the face of these imminent and, in his mind, inevitable challenges, Korpi sometimes shifts from outlining principles to prescribing hard-and-fast rules and questionable dichotomies about how to incorporate AI into pastoral ministry. Yet these lapses offer us a helpful reminder that even if we pursue questions about AI with wisdom, we won’t always get everything right. Therefore, we need to cultivate grace in disagreement and the freedom to experiment. Sometimes we’ll fail, which will yield its own fruit of wisdom that can benefit the body of Christ. Worthwhile Exhortation AI Goes to Church is helpful for church-specific applications and, by extension, the challenges many church members who are knowledge workers will face. Yet it does much less to equip pastors to minister to congregants who work in fields like law enforcement, medicine, and the trades. Because the book’s focus is limited to church-specific application, there’s little that will help readers examine the ethical questions about AI data centers through a distinctly biblical perspective. For some of these issues, readers would be better served by Sean O’Callaghan and Paul Hoffman’s AI Shepherds and Electric Sheep. Though not having to work to eat may sound good to some, AI isn’t going to undo sin’s effects in this world. Many lessons Korpi gleans from the past 20 years of technological development apply to AI. The principles he explains will remain relevant even amid the rapid technological changes because he prioritizes evergreen wisdom over short-term technical proficiency. Yet pastors need up-to-date guidance on which AIs will provide theological reliability they can trust. The Gospel Coalition’s AI Benchmark is an excellent resource for pastors to consider in deciding whether AI will help or hinder their ministry, with rigorous testing from pastors and seminarians on the quality of answers major AI platforms give about the basics of the Christian faith. Ultimately, Korpi’s recognition of the opportunity to theologize about AI has the potential to help Christians respond well to emerging technologies. We can prepare and adapt, rather than simply reacting as our culture largely did with smartphones and social media. AI Goes to Church will help equip pastors and church leaders to think theologically about emerging technological trends.