I was listening to a podcast the other day where the hosts were talking about the role of Artificial Intelligence as we move into the future. They talked about how for AI to be successful it requires a huge dataset to ‘learn’ off. As it learns more about what we are posting and requesting online it will begin to respond better and be even more helpful to us. You’ll have probably noticed that when you type something into a search engine often there is an AI answer that pops up first – often those answers are super helpful because it has scoured a huge dataset and has answered more intelligently than our search engines have.

However, some experts however are concerned about its long term viability from a a quality perspective. Here’s why.

You may also have noticed that increasingly more and more companies, churches, individual creators etc. are using AI to generate blurbs, blogs, advertising, help forums etc. While our experience of these blurbs and blogs may be good or bad the one challenge that we may have to face is that there is increasingly more info on the internet that didn’t come from humans but from AI.

AI doesn’t just feed from the internet, it is also feeding the internet.

(I’ve got a point coming I promise)

So, if this use of AI grows in this way it is conceivable that we end up up with AI of decreasing quality because it is no longer learning off humans with their creativity but is instead repeating what it has already said. Its data pool and responses become stagnant rather than fresh. We could potentially end up seeing creativity dry up in a way we have never needed to worry about before.

Whether this happens or not I don’t know but here is what it got me thinking about.

Religion and tradition – an obvious jump right?

This possible trajectory of AI feels just like I’ve observed happening with religion and tradition. When we read about the Pharisees in the Gospels we often find that they were often more concerned with their own traditions and teachings formed from what they had learned from the Scriptures than they were with God Himself. Jesus would point this out to them on different occasions which they never loved. Ultimately this is why they missed who Jesus truly was. Jesus was the true, creative source. He was the one who could have enlightened the Scriptures for them and helped to walk them into a new covenant and relationship with God. Unfortunately they had become more concerned with protecting and feeding off the stuff that they had supplied. They had become so numbed by their own thinking that they could no longer stomach new food.

This is why religion and tradition can become stagnant very quickly. Rather than being in communion with the living God they would rather hold to the rules formed that require less thought to follow. Any thinking that lands outside of those lines cannot be tolerated and is therefore dealt with sharply.

Just so I’m clear here, I don’t mean that truths that are centuries old are no longer relevant. God’s word and His instruction will never outdate! What I’m talking about are our human traditions and thinking.

The church’s number one goal is to follow God with all that it has, and its second goal is to love the people God created with all they have. In each generation the church has to search and learn how to do these two things and the practical ways this happens will alter over the years. In some occasions this is super obvious but in other areas it isn’t so easy. I think the church has a huge question to ask itself when it comes to decisions around the changing world we live in.

What is Sacred and what is Style?

Or to put it another way; what are the undeniable, unchanging truths about God and His church that we cannot interfere with and what are the structures we created that must be interchangeable? For example, I believe an undeniable truth is that we are called as people of God to be the church together meeting in community but it’s a style thing for the church to be limited to a big building with a steeple which has to meet at 10:00 on a Sunday morning. We are undeniably called to share the gospel and make disciples of all nations but how we do that is up for interpretation. In my humble opinion the bullhorn on the street approach has most likely had its time in the western world and there are more effective newer styles that are way more effective in 2024.

I have watched too many churches over the years cling to a style because they believed it was sacred which resulted in their decline. On the other side I have watched too many churches let go of something sacred because they believed it was just a style and they have seen the same decline.

Being attuned to Gods word through the Scriptures and His Spirit is the only way we can ensure we are following His lead as the generations come. We can’t afford to become stagnant because we have cut off the source. We cants afford to simply feed off our own ideas that were useful once but should have been discarded years ago.

I would encourage you if you are involved in church leadership on any level to do an audit of your church. What is style and what is sacred? What are the things we like to do and what are the things we are required to do before God? What is motivated by His presence and what is motivated by our preference?

How can we ensure that we don’t become stagnant but instead are always supplied by the living water of God which will always hold to the gospel truth whilst also reaching the ever changing world we live in?