Hot Topics (Part 3)
Our culture is experiencing a massive shift that all has to do with a piece of technology: artificial intelligence.
Yep, we’re going there.
How might AI impact ministry? How are churches adapting to (or resisting) the AI movement? What does AI even have to do with church?
In this episode, Amy and Sean are joined by Paul Alexander, the Executive Pastor at Sun Valley Community Church in Arizona and a member of the Unstuck team, and Executive Director of IT at Sun Valley, Mika Casey.
They discuss key questions and changes surrounding AI, how to use AI tools in your ministry (and what guardrails to put in place), and what’s at stake for the Church in the era of AI.
AI in and of itself probably reveals more about your character than it does reveal anything about AI itself. [episode 428] #unstuckchurch Share on X AI is going to be understanding, empathetic, available 24/7 — but at the end of the day, it's not real. [episode 428] #unstuckchurch Share on X Allowing our staff to use it as a tool has actually freed up their time to be more people-facing instead of screen-facing. [episode 428] #unstuckchurch Share on X Genuine conversation, authenticity, credibility, are still things that AI can't replace. [episode 428] #unstuckchurch Share on X
This Episode Is Brought to You By Donorbox
Still relying on cash and checks for offerings? Half of churchgoers already prefer to give electronically. Donorbox Live Kiosk helps churches like yours boost giving by 35%. Imagine thousands more dollars each month to fortify your ministry.
All you need is a tablet, card reader, and Donorbox’s app. Donorbox lets congregants make tithes, offerings, and donations instantly with cards or digital wallets, like Apple Pay & Google Pay.
Get two months free at donorbox.org/unstuckpodcast
Get the Leader Conversation Guide
Opt-in here and get access to the Leader Conversation Guide for this episode and to the full archive. Emailed each Wednesday.
Share Your Thoughts and Questions on Social Media
We use hashtag #unstuckchurch on X @unstuckgroup and on Instagram @theunstuckgroup.
Write a Review—It Helps!
Your ratings and reviews really do help more pastors discover the podcast content we’re creating here. Would you take a minute to share your thoughts? Just open the podcast on iTunes on your phone or computer, click Ratings & Reviews, and leave your opinion. Or leave us 5 stars on Spotify.
Transcript
Sean:
This week’s podcast sponsor is Donorbox. You know, a lot of churches are still relying on cash and checks for offerings, but actually half of churchgoers prefer to give electronically. Donorbox’s solution, their Live Kiosk, helps churches like yours boost their giving by up to 35%. All you need is a tablet, a card reader, and Donorbox’s app. Donorbox lets congregants make ties, offerings and donations instantly with cards and digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay. You can get two months of the Live Kiosk for free if you go to donorbox.org/unstuckpodcast, that’s donorbox.org/unstuckpodcast.
Welcome to the Unstuck Church Podcast. My name’s Sean, and I’m here with my friend and teammate, Amy Anderson. And Amy, I’m excited for this conversation today. This is actually episode three of our December series, hot topics, where we’re digging into some of the hottest topics that church leaders are wrestling with right now. We kicked things off with a conversation about Christmas, and then we talked about burnout. And the, this week we’re talking about the controversial technology of AI.
Amy:
Yeah. I’m kind of excited to talk about this. I am kind of a novice when it comes to AI, so I’m looking forward to learning something myself. So, to help us think through this topic, we are joined by Paul Alexander, the Executive Pastor at Sun Valley Community Church in Arizona. And Paul has more than 28 years of experience serving in the local church, and he’s been curious about how AI will impact ministry and how churches can prepare to shepherd people through these massive cultural shifts. And I should add, Paul’s been on our team at The Unstuck Group longer than me. I think he was the one of the founding consultants that joined Tony Morgan back in the day. So Paul, thank you so much for being here today.
Paul:
So glad to be with you guys. I’m looking forward to a fun conversation.
Sean:
We’re also joined by Mika Casey. Mika is at Paul’s church as well there in the Phoenix area. Mika’s a former entrepreneur, and currently, he’s the executive director of IT at Sun Valley. So, Mika, it’s great to have you on the conversation also.
Mika:
Thank you for having me. Looking forward to it.
Amy:
All right. Well, let’s jump in. Paul. AI is obviously creating a massive cultural shift right now. What are some of the key questions your leadership team at Sun Valley is wrestling with when it comes to how AI might impact your ministry?
Paul:
Yeah, Amy, I think a lot of church leaders are wrestling with what their posture should be towards AI, and it has brought up all kinds of anxiety. I know the question comes up to me frequently from other church leaders I interact with. Like, what are you doing at Sun Valley about AI? Almost like it’s a problem to be solved. And I’ve gotta be honest with you. Okay, so tip all my cards. Sun Valley actually has a bias towards embracing technology as a tool to support the spread of the gospel. So we’re not afraid of technology, rather, we kind of have a posture of utilizing it to help people meet, know, and follow Jesus. I mean, imagine how powerful it could be to put the right message in front of the right person at the right time, just like the Apostle Paul talks about in scriptures. Hey, when I was with the Jew, I presented the gospel this way. When I was with the Greek, I presented the gospel this way to try to make the gospel as accessible to people as possible. So, really, honestly, Amy, it hasn’t been a source of pressure or anxiety for us.
Now a couple of ideas I’ll throw out there, and we can kind of go with the conversation, see where it goes. Allowing our staff to use it as a tool, ironically, has actually freed up their time to be more people facing instead of screen facing. So there’s some irony to all that if you let yourself live with that statement for a minute. But earlier this year, we did actually feel compelled to address AI with our staff because we had staff who were early adopters. They were already utilizing AI for things like content generation. You know, Sunday happens every week, and so there’s just that normal grind we have to 52 events a year. And so it’s natural, I think, for church staff to feel the pressure of all that. So they were using it to save time with tasks that they’re responsible for. Things like social media, small group content, message research, even grant writing and finances and business, workflow, all kinds of really neat, unique applications.
But the way that we addressed it with our team, Mika, who can speak more to this, actually helped us put together some guidelines. And really our posture is, hey, this is a tool to help support our work, not replace our work. And so we learned, we always have to check whatever AI produces for us regarding voice and culture, and then also theology. And so the good news is to date, we really haven’t had any issues with AI that we’ve had to correct or address that have violated our culture.
So one of the more fun things recently that popped up. This came to my head just so listeners can realize there’s so many wonderful ways to use this tool. Recently, we did a video shoot at one of our campuses that we’re opening up, and we had the whole video crew over there, our Lead Pastor over there. And we’re encouraging everybody who lives west of a particular road, Hey, you know, consider prayerfully think through, would this be the campus that you would attend? So just some public conversation around that to the whole church. And unfortunately our Lead Pastor used the wrong street in the video. And so they’re editing this later and they realize, oh, that’s the wrong street. We meant to say this other street. And so instead of getting the entire video crew back together, get him back over there, they ran it through an AI filter and actually changed what he said to the right street.
Amy:
No way.
Paul:
So it saved a ridiculous amount of time, and we still showed it, and no one knew the difference. So, you know, some people may hear that and say, oh my goodness, that’s so scary. And like any tool can be used for terrible things, but can also can be used for wonderful things too.
Sean:
Yeah, absolutely. Mika, I remember back in the nineties, it was like early nineties, watching the Today Show, and there’s this famous clip of Katie Couric who said, the internet, what is this internet thing? And we look back on that now, like, how could we have been so ignorant to not understand what the internet is? We live with it. It affects our life every single day, almost every single minute. I feel like we’re kind of in the same place now with AI. We don’t know what we don’t know about it, but there’s a big future with how we engage with AI out in front of us. I wonder what kinds of changes that you’ve seen maybe in your community, how those are showing up in conversations of your community, in your community because of AI right now?
Mika:
Right. Yeah. I do remember that clip. That’s pretty famous. I think that’s come around a couple times.
Sean:
That was a long time ago.
Amy:
Honestly, I could recreate that. Like, Sean, what’s this AI thing?
Sean:
It’s perfect.
Mika:
And I think a lot of it is habit, right? So even with myself, I was kind of an early adopter of AI, but I’d forget to use it, you know, I was such in the habit if I needed to look something up, going to Google.
Sean:
Yeah, good point.
Mika:
I’d say over the course of this year, that’s shifted, right? So I’m barely on Google at all, and I pretty much go to chat. That’s my preferred LLM: ChatGPT. So it’s just kind of changed habitually how I’ve used it and become more a part of my life, not just in the workplace, but also personally. I know a lot of people who’ve started to do the same thing. And I looked up recently, and it shows that the majority of Americans now use AI several times a week. So we’ve gone from that curiosity phase to half the country, starting to use it in somewhere shape or form quite often.
And I’d say from at least anecdotally what I see, there’s either a posture of excitement or a posture of fear depending on what seat you sit in.So for me, getting to use it here at Sun Valley, and personally, I’m excited about what it’s allowed me to do. Exercise some new skills, save some time, save some money like Paul talked about. So I’m embracing it, excited about what’s to come.
But there’s also a fear side I’ve seen too. So let’s say your job today is someone who does transcripts or who does voiceover work, you know, AI can do those things very quickly and easily. So you might be concerned, is my job safe? I’ve got some friends who have been unemployed for quite a while. They feel like the job market’s become very difficult because there’s literally tools out there that are like Tinder for job applications. So swipe left if you wanna apply, swipe right if you don’t, and the tool will modify your resume to fit the job, create a cover letter, do all the work for you. So that’s what they’re up against. These people using tools like that just to get an interview. So I feel like, you know, the whole business play marketplace has kind of become a little bit frozen as far as hiring and firing as companies. They’re trying to figure out do they need the stuff they once thought they did. So yeah, there’s a lot of both excitement and uncertainty around it.
Sean:
Mika, let’s say just hypothetically, I record a podcast for church leaders. Should I be concerned about my role?
Mika:
No, I don’t think so. Okay. You know, at least today in the podcasting world, I think genuine conversation, authenticity, credibility, those are still things that AI can’t replace. It could probably simulate a conversation, but I don’t know how fruitful it would be. And I don’t know if people really wanna listen to something that’s AI generated.
Sean:
There you go. Alright. Good answer. Thank you.
Amy:
Well, Paul, maybe appealing to the pastoral side of your makeup, talking about this issue of job displacement, the economic impact of AI, is, or how is your team thinking about preparing to care for people who might lose their jobs or face significant career disruptions because of AI? Any new ideas or conversations that that’s creating for you and the team?
Paul:
Yeah, that’s a really good question, Amy. And most pastors, if they’re thinking logically about what’s been entrusted to them, like the people and the care and the people that they’re pastoring, my hunch is every pastor probably has somebody in their congregation that’s been impacted by this, to Mika’s point from a job market standpoint in some fashion.
And so while we can’t really predict the future, you can prepare for it. So when crisis comes along, it just reveals what’s already there and it creates new opportunities. It’s really crisis, if you posture yourself properly towards it can be a lot of fun. And so it helps you understand what reality is and how well prepared you currently are. It’s like when you go out on Saturday and, you know, college football’s getting ready to happen this weekend, and when that first whistle blows, you’re as prepared as you absolutely can be. There’s no more preparation you can do once the clock starts.
And so I would encourage pastors to start preparing. So what I mean by that is, the way that you budget at your church, do you have reserve funds in place today? So if something were to happen dramatically in the economy, as a result of some worst case scenario, AI disrupts the job market to a significant point, which may impact giving in your church. And so are you prepared for something like that? Do you have reserves funds set aside? Are you budgeting responsibility, not being hopeful about future finances that might come in, but based on past performance? So are you budgeting based on what you think might happen next year or are you budgeting based on real receipts this year? Are you creating margin in your finances as a church?
You know, are you building a culture of generosity in your congregation? And actually doing what Paul told Timothy, like commanding the rich in this world to be generous. Like, are you actually discipling people when it comes to generosity and finance? These are all ways you as a church can prepare for like the unknown surrounding what may or may not happen with the job market. So again, while we can’t predict it and we don’t need to necessarily need to be fearful about it, I do think it’s wise to be prepared for it. And so, you know, benevolence helping people in your congregation with rent payments or mortgage payments. Do you have a process in place or is it just a free for all people get in a line and come get money? My hunch is if you’re being responsible about it, you’re probably stewarding that well and have some kind of process in place.
But you, even on the fear side of it, like Mika was talking about some of his friends who are going through job market stuff, I think fundamentally as pastors, we believe people are created and they’re made in the image of God, and they’re created for real relational connection with other human beings and their creator. This is why when that guy comes to Jesus says, what’s the deepest thing you got, Jesus? He says, well, love God, love people. That’s as deep as it gets. And we’ve seen it all throughout history. People have chosen to chase all kinds of substitutes for that. Even in Romans chapter one, there’s this verse tucked in there. And in this, there’s a phrase where people are actually inventing new ways to sin. And so, I just think it’s interesting. We know this as pastors, fundamentally, people have chased all things to be substitutes for what their soul really craves. And my hunch is AI will create new opportunities for new ways for people to sin. But our calling hasn’t changed, to help people meet Jesus. And when people hit rock bottom and they realize they need a savior, we need to be there calling them towards repentance and calling them towards hope and freedom and Jesus.
Sean:
Yeah. Mika, you mentioned earlier some of the AI tools you’re using personally. I wonder what, are there any tools that you’re using kind of collectively as a team there at Sun Valley? And if so, what are you finding most helpful? What are the kind of guardrails or guidelines that you’ve put in place, if any, for how the staff use those?
Mika:
Sure. It’s a great question. So there’s a lot of different ways we aren’t collectively using like one workspace app that’s shared or anything like that. But just in talking to different ministries, most people I talk to are using it in some form or another, so I’ll just go through a few and if you want to dive deeper on any, we can. So some obvious ones, like written content generation, Paul touched on those. So whether it’s group notes, social media, curriculum, emails, you know, cleaning those up, organizing LLMs are really great at that video. Voice graphic generation and edits, like Paul mentioned as well. We use it for coding assistance when it comes to our CRM website. Our kids ministry is actually recently written their own app or vibe coded their own app using AI to start helping with contextualizing the curriculum. We use a third party, kind of get some of the videos and curriculum and we don’t like to say, show the same content or ask the same questions during the middle of the week as we do on Sunday because the same kids might be there. So, hey, I’m gonna need two questions Sunday, two questions, Wednesday, two questions Thursday, and help do something that basically takes manual time and just kind of disseminate that, get reviews and stuff like that. So it was a cool thing I learned about recently. A lot of people use it as a foundational starting point for bible studies, scripture verses looking those up. We’ve done large scale data and sentiment analysis on a survey to kind of get a sense of what type of questions people were asking on what topics that would be humanly impossible. We just launched an AI-person summary in Rock. Our church management system. So you can get a.
Paul:
Hold on real quick.
Mika:
Oh, go ahead.
Paul:
This is cool. What Mika is talking about here. The kids ministry thing was actually really cool because they’re taking content like a lot of churches do, and they’re trying to contextualize it to our church with our voice and all that. And they figured out a way to do this. It saves so much time, I’m so proud of them. They need to figure out how to make that available to other churches. But then, the Rock summary thing I think has a lot of implication. And so I’m, I know I just teed you up big time there, Mika, but I really think what you guys are doing with that is really, really valuable and really important.
Sean:
Tell us more about that, Mika.
Mika:
Sure. And to be fair, I have to give credit to Life Church. I literally saw, they were on a call talking about something completely different in one of the cohorts I’m a part of. And I saw it and I go, wait, go back a screen. And I saw them doing it in their Rock system, so we learned a little bit from them. Some other churches have launched it as well. So we built our own version of that. But basically what it does is it’s a little block in a person’s profile and in the background it’s going and kind of gathering all the things we know about that person, how long they’ve been at our church. When they said yes, when they were baptized, if they’ve made those decisions, what groups they’re a part of, are they serving. And kind of basically sends all that to the LLM and a non personally identifiable way, so it’s not sending their full name and birthdate and those types of things. And then coming back and summarizing it.
So normally if I was gonna follow up with someone, I’d have to kind of jump through different parts of their profile to kind of put all those pieces together. It’s giving me a several paragraph summary of who that person is and maybe some actually action items in terms of maybe things I should ask them about.
Sean:
Oh, that’s awesome.
Mika:
Hey, you were leading a small group a year ago, but I see you kind of stepped away from that. Is that something you might be interested in doing again?
Sean:
Oh, I’d love that.
Mika:
Or whatever the situation is. So just, you can think of the amount of people that we get in contact with throughout the course of the day across all our ministries, like just a great time-saver.
Sean:
Yeah. That’s fantastic.
Paul:
Yeah. So Sean, remember back in the day, the Ritz Carlton built this CRM called Mystique. You may have read about it. And so they would drop notes in, like, so if you and your wife went to the Ritz and you had a Boston Red Sox license plate holder on your car, they would drop that note in, in their CRM about you.
Sean:
Okay.
Paul:
And so what would happen is, everybody at the Ritz had a thousand dollars a day allowance to deliver exceptional guests experience, essentially.
Sean:
Oh, interesting.
Paul:
And so they could pull up the CRM, Hey, Sean and his wife are staying here. Oh, he’s a Boston Red Sox fan, he likes this color, Gatorade, whatever it is. And they could have Boston Red Sox tickets that are sitting there for you, ready for you if knowing that you’re a fan.
So imagine if you knew, if, gosh, I mean, really imagine if you knew where your people were at spiritually in your church. And you didn’t have to chase it through a bunch of different platforms and databases and lists. It was all in one place and aggregated for you, and it’s just right there and you know, oh my goodness, this is the spiritual step they need to take and what I need to challenge them on or lead them towards.
Sean:
Yeah. So Mika, you’re using Rock CMS, you’re gonna have a number of churches after they listen to this, want to know how you’re doing this. How would you direct them? What’s the best way for them to find that out?
Mika:
So if they’re not the coding type, if they’re willing to maybe budget a little bit towards it, I don’t think it’s a heavy lift. Even for smaller churches, you could reach directly out to Triumph. I know they’ve got a plugin that basically is kind of built out to do that. If you do have the desire to try to code it, they’ve got an API Built In, which is basically a tool to connect out to, I know at least Chat GPT because that’s what we’re using. I don’t know if you can use like Gemini or Claude, but once you kind of make the connection, it’s just a matter of there’s some, there’s a good recipe out there. I’ll say that. So people know Rock and will know recipes.
It’s, oh man, I wish I could give him credit if you find it. I don’t know if it was from LCBC or what church, but they wrote kind of their own version of it and kind of gives you a good starting point of how to send the prompt in. And a lot of it, once the connection actually didn’t take us too long, it was more than tweaking the prompt, making sure it was coming back with what we were looking for and in the format we were looking for. It’s not, I’ll just say on a scale of like one to 10, it’s probably like somewhere in the five or six range of difficulty. It’s definitely doable.
Sean:
Well, it sounds like worth the time investment for sure, for the information that you’re getting.
Mika:
Oh, yeah, it’s great. And then, the last one I was gonna mention that I’m really personally proud of is we actually got a six figure grant from the Department of Homeland Security last year.
Sean:
Oh, wow.
Mika:
To help us with some of our security, door access, cameras, things like that. Even cybersecurity. It was something I wasn’t even going to try. I’ve never written a grant before. But someone said, you know, what do you have to lose? And so AI was a huge help. I’m actually, I consider myself a pretty good writer, but I’m not a grant writer. So it really helped me organize my responses and apply for that. And in like a matter of, I think about a week I went through the entire grant, applied and we got it. We actually applied for it again this year, and it was immensely helpful in going back and doing that again.
Sean:
Love that.
Mika:
Because it remembered everything I was doing, which is also a cool feature. So, and I’ve talked to some other churches about going for it as well, so hopefully they’ll get the grant too this year.
Sean:
That’s great. Love that. Any guidelines, talk about the guidelines that you have in place just for the team there?
Mika:
So as Paul mentioned, we did send something out earlier this year. Our guidelines are the same then as they were now. Basically the first one is don’t send anything personally identifiable to any LLM. So don’t upload someone’s name and giving data. I mean, to date, I can’t think of any instances where that type of data has leaked out or breached, but we just don’t want to even take that chance. We wanna respect our guests and their personal data. So that’s really ultimate rule number one.
Amy:
Mika, really quick, just for the other Katie Courics out there like me who are listening today. Can you tell me what an LLM is?
Mika:
Sure. It’s a large language model. So basically when you think of chat, GPT, Claude. Something that you can type something into, then it’s gonna spit back a response. And if you wanna learn about how that all works, it’s based on tokens. There’s some good YouTube videos.
Amy:
A large language model. Got it.
Mika:
Yeah. That, I mean, that’s the most common AI use today. You’ll read stuff about AGI that they’re chasing after artificial general intelligence and there’s all types of things, but the majority of AI tools are based on that.
Amy:
I’m just confirming to our listening audience that this is the real Amy Anderson, and I clearly don’t use AI to drive my content. So.
Sean:
Good point. Well done.
Amy:
Okay. I interrupted you. Sorry, go ahead.
Mika:
Oh, no problem. So yeah, so the main thing is don’t send that, and that you also have options too. So like we, or at least myself and a couple other of us use chat GPT primarily, you can opt to use a paid version of that. There’s a plus version, a business version, and you can actually opt out of any of your data being used to train their model, which I highly recommend. Honestly, if you’re uploading anything, you probably should be on one of those paid plans. They’re like 20 to $25 a month. You really don’t have an excuse not to be if you’re uploading anything.
And then secondly, Paul touched on this earlier, but those models aren’t perfect. Right? So we’ve just told everyone, you’re responsible for the way that you use your AI tools. You can’t blame something on them if it gets it wrong. So anything you produce, you’re responsible for. So use your wisdom and discernment in how you say things and make sure it’s in our voice. So yeah, we don’t want you just saying, yeah, give me group notes for this weekend. And it doesn’t sound like us. It doesn’t match our theology. It’s a good place in terms of organizing ideas and maybe generating some ideas, but we want it to be authentic as well.
Amy:
So, Mika, what do you think is at stake for the church in this AI era? You know, Tiffany, on our team, she sees us as a big opportunity for what’s unique and distinctive about the church, kind of to shine brightly. Right? What do you think, what areas of opportunity are you sensing for ministries to kind of lean into what’s different about the church from the world?
Mika:
That’s really good. So I actually just talked with one of our campus pastors the other day, and I was just asking how things were going. And he said that more than ever, people he talks to are desperate, and that’s the word he used, desperate for connection, authenticity, and vulnerability. So just more and more people are missing that in their lives. I kind of did a little research and I found a really odd statistic that something like one in four 18 to 29 year olds have tried AI as a romantic partner or conversation.
Amy:
What?
Sean:
I saw that same thing, Mika, yeah.
Mika:
Yeah. And there’s more than one like kind of psychology journal that has talked about that. So it wasn’t just one study that showed that was just several. So as weird as that sounds like, think about it, right? The AI is gonna be understanding, empathetic, available 24/7, so someone who’s missing that connection might, that might appeal to them, but at the end of the day, it’s not real, right? And eventually that’s gonna manifest itself. God, on the other hand, is all those things, and he is real. And so I think as a staff, as our volunteers, we need to help fill that hole for people before they try to pursue it in some other way.
So, and then actually really interestingly, that same pastor was telling me, we send out, so we send out, when it’s your birthday, you’ll get a text from us. It’s not AI, just we do automate the sending of the happy birthday, but if you respond back, it is our campus pastor on the other end that you’ll be having a conversation with. And so, you know, over the years, some people will say, Hey, is this really you? That’s shifted recently, and people have started asking, and a lot, is this AI. So there’s already kind of this distrust that’s building among people. Like, are, is there a real person on the other end of this? Because AI’s getting so good, you can call customer service and have a cold conversation and you weren’t talking to a person at all. It’s passed what’s called the Turing test. Like can you tell that it’s an AI or a person, it’s past that through voice.
Amy:
Wow.
Mika:
So that’s kind of the, I mean, that’s the opportunity on the people side. I do just wanna say from a technological side, I’ve been, I go to several technical conferences, church conferences throughout the year, and I’ve seen over the past two years, but really the past year, especially, a lot of small churches that I felt like were kind of behind technologically, whether it was their website, an app, just things they weren’t able to do, maybe because they didn’t have the monetary resources or the staffing. Have been able to catch up because some of the tools that are available to them. So I think that’s really encouraging. It makes me happy when I see the big-C Church moving forward and winning more people for Jesus. So I’m excited that maybe AI will help level the playing field for them and help them catch up in ways that maybe they otherwise couldn’t. So that’s encouraging.
Sean:
That’s good. Paul, you talked to a lot of church leaders, both because of your role there at Sun Valley, but also on our team with all the churches that you work with on site. If you were talking to one of those church leaders that really hasn’t started thinking about the bigger implications of AI yet, what would you encourage them to do? Where do they start with all of this?
Paul:
Yeah, Sean, I think it’s a good question. I’d honestly, I’d start with the scriptures. Scripture’s really, really clear. Sean. God has not given us a spirit of fear. We don’t need to be afraid of this. We do need to continue to take on the posture of being a missionary in the culture and in a place that God has placed you.
And my hunch is in today’s world, you probably have somebody in your church that gets paid to work with technology. So if you feel personally as a pastor, uncomfortable with this, you weren’t trained for this. I mean, you took Greek, you went to seminary, you know, you don’t have the expertise like Mika or maybe have a guy like Mika on your team. You probably have a guy similar to Mika in your church. And you know, stop asking them to hold a door and invite them to a big problem to solve. And so I would just really, I would challenge the people in your church that are working in this space to think through how they might use their ability and experience to advance the kingdom in the church and in the community that your church is at.
So, I mean, I think throughout the ages, I think this is important, we forget this throughout the ages, every advancement in technology has been met with both excitement and fear. There’s people on both sides of that coin. And that’s true in the church. Okay? So go old school, like when the printing press came along, there were people losing their minds. We can’t let people read the Bible. Imagine what would happen. Let’s not approach AI like that. You know, the same conversation, what the internet, we can’t do video teaching, you know, that would never work.
Well, you know, so I mean, I think this is the same kind of moment. AI in and of itself probably reveals more about your character than it does reveal anything about AI itself. How you choose to use it probably reveals more about you than it does about the tool itself. So I would encourage pastors, say, prayerfully support it. You probably have somebody in your congregation who can help you with this. This is a direction, to Mika’s point, this is a direction that culture’s going. And as a missionary, we cannot remove ourselves from culture. We have to jump in, do the messy work to figure it out and help people meet Jesus. We can’t ignore this.
Sean:
Yeah. That’s a good word, Paul. Well, I have found this conversation fascinating. I really do think we’re on the cusp of something that’s gonna impact us in positive ways and probably create some challenges for us. So the insights from you guys and what you’re experiencing there on the ground at Sun Valley, really helpful for our listeners. Any other thoughts, Mika, Paul, any other thoughts that you’d like to leave our listeners with today before we wrap up?
Mika:
So I thought of one just as Paul was sharing what he did. So if you look at schools today, educators, their initial approach to AI was, Hey, don’t use it. You need to do all this by yourself. Don’t use it at all. I think that was a losing fight because students were gonna use it one way or another. I’ve seen some churches kind of take the heavy handed approach with their staff and say, either you can’t use it at all, or every time you use it, you need to cite it. So even if you shape up an email, you need a site that you used AI to reorganize your email. I think that approach might actually either one, discourage the use of AI or worse cause people to hide the fact that they’re using it or feel ashamed of it. I just don’t think that’s the best approach. But at the same time, exercise wisdom, be a good steward, don’t so embrace it that you throw an AI chat bot on your site that you think is gonna answer people’s theological questions. And trust that it’s never gonna make a mistake. So I think there’s a balance, but I think the balance should lean a little towards using the technology in ways that make sense.
Amy:
Hey Sean, let me just jump in. You know, a couple of my key takeaways number, because I probably have a little bit more of the fear aspect only because I’m not too familiar with it yet. I have just kind of dabbled in that world. But one thing that stood out for me from the very beginning of this conversation is that it can actually be used to help you be more people facing and even that advice right there, Mika of don’t throw an AI chatbot that would work completely against what y’all were talking about. Where we have the opportunity to be people, to people and to empathize and to be real. And so that’s a good motivation, I think for pastors. If we can get our staff, our leaders, our ministry leaders, more people focused, that’s a huge win. And then secondly, what you just closed with Paul on, there’s probably someone in your church who has a technology job. And we don’t do this enough. We don’t lean into those unique people in our church who have these really great gifts that we don’t have, but to build a team to kind of demystify this, to start learning and taking first steps was just a fantastic suggestion. So thanks for that.
Sean:
Agreed. Yeah. And don’t say no for them. Too many times we step in and think they’re too busy. They couldn’t possibly help us with this, but a real leader sees a problem and wants to help solve it. So don’t say no for them. That’s really good, Amy.
So as we wrap up today, we want to say a huge thank you to everybody who’s been listening to The Unstuck Church podcast throughout 2025. Just your engagement with us, your support through this podcast, and hopefully the content’s been helpful for you. It just means a lot to us. So thank you.
Amy:
Yep. We are very grateful for all of you who listen and you’re leaders who are committed to leading healthy, growing churches. And if you’ve been thinking about taking your church through one of our consulting processes, whether that’s The Unstuck Process, staffing structure, multi-site, even our cohorts, now’s the time to reach out.
Sean:
Yep. You can head over to theunstuckgroup.com and start a conversation with us there today. Connect with me and I would love to share how our team might be able to help in 2026.
Amy:
Yeah. And Sean, I’m excited. Coming back next week for our fourth podcast in this series, we’re going to be talking about the spiritual openness of Gen Z and how churches can be responding. And we’re going to be joined by Chris Allen, one of our ministry consultants and a pastor at Centerpoint Church in Orem, Utah, which is located about five minutes from the Utah Valley University. And he is just going to have some great things to share with us. So you won’t want to miss that.
Leave a Reply