Earlier this fall I created a post on LinkedIn that went semi-viral (by LinkedIn’s standards anyway). I quite accidentally shook up and popped the cork of that platform’s algorithmic champagne: hiring + AI + a ranty tone.
I don’t post regularly on LinkedIn, so I was shocked when it surpassed 150k impressions, 350 reactions, and 70 comments in a matter of days.
For the sake of transparency, here’s what I said:
Dear students who want internships:
If you copy the job description I posted online and paste it into ChatGPT and send me a cover letter that basically just spits back at me what I told you I’m looking for, I can tell.
If you did not read a single word of our website, or actually learn what we do before you apply, I can tell.
If your cover letter is generic, it might as well just be your resume in paragraph form. No need to send that at all.
If you address your cover letter “To whom it may concern” when I have clearly given my name and actual email address as the contact to reach out, I’m not going to respond.
I can 100% empathize with how difficult it is out there right now: I read the posts on LinkedIn by people who have applied to 100 jobs and been treated like bot by a bot. I have personal friends who are going through it.
But as one company that is NOT using AI to sort through applications or to “do interviews,” I can tell you a real human is rejecting the lack of effort.
The surest way to standout as AI proliferates is to be truly, completely, transparently human.
(Steps off soapbox.)
I love students, and mentoring interns, and I really wasn’t trying to pick on them: I want to help them land jobs.
But it’s that last line I’m writing about today, as I think it has implications for ministry leaders.
The surest way to standout as AI proliferates is to be truly, completely, transparently human.
Clearly the sci-fi era is here, and I’ve little doubt we should believe Sam Altman when he tells us his vision will come true (to some degree). That they will build the things they say they will build. I understand, eyes wide open, that we are in new airspace. The technocrats are promising a world where humans need never suffer, nor lift a finger, nor stomach ideas with which they do not already agree. Where diseases are cured. Where loneliness is solved. Where hunger is solved. Where you never have to linger long in wonder or have a question in your mind go unanswered. Utopia.
And I see the hand-wringing, the research papers that spew derivative, almost-true online articles and shorts. Have the last decades’ technology innovations made us better? Happier? Has reducing friction and saving time made us healthier? No! We have a meaning crisis, a loneliness epidemic, shorter attention spans and yet hours attentive to the screens we never leave out of our pockets… you know the arguments. Not to mention… can we even power it?
Somewhere between the “Can we?” and the “Should we?” macro questions, we are all having that lightbulb moment when an LLM saves us hours of work doing something we’ve done 1000 times. AI got here and ingratiated itself before the bigger questions have been answered.
I’ve no doubt these tools are going to occupy that gray space that so much technology falls into: useful to humans, and also, bad for humans.
I’m rehashing now what people far smarter than me have said, but I’m getting to my point:
The Church has a momentous opportunity in the AI era, if we are thoughtful in our response.
Our faith hinges on the overwhelming love of God for humans, made in His image.
We should be the most pro-human voices in the world.
We don’t have the same bottom-line as the world.
We don’t have the same vision of the future.
We don’t hold the idea that suffering is meaningless, or that ease is gain.
As young people struggle to find entry-level jobs because only the experienced are employable, with AI “gruntmen” to do the menial work…
And as robots replace careers in manufacturing, art and design…
And as lonely people take the bait that wearing an AI-enabled necklace around their necks and recording every word of their interactions will help them feel more connected, or at least, less alienated.
We need to SHOW UP.
We have spaces and rhythms where humans gather. We value apprenticeship and mentorship, the things the next generation needs and isn’t getting from the marketplace. We can make decisions about staffing, about meeting, about training, about loving, that remind us we are LIGHT in a dark world.
In closing, because here at The Unstuck Group we are ever-focused on practicality, let me leave you with just a few ideas about how this might play out at your church:
- Give your staff clear guidelines about what kinds of work you expect to be done by a human brain and where AI is acceptable. An example, “We won’t use AI to write sermons or curriculum, but we can use it to repurpose sermons or curriculum we created into other formats. Thinking done by people empowered by the Holy Spirit; iterating and repackaging by AI.” Don’t leave your staff to figure it out on their own. You will get widely different behavior by different people if you don’t make it clear.
- Keep celebrating human creativity and contributions by engaging people to make art to the glory of God: to write, create video content, create graphics, make music and more. Don’t replace human work with AI tools without serious reflection about what the real win is.
- Build an internship or residency program to invest in young people and give them real, entry-level opportunities to learn skills and leadership. Those opportunities are shrinking in the marketplace. We dare not reflect the world in this way.
- “Automate the transaction, not the interaction.” That’s a mantra of Jonathan Smith, the lead pastor of OneChurch.to in Toronto, and a ministry consultant on our team. Whenever AI is proposed as a solution to a problem, think people-first. Will the technology streamline a transaction? Will it de-personalize an interaction? It’s going to be a tension-to-be-managed, to quote Andy Stanley.
We can be truly, completely, transparently human, clinging to our understanding that to be human is to be spirit and body, made in the image of God.
Are there things about the future of this physical world that can terrify? Yes.
Was our hope ever in this physical world? No.
The Church will keep us grounded in reality if she remembers her calling.
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