I was recently reading a friend’s blog… “A Voice in His Garden” and she was lamenting the growing use of AI to enhance worship.

To improve voices, to make the music more powerful, and often literally, as a way to gain more “followers”.

And I totally agree. In fact I think we already use way too much technology … so our music matches “the world”.
Because otherwise people won’t come to church.

But honestly I feel totally the opposite.
I don’t go to church for the performance.
I go to connect.
To connect with Yahweh.
To connect with my brothers and sisters, my church family.

I do want a sermon to challenge and inspire me.
But whether it has high tech, video enhanced overheads or not. Who cares.
If the apostle Paulus turned up at your church would you refuse to listen if he hadn’t prepared a power point presentation using all the latest techniques? Would you just “switch off” and browse social media on your smart phone instead?

That says more about you than it says about him.

Of course it’s tempting to use AI to improve our music, and our sermons.
I can easily imagine a lot of preachers now at least run their sermon through AI for a review and edit before turning up to church to present it. But how much longer before we start using AI to write it in the first place? How much longer before we use AI to write our worship songs?

To be blunt. I probably know more about AI than anyone reading this article. I’ve written advanced software for more than 40 years. I’ve even written software which uses AI in some cool ways. But not for church.

Despite the impression given by popular media, AI has no intelligence. AI cannot think. All it does, is remember every document it was trained on, and make statistical links between them. So if you ask a particular question, it finds the documents which have the most links to your question, and forms its answer based on those. It gives you the most probable answer.

AI has no soul. AI has no spirit…
AI cannot do what you can do.
AI cannot hear from God. AI cannot hear from the Holy Spirit.

But you can.

I’ve lamented in other articles about churches which run like businesses.
And the bigger the church or ministry, it seems the more we think we must improve our business practices if we want to run the church better. Boards of directors, budgeted expenditure for the next two years, even expecting people to make budgeted giving commitments for years ahead.

But that means that in the end we are only running a business, not a church.
If all we focus on is costs and returns. If all we stress about is staffing and resources… Where is our faith?

Where would we be if men of faith like George Mueller had run his ministry like a business?
What would Francis Schaeffer have created if he had focused on the business side of his ministry?
They created amazing, life changing ministries, by listening to the voice of God, and doing that, in spite of the “logical” business side of things which was telling them it was impossible.

Church is not a business. That should not be our focus.

Just to be clear. I’m not suggesting we reject all technology and we all become luddites.
But I am saying we must not follow the world and its obsession with things like AI, business modelling, or even social media. We must be different. We must depend on God. We must listen to him, and only do things his way, in his time.