Faith leaders bring ethical concerns, curiosity to AI debate at multi-denominational conference

[Episcopal News Service – Minneapolis, Minnesota] Some of the most tech-forward minds in the Protestant church gathered here this week at the Faithful Futures conference, where participants wrestled with the ethical, practical and spiritual implications of artificial intelligence. The Episcopal Church is one of four Protestant denominations that hosted the Sept. 2-5 conference. About halfway through, one of the moderators acknowledged that AI has advanced so far and so rapidly that most conferences on AI are no longer focused just on AI.

The increasingly pervasive technology is generating increasingly pointed debates: Can AI be harnessed to supercharge efficiency? Will AI worsen economic inequality? Are we treading an ethical minefield by embracing experimental tools developed by profit-driven corporations? How should we respond to the ecological impact of AI’s need for vast computing power? And how serious is the threat that AI “hallucinations” could harm users’ sense of reality or even cause them to harm themselves?

Faithful Futures’ scope was broad enough to pull on all of those threads, tied together in the theme “Guiding AI With Wisdom and Witness” that emphasized how faith communities are called to respond to this AI moment. Amid a wide range of perspectives, one point of consensus was that the church cannot ignore the rise of AI and its implications.

“What does it look like for God to be at the center of these tools?” speaker Jovonia Taylor-Hayes, a leadership coach and former corporate manager, said in her Sept. 3 keynote. “We should ensure that the technology supports, not replaces, spiritual beliefs.”

This was the second annual gathering of the Faithful Futures conference, organized by leaders from The Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church and the United Methodist Church. About 60 participants, split about equally among the four denominations, attended in person at Westminster Presbyterian Church in downtown Minneapolis. An additional 300 signed up to view and comment on livestreams of the week’s keynote addresses and moderated discussions.

The participating denominations also are separately in the process of developing and formalizing churchwide statements and resources to address artificial intelligence. Faithful Futures’ organizers sought to deepen those ongoing conversations, while encouraging a mix of caution and curiosity toward AI.

“It’s natural for people to show up to Faithful Futures wanting to learn more about how to use AI in their church, and I think you will find that here,” Corey Schlosser-Hall, the Presbyterian Church’s deputy executive director, said in his Sept. 2 opening remarks. “But the focus of our time here is less on the ‘how to’ and more in reflecting on the possibilities and the perils of AI as it meets and intersects with the wisdom of God and the witness of God’s people.”

Artificial intelligence has been theorized and pursued for decades, though in the past few years, AI has moved into the forefront of the cultural, political and spiritual conversation, most notably since the November 2022 release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4. That and similar chatbots broke new ground with their ability to parse vast troves of data and respond quickly and accurately to queries and to complete tasks, delivering their outputs in conversational language suitable for consumer applications.

Major tech companies are now in a race to develop and deploy a wide range of AI products, from Google Gemini to Meta AI. Although chatbots may be the AI many people think of first, the underlying technology is powering countless other tools, from voice transcription and translation services to the automated responses delivered in customer service portals.

It also is upending consumer behavior. An Adobe study, for example, found that use of AI to assist in online shopping has skyrocketed in the past year, with more than half of consumers expected to rely on the technology in 2025 to make purchases.

Robert Willer, the ELCA’s director for theological ethics, told Episcopal News Service that enormity of these changes is greater than we can yet understand. “I think this is transforming society in the way that the Industrial Revolution did,” he said on the first day of the Faithful Futures conference.

Denominations mobilize for churchwide responses to AI

Willer is among the Lutheran leaders who now are developing churchwide resources on AI, as mandated by the ELCA’s governing body, the Churchwide Assembly. The Presbyterian Church is engaged in similar work based on a resolution adopted last year by its General Assembly.

“There’s no rolling back the clock on technology – artificial intelligence is already reshaping the world around us, and like it or not, it’s here to stay,” the United Methodist Church says in an online resource compiled by its Discipleship Ministries office.

The Episcopal Church formed a Task Force on Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property in response to two resolutions adopted in 2024 at the 81st General Convention. It will report on its findings in 2027 at the next General Convention.

The Rev. Lorenzo Lebrija, a member of the Episcopal task force, serves as chief innovation officer at Virginia Theological Seminary and executive director of the seminary’s TryTank Research Institute. He also was the lead Episcopal convener of the Faithful Futures conference, and on Sept. 3, he led a morning discussion on how best to define artificial generative intelligence, or AGI.

He gave this definition as a starting point: “an AI system that can learn, reason and perform any intellectual task that a human can.”

A worst case scenario, Lebrija said, might be that as it learns to complete tasks faster, it also has the potential to rapidly break social systems, which in certain extreme scenarios “would lead to the end of humanity.” If that outcome is possible, people of faith might feel called to add their voice to the debate, he said. “Should we as a church stand up and say, hey, that’s not a good road to go down?”

Lebrija’s prompt generated much discussion on the relative threat posed by unchecked AI, with some participants noting that AI also has the ability to help humans achieve previously unimaginable advances in fields like health care and the sciences. Others underscored that whatever the value of AI, it is being hyped by corporations that need to make it profitable. Part of the hype is rooted in the potential to replace human employees with less-expensive automated functions, which could lead to an epidemic of joblessness.

The Rt. Rev. Nicholas Knisely, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Rhode Island and a member of the Episcopal task force on AI, said he was surprised by some of the results of a survey conducted by the task force. Respondents from older generations were more receptive to AI, perhaps because they grew up seeing technology as beneficial to humanity, from medicine to space travel. Younger generations, on the other hand, were more skeptical of AI and its real-world impact.

Knisely acknowledged that we still don’t know whether AI’s benefits ultimately will outweigh its risks to humanity, but he doesn’t foresee a potential doomsday in the short term. “I’m not worried about it now, and I’m not particularly worried in our lifetime.”

Victoria Linner, on the other hand, voiced some of her generation’s skepticism. At age 27, Linner said she is worried about potential loss of jobs and economic opportunities, if companies conclude the expertise of college graduates can be replaced in the workplace by AI-populated chatbots.

Linner mentioned the Episcopal-affiliated chatbot AskCathy, now known as EpiscoBot, which is maintained by Lebrija’s TryTank. The tool answers questions and performs tasks related to The Episcopal Church – it can even produce the text of a service bulletin for Sunday worship on command. Linner, a student at Virginia Theological Seminary, wondered whether a real-life Cathy who previously produced that service bulletin working for her local congregation will now be out of a job.

“Who is going to be impacted the most by AI?” Liner asked. “If entry-level positions are gone, how are you going to start a career?”

AI raises spiritual questions over what it means to be human

Much of the conference seemed to pivot on questions that defied easy answers. In an afternoon session Sept. 3, several church leaders who attended last year’s Faithful Futures conference in Seattle, Washington, were invited to give 10-minute presentations on their preferred topics.

“What happens to theology when the appearance of intelligence is no longer uniquely human?” said the Rev. Michael DeLashmutt, a theology professor at General Theological Seminary in New York, New York, who also serves as the Episcopal seminary’s senior vice president.

DeLashmutt argued that people of faith, in an era of AI, must not forget what it means to be Christian and to be human. “Being human means being relational, embodied, justice-oriented and open to God’s spirit,” he said. “So, I think the real risk is not that machines will become human, but that we will forget the fullness of what humanity actually is.”

Kip Currier, a computing and information professor at the University of Pittsburgh, warned that AI is being used by sports betting platforms to appeal to gamblers, including those suffering from addiction. Mark Douglas, an ethics professor at Columbia Theological Seminary, outlined the ecological impact of AI data center, which needs to consume massive amounts of energy and water.

The Rev. Andy Morgan, a Presbyterian pastor based in Knoxville, Tennessee, described himself as his denomination’s “unofficial AI person” and suggested that preachers should not be afraid of using AI to improve their sermons – as long as they establish boundaries to prevent delegating too much to the technology.

And Scott Lyon spoke of his experience founding Solace, a company that develops digital tools to support spiritual growth. He emphasized that congregations considering whether to add AI to their workflows should understand the “spectrum of trust” before granting the technology autonomy.

At the “instrumental” level, a congregation might use AI to simplify mundane tasks, like manipulating a mailing list of members, Lyon said. On the other end of the spectrum, Lyon advised extreme caution before delegating full autonomy to an AI tool in public-facing roles, such as a digital evangelism agent interacting with people on the congregation’s behalf on social networks.

The next day, Sept. 4, the Rev. Doyt Conn, rector of Epiphany Episcopal Parish in Seattle, led a morning session that posed another potentially troubling question for the AI era: If an artificial being could be created with human-like skills but without human flaws, then “what does it mean to be human?”

The group engaged in a lively discussion on hypothetical scenarios, such as whether the AI humanoid could be baptized or even ordained as clergy. Some questioned whether a “natural” human, made by God in the image of God, was still distinct from a synthetic creature made by humans in the image of humans.

The Rev. Patricia Lyons, who teaches practical theology at Virginia Theological Seminary, said the debate highlights two competing heresies – that humans are just spirits trapped in physical bodies and, conversely, that humans’ essence can be reduced to those bodies and what they do in the physical world.

Christianity teaches “the human person is a unity between spirit and flesh,” Lyons said, and “the resurrection of the body is the final sign that death cannot break that unity.”

Lyons told ENS after the session that she was excited for the church to engage in these debates with both curiosity and ethical concern. She shares some of the concerns but thinks it wrong to elevate fear of AI to the fear of death, which Christians believe Jesus has overcome.

“There’s nothing AI can do to stop the redemption of the world,” she said. “Our witness has to be curiosity, but it has to be curiosity grounded in our responsibility to the common good.”

– David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at dpaulsen@episcopalchurch.org.