More questions from Fort Wayne — this time about whether the Church should be in this “AI” conversation at all.

Last time I worked through the Love Fort Wayne attendee questions that were really about staying human. This is the second batch, and they pointed the other direction. Not what does AI do to us? but should we even be doing this? And underneath that: if we do engage, what's actually at stake?

Three questions, one nerve. Let me take them in order.

Question 1: 

You mentioned several times the idea of being cutting edge or catching up with society. I’m curious if the churches purpose was ever meant to catch up to society? Is it a worthwhile effort (coming from a gen z church leader who values AI!)

"Was the Church ever meant to catch up to society?"

A Gen Z church leader asked me this — and I loved it, because the honest answer is it depends. We're called to be in the world but not of it, and striking that balance is one of the oldest tensions we carry.

But here's the thing that reframes the question. Of all the major technological shifts of the last thousand years, the Church has gotten out in front of exactly one: the printing press. By engaging the Gutenberg revolution instead of resisting it, the Church put the Bible into the hands of ordinary people across the majority world over the centuries that followed. And it was controversial in its day — plenty of leaders questioned whether "the common man" should even be reading Scripture for himself at all.

I'd put AI in that same category. How AI gets installed into culture — how it shapes the way we gather information, process it, and decide what's true — is being decided right now. Choosing to engage gives the Church a voice in the implementation, the ideology, even the training of these models. Sitting it out hands that voice to someone else.

And our people are asking us to engage. The most recent Barna data is clear on this: those who hold a Christian worldview want their leaders in this conversation. They want direction, and they won't accept vagueness or passivity. If we don't guide them here, they'll find direction elsewhere.

So — is it the Church's job to "catch up" to society? Not explicitly. But we are called to go and make disciples of all nations. And Paul didn't stumble into Athens by accident. He walked straight into the Areopagus — the intellectual and cultural center of the known world — and quoted their own poets back to them. Why? Because he understood that engagement is the price of influence.

AI is ours to engage.  The question isn't whether we should “catch up”. It's whether we'll engage culture in this historical moment, or give up our opportunity for influence. 

Which leads to a more pointed question I got — phrased, in classic fashion, as:

Question 2:

"asking for a friend: why do you call Grok the moral cellar?”

Without a true North

The "moral cellar" line is half a joke (and yes, the fact that it was remembered it is doing it’s intended work here 😉). But there's a real point underneath, and it isn't really about Grok. I once asked Grok to describe its own moral constitution, and it told me, in effect, that it's anchored to a mission of understanding the universe, committed to truth-seeking without deference to any religion or ideology, and devoted to treating every perspective as equal — embracing, in its own words, the rejection of dogma.

Read that carefully. Apart from refusing to help with outright crime, it's describing strict moral relativism: everything is open, nothing is fixed. And here's the problem — any model that treats all perspectives as equally valid will eventually struggle with truth. Because Grok (or any similar AI model) refuses to anchor itself to anything stable, it's left without a true North.

That's useful for some things — raw comparison, stress-testing an argument from every angle. But it's a dangerous foundation to build on. History is fairly blunt on this point: whenever “everyone does what is right in their own eyes”, it's the least fortunate among us who pay for it first.

This isn't really a knock on one product. It's a warning about a posture. The Church has something the relativist machine structurally cannot: a fixed point. In a moment when the tools are infinitely flexible, that isn't a weakness. It's a solid foundation.

Question 3:

How do you handle the tension of the usefulness of AI with the truth that we were created to work? 

Created to work, cursed to toil

The last one is a million-dollar question: how do we hold the sheer usefulness of AI together with the conviction that we were made to work?

Both things are true. We were created to work — yet we were cursed to toil. Those aren't the same thing. I actually took this one to Gamaliel to chew on it (here's the conversation), and the thread I keep pulling on is that God's redemption story includes lifting that curse — returning work to something meaningful and fulfilling rather than mere toil.

If we're honest, not all of our work lands in the "meaningful and fulfilling" column right now. A lot of it is just toil — the loops, the formatting, the inbox, the busywork nobody was uniquely made to do. So here's the possibility I can't shake: what if AI is, in some small way, part of how that curse gets rolled back? What if handing off the toil is exactly what frees us to do the work we were actually made for?

I don't want to over-spiritualize a piece of software. But I'd rather ask a hopeful question than a fearful one.

Engagement, not retreat

Three questions, one posture. The Church doesn't need to chase every trend, and it shouldn't. But there's a difference between being of the world and being absent from it. Paul went to the Athens. The reformers picked up the press. Our moment happens to look like this one.

So engage it — anchored to the truth that doesn't move, and to the hope that even our toil is being redeemed.

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