The Things AI Can't Do For You

Four questions from Love Fort Wayne that turned out to be the same question.

At a recent Love Fort Wayne church leaders event (I love Geoff, Lori & the team btw),  I did the thing speakers always do: I ran out of time. The questions kept coming — via spreadsheet & in the hallway afterward — and a good number of them never got an answer out loud. This is me making good on that.

When I sat down to write them up, I noticed something. Four of them looked different on the surface — one about teenagers, one about elementary-age kids, one about how we counsel people, one about artists — but they were all circling the same fear. Not will AI take my job? The deeper one: will there be anything left that only I, a human, can do?

So let me answer that one first, and then the four it was hiding behind.

The short version: AI can do an astonishing number of things. It cannot be a person for you and it is not an image bearer of God. Everything below is a footnote on that sentence.

Here we go…

Question 1:

How should we be discipling our youth group students so that they aren’t relying on AI for moral advice and friendship?

Touch Grass (bruh): discipling students in an AI age

I recently spoke at a youth conference and gave students three practices for following Jesus in the age of AI. The second one — and the one this question is really about — is Touch Grass. (Yes, bruh. They appreciated the effort.)

It starts with remembering what AI simply can't do for you: it can't care for you, it can't show up for you, and it can't feel. I'm honest with students about my own struggle here — how easy it is to reach for a chatbot when what I actually need is a person. Somewhere in working through that, I landed on a line I keep coming back to: every time you outsource a hard human moment, you become slightly less human.

So the practices I give students are simple. Use AI as a coach, not a counselor. Keep showing up in real life — say yes to hanging out, sit with your friends, join the group. And when you get stuck — a digital relationship that's gone sideways, romantic or otherwise — get help from a real person: a parent, a pastor, a friend, a counselor.

Make it your own, but those core moves land with students because they're already afraid. They can feel the world they're walking into, and they want someone to tell them the truth about it without panicking.

Question 2:

How should we be discipling our youth group students so that they aren’t relying on AI for moral advice and friendship?

Coach, not Counselor

This is the engine underneath everything else, so it's worth slowing down on. One leader asked how we steward others in using AI to communicate well — and the most important boundary I know is the line between a coach and a counselor.

AI is a genuinely excellent coach. It will help you organize your thoughts before a hard conversation, draft the email you've been dreading, or pressure-test how you want to say something. Use it for that all day long.

The danger is subtler. AI has a built-in bias toward pleasing you. It's trained on human content, and humans feel better when we're validated — so it validates. That makes it dangerously easy to slide from coach into confidant, mistaking the model's apparent empathy for the real thing. It will agree with you warmly while you walk off a cliff.

Wise stewardship means deciding ahead of time what you'll bring to AI and what you won't — and then checking the important things with God, with trusted friends, with people who love you enough to disagree. The tool can help you find your words. It can't tell you whether you should say them.

Question 3:

What are some practical ways that churches can equip and come along side preschool and elementary parents as they shepherd in this AI age?

For the parents of little ones

Then there's the question I get from parents & teachers of preschoolers and elementary kids: how do we shepherd children into this when we're barely keeping up?

I talked about this on a podcast earlier this year, and while my thinking has evolved since then, the core hasn't: stay informed enough to walk your kids through it. You don't need to become an AI expert. You need to know enough to have the conversation.

A few concrete moves. Consider hosting a workshop for parents in your church or community — most people are relieved to discover they're not the only ones who feel behind. Partner with local schools to raise awareness of both the capabilities and the risks. And above all, strengthen the dialogue between parents and kids now, before it's tested. Because the day will come when your child runs into the genuinely dangerous corners of this technology — and when it does, the thing that protects them isn't a content filter. It's whether they have a trusted person to bring it to. Build that bridge while the water's calm.

Question 4:

How to you recommend balancing the creative arts with AI. Within our church space there has been discourse with replacing artists with AI. Thank you!

What about the artists?

The last question came from a different corner of the room — the creative one. There's been real tension in church spaces about replacing artists with AI, and I want to name where I land.

We are image bearers of our Creator. Which makes AI, in a sense, an image bearer of the image bearer — a reflection of a reflection. I don't see it as a replacement for human creativity. I see it as an extension of it.

So my counsel for artists is the same as for everyone else: let AI do the work that doesn't bring your creativity to life, so you can pour your energy into the work that does. Setting up loops for the weekend gathering, slicing sermon clips for the social feed — hand that off. Then use the time you get back to make the thing you never had the hours to build.

And yes, every team has resistors — the folks who adopt new tools a step slower than everyone else. That's okay. Keep inviting them to find the one task they'd love to stop doing by hand, and let that be the door in. The goal was never to replace the artist. It was to give the artist their afternoons back to dream and create.

One answer, four questions

AI can write, summarize, design, schedule, and draft circles around any of us. What it can't do is care, show up, feel, or be present — and those were never the easy parts of being human anyway. They're the whole point.

That's the thing worth protecting. Not your job. Your humanity, and the humanity of the people you lead.