Many people, especially Christians, have a lot of unanswered questions about using AI. What is the right way, and the wrong way, to use it? When does it constitute “cheating”? When is using it just laziness? At what point is the work done by it still considered mine?

That feeling is both normal and very common today, especially in those who care about integrity. We're not sure where the lines are. We sense there are important questions here, but we're not always sure what they are.

The good news is that this is not a new dilemma for Christians. Sure, the technology may be new. But the dilemma of how to live as a faithful Christian in an age of technological change is one that the Church has faced many times throughout its history. We're not starting from scratch. What we need is to apply the theological wisdom of the past to this new moment.

So let's do that. What are the questions Christians should actually be asking about AI?

The Obvious Stuff (and Why It's Not Enough)

AI can write, summarize, generate, analyze, and simulate. It can amplify productivity in ways we've never seen. Many people have even begun calling it a superpower. The ability to turn a forty-minute meeting into a two-page strategic summary in under a minute is remarkable. The ability to translate ministry resources into dozens of languages overnight, to equip a small church staff to do what previously required a large communications team, to help a pastor take a sermon outline and generate a slide deck that used to take an afternoon but now only takes minutes—these are genuinely good things. As the adoption of AI continues to spread through society, its faithful use is not a future concern but a present reality for many in your congregation.

So yes, AI can absolutely help human beings. The productivity benefits are real. The efficiency gains are real. The potential to accelerate mission is real.

But "it helps us do more" is not a sufficient theological evaluation. Christians have never judged tools by productivity and efficiency alone. We've asked deeper questions. And it's time to ask them again.

Does This Tool Strengthen Wisdom or Substitute for It?

The Book of Proverbs opens with a declaration that wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord. Wisdom in the biblical sense is not just information processing. It's not pattern recognition. It's the cultivated capacity to see rightly, to discern what matters, to act with understanding in complex situations. Wisdom is deeply personal. It grows through experience, failure, prayer, community, and sustained engagement with God's Word.

AI can aggregate information at a scale no human can match. But it cannot be wise. It has no fear of the Lord. It cannot pray. It has no stake in the outcome of its recommendations. It learns from data, not from suffering, joy, or moral growth. Researchers who study the impact of AI on the brain are now raising serious questions about what they call "cognitive offloading"—the tendency to outsource thinking to devices in ways that may atrophy our own capacity for deep reasoning.

Which raises a genuine question for Christian leaders and believers: Are we using AI to augment our wisdom, or are we using it to avoid developing it? There's a meaningful difference between using AI to gather information so we can think more clearly and using AI to outsource the thinking so we don't have to think at all.

The first can accelerate wisdom. The second atrophies it. And once you've lost the habit of thinking hard, it's difficult to recover it.

What Is This Doing to Our Relationships?

Christians believe that love is the fulfillment of the law (Romans 13:10). We exist for relationship, both with God and with one another. Community, pastoral care, spiritual friendship, accountability, presence…all of these are not incidental to the Christian life. They're central to it. And yet we are navigating an unprecedented loneliness crisis, both in the United States and around the world, with significant consequences to our well-being as individuals and as societies.

AI can simulate many relational functions. It can respond to messages, offer encouragement, and provide what feels like counsel. And increasingly, people are turning to AI not just for information but for companionship. People of all ages are increasingly using AI for companionship, noting significant feelings of emotional attachment because the AI is always available, always patient, and never needs anything in return.

That should give us pause. Because the question isn't whether AI can perform relational functions. It's whether we want to live in a world where machines are a ready substitute for human presence. Andy Crouch notes that genuine human connection is irreplaceable precisely because it involves vulnerability, being truly known, and truly knowing another (Andy Crouch, The Life We're Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World (New York: Convergent Books, 2022), 47–62). From a Christian perspective, real relationship—the kind that forms us, challenges us, and reflects the love of God—requires another person. A soul. Someone who can be hurt, and forgiven, and transformed. Real intimacy is formed through an ongoing commitment to one another through the rhythms of life, both the highs and lows. We deepen our relationships with one another, not by avoiding the risk of vulnerability, but by embracing it in all its messiness.

AI cannot do that. And we should be wary of uses of technologies that quietly erode the habits and structures of genuine human relationship, even when they offer something that feels relational in the moment.

Who Does This Serve and Who Does It Leave Behind?

The biblical tradition has a persistent concern for the poor, the marginalized, and those on the wrong side of power. The prophets return again and again to the question of who bears the costs of human arrangements, whether economic, political, or social. The New Testament echoes the same concern. If a technology produces winners and losers, Christians want to know who the losers are because we are called to care deeply for them.

AI is already creating economic disruptions. Entire categories of work are being automated or transformed. How much AI will impact the job market is uncertain, but what is certain is that it will. The burden of disruption rarely falls equally. 

Christians shouldn't pretend this isn't happening. And churches need to be asking: How does our congregation help people navigate this transition? Who in our community is most at risk? How do we serve them?

This isn't an argument against AI. It's an argument for asking the full set of questions. It’s not simply asking, "How does this help me?" but "How does this affect them?"

What Habits Is This Forming in Me?

Formation is a category the church understands deeply. We know that we are formed by what we repeatedly do. Practices shape the soul. Our habits have a profound impact on our spiritual formation. Fasting teaches us to want differently. Scripture meditation rewires the mind. The spiritual disciplines exist precisely because humans are formed by habit, not just by intention. This is not merely a theological claim. Even secular scholars note the power of habit in everything from our mental health to our physical fitness.

AI introduces new habits. The habit of reaching for a machine before thinking. The habit of expecting instant answers. The habit of consuming AI-generated content so frequently that we lose the ability to distinguish a carefully crafted human sentence from an algorithmically generated one. The habit of externalizing memory, creativity, and judgment until we're not quite sure what we ourselves would think if left alone with a problem.

None of these habits are inevitable. They're choices often made below the level of conscious awareness. Which is exactly why Christians need to pay attention. Formation happens whether or not we're paying attention. The question is whether we'll be intentional about it.

The world has plenty of people asking how to use AI. It has far fewer asking what using AI does to the soul. The Church should be raising that question loudly, wisely, and without apology.

Asking Better Questions

Let me be direct: I'm not suggesting that Christians adopt a posture of suspicion toward every AI tool. I use AI. I find a lot of value in it. And I think the church will discover significant opportunities to enhance our missional work through AI in the coming years (this is already happening in areas like Bible translation and online discipleship).

But the way we enter this moment matters. If we enter it asking only, "How can I use this?" we'll miss half the picture. If we enter asking "What is this doing to us?" alongside the efficiency questions, we bring something genuinely valuable to the conversation: a theological anthropology, a commitment to formation, a concern for the marginalized, and a vision of human flourishing rooted in the image of God.

The world has plenty of people asking how to use AI. It has far fewer asking what using AI does to the soul. The Church should be raising that question loudly, wisely, and without apology.

Because the tools we use always form us, in one direction or another. And Christians, of all people, should care deeply about the direction.

Todd Korpi, author of AI Goes to Church: Pastoral Wisdom for Artificial Intelligence, assisted with this article.