Five years ago, artist and designer Simon Weckert had an idea. He took a little red wagon, filled it with 99 smartphones all running Google Maps, and walked through the streets of Berlin. Wherever he went, the streets were empty, so much so that the scene was almost dystopian. His YouTube video shows clips of him walking down the center of vacant highways. It’s mostly silent, but for the wind and the wagon’s squeaky wheels.
The streets were empty for a reason: Wherever those 99 phones went, Google’s algorithm decided there was a serious traffic jam and sent drivers using the Maps app’s navigation tools on a different route. Vehicles were redirected to avoid Weckert’s wagon. He’d effectively hacked Google Maps.
Weckert’s point was that we’ve integrated this technology into our lives to such an extent that it holds unquestioned and even unnoticed power over us. It has become an unseen and unfelt hand guiding (or even dictating) our daily commutes. Without thinking about it—without questioning the reality or source of the algorithm’s power—we’ve offloaded certain God-given interpretive and cognitive faculties to a machine. In just two decades, Google Maps has grown to more than 2.2 billion active users, about one in four people on the planet who no longer routinely navigate for themselves.
Philosophers and anthropologists often describe our relationship with technology as co-constitutive. This means that technology makes us even as we make it, and understanding that reality is especially important now that we have entered the era of artificial intelligence.
In just the three years since ChatGPT launched, it’s estimated that there are nearly 800 million monthly active users. Google Maps took around 7 years to reach that milestone, and ChatGPT is now just one of many popular AI chatbots. Moreover, unlike Maps, chatbots will respond to any type of query, from “Make me a budget” to “Write me a sermon” to “Who is God?”
It’s essential for Christians to deliberately and carefully consider how this technology will change (indeed, is already changing) our daily practices, our societies, and the church and to do so before it becomes as unconsidered as Google Maps. Christian leadership must critically evaluate AI before it becomes part of the scenery.
Much has already been written about Christians who have decided to use or shun new AI technologies like Gemini and ChatGPT. But to me, as a PhD researcher studying these AI models, much more needs to be said about what will happen if we do use it—as many (perhaps most) of us will to one degree or another.
Technology changes us. But how, specifically, would this technology change us? And how will that change matter for Christian leaders, particularly pastors? On this front, I’ve found the thought of media theorist Neil Postman to be an indispensable source of wisdom. In 1998, as he looked to the horizon of the 21st century, Postman gave a talk in Denver entitled “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change,” and I’ll interpret these philosophical reflections for pastoral practice. Here are five things pastors should ask before using AI.
1. From Postman: “Technology giveth and technology taketh away.” For pastors: What essential spiritual or cognitive faculties might atrophy when we use these tools?
All technological change is a Faustian bargain, Postman observed. It comes with benefits and prices paid.
In the dialogue Phaedrus, which Postman cites in the first chapter of his book Technopoly, Socrates argued that the technology of the written word damaged the human capacity for memory and that it would lead to “the show of wisdom without the reality,” an effect that may seem even more relevant in 2025 than it did in 370 B.C. The telegraph gave rise to the instant transmission of news, but it also decontextualized daily life. Social media draws us virtually near our friends and loved ones, affording constant and instantaneous communication, but it has also driven us apart.
In June 2025, MIT published a study that used brain scans to compare the cognitive functions of three groups of essay writers: those using their brain only to write, those who used search engines, and those who used chatbots.
The results were dramatic: The “brain only” group showed the most intense and widespread neural engagement. Those using search engines landed in between, and the AI-assisted group demonstrated the weakest brain activity, largely offloading their cognitive work to the machine. In fact, these participants using AI struggled to recall their own work and reported the lowest sense of ownership.
Convenience comes at a price. And when this tech is used repeatedly, these cognitive effects become more pronounced. The researchers called this an accumulation of “cognitive debt”—a condition where reliance on external tools gradually replaces the cognitive processes required for genuine understanding.
Pastors won’t be different from other writers on this point. If they outsource the rigorous work of exegesis and reflection, their God-given faculties of interpretation and creativity will atrophy. Efficiency is gained, yes. But formation is lost.
2. From Postman: “The advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population.” For pastors: Whose voices are amplified by this technology, and whose are silenced?
There are winners and losers in every technological shift as technology redistributes power. The printing press, for example, took power from rulers, priests, and scribes and gave it to the people, contributing to the rise of the Protestant Reformation and democratic governance. Other technologies, like the social media algorithms that concentrate informational power in a few tech companies, redistributed power in the opposite direction. Technology is not necessarily just nor its effects reliably equal.
This reality calls for dogged adherence to a distinctively biblical ethic of justice. For example, the laws of gleaning in Leviticus 19:9-10 mandated that harvesting be intentionally inefficient to provide for the poor. This is a meaningful counternarrative to AI’s relentless drive toward efficiency and optimization. We must ask who benefits in the AI era.
We should also ask what biases generative AI imbibes as it is trained on the vast corpus of the internet. When we use these tools, we risk adopting perspectives distilled from the AI models’ training data, which is not reliably truthful, let alone biblical. If we consume AI output uncritically, we may all too easily become “conformed to this world,” in Paul’s words, rather than being transformed through the renewal of our minds (Rom. 12:2).
For pastors, this requires attention to how AI use can degrade our thinking by subtly amplifying some voices and silencing others.
3. From Postman: “Embedded in every technology is a powerful idea.” For pastors: What kind of person does this technology invite me to become?
Postman illustrates this third idea by expanding on an old adage: “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. … To a person with a TV camera, everything looks like an image. To a person with a computer, everything looks like data.” Each technology carries a philosophy that shapes our perception of reality long before we read the user manual.
Consider the mechanical clock, which shifted the perception of time from natural rhythm (Kairos) to precise, measurable units (Chronos). This embedded a bias in our culture toward efficiency and the commodification of time, altering professional and even spiritual life.
AI evangelists likewise tout incredible “productivity gains.” But that is merely the technology’s utility, not its embedded philosophy. The philosophy of these tools is that the world is essentially data, and truth is probabilistic and statistical. For the chatbot, the “right” answer to any question is determined not by some objective standard of truth but by what word is most likely to come next in other documents on related topics on the internet.
We are shaped by what we trust. The psalmist observes this regarding idols: “Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them” (115:8). Our tools too are not neutral.
If we rely excessively on AI—a technology biased toward efficiency and derivative summarization of existing data—we risk becoming derivative ourselves. Pastors must ask how these tools are transforming their worldviews and their souls. Does this emerging perspective align with biblical principles?
4. From Postman: “Technological change is not additive; it is ecological.” For pastors: What kind of church must we become to minister faithfully in the world made by AI?
Like it or not, new technology means a new world. “In the year 1500, after the printing press was invented, you did not have old Europe plus the printing press,” Postman illustrates. “You had a different Europe.” The Roman Road system didn’t just add easier travel. It created an ecosystem that made possible the rapid spread of the Gospel—as well as the efficient persecution of the church. It made a different world.
A major new technology doesn’t just add something, then. It changes everything, like yeast working its way through a batch of dough (Matt. 13:33). And it bears repeating that the emerging and ever-improving AI tools we are seeing are already changing the world around us. We can’t hide from this shift; we must understand its profound impact and act with wisdom and discernment, steering its use.
I’ve begun consulting with pastors and church leaders on how to understand AI technology and be good stewards of it. Most of the pastors I’ve spoken with have not written an AI policy for their churches, spoken with their congregations about AI, or even considered doing so. How are we to be good stewards if we don’t seek to understand the agents of our world’s change?
Ezekiel was called to be a watchman for the house of Israel (Ezekiel 33). Watchmen must understand the nature of an approaching threat or opportunity, and they are held responsible for making the threat known. It’s imperative that pastors understand this shift and actively shepherd their congregations through it and imperative that they speak prophetically into the new world AI is creating.
5. From Postman: New technology “tends to become mythic.” For pastors: How do we ensure this tool serves us and not the other way around?
When a technology becomes “mythic” in Postman’s sense, we cease to see it as a human artifact and begin to treat it as a force of nature, something inevitable. This is dangerous because we integrate that tech into ourselves and our daily lives without question, like the Google Maps users changing route to avoid Weckert’s wagon.
We’re rapidly approaching this point with AI. When we accept algorithmic verdicts as inevitable and treat the output of these AI models as oracular, forgetting it’s a statistical prediction rather than a thought, we engage in a form of idolatry.
Colossians 2:8 warns against being taken captive by “philosophy and empty deceit.” Understanding that every technology is embedded with its own philosophies and biases, this passage speaks meaningfully to our present age. Whether it’s a red line on Google Maps, an echo chamber on Instagram, or ChatGPT’s response to your last prompt, it’s easy to forget the nature of the technology and unintentionally elevate it to mythic status.
Pastors—and all Christians—must actively demythologize AI, recognizing it as an imperfect (if incredible) artifact of human invention. We must proceed with our eyes open so that we may use this technology rather than be used by it.
In the deserted streets of Berlin, Weckert’s wagon performance was a prophetic gesture. He wasn’t riding the wagon but pulling it, deliberately, to make visible the invisible hand of the algorithm. He mastered this tool to show how it commonly masters us.
This is the pastor’s calling in the age of AI: not to follow the blinking red line of efficiency down whichever road it may lead, but to be the one pulling the wagon and to disciple fellow Christians to do the same.
Of course, this is not the first time that God’s people have had to negotiate a new technology. Five hundred years ago, Martin Luther saw the printing press, one of history’s most disruptive technologies, not as a threat but as an instrument of the divine. “Printing,” he exclaimed, “is God’s ultimate and greatest gift … through printing God wants the whole world, to the ends of the earth, to know the roots of true religion.” Luther understood that this new power could serve the idols of the age or be mastered for the cause of the gospel. He chose the latter.
The choice for pastors today is the same. Not so much whether or not to adopt a new tool, but in what direction to pull it. AI offers a world of efficient, probabilistic, and often derivative answers. The gospel offers a world of hard, paradoxical, yet life-giving truth. The one offers efficiency. The other, transformation.
The question, therefore, is whether we will let ourselves be guided by a machine offering, as Socrates warned, “the show of wisdom without the reality.” Or will we take the handle of this powerful, promising new tool and steer it with purpose? The challenge is to pull on a straight path that leads not to the predictions of an algorithm but to the scandalous grace of God.
A. G. Elrod is a lecturer at HZ University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands and a PhD researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is the founder of Nativ Consulting, which helps pastors and Christian organizations navigate use of AI.
