[20 Minute Read]

The following essay was originally published by Christian Daily International (CDI) as a response to an article by MissioNexus President, Dr Ted Esler, “Proposing the AI-Native ministry strategy“. We also highly recommend reading Ted’s Substack article, “How AI is Going to Kill You“ and Greg Kyle’s CDI article, “Beware the Serpent in the Machine“, a concern for young people and AI use. 

Dear fellow pursuers of the purposes of God in the world,

Grace and peace to you in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Christian Daily International recently ran an opinion piece by Ted Esler on the idea of an “AI-Native Ministry”, which raised an important question for those of us working at the intersection of ministry, research, leadership development, and emerging technology.

Importantly, Ted did not argue for replacing people with machines. Quite the opposite. His vision is that AI should enable greater human presence, stronger community, and increased human agency in decision-making. That resonates strongly with what we are discovering through our own work in Africa.

Over the past several years, our research has increasingly focused on a deceptively simple conviction: we need to listen in order to understand, so that we can learn to ask better questions.

That conviction has shaped an emerging Continental Learning Ecosystem involving conversations with Christian leaders across Africa. The objective is not primarily to collect more information about African Christianity. There is already an extraordinary amount of information available. The challenge is different.

The challenge is finding ways to create spaces in which the knowledge, experience, questions, struggles, innovations, and wisdom already present within local communities can be heard for mutual benefit. And then, how might technology help us recognize patterns and connections within thousands of conversations without removing those conversations from the people and contexts that gave birth to them?

This is where Ted’s concept of AI-native ministry becomes particularly interesting.

1. Listening at a scale previously impossible

Aside from automated infrastructure maintenance work, our experience has convinced me that one of AI’s most significant contributions to ministry and research may not be its ability to generate answers or solutions, but its ability to help us listen. This is an important factor in the shift of thinking from a “ministry to” mentality to a “ministry with” posture.

Imagine hundreds of church leaders across different African countries and language communities participating in facilitated conversations about the challenges facing their churches and communities. Imagine if their communities were also included in the conversations.

Those conversations can now be recorded and transcribed at scale. AI can then assist in identifying recurring themes, comparing conversations across regions, surfacing minority perspectives that might otherwise disappear within large datasets, and identifying questions that deserve deeper investigation.

What previously required a research team months or even years to process can increasingly become part of an ongoing learning process with real-time feedback loops so the conversations evolve over time.

But we must note an important caveat…

• AI is not conducting the conversation. People are.
• AI is not deciding what the experience means. Communities and researchers are.
• AI is not determining what should be done. Leaders are.
• AI helps us see relationships within the information that human beings may struggle to see simply because of the volume involved.

2. From extracting knowledge to circulating knowledge

There is another dimension that becomes particularly important within an African context. For generations, research has often moved in one direction. Information is gathered from communities. Researchers analyze it. Academic papers are produced. Those papers enter universities, journals, conferences, and libraries. The end. Maybe they are read and cited in the academic whirlpool.

Yet the people whose experiences produced (and own) the knowledge may never encounter the research again. AI gives us an opportunity to rethink the entire research knowledge and application cycle.

The same research can potentially produce an academic paper, a leadership resource, a short training module, a discussion guide, a visual summary, an audio resource, material translated and contextualized for different language communities, even dramatized or sung if desired.

This means that knowledge does not simply move from the grassroots toward the academy. It can circulate and positively impact the communities intimately related to it, especially where advancing the gospel is concerned.

Local experience can inform research. Research can identify patterns. Those patterns can return to communities as questions and resources. Communities can respond to them. Their responses then deepen the research and ministries can better serve the needs of the community with the community— their physical, social, and spiritual needs.

With this, we move from a research pipeline toward a learning ecosystem. And perhaps that is one practical expression of what an AI-Native ministry could become beyond maintaining institutional well-being.

That said, our research experience also suggests several cautions that should accompany the AI-Native concept.

2.1. Intelligence as infrastructure must not become intelligence as authority

If AI becomes invisible infrastructure there is a danger precisely because it becomes invisible, especially if it becomes influential in decision making. Eventually we may stop asking where its conclusions came from.

For example, with our work with ministry-related research, the AI system can summarize 500 conversations and confidently tell us, “These are the five dominant concerns of African church leaders.” That statement may sound authoritative, but:

• Who participated in those conversations?
• Which countries were represented?
• Which languages were used?
• Who was absent?
• How were the questions framed?
• Which voices were easiest for the technology to interpret?
• And what culturally significant meaning may have disappeared during transcription, translation, or summarization?

In other words, AI can help us identify patterns, but pattern recognition should not automatically become interpretation. We still need human discernment and leadership.

Human beings, particularly people rooted in the communities being represented, must remain responsible for meaning. The moment AI moves from assisting interpretation to becoming the unquestioned interpreter, infrastructure has quietly become authority.

That is a line we should be very careful not to cross.

2.2. An AI-native ministry must remain context-native

There is a second concern particularly relevant to the Majority World (aka Global South). Most major AI systems are not culturally neutral. This is especially problematic for cross-cultural ministries.

AI systems have been developed largely within particular technological, economic, linguistic, and intellectual environments. Their training material disproportionately represents some parts of the world, while other communities, languages, oral traditions, and knowledge systems remain significantly under-represented.

This matters enormously in Africa. A conversation among pastors in rural Malawi cannot simply be processed as though it were equivalent to a leadership conversation in London, New York, or even Nairobi or Johannesburg.

Language carries culture. Stories carry knowledge. Silence carries meaning. Relationships carry authority. An AI-native organization must therefore also become deeply context sensitive—context-native even.

The objective should not be to make African knowledge more understandable to the machine. The challenge is to use the machine without flattening the richness of African knowledge. That requires local facilitators, local languages, contextual interpretation, and continual human verification.

2.3. Efficiency must never become the primary measure of success

AI makes things faster. That is useful, but ministry is filled with things that should not necessarily become faster. Listening takes time. Trust takes time. Community takes time. Discernment takes time. Reconciliation takes time.

Some of the most important moments in our research have not come from the most efficient processes. They have emerged when people felt sufficiently safe to tell their stories, challenge an assumption, disagree with one another, or ask a question nobody had anticipated.

The danger is that once AI allows us to process ten times as much information ten times faster, we start believing that processing that much information that fast means we have learned that much more. It does not. Information processing and human understanding are not the same thing.

Perhaps the measure of an AI-native ministry should therefore not primarily be how much work AI allows us to automate. To build on Ted’s hopes for AI involvement, a primary question should be: “What has AI enabled us to do that allows us to become more human, more relational, more attentive, and more responsive to one another?”

3. Toward an AI-enabled human learning ecosystem

As Ted noted, the question facing Christian organizations is no longer whether artificial intelligence will be used by ministries. In many respects, the transition toward becoming core to an organization’s infrastructure has already begun. Similar “AI-Native” thinking is already appearing elsewhere, including institutional discussions about redesigning work and governance around AI rather than merely adding individual AI tools.

For me, the important question is, “what kind of additional infrastructure we will build over AI?” Our emerging experience within the African learning ecosystem suggests a possible answer.

• AI can help us listen across countries.
• It can help us work across languages.
• It can help researchers recognize patterns across thousands of conversations.
• It can help connect people who are wrestling with similar questions without knowing one another.
• It can help translate academic knowledge into accessible resources.
• And it can help return knowledge to the communities from which that knowledge emerged.

I wonder if the most exciting possibility for our future is not simply the emergence of an AI-Native ministry in itself. Maybe it is the emergence of human learning ecosystems made possible by AI, which support “ministry with” objectives that aid human flourishing. In such an ecosystem, artificial intelligence does not become the voice. It helps us hear the voices that were already there.

And perhaps, in a continent as diverse, multilingual, relational, and rapidly changing as Africa, that may prove to be one of its most significant contributions.

Pray

• Pray for great wisdom and discernment for ministry leaders as they assess the AI benefits and risks for their organizations.
• Ask God to give you a spirit sensitive to how much you invest trust in synthetic intelligence to help guide your ministry (and life).
• Pray against the temptation to take short-cuts when the ‘long road’ can better lead to deeper relationships and personal transformation.
• Embrace aspects of AI use that you feel after prayer are acceptable for the furtherance of the gospel, the expansion of the Church, the unity of the Church, and the maturing of disciples.