3 Questions AI Is Forcing Your Congregation to Ask

Lewis Center for Church Leadership

by

Local Church

Leading Ideas | May 12, 2026

The questions I keep hearing from pastors have shifted over the past year.

A year ago it was mostly tool questions. Which AI should I use for sermon prep? Can it help with the bulletin? Is it okay to use it for writing?

Now the questions are different. A pastor wants to know how to respond when a congregant tells him his job was eliminated and he’s wondering if he still has value. Another doesn’t know what to say to parents whose teenagers are turning to AI chatbots for emotional support before they’d ever come to a youth pastor. Another is trying to figure out how to lead a congregation when people can’t agree on what’s real anymore.

The pastoral work here is getting concrete about what trustworthy formation actually looks like, and saying clearly, before the confusion settles in, why embodied presence and shared history matter in ways a language model cannot.

Those are pastoral questions. AI just pushed them to the surface.

Most of the conversation in church circles is still about tools. Which chatbot to use, how to generate graphics, which translation software works for multilingual services. Useful, all of it. But those aren’t the questions that will define pastoral ministry over the next decade. The harder questions are already showing up in counseling sessions, small groups, and late-night texts. They fall into three categories I’ve been calling disruptions, and most churches don’t have language for them yet.

Disruption 1: What do I do when my work disappears?

The theology of work wasn’t built for what’s happening right now.

For a long time, automation went after blue-collar, routine physical work. The assumption was that education and knowledge work were protected. That assumption didn’t hold. The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs Report projects 92 million jobs will be displaced by 2030. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said earlier this year that AI could eliminate nearly half of all entry-level white-collar positions in tech, finance, law, and consulting. Cornell research found companies adopting AI have already cut junior hiring by about 13%. Job openings in professional services hit their lowest point since 2013 this past January.

This is moving up the skills ladder fast. And it’s not staying in the secular workplace.

When someone in your congregation loses their job to automation, they don’t just lose income. They lose the thing they organized their week around, the role that gave them a sense of contribution, often a major piece of their identity. For a lot of people (including a lot of church people) work is where they’ve been told their worth lives. Hustle culture. Productivity gospel. The glorification of busyness. The church absorbed those messages right alongside everyone else. And now many faithful, hardworking congregants are about to receive what feels like evidence that they don’t measure up.

Pastors who’ve done the theological homework here have something real to offer. The doctrine of imago Dei doesn’t attach human worth to human output. You were made in the image of God before you ever produced anything, and that status doesn’t expire with your job title. But that truth needs to be preached before the crisis arrives. Handing someone a pamphlet about their dignity after they’ve already been notified their role was automated is a little late.

A few questions worth sitting with as you think about building this into your teaching: Does the technology help people express their gifts, or does it eliminate the need for those gifts? Is your congregation’s sense of worth built on what they produce, or on who they are? When automation displaces someone in your church, what does your pastoral response actually look like? And when it starts touching ministry roles themselves, because it will, what will you say then?

The pastor with real theological answers to those questions, ready before the pressure is on, will matter more than almost anyone else in the room.

Disruption 2: How do we know what’s true anymore?

Pew Research found that 64% of teenagers now use AI chatbots. About 12% say they’ve used one for emotional support or advice. A 2025 RAND study found roughly 1 in 8 adolescents and young adults are turning to AI chatbots for mental health guidance, a number that climbs to 1 in 5 among 18-to-21-year-olds. Researchers point to the low cost, immediacy, and perceived privacy of AI as the main draws, especially for young people who won’t seek traditional counseling.

I don’t find those numbers alarming because teenagers are using chatbots. I find them interesting because they tell you something about what people are looking for that they’re not finding elsewhere. But there’s something in those numbers that pastors do need to think hard about. A generation is forming its relationship to authority, truth, and guidance through a tool that is confidently wrong with some regularity, has no accountability, and has zero interest in anyone’s long-term formation.

I’d call it synthetic authority. It’s genuinely new. The Reformation was partly a fight about who gets to say what the Bible means, but at least that fight was between people who could be questioned, challenged, and held to account. An AI can write a “prophetic word,” generate a theological explanation, or produce a counseling response with no person behind it. No accountability. No consequence. No relationship.

The church has always been a place where character is observable over time, claims get tested in community, and slow knowledge is valued overconfident-sounding answers. AI can generate a confident answer. It cannot generate a track record. The pastoral work here is getting concrete about what trustworthy formation actually looks like, and saying clearly, before the confusion settles in, why embodied presence and shared history matter in ways a language model cannot.

Disruption 3: What happens to community when connection gets easy?

The Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic in 2023. The data since has only gotten worse. A 2025 APA survey found more than 6 in 10 U.S. adults report feeling lonely or emotionally disconnected, and nearly 7 in 10 said they needed more emotional support in the past year than they actually received. A Harvard survey found 21% of adults describe serious feelings of loneliness. The number of Americans with no close friends has grown five times over since 1990.

The church should be the obvious answer to a crisis like that. But there’s new competition now.

The church that names this honestly, as pastoral diagnosis rather than moral condemnation of lonely people, and actually creates belonging that makes the frictionless version less appealing, has an opportunity that nothing else in culture has right now.

An AI companion is available at 2 a.m. A small group meets Thursday nights, requires showing up, requires vulnerability, and includes the real possibility of conflict, misunderstanding, and rejection. For someone already lonely and already scared of being hurt again, that is not an easy comparison.

Real love involves risk. The risk of rejection. The risk of being known by someone who might judge you. The risk of needing something from someone who might not show up. AI removes all of that. And because it removes the risk, it also removes the formation that happens on the other side of risk. Courage gets built through rejection, not around it. Intimacy requires being truly known. Reconciliation only happens if there was conflict first.

Frictionless connection is an escape from the conditions that make community possible. The longer someone lives in that escape, the less practiced they are at tolerating the difficulty of actual belonging.

The church that names this honestly, as pastoral diagnosis rather than moral condemnation of lonely people, and actually creates belonging that makes the frictionless version less appealing, has an opportunity that nothing else in culture has right now. Genuine community is irreplaceable. A lot of people have just forgotten what it feels like.

What to do with all of this

These disruptions are already sitting in your congregation. Not someday. Now. Job anxiety is real and rising. The question of what to trust is real and getting harder. Loneliness is real and the data shows it worsening.

The church has resources to address all three that no other institution in our culture has. Two thousand years of saying your worth is given, not earned. A community built around embodied accountability and observable character. A gathering place where real presence, real need, and real reconciliation are the whole point.

The pastors I’m most encouraged by right now are the ones doing the theological work before the pressure lands. Building a theology of vocation into their teaching before their congregants lose jobs. Creating discernment frameworks before synthetic content becomes impossible to spot. Investing in the slow, unglamorous work of genuine community before loneliness becomes the only story their people know.

It’s the oldest pastoral challenge in the world. The circumstances just changed.

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Kenny Jahng is Editor-In-Chief at ChurchTechToday.com. He's also the founder of AIforChurchLeaders.com. Kenny is a Certified StoryBrand Copywriter Guide and founder of Big Click Syndicate, a strategic marketing advisory firm helping Christian leaders build marketing engines that work.

This article is reprinted by permission from Leading Ideas, a free e-newsletter from the Lewis Center for Church Leadership of Wesley Theological Seminary and available at churchleadership.com.