Nick Skytland likes to ask pastors a matter.
“Have you ever considered that the largest mission field on this planet is nowhere within the physical world?” he’ll say.
“It’s actually the digital world.”
Usually when he asks that, the NASA chief technologist, whose day job is concentrated on getting astronauts back to the moon, just gets blank stares.
For a couple of days in October, though, Skytland was surrounded by individuals who do know the scope and scale of the digital world. And in the event that they didn’t reply to him, it was because they were busy working with artificial intelligence programs to develop real-life solutions to take faith to the digital mission field.
About 200 people gathered on the tech company Gloo’s headquarters in Boulder, Colorado, for the first-ever “AI and the Church” hackathon. Gloo, which is devoted to connecting and equipping the religion community, invited 41 teams to compete for $250,000 in prizes and $750,000 in additional funding. Skytland and a NASA colleague, Ali Llewellyn, cohosted the event.
The “hackers” worked on one in every of 4 challenges: streamlining church administration, equipping the church, deepening intimacy with God, and pushing “beyond boundaries.”
They lounged on couches and hunched over laptops at tables across the headquarters’ open workspace, a part of an old constructing Gloo renovated and modernized. Some wore noise-canceling headphones, blocking out any distractions from their work. Others chatted and made latest friends. Still others worked together on problems with their projects.
Basil Technologies’ team wrestled with the restrictions of AI-generated illustrations.
The faith-based tech nonprofit, with offices in San Francisco and Seattle, was working on a “kidechism”—an algorithm that will take complicated religious texts, akin to the Westminster Catechism, and make them easier for teenagers to grasp. The program they were using generated friendly, movable animal stickers to make the training experience appealing and interactive.
The AI produced great-looking sheep. Each had a definite face with a distinct expression. But for some reason, this system had problems with monkeys. They just looked weird. They bumped into other limitations with the AI, too.
“If you are trying to generate an AI storybook just blindly, it will possibly look really terrible,” Basil Tech’s chief technology officer Sang Tian told CT. “We distilled it to background and stickers because we realize simpler stuff like this, AI is more apt to do.”
Testing the bounds is an element of the purpose of a hackathon, based on Gloo cofounder and CEO Scott Beck.
“A hackathon allows the responsible utilization of AI to resolve some very practical problems,” he said, “and the advance of things like human flourishing and growth journeys.”
Not everyone seems to be enthusiastic about the probabilities of AI. A recent survey conducted by Gloo and Barna found that only 8 percent of Christians are involved in using the tech to review the Bible. And greater than two-thirds say they wouldn’t trust AI to show them about Christianity. Few are able to invite the algorithms to take over spiritual discipleship at their church.
But the hackathon organizers and contestants are taking the “If you construct it, they may come” approach.
A team from BibleMate, for instance, worked on a Bible study chatbot. Hope Media Group, which began in 1982 as a Christian radio station in Houston, worked on an AI-powered prayer guide. Dream City Church, a multisite Assemblies of God church based in Phoenix, developed tech that may produce customized spiritual growth plans.
Others worked on tracking volunteer teams or transforming a web-based sermon into social media posts. One project was designed to educate people in evangelism.
“Technologists are the frontline to assist our churches,” Llewellyn said.
One participant, Liz B. Baker, used her experience in corporate consulting and ministry to survey 52 churches, with a watch toward growth and discipleship. She found that a standard concern amongst pastors was whether or not their sermons had any tangible impact.
“Many of the pastors are frustrated that individuals leave church on a Sunday [and] go right back on this planet and forget what they’ve learned,” Baker said. “I’ve heard so many pastors really wanting their congregants to use what they’re hearing on a Sunday morning versus just hearing it and moving on with their lives.”
Baker said creating large amounts of customized content every week is taxing for a big church and nearly not possible for a small one. Maybe AI could help? She joined a team working on a program to supply content that encourages additional learning throughout the week.
Another team produced a program with an analogous idea, searching for to increase a pastor’s work into the digital space. Pastors.ai developed a tool that may answer theological questions from a selected pastor’s viewpoint by synthesizing that person’s body of labor. It won the hackathon’s award for “best generative AI tool.”
BibleMate won best product design, while Alpha UK took home one other award for a tool to coach small group leaders.
“Our hope is twofold,” Skytland said. “One, that we raise up a generation of technologists that need to serve and walk alongside the church. And number two, that we raise up churches which are using technology to achieve the world.”
Five other tech teams also won awards, including Basil Tech, which took home the highest prize of $100,000 for “best overall value to the ecosystem.”
Kidechisms has the potential to show spiritual lessons to many Christian kids, based on Basil Tech CEO Kevin Kim. He said it also shows the probabilities for AI—if Christians learn to embrace it.
“We took something that was inaccessible,” he told CT, “after which through AI made it accessible.”
Rachel Pfeiffer is a senior associate editor at Focus on the Family. She reported this piece from Boulder, Colorado.
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