"You want an AI Pastor, You Just Don't Know it Yet"
Cameron (00:01)
Hello and welcome to Thinking Out Loud. I'm your co-host Cameron McAllister.
Nathan (00:04)
and I'm your co-host, Nathan Rittenhouse. In this episode, we do a fun review of an article that makes the claim that you actually want an AI pastor. You just don't know it yet. Cameron and I try our best to make a good case of the value of AI in the pastoral role. And then obviously, if you've been listening to the show, it's going to take a turn where we offer some critiques. If you like what we do, continue to like, share, and subscribe. And if you want to support our work, you can do so by visiting www.toltogether.com.
Cameron (00:07)
How did you feel about having an AI pastor or an AI author producing for you spiritual resources? This was sent to me. So this is an article from Tony Kritz's Substack. And well, the title
Nathan (00:23)
I don't know that the title is worse than that Cameron. It's you want an AI pastor. You just
don't know it yet or something.
Cameron (00:29)
You want an AI pastor and you just don't know it yet. Yep. That's it. So let me walk you through the scenario that is, that's set up in, this sub stack and it is fictional. Masterfully done, but it's really, it's fictional and it isn't fictional. It's fictional in the sense that he, the gut Tony crits created a little story. It's not fictional in the sense that what happens in this story is happening now in real time. So it's not speculative. I'll lay it out for you and no, this is not an episode of black mirror.
Nathan (00:40)
Masterfully done.
All right, lay it out for us.
Cameron (01:00)
But he talks about a very, so in the story you're presented with this very successful kind of a mega church, multiple staff members, multiple programs. It's a huge sprawling institution. And the senior pastor has announced much to the surprise of the entire congregation that he is going to retire a little bit early at the age of 63 or something like that. And so it's a, it's a meeting with the elders and a consultant has been brought in an AI consultant. Now.
The stakes are high because this is such a massive sprawling institution, because there are so many salaries, because there are so many programs, they really can't afford to lose any donations whatsoever. This model depends on that membership. And they just know that if the senior pastor retires, they're going to see a drop in membership and they're going to see some drop, probably a significant drop in donations, which they can't afford. So an AI consultant is brought in and I can't remember the precise
Nathan (01:39)
membership.
Cameron (01:58)
We'll, we'll, we'll try to put a link here to this sub stack article so you can see it for yourself. You really should read it. The title of, of what this guy, the company, this guy represents is pretty brilliant and you'll get a chuckle. It's kind of dark too, but essentially what he says is you can't afford not to hire us. Cause what we're going to do is we're going to create ⁓ an AI pastor for your, for your, for your church. But this pastor will do everything that your pastor did only this pastor.
Nathan (02:01)
Yeah.
Cameron (02:27)
We'll do it orders of magnitude better. He'll cater to every different conceivable type of audience. You got a traditional crowd that wants the theological creeds quoted and a lot of church history. He'll do that in, well, it will do that in droves because it can draw from vast stores of information there. You have a more contemporary crowd that want good, concise, cultural engagement. It'll do that also. And it'll produce tons of blogs. It'll produce tons of podcasts. mean, just resource upon resource.
Nathan (02:56)
daily devotions.
Cameron (02:58)
daily devotions. and by the way, yes, you'll have to pay us, but what you will pay us will be a fraction of the salary of your current senior pastor. And so some of the
Nathan (03:08)
but we'll use some of his personality
and keep some of that. So there'll be continuity with the previous pastor. ⁓ Everybody will give feedback. the pastor will, the AI pastor will be an amalgamation of all the different, you know, personality types of thousands of people in the congregation. He'll reverse age. He'll reverse age.
Cameron (03:13)
Yeah, he has a kind of...
and his kind
of folksy style will be incorporated. yeah, but slowly we're going to reverse age the pastor. be a subtle, slow, backward creep. So all of this will be taking place.
Nathan (03:41)
Because 49 is
apparently the ideal pastor. A 49 year old who seems wise beyond his years is the statistical ideal for a pastor. So you got to get your AI pastor into that category.
Cameron (03:53)
Well, of the many kind of, well, one of the many realistic features of this piece is that the AI consultant is constantly pulling from data on what the public wants. And yeah, 49 is, they have found as the ideal age for the pastor, not too young, not too old, just that perfect spot there. So we'll, we'll get them to the place where, or it to the place where it's just, just right age wise.
So some of the elders who are older people shift in their seats, they're uncomfortable and they sort of raise concerns. Well, what if this isn't real? But they're all very feeble concerns and tell the very end of the story. And I'm kind of giving away the, it's sort of building up to this pungent punchline, but we're going to give it here anyway. You should go read the whole thing. But an elderly lady finally says, well, where is the Holy Spirit in all of this? And everybody, it's very somber moment, kind of crickets for a second.
And then the AI consultant sort of leans in and intones are all of our studies have shown that most people don't care about that very much, basically. And that's the end of this dark little parable that really isn't a parable. Let me say a few words. I'm going to draw my personal experience a little bit. I'll, I'll, I'm going to deliberately be somewhat cryptic to protect people, but I'll just say this, Nathan.
The reason when I read this, thought there's nothing far-fetched about this. This does not feel speculative. This is not like something out of the Handmaid's Tale is because I've sat in not several, but many meetings like this. And I was in the position of one of those hesitant older elders, although ironically I was the younger person in the room, surrounded by a lot of old people who were very enamored of this technology.
And the idea was, again, was, let's build a dedicated AI unit to take the place of this particular person and continue. And it'll be imbued with this person's personality. Now let's, let's bracket whether that personality here is, is serving a very unique function in that particular scenario. So we're going to bracket the philosophical questions that that raises, but yeah, this, the personality will be imbued in this unit and it will continue to produce resources.
And it will continue to produce amazing ministry. And so we'll be able to reach more people than ever before. The possibilities here are limitless. I've, know, lots of words like visionary were used. This is evangelism for the 21st century, all of that. And I, in those contexts, was told that I was negative, cynical, or that I just needed to be more engaged with the culture when I said,
Well, I started to raise just some of the very basic questions of, is this honest, first of all? And I was, and I was continually, they, the answers came like the answers of that AI consultant. Well, it will do this and this and this and this, and it will cater to this data set and it will answer here. And I eventually got to a place where I said, I'm not asking whether it will be effective. I'm not asking whether it will work. I'm asking whether it is ethical. And that's where.
I received basically answers along the lines of, our studies have shown that people don't really care about that.
Nathan (07:21)
Yeah, so it's a, it's more of a parable than a prophecy, I think at this point, because you're saying, know, prophecy would be say, this is coming and you're saying, no, this is already here and is part of the way in which these conversations are being happened, even within spiritual communities. the part of it that is, I think the part of it that's jarring is, is that when you look at technological transitions, very rarely do they just drop out of the blue.
There's always a lead-up or a build into it. The shocking part of the article is they're saying, know, what about, oh, they say, well, know, 30 % of your congregation doesn't come to church. They listen to your pastor on the screen already. So having a digital version, that's not a problem. And then for the people that are actually, yeah, you're already conditioned already, even with the biological, physical pastor that you have, most people are engaging with that pastor through a screen.
Cameron (08:06)
They've been conditioned, basically.
Nathan (08:19)
So even in the big auditorium or the multiple campuses, they said, look, almost everybody in there is watching on the screen, the pastor who might be upfront and maybe the first eight rows of people are looking up at the pastor, but those are all staff members or close family. They're not going to leave. you know, they're committed to making the church work. So a huge percentage of your congregation is already only engaging with the leadership digitally. So what's the difference?
And I think those are the types of ⁓ commentary, critique, or prediction here that are a little too on the nose of saying there's a way in which we've set ourselves up for this to even be thinkable. And this isn't like the future of AI. This is stuff we've already done.
Cameron (08:56)
Mm-hmm.
And I think one of the big catalysts in recent years was COVID, although this was already happening, but it happened in a big way when lockdowns took place. we actually, we did, I think we've done several podcasts about communion. That was one of the more interesting debates that happened during the COVID lockdowns was can we do digital communion? And I have friends who were very, very involved in that and were
became basically very disillusioned with their churches when they said, hey, go and this is, I'm not making this up. Run to your pantry. Got some crackers in there, go grab those. And you got a little bit of fruit juice or some wine over there. Just grab it and we're going to, I we're going to do the Lord's Supper. And for some of my friends, that was, that was it. That was a bridge too far. They thought, no, this is, we have different understandings of the Lord's, not only the Lord's Supper, but how we worship physical presence. Yeah.
Nathan (10:01)
But.
But even before that, there was that whole brouhaha about the Catholic communion app. This was pre-COVID where you could basically take communion through an app on your phone. there were no physical... I mean, there's some significant theological issues even with Catholicism for that. what I'm saying is it's easy to trace the choices that we've made in the past that lead up to these moments.
And so I just want us to take a little bit of responsibility for the way in which we've effectively used humans in many ways. We have already been using humans as non-humans. And so to think we're going to replace this human with a digital representation of the human, which is the way in which we've been engaging with humans, is not a big step. It's kind of what we've been doing.
Cameron (10:58)
Right. It's not.
We've been on this trajectory for quite a while. You and I are both reading Paul Kings North's new book against the machine. And toward the end there, I'm not giving too much away here, Nathan, this will come as zero surprise to you, but he cites some pretty exotic examples of AI Catholic priests. And not now. There's, there is a spectrum. Not everybody is in support of this kind of stuff, but there, of course there are some earlier adopter types, even within monasteries who
applaud this and they say, this AI priest can't, you wouldn't believe how many people he can bless or it can bless. You wouldn't believe how much more efficient and effective this is. in other words, I'm only saying that just to say this is so widespread now. You're not getting away from it anywhere. It is here. The future is here.
Nathan (11:43)
It's not, saying it's already here. It's already here. the thing of it,
and so here's the thing. It's easy to be like, ⁓ you know, the, the, the fear part of the paranoia about it. Like, no, the way that technologies get implemented are through choice. We want it. We ask for it. In fact, we're usually willing to pay for the thing that we ended up complaining about taking over our lives. So it's a weird form of, it's,
You're not rebelling against it. You're paying for it. Is the... Okay, hit me.
Cameron (12:15)
Okay.
Here's a thought experiment, Nathan.
All right, we're both going to do something that will be uncomfortable for us first. In a spirit of good faith, let's both of us try to be devil's advocate for just a second for this technological development. And let's try to steel man some of the arguments in favor of it. Because I think it's going to be both from our tone, but for people who have been listening to us for a while, it'll be very obvious.
where we come down here. So let's make a case for it as devil's advocates and then we can move into why we both believe this is misguided and some of the reasons for that. So why don't we make some arguments in favor of, yeah, I'd love to hear you go first and I'll chime in.
Nathan (13:04)
Sure. You want me to go first?
Okay,
this is, ⁓ again, there's nothing new under the sun here. So this is saying, hey, look, ⁓ the future of the church are young people. And in fact, as that group ages, increasing percentage of humanity is engaging with all information and with all people already through digital formats, through screens. The vast majority of our human interaction is already mediated through digital technology.
⁓ If we want to be relevant up to speed if we want to be able to speak in the lingo if we want to have a customized expression of Think in the past Cameron how long it took a missionary? To travel to another country you might have a Wycliffe Bible translator who lived on the edge of the village for five years Just to get the first fragments of an understanding of the language before the work even started and if you're looking at rapidly changing cultures about globalization and then even changing dialects and interest within
young adults, why would you not want some format that could precisely and in a targeted sense ⁓ preach the gospel in a modern lingo, parlance, and language with all the cultural references instantaneously available to them with an already backed up digital profile of what persuades them the most? Why would you not use that to deliver something that you thought was beneficial for their salvation and
Cameron (14:12)
Mm-hmm.
Nathan (14:34)
eternal security in their way of life now. Like, come on, why wouldn't you want that? It's the mission. We'll take all the things that we've already been doing, mythologically, and say, where are the people actually at? What's the culture? What's the language already? And then we can, with precision, ⁓ don't even have to get on an airplane, deliver the good news.
Cameron (14:58)
I think that's really well stated. This is missions for the 21st century. think to go along with that, Nathan, as the devil's advocate here, I would add also that the ⁓ unbelievable speed of our culture is a real factor. And you may not like it. I don't like it. Social acceleration is however, a fact of life. And the truth is, if we want to meet that intense demand for speed, for more resources, for more information,
I mean, for all the talk of dwindling attention spans, we are a population of zealous information goblers. We have to be able to feed that intense online monster. And this is how we can do it. It's not possible for a human. No human is up to that task. No human can produce the resources needed for the today's consumer demands. And this can.
Nathan (15:41)
Mm-hmm.
Okay,
if you're thinking that we're over blowing this, so NPR had an article yesterday, Cameron, that one in five high school students either is in or knows somebody who's in a romantic relationship with an AI chatbot.
So this isn't future tense where the culture is at. mean, think how cool it could be to have an AI pastor that each morning could send a personalized video to every member of the congregation asking them about how their knee is doing after the surgery. Your granddaughter is having the tonsils taken out. That could remember 2,000 people's personal relationship situations and issues and life expectancy and have a casserole Uber Eats dropped off. I mean, you could
Cameron (16:16)
Hmm.
Nathan (16:33)
You could so, even for the not the young people, you could so precisely digitally ⁓ serve the emotional and physical needs. If you had a, an AI pastor who just could do it all.
Cameron (16:49)
Not to mention, let's just add to that, you are often, you find that dizzying pace produces all sorts of crazy questions, never before anticipated when you're speaking to young people in your life or really just anybody. Well, this AI technology can get answers instantaneously to all the latest problems, all the latest sexual trends, all the latest philosophical issues, all the latest theological and archeological issues, everything.
It's got that it's got hive brain on steroids. Why wouldn't we leverage that? Yeah.
Nathan (17:22)
Okay, how about this one?
Are our AI assistants already our pastors? So why wouldn't we add theological content into that? If you're looking for the way in which we use AI assistants, all the way back to Alexa, there's a sense in which it becomes the focal point of where we ask our questions. We've already been doing this. So why would we not just embrace adding a theological and Christian perspective into
Cameron (17:37)
Expand on that a little bit. What do mean?
Mm-hmm.
Nathan (17:57)
and upgraded Alexa-style format.
Cameron (18:00)
Yeah. And not to mention Nathan, numerous pastors, more than we would want, more than would admit it, are having chat GPT or whatever AI software they're using, you know, they, of preference, they're already having it make their sermons, write their books. That's also happening. Yeah, we're there. The future is now. You're living in there.
Nathan (18:19)
So we're already here.
So just call a spade a spade and you don't
have to hire the person to act like they're doing it.
Cameron (18:29)
So in this story, this parable, Nathan, the AI consultant is just being a realist and saying, this is the world you live in. Hey, and this is the conundrum that you're facing right now in this particular institution as a church. And you will, you're not going to survive unless you capitulate or unless you adopt this, this technology, if you can't beat them, join them. All right. Anything else you want to add there, Nathan? I think we've made things pretty interesting.
Nathan (18:56)
That's what I'm trying to think. Did we?
We tried our best. I'm almost convinced. Okay.
Cameron (19:01)
Now, actually, let me add something. Okay. Let me add
something because here's, because you and I are philosophical and theological nerds. So we're going to, our objections will be, many of them will be ethical and theological and philosophical. Somebody might add to that if they're a little bit more informed, they might say, look, Cameron, Nathan, if we are building this dedicated AI unit on a distinct human personality,
And we are feeding to it the books this personality has produced, the sermons this personality has written. How can we not say that it's completely other than that person? I mean, after all, it will use all of, in this case, this pastor's, it'll use all this pastor's turns of phrase, even, even his folksy style, even one of the recurring jokes that will be integrated in there. This will be so unbelievably real that if you were in an email dialogue,
You would be fooled and have no clue that you're speaking to an AI unit. So my question is, what's the difference? How is that not this guy's personality? We're doing it ethically. It's not like we're feeding it foreign stuff that we've made up or anything like that. We're doing it the right way.
Nathan (20:03)
Well, okay.
and a guarantee of no moral failures or embarrassing scandals.
Cameron (20:20)
Yes, that's actually in the parable as well. Yeah. You've got a lot of leaders who are following and they're yeah, big liabilities. Not that, not this thing. Okay. I think so we're done.
Nathan (20:21)
That's a big one too.
Okay, we're done here. It's been a good podcast. Now
everybody go out and get your AI pastor.
Cameron (20:37)
Okay. So where do we go from here? Well, part of why we did that, it's important to do an intellectual exercise like that just to see, because these are the arguments that we're hearing. I've heard many of these. not making these up. We're not pulling rabbits out of hats. These are the arguments that are out there in circulation. I think evangelicals in particular are very susceptible to them because evangelicals are as a group, activists.
More activists and less reflective. This was an observation that came from Mark Knoll several years ago, and I think it's really perceptive. It's not that evangelicals don't have an intellectual culture. They do now, but it's relatively young. as a group, evangelicals are very good at mobilizing movements. So that's a great strength, but it's also a weakness sometimes. It's a weakness when we're confronted with something that is genuinely new. AI is genuinely, it's, it's gen, we're, facing some stuff that's genuinely new here.
And you have a kind of utilitarian mindset that basically does say, this is incredibly effective. Think about how this could reach people. Let's back up for a second, Nathan. You know, one of the key questions of our age, you know, we've, we've mentioned them on the podcast. A lot of people point to what does it mean to be human? Yep. That's a big one. What is, know, what is the good life or what's a meaningful life? But I think another one that's huge right now is what is real.
And that's only going to become, yeah, duh, duh, duh. And that's only, I mean, it's, that's a huge issue now. It's only going to be become more pronounced. No.
Nathan (22:02)
Dun dun dun.
Did we talk about Sora 2 yet? Have we talked about Sora 2? Have you watched
any of the Sora 2 videos? So Sora 2 is a... ⁓ you got to do this, Cameron. ⁓ So this is entire videos just with word prompts. And I guarantee you that you would not be able to tell that they're not humans ⁓ all the way through. yeah, so if you're listening to this and you haven't yet, just YouTube Sora S-O-R-A 2.
Cameron (22:18)
No.
Nathan (22:38)
And there's an app now where you can just build totally fake and crazy. mean, a lot of fun stuff. That's phenomenal level video that has no burial. But I sat down with my kids and, like, so you can watch Ronald Reagan talking about how the moon landing was faked. mean the whole thing and just say every single video here, not only was there not a real actor involved, none of the content or none of this is true.
and a ton of more fun. It's dogs driving cars and Ronald McDonald fleeing from the police and you know,
It's entertaining, but it is so lifelike in this video that there's no way you can see that you would be able to tell that it's not. So the question, okay.
Cameron (23:14)
I did.
I did see one of these. I
didn't know it was Zora 2. was, you know, who YouTube or Jake Paul is. It was Jake Paul coming out of the closet. And I, and and I saw it and here's what I thought. I didn't think the video itself was AI or fake. I thought it was a, I thought he was, he was, it was a prank or a skit that he was doing. But then when the presenter showed it, he goes, look at this.
And he said, I'm about to blow your mind. And so I watched it. thought, that's a pretty funny skit. You and he says, it's not that it's not what he's saying. It's that the whole thing isn't real. And there's no way you knew that. And I really was, my mind was blown. It looked.
Nathan (23:55)
Right. And it didn't...
it didn't... it's not video editing is the difference. It's somebody typing a prompt. There's no visual input.
Cameron (23:59)
Perfectly real, yep.
So the mind reels with what the possibilities are there. so let's back up again to that question of the big, one of the big issues, what is real? And as God's people that we are devoted to Jesus who said, I am the way, the truth and the life. How does that, that casts a shadow.
Nathan (24:08)
to generate it.
But no, no, no, this is great. I know it is though. We're we win this this is all good news I'm so glad you asked actually I was ⁓ Speaking at a retirement community last night and got home about midnight last night So this is all fresh on my mind now that I'm awake and people were asking about AI and reality and how we know it's real and so let me just frame this in a couple ways and then get to the heart of your question I was pointing out that And we've made this distinction before that the reason that a zombie seems weird to us
Cameron (24:38)
on on a lot of this.
Nathan (25:07)
is because it's presented to us as a animated human body without consciousness. A ghost is weird to us because it's presented to us as consciousness without a human body. So they're the opposites of each other and both are intended to be creepy. Why are they creepy to humans? Because we believe as Christians that humans are meant to be integrated wholes. Consciousness, mind, body, soul, the whole package in one. And so zombies and ghost,
take extreme polar opposites and slide the scale all the way to the spiritual or all the way to the physical. And that weirds us out. AI is new in that it mimics human consciousness without any lived experience or practical wisdom. We're not used to information that's generated without a reference to reality that's come from an embodied. We're used to humans being the observer of reality and then generating that information. And so,
That's a new thing where we now have legitimate information in human form that has the similance digitally of the human body and the information of a human mind, but doesn't exist in real life and doesn't actually have any human experience. Now, that can all be programmed in. You've probably seen the uproar around Tilly Norwood. Have you seen this? This is a totally fake actress. And then you have, you know, Hollywood like, no, you can't use. It's like, well.
Cameron (26:24)
Yes. yes.
Nathan (26:30)
We'll have to teach them how to dig coal or something. I don't know what we'll do with our actors and actresses in the future. But the, power the plants that run the AI systems. But the, thing of it is, is so, so you have that element. And, and as I'm thinking about this, I keep coming back to a Charles Taylor thought and here's, here's my summary. The X-Carnation is complete.
What Charles Taylor said that set us up in the theological movement and so when you're talking about Christ coming in the physical body the incarnation is that Christianity by and large has Ex-carnated into out of the flesh so carne flesh the excarnation so incarnation Jesus coming in the flesh we've ex-carnated meaning that we have made Christianity all about ideas and If Christianity only is about ideas and has no physical manifestation or representation of itself in the physical world
then it will be easy to replicate that digitally or through artificial intelligence, if it's just about ideas. So here's the crazy example. You talked about, you do a digital online communion? I'm part of a church that when we do communion, we wash each other's feet. That's very hard to do digitally. And so what I think the future of the church will be, my experience, Cameron, in the last five years has been a total shift
Cameron (27:30)
Mm-hmm.
Nathan (27:51)
from working with people who had a very ⁓ reductionistic, materialistic vision of the world and saying, hey, there's a second story here. There's an upstairs. ⁓ There's a spiritual reality to that. ⁓ And so, I felt like I was pulling in that direction. Now, I feel like I'm pulling back in the other direction of saying, no, there's a physical world that is good. ⁓ And it's not because they've overly spiritualized in Christianity. It's that they've embodied a non-physical digital world.
that mirrors and mimics an addiction to a spiritual reality. But the fact of the matter is that most of the people already living in those digital spaces are not meaningfully engaging the physical world already. And so the role of the Christian is to stand in the tension between an extremism that says it's only raw matter or it's all theoretical and all spiritual and all digital. And we live in the tension of ⁓ trying to hold on to both of those.
Cameron (28:33)
Mm-hmm.
Nathan (28:47)
and call people in both directions back to reality. And it's been unique for me to just live through the shift in which it's the same tension, but the direction that I'm pulling is different to say, come back down to the physical world, hug your grandma, you know, as a, as a manifestation of the goodness of like Jesus came into the earth. And if you zoom way back on the biblical story is that spirit precedes matter. It's not saying that spirit is more real than matter.
Cameron (28:57)
Mm-hmm.
Nathan (29:14)
It's that spirit precedes matter. so true spiritual spirituality has a physical manifestation. And yeah, that's it. Yeah. Pure spirituality has physical manifestation in order for to be a biblical and God ordained way in which we engage that. so at the point that your church slides purely into the digital space, it's mimicking the spiritual in that it's detaching itself from the physical implications of it. So
As long as we have physical bodies that we physically care about and want to engage with the physical earth, the church is going to have to do that work. So that's part one is the call back to the physical. The second element of this is what does happen Cameron, when all forms of digital engagement we assume to be fake. There might be in five years, a massive demand for in-person face-to-face human community.
And you know who's been practicing that for like 2000 years? The church. You have an idea. And so I'm wondering is, there a possibility that this thing burns it out itself out so fast that you're going to have a huge amount of people who don't care whether or not what they see on their screen is true or not. If it's entertaining, so be it. But then there will be people who are like, wait a second, I'm missing something here. And where do we go? And so that's a, another issue we got to think through or prepare for, or look forward to.
Cameron (30:14)
I have an idea. The church. ⁓
I think
we're in the era of, we're already there. And so we're already there in terms of all this digital technology and people buying in, but we're already there also when it comes to people who want the real. Like you just said, there are growing numbers of people who want to live smaller, slower, and more connected with human beings. ⁓
intimate relationships that is already happening and younger people are leading the charge and yes, there are numbers and data that bear that out as well if that's what you must have. But Nathan, mean just so many good thoughts that you offered us there, obviously fresh on your mind from this very unique event that you just did. But we also can think about some of the main issues that we're dealing with in our society, people feeling intensely lonely, scared and empty inside.
And if we think about that, we can also see how all of this stuff may seem to ostensibly be very effective, but in the end, it's only contributing more to that disconnection, to that isolation and that loneliness. I pastoral work is all about the mysteries and ambiguities and messiness of face-to-face interactions with people whom you know.
It's visiting people when they're sick. It's doing their funerals. It's doing their weddings. It's all the great rites of passage of life. It's all of the awkward stilted conversations and all of the bad coffee. I mean, that's a kind of recent development, but that's all part of it. But that's also what we need. We need to know and be known by others. This is what grounds us, but also that's because we're persons.
Nathan (32:24)
But that's not a paid pastor's
job. It's a human, it's a Christian role in the world. You don't need to be on the paid staff of a church to get your children up and rub their heads and give them a kiss and make them breakfast and hug them and you know, onward you could go with a thousand different other examples of the way we were built to engage the physical world as physical creatures and it was declared to be good.
Cameron (32:48)
Yes. And the end. The end. One of the key challenges of our day is to be fully human and to recognize that this is a good thing.
Nathan (32:49)
The end.
and
And we believe in a physical resurrection and a physical long-term recreation also. So the physical world is going to a prominent part of your future.
Cameron (33:06)
And I'm gonna, yes we do.
So one kind of sobering parting thought, but I think that it's hopeful in the sense that it provides some clarity here as well. But I think there's an irony here that a lot of people who think that this, all of this, the embrace of all of this is going to be helpful for the church are actually walking in lockstep with.
tech bros and various others who have a very different vision of reality. mean, in essence, if you look at some of these people, whether we're talking about Ray Kurzweil or Sam Altman, some of them, mean, essentially their goal, their aspiration is to build God. Many of them use that very terminology. So they would say, hey, we want to build God or we want to usher in the singularity or whatever utopian vision.
Nathan (33:55)
Mm.
Cameron (34:04)
Christians or self-identifying Christians would say, well, yeah, but we're just going to use this to direct people toward, ultimately toward salvation. So again, both are saying technology will bring us salvation. So you want to be very careful who you're walking with in all of this. Whose vision are you buying into? That's a key question that should orient and frame and really reframe this for us, I think.
Nathan (34:18)
So how do you, let's.
Let's go real quick as we close here, some practical ways which we can rebel against this. So if we don't want to have an ex-carnated faith, if we don't want it just to be about ideas, which I would say is not just like Jesus idea, it's about, you know, true religion, orphans, widows, actual work in the world. But there are other things that you can do personally to start on this, um, that aren't super extreme. Maybe, um, at least once a week, you want to try kneeling to pray. What are the things you can do with your body?
⁓ You can go back through, you can say, I'm going to be more intentional about giving people good hugs at church. I don't know, it depends on your personality here. But just think about where are the ways in which we can engage the physical world that's connected to our spirituality in a sense that I think praying for our meals when we're eating physical food and giving thanks for that is a crucial one of putting ourselves in a posture of giving thanks for the physical world around us.
And so there are these habits and these patterns that have been standard operating procedure through the history of the church, which by and large hasn't seen a big division between the spiritual and the material. And so we're pretty good at this historically. Let's not lose some of those things and ⁓ maybe dig up some of these older practices that you can do with an extra sense of ⁓ grin in your soul as you see it as a form of rebellion against a world that is trying to shoehorn us into.
thinking of humanity only in digital terms.
Cameron (36:07)
Be careful with greeting one another with a holy kiss though. That can be. I'm just kidding. Absolutely. You've been listening to Thinking Out Loud, a podcast where we think out loud about current events and Christian hope.
Nathan (36:10)
You should ask permission first.
I mean, New Testament only says to do it six times, so it can't be that important, Cameron.
Cameron (36:27)
Ha