Responding to AI concerns is a matter of pastoral care

Calling all pastors — this piece is for us. If you’re like me, you were trained by mentors, seminary professors and catechists to prioritize pastoral care within your ministries. Regardless of denomination, we were trained to give our ear to the needs of our congregants.

We were taught how to make visits to those who are sick and shut-in. We learned how to offer bereavement care to people who are living with loss. We found a rhythm of feeding our communities through food pantries and food drives. Some of us learned how to become advocates for our members through the work of lobbying and demonstrating publicly to get the attention of our elected officials so that the necessary policies might be changed for our communities to live well. For most clergy, that work has fallen under the umbrella of pastoral care.

But what if I told you that, in addition to our members needing their pastor to hold their hands through those needs, in this moment they also need their pastor to walk them through the implications of artificial intelligence? Yes, grappling with the implications of AI is actually a pastoral care concern. Why? Because the fast pace of technology has a direct impact on the personal and professional lives of our parishioners.

Our members have always looked to their congregational leaders to help usher them through unexpected communal moments within society. When natural disasters occur, we look to the church for assistance in recovery. When a global pandemic broke out six years ago, we looked not only to public health officials and scientists, but also to clergy to make sense of what we were living through.

When elected leaders choose to roll back wins that we thought were secure, folks have looked to the church to speak into that gap. Likewise, as technological innovation advances at an alarming rate, people are looking for hope, clarity and wisdom as they confront it. Friends, this is a pastoral care moment.

According to findings from the Pew Research Center, 53% of Americans responding to a June 2025 survey said that AI will worsen people’s ability to think creatively, and 50% said AI will worsen people’s ability to form meaningful relationships with others. Pew’s report on the study also said that “nearly four-in-10 U.S. adults say they engage with AI at least several times a day. This includes 7% who report doing so almost constantly.”

With so many people adapting to AI, it’s time for the church to grapple with the reality that we are in the midst of a seismic shift not unlike prior agricultural, scientific and industrial revolutions. We must all grapple with the ongoing momentum of this digital revolution. We wouldn’t leave our members to struggle alone with the changes brought about by the aforementioned revolutions. Likewise, we cannot leave our members in this moment.

I am encouraging clergy to take this conversation very seriously. This does not need to happen at the level of adaptation but at the level of implication. Clergy do not need to become experts in artificial intelligence overnight. But we can do what we’ve always done: Examine the implications of a particular social movement.

We might not be able to tell our members how to use AI perfectly, but we can hold open our offices if they want to discuss their AI use and how it affects their lives. We can help them ethically discern how far is too far. We can listen to their excitement around how much easier their lives are with AI while still guiding them toward reflective questions that interrogate how safe the use of AI is based on their particular personal and professional needs.

A blog post from Cornell University’s Brooks School of Public Policy explains, “Many Americans worry that AI could exacerbate inequality, threaten jobs, infringe on privacy, or make opaque decisions with serious consequences, often without meaningful human oversight. As one woman in her 70s put it, ‘It will eventually eliminate jobs. Then what will those people do to survive?’”

If someone came into your office with those concerns without using the letters “AI,” you wouldn’t hesitate to offer them pastoral care. When AI is involved, the needs are just as real.

I’m here to encourage you, pastors. You do not have to solve the problem or possibility of AI. No one is expecting that, much like no one expected you to become a medical professional, scientist or public health expert during COVID. The demand on clergy now is to point people toward the necessary resources and to walk with them through the uncertainty of this current moment.

We have the opportunity to lean into the hard work that data scientists, scholars and technologists are already doing. The paper just released by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, “Exploring the Impact of AI on Black Americans: Considerations for the CBC Policy Initiatives,” is a great example of freely available research on the topic of AI. This paper deconstructs the myth of tech being neutral and dives into how bias, discrimination, race, achievement and predictive data are built into AI results. There are countless resources similar to this one.

My call to clergy is not to become experts in the field of AI, but rather to treat the AI revolution as a significant shift — one that our members deserve to be guided through pastorally. May we each find ways to show up for our congregants as well as ourselves during this quickly changing, ever-evolving, digital revolution.