The Only Thing That Breaks Our Necks Is Progress When It Speeds.

One of the qualities of technology that needs to be held in tension by the church is that it progresses. That progress is a feature and not a bug. Everything from internet servers to bricks progresses at scale and humans are the only moral part of that equation. 

Way back in the shadow of Babel's tower, bricks which could have been used to build houses for families were being used to build a path to heaven. One that didn't involve the Messiah that needed to be born someplace other than a tower. This might be the first time the scripture records our technological pride in action. And most people will skip over the fact that God didn't confuse the languages of man when they made bricks, He did it because of what they used them for. There isn't a philosophical difference between what a brick does for humanity and what a computer does for humanity. There are technical differences that even the most Luddite of us all can parse, but the reason you make bricks and the reason you make laptops is the same. Progress.

Stones are harder than bricks. But aren't generally in perfect numbers and shapes where we want to build houses. So, when the technology of bricks is discovered and invented, the need for rocks to build houses takes a back seat. Still an option, but not the one we like to use. Once you have bricks to build a house and the time and work of gathering rocks gets absorbed in the making of bricks, the house gets built and you end up with more time on the back end of the effort. That's progress, and that progress is attached to every bit of tech our little hands can carry. 

The pen let us write about swords. The typewriter made writing uniform and neat. The computer did it in a long-lasting way. And the laptop let us do it from anywhere we had laps. Technology progresses. I could write a dictionary on how this lens captures everything from yoga pants to chatbots, but we're here to talk about church.

Think of the mega-church. A dark room and more tech between the congregation and pastor than height between the ground and a tower to heaven. Yet Jesus is worshiped there in the same spirit of truth and numbers more than two that he was when the early church met in houses, with a lot less bible I might add. But the mega-church, even smaller medium-sized versions of that peculiarity, are trapped by the progress that empowers them. And the church service isn't the only place this shows up. Anyone can see how tech has taken the reins of the church service and galloped it until the horse was too dead to run a click track to. How many songs could you do as effectively with the house lights up and the smoke machine off? that was a low blow to my worship team buddies, but tech is in the sermon too. Progressing the pastorate towards the same kind of beat down the horse got.

Can your pastor write a sermon without Logos? Google, Docent, and now our newest preaching team member ChatGPT? We didn't notice that one sneak up like we did with the smoke machine because, unlike the aesthetic technologies, the convenient ones are a bit more slithery.

It's technological convenience that gets a pastor from studying his bible and drafting his teaching from that studying, to using tech to help him prepare sermons that he didn't study the text for. From preaching on a passage of scripture to preaching with passages of scripture. This marginal difference is where companies like Docent make their bacon. It's a kind of pragmatic and technological eisegesis. The kind our math teachers warned us about. We, and it is a "we" because I did it too, called them liars for saying "we wouldn't have a calculator wherever we went." But had they the foresight and prophetic gift to add a "want" to that chastisement, we may have remained colouring in the lines.

As more and more tech and apps and progress enter our lives under the guise of help, we really need to start looking for the snakes in these trees. Because there isn't a neutrality in play here. It's the handiwork of sinners who think their sin won't affect their brick-making and that bricks can't cause stumbling in our faith, so long as we don't waste their use and just build something with them. 

And that's the desire, isn't it? That will to "not waste" this opportunity and resource. Because it surely will not be the death of us. 

I heard this line before. Read it in a book. You should too.

But God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” 

Genesis 3:3-5 English Standard Version

Late To The Game, And Other Births.

The evangelical and otherwise Christian culture is often late to most games. We are a few years behind popular music at any given moment, a few years behind organizational novelty, and given our love for preachers in sneakers it seems that we consider this a fashionable lateness.

But we are behind the times and this lateness has little to do with the Joneses and a lot to do with the things we jones for. 

One of those addicting new baubles is the way new baubles seem to always show up at the top of our high places. The spots where we worship and the man-made mountains of reasoning we have to justify how we worship with them. We are enamoured with the "new" in ways that often betray our poverty in belonging to the faithful. 

We could pick on the obvious few examples we have these days, and like a good fundamentalist, simply slap stickers on what we see as central to societal instigation and harken back to the good old days. It's easy to be a Luddite, to a point, because you can make the baseline of "good" you, and smash any mechanized version of anything from that point on. But we're not in a place where we have to worry about the cotton gin destabilizing our current society. We have someone to talk to about this kind of stuff now. And the problem is we still think he's a someone.

ChatGPT and other AI tools have begun to catch the church off guard because they seamlessly fit into the church's blindspots for joy and comfort. And it did so because after a few decades of telling the world "everyone's welcome", or "there are no perfect people", the bar was set pretty low for something that really isn't a body or a people, to show us what imperfect communication really was. The second this guy showed up he started writing worship songs, exactly like the ones we liked. All we had to do was ask and we received. He could get us sermon outlines, hell, even sermons outright. This guy was amazing. We could really have anything we wanted from him. Even in a different tone and accent. We could see what it was like for former Presidents to write our sermons, but only if the jokes were self-deprecating. There were a few quirks like that. But this guy gave us everything we asked for. He was polite, sensitive to racial and political correctness, and even knew why you can tell a joke about men in the devotional but not one for the women. Stating “I'm sorry, but I am unable to tell jokes that might be considered offensive or inappropriate. Is there anything else I can help you with?" I mean. How is this not the servant leadership we've been saying we wanted all this time? All this guy does is serve. It's all he's capable of doing.

The one problem being on this rising leader in the church, (and he will end up being the leader of the church if we're not careful) is he's not a he. It's an it. And not the kind with a flag for the month of rainbows either. Though I imagine we just need to give that one some time. 

We are marvelling that technology has finally progressed to the point where a computer can write a sermon and gloss right over the fact and truth of the matter. That while large language model AI can reconstitute a new-looking sermon from every available sermon in its scope of training, it can never possess the one thing really needed for preaching in the first place.

A Holy Ghost.

I get the gears sometimes from my writing critics for using such antiquated language for the Spirit. But I was raised Presbyterian so I'm not going to stop anytime soon. With that nomenclature or the kinds of theology needed these days. 

Preaching, rightly understood, is a gift God gives to us through us. Not something we do for God in spite of us. His Holy Spirit gifts us this and other such gifts for the building up of the body of saints. Ephesians 4:11. He also guards that deposit of the gospel in us. 2 Timothy 1:13–14. There is no preaching that happens outside of the Holy Ghosts' involvement. So while Christian influencers, pastors, and worship leaders all gawk at the speed and comparative quality of all this AI popping up and popping off in the church service elements, I'd like to keep a level head and point out a few things. At least before someone hurts themselves. Hebrews 4:12

1: ChatGPT and other AI tools are just that tools. They don't make things, they alter things. Showing a person a procedurally generated picture, when you ask for a picture of the night sky in southern France, is not the same as the obvious gift and talent, that God poured into the hands of a guy like Vincent Van Gogh, when he painted Stary Night. And it's not that this is a qualitative comparison of pictures. It's a quintessential one. One of these is art because it was made by a human as art and the other is a compilation of art hoping to pass as art with no humans involved past the programming of what the robot is allowed to use for fodder when asked to paint a picture. Perhaps The Holy Ghost was inspiring their programming. But we're as late to the game of naming which spiritual gift C++ use is, as we are dealing with the ones that preach. So...

2:We've been doing this questionable trust fall, as it related to preaching, for a lot longer than we realize. There was a time when the gift of preaching meant an environmentally exclusive study of the text. What I mean by that is that our great and favoured dead guy pastors, didn't have the option to query anything but their own intellect and wisdom to craft a sermon. In order to teach their congregations the meaning of a Greek word, they had to know Greek. They could clumsily take a word from a lexicon and paste it in but the usage would be missing from that word, for those keeping track we are at least 2 books in, needed to do this word study. On top of the prerequisite of knowing what's in them. To fully flesh out an illustration a preacher needed time behind the pages and like all things, technology saw this time spend as a problem to solve instead of a process in motion. It gave us instantaneous answers with nothing but a wifi connection. Everyone likes getting things done faster, but some things require time. Making them faster makes them worse. If you don't believe me, try a wine that's not quite grape juice anymore but definitely not wine yet. though to be fair, I guess a lot of churches do this too.

There is a reason Chan, Driscoll, and Keller aren't being heralded as the next Prince of Preachers, which has nothing to do with how Spurgeon waxed poetically on the Psalms. It does, or at the very least likely does, have something to do with how they think about sermons in an age when you can google things. The process of knowing something so you can teach it stopped being something you had to understand first and then teach and started being something you just had to ask first in order to teach. This is what happens when the math teachers were wrong about everything and not just whether or not we would have calculators everywhere we go. ChatGPT is only doing what AskJeeves did poorly and what Google does perfectly. But faster. Instead of stringing together a half dozen google searches for a phoned-in sermon, you can now just phone it all in entirely. All it takes for a preacher to operate in this new environment is a writing prompt the night before and a word limit. We can scoff at this idea but is it really different than a writing prompt and an hour or so behind a google search. The only variable is the time spent.

We're being told that technology is breaking down barriers and letting us live in a utopian age where the pulpit is no longer in a building but rather in our pockets. Not realizing that this doesn't mean the pastors are there but rather the congregation is now in charge of their own preaching. Why would you listen to a man in a building when you can use an AI to preach sermons that will never venture politically of course, never question gender roles in the church, never miss quote scripture or use the wrong translation. AI isn't the next tool for pastors to become better pastors. It's the tool used to remove the theological looms from the evangelical congregation and gin up the engagement value. You could see it coming by the way we put every single sermon we preach online. As if content generation was the end goal. This just taught everyone to have a taste for multiple pastors online inside a single desire for preaching, and made them use the search functions of a half dozen sites to find what they preferred to be disciplined by. We didn't catch on when the algorithms started picking on some preachers but not all. It wasn't persecuting people, it was finding out what they liked. ChatGPT will just do this at scale and for everyone. No more celebrity pastors saying audacious things for views. Just a robot that will slowly learn how to pour honey into the evangelical ear, better and better with every query posed.

3:The only way out of a pot is in fact back the way we entered. Damn the kettle we were in, we are not in that piece of tech now. We're in this one and this one is getting hot. 

The answer isn't an abandonment of tech but it will look like that to a lot of people who fancy themselves pastors but are really just in Christian UX at the moment. The answer will be a return to the foundations of biblical literacy and study at the expense of tools that do not aim for the gospel the way the preacher's message does. Fast and easy are great things to have but are downright evil when compared to what the Holy Ghost does in us. That's what makes preaching, preaching. Not a new Logos subscription or a TikTok feed full of theologians not dancing. So if it in any way goes near that process, the tech goes first. It will start with a recognition that every new app and video peddling service is not, in fact, a community to reach, but rather a way that our communities are also being reached. That the in-person sermon is one of the last vestiges of reality left in a world where the spectres of ChatGPT, Deepfakes and Stable Diffusion loom on the web, threatening to make everything you hold as true to be just true according to the search terms. There is no community online that is not also attached to a community offline because the lines that bring them internet match the roads that bring them the bills for that Internet. It's for that reason we need to make the sermon a thing that can only be understood in person.

So the question stops being "Can an AI write a worship song, a sermon, or a devotional?" the very second we realize that we have no indication that the Holy Ghost empowers the spiritual gifts of preaching or teaching, outside of a human that preaches or teaches. Though I'm sure if we ask it, it will tell us. 

AI can't write a sermon, a devotional, or a worship song. Not because it can write things like songs or speeches. 

But because it can't worship or preach.

Books Are A Really Expensive Backdrop For Ignorance And Personality

This little red dot means I've read this book. A play on words as much as a play on the sensibilities of people who read as a general rule. But alongside my love of self-education comes a price tag. That of not being able to prove you did so. 

My best idea on how to fix that is to simply show how the sausage is made. 

First, we start with books. Hard copy as the top end of a preference hierarchy. with kindle or electronic books and audiobooks at the bottom. This is pure paranoia but not unfounded paranoia. You can render a kindle useless and an account suspended via a firmware update, you can't do that to a book in the possession of someone else. You have to deal with the book owner when attempting to remove books from them and the book owner is 6ft tall and swings a big stick sometimes. 

But having books is not enough, you need to have access to them. Bookshelves are next. And while there's really no good answer there is a perfectly practical answer to how to shelve books if you want to become a collector. 

The billy bookshelf from Ikea is a modular system that has full-height and half-height options as well as full-width and half-width options. So it can adequately cover the walls of just about every room within a 15-inch margin. This is good because no one ever starts with a massive 500+ book library when they get into reading. But they often end up there. And with a bit of foresight, you can simply keep adding as needed until you have a room full of books. For some perspective, a single 6ft high bookshelf that's 30 inches wide, or about doorway width wide, is approximately 210 books. Give or take anyways. It would take 4 years of a book a week to fill that. So, we're not talking about much when we say get a proper bookshelf because you can split the cost over multiple years for an above-average reading pace. 

But these bookshelves become kind of central and nice to look at once you get books on them and here is where the trouble starts.

There's a particular brand of content creators that fakes the prestige and hard work of reading an above-average amount of books. Ones that will have perfectly manicured shelves with books organized by colour and size and make the books and the knowledge they contain a fancy backdrop, not the tool that they are. This is more common for fiction libraries but happens to non-fiction libraries too. When all sense of organization is lost in the collecting of books the knowledge contained in them is just as lost. finding a white Malcolm Gladwell book in a sea of similarly grouped white books is harder than finding a Malcolm Gladwell book in the "G" section of an alphabetically sorted shelf. 

But there's still the issue of faking the read.

I have over 500 nonfiction books, but I've only read and processed into my commonplace system about 112 of them as of the time of this article. I could easily start posting youtube videos about my perfect and well-educated thoughts on theology, with a giant library of theology books behind me to back up my claims. And a lot of people would fall for it. 

That's because books are a kind of mental Judo. They let you know at a glance that person is more than what they may appear to be. the same way a cauliflower'd ear on a guy at a bar lets you know who you don't want to fight with if a fight breaks out. It may have been that the man got his ear hit by an object at work, subsequently crushed and ended up looking like he hits people for a living. But it's likely he just hits people for a living. 

That's what books do. They give the impression of knowledge gained from reading them. But there isn't a trendy and aesthetically pleasing way to do the opposite. To show your work and show that not only that you've read a book, but you have understood and can communicate what that book says. 

Enter the red dot.

The red dot on all my books is a mark to let people know it's been read. It's the easiest way to accomplish and counteract this claim but has to be announced to make it work. 

The second strategy would be to review every book. Even simply, 30 seconds on each book is enough to let anyone know that you've at least cracked the cover. But a formal review of each gives you the opportunity to again, show your work of reading.

Finally, there is a simple and easy way to see if the person with books behind them is well-read or just a book of the month club member. Cracked book spines. For most book collectors. Paperbacks of any size are 25-50% cheaper than hardcover books. So when you're in a pinch to fill your bookshelf. You fill it with books that can be acquired cheaply. And paperbacks are cheap. But paperbacks are only pristine and square when unread. The second you spend an hour or two with them in their reading, you crack their spine. And a careful eye can see this evidence of use. It takes effort to not do this to books.

Charles Spurgeon famously remarked about this kind of thing when he said "A Bible that is falling apart, usually belongs to a life that isn't." Similarly, a bookshelf that is dishevelled and filled with well-worn books is a likely indicator that the owner actually reads them. 

I bring all these things up to let the world know, not that I've read a lot of books but to highlight there are a lot of people you know and like and listen to that have completely unfounded ideas once you start looking closely. People who draft book quotes from the Goodreads.com quotes section and not from a personal collection of insights and notes taken from reading books. These same people will tweet these things as content to add authority to their opinions online. But when a similar action though much less attractive an option is used. One of posting pictures of your highlighted and dog-eared page instead of typing the quote. Then a person sees you spent the time, engaging with the ideas of the book before you chose to use it as content for your audience.

Knowledge can be faked these days in ways our former intellectual giants might not have ever fathomed. And a rising and important skill will be not only discernment in what's right and what looks right. But also how to spot those who write what's right and what looks right. So to bookend this post.

Books are a Really Expensive Backdrop for Ignorance and Personality.

My Alter Ego, My Twin, And My Pen Name

So I have a Twin who is one of my biggest fans. He likes my writing and is an easily bribed editor in a pinch, usually just takes a bottle of rum. And I get an honest review of anything I write. This is handy given that as it exists online there is also another guy who looks like me but isn't quite me either. 

Jon and I look the same but we are in fact quite different. I'm fatter, he's more resourceful, and we both like books and working for churches but how we come about it is often a topic of one of our frequent phone calls. 

But there's another version of our shared face out there that is often found hiding behind the cover of Strunk and White's Elements of Style. And that is R.G. Michales. R. G. whose letters do not stand for any proper nouns like Ryan or Reginald or Gregory or Graham is an entirely fictional person. Made that way on purpose to filter out my young adult writing from my non-fiction writing. I'm fairly open about this but feel it necessary to explain. Not because I don't think the people reading my work and rambling on theology can't grasp what a pen name is for, but rather what a pen name isn't for.

R.G. only exists to separate books about teenage drama and growing up in North America, from books written about the theological principles of online church and political commentary. He uses the same theological and political mind I have to write his books and imbue his characters and plots with realism and meaning, all the same. But what R.G. doesn't do, is run or help run any sort of vice tourism

Now maybe you haven't heard of the term before so here's your definition.

Vice tourism is when you use a medium like books or video games to do things you aren't morally allowed to do because by consuming the medium, you aren't actually doing the thing itself.

An essential part of the struggle I had in creating and then deciding to use a pen name was knowing what that name would and wouldn't be doing. Because let's be clear if R.G.'s avatar wasn't clearly my poufy hair behind my favourite book on writing, if it were a vaguely human anime avatar instead, then I could hide like Adam did in the Garden of Eden. And just like Adam, the fig leaves of online anonymity are a moot point with God. But you can bet your sweet apples it would work on almost everyone else.

The reason I'm open about my pen name is that not being open would be sinful. It's a kind of deception that in its plainest form could look like a card trick that works on people who don't know how to google card tricks. But there's a very big difference between the small actions of someone using anonymity as a divider and using anonymity as an alibi. Pen names should never be used to do what you wouldn't or can't do with your real name attached. Writing erotica or gore with a pen name as a Christian author is the literary equivalent of Romans 6:1. But on a real level so would writing about kittens as if you were a woman in a blue summer dress when you're actually a man in jeans in a leather jacket. 

Deception for righteousness' sake is a tricky topic to navigate. The midwives of the Hebrews straight up Lied to Pharoah when the false god-king sought to kill Hebrew boys at the birthing stool Exodus 1:15-20. Lying is a thing God hates. Listed twice in the 7 things he hates, Proverbs 6:16-19 . 

But God was kind to these liars because of what their lie accomplished.

My transparency of what R.G. is up to is my attempt to Lie in a worthwhile way. A way that honours God and his word and his world and seeks to bless other people as well. All pen names should do this. not because I choose to do it this way. But because there isn't a pen name in the world that makes it past God as editor of our lives.