In Many Ways

The biggest, most recent change is artificial intelligence (AI). I’m pretty much retired now.

I left my job back in 2022, and soon after, ChatGPT became popular. I do maintain an interest in developments in instructional design. I quite enjoyed much of the mundane work, but I would think that most of that is done by AI now, though it’s always important for a human to check it. And one wonders whether eLearning courses are going to be as necessary now. Perhaps people might do most of their learning through direct action with AI.

Through most of my life, I’ve also been involved in church activities, sometimes preaching, giving Bible studies, getting involved in evangelism and so on. AI is particularly helpful for all these activities. Churches, particularly evangelical ones, tend to be cautious and conservative. Some are suspicious at the use of AI for sermon preparation and so on. But, as long as someone doesn’t put their entire trust in what AI comes up with, I see no harm in it. In fact, it can be hugely beneficial.

I generally use Microsoft Copilot if I want an opinion on some puzzling Bible verse. I’m almost always impressed with the answer. There’s a variety of opinions in theology. You’re never going to agree with everyone about everything, unless you’re involved in some crazy cult with some guru who claims to know everything 😀.

So, if I read an old-style Bible commentary, I won’t always be impressed by what it says. And it’s the same with AI, which is built on good web resources, but which will occasionally get things wrong. As for sermons, I can’t see how anyone would ask AI to prepare a sermon and do nothing but read what AI said. It’s more a matter of using it as a preparation aid. For example, if you give a sermon on Matthew 3, you might ask it to give you a helpful outline or ask it about different opinions on a verse that might be a little puzzling. For example, “why did Jesus need to be baptized?”

Here’s the answer that Copilot gave me.

But before AI, during my preparation, I might have still read up on various opinions or even listened to sermons on the particularly passage that I was about to preach on. Even if I quoted someone else, the sermon would be mainly my perspective. I would be much happier to provoke people to open their Bibles and read the passage for themselves than to merely listen to my opinions. And I would pray that God would somehow speak through me. It’s not that my sermon would be “verbally inspired” – as the Bible is. But I would hope that something that I said might encourage or challenge someone in the way that sermons that I listen to might have the same effect on me. They might provoke me to spend more time reading and meditating on the Scripture passage on which the sermon was based.

In my early life, I worked in engineering, for example on lathes. After I left that field, back in the 1980s, I remember hearing of computer numerical control (CNC) lathes, where you’d program what you wanted to produce rather than produce it yourself. I would imagine that AI is having a big impact in that field too. But again, you’ll generally need humans to check the AI work. If anything goes wrong with the plumbing in my house, I’d like to have an AI robot to sort it all out – or an AI barber or dentist, but that’s probably a long way off yet 😀. But you can get general advice from AI applications on areas such as health – and they do often encourage you to go to a doctor or dentist or whatever.

I was a technology teacher back in the 1980s, at the time when we were moving from blackboards to overhead projectors. I still have some blank plastic overhead projector sheets somewhere in my attic – never gonna use ’em – never gonna use ’em 😀. Since the 1990s teachers use projected screens from computers. So much has changed. But it’s all getting better.

I like to end my post with songs. I won’t bother with AI though. I’ll just include a couple of songs about the Bible. Technology has been hugely helpful for Bible Study in all sorts of ways. And it’s my hope that technology will continue to make it more accessible across the entire world.