A bishop wrote to her diocese this year asking that AI not be used in sermons, in spiritual writing, or in pastoral care. The worry behind that request is older and simpler than the technology. A machine has no conscience — and it is being brought close to the parts of a community’s life that depend on one.
It helps to be plain about what today’s chatbots actually are. They are amoral. Not wicked — that would take a will. They have no sense of truth, no notion that the words they borrow belong to someone, no regard for the person typing to them, and nothing they must answer to. Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, says it without softening: these systems have “no moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil,” and they “do not understand what they produce.”
You can see that amorality in what they do. With no sense of truth, they make things up — confidently. Built on other people’s writing taken without asking, they hand it back as a product. They quietly learn from what you type unless you know to switch it off. And they are starting to carry advertising. None of it is malice. It is indifference at scale, pointed at profit.
For a community of faith that is not a small thing. A sermon, a prayer, a word to someone grieving — these are worth something because a person meant them. A machine can copy the shape of any of them, fluently, with none of the substance. The fear is not that it will preach badly. It is that it will preach well, and that something will quietly have been hollowed out.
But the choice was never really “use it or refuse it.” Underneath sit two older questions. Who authors? When something is written or decided, is a person still the author — or has the machine quietly become one? Who governs? Who sets the limits the tool must keep, who can see what shaped it, and who can switch it off?
That is what we built the Village to answer. Its assistant lays out options and hands every real decision back to a person; by design — enforced in the code, not promised — it makes no pastoral, governance, or moral call. It draws only on the sources a parish chooses, each with the right to use it recorded. It keeps a community’s records in New Zealand and the EU, takes no advertising, learns from nothing without permission, and lets a community pack up and leave at any time.
And none of it is all-or-nothing. A parish can take as little as it likes — even just its own records, with no AI anywhere near worship — and still have the thing that matters most: it stays in charge.
AI is already reaching the life of communities of faith, in small ways. The question is whether, when it does, a person is still the author and the community still governs — whether the switch stays in the room.
The full essay — Sovereignty Without Dominance — for Faith Communities — sets this out at greater length, in conversation with the Bishop’s pastoral letter and grounded in what the Village actually does.