Editor’s Warning: The rise of artificial intelligence is having obvious impacts on every aspect of American life. The perspectives range from complete adoption to apocalyptic theories and everywhere in between. This article delves into the middle ground, warning of how AI can yield both good and bad results. I am exceedingly concerned with what AI will become and how it will pervert the Gospel through manipulation and worldly compromise. This is a path to a lukewarm church, and while the benefits of AI are undeniable, the pitfalls are even worse. Go forward with discernment and prayer. With that said, here’s the article…
A new survey paints a picture that’s both efficient and unsettling: nearly two-thirds of pastors crafting weekly messages now lean on artificial intelligence for help. Released this week by AiForChurchLeaders.com and Exponential AI NEXT, the “2025 State of AI in the Church Survey Report” draws from 594 church leaders across denominations. It reveals ChatGPT topping the list at 26% usage, followed closely by Grammarly for polishing prose. “ChatGPT is the most visible generative AI tool that can engage in human-like conversations and assist with a wide range of tasks, from answering questions to generating content,” the researchers explain.
Daily or weekly AI engagement has climbed to 61% among pastors, a sharp jump from 43% just a year ago. Tools like these handle outlines, research, and even initial drafts, freeing up hours for hospital visits or family time. One pastor in the survey described it as a “research assistant,” pulling together biblical cross-references faster than flipping through a concordance. Another 8% tap Canva’s AI features for visuals—flyers, slides, social posts—that once took a graphic designer half a day.
Churches facing shrinking attendance aren’t waiting around. With 15,000 congregations at risk of closing this year, as Axios reported last month, megachurches and small parishes alike are experimenting. In Phoenix, Dream City Church’s Luke Barnett recently played an AI-generated voice message mimicking the late Charlie Kirk, assuring listeners his “soul is secure in Christ” amid grief. It’s a stark example of how AI can personalize comfort when human voices fall short.
Over at La Mott A.M.E. in Pennsylvania, Rev. Louis Attles built a chatbot called “Faith” to sift through scriptures for sermon ideas. “You can’t outsource your morality,” he told reporters. “It cannot keep a covenant for you.”
Yet as adoption surges—91% of leaders now back AI in ministry, per Exponential’s mid-year findings—the old guard sees shadows in the glow of screens. Back in 2023, Barna Group’s poll showed most Christians rejecting the idea that AI fits the sanctuary, with over half saying they’d be disappointed if their church plugged in. Fast-forward two years, and that resistance has softened, but not vanished.
A Christianity Today piece from earlier this year warned that leaning too hard on algorithms risks “habituating ourselves toward a certain kind of interaction,” one that skips the grit of real relationships for polished outputs. “God calls us to get into the mess,” author Gretchen Huizinga wrote, echoing the biblical push for flesh-and-blood community over tidy transactions.
Skeptics go further, spotting a deeper agenda. AI models like ChatGPT aren’t blank slates; they’re trained on vast troves of internet data, laced with biases from Silicon Valley’s elite. Remember when Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis tested it, prompting a fabricated “Bible verse” on Jesus’ views of transgender issues? The output twisted Scripture into modern politics, a glitch that fuels whispers of deliberate design.
What if these tools, slipped into pulpits, quietly steer sermons toward progressive tilts or dilute hard truths on sin and redemption? It’s not paranoia to ask—it’s prudence, especially when apps like “Text With Jesus” let users “chat” with a digital Savior, complete with options for Judas or even Satan. As one theologian put it in a recent Charisma Magazine interview, “Artificial intelligence is a machine… one thing to request outlines and ideas, but another to deliver messages written by a machine.”
Scripture doesn’t mince words on truth-tellers. In 2 Timothy 4:2, Paul charges preachers to “be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction.”
Machines excel at speed, but patience? That’s forged in prayer closets, not prompt bars. The survey nods to this tension: leaders fret more now about “weighty ethical and practical considerations.” Pushpay’s earlier 2025 report, polling 8,000 church staff, found AI booming 80% for emails and graphics—but not sermons. “Leaders remain reluctant to rely on AI for pastoral content,” it concluded, holding firm that the Holy Spirit, not code, shapes the Word.
For families in the pews, the shift demands vigilance. Parents teaching kids Proverbs 22:6—”Train up a child in the way he should go”—might pause before letting AI apps handle bedtime Bible stories. It’s a tool, yes, like the printing press that spread the Reformation or radio that carried Billy Graham’s crusades. But tools serve masters. When 32% of Christians in a Barna-Gloo survey claim AI matches humans at Bible-based preaching, it’s a signal: discernment isn’t optional.
The path forward? Use AI to sharpen the arrow, not replace the archer. Let it dig up facts or brainstorm illustrations, then douse everything in prayer and personal study. Churches thriving amid decline will blend tech’s edge with timeless conviction—reaching the lost without losing the soul. As these digital helpers evolve, one question lingers: Will we wield them as stewards, or let them rewrite the gospel in binary? The flock deserves better than echoes from a server farm. They need shepherds who know the Shepherd’s voice firsthand.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.