From Taipei to Buckhead: The Churches That Said Yes to AI

In Taipei, a Presbyterian pastor spent last Tuesday learning how to use NotebookLM to design a small group curriculum on Philippians. In Buckhead, Georgia, a megachurch's AI app called "My Faith Assistant" answered a parishioner's question about grief at 2:47 AM — something the pastoral care team couldn't have done without hiring a night shift.

Neither pastor thinks AI is the future of the church. Both think it's a useful Tuesday.

And honestly? That might be the most theologically mature take I've heard all year.

The Bootcamp That Didn't Make Headlines

In early 2026, a consortium of Taiwanese churches launched what they're calling a "Church AI Bootcamp" — a structured training program that teaches pastors and ministry leaders to use 15 different AI tools. Not abstractly. Practically. As in: here's ChatGPT, here's Perplexity, here's NotebookLM. Now build next Sunday's sermon prep workflow. Now design a youth group icebreaker. Now draft that grant proposal you've been putting off for six months.

The Gospel Herald reported that the response has been overwhelming. Pastors are showing up who've never used anything more sophisticated than a Bible concordance app. They're leaving with workflows.

No existential crisis about whether AI will replace the Holy Spirit. Just pastors learning tools.

Meanwhile, across the Pacific, CBS Atlanta reported that Buckhead Church in Georgia has deployed an AI-powered platform called "My Faith Assistant" that provides personalized spiritual guidance to thousands of worshippers. The church describes it as "pastoral care at scale" — an AI that can engage congregation members with scripture, prayer prompts, and encouragement when the human staff is unavailable.

Two churches. Two continents. Two very different implementations. Same instinct: this tool exists; let's see if it serves the mission.

The Pauline Precedent

The church has always been pragmatically adaptive about communication technology. We just forget because we've theologized the results.

Paul didn't write letters because he had a theology of epistolary communication. He wrote letters because the Roman postal system existed, he couldn't be everywhere at once, and people in Corinth were doing weird things at communion. The medium was pragmatic. The message was urgent.

The early church adopted the codex (bound book) over the scroll faster than any other group in the ancient world — not because codices were holier, but because you could flip to a passage more easily. That's a UX decision, not a theological one.

Gutenberg's press, the King James translation, radio evangelism, church websites — at every turn, a portion of the church has adopted new communication tools while another portion has insisted the previous medium was the sacred one. (There are probably people who still think the scroll was more reverent than the book. They may be right, but they lost that argument in the third century.)

Paul put it bluntly in 1 Corinthians 9:22: "I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some."

That's not relativism. It's strategic flexibility in service of an unchanging gospel. The Taiwanese bootcamp pastors and the Buckhead tech team are working in that tradition whether they'd articulate it that way or not.

The Numbers Are Settled

If you're still debating whether pastors should use AI, the data suggests the debate is over. A 2025 study reported by the Christian Post found that 61% of American pastors now use AI tools weekly or daily, up from 43% just two years prior. ChatGPT and Grammarly top the list. Comparable data from the global south is harder to find — but anecdotal reports from organizations like Subsplash suggest adoption is accelerating in South Korea, Brazil, and Nigeria, often leapfrogging the desktop-first pattern of American churches entirely.

Barna's research paints the same picture from a different angle: according to Barna, pastors see AI not as a replacement for ministry but as a way to free up time for the parts of ministry that actually require a human — prayer, presence, and the messy, beautiful work of being with people in their worst and best moments.

The question has shifted. It's no longer "Should the church use AI?" It's "Is the church using AI well?"

The Caution That Actually Matters

Here's where the Taiwanese bootcamp gets something subtly right that many American tech-forward churches miss: they're training communities, not individuals.

There's a difference between one tech-savvy pastor adopting AI and an entire ministry team being equipped together. The former creates dependency on one person. The latter builds institutional capacity.

Proverbs 11:14 says, "Where there is no guidance, a people falls, but in an abundance of counselors there is safety." The Hebrew word for "counselors" — yo'etz — implies strategic advisors, not just people who agree with you. A church that trains its whole team to understand AI has more yo'etz in the room when it's time to make decisions about how far to go.

Because the real risk isn't using AI in ministry. It's using it unreflectively. And the best hedge against unreflective adoption isn't avoiding the technology — it's having enough people in the room who understand it to ask the right questions.

What Nobody's Celebrating Enough

Here's the part of this story I find genuinely moving: the global south and the global east are not waiting for Silicon Valley to tell them how to use AI in ministry. They're figuring it out themselves, in their own languages, for their own contexts.

Taiwan's bootcamp is conducted in Mandarin. The curriculum is designed for Taiwanese church culture — not imported from an American megachurch playbook. They're not copying Saddleback's AI strategy. They're building their own.

That's Acts 2 in miniature. Pentecost wasn't everyone speaking one language. It was everyone hearing the gospel in their own. The universality of the message didn't erase the particularity of the audience.

If AI helps that happen — if a pastor in Taipei can use the same underlying technology as a pastor in Buckhead but adapt it for a completely different flock — then maybe the tool is serving the mission after all.

Not as a savior. Never as a savior.

As a useful Tuesday.