On Grief, Conversation, and AI

By Travis Jamieson

Why the church needs honest conversations more than easy answers

For the past several months I've been talking with pastors about artificial intelligence. Some are excited, some are scared, and most are a little of both. They tell me how they're using it, what they're afraid of, and what they think it means for the church. After all those conversations, I keep landing on the same thing: we have a lot more questions than answers. I'm not sure that's a bad place to start.

At Faith, Work & Tech, we've been building Project 1232: Equipping Pastors for the AI Age, a six-part video curriculum for pastors working through the opportunities and challenges of AI. From the beginning we knew conversation had to sit at the center of it. AI is changing so quickly that any definitive answer about how to pastor in this moment would probably be out of date by the time the curriculum came out. So instead of handing pastors a set of answers, we wanted to show what it looks like to approach this with curiosity, humility, and honest conversation.

So we spent three days at Menlo Church filming conversations around a table. The pastors came from different traditions and backgrounds, and they talked openly about how they were using AI to research, write, and build. They said what excited them and what worried them, and they named the lines they weren't willing to cross. They disagreed with each other at times. What stood out to me was how well they listened anyway.

Making room for grief

The theme I least expected was grief. I assumed we'd hear it from tech workers worried about their jobs, and we did. But we heard it from the pastors too, and what they felt didn't fit in one box. They were hopeful and anxious, amazed and sad, often within the same minute.

Many of them were thrilled at the thought of AI speeding up medical discoveries that could save lives. The same people worried about the livelihoods of the folks in their pews. They were impressed by what these tools can do and, at the same time, mourning what might get lost along the way.

You may feel some of that yourself. We tend to talk about AI as if we have to pick a side, optimist or pessimist but real life doesn't work that way. You can be glad about something new and still grieve something familiar.

None of us would have thought to name grief if we hadn't made room for an honest conversation. It only came out because a few pastors were willing to say what they were really feeling. That's what conversation does. It's more than swapping ideas. It brings to the surface what's going on underneath.

The God who meets us in grief

These conversations also reminded me of something basic about the Christian faith.

I don't have many answers about where AI is headed. I can't tell you how it will change our work, our relationships, or our churches, and I've grown wary of anyone who says they can. But I do know something. We worship a God who made himself known in Jesus Christ, and Jesus holds together all our mixed-up emotions, our hope and our fear, our sorrow and our joy.

Standing at the tomb of his friend Lazarus, Jesus weeps. He steps right into the sorrow of the people around him. Then he calls Lazarus out of the grave. The Jesus who weeps over death is the same Jesus who has power over it.

This isn't a God who keeps his distance from suffering and hands out tidy explanations. He walks into the wilderness of our grief with us and promises that grief won't get the last word.

That matters right now, when the world is changing faster than most of us can follow. We don't have to pretend every new technology is good, and we don't have to treat every change as a threat. We can be grateful and concerned at once, and we can admit both what we might gain and what we might lose.

We also don't have to do this alone. Maybe the most valuable thing a pastor can offer in the AI age isn't a set of confident answers. It might be a community where people can speak honestly, listen patiently, and work out together what faithfulness looks like. It would be a place where excitement doesn't drown out grief and fear doesn't smother hope, held together by the God who knows what grief tastes like, who went into death itself, and who rose again.

We don't know what the future holds. We do know who meets us there, and that frees us to face it together, honestly and with courage.

About the Author

Travis Jameson is the Director of Church Engagement at the Bay Area Center for Faith, Work & Tech and a co-pastor in Palo Alto. He works at the intersection of faith, technology, and vocation, helping churches and leaders navigate the changing nature of work. Travis led the development of Project 1232, a six-part video curriculum created in partnership with Notre Dame's Institute for Ethics and the Common Good to equip pastors for the AI age. He also hosts the Faith (In)Forming podcast and is writing a book on pastoral presence in a distracted age.