How do you measure whether an AI model supports human flourishing, or a Christian worldview? Gloo AI is trying to answer that question, and its story runs from NASA's open innovation labs to the halls of Missional AI.
In this episode, recorded live at the Missional AI 2026 Global Summit in Silicon Valley, Josiah, a software developer with the missions technology group Renew, sits down with two leaders from Gloo:
Gloo serves the faith and flourishing ecosystem, and its AI division was born from a conviction formed at an early Missional AI gathering.
Gloo is a technology company based in Boulder, Colorado, that connects organizations across what it calls the faith and flourishing ecosystem: the roughly 450,000 faith-based organizations in the US, mostly churches, along with parachurch ministries, student ministries, anti-trafficking groups and others working toward God's design for human flourishing.
Before Gloo AI existed, Steele explains, there was a division called GlooX. The catalyst for renaming it Gloo AI was Gloo's first experience at Missional AI several years ago. It convicted the team that someone needed to show up well, organize resources and advance meaningful research on the problems the community was raising. Steele loves seeing how Missional AI has grown from an event into a movement, and at SV26, most attendees were first-timers.
A wave of experienced technologists joined Gloo in early 2025, and Steele and Nick see God's hand in how it happened.
In early 2025, amid sweeping changes across the US federal government, Nick received the same email as many federal employees. At the time he led a portfolio worth a couple of billion dollars. The moment gave him room to step back and ask: what if he left the comfort of a 25-year career and pressed into the unknown for the kingdom? He loves working on frontiers, and he'd often given friends the book Halftime, encouraging them to use their careers for something significant. Now he realized he didn't need to wait until retirement himself.
The timing lined up remarkably. Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, already chairman of Gloo's board, had stepped into an executive role leading technology, and he challenged Steele to make Gloo's AI strategy open, not closed. That was new territory for Steele. Pat connected him with Greg Lavender, then Intel's CTO, who spent a weekend giving him a crash course in open approaches. Greg, now Gloo's CTO, told Steele he'd need to find a leader for it. Twenty-four hours later, Steele was on the phone with Nick, whose first words about his NASA role were that he led all the open initiatives there.
Nick had helped start open innovation at NASA in the mid-2000s, long before it was widely discussed, and had led some of the world's largest hackathons and open innovation communities. Why keep that separate from God's kingdom? Nick, along with his longtime colleague Ali Llewellyn, joined Gloo. Several other talented leaders joined around the same time. "There's only so many times in your life where it's so obvious that God's hand is on something," Steele says.
Nick likes to measure Gloo's journey in weeks, not years, because it sits between the church, which moves slowly, and the AI industry, which moves at breakneck speed. Models can be outdated in two months. "We don't want to miss this moment," he says. "We want to shape technology for good."
Hackathons bring talented believers together to build real solutions fast, and with AI, you no longer need to be a developer to take part.
Nick ran hackathons before they were mainstream. He helped run the first hackathon at the White House and co-founded Random Hacks of Kindness, which brought together Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, NASA, the World Bank and HP to tackle crisis response and disaster management. Each contributed what it could openly share: technology, data or challenges. The conviction that we're better together, which he sees as deeply biblical, grew into hackathons with 20,000 people in 250 cities. In all, he's been part of more than 2,000 hackathons.
A hackathon, as Josiah explains, brings people together to tackle a problem in a set time, like an intensive group project. A deadline matters, and so does great food. When Gloo AI launched, founder and CEO Scott Beck wanted to host one, to help people build powerful tools for the kingdom quickly. One of the first calls was to Nick and Ali. The first Gloo Hackathon took place in October 2023, and the energy was electric. Since then, Nick says, they've poured everything they know into it. Steele adds that it's far more than coding: it's people riffing on what God has put on their hearts and building together, sometimes winning with teammates they've just met.
Josiah has seen the ripple effects firsthand. After a satellite event, a Brazilian team went on to launch a 500-person hackathon of its own. Building something together at two in the morning to solve a missionary's problem, he says, is one of the most powerful kinds of networking there is.
Nick calls 2026 "the year of the builder." With AI tools and vibe coding, you can arrive at a hackathon without knowing any programming language, build a working prototype and still have time to spare. Gloo's goal is twofold: to equip the faith ecosystem with advanced technology, and to influence AI communities with faith, including believers working at frontier labs.
Gloo's Flourishing AI (FAI) benchmark grades leading AI models on how well they support human flourishing, and, in a newer version, a Christian worldview.
Gloo AI's mission is to make values-aligned AI accessible to the world. But how do you measure "values-aligned"? Steele's answer: AI that supports human flourishing. Researchers at Harvard's Human Flourishing Program, Baylor and Gallup had already defined a baseline for flourishing in their Global Flourishing Study. Gloo asked: what if we measured AI against the same baseline used to measure humans?
At Pat Gelsinger's challenge, the team turned that idea into standards and then a benchmark, because a benchmark makes standards actionable. Organizations across the faith and AI community helped shape the questions, and Nick then took over leadership.
Most AI benchmarks measure speed or accuracy. FAI looks at something no one else was measuring. It evaluates models across seven dimensions of human flourishing using three types of questions:
Gloo released the first FAI results in July 2025, then added an evaluation through a Christian worldview lens. As expected, models scored lower against that stricter standard. Gloo can now evaluate a new model within 24 hours, revealing what it values, what it encourages and where it is "formationally silent." Results and methodology are available at gloo.com/fai.
Models score well on practical areas like health and finances, but poorly on meaning and faith, because that's not what they're optimized for.
Models tend to score highest in areas like physical health and personal finances, lower on character and lowest on meaning and faith. That suggests their training data doesn't prioritize philosophical or theological content. When Gloo grounded models in a corpus of faith-based content, scores rose dramatically.
Steele names three things that keep him up at night:
The leaderboard shifts constantly as new models launch. Grok 4 jumped to the top the day after Gloo published new scores. More recently, Steele says, Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 marked a big step forward in safety, though, like most models, it still struggles with faith alignment.
Nick notes that frontier models are optimized for safety and neutrality across a huge range of users, and they're trained largely on secular data. "You should not go to Reddit and ask for marriage advice," he jokes, but in effect, that's what many models are drawing on. And people increasingly use AI for questions of purpose, faith and relationships, treating it as a companion or coworker.
Improving alignment takes more than asking a model to answer like a theologian, Nick says. It takes a system with multiple layers. AI conversations unfold over many turns, and that's how formation works: through the voices we trust, over time. As technology mediates more of our experience, Nick wants his own kids to use AI that grounds them in biblical truth. That's the gap Gloo aims to help close.
Both guests spoke at the Missional AI 2026 Global Summit. Find their sessions in the Missional AI Video Library under Silicon Valley 2026:
Listen to the full episode on the Missional AI Podcast, and subscribe so you don't miss future conversations.
Missional AI London returns on July 15, gathering a global community in central London for a day exploring faith, AI and God's calling in technology. Tickets are going fast at missional.ai.
This episode was made possible in partnership with Gloo, the technology platform connecting the faith ecosystem.