There's a moment in our latest podcast episode where Yvonne Carlson reframes the entire conversation about AI in one sentence.
"To me the question isn't, how should I use AI? There's a lot of applications. It's how I should not."
That single inversion — from optimization to discernment — is the question the church has been slow to ask, and the one Joshua Seal, Yvonne, and the global Missional AI community gathered in Silicon Valley this year to wrestle with. Not how to do more, faster, with less. But how to remain human, faithful, and formed by God in an age when a tool can mimic almost everything we used to call uniquely ours.
This post is an invitation to sit with that question for a few minutes.
When Yvonne explains why she keeps coming back to the "how should I not" question, she roots it somewhere most AI conversations never go: the doctrine of personhood.
"This really is rooted in our theology of personhood. Like, what does it mean to be human? And what do we bring to our communities as a result?"
It's a small phrase with enormous implications. Because the dominant story we hear about AI — in keynotes, in newsletters, in the constant drumbeat of productivity content — is that the right question is always what can I now do that I couldn't before? Faster sermons. Translated services. Agents running while you're in another meeting. The horizon keeps moving, and the invitation is always to keep up.
But Scripture doesn't measure a life by its throughput. It measures it by faithfulness, by love, by the slow shaping of character. And it tells us that we were made — fearfully, intentionally, particularly — for specific work in specific places among specific people. The question of how we use a tool can never be separated from the question of who we were made to be.
A new phrase emerged in the conversation this year: the vibe worker. After the era of vibe coders — non-engineers prompting their way to working software — we're now watching anyone with a laptop spin up agents, automations, and workflows that used to take a team. It's exhilarating. It's also exhausting in a way few people are talking about yet.
James, our host, named it gently: vibe burnouters.
What happens when the ceiling on what you can ship keeps rising, and the floor of what's expected of you rises with it? What happens when the only thing limiting your output is your willingness to keep adding more?
Yvonne admits her own team teases her about this exact temptation: programming agents to work for her while she's in a meeting. She can. But she's learned to ask a harder question.
"Just because I can doesn't mean I should. Maybe God wants me to do this work myself. Maybe I'm losing something by handing off this work to AI."
That second sentence is the one that should stop us. Maybe I'm losing something. Not productivity. Not efficiency. Something more interior — the formation that only happens when we stay in the work long enough to be shaped by it. The prayer that happens in the slow draft. The discernment that happens in the conversation we didn't outsource. The character that's built in the friction.
There is work God assigns us not because He needs the output, but because He's forming the worker.
If AI changes what we can do, it also changes what we believe we are capable of doing. That shift, James observed during the summit, is rewiring how people see themselves — their identity, their role on a team, their place in a community. It's a quieter crisis than the headlines suggest, and it's already here.
So the church's question becomes pastoral: what are the things in a human life that should be guarded, not optimized?
Joshua's answer was honest. He doesn't have a clean framework yet. None of us do. But he pointed to creativity, to the irreducibly human element in the work of his collaborators, to the way certain things "just don't feel like anything can replace that human element." Yvonne pointed to relationships — to the quiet horror of imagining a meal where you talk to your phone instead of the person across from you.
The list is longer than that. Presence. Lament. Hospitality. Confession. The long obedience of pastoring real people through real grief. The friend who shows up. The teacher who notices the kid in the back row. The leader who refuses to delegate the hardest conversation.
These are not inefficiencies. These are the substance of a Christian life.
None of this is an argument against AI. Joshua was clear: he's been in too many conversations this year that focus only on the risk, and that, too, is a miss. The opportunities are real. Language barriers falling. Bible engagement at a scale unimaginable a decade ago. Builders in Nairobi, Paris, Mumbai using these tools for the mission of God.
The posture the community is being called into is both/and. Lean in enough to learn. Step back enough to remain yourself. Use the tools, but stay vigilant about what they're forming in you. Hold the opportunity and the risk in the same hand, and refuse to let either one go.
This is, in the end, a discipleship question. And it's one the church can no longer leave to the technologists.
The Missional AI community has begun the work of writing some of this down. The AI Ethics & Standards Playbook, released last October, is one early attempt — a starting point, as Joshua put it, in what is likely to be a five-year journey toward shared theological language, certifications, and standards for builders and the church.
It's not the final word. It's an invitation. To think together. To disagree well. To form a posture before the technology forms us.
Because the most important question of this decade may not be what AI can do.
It may be what we, as followers of Jesus, refuse to hand over.
Listen to the full episode. Joshua Seal, Yvonne Carlson, and James unpack the SV'26 summit, the global community, and where the conversation is headed next. Available wherever you get your podcasts.
Download the AI Ethics & Standards Playbook. A free ebook from the Missional AI community to help your team, your church, or your organization think well about AI. Available at missional.ai.
Join us in London this July. Missional AI London brings together hundreds of builders, pastors, and leaders from across Europe and around the world to wrestle with these questions in person. Registration coming soon at missional.ai.