Digital Ethics & AI

So let me take you back in time for just a moment. I want you all to picture 2020. We know the year well. It was a year that marked the pivotal moments for many of our ministries, for many of our churches. If we were in the... Maybe the first word that comes to mind, like Ruth Ellen shared there, is COVID, right? We've got a lot of these kind of concepts coming at us right away.

Take us back. What happens? 2020. COVID hits the world. It's a global pandemic. Churches are really quick. They're scrappier than I give them credit for.

Churches quickly begin to develop online streaming. Facebook Live begins to take over the world. The more technologically savvy ones go over to YouTube. Some, like the ones in this room or in this space, go to Twitch and start to live stream on that space. Some are live streaming services. Some are live streaming Bible studies. There's Zoom calls.

Zoom Bible studies. This boom of culture. And then the world begins to open up slowly. And I begin to hear this chatter in my denomination. I begin to hear, I can't wait for things to go back to normal. Can't wait for us to get out of this live streaming church, for us to get off of Facebook and YouTube and to get back to normal. A lot of people heard that, and they kind of rolled their eyes.

It's like, oh, saying, oh, well, you know, it wasn't that bad. Oh, well, you should still have one. Maybe you shouldn't. Should we keep putting money into this? Should we keep investing into this? What do we do with this online ministry thing? But not many people saw what I think we should have seen.

What we should have seen was, who are we reaching that we've never reached before? And who will we be leaving behind whenever we stop live streaming? Those people were the very first to come into my heart and into my mind. Remember, I started hearing about some of the larger churches that had a bigger, broader reach that were going to stop being online. And I thought about how many people maybe were feeling found and seen and known in the comments section that had never been in a church setting and might never go to a church setting. There are people on the other end of this screen. There are human beings behind those usernames and behind those profile pictures, and if they are brave and bold enough, behind the cameras and their webcams that they are willing to turn on.

This is the mindset I want us to enter into as we think about digital ethics, is that whenever we talk about digital ethics, we aren't talking about computers and bits and bytes and code. We may end up there, but what we're talking about is we're talking about human beings. We're talking about the people that make up this church. Before we get any further, I'll introduce myself so we can go to the next. I am. So I'm Nerd Pastor Nate. I pastor a church that I was on back in 2020, but we were before COVID.

I got the approval in February of 2020 to plant this church before March hit, and we had to figure out what it meant to be online. But I've been planting a church called Checkpoint for the past six years. We are on Twitch. We're on Discord. We're on YouTube. We have a growing community in all of these different places. We have a lot of really exciting ministries going on.

We've created curriculum. We've created these things called nerdy sermons, which are like video essays, where we do the kind of work that Dr. Level Up was describing earlier in video essay format to deliver out into our people as a means of discipleship. We've built a rigorous and thoughtful methodology behind ecclesiology on Discord. We've built a true blue church on Discord. That shouldn't surprise many of you in this room, but it is something that surprises the people and the powers that be in the denomination which I serve. And so I'm coming to you from the perspective of digital natives, of somebody that loves them so deeply that I was called to plant in this space, to reach out to the nerds, the geeks, and the gamers that call not only their fandom their home, but also the internet their home.

And because this is something that involves people, this involves human, this involves real living, breathing souls, I believe that this means this is something we have to consider from an ethical lens. And so I have a couple of things that I think I can offer. The first one, you can actually go to our website, checkpointchurch.com backslash safe point. It's listed there on the screen, S-A-F-E-P-O-I-N-T. We develop every year an updated version. We call a safe sanctuary policy in the United Methodist Church. We take the safe sanctuary policy, we updated it with digital kind of considerations in mind, and that is available for download.

If you want it, go, take it, steal it, use it, adapt it. The updated version will be going live in a couple of weeks for 26, and we are proud of putting that out there and we'd like to take advantage of that. So download safe point, but I bring that as kind of a part of my tool belt here is that I've developed a platform of safety that I'm willing to share with all of you and to work through with you. The second one that I just mentioned, we have an active community. We're about the same size as the Church Digital, and like people at the Church Digital would likely know, you need folks to moderate, to organize, to handle any conflicts that might come up. But not only conflicts, but to provide care for the people that are in this place. And then towards the end, we're going to also take a quick look, a quick lens look at AI.

And the reason why I'm doing that is that I had the opportunity here to publish a book through Abingdon Press called God and the Machine, which was a theological, pastoral perspective on AI. Not so much saying, should you use it, should you not, instead saying, as people of faith, how do we even start the conversation? Because I do think we should be having the conversation, if nothing else. So that's a little bit about who I am and a little bit about what I do. If you see online, you're Nate. But that's enough for credentialing. We'll go to the next slide.

So like I said, we believe that digital lives are real lives. These are real things. How many of you in the digital space have ever heard, this isn't real church, or you're not really gathering, or, well, you're just on a stream. You're just on a chat. You're not actually participating in a community or relationship. Well, I don't know about you, but whenever I am in a Zoom call, whenever I call, whenever I'm on Twitch, I don't just disembody myself from my hands and my brain and begin to type mindlessly on my phone. I'm there.

I'm engaged. I'm in the space. Whenever I make a joke that somebody laughs at me, I feel that I've been funny. Whenever I make a joke and I get a bit of embarrassment that I didn't quite nail the landing there. But nonetheless, I am a part of it. I am engaged. I am in that moment.

I am just as real as anybody else as I'm engaging online. And so we have to move past this as even being thought. The space of digital church is real church. The space that occupies a username or a profile, there's a real person behind that. And because of that, ethics is important because it means that the state, the things that are important to us in the church and have always historically been important to us in the church are still important. There's something we should be considering because real harm can be done online. But also, real prayers can be offered.

Real care can be offered. Real relationships can be offered. And so we should take this thing very seriously. Before we move on to the next slide, I'll say another about what is any of this and what is our responsibility in this? And that is that I believe that AI, the internet, computers, Twitch, YouTube, Discord, fill in the blank. These are all what I like to call technology. And the way that I define technology is that I define it as knowledge applied towards a goal.

It's something that we know, something that we've figured out how to do, and we're putting it to work. Knowledge applied to a goal. That's what technology is. I believe that whenever we read the story, perhaps of Bezalel in the Old Testament, and we read about Bezalel having the knowledge of woodworking and of gold working and being tasked with applying that knowledge, that technology of art, unto the Ark of the Covenant. We have this person specifically blessed by the Spirit of God to apply gold, to do the work of technology, to do the work of knowledge as a goal. I see that as an example of stewardship. I think we are called to be stewards of the earth.

And as a part of stewards of the earth, we are also called stewards of knowledge that is applied towards goals, otherwise known as technology. So all of this, ethics, is our obligation as those in ministry. If you are a pastor, or if you are, you know, a leader within a congregation, or even if you're a layperson, you're still called towards some kind of role in ministry. If you're called towards that, that means that you are called to be a steward of this thing. And so especially if you're called to be online, if you're called to be in a digital landscape, then all the more so we are called to be good stewards of digitization and digital technology, which ethics is certainly a part of. We'll go to the next slide. So something that I want to kind of keep in our back pocket as we go through all of this is that none of this is going to be like by and large to every situation in this room.

Some of you maybe have hybrid churches. Checkpoint, the church that I pastor, is a digital first church. So we are primarily online. You're also going to have different platforms that you're utilizing. Discord has different terms of service from YouTube versus Twitch, all of these different things. There's going to be a wide range of expectations and nuance brought to this thing. And so I want you to, instead of thinking about this as being something by and large, bilateral thing that's foisting upon you, think of this as an invitation, a posture of stewardship, towards a posture of consideration and discernment of what we're actually doing in this place.

Again, as a reminder, like I started with, this is towards real, breathing human beings. We'll go to the next slide, Karen. So safety. Safety is where we're going to get started. We're going to get started with that. What is ethics online? What is digital ethics?

This is how we actually keep people safe online. That is our number one prerogative whenever we get started in this work is how are we creating a safe environment? So I mentioned I'm a United Methodist because of that. Gullah named John Wesley, who was father, founder of the movement. And one of his things is he has these that we utilize as actually our. And the first one is what I'm starting with here. Do no harm.

We believe that safety and avoiding harm, getting in the way of harm being done. That is our number one kind of concern in this space. We'll go to the next slide. I'll talk a little bit about what SafePoint is. This is how, again, the framework we've built around, but this doesn't have to be. It's just the framework that we've kind of adapted and taken into hand. So within CheckPoint, if you went into our Discord today, you would join and you would see this traditional Discord stuff.

But then we have a hidden section that is only for our moderator. And we call our moderators guardians. And this was explicit language. We really want them to see themselves guardians of the space in the same way that a parental guardian is a guardian. These are not police. These are not people who are micromanaging. These are not people who are constantly looking at every single message that is sent.

They do that, but I also find that to be not super helpful. And so instead, we wanted this to be towards protecting, creating, and engaging with the safety and the safety practices of our space. So guardians was one of the first things that we instituted at CheckPoint. These are people who are volunteers, they're lay members from within our church that picked up and said they want to do this. They want to contribute in this way. They've been background checked. That's a crucial first step.

And then they've actually been trained. And not only have they been trained, but they will continue to be trained on a yearly basis. We have annual trainings. We actually, that's why I mentioned the 2026 policy is going live in a couple weeks, because we are required to do this every single year to go. We make it available to the whole church. Anybody's welcome to come, but our guardians, they are required to be there to keep up with their annual training so that we can be aware of what to know and what to be concerned about in regards to our space on Discord, which again, is our church building. So it's our most important space that we want to preserve.

We also take very seriously concern, clear telegraphed language that deserves a response of urgency. And so we've actually set up an exclamation on our Discord that auto-draws suicide prevention hotline, access to the 988 number, any of those kind of things that people are able to utilize or that are in use. So we have that literally just like a command button so that people, if they need that help and if they're unaware of assets, we want to make sure that they have that. Since we are not a totally U.S.-based server, we also include the numbers that we have hotline. So all of that was something that we developed in the past year or so just to try to create an instant reaction of safety for the space. And then another thing that we realized we needed is to be a guardian. Not everybody was called the highest level of involvement in safety.

Some people we just needed to have in the room. We just needed to have in the space to be essentially, if you think about it as parental guardians, maybe you could think about it as youth pastors instead. If you think about youth pastors, typically they have parental guardians that do hop in. They have parents that step in and volunteer as just another adult background checked person to be a second person in a youth group setting. And maybe I should back up and say, we believe this policy applies to everyone. That's something that we took very seriously in the beginning. Within our own like denominations policy, the language that they use is that safe sanctuary is designed for children and for vulnerable adults.

That's like the two people groups that they're trying to protect. My humble opinion is on the internet, there's no such thing as a non-vulnerable adult. We are so very, very rife with scams. The internet is such a place that creates emergency and urgency and situation. And so our by and large rule is this safety that we are applying applies to everyone. We're not just setting children and vulnerable adults aside. We're saying vulnerable whenever it comes to the internet.

And so that's why all of this is important and why we have this as kind of a by and large system of preventing harm. So a part of that harm and a part of that harm avoidance means that we have to be talking about it in the first place. So I'll go to the next slide and say that one of the first principles, regardless of your context, is to try to be preemptive. So that's a good measure that is allowing us to use our brains or guts sometimes just to know where could harm be done here? Where is there risk? Where have I maybe even seen? But, you know, like a lot of other adages, the worst time to implement a policy is tomorrow.

You should do it. The best time was yesterday, second best time today. Try to figure out what harm can be done. Try to put in steps as soon as you know them so that you can get ahead of the potential harm to be done rather than to be behind the curve or worse, just totally unaware of it. You do not want to be blindsided by a potential harm. And then the next thing, the next slide, is to consider the platform on. So this is some stuff that is pretty huge at Checkpoint.

I've mentioned Discord is our most important space. It's the space we put the most energy and effort into protecting and keeping safe. It doesn't mean that we don't on other spaces, but this is the space. And so a couple of things that we've noticed on the platform is BM culture. We say you shouldn't. We can't police that. We can't micromanage that.

We can't tell that they're not allowed or else we'll kick them out. Because that's just going to be too hard to manage. In the way of building relationships. What we can say is have plaster. We don't think you should do. And we're not going to give you a reason to do that. And so we opened up tickets on our system so that if you need more private conversation, you can have a private conversation with our guardians or with me as the pastor.

If you need something that is even more private than that. And you can reach out on a ticket and we can give you a way to a recorded Zoom call or something along those. A more private space or at least a more inaccessible space that is still a part of the cloud for safety reasons. I'm just noticing I caught something wrong. Okay, I will correct that. No private DMs. We are sure not to encourage people.

To take things outside of our server space. The second thing is in error. We don't have any open rooms in our Discord server. Every room is open until we have two background checked adults that can open and occupy that room. And so this is very much akin to the policy window on doors. Every door in a church is supposed to open so that you can look in even to private meetings. Every meeting with an upward number of youth or vulnerable in our denomination, you have to have two adults or a certain number of adults per kid.

All of those things are important. All of those things are important. And so we actually keep rooms closed. We keep them completely locked off. We only open them whenever we know for a fact that we have. Oh, no, y'all can't hear me? Let me see.

Your sound keeps dropping out is what it's doing. Interesting. Let me try. I'll just disconnect. If cell service holds better. And worst case scenario, if this still doesn't work, then I can just. Is that any better?

Lost you for quite a bit of what you just said. Oh, no. Well, let me know. I've disconnected from Wi-Fi. Can you hear me any better? Well, it's like I said, it's it'll just all of a sudden cut out for about a second as you're talking is what it's doing. So.

Let me. I've had this problem before. So what I'm going to do. All right. I tried to turn off sensitivity as well as suppression. OK. Did that make it any better?

You didn't cut out there. I didn't think it was that because you would be in the middle of a sentence and it would just it would just drop. But it sounds good. We'll just keep going. It was doing it occasionally, sporadically. And it just started getting worse there in the last five minutes. So.

I'll let. OK. We'll type in the chat again if it's having a problem. Yeah. Let me know if it if it stops again. But it could have been the headphones. And if I need to, I can always try and take out the headphones and just go straight into the phone.

We'll see what we can figure out. But yeah, I was supposed to be from my office, which would have been the nice, fancy big microphone and camera and all that good stuff. But yeah, perhaps maybe auto noise suppression. So other noise around you might be causing it to suppress it for a second. So that'd be my guess. All right. Frank says seems to be OK.

I'm going to pay it. I've got the chat up on my computer, so I'm able to at least pull from there. If it does it again, let me know. All right. But yeah, I can't remember where we necessarily left off, but this is a really important page. No private DMs, rooms stay closed, the opposite of what it says, until we have two trusted adults. And then we've also created a pretty advanced like ticketing system for our community now.

And so we are going to log concerns. We're going to have private spaces within our actual server that doesn't require people to go outside of our server to let us know when things are going on. But we aren't going to micromanage. We aren't going to police a space. We believe that's very much a part of the ethical concern that is very new in digital context. And I can give an example. And my dad's church growing up, we were at a church plant.

It was a traditional church, very brick and mortar style. If somebody was getting coffee at the coffee bar and was, you know, talking about, I don't know, they were sharing a rumor about somebody or something, you know, how church gossip goes. And so maybe they would be sharing a rumor or something. Odds are, unless it just so happened that somebody walked by at the worst imaginable point, nobody would know that conversation is going on. That's not the reality of Discord. Every conversation ever is seen by everyone. And so whenever it's something that is constantly in people's eyeballs, whenever it's something that everybody can always see and it's constantly tracked, that can create a culture that can get really unhealthy really fast.

And so often I will have people that will message me and will say, hey, so-and-so is sharing heresy. And I will say, I think they're just having a conversation, actually. I don't think that what they're doing is actually trying to cause any trouble. And I think that if I step in and stamp out that conversation, then that's going to say a whole lot more about me and a whole lot less about that person. If they have questions, if they have conversations that they need to bring to the fore, like, they will probably do that. They'll probably bring up those conversations. If they're actually spreading something, proselytizing it, okay, you know, that's a different concern.

But, like, for the most part, we really don't want to micromanage a Discord space because we just have to understand this is a new paradigm of relationship, one in which not every relationship, not every conversation going on of Discord space needs everyone engaging in it. And that's a different, that's a new ethic, that's a new thing that we have to develop and talk about and work through in and of ourselves. And so often what I'll end up doing in that situation where somebody will come to me is I will say, let's talk about it, rather than let's go bring it up to them. Let's you and I talk about this. Because if you have a concern with this, I want to hear your concern, but I don't necessarily think that this is an appropriate use of our privacy in this space or the way that we talk to one another. So it's all about designing around the platform itself. A lot of these things are not relevant if you are a Jate and you're, you know, Jate does have a Discord server, but, like, by and large, his stuff on Twitch, completely different set of concerns, completely different set of things that you have to worry about.

If you're on Facebook, you've got a totally different set of concerns. People know you by your profile. I have never checked anyone's Discord profile. I don't care. There's no reason. There's no central hub for that to happen. So everything stays in my space, but in my space.

But on Facebook, right, like, you have to worry about what your church members are maybe posting or sharing out there because of the fact that it is, it's a bit more focused on doing that, a bit more focused on encouraging. That kind of behavior. So it just is tuning into the platform and asking the relevant ethical questions. What is going wrong in these spaces? Where have we seen harm being caused in these spaces? And how can we address them adequately? And that actually connects to our next kind of transferable principle here.

So I'll go to the next slide. And I'll say that a lot of this has to do with equipping and training and building up laity within the midst of safety training rather than just kind of top- down policing. That kind of stuff is very normative for Discord. I cannot tell you how many people have joined our Discord server and have said, every other server kicks me. Every other server bans me. Every other server doesn't hear me out. The normative experience of the internet is censorship, silence, not willing to tolerate difference or nuance or conversation.

And so instead, they just force people out, which to me is just not, it's not the ethical way to do church ministry, especially if you consider your Discord server to be your literal church. Often, I will have people, just like they'll come up to me and talk to me about heresy, I will have people that will come up to me and will say, we need to ban this person. And I have a tough time. We have not banned many people aside from bots. We have a no bot policy. So we do spam bots, spam accounts. Those are easy bans.

But whenever it comes to a person who's causing trouble, we are really hesitant to ban. And the reason for this is, if we're taking this thing seriously as the Checkpoint Church Discord server is a digital church building, then banning someone, in my mind, is the equivalent of excommunication. We're doing something that requires a church vote in some denominations, in some structures. Like, we're doing something that is so harsh if we are considering this and taking it seriously as a church building. And so instead of these drastic measures, instead of these intense reactionary experiences, I think that the better way to do ethics online, the better way to do community building ethics online, is to actually train up leaders in your space. To actually form people to be paying attention, having those conversations, and even better, modeling, like showing how are we in relationship online, how are we doing things online, what do we utilize? A great example of this is prayer requests.

So I grew up in, before my dad's church, we went to the church where, you know, at a certain point in the worship service, everything would kind of slow down. The pastor would take out a notepad and would ask the congregation, all right, who has prayers and praises for today? And people in the congregation would raise their hands and would offer something, right, in that moment. They would offer a prayer. They would have a, my dad called them, yeah, gods. So whatever, they would offer up something that was valuable in that time that needed to be prayed for or that needed to be shared for the good of the body in that moment. On Discord, our prayer request channel, but then it, oh, I should say, and then it kind of stopped there, right?

Like maybe you'd have a prayer list, maybe people would check in, but odds are normally it'd be the pastor, taking note of that and sharing that around the church. On Discord, we have this really interesting opportunity where we have prayer requests channels now. We have spaces where people offer up prayers. And I don't know, I'm very new to this server in particular. If y'all have a prayer request channel or if you have a prayer request channel in your space, you have probably noticed that the first person to get to, the first person to address a prayer request, isn't always the figurehead pastor. It's not always even a Bible study leader or a leader in the church at all. Instead, the person responding to prayer requests is whoever's available in that moment and just cares for their brother and sister in Christ in that moment and wants to share some kind of love with them.

And I think that is a radical example of building a culture of care because of the fact that I have checked enough prayer requests, because of the fact that I have modeled that kind of response, then we have that same thing in our church spaces. People are just going to naturally begin to pray for each other. They're just going to naturally begin to care for one another or be aware of what one another having going on. And so modeling that is always going to be the better reaction, the better response for us. Last point on safety will be our last slide here. And that is, these are five things. If you want to use them, you can use them.

You can screenshot this. You can copy this down. One of them obviously has to change because it got it backwards. So imagine the harm before it happens. On purpose, be preemptive in our harm prevention. Design against the platform's defaults, not with them. Try to think about what are the terms, how is the terms of service not going far enough?

Where have I seen harm being done on this platform before? In my opinion, keep rooms closed until you can have enough background checked people to open them. The one that I think is very applicable to many situations is to be a transparent leader, to be a transparent space, not a surveillance one. Nobody wants a constant somebody watching over their shoulder to make sure they're saying the right thing in their ever-present conversations. And then focus on training people to model and to be formed, not just to be kind of constantly checked and held to account. Instead, we can build a culture online. We have a unique opportunity to do that exact thing.

Let's see. Some other things worth grabbing here. We'll go to the next one. An important thing online when it comes to ethics is to not worry about metrics as much as we like to. This is something that I think is maybe more applied to some of us than others. Maybe you're not a numbers person. Maybe you're not somebody that is obsessed with how many views you're getting or how many subscribers you have or how many users you have joining.

Instead, for me, I want to encourage you to think about the fact that each of those people are people. Every username is a person. Every profile picture is a real person. If you have a church of three people, that might not be enough to sustain a salary, but it sure is three people that you're reaching. And so we need to keep that in mind with our ethics is that these are not just metric situations that we need to flaunt or that we need to stress over or worry about. Instead, these are moments that we need to be considerate and considering of the person that is actually on the other side of that screen. Next one, moderation is pastoral care.

This is a tough one, but I think we have to consider what does it mean to keep a space safe from a pastoral level and from a theological level. We need to make sure that what we do is consistent, that has a by and large kind of approach. We aren't giving certain weight to others and not to others. Remember that everything that we are doing is being seen. In that same, to flip the script, right? Like if everybody can hear every conversation, everybody can also see every pastoral decision that we make that's not in a private ticket. Like if we are doing something, it is being seen, it is being observed.

And so we have to be aware of our consistency, of our fairness, of our transparency in the midst of all of this. All of that is very important to this work. I just got done reading a book called Attensity from the Friends of Radical Attention out of New York. Go to the next slide there. And this is a great quote from it. Attention taken to its highest degree is prayer. One of the most ethical things that we can do for people online is to pay attention to them and simply just to give them the time of day to actually notice what they're doing and then to ask the same of them.

So one of the things that I often say online is everything changed in a realm of competition. So whenever I first became a church planter, I was given warning. Everybody said, hey, you know, just so you know, church planning is very competitive. You're going to hear a lot of people say you're stealing from their flock or they're going to view you as competition. I think that's changed. I never really got to feel that, but I think that I've not heard that conversation much since I got started because I think that that is no longer the key source of competition in the church. Who we are competing with is the attention economy.

Who we are actually competing with is Instagram, is a TikTok feed, is an algorithm. That is our ethical competitor. That's who we're actually trying to work against. Whenever I think about Instagram and I think about Facebook and I think about TikTok and I think about all of these models of attention addiction, they want the first thing that you do in your morning is to open up your phone and to go to their app. And so I think that it's not a bad line of thought to say, what can I do as a leader of a church to make that the prerogative? To replace that addictive feed and then to send them in a better direction. And so it's tempting to think about it as capturing attention, but that's the Instagram way.

So we have to think about it maybe like that at first to actually get the attention at the very beginning. But then we want to build towards a better way. We want to build towards something healthier, holier, more set apart. And so it's a funny thing, but I often describe a lot of the work that we do as kind of working ourselves out of a job as a digital church. Because there are some people that are addicted to the internet, they're addicted to the algorithm, they're addicted to their social feeds. And I want to get them off of those onto our Discord server. And then that might inevitably mean that they're on the internet less, that they're on their phones less, and that they're in our digital space less.

And that's just a risk that I have to take because I think that, again, attention and the attention economy is something that we have to be really considerate of in the current zeitgeist of culture. I don't think that's everybody. I personally do not consider myself to be addicted to the internet or to the algorithm. I love being a digital native. It is not something that preoccupies my mind or my time or my attention. The time I spend is intentional, is on purpose, going to Flatcap's post from earlier, right? Like, I think that there are people who are that way, but I think there are also a lot of us digital natives out there that we truly do live a full life through digital means, and that that is a fine and a holy thing to do as well.

So I don't think that everybody has an unhealthy attention economy, but I do think that there are – that is a part of our work. A part of our work in the ethics of the Christian way online is to seek out redemption for the attention economy and the way that we pay attention to one another and the way that we pay attention to our phones and technology around us. Okay. Next is going to be AI, but before I get there, we can kind of pause for questions. And I know – I'm really stopping because I saw Vernette there asked a question that I would answer, but if there's any others that want to, we can have kind of a half-time, a little over half-time break for questions. So the question was, what does it look like to disciple people in your online church? How do you know people are maturing in Christ-like character?

Like with any church is kind of how I would answer that. I think that's been – if there's one kind of, like, summary energy of the past 13 slides, it is that a lot of this work is the same. Often in my job, I'm kind of, like, beholden to two groups. I'm beholden to the people that I am called to minister, and then I'm beholden to the, like, leaders, the Episcopal leaders of my space. And so the work that I do here with the people that I'm called to serve is actually the same thing I've always been doing. It's the same work. There's nothing new.

It just has to be translated. And so the actual work of noticing this is by trying to discern what is going on here, and having to describe that to an Episcopal leader who is in their 60s gives a whole lot of opportunity to practice that translation work. I'll give you an example since I feel like I don't know if I fully answered. Whenever I first was called to this, I had to go – I was going through the ordination process at the U of C, which is very vetted. It's a very lengthy process. And you have to go before the board several times, which is just a collection of peers and mentors and leaders within the conference that are called to ask you the hard questions. And one of the hard questions they asked me was, Nathan, what is this new church you're planting for nerds, geeks, and gamers online, what is the ecclesiology of your church?

I was fresh out of seminary, and I was like, let me look up what ecclesiology means real fast. And I have no idea. Like, I have never been asked this at any church I've ever served in my entire life. No one has ever cared about what the ecclesiology of the church is. I've never been sitting on a church council meeting. The whole room's – That's not a conversation that we have very often. And so, what that revealed to me was, I have the opportunity to begin to have the conversations of what does an ecclesiology.

What does the church look like online? What does it mean to gather as not a community or a club or a group of people gathered, but instead a true church, the body of Christ? How does the body of Christ show up online? What does that actually mean? And so, it made us ask those questions. And so, in that same light, we are constantly asking, what does it mean to become a disciple online? How are we viewing our lives differently?

How are we growing in the fruits of the Spirit, right? Like, are we paying attention to those things? Are we tracking those things? One of the ways that I know that our folks are being discipled is we actually offer communion every Sunday on our space. And I could talk more about that, but I don't want to take a ton of time. But I will notice when people start showing up to communion. When they start being a part of that experience, when they start joining us in that act, when they're observing that moment and that holy sacrament together, that is a shift for people.

That's a moment where they are growing in their relationship with Christ in that moment. And so, that's something that we try to keep track of, try to pay attention to within people's lives. And then we actually have a moment built into our system where we have these folks in our community called Level 2. And the whole principle of Level 2 is that that's the closest thing we have to membership. And so, what I ask of folks is like, are you willing to change your mindset from being served by the church to serving the church? And if they're willing to say yes to that, congratulations, you're a Level 2. Like, that's what I need to know.

Are you willing to change your vision of yourself from being served by a consumer of this church experience to serving the community? So, yeah, that's that. Ruth Ellen, if there's time at the end, let's ask that question again because I do want to let you know more about how we do community. I think it's really cool. But I also want to get to these notes on AI real quickly. I'm not going to super dredge in the water here. You can go read my book if you really want to know the full thoughts on AI and that I have for them.

Again, the basic approach that I have towards ethics around AI is using what I kind of propose as a mixture of using the two most important commandments. How do we love God? How do we love our neighbor? And how do we do that with AI? And the answer may be sometimes we don't. Sometimes the best way to love God with AI is to not use AI. Sometimes the best way to love our neighbor is to not use AI.

I have tons of examples of how it's been used well and how it's been used poorly. But what's most important to me is that we even ask the question. Go, baby. Go, baby. I'm going to meet you. This kiddo popped in there for just a second because she has me ranting and raving in here. So I'll say in our mindset, in our vision of AI and how we approach it, for me, the first question is often the wrong question.

I'll go to the next slide there. The wrong question to ask about AI is, is it allowed? Is it cheating? What happens if I get caught? Will I get caught? To me, all of those questions imply an immediate sense that you already know that it's wrong. If you've already made up your mind that AI is wrong and you choose to use it, I think we know that is not a healthy theology of utilizing this thing.

If you feel guilty about using AI, then that's a problem of sin. We've got to call it as we see it, folks. Like, I'm not normally the one to throw that, but like, we have to name the elephant in the room. If you feel guilty and you use it anyway, that's a bad sign. That's a red flag. That's something you should be paying attention to. And so, for me, I didn't want to approach AI from the lens of, is this right?

Is this wrong? Instead, I wanted to approach it from a theological lens. What's actually happening and how can we use it in a formational way? Or better, how can we use it for formation rather than being formed by it, as Dr. Level Up might encourage us to consider from the earlier talk. One of the ways that I offer a framework for this in the book, in chapter five, I think, is the next slide. And that is that I encourage you to use AI as if ethics is the engine which drives it.

You cannot move the car if it does not have an engine. And so, if you aren't starting with ethics, then you aren't starting the car at all. You should not even consider using AI until you're willing to have a conversation of the ethics around the thing. If you aren't considering what it's doing to people around you, if you aren't considering what it's doing to the relationship that you have with God, then you ought not even turn the key in the ignition. We have to start with ethics. That has to be the beating heart of our process and of our conversation around it entirely. I'll offer some warning lights here.

We can go to the next one. Just some quick ones as I'm kind of burning through these. Know and be aware, if you don't know that AI has a bias, you've not done enough work to start the car. If you don't have a strong comprehension of what it means to seek out justice, whether that's climate justice or social justice or what have you, you haven't done the research necessary to utilize AI. You shouldn't start the car. If you're not aware of the privacy concerns, then you're not ready to start the car of AI. If you aren't aware of what is the truth, the way, the truth, and the life, I mean, then you aren't ready to start the car.

So those are some things to kind of pay attention to as you're approaching this is what have I done? What work have I done in the AI conversation? If you haven't done the work, then it's not ready for you yet. It's exciting technology, it's innovation, it's something that is moving so quickly, it's intimidating, and sometimes it feels like the easy way out. Regardless of any of those things, regardless of if you think it's good, bad, or ugly, it has to be interrogated. That's what I really argue from a very formational level. We can skip that next slide because it's basically answered in the one after it.

The way that I offer an argument for is that I think that we need to be considering AI from a human-forward perspective. Humans are the most important part of what we do. Humans, this is a big argument for the book that I'm not going to go into too much here, but I really try to clarify that one of the most important things about AI for us is that we understand it as a technology, we understand it as a tool, that we do not at all conflate it with a person because there is no way, shape, or form that technology can bear the Imago Dei. That is incredibly important to our faith. That is an incredible theological claim. That's one of the lines that I draw in the sand for me in AI, and it's a way to start it because I think it reminds us, it kind of opens our eyes to this cannot be an image bearer, we are the image bearers, this is a tool made by us, it cannot bear the image of God. If anything, it might bear our image, but it is no different or better than money.

It is no different or better than man-made power or governmental structures. Human forward is the way forward. Loving God and loving neighbor, that is the way forward. That is what we have to consider in the midst of interiating this conversation around AI. But again, I don't want to necessarily discourage you entirely. The most important thing for me is that people are actually talking about it. If I had to make a choice, I want you to be talking about AI.

I want you to not avoid it like it's the elephant in the room. Instead, I want you to be constantly interrogating it, understanding it, keeping up with the news, being familiar with what's going on. If you think AI has no problems, then there you go. That's another example of like, you're not ready to start the car. There are problems. There are issues. There are things we have to be aware of.

If you think that AI is 100% good all the time for every use case, you're not thinking hard enough about this. We have to consider it from an ethical lens. And so that's kind of what I am going to try to offer in this time. And we'll go to the next slide just to remind you the name of the book is God and the Machine. And it is actually a Bible study. So it's broken out into six chapters and you have access to or you will have access to videos if you purchase both the book and the leadership guide. There is a leadership guide with study guide questions, prayer requests, or not prayer requests, but written opening and closing prayer, things to continue the conversation, all that kind of stuff.

But if you would like to check out God and the Machine, I would love that. Be sure to leave me a good Amazon review to get those numbers up. Always appreciate that kind of stuff. And if you want to continue the conversation, I have a whole conversation about AI that I could have gone more into. But I just kind of wanted to bring the initial thoughts of ethics into the situation, into the conversation before my time is over here. And then a note to leave you on, one more slide here, is let us not be known by our innovation, but instead by our love. Let us keep that in mind.

These two greatest commandments of loving God and loving neighbor, let that be the driving force, the thing that moves us forward, whether that be safety online or digital ethics or any kind of church ministry that we are called towards, or whether that be our AI use or what have you. Regardless of any of this, if you had to leave with one thing, I hope that you'll pick one of those pieces that really hammers in the fact that we are called to be known by our love. We are called to love God and love neighbor, regardless of the mission field, regardless of the tools that we use or the technology that we inhibit. My reminder from the book there is we are not called to out-innovate Silicon Valley. We are here to love God and neighbor in front of a machine before the machine ever even gets to people, ideally. Okay, that's it. Last slide.