Yesterday's Christian Daily International opinion piece by Ted Esler on the idea of an “AI-Native Ministry” raises an important question for those of us working at the intersection of ministry, research, leadership development, and emerging technology.
Ted made a helpful distinction. Rather than asking, “Where can we use AI?”, he suggests that organizations will increasingly need to regard intelligence itself as part of their infrastructure, part of their essential team even, providing essential services. I agree. In the same way that electricity or the internet eventually became embedded within organizational life, artificial intelligence may increasingly operate in the background of how we maintain our organizations, conduct research, communicate, organize information, discover relationships, and make sense of complexity.
Importantly, Ted did not argue for replacing people with machines. Quite the opposite. His vision is that AI should enable greater human presence, stronger community, and increased human agency in decision-making. That resonates strongly with what we are discovering through our own work in Africa.
We need to listen in order to understand, so that we can learn to ask better questions.
Over the past several years, our research has increasingly focused on a deceptively simple conviction: we need to listen in order to understand, so that we can learn to ask better questions.
That conviction has shaped an emerging Continental Learning Ecosystem involving conversations with Christian leaders across Africa. The objective is not primarily to collect more information about African Christianity. There is already an extraordinary amount of information available. The challenge is different.
The challenge is finding ways to create spaces in which the knowledge, experience, questions, struggles, innovations, and wisdom already present within local communities can be heard for mutual benefit. And then, how might technology help us recognize patterns and connections within thousands of conversations without removing those conversations from the people and contexts that gave birth to them?
This is where Ted's concept of AI-native ministry becomes particularly interesting.
AI can help us listen at a scale that was previously impossible
Aside from automated infrastructure maintenance work, our experience has convinced me that one of AI's most significant contributions to ministry and research may not be its ability to generate answers or solutions, but its ability to help us listen. This is an important factor in the shift of thinking from a "ministry to" mentality to a "ministry with" posture.
Imagine hundreds of church leaders across different African countries and language communities participating in facilitated conversations about the challenges facing their churches and communities. Imagine if their communities were also included in the conversations.
AI can assist in identifying recurring themes, comparing conversations across regions, surfacing minority perspectives.
Those conversations can now be recorded and transcribed at scale. AI can then assist in identifying recurring themes, comparing conversations across regions, surfacing minority perspectives that might otherwise disappear within large datasets, and identifying questions that deserve deeper investigation.
What previously required a research team months or even years to process can increasingly become part of an ongoing learning process with real-time feedback loops so the conversations evolve over time.
But we must note an important caveat...
- AI is not conducting the conversation. People are.
- AI is not deciding what the experience means. Communities and researchers are.
- AI is not determining what should be done. Leaders are.
- AI helps us see relationships within the information that human beings may struggle to see simply because of the volume involved.
Infrastructure beneath the conversation... rather than a focus or (co)determiner of the conversation.
This, for me, is one of the most promising expressions of an AI-native ministry. The technology becomes infrastructure beneath the conversation, supporting it, rather than a focus or (co)determiner of the conversation, driving it.
From extracting knowledge to circulating knowledge
There is another dimension that becomes particularly important within an African context. For generations, research has often moved in one direction. Information is gathered from communities. Researchers analyze it. Academic papers are produced. Those papers enter universities, journals, conferences, and libraries. The end. Maybe they are read and cited in the academic whirlpool.
AI gives us an opportunity to rethink the entire research knowledge cycle.
Yet the people whose experiences produced (and own) the knowledge may never encounter the research again. AI gives us an opportunity to rethink the entire research knowledge and application cycle.
The same research can potentially produce an academic paper, a leadership resource, a short training module, a discussion guide, a visual summary, an audio resource, material translated and contextualized for different language communities, even dramatized or sung if desired.
This means that knowledge does not simply move from the grassroots toward the academy. It can circulate and positively impact the communities intimately related to it, especially where advancing the gospel is concerned.
Local experience can inform research. Research can identify patterns. Those patterns can return to communities as questions and resources. Communities can respond to them. Their responses then deepen the research and ministries can better serve the needs of the community with the community— their physical, social, and spiritual needs.
From a research pipeline toward a learning ecosystem.
With this, we move from a research pipeline toward a learning ecosystem. And perhaps that is one practical expression of what an AI-Native ministry could become beyond maintaining institutional well-being.
That said, our research experience also suggests several cautions that should accompany the AI-Native concept.
1. Intelligence as infrastructure must not become intelligence as authority
If AI becomes invisible infrastructure there is a danger precisely because it becomes invisible, especially if it becomes influential in decision making. Eventually we may stop asking where its conclusions came from.
For example, with our work with ministry-related research, the AI system can summarize 500 conversations and confidently tell us, “These are the five dominant concerns of African church leaders.” That statement may sound authoritative, but:
- Who participated in those conversations?
- Which countries were represented?
- Which languages were used?
- Who was absent?
- How were the questions framed?
- Which voices were easiest for the technology to interpret?
- And what culturally significant meaning may have disappeared during transcription, translation, or summarization?
In other words, AI can help us identify patterns, but pattern recognition should not automatically become interpretation. We still need human discernment and leadership.
Human beings, particularly people rooted in the communities being represented, must remain responsible for meaning.
Human beings, particularly people rooted in the communities being represented, must remain responsible for meaning. The moment AI moves from assisting interpretation to becoming the unquestioned interpreter, infrastructure has quietly become authority.
That is a line we should be very careful not to cross.
2. An AI-native ministry must remain context-native
Most major AI systems are not culturally neutral.
There is a second concern particularly relevant to the Majority World (aka Global South). Most major AI systems are not culturally neutral. This is especially problematic for cross-cultural ministries.
AI systems have been developed largely within particular technological, economic, linguistic, and intellectual environments. Their training material disproportionately represents some parts of the world, while other communities, languages, oral traditions, and knowledge systems remain significantly under-represented.
This matters enormously in Africa. A conversation among pastors in rural Malawi cannot simply be processed as though it were equivalent to a leadership conversation in London, New York, or even Nairobi or Johannesburg.
An AI-native organization must therefore also become deeply context-native.
Language carries culture. Stories carry knowledge. Silence carries meaning. Relationships carry authority. An AI-native organization must therefore also become deeply context sensitive—context-native even.
The objective should not be to make African knowledge more understandable to the machine. The challenge is to use the machine without flattening the richness of African knowledge. That requires local facilitators, local languages, contextual interpretation, and continual human verification.
3. Efficiency must never become the primary measure of success
Ministry is filled with things that should not necessarily become faster.
AI makes things faster. That is useful, but ministry is filled with things that should not necessarily become faster. Listening takes time. Trust takes time. Community takes time. Discernment takes time. Reconciliation takes time.
Some of the most important moments in our research have not come from the most efficient processes. They have emerged when people felt sufficiently safe to tell their stories, challenge an assumption, disagree with one another, or ask a question nobody had anticipated.
Information processing and human understanding are not the same thing.
The danger is that once AI allows us to process ten times as much information ten times faster, we start believing that processing that much information that fast means we have learned that much more. It does not. Information processing and human understanding are not the same thing.
Perhaps the measure of an AI-native ministry should therefore not primarily be how much work AI allows us to automate. To build on Ted's hopes for AI involvement, a primary question should be: "What has AI enabled us to do that allows us to become more human, more relational, more attentive, and more responsive to one another?"
Toward an AI-enabled human learning ecosystem
As Ted noted, the question facing Christian organizations is no longer whether artificial intelligence will be used by ministries. In many respects, the transition toward becoming core to an organization's infrastructure has already begun. Similar “AI-Native” thinking is already appearing elsewhere, including institutional discussions about redesigning work and governance around AI rather than merely adding individual AI tools.
What kind of additional infrastructure we will build over AI?
For me, the important question is, "what kind of additional infrastructure we will build over AI?" Our emerging experience within the African learning ecosystem suggests a possible answer.
- AI can help us listen across countries.
- It can help us work across languages.
- It can help researchers recognize patterns across thousands of conversations.
- It can help connect people who are wrestling with similar questions without knowing one another.
- It can help translate academic knowledge into accessible resources.
- And it can help return knowledge to the communities from which that knowledge emerged.
The technology must remain underneath the ecosystem rather than sitting at its center.
But the technology must remain underneath the ecosystem rather than sitting as a driving force or focus of it. The focus that AI serves must remain people, relationships, communities, local knowledge, theological reflection, and human discernment.
I wonder if the most exciting possibility for our future is not simply the emergence of an AI-Native ministry in itself. Maybe it is the emergence of human learning ecosystems made possible by AI, which support "ministry with" objectives that aid human flourishing. In such an ecosystem, artificial intelligence does not become the voice. It helps us hear the voices that were already there.
And perhaps, in a continent as diverse, multilingual, relational, and rapidly changing as Africa, that may prove to be one of its most significant contributions.
Adriaan Adams is a local missions practitioner from South Africa, a speaker, consultant, and futuristic thinker with a passion for the application of AI in ministry and missions—the subject of his ongoing PhD research in Africa. His commitment to develop next generation leadership led him to create the Generation Index, an intergenerational competency tool for organizations. Generation Index is now an organization that believes that by identifying the common behavioral trends between generations and creating intentional focus within the workspace to address them, a healthier environment of collaboration can be developed. Adriaan has been involved in the World Evangelical Alliance Mission Commission (WEA MC) since the early 2000’s, an Associate Director, and then a Deputy Leader since 2020. He joined the WEA MC's Executive Committee January 1, 2026 with special responsibility for innovations.
