(RNS) — I was recently invited to join an online webinar titled “AI & the Future of Episcopal Ministry: Living Case Studies in Sacred Innovation,” hosted by the Episcopal Parish Network. The series gathers clergy and lay leaders to explore how emerging technologies are reshaping ministry.
In the Q&A period, someone asked a question that has lingered with me: “I’ve read some beautiful prayers written by AI — deeply moving words that comforted someone I love. But are they really prayers?”
What excites me about this question is that, at its core, it isn’t really about artificial intelligence: It’s about trust, authorship and the Holy Spirit. Christians have wrestled with these themes for centuries.
Anglicans inherit a tradition of humility about the sources of spiritual knowledge. The Reformation cry of “ad fontes” — “back to the sources” — was never merely antiquarian. It called the church to return to Scripture in its original languages and to the living tradition of the early church fathers, testing every authority against the word of God and the Spirit who illuminates. Later Anglican thinkers, following Richard Hooker, would frame this task as holding Scripture, tradition and reason in dynamic conversation — a posture of discernment rather than distrust.
In the 19th century, theologians such as Bishop Charles Gore extended this insight. In his writing, Gore described revelation as an ongoing process in which the Spirit guides the church’s reason as it engages new knowledge. That vision of “Spirit-filled reason” feels remarkably apt amid today’s digital upheaval. The challenge of AI is not new in kind; it’s another chapter in the perennial Christian task of discernment.
When people ask “Can we trust what AI says?” they’re echoing an old question: How do we know which voices to trust? For centuries, Christians have prayed words chosen by others, relied on translators and liturgists, and interpreted Scripture through editors, scholars, commentators and preachers. AI introduces a new kind of mediation, but the fundamental issue — discernment — remains.
In an algorithmic world, authority becomes ambient: Truth now arrives through feeds and search results. The Christian vocation is to keep asking what the New Testament’s First Letter of John commands: “Test the spirits.” Does this voice lead toward humility, compassion and truth, or toward vanity and domination?
Christian discernment has never meant rejecting the technological mediation of the gospel (whether the tradition of Roman-era letter-writing carrying the words of the first Christians to 19th-century radio sermons proclaiming the good news on the airwaves); it has meant faithfully sanctifying technology, recognizing that God often speaks through imperfect instruments while calling us to Spirit-led discernment.
So, can a prayer written by AI be “real”? Nearly every prayer we use is, in one sense, borrowed. The Psalms, Cranmer’s collects, hymnody: Our devotional life has always been mediated through the words of others. Christians pray with the voices of saints, poets and sometimes strangers.
From a theological standpoint, even our most spontaneous prayers are given to us. “The Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words,” St. Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans. Speech directed to God is itself a grace. As we confess in the Creed, God is “creator of all that is, seen and unseen.” That unseen realm now includes code and computation. If we adapt the principle of “ex opere operato” — the idea that sacraments are effective in themselves, not in the intentions of those performing them — to the 21st century, the holiness of a prayer does not depend on the holiness, or the carbon-based biology, of its author.
Of course, not every AI text is spiritually on target. Algorithms mirror the data that train them, including our own biases. Yet the possibility that digital language might sometimes serve as a vessel of grace should not surprise us. The church has long baptized the languages of its age: Israel reused Babylonian creation poetry; the early church adopted the Greek term Logos to understand the divine nature of Christ; missionaries translated the gospel into countless local idioms. Each act of translation was a wager that God’s truth can inhabit new media.
If we take that wager seriously, the question shifts from “Who wrote this prayer?” to “Which spirit does it express?” The Spirit who moved through prophets and poets is not confined to quills or keyboards. God may yet speak through the odd syntax of large language models, provided we have hearts attuned to grace.
Still, prayer is never merely text. It is relationship. Machines can help us form words, but only persons in communion can pray. The danger of AI spirituality is not that God won’t hear such words but that we might forget our own participation in them.
Perhaps the greater miracle is that God keeps answering prayers written by anyone (or anything) ever willing to speak words of grace, love and consolation to the beloved world God makes, sustains and redeems. Anglicanism has always held reason and mystery together. In an age of algorithms, that balance may be our gift to the wider church: cautious, curious and confident that the Spirit still moves where the Spirit will.
(The Rev. Michael W. DeLashmutt is dean of the Chapel of the Good Shepherd and senior vice president at the General Theological Seminary in New York City, where he also serves as associate professor of theology. His most recent book is “A Lived Theology of Everyday Life.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
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