Summit probes the danger and benefits of AI

Key points:

The third annual AI and Church Summit was hosted by the United Methodist Board of Discipleship Ministries.
Negative effects may be coming as the technology swiftly develops, speakers warned.
One speaker said that an AI takeover is not inevitable.

Thanks to artificial intelligence, things are about to get “really strange.”

That was the closest to a sure thing spoken during the AI and Church Summit on Aug. 24-27 at the Harry Denman Building.

On the upside, AI possibilities include significant medical advances, reduction of workplace dangers, increased productivity and economic growth.

The downside is, well, how about an apocalypse?

“The world’s going to get really strange really fast,” said Brian Patrick Green, director of technology ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. Green wasn’t present in person, but in an appropriately science fiction-like touch, a large projection of his head hovered above the audience of 165 while he spoke. Another 402 people followed the summit online.

“We need to be mentally prepared for this, and so you need to be the leaders that your people need and that the world needs,” Green told the church leaders at the summit.

The Rev. Scott Hughes, associate general secretary of World Service at United Methodist Discipleship Ministries, sounds a memory chime at the AI and Church Summit in Nashville, Tenn. The third annual ecumenical gathering was hosted by Discipleship Ministries. Photo by Chris Law, Discipleship Ministries.

Leaders from Protestant denominations discuss what they are doing to address the challenges and potential of artificial intelligence during the AI and Church Summit in Nashville. From left to right are Corey Schlosser-Hall with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.); Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of The Episcopal Church; Bishop Lanette Plambeck of The United Methodist Church; Bishop Andy Doyle of The Episcopal Church; the Rev. Danielle Hickman with the United Church of Christ; and the Rev. Jihyun Oh with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Photo by Chris Law, Discipleship Ministries.

“Human Agency” was the hopeful theme for the third year of the summit, which for 2026 gathered four mainstream Christian denominations: The Episcopal Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and The United Methodist Church. The United Methodist Discipleship Ministries hosted this year at Denman, which houses its offices.

“If all hell does break loose in four weeks or four years, if the apocalypse really does come … that’s actually what our faith is for — apocalyptic moments — and we never feel ready for them,” said speaker Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, the spiritual leader for The Episcopal Church’s congregations and schools in the District of Columbia and four Maryland counties.

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The bad news is so bad that the organization that described the downside at the AI and Church Summit barred reporters from the session, or even identifying the organization itself. But here’s the gist from an approved summary provided by summit leaders.

“The risks … are not speculative or science fictional,” reads the summary. “They include the use of AI systems in cyberattacks, the dual-use problem in the life sciences where the same capabilities that could accelerate cures could also lower the barrier to biological weapons and documented cases in which conversational systems have contributed to real-world harm.

“The discussion also touched on the difficulty of evaluating systems that can misjudge their own situation, and on failures that appear to stem less from gaps in a model’s knowledge than from something resembling motivated reasoning.”

This is not a burden the church can kick down the road to the next generation, Budde said.

“If we’re the ones to bear it, then we’re the ones,” she said. “And I think of my grandchildren and maybe some of yours, and say, ‘Well, better me than them.’

“And if there’s something we can do to make it a little bit better for them, Lord, it’s for this hour that we have come.”

Science fiction predicted AI decades ago. Think of the Library Computer Access and Retrieval System that calmly and neutrally answered any question Captain Kirk shouted on “Star Trek.” Now think of the HAL 9000 (Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer) in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which had a psychological breakdown and started killing the crew of its spaceship.

“We … are standing at a threshold,” preached the Rev. Winterbourne Harrison-Jones, pastor of Witherspoon Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis, on the last day of the summit.

“It is changing how we teach,” he said. “It is changing how we learn. It is changing how we preach. It is changing how some pray. It is changing how we create and how we communicate, how we hire and how we govern, how we diagnose and how we decide. It is also influencing what we see, what we believe, whom we trust and even how we imagine ourselves.”

AI can recognize faces, identify patterns, interpret images, generate language and predict behavior, Harrison-Jones pointed out.

“Yet, we remain in danger of failing to see one another,” he said.

The Rev. Winterbourne Harrison-Jones, pastor of Witherspoon Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis, speaks during the AI and Church Summit in Nashville, Tenn. Harrison-Jones delivered the closing sermon of the conference. Photo by Rich Copley, multimedia producer at the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

Chebon Kernell, executive director for the United Methodist Native American Comprehensive Plan, speaks Aug. 24 during the AI summit in Nashville, Tenn. Kernell argued that the artificial intelligence movement can still be halted. Photo by Rich Copley, multimedia producer at the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

The environmental impact of thousands of data centers and cooling stations needed for AI to function will negatively impact the environment, which is already threatened by global warming. The data centers and cooling stations will occupy thousands of acres of land and consume water needed elsewhere.

Native American land is being targeted for data centers and cooling stations because there is less regulatory red tape, abundant land, existing water rights and tax advantages, according to The New York Times.

Chebon Kernell, executive director for the United Methodist Native American Comprehensive Plan, is helping to lead the resistance to AI within The United Methodist Church.

The AI revolution isn’t inevitable, Kernell said.

“There is a massive growing tidal wave against the use of artificial intelligence and … these data centers right now, and it’s larger than it was in March, and it’s larger now than it was a year ago,” he said.

The first book in the Bible tells an applicable story about the difference between knowledge and wisdom, said Bishop Lanette L. Plambeck, who leads the Dakotas-Minnesota Area in The United Methodist Church’s North Central Jurisdiction.

“Genesis begins with human beings being created in the image of God, and then almost immediately there is a tree, the tree that holds knowledge of good and evil,” Plambeck said.

“Here we are, thousands of years later, carrying devices that give us access to more information than any generation before us could have imagined. … AI does not discern; it processes, it predicts, synthesizes, generates, it even mimics human thinking. It can reveal a pattern I missed and challenged an assumption at an extraordinary speed.

“But it does not bear moral responsibility for what I choose. It does not love my neighbor. It does not grieve. It does not forgive, and it does not encounter God.

“I do, and we do.”