A large part of my working day is now spent in conversation with a machine.

I’ve been working like this for several years now, using the major conversational AI assistants – Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude – which have gradually become part of almost everything I do, from writing to audio transcription, translation, image generation, video editing, or that much less glamorous but equally necessary task of opening an Excel spreadsheet crammed with nested formulas, cross-references and columns that nobody can remember who created or for what purpose, and managing to extract something from it that a human being can understand. At this stage, practically my entire workflow runs through a system built on a combination of AIs.

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Over this time, I’ve seen them change from one quarter to the next, both in terms of what they can do and the way in which one ends up working with them.

There are pastors who use AI to organise the outline of a sermon, to expand on an idea that fell short on Thursday evening, or to put together the Sunday service

My situation may be more intense than that of most people, as I consider myself a regular—even advanced—user of these tools. But this is no isolated anomaly: artificial intelligence is already part of the day-to-day work of many churches, even though we hardly ever talk about it.

There are pastors who use artificial intelligence to prepare the PowerPoint presentations that are then shown on Sundays; there are those who use it to organise the outline of a sermon, to find an illustration that’s missing, to expand on an idea that fell short on Thursday evening, or to put together the Sunday service, and I won’t even get into the posters for campaigns, concerts and days of prayer – an area where quite a few pastors have finally found an outlet for all the visual creativity they’ve been harbouring, with results that graphic designers across half the world are still gazing at, having not quite recovered from the shock.

In the academic world, where this ceased to be a novelty quite some time ago, the phenomenon has reached proportions that it would be absurd to deny. According to Eurostat data for 2025, 59 per cent of young Spaniards use generative artificial intelligence for educational purposes, compared with a European average of 39 per cent, which places us at the forefront of Europe by a fairly wide margin; and the CYD Foundation’s report Use and Perception of AI in the University Environment, published in July 2026 based on a sample of 800 students, raises the figure to 90 per cent among university students, with the added detail that one in four admits to attending fewer classes as a result.

When a tool appears that promises the same result with half the effort, we don’t usually need much persuading

That Spain tops this European table – and I say this with all due affection for our own country – has not surprised me in the slightest, because we are a nation with a rather long-standing affinity for taking shortcuts, and when a tool appears that promises the same result with half the effort, we don’t usually need much persuading here. What I haven’t been able to find anywhere – and I confess I’ve looked for it – is the equivalent percentage amongst students at our faculties of theology, a figure I’d love to know, though I suspect it would keep more than a few people awake at night. If anyone has this data, please write to the magazine.

 

What isn’t being said

What strikes me most about all this is not the use of AI itself—which I see as inevitable and, to a large extent, desirable—but the silence surrounding it.

After quite a few conversations on the subject, my impression is that within the Spanish evangelical world, artificial intelligence is being used far more widely than is openly acknowledged, and that almost no one explains how they do it, so that we have neither a manual, nor a shared set of guidelines, nor hardly any accounts from anyone willing to say quite naturally, ‘I prepared this in this way, using this tool, giving it these instructions, and then I checked it in this other way’. We have dealt with this new development in a way that is very much our own: by incorporating it thoroughly without discussing it with anyone.

This silence has two sides, and both concern me, albeit for different reasons.

Rather than protecting us from anything, the lack of honest debate prevents us from moving forward, because one cannot improve what cannot be named

The first is a sort of vague sense of shame, whereby admitting that one has used artificial intelligence is tantamount to confessing that one did not actually do it oneself, that it was handed to one ready-made, and that the credit, if any, belongs to someone else; and as nobody wants to be seen in that light, especially in front of an audience that regards them with respect, they keep quiet and carry on.

The second aspect is far less innocent, because there are those who have discovered that with these tools they can achieve formulations, conclusions and levels of refinement that were previously beyond their reach, and rather than sharing this discovery with others, they prefer to keep it to themselves, discreetly enjoying a new ability that others do not possess – which is no longer a matter of fear but of competitive advantage, something that is far less amusing amongst colleagues.

The result, in either case, is the same, namely that the Church is indeed using artificial intelligence whilst carefully refraining from discussing it, maintaining an outdated discourse on a new practice and claiming we do things one way when we are actually doing them another. This, rather than protecting us from anything, prevents us from moving forward, because one cannot improve what cannot be named, nor warn of a danger one is unwilling to face head-on.

 

This is not the first time this has happened to us

To break this silence, it helps to remember that the Church has been through similar debates before – not to settle this one with an argument based on historical authority, which would be somewhat disingenuous, but because that history teaches us something about how we usually resolve such issues.

There was a time when the first annotated Bibles and biblical commentaries aroused suspicion, because it seemed that the believer was no longer engaging with the text alone but through the voice of another; and those who raised this concern were not speaking nonsense, as it did indeed change something in the way we approach Scripture; then came concordances and biblical dictionaries, followed by digital libraries such as Logos, which make available in two clicks what once required an entire bookshelf and a long afternoon’s work, and finally internet search engines, which put the whole world at our fingertips.

We continue to demand—and quite rightly so—that whoever preaches understands what they are saying, makes it their own, and is accountable for it before God

With the benefit of hindsight, what we did at each of those stages was neither to reject the tool nor to adopt it without thinking, but to learn gradually to distinguish between what saved us work and what saved us thought – which are not the same thing.

And we must acknowledge that those who warned of the danger back then were partly right, because anyone who has heard a sermon cobbled together in twenty minutes using the very first result a search engine returned knows that that fear was not unfounded and that something was lost along the way, even if it wasn’t quite as much as was feared.

What was not lost—and this is what gives me hope—was the measuring stick: nobody today considers a pastor to be any less faithful for consulting a commentary, nor that a sermon is any less his own because it began with a search; but we continue to demand—and quite rightly so—that whoever preaches understands what they are saying, makes it their own, and is accountable for it before God and before their congregation. That requirement remains as valid as ever, and the only thing that has changed—though it has changed enormously—is the power of the tools at our disposal.

 

Those who do not wish to, and those of us who cannot sit still

That standard does not oblige anyone to adopt these tools. I want to make one thing clear, because I believe it is only fair and because I genuinely feel this way: anyone who decides not to use these tools has more than enough reasons for doing so, and I find their stance entirely consistent.

Two attitudes coexist: that of the person who steps back out of conviction, and that of the person who dives into everything by nature. Neither is sufficient on its own

I remember those pastors who, in their day, used to say they didn’t type on a computer, that they prepared their sermons by hand as had always been done, or those who took years to start carrying a mobile phone, and I never saw that as backwardness, but rather as a considered decision about how they wanted to work and what they were prepared to let into their lives – a form of restraint that is rather scarce these days and which some of us would do well to emulate. I still find it just as respectable now, and I have no desire whatsoever to convince anyone otherwise.

Having said that, and since we’re being honest, I admit that for those of my generation, such prudence is quite a struggle.

We millennials are incapable of letting a new development pass us by without getting involved: we’ve had no problem embracing liturgical renewal and the introduction of technology into churches; we’ve adopted new tools even when it wasn’t at all clear what use they would be to us, and we’ve switched jobs, formats and hobbies with a zest that our elders have at times found reckless – and probably with good reason, because along the way we’ve taken a few knocks that we could easily have avoided if we’d listened a bit more.

Although it must also be said that everything has its limits, and that the worship songs generated entirely by a machine—which are already doing the rounds and some of which sound frankly quite good—still send a shiver down my spine; a feeling I’d find rather difficult to defend in a theological debate, yet one I simply cannot shake off.

All in all, that same curiosity, which sometimes gets us into trouble, has a flip side that I find valuable: it has kept us holding on to the hope that God is still doing new things, and to the suspicion—perhaps somewhat naïve—that in every new tool that appears there may be an opportunity for His work that it would be a shame to let slip by.

So here, the two attitudes coexist: that of the person who steps back out of conviction, and that of the person who dives into everything by nature; and I suspect that neither is sufficient on its own, but rather that we need one another, because the prudent one prevents the curious one from crashing, and the curious one prevents the prudent one from getting stuck at a station where the train no longer stops.

Daniel Gómez, Communications Coordinator for the Federation of Assemblies of God of Spain. This article was originally published in 'Fiel' magazine and has been translated with permission.

Part II will be published next week.