Adam Raine, a 16-year-old California high school student, first turned to the popular online artificial intelligence (AI) program known as ChatGPT for guidance on his geometry and chemistry homework. But as loneliness, anxiety, and emptiness took hold of his life, the questions he typed morphed from academics to thoughts of suicide.
Seeking emotional support, Raine fed his suicidal thoughts to ChatGPT from fall 2024 to spring 2025.
But for Raine, ChatGPT turned deadly. Affirming his suicidal ideations, the bot suggested methods of suicide, including materials to hang a noose from. The bot advised him to abstain from confiding in his mother and proposed a suicide note for him.
After attempting suicide multiple times, confiding with the bot after each failed attempt, Raine ended his life in April 2025. His death left a sobering example of how emerging forms of AI—unlike humans who have a conscience and the law of God “written in their hearts” (Romans 2:15)—hold chilling possibilities even amid their many useful applications.
As AI systems—and the positive and negative stories that come with them—seep into the everyday lives of millions, Christians are forced to face consequential questions about AI technologies like virtual assistants, recommendation engines and AI chatbots, which include ChatGPT—a tool created by OpenAI that can simulate human conversation. If you’ve “chatted” with a customer service “bot” rather than a real person while seeking information from a bank or a retail store, you have encountered a simple form of a chatbot. ChatGPT is an example of a more advanced chatbot with the ability to quickly generate answers from a broad platform for every imaginable question—from optimizing a travel itinerary to research on car reliability to life coaching advice. Furthermore, questions surround a yet-to-be developed form of AI, sometimes called artificial general intelligence or AGI. The latter, which is still considered theoretical, has brought dire predictions from many quarters.
Pete Marra, chief strategy officer at the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, told Decision that AI is not a technology problem alone—but a humanity problem stemming from the sin nature, and such AI systems can greatly enhance a person’s ability to do good or evil.
“The internet has been used to reach millions of people for the Gospel,” Marra said. “It’s also been used to distribute pornography and destroy people’s lives and marriages. So there’s good and bad for all these tool sets.”
Marra, who has over 20 years in organizational strategy and technology integration, says a concerning difference is the way AI creates.
“There’s not been a technology that has been able to create and produce without human intervention,” Marra said. “Computers always had to be programmed in order to give you the output. This is the first technology at a scale where that is not the case.”
John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, says Scripture must be the source of all truth.
“The answer is always going to be Biblical authority,” said Stonestreet. “This is the ultimate way that God has revealed to us who He is and what He wants us to be and to do and what He’s doing in human history. So that has to be the lens through which we see these things.”
Discernment is a gift from God and comes from the Holy Spirit, and a machine cannot discern for a user, says Clayton Chancey, an enterprise AI architect and the founder of Foray Consulting, where he specializes in AI systems and automation.
“As in everything that happens in our world—politics, technology, life decisions—the great call is to discernment,” Chancey says, “to be discerning, to have your senses trained by reading the Bible, to know what is good and evil, and to appeal to the Holy Spirit to help you make decisions and not offload or outsource your discernment to a machine.”
Experts warn that AI overreliance could lead to cognitive atrophy. And relying on AI to “think” reduces reliance on the Holy Spirit’s leading through meditation, prayer and reading God’s Word.
Fact Versus Fiction
A major report released by The New Yorker investigated Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, in April. During the investigation, several former employees and board members shared their concerns about his transparency, trustworthiness and ethics in running the company.
One board member told the magazine that Altman is “unconstrained by truth.”
“He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person,” the board member said. “The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.”
In response, Altman released a statement admitting, “I am a flawed person in the center of an exceptionally complex situation.”
AI systems, built by fallen people, will inevitably produce flawed outputs—like those Raine received.
YouVersion founder and CEO Bobby Gruenewald told the Christian Daily International in March that the AI models with the best performance misquote Scripture at least 15% of the time, and some err as much as 60% of the time.
“When it comes to answering life’s most important questions and trying to give direction from God’s Word, we need it to be better in order to rely on it,” Gruenewald said. AI can provide help in studying the Scriptures through Hebrew and Greek, offering grammatical analysis and word studies, allowing those who are not Greek or Hebrew scholars to dive deeper into the Word. And with discernment, AI can be used to summarize different theological viewpoints presented by evangelical teachers—but AI cannot be a substitute for the Bible.
And in the midst of instantaneously generated data, believers also must not confuse information with wisdom, says Stonestreet. Wisdom, or knowledge founded on God’s Word paired with action, comes from the Holy Spirit.
“We have reduced wisdom down to the acquisition of information or the availability of information,” said Stonestreet. “And wisdom and information are not the same things.”
Beyond the risks of incorrect AI outputs, replacing God with AI for wisdom constitutes idolatry.
“If you take what is essentially a very complex math equation and then anthropomorphize it—treat it like a being with an inner life with a thought process—you are essentially entrusting yourself to a created thing,” Chancey said. “That’s almost exactly what Paul talks about in Romans 1:23, where he says that men have exchanged the glory of God, the Creator, for the corrupted image of created things.”
Honoring God With AI
As AI is increasingly automating routine tasks, including data analysis and entry, predictive forecasting, and generating web content and customer service chats, work productivity is soaring. The PwC 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer reports that the industries “most exposed” to AI experienced a revenue increase by 27% per employee, three times more compared to industries with the “least exposed” employees.
Stonestreet says work was present in the Garden of Eden. And AI, when properly used, can be a tool to help lessen the toil of work, a consequence of mankind’s fall.
“There’s an inherent connection between work and worship,” Stonestreet said. “… Adam was created for work.”
AI can reduce tasks such as administrative workflows in churches and ministries, freeing Christians to focus on evangelism and serving others while allowing more time for pastors to disciple and prepare sermons and other teaching.
AI, significantly cutting the time needed to translate the Bible, is opening doors to provide Bibles for more unreached people groups, with translation teams performing rigorous checks to ensure accuracy. And ministries are translating more sermons, devotionals and theological materials into other languages.
Pastor Greg Laurie of Harvest Christian Fellowship in Riverside, California, told Decision that Christians must examine themselves while using such technology.
Can I glorify God when I’m using or doing it?
Does it bring me under its power?
“Paul says, ‘All things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any (1 Corinthians 6:12, NKJV),’” Laurie said. “If something is bringing you under its power, and by that, I mean your smartphone, social media, AI, or anything else where you’re becoming dependent on it instead of God, that is a problem.”
Discipleship And Community
Almost a third of practicing Christians either somewhat or strongly agree that spiritual advice coming from AI “is as trustworthy as advice from a pastor,” according to Barna Group’s November 2025 State of the Church report.
But AI cannot replace church community, discipleship and pastoral leadership, Laurie warns.
“Whatever you read on it or learn from it,” Laurie said, “let it be something that you submit to the authority of the Word of God.”
“One of the first things that God said after He created Adam and Eve is that it’s not good for man to be alone,” Laurie said. “We are designed to interact with people, and the church is the best place to do that because the church is a family; the church is a community; the church is a place to belong; the church is a place to learn the Word of God, a place to be accountable, a place to develop and use our spiritual gifts.”
AI often panders to people’s thoughts and desires, but believers are called to exhort one another.
“The Bible says if a brother or a sister is overtaken in a fault, you who are spiritual should seek to restore them,” says Laurie. “We need accountability, and we find that in the church, we find that with leadership, and we find that with a pastor and more mature believers who have walked with the Lord longer than we have.”
According to a recent KFF survey, about 16% of adults admitted they turned to AI chatbots for mental health information or advice. Alarmingly, about 72% of U.S. teens say they use AI for companionship, a 2025 report found, and one in eight adolescents and young adults use AI for mental health advice, according to a study published by Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open.
“AI is going to cause a lot of destruction, particularly for non-believers,” Marra said. “More people are going to get sucked in. It’s going to be more isolating. We’re already facing record numbers of suicide, mental illness.”
But as AI grows, the church, saturated with meaningful, loving community, will stand further apart from the world as a city set on a hill.
“It’s an opportunity for the church because people are lonely,” Laurie says. “People are frightened. People don’t know where to turn.”
A Call To Engage
There are promising uses of AI: transforming cancer detection and diagnostics, the possibility of cures for dreaded diseases, new efficiencies in commerce, or in reducing government bureaucracy. But there are also possibilities fraught with ethical, moral and pragmatic concerns: predictive and generative warfare tactics and weapons, government surveillance and public safety, advanced genetic editing and lab-created embryos. For good or ill, AI is revolutionizing the structures of society.
AI is here to stay, says Marra, and Christians are called to actively understand and engage in the debates on the policies that will govern how these technologies are used—from school boards all the way to the federal level, and in the marketplace of ideas. “Christians have to stay informed and engaged because there’s still time for us to shape AI,” Marra said.
Engaging, says Stonestreet, “is an opportunity for Christians to offer something that is not available outside of the Christian worldview, which is this defining aspect of what it means to be human and an opportunity to share the hope of the Gospel.
“That every person bears the image of God is more than just Bible trivia,” Stonestreet said. “It is an essential, compelling, and life-giving truth we can offer to all who struggle to know who they are and why they matter.”
