Season 11 opens with returning guest Drew Dickens for a state-of-the-union on AI and the church. Four months since the IC Conference ("forty years in AI time"), Drew catches Doug up on the summer of new models, the scramble around AI policy, and why survey numbers on pastor AI usage range from 10% to 78% (hint: we haven't defined what "using AI" even means).
From there, the conversation moves to what matters most for church leaders: the shift from generative to agentic AI, the sobering reality that counseling and spiritual formation remain the #1 use of AI worldwide, and what it means that congregants are taking their 3 a.m. existential crises to a chatbot. Drew shares practical steps (survey your people, talk about it from the pulpit, build an AI policy for your church and your families) alongside a real caution about "frictionless faith": when AI removes the friction, it may also remove the very thing that forms us.
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00:00) Welcome back: Season 11 kickoff (
00:25) IC 3.0 and the Radical Alignment Assessment (
01:16) Drew's takeaways from the IC Conference (
03:24) The summer of new models (
05:45) AI policy, rogue models, and data centers (
07:17) Beyond admin: how churches are using AI (
09:59) Less than 10% of churches have an AI policy (
11:02) Kitchen table vs. AI conversations (
11:42) The #1 use of AI: counseling and spiritual formation (
13:35) The 3 a.m. crisis: how pastors should respond (
15:30) Will AI change the ecclesiology of the church? (
16:45) Talk about it: surveys, forums, and sermon series (
17:48) What is agentic AI? (
19:43) Predictions on agentic adoption (
21:50) Frictionless faith and spiritual risk (
24:26) Philosophy, AI labs, and what's left for humans (
26:54) Leading without fear + closing call to action