In a world with AI, why bother with human administration?

Claude can manage your inbox with swift precision and pithy replies. Gemini can generate a roster from a Google Sheet. ChatGPT can take care of your socials with graphics and captions. In the coming years, we’ll find more and more ways that AI can be of service to us. It’s providing some ways to get things done that frees up time for pastoral ministry over administrative support and there’s a gift in there, but it’s a complicated gift to unwrap and worth taking time to do so, leaning into the good, bad and the ugly along the way. 

Let’s start with the good. 

It saves some time. Your time is precious. Those who are engaged in ministry roles have sought to dedicate their time and vocation to seeing people know Jesus, whether that be within a church or a parachurch organisation. It is a rare person  who moves into a ministry role declaring their enjoyment of the administrative tasks that undergird pastoral work, and often, that results in a begrudgingly slow or haphazardly rushed  completion of those tasks, or at worst, complete neglect of them. If there is a tool within AI that can reduce the time spent and increase efficiency without sacrificing data privacy (more on that later) or efficacy, we’d be silly to not at least consider the use of it. 

It doesn’t get sick, or tired. Humans do. There are times when human administrators are sick and can’t complete their tasks, and the reality is that stress is caused when that happens. Rosters need to be done, slides need to be created, all these tasks need to be completed and the human cog in the wheel that keeps them spinning could be considered a weak link. AI isn’t going to get a cold, and it doesn’t have children who need to be collected from daycare suddenly either. There’s something bolstering about that reliability. 

It doesn’t cost anything, or at least, costs less than a human worker does. There’s no hiring process, and there’s no superannuation to pay, and we all know that budgets aren’t stretching as far as they used to. It feels a lot more prudent to employ someone to share the gospel than to employ someone to work on the support structure that keeps the gospel work going. 

Yet… we’ve got to take a moment to look at the bad, and the ugly.

Though AI is lower cost and doesn’t get sick, it simply isn’t… human, and whilst humanity comes with weaknesses, our God-given humanness is an inherent strength in all matters of ministry, even administration. An email composed by AI may contain the right information and even some phrases that would suggest care and compassion, but a promise of a prayer written in an email by AI will rarely ever find its way to someone’s lips, and a social media post composed by AI will not only be an echo of other AI posts, it will also not be a true reflection of the heart of the person posting it. There are, of course, ways to counteract this - by checking and editing and rechecking before we utilise what AI has generated. There’s no shame in that way forward, but I do wonder if perhaps we honour the heart of ministry when we have human hands and hearts at work within it, even in the support systems that administration provides. 

The ugly side of AI is a question that, honestly, I’m unsure of the answer to. I’m certain I could ask Claude and he would tell me, but the question alone is enough to make me not want to ask Claude. What impact is AI having on the world we’re called to steward? We know that a prompt to AI will take more than 10 times the energy required for a regular Google search, and generally, several prompts are required to render the response desired. We know that data centres are popping up in lower socioeconomic areas to support the energy needed to sustain the use of AI. We know that as “asking ChatGPT” becomes more and more common of a response, our own discernment and literacy is falling and this does not bode well for the future. 

Data handling is a necessary part of ministry administration. It is a privilege to be trusted with people’s information, and as we handle it, we must do so with the utmost care. It is true, indeed, that ChatGPT can handle our attendance data and congregant information faster and turn it into graphics and lists that we may need, but once we have given it the information, the question that is unanswered at this point is ‘where does the data go once it’s been used for this purpose?’ Nothing is temporary once uploaded and we cannot be certain that it wont be sold or used for other purposes that those who trusted us with their data did not consent to. This is a true ugliness, and an aspect of AI that we must avoid if we are to be good stewards of information.

I wonder if in our pursuit of getting the job done quickly we may pass too easily over the ugly. We may find ourselves saying that it’s worth the energy of the earth being spent to avoid spending our energy, or we may hear the cries of the industry that you’ll be “left behind” if you don’t get ahead and start using AI. It seems to me that the vulnerability of having a human do the work is also part of the beauty of a human doing the work. Yes, the computer can calculate faster, but for the cost to our world and to our collective and individual minds, we may find that long term it simply wasn’t worth it. 

There is a beauty to human administration. Amongst the spreadsheets and the rosters and the polite emails and well-managed calendars, you’ll find people who care about those whose time they are managing and whose information they are stewarding. You’ll find that when they write in an email “we’ll be praying for you” that they sit and pray a moment before they send it. Our team at Virtual Church Assist are astoundingly efficient at what they do - many of our clients will attest to that. They will also attest to the fact that we have made mistakes and gotten sick, but that with that very weakness comes the strength of heart that comes with our God-given humanity. I reckon that’s worth it. 

You might say I’m simply behind the times, that there’s enough redemptive good to AI to make it a gift horse rather than a trojan horse, but I think there’s something worthwhile about keeping our administration human and seeing AI as a tool to be used with discernment. There is a place for AI, and I’m not yet sure what it is, but I can say with certainty that it is not to be rushed into lightly.  We’ve got to consider the good, bad and the ugly of it before we can dive in, and then, only then, can we move forward with confidence.