Use It Or Lose It
This is a piece that I recently wrote for Ascend, the Church of Scotland's Centre for Support and Development. It was in the March 2026 e-news that went to all CofS ministries and was the first in a series they are going to be running on 'Digital Wisdom'. They asked me to write a piece about the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in ministry.
For five years I took French lessons. I was not a natural polyglot. It took effort and work. I found spoken rather than written French easier, but both required an investment of time. My last French lesson was in 1987. Nearly 40 years later, when in France and needing to communicate it feels like walking through treacle to bring to mind what I wish to say. Those years of grounding help, but without regular use, my facility in French is increasingly limited.
They say about riding a bike that you never forget how once you have learnt. There is some truth in that, but that example is about procedural memory affecting motor function and balance within the cerebellum, and not about the parts of the brain we associate with creativity.
While tools that deploy forms of Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be profoundly useful, for instance in assisting with medical diagnoses or finding patterns within data quickly and efficiently, there are some major downsides to the increasing prevalence of AI tools. Chief amongst these for those who are creators (of liturgy, of prayers, of sermons, of eulogies, of reflections, of music, songs and hymns) is the erosion of our ability to be creative. Use it or lose it.
Any writer will tell you that the more they write the better they write. My late father (an organist) joked with a church elder who once said to him “J.B. Dykes never wrote a bad hymn tune!” Quick as a flash, my dad replied, “You should have seen his wastebasket!”
Getting our brains working creatively is a wonderful blessing for us, for Christ, and for the church. It brings about innovation and new connections. It is an avenue for the Spirit of God to work through us, inspiring us in our leadership of worship and of the community of faith. While that blank page may look daunting when we open a notepad or a new Word document, it is an invitation to be creative.
I have been fascinated with AI since first watching ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ as a young teenager. The 1968 film famously includes the character of HAL (Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer), one step ahead of IBM! My bookshelves bear testament to my ongoing interest in this developing technology. I was pleased to contribute to the paper written about AI for the Church of Scotland in 2021. This is not being written from a luddite perspective.
Around that time, tools from OpenAI were becoming available for the public to use. I played around with them to see what they could do. At an online seminar I was involved in we played with the then brand new ‘text to image’ tools. The results were… intriguing and the questions they raised fascinating. We all know now, of course, that the results are everywhere around us. Spotify reckons that about 40% of the new song uploads on their servers are AI-generated. Amazon is awash with AI-generated books. And we can all be excused for being startled at a video we have just watched (elephants rescuing tigers?) only later to realise it was AI slop.
There is much fertile ground to be explored over the use of AI: its use in modern warfare, the environmental impact of datacentres, what it means for this level of technology to rest in the hands of a small group of billionaires with deeply questionable motives, the impact on societies and the job market, who ‘owns’ the decisions of AI tools, what to do if you think someone is passing off AI-generated work as their own… but that is for another time.
Today’s question is about our own creativity. When we are tempted by that prompt in a new Word document ‘Describe what you’d like to draft with Copilot’, and give up on using our own creativity then is it far wrong to suggest we are on a path to losing it?
Yes, we are all busy. Yes, it is hard work sometimes. But so it should be to be truly creative. It takes effort and practice. I believe God rejoices in that creativity, for it is of God’s own nature. What say you? Use it or lose it?
Questions to ponder…
- Is AI on your radar in ministry – if so, what are you doing, hearing, or seeing in your context?
- What practices help you nurture your own creative “muscles”?
- How do you understand creativity as part of your calling and ministry?
- Are there areas of ministry where you feel AI could support you without diminishing your own creative engagement?
- What concerns or hopes do you carry about how AI might shape the church’s future creativity?
