Faithful Innovation: Negotiating Institutional Logics for AI Value Alignment Among Christian Churches in America

Abstract

As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are progressively integrated across life domains, religious organizations are negotiating opportunities and tensions as AI applications are incorporated into their daily practices. Given the limited and growing research on AI and religion, this study explores how religious leaders perceive and manage emerging automation to align with institutional values. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with pastors in Christian churches in the United States, this study reveals how they understand and prioritize their mission, community solidarity, and beliefs regarding human dignity and agency in their AI adoption. This study helps shed light on the significance of faithful adherence to values in advancing responsible AI and religious human–machine communication. Findings also highlight the performance of religious authority amid the plurality of institutional logics in current church settings. This paper concludes with a call for future research to extend our understanding of the socio-cultural implications of automation and recognize efforts by key religious leadership to influence AI adoption, ethics, and governance.

1. Introduction

Recent developments in AI (artificial intelligence) have raised an array of opportunities as well as moral challenges for both individuals and wider society. As AI applications become increasingly powerful and are incorporated into everyday platforms, salient concerns of our time revolve around how to ensure AI is directed toward humane ends and produces intended outcomes without undesirable side effects (Han et al. 2022). Beyond finetuning large language models and mechanism designs, the profound problem of AI alignment deepens our need for understanding how and which values are embedded in AI development and use within real-world contexts (Russell 2019). While significant efforts have been made to guide AI systems’ objectives, emerging research has yet to catch up on clarifying users’ lived realities and concerns about human–AI value alignment (Chubb et al. 2024). Furthermore, as one of the primary goals of AI alignment is to ensure that robust AI systems align with human values and principles (Gabriel 2020), a crucial question arises regarding context and diversity as we interact with artificial agents. Which values and principles should be prioritized by whom? As religion influences sense-making and value formation, it is important to examine how religious individuals and collectives understand how AI systems align with and reflect their everyday faith and institutional norms.

These issues have come to the fore as some churches in America and Europe have recently received worldwide media attention for their use of AI to create and autonomously conduct religious services in their entirety. For example, churches in Germany, Texas, and New York have hosted AI-led services including ChatGPT-powered (https://openai.com/index/chatgpt/, accessed on 11 November 2024) elements like the call to worship, hymns, pastoral prayers, and sermons (Edwards 2023; Patterson 2023). But despite the popular spotlight on striking, one-off cases that have displaced the role of human clergy in leading church services, less systematic research has been conducted to understand the institutional norms and values of religious organizations which have incorporated AI (Simmerlein 2024), including how leaders experience and engage with emerging technologies of automation into their everyday work (Trotta et al. 2024). Prominent Christian leaders like the Pope have also been highly profiled in the media for recognizing tensions between values in AI ethics and steering AI development in line with faith-based, human-centric principles (Anyanwu 2024; Pope Francis 2024).There is therefore immense value in connecting digital religion and organizational communication insights with a deeper concern for religious AI developments and the discovery of spiritual innovation within current church settings.

In this context, we explore how Christian pastors understand and work to accomplish AI alignment with their values and interests. Specifically, in this paper, we raise the research question of how pastors negotiate plural institutional logics as they enact their authority to accomplish AI value alignment within church settings. Here, we draw upon research on digital religion and the interdisciplinary approach of institutional logics to examine how religious leaders negotiate the plurality of logics as they enact their authority with emerging AI technologies within their organizations. Institutional logics are interrelated sets of cultural elements that help people and organizations make sense of and order their everyday activities in time and space (Haveman et al. 2023; Thornton and Ocasio 1999). Here, we examine religious organizing by focusing not on the mechanical and technical infrastructures of media and AI, but on how churches are guided by values and beliefs (Berger 2021) and are dynamically brought forth in interactions that allow the reproduction of a collective “self” with symbolic and material characteristics, including those related to emerging technology behaviors (Brummans et al. 2014; Cheong 2017). This constructionist perspective guides us to discover the ways in which religious leaders’ perceived usefulness of AI is tied to their selective adoption, and, by doing so, advances our understanding of the performances of religious authority in dealing with changes and continuities of church life. Furthermore, our inquiry adds practical knowledge in the important but underdeveloped field of religious AI to advance more interdisciplinary work on AI adoption, alignment, ethics, and governance.

In what follows, this article discusses the role that institutional logics play in facilitating the adoption and innovation of AI technologies within religious organizations. Then, the article presents findings from interviews with Christian pastors in the United States. We conclude with conceptual and empirical contributions in understanding religious automation, along with the future implications for religion and growing concerns for value-based AI governance and ethics.

2. Religious Institutional Logics and Technological Innovation

With the mounting and accelerated development of AI technologies, religious leaders face more possibilities and pressures to adopt emerging digital applications, but less is known about the ways in which they approach AI to achieve missional legitimacy and growth (Trotta et al. 2024). Understanding religious institutional logics can help in part to illuminate emerging technology adoption as churches are guided by norms of appropriateness (March and Olsen 1989), as they establish “how things are done” and set “the rules” for what they can do (Santos and Eisenhardt 2005, p. 491).

As a metatheory, institutional logics represent a system of sense-making (Haveman et al. 2023) and refer to “the socially constructed, historical patterns of material practices, assumptions, values, beliefs, and rules by which individuals produce and reproduce their material subsistence, organize time and space, and provide meaning to their social reality” (Thornton and Ocasio 1999, p. 804). Institutional logics shed light on decisions and outcomes as the negotiated results between individual agency and institutional structure (Thornton and Ocasio 2008). This ideally helps to identify the formal and informal rules of actions, interactions, and interpretation that “both regularizes behavior and provides opportunity for agency and change” (Thornton and Ocasio 2008, pp. 101–2). As a sensemaking framework arising from controversial practices and beliefs embedded within institutions (Alford and Friedland 1985) and normative dimensions and internal contradictions within institutions (Jackall 1988), institutional logics have been applied in different fields to understand how organizations navigate change and challenges. For instance, prior studies have examined how firms adapted to different state and market logics amid economic transitions (Haveman et al. 2023) and have compared how Christian and Muslim religious family firms negotiated the plurality of institutional, family, and community logics (Fathallah et al. 2020).

From an institutional logics approach, religious organizations are a key societal sector and a fundamental institutional order in inter-institutional society, embodying a distinct set of expectations for their social relations and organizational behaviors (Friedland and Alford 1991). Churches (re)produce their beliefs through ritual communion and the realization of values through the “symbolic construction of human activity”, converting “issues into moral principles” accepted voluntarily on faith and grounded in a particular cosmogeny with its congregational membership (Berger 2021; Thornton et al. 2012, p. 43). As Christian organizations abide by their primary missions of outreach to the world, worship of God, and the building up of people (Boggs and Fields 2010), multiple logics can interact and vary in the organizational functioning of their faith and everyday activities (Knutsen 2012; Friedland and Alford 1991).

Within contemporary mediated environments, automation practices introduce added, even contesting, logics of action for religious entities that guide the forms of technological design chosen and ways of machine-aided religious systems deployment (Nord et al. 2023). Thus, the correlative is how religious leaders encounter and manage pluralism as they negotiate various institutional logics (Greenwood et al. 2011) “in which the coexistence of logics is accompanied by contradiction and tension” (Lounsbury et al. 2021, p. 265). For American clergy, for instance, operating under religious marketplace conditions prevalent in Western capitalist economics (Silliman 2017) implies they need to adjudicate between divergent logics as their organizations innovate mediated practices and market their “brand” in response to user demand (Einstein 2007). The dynamic relationship among commerce, consumption, and Christianity emerges from the “historical co-development of capitalism and religion” in the United States. Market logics prize efficiency to ensure competitive advantage, selfish conveniences, and the adoption of technological developments with pragmatism (Bustinza et al. 2019). Yet the employment of commercial elements in religious practices, associated with growth and success, may in turn become “a sign of divine blessing” (Gümüsay et al. 2020, p. 127). In this way, religious organizing with a market orientation gives rise to “competing logics” which underpin intricate negotiations of religious investments (Alotaibi et al. 2022).

Although religious organizations are not tied to for-profit intentions that fuel “computational functions that standardize life processes to facilitate the appropriation of data” (Pink et al. 2022, p. 8) under “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff 2019), they nonetheless may face the “logic of pre-emption”. The latter refers to a “bias of automation” which obstructs human decision-making as social processes like human judgment are displaced with machinic ones (Andrejevic 2020). In close relation, religious leaders may also face pressures to view and treat human experience as data in their attempt to quantify church growth and community engagement (Cheong 2021). These challenging intersections of AI automation and religious organizing raise questions on how religious leaders perceive AI and adjust their workflow, given the growing number of AI applications on digital and convergent platforms.

3. Religious Leadership Perception and Management of AI

In light of the plurality of religious institutional logics reflecting potential tensions in church practices incorporating emerging AI, clergy must strategically negotiate their practices to (re)construct their leadership work. In this sense, religious authority is understood not only as an endowed appointment or fixed role but entails ongoing and continuous effort. It is performative and action-based (Bourgoin et al. 2020) as an everyday enactment of interactions to guide collective action and enable a discursive sense of negotiated order (Brummans et al. 2013; Cheong 2017). Innovation triggers the need for renegotiating the rules of the transaction between organizational agents and the organization, including the renegotiation of who is authorized to speak and lead on behalf of the organization, i.e., both “authoring” and “authorization” are crucial for “holding the organization together” (Taylor and Van Every 2014). It follows that with the growing integration of AI into everyday media and communication platforms, pastors need to strategically negotiate varied procedures as they perform their authority as agents of organizational and social preservation and change (Münchow et al. 2024). This responsibility suggests the need to develop a deeper understanding of how clergy work as they encounter plural institutional logics with AI automation.

Existing research highlights different strategies leaders can take to negotiate multiple logics within their work settings to deploy, replace, decouple, or compartmentalize certain institutional logics (Knutsen 2012). Specifically, prior research highlights how voluntary organizations integrate Christian values into co-existing logics (Creed et al. 2010). Other studies point to way in which religious organizations adopt dominant logics over others, and/or adhere to a supraordinate logic or overarching set of beliefs, values, and practices that shape and influence institutional logics, based on “delicacy and discernment” in applying insights from Biblical scriptures to represent transformative outcomes (DeJordy et al. 2014). The latter strategies might be particularly pertinent for Christian pastors as they harness “God-given tools to proselytize and convert non-believers” through emerging digital technologies “to redeem the internet” (Laughlin 2021, p. 2). Their mediated and online work should line up with spiritual principles and purpose, including valuing human agency and dignity; the “total vocation of the human person” (Onyeukaziri 2024, p. 4) and “conferment that entitles its holder to certain respectful treatments unavailable to those without it” (Ilesanmi 2023, p. 652).

Accordingly, as proposed in a comprehensive review of institutional logics research, Lounsbury et al. (2021) recommend furthering inquiries related to values, to apply “meaning-centric approaches” to the “inner architecture” of institutional logics to capture the coherence of organizational configurations diachronically (Friedland 2012). This is because the durability of religious institutional logics can, in part, be explained by clergy behavior, which is beholden to a “set of collective ideals that imbue institutional orders with transcendental” qualities (Lounsbury et al. 2021, p. 268). However, the question of how clergy perceive and manage their institutional logics when taking action to engage AI is an empirical one, yet to be fully explored. Hence, in this paper, we pose the following research question: how do pastors negotiate plural institutional logics as they enact their authority to accomplish AI value alignment within church settings?

4. Method

As we seek to explore the perceptions and practices of pastors in everyday organizational practices, we conducted semi-structured interviews with a purposive qualitative design to understand the meanings behind descriptions provided by interviewees while allowing us to follow up on questions deemed important by interviewees (Brinkmann 2022). This exploratory design sought a targeted sample of clergy participants with relevant experiences with digital technologies and AI. Careful consideration was given to recruiting participants until data collection reached theoretical saturation, consistent with the research question, where new data added little additional insight (Saunders et al. 2018). This studyis based on in-depth interviews with 25 religious leaders from 21 Christian organizations in a Southwestern U.S. state, which has well-constructed broadband infrastructures in supporting internet and AI access. Participant recruitment was guided by local church directories and resources from the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, with complementary recruitment through personal networks and snowball sampling from interviewees’ referrals to establish rapport and reach this niche population of interest. As reflected in

Table 1. Demographic information and current AI usage of interviewees.

Pseudonym	Gender	Age/ Range	Organization Size	AI Adoption Summary
Pastor J	Male	48	Large	Basecamp for project management
Pastor GK	Male	34	Mega	read ChatGPT-generated sermons
Pastor B	Male	43	Mega	field-line marking robot for sports ministry
Pastor ME	Female	45	Mega	ChatGPT general use
Pastor S	Male	40	Large
Pastor RY	Male	30s	Mega	AI and metaverse use, designed a VR church
Pastor AL	Male	33	Mega	ChatGPT-composed sermons AI for making short form content of sermons, subtitles, summaries, video descriptions, and podcast descriptions
Pastor LA	Male	30	Large	ChatGPT for marketing purposes/writing informational ads and social media posts
Pastor SA	Female	36	Mega	use ChatGPT to check grammar and composition clarity use ChatGPT to draft email and text messages to families
Pastor JF	Male	48	Medium	use Alexa in the office
Pastor ER	Male	35	Large	use ChatGPT for research
Pastor CH	Male	28	Large	use ChatGPT to help with data problems in finance work use ChatGPT to write HR requirement job duty
Pastor JH	Male	34	Large	use AI to enhance sermons ChatGPT writes emails use ChatGPT for research
Pastor DE	Male	54	Large	ChatGPT to generate questions
Pastor TB	Male	48	Medium	AI image generator to translate ideas for illustrations
Pastor D	Male	26	Mega	ChatGPT general use
Pastor MA	Male	44	Mega	ChatGPT for mental health questions and basic theology questions AI for marketing
Pastor JO	Male	40	Medium	ChatGPT general use AI for content producing on social media
Pastor KA	Female	33	Mega	Facebook generative AI descriptions for baptism ChatGPT in checking, outline sermons ChatGPT writes emails ChatGPT brainstorm to support mentorship
Pastor RC	Male	39	Mega	ChatGPT to write emails, videos, and send out marketing and branding AI captures best moments of talk videos ChatGPT to write sermons
Pastor JI	Male	68	Small	Waymo to support church services use Alexa and Google Nest
Pastor JK	Male	29	Large	ChatGPT for fun ChatGPT for sermon titles and summary AI to generate images to support sermons
Pastor AB	Male	33	Mega	Grammarly for spellcheck on blogs and sermons
Pastor JS	Male	45	Medium	use ChatGPT for travel ChatGPT to write a reference letter phone call with AI customer service
Pastor PC	Male	43	Medium	ChatGPT, Claude, Bard to ask questions about theology ChatGPT as search engine for sermon preparations ChatGPT to schedule calendar

, of the leaders interviewed, twenty-two were male and three were female, with ages ranging from 26 to 68 years. All leaders had at least a high school diploma, and 84% held a college or graduate degree. Regarding their race and ethnicity, two identified as Hispanic; one as African American; one as Asian; the rest of interviewees identified as White. The range their congregational sizes was categorized according to Seabright and Raiber’s (2020) typology of American churches: 9 mega churches, 6 large churches, 5 medium churches, and 1 small church. The denominations included Lutheran, United Methodist, Baptist, Evangelical, and non-denominational churches. Interviewees served as junior or senior ministers with varied official titles reflecting their leadership in churches including lead pastor, associate pastor, technology director, and youth leader.

The interviews focused on three main areas: their work and emerging technology practices in churches, their perceptions of AI, and their views on the future of AI in the church. All interviews were conducted in English, between October 2023 and April 2024, 9 out of the 25 interviews were held in person (8 in church offices and 1 in a cafe), while the rest were conducted over Zoom. Interviews ranged from 31 to 75 min in length, and interviewees received a gift card (USD 30) as an honorarium for their participation. All interviews were transcribed through the Otter.ai tool, and were reviewed for accuracy by researchers, resulting in 1151 min of recordings and 369 single-spaced pages of transcribed data.

To investigate our research question, a thematic analysis was conducted as an appropriate method for systematically uncovering structural aspects in accounts of lived experience (Lindlof and Taylor 2002; Ryan and Bernard 2003). We relied on open, axial, and selective coding techniques in the development of grounded theory, since they provide robust, well-tested analytical procedures for developing in-depth insights into an emerging phenomenon (Charmaz 2006). Through open coding, we individually compared and contrasted events, actions, and interactions, while repeatedly reading the transcribed datasets. Repeated reading and coding supported by MAXQDA software allowed us to identify recurring points of reference in the data, including “compelling incidents, sequences of action, repetitive acts, and other critical details” (Lindlof 1995, pp. 219–20) that informed our understanding of interviewees’ perceptions of institutional logics. Based on discussions of our individual analyses during joint data analysis sessions, we then looked for the regularity with which these points of reference recurred in the data. This enabled us to define conceptually similar categories or themes (Charmaz 2006) in pastors’ ways of understanding and adopting AI. Axial coding, in turn, allowed us to check these emerging themes against our data and uncover conceptual relationships between them. In the final selective coding stage, we sought to define these themes conceptually and determined that religious leaders negotiated institutional logics through three key processes, which included a commitment to a supraordinate overarching logic, and the elevation of two dominant logics over others. The next section further describes and illustrates each of these themes with representative quotations that reflect interviewees’ viewpoints. To maintain anonymity, interviewees will be referred to using acronyms throughout the rest of the article.

5. Findings

As summarized in Table 1, most interviewees utilized AI in the form of generative AI applications. 68% of interviewees used ChatGPT in sermon preparation processes and to enhance their sermonic performances, edit and caption videos, generate images, schedule tasks, and streamline administrative workflows. A total of 12% of interviewees utilized other generative AI applications, such as Claude and Bard, or applications with generative AI functions, including Grammarly and Facebook, for supporting writing and research practices; 8% of interviewees used AI virtual assistants like Alexa and Google Nest, to assist their task management; while 4% of interviewees integrated Waymo, an AI-supported autonomous vehicle services, to facilitate the logistics of ferrying people to their church services.

Results showed that religious leaders espoused a supraordinate logic to represent their institution’s uptake of AI to fulfill the church’s ultimate mission. In addition, pastors stressed the dominant institutional logics of community solidarity and human dignity over co-existing logics of branding, technocratic efficiency, and AI logics of pre-emption which bias machinic decision-making.

5.1. Commitment to Missional and Eschatological Thinking About AI with Transformed Outcomes

More than half of the religious leaders interviewed expressed an overarching devotion to an eschatological “eternal perspective” and “missional mindset” in their work with AI digital technologies. Valuing Christian telos with the anticipation of heavenly perfected glory helps recast contemporary institutional change with AI adoption as purposeful, redemptive actions toward the end-goal of proclaiming the gospel to the world and transforming lives (Laughlin 2021). As Pastor JI (male, 68) said, their church leadership decided to adopt AI by first trying to “figure out what you are going to do as a mission” because they “wanted to start as a mission, looking as what the needs were in the community to how to reach people in the community. And then from there began to look at a church… as a byproduct of that mission”.

Employing this broader supraordinate logic related to the church’s salvific mission means that for some leaders, like Pastor B (male, 43), short-term utilitarian gains are of reduced importance in their use of and approach to AI, unlike in for-profit settings. As he explained,

“We have seen this, especially the automotive industry, where many jobs have gone away, because of the introduction of robotics makes it more efficient, quicker, cheaper in the long run… Because I think it is a mixed bag, right for businesses, but it makes sense to me for a business and that their biggest concern is the bottom line. A church, our values are different. That is not our primary concern. It never will be the bottom line. Our mission, and our purpose is to pastor people and try to introduce them to relationship with their Heavenly Father. So that just causes us to look through a different lens, as far as efficiencies even are concerned, maybe we can be more efficient with robots and save money. That doesn’t mean it is the right decision for us to make for our context”.

(Pastor B, male, 43)

In tandem, religious leaders highlighted that their AI integration into existing organizational practices should contribute to the longer term and continued spiritual growth of their members—“that would be wonderful way down the line”. As Pastor AL (male, 33) shared, “I think, for us the priority is, you know, resources for the spiritual formation of our congregation, and the great bonus [is that] other people benefit, because that’s great, we’re happy with that”. Related to this, Pastor JO (male, 40) whose organization used AI to assist with the content production on social media platforms, explained his view on the use of AI to influence and transform peoples’ lives,

“we will put clips of a sermon up, we will put quotes up, we will put kind of challenges and encouragement up for people to continue to grow. And so we try to utilize social media throughout the week, to bridge the gap from Sunday to Sunday, to keep speaking truth and encouragement and spirituality into people’s lives”.

Accordingly, religious leaders stressed the importance of how their AI-supported practices need to align with their values and beliefs to fulfill their mission faithfully. According to Pastor JK (male, 29), “we want them [technology use] to be consistent. So consistency, privacy and integrity for individuals that we interact with. Then also, faithfulness to [our] beliefs”. Another pastor touched upon how AI is encoded in artificial agents that may create undesirable outcomes, so their mediated church practices should be guided by Scriptural guidance to ensure that their messages are accurate and truthful. He said,

“There is a certain way that we want to say things. We want things to be obviously biblically true, but we you know, we want them to be set in a way that’s clear and understandable. And so the unwritten rules, were … related to what we’re going to post, what we’re not going to post, how we’re going to say it, what we’re not going to say”.

(Pastor JO, male, 40)

Thus, the first set of findings point to ways in which pastors articulated a supraordinate institutional logic to represent their uptake of AI as they expressed their commitment to a broader reasoning linked to fulfilment of the “Great Commission” to bring the Christian message to redeem all people. In every instance, they were careful to stress how their work lines up conscientiously with Scriptural principles, which guided their AI adoption in ways that advanced spiritual growth and the transformation of their congregation.

5.2. Prioritizing Community Engagement and Solidarity

Second, religious leaders reported that they prioritized community engagement and solidarity over individualistic benefits or gains within their churches. AI integration is operationalized in ways that strengthen community bonding and bridging ties.

For example, a leader who coordinates youth services of a megachurch shared how the use of generative AI applications saves her time and effort so that she can be freed to do more in-person ministry to ameliorate constant community needs. In her words, “technology is a way for me to not spend two hours crafting an email, but 30 s with ChatGPT can give me the first draft that I need, I might still need to tweak it. But then I have more space to do what, you know, other phone calls or other needs that the church might have, like I said, we’re serving so many families… that’s a much better use of my time than spending two hours crafting an email ChatGPT could do in just seconds, right” (Pastor SA, female, 36).

In a related way, Pastor DE (male, 54) explained why he utilizes AI to support his work: “AI things that would help us creatively do things so much quicker than we could ever imagine so much more effective than we could imagine. And can you imagine trying to have to hire somebody to create all of that is a software”. As he leads his church in sermon preaching and the preparation of Bible study curriculum, he has tried to harness generative AI output to support his brainstorming and produce creative ideas for leading small group and family Bible studies. He said,

“the one area the what there is one thing that I do each week that I’ve only been doing for a year … for ease of time, it speeds up the process for me immensely is that I do use an AI generator, ChatGPT …. Every week, I produce small group discussion questions for small groups based on the message on Sunday. So once I know what the message is, and I’ll get it there, often I’ll go well, let me just start here. And I’ll go into a ChatGPT. And I’ll go small group discussion questions …. Give me five”.

Consequently, while this pastor has found that generative AI has been generally helpful and supportive, he stressed that AI is used in his organization only in “a way that enhances connection”. As he emphasized emphatically, “because what we always need to know is what we have an advantage is community and its people and its relationships. But if those relationships can be initially fostered through something, then that’s good. The goal is not AI. The goal is connection”.

In the above ways, leaders negotiate the potentially conflicting market logics of self-centered convenience and efficiency gains to potentially reduce their own workload, with their pastoral priority of supporting as many people as possible in their community for the common good. According to Pastor LA (male, 30), “all that time that we save gives us the opportunity to you know, just the more time that we have to do the ministry aspect of it, the less time that we need to spend on the system, kind of posting information and stuff, I think it’s really helped us out a lot”.

Furthermore, related to elevating the dominant institutional logic of community solidarity, it is notable that several pastors mentioned how AI is strategically deployed to find out more about their local community’s socio-demographics and the proximal neighborhoods close to their church premises. According to Pastor JI (male, 68), “I always want to be able to have the influence in people’s lives to talk to them about some of those personal things, as long as God allows me. And so by studying this one mile parish, it allows me to develop friendships, and it can take years”. This community bonding also impacted how Pastor MA (male, 44) integrated AI “to find out [more] in a new neighborhood” as part of his work “targeted in those [church] marketing campaigns”. In this way, AI-supported marketing practices assisted pastors to understand their community better to increase in-person connections. As Pastor MA noted, “we’ve used technology as best as we can, specifically with the marketing piece to try to figure out who are the people that is in our community, we always like to look at what is the 10 mile radius around our church buildings”.

It follows that as religious leaders recognize the importance of marketing to geographically proximate groups, they are cognizant of the implications of branding in church settings. As religious leaders understand it, branding activities involve strategic narratives that help religious leaders and organizations frame a cohesive group identity to improve their public reputation, attract believers, and retain congregations (Cheong 2021; Einstein 2011). For example, Pastor JK (male, 29) explains that using communication technologies like AI can help support their local community and global engagement, “we want to prioritize… a unified sort of display of community engagement so that whoever, you know, is posting or commenting or putting a video up, there’s doing it in a way where it’s still a Shepherd every time rather than someone being able to kind of tell who, which posts do they want to interact with”. Another, Pastor RY (male, 30s) said, “when you go on there, which is kind of a guiding principle to me is that if we’re going to be online, especially online, we want to reflect our brand… would look like, in person. We don’t want to look too different, even though it’s going to be different, because it’s online to an extent”.

Therefore, in order to preserve community solidarity, Pastor AB (male, 33), stated that his church built what “we call a brand guide” which is “a style guide” that “goes to all campuses”. This brand guide specifies the details of their digital presence as a religious organization operant in multiple sites, i.e., “the brand guide kind of talks about is, what colors do we use? What kind of graphics do our looks look like? What are standards for live stream? … we’re trying to tweak …content that we’re putting out from all of … our live stream services that keep coming from each campus”. Another leader pointed out that their organization’s branding has delivered a consistent digital presence and aligned with their work in delivering “true and accurate voices to the community”. As Pastor ER (male, 35) explained with his current and past experiences, “we have some similar language that we’d like to use, similar graphics color schemes… I’ve been at churches where in order to send any sort of communication at any point, you have to run it through the communication team. And they check grammar, they check format, they make sure everything is up to par as to exactly because everything they want communicated out to the church, they want it to all look the same sound the same, be in line with the overall church mission and vision”. Hence, for multiple pastors with AI use, they emphasized the dominant institutional logic of community engagement and solidarity, paying particular attention to their local neighborhoods even as they attend to market logics underscoring concomitant AI-supported advertising and branding activities.

5.3. Upholding Human Agency, Dignity, and Well-Being

Third, while AI can be adopted in a diversity of ways within religious organizations, religious leaders have stressed the importance of valuing human agency and dignity as they seek to elevate human authorization and authorship in their work over AI’s pre-emptive logics, thereby advancing ethical and responsible AI.

According to Pastor PC (male, 43) who has an engineering background in technologies, he rates the performance of generative AI by evaluating how well the content works to provide supplementary commentaries or contextual background information to help him interpret religious texts. He said, “I am having to discern for myself, what is appropriate, what is not appropriate? I guess I benefit from understanding technology, understanding how it was generated, machine learning in general”. This response on the necessity for human reasoning resonates with another leader, Pastor KA, who utilizes AI to provide feedback on her work after she composes her sermons. She said, “I’ll run a sermon through ChatGPT and be like, and ask the question, Am I missing anything?... What is the main point of my sermon? Because I wanted to see if what I was trying to communicate. As my main point is what ChatGPT did and I was like, Okay, we’re pretty like, close to it”. (Pastor KA, female, 33). The above illustrates how the adoption of AI is guided by leaders’ negotiation of institutional logics that prioritize human judgment and knowledge as AI is deployed to assist and restructure work for them. In the words of Pastor PC who uses AI to locate specific resources, “I know what to ask because I know it’s there. But it gives me a much quicker response. And it’s digital. So I can simply copy and paste over it really streamlines” (Pastor RC, male, 39).

Thus, pastors are quick to clarify that while they have used AI in their work, they are still in control of their message and act in authority. According to Pastor GK (male, 34), the integration of AI in his work processes is not without his discernment or his imposed limits on machinic authorship. He reflects on specific ways in which AI is used or constrained, and said that “I’m writing a biblical sermon about with this application, help me come up with a creative title. Or whether it’s like even for design purposes, like hey, we’re putting together this summer calendar, I want it to look and feel like this give me an image that I can use to put dates on or whatever the case may be, even to …the greater extreme of not writing the actual sermon content”.

In corollary, some religious leaders have set clear boundaries in how they interact with AI, which upholds their dominant institutional logic of preserving human agency and well-being. According to Pastor JF (male, 48), as AI raises similar concerns and risks like with prior technologies, he advocates for responsible usage limits. He said,

“How do we treat these [new AI] things? In their proper place? How are we not ruled by technology? Because it’s, I mean, studies show that you become addicted to things like Instagram. How do we not become addicted? How can we use these things in a way that is constructive, that is honoring to God and honoring to and loving towards people without just becoming numb consumers of things?”

Similarly, Pastor LA (male, 30) highlighted the importance of drawing clear distinctions on human AI-generated content to recognize the embedded “obviously glitches” and “obviously funky” in AI. He stressed that “if you’re going to use it, you have to reread it and reread it and reread it and you have to make it your own, you know, we can’t just use ChatGPT to write copy and then copy paste post. But you have to make it live, you have to Living Word ask it, you know, you have to make sure that it feels like us. And that it is us”.

This commitment to human agency and wellbeing likely explains why religious leaders are mindful that their integration of AI does not automatically push out or erase existing communication practices that serve the diversity of needs in their organization. Pastor CH (male, 28) explained that the adoption of AI technologies in his church was met with little resistance since the introduction of an AI chatbot on their website served not as a replacement but a complement to other forms of their existing services and outreach. He shared this comment while referring to their church website, “you see a chat bot there. And you’re like, well, let me just see how quick this will go. And then I think people are pleasantly surprised how quick they get their answer. Haven’t heard really any negative feedback from it? Because it’s not like we took away phone calls and moved only to chat online”.

6. Discussion: Keeping the Faith with AI Innovations

New media are never merely adopted in a moment but made sense through values, discourse, and imaginations of past and present innovations and futures. From a sense-making perspective, pastors are institutional leaders who sustain their churches through mediated storytelling and acts of authorization and authoring that constitute their authority to lead in organizations rooted in theological belief systems. Interestingly, amid the recent meteoric AI growth, religious leaders face the challenge of negotiating multiple logics as they engage AI applications. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with U.S. pastors, this study documented and discussed how pastors perceived and managed AI adoption within their workflows and settings, in ways that implemented a supraordinate institutional logic and distinctive logics in their professional practice. The findings illustrate how leaders enact faithful AI innovations when they express commitment to an overarching logic linked to their redemptive mission and prioritize logics of community solidarity, human dignity, and agency. In doing so, they perform their mediated authority faithfully; in good faith and with faith-based principles.

Consequently, the findings here have ramifications for efforts to promote ethical and responsible AI writ large, and for AI, religion, and human agency in particular. As AI applications are rolled out in quick succession, mounting concerns have been raised about the potential for bias in machine-led decision-making, potential misuse of AI for malevolent purposes, and the ethical implications of AI adoption without critical human oversight (Díaz-Rodríguez et al. 2023). Much debate has also arisen regarding technological and social guardrails to guide and monitor AI development toward public safety and well-being, including comparable concerns raised by and within religious circles regarding human agency and dignity (Anyanwu 2024; Schuurman 2019). Growing inquiries in AI ethics as it intersects with religion can inform ethical considerations surrounding AI innovations by examining how faith-based practices and principles can be applied to guide the development and adoption of AI. Here, the findings of this study contribute to addressing these growing inquiries and concerns about AI developments and the future of humanity. Results highlight a spectrum of ways in which religious leaders can adopt AI as they faithfully regulate and selectively engage with AI applications in ways that do not upend extant governance, even while they realize new opportunities for religious content creation, marketing, and community building. In response to dystopic visions about the “AI revolution” causing threats and disruptive upheavals to workers or recurrences of “automation anxiety” (Kelly 2023), findings here paint a more moderate, even hopeful, picture for human agency and dignity as religious organizations incorporate the latest technologies by seeking to honor community building and the “total vocation of the human person” (Onyeukaziri 2024, p. 4). In this sense, while AI entails automation, it is not self-governing as religious leaders embed AI into their existing authority practices to perpetuate continuities in their everyday sense-making and operations. As Cheong (2021) shows, emerging robotic applications are not autonomous but bounded by organizational forces which influence the scope and level of automation within religious settings.

Therefore, this exploratory study helps lay out some key issues and processes related to mediated religious organizing, governance, and ethics that deserve greater future attention in the following areas. First, while mainstream and corporate AI adoption often stimulates individuals to act as efficient agents of organizational and social change, faithful innovations move beyond common assumptions that AI exist to exploit cost-benefit productivity or labor gains. Pastors assert that their promotion of spiritual growth, community engagement, and human flourishing helps differentiate them from other institutional logics and organizational forms, which provides a powerful basis for their AI connections. In this way, findings in this study are congruent with prior research on “cultured technology” within religious communities (Barzilai-Nahon and Barzilai 2005), and the religious–social shaping of technology (Campbell 2017), broadening concerns regarding spiritual beliefs shaping technological developments in studies of digital religion (Campbell and Cheong 2024). As such, findings in this study add further evidence to counter popular understandings of the nature of AI innovations; that AI and faith-based principles are not incompatible, and that religion persists, and even flourishes, in novel configurations incorporating AI.

Accordingly, the analysis here suggests that future research related to digital religion would benefit from examining a wider range of perceptions and practices of religious leaders in supporting the continued and discontinued growth of AI. Though many leaders today face openings to adopt AI templates and practices to support the authoring of multimodal texts, pastors’ responses were careful to highlight limits and constraints on their AI-supported authorship, which in turn affected the performance of their authority. In light of the limitations of the sample in this exploratory study, future studies should investigate larger and more diverse samples of religious leaders as well as go beyond pastors’ self-reports to include ethnographic observations of their job scope and authority practices in action. As Cheong and Campbell (2024) note, appreciating how religious norms vary by cultural contexts will also allow for comparative and intersectional research toward more nuanced understandings of digital religion in the future. Moreover, further research could employ other research methods like sentiment analysis to focus on the emotive dimensions of pastors’ awareness and perceptions of emerging AI technologies to shed additional light on how pastors form and negotiate institutional logics overtime. In addition to audio-based interview data, video-based or web-based interactions could be sought to enlarge the methodological repertoire for real-time data collection on religious leadership and AI practices.

Second, findings in this study have implications for the future study of AI organizing, ethics, and governance. As far as we are aware, there are scarce empirical studies that systematically examine religious leadership as they try to manage diverse values in plural institutional logics. Thus, more interdisciplinary work on AI ethics will help enrich religious as well as other non-profit studies that seek to address religious organizing in new AI environments in parallel with the proposal by Iskandarova and Sloan (2023) that voluntary and government agencies should adopt AI with human-centered leadership rather than focus on efficient labor processes. As Whittlestone et al. (2019, p. 196) recommend, “all areas of AI ethics would benefit from a more rigorous explanation of the tensions that arise when we try to apply principles to concrete cases”. Hence, future research can document how religious leaders comprehend AI and the ethics of its applications amid normative and internal tensions where it meets other new logics to generate new insights on “process-focused” human-centered AI as a recommendation on advancing AI ethics (Kishimoto et al. 2024). This research lacuna deserves more attention since the constructionist approaches to understanding religious and spiritual variables have been largely excluded from organizational and management research despite its central importance in nearly all societies (Lounsbury et al. 2021; Tracey 2012) and the need to create social bodies that can incorporate and express the ethical sensibilities of their users. Accordingly, future interdisciplinary research on religious organizing can address how religious understanding informs AI practices, including the practice of faith-based reasoning and interfaith dialogue to mitigate ethical concerns like authenticity, bias, and potential human devaluation (Tampubolon and Nadeak 2024), ensuring that AI developments enhance moral and spiritual futures.