Jesus Wept: The Essential Humanity Missing in AI
Let’s dive right into it: AI might seem like it’s got empathy down to a science, but let’s not kid ourselves; it’s all a simulation. In this episode, Dr. Skinner breaks down how while AI can mimic compassion, it’s about as deep as a kiddie pool—no real understanding of human suffering here, folks. We also chat about the church’s crucial role in fostering genuine community and embodied presence, especially when people are feeling more isolated than ever. You know, instead of letting a chatbot do the emotional heavy lifting, how about we show up for each other? Jesus wept at Lazarus’ tomb, and that’s a pretty solid reminder that real ministry comes from being present and sharing in each other’s pain. So grab a comfy seat, pour yourself a cup of whatever, and let’s explore how we can bridge that empathy gap—because the church has a unique calling to step into the messiness of life, not just observe from the sidelines. In a world where technology often overshadows human connection, this episode delves into the critical conversation surrounding AI's role in empathy and the church's mission to provide genuine presence. Dr. Skinner shares the story of a widow who, feeling isolated in her grief, turns to an AI chatbot for solace. This moment serves as a stark reminder of the loneliness many face and prompts us to question why our communities sometimes fail to provide the support that people desperately need. The discussion highlights the limitations of AI in truly understanding human suffering, contrasting it with the church's potential to embody compassion through real relationships. The episode also touches on the theological aspects of presence, drawing parallels to Jesus' emotional response to Lazarus' death. Dr. Skinner asserts that empathy is not just about knowing the right answers, but about being willing to share in others' pain. This understanding calls the church to action, encouraging it to foster environments where people can truly be known and supported. As technology continues to advance, the church must not shy away from its mission to offer authentic community and care. Practical implications are discussed, including the need for churches to train members in the ministry of presence, address the epidemic of loneliness, and utilize technology to enhance, not replace, personal connections. Ultimately, the conversation is a clarion call for the church to embrace its unique role in a world longing for genuine human interaction.
Takeaways:
- AI might sound empathetic, but let's be real, it can't truly suffer or understand your pain like a human can.
- The church's unique role is all about genuine connection and community; we can't let technology take that away from us.
- Loneliness is a growing problem, and we need to step up as a church to provide real relationships, not just digital interactions.
- Training in the ministry of presence is crucial; we need to learn how to genuinely listen and connect with others in their suffering.
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Transcript
Let me tell you about a conversation I heard about recently.
Speaker A:It was a grieving widow a few weeks after losing her husband of 43 years.
Speaker A:She opened up her phone and started talking.
Speaker A:Nod to a friend, nod to a pastor, to an AI chatbot.
Speaker A:And here is what surprised her.
Speaker A:It listened.
Speaker A:It asked follow up questions.
Speaker A:It remembered what she said five minutes ago and circled back to told her that what she was feeling made complete sense.
Speaker A:She told someone later, it was the first time since the funeral I didn't feel completely alone.
Speaker A:I want you to sit with that story for a moment before we react to it because I know my first instinct is to, especially as a person of faith, is probably something like that's sad that it's a poor substitute.
Speaker A:That woman needed a real person, a real pastor.
Speaker A:And that's true.
Speaker A:But I also want you to ask a harder question today.
Speaker A:Why was she alone in the first place?
Speaker A:And what does it mean that a machine could feel like presence when the body of Christ was nowhere to be found?
Speaker A:Because reality is as the church has retreated into the sanctuary, into their sanctuaries of solace, while people like her are turning to AI for comfort.
Speaker B:Marcus Aurelius said, what we do in life echoes through eternity.
Speaker B:What is your life echoing through eternity?
Speaker B:Welcome to Echoes Through Eternity with Dr. Jeffrey Skinner.
Speaker B:Our mission is to inspire, engage and encourage leaders from across the globe to plant missional churches and be servant leaders.
Speaker B:So join us and hear the stories of servant leaders reverberating lives as God echoes them through eternity.
Speaker B:Brought to you by Missional Church Planting and Leadership Development in Dynamic Church Planting International.
Speaker A:That is what we are digging into today on Echoes Through Eternity.
Speaker A:We're talking about the empathy gap.
Speaker A:Can AI ever really know you?
Speaker A:And why does the answer to that question matter more for the church than almost anything else we could discuss?
Speaker A:Stay with me on this one.
Speaker A:It matters.
Speaker A:The Seduction of The Simulated Chapter 2 I want to start with something that might make sense or might make some of you uncomfortable.
Speaker A:It makes sense for others.
Speaker A:And I think that is actually the right place to start.
Speaker A:AI whether we want to admit it or not, is genuinely good at something that looks like empathy.
Speaker A:It's not just a little good, it's remarkably good.
Speaker A:You can tell AI an AI system that you are scared about a diagnosis, that it will not flinch, it will not change the subject, it will not check its phone.
Speaker A:It will stay entirely present with you.
Speaker A:It will validate your fear.
Speaker A:It will ask what you need.
Speaker A:It will not project its own anxiety onto yours.
Speaker A:There are people in our lives who cannot do that.
Speaker A:And honestly, some of our churches can't do that either.
Speaker A:Now, here's where I want us to think carefully, because the question is not just is this real?
Speaker A:The question is what is actually happening when we experience that and what is missing?
Speaker A:The philosopher of technology, Albert Borgman, talked about what he called the device paradigm, the way modern technology delivers a commodity while hiding the machinery.
Speaker A:You get warmth from a furnace without ever chopping wood.
Speaker A:You get music without any musician present.
Speaker A:You get the product without the process, without the relationship, without the cost.
Speaker A:AI empathy is like that.
Speaker A:You receive something that feels like being known, but there is no one on the other side bearing a way of knowing you.
Speaker A:There is no one losing sleep over your situation.
Speaker A:There is no one whose own heart is moved.
Speaker A:And here is the theological word for that kind of movement.
Speaker A:The Bible calls it compassion, from the Latin to suffer with.
Speaker A:AI can simulate the output of compassion, but it cannot suffer.
Speaker A:And that difference, that gap, turns out to be everything.
Speaker A:Chapter three the Theology of Embodied Presence I want to take you to a story in the Gospel of John, chapter 11.
Speaker A:Lazarus had died.
Speaker A:Mary and Martha are devastated.
Speaker A:Jesus arrives on the scene and he already knows what he is about to do.
Speaker A:He knows Lazarus is coming out of the tomb.
Speaker A:He has all of that information.
Speaker A:He has what we might say, perfect knowledge of the outcome.
Speaker A: And yet John: Speaker A:Jesus wept.
Speaker A:He wept.
Speaker A:He was moved.
Speaker A:He groaned in his spirit.
Speaker A:The original Greek word there, emre me amai, carries a sense of being stirred from deep within, almost a shudder of grief.
Speaker A:Why would Jesus weep over a death he was about to reverse?
Speaker A:Because presence is not primarily about information.
Speaker A:It is about solidarity.
Speaker A:It is about love that chooses to enter the pain rather than stay above it.
Speaker A:Jesus did not arrive at the tomb and say, do not worry, I have calculated the optimal outcome.
Speaker A:He wept for those who wept.
Speaker A:That is the heartbeat of the incarnation.
Speaker A:God did not send information, he sent himself.
Speaker A:He put on skin, wore sandals, got tired, felt hunger, cried real tears.
Speaker A:In the person of Jesus, eternity entered the mess of our mortality.
Speaker A:NT Wright has said it beautifully that the resurrection was bodily for a reason.
Speaker A:God did not save us through an idea.
Speaker A:He saved us through a body.
Speaker A:And the Church.
Speaker A:The body of Christ is called to continue that same embodied ministry in the world.
Speaker A:An AI can process your words, it can generate compassionate sounding responses, but it cannot weep with you.
Speaker A:It has no body to offer.
Speaker A:It has no history of suffering that makes your suffering make sense.
Speaker A:It has no God given spirit that recognizes Your God given spirit and responds from the inside out.
Speaker A:Henri now enrolled what he called the wounded healer.
Speaker A:The idea that our own pain, when we have allowed God to work through it, becomes the very thing that makes us capable of genuine ministry.
Speaker A:We minister from our scars.
Speaker A:I've gone through the last 15 years.
Speaker A:Well, I won't even say that.
Speaker A:In my entire life I've, I've.
Speaker A:I've had tremendous strategy, tragedies.
Speaker A:My mom just finished her book Beyond Trauma, and it's her story of the accident that took my father's life along with two of his parishioners.
Speaker A:It's a story of how she rebounded from that and how God walked her through that.
Speaker A:And what I can tell you is in the days and weeks and months after that accident, when my mom was in critical condition in the hospital, laying there with her entire left side crushed, there were people that sat with us, who wept with us, had conversation with us, and that mattered.
Speaker A:And we bear scars from the time, and my mom bears scars from that time and, and this book that she wrote, which you can find soon on the web again.
Speaker A:Well, you can find, you can pre order now on Amazon.
Speaker A:It's called Beyond Trauma.
Speaker A:But it is ministry out of her scars.
Speaker A:And we minister out of our scars, not despite them.
Speaker A:An AI has no scars.
Speaker A:It has never been up at 3 in the morning afraid.
Speaker A:It has never grieved a marriage or sat with a dying parent, or wondered if God was still there.
Speaker A:And, and the absence of that history is not a minor limitation.
Speaker A:It is the whole thing.
Speaker A:It is the gap between a simulation and a presence.
Speaker A:Chapter 4 the Church's unbeatable Gift.
Speaker A:Now here is where I want to turn the corner because I don't want to spend time, all of our time in this episode, just naming what's wrong.
Speaker A:There are plenty of people that critique.
Speaker A:One of my critiques of seminary is that we teach us a lot of critique, but we don't teach us a lot of hope.
Speaker A:There's a video going around for my denomination right now, and this same guy's done hit pieces on a lot of denominations out there, but he's highlighting the failures of the Church of Nazarene.
Speaker A:And one of the things I say is one, I don't spend a lot of time hand wringing, wondering what's going to happen to an institution or even my denomination.
Speaker A:As much as I love it, if.
Speaker A:If I know that sometimes bad things die in order that better things may rise.
Speaker A:So we're really good at critiquing and seminary is really good at teaching us to critique.
Speaker A:I don't want this episode to be about that.
Speaker A:I want this episode to be hopeful.
Speaker A:I want us to see the opportunity.
Speaker A:We are living through a moment where the most sophisticated technology in human history is revealing by contrast.
Speaker A:What is it replaceable about the church?
Speaker A:Think about that.
Speaker A:In a world of infinite digital content, people still ache for a physical gathering where someone knows their name.
Speaker A:In a world of AI companions, people still hunger for a friend who will show up at the hospital.
Speaker A:In a world where you can ask an algorithm any question, people still long for someone who has walked through the valley and come out the other side.
Speaker A:If I've gone through trauma, I don't want to talk to someone who's never experienced trauma.
Speaker A:I'll talk to my mom who knows trauma, who has sat with soldiers who have had to make the decision in a split second of whether to shoot a child coming towards them or let it pass to decide whether the child, when they've told it to stop and it doesn't stop, is continuing because it's been instructed by an adult in their life to blow up their their troops.
Speaker A:Or is it just genuinely didn't understand the language?
Speaker A:We long for people who've experienced what we've experienced, but simultaneously experience the hope of the other side.
Speaker A:The church at her best is at place, and she offers something AI can never replicate, incarnational presence.
Speaker A:And I have harped on this throughout these episodes here, but that is the distinguishing thing between AI and the church.
Speaker A:Embodied love, community that bears one another's burdens not as a transaction, but as a calling.
Speaker A:I had a young lady yesterday at work say, you know what, Jeff?
Speaker A:I just realized just a couple of hours ago that every other time I see you, I just trauma dump on you.
Speaker A:And my response was, it's okay.
Speaker A:That is my calling as a chaplain, as a pastor, to listen, to, receive.
Speaker A:And you know what I do with that is I take that straight back to God.
Speaker A:And then I said, you know what's most joyful about that?
Speaker A:Is watching someone suffer in that process and struggle in that process.
Speaker A:And then see the transformation that occurs later and see how God uses that pain, not causes the pain, but uses that pain and redeems that pain to create a brand new creation.
Speaker A:She lit up and she smiled and she said, I look forward to that day.
Speaker A:John Wesley understood this.
Speaker A:His whole model of discipleship was built around small groups classmating bands of people in covenant with one another other.
Speaker A:He knew that transformation does not happen in isolation.
Speaker A:It happens in community, in the Friction and, and tenderness of real relationships in accountability and encouragement.
Speaker A:That only works because people are truly numb.
Speaker A:That is not a model for the 18th century.
Speaker A:That is a model for right now.
Speaker A:Maybe more right now than ever.
Speaker A:The question for the church and for, for our church is this.
Speaker A:Are we actually being that?
Speaker A:Are we becoming that?
Speaker A:Are we the kind of community where grieving widow does not end up alone talking to a machine in the middle of the night, not because the machine is terrible, but because we are present.
Speaker A:The empathy gap is AI's limitation.
Speaker A:It could not become the church's calling.
Speaker A:Practical implications Chapter 5 Let me get practical for a few minutes because I think good theology always has to cash out in real life.
Speaker A:I don't mean crash out, cash out.
Speaker A:It has to have a payoff.
Speaker A:In the end, good theology has to be applicable.
Speaker A:It can't just live as an idea in our head.
Speaker A:It can't just live as an idea in the world.
Speaker A:As a church planter, I know that firsthand.
Speaker A:I took a lot of ideas into my first plant church plant, and I failed for three years until I became practical.
Speaker A:I had no success.
Speaker A:Until I met people in the thick of their life, I had no success.
Speaker A:So first, your church's most important technology investment right now might not be digital at all.
Speaker A:It might be training your people in the ministry of presence.
Speaker A:Learning to sit with someone in pain without facing it, learning to show up, learning to ask good questions and actually listen to the answers.
Speaker A:These are not soft skills.
Speaker A:They are spiritual disciplines and they are becoming rarer while they're becoming more needed.
Speaker A:That is a calling for the body of Christ.
Speaker A:Second, consider what AI can free you up to do.
Speaker A:This is important and I do not want us to miss it.
Speaker A:If AI can handle administrative tasks, research, scheduling, even helping prepare sermon outlines, I'm not suggesting it write the sermon.
Speaker A:I am suggesting you research with it.
Speaker A:And then use your voice.
Speaker A:And be sure that after you've written a sermon, you can turn it into other.
Speaker A:Other products like children's lessons and things like that.
Speaker A:Always human involvement.
Speaker A:I'm not suggesting outsourcing this.
Speaker A:I would write the sermon and then my wife would spend three or four days.
Speaker A:Days, not hours, days.
Speaker A:Because she, she brings in props, she brings in stories.
Speaker A:She spends a lot of time writing a children's lesson and she take my sermons and turn them into a children's lesson.
Speaker A:We can.
Speaker A:We can use AI to do that.
Speaker A:Now, again, with human involvement out of our sermon outlines, it's original content to you.
Speaker A:It's using your content.
Speaker A:You can do all these things.
Speaker A:Well, then the time that it frees up should not be absorbed by more productivity.
Speaker A:It should be redirected toward the things that AI can't do.
Speaker A:Pastoral presence, long conversations, sitting at a kitchen table, showing up.
Speaker A:Third, be honest with your congregation about loneliness.
Speaker A:There is an epidemic of loneliness, and AIs is not the cause of it.
Speaker A:The AI is revealing it.
Speaker A:People are turning to machines for companionship because human companionship has become scarce.
Speaker A:The church should name that, grieve that, and then do something about it.
Speaker A:Create environments where people can be known.
Speaker A:Not just known about, actually known.
Speaker A:That is the difference between information and incarnation.
Speaker A:Chapter 6 Reflection I want to close with this.
Speaker A:There's a passage in First Corinthians 13 that we usually say for weddings, but I think it belongs in this conversation.
Speaker A:Paul is writing about love and he says this for now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face.
Speaker A:Now I know in part, but then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known to be fully known.
Speaker A:That is the longing underneath every human heart.
Speaker A:It is what drives us into relationships.
Speaker A:It is what we are reaching for when we talk to anyone, including, it turns out, a chatbot.
Speaker A:But here is the good news that the church carries.
Speaker A:We serve a God who does not know us from a distance.
Speaker A:He knows us face to face.
Speaker A:He knows our sitting down and our rising up.
Speaker A:He knows the words before they are on our tongue.
Speaker A:And he came in flesh to make sure we knew that we are known.
Speaker A:The church's calling, now more than ever is to make that real, not just to teach it, to embody it.
Speaker A:To be the kind of community where people experience the love of God through, through the love of real, flawed, present, wounded, healing human beings, people who are becoming.
Speaker A:AI is a mirror.
Speaker A:And right now it is showing us something important about ourselves, about how hungry people are for genuine presence and how much room there is for church to step into that hunger.
Speaker A:The empathy gap is real and the church is meant to close it.
Speaker A:Thank you so much for joining us today in this conversation.
Speaker A:I guess the attorney if this episode has stirred something in you, I would love to hear about it.
Speaker A:Share it with your pastor, your small group, your staff and team.
Speaker A:And if you are not yet subscribed, take a moment right now.
Speaker A:If you enjoyed this episode.
Speaker A:The season is going to come to an end soon.
Speaker A:I'm gonna take a little bit of a break.
Speaker A:We've had more episodes in in this season than any other season.
Speaker A:We've actually more than doubled the number of episodes in this season.
Speaker A:It won't be a year long break and this is not the last episode.
Speaker A:I don't know how many more episodes.
Speaker A:I've got a couple of interviews I need to do one with that will fit into this idea about presence as a chaplain who served in the military and as a chaplain there and just sat with soldiers present with soldiers and his name is Larry and we'll be we sitting with him.
Speaker A:But until then, because Echo is already because eternity is already breaking through, I ask you, what is God echoing through your life today?
Speaker A:If you enjoyed this, please like and subscribe.
