🌑 The Question You Swallowed
Have you ever carried something for weeks, not a crisis exactly, but not nothing either, and found yourself unable to say it out loud to anyone who knows you?
It lives in the back of your throat. You rehearse it on the way to church. But by the time the service starts, you have swallowed it again. The pastoral appointment feels like too much. The text to a friend turns into a forty-five-minute call you do not have the energy for. And so, late one night, you open a chat window instead.
Within seconds, something answers you. Calmly. Patiently. In four clean paragraphs that affirm your feelings, offer a framework, and close by telling you that you clearly care about doing the right thing.
You close the app feeling lighter.
And you did not notice what was missing.
🕊 Three in Ten
This is not an isolated habit. New research from Barna and Gloo, released in late 2025, surveyed more than fifteen hundred American adults about faith and artificial intelligence. The number I want you to sit with: three in ten U.S. adults say spiritual guidance from AI is as trustworthy as spiritual guidance from a pastor.
And that number is not being pulled up by people at the margins of church life. Among practicing Christians, the rate is even higher. Among Gen Z and Millennials, it is closer to four in ten.
Historians of technology will recognize the pattern. Gutenberg’s press democratized Scripture and sparked revival, but also fractured interpretive authority into thousands of competing voices. Radio gave people a parasocial preacher who could not know them, could not pray with them, could not sit in silence with them. Social media formed a generation before the church found its words.
AI speaks back. It asks follow-up questions. To the person on the other end, it sounds a lot like wisdom.
🌿 Information Shaped Like Wisdom
Here is the tension at the heart of this moment: the AI answer feels complete. It is long enough to seem substantive. It uses language that sounds right. And it is deeply, structurally private. No awkwardness. No relational risk. No chance the person on the other end looks at you differently afterward.
That frictionlessness is the product.
But most of the actual work of spiritual formation happens in the friction. Jesus had access to the fullness of divine knowledge, and he sat with a woman at a well and asked her for a drink of water. He walked alongside two disciples on the road to Emmaus and pretended he did not know what had happened in Jerusalem. He asked a man who had been paralyzed for thirty-eight years whether he wanted to be healed.
Jesus did not remove friction. He inhabited it with people.
What you receive at eleven at night from a chat window is information shaped like wisdom. It may even use Scripture. But it cannot know you. It cannot love you. It cannot be present with you in the places that actually need presence.
🙏 The Habit of Authority
There is something deeper at stake than any single conversation. When we repeatedly reach for the chat window in our spiritually significant moments, about marriage, calling, repentance, doubt, identity, we are not just finding answers. We are forming a habit of authority. We are training our souls to seek guidance from something that was never designed to shepherd us.
The thing you repeat becomes the voice you trust.
The desert fathers and mothers understood this. The abba, the amma, the staretz: these figures sat in silence with people. They asked the harder question back. They were willing to let formation be slow and costly, because they knew that conformity to Christ does not happen through information transfer. It happens through presence, obedience, suffering, and the ordinary friction of real relationship.
An eleven-at-night chat window cannot offer that. Not because it is evil. Because it is something else entirely.
🌙 A Breath Before You Continue
Before you read further, pause. Take a slow breath.
Formation is always happening, in the voices you return to, in the questions you bring where, in the authority you quietly grant.
You are known by a God who is not surprised by a single question you have carried.
🌿 Three Practices for This Week
Try this: for the next seven days, simply notice where you reach first when a spiritually significant question surfaces. Not to judge yourself. Just to see clearly. Awareness is the beginning of discernment.
Interrupt the pattern once. When something tender or uncertain arises this week, resist the first impulse. Take it to an actual person. Send a voice memo. Text someone who knows your name and your history. That single interruption is formation.
If you lead a group, a class, or a household: begin the conversation. Ask what questions the people around you have taken to a chat window that they might not have taken to a friend. The conversation itself is pastoral care.
📖 Where Does Your Help Come From?
I lift my eyes to the hills: where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.
(Psalm 121:1-2)
The psalmist’s first move is not a search. It is a gaze. Not resolution, but orientation. The question is asked out loud, to someone specific, before any answer arrives.
Where are you looking first?
🕊 The Tools Are Not the Enemy
The question you are carrying is not too small for the God who made you. It is not too messy for the Spirit who knows your name. It is not too inconvenient for the body of Christ, which was designed for exactly the weight you are trying to carry.
The tools are not the enemy. But they are not your shepherd.
Maybe the work of this season is relearning how to knock on a door, human or divine, and wait for someone who actually knows you to answer.
🌿 Questions Worth Sitting With
Which question have you taken to a chat window this week that you have not yet taken to God or to a person who loves you?
How might your formation look different if you treated AI as a tool rather than a counselor?
Where in your life do you most need the friction of real presence right now?
🙏 Thank You for Being Here
Thank you for trusting me with this conversation. Each episode, each post, each listener who stays curious and spiritually awake: you are part of something that matters. Your support helps this work reach someone who is awake at eleven at night, carrying something they have not yet said out loud.
May your questions lead you to the one who is not surprised by any of them.
May your formation happen in presence, not just clean paragraphs.
May your faith stay human, and may your soul stay awake.
— Drew
drewdickens.substack.com
