As the Phygital Fellows prepare for an upcoming gathering in Berkeley, CA, I find myself thinking about how the physical and digital life continually shape each other. An online conversation changes what happens around a dinner table. A gathering becomes a recording that reaches someone we will never meet. For the church, this calls for theological attention to how technology shapes our relationships with one another, the world, and the Divine. Three learnings with the Phygital fellows over the last couple of years really helps to shape these important discussions.
The first lesson is AWARENESS, which considers noticing how much has already happened in the realm of AI before we decide whether to use AI. Consider the drive to a new location for a community meeting. Google Maps has described using machine learning to combine historical traffic patterns with live conditions, predicting how long a journey will take. The app is making an educated forecast about your route before you set out. Follow its recommendation and a prediction becomes a physical decision to turn onto that street, pass those businesses, and encounter someone’s neighborhood through a windshield. AI can dictate where you choose to go or not go, and we might not be aware of how these small decisions, over time, shape whose story we interact with. If there are certain neighborhoods your GPS never sends you through, perhaps you will never interact with that community.
Not every algorithm is AI, but many familiar services use machine learning to recognize patterns and make predictions. Generative AI, which produces text, images, and other content, is one part of that larger landscape. A chatbot makes the encounter obvious. A recommendation to take one route over another could be a relatively hidden means of shaping your and your neighbor’s story filled with unforeseen unintended consequences.
There are gifts here. A person recovering from surgery can pray with a congregation through a livestream. A conversation across time zones can grow into friendship. Awareness includes noticing those possibilities and asking what makes them hospitable. Can people participate, or only watch? Is there someone to respond when they reach out? How might we recognize the person joining from a hospital room as someone whose presence changes the community?
Theologically, we should pay attention to what repeated encounters teach us to expect. The church has language for this: formation. We might begin by tracing an ordinary Tuesday, noticing what selects our routes, our stories, and the people whose voices reach us. Then ask where those selections widen our capacity to love and where they narrow it. Awareness gives us something concrete to discern together.
The second learning is RESISTANCE. Once we notice how a system works, we become responsible for asking whose life it improves. In Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson examine the persistent assumption that greater productivity will eventually benefit everyone. Their history gives us reason to question this promise. Medieval improvements in plows, crop rotation, and mills increased production while bringing little benefit to the hands doing the work. As the authors explain, wealth could rise into magnificent cathedrals while ordinary people remained poor. The church should recognize its own place in that picture.
Early British textile factories offer another example. Machinery increased output and enriched owners, while workers endured exhausting hours, close supervision, and dangerous conditions with little, if any, personal prosperity. History should make us cautious whenever someone promises that automation will free everyone for more meaningful work. Who owns the hours being freed? Does a worker receive a shorter week and greater security, or a termination notice? When wealth accumulates among those who own the systems, the distance between people with resources and people without them can grow even as the technology improves.
The church needs the courage to bring these questions into the public conversation. Our congregations include people whose jobs are being redesigned, whose creative work supplies raw material for somebody else’s product, and whose access to services depends on systems they cannot question. We must listen to their experiences, support their voice in decisions, and insist that efficiency include an accounting of what happens to them.
Resistance also reaches our own budgets. Faith communities are not immune to the pressure of implementing unquestioned efficiencies. Before celebrating the savings from a new platform, we should ask what labor it replaces, what access it requires, and who will struggle to participate. A congregation can advocate for workers to share in productivity gains and preserve a human point of contact for neighbors excluded by digital systems. Our baptismal promises to resist injustice should remain recognizable when injustice arrives with a subscription plan.
The third learning is ETHICS, which requires examining the values already operating inside the technology. Technology comes to us shaped by decisions about what counts as success, whose experience supplies the data, and which mistakes are tolerable. Bias can enter through technological platforms themselves. Before any tool reaches the market, someone has asked if the app is risky, valuable, or scalable. These words must be defined through the lens of justice. A new technology is risky for whom? To whom? What does and app’s success look like. Someone supplies these definitions, and we must consider the means through which these tools reach their audience.
A 2019 study in Science Magazine[1] examined a widely used health-care algorithm that predicted spending as a stand-in for medical need. Because less money was spent caring for Black patients, the system underestimated their needs. At the same assigned risk level, Black patients were sicker than white patients. The choice of what to measure carried an existing inequality into a supposedly helpful decision.
Then there is the physical world beneath our digital language. Whoever coined the term, “The cloud” which holds an unbelievable amount of information, has an exceptionally good marketing team. It sounds weightless, natural, and almost out of sight to wear we forget that the cloud is a collection of data centers which require buildings, electricity, and cooling infrastructure. The International Energy Agency’s 2026 outlook projects global data-center electricity consumption rising from about 485 terawatt-hours in 2025 to 950 in 2030, nearly doubling. It is true that energy needed for individual AI prompts are becoming more efficient, but expanding use drives overall demand upward. The associated carbon emissions belong alongside water use in our moral accounting. We should ask whose water supplies face pressure, who pays for new power infrastructure, and whether nearby communities have meaningful authority over decisions affecting their lives.[2]
Part of being in a faith community in this rapidly changing world of AI is to consider one ordinary encounter with technology and the name of someone affected by it. Perhaps you know someone navigating an automated application, a musician wondering if their work is being sampled without permission, or a neighbor living beside new infrastructure. Ask that person what they wish faith communities would invest their voice in. Carry their question into a faithful space. Let their story interrupt our programming and plans. Give consideration time on leadership agendas. Through awareness, resistance, and ethical exploration faith communities can offer advocacy and prophetic witness within a new and ever-growing landscape
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax2342
[2] https://www.iea.org/reports/key-questions-on-energy-and-ai/executive-summary