A pastor in California named Justin Lester has built a digital twin of himself. Fed nearly two million words from his sermons, books, and other messages, the artificial intelligence clone counsels hundreds of people in Vallejo, California, around the clock — comforting a woman the night before heart surgery, advising a man despairing over a lost job, and drafting a letter for a homesick child at camp. According to The New York Times, which reported on Lester's project, the AI twin even speaks in the pastor's cadence.

Lester is not alone. The creators of an app called Bible Chat have built what amounts to a digital chaplaincy: users confess their secrets and sins to a chatbot and ask it for help interpreting the Bible. The app has been downloaded more than 30 million times, and other so-called 'faith tech' tools are rising fast alongside it.

Writing in Christianity Today, Chicago pastor Chris Butler is not concerned with the most obvious objections to this trend. The deeper problem, he argues, is what the technology does to spiritual authority itself — an authority the church already struggles to exercise well.

Scripture describes the pastor's task in solemn terms: leaders must 'keep watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account' (Hebrews 13:17). An AI clone can dispense words. It cannot give that account to God. Nothing is at stake for it, and it answers to no one. When the pastor created a digital twin to extend his care to more people, Butler writes, he unintentionally surrendered the one thing he was set apart to carry.

The commands of Scripture make no sense in a chat window. We are called to 'bear one another's burdens' (Galatians 6:2), to 'confess your sins to one another and pray for one another' (James 5:16). It is human beings — not lines of code — who can truly listen and petition God on our behalf. As Butler puts it, it may be alluring to tell your problems to AI and never face the raised eyebrow of a flesh-and-blood shepherd. But that appeal is precisely the problem: many people want leaders subject to scrutiny while keeping their own lives subject to no one. A pastor who cannot see you is, for some, exactly the pastor they want.

To be fair, bad spiritual authority is real. Butler acknowledges that many Christians have left churches for reasons any reasonable person understands: pastors who manipulated and abused people, covered up sins, or lorded their authority over the flock. Scripture never asks us to pretend otherwise. But the answer to bad authority, he writes, is not no authority — and certainly not an AI bot that validates every emotion. The answer is accountable authority found in a local congregation.

That authority matters because it comes from God (Matthew 16:16-19). When it is exercised the way Jesus exercised it — kneeling with a towel to serve the ones He leads — it shapes us into the people God has called us to be. Paul told Timothy to take what he had received and 'entrust it to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also' (2 Timothy 2:2). The methods have varied across the centuries — personal discipleship, formal training, ordination — but the aim has never changed: connectedness to the historic church, to a faith delivered and passed along by humans to other humans.

Scripture is equally clear that God calls specific people to the solemn work of watching over His flock. The ascended Christ 'gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry' so the body would be built up and no longer 'tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine' (Ephesians 4:11-14). We all need someone who feeds our faith, guides us, and corrects our course. That someone ought not to be a chatbot, but a person set apart by the Holy Spirit for the task.

Christians have carried this authority imperfectly — and sometimes sinfully — for centuries. Church-hoppers flee accountability from one congregation to the next, and too many churches let them. These technological innovations are not making things better. We can use new tools without surrendering the undershepherds who keep watch. Whatever the church becomes in the years ahead, it cannot be the church without them — and without the mutual submission that holds God's people together.

Read the original at Christianity Today.