A Pastor’s View of GRACE with AI
An Interview with Pastor Scott Crosby, Part IV
We are continuing from the last three weeks in an interview with Pastor Scott Crosby of Liberti Church Fairmount on the intersection of Faith, Work, and AI.
Last week:
AI may greatly enlarge what a business leader is able to do. Christian faith asks what kind of person is exercising that enlarged capacity, before whom, and for whose good.
RUSS: Your focus on Character brings me back to the GRACE framework that I first introduced in The Smart Steward back in February as an introspective set of questions that faithful business leaders can use to keep their AI ambitions in check. What would you add to or take away from this:
- Goods in Tension: What competing goods are at stake, and what might be lost?
- Responsibility: What responsibilities do we retain, even if AI performs the task?
- Allegiance: What is shaping this decision the most?
- Character: Who is this decision shaping us to become?
- Effect: Who bears the consequences, especially those with less power?
SCOTT: The GRACE framework is really helpful. What I would like to explore are some of the patterns that are already there, because I don’t think the five questions simply sit beside one another. They seem to help interpret and correct one another.
Start with Goods and Responsibility.
The old business saying is that you can have something good, fast, or cheap, but usually only two of the three. That is a useful reminder that sometimes the tension really is a tension. We have limited time, money, attention, and people. Something may be excellent and fast, but it probably will not be inexpensive. Or it may be excellent and inexpensive, but it will take longer.
Our limits are real. Faithfulness does not make those limits disappear. Sometimes wisdom means choosing among genuine goods and being honest about what we will gain and what we will lose.
But not every apparent tension works that way. Sometimes the problem is not that two goods are competing. It is that two goods that actually belong together have been pulled apart.
I think GRACE itself shows this. Goods and Responsibility need one another.
Goods asks what is worth protecting or pursuing. Responsibility asks what remains ours to carry in relation to those goods.
Goods without Responsibility can become little more than values language. We say we care about human dignity, employees, customers, creativity, or trust, but never ask what those commitments actually require us to own, protect, sacrifice, or refuse.
Responsibility without Goods can become mere control or compliance. We can say that a human remains accountable, that there is an approval process, that someone signs off on the result. But responsible for what good, and responsible to whom?
Put the two together and the question becomes something like:
What good has been entrusted to us here, and what does responsibility for that good require?
Christian character gives us some familiar examples of why this matters. Paul tells Christians to speak “the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15). Truth and love are different, but they belong together. Christian truthfulness should be loving, and Christian love should be truthful.
Pull them apart and both become vulnerable to distortion.
“I’m just being honest” may describe courage, but it can also cover aggression, self-justification, or simply wanting to unload on someone.
“I’m trying to be loving” may describe compassion, but it can also cover fear, avoidance, or the need to preserve someone’s approval.
The same is true of forgiveness and the pursuit of reconciliation. We can use the language of forgiveness while continuing to cultivate resentment. We can restore the appearance of relationship while quietly keeping the offense available as a weapon.
Business has its own versions of this. Efficiency and responsibility are both real goods. We should not preserve pointless work just because it is familiar. But efficiency separated from responsibility for workers, customers, formation, or long-term consequences can become extraction while continuing to call itself stewardship.
So under Goods in Tension, I might ask not only:
What competing goods are at stake?
but also:
Are these really competing goods, or are they goods that need one another and have been pulled apart?
And perhaps:
Are we still pursuing the good we are naming, or has something else begun borrowing its language?
Fear can call itself prudence. Aggression can call itself honesty. Control can call itself stewardship. Extraction can call itself efficiency.
That distinction seems particularly important with AI because the vocabulary around it is so attractive.
Then I see another pair inside GRACE: Allegiance and Character.
Allegiance asks what is governing the decision. What are we loving, fearing, trusting, protecting, or feeling pressured by?
Character asks what repeated decisions under that direction are forming us to become.
Those two questions need each other too.
What governs repeated choices gradually forms the chooser. But what we are becoming can also reveal what was governing us more clearly than we recognized at the time.
A company may sincerely say that prudence is shaping its AI decisions. But after years of avoiding every unfamiliar risk, its developing character may reveal that fear had much more influence than anyone realized.
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Another company may speak constantly about innovation. But if the resulting culture becomes impatient, driven, unable to rest, and increasingly willing to treat people as disposable, then Character may tell us something important about what “innovation” has actually come to mean.
So I might hold those two questions together as well:
What is governing us, and what kind of people is living under that direction forming us to become?
That brings me to Effect, which may be doing something especially important in the framework.
I don’t think Effect is simply the fifth question we ask after the other four.
Effect gives us a way to test what we have said about Goods, Responsibility, Allegiance, and Character against what actually happens.
And I think that becomes particularly powerful when we use GRACE across time.
We can look backward:
What happened when we made decisions like this before?
We can look carefully at the present:
What is actually happening now, and who is experiencing it?
And we can look forward:
If this continues, where is it likely to lead?
The past matters because businesses do not make decisions from nowhere. We already have histories. We have made promises, adopted technologies, created habits, gained and lost trust, discovered unintended effects, and sometimes learned that what we thought we were doing was not quite what we were actually doing.
Suppose a company adopted AI two years ago in the name of efficiency while promising to retain meaningful human responsibility.
Looking back, perhaps the efficiency gains were real. But perhaps human review gradually became automatic. Maybe junior employees stopped developing kinds of judgment they once learned through the work that is now automated. Maybe customers with unusual situations found it increasingly difficult to reach someone who could actually take responsibility.
Those effects do more than tell us whether the project “worked.”
They give us evidence for reconsidering the whole decision.
Did the goods we said we valued actually remain healthy?
Did we carry the responsibilities we said remained ours?
What do the effects suggest about what was really governing us?
What kind of character and culture were actually formed?
Then we bring what we learned back into the present decision and ask the questions again with better eyes.
That makes Effect a kind of feedback loop through GRACE.
But I would want to keep Effect joined to the other four as well.
Effects matter, but they do not become the final moral authority. Otherwise we simply end up saying, “It worked, therefore it was right.”
A profitable outcome can still be wrong. A faithful decision can still be costly.
So I would put it this way:
Effects are evidence by which our discernment can be tested. They are not a substitute for discernment.
Good intentions tell us something. Fruit tells us something too.
And that may be the thing I appreciate most about GRACE when I see the questions together.
Goods and Responsibility help us ask what matters and what has been entrusted to us.
Allegiance and Character help us ask what is governing us and what that direction is forming.
Effect helps us look honestly at the fruit, learn from the past, see the present more clearly, anticipate the future, and then come back to the other questions again.
So I would not add another letter.
I would let the letters keep one another honest.
Sometimes the challenge is a real tradeoff among good things.
Sometimes the challenge is recognizing that goods which belong together have been pulled apart.
Sometimes something unhealthy has kept the vocabulary of the good after the reality has changed.
And sometimes the effects of yesterday’s decisions are exactly what help us see today’s decision more truthfully.
That is why I like your description of GRACE as a framework for discernment rather than a formula. Knowing the questions matters. Becoming the kind of person who can answer them truthfully when fear, ambition, pressure, profit, or self-interest are involved is something deeper.
RUSS: …Let’s get practical here. What can we do to participate with God in forming us into business leaders that glorify God in how we use AI?…
Continued next week…
