A Pastor’s View of Work and AI
An Interview with Pastor Scott Crosby, Part I
I met Pastor Scott Crosby through a FaithTech forum on the Theology of AI. His shared thoughts on the topic that were rich and well aligned with the concepts we’ve explored at The Smart Steward, so I asked if he’d be open to an e-mail interview on the intersection of Faith, AI, and Business. He agreed. I’d like to share the fruit of that interview over the next few weeks.
RUSS: I would say that my interests for many years have largely fallen in the business-faith-technology intersection space, with a practical bent. My sense is that your focus, especially recently, has been in the faith-AI intersection space, with a theological bent. But you’re also a pastor who regularly deals with very practical matters amongst your flock. I’ve asked you to wear more of that “pastor’s hat” rather than the “theologian’s hat” for this discussion (although those two aren’t mutually exclusive, so maybe it’s the same hat just worn differently). But let’s start with the basics. Who are you? What do you do? And what has led you to think deeply about the theology of AI?
SCOTT: I think the “same hat worn differently” is probably right. And I’m glad our paths crossed through the FaithTech forum. I thought that online gathering was excellent, and I think FaithTech is doing important work in helping Christians think carefully about this moment.
I’m the senior pastor of Liberti Church Fairmount in Philadelphia, and I’ve spent more than three decades in pastoral ministry. Eighteen of those years were spent serving under Dr. Tim Keller in Manhattan, so a significant part of my pastoral life has been among urban professionals trying to work out what faithfulness to Christ looks like in business, culture, vocation, and ordinary life.
Most of my work is still very ordinary pastoral work: preaching and teaching Scripture, walking with people through suffering and decisions, helping people grow in their callings, developing leaders, and trying to help a congregation learn to live faithfully before God and love their neighbors well.
That is an important part of why AI became so compelling to me, but the research itself began in a more concentrated way.
At one point, three things I had encountered at different times came together in my mind with unusual force. One was Vern Poythress’s work on reforming ontology and logic in light of the Trinity. Another was John Frame’s triperspectival approach, which I had first encountered years earlier in The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God and later again in his primer on triperspectivalism. The third was the Redemptive AI work coming out of Praxis with Andy Crouch and others.
I experienced that convergence very much as the Holy Spirit’s leading. Those three streams became explosively generative for me. Poythress gave me a way of thinking about what kinds of things exist and how created realities relate. Frame gave me a way of holding together what God requires, the actual situation before us, and what is happening in the person acting. And Redemptive AI raised the practical question that initially seized me: What does redemptive interaction with AI look like if our relationship to it is shaped neither by fear nor by utility?
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The basic shape of the field seemed to come into view almost at once. Much of the work since then has been tracing that vision back through Scripture, theology, ethics, philosophy, and the technical literature, testing it carefully, and trying to explain it in a way that other people can examine and explore.
That research has now been formalized in my doctoral research at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where I’m pursuing a Christian practical theology of faithful and redemptive human-AI collaboration.
Pastorally, though, the questions become very concrete very quickly.
AI is entering the ordinary places where people live their lives: work, education, creativity, relationships, ministry, and decision-making. And much of the public conversation still tends to be dominated by two questions.
One is fear: What is this going to do to us?
The other is utility: What can I get it to do for me?
Both questions matter, but I think Christians have a larger set of questions available to us. What is this thing we are relating to? What is our work actually for, and what should this new capacity be serving within it? What are we hoping AI will give us? What are we afraid it might take away? What habits are forming in us as we use it? What responsibilities are ours before, during, and after we use it? And is our use of it helping us become more faithful in loving God and the people entrusted to us?
That is also why I began writing publicly about this. I did not even have a Substack until February of this year. But as I watched anxiety about AI begin touching friends in the Christian community and leaders in the business world whom I know personally, I wanted to share some of what I was seeing in the research in a non-anxious and accessible way.
The AI Is… series has been one attempt to do that: to take some of the deeper theological, philosophical, and technical architecture and translate it into everyday language for people who are actually trying to live and work faithfully in this moment.
So in that sense, the pastoral and theological hats really are the same hat. The research asks some very large questions, but I care about them because they eventually arrive in someone’s office, someone’s vocation, someone’s conscience, and someone’s relationships.
RUSS: Thanks. That’s rich. There’s a lot there I want to explore, but…
Continued next week…
