A few weeks ago, Andrej Karpathy — former AI director at Tesla, co-founder of OpenAI — released a project that made me think about ministry.
I didn’t expect that either.
Karpathy built a framework called autoresearch. It runs autonomous ML experiments on a single GPU while the researcher sleeps. The AI agent modifies training code, runs a 5-minute experiment, evaluates the result, keeps improvements, discards failures, and loops. About 12 experiments per hour. Roughly 100 overnight. He woke up to measurable performance gains — with zero human intervention during the run.
The part that got me: Karpathy doesn’t write the training code anymore. He writes a Markdown file — plain English instructions — that tells the AI what to research, what constraints to follow, and when to stop. His words: “you are programming the `program.md` Markdown files that provide context to the AI agents.” He calls this “programming in Markdown.”
The human moved up one level of abstraction. Define the methodology, set the guardrails, let the system execute. Not less involved — involved differently, at the level of direction instead of mechanics.
39,800 GitHub stars in the first two weeks. The tech world noticed.
I think the church should too.
The Parable We Keep Skimming
In Matthew 25:14-30 (ESV), Jesus tells the story of a master who entrusts his servants with talents — significant sums of money — before leaving on a journey. One receives five talents, another two, another one. The first two invest and double their resources. The third buries his in the ground.
When the master returns, the investors are praised: “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much” (Matthew 25:21, ESV). The one who buried his talent gets rebuked. Not for losing money — he hadn’t lost anything. He was rebuked for doing nothing with what he’d been given.
We tend to read this as a general principle about using your gifts. It is that. But I think there’s something more pointed here for 2026.
AI is a talent in the Matthew 25 sense. It’s a resource placed in front of this generation, and we have a choice. Invest it toward the mission, or bury it because the risk feels too high.
What This Looks Like at My Desk
I want to be specific, because the abstract conversation about “AI and the church” doesn’t move anyone forward.
I’m Director of Product at HarperCollins Christian Publishing, where I lead Bible Gateway — a platform serving over 75 million monthly visitors engaging with Scripture. Before this role, I led product for SermonCentral, which grew to 14,700+ paying subscribers with access to more than 145,000 sermon manuscripts.
Over the past year, I’ve built a system of 18 AI agents that handle competitive analysis, research synthesis, meeting intelligence, content drafting, and task management. Several run overnight — not unlike Karpathy’s loop. The architecture is different (mine orchestrate across business functions, his optimizes a neural network), but the pattern is identical: define methodology, set constraints, let the system execute, review results in the morning.
Every hour I used to spend pulling competitor data or formatting reports is now an hour I spend thinking about how 75 million people experience Scripture online. Or how to make Bible Gateway better for the person opening it at 2 AM because they can’t sleep and need something solid to hold onto.
Karpathy programs research methodology in Markdown now instead of writing Python. I program strategic priorities and agent instructions instead of pulling spreadsheets. The abstraction layer moved up. The work got more human, not less.
The Fear Is Understandable — and Partly Right
I hear the concerns from church leaders, and I take them seriously.
AI will replace authentic ministry. AI will make pastors lazy. AI will simulate relational presence that only a human body in a room can provide. These aren’t irrational. Some are already happening in small ways.
If a pastor uses AI to generate a sermon they never wrestle with, that’s a problem. If a church deploys a chatbot as a substitute for pastoral counseling, that’s a problem. If we treat AI-generated prayers as equivalent to the honest, stumbling prayers of a person before God — we’ve lost something that matters more than efficiency.
But Karpathy’s work shows the other path. The tool doesn’t replace the human. It moves the human to where they’re most needed.
The pastor doesn’t stop preaching — they stop spending 4 hours hunting for the right illustration and spend that time with the family walking through a divorce. The administrator doesn’t stop managing — they stop updating attendance spreadsheets and spend that time training volunteers. The ministry leader doesn’t stop leading — they stop drowning in email and spend that time on the phone with a donor questioning their faith.
I’ve lived this tradeoff. When my agents took over competitive analysis (something that used to eat 3-4 hours a week), I didn’t fill that time with more busywork. I spent it in 1-on-1s with my team and in deeper product strategy. The output quality went up because I was operating at the right level of abstraction.
Where the Line Is (and Where I’m Still Figuring It Out)
I want to be honest — I don’t think anyone has this mapped perfectly yet. I certainly don’t.
Here’s where I’d draw it today:
AI should handle the administrative. Scheduling, data analysis, report generation, email triage, content formatting. These consume enormous amounts of ministry time, and they don’t require pastoral presence. Automate them aggressively.
AI should accelerate the research. Sermon prep research, theological cross-referencing, community demographic analysis. These benefit from AI’s speed and scope. The pastor still does the synthesis — the “what does this mean for my people on Sunday” work. But raw material gathering? Let the machine run overnight, like Karpathy’s experiments.
AI should never simulate the relational. It should not write your prayers. It should not be the voice your congregation hears when they need a shepherd. It should not replace the hospital visit, the awkward conversation in the parking lot, the moment after the service where someone says what they’ve been carrying for months.
The servant in Matthew 25 who was praised put the resource to work — but in service of the master’s purpose, not his own convenience (Matthew 25:20-23, ESV).
Here’s the tension I haven’t resolved: where does “accelerating research” end and “simulating thinking” begin? When an AI summarizes 30 commentaries on a passage, is the pastor still doing exegesis, or are they just picking from a menu? I don’t have a clean answer. I think it depends on whether the pastor is engaging the summaries critically or just grabbing the first one that sounds good. But that’s a discipline question, not a technology question — and discipline questions are harder to solve with guardrails.
If You’re a Church Leader Starting from Zero
You don’t need 18 agents. You need one tool that saves you 3 hours a week.
Pick the task that eats the most time with the least relational value. For most pastors I’ve talked to, it’s sermon illustration research, email management, or meeting notes. Start there. Learn one tool well. Measure the hours you get back.
Then — and this is the part most people skip — reinvest that time in something only a human can do. A visit. A phone call. An hour of prayer you’ve been meaning to protect but kept losing to administrative drift.
Set your guardrails before you need them. Write down what AI will not do in your ministry context. Revisit it quarterly. Technology expands into unintended spaces when boundaries aren’t explicit — I’ve watched this happen in product development for 15 years.
The Talent in Front of Us
Karpathy’s autoresearch is an engineering achievement. But the deeper pattern is almost theological: the human was never meant to stay at the level of mechanical execution. We’re built to operate at the level of purpose, direction, and relationship. Genesis 1:28 gives humanity dominion and stewardship — a mandate to cultivate, not just maintain (Genesis 1:28, ESV).
The master in the parable didn’t give talents so the servants could admire them or lock them away. He gave them to be invested — put to work — in ways that generated return.
For those of us building technology that serves the church, the return isn’t financial. It’s pastors freed from busywork to do the work they were called to. It’s 75 million monthly visitors encountering Scripture through a platform that keeps getting better because the product team has time to think. It’s churches stewarding every tool available — including AI — in service of the mission they’ve been given.
The talent is in front of us. What we do with it is a stewardship question.
Josh Read is Director of Product at HarperCollins Christian Publishing (Bible Gateway) and holds a doctorate in Strategic Organizational Leadership. He writes about AI, product leadership, and digital discipleship at drjoshuaread.com.