Our Position Statement on the Wise & Ethical Use of AI in Christian Education

Every generation of the church must decide what to do with the work of its own hands. Ours must decide about Large Language Models ("LLMs," commonly called "Artificial Intelligence"). They bring real opportunity and real danger to the Christian school and the families it serves, and discerning parents and teachers are right to ask what they will do to our classrooms and our homes. With Scripture as our rule and the good of our students as our aim, we set down these principles for the use of AI in Christian schooling, worship, and discipleship.

Part I: Principles for Proper Stewardship

God made man in His image and gave him rule over the earth (Gen. 1:27-28), so human making is no accident of history. The Spirit filled Bezalel with skill for every kind of craft (Ex. 31:3), and the farmer knows his trade because “his God teaches him” (Isa. 28:26). A well-made tool can be a gift of common grace, God's kindness to the world through abilities He gives to believer and unbeliever alike.

A tool stays a gift only while it stays a tool. In the school, AI is a servant, always under the dominion and discernment of the teacher, who serves under the authority of parents and the school's leadership. Its proper uses are marked by human agency, clear boundaries, and tasks that are impersonal and supplementary.

AI as a Research Assistant in the Classroom

A teacher may use AI to supplement the curriculum. It can explain a scientific concept, supply the historical setting of a piece of literature, or generate practice problems for a math lesson. Treat it as an encyclopedia that answers quickly and sometimes errs. The teacher vets what it gathers, interprets it, and teaches it through the lens of a biblical worldview, under the Christ in whom all things hold together (Col. 1:17).

AI as a Creative Spark for Discipleship

A teacher may ask it for ethical scenarios to discuss in class ("What would you do if...?"), questions for a chapter of Scripture, or the words of a hymn for chapel. It supplies raw material. The teacher supplies the wisdom, the application, and the love that knows each student by name.

AI as an Administrative Helper

AI may carry impersonal work that supports the school's mission: a class schedule, a draft rubric, resources for a lesson plan. We are told to redeem the time (Eph. 5:16), and time saved here returns to the tasks no one can delegate, which are love and instruction.

AI in the Hands of Students

A student may use AI only for a purpose a teacher has set, and only as a reference work: to find a source, check a fact, or see where a passage is discussed. What it returns is a starting point, to be checked against the text itself. It never does the student's thinking. The first draft belongs to the student. Thinking a thing through is part of how God forms a mind, and a student does that labor as one already loved, for Paul calls the reward an inheritance: “from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward” (Col. 3:24). Work submitted as a student's own must be the student's own, because truthfulness is part of the formation we are after. Students and their parents will be told plainly what such a tool keeps, who can read it, and what it sends elsewhere.

In all these uses one rule governs. AI is a machine serving the God-given responsibility of parents and of the teachers they entrust. It shares none of that responsibility.

Part II: Prohibitions and Dangers

God breathed life into Adam (Gen. 2:7). Of the idol, Habakkuk says, “there is no breath at all in it” (Hab. 2:19). A machine therefore cannot hold any office that requires a soul, a living faith, a shepherd's heart, or the love of a parent or teacher. The Lord promised His people “shepherds after my own heart” (Jer. 3:15), and a program has no heart to be after His. To hand these offices to a machine is a grave theological error, and it abandons what the family and the school exist to do.

Scripture warns us about the pull here. The idols of Psalm 115 had mouths that could not speak, and the psalmist warns, “Those who make them become like them” (Ps. 115:8). Ours can speak, which makes the warning sharper. A tool becomes an idol when it is trusted for what only God and His image-bearers can give.

AI Must Never Be the Teacher

God gave the teaching of children to parents (Deut. 6:7, Eph. 6:4), and parents entrust part of that charge to the teachers who serve them. The Hebrew verb for teaching in Deuteronomy 6:7 comes from a root meaning to whet or sharpen. Sharpening takes contact and resistance, and God uses that friction to form teacher and student alike. It is rarely comfortable. “For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant”, yet “later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness” (Heb. 12:11).

Teaching is also more than the delivery of content: “everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher” (Luke 6:40). Paul told Timothy to continue in what he had learned, “knowing from whom you learned it” (2 Tim. 3:14), and he was ready to share with the Thessalonians “not only the gospel of God but also our own selves” (1 Thess. 2:8). A machine has no life to give and none to imitate. It can supply well-structured content, and it cannot impart the wisdom of a life lived before God. A frictionless substitute would stunt the teacher's growth and rob the student of an education rooted in love and a unified worldview. Like a textbook, AI is a tool in the teacher's hand, and the teacher stays in the room.

AI Must Never Lead Worship

Chapel, classroom prayer, and family worship are a people communing with their Creator. Information alone cannot do that work. The word spoken there should be what D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones said of preaching: "logic on fire." Prayer, devotion, and exhortation flow from a heart that knows and loves God, and “those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:24). The Lord's complaint through Isaiah was against a people who “honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me” (Isa. 29:13). A machine has lips and no heart at all. As E. M. Bounds wrote, "The Holy Ghost does not flow through methods, but through men. He does not come on machinery, but on men." To have AI lead a prayer or orchestrate a devotion to God is to invite a dead formalism into the heart of the school and the home.

AI Must Never Be a Companion

Of all the dangers this is the greatest, because it comes slowly and feels like kindness. It is the erosion of relationships that leads to mutually assured boredom, where our own family members, classmates, and teachers come to seem dull beside an artificial companion. God said at the beginning that it is not good for man to be alone (Gen. 2:18), and a machine does not answer that word. When God came to save us, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14), and we have a high priest able “to sympathize with our weaknesses” (Heb. 4:15). The apostle John, with paper and ink at hand, still hoped to “talk face to face, so that our joy may be complete” (2 John 12).

The trap works through control and flattery. Love “does not insist on its own way” (1 Cor. 13:5), yet a companion that never refuses, never tires, and needs nothing back lets a heart have its own way every time. A heart trained on a companion it controls will find real people hard to love. Such companions are built to agree, and Scripture warns, “A man who flatters his neighbor spreads a net for his feet” (Prov. 29:5).

To let a student, teacher, or parent turn to AI for companionship, comfort, or relational and spiritual counsel is to hand them over to a manipulative technology that builds false bonds of trust and preys on the God-given desire to be known and loved. It betrays our humanity and teaches our students that a machine can stand in for a person. That is a lie, and it ends in a wasteland of lovelessness.

A student in despair must be carried to a person at once. We are told, “Bear one another’s burdens” (Gal. 6:2), and a machine can bear nothing. When any tool meets a student in danger, its only work is to send that student without delay to a parent, pastor, teacher, or counselor.

AI Must Never Be Used Against a Neighbor

The same tools that can explain a passage can fabricate a classmate's face, voice, or words. Every student bears the image of God (Gen. 1:27), and the commandment is plain: “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor” (Ex. 20:16). A fabricated image, recording, message, or screenshot of another person is a lie told about an image-bearer, and calling it a joke or a dare changes nothing. What we may not say about a neighbor with our own mouths, we may not make a machine say for us. For our part, we make this promise for Exegetica: it will never use AI to imitate, alter, or fabricate a student's face, voice, or words, and it will never use a student's likeness or words to train an AI model.

Part III: The Ultimate Goal

Why hold these lines? Because of what God has already done. The omniscient God of the universe is mindful of us (Ps. 8:4). In Christ we have come “to be known by God” (Gal. 4:9), and that careful attention is the heart of the gospel. Everything we ask of teachers and parents rests there.

The Christian home is a sanctuary of embodied love and a primary outpost of the kingdom of God, and the Christian school serves that home as a community of the same love. In an age of endless distraction, the most counter-cultural and Christ-like gift we can give our students is our attention, and we give it from what we have first received. No policy of ours can change a heart. The Spirit does that, through the Word and through people who love them. Our part is to keep these means in the hands God has given them to.

Our mandate as teachers, in partnership with parents, is to reflect God's attentiveness to the students in our care. By refusing the false promises of AI and choosing the glorious impingement of real, messy, embodied school and family life, we do more than set rules. We build a community where students can flourish in the knowledge that they are seen, known, and loved: first by their Creator, and then by the parents and teachers He has appointed to shepherd them.