Artificial intelligence is no longer just a Silicon Valley buzzword, it’s here, and it’s already reshaping the missions world. From movement leaders to on-the-ground trainers, we’ve seen firsthand how people are beginning to adapt. And if you want to understand what’s helping drive that shift? Start by looking in their pockets.
 
Last year the Pew Research Center[1] gave us an interesting snapshot of smartphone usage in a few select countries, including Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, Malaysia, and Singapore. Aside from simply giving us interesting insights into smartphone usage, when combined with data from the World Christian Database and the Joshua Project, it provides us with an extraordinary look at where missionaries are coming from, where they’re going, and what’s in their pockets. 
 
The Center for the Study of Global Christianity is clear: not only is Christianity a Global South religion, but its missionaries are also being sent from here.[2] 

So, what does that Pew study have to say about the phone usage in those countries? 85% of Brazilians, 98% of South Koreans, and 47% of Nigerians have a smartphone. According to Statista,[3] 75% of Filipinos say they have a smartphone. Personally, I have never met an American missionary without a smartphone—in fact, I’ve never met a cross-cultural missionary that hasn’t had a smartphone, full-stop, in the past decade. So, our missionaries are entering the field with smartphones in-hand, and they’re going to places to talk to people about Jesus—and those people have smartphones too.
 
Now, to be quite clear, having a smartphone does not guarantee easy, cheap, regular access to the global internet. But it certainly makes it easier. Our, admittedly anecdotal, experience seems to bear this out—missionaries, whether local or cross-cultural, are increasingly becoming more and more digitally connected with both seekers and disciples. But I think we all generally know this already, what does that have to do with AI? Well, we’d contend that with preachers, teachers, and seekers spending increasingly larger timeframes looking at those bright rectangles, they’re increasingly being hit with the AI wave. AI is now everywhere in their digital lives, and it’s beginning to change the shape of missions, permanently. 

Content Creation

For decades, we’ve advocated for and trained workers in the use of media in cross-cultural missions—and it hasn’t always been smooth sailing. Most workers were willing to acknowledge that having audio-visual resources and/or a robust presence online was useful; however, there was reluctance to get things going without a young person to do the work, or dedicated photographers, designers, videographers, or social media managers. Even though designing, creating, and distributing resources to whomever you’d like has never been more possible, the prevalence of hastily downloaded Google clip art, paragraphs of English-only text on slideshows, and cheap, easily-disposed-of paper slips (Bevin tells me that these are called “tracts”, they’re like IRL posts that often have old-timey pictures on them that you give to individual people), is never-ending. Without support, it just seemed too hard. 
 
Or is it? 
 
We began to see a shift in early 2024. When meeting movement leaders, pastors, or evangelists, AI was frequently at the forefront of their minds! The types of questions we heard were, “What is AI?”, “What can it do?”, and, pulling out their phone, “Show me how I can use it”. Then, in only a years’ time, we have seen a massive shift. Now when we arrive, they’re asking us if the images they made in Leonardo are good enough, or which video model is best to use, or if we still think ChatGPT beats out Gemini? 
 
Field workers, particularly the younger generations, are already creating content for missions work and the upsurge has started to change the content of missions work greatly. We’re seeing a lot more visual elements in teaching; we’re seeing written content that is more understandable and straight-forward; and we’re seeing everyday people flex their artistic muscles. Essentially, there’s a growing trend towards the widespread use of communication forms that were once the exclusive domain of skilled practitioners and artists.

Teaching and Discipleship

The use of the more visually interesting aspects of generative AI is certainly one of the most compelling parts of this recent rise. However, it doesn’t seem to be the most common use of AI in missions—this title seems to solidly belong to the textual models. These tools, like ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Perplexity etc., seem to be much more commonly used amongst missionaries. Pastors, evangelists, small-church leaders, and teachers have all begun to use these tools on a very regular basis. And honestly, it’s difficult to nail down any one thing that these tools are doing in missions. People are using them in so many different ways that it’s, quite frankly, extraordinary. We’re seeing teachers and church leaders use them to lay out difficult-to-communicate ideas and practices, people are replacing Google when it comes to answering general questions, and custom chatbots trained on specific content are being created. We're seeing writers use them to better describe what they’re thinking; we’re seeing everyone design curriculums, create social media posts, produce tasks and goals, and the list goes on and on. In general, AI-driven or AI-enhanced tools are improving efficiency across the board, essentially providing individuals and teams with their own “personalized assistants,” to help throughout their work. 
 
Something that we’re not seeing as much of, but that we would like to see is our missional training pivot to a more learner-centric, inquiry-based, model. For too long our missional training has been shaped by industrial-era assumptions, in which students were seen as passive recipients being prepared for roles in structured systems. Missions training has started to lag behind the transformation of these educational models. But discipleship and cross-cultural engagement requires curiosity and adaptability—an ability to listen, reflect, and grow. These are all qualities that newer educational models are focusing on, and we should be at the forefront of these changes! With regards to AI, many see it as the next catalyst to help move us beyond traditional lecture-based approaches toward more dynamic, formative, and transformative models of learning.

Cross-cultural Storytelling

One of the most exciting ways we’re seeing AI make a difference in missions today is in cross-cultural storytelling. At its heart, missions is a story-sharing endeavor. We are bearing witness to the story of our Creator God stooping down to Earth—an absolutely incredible, spectacularly wild story. Often, our goal when conveying this good news is that we do it in a way that makes sense to the people we’re speaking with. We consider their language, worldview, and cultural setting. And historically, that has been hard to get right! It takes considerable learning, good translators, skilled creatives, cultural insiders, and a mountain of trial and error. But now, with the help of AI, we're seeing both local and cross-cultural missionaries create unique, localized stories that connect more powerfully than ever before.
 
Earlier we talked about image generation models, but it’s good to note that it’s not just that missionaries are creating visual elements, it’s that they’re using these visual tools! These tools can create illustrations and characters that reflect local clothing, landscapes, and symbolism—without having to rely on foreign or outdated visuals. Believers are also writing short testimonies, parables, and teaching with help from large language models, and these are being crafted into social posts, various video forms, and audio content available on their phones. This is incredible for those who avoid copious amounts of reading. 
 
What’s striking is how adaptable all this tech is—it can help a rural evangelist in West Africa create a contextualized audio drama, and it can help a youth pastor in Southeast Asia rewrite a Bible story using local slang and humor. We’re not talking about copying Western material and translating it; we’re talking about fresh storytelling that flows out of local voices and contexts, shaped with tools that amplify their reach. When done well, AI isn’t replacing the storyteller—it’s becoming a co-creator, helping mission workers speak more clearly into the lives of the people they love.
 
Looking ahead again, I believe that there’s also a compelling opportunity to use these tools to alter the traditional flow of theological content. Much of Christian theology and missiology the past 1000+ years has historically come from a Western perspective, and many believe that a decentering is needed to better reflect the current makeup of global Christianity.[4] With improvements in translation and localization, the church could genuinely begin to elevate the voices of theologians and storytellers outside the Global North, making their insights accessible to the broader Church. It shouldn’t take their language being translated into European languages for those voices to be heard, but I tell you what, I’d rather have an imperfect English translation that doesn’t quite get the depth of what others are saying, then not hear their voices at all. Todd Johnson, from The Center for the Study of Global Christianity, has a story he likes to tell of a colleague leaning over to him in the middle of a conference and recounting a Ghanaian proverb: “It is good if you invite me to your table, but it is far better if you invite me into the kitchen.” And I think we cannot stress that enough, the Body of Christ doesn’t want to just be “invited to the table”—they want to be in the kitchen where the decisions are made! Admittedly, this is our own prayer, more vision and hope than a trend, but it’s one I genuinely believe we should be preparing for.

Ethical Considerations

Before we finish here, we think it’d be careless not to touch on some of the genuine ethical tensions surrounding AI. As we have recounted, these tools are incredibly powerful, but that power isn’t neutral, and comes bundled with questions we can’t afford to ignore.
 
Honestly the first major issue is data—where it comes from and how it’s gathered—and whether that process is just. The truth is, many large language and image models are trained on data scraped from the internet—often without consent, credit, or compensation. Most people consider these methods unethical, if not outright illegal. According to polling by the American AI Policy Institute,[5] 60% of Americans believe scraping publicly available data without permission shouldn’t be allowed. Just 19% supported the practice. And when asked whether AI companies should compensate those that provided the data, like the writers, researchers, and artists, 74% said yes. These numbers reflect a deep, intuitive sense of fairness—permission and payment should be required, and “publicly available” does not mean “free to exploit.”
 
There’s also the issue of agency. Dr. Sabba Quidwai has a great article on her Substack that I can’t recommend enough[6]. In her piece she references a tweet by Andrej Karpathy (he was a founding member of OpenAI before he became the AI Director at Tesla): 
Agency is greater than intelligence, because intelligence alone doesn’t guarantee control. The smartest system in the world means nothing if it isn’t the one making decisions. AI is rapidly surpassing us in intelligence, but what truly matters is who holds the ability to take action, set direction, and shape the future. If we’re not careful, AI won’t just outthink us, it will out-decide us.
As we bring AI into our missions work, we have got to ask: Who is shaping the content? Who has final say? And are we unintentionally surrendering our role as thoughtful, Spirit-led decision-makers in favor of algorithmic convenience?
 
As we have reflected on current uses and cautions of AI, there are plenty of questions we need to ask. In my mind, we need to get back to the issue of love and dignity. Are we using these tools to love others well, with integrity and humility? Are we genuinely grappling with the difficult questions and asking God what he has to say about them? If not, we need to pause and re-evaluate. But if AI can help us serve more clearly, justly, and beautifully—then it’s worth exploring—not blindly, not carelessly, but prayerfully, wisely, and together. And as far as we can tell, that’s already happening.