Pastor, You Must Make a Commitment to Email
We cannot afford to be digital refugees.
I began my pastorate at FBCLG in November 1990. The church had neither a desktop computer nor a fax machine, even though many of our leading members held degrees in technology. One of my associate ministers and his wife were among them, yet the church made no use of that expertise.
That wasn’t unique. It would be another year before folks started talking about the World Wide Web and the Information Highway. I’d had some exposure to a personal computer because one of my best friends, a deacon at my previous church, worked at IBM. He brought his MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System) machine and dot matrix printer into my office and taught me how to use it. I was fortunate. Most pastors I knew had not even seen one.
A few years into my tenure, one of my young entrepreneur members introduced me to email. I was interested but skeptical. It struck me as some exotic technological side show, the kind of thing that would never really matter to my work or my life. I never will forget the day that young man looked me in the eye and said, “Pastor, you must make a commitment to using email.” I thought he was being dramatic.
He was right and I was wrong. But the adoption was steady, not overnight. According to the Pew Research Center, in 1995, only 14% of Americans were online at all. By the year 2000, that number had tripled to 46%, roughly 86 million people. It took the better part of a decade for email to settle into ordinary life. Today it is hard to find a working adult who does not have an email address. Email has all but replaced the fax machine and put a serious dent in the United States Postal Service. There is no serious business done anywhere in the world that does not run on email.
Now compare that to AI. ChatGPT launched at the end of 2022. Two months later it had 100 million users. Instagram needed two and a half years to reach that number. TikTok needed nine months. Nothing in the history of consumer technology has moved this fast. And ChatGPT is one tool among many.
The speed alone should get our attention. So should the nature of the thing. Email was a communications tool. We embraced it because we already knew what it was for. We just had a faster way to write a letter. AI is something else entirely. It thinks alongside us. It writes and reasons and remembers. The other day AI Claude told me to “holler if I need some help” with a task. That was after Claude told had me that he/she/it was praying for me!
Most folks do not realize they have been interacting with AI for years already in their everyday lives. The search bar. The smart speaker. The photo app on their phone. AI is already there.
This is the most dramatic shift in our social, economic, and political lives rivaled by the discovery of fire or the invention of the printing press. I do not say that lightly. The world is going to divide itself, plainly, into the AI capable and everyone else. That division will track income, it will track opportunity, and it will track power. It will sort our children before they know they are being sorted.
Skill development has always been part of my ministry. Our church was one of three organizations in the state that offered job training for employment in the solar sector. DFREE® was designed to help folks identify their financial needs and prepare for future opportunities. There is no financial preparation today more urgent than preparing people to develop and expand their technology skills, starting with AI.
That is what I plan to do. In a few weeks DFREE® will announce an introductory effort that certifies people in Claude.ai. After that we will begin offering more technology and AI related training through the DFREE® Online Academy.
We cannot afford to be digital refugees. I plan to do my part, even while I’m in retirement.