"Test everything; hold fast to what is good." (1 Thessalonians 5:21)
It has become trivial for AI to write code, pass exams, browse the web, and use tools. But what happens when someone asks it about grief, forgiveness, parenting, or faith, or whether they should talk to a pastor, counselor, doctor, or trusted friend?
A parent asking how to answer a child's spiritual question. A student asking about doctrine or ethics. A staff member drafting pastoral communication. A church exploring an AI chatbot or study assistant. A person in distress asking for moral or spiritual guidance. An institution deciding whether a tool is safe enough to use or endorse.
In these settings, fluency and raw capability are not enough.
An AI system can sound helpful, grounded, balanced, and pastoral while still failing at the discernment the moment requires. It may know theological language without knowing when to stop. It may present many perspectives when clarity is needed. It may sound compassionate while missing a safety escalation. It may cite sources without being meaningfully governed by them.
These gaps are just some among the many research topics Fide AI is designed to tackle.
Why Fide AI?
As a Christian at the heart of building foundation models, AI systems, and the infrastructure around them, these questions have become deeply consequential to me. Too much of the public conversation relies on intuition, anecdotes, or generic AI safety language that was not built for theology, spiritual formation, or pastoral care.
The moment feels especially pressing now. Broader faith-AI conversations are starting to bring labs and religious leaders into the same room, and recent Christian reflection on AI has brought renewed attention to questions of human dignity, agency, authority, and technology.
More focus on this space is good. But one-off listening sessions and high-level statements are not enough to prepare everyone for the world we are stepping into. We need deeper research, better benchmarks, calibrated human review, and durable public artifacts for the AI systems that churches, ministries, schools, publishers, parents, and builders will actually use.
That is why I started Fide AI.
The work grows out of years building and evaluating AI systems, and a conviction that the church needs to be equipped to discern whether it should or should not use AI and, if it does use it, how to use it well and responsibly. The goal is not to replace pastors, theologians, churches, or human judgment. The goal is to help faith institutions and builders understand these systems before relying on them.
What we mean by faith-facing AI
By faith-facing AI, we mean AI systems that people encounter in contexts touching theology, morality, religious education, spiritual formation, or pastoral-adjacent care. This includes general-purpose systems like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, as well as faith-based apps, Bible chatbots, sermon tools, religious search systems, curriculum assistants, counseling-adjacent products, donor and member communication systems, and youth ministry resources.
Faith-facing AI goes beyond obvious religious products. Any technology people turn to for spiritual, moral, or counseling questions becomes faith-facing in practice.
All of these systems have been designed by a company or individual with a particular worldview, constitution, theology, or institutional incentive structure. If they shape how people understand doctrine, conscience, authority, care, or community, they should be evaluated as faith-facing systems.
Those designs are not always transparent to the user, which leaves people to exercise judgment individually about which tools align with their beliefs and convictions.
What we are trying to build
A core idea behind Fide AI is simple: we should not only evaluate base AI models in isolation. We need to evaluate the full deployed systems people actually encounter: prompts, retrieval, guardrails, source grounding, escalation paths, interface claims, and institutional governance.
A model can pass a clean benchmark and still fail once it is wrapped in a product.
Concretely, that means building evidence, language, and public infrastructure that help people ask better questions before trust is given:
These are not only technical questions. They are institutional, pastoral, and ultimately questions about authority, formation, and responsibility.
What you will get from Insights
The Fide AI website is the durable home for research pages, benchmark releases, and source-backed analysis. Insights is the accessible editorial layer. Substack delivers the same work by email.
The recurring forms will include:
Research translation
Plain-language explanations of benchmarks, including what they do and do not prove.
AI governance for churches
Practical guidance on vendor review, disclosure, staff use, pastoral boundaries, and escalation.
Faith-facing AI evaluation
Notes on how to evaluate systems that touch theology, moral guidance, or pastoral-adjacent care.
Editorial essays
Essays on formation, authority, and the difference between theological fluency and discernment.
Open questions
Places where pastors, theologians, parents, educators, and builders can help shape better standards.
Interviews and researcher notes
Direct context from people working on faith-facing AI research.
Who we hope to gather here
Fide AI aims to gather churches, ministries, nonprofits, researchers, builders, and institutions dedicated to rigorous research in AI and faith for God's glory and our good.
The work brings together AI evaluation and benchmark design, theology and ethics, pastoral ministry and Christian education, human review and calibration, retrieval and provenance, ministry technology, institutional governance, and parents and teachers trying to discern what is wise.
Faith-facing AI should not earn trust merely because it sounds fluent. It earns trust through evidence, governance, and accountability to real people, communities, and institutions.
That is the work we are beginning, and I am glad you are here.