God in the Machine

My first encounter with Scripture wasn’t bound in leather or marked with a ribbon - it was pixelated, backlit and tucked under the glow of an iPad screen late at night. I didn’t flip pages; I swiped. It didn’t feel strange; it was normal. My Bible wasn’t on a shelf, but in the App Store. For my generation, Scripture drifts through fibre‑optic cables and silicon chips, ready to be summoned in a millisecond by anyone who cares - or even half‑cares to look.

The funny thing is, access has never been easier, yet engagement has rarely been harder. We sit amid a fire hose of digital stimuli: TikTok swipes, Netflix auto‑nexts, doom scroll newsflashes - each optimized to hijack attention and increasingly, emotion. The Bible is available everywhere, but so are an infinite number of shiny things.

The Bible deserves to live wherever our attention lives and yet the glowing rectangle in our hand seems happier to sell us anxiety than offer us peace. A tradeoff that’s increasingly affecting the way modern Christians interact with Scripture. The question that keeps me up at night is no longer how do we hand people a Bible but how do we help them want it?

Enter ‘Adaptive Discipleship’ - a practice rooted in theology, design, and artificial intelligence. It sits within an emerging field I call Spiritual Computing, founded on the conviction that code can be conduit and algorithms can bear sacramental weight. Just as the printing press once ferried Scripture into vernacular tongues, AI can now help carry it into personal hearts.

Below is a roadmap for that conviction, stitched together from my journey as a designer, coder, and eventually, founder of bible.ai. As early pioneers in this space, we’ve had rare access to rooms, conversations, and research at the cutting edge of what’s possible. From pastors in Tokyo to nonprofits in Middle America, we’ve witnessed firsthand how the future of faith is unfolding. We are standing on the brink of a pivotal moment - one that calls those of us who care about the gospel to learn to write in bytes as fluently as earlier reformers wrote in ink.

Adaptive Discipleship for every nation

Adaptive Discipleship is a model of spiritual formation that uses artificial intelligence to craft a tailor‑made journey for every believer. By weighing factors such as culture, language, learning style, spiritual maturity, life experience, education, and social context, it delivers biblical teaching in the form and at the pace that fits each individual best.

This approach transcends cultural, educational, and linguistic boundaries. By addressing the unique nuances of each individual, it delivers spiritual content that resonates across diverse contexts and through multiple modalities. In doing so, it not only fosters global community but also celebrates the richness of its diversity. I’m continually amazed by how cultures diverge in such unique and beautiful ways and I believe there is always more work to be done in honoring, understanding, and learning from that diversity.

While this concept is revolutionary for Christians in Western societies, the potential is magnified when applied to regions like the Middle East, Africa or Latin America. All around the world Adaptive Discipleship has the power to truly transform nations and leave a lasting impact on generations for Christ.

Adaptive Discipleship represents a decisive move toward truly personalized spiritual formation. By harnessing AI, we overcome the limitation of the one-size-fits-all approach of modern discipleship resources. Much like a master tailor crafting a bespoke garment, Adaptive Discipleship designs spiritual growth pathways that fit each believer’s unique needs, goals, and circumstances - building an individual spiritual profile that guides their journey.

Personal discipleship before algorithms

Long before the personal computer, a 17th‑century pastor named Richard Baxter practiced the prototype of Adaptive Discipleship. In The Reformed Pastor he describes visiting every household in Kidderminster, sharing meals, praying in parlors, and probing hearts to craft custom spiritual plans. Baxter asked open‑ended questions - How goes it with your soul? - and then listened until each family’s joys and wounds surfaced. The result was not only individual transformation but civic renewal. Tavern brawls dwindled; literacy rates climbed; the sound of psalm‑singing reportedly spilled from cottage windows at dusk.¹

Baxter’s approach was intimate and exhausting. He maintained a punishing schedule despite chronic illness, often preaching and visiting parishioners late into the evening. Historians estimate he spent at least four evenings a week walking muddy lanes lit only by lantern, offering counsel and prayer. As congregations ballooned in the industrial age, most pastors could not sustain that level of one‑to‑one care. Broadcast sermons, mass-distributed devotionals, and standardized study guides became the pragmatic substitutes. Helpful, yes, but inevitably general, treating every seeker as if they have the same story, struggles, and spiritual pace.

From house‑calls to hyperlinks, what Baxter did with shoe‑leather we can now attempt with silicon. Adaptive Discipleship is less about a seismic shift but more about reviving an old posture (personal, responsive, intentional) at digital scale.

Technology’s arc toward personalization

Johannes Gutenberg never set out to spark the Reformation. He simply wanted to solve a hardware problem: replicating text without carving a new block of wood for every page. At the time, copying a single book was a monumental task, done painstakingly by hand or by carving entire pages into wooden blocks. Movable type collapsed the cost curve so dramatically, that what was once rare and laborious, became rapid and replicable.² A single Bible could now travel faster, further and into more hands than ever before.

The impact was monumental. What began as a hardware innovation soon became a cultural earthquake. Suddenly a Bible wasn’t chained to a lectern - it could be printed, purchased, and passed from hand to hand. In an age where ideas were often bound by geography and gatekeepers, Gutenberg’s press broke the bottleneck. Words could now travel without permission. Truth could scale.

So when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the Wittenberg Church door in 1517, it wasn’t just an act of protest - it was a spark in a landscape made flammable by print. The theses might have remained a local grievance, but the printing press turned them into pamphlets, then into wildfire, and eventually into a movement. Gutenberg didn’t set out to reform the Church. But by changing how we reproduce and distribute words, he opened the way for ordinary people to read the Word for themselves.

Fast‑forward to 1989.³ Early Spiritual Computing pioneers uploaded ASCII text files to some of the first FTP servers. These were humble beginnings. But they marked the first time the Bible began to circulate freely through digital space.

In 2007, Apple launched the iPhone - a revolutionary device. By 2008, YouVersion followed by placing 41 Bible translations into a pocket-sized app. Scripture was no longer locked to ink or geography - it now lived in browsers, hard drives, and home screens. They didn’t just expand access; it created a new domain for spiritual life to inhabit. For the first time, the Bible could sit beside a weather app, a text thread, and a song playlist - ready to be tapped at any moment.

Over the past two decades, significant advancements in technology and substantial investments in Bible translation have ensured that 98% of the world’s population now has access to at least some Scripture in their language.⁴ Together, digital innovation and translation efforts effectively solved the logistics of global Scripture distribution.

But a new challenge has emerged: not how to deliver Scripture, but how to awaken desire for it.

Same Bible, different doorway

Today, we have an abundant supply and dwindling demand. Shaped by infinite feeds and rapid-fire clips, this generation finds even the most feature-packed Bible apps hard to stick with. For many, Scripture feels static, the online world kinetic.

With the rise of AI, we now possess a new textual paradigm for the first time since Gutenberg. A mechanism not just for moving text, but for morphing it - summarizing, contextualizing, staging conversations, even voicing it in a tone congruent with a user’s emotional bandwidth on a given Tuesday morning. We can, quite literally, make the Bible’s teachings talk back.

Picture Ezekiel explained in Gen-Alpha lingo, illuminating Scripture to a 14 year old in Rio. Picture Proverbs 18 spoken as quiet encouragement during a night-shift break, comforting a weary doctor in an Auckland hospital corridor. Picture an anxious single mother after midnight in a dim London flat speaking to bible.ai’s voice mode - its genuine cadence wrapping God’s words around her fears, unfolding healing, insight, and hope. These aren’t just hypothetical situations - they’re real-world testimonies happening every day on bible.ai.

Gutenberg collapsed the cost of reproduction; AI collapses the cost of personalization. One sparked a reformation of access, the other will ignite a reformation of engagement - a shift from getting Scripture into hands to getting Scripture under skin.

Personalization isn’t a gimmick - it’s a theological conviction. God who numbers every hair and calls each star by name refuses to address His children in bulk and neither should we. By harnessing AI well, we honor the sacred uniqueness of every soul.

To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, God doesn’t love a generic mass; He loves each of us as if there were only one of us.⁵ AI finally gives us tooling to echo that love at scale.

From donkeys to data

Skeptics understandably hesitate to place AI inside Christian life; any brand-new technology feels precarious when souls are at stake. Yet history offers a counter-narrative: God has always co‑opted prevailing media. Stone tablets, papyrus scrolls, parchment codices, radio crusades, televised sermons - each arrived as a disruptive novelty and in time, became a trusted vehicle for the Word.

Machine intelligence is merely the latest medium. The real issue is not whether God can speak through AI (He once made a donkey speak) but whether we will steward the medium faithfully enough for Him to do so? When Balaam’s donkey spoke,⁶ the miracle lay not in the animal’s biology but in divine intentionality. Likewise, AI-generated words may be synthetic, yet the Spirit, when invited and bounded by Scripture, can breathe life even into silicon syllables.

In other words, we don’t just ask whether AI can disciple. We shape it so that when it does, it does so faithfully: with sound doctrine and theological integrity.

Beyond the screen, toward the burning heart

The truest metric of discipleship has never been screen analytics or monthly active users; it is the moment a human spirit catches fire. Statistics show that the average young person spends five empty hours a day on social media,⁷ yet when Jesus took one short walk with two travelers on the Emmaus road, that brief conversation changed their lives forever.

The goal, then, isn’t to stretch engagement but to deepen it - to trade shallow longevity for small moments of piercing significance. Adaptive Discipleship must rise above mere stickiness. Every interaction should strike flint, sparking wonder and moving a person one step closer to concrete reflection, repentance, and a hope that endures. When AI’s feedback loops are tuned to Holy ends, they don’t simply keep us online; they usher us inside the story God is still writing.

And so we stand at a Gutenberg-grade threshold once more. The printing press set truth loose on pages; now AI can set it loose within personhood - ethical, contextual, indivisibly aligned with every bearer of the Imago Dei. The task before us is not to out-compete the next viral platform but to out-love it: to design experiences so attuned to the soul’s spiritual cadence that disillusionment feels pale by comparison.

If we steward this medium with the same surrendered devotion Richard Baxter showed on cobblestone streets, we’ll witness the Word do what it always has: mend the wounded, summon the searching, and steady an anxious generation on the brink of despair. Gutenberg handed the world a book they could grip; now we have the chance to craft encounters that grip them back, until swipes kindle sparks and sparks to flame.

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1. “When Baxter came to Kidderminster, scarcely one family on each street among the 800 families honored God in family worship. By the end of his ministry in 1661, there were streets on which every family did so. On the Sabbath, he writes, “you might hear an hundred families singing Psalms and repeating sermons, as you passed through the streets.” Of the approximately six hundred people who became full communicants under his ministry, he adds, “There was not twelve that I had not good hopes of, as to their sincerity”“. - Meet the Puritans, Joel R Beeke Ph.D. & Randall Pederson ↩

2. “In 1483, the Ripoli Press charged three florins per quinterno (a section of folded paper) for setting up and printing Ficino's translation of Plato's Dialogues. A scribe might have charged one florin per quinterno for duplicating the same work. The Ripoli Press produced 1,025 copies; the scribe would have turned out one." - The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (3 florins ÷ 1,025 = ~0.003 florins per book) This implies that the cost per book decreased 341 times within a generation of Gutenberg’s workshop. Staggering. ↩

3. The website Project Gutenberg released the complete King James Version of the Bible as electronic text on 1 August 1989, making the first full Bible freely downloadable from the Internet via anonymous FTP servers at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). This milestone was led by Michael Stern Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg and a pioneer of digital literature. ↩

4. The latest surveys report that at least part of the Bible is now available to 7.3 billion people - about 98% of humanity. Wycliffe Global Alliance ↩

5. “He [God] loves each one of us as if there were only one of us.” - The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis ↩

6. Numbers 22:21–34 ↩

7. According to the American Psychological Association, studies indicate approximately 5 hours of daily screen time. However, based on personal discussions, the actual average for Gen Alpha and Gen Z is often significantly higher and more concerning. ↩