When is it appropriate to use AI? 🤖 (A bare minimum litmus test) ✨

I have lots of thoughts about AI, some of which are fairly clear, some less so.

But here are two principles I was thinking of recently that I think are non-negotiable when it comes to using AI, whatever your philosophical views of AI are.

1) Would you think it was OK in principle to delegate the task to another human being?

 

Here's a few examples:

 

Write a political speech. Write a best man speech. Data entry. Write a love letter. Write a social media post. Design your logo. Write a YouTube comment. Ghostwrite a book. Illustrate a book you wrote. Design stickers for you to sell on Etsy. Summarise the minutes of a meeting you were chairing. Write the captions of a video. Summarise an email from a friend. Book-keeping. Research your project. Write alt-text for images on your website...

 

Also, with each of these tasks, would you distinguish between a) delegating a rough draft (which you then take as a starting point and make your own), or b) delegating the entire task? [Edited to add: conversely, would you do a rough draft yourself and then delegate to someone else to polish off?]

 

Different people will have different answers to each of these. What I'm asking, is what do YOU think is appropriate to delegate?

• If you'd be willing to delgate to another human, it may be appropriate to delegate to AI (other factors may of course mean it is not).
• BUT if you'd not delegate to a human, what makes it OK to delegate to AI?

We need to think about these things.

 

Would you delegate an illustration to brighten up a text-heavy blog post to AI? I just did. Not sure how I feel about that :-)

2) In a specifically Christian context, assuming your answer to my first question was yes, would it be something you were OK in principle with delegating to a nonbeliever? 

(I'm of course assuming a sympathetic non-believer who will do the task to the best of thier ability, not an anti-Christian troll!)

A few examples: 

 

Write a sermon. Write a prayer. Give you spiritual guidance. Design sermon visuals. Design church publicity. Write a Bible story book. Illustrate a Bible story book you have written. Advise you on the best candidate for a church job. Write a hymn. Write a tune for a hymn you have written. Plan a Sunday School lesson. Draw visuals for a Sunday School lesson you have written. Plan a church rota. Summarise the theological scholarship on a topic. Plus many of the examples in the first section...

Again, different people will have different answers to these. My question is what do YOU think is appropriate to delegate to a non-believer?

• If you'd be willing to delgate to a non-believer, it may be appropriate to delegate to AI (other factors may of course mean it is not).
• BUT if you'd not delegate to a non-believer, what on earth makes it OK to delegate to AI?

We really need to think about these things. 

Oh, and finally, if you have a chatbot that pretends to be Jesus, that is idolatry and blasphemy.

John 1 Sunday School lesson

 I have just finished a PowerPoint for teaching John chapter 1 (v1-18) to kids. I actually taught this a couple of years ago, and I thought it might be helpful to someone.

Notes:

• These were 5-7 year olds, familiar with the Bible.
• I only read a few verses. I covered more of the content in paraphrase, but didn’t include everything in the passage. Better to explain a few things well, than overwhelm them with what is a very abstract passage for this agegroup.
• I used verse 1 from the NIV, as that was the translation we learned our memory verse in. The other verses we read from our class Bible, which was the NIrV - it’s much easier for kids, as you don’t need to explain every second word!

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What I used for visuals

• Two acetate circles , one with ‘God’ on it at the top, and one with ‘Word’ at the bottom.
  I used stick on foam letters because I had some, and got a bit carried away decorating with gold paint sticks, but you could also just write with permanent markers. (If you don’t have acetate, cut up a plastic pocket)
• Sellotape to attach circles to the whiteboard – bluetack wouldn’t hold them.
• A small globe
• A baby doll in a manger
• An action man made to look like adult Jesus (beard painted on, and a bit of cloth for clothes)

Craft materials

• Large roll of paper
• Bible verses about God in giant print, which I had cut apart in advance. (here is a selection you can use)
• Glue sticks
• Glitter (star stickers would have been as fun and less chaotic J)

Other resources

A phone and speaker, with Awesome cutlery’s Party sketch and God doesn’t have a Birthday song.

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Lesson

[Note: All questions were genuine questions, not rhetorical. I let the kids answer, and then carried on.]

 

Who have we been learning about?
[Recapped previous teaching series - very briefly]

Today, we’re going way back before that, to the beginning of the world.

Who made everything?

GOD was there before the world –
God has always been there, no matter how many years you go back: a hundred… a thousand… a million… a billion… a trillion.... Right back to infinity.
He never had a beginning.

Do you know a Bible verse that talks about the beginning? [This was a verse we had learned a week ago in Junior Church - otherwise I would just have read it here]

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. John 1v1

Someone was with God – who?
The WORD

 What else does it say about the WORD?
He was God.

 (overlapped acetate circles)

He was with God AND he was God. 

God is not like humans.
I’m with you – I can’t be you!
God is so amazing we can’t understand him!

He made everything – do you know how?
“God said” (point to WORD)

He gives Life
He is the Light. 

[Read first part of v14]

“The Word became a human being. He made his home with us.”

What did the WORD do?
Do you know who the WORD is?
JESUS. He is with God (he’s God’s Son)
and he IS God. 

When did Jesus become a human being?

He’s different from us - we didn’t exist before we were in our mum’s tummy. Jesus did.
The great big God [spread out hands high and wide] became a tiny little baby [cup hands together].

He came to the world he had made, to show what God is like.
He looked ordinary (he was a normal human being), but he was God – with God’s love & power.

 

Did everyone accept/welcome him?

• Some did
• Some killed him.

Does everyone today accept/welcome him?

• Some do.
• Some don’t believe.
• Some hate him.

[Read v 12]

“Some people did accept him and did believe in his name. He gave them the right to become children of God.”

The Bible says that those who believe in him become God’s children.
It’s not about if your family believe, or you go to church. What matters is that YOU believe.

Craft

[Showed printed out Bible verses.] The Bible says lots of things about God – lots of words.
Jesus is God – what the Bible says about God is true of Jesus.

Drew round the tallest child on a large piece of paper. Let the kids stick the verses on. Added glitter. Wrote “The Word became a human being” beneath it.

Trinity explanation

As we had a bit of spare time I very simply explained the Trinity using a triangle. This could be heresy but I don’t think it is, as I explain here. ymmv.

Listen

And finally, to wind down, we listened to Party by Awesome Cutlery.
Followed by God doesn’t have a Birthday.

 

Acknowledgements: the circle idea is loosely adapted from an idea in the Mustard Seeds materials. “The great big God became a tiny little baby” is from a Go Teach lesson in, I think 2005.

Easter stickers

I'm not very good at updating this blog with my actual art 🤦

I've recently got easter stickers printed.

First, some brand NEW designs, aimed at younger children, or new contacts who know very little about Jesus. Still the focus on Jesus' death and - especially - resurrection. Nice and cheerful and Eastery. Lots of eggs! But avoiding the wall-to-wall pastels and fluffiness that is characteristic of lots of Easter stuff.

 I also reissued my classic Easter designs as paper stickers. Aimed at primary school children. More depth on why Jesus died and rose - probably best for church kids who know the basics. Leaning into the sometimes ghoulish tastes of small boys💀!

 

 

I have other Easter stickers still available while stocks last. Find them all here.

Quirky Sunday School leaders

Came across this in an old magazine I found lying around in church. I liked it.

Embrace the lady who is not seriously on the Asperger's scale, but is unusual. Part of her unusualness lies in her ability to design a £2 torch out of A4 paper, paperclips and a dumpster dive at the local hardware shop. She wants to do it not just because she can but because she knows that Jesus is the light of the world, and that children who do the torch activity will have the torch and handwritten Bible verse sitting on top of their fridge with the other torches for months to come. (This idea may or may not be based on the observation of the top of the author's fridge.)

Embrace as one of the team the unemployable man who really needs as much looking after as any of the children because of his disability issues, but radiates pure joy at being part of the team. Yes, you had to recruit another team member to look after him. No, any sensible analysis says he should have been gently moved aside to whatever places such men are gently moved aside to. But his heart is for the gospel, and has been for many years, and now he is here on the team, and who really knows how God will use him. Perhaps he will simply be a drain on resources. Is this actually bad for the gospel?

(Sorry didn't take a note of the author, but it was an issue of The Briefing from 2013, I think)

Swallowed a dictionary

Tidying out, and came across a piece of paper from a number of years ago, where I'd jotted down a quote from a kid at Sunday School.

Me:This story will be familiar to all of you

Child: That doesn't look like a story I'm familiar with - according to my calculations 

Advice for Sunday School teachers

As a new school year begins, I thought I’d post some stuff I wrote for the leaders of my old Sunday School class, on the off-chance it was relevant for someone reading the blog.

There are infinite amounts of advice that could be given, but I think these are the most important, and hold true whatever format or style your teaching takes.

 

✝️ Preach the gospel

Children easily learn to parrot 'Jesus died to save us from our sins'. But they often really believe it's about being good, going to church, or having a Christian family.

Tell them it's not - tell them often.

Don't assume they are believers (Saying ‘IF you love/follow/believe in Jesus…’ is a good way to do that simply.)

Use different words or ways of explaining the gospel, that fit with the story e.g. Yes, Jesus died to take the punishment for our sins - but also, Jesus died to make us God's friends, so we can be in his family, to set us free, to beat the devil, to give us new life etc. etc. etc…

 

 

 📖 Teach the truth

They're young - you need to simplify things. But make sure everything you say is true. (Not watered down, but distilled, as I heard someone say once).

Make sure you're teaching what the Bible actually says, not what tradition has added!

Trite 'Sunday School answers' are often unhelpful. Be honest about the bits you find hard to understand.

If it comes up, be honest about things that Christians genuinely disagree about. This could be 'in some churches they believe X but we believe Y.'
Or, for things that we ourselves have differing opinions on (e.g. creation, predestination, eschatology, Hallowe’en), simply 'Some Christians believe X and some believe Y - but we all believe Z, which is the most important (maybe add ‘ask your parents what they think’.)

Be honest about the sins and failures of Bible heroes. Be honest about your own sins and failures (both at a PG level of course 😁)

 

 

🥰 Look out for outsiders

Every child needs to feel they belong.

Pay particular attention to those who don't fit in in some way - those who attend irregularly, are particularly shy, are always in trouble, struggle academically, hate doing crafts, are from a different race or culture, are less well off, have a disability, are neurodivergent, come from a non-christian family, have a difficult family situation… or just that child you really don't like for whatever reason 😬

If they don't know that we welcome them, they won't understand that Jesus welcomes them. 

 

🙏 Pray

The one I'm least good at!

The best planned lesson in the world is no good without prayer. Pray for yourself as you prepare, pray for yourself as you teach, pray that the children will understand, pray that the Holy Spirit will speak to them.

Pray for their families, pray for their schools, pray that they will not believe the lies the world tells them, pray that they will believe, pray that they will keep on going.

Solitary sheep

I'm reading Genesis at the minute, and I got to the bit where Jacob sent a gift to appease his brother Esau: 

🐐 200 female goats, 20 male goats, 

🐑 200 female sheep, 20 male sheep, 

🐪 30 female camels with their babies, 

🐄 40 cows, 10 bulls, 

🫏 20 female donkeys, and 10 male donkeys.

It made me think of the time we did that story at Sunday School and one small boy started giggling.

Because, he said, "180 female sheep wouldn't be able to get married".

A loooooooooong time ago

I was explaining to the children how God has always existed. 

He was there 100 years ago... A thousand years ago... A million... A billion... A trillion...

5 year old: an octillion

7 year old: a googolplex,*

Wasn't expecting that 😆

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*Fortunately I did know this was a real number! Didn't know how big, so I've just looked it up. It's 10¹⁰¹⁰⁰, which means that the mass of the books needed to write the number down would be many times the mass of the visible universe. Fairly large, then.

Analogies are not (necessarily) heresy

Wrote this aaaages ago - finally got round to finishing and posting.

From time to time, people claim that this analogy or that analogy of the Trinity gives the wrong idea of God, or is even heretical. I'm sure that's sometimes true. But sometimes I think it's just that the people criticising it are trying to make an analogy do more than it's meant to.

For example, take the triangle. People say it's a bad way to explain the Trinity because each member of the Trinity is fully God, whereas each side of a triangle is not a triangle. But, I don't think it's bad, just - like all analogies - incomplete. It would only be a bad analogy if you were saying that a triangle says everything that's to be said about how the Trinity relates - and that's not how analogies work.

Craft we made, based on these instructions.

 

I have used the triangle analogy in Sunday school. I'm teaching people who may not yet even know that Jesus is God. So all the analogy is meant to say is that:

• The trinity is a thing.
• There is one God, made of three people, (who are all God).
• They are the Father, the Son (Jesus) and the Holy Spirit.

It's true in what it intends to teach - it's not the last word on the subject.

Actually, it's the same with the analogies of Jesus which are used in the Bible. He is variously described as our father, future husband, brother, master, shepherd, a lamb, a vine, a gate, bread, water, light... If you took any of those to extremes you could easily make a heresy. And some of them are mutually contradictory.

 

But the point is that Jesus - who is far more than we could ever understand - is a little bit like all those things (and the context usually makes it clear in what way).

Here's a quote:

We have to think about Christ using ideas and images, but if we put our trust in these symbols, rather than in the One they symbolize, we will be making a big mistake. [...] By using more than one image for God, we remind ourselves that any image we use is only temporary; it must be corrected and relieved by other images. These images serve our minds; they do not save our souls. A fork is not food.

~Michael Ward, The Narnia Code

Non sequiturs

First day back at Sunday School, colouring pictures about 'B is for Bible', when the child next to me suddenly asks  - "Did you know that pirates still exist?"

A few minutes later he starts talking about the noise turkeys make, and instead of colouring his picture, fills in all the blank space around it with pictures of two turkeys, a nest, a baby turkey and eggs.

I'm going to enjoy having this child in my class! 😊 * 

 

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*I realise that could sound sarcastic but I mean it literally.

Forks

I've wanted to use wooden forks as kings for aaages! 

King David

We made these yesterday.

With more time, glitter or gold paint on the crown would have been nice.

Colosseum / Herod's temple size comparison

 Answer to question in previous post:

(very simplified plans)

Out of the mouth of babes

 Haven't posted one of these for ages...

We were doing the calming of the storm in Sunday School, and Naresh taught us how to make paper boats.

My boat

One of the kids was struggling a bit with the folding, and said,

"My paper won't obey me, like the sea obeyed God."

A problem with Sunday School materials

I recently had to send this message out to the other leaders in my class, to make them aware of an issue with the Sunday School materials we are currently using (which will remain nameless to protect the guilty). Actually, it's a problem with many different Sunday School materials.

"Hi Explorers' leaders. Just thought I should flag up an issue to look out for with the [Sunday School] materials.

There is often a problem that it assumes the children are believers. We should never assume that!

So instead of saying, for example "the Holy Spirit is with you" - it's much better to say, "If you belong to Jesus/Jesus has forgiven you/you believe in Jesus (or similar) the Holy Spirit is with you."

You don't need to labour the point, but just make sure you're not making statements or false promises that may not be true of the children."

Bearing in mind these are evangelical SS materials, this is quite concerning.

How many times have we heard a testimony from someone who realised at the age of 9, or 15, or 21, that they had just been assuming they were a Christian, and had never believed for themselves? Never mind those we know who were brought up in church but never come to faith?

Of course, for children brought up in a Christian family, this may be a subtle, gradual thing. Not everyone has a crisis conversion. But children need to know that salvation is by faith - not by having Christian parents or being in my Sunday School class.

I still don't have enough S's

The magnetic letters I have been using for Sunday School are the ones I had when I was wee.

I bought some extras recently, but it's still not enough!

 Well, it'll amuse the children.

When the standard answer backfires

In church we have worksheets for the kids, to help them engage with the service. I was picking up those that had been left on the seats.

One of the questions said 'draw or write something from the Bible reading'. One child had written 'God'.

I suppose it seemed like a safe bet. However I'm not convinced the child was actually listening. You see, we're going through the book of Esther at the minute...*

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*Esther is the one book of the Bible that doesn't mention God even once!

Lydia craft

Here’s an idea for a simple, fun craft that brings out a lot of things from Lydia’s story.

All you need:

• Paper towel - I found that cheap stuff is best. If you don't have any plain paper towel, toilet paper works too!
• Felt tip pens
• Water 

What to do:

1. Make sure you are working on a surface that is OK to get wet, and to get pen on! You could put the paper towel on a plate, or on newspaper.
2. Draw rough circles of coloured dots. You can do different sizes - the space in the middle shouldn't be very big, though - 3-4cm max.
   
   I tried a heart in the middle, but you might find that too difficult.
   
   
3. Dip your finger in the water, and touch the space in the middle of each circle.
   
   
   
4. Watch as the water spreads out.
   
   
5. Larger circles will need a few more drops, but wait until it stops spreading before adding more. Use as little water as possible, or the colours will all wash out!
6. Leave to dry.
   
   

Links to the story:

• The dye from the pens reminds us of the dye that was used to make Lydia's purple cloth - but use other colours if you prefer.
• If you draw a heart, that reminds us that the Lord 'opened Lydia's heart'.
• Water reminds us of Lydia's baptism.
• The colours spreading remind us of the good news of Jesus spreading.