AI is Coming for Online Pastoral Education

Artificial intelligence is going to make online theological & pastoral education obsolete by 2030. That’s a bold claim (feel free to remind me that I got this prediction wrong!), but likely to come to pass. Online theological education as it is currently deployed may continue to exist by that year, but it will be hopelessly and clearly dated and on its way out.

There are currently two kinds of online theological education. The first developed to provide pastoral education where it was previously absent. This approach is aimed primarily at the developing world or countries with infant churches that lacked their own institutional resources. The second kind of online theological education developed as an alternative option for constituencies that formerly attended classes in-person or residentially. Both kinds, but especially the alternative model, are going to find themselves out competed by AI education.

I’m going to provide a description of current online pastoral education, a prediction for the effects of AI upon it, and prescriptions for how to adapt for the sake of the church.

What Is Online Theological Education?

Online pastoral education required the right technological conditions to emerge, most notably the rise of broadband internet. What we call “online education” typically means pre-recorded lectures streamed over the internet, sometimes augmented by live video classes, the best versions of which provide some kind of digital interaction between students and teachers. In many cases, however, it amounts to self-guided reading, online quizzes, and some form of grading, whether by a professor, a TA, or increasingly, a computer. 

When it first appeared, online theological education had to justify itself as a credible alternative to the traditional in-person model. Within higher education this wasn’t unique to seminaries, but the arguments made in this context were especially weighty. Churches had the appropriate intuition that pastoral education should be more than informational transfer and include a personal dimension. So when online models emerged, they had to explain how they weren’t merely digitized content delivery, but a valid path to real pastoral preparation.

There are generally three arguments in support of online education as an alternative model. First, it offered access. Students who were unable to attend seminary due to job constraints, family commitments, financial limitations, or geographic isolation could now connect with high-quality faculty, gain institutional credentials, and benefit from curated curricula. The institution’s reach now extended far beyond its physical footprint to recruit those who earlier would not have been able to attend; students no longer had to bear the expense of moving with all the attendant costs (social, ministerial, contextual, familial) associated with a relocation. And in a competitive educational marketplace, whichever schools move online first or best are able to more effectively recruit students who wouldn’t otherwise consider them. Hesitation seemed like acquiesce to obsolescence. 

Second, online education is cheaper. The more students were online, the less overhead (dorms, class rooms, cafeterias, landscaping, etc.) was needed. Class sizes could expand. Fewer full-time faculty were needed, and lower-paid adjuncts or administrators could facilitate the courses. As costs dropped, the appeal to price-sensitive students grew. Affordability opened the doors wider, which made theological education more accessible and an appealing alternative to the expensive, inconvenient traditional model.

But third—and most important for online pastoral education—students could stay rooted in their home churches and cultures. Churches no longer had to send their emerging leaders away, risking the loss of those future leaders altogether. And students didn’t have to uproot their families or abandon their communities in order to prepare for ministry, but instead could be trained in the specific context where they were called to ministry in the first place. 

This was the heart of the online pastoral education argument: the very technology that enabled distance learning also allowed for a more deeply embodied connection to the student’s local church and context. Good online theological programs recognized that formation had to remain personal. Some schools added features to help address this, such as professor Q&As, virtual office hours, mandatory online discussions in forums, and occasional cohort gatherings in-person or online. The best versions required a local mentor, often a pastor, to walk alongside the student.

Still, at its core, online education is a tool for transferring information. And while the informational transfer aspect of seminary education is frequently denigrated, it remains essential for pastoral preparation: pastors need to know the right stuff. Content delivery is essential for ministerial preparation, and has always been a central feature for pastoral training. 

The difference is that the context of that transfer shifted from an embodied, relational classroom to a digitized avatar, often in a depersonalized format. Online education needs to supplement this deficit by being more personal and more in-person, and often does so, just typically not through the school itself, but rather through the student’s church and mentors. Online education can still function well for pastoral education, especially in the absent model, because it curates information within the theological tradition of the school and student, provides assessment and credentialing by conferring degrees, and allows for students to apply what they are learning in their context.

But here's the problem: once you’ve moved online, you're no longer just competing with the seminary down the road. You’re competing with everyone. Students can now compare your faculty, curriculum, and format with those of every other institution in the world. When all things are equal—when access is universal and the platform is the internet—the edge disappears.

The online pitch is: Our education provides good information cheap; you can stay home (convenience!) and formation will occur in your church where you serve.

The AI pitch will be: Our education provides even better information more cheaply; you still get to stay home and formation will occur in your church where you serve.

AI Changes the Game

AI will outperform traditional online models because it isn’t just distributing information: it’s tailoring it. It will personalize content, adapt in real time to a student’s learning style, provide instant feedback, and offer a level of interactivity and contextual relevance that prerecorded lectures and online forums cannot approach. It will be cheaper. It will be more scalable. And paradoxically, it will feel more personal, not less.  

We’re not there yet. But we’re not far. 

[It] means we could go in a relatively short span of time — a year or possibly less — from A.I. systems that look not that different from today’s A.I. systems to what you can call superintelligence, fully autonomous A.I. systems that are better than the best humans at everything. In ‘AI 2027,’ the scenario depicts that happening over the course of the next two years, 2027-28 (emphasis added).

This is Daniel Kokotajlo, Executive Director of the AI Futures Project, this past week in the New York Times. The next 18 months will likely witness an exponential growth in AI capability that will be absolutely mind-boggling.

The difference between current AI and what’s coming is greater than the difference between the first rotary phone and the latest iPhone. The next generation of AI will be able to read everything that’s ever been written, watch every recorded lecture, and listen to every interview. It will absorb every new book, every journal article, every publication as it’s released. It will not forget information it comes across. It will synthesize all of it instantly and deliver the information more thoroughly and accurately than any human professor ever could. You don’t have to believe that AI will possess actual intelligence, creativity, consciousness, qualia, sapience, or personhood to see the challenge here. AI, for all practical purposes, will be a self-possessed infinite library capable of guiding students to its riches. 

And AI will no longer just wait for prompts through a text interface. It will be able to converse in real time, and offer guidance proactively, like a theological tour guide. It won’t just generate text, it will appear and speak. Deepfakes and digital avatars—already impressive—will become indistinguishable from real faces and voices. 

The AI professor won’t just present content. It will be compelling, persuasive, and even charismatic — and more so than humans. Video classes powered by AI will feel more engaging and personal than any Zoom call or pre-recorded lecture ever has. Its ability to adapt to the student, on the fly, will outpace every digital classroom we’ve built so far. And even if governments or regulatory bodies are able to require things like AI signatures on these presentations, they will not dissuade students any more than a watermark or institutional logo currently does. Students will be studying (or whatever you prefer to call it) with the AI precisely because it is AI.

And the backend won’t escape either. AI will collapse the administrative load that currently bloats online education—grading, paperwork, and bureaucratic processing will all be automated and immediate.

All of this makes AI-based education cheaper than human-based online education. It also changes the competitive landscape. Right now, online schools have to compete globally. Once AI fully enters the scene, they’ll have to compete universally—not just against the current faculty in other schools, but against all the voices of history. St. Augustine and Martin Luther. Athanasius and the Cappadocians. C. S. Lewis and Karl Barth.

AI will not only quote them, it will have “read” their complete works and be able to interact with them more fluently than any of us, all the while looking and sounding like them. Your online professor might know their material brilliantly, but AI will allow you to learn the theology of the Summa “directly” from Thomas Aquinas or how to preach from Billy Graham.

The difference between AI-mediated and directly learning from past figures will seem immaterial and theoretical to students. Protest the inhumanity of it all, bemoan the loss of the real; it won’t matter. All of the reasons that students opt for online education (access to information and institutional credentialing, affordability, staying rooted) and why schools promote it (increased student base, lower costs) not only remain in AI-education, but are strengthened. 

Even if the most bullish predictions of AI’s capabilities in five years are overblown, the pressure from AI upon online education is already intense and only going to increase. There’s no way the current approach to online education can keep up. This is not just another shift within the same model. It is a transition to a new era. To use an analogy from an earlier era of the internet, online theological education is not Barnes & Noble taking over the local independent bookstore. It is Borders being overwhelmed by Amazon.

What’s likely to happen is that schools and ministry platforms will subscribe to AI packages, trained within and tailored to their theological traditions. Much like subscriptions to streaming platforms (Amazon/Audible, Spotify) and digital library service bundles (ATLA, EBSCO, Logos) AI will not circumvent copyright, but become intertwined with it. These AI engines will become a new online faculty, curating and delivering the education, answering questions, guiding reading, and walking with students. A subscription package is going to be a lot cheaper, and more effective, than a fully staffed online department.

Online education as we understand it will not be destroyed by AI. It will be absorbed, replaced, and quietly left behind.

What’s to Be Done?

But not all hope is lost for schools that invested heavily in online education. Barnes & Noble, once on the verge of collapse, is now in the midst of a quiet renaissance, not by outcompeting Amazon, but by going local, reinvesting in in-store experiences, and cultivating what Amazon could never replicate. The same possibility is open to theological schools who have embraced online education: adapt not by resisting AI, but by leaning into what it cannot do. Schools that prepare wisely for the AI revolution can pivot successfully. More than that, the church needs them to.

So how should they prepare?

First, online seminary programs shouldn’t treat AI as the enemy. AI replacing online courses is not a loss—it’s a refinement. Aside from the issue of pastoral formation already being handled in local church settings, all the other benefits of online education are provided more efficiently, simply, and cheaply by AI. Information transfer has always been a key part of ministerial education, and a model that facilitated digitized information transfer being displaced by one that does it better is not a philosophical disaster. It’s progress. If a school has already crossed the digital Rubicon, there’s no point trying to paddle backward by holding the line at Zoom. AI will do what online courses were designed to do, only faster, more thoroughly, more accessibly, and at a lower cost. The wise move for online classrooms is not to resist AI, but to offload content delivery to it with intentionality, and then reinvest in what AI cannot do.

Many online schools and faculty will protest that, even though it may be done by livestream, there is still a face-to-face interaction between human faculty and students, which will remain indispensable. Interaction between people is crucial for formation, not just as pastors, but as humans. Megan Fritts, professor of philosophy at the University of Arkansas Little Rock, in a beautiful recent essay made the case that there remains a formative value for a humanities education because “the very essence of humanity entails something that, in fact, [AI] will not do at all.” Invoking Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alasdair MacIntyre, she argues “Human linguistic expression arises from the human form of life and also shapes the human form of life. There is arguably nothing more distinctly human about a life than that it is filled to the brim with language.” Language and conversation and interpersonal interaction are necessary for human formation, and currently ChatGPT cannot provide that. The online interactions between faculty and students remain formative, still. But where I fear Fritts’ argument falls short is that AI will soon be able to speak like a human to humans “better” than humans. 

I did my pastoral education in a traditional, in-person institution, but my doctoral work is a combination of self-driven study and online interactions with my advisors and learning cohort. Those online, Zoom-mediated, face-to-face conversations are invaluable for my education, but the reason they have, and will continue to hold, real value is because I have met all of my digital interlocutors in the flesh.

Second, institutions must re-center their programs on personal formation. Any digital interactions between human faculty and students need to be anchored in some degree of in-person connection: hybrid courses, week-long in-person intensives, annual retreats, visits from the faculty to students in the absent model. That means giving serious attention to mentoring, local church involvement, and student peer cohorts. The strongest online programs already understand this and supplemented their coursework with meaningful in-personal components. Those features must now move from supplement to center. The marketing shift should not be “We are better than AI” but “Here is our AI-powered curriculum, and here is how we ensure you have embodied, personal formation alongside it.” 

The school’s value-add becomes less about the content (though that institutional and theological-traditional curation for the sake of credentialing will remain important) and more about the community and the context in which that content is lived and ministerially brought to bear. This will be especially true since students will wonder why they need to pay tuition if they can just purchase the AI-subscription package on their own anyways. Digital faces, AI or otherwise, in pastoral education will all be the same to students unless there is an embodied connection between teacher and learner.

Third, online schools must aggressively localize their student experience. That means forming cohorts not just around shared classes, but around shared geography and ecclesial life. Churches that welcomed online sermons and video classes are likely to welcome AI-driven tools as well. But they will need trusted pastors and theologians to walk with students through them if they are be fruitful in the life of the church. Schools can help by building networks of mentor-pastors and regional facilitators. The best online programs will not be the ones that resist AI, but the ones that embed it within a larger structure of discernment, discipleship, and pastoral accountability. Sermons should be delivered with a people, known and loved, in mind. AI may be able to provide the best rhetorical guidance, but congregations are known personally. Mentors in the local church are essential for helping students move from speakers to embodied and embedded preachers.

In short, theological schools must stop thinking of themselves as the source of all education and begin positioning themselves as curators of formation. AI will soon become the primary tool for delivering theological content for the everyman in the pew or desk. That is not where the battle lies. The battle will be in who provides the context, the community, and the wisdom to help students discern what to do with what they’re learning. That cannot be automated or downloaded. That must be lived, face to face, in the body of Christ.

What About Traditional Seminaries?

In their best versions, online pastoral education prioritizes formation within the student’s current ministry context; in-person education treats preparation itself as the student's vocation. That means that all the embodied aspects of online education (learning cohorts, access to pastors and mentors, connection to the local church) need to remain present in and be stressed by traditional schools. Similarly, traditional schools are not exempt from the challenges ahead. In fact, some of those challenges are about to intensify.

Residential theological education will soon be, comparatively, dramatically more expensive, even when underwritten by generous donors or institutional endowments. And it will be costlier in terms of time and energy. As AI becomes capable of delivering more accurate, responsive, and personalized instruction, schools will have to work harder to explain why students should leave their homes and ministries to pay significantly more for something AI can provide more efficiently.

That means traditional schools must make a clear and compelling case. They cannot assume that their value is self-evident, nor can they rest on nostalgia or prestige. They will need to show why learning in-person, in a classroom, at a slower pace, with embodied faculty and peers, offers something essential that AI cannot replicate and is worth still receiving instead of what AI can provide. Fritts argument from the formative nature of language in community is one.

But another way to begin making that case is by drawing from what Pierre Bourdieu called habitus and what James K. A. Smith has framed as the formative power of liturgy. The sets of dispositions, habits, and ways of being that we absorb through repeated practices within a community shape us. Ministerial formation is not only about what we learn, but about how we learn it. It is about the posture we take toward the truth, the community in which we receive it, and the pace at which we are shaped by it. In-person education allows for a kind of deep formation that comes not just through content but through environment, repetition, and the embodied presence of others; by making that the vocation and rhythm of life for the student. In other words, it is not just how information is received, but how it is given, that matters. That interaction is personally formative, and especially in the context of theological study, is spiritually formative.

In this model, the classroom is not merely a delivery mechanism for information. It is a space of communal formation. It is where the future minister learns to attend to God’s word with others, to hear truth not only in words but in tone, expression, and shared life with a fallible professor whose quirks and shortcomings cannot be adjusted at a whim. It is a slower process and less efficient one, but it is precisely in that slowness and inefficiency that something vital is formed.

Personal, embodied teaching of the gospel prepares students for personal, embodied ministry. The challenge for residential schools in the age of AI will be to show that their slower, more expensive model is not a relic of the past but a deep investment in the future of the church. They will need to articulate not just what they teach, but how their way of teaching is part of the formation they offer. That will require clarity, humility, and a renewed commitment to the kind of formation that only happens when truth is shared in person, among the people of God. 

In all these models, the new reality is that the theological institution is no longer the primary dispenser of content, but still has an invaluable role in pastoral formation as the guardian of tradition, mentor for maturity, and the cultivator of character. This is work no AI can do. And it is exactly the work the church most desperately needs seminaries to do for the sake of Christ’s sheep, whether its pastors are formed via online-facilitated or traditional education. In the coming days, an embodied ministry of the gospel is what will distinguish the church from an AI-dominated world.