Prayer – Scribbling Theology

I have ADHD, and AI has revolutionised how I approach research, manage tasks, and train my attention towards things that matter to me. If technology can help me engage more deeply with something I care about, why wouldn’t I explore what it could offer prayer, Scripture, or life in a church community?

Can Technology Deepen Christian Spirituality?

We already accept quite a lot of help when we pray. We read words somebody else wrote, listen to music, light candles, and look at images. A prayer book gives us language when we struggle to find our own. An audio Bible lets us hear a passage while walking.

AI can answer back, and we have to decide how much to trust its response. I’m interested in whether that back-and-forth helps someone stay with a passage or pray in their own words. I’d also want to understand what it changes about the practice along the way.

John’s Gospel introduces Jesus as the Word who became flesh and lived among us (John 1:14). In the Gospels, he eats with people, touches the sick, and gets tired. For me, that makes it difficult to imagine Christian spirituality as something we do by getting our bodies and their needs out of the way. The person praying has a particular body, a particular mind, and circumstances that affect how they pray.

Technology, Disability and Accessible Worship

Take the expectation that prayer happens best when we sit still in silence. That can be a helpful practice, but I wouldn’t assume that difficulty with it tells us much about someone’s desire for God. A person might find it easier to listen to a Psalm while walking, or follow a short guided prayer. A reminder on their phone might help them return to prayer during the week.

The same applies when we gather. Captions and transcripts can make a sermon accessible to someone who cannot hear it or needs more time to process what was said. Speech-to-text could help someone prepare the prayers they will lead. A member living with chronic illness might be able to lead a small prayer group by video even when travelling to the church building is difficult.

I’m drawn to that last possibility because it changes who gets to contribute. In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul describes a church whose members need one another and whose gifts belong to the whole body. If our arrangements make it difficult for someone to take part, the congregation also misses out on what they bring. So I’d want the conversation about technology to begin with the people facing those barriers. They may have a much simpler idea than whatever the church was about to buy.

Using Virtual Reality for Christian Prayer

Then there is the idea of putting on a headset to pray, which admittedly takes a little more getting used to. Imagine being unable to travel to a retreat, but having access to a headset and a guided time of prayer in a quiet virtual chapel. You hear a Gospel passage, sit with it, and have time to pray without the programme constantly moving you on to the next thing.

The Church of England’s 2022 Prayers at the Foot of the Cross, filmed at Bristol Cathedral, brought prayer, choral music, and silence into a 360-degree service viewable with or without a headset.

I can also see a connection with Ignatian imaginative prayer, where someone pictures themselves within a Gospel scene and attends to Jesus. A virtual setting might give a person a way into that practice. Of course, a designer would be deciding what the scene looked and sounded like, so we would need to recognise those details as an interpretation. A convincing reconstruction could easily make us forget how much has been imagined.

A headset may be distracting or uncomfortable for some people, and an audio recording may work better. I’d ask those who try it what helped them pray and what got in the way.

How AI Can Help with Bible Study

AI interests me for a slightly different reason: you can keep asking it to explain something. If an answer assumes knowledge you don’t have, you can ask it to go back a step. You can compare interpretations, work through unfamiliar terms, or break a large research task into something you can actually begin.

Given the difference AI has made to my own research, I can see why this would be useful to someone opening a biblical commentary and wondering whether they need another book just to understand the first one. They might ask for an explanation of the argument, then return to the commentary with a clearer idea of what the author is saying. They could also bring a more specific question to their Bible study group.

I would be careful about letting the answer end the enquiry, though. AI can produce plausible explanations and references that turn out to be wrong. With theology, there is also the question of whose interpretation it has presented as obvious. Asking where an idea comes from, checking the source, and reading a different view are part of using it well. I want to come away better able to read the passage and judge an interpretation for myself.

Using AI to Write Sermons

For someone preparing to preach, that help can extend into the writing itself. A minister could give AI their notes and argument, ask for a first draft, and work through the result. It might suggest a structure they hadn’t considered or help untangle a paragraph that looks fine on the page but sounds dreadful aloud. Tools such as Logos’s Sermon Assistant already offer help with outlines, illustrations, applications, and discussion questions.

I can understand why people hesitate here. Working out what to say is part of coming to understand a passage. If a preacher skips that process and delivers an argument they have barely considered, the congregation may hear something polished that its speaker cannot really explain. There is also the congregation itself to consider. A sermon on forgiveness will be heard differently by someone recovering from abuse, and a fluent draft may fail to recognise what its advice would ask of that person.

Also, it’s worth noting there is no substitute for the Spirit. A good preacher labours over the text and submits it to God. Technology will always have its limits. But I wonder if occasionally the Spirit can even work through code.

I think AI could help write a sermon if the preacher can explain and take responsibility for the final words. Quotations need checking, invented stories cannot become personal testimony, and substantial AI involvement ought to be acknowledged. Private pastoral conversations also need to stay private; they aren’t material to casually paste into a prompt.

There are useful possibilities after Sunday as well. St John’s Cathedral in Brisbane is exploring AI in ministry, including devotional material and ways of sharing sermons with reflection questions and captions. A checked, plain-language summary could help a group return to a difficult sermon during the week. I like the possibility of giving people more time with an idea, especially when hearing it once wasn’t enough.

AI, Mental Health and Pastoral Care

Someone struggling to contact a pastor, friend, or counsellor might ask AI to help organise what they want to say. They can read the draft, change it, and decide whether it says enough to begin the conversation. For someone who keeps putting off that first message, having a few sentences to work with could help.

Healthdirect explains how online services can connect people with mental health support, while advising that AI should not replace professional care. A church can help someone find a qualified counsellor and make room for prayer and friendship alongside that care. A quiet video conversation may also be easier to manage than a crowded gathering for someone who is struggling.

I’ve written before about knowing and being known. If AI helps someone put words to what they are going through, I’d hope it also becomes easier to share that with a person they trust. Someone who knows them can stay in touch over time and ask how things are going. A video call might make that possible during a week when meeting in person is too much.

For a church wanting to try some of this, I’d start with a conversation: what are people finding difficult, and what would they like help with? Let them help decide what happens next, then give them time to try it. I’d want to hear from the person who joined the discussion, or found a way of praying they wanted to keep.

A lone figure walks a winding path beneath a dark sky, passing a solitary tree, with distant hills fading into shadow.

See part II here

Faith isn’t always a song. Sometimes it’s silence. Sometimes it’s the weight in your chest or the prayer that doesn’t come out.

I wrote recently about how it can be hard to pray. That post came from the same place this one does: the collision of my faith, my own deconstruction, and my mental health. Depression and anxiety are not just private struggles for me. They press into the very practices I was taught to depend on: prayer, worship, and even reading Scripture.

When the Practices Don’t Come Easy

For a long time, I thought faith meant doing all the “Christian stuff” without faltering. Show up. Pray hard. Read daily. Worship freely. But when depression clouds over, prayer feels impossible. When anxiety tightens my chest, sitting still with Scripture feels unbearable.

Deconstruction only complicates it. The simple answers don’t work anymore. The sermons I once leaned on feel too neat. And so, I find myself in the strange space of still wanting God, believing, but struggling to do the very things that once marked faith.

Maybe that’s you, too. And perhaps you need to hear this: it is okay if faith feels hard. It is okay if you can’t pray like you used to. It is okay if your anxiety follows you into worship.

The Bible Doesn’t Hide This Struggle

Scripture gives us permission to feel this tension.

“Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me?” (Psalm 42:5)

“You have taken from me friend and neighbour. Darkness is my closest friend.” (Psalm 88:18)

Job curses the day of his birth (Job 3:1–3).

Elijah collapses under a broom tree and prays, “I have had enough, Lord. Take my life.” (1 Kings 19:4).

Jeremiah laments bitterly: “Cursed be the day I was born.” (Jeremiah 20:14).

And Jesus himself says in the garden, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.” (Matthew 26:38).

If this is in the Bible, then you have permission to bring your sorrow too. You do not have to hide it or cover it with worship songs you can’t sing.

When Faith Becomes a Weapon

There is another layer to all this. It is not just the depression or the anxiety or the silence of God. It is the voices around you.

“If you prayed more, you wouldn’t feel this way.”

“If you just trusted God, the anxiety would go away.”

“Maybe you’re not as faithful as you think you are.”

I have heard those lines. Sometimes out loud. Sometimes in the quiet judgments that float in church air. They land heavily. Because if you are already depressed, those words do not lift you. They bury you. Suddenly, it is not just your mental health you are fighting; it is the shame that you have somehow failed God by being human.

This is spiritual gaslighting. It turns faith into a weapon. It tells you that God is measuring your serotonin levels and writing them down as proof of your devotion. That is not gospel. That is cruelty dressed up in religious language.

The Bible never says, “the faithful never falter.” What it does say is that “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” (Psalm 34:18). What it does say is that Christ himself was “a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.” (Isaiah 53:3).

So let me say it plainly. You are allowed to be a Christian with depression. You are allowed to follow Jesus while anxious. You are allowed to belong even if you never get “better.”

The Weight We Carry and the Silence of God

Depression changes how the brain works. Anxiety floods the body. Trauma plants itself deep in memory. None of this is weakness. But it makes faith practices like prayer, silence, and Scripture feel like mountains you do not have the energy to climb.

And when God seems silent on top of it, the weight doubles. Prayer feels like speaking into an empty room.

That silence is not new. Israel wandered in it for forty years (Deuteronomy 8:2). The exiles sat by Babylon’s rivers, asking how they could sing the songs of Zion in a strange land (Psalm 137:1–4). Four hundred years of silence stretched between Malachi and Matthew. And then Jesus himself cried from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34, quoting Psalm 22:1).

The mystics dared to say this silence is not always absence. St John of the Cross called it the “dark night of the soul.” In that night, prayer feels empty, but God is nearer than ever, stripping away illusions and deepening love. Silence can feel like abandonment, yet it may be the place where God is holding us most closely.

So hear this: it is not a failure of faith to feel the weight of depression or to sit in silence where God feels far. You do not have to “fix yourself” before God will listen. You are allowed to come as you are, heavy, anxious, waiting in the quiet.

Not the End, Just the Beginning

This is not where the story resolves. It is just where it begins with honesty. Faith and mental health do not meet in quick fixes. They meet in ache. In saying the truth out loud.

If you are depressed, anxious, exhausted, or carrying grief, you are not less faithful. You are walking with Job in the ashes. With Elijah under the tree. With Jeremiah in the ruins. With Jesus in Gethsemane.

So take permission. You do not need to be a “better Christian” before you can come to God. You are already beloved. You are already enough.

Faith is not the absence of ache. Faith is bringing the ache to God, even when you are not sure God is listening.

Tag: Prayer

Techno Jesus: AI, Technology and Christian Spirituality