AI, Justice and Creation Care
An update from the AI Working Group
03 October 2025
23 September 2025 saw the Methodist Church’s Artificial Intelligence Working Group meet at Methodist Church House to explore how AI intersects with the care for creation, justice, and mission. The group heard from Hamish Leese, Andy Dye, Paul Morrison, Rachel Lampard, and Jonathan Hustler, and spent time in discussion and discernment together.
Why this matters for the Church
AI is no longer a niche topic; it shapes education, communication, public services, and the wider economy. For a Church committed to justice, care for creation, and human flourishing, AI raises urgent questions: Who benefits and who bears the costs? What does faithful, responsible use look like? And crucially, how do we keep the mission of God central in a rapidly changing digital world?
What we covered
AI and the environment: promise and peril
Izzy Soloman presented the hopeful potential of AI: smart agriculture, clean energy forecasting, and biodiversity monitoring that can target resources, reduce waste, and improve reliability on the grid. Yet, the costs are sobering: energy- and water-hungry data centres, reliance on non‑renewable minerals often mined under exploitative conditions, toxic waste, and rapid hardware obsolescence that too often ends up in the Global South.
We reflected on justice frameworks - looking backwards (historical responsibility), in the present (polluter pays), and forwards (future emissions and moral thresholds) - and asked where fairness and limits belong in our discernment.
Net Zero 2030 and the AI challenge
Hamish Leese connected AI to the Church’s Net Zero 2030 commitment. While AI might enable some environmental gains, the current trajectory of data centre growth and energy demand risks undermining the Church’s climate ambition. The group also explored the contested value of offsetting and the priority of real reductions in emissions.
Centralising data servers can be more efficient, but efficiency often enables more growth, not less. Without decoupling growth from carbon and water use, the environmental burden increases.
Global partners: a varied and vital picture
Andy Dye shared insights from partner churches. In parts of Africa, connectivity and cost are the immediate barriers; elsewhere (e.g. Hong Kong, India, Singapore), churches are experimenting with AI for ministry and reflecting on the theology of AI, the future of work, and worship. Across regions there’s a shared concern about deepening inequalities and the material impact of AI on local communities, electricity, and water.
Justice and ethics: ten areas of risk
Paul Morrison and Rachel Lampard named ten ethical pressures - from bias and discrimination, surveillance, and misinformation to privacy, concentrated power, cognitive impacts in learning, human dignity, autonomous weapons, and ethical investment. A core question emerged: Is “ethical AI” genuinely possible, or are the harms inherent to the way AI scales? Either way, the group agreed the Church should urge caution wherever AI constrains human flourishing or harms those already at the margins.
What Methodists are telling us
A survey of 291 respondents shows 80.7% want to learn more about AI’s environmental and human impact. Leading concerns include:
- Complicity with environmental degradation / creation care (31.1%)
- Justice issues and exploitative data practices (26.4%)
- Potential hypocrisy with justice‑seeking and net zero commitments (12%)
- Harms to young and vulnerable people (10%)
- Calls for greater disclosure (7.1%) and clearer policy (5%)
The message is clear: the Church should discern internally and speak in the public square, setting an example that prioritises the good of the world over convenience.
A theological lens: safe, effective, efficient
Jonathan Hustler invited us to hold AI within a three‑strand approach - safe, effective, efficient - with humility. Safety includes safeguarding, data protection, and wellbeing. Effectiveness asks how AI might support ministry, worship preparation, and the stewardship of our collective memory. Efficiency requires honesty about financial, environmental, and human costs, including impacts on mental health and time.
What we’re doing next
- Drafting guidance: Develop Connexional guidance for safe, transparent, and just use of AI; offer advice to Districts, Circuits and Methodists.
- Net zero accounting: Explore how to reflect AI‑related emissions and water use in our Net Zero 2030 planning.
- Global listening: Share our emerging work with partner churches and incorporate feedback from diverse contexts.
