008. As the World Gets More Synthetic, the Church Must Get More Human ft. Carey Nieuwhof

In this episode of Formation, John Ortberg sits down with Carey Nieuwhof to talk leadership, fame, faith, and what it means for the church to stay human as the world turns synthetic.

Carey Nieuwhof has spent the last decade in a chair few people occupy: hundreds of conversations a year with pastors, CEOs, authors, and public thinkers, watching up close what success does to a person's character. In this conversation with John Ortberg, recorded in the redwoods of Northern California, that vantage point turns into something more personal, a wide-ranging talk about leadership, fame, faith, and the strange new terrain of artificial intelligence.

The two friends trade stories before they trade ideas: a Wendell Berry "fan email" that turned out to be an AI scam, the surreal experience of gifting Scott Galloway a Bible after an emotional conversation about faith, and what it was like for Carey to sit across from Tim Keller weeks before the world shut down in 2020. From there the conversation opens into Carey's real preoccupations: why dogmatism is usually fear in disguise, why nobody at the top actually has it figured out, and why he worries that platforms now grow faster than character can keep up.

The back half is Carey's sharpest territory: the book he's been living inside for two years, on AI and the church. He lays out both the utopian and the dystopian cases, from cured diseases to a possible "white-collar bloodbath," and lands on a single, disarming thesis. As the world becomes more synthetic, the church's job gets simpler, not harder. It has to become more human. Along the way, he and John wrestle with AI companionship, AI grief, and what happens to resurrection, prayer, and preaching when a chatbot never has a bad day and never runs out of answers.

Resources Mentioned

• Leadership Is an Art by Max De Pree
• Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
• Range by David Epstein
• The Algebra of Wealth by Scott Galloway
• Tides of Mind by David Gelernter
• If Anyone Builds This, Everyone Dies (on artificial superintelligence risk)
• Her (2013, dir. Spike Jonze), the AI-companionship film Carey calls prescient
• Sermon Central, the sermon-sharing platform discussed in the context of AI-era plagiarism

About Carey Nieuwhof
Carey Nieuwhof is a former lawyer and pastor who now hosts one of the most-downloaded leadership podcasts for church leaders, with over 800 episodes and 40 million-plus downloads. He is writing a forthcoming book on AI and the church.

Formation is hosted by John Ortberg. New episodes at https://www.formationpodcast.com

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