Where Do We Go From Here

In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. published what would become his final book. He titled it Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? The Civil Rights Act had passed. The Voting Rights Act had passed. The legislative mountains had been moved. And King, rather than celebrating, was asking the harder question that the victories had now exposed.

The removal of the barrier, he understood, does not automatically produce the just society. Dismantling is one kind of work. Building is another — slower, less dramatic, more demanding, and in many ways more dangerous, because it requires the movement to become something different than it was. Protest is clarifying. Institution-building is complicated. King saw the moment clearly: the freedom to pursue justice in new arenas had arrived, and the question was whether the movement had the theological imagination and organizational courage to follow it there.

The Black church is standing at a similar crossroads today.

Artificial intelligence is not a future concern. It is already here — reshaping labor markets, concentrating economic power, influencing who gets bail and who doesn't, shaping the information environment that our congregants navigate every single day. The communities Black churches serve are already being affected. And the church that waits for a more convenient moment to engage this reality is not protecting its people from it. It is simply leaving them to face it alone.

The question is not whether the Black church will encounter artificial intelligence. That question has already been answered. The question King was asking is the right one: Where do we go from here?

We Have Been at Crossroads Before

The Black church did not survive four centuries of American history by avoiding difficult terrain. It survived by moving through it — by taking the tools and conditions of each moment and pressing them into the service of a mission that outlasted every single one of them.

The invisible church of the antebellum South turned the slaveholder's Christianity against itself, finding in the Exodus a God the slaveholder had not intended them to meet. The Black church of the Great Migration built institutions — banks, newspapers, hospitals, schools — in cities that had not prepared for the arrival of six million people and had no intention of welcoming them. The church of the Civil Rights Movement weaponized the Constitution, the courts, the television camera, and the spiritual discipline of nonviolent resistance to dismantle a legal architecture of oppression that had stood for a hundred years after emancipation.

In each of those moments, the church faced a version of the same question: What does faithfulness look like right now, with these tools, amid these pressures? The answer was never avoidance. It was never uncritical adoption either. It was discernment — the willingness to engage the moment on the mission's terms rather than the moment's terms.

That is the tradition we are inheriting. And it is exactly the tradition we need.

The Gap Is Already Costing Us Something

The Black church's technological lag is not cultural indifference. It is the predictable result of structural inequality that has always distributed access to capital, infrastructure, and innovation unevenly by race. Every major technological shift in American history has reached Black communities later, with less support, and configured to serve someone else's needs first. This one is no different.

The digital divide is documented and persistent. Lower rates of broadband access, device ownership, and digital literacy in Black communities — particularly in lower-income and rural areas — mean that Black churches in those communities are navigating an AI moment with fewer resources than the institutions they are trying to keep pace with. This is not new. But the stakes have never been higher.

Artificial intelligence is not simply a faster way to do familiar things. It is a structural reorganization of how labor works, how information moves, and how economic power accumulates. The workers most exposed to automation are those concentrated in transportation, manufacturing, retail, and service industries — sectors where Black workers have been historically overrepresented, not by choice, but by the long architecture of occupational segregation. The McKinsey Global Institute has documented that Black workers face an above-average risk of job displacement from automation for exactly this reason.

The communities most at risk from AI's disruption are the communities the Black church was built to serve. Which means this is not a technology question. It is a ministry question. And the Black church has never had the luxury of treating ministry questions as optional.

There is a deeper dimension to this gap worth naming plainly. Black people represent roughly 13 percent of the American population and approximately 3 percent of the technology workforce. AI systems are not neutral instruments. They reflect the values, assumptions, and blind spots of the people who build them. When Black voices are absent from the rooms where these systems are designed, the systems carry that absence forward — into hiring algorithms, into criminal risk assessments, into medical diagnostic tools, into the search results that shape what our children believe is true about themselves and their world. Safiya Umoja Noble documented this in Algorithms of Oppression. Virginia Eubanks documented it in Automating Inequality. The research is not ambiguous. Systems built without us tend to work against us.

This is not a reason for despair. It is a reason for urgency.

The Stewardship Argument

The Black church has always been required to do more with less. That history is painful. It is also, in this particular moment, a kind of preparation.

The most immediate opportunity that AI offers Black congregations is administrative — and the word "administrative" undersells what that actually means in practice. In the average Black church, pastoral care, sermon preparation, community programming, communications, financial management, and event coordination fall on small staffs or volunteer teams who are already overextended. The pastor who spends two hours on a newsletter is not spending those two hours on the hospital visit. The administrator buried in scheduling logistics is not building the community partnerships that the church's mission requires.

AI tools can meaningfully reduce that burden. Generative AI can assist with drafting correspondence, grant applications, social media content, and educational materials. Scheduling platforms with AI integration can reduce the friction of coordinating volunteers and managing calendars. Financial tools can help treasurers make better-informed decisions with limited resources. None of this is glamorous. All of it matters.

The goal is not a more efficient church. It is a more available church — one whose leaders have more time and energy for the ministry that no technology can replace, because AI is carrying some of the load that was consuming them. Time returned from administrative work is time returned to presence. And presence is what the church has always had to offer that nothing else can replicate.

Howard Thurman understood this. His foundational argument in Jesus and the Disinherited was that Jesus ministered from a position of solidarity with those who had their backs against the wall — and that the church's calling is to embody that same solidarity. That calling cannot be delegated to an algorithm. In an era of algorithmic impersonality — where automated systems make consequential decisions about credit and bail and healthcare and housing without human accountability or compassion — the Black church's insistence on the full humanity of each person it encounters is not a relic of a pre-digital age. It is a prophetic act. It is what makes the church the church.

But Thurman's vision of presence-centered ministry is only sustainable if the people doing it are not drowning in work that a machine could do. That is the stewardship case for strategic AI adoption. Not efficiency for its own sake. Presence made possible.

The Prophet's Obligation

The Black church cannot engage artificial intelligence without raising its prophetic voice about the conditions under which that technology is being built and deployed. This is not a sidebar to the conversation. It is the center of it.

Consider water.

The data centers that power large AI systems consume extraordinary amounts of water for cooling — a single facility can consume millions of gallons annually. This is not an abstraction. Sand Branch is a historically Black community located near Dallas, Texas — not far from where I pastor — that to this day lacks access to a reliable, clean water supply. That reality echoes what the nation watched unfold in Flint, Michigan, beginning in 2014. Sand Branch is not an anomaly. It is a pattern. And the pattern is this: communities of color, with less political power and fewer resources, are systematically left without basic infrastructure while new technologies expand their demands on the very resources those communities lack.

The expansion of AI requires water. The people least likely to have clean water are the people most likely to live near the infrastructure that AI requires and least likely to share in its benefits. That is not irony. It is a moral indictment. And the Black church — which has always understood that the Gospel has something to say about who gets water and who doesn't — cannot embrace AI without also raising its voice about what that infrastructure is costing the people closest to the ground.

The same prophetic obligation applies to the question of bias. AI systems are not neutral. They are trained on historical data — which means they are trained on historical injustice. Facial recognition systems have documented higher error rates for darker-skinned faces. Criminal risk assessment algorithms encode the racial disparities of a justice system that was never designed to be just. Hiring platforms trained on historical patterns of employment perpetuate the exclusions that produced those patterns. These are not bugs. They are the predictable outcomes of systems built without sufficient accountability to the people most likely to be harmed by them.

And there is a subtler dimension to this that the Black church should take seriously. The large language models becoming central to everyday information access reflect the values, priorities, and assumptions of their developers in ways that are often invisible to users. When those systems are shaped by ideological environments that protect dominant perspectives, they may struggle to generate content that prophetically challenges those perspectives. A tradition whose survival has always depended on speaking truth to power cannot afford to outsource its voice to systems that may be designed, however subtly, to protect power.

Cornel West wrote in Prophesy Deliverance! that the Black prophetic tradition is distinguished by its willingness to speak the truth about what is, in the name of what ought to be. That willingness is not something AI can replicate or replace. It is the soul of the tradition. And it must be brought to bear on AI itself — on who builds it, who controls it, who profits from it, and who is being asked to simply absorb the cost.

Boldly Going

There is a phrase from a different cultural tradition that keeps finding its way into my thinking about this moment. In Star Trek, the mission of the Enterprise is defined in its opening: to boldly go where no man has gone before. The crew does not know what they will encounter in uncharted space. They go anyway — not recklessly, but with curiosity, with values intact, with a commitment to the mission that survives every new encounter with the unknown.

That is the posture the Black church needs in the age of artificial intelligence. Not the posture of the institution that waits until the territory has been mapped by someone else and arrives late, poorly resourced, and on someone else's terms. Not the posture of the institution so afraid of losing itself that it refuses to move at all.

The posture of a people who have always had to navigate uncharted territory. Who have always had to ask what faithfulness looks like in a moment nobody prepared them for. Who have survived every crossing because the mission was stronger than the conditions.

The Black church needs to invest in AI literacy — in its congregations, its communities, its young people who could be in the rooms where these systems are built rather than simply subject to them. It needs to partner with schools and workforce programs to create pathways into the technology sector for Black youth and adults. It needs to develop the institutional capacity to evaluate AI tools critically — to ask whose values are embedded in them and to make intentional decisions about what it will and will not adopt.

It needs to advocate — at the level of policy and governance and public accountability — for AI development that is transparent, for algorithmic systems that can be audited and challenged, for environmental regulation of infrastructure expanding on the backs of communities that have already given enough. The Black church has always understood that faithful ministry includes advocacy. Sand Branch needs water. That is a ministry issue. It is also an AI issue. The church should be saying so, loudly.

And it needs to protect, fiercely and deliberately, what AI cannot touch. The deacon who sits with the widow. The mothers' board surrounding a grieving family. The pastor at the graveside speaking resurrection into the face of death. The congregation that shows up — in body, in presence, in the full weight of its humanity — because showing up is what the church does. These are not ministry tasks to be optimized. They are the ministry. Every AI adoption decision must be evaluated against that conviction.

The Answer to King's Question

King's question was never really about strategy. It was about identity. It was asking: after everything that has been endured, everything that has been built, everything that has been sacrificed to get here — who are we, and what do we stand for, when the next hard thing arrives?

The Black church's answer, across four centuries, has been consistent even when the conditions were not. We are the people who show up. We are the people who tell the truth. We are the people who hold together what the world is trying to tear apart — lament and hope, grief and praise, the reality of what is and the conviction of what God intends.

Artificial intelligence does not change that answer. It tests it. It asks the church whether the identity that survived slavery and Jim Crow and redlining and every other attempt to diminish it will also survive the seductions of efficiency, relevance, and technological cool. Whether the church will arrive at the AI table with its prophetic voice intact or whether it will trade that voice for a seat.

The Black church has stood at crossroads before.

Every generation has been required to ask what faithfulness looks like in this moment, with these tools, amid these pressures.

The question is the same in the age of artificial intelligence. What has changed is the urgency.

The way forward is what I have called prophetic partnership: a relationship with AI that is strategic without being naive, justice-oriented without being paralyzed, and always accountable to the conviction that the church's mission cannot be automated. The Black church has always found a way to use the tools of the moment in service of a mission that transcends the moment.

It can do so again — not by surrendering its prophetic voice to the algorithm, but by bringing that voice to bear on how these tools are used, who they serve, and who they must never be allowed to replace.

This is where we go from here.