Weekend Plug-in 🔌

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(ANALYSIS) Christian missionary Leslie Taylor preaches in English and Japanese each Sunday at a bilingual church in the Tokyo area.

A military brat who spent time as a child in Japan as well as Florida and Tennessee, the father of three prepares his lesson in English. 

Then he goes through his manuscript — sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph — to translate it into Japanese.

“That translation aspect can obviously be very difficult at times,” Taylor said.

ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot made by the company OpenAI, has helped improve the missionary’s process.

“I do as much as I can by myself, but sometimes it helps with particularly complicated sentence structures,” Taylor said of the AI program, “or I may ask it to explain a nuance, etc.

“It’s still necessary to know Japanese because sometimes it gives mistaken translations — or just slightly off my meaning — so I need to discern,” he added. “But it is a helpful tool in the process to be sure. I would never even consider it as a source for any actual content, however.”

Roughly 6,500 miles away, Dion Frasier, a minister in suburban Columbus, Ohio, relies on ChatGPT to translate his sermon into Creole.

“We have a growing Haitian population in our area, and they are starting to attend church regularly,” Frasier explained. “We translate and hand out copies to families each week.”

The number of languages with full Bible translations tops 700 — accounting for the native tongues of 80 percent of the world’s population, the American Bible Society notes. 

About 3,750 vernaculars lack full translations, but AI could help speed the process of taking the Bible from its original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek into more languages, according to ReligionLink.com.

READ: The Moral And Ethical Challenges Posed By Artificial Intelligence

A team at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute “is using natural language processing, which enables machines to understand and respond to text or voice data, to help increase the efficiency of Bible translation and allow for more languages to be reached at a faster rate,” reports Ken Chitwood, ReligionLink.com’s editor.

Christians in the U.S. express complicated feelings about AI, with 30 percent believing it is exciting but 34 percent seeing it as scary, according to a recent survey by the Barna Group in partnership with Gloo. (A Catholic advocacy group in California recently dismissed a robot priest who advised its followers to “baptize children in Gatorade.”)

Mary Nelson, a Christian missionary with her husband, David, in Tauranga, New Zealand, identifies with both the enthusiasm and wariness toward AI.

“Myself, it makes me nervous — the whole AI arena,” Nelson said. “Automatically, our mind goes to all the different problems that can come about from AI and still may. But if there’s a tool that means we can get Bible lessons out quicker … I can’t think of why we should just say no because of what it might do.

“I think we put all the precautions in place and use the tool but use it intelligently,” she stressed. “If we use our own human intelligence to use this artificial intelligence, then I think it’s really good.”

A decade ago, Nelson developed an online ministry called Mission Bible Class, which provides free resources to teach children around the world. 

Nelson’s collection of more than 170 Bible stories — all in English — draws about 8,000 pageviews a day. For years, she has dreamed of making the materials available to the world’s roughly 500 million Spanish speakers.

To pursue that goal, she and a team worked with translator Tae Perkins — a former missionary to Chile who lives in Lubbock, Texas — to develop a plan estimated to cost $100,000 and take two years.

But then ministry supporters asked if they’d considered enlisting AI.

They had — and rejected it.

Still, they tried it again, unaware how quickly — and how much — the technology had advanced.

“We were basically just testing it out,” said Gina Nored, who works with Nelson in New Zealand through Memorial Road’s Helpers in Missions program. “The logic kind of was: Let’s give some reason to why we’re not using AI. And then we realized: Maybe we should be using AI.”

They discovered ChatGPT could translate the English lessons into Spanish in an easily editable format.

“It takes me about two to three hours to translate one of her lessons,” Perkins said of the previous manual process — which was followed by an additional hour for editing.

By comparison, AI requires less than 15 minutes to translate the same lesson before it goes to the human editor. Then, Perkins said, “It takes me about 30 to 45 minutes to edit one that’s been passed through the AI.”

Suddenly, the expected cost dropped 75 percent to about $25,000. The anticipated timeline split in half to one year.

“By using AI, it allows us to be more efficient in projects that we feel passionate about,” Nored said. “But then it allows us to have more time and energy and resources spent on other things that we would otherwise have to put on the back burner or just not be able to do.” 

Veteran minister James Nored, Gina’s father, speaks just one language: English.

“I took Greek and Hebrew and all that, but I’m not all that fluent in another language,” said Nored, who earned a doctorate in ministry from Fuller Theological Seminary.

But through the magic of AI, his voice can be adapted to numerous languages — from Arabic to Portuguese.

Nored serves as executive director of Next Generation for Christ, a Virginia-based ministry focused on evangelism, discipleship and missions. He wrote and produced the Story of Redemption Film Series, filmed in Israel and other countries. It’s available in more than 60 languages.

“Most of our languages for our Story of Redemption series have been done by humans and professional translators, who are often assisted by AI tools,” Nored said. “And we have found some really great, talented people to do voiceovers.”

But AI advancements allow the ministry to “quickly produce” computer-generated voiceovers for videos and subtitles, he said. That’s especially helpful, he noted, when faced with scarce funding, voice talent or time.

He cited a ministry to the blind in Albania as an example.

“We had the video series with subtitles, but that obviously would not be very helpful for this people group,” Nored said. “We were able to quickly produce an AI-generated Albanian voiceover, and it worked well.”

Back in Japan, Taylor stresses that his sermon represents more than words on a piece of paper.

When he stands before his multicultural congregation, which includes American, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Lithuanian members, he’s not just conveying information.

He’s sharing the Gospel.

“It’s sharing the heart of the text, obviously,” he said. “But I mean, if I really think about it, it’s very humbling because you’re really representing God to people. … And so I think it’s a sacred task that needs to be taken seriously.”

AI, he believes, can help with that task.

But it can’t replace the value — and necessity — of humans interacting intelligently with the Holy Bible.

Inside The Godbeat

Through the American Jewish Committee’s Project Interchange, I was one of a dozen U.S. religion journalists invited to spend a week exploring political, social and religious issues in Israel in 2019.

Another religion writer on that trip was Jana Riess, Religion News Service’s “Flunking Sainthood” columnist. We were on the same helicopter one day as the group traveled from Tel Aviv to the Golan Heights overlooking Syria and Lebanon.

I mention Riess because she had an interesting column this week on — as she put it — “Why I’ve been AWOL.”

“I am fine,” her column noted. “Or at least, as fine as I ever am when I’m writing a book.”

The Final Plug

A grease fire that severely burned Richard Inyang on his stomach, arms, hands and upper thighs could have killed him.

But it didn’t.

As the Minnesota preacher sees it, the Lord still has a purpose for him, as I explain in a feature I wrote for The Christian Chronicle.

Happy Friday, everyone! Enjoy the weekend.

Bobby Ross Jr. writes the Weekend Plug-in column for Religion Unplugged and serves as editor-in-chief of The Christian Chronicle. A former religion writer for The Associated Press and The Oklahoman, Ross has reported from all 50 states and 18 nations. He has covered religion since 1999.