Picture a Christian leader

AI, women in ministry, lots and lots of head coverings, and encouraging unveiled faces

Gentle reader,

I keep thinking about AI generated images as a window into our collective imaginations. A few months ago, I wrote about AI idolatry as a sign of our distorted understandings of God:

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Today, I’m using AI images to encourage us to think about how we imagine Christian leaders and how our imaginations might fall short of remembering that every human is in the image of God and every Christian has been incorporated into the priesthood of all believers.

Even if you don’t read the post, scroll to the end for a collage of women in ministry.

I remember learning, in college, about a study in which people were asked to draw “a mature person” or “a successful person”, and they almost invariably drew men.¹ AI has been trained in this same society, one in which mature and successful human being are assumed to be masculine. One in which it cannot image-ine women in certain ways.

What does AI imagery reveal about our cultural imagination of Christian leaders?

When I ask for an image of a Christian leader, teacher, pastor, or evangelist, AI always produces a male image. Always. Without exception.

About 70% of the male images are white, but AI does have some sense that black men lead in the church and sometimes produces such an image spontaneously. But it does not produce images of women.

To generate an image of a woman, I have to type “female” into the prompt. It’s a specific modifier, one that AI would never image-ine without me insisting on it. Almost all the images of women leaders are of white women. To generate an image of a black woman, I have to add another modifier. AI has not been “trained” to image women and women of color leading in the church.

(Neither have we, folks.)

Some of the male images are odd, but all the female images feel strained, outside of contemporary culture.

AI loves vestments, but it definitely doesn’t understand vestments. (I don’t either, so I’ll leave that to my anglophile friends.) (Winking emoji! ;) )

The pictures below are typical of the results of the unmodified prompts and of the prompts modified with “female.”

I’m not sure why she’s not facing the crowd.

AI is circulating some odd communion elements and floating candles.

I’m interested in their similar books, which don’t seem to be Bibles.

Here, AI reveals how lots of churches are failing at biblical literalism, as AI makes it obvious that literal elders should be advanced in years. (That’s another winking emoji, friends ;).)

Props to him if he’s in Scotland, as he seems to be wearing a kilt, and we’re all for contextualization.

I think these two look like siblings.

Maybe a little nod, here, to Ruth Bader Ginsberg? A confusion between vestments and the judiciary?

I do not know what liturgical implement he is wielding. Rolling pin? Sad sceptre?

I have to give it to AI here; that male “Christian professor” is literally an image of half my friends.

Again, we get an occasional unprompted person of color for the men but not for the women.

AI got a memo about the hats.

We know the title “senior pastor” isn’t in scripture, but AI is definitely interpreting in a way similar to “elder.”

Lots and lots and lots and lots of head coverings.

It’s hard to say for sure, but is that baby wearing a headcovering? It must be a girl.

AI can tell us about the world as we know it, but it takes human faces and human ministries to witness to the world of God’s New Creation.

I hope you’ll be encouraged by this collage, which shows faces of women in ministry. I’ve known some of these women for years; others I’ve never met. Some were my college and seminary classmates. Some are my students and some have been my teachers; many have been both student and teacher to me. They are Methodist and baptist and Presbyterian and nondenominational and Episcopalian and Nazarene and pentecostal and of denominations I’m not naming. They serve as professors, superintendents, bishops, preachers, teachers, pastors, evangelists, academic deans, and in many other roles.

Their unveiled faces image Jesus.

(I tried very hard to include every image submitted, but it's possible some got lost in comments, etc. If I didn't include your image, it was NOT intentional.)

Feel free to download and share this image. Posters and other prints are available at my Redbubble site.

Grace & peace,

BFJ

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1. Thanks to Elesha Coffman, for sharing that the Draw-a-Scientist Test, in the early 1980s, credited Margaret Mead and Rhoda Metraux with the first version of this experiement. https://kbsgk12project.kbs.msu.edu/.../draw-a-scientist...