By Aku Nikkola, editor-in-chief of Tekoälyfoorumi. ChatGPT’s o3 model and Claude 3.7 Sonnet were used in writing this piece. It is based on Yle’s 5 February report on the preparation of the service and The Associated Press’s 8 March article on the lessons of the AI service.
Finland’s first AI church service was held at St Paul’s Church
On 4 March, St Paul’s Church in Helsinki hosted Finland’s first church service in which almost all the content — the sermon, prayers, hymns, music, and a visual story — had been produced with AI tools. The experiment drew more than 120 people, clearly more than weekday evening events usually attract.
According to pastor Petja Kopperoinen, the idea for the service came from an AI & Religion conference in Geneva, where he heard about a similar experiment held in Germany in 2023. He wanted to repeat something similar in his own St Paul’s parish, and told the vicar, Kari Kanala, about the idea. Kanala admitted he was initially cautious about the experiment, but wanted to meet the new phenomenon with an open mind.
They did decide to inform the bishop of the Diocese of Helsinki, Teemu Laajasalo, in advance, since bringing AI into a church service was such a new thing.
What was learned from planning and holding the service?
Kopperoinen, who played the central role in preparing the AI service, built the 45-minute whole with several generative applications. ChatGPT (the 4o model) wrote the sermon, the prayers, and some of the song lyrics; the Suno app composed pop-style melodies; and Synthesia created video avatars of Kopperoinen, the vicar Kari Kanala, and a colleague of theirs.
One of the more startling elements of the experiment was the voice of the late president Urho Kekkonen, produced with Akool technology, reading an Old Testament text.
The story projected onto the church’s large screen showed Jesus in traditional robes with long hair and a beard, while Satan was dressed in more modern clothes, with a threatening expression and a higher voice — both characters entirely AI-generated.
Clear limits were set on the use of AI, though. Absolution was not given through AI, and communion was not administered at all — and those limits were partly set by the AI itself. “The AI answered that it cannot give absolution or bless,” Kopperoinen told Yle.
ChatGPT also initially refused to write dialogue between Jesus and Satan, but relented when Kopperoinen assured it that he was a Lutheran pastor and that there was nothing improper about writing the exchange.
At the service itself, the clergy and congregation sang a few traditional hymns accompanied by a real cantor, but the AI-produced songs provoked mixed feelings. People liked them on the one hand, and on the other described them as “soulless”.
“I did like the songs. They were really catchy, even though they lacked the kind of soul people have,” said student Jeera Pulkkinen, who did not like the rapid delivery of the AI’s texts.
“It felt more like a performance than a service… It felt distant. I didn’t feel they were speaking to me,” Taru Nieminen told AP News.
Eeva Salonen, development director at the Helsinki Parish Union, likewise said the service felt “more like a performance” and more impersonal than it would have been with real people. “But I really liked it,” she added.
The audience’s reactions confirmed Kopperoinen’s view of AI’s role in the church: AI can serve as a tool, but it does not replace a pastor’s capacity for empathy and genuine encounter. “It cannot be empathetic towards people. AI cannot really answer your questions in a spiritual way,” Kopperoinen said.
Both Kopperoinen and Kanala believe AI does have its place in the church. St Paul’s already uses it in bookkeeping, and Kopperoinen sometimes turns to ChatGPT for help drafting sermons or finding verses on a particular subject.
“I think of this as opening a conversation. AI is unavoidably coming into everyone’s working life,” Kopperoinen told Yle.
St Paul’s hopes the experiment will spark discussion about how the church could reach people who are not spoken to by a traditional Sunday morning service. As Kopperoinen sees it, it is understandable that not everyone is interested in a service at ten on a Sunday morning.
“In the Bible, Paul is held up as a model who went to places nobody had been to yet. So it’s natural that it is St Paul’s parish reaching the people who haven’t been reached before,” he said.
Anna Puzio, a researcher in the ethics of technology at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, pointed out to AP News that because of the concerns around AI it is important that churches and religious groups experiment with it. That way they can help “shape these AI processes and develop AI and design it in a responsible way”.
Taking an active role in developing and adopting technology, rather than merely reacting to change, can produce valuable insights — for the church and for other actors in society alike. Perhaps the most valuable lesson from the experimental service is precisely that testing the boundaries helps define the core — what ultimately makes an encounter genuine and meaningful, whether the connection is spiritual or secular.
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