My RSS feed for Religion News Service yields some great religion reporting and commentary, but it also grabs everything from RNS’s “press release distribution service.” That includes lots of the usual boilerplate announcements from various denominations and religious organizations — anniversaries, hirings, publications, etc.
But it also includes some marketing curiosities and dubious promotional hype. These are sometimes amusing, sometimes confounding.
Let’s take a look at a few recent examples from the press release slush pile:
• This press release is from Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer, which is both the name of the group and the name of the thing they say they’re going to build: “Construction begins on major Christian landmark in Britain celebrating a million answered prayers.”
EWAP says it has raised $50 million to build “Britain’s largest Christian monument.” The monument/installment/statue-thing will be:
… located 100 miles north of London near Birmingham, will stand 167 feet tall in the form of a Möbius strip — a continuous loop symbolizing the everlasting nature of prayer and God’s faithfulness.
Taller than the iconic Christ the Redeemer statue in Brazil, the structure will contain one million bricks — each representing a story of answered prayer that visitors can access through their smartphones.
On the plus side here, I love the idea of a ginormous Möbius strip. That would be neat.
Does the world need such a thing? Well … yes and no. Did the world need the concrete dinosaurs of Apple Valley? Did the world need the 40-feet tall bowling pin statue outside of Green Brook Lanes? Maybe, maybe not. But I’m glad they’re there.
The group’s artist’s conception of its completed “monument” raises some safety concerns and other questions:
What happens if it gets, like, windy? How do they plan to keep skaters off of that thing?
And is brick really the best material for this building project?
But first I’d ask questions like “Why is this supposedly UK-based project exclusively using American dollars in its press release?” and “Can it really be true they’ve already raised $43 million in donations for this?” and “Where will that money go once it’s clear that this thing is never getting built?” and “This is a scam, isn’t it? Because doesn’t it look like a scam to you too?”
• Next up is a confusing press release from the First Baptist Church of Dallas, the best little MAGA-mega in Texas.
How do we know it’s the “best”? Because the evil liberal secular media said so: “The 16,000-member First Baptist Church of Dallas, pastored by Dr. Robert Jeffress, was announced Sunday, October 26, as the ‘Best Church in the DFW Metroplex,’ as voted on by readers of The Dallas Morning News.”
I had to go back and check. It was the Houston Chronicle, not the Dallas Morning News, that did that blockbuster investigative report in 2019 on sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention. Phew.
But what exactly does the “Best Church in DFW” mean? Like, I get it when newspapers do readers polls to name the “Best Pizza” in town, and the pizza place frames the article and hangs it up behind the counter. I understand, generally, what’s going on there and what it means and all the Chamber of Commerce-meets-Yelp implications of that. But I can’t quite grasp what readers are being asked to judge when given the chance to pick the “best church.”
The final graf of First Baptist’s press release clears this up a little:
First Dallas extends heartfelt thanks to its members and community for this year’s Gold Award recognition. The church was previously honored with the Silver Award in 2024 and has been recognized among the Top Places to Work since 2021, including ranking #2 among midsize organizations in 2024.
Ah, OK. It’s one of those “best places to work” surveys. That’s not at all the same as being named “best church.” But having said that, it’s still commendable. Robert Jeffress may be an idolatrous right-wing demagogue and attending First Baptist of Dallas puts your soul in peril and makes you complicit in the white supremacist agenda of a wanna-be fascist authoritarian regime. But, on the other hand, they also have on-site child care and probably, like, good dental coverage. So there’s also that and good for them on that score.
• Finally here’s the latest from one of the most prolific press-release releasers in the slush pile, Gloo — “a technology platform serving the faith ecosystem.” Like almost all of Gloo’s press releases, this one is a relentless stream of technobabble: “Gloo AI Hackathon awards $250,000 for values-aligned AI innovations advancing human flourishing.”
The three-day event brought together developers, content creators, Bible translators, publishers, church leaders, game designers and more to harness AI for human flourishing and organizational thriving within Christian communities. More than $250,000 in cash prizes were awarded to the top-performing teams whose ideas pushed the boundaries of what values-aligned AI can do.
This all sounds like it was organized by people who looked at Bible Gateway and thought, “Gee, I wish this were more like the ‘A.I. summary’ features that have made Google search so much less useful and trustworthy.”
Gloo’s press releases always seem to be aimed at two audiences: white churches desperately hoping that technology will boost church growth, and the kind of venture capitalists who might be persuaded that “the faith ecosystem” might be a lucrative new data-mining niche. And I’m still not quite decided on whether they are, themselves, true believers in the former project or just cynical grifters in the latter.
Patrick Gelsinger, the former CEO of Intel who now runs Gloo, would insist he’s in that first category, touting his new company’s work as the biggest thing for Christianity since Gutenberg. That Guardian article sums up Gloo as “think Salesforce for churches, plus chatbots and AI assistants for automating pastoral work and ministry support.”
If the last nine words of that paragraph don’t make you squirm a little, you lack imagination. A.I.-written sermons are coming soon. But Grok-in-the-pulpit doesn’t worry me as much as Grok at the bedside, when these inhuman tools start being used to automate the kind of pastoral work done in hospitals, hospices, and cemeteries.
That article also clarifies that Gloo’s “human flourishing” language doesn’t come from Miroslav Wolf, but from Harvard’s “Human Flourishing Program,” an attempt to quantify qualities that recalls that Oscar Wilde line about knowing “the price of everything and the value of nothing.” The aim seems to be to create concrete, three-digits-after-the-decimal metrics that can precisely quantify all those fuzzy questions I had above about what it means to say a place is “the best church.” Goodhart’s Law will remain in effect, with a vengeance.
My main questions about Gloo remain these: What data are they collecting? What are they using it for? And who are they planning to sell it to? And I’m far from convinced the answers to those questions will have much to do with human flourishing.
Select your answer to see how you score.
