There is an uncomfortable pattern starting to show up around AI and care.
In healthcare, a growing body of research suggests that chatbot responses can sometimes be rated as more empathetic than human ones. One 2025 review found this pattern across most of the studies it looked at, and a 2025 oncology study found that both patients and physicians perceived chatbot replies as more empathetic than physician responses. Research on disclosure also suggests people may be willing to tell difficult things to chatbots, especially in sensitive health contexts. And in the church world, 2026 Barna/Gloo research found that nearly one in three U.S. adults say spiritual advice from AI is as trustworthy as advice from a pastor, rising to two in five among Gen Z and Millennials.
I want to take that seriously before I argue past it.
The first thing it might tell us is something about AI. It is always there. It does not interrupt. It does not gossip. For someone carrying shame, hidden pain, or something they are not yet ready to say aloud, AI may feel like a lower-risk first point of contact. There is no relational cost. No fear of disappointing the other person. No risk of the wrong look at the wrong moment.
But the second thing it might tell us is something about the church. If people find it easier to confess pain to a machine than to another Christian, that is not only a technological story. It is also a pastoral one. It should make us ask whether we have sometimes made human care feel unsafe: judgemental, rushed, too eager to fix, too focused on saying the right thing and not enough on simply being there.
So I am not writing this as a defence of the status quo. Human care can fail. Pastors can be clumsy, distracted, or defensive. Some people have been genuinely hurt by communities that were supposed to care for them. If AI exposes those gaps, that is useful to know.
But I want to argue that AI cannot fill them.
At one end of the care spectrum, what people often need is practical. Someone needs reassurance, a next step, a way of making sense of what they are feeling. AI can help with some of that. It can offer calm words, help someone name what is going on, provide broad guidance without getting tired. For someone who needs to find words before they can speak to another person, AI might even help them get ready. A first draft of courage, maybe.
But pastoral care at its deepest is something different. It is not information delivered with a sympathetic tone. It is presence. It is someone being with you in the thing, not just giving you words about grief or fear or shame, but sharing the weight of it. Sometimes that care is a prayer. Sometimes it is silence. Sometimes it is someone making tea, sending the message the next morning, or turning up again when the first conversation did not fix anything.
And that is where AI reaches a limit that is not just about where the technology is today. It is about what AI is. It can produce pastoral-sounding responses. It can simulate patience, empathy, and tenderness very convincingly. But it cannot share mortality. It cannot sit with you as another fragile human being who also knows, from the inside, what it is to suffer, to fail, to grieve, and to need grace.
The theologian Eric Stoddart makes a distinction that helps here. There is abdication: handing care over to AI entirely. There is delegation: using AI tools while a human retains responsibility. And there is collaboration: humans and AI working together with discernment.
Those categories are useful. But his deeper point matters more. Authentic pastoral care requires genuine contingency and mortality. A carer who cannot die cannot offer what care, at its most essential, requires.
That feels right to me. Not as a rhetorical point, but as something I think is actually true about care.
There is a reason John 11 matters. When Jesus arrives at Lazarus’s tomb, he does not deliver a pastoral speech. He weeps. The God who has the power to raise the dead chooses first to weep. The emotional response of one mortal being to another is not incidental to the scene. It is the scene.
And 2 Corinthians 1 puts it plainly: the God of all comfort comforts us so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. Pastoral care flows from shared creaturely experience of suffering. The comfort we offer is downstream of the comfort we have needed. AI has received no comfort. It has needed none. It stands outside the condition it is speaking into.
That is not a small thing.
Sherry Turkle, writing from a secular position, called AI intimacy a collection of “as if” performances: behaving as if it cared, as if it understood. She was troubled by this, and I think her instinct is right. If AI gives us a cleaned-up version of care without the demands of real relationship, we may find ourselves preferring it. No awkwardness. No waiting. No risk of being seen. And if that preference becomes normal, we may start to find ordinary human care intolerably difficult by comparison. Not because human care got worse, but because we stopped tolerating its costs.
There is probably a legitimate role for AI somewhere in this. If AI helps someone rehearse a hard conversation, find language for something they cannot yet say, or take a first step toward disclosure, that may be genuinely useful, as a doorway toward human care, not a substitute for it. AI might also support the carer behind the scenes: helping a pastor or leader think through how to approach a difficult situation, what to avoid saying, where safeguarding concerns might apply. That feels different from asking AI to do the caring.
But the line matters. Abdication may not arrive as a dramatic decision. It may arrive as a convenience that slowly becomes normal. In grief, crisis, trauma, spiritual despair, or serious mental distress, the red line is clear: people must not be left alone with a comforting simulation.
We need people who can actually be present. People who have suffered and who will die. People whose compassion is not generated but lived. People who can weep, pray, sit in silence, fail, return, apologise, and remain.
The question is not whether AI can sound pastoral. The deeper question is whether we still know what care is, and whether we are still willing to pay its cost.
AI may be able to produce the language of care. But care, in its fullest sense, cannot be separated from the person who gives it.
Pastoral care is not just the right words in the right order. It is one fragile person refusing to leave another fragile person alone.
