The Temptation of Efficiency
Faithful Intelligence, Part 4
Faithful Intelligence, Part 4. Why kingdom work and efficiency culture are in deeper tension than we want to admit.
The Temptation of Efficiency
I’m sometimes told that I’m a very efficient person. This isn’t entirely a compliment. The way I see it, over the years, I’ve probably gotten a lot of the wrong things done very efficiently.
That’s an odd way to start a post about efficiency. Not the productivity wins I’ve seen. Not the reclaimed hours due to AI. Instead, the this post will focus on times I optimized my way past the thing that actually mattered.
Efficiency is a measure of throughput. It tells you how much you’re producing per unit of input. What it doesn’t tell you is whether what you’re producing matters. That’s a different question entirely, and it requires a different kind of intelligence to answer.
AI is extremely good at efficiency. It is not always good at the question efficiency can’t answer.
So before you hand it more of your ministry, ask yourself: if you removed all the AI-accelerated output from your work this year, what would remain?
Relationships. Discipleship. Prayer. Presence. The slow, irreplaceable, unscalable human work of one person walking with another person toward Creator God.
If that core is strong, AI is a genuine amplifier. If that core is weak, AI is accelerating a problem, not solving one. Which is exactly what I argued in the moving the needle series. Know what you’re actually trying to move before you deploy anything to move it faster.
The Allure Is Real
I am pro-AI. Genuinely, enthusiastically, without apology. At the International Mission Board, we are doing some truly amazing things with AI.
On a personal note, I’ve reclaimed hours every week that used to disappear into administrative tasks. That time has gone back into relationships, into developing people, into the kind of slow unscalable work that actually makes disciples. AI has also multiplied my output in ways that would have taken a significantly larger team a few years ago. When AI frees time for presence, it’s doing something great.
Here’s what I didn’t fully anticipate: efficiency is addictive.
Once you’ve optimized one thing, the instinct is to optimize the next thing. And then the next. And eventually you’re applying efficiency logic to things that weren’t meant to be efficient.
You can’t disciple efficiently. You can’t grieve efficiently. You can’t pray efficiently, or rather, you can, but what you’re doing probably isn’t prayer anymore. You can be more effective, more contextual, better prepared, but the formation that happens in the slow work of showing up, over time, for another person. That doesn’t compress.
The moment efficiency becomes the primary lens, something shifts at the level of value. You’ve moved from “what is faithful” to “what is fast.” Those questions have very different answers.
What the Bible Says About Speed
The God of the Bible operates on a timeline that makes most ministry leaders deeply uncomfortable.
Consider Abraham. He received the promise when he was seventy-five. Isaac was born when he was one hundred. Twenty-five years of waiting for a single child, while the nations of the earth hung on the fulfillment of that one covenant.
God was not slow because he lacked capability. He was deliberate because the process was the point. Abraham wasn’t just waiting for a son. He was being formed into a father of faith. The waiting was the work.
That pattern holds across the whole of Scripture. Moses: forty years in the wilderness before his assignment began. The disciples: three years with the Son of God himself, and they still didn’t fully understand what was happening.
Formation takes time. Character is slow. Trust is built in the accumulation of ordinary faithfulness, not in optimized sprints toward measurable outcomes.
The fruit of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control) are not efficiency metrics. They are the outputs of a continuous, often invisible process of transformation. AI can accelerate information delivery. It cannot accelerate formation.
The Pattern
A ministry leader discovers AI. Genuinely saves time. Starts applying it more broadly. Begins measuring outputs: content produced, contacts made, programs managed. The numbers go up. Leadership is pleased. More AI is deployed.
At some point, hopefully someone asks, “Are people actually being discipled? Are lives being changed?” Again, I want to point you back to the moving the needle series.
Many organizations find they’ve been measuring what’s easy to measure. The things that actually matter, depth of relationship, spiritual growth, lasting transformation, are hard to measure and slow to develop, so they got quietly deprioritized in favor of the metrics that move. This is the needle problem again. Know what you’re trying to move. Stay ruthlessly honest about whether you’re moving it.
The fix isn’t less AI. It’s clearer thinking about what AI is for.
Application
Start with the core and let AI serve that.
What’s the core? In ministry: relationships, spiritual conversations, discipleship, prayer. The work of one person walking faithfully with another person, over time, through ordinary life. Use AI on everything else (administration, content research, communication, preparation) to free you up to do more of that. More presence. More depth. More of the slow work that doesn’t show up in a dashboard but produces the thing we’re actually after.
Disciples made. Communities transformed. The knowledge of the glory of the God of the Bible covering the earth as the waters cover the sea.
Efficiency is a good servant. It is a terrible lord.
Keep it in its place. But know that keeping it in its place requires more intentionality than you think. The temptation is quiet. It doesn’t announce itself. It just makes the fast thing a little easier than the slow thing, every single day, until the slow thing stops happening.
Use AI well. Use it broadly. Just make sure what you’re amplifying is worth amplifying.
Next: AI Can’t Pray — the irreducible human and divine elements of gospel work that no model will ever replicate.
