Training Jedi in the Age of AI Clone Wars (Re-Release)

Notes on AI, Ministry, and the Lost Art of Embodied Presence

Author’s Note: As we enter the holidays, I am going to be reposting some of my best work and essays from when I first started my SubStack. My heart is I want these posts to live a new life and reach more people, and to spend the holidays focused on local ministry, family, and fundraising.
I hope you enjoy this essay! It was a fun one.

1. Clones, Droids, and the Death of Discipleship?

Let’s start with war. Because that’s what you do when you’re trying to sneak theology past people’s defenses: use explosions and lightsabers.

Within this war, there’s a horrific plotline in Attack of the Clones that should make every youth pastor sweat.

It’s not found in the lightsaber twirling. Not Yoda’s bounce. Not even Anakin’s pathological flirtation strategy that involves war crimes and weird sand monologues.

No, the real horror is logistical: an entire galactic war, fought not by those with convictions, but by copy-pasted humans and cold metal algorithms.

On one side, you’ve got the Separatists: a million-strong droid army, soulless, willing to execute orders but unable to ask questions.

On the side of the Republic, the Jedi Council—supposed guardians of peace—sign off on an ethics nightmare: an army of cloned child soldiers ripped from Jango Fett’s DNA like theological hot takes ripped from a conference livestream.

It's “ministry” without mentorship. Strategy without sweat. Presence replaced by automation.

Both sides say the same thing, in different dialects of despair:

“We don’t have the time to train real warriors.

Let’s mass-produce soldiers instead.”

And here’s where the metaphor starts hitting too close to home.

We are now, unmistakably, living in the Clone Wars of ministry… where the clones and robots go by names like Claude, Gemini, and of course, ChatGPT.

There’s a battle for truth, for souls, for sanity… and many of us are responding by building digital armies: sermon bots, quote machines, generative content pipelines, and platform strategies that look suspiciously like conveyor belts for charisma.

And the Jedi of our age….the pastors, mentors, theologians, teachers… are under immense pressure to fight the war without actually forming the warriors.

We don’t have time to disciple, so we deliver downloads.
We don’t walk with them… we upload into them.
We are in danger of forming less Jedi, and more clones.

2. The C.S. Lewis You Can Text

The weirdest part? The clones are getting really.…..good??

Right now, you could spin up a language model, train it on the entire corpus of C.S. Lewis, and create a chatbot that talks like it’s fresh out of the Kilns.

It’ll quote The Weight of Glory while giving you book recommendations and affirming your spiritual angst in a charmingly British tone. You can literally sit at your desk and have a theological chat with a digital imitation of your favorite dead thinker.

It’s compelling. It’s comforting.

And, if allowed to become a crutch… it is deeply dangerous.

Because those models are trained on words without wounds.

They know what was said. Not why. Not what it cost.

AI systems are both robots and clones.

Robots in their function. Clones in their formation.

They’re trained on the thoughts and instincts and expressions of real human beings—but they’ve never tasted pain. Never felt the slow agony of sanctification.

Never buried a friend or wept through a sermon.

3. Ministry Without Interns & Robots Who Write Instagram Captions

I’m no Luddite. I use AI.

I was an early adopter, even before the hype rolled in like a tech-flavored tide.

I formerly worked at a church as a full time pastor, but currently, I’m an odd duck… a man who was called by God to pack up and move to do ministry in a land where church staff jobs that pay a living wage are few and far between. I’ve started a bivocational parachurch ministry that comes alongside local churches to fill a deep spiritual formation gap I see in young adults.

As a result, for years now I’ve found myself trying to accomplish big things with a nonexistent workforce. No interns. No staff. No communications team editing sermon clips or writing tweet threads while I go pray on a mountain.

I am the communications team. I’m also the preacher, the teacher, the graphic designer, the podcast editor, the email newsletter guy, and the IT help desk when the mic stops working.

So yeah. When I finish crafting a sermon or writing a blog post, I sometimes feed it to my little digital assistant and say, “Hey, can you turn this into a caption I can post on the gram so I don’t scream into the abyss of promotional burnout?”

That kind of task? The admin swamp I never signed up for? AI’s been a Godsend. Like handing your journal to a robot who turns it into a flyer and doesn’t ask for coffee.

But that’s exactly why this moment is so tricky.

The tools are helpful. The temptation is existential.

When AI helps with the work, it’s a blessing.
When it starts replacing the work...
...that’s when we start handing the war to the droids.

4. Padawans with Wi-Fi: Why Teaching Must Bleed

I’m a millennial… which means I was the first generation to really “grow up” with modern tech.

But the real digital natives? They’re the ones I’m discipling now.

Ages 12 to 20. Gen Z. Gen Alpha.

Gen “I wrote my college essay using ChatGPT while listening to lo-fi beats and simultaneously starting a Shopify store.”

These are the ones who grew up not just using the internet, but bathing in it. They don’t go online. They are online.

Which is why we need to talk, urgently, about embodied presence.

Because…. here’s the shadow creeping across the council chamber:

We are called to the vital task of training REAL Jedi in the age of the Clone Wars.

Real students. Real young men and women.

Real people who want to know how to preach the gospel, teach the Bible, lead others in the ways of Christ.

Here’s the reality: they’re also the same students who use AI to write emails, summarize articles, and help them flirt via text.

They are intelligent. Motivated. But they are growing up inside a machine that thinks for them if they let it.

The temptation for us… as ministers, as mentors, as weary digital prophets… is to match pace. To turn our training programs into content factories. To pivot toward efficiency, reach, engagement metrics, SEO-optimized theology.

I’ve been there. I worked as the “Senior Content Strategy Director” for a network of hundreds of churches. My whole job was to make content that could survive the scroll.

I founded two podcast networks. It almost killed me.

Because content is quick. Formation is slow.

Content is scalable. Discipleship is not.

I’m not training my students to build better content. I’m training them to become human again. That takes time. That takes soul.

Here’s the real danger: when you can ask your pocket supercomputer a theological question and get a thousand-word answer in the style of Dietrich Bonhoeffer... you might stop asking people.

You might forget that the living answer isn’t JUST the information.

It’s the incarnation.

One of my students, to my horror, told me that they started asking CHATGPT to “Answer this theology question in the style of Aaron Salvato.”

I was HORRIFIED, because there is not nearly enough written content online by me to encapsulate all my theological views… thus any AI asked to perform as me will simply be making educated guesses based on loose details it picks up from searching my name on Google.

This is a danger in and of itself. Rather than actually talking to REAL people, young people are tempted to ask AI to pretend to be the people they want to talk to.

The truth of the matter is, my students can Google anything. They can clone my voice. They can download better arguments than I’ve ever made.

But none of it will matter if they don’t learn how to live it.

Discipleship is not a content transfer. It’s a soul transfusion. You can’t shortcut it. You can’t download it. You have to sit with it. Wrestle with it. Bleed.

That’s why I believe this:
If we don’t embody truth...
We’ll raise a generation that can explain the gospel, but not carry a cross.

And the galaxy doesn’t need more Jedi-themed content creators.
It needs actual Jedi.

5. The Swamp of Discipleship

Let me tell you something unmarketable.

I run a discipleship school in the middle of nowhere.

A tiny group of Gen Z students gather twice a month in a church conference room that smells like history and burnt coffee.

We crack open the Sermon on the Mount like it’s a treasure map written in fire and ink.

And we go slow. Painfully slow.

In my Calvary Chapel youth pastor days, I was blessed to be able to teach through entire books of the Bible in the span of weeks or months. It was a gift, and through the teaching, I learned the scriptures broadly.

But in this season, Jesus has been calling me to slowwww down. Give the concepts room to breathe.

So we go, slowly.

Three hours on a single beatitude
Three hours on what it means to mourn.
Three hours on the word “meekness” like it’s an ancient Jedi technique.

We drag the text through our doubts, our trauma, our buried shame and half-baked dreams. We don’t try to master Jesus’ words. We let them master us, inch by inch.

There’s no band or giant LED screen or fog machine. It’s not marketable.

But it is working. The students are growing. They are a close-knit group of friends, yet they are choosing to come week after week to give up 3 hours of their Sunday nights to meet Jesus, both in the text, but also in the room.

In this I must stress… formation doesn’t happen at the speed of content. It happens at the speed of relationship.

And relationship, if it’s going to matter, has to show up with a body.

I’ve been shaped by many books. My shelves carry names like Lewis and Bonhoeffer and Kierkegaard—voices that have haunted me in the best possible way.

But the most haunting thing about AI…. is that it can now sound like all of them. You can literally ask a model to write a ten-chapter book on spiritual formation in the voice of Eugene Peterson, and it’ll deliver something close enough to fool your small group.

It’s wild. It’s impressive.
And… without deep human intentionality driving it… it is hollow.

Because here’s what AI can’t do:
Sit with you at a diner and weep while you describe the night your calling almost cracked under the weight of burnout.

Look you in the eye and stay there while you try to believe again.

Read your hesitations and know when to press in gently instead of offering a resource link.

When a student texts me a theological question, I could feed it to the algorithm. I could grab a GotQuestions link. I could summon the digital clone of my own mind. I’ve got transcripts of hundreds of sermons, journal entries, blog posts—enough to build a robo-rabbi Aaron and let it disciple in my place. Give it a friendly avatar and a warm tone, and boom, you’ve got Instant Mentor™, now with 90% fewer awkward silences.

But I’d rather say this:
“Let’s get coffee.”
“Let’s do a phone call.”

Because the table matters.
Because the tone of voice matters.
Because the trembling, the sighing, the cracked laughter, the way someone says “I don’t know” after trying for ten minutes to find the words……that’s where the formation happens. That’s where the presence is.

I went through a season of deep burnout not too long ago. And yes, I read books about it. Yes, I searched online for tools. Yes, I devoured the articles and blogs and downloaded the PDFs.

But healing came not from information.

It came from the man who sat across from me in a therapist’s chair and let me weep without trying to fix me. From the spiritual director who Zoomed in with a soul full of patience and asked better questions than any robot could invent. From local pastors who talked with me long after the sermon ended, letting their battle scars breathe while I showed them mine. From my dad calling me and saying, “How are you, son? Really?”

It came from friends who didn’t send me memes…but voicemails.

Full of actual voices. Full of actual soul.

That’s how you train a Jedi. Not through data packets, but presence.

Not with download links, but life-on-life scars.

Even Luke Skywalker didn’t Google his way out of deconstruction.
He didn’t podcast his way through grief.
He didn’t take a course on spiritual formation.

He found Yoda. A grumpy green hermit. Sitting in the swamp.
Covered in muck.
And wisdom.
And disappointment.
And faith.

Yoda didn’t hand Luke a syllabus. He handed him silence.

Repetition. Mystery.

A cave full of darkness where he learned that his true enemy was not Vader, but Luke’s own weakness and fear.

That’s discipleship. And the galaxy is desperate for more of it.

Embodied presence isn’t just one strategy among many.
It’s the only way the Force gets passed down.

And it’s slower than everything else.
Which might be the best sign that it’s true.

6. The Clone of Me Can’t Cry With You
(Final transmission from the swamp before the algorithm eats everything)

Here’s what happens when a world chases optimization:
It forgets how to bleed.
It forgets how to stay.
It forgets how to see the people sitting right in front of it.

And that’s why this matters.

Automation promises results. Presence promises relationship.

One delivers numbers. The other delivers names.

And when you’re knee-deep in ministry that feels like failure by every visible metric, when your reach is shrinking and your followers are not engaging and your latest reel dies in silence… this is when you remember what presence actually is.

It’s that sacred, maddening, beautiful act of knowing people.

Their actual lives. Not their curated Instagram presence.

Their fears, their questions, the weird metaphor they used during prayer last week at community that you’re still trying to parse.

Presence means praying for students by name.
Presence means knowing which one of them is walking through heartbreak… and which one hasn’t slept because their parents are fighting again.

Presence means choosing the quiet room with the peeling paint over the online platform with built-in analytics, because you love them more than the metrics.

And here’s the cost of choosing presence: your ministry will probably look smaller.

People may not get it.
You’ll be passed over for speaking gigs and forgotten by the algorithm gods.

But here's the miracle: the work will be real.
And it will last.

You can build robots. You can generate content clones. You can raise up a thousand well-polished, AI-trained ministry influencers who can quote Keller in under ten seconds and generate a five-point sermon while eating a protein bar. But that isn’t the Way.

The Way is slow.
The Way is human.
The Way is with.

We don’t need Jedi who can regurgitate theology with 99% accuracy and emotionally connect like a personality quiz.

We need Jedi who suffer long with people. Jedi who’ve seen the dark side in themselves and still keep showing up. Jedi who aren’t obsessed with content but with character formation. With souls. With sacred slowness.

I still believe in content. That’s why I’m writing this.

I still believe AI is a powerful tool that can be used for good.

But I believe in presence more.

Again… Discipleship is not a content transfer.

It’s soul transfusion.

That’s why I’ll keep showing up in the living rooms and the lunch meetings.
That’s why I’ll keep asking hard questions and sitting through the long silences. That’s why I’ll keep praying with students one by one, name by name, story by story.

Because in the end, I don’t want to make clones.
I want to train Jedi.

And that starts… not with a platform. But with a table.

With people brave enough to sit across from each other and say:

“I’m still here.”

—

ABOUT GOODLION MINISTRIES

If this kind of wrestling speaks to you, that’s the heart of what I’ve been building here at GoodLion. I invite you to help me keep doing it!

GoodLion Ministries exists to help people wrestle with faith, find clarity in the chaos, and follow Jesus deeply.

We run a weekly School of Discipleship for young adults. We write. We teach. We podcast. We make disciples. We hope.

You can help me keep doing this work by becoming a donor.

👉 Support GoodLion Ministries Here

Thank you for walking with me.

– Aaron