For the past year, our small team at Brilliance Labs has been building AI tools for our own operations — and, increasingly, helping mission-driven organizations think through how to use those tools faithfully. The most common question we get, across every conversation, is some version of the same thing:
“We can see what AI can do. But how do we know when we should — and when we shouldn’t?”
We’ve spent a long time wrestling with that question alongside theologians, ministry leaders, technologists, and the Brilliance Labs community. Today we’re publishing the result as a living document: a framework for using AI in a way that keeps prayer, discernment, community, and the image-bearer at the center of the work.
What’s in the framework
The framework is built around four things:
- Six foundational principles — postures (not rules) that should be carried into every use of AI
- Four filter questions — asked before any AI work begins, not after
- Two lanes — distinguishing where AI plays an adjacent role from where it can play a central one, and at what intensity
- Four anchors — Past, People, Place, and Prayer — that hold a life of faith together through the work
Who it’s for
The framework is written for anyone in mission-driven work who’s trying to use AI well: ministry leaders evaluating tools, IT teams writing an AI policy, founders deciding what to automate, individual practitioners trying to stay faithful in their craft. It’s designed to be read end-to-end, but also to function as a working reference you return to in the middle of a hard decision.
Who shaped it
The framework draws on Missional AI’s seven principles, Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine (2024), and the thoughtful feedback of the Brilliance Labs community. It is genuinely a community document. Where it lands as written, we hope it serves you. Where it falls short, please tell us.
What this is and isn’t
It is a research project. It is a living document. It is one organization’s attempt to think clearly about an unfolding technology in light of Scripture, tradition, and the calling of mission-driven work. It is not a policy template you can copy-paste, nor a final answer. It is a posture — to be taken up and tested in the actual work.
If you’d like to talk through how the framework might apply to your organization’s AI work, that’s exactly the kind of conversation our Ignite AI Consulting engagements are built for.