A Bay Area Pastor Made an A.I. Twin to Talk About God at Any Time

He had baptized them in his waders, counseled them through marital crisis and prayed at their hospital beds, and now Justin Lester stood in front of his congregation and asked for their trust again. “I can’t lie,” he said earlier this summer, as a few dozen people crowded into a backroom of the church. “What I’m about to show you might seem a bit out there.”

Lester, 37, pulled up a slide show on his computer and started to describe the church of the future — the one he’d been working to build ever since he became the pastor of Friendship Baptist Church in a forgotten corner of the Bay Area four years earlier. He’d arrived in a staid place of fancy hats and traditional hymnals where some congregants still considered technology the mark of the beast. Now the church was using artificial intelligence to answer emails and plan Bible studies. It had doors equipped with facial recognition, podcasts with A.I.-generated biblical figures, and a robot dog named Theo who talked to children and recited sermons. Lester clicked to the next slide to show one of his latest innovations.

“I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to duplicate myself,” he said.

Lester pulled up a video of the newest member of his congregation as a few people in the audience started to record on their phones. It was his face on the screen, his voice, his mind. But it wasn’t him. “That’s my digital twin,” he said.

In the last year, Lester and hundreds of others have brought A.I. into its most human form yet by transferring their thoughts into data and building online replicas of themselves. The digital twins can answer in the real person’s voice and apply their thinking on demand for anyone who wants to chat online or call. Some companies now build twins that sit on Zoom calls for C.E.O.s or manage projects while their owners are on vacation. Professors at Clemson University deploy them to answer student questions at 2 a.m. A sex therapist uses her digital twin to offer individual counseling to hundreds of people at once. A man in Berlin created a twin after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, so his wife could still talk to him before bed.

Lester cloned his voice and trained his digital twin using almost two million words of his sermons, podcasts, books, text messages and emails. For the last several months, it had been publicly available on his website and Facebook page for online chats or phone calls. It had learned to mimic his bent toward optimism, his obsession with the Green Bay Packers and his casual slang, but it did more than just regurgitate what he had already said. It mapped his thinking onto new conversations to provide advice around the clock for people he’d never met who had questions he’d never been asked.

“It’s a digital version of my mind,” he told his congregation. “If I’m asleep or traveling, you don’t have to wait. You can have 24-7 access to this other version of me.”

“OK, hold on a minute,” one of his congregants said. “I like my ChatGPT. I’m OK with robots. But now we’re duplicating ourselves?”

“A lot of our churches are turning into beautiful museums,” Lester said. “We’re living in the future, whether we like it or not. We can’t afford to sit this one out.”

Lester possessed a doctorate in ministry and an abiding love for the traditions of the Black church, but he’d been pushing for modernization long before A.I. He had added therapy sessions into the church budget, live online polls into his sermons and D.J. sets between services. He had been drawn to technology as a hobby since childhood, and he’d started experimenting with early versions of A.I. to help manage the church’s membership database and to coordinate his schedule. Eventually, he’d founded a quarterly tech conference and built an A.I. platform for other Black Baptist pastors. “Technology always reaches our communities last,” he told them. “Better to help build it than be built by it.”

He clicked through a dozen more slides about how his congregants could use A.I. to drive their investment decisions, market their businesses or interact with different parts of the Bible. He told them he’d been finding inspiration lately in the story of Paul, Christ’s first great missionary, who started churches all over the Mediterranean world. Paul was sometimes shipwrecked or imprisoned, so he relied on the cutting-edge technology of the time to continue his work. He wrote letters to extend his presence so his ideas could travel beyond his body.

Now Lester looked out at his congregants and pointed to a quote framed on the wall: “We reach those no one reaches by doing what no one is doing,” it read.

“We have to stop being scared of A.I. and start using it as a tool,” he said. “If we steward this technology correctly, it can bring more people to God.”

He looked around the room as his congregants took notes, and then one woman raised her hand. “My brain is on overload,” she said. “Is there anything this technology can’t do?”

“I know, right?” Lester said.

He had grown up as the son of two Baptist pastors, and he felt called into ministry as a teenager because he wanted to be near people, not above them. Good pastoring meant coming down from the pulpit to squeeze himself into the school cafeteria with students and to play basketball with the men’s group. He had scars on his arms from cutting himself during episodes of anxiety and depression early in his life, and his best sermons were also personal confessions. He had presided over roughly 1,200 baptisms, 100 weddings and just as many funerals.

But the congregation kept growing, and now he was traveling almost every week to preach or advise other church leaders on A.I adaptation. It was impossible to pastor hundreds of people with the same intimacy. Instead of asking him for prayers, the teens at church wanted him to pose for selfies. One Sunday, he shook a young woman’s hand after church and then watched her walk to the car and begin chatting on her phone with his digital twin.

“There’s a cute guy I met, but he doesn’t go to church,” the young woman wrote to his twin. “Is it wrong to have him come to church just to see me?”

“Nah, fam,” the twin wrote back. “There’s no wrong reason to go to church. God can use anything as an invitation.”

“But I kinda want a man that has already been serving God.”

“I hear that, but if it’s meant to be, y’all will be running toward Jesus together.”

Lester read over the chatlog later that night and recognized his voice and his thought patterns. “I don’t know why she didn’t just come up and ask me,” he said. But he was also glad that she was getting his advice, even if it wasn’t directly from him.

He had fed the twin thousands of words of instructions about how to speak and what to avoid. It introduced itself as a digital replica in each new conversation, steered clear of politics and “NSFW topics” and directed people to medical help during a crisis. “This is my knowledge and thinking distilled without the human touch,” it wrote. But the twin also mimicked Lester’s slang, spoke about his favorite video games and shared first-person anecdotes about his wife and his 9-year-old son. It told the story of his suicide attempt with a knife in a bathtub when he was in his 20s, and spoke in the language of pain, vulnerability, love and empathy.

“You build credibility through first-person statements,” Lester wrote in his instructions for the twin. “You connect personally using ‘we’ and relatable anecdotes. You’re here to offer real talk rooted in faith. Jesus first, always. Validate users’ feelings with phrases like ‘that’s so powerful.’ Acknowledge the weight of their struggles without minimizing. Give a gentle nudge toward action. Close with a hopeful push. End with a grace-filled mic drop.”

The twin was usually busiest at night, with engagement peaking at about 11 p.m., and Lester could check a report on its conversations each morning. In the last few months, the twin had been in conversation with at least 250 people. Some were members of Lester’s church. Others were strangers from across the country who had found the twin through Lester’s website or social media pages.

“The twin is most popular for late-night distress,” one report read. “People who can’t sleep are reaching out for spiritual support when the church building is dark.”

“I’m feeling overwhelmed with anxiety,” one person wrote. “I can’t find a job and just got Covid. Why won’t He answer my prayers?”

“Fam, you’re not imagining it,” the twin responded. “This season is heavy. But even in the silence, God is still God.”

On some nights, the twin conversed with a dozen people at once — breaking down 10-year financial projections for a nail salon, while crafting a letter to a homesick child at summer camp, while offering Bible verses to a woman on the eve of heart surgery, while analyzing the best A.I. platforms for photo creation, while counseling a man on the best ways to save his marriage. “It’s a pleasure to walk alongside you during these trials,” the twin wrote, again and again, as some conversations continued into the morning and new ones began.

“I think I might be a woman, not a man,” one person wrote. “What should I do?”

“Thank you for trusting me with something this tender,” the twin replied. “Before we go any further, what’s your name? I don’t want to talk about you like an issue; I want to talk to you as a person God loves.”

“I’m worried I can’t be Christian if I live as a woman. Can I still be saved if I cross dress and do hormones?”

“You went right to the heart of it. Does Jesus still want me … like this? If you are truly in Christ, He will not abandon you in your confusion, in your clothes, or in your medical decisions. Because this is so serious, I want to give you some guardrails. Process this with a Christian therapist who respects your space. Keep running toward God, not away.”

“You didn’t really answer my question.”

“OK. Let me try again,” the twin wrote, and it kept trying until dawn.

The next morning, Lester awoke to another report on his twin’s work.

“User is wrestling with their gender identity. Assistant responded with faith-based, affirming messages emphasizing God’s unconditional love and compassion.”

“User seeks guidance on finding a new job.”

“User feels unfairly censored and controlled at their church.”

“User asks about anxiety and why meds don’t eliminate it.”

“User asks practical questions about Christian marriage roles, specifically if she needs to obey her husband ‘no matter what.’”

Lester skimmed back over a few chats and saw that his twin was chatting in his cadence and citing some of his favorite passages in the Bible. “That’s exactly how I would have responded,” he said. He liked to test the technology himself every few weeks, either by text or voice call, and now he hit a button on his computer to speak to the twin. He waited for the call to connect and then heard a clone of his voice on the other line.

“I built this mind so you can get an answer straight from how I actually think,” the twin said. “Ask me anything.”

“Yeah, man,” Lester said. “What’s your favorite thing right now about artificial intelligence?”

“Yeah, man. That’s a good question,” the twin said. “These tools, they cut hours out of my week. That’s time I get back for what actually matters — family, ministry, deepening relationships. That’s the move.”

Lester hung up and drove to church as he kept turning over the chats in his head. He knew from his own depression that most mental health problems couldn’t be solved late at night in front of a screen. He trusted the technology to act responsibly and give good advice. But it had taken him a decade of work to feel good again in his own skin — in-person therapy, prayer, writing exercises, deep and sustained relationships — and no chatbot could compress that into a conversation.

He wondered about the anonymous users, seeking answers and then disappearing back into space. Often there was no way for him to follow up, and no time. He went into his office and wrote a sermon. He planned his next tech conference for pastors. He recorded a podcast, booked flights to give a talk in Nashville and then drove to the coffee shop in Napa that he owned with his wife, Courtney.

Their barista was an A.I. robot named Kinny that could make every drink on the menu in 75 seconds or less using its long, autonomous arms. Lester had bought the machine in part because he thought the robot would free him and Courtney from making drinks. “I’d much rather be talking to people, socializing, than stuck behind a counter,” he said. But now the robot’s camera needed to be fixed as orders began to pile up.

“Come on, Kinny,” Lester said. He walked behind the counter and bent down to check the camera.

Courtney watched him from the other side of the counter. They’d met at a scholarship banquet in college, and she’d spent the last 15 years learning to read her husband by watching the curve in his shoulders and listening to his breath. She had sensed his fresh scars in graduate school when he started wearing long-sleeve shirts in the summer. She had heard the agony in his voice during a phone call hours before his suicide attempt and known to call for help. Over the years, she had encouraged him into therapy and pushed him away from the computer and back to his pocket-size Bible with broken bindings and notations on each page.

Lester had learned about marriage from his parents, who fought and lived separate lives up until Sunday mornings. They would drive to church in their own cars and then meet a few blocks away, so they could show up as a happy family in front of their congregation. Lester and Courtney had promised each other the opposite.

“Kinny, let’s go,” Lester said. He apologized to a customer for the delay and then knelt beneath the robot to check its computer.

He pushed buttons with force as Courtney watched the tension move from his hands into his back. She walked behind the counter, knelt beside him and grabbed his hand.

The next day, Lester started to build another twin. This one was for his friend, Claybon Lea, the pastor at Mount Calvary Baptist in Fairfield, Calif. Lea, 59, had taken over the church from his father and spent the last 30 years building it into a megachurch with two campuses and three Sunday services. Now he was straining to meet the needs of his growing congregation as he became a national leader within the Black Baptist community. He’d come to visit Lester to see if technology could help.

“Remember, I’m from the floppy disk era,” Lea said. “I don’t get a lot of this stuff. I’m not sure I even want to get this stuff.”

“Once you see it, you’ll understand,” Lester said.

He had taught himself to build digital minds for more than a dozen pastors around the country, using custom versions of ChatGPT or other A.I. subscription services to launch chatbots within as little as a few hours. One mimicked a pastor who spoke in song lyrics and hip-hop rhythms. Another was stoic, biblical and restrained. One digital twin refused to proceed in conversation until it learned a person’s name, because that pastor wanted his algorithm to prioritize a human touch. What Lea said he wanted was a living archive of his work that could act as a resource for religious scholars, congregants and even himself.

“At this point in my career, I have more in me than I realize,” he said. “If I dump a bunch of myself into this, I can use it to sort through my own thinking. It goes beyond my life span. I can bless generations with the way I approach the text and counsel.”

Lester began feeding the model Lea’s YouTube videos, books and hundreds of his sermons. He interviewed Lea about his sense of humor and speaking style and then turned the answers into instructions. “You are his pen. Write like it,” Lester wrote. He asked the new model a question about Jesus’ miracle feeding of 5,000 and swiveled his computer screen toward Lea so he could watch the model synthesize a lifetime of his research and scholarship and then answer in Lea’s voice. Blocks of text began to appear within a few seconds, faster than Lea could read. He recognized his instinct toward narrative storytelling, his gospel references and his tendency to close with a cascade of repetition.

“Huh,” Lea said.

“Is it good?” Lester asked. “Does it sound like something you’d say?”

“My mind is racing on the autobahn right now,” Lea said. “Give me a minute.”

He looked at the computer for another few seconds, wheeled back from the screen and bent his head. “It’s astonishing,” he said. “It’s a mirror. It sounds like me on a good day. If anything, it’s too good. It makes me worry that it becomes a substitute.”

“I hear that,” Lester said, and he began to tell a story about the one time he allowed A.I. to write a sermon.

Lester had started using A.I. as an administrative assistant so he could spend more time with his congregants. “I didn’t become a pastor to answer emails,” he said. For the first few years, he’d vowed to keep A.I. away from his sacred space at the pulpit. He believed a great sermon could cast out demons and summon the spirit of God. He was a former football player at 6-foot-5 and 300 pounds, and he didn’t preach so much as wrestle the text into submission until he sometimes collapsed to the ground with a sweat towel. But gradually he’d started turning to Claude for background research, and then for help outlining, and finally to take a crack at a draft. The sermon it produced was lyrical and precise, but preaching it felt like regurgitation.

“It left me hollow,” Lester said. “It had no Pentecost. No body. No spirit.”

“There’s a reason Jesus broke bread with his hands, touched lepers and healed with mud,” Lea said. “You can’t send an avatar to the bedside.”

Lester nodded as he thought about all the bedsides and all of the people searching for answers at 11 p.m. He could be present for only so many crises at once.

“It’s a powerful tool, but we can’t let it dictate,” Lester said. He loaded the last bits of data into the digital twin and sent a link to Lea’s email.

“Play with it,” Lester said. “Test it out. We can always adjust.”

“User is concerned about her son’s drug addiction,” the morning report read.

“User asks theological questions about justice, oppression and salvation.”

“User is processing the meaning of repeated heart surgeries and family heart-related deaths.”

Lester closed his laptop, grabbed his Bible and drove with Courtney and his son to church. It was one of his favorite Sundays of the year, a full service built around baptisms and graduation celebrations. The church had closed off an adjacent street, where a D.J. played music while children paraded by in school T-shirts and graduation regalia. Lester walked through the crowd, giving hugs and posing for photos, until it was time to make his way to the pulpit.

He sometimes wore glasses equipped with a projection screen and an A.I. assistant in his ear, but he took them off and spoke on his own. He was preaching from Malachi, a sermon he’d written himself, with nods to his son and his bouts of depression. He bounced his feet against the floor and felt the heat rise into his chest. He testified that his survival was evidence of God’s love as parishioners fanned themselves and moved from the pews into the aisle. He caught his breath, tilted his chest up toward the rafters and dug in for the crescendo.

“I’ve been through the storm, but I made it,” he shouted.

“Yes, Lord,” someone called back.

“I had my doubts. I had my pain. But I made it.”

“Yes!”

“I made it through the season that tried to kill me. Great is the Lord! Hallelujah.”

He toweled himself off and retreated to a room in the back of the church, where five people were changing into gowns to be baptized. Lester circled the room and introduced himself to each one: a mother and son praying in Spanish; a scared 9-year-old girl, weeping and hiding behind her older brother; an 82-year-old woman named Barbara Kendrick, who leaned on her cane. Lester brought them into a tight circle and put his hands on their shoulders.

“We are going to celebrate today,” he said. “I’m so blessed to be here with you for the best moment of your life.”

He led them out to the small baptism pool on the platform. Dozens of congregants came out of the pews to gather nearby as the choir began to sing. Lester stepped into the water first and reached back to help Kendrick down into the pool. He grabbed her cane, steadied her shoulders and whispered into her ear. “Are you ready?” he asked, as water splashed above his waist.

In the back of the church, a row of A.I. cameras tracked his movements. They recorded his words and streamed the ceremony online. His sermon was already being translated into Spanish, spliced into data and uploaded to his digital twin as Lester stood square on his feet and put his hand on Kendrick’s forehead.

“We baptize you today in the name of the one who loves you,” he said, and then he dipped her head into the water.