The Roman Road

There is a stretch of road in southern France, paved by Roman engineers more than two thousand years ago, that is still in better shape than the highway I took to get coffee this morning.

That is not a complaint about Kentucky's Department of Transportation. It is a fact about Rome. The roads they built were so well-engineered, so carefully maintained, so deeply laid into the ground beneath them, that long after the empire that built them collapsed into history, the roads themselves kept going. They are still walked. Still mapped. Still, in places, drivable.

The Romans did not build those roads for the gospel. They built them for legions, for tax collectors, for trade. They built them because an empire that cannot move cannot rule.

But the gospel used them anyway.

The infrastructure underneath Acts

It is easy, two thousand years on, to read the book of Acts and miss the infrastructure underneath it. Paul walks from Antioch to Iconium, sails from Troas to Philippi, writes letters that arrive in Rome and Corinth and Thessalonica, and we treat the logistics as a footnote — as though the spread of the gospel in the first century were a purely spiritual event happening above the ground.

It was not. It happened on the ground. On specific roads, in specific cities, under a specific political order.

Before Rome, the ancient world was a patchwork of disconnected places. Cities and nations clustered around the routes that already existed — rivers, coastlines, a handful of ancient trade roads — and if there was no road to where you were going, you generally did not go. This is why, century after century, Israel was attacked from the north and from the south but almost never from the east. The desert lay east. Armies did not cross deserts. They came down the King's Highway, or up the coastal road, or along whatever route their grandfathers had marched before them. Geography was destiny, and the geography had limits.

Rome changed the geography. Over the centuries of its expansion, the empire built and maintained a road network at a scale and quality the world had not seen and would not see again for a very long time. More than fifty thousand miles of paved road, engineered to drain, to last, to bear weight. Mile markers. Way stations. Bridges that still stand.

And then there was the Pax Romana — the Roman peace. For roughly two centuries, a traveler could move from Jerusalem to Spain under a single banner. One rough legal framework. One widely accepted currency. One common trade language layered over the local ones. The risk of bandits and brigands, while never zero, was a fraction of what it had been a hundred years earlier. You were crossing the empire, not crossing borders. And the empire, whatever else it was, kept its roads safe.

Paul's missionary journeys were not possible in the world that existed two hundred years before Paul. The infrastructure preceded the mission and made the mission possible at the scale it reached. The letter to the Romans arrived in Rome because there was a way for a letter to arrive in Rome. The churches in Asia Minor received Paul's correspondence because the roads and the sea lanes and the postal logic of empire made it so a letter from a prisoner in Caesarea could land in Ephesus and be read aloud to a gathered congregation.

There has never been a better moment, geographically and politically, for the gospel to move at the scale it moved. And it was built by people who had no idea they were building it for that.

Providence wears strange clothes

This is the part of the story that should make a Christian thoughtful, not triumphant.

The Roman Empire was not a Christian project. It practiced emperor worship. It taxed its subjects into poverty. It crucified Jesus. Its peace was kept by the sword, and the sword fell on plenty of people who did not deserve it. When the early church looked at Rome, they did not see a partner. They saw, at best, a tolerable arrangement and, at worst, the beast of Revelation.

And yet.

The roads carried Paul. The peace protected the travel. The common Greek let the letters be read in cities that had no business sharing a language. The very infrastructure of an empire that would, within a generation, begin feeding Christians to lions was also the infrastructure that carried the news of Christ to the ends of the known world.

This is what providence often looks like in scripture and in history. It rarely arrives in clothes the church would have chosen. It works through tools the church did not build and could not have built. It uses what is already there — Roman roads, Babylonian exile, a Persian king's decree, a census that drags a pregnant teenager to the town where the prophets said the Messiah would be born — and it does its work anyway.

The church has always inherited tools it did not make. The question has never been whether to use them. The question has always been how.

The pattern repeats

Roman roads gave the early church a geography through which it could move.

A thousand years later, the printing press gave the Reformation a Bible that could sit on a kitchen table instead of a cathedral lectern. The press was not built by reformers. Gutenberg was a Catholic businessman trying to make money. But within a century of his invention, the scriptures were in the hands of farmers and tradesmen, in their own languages, and the church was never the same.

Then came the wire. The telegraph, the radio, the satellite, the internet. Within a hundred and fifty years, a missionary in a village without electricity could put a discipleship video on a phone and watch a teenager in another village without electricity watch it the next morning. The infrastructure outran what anyone could have predicted. A pastor in Kentucky can now teach a class that lands, the same day, in Nairobi and Manila and São Paulo. None of that was possible thirty years ago. Most of it was not possible ten.

Roads. Press. Wire.

And now this.

AI as the next road

I think AI is the next road.

I want to say that carefully, because the phrase has been so badly used by so many people in the last three years that it has lost most of its meaning. So let me say what I mean and what I do not mean.

I do not mean that AI is going to save the church. The church does not need saving by a technology, and any technology that promises to do so should be treated with suspicion.

I do not mean that pastors who do not learn to use AI are going to fall behind, or that the future of ministry belongs to whoever builds the cleverest agent. That is hustle language dressed up in ministry clothes, and it should be rejected wherever it appears.

I do not mean that AI is morally neutral. It is not. Nothing is.

What I mean is this: AI is providential infrastructure for the work of the church in this generation, in continuity with the roads, the press, and the wire. It is a tool the church did not build and would not have built. It is being built, right now, by people whose motives are mixed at best. And it is going to carry the work of the gospel further and faster than most of us have yet imagined — if the church will steward it.

Consider one example, because the abstract version of this argument is less useful than the concrete one.

A discipleship book translated from English into a less-resourced language used to be a six-month project. An editor would sit with a draft, work through it line by line, send it back, and work through it again. The cost would run twenty thousand dollars or more by the time it was done. For a small ministry serving a small linguistic community, that math frequently did not work. The book did not get translated. The discipleship resource did not arrive. The community went without.

That same translation, today, can be done in under a week. The human editor is still in the loop — should still be in the loop, because discernment is non-delegable and translation is an act of pastoral judgment as much as it is an act of language — but the timeline has collapsed, and the cost has collapsed with it. A ministry that could not afford to translate one book a year can now afford to translate ten.

That is not a productivity story. That is a the gospel just got cheaper to carry story. And it deserves to be felt as such.

Multiply that by every category of ministry work that used to require a staff a small church could not afford. Sermon preparation research. First-draft curriculum writing. Translation of pastoral resources. Administrative work that used to eat a bivocational pastor's Saturday. Communication with members in their own languages. The math of ministry has shifted under our feet. A hundred dollars used to reach one person. It can now reach a thousand. The multiplication is not theoretical. It is already happening in ministries that have learned to use these tools well.

This is what it looked like, I think, when the first generation of believers realized they could put a letter on a ship in Caesarea and have it read aloud in Rome within weeks. We used to not be able to do this. Now we can. What does faithfulness look like, now that we can?

The honest cost

The honest answer is that faithfulness looks like cost.

The Romans built their roads, and the cost of using them was real. To travel on them was to travel under the protection of an empire that demanded loyalty oaths and burned incense to its emperors and crucified the Lord of glory between two thieves on a Friday afternoon. The early church did not pretend the cost was not there. Paul wrote some of his letters in chains, on Roman parchment, carried by Roman couriers, to churches gathered under the shadow of Roman power. He used the road, and he paid the cost, and he kept walking.

AI carries costs too. Real ones, not hypothetical.

There is the cost of formation. A pastor who outsources too much of his thinking to a machine will, over time, become a worse pastor. The work of wrestling with a text, of sitting with a hard pastoral question until the answer comes, of writing the sermon you do not yet know how to write — that work is not friction to be eliminated. It is the work that forms the one doing it. Lose it, and you lose something the people you serve are depending on.

There is the cost of presence. The technology that makes it possible to do more work in less time also makes it possible to spend less time with people, less time on your knees, and less time walking the neighborhood your church sits in. The temptation to let the tool do what only a human should do — to send the auto-generated condolence, to let the chatbot answer the question the grieving widow actually needed her pastor to hear — is real, and it is closer than most leaders admit.

There is the cost of discernment. AI can draft. It can summarize. It can accelerate. It cannot discern. It cannot tell you whether to forgive the elder who keeps showing up to meetings drunk or to remove him for the sake of the flock. It cannot tell you whether the family that just walked into your church for the first time in three years needs to be welcomed warmly or confronted gently. It cannot tell you what God is saying to your congregation right now. Those judgments are pastoral. They stay with the human. They cannot be delegated, and any pastor who tries to delegate them will, sooner or later, hurt the people he was called to shepherd.

The costs are not arguments against the road. They are arguments for walking it carefully.

The call

So what is the call?

I do not think the call is to keep up. The pace of change in AI right now is faster than anyone — including the people building it — can fully track, and the leader who orients his ministry around staying current with every new model release is going to spend the rest of his life exhausted and behind. Keeping up is not a Christian virtue. It never has been.

The call, I think, is stewardship.

The right question is not how do I master this tool or how do I avoid being left behind. The right question is the old, familiar one: what has been given to me, and how do I use it faithfully? That is a question the church knows how to answer. It is the question we have been answering for two thousand years, in every generation, with every new gift that has landed in our hands.

Practically, for the leaders reading this, I think stewardship looks like a few things.

It looks like building a framework of moral and ethical use before you build a workflow. Decide what AI will do in your ministry and what it will not. Decide what stays human and why. Write it down. Tell your team. Be ready to defend it.

It looks like refusing to let the tool displace the people it was meant to serve. The point of the road was never the road. The point was the people at the end of it. If your use of AI is making you a more distant pastor, a more efficient administrator, a less present human being, the tool is using you and not the other way around.

It looks like touching grass. Being with people. Praying without a screen open. Letting the technology serve the mission and refusing to let it become the mission.

And it looks like courage. Not the courage of the early adopter — that is mostly vanity. The courage of the steward, who sees what has been given and refuses to bury it in the ground out of fear of what the master might think.

The first generation of believers did not have the option of cowering. The roads were there. The peace was there. The mission was given. They walked it under the threat of martyrdom, and they did not stop until the gospel had reached the edges of the known world, because that is what Jesus was worthy of.

The road in front of us is different. The cost is different. The opportunity, in some ways, is greater than anything Paul could have imagined from a prison cell in Caesarea. But the call is the same.

Carry the message of Jesus as far and as fast as you can, with the tools you have been given, until he comes back.