At the end of 2025, Pope Leo XIV, leader of the Roman Catholic Church, asked “How can we ensure that the development of artificial intelligence truly serves the common good, and is not just used to accumulate wealth and power in the hands of a few?”
It’s encouraging to see faith leaders engaging with emerging technology and asking constructive questions. AI, artificial intelligence, is one of the newest forms of technology humankind has, with implications for all sorts of economic and social impacts. Cultural assumptions have been challenged by technological developments throughout human history, and these social shifts can help or hurt, but the tendency is for those shifts to happen uncritically, treated more like weather systems we can’t control than structural influences we could plan and prepare for.
Historically, while churches have tended to be significant social structures in the United States, they have shown a high level of skepticism about technological changes and whether or not to take advantage of them.
Cast-iron stoves may look quaint to us today, but in the early settlement of Licking County, the establishment of the Granville Furnace and manufacturing of stoves in the first decades of the 1800s was a development in line with what had become a revolution in heating and cooking technology in the United States. In the late 18th century the Franklin Stove, invented by American genius Benjamin Franklin, revolutionized open-hearth fireplaces with cast-iron inserts, reducing the amount of firewood needed to both heat the home and cook meals. From that technical innovation, a cast-iron stove was the logical next step, and homes all over the continent soon employed them, driving sharp demand for such products, including from the Granville and Mary Ann Furnaces in our area.
Churches, however, were slow to accept stoves inside their sanctuaries. An early history of Granville tells us about the box pews in what is today First Presbyterian Church, similar to but higher on each side than those you can still see across the intersection at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church: “Each pew had about ten sittings, and sometimes accommodated two families. The mother would generally have a little ‘foot stove’ in cold weather, which, as a great favor, would sometimes be passed to the younger members of the family. These tiny furnaces, supplied with coals, were all that served to give the comfort of warmth to the congregation in the coldest weather.”
In the first two buildings that church used, from 1810 to 1817, and 1817 through 1832, the frame building had windows which could be opened in the summer, but in the winter heat was a private matter. Through those years, Henry Bushnell tells us in his 1889 “History of Granville,” “the congregation had attended two services a day, morning and afternoon, sitting in the cold. In the minds of some it was a desecration of God’s house to put stoves in it. [emphasis added] After decent resistance, however, the experiment was tried with two common-place box stoves. They stood in the center aisle; one of them near the front door… the other stove stood near the pulpit… It was a great improvement upon the cold church, but it did not banish the little foot stoves from the pews.”
Clearly, worshipers were cold during much of the winter, but to change that circumstance was for some “a desecration.” They might have cast-iron stoves at home, but in church, they were a convenience that took something away from rather than adding to the experience of community worship. Even generations later, in 1889 the author seems to feel obligated to describe opposition as “decent resistance.” Comfort and convenience seem to read, at least to some in leadership, as counter to the values their institution stood for. Is that still a concern today?
The record adds this interesting anecdote: “One old gentleman who had opposed it strenuously as an unwarrantable innovation and refused to help defray the expenses, realized one cold day how sensible it was, and came to town early next morning with his money ready to help pay for it.”
By 1862 a third church building, their present home, was built with heating a part of the overall design. For over fifty years previously, not a few saw it as “an unwarrantable innovation.”
Ohio and the Midwest are blanketed with similar stories, with the pivotal era seeming to be the 1830s, when unheated public spaces and personal warming stoves began to be replaced with more communal and collective solutions. It wasn’t just Granville: Mt. Pleasant, Brecksville, London and a wide range of other early Ohio church histories report how church stoves were a source of controversy, even congregational division… often resolved only by the coming of a truly cold Sunday, and some changes of heart with the freezing of toes.
What can the adoption of cast-iron stoves tell us about more current technology in our communities today? One parallel might be how early adopters in private homes or personal spaces can start a sort of domino effect, as others realize they would like to try this now tested technology in their pew. There are always holdouts to any tech solution, but at a certain “tipping point” once enough people are willing participants, a comprehensive solution becomes almost inevitable.
A more obscure similarity may be at work in how those holdout non-supporters of new technology make their decisions to adopt a new approach. When does “decent resistance” become obstructionism in the minds of the majority? Or how cold does it have to get for strenuous opposers to change their thinking?
The flaw, if it is such, may be in this comparison that no one today, this side of Amish settlements in our rural districts, thinks adopting central heating was harmful to community values or religious teaching. Taking it away now would be seen as an absolute handicap to getting the work of the church done. As such, it’s an argument to press forward to make use of AI and similar tools in both church life and economic development for today’s Licking County. The countervailing point would be to say that AI might not be a net good for us all…
Which is exactly what many Amish would say about central heating. How does technology serve the common good? Uncritical adoption of technology may be the question faith communities are inviting us to consider, as we seek the common good answer to everyday technologies in our homes, and in our shared involvements.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller and preacher in central Ohio.