Where the Devil Lives

Thoughts on details, noticed and not noticed.

I keep thinking I will hear of a good use for AI, a way the tool could work in my work. I sort of have a belief, I guess, that a tool must be useful for something, that any tool can be good. If you know how to use it.

So far, with AI, all I’ve got is transcription of audio and nightmares.

Nightmares like: “AI-created listicles were cropping up, drawing from McClatchy-journalist-created work … but sometimes getting details slightly wrong.”

And: “The company has also declined to set a policy about issuing corrections to erroneous AI-created work.”

What is journalism without a commitment to corrections? Without concern about details? Don’t we know that’s where the devil lives?

Photo by Daniel Silliman: PLEASE USE OTHER DOOR —>

Recent work

• Reformed Presbyterians excommunicate a white supremacist minister.

• Leaders at a charismatic megachurch apologize for “not telling the truth enough” about a prophetic minister who gleaned info from Facebook.

• Twelve news stories you might have missed, from a change in calculations of environmental costs to a relaunched nuclear reactor to an Olympic scandal.

How to deal with news

My biggest insight about the news might be an insight about what news is for. Increasingly, with social media and the way we interact with news by posting and proclaiming our reactions, what the news is for, is having an opinion.¹ We want to have the news so that we can be right about things, be on the right side of things and say, see? I am right.

But news is actually designed, intended, aimed at helping people understanding the world. News, done right, answers the questions of who, what, where, when, why and how. Not: which side? Not: who’s right? News describes. That’s all. It collects the important details and presents them for our understanding of what happened, what is happening. It tells us how the world is, not how it ought to be.

I want to write the news and consume the news as an effort of understanding.

And then, as a Christian, I want to react with love.

What Derek Sweatman saw

My friend Derek was good at noticing the normal details of church. He loved what I call “normcore” church and he called “forgettable church”—just the mundane good stuff that happens in a community brought together and held together by an allegiance to Jesus and a desire to worship.

Interactions. Quirks. Community. Grace.

Potlucks. Peculiar friendships. Creaky floors. Parts of a service that don’t go according to plan. Prayers, and the traces of physical evidence they leave behind. Leftover sermon notes. The way the light comes in to the building.

The stuff is easy to miss. Both by the people who don’t go to church or don’t go anymore and by the people who so ambitious and aggressive that they overlook the normal goodness. The stuff is small and just happens, so no one can take credit. You kind of have to train yourself to notice. You have to practice noticing.

And if you’re a pastor trying to cultivate that kind of space, you have to work at saying things like, what if this doesn’t need to be blow-out special? And what if this sermon were simpler and more to-the-point?

Derek started working on this in response/reaction to evangelicals dreaming megachurch dreams. What if church was excellent? they would ask. What if you became the next Christian pastor megastar? And he didn’t like the questions and they way they felt in his spirit. He asked his own:

In the middle of all that I had this thought: What if we didn’t matter?

… What if our efforts were not based in a need to be known, but in something else? What if we weren’t all that concerned with being memorable? What if our people never felt like they were just part of the pastor’s vision board? What if there wasn’t a vision board?

As a pastor of a medium-sized Independent Christian Church in Atlanta, he turned away from the model that was packaged and promoted and promised at so many conferences for young ministers. He tried something different. Less ambitious. Or maybe, in a way, more.

He worked to be a pastor of a quiet congregation, and one who was, as he said, “learning what it means to be present in the moments God graces our church with, and to live (mostly) free from the anxieties of platform and influence.”

I don’t know how he’d grade himself on the result. But I can tell you in the process of trying, he ended up ministering to a lot of people. He mentored many young ministers. And expanding people’s imaginations about what a good, healthy, faithful church could look like. Because he could see the normal goodness of a not-special Sunday morning.

Derek died unexpectedly last week at the age of 52. He was pastor of Atlanta Christian Church for 18 years. The loss is devastating.

Derek Sweatman 1973-2026

The ideal pastor

From Gregory the Great, from Derek, advice from the year 590 on what Christian authority should look like:

For man does not love the sacred office, nor does he even understand it, if by craving a position of spiritual leadership he is nourished by the thought of subordinating others, rejoices at being praised, elates his heart by honor, or exalts in the abundance of his affluence. Truly, it is worldly gain that masks itself under that type of honor, when in fact, worldly gain should be destroyed.

1. As is often the case, this phenomenon is not entirely new and not entirely the product of the technology that makes this experience most visible to us today. The way people process news on Facebook is also the way they process it in bars, reacting with strangers and alcohol. But now you can be in the bar all the time, with so many more people, and none of the warm feeling of community.