It’s summer of 2024, but I’m taking us back to the 1960s. Alliance family, thanks for joining me today for some leadership reflections. And by the way, this is one that you’ll want to watch all the way to the end. The 1960s in America were a whirlwind.

Economic prosperity fueled the suburban dream. Station wagons packed for vacations, families settling into new homes, rock and roll boomed, Elvis dominated the airwaves, and the rise of television brought the world into living rooms. Miniskirts, bouffant hairdos, and sharp suits defined early sixties fashion. But change was brewing. The Civil Rights Movement roared with peaceful protests led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Young people, disillusioned by war and societal norms, donned tie-dye and bell bottoms, embracing flower power. Psychedelic music from Jimi Hendrix and Janice Joplin became the soundtrack of a counterculture advocating peace and love. The Vietnam War cast a dark shadow. Drafted men faced a brutal conflict, sparking protests and fracturing the nation. Women, inspired by the fight for equality, started questioning traditional gender roles. By the decades end, assassinations and political unrest left America in a state of disruption.

During this time, I was growing up in small town USA, Monticello, Minnesota, where the Mississippi whispered.

Wait a minute, wait a minute. That is not the way you pronounce the name of my hometown. It is “Monti-cello,” not “Monti-chello.” That, my friends, was a computer-generated script, image, and voice. That wasn’t me. That was my avatar. I didn’t write or record those words. I did provide prompts for AI to write the script. We did authorize AI to use a video of me to create the avatar, but that wasn’t me. I, John Stumbo, did not record that. For some of us, this is disturbing. We don’t like that AI now has the capacity to do this kind of thing. For others, it’s intriguing. We’re curious about the positive potential of this tool. I’ll come back to that conversation about the use of AI in a few minutes. But first, let me pick up my story where the avatar mispronounced my hometown.

During this time of cultural upheaval in the 1960s, I was growing up in small town USA, Monticello, Minnesota, where the Mississippi whispered stories and more than 10,000 lakes reflected the endless sky. My summer days were spent on the banks and beaches, fishing rod in hand, transistor radio crackling with Minnesota Twins baseball. I’d skip stones across the glassy surface, find crayfish under the rocks, and on scorching, humid days, there was nothing better than a cannonball into the cool embrace of the lake, although confessedly, with my lanky body and lack of coordination, I’d never made great cannonballs. Evenings were for campfires under a sky thick with stars, the hum of mosquitoes a familiar lullaby, accompanied by the melancholy call of the loon, amplified by the still waters of the lake. I can become nostalgic very quickly.

Our lives revolved around the church where my father served as pastor of a small but growing Alliance congregation. It would’ve been easy to stay sheltered, small-minded, a small church in a small town in a small denomination, except The Alliance had true leaders in our midst. Leaders like Leo Berth, our district superintendent. Leo, with my dad and others, dreamt of larger things. They took a swamp in the Minnesota North Woods and turned it into Big Sandy Camp, a haven for spiritual growth. Big Sandy became my own childhood personal paradise, a place that shaped me and continues to thrive today.

My father saw that our growing church, Monticello Alliance, was unable to grow much more in our limited building and on our limited property. He looked across the Mississippi River and led the congregation to buy a large parcel of vacant land, even though it was a different zip code and county. Today, Riverside Alliance Church thrives, annually seeing hundreds come to faith in Christ. These leaders weren’t afraid to take risks.

St. Paul Bible Institute needed a different location to secure a stronger future, so they did the unthinkable. The leaders of that small college trusted for a miracle and secured from the Jesuits a beautiful 173-acre campus. It was a leap of faith, but Crown College, as it became, nurtured my education and continues to stand strong. The campus and ministry is an Alliance family gem. As a boy, I couldn’t understand or fully appreciate the risk involved in their dreams, but for a lifetime, I’ve benefited personally from and continue to be inspired by those dreams. This kind of visionary leadership wasn’t contained just to our geographic region.

Throughout the 1960s, The Alliance seemed to have many dreamers launching ministries, such as Alliance Youth Corps, the Jaffray School of Missions that later became Alliance Theological Seminary, and countless church plants, each a testament of the audacity of hope. In the decade of the 1960s, our international workers opened new ministries in no less than nine countries from Brazil to Taiwan.

The first LIFE Conference was held in Chicago in 1962. In the same decade, Bud Maynard and Mike Feather led the beginning of Stewardship Ministries, and today we experience the many blessings of Orchard Alliance. Today, it’s Shell Point Retirement Community, a cherished retirement location for some 2,500 residents. But in the 1960s, it was a little more than a pile of sand along the river of one of Pastor Sam Farrell’s preferred fishing locations. The landowner donated the property, leaders like Sam took steps of faith, and I honor them and those like them.

Again, as a boy, I couldn’t understand or fully appreciate the risk involved in their dreams, but for a lifetime, I’ve benefited from and been inspired by those dreams. Not everything they launched endured the decades, but their dreams and plans, prayers, and efforts touched lives along the way and shaped us into who we are today. Dreams are an expression of faith, and faith is confidence that God’s still very much at work in this world. But even in our own Bibles, in the great chapter of faith, it acknowledges that those who have faith don’t always get to see their dreams fulfilled.

Hebrews 11:13: “All these people were still living by faith. When they died, they did not receive the things promised. They only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners, strangers on earth.”

Perhaps that’s my segue back to AI. This technological advance makes me feel more like a stranger and foreigner in this world. I long for the beauty, the purity, the transparency, the holiness, and wholeness of heaven. Everything in this world bears the taint of sin. Technology cannot out-advance our inherited brokenness, yet it is in this world that we are placed and for this moment for which we were chosen.

Alliance family, we are at our best when, in obedience to and independence upon the Spirit, with faith-inspired confidence that God is very active in this world and has much more He desires to accomplish through us, believing for the immeasurably more, we are at our best when we engage the moment rather than shelter ourselves from it. Is AI loaded with dangers and evils? Yes. Is AI a tool that we can utilize to advance the gospel? Yes. We’re finding numerous positive uses for it at our office. Our Alliance Center for Leadership Development is using AI tools to translate our School of Ministry training materials into multiple new languages. By using AI tools, we can reduce the time it takes to prepare training in new languages from years to months. This will help us train an ever-increasingly diverse group of leaders for the church of tomorrow.

We’re also using AI tools to preserve our out-of-print Alliance books and material, translate them, and make them accessible for future generations of Alliance leaders. Every technological advance in communications has given rise to opportunities for evil and good. In the 1440s, Gutenberg couldn’t have imagined his technology eventually being adapted to produce the evil of pornography. Yet, countless Bibles and spiritually beneficial printed materials have circled the globe. The telegraph, telephone, radio, television, computers, internet all are in a long and continuing line of communication technologies that we engaged, knowing that evil would seize the moment as well. Ultimately, my concern is not about AI and our usage of it but about who we are and who we are becoming in this season.

Like our founder, Dr. Simpson, or my father’s generation of decades past, will we continue to dream dreams, envision visions, and take steps of faith? Or will we withdraw into some cowering corner of self-preservation? Who are we becoming? Every ministry that impacted your life was once merely somebody’s dream. Don’t let the dream stop with them.

And just this one time, let’s let my avatar have the final word. You know the line, Alliance family, “All of Jesus for All the World.” But maybe you’ve never heard me say it quite like this. “All of Jesus for All the World.” It’ll take all of us. Does that include avatars?