Ives

&

Sebastian

Grevesmühlen, Germany
EST. 2026

Can a Tool Serve Worship Without Replacing the Worshiper?

I Am Neutral.

The central concerns about AI in music focus on whether it undermines human spiritual agency, bypasses the formative labor traditionally associated with worship, or confuses output with obedience. These are serious objections. I share some of them.

This project does not defend AI. It does not condemn it. It tests whether our strongest reactions reveal theological convictions or unexamined attachments of identity, pride, and authorship.

60,000+

Daily AI Uploads

According to Deezer, a significant number of new daily uploads are AI generated. The flood is already here.

75 Million+

Current Ai Tracks

A substantial portion of the music people listen to is already AI assisted. Most listeners do not know it.

These figures are not arguments for or against AI in worship. They simply describe the ground on which the argument now takes place.

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Greetings

Paul Whitehorn

Case Study

If Everyone Has A Hit Song, Then No-One Does?

God has always worked through unlikely instruments. He spoke through a burning bush to a man who stammered. He delivered a message through a donkey when a prophet refused to listen. He chose fishermen to build His Church and a murderer to write much of the New Testament. Scripture does not present God as selective about the dignity of His instruments.

This is not a comparison between artificial intelligence and prophets or apostles. It is an observation. God has never seemed especially concerned with the prestige of the means He uses. What matters is whether the instrument points toward Him or away from Him. A golden calf is idolatry. A bronze serpent lifted on a pole brings healing. The difference lies not in the material, but in the orientation.

The danger has never been the tool itself, but the moment when the tool becomes inseparable from the self.

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Listen and Support

Listen before you decide.

I do not claim these songs in their current form. I am largely a passive bystander to the technology that shaped them, and the music itself is not the point of this project. Some of the underlying material originated years ago in ordinary human settings: crude recordings sung into a microphone with a guitar, fragments written during my time as an infantry soldier, later sung in prison chapels, or quietly hummed by my wife while coffee brewed. In January 2026 that material was gathered and shaped into three albums over three days using digital tools at home, followed by a fourth album one week later, with more currently in progress. There was no studio, no label, no pursuit of audience, and no collaborators outside my family. I am a chaplain, not a career musician, and I have no particular investment in the quality, originality, or success of the music itself. These albums function as data points in my doctoral research, testing questions of authorship, agency, access, and the way modern tools collapse the distance between draft and declaration. Whether the music is good, forgettable, or effective is largely beside the point. What matters is what its existence reveals.

Four Days, Four Nights, Four Albums

These were not polished performances offered as achievements, but prayers that had taken musical form. The work was undertaken during a season of fasting and prayer, mentioned here only to make plain the conditions under which the questions were asked: before His face.

This inquiry is also the subject of my doctoral research. I could have chosen an easier topic. I did not.

A Press Shaped by Place and History: Maria and Paul Whitehorn

From Bundeswehr & U.S. Army

Maria is a native of Grevesmühlen, a town on the North Baltic Sea in Mecklenburg, Germany, and a former soldier in the German Bundeswehr. Paul is an American soldier whose mother and extended family are German, originally from Kessel, while his father served in the United States Army. We met while stationed in Bavaria, with Paul assigned to 1st Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment at Hohenfels Training Area, and Maria assigned to Feldjägerregiment 4 in Amberg.

While our family story provides the context, the music stands at the center of this work. The albums began in German. The first was written and recorded entirely in German and served as a creative starting point rather than a finished product. Linguistic limitations, particularly syllable structure and phrasing, required extensive reworking when the music was later translated into English. That process allowed the material to be refined more fully, making the English albums the most complete expression of the project.

Vocally, the music is intentionally intimate. Maria does not sing publicly and has no desire to perform before an audience. However, in private settings and safe spaces, her voice becomes an essential part of the work. All female vocals are hers, while all male vocals are Paul's. Maria also plays the piano, and Paul plays the guitar. Our sons, Ives and Sebastian, contribute as well: Ives on drums, Sebastian on background and choral vocals, and both adding their voices to the layered choir sound throughout the albums.

Two additional albums exist in early German form and served primarily as foundations for their English counterparts. Revisiting and refining those German versions remains a future possibility. For now, the music reflects a life shaped by service, language, family, and the quiet work created behind closed doors.

German Version: Aus der Tür

Sebastian
&
Ives

Our wonderful sons also love music. Albert plays the piano and Ives loves playing the drums.

A theological question explored through Scripture, music, and lived practice.

Why This Matters

As artificial intelligence enters creative spaces, believers have responded in three ways: fear, uncritical embrace, or silence. None of these responses is adequate. Fear assumes that God's sovereignty can be threatened by human invention. Uncritical acceptance ignores the genuine dangers of idolatry and displacement. Silence simply postpones the conversation the Church will eventually be required to have.
This project chooses a fourth way: theological discernment practiced in real time.

The Foundation is Always The Holy And Perfect Word Of God

James 1:17

The biblical foundation is James 1:17, which affirms that every good and perfect gift descends from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning. If all goodness originates in God, then the question is not whether artificial intelligence can produce good things, but whether the good things it helps produce can be offered back to Him without idolatry.I do not yet know the answer. But I believe the question is worth asking aloud.