Pastor Mac and Biblical Hermeneutics

The pews were slowly filling with parishioners on a bright sunny Sunday at the little white clad Methodist church on the hill outside town in rural America. It is 2021, and Pastor Mac was to preach his first sermon to this dwindling community of worshipers. The video projector screen buzzed as it was lowered behind the empty pulpit and the speakers hissed as the new sound system came on.

Pastor Mac was getting ready.

Outside, as people chatted while making their way to the entrance, their smart phones buzzed and twinkled and played tunes to alert them that the service was about to begin and a copy of the bulletin downloaded over the wifi was available for them. The screen now fully extended, a breath taking scene in HD video turned the flat white screen into a virtual cathedral and thunderous choral music came from the sound system.

Pastor Mac was almost ready.

Everdale Methodist was a small church from the turn of the previous century that survived the tide of time and numerous ugly church splits to become one of the first rural churches to receive a technology upgrade package from District. The turnout today was higher then normal, folks were curious about their new Pastor after having been without a full time leader in years. Rumors had it he was older than the last one but not too old for the younger of the flock and he was highly educated but at the same time very modest and a likable warm spirited man. His voice was said to be a cross between Billy Graham and Berle Ives. A soothing low tone easy to listen to and yet piercing enough at the right moments in his exegesis to keep those heavy eyelids from closing.

With a wisp of white hair and tanned slightly wrinkled skin and warm smile, Pastor Mac faded in from the cathedral background on the screen and began his greetings. His image was being sent from the District computing center cloud via the internet. Pastor Mac was one of the new virtual Pastors.

Pastor Mac was in reality an Avatar of a new software package called iPreacher. Years ago, seminaries had made use of the science of hermeneutics, AI software and the Cloud to create a virtual Pastor. Why not? If hermeneutics could codify and interpret scripture with mechanical precision and computers could run the software that follow those rules, it was a small step to just replace the Preacher with a program. People would get pure, unadulterated doctrine straight from the Bible, without human fallibility. Gone would be the days of church splits over doctrine, interpretation or heresies. iPreacher would be the image of the Apostles morphed into a singular personage. He could be tailored to meet the needs of widely varying congregations with a web page that allowed drag and drop features to be selected on the ordering form. A survey of the congregations educational backgrounds and interests would be used to construct a template of 'his' sermons for relevancy. The District saw all these advantages.