AI Drone Swarms – a parable for the coming church?
In 2019, the film Angel Has Fallen, Morgan Freeman, playing the role of the President of the United States, is fishing in a small boat on a remote lake.
Trouble arrives in the form of a terrifying swarm of black, delta-winged flying drones that lock onto targets and wipe out the Presidential guard stationed around the lake’s perimeter, before moving on to assassinate the President. No spoilers…
The drone swarm scene cuts away periodically to show a hand operating a ‘kill-no kill’ remote-control device: life and death in his hands.
In the early 2000s I took my A-Level Chemistry students to the annual Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition. We were all agog walking past huge portraits of Isaac Newton, Humphrey Day, Michael Faraday and the like, up and down the corridors of the rather beautiful Georgian Royal Society building overlooking St James’ Park. One of the exhibitions was manned by a few postgraduate students researching butterfly flight. They showed us slow-motion video footage of how butterflies use their wings to fly and navigate in small spaces and were quite open about the project’s Ministry of Defence funding and the purpose - to manufacture miniature surveillance drones.
Twenty-five years on, and the technology is in use.
But now, in 2026, the technology has moved on even further: the human operator has been removed. Fully autonomous drone swarms, in which each drone learns from its flying-formation neighbours, locates and attacks a target without human instruction and returns to base, have arrived. AI-Controlled Military Drone Swarms.
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How can this chilling technology be a parable for the body of Christ?
One of the surprising aspects of Jesus’s conversation with Nicodemus, the Pharisee who ‘came by night’ to wrestle over some theological points, is Jesus’s rather cutting comment, ‘How is it that you, a teacher of Israel, do not these things?’ John 3v10
Apart from the infamous statement to Nicodemus that he needed to be ‘born again’, Jesus went on to teach Nicodemus about the Holy Spirit:
‘The wind blows where it will, you hear it, but you can’t say where it comes from or where it’s goes. So is everyone born of the Spirit’ John 3v8
Whilst this was a 1:1 conversation with Nicodemus, in Jesus’s mind was a larger picture ‘everyone’, plural, all believers. Christianity is not a religion in the sense that its followers attempt to adhere to a set of external commands. It’s a mass of people blown here and there not by a written command, papal decree, or denominational headquarters, but by an internal weather system…the Spirit of God.
Combine that plural picture with the teaching in 1Cor 12 and elsewhere that the church is the body of Christ. And that Gal 2v20, Romans 6v1-6, Col 3v3, and John 15, and we begin to see the church less and less as an organisation but that its ‘organisation’ is directed, not by decree, but by the Father, the Son, and the Spirit internally abiding in each believer.
Near where I live in North Somerset is one of the gathering locations for starlings who then take to flight in thousands to perform seemingly orchestrated ‘murmurations’. Each starling, surely, is an autonomous bird, and yet there seems to be a submission to a collective consciousness so that the whole mass of birds acts as a coordinated ‘body’ and creates intricate and beautiful 3D patterns in the sky.
‘Consider the ant…they have no captain, overseer or ruler’ Prov 6v6
Like ants, fully automated drone swarms have no leader, and yet the colony survives. Each ant has a particular role, making individual decisions and yet those decisions are coordinated with the overall community, and the community of autonomous ants seem to act as one organism.
So it is with the body of Christ. Each believer is directed by the ‘wind’, by the Spirit, and yet act collectively as a body.
‘But to each one of us grace was given…and Christ Himself gave some to be apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry and the building up of the body of Christ’ Eph 4v7-12
There are different gifts but the same Spirit, different ministries, but the same Lord…the manifestation of the Spirit is given to each one for he profit of all: to one a word of wisdom, to another a word of knowledge, to another faith, to another gifts of healings, prophecy, tongues and interpretation of tongues, but one and the same Spirit works all of this, distributing to each one as He wills’ 1Cor12 v 4-11
‘Whenever you come together, each of you has a psalm, a revelation, a tongue, an interpretation…’ 1 Cor 14v26
The picture here of the church is a dynamic living organism, coordinated by God Himself, living in each believer. Together, then, however its leadership is formed, its leaders are only recognised as leaders because they exhibit this Spirit-led, born-again life, which is not dependent on an external authority.
‘Consider the ant…they have no captain, overseer or ruler’
Note this: not one of the churches in the New Testament, Jerusalem, Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Galatia, Rome and so on, had one leader. There were pastors, but no single Pastor; there were ministers, but no Minister; there were priests, but no Priest, no Vicar, no Orthodox Archimandrites, no ‘lead’ elders, and so on. Elders were appointed by apostles, and once appointed, were the authority locally. The various ministries of apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers, and anyone exercising a spiritual gift, all functioned whilst recognising the spiritual authority of the local eldership.
A drone swarm as a metaphor for the body of Christ – the church
Conclusion.
Can you imagine a church with plural elderships, not solitary leaders? A church in which every member is being blown around, or ‘led by’ by the Spirit of God? A church in which every member is discipled by Christ? A church whose elders are appointed for their spiritual maturity, not their worldly expertise e.g. management experience, counselling qualifications, or ability to teach.
This is the body of Christ, whose life is Christ Himself, coordinating His own body just as our brains coordinate the workings of each part, or each cell. Every cell in your body functions in its own way, but it is alive with the same life - yours. Its name, if you like, is your name. My name is John Stevens, so if a cell in my liver were being interviewed and was asked, ‘Whose life are you alive with?’ the cell would answer ‘John Stevens’. The interviewer might then ask, ‘But are you not an autonomous living cell, making your own decision?’ The answer would be ‘Of course. But I am just a small cell of John Stevens, we are one, not two, and so my choices are John Stevens’ choices’.
A drone swarm as a metaphor for the body of Christ – the church? Yes. Separate believers coordinated by a guidance system not of preprogrammed AI software, but the Spirit of God, not to attack and destroy, but to be the embodiment of the love of God to the world.