Keith Getty, the Grammy-nominated hymn writer who co-wrote “In Christ Alone,” says congregational singing isn’t a relic worth defending against artificial intelligence — it’s the answer to it.
“As we enter the AI age, both the confusing disparity of what people have known to be true in the past and what is the new reality that they’re going to discover in the next one to 10 years will be so dislocating,” Getty told The Christian Post ahead of the 10th annual Sing! Conference, set for Sept. 7-9 at the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center in Nashville.
Getty and his wife, Kristyn Getty, co-founded the conference, and this year’s gathering carries the theme “Symphony of Scripture” — timed to the 500th anniversary of William Tyndale’s English New Testament, the translation that first let ordinary English speakers read Scripture in their own tongue. That history is the whole point, Getty said.
“People would carry the Bible out of church by being able to sing the Bible in their own tongue,” he said, tracing a straight line from Tyndale’s translation work to the hymn-singing tradition Sing! exists to renew.
Getty’s concern about AI goes beyond nostalgia for old hymnals. He’s watched each wave of technology reshape how people relate to one another, and he worries this one could be the loneliest yet.
“With the internet…rose depression, and then social media rose anxiety,” Getty said. “And I think what AI is going to do for loneliness and just the lack of any sense of friendship is so crazy.”
Still, Getty isn’t interested in preaching panic. He wants Christians to respond by getting more rooted, not more anxious, pointing conference-goers toward what doesn’t change even as the technology does.
Related: Hymn Writers Keith and Kristyn Getty Say God ‘Created Us’ to Sing
“I think all the more important that we sing of Heaven, that we think of Heaven, that our trust is [in] eternal things,” he said.
Scripture itself makes the case for singing over simply reading, in Getty’s view — a point he’s made before, explaining how worship music helps children memorize Scripture better than almost anything else.
“Scripture itself is about 20% poems and songs,” he told The Christian Post. “The Bible is more biased towards songs and poetry than any Christian book written since.”
For Getty, that’s not incidental. Singing carries a weight reading alone doesn’t.
“Singing is exhilarating,” he said. “It’s a holy privilege. It is doxological worship to our God and Heavenly Father. But it’s never less than instructional.”
This year’s Sing! Conference will tackle the AI question directly with what Getty called a “first-of-its-kind conversation” between apologist Wes Huff and mathematician John Lennox on “biblical intelligence versus artificial intelligence and the future.” The rest of the lineup reads like a reunion of the reformed and evangelical world’s favorite voices, with John Piper, Sinclair Ferguson, Malcolm Guite and Os Guinness all scheduled to join the Gettys onstage.
It’s the same pairing of serious theology and ordinary devotion Movieguide® has heard from the Gettys before. Kristyn Getty described congregational singing there as “a witness to the world, a witness to the next generation looking on.”
That’s the wager behind Sing! 2026: in an age when AI can generate a song, a sermon or even a synthetic friend on demand, the thing that actually forms people is still a room full of Christians singing true words together.
Read Next: ‘In Christ Alone’ Writers Reflect on the Hymn’s Humble Beginnings 20 Years Later
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