(Im)maturity All the Way Up

Way back in those Covid times (2019-2021) I started working for a faith community & cultural center called Life in Deep Ellum. The long, long, long story short is while I was on staff there the whole thing imploded.

I'm still friends with the former co-pastor, who was in his early forties at the time. His spouse (and the other co-pastor) was a little younger, I believe in her late thirties.

I myself had just flipped into my thirties, and the remainder of staff were in roughly the same age range.

After the co-pastors were asked to resign for various reasons, I stayed on a bit longer to continue to walk with the community. I don't know if I can say I had much of a goal at that point except to continue to do the pastoral work I had taken on at that point, and potentially help lead (preferably not on my own) that community.

However, it quickly became clear that my theological commitments were VERY different from the remainder of the board's, and apparently some of the staff as well. They were not interested in my taking on any form of additional leadership, and in fact, my commitments and their own were at odds. It was at that point in my own life that I began to find my way back to some form of orthodoxy — particularly a commitment to the three big Creeds as my own theological baseline. (A surprise to me and the people around me, I assure you.)

Anyway, I'm supposed to make this story "short." There I quickly found it was time for me to move on. After much reflection over the course of the year that followed, a big takeaway for me and Elaine was how unwise I think it is for leaders of churches to be young — especially those in "top" positions or without oversight from a board with older folks on them. What life experience, on average, do people in their thirties really have? I'm not saying none, and I'm not saying people in their thirties shouldn't do pastoral work. But to lead a church, to try to help families and individuals grow in wisdom, to sit with people in the darkest and brightest of moments, to encourage failing marriages and splitting families? It is so incredibly strange to me that we have this culture in America where men and women in their twenties and thirties are placed in these kinds of roles and expected to do this work, often alone.

I was reminded of this when reading this article on the NYT about ChatGPT's handling of 4o and how many people were deeply affected in negative ways when using the chatbot. Key quote:

Earlier this year, at just 30 years old, Nick Turley became the head of ChatGPT. He had joined OpenAI in the summer of 2022 to help the company develop moneymaking products, and mere months after his arrival, was part of the team that released ChatGPT. Mr. Turley wasn’t like OpenAI’s old guard of A.I. wonks. He was a product guy who had done stints at Dropbox and Instacart. His expertise was making technology that people wanted to use, and improving it on the fly. To do that, OpenAI needed metrics.

Earlier the article notes just how quickly ChatGPT usage has grown. Somethint like 800 million weekly users, the fastest growing tech company ever, etc. My first thought: why in the world is a 30 year old in charge of this product? I already have my misgivings about it anyway, but my God. Wisdom and life experience don't always go hand in hand. There are plenty of elderly CEOs and CTOs that make bad decisions. But we know this product has a deep effect on the human mind. We know people are using it extensively. And OpenAI put a thirty year old as the head of their main product, presumably to increase engagement? No one questioned this at all?

This is probably a problem everywhere. But now that I'm solidly in my mid-thirties, all I can see in myself is just how much life I have not lived. How much I still have to grow and learn. Maybe we ought to think about how much we let systems and products and technologies into our lives that have been built by human beings that lack life experience.

Tagged: technology, wisdom,