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Jonathan Bentley


 Jonathan Bentley

Jonathan Bentley spent thirty years as a technology entrepreneur in fintech and fifty years as a church layman, elder, and Bible study leader. After selling his company and retiring, he set out in 2023 to get beyond a two-decade deconstruction journey—walking 120 miles through Italy on the Way of St. Francis. His theological path has wound from the barefoot Jesus Movement of the 1970s through charismatic and non-denominational evangelicalism toward progressive Christianity and Open and Relational Theology. That pilgrimage became the book Shadowing St. Francis: A Pilgrimage of Sacred Emergence in the Age of AI, a spiritual memoir exploring faith, technology, and what wants to emerge when we finally let go. He writes about spirituality and AI at jesusmoves.org and lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.  


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EXPERIENCES
    Activity Time Information
    Show Date
    Sat 5 Sep 2026 1:00 PM to 1:50 PM
    Title ShortSaint Francis, AI, and the Future of Faith
    Venue Oasis
    Experience DescriptionApproaching 70, after three decades in technology and a two-decade journey through the unraveling of inherited certainties, Jonathan Bentley walked the Way of St. Francis from Florence to Rome. He didn't walk alone — three friends made the pilgrimage with him, a small fellowship whose conversations along the trail shaped the book that came after. He went looking for resolution. He came back with something more useful: a way of seeing. In this session, Jonathan tells the story of that pilgrimage and the unlikely partnership that shaped it — an AI research companion that, by virtue of having no ego to protect and no tribe to defend, kept pointing him toward what the mystics have long known: that the truth emerges from beneath, and never descends from above. Drawing from his memoir Shadowing Saint Francis: A Pilgrimage of Sacred Emergence in the Age of AI, Jonathan shares stories from the trail, lessons from a barefoot monk who reformed a church by living differently inside it, and an invitation worth considering: that the future of faith may already be arriving — and that it may look more like Francis than like any of us expected.