From Church to Camp: Digital Religious Authority, Artificial Intelligence, and Counter-Hermeneutics in a Diaspora-Focused Covenant-Restoration Ministry

AUTHOR PREPRINT — NOT PEER REVIEWED. Version 1.0, refreshed 28 October 2026. Author: Pastor Selvin. Affiliation: Covenant Servants House of Prayer Ltd. Includes Supplementary Table S1 with the unchanged 89-post public ministry blog corpus. In this qualitative single-case study, I examine how the diaspora-focused covenant-restoration ministry I lead uses digital media and artificial intelligence to sustain religious authority, institutional memory, scriptural interpretation, and communal identity outside conventional church-centered frameworks. Data include a cutoff-defined corpus of 89 public ministry blog posts published from 2023 through 12 September 2026, selected author-owned research and teaching documents, and a structured reflexive author memo. The analysis focuses on three linked practices: the deliberate shift from “church” to “camp” as institutional self-description; a counter-hermeneutic organized around audience, covenant, textual context, and distinctions between explicit claims and inference; and AI-assisted retrieval, comparison, visualization, and teaching preparation under retained human doctrinal authority. Findings show a documented development from ordinary church language toward explicit camp identity, AI adoption driven by bi-vocational labor constraints, and differences among public teaching, provisional internal research, and later author rulings with distinct evidentiary and institutional status. The case contributes to Digital Black Religion scholarship by examining technology-enabled institution-building beyond conventional Black church categories and by examining AI as a set of systems for organizing work, finding evidence, and retaining knowledge, beyond the question of whether it can generate sermons.