AI is here. It can crank out emails, design sermon slides, even outline a sermon before your coffee’s done brewing. And yes—churches need to use it. But here’s the thing:
AI isn’t human.
It sees every problem as content to generate, schedule, or optimize. But writing a baptism story, planning a worship moment, or inviting someone to trust Christ isn’t “content.” It's a ministry. It’s an exercise in theology, timing, intuition, and the creativity of image-bearers of the Creator.
AI is a tool—like a hammer.
In skilled hands, it can build something beautiful. But in the hands of someone without vision or skill? Without pastoral care? It makes a lot of dents and noise. Don’t get us wrong, there are a lot of nails out there in the world…but when we treat everything like a nail, we flatten what should have otherwise been carefully shaped.
The Real Risk: Not That AI Takes Over—But That We Let It
AI isn’t the enemy. It’s a fast, shiny shortcut. And when the Church leans on it too hard, we don’t just lose originality—we lose authenticity.
What happens when we overuse AI?
- Graphics are done fast and cheaply, but lack emotion and quality
- Social posts feel automated, not alive
- Everything starts to feel like a “Live, Pray, Love” bumper sticker
AI is a remarkable time-saving tool—just like eating fast food. It’s a real life-saver when you’re in a pinch, but a steady diet of McDoubles starts to get pretty old pretty fast. Just ask that guy from Supersize Me.
AI Won’t Destroy the Church
Despite all the fear-mongering, AI can’t know your congregation like you do. And even when our AI overlords do finally take over, people will still crave the connection with other people that they were designed for. An AI Chatbot will never be able to sit with grieving families, pray with teenagers at camp, or feel the room shift during a bridge.
It can write about God. It cannot experience the spiritual.
So the question isn’t “Should churches use AI?”
It’s: How do we use it without outsourcing the very things we’re called to steward—truth, creativity, and above all else, people?
Marketing and Communications: Leading Where It Matters
In marketing, if you do the mean average of what everyone else is doing, you don’t get the mean results.
You get nothing (pretty much).
It’s that old 80/20 rule. The top 20% of effective marketers are going to have 80% of the overall success. So if you’re in the 50th percentile, you’re biting out of a pie that’s only 20% of the whole!
So, how can you manage your AI usage as a church to maintain a high level of marketing and communications output? It starts with a strategy that doesn’t end up in a ditch on either side.
Where AI Can Actually Help the Church
1. Administration
- Automate scheduling, meeting notes, follow-up emails, and sermon transcriptions.
2. Sermon & Study Support
- Pull supporting scriptures, context, and word studies.
- Turn sermon notes into slides, handouts, or small group guides.
3. Pastoral Care & Communication
- AI translation to support multilingual members or services.
- Proofing and editing support.
4. Discipleship & Groups
- Create discussion questions or summaries from sermons or Bible passages.
- Quickly summarize books, commentaries, or theological articles.
5. Accessibility & Inclusion
- Live captions for hearing-impaired members.
- Translated slides, livestream subtitles, or AI-generated devotionals/audio Bible.
6. Security & Facilities
- Smart cameras, building monitoring, and predictive maintenance for church facilities.
7. Volunteer & Member Engagement
- Alert staff if someone stops attending or serving.
- Help schedule volunteers and answer common questions via website chatbots.
8. And yes—Marketing & Communications
- AI can help draft emails, social posts, and graphics—with humans still shaping the voice, theology, and heart.
Where AI Breaks Down in the Church
1. Too Many Subscriptions, Not Enough Results
- Churches sign up for multiple AI tools, don’t learn them, and end up paying for platforms that never get used or actually help.
2. Babysitting the Machine
- In trying to automate everything, teams spend more time correcting AI-generated work than if they’d just done it themselves.
3. Creativity Collapse
- AI can mass-produce content, but not excellence. If your standard is low, AI is fine. If you care about beauty, storytelling, and worshipful design, AI can turn your work into the church version of Walmart Christmas cookies—cookie-cutter, forgettable, and nothing anyone talks about or shares.
4. When Efficiency Replaces Empathy
- The real danger isn’t that AI lacks compassion—it’s that we do. Churches can become so focused on automating, optimizing, and systemizing ministry that people start to feel like data points, workflows, or tasks to be managed instead of souls to be shepherded. AI should serve people, not make people feel like interruptions to a system.
What Will Actually Win: Humans + AI
- AI must be supervised by humans. No AI-generated content should go out without review.
- AI is a tool, not a team member. It assists—humans decide.
- The quality of AI depends on the human guiding it. Bad input + bad vision = bad output.
- Spirit-led creativity > algorithm-led creativity. Our creativity begins with the Creator and His lowercase “c” creators. AI is going to give you an idea that everyone else has already done, without any cultural context to apply it.
- Excellence is an act of worship. The Church should set the standard—not settle for generic.
Don’t Forget
AI isn’t the future of the Church—people are. Spirit-filled, Scripture-rooted, creatively courageous people.
Use AI. Don’t fear it. But don’t let it rob you of the opportunities to be truly creative to the glory of God.
The Church won’t transform the world by being faster. And we certainly won’t transform the world with hundreds of stale, knock-off, robotic social media posts.
We will transform the world by being faithful. And humans with the right tools in their hands are the only ones capable of that.
