Until now, AI tools have been passive. You ask, and they answer. A new category of AI has arrived that works completely differently: AI agents. Most churches aren’t ready for what that means.
One of us has been an early adopter of agents. The other was hearing most of this for the first time while we recorded, and probably feels a lot like you do: impressed, and a little uneasy.
From Answering Questions to Pursuing Goals
The large language models most of us now use every day, like ChatGPT and Claude, wait for a prompt. You ask them to write an email or design a flyer, they produce it, and then they wait again.
An agent is different. Instead of giving it instructions, you give it goals, and it keeps working on them. You give it access to a few tools, like your email and calendar, and it carries out what you asked for continuously, not just once.
It isn’t fully autonomous. You set up the sandbox. An agent isn’t cracking your passwords or getting into accounts you haven’t given it. But inside the access you grant, it does the work over and over without being asked again.
How we got here
We’re mostly a Claude organization, both at REACHRIGHT and at our church. (If you’re a church, look into Anthropic’s nonprofit discount on Claude. It’s substantial.) The first step toward agents for us was Claude’s scheduled routines. Every Monday at 9 a.m., one of mine checks our website traffic across every site it needs and builds a fresh dashboard.
Then the agents arrived:
- OpenClaw, originally called Clawdbot, turned Claude into a personal assistant that lived on your own computer. It ran tasks on a schedule and pursued goals. It was complicated. I bought a Mac Mini just to run it, and it’s still sitting on a desk in my kitchen.
- Grokbot, from Elon Musk’s xAI, came out in August and was the first one most people could use. You can set up a “boss” bot with sub-bots underneath it, like an org chart for your business or church.
- Meta’s Muse, released about a month and a half ago, was the turning point. It took everything the earlier agents could do and made it simple enough for the average Instagram or Facebook user. It has a cute little face, and the first thing you do is give it a name. Then it asks for access to your email and calendar, and it starts getting things done.
Every major AI company is following. OpenAI has released one, and we’ve heard Anthropic’s is in early preview. Agents will soon be everywhere.
What it actually feels like
The first thing I asked Muse to do was pull my son’s basketball schedule, which arrives by email and lives in a separate app, into my Google Calendar. After my experience with OpenClaw, I expected hours of fiddling to get it working once and then never again. Instead, every one of my son’s games has shown up in my calendar since I set it up a month ago.
It feels like science fiction becoming normal life: everyone gets their own Jarvis.
What an Agent Can Do for a Church Staff
My assistant, Abby, does three core things that turn into most of her other work: she manages my inbox, my calendar, and my travel. (Abby, your job is safe.) But I’ve found that some tasks I relied on her for are now done more efficiently by AI tools.
Muse, Grokbot, and the others are already ready to handle a lot of a pastor’s administrative work:
- Email triage. I use an inbox-zero system where every message gets sorted into Action, Read, Needs Direction, or Working On, so I only see what I need today. An agent can do that for a personal or church account. It may ask you a few questions, like “Where should this kind of email go?”, but it can do it about as well as a person, and better than a person you’re just starting to train.
- Routing. It can send emails on your general church account to the right staff member.
- Calendar management. Connect your Google Calendar and it can schedule things for you.
- Drafting messages. Want to grab coffee with someone? It can draft the note so it’s ready to send.
That’s the floor, not the ceiling. It’s what an agent does on day one.
We’ve seen it firsthand. Our pastor’s wife, who leads our women’s ministry, had been struggling with organization on a few projects. I helped her set up Muse, and she was blown away. Now I get two or three emails and texts a day from her agent with updates on things I’ve asked about.
And it’s not a steep learning curve. It’s probably easier than signing up for ChatGPT. You download the app and talk to it or text it.
Will it replace ChatGPT?
For a lot of people, probably. You can ask an agent any question you’d ask ChatGPT. For many people, especially those who aren’t very tech-forward, an agent from the company behind their Instagram and Facebook will be their first real experience with AI, and it already knows a lot about them.
For more technical work it won’t replace everything. I usually have Claude Code open behind my other windows because we build things constantly. A friend who runs a physical product business has a team of Grokbots, managed by a supervisor bot, handling customer support requests like “my shipment never arrived.” You can do very complex things with agents. Most churches won’t need to.
Don’t be the blinking VCR
My biggest fear is a pattern I’ve watched play out generation after generation: people reach a certain age and decide, “Nah, I’m not learning that.” That’s why my grandparents’ VCR always blinked 12:00, and why my dad never really learned email.
Whatever your reason, conviction or just not wanting to, if that’s your posture toward AI, the world will pass you by. You’ll be like the Amish.
The Questions We Can’t Fully Answer Yet
This is the part where we’re honest that we don’t have every answer.
”It wants my email and calendar?”
That was our first gut reaction. For people in ministry, email holds sensitive things: prayer requests, health information, struggles in someone’s family or marriage. It’s normal and good for ministry leaders to talk about those things. But now an AI is reading them.
A few months ago, I would have told you never to do this. Here’s where I’ve landed now: real privacy in your digital communication is quickly coming to an end. You may never connect an agent to your own inbox, but you can’t control the inboxes of the people you email. The moment someone with an agent reads your message, it’s processed, and you’ve almost certainly already emailed people who use agents. Our newsletter alone goes to thousands of people whose agents are sorting it.
It’s a bit like going out in public: if you’re out in public, you can end up on someone’s camera. Using the internet increasingly works the same way.
Practical takeaway: be very careful about sending anything truly private in writing. If something must stay confidential, digital is no longer the place for it.
That has an upside. If we share less over email and text, we’ll share more in person, and that pushes people toward church and real community. What the enemy means for evil, the Lord redeems for good.
What about church finances and giving?
Agents are already being connected to people’s banking. The obvious next question is what happens when they reach church finances and giving records.
I realized something while we were recording. Every month, we email our church council the financials before our meeting. I know some of our council members use AI agents to process their email. So whether we like it or not, at least one agent already has our financial documents, just because that’s how email works now. I suspect most churches are in the same position.
My own policy so far: when I’ve used Claude to analyze our giving, I strip out every piece of personally identifying information first, including names, emails, phone numbers, and addresses, and give it only the numbers. I stand by that. But it would be naive to think AI doesn’t already see some of our giving data through other people’s inboxes.
We’re working this out alongside you. How is your church protecting people’s privacy with tools like this? Tell us in the comments.
The early warning signs
There have already been problems:
- Amazon blocked Muse from its platform over unauthorized agent access. (Part of that is business: Amazon’s model is frictionless buying, and agents shopping around for the best deal on Tide Pods threaten it.)
- Early rollouts of agents have had reports of them deleting user data by accident.
- In the AI race, safety often looks like a low priority.
People Will Find Churches Through Their Agents
This is the one churches most need to hear. People already ask their agents, “What church should I visit this week? What time are services? Put the best church for me on my calendar for this weekend.” In some cases, the agent makes the decision without the person even being involved.
That’s happening right now. If your church’s information isn’t clear and findable online, an agent can’t recommend you. (This is the same work we’ve talked about for showing up in ChatGPT’s church recommendations.)
People are also starting to trust agents with money. We spend around $20,000 a month on ads at REACHRIGHT, and AI now prepares every adjustment to that spend. All I do is click approve. I rarely change what it recommends. I have no plans to remove myself from that decision, but it has proven it can spend efficiently without me. For the record, I would not give Muse your credit card the day after you give it your calendar.
Where We Land
Be cautious, but get your hands on it
We’re generally positive about AI, but not naive. Our advice:
- Research it.
- Be cautious. Don’t take unnecessary risks.
- Dabble anyway. Start using these tools, for your own growth and so you can relate to the people you minister to. Don’t get left behind.
The growing pains will be real
We’re not going to sugarcoat it. As we recorded, hacking was spiking across the internet. My son’s school had to cancel classes after its entire network was hacked and taken offline. A vulnerability in PHP, which runs roughly 70% of the web, had gone unnoticed for about a decade. The newest AI found it almost immediately, and it was exploited at massive scale. We had to emergency-patch the several hundred church websites we manage.
People will lose jobs, and at first it won’t be mostly blue-collar work. It will be work like ours: anything done on a computer, like data entry, programming, and the hands-on work of web design that REACHRIGHT was built on. Sadly, some of the biggest givers in our churches will be among the people affected.
It’s even reaching video. We film this podcast with one camera, but our editor recently sent back footage from a side angle we never shot. AI generated it, including parts of the background and an arm the original camera never captured, and it looked seamless. Meanwhile, a member of our sales team in South Africa is so good on camera that people constantly comment “stop using AI” on her ads, even though it’s 100% her. (For the record, every episode of this podcast so far has been the two of us, not AI avatars.)
The prevailing approach is growth at any cost, with the consequences left for someone else. That seems to be the U.S. government’s position too, because slowing down means letting countries with different agendas take the lead. Buckle up.
The church is uniquely positioned
AI will create deep new societal problems. Along with the job upheaval, we’re already seeing people isolate themselves, befriend AI, and even form romantic attachments to it. An agent with a name and an animated face that manages your grocery list, answers your email, and eventually hears about your marriage problems feels like a much scarier version of that.
We don’t have to fear it. The church is uniquely positioned to be the answer to AI’s worst effects: the answer to loneliness, to meaninglessness, and to newly empty hours. Jesus is the answer to all of it. These tools can also save church staffs a lot of time. But mostly, we believe this will push people toward real community, real relationships, and the Lord.
We think it could be the church’s finest hour. And we can’t see any scenario where Jesus isn’t Lord at the end of it.
Your Next Step
When someone’s AI agent goes looking for a church this weekend, will it find yours? We offer a free church marketing and website review. Our team will look at how findable your church is online, from local search to AI recommendations, and send back honest, specific recommendations you can actually use. No sales pitch. Real feedback.
Turnaround is about 48 hours. It’s free for any church that asks.
More Resources
- AI Agents for Churches: What to Hand Off, and What Never To
- How to Show Up When People Ask ChatGPT for Church Recommendations
- Which Church Staff Roles AI Will Replace First
- AI in Churches: Where Does It Cross the Line?
- The AI Church Workflow That’s Saving Entire Staff Teams Hours Every Week
- AI Just Changed the Rules for Church Marketing (Again)
