Church staff teams are stretched thin, and AI is supposed to help. The problem is that most church teams have no idea where to start.
So here’s the specific version. Three workflows, all of them running at a real church right now, all of them things you could build starting Monday. 93% of church leaders are already using or actively exploring AI — which means the question isn’t whether your team touches this. It’s whether anyone on your team is doing it well.
Some context on where this is coming from: our lead pastor has been on a three-month sabbatical, which has meant running the show at church while also running ReachRight. Tired is the honest word. And in that season, the thing that has actually helped is not some sweeping transformation. It’s a handful of unglamorous, repeatable workflows.
What “Saving Time” Actually Means
Let’s fix the framing first, because it’s where most of the argument about AI in ministry goes sideways.
We bought a Claude subscription for everybody on paid staff at our church. Not the expensive tier — just the $20-to-$25-a-month plan, which is plenty for church staff work. Has it saved time?
Honestly, we’re not working less. There is no utopia where the staff does four-hour days and mails in the rest. What happened instead is that we’re putting out the quality we always wanted to put out and never had time for. The bulletin is better. The email is better. The small group questions are better. In that sense, yes — it bought us the time to execute at the level we always intended.
That distinction matters, because almost everybody in ministry got into ministry for the relational part. The prayer. The discipling. The small group. Nobody took the job because they loved formatting bulletins. So the win isn’t fewer hours on the clock. The win is more of your hours pointed at the part of the job that only a human can do.
The pushback, and why we don’t buy it
We’ve made a lot of content about AI, including an episode about how AI can make you a better preacher that was deliberately a little provocative. Plenty of people rage-clicked without watching it. But the substantive pushback was always the same: you shouldn’t want to save time on sermon prep. That’s where the Holy Spirit meets you.
We affirm that. Nothing here replaces the Holy Spirit. But the argument proves too much.
Every technology has done this. Before cars, walking to church was part of the rhythm — the prayer time on the way, the forty-five minutes that now takes three. You could have built a spiritual case for the walk. And you’d have been describing something real. But almost nobody would trade the car back, because what the car actually did was hand those forty-two minutes to something else.
Preparing a bulletin can be a real act of service. It is not the thing itself.
Think of it like a human assistant
Here’s the closest analogy we’ve got. At ReachRight, I have an assistant who handles a lot of day-to-day work — email, calendar, travel. When that arrangement started, it felt strange. Delegating things I’d always done myself felt like something I should be embarrassed about.
But the job of a good assistant is to take work off your plate so you can spend your time on what only you can do. This podcast isn’t something I could hand off. Neither is preaching, or an interview, or sitting with someone in a hard week. Because someone else is triaging the inbox, those things get my actual attention.
Treat AI exactly the same way. It’s there to clear the work that doesn’t move anything, so you can spend your time on the work that preaches the gospel and makes a dent in the kingdom — the work that requires a human being.
And to be clear about the official ReachRight position: we are not trying to get AI to replace the Holy Spirit. AI is not going to pray for your members. That’s your job, and it’s the beautiful part of the thing. What’s on the table here is the admin.
Workflow 1: Turn Sunday’s Sermon Into the Week’s Content
This is the highest-leverage one, and it’s where most churches are leaving the most on the table.
Most of these workflows live in a document we put together called 77 AI Prompts Every Pastor Needs — every prompt in it is something actually in use at a real church, some weekly, some once a year. Over 5,000 churches have downloaded it. Grab it free here.
Why most attempts at this fail
We think of AI backwards. We assume the way to use it is to type something ultra-simple and hope, without giving it anything of substance to work from.
A bad prompt looks like this, typed in on a Monday morning:
Hey, I need social media posts for the week. Can you write them for me? We’re a church in Grand Rapids, Michigan with about 100 people.
That’s context, technically. It’s just not content. You’ve asked a tool with no material to invent material.
The whole model should flip: let AI be the assistant and the thought partner. You be the leader. You bring the content, the context, the information, the judgment. It brings speed and volume. Before any of this, it’s worth having an AI that has already studied your church — tell it to read every page of your website, and prime it on who you are.
The actual workflow
Feed it the sermon.
Go to YouTube, click more under the video description, and choose show transcript. Copy it. Paste it in.
A typical 30-to-40-minute sermon transcript runs around 5,000 words. That’s 5,000 words of real content that you curated, that you spent fifteen or twenty hours preparing and praying over, that you built with the Holy Spirit. That’s the raw material. Now have it organize that material into the shapes you need.
The three uses that earn their keep every week:
- Life group and small group questions. This is the standout. AI is genuinely good at conversation starters, discussion questions, and icebreakers tied to the actual message. This used to be somebody’s job — we had a church secretary whose weekly assignment was coming up with a fresh icebreaker, and she’d spend a real hour racking her brain for it. Now you get ten decent options and pick the one that fits.
- Social captions and carousels. Pulling the quotable lines out of a sermon and turning them into captions or still-graphic quotes is exactly the kind of task it’s built for.
- The starting point for everything else. Newsletter blurbs, series recaps, follow-up emails. Your sermon becomes the engine for the entire week of communication rather than a one-time event that disappears on Sunday afternoon.
If you want the full recipe, I walked through how to turn one sermon into 42 pieces of content start to finish in its own video. We’ve also broken down five ways to repurpose old sermons if you’ve got an archive sitting there doing nothing.
Where we’d pump the brakes: automated clipping
There are AI tools that will pull your sermon off YouTube, cut 45-second vertical clips, caption them, and drop music behind them. Sermon Shots, Opus Clip, and others in that category.
Our honest read after using them: the captions are almost always perfect. The clip selection is the problem. Framing and centering are fine. But choosing which forty-five seconds actually lands is a judgment call, and that’s the part a human editor does much better. Our church posted an AI-selected clip of one of my sermons this week and it came out okay — okay being the operative word.
So we don’t think most churches should be running fully automated AI clipping right now. You’re better off having a person do it, in-house or hired. We’ve compared the sermon clip tools honestly and laid out the DIY-versus-done-for-you tradeoff if you’re weighing it.
Workflow 2: Weekly Communications
Newsletter, bulletin, announcement copy. This is the least glamorous workflow and probably the one that saves the most hours across a whole staff.
Here’s the reality: not every church team has an experienced copywriter, and that’s completely fine — it isn’t a skill set every church can staff for. But good copy still matters. The newsletter still has to be read. The announcement still has to be clear.
What AI is good at here is the craft layer, not the substance layer. The content is still yours — what’s actually happening this week, what the church needs to know, the specific thing you want to say. What it can do is take your material and word it tightly, warmly, and briefly. That’s the hour of self-editing you were never going to have time for.
Why vanilla ChatGPT sounds like that
A lot of people try this once, get something unusable, and rule the whole thing out. Fair — because here’s what a brand-new account with no context produces when you type write an email to my church encouraging them to come out this Sunday:
Are you looking to expand your faith journey? Visit us this Sunday.
Nobody in your church has ever said that sentence out loud. It’s vague, generically spiritual mush, because the tool is trying to appeal to everyone at once and it doesn’t know you yet.
That’s not a verdict on the tool. That’s what happens when you skip the setup.
Build a voice skill — this is the actual unlock
Here’s the piece that separates the churches getting value from the churches giving up.
Make a skill that is your voice. In Claude they’re called skills; ChatGPT and other platforms have their own version. Train it on your denominational background, your theology, some of your sermons — and most importantly, on what you like and don’t like. Then keep editing it as you go.
We have a ReachRight voice skill that we use for our main website copy. At church, I built one for the weekly email. The process was simple: I fed it several emails I’d written myself so it had my style, then trained it on our church’s voice on top of that.
Fifteen minutes of setup is the difference between cheesy AI writing and something you’d actually send.
What that looks like week to week
Part of covering the sabbatical has been writing the weekly email our lead pastor normally writes. Here’s the real loop, from last week:
I was preaching on the feeding of the 5,000 and wanted to open with a joke about it being a surprisingly math-heavy sermon. I brought that idea in, we brainstormed angles, then I had it write the copy. I proofed it, made a few changes, and sent it.
So it’s more than proofreading — it needs real direction and a real starting idea from you. But as a copy assistant, it will get you 90% of the way there once it has good context, and you put on the last 10%.
Working with AI this way is a skill, and it’s one people will get better at over time. Think about how quickly younger generations got fluent with touchscreens once smartphones were everywhere. This will go the same way. Right now it takes deliberate effort.
Workflow 3: Sermon Research in Claude Code
This is the one that’s changed my week the most, and it’s also the one that needs the most careful explanation — because the moment “AI” and “sermon” land in the same sentence, everybody tenses up.
What it is, without the technical part
If you have a paid Claude account — again, the cheaper paid tier is fine — you have access to something called Claude Code.
Claude Code used to be genuinely hard to use. You had to work in the command prompt, the black window with C:\ where you type commands to change directories. That’s how we started, walking each other through it. That’s no longer true. It’s in the Claude app now — desktop, and even on your phone.
What it lets you do is install skills. So I built a set of skills around the biggest things I actually do in a normal week as a pastor, and put them in a public GitHub repo. GitHub is just a place where files live; that’s all you need to know about it.
Here’s the easy way to install it, and it’s genuinely this easy: open Claude, go into Claude Code, and type something like —
This guy Thomas from ReachRight said these skills would help me prepare things as a pastor. Here’s the link. Install it.
Paste the link from the episode description. It knows what to do from there.
The first time you run it, it asks a handful of questions about your church: what kind of church, what size, what denomination, what you believe, anything else it should know, your website. That’s how it gives you contextual answers instead of generic ones. If you’re a church that practices infant baptism, it should reflect that rather than defaulting to believer’s baptism.
What the sermon research skill actually produces
There are six or seven skills in there, but the one I use most is sermon research. I say something like I’m preaching on Matthew 14:13–20 this week, run the sermon research skill on it, and it goes and does a deep dive:
- Passage context and history — the situation the text sits inside
- Key words and their Greek meanings — the concordance work
- Parallel passages — related texts and similar phrasing elsewhere in scripture, which ended up carrying a big part of this week’s message
- Commentary research — pulling from the most prominent commentaries on that specific passage
- Thinking prompts — usually seven or eight, and this is my favorite part
The prompts are the surprising value. They’re things like: your audience lives in this part of town and may hear this differently than the original audience would have — how might that change what they need to hear? It gets me thinking about the objections in the room, the context that’s shifted, the questions my people will actually have.
Put that in context. The alternative is me walking to the shelf and pulling down a commentary, a Strong’s concordance, and a Bible atlas, then finding and cross-referencing all of it by hand. This is the one-stop version, and it hands me roughly a ten-page PDF that’s a great primer for building an expository sermon. It’s probably saved me a couple of hours a week, and I’ve used it on my last ten or so messages.
The order is the whole ethical question
Here’s the part I want to be unambiguous about, because it’s where the line actually sits.
I do my hour with the Lord first. Before any research runs, I read the passage, I pray, and I spend about an hour with just the text — listening for what I need to hear and what I’m supposed to be saying this week. Only after that do I run the research.
At no point does this delegate the role of the Holy Spirit. I’m still praying about it. I’m still writing my own sermon. It’s a research tool that gets the reference material to my fingertips so I can do the actual business with the Lord. That’s the whole claim. If you want the longer version of that argument, we’ve made it here and worked through the broader ethics of AI in ministry too.
The Numbers
If you need something to take to a board or a staff meeting, these are the figures worth naming:
- 5 to 10 hours a week reclaimed by pastors using AI for sermon prep and communications alone, in the U.S.
- 10 to 15 hours a week saved by church operations teams using AI for scheduling and admin — the tasks it’s genuinely best at.
- A $100/month tool that saves 10 hours of staff time per week is a strong ROI for any church over 50 members. Run the math on what an hour of staff time actually costs you.
- 93% of church leaders are using or actively exploring AI.
Sit with the first one. Five to ten hours is most of a working day. How many more people could you meet with in a week if you had that back?
And a genuine question we’d like answered in the comments: is your church actually paying for this yet? Not the AI baked into Canva or your church management software — one of the real models, ChatGPT or Claude or similar, for someone on staff. We’re curious how many churches have crossed that line.
The Part Most Churches Skip
That 93% number has a shadow side. If nearly every church leader is already using or exploring AI, then the majority of your staff is probably using it right now — and the question is whether anyone has said out loud what’s allowed.
What we did
Two things. We bought subscriptions for everybody, which settles the permission question implicitly. And we spent 90 minutes in a staff meeting going through what we will and won’t do with it, which produced a written AI policy we actually implemented.
If your church doesn’t have one, we made a free editable AI policy template you can download. It’s a simple Word document — drop in your church’s information and adjust the limits to fit you. We’d guess 95% of it is what you’d want already.
We’re also overdue to revisit ours. The first time we talked about this as a staff was about a year ago, and the relationship has shifted noticeably in that window. A year ago there was real fear and trepidation — any kind of AI was almost immediately read as something evil, and our staff was touching it reluctantly if at all. Now there’s more acceptance of it as part of normal life. That’s how technology usually goes. But a year-old policy is a year old.
Where we’ve fallen short
To our disappointment: our church has not done a good job addressing this from the pulpit. As much as we’ve talked about it as a staff, the congregation has the same questions and hasn’t gotten the same conversation.
And they’re all over the place. Some people are using it constantly. Some are almost certainly going too far with it. Some are opposed to it entirely and won’t associate with anyone who touches it because they read it as the mark of the beast. That whole range is sitting in our pews, and it’s sitting in yours.
The difficulty is real, especially if you’re an expository teaching church — scripture never directly addresses artificial intelligence. But there’s an enormous amount of theological and ethical work to be done here, and pastors need to be bold about it, because your people are going somewhere for these answers. If it isn’t you, it’s a podcast, a forum, or the chatbot itself. This belongs in Sunday services, in your communications, maybe in a class.
Where People Actually Are on This
It’s worth being accurate about the mood, because it’s easy to overestimate the enthusiasm.
Positive-versus-negative is too binary to describe it. Broadly, the sentiment right now is not hostile so much as not particularly interested and not particularly trusting. There are people at both extremes, but the middle is skeptical. Among Gen Z especially, outside of tech circles, we’d read it as mostly negative — and for a lot of different reasons.
Part of the difficulty is that “AI” is an impossibly broad word. Someone who is furious about AI art or AI music isn’t making the same objection as someone worried about jobs, and neither is making the same objection as someone worried about their teenager’s relationship with a chatbot.
Meanwhile, most of those same people are using it for ordinary things. Photographing a plumbing problem and asking what’s wrong with it. Describing symptoms and asking whether it’s worth a doctor’s visit. Functionally, a more personalized Google. And then at the far end there are people carrying on actual relationships with an AI, which is a genuinely different phenomenon.
So the honest summary is that it feels chaotic. People are scattered, because the technology moved faster than anyone’s understanding of it could. That’s not a failure on their part.
Which is exactly why silence from leadership is expensive. When people are confused and nobody they trust is talking, they don’t stay confused — they go find someone who is talking.
The trajectory nobody gets to opt out of
What’s genuinely unnerving isn’t that AI advanced fast. It’s that the advancement is exponential, and we are still very early in what this becomes. Look back in ten years and parts of how we live now will be unrecognizable.
Underneath most of the resistance is a fear of change, and that fear has good reasons behind it. But here’s what gets missed: there is no putting this cat back in the bag. The church can declare it evil, ignore it, rebuke it, want nothing to do with it. That doesn’t change the trajectory of the world by a degree. It just leaves the church out of the conversation.
And a fully AI-dominated future will contain human beings who need the gospel exactly as much as they do now. The only real question is whether you’ll be part of delivering it to them.
We’re not blind to the size of this. It’s going to shake what it means to be human, and a lot of what the most alarmed people imagine is probably something we’ll have to sort out for real. But it’s an unstoppable train, and we’d rather be on it doing something useful.
The One Thing You Never Delegate
We got asked for a warning to close on — something churches could become overreliant on. Here it is, and it starts from an unexpected place.
The church is actually in a very good position as AI rises, because we hold several of the few things AI structurally cannot replicate.
The gospel first. He didn’t die for machines. He died for human beings, and the church is the instrument God chose to carry that message. We have what people are about to need very badly.
Because two things are coming. A loneliness epidemic, as more people lean into machines and machine relationships instead of each other. And a crisis of meaning around work — many serious people are predicting that human time becomes economically near-worthless when a machine can do nearly everything more cheaply. Those aren’t technology problems with technology answers. Jesus is the answer to loneliness. Jesus is the answer to whether your life still means anything once your labor isn’t needed. And the church is where that answer lives.
Which gives you the boundary. The caution isn’t don’t use AI for the bulletin. It’s this: the parts we hold ourselves are the parts we must never hand off.
Never delegate the Holy Spirit’s assignment in your life. Never delegate listening to him. And never delegate real human interaction. I’m firmly against building chatbots that simulate what a pastor or a licensed counselor would say in a hard moment — because there is something real in human presence that a machine cannot reproduce, whether we like it or not.
The mistake isn’t using the tool. The mistake is leaning so far into it that you stop doing the thing you were made for, in exactly the area where the church has the most to offer. Never giving up real human relationship is a hill we’ll die on.
Start With One
Don’t try to build all three workflows this week. Pick the one that maps to your worst bottleneck.
If Sunday’s message disappears on Sunday afternoon, start with the sermon-to-content workflow. If your newsletter is the thing that’s always late, build the voice skill. If you’re the one preaching and prep is eating your week, install the sermon research skill.
Then do the unglamorous part: write the policy, and talk to your staff about where the lines are. Because the tools are already in your building. The only variable is whether anyone has decided how they get used.
Your Next Step
Not sure where your church stands on any of this — your website, your search presence, whether you’re findable at all when someone goes looking? We offer a free church marketing and website review. Our team will do a deep dive on your site and your overall digital strategy, then send back honest, specific marching orders you can actually use. Take it and run with it yourself, hire us, hire someone else. Genuinely up to you. No sales pitch, real feedback.
Turnaround is about 48 hours. It’s free for any church that asks.
We’d also love to hear from you in the comments: is your team paying for AI yet, and has anyone written down the rules?
More Resources
- Which AI Tools Are Actually Saving Churches Time (And Which Aren’t)
- How Smart Churches Are Using AI Prompts to Save HOURS
- Why Your AI Prompts Suck (And How to Fix Them)
- Claude Code for Church Staff: A Real-World Pastor’s Guide
- 6 Ways Pastors Should Never Use ChatGPT
- 7 Church AI Rules Every Pastor Needs in 2026
