Two-thirds of pastors now use AI for sermon prep. A third of practicing Christians say they trust AI’s spiritual advice as much as they trust their pastor’s.
AI is already in your church — whether you invited it in or not. So the honest question isn’t should we use it. It’s which jobs get squeezed first, and where do we draw the line? That’s the conversation we got specific about in this episode.
And let’s name the obvious thing up front: for a lot of church staff, this is a scary conversation. We’re not going to pretend it isn’t. But we think the picture is more hopeful than the headline makes it sound — as long as you understand what’s actually happening.
”AI Didn’t Take My Job. It Took Part of It.”
Start with a real example from our own team: Shiloh.
He started at ReachRight as a blog writer, then led our blog team. AI didn’t replace him as a writer. What it did was bigger — it replaced blog writing as a whole. We found there just isn’t much traffic or value left in human-written blog posts for most churches, so we pulled back hard on it. (We have years of old content telling churches to blog. We’re stepping back from that advice now.)
But here’s what happened to Shiloh’s actual job: it changed. The parts that were time-consuming and not especially fun got handed to AI. That freed him up to do the things only he can do — like co-hosting this podcast (an AI co-host would be awkward), and producing far more content than one person used to be able to.
Notice the shape of that. He’s not working less. He’s putting more effort into the work that matters and letting AI clear the busywork. That’s the pattern we keep seeing, and it’s the one to hold onto for the rest of this conversation:
AI rarely deletes a role. It hollows out the tedious middle of a role and pushes the human toward what only a human can do.
This isn’t even the first time technology has reshaped church work. It’s just the latest step in a very long line of them.
Quick Reset: What AI Actually Is
Our audience hears us talk about AI constantly, but it’s worth getting back to basics, because half the confusion in churches comes from not knowing what we’re talking about.
When we say “AI” in 2026, we mostly mean large language models — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini. AI has existed far longer than the hype, but LLMs are what everyone’s now bumping into. And the key thing to understand: an LLM is trained on enormous amounts of text, and it works by predicting the next piece, over and over. It is not a human mind. It has no emotions, and it doesn’t reason the way you do.
That’s why it can do genuinely impressive things and then trip over something a child wouldn’t. Ask it how many L’s are in “Google” and it may confidently get it wrong. It’s bad at spelling and shaky at math, because it isn’t solving — it’s predicting one step at a time until it lands somewhere plausible.
But that same predict-the-next-piece engine now powers image and video generation that’s genuinely remarkable. We’re well past the era of AI giving everyone eleven fingers. At ReachRight we’re comfortable enough with it now to use AI in a lot of our ad creative — and even in B-roll. Our editors have experimented with AI versions of us for cutaway shots. It fooled Thomas’s wife. That’s how we know it’s good.
To be clear, that doesn’t mean a robot makes the whole video. We still have editors, writers, thumbnail designers, a whole team. AI just saved them from hunting down or reshooting a clip. That’s the texture of how this actually works in practice — it’s a tool inside a human process, not a replacement for the process.
So what’s it genuinely good at? Drafting, summarizing, pulling research (double-check it — it can be wrong or dated), brainstorming, and formatting. What’s it bad at? Being a human brain. It can’t edit with real judgment. It’s a front-end idea machine that still needs a person to clean it up and make it real.
Where AI Lands First in Church Work
So which church roles does AI touch first? In our experience, almost all of them sit in the communications and operations world — which makes sense, because AI is innately a communications tool. Its very first use case was writing.
Communications and writing
This is the one we’d flag first. AI is great at taking your concepts and turning them into a polished draft.
A real example: this week Thomas got an email from someone expressing some hurt about a comment made in a sermon. Not a crisis — but the kind of message where a clumsy reply makes things worse. So he sat down with AI as an assistant. He gave it heavy context first: here’s what I want to address, here’s my position, here are the scriptures I want to walk through. Then it helped draft the connective tissue between his points. It saved a ton of time and kept him from stepping on a landmine.
What it did not do is write his weekly newsletter unsupervised and hit send to the whole congregation. That’s the line. AI helps you say your thing better. It doesn’t get to be the thing.
Graphics and design
This is where churches are most comfortable already. Per Barna, 88% of pastors are comfortable using AI for graphic design and 78% for marketing materials. And it shows — Shiloh is on a few church email lists (even ones he doesn’t attend), and he’ll tell you roughly 90% of the church graphics he now sees were clearly made with ChatGPT. Once you have an eye for it, you can’t unsee it.
The appeal is obvious. Making a clean Father’s Day lunch graphic in Canva can eat a couple of hours. AI can spit out something usable in a few tries. (Thomas mostly uses Nano Banana, Google’s image model, through an app called Higsfield that lets our creative team pick from dozens of models.)
One real casualty here: stock photography. We’re generally against stock photos for churches. But if a church is forced to use them, AI-generated images of people now look better than posed stock actors — and they’re getting close to indistinguishable. That business is going to shrink fast.
Sermon research
Thomas is open about using AI early in his sermon process — never to replace the Holy Spirit, but as a research assistant. He built a Claude skill with about 14 functions, one of which runs a full sermon-research pass: feed it a passage or topic, and in about seven minutes it pulls cross-references, commentary context on the passage and the book, and the themes commentators surface — and hands back a clean PDF study partner.
The honest result? He’s not saving time. He’s putting out better quality. The work he used to spend gathering five books and Googling cross-references now goes into the thing only he can do: prayer, sitting in the text, letting God speak. AI didn’t buy him leisure. It let him lean harder into the irreplaceable part.
Admin and operations
This one’s quietly huge. One church we know rebuilt their internal systems with Claude as the central hub — it transcribes meetings, files everything where it belongs, and can reference past meetings when something relevant comes up. Their admin and team communication got dramatically easier.
No church is going to fire its admin over this. But the admin who uses these tools becomes far more efficient — and that’s already happening everywhere.
The Curriculum Question — and the Rule That Settles It
Here’s a harder case. What about building curriculum or small-group questions?
Take two versions. Version one: a youth pastor feeds in the outline of the message he’s about to preach and asks for five discussion questions for small groups afterward. Thomas does a version of this himself — he pulls his sermon transcript off YouTube and runs it through a skill he built that turns his own preached words into life-group questions. That’s healthy. It’s amplifying what he actually said. (He’d never post the output without reading it first.)
Version two: someone types “write our children’s ministry curriculum for the semester.” That’s a step too far. Deciding what to teach your kids this year is something to pray about — to bring to the Holy Spirit and ask, what’s our assignment? AI doesn’t get to make that call.
But notice the seam. Once you’ve wrestled with the Holy Spirit, landed on a theme — say, teaching kids about creation and where the world came from — and outlined the weeks yourself, now AI can help connect the dots, break it into four parts, suggest a structure. The assignment is yours. The assembly can be assisted.
That gives us the rule of thumb for this entire topic:
The Reframe Nobody Expects: AI Helps Small Churches Most
Here’s where the conversation turned, because the “AI is coming for church jobs” panic misses something true about how most churches actually run.
Everyone’s against people losing jobs — obviously. But ask a different question: how often, especially in small churches, does a role get filled by someone who shouldn’t be the one filling it, simply because resources and manpower are thin? The pastor’s spouse ends up running children’s ministry not because it’s their calling, but because someone has to. One staffer absorbs the social media on top of their real job because there’s no one else.
In that world, AI isn’t a threat. It’s relief. It lets people stop stretching to cover the gaps and refocus on what they’re actually called to — which, in a church, is usually the deeply human stuff: the spiritual, relational, pastoral work. Handing the overflow tasks to AI is, on balance, a good thing.
Which leads to a counterintuitive prediction: AI will most affect the mega church, not the small one. Think about who’s actually at risk. The average church can barely afford one full-time person — its lead pastor. The idea that AI replaces that one stretched-thin staffer is wishful thinking. But a megachurch with a 20-person communications team, where one person does only writing and another does only graphics? That’s where some roles are genuinely susceptible, because the labor is divided into exactly the slices AI is good at.
As Ed Stetzer put it: AI probably won’t replace a lot of church jobs — but someone using AI might. The real danger isn’t adopting AI. It’s refusing to touch it at all. Be the person who flatly won’t engage with it, and in a couple of decades the church may regard you the way we regard the Amish — removed from the culture, left behind. We’re all for a thoughtful Christian ethic around how to use it. We’re not for pretending it doesn’t exist.
The Roles AI Can’t Touch — Anything in the Book of Acts
Now the other side. Some roles aren’t getting “streamlined.” They’re structurally human, and they always will be.
The rule of thumb here is simple: anything you see described in the book of Acts cannot be replaced by a machine. Preaching. Caring for the poor and the sick. Discipleship and mentoring. Hospital visitation. These aren’t just off-limits by conviction — they’re practically impossible to hand off.
There’s even a strange parallel in medicine: as more surgery moves to robotics, the humans physically present in hospitals may increasingly be nurses and pastors — the ones doing the embodied work of presence. That’s the category. The raw human stuff can’t be abdicated.
Discipleship is the clearest case
Shiloh spent two years leading a small group of young men in youth ministry. They’d come over every week, ask the questions they didn’t have answers to, sometimes just grab food and hang out. It was transformative — for them and for him. They’d call at random hours: I’m thinking about dating this girl, what’s the godly way to do this? Or, I’m having an anxiety attack, can you pray with me?
No chatbot can be on the other end of that call. And here’s the sharper edge: AI wouldn’t even give the right answer if it could. When one of those guys was rushing into a relationship, the loving move was to say, “I don’t think you’re ready — here are the flags I’m seeing.” AI almost never does that. Its agreeableness is its great weakness. A real mentor will tell a young man “no, don’t do that.” AI is far more likely to say, “if it feels right, go for it.” Discipleship requires someone who’ll tell you the hard, true thing. That’s not a feature you can prompt into existence.
This is why the trust numbers sting. 34% of practicing Christians say AI’s spiritual advice is as trustworthy as their pastor’s — and in past data that’s climbed into the 40s for Gen Z. We don’t agree with it, but it’s happening, and it’s worth fighting for the alternative: real, one-on-one, accountable discipleship.
One practical move: address it directly in your small groups. Just name it. Tell people the truth — there’s no Holy Spirit moving through a chatbot. It won’t hold you accountable. It’s built to keep affirming you, even in your delusions. A lot of people genuinely don’t think twice about it; they used it for a school paper, so they figure they’ll ask it their spiritual questions too. Naming the difference out loud matters.
Worship: Where We Got Stuck on Purpose
Then there’s worship music — and this is where we’ll be honest that we don’t have a tidy, fully-worked-out theology. We just have strong instincts and a lot of gray area.
AI music is real and it’s everywhere; some of the most-streamed tracks on Spotify are AI-generated. People are making worship songs this way too. Gut reaction? We both hate the idea. We don’t want to walk into a service and have an AI voice lead worship — it crosses into that Acts category for us.
But here’s the honesty: Thomas can’t deny that people have been moved to genuine worship by songs they didn’t know were AI. His mother-in-law embraced one without realizing. Would he tell her the worship she offered God was invalid? No — that’s not his place. He’d tell her the song was AI. He wouldn’t tell her the Lord didn’t receive her heart.
For Shiloh, the line lives in the lyrics and the composing. Look at the Psalms — David writing from his actual experience, his real heart-cry to God. The worship songs that genuinely move people usually come from a testimony, a place of real pain or praise. Joining your voice to that is beautiful. And the act of composing — whether on a guitar or in Logic on a laptop — is itself an act of worship and art. The effort and the expression are part of the offering.
So where’s the actual boundary? Producers have recreated instrument sounds digitally for years — nobody objects to that. Using AI to brainstorm forty options for one stubborn lyric line you’re stuck on? Probably fine. Having a machine generate the whole song from a one-line prompt? That’s different, because you skipped the part that was the worship. As Shiloh put it: prompting is a skill, maybe — it’s not an art form. (Thomas’s deadpan: “I prompt under the Lord.” It’s not the same thing.)
We didn’t resolve it cleanly, and we’re not going to pretend we did. The same unanswered question hangs over autotune and every other tool. Generally, we’d want it done by human hands and the Holy Spirit. But we’re already using tools that blur the edge, so the line is genuinely hard to draw — and we think it’s more honest to say that than to fake a rule.
The Stat That Should Worry You Most: Only 5% Have a Policy
Here’s the number that ties the whole episode together. Per Barna, only 5% of churches have a written AI policy. Meanwhile 64% of pastors now use AI for sermon prep — up from 43% in 2024. Usage is sprinting. Governance is crawling.
That gap produces real dilemmas with no agreed-upon answer. A pastor we know was brainstorming a message with AI — not writing it, just brainstorming — when it produced a single line that nailed the heart of his whole message. He asked where the quote came from. AI said: I just came up with it. Now he’s stuck. It’s a genuinely great line. Does he use it from the pulpit? Does he credit AI? Does he say nothing? There’s no settled etiquette yet, and every church will land somewhere a little different.
Thomas’s own take: a research assistant doesn’t get a credit line. If Shiloh compiled research for a sermon, you wouldn’t expect “Shiloh found this” from the stage — that’s just what an assistant does. Since Thomas uses AI as a research assistant and not a ghostwriter, he’s comfortable there. If he were having it write the actual one-liners, he’d feel differently. Reasonable people will draw that line in different places — which is exactly why you need a written one.
ReachRight has a policy (we’re finishing up a template churches can download and adapt — link in the episode description). And here’s the surprising part of what’s actually in it: most of the meat isn’t theology. It’s privacy and legal protection.
The biggest single rule is about data. One legitimate use of AI is analyzing giving — but you never load identifying donor data into a tool like Claude. Before anything goes in, strip every name, email, phone number, and address, and replace them with reference numbers you can decode on your own end. Then you can safely ask, “what’s the average number of gifts per giving unit over a year?” The lazy move — dump the raw spreadsheet in and hit send — is genuinely dangerous. So yes, a surprising amount of a good church AI policy is practical legal guardrails, not doctrinal positions. Most churches aren’t thinking about that yet. They should be.
And whatever you write, treat it as a living document. This technology does things today it couldn’t do a year ago. Revisit your policy every six months. As more of your staff use AI, situations will surface that you never anticipated — that’s not a failure, that’s the process.
The Bottom Line
AI is already inside your church. The roles it touches first are the ones full of repeatable, task-based work — communications, graphics, sermon research, admin. The roles it can’t touch are the ones in the book of Acts — preaching, presence, discipleship, the human work of pastoring people through real life.
In between those two is a wide gray zone, and the churches that navigate it well won’t be the ones that ban AI or the ones that hand it the keys. They’ll be the ones that decided, on purpose, where their lines are — and wrote them down.
We’ll probably revisit this in a year to see how much has changed. In the meantime, we genuinely want to know: where’s your line? Leave a comment on the episode and tell us. That’s the most valuable thing you could send us right now.
Your Next Step
Wondering whether your church is using these tools well — or whether your digital front door is even ready for the people AI is sending your way? We offer a free church marketing and website review. Our team will look at your website, your search presence, and your overall church marketing, then 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.
