Most churches are still trying to figure out Instagram.
That’s not a knock — it’s just where the conversation is. Should we be on more platforms? What about Reels? Should we cut Facebook? Those are the questions in every staff meeting we sit in on right now.
Meanwhile, a much bigger shift has already started in how people find churches, and it has almost nothing to do with social media. People are typing things like “find a church for young adults in Dallas” directly into ChatGPT and Perplexity. The AI is pulling real answers — specific churches, with names, links, neighborhoods — from a small set of data points most churches don’t even know they should be optimizing for. The churches showing up in those answers are getting a quiet, compounding head start. Almost no one in church world is talking about it yet.
That’s not the only trend that matters, but it’s the loudest one being missed. This episode is the honest list — what’s actually worth your attention as a church leader in 2026, what to deprioritize, and the filter we keep coming back to: does this help us reach new people, or does it just keep us busy?
The New Front Door: AI Search
For the last decade, “where do people find a church?” had a clear answer. Google. Specifically Google Maps and Google search. Your job was to claim your Google Business Profile, get reviews, optimize your site for local search, and the visitors followed.
That answer is changing fast.
A growing number of people — especially under 40 — are skipping Google entirely and asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Gemini. The query isn’t “churches near me.” It’s “a non-denominational church for a family with kids in the south Austin area” or “a church plant in Phoenix that has a young adult community.”
And the AI doesn’t return ten blue links. It returns three churches, by name, with a sentence about why each fits.
That sentence is the entire game. Your church either gets named in it or it doesn’t. There is no second page.
Why this matters more than the next algorithm change
Search has been slowly evolving for years, but this is the most consequential shift since mobile. The reason isn’t that ChatGPT has more users than Google — it doesn’t, yet. The reason is who is using it. Younger adults. The exact demographic almost every church says it wants to reach. They’re using AI as a first-pass tool for a growing number of decisions, and “where should I go to church” has quietly joined the list.
If you’re not in the AI’s answer set, you’re invisible to that user. Forever, as far as they’re concerned.
What AI Actually Pulls From
The biggest misunderstanding pastors have about AI search is thinking the AI is making things up. It isn’t, mostly. ChatGPT and Perplexity are pulling from a real and surprisingly small set of signals when they recommend a church.
The four that matter most:
- Reviews. Specifically, your Google reviews — both the count and the substance. AI is good at reading patterns. A church with 60 reviews that mention things like “warm welcome,” “great kids ministry,” “easy to visit as a first-timer” will get described accurately. A church with 3 reviews from 2019 will get skipped, or worse, summarized in a way that misses what makes you, you.
- An active, content-rich website. Not a one-page site. Not a site that hasn’t been updated since 2022. The AI is reading your About page, your Plan Your Visit page, your blog, your sermon descriptions. If those pages are thin or stale, the AI has nothing to pull from.
- A real FAQ page. This is the most underrated piece on the list. AI is trained to match user questions with answers, and a well-built FAQ (“What time are services?” “Is there childcare?” “What should I wear?” “Are you affirming/non-affirming?”) gives it ready-made answers to feed back to the user.
- Consistent, current content. Sermons, blog posts, podcast episodes, event recaps. Not so the AI loves you — so the AI has reason to believe your church is still actively meeting and growing.
Notice what’s not on this list: your social media follower count, your logo redesign, your church app. The signals AI weights are old-school, web-first signals — and that’s actually good news for the average church. It means you don’t need to be loud on TikTok to win here. You need to be findable, factual, and active on the open web.
The 60-Second AI Audit
This is the homework assignment we’ve been giving every church we talk to right now. Do it before you read any further.
- Open ChatGPT (or Perplexity) on your phone.
- Type something a real visitor might type — “find a [your denomination/style] church in [your town] that has a strong [kids ministry / young adult community / etc.]”.
- Read what comes back.
If your church is in the answer, with an accurate description: you’re ahead of 90% of churches in your area. If your church is in the answer with a wrong description (out of date service time, wrong demographic, wrong vibe): your website is feeding the AI bad info, and you can fix it. If your church isn’t there at all: now you know.
Run that same query every quarter. The answers shift quickly as AI models retrain, and so does your spot in them.
Content Multiplication: AI’s Best Use Right Now
Pivoting from how people find you to how you reach them — the second trend worth watching is what AI is doing to content production.
For most churches, content is the bottleneck. You have one or two staff members trying to do everything: write the email, post the social media, edit the video, build the slide deck, update the site. AI is finally good enough to take a meaningful chunk of that load off — if you treat it like a multiplier on what you already have, not a content generator from scratch.
The right framing: your sermon is already the content. What AI lets you do is turn one sermon, recorded once on Sunday, into a week’s worth of multi-platform content without writing any of it from a blank page.
What this looks like in practice
- A sermon transcript becomes a long-form blog post (lightly edited, not just dumped). Good for SEO, good for AI search, good for people who don’t have 45 minutes for the full sermon.
- The transcript becomes 3–5 short social captions, each pulling a different idea.
- The video gets clipped into 4–8 short-form vertical pieces for Reels, Shorts, and TikTok.
- The strongest 2–3 minute moment becomes an audiogram for your weekly email.
- The whole sermon becomes its own podcast episode (more on that below).
None of these are new ideas. What’s new is that the work of doing it dropped from “a full-time content manager” to “a thoughtful person with the right tools and 90 minutes.” That math has changed everything for small church communications.
If this is the part where you’re nodding but you don’t have the bandwidth to actually do it, this is exactly the gap Sermon Sling is built for.
Short-Form Video Has Matured
Speaking of clips — short-form video is the trend that’s no longer a trend. It’s now the default format for reaching anyone under 40 on a phone, and the experiments are over.
What’s changed in the last 18 months: the bar got higher. The early days of TikTok and Reels rewarded raw, awkward, low-fi content. That stopped working. Today, the clips that get organic reach have intentional cropping, real captions, a strong hook in the first two seconds, and a clean payoff. They look produced even when they’re not.
The other shift: clipper tools alone don’t work anymore. Two years ago, an AI that auto-pulled a 30-second moment from your sermon and stamped captions on it could get reach. Now those clips look generic, the captions miss the rhythm, and the algorithm has caught on. The clips that hit are the ones a human picked, framed, and titled.
For churches: short-form is non-optional if you want any visibility under 40, but you have to actually invest a person’s attention in it. Don’t outsource it entirely to a clipper.
The Quiet Death of the Church App
For about a decade, every mid-to-large church got pitched the same idea: you need a custom church app. Sermons, giving, events, push notifications, all in one place.
That product, for almost every church, is finished.
Here’s why: the average smartphone user has a hard ceiling on how many apps they’ll actively use. Your church app is competing for that slot with their bank, their texts, their calendar, their kids’ school portal, and Instagram. It’s losing.
What we’re seeing now: churches that invested in a custom app five years ago are watching install counts plateau, daily active usage collapse, and the costs to maintain it stay constant. Even churches with 1,500+ Sunday attendance often have a few hundred app installs and a few dozen weekly active users. The math has stopped working.
What replaces it
Your website does almost everything an app does, and the user doesn’t have to install anything. A modern, mobile-first church website handles:
- Sermon library (better discoverability than an app)
- Live streaming
- Online giving (better conversion on web than app for first-time givers)
- Event sign-ups
- Plan a visit forms
- Contact / prayer requests
The features the app actually did better — push notifications, in-app messaging — those have been eaten by SMS, which we’ll get to in a second.
The straight talk: if you’re a church that already has an app and it’s still useful for your members, fine. Don’t tear it out. But do not start building one in 2026, and do not invest fresh money into one. Put that money into your website, your reviews, and your SMS strategy instead. We did a whole episode on this if you want the long version.
SMS Has Eaten Email’s Lunch (For Follow-Up)
This is the trend that surprises pastors the most when we show them the numbers.
Email open rates for churches typically run 25–40%. Click-through rates are in the low single digits. That’s actually fine for newsletters and content — email is still the right channel for that.
But for follow-up — first-time visitor follow-ups, event reminders, prayer requests, volunteer asks — the right channel is now text, and it isn’t close.
SMS open rates run 95%+. Most texts are read inside three minutes of being sent. Click-throughs are several times higher than email. And — this is the part that matters — first-time visitors who get a thoughtful text within 24 hours of visiting are dramatically more likely to return than those who get the same message in an email.
The non-negotiables on SMS
- Get permission. Use a check-the-box on your Plan Your Visit form, your event sign-up form, your kids check-in. Don’t import a list and start texting.
- Keep it human. No mass-broadcast feel. “Hey Sarah, this is Pastor Mike — so glad you visited Sunday. Anything I can answer for you before next week?” beats every “Dear Friend” template.
- Limit volume. Two or three a month, max, beyond direct one-to-one follow-up. Texts feel personal — abuse that and you get blocked, fast.
- Pair it with email. Texts are for short, time-sensitive, personal. Email is for content, longer announcements, anything you want them to be able to scroll back to.
Most of the church communications platforms on the market now have SMS built in. If yours doesn’t, that’s a flag.
The Sermon Podcast Opportunity Most Churches Are Ignoring
Here’s a piece of free real estate sitting in plain sight: Apple Podcasts and Spotify have a discovery problem, and your church can take advantage of it.
Most churches already record their sermons. A lot of them already post the sermon on YouTube. Almost none of them publish the same sermon as a podcast.
That’s a mistake. Here’s why.
A YouTube sermon competes with millions of other videos and a TikTok-trained algorithm. A podcast sermon competes with the local-other-churches list and a much friendlier discovery layer. People who use Spotify or Apple Podcasts to listen to sermons are doing it on commutes, on walks, while doing dishes — recurring weekly habits in a way YouTube isn’t. And the cost of being there is essentially zero. Your audio is already recorded. The only work is uploading it.
What “doing this well” looks like
- Use a real podcast host (Transistor, Buzzsprout, etc.) — not just a YouTube link.
- Title each episode like a podcast, not a service. “Why God Feels Distant in Suffering” beats “May 4 — Pastor John.”
- Write a 2–3 sentence description per episode. Use real keywords.
- Submit to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube Music. Takes a few hours total, then you’re in every directory forever.
For most churches, this is genuinely 1–2 hours of setup, then 5 minutes a week — and it puts your pastor’s voice in front of new ears every Sunday with zero new content production. We did a full episode on church podcasting for the deeper how-to.
YouTube as the Long-Term Compounding Asset
We’ve said it before, and we’ll keep saying it: YouTube is the platform churches are leaving the most fruit on the tree on.
The short version, since we just covered this in detail: YouTube is a search engine, not just a video host. People type real questions into it (“how to forgive a spouse who hurt you,” “is the Bible literal,” “what does Easter actually celebrate”) and the algorithm serves up content. Your sermon, with the right title and thumbnail, can be that content for the next ten years.
The mistake churches keep making is treating YouTube like an archive — upload, walk away. It’s a platform. It needs titles that earn clicks, thumbnails that signal a real human picked them, and a posting cadence that tells the algorithm you’re alive.
For a much deeper dive on the YouTube specifics, see How Churches Should Think About YouTube in 2026.
What’s Mostly Noise
Equal time. Here are the trends we’re watching get less important right now, in case you’ve been told otherwise.
- The metaverse / VR church. It’s not coming for your church. Not in 2026, not in 2030. Skip the conversations.
- Crypto giving. A handful of churches accept it for one specific donor. For 99% of churches, it’s a distraction with compliance risk.
- A standalone church app. Already covered above. Skip.
- Threads, Bluesky, and the next “Twitter alternative.” These come and go. Until one shows real durability, claim your handle and move on.
- Generative AI sermon writing. Not a trend in the way it gets pitched. Helpful for outlining, brainstorming, sermon prep aids. Not for handing your church a sermon written by a model. We’ve talked about this a lot.
The filter is the same one we keep coming back to: does this actually help us reach new people, or does it just keep us busy? If the answer is the second one, it’s noise.
The Mindset Shift Underneath All of This
Step back from the individual trends for a second.
The thing they all have in common is this: for the last fifteen years, the church digital playbook was about building a presence so people could find you when they were ready. Build a website. Run some Facebook ads. Post a clip. Show up in Google when somebody finally typed your name.
The new playbook is about being retrievable — by an AI, by a search engine, by a friend texting “do you know a good church near me?” — at the exact moment a person is making a decision.
Retrievable means accurate, current, and substantive. It means real information about who you are, what your services are like, what you believe, where you meet, who’s there. It means reviews from real people. It means a website that updates more than once a year.
And here’s the surprising part: the churches that get this right are not the biggest churches with the biggest comms teams. They’re often mid-sized churches with one staff person who decided to take this seriously. The barrier isn’t budget. It’s attention.
Your Audit Checklist
If you walk away from this episode with one to-do list, this is it.
1. Run the AI search on your phone
Open ChatGPT or Perplexity. Search the way a real visitor in your community would. Note exactly where you are and aren’t showing up — and whether the description is accurate.
2. Audit your reviews
Look at Google. Number of reviews, recency of reviews, what the actual text says. If it’s been more than two months since your last review came in, ask a few members at coffee on Sunday to leave one. This is the single highest-leverage thing you can do for AI visibility this month.
3. Build or upgrade your FAQ page
Real questions, real answers, in plain text. Service times, what to wear, kids ministry, doctrine, parking, what to expect. AI loves this format. Visitors love it too.
4. Decide your sermon multiplication workflow
Pick a person. Pick the steps. Pick the tools. Make it a 90-minute weekly habit, not a maybe.
5. Pick one short-form video clip per week
Not five. One. Done well. Posted to Reels, Shorts, and TikTok. Build the habit before the volume.
6. Move new-visitor follow-up to SMS
If you’re still emailing first-time visitors, that’s the swap. Pair it with email — don’t replace email entirely. Just the follow-up moves to text.
7. Set up a real podcast feed
Pick a host. Submit to Apple, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube Music. Upload Sunday’s sermon. The whole thing should take less than an afternoon.
8. Sunset the church app conversation
If you don’t have one, don’t build one. If you have one, don’t pour fresh budget into it. Put that money into the website and SMS instead.
The Bottom Line
There is more new technology hitting church communications right now than at any point in the last fifteen years. That can feel paralyzing. The temptation is to chase all of it, or to dismiss all of it as hype.
The healthier move is to use the same filter every time: does this actually help us reach new people, or does it just keep us busy?
By that filter, AI search is the biggest unaddressed opportunity in church digital right now. Content multiplication is the second. SMS for follow-up is criminally underused. Podcasts of your existing sermons are nearly free reach. YouTube is the long-term compounding asset most churches still treat as an afterthought.
Most of the rest is noise.
Pick one. Move on it this month. Then come back for the next one. The churches doing this consistently for the next year are going to be markedly ahead of everyone else by the time most of the conversation catches up.
Your Next Step
Not sure where your church stands on any of this? We offer a free church marketing and website review. Our team will look at your AI search visibility, your Google reviews, your website, your social media, and your overall digital presence — then send back honest, specific recommendations you can actually use. No sales pitch. Real feedback from people who do this every day.
Turnaround is about 48 hours. It’s free for any church that asks.
More Resources
- How AI Is Changing the Way People Search for Churches
- The Biggest Shifts in How People Are Finding Churches Today
- Ranking Church AI Trends for 2026
- Why Your Church Doesn’t Need a Church App
- Text Messaging for Churches: A Practical Playbook
- Which Social Media Platforms Are Actually Worth a Church’s Time?
- How Churches Should Think About YouTube in 2026
