Church tech is a crowded space, and everybody has something to sell you. So we’re cutting through the noise and ranking the biggest church tech trends right now: what to invest in, what deserves some caution, and what you can safely ignore.
We’re the church tech guys. (Not the church tech bros. In Hawaii, maybe the church tech braddahs.) But this isn’t your grandma’s list of church tech trends. You already know to be on social media, have a good website, send email, and offer online giving. As much as we love church email, it’s not what this is about. These are newer trends, mostly from the last year or so, that some churches have adopted and some haven’t.
Tech That Strengthens Community vs. Tech That Replaces It
AI has turned church tech into a question of discernment. Technology can help us carry out our mission. In some new ways, it can also start to replace the mission, and that’s not good.
There’s more pushback on technology in churches than we’ve ever seen, and that’s understandable. Nothing has ever been as transformational as what’s coming, and most of us don’t realize how much AI has already changed our lives. There are AI protests outside major Silicon Valley headquarters right now, with hundreds or thousands of people picketing. That fear is real.
So as we rank these, we want to hold on to what makes us Christian. Some of these trends make life easier. Some tempt churches to lean on technology in place of the Holy Spirit and in place of real community. We don’t want to go anywhere near the second category.
The reason this matters now: early adopters get outsized results. Churches that started a TikTok channel in 2018 or 2019 are seeing far better results today than churches starting now, because platforms reward the people who show up first. The catch is that jumping on the wrong trend wastes your time. This list is meant to help you tell the difference.
The ranking system
- 🟢 Green light: Go ahead. It’s probably smart to take advantage of this.
- 🟡 Yellow light: Use discernment, or it may not be that effective.
- 🔴 Red light: Avoid it.
1. Church Website Chatbots
🟡 Yellow for practical questions. 🔴 Red for anything spiritual.
These are showing up everywhere: an AI chat window on a church website that answers questions around the clock or collects contact info for a Plan Your Visit.
We know this one well, because we just got a demo to build a support chatbot for REACHRIGHT’s own website clients. In tech support, about 90% of requests come down to the same ten questions asked over and over. A chatbot can handle those.
For churches, the versions we’ve seen let you pick a denomination and train the AI on it. We’re part of a Foursquare church, for example, and an AI could absorb our foundational documents and polity, just as it could for Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, and everyone in between. It could probably get answers right 99% of the time.
What worries us is the other 1%. What’s at stake when AI gives a wrong answer with the authority of the church behind it?
There are really two kinds of chatbots:
- A practical chatbot that only pulls from your website. What time is service? What should I wear? Who’s the pastor? Where can I watch the latest sermon? That’s fine. It’s quick answers to practical needs.
- A conversational AI that talks with people about faith and theology. That’s a red light for us.
Two reasons. First, AI is wired to affirm people. Your ideas are always great, and you’re the best person who ever lived. That’s close to the opposite of the gospel, which starts with the truth that we aren’t good on our own. Maybe someday AI can reliably be trained not to just tell people what they want to hear, but not yet. Second, and deeper: we’re called not to forsake meeting together. People’s need for connection with brothers and sisters in the faith can’t be delegated to an AI.
If you do run a practical chatbot, never let it pass as a person. That’s a hard line. Say clearly, in bold, that it’s AI and that AI makes mistakes.
2. Hybrid Services
🟢 Green for putting your services online. 🔴 Red for “online or in person, whatever’s convenient.”
90% of churches now operate hybrid, meaning people in the seats on Sunday plus people watching online. That’s believable after COVID, though it must be a broad definition. Before COVID, most churches didn’t video their services. During COVID, we all bought cameras. At our church, until 2019 we mostly did audio recordings, and we’re thankful video is available now.
If hybrid just means putting your services online, it’s a clear green light. If you’re not doing that, you’re missing a huge opportunity.
Live streaming specifically is more of a yellow for most churches. Doing it at the quality you want is hard. If you’ll really put in the effort, you can do it well, but most churches have bigger fish to fry.
The version that’s a red light for us is the invitation that says be part of our church however is most convenient for you, online or in person. A virtual visit isn’t as valuable as being there. That doesn’t make watching online bad, but presenting the two as equal options sends the wrong message. People need to actually be together in the flesh. Call us old school. We’re not about convenience in that way.
3. AI Captioning and Translation
🟢 Hard green for captions. 🟢 Light green for translation.
This means AI-generated transcripts and captions on videos, sermon clips, and live streams, plus AI translation into other languages, live or after the fact.
Captions are a no-brainer. We use auto-captions on everything. YouTube practically makes you opt out, and the quality is so good now that we rarely see mistakes, especially with clean audio from a microphone on Sunday. Most people scroll social media with the sound off, so put captions on your YouTube videos and sermon clips. The better they are, the better.
Translation is a lighter green. We’re experimenting with it ourselves, using AI to create Spanish versions of some of our most-read blog posts, because a growing share of our traffic comes from Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries in Latin America. A blog post is easy to check. Most churches can’t verify every word of a translated service. Then again, I’ve preached with live translators I didn’t know, and I couldn’t have told you whether they were doing a good job either.
Our one caveat is the why. If you’re an English-only church with no Spanish service, is your church the best place to disciple a Spanish speaker over the long run? It might be better to point them to a local pastor who speaks their language. If translation is easy, great: more people hear the gospel. If it takes a lot of extra effort, it’s probably not a priority for most churches outside specific contexts.
4. Church Apps
🔴 Red light for about 99% of churches. 🟡 Yellow for churches of a few thousand or more.
Our opinion on church apps hasn’t changed in as long as they’ve existed.
REACHRIGHT has the staff to build church apps. They’re right in our wheelhouse. Our sales team constantly hears churches asking for one. We still don’t build them, because we don’t see the value for most churches.
Apps work when communication flows both ways. Most churches want an app that shows the same events, giving, and sermons that are already on their website. Sending people to your website is faster and has less friction. If someone really wants an icon on their phone, they can add a shortcut to your site. Many churches use Planning Center, which already has a lightweight app for event registration and giving.
The exception is a church of a few thousand people, maybe 1% of churches. At that size, an app can support real two-way activity: a prayer board people actually monitor, or a church-only marketplace where members give things away to each other. In a church of 60, you’d get one post every three months. In a church of 3,000, you might get a handful a week. At that size, experiment.
We’d honestly love to be proven wrong. If your church has an app that’s widely used and worth every penny, tell us why in the comments. We’re open to being convinced.
The app craze is over anyway, and not just in churches. Remember Apple’s slogan, “There’s an app for that”? Every business, Starbucks included, rushed to build an app. That era is gone.
5. AI-Generated Worship Music
🔴 Red light, with a lot to wrestle with.
AI-generated worship music is already charting. Solomon Ray, an AI “artist” on Spotify that isn’t a real person, has found real success on Christian platforms. Whatever we think of it, people are listening.
We think it’s gross. Worship is more than words, and more than sounds arranged into music. AI music isn’t art and it isn’t made by someone with a soul. We don’t even know what “success” means for an AI. It can’t succeed or fail. It just exists. And why give streams to AI-generated tracks when you could support people who are actually worshiping, or write your own songs?
That said, we’ve played with tools like Suno, and they’re impressive. We’re not in the camp that calls Suno an evil company. Some people in creative industries, actors especially, are terrified of AI. We get the backlash, but our objection is more specific.
The harder question underneath
Here’s what I keep wrestling with: what qualifies a song to be sung in church?
We already face versions of this question. Some of our team members in the Philippines attend churches that have sworn off Hillsong music because of the leadership controversies there. Conservative churches have long wrestled with the fact that charismatic movements like Elevation, Bethel, and Upper Room write most of the worship music people actually know and love, even when those churches disagree with their theology. Many worship leaders whose songs we’ve loved have had moral failures and been removed from ministry. I’ve even heard a story, which could be an urban legend that I never verified, about a beloved worship song whose emotional backstory was supposedly invented to sell more copies. I’ve sung that song, and it meant something to me.
So does a worship song have to be written by a human? By someone who shares my theology? By someone actively living out the gospel? I prefer all three. But if you rule out every song that fails one of those tests, you’ll have a very small catalog left.
Can AI-written lyrics become worship? We think they can when you sing them prayerfully to the Lord and make them your own prayer. Worship leaders already do something similar when they lead “Can’t Help Falling in Love” as a song to God. It was written as a love song to a woman, but singing it to God changes it.
Where we land is red. Maybe someday there’s a narrow yellow case, but we’re not there. This deserves its own conversation, so sit with it.
6. Pastoral Care AI
🟢 Green for prompting pastors to care. 🔴 Red for AI giving the care.
This is AI helping with the shepherding side of pastoring: flagging members who haven’t been around in a while, or helping draft a note to someone who just lost a family member.
When you call it “pastoral care AI,” it sounds terrible. Using AI to counsel or advise people is a hard no. AI affirms people too much, and pastors often need to be firmer with their sheep than that. People are already using AI as a counselor without anyone’s permission. Churches should push back on that, not automate it.
But automation that prompts pastoral care is another story. Here’s a project I just built at our church. Giving had been flat, and I noticed that fewer than half of the people who gave once over the last two years ever gave again. That surprised me. I’d assumed that once someone gave, they’d keep giving.
So I used AI to build a tool that syncs with our giving records. It’s anonymized, so it never shows names or identifying information, just a giver number. When someone gives for the first time, it puts a draft email in my inbox, with no email address attached yet. The draft thanks them for their first gift, encourages them with the impact it’s making, and prompts me to add some personal discipleship of my own, especially if I know the person.
Notice what it doesn’t do. It doesn’t send a cold, templated message automatically. It reminds me to do my job as a pastor, prayerfully, and lets the Holy Spirit guide what I say. That’s green.
7. NFC Tap Stickers
🟢 Green light, even though it’s still early.
If you’ve been to our church recently, you’ve seen stickers on the back of every chair that say “tap here.” Hold your phone to one during the offering and it opens the giving page. During the sermon, it opens the sermon notes. During announcements, it opens the signup for the Bible study or new members class.
I installed these at our church. It’s NFC, the same technology you use when you tap your phone to pay with Apple Pay or Google Wallet. Ours is linked to ProPresenter, so in theory, whatever is on the screen becomes the call to action when someone taps. We started with giving because we want to take friction out of generosity, but the signups have been a bonus.
To be candid, it’s been unreliable so far. Sometimes the ProPresenter integration works and sometimes it doesn’t. People who are less comfortable with technology hold the wrong end of the phone to the sticker. There’s been a lot of training. We literally brought a chair onstage one Sunday to demonstrate how to tap it, a highlight of my ministry career. Our ProPresenter team has had some headaches syncing it up.
The results so far are middling, but we’re still green. We get the vision, and we believe it will work out. Is your church using tap technology? How’s it going? Let us know in the comments.
The Scorecard
| Trend | Our Rating |
|---|---|
| Website chatbots | 🟡 Practical questions only, clearly labeled as AI. 🔴 for spiritual conversations. |
| Hybrid services | 🟢 Services online. 🟡 Live streaming for most churches. 🔴 “Online or in person, your choice.” |
| AI captioning & translation | 🟢 Captions. Light 🟢 translation, if you know why you’re doing it. |
| Church apps | 🔴 For most churches. 🟡 For churches of a few thousand or more. |
| AI-generated worship music | 🔴 |
| Pastoral care AI | 🟢 Prompts that help you care. 🔴 AI doing the counseling. |
| NFC tap stickers | 🟢 Still early and a little buggy. |
What other new tech is working at your church? Let us know. We want to keep sharing what’s actually helping churches.
Your Next Step
Not sure which tech investments are actually moving the needle for your church? We offer a free church marketing and website review. Our team will look at your website and digital presence 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.
