My friend, Sonya, at church told me of her recent Sunday school session. It was for primary-aged children and focused on Elijah and the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18). Uninspired by the teaching material that week, Sonya turned instead to AI:
“Write a song to the tune of ‘Twinkle twinkle little star’ based on this passage, that young children will enjoy singing and will make this story memorable,” she asked.
A few seconds later out pops a song.
And then: “Suggest a craft activity connected to this passage that they will enjoy doing – we have 25 minutes and basic craft materials.”
…
Her summary of the subsequent lesson: “Amazing – better than the book. Our kids loved it!”
Just one small example of how Christians are taking to AI, sometimes corporately as a church, more often as individuals. Many of them are already using versatile and powerful AI tools like CoPilot, Gemini or ChatGPT at home, at work, and to support their children’s education, so why wouldn’t they use them for Christian ministry?
Let’s look at some examples of how AI could help us in our churches – individually and collectively.
Individual uses of AI
For understanding complex documents
AI can take a Church Report and summarise it well. I attend Baptist Union Council meetings, and our reports can run into hundreds of pages. So sometimes I will use Google’s NoteBookLM to turn a dense PDF into an easy-listening, 15-minute, conversational podcast. These podcasts are between two engaging “AI hosts” who talk through the material in a relaxed manner. Google has recently added a facility whereby the listener can interrupt and ask questions – for example: “Hang on. Isn’t there a problem with that proposal?” etc.
NoteBookLM can even produce video-summaries and infographics from almost any PDF or YouTube link you throw at it.
I don’t fully trust large language models, but I do find this useful for material I’m going to read anyway – where the AI enables me to focus my attention on specific areas – or for documents that are less important to me, where a quick overview is sufficient.
For ministry support
I know of people who, like me, will use ChatGPT after writing a sermon. They might ask: is my sermon easy to follow? Where is the argument weak? What questions might believers or non-believers have after listening? As well as the all important, help me make this shorter! It’s like having a sparring partner to help sharpen your thinking. According to one US survey the large majority of ministers are now using AI in their ministry. In the UK it will likely be lower, but possibly not much. Has your church had a conversation about use of AI in ministry?
As a creative partner and admin assistant
We shouldn’t underestimate AI’s usefulness in brainstorming. One person in my church uses it to sketch out outline Bible studies for use in prison ministry. And many people use AI creatively – including Sonya of course. One family I came across use AI to transform their children’s prayer requests into rhymes they can memorise and pray together.
And for routine admin, AI is like having your own assistant. My current favourite example is asking Gemini within Gmail … “find that email that so and so sent to someone or other about such and such…” Invaluable!
All of these examples are anecdotal and individual. But there are also growing examples of churches in the UK beginning to adopt AI.
Corporate use of AI by UK churches
During the service – removing barriers
“There came a sound like the blowing of a mighty wind from heaven… and each one heard them speaking in their own language” – Acts 2.
Breeze Translate is one of several Christian organisations using AI to help churches include people for whom English is not their first language, as well as members of the deaf community. Their mission, as Product Lead, Mike Ashelby, says, is to “break down language barriers … by using AI not to replace human connection but deepen it.”
Simply explained, their technology transcribes the spoken word of a prayer or a sermon into written text. This is then auto-translated into one of 200 languages and, finally, delivered to individuals’ phones, in their own tongue, as written captions, or spoken words via a headset. Congregation members scan a QR code and select their language. That’s it – no app required.
What churches are saying about Breeze:
- Harvest Church: Breeze “translates spontaneous prayers and words of encouragement… These are often quite speedy or dialect heavy… Breeze is so accurate that they can quickly bring up their phones and follow along.”
- Silver Street Church: “I was very encouraged to hear from one of our Iranian men who has very limited English but told me that with the aid of Breeze he can understand 90% of the sermon.”
- iHarvest Church: “… there was an electric buzz in the room as people discovered their own African, Chinese and Indian dialects – people were shouting out in excitement!”
Language translation is a sweet spot for AI. Christian Vision are using AI to translate and lip sync evangelistic videos into local languages, while Wycliffe Bible Translators state that AI enables … “local Bible translators to produce high-quality translations quicker than ever”.
In Ashelby’s words, these innovative organisations are “ensuring that every tribe and tongue isn’t just a future hope, but a present reality”.
Before and after the service – answering questions
Several UK churches now offer an “AI-welcomer” on the church website to answer frequently asked questions that people type in, like: are there activities for children in this service … where do I park to attend church? … etc.
More interestingly, a few UK churches are publicly experimenting with “content re-purposing tools”. One of these, pastors.ai, for example, takes a Sunday sermon from YouTube and generates: a set of questions for small groups …. a summary of the sermon for a newsletter … a blog based on the sermon for the church website etc, and lastly, but importantly, an “AI bot”.
This single-sermon AI-bot knows that one sermon inside-out. People can type in questions (which perhaps they were unable or unwilling to ask the preacher in person!) and the bot answers. When I tried this a year ago with a sermon from Genesis 39 (Joseph and Potiphar’s wife), the bot capably answered questions on this well-known story, even drawing on related passages beyond Genesis 39.
This can enable a much wider audience to interact with the church’s message than would otherwise be the case. But churches using such platforms also need to take care that, for example, “questions about a sermon” can reveal a deeper pastoral need. For example, “explain what the preacher meant about forgiveness”, could really mean: “I can’t forgive God for my child’s illness”. AI will answer pastoral and life application questions from a sermon often well, but ultimately AI is OK as a summariser, not a pastor.
But how then do we use AI well?
AI is developing at an astonishing pace and, as we have seen, it can be an invaluable tool for extending the gospel, supporting creativity, and assisting in research and administration. This can all serve the work of the Kingdom.
But there need to be guardrails when using AI in ministry. We have come across some of these in this short article, eg: being thoughtful about what information we input to AI and configuring options so that our material is not used for training AI models; keeping a human in the loop – someone who knows what a good answer looks like; and discerning when AI can drift from being a summariser to being a pastor.
And, of course, remembering that AI can – and does – get things wrong. We have not covered this in this brief piece, and nor have we discussed long-term costs of using AI such as job displacement or erosion of critical thinking skills. These matter but should not prevent thoughtful use of AI.
The AI Christian Partnership is actively working to develop guidelines to help churches have a conversation about AI and answer the question: how to use AI and, importantly, when to not use AI.
Apps and AI platforms named in this article are for illustration only, they do not comprise a recommendation to use them and, in every case, alternatives are available.