There has rightfully been a lot of talk over the past two years about how to use Artificial Intelligence within the context of the Church. Early on at CHURCH.tech we saw how critical it would be to create a tool that would give churches a trusted partner to help them leverage AI in their day-to-day operations. The result of what we’ve built at CHURCH.tech (and what most of the other AI tools in the church space have created) is a great way for church staff to save time on tedious weekly tasks. This is great, but we believe it really only scratches the surface of the utility AI has in the Church.
This article is the first in a new series we are starting in 2025 that covers what we’re doing at CHURCH.tech to help lead the church to the forefront of the conversation around Artificial Intelligence. We’ve spent the past two years with our heads down trying to build the best tool we can for the church. While this has given us the space to build and iterate quickly, the downside is we’ve let other voices speak louder than ours about a topic that, honestly, we feel most equipped to talk about.
Our goal in 2025 is to pull back the curtain and shine some light on what we’re doing to help the church stay up-to-date on the latest AI advancements and tackle some of the biggest opportunities AI presents.
Apart from saving time for church staff there is one massive opportunity that we’ve found has the chance to radically change the way your church engages with your sermon throughout the week. It’s one of the biggest challenges a preacher faces knowing that by Monday morning nearly everyone will forget what you talked about on Sunday.
Sermon clips that are cut out from the sermon and posted on social media are a great outreach tool to help engage people who don’t go to your church or didn’t listen to the sermon, but what we’ve discovered over the past two years is sermon clips on social media fall short of engaging the active members of your church who attended and heard your sermon on Sunday morning. I’ve scrolled right past the social media clips from the church I attend countless nearly every time they pop up because I was there, and I’ve already heard the sermon. Watching a sixty to ninety second clip out of context on social media doesn’t actually help me reconsider and re-engage with what was discussed.
It’s a generally accepted assumption at this point that the best form of media to attract large-scale engagement is short-form video. That’s why sermon clips are so attractive. The Church creates a seemingly infinite amount of long-form video content every Sunday so why not turn it into short-form content that conforms it to the increasingly shorter attention spans of the world (mine included). This has helped churches undoubtedly increase engagement across the board on social media, but active participants of the church aren’t the ones engaging.
The problem still exists that those hearing your Sunday sermon aren’t going to remember it. I take notes all the time during my church’s sermon, but I’m not the best, in the moment, at applying the sermon to the things I’m going through in my life. It takes time I often can’t find throughout the week to go back and internalize the truth being spoken in the sermon to the point where I can reflect on its application for my own life. This is the power of Artificial Intelligence for the Church.
At CHURCH.tech we believe the logical next step for the Church is to let AI contextualize the truths being talked about in your sermon to the season of life of each individual in your church. This doesn’t mean we want to clone your pastor and create a hundred different versions of your sermon each week. That’s inauthentic. Instead we believe a delivery mechanism should exist to replay the most critical moments of your sermon within an experience that allows for your church to engage with it on a much deeper level than ever before.
As a leader in the Church it is hard to be an involved pastoral figure to more than thirty or forty people. You can be the pastor of a large church, but it becomes exponentially more difficult to be truly engaged in the lives of more than a few dozen. Your church ends up fighting the battle of needing to grow but also wanting to maintain the authenticity a smaller church offers.
Our internal mission statement is to:
Help people in ministry spend less time with technology and more time with people.
Seems kinda odd for a company that builds a product centered around technology, right? Most tech companies want you to spend more time using their tools not less. The juxtaposition of who we are as a company and the tools we want to build is something that we hope mirrors the counter-cultural image that Jesus paints through his life. Building tools that help foster more engaging discipleship systemically throughout your church is the exact thing we’ve been aiming to build, and we’re finally here. Better discipleship is at the core of everything we’ve been building and everything we’re building in 2025, and it’s what we believe is the next real opportunity of AI within the Church.
