Ask ten church leaders what they think about artificial intelligence, and you'll get ten different answers. At least one of them will tell you it's the devil.
Over the last several years, we've tested nearly every AI tool we could get our hands on, looking for where it actually helps a church and where it doesn't. This September, we're bringing what we've learned to the Elevate Church Conference: where the real opportunities are, where leaders need wisdom, and how to use these tools without losing sight of what matters most.
It's Just Really Smart Math
Before you can decide what you think about AI, you have to understand what it actually is. Strip away the hype, and AI is math. It's a prediction machine that has studied an enormous amount of data and learned to guess what comes next. Ask it for a picture of an orange cat, and it's looked at a billion pictures of orange cats and given you its best guess at what you're picturing. It's basically a really, really smart Mad Lib. It isn't picturing the future. It can only work from what it already knows.
That distinction matters because most of the fear around AI — that it's coming for every job, that we'll all be working for the robots — comes from treating it like something it isn't. History offers some perspective: most Americans polled in the 1960s opposed going to the moon. We went anyway, and it became one of the defining achievements of the century. New technology tends to get demonized before it goes mainstream, and AI is no exception.
What the Printing Press Can Teach Us
Churches have always been slow to adopt new technology, and that's usually rooted in fear. The printing press is the clearest example. Before it, the Catholic Church held the only copies of Scripture. After it, Bibles ended up in everyone's hands, and people no longer needed a priest to interpret it for them. The church, as it existed, broke apart. It didn't die. It underwent a reformation and emerged expressing itself differently.
AI and the internet more broadly have the same disruptive potential for the church today. The difference is speed. The printing press reshaped the church over decades. AI is doing it in months, sometimes days. It's hard to go a week without discovering some new capability worth deploying.
Where Churches Are Actually Winning With AI
So, where is AI actually helping? Not with the flashy stuff. The churches seeing real benefit are the ones asking a simple question first: what can we offload that was never instinctively human to begin with? Filling out forms. Answering routine emails. Taking meeting notes. Nobody wakes up hoping to spend their morning on the low-level administrative tasks of running a church, and letting AI handle them frees up staff for the flesh-and-blood work of ministry they were actually called to do.
Widespread email adoption did not occur until the early 1990s, which makes it barely 30 years old, yet we treat it as if it has always been essential. AI will likely follow the same path. And to be clear, this isn't about replacing what you love. If AI can free you from the parts of your job you don't love, so you can spend more time on the parts you do, that's the whole point.
Humans Stay in the Loop
One thing worth emphasizing: AI should never run the show by itself. Every workflow needs a human double-checking the work at every step before it moves forward, because AI still gets things wrong. Some call it hallucinating. Call it what it is: lying. Either way, someone has to catch it.
That human-in-the-loop approach is also the answer for the leader who says AI is the devil. Plenty of pastors have said it themselves, more than once. And that's a fair belief to hold, as long as it's grounded in fact, not in something you saw on TikTok or a post about a data center going up down the road. Take the time to actually understand the tool, its history, and the people who built it, before you form a conviction about it.
Built for Every Seat on Your Team
Last year's Elevate breakout on AI was a 101 course: how to write a prompt, how to get ChatGPT to give you something useful. This year's session is a 201 class, and it isn't just for the communications and social media staff. It's built to be role-agnostic. Whether you run facilities, work the front desk, lead worship, or shepherd kids, there's something in it for you. It's platform-agnostic too, built to work with whatever tools your team already uses rather than selling you on a particular one.
What's new this year is the shift from one-off tasks to entire workflows. Instead of asking AI to write a single paragraph or generate one graphic, this year's breakout shows leaders how to talk through an entire project out loud, no typed prompt required, and let AI build out multiple deliverables across multiple platforms, plus a to-do list of next steps for the team. Work that used to take three or four people 10 to 30 hours to finish can now come together in 10 to 15 minutes.
Be the Calm, Reasoned Voice
Here's the challenge for church leaders: most of what we know about AI comes from social media, and social media isn't designed to inform us evenly. Jaron Lanier, the virtual reality pioneer and author of Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, argues social media isn't built to pull us left or right so much as it's built to pull us downward. On a topic like AI, leaders have to resist that pull and be the calmest, most reasoned person in the room, grounded first in Scripture and then in fact, not in whatever's trending that day.
Church leaders who want the full walkthrough, including how to build a complete AI workflow in a single conversation, can catch this breakout session at the Elevate Church Conference, September 21 and 22, 2026, at Brentwood Baptist. Learn more and register at elevatechurchconference.com.