94% of pastors say churches need AI guidance. Only 4% have a policy.
Nearly every pastor agrees churches need guidance on AI. Almost none has written it down yet.
Barna's Faith & AI research with Gloo asked US Protestant pastors whether a church should have guidelines for responsible AI use. 94% said yes — 45% favouring a formal policy, 49% informal guidance only. Just 6% said a church needs neither.
In their own churches, the picture is very different. Only 4% say their church has a formal AI policy, and 17% say it has informal guidance. The other 79% have neither. One in five churches has any guidance at all; four in five have none.
And this is not a debate about a tool nobody uses. 87% of pastors use AI in some form — half to brainstorm or generate ideas, about a third for biblical or theological research (36%), a third for small-group questions and admin (34%), and nearly a quarter to write or edit sermons (24%).
That is the gap in one sentence: the people using AI every week are the same people who say their church has not agreed how to use it.
Barna's own point is a practical one, not a scolding one: guidelines help a ministry team stay aligned on AI use, and they bring transparency and build trust with the congregation. A short, shared agreement beats a long document nobody has read — and it beats silence, which is what most churches have now.
So here is the weekend version. It is the whole point of the template we published this week:
- Friday evening, 30 minutes: name one person to own the policy, and one person to review it with them.
- Saturday morning, 90 minutes: fill in the template together — the approved-uses list, the never-enter list, the giving-data rule, and a review date.
- Sunday, one minute: tell the congregation, in a single sentence, what you agreed.
That is how a church joins the 4%. The template is copy-ready, with the blanks to fill in and nothing to buy: A church AI policy in a weekend →
Sources: Barna Group, Church AI Policies: Pastors Say They're Needed. Few Exist. — Faith & AI research with Gloo (part of the State of the Church initiative): 94% of US Protestant pastors say a church should have guidelines for responsible AI use (45% formal policy, 49% informal only, 6% neither); in practice 4% have a formal policy, 17% informal guidance, 79% neither; 87% use AI in some form (50% brainstorm or generate ideas, 36% biblical or theological research, 34% small-group questions and admin, 24% write or edit sermons). Survey of 442 US Protestant pastors, December 2025 (sample size and field dates as reported by Crosswalk, 5 November 2026). These figures come from this survey only — the policy template page cites a different Barna survey (Barna/Pushpay's State of Church Tech 2026), whose 5% “have a policy” figure should not be mixed with the 4% here.
Related reading: A church AI policy in a weekend — the copy-ready template this post points to; and the Responsible AI guide — the principles behind it.