A church AI policy in a weekend

For pastors, elders, church staff, and volunteers. Includes a copy-ready one-page policy template — adapt the blanks, print it, and put it where your team can find it. Reading time: about 7 minutes.

Most churches do not need a long policy. They need a short one that everyone on staff and every volunteer actually knows: what AI may help with, what it must never touch, who approves a new tool, and who checks the output. You can agree that in a weekend — no consultant, no committee that meets for six months.

The gap is real. Barna Group and Pushpay's State of Church Tech 2026 found that 60% of church leaders personally use AI at least once a month, but only 33% say their church uses AI in ministry or operations — and while 64% say it is important for a church to have an AI use policy, only 5% of churches currently have one. This page is a practical way to join the 5%.

Friday evening — 30 minutes: name the owner

Pick one named person to own the policy — usually the pastor, an elder, or the church administrator — and one other person to review it with them. AI decisions made by “everyone, individually” are how a church ends up with five different tools, no agreed rules, and a prayer request pasted into a chatbot nobody vetted. Write the two names down now; the rest of the weekend fills in around them.

Saturday morning — 90 minutes: fill in the template

Work through the template below as a team, not as homework. The only decisions that need real discussion are the blanks: your approved-tools list, your giving-data rule, and what happens when a tool gets something wrong. Everything else in the template is a safe default — keep it unless you have a reason to change it.

Sunday — share it, in one minute

Tell the congregation in a single sentence, from the front or in the newsletter: “We've agreed a short policy for how we use AI — it helps with drafting and organising, it never handles private or pastoral information, and a person always makes the final decision.” Then put the finished policy where staff and volunteers can find it — a printed copy in the office and a link in your staff handbook beat a perfect document nobody can locate.

The template: [Church name] AI use policy

Copy, adapt the blanks, and review it at least once a year — and whenever you adopt a new AI tool.

Our principle

AI is a tool for drafting, summarising, translating and organising. It cannot pray, counsel, comfort, or make a pastoral decision. Ministry is relational: if a task involves being with someone, comforting someone, or deciding something about someone, a person does it.

Approved uses

AI may help with: first drafts of newsletters, notices and social posts; sermon outlines and study notes (checked against Scripture before use); summarising public documents; translating public material; captions and transcripts; and organising rotas and admin. Every AI-assisted item is checked by a person before it is published, sent, or preached.

Never enter into a general AI tool

Prayer requests, pastoral conversations, safeguarding information, children's details, health or family details, giving records, donor lists, member records, passwords, or anything someone told you in confidence. If in doubt, leave it out — you can almost always describe the task without the personal details. (This matches our Responsible AI guide: public material is green, internal material is yellow — strip names first — and the list above is red.)

Giving data — a special rule, especially at year-end

Giving, people and attendance data are only ever used inside tools your church has explicitly approved for that purpose — for example, your giving platform's own reporting features. Never paste a donor list, giving history, or attendance list into a general chatbot, even to “just summarise it.” That rule matters most in year-end giving season, when AI giving and donor follow-up features are being promoted hardest.

Approved tools

Only these tools may be used for church work: [ list them by name — e.g. your office suite's built-in AI, your giving platform, your captioning tool ]. Anything not on this list needs the policy owner's approval first, including free tools and tools a volunteer already uses personally. Before approving a new tool, check its data settings: does it use what you type to train its models, and can that be switched off? If you cannot switch it off, or cannot see where the data goes, do not approve it for anything beyond public material.

AI assistants and chatbots

If the church ever puts an AI assistant in front of visitors or members, it answers only from the church's own material, says plainly that it is automated, never pretends to be a person, and hands pastoral, crisis or safeguarding conversations to a real person immediately.

Children and young people

No children's names, photos, school details or safeguarding information go into any AI tool. AI-generated images or stories are never presented as if they were real children or real events.

Accuracy

AI output is a first draft from a keen but unreliable volunteer: welcome, edited, and supervised. Check every Scripture reference, quotation, date and figure against a trusted source. Never publish AI-drafted giving figures, impact numbers, stories or testimonials — use only your real records.

Honesty

Do not mislead people about AI's role. If AI substantially helped write a public document, a simple acknowledgement is healthy. Never present AI-generated material as a real person's words, story, or testimony.

When something goes wrong

Tell the policy owner the same day. Correct the published item, tell anyone affected, and note what changed so the same mistake is not repeated. A mistake handled honestly builds more trust than a perfect record claimed.

Owner and review

Policy owner: [ name ]. Reviewer: [ name ]. Next review date: [ date — within 12 months, or sooner if a new tool is adopted ].

This template is general and educational, not legal advice. Your church's own safeguarding, data-protection, and denominational policies always take precedence.

Weekend checklist

• Owner and reviewer named
• Approved-tools list agreed (and data settings checked for each)
• Giving-data rule agreed before year-end giving season
• “Never enter” list read aloud to staff and volunteers
• Policy printed in the office and linked in the staff handbook
• One-sentence version shared with the congregation
• Review date in the diary