AI & Ministry
AI & Ministry
Some reflection and thinking about this is in The Brain the Size of a Planet — an essay on why what you bring to AI matters more than the tool itself.
Our church fellowship hall was running scheduling through email, hallway conversations, and my memory. As the sole administrator, I was the only person with full visibility into how badly the system wasn't working. Using AI, I rebuilt the process as an self-service application, designed and shipped in two weeks, and now used by the full membership as needed, 24/7.
During the build, I rediscovered a three-year email deliverability problem that had blocked the church email, leading to a paid work around. Using AI I was able to finally diagnose and resolve the root cause (email authentication misconfiguration), restoring full deliverability as a side effect of the project. What started as a scheduling fix led to an infrastructure recovery no-one else in the church organization know it needed.
What changed: A manual, frustration-prone, single-person-dependent process became a self-service system used by 60+ people. A hidden communication failure was diagnosed and resolved. AI functioned as a skill-enabler for a non-coding pastor.
Mid-2023 | 12-week program | 15 participants (ages 40–75)
n mid-2023 -- before most churches were having this conversation -- I designed and led a 12-week AI literacy program for my congregation. The goal was not to make anyone a technology enthusiast. It was to give non-technical adults a framework for thinking clearly about a technology that was already reshaping decisions being made around them. This is an account of how that program was designed, what changed, and what it taught me about the pastoral dimensions of technological discernment.