Should Church Staff Use AI?

A Guide to God-Honoring AI Use for Ministry Staff

Church offices, staff meetings, and pastoral circles are all having the same conversation right now.

And it sounds a little something like this: "How does AI play a role in our work? Should we even be using it? Are we compromising our integrity?"

We get it. As ministry leaders, we care deeply about leading with integrity and faithfulness, so it’s worth considering how AI fits into the conversation.

But here's a hot take: maybe being set apart as ministry staff doesn't mean avoiding AI.

Maybe it means understanding what it looks like to use it in submission to God’s design.

A hammer was designed to be a tool that can build a home. But it can also be used to break a window. Just like any tool, AI can be used for good or for harm.

So what if the question for churches wasn’t whether to engage with AI, but how? And what if there’s a way to design your church’s AI usage to amplify your message, not compromise it?

We talked to Michael Tuszynski, CEO of Church Media Squad, to learn what it can look like to use AI faithfully, practically, and wisely in ministry.

After all, every hour saved with AI is an hour that could go toward your people.

Start With This Question

Before you search for another AI tool or sign up for another subscription, Michael says to start with a single question:

What things do I do on a daily or weekly basis that take me away from people?

Starting with this simple filter can give you more time to serve your church and reach your mission. If AI can help you knock those tasks out faster, (or eliminate them altogether) you likely have a God-honoring reason to use it.

Where Churches Are Getting It Right (and Wrong)

Some of the most effective AI use cases in church ministry right now revolve around research, idea exploration, building simple automations to speed up workflows, and clearing the administrative busy work that gets in the way of real ministry.

However, we’ve started to see a concerning trend: AI being used to abdicate—not just delegate—discipleship functions. Michael has learned to draw a clear line here. "When we use AI to take over any of the discipleship functions or teaching functions of a church, we're using it the wrong way."

If you find yourself using AI to write discipleship guides, sermons, or other content that's meant to teach or disciple your people, it might be time to stop that.

AI can amplify your teaching and discipleship—it cannot replace it. That work belongs to your pastoral staff.

A better way to approach AI usage is to find non-discipleship, administrative areas that are taking up your time, and delegate those to AI instead. Here’s what we mean →

How AI is Serving Churches Well

We’ve worked with thousands of churches to improve their media and save them time, and this is what we know about how they’re using AI:

1. Sermon-to-discipleship pipeline Take a sermon transcript and let AI turn it into draft discussion questions or social content that extends Sunday's message throughout the week.

2. Task and to-do organization AI is surprisingly good at helping you build and prioritize task lists for your communications department—even creating an optimized daily task structure.

3. Turning processes into automations If you have communications processes and policies written down, AI can help you map them into automated workflows that save hours every week.

Start With Theological Guardrails

This won’t come as a surprise, but AI has no understanding of your church's theological nuances. AI doesn’t hold a biblical worldview, and that’s worth knowing before moving forward with any AI usage.

"It's really important to have clear theological guardrails that you can train or inform your AI on. Otherwise, the systems can spit out information that might not align with the theological perspectives your individual church has in place."

Step one is to make sure your AI knows who you are. Feed it your statement of faith, your values, your theological distinctives. Treat it like onboarding a new staff member—sharp and capable, but starting from zero on your church's DNA.

A Word on Creative Work

AI can handle a lot. But there's one thing every church creative or communicator needs to hear:

AI always moves to the average.

Graphic design, sermon series branding, video concepts, and creative direction aren't just simple tasks to knock out. They're a tool God has trusted you with to communicate who your church is before anyone walks through the door. AI can give you a rough draft, but it can't give you a distinct creative voice. It can generate a graphic, but it doesn’t know your church*.*

“When you trust AI to do creative work, you're going to get very average work. It won't necessarily be bad every time, but it's not going to be excellent.”

For quick turnarounds and low-stakes work, AI is a capable starting point. But when the goal is to reflect the excellence of the One you serve, bring in real creatives. That work still belongs to humans.

A Practical AI Starter Kit for Church Teams

If you’re ready to start experimenting, these are a few ideas to get the ball rolling.

Starter prompts to try this week:

"I'm a church communications director. What are the highest-impact SEO keywords for a church in [your city]? Help me build a list of blog topics around those keywords."

"Here are my church's communication processes for Sunday morning. Help me map these into an automated workflow."

"Here is our typical first-time guest communications flow and how we’d like to improve it. Can you help me automate it while keeping it human?"

What Happens If You Do Nothing

If you opt out of AI for your church, your walls aren’t going to come crumbling down. You probably won’t notice a huge shift in your day-to-day.

But you’ll miss out on the time AI could give back to you. And the biggest part isn’t just leaving that time on the table, it’s that you’re not leaving room for what God wants to do in those gaps.

Maybe He has fresh vision for how to reach the people in front of you but you’ve been too busy to hear it.

Maybe He wants you to more deeply disciple and train up the volunteers on your team.

Maybe He wants you to get back to walking alongside the people doing ministry with you.

We don’t know exactly how He wants to fill those gaps, but we do know that He can do a lot with a little. Are you willing to see what He will do?

Giving you more time for Ministry

AI is one way to get time back. But if your media and communications are still eating up your week, there's another option…hand it off.

At Church Media Squad, we handle graphics, video, branding, social media, and more so your staff doesn't have to—because creativity shouldn't come at the cost of your community.

Our 14-day FREE trial allows your church to try TheSquad without putting any money down. We want to serve your church before earning anything in return. Want to see how it works? Schedule a call with our team.