AI Isn't Coming for Your Pulpit.

What artificial intelligence is actually good at in a small church — and the one place it has no business being.

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Every church has a room where the bulletin gets made.

It's a small room. There's a copier in it that has been a member longer than most of the members. It has a name. Somebody has laid hands on it. When it jams — and it jams — there is a specific person in the congregation who can fix it, and that person is on vacation, and they are always on vacation, because the copier knows.

The bulletin gets built in Microsoft Publisher. Nobody chose Publisher. Publisher was simply there, the way a well is there, and one day somebody drew from it, and now that's how it's done. The file is named Bulletin FINAL.pub. There is another file named Bulletin FINAL v2 USE THIS ONE.pub. Nobody is entirely sure which one printed last Sunday. We don't talk about it.

And every single week, somebody sits down and retypes the whole thing. The service times. The sermon title. The nursery volunteers. The fact that the youth car wash got moved to the 14th. They type it into the bulletin, and then they type it into the website, and then they type it into the Facebook post, and then they type it into the email, and it's the same eleven pieces of information, four times, and it takes two hours, and it is Tuesday, and the sermon is not written.

That's the problem. That has always been the problem. And it turns out that's the thing computers are finally, actually good at.

You're Not Early. You're Also Not Late.

Here's the part that surprises people.

Barna ran the numbers in late 2025 and published them this past June: 87% of pastors are already using AI in ministry. Not 87% have heard of it. Not 87% are curious. Eighty-seven percent are using it. Only 13% aren't touching it at all.

If you're reading this thinking you missed a train — you didn't. The train is extremely full. Your associate pastor is on it. He didn't tell you because he wasn't sure how you'd take it.

But look at what they're using it for, because this is the whole ballgame. The top uses are brainstorming (50%), making graphics (37%), digging through research (36%), writing small group discussion questions (34%), and plain administrative work — emails, scheduling, documents (34%).

That's the Tuesday list. That is, top to bottom, the pile of stuff that stands between a pastor and the actual work of being a pastor.

And the same pastors are nervous about it, which I think is the right instinct. Seventy-one percent describe themselves as cautious. Sixty-three percent worry it could replace pastors. That's not Luddism, that's discernment. Hold onto it. We're going to come back to it.

The Boring Miracle

So here's a thing that happens now.

You take the bulletin you already made — the Publisher file, the Word doc, the PDF, whatever came out of that little room — and you drop it into your website. And the website reads it. It pulls out the service times, the announcements, the sermon title, the car wash that moved to the 14th, and it puts them where they go. The events land on the calendar. The announcements land on the homepage. You look at it, you fix the one thing it got wrong, and you hit publish.

That's it. That's the feature. We built it into Holdfast because when I asked church staff what actually ate their week, not one person said "our website needs a parallax hero video." They said: I type the same thing four times.

It is not a thrilling feature. There's no demo where the crowd gasps. It just quietly hands two hours back to a person who badly needed two hours. Which — if we're being honest about what most church tech is actually for — is the miracle.

Five Things to Try This Week

You don't need a strategy. You need one small win. Pick one:

Turn a sermon you already preached into small group questions. Paste in your manuscript or notes and ask for six discussion questions for adults, plus three for middle schoolers. It'll take ninety seconds. It would have taken you forty minutes on Thursday night, and you know it, because you've done it on Thursday night.

Write the hard email. Not the pastoral ones — we'll get to those. The logistics ones. "Draft a warm, clear email to our volunteer team explaining that the training moved to the 21st and we need an RSVP by Friday." Then edit it so it sounds like you. It's a first draft machine, and a first draft is the expensive part.

Make the graphic. Nearly four in ten pastors are already doing this. If your announcement slides currently feature clip art of a globe with a cross on it that you found in 2011, this is a low bar to clear.

Summarize the meeting. Elder meeting, deacon meeting, whatever. Feed it your notes and get action items and owners back. Nobody has ever enjoyed writing minutes. Nobody.

Ask it to argue with you. Working on a passage and want to know how a Reformed guy, a Wesleyan, and a Baptist would each read it? That's a genuinely great use — not to decide for you, but to make sure you're not preaching into a mirror.

Notice what all five have in common. Every one of them is prep, or paperwork, or plumbing. None of them is the sermon.

Now the Part That Matters

Twenty-four percent of pastors now use AI to write or edit sermons. Two years ago that number was 12%. It doubled.

I'd like to make a case for staying in the other 76%.

Not because it's cheating, exactly, and not because I think the Holy Spirit is confused by software. Because of what preaching costs, and why that cost is the point.

A sermon is not an information delivery system. If it were, we'd email it. A sermon is what happens when a particular person, who has sat with a particular text until it cost them something, stands up in front of particular people whose names and marriages and diagnoses and doubts they know, and says: here is what I have seen, and I am staking my week on it.

The study cannot be outsourced, because the study is what changes you, and a congregation can always tell the difference between a pastor who has been changed this week and one who has not. They can't articulate it. They just get quieter, or they don't.

So here's the line I'd draw, and it's a clean one: let the machine handle everything that happens between Sundays so that you can be fully present on Sunday. Give it the bulletin, the calendar, the slides, the email chain, the minutes, the volunteer schedule. Take back those hours.

And then spend them on the text. On the hospital visit. On the guy in the parking lot who's been circling the door for three weeks. On your own family, who would like to see you.

The promise of this technology in the church isn't a better sermon. It's a pastor with enough margin left to actually be one.

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Holdfast builds websites and apps for small churches — including a bulletin importer that reads the document you already made and fills your site in for you. If your Tuesdays are the problem, we should talk.

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Source: Barna Group, "New Research: Pastors Are Using AI More Than You Think" (published June 2026; surveys of 442 Protestant pastors, December 2025).