AI Ministry Framework
This page captures my working framework for deploying AI with wisdom, intentionality, and faithfulness inside a church context. It's how I think, how I plan, and how I'd approach the work at Lakepointe from day one.
Foundation
When I think about my Christian walk — privately and publicly — I think in terms of stewardship. How do I steward the finances God has given me? How do I steward my time? How do I steward my family? Stewardship is the lens through which I evaluate almost every significant decision.
When it comes to AI in ministry specifically, the word I hang my hat on is leverage. Stewardship is the why — the conviction that drives the work. Leverage is the how — the mechanism by which AI actually multiplies what the church already has.
These two words aren't in tension. They're in sequence. You steward well by leveraging wisely. And you leverage wisely by always asking: does this create more capacity for ministry, or does it consume it?
Framework
Before evaluating any tool, automation, or workflow change, I ask which bucket it belongs to. The first three generate measurable leverage. The fourth is the reward for doing them well.
Grow the mission by growing the people who are part of it.
How do we use AI to better convert people from considering the church to actually attending? Once they're a visitor, how do we convert them from visitor to member more effectively? Are there ways AI can improve the guest experience so dramatically that retention increases?
Find where money is leaking and eliminate it through smart automation.
This is the efficiency question. Looking across the entire budget and every ministry area and asking: where is there waste? What are we paying for that AI can do better, faster, or cheaper? The goal is not to recreate existing software — that's almost always a mistake.
Give people their hours back so they can spend them on what only humans can do.
This is where the most opportunities live. Every staff member has tasks that consume hours every week that have nothing to do with ministry. Email management. Data entry. Report generation. Scheduling. Follow-up sequencing. AI can handle all of it.
Real Example
My wife's team runs a weekender event at their church. Previously, staff had to manually scan physical forms and hand-enter every attendee's information into their database — a process that took hours. Now: scan the forms, upload to AI, and it pulls everything directly into the system automatically. That's bucket three. Hours recovered. Zero new hires needed.
The Right Order
Most churches will be tempted to jump straight to the exciting projects — the chatbots, the creative AI experiments, the innovative ministry ideas. And those projects are worth doing. But the order matters.
Buckets 1, 2, and 3 generate measurable leverage — more revenue, lower costs, multiplied staff capacity. That leverage is what funds the margin to do bucket 4. Build the foundation first, and bucket 4 becomes something you do with house money. Skip the foundation, and bucket 4 is a cost center with no way to justify itself.
Missional Innovation
Doing things the church was never capable of before. Exciting, creative, expansive — and only sustainable when funded by the leverage the first three buckets generate.
"If this position only does bucket 4, it is by definition a cost center with no measurable return. But if we build the leverage infrastructure first, bucket 4 becomes something we do with house money — and the role pays for itself."
Buckets 1–3 vs. Bucket 4
What Not to Do
The biggest mistake I see organizations make with AI is confusing activity with progress. Building feels like moving forward. It isn't always.
The clearest example: someone decides to build a custom church management system using AI tools because they don't love Planning Center. So they spend weeks building it. Then weeks fixing it. Then weeks updating it as AI tools change. They've spent enormous amounts of time and money recreating something that already existed, works well, and costs a fraction of what they just spent.
That's negative leverage. You didn't steward the tool — the tool consumed you.
The discipline is always asking: is this the highest leverage use of the time and money we're putting into it? If the answer isn't clearly yes, the answer is no.
If a tool already does it well, use the tool. AI is for gaps, not replacements of working systems.
The tool will change every few months. The system underneath it shouldn't. Build systems that survive tool changes, not systems that depend on specific tools.
Change management starts with willing adopters. Don't waste early momentum trying to convert skeptics. Let results do that work later.
Implementation
Most people start a new role by building things. I'd start by listening — because getting it right matters more than getting it fast. Here's exactly how I'd approach the first 90 days.
DAYS 1–30
The highest-leverage activity in the first 30 days isn't building — it's learning. Identify 3–5 churches that have already implemented AI at scale for at least a year. People like Jay Owen at The Church of Eleven22 who are already operating in this space. Sit with their teams. Ask what worked, what failed, what they'd do differently. Ask for copies of what they built.
Most will say yes. And in doing so, you inherit a year's worth of wins and lessons in 30 days.
Simultaneously: get 100% immersed in Lakepointe. Budget data. Ministry operations. Systems inventory. Staff structure. The goal is to have a complete picture of how the church functions financially and operationally before building anything.
DAYS 30–60
Now we have two datasets: what other churches have built, and how Lakepointe actually operates. Days 30–60 is the deep comparison. What can we take directly from other churches and implement as-is? What needs to be adapted to Lakepointe's context? What's unique to Lakepointe that requires something built from scratch?
This phase is also about people. Who on staff is eager to try new things? Who is hesitant? We map the willing adopters first — they're where early momentum comes from. We don't approach the hesitant ones yet. We let results do that work later.
By the end of day 60, every possible AI opportunity should be ranked by leverage — highest impact to lowest — across all three buckets.
DAYS 60–90
Now we build — but only the highest-ranked items. The ones most likely to produce tangible, measurable results quickly. By the end of day 90, there should be real numbers to point to.
Hours recovered per week. Budget line items reduced. Guest follow-up response times improved. These aren't projections — they're proof points that build the case for everything that comes next.
The first 90 days isn't about doing everything. It's about doing the right things first, proving they work, and building the organizational trust to go deeper.
Interview Reference
There are two categories of AI work in a church. The first requires no access to your internal systems — we can start it on day one. The second is where the real leverage lives, but it requires understanding how you actually operate before building anything.
Building without that understanding is negative leverage — it creates work that doesn't fit, systems that don't connect, and tools that staff won't use.
Day One Ready
Content and communication — we can build these immediately.
Preaching & Teaching
Communications & Content
Worship
Discipleship & Spiritual Formation
Global & Outreach
Accessibility
Requires Understanding Your Systems
The highest-leverage work — but only after we understand how you operate.
Member Care & Pastoral
Giving & Stewardship
Administration & Operations
Data & Analytics
HR & Staffing
Governance & Compliance
The line is this: content and communication require no internal access — we can start immediately. People, data, and money require understanding how you operate. That's not a reason to wait. It's a reason to learn fast.
The Opportunity
The church that figures out how to use AI faithfully — and documents it — shapes the national conversation. Lakepointe has the size, the credibility, and the platform to be that church.
If this is done well inside Lakepointe, hundreds — eventually thousands — of churches will be watching and asking: "How did you do that? How can we do it too?" That's not a side effect of the role. That's the opportunity.
Ethical AI
"Ethical AI" means something different depending on whether you're talking about how tools are built, how they're deployed inside an organization, or how they shape culture at large. Each layer has its own questions — and its own answers.
Tool Stack
Six years of building automations, integrations, and AI workflows — with whatever tools the job required. The specific tools change; the underlying skill transfers.
A principle worth naming
One of the most common AI mistakes in organizations is tool-hopping — switching platforms before exhausting what the current one can do. My default is to stay in a tool until there's a specific use case it genuinely can't handle. That discipline matters even more in a large organization where every tool change carries a real training cost across hundreds of staff members.
The honest framing: I haven't used every tool on this list by name — but I've gone deep in the equivalent tool in each category, and I only moved when a specific use case demanded it. I can already tell you how I'd use yours. The tools change; the underlying skill — and the discipline to use tools well — transfers.
Microsoft just announced Copilot Cowork — a new agentic layer inside Microsoft 365 that doesn't just answer questions. It executes multi-step tasks across Outlook, Teams, Excel, SharePoint, and PowerPoint on your behalf. You hand it a task; it builds a plan and carries it out.
Here's the notable part: Copilot Cowork is built on Claude (Anthropic's model), not OpenAI. Microsoft explicitly states it integrates "the technology behind Claude Cowork." This is a major shift — Microsoft is now running multiple frontier models inside Copilot, not just OpenAI's GPT-4o.
Copilot Cowork
EnterpriseCloud-based, lives inside M365, accesses your full enterprise data graph — email, Teams, calendar, SharePoint. Built on Claude. Governed by IT.
Claude Cowork
Personal / StartupDesktop agent, lives on your machine, accesses folders you grant. Built on Claude. More flexible, less governed. $20/month Claude Pro.
Broader availability through Microsoft's Frontier program in late March 2026. Enterprise E7 bundle ($99/user/month) available May 1, 2026.
AI Terminology
Four concepts that explain almost every AI tool you've heard of — and how they relate to each other.
The simple version: The LLM is the intelligence. A wrapper configures how you access it. An orchestration layer gives it tools and the ability to take multi-step actions. An agent is what that looks like in practice — a system that takes a goal and figures out how to accomplish it.
How they build on each other
Note: Many tools span multiple levels. Manus is an orchestration layer and an agent — it manages the process AND executes it. Copilot Cowork spans all four: it uses an LLM (Claude), has custom configuration (wrapper), manages multi-step M365 workflows (orchestration), and acts autonomously on your behalf (agent).
Supporting concepts
OCR
Optical Character Recognition
Reads text from scanned documents, images, and PDFs so AI can work with it.
In ministry context: Connection cards, paper giving records, printed rosters — OCR is what turns a scan into usable data.
NLP
Natural Language Processing
The capability that lets AI understand what you're actually asking — not just keywords, but meaning and intent.
In ministry context: It's the foundational layer behind every LLM. When you type a question and the AI understands it, that's NLP.
RAG
Retrieval-Augmented Generation
AI looks up relevant information from your own documents before answering, rather than relying only on what it was trained on.
In ministry context: This is what a Custom GPT with uploaded church documents does — it retrieves from your knowledge base, then generates an answer grounded in your context.
API
Application Programming Interface
The way software tools talk to each other — a standardized connection point that lets one system send and receive data from another.
In ministry context: The Planning Center API is what made the wife's-team workflow possible — it's how Mind Studio, Google Sheets, and Planning Center all connected into one automated pipeline.
Theology
This is a functional first draft — written in a single afternoon as a starting framework, not a finished theological treatise. It reflects genuine conviction, but it deserves more refinement, peer review, and pastoral input before being treated as a definitive statement.
"The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom,
and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding."
— Proverbs 9:10
Foundation
Before we ever talk about algorithms and language models, we have to establish our theological foundation, because everything flows downstream from our anthropology, and our anthropology flows downstream from our theology.
Scripture is unmistakably clear: God alone is the Creator ex nihilo. He spoke, and matter came into existence. He breathed, and man became a living soul. That creative act is categorically unique to the divine. When we build AI systems, no matter how sophisticated they become, we are not creating in that sense. We are sub-creators — to borrow Tolkien's language — working with the raw materials of a universe God already made. The patterns AI learns from, the language it processes, the logic it follows — all of it is derivative of a created order that bears the fingerprints of God. AI doesn't generate meaning. It redistributes it.
Anthropology
Genesis 1:26-27 is the cornerstone of our entire anthropology. Man — and woman — are made in the image of God. This Imago Dei is not a feature. It is not a capacity. It is an ontological reality conferred by the sovereign act of a personal God. It encompasses our rationality, our moral accountability, our relational depth, our capacity for worship, and most critically — our souls.
AI has none of this.
A language model can produce a sentence that sounds like prayer. It can structure a theologically accurate statement about the atonement. It can even write a moving devotional. But it does not know God. It cannot commune with God. It has no soul that will stand before the judgment seat of Christ. It has no conscience quickened by the Holy Spirit. It experiences nothing. It repents of nothing. It worships nothing.
This is not a limitation that better technology will eventually overcome. This is a categorical distinction rooted in the nature of what God made and what man makes. No amount of computational complexity produces a soul.
Non-Negotiables
Romans 10:14-15 speaks of feet being sent and mouths proclaiming. The sermon is a spiritual act — a man of God, filled with the Spirit, opening the Word before the people of God. AI can help research, organize, and illustrate. But a congregation cannot be fed by a machine. The Holy Spirit works through yielded human vessels, not code.
Counseling, shepherding, walking with someone through grief or sin or doubt — this requires a soul formed by grace ministering to another soul. The pastoral epistles are full of embodied, relational, accountable ministry. AI has no accountability before God for the souls it touches.
This is non-negotiable. Scripture is the supreme authority in all matters of faith and practice. Any AI system we deploy must be subordinated to that authority. If an AI tool generates something theologically inaccurate, we correct it by Scripture — not the other way around. Pastors and elders must be theologically literate enough to audit what AI produces, because a tool that subtly undermines sound doctrine is more dangerous than no tool at all.
The church is the body of Christ — an embodied, covenanted community. There is a growing temptation, particularly among younger people, to substitute digital interaction and AI companionship for genuine community. We must be prophetic voices against this. Hebrews 10:25 doesn't have an asterisk for technology.
Vision
With those non-negotiables firmly established, here is how I believe a theologically serious, Great Commission-driven church should think about AI:
It is a force multiplier for ministry, not a replacement for it. Our staff can serve more people. Our communication can be clearer and faster. Our benevolence ministry can identify needs more quickly. Our global mission work can overcome language barriers. Our discipleship resources can be better organized and more accessible to the congregation.
Think of it the way the first-century church would have thought about the codex replacing scrolls, or the way Spurgeon thought about printing his sermons for global distribution. The technology changes. The mission doesn't. The message doesn't. The Author of that message certainly doesn't.
Closing
I'll close with this. The greatest theological danger AI poses to the church is not that it will become sentient and rebel against us. The greatest danger is far more subtle and far more in keeping with the patterns of sin we already know — the danger that we will become lazy, that we will outsource what God intends to sanctify us through, and that we will slowly, imperceptibly, begin to trust in the tools more than in the God who gave them.
Every generation of the church has faced a version of this temptation. The call of faithfulness is always the same: hold fast to the Word, depend on the Spirit, pour yourselves out for souls, and let everything else — including technology — serve those ends rather than replace them.
Soli Deo Gloria.
Context
Understanding where AI is today requires knowing how fast it moved to get here. This timeline covers the major inflection points — the moments that changed what was possible.
I’d love to talk about how AI can serve Lakepointe’s mission.