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. If it doesn't clearly fit one of these three, it probably isn't worth doing yet.
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? This bucket is about growing the mission by growing the people who are part of it.
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. The goal is to identify what's genuinely wasteful and eliminate it through smart automation.
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 — not by replacing people, but by giving them their time back so they can spend it on what only humans can do: loving people.
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.
Beyond Efficiency
The first three buckets are operational — they make the existing church work better. But there's a fourth category that's different in kind, not just degree. This is using AI to do things the church simply couldn't do before. Not efficiency. Expansion.
A pastor named Joby Martin leads a large church in an area with a significant Spanish-speaking population. His team built a workflow: upload the YouTube URL of a sermon to AI, generate a full transcript, translate and adapt it into Spanish, then synthesize an audio track that sounds like Joby — but in Spanish. An entirely new audience now has access to his teaching in their heart language, at essentially zero marginal cost.
That isn't bucket one, two, or three. That's the church doing something it was never capable of doing before. That's missional innovation — and it's where AI gets genuinely exciting.
"The first three buckets make the existing church work better. The fourth makes the church capable of things it never was before."
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 11:22 Media 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.
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.
Timeline Slideshow — Insert Here
This will be an interactive timeline beginning with ChatGPT's launch in November 2022 through present day, covering every major AI milestone relevant to ministry and business contexts.
Built as an interactive slideshow — coming soon.
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 and aligns with the Baptist Faith & Message, 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 very nature of what God did when He made humanity. The Southern Baptist confession is firm here: man is a spiritual being, and that spiritual dimension is the exclusive creative act of God.
No amount of computational complexity produces a soul.
This means pastors must be clear with their congregations — AI is a tool, not a being. And conflating the two is not just philosophically sloppy, it is theologically dangerous.
Epistemology
Our Baptist tradition has always understood that Scripture doesn't just give us information — it gives us wisdom, which is a categorically different thing. Wisdom involves the fear of God, moral formation, lived experience, suffering, sanctification, and the illuminating work of the Holy Spirit.
AI can process information at breathtaking scale. It can synthesize, summarize, and pattern-match across an enormous corpus of human knowledge. But it cannot be sanctified. It cannot be broken before God. It has never wrestled through a dark night of the soul and emerged with deeper faith. It has never sat with a dying man and had the Holy Spirit give it words beyond its preparation.
This is why I would never — and I want to be emphatic here — allow AI to replace the pastoral office. The shepherding of souls requires a shepherd who is himself a sheep. That vulnerability, that shared humanity, that "I have walked through this valley too" is not a feature AI can replicate. It is the very nature of incarnational ministry, which itself reflects the logic of the Incarnation — God taking on flesh to meet us where we are.
Common Grace
Now — and here's where I want to push back against reflexive technophobia — Reformed and Baptist theology both give us a robust doctrine of common grace. God, in His kindness, restrains evil and distributes good gifts across all of humanity, believer and unbeliever alike. The engineer who built the printing press wasn't necessarily a Christian, but God used that technology to fuel the Reformation and spread the Word of God to millions.
AI is a gift of common grace. The same God who gave humanity the intellectual capacity to reason also gave us the capacity to build systems that extend that reasoning. When we use AI to reach more people with the gospel, to organize our benevolence ministry more efficiently, to help a small-group leader find a well-researched answer to a theological question — we are being faithful stewards of what God has placed in our hands.
The parable of the talents should ring in our ears here. We will not be rewarded for burying a tool out of fear.
Hard Lines
Given all of that, here is where Scripture and our Baptist confession demand we draw firm lines:
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 in our tradition. The Baptist Faith & Message is clear — 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.
Coming Soon
This section will document the specific tools Jake uses, what ministry problems each solves, and real examples of each in action.
I’d love to talk about how AI can serve Lakepointe’s mission.