Pushpay CEO: “Nobody Goes to Seminary Dreaming About Admin Work”
Enhance, Don't Replace: The line between using AI to free up people and using it to replace people is real, and worth drawing deliberately.
AI's Real Gift Is Time: The most meaningful return on AI in ministry isn't efficiency — it's recovered pastoral presence.
Know Your Flock First: AI tools are most powerful when they help you see who needs attention and give you time to actually go love on them.
I remember conversations in my dorm room at Bible college. Late nights, bad coffee, friends scattered across the floor talking about what ministry was going to look like someday. Pastoral care came up. Preaching came up. Discipleship came up.
Budget reports never came up. Nobody said, "I cannot wait to transcribe a sermon and chop it into social media clips." Nobody talked about the hours that would eventually disappear into administrative work.
And yet, here we are.
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Kenny Wyatt has spent years building technology for churches. As the CEO of Pushpay, he recently co-produced the State of Church Tech report alongside Barna — a survey of roughly 1,300 senior and executive pastors on how churches are adopting and using technology. He's worked with countless congregations, and he's watched the same pattern repeat itself.
AI is already being used in your ministry. The question is, do you want to make AI a strategic part of your ministry, or is it just going to be a collection of individual habits happening inside your church?
The Time & Energy Drain
The gifted, called people in your church leadership team are spending significant chunks of their week doing work that could be handled another way.
That’s not a bad thing, per se. It's just how ministry organizations tend to grow. Responsibilities accumulate. Staff members become the system. And before long, the ministry leader God called to love on people is spending Tuesday afternoon doing things a well-configured piece of software could handle instead.
And that's not a productivity argument. It's a pastoral one.
Three Days to 30 Minutes
Pushpay built a product through their Resi platform called Studio AI (read the press release here). It takes a half-hour-long sermon, and uses AI to generate a transcript, identify the moments most likely to land on social media, suggest titles and captions, and push the content out. The whole process, from raw sermon to published clips, happens in seconds.
Before Studio AI, the same work took three to four days.
Someone (maybe you) would have had to sit with the recording, transcribe it, go back through it, pull the moments that mattered, write the posts, and get them scheduled. Three to four days of a staff member's time, every single week, for content that supports the ministry but isn't the ministry.
Across a year, that's a substantial portion of someone's capacity redirected away from people and toward process. Situations like this one are increasingly common - and they highlight the importance of thinking strategically about HOW your church is engaging with AI.
Two Questions To Frame Your AI Strategy
Wyatt frames AI adoption for churches around two questions he'd ask himself if he were a lead pastor.
1) How can AI help me know my flock better?
Not just the regulars, but the person who's been watching sermon clips on social media for six months and hasn't shown up yet. The long-term giver who's quietly disengaging. The volunteer who's burned out but hasn't said so. AI-assisted tools can surface patterns in data that a busy pastor would never have time to spot on their own, and then point toward who needs a phone call, a visit, or an invitation.
2) What should AI NEVER replace?
There are things that require a human presence, a pastoral voice, a person who knows your name and prays for you by name. First-time attenders getting a personal note. Someone in a hard season getting a call, not a workflow. Those things aren't inefficiencies to be optimized. They're the point.
What are those personal touches that I don’t want a bot to take over? Draw bright white lines around that and say, no, we’re not going to do that.
60% of Pastors Are Using AI
Pushpay and Barna released a report this year, based on a survey of roughly 1,300 pastors. It found that 60% of pastors are already using AI personally. Only 33% report using it in ministry. Wyatt suspects that number is actually much higher, because so much AI use in churches is happening informally, staff by staff, task by task, without anyone coordinating it or asking whether it's serving the mission.
Since AI adoption is often informal and happening staff-by-staff, a good, thoughtful set of AI guidelines is a leadership necessity for coordinating efforts and ensuring the technology consistently serves the church's mission, not just individual tasks.
I've interviewed dozens of pastors over the past weeks and months, and I typically close conversations by asking which tech tools they're using most.
AI almost never comes up.
Then, when I ask "Are you using ChatGPT or Claude at all?" and suddenly, the pastor begins rattling off a long list. It's everywhere... but it just doesn't register as a 'tool' the way Pushpay, Steeplemate, or Planning Center do. When I ask whether they have a policy guiding how their church does and does not use it? That's where the conversation slows right down.
The goal isn't to hand your ministry to a machine. The goal is to get the machine out of the way so you can do your ministry.
Kenny Wyatt, CEO of pushpay
Your To-Do:
Get your staff in a room and ask them one question: what are you using AI for right now?
Don't frame it as an audit. Just be curious. What comes back will tell you more about where your church actually is with this than any report will. Then start deciding what stays, what goes, and what needs a guardrail.
So, will you use AI to support and extend your ministry? Or, will it remain purely a productivity tool for individual leaders in your church?
