AI Resilience Report forDirectors, Religious Activities and Education

Right now, AI is mostly augmenting — not replacing — the people who direct religious education and activities. The work is shifting first in administrative and content-prep tasks, exactly the areas O*NET flags as most automatable. According to new Barna research from March 2026 ^[1], a majority of church leaders personally use AI at least once a month, though only 33% say their church has formally integrated it into ministry or operations.

Surveys cited by Hartford International Seminary ^[2] show that 45% of church leaders now use AI — an 80% jump from the prior year — mostly for emails, scheduling, bulletins, visitor follow-ups, and sermon research, while fewer than 25% use it for theological content like sermons or devotionals. Practical guides like ChurchTechToday's 2026 roundup ^[3] describe new "agentic" assistants that can research retreat venues, monitor event registrations, and turn receipt folders into expense reports — directly tackling the budgeting and program-implementation tasks. The deeply human tasks — counseling members through grief, financial stress, or doubt — are not being automated.

As a chaplain writing in the Journal of Lutheran Ethics ^[4] explains, AI apps can summarize what different traditions say about suffering, but they cannot truly "know" a person or weigh the moral and ethical realities of someone's specific situation.

Adoption is moving faster than many people expected, but with real brakes. On the "go faster" side, cheap, ready-to-use tools like ChatGPT and AI features already built into Planning Center, Tithe.ly, and Mailchimp make the technology nearly free compared to hiring more staff, which is why Smart Church Management's 2026 guide ^[5] calls AI "as ordinary in church operations as email." Small and understaffed congregations especially benefit. On the "slow down" side, trust and ethics are huge issues: Barna found ^[1] that 83% of leaders worry about data privacy, 51% about plagiarism, and 49% about losing authenticity in preaching — yet only 5% of churches have a written AI policy.

Congregants are wary too; the Hartford piece notes a 2025 Pew study ^[2] finding 73% of Americans believe AI should play no role in advising people about their faith. Scholars in the field are also raising bigger concerns: the Religious Education Association's 2025 annual meeting ^[6] highlighted how AI is creating new inequalities for resource-limited communities, a phenomenon researchers call "digital colonialism."

The hopeful takeaway for you: AI is taking over the spreadsheets and scheduling, but the heart of this job — counseling, mentoring, and walking with people through their biggest spiritual questions — is exactly what AI cannot do, and what congregations say they value most.