A Church AI Policy Template You Can Copy Today

Most churches now use AI somewhere, and most have never written down the rules. Exponential’s 2025 State of AI in the Church survey reported that 91% of church leaders support AI use in ministry and 61% use it frequently, while 73% have no AI policy. That gap is where problems live: a volunteer pastes members’ prayer requests into a chatbot, a guest speaker quietly generates half a sermon, a vendor’s terms let your recordings train someone else’s model, and nobody decided any of it.

A church AI policy fixes that with one page. Below is a complete template you can copy, adapt and adopt at your next leadership meeting. First, a short case for why it’s worth the meeting.

Why every church needs an AI policy

Church bodies have started saying so out loud. In September 2025 the Southern Baptists’ ERLC released The Work of Our Hands: Christian Ministry in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, a free practical guide for churches led by Jason Thacker. On the EFCA blog, two reviewers of Todd Korpi’s AI Goes to Church, a software engineer and elder and a missionary educator, reached the same conclusion from different directions: pastors can’t afford to ignore AI, and it’s better to lead on it than react to it. The question has moved from “should churches think about this?” to “what did your church decide?”

Our version of the case, in three points:

1. Your people are already using AI. Staff, volunteers and guest speakers are making individual judgment calls right now, with no shared standard. A policy turns fifty private decisions into one public one.
2. Trust is the whole asset. A congregation that wonders whether the sermon was machine-written, or whether its prayer requests went into a chatbot, has a question mark where trust used to be. A published policy answers it before it’s asked.
3. The data is sensitive. Sermon recordings, pastoral notes and member information are among the most personal data any organization holds. What happens to them shouldn’t depend on a vendor’s default settings nobody read.

One distinction is the hinge of the whole policy: there’s a real difference between speech recognition, which writes down the words your pastor actually preached, and a language model generating content. A good policy protects that line in writing. We explain where we think it sits in AI for churches: what it should and shouldn’t do.

How to use this template

Copy the section below into a document, replace the bracketed items, delete anything that doesn’t fit, and bring it to your elders or leadership team. It’s written in plain English on purpose: a church policy that reads like a software license won’t be read. Most churches can adapt it in under an hour.

The template: [Church Name] AI Use Policy

[Church Name] — Artificial Intelligence Use Policy Adopted [date] · Reviewed annually · Responsible: [name, role]

1. Purpose and scope. This policy governs the use of artificial intelligence tools, including chatbots, transcription services, image generators and AI features inside other software, by [Church Name]‘s staff, volunteers and guest ministers, in any work done on behalf of the church. It exists to protect the integrity of our preaching and pastoral care, the privacy of our congregation, and the trust between this church and its people.

2. Transparency to the congregation. We will be open about how we use AI. A current summary of our approved uses is available to any member on request [or: is posted at (location/URL)]. If we materially change how AI is used in our ministry, we will say so plainly.

3. Red lines: what we will not use AI for.

• AI-written sermons or teaching. No sermon, Bible study or devotional presented as the work of one of our ministers may be generated in whole or in substantial part by AI. Transcribing what was actually preached, and organizing material drawn only from it, is permitted; generating the message is not.
• AI pastoral counsel. No AI tool may be used to conduct, simulate or substitute for pastoral counseling, prayer ministry or crisis care. Members in need speak with people.
• Undisclosed AI content. AI-drafted material we do use (see §4) must never be presented as the personal work or words of a specific person.

4. Approved administrative uses. AI tools on the church’s approved list may be used for: transcribing sermon audio and meeting recordings; drafting and editing administrative text (announcements, emails, event descriptions) that a person reviews before sending; formatting, summarizing and organizing existing church material; translation drafts, reviewed by a fluent speaker before use; and scheduling, spreadsheets and similar office work. In every case a named person remains responsible for the final output.

5. Data privacy. Sermon recordings, pastoral notes and any data identifying members may only be entered into tools on the approved list. Before approving a tool, the responsible person must check the vendor’s data terms and record whether church content is used to train the vendor’s models, preferring vendors that don’t train on customer data or that offer an opt-out, which must be used. Prayer requests, counseling notes and minors’ information may not be entered into general-purpose AI chatbots.

6. Review and responsibility. [Name, role] is responsible for this policy: keeping the approved-tool list, vetting new tools before adoption, and answering questions from staff and volunteers. The policy returns to [elders/leadership team] for review every [12] months, or sooner if our tools change significantly.

That’s the whole thing. Six sections, one page, and every hard conversation happens once, calmly, in a leadership meeting, instead of piecemeal after something has gone wrong.

Adapting it to your church

A few notes on the questions we hear most:

On the red lines. Some churches will want to allow AI-assisted sermon research while banning generation. That’s a legitimate line; Barna’s 2024 research found that only 12% of pastors were comfortable using AI to write sermons, while 43% saw merit in it for preparation and research. Practice has moved since: in Barna’s 2026 update, 24% of pastors reported actually writing sermons with AI. Whatever you decide, draw the line explicitly. The worst policy is the unwritten one.

On the approved-tool list. Keep it short and actually maintained: five tools someone has vetted beat fifty nobody has. For each, record the answer to one question: does this vendor train its models on our data? You have to check vendor by vendor, because defaults differ and change.

Since SermonKeep is ours and this is our template, here are our answers, so you can put them in your list. SermonKeep’s speech recognition provider, AssemblyAI, has our account opted out of its model-improvement program, and we delete each transcript from AssemblyAI as soon as we’ve collected it. The language-model providers we use through their APIs don’t use API data to train their models, and we don’t train models of our own on your sermons. The details are in our privacy policy for churches.

On transcription specifically. Sermon transcription fits comfortably inside these rules: the input is a public act (the preached sermon) and the output is a faithful record of it. If your tool also drafts material from the transcript, like a summary or a small group guide, check that it works only from the preacher’s words and that a person reviews it before it goes out. That’s the line §3 draws.

On the responsible person. Resist the committee. One named person with authority to say “not that tool” keeps the policy alive; a working group will schedule a meeting about it.

Adopt it this month

A church AI policy isn’t really a technology document; it’s a trust document. It tells your congregation, in writing, that the sermon they hear is the one their pastor prepared, that their private moments stay private, and that someone they can name is minding the store.

Copy the template, argue about the brackets, and adopt something. If sermon transcription ends up on your approved list and you’d like to see a sermon-tuned transcript of your own preaching, SermonKeep does your first sermon free, up to an hour, no card required. Whatever tools you choose, write the policy first. It’s one page, and your congregation is worth it.

Sources

• Exponential, AI in Churches 2025 (Kenny Jahng, November 2025). The Christian Post reported the survey covered 594 pastors and church staff.
• ERLC, The Work of Our Hands (September 2025), as reported by Baptist Press.
• EFCA, What Should Pastors Do About Artificial Intelligence? (December 2025).
• Barna, Three Takeaways on How Pastors Can Use AI (February 2024; 278 U.S. Protestant senior pastors) and Pastors Are Using AI More Than You Think (June 2026).