How AI Can Aid Evangelism in Your Church

If you're struggling to know what to do with generative AI at your church, you're not alone. Is it a friend or foe of the Gospel? The answer is it could be both. Correctly trained, it could be a useful tool to aid with evangelism at your church. Unsupervised or ignored, it could be harmful to the spread of the Gospel.

In the Reformed tradition, we have not been shy about using technology to promote the spread of the Gospel. Martin Luther was an early adopter, using the newly-invented printing press in the 16th century to scale up the publishing and distribution of his important Reformation messages. But it wasn't just about the printing press's capabilities. Even more important was Luther's decision to write in common languages, not the Latin the church used at the time which was not understood by most people. It was mostly this democratization of the language which allowed the Gospel to spread during the Reformation. 

Today, it’s not so much a language problem as a “too much information” problem. Technology - specifically the Internet - has created a cacophony of voices and information on faith, belief, and spirituality. To ensure people hear the Gospel, churches need to filter out all the noise and misinformation and lead people directly to the eternal truths. 

How does a church do that, given that most churches don't have technologists on staff and are lucky to have a somewhat current web site to connect with visitors and seekers. That's where AI comes in. Or more specifically, AI agents. These are the church worker bees of the future, trained on specific information to point both church members and prospective members/seekers to accurate information they need to experience the Gospel deeply or even for the first time. 

To be clear: AI agents should never replace humans for long-term discipleship activities which require human connection and human empathy. They are best at the organizing, facilitating, and follow up activities which most of us struggle to do consistently. 

I built an AI assistant for my church, Crossroads Fellowship CRC in West Des Moines. It's been trained on the Creeds and Confessions, as well as CRC official positions on social issues and Reformed theology. I believe every CRC church should be embedding such an assistant in their web sites. Here's why:

1. It is more efficient in educating people online in Reformed theology and what the CRC stands for than a static web site.
2. It creates an open door for new believers to experience our rich doctrines and theology. This is critical, given the revelations at our most recent Synod that many CRC churches are not requiring new members to learn and/or commit to the Confessions.  
3. The main AI assistants we are all using to get information every day are misleading people when it comes to basic questions on faith and spirituality. Research by the Gospel Coalition confirms this. If we are serious about evangelism in the CRC, we need to respond to this.

What would you train an AI agent on for your church? Happy to help you through that thought process and answer any questions about how we're doing it at Crossroads. Please respond in the comments!