Justin R. Lester walks churches through five steps to start using AI: learn prompt engineering, automate one repetitive task, spend 30 minutes weekly on ChatGPT or Claude for sermon drafts, appoint an AI volunteer, and track results monthly by souls reached and time saved.
Chapters
Here are 5 steps for churches to start using AI completely from scratch. My name is Justin R. Lester, and I'm That Tech Pastor, where not only I use tech to pastor, but I also love to pastor tech people. And let me tell you this, you're not late to AI. You're invited to— you're just uninvited to rooms that you haven't built yet. If your church is overwhelmed by AI, you're not alone. So here's how to get in the game with no tech background, no staff, and no fancy gear. Here are 5 ways to get started. You ready? Number 1, learn prompting. Not just what to say, but how to say it. Number 2, automate one thing. Start with follow-up texts or follow-up emails. Number 3, Use a Copilot or ChatGPT or Perplexity or Claude weekly for 30 minutes. Do this, do sermon ideas, ideas or bulletins or sermon drafts or drafts for your announcements, things of that nature. Start with the text, don't go to video yet. Number 4, train a volunteer as an AI minister. Use people in the church that already use it that now can use AI as a ministry for them, and you'll be surprised how many people want to use it to build the church. And then lastly, evaluate your results monthly. Set KPIs, souls reached, time saved, dollars stewarded. If you want a way that you can chat with me actually offline and engage with me to talk through this or create custom sheets in my vault, go ahead and comment AI launch and I'll send you a link. But you gotta do this, not only comment, but you gotta share this video so that somebody else can get the video and then also follow me. And once I see you share and follow, comment AI launch and I'll send you a link to my chat and my vault that has all this information, how you can get AI working in your church.
