Somewhere in your church this week, a staff member asked an AI tool to draft a newsletter, summarize a meeting, or write small group questions. Maybe that was fine. Maybe they pasted in a prayer request or a member’s personal story along the way. The honest answer for most churches is that nobody knows, because nobody has said where the lines are.
You’re not alone in that. New Barna research found that 94 percent of pastors believe churches need AI guidelines, yet only 4 percent have a formal policy and 79 percent have nothing at all. Most pastors already know where they stand. Very few feel positive about AI interpreting Scripture, and almost none want it anywhere near pastoral counseling. The convictions are there. They just haven’t been written down, which means your staff can’t see them, follow them, or be held to them.
For a multisite church, the stakes are higher. Every campus, every ministry team, and every device is a place where the culture either travels or quietly drifts. If your central team assumes one thing and your campus staff assume another, you don’t have an AI problem. You have an alignment problem that AI is exposing.
At ministryengine, we believe the secret to lasting impact is integrity: what a church believes, says, and does should line up, from the senior pastor’s office to the newest campus. That’s why we help big-vision churches build long-term solutions instead of quick fixes. An AI policy is a small but revealing test of that integrity, and the strongest reasons behind it are theological before they are operational. AI cannot shepherd people, because shepherding means knowing and being known (John 10:14). It cannot speak for your doctrine, because Scripture entrusts that to accountable elders (Titus 1:9). And it cannot sit with a grieving family, because presence was never a delivery method for care; it is the care (Romans 12:15).
So we built a tool to help you lead this well. We’ve adapted the AI Use Policy that we helped Woodside Bible Church create for its staff across 13 campuses into a ready-to-use template for your church. We started with a multisite church’s policy on purpose, because a policy that has to hold together across thirteen locations is solving the hardest version of this problem. We added Scripture grounding to its strongest claims, highlighted every decision your leadership needs to make, and included guidance on what should stay non-negotiable at the center and what your campus pastors should own locally.
Here’s the plan. Download the template and fill in the highlighted fields. Bring it to your elders this month and name one person to own it. Then teach it to your staff in person, so they understand the why before you ask them to sign.
Download the AI Use Policy Template
If you want help adapting the policy or building the leadership structure around it, reply to this email. That’s the work we love doing with multisite churches, and we’d welcome the conversation.
Thomas Lewis
ministryengine
Long-term solutions for big-vision churches
Data: Barna Group, “Pastors Say Churches Need AI Guidelines. Few Have Them.” October 6, 2026.
