A member in your church told you what she gave this year. She also told you where she lives. Somewhere in a file there is a note about a father being in hospice, because he wanted the church to know and he wanted someone to pray for him.

These people did not tell a company, they told the church. 

That distinction has to matter to those of us called to this work. We are stewards of real life moments and technology can never compromise the work or the humanity of those that we are called to serve. This is coming from someone who absolutely loves technology and uses it to make my life easier at every opportunity! AI is no different. We, over here at Mooney Projects, appreciate the technology while maintaining healthy caution about how much information we share with it.

One rule, short enough to tape to the desk

Names, addresses, giving amounts and membership records never go into a public AI tool.

So, what's the AI rule? Personally identifiable information about people should never go into a public AI tool. Nearly everything else about AI in the church office is a judgment call, and faithful people will land in different places. However, this one is an early safety measure that should not be ignored.

When you type something into a free, public AI tool, you have handed that text to a company; for better or worse. Depending on the tool, it may be stored, used as training data or even just read by a person checking quality. It may shape future versions of the thing. Some tools let you turn that off, and most of us never look.

The trouble isn't that these big companies are careless or even malicious. The trouble is that it was never our data to hand over.

What counts

Most of us know better than to paste the giving report into a free chatbot. However, The near misses are quieter.

A first name, in a sentence that also says something about her. An address sitting in a signature block you forgot to trim. A screenshot, which is only the spreadsheet wearing a different coat. A file you uploaded instead of pasted, which is the same thing again. Anything at all about a child.

If you wouldn't read the sentence aloud from the pulpit, it doesn't go into a free LLM using your data.

You don't have to give up the help

Listen, I get it. I love the bots and once you start using them, you kind of love the help. Just don't send the details. Write the prompt with the private parts left as blanks and fill them in yourself afterward. The AI writes the shape of the letter. You plug in the people.

Write a warm, specific thank-you letter to [NAME], who gave [AMOUNT] to our [CAMPAIGN]. Our church is [CHURCH] and the gift will fund [SPECIFIC USE]. Under 180 words, in the voice of a pastor who knows this family. Name the concrete thing their gift makes possible. Do not use the words "generosity" or "blessing." End by inviting them to come see the work.

Five blanks. Five places where somebody's information would have gone and didn't. Filling them in takes two minutes, and you were going to make it personal anyway.

The two odd instructions in there are doing real work. Asking for the concrete thing their gift makes possible is what separates a letter from a form letter. This also gives you, dear reader, the opportunity to reflect on a meaningful answer to this question which will serve you well into the future. And banning "generosity" and "blessing" sounds strange until you have read a hundred of these and noticed that both words are so overused that they've almost stopped meaning anything.

Almost nobody has written this down

Current research on the topic found that the great majority of pastors now use AI in some form, and that only a small fraction of churches have put anything in writing about it. (Barna Research)

Barna found that 5% of churches have written guidelines for AI. A separate Gloo and Barna survey of Protestant pastors put the share using AI in ministry at 87%.

So the decisions are being made one at a time, quietly, by people with no idea whether anyone would mind. That is where the trouble comes from, not from carelessness. It comes from a church secretary at a quarter to five on a Wednesday who needs a letter written, has a tool that will write it, and has never once been told where the line is.

She deserves to be have a basic policy told to her, letting her know where your church stands. Four sentences everybody has heard:

We use AI to help with writing and administrative work. We do not put members' names, addresses, giving information, or pastoral records into free AI tools. Anything AI drafts is read and edited by a person before it goes out. If you're not sure, ask before you paste.

Say it at a staff meeting. Put it in the volunteer handbook. That is most of the work right there.

What we are actually protecting

It is tempting to file this under compliance, but it's really more than that. Noone in your church handed over their information because they read a privacy policy. They handed it over because it was the church asking. That trust took years to build, and it is not ours to spend for twenty saved minutes. Guard it the way you would guard anything else valuable somebody placed in your hands.

More like this in The Church Office, a weekly note on technology for the people who keep the church running. One useful thing a week, in plain language, that you can do yourself.