Hello Brothers and Sisters in the Lord

Hope you had a restful ANZAC Day long weekend. If your church ran a dawn or morning service, well done to everyone who made it happen.

Jackson Wong

Over the past year or so, a handful of Australian churches quietly started using a small AI translation tool. Under five thousand dollars to set up. Rather than displaying translations on the main screen, attendees connect their own device to access the translation in their language, with dozens of languages available. For a multicultural congregation in western Sydney or outer Melbourne, that solved a real problem they'd been managing around for years. No interpreter required, no second-language coordinator scrambling before the service.

That's what thoughtful AI adoption looks like in a small church. Specific, focused, solving a real-world problem.

But here is what adoption should not look like.

Imagine a pastoral email arrives in someone's inbox. It's warm, specific, and it lands on exactly the right day. The person reading it feels genuinely seen. What they don't know is that the sender typed a few details into an AI tool, accepted what came back with minor changes, and moved on to the next thing on their to-do list. If they ever found out, the email wouldn't feel the same. What made it meaningful was the thought behind it, and it is no longer as genuine as it seems.

Let's avoid that mistake before someone in your congregation stumbles into it. It's worth your leadership team having that conversation now.

The software vendors who sell church technology tools claim AI saves significant time every week. Some put it at six or more hours saved on communication tasks alone. Others claim five to ten hours, even more than ten hours of admin saved per week.

The most rigorous independent measurement tells a different story. A 2026 Foxit study tracking actual rather than projected savings found workers net roughly fourteen to sixteen minutes per week, because most of the time saved gets spent checking whether what AI produced is accurate.

But even if those bigger numbers were true, they may not be solving the right problem. Volunteering Victoria's 2025 State of Volunteering report surveyed more than 2,500 Victorians and found that only 57.9% of volunteer leaders, the people who coordinate and manage other volunteers, expected to still be in their role in three years. The top reasons for leaving were paperwork and burnout. That's general volunteering data from one state, not a national church figure, but the pattern is consistent with what we hear from small churches across Australia.

AI might help one person get a bulletin drafted faster. It won't fix what's making your volunteer coordinator quietly wonder how much longer they can keep going.

Most churches arrive at AI the same way they arrive at most things. Someone on the team starts using a tool, it works, and nobody talks about it until it becomes a habit. That's not necessarily wrong. But it's worth pausing before it gets to that point.

A decision made together looks different from a tool quietly adopted by one person. It's not about the tool. It's about whether your team is on the same page.

The good news is that a policy document and a strategy meeting are both worth having. But before you get there, you need the conversation. We've put together a simple one-page resource to help you start it.

That's what the Toolbox resource this issue is. A simple one-page conversation starter for your leadership team. Work through it together and you'll have the raw material to make a considered decision as a team.

Fair disclosure while we're on the topic. I use AI tools to help research and draft this newsletter. Not for anything personal, and always under my own edit.

You don't need to have this all figured out. You just need to start the conversation. The resource below will help you do that.

The Toolbox resource this issue is the Five AI Questions for Your Church's Leadership Team. It's a one-page conversation starter you can work through in fifteen minutes at your next leadership meeting. Grab it below.