Greetings in Christ!

I hope this email finds you well, as we prepare to retell the story of Christ's humble Nativity, his stepping forth on the journey that would bring him to the Cross for our salvation.

As we head into 2025, I thought I'd share some thoughts on what's in store for churches as it relates to artificial intelligence. Here is what we'll cover:

• Gross stuff that we'll unfortunately see more of.
• What you can do with AI for your church now
• How your church will need to relate to AI in 2025, inlcuding optimizing for AI search

Hucksters Are Going to Do Their Thing

Many of you probably saw the X post of the mega-”church” “pastor” offering “pastoral” “care” via AI.

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Ugh.

Let’s be honest, there’s going to be more and more of this kind of stuff in the future.

That’s the double-edged sword when it comes to technology and our sinfulness. God created nothing evil – including human ingenuity. But, from the very beginning, humans have used that capacity for harm.

Abel, being a drover, would have been generally hindered by technology. You don’t need many tools to care for flocks, and carrying around a lot of stuff as you lead them to their pastures would be annoying.

Caan, on the other hand, was most definitely a technologist. Farming requires many tools: plows, hoes, scythes, and flails. You even need tools to make and repair your tools: hammers, chisels, hatchets, and the like.

Caan would have used one of those tools to shed his brother’s blood.

AI holds lots of promise for the Church, but the danger is always there to use it not to build others up in the Spirit but rather to spiritually harm them. Hucksters will follow Caan's example in their use of technology. That much is certain.

Get To the Top of the Organic Rankings

In SEO-talk the "organic rankings" are the traditional link results in Google. I have a system to get church websites to the top of those results, and I am offering that service through the "Orbital SEO Package." This package puts the right text at the right spot on the church's homepage, properly formats metatags, and sends authority to the homepage via links from other sites. These simple optimizations will put you ahead of the vast majority of churches and will help your search appearance.

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Stuff You Can Do with AI Right Now

Worship Planning

I’ve used AI for a year and a half now to plan worship. I don’t use it week in and week out, but I do use it to plan my midweek worship series for Advent and Lent. What used to take me hours now takes about twenty minutes of prompting ChatGPT. I wrote up an article on my process on Linkedin. You can check it out by clicking here.

Sermon Transcripts

I have been using AI to help produce readable sermon transcripts suitable for public consumption based on a recording of my sermon. This is a multi-step process in which I get a transcript, typically using MS Word’s transcription feature. That’s not usually fit for consuming through reading, so I will then use a series of prompts in ChatGPT to turn it into something much more readable. I then will post that to my church’s website.

Image and Video Generation

I’ve been using DallE to generate images for ministry purposes quite a bit. It’s a quick, easy way to get a thumbnail image for a sermon post on a website or a church advertisement.

I’ve only begun to mess around with Sora for video generation, but it looks promising as an alternative to using stock footage, which can be quite expensive!

Media Editing

Media editing takes a shockingly huge amount of time. Even something as simple as making a short-form video can take hours. Powerpoints, too. One of the most promising developments in AI right now are media production apps which do things like automatically cut up longer videos into shorts, cut in B-roll and transitions, add captions, etc. Similar apps will produce a PowerPoint presentation for you based on written text. I haven’t used these products yet, but I have heard good things.

AI and Churches in the Future

Here are a few ways I see churches interacting with and using AI in the future, even as close as 2025.

AI Agents

I foresee the rise of AI agents being adopted for workflows already in 2025 by some churches. An AI agent uses AI tools and automation to create complex tasks. Here is an example of an AI agent that I think would be quite useful: A media posting agent. For this agent, you could load a video of a worship service into it, and the agent would then:

- Post the video to YouTube, complete with title and description.

- Cut the video into shorts, including captions and video effects, and upload the shorts to Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok.

- Turn the sermon into X posts, and schedule the posts.

- Turn the sermon into a podcast episode, complete with a readable transcription, and post the episode.

All that is probably 20 hours of work by a human that could be accomplished with the click of a button.

There are almost limitless use cases for AI agents.

AI Search

Already, about 10 percent of online searchers are using AI products like SearchGPT and Perplexity. That’s an amazing adoption rate given how young these products are. AI is going to be incorporated into search more and more.

Churches need to be ready for this.

The most important way for your church to be ready for AI Search is to use language on your website that is easily understood by Natural Language Processing. This means that you need to talk to the AI crawlers like they are 5 years old.

Here is an example of the kind of text on your website that can help you in an AI search: Faith Lutheran Church is located in Saint Louis, Missouri. We have a Sunday School for children and a traditional and blended worship service.

Don’t use complex sentence structure. Don’t let pictures do the talking. You need to talk to the bots using headings and paragraph text, using simple, straightforward sentences.

You will be rewarded for doing so.

Also, trying to be obscure might be a winning strategy for humans. But, it isn’t for bots. I have seen some churches in my own church body (the LCMS) identified as Baptist or Non-denominational by AI search products because they try to obscure their affiliation on their website. I’ve gone back and checked later, and that identification by the AI search product changed. This tells me that the AI isn’t sure what to make of that church. And, if the bots can’t really with confidence tell who you are, they aren’t going to recommend you with confidence.

Play Nice with the Bots

That brings me to my final point for today.

AI companies are running out of training data. This means that they are starting to generate their own training data, using their own AI products.

My hunch is that organizations that provide a fresh influx of data will be rewarded.

In other words, post content. Post videos, podcasts, and sermon transcripts. Play nice with the bots, and they will play nice with you.

Hopefully.

That’s it for today. I pray that the Lord bless your Christmastide.

All glory, praise, and honor be to Jesus Christ, the humble babe of Bethlehem.

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God's blessings, Pastor Chris Jackson "SEO Priest" ​chris@churchseo.io​ Subscribe Now for Free Not subscribed to the free Church SEO Shapeup Newsletter? Subscribe now. Get My Free Comprehensive Church SEO Checklist ​Get the checklist that will guide you to winning top search visibility. Completely free. Inexpensive 1-Page Church Websites Designed to make it easy for your church to get on the web. Check it out. Need Help With Your Church's SEO? I aim to give away all my SEO knowledge for free. However, if you need muscle to accomplish your church's SEO goals, here are a few ways I can help: ​Stratospheric SEO Package. This is a baseline SEO package designed to give your church name, address, and phone number across the internet and to boost your church's SEO power. It helps you show up better in map results. Start with this package. ​Orbital SEO Package. The Orbital SEO Package does everything in the Stratospheric Package and also optimizes your church's homepage and boosts your church website's authority. It will help you show up better in both the map results and the link results. This package offers powerful optimizations. ​

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