How MinistryPlace Uses AI: A Full Disclosure

Who Is Behind MinistryPlace

MinistryPlace was founded by Brent Lacy. I have served in ministry since the late 1990s, working with small and rural churches in pastoral, leadership, and volunteer roles. In my day-to-day professional work, I help manage business IT infrastructure for businesses and manage a team that specs and builds AI-powered solutions and roadmaps for clients, helping their teams work more efficiently, making their organizations more productive, keeping their critical data secure and budget intact. That combination, real-world AI implementation experience and decades of small church ministry, is what makes MinistryPlace different from every other church AI resource site. I am not writing about AI from the outside. I am building with it every day, and I understand both what it can do and where it fails.

Most church AI resources are written by either technology people who do not understand ministry, or ministry people who do not understand technology. I have spent decades in both worlds. That is not a credential I am bragging about. It is the reason MinistryPlace exists.

My IT Background and Why It Matters for Ministry

Before I explain how MinistryPlace uses AI, I want to explain why my technology background shapes everything about how we approach it.

I have spent years helping organizations use technology to become more productive and efficient while keeping their data secure. That work taught me several things that directly apply to how churches should think about AI:

• Data security is not optional. Organizations that treat data security as an afterthought pay for it eventually. Churches hold some of the most sensitive personal information that exists, and most of them have no formal data governance at all. That is a problem I take seriously.
• Tools are only as good as the people using them. The best technology in the world produces bad outcomes when people do not understand what it does, what it cannot do, and where the risks are. AI is no different.
• Efficiency gains are real, but they have to be earned. AI genuinely can make organizations more productive. But the productivity gains come from thoughtful implementation, not from blindly adopting every new tool. The same is true in ministry.
• The people who get hurt by bad technology decisions are rarely the people who made them. In a church context, that means your congregation. The pastor who carelessly enters member data into an AI tool is not the one whose privacy is violated. The member is.

That background is why MinistryPlace’s AI resources are not cheerleading for AI adoption. They are practical, honest, and grounded in the real risks that small churches face when they use these tools without clear guidelines.

How MinistryPlace Uses AI in Content Development

I am going to be specific, because vague disclosure is not really disclosure.

What We Will Never Do

These are not aspirational commitments. They are operational rules.

• We will never enter church member data into AI tools. No names, no prayer requests, no counseling notes, no giving records, no family situations. Not for any reason.
• We will never use AI to generate pastoral care content for specific individuals. The guides on this site are general frameworks. They are not AI-generated responses to specific pastoral situations.
• We will never present AI-generated content as if it were not AI-assisted. This page exists because transparency matters. If you ask whether AI was involved in something on this site, the honest answer is: yes, with human oversight at every step. That phrase, human in the loop, is not a disclaimer. It is a design principle. Every resource on MinistryPlace goes through a human review process before it is published. That human has ministry experience, theological training, and the pastoral judgment to catch what AI cannot: the subtle theological error, the illustration that would land wrong in a rural congregation, the advice that sounds right in theory but fails in practice. AI accelerates the work. A human is responsible for the outcome.
• We will never recommend AI tools we have not evaluated. Every tool mentioned on MinistryPlace has been tested. The recommendations reflect actual use, not affiliate relationships or sponsorships.

Why I Built This for Small Churches

I came to ministry in the late 1990s and have never left it. Over those years I have served small churches, rural congregations, and volunteer-led ministries in a variety of roles. I know what it is like to show up on Sunday morning as the pastor, the sound technician, the janitor, and the person who remembered to order communion supplies. That is not a complaint. It is the reality of small church ministry, and it is the context that shapes everything MinistryPlace produces.

When AI tools started becoming genuinely useful for ministry work, I saw an opportunity and a gap. The opportunity: these tools could give a bi-vocational pastor with 20 hours a week for ministry access to the kind of research, writing assistance, and administrative support that large churches take for granted. The gap: every resource being published about AI for churches was written for large churches with staff, budgets, and technology teams. The pastor I described above was an afterthought, if he was considered at all. MinistryPlace exists to close that gap.

MinistryPlace exists to close that gap. The 80% of U.S. churches with fewer than 100 in attendance deserve the same quality of practical guidance that large churches get. They just need it in a form that fits their reality: free or affordable, practical rather than theoretical, and written by someone who has actually served in that context.

A Note on AI and Pastoral Integrity

I want to be direct about something that I think gets lost in most discussions about AI in ministry.

AI is a genuinely useful tool. It has made MinistryPlace more productive. It has allowed me to produce more resources, more quickly, than I could have produced alone. That is real value.

But AI is not a pastor. It cannot pray. It cannot know your congregation. It cannot sit with someone who is dying. It cannot preach with the conviction that comes from genuine wrestling with the text and genuine love for the people in front of you. The things that make pastoral ministry irreplaceable are exactly the things AI cannot do.

The resources on MinistryPlace are designed to help pastors use AI for the tasks that consume time without requiring their unique pastoral gifts, so that they have more time for the things that only they can do. That is the only use of AI in ministry that I can endorse without reservation.

Frequently Asked Questions