Your ministry cannot afford to ignore AI. It also cannot afford to use it foolishly.

You hear the word AI and you feel one of two things. Either a knot in your stomach, or the quiet dread that you are already three years behind and it feels too overwhelming to try and catch up.

I want to take both of those off your plate, because neither one is going to help you lead well.

Here is what I have come to realize in the last few months. AI is not coming to ministry. It is already here. Your volunteers and lay leaders are using it to write their small group studies. Your donors are using it at work every day. Somebody on your team has a tab open right now asking a chatbot to fix an email. Someone is using it to plan and coordinate an outing, or to design an events page. The big question is whether the people called to shepherd will actually lead through it or hand the wheel to a tool nobody thought carefully about. And what is AI? Is it a research or editing tool? Is it to generate ideas or a thought partner? Or, as I argue, it is so much more than that. So much more.

I am not writing this as a tech guy who found a shiny tool. I am writing it as someone who knew nothing about coding, design, or research, and was able to figure it out little by little. I just started dabbling in it, and then my eyes were opened to the infinite possibilities. I am now able to dream up possibilities and get things done in a way I was never able to before.

Here is what I have done in the last few months.

I built a research assistant for sermon prep. Not to write the sermon, but rather to do the research and pull together the information. It allows a person to pull the cross references, look at observations after they have done their own study, and bring together the historical context.

I built a tool for small ministries drowning in financial admin. You speak or type what came in and what went out, in your own local currency, and it turns the mess into clean donor reports and a real picture of your finances. The kind of thing that used to need a bookkeeper you could not afford.

I built a tool that sits down with a person, gently interviews them about their faith story, and hands them back a written testimony they can actually share. Stories that were stuck in people's hearts, now on the page.

I am also building a devotional app, as well as an AI Gospel Ventures fund that allows me to work with people around the world and provide them with jobs.

Some of these tools are there to build up the body. Some are built to generate revenue to support the work of Resource Global around the world.

None of these tools replaces a single human being. Every bit of it gives humans their time and their energy back so they can do the work that matters. That is the whole point. That is the only point.

But the dangers are real.

They really are, and as much as there is potential, it is the Wild Wild West.

AI will lie to you with total confidence. It will invent a Bible verse, a statistic, or a quote and hand it to you. If you preach it without checking, that is on you, not the machine.

It can feed your laziness. Instead of doing the work and thinking through what you are preparing, you get lazy and ask it to write that sermon or that Bible study without putting much time into the preparation.

It can become the God you always wanted. A god who is there at your disposal, who speaks to you whenever you want, who reaffirms your ideas and does what YOU want it to do.

And if you are not careful, you can use image and video manipulation for selfish gain.

There are also real questions about privacy, about what you feed it, about leaning on it so hard that your own people stop learning to think. These are not reasons to run. They are reasons to lead.

And we need to shepherd the people God has called us to lead and help them learn how to navigate it. It has the potential to change how your church and your ministry operate.

One thing you can do today.

Pick a single task on your team that everybody dreads and nobody is called to. Formatting the bulletin. Turning meeting notes into next steps. Drafting the first pass of a newsletter. Just one. Sit down with a free AI tool and try to hand it that one job this week. Do not automate anything sacred. Automate something annoying. Then watch what your people do with the time you just gave back to them. That single experiment will teach you more than any article I could write, including this one.

Over the next four posts I am going to walk through the four places AI moves the needle for a ministry. Getting your team's time back. Doing big things with a small staff. Connecting with donors and telling truer stories. And building healthy income without pulling you off mission.

If you are a church, a ministry, or a Christian business trying to figure this out and need to talk with someone, hit me up. I would love to connect, touch base, and hear what you are doing. My email is tommyplee@gmail.com.