If that person’s prayer life improves, the AI will then shift to another area of spiritual health. “So it changes in real time for the member,” Lyons said.
At the same time, a church can use that information to help disciple congregants. Pastors will receive recommendations for how to respond to the data strategically. “How do we plan our sermon series, or how do we plan our Bible studies around that?” said Lyons.
Or, for example, if “there’s a pocket of folks in [a certain] area that are all struggling with the same thing,” he said, church leaders might conclude, “Maybe we can get them connected into a small group, and then we can all help them grow together because they’re all struggling with that.”
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“We realized after talking to a lot of pastors, they’re not going to force people into groups. Like no one’s going to do that, right?” Fontenot said. “So…we give the churches the option to build these groups…maybe there’s a volunteer that’s a stakeholder at the church that wants to help mentor and guide people through their spiritual journey.” If someone does want to form a small group based on this data, Atrium will use Gloo’s LLM to create content for that group.
“AI is mostly helping to write the discipleship, the Bible studies, the email campaigns that are directly getting there to help [people] grow,” said Lyons. For those resources, “we’re tapping into what Gloo already uses for discipleship.”
“A church…really can get a pulse on its membership and understand, like…what’s the spiritual component of our church?” he said. “Are we a really deep church, or are we full of new believers? What do they need, or how can we help them grow? And how can we truly disciple our church in a different way by understanding where they’re at?”
“I mean, some of these churches have 20,000 members,” said Fontenot, “and it’s like, how do you read 20,000 surveys? Let’s use AI to summarize based off the weights of each of the survey respondents in these categories to then identify how to improve certain areas that are lacking versus others.”
Disclosure: ChurchLeaders is owned by Outreach Inc., which is owned by Gloo. Masterworks is also owned by Gloo.
