Transform Your Church Operations: AI-Powered PewSheet Automation
The Setup - Explaining the Problem (and my doubts!)
This week, I had a text message come through from a really good friend. A couple of weeks ago we had gone on a retreat. In my always-over-the-top way I spent twenty minutes telling them AI would help their ministry.
They took me at my word! I got a text a few weeks later.
"We've got these Pew Sheets that take us a lot of time to prepare each week. We have to pay someone to help with some of the information! Could AI save us time and money?"
Sure - I said, and we setup a zoom. I have to be honest though, that when it came to it I bottled it a little bit. They explained their issue as follows:
- They needed something that would automatically write their PewSheet each week.
2. They had a news site on a separate website that they wanted to draw news from.Otherwise they were writing everything twice.
3. They needed to include the Church of England's Collect
4. They wanted to include the scripture reading, printed in full.
I had two thoughts.
1) This is all drawing from external sources, something I'd struggled to get AI to do well before.
2)This was the sort of thing I used to write scrapers for all the time.
So our first suggestion was just that. LLM's are excellent for teaching basic coding, and realistically this was very basic coding! Blessedly their partner had been a coder before.I sent them the GoogleDocs API guide, gave a demo on asking ChatGPT to act like a programmer ... and left it at that.
But the next day, while i was in prayer I felt a little nag at the back of my mind. This approach wasn't really what they'd asked for. So I got playing with different prompts for ChatGPT - and i was wrong to doubt all along!
TLDR!
A Small church wants to automate creating Pew Sheets for their congregation
They need to include the collect.
They need to include the scripture reading.
They need to include news drawn from a third party website.
They want a solution that saves both time and the money of paying a third party to produce the sheets.
ChatGPT saved them time, money and effort with some simple prompt designs.
The Solution!
So - after playing with Large Language models including Co-Pilot and ChatGPT...
I found a prompt produced the most consistent results. For your own situation, I'd recommend adjusting the prompt to your own tradition.
If you don't have a news website of your own, you can point people towards a Christian News site. You can also include information from a social media feed like your public Facebook or Instagram pages.
HOW TO DO IT
Firstly, login to ChatGPT over at chatgpt.com.
Where it says "Message ChatGPT", paste this:
"Acting as a Church Secretary in a Church of England church from the United Kingdom, could you please write a 'pew sheet'. This will be a single page comprising of the Anglican Collect for the day, followed by the lectionary readings. After this, could you please include any news from https://notarealchurchnewssite.com/benefice-news/church-news-events/ that has occured since the first of August 2025?"
We found that ChatGPT in particular completely understood the assignment, providing something that was even perfectly formatted.
We also found that it would create Pew Sheets for the next few weeks. With the tradition we were working in that meant specifying the church calendar. I'm sure it would work easily as well for other traditions by using calendar dates.
One important note. We found it worked best if we specified to ChatGPT several times the correct date.Otherwise it did tend to give the wrong week, and we saw differences between collect and lectionary e.t.c.
Our prompt looked like this:
"Acting as a Church Secretary in a Church of England church from the United Kingdom, could you please write a 'PewSheet' for the 12th Week after Trinity. This will be a single page comprising of the Anglican Collect for the 12th Week after Trinity, followed by the lectionary readings. After this, could you please include any news from https://notarealchurchnewssite.com/benefice-news/church-news-events/ that has occured since the first of August 2025?"
Conclusion
Conclusion: A Joyful Revelation
And there you have it! What started as a moment of doubt ended with a joyful revelation: AI can truly bless our ministries in ways even I hadn't imagined! With a little creativity (and some prompting know-how), tools like ChatGPT can save us time, money, and a whole lot of effort. It’s amazing to see how even something as practical as a Pew Sheet can be automated, giving us more room to focus on the heart of our mission—serving others and spreading God’s love.
So, if you’re hesitating, just give it a try! Whether you're creating Pew Sheets, managing service schedules, or even just looking for inspiration, AI can be an unexpected but faithful helper in the work we do. Plus, let’s be honest—it’s pretty fun to see tech lend a hand in ministry!
Have you tried something similar, or are you struggling to get this working? Whatever it is we'd love to chat with you in the comments!