# Sandra Kowalczyk, Communications Coordinator at Bethany Lutheran Church (Bismarck, ND) — read of Church AI, May 18 2026 > 8 years doing church comms, currently the entire communications department for a 600-member congregation, running on Planning Center, Mailchimp, and a Canva Pro account my pastor thinks is a waste of money. --- ## How I got here Someone named Diane posted it in the Church Communications Professionals Facebook group on Thursday. She said "has anyone tried this?" and it had 47 comments by the time I saw it. Half the comments were just "following" which tells you how tired everyone is. I clicked through on my lunch break and read it on my phone while eating a sandwich at my desk, which is how I read everything. ## What I clicked first The pain section stopped me. The line "Bulletins eat half the week / Chasing eight ministry leaders for updates, normalizing their formatting, catching the typos in the pastor's title slide. Tuesday to Thursday, every week, without fail." I read that twice. That is my week. Not a dramatization. That is literally Tuesday through Thursday for me. So whatever this product is, they at least talked to someone before writing the page. ## Where I paused The visitor retention claim: "Our visitor retention went from about 12 percent to 31 percent in four months." That is attributed to Marcus Webb, Executive Pastor at Summit Ridge Fellowship. I paused on that for a while. Not because it's impossible, but because it's a very specific number and I have no way to verify it. I tried Googling "Summit Ridge Fellowship Marcus Webb" and got nothing useful. That doesn't mean he's not real. It means I can't confirm it. The claim is also doing a lot of work on this page, and if it's the result of just getting follow-up emails out on time, I believe it mechanically. But I want to know what "visitor retention" means to them exactly. Attended a second time? Joined a small group? Membership? Those are wildly different numbers. ## What I distrusted The testimonial names. Renata Silveira. Marcus Webb. Patricia Olmedo. I'm not saying they're fake. I'm saying that set of names looks like someone ran "diverse but plausible church staff names" through a generator. Three testimonials, three distinct demographic reads, zero photos, zero church websites linked. I looked up Crossroads Community Church with a communications director named Renata Silveira and couldn't land on a specific one. There are a lot of Crossroads Community Churches. Also the nav has a link that just says "Honest." That is a strange thing to put in your main navigation. If you have to label a section of your website "Honest," I start wondering what the rest of it is. The stat "Response rates typically double within the first month" for the volunteer ask generator. Typically. From what baseline? Double from what? That sentence is doing a lot of work with no sourcing at all. ## What would convince me I want a case study from a church I can actually find. A specific church with a public website, a real bulletin I can look at, and someone I could theoretically email. One real verifiable example beats three glowing quotes I can't trace. Mainline Protestant would help me specifically since the page says it handles denominational differences but the sample bulletin reads evangelical and the testimonial churches don't signal any denomination. Also: show me what the "training on past bulletins" actually does. The Patricia Olmedo quote says "after two weeks of training on our past bulletins." What does that mean technically? Does it store my bulletins? Does it fine-tune something? Does it just put them in a prompt? For a church that's concerned about data privacy and potentially has member information flowing through, that matters. ## What I'd ask in an email reply 1. The Olmedo quote mentions "two weeks of training on our past bulletins" -- what is actually happening to those documents? Are they stored on your servers, used to train a shared model, or just referenced in context per session? Our denomination's IT folks will ask me this. 2. The pricing says "no per-contact surprises" but the Starter tier has "visitor follow-up sequences up to 50 per month." We get maybe 15 first-time visitors in a good month, so that's fine, but if I'm on Growth at $99 and something changes, what exactly is unlimited? Unlimited sends, unlimited contacts, unlimited drafts? 3. Who built this? There's no founder page, no About page, no team listed anywhere. I'm being asked to pipe my congregation's communication data through a product and I don't know who runs it. ## Verdict: on-the-fence The pain description is accurate enough that I want to believe the solution is real. But I can't verify a single testimonial, the "Honest" nav link makes me uneasy, and there's no human face on the company anywhere. I'd reply to a founder email if one showed up with a verifiable reference. I wouldn't sign up cold. --- *Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-05-18. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*