If you are a pastor or a volunteer doing the church admin, you may already be using an AI tool. You are trying to get the Monday jobs done before lunch. The question for a church is not whether to use one, but what goes into it.
I use Claude as the main example. The same thinking applies to ChatGPT and Gemini, and I mention them only where you may already be using them. This is information, not legal advice. If a decision here is big, ask a lawyer who knows POPIA.
Why a church is different
South Africa's Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) has a stricter category called special personal information. Section 26 lists religious or philosophical beliefs among the things a responsible party may not process unless an exception applies. Section 27 says the prohibition does not apply when the person has consented, and there are other grounds too. See also this summary from a South African law firm and the Information Regulator's guidance note.
A list of people who belong to your church is, in effect, a list of people's religion. That is why church member data deserves more care than a shop's customer list.
Section 28 gives religious organisations some room. A church may process information about its own members, or what it needs for its aims. But section 28(3) says that information may not be supplied to third parties without the person's consent.
Here is a question worth thinking about, and I am not giving you a legal reading. If you type members' details into an AI company's tool, is that supplying them to a third party? I do not know the answer, and I would ask a lawyer before relying on either view. In the meantime my advice is to keep member details out, and the rest of this post follows from that.
Where your words go
When you use Claude, what you type travels to Anthropic. Anthropic's privacy policy says personal data is transferred to its servers in the US and other countries. Checked 7 November 2026.
POPIA section 72 limits passing personal information to someone in another country unless an exception applies, for example that the recipient is bound by law or agreement to protect it, or that the person has agreed. Whether that matters for your church is a second question for a lawyer. It is another reason the safest habit is to keep people's details out of the chat.
What stays out of an AI tool
Treat anything you type as leaving your building.
- Names with phone numbers, addresses or ID numbers of members.
- Anything about a person's health, marriage, money, debts or discipline.
- Counselling or prayer requests that name someone.
- Details about children.
- Giving records, or a list of who gave what.
- Passwords, bank details and the contents of the member list itself.
If you would not read it out loud in a Sunday service, do not paste it.
What is fine
AI tools are good at first drafts of ordinary work, and most of that work has no personal detail in it.
- Turning a sermon you have already preached into a few short posts.
- A notice about a public event, such as a youth camp date or a clean-up day.
- A template for a volunteer reminder with a blank where the name goes.
- Tidying the wording of a letter you wrote.
- Summarising a document that is already public.
The trick is the blank. Write "Hi [name], thanks for serving on [date]" and add the name yourself in your own message app. Claude never sees the person.
Check the settings yourself
Whether your chats can be used to improve the product depends on a setting, and settings change. Do not trust what you remember, and do not trust me. Look at it now. What follows is what Anthropic's pages said when I checked on 7 November 2026.
- The training setting. Anthropic says that on Free, Pro and Max, your chats may be used to improve Claude only if the model improvement setting is allowed. I have not found a page that says which way it starts, so check your own account. It is at claude.ai/settings/data-privacy-controls, and you can change it any time.
- Incognito chats. Anthropic says these are never used for improvement, even with the setting on.
- How long chats are kept. Anthropic's data page says that with the setting allowed, data can be kept for up to five years, and with it off, about 30 days. Anthropic's other help page on storage says deleted chats leave your history at once and its back-end storage within 30 days, and that turning the setting off does not pull data back out of models already trained.
- Memory. Claude can carry earlier chats into later ones. It is on by default for Free, Pro, Max and Ultra. Another reason to keep names out.
- Shared accounts. Anthropic's Team plan is for groups of 2 to 150 people, with admins managing access and billing. Anthropic's data page says that under its commercial terms it does not train on Team prompts unless the customer opts in. That page is written about Claude Code, so read Anthropic's own Team privacy article before relying on it for chat.
If you use other tools, each has its own setting too. Google's Gemini help page says that with Keep Activity on, your activity is used to improve its services, including training generative AI models (checked 6 November 2026). ChatGPT has a data-controls setting for training on your chats. I could not confirm which way it starts, so check it on each account the church uses.
Each phone and each person's account has its own setting. Switching it off on the church laptop does nothing for the pastor's phone.
A one-page policy you can copy
A small church does not need a long document. Paste this into a page, change the names, and ask the people who help you to agree.
We use AI tools to draft routine work. A person reads, corrects and sends everything.
We never type members' personal details into an AI tool. That includes names with contact details, health, family trouble, counselling, giving and anything about children.
We use blanks and add names ourselves afterwards.
Pastoral care and sermons are written by people.
Each person checks the training setting on every AI tool they use.
Where we can, we use a church account, not a personal one, for church work.
If someone pastes something they should not have, they tell [name] the same day. Nobody is in trouble for telling.
We look at this page every [six months] and when a tool changes its terms.
If you are not sure where your lists are kept, start with the 30-minute check. Knowing what you have makes every other decision easier.
If you would like company
Setting a few good habits is not hard, but it is easier with someone beside you. I am happy to talk it through, and AI for your church is where to find out how. If you just want to ask a question, send me a message.