The one-page AI policy a church can actually adopt

A church AI policy that people actually follow fits on one page and says three things: nothing goes out in the church's name that a named person has not read; anything a person in the congregation hears or reads is said out loud to be machine-made the first time it is used; and the recordings of our services are ours, not a training set for someone else. Everything else is detail hanging off those three lines.

We wrote ours after we had already been running live translation on a Sunday for months, which is the wrong order and also the usual one. The policy that came out of that is shorter than the one we would have written beforehand, because by then we knew which worries were real.

The three lines, and why each one is there

A named person reads it before it goes out. Not "the team reviews AI output" — a name, per kind of thing. The reason is that review is the only part of this that can quietly stop happening. A rule addressed to everyone is addressed to nobody by the third month.

If the congregation hears it or reads it, we say where it came from. Once, plainly, the first time. The objection we expected was theological and it never came. What actually upsets people is finding out afterwards. We learned that the hard way and wrote about what to say from the front separately, because the sentence matters more than the paragraph.

Our recordings stay ours. This is the line to get right in writing, because it is the only one you cannot fix later. Ask every supplier the same question in the same words — is anything from our services used to train a model, and where is it stored — and keep the answer. A supplier who cannot answer it in one sentence has told you something.

Who owns each kind of draft

This is the part that makes the page usable, and it is just a list with names next to it. Ours reads roughly like this, and yours will have different jobs in it:

• Live translation during the service. Owned by whoever is at the desk that Sunday. Their job is not accuracy word by word — nobody in the room can check that — it is to notice when the feed has gone quiet and to say one sentence from the front when it has.
• Names and terms. Owned by one person, usually whoever knows the congregation best. Every name, place and recurring phrase goes in an approved list before it can appear in a translation or a draft. This is the single highest-value hour anyone will spend on this, and we listed the forty words we started with.
• The transcript and the summary of the sermon. Owned by the preacher. Nobody else should be deciding what a sermon said.
• Drafts for the blog, the newsletter and social. Owned by whoever runs communications. These are the ones that leave the building fastest and the ones where machine-made text reads most obviously as machine-made, so this is where the reading actually has to happen rather than be assumed. If you want a picture of what these drafts look like coming out of one recording, that is the content pack.
• Study guides and anything printed. Owned by whoever teaches from it. Print is slow and permanent; treat it that way.
• Answers to questions about the sermon. Owned by a pastor. If people can ask a question of the sermon and get an answer grounded in what was preached, somebody in ministry has to be able to see what is being answered.

Six lines, six names. That is the whole middle of the page.

The sentence you say from the front

"From today you can hear the sermon in your own language — scan the code on the card in front of you. Yes, a computer does the translating, and yes, Markus checks that it holds up."

It takes nine seconds and it does more work than the policy document does, because almost nobody in the congregation will ever read the policy and everybody in the room hears that. Say it the first Sunday, say it again a month later, and then stop saying it.

What to leave out

Do not try to rule on what individuals do privately. A policy that tells a volunteer she may not use a spell-checker is a policy that gets ignored in week two, and that teaches people that the whole page is optional.

Do not write percentages into it. "AI may produce no more than 30% of a text" is unmeasurable and everyone knows it.

Do not name products. Suppliers change; the three lines do not.

Do not promise accuracy, yours or anyone else's. The honest version is that translation and transcription both make mistakes, that the mistakes in a translated service are usually invisible to the room rather than obvious, and that the answer is a person who checks rather than a number on a page. We have written at length about what to test before you choose anything, and the short version belongs in the policy: we check, and here is who checks.

What to do on Sunday

Open a blank page. Write the three lines at the top. Underneath, list every kind of thing your church produces that a congregation sees — slides, newsletter, socials, sermon audio, the translated service if you run one, the follow-up messages to visitors — and put one name beside each. Where you cannot think of a name, you have found the real gap, and it was there before any of this arrived.

Then read it to the team in five minutes and ask only one question: is there anything on this list you would not want your name against? The answers to that are worth more than the document.