Church of England AI guide draws a line around pastoral information

Guidance and responsibility

The Church of England's practical AI guide gives parish teams a boundary more specific than whether they approve of the technology: public communications and confidential care are different kinds of work. Its advice treats drafting general announcements without personal information as appropriate, while rejecting inputs such as safeguarding disclosures, pastoral notes and identifiable photographs of children or vulnerable adults.

The nine-page document is marked October 2026. An earlier indexed Church webpage carried an October 29 date; the current page is dated November 2. Those dates do not establish a new November policy. The Church explicitly describes the document as guidance, not policy or an encouragement to adopt AI.

It advises selecting a small set of approved tools, checking generated material, and keeping responsibility for spiritual direction, counselling and pastoral care with people. It does not establish that parishes have implemented those recommendations. For a church administrator, the immediate issue is therefore local practice: what actually happens when someone wants help with a document? Church guidance and PDF Source: churchofengland.org

A second check before using a tool

A useful comparison comes from Australia's privacy regulator, not another church announcement. Its guidance, published in October 2024 and updated in January 2025, recommends against putting personal information, especially sensitive information, into publicly available generative AI tools. It also urges organisations to examine intended uses, who can access information, human oversight and ongoing staff training. These are Australian recommendations, not a statement of English legal requirements. Their practical contribution is to show why selecting a familiar product is only the beginning of assessing a workflow. Australian privacy guidance Source: oaic.gov.au

Consider a hypothetical church administrator preparing a winter noticeboard. Asking for a clearer heading for publicly advertised opening hours is one task. Asking the same tool to organise a list explaining which households need emergency assistance is another. A single button labelled “improve this text” can conceal that difference from a hurried user. This illustration is not a report of an incident.

Our practical suggestion is to test a proposed workflow before introducing it: can a volunteer explain what information is involved, who has authorised the use and who will check the result? If those answers depend on an unavailable specialist, the process is not yet clear enough for routine use. A short rehearsal with invented information can expose uncertainty without using a real person's circumstances. The exercise should also identify a named person who can answer questions.

For Christian readers, the concern is also trust. Proverbs 11:13, NIV Proverbs 11:13 (NIV) contrasts betraying a confidence with keeping it. Within that wisdom teaching about trustworthy conduct, confidentiality is a responsibility toward another person, not merely a technical setting. Applying that principle to church administration does not determine a product's security. It does explain why convenience alone cannot settle whether entrusted information belongs in a prompt.