By Michael Gryboski, Editor Thursday, April 23, 2026

An artificial intelligence tool launched by the Southern Baptist Convention's International Mission Board has been used by more than 600,000 people over the past year.

Known as “FaithBot,” the IMB launched the AI program in April 2025, in part to help handle the large number of messages it receives from around the world.

Don Barger, who serves as director of innovation and artificial intelligence on the IMB Global Engagement Leadership Team, told The Christian Post in an email on Tuesday that, since its 2025 launch, “over 600,000 people have engaged with the tool in English.”

According to Barger, that total doesn't include the people who used FaithBot in the 25 other languages in which it's offered. Barger said the number was “truly surprising,” but added that he believes “what matters more is what's behind it.”

“Pastors with limited access to theological libraries are using FaithBot as a research assistant to ethically prepare their sermons,” explained Barger. “It surfaces sources, raises interpretive questions, suggests frameworks, and then gets out of the way so they can do the distinctly human work of preaching.”

“Bible study groups are using it to dig deeper into passages. New believers with no local church nearby are using it to keep learning. Seekers, people who have carried questions for years and never felt safe enough to ask them out loud, are turning to FaithBot to help answer questions.”

Barger told CP that one of the benefits of FaithBot was that it effectively countered what he described as “the politeness problem,” noting that with “traditional outreach,” individuals “tell you what they think you want to hear.”

“In contexts where religious identity carries social risk, it's not just social awkwardness, it's sometimes genuinely dangerous to voice doubts to a foreigner with a visible agenda,” he continued.

“FaithBot changed that dynamic in ways we didn't fully anticipate. People asked questions they likely never would have asked a human. Some of these are doubts they have carried for decades. Until they had access to AI, they really didn’t have a place to ask these questions.”

In recent years, many churches and ministries have used AI tools in their work, with some entities launching their own chatbots to answer questions about Christianity.

According to a report titled "The 2025 State of AI in the Church Survey Report," 61% of surveyed pastors said they use AI weekly or daily, an increase from the 43% of pastors who said the same in 2024.

However, many have expressed concern about society’s growing acceptance of AI content and programs, including their use in church and ministry endeavors.

For example, a 2023 study by Barna and Gloo found that 51% of respondents believed AI negatively impacted churches, while 22% believed it was good for churches.

Similarly, concerns have been raised about the accuracy of such tools, particularly when they're used to explain biblical issues or topics to a user unfamiliar with Scripture.

Last month, YouVersion founder and CEO Bobby Gruenewald explained that his organization doesn't plan to launch a public chatbot for users, due to concerns over inaccuracies.

“The best model with the best performance, with the most popular versions of the Bible that are most indexed, misquotes Scripture at least 15 percent of the time,” Gruenewald told Christian Daily International. “Some of them as much as 60 percent of the time.”

Regarding these concerns, Barger told CP that one of the reasons IMB launched FaithBot was to provide people who are already using chatbots to ask questions about religion with a more accurate tool.

“If people are already defaulting to AI for answers to their deepest spiritual questions, I'd rather they have access to something grounded in Scripture than something trained on everything the internet has ever said about God,” Barger explained.

“What FaithBot represents is a conviction that the Church should be present where people are already asking questions, and that presence should be theologically grounded rather than algorithmically generic. The world built a tool that will answer spiritual questions with whatever the internet contains. We think the Church can do better than that.”

Barger explained that IMB had begun work on FaithBot in 2024, partnering with Chipp.ai and devoting several months to learning "about what works, what doesn't, and what people ask when they feel safe enough to ask honestly."

Barger also stressed that there were “certainly things that AI shouldn’t be involved in,” such as “counseling, trauma healing, preaching, praying, and other things that are uniquely human.”

“Faithbot doesn't resolve the tension between AI-mediated ministry and embodied human presence, and we're not pretending it does,” he said. “FaithBot is a front door, but we don’t see it as a final destination.”

“It's built to triage genuine Gospel conversations toward human responders, not away from them. It’s built to help do research, not preach. When conversations move toward crisis, grief, or acute need, the tool routes to human support. Algorithms don't provide soul care. Souls provide soul care.”

News Source : https://www.christianpost.com/news/imb-sees-over-600000-people-use-ai-tool-faithbot.html