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The European Christian Internet Conference, with WACC Europe, hosted a joint webinar on 29 April, “Feeding AI: How Data and Chatbots Can Guide People to Church.”
Via crucis in front of the Helsinki Cathedral, April 2026.
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Participants had the opportunity to hear two presentations on the challenges and opportunities artificial intelligence presents for the churches, and engage in discussion on the topic.
A span of services
A keynote by Eeva Salonen, development lead at the Helsinki Parish Union, Finland, titled “From navigation to knowledge: AI chatbots as engines of customer insight,” focused on the relationship between the church and urban residents.
Specializing in human-centered development and knowledge management, Salonen supports parishes in engaging people, and also works as an interaction architect for the Heräys AI conference in Finland.
Salonen opened by describing how Finland’s largest parish union — comprising 19 parishes — began deploying an AI chatbot on its Finnish-language website. The union serves around 305,000 parish members, representing roughly 44% of Helsinki’s population, and provides services spanning spirituality, life events, community activities, and everyday support.
The problem the chatbot was designed to solve was a familiar one: a sprawling website with thousands of pages, multiple parishes, and users who often could not find what they were looking for without human help.
Round-the-clock support
“Human help is not always multilingual,” Salonen noted, and staff assistance was largely limited to office hours. The AI chatbot, developed in partnership with Finnish company Leadoo, offers round-the-clock, multilingual support.
The system works by drawing on a knowledge base that human staff have built and continue to refine, combined with a large language model to generate responses. In its first year of operation, the chatbot recorded nearly 44,000 interactions and around 8,500 full conversations. More recently, monthly approaches exceeded 9,100, with over 1,200 conversations. Salonen was candid that the team is still learning: teaching the bot to give better answers, and working to earn higher user satisfaction ratings, remains an ongoing process.
Salonen also highlighted the value of what the chatbot reveals, not only what it delivers. Drawing on her background in service design, she described how each interaction amounts to a small piece of customer insight — real data about what people actually need, in their own words, rather than the assumptions institutions often make on their behalf. The data showed that users are primarily asking how to contact the right person, what events are happening and when, how to navigate life events such as weddings, baptisms, or funerals, and where to find relevant information. Crucially, people are not just seeking information: they are looking for clarity, direct answers, and guidance.
“Users are not just looking for information,” Salonen said. “They want to find clarity — who do I contact for this, and even some kind of guidance.”
Present on every channel
Rev. Ralf Peter Reimann, president of WACC Europe and internet commissioner for the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland, Germany, delivered a keynote, “Your Data is your AI Strategy: How to Feed AI Systems with Structured Data from Parishes.” The work of Reimann explores digital justice and the intersection of theology, technology, and artificial intelligence.
Reimann’s starting point was theological: drawing on the 1934 Barmen Declaration, which affirmed that the gospel is meant for all people, he argued that in the age of AI, churches have an obligation to be present on every channel through which people seek information — including AI systems.
As AI tools become the default way people search for information, the dynamics of discovery are changing fundamentally. Where a Google search once returned a list of links, AI systems typically deliver a single answer or a short conversation. As Google increasingly offers AI-generated overviews rather than ranked results, click-through rates to individual websites are falling sharply.
Surviving in the AI era
“In order to survive in the AI era,” Reimann said, “we have to expand our visibility beyond search.” The implication for churches is stark: if a parish’s information is not structured in a way that machines can read, it will simply not appear when someone asks an AI assistant where they can find a church service, or which congregation near them has a good choir.
Reimann offered a blunt illustration from personal experience. The church where he occasionally preaches publishes its bulletin as a JPEG image uploaded to its website — a format that cannot be indexed by search engines, cannot be read by AI, and is inaccessible to blind users who rely on screen readers. In his own city, he found it difficult to locate Protestant churches through AI queries at all.
His response is a project being developed by the Protestant Church in the Rhineland, with support from the EKD — Germany’s national Protestant church — to create structured, machine-readable location pages for every city and municipality in the country. The pages are built on existing infrastructure including the EKD’s “digital kirchturme” (digital belfries) project and regional event calendars, and will list church buildings, services, and other activities in a format validated against schema.org standards — the technical vocabulary that allows machines to understand what a website is actually about.
A minimal viable product already exists, and the team plans a nationwide rollout by the end of May. By the end of next year, Reimann’s goal is to have 750,000 entities — buildings, services, and events — available in structured form, accessible to both human users and AI systems. His vision is specific: by Christmas, someone should be able to ask an AI assistant for family-friendly Christmas services in Cologne and receive a reliable, accurate answer.
What both presentations made clear is that the question of how churches engage with artificial intelligence is no longer hypothetical. It is a practical challenge being worked through in real time, with real users.
The annual European Christian Internet Conference (ECIC) will take place in Rome, Italy on 10 – 12 June 2026. Titled “From Prompts to Prayers: AI and Authentic Spirituality,” the conference will explore the impact of artificial intelligence on spirituality and our faith practices.
Video recording of the webinar Feeding AI: How Data and Chatbots Can Guide People to Church
European Christian Internet Conference 2026: AI and Authentic Spirituality
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