How Churches Harness Data and AI as Tools of Surveillance
Updated: August 22, 2025 – This article has undergone significant revisions to reflect ongoing investigations into the capabilities and claims of faith-tech companies like Gloo. Further updates will follow as new information emerges.
Unseen Surveillance in Modern Worship Spaces
Imagine a Sunday morning at a large Midwestern megachurch. As congregants enter through automatic glass doors, they unknowingly pass through a biometric monitoring system. High-speed cameras capture multiple facial images per second, focusing on key features such as eyes, noses, and mouths. These images are processed by neural networks that convert them into unique digital identifiers. Before attendees even reach their seats, their digital profiles are cross-referenced against an on-site database containing membership details and watch-list alerts, all securely stored behind the church’s firewall.
Elsewhere, a woman walking home scrolls through her social media feed, unaware that sophisticated algorithms have aggregated her social media activity, private health records, and veteran outreach data. Her military background, chronic pain, opioid dependency, and devout Christian faith are flagged, triggering targeted advertisements inviting her to attend a local church service. This scenario, while hypothetical, mirrors real-world applications increasingly integrated into places of worship nationwide, where spiritual care intersects with advanced technology in ways many congregations do not fully comprehend.
The Rise of a Faith-Tech Ecosystem
In Boulder, Colorado, a burgeoning hub for faith and technology, the company Gloo is pioneering a digital infrastructure designed to usher churches into the era of algorithm-driven insights. Gloo positions itself as a “technology platform for the faith ecosystem,” aiming to unify and modernize how churches engage with their members.
Churches in the United States represent a highly segmented market that has been slow to adopt digital tools. Gloo’s founders, including Scott Beck-an entrepreneur with a track record of scaling businesses like Blockbuster and Ancestry.com-and Theresa, an artist known for eco-conscious workshops, have convinced thousands of congregations that spiritual well-being can be managed similarly to customer engagement. Gloo’s platform functions much like Salesforce but tailored for religious organizations, offering psychographic data and insights through its “State of Your Church” dashboard, a tool designed for today’s clergy.
Since its inception in 2013, Gloo has steadily expanded its reach, now partnering with over 100,000 churches and ministry leaders across the U.S., a country home to approximately 370,000 distinct congregations.
In 2024, Gloo secured a $110 million strategic investment from mission-aligned backers, including child development NGOs and denominational financial groups, marking its evolution from a basic service provider to a dominant player in faith technology. The company has since invested in a suite of ministry tools such as automated sermon distribution, real-time donation analytics, AI-powered chatbots, and leadership content libraries, creating an all-in-one platform that integrates back-office functions, member engagement, and deep psychographic profiling.
Strategic Growth and AI Integration
In March 2025, Gloo announced that Pat Gelsinger, former CEO of Intel and chairman of Gloo’s board since 2018, would take on the role of executive chair and director of technology. Gelsinger, known for spearheading innovations at Intel and VMware, brings significant tech expertise, though he is currently involved in litigation with Intel over compensation disputes.
Simultaneously, Gloo invested in Barna Group, a Texas-based research organization that has surveyed over two million Americans for four decades, providing comprehensive data on religious beliefs, worship patterns, and cultural engagement. This partnership merges Barna’s rich behavioral and spiritual data with Gloo’s digital infrastructure, enabling churches to segment, score, and deploy insights with unprecedented precision.
Gelsinger revealed in a June 2025 interview that Gloo has been acquiring approximately one company per week, aiming to scale its influence across the faith-tech landscape. By April 2025, Gloo had acquired or gained majority ownership of 15 mission-aligned companies, expanding its technological and distribution capabilities.
AI Tools Tailored for Spiritual Care
At the AI & the Church Hackathon in Boulder in September 2024, Gloo unveiled new AI-driven products, including Data Engine, a content management system with digital rights protections, and Aspen, a prototype chatbot designed to be “spiritually safe.” Central to these innovations is CALLM (Christian-Aligned Large Language Model), a faith-tuned AI that powers the chatbot and other tools.
Gloo also introduced the “FlourishingAI Standards,” a benchmark assessing AI models across seven dimensions of well-being: relationships, meaning, happiness, character, and finances. Developed in collaboration with Barna Group, Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program, and Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, this $40 million international project spans 22 countries and involves partners like Gallup and the Center for Open Science.
Gelsinger emphasizes the economic potential of this sector, noting that U.S. church donations total around $300 billion annually, with an additional untapped $200 billion outside church channels. Including the broader “economics of flourishing,” the market could approach $1 trillion, representing a significant opportunity to optimize resource allocation and outreach.
Data-Driven Outreach and Partnerships
One of Gloo’s most prominent collaborations was with the nonprofit “He Gets Us,” which launched a billion-dollar media campaign to modernize Jesus’ image. Interactive tools on campaign websites collected personal data through quizzes, church matching, and prayer requests. Gloo then enriched this data with Barna’s behavioral research, creating detailed spiritual profiles that far exceed what individual congregations could achieve alone.
Although Gloo’s involvement with “He Gets Us” has reportedly ended, the campaign sparked a significant partnership with the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (AME Zion), a historic denomination with roots in abolitionism and civil rights. In 2023, AME Zion began using Gloo’s “State of Your Church” dashboard across its 1,600 U.S. congregations, representing approximately 1.5 million members. This marked the first large-scale deployment of Gloo’s framework by a major denomination, providing real-time insights into church culture, membership health, and community well-being.
Behind the Digital Curtain: The Church’s Data Supply Chain
Modern churches often begin their digital engagement with intimate moments-prayer requests, small group sign-ups, or livestream attendance. However, beneath these pastoral interactions lies a complex data pipeline resembling Silicon Valley’s attention economy. Charles Kriel, a filmmaker and former UK Parliament advisor on disinformation and addictive technology, highlights how many churches unknowingly rely on third-party services that collect and monetize congregant data.
Today, churches combine first-party data collected internally with third-party psychographic profiles to fuel predictive algorithms. These systems recommend sermons, match members to groups, and trigger outreach when engagement wanes. Some even employ biometric surveillance. Since 2014, Israeli security expert Moshe Greenshpan has adapted airport-grade facial recognition technology for churches through his company FA6 Events (also known as “Churchix”), now used in over 200 churches worldwide, nearly half in the U.S.
FA6 Events transforms church entrances into biometric checkpoints, performing instant headcounts, security scans, and attendance logging. Facial images are processed by neural networks to create unique digital signatures, which are matched against local databases containing names, membership roles, and watch-list flags. This system can alert security personnel in real time if individuals on restricted lists attempt entry, or notify pastors when long-time members become disengaged.
“To my knowledge, no church has informed its congregations that it uses facial recognition,” says Moshe Greenshpan.
While all data remains stored on church-owned, encrypted hardware rather than the cloud, Greenshpan acknowledges that technical safeguards do not guarantee transparency. Meanwhile, Gloo’s Gelsinger envisions these technologies fostering community care, such as notifying churches when new residents move into a neighborhood to facilitate welcome gestures or connecting addiction recovery ministries with those in need.
Data Privacy Concerns and Ethical Challenges
Data collected by churches often flows through CRM systems, cloud servers, and vendor partnerships. Some is used internally to boost engagement, while other portions are repackaged and sold within the faith-tech market or even to political advertising networks. Brent Allpress, an academic researcher, revealed that Gloo had access to client church databases and was strongly encouraged to aggregate this data, including sensitive health information, into centralized silos.
Gloo disputes some of these claims, stating it does not retain campaign data and operates under data processing agreements limiting its use to church directives. Nonetheless, the blending of pastoral care with data-driven marketing raises concerns about exploiting vulnerabilities, such as mental health struggles or relationship crises, for outreach and financial gain.
Legal Ambiguities and the Need for Oversight
Faith-tech developers assert their tools aim to enhance care and tailor support, but experts warn that without clear data governance and transparency, these systems risk becoming instruments of surveillance. Gloo’s complex legal framework includes multiple agreements that restrict congregants’ rights to legal recourse, enforce arbitration, and permit broad data sharing with service providers and advertisers.
Biometric surveillance in churches operates in a legal gray area. Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) offers some of the strongest protections, requiring consent and data retention limits, with penalties for violations. However, most states lack comparable laws, leaving congregants vulnerable to unchecked data collection.
“There is a real risk that information gathered on a person can be used against them outside of the church,” warns Emily Tucker, privacy expert at Georgetown Law.
Tucker, who has a background in divinity and law, emphasizes that privacy is essential for authentic spiritual relationships and rituals. She cautions that data collected by faith-tech platforms is often insecure and can be weaponized, citing examples like government surveillance and immigration enforcement using IRS data. Churches, she argues, must carefully consider the potential harm to congregants from data misuse.
The Future of AI and Spiritual Care
At the April 2025 Missional AI Summit, attended by over 500 pastors, engineers, ethicists, and AI developers, Gelsinger spoke about shaping AI as a force for good aligned with Christian values. He likened AI’s transformative potential to historical technologies like Roman roads and the printing press, predicting AI will soon permeate every interaction.
Gelsinger highlighted how AI adapts to human communication, becoming a new interface compatible with humanity. Yet, the rapid adoption of these technologies outpaces the development of ethical guidelines, raising critical questions about transparency, consent, and accountability in faith-based AI applications.
As these tools become deeply embedded in the fabric of modern Christianity, the choices made today will determine whether AI enhances pastoral care or erodes privacy and trust. While some view this evolution as an unstoppable wave, others urge caution and vigilance to protect the sacredness of spiritual life.
