Why I am building Pastorly

I am Raymond, the founder of Pastorly. For almost twenty years I have served at my local church, preparing sermon slides with my pastors for most of that time and looking after sound, visuals and livestreams. I have spent a lot of Sundays at the back of the room, watching the screens while the pastor preached.

My role has been to support and serve the people who teach and care for the church. Pastorly is how I am continuing that service.

Making the slides

Before AI, the slides for one sermon could take hours, sometimes days. We would search for images, work on them in Photoshop, check them against the notes and start again when they did not fit. A change on Saturday night could mean redoing something we thought was finished.

But the first task was always to understand the message, reading the pastor’s notes and working through them with him. What was he teaching? Where was the sermon going? An image could look impressive and still work against the point.

The slides were a small part of Sunday, but they were the part entrusted to me. “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord” (Colossians 3:23, ESV). I wanted to do that work faithfully with the skills God had given me. Better tools do not change that responsibility.

Becoming a father

Becoming a father made me think harder about what we teach children. Trying to explain the Trinity to an eleven-year-old and a six-year-old at the same time shows you how much thought good teaching takes. Children deserve that thought, and the people teaching them need time and support to prepare well.

That is part of why Pastorly goes beyond sermon slides. I want to help the Sunday School teacher, the youth leader, the person running a weekly Bible study, and the volunteer preparing another lesson after a full week at work.

Helping the sermon go further

A pastor has already put study and prayer into Sunday’s sermon. Pastorly helps that preparation reach further: into slides, Sunday School lessons, Bible studies and youth material, without everyone having to begin again from a blank page.

Work that once took a weekend can now take an afternoon. The church is one body, and most of us will only ever serve a small part of it directly. Pastorly is a way to serve churches I may never walk into.

Over the past few years, I have spent a lot of time working with AI and learning where it is genuinely useful and where it needs restraint, checking and human judgment.

Pastors once searched online for resources; now many ask AI. But general AI tools can get things wrong, and on matters of faith they often flatten conviction into something vague and neutral. Aide, Pastorly’s study and research assistant, works from a clear biblical foundation and is built to serve the church, not to stay neutral about the faith.

The sermon is the pastor’s

The sermon belongs to the pastor, who prepares it in prayer and in dependence on the Holy Spirit. No software can do that work, and Pastorly is not built to try. That conviction shapes everything I build.

Pastorly starts from the pastor’s notes. In the outline it reads from them, anything the AI adds is clearly marked and kept apart from what the pastor wrote, and nothing goes into the pastor’s notes unless the pastor accepts it. Gaps and uncertainty are shown, not hidden, and everything can be reviewed, corrected or changed.

Scripture is the final authority. The pastor still studies, prays, judges what is sound and takes responsibility for what is taught. Pastorly does not replace any of that.

Preparing resources is part of ministry. But so is time with the person who needs a conversation, the family waiting at home and the congregation being taught. I want Pastorly to give pastors and volunteers that time back.

If you are a pastor or ministry leader, I would genuinely like to hear from you: raymond@pastorly.ai

For almost twenty years I have served from the back of the room while God’s Word is preached at the front. Pastorly is that same service, for more churches.