Frequently asked
A few common questions. Not seeing what you need? Write us at hello@pastorly.ai.
What is Pastorly?
Pastorly is sermon preparation software for pastors. You study a passage with Aide beside your own notes, prepare the message, and then build the ministry that follows from it: a slide deck, a Sunday School lesson, a Youth lesson, a Bible Study. All of it stays tied to the passage you actually studied.
It is not a place where you hand over a topic and collect a sermon. You do the work. Pastorly keeps it together and carries it into the week.
What you build comes out as files you own. Slide decks export to PowerPoint or PDF, and manuscripts, lessons, handouts and study guides export to Word or PDF.
Does Pastorly write my sermon for me?
No. Pastorly is built so that you write it. Aide studies the passage with you, answers questions beside your notes and helps you shape an outline, but the message is yours to write and yours to preach.
If you want every word in front of you, Pastorly will draft the outline you approved into a full preaching manuscript. That is a choice you make, not the default, and it is a draft to make your own rather than a finished sermon. Your slides and lessons keep following your outline, never that manuscript.
Where Pastorly develops a point beyond what your notes said, it tells you. Each point in your sermon draft is marked either From your notes or Developed for you, so you can see which words started with you.
Most tools in this space sit at one end or the other. Some write the sermon for you. Others work after the fact, turning a sermon you already preached into clips and posts. Pastorly sits in the middle, where the preparing actually happens.
What is Aide?
Aide is the study assistant built into Pastorly: a study partner at your desk that brings the book, shows the page, and never climbs into the pulpit. Aide works in the same window as your writing, so you can ask a question about the passage without leaving the note you are working on.
Aide knows what you are working on. The note in front of you, the sermon it belongs to, your church, your tradition. A general assistant starts cold every time you open it and has no idea what you preached last week.
Aide walks through the preparation with you rather than handing you a finished product. If you seem to have a passage wrong, Aide says so once, and if you disagree, drops it and gets back to the work.
Where do Aide's answers come from?
Aide answers from your own notes and the passage in front of you. When a question needs more than that, Aide searches and shows you the links it used, so you can open them and read them yourself.
Ask Aide to check something, or run a check over a whole note, and Aide goes to sources and tells you plainly when they disagree. Quotations get particular attention, because a confident quotation from someone who never said it is the easiest thing for any AI to get wrong.
Scripture is handled separately and always. Every Bible reference is checked against the text before it reaches you, and Pastorly will not show you one the text does not carry.
Can Pastorly get it wrong?
Pastorly can get things wrong, and so can every tool built on a language model. These models predict likely text rather than look up settled facts, which is why a sentence can read with complete confidence and still be wrong. Dates, quotations and anything attributed to a person are where it happens most.
Pastorly checks its own work, and those checks catch real mistakes. What they cannot do is remove the possibility of one. A claim that passed a check has not been confirmed true, a source listed under an answer has not been endorsed, and anything Pastorly did not flag has not been cleared.
So the last read is yours. Check Scripture references, quotations and anything attributed to a person against the source before you preach it, publish it, or hand it to a volunteer. Pastorly is built to make that read short, not to remove it.
Will it fit my tradition?
You tell Pastorly your denomination when you sign up, and you can change it in your settings. Aide's foundation is historic Christian teaching, shaped by the distinctives of your own tradition, so a Reformed pastor and a Pentecostal pastor are not handed the same generic answer.
Where traditions genuinely differ, Aide names the disagreement rather than quietly picking a side for you. Where your own position would change the answer and is not yet known, Aide asks.
The list today is Non-denominational and Evangelical, Baptist, Pentecostal and Charismatic, Reformed and Presbyterian, Anglican, Methodist and Wesleyan, and Other.
What does Aide treat as authoritative?
Scripture stands above everything else Aide draws on, and nothing Aide finds elsewhere is allowed to stand against it. Beneath that, your church's tradition and what you have told Pastorly about your church shape the answer. Anything found on the web comes last.
What does not move, for any church and any setting: Scripture as the final authority, one God in three Persons, Christ crucified in an atoning death, bodily raised and returning, and Jesus Christ as the only Savior.
Is it right for a pastor to use AI?
That is your call and your church's, and Pastorly does not try to settle it for you. The line most pastors draw is between help with the work and handing over the work. Studying with a tool is not the same as letting it preach.
Pastorly is built on that line. It is made to give back the hours that go into preparing everything around a sermon, so more of your week can go to the text, to prayer, and to the people you are preaching to. What you say on Sunday should still be something you have wrestled with.
Whether to tell your congregation is worth deciding on purpose rather than by default.
Is my sermon content private?
Your notes, sermons and church details remain yours, and Pastorly never sells them. What you enter about your church is there to shape what Pastorly prepares for you.
Your Notepad text and your conversations with Aide are excluded from Pastorly's AI records at the moment those records are written, rather than cleaned up afterwards. They are never stored there at all.
Can I keep notes about people in Pastorly?
The Notepad is your workspace, and Pastorly does not police what you write in it. Plenty of what a pastor writes down has nothing to do with Sunday, and that is a fine use of it.
What is worth knowing is where it goes. Pastorly works by sending what a task needs to AI services run by other companies. That covers anything you ask Aide about and anything Pastorly prepares for you, and while automatic help is on it covers notes Aide is watching for suggestions. Automatic help is yours to switch off in Settings.
Information about other people stays your responsibility. You are the one with the relationship and the duty that comes with it, and storing something in Pastorly moves neither. Pastorly is built to prepare teaching material, so it has no features for managing records about people.
For anything to do with safeguarding, your church's policy, your designated contact and your local reporting requirements come first every time. Pastorly's help with youth and children's ministry is help with running a lesson, not a substitute for any of that.
Does Pastorly train AI on my sermons?
No. Pastorly has no AI model of its own, so there is nothing here to train. Pastorly is built on AI services run by other companies, the same way most software of this kind is built.
To prepare your material, the content a task needs is sent to those services and the result comes back.
Those companies are separate from Pastorly. What they may do with what they receive is governed by their own terms rather than Pastorly's, and they process information outside Australia. Pastorly chooses established providers and sends no more than the work requires.
Where is my work stored?
In Australia. Pastorly's database, its file storage and the application itself all run there.
The outside AI services do their processing elsewhere, as described above. Storage stays Australian.
Does anyone at Pastorly read my work?
In one specific way, and you hold the switch. In Settings · Data Controls, Help improve Pastorly lets Pastorly review some account content so that problems can be found and fixed. It is on when you create your account, and you can turn it off there at any time.
That is Pastorly looking at how the product is performing, and it is not model training. Your private Notepad text is not part of it, and switching it off deletes the copies it made.
What does it cost?
Pricing is not settled yet. When plans open, we will tell you before a price you are on changes.
What happens if I cancel?
Cancel whenever you like from your settings. Your plan keeps running until the end of the period you have paid for, and then it stops. Nothing renews.
Cancelling part way through a period does not refund the rest of it. Where the Australian Consumer Law, or a similar law where you live, requires a refund, that applies whatever this page says.
Closing your account is a separate thing from cancelling a plan. That starts the 30 day grace period described in your data controls.
Can I change my email or close my account?
Yes. Change your email and password in your profile settings, and schedule account deletion in your data controls. Deletion has a 30-day grace period, so an accidental request can be undone.