Why We Built AlignedAI: A Founder's Story

The pastor stared at his laptop screen, frustrated. He had spent the better part of a Saturday afternoon trying to get ChatGPT to write a sermon that sounded like him — one that reflected his church’s doctrine, his tone, his theological depth. The AI kept producing something that felt generic, surface-level, and theologically off. He closed the tab and called his best friend.

That friend was Jonathan Bodnar.

The Spark in McKinney

Jonathan had spent the last five years building AI-powered tools for businesses and nonprofits. He’d seen firsthand how powerful artificial intelligence could be when applied with precision. So when his best friend, a pastor in their shared hometown of McKinney, Texas, started experimenting with AI for sermon writing, Jonathan paid attention.

At first, the pastor was amazed at what AI could do. But the excitement quickly gave way to frustration. The tools available were generic. They didn’t understand his doctrine. They didn’t know his Bible translation preferences. They couldn’t capture his voice. And they certainly didn’t grasp the nuances of his church’s culture and context.

"My best friend is a pastor here in McKinney," Jonathan says. "He was initially amazed at AI's capabilities, but eventually realized that AI without proper training on doctrine and a large corpus of church data and sermons was inapplicable in real church environments. So that's what sparked AlignedAI."

Jonathan had already built and exited a successful church management software (ChMS) and giving platform. He had over twelve years of experience shipping and scaling SaaS products. He knew what it took to build something that people would actually use every day. And he knew, after years in the private sector, that the church was being left behind.

Q: What gap did you see in the market for pastors and AI?

"I was hoping to find something that even began to touch the surface of what's possible, but with no luck," Jonathan says. "After spending the last 5 years building AI-focused tools for businesses and seeing the breadth of capabilities, I knew there were so many ways to harness AI in a way that served the church and Christian mission more than what was available at the time."

What he found instead were tools that offered little more than sermon repurposing — take a transcript, reformat it, maybe generate a few social media posts. Functional, but shallow.

"There was no other app on the market capable of quality, speed and ease of use at an enterprise level suitable for pastors and church leaders to actually get the most out of AI," he says. "Not just for sermon repurposing, but true AI tools, integrations, automations, and AI assistant features."

So Jonathan did what he’d done before: he built it himself.

The Real Bottleneck Isn't Distribution. It's Preparation.

By the time Jonathan studied the AI-for-churches landscape closely, a category had already formed. Most of the tools clustered around one idea: repurposing. Upload a sermon recording, and the AI turns it into social clips, blog posts, newsletters, and discussion questions. Content recycling.

That has real value, especially for small teams with limited communication bandwidth. But it is not what pastors struggle with most. The real bottleneck is not distribution. It is preparation — the study, the research, the writing, and the theological reflection that happen long before a sermon is ever recorded.

When pastors reached for general-purpose tools like ChatGPT to help with that upstream work, they kept hitting the same four walls:

• Doctrinal alignment. A generic model does not know whether you hold to Reformed or Arminian soteriology, whether your eschatology is premillennial or amillennial, or whether you baptize infants or professing believers. Ask for help on a sermon about election and you will get an answer — just maybe not your answer. For pastors, theological precision is the foundation, not a setting.
• Voice. Every pastor has a cadence their congregation recognizes. Generic AI produces generic output that sounds like no one in particular, which is a problem when your credibility is built on authenticity.
• Privacy. Sermon prep is personal. Pastors pour their own prayers and wrestling into it, and many were rightly uneasy about sending that to a tool that trains on user inputs.
• Depth. General models are tuned to be helpful and harmless, which often means safe and surface-level. A pastor preparing a message on suffering or the sovereignty of God does not need safe. They need substance.

That was the gap AlignedAI was built to fill — not the work that happens after the sermon, but the work that happens before it.

What "Aligned" Actually Means

The name wasn’t an afterthought. It was the thesis.

"I named it Aligned because the whole idea is that everything would be aligned with your doctrine, your chosen Bible translations, and your church context and culture," Jonathan explains. "Alignment for pastors and church leaders is the most important thing."

He draws a parallel to the business world, where misalignment between teams, strategy, and execution can quietly dismantle an organization from the inside.

"This is true in business too; without alignment, fractures grow," he says. "I want to ensure that when pastors start picking up on the capabilities of AI, they have the tools to apply it in a contextual way to their church, not just generic advice or repurposed sermons."

That alignment isn’t just about theology, though that’s foundational. It’s about tone, voice, preferred translations, and the unique culture of each local church. A tool that doesn’t understand those things isn’t a tool a pastor can trust. And trust, Jonathan knows, is everything.

More Than a Sermon Repurposer

If you ask Jonathan what AlignedAI does, he won’t start with sermons. He’ll start with the pastor’s day.

"In the church environment AI is so much more than a sermon repurpose tool," he says. "My goal is to introduce and educate pastors on the power AI has to help them lead more efficiently."

The platform includes features that go well beyond what most church-facing AI products offer. There’s an AI assistant a pastor can text via SMS — a 24/7 direct line for meeting scheduling, email drafting, a daily brief, and more. Think of it as a chief of staff that never sleeps and never forgets.

Then there are the church KPIs. AlignedAI can pull data from apps churches already use, like Planning Center, and generate instant reports or ongoing updates on the metrics a pastor actually cares about. Attendance trends. Volunteer engagement. Giving patterns. Not dashboards for the sake of dashboards, but actionable insights delivered on demand.

There are boundless opportunities in the AI space, and I intend to bring those to pastors.

There’s also The Journal — a private, secure space for pastors to keep thoughts, notes, and ideas for future use. Sermon seeds. Devotional outlines. Book chapters. It’s a digital moleskine that can recall and organize anything a pastor puts into it.

And yes, there’s book writing. AlignedAI can help structure and write an entire book in a weekend, using the pastor’s own content, tone, and ethics as the foundation. Not ghostwriting. Not generic content generation. A collaborative process that starts with the pastor’s voice and builds from there.

"There are boundless opportunities in the AI space, and I intend to bring those to pastors," Jonathan says. "Free when I can, but inexpensively when they cost significant company resources."

What Makes AlignedAI Different

The AI tools market is crowded, and new products launch weekly. What separates AlignedAI is not a single headline feature but the way it is engineered around the realities of ministry.

Doctrine alignment that deepens over time. AlignedAI is designed to learn and reflect a pastor's theological framework rather than impose a lowest-common-denominator Christianity. The goal is not to make the AI "religious" but to make it theologically literate in a way that respects the pastor's convictions. (More on that approach in doctrine-aligned AI.)

Pastoral voice learning. Over time, the platform picks up on tone, vocabulary, and rhetorical patterns, so a draft reads like something the pastor might have written — not like a chatbot. (See AI sermon writing.)

Sermon memory. AlignedAI does not treat every session as a blank slate. It builds context across past sermons and recurring themes, which helps maintain theological consistency and supports coherent teaching series.

Privacy-first architecture. Pastor data is not used to train models. Sermon content, study notes, and personal reflections stay within the platform — a meaningful distinction for leaders who have been cautious about AI for exactly that reason.

An assistant, not just a chatbot. A chatbot answers questions; an assistant works alongside you, holding context and supporting an ongoing weekly rhythm. That is the difference Jonathan kept coming back to. If you want to see how that compares to a general-purpose tool, we wrote a detailed breakdown in ChatGPT vs. AlignedAI for pastors, and a broader survey in AI church tools.

Q: Why give it away free?

Jonathan’s answer is disarmingly simple.

"ChatGPT is free to use, albeit not a suitable option for church leaders," he says. "Most apps marketing AI for pastors or church leaders often charge $20 per sermon, which is ridiculous."

He pauses, then gets specific.

"The AI credits needed to generate a sermon are about $0.025 — why charge for that? It's a powerful resource that pastors need, so give it to them free if it doesn't cost you anything. I only intend to charge for the things that cost to produce."

The free tier at aligned.church supports up to 200 sermons or messages per month. For the vast majority of pastors, that’s more than enough. No trial period. No bait-and-switch. Just free.

From Enterprise SaaS to the Local Church

Jonathan’s path to AlignedAI wasn’t a straight line, but every stop informed the destination. He spent seven years in the B2B private sector building multi-million-dollar SaaS companies for businesses and nonprofits. Before that, he built and exited a church management software and giving platform. Over twelve years of shipping product. Five years of deep, hands-on AI work.

"I learned a lot, but primarily that if you build something of value that people need, want, and enjoy using, you win," he says. "Free or not, you help the world and the industry you're in by creating something that matters to people."

Those years in B2B left him with a few convictions that now shape every screen in AlignedAI. Users do not care about features; they care about outcomes — finishing the work faster and better. Enterprise quality is not about complexity but reliability: the software that wins is the software that works every time, without friction. And in the end, trust is the product. Pastors are not adopting an app so much as betting that a tool will not let them down when Sunday is bearing down on them.

That philosophy is baked into AlignedAI’s design. It’s built for daily interaction, not occasional use. An iOS app is on the way. And the SMS-based AI assistant means pastors don’t have to open an app or log into a portal to get help. They just text.

"AlignedAI is built for daily interaction, with an iOS app on the way," Jonathan says. "You can interact with your AI assistant 24/7 through SMS, giving pastors a direct line to what I hope will be a valuable part of their life — increasing their capacity to do more ministry."

It’s a tool designed to meet pastors where they already are: on their phones, between meetings, in the margins of a packed schedule.

Q: Where's the ethical line with AI and preaching?

Jonathan doesn’t dodge this one. He leans in.

"The cop-out answer is that AlignedAI is not writing for you; it's using YOUR content and merely restructures and better formats it for you," he says. "But in truth, I know there's a fine ethical line."

He’s thought about it carefully, and his answer reflects that.

"A tool like AlignedAI is just that — a tool, not intended to replace a pastor. Pastors and church leaders must seek God and the Holy Spirit for themselves and use tools to help them be more efficient, not replace the hard work of leadership."

It’s a distinction that matters. AlignedAI doesn’t generate theology from scratch. It works with what the pastor gives it — their sermons, their notes, their doctrinal commitments — and helps them do more with it. The AI sermon writer is a starting point, not a shortcut. And the platform encourages pastors to develop a thoughtful AI policy for their churches, so the boundaries are clear from the start.

A Tool, Not a Replacement

Jonathan Bodnar isn’t trying to automate the pastorate. He’s trying to give pastors back their time.

The McKinney pastor who started it all — the one who spent a Saturday afternoon wrestling with a chatbot that couldn’t understand his theology — was the first proof that the gap was real. Not a gap in technology, but a gap in application. AI had the power. It just didn’t have the context.

AlignedAI is Jonathan’s answer to that problem. Built by someone who understands both the technology and the church. Designed to be aligned — with doctrine, with voice, with mission. And offered freely, because he believes pastors shouldn’t have to pay a premium for tools that help them do the work they were called to do.

If you’re a pastor or church leader curious about what AI can actually do for your ministry, Jonathan’s invitation is simple. Try it. It’s free at aligned.church.

Related reading

• AI for pastors
• doctrine-aligned AI
• AI sermon writer

Write Sermons Free: 200 Per Month on AlignedAI

Pastors can draft up to 200 sermons per month at no cost on AlignedAI. Each outline, manuscript draft, illustration set, or prep request counts as one message on the free tier — enough for weekly preaching plus Bible studies and church communications.

Sign up free at aligned.church →

No credit card required. Configure your theological tradition, Bible translation, and church context during setup.