On August 21, 2025, developer Dara Sobaloju posted what he thought was just another idea on X: “I want to build a Bible presentation AI agent for church use. Imagine Bible verses coming up on screen as the pastor preaches just based on what he’s talking about or his paraphrases and quotes. I want to build this completely in public, starting today…”
The tweet struck a chord. It quickly drew questions, suggestions, and encouragement from pastors, developers, and curious churchgoers. Since then, Sobaloju has been documenting his progress on Pewbeam AI, an agent designed to listen to sermons in real time and project relevant verses on screen.
Sobaloju’s project is not an isolated case. In recent years, Nigerian churches have begun experimenting with AI in their own ways. In 2025, the Deeper Christian Life Ministry launched Ask Kumuyi, an AI chatbot that fields questions about sermons from its General Superintendent, Pastor W.F. Kumuyi.
The Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) has an AI chatbot, Apostle Stephen, which greets users with: “Hi there, I am Apostle Stephen, the RCCG Digital Missionary. How may I help you today?”
In 2023, Longbeard, a Canada-based technology agency launched Magisterium AI, which it describes as the “World’s Number 1 answer engine for the Catholic Church.”
These church-led bots focus mainly on answering questions about doctrine, faith, and church activities. But outside official institutions, independent developers like Sobaloju are imagining different applications of AI in churches; tools that don’t just answer questions, but solve problems in real-time during services.
Sobaloju’s Pewbeam AI wants to address a problem he’s seen many times: a preacher misquotes or paraphrases scripture, and the disruption derails the flow of the message.
“I saw firsthand how it disorients the speaker,” Sobaloju says. “For this to work, there needs to be voice input. The idea is to leverage AI so that when the pastor paraphrases something, the system picks it up and puts the right scripture up in real time.”
Building from Nigeria, for Nigeria
Sobaloju had nursed the idea for two years, but it remained wishful thinking until recently when a friend, Tony Deoye, joined him as brand designer. After jotting down a mini product requirements document (PRD), he tweeted about the idea. The response surprised him. Pastors and churchgoers alike said they wanted it.
His goals for Pewbeam are shaped by Nigeria’s realities: poor internet coverage, unreliable power, and varying hardware capacity. “Anything that can work in Nigeria can work outside Nigeria,” he says. “It’s a harsh environment.”
To meet that challenge, he’s focused on three layers: speech-to-text in real time with minimal delay, offline-first design with optional connection, and contextual accuracy to ensure the verse matches the preacher’s intent.
He’s using Faster Whisper, an optimised version of OpenAI’s voice recognition model, to match verses. The system also supports ‘direct call’: when a pastor calls a verse, it pops up instantly.
The hurdles in building Sobaloju’s AI agent are evidently significant. The models must be lightweight enough to run on everyday laptops, yet accurate enough to avoid mismatched scripture. “When the pastor is talking about something, there might be several references to it in the Bible,” he explains. “The challenge is making sure the right one comes up in real time.”
Still, Sobaloju is optimistic. His current goal is to adopt a business model similar to that of YouVersion Bible app, developed by a USA-based church, Life Church. Their model is simple: people support the app by making donations so that millions of users can download it for free. In the long term, Sobaloju believes Pewbeam can adopt a model where more affluent churches pay subscription fees so that smaller churches can access the tool for free. “I’ve learnt that if something is good, it is worth paying for,” he says, explaining that big churches will definitely want to pay for a service that solves problems.
A wave of AI builders in church
Tolulope Adeniyi, another Nigerian developer, is building Spetra (a blend of ‘scripture’ and ‘ultra’), a bot that works similarly to Sobaloju’s Pewbeam. Also powered by OpenAI Whisper, it “automatically cues a bible verse on the interface and runs fully offline to ensure accuracy, low latency, and independence from internet connectivity”.
Adeniyi says the idea came to him, “from watching the awkward pauses when preachers referenced scriptures. I thought, ‘what if AI could bridge that gap?’”
In Lagos, Olanrewaju Taiwo is building an AI app called Sermon AI. Inspired by Sobaloju’s tweet, he began experimenting with sermon transcription and later started work on Meno, a Bible app in beta. Meno, Greek for “abide”, uses Google’s Gemini model to explain verses.
For Taiwo, the innovation is part of a long tradition: “Scrolls came before books, books before phones. Now we’re here with AI. It’s technology, nothing to fear.”
In the diaspora, London-based David Olowomeye has developed Gospel Note AI, a mobile app designed specifically for taking notes during sermons. Unlike general-purpose apps like Otter.ai, it won’t transcribe ordinary conversations. “It’s for church. If you try to use it elsewhere, it’ll tell you it’s not a sermon,” he explains, adding that the app has been programmed around the Bible and related materials.
Olowomeye isn’t planning to monetise his product yet, but sees it as a niche tool for Christians who want organised sermon notes.
Can AI belong in the church?
The idea of AI in churches might sound strange, even risky. Religious institutions have a long history of regarding technology with scepticism. “When television came out, they called it the devil’s box,” Sobaloju says, “but AI is even closer to the devil’s box than a TV, but churches are open to it. That’s exciting.”
Beyond transcription and verse recall, Sobaloju, Taiwo, and Olowomeye imagine other uses: AI-assisted census-taking during massive conventions like RCCG’s annual gatherings, AI-powered donation tracking, and even offering collections.
In Adeniyi’s words, “we’re entering an era where the technology backbone of churches will be invisible but indispensable.”
Adeniyi adds that AI can be used to help church musicians score songs effortlessly, compose harmonies, and even explore new sounds that elevate worship. It’s not about replacing human creativity or spiritual leadership, but about amplifying it.
What are the risks involved?
The risks of inviting AI into spiritual life are hard to ignore, especially when it comes to generative AI chatbots that are built for religious purposes.
“No matter how smart, intelligent, convincing, deep or emotional [AI] may sound, it does not know what it is saying,” Rotimi Awaye, an evangelist who also runs KiniAI, an AI consultancy, cautions.
The technology’s tendency to “hallucinate” by producing confident but false answers could be dangerous when those responses are about sensitive topics related to scripture or salvation. “Whatever church builds a model, the underlying system has already been trained on every form of doctrine in the world, both good and bad,” he explains.
Even if a church fine-tunes the model with its own doctrine, the underlying foundation still carries traces of conflicting worldviews and can offer misleading answers.
Most troubling, Awaye says, is overreliance. “It can get to a point where people won’t read the Bible anymore, they’ll just ask AI.”
The danger intensifies when these chatbots assume divine identities, such as GodGPT, Apostle Stephen, or AskKumuyi. “I said hi to GodGPT once, and it replied: ‘I am God,’” he recalls. “Now, imagine someone who is genuinely seeking God and doesn’t know any better.”
“I would shy away from spiritual names,” he urges technologists building specifically for religious institutions. Instead, he recommends that churches and developers use names that make it obvious the system is a chatbot, not a pastor or spiritual entity.
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Mark your calendars! Moonshot by is back in Lagos on October 15–16! Join Africa’s top founders, creatives & tech leaders for 2 days of keynotes, mixers & future-forward ideas. Early bird tickets now 20% off—don’t snooze! moonshot..com
