How churches use data and AI as engines of surveillance

These virtual scenes reflect real capabilities that are increasingly woven in places of worship worldwide, where spiritual care and monitoring converge in ways that a few of the two groups are perceived. Where the ethics of the rational and evangelical spirituality that was one day such as oil and sacred water were mixed, she gave birth to this unlikely corrosion that the infrastructure is already generated to reshape the theology of trust – and to redraw the features of society and pastoral power in modern spiritual life.

An environmental system for ecumenical technology

The company said in an e -mail statement that the church is “a very fragmented market and it is one of the largest market that adopts full digital technology.” “While churches have a variety of goals to achieve their mission, they use Gloo to help them communicate, interact with them and know them at a deeper level.”

Gloo was founded in 2013 by Scott and Teresa Beck. From the late eighties to the 2000s, Scott turned into a series of 3500 stores, as Boston took PubLic, founded by Bagels Einstein Bros. Before going to the seeds and directing startups such as Ancestry.com and Homeadvisor. Teresa, an artist, has built a reputation created cooperative workshops and environment throughout Colorado. Together, they reformulated pastoral care as a problem with predictive analyzes and sold thousands of churches about the idea that spiritual health can be managed like customer participation.

Think of Gloo as something like Salesforce, but for churches: behavioral analysis platform, supported by visions created by the Church, psychological information, and third -party consumer data. The company prefers to indicate itself as a “technical platform for the ecosystems of faith”. Either way, this information is combined in the “Church Case” – an interface for the modern pulpit. The result is a type of digital shock: a crystal ball to find out who must be verified, who is comfortable, and when to behave.

Thousands of churches have been sold on the idea that spiritual health can be managed like customers’ participation.

Gloo accommodates each of the digital bread crumbs that the street veraft leaves-how the church often attends, and how much money you donate, the church groups that they record, and the main words that you use in online prayer requests-and then classes on third-party data (demographic factors for dance, consumer habits, and even credit and healthy indicators). Behind the scenes, it records the people and the groups – the urgent who expose the most at risk of drifting, ready to resume the donation, or in need of pastoral care. On this basis, automatic festivals are customized by text, email or chat inside the application. All the results are flowing into the single dashboard, which allows priests to discover trends, testing correspondence, giving and attendance. Basically, the system treats spiritual participation such as marketing suppression.

Since its launch in 2013, Gloo has increased steadily its mark, and has begun to become the connective tissue of the country’s divided landscape in the country. According to the Hartford Institute of Religious Research, the United States is home to about 370,000 distinguished groups. As of early 2025, according to the company’s numbers, GLO has held contracts with more than 100,000 churches and leaders of the Ministry.

In 2024, the company obtained a $ 110 million strategic investment, with the support of “mission alignment” investors ranging from a non -governmental organization to develop children to a sectarian financing group. Its development from the church’s basic seller has strengthened the tyrant of faith.

I started to capture and invest in a group of ministry’s tools-everything from the distribution of the automated sermon to giving analyzes and attendance in the actual time, chat libraries driven by artificial intelligence, and driving content libraries. By placing these capabilities on its basic platform, the company has created one store for churches that combine the services of the back office, the applications of the members and the psychological visions to perceive completely that the unified “ecosystem” system.