“Help us communicate better” sounds like a reasonable request. It is also an invitation for an AI tool to guess.
Communicate what? To whom? What do they need to understand or do? Which details have already been decided? Who will check the finished message?
Without those answers, you may receive a confident plan full of newsletters, social posts, reminders, and new work for somebody. The writing might be polished. You still have to decide whether any of it belongs in your church.
When an AI response is unhelpful, one place to look is the assignment. Have we asked for a defined piece of work, or have we handed over our uncertainty and expected a finished decision in return?
My wife Danielle often says working with AI is like being married. You have to give explicit, detailed instructions or else you cannot get upset when you do not get what you asked for. It is a classic example of “I heard what you said, not what you meant (or thought).
Begin with an ordinary task
Imagine a church preparing for a volunteer orientation. This is a fictional example, with no private information involved.
The meeting is Saturday, October 17, 2026, from 9:00 to 10:00 a.m. in the fellowship hall. Current and prospective volunteers are invited. The ministry coordinator needs people to reply by October 14. Childcare will not be provided.
“Write an announcement for volunteer orientation” leaves several of those details unstated. The tool may, leave them out, ask for them, or offer details you never approved. You have created extra checking work before the first draft is useful.
The CARE framework used in The Pastor’s Workbench gives you a straightforward way to define the request.
Context tells the tool what it needs to understand. Assignment states what you want done. Requirements establish what the result must include and what it must avoid. Evaluation identifies how the work should be checked.
Those terms are useful because they make you examine the request. You do not need a long prompt or an elaborate role description for every small task.
Here is a complete example:
Context: We need to announce a volunteer orientation to current and prospective church volunteers. The meeting is Saturday, October 17, 2026, from 9:00 to 10:00 a.m. in the fellowship hall. People should reply to the ministry coordinator by October 14. Childcare will not be provided.
Assignment: Draft a short email announcement people can read quickly.
Requirements: Use a plain, welcoming tone. Keep the body under 150 words. Include every logistical detail above and one clear request to reply. Do not invent the coordinator’s name, an email address, food, activities, or an online registration link.
Evaluation: After the draft, list any information still needed before sending. Check the date, time, location, reply deadline, and childcare statement against the supplied details. Keep your checking notes separate from the email.
That request gives the tool enough information to draft something you can evaluate. It also makes the remaining gap visible: the sender may still need to provide the coordinator’s contact information or explain how to reach that person.
Decide what you are asking the tool to do
Drafting an announcement is a bounded assignment. Deciding whether the orientation is needed, who should lead it, or whether childcare should be offered involves other people and responsibilities.
You can ask AI to help you consider those questions. Treat the answers as possibilities to examine. Do not let an assumption quietly become a decision because it arrived inside a finished document.
This is where a useful draft can become troublesome. Once the text looks complete, it is tempting to review it for tone and move on. But you need to check whether the tool added a commitment. Details, details, details. “Refreshments will be provided” sounds harmless until someone has to buy them. “Training is required for all volunteers” may create a policy nobody actually created or approved.
The draft has no authority to commit your church to either statement. So check it! Remember, AI is a tool you use.
Check the answer against the assignment
The evaluation instruction helps organize the review. It does not relieve you of doing it.
Read the draft beside the facts you supplied. Check every date and practical detail. Look for an invented promise, a changed requirement, or language that could pressure people beyond the invitation you intended.
Then read it as the recipient. Can the person tell whether the message applies to them? Is the next step clear? Do they have the information needed to respond? Or is this going to result in a barrage of unnecessary (and unwanted) texts, calls and emails? Remember, the goal is to SAVE time, not consume more of it.
If the tool gives you a long campaign when you asked for one email, return it to the task. You do not owe every idea it suggests a place in your plans.
For your next low-risk assignment, write one sentence for each part of CARE. If you cannot state what a usable result would look like, stop right there. You may need a short conversation with a ministry leader before you need a better prompt. If YOU don’t know, there is no way to use a tool to help you communicate better.
Like Danielle always says, it is about over communicating. Like marriage. You have to be clear and specific.
The free Skool community includes the CARE Prompting lesson in 01 Start Here, with the CARE Prompt Card. Join The Pastor’s Workbench community free if you’d like to sit the framework beside your next task.