Why congregations keep a person in this chair
This job runs on relationships. A director of religious activities and education plans classes, recruits and trains volunteer teachers, counsels members through grief and milestones, and keeps a program alive week after week. Software can draft a lesson outline. It cannot sit with a family after a funeral, or persuade a tired volunteer to teach one more semester.
Two tasks show the split well. Planning a year of faith formation starts as a scheduling and curriculum problem, and that part moves to a screen easily. Leading the program does not. The director knows which teacher is burning out, which teenager stopped showing up, and which family needs a visit rather than an email.
Budget and oversight work sits in the middle. Drafting a program budget, tracking supplies and reporting to a board are clerical tasks with clear inputs. Deciding what the congregation should spend on, and defending that choice to people who disagree, is judgment that belongs to a person with standing in the community.
What AI does, what it assists, and what stays with the director
The clearest machine work is paperwork. Writing bulletins and class announcements, keeping attendance and membership records, and building a room and session schedule are all handled well by ordinary office tools with language models attached. Across the task list above, that share is 10% of task time.
A larger slice is assisted rather than handed over. Curriculum selection, lesson material drafting, volunteer rosters and grant or newsletter copy go faster with a drafting tool, but someone has to check the content against the tradition being taught and the age group in the room. That assisted share prints as 45% of task time.
The rest stays with the director: pastoral counseling, teaching and leading services or classes in person, visiting members, and recruiting volunteers face to face. Our fields put 45% of task time in that group. You can see how these three groups are built in our coverage method.
Good to know: this page is about religious activities and education directors, not film, creative, art or finance directors, which are scored separately in the full job rankings.
The evidence, and what is missing
There is no direct test of AI against people in this job yet. Our quality grade is D, which is the grade we use when nothing has measured machine output against a qualified professional in the role. No benchmark has asked whether an AI-built faith formation program keeps families enrolled, or whether an AI-written counseling response helps a grieving member.
What would settle it is narrow and testable. A study comparing AI-drafted lesson plans with director-written ones, judged by teachers and parents over a term. A measured comparison of volunteer retention under AI-scheduled versus director-managed rosters. Until something like that exists, the honest answer is that the assisted tasks are proven and the human tasks are untested. How we grade this is set out on the quality parity page, and the wider approach is in our methodology.
The labor market around the job is steadier than the headlines suggest. BLS figures in our data show about 22,160 people in the occupation, median pay near $52,100, and projected employment growth of 3.3% from 2025 to 2035.
When the picture could shift
Most likely between 2036 and 2049 (8 in 10 of our scenarios). The replacement-year method explains how that window is built.
Two things could pull it earlier. Cost is one: the figures above show software for the admin side is cheap next to a salaried director, so a small congregation under budget pressure can try it without much risk. Adoption is the other: if church management platforms ship curriculum, scheduling and newsletter generation as standard features, the clerical hours shrink without anyone deciding to automate anything.
Two things hold it back. Pastoral trust does not transfer to a tool, and confidential conversations are the part of the week people value most. And the physical presence this job needs is not a robotics problem waiting on hardware; our robotics tier for the role is none needed, which means the barrier is social, not mechanical. Small nonprofit employers also adopt new systems slowly, with volunteer committees signing off.
How to stay needed
Lean into the work that sits in the human group. Three are worth protecting deliberately: counseling and accompanying members through hard weeks, teaching and leading in person rather than only planning, and recruiting, training and keeping volunteers. Those are the tasks a congregation notices immediately when they stop.
Two skills raise your value alongside them. First, program evaluation: knowing which classes hold attendance and why, with simple numbers you can show a board. Second, practical tool fluency, so drafting a newsletter or a lesson outline takes minutes and the saved hours go back into visits and volunteer development.
Clergy is the closest neighboring role, and many directors move between the two. Philosophy and religion teachers, postsecondary suits directors with graduate study who prefer the classroom. Education and childcare administrators, preschool and daycare uses the same mix of program planning, staff supervision and parent relationships.
To go further, see the rest of the religious workers family, the other services sector, our list of jobs that mostly need a person, or put this role next to another on the compare tool.