California pastor creates AI twin to answer parishioners daily

Justin Lester has created an AI duplicate of himself to help meet the growing needs of his church, and he says more people are using it each day. His Instagram bio says the tool is trained on everything he has taught and said, updated daily, and available to call, text, or video chat.

Lester’s public materials place him in the San Francisco Bay Area and describe him as a pastor, technologist and theological strategist. His website identifies him as Justin Lester, M.A., M.Div., D.Min., and promotes both an AI MasterClass and an AI Ebook, signaling that his work on artificial intelligence extends well beyond a single chatbot built for parishioners.

The AI twin sits at the center of a broader effort to merge ministry and technology. On Instagram, Lester presents himself as ThatTechPastor, a label that matches his podcast, Tech with ThatTechPastor, which Apple Podcasts describes as a weekly show where theology meets technology and purpose gets practical. The show explores faith, AI, business and spiritual formation in a digital world, placing Lester in a growing circle of clergy testing how far automation can go inside religious life.

That question has become a live issue for faith communities across the country. A 2025 Deseret News article framed AI and religion as a debate over where spiritual leaders should draw the line on artificial intelligence and how it could shape both spiritual practice and the well-being of communities. Lester’s answer has been to build a digital stand-in that reflects his own teaching, while still keeping his name and authority attached to it.

He is also listed as a member of AI and Faith, a network that brings together religious voices engaging the technology’s ethical questions. Separate references say Lester has spoken on AI ethics at the international level, and one event listing points to a Sept. 15, 2025 AI-101 Critical Conversation involving him, underscoring that his work has moved from internal church support into public-facing education about the uses and limits of AI.

For churches, the appeal is obvious: a pastor’s voice, available at any hour, without waiting for office hours or a Sunday service. The harder issue is whether a tool built from sermons, teachings and daily updates can expand pastoral care without turning intimate religious guidance into another automated product. Lester’s AI twin is already being used more often, and that makes his experiment a test case for how much digital scale faith leaders can accept before authenticity starts to fray.