You can now connect ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever AI tool you use to read/view data in your Planning Center account! 

  • Ask quick questions about people, events, donations—anything in Planning Center 

  • Build custom dashboards and reports with data from across Planning Center 

  • Automate tasks in other software tools based on what’s in Planning Center

  • Audit settings in your account 

The Planning Center MCP (Model Context Protocol) is available for Services, Giving, People, Registrations, Calendar, Groups, Publishing, and Check-Ins. The only edit or “write” abilities are in People: the AI tool can make notes and fill out forms on your behalf.

Even the most capable AI tools require a lot of context before they can do anything helpful. That empty chatbot window can feel a lot like that empty page of your college essay! Where to even start? 

But your Planning Center account already has tons of ministry context: attendance, zip codes, schedules, demographics, engagement history. That’s a big headstart on context you can’t get anywhere else.

Connecting Planning Center to Claude or ChatGPT means you can access your work more easily, without manually feeding the model everything it needs to know.

A lot of churches are using AI tools to help automate tasks, summarize content, and create efficient processes. Our goal is to equip you with the access you need to use these tools alongside Planning Center, however you want to. 

A few reasons to use the Planning Center MCP 

You don’t have to use AI tools in your ministry to be productive or to find value in Planning Center. And no matter what’s going on with AI, we’re committed to improving our products to do the work you need.

But the MCP is a great way to expand what you can do on your own through Planning Center! 

Here a few ideas!

Ask questions and create reports across multiple products. 

There are a few powerful ways to pull information from across Planning Center (like lists in People). But sometimes you need a customized report, or just a quick answer to a question without going through a whole process. 

With the Planning Center MCP connected, you could use your AI of choice to put together an attendance dashboard that combines data from Services, Check-Ins, and Registrations. 

You could also put together a giving report that takes attendance into account, or just ask who’s donated for a second time this year or in the last month.

Bring data context into your ministry projects quickly and easily. 

Let’s say you’re planning a children’s ministry event, pulling from past curriculum, looking through meeting notes, and making your plan. Now you can use AI to inform your work by quickly pulling data from Planning Center!

How many volunteers did we need for VBS last year? How many kids signed up versus actually checked in? How did attendance numbers change each day of the week? Did we have a giving fund for VBS? 

The Planning Center MCP can read/view data in all products 

When you connect the Planning Center MCP, you can choose which products you will give the AI read (or view) access to. 

Authorization request screen for Planning Center, displaying permissions for accessing and writing data on various categories like People and Calendar.

Then when you ask a question, make a request, or start a project, the model can reference information from Planning Center to help with the response. 

Additionally, if you give it access to People, you can allow write access, so it can actually make changes in your People account. 

Right now, that means you can create notes and add them to people's profiles, and fill out forms.

How to use the Planning Center MCP 

Open possibilities can be overwhelming. The Planning Center community is a great place to take your questions and ideas, and see how other churches are using technology in their ministries! 

Our customers are doing all kinds of things, like: 

  • Reviewing lists in People to see if the logic/conditions need to change to get accurate results 

  • Creating an engagement dashboard of all of the ways people are engaging with the church for an at-a-glance view 

  • Auditing settings in Groups: making sure the right type is set and the group description is published

  • Adding a prayer request note in someone’s profile 

  • Using it with the Gmail MCP to summarize the email threads and add them to their profile 

Join the community to share your projects and find inspiration. 

Security settings: protecting people's privacy 

It’s very important that you are in total control of how AI interacts with your Planning Center data. 

By default, both OpenAI (ChatGPT) and Anthropic (Claude) can use your conversations to train their models, which can include personal information from Planning Center. But both Claude and ChatGPT offer a setting to turn this off. We strongly recommend doing this before you get started, and requiring all admins to do the same. 

You also have total control over who has access to the MCP from your Planning Center account. A few settings will help you stay informed and keep your information safe. 

  • All org admins will be notified when someone first connects to the Planning Center MCP. 

  • You control who has access to the MCP. Org admins control who connects to the MCP. You can specify who and who isn’t allowed access, and you can revoke it any time. 

  • People can only access data they have permission for in Planning Center. This does not expand your admin's access to what is in your Planning Center account. 

Planning Center does not use your church data to train any AI models. We handle member data only as you instruct. Our tools are contractually prohibited from using any of your data for training, and we process all data securely under the same privacy standards as the rest of Planning Center. Read more about our commitments in our privacy policy.

How to connect the Planning Center MCP to ChatGPT or Claude

This doc outlines how to get things set up, so follow the step-by-step process here. We highly recommend you go through the entire checklist to make sure you’re aware of all the security nuances!

We’re planning to continue expanding what you can do with these AI tools through the connection to Planning Center. We hope this tool can help you do the work you are already doing to help and serve the people in your community. 

Please let us know if you have any questions or ideas on what you’d like to see next. We’re looking forward to hearing how you use it! 

💙 Planning Center