These hypothetical scenes mirror actual capabilities more and more woven into locations of worship nationwide, the place religious care and surveillance converge in methods few congregants ever understand. The place Huge Tech’s rationalist ethos and evangelical spirituality as soon as combined like oil and holy water, this unlikely amalgam has given delivery to an infrastructure already reshaping the theology of belief—and redrawing the contours of neighborhood and pastoral energy in fashionable religious life.
An ecumenical tech ecosystem
The rising nerve middle of this faith-tech nexus is in Boulder, Colorado, the place the religious information and analytics agency Gloo has its headquarters.
Gloo captures congregants throughout hundreds of information factors that make up a far richer portrait than any snapshot. From there, the corporate is establishing a digital infrastructure meant to convey church buildings into the age of algorithmic perception.
The church is “a extremely fragmented market that is without doubt one of the largest but to totally undertake digital expertise,” the corporate stated in an announcement by e-mail. “Whereas church buildings have quite a lot of targets to attain their mission, they use Gloo to assist them join, interact with, and know their individuals on a deeper stage.”
Gloo was based in 2013 by Scott and Theresa Beck. From the late Eighties by way of the 2000s, Scott was turning Blockbuster right into a 3,500-store chain, taking Boston Market public, and founding Einstein Bros. Bagels earlier than occurring to seed and information startups like Ancestry.com and HomeAdvisor. Theresa, an artist, has constructed a fame creating collaborative, eco-minded workshops throughout Colorado and past. Collectively, they’ve recast pastoral care as an issue of predictive analytics and offered hundreds of church buildings on the concept religious well being could be managed like buyer engagement.
Consider Gloo as one thing like Salesforce however for church buildings: a behavioral analytics platform, powered by church-generated insights, psychographic data, and third-party client information. The corporate prefers to seek advice from itself as “a expertise platform for the religion ecosystem.” Both approach, this data is built-in into its “State of Your Church” dashboard—an interface for the trendy pulpit. The result’s a type of digital clairvoyance: a crystal ball for figuring out whom to examine on, whom to consolation, and when to behave.
1000’s of church buildings have been offered on the concept religious well being could be managed like buyer engagement.
Gloo ingests each one of many digital breadcrumbs a congregant leaves—how typically you attend church, how a lot cash you donate, which church teams you join, which key phrases you employ in your on-line prayer requests—after which layers on third-party information (census demographics, client habits, even indicators for credit score and well being dangers). Behind the scenes, it scores and segments individuals and teams—flagging who’s most vulnerable to drifting, primed for donation appeals, or in want of pastoral care. On that foundation, it auto-triggers tailor-made outreach through textual content, e-mail, or in-app chat. All the outcomes stream into the one dashboard, which lets pastors spot tendencies, take a look at messaging, and forecast giving and attendance. Primarily, the system treats religious engagement like a advertising and marketing funnel.
Since its launch in 2013, Gloo has steadily elevated its footprint, and it has began to change into the connective tissue for the nation’s fragmented spiritual panorama. In line with the Hartford Institute for Faith Analysis, the US is house to round 370,000 distinct congregations. As of early 2025, in response to figures supplied by the corporate, Gloo held contracts with greater than 100,000 church buildings and ministry leaders.
In 2024, the corporate secured a $110 million strategic funding, backed by “mission-aligned” traders starting from a child-development NGO to a denominational finance group. That cemented its evolution from primary church companies vendor to faith-tech juggernaut.
It began snapping up and investing in a constellation of ministry instruments—the whole lot from automated sermon distribution to real-time giving and attendance analytics, AI-driven chatbots, and management content material libraries. By layering these capabilities onto its core platform, the corporate has created a one-stop store for church buildings that mixes back-office companies with member-engagement apps and psychographic insights to totally understand that unified “religion ecosystem.”
