Pastor AI Skills

14 AI-powered workflow tools built for pastors. Not prompts. Real multi-step skills that handle the weekly grind so you can focus on ministry.

Built for Claude Code. Also works in Claude.ai Projects.

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About

I’m Thomas Costello. I’ve been in pastoral ministry for 20+ years and I run REACHRIGHT, a church marketing agency. I built these skills for myself because I got tired of writing the same types of content every week from scratch. These are the tools I actually use.

I’m sharing them because pastors deserve better than generic AI prompts. These are workflow tools with pastoral sensitivity built in, not templates you have to heavily rewrite.

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Install (One Command)

Open Claude Code and run:

/plugin marketplace add tkcostello/pastor-ai-skills

Then:

/plugin install pastor-skills@pastor-ai-skills

That’s it. All 14 skills, the shared foundation, and the PDF templates install together, and you get updates whenever this repo improves.

Then run your first skill:

/pastor-setup

It asks for your church’s details once (name, your name, attendance, location, denomination, Bible translation) and saves them. Every skill uses them from then on. You never repeat yourself.

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The Skills

You don’t have to remember the slash commands. Once installed, just ask in plain English (“help me research Philippians 2 for Sunday”) and Claude picks the right skill.

One note on the commands: when installed as a plugin, Claude Code may show the skills with a prefix, like /pastor-skills:church-email. Type / and start typing the skill name and it will come up either way.

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Other Ways to Install

Manual copy (Claude Code)

git clone https://github.com/tkcostello/pastor-ai-skills.git

# The foundation and setup skills are required
cp -r pastor-ai-skills/skills/pastor-foundation ~/.claude/skills/
cp -r pastor-ai-skills/skills/pastor-setup ~/.claude/skills/

# Copy any skills you want
cp -r pastor-ai-skills/skills/sermon-research ~/.claude/skills/
cp -r pastor-ai-skills/skills/church-email ~/.claude/skills/

# If you copy any PDF-producing skill, also copy the shared PDF library
cp -r pastor-ai-skills/shared ~/.claude/skills/

The plugin install above is easier and keeps itself updated. Use manual copy only if you have a reason.

Claude.ai Projects

1. Create a new Project in Claude.ai
2. Copy the contents of skills/pastor-foundation/SKILL.md into your Project’s custom instructions
3. Add the SKILL.md contents for whichever skills you want below it
4. Paste in a filled-out church profile block (the pastor-foundation file shows the format)

You lose the PDF output in this mode, but every writing skill works.

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PDF Output

Eight skills deliver a formatted, print-ready PDF (sermon research briefs, meeting agendas, small group guides, letters on your letterhead, and more). These need one Python package:

pip install reportlab

Claude Code installs it automatically the first time a PDF skill runs. The skills that produce PDFs: sermon-research, sermon-brainstorm, sermon-series, meeting-agenda, small-group-questions, midweek-devotional, announcement-script, church-letter. Everything else has zero dependencies.

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Philosophy

These are workflow tools, not prompt templates. Each skill has a defined process, format rules, and quality standards built in. You don’t need to know email marketing best practices or YouTube SEO. The skill knows.

The foundation layer keeps everything consistent. Tone, theological sensitivity, and your church’s details carry across every skill automatically.

Sermon prep tools help you research and think. They never write the sermon. That’s between you and the Holy Spirit. The research skill digs into commentaries and context. The brainstorm skill asks you questions. Neither one hands you a manuscript.

Every output is designed to be ready to use. Not a rough draft you have to rewrite. Copy, paste, send. If you’re rewriting more than 20% of what you get, the skill didn’t do its job.

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About the Author

Thomas Costello is the founder and CEO of REACHRIGHT and Executive Pastor at New Hope Hawaii Kai. He’s been in ministry for 20+ years, planted a church, led a church through a merger, grew a church from 30 to 150, and built a marketing agency that serves churches across the country.

• LinkedIn
• Twitter/X
• REACHRIGHT

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License

MIT. Use these however you want.