Search 
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Pushpay's AI People Search lets you find exactly who you're looking for in ChMS using plain language. Here's what that changes for your team.
In most churches, one or two people actually know how to build a complex ChMS search. Everyone else either asks them or skips the query entirely. That’s a design problem within a church management software, and it’s why AI for People Search was built.
The feature is now live for all ChMS users. You type a question in plain language, and the system builds the filters for you.
Five minutes of filter-stacking, compressed to five seconds
ChMS has always had powerful search capability. The issue was never that the data wasn’t there. It was the gap between knowing what you wanted to find and knowing how to tell the system to find it.
Building complex, cross-referenced searches requires a specific kind of technical fluency most church staff don’t have and weren’t hired to develop. So when the connections pastor needs first-time givers from the last 30 days, or the children’s director wants to see kids with missing birthdays in their profiles, someone either knows how to build that filter or they ask someone who does. In a lot of churches, that’s the same one or two people. And those people are already busy.
The time compression the beta data showed was significant: what was taking minutes now takes about five seconds. Across 331 accounts and 1,226 unique users, the feature logged 15,185 prompts during beta. People kept coming back to use it. Every minute of filter-building friction is a reason someone doesn’t pull the list they need. So the question isn’t how long it takes when someone finally does the search. It’s how many searches never happen at all.
What they’re actually searching for
During beta testing across 331 accounts, the queries broke into six categories pretty clearly: names and groups, giving and financial, children and youth, groups and membership, attendance, and volunteering. That’s a useful list to look at because there’s nothing exotic about it. These are the questions every ministry team has every week.
The children’s pastor wants to know which kids don’t have birthdays listed. The finance director needs household giving numbers before the budget meeting. For the volunteer coordinator, it’s a simple question: who’s currently serving in a specific ministry? And the connections team is looking for people who joined a group in the last 30 days but haven’t been back since.
These are the routine queries that build an accurate picture of your church.
Who gets to search now
One of the original design goals was making powerful search accessible to every ChMS user, not just the ones who know the system well.
When search requires a specific skill set, it defaults to a bottleneck. The people doing ministry work stop asking the system questions because asking requires either learning filter logic or finding the person who already knows it. Neither option is appealing at 8:45 on a Tuesday.
During beta, the number of unique users performing complex people searches grew by 5x. That’s the access story more than anything else. The search capability didn’t change. The barrier to using it did.
In practice
A few examples from the product to make this concrete. Any of these can now be typed as a plain-language question into the AI search bar:
- “Show me families who haven’t attended in 30 days”
- “Find people who gave for the first time in the last 30 days”
- “Find children who don’t have birthdays listed in their profiles”
- “Find people who are not in a group”
- “Find people who serve in children’s ministry”
The system interprets the question and applies the filters. You can review them, adjust them if needed, and clear them with one click. Beta users were clear about what made it useful: “It created the filters correctly and grouped them correctly” and “Having the predicted columns is super helpful.” That second note matters. The system doesn’t just build the query, it surfaces the relevant columns so you’re not staring at a result set and manually adding display fields afterward.
Specificity in your query helps too. “Find active people” will produce something, but “find active profiles created this year” or “find active profiles over the age of 18” gives the system more to work with. Most users find their footing quickly, but it’s not instant-perfect from query one.
Already in your system
The most consistent frustration among church administrators isn’t that their systems lack data. It’s that getting usable output from that data requires more technical effort than their job description covers. Information about attendance, giving, group involvement, and life stage is already in ChMS. The people who most need to act on it are often the least equipped to extract it.
AI for People Search doesn’t add new data. It changes who can reach the data that’s already there. Your children’s director shouldn’t need to route a request through your system admin to find out which kids aged 6–10 in your database haven’t attended in 60 days. Now they don’t have to.
