Good Church is an AI governance and policy advisor for New Zealand churches. Staff and volunteers ask a question in plain English and get an answer drawn from their own church's documents, with the source cited. We took it from a working MVP to a multi-tenant platform churches can sign up to themselves.
Clare Pattison and Dan Cooper started Good Church in late 2025 to get what a church board has already decided into its people's hands fast. Anyone on a church team - committee members, leaders, volunteers - should be able to ask "can a new volunteer drive the youth van?" and get the church's own answer.
They came to us with a working MVP built by another developer. The question-answering pipeline was there, but it served one organisation. Phase 2 was about turning it into a product: true multi-tenancy was a hard requirement, along with per-church document upload, Charities Register data, legislation monitoring, safeguarding alerts and billing.
Phase 2 went from handover to public sign-up in about four weeks, in July 2026.
The rule for every AI feature: stay inside the documents the board has already signed off, and keep a person in the loop wherever it matters.
Hybrid search over each church's own documents, with OpenAI embeddings, finds the right section before Claude writes an answer.
Anthropic's Claude writes the legislation summaries and suggested policy wording, and powers the conflict checks.
For legislation relevance and conflict checks, a fast model screens everything and a stronger model confirms what it flags.
Law-change recommendations wait for admin approval, and safeguarding questions go to a person, not just a chatbot.
Churches are handing over their policies and their people's questions, so the platform had to earn that.
Policies, procedures and legislation that keeps moving. If your people need fast answers from your own documents, we can build it, host it and keep it running.
Last updated 19 September 2026