Connect AI tools to Planning Center
You can use AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and others to interact with your church data in plain language, helping find first-time visitors, identify volunteer gaps, and ask questions about your people, with no coding required.
How it works
Planning Center supports a connection standard called MCP (Model Context Protocol) that lets AI assistants talk directly to your account. Think of it as a bridge between your AI tool and your Planning Center data.
Once connected, your tool can work with data in People to answer prompts such as "Who visited for the first time this month?" "Who's a member but not in a small group?" and more. More products are on the way!
Data and security
When you ask a question, your AI tool queries your Planning Center account in real time to get the answer, the same way it would if you searched Planning Center yourself.
Only people with a Planning Center login can connect, and they’ll only see data within their permissions. This doesn’t grant anyone a new level of access.
Your data is not stored by Planning Center for AI purposes. Your connection reads data in real time during your conversation.
Warning
By default, both Anthropic and OpenAI can use your conversations to train their models, which may include personal information from Planning Center. Both tools offer a setting to turn this off, so check your tool's model training settings.
Administrator controls
Organization administrators can see and manage who in their organization is connected to an AI tool.
In Planning Center, select the product name in the top-left corner to open the product switcher.
Select Account settings from the dropdown.
Select the Integrations option from the left sidebar.
Select the External connections tab at the top of the page.
Scroll down to the Planning Center MCP section.
From here, you can see who connected and when, and disconnect any user's access.
Get connected
Planning Center works with any AI tool that supports the MCP standard.
Most tools accept either the following URL — https://mcp.planningcenteronline.com/mcp — or JSON configuration:
{
"mcpServers": {
"planning-center": {
"url": "https://mcp.planningcenteronline.com/mcp"
}
}
}While connecting, you'll go through a standard sign-in flow to authorize your Planning Center account.
Select your tool of choice below to view its help documentation on connecting using the MCP standard:
Verify the connection
After connecting, give your tool a simple prompt such as "Using Planning Center, how many people are in my database?" or "Show me the most recent form submissions." to verify everything is working.
If you get a response with your church's data, you're connected.
Troubleshooting
Here are some common issues and their fixes. If none of these get you up and running, reach out to the Planning Center support team — they're happy to help!
You can also share feedback and join the community discussion in Planning Center MCP on Circle.
Try disconnecting and starting over, and double-check that the server URL is correct in your AI tool. It needs to point to https://mcp.planningcenteronline.com/mcp
Your authentication may have expired. Disconnect and reconnect to reauthenticate.
When you first connect, you choose which Planning Center products to give your tool access to. If you accidentally skipped one, your AI tool can't answer prompts about that product.
To fix this, disconnect and reconnect, and double-check that you've selected all the products you need on the authorization screen.
Try a simple prompt, such as "How many people are in my database?" to verify that your connection is working. If that works, the issue may be that your prompts are not specific enough for your AI tool.
AI tools can misinterpret data. Be as specific as possible in your prompts, and always verify important data directly in Planning Center.