EXPOSED
This catch-all covers religious education directors, lay ministers, chaplain assistants, missionaries and outreach coordinators — the modal worker spends most hours with people in rooms: teaching classes, visiting the sick and grieving, coordinating volunteers, leading small groups. AI already handles the paperwork layer well — lesson plans, newsletters, curriculum adaptation, event scheduling, donor and attendance records, translation of study materials. What it cannot do is embody a faith tradition in front of a congregation or sit with a family at a deathbed, and buyers here specifically want a human who shares their commitments; the real employment risk is congregational budgets and membership decline, not software.
Dipped in 2020, then grew past where it started.
Median pay $31,630 → $45,280 +14.5% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
+0.6%
Percentage only. The projection counts a different population from the 15,760 above — it includes self-employed workers, which for this occupation is most of them, so the two headcounts are not comparable.
Growing, and only partly exposed
The BLS expects +0.6% more of these jobs by 2034, and at 59/100 the work is only partly exposed — some tasks are automatable, the core of the job is not. Nothing here is in tension.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~11,100 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
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The BLS uses Religious Workers, All Other for work that doesn't fit any named occupation, so it covers roles that have little in common with each other. Two consequences worth knowing before you read anything below:
Holding it up: trust premium . Weakest point: liability shield .
Tasks largely resist digitisation The hours that define the job — sitting with a family the night a diagnosis lands, running a confirmation class where the point is that a believing adult is in the room, driving a van full of teenagers to a service project — cannot be shifted to software, which is why this sits at 14 rather than higher: the newsletter, the attendance database, the curriculum handouts and the grant paperwork genuinely can be, and for many of these workers that is a real slice of the week.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments Hospital and hospice visits, home calls, mission field logistics, setting up and tearing down fellowship halls, and food-pantry or shelter shifts put this worker in unscripted physical spaces most days; it lands at 13 rather than 17 because the environments are buildings and living rooms rather than roofs, rigs or highways, and no tool or heavy equipment work is involved.
No licence, no signature requirement There is no state licence, no exam, no scope-of-practice statute: ordination or denominational commissioning is a private credential a congregation can grant or withdraw at will, and chaplain-assistant or religious-education-director roles are often filled by volunteers or lay members with no credential at all, so a 2 reflects that nothing legal forces an employer to keep a human in the seat.
Meaningful discretion Calls like whether a grieving parent needs scripture or silence, whether to escalate a disclosure of abuse, whether a volunteer should be near children, and how to teach doctrine to a family that disagrees with it are made alone and unsupervised — but a 12 rather than 16 because denominational polity, a senior clergy member and lay boards set the doctrinal and disciplinary boundaries this worker works inside.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (14/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (2/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (18/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (12/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 32 of this occupation's 59 points (54%).
Embodiment (13/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 73/100 — SAFE.
Diocesan/denominational safe-church policies (post-abuse-settlement insurer requirements from carriers like Church Mutual and GuideOne) assigning the religious education director personal sign-off on volunteer background screening, minor-supervision ratios, and abuse-allegation escalation — a documented, auditable consequential call under ambiguity.
Task-mix shift: the occupation genuinely has two tiers. If curriculum writing, newsletters, translation, donor records and scheduling are fully absorbed by parish-management AI tooling, the residual role is bedside presence, conflict mediation between families and leadership, and formation of volunteers — the tier that resists.
Formal endorsement/credentialing requirements spreading beyond ordained clergy: e.g. hospital and hospice chaplaincy contracts requiring Board of Chaplaincy Certification Inc. (BCCI) or APC certification for anyone providing spiritual care billed under CMS conditions of participation, and state clergy mandatory-reporter statutes (already expanding in states revisiting the clergy-penitent exception, e.g. Washington SB 5375) naming lay religious educators as reporters with personal liability. Both create a named, liable human in the room.
Denominational statements restricting AI use in pastoral or catechetical settings — e.g. rulings that instruction and spiritual counsel must come from a professed member of the tradition, in the manner of existing halakhic and Vatican (Antiqua et Nova, 2025) cautions on AI in ministry — would harden an already-high premium into an explicit prohibition.
The limit. Trust premium is already near ceiling at 18; the binding constraint on this occupation is congregational budgets and membership decline, which no lever here touches. Higher scores mean the surviving jobs are safer, not that there are more of them.
| Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 720 | $62,620 +38% |
| Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA | 470 | $51,550 +14% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 450 | $50,210 +11% |
| Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, AZ | 450 | $61,640 +36% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 390 | $47,940 +6% |
| Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD | 350 | $32,220 -29% |
| Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, OR-WA | 320 | $41,700 -8% |
| Baltimore-Columbia-Towson, MD | 300 | $37,890 -16% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 280 | $86,330 +91% |
| Denver-Aurora-Centennial, CO | 60 | $75,460 +67% |
| Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 720 | $62,620 +38% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 59. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.