Lifeline for Leaders
Lifeline for Leaders is a podcast created to strengthen, encourage, and unite those serving in pregnancy care clinics and pro-life ministries. Hosted by Kirk and Linda Thomas, the podcast features thoughtful conversations with leaders, ministry partners, authors, and experts who understand the unique challenges of this work.
Each episode offers practical insights you can use right away, along with stories and perspectives that remind you you’re not walking this journey alone. Whether you’re navigating leadership decisions or facing a demanding season, Lifeline for Leaders exists to provide community, connection, and clarity—helping you move forward with confidence and purpose.
Lifeline for Leaders
Episode 14 - AI Is Everywhere—But Should Your Clinic Be Using It? (with Jon Merwarth)
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AI is everywhere—but for many nonprofit and pregnancy center leaders, it still feels overwhelming, unclear, or even a little intimidating.
In this episode of Lifeline for Leaders, we welcome back Jon Merwarth, founder of ThrivePoint Consulting, to talk about how leaders can approach AI with wisdom, confidence, and practical strategy.
Jon brings decades of experience in business, nonprofit leadership, and organizational turnaround, and he helps mission-driven organizations move from confusion to clarity. In this conversation, we focus on one of the biggest leadership questions today: How should pregnancy centers and nonprofit leaders use AI without losing discernment, privacy, or mission focus?
We break down what AI actually is, why some leaders fear it, and why others may be relying on it too heavily. Jon explains how AI should be treated as a tool—not a replacement for leadership. From donor thank-you letters and volunteer communication to event planning, policy writing, research, and board education, AI can save valuable time and improve efficiency when used wisely.
We also discuss important cautions around privacy, personal identifiable information (PII), client confidentiality, and why leaders must remain the final decision-makers. AI can help with productivity, but wisdom, discernment, and mission clarity still belong to you.
If you’ve been wondering whether AI is something your center should be using—or how to use it responsibly—this episode brings clarity without the hype.
Connect with Jon Merwarth:
Visit ThrivePoint Consulting to learn more about consulting services, upcoming AI webinars, and leadership resources. You can also connect with Jon Merwarth on LinkedIn.
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I saw immediately was it was a productivity game changer. And I just know that it's um it's helped advance many aspects of the cause for me, being able to get a lot more done um a lot faster than I ever did it before.
SPEAKER_00Welcome to Lifeline for Leaders, a podcast created to strengthen and connect those serving in pregnancy care clinics and pro-life ministries. I'm Linda Thomas.
SPEAKER_01And I'm Kirk Thomas. Each week we sit down with leaders, ministry partners, authors, and experts who shape the pro-life landscape, sharing practical insights you can use right away, and inspiring stories that remind you you're not walking this journey alone.
SPEAKER_00Our mission is to help you serve with confidence and resilience. This is your community, your support, your lifeline. Today's lifeline is finding clarity when everything feels uncertain and learning how to move forward with confidence in a rapidly changing world. We're joined by John Merwarth, founder of Thrivepoint Consulting. John is known as a get-it-done leader who has helped transform struggling organizations into thriving, mission-focused ministries. With decades of experience in business, nonprofit leadership, and organizational turnaround, he helps leaders move beyond ideas to real practical progress. Today we're talking about something many leaders are hearing about, but not always sure how to approach AI. What it is, why it matters, and how to use it wisely. John, welcome. Again, welcome back.
SPEAKER_02Thanks. Hello, good afternoon.
SPEAKER_00Good afternoon. Kirk, if you would start us in prayer before we dive into the conversation.
SPEAKER_01I'd be honored to. Thank you, Linda. Lord, give leaders listening today wisdom for the decisions in front of them, especially the ones that affect people, services, and their missions. Help them lead with courage, steward growth well, and stay grounded in your truth. We pray these wonderful things in your name. Amen.
SPEAKER_00Amen.
SPEAKER_01Well, welcome back, John. We appreciate you coming back. And, you know, AI was such a popular topic. We touched about it, I touched on it a little in our previous episode. Today we're just going to get right into it and focus on AI because it's so important. Just tell us a little bit. You know, I mean, AI is the catchword today, and everybody's talking about it. You know, some people know a lot about it, some people don't have any idea about it. Can you tell us kind of what's the right move with AI for a pregnancy care center leader?
SPEAKER_02I would never recommend doing anything you're not comfortable with. I think that's that's one of the things you have to start with. I think leaders in pregnancy centers do need to understand it better. If they don't already, they need to understand it better because it is something that is being used. It's being used by your your clients, it's being used by your donors, it's being used by your staff, your volunteers, your board members. So it is it is being used. And one of the the things that are I think are are that we need to realize about AI is that some leaders are avoiding it because they're afraid of it. And then other leaders are leaning on it, I think, a little too heavily. And those are some things that you know just need to be talked about. And this is a great I'm I'm glad you're bringing this subject up because it's something that we all we all need to hear more about, discuss it more, and be more open about it.
SPEAKER_00So let's just talk about the fear that executive directors and and others are feeling as it comes to AI. Do they have something to be fearful about?
SPEAKER_02Well, yes and no. Um really need to make sure that you are relying on your God-given wisdom and discernment when you're using AI. Because if you if you're not careful, it can produce information that's false. One of the big fears that I I know I hear a lot of people say is that it doesn't sound like me. So if I if I produce maybe a letter or an email that the AI helped me generate, it really doesn't sound like me. Another thing you you may have heard this before, I've certainly heard it a lot, is you'll you'll produce a product, a document, or something like that, and somebody say, You used AI for this, didn't you? So and people are afraid of that. It's like you don't want to be, you don't want to go into the room and have somebody say, Oh, this doesn't count because you used AI. By the way, if somebody says that to you, they don't understand AI. I'll just I'll just make that comment. Everyone's using it, whether we like it or not. And those those are where some of the fears come from. The other thing, too, is much bigger, maybe more conspiracy related, is we're afraid the AI is going to take over the world. I mean, this has been in movies since the 70s, yeah, right? And eventually how AI gets control of everything and it knows everything. So I would be cautious about that. I mean, you definitely would not want to use AI for client interactions or advice on how to handle a client or a patient. Those are where privacy issues come in. So so I don't know that I don't I don't like the word fear, but I think caution is a good word when it comes to AI.
SPEAKER_01You just mentioned privacy issues with AI. So maybe, you know, I mean, I don't know if PII, private, private or uh personal identifical identifical or let's see, PII, whatever that helps. Personal identical identifiable. There it is, John. So thank you. Thank you.
SPEAKER_02But you are there. And it's tricky because because it's smart. It it it's been it's been pre-trained to gather a lot of information. So it doesn't take much for it to figure things out, to put one and two together to come up with three. So sometimes all you have, like if it's a four or five-part equation, if you give it three parts, it might get the other two. So you really do have to be careful. I think that's a really that could be a lengthy conversation on that, but you really it's time for pregnancy centers to really put the in-place policies when it comes to using AI.
SPEAKER_00So, in practical terms, what are some things that you would recommend that centers use AI for?
SPEAKER_02Well, I don't know if that's if there's an anomaly out there or not, but I know most pregnancy centers that I've talked to over the past seven plus years is we're short-staffed. Like everybody is working to capacity. We're often being drug away from things that are really important to us because a new task came along that we have to do. What I would say is that AI can save you a lot of time. It can save you a lot of time. We don't have time to get into this, but I'll just say um my wife is looking at AI and her job, and they just found a model that is going to save them a two-man team. It's gonna save them about 10 working hours a week, man hours a week, just from this AI model. So could you imagine if you had a 30-hour a week or a 40-hour a week um pregnancy center staff member who could free up 10 hours? And to answer your question, Linda, more directly is like letters, first drafts. You can do you can have it do a first draft for you on a letter, on language for an event. You you want to have an event, you can tell it what the event is, who you want to communicate it to, what the what the catch item is, what you're trying to accomplish, and AI will generate the first draft of the language for that event. Volunteer communication, board education, policies and procedures. If you need to redo your policies and procedures, you know what needs to be redone. Instead of typing the whole thing and doing all those edits yourself, ask AI to do it for you and give you a first draft.
SPEAKER_01Saves you a lot of time. It saves a lot of work. One of the things too, John, is that a lot of people will try AI for the first time and they just put in kind of a generic prompt into the model, and they really don't get much out because you know, one one is that the AI model doesn't know you very well. And it's very important for you to get to know your your AI model. Is that correct?
SPEAKER_02It is. It's for and it's important for the model to get to know you. Yeah. So you got to give it information. Remember, it's computer generated. It's not thinking, it's it's it's preempting the next word in a sentence. So it's and it's taking the information that's been pre-fed into it to do that. So I know like one of the things I hear a lot of times is the word artificial, like people feel like they say, like, well, when I use AI and I get it, the output I get just feels like it's artificial, right? Well, some of the things that would help with that is letting know AI your writing. Give us some of your sample writings that you wrote yourself. And when you do that, say, I just uploaded three documents that I wrote myself. I want you to recognize the style and implement that the next time I ask you to do a project for me. Tell it your personality type. Give it your bio, tell it what your standards are, tell it what the goal is of your center, what your values are, what your missions are, what your mission is, and tell it to use that information when it produces these first drafts for you. And it will pick up on it.
SPEAKER_00John, that's super interesting. Um, I've never thought about like uploading letters or notes, but I have noticed that in the questions that I've asked for it, it does kind of pick up my style and and my voice. So I think the actual sample writing is even more beneficial.
SPEAKER_02Is the the more you interact with it, it will it will pick that up. It just takes more time. So, like once I figured some of it out, I just started uploading documents and I started telling it as much as I possibly could so that I didn't have a that longer process. It made the process a lot faster for me. Here's another thing, too, I'll say that you can do. Let's just say you have a repeatable document. Something that something that you use often, but you customize it, right? So I know for me, like I have a particular brief that I do for counties. Okay, it's on maternal health care. But I've produced a couple of those, and the first one that I produced probably took me a week or so. But after I finally got the product that I wanted, I re-uploaded it to AI and said, this is our gold standard. From now on, when we produce these, I want the sources to be listed the same way. I want the the content to include similar things. I want the sections to be the same. So now what took me almost two weeks the first time, I could probably do it in less than a day. But that's the type that's the type of time saving that I've that I've been talking about is what took me two weeks to produce to my satisfaction. I can get to my satisfaction now in a day.
SPEAKER_00So, John, you're you know, we've talked about uploading some information that even we've created. Do you do you have to subscribe to a service, pay for a service to have privacy, or or is it private? How private are the paid services? How private are the ones that are free?
SPEAKER_02Sure. So there's a reason they call it open AI. A lot of the free services are getting information directly off of servers around the world. And as more information is given to AI, it's taking it and it's it's being pre-trained with that information. So in some cases, the information that you tell it is is being reused in other prompts that people are using. The paid version, most of your paid versions give you your own storage, your memory storage. And from what I understand is that does not go into the open, the open market. That stays within your chat, if you're using chat GPT. So that that stays, I don't want to say it's private, but from what I understand, is it it doesn't go as public as the free versions do? The other thing with the free version is it doesn't keep track of your chats. So you could have a chat and then you could go back the next day and want to look at what you did yesterday and it'll be gone.
SPEAKER_01How do how do leaders use AI for discernment and making decisions so that they're they're not losing themselves? You know, I mean that they're that they're they're they're they're utilizing it as a tool, but they're they're actually making the decisions, you know. I mean, because some people pretty much just count on AI totally. And I mean, again, we've talked about that. Sometimes AI is wrong, right? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Boy, that's that's a tough one because that's that's a lot of that's self-discipline. But I think your mindset should be you're in charge. Like you don't settle for a for an end product that that you're not happy with. And I also think you need to spend the prompts is key. You have to learn how to prompt AI to get a good finished product. I know like some people I look I I look over the shoulder or they'll ask me to come look at it, and I'll see like they have one sentence. Write me a letter to the donors telling them thank you. It's okay. Well, when you look at my prompt, it's like four paragraphs long. You know, write to the donor, thank them for coming to my banquet, mention the three uh testimonies that we heard, and thank them for this very specific gift. Keep the tone warm but confident. You know, you gotta all those prompts go in there. That gives you a much different product than it than it does with the one or two sentences.
SPEAKER_00So if you're doing all that, is there really a benefit to I AI? What's the benefit?
SPEAKER_02Well, again, you're not you're not writing it word for word yourself. You're just prompting it to you could you could prompt one or two paragraphs and get a five-page document out of it. So it really saves a lot of time. That's the big benefit, time saving.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So I always tell people that I think if you took the time, you could produce something better than what AI could do. Or just as just as time is time is the key there.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's a ma it it it is amazing to to put your prompt in, and then, you know, I mean you write out a a paragraph of a prompt, and then within seconds it comes back with, you know, a you know, pretty darn good answer.
SPEAKER_02So uh Well, sure, and it's not only it's not only uh writing, it's it's res researching as well. I mean, you could you can ask AI to give you the demographics for a geographical area, and it'll search five different sources. It'll first search your county, your state, the U.S. Census Bureau, it'll go grab all that and it'll do it in seconds. Where I don't know, it could take me a very long time to go search all those sources, and it does it in seconds.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you'd have to do the research on where to access the sources, then actually look for the sources and find them. So yeah, that that is the biggest, biggest benefit I see in in like a personal way. But for for for the leaders who still are not convinced that AI is is for them, that they're they just maybe just are probably too concerned about some some legal implications or maybe some um things that will expose the center and the the client information. What do you have to say to them? Are they gonna get be left behind if they don't implement A?
SPEAKER_02Well, I you know, I don't see how AI is going to replace the human brain. So I would I would encourage people with that. Um, I would also say that for the most part, your your legal issues and and that type of thing is gonna come from medical information, it's gonna come from client information, it's it's gonna come from not checking sources. So there's always, even if you decide to use AI for productivity's sake, there still needs to be that human element, there still needs to be that mission control with AI. And my my biggest fear for anybody is handing over control and and not being the final say. You need to be the final say on whatever AI produces.
SPEAKER_00That's such a great point.
SPEAKER_01There's so many choices out there, John, as far as different AI models. Is there a specific, you know, I mean, we've got we've got uh Chat GPT, we've got Gemini, we've got Claude, we've got, you know, everybody seems like they've got an AI model out there out there. Is there a specific one that you would recommend to a pregnancy care center that might be best suited for a nonprofit Christian organization?
SPEAKER_02That's hard to say because you know, there are differences between the different models. Some they've spent a lot of time feeding it information on graphics so that it'll generate the graphics for you, to generate pictures. You know, a lot of them, no matter which one it is now, you can send a picture of yourself and say, give me a cartoon character character of my picture, and it and they'll all do that. But some are better and faster than others. I think the one thing that's interesting about that is I've been noticing on social media a lot lately, like little videos that say, if you've only been using this one model, you're left behind. You should do this model, blah, blah, blah. Well, you know what happens at the end of the video? It says for a small fee, you can buy the model that I just sold you.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02The people that are telling you this model is good, this one's not good, those are the ones that are selling products. So test them out and look at myself. Personally, I use a combination of them. And Chat GPT is one of them. That's that was really one of the first.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I just, you know, I was just listening to this to this and thinking, you know, fear has been brought up a few times in this conversation. And I, you know, what is greater? The fear of implementing AI or the fear of not implementing it.
SPEAKER_02Well, you know, before I started using it, I didn't have any fear at all. But uh, what I saw immediately was it was a productivity game changer. And I just know that it's um it's helped advance many aspects of the cause for me, being able to get a lot more done um a lot faster than I ever did it before. And I know that for my staff, not all the staff, but for some, especially like development, marketing, the events people, it saved them a tremendous amount of time being able to get those first drafts with AI. And then for other people, like maybe uh an operations manager or an executive director, you know, research speeds it up tremendously. So it allows you to do the things that you have to do. And then it even frees up some time that when those distractions do come your way, you can handle them without abandoning your your main focus or your main project or goal for the day.
SPEAKER_01Well, I know, I know you we mentioned last episode that you do some free webinars. You know, I mean, and uh do you do you do those on uh different topics? You know, I know one was on AI. I mean, is that something you're gonna continue to do throughout this year?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we're we're currently developing those, Kirk. The I think the biggest one to get out right away was the AI, just to break the ice with that, to let a lot of people know the very basics and try to bring some clarity to it. It's not something that I feel has been communicated very well, and hopefully the free webinar that we just did will bring some clarity there. We do plan to do those on other things as well. And then there will be additional offerings for AI too, like very specific. We'll talk about prompting. So we'll we'll take a whole session on teaching people how to use the prompts for AI, which is basically the orders that you give it, right? But there's specific things that really help hone hone that finished product in, and it's all in the way that you prompt it. And we'll also spend time about what to upload, how to upload it, what to prompt it as you're uploading, you know, documents that you wrote before, your bios, your personality type, your styles, your communication style, all those things. So you can really get into some details and specifics, and we are going to be offering that in the near future.
SPEAKER_01Is there say I I I'm listening to the episode and say, Darn, I missed that. I really wanted wanted to see that episode or that webinar. Will you have it recorded where maybe you can send it to people? Is that That's going to be a possibility?
SPEAKER_02We are going to record them. And if something like that does happen and you're interested, the best thing to do would either go to our website, thrivepoint.org, and just request to speak to me. You can use my email, which is john at thrivepoint.org, and I can interact with you directly. And you know, that can turn into exchanging phone numbers and we can text and communicate. Um, one of the things I'll say about ThrivePoint is we really wanted to have a firm that was relational. So it's not just a hit and run. We'll drop in, do a day and a half, and we're done. And then a lot of times centers two and a half weeks later will say, What were we supposed to do again? I I don't want it to be like that. I want to, if somebody has a question, if somebody wants to talk, just pick up the phone, text me, call me, and we'll solve it just like that. And we'll answer your questions as best we can.
SPEAKER_01One thing I want to say, John, real quick is that I appreciate you know our past uh experience with you being at the the center. And then also I got to say thank you for what you're doing now. I mean, because that's so so needed for these centers that might not have the resources internally that can reach out to you and you can provide the wisdom and lead them, you know, I mean, to run a more efficient, effective center. So thank you.
SPEAKER_00All right, John, thank you for sharing your insight and experience with us today. This conversation brought clarity to a topic that can feel overwhelming and helped us think more carefully about how to approach AI in a way that is practical, responsible, and thoughtfully applied. If today's episode resonated with you, you can learn more about Thrivepoint Consulting at thrivepointconsulting.org or connect with John Merwar, the M-E-R-W-A-R-T-H on LinkedIn, right? And as always, thanks for listening to Lifeline for Leaders. We'll see you next time.
SPEAKER_01We appreciate it, John. Thank you. And God bless you both.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for joining us today on Lifeline for Leaders. If today's episode was meaningful, feel free to share it with someone who might benefit. And don't forget to subscribe so you never miss a conversation.
SPEAKER_01Remember, you don't have to walk this mission alone. We're honored to walk alongside you.
SPEAKER_00See you next time.