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Glippity gloppity Gloo

Glippity gloppity Gloo

Last updated on: July 20, 2026 at 4:47 pm by Fred Clark

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Glippity gloppity Gloo 2026-07-20T16:47:47-04:00 Fred Clark

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News item: “RNS reporter Bob Smietana on Gloo, the faith-tech company chasing a one-stop IT/AI solution for churches.”

I’ve written about “Gloo” a few times here, mostly trying to decipher the tech company’s impenetrable jargon to try to figure out what exactly it is they’re offering to sell to “the ‘Faith & Flourishing Ecosystem’ of American churches.”

Gloo has been a staple of the Religion News Service Press Release Service — the sometimes strange, unedited collection of “news” and announcements from religious organizations and companies. The posts I’ve done based on some of those quirkier press releases (see here and here) are not a representative sample of such releases, most of which are the kind of bland announcements of new hirings and appointments that are meaningful to those organizations even if they’re not Big National News. Gloo’s corporate- and tech-bro jargon stood out amidst all of those earnest announcements due their breathless hype and confused phrasing.

That led me to say this back in March:

I do not trust “Gloo.” … It’s an “AI-Powered technology platform for the faith and flourishing ecosystem.” It presents itself as something like a Cambridge Analytica for churches, and seems intent on doing for churches what Cambridge Analytica has done for America and the UK. It seems to collect and analyze “data.” My guess it that it collects and sells data. To whom? For what? I have no doubt that someone is “flourishing” due to all this data collection, but I don’t think it’s going to be churches or the people they are meant to serve.

Smietana, a top-notch veteran religion reporter (and fellow Gannett survivor), has also been reading all of those press releases sent to RNS, where he is now a national reporter. The link at the top here is to his appearance on the RNS podcast “Complexified,” summarized there like this:

Nearly half a billion dollars, gone, over thirteen years.

That’s how much a company called Gloo has lost trying to build an all-in-one digital & administrative powerhouse for what it’s calling the “Faith & Flourishing Ecosystem” of American churches.

A tech company that can handle email & texting, data analytics, web hosting, podcast hosting, IT infrastructure, sermon-to-social video clips, all the way to AI-generated devotionals and study guides. That’s just a taste.

Our guest is RNS reporter Bob Smietana, and we’re asking:

What happens if it works? What happens when one for-profit company, one whose SEC filings admit it might not survive the year, becomes the back office for a huge slice of American Christianity?

Who holds that data? Who shapes that message? What happens if all of that data falls into the wrong hands?

This discussion is a follow-up to Smietana’s recent piece focused mostly on Gloo’s latest stock offering and its plans to finally turn a profit: “Faith-based AI company Gloo faces moment of truth after $438M in losses.”

Tech companies don’t think of such losses as “losses.” They think of it as money they have spent or invested or churned or passed-through — and the bigger that number is the more active they’ve been and, therefore, the more successful they’re about to be.

The key players in Gloo are people with real-world experience in successful companies. Its CEO is Scott Beck, “a former Blockbuster and Boston Market executive,” and its executive chair and head of technology is the former CEO of Intel, Pat Gelsinger.

Smietana also includes this note on Beck’s background:

Beck started working as a teenager at Waste Management Inc., the garbage hauling company his father co-founded, and later was an early investor in major franchises. He said he’s seen the power of what he called the “collective might” of organizations that work together.

I supposed that “the collective might of organizations that work together” might be one way to describe what Waste Management and BFI were up to all those years.

The legit business experience of its top people makes me think Gloo isn’t just a Barnum-esque Harold-Hill-in-River-City attempt to take the money and run. But I’m still not sure the business it’s setting up is the same as the business it’s marketing itself as to local churches.

Sure, local churches probably want and need email hosting and web hosting, and maybe some even want to have podcast hosting or help putting services online. But “data analysis” and “A.I.”-anything are “services” most churches never knew they needed and will have to be convinced could mean anything to them.

Unless, I suppose, your pastor is excited by the prospect that his sermons could be run through some LLM to produce “AI-generated devotionals and study guides,” in which case I would suggest an emergency meeting of the board of elders to explain to him why that would be a Very Bad Idea.*

But if those churches don’t have an urgent felt need for many of the services offered by Gloo, what those churches do have is people — people who are a source of data.

I suspect that Gloo’s actual business model sees those people and those churches not as consumers to be served, but as a resource to be mined and packaged and resold to whoever’s in the market for all of the data they’re offering to collect and “analyze.” That suspicion seems to be shared by the folks at that Complexified podcast, so I’ll have to give that a listen.

To be fair, I will acknowledge that I am biased to be skeptical of “tech” companies making big promises, and that this skepticism is only amplified when “tech” morphs into (ugh!) “faith-tech.”

It’s also possible that I’m just not tech-savvy enough to fully understand the way that bleedng-edge data analysis and high-tech, A.I.-driven synergies might lead to a revolutionary paradigm-shift throughout the entire Faith & Flourishing Ecosystem.

Or perhaps that I’m simply not smart enough to understand that there might be some context in which those strings of words might actually mean something. I suppose that’s possible too.

But so far my disinclination to trust companies like Gloo is based on the arguments I’ve seen in favor of such companies. I hear people enthusing about the possibility of “Palantir, but for churches!” and think, “Yes, exactly the danger I see here.”

I’m not sure that this variation of the Torment Nexus will turn out to be profitable, but in any case I’m still pretty sure that wasn’t the main concern of the classic sci-fi novel “Don’t Create the Torment Nexus.”

(Now I’m thinking that a sci-fi novel along the lines of Don’t Create The One-Stop IT/AI Solution for Churches could make for a terrific story, but I’m not sure there’s a big market for ecclesiological dystopian fiction.)

* If you want to turn your sermons into devotionals, do it the way God intended, as demonstrated by Gertrude “Biddy” Chambers:

For the remainder of her life — and at first under very straitened circumstances — Oswald Chambers’ widow transcribed and published books and articles edited from the notes she had taken in shorthand during the Bible College years and at Zeitoun. Most successful of the thirty books was My Utmost for His Highest (1924), a daily devotional composed of 365 selections of Chamber’s talks, each of about 500 words. The work has never been out of print and has been translated into 39 languages.

P.S.: Oswald Chambers died in 1917 from appendicitis. He initially refused to go to the hospital for treatment because he was in Egypt as a YMCA chaplain serving troops during the first World War. He “resisted going to a hospital on the grounds that the beds would be needed by men wounded in the long-expected Third Battle of Gaza.” It was an earlier time, when it was still considered possible to keep track of the number of battles of Gaza.

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