You open a new chat with Claude. Before you ask anything, you type out your job.

You explain your church. You explain the project you’re working on.

You did the same thing yesterday. You’ll do it again tomorrow.

Maybe you keep a block of text in a note so you can paste it in each time. That works, but it gets old.

Claude can remember this stuff for you now.

WHAT MEMORY AND CHAT SEARCH DO

Memory lets Claude keep track of who you are and the work you’re doing. Claude builds a summary from your past chats.

It sticks to work things, like your role, your projects, and how you like to work. Then it brings that summary into each new chat.

The summary updates about once a day. So something you mention this morning may not show up until tomorrow.

If you use projects in Claude, each project gets its own memory. Your budget project keeps its own summary.

Your hiring project keeps its own summary. The two stay apart, and they stay apart from your regular chats too.

Chat search is the other half. You can ask, “What did we decide about the staff retreat?”

Claude searches your past chats to find it. You’ll see the search happen right in the chat, with links back to the chats it found.

HOW TO TURN IT ON

These steps come straight from Claude’s help center.

1. Open Settings and go to Capabilities.
2. Turn on memory.
3. In the same place, look for “Search and reference chats.” This is chat search. It’s on by default once it reaches your account.
4. To see what Claude remembers about you, click “View and edit memory.”

You can change the summary any time. Ask Claude to edit it.

You can also tell Claude in a chat what to remember. Your changes show up in your next chat right away.

3 WAYS TO USE IT AT CHURCH

Start with your weekly staff meeting. Once Claude knows your role and the projects on your plate, you can ask for next week’s agenda in one line. Claude already has the background.

Chat search helps with old decisions. Say you planned the volunteer schedule for the fall festival last month.

Now a team lead asks why parking starts at 8. Ask Claude what you decided about the parking team. It searches your past chats and pulls up the answer.

You can also set up one project for board reports and another for the church newsletter. Each one keeps its own memory. Claude won’t mix your board report notes into your newsletter.

GUARDRAILS FOR CHURCHES

Memory saves the work you talk about. So think about what you type before you type it.

Keep pastoral care details out of Claude. A member’s health problem or a counseling conversation should stay out of your chats. The same goes for member contact data and donor details.

For a one-time chat you don’t want in memory, use an incognito chat. Click the ghost icon in the upper right corner of a new chat.

Incognito chats aren’t saved to your history. They aren’t added to memory, and chat search can’t find them later.

On a Team plan, incognito chats still show up in your organization’s data exports. Treat them like any other work record.

One note on Team plans. Claude’s help center says Team plans have no organization-wide switch for memory. Each person on your team controls their own memory setting.

So talk about it as a staff. Agree as a team on what goes into Claude and what stays out. On an Enterprise plan, an owner can turn memory on or off for the whole organization.

If you ever want to start over, you have two choices. Pause memory keeps what Claude has saved, but Claude stops using it and stops adding to it. Reset memory deletes all of it, including project memories, and you can’t undo it.

WHO CAN USE IT

Memory works on every Claude plan, including the free plan. Chat search works on paid plans: Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise. Both work on the web, in the desktop app, and on mobile.

Turn it on, and stop starting every chat from zero.

If you want to learn this kind of thing with other leaders, come join us in The Builder Collective. It’s a community of executive leaders learning how to put AI to work. You can find us at thebuildercollective.ai.