Silas settings

Silas is off until an admin turns him on, because turning him on sends what he reads to Anthropic, the company behind his model. Everything about him is on one page: the Silas page in church settings.

Who gets Silas

Silas comes with any paid part of Trellis: Giving, Communications, Serving, Worship planning, Registration, Check-in, or more group members. He has no price of his own. A church on free Groups alone doesn't have him. See the Pricing page.

Turn Silas on or off

1. Open Church settings, then Silas.
2. Press Turn Silas on. (Or Turn Silas off.)

Only an admin sees the button. Anyone else who opens the page sees "An admin turns Silas on or off here."

The change is for the whole church at once. There's no switch for one group, one person or one feature. With Silas off, the write-up pages still work: a leader's paragraph is kept as the meeting's note, and the Silas buttons don't appear.

The switch doesn't turn off Ask Silas, the help chat, which answers from Trellis help and reads none of your church's records.

If your church has a paid part, turning Silas off pauses what he does in Lighthouse AI, and the page says so before it turns him off. Press Turn Silas off and pause Lighthouse AI, or Keep Silas on. While he's off there's no weekly read and no drafts, but Sunday's forecast is still made from your counts.

What the page tells you

Next to Silas, the page says where he stands:

• On.
• Off. Silas reads none of your church’s records. With Lighthouse AI, it adds that the rest of Lighthouse is paused until he's back on.
• On, waiting for this Trellis deployment to be given a key: on, but not able to read yet. Contact support.
• Not included: the church is on Groups alone.

This month shows how many times Silas has read for your church, out of the month's allowance. The count starts again on the 1st.

How much Silas reads

These limits are set in Trellis and shown on the Silas page:

• Up to 500 reads a month for each church.
• Up to 300 reads a day for each church, and 60 a day for each person.
• Up to 20,000 characters typed for one read.

The month resets on the 1st, and the day's count the next day. When a limit is reached, Silas says so and the paragraph you wrote is kept. You can still save it and take roll the usual way.

What he sees

Only what each read needs:

• A write-up: the paragraph, and the names on the roster it's about. For a serving day, the day's schedule too.
• A new volunteer: their own words, and your list of serving areas.
• A service plan: its order, the message, and your songs.
• A message template: the one-line brief and your existing templates.

It goes to Anthropic's Claude model under Anthropic's API terms, which don't train on it. Trellis keeps a count of each read (which church, who asked, what kind, how big) for the limits, not what was read. The privacy policy says this in full.

Before you turn him on

• Tell your leaders and directors he's coming, and that he only suggests. They still press Done.
• Point them to What Silas does.
• Whatever a leader writes in a write-up goes to Anthropic for that read, pastoral detail included. Decide together what belongs in a write-up.

Still stuck? Ask Silas