The digital pullback is happening, and it's been happening for a while. Churches are once again so fixated on in-person attendance that they've started treating their own digital offerings as a threat, as if a livestream is the reason a seat sits empty. So they add friction. They quietly limit the stream, make more and more things available only if you show up in person, and lean hard into paper…
You don't have to understand AI to start talking about it. The easiest way I've found to help a team adopt a new technology is almost embarrassingly simple. Just train on it. I know how that sounds. But new technology brings new questions and new opportunities, and the hardest part is rarely the tool itself. It's figuring out how to give your people permission to start using it. You don't do that…
One of the strange blessings of being one of the first online pastors was that there were no books to read. There were no conferences either. So I emailed churches my size and asked questions. Those blind emails connected me to some of the largest churches in the world, and I found out something surprising. They wanted someone to talk shop with too. They were just as curious about what we were…
Peter Drucker gave us one of the sharpest definitions of innovation ever written. He called it " the specific instrument of entrepreneurship... the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth. " Read that again slowly, because it says something the church needs to hear. Drucker is making a claim most of us skip right past. Nothing is automatically a resource. A thing only…
When was the last time you had a real aha moment? The kind where your mind just unlocks. Maybe you watched The Lord of the Rings when you were young, came back to it years later after really knowing the Bible and being a bit older, and thought, "Oh, this Tolkien guy really knew what he was talking about." That type of moment. Now, I see any LOTR clip on Instagram and immediately stop scrolling to…
I don't say that for shock value. It's just the thought that goes through my head when it's quiet and still, when I've been told to put the phone down, stop scrolling, stop working, and simply talk to God. Because here's the truth: it's really hard for me to do nothing with my hands. I'm somebody who loves working. I love solving problems. I love strategizing. I love moving the ball forward. I…
I've been writing a lot about Claude and AI lately, and honestly using it every single day, and it keeps hammering the same point home. The tools are finally here. The question is whether the church is ready to pick them up. Is your church using all the tools yet? Everyone is talking about AI and the church, but nobody has an honest read on where churches really stand. So Will Mancini (Founder &…
My favorite fitness videos are the transformation ones. In about 30 seconds, you watch someone change completely. They stitch together photos taken over weeks and months, and at the end you see the final result, the kind that makes you smile. What's fun is how fast the change happens. You're not there for every workout, every hungry restless night, every day they felt beat up and defeated. You…
Rainn Wilson's podcast featuring Pete Holmes talking about Hell is the exact clickbait churches compete with today. People are skipping Sunday service to watch this on 2x speed instead. We're all competing for attention. The church included. We live in an era where everything is a scroll away. Even social media has pivoted to this tactic. Social media used to be a place we went to connect with…
I was scrolling on Instagram the other day and a clip popped up from Ed Catmull, one of the co-founders of Pixar. He was telling a story about Steve Jobs firing two board members because they never disagreed with him. They just nodded along. And Jobs basically said, what's the point of having you here if you think exactly like I do? He wanted people at the table who would push back, poke holes,…
I'm no doomer on AI. I recently got to contribute to a Christianity Today article reacting to the Pope's mini book on AI , and my piece of it was simple: it's okay to feel anxious about what AI is going to do to our future, and we should also have hope that humanity is special in a way no AI advancement will ever supersede. AI is a tool. We have to learn to wield it wisely. So the question I want…
I was on The Unfair Advantage podcast to talk about building your tech stack as a church planter. This was a fun conversation with my friend David Hibiske. I give practical tips around your people system, giving system, and a few other platforms/tools you should consider. Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify . Clip from the pod Related posts: Tech & Digital Strategy Recommendations for Small,…
I started reading Todd Wilson's How Did We Get Here? and got hooked fast. Part of it is watching how much of this story runs through Southern California. Part of it is where Todd references Dr. Gary McIntosh, who I actually had as a professor at Talbot . And part of it is reading about Rick Warren as a chapter in church history when, for 14 years, he was my boss and my pastor, not just a name in a…
Open your spam folder for a second. Every email sitting in there got there one of two ways. The first way is what some folks call Software 1.0 . An engineer sat down and wrote a rule: if the subject line says "winner" or "cash," send it to spam. Specific task, specific code, done. We've been doing this since software was software. The second way is Software 2.0 , which really showed up around 2017…
We switched to Rock RMS in August of 2025. It was a big shift, and you can read about that whole saga here . My deep dive into Claude happened right around the same time, and honestly, the more I poked around, the more my mind got blown by what's possible inside the Rock ecosystem. We're running 18.2, and the agent support is wild, especially what Claude can do in MCP mode. Quick word of caution…
You know the feeling. You sent the message. It got read. No reply. The little " Read 3:42 PM " sits there doing absolutely nothing, and saying everything. You're checking your phone every fifteen minutes. You're rereading your last text, wondering if it landed weird. You're wondering whether you're being quietly ignored, if they haven’t seen it yet, or if you’re just going crazy. Welcome to the…
I’m all for digital options at churches, but sometimes it’s a mistake to make things strictly digital. A story has been circulating in my area about an 81-year-old man who has been a Dodgers season-ticket holder for 50 years , but can no longer get printed tickets. He doesn’t own a smartphone and has no desire to use the team's app. I think he should still be allowed to print his tickets, even if…
I decided to make an iOS game app . I used Lovable and Claude Code . I break down the whole journey in this video . Play at FlappyPastor.com Download App
There is a part in Ray Dalio’s book Principles: Life and Work that has stuck with me. He categorizes success into 3 levels: 1. Successful, but don't know why (The "Lucky" Ones) Dalio explicitly warns against taking advice from people who have achieved a good result but cannot articulate the exact cause-and-effect of how they got there. If someone doesn't know why they succeeded, they cannot be…
I’ve been fortunate to know about Lux Digital Church since its early beginnings. Mark Lutz is the real deal. He is a pastor. He is building a real church for gamers. This isn’t just a stream. This is a biblical community. I actually mention Lux Digital Church in my book for this very reason. Mark was on the Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast this week, and you need to listen to or watch it . He…