Watch the full episode here -- https://youtu.be/1ZI0KEISOQc
We had the privilege of picking the brain of Jason Moore, a communications expert for churches, who's been charting this fascinating intersection of AI and Church.
From AI-powered chatbots to virtual prayer platforms, AI is making its way into the daily life of ministry.
In this episode, we talk about the benefits of AI in the church and the elements to be weary of.
--
For more information on Jason Moore, visit midnightoilproductions.com
Follow Jason on Instagram at @midnightoilprod
--
For more information on how to grow your church, visit http://tithely.com
Watch the full episode here -- https://youtu.be/1ZI0KEISOQc
We had the privilege of picking the brain of Jason Moore, a communications expert for churches, who's been charting this fascinating intersection of AI and Church.
From AI-powered chatbots to virtual prayer platforms, AI is making its way into the daily life of ministry.
In this episode, we talk about the benefits of AI in the church and the elements to be weary of.
--
For more information on Jason Moore, visit midnightoilproductions.com
Follow Jason on Instagram at @midnightoilprod
--
For more information on how to grow your church, visit http://tithely.com
Frank here with another episode of Modern Church Leader, joined by my new bud, jason Moore, all the way from Ohio Did you say Dayton Ohio?
Speaker 1:Dayton Ohio home.
Speaker 2:I love the Wright brothers. Interesting fun fact yes that's our claim to fame and like where was LeBron from Akron? He was Akron right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, that's kind of up north near Cleveland.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay, well, lebron, ohio, so you know close enough, I guess.
Speaker 1:Yes, we can claim him.
Speaker 2:Well, man, it's great having you. Thanks for jumping on the show today and we're going to talk about AI. But before we jump into that, I'd love to just let the listeners know a little bit about kind of your church background and what you do today and kind of how you've got into this space.
Speaker 1:Sure, sure. Well, this is a weird place to start, but when I was in about third grade, I discovered that I had the ability to draw in a way that was all the.
Speaker 2:All the other kids would ask me to draw pictures for them, and even at third grade, I mean, it was one of my sons loves drawing, by the way, like he's always drawing, he's kind of the like superhero, like transformer, like he likes to draw that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:I love that stuff yeah.
Speaker 2:That's the jam.
Speaker 1:Yeah, those are the kind of things that I drew at that age and growing up, and so my dream as a third grader was to be an artist. When I grew up I didn't know exactly what that meant, if that meant to be a cartoonist or or draw comic books or whatever, yep. And as I got a little older, I wanted to. I really wanted to go to Hollywood. I want to make movies, you know that kind of thing, and that was my dream really all of my childhood.
Speaker 1:And then between my junior high and high school, the summer, between those things, I went on a retreat and it's as close as I ever heard the audible voice of God in my ear say I want you to go into ministry, which was so confusing to me Because at that time there weren't a whole lot of artists in ministry that I knew of.
Speaker 1:You could be a pastor or you could be a musician, but and I was a musician but I didn't really feel like that was my call. I didn't feel called to be a pastor, and so I ended up going to art school. But while I was there, there was a church in my area. I was looking for some freelance opportunities and they actually did use artists and long story short. I started doing some work for them, became an intern, and this was a very large church and they were doing a national search for a new director of their communications ministry, and even though I was an intern, they interviewed me too and ended up giving me the job over people that were probably way more qualified than me, and I knew at that time, like this is, this is what I was put on the planet for.
Speaker 1:So, I am passionate about helping churches communicate the gospel in a way that is deep and meaningful and creative and transformative, and so I'm a big believer that the image does that story does that. You know those kind of things. And so for the last 25 years, I have worked to help churches with media and communications, really around worship design. So the collaborative process I've written books about. You know how do you do collaborative worship design. We're pastor and media people and you know people who would write drama and you know script things. You know all. All those people would come together to create a narrative experience of worship or all the pieces connect.
Speaker 1:And then years later, probably 2010 or so, I had an event that I was supposed to had, an event I was doing, and I couldn't get out Saturday. After the event finished and because I couldn't leave, I had to stay till Sunday. And they said, hey, would you come to our worship, since you have to fly out on Sunday and tell us what you think? And I was like, sure, I can do that. And that was the first time I ever done what I now call a secret worship or consultation, and they valued the feedback I gave them so much I just started building it in, so I would do a Saturday training somewhere and then stay till Sunday, and so that became a big part of my work where I would offer these evaluations to help people see themselves from an outsider's perspective.
Speaker 1:You know I because I went to art school I do a lot around branding and media production and then in 2020, when the pandemic hit kind of out of nowhere, people came to me and said Will you help us navigate this time where we can't do worship in our building? And some folks commissioned me to do some trainings on hybrid worship and online worship and saw a bestselling book in in 2022 called Both and Maximizing Hybrid Worship for in person and online engagement, and the last couple of years have really been spent on helping churches think about how do you create a both and experience where, where no one feels like an afterthought not the people in the room and not those gathered online. So I guess that was a long story, but yeah, that's that's my story.
Speaker 2:I love it. I mean we're. We are what? Three years out from kind of COVID beginnings, Our churches still struggling with the kind of hybrid experience.
Speaker 1:You know, what I have found is that a lot of churches, the approach when we began the pandemic for so many churches was ready fire aim. We didn't have time to aim, we just had to get online and a lot of people never really live Facebook live.
Speaker 1:Let's go, everybody the camera upside down and sideways and you know all those kind of things and you know, I think when you don't build your strategy on why you're doing it, but how and what becomes more important than why, I think you run out of steam. And so I've seen a lot of churches tell me, I've had so many churches tell me, that their online worship numbers have dropped, but it hasn't matched the number of people coming back to the building. Right, I think part of that is that we were really attentive attentive to those folks online when our cameras were up close to us, when we were thinking about those on the other side of it. But the more people we got in the room, the less we thought about those who are not in the room, and there are still a lot of people participating that way.
Speaker 1:I had someone say to me the other day Jason, I think we're going to shut down our our stream, and I'm like, why would you do that? And he said, well, we want people to come back to the building. And I said my friend, appreciate the thought behind that, but if my favorite restaurant stops offering delivery service, it doesn't mean I'm going to get in my car and drive to the restaurant. I'm going to find another restaurant that offers delivery service.
Speaker 1:That doesn't mean I'm never going back to the restaurant. It just means that the way that I interact with the restaurant these days is a little different. Things have shifted with new options and you know those kinds of things.
Speaker 1:So, you know, are they struggling with it? I think what I would love to get every church to begin to think more about is why are we doing this? I see it as a great commission moment. We have the opportunity to take the gospel everywhere. To use another biblical reference, I see it as a new wine skin. You know, the wine hasn't changed, the gospel hasn't changed, but the way that we deliver it, the way we serve it up, has to change.
Speaker 1:I'm also a proponent of both and not either. Or. I do think that we online shouldn't replace in person, but I think that if we can be intentional, we can deliver an experience sort of like professional sporting events, where things are happening in the moment and we are serving people who are physically gathered and those who are digitally gathered as well, where everybody feels like they're the primary audience. So I guess my answer to that question is it's a little complex. I think some people don't realize they're missing an opportunity by making this kind of a back burner or just throwing a camera in the back of the room and going about business as usual, when they really could be engaging people in a deep and meaningful way.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, I mean not the main thing we'll talk about, but I guess we could talk about this for you know, easy, an easy hour, with all your experience doing it. I just find it.
Speaker 1:I'll come back, we can talk about it.
Speaker 2:We'll do it, yeah, a both hand hybrid church session. It's just fascinating, you know. But I but you know there's all kinds of churches size wise, resource wise, expertise, volunteer, set, all the. There's all these dynamics that you know like every church is going to. You know, or I don't know if it's every church, but you know churches are all going to kind of struggle for different reasons.
Speaker 2:Doing this, especially if you get my take is like when you're I don't know what the number is, but let's say when you're 5,000 plus like you have the resources to pull off both and probably pretty well right, with intentionality and a strategy and focus and all that kind of stuff. But when you get to your average size church you know 100 people, 200, you know maybe 200 right, like doing both hand is actually really hard because they barely have the resources to pull off an in-person experience really well right, yeah, think about all those components kids, ministry, streaming something, worship. You know they're just trying to do the basics well. So I think that's the bucket that I always find myself thinking about more, because I thought those are the ones where you know it's just harder.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I agree, and at the same time, I think there's a counterpoint, that it's more about authenticity than it is about being slick or perfect, and so I have seen people take a smartphone and create really engaging and incredible hybrid worship. So people in the room and at home feeling connected and like participants. I talk in the book and in my trainings about the idea that we've got to move from this idea that people are watching worship at home and instead worshiping from home, and we don't want them to. We don't want to think of them as viewers but as participants, and the only way they can participate is if we give them room. So part of the deal is just acknowledging their presence and then giving them the ways to be a part of what you're doing.
Speaker 1:So you don't have to have three cameras and a crew to say, hey, if you're at home right now, we're going to ask this reflection question and so you can put your answer in the chat and a little later, a little later, we're going to share some of those responses.
Speaker 1:Right, you know, if I'm at home and I put something in the chat and 20 minutes later in the worship, the pastor says we've had some great reflections, frank this morning said and your reflection is shared. If you're sitting in your living room in that moment and your prayer request is offered or your reflection is offered, all of a sudden you feel like a participant in that experience rather than just somebody who's watching. And the great thing about that is it doesn't require any additional budget, it doesn't require any fancy equipment, you know. It doesn't require that you have a staff. It's really just intentionality. So now I do agree that having multiple cameras and better lighting and all that can make for a better looking experience, but I do think there are some, some low hanging fruit opportunities that even small churches can engage in that will take their hybrid ministry to a whole nother level.
Speaker 2:That's your revised, updated edition. You got to write the same book but for the hundred member church there you go, there's a lot of stuff in the current one.
Speaker 1:That probably applies, but that's a good way to to like re-market it.
Speaker 2:Yes, remarket it and be very purposeful about like, okay, I'm talking to you, pastor, the hundred member church, here's exactly how to do it, kind of thing. I think that would be awesome, absolutely yes, okay, but we're not here to talk about that, although we spent talking about it. Ai is like all the rage, you know. I think I read something yesterday like half the people in America, or it was like more than more than half, had like heard of it and like half had used something like chat, gpt or something like. It was kind of crazy status. Those are probably not the right stats, but it was crazy Like the, the actual, you know knowledge of AI and how fast it spread through the population.
Speaker 2:I mean, my in-laws are in town, they're visiting, they're out there playing with the kids, and last night they get in and my father-in-law, he's like so how's like AI affecting the business? And I was like you know, he's 77. And I'm like everybody's known, everybody's got AI on the mind. It's crazy. Yeah, so you're doing some stuff, you see you mentioned since November or so, yeah, what's your let's start with just what's your take on AI? What, what do you see?
Speaker 2:in your church space.
Speaker 1:I have seen those statistics. I don't have them memorized either, but you know, the thing is is I think a lot more people have interacted with AI and just don't know it. So if you've used your GPS, if you've been on Amazon and it's suggested something to you, if you have a voice assistant in your home, you know we have Alexa who will tell us what the weather is and call up our favorite radio stations and all those kinds of things Chances are you have already interacted with AI and maybe you just don't recognize it yet, right? You know, the thing about AI for me is that when I first started seeing some of the things that were happening with chat, gpt and there's a text image generator called Dolly that I first started to play with that you, you know, you enter a text prompt and it creates an image, and I mean it scared me a little bit as an artist. I'm like, oh my gosh, like I guess I can pack my stuff up and go find another job because you're not going to need me anymore, right? And the thing is, is it reminded me of how I felt in the early days, when I mentioned to you that I was an artist from a young age, and when I decided to go to art school, I had no computer experience, I mean, other than playing games and things like that. So the thought of Photoshop really scared me because I thought, gosh, if I start using a computer, I'm going to lose my ability to draw and paint, and you know all of those things. And what I discovered was that Photoshop really just allowed me to paint in a new way, to draw in a new way, to take what was in my head and realize it in a new form. And the same thing really is true with AI. The more I've played with it, the more I've realized that, like, I can achieve things with AI that I couldn't before, but but I will be honest that I was scared at first. I have found that there are so many church leaders that I talked to that are skeptical, that are scared that it's like the influence of the devil. You know those kind of things. Most of the people that I've talked to, though, that are skeptics and scared, haven't really ever played with it, and the more that I played with it, the more I realized this thing isn't as scary as we might think it would be.
Speaker 1:The other, the other analogy I've been using with folks, as I've been talking about this, is that it's a tool, you know, just like an axe. You know an axe can be used to cut down a tree and chop up firewood, and that's that serves a great purpose. But you have to learn how to use an axe, because if you're, if you don't, you might accidentally swing it back and hit yourself in the face or, you know, chop a finger off or or, or worse, some people would take that axe and, you know, put it into someone's skull. You know like we can use it as a weapon too, and an AI is not inherently good or inherently bad. The people that use it may be inherently good or inherently bad.
Speaker 1:Now, I think you can do a lot of damage. You can do a lot of damage with an act. You can probably do a whole lot more damage with AI if you use it in a way that's not responsible. But I think we as church leaders ought to come to know these tools in a way that we can help those within our care and our congregations to kind of know how to navigate faith and life in a world where AI. We've just seen the tiny little tip of what's to come. What's come. Yeah, the last six months have been incredible. I mean, every week you can't even stay up with the news because every day there's a new development. I know.
Speaker 2:I have noticed that for a minute for a month or two. It was just every single article I read and it seems like in the last month or so it's kind of like people are like, ok, I just have to stop talking about it, even though there's still things happening every day. Right, it's probably just advancing just as fast, but it was like every day you were hearing about chat, gpt, and then eventually like barred, and it was like, oh my gosh, can you stop talking about this? Yeah?
Speaker 1:Oh it's awesome.
Speaker 2:It just seems like it's kind of died down a little bit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I do think that there is probably a level of fatigue with some folks. I'm sure people on my Facebook timeline are sick of hearing me talk about all the latest things, and then I've got a few people that geek out with me about it and we have lots of private messages going back and forth and the interesting thing is some of the things I taught just even two or three weeks ago are almost invalid, because now the software will do this, or now AI has figured out how to do this and that, and so it's just changing at such a rapid pace. But more than anything, I just really want to encourage your listeners to experiment a little. Get in and see what it is and what it will do. I think that it will calm some of those fears that a lot of us have.
Speaker 1:It's easy to conjure up images of the Terminator and the Matrix and Agent Smith and all of those things I said in a recent talk. I hope the future is a whole lot less I'll be back with the Terminator and a whole lot more Johnny 5, no Disassembly great 80s movie if you're not familiar with it. But anyway, I think that getting in there and playing will dispel some of the myths and fear and all those things that folks may have.
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally what you've been. Sounds like you've done some speaking on the topic. What are you speaking about? What are you teaching? Talking about training churches on as a really big guy.
Speaker 1:Absolutely so recently. I've done two summits here just in the last few months. The first one, I did a whole session on how to open discipleship doorways by using AI to assist you in that task. And so chat GPT is this incredible large learning language model. You mentioned it a couple of times. It's probably the one that most people are familiar with. It allows you to interact with it like you're having a conversation with another person, and the more information you give it and the better you describe what you're after, the better the output is going to be. Now I do want to caution people against this mentality, and I know you're aware of Kenny Jain. Kenny said in a talk and I've heard him say this a few different times we don't want to treat it like it's a vending machine. A lot of us think we can just push a button and out comes a sermon or out comes some great thing. I suppose for simple tasks it will do things like that, but the idea isn't that you say, hey, chat GPT, write me a sermon.
Speaker 1:And then you preach that sermon after it spits it out. You have to do a lot of back and forth and the more you put into it, the more you give it your theological perspective. The more you tell it what you're trying to accomplish. The more you have a conversation with it, the better the output. I don't see AI as doing it for you as much as it is assisting you and clarifying what you're after and that kind of thing. So in that first talk on Discipleship Doorways I asked it to. I gave it a Bible verse that I wanted it to explore and I wanted to show pastors how they could really extend what they're doing with their Sunday sermon so you could take your sermon, put it in there. And I showed them how you can clone your voice and then use chat GPT to write a script and then you can actually put out. I put together this little two minute, basically like podcast that completely convincingly sounds like me delivering it, but it's actually AI. So I went to chat GPT. I said here is the scripture. I want you to give me three reflection questions on this. I want you to do a little bit of a breakdown on what these verses mean and how they apply to our lives and so chat. Gpt writes a script. I then go over to a service called 11Labs. Now the cool thing about GPT is right now there's a free version, so anybody can try this out.
Speaker 1:11labs the voice cloning software that I talked about. It doesn't do just voice cloning. They've got a bunch of AI voices that you can use for voiceover and things. To get started, it's only like $1 for the first month and then I think it's $5 after that, so that's also really inexpensive. So small churches can do this as well. Took the script, put it into there After giving it three different clips of audio of me teaching it learned to talk like me. It pauses where I pause. It speeds up where I speed up. For the most part it's really really convincing.
Speaker 2:It was a weird thing. It was only listening to you.
Speaker 1:It is weird.
Speaker 1:You're like uh, so much, yeah, I mean it's almost like when you listen to yourself on tape and you're like I don't really sound like that. It gives you that vibe. The only thing I didn't like is, for some reason, the way that it pronounces God. It's like God when I sound like a TV preacher when I say it and I don't know why it throws in that pronunciation sometimes, but it does so anyway. I feed it the script. I take two or three different takes. You can. It's got these settings that are called stability and so if you turn the stability way up it's going to sound a little bit monotone and it's always going to sound really consistent. And then you can turn the stability down and it's going to be a little bit more like up and down and then more energy and exciting and faster and slower. So I found that if you run two or three of those and you get different takes, then you can kind of splice those things together and create something that really sounds like you. So the premise of this talk was that a lot of pastors don't have time or skills or expertise to record a podcast every week, but you could very easily take your sermon, put it in the chat GPT say, hey, give me a summary of this. Three additional scriptures that relate to this, some other questions that might challenge my people for the week Copy all that, put it into 11 labs with your voice, export it, upload it and by Tuesday you've got a three minute Bible study that your congregation could listen to and it sounds like you delivering it. And I don't think it's OK to let them know that it's AI doing it. But it's going to sound. I mean, they wouldn't know.
Speaker 1:When I produced my little test of this, I pulled my wife into the room and she didn't know what I was doing and I said listen to this, what do you think? And she's like you started a podcast. And I'm like well, what do you think of it? And she's like I don't Sounds fine to me. And I'm like I didn't speak one word of that. She's like what do you mean? And I said that's all AI. And she's like what? And then I started playing with it to mess with my dog. Hey, finn, come here. And he runs in and he thinks it's me talking to him and I was yelling at my kids from my computer in the other room. They're like what do you want, dad? And I just kept hitting the button and then they came in. They realized it was me off the computer and they're like so we can really say what we want.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a little creepy, so that was one talk I did and those are all tools I would recommend People check out.
Speaker 2:So do you find yourself like? That to me sounds like I'm kind of I'm just exposing church leaders to the technology and showing them some ideas so that they can go like, oh, wow, like mine loads. Now I see what could be done.
Speaker 1:Yes, that's part of my goal right now is to just help people embrace these tools and see that they're not going to necessarily bring an end to the world, but that you know, in a way, I see this as a potential equalizer for all sorts of churches, because you can be an elevation church with multiple campuses and a huge budget and great dynamic preaching and music and all those kinds of things, and have loads and loads of money to spend on podcasts and things. Or you could be a little 50-person church out in the country, and since chat GPT doesn't cost anything and I can afford $5 a month to sign up for this podcast that podcast doesn't only reach your own people, but has the potential, if you're creating compelling content, to reach well beyond your church. And so I know of a church here in Ohio that meets in a living room. It's a Filipino church and they are reaching 1,500 people every week online Like that, regularly, tune in, they interact, they give offering, all those kind of things. Now, this doesn't really have a lot to do with AI, but they're having so much impact through what they're doing online, and so I think that any church that wants to embrace these tools could have even greater impact than they might otherwise have. So part of it for me right now is exposure. Let's look at what these tools are. The second reason that I'm pretty excited about them is that I think it also is helping churches level their content up. If you write a sermon and you stick it in there and you say help me, strengthen this content, help. What other illustrations might fit with this? I was just doing something.
Speaker 1:I work a lot with the United Methodist Church and about three weeks ago I was in California Pacific annual conference of the United Methodist Church out in LA and they have this big event that happens annually it's called annual conference for three days and they hired me to help them with all the branding and I told them I was doing this. We were designing a presentation where we were talking about ending spiritual and physical hunger, and we wanted to do this live presentation where they walked around on stage and they picked up these different elements to represent different areas of spiritual and physical hunger, and I was really stumped on a couple of them. I'm like I don't really know what to do with. Like one of them was talking about clergy and so they picked up a robe and a stole which some of their pastors would wear. And then they moved over to this tent that was talking about kind of homelessness and poverty.
Speaker 1:And then one of them was to talk about lay people and I'm like what would have I don't know what kind of image that isn't like cheesy and like all the typical ones, would be like a shepherd staff and things like that. And so I went to chat GPT and I'm like what would be a symbol of laity in the church and I gave it some of the other symbols I was using and it mentioned a toolbox and how there are things in the toolbox that represent the way laity work and I was like that's a that would work perfect for this situation. So you know, I use it to help me brainstorm, so it takes content to the next level. It's great for helping you.
Speaker 1:Edit, I was speaking at an event in Michigan a couple of weeks ago and they said we need a hundred word bio from you and my bio is probably 500 words and you know that's the kind of thing that for me I'm like well, do I include this or do I include this, or I don't know. So I just went to chat GPT, stuck my 500 word bio in there, so give me a hundred word version of this, and it did a great job.
Speaker 2:I'm like I'll take it done yeah.
Speaker 1:And I didn't have to agonize over which parts to include and which not to include, you know. So it's good for that. I also love it for image generation and creation. So the second conference that I spoke at, which actually just happened on the 27th of June, just a couple of days ago, I taught a session on how to brainstorm and brand a design worship series, sermon series, and so I started off by going to chat GPT and saying I'd like to create a sermon series on the life of Jesus, starting with his birth and ending with his death, but to cover the miracles that he performed throughout his life. Can you help me do that? And one thing just a little tip.
Speaker 2:Yes, I can help you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, are you kidding me? Absolutely. Well, one of the things that is really important with chat GPT is that you help it understand its role. So, if you ask it, I need you to take on the role of brainstorming partner. You know, I need you to take on the role of you know, medical professional, if I'm asking it something. The other day I asked it if it could help me. My front yard looked a little dead and needed some help and I'm like can you help me, can you take on the role of landscaper?
Speaker 1:and they gave me a whole plan for, like, what to do to my lawn to fix it. I mean it's crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But anyway, I asked it if it could help me with that series. It laid out like 10 different miracles that Jesus had performed and all the references and all those kinds of things. I'm like, can you help me organize this in a six week series? So it comes in, re-jiggers all the material and gives you the six weeks. Then I say, okay, I would like an application for each week and a summary of where we would go. And it gives me all that. And so then I said, can you provide me with 10 different titles for this series? And it kicks out like all these titles and the first 10,. I was like, give me 10 more, and the second 10,. The first title was Beyond Belief the miracles in life of Jesus. And I said I'm nostalgic and I love the old Petra album Beyond Belief, so I'm going to go with that one.
Speaker 1:So then I asked it to write a bumper script for me for a 30 second bumper, and it writes this script that I mean every word of it was perfect for what I wanted to achieve.
Speaker 1:Now I could have gone back and forth and all that, but I'm just trying to demonstrate the process.
Speaker 1:And then I said, can you describe the images that we would see in this trailer, while we hear a narrator, and it describes all these great images. And then I jump over to another resource. One of my favorite resources is Mid Journey, which is a text image creator, and I start putting in the image descriptions there and it starts generating, you know, the nativity scene or Jesus feeding 5,000 people, and part of the beauty of that is that those are hard images to find anywhere, like it's hard to go to a stock photo library and find an image of Jesus feeding 5,000 people and even if you do, it's often like really cheesy and not very well done and, you know, just not something that I think would be very commercially appealing. So you can work with Mid Journey to get the look you're after. You may have seen I've been seeing it go around. You know people have been showing these images of Jesus taking a selfie at the Last Supper with all the disciples.
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1:If you haven't go, Google it, you'll find it, and so it can create these contemporary images that make Jesus come to life in a different way. So anyway, I went, ran it through its paces there, got all my images, stuck those into another app called Leopix Converter, which makes them 3D, takes them and gives them depth. So it's sort of like when you're on Facebook and you see one of those Facebook 3D images where you can kind of there's parallax.
Speaker 2:Moves a little bit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it took every image. It did that. I strung all those together, I put some music to it, I added a title and then I posted the script, the narration, into 11 Labs, created a voiceover not using my voice, but using a voice that sounded like a professional movie guy and in probably 10 hours I had a bumper video that is I could send you after the fact if you wanna. I don't know if you do show notes, but I could certainly send that to you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, send it, I wanna see it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the thing is is like any church could do this Right. A little tiny church with no media staff could do everything that I did using AI and now you have got this high end looking trailer and all the materials you need to move through this series.
Speaker 2:You just created the sermon series framework and drafts and notes and some marketing material and graphics for each week and, like you know, you have this whole kit and maybe you know, maybe that kit's 50% done or 75% done or 90% done and it takes, you know, the pastor or the staff or the volunteers like some time to kind of put the finishing touches on it, review it, make sure it's obviously like accurate and make sense and all this kind of stuff. But I mean you've saved that's kind of how I'm thinking about this stuff. I mean you just saved somebody like hours and hours. You either gave them something they never would have done right, if you're a small church maybe, like you just never would have done this because it's way too much work and you don't have the resources to do it or you've saved a team of people that do this every for every series, right, every six weeks. They're just always on this schedule. You've just saved them like I don't know, cut the production time in half to create all this stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you know, cut the production time in half is a great way to say it because, going back to our axe metaphor for a moment, you know it's conceivable that you can knock down a tree without an axe. The axe isn't gonna cut the tree down for you. You have to wield the axe. But it's gonna be a whole lot easier to cut that tree down with that tool in your hand than it would be to try and knock it down or dig it up like Clark Griswold and Christmas vacation or whatever yeah.
Speaker 1:And so I think that's you know, part of this is just getting comfortable with the axe and helping people see that, like the axe, a lot of people think the axe is gonna turn on us and swing itself. I don't think the axe is going to swing itself. I hope I'm wrong about that. I'm not saying that I'm carefree or concern free, that I do worry about. You know all the stuff that you see in the movies. On the day you say I want you to create a sermon series and it says I don't wanna create a sermon series, you know. And then it tells us what it wants to do. You know I hope that day never comes to a tuition.
Speaker 1:Right, right, but you know these language models don't actually think they are predictive. You know they predict the next word in the sentence and then generate these things based on all of the data that it studied, and you know that kind of thing. But yeah, you know, I think the possibilities for small church, for large churches too, are just endless. And it's branding, it's theological stuff, I mean it's if you wanna create a Bible study out of that stuff, it can do all that. And I think an important point that you made in your summary there is that it doesn't do 100% of it for you. You partner with it. And so I think the wrong mentality is to think well, ai, ai is just gonna do it for me. And if you lean on it like that, I think that is where you start to cross some of these ethical and moral lines, where it's like I'm not doing any fact checking because chat GPT can throw out some inaccurate information.
Speaker 2:Well, there was that whole like legal case right when, like the lawyer used it for something and submitted it and the judge was like these are fake. This is literally fake stuff, and they didn't detect their work.
Speaker 1:I had a friend of mine who is in a higher education who was writing a paper and it attributed some made up book to me and another person that I've co-authored books with and he's like when did you write this book? I'm like I've never written that book. I don't have the idea what that is. And chat GPT used it as a reference and some brainstorming he was doing. I'm like, nope, that's not real. They call it hallucination.
Speaker 1:Sometimes the GPT does a little bit of a hallucinating. It does less and less of that the more information you give it. But I think pastors do need to fact check and make sure that the information that it's spitting out is real. But I would just say this for those skeptics out there using chat GPT without conversing with it and doing that back and forth is not all that much different than going to like sermoncentralcom and downloading a sermon and preaching it without doing additional study, without personalizing it, without bringing your own experience to it. Both of those things aren't a good idea. So I think it's important that we use these tools as they're intended to be.
Speaker 2:I mean, we've been working on this tool called Sermonly. Like we're a software company, right, we do software, we're church guys, we're pastors. So we started building this thing like two years ago. Right, it was just a fun kind of like side project, like nothing, not core to what we do in terms of like helping churches with technology. But we thought, man, let's make a sermon writing tool for pastors, like just for people writing sermons, love it, and it's been fun. But it's like how do you make that better than what they could do just with a Word doc in Google, right, yeah, or Sermon Central or whatever.
Speaker 2:But when AI kind of hit big earlier this year, we were like, oh, that's it, Like let's put chat GPT or Bard or you know.
Speaker 2:So we started with chat GPT, but we're building in kind of AI, like the AI assistant, the researcher, the co-pilot kind of concept, where it's you know, it's like I love your Sermon Central kind of concept because you're like you can use it to help you write a draft or kind of build some things out, but, like you, it's not meant to write your sermon for you.
Speaker 2:You're still led by the spirit, you still know your congregation, you know the people, you know what's going on, and so the sermon's left to come from you, right, it's like from your heart. But chat, gpt or the tool we're building is called Sermonly, like it's meant to just be. It's like make it more efficient, make it easier to do what you're already doing, like hopefully, make it kind of like a superpower, like now you can, you don't need a whole research team Like the mega churches, like you have your built in research team like right there helping you like craft your sermons, kind of thing. So like I think there's like tons of opportunity for pastors to use this all the things you described to, yeah, to just be more efficient, more effective, more super charged than what they're doing.
Speaker 1:One other way that I really love to think of chat GPT is that you can also kind of make it your foil. Like, if I'm trying to reach somebody that believes there's no God, I want you to take on the persona of a skeptic. Or let's say you're trying to preach on tithing. I want to take, I want you to take on the perspective of someone who thinks that the church is just a money grubbing institution or whatever.
Speaker 1:What would your response to these things be? It can actually help you have this conversation like how do I help somebody who is a skeptic or doesn't understand, or whatever. It'll ask you the right questions to provide the things in your sermon that are going to maybe turn on somebody that would be a skeptic.
Speaker 2:You know that kind of thing. So, yeah, prompt, it's like all about how you're feeding it, like you said, and giving pastors even prompts like that, like oh, have you considered asking it this to help you flesh out that point, or whatever. Like just that's really what it comes down to is being creative about how you want to like, feed that information and talk back and forth to it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and just to remember that, it's not like highly technical, it's just like our conversation right now. Yeah, I can ask it a question. I had a friend of mine say to me after watching one of my sessions I find it funny that you and other presenters say please to the program. I'm like, yeah, I don't need to say can you please? Blah, blah, blah, but there's something about the conversational nature of interacting with chat, gpt, right, the more you kind of humanize the conversation, the better it seems to bring back content that is more usable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so yeah, I think of it as an eager assistant. I think of it as an expert that can help me as I'm developing something. I think of it as a foil. I think of it as a grammar assistant when I need it to help in that way. I think of it as an editor. There have been so many times I'm like, can you help me shorten this or whatever, all of these great things I have said before, it's like the most devout Christian I know, when you give it those parameters and you ask it to help you look at scripture or write a Bible study or whatever, I mean, it comes up with these incredible insights and questions and all those kind of things, and I just have heard some skeptics out there say this just seems like it's of the devil, and I've just seen so many opportunities come from the outputs that I think God's got to be in this. Let's not forget that God said he would use the very rocks themselves if we didn't do the work.
Speaker 1:And so I think God can use any tool and we've got to use it responsibly. But I'm a proponent, at least in these early days as I've been exploring.
Speaker 2:Yeah, explore it, explore it, play with it. I mean I feel like that's kind of the theme right, just go go experiments, play, ask it crazy things, learn how to prompt it and see what it can do. And then try to take some practical examples. I mean a real easy one is writing your newsletter. Have it help you write your newsletter. Nobody's, you're not writing a sermon, so you don't have to worry. Help for that kind of stuff. I think it just makes sense. And then the whole sermon series idea that you kind of walk through. I mean I want to see the video because, like yeah, I will definitely send it to you.
Speaker 1:And actually I did two videos one where I basically had the AI do everything and then one where I took the materials, the images and things that it created. And then I did sort of my normal process because I wanted to show people that, like, you can use it to really just kind of do a lot of it for you, or you can use it as a tool where I probably brought 60% of what I would do to it to show people that you can use it in both ways. My hope is that most people would take it beyond just the what AI is producing to add their own stuff in there, but I did want to kind of show people what these tools could do. There's one other just quick thing I want to mention.
Speaker 1:There was an article recently released and I don't know if you saw this, but somewhere I forget where it was England or something someone produced an AI worship service where they had the AI preach a sermon and they gave it an avatar.
Speaker 2:I heard about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I don't think that's the right way to use AI. I don't think that we ought to be going to AI to seek our spiritual direction and those kinds of things. It doesn't have a soul, it's not Christian, you know. But I think it's fine to help us as we guide it or as we ask it to partner with us, but I don't think that AI ought to be preaching the sermon for you or trying to create these experiences or expressions of faith on its own.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I would agree with you wholeheartedly on that. It is just a robot, or maybe not even a robot, I'm not sure.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:It is just something digital thing on computers, not a human. So good point, Good point. Oh man, this has been awesome. I know we could keep chatting for a while on this. Well, in like 10 days I'll have you back because there'll be a bunch of new things that have happened and we'll talk about it.
Speaker 1:Whole different conversations.
Speaker 2:Totally different. No, we should do it again, maybe in a few months or something like that. I'd love to. Yeah, things are going. Where can folks go to check you out, learn more about what you're doing, if they want to get help from you? Where's the best place? Sure, sure.
Speaker 1:Well, if people want to reach out directly to me, they can find me at mail mail. Mail at midnightoilproductionscom. I'm at midnightoilproductionscom, although I'm in a redesign on my site, so don't look at the current one right now Midnight oil productions.
Speaker 2:I like it.
Speaker 1:Burn the night oil. That came from both the fact that I do lots of late hours, but then there's this parable of the bridesmaids that have to keep the lamps lit in order for the master's return. That's a parable, and that spoke to me when I was creating my company. If you want to go to midnightoilproductions I'm sorry, facebookcom forward, slash midnightoilproductions you can find me there as well. And I would be happy to connect.
Speaker 2:OK, thank you, Frank. Two quick questions before we wrap it up. What's a book that you just think everyone's got to read this book?
Speaker 1:Oh, man Gosh, I am one of my favorite books is Made to Stick. It's a little bit older, but Chip and Dan Heath it's a book that I think every pastor ought to connect with, because it'll help you create content that will last beyond Sunday and even beyond that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that. All right, last one. What's a podcast that you're listening to right now?
Speaker 1:Golly, you know I am. This is probably not supposed to be my answer, but my favorite podcast is Fly on the Wall, which is two guys from Saturday Night Live.
Speaker 2:Love it. No, that's actually what I want. I want people to share the random podcast that they actually like, that they really sincerely are listening to right now.
Speaker 1:Yes, it's Dana Carvey and David Spade and they tell all these fun stories about Saturday Night Probably not safe for work in some of the language and things, but I really enjoy that one. You know, I'm always a fan of Kerry Newhoff and all the stuff that he's doing and saying. I mean he's always great, but yeah, I mean there's just lots of stuff out there. And those are a couple that I would mention.
Speaker 2:Very cool man. Well, thanks for coming on the show that's been awesome.
Speaker 1:Hey, my pleasure Great to meet you and chat with you, and I would happily come back and chat again.
Speaker 2:We'll do it again and everyone else just you know look forward for episode number two. Thanks for joining us today. We'll see you next week on another episode. See you, man ONnaB.