podcaststrategy

How to Leverage AI for Your Church & Your Future with Kenny Jahng

Welcome back to the unSeminary podcast. Today’s podcast is the second of a two-part series (you can listen to part one of the podcast here) with Kenny Jahng, an expert when it comes to using AI in the church, and the founder of Big Click Syndicate.

In today’s episode we’re delving into the implications of AI, the fears surrounding it, and how it can be harnessed to help you in ministry.

  • Using AI. // AI has been with us for a long time, used in places such as Google auto-complete, Amazon, and Netflix recommendations. It’s recently gained attention with the emergence of generative AI which works with people to create new things instead of just analyzing and manipulating existing things.
  • Getting past FOLO. // Because it’s so pervasive in terms of its potential application, there are many questions and issues that using artificial intelligence brings up. Most notably there is a fear of looming obsolescence (FOLO) and that it will take over jobs. So in ministry there is the question of what is our responsibility to our staff in terms needing to up-skill or re-skill them to protect their jobs in a way to make them sustainable.
  • Depending too much on technology? // Another concern that comes up is overdependence on technology and its impact on problem-solving abilities and mental health. Are we really putting meaning into what we do, or depending too much on the technology to get it done? What are humans’ purpose in life if AI machines can do everything for us better than we can? Lastly, there are moral and ethical implications of AI and the potential for misuse.
  • Multi-modal in communication. // In spite of these questions and concerns, churches and ministries can learn to leverage AI technology effectively. There are four general buckets to think about where AI can help in your ministry. The first is communications. It may be better emails, social media, newsletters, bulletin inserts, and so on. AI is now multi-modal and does video generation, image generation, and audio generation, so anything having to do with communications is an easy place to envision AI helping.
  • Research, analyze, organize, produce, and improve. // The second part to think about is research. AI can help you brainstorm, come up with topic suggestions, summarize contents, or gather information. The third bucket is analyzing and organizing information. AI is great with taking unstructured data, extracting the core concepts, and organizing it all. The last area is improvement. Because AI understands best practices and pattern recognition, it can help you produce and improve something like discussion questions. Or it can reframe content you’ve created so that it resonates better with different audiences.
  • Train it so it can learn. // Kenny suggests we think of AI as a seminary student intern rather than a push-button solution. It’s intelligent and has a heart to serve, but won’t get things right all the time. Through conversation and redirection, you can train it so that it can learn.
  • Don’t fall behind. // While AI is still in the early adopter phase, it is becoming increasingly pervasive and relevant in various industries, and it can revolutionize ministry too. It’s up to us as the church to not be left behind. The future of AI will accelerate and will provide opportunities for those who adopt, but drag those who don’t.
  • Experiment with free tools. // Try out AI through free tools such as ChatGPT or Claude.ai. Copy and paste something you’ve written and ask it what you’re trying to get across and how it would improve it. Kenny also offers the AI for Church Leaders platform and FaceBook group, which offers learning resources, training, and workshops for church leaders interested in leveraging AI for ministry.

You can learn more about using AI in your church through the resources at www.aiforchurchleaders.com. You can also join them on FaceBook to see how people at other churches are using AI in their ministries.

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Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Hey, friends welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in. This is the second part of a 2 part mega mega episode. We’re talking to Kenny twice in one month which is so good. If you missed our first episode, you need to go back and listen to that. If you’re trying to understand who Kenny is, he’s a good friend, ah, he is one of the smartest people I know, and he is a real expert on particularly artificial intelligence as it comes to the church. Um, and you know he’s a communications expert. He’s got lots to offer. But today we want to focus particularly on artificial intelligence and what what should we thinking about, how should how should that fit into our our our mix. But why don’t we start, Kenny, with AI – kind of help us at a high level. Let’s kind of define some terms. What do we mean by AI? What is that? You know when when we hear that word out there, what does that look like? What is what are some of those kind of at a high level? And then we’ll dig into what what it means to us as a church.

Kenny Jahng — Yeah, absolutely. So AI has been the I feel like the media darling of the year.

Rich Birch — Oh absolutely.

Kenny Jahng — Everybody’s talking about it. Um, it came onto the scene at mass media in November of this past year because this thing called ChatGPT came out from a company called Open AI. Now we need to, you know, reverse ah the the screen a little bit because um, AI has been with us for a long time. AI is baked in everywhere. Whether you use um basic GPS is AI driven…

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Kenny Jahng — …or Google auto complete, or your Netflix recommendation queue or um, everything that pops up on Amazon. I mean there’s so many places that AI is used on a daily basis that we already know and accept. Um and now there’s this thing called generative AI, this version of generative AI that’s come out. And I think the reason why it’s different um, it feels different or has captured the creative imagination of the general public is it is basically, if you think of it from like a Cliff Notes point of view, um, it’s this machine learning, right? Like all the brainiac things that we associate with algorithms and computers and predictions and all that, you know, crunching data, the machine learning AI, on top of that is layered this thing called natural language processing, right? So these are um, you know, new technology techniques that help computers understand interpret and then generate the results in human language.

Kenny Jahng — So you don’t need to understand how to, you know, have you know nerdy glasses and a computer, and a lab code, and be a scientist to figure out how to actually interact with the AI. Now it’s accessible to you, me, and everybody else. And I think that’s one of the reasons why. And because generative AI creates new things instead of just analyzing and manipulating ah existing things um, and it has all started in a text basis, anything that is in the realm of text and language, which is pretty much anything and everything…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Kenny Jahng — …that’s why it’s applicable to every single industry every single niche…

Rich Birch — Right.

Kenny Jahng — …every single level of seniority in an organization, whether you’re entry level or all the way up to the head boss, um, it’s applicable to everybody. And I think that’s why it’s taken the world by storm in the last year or so.

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s amazing. I love ah The Economist, read that pretty regularly, and they had an article about six months ago that made a really good point about AI and that stuck with me. They said we stopped calling it AI once it becomes a normative part of our lives. And so all those things you talked about, GPS, you know even I remember I remember Google autocomplete when it first came out there in like 2010. And I remember being blown away by that. I’m like this is unbelievable. Like it is guessing my next words and getting it right. But but we just take that for granted now now that’s like baked into, like I would be so annoyed if my phone didn’t do that, right? If I didn’t, you know, when you’re typing it’s like I got to type a whole sentence out? Come on. This is I don’t want to do that. Ah, pretty amazing.

Rich Birch — Now when we think about AI, what I’d love to do is kind of break this conversation into two parts. One um, you know, what is the impact that AI is having on our people? You know what kind of pastorally what should we be thinking about? And then the second part, how could we leverage this for you know, really what we do as a church, as we think about this? You know, I would think everybody who is in a knowledge working role of any kind, or maybe just a role in general is thinking about AI. We hear this all the time in the press. Like hey it’s it’s impacting it’s ah, part of the writers strike, you know, out in the west coast. And you know you know there’s lots of people are thinking about it. What how should we pastorally be thinking about AI? Kind of what is what is our, you know, the heart of of a pastoral leader?What should we be wrestling with when we think about AI and its impact on our people?

Kenny Jahng — Um, there are, again, because it’s so pervasive in terms of its potential application, I think there’s so many questions and issues that AI brings up, especially from a pastor’s point of view.

Rich Birch — Right.

Kenny Jahng — So I think you know number one is the thing that is driven by fear, right? I like to say there’s a lot of folo in our life. Fomo used to be the word of the year for you know a couple years ago…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Kenny Jahng — …for social media. Now the word of the year is folo – fear of looming obsolescence, right?

Rich Birch — Oooh wow.

Kenny Jahng — So we all know the storylines in Hollywood and and and what AI is it’s it’s the terminator. It’s, you know, it’s going to take over the world. And on a real practical basis there’s a lot of fear right now that it’s going to take over people’s jobs. And so job displacement I think is a real concern to our people, um, both our own staff as well as the people in our congregations about their own livelihoods. And so I think there’s a lot of questions there of what is the responsibility of a ministry versus a Wall Street company, right? A Wall Street company will just cut because it’s all transactional. Um, but we look at our own staff and people as humans, and it’s very different than just a bottom line P and L statement. So is is there a responsibility to up-skill them, re-skill, um to protect their jobs in a way that makes it sustainable? So there’s all these questions there. I think that’s one of those big issues.

Kenny Jahng — I think another one is um, psychological concerns, dependent overdependence on technology. Um, there is um, is it the movie WALL-E? What was the movie where um, it depict the animated movie that depicted our society where we just become lazy butts…

Rich Birch — Yes [laughs].

Kenny Jahng — …and just watching TV…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Kenny Jahng — …24/7 with [inaudible] the air…

Rich Birch — Yes, yes.

Kenny Jahng — …and just sipping you know, sugar field sodas all day and um.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Kenny Jahng — So right there’s there’s this sense of over-reliance on technology and AI specifically can you know basically plummet our own problem solving abilities, cognitive skills. And you know and then that leads to our own identity and self worth if you’re not actually doing stuff and and creating meaning and you’re just relying on everything, you’re just coasting along. What does that mean for that and mental health? I think that’s an issue.

Kenny Jahng — Um I think there’s spiritual concerns. Um, you know, what what does that mean, um, you know, in terms of our purpose as humanity in life? Do we actually have purpose beyond that? If if AI and the machines can do anything and everything we’re supposed to do better, right? Everything from um, tending the garden, right? Like um I just saw a ah video of an AI robot that can literally go in and clean restrooms um much more efficiently and much more spotless than a human being. Um you know, and so and then there’s morality and ethics and there’s all these things that I think come into play there.

Kenny Jahng — Um, and then I think there’s, you know, there’s other concerns that we have in terms of bad actors in our society being able to take this and the sinful nature of it and how that temptation…

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Kenny Jahng — …will creep into almost every aspect of our life. It’s simple things where um if you’re able to employ AI to do the stuff of your work, um, do you take credit for it, or is there attribution? And you take all the shortcuts um and just submit it as is where you really know that it’s not your best work? Um, that there probably needs to be some you know human oversight or human interaction with the content that you produce, etc. So those are some of the issues. I think there’s plenty plenty more that we can nerd out on if we want to.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s interesting that the bad actors one is it is a fascinating thing to think about. Because I think you know I generally we have been I’ve been a fairly pro-tech person. Like I’m like I think technology on balance has helped humanity. I think…

Kenny Jahng — Yeah.

Rich Birch — …you know, the last thirty years of development has been um, you know it’s that whole thing, right? It raised people out of poverty. You know, it has it has helped in a ton of ways. But there are bad actors out there who will leverage technology and will leverage this round of technology. And I think there’s a creeping sense of, man, like maybe it wasn’t ah, great idea to hand social media to ah, you know, kids and like the the negative impact that it’s had on them. You know, I have friends in their twenties who are ditching their iPhones and getting flip phones because they’re so frustrated with what’s happened with Instagram to them, and what it’s done to them. And that’s like and that’s not a few people. I know, you know, handfuls of people who are doing that and I you know can see that for sure.

Rich Birch — Well, let’s let’s pivot and and think now about what we should be thinking about on how do we leverage this technology? So I’m going to I’m going to leverage you as a consultant, a coach – I know this is the kind of thing you’re helping people all across the country think about this. And um, let’s say I’m a church I’m an executive pastor of a church maybe 1500, 2000. I’ve got a staff team of 15 or 20 people. And I’m thinking how can I leverage AI? What should I be thinking about today? Like like this quarter, you know, I know there’s there’s stuff coming in the future, but what should I be thinking about like even today around how we should leverage it? How should I be coaching my team to think about it?

Kenny Jahng — Yeah I think there’s four general buckets that you could think of in terms of where AI can actually help in your ministry workflows.

Rich Birch — Okay.

Kenny Jahng — One is because it’s all language-based at first it’s ah communications, whether it’s helping you write better emails, social media, newsletters, bulletin inserts—right?—ads. All anything to do with language communications I think is is a good one. Um, we are now seeing AI go um—here’s a nerdy word—multi-modal. And Multi-modal just means…

Rich Birch — Love it!

Kenny Jahng — …it just means different form factors, different way different outputs. So instead of just text um AI is now you’re going to see a lot more tools, you know, image generation, video generation, audio generation. And so anything that to do with communications is definitely an easy place that you can envision AI helping.

Kenny Jahng — Second one I think is actually a ah much bigger benefit and that’s research, whether it’s helping your brainstorm, summarize contents, come up with topic suggestions. Um, you know finding topics that you’re not um, fully versed on but you want to get up to speak quickly and you know get quick teachings on that topic.

Rich Birch — No, that’s great.

Kenny Jahng — Um, a third bucket is analyzing things and organizing thing. It’s great with data manipulation, taking unstructured data, make it structured, extracting core concepts, reorganizing things, even planning. Recently I just used AI to plan a project.

Kenny Jahng — Um and the last one I would say is just improvement. Because AI this generative AI thing that we have right now is basically trained on millions and millions of examples of content that is just consumed, it understands best practices, pattern recognition of all the best things out there. So it can help you improve things like content logic, the logic of your arguments. Um, it could actually help you take it and produce discussion questions and and clarify those questions so it aligns with what you’re trying to message. Um or reframe reframing the content that you have so that it actually um, resonates better with different segments or audiences. So those are I think four interesting ways that you can actually think of it. And at the end of the day I think here’s the one tip I I would say is, you should think of it as not a push button like one button push button candy machine and you know you push the button and out pops out a nice shiny wrapper that you just open up and consume as is.

Rich Birch — Yes, yes.

Kenny Jahng — You really need to think of it as a seminary student intern…

Rich Birch — Oh that’s good.

Kenny Jahng — …thinking that it’s it it’s pretty intelligent…

Rich Birch — Yep.

Kenny Jahng — …it’s open minded, it’s has a heart to serve but it doesn’t know everything. And as with an intern you’re going to assign it the task. It’s the comeback and it’s not going to get it right every single time. In fact, most of the times it won’t get it perfect. But through conversation and through redirection you are able to train it to go back and do it again and again and again. And here’s the difference versus a irl intern, in real life intern, and and an AI intern has a perfect attitude. No matter how much tasks you throw at it, it just says, thank you. My pleasure. How do I do more, right? And so this is a great way to think of it I think…

Rich Birch — Totally.

Kenny Jahng — …in terms of having a conversation, develop that relationship with the AI where it’s a seminary student intern in your office.

Rich Birch — Yeah that’s so good. I know I’ve had a couple really great interactions where I’m like oh my goodness this is so helpful. One of them was exactly we talk about unstructured data. We had a number of um, feedback on a thing we did. So it was like a forum we sent out to people and it was like give us your comments. And there’s there’s obviously the, you know, we had lots of like rate at 1 to 5, all that kind of stuff, but then there was open comments. And you know, this this can be somewhat unruly because it’s like what do we do with all this? So what what we did was literally took took all that, copied and pasted it it, dumped it into ChatGPT. It informs chatbot chip, very similar to what you’re saying, informed it like hey I’d like you to think like you are you know going to read through all this information and and try to draw out some insightful insights from this. And you know it it started to generate we asked at for statistical, what kind of things we was talking about. What, you know, what were the, you know, what were some of our learnings that we could pull out of it. Now we ultimately went back in and pulled out and tried to find um, you know, which was amazing. It was incredible. Super helpful, very quick. Um and was able to verify, and it was, you know, cut back—I don’t know—hours probably 8 hours of work it would have taken to do that. Um, and to be honest, what would have happened is we wouldn’t have done it. Like you know, we wouldn’t have actually looked at all that customer feedback, or in this case, you know this kind of guest feedback. We just wouldn’t have.

Rich Birch — Another one we did we have a program where very similar kind of thing um where we ask we we send kids to camp and um we provide financial resources for them. And a part of what we do is we give them like ah a form to fill out and we ask them to write, we don’t tell them, we asked them if they could write like a little descriptor of their story. So similarly I asked I asked ChatGPT to think like a fundraising expert and I said, here’s a whole bunch of stories from people. Can you pull out the five most salient stories that will motivate and then I gave a description of the donor that I was trying to communicate with. And, man, it pulled out these great stories and then we manipulated them and kind of, you know, massaged them to make them anonymous. It did all that work for us. Again, I could have done that work that would have taken a day, ended up took take maybe 90 minutes to do what would have taken a day. So I think there’s lots of stuff like that if we start to think creatively around how we can help.

Rich Birch — Now let me be the the devil’s advocate which is maybe the wrong thing to say as a church leader, but you know there’s something like 20%—I think you told me this—20% of churches don’t have a website. Like they… which is crazy to me. Ah so why should we be moving on to AI like is this is this as foundational as the web? Is this as important as, you know, as that at this point, or are we still kind of in the early adopter phase.

Kenny Jahng — Yeah, we are so we are definitely in the early adopter phase of this thing, much earlier than any other technology that’s been released to the public, right? So think about ChatGPT and all these chatbots. Um, it actually doesn’t work if you think about it, right? It it it hallucinates, basically gives you false facts. Um, it actually sends back wonky answers sometimes. It’s not something that Apple would release to the public as is.

Rich Birch — No, no.

Kenny Jahng — There’s a lot more development that would happen, right? Steve Jobs would kick it back to the engineers and say, you guys have to pull an all nighter and continue to work on this thing.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah.

Kenny Jahng — So we are at the very very beginning. And recently there was a survey I think only 17, 17% of um of adults in America have tried ChatGPT so it isn’t it it hasn’t hit in terms of mass usage.

Rich Birch — Which is a lot of people but not a lot of people, right?

Kenny Jahng — Yeah, it’s a lot of people, but not a lot. Um, so I think we are at the very beginning. But I do think that this is something that is definitely, again, It’s not VR goggles. It’s not Blockchain.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Kenny Jahng — We went through those new cycles of fads. And sure there’s definite definite really good use cases for each one of those. But to have this massive penetration across the entire landscape of society, I don’t know if those are ready yet. Um, but I do think that right now we we are in a position, and again you’re seeing it in the headlines, Fortune 1000 companies are adopting this today. If you don’t have something to say about AI to your stakeholders and shareholders in any corporation today, you’re behind. Um and I think that’s really a sentiment of what’s going on. This is here to stay and it’s going to become much more pervasive than we even think. And I do think, you know, I think you said it correctly, at some point it’s going to be normalized. So like all this fad news coverage is going to die down, but it is going to continue to be pervasive in its reach and I think it’s it’s up to us as the church not to be left behind. Because again this isn’t like, Oh you didn’t hop on the VR goggle train, you’re in trouble. No, it’s not like that. This is this is a lot more serious. Um, the future of AI is pervasive, it’s personalized, and it really is going to be something that is going to accelerate and provide opportunities for those that adopt. But it also is going to really drag the people that don’t in my opinion.

Rich Birch — Yeah I would totally agree. You and I are men of a certain age. We’ll we’ll say it that way. And I know for me, it feels very much like the early days of the web. Like I can distinctly remember like ’95, ’96 being like oh my goodness. Like this is a huge deal. Like the the idea of being able to organize the world’s information and have it at a click away, you know, when it still felt like you would click on something and you would go to like I’m in Germany now. You felt like you were you know on some server somewhere in, you know, ah some other part of the world. Um, when you look back at what the internet was at that point, it was wonky it was it didn’t work. It was broken. There was no good way to access the information. There was no centralized way to it was an organized well um, but man it made a huge difference. I personally I would I totally agree with you that I think it’s in that this is at that same kind of level of of um…

Kenny Jahng — Yeah.

Rich Birch — …you know, of importance. I know sometimes, Kenny, because this is what I love about you as a friend, Kenny, you’re such a good early adopter on so many things, and like I remember you were like a Google glasses ah you know early adopter. And you were like, this is revolutionizing! And I’m like they’re goofy. This is they’re terrible. No one’s ever going to wear those. And what I don’t want people to do is to is to put this in that category because it’s not. It is this is not that kind of thing. Um, it’s ah it’s a massive deal that we need to be… You know, you don’t need to be thinking about it all day long, but it should occupy a small part of your brain and think how can I what how can I leverage that?

Kenny Jahng — Oh absolutely. Yeah.

Rich Birch — I think in the same ah, in the same way that church’s progressive growing churches that are making a difference would not operate without a database, you would never think like oh we wouldn’t have a church management system, the same is going to be true for AI. You’re going to have some sort of interface that’s going to help you engage with your people both from a communications and a connection point of view that’s going to be AI, you know, driven for sure. 100% that, you know, and I can say that without, you know, without you know any hesitation for sure. I think it can be hugely important.

Kenny Jahng — Yeah, and I think here’s the difference. Ah between this and other “technologies”: um AI isn’t just about tech.

Rich Birch — Right.

Kenny Jahng — It’s more about building a culture of learning and adaptability, right? It’s more about having a growth mindset and really asking that innovation question of how might we take the best of AI to apply to what our mission and objectives are and what we do in our work? You don’t have to be a techie to leverage AI; you just need to be a problem solver.

Rich Birch — Right.

Kenny Jahng — Right? And so again, if you go back to that seminary intern type of thing like if you had a team of robust interns to be able to do a lot of, you know, ah work for you at your disposal, what else could you get done in your ministry? And I think that’s a little bit of the sentiment that people have to have here.

Rich Birch — Totally true. That’s so good, dude. Well anything else, you’d like to say as we kind of round the corner here and and and close this bad boy down? Anything else you’d love to that we should be thinking about or wrestling with as we think about AI?

Kenny Jahng — Um, yeah, I just I just hope that everyone takes that first step of trying it out. There’s so many naysayers. Back in the day when I was a church online pastor, right?

Rich Birch — Yes, yes.

It’s it feels there’s it feels very similar where there are a lot of darts being thrown at you if you are an advocate for AI in the church.

Rich Birch — Sure.

Kenny Jahng — Um, and what’s interesting then and the interesting now is there are a lot of people that actually haven’t tried the actual thing that they are objecting to.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Kenny Jahng — And I would just say go out and try it and there’s a lot of free tools out there like ChatGPT there’s Claude.ai and I think you’ll be pretty amazed. I think a really small step that you could take is literally copy paste something that you’ve written. Maybe it’s an email to somebody or um, part of your sermon that you’ve written, or just some content. Take copy paste some content put it in there. And just ask it a couple of questions. Um, tell me what I’m trying would you share with me and summarize what I’m on trying to get across in this piece of communication, and how might I improve it to bring more clarity, more um, you know, compelling call to action? Um, how might I actually um make it more understandable? Just ask some basic questions and see what it comes back with, and have a conversation. They’re called conversational chat bots for a reason have a conversation about that thing you just copy pasted into. Just just one simple step. And I think that will give you a lot more understanding and hopefully inspiration in terms of how to actually potentially use this for more things that you might have thought it could be used for.

Rich Birch — So good. Well, Kenny, I really appreciate this. I we didn’t talk about this before he came on but I do want to send people to aiforchurchleaders.com. This is a was a conference an online conference that you put together. Tell me about this. Ah you know what this was amazing. What an incredible resource for people. I think this could be a great starting point for people who are listening in saying, hey, here I could kind of dive deep dive and kind of get up to speed quickly. Tell me what what is aiforchurchleaders.com?

Kenny Jahng — Yeah, so we, you’re right. We kicked it off with a um, a large event with thousands of church leaders. But it has turned into a ongoing learning platform. It’s a place to actually get regular learning, training, etc for you and your staff. So if you want to learn how to leverage area for a ministry, whether it’s specific tools like ChatGPT, or Jasper, or Midjourney or any of these geeky platforms that you’ve heard of um, there’s some really accessible training in there as well as advanced stuff. And then we have monthly workshops and webinars to do that. And I think one of the best sections inside AI for Church Leaders is section that deals with leadership topics regarding AI adoption. So if you’re really early on this AI adoption curve and you have some basic questions, that’s the that’s the place that I would start with inside that says you know as ah as a church leader should I trust AI? Um, you know is it something that I could use for my volunteers and my staff? Um, what are the ethics surrounded? What’s the future of it? You know what are some of the questions that a pastor should be asking? Things about AI policies, all those leadership topics is a great way to start. That’s not the nerdy, nerdy stuff um, that actually I think would be helpful for any church leader that’s listening in today.

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s so good. So again, friends, Kenny is ah a real expert in this area. He is, as we’ve been joking, the bishop of AI. He’s really on the forefront helping us understand and piecing this together. It’s a bit of the Wild West, but it’s going to make an impact on, you know, so many people so many, you know, ministries. It’s going to help us reach more people. I know there’s so many church leaders that are listening in or saying, listen I want to lead a kind of ministry that makes a difference, that sees more people get connected with Jesus and sees those people grow closer, and I do think that AI is going to help us do that. And you know I don’t think we should be afraid of it I don’t think it’s like oh it’s going to It’s the end of the world or whatever. Um, you know we know how the story ends and He still sits on the throne. And so let’s use all this technology. Let’s find a way to say, hey, we can use this to you know to to reach more people see them grow closer to Jesus.

So thanks so much, Kenny. Where else do we want to send people if they want to track with you online? Ah how else do we want people to connect with you ah, just as we wrap up this two-part episode. So good!

Kenny Jahng — Absolutely. I’m I’m available on socials if you Google me, it’s ah it’s not hard to find me. um the other invitation I would say is join our FaceBook group. We have a FaceBook group under the same name…

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Kenny Jahng — …AI for Church Leaders FaceBook group. Um, we’re growing rapidly. We crossed 4000 last month…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Kenny Jahng — …likely we’ll I think we’re going to reach 5000 members this month. And it’s just a it’s a hyperactive group. And it’s a place for people, again, people that have never even tried AI if you just want to lurk and listen and see what people other churches are doing, I think that’s one of the best places to learn about AI from ministry. Because in the news you hear about how AI is being used for lawyers, and manufacturing, etc. But here in that group you’ve literally got thousands of peers learning together.

Rich Birch — Right.

Kenny Jahng — And so the AI for Church Leaders FaceBook group I think is a great place as a next step.

Rich Birch — That’s great. Thanks for being here, Kenny. Appreciate you, appreciate your friendship, appreciate all the ways that you help so many people. Thanks for for being on the show today.

Kenny Jahng — Thanks, Rich.

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Rich Birch
Rich Birch is one of the early multi-site church pioneers in North America. He led the charge in helping The Meeting House in Toronto to become the leading multi-site church in Canada with over 5,000+ people in 18 locations. In addition, he served on the leadership team of Connexus Church in Ontario, a North Point Community Church Strategic Partner. He has also been a part of the lead team at Liquid Church - a 5 location multisite church serving the Manhattan facing suburbs of New Jersey. Liquid is known for it’s innovative approach to outreach and community impact. Rich is passionate about helping churches reach more people, more quickly through excellent execution.His latest book Church Growth Flywheel: 5 Practical Systems to Drive Growth at Your Church is an Amazon bestseller and is design to help your church reach more people in your community.