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Welcome to the unSeminary podcast. This month we’re focusing on key “Unpredictions”—timeless truths that church leaders need to be focusing on in 2025 and beyond. In this episode, we’re learning from Kenny Jahng, founder of Big Click Syndicate and AI for Church Leaders, and Editor in Chief of Church Tech Today. We’re talking about how the world will be smaller.

What can churches do to better engage their online visitors and encourage people to take next steps with Jesus? How can technology, particularly AI, play a role in enhancing church communication and furthering the spread of the gospel? Tune in to learn how AI can be used to repurpose your sermons into content across multiple platforms and effectively reach wider audiences.

• A new tool for the gospel. // Church leaders need a theology of AI for the church in order to consider how it can best be used to advance the gospel. One of the core questions Kenny believes church leaders should weigh is if can God use digital tools for His glory. Just like Roman roads were “new technology” used by the early church to spread the gospel, we can use today’s technology to do the same. If you believe that God can use AI to serve the mission of the church, then it opens up a new sandbox to play in and offers endless possibilities.
• AI is perfect for translation. // Generative AI, the latest evolution in artificial intelligence, not only processes data but creates new content. This includes generating text, audio, video, and images—capabilities that can be used for church communication. This technology can replicate a pastor’s voice in different languages, providing a more authentic experience for audiences around the world without the need for constant re-recording. Global ministries and missionary organizations can also use AI to translate the Bible into heart languages to increase the spread of the gospel.
• Use AI to expand your reach. // We live in a YouTube world where the average video is viewed for about four minutes. Would someone get to anything meaningful, material, or significant in that first four minutes of your sermon before they abandon it? We now have tools that will identify the key points of our sermon videos and repurpose them into short pieces. AI can help churches engage their local communities by repurposing sermon content into bite-sized pieces for social media, blog posts and more. This approach allows churches to reach people who may not have time to watch a full sermon but can engage with shorter, more digestible content.
• Train staff and volunteers to use AI. // AI tools like Sermon Shots can automatically generate short-form shareable media, making it easier for churches to maintain an active online presence without overwhelming their staff. Encourage your team to brainstorm and implement new ideas for online engagement. Invest time and resources into exploring AI and other technologies that can enhance your communication strategies. Training volunteers to help with AI-driven tasks is also a way to activate more volunteers in your ministries.
• AI can help answer FAQs. // There are people who are watching your videos and have questions. AI excels at transforming sermons into FAQs, glossaries, discussion questions, and more to maximize your outreach and better serve your audience.
• Use AI to reach more people through your website. // Many people don’t think of the church website as being a place of ministry, but rather as a directional sign that tells visitors where to go. View your website as a platform to actually engage and influence people in their quest to learn about Jesus and a biblical worldview.
• Repurpose your sermon. // Kenny offers a website for church leaders at www.repurposeyoursermon.com which provides practical guidance on using AI to maximize the impact of sermon content. It takes your sermon and walks through a dozen different ways to create devotionals, sermon clips, quote images, and more.

Visit repurposeyoursermon.com to discover how to transform your sermons into multi-channel content and increase your reach. You can also find Kenny on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. Plus, don’t forget to download the unPredictions Team Playbook for this podcast episode.

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Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. Man, I am so glad that you are fired up and here to be here today. You’ve caught us in the middle of these Unprediction episodes where we’re looking at things that were true last year, are going to be true this year and are going to be true next year. I’ve got my friend Kenny Jahng on and today we’re talking about the fact that this year, the world will be smaller than it was last year as global connections grow, leveraging technology for communication and learning. It’s just going to continue to be critical in our mission. Churches, you and I should aim to develop global relationships and share their ministry more widely.

Rich Birch — If you do not know Kenny Jahng, what rock have you been living under? He’s a certified StoryBrand copywriter guide, the founder of Big Click Syndicate, a strategic marketing advisory firm that really helps Christian leaders build marketing engines that work. In addition, Kennedy well, I’ve made you a Kennedy. Kenny is the editor of chief of also of a Church Tech Today and is the founder of AI for Church Leaders. Plus he’s a friend of mine. Kenny, welcome to the show. So glad you’re here.

Kenny Jahng — You make me sound like a really busy person Rich.

Rich Birch — You are, what are you talking about? You’re so busy. I love it. Kenny is like, you know, I don’t know how many segments of trips you did last year, but you definitely did more than mine. We’re always on the plane, going places. Fill out the picture, kind of tell us a little bit more about Kenny. And then we’re going to jump into this conversation.

Kenny Jahng — Absolutely. I guess someone called me a ministry entrepreneur recently and I think ah that kind of fits the bill.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Kenny Jahng — I basically have been able to identify problems that I see that are solvable and a little bit arrogant enough to think that I can make a dent in that problem. And so um I’ve you know basically have a bunch of different ventures helping church leaders ah resource, whether through conferences or through um resources like ah courses or templates and workshops and books and stuff like that. So there’s all these things that I’m trying to do to basically empower the church leader to have much more impact wherever they are.

Rich Birch — Love it. Well, in my mind, one of the hats you wear is the Bishop of AI as a mutual friend has called you. You’re the guy that, now the good thing is like, you and I, we’ve known each other for whatever 15 plus years.

Kenny Jahng — Yeah.

Rich Birch — And you’re always the guy who I think of like, I wonder if there’s an app that does this, or I wonder if there’s a website that does this. Kenny is the guy who knows that. And that over the last couple of years, really since ChatGPT came out, has ah really blossomed into this incredible, you’re just an expert on this whole area of artificial intelligence. And so I want to leverage that today for this whole idea of communication. And okay, how how can we leverage these tools to kind of communicate better?

Rich Birch — I’m a firm believer, I’m pro-tech. Listen, I think when I look at the New Testament, um are you know the writers of the day, Paul used the technology of his day, which was the Roman roads and the Greek language to spread the message of Jesus. We want to be doing the same thing today. Challenge us. What should we be thinking about when you think of this idea of leveraging you know AI for communication, particularly with a global bent? Tell us what we should be thinking about these days.

Kenny Jahng — Yeah, AI is a tool. It’s not gonna necessarily come take you, your job away immediately. um You know, I like to say it’s taken my job, but to a whole nother level.

Rich Birch — Oh, I love it.

Kenny Jahng — And I think this is one of those things where um we need a theology of AI for the church. And I’m working on a book and some other resources around that. Because I’m trying to explore the questions that actually determine how do you get to a point of understanding how we should best use AI for the gospel?

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Kenny Jahng — And one of the core concepts or core ideas, I think, Rich, is this, if you look at the Toyota 5Ys, you know that process where you’re asking, why do you believe this? And then why do you believe that? And you get down to it five levels deep.

Kenny Jahng — I think the question that church leaders need to answer for themselves is, do you believe that there actually could be any divinity in the digital tools that we have in front of us today? Do you think God could use digital tools for His good and for His glory? And if the answer is no, then we must compartmentalize it, we must block it, we need to shut it down, etc. And for those that are um against AI um immediately, I would say then, let’s you know let’s call you out and say then, are you consistent?

Kenny Jahng — So are you using the internet? Are you using smartphones? Are you using GPS? Because if AI is evil and it’s not of of God, then so is all this other technology that we have that’s pervasive all over.

Kenny Jahng — And so that fundamental question is the first place, square one, we have to go, Rich. And then after that, um if you were able to say, yes, God could use it to redeem our world, we could use it to become um much more impactful heralds of the gospel…

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love it.

Kenny Jahng — …then it just opens up this play, you know, sandbox that we can play in. And it’s just an amazing world together.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love what The Economist said, the newspaper, they talked about, I love their definition of AI. They said, AI is the label we give advanced technologies when we don’t understand them. And ah eventually what will happen is once you start to understand their use, their functionality, we stop using that term. So like in a very real way, I still remember, this is years ago, 15 years ago, I remember auto-complete on Google search…

Kenny Jahng — Yes.

Rich Birch — …like where you would go and you would start typing and then it went And I remember my mind being blown away. I was like, oh my goodness. What is happening? Like what is this thing? This is ridiculous. That was a form of AI that literally is a forum of the very actually very close to what what ChatGPT is doing today. It’s it’s a taking information and extending it. But there’s a specific kind of AI, generative AI. Can you define that for us, maybe for church leaders that have heard that before? What does that mean, generative AI?

Kenny Jahng — Yeah, generative AI. So again, you’re right. AI has been around for decades in different forms. This latest flavor genre called generative AI hit the media by storm when ChatGPT was launched in November 22. And the difference between all the other stuff and this stuff is it is now able to actually create, generate, create new things. So the old AI, the stuff that we’ve known AI historically, um IBM Watson being able to play chess against the chess grandmasters. I think of it as like these this brainiac computer that the old AI just does computations, large amounts of massive data computations in the brain.

Kenny Jahng — Generative AI is to do that and then actually create new outputs. And so we are in a world, if you want to be a little bit nerdy, Rich, you’re hearing the term multimodal AI right now, which only means it can talk about text, audio, video, um images, both inputs and outputs. It’s able to converse across all of that now. And so this is the wild, wild west because AI is now creating brand new things. It’s actually generating new content.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love that. I saw a study recently that said 11% of American workers you a use AI on a daily or use AI on a daily basis, which I thought was amazing, 11%. 40% do on a weekly basis. This is clearly a trend that were you know is happening all around us.

Rich Birch — Let’s get kind of practical here. What would be a use case particularly on the communication side, maybe a tool that we could be thinking about and a way that our churches, either a way that maybe you’ve seen a church or you kind of wanna poke us towards, hey, we should be thinking about maybe using a tool like this this way.

Kenny Jahng — Yeah, there’s very um funds novel things that we could use AI for. There’s some practical productivity stuff. I think that if you’re talking future forward, um things that really do have a massive impact is translation. AI is perfect for translation.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Kenny Jahng — So one of the reasons why AI has taken the world by storm is because um it is relevant to every single language because it understands every single language.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Kenny Jahng — It’s relevant to every single industry because it’s pretty much read every single book under the sun, every single webpage out there.

Kenny Jahng — And so language is just one of those things that it’s completely conversant in and allows you to translate not just text, not just audio, but now video. You’re able to actually take a video, say, let’s say your sermon, um speaking in one language, it could translate it and clone your voice and clone your video of yourself and lip sync you to that new translated audio, even though you don’t speak that other language. And so once you start to see that technology in action, your creative mind just starts to expand of how you can use that in so many different practical applications.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love this. When this, when we first started to see this being used, there was like a real negative backlash against these kind of, what was that term that kept getting kicked around? There was like the, you know, what was it? Fake deep fakes, you know, like, oh, this is a deep fake or whatever.

Kenny Jahng — Yeah.

Rich Birch — And oh, that’s, this is going to take over the, you know, world and be super negative. But there are some positive use cases for translated video like this. What would be an example or two that you’ve seen? And then I’ve got a couple I can think of as well.

Kenny Jahng — Yeah, so um but I’ll give you two. One is I’ve worked with some organizations that are missionary organizations that are basically translating the Bible into the heart language of hundreds of other languages around the world, right? The gospel needs to actually reach um all the ends of the earth. Um, they’re doing that on video where there’s a person who’s actually speaking and they’ll, you know, is translating the video.

Kenny Jahng — But the problem with that methodology is in five, 10 years, my hairstyle, my clothes goes out of style. And so if you’re trying to reach unbelievers in a secular culture, um, that matters. And so they have to invest in rerecording reading the entire Bible in multiple languages over and over. You can just imagine the expense for that.

Rich Birch — Yeah, the complexity of that.

Kenny Jahng — Now with AI, you can completely do that um in an instance and update their clothes up that they look, etc. And then here’s the super thing that I think who can argue against this using AI for translation when you put that into countries where there’s security and sensitive issues when Christians are being persecuted. You don’t want to put a human being on camera.

Rich Birch — Right.

Kenny Jahng — Well now you can actually use the voice and cloning um and translation.

Rich Birch — Wow.

Kenny Jahng — But you know you basically keeps someone safe. ah So that’s the first case. The second case…

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s amazing. That’s powerful. I love that. I know we had our friends from The Chosen, ah the foundation that’s behind The Chosen, and they’re using AI in that exact case…

Kenny Jahng — Yes.

Rich Birch — …where they’re translating that. I think the most translated television show of all time is Baywatch, which believe it or not, it’s like 50, isn’t that funny? 50 some odd, you know, translations. But they’re aiming for like 120 translations. So like way more than the most.

Kenny Jahng — Wow.

Rich Birch — And they’re closing the gap using AI that they’re, you know, they’re, they’re taking, literally taking their raw video content, dumping it into generative AI, and then having it produce entire episodes of The Chosen in multiple languages ah for exactly the reason that you’re saying there. That’s that’s so cool.

Kenny Jahng — Yeah, I I think that’s powerful. And like for all the opponents of AI, I dare you to call me up and let’s have a discussion about that. How can you argue against using AI for that type of use?

Rich Birch — Yes. Right.

Kenny Jahng — The other one is every or most churches have some sort of ministry for missions, oversee missions.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Kenny Jahng — And so, for example, my church, um you know, has a long-standing over a decade, I think, relationship with a ministry locally in Guatemala. My previous church had one in Dominican Republic. Imagine, um as you build the relationships over the years, and they know the pastor, and they have this relationship, imagine now um instead of having translation issues or having to have a translator present whenever you’re there, that you can actually translate your sermons into their native tongue and then send those videos.

Rich Birch — Amazing.

Kenny Jahng — And now you’re able to actually start to disciples of them in a much more meaningful way than just a periodic trip once, twice a year, um that you can actually send them materials and resources that are translated that completely um is able to be received very well by the people overseas. So um I think that’s just another um interesting way that translation could work in our favor and takes very, very little time, very low cost, and it’s accessible to every single church that’s listening here today.

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s crazy like that, ah you know, that’s and that’s a great example, great use case and relatively simple to do. um We were talking beforehand, you know, I used a tool called Hey Gen, which I think you put me on to probably. I’ll credit you if you didn’t anyways. Which is, ah you know, the ah ah low cost, does exactly what we’re talking about here. And I’ve done it where I’ve made, I made a video, I don’t know, six months ago and posted it on Instagram where I translated myself into multiple languages. And it’s fun to hear yourself speak Russian and, you know, whatever, you know, Cantonese and different languages. ah But I did the reverse. I took ah a speaker, a French speaker and translated into English because I wanted to hear what does that sound like?

Kenny Jahng — Yeah.

Rich Birch — And I was blown away with how good the translation was. Like It was like, oh, wow. Like it it the accent was great. It was easy to understand. Man, that opens up all kinds of opportunities. And I think there’s something about when we know that it’s happening, I’m willing to adopt that technology like as a viewer. Like if I know if I’m not if someone’s not trying to trick me and they’re you know in this case the case you’ve just given like hey you know this pastor, you know they don’t speak Spanish or you know whatever language you’re speaking in the you know the location. But we’ve got another way to try to make it accessible to you. I think there’ll be high levels of adoption there.

Kenny Jahng — Yeah, absolutely. And if you look at the demographic trends in all the major metro areas and even the smaller ones in this country, you are seeing that um many, many communities, most communities are turning much more multi-ethnic, multi-lingual.

Rich Birch — Oh, a hundred percent. Yes.

Kenny Jahng — And so um I think it’s going to be an even more pressing need. If your church is serious about reaching your own zip code, you’re going to need to start to think about the populations that don’t that are not native English speakers, at least here in America.

Rich Birch — Yeah. A hundred percent.

Kenny Jahng — And how do you serve them? How do you bring them in? How do you actually present the gospel to them in a way that is much more receptive um so that you can get more decisions for Christ and baptisms and all all the other things that we are trying to do in our call and ministry.

Rich Birch — Yeah, absolutely. And we’ve done that for years with human translators. This scales that up faster. And I would argue in a more compelling manner, like it’s compelling to watch this content. um you know it doesn’t the lip sync is better, you know all that stuff. They’ve solved some of the technical problems with you know with this kind of translation. I literally was talking to a church leader last week that was asking this exact question. They’re saying, hmm, I wonder if we should be thinking about Portuguese, French… um and I can’t remember what the third language was, you know, launching some sort of experience that translates that isn’t trying to hide the fact that it’s an English speaker, but it’s translating this. That’s that’s great. What other ways? So go ahead.

Kenny Jahng — So here’s here’s the translation tool I want, Rich. It’s the English to English tool. And I wanted to take my message. So it’s going to take my message, whatever I i give as a presentation or talk, and then it’s going to transcribe the ChatGPT. And then ChatGPT is going to make it much more logical, much more clear, much more compelling, and then make me say it in the video. So that’s a better version of me. How about that?

Rich Birch — Yes, a snappier version. Take put the look put the the Tim Lucas filter on. How do I say this? I’d have to say it louder. You know and and there and there’d have to be spaghetti or some sort of prop every time.

Kenny Jahng — Yes.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great. I love that. That’s that’s so good. Well what about so I love this idea. Even when you got me thinking there when you said that too was you know, international partners, you know, all struggle in another language. You know, I might only know five words in Spanish, but like I have a relationship with these people. We’ve been you know there are a bunch of times. And like and when we’re when we’re on site, all struggle through and we’ll like all use Google Translate…

Kenny Jahng — Yeah.

Rich Birch — …and like try to have a conversation. It’s wooden. But it does feel like there’s some sort of relationship there. Another thing we could do is like when we’re on, you know, yeah oftentimes those in those environments, they’ll like want to shoot a video to say something back to the church instead of like putting, you know, subtitles on that, we could take that video and very low cost, like, you know, less than the definitely less than the cost of the, you know, a coffee at the airport. We could translate that and show that to the people at our church back home. Man, that would be powerful, a powerful way to use that kind of technology. I love that. So good.

Kenny Jahng — Yeah, and i’m I’m looking waiting for the future, right? We we talk about innovation right now in dog years, right? And in given 365 days a year…

Rich Birch — Oh, that’s good.

Kenny Jahng — …we’re seeing seven leap frogs in the innovation right now. And um just like I don’t know if you know, there’s a Google Translate app where you can hold it up as ah your camera and it will translate in real time signs that you see in other languages.

Rich Birch — Yes, yes.

Kenny Jahng — I’m for sure that that’s going to be with video translation, that I’m going to be able to hold up a camera to you speaking and it will actually change your voice, not just subtitle you…

Rich Birch — Sure.

Kenny Jahng — …but that’s the future. And so I think it’s it’s bright for us, especially for talking about translation as a use case.

Rich Birch — Dude, I literally used that app last week. I was in Quebec, French speaking and, you know, predominantly French speaking. And we literally were walking around like using it on signs, using it on our, you know, menus at restaurants. It’s wild. Like I’m like this, I’m living in the future. It’s incredible. It’s incredible. I’d seen it advertised, but never used it before. And it’s free somehow.

Kenny Jahng — It’s a great time to be alive.

Rich Birch — Crazy. It’s crazy. I’m like, how does this happen? And it doesn’t cost me anything.

Kenny Jahng — yes

Rich Birch — I don’t have any perception of how it’s costing me is probably a better way to say that. What about are there any other uses, maybe close to home? I love that global, but are there ways that we should be thinking about this year using generative AI to help us reach people in our neighborhoods, around the corner, that sort of thing?

Kenny Jahng — Yeah, I mean, how many days do you have? Can we start the list alphabetically? I mean, there’s so many ways that we should be using AI to reach more people. I will say this, every single church has a website, I hope, and every single church has a sermon archive on there. And I think the problem right now is that we live in a YouTube world, right, where the average view of a video is four minutes or so.

Kenny Jahng — um If I actually pulled up your website, anybody who’s listening today, we go to any given sermon page and hit play and then start the YouTube countdown clock before someone abandons a video of you, four minutes. Would they get to anything meaningful, material, significant, memorable…

Rich Birch — Oh, dude. Come on. Come on.

Kenny Jahng — …in that first four minutes before they abandon your website page?

Rich Birch — Dude, that is, you know, that’s a great way to think about this. You know, stop complaining about the fact that we have low, you know, memory and like we all that stuff.

Kenny Jahng — Yeah.

Rich Birch — Let’s think about the practical use case. Like that’s a great example. So many people, they’re just warming up in the first four minutes. They’re not getting to it.

Kenny Jahng — Yes, exactly.

Rich Birch — So so what do we what can we do? How how do we how do we live in a in, like you say, in a YouTube world ah where that’s yeah people’s primary orientation or even more so like you know TikTok, Snap, all that.

Kenny Jahng — So I mean we we live in a short form video world.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Kenny Jahng — And so this is where AI, it used to be you have to the reason why no one does it in the past 5, 10 years is because you need to hire a video editor. Someone needs to literally sit through your entire sermon, transcribe it, read it, highlight, pull out the clips, um you know edit it. It it’s it’s tedious. It’s laborious and it’s expensive.

Kenny Jahng — And now you’ve got ah tools like Sermon Shots that basically you upload your video or just put in your YouTube link, and it will automatically identify the hotspots, the the the key points of your sermon, automatically clip them, resize them to whether you want vertical video, square video, horizontal, and then it will repurpose them into short form pieces. You should post that. Now you should post it on social, you should send an email, but you should also put it on your sermon page.

Kenny Jahng — There’s all these other types of forms of content that you should actually be reformulating your long-form sermon into and putting it on your sermon page. I think for me, there’s over 10 different types of short-form content that should be on a given sermon page and AI is here to help. And it costs pennies, and it also takes like um um less time than you would ever think. And so um and here’s the other kicker, Rich. You and I are always nerding out on this. How can we activate more volunteers in our ministry?

Rich Birch — Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Kenny Jahng — And that’s a perfect volunteer role. That’s something that can be done asynchronously, off-site. They don’t need to drive to the church. And it’s something that there’s someone in your church that is has got an hour a week to actually start to do some of these things for your sermons. And the and the the ROI is limitless, right? Because once you put the stuff on the internet, it actually has traction. So anyway, repurposing your content.

Rich Birch — Let’s slow down on this, repurpose your sermon, I love it. So you said 10, that caught my attention. I’m like, oh my goodness, 10. I love the idea of taking the, obviously we’ve got the general sermon, lots of people write discussion notes. So that’s two, I get a couple of clips that, like what would be some of those other 10 that I should be thinking about?

Kenny Jahng — Yeah, so one is FAQs. So there are people who are watching your video, and there’s questions. So this is this from me. For me, it’s from my history as a Church Online pastor, right? So what’s the difference between in-person church and Church Online? There’s a couple of things. Church Online is not always um a degraded version of in-person services. And here’s the one place where I think Church Online shines that’s better than in-person. And that is, in in-person church, the pastor is upset when people chat during their sermon. When people are talking and murmuring and asking questions with each other and chatting with each other, people get upset. If you talk to any church online pastor, we get upset when no one’s talking during the sermon.

Rich Birch — That’s good. That’s good. I love it.

Kenny Jahng — Right?

Rich Birch — Yes, true.

Kenny Jahng — And what what actually comes up in the chat, the live chat is there is people are asking questions. They’re asking basic questions…

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.

Kenny Jahng — …like, why are we taking snack in the middle of the sermon, bread and juice, and what what’s going on here? Like people have never been to church are asking these questions. Like, what is this Christianity’s jargon? and So all these things come up. So asking FAQs about the topic is a great thing that AI is perfect for doing that.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Kenny Jahng — And then related to that, I’ll just give one more. What about a glossary?

Rich Birch — Oh, I love that.

Kenny Jahng — Why don’t you take out all the jargon and Christianese terms and then just put those definitions there on the sermon page so that someone who’s not…

Rich Birch — Dude, that’s great.

Kenny Jahng — …a believer, that doesn’t have that didn’t grow up in Sunday school actually wants to know about these terms. Don’t make them look it up, put them right there. So those are just two additional easy things that you can do with AI that can be done in an instant with a transcript that takes you no time, but it will serve the viewer someone who comes to your site, oh, tremendously, right? You can imagine that…

Rich Birch — Oh, I love that.

Kenny Jahng — …how how how helpful that is.

Rich Birch — Well, and I love the glossary idea. That’s like close to home because that man, I’m I’m passionate about how do we help unchurched people. And we often trip and this is one of those things I found that but ChatGPT particularly is so good at is helping us think differently than ourselves.

Rich Birch — And so I could see take your transcript, drop literally get the text file, drop it into ChatGPT and just say, thinking like a person who doesn’t who who doesn’t normally attend church, pull out at least a dozen ah phrases or words that ah that they would not understand, define those in a way that, you know, whatever, aligns with evangelical thought and, ah you know, generate that term.

Rich Birch — Or and you could also say, like, you know, reference a ah code time code in the message if you’ve got time codes in your thing. And literally that, you you know, you copy and paste that, do that every week. It takes, well, it takes a lot it takes way shorter to do than we just talked about it.

Kenny Jahng — Yeah.

Rich Birch — Like, it’s like 15 seconds every week to do that and goes out of our way to, you know, hey, make it easier for people who don’t attend church on a regular basis. Love that.

Kenny Jahng — Absolutely. Absolutely. So, like, shouldn’t we merchandise the page, as we say in in business?

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Kenny Jahng — Shouldn’t we dress up the sermon page with not just that long-form content, but ways to engage it in short-form ways in different angles? Because some people might be more attuned to enter from the angle of text. So maybe it’s a summary. Maybe it’s um doing discussion questions. Maybe it’s pulling out the Bible verses and having some commentaries about those. There’s so many different ways to engage the same topic. The point of your sermon archive page should not be for them to actually play the whole video. The whole point is to engage them so they ask more questions and they take whatever their next step is…

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Kenny Jahng — …in their relationship with Jesus Christ to take that one little step further. And I think this is the this is the opportunity that the church has today, especially with AI here to support us.

Rich Birch — Well, and I love that because it what it’s, it’s looking at people and the like, in this case, people that come to our website or people that come to our church and saying, Hey, people are going to engage at different levels. Like there are going to be people that are just going to watch your four quote things that are fun to watch.

Kenny Jahng — Yes.

Rich Birch — There are, and then there’s going to be people that are going to want to look at the glossary. People might read your notes. People might write, read the thousand word, you know, article on what you’re talking about. And then some people might be so intrigued by all of that that they’ll sit and watch the 45 minute message. But we start with just the 45 minute message. Why is that? Why do we, it’s like our bias is towards you got to watch this whole thing as opposed to, you know, serving them. Why, why do we do that?

Kenny Jahng — Well, I don’t think people at this point in the church, the staff look at the website as the place of ministry.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Kenny Jahng — So it’s not, you you get them to the website, but the website is just a pointer, a directional sign. It’s a map in the whole building of where you’re supposed to go. And the only place you’re supposed to go from the website is to the church building, right?

Rich Birch — Right.

Kenny Jahng — And so I like, it and it’s almost, I say it’s almost like a bait and switch. You’re just trying to get them to the website. So they get them into, I say a timeshare presentation inside your sanctuary.

Rich Birch — Oh!

Kenny Jahng — Let’s close the door, lock the door for 90 minutes. And then promise them what ah a mug or a t-shirt at the end of it instead of a tickets to a show.

Rich Birch — Oh, dude.

Kenny Jahng — But like backing up to be serious a little bit, Rich.

Rich Birch — That’s true.

Kenny Jahng — That you’re not looking at the website…

Rich Birch — Right.

Kenny Jahng — …as the place to actually engage and influence people in their quest to learn about Jesus and the biblical worldview that you have to offer.

Rich Birch — Love it. Well, friends, the thing I love about this is, and what you’re pushing us here on, you know, repurposing our, you know, our sermons is like for years, I’ve had this, and you and I’ve had this back and forth about Church Online for, I don’t know, more than a decade…

Kenny Jahng — Yes.

Rich Birch — …where I’m like, I love Church Online. I’m a pro Church Online guy. Some people are going to say I’m not by what I’m about to say. But I’m like, the form of what we do, most of what we do, doesn’t fit or the what the the product that we do doesn’t fit the form. The 45-minute, hour-long thing, it does that doesn’t feel like the internet to me. That feels like something else. But this idea of breaking it up into all these different bits and pieces This feels a lot more, I’ve written about this. I’m like, I think the best church online out there is the IF gathering people, because they figured out how to do it in a whole bunch of different ways, small groups.

Kenny Jahng — Yes.

Rich Birch — And mean sure, they’re doing in-person, they’re doing you know the kind of you know synchronous event online, all of that. But this makes it much more approachable for an average church. I’m a church of 500 people, I could do this. I could find a small team, an AI team, a digerati, who would say, all we’ll do this every week. And um you know the take a couple hours a week and generate or not even take an hour a week and generate all kinds of great stuff.

Rich Birch — So I want to make sure people check out repurposeyoursermon.com.

Kenny Jahng — Yeah.

Rich Birch — This is a resource you’ve put together. Friends, I am unabashed. Like I want you to check this out. What you should do right now is stop this episode and go to repurposeyoursermon.com and engage there. But tell us about that. For the people that didn’t do that, ah tell us what is repurposeyoursermon.com.

Kenny Jahng — Yeah, so we’ve built a community of thousands of church leaders on Facebook. There’s a group called AI for Church Leaders that you can join. And what we’re hearing from our community is they want practical ways of using AI.

Rich Birch — Right.

Kenny Jahng — And so the sermon is the one of the most popular things like we know that we have opportunities to actually do something with a sermon, but we just don’t know what. And so that’s why we built this resource. So it takes your sermon and we we walk through, um I think, a dozen different ways to take your long-form content and create discussion guides, sermon clips, um your the the quote images, devotionals, um summaries, blog articles. There’s all these ways that I think you should do it.

Kenny Jahng — And then we’ve actually mocked up a sample sermon page, right? SoI’ve I’ve gone on this rant with you today and I say, look, this is what you should be doing. So my worldview, I think my point of view is like there’s a sample sermon page outline that we’ve actually built and you can download and look at it and use as inspiration and then learn how to create every single one of those things.

Rich Birch — Love it. Love it.

Kenny Jahng — And so It’s a practical thing. I think every church could benefit from it. If you don’t follow it, the whole point is at least it will start a discussion internally with your teams and say, hey, maybe there’s one, two, or three good ideas that we can start to figure out how to repurpose our sermon for greater impact. And really the original reason why you are preaching the sermon. And I think this is, again, the caveat, Rich, I think here is many pastors forget that the number of people that might listen to the sermon that they’ve invested 5, 10, 15, 20 hours in, is not limited to the people in the room.

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s so true.

Kenny Jahng — The people that actually end up benefiting from that gospel message could be 10x, 100x, 1000x the number of people in your actual room.

Rich Birch — Yep. 100%.

Kenny Jahng — So why don’t we bless as many people as possible with the sermon that you’ve been called to preach?

Rich Birch — Love it.

Kenny Jahng — And so this is one of those, a drop in the bucket to help you you know get to that goal.

Rich Birch — Love it. So yeah, that’s repurposeyoursermon.com. I would love for you folks that are listening in to drop by there to check it out. I love that you’ve made this so practical, this templated page that says, hey, here’s what that should look like.

Kenny Jahng — Yeah.

Rich Birch — And and friends, the reason why we’re talking about this and during this Unprediction series of of interviews is because you know, a year ago, you were thinking, I should be thinking about something with AI and communication. And you’re still thinking that now. And we’ve been talking about it for 31 minutes and you haven’t done anything about it. And unless you take action now, a year from now, you’ll be thinking the same thing and you’re going to be behind on reaching your community. So I want you to double down and invest in this area, like all the areas we’re talking about this month. But this is a really important one that I want you to, you know, spend some time, focus, find some volunteers to pick up this ball and run with it.

Rich Birch — Well, Kenny, you are a gift to me. You’re a gift to the broader community. I’m so thankful that you are here today. As we wrap up today’s episode, anything kind of final thing you’d love to say as we wrap up today’s conversation?

Kenny Jahng — I just want to say it’s ah it’s a word of encouragement. We have so much available to us today um in the technologies, not just AI, in so many things that we have available to us. And I think we just need to lean into that growth mindset…

Rich Birch — So good.

Kenny Jahng — …and let God order our steps in front of us. If we just have the willingness, open heart to do that, um great things can happen for ministries all over the place.

Rich Birch — Love it. So repurposeyoursermon.com is where we send people to. If people want to follow you on socials or anywhere else, where do we want to send them for that?

Kenny Jahng — um You know, I’m pretty easy to find. as Someone said they couldn’t find me recently. I was like, I dispute that. If you Google my name, Kenny Jahng…

Rich Birch — I would agree. Oh my goodness. That’s hilarious.

Kenny Jahng — I’m available on most of the I’m i’m available on the the new kid on the block, TikTok. So if you want to look at some of the my viral videos there, I’m available on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, wherever you want.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Kenny Jahng — So I love engaging with church leaders everywhere, invite you to have a conversation. And I want to, more importantly, I want to learn from everybody, right? we got We have to learn together. And so just hearing what’s working for you in your neck of the woods is a blessing to me. And so I just invite you that conversation.

Rich Birch — Thanks, Kenny, really appreciate you being here today.