Church Production shares "What You Can Do Now to Get Ready for Christmas" (5-minute read), in which Nick Burt lists what to do before the season gets busy. Set expectations with family now and plan time off right after Christmas. Look back at past services to judge how many volunteers you need. Call vendors and rental houses early, since some gear is back-ordered into next year. Book freelancers early and ask their rates. Free to read.

Editor's note: The cheapest step on his list is a calendar entry: schedule a volunteer dinner or training night before the busy season starts. He also suggests servicing what you already own now, from projector lamps and haze fluid to the bulbs in your Christmas light strands.

Church Tech Today shares "Why Does Your Church Website Get Traffic but No New Connections?" (5-minute read), on visitors who leave without reaching out. Its fix is a second, smaller next step beside Plan a Visit: a free resource on a topic your church already talks about, traded for a first name and email. Send an automatic welcome email the moment someone signs up, have a staff member follow up, and test the form on a phone.

Editor's note: Start with its measure: each month, count new connections next to website traffic. The article recommends FrontDoor, a free tool co-founded by Church Tech Today writer Kenny Jahng, which also appeared in last week's issue. It notes the same setup can be built from a design tool and an email platform.

Churchfront shares "The Stream Deck Layout I Wish Every Church Had" (15-minute watch), touring a booth run from Elgato's Stream Deck button panels and the free Bitfocus Companion software. One page holds what a volunteer operator might touch on a Sunday: lighting cues, slides, cameras and switching. He built eight pages in two days with help from Claude, and says the hard question is what volunteers should touch, not how to program the buttons.

Editor's note: His layout is eight pages, but he says yours "could be as few as five buttons." Write down the five things your volunteers press every week before buying anything. Stream Deck is hardware you buy; Companion is free. Churchfront sells help building these systems through an application on its site.

Subsplash shares "Touchless church check-in: What it is & why more churches are switching" (4-minute read), on moving kids check-in to the parent's phone. Parents choose which children are attending in the church app before they arrive, then scan a QR code at the kids' wing. The printer makes a name tag with allergy alerts and a matching guardian pickup code. Volunteers only need to run the scanner and the tag printer.

Editor's note: The article says a new volunteer can be trained in under five minutes. It is written by a vendor: check-in is part of Subsplash's church management platform, which it prices on request through its pricing page. Subsplash also appeared in last week's issue.

OpenAI shares "GPT-6 and Intelligent UI for everyone" (5-minute read), announcing that ChatGPT can now answer with charts, forms, tappable buttons and small tools such as a bill splitter, not only text. It also starts answering while it is still thinking: on questions that need web search, GPT-6 Instant starts answering 44% sooner on average than GPT-5.6 Instant. OpenAI says more than 1.2 billion people use ChatGPT each week. Paid plans got it October 7, and the free tier the next day.

Editor's note: For a church office, try it on a task you already do: ask ChatGPT to build a simple event budget calculator and see what comes back. The free tier runs a model OpenAI calls GPT-6 Luna; paid plans get GPT-6 Sol.

Church Tech Today shares "What People Searched for Most in the YouVersion Bible App in 2026 and How Your Church Can Answer It This November" (6-minute read), on YouVersion's 2026 search data: Psalm 91 was the top search, with anxiety, hope and healing also among the most searched. It suggests teaching Psalm 91 beside Matthew 4 during Global Bible Month, November 1 to 30, with Life.Church's free Open Network kit and a free Bible App Church Page.

Editor's note: November has five Sundays this year, and the last, November 29, is the first Sunday of Advent. The article closes by suggesting an anxiety resource on your website, offered through FrontDoor, the same free tool recommended in the website item above.

ICYMI: Church Production shares "Before You Turn It Down, Find Out What “Too Loud” Really Means" (7-minute read), in which Ron Cochran argues a volume complaint often describes harsh guitars, cymbals or buried vocals rather than volume alone. Lowering the limit again and again leaves a lifeless mix with the same harsh sounds still in it. Ask where the person sat and whether it was one song. Fix the sources first, and keep the vocals clear.

Editor's note: His free test works at any sound board: close your eyes during a song and see whether you can understand the lyrics without the screens. If you can't, the vocals need room, and pulling a few instruments down a few dB often does more than any plugin.

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Correction: our Sept 27 issue named discernai.church without a Disclosures entry. We have no relationship with it.

In the interest of “shunning the appearance of evil” resulting from undisclosed relationships and/or potential conflicts of interest, we disclose our relationship(s) with the providers mentioned.

We also disclose our own use of AI. This newsletter is researched and drafted with Claude, an Anthropic product. Every issue — the summaries and the editor's notes alike — is reviewed, edited and approved by a human editor before it is sent, and the selections are made by a person, not a model. We are stating this plainly because a Wall Street Journal opinion piece in August ran without such a note and the omission became the story.