REACHRIGHT shares "AI Agents for Churches: What to Hand Off, and What Never To" (14-minute read), on AI agents, software that takes actions instead of only answering. Seven jobs can go to an agent with a person checking the result, including retreat research, volunteer scheduling drafts and broken-link checks. Four never should: pastoral care, spiritual discernment, sensitive member data and spending authority. He closes with a seven-line AI policy that sets the agent spending limit at zero.

Editor's note: Start with the policy's first line: name one staff member who approves agent tools. His job list assumes a staff of five to fifteen. He recommends Claude Cowork first for most church offices, and this newsletter is produced with Claude. REACHRIGHT sells church marketing and offers a free 30-minute Church Marketing Review.

Church Production shares "Bass Players, We Need to Talk About Your Tone" (8-minute read), in which Ron Cochran argues that distortion built into a bass signal cannot be removed at the console. Many players shape their tone at home in headphones and rarely hear it through the church's sound system. His fix for techs: double-patch the bass, with one clean channel and a second with grit added only when a song calls for it.

Editor's note: His advice to players costs nothing: simplify the pedals, use a good direct box and good cables, keep your level consistent, and when in doubt send one clean signal. He also tells techs to earn trust before asking anyone to change their gear.

Subsplash shares "Church digital strategy: A practical framework for the next 12 months" (6-minute read), which opens with a 90-minute audit. List every platform with its cost, renewal date and original buyer, count how many systems hold member records, and remove former staff and inactive volunteers from admin lists. Each quarter then gets one owner. When budget and staff are thin, it says to fix reliability first, then findability, then consolidation, and only then add new channels.

Editor's note: The plan is written for teams serving 200 to 2,000 attendees, but lets small teams stretch the first two quarters over eight months. Subsplash, which also appeared in our last two issues, names its own products for each quarter and closes with a free demo; its pricing is on request.

Church Tech Today shares "How Do You Get Church Website Visitors to Share Their Email Address?" (5-minute read), a five-step guide. Offer a short free resource tied to a felt need, such as a devotional your staff already wrote. Keep the form to a first name and an email address. Send the resource the moment someone signs up, from a real staff member's name, with one next step. Name one person who checks signups every week.

Editor's note: This follows the Church Tech Today item in last week's issue. Its last section walks through setup in FrontDoor, a free tool co-founded by Church Tech Today writer Kenny Jahng, which appeared in our last two issues. Its sample permission line is ready to adapt today.

REACHRIGHT shares "Meta Muse for Churches: A First Look at Meta's AI Agent" (11-minute read), on Meta's personal AI agent, launched September 8, which browses websites, fills out forms and books. Thomas Costello expects newcomers to ask it to find a church and plan a first visit. His fixes: put service times and your address in plain text, answer parking, what to wear and kids check-in on the page, and keep your Google Business Profile matching your website. Muse is free with a usage limit, with paid plans at $20 and $100 a month.

Editor's note: Muse uses your conversations to train Meta's AI by default; he says to turn that off under Settings, Data controls. Meta has announced no church or nonprofit pricing. Keep the church card, member records and any inbox that holds prayer requests out of it until you have a written policy.

Churchfront shares "Culture Is the Root, Systems Are the Fruit | Chris Kuti" (52-minute watch), a Churchfront Conference 2025 keynote on worship team culture. Kuti argues that teams fall to the level of the culture they have allowed, and gives five ways to build it: clarity creates culture, character carries it, consistency builds trust, community fuels it, and conviction sustains it. His first step is writing a one- or two-sentence cultural creed and reading it before every rehearsal.

Editor's note: Two of his ideas cost nothing this week: put table, story, serve and prayer moments on the team calendar, and write down any process that lives only in someone's memory. Churchfront offers a free account; its Premium coaching costs $97 a month.

ChurchLeaders shares "John Piper Is 'Appalled' by the Thought of Using AI To Draft a Sermon" (6-minute read), revisiting a February 2025 "Ask Pastor John" episode. Piper allows ChatGPT for information and inspiration, the way pastors use commentaries. His line falls at composition: a pastor who has AI write a first draft, edits it and preaches it as his own is deceiving the church. AI-written newsletters, he says, should credit AI in a note at the top.

Editor's note: A Barna survey of 442 U.S. Protestant pastors, released in June 2026, found 24% use AI to write or edit sermons, and 71% describe themselves as cautious. This newsletter discloses its own AI use in the Disclosures section below.

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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.