AI For Church Leaders shares "Before the Fall Rush: 5 AI Tasks to Knock Out Now" (5-minute read), five tasks for the weeks before Thanksgiving, Advent and Christmas Eve land. Build a communication calendar that works backward from each event. Pre-write the announcements you know are coming. Have AI read your "Plan a Visit" page as a nervous first-time guest, then fix the top two issues. Draft a bounded volunteer appeal. Hand one repetitive task to AI.

Editor's note: The piece says to pick one task this week, not all five, and prints a ready-to-paste prompt for the calendar. AI For Church Leaders is curated by Kenny Jahng, who also edits Church Tech Today, the source of our website-security item below.

Paul Alan Clifford shares "ProPresenter Tutorial: What's new in ProPresenter 22 (Part 1)" (16-minute watch), a beta tester's tour of ProPresenter 22, now in public beta. Its biggest addition is cloud workspaces: build slides Saturday night on one of the two editing seats every organization gets, and they sync to the church computer. If the internet drops at service time, the downloaded workspace still runs. Also new: Live Edit, text animation, and Apple TV classroom displays.

Editor's note: He says the cloud costs nothing extra on version 22 within a storage limit. Clifford sells team training at ChurchTechU for $99.97 a month and offers a free ProPresenter 22 guide for your email address.

North Carolina Conference of The United Methodist Church shares "Cybersecurity Awareness Month: Keeping Church Data Secure" (3-minute read), a checklist for the records a church holds. Stop sharing files with "anyone with the link," and keep them in a church account rather than personal drives. When roles change, remove access to email, financial and church management accounts. Use role-based addresses like office@, and make recovery contacts the church's own. Require two people to approve payments.

Editor's note: Nothing on the list costs money or is specific to Methodist churches. For a fuller access review, the article points to the GCFA technology checklists. It also recommends a guest Wi-Fi network kept separate from office devices.

Church Tech Today shares "PHP2Shell and UpdraftPlus: Check Your Church WordPress Site" (8-minute read), on two threats to WordPress sites this month. PHP, which your web host runs under WordPress, got critical fixes October 21; updating WordPress does not apply them, so the piece supplies a note asking your host to confirm. Separately, the maker of the UpdraftPlus backup plugin was breached: update it, delete every UpdraftCentral key, and remove unfamiliar Editor or Administrator accounts.

Editor's note: Your PHP version is under Tools, Site Health, Info, Server. If nobody at your church knows who hosts the website, find that out first. The piece also says to name one person who owns website security, and to skip unofficial "fix" plugins.

Planning Center shares "New For You in Planning Center This Fall" (5-minute read), a roundup of new features. Church Center now offers direct messages between group and team members, and every chat with a minor automatically includes two adults. A new announcements page works as a digital bulletin. People workflows can now take actions on their own, such as sending a welcome email to new members. Emails can now carry attachments and images. Planning Center sells monthly plans per product, each with a free tier, on its pricing page.

Editor's note: Pass the two-adult detail to whoever leads your children's ministry. It is the strongest case for moving group chats out of outside messaging apps. Workflow actions can also wait overnight or skip certain people.

Google shares "New Gemini tools for small business owners" (6-minute read), announcing a business landing page in the Gemini app. Upload your website, brand kit, fonts or color palette, and Gemini keeps that style for the graphics it makes afterward, so you stop re-uploading your guidelines. It can also turn messy spreadsheets and receipts into clear charts. Google says the tools begin rolling out in the coming days to all Gemini app users worldwide.

Editor's note: Written for small businesses, but a church whose flyers change look with each volunteer could set its colors and fonts once. Google sells paid Gemini plans starting at $4.99 a month; this announcement covers all app users.

Churchfront shares "How Volunteers Mix a 160-Channel Choir and Orchestra" (17-minute watch), a visit to Brentwood Baptist Church in Tennessee, where a volunteer runs the console three Sundays out of four. Volunteers never build a mix from scratch: virtual soundcheck (playing recorded tracks back through the console) gets it close before the service. They get a few big controls instead of hundreds of small ones, and careful mic placement means less to fix.

Editor's note: Don’t be fooled by the arena-grade audio setup; the host says the same principles apply at 16 channels: start from a mix, not from zero; keep the layout simple; get the sound right at the source. Churchfront designs and installs church AV systems, priced on request.

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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.