Pastor Justin R. Lester walks through seven apps church leaders can use to save time: Claude for writing, Perplexity for research, Bing Image Creator for graphics, captioning tools for video, Gamma for presentations, ManyChat for social media automation, and Microsoft Designer for design work.
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What's up everybody? I'm that tech pastor, AKA Justin Lester. I'm here today to talk to church leaders. I pastor a church in California and one of the things about me is I've been pastoring is I've been in love with artificial intelligence and how to use it for the local church. So I constantly get asked by church leaders as I'm juggling all my responsibilities from sermon prep to member engagement, how can I use AI to feel like I'm still with people but also automating a lot of my processes? I'm here to help. Stick around to the end. You're going to like these. All right, let's jump into it. First up for writing assistance, my favorite one out there is Claude. Now this app is perfect for helping you craft writing, whether it's emails, looking for inspiration, how to structure your thoughts, how to proofread. Claude is amazing. Now it's a large language model, so that's the same thing as like Gemini, same as chatgpt, all of those. I personally prefer anthropics. Claude. Claude does some amazing work. It's simple, to the point, has memory for you. The one thing it can't do is search the web. Looking to search the web for like websites and things like that. Go over ChatGPT. But Claude to me especially 3.5 Sonnet, amazing. What about study? Well, one of the things about study, you have a sermon to write, you have things to research, you have things you want to find. Perplexity is a much have. It's an excellent tool to dive deeper into scripture to get understanding of text. It helps you prepare insightful, impactful sermons. And if you want a paid version, check out Scholar GPT. Scholar GPT searches scholarly journals that I had access to to go on Scholar GPT and you're able to go and you know, do all the research you want to do with scholarly journals and all of that. Number three, you want to make video images, Check out Bing's image Create. Now on list is Dall E. If you need stunning imagery for your sermons, for your youth group, for graphics, things like that, you can create high quality visuals that complement your messages and complement your church beautifully. Number four captions. Now hear me. After you have your sermon done, you're finished with your sermon. You're trying to sit there, make sure you get promoted out. I love captions. Captions can take your long form video. If you pay for it and it'll help you edit it, it'll find viral things inside of your sermon. Viral things inside of your Worship experience and create engaging promotional videos. You also can use it to use to get AI avatars to assist you to do this work as well. And so while Opus and Clap, I've said these before, do some things captions a little more polished than those other apps. Number five is for your presentations is Gamma. Now there's a bunch out there. You probably see a lot of ads for like beautiful AI. Do not use beautiful. There's a lot of apps out there telling you how they can do PowerPoint presentations in 10 seconds. No one's better than Gamma. And Gamma has updated itself where you can edit things, put websites on it, you can make, you can get AI powered images images. Gamma is your go to app to make your presentations dynamic and visually appealing. Check out Gamma. Get your presentations done in 10 seconds. Last for social media you got to check out manychat. Now one of the things too, if you have Instagram to automate your engagement to make sure that every person who messages you or comments on your pages gets a message from You. That's where ManyChat comes in. ManyChat is where you see some content creators will say things like comment more and I message you comment next steps and I'll call you. Comment this and you go to my website. That's where ManyChat comes in. They're not messaging every single person. ManyChat is automating that conversation, making sure they have a whole conversation, getting you to their listserv so you can communicate with that person directly. So check out manychat for you and you'll see amazing things. Lastly, Microsoft Designer. Now if you have canva, stay on Canva. If you have Photoshop, stay on Photoshop. But if you want to find something that can work with Bing's image creator and Copilot and all the things that are going with Microsoft. I love Microsoft Designer. It's like Canva on steroids. It's Canva Pro for free. That's all I got. Microsoft Designer. Now it's a little more cumbersome because they're still building out the interface. The UI is not perfect but it's. It's creating visual content. It's Canva and Microsoft are great. I like Microsoft Designer. You can put prompts in for it to make an AI version. If you have an AI image, it'll edit it for you. In Microsoft Designer. It'll help you make your marketing materials, it'll help you make your social media posts. Everything would be great. Check this out. Identifying these apps into your daily routine saves time, improves your content you engage more effectively with the people you minister to. I love to hear what you use, but that's me. Those are the, those are the apps I would recommend. If you're starting out in AI for your local church, check those apps out. Let me know what you like. If you like the video, leave a thumbs up. If you don't like the video, leave a thumbs down. No matter what you do, hit that like button notification and get the latest content. Keep leading people. Keep inspiring people. I'll catch you on the other side. Peace.
