[00:00:05] Carla Green: Welcome back to Ministry Maximizer Podcast. I’m Carla Green, one of your hosts, with David Maples. David, what happened to your hair?

[00:00:14] David Maples: Funny story. I was stuck out of state for a while and was down in Louisiana, in the swamp. I did this in high school; I had long hair in high school at one point in time, and then I cut it off and gave it to a charity.

[00:00:39] David Maples: I was down in Louisiana, and I’d been talking about doing this for a while but I hadn’t done it yet. It was 100 degrees outside with 80% humidity. I called my wife up one night and said, “I’m thinking about doing it.” She said, “Yes, you should go ahead and do it.” I went out that night and looked up some different charities, and I found one called Children with Hair Loss. I proceeded to braid my hair that night, put rubber bands on each end of it, and I cut it all off.

[01:05] David Maples: Now, I cut it pretty short, but then I realized I had done this at home, so there was no option but to get clippers out because it was absolutely terrible. And I just took it all off. So, I’m kind of entering my Lex Luthor phase for a brief period of time here. I think I’ll probably do this for a few months and then I’ll probably grow it back out, but it’s a good thing.

[01:24] David Maples: If you get a chance, if anybody’s listening to the podcast, there are several good charities out there. Children with Hair Loss is a good one, Wigs for Kids is good, everybody’s heard of Locks of Love. But basically, there’s a lot of these charities that help kids who have hair loss for lots of reasons: cancer treatment, that kind of thing. For them, you know, as an adult, it’s very different. You kind of, I mean, people are shocked. Nobody recognizes me without my hair. I have to go introduce them and hand them a card and say, “Hey, by the way, do you remember me?” because they don’t know who I am now.

[01:53] David Maples: But with kids, it’s a very polarizing thing. Because as an adult, you get used to this stuff, but for a kid, it’s very hard to go in there and now you look like everyone else. And you’re also dealing with, like if you have unexplained hair loss or you’re dealing with cancer treatment, it’s a very different thing. So, I do think it’s a useful thing. It’s just like giving blood; if you can, you do.

[02:17] David Maples: So for me, I grew my hair out in the pandemic, enjoyed it for a while, and then it got really hot and hard to maintain. And I was like, someone else can benefit from this other than me. I think the rumor is that they’re going to be able to make three wigs out of my hair, so that’s pretty cool.

[02:31] Carla Green: I thought we were going with the story that you’re working so hard on this project, you were pulling your hair out, so you just went ahead and pulled it all out.

[02:38] David Maples: Ministry Maximizer has been so stressful. No, I don’t know how useful that is.

[02:45] Carla Green: Well, you look good regardless, hair or hairless, and you’re closer to God this way, right? That’s what my husband says, “The less hair you have, the closer you are to God.”

[02:53] David Maples: I guess. The hair isn’t like a tinfoil hat, it doesn’t interfere with the Almighty, right?

[03:00] Carla Green: I don’t think so.

[03:02] David Maples: The funny thing about it is, now that I have, like even preparing my backdrop for today, I had to change something in the background because I had some beige-colored things and I was like, that doesn’t work.

[03:13] Carla Green: Now you’re just going to blend in.

[03:15] David Maples: Yeah, it’s a total thing, just disappear. But no, I’m glad to be back. I was literally out of pocket for about seven or eight weeks and ready to get this rolling. A lot of things, we’ve done a lot of stuff to Ministry Maximizer in the interim, though. So it’s not like we sat idle on this. We have tooltips in there, we’ve got a lot of other options, we have a lot of more memorized things you can do to help prepare it to match your voice or give you options really in your sermons—not just sermons, but anything you’re doing—to kind of save you time and energy. So, pretty excited to show that to people too. So, what have we got cooking today, Carla?

[03:51] Carla Green: We are doing “Addressing the Critics.” So, we were not being critical about your hair, but it is interesting because I do think there are critics when it comes to this, even with, I mean, all criticism is good, I mean, not all criticism is good, but it can be helpful because it kind of helps you think, why are you doing what you’re doing and it’s how we take it. And so we welcome all of that. And one of the questions that comes up, and I don’t know how you want to start into this, but is, you know, why do we use Ministry Maximizer versus what’s already out on the market? And so, I thought maybe you would address that because you’re more AI-aware.

[04:27] David Maples: You can definitely grill me on these things if you want. That’s a very valid, I think it’s a valid question, what’s different. We’ve had people say, how is it different than ChatGPT? And I’m like, how is it alike? It’s, but that’s, of course, that’s kind of that piece of it. You just have to recognize that you’re always going to have to face, you’re going to have to always face that not just your critics, but when you’re using any piece of software or any piece of technology, there are going to be real challenges in how you use it, etc. How is it different than anything else out on the market you can use?

[05:04] David Maples: So, at the most basic level, it’s one of the only AIs on the market, not AIs, it’s one of the only platforms on the market that lets you choose multiple types of AI depending on what you want to use. So for some people, they love Anthropic, they love Claude—which I think Claude, I think Anthropic just rebranded as Claude, which I heard about recently. But some people love ChatGPT, but ChatGPT is kind of like a Coca-Cola; it is the name brand that everybody knows. It’s got some things it does very well, but it’s not great at everything. So with ours, we let you choose between Llama, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, which is Google’s. And they’re all good for different things and you can kind of figure out kind of where your sweet spot is for how you want to use it and how you want to utilize it. I think that’s thing one. It may not matter to you.

[05:55] David Maples: So let me go with the next one. The next one is that we keep your information private, proprietary. It’s not being trained on, and it’s not being put in the systems. And one of the things about it is because as we interface with the other models on the market, we make sure that your data stays your data. We don’t train on it, we don’t trade it, and we’re not training the next level of model on it. Now, again, should that matter? Well, first of all, it helps—not saying that you should put personally identifiable information about your parishioners in there—but it helps provide a level of protection in case you accidentally do that. But more importantly, I don’t think your information necessarily should be going into training the new model, especially if it’s your intellectual property. So if it’s your sermon, if it’s something you created in concert with communion with the Almighty, that is between these four walls and God. It’s your thing. So that is one of the big things about it. So you don’t have to worry about this stuff being out there.

[06:52] David Maples: The other thing about it that I think is actually important is that we have tools in there like the strategic planning for your church. You do not want to be putting that stuff in the open in another platform if it means that someone else can get access to that data. And that’s one of the things. With ours, we don’t do that. We gatekeep the data and we’re not training on it. We’re not looking at it or reviewing it.

[07:16] Carla Green: Well, and I think the point too is that you, when you want to release your data to the world, because as churches, we want as much of the kingdom message out as possible. But we don’t necessarily want our musings or our thoughts till they’re formed and we’re ready to put them out there to the world. And so this allows you to play without having other things out there before you’re ready to communicate it to the world.

[07:43] David Maples: Absolutely. And I think that is actually one of the things that, honestly, that’s probably one of the biggest things for me. Beyond just those really top-level things, the way we’ve built out, you can chat. You can make it more like a ChatGPT if you want to. You can communicate with it in a chat box just like you do with ChatGPT, but you can say you want to talk to a different model, etc. But ours, in particular, gives you the ability to, no matter which model you’re using, to memorize certain information about you, your church, your ministry, etc., and have that stuff baked in. And then that can follow you in any given prompt.

[08:22] David Maples: There’s another thing we just introduced into it is a global kind of toggle. One of the problems or challenges with the AIs is that they’re very sycophantic. No matter what you put in there, it tells you that this is a great idea, you should totally do this. We actually have a global toggle that you can choose to turn on in your account that actually directs the AIs to be much more neutral, challenge you on more things, and be a little less agreeable with whatever you come up with. And so, I think that’s part of it.

[08:53] David Maples: You know, today, it was kind of interesting. I actually used, I showed Ministry Maximizer to somebody else in the mortgage business of all things, because he was wondering about like software we’d built. And I showed him a demo of it, and he’s like, “Oh, this is really cool. I’d like to get in front of churches, I’d like to talk to people, maybe I can introduce you to some people.” And I was like, I never thought about that. Like there’s a whole other group of people out there who would like to, who might want to help spread the kingdom message even if they are not directly in the ministry. And that was kind of a really interesting moment for me today.

[09:27] David Maples: But with that, there’s literally a litany of things. So, the privacy, how much time it can save you versus one of the other applications. And I think the last one, which probably is something we should highlight up front, is the learning curve is much, much, much less. So you don’t have to have everyone who is an AI technologist or an expert. With about 15 minutes of one of our webinars, I think the average person working in the communications department of a church will get it and understand how to use our application or platform. And you don’t have to worry about that. So those are kind of the top five reasons, I think about it. And those are things I think that’s really interesting about it versus another piece of software.

[10:13] Carla Green: Well, I just heard a friend of mine who’s a coach, she’s actually training people on how to use AI, not for churches, but how to ask it questions. And like that is what Ministry Maximizer does. It’s already got questions that are, that help you get to what you’re wanting to glean quicker because the questions are already there. And then I think the other thing too that is on our hearts is that we want to build a community to where we’re getting good ministry best practices going. I really want to deliver you, David, as an AI expert to the church world. So we know going forward what we need to be aware of when AI is changing constantly and where the pitfalls are and have a voice that can be trusted in that arena as well. And so we want to do that through our online community and make sure that even if there’s things that we can tweak to help make it better, we need you to be part of our community first before we start doing that. And then we can start building things more specifically that you are also looking for. It’s great the way it is for sure, but we don’t know everything of how it might be used in the future.

[11:24] David Maples: I think there’s going to be a lot of options on there. And one of the things that’s very interesting is that we built this for Christian ministries. We didn’t build it for anybody else. And so it is very specifically aimed at that space in the market, in the theological market. And I think that’s one thing that makes us, we’re not trying to be an everyman for everything that ails you. If you run whatever it is, this is not the tool for you. But if you’re running a church and you’re trying to increase access to the Christian ministry or increase reach, this is the tool that we built for you in particular.

[12:03] Carla Green: And I think it’s the right time. I feel like we’re moving away from being so sermon-message heavy to being more, to where we need to pivot to being way more relational in people’s lives. And the way the life of church goes is just, there’s not enough time to build that relationship piece in. So if we can take your message and repurpose it into all the different avenues you need it and free up time for you so you can get in front of people, that’s also what we’re wanting to do. I was showing it to one person who’s a pastor out in Colorado and he’s like, “I like that it’s all together.” Like I like that all my chats are together. I like that all the different things that I would possibly need are in one dashboard and here. You’re not going to find that with a spin-off of just one AI engine.

[12:57] David Maples: You asked, you said that people were asking about different things. How I kind of imagine the expansion of what we’re doing here is that, for example, there are AI tools built just for creating your podcast. We’ve talked about that. We actually already have a module built out that we can add into here, that if you want to run a Christian-based podcast, etc., that we can put that module into Ministry Maximizer. And from our standpoint, I’m kind of not wed to it looking a certain way. There are obviously different tiers or levels of access that you can provide in any kind of piece of software, but from my standpoint, I don’t think I need to break that piece off and make it its own particular tool when I can build it into the tool we’ve already got.

[13:51] David Maples: And that’s another thing we did recently is that we’re going to be putting this in now. So we built in the functionality for tooltips, which are going to be all over the application, but the idea with it is to just kind of deepen what you’re doing there. We got some other stuff that’s coming soon. We’re going to try to, we’ve been working out a possibility of building a save template. So for example, when you’re going through your methodology or your particular branch of the Christian tree, you may have a Methodist background or you may come from an evangelical standpoint or a particular, like The Vineyard is a particular set of churches. And so the idea with it is we’ve got those in there as options and it pulls really well from that information within that particular denomination. But the idea is we want to make that we want to set a default button so it can just be like yours always goes to those defaults, so you can actually skip that step. But not there yet, we’re working on that, but that’s definitely on the roadmap for what we’re trying to do.

[14:55] David Maples: But to your point about the episode, it’s just like anything else. This is a tool, and you do get criticism about these tools, like taking you away from the church. I think in the perfect world, this would literally be background noise. If Ministry Maximizer worked right, it would inform and help and expand what you could do in your church, but it would provide time for you to minister to people in your congregation, to go out and meet with them, to sit with people who are sick and ailing, to spend time with the kids in the youth group things, etc. So ultimately, my perfect vision for this tool is that it literally frees you up for spending that time for those real human connections because that’s where ministry really happens. It is in that individual connection between individual members of the church. And I think this is what I really want. I’d love for it to be in all these churches and be ubiquitous and everywhere, but I don’t ever want it to be the focal point of whatever you’re doing. Like, oh, we’ve got Ministry Maximizer, we’re great. I think it’s all about how does it help you engage.

[16:03] Carla Green: And I think it’ll be different for others, for everybody. I like that we named it Ministry Maximizer because I feel like it can take the thing that you’re strong in and repurpose it in the things that you’re not. And so you don’t have to use, if you’re great at sermon outlines, you don’t have to use that piece. You can use how to make small group discussion tools out of it or how to use do blogs with it or, like even the exegesis part, that to me is beautiful, the fact that I can throw in a verse and it creates the whole exegesis for me. So I don’t have to go look up all the Strong’s Concordance; it does that for me. And so I can then get it all in one concise thing, and it doesn’t matter whether I went to the website or went to a book and flipped open the page and wrote it all down. That to me is not, that’s not a spiritual walk for me to thumb through a reference. So it’s, I’m not breaking a spiritual rhythm. It’s giving it to me quickly so I can study what it gives me and interact with the word. So, somebody asked me what my favorite was. I think that one is one of my favorites, and then also the parable creation, like creating stories because a lot of times I’m more, I don’t necessarily have that story creation brain. I can put thoughts together, connect things, but I don’t necessarily build a story out of it. I don’t have that type of a thought to do it, although it’s helping me because I feel like it’s an avenue into a brain cell I didn’t have that it’s kind of creating.

[17:31] Carla Green: But one of the critic things too is how does this take away from the Holy Spirit and how he wants to inform you? And I don’t think it takes away. It can take away if you totally shut up talking to him. It’s how you interact. You still have to test the word. You still have to test what somebody’s giving you. It’s not any different than if a person with a prophetic voice would come and say, “Hey Carla, I see this in your life and you should go do this.” I’m not going to go do this until I test it, pray about it, and make sure that that’s what the Holy Spirit’s saying. And so I think it’s just another point of information or something that you might not even have thought about. And the way it connects things together of communities I haven’t thought about how to enter, or people groups, like age people groups, like kids, how do I make this more kid-friendly? Like something that would really strain my brain because I don’t think in kid talk.

[18:27] David Maples: And that is, like youth ministry is its own particular thing. People who are good at that, that’s what they do. I don’t know, I feel like it’s almost a separate gift, right? It’s a different thing that you have access to that you can really do in a different way. I just think it’s my thoughts on it. And so with this, I think my favorite way for people to use it is as an interactive piece. You know, so drop your existing sermon in there and have it analyze it and have it help you strengthen places that may be weak. Or if you’ve had a sermon that you’ve gotten a lot of criticism on or feedback, because everybody’s got an opinion Monday morning. It was either a good sermon or it was not. I think the worst thing is to be meh, you don’t want to have a meh sermon. But you’ll get people who are like, “Well, I don’t know that I liked your take on XYZ.” And so the thing about those kind of things, it can help strengthen what you do.

[19:30] David Maples: I think using it from a kind of way to sharpen the tools that you’re using really could be helpful. Or if you think about it, like if you put in when you have it create one if you want, and you have it, it’s one of the follow-up questions. We’ve got a follow-up question in there to like show potential pitfalls and outcomes. And maybe that’s something you should be aware of. I’ve always felt when you give talks that your message is measured at the ear that is hearing you. And I’ve always as someone who’s done public speaking, I’ve always thought that if people didn’t get my message, it was my fault. It’s honestly not their fault, it’s my fault. If I talked at the wrong level for the audience, if I talked in a way, and I typically have a problem doing that. I typically talk at a very high technological level. And so for me, building this out with the sermon analyzer has actually informed some other stuff I’ve built out for the other products I work on because for me, I need to know, am I talking to a whole bunch of blue-collar construction guys about AI? That is a different talk fundamentally than somebody who’s like a technocrat, you know, somebody who knows technology inside and out. And I think that’s kind of the thing I think that could be very useful in Ministry Maximizer is you can look at who are you talking to in your congregation. Maybe the sermon is broadly for everybody in the congregation, but it’s particularly for people in the congregation who are currently struggling with something, are struggling with their faith. And that’s the person you need to reach that day.

[21:04] David Maples: I don’t know that every time you deliver a sermon, it’s supposed to be like a 1 million megawatt, you know, spotlight put on one person, right? And I also don’t think it’s necessarily just to be broadly for everybody, but I think a lot of times embedded in your mission or whatever you’re saying, there’s a particular person in your congregation or a particular group of people that you’re trying to reach with it. I think that’s what’s beautiful about it. And then if you use it, back to the point, I think if you use it as a tool to challenge yourself, come up with the first, stop doing the thing where you give up at the first prompt. See how you can make it better. It’s got follow-up questions in there for a reason. Get it. Look, a lot of people will do it and in the first blush, it’ll be like, “Oh, this is a really good offertory message,” right? Really great. Struggle with it a little bit. Look at it and say, “Well, how can I make it better?” Because remember, these things are just, they’re just machines. And as smart as they look, I’m going to say something here that’s going to make people in the AI space very unhappy: they are not thinking machines. Period. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. That is a fact that’s being borne out by technology. They’re incredibly impressive in what they’re doing, but they have no ability to learn beyond their training data. So the minute, to explain this, when you’re actually prompting them and talking to them, they’re not learning from that individual chat you’re giving. The machine is not getting smarter. Whereas everything I say to you, Carla, or anybody in the audience, you’re going to have ideas and you’re going to build that into the world model of your life based on this conversation we just had. The machines don’t do that. They have amnesia. Every time you talk to them, it’s like a brand new thing. They’ve never met you before. So we’ve built some things in there to help provide some kind of pseudo-memory, but it’s really not there. So you have to realize when you get into a groove with this, you really do want to struggle with that. You will make it, look, out of the gate, Ministry Maximizer will be amazing. If you play with it just a little bit, you’ll make things probably three to four times better.

[23:07] Carla Green: And I think like even if it could learn, we have to remember the kingdom is upside-down thinking. So a lot of times, unless the upside-down thinking, like everybody knows that if you reap, whatever you sow, you reap. That’s an upside-down kingdom message. And so AI would probably pick that up because that’s one that’s across the board. But there may be other things that God’s showing you that doesn’t, the world doesn’t get. Well, AI is not going to pull that back. Like there is one time that I tried to get it to say something about excellence and not about it being about performance, but about a sense of being and who you are connected with. So like, for example, you know, we call in the England, London world, you know, the kings and queens, you call them your excellence. Well, it’s not because of what they do, it’s because of who they are. And that’s more of our kingdom mindset. It’s more of who we are because of who we’re associated with. But AI wanted it to be about what we do, and I could not get it to say that it’s not about performance, it’s about our connection with Jesus and our bloodline with him. And it would not do it. So I had to rewrite it. So there’s going to be a few things, not a ton, but maybe more as we get into it, that you will have to break in and say, nope, that’s not what I meant, and I’m going to have to rewrite that. But then you can give it something better and have it rewrite it into something else. But that’s one of the critic pitfalls is you can’t just, you don’t want worldly, you know, you want kingdom messages. So it may struggle at that higher level of thinking that what the Holy Spirit wants to show you, you’re going to have to break down and write it yourself, and then use it as a repurposing thing, not necessarily as a creation thing. And so you just have to be aware of that. But that’s cool, that’s the level at which you should be preaching, right? That it can get here, but what’s the extra? And but like I said, it can still repurpose it into other avenues.

[25:10] David Maples: Can we dive a little bit into, I want to talk a little bit about historical context because there’s a lot of anxiety right now regarding digital technology. And I think a lot of that is proper, but I think a lot of the anxiety kind of attaches itself to all the things, no matter what it is. Like social media is evil, right? You’ve heard people say things like that. Social media undoubtedly has a lot of challenging elements on it. So does AI. We’re hearing a lot of negative press about AI right now. But I feel like maybe this is the wrong term, but I feel like right now, in this current age right now, it feels like people are suffering from a kind of a historical amnesia, for lack of a better term. It’s like we forget about the way that…

[26:03] David Maples: Okay, so this is where this comes from. Mike Duncan has an amazing, I think it’s Mike Duncan, has an amazing series of podcasts. He’s this historian guy. I’m working through his podcast called “The History of Rome” right now. And it’s important because it’s like a 71-hour total series of a podcast, and each episode’s like 30 minutes, and they take you through the beginning of the Roman Republic all the way through modern day. But Constantine came up, you know, they talk about the early church. It’s really, really interesting. But people forget about things that historically were… Okay, so for example, early on, people don’t realize that, and I’m just going to nerd out about this just for a second if you’ll indulge me. People don’t understand how technology is different. We have books, we have the internet now and all these other things, but it took a long time to get there. When this all originally happened, things were written on scrolls. And scrolls are like little rolled-up pieces of sheepskin, papyrus, what have you. And that’s your one-page thing, right? And then the next evolution of that was a thing called a codex. And a codex was literally like several pieces of paper you’d kind of tied together. It’s a precursor to a book, right? Because books weren’t things yet, right? And by the way, these were considered massive technological, like it seems obvious now, but you’d be like, “Man, what do you got with you there?” And you’ve got a whole quiver, right, thing of like all these scrolls, right? And instead, it’s like that’s really cumbersome, right? It’s not very productive, doesn’t really work well.

[27:40] David Maples: So you get this codex, and it was a thing that the early Christians used, and it was championed by them. And this kind of came up in the codex a little bit about how this is used to move things. And we talk about that. So, you know, and then and then we get, I mean, there’s a lot of different technologies, but that’s just one. And then we get to movable type. You know, we get to the printing press, right? And how that is a massive thing. And in fact, I’ll go ahead and say this, there’s nothing against the Muslim faith, but the Ottoman Empire forbade Muslims to use printed type. Meanwhile, Christians in Europe are like, “No, man, this is great. We can all have Bibles. This is amazing.” And that was an amazing technology, not just for that, because that’s where people were taught to read. A lot of people were illiterate, but now you have a Bible and you actually… and so it’s like double duty, right? It’s amazing. It’s not only that it’s the word of God, but it’s, it is literally you have this item now that people are learning how to read, and that starts transforming the world really, really quickly. And the Christians adopted that. And Christians, I will say, have adopted technology. Think about originally like radio type things, The Church Hour, they did broadcasting things in the 1900s. So there’s a lot of different things. And now, so think about everything that happened in the previous 2000 years, we’ve had as much of that happen in the last 50. You know, radio, TV, internet, websites, email lists, digital platforms, podcasts now, and now we have AI. And I think, you know, maybe it just feels like it’s too much, too fast, right? Maybe that’s why. But a lot of people right now are just like, you know, how can we possibly adapt this? The church has always done this. How do we do this to get the message out? How would we do to move it? And look, that’s me nerding out. I like history, and I think it’s really interesting. And it’s really funny when you look at these things, and it’s amazing that you can get the information out there.

[29:33] David Maples: Think about it, in 1200 AD, you’ve got these monks with like illuminated lettering. And by the way, it’s beautiful, but nobody had a Bible in their house. You couldn’t read the word of God. And it was a major thing in the Reformation, right? The Reformation, you can argue, would not have happened without the printing press.

[29:49] Carla Green: Or without Luther saying, get it out of Latin and let’s get it into some readable language.

[29:54] David Maples: And you see, that’s, that’s also like adoption of technology, right? If you think about it, right? Why keep it in Latin? You keep it in Latin because the only people who can read it are the people who know Latin, which most of us don’t. Nobody knew it back then except for the church and a lot of people in power. And so I think, I think it’s impressive, but I think it also is kind of a double-edged sword though. We have to recognize that any technology has to be prudently applied, and you have to figure out how it works for you. Don’t, don’t be a slave to the technology, make it serve you and, well, or make it serve God’s mission. It’s that kind of thing. So that’s my soapbox for today.

[30:35] Carla Green: Well, and I think the verse that keeps coming up that I feel like possibly the Holy Spirit’s giving me is the whole idea that the harvest is plentiful and the workers are few. And God always makes a way where there seems to not be one. And so I think AI, used in the appropriate way, is helping us with the harvest because if we can get to more people… I mean, that was the whole, I mean, that’s always been the whole point of everything. Like the Bible getting to more people, Jesus coming when he did to get to more people because the roads were in the right place. So this is a tool because it’s a lot of hard work. There’s a lot of people who are hurting that need face-to-face. They don’t necessarily… And I’m not putting down the sermons, your weekly messages, but I can go on… there is enough sermons on YouTube that if nobody ever preached again, there’s enough information out there, to be honest. And so, but there aren’t enough people who are willing to get in front of people’s faces and say, how can I help you? Where, what is God doing with you today and how can I help with that? And so, and I’m not sending letters and emails or whatever about your sermons because I do think God’s wanting to create more, and I love to create messages and I love that. But at the same time, I always have to stop myself and say, what am I doing for the person who’s right in front of me that needs a kind word, that needs a prayer, that if I don’t have time, if I don’t have space, if I don’t have margin, and I’m so distracted with the busyness of church that I can’t be the church, then that’s a problem. And the world is crying out for it. The world is crying out for us to be present and to host the presence in front of people so we can give them Jesus. And they can get it on YouTube with a sermon, but they can’t get the touch of a person caring about them and showing what that really is like. And so Jesus preaching was part of what his ministry was, it wasn’t all of his ministry. And so there was a lot of hands-on, you know, getting in front of people and really showing them the kingdom, not just telling them about the kingdom.

[32:48] David Maples: That’s a very good point. And that kind of goes back to the saving yourself time to free yourself up to do other things. I like it because, and I’m not a preacher, but I like it because it allows me to… See, I like the sermon generator just for myself a little bit because you can mix a couple of different concepts together. I know I keep going back to Ruth because I’ve mentioned her in several of these episodes.

[33:13] Carla Green: It was so cool.

[33:14] David Maples: Anyway,

[33:17] Carla Green: What he’s talking about is we were testing this out, and I was giving, as we always do, David was asking me like, let’s give it something. And so I was giving it some mainstream things. And he’s like, okay, that anybody could pull that back. Let’s give it something weird. And so he gave it Ruth 3:7, which I had no idea what it was, and he didn’t know at the time either. I’m not that biblically literate to know what Ruth 3:7 is, but it ended up being something about Boaz just finishing with his drink and going back, and Ruth was waiting on the edge of his bed, and he’s her kinsman redeemer. And it pulled in this whole church responsibility and the other stuff that I had fed it about us being the church and sons and daughters, and it pulled in how we’re supposed to be kinsman redeemers even in the dark of night when people aren’t watching. And it was like the most, it was really beautiful the way it tied it together, and it got us… we both were like, “This is so exciting.” And that’s, it’s kind of, I mean, every time we have these talks, it always just kind of makes me excited about the word and what God’s doing and how even AI is putting it together. My husband goes, “How can it do this?” when he looks at the stuff that I give him. And I said, because AI has read its Bible. AI has read commentary. AI, it can handle more information than we can. And so why not use it to cross-pollinate that way? Just some of the stuff that I’ve seen, even when I let other people create, it’s just so much fun, to be honest. It’s a fun tool.

[34:49] David Maples: From my standpoint, I think it’s, so one of the hardest things for me is when I, okay, this sounds really bad, but when you go into the sermon or you go into the church and it’s the same message… I’m not saying that I don’t want to, I am going to go ahead and say it. I don’t want to go in and hear the same sermon I’ve heard 25 times before. I could probably give that sermon. And the reality of it is, is that, and look, for somebody who doesn’t know, and it’s not just for me, and I know I sound very selfish, but when I go in and hear something different, that’s when the sermon resonates with me. When I hear about how it affected somebody in the community, when I hear those kind of things are what makes it really interesting for me. And so when you go in and bring things together in a way, kind of cross-mixing something in a way that I haven’t heard before, now, the tool won’t do this just on its own. It needs you. It needs you to be involved with it. You have to give it the seeds, the inspiration of what you want to look at, and then you need to challenge it because it’ll come up with something and you have to look at it and say, does this really jive? Does this groove? Do these things together in the same story? And I think that’s kind of, I think it’s exciting, right? Because I think you could probably cross-mix or create sermons that have never been given before, ever. And so for me, that is a way to deepen exploration of the word in a way that’s maybe not been done before. I think we need to make sure it doesn’t turn into like technological idolatry or something like that because you got to remember, it needs to be a tool. It’s how can our church use this tool? Not how do we become disciples of this tool and become completely dependent on it. So I think it’s, for me, it’s a way to increase or deepen those things. Even there, you could have someone who is preparing sermons or what have you, or preparing their offertory, and you can have it challenge you. You can have it literally deepen your understanding of stuff and you could, you can actually treat it kind of like, for lack of a better term, a devil’s advocate. Poke holes in my sermon. Tell me what’s wrong with it. Tell me what’s not working correctly. And it will absolutely challenge you if you ask it to do it. And I think that’s kind of exciting as well. I think that’s totally something that is how it should work.

[37:05] Carla Green: I was just thinking, in the profile piece of it that we have, is there any way that we could create, for lack of a better term, avatars who are critics in our church that we know, like so different personalities, like I know Bob will always ask me about this or always be, maybe there’s four or five personalities that always kind of come up and they’re always, they always have something that they are wanting to address. Maybe he’s more critical or he’s more, or maybe he’s overly positive and always wants to see something rosy. So can he come in and be a critic in my analyzer and how would this, how would Bob handle this or, you know, maybe Paula is always political and there’s got to be a political bent to it and what is she going to, you know, how’s this going to impact her? So I’m just wondering, is there like critic avatars that we could create at some point?

[38:07] David Maples: Yeah, we could totally do that and either make it a follow-up or make it part of a prompt, or part of, we call them prompts, y’all, but it’s like calling a spaceship a mode of transportation. It is, but it’s like, well, car, boat, plane, train, rocket ship, you know what I mean? It’s just one of those things. But for lack of a better term, internally we call them the prompts. We could totally make it part of that process. And we just need to come up with what those things look like. We could even set it up. This is actually probably more advanced. We could set it up so that one of our, we’d have to train somebody in how to build it. It may just be, you might be right, maybe we just supply like four or five of those. They’re basically, they’re basically critics or critique what I just came up with through the lens of XYZ person. And we could totally do that. We could just make it a follow-up thing that it literally is something on a follow-up. By the way, for those of you listening, the way our system is set up is that you have the initial outcome of the entire thing that you want to create, and then there are these follow-up options. And the follow-up option can be a sandbox where you type in whatever you want, or we have in some cases, we have pre-loaded like 30 of these things or 20 of these things, depending on what it is. Not to overload you, but that way you have different options to say, “Oh, do this.” Like if you have your thing and you need it translated into Spanish, you just press the button and say go, because you don’t need to give it the entire message on how to do this and make sure it’s correct.

[39:52] Carla Green: Two of my favorites are the objection, like what are the objections I’ll get, and then also make this for kids. And so some of the kids’ ones are so incredibly cute, what they come back with because they’ll give you activities and just very clever things that my brain doesn’t go towards, and then I get excited about like, man, I want to give this to kids. I want to go teach kids.

[40:15] David Maples: Yeah, funny enough, we’re sitting here recording this podcast. My father just called me because he keeps asking me about using this in the Bible study thing that he runs every Sunday. And it’s kind of funny because he’s the most… I don’t know, he’s that guy who’s worried that you get a Nest thermostat, one of those smart thermostats, he’s worried it’s going to start infiltrating your house and interrogating the other appliances and building up an army against you or something. He’s asked me before, he’s like, “What if someone hacks my thermostat?” And I was like, “Oh golly, where do I start here?” But that’s a whole different thing.

[41:22] Carla Green: Go change your password, Dad, it’ll be fine.

[41:24] David Maples: Yeah, Dad, please, change your password or do me a favor, just put the laptop back in a box and just ship it somewhere. Anywhere else. No, I’m kidding. I’m being harsh. But it is interesting because you do have this kind of… and I will say, you’re going to have people in the congregation who, once they start knowing you’re using different technology things, they’re either think it’s amazing. 5% of people on either end, they either love or hate whatever you do. So my hair is off my head. 5% of people will be like, “That’s amazing, it’s so much nicer now.” And I’m like, okay, thanks, you hated my long hair. And then 5% of it, “Oh, I can’t believe you did that, that’s terrible, you cut your hair off,” right? And then most people are just kind of like, “Meh, it’s all right. You’re good.” But you got to be careful you don’t listen to the squeaky people out there who kind of run your life.

[42:15] Carla Green: And I think that’s part of the problem that we’re coming into with the social media generation, is that we are wanting likes. And so we, you know, it’s feeding into that fear of man instead of fear of God kind of concept. And so, so whatever you do with Ministry Maximizer, like if this is what, listen to what God’s telling you to do. If this is something that he’s saying, “Yes, this will help you,” like pray about it. We don’t have any worry about, you know, if it’s not for you and God doesn’t want you to use it because you’re at a different point in your life, then don’t use it. But if this is something that is going forward, then definitely sign up. I did want to address the Bible study thing. I actually also lead a business Bible study once a month. When I was releasing Ministry Maximizer, I had my group actually fill out the prompt for the small group discussion, and we built our next session on what they said. And it was very clever, it was good, and I went back after we did it and just said, “You know, make it more practical and add some fun elements.” And it was probably the most fun… I’ve been doing it for three years, and that was probably the most fun that we had. And I’m usually pretty good at it. So I was like going, “Wow, you kind of kicked my butt, AI.” Like, well done. So, but just the added elements of taking a verse and, like I think it was the, it was the woman who was being stoned for adultery, and they were wanting her to be stoned. And like, we just did, like it even suggested doing a T-chart to where, you know, like how did the Pharisees act versus how did Jesus act? And like, how does that translate into your work of how do you judge people? You know, like at the beginning it asked, like the icebreaker was to write a short headline that somebody might misconstrue as something negative, like “She left early again for work.” You know, and so maybe it was she had to go to a doctor’s appointment or something. And so that’s the whole story. So we had so much fun with the elements that I didn’t have time to think about or would have taken the time, and it really impacted our lesson. So yes, the Bible study thing, like if you’re leading a Bible study, if you’re like, “I am not a pastor and this is not for me,” but I do lead a Bible study, that piece of it’s amazing too. Like it can help create content for you, and then you just go study what it gives you. Because you can even ask it after it brings back, like here’s your class, because I think it’s like, is it 45 minutes, is it an hour, is it 90 minutes? And then you can even say, “So how do I prepare for this?” And it will bring back again how do you get prepared as the leader for this lesson. So it’s brilliant in that, and it’s fresh and new and different as well.

[45:11] David Maples: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s, look, I think it’s a cool tool. I think it is. I think no matter what tool you’re using in your ministry, there are certain things you should do. You got to figure out like how you’re going to put the tools into your organization. And it doesn’t have to be a crazy 500-point checklist or whatever you’re doing it, but you want to have a baseline before you put any tool in there, like how do you currently do these things? Because one of the challenges of AI, and you’ve heard people saying it, and this is the part I don’t get. I have people, I’ve actually got like three people who hit me up today or yesterday or over the weekend that they want to know about me coming into their business and helping implement AI. And there’s that report from MIT four or five weeks ago and it said that 95% of businesses don’t have a plan to implement AI effectively in their business. And I’m scratching my head, like literally, I’m scratching my head. I’m like, how is that a real, how is that real? How is it that bad at these organizations? And I think it’s for a lot of people just like with churches, they’ve thought, “Oh, we’ll just grab this new shiny thing and put it in our church or whatever it is.”

[46:15] David Maples: There are very obvious… So come to one of the webinars or sign up for Ministry Maximizer and we’ll show you guys how to put it in there. But the failure rate of people implementing this in their ministry should be somewhere around the less than 1% because you didn’t, you didn’t try level. It should not be something crazy like 95%. And I think for a lot of people, it’s you look at what’s the current church’s technological state. So for like the strategy thing about growing your ministry, that’s one of the big things we have in there, right? We have an entire thing to build your roadmap. Heck, that would save most ministers or planners for churches, I don’t know, months of time particularly. And use that and start, and you can actually use it to help assess like weaknesses in your church, like some challenges. I don’t like the term weakness, I like the term challenge because you can, a weakness makes it sound like it’s structural or fundamental. I think ultimately you can turn any of those things around or mitigate the challenge if you want to do it. But if you get a baseline of where you’re at technologically in the church, and this is a pretty inexpensive thing. I mean, people are spending 100 bucks a month or something like that on something like this tool. And, but you know, for most churches, it’s not just very affordable, but you can look and say, what is your currently technological state? Like, how are you going to use this stuff? And then all you need to do is find the thing that’s going to save you 5, 10 hours a week, and it not just makes sense, it makes a stupid amount of sense. But you want to figure out like your, so what’s your technological adoption rate? And it can help catapult everything else you’re doing. So it’s got in there, it’s got a thing to help. Okay, so you have a problem with social media in your church. Your communication people are challenged on it. Now, just because somebody thinks social media is fun does not mean it’s effective. You want to look and say, how is this helping us expand the mission of our church? And Ministry Maximizer can help you figure out those next steps, can help you get a roadmap and a plan for doing that. But you want to have a baseline of where you’re at now.

[48:27] David Maples: So for example, just an example, you’re going to start using Ministry Maximizer to help plan out or put together your social media pieces of content. Great. Get your baseline. How many people currently look at your stuff? How many people currently engage with it? How many people are following the church? And you just write those down on a napkin or a piece of paper or a spreadsheet or wherever you want to put it. But put it somewhere. And then start using the tool and measure how those things measurably improve over the next six weeks. And that’s valuable. When you’re looking at saving time in your ministry, find out, okay, how much time are you spending on X right now? You probably know. If sermons are a challenge for you, maybe you love doing it, so keep doing that. But I think, and I think you want to tie it to the outcome. So you say, “Okay, cool, I’m going to use it to help prepare this, and now I’m saving 20 hours a month.” And then the outcome is, I spent 12 more hours meeting with parishioners. I did the six other hours of doing church financial stuff that I hate doing, and I don’t like doing, right? But I was able to get to that now. And I had two hours to rest and relax and reflect and pray. Valuable. And I think that’s how I’d like to see people using these tools. I think they should do that. And you know, and then you can ask your questions. You can do that kind of, what do you call it in a business? It’s like a purpose… okay, so it’d be like a mission alignment framework in a church probably. It’s like in business, it’d be like a purpose alignment, like you have to figure out what you’re doing. So, how much does it cost? Does it fit our budget? And does it provide real value? Is it convenient? Is it easy to use for us? I think it checks all those boxes. And does it have the features that we need to accomplish our goal? And if there’s a feature you want and you’re a subscriber, you can request it. Just like tonight recording this podcast or today recording this podcast, Carla said the avatars. So we can totally, we can add that in. We can have that in here in a couple of weeks. And so we’ve been adding stuff. And like right now, already feedback from users and people who we’ve shown the application to have helped us add in more things because we are doing this to support the ministry. So we’re here to serve that goal. So if there’s things it needs to have, we need to know. Use it and then let us know. And then we need feedback when we put a new feature in, we need feedback on that because we need to know how you like it. One other thing I can promise about our software is that we will try as long as possible when we put a new version of the dashboard or an upgraded user interface or what have you in there, we will try to always give people a very long time window to adopt. This is not where your accounting software says, “Hey, we’re doing this,” and three weeks later, you wake up one morning and you cannot go back to the old version and you’re spending extra time and you’re making mistakes. So our goal is to make something that is usable for you, etc. And then there are ways in there to keep your old chats, your own things. You can asterisk and star those things and keep those things for a long time moving forward. Sorry, I kind of went off on a big tangent here, but those are things I think that are important.

[51:28] Carla Green: Yeah, and we want to just invite you all in to be part of our Ministry Maximizer community, and so you can also be our cheerleader and our critic.

[51:38] David Maples: Yeah. No, I mean, that’s what I want. And then I want to know from you all out there, you can either comment on this episode or you can email us at Ministry Maximizer and let us know if this gave you any ideas. I hope this gives you some ideas. And look, if you don’t use Ministry Maximizer, go find a tool. I think you’ll find that this tool is totally worth your time. But we do webinars every Thursday, not every Thursday, but like every other Thursday at like 11:30. We kind of do those. I think the next one’s coming up in a couple weeks. And we do those so people can at least see kind of how it actually… this is not just to say, “Hey, here’s the thing we want to sell you.” It’s, how does this actually work for us? And then at the same time, we want to know what’s working for you in your congregation. We do want to know from our standpoint, like what else can we add in here to make this work better for you and your ministry.

[52:33] Carla Green: Yeah, so if you want to sign up for one of our webinars, you can just go to ministrymaximizer.com and sign up. I think it’s the first and third Thursdays. And so, it’s when you’ll find that. And so, yeah, we’d love to just let us know so we can send you a link and you can hop on, invite your friends and other ministry leaders.

[52:53] David Maples: And we can promise they’ll actually be run by us because we’re actually humans in this thing. So we want to let people know that we’re not having…

[53:02] Carla Green: A human tell that we need to…

[53:04] David Maples: Well, you know, I’m going to glitch again and whatever it is, losing… yeah, I need more motor oil or something. I don’t know. That sounds terrible. How do you power these machines? Well, like in the age of… and if you’re out there listening, so we’re recording this on October 6, 2025, and Sora 2 just dropped last week. And there’s a lot of people in my own organization asking like, “Oh, wow, this is really amazing,” but it is… if you haven’t gotten the time to spend time looking at these things, it is really, we’ve entered kind of the crazy future. Like people are in there and they’re basically, whatever I said in this podcast, I could actually put The Rock in saying it instead of me. You know, it’s kind of, it’s a little…

[53:48] Carla Green: He too is bald.

[53:51] David Maples: Yeah. And actually, that’s it. I’ll just, I’ll do a… Oh man. So should we do a promo for this with The Rock introducing us? Should we totally do that?

[53:59] Carla Green: We’ll be in trouble for that. I think.

[54:01] David Maples: Probably, but I mean, heck, why not, right? You know, I don’t know. It’s just, it’s one of these things. I could make myself a…

[54:08] Carla Green: Maybe we should do something from the faith, like, you know, Billy Graham or somebody that’s gone that we know that…

[54:13] David Maples: Yeah, they wouldn’t, they wouldn’t do… yeah, we could do that. I mean, I’m watch us do this and we get a thing from Billy Graham’s church or cease and desist. Do not use us.

[54:23] Carla Green: Yeah, we yeah, we don’t want to be, yeah.

[54:25] David Maples: Well, we could totally do it and do it with the watermark and say it’s in good faith, good fun.

[54:31] Carla Green: In good faith. I’m not even sure we could say good faith.

[54:34] David Maples: No, we can’t say it’s a good faith. We’ll say it’s in good fun. So maybe, maybe we should do that. We’re going to, we’re going to make a Billy Graham version of us talking about Ministry Maximizer. We’ll have Billy Graham talking about my, about, I don’t know, whatever we talked in this podcast. So maybe. It sounds, why not? We’ll make it funny. We will do it in a respectful manner.

[54:55] Carla Green: Maybe somebody that couldn’t sue us, like Martin Luther or something. Maybe we can go further.

[55:00] David Maples: Martin Luther’s easy, except what is he going to, is he going to speak German? You know, I guess. So, so here’s, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to record it right now. It’s going to be like, “Hi, I’m Martin Luther, and I want to talk to you about, gee, I wish I’d had Ministry Maximizer in 1535.”

[55:18] Carla Green: That’s right.

[55:19] David Maples: I should look and see, when did Martin Luther live? Let me look. 1535, he’s still alive. In ’46 he dies. So I’m going to, totally. So I need an older Martin Luther who talks about this in 1535.

[55:35] Carla Green: Instead of his 99 theses, it’s 100 theses now because we’re putting Ministry Maximizer in.

[55:39] David Maples: Yes, Ministry Maximizer is something. If I could nail this to the door of a church right now, Ministry Maximizer would be the next thesis on there.

[55:47] Carla Green: Exactly. Look at us, we’re historically relevant.

[55:51] David Maples: Yes. I could do that. I still like the Billy Graham idea. I mean, look, if they sue us, they’ll sue us, but I don’t think they’ll be… they probably just tell us to take it down. I don’t know. I mean, what are we going to do? I think we should totally do it. I think we should totally do it. Look, we’ll have, we’ll put a conversation between Billy Graham and Martin Luther.

[56:08] Carla Green: Yeah.

[56:09] David Maples: That would be interesting. I don’t know how he’d feel about that.

[56:11] Carla Green: Come on, that would be cool.

[56:13] David Maples: Yeah.

[56:13] Carla Green: I think…

[56:15] David Maples: That would be really cool.

[56:16] Carla Green: I think I don’t think Billy Graham would have trouble with it. I mean, I don’t know Billy Graham, but why would that be a problem?

[56:21] David Maples: No, I mean, if you could talk to… I mean, look, everybody, if you asked any biblical scholar who they want to talk to, the short answer is Jesus, but you know, that’s easy. But like, I want to talk… I want to… I want to have… see, like, who would you talk to in the Bible? Like, who would you want to go talk to?

[56:38] Carla Green: Who would I want to talk to in the Bible? I would probably say one of the disciples, or Paul. Probably Paul, and then maybe King David or Solomon.

[56:50] David Maples: Got it. I want to talk…

[56:51] Carla Green: Or I want to talk to a woman, like Esther or Ruth. Come on.

[56:53] David Maples: Yeah, you could totally do that.

[56:56] Carla Green: Or Deborah, really. Let’s talk about Deborah because like, she’s this amazing prophet, judge, and there’s like two verses. Like, I want to know why she didn’t get more because there’s got to be more to her life than just those two verses or however many verses there were.

[57:09] David Maples: Is there any other historical stuff about Deborah?

[57:11] Carla Green: I’m not sure.

[57:12] David Maples: I wonder if we could create some, we could create some video content around this stuff on social media, like with a… Dude, we could totally create some really cool stuff right now, historically, maybe not accurate, but based on like conversations they might have had, right?

[57:28] Carla Green: Right.

[57:29] David Maples: Dude, we could create some really cool biblical stuff. Like, I’ve got to show you some of the stuff we’ve got. By the way, any of you out there, if you come to one of our webinars too, I’ll tell you about all this stuff if you want to know about it. But I don’t know, I think about like, like it sounds kind of bad. It’s like one of the Roman centurions when they’re crucifying Christ, like, “What do you really think about this?” Because you know all these guys weren’t totally gung ho about this, right?

[57:51] Carla Green: No, no. Well, I mean, the centurion who’s, you know, who Jesus healed his slave, like you know he wouldn’t be.

[57:59] David Maples: Yeah, but I mean, that’s the whole thing, right? It’s like, it’s like if you could be a fly on the wall at this time, right? Or or like when the, when the temple falls in Jerusalem, you know, like there’s, there’s so many amazing historical events that we could… And all we, all we have… So a lot of biblical stuff, like we’ve got the gospels, and then we’ve got, there’s some, like Josephus, there’s a few Romans who wrote about what was going on in Judea at the time, right? But it’s like, and so like, look, I’m into this history of Rome thing right now because it really is, it is very interesting because Judea is a very big crossroads, there’s a lot of, there’s some stuff going on there. But it’s, it’s really interesting how all this stuff works into the machinations of the emperors and things like that. And it’s just, I just think this stuff’s really interesting. But to go back and talk to people in the Bible, like what’s, like a lesser-known apostle? Like what are they thinking, you know?

[58:56] Carla Green: Or Barnabas. Like, I feel like even Barnabas, who was the encourager, and like how he walked with people and encouraged them and, you know, he didn’t get a lot of time in the Bible, you know, I’d want to know about that. So, but yeah.

[59:08] David Maples: There’s a lot of really cool stuff. I think there’s probably a lot of cool stuff we can explore with this. And maybe we should for Ministry Maximizer, as like promotional stuff. And we could, I don’t know, the Deborah stuff, is there any other… that would be really interesting to know kind of what those communications would have been.

[59:27] Carla Green: I mean, there’s just so many, there’s a lot of women that are mentioned in the Bible that I think had huge roles that don’t really get a huge play. You know, like Lydia or Priscilla in the New Testament, who were probably pastors in their town because they were, they had house churches. You know, or, you know, Joanna, the ones that financed Jesus’s ministry. Like, what was that like? You know. So, yeah, so there’s just, there’s a lot. There’s a lot.

[59:57] David Maples: I don’t know, this is kind of exciting because now I’m thinking about like, huh, other ways we could explore this. And I know we’re boring anybody in the audience right now who’s still listening is like, “What are we, they’re just talking about stuff.”

[01:00:09] Carla Green: That’s right. We’re just, well, no, we do this. Like we have like, this is where our ideas come from.

[01:00:14] David Maples: Yeah.

[01:00:15] Carla Green: But I was thinking, I think it’s important, like there’s so much out there that we could be doing. Like I could get off now and go watch TV and some rerun that I’ve already probably watched of something. But to think about like what’s, to wonder about the characters and have AI kind of build what’s out there and do study about it, like why not? Like why not do more of that? I mean, there’s people who’ve written books on characters and expounded on them and didn’t really have more than just the research or what they felt like the Holy Spirit was saying to them, or made it more of a novel. So…

[01:00:50] David Maples: I want to share something with you. Have you seen the Lego Bible?

[01:00:53] Carla Green: Okay, our other co-host is MIA.

[01:00:56] David Maples: It’s called The Brick Bible.

[01:01:01] Carla Green: Oh, nice. The New Testament.

[01:01:03] David Maples: Does it fall apart when you pick it up?

[01:01:04] Carla Green: No.

[01:01:05] David Maples: They made the entire New Testament as Lego characters, like a graphic novel.

[01:01:10] Carla Green: That is so cool.

[01:01:12] David Maples: And I got this years ago because I was like, you got to be kidding me, right? So it’s the New Testament, right? And it’s not all of the scripture, but it’s a lot of it. Like easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, so it is literally that, you know, someone did that. But the thing that’s crazy about it, and I was like, it’s kind of a really cool way… I mean, maybe the kids wouldn’t think it’s cool now because this is probably like 10 years old, but it was a way to make things more accessible to kids. And I thought that was really a neat thing. And so I bought it years ago, and it’s, you know, it’s just, I thought it was a really cool thing. And so, so if you want to go buy it, I’m sure it’s available on Amazon or something.

[01:01:52] Carla Green: Well, and actually, kids’ Bibles, there’s a beginner Bible that I have that’s like it pretty much goes through the Bible, but it tells how all the stories end up like, that connect to Jesus. And I always, I always point those, that Bible to new Christians because if you haven’t been raised in the church, you don’t know the stories, you want to catch up with knowing some of that, reading that children’s Bible is probably one of the best ways of getting a better grip on biblical stories, having some reference when preachers are talking. And so I highly recommend a children’s Bible for new Christians or even for Christians who haven’t really been in the Bible because that will give you a quicker snapshot of it than you when you go back and read it, you’ll have context for what you’re reading.

[01:02:39] David Maples: Very cool. That’s just a freebie on this podcast. So we are promoting other things on the pod, none of which we have any relation to at all. So, kind of, so what we’re going to talk about on the next episode is that we’ve talked a little bit about critical stuff. We’ll probably dive a little bit more into that, and then we’re going to talk about smart outreach, using data analytics, kind of looking in your own database at your church, looking at what your data is on your parishioners and things like that because we think that we’ve talked about this a little bit, but there’s a lot of information in there that can help improve your church right now. If you’re financially struggling, how have you engaged the people in your church? It’s not just about money, right? It’s about engagement. Because if they’re engaged, they give. Unless something else is happening in the world, they give. When you haven’t engaged them, that’s when things start to fall off. And usually that is very apparent in your church rolls. You know, how have you reached out to the people in your church? How have you ministered to them, etc.? So we’re going to discuss that a little bit more about how you can use data analytics, how you can use that ethically, and look at doing other things.

[01:03:54] David Maples: And by the way, just so you can do this, I’m going to pitch Carla for a second here. Activate the Church is her not-for-profit, and she actually provides consulting for churches on how they can increase their reach and their efficacy. And she actually takes kind of a top-down look and a holistic look, for lack of a better term, and what you can do more effectively in your church. Everything from you’re having trouble getting people to give, you’re having trouble putting butts in pews, you’re having trouble figuring out like where do you expand next? Do you get a second location or do you expand the current… what is the thing is called? You add pews, I don’t know, do you expand the, whatever it is. Do you increase the size of your facility? Do you add on rooms for Sunday schools? Or do you open another church somewhere else? And the answer is maybe both. But that’s stuff that Carla does. So I just want to kind of give her a plug, and she’s been so gracious to help start this entire thing with me. It’s been kind of a crazy journey, and we’ve just now, like I said, we just launched pretty recently. And it’s cool. It’s exciting. It’s exciting times to be involved in this stuff. So but with that, I think that brings us to the end of the episode. Do you have anything else you’d like to add, Carla?

[01:05:07] Carla Green: No, just thank you for all of that. And I do think it’s time to start looking at how we look at our churches, and there’s just been an article out, I probably need to put it in the comments about how the generation under the millennials are coming back to church. Yeah, structured church, and are you ready for it? Like, are you ready to receive what’s coming to you? And I think Ministry Maximizer is one way, but I think there might be others too. And it’s time for us to take a hard look at are we prepared for the harvest coming to us in our churches to meet the needs of what they’ve been going through in their young lives? And we have a lot of work to do.

[01:05:53] David Maples: So the question is, do you have the ‘rizz’ to engage the new kids, or is your entire ministry ‘sus’? So we should…

[01:06:01] Carla Green: I’m too old for that language. I’m sure it means something to somebody.

[01:06:05] David Maples: Yes. By the way, if you’re one of those members out there, let us know how much it made you cringe or how cringe that was. I’m sorry, I’m trying to use the right language to do this. I am learning. There’s like 100 different words I have to learn now.

[01:06:18] Carla Green: Can’t you just shorten them, like ‘def’?

[01:06:21] David Maples: No, it’s not, I mean, ‘rizz’ is charisma, ‘sus’ means suspicious, but like ‘cap’ and ‘no cap,’ you know, there’s…

[01:06:31] Carla Green: I need to know. These words create worlds, and those aren’t creating much world.

[01:06:35] David Maples: Yeah, well, like, you know, but Carla, that’s pretty funny. So I’m ‘dead,’ and that’s, it just, it’s, but it’s interesting stuff, right? Ministry Maximizer can help you communicate with them. You can put it in Ministry Maximizer and say a whole bunch of Gen Z people came to my church and said the following. Just record it and feed it in and say, “What does this mean?”

[01:06:56] Carla Green: You need to translate it into this short lingo.

[01:06:57] David Maples: Yeah, we should come up with a translation app. The new AirPods have real-time translation. We should have them translate Gen Z. There’s probably a product for that we just came up with. You’re welcome if you’re listening to the pod.

[01:07:10] Carla Green: That’s right. And thank you for the time that you have given us that we have rambled.

[01:07:13] David Maples: Yes. Everybody else out there, I’m sure we’ll get tons of bad comments. Give us three stars and tell us about how bad this podcast was.

[01:07:20] Carla Green: It was a critic one.

[01:07:22] David Maples: Yeah, totally. I’m totally down for it. Just barely average. But with that, thank you for spending your time with us today. We really appreciate you being here. Next week, the next episode, we will talk more about data analytics and outreach in your community, about how to use it ethically, ways to go about doing it. And for a lot of people, that episode’s going to meet you where you’re at. You could be a very advanced ministry that has very advanced analytics, or you might have everything in a shoebox, or you might have a small ministry where everything is written in a spiral-bound notebook. Step one, we need to digitize that. But we will talk more about that. But we’ve got ways to possibly do that in Ministry Maximizer. So I haven’t talked about that, but I’ve got some things I’ve built recently that we’re going to put in there. So cool stuff. Well, with that, thank you very much for listening. I’m David.

[01:08:12] Carla Green: And I’m Carla.

[01:08:14] David Maples: Go out there and be awesome and listen, engage those ministries.

[01:08:18] Carla Green: See you.