Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Software?

I come from a business background. I’m process-oriented to my core. When I look at any organization — for-profit, nonprofit, church, charity — I see a collection of processes that operate, ostensibly, to achieve the mission of the entity. And those processes use technology, when it’s available, for the sake of efficiency and effectiveness.

Nobody uses paper ledgers anymore. We have accounting systems. Engineers don’t draft by hand on vellum. They use tools like Fusion 360. Hospitals don’t keep patient records in filing cabinets. Every industry has moved its core processes onto technology because the mission is too important to be bottlenecked by manual work.

Every industry except one.

The Church Has Software for Everything Around the Mission

The church software ecosystem is actually quite robust. There are excellent tools serving churches right now, and I want to acknowledge them because they do important work.

ProPresenter handles worship production — getting lyrics and media on screen during services. Planning Center coordinates volunteers, scheduling, and people management. As a drummer, I have logged in to Planning Center plenty of times. Tithely and Pushpay process giving and donations. Subsplash powers church apps and streaming. Logos and Accordance provide deep personal Bible study tools for pastors and scholars. Breeze and ChurchTrac manage the CRM side — who’s here, who’s in what group, who needs follow-up. And behind all of it, there’s the usual back-office infrastructure: accounting, email, websites, communication platforms.

These tools matter. You need to manage volunteers, process donations, stream services, coordinate teams, and keep the books. I’m grateful for every one of them.

But if you step back and look at that list through a process lens, something becomes obvious: every single one of those tools serves the operational infrastructure of the church. The wrapper. The machinery that keeps the organization running.

None of them serve the core process.

What’s the Core Process of a Church?

If you asked a hospital what its core process is, the answer would be patient care. Not billing. Not scheduling. Not the patient portal. Those are essential supporting processes, but the hospital exists to diagnose, treat, and heal.

I used to work in the offshore drilling industry. No, not actually on a rig… I was office-bound. But you ask a driller what their core process is and they’ll say, “turning right”. Meaning, the bit should be turning to the right. That’s how they make money

If you asked a church what its core process is, the honest answer should be something like: proclaiming the Kingdom of God. Teaching the Word. Making disciples. The pipeline that flows from pastoral direction through lesson preparation through classroom delivery through learner engagement and into the lives of families and communities.

That’s the thing the church exists to do. Everything else supports it.

And that pipeline — from the pastor’s study to the learner’s life — is essentially unserved by software.

Think about that for a moment. The most important process in the church has the least technological support. Churches have invested in software for every supporting function except the one that defines the mission. It’s as if a hospital had world-class billing, a beautiful patient portal, and an automated scheduling system — but the doctors were still diagnosing with handwritten notes and no access to shared records.

The Point Solutions

Now, to be fair, there are AI tools that have entered the church space in recent years. Several of them help with sermon preparation. They can generate outlines, suggest illustrations, offer commentary, and speed up the writing process.

These are useful tools. They serve a real need. And for a pastor who’s staring at a blank page on Saturday night, they can be a lifeline.

But they are exactly that: point solutions. They help one person do one thing faster. They don’t address the broader system. They don’t connect the pastor’s direction to the Sunday school teacher’s preparation. They don’t ensure that the youth class and the adult class and the children’s ministry are all encountering the same scriptures and the same core teaching on a given Sunday. They don’t account for the theological convictions of the church, the specific context of the teacher’s classroom, or the formational journey of the learner over weeks and months.

A sermon outline tool is to teaching ministry what a calculator is to financial planning. It’s helpful in the moment. But it’s not a system.

Why Technology Matters Here

Some people hear “technology for ministry” and instinctively push back. “The Holy Spirit doesn’t need software,” they’ll say. And they’re right. He doesn’t.

But the Holy Spirit also didn’t need Roman roads. He didn’t need the printing press. He didn’t need the Bible to be translated into a thousand languages using software tools. And yet, God’s people have used every one of those technologies to advance the Kingdom. Not because the Spirit was insufficient, but because the tools removed friction so the work could go further.

That’s what technology does at its best. It doesn’t replace the sacred work. It clears the path so the sacred work can happen.

The technology exists today to do something that wasn’t possible even five years ago: to understand context, to adapt content for different audiences, to synthesize scholarly research in seconds, to coordinate teaching direction across an entire church body. AI, natural language processing, semantic analysis — these aren’t science fiction anymore. They’re mature, available, and deeply capable. The tools are here. The question is whether the church will use them for its core mission or continue reserving them for the operations around it.

The Broken Piano

There’s a song from some years ago titled “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?” It was a provocation: why do secular artists get the best production, the best creativity, the best talent, while the church settles for less?

I feel the same way about technology and software in the church. And honestly, it’s a pattern I’ve seen play out in more tangible ways too.

It has always bothered me when someone donates an old piano to the church — one they’d never keep in their own living room. Or a broken-down drum set with cracked cymbals and a torn kick head. The implicit message is: “Well, either we throw it away or we give it to the church.” As if the church is where things go when they’re no longer good enough for us.

It shouldn’t be that way. God has blessed us richly. We should return our best to Him and to others. Not our leftovers. Not our cast-offs. Our best.

And when it comes to the tools we use to teach, to prepare, to coordinate the ministry of the Word across a church body — why would we settle for a blank page and a Saturday night scramble when the technology exists to do so much better?

What We’re Building

This is why I’m building Appostolic.

Not to replace the pastor. Not to automate the spiritual work of teaching. Not to generate sermons by machine. But to serve the entire teaching pipeline of the church — the core process that everything else is built around.

A pastor sets a vision and a teaching direction. Teachers across age groups prepare lessons that align with that direction — adapted for their specific classrooms, their specific people, their specific context. Learners engage with the material. Families discuss the same themes around the dinner table. And the whole arc of a church’s teaching ministry moves forward with coherence, without the pastor needing to micromanage every classroom.

That’s not a point solution. That’s a system built for the core process.

I’m a business person. I think in processes and systems. And I’ve come to believe that the process-oriented view of the world that God gave me — the instinct to see how things flow, where the bottlenecks are, where technology can remove friction — wasn’t just for the corporate world. It was preparation for this. For building something that serves the thing the church exists to do, with the same seriousness and craft that the best software companies bring to their domains.

Don’t we owe that to the mission? Don’t we owe it to the Sunday school teacher who spends six hours on a lesson that reaches twelve kids? Don’t we owe it to the pastor who carries the weight of an entire church’s teaching direction on his shoulders alone? Don’t we owe it to the God who gave us the message in the first place?

The church has software for everything around the mission. It’s time it had software for the mission itself.

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Appostolic is the first platform built for the teaching and proclamation pipeline of the church — from pastoral direction through classroom delivery to learner engagement.