New AI Tool for Pastors, Leaders, and Everyday Christians with Austin Armstrong and Kenny Jahng

Episode Summary: 
This episode features Austin Armstrong, serial entrepreneur and founder of Bibley, joining host Kenny Jahng to dive into the power of AI-driven tools for church leaders and Bible enthusiasts. 

Together they explore how innovative platforms like Bibley are transforming sermon preparation, personal Bible study, and digital ministry outreach. Listeners will discover actionable ways to leverage technology in practical, affordable ways—and hear strategies directly relevant to pastors, church tech teams, and faith-based communicators. If you want to make ministry more effective and accessible through digital tools, this conversation is for you.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:
How AI-powered Bible study tools are streamlining sermon prep and lesson planning
What makes Bibley unique with “27 different tools and use cases” for Scripture engagement
How to use features like the Sermon Builder, Biblical Character Study, and Memory Verse Mnemonics for teaching and discipleship
Ways pastors, Bible study leaders, and everyday church members can benefit from AI-driven resources
Why affordable tools, like Bibley’s $5/month plan, are lowering barriers for every church
The critical importance of consistent digital content and video in modern ministry outreach
Practical tactics for repurposing sermons and staying top-of-mind in your online community

Key Quotes: 
“Consistency is like compound interest; the more you do, the easier it gets, and the more effective it becomes.” — Austin Armstrong
“Video is the new black. All churches need to invest in video in 2025.” — Kenny Jahng

Links & Resources Mentioned: 
Bibley — https://bibley.io 

Syllabi — https://syllabi.io 

Opus Clip (for sermon video editing)

SermonShots — http://www.sermonshots.com/kenny

About the Church Tech Today Podcast: 
The Church Tech Today Podcast helps pastors, church staff, and ministry leaders navigate the intersection of faith and technology with confidence. Hosted by Kenny Jahng and brought to you by www.ministrylibrary.com.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Kenny Jahng [00:00:04]:
Hey friends, it’s that time again. Kenny Jahng, Here we are in the church tech today universe with AI and one of the things that I was able to do this is the power of social friends. I was able to get on a platform, learn about a new tool and then immediately connect with the founder. And this is somebody that actually been following from afar. It’s one of those things where hey, hey. One day I’m going to eventually meet him in person and compare the profile pic to the human. But I’ve got Austin Armstrong on today. Welcome Austin.

Kenny Jahng [00:00:35]:
How you doing, Kenny?

Austin Armstrong [00:00:37]:
Thank you so much man. I’m doing great. It’s so fascinating how quickly line this up to your point, right? I posted about Bibley yesterday. You left a comment, I immediately messaged you and here we are 24 hours later doing that. So that’s the power of the Internet.

Kenny Jahng [00:00:54]:
This is the power of the Internet and in terms of the entrepreneurship, the reason why I love everything doing and following and everyone. We’ll drop all his links below. But there is a bias for action that I think we both share. And I love the fact that you’re also have I say two clicks forward in terms of generosity of just sharing knowledge and everything that you’re doing with people that you have this posture of really openness, open handedness in terms of something of scarcity. And so just thank you for everything that you are doing for all the people that you influence. So let’s get right to today. The thing that piqued my interest is that you are out. I think in the general sphere at least that’s how I’ve encountered you sharing about social and AI and entrepreneurship, et cetera.

Kenny Jahng [00:01:44]:
But you launched a tool for pastors that is specifically bible centered and so I wanted to bring you on. So why don’t you just share? So wait a minute, let me back up for this credit. I’m just so excited. Austin, can you just give us the 30 second elevator pitch of who you are, what you’re doing, how you’re conquering the world out there?

Austin Armstrong [00:02:04]:
Yeah, sure. So my name is Austin Armstrong and I am a social media addict. Now I’ve been doing this for 20 years now, which is kind of crazy. I stumbled into social media in its infancy when I was 14 on MySpace, jumped in immediately, started growing large followings and figured out how to monetize on MySpace at 14, 15, 16 years old. I was in the marketing agency space for about 11 years. I started growing my personal brand really online seven years ago and can you still hear me? It said Failed to detect my audio. Okay, sorry about that.

Kenny Jahng [00:02:50]:
This audio is actually better.

Austin Armstrong [00:02:53]:
Oh, cool. Okay. Zoom. Yeah, it just popped up for some reason, but yeah. So I started growing my personal brand about six, six and a half, seven years ago now, really initially blew up on TikTok, adopted that to other platforms, got fascinated in the AI space a little over three years ago now. I launched my first AI tool a little bit longer than two years ago called Syllabi, which lets you create, schedule, publish and automate videos to social media. And I had gotten to a point where I was able to be a successful affiliate marketer for a lot of different AI and software tools and had the idea, well, if I’m so successful with affiliate marketing, why not create the tools myself and own them and see what happens that way. And so now I’ve become kind of a serial entrepreneur and I build micro SaaS tools outside of Syllabi as well to just sort of help people.

Austin Armstrong [00:03:56]:
That’s what it’s all about. We create tools where, yes, we’re testing different markets and testing different ideas, but entrepreneurship is really about problem solving, seeing a need for something and jumping in and trying to help people. And so that’s kind of the last 20 years.

Kenny Jahng [00:04:14]:
I love it. I love it. So, by the way, you guys have to check out Syllabi at Syllabi IO, a great tool to check out, but we’re not here to talk about that today. We’re here to talk about another one. Why don’t you share with us the Bible tool that you actually have launched at this point?

Austin Armstrong [00:04:29]:
Yeah, yeah. Can I share my screen?

Kenny Jahng [00:04:31]:
Yes, absolutely.

Austin Armstrong [00:04:33]:
Perfect. Okay. Yeah. So this, this tool is called Bibley. So it’s Bibley IO and we train this on the Bible and there are a lot. There’s actually 27 different tools and use cases within it. So you can use it as AI powered Bible study tool. Let me show you.

Austin Armstrong [00:04:55]:
Kind of just immediately jumping in. So there’s a lot of these tools in here. Apologetics helper, end time analysis, sermon builder, biblical character study, Biblical festival explainer, biblical name meanings. I don’t need to shout all of these. I’ll kind of go through and we can test some of them. But it’s really just designed to give you a better understanding of the Bible. It’s been fascinating. We actually just launched it yesterday and it’s been amazing to see how much interest there is so far.

Kenny Jahng [00:05:34]:
Absolutely. Now, in this space, I think the AI front is just beginning to, to get the exposure it probably deserves in front of pastors and Church staff. And if you’ve been following along our channel and all the things that we’re doing in AI for church leaders, there’s tons of new developments coming out. But this tool in particular I think was interesting to me because it actually is one of those things where it’s almost like a Swiss army life. Instead of taking the approach of a, there’s an app for that and going down a very specific path. You actually have a diversity of use cases. And I’d love to hear like, how did that come about? Like where, where did that product development plan come about? And are you planning to add like, what’s the next step? Because you’d have a, you have a definite, a great palette of tools. But I can see how now you can go in so many different directions from here.

Austin Armstrong [00:06:26]:
Yeah. So the original idea came from, we actually built this infrastructure out for an entirely different idea around relationship relationship coaching. So we partnered with an influencer about a year ago to create a tool called Pocket Communication Coach. And what that does, we, we trained it off of this relationship coach shout out to Ken Canyon, his expertise. He’s been a relationship coach for like 20 plus years. Absolutely brilliant guy. And so we created all of these different tools of how to talk to your spouse, how to solve workplace problems, talk to co workers. How do I communicate better based on how he would answer that.

Austin Armstrong [00:07:11]:
And so it’s like having a relationship coach in your pocket. And so once we have the infrastructure in place, we could kind of replicate it for different industries and plug and play. So that’s, that’s really where the original idea came from is okay, well, I know a lot of people in the church space. I come from a Christian background myself. I was, I was raised Christian and grew up that way my, my whole life. And I know a whole lot of people that are in this space. And I’ve been connected with a lot of faith based content creators and people trying to bring AI and content creation into the church and bridge that gap between religion and social media and AI. And I thought it was a really cool opportunity to bridge that gap and create a really cool tool that helps a lot of people, hopefully.

Austin Armstrong [00:08:05]:
And so where we’re going with it too, it’s really just based on where our users go. I mean that’s one of the things or what our users are interested in. That’s one of the things that’s really carried syllabi so far is I have always been a build in public type of guy. You mentioned my transparency and that’s what this is all about. I’m not a greed person. I just want to help people. And so, you know, it’s going to depend on what the interests are. We always have that, that dialogue.

Austin Armstrong [00:08:35]:
If there’s a feature that you want, let us, let us know. We’ll, we’ll make, we’ll probably make it happen. There’s a lot we can do with synergies of like video creation. So we could create videos on different sermons or allow you to connect your social media accounts to it and publish some of these things out there. There’s a lot of different directions that we can go. But it really, I’m just interested to see how people use it and what people would like to see out of it.

Kenny Jahng [00:09:06]:
I love it and I’ll just call this out. Pastors are always looking for affordable tools and you’ve chosen the business model that I think is affordable to every single person listening in today that I think the premium plan is as low as 4.99amonth. Right. It’s not expensive. It’s something that is within reach of everybody out there.

Austin Armstrong [00:09:28]:
Yeah, five bucks a month or you can purchase an entire year for 41.99 and save 30% which gives you and everything’s unlimited access as well. We’re not nickel and diamond yet. Just have fun with it. Use it now.

Kenny Jahng [00:09:43]:
What about. So let me, let me ask you, what about the use cases? Is this mostly for a pastor or is this for Bible study leader or is it for a congregation member?

Austin Armstrong [00:09:57]:
I think honestly it’s for anyone that wants to get the most out of the Bible. And so maybe we can dive in and kind of do like a little demo of some of the tools if that would be helpful for the audience. Let’s go with the sermon builder first. Every tool on here has a little example of how it works and some example queries. Kenny, why don’t you give me a topic of sermon focus.

Kenny Jahng [00:10:26]:
What about friendships? Like what? How do you develop deep, meaningful friendships? I think that’s one of the things that this generations in front of us are so lonely and isolated. They don’t, they’ve forgotten the art of friendships.

Austin Armstrong [00:10:42]:
I love that. Okay, so this is going to immediately start to outline the structure of the sermon for you and you can of course customize it. Now forgive my computer here, I have a million tabs open so it’ll catch up in just a second here.

Kenny Jahng [00:11:02]:
And so this, what I love about your tool though is just so clean. The UI ux, the user experience has just been simplified I guess. So it’s not cluttered.

Austin Armstrong [00:11:13]:
Thank you. Yeah, you know, we, we’ve done a lot of user interviews with a lot of these tools and so we try to make it as simple as possible. But here’s our sermon example and you can customize this however you’d like, but there’s an introduction here. You can give an opening, anecdotal story, thesis statement, biblical references and the verses that you can pull from here, main points of the sermon and then a conclusion, final thoughts. And you can use this to save a whole lot of time.

Kenny Jahng [00:11:50]:
Yeah. And then you can just click copy and put this into Google Docs and work on it further, right?

Austin Armstrong [00:11:56]:
Yep, yep, absolutely. There’s a one click copy button there, right here on the right hand side. You can also share this document with somebody if you’d like. But yeah, it’s just as simple as copying and pasting that over into a Google Doc and feel free to customize it however you’d like.

Kenny Jahng [00:12:13]:
Awesome. What about the tools for personal study? So if you are an actual congregation member and you’re trying to go down maybe. I think the tool that I liked was. I think you have a biblical character tool.

Austin Armstrong [00:12:29]:
Yeah, Biblical character study. All right, give me a character.

Kenny Jahng [00:12:35]:
Habakkuk.

Austin Armstrong [00:12:37]:
How do you spell that?

Kenny Jahng [00:12:38]:
H A B A K U K H A B A K U K. Or maybe it’s KK uk. There you go. It found it.

Austin Armstrong [00:12:51]:
There you go. Cool. Yeah. So we can see Habakkuk is one of the 12 minor prophets in the Old Testament of the Bible, recognized for his profound contributions and understanding, faith, justice and God’s sovereignty. Here’s an overview of him, including his roles, key qualities and of course my browser keeps crashing there, so just give it a second. There we go. So we can see his role, role in biblical events. Here we can see key qualities about him.

Austin Armstrong [00:13:25]:
Significant life events as documented spiritual lessons, key verses that he’s mentioned and contributions. Now I will also say this is AI generated and so always do some fact checking along that as well just in case there’s potential inaccuracies. It’s very good. But there could be some things that are slightly skewed. So always keep that in mind with AI.

Kenny Jahng [00:13:51]:
And is this mobile friendly? If I’m on the go, if I’m in a cafe or even church or Bible study group. How does this play on a mobile device?

Austin Armstrong [00:14:03]:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s completely mobile friendly. It’s in browser. You actually just gave me a great idea. We might turn this into an app so you could just use it as a downloadable App rather than in the web browser.

Kenny Jahng [00:14:16]:
I love it. So if someone is actually looking at all these tools here, where do you. Where would you suggest that people start? Like, what’s the first place to start? Because I think there’s so many goodies in here. Some are obviously, I think have the sweet spot of utilizing AI. What? Any suggestions?

Austin Armstrong [00:14:38]:
Well, I think it depends on how you want to use it and what your purpose are for. You can look your name up in here. That’s a fun little way to get started. So if we do John, we’ll find a bunch of references of the name John.

Kenny Jahng [00:14:58]:
I love that.

Austin Armstrong [00:14:59]:
Yeah. So you can research. If you have a biblical name, you can research that in here.

Kenny Jahng [00:15:03]:
I could see families doing that with their kids.

Austin Armstrong [00:15:06]:
Absolutely, Absolutely.

Kenny Jahng [00:15:11]:
I love it.

Austin Armstrong [00:15:12]:
Information there. Yeah. I mean, psalm study guide, moral guidance. You can use it for prayer assistance, prayer request, helper.

Kenny Jahng [00:15:26]:
Oh, can we try the memory verse? That was something that we saw that was interesting. That other. I don’t think other tools have gotten to this section yet. So why don’t we just start with the standard John 3:16? Yeah. The mnemonics, I think is really good. So I could see how leaders, even parents, pastors, can go to this tool and even use this with their families or with their groups or even by themselves. Right. And to actually use this as a challenge, you know, run contests and that.

Austin Armstrong [00:16:17]:
Yeah. Try and memorize one verse a day.

Kenny Jahng [00:16:19]:
Yeah. You could text these out. Right. Copy, paste and text that out. And just to make sure that everyone has that stays on track all week. So many different ways to use this.

Austin Armstrong [00:16:29]:
That’s actually a great one too. So the. Now that you bring that up, I’ve been a part of some sort of daily devotional text threads before too. So I know some people do that. So if you want to start your day with something, you could type a topic in here and have that sent in your text group or WhatsApp group or whatnot.

Kenny Jahng [00:16:50]:
Well, thank you so much for sharing a view of this app. I think it’s at this cusp of being able to personalize direct access to more resources and personal study, both for the parishioner and for the pastor. Before I let you go, you have so much insight and experience on digital side of community development and all that kind of stuff. I would just ask you what’s one or two things that you might offer in terms of suggestions to the church, to pastors who are trying to reach as many people in their zip codes as possible. What’s one or two things that you would Suggest in terms of their posture or tactics or strategy, something that you would advise a friend. If you came across a pastor at Starbucks and you’re meeting with them regularly, what’s one direction? You would send them off and say, hey, you need to think about this kind of stuff for your own ministry.

Austin Armstrong [00:17:46]:
Yeah, I would record every sermon on video and turn it into short form clips and repurpose those clips across TikTok, YouTube shorts, Facebook Reels, Instagram reels, X every social media platform. You know, if you’re recording a hour, hour and a half sermon, you’re going to get a lot of clips out of it. You could use a tool like Opus Clip to do this very quickly. If you don’t want to have a manual person edit it for you and just post one to two every single day and that will help your accounts grow. That will get the word out there. I’ve even seen churches live stream on YouTube and Facebook. You know, don’t be afraid of video to spread your message.

Kenny Jahng [00:18:35]:
Absolutely. And then I think the golden rule across all social and digital is the keyword consistency. Right. Can you just talk about that? Just why is that so important?

Austin Armstrong [00:18:47]:
Well, it’s like compound interest. Right. The more that you do it, the easier that it gets and the more and more the successful results come from that. And so it’s just a, you know, your number of at bats. The more that you post, the more anecdotal evidence that you’re going to find of what tactics and strategies and types of content actually work online so that you can double down and do more of that thing. It also just allows you to stay top of mind with people on an ongoing basis. There’s a great sort of story that I’m going to butcher about the real estate agent at the family dinner. And cousin Austin is, is saying, I just bought my first house and I’m so excited about this.

Austin Armstrong [00:19:38]:
And the real estate agent cousin says, why didn’t you use me as your real estate agent? And they say, oh yeah, oh gosh, I completely forgot. I just found somebody on Instagram that I’ve really enjoyed their content to use. Right. And so if you are not top of mind, somebody else is.

Kenny Jahng [00:19:57]:
Yeah, so that’s a good word from Austin. Consistency and video. As I always say, video is the new black. You just need to invest in video, Vida video. And I love your sentiment of like it’s all about just the number of at bats you have. You just need to continuously be top of mind. Thank you so much. Austin, as we leave, what’s the best way for people to follow you, to get into your orbit.

Kenny Jahng [00:20:22]:
What’s your native platform, and what are some of the other places that people could see and just enjoy and benefit from the content that you’re putting out?

Austin Armstrong [00:20:30]:
Yeah. Well, thank you so much again for having me on, Kenny. It was an awesome time. My main platform is Facebook, so that’s where I’m most active all day. Austin Armstrong. I am active on every other platform. If you just do a search for Austin Armstrong. I am the nerdy AI with glasses Austin Armstrong.

Austin Armstrong [00:20:49]:
I am not, like hunky stud from LA Austin Armstrong. Nor am I the Florida Gators defensive line coach Austin Armstrong. I’m right there in the middle, the friendly one.

Kenny Jahng [00:21:03]:
So, Austin, hopefully we’ll have you back. Everybody, please let us know what resonated with you in this conversation and what questions do you have. We’ll drill down further and somehow twist Austin’s arm to come back and visit us again here at Church Tech today. Thank you so much, Austin, and thank you, everybody for chiming in. We’ll see you here in the next video.