One of my favorite parenting moments.

For two years, the slowest part of my week was everything that happened after the Sunday sermon was preached. The video edit. The transcript. The blog post. The podcast. The social clips. Close to two hours a week, and none of it is the actual message. 🧵

This quote, from @jenwilkin and J.T English's book 'You are a Theologian', is so relevant for the Church today:

The critique I keep hearing of using AI in ministry: the more you rely on AI, the lazier your thinking gets. You stop wrestling with a text and start outsourcing it. You stop forming your own ideas and start borrowing ones that were generated for you.

Repentance = Good News New post: open.substack.com/pub/darrenro...

For years, I've been dumping notes into Obsidian. Research, sermon prep, half-formed ideas, quotes I didn't want to lose. Thousands of notes, carefully organised. And mostly sitting there doing nothing.

NEW: Believe: The Word I Thought I Knew darrenrowse.substack.com/p/believe-th...

Henri Nouwen said the spiritual life is not about giving something up. It is about being drawn toward someone. Prayer, meditation, all of it, exists to keep your eyes on Jesus. Not as a technique. Not as a duty. As a way of staying familiar with a face worth knowing.

The yoke is the rest... darrenrowse.substack.com/p/the-yoke-i...

I've been quietly refining an AI sermon research prompt for two years. A few people asked me to share it, so here it is, along with what I've learned along the way. (This is about researching sermons, not writing them. Worth saying upfront.) 🧵

NEW: The Sermon Research Prompt I Use Each Time I Preach darrenrowse.com/posts/the-se...

New on the blog. How I used #ClaudeCode to build an interactive HTML page to explore the life of Jesus.

I've been doing a study on the life of Jesus, working through events chronologically, and picked up Cox & Easley's Harmony of the Gospels as my guide. Somewhere along the way I thought: I wonder what Claude Code could do with all this data.

NEW: The Leap - What I Preached on Sunday open.substack.com/pub/darrenro...

Each year, we survey our church to get a snapshot of the health of our community. The last 3 years I've used AI to help analyse the data and each year it's improved the process. Today I got Claude Code to do the last survey for me, and it blew me away with how well it did it.

PASTORS: I'm 5 articles into my 'AI for Ministry' series. What other questions do you have that it'd be helpful to have answered in a future essay?

NEW: How I Debrief Every Sermon with AI (And What It’s Teaching Me About My Preaching) 👉 darrenrowse.com/posts/how-i-...

Two Bible apps. Zero lines of code written by me.

NEW: How I Built Two Free Bible Apps with Claude Code darrenrowse.com/posts/how-i-...

Someone says it most days. "I knew I recognised you, you're the blogging guy, right?" Yeah. That was me. From 2002 to 2024, I ran ProBlogger and Digital Photography School. Long run. Proud of it. But the story didn't stop there.

Next post in my AI for Ministry series is scheduled for tonight. Another one on using Claude Code to build tools.

Pastors: What stage of preaching are you at? There are 39 to choose from! stages.darrenrowse.com

I connected an AI assistant to my Obsidian vault. Here's what happened. I'm a pastor, not a coder. I have thousands of notes in Obsidian spanning sermons, research, quotes, and half-formed ideas. 🧵

Words used to be enough on their own. Scroll any feed now. Everything needs a visual. An image, a GIF, a meme, a video, a string of emojis. As if the words alone can't carry the weight anymore. Maybe they can't? That feels like a loss.

NEW: How I Connected Claude Code to My Obsidian Vault: A Guide for Non-Coders 👉 darrenrowse.com/posts/how-i-...

Most "light-bulb moments" aren't actually sudden. They're the result of a process that happens partly in your conscious mind, and partly without you even knowing it. Here's the five-stage process I've noticed behind most breakthroughs:

Pastors: Do you currently use AI in your work? 1. No, and I never will 2. Not yet, but I'm curious 3. Yes, occasionally 4. Yes, weekly 4. Yes, Daily Would love to hear about your experience with AI.

Claude code users. What is your most used /command? And what does it do? Mine is /process-inbox and it organises my Obsidian vaults inbox which is where I keep all my notes that are quotes, reading notes, meeting notes etc.

God’s love doesn’t arrive after you’ve gotten yourself together. It doesn’t wait for you to become more devout, more humble, more spiritually reliable. It comes first, before the promises, before the progress, before you can prove anything at all.

I'm a 54-year-old pastor. My coding knowledge is a bit of HTML from 20 years of blogging. That's genuinely it. In the last year, I've built six tools that my ministry team uses every week.

Pika (from @goodenough.us) Review: The Simplest Blogging Platform I’ve Used in 20+ Years Here's the review darrenrowse.com/posts/pika-r...

We've been running a series at church called Questioning Christianity that has been getting a lot of positive responses from our members (and those they're bringing to hear it). Here's what we've covered so far: one.org.au/questioning-...

I had the opportunity to share a message about prayer, faith and persistence in the face of injustice yesterday at church. The recording is now up for anyone interested in catching it. one.org.au/blog/the-per...

This year I tried something a little different for my Easter Sunday message - hope you enjoy it one.org.au/blog/easter-...

I’d love to see the billionaire’s WhatsApp group just before he sent this out.

I used to look at the US as a country that was all about stability, leadership, inclusivity, generosity. It’s been a while since I felt that way. This past few weeks it has been quite the opposite. Sad to see.

Well hello there #PentaxMX

This lens was born in the same year I was and it is still going strong. Here's my review

From today’s photo walk shot with the Chinon 55mm f1.7

"And if anyone tries to say that the good news is not about all these things—about freeing slaves, about helping the poor, about reconciling warring factions, ethnic groupings, and whole nations, about looking after the blessed world we live on and in..." 1/2

Took out the Schneider Kreuznach Edixa-Tele-Xenar 135mm f3.5 (which I picked up at a camera market on Sunday) tonight for a first whirl - first impressions are good!

Camera nerd heaven at the Melbourne Camera show.

There's a whole generation of photographers who have never focused a camera manually. This lost art is one of the biggest challenges for those trying vintage lenses - so I wrote a post with tips on how to do it. open.substack.com/pub/rowse/p/...

When the opportunity for bird photography presents closer to home than you expect and all you have on your camera is a 50mm lens! Thank goodness for a high-megapixel sensor that lets you crop and still get some details.

When you track a parcel (new lens) from Tasmania… 😊 to your state and then to your suburb… 😃 only to see it do a 180 turn and return to Tasmania due to incorrect addressing! 🤦‍♂️

Substack growth - slowly but surely. Interestingly enough, today I noticed I've started to get a trickle of Google traffic. substack

When I first saw this lens… my heart sank. When I saw the images it took… my heart soared! open.substack.com/pub/rowse/p/...

Current View

Not all things ask to be seen. Some drift at the edges, soft, shapeless, unconcerned with clarity. Golden echoes hum in the green, whispering between what is and what is not. They do not beg for form, yet they remain. .

My wife on our walk today: “You have photographed that tree three Saturdays in a row!” Yes I have. But with three lenses!