iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

If you give it a go, I'd love to hear how you find it as I'm going to write this up as a longer blog post at some point and would love to include any feedback you have along the way.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

Note: this is not something you want to do at midnight the night before you preach it. It gives fairly significant feedback, which will take some time to work through and implement.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

Adapt the bracketed bits to your own context, and swap the listeners in section 3 depending on what you're preaching on. That last part is where a lot of the value is.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

Here's the prompt I give it, along with my manuscript, if you want to try it. It'll work with any model (Claude or otherwise), though I'm getting the best results with Fable 5.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

And as always, everything it suggests needs to be weighed with prayer and discernment. It's a coach, not the preacher.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

One thing I've found matters a lot: I ask it to coach, not rewrite. It points to the problem, and with discernment, I solve it. That keeps the sermon in my voice, which I think is the thing most at risk when preachers lean on AI.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

Fable is a real step up. Its feedback has a nuance and depth I haven't seen in other models. It feels less like generic AI feedback and more like notes from a thoughtful colleague who actually read the manuscript closely.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

For a while now, I've been feeding Claude my sermon manuscripts and asking it to coach me: identifying weak spots, flagging questions the sermon leaves unanswered for different hearers, picking up repetition and gaps in the logic, and doing some fact-checking.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

For those of you in ministry using Claude and wondering about the new Fable model: I've been really impressed with it as a sermon coach (I've included a prompt below).

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

One of my favorite parenting moments.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

And expect to go a few rounds. None of it just happens. It was more like working with a very fast, very patient assistant who knows all the technical parts.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Stay the director. You don't need to know how it works underneath. You need to know what good looks like, and be willing to say "not quite, try again."

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Describe it like you're talking to a person, including the small details you'd normally keep in your head. The details are where the value is.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

The commands run free on my own laptop. I've learned a few things along the way, if you want to try something like this yourself. Start with the boring, repetitive task, not the exciting one. The win is hiding in the thing you already do every week.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Here's a sample of a clip of our senior pastor that I just created using the command.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

The second one turns a sermon into a vertical clip for social media. It reads the transcript, suggests four moments worth clipping, and once I pick one, it reframes it for phones and adds the captions that light up word by word. Services will do this for you for a monthly fee.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

An hour and a half became about twenty minutes of actual work.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

The first tool is the one I lean on most. I trim the raw sermon video, type one command, and when I come back to my computer in 15 minutes, I get back a branded video, a transcript, a blog post with discussion questions, the descriptions for YouTube, and the podcast audio.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

The shift: I stopped doing the repetitive jobs and started describing them. You explain what you want, the way you would to a person, and the AI does the fiddly technical part and shows you the result.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

This year, most of it disappeared. Not by buying software, and not by hiring anyone. I described the routine in plain English, and now a couple of commands in Claude Code do the lot.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

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. 🧵

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

We rehumanize our political enemies. We rehumanize the unbeliever and the antagonist of our faith. The Bible invites Christians to see humanity as “us” and not as “other.” And so does the example of Christ."

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Christians, of all people, hold the opportunity and responsibility to recognize and champion the dignity of all people. In a world that seeks to dehumanize, Christians are called to rehumanize all people. We rehumanize our neighbors. We rehumanize the oppressed.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Image-bearing means that all humans, regardless of social, intellectual, or physical distinctions, are endowed with divine dignity, value, and worth. Every single person you have ever met bears God’s image.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

There is no such thing as conditionality to image-bearing, and that means there is no such thing as conditional dignity. Image-bearing is not based on usefulness. Image-bearing is not based on ability. Image-bearing is not based on productivity or contribution.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

When we understand that every human bears intrinsic worth because of origin and design, we become better equipped to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

The image of God is not limited in any way to a particular kind of human. All humans are endowed with dignity from their Creator. Hence, the Bible’s many warnings against showing favoritism.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

By contrast, the Bible opposes qualified dignity and instead democratizes it. Rather than reserve the dignity of image-bearing for the few, it proclaims it for all humans. The Bible utters an unequivocal “no” to any form of qualified dignity.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

We elevate one gender, ethnic group, age demographic, socioeconomic status, or standard of beauty as more worthy of dignity than another.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

"Image-bearing was a privileged status in ancient times. And it is in modern times, as well. While contemporary worldviews may not use the terminology of image-bearing, modern-day humans are no less inclined to dignify only certain kinds of humans.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

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

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Very cool!!! I can already think of a few good reasons to use this

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

I'd love to know what you think about it - and if you give it a go I'd love to hear what it helps you think through!

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

I've written up how it works in more detail, including a couple of real examples, the GitHub link if you want to build your own version, and a simple prompt you can use right now with a free AI account, no setup required. You can read it at darrenrowse.com/posts/what-...

darrenrowse.com

What If AI Asked You Questions Instead of Answering Them? - Darren Rowse

“If you've been following this series, you'll know I've been writing about how I use AI in ministry. I've covered why I started, the tools I've built for our staff...

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

That connection became the spine of a sermon. The thinking was mine. Claude just kept the space open long enough for it to happen.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

A recent session: a Bonhoeffer quote surfaced about costly grace. I'd read it dozens of times. But one question from Claude shifted the angle I was looking from, and I ended up connecting it to something I'd been noticing in our congregation for months.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

The name is a coffee reference. Ground coffee is made of grains, and you can't rush a brew. You give it warmth and time and something worth having comes out.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

And then it just keeps asking questions. One at a time. Not explaining the idea back to me, not offering solutions. Just holding the space open until something worth keeping emerges.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

The process starts by surfacing what it calls a "grain" from my Obsidian notes: a quote, a half-formed idea, something from a conference or a book I'd forgotten I'd saved. Then it asks: "What does this stir in you?"

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

When I run it, instead of asking Claude to produce something, it makes the AI start asking ME questions that are designed to get me thinking.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Over time you lose the thinking muscle. I think that critique has merit - but it really comes down to how you use it. A few months ago, I built a command called /brew that is designed to do the exact opposite.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

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.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

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

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

I wrote up exactly how I did it, step by step, for anyone who uses Obsidian and wants more out of it without needing to understand what any of the technology actually does. darrenrowse.com/posts/how-i... It took me about ten minutes to set up. It changed how I work.

darrenrowse.com

How I Connected Claude Code to My Obsidian Vault: A Guide for Non-Coders - Darren Rowse

I remember the exact moment things changed for me with AI. In the first post in this series on using AI in Ministry I wrote about how I got started:...

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

It could pull from research I'd filed away months ago. I'm a pastor, not a developer. If I could set this up, most people can.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

A few months ago, I found a way to fix that. I pointed Claude Code directly at my Obsidian vault, no coding required, and suddenly I had a thinking partner that already knew my notes. It could find connections I'd forgotten I'd made.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

AI tools changed some of that. But I kept hitting the same wall: I'd have to describe what was in my vault, copy things across, paste context in. The AI was smart. It just didn't know my stuff.

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Darren Rowse @darrenrowse.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

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.

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