Churchfront Podcast

About This Week's Guest Nathan Finochio is the founder of TheosU, an online theology school built for the local church, where the faculty are pastors who preach on Sundays. He spent nine years as a teaching pastor in New York and is the author of Hearing God and Killer Church. Jake Gosselin sits down with Nathan to talk about AI and the church: how it will reshape church staffing, how Nathan uses it for sermon prep and book writing, why he trains it on his own theology, and why AI will never visit a family in a hospital. They get into whether AI can ever have a will, why the early church avoided instruments, and why LED walls exist so the church can sing together. Then Jake asks the question at the heart of Churchfront's work: should a church spend five million dollars on its AV? Nathan makes the case for excellence without idolatry, explains why healthy churches outgrow their rooms and systems, and offers a line every worship team should hear: lo-fi isn't a sacrament, and hi-fi isn't a sacrament. It's about the offering that's being brought.

A lot of churches meet in a school, a cafeteria or a rented space, and set up and tear down the whole system every Sunday. In this episode, Luke Jackson talks with Josue Escobar from the Churchfront consulting team about the portable system we designed for Cross & Crown, a church plant in Florida, and what their launch taught us. They cover why a portable church needs a system instead of a gear list, how one network run carries lighting and audio to the stage racks, why Dante is part of the system but not its backbone, what happened when a power cable shook loose between the gym and the storage shed, how long setup and teardown really take, choosing a console volunteers can run, and turning a detailed plan set into a simple guide for volunteers. Along the way, Josue explains what a McGriddle has to do with consistent Sunday mornings.

About This Week's Guest Jon Rush is the founder of Scroll Company, an agency that helps legacy and missional organizations, including Maxwell Leadership, reach new audiences through campaign-based creative work. Before that he spent ten years at a large church outside Chicago and five years at Elevation Church in Charlotte, where he pastored the broadcast location. He travels to speak and teach. Creators have broad reach. Pastors have depth. Jake and Jon talk about how local church leaders can use content to extend the influence they already have: theology nights as a way to launch a church, a weekly podcast paired with a Zoom community for discipleship, and how a pastor can serve their people in ways no national creator can. They also debate whether churches should livestream their Sunday services, why content works best when it's made for the platform instead of repurposed from the sermon, the seeker-sensitive overcorrection, why only the people of God have a sanctuary, and what the church should do about Roblox, Grand Theft Auto and the coming digital worlds.

About This Week's Guest Tyler Kerpsack is a front of house engineer who has been mixing since 2006, from church rooms to arena tours. He co-founded the creative agency Actify, consults and trains church production teams with Blackbox, shares weekly mixing tips with tens of thousands of engineers online, and is an Emmy nominee. Jake sits down with Tyler in the Churchfront studio to talk about where church sound is headed. They cover why the PA brand matters less than the room and the design, when an immersive system is good stewardship and when it isn't, and why both of them expect real-time AI mixing engines to arrive soon, leaving the engineer to bring taste instead of turning knobs. They also talk about what that means for church teams. If technology takes over more of the mechanics, the time it frees belongs to people. Jake makes the case that the church is called to make disciples, not ProPresenter operators, and Tyler shares how he hid behind production in his own faith for years. Along the way: Avantis and SQ versus the Waves LV1, Dante and control systems, building your own software with AI, and what mix engineers should learn next.

About This Week's Guest Chris Kuti has spent 20 years leading creative teams, from worship and production teams to songwriting and communications teams, in settings from living rooms to arenas and from church plants to multisite churches. In this keynote from Churchfront Conference 2025, Chris tells the story of a rehearsal that sounded perfect and felt empty, and what it taught him about leading people instead of just running ministry. You can have the right sound, the right systems and the right skill and still have the wrong spirit. He walks through five ways to build a team culture that lasts: clarity creates culture, character carries culture, consistency builds trust, community fuels culture, and conviction sustains culture. Then Jake Gosselin opens the floor for audience questions on shaping one worship culture across every service and rebuilding culture after years of turnover.