AI & The Adventist Church, with Tech Entrepreneur Jason Alexis

The future is often described as a place of flying cars, self-lacing shoes and hoverboards. But what about a future where technology helps us better understand faith and then share it with the world? Well, that's a future that Jason Alexis, the founder of Fluid Ministry, believes is within our reach. I think the ability to have an Ascend the Adventist-trained AI program on different aspects, whether it's trained to talk to the EG-Wide database or have our own influences, could be a specific development as we move forward.

More AI-based tools, but that are trained on the Adventist model so that you can trust that data that comes out. An Adventist-trained AI might sound like science fiction, but in this episode we'll delve into the fascinating possibilities of artificial intelligence and how this rapidly evolving technology has the potential to revolutionise the way we study, connect and share our faith. I'm Luke Verrugin and you're listening to the Blue Vineyard Podcast. Jason, welcome to the show.

Hey, Luke, thank you for having me. Thank you. Jason, I want to give you a little bit of creative constraints. A lot of the people who are listening to this will possibly not have heard your name before.

And so we'll delve into these things a little bit through the show. But for a start, how would you describe yourself if you were limited to five words only? Oh, interesting. Five words.

Tenacious, process, Moses, the Bible character, family. I love my family. And Christian. That is such an interesting mix of words.

So I want to pull on one of the threads first. You said, Tenacious, I think that speaks for itself, like knowing a little bit that I do. And I think people will see that come out in your story. We'll talk about that later.

You said Moses. I'm interested. Let's just start there for a second. Why Moses?

Yeah, I resonate with Moses. Moses from the Bible character, he was this person that God has given a great mission to go and he felt ill equipped to do so. So much so that he suggested that his either speech impediment or ability to master the Egyptian language was going to be a deterrent. So he is questioning God.

In this story, he met Jesus at the burning bush. And the fact that they met God at the burning bush and the fact that the bush was burning without being burnt should have been assigned enough. But yet still you see a series of doubts where he goes through this ritual with God having him where God, he puts his hand in his coat, pulls it out, it turns to what it did and then he threw the rod down, it turns to a stick. So it's almost like he was doubting God and yet still after all of those things, he said, hey, I don't think I can do it.

And when you read on later in the Bible, the Bible actually says that Aaron was already on his way, which is his brother. God already had sent help for him, but he felt ill equipped. So throughout my entrepreneurial journey, I've always seeked partnership and I've always seeked someone to do it for me in terms of being the face of the thing. I've always looked for people who were the voice, the face, like doing these type of podcasts wasn't really something I did love doing.

I love the behind the scenes. I love being the process person, developing the app or creating. I would create the whole script and I'll give it to someone. And I've tried that so many times and yet still it seems that I am the one should be doing it because God had put it in my heart.

And when I reached that point and I took on that mantle of trusting in my abilities and inabilities because I don't feel polished and never feel like a speaker, especially the podcast type. I felt maybe my twang or accent would have been a limit initially. So I had all these insecurities at times that I felt that I was not supposed to be. So yeah, Moses is why I resonated with him and he saw what he was able to do when he trusted God.

Beautiful. So you mentioned your accent just there. So maybe we could start there like a little bit of your history. So where are you from originally?

Where does that accent hail from? So originally from Trinidad and Tobago and it goes beyond just the accent. So originally from Trinidad and Tobago, it's next to Venezuela. We are the furthest island down the chain of, if you're not familiar, we are the last stop.

If you go down the Caribbean chain, we are the last stop. We are known for the steel drums or the steel pan, the only music instrument that was invented in the 20th, 21st century, as well as soca and calypso, which is unique kind of sounds that is coming out from there. Plus I think a trivia fact is that we have the largest pitch lake in the world. Plus, I think we had one of the wonders at one time, which is the largest roundabout in the world.

So just a few tidbits. Yeah, that's cool. I mean, Australia, I remember when I was in school and I remember the steel drums, like I was captivated by that. I was fascinated by that as an instrument for a while.

It's a very cool thing. What a coincidence. That's cool. That's very cool.

So obviously, that's where you started your journey. So how long were you there? Where did you go next? So when I left there around 21 years old, I was trying to get a scholarship to come to America.

And that's part of my story that I did not, I really wanted to come to America. I did not want to go to local university. And I had a vision of traveling and exploring. And I really, really wanted it that badly.

Another thing I wanted badly was business. And we can talk about that later on. But at 21 years old, I finally got a tuition and fee scholarship to Howard University in Washington, DC. So there I spent about the first four years there as a mechanical engineering student.

Incidentally, that's where I met my wife, who was part of the same program. And yeah, then after that, I went on and I did an internship for a bit. I didn't quite like it. But all throughout that process, I have always, because I was an older student and I needed to survive, I started my entrepreneurial business.

Well, actually, I improved on it. Because ever since growing up, I was always selling something. My mom was a micro business person and she encouraged me to do the same. So it was always in my blood.

I kind of took some of the things I was learning, the process, the steps, even in mechanical engineering. And it's about product development, taking an idea to watch fruition. So I apply a lot of those principles that I learned to try to create a business using that. So that is kind of my journey up to Howard University.

Interesting. So you mentioned the influence of your mother as a micro business person. Just generally, there's a lot of different things that are in your experience. Who would you say shaped your thinking the most over the years?

Your mother is one of them. But that could also be authors or preachers or mentors that you had. Who would you say are the top few influences that shaped your thinking and who you are? That's a good question.

Growing up a son of a single parent, I would have to say primarily my mother initially. One from a business perspective. Also she gave me Jesus. She found God when she was around 38 years old and she had never looked back.

She had a very tough life, which I can probably share another time. But I can see the passions that she had and I saw her faith. So a lot of what I've learned is to walk in faith and not insight. And I think I took that with me even throughout my life and decisions that I made.

So that has been my biggest influence is to seek God. And incidentally, some of the people that formed my specific business, especially when I refined things, one of the guys is Jermaine Griggs. And I'm really not good with names. I usually consume contents, but he's one of the main ones.

He's a block entrepreneur and he came out of the church space. He had a program called here and play where he taught people to learn piano by seeing and hearing. So here and play, actually by hearing. So he had DVDs or CDs back then where people would buy it.

So I think that's one of the things he did that was successful. But what he did that was very unique. He was able to scale, personalize interaction through automation. He was one of the very early leaders that were doing a lot of fancy things by merging in your name.

When he leave a voicemail, you'd hear your own personal name, all via scripts, all via hand coding. So that's what he did to grow his business. And as an engineer, that sort of marketing made the most sense to me because you kind of put data, you put structure, you put automations. So a lot of what I had done initially before I had developed my products, I started in consultation first and applying it to some of our early businesses because I was always thinking about how do you scale, not just to our for, you know, our for dollars.

So those two I would say as maybe the top two. But there's so many influences you see throughout your life. You know, people you meet, maybe my initial first business partner would be the third. One of my first business partners when we really start, he actually put me on to German Greeks.

He had a successful business. He dropped out of school and he was selling broadband internet. And that's before it became so accessible. But the way he connected people, the way he formed relationships is something I've never had as part of my repertoire.

So I picked up a lot of how he engaged, how he connected people and how he networked. And he's really good at it. He's a very likable guy. He's a perfect face of a company.

But a lot of the behind the scenes things is some things that I've applied to, to what I don't have. So those, those three I would say. Yeah. Excellent.

So we got up to in your narrative, we were talking about how you got into doing mechanical engineering. If you had stayed in mechanical engineering, we probably wouldn't be having this conversation right now because you ended up in technology. So how did, how did that happen? Yeah.

So as in undergrad, I started building websites using Droomla. But I didn't, I wasn't really interested in building websites. In fact, I wasn't necessarily building them myself per se. I was learning.

I had people do it. I was interested in applying a business model that took an idea, a client's idea from start to finish without months and months of delay. Back then, building a website took months because maybe this one person who knew how to do it would whip up Dreamweaver, one of those custom HTML websites and they would send you an update every two, three months. And I found that that was unnecessary.

Obviously, back then having a website wasn't the most important thing. So people weren't rushing to have it, but yet still I find it was. So I took the idea of building websites to make money and I was focusing back in my country, Trinidad and Tobago, where it was less accessible and I was putting all these systems and processes in place. So because of that, I was doing, yes, I was doing my engineering, which was technically easy for me based on my background.

So it gave me some time to actually also do business, which eventually caught up with me, I almost lost my scholarship, but I think that goes into me playing both church and the world. And that's a different conversation. But as I progressed, I realized I did not love mechanical engineering. As I taught, I think more of it, I wanted to make money and my mom was back home.

I know she was struggling. So there was maybe some burden to figure out something, to survive and maybe eventually be in a position to help my mom who had given me everything that I wanted. After grad school, I went on to work and that definitely sealed the deal because most engineering students, you think you're going to be working on cool projects, you know, you're really doing all the paperwork the first three, four years. And that wasn't something that I enjoyed unless you have a lot of experience or you have a unique skill set.

So that really turned me off. I went back to grad school as an international student, wasn't married, so I needed to be legal. So I went back to grad school because some of the things I've done was recognized. As an undergrad, I did a lot of interesting things.

I was the president of the American Society of Engineers, a local chapter. We held a forum with the teachers and students. We wrote a report. And I think some of those things really attracted some of the professors.

So they were able to invite me back to grad school where I managed, initially managed like a summer camp program. I helped him with his grant, at least be a facilitator. So those were things I would do. They were not engineering based.

They were all administrative, you know, process based. But eventually I dropped out of grad school when I got re-baptized and I teamed up with that gentleman I mentioned earlier on, the one who was really good at marketing and networking. I felt like I could have teamed up with him, with my passion and with his business skillset for us to actually start a business. And initially it was a business slash church adventure.

But when I got re-baptized in 2012 and then he also got re-baptized, I believe, we saw that there was an opportunity for churches and technology. So that's where I kind of continued the business, went full on and decided to look at ways where we can actually use our talents to empower the church. Because we saw at one time, 170 something people got baptized, drew in one of the series we were part of. There was a new pastor, a great preacher.

We were doing things like cool social media, the videos, the social media marketing, the texting. When we combined all of those digital tools, back then when most churches weren't doing it, we saw an impact. People were attending, people were engaged. So I saw an opportunity and I thought it was going to be something that I did for God, as well as make money.

So that's what kind of pulled me fully away from engineering towards that path. So what is now labeled fluid ministry? Is that, have you been in the same business the whole way along or have there been multiple things? So 2015 is when fluid ministry started, 2012 was a previous company called Symbiota.

So that initial step was a stepping stone. Fluid ministry is what eventually that business partnership broke apart for different reasons. So then I started, I was left without a degree. I had an undergrad degree but not having a master, not having practiced my engineering field, having a young child at that time, we have two kids.

My youngest was born in 2013, so he was young. I was at home. My wife was working because we moved from Washington DC back to her hometown, which is Houston. And she had a job, incidentally at one of the places that I interned at years before.

And so she was working. I was at home. She was a main breadwinner and I was trying to make this business continue. So that's 2015 is fluid ministry.

Between that was a learning experience. So tell me a little bit about fluid ministry. So what sort of a company did that end up being? What does that look like?

What are the products? What is fluid ministry? So fluid ministry is a company that is focused on churches and helping them with digital tools. And especially some of it were more teaching, so we as a company have written books for different organizations, including the Adventist source, as well as other collaborations with non-Adventist entities.

Later on, we started to specialize in developing SaaS products. Specifically, we focus on mobile, what we call mobile ministry or digital. Mobile ministry being mobile apps, mobile websites and text messaging. Eventually, it really became the text messaging app, which is now called Passesline.

So Passesline is one of the products of fluid ministry, which is my legally registered company. Fluid ministry owns Passesline.com, display.church, ccbchimp.com, and confirm.church. So it's a series of SaaS apps that we have developed that solve specific needs for churches that helps them do online digital evangelism better, whether we plug and play things or connect things. So, for example, we might connect one church management system to different apps so there's no data silos.

So that's how, that's what we primarily do, and that's what it had evolved into. So there's really strong, like there's two strong pieces. There's like, you know, the products that you're building, but a lot of them have this trend toward integration, right? Like, that seems to be a real strength of the business.

Yeah. That's right. Yeah. All of them, it's products that integrate or get different services that churches already use to speak to each other or to enhance the feature set.

So you've obviously, you know, you had all these different sets of experience that have, you know, that's brought the success that you have found through your experience. You've said a few things, and I'm curious from your perspective, what is the thing that you are uniquely talented at? What is your superpower? I would say the one thing is process.

I'm OCD on process because I have the ability to see patterns and then put that into step-by-step process. I see the market trend, so a lot of the things we did was very innovative for the trade space because I saw where things were going. And since we were new, we were agile. So my ability to see patterns and see where things are going, see where the needs are, and see it before most others is probably my greatest strength.

But when everything else I do, I think business development, actually how do you put together business automation and process? How do you actually create a workflow where you can have a remote team work effectively and efficiently and not just use emails? So we have been exploring remote tools for a number of years. I think I was one of the first people to explore things like, way before Google Docs became a thing, there was a Microsoft product that was synced online and there was a bunch of Microsoft tools that were meant to make you be more digitally online.

So I didn't like emails for communication as a primary form. I use a lot of digital tools to sync. So I would say some of those other things include business development. I had to learn marketing.

It's not my natural strength, but I'm more of a digital strategist. So I use data and I use no nonsense, no hype type marketing to get things out. I wouldn't say I'm a natural marketer, but I've learned it and I've learned how to scale that using process and automation. That's very cool.

You mentioned in there that you've had a lot of experience using remote tools for remote, particularly remote teams. Totally selfish question here. What would you recommend as some of the best options for project management for remote teams that are in the technology or software space? Yeah, that has grown a lot.

The question is, do you want a free solution? What is your style? Are you looking for a lot of data and dashboard? Are you looking for something very simple?

I think there's so many options now that there's no good answer. But what we started with, I don't recall it's Groove. There was a very old Microsoft tool that I used that was good back then, but I really spent a lot of time at Basecamp. 37 Signals is a company behind Basecamp and they actually wrote a very popular book on remote teams and they pushed that philosophy for a long time. They had remote work.

So their philosophy and the fact that they created this tool, that's something I use for a number of years. But these days, I'm using anything between Trello, which is an Alassian product. I think it's the makers over there in Australia over by you. I use Jira, more so for some of my newer products, but there are other good ones like Airtable, Asana.

There's so many now, Monday, that it just depends on how pretty do you want it and how simple your needs are. Are you marketing driven? Are you design? Are you development?

But I would say you try a few and stick to something that you think would work. You can always change, but find something that works for your team. The process is more important than the tool. The tool is just a tool.

Do you have a process that makes sense for you? Yeah. No, I just asked because quite literally we're in the process right now of testing a few different options and so I appreciate your input. Okay.

So just thinking about the building of your company, I'm just curious, what has been the hardest part of building Fluid Ministry? What has probably been the greatest challenge in that process? That's a good question, man. If you go purely on like a biblical perspective, I would say lack of faith and a deep relationship with God.

In retrospect, that would be my biggest challenge. How do I depend on him more? There's a friend of mine in our men's group. He mentioned something recently and he's an entrepreneur as well.

He's a licensed architect and a builder and he builds. So he moved from Canada originally from Jamaica, but he's in Texas in the United States now and he mentioned something profound. We know business is about risk taken. How much of this, how much of that is gambling and how much of it do we say that is risk versus gambling?

I think as somebody like me that I try to follow a biblical Christian worldview, I would say that that is one of the challenges, not taking risks that are not approved by God. That's the cheat way. That's like the overall challenge. I can get specific on some of the other challenges, but that's what came to my mind.

That triggers another question then because God has used my entrepreneurial experience to teach me a lot about him. What have you learned? What's probably been one of the most significant lessons that you've learned or God has taught you through your entrepreneurial journey? I think the idea of having success and you are driven by this, it reminds me of the story of Abraham and Isaac.

Abraham really wanted a son. In order to achieve that, he was influenced to take a shortcut. I think a lot of times in business, sometimes we take a path that we shouldn't take, but then you eventually get this thing that you so love. I really wanted to develop a business and eventually I think I fell more in love with the idea of having an Isaac as is the Abraham-Isaac biblical story.

I think God has to test you to see do you love him more than this idea of Isaac. A lot of times I think the lesson that I've seen is mixed love, is where you become luquwarm because then you so much into your business, especially as a man, it becomes your child, it becomes something you work on, and sometimes it consumes you. The second thing I would say is that because my business was tied to churches, I made the excuse that I was indirectly working for God's kingdom because we help churches communicate better online or connect different systems. We are talking to pastors, we are working with churches, hundreds of them every year.

I made the excuse that my ministry that we call it was more important or as important where I probably didn't need to pray as much or study as much because I was doing ministry. I think that's something else that I've learned that that's not so. As I shared earlier on before the call in Mark 1.35, it shows that Jesus in Mark 1 had started his ministry, he had went out into the wilderness, he was tempted but he was given this outpouring, John was decreased, he was increased, John was imprisoned. His ministry had started, he was healing the sick, he was casting out demons, but smack dab in the middle of all of that, in Mark 1.35 we saw that he woke up early in the morning, he went to a quiet place and prayed, even God who was as man and earth showed us the example and I think that is one of the things that I've learned that despite what you do it, even if it's a ministry or business directly tied to churches or not, that that will never be important.

You should not love Isaac more than you love God. Oh, that is so powerful and I mean, if there's anyone that's listening to this who is in business, I don't see how that wouldn't resonate, that is such a true reflection. Just on that point of balancing that, how do you balance that now? I would call it work in progress, but I have made significant steps over the years because God have knocked me over so many times and that you were forced to because you had no other choice.

I recognized, I fell out of love with God. I recognized that I was stressed. I was stressed in my family, the business wasn't growing as much as it could because I think about that other biblical story with Peter when he was on the disciples, they were fishing whole night and Jesus just came and said cast your net on the other side. So the idea that you cannot outwork God by doing more, using your physical talents is something that the more I remember that is the more I recognize that working more, working longer, having an unbalanced life, definitely not put in God first is counterproductive to what it is that I can actually achieve.

So once I recognize that the biggest thing is prayer and I have this acronym that I shared in a sermon recently, PSA, which is Prayer Study Act and you see that it's a tree-legged tree and it's two and most people are leaving out one or the other. The most important one that leads to the others is prayer. Early in the morning, by yourself, where you can get to know God. The more you know God, everything else comes naturally.

You don't even have to think. First you wake up very early in the morning, so you're going to pray and study and you get his spirit in you. Because you wake up early, your day starts earlier, you can get an exercise, which is a thing that I struggle with, you can get more done and because of those things, you have the right spirit. When things you encounter throughout the day comes up that is a little bit negative, you have the spirit of God to deal with it.

So you don't derail your day because of these outside inputs, stimulus. So I think for me, it's a work in progress and I would say two other things. Have a group of people that are like-minded. So that's something God had motivated me to start.

So I have a men's group. We are at the same level, so it's not something I'm not a mentor in, but we all pray and share. David had Jonathan, so I think that's important to have other people who can keep you accountable as your journey. And obviously have a church community.

I think some people, I think entrepreneurs, I don't know how many, some of us kind of neglect the church. We go to church and our minds are so consumed, we feel like we don't have time. We want to give money, but we don't have time to engage with the corporate community. We always focus on the next thing.

And I think that has been my biggest mistake. Enter into the gates with times given and enter the courts with prayers that you have to fellowship. There's a blessing, especially that weekly rest. There's a blessing that comes with that.

Absolutely, yeah. Absolutely. I feel that you mentioned the church community aspect of it. It is, well, two things.

The church community aspect, I've always been, especially when I was younger, I was very, very involved in church in every possible way. And I was a freelance sort of business owner, but I wasn't actually building a company. And when I transitioned from just being a freelancer to building a company, I found it much more difficult. The pressure I felt internally to step back from church was much, much stronger than it was prior to that.

And so I definitely feel that. The other thing that you said that I wanted to comment on was the absolute necessity of prayer. I acknowledge that and I agree with that, but out of my whole Christian experience, that I've always found that to be the most challenging because I'm the extrovert. I always want to be around people.

And so the quiet moments where I'm going to sit down and pray and discipline my mind to spend that time with God, that is the most unnatural part of my Christian experience. And so hearing you say that, that inspired me to make that more of a priority in my life. So I appreciate you sharing your experience. Just with this as context, so you shared a little bit with me before we started recording that you're in the process of some really large and significant shifts in your journey.

And I thought, you mentioned that you'd be happy to share that. So I was wondering if we could perhaps take a minute if you could share as much as you're comfortable to about the changes that are going on right now. And maybe we can talk a bit about how you're navigating that and thinking about that as an Adventist entrepreneur. Yeah, definitely.

I think as an entrepreneur, the whole idea of success and failure hits you, right? It's like, if I'm not successful at an adventure, then maybe something is wrong with me, something is wrong with my ability. And throughout the Bible, though, we do see a lot of times, I think about Elijah, he was at a brook, right? And he was being fed by ravens and he had water to drink.

But then God dried up that brook and obviously the ravens stopped coming and he had to move from where he was because there was a greater opportunity forward. So I think the idea in business is being so comfortable where you are that if something may not be working as well, maybe it's working financially, but it's probably not working for your balance in life. It's affecting your spiritual growth. In fact, anything that the Bible say cut it off, right?

If you're, you know, offend you. And I think that's the idea. So I think for me, we are exploring the next phase, one of the challenges I see for myself is that God had called me into ministry a number of years ago to be some version of a pastor. I've heard that so many times, hey, you should be a pastor.

I'm, you know, not because of how I look and song, but mostly when I share things, it's like, are you a pastor? You should be a pastor. I never wanted to be because I grew up relatively without, I was blessed because God took care of my mom and I, but I didn't grow up with much. So I'm like, I'm going to be what is going to give me the most money.

I wanted to be an engineer. It probably would have been a stable income that didn't quite work out. Then I wanted to be an entrepreneur. And I was, I so wanted this thing.

I've toiled and work for it for a number of years. And at this time, there's aspects of it. And this is a testimony in progress. You guys are having a front row seat that there's aspects of it that God has been revealing to me that has sidetracked me so much.

So that the things that I used to do that were pastoral or ministry based or speaking or those things fell at the wayside, even as a lay preacher or lay person and aspects of my business took over. I loved Isaac more than I love God. So right now we are actually exploring some transition in some of our businesses, at least one of them. But the hardest thing to do is when God asks you to sacrifice your business or Isaac for you to actually go through those steps.

First you have to take Isaac. You have to walk up the hill. And you know, I mean, you know, you're going to sacrifice it. Do you have the faith to actually go through it?

And I think for me, I took too long, even though God has been pushing me. And then it reached a point where you kind of have to, and I would caution people to not wait if God says to do it in faith, do it because he has something better. Because the other story I will share with you is, and notice most of my references is biblical. I believe that if you really want to get good at business, you can read a lot of other things and nothing is wrong with that.

But most of my success and most of my business ideas, you look at the Jesus model and you look at how many companies are doing this free, this idea of giving away things and building their business. That's the Jesus model. So anyway, I use a lot of these biblical references and I think they are applicable to business. So with Abraham and Lot, that story was Lot, his nephew, or his relative, their servants were squabbling over the land and the water.

And then God told Abraham to leave Lot and his servants in this beautiful land that was overlooking what we then know Southern Gamorro. And he told Abraham to move further. And I think in business, a lot of times God is telling us to move on, but we think we have to stay and fight. And it gets back to the idea that I talked about of gambling, how much of it is risk taken and how much of it is gambling.

If it's gambling, you are doing it with your risk taken without God. If it's a risk with God, the risk was for Abraham to leave this beautiful land and go because God had a better way. So that's what I would say in terms of some of those things. Yeah, I appreciate that.

And with the changes that you're going through right now, do you have a clear sense of the next step or is that still veiled and you're still waiting for God to make that clear to you once this transition is complete that you were just referring to? You know, God is so beautiful. He doesn't give you all the steps. And I think that's where that fate comes in.

But he had put on my heart something to do and he had given me pieces of those steps, glimpses. So one of the business I'm exploring, you know, moving away from it and selling it. So we are in that discussion right now. And it's the baby.

It's the one that I put most of my blood, sweat and tears into. It's the one that took me probably away from God the most. And maybe that's why I need to. But God over the one year ago had motivated me to start a new venture.

He'd given me the idea and the name and everything. And it was such a beautiful product. I've run the idea by a few people and it's like, this is a good product. What happened was my main business, the one that I'm transitioning from, I'm trying to transition from, so on attrition.

And because that was the main business, I got scared and I decided not to fully follow God's will, which was he had prompted me to start shutting down or slowing down development of that main business. Don't put more effort into it. Shift my resources to this new venture because I know he foresaw what was coming. And unfortunately I still did both, but I did not fully follow his direction to this point where at this time is actually a little bit more challenging, a little bit more costly.

And we are facing a situation where we have to transition versus where I could have followed his will. Maybe if I had followed his advice, he would have allowed me to keep both. I don't know. So that's my testimony in motion, the ability to listen to God.

But tell God for his grace because he has closed so many doors. So many safety nets that I relied on to keep businesses going was closed. Many are saying no and God had forced me to the point that I had to make a decision. So it's a difficult path to go through.

But the more you pray early in the morning by yourself is the more faith you grow to know that despite how difficult it is, God, the same God who was with you all these years ago and have guided you is the same God will get you through. You have to go through this trial. Yeah, what an excellent way to close that idea. So I want to shift gears a little bit just for this last section of our conversation.

So in the Adventist digital ecosystem or all of the things that the church does, what are the spaces that you see that there's room, that there's tools that need to be made that haven't been made or perhaps opportunities that the church could capitalize on in the technology space but we haven't? That's a good question. When comes to Adventism? We have usually been at the forefront for a number of years.

We were some of the first to give in, having an online given solution for a number of years way before churches. We had things like where churches could access free websites in our evangelistic effort. What we did through technology was always advanced. We seem to have stopped somewhere along the line, the church or some members or some leaders decided to basically guard the gates of progressive type ideas.

Somehow technology was tied with progressive ideals or liberal ideals. So once you hear something, technology base, you don't want that in the church because it's going to bring in whatever. So I think somewhere along that line there was a pause and that created a lag where we were left behind generally of sorts. But I call something post-COVID, pre-COVID, right?

I think it did write churches' minds and I think you're seeing more people coming up with ideas. Now, here's to answer you specifically. I think we have a lot of skillful people, a lot of vendors, a lot of entrepreneurs who are actually wanting and willing to help. I think it's so fragmented that there's so many ideas and so many similar things happening.

But I think it's also the nature of the church where we are not one monolith organization. We operate under our 27, 28 beliefs, but each entity across different geographic places kind of function independently and it allows those regions to adjust to how fast or how slow those places are. In fact, that's why we have remained successful as a global organization. So I always think that there is room for improvement, but I think it's going to go as fast as we become united.

What I'm seeing, however, I am seeing a lot of the pastors that I worked with in Adventism who had creative ideas, they are now assuming leadership positions. So I think a lot of it is bureaucratic. It's not necessarily the technology. It's being done maybe at the church level, the conference level.

It's just not as united. So it doesn't seem, it seemed like there's missing things, but I'm seeing more people assuming those positions and I think God has his time. But if I have to pick one thing that churches could actually think about is obviously the whole concept of AI. And we know AI as a tool is agnostic.

It doesn't have good or bad intention. And I think the ability to have an Ascender Adventists trained AI program on different aspects, whether it's trained to talk to the EG white database or have our own influences could be a specific development as we move forward, more AI based tools, but that are trained with an on the Adventist model so that you, you can trust that data that comes out. And if I can just give a shout out to a friend of mine, Scott Hightman over here in Australia has produced exactly that. So he has an AI that has been trained on all of Ellen White's writings that they're looking at rolling out in some products, at least as far as I know.

So yeah, it's a good pick. You mentioned AI. I'm curious. Where do you think, and I know obviously, you can make reference to this in your, sorry, you were making reference to this in relation to the church, but just in a more broad manner, where do you think AI is going?

Or do you think that's even possible to answer? Go and it's, it's something I'm still exploring. It's here to stay for sure. I think there's a lot of conversation around ethics that would, would be have because as it becomes a mainstay, there'll be concerns because of the power.

I think it's going to be ubiquitous, it's going to be everywhere as we already seen it. So I think every app that you use in the next 10 years, AI would be almost like the next Google. So at one point in time, you know, you go from Yahoo to Google, just Google this, you know, the whole AI idea would just be part and parcel of everything that you would do. So where it's going, it's going to be ubiquitous.

It's going to be a part of everything, which is good and bad and scary, you know, but I think it's really up to businesses. If they want to adapt, they just have to understand it. They have to learn, you don't have to be the first to implement everything that comes out of it, but I think you should definitely explore it because it definitely changes the way people interact with technology, right? It allows you to be more human with it.

So I think that's inevitable and companies that don't adapt to that will not survive. In the church space, however, we've seen a slow adoption, but I think the change will be rapid at some point in time, but there's a slow adoption because there's some concerns and resistance, but that's what we see within the church space when it comes to, you know, building products for churches. In the business world, it's rapid and it's here to stay. Yeah, that's a good point.

So just as we start to wrap up our conversation today, if anyone would want to reach out to you if they have any questions or perhaps want to do business with you, what's the best place for people to connect with you? Oh, yeah. I would say via email. I'm not as active on social media, but I would say send me an email at Jason at Fluid Ministry.com and I'll happy to chat with you.

If you find me on Instagram or LinkedIn or Facebook, I do check those as well. So I think my handle is probably just Jason Alexis, but email is probably the most direct for me. Yeah, no problem. We'll put that in the show notes.

Jason, thank you so much for being on the show. We've really enjoyed it. We'll have to have you back some other time. Definitely.

Thanks for having me. All the best.