Discern
& Build: AI for Ministry Leaders

Executives and department leads of established ministries working out how AI fits their organization: strategy, policy, and practice.

Pastors and staff with an operational need worth solving and a willingness to learn a better way.

Christian nonprofits and mission organizations that need more capacity but don’t have a tech team.

You direct the AI; it does the building. We teach the approach we use every day, and we'll send the exact tools and setup instructions to install ahead of time.

Clayton Henry is a Harvard-educated U.S. Army veteran and software engineer focused on designing and operating complex, high-stakes systems. His work centers on production-grade AI, architectural clarity, and durable system design, and includes published research and patented approaches in applied AI and secure networking. As co-founder of viaforge.ai, he works with organizations making consequential decisions about AI adoption and governance. He lives in St. Petersburg, Florida, with his son Cash, and enjoys music, writing and other long-term creative projects.

Ronald is a technologist who has been playing with machine learning since 2016. After more than a decade as an engineer at Intel, he now works as an independent Bitcoin and AI consultant. He loves building new solutions and learning the latest tools, from frontier models to self-hosted AI.

Thomas is the lead pastor of Trinity Church of Portland, the church hosting Discern & Build, and the founder of Humble Beast, a record label and ministry. A spoken-word artist and member of Beautiful Eulogy, he writes and speaks on creativity, discipleship, and the Christian life, bringing creativity and theology together to glorify the God who made both. He also does AI integration consulting for several major Christian organizations, and at the conference he walks through his own real AI workflows as a pastor.

John Buckingham is a product leader and builder based in Vancouver, WA, and Senior Product Manager at Buzz Health, where he works on product strategy and applied AI. He designs and runs multi-agent AI systems, building custom MCP servers and wiring tools together, including a fleet of specialized agents and browser automation. His current project, Magellan, is a knowledge-graph pipeline for agentic deep research. Earlier he founded the Portland agency Pancake Creative and led product at Visiting Media.

Ahshuwah is the founder and director of Brilliance Labs, a Portland innovation lab putting bright ideas to work across the full spectrum of God's mission. Through Ignite AI Consulting, he helps churches, ministries, and nonprofits adopt AI with discernment, keeping prayer, people, and faithful stewardship at the center. A systems thinker and builder, he led the AI work inside Brilliance Labs itself, bringing Claude into budgeting, bookkeeping, donor management, event coordination, and a full website rebuild. At the conference he'll teach the Christ-Centered AI Framework and share a case study on putting AI to work in a small nonprofit.

Ted leads data engineering, analytics, and data science at Ligonier Ministries, and he's at the front of Ligonier's hands-on exploration of AI, prototyping tools that serve the ministry's mission. He's seen how one relevant problem plus one guided build gets a ministry leader off to the races, and he brings that conviction to the room.

John is Director of Innovation at Ligonier Ministries, where a serious commitment to leading well with AI is already taking shape. He's charting what AI-equipped ministry looks like for a large, established teaching ministry, and with Ted Hallum he'll share what Ligonier Labs is building, then stay in the room, learning and building alongside everyone else.