Encuentro Ministries
South Florida
Prepared by Ministry of Order for The Church Executive AI Workshop · June 4, 2026 · Orlando
In the room: Carlos Vargas (Pastor / Leader) and a second team member.
Where you're starting from
Encuentro is a Spanish-speaking church-planting and discipleship ministry — front-door focused, with leaner infrastructure than the established churches in the room. That shapes the recommendation: favor low-cost, high-leverage, bilingual tools that multiply a small team's reach, and skip anything that needs a big existing data stack. AI is genuinely native to your context here — large language models are strong in Spanish, so the same build serves both languages at once.
Your recommended builds
1. Newcomer Path Builder — your highest-leverage front-door move
For a church-planting ministry, the first touch with a guest is everything. A 1-minute intake (life stage, what brought you, where you're hurting) and an AI-drafted, staff-reviewed three-step next-step path personalizes follow-up at a scale a small team can't do by hand — and the AI drafts naturally in Spanish or English. The human always reviews before sending; the sensitive disclosures stay protected. → Full brief: ideas/03-newcomer-path-builder.md
2. Guest-to-Member Funnel — see who's actually being discipled
As you plant and grow, the number that predicts long-term health is how many first-time guests end up in a group. The five-stage workflow (Visit → Return → Connect → Group → Member) is free in Planning Center People and gives you a clear picture of where people connect or fall away. → Full brief: ideas/02-guest-to-member-funnel.md
3. Sermon Prep RAG Assistant — multiply your teaching
A retrieval assistant grounded only on your own doctrine and trusted (licensed) commentary, with cite-or-refuse, gives your teaching team speed without the invented citations that open chatbots produce. Start free in NotebookLM. Especially valuable if teaching responsibilities are spread across a lean team — and it works across both languages. → Full brief: ideas/10-sermon-prep-rag-assistant.md
Your 90-day path
| Quarter | Move |
|---|---|
| Q1 (0–90 days) | Replace the welcome card with a consented bilingual intake form; draft newcomer paths manually for a month to learn the patterns. Pilot the Sermon RAG in NotebookLM. |
| Q2 | Turn on the AI-draft step (staff-reviewed) for newcomer paths. Stand up the Guest-to-Member workflow. |
| Q3 | Track 90-day return rate by path type; double down on what works for your community. |
The one rule that governs all of it
From the workshop's security model: "where you're hurting" is a sensitive disclosure — treat it like pastoral confidence. The AI only ever produces a draft; a person reviews and sends. Get consent on the form, store responses with restricted access, and never paste raw personal details into a consumer chatbot — use the API tier.
A note on cost
Every build recommended here runs on free or near-free tools (Planning Center People is free; NotebookLM has a free tier; the newcomer path runs ~$20–30/mo all-in). This set is chosen deliberately for a lean, planting ministry.
Full idea library and the other churches' packets are on the Ministry of Order briefs hub.