Vietnamese Grace Community Church · Sacramento
We leverage emerging technologies and build our own software and tools to innovate on the everyday work of the church: lifting the repeating weekly load off our worship leaders, media team volunteers, and ministry leaders, so their time goes to the ministry itself. It is all trained on our own data since our team formed in 2018, and we use technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) where they bring real value.
Vision & Mission · 2026–2027
The center of everything here is Christ: that He is worshiped, His Word taught faithfully, and His people shepherded and welcomed. We build these tools to serve that center, lifting the weight of the recurring work so more of our time and strength is free for worship, the Word, and the people in front of us.
We want serving at Grace to be sustainable, so the people who carry the ministry can give their best hours to worship, teaching, and welcoming others, and keep doing it for years. These are the goals that get us there:
Abraham Nguyen
Nghia NguyenThe Need
Every initiative here has to meet a real need, and some of those needs we feel before we can name them. The oldest version of the problem is in Acts, where the early church hit the same strain we do: the work of keeping a church running pulling against the work a church exists for.
It would not be right for us to neglect the ministry of the word of God in order to wait on tables. Choose seven men from among you who are known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom. We will turn this responsibility over to them and will give our attention to prayer and the ministry of the word. … So the word of God spread. The number of disciples in Jerusalem increased rapidly.
Acts 6:2–4, 7
The apostles would not leave prayer and the word to wait on tables, but they did not dismiss the tables either. They set apart seven men full of the Spirit and wisdom for that work, and as the seven served, the word of God spread all the more (Acts 6:2-4, 7). Even waiting tables called for the Spirit. The same honor appears earlier: the first craftsman Scripture describes as filled with the Spirit of God is Bezalel, given the skill to build the things Israel worshiped with (Exodus 31:3). Skill for practical work is a gift from God like any other, one we can hand back to Him rather than keep as our own.
Our team is no different. Some of us teach, some make the slides, some lead the singing, some run the sound. Building and running these tools is that same kind of work: practical, often unseen, and done for God all the same.
Much of our ministry still runs by hand, rebuilt from scratch each week. That holds up for a Sunday, often well. But the recurring work falls on a few people: slides, set lists, recordings, announcements, week after week. Piled on duties that return every seven days, it wears them down and, in time, burns them out. It also crowds out what matters most: teaching, shepherding, welcoming someone new.
We hold it all loosely, because it is God's work before it is ours. Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain (Psalm 127:1), so we pray, as Moses did, that God would establish the work of our hands (Psalm 90:17). And because the work is His, the way we have always done it is not sacred. When an old pattern could no longer carry the mission, the early church changed it, as we saw in the Acts passage above, and the gospel reached further. Changing how we work is not novelty. It is ordinary faithfulness: keep what still serves, repair what does not, so neither the ministry nor its people are worn down by habits no one has stopped to question.
We are not the first to feel this, and others have already built for it. Most churches now plan on a shared platform like Planning Center, which serves more than 90,000 churches. At our church, more than ten ministries need some kind of rostering, and a few still do it manually, on paper.
Lifeway Research found that 84 percent of churches encourage every member to serve, while only about 30 percent served in the past year. Aaron Wilson, writing up that research, adds a finding from his own church’s survey: the people who serve are the ones who feel they belong. More than attendance, more than small groups. Serving is what makes someone part of the church rather than a visitor to it. So the 70 percent who never sign up are the ones missing out.
Good tools cannot make anyone volunteer. What they can do is answer the questions a willing person runs into first: what is needed, on which Sunday, and exactly what is expected of them if they say yes. Today one person holds those answers in their head, and they arrive as a text the week before. Written down, the ask becomes one date and one clear job. That is far easier to accept, and far easier to keep doing. Then the work becomes what it should be, service to the body and to God, with our eyes on Christ.
The Initiatives
Built in-house and rolled out one at a time, so each is fully in use before the next begins.
Builds Sunday's Vietnamese and English slides in minutes, so no one types every verse by hand.
Pulls each Sunday's sermon out of the long livestream and publishes it, with two quick approvals.
Songs, set lists, and who is serving, together in one place instead of scattered across email.
Anyone can request an announcement, a pastor approves it in one tap, and it reaches the Sunday screen.
Beyond the software, we are also planning hardware: livestream portability, backfill speakers, and added cameras. See what is next →
01 · N88 Media Suite
In plain terms: it builds Sunday’s Vietnamese and English slides in minutes, so no one types every verse and lyric line by hand.
Right now every slide is made by hand. Someone finds the passage, copies the Vietnamese, pastes it in, copies the English, pastes that in too, then resizes whatever runs off the screen. Then the next verse, and the next, and every song after that. It is about an hour of careful work, often longer. It is also only one item on the Media Team's week, alongside the recordings, the announcements, and everything else Sunday needs.
N88 is a desktop app built for the Media Team to build the bilingual slides for Sunday: every scripture passage and every song lyric, in Vietnamese and English, sized appropriately for a Vietnamese audience and set to our ProPresenter templates. It reads the passages the pastor has already entered and builds the slides in seconds.
The name is from Nehemiah 8:8: “They read from the Book of the Law of God, making it clear and giving the meaning, so that the people understood what was being read.” The Levites did not simply read the text aloud; they made it plain, so that understanding could turn into worship, and that day it did, the people wept and then feasted. That is the heart of the media ministry: the Word set so plainly before the congregation that nothing stands between them and what is spoken. Explaining the text is the preacher's calling; our part is to make it plain to see and easy to follow, and to keep every distraction out of the way, so that seeing turns into understanding, and understanding into worship. N88 exists to serve that clarity, every week.
Two engines, chosen for what each part of the work actually is. Scripture is exact and stable, so it gets a predictable path. Lyrics have to follow the music, so they get a model that can read musicality, with a person reviewing every slide.
Preprogrammed software, trained on years of our own data since 2018. Same passage in, same correct slide out. It is built for the hardest cases: the Bible’s longest verses (Esther 8:9, Revelation 20:4, Ezekiel 48:21), with smart detection that resizes a long passage so it still fits the screen.
AI-driven, still experimental. An AI reads a song’s musicality and segments it the way a worship team would: by verse and chorus, Vietnamese and English kept on their own slides, about two lines each so it is easy to sing.
The real slides the app produces. They look just like the ones we make by hand now, built in seconds instead of an hour, and nothing here is staged.
02 · Sermon Publishing Automation
In plain terms: it pulls each Sunday’s sermon out of the long livestream and posts it on its own, reaching people at home and in Vietnam.
Since 2010, the Media Team has done the post-service work of processing our Sunday sermon audio and delivering a finished MP3 to VietChristian, a Vietnamese Christian publication that has carried our sermons for nearly two decades. When everything went digital in 2020, it opened a new door: we could also trim each sermon out of the livestream and upload it on its own, so the message reaches beyond our congregation and onto people’s YouTube feeds. The early results have been encouraging, with steady listeners in Vietnam and in other Vietnamese communities across the United States.
The catch is how much hand-work each week takes:
We have tried folding all of this into one manual, unified routine, and even then the administrative burden stayed high. This does not sound like a lot of work. But week to week, keeping it consistent, handling each piece with care, making sure every sermon reaches VietChristian and YouTube, and holding production quality high, it all adds up.
So we built a real pipeline. It leverages artificial intelligence (AI) with a human-in-the-loop (HITL) process and the software behind it (runners, scheduled jobs, and scripts) to automate every step above. It asks for only two approvals: first, approve the sermon trim; then, once it has prepared all the media assets, approve the publishing. Everything in between runs on its own.
The whole weekly job is two approvals, each about a minute from a phone. A link arrives Monday, and nothing is shared until a person taps approve.
Gate 1
Approve the sermon
Confirm where it starts and ends.
Gate 2
Approve publishing
Preview the finished cut, then send it out.
The blue path runs on its own. Amber gates need a person. Nothing is published until someone approves.
The next step in the pipeline
In 2025, 87.5% of online adults watched short-form video every week, and now spend more time on short clips than on long-form video. That is where viewers’ attention has moved. So the same pipeline that trims a sermon takes one more step: it finds the moments that can stand on their own and shapes them into YouTube Shorts, each carrying a whole thought and linking back to the full sermon. The aim is reach, to meet someone mid-scroll with a word that stops them. That reach is also what makes a clip risky. Lifted out of the sermon, a true sentence no longer carries the context that held it steady, and it can land as something the pastor never meant. So nothing is published autonomously: a council of AI agents weighs every Shorts video candidate for doctrine, for context, and for whether it is worth anyone’s attention, and a person approves what goes out.
GradesEvery candidate carries four marks from the council: hook, will it stop a scroll; weight, its lasting spiritual impact; stands alone, whether it holds up on its own; and an overall score that weighs them together.
Full sermon An AI agent is an AI given one small job and nothing else. It is not a chatbot you hold a conversation with: one question, one answer, and it is finished. “Would this clip catch someone’s attention?” is a job for an agent.
Putting several agents in a row, each with its own job, is what people mean by an agentic process. One agent looks at a clip, hands its answer along, the next one looks, and so on. Nobody asks a single AI “is this good enough to publish?” and takes its word for it, because a model asked a broad question like that tends to agree with whoever asked.
So the job is broken into seven small ones, and no agent sees what the others said. Seven separate answers, each about one thing, all of them written down where a person can read them.
They work in two groups. The first three grade the clip out of 100. The next four can veto it outright. It has to clear all seven before a person sees it at all.
Full trimmed sermon + sermon transcriptthe finished cut, and its text with timestamps Each agent reads the cut passage, answers one question, and grades it out of 100 on its own. They work blind to each other, so one agent’s enthusiasm cannot pull the rest along. These are the marks on the cards above.
The hook came back weakest at 72, which is the honest read: this one opens quietly. It cleared because the other two were strong, and the overall came to 89.
This council gives no marks. Every agent answers yes or no, and any one of them can end the clip by itself. A doctrinal problem is not the sort of thing a strong hook is allowed to outweigh, so these do not average.
20:55–21:29 
06:31–06:52 
38:29–38:51 03 · Grace Worship Planning App
In plain terms: the songs, the Sunday plan, and who is serving live in one place, and last week can be reused instead of rebuilt.
The Grace Worship Planning App is one system for planning worship from end to end. In a single place it holds the song library, the set lists, the order of worship, the team roster, and a live stage view, on iPad and on the web. Whether you plan the service or simply show up to play, it is the one place to find what to sing, in which key, led by whom, and when.
The song library is the heart of it. Today, our music, our chords, and the set list emails we keep referring back to are usually buried somewhere in an inbox, and each of us has a different way of digging them out. When all of it lives in one place the whole team can reach, the scramble stops: everyone works from the same source, walks in prepared, and can put their attention on leading worship instead of on the search.
The app idea is not new to us. It was drafted and redrawn many times, as early as 2018, but building it was never feasible then, with limited time and other priorities in the way. Real work began in February of this year, and it pilots with our worship teams this September.
Rosters in Word, songs in binders, plans in inboxes. Every team kept its own copy.
We moved to one shared schedule earlier this year, the right step forward, though it still leans on manual email and one person keeping it current.
Library, set lists, roster, and stage view in one system, on iPad and the web.
On iPad, on stage. Tap between the song library, the setlist, live mode, and the calendar.
On the web, at your desk. The same library and plans, in any browser. The toggles here and above stay in sync.
Feature 01 · Song Library
Keep every version of a song in one place: the original, the transposed, the reharmonized, in whatever keys your teams use. Paste the lyrics once and update everywhere. Nothing you have built is retyped or lost, so past work stays reusable week after week.
Feature 02 · Setlist Creation
Pull songs from the library or add new ones, drag them into service order, and group them by moment. When the set is ready, the app prepares the emails, the rehearsal dates, and the reminders for you. You plan the worship; it carries the logistics.
Feature 03 · Notes & Assets
Add a note to the whole set or to a single song, and hang the assets off it: click tracks, a reference video, a personal reminder. When it is time to lead, everything the team needs for that song is already in one place.
Feature 04 · Rostering
Today, filling a Sunday team means one person texting and calling down a list and re-checking the night before. Team-based scheduling is how most churches have already solved this: build the teams, assign a service, and each person gets a request they accept or decline in a tap. It is the same pattern Planning Center Services uses across more than 90,000 churches, so this is proven ground, not an experiment. The reminders and the yes-or-no are handled for everyone, so no one chases anybody, each team member sees their commitments ahead and knows what is expected, and a decline comes early enough to fill the gap before Sunday.
Feature 05 · Live Mode
On Sunday or in rehearsal, Live Mode shows the whole set in order: full lyrics, chords, and attachments, scrolling as you play. Pull up a click track and play along, transpose on the fly, and never shuffle papers again.
Underneath all of it: reusability. A song entered once is entered for good: its key, its chords, its arrangement, ready the next time it comes around. Duplicate last Sunday into next Sunday in one tap and the songs come with everything already on them.
Before
After
The Grace Worship Planning App is built and hosted in-house, so it costs Vietnamese Grace nothing. It is still worth seeing what the same system costs a church that buys or rents one.
Built in-house and given to Vietnamese Grace Community Church as a lifetime license. Nothing to buy, nothing to renew. Abraham Nguyen covers the hosting fees personally.
If the platform proves itself here, it can be offered to other churches commercially, and Grace keeps its lifetime license either way.
What the same system costs elsewhere
04 · Grace Announcements Planner
In plain terms: anyone can request an announcement, a pastor approves it with one tap, and it lands on the Sunday screen.
Today the announcements rest almost entirely on one person. The pastor handles them single-handedly and by hand, week to week and largely from memory. Each week they go out as a manual text in the sermon submission. Some change, some should run for several weeks, and in a busy stretch one can be forgotten between Sundays. And when a ministry leader needs something announced, there is no clear way to request it: the ask lives in a text thread or a hallway conversation, and it does not reliably reach the Media Team who put it on the screen. There is no shared way to request, review, and approve an announcement, so it all rests on memory.
The Grace Announcements Planner gives that a real workflow, built into the worship service planner. A member submits what they would like shown and for which Sundays, a pastor or elder approves it with one tap from an email, and the approved announcement flows straight into the service plan, ready for the screen, with no one re-typing it.
Nghia Nguyen is leading this effort and building the workflow. In development now.
Submit what to show and which Sundays, with an image if there is one.
One tap from an email approves it. Nothing shows without approval.
The team is told automatically. No chasing, no missed requests.
The approved announcement flows into the service plan, ready for the screen.
Beyond Software
Software carries the repetition, but sound still travels through speakers and ministries are still built by trained people. Beyond the software, the same strategy extends to the room itself, to our partnership with Bethany Presbyterian Church whose building we share, and to a Media Team training guide that puts the heart of worship and service in writing so the ministry can grow its people.
Hardware Roadmap
Opening the mixer and cameras so our church, Bethany, and any guest can run a quality stream, with a setup that is universal and easy to use.
TargetSpeakers that fill the back of the room, so depth of sound reaches every row, not just the front.
PlanningAdded camera angles for a fuller, warmer view of the service on the stream.
PlanningA real video-operations booth with an ATEM switcher and the gear behind it, serving both our church and Bethany.
PlanningPinch or double tap to zoom
