A word from your pastor, smarter sermons, and 50 languages

Last week we rebuilt Bible study. This week was about voice, sermons, and reaching people in their own language.

🎙️ "A Word from your Pastor"

Pastors can now record a short devotional — in their own voice, or an AI clone of it they train once — and it lands in members' apps as a card they can play. It's the between-Sundays connection pastors have been asking for. Members see a "A Word from your Pastor" card; pastors get a simple composer with voice-tuning sliders and a live preview.

• Record sermon audio in-app right on the New Sermon page — no separate recorder needed.
• Up to a 3-minute voice-clone sample with a guided Psalm 23 script to read.

📝 Smarter sermons

• Auto-devotional — turn any sermon into a short devotional automatically, saved under "My Devotionals."
• Reflect (SOAP) — journal a sermon straight from the player using the classic Scripture · Observation · Application · Prayer method.
• Listen-streak — a gentle streak chip that rewards consistent listening.

🙏 Guided prayer

A new library of guided-prayer audio sessions — including the Examen — with a dedicated browser and player.

📚 Teaching Library uploads

Pastors can now upload PDFs and Word (.docx) documents to ground their Discipleship AI — not just plain text.

🌍 SoapBox now speaks 50 languages

Our biggest reach milestone yet:

• The app's entire interface is now translated into 50 languages.
• Community posts and ORA answers auto-translate into your language.
• Pick your language anytime from a new picker; new sign-ups inherit the language they chose.

And behind the scenes, our translation reach already extends to 140+ languages.

👥 People & roles for pastors

• Member-invite emails — add a person and they get a status-aware invite or welcome email with your church's code and store links.
• Co-pastor roles — promote a trusted member to co-pastor.

🤝 An early look: Connect your AI agent

We began rolling out the ability to connect an outside AI agent to your faith life, starting with a careful prayer-consent flow. (Much more on this next week.)

🛠️ What we fixed — including an honest one

• Squashed a systemic sign-in token bug that caused intermittent 401 errors across several screens (Support, voice upload, the People tab). Secure calls now always use a fresh token.
• Fixed the pastor dashboard showing "New Visitors: 0" forever — it was reading the wrong ID.
• Aligned the pastor dashboard stat cards across iOS and Android.

🔜 What's next, and why

The world is moving toward AI agents that act on our behalf. We don't think faith should be left out of that — but it has to be done with consent and grounding, never manipulation. Next week we open up the agent side of SoapBox: a way for pastors to share their content with AI agents (and get paid fairly), and for members to let a trusted agent pray, give, and learn within boundaries they set.