For twenty years my job has been to decide what's true, and then write it down so it holds.

Princeton M.Div., ordained 2003, Stated Clerk of two presbyteries. Founder of a church-website agency and a financial-literacy nonprofit. I lead software teams — human ones for a decade, and since 2025 mostly AI — and the part of that work I'm best at is judgment: deciding whether the output is actually good, and being able to say why.

Most of what's below is live. Where it isn't public I've said so.

Selected work

• Sermon Helper

  Sermon-preparation software for Presbyterian pastors. It reads a pastor's whole archive, learns how they preach, and helps prepare the next sermon — then turns each one into a week of liturgy, study guides, devotionals and posts.

  The judgment in it: a 38 KB style guide encoding Reformed theology and what to avoid, prepended to every generation; seven sermon shapes with their own rules; and a blind bake-off in which the cheaper model beat the more capable one on voice fidelity — the thing a pastor actually notices.

  Twenty thousand illustrations generated and de-duplicated by model. My own 415 sermons were the first archive in.

• Church website builder

  Point it at a church's current site. It reads the site and the church's own social photos and produces a new one in about a minute, with an editor and one-click publish.

  The judgment in it: the first real builds were worse than the sites they replaced, and nothing in the pipeline could see it — the grader compared our variants with each other, never with the incumbent. I rebuilt the quality system around one rule: measure the artifact against the thing that matters, not against itself.

  Independent critics now grade every gate church "better than theirs."

• A knowledge base for stated clerks

  The national association of PC(USA) stated clerks had a twenty-year email archive full of hard-won answers nobody could find. I turned it into a searchable assistant grounded in the constitution and in peer practice.

  The judgment in it: reading every thread, quarantining the thirteen that were confidential, distilling the answers, and finding that shaping retrieval raised citation quality far more than swapping the model did.

  2,028 messages became 295 curated questions and answers.

• Subject Mastery (private)

  An adaptive tutor I built for my two children: a library room and an owl who asks questions aloud, teaches when they're stuck, and never gives the answer. Underneath, a Bayesian knowledge-tracing engine and a prerequisite graph.

  The judgment in it: the content is written by models and passes a two-stage review ladder before a child sees it — generate, review, promote — and every threshold is treated as a hypothesis until the telemetry says otherwise. The worst bugs were found by measuring, none by looking.

  1,590 topics, 6,843 fact cores, 63 server tests green.

• Endowing People

  A free twelve-month financial-literacy program I founded for the working poor in a post-industrial town. It teaches credit as a tool, explains how the monetary system reaches a household, and runs long enough for people to open the brokerage account and build the score.

  The judgment in it: an IRB-approved study on the CFPB Financial Well-Being Scale, a literature review of thirty-plus papers, and charts rebuilt each year from FRED and Shiller data rather than copied from a deck.

  2026 cohort: 28 participants, in person and online.

• Google Ads and SEO for a $3 million business, since 2012

  For fourteen years I've run search advertising and SEO for Tampa Bay Food Truck Rally and its Orlando and Ocala sister companies — a catering business with roughly $3 million in annual revenue. Strategy, campaign structure, keyword and geo expansion, bidding, and the lead tracking behind it.

  The judgment in it: distrusting the dashboard. When the numbers looked too good in 2025 I found the account was firing two conversion actions per lead and halved the reported figure before anyone quoted it. One geo-targeting change in 2026 cut cost per lead by 37 percent.

  On the current account alone: $300,000 in managed spend and more than 6,000 leads.

• Gulf Shores Realty

  A 3,500-page real-estate site on the Florida Gulf Coast — gulfshoresrealty.com — WordPress with live IDX listings, community pages and an agent directory, plus the search advertising and analytics behind it. The largest site I've designed and built. Others on request.

  Live, and still the site the agents send people to.

• Governing documents, rewritten

  A presbytery's manual of operations and standing rules, plus its child-protection, misconduct and harassment policies — audited against the constitution and rebuilt as tracked-changes redlines, every edit with a margin note giving the authority and the reason.

  The judgment in it: reading the Code of Virginia rather than punting to counsel, and finding that clergy are mandated reporters for children but not for adults; catching a dead judicial citation the national model policy still carries; and having my own supervision clause caught by a reviewer who read it more carefully than I had.

  Four documents, roughly a hundred tracked changes, each one cited.

How I work

• Evidence or it didn't happen. A claim about a system gets a file and a line, a command and an exit code, or it gets labeled as a guess. A stated uncertainty is correct; a confident wrong answer is a failure.
• Measure the artifact against the thing that matters. Three scorers I built measured our own output against itself and passed work that was worse than what it replaced. The fix each time was the same: compare with the incumbent, the reader, the child.
• Blind before you believe. Model choices are made with counterbalanced, blinded reads and cost telemetry. The capable model loses to the steerable one more often than you'd think.
• Verify before acting, including on yourself. Three of my own audit findings on a recent pipeline were measurement errors. They were retracted before anyone acted on them, which is the point of writing them down.
• Write it so it holds. Rulings, redlines and policies are read by people who disagree with you and are looking for the gap. Write for that reader.

Writing and teaching

Talks at Stewardship Kaleidoscope (2017, 2024), the Mid Council Financial Network (2016) and the Patton Lecture Series (2012). In 2026 I've been teaching the presbytery to use AI well: a seminar on what it is and where the ethical lines are, and a hands-on workshop that leaves pastors with a working assistant that knows their own context. I also wrote the presbytery's policy guide for church boards and its moderator training.

Three long manuscripts in progress — on faith and science, on epistemology and the replication crisis, and on the generalist's advantage. They'll probably become video before they become books.

Background

2025–

Stated Clerk, Presbytery of the Peaks (108 congregations). Acting from March 2025, elected October 2025.

2022–

Founder and executive director, Endowing People.

2020–22

Stated Clerk and director of communications, Presbytery of the Peaks.

2019–20

Pastor, Williamson Memorial Presbyterian Church, Virginia.

2015–19

Stated Clerk and director of communications, Presbytery of Tampa Bay. Rewrote the ministry manual and bylaws; designed a $200,000 grant program.

2013–

Founder, Internet Outreach Experts. Websites, search and ads for churches and small businesses; team of five at its peak, two today.

2008–13

Associate Pastor, Hyde Park Presbyterian, Tampa.

2003–07

Pastor, Milford Presbyterian; organizing pastor, Living Peace Church; assistant to the Stated Clerk, Presbytery of the James.

2002

M.Div., Princeton Theological Seminary. B.A. Psychology, College of William & Mary, 1999.

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