I said I would build one app a week for Lent.
I did not.
That deserves to be said plainly before I explain anything else.
On Ash Wednesday I wrote that I wanted to spend the forty days of Lent building small, useful tools for the Church: one week, one app, one real need. It felt like the right kind of discipline: practical, creative, and pointed toward service rather than self-improvement.
Week one worked. Worship Cast shipped.
It solved a problem I’d watched up close: the chaotic, very human job of running worship slides during Mass while also trying to sing, pray, and keep pace with everyone else. Worship Cast let that display become more flexible, more live, and less dependent on one person chained to a laptop in the corner. I’m glad I built it, and glad I wrote about it.
The weekly rhythm did not hold.
What actually happened
The honest answer isn’t dramatic. I didn’t run out of ideas. I ran out of the kind of time weekly shipping quietly demands.
A weekly build isn’t just code. It’s choosing the right problem, cutting scope to something honest, building it, testing it, writing about it, and making it clear enough for someone else to care. Even with AI tools speeding parts of that up, the whole cycle needs margin: evenings and weekends that don’t already belong to something else. I underestimated that.
And after Worship Cast, the next idea didn’t get smaller. It got bigger. It stopped feeling like a one-week experiment and started feeling like the seed of a real product.
The cadence failed; the reason didn’t
The challenge did fail as a weekly cadence. I didn’t ship six apps. I didn’t keep the public rhythm going through Lent. I didn’t write the weekly updates I promised. There’s no way around that.
But the point was never six random artifacts. It was to force myself to look hard at the gap between the tools churches need and the tools churches actually have, and to start building into that gap instead of just noticing it.
That part worked.
From Worship Cast to something larger
Since then I’ve kept circling a bigger church-focused idea I’ve been calling MyChurch.
I’m not ready to write its launch post, and I’m deliberately not treating it as an open-source weekend experiment. Worship Cast was something I could build quickly, share openly, and learn from in public. MyChurch is different. It needs to become a proper application, something real churches can responsibly depend on.
That means moving slower, and thinking about the unglamorous things: onboarding, privacy, data ownership, reliability, and the questions that are easy to ignore when you’re just trying to ship by Sunday morning. For now I’m keeping the details quiet while I work out what it actually needs to be.
Less exciting than “one app a week.” Probably more honest.
What the challenge actually taught me
A public commitment creates pressure, and pressure is good for starting. It made the first step concrete enough that I couldn’t keep postponing it. Worship Cast exists because of it.
But pressure isn’t momentum, and not every idea belongs to the same rhythm. Some things should ship fast because the scope is clear and the cost of imperfection is low. Some things should be built slowly because people may come to depend on them. I’m learning to tell the difference.
Worship Cast belonged to the first kind. MyChurch, done properly, belongs to the second.
Closing the loop
So this is the closure, and the reset.
I didn’t finish the Lenten one-app-a-week challenge. I shipped one app, learned more than I expected, and watched the work turn into something larger than the challenge could hold.
I still want to build for the Church, maybe more than before. I just no longer think the most faithful version of that work is always the fastest one.
The weekly challenge got me started. Worship Cast was the first offering. MyChurch is where the thread goes next, slower than I expected, and probably better for it.