Divine Eagles

A growing youth church in Calgary needed more than a website. Every Sunday, first-timers would attend and never hear from anyone again. Regular members drifted without follow-up. Sermons were recorded, uploaded to YouTube, and left there with no readable layer on top. The leadership team had no real-time view of what was happening during service. Attendance data was being lost every week. The ask was a web presence. The real need was infrastructure.

I built the whole thing from scratch: design, branding, frontend, backend, database, and the AI pipeline. The public site covers sermon archives, events, and a playlist section curated for what a youth congregation actually listens to. The ops layer is where it gets interesting. Members check in every Sunday by scanning a QR code, and the system tracks their attendance streak in real time. First-timers get a confetti moment on screen and a Telegram alert fires to church leadership before the service even ends. On Monday, three automated email flows go out: a welcome to first-timers, outreach to members who missed after three consecutive Sundays, and a summary report to the pastoral team. The sermon pipeline runs in Python. It pulls the latest YouTube upload, waits for auto-captions, sends the transcript to xAI Grok, validates the response against a strict schema with scripture cross-links, then writes to a volume-mounted file that updates the live site without any redeploy. The whole system runs in Docker Compose. Zero manual Sunday overhead.

• Actively used by a live congregation every Sunday in Calgary

• First-timer pipeline: QR check-in to Telegram alert to Monday welcome email, fully automated

• AI sermon recap live on the site within hours of the service, no redeploy needed

Technology Stack