In 2026, everyone is a builder.

Over the last several months, we've introduced you to some of the people building alongside Gloo for the faith and flourishing ecosystem. They showed us you don't need to be the most technical person; you just need a problem worth solving and the passion to solve it. We call them Heroes of the Ecosystem, not because they took home the top prize at the Gloo AI Hackathon, but because they're on the front lines every day, building for their communities, causes, and missions.

Meet Preston Zeller, a builder from Mesa, Arizona, who has spent the last 16 years building, marketing, and growing technology companies. His current company, Psalmlog, helps people track and measure their spiritual growth. Muse — the open-source tool he brought to the Summer Challenge, a builder competition run with YouVersion and Gloo — grew out of that same question: what does it look like for scripture to show up inside someone's everyday life, instead of waiting for them to go looking for it?

The Problem Worth Solving

Bible engagement is actually having a moment. Per Barna's 2025 research, weekly Bible reading among Millennials jumped 16 points in a single year, and Gen Z isn't far behind — both groups are opening scripture more than they have in decades. But Barna's own read on the data comes with a caveat: engagement is outpacing conviction. People are showing up to the text more often without a clear bridge connecting it to what's actually happening in their lives.

That's the gap Preston started poking at. Not "how do we get people to read the Bible more" — plenty of tools already chase that. His question was narrower and stranger: where is scripture-shaped meaning already hiding in something people engage with every single day, without being told to?

His answer was music. "I like music — it's just a common thing I think everyone shares," he says. So he built Muse to take a person's actual playlist — the songs, the lyrics, even the music key, which can shape whether a song reads as hopeful or heavy — and surface what that music is actually saying thematically. From there, Muse lets someone dig into a topical word or theme, and that's where it starts introducing scriptural ideas: not a verse dropped in cold, but one connected to something the person was already feeling.

A Tool, Not a Substitute

Preston is careful about what he claims Muse can do. When he ran it past beta testers, the reactions surprised even him. "One guy had a list of just gangster rap songs, and he's like, 'this is how I'm feeling.' And I knew him well — I was like, yeah, this sounds about right," Preston says. The tool wasn't judging the music. It was naming something true about the person underneath it.

But he's quick to draw a line around what that means. "It can be a reference, just like any book or YouTube video," he says. "You ultimately have to go back to Scripture." Muse isn't trying to replace the harder, slower work of actually engaging the text — it's trying to make the on-ramp shorter. If someone clicks through from a song they already love into a scripture idea they'd never have gone looking for on their own, and that's the moment that gets them to open a Bible again after years away, Preston sees that as the win. Music becomes the gateway. Scripture is still the destination.

That distinction — tool versus substitute — is also why Preston talks about building with real caution. Large language models have a well-documented tendency to agree with whoever's talking to them, which means an AI tool exploring someone's faith can end up flattening or confirming whatever bias they walked in with. Preston's response isn't to avoid the technology. It's to keep pressure-testing it against real scenarios until it's reliably pointing people back to scripture instead of just reflecting them back to themselves.

What community are you called to serve?

If everyone is a builder, the claim is simple: you have a part to play.

Preston's part was noticing that most people won't open a Bible app cold, but they'll press play on a playlist without thinking twice — and building the bridge between those two moments. He points back to the parable of the talents when he talks about why: "We are here at a time and a place in technology and society to be able to do something about it," he says. "We need to invest our skill sets into doing something great."

What's the moment in someone's ordinary day where meaning is already hiding, waiting for a bridge? What tool could you build to shorten that distance? What team do you need to build it with?

Let's get building.