Podcast Episode 3: 3 Underrated Features Churches Are Overlooking | Ep 217

Description

We're halfway through 2026, and Jon, Emily, and Nicole are treating it as a checkpoint, not a victory lap. This episode pairs a v19 walkthrough with the mid-year reset most teams will skip.In Jon's segment on v19, he covers the features your church should be paying attention to. With the most important one being AI. The AI Summit on July 7th is the Community's first look at AI Agents and the biggest event of the summer.Emily and Nicole lead a mid-year reset around three critical questions: what you accomplished so far in 2026, what needs to change, and what to learn now before fall. They revisit the Vacation Test and flag Following, NextGen Check-in, and Connections as summer priorities and underrated features.Listen to the full episode, then share it with your team to make the most of 2026.Visit the show notes to find all the resources talked about in this episode. Don't forget to join the new Rock Cast Rocket Chat Channel to see what other churches are saying about this episode.

Transcribed Content

Welcome back to ROTcast. Thank you guys for tuning in. Today, we have a jam packed episode. John's gonna walk us through v 19 and all the features your church should be paying attention to. And then since we're halfway through the year already, we're gonna do a little midyear reset, and we'll give you a few questions that you can follow along with. John, what do our churches need to know about? Well, first of all, v 19 is released, so it's not too late to install. In fact, it's a great time to install. I think sometimes doing it in the summer is a great time too because not that there's nothing to do, there's always something to do in a church, but it's a time when you can start prepping for for fall. We've already had a few bug fixes inside there, so it's it's a good release, and more versions are coming. But the big thing is connections, and we've really taken that to the next level. If you have not already gone out to at least the pre alpha site and used the new list view, you're in for a real, real treat. We've really spent a lot of time on that UX, and the dev team did an amazing job on the implementation of that. It's good to have a good design, but sometimes good design is there's lot of work that goes into it, but it's even harder to make that actually come to life inside of the code, and it's really great. So it's a complete reimagination of that. Don't worry, more is coming in version 20, but there's some significant improvements right there. You're gonna want to get that in front of your staff. So be sure you prep your staff before you do this. This is not an update you just wanna go install on a Friday. You should never install on a Friday. But you're definitely gonna wanna show your staff some screenshots of it. There's a great video out there that kinda goes over a lot of the new versions. And there's a whole video just on connections. So send that out to your staff beforehand because you do not want to surprise them. Yeah. That's a great point. Connections is probably already in use by your volunteers and staff. And if they just come in one day, they open it up and everything's changed, that could be a little shocking. So do make sure to spend some time putting that training together, quick screenshot, maybe a quick video or a point to the video that exists. Yeah. You can really snatch failure from the jaws of success by doing that. You can have a really good successful thing and you don't train, boom. It's all of a sudden now you're you're working back upstream. But beyond that, there's some great analytics built in to connections. There's a snapshot analytics that really helps make sure that you're on track and that everybody's providing accountability. But again, there's more coming on connections in v20. 19 is the first release that has the Essentials features built in. So everybody who who upgrades is automatically in what we call trailblazer mode, which is the hard mode. You can switch that down to essentials if you'd . Initially, you won't see a lot of difference. It just takes time to go through all the features and hide the complexities. And again, that might sound easy too, but we've had some pretty difficult meetings trying to decide which features to hide because we can make a case that they're all needed because someone already did make a case of why they are needed. Another feature which is kinda cool is a zero config CAPTCHA. CAPTCHA has always been a part of Rock, at least in the last few versions. But you always had to configure it. You had to go get a Turnstile account. You had to go out, make another service, and wired all up. So now out the box, you don't have to do anything. We just took care of it for you. We're using a different library that does the same types of proof of work, but you don't have to do anything configuration. So out with the old, in with the new. There's also a really cool unsubscribe report. So a lot of times when you're sending out communications, gotta be careful if you send too many or if you send the wrong types, people will unsubscribe. Well, now you have a report that tells you who caused what. And so I would recommend that you tell your staff that there is a report that. Sometimes just knowing there's a report that that's gonna track who's doing the unsubscribes is enough to kind of make them second guess whether they should send it to a full a big list or a small list. But the good news is you now have that report. There's also a new Check-in Manager roster. So within Check-in Manager, there's a roster block that tells you who's in the room, and that's been completely redesigned. It's using the new Obsidian framework. And the best part is it's real time. So as new people check-in, those people automatically just pop into your screen. There's no need to refresh the browser. And so that's a really cool upgrade. Another thing, really small, but if you go to a page at the bottom, you've always been able to look at the timings on the page to see kinda, , how fast it loaded and what took a long time if the if there was a problem. That's been completely redesigned, completely rearchitected. So those page timings are now exactly the same data that you would see in observability. Nice. But you don't have to configure observability. So observability is a great feature, but for a lot of churches, it's probably not worth the setup cost. With this, you can see the same data, and you don't have to do any configuration. You're just seeing it live right on the page. The last feature I just kind of threw out there, there's so many that we could spend literally all day talking about them. And if you want that, let me know. We'll we'll we'll set something up. We'll go line by line, and every single line of source code changed. Oh, wow. It'll be exciting. That'll be a solo podcast. I don't know if I'll be here for that one. Yeah. That's okay. If there's demand. It's a small thing, but I think it's nice to know. These are some of the things that probably don't get mentioned. They're in the release notes, but they probably might get missed. If you're familiar with the schedules within Rock, they're really powerful. One of the most powerful parts is you can create reoccurring schedules. And the way we do that, and is the way the industry does it, is using a technology called iCal. So iCal is a little string, a little bit of text that that describes the pattern in a very structured way. And it's great that everybody uses it. The problem is it's really slow to query that and to get the real dates out of it. If you're doing one schedule, no problem. If you're having to query across a whole bunch of stuff, it's impossible to do performantly. So one of the things that we've done to fix that is we now take that iCal schedule and and we kind of what we call unpack it into actual the dates, and we store those dates in the database. So if you were to say, My schedule is every Wednesday, we're actually gonna write the dates into a new table, schedule date, of all those dates. So that allows you to quickly query using SQL or Lava to find out, , give me all the events on this date and it unpacks all of that scheduling for you. And we keep that table up to date for you. Nice. So for those of you in the SQL area, look at that. And what about for churches that aren't really down in the weeds that with their data? Just know that it's there and we're using it, so everything just got faster. Great. Yeah. I guess there is one more feature. Probably another one of the mega features of '19 is AI. So AI is now officially arriving. However, we're gating it a bit. And so we're gating it so that we can test it in real life before we just roll it out. So just making sure that the guardrails are all in place. But already, there's three or four churches who are actively using the AI features, and we're getting back feedback on that. Initial feedback has been really good. They've caught a few little code things that we need to polish up, and that's great. It's exactly what we wanted. And I'm really happy because the things that they're finding are actually native code. So it's very easy to fix. It's not trying to wrestle the AI. We don't have a problem that the AI got loose. It's more , Oh, we forgot to add this little bit of native code there. So perfect testing. Exactly what we wanted. Great. Yeah. And, , we do have the AI Summit coming up on July 7. That's perfect timing. Yeah. We're putting a lot of time into that. So not only are going to hear from us, but you're going to hear from people who are actually using it. Yeah. That's very exciting. Thanks for walking us through all those v 19 features. Yeah. I think now is a great time to pause and just do a quick recap of where we've been. Emily, you wanna kick us off? Yeah. Absolutely. , let's start with a quote from Socrates. He said, The unexamined life is not worth living. That's a pretty abrupt statement. Right? But if you think about the way that most of us are living, we have maybe some high level things that we pay attention to. We examine our lives when we get to annual reviews, when we get to big goals. Maybe we do , we set resolutions at the end of the year, the beginning of the next year. But it's really more of the micro check ins that help direct the path of your life. And summer's a great time to have one of those check ins and say, , am I moving things in the direction that I want to move them? And so we wanna talk about three things that you can focus on this summer. One is what did you actually accomplish in the first half of the year? Two is, what do you need to do differently? And the third one is, what do you need to learn to support your growth and your path or your trajectory this year? So, John, do you wanna talk with us about, , what do you think about the first half of the year? Well, honestly, I'm still mourning the fact that we're halfway through this year. I cannot believe I know. That the year's half over. Fast. I did hear conspiracy theory. Do you want a conspiracy theory? Oh, sure. So CERN just turned off their supercollider, and people are already reporting that the days seem longer. I don't know. Okay. Some people say they're just they're just crazy, but but I've been thinking about that. The last two days have seemed a little longer to me too. But, again, I think I have confirmation bias probably. So maybe that was it. Maybe that's the problem. And that they turned it off, maybe the next half of the year will go slower. Maybe. Anyways, here we are halfway through the year. And I think our instinct is probably to initially just go, , look at the list of what of what we've accomplished and immediately go , is this good or not? Yep. But I think we need to reflect a a little bit deeper and just see, , what value have we done. Not not necessarily what have we checked off, but what's the results. Because checking boxes for no for no good for no reason is not is not helpful. But what value have we added? And I would just encourage you to just sit down and reflect on that. Put something on the calendar, maybe over the over the weekend, just think about that. But if you don't book it on your calendar, it won't happen. That's true. But don't think about necessarily what boxes you check, but what value did you check off. That's important in ministry because you never run out of boxes to check. Right? You're just always there's more to do and more to do. And it's just easy to get lost in the mundane of constantly moving forward without taking a minute just to reflect, see the impact, and kind of reset your your energy and your focus for the next part of the year. Yeah. And for our listeners, that's your first question. , think about the first six months and what are you most proud of? We want to know hear about it in Rocket Chat. And, Emily, that's a great quote, great Socrates quote. It hits home, especially for somebody who's come from a classical liberal arts background. But it makes me think of not just what have we done, but also about, , what we should change and, , looking forward. John, do have any thoughts on that? Yeah. So I think, , once you get through step one, which is, , reviewing what you've accomplished, the next thing is to say, hey. What do I need to do differently? Mhmm. And I've thought about this a lot lately. That unreflective life is not worth living is that's always kinda haunted me. I think one of the things we need to think about is, , we live in a very it's the most amazing point in time ever. And there's and you could say that for a lot of reasons, technology, AI, whatever. But I think if if we if we're really honest, there's no point in history that we've been so fortunate. And I guess we can all we can all point to, , travesties in our lives. But those travesties are just, , minor irritants to most of all history. And I think as a culture, we're constantly looking for more leisure, more wealth, and more options. But we have to recognize we've never had more leisure, more wealth, more options. And I know it's probably when you hear the word wealth, you're , I'm not wealthy. Well, we are. If we compare ourselves to any point in history, we are complete we're kings and queens. Yeah. , the bed that you sleep in is a bed everybody on the planet for all history would have died for. But because there's always someone who's wealthier, we don't see ourselves as wealthy. So I think sometimes we just need to break out of that. And I think, again, the opportunities that we have in our quote industry working in the church, we're so fortunate, and it's so important that we do what we do. And if we're not fully engaged, and if we're not fully trying our best every day to climb that hill to bring people closer to Christ, then we're really missing out. And I go back to the first century church. I don't think I saw a lot of leisure in acts. Paul got stoned. He got up and went back in the scene. I'm not saying we need to go to that extent. Let's not start throwing rocks. And if you hit by a Rock, let's not, , go back in and get hit again. But if we're if we're honest, there's a lot more we can do. And I think we just need to figure out ways to motivate ourselves. Mhmm. And I know it's hard. That's why I think about it a lot. There's just a lot of days where it's just hard. But I keep thinking about my ancestors and the book of Acts, and I'm constantly reminded about how fortunate I am. Yeah, perspective is important. , if we think truly about what we need to do differently, a lot of the times it comes down to where our attention is going. And there's a Craig Groeschel quote that kind of rings around in my head. He said that your life tends to move in the direction of your strongest thoughts. And that's extremely tied to your focus and your attention, right? So just look at your time. In an average day, maybe do a time survey for a couple of days and see, Where is my time going? Where is my focus going? Because your life is moving in that direction. What is a time survey? Unpack that. Okay. A time survey is where, , when time passes, a lot of times it does so without our conscious attention. And we get to the end of the day, have you ever felt , oh, I don't even know what I got done today? That can happen so easily. Or maybe we misallocate our time and we think, I had no free time today. I did this, , these things. But in truth, we had other things that caught our attention. So if you just take a day or two and you kind of just write down how long you spent doing things and what things you actually did, you might surprise yourself about how much time you could have available if you just consolidated some things or stopped doing things that don't serve the person you want to become. A lot of times we do things that are feel productive but don't add value. That's true. checking email constantly. You might feel you're checking boxes, but you're not really getting value out of that. So, yeah. Pen and paper, I would say fifteen minute chunks. , at the end , you should be doing it as you go, but at the end of the day, can't leave until you have every fifteen minute chunks, , described. And if you only do it for a few days, I mean, I've I've gotten so much out of that. I have too. I've personally done that several different points, and I always learn something. We make assumptions about our time. Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, I definitely fall into that category of, , always wanting to look at my notifications and see what's happening. But, , it also you're talking about wealth reminds me of this, , crazy statistics that I've heard of before. I'm not even gonna attempt the statistics. I'll just butcher them. But it was something if you own a car, if you, , eat three meals a day, if you have a, , a roof over your head, you're actually in, top 10% of super wealthy people in the world. And I think we just sometimes take that for granted. For sure. Yeah. But, Emily, those are also really convicting questions. And I think that time survey, is that what it's called? That's a great tool for understanding where, , your effort and your attention is going. But, John, , what are you actually looking forward to in the second half of the year that you wanna personally work on? So personally, I mean, of course, there's projects. But personally, I think it's just my use of AI is one of the things I want to do. I feel I'm doing well with that, but I still feel I'm just scratching the surface. And there's so much more to learn. And I feel if I can build out my agent better, provide better context, I can release myself to do more impactful work than a lot of the mundane stuff. In fact, just before the podcast, I had a fifteen minutes. I'm , what am I gonna do with this fifteen minutes? I'm , well, I'll start bullet pointing all the things that my agent could do for me that I shouldn't do. And that list will not be complete, but it's how you fill the gaps. I think a lot times when we're working with AI, we're trying to get big wins, and we're ignoring the tedious context that we need to type in and provide. We're trying to pop out Let's say bubble paper. People get addicted to hitting bubble paper. I feel that's where we're looking for big bubbles to pop. And sometimes the biggest wins are going to come through disciplined approaches to documenting what we do. And the funny thing I think about this is, I'm doing this for AI, but really, this is what business leaders have done forever. They did it so that they could delegate it to somebody. It just happens in this case, we're delegating it to a machine. True. , it reminds me of an analogy that Emily once shared And with that in the wintertime things no, maybe not in Arizona, in other places, It gets cold. Things, die. They get buried in snow. leaves fall off the tree. Animals go into hibernation. And it might look a season of decay or stillness. But really there's work happening underground that is heading in preparation for a more beautiful or more richer or plentiful spring. So that growth, it doesn't happen automatically. Sometimes you have to put ourselves into those uncomfortable positions in order to do the growing. But, Emily, what should a church be focusing on? What should be on their learning list for the second half of the year? Well, I think John just touched on a great one, and that's AI. , the starting line for that keeps moving, so there's no better time to get started now because you just will get further behind. It doesn't have to mean , John, you've talked about on this podcast some of the things you're doing from an engineering perspective with AI, and I don't think every leader needs to feel they have to be in it at that level to get value out of it. What they should be doing is learning how to evaluate AI tools properly, trying some things themselves when it comes to productivity, research, and the kinds of things that they can move forward with themselves, and then encouraging and motivating their staff in the right direction and adoption as well. Yeah. And one thing I'd throw out, just to be transparent, , I'm at that stage in my career where it's , you might start telling yourself lies. I could start telling myself lies that I can't do that. And I lived through the beginning as a kid, the PC generation, the PC evolution revolution. And then we had the Internet revolution. And I was definitely a part of that as part of I kept right in college, brought that into a lot of companies. I literally had a moment a few months ago where I was , is that night? I'm trying to learn this AI agent stuff. My little inner voice said, John, is this maybe the revolution that you don't make? Because there's always gonna be a revolution you don't make, , right, either through death or whatever. Naturally. But most people, , there's a point in their life where they don't make the next revolutionary shift. You can think of it your grandparents maybe didn't do cell phones. Right? I was , is this maybe the revolutionary shift that you don't make? Maybe you just keep doing what you're doing. , you're you're still having impact. Right? But maybe this is the the one you don't do because it's hard, and I was I was struggling. I was feeling kind of stressed and having some anxiety over what I was trying to do. But I just wanna encourage you. , just it's not that hard. And on the other side, it's so much you're so much more productive, and you're able to do so much more work. So if you're feeling that, , I don't know if this if I can do it, just trust me. You can. , I had the same, , anxiety about, , do I is this where I tap out, basically? And and I don't tell people that. Right? , you just fake it. But I think about that night and I'm , I'm so glad I just pushed through. Yeah. Mean, sounds another little lie that the devil plant in your head to distract or discourage. Yeah. And one of my favorite authors, the Heath brothers, they had a book, I think it was on Switch, where they talk about the elephant and the writer. Definitely go into ChatGBT and say, Explain to me the concept of the elephant and the writer. It will change your life. And that was the elephant saying, gee, John, I'm not sure you're capable of this. And my writer had to go, nope, shut up. We're doing this. So it's a concept. The elephant and the writer really has been very impactful in my life. That's great. Well, we're excited because AI agents are coming to Rock as well. So if you're a leader at the Rock space, for sure make sure you don't miss the AI Summit that we keep talking about. You'll definitely want to be there. It's virtual. It's free. It's July 7. And, , for those of you unable to make it or maybe listening to the podcast after the fact, there is a recording that you wanna pay attention to. You'll wanna just make sure your team is is prepared for that. Alright. Well, while we're talking about summer, we've talked about what we need to learn. How about what we can still get done because summer's not over? Let's do it. Let's do it. Okay. Summer's a great time to catch up on something. It is. , your staff isn't in the middle of a lot of events once you get through the camp season. You have a little time in preparation before fall kickoff, so put it to good use. Right? And elephant is saying, summer, no. , this isn't where we're supposed to, , take a break. And then you gotta get your rider going saying, no. Summer's when we get caught up. Let's go. That's right. We get ourselves prepared for a really productive, high impact fall. So remember a recent podcast where we talked about this fragility concept and things are fragile or they're resilient, but then there's this third category that's antifragile. You want to be moving more and more of your systems into this antifragile process where things get stronger under pressure. This is the time to evaluate your systems. Right? Where are things fragile? And if you have had a Rock admin go on vacation this summer or about to, you might be uncovering where that fragility is set up in your systems right now. So don't lose that. It's a great opportunity. Document a few things and then get those into the list of things that you can, , reduce. Yeah. I mean, you called it out in that podcast. It's called the vacation test. Yes. Pretend someone's on vacation and see if the process is in summer, you kinda don't have to pretend. You don't have pretend. So dive in and do it. , this is the time. And then beyond the maintenance or the systems evaluations, there are probably some features in Rock that you should be paying attention to and getting into. I don't know a single church that uses every feature in Rock, and there are a few that you definitely wanna make sure are on your to do list if they aren't already. One is following, which we keep talking about. Following is easy. It's the core of relationship management, which is what Rock is designed to do. It's the core of ministry. Where are people? What are they doing? You can set it up very quickly. Follow people's main life events. You can follow groups. This gives you those pings. It pushes information to you so that you have an opportunity to reach out and connect with someone and keep people on your mind. Yeah. I'd say it's a very easy feature, you mentioned. If you people, you have to use following. Yes. So if you don't people, know, don't use following. Also, why are you in ministry? Yeah. It's literally that powerful, and it's so easy. Yeah. So you could have it implemented in It's so quick. An afternoon. Yes. Exactly. Alright. So following check now that you've got that in, what's next? Next gen check-in. Have you been putting that off? It is so powerful. It's so fast, and it is the gateway to your first impressions with all of your families. So don't let that one go by. This is the perfect time actually to move your whole team into NextGen check-in before fall kickoff. Yeah. Because eventually it's going the old one's going away. You can't stay there. You're gonna have to do it. You might as well do it now. Do it now. It's a great window. Don't do it while you're trying to do everything else at once. This is the time. And then connections. So you mentioned connections. Got a huge facelift in v '19. More is coming in v '20. This is gonna be a game changer for your staff and your volunteers, and they're going to love it. But they do need just a little quick introduction from you before, , it hits their their action items and their dashboard because it's a little bit different, but it's fantastic. Yeah. Just cheat. Use our video. Yeah. ? Pretend you did it. ? Give yourself a little pat on the back. Right. You don't have say , was given to me. And it's , hey, we worked our team has worked on this video. There you go. And you did. You worked on getting it from our web page to your web page. I think that counts. All right. Well, for those listening, let us know if you have plans to implement one of these features over the summer. Or maybe there's another one that we didn't talk about. But I think this was a great and much needed recap of what we've done and where we're heading next and how we're gonna make the most of the next six months. So to quickly recap, AI Summit, it's July 7, ten to 11:30AM Pacific Time. It's virtual. Ninety minute demo. Registration link will be in the show notes. And then our last announcement is that Rx twenty six is November third through fifth. And trust me, it might seem it's far off, but time goes by And we have our Gold Circle Award submissions that are now open through September 18. So for our new listeners who might not be familiar with this, we, recognize great innovative ministry work that's powered by Rock or Dun and Rock. And they're judged by a panel of community members themselves. And we're accepting three categories this year. That's Rock Mobile Apps, Websites, and Innovation. So if you've been working on a project with either a partner or you're doing it in house, submit your projects. We want to see it. Okay. That's all that we have for you guys this episode. Thanks for tuning in.