Podcast Episode 208: Episode 181: What's coming to Rock and updates at Spark

Description

Join Jon, Nick, and Emily as they discuss updates coming soon in Rock. Learn more about Rock'n Roadshows, as we hope to have many throughout the country with a brand new presentation. Also, hear about the new hires we have made over the last few months and the changes you can expect with them!

Transcribed Content

This episode of Rockcast is brought to you by Rock partner Triumph Tech, a full service specialist partner. Rock partners provide crucial support for Spark Development Network and important services for the Rock community. Connect with Triumph Tech today at rockrms.com/partners. Welcome to Rockcast. This is the podcast dedicated to the Rock community. I'm Emily Forman, and we have here today Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo. And here's what we're gonna discuss today. We're gonna review a little bit about the Rock platform, including an update on our next gen check-in plans, which is a very exciting topic I know some people are waiting to hear about. We'll be talking about custom indexes. How should you deal with the suggestions that come your way? And what does the product team suggest? We'll also be talking a little bit about our recent trip to the CITN conference and how that went, as well as some updates on our team that you may find interesting, and finally, community updates, including our donation plans and and how you might be involved with that. Alright. We have an exciting agenda and it's kind of a long one today, but we gotta start with our version update, As always. As always. Alright. So 16.7 is what we've been working on for a while, it's got a bunch of bug fixes in it and we were guesstimating within the next two to four weeks that we would be moving to alpha. And of course v 17 work is still ongoing, maybe touch on that later but there's just a lot of polish that's happening, getting that ready so probably won't be many more v 16 updates after sixteen seven. It'll just depend on what the rest of the year entails. Sure. Great. Thank you, Nick. Yep. I know when we talk about Rock as a platform, one of the biggest topics has been what is going on with next gen check-in and when can I get my hands on it? John, what can you share on that? So NextGen check-in is nearly complete. We actually beta tested it at the conference. So if you were at the conference, you got to play with some of the new things. So here's the plan. The check-in component, the kiosk component will be in 16.7, which Nick just mentioned is going to Alpha. Now, we need to do a slow roll on that. We do not recommend that you just one weekend, change over to that. That would be Oh my gosh. That would be very I haven't even played with it yet, so yeah, don't do that. If you just do regular stuff, we've tested it, but there's so many different edge cases, so many different ways that you can configure check-in, every church is literally different. It's one of those areas that every church is literally different. But here's a few things you should know. The configuration is compatible with V1 check-in and gen are compatible, except labels. So labels in next gen, you can't use your old labels, you have to make new labels. Good news is we have the label designer, so that remaking the labels should be trivial. So labels are not compatible. That's about the only thing that's not compatible going forward. In sixteen point seven, however, when I say check-in, it's really just a kiosk. We have not redone the check-in manager and some of those ancillary kind of things around check-in. We plan to, , we're just trying to get this piece out first. There's also the NFC mobile check-in. That's nearly done, but first we want to just get the kiosk going. So what I'd recommend is, if you're not in a hurry, then don't worry. Just keep waiting till seventeen, and we'll give you a big thumbs up when lots of people have tested it. If you're excited and you wanna test it, I would recommend installing it and using it on a single kiosk, maybe for your staff families to use. And if that and when that goes well, then roll it out for the kiosk or maybe some of your volunteers could use. If that goes well, maybe just roll it out to one of your kiosks out in the open. And just kind of test it from there. Cloud Print is also ready and that will be ready for testing. Again, we wanna test test test before we put that into production. The kiosk software, both the Windows client and the iPad, you'll need new versions to use it with next gen. Those versions are compatible with v one two, so you can, , roll that out to everything if you'd . Again, I'd probably roll it out to one. You can do that on Windows. A little harder to do that on iPad. So we're in a test flight right now on on the iPad. So we're trying to get a few people to install a test flight onto their iPads. Because once we release that to the Apple Store, unfortunately, then everybody gets it. It's a good thing and a bad thing. So that in a nutshell, is the story on NextGen. And again, 12 churches help fund all of this. our first goal is get the 12 churches starting to understand it, starting to test it. But hey, if anybody else wants to join in, I would just say roll slow. Do not get ahead of the boulder. Everything should be fine, but there's no use. There's no reason to go in the year on a flop in check-in. Right. And and check-in is probably the most widely divergent in terms of how it's used, and the number of churches using it might be highest in our platform. And the criticality of it. Yeah. Yeah. So, and the v one check-in was based off of the workflow engine. The new check-in is not, and that's why it's 25 times faster. So it's way faster. However, if you had any custom workflow actions in there, which, that's pretty rare and you would know, or if you've made any changes to some of those, there could be some things that don't go as planned. The team has done a lot of research though into all those custom actions, and we've looked at a lot of instances, not every instance, but a lot of instances to see what configurations were in play. So a lot of due diligence was done, but because of all the edge cases and the way people use different features, it's possible we miss something. There were a couple little minor features that micro features we took out of check-in just for performance and no one's using it, it's kind of crazy. Perhaps you were one of the churches that did use it. But again, we did a lot of due diligence. We sent out a lot of requests for run this sequel so we can see what your setup is. And so we went made spreadsheets, went crazy through that. So again, we did a lot of due diligence, but it is still possible something might have slipped through. I think it's pretty incredible with this particular feature, how many churches participated in the development of this feature in ways they may or may not even know just by providing feedback in those ways or the funding and insights that other churches prepared. But this is really, as you mentioned, based on the knowledge of so many different data points across many churches. And then I think it really truly is a great community feature for that perspective. Yeah, and we had the 12 churches come in in January of this year and participate in The goal of the meeting was really to look at CAST vision for where check-in could go. I think it turned into more , Hey, what other features could we add? Maybe less visionary features than we were hoping, but still good positive things. But I think one of the best things that happened to the meeting from my perspective is the 12 churches got to see a little bit of a glimpse into our life because they all saw that they don't agree on how it should and all the different features that should go left and right and up and down and diagonally. And it was just kind of fun to see them and watch them realize that that's kind of our everyday. we're trying to make it so that we can, everybody can have their way. But that's very difficult. Yes. So it was kind of refreshing to see people kind of see behind the curtain of of what we try to work with. Wow. Well, that is an exciting update. And that alone would be worth coming to the Rockcast for and subscribing, but we have more. And one topic that has come up from time to time, John, is about custom indexes, ones that are suggested. What do you do about that, how do if it's really a good idea to to use a certain one or another? Can you just provide some insights on an approach to that? Yeah. So let me first start with what an index is. So think of your database as card catalog, the ones that you used to use at the library if you're over than maybe older than 40. So instead of going through the card catalog, looking at every single card, trying to find Ted Decker, you would go to an index and it would kind of tell you, hey, it's in Drawer 6, and it's about halfway back. So it's much easier to find. And so database uses these indexes to help look up data faster. You might think, well, why don't we have an index for everything? For every different way you'd wanna search and sort, why don't we just have it for that? And if your database is only read only, would be great, because it'd make it really fast to read. But every time you needed to put a new card into the card catalog, it would have to go update all of these indexes, and that's very slow. So it's a really fine balancing between read performance and write performance. So you don't want to have too many indexes. Now the database tools that you use, if you use Azure SQL or maybe it's another tool that you use, can make recommendations for maybe indexes that would make your system go faster. Couple things you should know though. A lot of times those tools, I'm not gonna say they lie, but they lie. They're guessing that this index might work and a lot of times in our experience, putting those indexes in, it doesn't even use it. So you have to be a little bit careful. But you also wanna look at the index and go, Why is this index needed? What is the business case for this index? And the tool doesn't know that, right? But for instance, we're going through a project right now, one of the index recommendations is to, if you look at it, you're , Oh, this is needed because one of your plugins is trying to access financial transactions by the foreign key. Well, we don't need to do that in core, so we would never have considered that. But now seeing it, it's , Oh, okay, well, fair, I think a lot of churches would probably want that who have similar plugins, and so we'll add that index. But if you just go around willy nilly just accepting all of the recommendations, you're going to create a mess, it's actually going to slow down your right performance and oftentimes, again, our experience, indexes won't even be used. Also, you don't want your indexes to get outside of the pattern that Core uses. And that's because we might come and make a very similar index or the same index, and we don't know your index is there, have no idea. And so you might have a duplicate index, which would actually be really bad. So it's really best to not take those recommendations. If you see them, you can send them to us, we'll look and consider. We have though gone through several different people's databases, we've sent them scripts that say, Hey, run this script for us and it'll tell us recommendations. And then we take all of those recommendations across all the systems and we go, Oh, everybody's Rock system seems to be telling us that we should do this. Well, that's a much more strategic way to do these indexes. And we have that data, we're analyzing that data, and we're making those considerations. Unfortunately, we have a lot on our plate, we started that project probably eight months ago. And I don't think there's anything there that's gonna change the world, right? It's gonna help be beneficial, but , that's why we're not running super fast. We wanna get to it, but we have a lot of things to get to. But I think the recommendation for us is , just don't go willy nilly adding those indexes, it's gonna cause a mess in the system and it's not something that's really easy to see and to undo. And we certainly can't do it for you. So I know some partners do that as a part of the health checks that they do, they kind of look for indexes that were added by CORE and kind of flag those. So our recommendation officially is don't don't accept them. If you look at it and you think it's needed, you can send it to us and we'll look at it. And, but be careful. And it would be good to have the business case of why you think it's needed. Yeah, and some technical people in our community can do that, they can look at, oh I think that's because of this. But you might be again going, this would be helpful and do it. Probably best is to move a little bit slower, send us the recommendation and explain why you think the business case is there because that would help us out too. We don't have to go recoury think through it. But a lot of times they're false positives too. They're recommending you things that actually the engine won't actually use. Very interesting. So it is a topic that we don't discuss a lot in probably public spaces, but it is something that has the attention of the core team and is intentional. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And when we're writing new features, we're creating new indexes specifically for the hot paths that go in Rock. But even we've really fine tuned the indexes around interactions because that's that's probably one of the hardest things to get fast in Rock is querying interactions. And so we've really have an index strategy for that. And what's interesting about that is the index strategy actually informs the way you should write your SQL to , if you come at the index, the interaction tables from the wrong direction, you can actually make the queries won't even finish. They'll time out. They'll be terrible. But if you come at it from the right direction, ridiculously fast, sub second for querying hundreds of millions of records. So sometimes you just kinda have to know that. Might say, well, how do I look at that? Well, look at the indexes that they'll lead your way. Also, think we talked about in the SQL class, if you take that. And you should take that? If you work with SQL at all? Work with SQL, yeah. You should take that class. You should. Alright. So the three of us were actually had the opportunity to attend the CITN conference recently. And that's not a conference historically we've always been able to get to sometimes because of time conflicts or location issues. But this year we were, and it was very exciting to go to head to Dallas, have a booth for Rock there, and connect with churches. So let's just talk a little bit about that. First of all, for those that don't know what CITN means, that's the Church IT Network. Believe it or not, there's a network of IT people that gather once a year. They've been doing it for a little longer than we've been gathering. But if we advertised, if we could if we said we advertise, that's probably the one spot that we advertise. We we actually show up a handful of times there with a booth, mostly because our community is demanding us to be there. I mean, historically, it's been more of an infrastructure conference. Right. Yeah. That's changed, know, think as infrastructure becomes less and less of a thing, it's more everything's in the cloud. It's become less so and there's more data there. But yeah, it's a blended conference now, think more, but priced a little bit more on the infrastructure side. And I think when the church software develop companies started showing up, that's when we got more pressured. , hey, why isn't why isn't Rock represented? Why isn't Spark here representing Rock? You're our platform and we wanna send people that we're talking to from the IT crowd over to your booth to get more information. So And it's been a great way that some some in the community have been able to help support the core team because we are spread pretty thin and so we've always had a couple of people Frank Grant's been super instrumental in helping us Mhmm. Provide a Rock one zero one session and connect with people. But it was really nice to have a booth this year and and then to be able to interact both with churches from the Rock community currently and those who are interested or who are being given a recommendation to speak with us. We had a nice opportunity for some face to face connections. Yeah. It was a good time. And , I think we did some sessions, you did one on what is Rock, which is really great because it's a we redid the whole PowerPoint presentation. We've had a PowerPoint presentation on that for a long time that was done at roadshows, but it's completely been revamped. So it's exciting to see that. I think our old one was not necessarily the best representation of of what is Rock anymore because it it just aged out. Right? It did. And it's probably a good example of something that just kind of got added to rather than reworked over time. So it did get a much needed facelift and it is a good representation now. And we were gonna talk about it a little later, but let's just pull that up right now. The roadshow season, we're getting ready to prep for that again. So Rock and Roadshows are an opportunity for churches that use Rock to share that with churches that are near them in some, , radius in a similar metro area, and to kind of walk them through what is Rock and how do we use it. And it's a great opportunity for churches to learn enough to decide whether or not that's a good potential platform for them. And, , we found that it's so valuable for churches to talk to people using the platform more than just trying to see it from a, , platform specific perspective. So they get to see the community, they get to ask questions of someone about how it's really being used. And the format of a roadshow is a church offers to host it. We provide the presentation we're talking about here and it has notes and things, it's easy to walk through, it's not a difficult presentation to give. And that church invites those who are near them to come, the attendance is really driven off of personal invites, And then they have a q and a session at the end. And that's been a very valuable tool in helping spread Rock. We don't have a sales team here or a support team. That's the community role. And it's been really valuable. So we are getting ready to kick that back off again and start scheduling road shows, typically not in the holiday season, but we can start working with churches to schedule those. So if you're interested, reach out and let us know and we will start working with you to get dates and locations. Yeah. So a lot of time and attention went to that that new deck. And then we talked about digital strategy and what's new in Rock, which you didn't miss anything if you went to the conference or watched the keynote. But I think the challenge is, in the past conferences were about roles, but I think in the future, we need to make it more about goals. Because for us to be successful in our jobs, it's not just about a single role doing a good job, it's about a set of roles that are working together to achieve a goal. And I think that's what we've been really strategic about with the Rock Conference is , hey, the IT department is really critical for this, communications department, so is the engagement pastoral staff, so are the finance tools. And I think that's kind of where we see trying to get as many different roles together, all pursuant to a specific goal of reaching people through digital spaces. And I think we need to see more and more of that. And I think that's probably the best way that we can push forward some of the initiatives. The goal that we want to get to is many different diverse roles working together. So John, from time to time we to give a little update on what we're doing behind the scenes from a staffing perspective and some of the operations things, Spark obviously has to function, and so we have a lot of those things to happen. And we don't talk about them a lot. But we do have some interesting announcements now or or discussion points, and one of those has been related to the recruiting efforts we've been putting in over time. Do you want to talk a little bit about some of our recent hires? Yeah, so a lot of our time is spent on recruiting, think it's shocking to if someone could calculate the hours and energy we put into that, and of course it's well spent, but it's just a lot of our time. But we've had some really great hires, I think if we go back towards early to mid summer, we had a whole batch of people come out of college and join and They're just doing an exceptional job. And I'm just really impressed with this generation. I think they're on fire for Christ. And they work hard and they have really great skills. Think and it's not just us. Reading on X and hearing and talking to other people, I think they're saying the same thing. this most recent generation coming of school right now is just a really great generation and really wants to work hard and pursuant of purpose. And so we're just really impressed with where we're going with some of these young folks who have joined our team. Maybe a little bit after summer, we've made some hires around graphic design, so I've been doing a lot of that graphic design and it is so nice to have a graphic designer who's not only more talented than me, which isn't that hard, but also has more time. And just seeing, I think in the last few weeks, the fruit of that, which one of the things is this PowerPoint presentation. But the PowerPoint presentation is not It's actually more than that because it's establishment of a branding guide for Rock, which we've loosely had. But now it's getting much more formalized and much more excellent. And just starting to see all that roll out, we'll be releasing the actual Rock branding guide here soon. But you can start to see a glimmer of where it's going. It's , yes, this is good. And we recently, very recently made a hire in the UX area, someone who can come on and help us improve our UX, take us to the next level. At both of those roles, it's not on day one now, everything changes. Especially on the UX side, there's just so much you have to understand about why certain things are a certain way and how Rock works, what's the ethos of Rock. It's easy to come in and have ideas, but it's harder to understand, what is the community Why the community want it this way? And in some cases, maybe those are wrong assumptions, but many times those are right assumptions. I want to manage expectations, because this is an investment that we still have to put in, finding investment one, training, investment two, then net rewards. But I think it's cool because I think that the students who started a little bit earlier already starting to pivot to the point where it's , okay, investment is starting to reap rewards. And so it's exciting because I think we're hitting to a new level. We haven't crossed that mark yet, but it's good that we have the momentum to cross Before we knew we wanted to cross it, we didn't have the momentum to cross it. Now we're starting to see the momentum is changing. But I'm really excited too about where graphic design is gone because we've had a little bit more time to do that. So go out and check out the social media outposts, you'll notice that the headers and logo's a little bit different. Go out to other areas where you start to see our graphics and you'll start to notice the change. You're gonna keep noticing the change. And if you want to, you can check out our social post from CITN where we had a picture of the booth, and that backdrop was also a totally new design from the designer as well. Yeah, and got really good reviews the I mean, we all knew going in, this is a great design, but to have it recognized. And it was immediate, the recognition, as soon as we put it up, people are , oh wow, I was shocked by that too. A lot of positive feedback. So with a growing team, we keep running into some space constraints, and finally we're in a position where we're gonna be able to do something about it. Yeah, so our growth started from a 12 by 12 room, think. And we've grown and grown and grown, we've always been very cautious and very careful with how we grow and the leases that we sign and I really feel God's given us a great gift to be able to move to a new office space. It's much, much nicer. It's bigger. I don't think it's extraordinarily bigger, but it's bigger, plenty of room to grow. While it is more expensive, it's not nearly as expensive as it looks. So I feel , and again, the whole story for it is , it probably shouldn't have happened, in fact, got some of our details crossed and when we thought we could move Mhmm. Wasn't quite when we thought it was. we misread the lease wrong and so we kinda got We were actually a year ahead of where we should have been looking. And then when we told the owner , I have a place that we're kind of interested in, actually, we'll come back in a year because I don't know if we're ready. He was , No, no, no. No, I'll pay for your lease for a year. I'm really interested in having someone with your level of team come and just be a part of this space because it'll help the other, know, there's some restaurants below us and it'll help them and and, , I think, , lot of building owners are trying to get their their space filled. So it just felt almost it was God ordained because it should have been a no, but it became a yes. And then it's been a slow build. It has. Our joke around here is two weeks. When's it gonna be ready? Two weeks? About two weeks. Yeah. It's pretty much It's been two months or two weeks? But funny enough, that that building was basically probably ready when we were first getting started. But no one's been in that Second Floor since. Yeah. We knew, we've known that space was there. It was just too big for us. And, so it's been on our radar for a while. It's , there's always that space above. It never got filled. Yeah. No. And it never was even built out. Right. So that's the incredible part of this is the build out there is specifically for us. So it's a completely new environment. It just does feel a gift from God. Yeah. And when we, and now that it's coming close to fruition, we're probably two weeks out. This time maybe for real. It's a ton of work, because we had to do all the stuff, but as you walk it, you're , dude, we don't deserve this, God, why are you so generous to us? But I think it's gonna be another part of our story too. It's gonna be another, I kind of see it as a standing stone, this is when we, we've always worked really hard, we've always done our best, but now we have the team is here, everything is starting, and your environment does play a role It does. It's hard to sometimes wanna do excellent work when everything around you is falling apart or, , the owner of this current building is , he could care less. , literally, , the amount of effort or thought put into things is Zero or less. Right. We're talking everything from aesthetics to dysfunctionality to even cleanliness and know, we have a lot Just control. I was gonna say we have a lot of friends. Unfortunately, many of them are bugs. And , it's been a good space for us for the time that we've had it. Because of the owner's lack of care, there's always a space to move into as we've grown. So we've been able to incrementally grow from suite to suite. And building to building, and move from that building to this Well, I think it's kept us humble too. It has. I will keep that, we're not changing that obviously, but I think sometimes it's good to bootstrap and people get handed tons of money and just, alright, , go at it that did, they generally don't work, right? Right. We've had to bootstrap and God's provided in amazing ways, but it's always when we needed it. Yes. And for those who are listening and are new to the Spark story in general, it has been a story of God's generosity and blessing one step at a time. There has been no major funding gift that's come in. There are certainly generous churches in the community that have been a part of our story. But it has been one step at a time and at the end of the day, that's how we can see that God's hand is at work. Yeah. And it's in a lot of different ways too. we've always wanted to have a slight upgrade in our chairs, because you sit in them all day and, , but we don't want to go spend a ton of money on that. But, know, someone business came through who had a whole bunch of used really nice chairs. And we were able to pick them up very cheap. Unfortunately, it was a lot more work than we thought. But, but now we have chairs that we couldn't afford or shouldn't have bought. Probably. The guy just kinda always is providing. But we're really excited about it. We'll be posting pictures of it once we get in and get it situated. It'll take us a while to get everything unpacked and looking presentable. But we're really excited about it. Feel again, it's a really great gift that God's given us. And we'll provide updates at whatever two week increment we actually get in, but it is looking more ready than it has looked in the past. So hopefully soon. Yeah. Know, thinking about the graphic designer a little bit, if you wanna go see some of the new stuff, go go check out we have all those AI songs and we put them on Spotify and Apple Music. So if you wanna go see a small little thing that he designed. If you saw it before, what I quickly threw up in fifteen minutes and now you see what he did, it's amazing night and day difference. And we did just, , I don't to brag, but we just get it. We got our first royalty check. Oh. Yes. And if you wanna know how much the royalty check was Yes. Go on Twitter or And I posted how much it was. So Oh. Just go look me up and I'll you'll find out how much our first royalty check for AI songs were. I would also to encourage you to listen more to those songs because, know, we can they could be a nice little donation model for for Spark. That's right. And they're a lot of fun. So if you didn't catch that, a little plug, go follow John on X and find out more about our royalty check, and then take a listen to those songs. Yeah. I mean, don't you wanna know how much we made? Yes. It was it was two months worth, think. Okay. I'm shocked. I am shocked that we made this much. Alright. So go find out. We'll put a link in the show notes for those of you who need a quick link, but it shouldn't be hard to look up. And yeah, , Taylor Swift, let's watch out. We're coming. Okay. Alright. The gauntlet has been thrown down. Yeah. Okay. I'm just waiting for I don't know. How do you get a Grammy? Best AI song of the year. I'm gonna read the manual for Is that a category? Should be. Okay. I mean, I feel I feel I'm an artist. Well, you are. Art needs to be recognized. AI songs didn't make themselves. It did take a little effort, but not much. Engineering. Those AI songs didn't make themselves. That's funny. That was Sorry. That was very good. Maybe you're also a comedian. That didn't go well at the conference. You being a comedian? Yeah. There's a lot of jokes. I don't think people realize are jokes. The real comedian went well. He did. Yeah. He did a great job. Showed me up. Yeah. It's alright. I don't mean yeah. I mean, I'm listening. He practiced a little bit more. I'm sure that's all it was. Maybe if you jogged around the auditorium, that would work for you too. Yeah. Dude, that was a long jog. Yeah. And I'm not sure if anybody's paying attention, but he took that stage full. I was , dude, you should slow. And he nailed it. Was glad he didn't trip. I thought his toe was gonna catch on the edge of the stage. I don't know. He did not slow down when the stage was coming. Right. He went I was impressed with the leap. Yes. Another great throwback to the conference. Okay. A couple of community updates now. One is regarding the donation rate. So if you remember about this time last year, we announced that we were going to change our recommended donation rate from $3 per average weekend attendee to $4.10. It had been a long time since we'd made an update and we really needed to do that. We also mentioned at that time that a year later, we would likely be increasing the donation rate to $4.6 So that would have been this coming January 2025. In the meantime, during the course of the year, a couple of factors changed. One is that so many churches in the community were very quick to jump on increasing their donation rate. That really adjustment to that was a little faster than we thought might happen in many cases. Now not all, but many. And that really did help this year. Additionally, we've been able to tighten up some expenses on the Spark side. So we're going to defer the next increase on the recommended rate to January of twenty twenty six. So that's gonna be pushed back a year. And we're telling you now, so you can begin planning for your '26 budget year. We know budget cycles come at various times during the year. So we are we're excited. We're super grateful for this community for stepping in and helping us get to where we needed quickly and wanna give you enough time to plan in the future. Yeah, and some churches have said, Hey, we already planned for it, so we're just going to keep going with it. And so they are going to raise theirs to four sixty. And that's what's great about our community, it's just the level of support and we're all marching together, right? So we're trying to make it as efficient as possible, we're not going to raise it because we can, but at the same time, they see the value and they want to fund it. And I think that's where the hashtag bettertogether is so true. It's not a cheeky thing we say, it's literally So if you've already talked about it and you already have it approved, go forward, don't not do it. Or maybe it allows you to fund some extra features or something else. Again, think when we're trying to make it as cheap as possible and you're trying to make it as generous, you're trying to be as generous as possible, that's where the magic happens. Absolutely. And , it really is a community effort. We are going to move at the pace that is allowed by the donations that we receive. So what we're able to put out is totally dependent on what's funded. And so many churches have recognized that. It's incredible. And a big thank you to those who have just put that extra donation in place just because they had it funded and they see the value of investing in what Spark's doing. Yeah, know when the first one came in, I responded back , first of all thank you for the generosity, but it's not even the money that made it so impactful, it was the fact that we're trusted and that what we do matters, ? I know it does, I get that, but to love to that level where someone goes, oh, I already planned for it, instead of going to spend it on something else, I trust you guys, I trust you with this money, so go do more. It was much more than just even the generosity, it was just the trust and the , putting something into action that actually meant something huge. Yep. Final update is the lava class, and we've actually filled up the lava class for this year and found a way to even open it up to a few more registrants. So it's double filled now. But we have a class coming up in the first quarter next year that has plenty of seats left if you're planning on getting that in soon. There are quite a few people in the community that I've heard interest from and haven't seen registered yet. So hopefully that second class session lines up with your availability. Don't be afraid to go ahead and register now. Use those extra funds from this year that maybe you have sitting in your budget to get that spot locked in. Yeah, know when I worked at the churches this time of year, was trying to maximize my budget. And sometimes that means just getting ahead of next year. If I can buy something this year that actually gets me ahead next year, that always works. And I think lava is that magic sauce that unlocks so much. And some people come out of lava class, masters of lava, some people will come out , just a little bit more confident and both are huge successes. That's right. , don't feel you're not, if you feel I'm not prepped for it, I'm not ready yet. Well, , you're definitely gonna come out way more knowledgeable than you went in. And I'd say you're probably never gonna be ready for it. That's a great point. Give yourself that boost. It's probably the fastest way to move forward quickly is to go through that class. Yeah, mean, it's really what makes Rock so powerful is when and understand lava. Probably one of my favorite things in Rock. It's the thing I love to think about the most. And we're always trying to make it easier, even last night I was writing a comment on a task internally saying, Hey, I know we didn't do this, but if we did, it would make Lava so much more powerful. So actually put it in there. there's no need for us from a C sharp development team to need that. But exposing it to lava would make it so much more powerful to other people. So we're always thinking through the lens of That's exciting. Of lava. , we feel so privileged to be able to work on what we're working on, but even more so in partnership with the churches that we work with in the community. So we just wanna say thank you for being a part of something really critical, really impactful for working with us together, for donating, for giving your time and energy, and for tuning into the podcast so we can share the level of impact that that's happening having. Please go ahead and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you can follow us for future updates, and thank you so much for tuning in. Do a church that loves the idea of using Rock but hasn't taken that leap yet? With managed hosting, churches of any size can get access to Rock's amazing technology, hassle free. With just one click, Rock's managed hosting removes the roadblocks that might stop a church from switching to Rock by making the process simple. Churches get the ease of a SaaS church management system without losing any of Rock's powerful features. Are you ready to take the next step or share with another local church? Visit rockrms.com/hosting today.