Podcast Episode 205: Episode 178: Special Edition with AJ Chiepalich

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Join us for an exciting live recording from RX24, where we chat with AJ Chiepalich, the Digital Director at Church of the Highlands! AJ shares his highlights from the conference, delves into the transformative impact Rock has had on their ministry, and reveals the details behind their Gold Circle Award-winning Small Groups Directory and Registration Tool.

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. Hi, and welcome to this special edition of Rockcast. I'm Emily Forman, we have a special guest here with us today, AJ Chibelich from Church of the Highlands. Welcome, AJ. Yeah. Honored to be here. Thanks for having me. Oh, we're so happy to have you. And I think we have to share right away with our listening audience where we're set. Where are we today? Oh, we are day zero of Rock Conference. That's right. Zero point zero. Yes. Rx twenty four is here, and we've been it's it feels we're either at the conference for our team or we're counting down to the next conference. So, it's exciting. We're in that in between stage on day zero, but it's here. And thanks for joining us and carving time out while you're here to spend some time with the Rock community and with our team too. Yeah, honored to be here. Thanks for having me. Well, just to set the stage a little bit, Church of the Highlands was launched in 02/2001 in Birmingham, Alabama and is now in 26 locations around Alabama and Georgia. So you've been also running on Rock now since 2020. Correct. So I think that sets the right stage. So AJ, why don't you tell us about your role and your team that you lead at Highlands and kind of how that works and interacts with the Rock platform? Yeah, absolutely. So I oversee our digital department, digital team. Technology at Church of the Highlands is split up into three lanes. Our lane specifically is more public facing technology. So, that would include web experiences, app experiences, digital, anywhere where data is integrated into that, so we own the data for everything, included in that is our church management system. So, the ingress of the data, whether that's from connection cards or digital forms, the integrity of the data, as well as the church management system that's all stored in, advancing that church management system, and then reporting on the data that's in there. So, it's a pretty broad scope of work that we oversee. But it all makes sense because all those things are integrated, especially with where personalization is going in the church world and church technology. It just makes a lot of sense that we have a good relationship with access and working with the data and using that across all of our platforms. And the key in all of that is the data is the underlying foundation. So, often we hear about people working against having their data in one place and trying to pull that all together. But if you start from the foundation of pull our data into one place and then work with it from there for processes and personalization. It's a pretty incredible approach instead of fighting against it. Yeah, It does make a lot of sense. Now, not every church's departments are really structured exactly the same way. Correct. So it seems a great overlay with Rock in general. Yeah. It works for us. And we have a lot of synergy with the other technology teams and we have to work really closely with IT and technology support, but it works for us. Yep. That's fantastic. Everybody has a slightly different Rock team structure. And so, I can't tell you the number of times we've heard from someone, especially at church that's considering moving to Rock, what should my Rock team look ? Your Rock team should look your entire staff. Everyone should be bought into the system. Everyone should be bought into the vision of how it supports the ministry. But from a more technical perspective, we run a pretty lean team and rely pretty heavily on a partner to help us advance our instance. But we have a couple of roles dedicated to data entry and data ingress that goes back to the connection cards, forms, attendance of things, making sure all that is cared for, and then data integrity of all that as it's maintained over time. And then we have a product lead and a product manager basically. They could be considered power users. So they can build certain things in Rock, but any of our heavy lifting, we typically try to push that to one of our partners. I love that you said the whole staff should be your Rock team, but you can't start there. So how what did that evolution look on the Highland side? You have some people that are big fans of moving it forward and know a little bit more about it. How does that how did that evolution happen through your staff? Yeah, I wouldn't say we've arrived by any means. It's definitely a journey. But it started with our next steps team who is a core ministry team at Church of the Highlands. They were things our assimilation process that we call Growth Track, small groups, pastoral care. They were overseeing all of those areas. So, they were a big part of choosing Rock, because they were looking at the practical, their ministry needs out there, how do those connect to Rock, Or whatever church management system we're using. So it started there. At ground zero, they were involved in the conversation. So we already even had that buy in before we committed to any technology. We didn't tell them this was the technology they were using. They were an integral part of the conversation and the decision. And from there, it's all about just spreading it back down to the campuses, campus staff, even the leadership, celebrating small victories in Rock, connecting ministry movement to technology in Rock so they can see the investment we're making is actually impacting lives. , we told a story last year at conference. It was really fresh. It happened while we were here at Rock Conference where we had just rolled out the toolbox, and a Dream Team coach was getting onboarded to being a new coach at a campus for a team. And they were looking at the last check-in information for a team member and asking the staff member, hey, what do I do with this information? And the staff member coached him, said, hey, this is a good indicator of their engagement, , and if they haven't been engaged in a certain amount of time, they show up on this list. He's , alright. What do I do? And the coach and the staff member said, hey. Just give him a call. So he calls the person, and long story short, it's it's a really redeeming story, but the the team member that the coach was calling was in a really rough place. I was preparing to take his own life. Oh, my gosh. And this timely call that was fed by a report from the toolbox in Rock saved this person's life and reconnected him to the church. I'm pretty sure restored his marriage. So many dominoes after that. And so stories that, we have to keep telling and connecting back to the technology played a part in this, and that's how we are continuing to roll this out to all the staff. So we're not there, but we're working on it. That's incredible. And that shows, of course, the technology that you mentioned, but also the processes that Highlands has put in place of how to interact with people and the training and coaching from staff all the way through volunteer levels and putting all of those together is where that magic can happen. Thank you for sharing that story. Yeah, absolutely. That's very impactful. Oh, yeah, it's powerful. Yep. So, how do you create small wins for critical people, maybe a leader or someone in an area that's just not sure they wanna be sold? How have you created some small wins for them in the past? Yeah, a huge part of it is connecting the things they're requesting back to the completed work. So, a very practical standpoint, anytime I can get up in front of all of our small group directors and celebrate some work that has been completed, they feel really seen and essentially cared for and that their feedback was heard. Because they're getting feedback from members and attendees who are, in this instance, registering small groups or looking for small groups. So they've got feedback on, hey, if the directory did this thing, it would be really helpful. Or if the small group registration form did this thing or if the administration process was a little different, it would really help us. So anytime I can come back and instead of just leaking that workout, push that in front of them and say, Hey guys, you guys asked, we delivered, we'll get standing ovations. Know, because they were doing this work every day. We build the system and then push it out to them, but they're living in it. So small victory for me sometimes is a really, really big win for them. And we can't forget to let them know when we have something that to do. Absolutely. I know sometimes I forget if something feels small to me, I forget to mention it sometimes or to give it the credit that's due there. And so that might be easy to overlook, but that sounds a really good thing to do. So as we're here on-site at RX24 AJ, what is it about this event and your being here? What do you most want to get out of the conference today and in the next couple of days? Absolutely, yeah. So I would say one of the biggest wins for conference for me is the networking and relationships that can be developed here. I think at any conference that might be the biggest takeaway. Hearing the product releases, feature releases, those are always really exciting and seeing the momentum that Rock has obviously is exciting that there is hundreds of churches represented here in one room, representing hundreds of thousands of people probably being impacted by these things. I think that has really that is really powerful and and there's a lot of momentum and energy in the room. But even just being in the lobbies, being in the labs, seeing this, , sometimes a little scrappy system that someone was able to come up with that just I mentioned earlier made a big impact on somebody doing the ministry. I love love love seeing that. But then just back to the relationship, , meeting that person and saying, hey, that was such a creative way to resolve that. Let me get your contact information. I wanna hear, I wanna pick your brain about some stuff. , how are you solving ministry problems? So I love doing that at conferences. And then you have that to rely on all year. My favorite sessions are the ones where someone describes the ministry problem or the situation that they were trying to solve. And then strategically talks about how they built the solution without getting too far down into it yet. Right. And then they talk about, how they measure it. So if you have the problem defined and you can measure the solution and then you build toward it, and then they're able to offer some takeaways or some inspiration on that. Those are the ones I really enjoy hearing about So, we aren't letting the cat out of the bag because that's what is happening here, but the gold circle awards come around annually at the conference. And, while we don't preannounce them to the audience, we have a panel of community judges. They're all independent, and they take a look at all of the projects that are submitted. And we have lots of categories. We have ministry use of Rock. We have design categories. We have, ministry innovations and digital formats. And this year, Church of the Highlands won, Gold Circle Award for your small groups directory and registration tool. What can you tell us about that project? Yeah. This is maybe one of the biggest projects we've taken on in quite some time. Our previous small group system, it aged really well, but when we retired it this summer, it was between ten and thirteen years old. So in technology, it lasted a really, really long time, but it was time to take it out to the pasture and take care of business there. Right. We had a little ceremony for it. Did you really? Yeah. We we had we had brainstormed a bunch of things. We wanted to do something for the team because literally every person on my team touched this project, which is actually unusual. Not that we're in silos, , for us to have a product this that is so stretched across every platform for us was really unique, and it was awesome to see the team come together. So shout out to the Highlands Digital team for a big win here. But anyways, I'm trying to celebrate with our team more and with ministry teams more. So we had a lot of ideas. We considered some things that I won't name. But what we ended up doing is we actually printed off the old code code base for the old system. And me and my admin, we cut it into little sheets of paper, and we stuffed it in a confetti cannon. Oh, cute. And so we shot it off. So there's a picture or a video of us shooting it, and it's The team didn't know what was happening, they're , why is all the paper white? And I'm , it's the old small groups code. That's great. Anyways, alright. So remind me of the question. Oh, yes. So what I was wondering is if you could tell us a little bit about the small groups structure and registration Okay. Got it. Project that won the gold circle award here. Sorry. Yes. So the project, it touched every platform for us. The end goal , we start with an end goal in mind. What is our ministry team trying accomplish? And one of the issues that kept getting resurfaced year after year was we wanted to have a more holistic view of engagement in our church, and our lowest lap going into this project was small groups. Mhmm. We have really great data on leaders, but not so much on attendees. So we we wanted to really go after this roster approach. And how do we get one to one people on on rosters for small groups to this person in the database? So the system before was in a totally separate database. It existed long before we were on Rock, and we were doing a lot of tedious data transfer between the two. So when someone would register a small group, we had to kick that data back over to Rock and see if they met requirements and then send that back over to the small groups platform. It was kind of clunky and not always the most accurate. So, back to you mentioned earlier, the data in one place, that was another huge goal. Let's get all the data just in one place. Let's not live in these silos of data. So, those two goals in mind, unifying the data, consolidating the data, that's kind of goal number one, and then advancing rosters so that we can have a fuller scope at someone's engagement. So we set out to do this. We built all the administration in Rock, which made the lives of those doing the administration a whole lot easier. It was different and there was change, , so I think Pat Lencioni talks about change versus transition. Actually, most people aren't really resistant to change. The idea of change, hey, let's do something a better way, most people are on board with that. It's the transition to the new thing that people struggle with. So I would actually say we're maybe in that area a little bit right now. People see the end of the road and they're , I see how this is better for us. And they're working through the growing pains of the new system right now. But we set out to resolve those two goals, rosters, data unity, and I would say we've accomplished those. So we want to expand even on the rosters even more, but we're integrating the toolbox in for small group leaders, so small group leaders can now see little engagement pieces for people in their small group roster. Sounds incredible. And then we've added a little value back in for the members right now. They can see their group details. So if they got added to the roster because they inquired and they want to go, but they don't remember what the address was or what time it is, they can now go to their Highlands app, look in the toolbox and say, got it. It's at this address at this time. Where we want to go in the future is adding more value for the members in. I would say it's a low value add for the members, but we really expand on that. So we're dreaming about what that might look . And then at the same time, how do we resource small group leaders even better, putting video content for leadership strategies or leadership talks or lessons from either our staff, trainings that we're doing, putting all that in the toolbox so they have access to it twenty four seven. Yeah. That's pretty incredible. I the concept of providing value for people who are giving you some kind of a login. Right? , to create a login, do this thing that can be a bit of a hurdle. And so making sure that people have value and increasing value over time is a really good perspective on that. Okay. So AJ, Church of the Highlands has been a super generous organization in helping sponsor features that the whole community can benefit from and also having some naturally very custom things to the way that you work. What have been a couple of your personal favorite Rock projects? Oh, wow. That's a tough one. I can tell you there's two that I'm really excited about the LMS coming up. I think that that is going to open the door for all sorts of ministry opportunity everything from discipleship to team onboarding. I think there is going to be a ton of it is a really high value product in my eyes. And also the new Check-in Rewrite, Check-in two point zero, is that what we're affectionately calling it? Yes. So I'm very excited about those two things. I would say the enhancements on the toolbox was maybe number three, because just we were talking, that's a big value add for leaders. And we have never resourced leaders with that amount of data, circling back to that story I told earlier, that has already had high ministry impact doing those enhancements on the toolbox. So, I'd say those are kind of my top three right now. I think those are top three material for sure. And you're right, why should we make it so that staff are the only ones that can see engagement opportunities when volunteers have just as big a heart and wanna help with ministry and that's why they're doing it. So, a great ministry feature. I would love to hear your personal thoughts, AJ, about the Rock platform, how the community and the platform is having an impact on the way you do ministry at Highlands. Okay, yeah, absolutely. So, we try to stay in a lot of relationship with other Rock churches. We've got close relationships with Life Church, New Springs, Christ So as far as the Rock community goes, we're pretty close with those few churches, right? And we're always talking about ideas. What are you guys doing in Rock? Show me how you're doing this for your leadership team or for ministry teams. So, kind of a micro level, that's our Rock community, right? Now, at the macro level, I mean, we have RPM and even some ministry team members from our central staff, they are leveraging the community to learn about other things, the Rock community online. And so, I don't know that I have direct examples, but I can tell you that both of those channels are a strong player in us advancing our instance of Rock. We couldn't do it without being inspired by somebody else, whether that be by the way someone, a ministry vision that someone has or the practical how they're accomplishing that. Well, you for sharing that. So the ministry and the size of your church at Church of the Highlands are unique, but you also work in a close relationship with a lot of smaller, newer churches or church plants through ARC and through some other things. And I know you have conversations with a lot of other churches, that are not necessarily in the same maybe size or category of ministry. And they're also considering , tools do we use to help move our ministry forward? And here at RX, we've been talking about different ways of using Rock. Using Rock in a trailblazer capacity where it's cutting edge and trying all kinds of new custom things, and then using Rocks right out of the box for the features that are really high value there. How do you approach those conversations with churches that are not looking to use a system in the same way that Highlands does, but could still benefit from Rock? Yeah, absolutely. So, , I I help them navigate this conversation or even the strategy in their in their own mind, . So what are you trying to accomplish? What does leadership put on you to set out to do? What are your resources to do that? And then try to pair in the correct product for you Mhmm. That checks those boxes. Right? I think Rock has a great potential to be a low resource tool and a low resource solution, meaning you can get going and get running pretty quickly without doing a whole lot of adjustments to how it comes right off the shelf. So I typically try to encourage churches, if you're at the size and at the place with your ministry processes where there's still a lot of flexibility in that, you're still finding your way, consider adapting your processes to the way that the technology does already because that's gonna save you money, it's gonna save you time, you're gonna get going faster, and then that's gonna get you a win down the road. So whenever you need to have an ask because there's a big ministry need with maybe a big dollar amount tied to it, you can say, hey, we've done it a little scrappy. We've done it efficient up into this point, but we're at a point where maybe we need to do something a little differently. We need to go custom in this area. Right? We've got a ministry need. We need the technology now to accommodate. So, always try to encourage them, work through this. And there's something we say at Highlands, and I don't think we coined it at Highlands, but excellence, it's a pillar for us. Right? As our staff values are love God, love people, pursue excellence, and choose joy. So, it's in the top four. But our definition of excellence might surprise people. It's not doing the best or being the best. It's doing the best with what you have. Right? So, that comes right in alignment with, you don't need to go out and spend a lot of money to get going on your church management system. Get you something that's gonna work for you off the shelf. And I think Rock is a great player in that conversation because there are so many great resources and blocks already in Rock that churches can get running right away with. And it kind of opens the door for future innovation should growth happen or budget change or whatever may happen down the road, you're not backing yourself into the corner. Absolutely. It's ready to scale. So if you start going multi site, then you can start expanding on what you've already built. You don't have to totally wash it. Start over. Yeah, that's a big challenge. Well, AJ, we really appreciate you coming and spending time with us at RX when I know there are so many great people that interact with and incredible sessions to listen to. Thanks for joining us and thanks so much for the part that Church of the Highlands plays in the community. I know a lot of people look up to what you're doing and we just really appreciate, your investments in the check-in and the LMS and, and your time here with us today. Thanks for joining us. Thanks. Have a good one. 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? 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