Podcast Episode 198: Episode 171: Special Edition with TJ Peera

Description

On Rockcast today, Tj Peera, Director of Data Insights at Fairhaven Church, shares his journey from healthcare to church tech. We discuss aligning volunteer leaders with a shared vision, leveraging data for spiritual health outcomes, and creating a unified experience for all. Tune in for insights on church innovation!Show NotesTJ's Home Church: Fairhaven Church: https://fairhaven.church/ RX Conference Registration: RX Registration: https://rx.rockrms.com/ RX Content Subscription: https://community.rockrms.com/subscriptions/rx23TJ’s RX23 Session: https://community.rockrms.com/subscriptions/rx23/leader-platformRocket Chat: https://community.rockrms.com/chatRock PartnersWe are thankful for our Rock Partners and their support of the Rock Community. Visit their websites through the link above to learn how they can help your ministry and confirm that those you work with are as invested in the success of Rock as you are!

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, the podcast dedicated to the Rock community. Join us as we delve into behind the scenes happenings, offer insights into our community, and explore leadership dynamics. I'm Emily Forman, and today with me are Laurie Jocham on our team and special guest TJ Pira with Fairhaven Church. Welcome to Rockcast. Welcome, TJ. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. I'm humbled and honored to be here. Alright. So, TJ, you are the director of data insights at Fairhaven Church in the Dayton, Ohio area. Your church has been running on Rock for several years, I think since 02/2021, and are of average attendance size about 4,000 per weekend. Does that sound about right? That is correct. We have we're a multi campus church in the Dayton area. We have four physical campuses, and this is actually our sixty year anniversary coming up. Oh, wow. That's great. Is that this year? Yeah. That's next month. Just found that out yesterday. Wow. Congratulations. You find out as the work comes in to support it. Right? This request. Right. But 50 was just felt yesterday. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yep. It's funny how that goes. Well, tell us a little bit about yourself. Well, I'm TJ. I do all things Rock within the Rock database, but I also do all things data. We're pulling data from the app and from other resources. So yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about your journey, how you came to Fairhaven? What led you there and and what drew you into this community? Sure. Yeah. The journey was actually part of my testimony. It's really neat to see how God works through all things. So I graduated college in 02/2010 and moved to the Dayton, Ohio area. Started off a career at Honda car sales. Okay. , that was fun, but it also was all nights and weekends. And the culture, as , the stereotypical culture in car sales is pretty cutthroat and wasn't exactly where I wanted to be. So I got into banking, figured that I was a little bit more safer route, but really wanted to get into healthcare. So I ended up taking a job in healthcare about, well, now twelve, thirteen years ago. And was actually looking to go from business to nursing. I started school for nursing. And during that timeframe, I was just getting into clinicals when the school had changed its whole structure and I would have just had no life. Would have had to get to work early in the morning so I can leave early, go to clinicals, go to lab, and then come home really late. And at that time, my wife and I were looking to buy a house. We were looking to foster children and just wasn't practical. At that same time, God opened the door and gave me a promotion at my job at the hospital. And I was doing business and analytics for them. And he said, Hey, got a promotion. I actually have something more exciting for you. So I was , Oh, okay. This doesn't work out. I'm still happy to be in the healthcare setting. And then God continued to open more doors to develop some of the skills I needed. So they were on software, which I think we'll get into the next question, but it just opened some skills I needed to develop in order to get me to Fairhaven and what Fairhaven was looking in somebody. So long story short, then ten years later, one of my friends, I was involved in our church and getting to I knew a lot of people from serving and attending. My wife actually works at Fairhaven, which is pretty awesome and a blessing to work with her. It's fun to work at the same place. Work goes home with you, but it's fun to talk about. And one of my friends was the operations guy here and he said, Hey, I know you do stuff with data and I know you do stuff with software and we're actually looking at moving to Rock. And it's a new software platform from Fellowship One. And so we had several lunches about it and they invited me to the Rock Conference. After researching, I was , this is where I got to be. This is where God wants me. And then in October, I got hired. Wow. There's a lot of transition that you just kind of glossed over in between all those things. But you touched on the skill sets that you'd been building that ended up being really valuable in your role there at the church now. Can you elaborate on that a little bit more? Oh, yeah. So, I'd to say, my previous experience, God was using to prepare me for the experience that I needed and the skills I needed in my current role here at Fairhaven. So, we were on this system called EPIC, which is a health record system where it basically groups people and things about them. You go to the doctor, you have scheduling, you have finance, you have your doctor's notes, all things that were very similar to Rock, where I started in software customization. So taking their product and customizing it to the needs of the hospital. And then I slowly got into the data analytics side of things. And so I always to say, physicians cannot know all things or be all things to their patients. The software cannot replace the physicians, but it gave them the tools to improve access to the info and relationships. Same thing with the church software. It's not replacing ministry, it's improving access to the info and relationships we have. So that got me really excited to say , Wow, it's doing the same thing I'm doing, but it was going from a physical health to spiritual health. Mhmm. Yeah. That's a great comparison. Now you had And I go ahead. Well, I was just gonna say I was in I ended in population health management, was something newer to the health field where you're looking at optimizing health outcomes for the specific populations of people. So it's using data to help doctors make and see decisions they might have missed and prevent issues and improve the quality of life. And I to say, I'm in a spiritual health management sector now where we're looking at we're looking at improving people's lives, right, and helping them on their journey to be spiritually healthy. Now you mentioned that you attended the Rock conference, but you did that before you left your job in the health care field and took the job at Fairhaven. What was it that happened at that conference that helped you make the decision to to make that move and go all in with Rock? Yes. I had to take my own PTO to attend the Rock conference, but they , Church wanted to make sure that this is something that was God had for you. So going to the Rock conference, it was really the community was unlike any other community. I've been to conferences on the business side of things and people are more or less in it to win it. They're not gonna necessarily support you. But here, the people want it to help you. They want to help you do better and they expect nothing in return. It's great. It's amazing. You can't really believe it until you see it in action. Right? Care about that you do good and you want to They don't see you as competition. So, I met so many people through the conference that just had this amazing passion that you can see for serving the church and what they did using their technical skills. Met some people through Rocket Chat. One of them was Tina Ruch. I met her at the conference, talked through Rocket Chat, and she helped me a lot. I felt such a consumer in the And she was , what, TJ? I felt the same way. But after two years, I can now be a contributor. And her goal was to spend half her days Friday meeting with other Rock and helping them. So there were several Fridays where she would help me with build within Rock, and a goal of mine. That's why you see more me more in Rock at sharing code, talking to people because I'm , I wanna be a contributor and help people build ideas because that's what was given to me, and it was such a huge help. And that's just critical for the community to function in the ecosystem process the way it is, and it's it's really unmatchable. I mean, I think back sometimes at various conferences as I see people in the hallway saying, hey. I love that thing that you shared. , how could I implement that at my church? Let me tell you my unique angle. Or someone saying, hey. , I'm talking about this, but don't worry. I created a white paper or I , I have a workflow that I exported that I'd be happy to send your way. And you're right. Where do you see that somewhere else? People would be , yeah. Number one, I'm not gonna tell you about it because this is my edge. Right? And if I did, I'm gonna be , good luck recreating that. So it's it's an incredible thing. I mean, it's yeah. It's just it's amazing that you can I was at this conference and they're you're using your skills to support the ministries of Jesus? Yeah. It doesn't get much better than that. Mhmm. Yep. And there's none of the splintering that you might see in places. Right? , nobody's saying, oh, my church is this particular kind of church or my ministry angle is this particular kind of ministry angle. It's just a really unified experience. Mhmm. So let's talk about one of your projects then, one that you might, some people might listen to hear and be excited to learn more about, and that would be your leader platform project. Can you tell us a little bit about that? That was a big project and a lot of fun. It was the first, , big project I got to work on for our church with our partner. And it's a really cool tool that our church was able to come up with. And it was built on the shoulders of giants, right? I saw someone else in the community and I said, Hey, you're doing something kind of that we're doing. And we met over a few meetings and they were showing me , Oh, you can do this. And we're , I those ideas. I want to build off of those. And so really what the leader platform is, is it's a tool for our serve teams that they can use to align all of our leaders and across all the campuses for a shared vision. But it also allows ministry specific training and development. So you go to this page in Rock and there's a homepage, it's for all the leaders. And you can see things news and updates, what's coming up in the church and you can see training. So we just had this Leader Summit and it's once a year where we get all the leaders together, but people can't attend it. What if they had something else going on? So we're able to put things up there the videos for the Leader Summit so that in case you missed it, they're able to see it. Or, hey, what was that that they did for me? , The unified place. So it kind of aligned our serve teams, provided more consistency. They were all on different platforms before, whether they were using Excel, Planning Center, SignUpGenius, texting, emails. Depending if you were on a couple serve teams, you didn't know where you were going to get your information from. Is the ministry leader going to text me? Am I going to get an email? Do I need to download that PCO app just so I can see it there? And just being a multisite church kind of made it even more confusing. So we needed to find some way to bring all the serve teams together in one consistent place. So that way, oh, yeah. I know I can go there and get the information I need or get the content or we even integrated the group scheduling into it. So they have one place to go to see all their scheduling needs. That's that's exactly what you need for volunteers. So in, in creating the centralized hub, what are some of the effects that you're seeing in those ministry areas, with with your volunteers? Are you seeing a change in their attitudes, their connection level? How has that helped the ministry that you guys are doing at Fairhaven? Well, I already said it kind of unified them. Mhmm. ? Now they have one place to go. Yeah. They can see everything that everyone else is seeing. So if you're in one ministry, you're not gonna miss something that's central to all the ministries because it's all in one place. One of the things is that the ministry leaders, for example, kids ministry, they could submit all the content they need for all the campuses. And then we still have a little personalization. There's news and updates. So that way each ministry leader for each campus can customize it to their own needs, but they don't need to get the content and the training curriculum needed for Sundays and have to send it out to their leaders and post it. It was all done centrally. It saved them time, effort, mistakes. And so it kind of goes to the model method there. We all have one model, but they have different methods of working at each campus. So it allowed them to do that as well. Nice. So you've shared with us previous to this that your next big projects are phase two of that leader platform and a dashboard aimed at guiding members of your congregation into the right next step. Can you tell us a little bit about how you plan to use Rock to do those? Yes. Yes. So the Leader platform, it was our phase one. Now we're looking at phase two. How can we get other ministries their own specific pages that will be valuable for them to use? And because they don't all look the same. Not everyone has curriculum kids, students, and group life does. So now we're evaluating what would be important for them to on their pages to communicate with their CERT team members. And then I love dashboarding and reporting. So I wouldn't guess that from your background at all. So we're looking at developing okay. Now that we're getting all this data, now that we're fully immersed in Rock, how can we take that data and display to the ministry leaders so that they can take actions on it? It's not, some some people look at that and they're , oh, it's a grade card. And it's not a spiritual grade card. It's more an evaluation for us as leaders to give indicators on whether we're winning or not. , bigger is not better, better is better. So how can we look at all the people in our ministry and meet them where they're at? So we're building this dashboard that will just be able to help us see where people are on their faith journeys. And we have six essentials, and I'm pretty sure a lot of other are very similar right now. How are people involved in worship, building relationships, pursuing God daily, serving others, giving generously and making God known? And how could we see where people are exceeding and recognize them as leaders and empower them to get other people to grow in their spiritual journey? Yeah. That's incredible. Well, TJ, the Rack community is made up of hundreds and thousands of stories of churches doing ministry in new ways and unique ways of people's stories where, , we've each experienced growth and callings and pain points, and we stretch and we share. And and that's what is just the fabric of this community. So we really appreciate you joining us on Rockcast to share your voice and your story that helps make up a part of that greater whole. Thank you so much for joining us today. Oh, it's been great. It's been a pleasure. Alright. And thank you to our listening audience. Please make sure you're subscribing for our podcast so you can catch the next episode and be up to date on all things that are happening with Rock as well as the stories and voices of our community. Thanks for joining us. 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.