Podcast Episode 180: Episode 153:Blink and You'll Miss It: Technology at the Speed of Light

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Get ready to stay ahead of the ever-evolving world of technology! Join us today with Nick Airdo, Jon Edmiston, and Emily Forman as we bring you the latest updates on the lightning-fast pace of technology, exciting new features on the horizon for the upcoming Rock version, and a sneak peek at what to expect at RX23.Show Notes:RX Schedule: https://rx.rockrms.com/scheduleRegister for RX23: https://rx.rockrms.com/attendingTru Hilton Room Block: https://www.hilton.com/en/attend-my-event/phxpgru-sno-0a29a517-1852-41e7-b8b0-43139a551d8f/Rock’n Roadshow near you: https://www.rockrms.com/roadshowSubscriptions: https://community.rockrms.com/subscriptionsDon’t forget to subscribe to this podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Rock 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 that explores the intersection of technology, ministry, and community with RockRMS. I'm Emily Forman, and with me here today are Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo, and we are going to share with you what's going on in the Rock world. Nick, give us the latest on our version update. Sure thing. The latest for this week is we are in alpha on a couple of versions 15.1, and we've actually gone back to a few older versions to fourteen point three and thirteen point eight. So all those will be starting beta probably next week, and then they'll be released about a week or so after that. So we've not been busy at all in the development side. Yeah, and neither is our community, No, we're super thankful again for the alpha testers and the beta testers who were lining up for this little go around. We had to, because not everybody has version 13, we had to kind of dig deep to find some people who could test those out. But for the most part, 15.1 is really where all the big fixes are. Then just some tiny things in thirteen point eight and fourteen point three. Okay, great. John, what else have we been working on? Quite a bit. I think we've been pulled in lots of different ways. So Nick referenced, there's been the patch updates that we've been working on that's taken a lot of focus because of how far back we're going. That always is a little mental gymnastics to get that all lined up. On top of that, we've been, of course, adding more bug fixes to 15 and some minor features that people have been funding and need urgently. We've been working on that. On top of that, we've been trying to get the next version stuff in, in terms of 16. On top of that, we've been working on some very intense performance improvements in the current environments to help out a few of the larger churches. And that's actually been taking quite a bit of our time. And so trying to really drill in and refactor and figure out some of this stuff, I think it's good because I think a lot of people are going to get some improvements out of that. But it's really, really, really difficult work. On top of that, we also a bunch of really great interns in doing some really great work. But at times it's a little hard to keep up with them because, A, they need training and help, but B, they're doing a really good job. And so some tasks that I always try to figure out how long is this task going to take? And you never know, especially with people who are coming in from the outside and younger, less experienced people, but they're actually really going through a lot faster than we thought. And so now trying to keep up with that and then taking them to the next level that you really weren't even really prepared for. You thought maybe at the end of the summer we'd run out, but they get through it in three to four weeks. It's , Oh, okay, that's awesome. You assemble some chairs too? My youngest son's coming in tomorrow to do that, but we don't want the current batch of interns doing that. It's a great thing, they're doing some really cool stuff, some stuff that's going to have huge ministry impacts. It's really cool to be working with them and then trying to also share with them that they need to reflect on the impact that their work will have. It's beyond just a few hours of work, has really impact. Really good kudos to them on having a good batch of future, hopefully, staff people. Right. And what a great way to spend the summer doing something that has high impact on a really great team. Maybe some people who are listening have seen our posts. We put a picture out of our intern crew this summer. So it's just a lot of fun having them here. Great energy too. Yeah, definitely. So we've been very, very busy. Of course we have the conference. That has been a majority of my time in the last couple of weeks is preparing the content for that, and we have a lot of content this year. So a lot to go over, a lot of stuff. Some of that, we probably won't be talking a lot about new product specifics until the conference, just because we don't want to steal the thunder. But there's a lot. A lot. There's definitely a lot. I mean, it just takes a lot of words to high level discuss what has been going on here. Lots of activity. Yeah. I'm not sure how we're gonna cram all that content into the- Allotted time? Yeah, the times that we We keep adding even allotted times to do more sessions. It's common that we do the keynote prep and they were , Oh gosh, we need a whole session on this. This is gonna be not enough. But then it's , Well, how are we gonna get the time to make the content? I think for something content library, I think there's gonna be a lot of questions, I think rightfully so. So we'll probably have a session that's more of just a q and a type session where there'll be a light overview and then a time for people to ask questions. And I think sometimes too, some of the new features, it's less about how the feature works and more about how do you cast the vision of why would you do it this way and what would some of the challenges be? Because I think definitely as we move out of some of the traditional church management space, it really is new and fresh, and I think some of the paradigms are having to shift. And while we've had six, twelve months of thought on that, it's easy to go, Oh, of course you should understand this, but this is the first time many people are hearing this. We have to go back and really articulate how we got to that point some of those shifts. So it's a lot of thinking. But on that topic, this has been an exciting week, I think, in terms of technology, in terms of the pace of technology. And a couple of thoughts I thought we could just discuss today on that. It's funny because I remember back to the beginning of my career, which was in the early nineties, And we used to get these trade magazines. You could get them for free. I was a kid at that point right out of college, I was , Oh, how do you get these trade magazines? Some people have them and can I get them? And they're free, but I didn't know that. So it's kind of one of those awkward things is , Can I sign up for these? They're , Oh, sure, go ahead. And I'm , Okay, I didn't know if there's a quota. And you get these magazines and I would read them cover to cover. I didn't understand most of it, but cover to cover. And I really feel that was a big piece of my early years in terms of understanding and building a breadth of technology. But I really kind of feel we get more news and new things in a week than we used to in a year. Even if you go ten years ago, I mean, the nineties was obviously more than that, but even go back ten years, we used to get the amount of new things in a year is now what we get honestly in a week. It's so hard to keep up. And I think that's fun, but I think it's a little bit scary too, because we have to carefully consider how these technologies should be integrated into the church in a responsible way. And I think as technologists, we often move too fast. Our first gut feels , Oh, this is awesome. We got to go do this. And when we move too fast, it's usually with too much emotion. It's , This is the coolest thing in the world. I think this week was a really cool week for technology. And it's hard not to go , Let's go. But sometimes when we do that, we're kind of playing checkers at best with strategy. And more accurately, we're just cannonballing into the pool. Let's do it. And our traditional maybe ministry colleagues move way too slow, right? But when we move too fast without a reason to approach, we can have missteps, but we can also break trust with them because if they don't see well considered rational thought in doing this, I think they lose trust because they're naturally moving more slowly. And we're trying to go way too fast and we can't even explain why or articulate the ministry values of that. And I think that that's a dangerous place to be if we want to have long term success. But I think the answer is to go back to first principle thinking, and we need to create frameworks that help us understand how we can apply these technologies in a spiritual dimension. And I can guarantee you one thing is that the people who are on those stages announcing all of these new products have no care and consideration for our space. You're not going to see Tim Cook saying, This is great. And the ministry impact is going to be amazing. It's almost actually the opposite. It's more the motivators for that money, influence, power are in direct conflict. This doesn't mean that the product and technology is bad, it's neutral. But they're not gonna do that work for us. No one in our space is gonna do that. Our outside our space is going do that work for us, so we have to do it. But these frameworks that we need to put in place in terms of evaluation and how do we do these, they're not easy trite things that we just come up with. There's no simple answers. As much as we just want to create simple answers so we can move on, we can't. But rather it has deep considerations and deep thought. Also too, we can't focus on edge cases. So many times, our culture wants I was listening to podcasts the other day, it was really talking about the logic of our culture and how flawed it is. If we were to go back in a time machine forty years, a high school debate team would just they couldn't even talk with us because of how we talk about ideas. An idea exists and it's true because I said it was, and it's a definition. There's a whole docu movie on what is a woman. And whatever you believe about that, doesn't matter. The fact is that no one even defines what it is and it is a problem. We have to be able to find things in deep knowledge, but we also can't treat edge cases as if that is the reason why we do something. There'll always be edge cases, they should be considered and dealt with, but they can't be edge cases. So sometimes in terms of digital ministry, we can say, Well, what about the shut ins? Well, of course, yes, yes. Let's figure something for them, but that doesn't make it valid for the whole. Edge cases should be considered, but they can't reign. And I don't have answers for this. I just think it's something that's interesting that we should think about. For example, one of the dimensions of this model might be connection. God's people are called to be in connection with each other, and we see that in spades in the first century church. So that's easy to say, but what are the facets of connection? What is connection? There's no simple answer. Where is connection? Great points. No simple answer. Right. So if we use these lenses to evaluate technology on, we could consider something social media. That's an older technology, but has social media made us more or less connected? And the answer is it's not simple. In some ways, we have more connections and a wider sense of surface relationships. We know more about more people and what they're doing over the weekend, but that's very surface. And in a sense, we're less connected because we don't have as many close relationships. Someone kind of explained it once, we have a connection bucket. We can only fill our bucket so high with connections, and if you fill it with a whole bunch of surface connections, we feel connected, but we're not. The other option is to have very few deep connections, and then our our connection bucket fills full, but we have deeper connections. So our surface connections make us feel we're connected even though we're not. Also too, social media, I believe and many others believe that it forms a sense of competition. It used to be the Joneses were across the street. And there's always a sense of competition that we shouldn't have, but we do. Keeping up with the Joneses across the street was kind of easy because they got a new boat, but we got a new car. Still bad, but you didn't feel as bad because you could see that there was somewhat parity. Also Joneses were in the same socioeconomic Neighborhood. Yeah. Neighborhood. So there was But now we're comparing ourselves in social media. We have a glass pane that used to be the kitchen window. We could see what they were doing, and now the glass pane is our monitors, and we're seeing the best of every single person. We don't see anything bad, we only see the best. So the Joneses are now a hundred to a thousand fold, and we only see their best and they're in different socioeconomic. And so it brings out this competition in us that kills connection in many cases. And it's maybe not a question of should we use social media, but how do we use social media and how do we train people in the spiritual space and how do we train them to use it? So as an example, kind of reflecting through, I don't use social media a ton, but social media is a passive form of connection, but how do we spawn active engagement from that? So in my mind, I think it's kind of cool because lately in the last year, I've been connecting more with my cousins through social media. So I kind of know what they're doing more, but I also am trying to train myself every time I see that to turn it into an active form of communication and then an in person active form of communication. At a certain point, I can't do it every month, every week, because they live in a different city, but I have to make that make me want to get in person communication with them. So if we have these frameworks, we can start to respond more clearly with questions , What is the impact of Apple's new Vision Pro in a spiritual context? If we had the framework, we could answer these questions much easier. Right now it's , Oh, it's cool. And we have the hype still in us from this week. And it's , This is amazing. Despite the price, it's still pretty amazing. And all the things we can do, but we don't have the framework to evaluate it. what's the right way to use this? And how does this deepen connection, but how does it maybe kill connection? And what are the pros and cons to that? Or another one, if we had frameworks, what are the limits to the ethical use of AI in ministry? The answer is, very often, is not going be yes or no. It's more subtle. AI, we should use it, but we should use it in these ways. We are actively trying to figure those types of concepts out in terms of what are ethical uses of AI and what are the boundaries we should put in place. Otherwise, we're left with an emotional infused excitement, which is cool for us, but the people around us, our leadership, some of them are actually in the same boat, but some of them aren't. And even if they are in the same boat, it causes us to waste money, time, and possibly send people down a path that is not a healthy path. So Apple's keynote to this week was amazing. The Envision Pro is awesome, but what is its feature in the church? I think even if technology XYZ should never be used by the church, it's still important to look into it. Because if culture's gonna be into it, we might have to pull people out of it. We need to have some sort of response, which we can't do if we don't understand it. Yeah. If there's some evil technology that comes out and everybody loves it, the answer to the church is not to ignore it. We might have to jump into that burning building and pull people out. And so we have to understand it. So someone might say, Well, you never go into this technology. It's , Well, okay. But then when people go into it, we might have to be pulling them out. Because I think a lot of this technology has a spiritual warfare component to it. Ever since I first used VR, thought it was amazing. Surprisingly, didn't think I would it at all. But I also felt there's a coldness to it, and it almost is the WALL E world where you could almost envision that if this gets to be too good and if it knows through AI and you look at image generation, video generation, it could meet every person's immediate gratification. And why would anybody ever want to leave that? And that's not a healthy place for any Christian. You could, I mean, taken to the extreme, you could have a culture that just wants to live in it full time. It's , they know it's the matrix, but they want to be the But they're okay with it. And how do we and that's the extreme, right? I'm not saying it will get to that, but it could. And it's sometimes in your thinking processes, you have to wargame the extremes on both sides and not let that necessarily taint you, but you have to think about it. So anyways, I think it's something that we need to, as a community, and need to, as a church area, think through. And I think it comes down to not simple answers. On one podcast, say you have the idea or you have the solutions, but you have to create the frameworks that you can then use as lenses to evaluate these things. In my mind, connection is one of those. How does this affect connection? But there's many others. That's just a starting point. But sometimes I get a little frustrated. I first get emotional. I wanna use this all. I wanna start downloading the dev kits and start going. And that'll probably still happen, but at the same time, we have to take a slower approach to make sure that what we're doing is actually helpful and not hurtful. Those are some really good thoughts, John. In addition to the potential challenges of confusion, chaos, wrong path, just even starting so many things that they can't all continue to move forward, even if they are great and in line with what you need, can be a real burden on the other people inside an organization. Yeah. And we could actually hurt people. We could actually, hey, come join our I mean, again, I haven't even thought through this. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but someone could We could say, hey, come use our new technology. That technology turns out to be evil. Now that person actually likes that technology. We introduced them to it. Then it's , Okay, now how do you pull them back out? I mean, there's one thing I do know personally, I believe that the devil's out, he's ratcheted up the war. Evil has ratcheted up the war and it's clear, it's obvious. They're not even hiding anymore. It doesn't take much to see that they're not hiding. So why are we so quiet? If evil's going to be so much more noisy, if they're turning up the volume, if I'm being honest, I don't see us turning up our volume. We're still a bit the church mouse. I saw someone last night, a respected actor, not an A lister, but an actor. He was saying, I'm tired of Jesus being that friendly little guy that I say a little prayer to before I go to bed. He's , I need to be talking about it all the time, how he's changing my life and what he's doing in my life. I'm , Yeah, you're right. We should be doing that. And I think, again, technology's neutral, much money is neutral, but it is a tool that the enemy likes to use, both money and technology. I think we can use the same tool. Money can be used to fund and help people, and technology much the same, but we have to be careful. And discernment has never been more critical than it is now with so many new things and that pace that you're talking about. Yeah. And many times our roles are so needed right now, but we have to be so careful that they're not based on emotion and excitement and that they're well reasoned. Because I think for honest, we all get emotional and excited about these new technologies and that's good, but we have to come back to reason and first principles to make sure that we're considering that too. Yeah, those are some really great thoughts. Thanks for sharing those with us today, Now for more great thoughts, because we have to put a pause on some of the things we're discussing about the product, you're gonna have to come to the conference. So it's right around the corner. We are seeing a lot of great activity from people registering, getting involved. We recently released the schedule. So if you haven't seen that yet, head over to the website, rx.rockrms.com. The schedule's posted. And if you've not been before, you can actually favorite the sessions that you want to attend and start creating your own schedule. So check out what's there. Start favoriting and saving the the sessions that you'd to attend so you can get that all squared away before you get there. We'll continue to release the things that you'll need or wanna hear before the conference. So stay tuned, pay attention. And if you haven't registered yet, and I know I've spoken with some people out there that are maybe just haven't gotten around to it because of vacation schedules and other things, make sure you do that soon. We're now on our second room block on the hotel across the street. So we are really filling up hotels. There are plenty around if we need it, but the longer you wait, the further out you may be from the event center. So make sure you register for the conference and get that hotel room while you're at it. Now, if you are registered, are you in the clear? Are you done with everything that you should do? No. This is the community event, and this is when we all come together. So who do that should be at this event with you? Maybe it's other people in your regional community, people you already know really well and they may or may not be coming, ask. Find out if they're going to be there. Also, maybe it's people that have never been before. We have an excellent new to Rock Track. And so if there's someone you met at a, say, a roadshow regionally or someone that's kind of called up and been kind of, what are you guys doing with Rock? Could you show it to us a little bit? You've been having those conversations. Invite them to join you at the conference. It's a great time to see what Rock's all about. They'll have to wait a whole another year before they have that opportunity again. And then maybe it's different people on your staff. So maybe you've been coming yourself or bringing a small Rock team with you, but there are lots of other people on your staff that could benefit. Think about kids ministry contact, a finance contact, Many different departments can find value from connecting with others in their same roles at this event and finding out what they're doing so you're not all recreating the wheel. We also have a really strong communications digital strategy track that's diving into the front end CMS tools with Rock. So there's a lot to see. Don't take my word for it. That schedule's posted online. Go check it out and think through who else should be coming to this event because it is one time a year and there will be a lot of great announcements and some new things that you don't know to expect. And that's all we can say about that. Just make sure that you're there. We have some new merch coming out too at the conference. That's right. Do. If you need that last little tip. Push you over the edge. That should push you right over the edge. Yes. Yes. And it will not be coming out before then. You want to get your hands on that at the event. Yep. Okay. So we hope to see you very soon. And if you happen to listen to this after the conference and it's the first time you've gotten involved with Rock Podcasts, don't forget, there is going to be a content subscription available so you can get the content, but make sure you budget for next year's event because there's some connection opportunities available in person that you just can't get virtually. So looking forward to seeing everyone there. Do not forget if you are listening to this podcast to subscribe to the podcast so you can hear from us immediately as soon as we update future releases, because this is where you're going to know what's happening here with Rock, and you're going be one of those people that's in the know. Join us next time. Thank you so much for being our listeners. We love sharing this time with you. 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.