Podcast Episode 173: Episode 146: Special Edition-Derek Mangrum

Description

Our special guest today is Rock Star Derek Mangrum from Central Christian Church. Join Emily Forman and Lorrie Yoakum as they learn how his curiosity lead to "ministry magnifiers"; workflows in Rock that cut hours out of administrative work, and how the most down loaded integration came from his simple question.Show Notes: Learn more about Derek's Church: https://www.centralaz.com/If you have a story to share: https://community.rockrms.com/get-involved/role/share-your-ministry-story Register for RX2023: https://rx.rockrms.com/rxregister/rx2023

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 this special edition of Rockcast. I'm Emily Forman, and, Lori Jocham and I have a special guest with us today. Welcome, Derek. Derek Mangrom is from Central Christian Church right here in the Phoenix Valley. Yes. Thank you for having me today. We're so excited to have you. And you're here in the office with us, which a lot of times when we talk with someone from the community, we're doing that over a video call or remotely. So people may or may not realize that you're within a drive of our offices. It's a bit of a drive. The valley's big, but this is not the first time you've come to visit us, is it? Nope. No. We are about an hour away. And so, yeah, I've made many trips over to see you guys, which I love doing every single time. I love seeing people and I love experiencing your guys' offices and kinda seeing how the sausage is made over here. Don't let the secrets out. So Derek has been with the Rock community since the very beginning. There are a handful of people that have really seen what's been going on and been instrumental forces in helping get the Rock community where it is today through their energy, their effort, their enthusiasm. Derek is someone that has been just around and in the community for a very long time, but you're kind of you you'll stay at the back of the stage. You'll take a back seat and help out where it's needed. And we just thought this was a great time for people to hear a little bit about your story, so that's why we've invited you today. That's awesome. Well, thank you. Yeah. Well, Central Christian is a church that's been running on Rock for a long time since I think you told us it was 2018. Yeah. I think we went live with it on version three. Okay. So. And version three was not your introduction to Rock. In fact, weren't you involved in some of the pre spark development conversations about what could be with a platform that yet had no name? Yeah. We had I had the virtue and the privilege of having Nick Airdo on staff with me at Central kinda at the time during the birth of this when it was just an idea. And so I was able to kinda orbit him a little bit as he participated early on in the team and the development of this and the birth of this. Yeah, I was always kind of around hanging on his shoulder, kind of wanting to know what was going on and being a part of it and trying to help as I could and just be a part of things. I think I remember the first time I ever saw you was in John's office at CCV and I was in office a couple doors down on a Friday when you and Nick would come up working on some concepts and some things behind Rock. So I know that you've been just a really familiar person from the core team's perspective for a really long time. Yeah. So that's pretty cool. Yeah, it is fun. It's fun to kinda see it grow over its life, but then just have those memories of those early, early days. How many offices have you visited our team in? Don't know the answer to At least three? At least. Yeah, but I mean, if you count again visiting CCV periodically with Nick when he would drive up on the weekends, four maybe or more. Yeah, I've been there. You have been, yes. And not just a fly on the wall, you've been helping with a lot of things. today you're here and also have volunteered to help us pull ourselves together a little bit, right? Yeah, my actual work is IT pro stuff. So servers and networking. And so as you guys have had to do office build outs and things, sometimes I would come up and help with cabling and building out the networks and installing wireless and things of that nature for you guys. Yeah. I don't think people realize that those types of things that have to happen where we drop whatever we're doing, Laurie community things, me community things and team things and John software architecture and Nick, , software development management to do the actual work of setting up offices. And so it's been super helpful that we have a little bit of a team extension in you on that. So let me just say publicly, thank you. And I hope people realize that the impact that you've had on our team and just knowing that we can raise our hand and call for help when needed has been super Absolutely. Thank you so much. Yeah. Well, that's nice of you to say. And you definitely don't want me in the architecture or development meetings. So I'm glad I can help in other areas. Well, listen, we all have the lanes of things that we're best suited for and you have I would say of all the people in the community, I know you're one of those that looks for extra ways to take your skill set, your, your encouragement, and really just move things forward and make sure our team feels a big impact from that. And and you've done it consistently over the years. So, we we really appreciate you. Well, thank you. Thank you. Absolutely. So you've been on staff at Central for how long now? February. Next month, actually, will be sixteen years. Wow. Congratulations. Thank you. Yeah. That that is a long time. And what exactly do you do there? What does a systems administrator do on a weekly, daily basis? My primary role is to handle all of our server infrastructure. So we are Windows and a Cisco environment. So I manage, install, update all the things related to that. Also, our networks, our wide area networks to connect all of our campuses and just general troubleshooting and other help as well. And then over the last few years, obviously, I've been learning Rock and trying to be more involved in our support and implementation of of Rock as well. So you mentioned multiple campuses. How big how many campuses have you moved to? We have five campuses. Very nice. Yep. All around the valley? Yeah. We have, four over on the East Side and then one in Glendale. So that keeps you busy? Yeah, yeah, it's, yeah, it does. So how many people work on the team with you in doing the IT piece? Our department has four people in it. We have a director, me as the assist admin, and then we have two kind of end user support people. And I mean, they're the workhorses, obviously, helping our end users with their PCs and printers and things of that nature and so much more. Absolutely. Yep. As somebody who worked as a pastor on staff, I love your department. How do I make this work? Yes. Very empowering for the people with you at the church. So Derek, how would people in the community, if they hear your name, they're , how do I know that guy? Remind them of where they might have run into you. Well, I try to be active and participate in the community. That is sometimes spotty for me depending on my workload. Mhmm. But I I try to do that and obviously, , community is huge here at Rock and I encourage everyone to participate in that. I try to do what I can, answer questions when I can, also ask them very often as well. This last year at Rx, I had one session that I spoke at. It was my first time doing that. But I've attended several conferences in the past. So hopefully you've seen me there. If you haven't, please come up and introduce yourself this next year. I would love to meet you. Great, and we were so excited to have you speak. I know that was a hurdle for you to jump over. Yeah, yeah, I'm more of a behind the scenes kind of person. So that was a big thing for me, but hopefully I'm kind of the poster boy for, if I can do it, anyone can do it type of thing. Absolutely, yeah. So maybe this year too? Got the email asking and I actually do maybe have a couple ideas that I will possibly pitch and see if one or both of those might be options. Very cool. Well, as I think the community will hear in this podcast, you to stay a little bit behind the scenes, but you have a lot of great ideas. Mhmm. And you've you've done a lot that's impacted ministry at Central Christian. And so the the ability to share that with the community can be intimidating. I don't think most of us are wired to love getting up on stage. So I was listening to a podcast yesterday by someone who she's very extroverted, but she still didn't getting on stage. And so she had to psych herself up behind the scenes and specifically say, it's not about me. I'm not here because I love it. I'm here because I have a really great story, and there are some people out here that can I can have a really positive impact on? And once she said that and she picked she said she would mentally, visually from the side of the stage, the spot she was gonna move to as she moved out there. And she would so she's doing the mental blocking, move out there and start with a smile and with the story of , wow, I've got something to share that's gonna be a big impact. So just encourage people who might be listening. If you've attended for a while and have some great ideas, don't let the fear of getting on stage be a showstopper. Absolutely. And everyone is so amazing. It's they are just excited that you're sharing and excited to hear what you have to say because you just said, you have something and even if it's not the whole thing, there's going to be a nugget or two that someone's going to walk away with that makes their job better and their ability to use and implement Rock better. And everyone is always just so gracious and so kind. If you flub or , whatever, it's no one cares. It's not a Toastmasters convention, nobody's there to give you a rating of one to 10 on your speaking. They wanna hear what you've done, what your impact has Absolutely. Well, and something else that you said that I think is a really interesting point. We have to remember that the things that come easy for us, the things that that we feel are natural, other people are looking at going, I don't know how to do that. That's so what we think is easy, what we think, oh, , I I know how to do this, so it's not that big a deal. It is a big deal. Right. It's your natural giftedness. And so those are the things we need shared because, I think so often we can downplay our own natural gifts and abilities and so. Yeah. That's a great point, Laurie. Derek, speak to the fear someone might have that maybe what they did wasn't good enough yet and they don't know all the things. Oh man, for me it is when I see other people in the community that I feel are just head and shoulders above me. And , I look at them and for one, I'm consuming because what everything they're putting out is amazing and I love. And then I just wonder, know, is what I have of, , value? Is what I have worthwhile? But again, even my thought is even if it's one person, , and I'm gonna make one person better or they're going to be able to do their job better, which is going to help the church that they're involved at be more effective, how many hundreds of people is that potentially still going to reach through whatever ministry they're going to impact with this knowledge that I was able to share. So, I mean, if you think even that small, touching one person can then touch hundreds. So if you touch five, you're touching thousands. And so it can grow really fast. So don't ever feel you don't have value in what and what you could share because again, even if one person derives some nugget of new knowledge from that and the impact that that can have is potentially huge. So my best advice is at Rx twenty twenty three, if you're getting up on stage to speak and you're having imposter syndrome, go find Derek and he can talk you out of this. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, imposter syndrome. Think I might be the poster, the face for that. I think we'd be surprised how many people struggle with that. I think it's very common. Absolutely. And I think it's something we feel we have to kind of put a shield around, but I think it's very common. I know I struggle with that. Sure, Yeah. So I wanna talk about something that you did because I think one of the things that I learned about you in asking some questions ahead of time so I could get to know you better is I think you have incredibly creative and curious mind. So I heard a rumor that you may have learned Rock by playing around inside of it with an interesting idea. Yeah. Yeah. My I've always been interested in primarily the workflow and lava, those technologies within Rock. And those are where I've spent most of my time and where I've developed most of my skills. And early on, I did that. One, because it was very interesting to me, but I didn't know it. So I actually developed a Rock, paper, scissors game in Rock. And it's silly and it's goofy, but you play Rock, paper, scissors against the computer. Do you win or does the computer always Man, I should have programmed it so that I would win every time. Wouldn't have the smart thing to But no, I win sometimes and I lose sometimes and there's a tie sometimes. But yeah, I mean, I was just trying to ask early on simple questions in a workflow, how do you branch to different processes based on values and an attribute. If it's this, you do this, but if it's a different value, then you do something else. Or another question I had was how do you select a random item out of a collection of items, for example. When I have the computer make its choice, it's randomly picking Rock, paper or scissors. Well how do I get it to randomly do that? It's these types of questions that I had and I thought this would be a good way to try and figure those out. Using the knowledge that I gained from that, obviously now I'm able to solve real ministry problems. When I have a collection of people and I need to pick a random one out of it. Or I need to go do this process or present this form if the person's an adult but present a different form if they're a minor in a workflow. Things of that nature. All of that stuff, know a lot of that stuff I learned in these early kind of just goofing around building fun, silly workflows. So that curiosity then created learned more by creating what you're calling a silly game. And so you were able to build on that for the last several years. Oh, Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I have a I have a little archive of these workflows. They're inactive now, but they're they're still there and they're kind of the things that I learned on. Absolutely. Yeah. That's that's incredible. I love that Rock paper scissors was how you really played around in Rock. Yeah. It was fun. Well, have a couple of things that you had mentioned to us as we were talking earlier that you felt you were able to really impact your community and the people at the church for ministry purposes with some of the workflow skills you've been building. Can you share a little bit about one of those projects? Yeah, a number of years ago we had a ministry, this was pre COVID and we had a ministry called Adopt A Family. And it was the premise of the ministry. I'm sure other churches have something similar as where churches at the family would adopt low income families in the community, and we would provide Christmas gifts and Christmas meals to them. And so we would partner with schools in our communities who would identify, , low income households in those schools, and then we would do this ministry. And there was a lot of logistics involved. Obviously, you're grabbing the demographic data from, , the family that's gonna be adopted. You're having people at church register to participate, then you have to match them together throughout the process. There's communications that are happening throughout at different milestones. You should have communicated with your family to let them know you're gonna be delivering You should have delivered, you should have, . And then there was a survey at the end for our people so that they could kind of give us their impressions of the ministry, maybe tell a cool story if they had and we would collect that. So it was a big huge thing and in the early years that was all manual. Wow. Everything was done on paper, in Word documents and spreadsheets, every email that was sent was sent by a person to a person. And so because it was so labor and time intensive, it was not a large ministry. And then in 2018, the young lady that was in charge of this ministry, we had just kind of started on Rock and she was tech savvy and interested in using Rock as well, came to me and asked if there was a way we could leverage this new thing we had for her adoptive family ministry to try and make it better and easier. And so we worked on designing and building a workflow that would handle a lot of these automated routine things that could be done by the robot instead of a person having to do it. And that freed the people in the ministry up to do the things only people could do. And that next year, I don't know the exact numbers but I remember it was either 50% or twice as big, the of our people being able to participate and the number of families in the community we were able to serve just because we were able to leverage this tool. And then in 2019, we wrote a version two that even did more stuff. It had registration codes that we would give to the schools that they could then hand out to the families. And so instead of grabbing their data on paper, they were able to just go to a website, enter the registration code and enter all of their family kids and it all just, yeah, that kind of stuff is cool because you build a robot and it just lets you leverage and magnify and multiply the ministry. And when I see and hear stories of 2X or 3X people being ministered to because of this tool that you built, that you add in as another staff person, right? To do this mundane rote things that need to be done, but don't need to be done by people and can be done super fast and twenty four hours a day without sleeping, without, , because the robot's doing it. It's just that stuff, just, that warms my heart, it puts a smile on my face and just knowing that something that I help build, let more people be ministered to. I love that. Is awesome. What an incredible, you said, I think the word was magnification. And I think that's a really powerful concept that you're able to focus your efforts to relieve the efforts of so many people that can then focus on ministry and the scale just in one year. That's an incredible value of the investment that you were able to put into that. Super fun. So thanks from all of us here for investing in those early games and things that you tried. The other thing that really intrigued me about that concept is that you said, and then the next year we came back with the two point o version. So I love that you're still continuing to iterate and expand on that. Yeah, we have a number of projects that where I'll be asked, we'll develop something and we'll run it. And then the next time that thing comes up, oh, but can it do this? Or could we have it do that instead? And it would be neat if, know, and so we create this list and any software, it's a version two and a version three. And again, it just becomes more and more feature rich and more and more functional. And again, makes the people involved in that ministry and it just makes their job easier so they're able to do, again, the human only things. That's the big thing for me is build the robot to do the robot y things. Let the people do the people things. They shouldn't be wasting their time doing things that the program can do. Let them just do the people, the human interaction stuff. That's what's fun. I love that the woman who was running this program said, I think Rock can do this. Let's leverage Rock to do these things. And you said, absolutely, let's make that happen. So I think there are so many things that we do, in our churches that we could allow Rock to do for us if we ask that question. Can we get Rock to do this for us and how do we do it? Yeah. And to talk to somebody you on staff who can make those things happen. So I think what a great, way for the two of you to come together and and Emily said, you said, magnify that ministry and reach that many more families. What a gift. Yeah. Those are those are some of my fondest memories of times in ministry. And it's weird because when you're in IT, a lot of times you don't feel you're doing ministry. Mhmm. , it's my job is to make sure the tools work so that the ministries can do ministry. But I have these moments and these memories of times when I get to actually do ministry that way. That's incredible because people probably don't come back and say, hey Derek, guess what, my internet worked today. So I was able to send those emails I needed to, do the research I needed for my message. Probably that feedback doesn't come your way. Yeah, I'm not interested in feedback. I feel if I'm doing my job well, no one even knows I exist because everything just works. So when I'm getting contacted, it's probably because something's broken. A lot of times I want to just be kind of behind the scenes and , what does he do all day? Well, what he's doing is so that you can do what you need to do. So you can ask that question. That's Exactly. That's good. Well, tell us some things you're thinking about doing with Rock in the future at Central. What do you have on your mind? Well, the big thing that we are working on now and are really excited about is we are actually having a new front facing website, public website built and we're using a third party vendor, one of in our community to do that, which is awesome because we don't have that skill set on staff. So if you need help, find a vendor because they are awesome. And our hope is that our website and its theme was pretty custom. It was built early on before some of the more robust tools were available. So this new website is going to be what I call much more Rock stock, which would be nice. That's Because it's going to give us the ability to manage and maintain it, I think, lot easier using content channel blocks and standard HTML blocks and there's not going to be a ton of crazy custom goofy script and all that stuff that I don't know. So we're going to be able to do a lot more in house management and maintenance going forward once this is in place. So that's going to be good and it's going to give me the opportunity to learn kind of new areas. Again, I'll be able to reach out of what I consider my core competencies again, workflows and lava to do more with the CMS type of stuff. So I'm excited for that. Well that's fantastic. With the announcements that came from the keynote at the last conference, it's just a reminder of how much attention is going into those external facing in Rock and the ministry value that's coming. And and it's so much more that's on the horizon. So that's a really exciting project that you're working on. Yep. And I agree. If the if the website's built correctly, it takes the administration work so much further down and makes it so much more accessible to people with different skill sets. you don't have to be a web developer to really keep your website fresh and in really good condition for the most part. Right. So that's that's fantastic. Love hearing when churches are updating an older Rock website to the newest technologies available or bringing their website in house and leveraging the data strategy that's available for personalization at that point. We are excited about that for sure. There are lot of opportunities now. So I hear a lot about Lava, and I am not somebody who knows that language yet. So how did you first approach LAVA? What how did you learn it? What were the things that you did to take the fear out of what LAVA is? Yeah, again, coming from my IT pro background, I mean, I've been in this industry for thirty years. So I've always been around, not software development, but scripting. Back in the day it was writing command lines or batch files for Windows and more recently it's PowerShell and writing PowerShell scripts and stuff. So I've been familiar with scripting, I've been familiar with the basic software concepts of storing things in variables and conditional branching and writing back in the day subroutines, malfunctions, those types of concepts. And so when I was first exposed to Lava and I see the if tag and the case tag and assign items to variable, it's that match was instantly made in my mind. So I really approached Lava initially as another scripting language. And that's how I kind of started my journey learning it. And again, I've always been a, hey, click that button to see what it does. It's nothing's going to catch fire in computing. So I would just start writing things to see what the result was. Just explore because again, whether it was the Rock, paper, scissors game or just how do I display the name from a person record? Those very simple things. anything else, don't know until . And so the only way is to go read the documentation, which is amazing in the Rock community. I mean, now I still, have it shortcut to the lava documents because I always have to , especially the case switch. It's every time I have to look it up, how is that done again? I never remember. So I'm always still going to the documentation even though I consider myself pretty familiar with it now. I think that's one thing I hear all the time. Yeah, I go back to the documentation. It doesn't matter who it is. Oh, yeah. Go back to the documentation. Yeah, so are you stocking the new lava updates as they come along and are released? So I try to keep up on them for sure. Yes, I will answer. I was gonna try and think of a more in-depth answer, but I'll just say yes. I do. I'm always very interested in the new technologies coming, new filters, the new way things can be done in Rock. Sometimes new filters are snuck in. Yeah, they're fun. Yeah, that's good. Well, and I heard a rumor, so I need you to verify this, that you may have played a part in the creation of probably our single most downloaded or implemented item in the Rock Shop. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Yes, yes, my favorite plugin, the Lava Tester. I think everybody agrees with you on that one. Yes, yeah, it's an interesting story because obviously before existed, it did not exist. Right. And so I one day was working on a workflow and I had an email template. I had a lot of lava in it. And the only way to see what that email would look is if I would fire a workflow instance and go through the process to the point where it sent the email and then go look at my email. I just was doing this over and over filling out this form over and over and it became so annoying. So Nick was still on staff at Central at the time. So as I always did, I would go into his office and cry about wishing Rock could do something that it couldn't do. And so we talked, I was , I would love it if there was a way to just take some lava and just put it in a text box and hit go and have it show me what it would look . And he's , scratched his chin. And I was , what, we might be able to do serious, it wasn't an hour later. Oh my gosh, how cool. He's , hey, Derek, come look at this. And I came into his office and he had this version one of the lava tester, which is really just a text box and a go button. I mean, that's literally all it was. And he showed me just put in some lava and hit go and then under it, it just displayed the results. And I think I hugged him. I think I kissed his feet, I think I bought him lunch. I was so excited. And then obviously anyone who sees that now knows that they've added the ability to access so many more of the objects and models within it, existing workflow instances. I mean, it's become so much more powerful, which is probably why it is the most downloaded plug in in store for sure. But it's because you said, I wish it could do this. Just the woman in your office, I wish it could do this. So if we're asking that question, we're going to save ourselves a lot of time if we're asking the right person. Yeah. So no question is a bad question in Rock. Absolutely. And in that early days, again, I was fortunate and lucky that I had, again, Nick in the office 10 feet away from me. But again, now we have the community. Right, you have this quote unquote office with hundreds of amazing people who know so much about Rock. You go walk into that office in Rocket Chat or Q and A boards and you ask and you're going get a dozen Nicks out there answering your question for you and giving you a ton of insight, examples, suggestions. And again, I ask as many as I try to answer. Is amazing. Talk about magnification, right? Oh yeah, absolutely. The entire community is. Now we're doing that not just inside our individual ministries, but in terms of the community as well. So those idea boards, by the way, are kind of the way to go now to get something in the community. The roadmap we always talk about is complex, And there are some things that come from core. There are some needs that come directly from churches that are funding them. And then the ideas board is always something I know our team is meticulous about staying updated on what is there. And so those upvotes do count because it's the community ideas that are highest interest that we know from the core team perspective represent the greatest critical need. So if you are unfamiliar with that board and the number of votes you have and how that works, you might wanna pop in and take a look. Yeah. We'll put that in the show notes. Awesome. Great. Okay. So one thing I to collect, because I was on staff at a church, we all know that those, those stories, those heartstring stories, those things when somebody did something that made a big difference, Those are the things that we use in churches. We use them from the stage. We use them in our staff meetings. So Rock is looking to collect those stories too. So tell me a time when Rock made things easier on staff, made things easier for an attendee. What is one time that you can tell us about that that Rock changed things? Yeah, I a number that are outward facing the adoptive family program, but one that comes to mind was because staff on church need to be ministered to. And we recently developed a program called the Wow Awards. And it is a staff appreciation program from your peers. So it gives the staff person the ability to kind of shout out another staff person if they kind of go above and beyond or do something And it's, again, a fairly simple workflow, but it just gives you the ability to kind of recognize that person and then that recognition goes to them to show your appreciation. It goes to their boss and then it also goes to HR. And those awards tally points throughout the year. And then at the end of the year, instead of having an employee of the year program that's run by our executive team or whatever, we have a staff appreciation award that's kind of all pure led. So it's really, really actually cool because this year, the three top finalists for this, all three of them were behind the scenes. Oh, were the ones that wouldn't have necessarily been noticed. They're not necessarily maybe noticed by more outward facing type of ministries and stuff that. But they're noticed by us, right? Yeah. People on staff in the trenches because they're just always killing it for us. And so it was really neat to see that program, one, be super successful. And two, not that previous award winners and previous programs were undeserving, but just that it kind of gave a new dimension because it was for the people by the people. Kind of leveled that playing field a little bit. And it's been a very well received program, I think. And I think it's been appreciated. What a cool application. Thanks for sharing one that impacted your staff too. That's great. And we should keep in mind that our staff needs the encouragement and insight as well. you mentioned, you don't always hear feedback of what your day to day work delivers. So a program that can add the extra encouragement all year. Yeah, absolutely. Very cool. Well, Derek, I hope the community has come to know you a little bit better today. And if you would , give Derek a shout in the chat community, come up to him at the conference. You're always a very friendly face. Thank you so much for joining us today and for sharing. And also thank you for coming to help us with some things in the office today. That's really helpful as well. Yes, well, I appreciate the invite. And as Emily just said, yeah, please feel free to contact me anytime out in the community or in person at a conference or anything that. I am always happy to meet new people and just be part of the community everyone else. Yes. Well, you so much for your time today. We appreciate it and love being able to share your story with the Rock community. Excellent. Thank 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.