Podcast Episode 149: Episode 122: Special Edition with Mark Wampler

Description

Rock Star Hall of Famer Mark Wampler joins us on Rock Cast today to share about his journey from trying to figure out how to do two things in Rock to saving over 10,000 staff hours through his development work. Mark shares some insights on how the Rock community has helped him become a Rock Star and offers some suggestions for how you can become one too. Listen in to this can't miss episode for tips on how your organization can recruit a Rock specialist and learn about some of the ministry projects Mark has worked to develop in Rock.

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. I have Jon Edmiston and our special guest today with us, Mark Wampler. Mark, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. A lot of the community knows your name, might recognize you from the conference. So we're really appreciative of your insights and thank you for joining us today. So you're with Watermark Community Church in Dallas. And what's your title there? Rock developer. They made me change it for Rock star because they didn't that on the website. I that on the website, but I get it. That's cool. It was Rock specialist, and then somebody asked, why do you guys have somebody who does rocks? , what what do you , do you have what? You have a the church geologist? Yes. Exactly. He should've just said, don't you read your bible? And just left it at that. Oh, that's great. Wow. Well, that's fun. Well, so today, anyway, you're the Rock developer, which is awesome. So the community may have run into you in any of these particular areas. You were the 2021 Rockstar Hall of Fame inductee. You've been a rockstar since 2018. You've been a speaker at the Rock Conference in twenty nineteen, twenty, twenty one. You have joined the one thousand community points club in the community. You're an alpha tester, and, of course, you're active in chat and any community activities that we have going on. So you have really engaged with the Rock community in a way that people admire and look up to. And that's kinda what we wanna talk about, , today is just , what does that look for you? How would you encourage someone else to get involved? And, , what what that takes. So tell us a little bit to start with about your role as Rock developer at Watermark and and how you're involved with Rock and what your actual job is . Yeah. So I originally came on staff to Watermark in 2014, and I came on staff with six months of IT experience. So prior to that I did six years in advertising as a media buyer. So I had no background in what I was doing. And I just had gifts that God had given me that I didn't realize I could use as a career. So I've always loved computers and all of that, but my parents never encouraged it as a job. Kind of late in life transition, new career, and they brought me on and then we switched Church Management Systems in 2017 to Rock. As a part of that we sent out a survey to all our staff and said, Hey, what do you absolutely need to do? What's a non negotiable? Some process that you have in place that Rock has to be able to do. And so there are three or four that came back and so I just started to figure out how to do that in Rock. And so things , , you're connecting or first impression cards on the weekend that new people come in and fill out, and we had to have a way to do that in Rock, so I had to figure out how to do it. So I looked at workflows and figured it out, and essentially made my own job. Wow. Well, it seems it's been a successful one. Yeah, it's been amazing. One of the things that I was able to essentially get another Rock developer hired by tracking what I do and tracking that. We had my first year doing full time Rock, I tracked it and I spent about a thousand hours of development time, plus, , break fixes and other things. And I was able to save ten thousand hours of staff time, of checking boxes and, , just all of the silly tasks that you do in a day to day thing that we were able to automate and help them focus on ministry instead of checking boxes. Oh, that's incredible. That's awesome. So it sounds you ended up with more than three or four processes that you had to build into Rock. Yeah. Well, mean, one of those was literally 85% of somebody's job. Just helped connect one volunteer with somebody who was trying to become a member. to hear that, so we do verbal testimonies, so you share , hey here's what God's done in my life, here's, , I've trusted in Christ at this time. And it was one person's job to literally connect volunteers with those people to get them through that process, and that's about 85% of their job. And so we are able to automate the majority of that. That's incredible. How they can train their volunteers to ask better questions, and encourage them, and disciple them better instead of focusing on the task. Wow. So to hear where you started when you joined the church and when the church moved to Rock, which was one of the very early adopters, really, you have had to self teach and self train in a lot of different skill sets, and I think many in the community might be surprised to hear that was your background. How have you gone about challenging yourself in those areas? What do you do when you decide you need to learn something that you're missing? Well, so I do StrengthsFinder's test. My number one at the time was learning. Now it's number two, Strategic leapfrogged it. But I just did. So, know, we needed to put a membership badge on our profiles. And so I got on the rocket chat or Slack at the time and I was , okay, I'm trying to do this. I've got if statement that's looking at this person attribute but it's not working. It's , Oh I had the pipe in the if statement, I need to assign it to a variable first. , one of the guys in RockyChat answered me back then and said, Here's what you need to do. Oh, okay, that makes sense. And so now I understand that concept and so I can start building from So I mean I did what everybody else does where they ask questions in Rocket Chat. And somebody helps you, I can help people now and I learned. Had no background in HTML or CSS or Lava or any of that kind of stuff. I was just , got to get a thing done. That's the benefit. I knew what I was trying to do. I had some task that I was trying to accomplish. Trying to just learn for learning's sake can be really difficult for sure. It can. There's no focused effort that you're trying to do and you're just kind of following some person's guide, which doesn't help a ton. It's amazing when you have a task to accomplish and a deadline hanging over your head and you see the gap between where you're at and where you need to be, how much you can get done inside the little positive pressure that creates. Yep. And now I look back at the things that I did when I first started, I'm , Oh, that was terrible. Why did I do that? That was a bad idea. But hey, it worked. I think we all think that. Yeah, we all do that. Yeah. You'll still think the same thing about what you're doing today in five years. Right. Mean, it's just too early days. Yeah. And you get this one shot at life. Right? , you can't go back and do it all perfectly from the beginning. So we learn iteratively. That's how it works. So, Mark, if there's a church out there right now that's thinking, I need a Rock developer or geologist on my church staff, , what might you recommend they look for? How would they go about recruiting someone you? So I wanna be the elitist and say that we've got it right, our culture is amazing. But that's one of the things that I would point to is that the culture at Watermark is a culture of authenticity and self leadership. And so it's very much focused on we're all sinners, we're all broken people, and focusing on that aspect of it, and we all need Jesus. And so our leadership and our staff leadership doesn't berate people in that way and say that I'm perfect, why did you fail? When people come to them and say, Hey man, I struggled and I committed this sin that has been in control of me for years. There's not this, let's shoot our wounded. It's let's come around our wounded and care for them and restore them to a place of honor as we work alongside them and encourage them. And so there's a desire to work on staff in our body. It's not something that people would think that you're going to have some kind of power over other people. It's the other way around. You're a servant leader, not somebody who would then control others. And I think the other thing that's super important in my opinion is you don't say someone's no for them. Because , I mean, I'm not gonna get paid as much as if I go do the work that I do somewhere else. But you let God's work in their lives, give them a yes or a no. It's not your control, and don't pressure them either. Don't impute God's will. Say, I think you need to work here. God led me into it. that's not, yeah. But yeah, just allow it and be , hey, you're who we would love to have on staff. And then let God's work, spirit work in their life and say no or yes. I think that's amazing. You just said something amazing there. When I was going and volunteering at my church, someone said no for me. , the person who I was working with, I said he said, well, we're looking for an IT person. And I'm , oh, cool. , , how much does that pay? And he's , oh, not for you. Not for you. , it would we you wouldn't be interested. And we couldn't couldn't pay what you wanted. I'm , well, just shock me. And he did. He did shock me. But I you're you're exactly right, Mark. , something moved in my life. And it's , no, I wanna do that. I I don't care. , I'll sell the house. I'll sell some cars. I'll whatever we have to do, , to to be able to do that. And but I think that's a really good point. Don't say no for somebody. Let them say no for themselves and let God, , open up some doors. Mhmm. And you never know what might be moving in someone's life at that time. I was actually talking with someone in an interview this week who said I I looked at her resume, and I said, well, it looks you would be pretty overqualified for this position. Why are you wanting to apply for this right now? And she said, well, circumstances in my life dictated that I follow a certain career path in order to provide for my family due to circumstances. My circumstances have changed. Now I'm looking for a job that I love for the rest of my career, and I don't have to worry about what it pays me. And, , we never know when somebody has that circumstance or another. , there are lots of many circumstances that could happen. But if we don't ask the question and we make assumptions, we might be missing out. Yeah. That's interesting too. You said something about failure in the first part of your response to that, and it sounds failure isn't dangerous thing in your staff environment. It happens, and it's more of a learning experience. Yeah, it's more about obviously the type of failure you're talking about. Are you hiding and stealing funds from the church? That's a little different than- It's a bad idea. You you have a sin struggle of pornography or , or something that, you confess to, , hey, I've been struggling in that area lately. And it's caused me to act out in certain ways and bringing that to your boss and to your leadership and then responding with grace and mercy. Then hey, we found out about it because we've been, , it got flagged on our computer and you've been doing this for six years now. We went back and researched it that's a different story than hey, know, this happened. I want to confess that you're treated differently in terms of your level of trust. For sure. Yeah. Well, tell us a little bit about some of the projects you've worked on in your Rock roll. Bet people would love to hear that. There's two of them that are recent that have been a lot of fun. Every year we reset our membership to zero. So if you want to continue to be a member at our body, you have to take kind of a re covenant or a survey at the end of the year. And so we built that in Rock, we used to do it in other systems, and it always was cumbersome to check off the box that these people did it and match them across systems and try and figure out who they are. We built that in Rock A Couple Years ago and we just continue to revamp that every year. That's been a lot of fun. It's a simple workflow in terms of the actual form, but all the stuff that happens on the back end of because we ask them kind of our doctrinal questions of do you believe in this, this, this, and this, and if not, help us understand. We have lots of follow-up to essentially care for those people that say that they're unsure about Jesus, or that they don't know about this, or that they have questions, , they were maybe something they wanted to encourage the staff with, and they can log that in there and we can then encourage the staff by the story that happened to them throughout the year. And then with that we have about 6,000 members that complete that each year. And so our elders take it very seriously when it says take care of the flock among you. And so every week, our small group leaders and staff members will send a weekly update to our elders. And previously, they've been doing that email. And so they were getting 45ish updates that could be one paragraph, could be six, in this one humongous email. And one that's insecure, people's data and things. We're doing our best to secure it, but you just can't, mean email's just bad. So we moved that into Rock and it's completely isolated and secure so that nobody can access it unless they should be. So we've really revamped that and it's been really amazing seeing the blessing that is to our elders to be able to actually care for the people that need care, and then also pray for the people that are going through hard times and surgeries or whatever else is going on in people's lives, being able to interact in a better way, more efficient, and care for them that need it. Wow. That's a lot of high impact and incredibly interesting work that you're able to do. So thanks for sharing that with us. You're also a rockstar and very active in the community. Can you tell us some aspects of the community that have been most impactful for you? Yeah, I think just the people willing to help. It's been amazing because I said earlier, I started off with nothing. So learning how to write LAVA and all the things and just trying to post stuff in there and people would be willing to gently correct. And there's not harshness or you're an idiot or anything that of , hey, we're all learning, let's learn together. And so just taking your step out and just posting what you're dealing with and being humble enough to know that you need help and that there's people there that are willing to help you. I think biggest thing for me that God just through my life and my story and everything, and the gifts he gave me, he's wired me for a heart of service. For me, I love getting to help the big C church and just glorify him with the gift that he's given me. It's the joy that we get to have to do that to others. That my organization and my staff, they, our staff values that and allows us to essentially kind of tithe back to the big C church in a way of , take time and that we get paid for to help the rest of the church continue to grow in their Christ likeness as well and help them in the ways that He's gifted us. What advice would you give someone who's aspiring to be a Rock star in the future? So I'm stealing from others, know, standing on the shoulders of giants. The quippy words that I is know yourself, be yourself and yourself. The gifts that God has given me allows me to help in certain ways. The gift that God has given you allows you to help in a certain way. So you don't need to be able to answer all the questions in all the areas. If you're great at hosting, then reach out to people and host them and ask how you can encourage them and show them what . But if you're great at programming, then help programming. What you've been gifted by God to do for his glory. That's the value that we get to do and have fun with. That's good advice. Don't try to be someone else. So, Mark, I assume that you don't do all Rock all the time and you have some free time too. Yes. Occasionally. Occasionally. What kind of things Not much. Interest you in your free time? Well, so I've got I've got a wife and three kids now. The third one was just born back in November, that's still very much in the forefront of life. But I love doing things with my hands, built a loft bed for my son and built a dining room table and bought a pop up camper recently. We're fixing it up so that we can do that. I love playing games with my kids and family and friends, board games and video games and love reading and spending time with my family in all the different ways that we can. So that's my primary focus right now with a five and half year old, three and a half, and an almost three month old, focusing on family during my free time as much as I can. Yeah, you are busy. Well, my wife is busy too. She's the full time homeschooling, full time mom, and all that kind of stuff. She does an amazing job and takes care of the house and all that stuff so that we can enjoy the time we get at night together and not have to worry about all the mundane tasks throughout the day as much, thankfully. It's such a fun stage of life and it goes so quickly, so enjoy it. Yeah, we are definitely doing that as much as we can, except for COVID and sickness. Yeah, except for all of that. Yes. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate your insights. We know the community will love to hear this chance that we've had to just connect and talk with you. Thank you guys for having me on. Thank you guys for what you do. It's amazing. I appreciate it. Thank you. It's a fun community to be a part of in in all the different ways that we're able to for those of us who are here today. So appreciate it. Appreciate you. Stay well. Thank you, Mark. Thanks, Mark. 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.