Podcast Episode 136: Episode 111: Special Edition with Tim Dear

Description

Strategy takes a front seat in this conversation with Rock community member Tim Dear from Pinelake Church as he recounts their organization's early commitment to support Rock, change management tactics during implementation and just how many Rock classes one person can take in a few short months.

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 Jon Edmiston is with me. And we have a very special guest here today joining us, Tim Deer from Pine Lake Church in Mississippi, all the way out here in Phoenix joining us for a masterclass live this week. Thank you so much for joining us, Tim. Thank you for having me. It's awesome, to be here. I've been here a few times over the years, not at this facility, but, I love it out here. I love the weather you're having this week. We love the weather this week too. It's not quite hot yet. Have you been here in the summers? I have been here in August. That's the worst. Yes. It was pretty brutal, but it's brutal in where I'm from. That's true. August as well. Yeah. A little more humid, but not cool. Not cool. Not cool. So, Tim, if people were to think about where they might have run into you in the Rock community before, because sometimes names are familiar, you have actually taken all three currently offered community Rock classes in the span of about six months, right? That is correct. I might be a little crazy, but we're trying to ramp up quick with a get on board as fast as we can so that we can move forward. It's a great time to be implementing Rock, especially with everything going on with COVID and things we took advantage of that to let's get going and roll out quickly. It is kind of a unique window of opportunity to make that move or the cutover. Now your church went live on Rock in February of this year, right? March 7 was our first go Now we had a couple of weekends where we did soft launches, just sort of in parallel with our current church management software, our previous, just to make sure that things were getting mapped correctly. Okay. So when I spoke with you, I think it was last December and you were considering eminently moving to Rock and had done your evaluation, you were pretty quick to do a couple of things. One of them was to to just absolutely line up full support of Rock immediately before you had moved over, before you had even, lined up all of the implementation details. You were very, very quick to commit to the financial support of the nonprofit, which was amazing. Tell us tell us a little bit about how that worked for you. So once we made the decision, we were all in. So it really goes back to why we made the decision with Rock and what drew us to Rock. We had been on another platform for eleven years. And as it turned out, we were about five to seven years on it too long. Just because of ministry changing, the world changing. And we saw that as your traditional church management software. We do some things really well. For people who are in our building, we know how to do it. We know how to take money. We know how to check-in. We know how to do events. That sort of thing. So what is it that would drive us to the next level? Who are the forward thinking groups out there that are looking at ministry years out not telling us how to do ministry but going along beside us and allowing us to be able to implement ministry that helps us and where we are. And we found that in ROP. Great thing is it being open source. The scary thing is it being open source. So there's risk and reward and we said the reward totally outweighs the risk where we were. The reason I say we were on our previous system too long is at Pine Lake we're about stories. Discipling stories, people are stories. And our data was everywhere, right? For us to do missions is in one place. To do prayer is in another place. Well, every time we're distributing data, we're distributing the stories. And there's no way to capture the full storyboard of a person that way. We saw it as, wow, we can extend this platform and make it to where we wanna go for for years to come. So once we made that decision, there's there's no stop. Decision is made and we move forward quickly. Yes. Did. Happy to, support you guys. Well, you. We definitely appreciate that. The other thing that I think is really interesting about your your story with Rock is, how quickly you decided to cut over. Because you went from a system you'd lived in for a long time that probably had things built out, in a lot of ways and and had systems and processes associated with it. And when you launched on Rock, you had really scaled back what it was you wanted to have in place before you did your initial launch. How did you make that decision? So I came from the secular world with HP Enterprise Services for almost thirty five years doing these implementations. And what I've learned is that enterprises and churches can only consume so much at a time. When I thought about everything that we were going to be rolling out in Rock, there is no way we can consume that that quickly. Things are going to break. Things how do you even prepare and train your people? If you're training three, four weeks before a go live on something, they're not going to remember anything. So we decided, we didn't want to run parallel systems. So we made a tough decision to move quickly and kind of our ring fence was if it updates anything in the database, it goes first. So contributions, check ins, some basic events. If people were giving us money for an event or paying anything, we moved that first. So ROP became over a weekend our, trusted source of truth, for our data and everything else was just starting to migrate over. So in hindsight, I think it was a great decision, because it's looking at where we are now and rolling out more things, I sure am glad I had that foundation now because now I'm able to see how things are being put together and, make some really informed decisions about where we go forward because everything relates in Rob other than where we were before. How you set group structures up, I would have never known that. And it would have been way too late down the road for me to know that had I did a big bang type everything goes at once. I'm glad you guys, worked with us through that. I think you kind of looked at us a little funny but yeah, I think it was the right decision and I would recommend it for churches of any size to do a phased approach. the change management associated with something that quick and drastic can be a little intimidating sometimes to leadership in an organization. How did you approach that? Back to we were on our systems too long. Our church was ready to move. We were ready to move to a new system. There was no pushback. At all levels of our church, people were really excited about moving. Once you get that type of buy in, it makes everything so much easier. No one said no, no one pushed back. Everyone were at all the meetings, right? Even some of our pastoral staff would show up to workshops and sit through hours of workshops making this right because we were so ready and excited about moving forward. That's great. What a great team to work with. And how long have you been on stuff? Almost a year. Nice. Were you brought in specifically to help with I was brought in to look at the entire technology solution. At Pine Lake, we're wrecking everything. We're just about changing everything that we have there. It's great. So what's up next? Your ministries must be lining up and asking for things as seeing success in other areas. What's next on tap for you? My biggest role now is just calming down, right? But seriously, we're looking at operationalizing our production environment, Getting to four week, six week sprints of really taking the time to, in some respect the pressure's off. We've broken the ice, we're alive, we're moving forward, ministry's happening. Now we just look at how do we sit back and take quality requirements. Thinking differently, that's been our theme. Think differently. Don't think just because this is the way we've always done it. Think differently. So that's exciting. We're starting to do getting to where we're doing the fun stuff now. Yes. So we talked about that earlier when we're rolling this out. I can't wait till the summer so we can do the fun stuff. So we're getting there now. So specifically we have in the summer we have a huge push for groups, group search and we really want invest some time and a lot of energy in getting that right because we believe small groups are where community comes together and where we can really help and disciple and minister to people in small groups. That is huge. We have this thing called the mobile app coming soon. Excited about that. Just everything that we're going be able to do with the Rock mobile app coming out, sometimes over the summer. Excited about that. So those are those are the big, the big things. Those sound good big things. They will keep you busy for a while. Yeah. So let's assume that you complete all the things you need to do and you actually have some free time. What kinds of things do you to do if you find yourself with a little extra time? Yeah, I'd find some extra time, but just, I I sports. I golf. I , I going to The Caribbean. Doing, going there in a couple of weeks. So excited about So, yeah. So those are the those are the things, that I enjoy doing when I'm not trying to be a Rock star. Being a Rock star. Not trying. Being a Rock star. After this week, you can add the title Rock master. You should use that around the office. I'm laying low right now. That's probably good. That's great. Well, I'm I'm excited about the community that you're building inside the class too. We hear a lot from people that they build some great relationships there that last for a long time. You were mentioning a little bit earlier that there was another class from your part of the country, another couple of attendees from your part of the country in class too. So that's exciting. Yeah, a couple of churches. There's one thing that I liked about it's just the ecosystem, community, and making relationships. Even making the decision once we were pretty sure about Rot, we traveled to a lot of churches and visited churches all over from Texas to South Carolina and Atlanta and talked to others. We did a lot of homework traveling around and talking to, folks. Having people there in my home state, north and south and some large churches there, yeah, we're definitely gonna build some relationships and community there to help each other out. That's exciting. Well, thank you so much for joining us today and for the week. We enjoy having you out and I know the community will appreciate hearing from you. Yeah. You called me at the beginning of year before my brain is all mush. That's right. That was strategic. Good good job. Alright. Thank you again for having me. Thanks, Tim. 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.