Podcast Episode 126: Episode 99: Special Edition w/ Christian Nelson

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On this special edition of Rock Cast, the team is joined by Christian Nelson of Traders Point Christian Church.

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 Podcast. We are excited to have a special guest with us here today, Christian Nelson, the CIO and IT Minister at Traders Point Christian Church in Indianapolis. Christian, thanks for joining us. You bet. I'm really glad to be here. Well, we're happy to have you. You've been such a great addition to the Rock community. Tell us how long now your church has been running on Rock. So we came onto Rock May of last year? No, the year before last. So I said, we had our transition in May. Okay. So a little over two years now. Okay, great. Time flies, doesn't it? This year is hard to measure time, actually. Yeah, yeah, I've definitely lost track of days and months. I'm surprised I even made it here. Well, you seem to have a really incredible community of churches using Rock in the Indianapolis area. Have you been how many churches are a part of that regional community? Do ? So I'm not sure how many are actually part of the regional community. I know that it is spectacular, though, that all of the churches that we regularly network here in Indy, we're all using it. So the people that I talk to all the time, this is a regular source of commentary and discussion. Yeah, it's great. I mean, we work a lot with Northview and Emmanuel, and there's just some fantastic churches over here that are using Rock. Well, John and I had the opportunity to come visit one of your regional community get togethers. Was that last year? Again, time, I don't know. Was a decade ago, It could have been. Yeah. Yeah. Was cold, I remember that. It's usually For me, it was cold. In Indianapolis. Yeah. It's kinda my think that was done with Emmanuel. That was with Rob Powell, think. It was. I said that was with him. We were talking about Rock. So, yeah. It was. That was a great trip. It was fun to see that in action. I'm not sure if churches realize that some of these regional communities are started and then kind of run by the local areas and tapped back into Rock centrally to make sure all the same information's coming and going and sharing very cool things. But we love posting the pictures from the events and really love supporting that. So it's fun to see that in action. Well, for our team, it's been huge. I mean, didn't even know that there was this big community right in our backyard until that event. Really? We were , hey, we know all of you. So there's been a lot of lunches and regular communication that's actually been great for community just through the pandemic to know that there's some people Oh, sure. Right in our backyard going through the same thing we are. Christian, tell us about your Rock team in house at Traders Point. I'm sorry. One more time? Tell us about your Rock team in house at Traders Point. , who do you have on your Rock team? What does that look ? Yeah, so we call, the team that primarily works with Rock is part of IT, and they are called the program management team. Okay. So they execute kind of large scale projects, and primarily in house what we do is we consider ourselves rocket experts. So we're gonna be able to configure things really well, come up with creative ways to use the product, hopefully mostly as designed, but sometimes we kinda gotta squint and say, How could we use this to accomplish a ministry goal? Then we try to, from that team, we have just an amazing group of people over there. We do have, a couple of partners that are on that team, as well as, we work with, every ministry has someone that is part of what we call the Rock star team. And so that, I'll talk about that here in just a minute. And then we have a data analyst who's on that team, and they have a team leader as well that's part of my IT lead team. So we have kind of our own lead team inside of IT and a project manager. So we've got a couple of resources that are just dedicated to all day, everyday Rock, and then we have the project manager and, the data analyst and a data integrity person who has a team of volunteers that does data integrity. Wow, that sounds a great team. Was that team structure already in place when you moved to Rock, or have you been changing that along the way? Yeah, we started with just kind of the traditional IT team that you think of, what we now call systems and support. And we knew that when we came to Rock, we were gonna need something different. And we brought on Miles, who I'm sure many of you have interacted with in the community. Miles is phenomenal. We could not have transitioned nearly as well as we did without Miles. He got check-in up and running. He just did some amazing stuff there. And he was kind of the beginning of that team, and he's kind of helped to build that out with Brian Payson's help if you get to interact with him in the community. And those guys have, over time, we just keep adding what we think is the next thing. So the data analyst is our newest ad to help us make really useful reports and dashboards. And then we think that our next step is gonna be probably some developers that are But we're not sure exactly what that's gonna look . We keep thinking, maybe not we, maybe it's just me, who keeps thinking that we're gonna need some developers, but we haven't had a need to really create from scratch very much. , it's all available. So every time I think I'm gonna need a developer, I'm , maybe we just need another, , internal person embedded with ministry team, or maybe we could just get some volunteers, or, , maybe we could just go on the community and find somebody in Rocket Chat who's already done it twice and use what they're doing. So we think that'll be next, but we don't have that yet. That's pretty interesting. Things you can get done with configuration and product knowledge and the community. Love how you mentioned the community that somebody's probably done it somewhere. Yeah, and if not, we can usually find somebody who's interested in jumping in with us. , yeah, what? We're having that exact same challenge. , what ideas do you have? What ideas do we have? I've never worked with a product that's got such a wide community that allows us to really, to just share openly. That's one of the reasons I love that I work for church now, right? we're all trying to do the same thing, the big C church. And so it's, I've never had this ability. There's no competitive advantage that any of us are looking for. We can all just work together to solve problems. That's exciting. So did you understand the community or the value of the community when you were looking at moving to Rock, or is that something that's grown over time? Yeah, no, not at all. When we were moving, everybody says they've got a great community, and I assumed it was something a customer advisory board where you had a few customers that would speak into your next release of the product. I had no idea that you could just hop on there and say, , ask any question, and that there were these hordes of people who just want nothing more than to help you and get points from Chip. , didn't see that coming. That's a big motivator, Chip points. Right? Totally. Oh my gosh. That's really funny. So how, what does your journey to Rock look ? How did you discover the product and then the community? Yeah, it was a long journey. I can tell you that. When I came on staff, we were sort of at, I don't even think we knew it, but we were kind of at a crisis point internally. People really wanted something very different. We had every ministry, within my first week, I had, I think, four ministries come to me with a church management software and say, Hey, I really wanna buy this thing to solve this problem I'm having. What's worse is that I could tell from my interactions that there was kind of a fundamental misunderstanding of how a database of record worked, how a church management software worked. So they would hear a pitch about, hey, this group's solution. It does this amazing stuff for groups, And it also has all of your data about finances and about where else these people are active and contributing. And so the groups team is thinking, great, I just installed this thing, and magically it has all the data about all of my guests and all of the people who are attending my church, they don't fully understand that in order to do that, everybody has to be using the product. And in fact, that was the exact problem we had with our previous solution. So I had all these point solutions, and I asked every person who brought me that , hey, so who else in the organization have you talked to? The answer was always no one, except for maybe their boss who had said, yeah, we desperately need this, let's go. So I had to spend a lot of capital, , personal capital, relationship capital, to tell everyone to stop. And to the church's credit, they listened to a brand new leader. I didn't expect that. I got a lot of buy in of people saying, If you think you can give me a better solution, I'm willing to be patient. And I think that's part of my story of coming on to a church is that I've got a lot more relationship capital than I thought. Every time I feel I'm up against something, I find out that there's a lot more willingness to be patient, willingness to wait for a better solution than what I think. And I think in IT, lot of times, it's one the things I have to coach my team constantly, is that we're not waiters. Right? our job isn't to just take a request and then go fulfill the request. Our job is to actually press pause and try to come up with a good solution. And every time I've done that with ministry, they're always willing to listen. Because ultimately, they don't care about the tech. They just want to serve people and for their outcomes to exist. So I got everybody to kind of press pause, and then I went looking for a solution, and I was kind of disturbed just by what I saw in the marketplace. I knew that over the last I did a lot of market research, and I knew that this particular market of church management software or relationship management software, whatever you wanna call that, I knew that it had been wildly distributed and that there was a very packed market. There was a lot of competitors, a lot of different solutions. And then I realized if you dig just a little bit, you start seeing that there's a huge consolidation happening, and that at the top, there's not hardly any competition. There's just a couple of choices up there. And sort of what I had seen and the way that venture capital works and that some of those other providers were gobbling up these software products, I knew what was next, that we're gonna see feature freezes and we're gonna see consolidation of decades of spaghetti code getting mashed together into just a couple of solutions that become the winner. And I didn't want any part of that. And I felt every time I found a point solution that looked it would work, I would hit this wall of , yeah, but I don't think it's gonna I don't think in five years it's gonna be what I want. And we're a rapidly scaling organization. I need a partner that's gonna grow with us. And I fell backwards into Rock. I don't even remember exactly how I heard of you. It might've been Mark Kitts, who's just a friend of mine kinda in the marketplace. He's a speaker at your conferences sometimes, but he's just a friend of mine. And he recommended that I take a look. And I remember I spent probably a month just going, This is too good to be true. this cannot possibly exist. It's an open source platform that's not trying to make money off of the product. They're just trying to grow the church. And I was looking at you guys and kind of your backgrounds and just kept saying, myself. , can't believe that this exists, and man, the reason that you guys exist is the exact reason why I left the marketplace and came to a church. , I just wanna serve. I wanna help churches get better. And so when I found that and realized just how different your model was, there were definitely, when we first looked at it, there was a few points that weren't very mature. I was , man, there's just some growth here that's gotta happen. But when I sat down with our ministry teams and explained as best I could, hey, as a guy who's been part of investment bank or venture capital backed organizations, let me tell you what that looks from the inside. And now let me tell you what this Rock model is, what Sparkability is doing, what's happening here. Every single ministry person, even though none of them had worked in those kind of companies before, they were , oh, this is obvious. , we wait. We can be patient for another year to wait on that particular solution or whatever their release cycle is. Little did I know that you guys would generally release features faster than we can keep up, so Have we filled all those I'm sorry? Have we filled all the gaps? Is there anything else we should be looking at? Oh man, I'm afraid to answer that because my team might come in here and if I miss one and cart me off. Most of them, yeah. I think, we're finding pretty consistently that the software gaps are far smaller than our process gaps internally. Okay. When we really dig under the hood of , hey, we're about to install this Rock feature, or hey, we're gonna set you up with this new thing, We find that the bigger challenge is actually having a well thought out documented process that's repeatable. And in a scaling organization, we've had a lot of ministers kind of change positions and grow into new roles, and there's a wake behind that. So kind of aligning our ministry to the software is our bigger challenge. Wow, that's a great statement. Yeah, one area that I think is missing though, we've talked a lot with our outreach folks, the, just how missions are managed. I think for us, there's some friction there. But that's the other beautiful thing about Rock is that your API is easy to use, and so if we need something soon, which, , 2020 kind of put a pause on all global mission trips, right? But if we need an immediate solution, we are always looking for things that we can just integrate. So we're confident in our ability to leverage the base product. That's great. What keeps you up at night? Are you thinking about? What are you worrying about? It could be Rock related, it could be not Rock related. Yeah, do we have that kind of time? Might need to count We'll make it. So I think in general for me, what keeps me up is trying to have the right conversations, trying to drive the right conversations at the right time with the right people. We're struggling just as we have scaled and now entered a pandemic. Maybe struggling is the wrong word, but it's such a challenge for us to be able to make decisions quickly in such a large and distributed organization that's reorganized a couple of times to better meet the demands of COVID. And so just trying to make sure that I'm getting the right players in the room. I think one place where I'm really struggling right now, probably my biggest concern right now is that we often mistake content for connection. That's good. And yeah, we see a problem with our, that we want to address. we talk about, one thing we say all the time around here is, if you're looking for hope, you should find us. we have the answer, right? And our first inclination is usually let's think about those problems and then let's make content and get it on the webpage in a place where people can find it. Let's do some SEO. Let's have a minister do some video recordings or something that and then get it on rocks so that our guests and people can see it. But really, maybe we just need to be making a connection there. Maybe we need to make it easier for people to talk. And I think during COVID, what we have seen, at least in the Indianapolis area, but I'm guessing it applies more globally, is that people are just desperate for connection right now. And again, we have the best model for that, and we have people here whose whole job is just connection with no ulterior motive other than helping you find hope and peace, right? the peace that transcends understanding, right? We've talked about this before. That for me is trying to figure out how to leverage technology to help drive actual connection is probably my biggest one. And I think right behind that is reimagining church in a digital medium. Everybody talks about, , hey, we're all online now, and church is online, and that's great. I don't think church is online yet. I think we're seeing the very beginnings of it, the earliest stages, but every single thing we do online is still geared towards a physical audience, right? I mean, we can have a separate host moment, we can talk to those people through the camera, But let's be honest, the reason we do four songs and a thirty minute sermon and then a response song after is because that's what works in a physical environment. Right. Right. It's our services are online, but not our churches and online. Right, and so people who are struggling with hope or their marriage is on the rocks, or they're not gonna watch an hour long sermon. They don't, they're If you look for church resources in those kind of moments, you won't find things that I think are truly helpful. You can do a Google search right now. You'll find some pretty startling results. And that's where I think it all goes back to that kind of creating connection, and then how do we really get church online? That's kind of my next, those are the things that are keeping me up right now and I don't, I wish I had answers I don't get. Yeah, and I that's, I think at these points of inflection, that's the hard thing to do. And then in hindsight, it looks easy once you see the model. I mean, think of the iPhone, it's amazing. But now that we know, oh, icons should be laid out this, when you click it, they should do that. And how do you copy and paste? I mean, I remember thinking that they're thinking about how to do them, impossible with your finger, you can't do that. And now we're just so used to it that it's , well, of course you do it this way. I think it's gonna be the same thing. We'll look back and go, of course that's the way digital church should have been . What took you so Completely agree with that. Yeah. So you came from the corporate world many of us. If you could go back to the corporate world, what's one thing that you would want to share now that you've seen another side on the ministry side? What's one thing you'd want to share with the corporate world that you've learned from the ministry side? Yeah, I think there's a guy on my team, Jeff, he says this really well. Between your office and your house, you're driving by 10 to 15 places that desperately need your help. As an IT professional, you can serve not by holding a door open, not by helping people find their seat. You can actually leverage the talent that God's given you to really serve not just your own church, but the big C church. And I had no idea. We don't talk about those things from stage. That doesn't come up. And in fact, it's sometimes very complicated. If you tried to serve right now with us, we have a couple of fantastically way overqualified guests that would love to serve with us, and we're having trouble internally to my team plugging them in because that's one of our goals for the next twelve months is to get those systems laid out. It might be hard, but man, do we need it. And we're a fortunate church that has a CIO and an IT team. I think we're in the extreme minority. We're on the far end of that spectrum. And so I think there's lots of opportunities to serve, and I wish that message would get out. Now, so if we flip the question, what's one thing coming from the secular world, the corporate world, and coming into ministry, what's one thing that you think the ministry side needs to know and hear about? What's one thing that you've brought in with you that you'd want to share with other churches? Yeah, I think that you, we desperately need churches in general to invest in appropriate digital judgment. That seems an easy concept, but when you really start thinking about digital judgment and what that means, they don't teach that in Bible college. Don't teach especially you think about small churches. We have a leadership residency program where we bring people on for a year to equip them to be leaders and then send them out. And that's the number one thing I tell them is you have to get a baseline understanding of technology. Because especially if you're a one or a two or a three person staff, you've got to leverage technology to get God's word out to your community and the people that you're serving. And so that digital judgment is so key. And we tend to promote in ministry side, people who are exceptional ministry leaders but maybe lack some of that digital judgment. It makes it hard then to collaborate across the organization and create systems that can make us all better. There's a lot of overhead there in helping people bring them along to how technology works and how it doesn't. So unpack that word judgment for me. , what does that mean to you, digital judgment? Yeah, it's a lot, right? So on the one side, it's even from sourcing technology. There's this belief, for those that have seen tech work well, there's a belief that technology can solve ministry problems on its own. Technology for tech's sake can just fix the problem. Silver bullet, yeah. Right, the silver bullet. And almost always, technology is just gonna amplify your problems. it's gonna, it's going to make more obvious those places where you have poor process. And so having the judgment to say, what, let's do this before we lay in tech. , let's figure out what a good process looks . Then let's go find tech that's gonna come alongside that. And that's just on the sourcing side. Once we're actually talking about leveraging technology, it's that concept of thinking through how are we gonna measure our results here and how do I wanna see that back? And many of us, especially if you're in a church that's growing, many of us are trying still to manage through anecdote, right? , I had a couple of conversations in the lobby, therefore this must be the direction that we need to go, when in reality, the two or three people that you talked to were probably not the people that were actually the target of whatever program you're trying to run. Yep. How do I under Digital literacy even is kind of in there. how do I really understand and interpret data? That's great. I mean, that's Yeah. When I was in the corporate world, I came out of college. I luckily got to work under a director of technology at Honeywell. He was two levels above me, I didn't have a ton of influence with him or he didn't have a ton of time with me. But he used to say brilliant technologist, but he'd say never do a process digitally that you haven't done with a pencil. And he would just make you, if you're working with a client, and you're , okay, here's the system. He's , have you done it with a pencil? No. Okay. Nope. We're investing money in it. Go do it with a pencil, maybe do it in Excel, but we're not going to code anything until you've been through that process, ironed out all the flaws, then we'll invest time to put some concrete around it. But until you get it all figured out. And I thought that was just one of the most, I mean, it stuck with me my whole career, so. Yeah, and on our side, I mean, on the IT side, even, , and this a problem that I run into all the time, I over engineer stuff. Mhmm. , I wanna create what I've been saying lately is, guys, we're sacrificing depth for scale here. , that's my new kind of catchphrase internally. Mhmm. Because I wanna build a system that 20,000 people could leverage tomorrow all at the same time. But if we're only gonna get 20 responses, maybe I should not spend my time there. Maybe we should not engineer that solution. Let's just put your phone number on the screen and maybe the campus pastor gets 20 phone calls. That's not the end of the world. Right. And that's been my advice to a lot of our campus leads lately is , hey, let's just do some stuff. Let's break it and then let me fix it. , let's do it till it breaks. And then, , we say stay scrappy. That's the phrase we're using a lot. But I think it's deeper than that. Yeah, I was just thinking about the other day with a church I was talking with. They were kind of on that same thing. They wanted everything to be perfect and never to have any kind of mistake or scalability issue. And I agree, that's what we should all be striving for, but my point was, do you want to do 10 things in a year that you can have that perfection on? Or do you want to do 100 things and maybe two or three of them you have a slight issue with? Which would you do the trade off for? Those are the extremes, but where do we put that line? If you want perfection, okay, well we can do 10, ? But if you want, , to do massive amounts of things and you're willing to deal with one or two little issues a year, is that okay? Well, I love that, and I'm challenging our team too to be really clear about the trade offs. Mhmm. Because I think about I always come back to this example of our worship team. Trader's Point has what I consider pretty highly produced worship. , it's polished. , it looks good. And there's a whole bunch of schools of thought on that, right? But if you talk to our worship team, they talk all the time about, yes, we're produced because we're going to multi site, we have to be very careful, but we have to be real. Mhmm. And so if a mistake happens or the sounds are off or the lights are off or, , last Christmas Eve we hit some snags with tech stuff, we had to, , restart our worship, that's totally fine because we're This is just Christians gathering together to worship. They're more than willing to make those trade offs. Right. For whatever reason, when my team gets in a room with ministry, they're pushing really hard and driving at the perfect solution. I say my team. I'm the most guilty of this of everybody on my team. , I wanna drive hard at that perfect solution when if I just said, , this might, we might not route all of these connection requests correctly. What if we just send them all to a person and let them sort it out? Almost always they're , Great, moving on. that's way better than we even planned, way better than we thought it would be. Right. And especially when it gets, when you start playing that through of what it's gonna take to route a CR to, , if you've got 50 different people that you want responding to that CR, how many questions you're gonna have to ask the guest to get that routed correctly, maybe if we just ask your name and phone number and call you, that might be better, especially right now. Right. Yeah, and what other thing might you realize in that short conversation that the deep seated issue is not really a disconnection request, but they're going share something with you that's, Oh yeah, well, my marriage isn't going so well. And boom, now you're off on something else that you never would have had access to. With a form. Yeah. And I think that's, again, and that kind of goes back to that content connection thing, right? it's all, this is all related to me. Yeah. And in all of this, I think we're both saying don't be sloppy. , don't want people to hear this and go, we can just be sloppy and we don't it's not about effort and care, it's just about , well, you can go too far too, and then you don't get as much stuff done. Yeah, and I think that, , especially as engineers, right, we tend to live in those extremes. Yeah. We wanna do it all or do none of it. And I, that's a constant battle that I fight with myself, and my team is, that's why I've hired the team. Have, they're a little more skilled at that than I am. So they have to fight with me about it probably more than anybody. Well, it's good to have checks and balances on a team. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't think What's interesting is I don't think ministry struggles that way very often. I think if you can lay out the options for ministry, they're quick to say, Yeah, scrappy's better here. , we're fine with having that longer conversation. We're fine with maybe we don't have everything we need when we go into the phone call. Because you think about what they do all day, they don't ever have all the info they need. So us trying to engineer it perfectly, they don't need that. Right. That's good. Yeah. Great insights. So let's take it back to Rock for a minute, because those are some excellent insights that I think you can apply across the board. Lots of different industries, lots of different teams, and you're applying them with Rock in mind through that Rock filter. What advice would you have for churches to get the most out of Rock? Yeah, that's a great question. I think for us, I always say there's two kind of starting points. Nothing else I say will make sense if you don't understand these two starting points. One, I tell my team all the time, we need to use influence rather than authority wherever possible. I'm the IT guy. If I wanted to lock it down so that this was the only piece of software you could use, I can. In my experience, that never works. People are just gonna bring their iPad, they're gonna go around you, they're gonna use paper, they're gonna find an Excel spreadsheet, they will work around you. So, I always wanna use influence. And by influence, what I mean is showing them what's possible. Ministry needs to touch. They've gotta hold it. It's really hard to try to whiteboard something or explain something. They need to see it. And so finding examples for them, and again, the community's great for that. There's all kinds of people who share plugins and can give you success stories, and nothing is better than finding a solution on the community, finding the pastor who's executing it, and connecting that pastor to your pastor to say, Talk to Joe. , you're gonna learn a ton. Because then they further buy in, right? So ultimately use influence because it's gonna be better for everybody. And then the second one I always say, these kind of starting points is bring us the problem, not the solution. So we've kind of been working very hard organizationally at don't come and say, I need 10 iPads. Come to me and say, , what you're trying to do. Because maybe an iPad is a terrible solution for that. And I don't I want you to stay focused on our guests and on your ministry. Let us handle the tech. I have guys out here who work here for eight hours a day and then go home and spend another eight hours just surfing the web and trying to get better at tech because they love it. Let us worry about the tech. Right? So bring us the problem, not pre baked solution. So with that kind of as the backdrop, we developed a rockstar team for us. And we went through every ministry. There's this exercise that I would recommend called capability mapping. It's been incredibly helpful for us. So we kind of take a grid of all the people in our organization, the ministries, and we try to identify what they're really good at. And when it comes to tech, what are they really good at? Maybe it's just doing the ministry work on the front end of the technology. Maybe they're not very capable with tech. And through that capability map, when you start to figure out who are your influencers of technology, who are the people that are open to new ideas and flexible and creative, and maybe have some digital judgment or the start of digital judgment, you can start to find people in every ministry that can be part of a team that's your early adopter team. It's the people that you can come to and brainstorm. And you can get a bunch of ministry focused people in the room, not technologists, and our guys can be there quietly to listen. In our case, we do a lot of it on Microsoft Teams. We have a Rockstar Team team. And we'll ask questions, we'll talk about release notes, because there's this huge gap that you have to bridge that we often don't think about or talk about, And that's the gap between the capabilities that you guys have created for us that are sitting on the shelf and the actual ministry user executing ministry. There's this huge gap. They don't have time to read the release notes. They don't have time to read our own sprint release notes of how we're the things that we're putting out. So that rockstar team, heavily in those people. We spend time with them, , we bribe them with lunches occasionally and, , that kind of stuff. We have contests internally, but just anything we can do to help keep them engaged with the community. And admittedly, through COVID, we've not been very great at that. We've been slammed. But keeping them engaged with Rock itself, inviting them to the conference, which it being virtual this year was fantastic. But I've even gone as far as I had in this year's budget pre COVID, I had budgeted for everyone on the Rockstar team to be able to come to the Rock conference. Oh wow. I think it's critical that they come, even if it's a more technical leading conference, I wanna pour into them and give them some professional development that their department doesn't have to figure out how to pay for and fund. And I worked with all the department heads to make that happen. And the department heads are seeing the value of their people being more deeply embedded with IT and in Rock. And so that gap though is difficult to bridge. That's the only way we found to do it. And it takes an investment of time. You've gotta set time then internally in our team, we have to have that program management team. Those guys have to invest heavily. They have to set aside time where they're not heads down cranking, but instead they're reviewing release notes that you guys are putting out. They're spending time in the community seeing what new ideas are out there, what innovation is happening. It's a very active process, and I think, especially in technology, we tend to be more reactive. We're constantly, again, it's that waiting tables analogy, right? , we're just constantly getting You have to be willing to put some firm boundaries up and make it a proactive process where you're reviewing and then trying to bridge that gap back and forth. Mhmm. That's a great I love that idea that even some of the simpler parts of that are just putting up a Slack channel or a Teams channel and having that conversation that we have patterned in the community inside your church within a sub community inside the church, and then posting bits of news from what's coming and the release notes. Even small investments that are going to pay huge dividends. Yeah, and we found, so when you guys came out with calling campaigns, I was so excited because I was sitting in these meetings with our ministry leads, hearing this desperate need for, we've just gotta get ahold of people. We have this database, we've got their phone numbers, let's just get ahold of them, whatever it takes. And then I was hearing about this awesome new feature and I was , this is perfect. And I made the classic mistake of I just handed the ministry the technology and was , okay, here, calling campaigns are set up, get some volunteers. And in our case, we use a phone partner that's a partner of Rock. So I could give them access to that softphone, so the caller ID would be from us. I got all this tech set up, and the first iteration actually went really poorly. Ministry didn't understand how to leverage it. They set everything. Instead of being more a campaign, they were , Yeah, why would I want to call the person a second time? , set everything to just be one phone call, whether you got through or not. I didn't take enough time to bridge that gap and say, let me do a little bit of PR here about how this works and the why. what's the purpose of this feature? If I'd had done that and then again on subsequent iterations, got better. But once that genie was out of the bottle, , that's a very vocal ministry team who had told everybody how awesome it was. And we were in the back going , No, that's not exactly how we intended to roll that out. It's that kind of thing of bridging the gap. It's so crucial, but I didn't take the time to be active. I just took one and handed it to the other. That's good. That's really good. Yeah, definitely easy to this year with all the things rushing back and forth. Yep. But I I just made that classic assumption of , well, I get it, so surely Yeah. I'd spent four or five hours getting it. I gave them ten minutes, , in a meeting. I'm I'm classic for that. I always assume that everything I know, everybody else knows, and Right. I'm not that smart, John. , just assume everybody else knows what I know. That's exactly. I'm , well and I realize, well, we all they know different things. I just assume and that's the thing with personalities too. Assume everybody's the same on the inside and has the same motivators and wiring. It's just amazing the diversity God puts in every part of creation, from trees to animals to people to insides of people. It's , it's almost we're supposed to be hands and feet or something. I've heard that, too. But I keep thinking everybody's a hand. Yeah. Well, really appreciate the insights that you've shared here with us today, Christian. This is so valuable, valuable for our team, valuable for, I imagine, everyone in the Rock community and anyone else who could get ahold of the podcast outside the Rock community. Just really good universal truths. And and I know there's a a career's worth of information behind that and sometimes some skinned knees and stubbed toes that lead to some great revelations. So, thanks for taking the time to consolidate your thoughts and share them with us. Yeah, and I think one thing we haven't had a chance to touch on that I think is really important to me is just kind of how we as churches can support Rock. So we've talked about how well you guys support us and the community for supporting each other. One thing that I think is often overlooked is how we support you. So to me, this is a black and white, of all the things I deal with, this one is the simplest. Good software costs money, and there's a hard stop at the end of that. Sometimes I've talked to some of my peers who say quantifying that to a CFO or a finance director who says, Oh wow, Rock is free, great. There's a donation component. , I just think that there's, it's much deeper than that. Quantifying the impact might be difficult until you just stop and think about how essential it is to our church. To me, it starts at the very top with , we've gotta have a focus on Jesus, or the church isn't gonna fail, or the church is going to fail. After that, in our world, the type of church that we are, we have a really good communicator. We have the right people on the bus, right? The right people on the team in the right places. And then right after that is software that helps us accomplish our mission. We cannot possibly scale. We cannot possibly have the right conversations at the right time unless we have software that lets us do that. We have to have technology that I say bubbles up the right conversation with the right person at the right time. Otherwise, how can a ministry leader possibly minister to five, six, seven hundred people? They have to know what those critical conversations are, and that's Rock. , that is the system that keeps us all aligned and pointing in the right direction. So we have to fund that. If we don't, it's gonna slow us down to the point of not being useful, and it will actually put a lid on our ability to grow. So to me, it's crucial. It also helps me with staffing. the fact that you guys are able to develop on the release cycle that you are means that, I said, I have not yet had to pay for developers on my team. We do leverage some ministry partners for that, but I don't have a developer. I don't have to have one. Developers are really expensive and hard to find in the church market. I'm sure you guys have probably run into that. Yeah. We know that. And so if I can contribute what ends up being a fraction, a tiny fraction of the cost of a single developer to you guys, then I don't have to hire one. And if we all would just contribute at that suggested donation level, , you guys are gonna be you're already faster than I can keep up with internally. It's gonna rapidly scale the depth of the solutions that you create. We can iterate faster, get beyond the first version of what you guys put out. You can start refining and have even more access for the customization that we all want. Right? nobody wants an out of the box solution. We always wanna try to customize every tiny little thing about it, and that's really hard for you guys to do right now, just at current staffing levels, but it would be phenomenal if we could just all contribute at the suggested level. And to me, we have to do that. And again, it's a fraction of the staffing cost. So that's my shameless plug for supporting Rock in general. I just I really want to see you guys be successful because I don't see an alternative in the market. There's not somebody doing what you're doing. Well, appreciate you saying that, and it certainly is true. I mean, we see the lost opportunity costs probably more than anybody because we have ideas, we know what we want to do, and we're just simply hamstrung on some of those other ideas. That's at the pain point is then passed on to the churches, and they don't even know it, because they don't what that opportunity is. So we appreciate you saying that. I wish everybody who could would jump on that bandwagon and Yeah, and unlike, , funding a competing organization or a different software product, we're actually putting money to people working on the big C church. , your goals are very similar to ours, you're on mission. This should be one of the easiest conversations you have with your CFO, not one of the hardest. So, I mean, I've said it on the community, I've said it during my talk at the Rock Conference, , I'm happy to hop on a call or a Zoom meeting and help somebody make a plan for that. I just think, , because everybody who's listening to this, , investing helps us at Traders Point as well. So happy to help however I can with that. Thanks for being such an advocate. You really are getting straight to the heart of why we are set up the way we are and why we do what we do. A lot of times we talk about what, sometimes how, but the why is really critical. It's hard for us to communicate that in a way that makes sense because we're the ones doing it. So to hear that from you is very impactful and very helpful. So thank you. You bet. Thanks for your time. Thanks for joining us. And we're looking forward to our next conversation with you. Yeah. Can't wait. Thanks, guys. 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. 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