Podcast Episode 101: Episode 74: Special Edition with Michael Mullikin

Description

In this special edition episode of Rockcast recorded at our recent Rock Experience Conference, we talk with Michael Mullikin, Operations Pastor at NewSpring Church. Michael graciously shares his heart for advancing church technology and inspires us to keep dreaming because we really haven't even gotten started yet.

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 another special edition of Rockcast, the podcast that lets what's going on behind the scenes with Spark development as we build Rock RMS, the product and the community. I'm Emily Forman. We have Jon Edmiston here. And today, we have a very special guest, the operations pastor of NewSpring Church, Michael Mulligan. Welcome, Michael. Glad to be here. Excited to let's have a conversation. Yeah. We're glad to be And here we are on-site at NewSpring with It's the middle of the Rock Conference Rx twenty nineteen, and we've taken a little break to get some time with you and so that you could share some of the wisdom behind the ministry that you've been running all this time and and a little bit about your insights into your perspective in the Rock community. And we're just really thankful for all you've done for the community and and interested to learn a little more today. Yeah. Well, hey. I'm excited to be able to be here and just to be a part, and we're excited to host the Rock Conference this year. Mean, it's been amazing to be able to see the community that we have in the Rock community. I mean, it's, , I can remember five years ago, or I think it was five years ago was the very first one in Phoenix, believe. Yep. The I think is the next year is back in Phoenix. Back in Phoenix. Year. Yep. The but just thinking about the maybe the seventy five eighty people that were there that for that very first one, and then seeing what it's grown to, it's really amazing to be able to experience the growth that we've seen in Rock, and just see all the churches that are involved. I didn't do a count of the number of breakout individual churches and breakout sessions, but that was one of that's one of the things I've seen on the schedule. It's really cool. It's normal it's not really just, , Rock staff people or spark development staff people doing these. Most of them are being hosted by a church. That's, , just a part of the community that's contributing and just helping build other churches, which is just part of my passion. I love that. So it's been really cool to be able to see that. Yeah, and we have to thank you not only for hosting, but I mean, Newspring and yourself have been such a supporter of us from the very beginning. I mean, when I say beginning, I mean, were just pouring the first pieces of code. How did you guys originally find us? So I can tell you thatso I was in industry for a while, for fourteen years, and I felt a call in the ministry. And whenever I felt that call in the ministry, I really felt specifically the Lord was calling me to to help the church with technology. Mhmm. Now what's interesting about that is I was not a technologist, and even what I did in the industry had nothing to do really with technology. Technology was more of a hobby, but I really thought it was something that God had put on my life that I was supposed to take a next step. So so I take that step from industry, move on to staff on to a church, and I start thinking about, okay, so if I wanna, , the church and technology intersect, what does that mean? So then I start looking at our systems, looking at our processes, looking at what current technology we're using, and recognize that or I recognized very quickly that if we were gonna be able to grow as a church, we were gonna have to figure some things out on the technology front, just for sheer efficiency of helping people take next steps and resourcing our pastors so they could be more effective at doing the work of the ministry. So whenever I looked at the existing church management system we had, I knew that it wasn't gonna be adequate in order for us to move more into the future. So honestly, were looking at potentially developing our own church management platform. And when we were doing this investigations and stuff, a guy, a mutual friend that's had a connection with you guys and was on staff at NewSpring said, hey, you need to call this guy before we start, , developing our own system. And that's whenever he gave me your number, John. And then in February, , we met up for the first time. And it was I said, I feel I really was called in a ministry to help the church with technology, but not knowing much about technology. And then being in a meeting with you and recognizing just the wealth of knowledge that you had, to me in my quiet time the next morning, I just felt an immediate peace , hey, this is what we're supposed to step into and this is what we're supposed to do. We're not supposed to try and do something on our own. One thing that I loved about it was in the room that I think there were four churches represented, if I remember right. Mhmm. And I I love the idea of the church working together to help further a mission. Because so many times it feels the church doesn't work together. And this was a particularly a partnership between some different churches on opposite coast of The US. , so we were separated by, I don't know, 2,500 miles or something that. But it was , God, , if you can do something in this, wouldn't it be amazing? So that's kinda how we jumped right in. And then that was 02/2012. So seven years later, man, we're sitting here in one of our little conference rooms and talking about what God is doing with all the churches that are here. It's been amazing. It is amazing, and that was one of the core values from the very beginning is we didn't, , we were working at CCV. We didn't want to do it alone either. We didn't want to have it be a one church thing. We wanted to get as many churches from the very beginning as possible, but I think the unique thing that I saw and I is that when we talk to people back then, even now, they have ideas, they have passion, but it rarely sticks for as long. Next year, it's something else, and then year after that's, again, another thing. But you've been so consistent in your vision, and I think that's been what's been unique in your support for Rock is this. It goes back all the way from the beginning, and it never failed, even though it took lots of years. I mean, didn't have something for you guys to use for several reasons. That's how big the project was, but you never wavered in your support, and your vision always stayed the same. It's interesting that I was told whenever I got into this that things are gonna cost twice as much and take twice as long as, , as you start. So I remember us talking today, we're gonna have something in two years. So that would have been 2014. We didn't launch till 2016, so it took twice as long. I don't know if it was twice as much, but it always just takes a little longer than what you expect in this particular realm, , of trying to develop and that kind of thing. But , I even think about Terry and what he talked about, , the Simon Sinek, , know your why. The reason why I feel that it hasn't changed very much for me is because I really do feel I know why God put me on this earth and what I'm supposed to be doing. And that hasn't changed. Now, I think the platforms may change sometimes, the ideas that we use, they change. But really, I really do feel called that this idea of technology in the church is something that I have a strong passion for. So when I see something Rock that's so extensible, and really is, I think you've used the term, hey, we've made it around the globe one time. Maybe that's what, I think you've said something that that before. We really haven't even gotten started yet. Right. , we've got the basic features that provide a great experience for the users of Rock, but what we're dreaming about is so much more than what we have right now. Mhmm. And whenever I think about that type stuff, it it it helps me not to veer off from the why that I have because I see the potential there. I see how much opportunity that we have. So no. So, man, I'm just excited. Even whenever you're rolling out the version 10, or I guess we're all nine right now, version 10, or nine will be rolling out soon. Yeah. Nine's out, ten's coming next week. Okay. Terms of beta alpha Yep. And the recording of this podcast. Okay. Well, I'm always terrible at that. So so, Hey. We may be on twelve by the time we waste the. No. I'm just kidding. I'm sorry, Emily. Just sweating it now. Yeah. I'm sorry, Emily. The But no, but I mean whenever, , when you were laying out at the conference, the new things that we're doing, I mean, those are really some very unique application in church management, relationship management, not really church management, that really are gonna be some cool things that honestly our churches haven't been able to experience yet. Yeah, I feel to date we've just been working on boring features that you kind of have to have. You have to start with these, and now we're getting to the ones that we've always dreamt of and been wanting to do, and of course, there's some exciting things today, but I'm really excited about the things we get to work on going forward right So one of your passions is discipleship and trying to bring people through the journeys. What projects are you working on right now that you're excited about in that area? I would say that, , as a church, we've kind of been known for our evangelism. I mean, just when if you ask other churches about, , what is New Spring about evangelism? And I would say over the last several years, we really have shifted some from just that evangelism, our evangelistic mindset, to really trying to take people on a journey. And the journey that we're trying to take people on is basically four steps. We want them to know God. We want them to find freedom. We want them to then experience purpose and then find family. And we believe whenever God, and really who it is, who your identity is in Christ. And then whenever you find freedom from the things that have been holding you back, then you really can see that purpose that God has for you. When you find and see that purpose, and you start doing it in community with family around you, you start living an overflowing life. And so at NewSpring Church, we want every person that attends NewSpring to have an overflowing and experience something beyond what they currently experience. And whenever I say an overflowing life, what I mean is the world defines things by almost how much you can get. , if you took a monetary type stuff or you look at acquiring either power or wealth or whatever the the thing may be, the Christian life is all about giving away. I mean, Christ gave it all for us. Whenever I think about an overflowing life, you've got to be giving when you're overflowing, you're giving something out to other And what I believe is whenever you're overflowing, it's gonna open up space in your heart, in your life for God to do more. So if you're asking me what our discipleship journey is right now, on a high level, that's what we're talking about. Now, next question is, so how can technology help with that? Certainly there's ways that, , to find family, Group Finder, right? I mean, that's a simple thing. I think there's some advances we can make in the way that we connect people. Whenever it's talking about finding purpose, there's assessments that we can give people, which is a healthy growing leaders. So that's a new feature in V9. So that's available to people as of this podcast. Nice, well done. And there's five assessments in there to help people find who they are and, , and use that to be able to find purpose. So, those are a couple things of the way technology can help us in our discipleship process. Obviously, things knowing God and, , tracking someone's process or someone's progress as far as meeting Jesus or getting baptized or then, , connecting to one of our what we're calling our connect classes are other ways that we're able to use the relationship management system of Rock to be able to connect people and to be able to track where they are in the process. One of the things I've been impressed with working with your team, because we work with them really tight and we got to witness in the services this weekend, was all the ways you do that connection, text to workflow. You guys had so many opportunities to text to workflow to get into a connect group. Is that what it's To get some content that you had a very special topic this weekend, you wanted to get more content out, so you used text workflow. I it was three or four times Is that wrong? The 30303. Yep, that's our number. Yeah, that's a good number. Don't know. Is. That's crazy how you got that number. That's good. But you guys are totally using that. It's so cool to see the technology in use, and it helps us because it's one thing to write technology, but to really see it in use, especially in that ministry mindset, it really kind of fills up our batteries. , one thing that statistics will show that people answer text messages by and large. I I think it's 95% of time somebody's gonna respond to a text message. Email and stuff that, have a response rate of something, you're doing good if you get 30%. Or actually no, you're doing good if 30% of the people open the email and then if someone actually takes a step through the email, it's 4% or something that. So what we found with text to workflow is that when we're in a service and somebody text groups to text to workflow, they get immediate response back that says, hey, , fill this out. We're gonna identify you. We're gonna try and help you get connected to a group and that kind of thing. And we've had a lot more success connecting people through that way, 30303 versus trying to, , have them sign up for something and sending them an email and that kind of thing. So whether if it's groups or toolkit, we did this weekend with some content that we wanted to distribute out, we've done it. I mean, I don't know how I price you go look and see how many keywords we have, but we have got a ton of keywords. I've filtered through it once in your instance. It's quite a long list, and there's some good ones in there too. I mean, and there's some funny ones. Guys have a good sense of humor too. Yeah. What's the one if you text? Anyway, I won't get into that, but there are some I know what you're talking about. We know we have some sarcastic people in our church that will text probably inappropriate things, so when they text an inappropriate thing, we have a response for them. That's That's pretty funny. But you guys develop a of content to them. Have a lot of devotions that you guys put out. I mean, it's remarkable, the amount of content that you guys put out, and then personalize it to, in the experiences within your apps or your websites. So you guys make an amazing amount of content. How do you guys generate all that content? Well, we have content team, and it's actually a fairly small team. I think there's three people that are on that team. But what our goals are is we write a devotional every day. We write two or three articles a week, and we also do some additional that would be supplemental content around. We do a need to know to kind of keep our people informed of what's going on and that kind of stuff. But honestly, most of those folks are more editors instead of actually content creators. Because we have a team of, I think 50 or 60 volunteers that will all of our devotionals are written by volunteers. And then they're edited by a staff member. But so it's been pretty cool to be able to see what God has done with that. And, , it's another one of those ways that if you can get someone, , involved in the process, they're a much more bought in even person in the church. Typically they grow more if they're, , actually serving in the church and doing that. And those folks that write content and all, they don't traditionally would see themselves maybe as a door holder or, , someone that would do some of their traditional volunteer roles. This is a new opportunity too that we've seen. So the way we get it done is through our volunteers, and we've got some awesome volunteers that we're super thankful for. That's the You have some volunteers on every front. I mean, facilitating our conference this year as well, your volunteer team is incredible. They just stepped right in and they're helping run the event with us. They're so friendly and so kind. And your staff members that we interact with, they're it's a pretty big group on a regular basis. They they interact in the Rock community. They encourage our team. , they just help facilitate things so nicely. They're really engaged. How how do you help make sure that that's passed down through your team? I think number I'll go back to the discipleship path that we have or whatever, because someone that's overflowing, it's just gonna come out of them. what I'm saying? And honestly, we've spent a lot of time with our staff, making sure that we have an overflowing staff before we ever try and figure out how to have an overflowing congregation or attenders. So we have really poured a lot into our staff and into our key volunteers, which is who you would see at one of these conferences, really trying to help them get free from things, find their purpose. And then honestly, whenever they find that purpose, we put them into a role that God has wired them for. And really it's not hard for them to overflow because they're doing something that they enjoy, ? And I don't wanna by any stretch make people think that somehow we got it all figured out because we don't have it all figured But man, we got a few things and we have some awesome volunteers that have really been able to just operate in the passion and the gift and the God has placed in them. And I think it's evident whenever others are able to come and to be able to interact with them, but they enjoy what they do. They do. Evidence is a good word for that. They're very passionate. There's a lot of joy. Yeah. So one of the things I think you guys have done an incredible job on is from the very beginning, even now, just helping other churches understand Rock, and because we don't have a sales force. We don't want a sales force. Our sales is our community, and you guys are champions on that. Can you tell me a little more about that and how you guys help people bring closer to Well, I would say, number one, I feel that the mission that you guys have is very similar to our own mission. In terms of, I mean, everything we do, we really wanna try and give it away. , we feel God has provided the resources for us to either write content or to do something. If He's done that for us, then let's give it to other churches so they can have some of that content. our kids curriculum, we give all that away. That's not those three people. That's a little larger team that creates a kids friend curriculum. But with that, really felt that our hearts were in alignment early on in terms of really y'all's passion is to resource the church. And you're doing that through code, more so than writing a devotional or that kind of thing, but it's just as important. Something that I believe I said this yesterday, but, , people us aren't seen by many people in the church, but they're felt by everyone, , because when we write a workflow or whenever we do some code in the background, very few people are ever gonna know our names, which is totally cool, But whenever they actually, when a workflow actually helps a volunteer or helps a pastor to do it, know, to discipleship someone better, it's felt by that person. And using the resources that we have in Rock, it's just amazing to be able to see what is the potential there. So whenever I talk to other churches, that's what I wanna talk to them about. Is hey, it's not so much just about the technology. It's not about the funding. It really is about resourcing pastors and resourcing staff and volunteers in order to discipleship better. So, and honestly, it's not a hard sell whenever you talk about that because it resonates with most pastors. It resonates with most staff because that's what we're about. , our heart beat is about helping people know Jesus better, so, , and growing in their faith and that kind of thing. Yeah, and the story, I mean, since you guys have been on Rock for so long, the stories you guys have about how technology and processes, you have to both, are making a difference in people's lives is incredible. We have some stories that have come out of the conference from you and lots of people. We've tried to, this year was all about trying to get stories, and I would encourage people to get the content subscription so you can hear those stories, because some of them are just so impactful. We're actually going to tell another one of your stories at the end here in a few minutes, so. Well, , stories are so powerful. I mean, whenever you really are trying to connect somebody's heart to something, and they see a story or they hear a story of something that happened, it can pull on your heart strings and stuff. And it moves from zeros and ones to a person's face or a person's name. And that matters, because it is about people. It's not about zeros and ones. It's about the individual that's life is gonna be impacted and forever be changed. And we don't know what the kingdom impact of Rock is. I mean, it's massive, I'm sure. But I'm excited just the potential of God using y'all's gifts, the gifts of the people there at this conference, others that the community of Rock, just to be able to develop new things that are gonna help people, , experience Jesus in a new way, to be able to grow in their faith and to be able to experience an abundant life that John ten ten promises us, right? I mean, the enemy is coming to steal and kill and destroy, but God's come to give us life and give it to a full or right? And so, , any way that we can do that, and I know one way that we use Rock for it is to be able to help people experience that. So it's been really awesome. And we love those stories because as a staff, we don't get to see those on the front line. We're a line back, and we see a lot of numbers, how many churches are using Rock. Well, that number's interesting, but it doesn't really move our needle, but one story about one person will just encourage us and our staff for weeks. Yep. And so we love hearing that stuff. It's awesome. All right. Thank you so much for joining us today, Michael. And again, thanks so much for hosting and for sharing your staff and your volunteers and all of your resources with us for this conference and for everything that you do throughout the year for us. We greatly appreciate it. Hey. I'm happy to be here. Anything we can do to help you or help the community, man, we're here, and our team's here to be able to serve. So thank you. You're welcome. 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.