Podcast Episode 25: Episode 194: Special Edition with Jimmy Witcher

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Trinity Fellowship Church in Amarillo, TX has built a culture around technology—and even AI—to empower innovative and personalized ministry. Hear how Pastor Jimmy Witcher built this culture and where they are going next.

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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 the Rockcast podcast. I'm host Emily Forman and with me today are Jon Edmiston and our very special guest, Pastor Jimmy Witcher. Jimmy has been the senior pastor of Trinity Fellowship for thirteen years and before that, spent twenty five years in Senior Business Leadership. Pastor Jimmy and his wife, Kim, host a YouTube show called More Than You Asked For, and he also hosts the ten minute Biblecast every Monday through Thursday, unpacking a daily section of Scripture. Also, Pastor Jimmy has written the book, Living in Heaven on Earth. Trinity Fellowship is located in West Texas and has been a member of the Rock Community of Churches since 2021. They're an innovative leader in digital ministry and we're so excited to talk with Pastor Jimmy today about his approach to innovation, digital ministry, and even AI. Welcome Pastor Jimmy. Well, welcome. Thank you so much, Emily and John. It's such an honor and a privilege to be with you today. We're so excited to have you with us. And you have such an intriguing background that's a combination of business and ministry. Tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are today. Yeah, you never would've thought I would end up a pastor. That would be the last possible thing that would've projected in my trajectory. So I actually went to school to be a chemist. So I wanted to spend my time in the lab and really never be in front of people. In fact, my personality profile says hates to be the center of attention. And so God thought it would be funny to make me a public speaker. So we started this journey, my wife Kim and I, we've been in ministry our whole lives. So we've always been a part of the church and part of what God was doing, but I was in the business world and kind of growing and doing some things through that while of course we're participating in church and became an elder of the church and all of those kinds of things. But along the way, just got the call of God to go in the ministry and just knew that that's really what we were supposed to do. And it was pretty fascinating. We got the call and had an experience with God in October of nineteen ninety nine, and we just thought we were gonna come back, and really, we thought we were gonna be missionaries in Mozambique, and really thought we were going. We got back from that trip knowing that, hey, we're about to leave the business world and go into ministry, only to find out there was no open doors. And in fact, God began to open doors in the business world. And so spent the next twelve years in business before stepping into Trinity fellowship to to be a part. We've been at Trinity for over thirty one years, but to step in in 02/2012 to be on staff, and then 02/2016 to become senior pastor. So spent really twenty five years in business, in the business world, which really leads us to even some of the computer things. A lot of what I did in the business world in senior leadership was implement ERP, enterprise resource planning systems, in manufacturing organizations. I worked for two different manufacturing facilities, companies, and then actually did some acquisitions in there. So implemented three or four different ERP systems, and helping integrate factories and inventory control and all those kind of things. And I was the lead implementer from the corporate side, working with our consultants and even doing some of the setup and at times coding when necessary to to get all that done. And so just, , kind of a weird thing to take that and then come into the Christian world. And and at first, I just thought, well, gosh, I've got all this experience that will have absolutely no basis in the church world. And then now all of a sudden, we say, no. No. No. It's quite the opposite. And in fact, one of the things that shocked me coming into the church was the, really, the lack of use of data and data management in the nonprofit Christian world. I mean, what things that the business world had been doing for decades. I mean, the church world isn't just four or five years behind, we're twenty, thirty years behind. And so just trying to figure out, been spending the last really fifteen years in the ministry world saying, all right, how we accelerate what's happening in the church to get some of these tools to help us grow and advance God's kingdom? Because there's lots of things we can do with technology, which of course led us to our dear friends at Rock and all the great things you guys are doing, so. Yeah, and I've witnessed that skillset. I mean, before I really knew your background, I was in a meeting with you when we were talking about a feature set, and you asked this question that was so nuanced and insightful, and deeply technical, that I was blown away. I've never had a senior pastor follow us down this rabbit, this deep rabbit hole in technology. I think in that point, you caught an issue that was going to be an issue on the future that we're working on, and I was , Woah, that was pretty amazing. Well, you're very kind. The back end of my head is still data tables and organizations and all those kinds of things. And don't change that. All right. I think it gives you a very unique perspective, because you have the strategy and the mission mindset of the church, and you can bring better alignment to how we can do that with technology, always keeping us on track. And I think that's what I love about , our team is that we're, yeah, we got to check all the boxes of church management, and we want to be a great church management tool, but we're very on fire to give features to the attendees, give features to build up their discipleship journey and win more people to Christ. So being able to have a senior leader who can, , help us with that is very exciting. Well, I'm I'm happy to help. I'm just delighted that you guys are are working with us to help us bring some things to to fruition. Mhmm. I mean, , one of one of the things that has just driven me and driven us and our team is I I actually believe we're on the on the verge of the biggest revolution really that's happened, , in the last probably fifteen hundred years, really going back to the printing press. , people ask me all the time, what's the what are the driving changes of technology? And I I , the Internet's amazing. I don't think it's the Internet, although the Internet made it possible. I really think it's, , these cell phones, the cell phones that we all carry around in our pocket. , it's changed everything. ? And, really, 02/2010 is when the proliferation of the smartphone really hit. And what I personally believe is we're gonna have a a the the same impact that happened during the reformation is what we have the opportunity to have today because we have new technology and new tools to reach the masses in a way that we've never had before. Everybody looks back to Martin Luther and the Reformation, and of course, Martin did some amazing things, but part of the history of that, and actually the History Channel did a nice little piece on this, you can Google it. Just do History Channel and Martin Luther Reformation, and you get this great little article. Because what Martin Luther did is he capitalized on this brand new technology called the printing press. And so there was lots of people that had issues with the indulgences of the church and things that were going on, but what Martin Luther did, he didn't just publish his thesis, he published his thesis, and he put all of that into print. He became the first bestselling author, creating the German version of the New Testament, all of these things, because he was using the technology of the day. And I really believe we have that today. So that's why I am so passionate about how to , Jesus called us to go and make disciples. Mhmm. But if we're gonna go and make disciples, , why are we not capitalizing on the technology we have today to reach people where they are? Certainly everybody else in the world is doing that. We as the church need to do the same. Yeah, and I think hindsight is such a fickle friend, because we look back and we say, well, of course. But there was a thing, we talked about digital ministry, there was a thing that was surprising many pastors when they had these meetings, it was called print ministry. It's , Yeah. We're gonna use paper? How are we gonna? Hindsight, it's , Well, of course you did that. Of course, tracks, of course. But that was a brilliant idea someday, and they probably had a lot of arguments, whether it was gonna lead to people not going to church anymore, because they could just sit at home and read the sermons. Right. So, what seems easy, of course, with someone's innovation that had to be pushed through, and you said, we're now in the digital moment, and everything seems hard and controversial sometimes, but it really isn't. The patterns that we create will seem, of course, to the next generation. That's right. And it's just tools. I mean, they're just tools. They're just new tools. The fundamentals, the basics are not changing. But it does give us a way to use those tools and to reach people a whole different way than we've ever been able to reach them before. Yeah, and the exciting thing is , was just listening to the podcast with Wes Huff, and he was talking about the Codex, which was basically a fancy word for book, and how Christians led to the advancements of page numbers and notes in the sidelines, and hopefully we get to do that again with these new digital tools. Absolutely. And the advantage we have, one of the things that the Reformation struggled with is they wanted to bring the Bible to the world, but they realized most of the world was illiterate. So they actually had to teach the world to read. That's how school most schools and all those things were born out of this movement to help educate people so that we could get them the Bible. And we don't even have some of those limitations now. And so it's a very exciting time, very exciting time to be in ministry, very exciting time with this kind of coalescing of technology and ministry together. I think there's some amazing things that God's about to do. Yeah. I hope maybe the Rock community I mean, Rock's technology, of course, but more importantly to us, it's a community, and hopefully this community can hyper speed some of those innovations in terms of working together, collaborating, helping fund things that are needed, and sharing best practices. Absolutely. I mean, the big advantage we have over industry, right? Is we're not competing. Yes. We're trying to build the kingdom. So everything, one church builds something or one ministry builds something, and we can share it with everybody. I think it's brilliant. Yeah. There's definitely an exponential edge there. Well, what has the move to Rock meant for for you and for Trinity fellowship? Well, it's been it's been incredible. And actually, you guys could probably tell me how long we've been on Rock. Is it five years? Something that. I was trying to remember, we were having this conversation today, I couldn't remember exactly how long. I know when I first came into ministry fifteen years ago, we were looking for a platform, we couldn't find one. So we took an off the shelf business platform, which is Acumatica, which is a Microsoft product for industry. And we basically tried to shoehorn it into a church management system. And so, we kinda used the CMS, the customer management system, where families became companies, and people that worked for the companies were the family members that we just tried to force this thing. And I think about 300,000 later, we quit. And two years later, it just didn't work. And that's when we found you guys. We found Rock. And Rock was poised to begin to do almost everything we wanted it to do. And so we implemented it, and it's just been incredible. So of course, we did all the basic things that I think churches do. Let's make sure we get children's check-in working. Let's make sure we get contribution records. We did all those basics, and we probably spent two and a half years, three years on just getting all the basics running. But then it became time, alright, how do we start implementing the dream? Now how do we start innovating and really using this platform to disciple as a discipleship platform, not just as a church member management platform. Yeah, that's exciting. Which is where we find ourselves. That's right. Yeah, that's where we find ourselves today. That's an exciting place to be. And it's ironic that we actually use it the opposite. So we now are trying to bend a Rock to make families organizations, which would be churches. And so, it's funny, because we to eat our own dog food so we can find all the things that are needed and bugs ahead of time. As you're talking about them, we actually do it the opposite way. Yeah. That's good. It's great to hear that you spent, , it does take a little bit of time to fully move into a new platform and make sure you're using all the administrative functions and things correctly, and your staff is trained and everybody knows what to expect, but some churches stop there and don't realize some of the innovative possibilities of what's happening and what's available to them inside the Rock platform. And that's something that you've really been leaning into at Trinity Fellowship. Where do you see Rock being a benefit in the future when we look at it from that perspective? Well, mean, know, Rock is the platform that we're building all of this on. And so it's the central thing. , one of the things that is so difficult in any technology environment, in any ecosystem that you're building, is when you end up having multiple ways of doing something, and it's not integrated. And so, what happens all the time in the church, this is a very common thing, I'm sure you guys see this with a lot of your clients. Maybe we have this church management system that allows us to pull a Dataview and send out an email. But because that's complicated, and I put that in air quotes, somebody thinks that's complicated. So what another pastor's gonna do, they've got their spreadsheet that they're keeping on the side with their list of names, and that's how they're managing their people, if you will, the youth group or the children's ministry or whatever it is. So one of the things we had to do at Trinity, and this actually started back in our Acumatica days, is we had to start educating our on the power of data. And and so, , as an example, I just made it an edict. If you're if you have pastor in your title, you're gonna learn how to use Excel. You're gonna learn how to use pivot tables. You're gonna , you don't have to be a master, but but you you don't get to delegate the data thinking to your assistant or to somebody that you think understands it better than you. And so one of the big things I think is really important for ministries to do this and to do it successfully, because when you're making a transition into a digital environment, it's not just the software, but it's building in the workflows and the culture so that people are leaning into the software. And as a senior pastor, I can tell you something that really excites me, and it just happened this week. Of course, , the time we're recording this, we just kinda finished up the Easter weekend. And you guys may or may not know, we we had an issue with children's check-in, and there was some things there. And so we had to we we we were running basically another instance of Rock in Pebbles. It am I saying it right, Pebbles? Is that the test environment? Does that make that mean anything? That would be your internal term for it probably. Okay, perfect. That's what we call it internally. So we had to run a version of that to do children's check-in. And so all of our leads, all of our new people who checked in for the first time, were actually in a different environment than our our production environment for Rock. And so our Rock team was been busy this week getting that information from, , the the test environment over into so that people could see it. Well, I've got my campus pastors. I mean, I had one just text me yesterday going, hey. When when are we getting our Easter leads? And so here here we are three three days, , after Easter, and I got a campus pastor dying for his leads. I just, , put my hands up in in celebration of, , , we're winning the war because now we've built a culture that is around the idea of, no, we need this data. This data is helpful in helping us do the ministry. But that culture took years to build, And it took years to get people to be willing to dive in themselves, not hand it off to assistant or somebody else, and just build. So I think it's a twofold thing for churches and ministries. We have to get the technology, get it implemented, but we have to build the idea of the need to use the technology and cast that vision that has to be in the grassroots of the organization. And that just takes a lot of time. And that's super interesting. Because you just tied that back to your earlier comment. You basically gave them digital literacy. Yeah. Yes, because you have to introduce that. I mean, literally, put this, when I was in manufacturing, one of the plans, and it's funny that you mentioned dog food, actually was a dog food manufacturing company. And so that we were part of, it was Merrick Pet Food. And when I first came in to the organization, and this is a large organization, a multimillion dollar manufacturing organization with five or six factories, 500 employees, and not an exaggeration, five computers. The whole organization was run on five computers. Inventory was kept on a spreadsheet. And so spent, I can't remember, it was way over 7 figures, implementing a new ERP system to bring the company forward. But take that into the digital age. So now we are in the end of the church world. Now you go into the church world, and it's almost the exact same thing. I've got pastors who, yes, they maybe have a computer, but they use their computer for email. They've never opened an Excel spreadsheet. They've never had to think about sorting data. So just even the mindset has to be trained into the organization. Really important. Yeah, fascinating. Now you mentioned your Easter leads, but I just wanna use that to say you have a really interesting follow-up process that you use. What can you tell us about how you use Rock for your individual follow ups? Yeah, well, we use Rock to track all of our So let me define what we call a lead. A lead is any first connect that we have with an individual. And so, , again, what we wanna do is is use this as a pastoring tool. How can we connect? And so what we feel is the first time somebody connects with the church, they're they're telling us something. They're they're saying, hey, I think that there's a need that you might be able to meet. And they may not know exactly what that need is, but they're telling us something and we wanna meet them in that place of that need. So we track every place we can think of to have a first encounter. And it's everything from the obvious, , children's check-in for the first time, give for the first time. And I actually have a little story about children's check-in here in just a minute, if you'll help me circle back talking about this train use of data. But then now we're trying to think of other creative ways to get people. So we do a at Easter, we have a big, pretty Easter photo booth, and we take a really nice kind of professional photo of you and your family because we wanna email it to you. But to email it to you, we need your email address. If you're not already in now you're in Rock, now you're a lead. And so it's just another way of saying, and this is the first time you've connected. And so obviously it's the obvious, somebody turns in a connect card or a prayer request or whatever it is. We're just trying to find every possible way we can connect with somebody for the first time. And and again, this is when you think about culturally how this gets built into the organization, then we start doing things in our our our leadership now, our our team leadership really understands this, and they're always trying to figure out how can we get new leads. So we might do a women's night, and there's always an event in the night that is totally intended to create opportunities for new leads. And we usually do it a couple of ways. Usually, we have a giveaway. We give away if it's a men's night, we might give away a TV or something. But but to give away the TV, you have to register for the event. Well, registering for the event, you're registering in Rock. If you never registered before, you're now a lead. Another thing we to do is what's the next step for you and your discipleship? And so we might have a text in, , here's the steps that you need , that we're encouraging you to take. Where are you? And we'll have them text in. And again, if they're not already in Rock, now they're a lead. So it's all these ways to create a lead. So then once the leads are created, then on Monday, there's a team that disseminates those to who's gonna follow-up, our entire pastoral team is responsible for following up on these, and so those get disseminated. And then we just have a tracking process where everyone is followed up on with a call, text, or email, And and there's a, , kind of a classic funnel process. We'll reach out once. If we don't hear anything, we'll reach out again. If we don't hear anything, we'll reach out again, and then we'll, , kinda terminate that process. But we'll we'll connect with them along the way. And just the testimonies along the way have just been incredible of people going , man, why are you calling me? I I had no idea. And and just getting to have that ministerial moment is just amazing. So that that's how we that's how we process and follow-up leads. And in fact, it's been so successful. We're we're literally overwhelming our staff with with new leads. And so now we're creating a volunteer team. We actually are taking one of our leaders who's a business guy who's used to processing leads with sales teams, and he's gonna create one of our, we call it a dream team that is really following up on leads, and they're gonna create a war room kind of environment, and basically, know, now we're gonna get some of our volunteers to be a part of this process. Just amazing. And don't you have a weekly meeting where a lot of the pastors are coming together and sharing stories from these and that Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. They they come together every Wednesday, and it's a thirty minute meeting, but every pastor comes together in every campus. We do it over Zoom, and it's it's two parts of the meeting. It's fifteen minutes of testimonies. , tell us what what's working, which just, , creates a lot of energy in and of itself. And then it's fifteen minutes of, okay. Well, this this is what we need to be focusing on this week. Where , are there any problem, , kind of that. But we also have a, if you will, a rating system, and and we kinda go through it because we we keep track of everybody and how many leads they have or have not followed up on. And so everybody gets to see their name on the board. That's either green, orange, or red. And you don't want your name to be red. And it's not that we're , , calling anybody out. We just kinda put it up on the board and you kinda see that your name is red. Your friends give you a hard time and then you do what you need to do to not be read anymore. Positive peer pressure. Positive peer pressure, exactly. That's great. Okay, now here's your reminder about the children's check-in story. Oh yes, thank you, thank you for that. So as an example of how do we use data, so we've been trying to create these leads. This is early on when we were first implementing, actually this even goes back to Acumatica, but it still works. What we found is our children's check-in team at the time, they weren't entering the data into the ERP. They they were they were basically writing down a card. They they filled out a card. And so if you were a guest, we filled out a card, and we would fill out a card for you five times. Oh. And then after five times, we would go to the trouble of entering you into the computer so that your thing could print out. And we're just , you can't do that. This this is a we're missing a golden opportunity. We needed to know the first time you checked in a child. And so just when you think about cultural changes and changing the culture, helping people understand that is a key part of building a cohesive system that uses technology to disciple people. That's fantastic. So in your position as senior pastor, what are your thoughts about digital ministry? That's a term that's thrown around a lot. What types of outcomes are you most interested in when it comes to digital ministry? Well, so the outcome, , we wanna equip saints for the work of the ministry, and that's Ephesians four, and then of course, we wanna and what is the work of the ministry? To go and make disciples of all people. And so that's what we wanna do is how do we equip people to make disciples? Now, of the things that has seemed to me to be a limitation in the church is we have traditionally built our systems around Sunday attendance and small group participation, both of which I'm a huge proponent of. Think they're very important and wonderful. And and I don't think those are going away. In in fact, I think a lot of the digital things are gonna increase because I think the more things get digital and the more people are separated, the more they're gonna want one on one connection. I don't think the nature of humanity is gonna change just because we're becoming a more digital world. I think it actually comes to our advantage. So I think those things are important. But how do we reach people and how do we help people reach people? Because what we wanna do is help connect people. And so part of that is when we're only centered around a Sunday in a small group setting, we're limiting the touch points that we have with people that we're trying to disciple. So how can we increase the touch points? And so that's where what we're seeing through the technology of the app, how can we reach people during the day? How can we do that? So we did something with you guys. We created journeys, which for us are daily devotionals. They're relatively short. I think the average is five days. We have some that are thirty days, some that are three days, but they're just devotionals that allow somebody to be discipled, to go through that. And so that's a way of reaching somebody. You talked about the Bible Cast. That's one of the reasons we created the Bible Cast, was an opportunity to spend ten minutes with somebody every morning to help teach people how to have a quiet time if they've never had that before. And all of these are things that we can now deliver this content to their cell phone, where they are in the moment throughout the day. Where I see this going is continue to increase. And one of the things that I'm very excited about is as we deploy journeys, beginning to have guided journeys. And, , and again, this kinda ties in with the idea of leads. So think about this. If you are a member of Trinity fellowship and you're going through a journey, I can empower you to be a leader. Now you gotta go through the growth track and, , you gotta be part of our leadership team. But as part of the as part of leadership, then you can lead five of your friends. So you can go to work and reach out to your work buddy and say, hey, I'm gonna do this kind of bible study on this app and on this website from my church. It's just five days. Would you guys wanna be a part of that? Well, most people are gonna wanna do that. And it's an easy low bar to help get the church membership to then to disciple the people that are around them, bringing in their family, bringing in their friends. And then, of course, you guys know the data side because we're here talking about it. For them for their friends to participate in the journey, they have to log in. And when they log in, they become a lead. And so now when we're highlighting or or promoting a men's night, they're gonna get a promotion for men's night, assuming they opt in to some of the , to the email receipts and all that sort of thing. It just expands our ability to reach those folks as well while empowering the congregation members to start discipling. ? Because if you think about leadership in the church, it's fairly limited about what somebody can do. You can be a life group leader if you're gonna lead. You can lead a small group, which frankly, a very high commitment. I mean, that's a high time, high investment, which is great, and people that do that are amazing. But then there's also, , either you do that or you invite somebody to church, , come to church with me. Those are those are kind of the two extremes. We don't really have anything that's a low bar leadership opportunity. And I I suppose the third one is you can serve on the dream team, , and and serve in an area ministry and kinda lead that, also a very high bar. But what if what if it's just, hey, what I'm asking you to do to be a leader at Trinity is to take five of your friends through a five day prayer journey. Man, that's a much lower bar, but now we're we're truly equipping the saints to do the work of the ministry while building a digital ecosystem that is ever , that is expanding and allows us to to help both equip our leaders as well as increase the footprint and the reach. It makes it so much easier for the average person to engage, which builds their own personal spiritual dedication and growth. And it really just ignites the Great Commission. What a really cool process. Yeah. Well, and the thing that's great about journeys is journeys are not done, , when it's a small group, and , I'm an introvert, I know a lot of pastors are introverts, it's a big deal for me to show up into a room of 30 people that I don't I mean, there's a lot of emotional energy and I'm a mature adult, so I know how to do it well, but I'm not saying it's easy. And so when we're thinking about people, for a lot of people, keeps them from engaging. And so if I can just invite you to a bible study that you don't have to show up for, you don't ever have to see anybody. All you have to do is read this thing, give a short comment, and you're now in community with five other people. It's just amazing to see what that can do. Yeah. Incredible. Well, you have such a unique background. I'm really curious if we can pick your brain a little bit about AI here in the podcast because that's a hot topic and I know that's something that's near and dear to you as well. So we're curious about your thoughts and and , what what you've been doing in that area. Yeah. Well, thanks. We love AI. Now I I will say this upfront, I believe AI will usher in the end of the world and the antichrist. So I am I am confident that the Antichrist will use it to control and manipulate the world. So I would just say that upfront. That being said, I think it's a fantastic technology that we need to leverage as much as we can to advance the kingdom as fast and as far as we can. So we have a couple of things that we're doing. Probably one of the things we're doing is we created an app called Nota, and I think you can download it from all the app stores, it's My Nota, it's m y n o t a. And this is really meant to be a discipleship tool for folks who are not yet ready to enter the church. One of the things that we look at when we think about the full spectrum of discipleship, is there's a lot of community, and I think as churches, it's a good thing for us to all be looking at. Because, especially in the West, we tend to trade a lot of church members from one church to another, and I don't know that that's terribly helpful for the kingdom. When there's this entire growing population, particularly of millennials, I mean, we've all seen the data of folks, , not not coming to church and and the the the, , the West becoming very quickly a non Christian world and all those sorts of things. But I think people are are very spiritual. There's a lot of data that shows Gen Z is very spiritual, very interested in spiritual things, but we felt we needed a bridge before they got to the church to kinda help begin that discipleship process. So that's what Nota was meant to do. And it's built on an AI platform. So it's done in a kind of a whimsical way. It kinda has a state park, , or a national park theme, and you can pick your guide. We were very careful to make sure they're not spirit guides, they're just your guide. So I think it's a cardinal and a fox and a deer, , but it's AI. And so, and again, it takes you through discipleship kind of journeys, but your guide is there with you along the way, asking you questions, hey, would you to talk about that? What do you think? And of course, we built that AI model to have a biblical worldview and a conservative Christian biblical worldview. And so it actually responds. So, I mean, we're using AI to help disciple and to answer fundamental discipleship questions that people might have. And our belief is that it's relatively new. We're still trying to get the word out that NOTA is there, but we're very much using it as a discipleship tool. And I believe a lot of people will be, especially those seekers, might be a little more ready to have this conversation with AI before they're ready to step into a church and have this conversation with a person. So that's one way that we're we're very much using AI. And then we're also are using AI. In fact, I just released it to our church, just launched it to our staff this past week. And so we created a website called lecternai.org, and it lets people sign up. And quite frankly, we did it mostly to save money because the , we we had an OpenAI account that we were using, but, , it was whatever it is, $20 a month, I think, to sign up for for OpenAI, and it was just getting too expensive. And so I reached out to our developer and said, hey. Is there any way we can kinda leverage what we did in building NOTA and kinda then create a platform where we can release AI and the AI tools to our our staff? And he said, well, absolutely. But if we're gonna do that, why don't we put a little paywall on the front of it and release it to the world? And so that's what Lectron AI is. I think for a donation of $5 a month, you have unlimited access to the AI. And and you sign up your organization, and then you can, , $5 a a seat, and you can disseminate that in your organization. But we were trying to create a very economical way of getting AI out to the church and the church body. And so we have two assistants in there right now. There's a content assistant for building content creation, and then there's a communication and marketing assistant for, , writing emails and all those sorts of things. And so I did a training with our staff. So the way we're using it is I, , I was listening to an AI podcast about a marketer, and he was talking about how AI is totally changing the marketing world. And what he had done to his company is he went to his company, and he said, hey. Here's the deal. AI is changing everything, but we're not gonna downsize, but here's what I am gonna say. I'm gonna give you six months. Here's the tools. You got six months, and you need to learn how to use this tool because at the end of six months, I need all of you 50% more productive than you are today because that's how we're going to grow our marketing firm. And so I I said that to our staff. I didn't tell them, , wasn't as strong maybe as the marketer was, but I did say, look, I want every single one of you to use this tool. And by having this thing lectern, instead of everybody doing their own chat GPT, it allows us as the church to have one voice, direction, one sound. And so, , and and I I don't mean this well, I I would say let me let me I won't pick on anybody. I'll pick on myself. I'm dyslexic. And so, , anything I write, I have to have somebody else read because God only knows what I actually said versus what I intended to say, and AI just helped so much with that. Mhmm. And and and for folks that, let me just say, are challenged with good sentence structure, maybe that's the way of saying it, AI solves those problems. And so that's what I was saying to our staff is, I don't ever want you to write another email. I want you to use this to build that email. If you're sending a text out to your students, don't think about don't spend an hour trying to figure out how to do this text. Just get the platform to build it for you, and it's gonna make you more accurate, it's gonna make you faster, it's gonna make you more efficient. So we're fully embracing AI all across the platform. And I can't wait to see as we continue to grow, and I know you guys have some plans and some thoughts for Rock. I think we're just barely scratching the surface for what AI's gonna do, and I just I can't wait to see what's to come. Definitely. But we're putting a lot of time and effort into that. And I personally, it's very frustrating because every week, there's this new things and new ideas. And your your ideas last week that you worked so hard on are eclipsed by this week's new new capabilities. So it's it's fun to work in, but it's also a little frustrating sometimes. Oh, sure. And I, , the the advice that I heard on that is, , find the applications that we need and just run it to ground, and then we'll catch up with the new stuff later. Because otherwise we'll never we'll never get anything done. Yeah. That's nice. But I I do believe it's gonna it's gonna be amazing. Yep, definitely. So you've talked about building a culture of data or data awareness inside Trinity Fellowship. How about innovation? How are you building a culture of innovation with your staff? Yeah. Well, I think that's always a challenge. Right? And it's always a challenge to and and and I think it's a challenge in two ways. And I think one of the ways it's a challenge, if I can I I don't wanna be critical, so I wanna be careful? A lot of times so let me just give a contrast of what I've seen in the church world versus the corporate world. That that might be the best way to to come at this, to answer this question. In the corporate world, innovation is encouraged. Mhmm. And innovation is strongly encouraged. In fact, tend to get, you're gonna put it this way, you're only gonna get promoted if you're innovative, generally speaking. Then you come to the church world, and sometimes for reasons of the way we conceptualize the word vision and things that, a lot of times the innovation is kinda locked into the senior suite, if you will. And so there's this kind of idea that innovation is only supposed to be here instead of innovation being throughout the organization. So I think as a leader, it's important to flip that upside down and to encourage innovation, But to do that, to to encourage innovation in a in a corporate setting, you have to make sure that the vision and the values are are strongly underpinned and reinforced because that creates a culture of safe innovation. Because people can then innovate within the sandbox, if you will, because the sandbox is clearly defined. When the sandbox isn't clearly defined, innovation can be dangerous, because it's kind of the old thing about fire. You have a fire in a fireplace, it's no problem. Fire outside the fireplace is a big concern. And so building a culture around the vision and values that is very structured of what the vision and the values are, and then saying, now how we do that, let's be as creative as we can be. And then you have these two things working together. You have people who are embracing data and learning the value of data, and then they're trying to solve problems, and so they're now being able to be creative with, okay, how can the data and how can these tools help me solve a problem? I'll give you a perfect example. Our campus pastor in Decatur, gentleman named Cole Wells, Cole's amazing. And Cole was thinking, okay, we've got this growing campus and I'm trying to reach these people, but there's just he goes, I just feel , , God's given me this thing, and I wanna connect with my congregation, , his local congregation in these ways. And he said, hey, would it be okay? Could I write a journey and then take my whole congregation through it? I was , absolutely. That would be amazing. And so he's taking his entire congregation through a thirty day journey at a time that's gonna take them throughout the through the end of the year. So now I have a campus pastor who's engaging in the journey. And remember the thing that's awesome about the journeys, by design, journeys are every single day. So it's a daily touch point every single day. So a campus pastor is thinking, how do I how do I pastor my church? And he's got the data and he's got the tool mindset, and so he gets creative and says, well, can I write a journey? Absolutely. And it becomes easy. And then the creativity and the innovation spurs from that. Yeah. What an incredible example. As you look towards success, how do you measure the KPIs or metrics that will indicate to yourself and your leadership and your campus pastors what success looks ? Yeah. Well, that's always the challenge. Right? And so one of the things we have to do is get away from the metrics that don't matter. And when I say they don't matter, they don't matter the way we think they So when I say that, it's just , for an example, weekly attendance. Weekly attendance is an important metric, I think we should all measure that, everybody should know, and we just passed Easter, so everybody always gets excited about Easter. We build the place up, that's great. But I don't really see that as a discipleship metric. So, , and I know we would all say this, so this is not this is not gonna be a surprising statement. , Jesus said go and make disciples, not go and make the attendees. So the, , the question is, how do we measure disciples versus how do we measure attendees? Now we've made an assumption over the years, and I I don't think it's a completely invalid assumption that a regular attendee is being discipled. But is that is that the best way of of measuring that? And so for us, kind of our our our big picture metric that we are holding on to is is really a Rock metric of the ERA. And so we're tracking the ERA by campus, and that's really who we're considering as our congregation. Because if you're an ERA, which I believe is estimated in regular attender, and it's a , I I assume that's a normal term on your podcast here. If if we're tracking ERAs, those are the peoples that we know we're discipling. So tracking them, obviously doing the due diligence when we have a lost ERA, making sure we've, the campus pastors are following up on every one of those and finding out why and all those things. So using that as kind of our overriding metric, but then really wanting to measure success along the way. So we're implementing steps very aggressively. And to be honest, we're we're we're just about to go into the part where you're you you probably need my technology people and not me because I'm at the edge of my understanding of what we're doing. But we're gonna implement steps, and we've created eight discipleship steps that we believe measure what it means to be a disciple. And so it's, , accepting Jesus, water baptized, holy spirit filled, connected, which means you're in community one way or the other. You're either, , in a small group or you're part of the dream team. You're contributing to the organization, your time, your resources. Oh, I skipped one. We just added this last year, freedom. So you've gone through a freedom kind of a class free, healed and set free is what we're calling that step, then connected, then contributing, then growing stronger. So there's a self development part and then reproducing. And so we created these eight steps, and they're both steps in our discipleship path, but they're also steps in Rock, so they're in Rock. And then what we're doing is we're tying activities to each one of those steps so that we can measure when somebody has completed that step. And then, of course, we're using all of the technology to point to that. So if you haven't completed step three, or let's just do step two, which is water baptism, then every time we're doing water baptism, that's gonna get presented to you. You're gonna be part of the email campaign. It's gonna be part of your featured list in the app. When you log in on the website, it's gonna suggest that you do water baptism. So that that's how we're we're measuring success, through the steps, but then using all of the tools to help display that and move people through those steps. And give them the right opportunity at the right time. Make it easy to say yes. That's great. Exactly right. Exactly right. And and what's been crazy, and I'll I'll share this for the for the pastoral folks that might be listening to your podcast. What's been amazing is just having the steps, not even in Rock, but just literally having the steps. People are , oh, this is so helpful. And it helps people know how to disciple. I mean, we we've seen just almost a revival in our youth around Amarillo because they're , oh, here's the steps. You accepted Jesus. Okay. What's next? You need be water baptized. We've got high school kids baptizing their friends. And it's , okay, what's next? We need to experience the holy spirit. Okay. What's next? And, , and you just keep taking the steps, and it keeps people moving along that discipleship path, which I believe the faster we can keep them moving, the more likely we are to have a long standing reproducing disciple. Yes. So that clarity has been a real essential piece of that, it sounds . Very much so. Very much so. What's my next step? And then help people to take that next step. And they know exactly what the next thing is. Well, Pastor Jimmy, we appreciate your insights. Thank you so much for joining us on the Rockcast today. Incredible things are happening in West Texas, and it's so interesting to hear how the business background and the ministry opportunity are coming together, and I have to say that you may not have found yourself in another continent doing missions work, but you certainly are doing missions work in areas where you have been, and so being open to that is really incredible, and I can't think of a better place to do mission work than one in the business world, and two, bringing those insights to the church to help move that forward. So we know so much hard work goes into that. We're just grateful for you, grateful for what you've been able to share with the community here today. Thanks for joining us. Well, thank you, and if you can, just let me let you guys just say how much we appreciate you, all of your hard work, and the way you guys partner with us. It's been incredible. So we very much truly love and appreciate you guys. Well, it's our honor. And I'd just to plug the pastor Jimmy's BibleCast podcast. I listen to it quite often. It's it's a regular part of my daily drive, and I get so much out of it. It's so encouraging. And it's obviously mostly about the Bible, but there's a lot of great leadership lessons. I just shared one with our staff in our staff meeting the other day. So highly encourage you to get plugged into that. It's about 10:15 minutes every day, and it's just perfect for your daily commute. Oh, thank you. And the good news is you can just check out the show notes for our podcast. We'll have a lot of links from what we've talked about here today. So we'll make it easy for you to take your next step in finding out information about what we discussed today. Thanks for joining us, Jimmy. Thank you, you 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. 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.