Podcast Episode 18: Episode 200: Milestones, Miracles, and Ministry

Description

On this special 200th episode of Rock Cast, Jon, Emily, and Nick recount the milestones and miracles they've walked through since 2014. Despite their struggles and hardships, the team persisted. What started as a passion project is now a mission-driven movement empowering hundreds of churches globally. Listen to this episode to hear how far Rock has come!

Transcribed Content

Thank you to the incredible supporters who make RockRMS possible. As a nonprofit based software, your generosity drives innovation and keeps Rock thriving for churches worldwide. You too can be a go giver by joining this amazing of donors. Visit rockrms.com today to set or update your annual donation commitment or to make your first donation. Thank you for being a part of this movement. Welcome to the two hundredth episode of the Rockcast podcast. We are so excited to be able to share with the community today a little bit about our history, about where we've been compared to where we are, and this is a really fun story. So help me welcome here Jon Edmiston, Nick Airdo, and myself, Emily Forman. We are your podcast team for the Rockcast, and we go kind of all the way back to where it all started. Yeah. Think of this as the pre release to the up and coming book on the behind the scenes. There are so many things that could fill a book that have never been talked about that I think people will be surprised about. We won't talk about all of them today, but we'll talk about some. Mhmm. So the first podcast, I did some research last night. Alright. I was digging through the archives. And if you follow me on Twitter, you might have seen some of the things I posted from the archives. But in the archives, the first episode was on 01/10/2014. That's a long time ago. That was a very long time ago. But we were already three years in at that point. So the topic was really the up and coming beta for for Rock one point zero and just answering questions about that, which I thought was pretty interesting. Also noticed, Nick, you said you were gonna write documentation. That did not work out. Yeah. Pretty sure. Remember remember my fingers got a little shorter typing. I think I might have given you some headaches when you're reading my material. It's for the better for the Okay. Just I we're going around introducing what our roles were and I heard that I was , my eyebrow went I up and was , tried rating one it just was not good. Overall, I didn't listen to the whole thing, I was , well, okay, not much has changed. That's interesting. But that sure feels a long time ago. It was a long time ago. There were quite a few things that were different about Rock at that time. Of course, the the product hadn't been released yet. I think beta was released in March 2014 and January o in October. But there were a few installs, and there were some churches that were following along pretty closely soon after we we released our beta. So that was an exciting time. Yeah. And I I think even to get back to that, to get to that point, , there is a lot of miracles that happened. Mhmm. , lot of people those who have been around a while know know this, but a lot of people in in the community don't realize that this wasn't the first piece of software that was written by the team. The first piece of software was commercialized and sold by CCV to a company, which at that point, way way way back, because that was even way before 2014, that was probably the best course of action, churches didn't want to become software companies, that makes total sense. And so that was a good model at the time maybe, but that didn't work out. It's just It's amazing what I think when you don't build it from the beginning, and you just go buy something, you generally don't care for it as much as the people who started it. And so we watched that kind of tank and just lack of innovation and lack of really care for the for The potential. The the community that they were, , they didn't really have a community, but Yeah. The churches that were using And so we really were , I was disheartened by that. , it's really hard to watch someone take that and then not see it to its potential. And so we thought, well, look, we should probably just start over. , that's that didn't work. Let's just start over. I mean, starting over, , first of all, what a silly concept. , I knew how hard we did it once. It can't be that hard. Well, we should we should have known. , it was gonna be a harder than we thought. And then you started over in I think PHP, wasn't it? Just for that lasted a month. Just a blink. Yeah, just the I mean, it's not nothing, no, not casting shade on PHP, but it's just the object orientedness and that wasn't PHP as it is today, that was PHP in very early forms. But there was a huge, huge problem, and that was that we had a non compete with the company that we had put this out to and we could not do anything. And so we approached them and said, Hey, do you mind what if we just got rid of the contract? You don't have to pay the royalties to us. They weren't significant royalties. CCV, the church who sold it was not doing this for money, right? I mean, I really love the heart of that decision. But because it wasn't that much money and they wanted us to be held to the non compete, of course they said no. And so we were , okay, well there's ten years, we have to wait. Yep. But at the end, you were kind thinking, well, we might as well just get started. And we're already a few years in at that point. But that was disheartening. There's a mountain in our way, but then they wanted to change some of the terms of the contract. We were , No, not really. But we can tear it up. And they said, Yes. So God came in and moved a mountain that seemed it was gonna be a six year mountain. And then, I mean, that was maybe a few months after we had originally started. It's just amazing how that you think there's this huge mountain in your way and then God in one day, just knocks it down. I was , Woah. And there's just so many miracles that go along with that. I think even just getting into that V1 release with such a small team, it just doesn't make sense. It sure doesn't. That team was also responsible for work at the church. Yeah, full time work at And the they gave us a little bit of time to work on it, but not much because they had needs. This again is not a software company. So a lot of that was done nights and weekends in the early days. So the fact that we got to that one point zero release was huge and Mhmm. And the fact that we got to it in 2014 is amazing. Because a non compete seems a legal hurdle that you just can't get around. Right. And I remember when we did the one O thing, we kind had a small little get together, think on a weekend once. And we signed one of the t shirts. And I remember thinking to myself, Oh, that'd be cool. someday maybe we'll have an office. , and I'm thinking a, , 10 foot by 10 foot office and we can hang this up, , on the wall be kind of a little And I was , that'd be crazy. That's never gonna happen. And now it's up on the wall and we have this office that's, , I mean, huge compared to what we thought we were gonna It have, is a blessing. And you can see that shirt today if you come visit us, it's right inside the front door in a shadow box on the wall. Yeah. So in this, mean, every time you look at it, you're , Well, yeah, I remember thinking that would never happen. And then that happened, , even a while ago. So there's just so many miracles that got us here and it's been great, but at the same time, there's definitely a lot of struggles along the way. Sure. This hasn't been an easy route. But if it had been, it would be harder for us as humans, I think, see God's hand and pattern in it. So it is a blessing to be able to see how God has moved mountains and paved a way for this project to move forward. Yeah. And I think, , I think people, especially who come now, don't realize that even our model is Oh my how hard the model is, especially in the beginning. it's hard now, but in the beginning it's near impossible because every church was telling us, this will never work. This model is not a great model, which is ironic because it's the model they use for running too. But , , well, if it's free, it can't be good. Everybody's gonna think that. And that's not They weren't wrong with that, right? There is a psychology to that for sure. And that was a big, again, back when open source was a thing, but not a real thing. Yeah. Now it's everybody uses software that they didn't pay for. But back then it was even more difficult and that the donation wasn't gonna fund us. I mean, I literally had an executive pastor once try to excel this out for me and show me how it wasn't gonna work. And it did, , it did because I think what wasn't in the Excel was God's plan. That's exactly right. I don't think there's a formula for that in Excel yet. Mhmm. I haven't seen that formula yet. Equals God parentheses. Right. Maybe it's hidden in the developer menu somewhere. Yeah. So he wasn't wrong, And a lot of the churches, even churches who use it today said no. We were never selling this. We were not pitching this. There's never been a pitch deck. And, , we'd go through , , they come and they'd be interested, we'd show them , Yeah, this is great. You should keep doing that. I'm not sure your model's great, but it's not really right for us. Yep. And in a sense that was a true statement too, it wasn't right for them at that time, and I'm sure that the concerns are valid, right? But you just keep working, you keep chipping away at it. Yeah, because I think even our faith, I mean, I know I was thinking, yeah, you'll be here eventually. I just knew it. I just knew it. Yeah. And to be fair, it has taken us some time to figure our part of it out too. When it comes to the funding, what is realistic? How does it work? And so there've been iterations as we've been figuring this out as well. And as you mentioned, Nick, we've had to try out various technologies and everything that looks a straight line from here to there has had all of these difficult conversations and spreadsheets and iterations to try and get to the right solution. But I mean, honestly, , there's been a lot of two AM work sessions where you just want to flip the table and be , forget it. , especially in the early days, because you could we could have said forget it and no one would even know. Mhmm. Right? Because it's really easy to give up when no one's going to see it. I mean, if we were to give up now, that would be a little bit more public thing, right? For sure. And not to say it's easier now, it's still as hard, maybe even harder, I think you just get to the pain a little bit, you build up tolerance. Yeah, back then you could literally just go, Nevermind. And no one would notice except a couple of people. Except the people that said, I told you that wouldn't work. Right. But even before they even told you that, back when there was nothing to even show, it'd be , okay, never mind, this is dumb, let's move on. Let's go play pickleball, didn't But, , so with the launching, we've really never felt we're ever ready. The funding, we never had a big check dropped on us. And I think that was God's plan. He's , Trust me, I'll feed you every day. And then as the organization eventually got more mature and grew, the growth is a hard thing too. I think a lot of business coaches tell you there's going to be phases that are hard to push through, different sizes, and we've had to push through a lot of that. And, , again, it's you're under resourced, makes it much more difficult because we have a passion for trying to do things right. And the community needs it right, and the church wants it right and deserves it right. And I feel we've always been struggling to hit that bar because every church wants it right in a different way, in a different place, in a different meaning. And I think because we're so close, because of our community, there's this accessibility and we that. Right? But if you're a Microsoft, you can plan all you want. I don't think it gets through the firewall of communication. There's a firewall between you and the people. And we don't want that because we want to be in the trench. But at the same time, it brings a lot of pressure. Yes. And conflicting goals, not everyone can have everything the way they want it all the time. It's just that's a law of nature. Yeah, and I think that's exactly the conflicting goals. They're all goals, they're all good goals. They're all well intended. But unfortunately, they become in conflict when there's limited resources. Yes. Especially because we have fewer resources, even those that get paid. I think it'd be fun to kind of paint a picture of the average week a little bit back in the day when this was all starting. A lot of this was happening in the hallway at CCV, right, in an office or two. , just walk through maybe what that looks , what the hours were, who was involved, what was happening. That was kind of an interesting time. Yeah. Well, it was an add on to our jobs. Yes. So a lot of times it wasn't really even at work, was after work. Sometimes we would stay late and okay, we'll meet at this time. Mhmm. Sometimes we'd have a quick meeting during work and have to make up the hours later at night. And you guys were gracious enough to do some of that on Fridays when I got to drive out Which from my was how far was your drive, Nick? Was just an hour, an hour plus. Nick did had Fridays off in his church role at Central Christian, and he drove up on Fridays to coordinate with the team and have some meetings to move things forward over the next week. And a lot of it was , Tonight, I'll work on this, you work on that. And then let's Divide and conquer. In the morning and see where we're at. Yeah, because again, we had real jobs. Exactly. And we were committed to those. It wasn't that wasn't necessarily a burden. It was a burden. I think Rock was more the burden than the job. Right? I think some people might assume , well, the job could become a burden. Rock was just a passion project Right. At that point. Yeah. And I think we thought naively that we could do all that and still keep being employed for long term. And God had plans and He made sure that we had to move out because there's just no way. in hindsight, there's literally no way. It was fine for where it started. Way But it once it had to grow, there was no way you can stay at CCV. When I think again another naive point was that we thought, well, we could just have this open code base. Everybody's just pushing stuff in everybody be working together. That was kind of an idea that we started with. Yeah, and I think it just doesn't work because everybody has a different idea. Everybody has a different coding practice. Everybody has a different thing. And there were instances where that actually did happen. Were parts of Rock that were actually, features of Rock that were created by a specific church. Yeah. And it wasn't bad, but it was super difficult. , okay, well that works and looks different and operates in a different way and doesn't use this context right. And so a lot of that had to be reworked. We didn't have a team DNA yet. Yeah, but even now, I think it's just You can't have all these people in various places just doing whatever they feel . Right, right. And just think, Oh, that's just gonna work. It just doesn't work. I haven't seen any project that makes that work well. And I guess, again, that was a naive thing. We thought that that would work. But also it's not just building the product, it's building the community. Community takes effort. The law of entropy exists. It's a law of nature that if systems have to have energy put into them, otherwise chaos ensues. I think that's part of the fall From of the Garden is entropy was introduced at that moment. And it's the same thing with community. It's it takes time, effort, there's a lot of strategy that goes into it. Even if you think of something Chip, that just wasn't made, right? It didn't just exist all of a sudden. I mean, I just posted some concept art of the original Chip, which we never posted because it wasn't what we quite wanted, right? It didn't have the right character, it took a long time to get that. And then Chip, what is Chip's personality? I mean, we had to think of that and talk about it. That's why we're very protective of Chip. some people are , why can't we just make Chip do and have whatever sticker we want? It's , because he has a personality we want to protect that personality and not everybody understands the personality. And so, we don't want stickers out there that portray him in a way that's going to change how we look at him. That's right. He's a little cheeky little character. We want him to be positive. And sometimes people have him do negative things or be mean spirited. Not in a sinful way, right? But it changes the personality. Sure. Even sarcasm would just be not a Chip thing. Right. And I think chip has been a huge thing, right? just if you want something done, just get off her a chip sticker and it'll get done. And that's just one small example. The logo, the branding, it's just everything. The community site, the chat, all the materials that support the community. And being available inside that chat, but not being overly available. Because in the beginning we had pull ourselves back and say, because we could answer every question easily, instantly, and we pulled ourselves back and said, No, no, no, no. if we're gonna build this up, we have to start letting people start answering the questions and getting the answers right. And so intentionally pulling back, and that's something that's really important even today, we have to make sure that there's space. I've had some people come to me and say, Yeah, I don't think I can ever be a rockstar because , some people just jump in and answer every question every, at the moment it's posted. And that actually frustrated me when I heard that, here's a person who wants to actually step up and be a rockstar, but kind of can't, because it's not we're not providing that space we did in the beginning. It's a careful balancing act. Right. It sure is. Even the point systems I mean, that was something that we had to build in and we wrote that software and Speaking of points, there have been a 100 I did my calculations correctly this morning, a 157,889 points given amongst the community members. Mhmm. That's amazing. That's a lot of people helping each other. It sure is. And we were told that wouldn't work too. Community support, we say, well, this is actually gonna work. No, it's not. And now I don't hear that much at all. I hear the community saying, no, this is actually really works when they're trying to tell someone new about it. And that's so great to hear. Yes, and even as people rose to positions of helpfulness and leadership in the community, that's how we were able to craft and begin our Rockstar program, which actually started in 2017 with 12 Rock stars that were that were going above and beyond to help out, and , that's been growing significantly ever since. Mhmm. But those are just really cool ways that we've seen the community help fulfill some of the things that were dream or vision that looked , how's that ever gonna work? Yeah, I love the fact that the rockstar program and the rockstars helps the community, but it really helps them too. It gives them an opportunity to step into a leadership, maybe technical leadership that they haven't maybe had a chance to, and be recognized for that too. So I think it's a symbiotic kind of relationship. But I think if we talk about going back to struggles for a minute too, it's looking at the market norms in the church space, that's been a really struggle. We had to push through that. , it would have been so much easier literally if we just started charging people from the day one. Here's the product, here you go. It would have been so much easier for us, but I think it was God's plan that we didn't. We have handcuffed ourselves in many different ways. we're a nonprofit, so we can't sell out. It's open source. So we had to make sure that we keep everybody happy. Otherwise, our source is right there. There's a lot of things that we have to do, and we've done that to protect the church. But the struggle has been that actually worked against us and still does The to some one thing I learned through all that is you never want to stand in between someone and their prophet. That is an ongoing lesson that we learn. As we are over here trying to service and work with the church through mostly the nonprofit, if as soon as someone comes and sees what you're doing, and then they want to , tack onto it in a profit motivation, anything you do to, for the for the right reasons, the good and right and noble reasons, if it's between them and their prophet, oh my gosh, you would not believe. That's part of the book. That's the secret. The secrets of the building of Rock. I've just seen it so many times. It's something I've been saying for a while, never stand between someone and their prophet. It's not good book. I just had someone come recently and they were trying to pitch an integration and they basically wanna strip out so many of the features of Rock to put their product in instead. It's , okay, well, know, we're an open environment, right? A plugin, but I'm sorry, you can't pay us to take features out of Rock to put it into your product. But it's just frustrating. But here's the one thing I do wish. I wish that the church could see how the secular world drools over them. I think that discernment is always easy to see. I think we sit in a different space. So if we're sitting off to the side and we get to see the way that the secular world is looking at the church and seeing the prophet and being one step removed, I think it gives us a different little perspective. The analogy, Emily, you're probably gonna get mad at me. Because , my analogy is a little crazy sometimes, but They can be. I kind of feel sometimes it's , we're a brother watching other guys look at our sister. Oh, that's funny. , and we're , woah, woah, woah, woah, I know what you're doing over there. , I know what your motives are, you get away. And sometimes that's not our job. It's not our job to fight that battle. I think it's our job to maybe communicate that and share. And I think we do, and then sometimes that doesn't always make everybody happy. So I would just say , having been through this, having the last twelve, fourteen years, this is something that we've seen and that we've learned, if we seem sensitive about it, it's because I think we have a slightly different point that we're standing at and can see. We have a lot of conversations that literally, I don't think most churches have the ability to get into, a lot of conversations that are had with us. And again, trust me, if you stand between their prophet, you will hear about it. That church is not going to hear about it, because they're the source of the prophet. If you're trying to flirt with the sister, you're not mean. If the brother's , Hey, I don't know if this is the best thing. They get a different side of you. You're going to get the true side, I believe. So I would just put that out there. Think deeply reflect about that, just making sure that you understand and have good discernment that I was talking to a pastor recently, and we're talking about a certain segment of the church space and was just starting some views on it. He's , That's really interesting, because I always saw those as costs. And I didn't understand the amount of profit that I was inferring as cost. Because there are as cost of doing all things, But in talking through that and sharing some statistics, he's , That's super interesting. So I always just, in my mind, I just thought of that as cost. And he's , Now I realize a lot of that is cost and a lot of that is profit. And I was , Dead on. Of course costs have to be covered to have capitalism. But within the church base, we have to understand how much profit is enough. How much profit. That's right. And in support of what you're saying, John, we get inquiries nearly every week from organizations that have just discovered the Rock community, and you can tell that they see it as a profit center. And they reach out to us to explore how they can insert themselves in the middle of it between where money may be flowing. And we have these kinds of inquiries constantly. And it's , maybe once every year, maybe once every two years, have someone come and say, hey, I see what you're doing, I love it. How can I support it? How can I understand what you're doing? And then they, , then they really are trying to figure out how they can make it a win win. Most of the time it's , just tell me how to get this in here so I can make the profit. And then if we kind of push back and say, even if we say, we don't really have time to talk about it, they get really upset. They do. Again, you're staying between them and their prophet. And it really comes off as entitlement. I see it, I want it. Yeah. I kind of feel another analogy is the sheep and the wolves. The wolves are , tasty sheep. And I mean that you're , woah, woah, woah. Then the shepherd steps in, in this case, in this relationship, and then it's , Woah, this doesn't seem right. And again, it's an open environment. Anybody can write a plug in that can do whatever they want. We won't take it out unless it's materially harmful to the system, or completely immoral, which I can't imagine what that would even look . We haven't run across anything So anyways, I think those have been the major struggles. But as we look at how we see it, I feel I have a lot of product angst, it's still not even close to what we want, right? It continues to get better, but I look at all the information, what could be, , how do we surface this better? , I feel the media watches data is so crazy cool, and there's so much good data there, and how do we get that out? You can see it today, there's UI for it, but rarely does anybody go in there and look at it. Because it's something else you have to do. how do we surface that in a way that is much more easy to see? Very cool idea. So we're not happy with anything. That's I think is the point. That is the point. And how many conferences did we stand on stage and say, we don't yet have feature parity and then we wanna do so much more. And then eventually we got to say, okay, we have feature parity with the major administrative features and functions the church has to have. Now we're doing new things. Yeah. We're in the circle phase now, which is really great. But someone will come up and say, Well, the connection request, that can be much better. Absolutely. That's why it's on the product roadmap for next up, because we need to go do another whole round of that. And guess what? When we're done, we'll probably need to do another round. And guess what? We'll do it again. And we just did that with communication tools. Yeah, I think the communication tools are They've really leveled up, it's exciting. Yeah, 18 has. And again, we're not done yet, but we're gonna now focus attention, the same types of attention to connection request. And I'd also say steps too, the steps analytics. The developer who wrote that put a ton of time and making sure everything just felt smooth and it it looks and feels really good. So definitely, I'm looking forward to you guys getting that in '18. But so we have this angst that we're never there. And I think it's always gonna come down to a lack of resources. And sometimes that's money, but it's also people. Sure. And it's just really hard to find, retain and invest in this talent. But if we look at in the future, I feel we have a solid vision of where we wanna go. We know what we wanna do. We have a lot of the data's already in there. It's It's just about making it more and more approachable. We just right now short term resource constrained. Right now, I think money is always something we're gonna be needing, right? But our biggest constraint right now is just getting more people in, trained and retained. But we do have right now a really solid younger generation that we're building into. We do. We continue to In do fact, next week I'm going to a university to talk and share some stuff about AI, but it's also recruitment trip. It's not technically recruitment because we're going to speak inside the classrooms. But there's It will work that way. Slides being put up about if you want to do this. Seeds planted. That's it. And we have gotten great We sure have. Great candidates from that in the past. A lot of times students in the technical space don't realize that they can combine their ministry desires in a career path that also is exactly what they are talented at and want to do. For sure. I mean, I've done this two other times or three other times. And I literally, as you're talking, you can identify the students who are gonna come up to you afterwards because their eyes are literally getting big and that you can see , it's a You can see that they're excited that they can put their faith into this. It happens to be a Christian college too. So, , not everybody there is obviously Christian, but you can tell in the audience because they're leaning They're having a light bulb moment. Yeah. They're leaning forward. Yeah. That's exciting. To almost a t, who's gonna come up to you afterwards. Very cool. Alright. I just wanna do a really quick comparison of then and now because I think these are fun things to reflect on. So Brock v one launched in October 2014. In January 2015, so this is the first quarter following year, we had a handful of Rock downloads, and about 14 churches were using some of the features that we had available at that time. Now we have, , 462 ish churches on Rock. And we've had over 8,500 downloads of the Rock platform. We published our first blog post in February 2014, so shortly after our first podcast. We've had 382 blog posts published, and of course, this is our two hundredth podcast episode. It's always run on Rock. Yes. That's right. We use our own tools. And so we run into things a little bit before you do in some cases, and hopefully that's helpful too. And then let's compare conferences. Right? So we had our first conference in 2015, and then we just finished our conference in 2025. So here's a couple of fun comparisons. Our first conference, we had nine speakers compared to 66 this year. We had 20 sessions back in 2015. Some of our attendees went to sessions from NewPoint, CCV, NewSpring, and Central Christian about things they learned in using Rock. We had four sponsors. Three of those sponsors are still sponsors today, including IT OneSource, Protect My Ministry, and Kingdom First Solutions. Wow. Shout out. Yep. 116 registrants compared to 808 this year. And instead of the Phoenix Convention Center, which was our site this year, we used two youth rooms in the upstairs at Christ Church of the Valley here in the Phoenix area. And our check-in, thought was also a really interesting comparison. This year, of course, if you came to the conference, you had Beacon check-in as an option. You had TAP check-in as an option. You could use a standard kiosk. Well, in 2015, we actually had a piece of paper with a 116 names on it that we checked off as people walked in, and we knew every face that was there. So those are some really cool comparisons about where we started and where we are, and we're just ultimately so grateful, of course, to God for the vision, the inspiration, and the daily bread that keeps Rock moving. And also to the community, it would be impossible to mention all of the people that have invested time, effort, blood, sweat, and tears into helping move all of this forward. And it it truly is a group project. And we often use the hashtag better together on things we post because that is, , just one of the best observations we could have about what makes Rock function and what makes it unique. And the fact that it's running on a model that seems it couldn't make sense outside of the kingdom of heaven is just another example of God's hand in this. We are so grateful to the community, so excited for what's to come. So much has changed since 2014, since 2011 when the nonprofit was formed, and there is so much more to do. Thanks for tuning in. We appreciate your listening. We appreciate your engagement in the community. It does make a difference. Be sure to follow our podcast wherever you receive your podcast so you can find out more in the two hundred and first episode and those that follow. This episode of Rockcast is brought to you by Rock sponsor Intulse, a voice over IP service provider. Connect with Intulse today at Rock R M S Dot Com Slash Sponsors.