Podcast Episode 10: Episode 207: Success Isn't Measured by Church Size

Description

Tune into this episode to learn what quality the most successful Rock churches have in common. Hint: it isn't church size! Jon, Emily, and Nick offer fresh insight into the Essentials model and discuss a new program they're building to train Community members to help cast vision for Essentials churches. This is an empowering episode for churches of all sizes and one you'll want to share with your team.Find resources mentioned in this episode from the complete show notes at podcast-episode-207!

Transcribed Content

We need you as a Rock star. We've made the path to stardom clear with the Community Point system. Check out all the ways you can contribute to the community and push Rock further. On the community page of Rock, look for the get involved tab and find out how you can do your part. Welcome back to another episode of Rockcast. I'm Emily Forman. I have Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo here, and we are going to talk about what's going on with Rock this week and last week. And we are ready to kick off with the latest Rock version updates. Nick, there's a lot going on on that front. Fill us in. Yeah. We had a little patch that we released for seventeen point seven. It's just to fix this one issue on event registrations for people that use redirection gateways. And so that went out really quickly, And that fixes also in eighteen point two, which has been going through alpha testing using our new process. So the team has been chipping away at the tests we lined up for them and the beta testing will start soon. And again, to just remind everybody that's rolling out to real production systems. We have, I think, two groups of people, two phases, phase one and phase two. We'll roll those out, I think maybe next week, but I'm not exactly sure on the date. It's either this week or next week. And then eighteen point three is in progress. We got some issues that we're working on in there. And then version 19. I just want to point out a few items that are exciting in version 19. So we've made a group scheduler performance improvement in that block. The person merge has gotten some cool new features. If you request a merge and you don't have the ability to do the merge, the last updated information about certain fields will be shown to you when you're doing a merge so you can maybe make some better decisions about which fields you wanna keep. And previous last names. So if you're merging to maybe somebody's maiden name and you're merging it in with their new record, it'll keep that previous name, which helps for cert during searches. And those are the ones that I wanted to highlight today. I just wanna throw out too that on that seventeen point seven release, everything that was in seventeen point seven got moved to seventeen point eight. And so we cherry picked out one fix in. And that was because it doesn't impact a lot people. Nick said, it only impacts you if you use the redirection gateway. But going into camp season, going into a lot of other things, we wanted to get that out there really quick. And we wanna do it with low risk. And so because of that, we pushed everything that wasn't seventeen point seven to seventeen point eight, put that one in there, and just kind of important to note, in case you were waiting for something in 17.7, you now want to think 17.8. Alright. Great. That's a helpful tip. And our new process currently is features go into major versions, and our dot releases are specifically for fixes. Yeah. So it makes those dot releases very low risk. Okay. Well, thanks. That's a lot of information, Nick. Alright. We're gonna kick off some of the other elements of Rock Now, and that includes things talking through Rock Essentials, an update on short links, and an AI agent in Rock that we talked about at the last conference. If you were there, we have some updates on that. And then some of the things you'll want to know about Rx 26 that are new currently. So, John, let's let's dive right into the essentials. Where are we at? This is a big agenda for us this year. Yeah, and I think it's important to know that essentials is something that will never be done. It is a thing. And just Rock's a thing, and Rock is never done, essentials is. And it's not really a thing, it's more of a concept. I think it's important that before we go forward, we go backwards and go back to why did we create Rock and why did we create Rock in the model that we did? If you go back to before Rock, BR. BR? Adopt that. Accessibility for technology was primarily limited by cost. And the Rock model has fixed that. So accessibility is our top core value. I mean, it's hard to have the most important core value, but in my heart, it is. And when we started, we just felt that this was an injustice, that only big, huge, large churches could afford access to the best technology. And so Rock has really flattened that cost curve. To the point where it is, zero. With the grants and all the different generosity things, Rock is available to you without having to worry about cost. That's right. And licensing is no longer the barrier for the best technology. So that doesn't mean that there is no barrier, that means that there's a next up barrier. And that next up barrier is mainly complexity. And so when we think about complexity, a lot of that complexity within Rock is perceived. That's a great point. I feel if we were to go into a new world and someone were to drop Rock into someone's lap, they would go, Oh, wow. Okay. Got it. This doesn't seem too hard. Now, the reality is if we did that, they probably wouldn't be using all the advanced features of Rock. They That's could store people, they could store groups, they could manage your giving, do a very, very basic website. So a lot of that is perceived. And what they usually mean when they say that Rock is complex, they're really being shown the most complex aspects of Rock, the most complex attributes of Rock. And that's why they go, Oh, this is complex, you need a developer. It's , Woah. So it's really not necessarily a product problem. That said, we're always onboard saying Rock is never gonna be acceptable to us. we're always gonna see the things, the little warts, the little changes that we can do. No, of course it's a product problem, but more importantly, I think way more importantly than we give credit to, it's really how we talk about rocks. And Rock is primarily shared by word-of-mouth from churches in the community that may be doing some really cool things because they've been on Rock for a long time and have some complex needs. So it kind of makes sense that that's the the message that's getting out. Yeah. When you say message, that's exactly right. And the message comes from marketing. And the thing is we've never done marketing. But here's the other reality. When you don't do marketing, you did marketing. Marketing always happens. Marketing always exists. And by not marketing, you're leaving a vacuum for everybody else to go describe the product. That's what our community has done. And for the most part, they've done a great job communicating the product. The problem is we've saturated the market for complexity. All the churches that want complexity, desire complexity, they pretty much are on Rock. , good job, community has done an amazing job. But now we need to be intentional about our marketing and not let it have a void that gets filled by whatever each individual describes it as. And so I believe that there are three sources of perceived complexity. The first is how we talk about Rock. We often explain a Rock we're talking to power users. And again, that's been a good thing, that's been successful. Those are the people that , a lot of our churches hang with, is other churches with power users. We lead with internals, edge cases, architectural flexibility, of outcomes. Yep. And I think a big one is that architectural flexibility. That's a key attribute of Rock, and that's what we're proud of. However, it's not often what people wanna hear. And I can give you a real life case. I had a church literally, I mean, not figuratively, literally get a little frustrated with me in a meeting because they're coming to Iraq and they kept asking me questions , Okay, group structure. Tell me how I should lay out my small group. And then every time that we hit a topic this, I'd be , Well, it depends. And they got frustrated hearing that, It depends. Now the truth was that is the right answer, but the truth also is , well, let me just understand what you want first. Not to say it depends, and say, well, tell me about your groups. Or to maybe just go down the path of the primary use case. Typically in Rock, you'd lay out your groups in this structure. You'd make one group type, maybe two if you wanted a regional kind of concept, but typically one group type and you just layer them this. That's what they kind of want to hear. I was trying to be detailed and give the most precise answer. An engineer's answer. Yeah, and a lot of times they don't want to hear that. Yeah, right. Now, another thing we would say internally, we always say call the foul. So it's likely that the answer I give you may not be the perfect right answer because of all your different use cases. So caveat that, say, Well, I mean, you might have specific use cases, and I'd be happy to talk to you about those. But typically, group structures in Rockwood look something this. So you kind of did both. And then they know where to start. And if something doesn't work for them, that's when it might be time to look at complexity. Right. We see flexibility as a feature. We don't see flexibility as also at the same time a confusion point or a detractor or a complexity Okay. So three sources of perceived complexity. Hit with the first one, how we talk about Rock. The second one is the examples that we showcase. The demos that we tend to show are the most advanced, what the most advanced churches are doing. And not only the most advanced churches, what they're doing, we show them the most advanced thing that they did. That's right. Now, in hindsight, that kind of makes some sense, right? Look at this, it's amazing. Oh my gosh. what? That's the thing we're most pumped about, but that's not the same thing that they're gonna be most pumped about. It's kind of if I'm gonna describe a new laptop to my mom, I might be jazzed by certain features, but she's gonna be jazzed by other features. If I'm trying to convince her this is a laptop for her, which feature should I tell her about? Not my feature set, but the feature set she wants. Otherwise, she's , Oh, great, that sounds awesome. I'm not getting that laptop, I don't even know what you said. Sounds overwhelming. Do I have to know all the vocabulary he Right, I think that's what good salesmen do. They lean in, they try to understand the person who's buying. Then they talk about that. if you go buy a car, they don't generally just take you over to the first car or their most favorite car and tell you about that. They ask you a few questions and then they start showing you a car. Then based on how you respond, they start giving you other attributes. Okay, three sources for perceived complexity, how we talk about Rock, the examples we showcase, and the other one is the absence of a clear on ramp. Oh, that's an interesting one. Yeah, so it's , okay, now you convinced me, now what do I do? How do I get started? Okay, now the complexity's really started. Now that part is not necessarily unique to Rock. I mean, every product you're gonna have to onboard. But I think our onboarding that we described, the unwrap that we described is the one we went down. And it's not necessarily the one that they need to go down. Churches who have bad data don't even need to transfer their data. And that's a good thing. And that's actually a benefit. Good news, your data stinks, so we get to start over, and there's really good techniques to do that. That's right. Let your people enter it. You're gonna have the best data known to man. week one, your data will never be better, will never be fresher. Your goal is not to keep it that way. So a lot of this is just thinking ahead, C is really on us. Actually, all of this is on us, so we need to do trainings and discussions this, cast vision this, but we're gonna go into a lot more detail, and we'll talk about that. So here's another key point about essentials. And it's a key point that a lot of people get confused about. Essentials is not about the size of the church, it's about the diligence that that church is willing to put in, or the amount of grit that they have. Oh, I'm glad you're pointing that out. That can be a really confusing topic as we speak into the community of current churches using rocks. So can you say that one more time? Yes, so Essentials is not about the size of the church, it's about the willingness to put diligence or grit into it. Everybody keeps asking, What's the right size? It's not the right size. It's just , Are they gritty? I'm thinking about a local ministry here in town, and I'm trying to, in my head, determine, would they be good for Rock? And I've talked with a senior pastor, and he's kind of interested, but he also is smart enough to realize this is a big deal. And the question I want to answer in my head that I'm currently trying to figure out is, is their support staff gritty? If their support staff's gritty, it's a great. If their support staff is not gritty, probably not ready. Or I need to cast division way differently. , it's great because it can store, it'd be a Rolodex and you can store your groups in that. And so I'm trying to assess that. I'm trying to, without really asking the question, because you can't ask that question. Right. Is your support staff really good? Of course they are, because that can mean they're highly relational and they do stuff, that's not a bad thing, that's a good thing. But right now for the essentials and their readiness for Rock is , do they have on a disc score, you want some high Cs in there? Yes. And you want someone with a little space in their role or calendar to be able to manage a system. Yeah. Which they might be doing on a different system today. It doesn't have to be that different, but someone has to care for it. Yeah. So we, and our personas are very purposefully built, right? So Ted Decker is the outreach pastor. I mean, we're gonna talk about stereotypes and I don't stereotypes because they're, , they're not true about the individual, but they're true in a larger sense. So he's kind of the idea guy, but he doesn't really implement. Alicia Marble, and she's the one that keeps that church going. She's greedy, she's disciplined, she's a good thinker, she has a process mindset. Rock Solid Church, our fake church, wouldn't be what it is if it wasn't for Ted and his ideas, but also for Alicia and her ability to implement. And so that's what we're looking for, more than anything on size. And I would say this, the difference between the most successful Rock churches today is not the number of attendees, but rather the discipline and process maturity of their internal team. Are they willing to put in the reps? That's a good point. If you're the NFL team, are you gonna put in your reps? If an NBA player, you're putting in your reps. It's not the size of the team's budget. It's , are the players hungry? And I think a lot of people I think a lot of people in our community maybe give too much deference to the largest churches, and not enough deference to the churches who are grinding it out. Also, so discipline and process maturity of the internal team, but also the quality of leadership of the team that's overseeing the data team. , are they disciplined themselves? Are they reading? Are they finding even out about Rock? Not that they have to know lava, that would be not a great idea. But do they understand how it's structured, its licensing model, what new features are coming, how we see ministry? I mean, that's important. And then third, and I bring this up third because it is third in priority, although it often gets put as highest in our minds, is technical abilities of the internal team. That's an interesting placement, so explain that. Yeah, and I put right next to this, in huge words, it's all uppercase, but this is not nearly as important as people think. People think the teams that have for the programmers are the teams that are gonna do better in Rock, that is not true. Best teams are not measured in the presence of a C sharp developer, but rather the amount of discipline and effort they are willing to put in. That's interesting. In fact, I think some of the churches that come top of mind who I'm most impressed with don't have a C sharp developer. Yep. But they've got some greedy people who are willing to get their hands dirty. So, and I kind of put it another way, it's that technologies SQL and Lava are not required. However, they are very approachable to anybody to learn if they have the desire and to put in the effort. The Traeger effect. Jennifer Traeger. Yeah. And I think there's a lot of people I can look at and they would be , Well, no, didn't want to learn Love and Sequel, I didn't come knowing it, but I recognized that they would be helpful to me, and so therefore I rolled up my sleeves and I learned it. I mean, I don't think there's a person on the planet who can't learn those two technologies if they desire to. And we've created classes specifically to help people who have a desire to learn that inside the Rock ecosystem. And we start from the beginning. So it is not only approachable, but we help make it easy to find too. Yeah, and hopefully this message is encouraging to a lot of people, even those who are not concerned about our Essentials program. Success is at the end of a willingness to be uncomfortable. That's true. Not an intelligence that you were born with, or that you've grown through college or experiences. It's , are you willing to put in the reps? Okay, let's go. And literally, train our whole staff on that. We just had a culture training yesterday, and we talk about, Hey, the stage is not for us. The stage that, we show a video, this concept makes more sense when you see the video. But we were the stage builder, the mic makers, lighting technicians, and we're building a stage for Alicia Marble to do stuff that she doesn't think she can do. And when she does it, because we stayed out of the way and we encouraged and we gave her the right training, then the world changes. But if we stand on that stage, the world won't change because there's very few of us, but there's a lot of leashes. , that's such a unique concept in the world today. Most people are looking at how can I build a stage I can stand on? Or where is the stage that preexists that I can stand on right now? Yeah. And it's unique concept to build a stage and say, come, come learn, come grow. And I would say that maybe the beginning, this might've been more evident, but now maybe not. Every time we get on a stage, it's at gunpoint really. we don't want to be on that stage, but we are , okay, God, send me, I guess I'll go, I'll do this. But we're not trying to be a cult of personality. In fact, we work very hard not to be. The cult of personality that we want is a million Alicia Marbles and some Ted Deckers and some fill in the blanks. Have a lot of personas. We talk about them primarily though. Okay, so that's who this is about. It's not about the size, it's about the diligence. So quit thinking about size, think about diligence. Now, moving on from that concept, related to it, our internal resources at Spark are very limited, very limited. So as we start to reach out internally, and that's not our primary goal, our primary goal is to work through our community. The community That's is the power of Rock. But we also have a part to play too, and our part is a minor part. But we are limited in resources. So as we start to reach out, we need to have a plan of who we target. Now, know you were the director of communications at CCV. I was the director of communications before you. We know that people don't to target, especially in the church world. Right. And I get it for good reasons, right? But here's the reality, if you don't target, you have a target. You just don't haven't identified your target. That's right. And the worst target you can do is to try to serve all people at all times, because you'll please no one. Your message has to be tailored to your audience. If you don't have an identified audience, then your message is too broad to make a difference for anyone. Or as you mentioned, it is actually targeting someone. You just don't know who it is, and that's a very ineffective process. Right now, the good news is with the community, we can have a diversity of targets. Because each church in the community hopefully has diversity in their size, liturgy, whatever. Oh, it's a hugely diverse community. Denomination. And so yes, we want to encourage that diversity. We love diversity. In fact, if you don't diversity, you're gonna hate heaven, because heaven's got so much diversity in it, we can't even understand it. So the diversity of our strategy will come through the community, which is our primary marketing tool, but as we talk internally, we have to have some kind of target. And the community should be here to help everyone and anyone, but Spark has to have a limited target. And to target everyone is to target no one. Right. Or I should say, let me rephrase that, to target everyone is to reach no one. Effectively, that's right. So it makes sense to us that we would focus ourselves. Now, this is a temporary target. The target always shifts and changes. So for us, because we're small, it makes more sense for us to focus on fewer churches that will have the greatest impact. Often called the eightytwenty rule. So we're gonna go after the 20% of churches or 20% organizations that we can get the 80% of the bang for. Now, the cool thing, this becomes a flywheel. And the community is a flywheel. The community started as five churches. Well, it's not anymore. And the more churches that come in means the more churches that can be reached. And the more churches they come in, then we get more reach. It's an exponential situation. Right. So we need to focus our internal So thinking on we need to have this flywheel to expand the community, which will reach others, which we can move on to the next branch. That's right. Even Spark has grown. Spark used to be literally zero paid people, now we have some more paid people. And hopefully over time as the community gets bigger, we get more people, we can reach more people. So for us right now, that means churches in the 3,000 to maybe 5,000 range initially. Now, thing I to say too, is size does not matter. I think so many times in our culture, size becomes value, and that is totally not true. No, not at all. And some people might say, already have a lot of churches in a community that size. Yes, but we've only scratched the surface. I think we've saturated the top 20 churches, for sure we've saturated that. When you move down to the 3,000 to 5,000, the percent saturation we have is single digit. So, I mean, yeah, there are a lot of churches in that size, but we have not saturated that. And that doesn't mean these churches are better or more important, it just makes more sense with our limited resources internally to start going down that path. And again, size does not mean these are older churches. There's a church in town that had 2,300 people for Christmas. They're less than three years old. Wow. That's incredible. So But we feel we can have more value in God's kingdom initially, if we hit these. Now, again, the community's gonna be hitting all the diversity, high, low, up, down. Right. And that's important. Now, as we start going through this, one of the programs that's gonna be really important is the ambassador program. Do you want to kind of unpack that a little bit? Yes. We're excited about the ambassador program. It's going to be a way that we can help train and pour into some of the leaders in the Rock community in a way that helps them have conversations with some of these potential target churches in this area. So there's different things these churches need to hear and know and understand, as you mentioned earlier, John. And that is going to be something that we can help with. So we're going to kind of mobilize a group that will be trained in how to reach churches of these sizes, asking the right questions, getting the right inputs, helping them move forward in their path. So there it'll be kind of a one to one relationship building guide to what is Rock and how to onboard if it makes sense. Now, these will not be people that will be pressuring someone to move to Rock, but maybe learning better how to evaluate if Rock is the right fit for them, and then helping them get connected in the ways that we know drive the growth and prosperity of the church and the community, right? Those engagement things that help them feel connected and move forward. So that's gonna be big part of casting vision from Spark into the churches, and we'll help get them connected with the experts that can really help those churches. And we'll provide training for that. That's right. There'll be training classes that understand, just we talked about how to talk outside of yourself. How does the sales guy at Ford approach That's the right. And this is intended to be a relationship building process too. There will be some guardrails that we put in place so that we don't create someone who's a helper forever to another church. We're not trying to create a lot of work that comes out of that on an ongoing basis. But there's definitely a gap that we can fill with that relational understanding and movement toward Rock expertise. And these are gonna be churches that are already kind of self announced that they're interested And what I think is really cool, this is just what we would do in the church. You have these people who show up, they say, I'm kind of interested in this. You get them into a connection process, right? And I hear there's a really cool product that has a connection tool. And we're thinking about using it. I don't know, we'll see. I hear you have to be a developer though to Oh use gosh. Oh, hurry, hurry. Let's But get that ambassador anyways, we're gonna put them into a process that links them up to people. Then not only do you help them understand Rock, but you'll do some check ins. Right. Just you would in the church. And you said, there'll be guardrails, you don't become their indentured servant. Yep. We don't want that. And that they don't We'll set the expectations so that they know, you're not there to do all the work for them. That's right. And , all of this that we're talking about, the ambassador program is new, formalized that way. But over time, it's all been a part of making Rock more accessible, which you mentioned way back at the beginning. And we started where we were, which, , this was an effort that came from some of the very largest churches. And we worked toward what does accessibility mean? And that definition continues to adapt and change over time as we saturate certain markets and as we meet certain needs. So part of what we're doing here is just moving into a slightly different space that we can learn and grow from, and we'll continue learning, growing, and moving into accessibility. So what we're targeting right now, what we're talking about, that will be temporary, and we'll continue to learn and grow and move. And that's just been the way that Rock has operated since the beginning. And once we've saturated all the three to five thousands, we'll move down to eventually where, oh, you're a five person church? Great. Let's talk. Here here's the one thing you need to know how to do. Yeah. That's great. Well, and if you happen to notice our website rollout, we have a brand new, beautiful, very modernized website about Rock, therockrms.com site, which we call our marketing site. There's a couple reasons that we have rolled out a new look and, , user experience for that site. One is, boy, did it need it. It needed a facelift for a while. And as they say, the cobbler's son has no shoes. So we just hadn't put the time and effort into that. We directed our efforts elsewhere. Honestly, it didn't really matter because Right. People didn't come to websites on Rock. That's so true. They came to the community. So But the more we move toward essentials and making this accessible for churches that are a little smaller and need a little less complexity, the more our complex website was making no sense. And so we reimagined the right pathways for churches to understand what is this Rock thing and how do I get involved. So if you haven't checked the site out yet, please do. We'd love to, , hear what you think about it. We're very excited about it. It introduces the community right up front on the homepage as well. And that's a really cool new thing, but there's a lot about the site that's really awesome. Its goal is to make it very easy for you to also share with other churches and they can better understand Rock and how to get connected or get started. So as we talk about different things on the podcast, we to have a diversity of topics. It's kind of a well balanced plate of food. So one of the things I wanted to talk a little bit about is a feature that think that gets underused. And there's a couple other features I want to talk about that are underused, but the first one is short links. So short links are basically a feature Bitly, it's a URL shortener, but it's so much cooler than Bitly. And so what this does is allows you to take a internet address, a URL, and mask it behind a shortened URL. And this all runs in Rock. And there's a lot of good use cases for that, but I think our toolset is way more powerful than any others. Why? First of all, it's tied to a person. So you, the person, can have your own, and everybody else can have their own. And you can have system ones too, but I think people understand that use case well, but I use these a lot. if I'm gonna send someone a link, I'll often just wrap it in a short link, because I wanna see if they use it and I wanna see the metrics of it. We added some new features recently, you can pin them now. So what I was finding is, I'm doing this a lot and some of my automated ones, it gets kind of messy in there. And so now you can pin them. So you can keep your top ones at the top. You can also, this sounds a really dumb feature. Well, that we didn't already have it, but you can now one click copy to get your link before you had to kind of know, Oh, this is going to that site, the URL of that site is, and then the short link is this, and you had to kind of piece it together in your head. Yeah, we waited too long to put that feature in. Oh, that's great simplicity. So you can copy to paste. There's also analytics. The analytics on the usage are really, really cool because it allows you to slice and dice it. One of the things that we've often made made very easy is applying the UTM codes. So UTM codes are marketing codes that you can kind of describe , Woah, here's the link, but where did, , this link was used on Facebook, this link was used on Twitter. And so the analytics dive into that. It will track the source that the click came from, right? Yeah, and for a long time, I mean, any URL you get, you can apply those codes yourself. But I kind of kept forgetting , is it underscore, is it dash? What was that one? Is UTM source? What's the other one? So we just put it in the product and we made it really easy. the sources are all defined, so you don't have to worry about typos. Some of the other ones terms are loose, you can type whatever you want. And we really thought through it and did a good case. You can also schedule your links. So it might be that the URL you send to somebody on Tuesdays goes to one link, redirects to one link, on Wednesdays it redirects to a different link. And you can do it by time, by day. And so this is really cool if you have links tied to NFC tokens or QR codes, just really, really flexible. Some of the use cases are personal sharing, I think I do quite a bit. Communications, you can set up communications with these and then now they can it it just makes it really easy to track its usage. I mean, you can track that usage through the communication analytics too, but if you wanna if you really wanna boil into the links, the communications works really well. Especially if the communications isn't always digital, you could put it on a poster, you could put it on anything you're tracking it. And then also in marketing and in service, if you put things on the back of chairs right now, that's a big thing. There's a huge thing tap to give, tap to do this. It's marketed as these huge features. It's really not a feature. It's , dude, it's just a short link. , come on, not that hard. And so the scheduling feature was added because of all this hype about tap to this. And we're kind of looking at going , wait, are making you pay for that? , we can do that for free, come on. In a lot of different ways on a lot of different things. And that's my personal thing. I've always looked at the very beginning is this disrupting people who are trying to make a lot of money to do nothing. It's , okay, well fine, we can do that. , Two days of programming later, it's There you go. And there it is, it's free. Take that. And in version 19, just pitching a little new micro feature to this, and this one came from our community, was expire in days. Oh. So a lot of times you get all these short links and it's , Oh man, we have There's churches that have tens of thousands, maybe a 100,000 short links because you can create them in lava and other places and it creates a short link for every single person unique, which is a nice feature, but it can overwhelm you. And so now you can say, Hey, expire in ninety days. the link is not needed. And that helps keep your short links a little cleaner. You don't need to, but it's just a good feature. There's actually some other features we want to add. I won't name them because every time I name a feature, then someone asks me , Why isn't it not done yet? I thought you said this was done, John. Yeah, I only try now to talk about features that are actually scheduled. And even then, schedules shift. So please give grace. Wow. That is a lot of power right under the hood of short links. And I bet a lot of people may not even know that this is possible in Rock at all. Communication teams probably aren't going to discover this for themselves in the platform, unless their team members are members of the community as well. Yeah, and we did upgrade them in the UI. In the menu, they used to be buried underneath admin tools, communications, and now they're just under admin tools, right at the top. And you might consider moving it under someplace where your communications people have Maybe easier they have a dashboard you wanna add it to, but if your communications team members aren't members of the Rock community, this might be something you wanna highlight for them as a great project to move toward this year. Time saving, cost savings, and then the analytics behind it tied into Rock are really powerful. Yeah, so send them a link to the documentation and wrap that in a short link. You can actually see if they clicked it. Haven't clicked it yet. I literally do tracking that. You. If someone asks for something, I'm , I don't think they're gonna look at this, I'll wrap it in a short link. I'm , just not knowing that everybody's gonna click my links now. I'm not gonna read it, but there's your analytic. That's great. Another thing I wanted to talk about coming up, that comes from the future feature is our AI agent technology that we're putting into Rock. We're still working on the skills for that. So we're building out all these skills for the agent. A preview of this will be coming in '19. We're not calling it done. I don't think it'll ever be done, we're calling it just still putting that preview moniker on it. The good news is since the conference, I think I mentioned at the conference, the biggest performance problem is actually the foundational models that do the orchestration. So not our code, but ChatGPT or Anthropic, whatever you choose. They were very slow at tool calling because every time it wants to run a tool, it has to ask itself, what tool should we call? And what do we need to send it? That's actually gotten a lot faster since the conference. These foundational models have seen the need for this and we're using it now. It's , Oh, wow, this feels much better. I'm really excited about how the team is doing this and how we're approaching it. We're really thinking through the right way to do it. I think in the beginning, it's easy just to go, This is a piece of cake. All we have to do is just have a great sequel and then just go. And that's a natural first thought. We had those first thoughts and then we prototype some of that and we realized, A, it doesn't work very well and B, it's highly irresponsible. It's almost malpractice. Yikes. Because you're skirting around the business logic. You're skirting around the configuration. A lot of times when you think about that, it's , oh, it's just a syntactical SQL problem. And it's not. That's that is a problem. That but that's a problem that's pretty easily solved. But you also have a valid values problem. So you say, hey, give me all the accounts where someone has given to. It's , Okay, which accounts are those? Which ones are considered giving? You have to go The whole structure of the system is there for a reason. And the AI has to understand that. And the AI has great at understanding that if you just describe it to it, and that's what these skills do. It provides a wrapper to all of the business logic that you've done. And I think really that is the future. Our skills might become, it'll get more adept at calling our skills. But at the end of the day, the AI needs to know, we do, what is the intent of these things? And that's also in the system, but it needs to come through it just we would come through it. You can't just throw a ton of SQL and it can go and query it, but it won't understand the business logic behind that. And I think as people start vibe coding, they're realizing that. Vibes coding is great for small things. I think vibe coding will get better. But when you start vibe coding, what's the AI gonna be doing? It's gonna be creating the same structures to collect the business logic. Right. So to me, it's coding something simple scripts and small websites. Yeah, AI can probably take that. Architecting large systems with flexibility and understanding for the future, it's not good at yet. Will, I'm not saying it won't do that. But it's only gonna do that through the same pathways of the engineering that we put into it, and the principles of design and principles of storing business logic. And it hasn't gotten to that yet. And that's why I kind of think the human in the loop will still be needed. It might be doing 90% of the work, but that creativity, that novel, thinking of something that truly never existed, I think that is a unique thing God's created us and doubt us with. And just remember these AIs, the tool sets are all based on just the knowledge and the thoughts that humans have had. There's nothing novel in them. They can come up with novel ways of reusing some of the thoughts that we've had. If you think through how Einstein created his theory of relativity, go read it. It's crazy how he came up with it. Completely novel thinking. I don't think we'll see it take on those. Because we're now into the gifts of God versus the application of the scientific laws that God also made. I think our creativity is different than that. It's unique. Yeah. So anyways, we're working on some great patterns. And I wanna have a whole podcast on this concept. The initial use case of this will be for humans to ask it questions and for it to do things, these skills. Just realize that in the future, the skills will rarely be used by humans. Things will happen, people will maybe sign up for an event, the AI is gonna go, Oh, they signed up for an event. I'm gonna go call these skills to do these things. And I'm gonna think, I've been told to look out for people who are maybe leaving or separating from the church, and I'm gonna go call these other tools. Majority of, I'd say day 100% of tool usage will be humans. Day two, it's probably gonna be 90%. And I think within a year or two, it's gonna be , Oh, a human actually called, used that skill, ? Where it's going is gonna be drastically different, think, than where people expecting it. Very interesting. Yeah. Very inefficient too. in the future, I think there's gonna be so much things happening. CPU utilization that is almost for not anyways, that's a whole another topic. Invest in your power company. Wow. So we have covered a lot of ground today. But before we sign off, I have to give a quick r x twenty six update, because this is going to happen in November, but there's a lot moving right now. We have just opened up our sponsor registration and sent some sponsorship packets out, so we're excited to see a lot of our sponsors returning with us and some new ones coming, and you'll start to see some movement on that front. So don't forget that they're great companies to connect with, and the conference is a great time to go around and learn more about the providers in the Rock space. Also, our team's getting ready to do another site visit at the Phoenix Convention Center, which is going to be the location again this year. But I can tell you we'll be in a different building than last year. So if you haven't heard that yet, we'll be kind of around the corner from the building we were in last year. And this year, the event will be all on one floor. So last year, if you joined us, we had a couple different levels to go to for different activities. We'll be all on one floor, but still in the Downtown Phoenix area. We're really excited about it. And a lot of work is going into planning this incredible event. I did wanna mention if you do not have your room tickets yet, the Renaissance Hotel, which is currently the only registration up on our Rx twenty six website. The Renaissance Hotel is gonna be the site of some after hours hangouts. So that's the place you wanna be. But we know there aren't enough rooms for everyone who's going to attend. There are other hotels. There will be space for everyone, but not all at the Renaissance. In the first month of having that registration open, 20% of the rooms have been sold out already. So we're here at January. It's in November. That hotel space is gonna go quickly. So here's my shout out to you faithful podcast listeners. Go get those rooms while you can because that's the place that you wanna be. That's where the cool kids are gonna be. Well, yeah. I mean, you can still come to the lobby. Oh, for sure. But then you gotta take the walk. You'll be you'll be walking over from somewhere else. So if you want the convenience of just going right upstairs to your room, the Renaissance Hotel is the one you'll wanna be in, and that will fill up soon. And once it does, don't worry, we'll open other registration links. You will not be Mary and Joseph looking for a stable. You will have a room in a hotel, but it will not be the Renaissance. Some of you might be thinking, I'm gonna have to walk to a different hotel in November, and it's not gonna be cold. No, it's gonna be great. Remember how you complained about the summer conference here in Phoenix? November's ideal. So it will be wonderful. Okay. That was my main pitch. Get the hotel room. We're excited about the conference. A lot's coming. There will be some additional changes. We'll keep talking about that as that continues to move on. But do bring those churches around you that might be interested in Rock. Do let your leadership know there's gonna be a vision day that they'll want to be a part of so they understand this incredible tool that's in their hands, the vision of where it's going, and can overlap that with the vision of the church. And then make sure your team's there as well. We look forward to seeing you, and thank you so much for joining us for another episode of Rockcast. Be sure to subscribe so you get a notification when we're back again. We need you as a Rock star. We've made the path to stardom clear with the Community Point system. Check out all the ways you can contribute to the community and push Rock further. 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