Podcast Episode 7: Episode 210: The Science of Finding Greatness in People

Description

In this episode of Rock Cast, the team gives a brief update to v19 heading into pre-alpha and revisit the heart behind Rock. More than a ChMS, Rock was designed as a relational management system to steward people, not just data. The feature, Following, is one of the most underutilized tools that acts as a personalized digest to help you respond with care and track major life events. They deepen the conversation by challenging listeners to invest in volunteers and build a simple volunteer growth framework.Visit the show notes to find all the resources talked about in this episode.

Transcribed Content

Hey. We're back again today. We've got three important things to talk about. Three great things to talk about. Three great things. Rock v 19 is going into alpha testing, so we gotta catch up on that. Yes. We've got a a feature that could change how your whole team does pastoral care. It will. And you're gonna tell us all about that. Yes. And spoilers. It's been around forever. So it's not new, but it might be underutilized. Yes. It is. Okay. And then finally, we're gonna talk about Adam Grant's science of finding greatness in people that everyone else has overlooked. Sounds a great ministry topic. Yes. But we have to kick it off with our v 19 update. Yes. Alright, Nick. Fill us in. Okay. Real quick. Before we talk about v 19, v eighteen three is kind of being worked on still, putting bug fixes in there, but we're not sure if or when that's gonna be released. It's probably gonna be after v 19, if any. So v 19 is going to alpha next week, which is super exciting. What does that mean? It really hasn't changed. That's alpha's the same as it's always been. So people are testing the features on their test systems, kicking kicking the tires on anything that's really important to them. But there's some really amazing new features in v 19 that I wanted to kind of go deeper into. We've talked about this a little bit in the past, the major UI overhaul to the connections feature, which I finally got to play with. Very cool. New UI. John, you've been instrumental in that redesign. What are the things churches who live in that tool need to know? Yeah. Well, first of all, it's been an amazing team project. , we had new UX resources applied. We have new some of our newer developers have been involved. It's been a complete team. And so even though some of the ones have been around for a while, I think we have, , five people working on it all at once, which is really rare for us. Usually, a feature is done by one person, and it was really fun for the team to all get in there and collaborate and work together on that. A lot of projects don't you can't do that with. This one, we could. So yes, the user experience is really different, and it's really exciting. A few churches have seen it already in use, and they were blown away. So it's definitely gonna give you some new ways of looking at it. And some of that, it's gonna feel right, but it's actually gonna perform better too. In some ways, the older UI, we were trying to achieve some stuff we just couldn't get done in one page. But we've really reimagined it. It has a few new features. So there's this concept of due dates on these connection requests. Before, we were trying to mimic that in some really weird ways, and now we've given you some configuration to do that. And then also near do. So there's do and near do. I feel I say near do Near do? A million times a day now. So I think the UI is gonna be the amazing part, and we're not done. Version 20 is gonna have the remainder of the connection features, but the big dog one is what we call list view. So board view is what you're kinda used to. Board view is still there, but list view is gonna be what you're gonna live in, and you're gonna want to live in it. And just amazing features for that. It's always exciting when you get to work on something and then you get see the the difference. Not every feature that's worked on do you see, the visible changes. This is a big one. Yeah. And there's one actually micro feature to it that we added, called celebrations. And that's a feature you can turn off if you don't want to by connection type, but it allows the people who are working on these connections to report a celebration because often there's so much ministry behind each one of those requests. And we wanted to celebrate that. Celebrations. Because we know that when we provide a tool this, everybody wants a tool this until they get a tool this, and now it becomes work. Right? It's it has all the features, but at the end of the day, it becomes work. So how do we get out of that, , work concept? And I think that the way we do that is to to celebrate the the impact that we're having. And and we are having that, but there's not been a tool to really capture that. And so you can now enter it. In V20, we're gonna have a nice report that's gonna show you all those celebrations. Very cool. Cool. Alright. So I don't wanna delay the next one. AI. Everybody's talking about AI. It's everywhere. We have AI agents and limited release. There's a handful of churches that have kind of been selected to play with this during their v 19 deployment. Can you tell us a little bit more about, , what a church should be doing with this on day one? Well, when they get it, they should just start trying to use it to do their day to day things. Now I think it's any AI takes a while to kind of figure out its use cases, and and we're in that too. And that's why we wanna limit it to one, then two, then three, then four churches. First first of all, we wanna we wanna test our guardrails. I feel really good about our guardrails, but we also wanna make sure that we're being careful. I think it'd be unwise to just go, AI, everybody gets it for day one. Let's go. So we wanna test our guardrails. Also, know we might need to adjust and tweak our skills and tools to make sure that we can achieve all that people want. In the limited testing that we in demoing we've done, some people have thrown out some, hey, make it do this. And, boy, I'm always nervous when I'm typing that. , okay. Let's see. And to date, it's checked all those boxes, but we know we're gonna find some places and some things that it can and can't do. Primarily, it's gonna be for your ministry staff to use. It won't do things build me a workflow. It can launch workflows and execute workflows, but it's not gonna build the workflow for you. That's certainly possible in the future, but we're trying to get it to more of the point where it's giving you data. Obviously, you can update people. You can change your addresses. You can email people. You can send SMS messages. You can do lots of stuff, lots. Yep. But if you're gonna say, hey. Add a defined value for me. I can't do that now. That'd be an easy skill for us to build, but we've built a ton of skills. And the team's done an amazing job there too. I was just looking at some of the the latest stuff yesterday, and I was blown away by by some of that. And you can build your own tools and skills. I'm building one of my own for something custom inside of our instances, and it's super easy. I was up late last night working on that, and I was , oh. Wow. Cool. So, , that one's gonna be a little bit of a slow roll. It's in '19, but we've held back some bits. You're gonna see some of the UI in there that that's gonna configure it, but but you're gonna go to the skill list and it's gonna be the pantry is empty because we're holding back the skill file, and then we're going to deploy that very cautiously. Okay. Alright. Very good. The next item on my list is event registrations. There's a new duplicate prevention feature and registrant filtering. So, I mean, people who have had large events have all dealt with duplicates. Emily, do of some churches and some of the issues that they've, , run into? And what does this fix mean for them? Yeah. This fix is gonna be huge for them. I mean, during heavy event seasons, it is tough to keep up with the number of duplicates that are created. And even, , strong data integrity teams can get behind. The downstream impact of that is, , you might have difficulty communicating with people. You got duplicates. You're trying to send information out to them. Which angle does it go in? You can have some weird ministry moments from that. So this will really help reduce some of that administrative pull on the teams and deliver some extra time for them to put into ministry. It's preventing duplicate registrants. So people registering the same person twice. Yep. And so, yeah, we've all been there. Making registrations simple is always a great feature. And I think that's cool. But what about filtering? You can filter now. That filtering by age and by gender? It's gender, age classification, if , adult child. So if you have an event and you only want adults Mhmm. Your children might show up in the list as selectable or not selectable. It won't let you register them, basically. Yeah. We still we still put them in the list, and that was a design decision we made because we felt if we if we took them from the list, they might try to add them back in. Right. Yeah. So we said, okay. Show them on the list, but if you pick them, it's gonna say, hey. This person doesn't really match the, , the age ranges. So I can't accidentally register myself for camp. Yeah. My kids camp. Right. Yeah. A lot of grandparents, I guess, tend to do that. Yeah. Or if it's a girls only thing, you can make sure that boys don't get into the registration. Yeah. So a lot of the complications with long registration periods that a lot of people have to work through, this is taking some of the pain point out of that on a lot of fronts. Alright. Several more features I just want to touch on. There's now Essentials and Trailblazer modes. So we're basically putting a tier right into Rock, simplify things if you're in the Essentials mode. There's native captcha. So we're kind of breaking the, the connection to an outside service. We're doing the captcha ourselves. So we'll prevent bots from hitting your, external forms. There is a next gen check-in, the roster block, which I think I touched on a little bit last time at the last podcast. And that is a very cool, amazing feature. It's now real time. You'll be excited about using that. There's giving journey improvements. Have some notes here. Sorry. Can't remember all these things. It's faster and, more accurate. I haven't yet played with it, but I'm excited to read up on that in the v 19 documentation. And then another one, the last one on my list, the group requirements, speed improvements. So if you've ever used group requirements in a significant way, you might have experienced how slow that can be. This is three times faster. So it's way faster, and it's fantastic. But that was a lot of stuff that we put into v 19. But some things didn't make it. So, John, what is coming in v 20 that we can look forward to? Yeah. A lot. We we the whole team is now, , focusing its attention on v 20. But it's been in the product planning stage for a few months. But finish out the connections features. The more we're we're using these features now ourselves, we're starting to see, oh, what would be really cool if we did this? So we'll put the board. The board is in '19 is still the legacy web forms board. That will get put in right into the current Obsidian block, which means that you'll be able to switch from list mode to board mode without going to get new data. So it's gonna be, , super Yeah. We have some reports the celebration reports. A lot of stuff for connections and a lot of stuff for we're adding stuff today, yesterday, for the next few weeks, we'll be adding, , little micro connections features. And then we're shifting our attention onto some other features. So digital publishing is gonna get a lot of new features. There's even some micro features in '19 that we're that we have snuck in, but we're gonna be looking at how do we create, in the future, easier ways to man to manage your websites. I'll just leave it at that. Some pretty exciting stuff. Exciting things to come. Yeah. I would say in in general, the team is super excited about the product direction, and some of these new features are gonna be, , game changing. That's amazing. Alright. Well, we mentioned that there's a hidden Rock feature, maybe not hidden, but not frequently used, that could change the way your team works. What do you think about telling us about that, John? Yeah. So why do we even do what we do? It's not to manage transactions. It's not to manage, , little bits and pieces and nitpicky things. We're trying to change lives. Yeah. And I think a lot of products started just more with that data take. And we've always started with a different take, and that's about relationships, that's about people. And it even goes back to the very first days when we changed. Rock was called Rock CHMS for, I think, four weeks. And it's , no, it's not about church data. It's really about relationships and people. And we created the RMS, relationship management system, because we just didn't want from day one to be known as stuffy church database. And this feature that we're going to talk about really unpacks that. It lets big churches feel small. It allows you to build connection and allows you to build relationships. Unfortunately, it's rarely used. And it's been there from almost day one, almost literally day one. And I know that because I even confirmed it this week. I went and queried a lot of databases that we work in, that we help churches with. And there are some people using it, but there's not a lot. And even some people who are using it are not really using it too deeply. And that feature, wouldn't you want a feature maybe that can just kinda hint and tell you about some some things that are changing in people's lives and you could just actively take action upon that? , think we all want that feature. Sounds the core of relationship management to me. Yeah. So the feature is called following. Oh, that is a feature name we are all familiar with. Yeah. And we use it actually internally, I think, fairly well. And again, it's been there from day one. So basically, picture this, , you're a staff person. Wouldn't you want to get a digest email of the people you care most about and what has changed in their record or what has changed in their life? Things maybe their birthday, maybe the fact that they signed joined a small group or a serving team, or they turned in a prayer request or maybe someone just added a note to the record. How would you to have a digest email address for for just the people you cared most about? Definitely. That sounds a huge helper. I don't have to remember those things. I don't have to go pull that information, And I can just look I care a lot more by knowing that. Yeah. So the tool basically does that. It's basically a tool that will send you a digest email every weekday of the people that you are following about some of those events that might be taking place on the record. So how does it work at a high level? Of course, the email is there. But there's also the ability to follow somebody. So if you go to any person's profile, you can follow or unfollow a person. So as you navigate a person profile, you should be constantly thinking, , on every time it loads, , should I follow this person? You want to be following not one, two, three, four people. You should be following, , hundreds of people. And you might be thinking, I don't wanna get overwhelmed. Trust me, , the data is not shifting that much. If you follow 500 people, you might get a few events a day. That makes sense. And why wouldn't you? Right? Because you wanna know. Yeah. It's actually one of my favorite emails. It's usually already in my inbox by the time I get to work. So you should be following hundreds, not five. That's how you manually follow people. Actually have some tools that suggest people that you should be following too, and you can set these up, and then you'll get an email saying, hey. This person is someone you might want to be following. Those suggestions can be based on, , if you're in a group together or if it's in a group that maybe you're following. So inside the UI, you can follow groups. So you can follow more than people. You can actually follow almost any entity, but the two big ones are groups and people. So if you follow a group, you can get suggestions , hey, someone joined this group. Do you want to follow them? And so you can set that up, triggers suggestions. You can even trigger a suggestion that auto follows you. So this was actually something we didn't originally come up with. The senior pastor at CCV loved this feature so much. He's , no. People should not have a choice on some group types whether they should follow those people or not. Absolutely. I it has to be an auto follow. I'm , oh, okay. I guess we better go back to the drawing board and add that. And he's right. That's a great feature. And I love the fact that he had that passion for , no, it's not a choice. If you're on staff, you're following the other staff members. You're following the people in these groups. Yeah, that's great. Just make it easy for people not to slip through cracks and to stay up to speed. Why? Yeah, why wouldn't you? In fact, is set to suggest a staff. And I'm always going in and say, okay, yep, follow. We should probably just change that to the auto follow. It's , Why not? Make it easy. Why wouldn't you? So you have these suggestions, right? You also have triggers. So that's what generates the following. And so you can trigger off of a lot of things. You can trigger off of a note was added of a specific type, a prayer request was added to that, or a person put a prayer request in, of course, birthday, their anniversary, wedding anniversary, whether they were baptized, if they attended a group for the first time of a certain type, if they've joined a group of a group type for the first time. And the most powerful one, although the little bit harder to configure is person history. So that looks at the person's history table and says, if any of these properties have changed or I mean, the person history table gets audited. It's almost an audit file. So almost anything that happens to a person. So you can create these complex if this change from this to this, then fire off this. So that one's kinda the magic Yeah. That's kinda does all things. One of the reasons why I know a lot of people don't or I it first got me to think that a lot of people don't use this is because we've gotten very few feature requests for following. In fact, I think it could total it to zero. Ouch. Yeah. Going through preparing for this, I was writing up in future product, we need to have an event trigger for this and for that and for this. So that might lead to, well, why don't churches use this? And I think the biggest one is that setup moment to configure this just never is introduced. It's in the documentation. It's clearly in the documentation. But there's just never that thing that says, when you get to Rock, it's , get my people in there, get this thing. Oh, that person's yelling about that process. Oh, we can make a workflow for this. When you get to some of these newer abilities, it's there's never a checkbox that says, now you need to do that. Right. It's a value add that no churches are currently doing in their other systems, but Rock can do that on day one. And we're always so busy that if it slips through cracks. It isn't check-in won't happen if you don't do it. Sometimes you need something urgent to make you take a step. Right? And it does feel a little passive or a little unpowerful until you follow enough people. If you follow five people You won't hear much. Yeah. We're kind of going through that too with a new feature we're rolling out, Outreach Toolbox, which we've talked about. At first, my vision in my head was , Oh, I'll follow 10 people. And I'm finding out , no, I need to follow a lot more people and I should, and it doesn't feel overwhelming to me at all. And it gets more powerful the more people you follow. , that's really exciting because typically, a level of relationships that can feel overwhelming to keep up with in a way that makes you feel a good friend, , the cap is right here. So you just blew the top off of that cap. Yeah. And I think it just goes down to our inner desire. We always wanna be that person who knows and follows up with people. We all know who a person in our life who's very good at that. And we're always , I wanna be more that person. Well, that person probably has a system. I mean, I don't think they're logically born with this innate radar of these things. I think they just took it upon themselves to find a way. Maybe it's technical, maybe it's not technical. But this is a really cool shortcut. I imagine if that person had this tool, they would be even more happy. So follow the people. Don't think of it as a notification tool, even though it's called following. It's a ministry presence tool. Do you wanna be present If in people's you do, this is the tool for you. I also think too there's this thought that, oh gosh, I'm busy. How am I gonna find the time to do this? You could literally have this working for yourself in an hour. Mhmm. You could literally have this working for your whole staff with some light training materials in a day. , literally, go to your calendar, find a Friday, take a virtual day. You're still gonna go to work. You're still gonna show up, but you're just gonna pretend this is hobby day. I'm gonna get this. I'm gonna get it working. I'm gonna get it I'm gonna get it documented for my staff. I'm gonna make the training material, especially with AI today. Just pass it the documentations and say, Hey, build me a training curriculum. It doesn't have to be that big. And then just roll it out. I think people will get excited once they start trying it. Think people I That's will get even shocked on your staff who are , this is a great feature. I can't believe we got this in version 18. You just smile and nod. Yep. Yeah. And that's when you should go , what other features am I not using that are this? And we're gonna be highlighting more of these today. So I know, I said it, we use it internally. , how do you guys use that? Yeah. That's a great question. So I know I follow several 100 people. Typically, there are definitely people I follow one off. Right? , oh, I connected with that person. I should follow them. I also follow groups for our registrations for various things. I follow community hub leaders because I interact with them a lot. I follow people that go through various activities that we have. And of course, our staff, I think you already mentioned that one. But yeah, it's great to see what people are up to. I use it for obviously following RX people I've met and being able to chime in on their special days. But yeah, that's a cool feature. And of course, then that reminds me of the reminder feature. So sometimes I'll use a note from the following to then go generate a reminder to do something else. Yeah. And I know when we used it back in ministry, sometimes it feels silly that you're just reaching out to somebody about their birthday, but I literally had a person who said, Thank you for thinking about my birthday. No one else in my life said anything about my birthday. And it was such a sad moment. Wow. For me it was , Wow, you have no one else. And I kind of felt guilty too because I'm , I just sent this. Yeah, effort to impact there is crazy. I think that's the key. I didn't feel I put a lot of effort into it. Yeah, it does make you feel kind of badly , gosh, maybe I should have put more effort into that. There's nothing wrong with having a helper tell you about someone. Yeah, it's kind of an executive assistant who's just saying, Oh, it's the president has those people who whisper in his ear this is the person, it's their birthday. Oh, hey, happy birthday. And that president looks he's smart, he's The hero. Really is. I think what really happens is when I get that reminder in, and I send a note about something, it's a birthday or whatever the trigger is, it just makes me think of that person. Right? And that's all we really need in our busyness. It's that reminder of that person. Kind of get the little warm fuzzy feeling. Oh, I love that person. And haven't thought about them in a while. This is great. Send them a little note and it strikes up a conversation that goes back and forth a couple times and it's great. It's a good relationship builder. And I think if you communicate to your staff with just three sentences and says, Would you want a tool that daily sends you a digest email of the people you care about most and what's happened in their life and a tool that will suggest those people you should follow and a tool you can wire up those events? And the staff person doesn't wire up the events. That's an administrative task and it's done. Would you want that? I I think they would go crazy. Anybody who said no probably shouldn't be on a staff. And I don't think anybody on a church staff would actually say no to that. So , why not spend a day to get it out? Yeah, That's that's great. And then when it comes around, this would be my second level challenge. Right? Don't just read it and toss it out the door and think, ah, I don't have time today to send the little thing. Literally, it doesn't take that long. It's it's one of those things that it takes you longer to think about it than to actually do it. And the effort to impact ratio is crazy. Yeah, and I think the next thing that drives that is just the more photos you have in your database. Oh, that's a great point. Because the digest has their photo. And when you see the person's photo, you're , Oh man, I need to do this. And there's tools in Rock that can make getting those photos really easy too, which we'll talk about that some other day. Yeah, that's great. So many small things that when taken together, do really make the difference between the relationship management system and a database. Yep. Yeah. Wow. Well, while we're looking at effort and value, what if we take another peek at it? , one of my favorite authors is Adam Grant, and he talks about the science of finding greatness in people that everyone else overlooks, which is interesting that he puts, , the science framework on that. Right? People Seems Jesus did that too. Yeah. Right. he took the fishermen and the He didn't make that up, Adam Grant. But what if we put that perspective on top of the volunteer need that we have in churches? , it's easy to think I don't have enough volunteers. And I know when I was in the communication team, , at church previously on staff, sometimes it was easy to think , great. Well, the kids ministry, they get volunteers easily that which probably isn't true. Right? It's just someone else's problem. The greeters, those are easy to find. It's hard to find people that volunteer in a niche area. And I'm sure the kids ministry people were , oh, well, this is difficult to find people and have them show up. And maybe the problem though isn't that there aren't enough people. It's not really the shortage. It's that that we have a a problem with developing the people that we have there in front of us. So that's kind of the premise of what Adam Grant's talking about. It isn't that there isn't potential out there. It's that maybe we're not recognizing it, and we're not helping curate or develop that in the people that are around us. And I think that's a really important thing. If we only tap the people that already look leaders that are in front of us, then we're not really managing or stewarding that leadership potential very well, which is, , a loss for the person that has that lack of opportunity. But it's a loss for the church too because every leader developed is part of the mission of the church to go and reach other people. , have either of you guys ever been that kind of overlooked person that maybe you weren't the obvious choice, but you got a chance? Yeah. I mean, I I I started my whole journey because somebody did that to me. They, , actually looked at me and said, hey, why don't you do this? Why don't you just schedule yourself to serve every week instead of me being aloof and saying, I'll get back to you? So they put the challenge out, and that set me on a trajectory. If they hadn't taken that step, and they were probably not super comfortable saying that, calling me out, but yeah, it takes that effort. I can think of a volunteer when we were doing IT. We would have a lot of volunteers in IT. And it was a really young kid and he showed up for his first night there early. And it was a big day because we were actually getting ready to open a new children's building. And so we had a lot of things to do. At the end of the night, he was still there. In fact, I was , Okay, guys, thanks for coming. We're gonna take all this cart stuff back to the office, but thanks, we really appreciate it. And he made it a point to even come back to the office with us just to help us. He would not leave until we left. But definitely on the surface, this was a person who I think most other people would dismiss as not willing to be poured into. And we poured into him and he actually, mean, give him all the credit for it, but he's now transformed into this amazing technical resource that's helping churches all over the place. But I think it would been very easy for a lot of people to dismiss that because he didn't have the pedigree, he didn't have the resume, he didn't have the leadership, He was very, very young. And because of that, inexperienced and maybe a little, we all were at that age, little didn't have the right mannerisms and didn't show any leadership back then, but now does. I think sometimes we can make a mistake and act as if leadership is something you're either born with or you're not born with. And just any characteristic, you might be born with a slight advantage in an area. But I think truthfully, leadership is something that you can develop. And if someone assumes about themselves that they weren't born with it, they may never truly know what their potential is. And that's something that we get to help be a part of. Yeah. I think it's just looking for those people who don't fit the chemistry box, but have the capacity, but maybe they don't show it. Because if I were to go back to that volunteer, I don't think they showed any of the check the boxes on any of the capacity, chemistry, competency. I mean, character is the other one we talked about and that box, I'm sure You probably need to check that one. Yeah, you could check that one for sure. It's a mystery. I don't think you can judge a character until you really worked for a while with them. But they didn't check the other three boxes on the surface. And I think that's what Adam's talking about, is the competency and the capacity, you may not know and can grow. Character, that's probably something you need to judge separately. But the people who often have a great resume often have a poor character long term. That's true. So we can't you're right. We can't base it on just how somebody presents themselves today. So that means we need to stop recruiting volunteers based on their current capacity or their current current leadership demonstration. We need to start looking instead for what can be developed. And I think that's a big switch that could have a huge payoff in terms of, , curating a really excellent volunteer team and pouring into people that can then pour into others. So we need to start investing in who somebody can be, not who they already are. Yeah. I think Adam kinda talks to you a little bit about sometimes we recruit by the people we see and that we can pull in. But it's more to Nick's story. It's , hey, what about that guy in the corner? Why don't you just go grab them? Don't give them necessarily an out and be , hey, man, I really need help. Next week, can you come and do this one thing for with me? More often than not, you're probably gonna get a yes. Yeah. And right? Put the challenge back onto them and see how they respond. That's that's our role. Right? That's how Jesus treated everyone. He puts it on them and sees how they respond. Yeah. And I've had a lot of volunteers , oh, I can't do that. No, I don't wanna do that. , hey, just trust me. Can you just help? I really need someone to help me. Can you just do this? And in our IT volunteering, sometimes , I didn't really know anything about computers. It doesn't matter because we go around once a month and all we do is we just wash computers. We clean their mouse and we clean their keyboard. And you wouldn't believe how many staff just were so excited about the fact that we came and cleaned their keyboard. It's nice. Came and cleaned their mouth. And anybody can do that. Yep. What a great service. And then we find the people who want to learn more and we just kept it. Yep. So we get blinded by personality, but we really should be looking for, , not are you currently leading a group, not are you currently doing this leadership activity, but will you fill that gap for me now, and how can I connect with you and build you into that? Next week, can you help me prep snacks? Yeah. Is this a person that cares about the mission? If they care about the mission, they can learn to do many, many things. Yeah. I think sometimes you have to actually go find those things. I don't think anybody on our team was thinking about, what we should do? Clean mice. We're just thinking, hey, how do we get volunteers in here with some easy things? And actually it turns out that those things actually had a huge value that we found that out later. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And so if we run-in with a, , a fixed perspective of , this is what we do and this is who we work with, you're just missing some critical ministry opportunities. Talent is, , pretty evenly distributed across a population. But we can create opportunities. And so I think it's kind of our responsibility in ministry to do that. you mentioned, Jesus did. And we should that should be our model. Yeah. I think the Pharisees would have picked very different people if they're gonna create their their list of 12. They wouldn't have picked the fishermen. They sure wouldn't have. I think what if we have, , this misunderstanding of the pipeline of what we're doing? Are we creating a pipeline of people who can serve so that the the spots aren't empty on a Sunday morning? Are we creating a leadership pipeline for the church of Jesus Christ? And that's a reframing that we probably all need to, , put some weight into. Nick, if we wanted to build a volunteer growth track in Rock structurally, how might you approach that? Gosh, I was thinking about that the other day. And there's so many possibilities. But the two that jumped out at me were steps. I might set up a step, let me track some people that I want to take to the next level. I just might create my own step for that. And what was there was the other another one? Oh, well, more along the lines of if they do join your team and you get them in there, push them through your own personal LMS that you set up. Push them through some training material. See how they respond. See how they move to the next class. Those are just a couple of ideas that I might use in Rock. Might say it's too following. Of course. Let's tie back to a you're following people, you're gonna naturally be interacting with them more. Yep. And they'll be front of mind, and so you can take advantage of those opportunities. I think that's great. So, , we need to prioritize character over current competencies. We need to build these growth paths so people can develop the leadership skills. But we also need to ask the people that are currently closest to the work. Right? So we have volunteers today. Are we are we maximizing usage of those volunteers? What are they learning on the job, right, while they're volunteering that we're not paying attention to? Do we just push repeat on things and not learn from our volunteers? I mean, if you're the person standing in the parking lot direct directing traffic, what are you learning that could influence the way that we're doing it? Mhmm. So don't forget to get, , connected to them. But sometimes it seems we think that staff are the only people that can do something right in ministry. And maybe we don't really think that. Maybe it's just more of a something we fall into. Right? It's maybe it's easier for me to do it than to try and recruit, retain, train, develop leaders and volunteers. That is a mindset. Yeah. It really is. And if we don't see that as part of our calling, it can be just easier to do it ourselves. It's definitely easier to lead someone that you're paying. For sure. Because there's a financial contract there that you're just , okay, I pay you this. You have to do this. But when you're doing it on on a social norm Yep. It changes a little bit. It's really then in that case, it's I'm leading by nature of my position, maybe on an org chart or a versus I'm leading through influence and modeling and relationship development. That one that second one takes more work. Yeah. Yeah. So has anyone seen a church that maybe gets this right? They listen to their volunteers that are on the front lines and make good changes? I know CCV we changed the parking lot flow several times. I mean, 100% based the volunteers who are running it. They're , Hey, I know this from a map, this probably makes sense. But if you're on the ground It does not flow that way. There's some improvements that could be made. And and it had huge benefits. Yep. And I think they're still continuing to make parking lot directional changes because I've been there recently, and it's it looks they're still listening to those volunteers. Yeah. Mhmm. So that's great. I think sometimes the best volunteers recruiters I've seen are the ones who don't I mean, they ask, but they ask in a specific way. They're , I need help with this. Can you come next week and help me with this? They don't say, Hey, would you be interested in serving in the children's ministry? It's they show a need, they show a direct specific need? Yeah, and they show They're very transparent about they have a problem. , they're very open about it. , I have a problem. I need someone who can manage snacks for me next week. Could you just come next week and just do that? And most people do wanna help out. Yeah. I mean, they're looking at the person , yeah, I could probably or maybe I can't next week because I'm gonna be out of town. But I could probably, , a different day. Okay. Don't let that go. Okay. What day would Yeah. And I think on the on the other side, sometimes in a well run church, people are sitting in the, , in the main auditorium or in the sanctuary, and they look around and they're , they don't need me here. Yeah. , maybe there isn't a big call for volunteers. Or maybe if there is, they walk in and they're , it seems they have enough volunteers here. Impression. They they don't feel, yeah, they don't feel needed. And it's hard to step up and say, hey, what can I do if it looks there's nothing that is needed? So I really that idea of saying this specific time and place, I have a need. Can you help? Yeah. I think back office is a different problem in that they don't see the opportunities. And so it's very common to say, I'm sorry, I don't need any help right now. And on our team, that was , okay, then who do we need to let go? Because staff, the way I phrased it was You had to have them, but they're an unnecessary evil. Meaning that the church, the big c church does not need staff in order to spread the In the perfect world, you'd have no staff, but that's not gonna happen. You have to have it. But if so if you have nothing to do for your volunteer, then I need to either cast vision and train or I have too many people. Yep. And I think it goes back to something you said earlier too, is , you have to trust them to do it. So a lot of people are , I can't have volunteers do my data entry or do my duplicates. We hear that a lot actually. , why? Well, they're not on staff. What's the difference? , does something molecularly change inside them when you pay them? It seems to me I might trust someone who's willing to do it for free more than someone I have to pay them to do it. I mean, they have to sign, they have to go through a training, they have to sign the agreements that say they won't do that. But your sad person did that. What's the difference? And it's not that you just do it first day, you give them something else to do to make sure you can trust the character because you gotta get that character fit. But other than that, I mean, I see that all the time with churches that you ask, Hey, is there anything I can Can I come in the office and do this? Oh, we don't really need any help right now. Yet at the same time, in a different conversation, they're complaining about needing to hire people. Right. Yeah, that is not uncommon. I know it's work and I get it. I've been through all that, but it's work upfront. And then once you've created them, they're just an asset. Right. That's amazing. Yep. So three three challenges. Right? Let's set three things out there that we can do to put this potentially in action this week that anybody listening to this can do. First one is, how can you modify your current volunteer recruiting to pick their character or their mission, , interest over their current competence? How can you modify that now? Another one is look and see who's been faithfully serving in their area and has not been invited into another leadership position or the next level up. Maybe they should help with recruiting more volunteers. Maybe they should help with training them. Maybe they should help run something. Maybe you've lost a staff position that coordinates weekend volunteers, and this person this volunteer could cover that for you. So think creatively about that. And then if a volunteer wants to help, let them kind of what you were just saying. , it doesn't have to be all staff. Someone says, how can I help? Never tell them we don't have anything available. Yeah. I'd probably just add one more, the awkward ask. Just go do a few awkward asks. And you have to do more than one because they're not all gonna be a home run. But Peter didn't come up to Jesus and said, Rabbi, can I be can I be one of your followers? He never would have done that. Jesus said, hey, get out of the boat. We got something else to go do. So go do that. Go find that person in the corner, that person that no one else is is really thinking about and just do an awkward ask. Hey, can you do this one thing this one time for me? Yep. Even if it's , you come in the office and assemble some furniture? Or I've got a closet that's a mess. Can you come organize it for me? Yeah. Those are great examples. And and then don't just leave them there. , retain that relationship and and pour into them. Take them to lunch. Yeah. Help them see help them have a bigger vision than what they came in with. Those are great topics. Did you guys know on a totally different topic that RX, the main hotel is about 65% full. Oh, nice. That's the hotel everybody wants to be in. That's the one. And that is gonna fill up. 100%. It will. Yeah. In fact, we have to open a new hotel here pretty soon. So the website will have that extra link coming up. So people probably should be thinking about getting those hotel rooms and their tickets because the ticket price is going up early bird ins. Have to. Do it now. Yep. Get those extra people there. So that's important. We have a lot of classes coming up this spring too for training. And then we are kicking off our Ambassador Program which is really exciting. That's the program where we're connecting people in the community that are interested in helping churches navigate potentially moving to Rock and what that decision making process can look , which is so much better if you have someone to talk to that knows it themselves. And we have volunteers that are stepping up into that leadership position. So we just have our first connection, our trial connection to see how it goes and what we need to refine before we roll that out more broadly. How are we running that? Is there a feature that we're using? Oh, funny about that. We're using our own connections feature. Yes. So we get to try that out too. And it's great. It dovetails right in with , let's find the volunteers and build the volunteers and give them a chance to to be leaders in their own right. And and this can be a huge help to the community. Mhmm. Yep. Very cool. Well, that's a wrap here today. So probably all need to look for how we can go identify greatness in people that haven't seen it in themselves yet and help them take that next step.