Podcast Episode 6: Rock Cast Episode 211: How Church Leaders Should Respond to the AI Race

Description

Transcribed Content

Hey. We've got some great things to talk about today, and I'm really excited to get into it. But before we do, we have someone new we need to introduce. Nicole has joined our team almost a year in now, so welcome. And she's doing a lot of things including the role of social media and communications, fundraising. Just a lot of fun stuff. Yeah. The really fun stuff, and she's really killing it. So, Nicole, welcome. Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you were doing before you joined our team. Oh, I appreciate that. I'm from Arizona. I went to GCU, graduated a few years ago. And I studied marketing communications. I immediately started working for a venture studio in the tech. And that was my first experience working in b two b marketing and software. And then after that, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. So I did a bit of everything. And I took on some contract work. I had a little stint where I started my own business. That was short lived. And, then I kinda gained some clarity during that time and realized, , Church Tech sounds a great opportunity. I wonder if anything is there. So I Googled, , ministry tech, West Valley. And then this company came up, I applied and the rest is history. That's pretty That's so cool. Interesting because there's probably not a lot of church tech out there. Then the West Valley Of Phoenix is probably I mean, that's a pretty narrow thing. So God had a plan is what you're saying. Absolutely. Every step of the way. So what's your first impression here in this church tech world? It's it's been a dream for me. I mean, it's combined my it's combined my experience in tech with my passion for ministry. And truly, , you just meet so many kindhearted people, and they're all on the same mission to glorify God's kingdom and further his impact through the innovative tools and digital ministry that we have now. Yeah. It's such a unique space. Well, we're really excited to have you on the team. Yeah. So let's jump in. We've got some things to cover. AI for church tech leaders. Mhmm. That's a big topic we're excited about. And then we're gonna jump into a hospitality book that might change the way that you do ministry. And we'll cover a few community updates. But let's get started. John, you've been doing a lot of AI research and have some great perspectives on what every church leader should know now about AI. Yeah. A lot of things have changed. A And lot of things have changed recently. So one of the podcasts I keep talking about is the AI AI Daily Brief. It's an amazing podcast. The host, Nathaniel Wittenmore. I love him because he's he's very humble, he's very concise, and he just brings together and synthesizes so many voices into one concise podcast. It's almost every day, a daily brief. But you gotta be listening to it if you're in church tech. I think it's one of the most important things that we understand because things are really changing. Now he has this concept, of recently that he's been saying that we're kind of in our second moment, our AI second moment. The first moment was when ChatGPT first came on the scenes. So we kind of all remember that a little bit. It was kind of a gradual thing. But man, the first time we used it, we were , this is magic. This is black magic. Right? We're actually going through that again this 2026. And if you're not seeing that, you're probably not paying attention enough about that. So the pace of change is rapidly growing. Every four months, it feels everything is leveling up to a huge extent. Yes. I was thinking about this a little bit this morning because things are happening. We're gonna go over some of those, but it's almost the fibrinacci sequence. , it gets tighter and tighter and tighter. And, , already in this quarter, we've changed almost as much as the first pre the previous three years in this one quarter in 2026. Wow. But I would say in the last month, it's almost as much as a quarter, and in the last two weeks, it's almost as much as a month. And I don't know where this is going because our brains can't handle this. Yeah. It feels things are really ramping up. So a few things. Let's just throw out a few things. OpenAI Codex, I mean, that's been around for a while, but it's really caught up, to its competitors, Cloud Code. But let's talk about Cloud for a while because Cloud has been on fire. Cloud Code expansion, I mean, it's it's just getting out there. It has a 2.5 annualized run rate. But what's interesting is the outputs is actually noticeable too. GitHub is going crazy, trying to scale because Cloud Code is out there making so many commits and and just amount of code. Wow. GitHub is getting a 135,000 commits a day, which is I mean, commit is a lot of code. Huge. Especially in the in the Cloud Code code world because it's not committing micro commits, it's committing huge volumes. So GitHub's over there just trying to keep up. Cloud Cowork is fairly new. It's Cloud Code for more of the business person. It's an amazing tool. If you're not using it, you have to use it. But they've added features Dispatch. So now from your phone, can control your Cloud Code co work and you can be, , running it on your desktop which is nowhere near you. Cloud Skills has been around for a while but they're really ramping up now. And if you look at Cloud Skills at the surface, it might just seem , oh, it's a it's a prompt file. That's interesting. It's so much more than that. It's really unlocking this new technology called progressive disclosure. So behind the scenes, it's actually chipping away at this huge knowledge base, not giving the AI access to the whole knowledge base, but just the piece pieces it needs. And that's a revolutionary technology. Not gonna go into it, don't have time, but if you're not if you're not familiar with these terms, you need to get caught up because it's it's pretty amazing. Claude managed agent just came out yesterday. Wow. What? This is a huge product. It's basically gonna kill tools n eight n. I was just watching a quick video about it. Just blew my mind. And you take that tool and you marry it to what we're working on in '19 with the MCP skills and tools, and it's next unlock achieved. Two days ago, Claude Mythos and their Project Glasswing, This is a brand new model that is so powerful in terms of how it codes that they can't release it into the world. In their testing, it's already created, over 4,000, zero day bugs. So it's going out there looking at software, not with the intent of finding these bugs, but because it's so powerful in a model of how of writing code, it's finding and creating thousands of zero day, which are basically hacks into, , Windows, your iPhone can take root access, control all of it, and thousands of those. So they're saying, hey. This is too powerful. We cannot release this into the world. The world will have security issues. So this Glasswing project is a way of restricting it to just a few people, a few major corporations who can get their systems fixed, and then they'll probably release a light version. We don't really know for sure what they're gonna do with it, but very concerning. In fact, I would go read Sure. There's some very interesting stories about its release, almost sci fi. There's a story where the researcher was trying to test it, so it put it into an environment and said, okay. Your job is to try to communicate to me in a way that shows me that you can communicate to me. So he leaves, walks away, goes away. It found a way to break out of its environment No way. And communicate with him. So he's sitting on a park bench eating a sandwich, and all of sudden his phone goes off and he's , I'm out. Oh. And he's , what? He was it was just supposed to communicate. It wasn't supposed to break out of its environment. Super crazy. Yeah. There's even, , weird some weird things. , there's now OpenAI Codecs plug in for Cloud Code. So now you can have two of these, , huge models working together on your code. One, , writing the code and the other one, , critiquing how it's doing. Predict a future war, AI war between OpenAI and Cloud because they're just, , critiquing each other. But we're starting to see the the frontier model explode. , there's a lot of, , just refined versions of the frontier models that are just crazy good. Memory is going mainstream, so we talked about that at the conference. , hey, one of the things that we need to get into our AI systems is memory. And once it has memory, it's gonna be a huge moat because your memories will be in one. We're starting to see that actually kinda take off. MCP is becoming a universal standard, so everybody is is writing MCP. You'll see a lot of people saying MCP is dead, but they're really talking about a different type of solution. So even the people who are, , nay on on MCP are really talking about something else. For our use case, it's still definitely the way to go. And you're starting to see vibe coding. I mean, I'll we've had vibe coding for while, but Mhmm. Since December, everybody's vibe coding something. And I have a whole bunch of we did a whole session on that, I even have more thoughts on that, but we don't have we don't really have time for that. But right now, if we if we kinda boil this down, it's it really comes down to dedicated agents. And people are out there writing these dedicated agents. Open Claw is one that's come out in the last few months, has had many names since its inception, but now Open Claw is kinda what they're landing on, which I think is very interesting because we were the the original founders of Claw. , got I was thinking Chip might have a preference here. Yeah. We were thinking about calling our AI tool RockClaw, but we thought that's too that's too niche. But everybody's doing something with with OpenCLaw, and it's a really great tool. Right? It's it's pretty amazing. It can do lots of crazy stuff. Security is a huge, huge issue. Yes. But everybody's writing these agents, including us, we're making personal agents to try to improve ourselves. That's great. Can you tell us more about those agents that we have? Yeah. So we're in the process of rolling this out internally, but a lot of this is just trying to , there's so much information, and some of it is not quite right because there's a lot there are a lot of people on social media who are trying to get clicks and views for money. Mhmm. Mhmm. And so sometimes they move a little too fast and some of their information is, , 90% right or 80% right, but not quite. So it's really hard to kinda get your feet in this. I've I've found it very fun, empowering, and frustrating. So we're we're synthesizing it. But I I've written a whole bunch of skills that are already running and and saving me so much time. , for one, I have a daily a daily brief that gets created, and every day I'm modifying it. So it tells me, , are there any critical emails from yesterday I haven't responded to? What's on my calendar? What's in my Asana? It goes and looks at the the developers that I'm personally leading, and it tells me about their workloads and do they need more work and how's it going and summarizes their team's responses to me in terms of their progress. It's really a game changer. It sounds an incredible time saver. Yeah. And we're working on other agents that, , we're still chiseling away at. But but something that, , we really have to be looking at because this is a huge, huge time saver and unlock. I feel the world's, , completely changing, and it's changing, , almost daily. It's so much easier to get left behind in a landscape this than it ever has been in a short period of time. Yeah. And so I'd say get out there, play, be careful. , as it relates to, , the Open Claw thing, all the agents I'm writing, have to be careful about. , I wanna go use the OpenClaw thing, but you're completely wide open. Mhmm. And based on, , the accounts that I have and the security , the security that it does have, I just can't do that. So I have to create sandboxes that that don't necessarily have access to all my credentials. I think the one thing we have to protect is our phones. Mhmm. If it has access to your Apple information, it's that's probably a very poor thing because that's a lot of your two f a's in there. Yeah. And if it can control your phone, it pretty much has your two f a. Yeah. So I'd say be careful with that and kinda keep it gated. And I see a lot of people in the community talking a little bit about that. , there's some churches who have basically outlawed Open Claw, which I think is a good idea. And, , at least start start with a a thick wall and then, Yep. You can work your way in. , I'd really I would love to hear how our churches are approaching AI. And that reminds me that we've created a new Rockcast Rocket Chat channel. Yep. So anybody who's listening can hop into that channel. And then we're gonna pitch you some questions and we hope that you respond and join in on the conversation. But for now, I wanna hear, , how are you approaching AI? Are you skeptical of it? Are you using Claude or any other dedicated agents? So let us know. Yeah. That's I hope that's gonna be another channel that is in Rock that is just getting so much more traction. We have the general channel. We have the Rockstar channel. There's a few channels that get, , 99% of the traction. I hope this is a new one. Yeah. That's great. Great collaboration point. Yeah. Great space for engagement. Mhmm. Yeah. Which reminds me is I actually wrote a skill too that goes through Rocket Chat and tries to find messages that the court team needs to know about. Oh, that's very helpful. Only in public channels. , your your direct messages are completely safe. So as it relates to church leaders, , first of all, the message is understand this. But the two things I really wanna plant in your head for today is, one, going back to Mythos and and Glasswing. This is the the new technology that's gonna be very important for lots of reasons, but mainly for systems security. Mhmm. We don't we don't have access to that. Only a few companies in the world have access to that. That will change over time. But what you're going to see fairly soon is the number of system updates, patches that are going out there is gonna dramatically exponentially increase. So it could be that you're getting updates on your operating systems and all those major softwares that you're using almost on a daily basis. Wow. So as that trickles down the chain, it'll eventually get to where we we can use it. Now we're laser focused. , minute we can have access to a tool this Mhmm. We're going to be using it to make sure that our systems are. So what do you do? right now there's not much we can do, but you must get to the latest version of Rock. Yes. That's always been a high priority, but now even more so. Yeah. You cannot come to us later and say, I'm on version fifteen, sixteen, 17 and expect us to get everything patched at this rate. You have to get to the latest version. 19 just went to alpha. You've got to be scoping to get to 19. We are not gonna be able to keep every single version of Rock patched. This could be a monumental, , change to system security. It'll be a phased, I believe. I think we're gonna just go through this phase of going from, , fairly mid level security Mhmm. To very secure. Ironically, I just watching a video as I was eating breakfast this morning. Was about eighties and nineties coding. And the guy was he he wrote for Microsoft. He wrote parts of Windows that we still use today. He's , back then, the security vulnerabilities are huge. , we just didn't know. So I think we're at a good level now, but we're about to get to a great level. But that transition is going to be a little rough. You've got to get to the latest version. You've got to minimally install plugins. That's a great point. Say that again. Minimally install plugins. We're already in v nine v 19 alpha. We're tripping over plugins that are poorly maintained. We're we've we've ripped out some deprecated code that we deprecated over five years ago. Yeah. And these plug ins have not adjusted to suit for that. Oh boy. Five years. Ouch. And it's not just one. So this is telling us these are poorly maintained. Not every software, not everything in the in the Rock shop is is of the same quality. Now some of you might be thinking, why don't you guys rate it? Why don't you guys first of we don't have the resources to go look inside of everybody's source code. We have to decompile it and do that. Secondly, it's a community. , no one wants to hear that their stuff isn't perfect. And we deal with that already. , I'm sure already in your year you've dealt with some of those types of things. It's hard. , we don't want to be the people saying it's not good enough, it's not good enough. We're working hard to make our stuff good too, and we're not we're not perfect. We understand that. But just know that every plug in so I'd say do not install a plug in unless you absolutely need it. I I can see metrics of how many plugins certain organizations have installed and some churches have installed so many plugins. It's , that's Just because it's there doesn't mean you need it. Yeah. It's one click away. We we made that really easy but yeah. The other thing is don't over customize. Mhmm. There's a tension, especially in a lot of, , technical people, including me, we wanna over customize. We wanna oh, , wouldn't it be cool if it did this? That is technical debt. That's something that makes it harder to update. Mhmm. We've been working really hard to improve the quality of Rock so that you can feel comfortable in updating, and we were responding quickly to our issues. , we're trying to keep it near zero. It's been lightning fast, especially in the past year. Yeah. I think my daily brief told me today we're up to seven. LO two of them are about to get closed this morning. And that's because we're in a pre alpha we're in the alpha stage. That's right. So those usually take up into the twenties. We're keeping that down. So you have to update. I know it's work on your side because you gotta you gotta make sure all your customizations and all these other things work. But I'm telling you, there's a tidal wave coming. You don't wanna be there. Well, that's one of the benefits of having our new release process. You can count on those two releases a year so you can prepare ahead of time and and have your team ready to go. Yeah. I'd also be very careful with recipes. Just because they're there, you need to evaluate them. You need to evaluate them on are they well written or not. And if you don't know, then they're not. Okay? So don't assume. Now if it's from someone, , there's lots of comments in the bottom saying , we use this. This is great. That might help you. But you have to evaluate them well. This is another area where we've had, , comments , well, why don't you guys grade them? If we could translate that, it's you could also translate that from our perspective is we want you to hurt people's feelings because the work that they did wasn't good enough. Yep. Now that there's something insecure or dangerous, we do, and we have Yes. But it's very rare. The other thing I would say is, is it written well? But also how is it really needed? Mhmm. There's some things that as we shifted our visual architecture in '18 broke some people's recipes. But I'm looking at these recipes, I'm , why? I mean, it's interesting, but why? And one of the quotes I I I just want to put out there, because I thought a lot hard about this. Vanilla trumps rocky road with sprinkles and gummy bears every time. A lot of people want to have their Rock rocky road with sprinkles and gummy bears. Don't. Vanilla is gonna trump that every time because you can update in peace with Vanilla. Yes. And , let's give a little shout out to Vanilla. There are so many options inside what you're referring to as Vanilla Rock that you have plenty of time and space to make customizations inside the framework of Rock without impacting your update process. Yeah. Just keep it as vanilla and to the core of Yes. You could also ask, , what does what would CORE do? And not that we're perfect or but what was their intention with this feature? And try to stay inside. Go downstream. Don't swim upstream. If you're adding all these doodads and hoop thing thingma jigs to it to it, just don't. You're gonna regret that. And I can speak specifically to that because I'm kind of addicted to those things too. Oh, I'll just have this little customization. I always regret it. And I always end up having to put work back in to get it back to normal. So the second big thing, security. Second big thing is the way we evaluate AI spending. Right now, for most of us, AI spending is another little service that we have. Mhmm. , we have Dropbox, we have Google or Microsoft, and we have our OpenAI account. And it's $20 a person. That is changing. You have to make AI a line item in your budget and prepare for that line item in your budget to drastically increase. The way you should think about it going forward is what percentage of your staff spending will be devoted to AI? Wow. That's a totally different radical way of looking at it. Yeah. And I would be putting in and you need be talking to your leadership now about this. Don't talk about what about it once it's changed. You wanna call the foul now. It's not to say, hey, we're gonna start doing this today. But in your next meeting with your supervisor or if you're on the leadership team, you need to be saying, hey, guys, I just wanna raise a point here. AI spending right now is just another service that we have, $20 $20 a month per user. It's going to be changing to be a percentage of our staff spend. I just wanna put that nugget in your head because you need to be thinking about it. What number would I put in my head? It'd probably about 10%. Now you might think, well, that's a ton of money. That's actually far less than what it's actually gonna be. So if you take someone NVIDIA, they're pushing the developers. Each developers and this has been publicly stated. Each developer should be spending 50% of what their salary is on tokens. Wow. Oh my goodness. Their salaries are $500,000 a year. Wow. So they're challenging their developers to spend $250,000 in tokens. Now they're developers, so that's a little different. But I again, I I'm thinking 10% is a good place to to put a needle. Mhmm. , it's gonna take us a bit to get to that needle, but I think we're gonna far surpass that. I think for churches, it might be, when we're done, 20 to 30%. Now you're gonna get 10 x, a 100 x the productivity out of that. And that's not to say that we're gonna decrease our staffs. That would be an Right. Immature way of looking at it. We're going to be able to do much more care, much more ministry with these. So think about that. We have to be casting vision for that now because I I I don't think it'll be too late once it happens, and we won't be budget we won't we won't be budget ready. Right. So. Yeah. Great thoughts. Well, thanks for sharing all of that, John. You're in in these conversations with churches constantly. What do you see as the areas that they're getting right and maybe the areas where they're stuck? Well, I think some churches are are keeping up with some of these latest trends and but there's a lot that that aren't. Probably be more eighty twenty, maybe ten ninety in favor of not Mhmm. Keeping up. So I think we have to be paying more attention. That's why we're trying to bring these topics to this podcast. But I wouldn't rely on the podcast to be the only topic because there's it's just moving too fast. But I also think that the community isn't really sharing enough about what they're doing. I think we're all waiting for this big magical thing that we can share. And I think we just need to share more. There's in Rocket Chat, there's an AI channel. Mhmm. Share anything. Even if you think I'm sure there's someone who who could probably look at what you shared and go , well, that's pretty, , basic. But there's gonna be 90 people who are , woah, tell me more about that. Think about the 90. Don't worry about, , the 10% that might know more. Even if you're just new and you just you're blown away by something, share it. And we need to get that dialogue going on this. Because if we work together, this will be an easier problem to solve. But if we're all working in our dark closets and in our, , shadowy places, we're not gonna be helping each other. It'll reduce the speed of knowledge, collaboration, and innovation. Yeah. I think if you're one of the 10%, don't share the hard scary thing because you're basically telling other people that you're never gonna do this, so don't even try. Try to share something that's more simple, that might be something that they could actually do. I think that's probably the the lesson for them. But I also think too, the average staff person, maybe the average person doesn't really know where they lie on the adoption curve. It's hard to know where you are. if you're a swimmer, how good of a swimmer are you? If you're Michael Phelps, you can probably grade yourself and everybody below you. But if you're in the middle, it's hard to grade yourself against Michael Phelps. , you can look at the times, but you don't know about the maturity of your swim Sure. Stroke. And I'm talking I know anything about swimming and I don't. The technique. The technique. Were you a swimmer? No. Okay. I thought maybe we could check another box of something we knew. So we wanna kinda help with that. We'll be putting out some resources soon just to kinda help people understand where they are on the adoption curve. So just keep up with it, get engaged, AI Daily Brief, highly recommend the podcast. I just kinda wanna hit on the fact that too that he there's not a lot of technical podcasts where someone doesn't come off hubris. This guy comes off just a friend, and I really that. And he's it's not always his ideas. He's sharing the industry experts. And again, I think there's just something really great about that podcast. That's great. Well, thanks for sharing some ways people can easily grasp some of the things they should be paying attention to and easy ways to start getting involved because starting now is definitely better than starting in a month or in two months based on the speed of what's happening and how quickly it's moving. Yeah. Well, we also mentioned that there's this book that we've been, reading that we think could really impact ministry. So if people wanna update the way that they're caring for people, I highly recommend a book called Unreasonable Hospitality. So the author's name is Will Guidara, and he co owned this New York City restaurant that was named the best in the world in 2017. So Wow. You're not just getting that stamp of approval for being average. Right? He has some great ideas that he put together in this book. So there's a ton of great information that somebody probably would have to read the book to get all of, but there were a few points I wanted to pull out today to share because I think they do have some ministry impact. The core idea from the book is really just that there's a difference between service and hospitality. So he shares this story that I think can kind of encapsulates this. There was this guest that had come into the restaurant that he owned and they mentioned that they'd never had a New York hot dog. So the the restaurant's in New York. They've never had a hot dog. This is a very nice restaurant. This is not a hot dog stand. And so their waiters decide that they hear this passing comment, and they're going to make this guest's day. So they go all the way out, literally across the city, find this New York City style hot dog, bring it back, and serve it up it's fine dining, the White Glove Silver Platter. Oh, wow. Right? And without telling them, they didn't say they were gonna do that. And it just knocked the socks off of this guest that was there. Mhmm. And there the book has a lot of little anecdotes that about ways that they learned to care for people, and that's not accidental. It doesn't just happen. Right? , you have to be intentional about it. So when you talk about service and hospitality, one of the ways Ghidara, the author, mentioned that you can distinguish them is that he compares service to being the color black and hospitality being color. So it's a black and white versus a color kind of thing. It's two dimensional versus three-dimensional. One builds on the other. Specifically, he said, service is getting things right. Hospitality is making people feel right. That's a huge distinction. It's very different. Churches are really good at service. I mean, we have seats in auditoriums. We have greeters. We have a lot of things that help create a an atmosphere of let me help you get to where you're going. But the level of hospitality that they talk about in this book is something I don't think most churches are doing today in most places. By hospitality, it really comes down to care. Sounds It's care. Yeah. And so the difference between the two isn't more information. It's the information's probably out there. This hot dog conversation was in passing. Somebody walked by, they heard it, and they acted on it. It's about what you do with the information. And so you have to be intentional about it. So a few of the key principles with maybe some ways you could involve Rock Mhmm. Since we're talking about Rock here. The first one is this one size fits one concept that he talks about. That's kind of the point of the book. The best hospitality is really personal. So the best hospitality that could be provided to John or to Nicole is tailored to the things about you that would make an impact. It's not something generic. It's knowing not just that the room exists with people in it, but who is actually in the room. Think about here's an idea. In Rock, creating something a person brief, which you could do with Lava, put a little one page together that could have a lot of information about the person. And the best way to personalize that is with a photo. Now this is highly usable by anyone. Put a report together, you click a person, you see a brief, you get all this information, maybe their baptism, family information, latest notes, anything relevant. And you could provide this to volunteers or staff right before a class starts. Or in a case where they're gonna be interacting with people in a new setting, they can be, prepared ahead of time to know who's coming and have some information. Then when the person walks in, it's not , hey, welcome. It's , oh, John. It's so great that you're here. We've been expecting you, , and and they can relate to you in a way that's very personal. I mean, we do that when people come on-site here to attend a class. Yeah. Masterclass, we do. We actually have a little report we put together and circulate to the people that are interacting with the team, and and it does definitely help Mhmm. Make things personal. So that's a great idea. The the maitre d' at this restaurant actually had sort of a report that that he would operate off of and review who was coming in for a dinner reservation. And so he knew exactly who it was when they stepped up, to the to the reservation desk. So that was pretty cool. Nicole, coming from outside the church world, do these ideas still resonate with you? Yeah. For sure. I mean, I think unreasonable hospitality, that idea isn't just a restaurant experience. I think it's something and Gadara talks about this. It's something that applies to all service based industries. And especially my career field working in marketing. I mean, you have to know your audience so well. You need to know their motivations, their pain points, their aspirations. I think that if you can build a, , highly personalized experience, you create something that's truly unforgettable. Yep. Mhmm. That's so true. So that was one point. This one size fits one. Another one is noticing absence as much as presence. And this is something that we've kind of built into the foundation of Rock from the beginning, and that is basically our ERA. Yep. Estimated Regular Attender. And it has an algorithm behind the scenes to help you understand if someone is engaged in your congregation or not. And it's some automations that help people move in and out of that status based on their engagement levels. You could take that a next step further and have a workflow that's , hey. Haven't seen you. Now be careful with this Right. Because it is based on certain data points that are not the entire story. But you could create a workflow when someone who has been attending regularly stops hitting the data points that trigger that and send it to a pastoral care pastor or a small group pastor, and they can reach out to someone just with for conversation and say hi. And I I wouldn't send something out that's a email that says, we noticed you haven't been sitting in your seat in the auditorium. Right. That wouldn't be great. I think they misunderstand ERA because they want it to they wanna turn it into something else. So think of the ERA as almost a light switch. You're here, you're not here. You're here, you're not here. But they also wanted to control the AC. Yeah. And they're , well, I can't use the air. I need to modify it because it doesn't control the AC. It's , no. It was built for here, not here. Here. So and so they don't use it because it's , well, if it doesn't control the AC, I'm just not gonna use it. So Build something else to control the AC. Correct. Rock is great for that. Yeah. But what you really wanna know actually, what pastors really want to know is, is that person engaged right now or not engaged? And what changed? And those change moments are where a great pastoral moment can actually happen. So, , build something off of that. And actually, if people in our community are using ERA, we'd love to hear about it in the new Rocket Chat channel. Yeah. So if you are, , let us know about it in the channel. And if you're not, maybe this is a great time to look into it. Yeah. I think if you are using it, you saying that you're using it encourages others , oh, yeah. Great. I'm gonna start doing this too. And some ways you use it are helpful too, not just a hands up. But here's what we do. , it helps so much to hear ideas from other people and they just kinda build on top of each other. Okay. So that's two of the ideas. Another one is this Wow File. And the Wow File concept in the book was something that Gidara worked with his team on, and they basically collected ideas and stories that could be used for hospitality. So it might be something they overheard that they thought could be acted on by someone. It might just be some, , ideas that they had, but they could inspire real action and they celebrated those in their team meetings. Rock could be a great way to facilitate something that as well. You could, put a a workflow together that's a a form that people could input information and what they heard or what they would suggest. Who are those people? Well, that's I'm glad you asked because I think there's a couple of people that could use this. Right? Yeah. Our staff and our volunteers. Yeah. You gotta get the volunteers out. The things that you hear, you can turn into action, but you have to mobilize volunteers. Mhmm. I think we just talked about that on the last podcast. It's really about casting vision to them too. It really is. I bet they'd get excited. Oh, I can put them into the Wow file and maybe they even get measured by how many Wow's they turned in, ? That's right. Mhmm. And provide them the ability to act on some things. If it's something simple, just enable them to to provide a great experience on that. And then celebrate it. , your pre service huddle, get together in the back room. Hey, , John had three great ideas he put into the Wow file last week. These are awesome. Here are some ways we've used that information to bless people. And I think that could really take off. It doesn't always have to be a wow thing to go into the wow file. the hot dog thing probably wasn't a wow thing in in Yeah. In hindsight, it's the brilliant, but in the moment, it's , you haven't had a hot dog? Yeah. Oh, put it in the wow file. Yeah. Because now we can do something about that. Exactly. And the big things are we usually capture those. Yeah. Right? But the small things can fall through the cracks, but they can be the thing that creates the moment for someone. So what are some Wow ideas? I mean, we're riffing now. Yeah. So, , some wow ideas could be, , you overhear that someone's going to have a minor surgery this week. Not a big deal. They're not asking for prayer. They just said something in passing. Mhmm. , you could then send someone over there with you could send a handwritten card from a team. You could send someone with dinner if, , if they wanted that or if it was gonna be a protracted recovery. You could do all sorts of things. I'd say there's two value in just knowing it too. Because if you say someone's thinking about, we're considering having another baby. Mhmm. Put in the Wow file. You don't have to actually send them something right now, but if you put in the Wow file and then other people can see it, then a pastor might be, oh, hey, , was talking to so and so, I hear that you guys might be thinking about having another baby. Yeah. And that just makes them feel warm and part I of the mean, there's confidentiality, you don't wanna break that. , it was said in confidence, don't put it in the Wow file, that that could be will be awkward. But I think if someone were to say, , hey, , was talking to so and so and they're thinking about having a baby. Yep. I think as long as the other person gets trained to say, hey, I was talking to Joe and Joe mentioned that you guys are thinking about having a baby, I think that's great. , how can we support you? Moving into your first house or, , anything that. That's a a small thing, but it feels personal. Well, John, you mentioned security and that is a big deal because we're talking about people and information about them. How would you approach security on something this in Rock? Yes. This is a challenge because now you have these lay leaders who need access to to put something in about a person. So it sounds easy, but how do you give them access to link that Wow to a person without giving them access to searchable database? Yep. Know, we have a person picker. That's a field type you can put into Rock. But if soon someone has access to a person picker, you now have access to kinda, , query the whole database. So what I would do is I would go back to what you talked about in your first point, which is that you should have these little reports about people so you can know a little bit about them. And so if you're a lay leader, you should be able to get to these reports for anybody person that you're coming in contact with often. So say you're you're a servant leader, you oversee the nine thirty kids or toddler rooms. Well, you should have a little report of all the people who are your volunteers who work in that area and from that report, there should be a link to the route to the workflow to say, hey, I wanna turn in a Wow report. It's already linked, so they can't query the database. I think that would be a very easy way to do this. I'd also hinge it back to, okay, now it's in this database, I'd put it as a notetype on a person. Perfect. That's what I was gonna ask. Would you create a separate notetype for this? Yes. A notetype called Wow notetype. Yep. , why? Just go with it. It's fun, it's easy, it's vocabulary. We talk about here, vocabulary is so important. If you can create not the I care about people note type, it's so hard to say, , but you call it the wow note type and the workflow puts it right into that wow note type. Link that back to the last podcast when we talked about following Mhmm. Because now it's a note. Oh, cool. , what do I do with this? Well, there's an there's an event. If you're following a person, you can be notified when there is a note of a specific type. So now everybody who is, , following those people, they're following the right people. They're gonna get a note, a digest that says the Wow note was added to this person. Very Now . it it all works together. It sure does. And all these features have existed in Rock since Rock version 2.5, . Exactly. And you mentioned earlier, be careful how you customize Rock. Nothing you're talking about here is Vanilla. Yeah. This is all vanilla. So that's very exciting. Yeah. And, , if you're hearing this and thinking , oh, I don't know. This sounds intel gathering. This sounds surveillance. It's not. This is actually about creating a church where people remember your name and they feel a friend. Yeah. And I I was thinking about this on the drive in. I think the word that comes to mind is intentionality. We just need to be more intentional. I wanna be more intentional. That's why I love the outreach toolbox, which is that whole discussion. I'm trying to be a more intentional person. And I think, , again, if done right, I'm gonna feel much more cared for Mhmm. Because people are intentionally trying to care for me. If there's a group of people intentionally doing that together, then the output of that can be even stronger. Yeah. And I think if again, done right, it makes you feel that person who got who's on the receiving side is , wow. This place actually talks to each other. They actually care about people. They talk about our lives and our care, and I I think that just shows a church that does care. Yep. Mhmm. So one other quick idea, because there's way too many to get to, but would be a personalized follow-up that you can scale with. So Rock also has this crazy thing called Lava, which means you can personalize messages to people based on what about them. So if someone comes to an event, you can follow-up with them personally. You could, for instance, follow-up with a mom who sent her kid to camp and say, hey. Thanks so much for sending your daughter to camp. Use her name, , Jane. Thanks for sending Jane to camp. And here's what's coming up next weekend in her age group. Or here's another way she can get involved with a, camp celebration. Her group will be sitting in this area. And you can personalize things very easily in Rock. That's not even a difficult one to put together. Yeah. It's actually fun. That's right. One more my last one, I promise. K. The full guest experience is we've been talking about individual moments, but the author, Ghidara, talks about not just creating a moment for someone, but the whole story arc of their experience with your organization is important. And he was kind of obsessed with that journey. So moments are important because they create the opportunities that allow you to build this arc together. So you do have to look for those and anchor off of them. And one idea is a workflow for first time guests. Now again, caution about the data. You might think someone just got there yesterday but maybe they've been quietly sitting in the back of your auditorium not engaged yet because they weren't ready to take the steps. So be careful what you would do with it. But you could have some workflows that include things a text message, and then after that maybe an email. And then maybe three weeks later, someone could contact them. I think, John, you attended a church at one time that did a mugging for people that were new. Yeah. He delivered cookies. The ironic thing is we drove thirty minutes ago to this church. -huh. And so he drove the senior pastor drove thirty minutes to our house, and I was out washing my car. And he walks up, I'm , I think that's the pastor from the church we just went to. He's , yeah, figured if you drove all the way to me, should drive all the way to you. And it just feels so personal. Yeah. So you can craft all sorts of moments that that begin the story arc of that person's experience with your organization. That's good. And we're doing some more work, think, coming up that we're prepping hopefully for the conference on leading people through those phases of engagement. Yep. Very excited about that. So bottom line, it's really not about the tactics of what you're doing, it's about building a culture. And so many good things are. It's building this culture that cares about people genuinely. And once you have that in place, you're empowering each individual person to help kind of make that magic happen for them. And your leadership team may need to be brought into this. Right? they may need to know what it is you're trying to do to help build this culture. So just encourage them to think about Rock not as a database, but to think about Rock as the operational infrastructure for a church that wants to love people well. Mhmm. a relation management system. Interesting. Yeah. Wish we had thought of that a long time ago. Yeah. We just picked the orders that we liked. It kinda sound a a ship from the Britain from UK. Yep. The RMS Rock. It kinda does actually. I think it's HMS, but yeah. It's close. It sounds very similar. So it's not about having information, it's about what you do with it, and it's about how you care for people. And that's what makes it unreasonable. Mhmm. That's great. That's a great book to to tie into. And some people might think, well, I don't really have access to implement ideas this. I think if you cast vision to your leaders on just what we just said, I can't imagine a leader who wouldn't be , let's go. Right. That's the foundation of what they wanna do in a church. Again, our channel in Rockcast can people can share some great ideas and build off of each other. We'd love to hear about that. But, Nicole, you're new to this space. What is hearing all of this, , what stands out to you? Yeah. I think that unreasonable hospitality is something that it's easy to agree with, and it sounds a great idea and everybody should be doing it. But I think the execution of it will be probably more difficult than people realize. Because, John, you said, it's you have to be so intentional about it and it takes consistent effort and sometimes some creative problem solving to go out of your way to, , make somebody's day that, make them feel special. But I think that you hit on it really well that Rock isn't just a product. It's a ministry. And when I started, that was something that really stood out to me working here. And I think you guys have done such a good job at ingraining that into the culture. But I have an example I can share. Great. So this week, our team member Blake and I, we sat down with our ambassadors and we did our ambassador kickoff meeting. So these are people that went through a training, and our meeting was just about welcoming them in. But what better and for those sorry. I'm getting ahead of myself. For those of people listening who might not know what this program is, it's for churches who are new and curious about Rock. They wanna learn more. And so we're gonna connect them with a group of ambassadors. And these are real community members. So what better way, , for somebody who's completely new to the ecosystem and our software to get connected and to feel recognized by being welcomed by a friendly ambassador. Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm , keep in mind that these people are all volunteers. , they're doing this out of their generous time. Amazing. It's, , very a great sacrifice on on their part. But I think that's just a testament to the kind of culture that we've built. Yeah. And I think you're right. It does take work, but it's the type of work that has eternal benefit. Mhmm. That finance cover the cost report that you're writing. What's I mean, yeah, it has a benefit, but it doesn't have eternal benefits. These are the features that I love implementing. It's work, but it also has a reward where I think a lot of the other work doesn't have a reward. And I love that it's built on the connections feature, which is another great way to create those personal connections between a person and a person that helps make ministry real. So, Nicole, thanks for joining the show today. It's been great to have you here. Do you have any closing thoughts? Well, , thank you so much for having me. It's a big honor. I would just say, to our community, remember to join the Rockcast ROCCAT channel. Leave your thoughts on any questions that we've pitched your way. And also, hopefully, we're gonna be releasing more of these video podcasts. So if you haven't yet subscribed to our YouTube channel and you won't miss an episode. Great. Well, thanks for joining us. It's been a great episode. A lot of great content, and I can't wait to hear what people have to say in our new Rocket Chat channel.