B (2:42)

Yeah, I want to take advantage, friends. I want to take advantage of the fact that Ronnie's here. You see churches across the country. You're working with churches across the country. You have a great experience. And friends, if you're listening in today and you're like, oh, like, we already have a system like this, I want you to listen in because we're not here to sell you on anything. We want to have a bigger conversation, ask some bigger questions to help you wrestle with and think about this issue. But frankly, to take advantage of your position at Touchpoint, because you see so much when you think about the landscape of churches, when they're looking at, you know, particularly the leaders, if we're thinking about an executive pastor type person, when they come to actually knowing their people, where their people are at at their church, where. What does a landscape look like for us on that front? How do we know kind of the people in our church? How do we get a sense of who are they? What are they doing? How are they engaging with us?

C (3:35)

Yeah, I love the church, Rich. I recently have been kind of working through the language with the Lord of. I think the calling on my life is to be the best maid of honor to the bride of Christ that I can be. So it's a unique vantage point serving church all over the country. Like you said, the church has a lot of passion and we're doing a lot to reach people. But some things that I see are that we still have visibility gaps. And why that matters is because churches cannot shepherd what they cannot see. And so we. We've got a lot of people in our care, but if we're just taking ministry snapshots instead of understanding meaningful steps as people take their discipleship journey, we're still struggling with visibility into what's actually happening in our church.

B (4:26)

Well, I'm looking forward to digging into that. I know many of us, I like to call it the nickels and noses issue. Like, we know, in fact, probably 100% of the pastors that are listening in today, they know how many people attended last weekend, and they probably know generally where things are at on the revenue side, particularly hopefully on the expense side, too.

A (4:48)

But.

B (4:48)

But that's just a really High level, maybe not that helpful. If I hear what you're saying, where does the picture start to break down when all we see is these two. If, if we're just looking at these two numbers, how does that kind of limit our ability? I like that, you know, to see our people, to ultimately disciple them.

C (5:06)

Yeah, I would say there is a ton of opportunity to transform data into discipleship. And when we stay high level, we're missing the opportunities that double clicking into those things would allow us. Like you said with an attendance example, we know how many people are in groups sometimes that's roster based. Churches that really are getting into this might know what their retention rate is. You know, how many people actually are staying in groups over the course of the season. But like, if we keep clicking and keep drilling into this, there is the ability for us to understand as people are engaging in these groups and disengaging from these groups, you know, who's still connected three weeks into the season, six weeks into the season, 12 weeks into the season and, and who's not and why did they fall off. So there is a high level view that's helpful year over year, season to season. But again, we're missing a lot of discipleship opportunities by not drilling down into this to kind of these personal levels.

B (6:04)

Yeah. And I can imagine as particularly as our churches grow, I think there's a lot of leaders in the church that are like really intuitive leaders and they like to kind of like get in a room and like I can feel this thing, I just know how it's going. But as the church grows and becomes, you know, more complex, that's harder to do. You can't, you just can't, you can't get in all the rooms. There's, there's, you can't be in more than one place at once. If you have multiple locations, you can't do that. And so how, as that happens, what are the kind of maybe questions that you see leaders asking that that doesn't work anymore though. They can't get answers out of that. They want answers for that, but they just can't get it. What, what are those?

C (6:45)

Yeah, I would say rich intuition is God given, but feelings are fleeting. Right. I'm a big believer in facts are our friends. So we, we've got to have the data and make data driven decisions. But I think the questions that leaders are trying to answer that sometimes they can't with those feelings. In my experience, it feels like the breaking point of visibility is around like that 300 mark. If your church is grow 2 or above around 300. Your. Your staff's eyes just can't see everything anymore on a weekend. And so the questions that I think we want to answer that we, we lose visibility to as we grow. And bigger churches obviously suffer from this as well. But we want to know who's new, we want to know who's stalling in their discipleship journey. We want to know who needs care, who's drifting. And that's the part, Rich, that I think is. Is really important, because when people are drifting from something that they were previously engaged in, it's probably the things of life that they're going through that we, the church, are responsible for caring for them and connecting with them. Shepherding through, you know, it's. It's a bunch of D's, Rich. It's doubt, it's divorce, it's depression, it's diagnosis, it's economic duress, it's disgruntlement, it's distraction. It's all of these things that we can't see if we're not double clicking. But, but we want to know who's drifting, we want to know who needs care, and we want to show up in a timely manner.

B (8:10)

Okay, that's fantastic. I love the D list as well. Good. Great preacher, lots of Ds there. Love it. So let's double click another D on this. This. I know you have a framework to help churches wrestle through this, to actually, you know, get beyond just these kind of high level, to undersea both see these people and understand them, move them along. Do you want us kind of talk us through this framework, give us a high level over and then maybe we'll kind of dive into pieces of it.

C (8:39)

Yeah, let's alliterate some more. Like I said, I was on church for a long time.

B (8:45)

Yes, exactly.

C (8:46)

Memorable, right? So, yes, this is a really simple framework that really is more stages. It's a progression. But even though it's simple, whether they know it or not, every church is in one of these stages when it comes to data driven discipleship. And so four kind of Cs of this or stages are conviction, collection, clarity, and care. And I'll just give a brief description of each of those and then we can go dive in a little bit deeper. But conviction, really the question that we're answering here is do you truly believe this matters, even when it's not easy? So leaders believe that shepherding is important, but do we want to move into doing it proactively? And are we comfortable using data as a tool to do that. Well, so that's kind of the conviction piece. Do you really believe that this matters Collection, then? Are you committed to consistently gathering the data that's needed, not just once, but as a rhythm? It's hard work, but it is a worthy cause, a valiant effort. Let's move to clarity real quick. Again, the question we're answering is, now that you have the data, do you have the insight? Do you really see what it's telling you and what are we doing with it? And then the last one, care, of course, is where we're acting on the insights to connect with our people. Will you actually act on the insights and shepherd people, or will it stay theoretical? That's. That's kind of where we're headed with this.

B (10:17)

Okay, that makes sense. So, again, so that's conviction, collection, clarity, and care. I'd love to talk about collection a little bit. So I think our churches would love to collect data. And in fact, I know there's lots of leaders that are listening in that are like. They're like, yeah, that sounds right. I would love to get more data. I'm just not sure how to do that. How do we build a system for collecting that data, for getting, you know, even the things you talked about, people dropping out of groups, you know, not just people rostering, but, like, how do we. How do we do that? What's the starting point for collecting data?

C (10:55)

To be honest, I think the starting point is your culture. I think that this is often an upstream problem when we think it's a downstream one. I think that we think people just need to follow up or just be more regular about it. But if we don't have a strong culture around why we gather the data and what we're doing with it, there's just a lack of clarity with the team. So I think culture really matters as a starting point. Of course, we can get into how to collect it, but I think we have to start there.

B (11:27)

Yeah, that's a good insight, because I can see where. Yeah, we have to. Even just at a high level, is this a conversation we're willing to have, want to have, want to be a part of, and we've got to deal with it. Like you say upstream rather than, okay, let's dive into the actual tool first. Let's figure out how important this is. My experience, I'm going to play a little bit of devil's advocate on this question. Hopefully you can take it, Ronnie. Our relationship can sustain that. But, like, I feel like churches collect more data that Than they use. Like, I. I'VE bumped into churches where they're like, yeah, we've got this data, but we're not actually doing anything with it. What's the difference between a church that does that like that just sitting on data, not using it, and one that actually can gain some clarity from it? What's the pivot between collection and clarity? How do we do that?

C (12:16)

Yeah, the difference is data and discernment. A church that's collecting information knows what happened. But a church with clarity understands what it means and what to do next. And like you said, we've got to be willing to talk about it. We have to spend the time to translate it. It is a pivot that raw data is. Is rarely helpful. And to. What do they say to. To push back on your pushback? I am surprised as I deal with churches, how many of them don't have all the data. I think sometimes we make an assumption that above a certain size, they just collect group data and they take attendance and that's what they do. Or our volunteers check in, or our kids and students check in regularly and they're excellent at it. I find that that is actually less frequent of a case than I think you or I would hope to believe.

B (13:09)

Okay, that's cool. And so again, I said we weren't going to be like selling Touchpoint, but I do want to understand kind of your unique position on this issue. How is Touchpoint Accelerate? Because to me, I think the model turns here on this collection clarity issue. It's like, man, we've got to. We have to use technology to enable us to collect data and then that. And then have some sort of intermediating technology that helps us gain better clarity on that. Talk us through What. Where is TouchPoint's kind of expertise in these two parts of the four Cs.

C (13:43)

Yeah, I would say that Touchpoint obviously helps with collection. We're a church management software with some unique features that are going to help you get an intuitive kind of collective view of people's engagement. So we offer things like engagement scores, which. Which not a lot of church management softwares have kind of baked into it. We want you to understand that overall participation and be able to see what level, at what levels people are engaged. And as they're disengaging, there are ways to do that and other softwares. But touchpoint does have some unique kind of approaches to that built into the software. I would say another piece to this that kind of separates us is we have a team of consultants, and those consultants are not only partnering with churches as they're kind of getting up and running in touchpoint to learn how to use the system. We're kind of ministry consultants. We often. Just a couple of weeks ago, I had a church in Texas approach me and say, you know, we have a lot of great people on our staff, but to be honest, a lot of them have transitioned from the market marketplace. We don't know what, we don't know what processes should we have, how, what should our baptism process look like. And so we have a whole team as part of our touchpoint team that sits with churches and helps strategize around ministry, philosophy and best approaches. And so I'd say that's another place where we, we kind of shine in the space. Everybody in the space wants to see the church win. Everybody has good hearts. And I can only speak to the team that I'm on. And these guys, they really counted a privilege to serve the church.

B (15:18)

Yeah, that's, that's amazing. Like, and you can see, you know, a church, when this is done well, when you have got a solution like touchpoint at the core of what you're doing, it ends up touching all of your processes. It doesn't surprise me that a church like that would reach out and say, hey, like, can you help us work through? Because you start to see the value of like, man. If we can embed this into the core of what we do, we get a better. Like you say, it's not just like, oh look, we get a good engagement score. You know, it actually helps us minister to people better. It actually helps us to. And so it makes sense to me that you find yourself in increasing conversations that are obviously related to technology. They, they have a, for lack of, better word, a touch point to technology. But they are, they're also, you know, other kind of related systems in the church. So obviously ultimately this all points towards care. Maybe paint a bit of a vision for us. Maybe think of a church that's doing this well, that's like, hey, here are some of the telltale signs that they're actually following through, that they're, yes, they've got, they've had a high level kind of culture. They've got this conviction, yes, we're going to do that. They're finding lots of places to collect data that doesn't seem intrusive. They're ultimately gaining some clarity on that. And that's translating into real world care. Give us some, a few pictures of what does that actually look like when you're like, that's working well.

C (16:35)

Yeah, I would say one of the best kind of tells of this is we hear less and less stories of people disengaging and nobody knew and they were hurt by that. We missed an opportunity to care for or connect with them when those things of life came up. You know, it's as simple sometimes as a phone call or a text, a conversation on a weekend, when the data is showing you that this person has been disengaging or not around to just reach out and say, hey, how you doing? You know, this is not surveillance. This is stewardship. This is, this is caring for our people. And there's a story out of the church where, where I used to work that I love and I still tell just because of the multifaceted kind of piece of the engagement that came out of it. So a campus pastor who was using data really well saw an individual in his church on a list of people who were disengaging. And so he reached out and he learned that this individual had lost his job, that was causing doubt in his faith, and he was actually beginning to struggle with some depression. You know, if we play that scenario out, if we never saw that, we didn't reach out, what happens to that guy? You know, the story could have looked very, very different. But because that pastor was able to use the data for the purposes of discipleship and make that connection, we, we saw him and connected him. We were able to address his physical needs. You know, there was some assistance the church could provide or point him to. We were able to help with mental needs, emotional needs, spiritual needs. There was pastoral care and Christian counseling and so, so many different ways that we were able to engage and, and, and walk alongside this individual. Like I said, the way I think the church wants to and should be. But we maybe would have never known about that individual if we hadn't had the indicator because of the data.

B (18:25)

Yeah, so you come, something you said there caught my attention. I'm like, oh, we gotta loop back around on that. The example you use there, you talked about the campus pastor type person. They, they had like a disengagement report. There was like, the system ended up generating, hey, here's the list of people. I'm assuming about what you said. Here's some people who, you know, I, you should connect with, talk to me about how that happens. I, I, I'm not like, I'm not putting down any other solutions out there. I've worked of them. I have not had that experience where it's like, hey, let's, these are some people you should talk to, talk to me about how TouchPoint actually does that. What does that look like at the level of a church? How do we get to the point where we're using this well enough that we can have a report like that that we could actually take action on? That's incredible.

C (19:13)

Yeah. I would say it comes down to consistency in some ways. Right. You build some custom reports in your system. Touchpoint has a lot of, lot of unique reporting that we can do to surface that data for you. But no matter what system you're using, I would say if you and your team aren't using simple, something as simple as absentee report of some sort, people who have been missing three or more consecutive weeks from groups or, or something like that, I mean you can start there and, and it's really that easy. But there are more complex ways to understand rather than the arbitrary. I want to call everybody who's missing three weeks. Understand as personal participation patterns change. And that is a really unique approach to it and I would say it does take a software like TouchPoint or even one that TouchPoint just partnered with called Path. We're getting into seeing those personal participation patterns and that's where I think we get into some secret sauce and just be able to show up in a really timely manner.

B (20:12)

Yeah, that's incredible. Like being able that to me friends. Okay, I'm just gonna stop pretending like I'm not biased. Like I'm biased. You should be checking out touchpoint. But like the, the. I was, I tried, I held for almost 20 minutes. I tried to be the, the, the unbiased, you know, second voice or whatever. But, but I, I think a part of the, all of these systems have for years have like they, this is the thing that's all been talked about. Like this is going to be amazing. But actually what they end up doing is being they, they're just like warehouses of data. Like, it's just, it's just a big list. It's basically a complex spreadsheet of people's names. And that's not helpful. That doesn't actually help us. And the vicious cycle I've seen with my team is our people, Our people people, the people that actually interact with our folks. They don't see the value in this helping them. So then they don't end up interacting with the tool and giving data and all of that stuff because they're like, well, this doesn't actually help me do my job, so why am I interacting with it? What I love about touchpoint is we're saying, hey, how do we get to the, to the idea of a personalized path, a personalized understanding of where people are at. That's, you know, that's incredible. So you've worked with lots of churches, hundreds of churches, and you know, lots all across the country. Great. Lots of different contexts. What trends are you seeing right now? That church that are helping churches think about engagement differently than maybe a few years ago. That things that are like, okay, this is, you know, kind of the cutting edge stuff we should be thinking about, you know, in the, in the future. What are some things we should be looking at.

C (21:49)

Yeah. I'm really grateful that in the last few years, I think there has been started to see a shift, at least in churches, moving from simply gathering the data to asking what they can do with it. How can we actually leverage this for discipleship? I think churches are taking that more seriously. It even used to be a little taboo for churches to gather data. That's not the case anymore, and I'm grateful for that. I see that moving in a really positive direction. I'm seeing churches being willing to evaluate their technology stack, which I think is really important. Again, we've been gathering the data long enough. Long enough. If it's not useful, what. What are we doing? What are we doing with it? So, yeah, understanding. Is our technology really serving us well and as a tool. Exactly. For those people you just mentioned, your people people, your pastoral people. Is it quick and easy and getting them to their people more quickly? And then even the idea of decisions being made around data about specifically the actual size of our ministry. I think this has been said for years now. Pre Covid, it was true. Now it's, it's even more true. Weekend service numbers don't tell the whole story of who is in and around our ministry pond. And we have to understand that and start making decisions around that. Because if we're seeing people less and less, you know, how are we creating spaces where they are willing to engage more frequently or in those spaces, how are we discipling them towards the importance of the weekend service and that gathering? And so I'm just seeing some things shift in that area as well. Executive pastors don't love this conversation, Rich. I'm just going to throw that out there because a lot of our staffing ratios are based on weekend service attendance numbers. But we're actually serving. The patterns that I'm seeing are somewhere between two and a half to three times that number of people in our ministries. So there's, there's a lot of movement in the world of data but those are some of the things that are kind of surfacing that I think is really helpful and productive for churches.

B (23:44)

Okay. I want to, I would, like I said I was. Want to take advantage of your expertise. An area that, speaking in this whole consistency issue, hey, how do we keep our people engaged, keep our staff, our volunteers, key volunteers engaged in collecting data and, you know, ensuring that they're engaging with the tools. What have you seen as best practices either on the front end? Like, hey, when we're rolling out a new system, if we've, if we've switched, say for instance, if you're listening in and you want to switch to touchpoint, what are some best practices on that front or just ongoing to keep our people using this? How do we, how do we. Yeah, what's best practice on that front?

C (24:27)

Yeah, what you're kind of hinting towards is a little bit around change management and the stick to it around that. Right There is a leadership coaching company that I've worked with in the past that talks about to achieve anything, you need clarity, support and accountability. And I'm a really big believer in that clarity. Again, we've talked about what are we doing, why are we doing it? Support is, do we have the tools and the training to make that happen? The biggest lacking piece that I see often in Church World is the accountability side. You know, we wrestle with the idea of grace and truth and a lot of times we want to link, lean really heavily into the gray side of things. I think there is a huge opportunity for accountability to be reframed in Church World. It doesn't have to be a drop the hammer approach. No, it's seeing people do the right thing and helping them continue to do that. So I would say if you don't have all three of those pieces, you're probably going to struggle to achieve just about anything. And the part, like I said, that I see really, really with area for opportunity in the church world is that accountability piece.

B (25:39)

Yeah, that's great. Any that I think that's a clear framework. That's like the cost of the price worth the price of admission of today's episode right there. Clarity, support, accountability. That's fantastic. On the accountability side, how do we do that? What are some ways to, you know, I'm thinking carrot and stick. It's like I can. We've celebrated where it's like, hey, look at this person. This department's doing a great job with this. How else are should. Have you seen churches that are particularly effective at driving that kind of consistency, driving accountability what are they doing to ensure that that's, you know, that's actually happening in their organization?

C (26:14)

Yeah. Casting the vision of this being stewardship, I think really matters. You know, there's a verse in Hebrews that talks about your church leaders will be accountable to the Lord for the people they're shepherding. And so I think really casting the vision around stewardship is part of that. But then practically, it can't be weird to talk about it. You know, let's talk about it in department meetings. Let's talk about it and celebrate in staff meetings. Let's bring it up in one on ones. Pull the technology up with the people that you lead and look through the lists and say, what are the stories? How are things going? You know, how can I support you as you move this forward? But I just think it can't be weird to talk about. So between taking the stewardship side seriously and just starting to incorporate it into every conversation, every meeting, if it matters to us. And it does, it does, because people are the mission of the church. Right. How do we just continue to build that culture around it?

B (27:09)

Yeah. It's so good. So you've put together a great resource that I want to make sure. If you're listening in, friends, you've invested almost 30 minutes here. You need to jump on this resource. Super helpful, the Church Health Assessment. Talk us through. What is this tool? How will it help? Why should we jump on board? You know, what kind of conversation could it help us with our team, even this week?

C (27:35)

Yeah. The Church Health Assessment is looking at five widely accepted kind of industry benchmarks to understand how your church is comparing to those. So like we talked about earlier, this could give you a starting place to understand, you know, based on those benchmarks, how is your church doing? How are a few of these ministries doing? And then it's, it's probably going to highlight somewhere specific for you to start drilling into and double clicking on. So that assessment is going to be@touchpoint software.com unseminary. Like I said, it's going to take you. If you've got the data, which is part of this conversation. Right. You know the numbers. It's only going to take you two or three minutes to get these five key areas kind of benchmarked to understand how your church is performing compared to those accepted benchmarks.

B (28:26)

Yeah, that's amazing. Like, again, friends, I would love for you to check that out. We'll put a link in the show notes to that. Thanks for doing that. What a great gift tool for people that are listening in. That's super helpful. I appreciate that. I think I can see where this kind of thing could be super helpful for us even to have like a bit of a leadership conversation around. Let's do it and then talk about it together. It's a good conversation. So taking a step back, if I'm. If I'm an executive pastor, senior leader who's listening in and I feel like I'm constantly. Or we're mostly reacting. We're constantly reacting to problems at our church. You know, we're not getting ahead of this. We're not seeing kind of data as it, you know, we're not developing, like you say ahead. We're just, it's stuff happens and then we react. How could we use data to help us get ahead of that rather than, you know, just reacting all the time? What's one of the first areas we should look at and consider as a church?

C (29:23)

Yeah, I would say that a simple place to start is kind of revisiting this framework of conviction, collection, clarity and care and ask yourself, what c is my church stuck on? Where are we stuck in this journey? And dive in there, ask the questions, reach out to another church who maybe is doing this really well. But that's where I would say practically, I would ask yourself, where are you on this kind of progressive journey of data driven discipleship?

B (29:52)

Yeah. So good. This has been a fantastic conversation, if you were. So I get one more last question in for you here. What's one question you wish every church leader who, who's listening in today would. Would ask about their church that almost nobody's asking right now that's thinking about this area, that's thinking about like, hey, what are we. You know, here's a question I wish we were thinking about that we're not thinking about today.

C (30:17)

Yeah, churches are asking a lot of good questions and I love this topic. I'm passionate about data driven discipleship. But I think the question behind the question behind the question kind of comes down to are we promoting participation or are we cultivating transformation? And that's what I hope that we're asking through this kind of sea of data and everything that we're looking at the core of things. Are we promoting participation or are we cultivating transformation for the people of our churches?

B (30:52)

This is fantastic. There's a ton we could talk about on this front. This has been a helpful conversation for us today. Friends. I want to encourage you to take the church health assessment, give us that address again that we want to send people to.

C (31:04)

It's going to be@TouchPointSoftware.com unseminary.

B (31:08)

Great. Will, you can do that right in your phone right now. We'd love for you to go and check that out. We'll put a link to that anywhere else we want to send people online, Ronnie, if they want to track with Touchpoint. Or maybe we're sitting in today and we're thinking, you know what, maybe we should relook at this area. I'm not super happy with what's going on on with our, you know, church management software. Where do we want to send them online to get more information about what, what you guys do?

C (31:30)

Go ahead and just check out touchpoint software.com I would recommend you get a demo. Like I said, it's kind of a conversation that churches are having right now evaluating their tech stack. If you haven't looked at it in a while, just take a look. Maybe just look around and we would love the opportunity to connect with you and demo Touchpoint for you. So that same website without the backslash get a demo and we'd be just thrilled to have a conversation with you.

B (31:56)

Yeah, that's good, friends. I just want to endorse that. I think that's a great next step for lots of our churches that are listening in today. Listen, friends, your team spends a lot of time in this tool. Whatever you use on this front day, you spend a lot of time on it. It's worth a sober second look. It's worth, if you haven't looked at this in a while, to take a step back and say, hey, let's take a look at this again. And Touchpoint would be a great one for you to take a look at and say, hmm, I wonder if maybe we should be looking at a change. So appreciate that, Ronnie. It's so great seeing you again. I'd love to have you come back on in the future. I'm sure there's more we could talk about, but thanks for being here today.

C (32:28)

Sounds good. Thank you, Rich.

A (32:30)

Thanks for tuning in to the Unseminary podcast. Drop by unseminary.com for more helpful resources for you and your team. There you will find articles, online courses, and so much more unseminary stuff you want. Wish they taught in seminary. Presented by CDF Capital. Visit them at CDF Capital Unseminary.