SPEAKER_03 0:03

Years ago, Pastor Aaron Grahava toured Life Dot Church's mission control, screens on every wall, including technology beyond what his church could ever afford, and he walked out thinking, we will never have this. Today his church has its own version, built in a fraction of the time and budget with AI. Now, when Pastor Aaron asks why his attendance was down, it can tell him the weather, the parade downtown, or that the Cowboys are playing it new. If you've ever wondered how to build an AI-powered dashboard for your church, this is the episode for you. Welcome back to the Build a Church Podcast, where we help you gain momentum, grow your church, and go the distance in ministry. I'm Josh Rowry. The goal of this podcast is simple that each week you would get an episode that would be a quick resource for you, offering practical advice, best practices, and encouragement in your mission as a pastor. Today I've got three pastors with me who are using AI to see what's really happening in their churches. David Russell is the lead pastor of Rise Church in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which he launched in 2023. Before planting Rise, David served as online campus pastor and digital director at Church of the Highlands in Birmingham, Alabama, where he pioneered the Pray First app, which has helped hundreds of thousands of people spend daily time with God. Aaron Garjava planted Rise Church on the northwest side of San Antonio in 2018. He's an energetic practical communicator who has built Rise around a strong culture of spiritual family. And Jeremy Burroughs is the senior pastor of Catalyst Church in Washington, D.C., which he planted in 2019. Jeremy is a self-described numbers guy, and under his leadership, Catalyst has kept growing while staying focused on reaching people far from God. Before we jump into the episode, here's something Jeremy shares in this episode that stuck with me. His church is growing in attendance and giving, but when he gave three years of data to AI, it spotted a leak in the boat. They weren't adding people to the dream team fast enough. Attendance tells you who showed up. Your teams tell you who's actually staying. That's why I want to tell you about your team.church. Your team helps your people discover how God wired them and connects them to a team where they'll thrive. Your church gets a custom URL with your own branding so people can take their assessment on their phone right in your next steps classes. It uses AI to match them to the right team and it gives you a volunteer dashboard that syncs with planning stuff. Try the Your Team Pro Tier 3 for 30 days at your team.church. Now let's jump into it with David, Aaron, and Jeremy. Okay, we got two Rise Churches and one Catalyst Church. We're not going to make Jeremy oversee a battle between David and Aaron to see who's the best RISE church, but so glad to have you guys on the call today. Thanks for having us.

SPEAKER_02 2:55

Thanks for being us.

SPEAKER_03 2:56

Yeah, well, I've introduced you guys in the intro, but uh just love getting to work with you guys and ARC. You're amazing pastors, church leaders, husbands, family men, but you're also people that have tapped into AI to do some cool stuff for your church, to give you a dashboard, systems, data to help you make better decisions. And so wanted to get you guys together on a call and see how we could help other people do that. And I don't know why I keep calling this a call, uh, probably because I'm at my office and recording this podcast episode in a different space I normally do, but on this podcast to talk that through. So, real quick, why don't you just take a second and tell us uh, you know, we'll start, we'll go um Aaron, David, and then Jeremy, how long you've been pastoring and then how long you've been using AI.

SPEAKER_01 3:41

Yeah, so we planted Rise Church in San Antonio, Texas. So we're kind of on the northwest side, and we planted in 2018. I think we're ARC 803, I think is the number that we are. And um, man, we didn't obviously AI wasn't around when we planted and started, so we're kind of fairly late adopters, but um, I kind of think of it like I try to be Apple and not Google. So we're not the first to the show. We try to make the best and take everybody's idea and make it better. So I think one of the things that we're trying to do, really work on right now is staff development and uh use a lot of AI tools to try to help us get better at actually pasturing people and not doing busy work. I mean, y'all know this ministry is full of just tedious, mind-numbing like data entry stuff. Like, we got to make sure that and it's all matters because it helps to serve people well. But man, the the ability for us to have agents and AI right now to help us take that into the next level for people, um, really just to free people up. That's what I tell our staff all the time, you know, and most of our staff means have to do this now regularly. AI will not replace you. People who know how to use AI will replace you. So your job is to actually get good at using these tools that are gonna be great. I get all the issues and all the problems that could come with AI, and obviously it's not a perfect tool, but I think um we've really been trying to use it in the sense of just getting us a good dashboard for our church. Um, I don't I don't know if you've ever done this. We did a we did a tour of Life Church one time, like it was like 15 years ago or something like that. And if you've ever been to their campus and their main hub, like they have the mothership or the you know the motherboard or whatever they call it, and you walk into their space center, it's like that screens everywhere, and it costs millions of dollars, and you're like, we'll never ever have this. Like, we'll never have this. Well, now, guess what? We have it with like, you know, two hours of work with a guy who knows AI better than I do, and we're able to do that and put it in our offices. So I think just the technology gap is being shrunk between uh, I think, organizations who have the resource to do it and those who don't. And so it's really, I think, just comes down to creativity and their ability to do it and want to get it done. So um, we we found that AI has been a huge tool for us. So that's been that's been big for us.

SPEAKER_00 5:48

All right, David. I've uh been pastoring now for as a lead pastor for almost three years. We're coming up on our third anniversary. I hear it coming up in just a few weeks. But I was all I've also been in ministry for now 25 years, most of that time as an associate pastor. So I've been in ministry a while. Uh I've been tracking uh machine learning and AI for a number of years, uh probably at least 10 years, just in terms of the news and some of the science behind it. Uh but it was about a about two years ago when I I first saw kind of the current iteration of the large language model that really wowed me and impressed me, and I could see where things were headed uh to just about where we are now. It's just it's actually been an incredible leap in advancement over the last couple of years. I've been using it, I'd say daily, kind of earnestly for about a year. Uh it's become part of my daily workflow as a pastor and also our team as well here uh for you know the better part of a year. Um, and it's been incredible to see just the innovation take place in just a short amount of time. Uh and I say the same thing as Aaron is this is a multiplier. It's not a re it doesn't have to be a replacement to people. It's really something that can multiply uh the outcomes and really actually save us a lot of time where we're now carrying in ministry for others uh more so than being stuck in a lot of the administration side. So truly, truly a game changer. I've not seen a game changer like this since the smartphone, and the prior technology game changer before that would have been the World Wide Web.

SPEAKER_03 7:11

Yeah, I heard the Microsoft CEO said this is the defining technology of our time is the large language models, the generative AI. So it's it's pretty game changing for everybody, and you guys are tapping into it. I'm I'm so happy to talk more about how you're using it. So, Jeremy, same question for you.

SPEAKER_02 7:28

So uh my wife Christine and I planted Catalyst Church in the Washington, DC area back in 2019. Same as Aaron. Uh there was no AI, or even at least that I knew of, at least back then. Uh would have loved to have planted with AI. That'd be that'd be fun. So I I think how uh leveraging AI, I probably am not as early as David was to the AI game, but uh, I'd probably say I've been using it daily for the past year, and have just found that I think that that same idea is it's an enhancement. It's sort of like a companion, I think. And I think we're all saying the same thing. I think what I found that AI does some of those lower level thinking, the lower level tasks, it enables to take care of those items. So you can actually do that, which makes a greater difference uh for the sake of people, what God's called us to do. So I I do believe as well, it's been a game changer, and I love I forget who said it, but it's really kind of shrunk that gap. I think AI has opened up technology to to everyone in a way that I think was hard to even fathom five years ago. So it's exciting to see. I'm excited to learn. I feel like I'm still a novice when I even hear how people are using it. So I'm every day I feel like I'm learning something about how to leverage AI for the sake of serving people.

SPEAKER_03 8:42

Well, it's an exciting time to be a pastor or a leader with AI available. I had someone in my life that is an engineer and he retired and he had a lot of free time. If you know any engineers with free times, they just kind of get into stuff. And he got into AI and he pulled me aside and he says, I need to train you on this. This is going to change how you do ministry, and you're gonna help other people do it. And now it's really exciting because I'm with people like you guys that are taking it and you're using it to help you make decisions as a ministry to inform you about really what's going on to show blind spots and to help you better disciple people. And so before we jump into how what each of you guys are doing, I'd like you to take a second just to describe. I'm calling it a dashboard, you might not even have a name for it, but how you're using it to inform you of what's happening in your church. David, you come to this from a little bit of a different perspective than the other guys because you have a little bit of a tech background and online background. So maybe kind of talk about how your background has kind of led you into this space.

SPEAKER_00 9:44

Yeah, thanks, Josh. I would first say right off the bat, the greatest thing about this is you actually don't need a tech background to produce some really incredible things. I mean, I've got friends with zero coding experiences that have now full full-scale built apps. Josh, I know you built actually some software as well. And so it's incredible to see. It's it's empowering a generation.

SPEAKER_03 10:03

You assume I don't have a um coding background, David. I'm a little offended. You are you are you are you are brilliant.

SPEAKER_00 10:11

There's no question about my own. No, I don't have any, I know nothing. Yeah, I and I think I I think it it certainly does take some level of of at least ambition and savvy. And if you if you put those things together, which you have both of those things, Josh, you can do a lot of great things. And so I just tell people, hey, don't be afraid, don't think of this as some sort of techie tool. Because if anything, a lot of what this allows us to do is actually break some things down. And frankly, every day I have a word come across my screen that I don't know what that is, but I can just say, expand on that. Explain that a little bit more. Tell me why I need to know about what that is, what's important about that. And so it becomes something that you can kind of have an exchange with and really learn. A lot of people are saying, you know, this is maybe uh causing knowledge to be worthless, you know, information to be worthless or experience to be worthless. I'm not sure I I agree with that all the way. I think there'll be a gap there now because of what this can produce, and we do need to take care of our critical thinking. Um, but you know, to answer your question, you know, more importantly, we've seen some great results from using this. And on the tech side of it, I would just say that maybe there'd be some some churches or pastors who just aren't the only th the only reason you wouldn't be well positioned would be if you didn't have good organization before. So if you don't have a gr a database or planning center or something, and even if you have that, if you haven't taken care of your records, then it you might have more of a challenge to create healthy dashboards and to see an accurate reflection of where you are in your organization. Uh, but for us, we started with some good principles. And I'd say honestly, even if you don't have that, what's amazing is you can have, you can actually ask a large language model to help you organize your data, give it some access to it, and it can actually look and see where you got some records and they'd be merged, or you have some misspelled names, or you have some people that might be in the wrong category or wrong membership class or whatever that might be. And it can even make recommendations for you and your team to go fix those things and then get that right. And then all of a sudden you start creating dashboards on top of that data that will give you a clear picture of the health of your church. And we have high-level dashboards that are just, I mean, at a 30,000-foot view. And we have some reports that are one person uses, you know, every single day, but it's because in their world, they're managed, they're they're monitoring something at a at a daily pace that's not all that important for anybody else. And so um, the days of sort of expensive software and you know, spending millions of dollars or whatever it might be, tens of thousands of dollars on an app or, you know, $5,000 on a website, whatever it might be, I think those days are over. I think you still can invest that way if you want to, but you're just gonna, you're gonna multiply with the capacity of what you had been doing uh prior to that. That software's gonna accomplish a lot more for you at a much more affordable price. And so I'm encouraged. In fact, I had a pastor just a couple of hours ago in my office from another church in town, and I said, Man, how's your website? And he said, uh, it's not that great. I said, Do you have 10 minutes? And he said, Yes, I do. And in 10 minutes, we gave him a brand new website and he was thrilled with it. You know, and I said, I think you should go take it and work out a little bit more, make it make it you. But just even the first stab that uh the large language model had it, in this case, Claude had it at that uh website, he was blown away. You should have just seen, I mean, he just had no idea. He just didn't know. He he had never really tried much of it. You know, he really wasn't really sure what it could do. And so I'm even joining that process of just kind of educating and lighting people on what's possible. But it's it's been a game changer for us.

SPEAKER_03 13:35

Okay, so Aaron or Jeremy, you know, we're talking about large language models, uh generative AI. If someone's joining the podcast and doesn't know what that is, could y'all kind of explain that to them real quick?

SPEAKER_01 13:47

Go ahead, Jeremy. You sound smarter than I am.

SPEAKER_02 13:52

Oh my goodness. So you're you're asking me, uh I almost want to defer to David. Yeah, go ahead, David. Answer it for us real quick. David, you I th I think you're the expert on this one.

SPEAKER_00 14:02

Yeah, I think what people are afraid of is these large language models, Gender of AI, Claude, Chat GBT, Gemini. It it almost seems like it's human-like because you put words in and then words come back out, right? And we we in the context in which this became kind of very popular, is a chat-based system. And so there's this human-like thing that I think a lot of people resist. They're like, I don't I don't understand it, and I don't like how that feels. Well, to understand it is simply this this is software that that mathematically predicts words. And so we've had predictive software for years. We've had software that forecasts stock markets and weather and all kinds of stuff. Well, now we have a piece of software that in effect predicts what the next word in its sequence of words should be. So you put in a sequence of words, and this software's whole job is to take that sequence of words and do its best job through this why these data centers are are needed for this. Massive computing power will parse what those words are in as much context as you give it, it will simply return words to you. And so one of the ways I like to explain it to people is like this is kind of like the first piece of software that's accessible to many people that can control software itself. And so if you especially if you're controlling software, if you have a certain task that you're doing every day, if you just have something you need help with, if it's if it's you know in a computer or if it's in words, these large language models are the T the ticket. Now there's other AI, there's scientific AI, mathematic AI, uh, there's specialized AI in programming that's going beyond what we can do here. There's all kinds of medical research AI. So AI is across multiple, multiple uh spectrums and contexts and worlds. Uh what's popular amongst us right now is is this large language model, which is effectively a word-based model. And it also means it's also really good at code. So that was one of the first things that was trained on as developers said, fix my problem, right? I need to write better code and I want to make a better AI. So start writing code. So one of the things it's exceptional at is writing code. Uh it's gotten pretty good at design and creativity and things like that. But I think that definition helps because if you if you think about it as something that's going to help you produce either software or words or language, helps you write emails, helps you draft letters, helps you with documentation, helps you organize things, then you're you're in the right kind of mindset for what this particular type of AI can help us do. But of course, AI artificial intelligence is simply there's something that has the capacity to uh to take mass amounts of knowledge and distill it down into something that's very parsable. Um is probably the best way to say it. And so that's all we're seeing with words is take a bunch of words and just make it make sense. And LLMs have become exceptionally good at words and and particularly in code. So I I think that's the best way I can define it in a in a way that hopefully is accessible to to people listening.

SPEAKER_03 16:58

I th I thought that was great, guys. I mean, I'm sure Jeremy and and Aaron could have explained it better, but I think they approve of your answer. Exactly. Coside. You guys, thank you for giving David a chance to shine on on this podcast episode. So uh next I'd like to do, we'll go in this order, Aaron um from Rice Church in San Antonio, Jeremy uh from Calus Church in the DC area, and then we'll we'll land with David from Rice Church again, but in Chattanooga. Um just give us an overview of like the what you've been able to create with with um AI in your church and how it's helping you, and then later we'll get into the implementation of it, but just talk about what it is real quick.

SPEAKER_01 17:39

Yeah, so you know, uh again, our biggest issue was really just quantifying data. We were great at getting it. You know, if you're if you're you know, you're running an art church or you have an AI, you know, any type of modern day life-giving model, all the things that we teach you, everything from planning center to um, you know, church metrics, there's so many great tools that are out there right that have always been out there for a long period of time to help us actually gather data. The problem was is that we felt like we couldn't understand any of it. Or we were getting it and we never used any of it. So we would do stuff like, I mean, you guys have probably done this as well, where you get around after a great Sunday, and it felt like great because there were a lot of people in the room and we're like, How was Sunday? And we were like, it was great. And it was great because there was just a lot of people in the room, or we had an energy, or we gave away ice cream to everybody. And then we'd come around the flip side and there'd be like half the people in the room because it was Memorial Day, and we'd be like, How was Sunday? And it was like, it was terrible because there wasn't enough people in there. And so it became like uh the gauge for how we were doing with church was all based on how our attendance was, and it's just not an accurate way to look at things. And so I learned I learned from a just really, really strong pastors in data and metrics, and they were just like, hey, and I'm not that guy. So I just want to like it. Seems like I don't know how I got invited to this call. So I just wanted y'all to be clear. Like, I'm not the expert in that, but I'm really good at finding people who are. And so um, I can find the Davids. Um, I'm not David. So I think at the end of the day, what I was what I was challenged with was, hey, I can't make it all about how the pastor feels. Because they'd all look at me like, how do you think Sims Last Sunday went, Pastor? And I'm like, well, if I preached a good message, I thought it was great. And so we needed to quantify the data. We had the data. I think it's important what David said. Like, if you don't have good tools and good pro like, I think good um uh habits as an organization, this is not going, this is not a magic bullet to fix everything. This is something that's going to take what you have and make it better. Hopefully, that's what it could do. Um, by the way, it can also make it worse. It can also overcomplicate things. I will say that I don't think anybody talks about this enough, is that like you can actually over-AI your church. Um, I I actually stopped a staff member recently because they were like, we're built, I'm like, what are you doing right now? They're like, we're building an app to fix the app, to help the app, to fit. I'm like, stop. Like, okay. Like you see what I'm saying? So it's like you can over-AI this thing. So anyway, all I have to say, what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_03 19:59

Well, you know, you bring up a good point is that, you know, uh because I love this tool so much, yeah. Like I said, I I've used it almost daily for four years. And I can find myself leaning into it when I don't want to do some of the real work that's required. And so that is something maybe we can come back to and talk about a little bit because it makes you feel better that you're actually doing something, but uh, you haven't really made anything better. It's just all on your computer.

SPEAKER_01 20:22

Yeah. I think if you're not careful, you can turn your staff into lateral movers instead of like vertical movers. Like I want you to move forward. And so AI is um, I don't think they're it's not gonna produce the sales. I think it's gonna help you maximize the sales. So I if I if we're thinking a different language or area, but so anyway, all that say we were throwing up stuff on the wall. We had a, I literally we had a whiteboard and we had like electrical tapes, and then you know, we made our own grid and it was like attendance and kids and ratios to cars and volunteer numbers and baptisms and all that kind of stuff. And then we'd have like first week and second week and third week, and so we had somebody come in every Monday morning and erase everything and like move it over and move it over. And then we could put it on spreadsheets, but nobody looked at the spreadsheets, and then you know, it was like we could print it out, but nobody looked at the print outs, nobody looked at the data. And so we're like, how do we get it in front of us? So what we do now is we literally take every piece of data that we have. And um, I had a guy in our church who was, you're right, Josh. We had an engineer guy who knew he's like, they're always looking to tinker, they're tinkerers. And so I was like, hey, here's and he walked into our church because he was in part of our my men's development group. And uh he walked in our church, he looked at our wall and he goes, So you guys like fill that out every week? And I'm like, Yeah, like it's just a volunteer. We have like an intern that does it. And he's like, Okay. And I'm like, what are you thinking? And he goes, Let me see. And the next week he had installed a TV vertical with an uh I mean, he made through Claude a dashboard that does like it, it'll over time it'll do like shifting slides of different different things. And so you can look at it, and it's all at a glance. So it's not just our attendance, but our five week rolling average attendance, it's not just our kids, but what Kids and the the the amount of kids and if we went down or went up or and again it just goes back to the I think Craig Rochelle invented this thought process in modern church leadership was just you can't you know manage what you don't measure. And so being able to actually then it's not just measuring, it's like seeing what you measure and actually using that data. So now in a staff meeting, we're able to look at it and go, hey, we didn't have a great Sunday just because pastor preached a good message. There was actually data to show that we were down. Uh our elementary skid was kids were down, or our volunteers are down, or whatever. So it's taking all of our data and actually making it quantifiable, making it the ability for us to actually see it and use it. I just wanted it in front of everybody. So that's one, um, which was big. The second one was our staff. Um, I really wanted our staff to be able to utilize. So it was, it's like, okay, if that's the public version of what that numbers are, every one of them has an app or we made a website, basically an app, and they have all have logins and passwords, and they can go in and legitimately have a conversation with the AI model and data. So let's say I want, I have my login. I'm coming in, I'm like, why was church low? So normally I'd walk into our staff and I'd go, Why was church so low? You know, that's that's the pet, that's what, you know, that's why they pay us the big bucks. We get to come in and complain about things that are our fault to other people. So we're like, why was church so low? So now I cannot talk to our staff. I can actually go on to AI and be like, why was church so low? And it can literally say, Hey, the weather was this comparatively for the last year to the last month to the last week. Hey, there was a parade in town. Oh, hey, we actually had uh a football game going on right up when Dallas plays at noon, it kills our attendance. It literally knows that. So it's able to go in and quantify all the data and say, hey, here's actually why your church attendance was terrible. Um, hey, why were our volunteers down? Hey, actually, the rotation of our volunteers based on how many people we connected with from planning center that put in that they connected with the people from planning center, they didn't make their phone calls. This person actually highlights a volunteer that didn't, a coordinator that didn't do his job to call the people, to reschedule, to make sure that that was covered. So it literally, it'll give you a bullet point answer, answer, answer by whatever. So we want them to be able to have a tool that they can go, I don't want to know how you're so if I sit down with a kids ministry and I go, how's kids doing? They don't go, great, based on their feelings or the how if you know they have a good marriage going on right now. They're able to go, actually, let me tell you the data. Here's what's what we're actually working on, here's where our trajection, our trajection is. And to your point, like um, David, I think was really, I think this is like to me the mote one of the more valuable ones, the projections it could give you on where you're going. Like, because like, how do you know your church is growing outside of attendance, right? Like, but being able to go like, it can project for you in the future where it's at. Like, that's that to me is just powerful. So you know if we're on the right track. Hey, are we trending well? I think five-week rolling averages are better than weekly attendance. So stuff like that. And it's able to conquer. So we use that kind of stuff, and then we're just now tinkering with, and this is not my idea. It's a friend of mine, he showed me something he was doing to try to we're just for volunteers and track growth and it um growing and losing volunteers. I know if you guys were like this, but like we don't know how we why are we losing volunteers? How are they growing? How many people are coming, how many people are going, all that. That's a whole back-end app that we're working on. And that's for my friend who gave me that idea to try to do that. So we're doing that kind of stuff. So those are just a few ways that we have dashboards just up, just to look so again, not to gather data. Like we still have to gather it. Input determines the output for sure. But once we get that, we can actually utilize it.

SPEAKER_03 25:33

So okay, awesome. Jeremy, what what are you using and and how are you doing it?

SPEAKER_02 25:39

So for me, I think when it comes to dashboards, I'm a numbers person. I love numbers. So I've always kind of had like a personal massive dashboard before AI that I was looking at. So I think for me, where I'm leveraging it the most is interpretation of data and helping me to make strategic projections and plans for the future. So I love to throw in, you know, let's just even say uh not just like the five-week or this year data, but like I'll say, here's the three years of data. Tell me what basically you're kind of asking it prompts, what are observations you have about our church? Um, essentially asking it where do you see the boat leaking water? So I'll give you a good case in point of how AI helped me interpret data. We're growing this year, attendance and finances. But I threw in my data and I was like, tell me what's going well, and tell me, you know, what are your interpretations based upon what do you feel like is going well numerically. And then also tell me where are areas I should be concerned. And essentially what it what it gave me was, which I kind of thought this, you know. I I think one of the keys with AI, and I teach our staff this, and I think the difference between those who use AI effectively and those who don't is you have to be spirit-led and strategic, and you never turn that off. So it's like, I think the ones who use AI well are strategic on the front end and the back end. The ones who don't use it well are not strategic on the front end or and or the back end. So I always tell our staff, I said, never take what ChatGBT or Claude says at face value. Like I need you to never turn off your mind and think critically about it. So what Claude and Chat, that's the ones I primarily use, brought up of like, hey, the church is growing, the finances and grow is growing, but what's lagging is you are not adding to the dream team fast enough and your groups have slowed down. Now, to be honest, upon the naked eye, I didn't see the groups thing. I was seeing the dream team thing. So basically what it says is, hey, these are your lead indicators of growth or stagnation. So you so it actually ended up prompting and leading us. We are we are changing things about our growth track because we realize our growth track was not as effective as it once was. So we we're now making some tweaks um to how we do that. So what it's done is and then it's also highlighted as well um some of the gaps we have in terms of our groups. So uh we we've we've learned, hey, we we have some some again leaks in the boat that we have to shore up in our groups so that let's just say six months from now, um, it's it's significant. You know, now it's barely noticeable to the naked eye. So it's trying to teach our our staff of like how do you be strategic with your data um and really leverage leverage these these these uh language models as uh in a way sort of a a companion uh to help you to interpret data. And the benefit is they can just interpret this mass amount of data, you know, like that, and and spit out some information um that is incredibly helpful. And I've also found this when it comes to my data, which is like the the key in AI, I know many of us know this, but it's our prompts. Like, what are we asking of it? I put the data in there, and then I'm asking different things about it. Like, compare our data to the average growing healthy church in America, and I'll even say, like this church, this church, this church, this church, this church. And so, you know, and the more you feed it, and I think that's critical for those newer to AI is like the more you feed it, the more it gets to know you. Where as you use it over a while, you have to feed it less because it already instinctively knows you. So it's like, okay, you know, now it will like reads my data as if I fed it all this information because I have been feeding it now, all this information now for uh a certain number of years. And then I'll actually have it as well. Take that data and I'll say, develop me a strategic growth plan for the next six months, 12 months, 18 months. It'll spit it out. And again, I take it, interpret it, process it, um, and then try to teach our. I I'm not at a place, Aaron, where you are. I'm trying to trying to some of our staff are more naturally are are getting into it, others of are a little slower. So I think now my next level is how do we teach our staff um to really leverage this in a greater way? Because I think the capacity is significant and really can help us. Because I'm I'm somebody who very much is um I tell people this numbers don't lie. Um, so the numbers tell a story, not the whole story, but they tell a story. So I think what the benefit of of using these in the context of dashboards, I think, is for um kind of a thought enhancement and strategic planning to enable us, you know, let's say again, small leaks in the boat now don't sink the ship 18 months from now. Um, and we actually come out 18 months from now much stronger because we saw a small leak because Claude examined three years of trends and said, Hey, I'm noticing this. You should look into this. So that's very hard question.

SPEAKER_01 31:10

Yes. We're trying to create like take the system. So, for instance, it sounds like we're on the same page in how we aggregate information, but almost like creating specific pathways for each staff member and steps based on both short term, so like from the weekend, but then also month and year. Is that what are you guys developing that? And David, are you developing that? How are you doing that now? Because that's the step we're in development right now. And I want to know how you guys are doing that as well. Because to me, I think step one is what we're doing. Step two is the AI or even an agent not just defining what they are, but then an agent taking what it needs to like. Well, here, Aaron, so you were down this week in kids. So here's what your steps are this next week. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And they have by Monday morning, they have a bullet list of what the because here's my issue, right? And you, I'm sure you guys struggle with this. The issue we always had with staffing, right, is like you either staff somebody who's super experienced, they're gonna be crazy expensive, or you saw somebody who's and and they don't know your culture, or you start somebody who's like super cheap, but they actually know your culture and they grew up with you, but they don't have any experience. So that experience gap is shrinking with AI right now. And so we're trying to utilize the other way because I think the other way is better because it's harder to teach culture than it is to teach a skill. So I'm curious, are you guys finding that being true in your guys' world and aggregating that to the next step, both small and long?

SPEAKER_02 32:29

I mean, I'll I'll just say I'll defer to David. I mean, we're we're not there yet with our staff to where it's like this automated, like giving our staff. I mean, I love that idea. And when you when you figure that out, I'd love to to know that because yeah, we're not there yet, but I love that thought.

SPEAKER_00 32:44

Yeah, and I would say right now, you know, our being three years in, our staff is pretty lean. So we're very heavily dependent on dream team leaders uh and volunteer leaders in our church. Uh, there are a couple of ways we've begun to to shift already from uh just kind of decisions based in data uh and moving that into understanding what what is impacting people. So for example, we do have a dashboard uh that measures things like engagement, measures our dream team, uh, measures families and check-ins and how healthy those things are are happening, uh, measures our next steps. And in all these areas, and in giving as well, by the way. But in all these areas, um, I'm moving our dashboards now to producing certain reports that ultimately I'm I'm I don't know what I'm gonna call it, probably eventually some sort of care system or something. But if you look at the numbers and you see a decline, I always wanted to know, well, like you, like you, Aaron, what, well, what's behind that? What happened? And so as an example, one thing that we uh recently did it to help our dream team leaders is uh on the same dashboard that measures our dream team health, we produce some lists based on some simple, simple requirements. Uh, does someone serve at least twice in an eight-week period? And we consider that person someone who's active on the dream team. But if they only serve once in an eight-week period, we're considering that person uh that's that's disengaged. Like they're kind of in danger of being disengaged. And then we have a disengaged list, which is they haven't served at all in eight weeks up to six months. And then after six months, they move on to a list called inactive. And so while they're in that period of maybe they've served, and in some cases we're seeing people who serve very consistently, you know, once or twice a month, to then sort of once a month, to then not at all in a couple of months, and we're able to make a phone call. And that their name shows up on the list. So the dream team leaders can see exactly where that person is at. Uh and it's not just a visual thing on Sunday. Uh we can still see that, but but the idea would be I just want to make sure that there's nobody that falls through the cracks. And so now instead of just servicing numbers, uh, many of our dashboards are servicing names of people who need a phone call from the leader uh of that team, somebody that that that they're that that person's responsible for providing ministry care for. And so we started doing that across a number of our other dashboards, family. Uh, next steps, we're having people getting stuck in the pipeline, and you know, maybe they weren't deciding about a team, but maybe our person wasn't getting connected to them and helping them onboard. And so it's helped us fix a lot of those kinds of issues as well. And we're just now starting to reflect some of those kinds of things to the front end of our website in terms of how our systems can actually help people understand where they're at on their journey. So not only do we have accountability on the team, but now our website and our soon to come app uh will actually provide some accountability for the people themselves. So they can actually see exactly where they're at on their journey, including having some potential streaks and things like that, maybe that help out. I don't know how much we want to uh gamify this thing, as some people like to say, but just provide some sort of mechanism where people can understand, you know, what their next step is. I think that'd be the dream of ours, is to not be not involved in the process. These are all people connecting with people the whole time. But if this piece of software in the middle helps us be more accountable to providing care for people, helping them not fall through the cracks, feeling seen and known and loved, and giving them purpose and putting them in a position, then let's use it for the glory of God. So that's why I'm not afraid of AI. We're already seeing it make a difference internally, and I want to try and reflect that um sort of internal leadership um help that it's that it's providing for us also with with people as well. And I think we'll see a lot of mileage out of that.

SPEAKER_03 36:19

David, just give us a like really quick overview of uh what you're using. You mentioned an app. I'd love to love people to hear that.

SPEAKER_00 36:26

Yeah, thanks, Josh. I'll just kind of give as quick a summary as I can. Uh, through our website, uh, we started with basically a simple profile that people can log into. We didn't have that before. And so now there's a profile that people can have. We call it Rise Profile, and they can log in. And we started with a simple feature, uh, taking message note, taking message notes in service. So as I preach the message, people can follow along the notes and fill in the blanks. And so we had that feature available on our website. I just said, and if you want to save them, just log in. And so a handful of people started doing that. And so we just started adding to that process. And so now on Sunday afternoons, it's kind of incredible. Uh, our team pushes up a our video uh to our video processing you come to Vimeo, that's what it's called. But and from there, Claude does everything else. Uh Claude actually will transcribe the message. It actually takes my message notes. I'm fairly I'm outlined, but I'm detailed outline, so I'm almost manuscript. It will take my outline and use that and then create a transcript so it knows what words to say. And I mean it'll spell y'all correctly. I was pretty impressed with that. Okay, so we have closed captions now. Uh it'll actually summarize an article of the message, and so you can either watch, listen, or even read the message on our website, which is incredible for SEO because now all the content I'm I'm preaching on Sunday is now in print on the website. We had a uh somebody, we had six people get baptized this past baptism because somebody Googled baptism at the lake, Chattanooga, and our our me talking about it surfaced it in a search engine. And uh this grandmother, all six, five of her grandkids want to get baptized, and she decided she wanted to be baptized too, and that's how they found us. So we we baptized her plus another 27 people this past weekend, which was incredible. So there's some definite advantages to it. Uh we have a discussion guide now that's created uh through AI for the message. And so the app that's coming is just that, uh, those types of features, but we're gonna advance it to in such a way that people can keep their next track their next steps of where they're at in their spiritual journey. Uh, they can even mark maybe their salvation date, their baptism date. Um, you know, if they've gone through next steps, we'll let them know, we'll kind of light up some badges in the in the app so they can kind of see where they're at. But then hopefully provide some tailored communications as well. So we've always just been sending these big email campaigns out just to one big, one church list, you know. And if it's about men's breakfast, I mean half that, half the church is not relevant to them, right? And so being able to send some tailored communications to different groups uh is really important for us as well. So we'll be able to do that um in the app. So there's some fun things uh that are possible, not just in sort of the administration layer, which that's where we started too, is just solving problems internally, getting a picture, getting a read on it, uh, but then flipping that to where, man, what can we do to help, you know, people get now, now that we can kind of functionally work in internally, man, what are some of the things we can do for the people we serve uh to just help them engage with scripture more? One year Bible reading plan uh on our site. You can track your progress through that. Um, just some things that just help people engage with God's word, help people get connected to groups. Uh, I can definitely see a future where uh some of the group selection process is aided by, hey, we see how you're wired based on the spiritual gifts assessment you completed in next steps. We see the five spiritual gifts, not just where you serve on the dream team, but how about a place you know for you to plug into small groups? This this group right here, you might really make a lot of friends in. You'll find some connections because there's a bunch more people uh that are wired the same way or in a complimentary way as you. So uh I'm I'm fired up about the future of ministry. And I think um, I don't know what's gonna happen to some of these larger providers. I mean, I love Planning Center. We love some of these bigger groups that are fantastic pieces of software we're gonna keep using for a long time. But also don't think churches need to be afraid of starting to just see what's possible. And if you've got a problem, uh just try try solving it in this way. And you might be wowed just like the rest of us at just what is possible. And it's gonna get better. It does make mistakes. I think that was really, really wise both Aaron and Jeremy said something to that effect. You do have to stay, you gotta stay involved, but it is pretty incredible to see uh what's possible. Um, and uh exciting exciting time to be in ministry, I think.

SPEAKER_03 40:40

Well, actually, I think that's a great note to end on, David. Uh, you really summed up everything for us really, really well and appreciate you bringing your wisdom and Aaron, you as well, and Jeremy. Thank you guys. I feel like we could have gone another 45 minutes and done this for an hour and a half very easily. And I really enjoyed this. I hope it's a blessing to other people. And I just want to thank you guys for joining the Build the Church podcast today. Thanks, John. So grateful to David, Aaron, and Jeremy for opening up their playbooks. Here's what I don't want you to miss. None of these guys are using AI to replace people, they're using it to see people better. Jeremy said it well. Numbers tell a story, just not the whole story. And David's dashboards don't just show the numbers anymore, they show the names. The volunteers who used to serve twice a month and hasn't been back in eight weeks, who now gets a phone call from a leader instead of flipping through the crowd. So stay spirit-led, keep thinking critically, and start small. Pick one problem in your church this week and see what's possible by creating your own AI dashboard. If you want to connect with any of these guys, here's where to find them. For Pastor David Russell, you can follow him on Instagram at at david underscore russell. Aaron Gahava, you can find at RiceChurch T X.com. And Jeremy Burroughs, you can find at your catalystchurch.com and on Instagram at Jeremy Burroughs B-U-R-R-O-U-T-H-S. This episode was brought to you by your team.church. Your team is the digital assessment platform church is used to connect volunteers to a team where they can thrive. Your church gets a custom branded URL to use right in your next steps class, plus AI powered team matching, personality insights, and a volunteer dashboard that syncs with your church management system of choice. Help people discover how God wired them and where they belong. Try the Pro Tier Free for 30 days at your team.church. Thank you for joining me today. I can't wait for you to be with me next time. Until then, keep leading and believing strong.