Last week I had the opportunity to meet with the men in my Zoom group of business owners at beautiful Lake Chelan in Washington state.  This is a group of men committed to serving the Lord and each other well.  All their stories are amazing.  I'll share more in future blogs. But, this one relates directly to my last blog on marketing and the stages of evangelism.

Back in January I announced that we were going to start a weekly Roundtable for clients to discuss topics of interest.  The idea was to create a collaborative learning environment for clients and our staff.  We admitted up front that it would be an experiment and that we would be learning as we go.  I thought you might want an update.

We all know that trust is foundational to successful relationships.  It is also foundational to a successful relationship with your database.  If you don't trust the data, you don't trust what the data tells you.  That's a problem.

Great news!  We are just about to the end of 2020.  I think all of us are ready to move on to 2021.  But, before we go, I thought it would be interesting to review the 52 posts of this blog this year to see what we might glean as we look ahead.

As the Andy Williams song (Youtube) tells us, this really is the most wonderful time of the year.  But, like everything else in 2020, the pandemic is making us re-think how we do Christmas services and events. 

(verse 3) There will be services for reserving and childcare for serving.  Families wary to go.  Because of scary Covid stories and tales of the gories of viruses long, long ago. 

The uncertainty of this year so far has caused all of us to innovate like crazy.  This weekly blog chronicles much of our journey as a software company. 

Hopefully this season will soon be over.  To help capture what you've learned, I wanted to share with you a conversation with Dave Workman about an affordable, fun, and creative way for a team to do strategic planning. 

Dave was part of Vineyard Cincinnati, an innovative mega-church, from its inception and then as Sr. Pastor for 13 years.  Currently he is president of Elemental Churches, a leadership development group devoted to helping churches become healthier and more effective. He is the author of Elemental Leaders and The Outward-focused Life.  

Churchteams was built around the idea of growing a church using groups as the common building material for every ministry. This means that everything that involves more than one person is managed as a group. 

Every worship service, small group, class, committee, ministry team, leadership team, service team, mission team, event, and even assimilation step is managed as a group. 

This is one of the design constructs that makes our software unique, powerful and user-friendly.  Once understood, ministry rocks of all sizes are formed together to become a solidly built organization.

I was so encouraged by this email from Kelly, a church admin assistant, in response to How we help the church be the church.

"Thanks for all of your help during this time. We have had two families already connect using the set-up in Churchteams. One from our church and the other is un-churched. They happen to live right across the street from one another and hooked up after seeing the link on FB. Thank you for all of your help in getting our church ready for serving our community during these difficult times."