Reid Hopkins is the Executive Pastor at The Brook in Madison, AL.  He also is the founder of XPMinistry.com, a website dedicated to encouraging Executive Pastors and helping the church be excellent with the administrative side of ministry.  We encourage you to check it out.

Next to our church is a busy Chick-fil-A.  At lunchtime, it’s hard to get in the parking
lot. Even though it has two lanes, the drive-thru line is so long people have to wait 30 minutes or more to place their order.  One of my best friends works with the team that built the Chick-fil-A app.  My favorite feature is the ability to place my order ahead of time for curbside pickup.  I order from the office, then go over and pick up my meal skipping the line completely.

The Churchteams Check-in system does for your church what the App does for Chick-fil-A. Our church is experiencing growth right now. We just completed a big construction project (a new worship center), and our church campus is located in a rapidly growing area of our city.

Apple co-founder and visionary leader Steve Jobs made a bold statement in 1985 about the culture of Apple. He said: 

 "We attract a different type of person…Someone who really wants to get in a little over his head and make a little dent in the universe. We are aware that we are doing something significant…Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future."

 That make a "dent in the universe" mission shaped the influence and impact of Apple for years to come. 

Last week I shared how church is critical to understanding the self-evident truth that all people are created.  This week I want to look at how a teams world-view is developed and how it gives people the best chance to realize the second self-evident truth - that all people are equal. 

Together I hope this two-week, Fourth of July inspired series of blogs gives a little perspective on what we are seeking to do as a company.

The second paragraph of the U.S. Declaration of Independence begins, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Over time data has a tendency to drift off the road and even crash.  The application itself might be fine, but the data is a wreck. When this happens, those depending on it no longer trust it, and start looking for something new.  

One popular solution is to put a sentry at the gate of the database.  This person is responsible for all data entry, reports, and maintenance.  This solution helps keep data safe, but it also creates a bottleneck on use of the data.  Like an accident on a 4 lane highway narrowing traffic down to one lane, church staff end up looking for detours to get their work done.  Pretty soon the staff has data in so many locations they find themselves once again lacking trust in the core data.

We've felt for a long time that the database itself could become a decentralized sentry.  We built reminder emails (groups, volunteers, payments) to make sure data is consistently collected.  We built scheduled reports to automate communication of information.  

We've also started building guardrails designed to keep data from getting wrecked.  In fact, we've released seven of these in the past couple of months.  Here they are along with a few other new releases.

Note: Churchteams partners with CLI to help church leaders develop effective systems for ministry.   

It is clear that something is different about church since 2019.  I mentioned this related to our voice of the customer research in my last blog.  But is this difference good or bad?  And, how can technology help?

Happy new year to you and your church teams.  May the Lord give you new insights for reaching people in the almost post-pandemic world of 2022.   

As part of our planning for the future, we recently contracted a Voice of the Customer researcher to interview eight of our most active customers.  There were lots of insights but two stood out to me that I'd like to address talk about in this blog post. 

If you ask around, I think you'll find that our clients love our software not just because of the technology, but also because our team cares about them.  Here's an excerpt from an email I got just last week from a Media Arts and Tech staff person after James helped them set up check-in.

"My friend was 100% right. ChurchTeams has been fantastic as we have gotten set up.  If you ever need an example person for a new church getting started please consider giving them my contact information. I would be happy to talk to anyone who has questions about what it is like to work with your software and your team."

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.