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.
First, our customers feel that Churchteams empowers them as staff to do a better job of accomplishing their ministry.
Second, across the board, everyone senses something is different since the pandemic. They're not yet quite sure of what, but even though finances are holding, engagement is not what or where it used to be.
When I think about how we empower church leaders, I don't think about specific features. Instead, because of my pastoral background, I think about the ministry purposes leaders are called to. My blog series' on evangelism, discipleship and volunteers in 2020 and 2021 have helped me flesh out what software focused on purpose looks like.
For example, next week at the Children's Pastors Conference in Orlando, I'm doing a breakout on creating a volunteer system. Here's an image I'm using to illustrate the first of three major ideas.
In this chart is a list of 12 software features that work together to create (and automate) a clean, uniform system for everything from recruiting to caring for volunteers. (These features are simply a compilation of ones mentioned in the volunteer blog series I concluded last week.)
As you can see, if I focus on one feature, say our state-of-the-art volunteer scheduler, I'm only empowering a church leader with one small slice of the overall ministry purpose s/he is responsible to accomplish. But if I focus on how our software helps accomplish their ministry purpose, now I'm empowering that leader at a whole new level.
That leads me to thoughts about the second insight from our Voice of the Customer research.
Something is different.
All of us are on the journey of getting used to whatever that different is. It's still in process and evolving. But, in our little world of ministry and technology, I have a hunch it is going to require us to provide tools that will help churches be more relationship than event driven, more adaptable than predictable, and more resilient than ever.
I'll build on these ideas in the future, but for now, I think what Jesus said in season one of The Chosen is great advice to all of us as we start 2022:
"Get used to different."
