EP343 - Jeff Talks Data, Mission Multipliers with ChurchApps.org

all right hey episode 343 343 of the church digital podcast you would think i would lose

track uh actually this is honest to god truth i have to pull up youtube like five minutes before

i do any one of these streams because i always forget what number i'm on uh you know i used to

be able to like you know first couple hundred i could like pull oh yeah that was episode so and so

we had that conversation and at this point like it all is just jumbled into one very enjoyable but a

little bit of a mess here hey listen what i'm doing here's where it even gets more complicated we're

doing two streams this week uh and so looking forward to this conversation uh coming up uh with

michael just around the corner but just a quick tip tomorrow uh 8 p.m eastern new york wednesday night

that's uh negative four utc if you're uh globally inclined um we are doing a conversation uh with

alan hirsch uh maybe the father of the modern church movement alan hirsch is joining us from way the

crap down in australia alan is a is a friend in support of the digital church network well excuse me

oh wow talk about a mess that was one of the rare um miss brand firings at digital church network died a

couple years ago god rest its soul uh dead uh alan hirsch has been a uh a i'm so flustered that i said

that those words alan hirsch has been a supporter of uh the church digital and digital missionaries like

you for uh for many years and so we're we're excited to bring him on recently had a conversation uh jesse

carbo published an article uh talking about the role of digital in incarnational ministry

incarnational is more like micro church more like network church very physical very relational

but you know us digital like can be very relational as well and so how does digital fit into a micro church

a physical relational ministry oh and the flip side of that you know hey alan how can you really be

relational uh using these these digital are you comfortable with that what does that look like

and and no one alan uh it's it's going to be a fun conversation that's going to be wednesday

8 p.m eastern new york uh that's negative 4 utc uh and he's he's in australia so that's going to be

thursday odark 30 i think it's like 8 a.m or 9 a.m his time good stuff by the way speaking of that

we're also going to be sneaking uh releasing sneak peek we're going to be releasing

the names and the dates of the four digital missionary conferences that we have coming up this fall we're

doing four summits back to back to back now we had we had previously only announced three of them

uh we had announced a a uh digital community summit we had announced a gaming summit we had announced a

i'm trying to think what was the other one i said oh european digital missionary summit uh but i did not

announce what the fourth one was and so we are going to announce that in the final dates literally

right here around the corner starting uh and so we're going to announce that it's going to be

happening this fall but tomorrow wednesday 8 p.m eastern new york is when all that is going to become

public and so come hang out get the sneak peek on something uh surrounding the digital missionary

conference and get uh hear a guy with an incredible aussie accent tell you what he thinks about digital

missions i mean it's it's a it's a win-win all around hey you know and i'm loving some of this

stuff that i'm seeing already uh in chat uh david johnson global media outreach always love our

friends over at gmo uh is is saying hello mr pete is doing once again his check-in um in uh he mr p broadcast

this in the vr so we've got an entire entirely separate audience watching in uh big screen right

now it's always a pleasure mr pete thank you uh ritesh i'm probably mispronouncing that i apologize

ritesh uh literally joined discord maybe five minutes before uh this stream and uh he immediately

went from discord and jumped on the stream so it's it's it's good to see him pastor d it's always a

pleasure to to see you as as well uh and pastor d says so we know you still have a heart for the digital

church yes the digital church very much so as a matter of fact already had some meetings there was

something side note we'll have to come back that's i don't want to i don't go down that

pastor d stop trying to distract me you don't do it um i i can go down rabbit trails all day long

with that comment right there but so i'm not going to and i'm gonna save it just say the church digital

um has a heart for digital churches and we're we're working on something i mean you know me i'm always

working on something but i'm working on something here that that i think will be worthwhile

for this and but right now here uh we're the other thing i can never keep track of is seasons

we're in season 13 i think um uh that that i'm calling uh empowering partners uh and no

equipping partners and empowering tools this is why you write stuff down i didn't write anything down

can you tell hey it's called uh it's called equipping partners and empowering tools really

highlighting ministry uh solutions software solutions hardware solutions that are in place that can help

people like you do digital missions at a global scale last last week we had an incredible conversation

uh about about about a tool that's been used to reach millions of gen a gen z i forget that the stats but it was like 10 million

gen a gen z last year it was ridiculous uh some of the things and it's freely available for for missionaries like

us to to use moving forward you have to go back and listen to last week 3 42 you want to get into that uh with that conversation

there um talking about that but this week uh i'm i am excited to bring on a michael from church apps into the conversation

because we're talking about some open source software that i think is really going to help elevate uh the the quality of ministry

that's going to be that can be done at a at a you know at a big level for no money it's crazy

hey michael how you doing doing good hey thanks for having me jeff

i don't think i've ever heard you go on the rabbit trail

oh my gosh you haven't been listening to much of my stuff that i live on the rabbit trail

i i set up house on on a rabbit trail there's little rabbits bunnies jumping all over no i'm kidding once

again rabbit trail stop it michael uh man it's it's so so good i i'm i'm excited looking forward uh to

this conversation as we're going to dig into to church apps uh and uh and hopefully get some some

missionaries connected to what to what you're doing by the way throughout this anybody that's watching

live uh feel free to throw any questions or thoughts into the comments into the uh the yeah the comments

and uh we'll we'll reference it and put it up uh yes because we love to interact with y'all in in real

time if you are watching on demand feel free to throw the comments and questions in there as well

uh i'll try to interact uh with them i'm usually pretty good about interacting with youtube in real

time but michael you know let's let's kick it off a little bit here um tell us a little bit about

what church apps is yeah absolutely so um church apps is completely free ministry solutions for churches

um our our tagline on our page is ministry is hard we make it easier um so i've been in ministry for

um over 20 years and um one thing that is for sure as the years have gone by more and more ministry

tools have i've been there like i'm i'm gonna use this now we're gonna use this and really our lives

too um as i got older and older i mean before i remember not having a cell phone now we have a cell

phone now you just keep adding more and more things on um and in the church world it seems like um the

cost of those things keep adding up and there there's a lot of expensive tools out there that were making

ministry um really awesome and they those tools are doing an amazing job uh but the open source front we

didn't see a lot of and um to be honest like a lot of tools start out a hundred percent free for

churches i have seen uh these tools that have been great and like they're pretty small but then when

they go to scale um and more and more churches jump on and i don't blame the people that are behind

them like hey we're gonna have to go to a pay model because the server space is costing us so much or

we're going to have to um uh just quit developing for it and that's that's what happened with a lot of

the the cool tools that i saw going up um through church and so uh we decided you know what let's make

it completely open source it's not just make it free let's make it open source that way it's for the

community it's for the church instead of being um held by any entity so all of our tools everything

that i'm going to show you here is a hundred percent open source and it is on github right

now you can go download the code and use it um to to hopefully bring more people to christ

yeah first off it it's so rare to find anybody that would give like open source stuff away in in the

church space like for free um like this is this is really it's really impactful like i you know i

i used to work for a uh a crm um a church uh chms a church database company literally the company was

valued at a billion dollars like like someone had acquired the company uh for a billion dollar check

uh a couple years ago and and and and you're providing a similar solution for nothing like i

mean just i almost like want to pause we'll get into some of the the features and and what it looks

like and and what types of tools you have within your suite but why are you giving this away like like

from a financial standpoint it doesn't necessarily make sense but you're you're doing it so talk talk to me

a little bit about that yeah so the the why is huge and um when we kind of look through the bible and we

you know look at acts four where this um this community of churches had sprung up and obviously

um that from that community is why we're sitting here today i mean churches were we're starting true

and it was going amazing and in there it talks about hey if anybody had any need then they were able to

give to one another to be able to do that and we thought man is that possible in the digital space

um and that's what open source is i mean it is completely possible and the fact that and i always

looked at the church like this um you know the capital c church i'm not talking about different

denomination the capital c church you love jesus here we are and we're trying to serve him the very best we

can we are the biggest organization in the world there's no organization that's bigger than the

capital c church um but we don't share tools i mean for the most part one big church and it's not that

they don't have the heart for it a lot of bigger churches want to help smaller churches and if you ask

them if you are a small church and you call a big church i mean they'll say yeah come on in and anything we

have we're you know we'll help you out with but as a global church uh we can do that digitally now so

let's let's set the ground and do it and so that's that's why we started it and from from the very

beginning um there was no there's not going to be a cost of this because we want the church um that has

zero dollars to be able to to to jump in and be able to use it and we want the church that has millions of

dollars um that they can invest towards it to be able to jump in and use it and we want those tools

to be the absolute best and we figure if every if the biggest organization in the world we pull all the

coders um that are in that big organization into one place we can make something phenomenal um and it's

amazing we're seeing god do it um so it's a huge is a huge um god-sized uh goal um plan like let's try it

and and god has been there and really taking it and keeps taking it bigger and bigger and bigger

um nothing that we could do only only what he could do yeah love that well you you probably got

some uh more on the side of zero dollars than the million dollars that that that are going to be

watching this stream in this podcast but you know we do have friends on both sides uh with i am i'm

looking looking forward to this so talk to us a little bit here about what types of of of software

what what types of tools do you have within the the church app suite yeah and i had to i had to be

careful because i can talk for hours and hours about how much that we have so i'm going to start with the

the one tool um that's kind of uh outside of the rest of the tools but still interacts with it it's

because it's a desktop tool so probably everybody is familiar with pro presenter which is a great

program um but not every church is able to afford that and so we have a program called free show and free

show is does everything that pro presenter will do it is a great way to be able to show the lyrics on any

screen it's a great way if you're a digital missionary to set up a lesson and run through a slide deck if

you needed to you can use free show it has ndi it integrates perfectly with obs it has a way that you can

search through uh all the worship songs pick out the worship song you need just throw it in and and go

you can bring xml bibles into it so you can um have scripture reading um it is connected to

pretty much uh more than i know and the the community keeps coming up with more and more things i'm like

holy cow this this thing can do so much which pro presenter can too um i was in children's ministry a lot

and we use pro presenter in a very uh finite way that you know we just kind of make a playlist throw

all the videos we need in there and then go through the videos well free show can do that um and

but a pro presenter can do so much more and free show can do so much more so worth taking a dive into

you know it's it's funny i was i was part of the team this is like in the way back machine i was

actually part of the team that designed pro presenter three um yeah what are they on like 17 now like i

said this is like decades ago but um when early early on we had more uh more at venues my church had

more venues this is early multi-site days too we had more venues running pro presenter than any other

church in the country and uh like it was just pro presenter was so volunteer friendly which really

and pro presenter if you're not in church venue space powerpoint easy worship google like google

slides but for worship like there's you know a lot of that's that's tied into it um getting some

interesting questions kind of coming coming from the room a little bit um is is it is it um first

off we'd love to talk about volunteer friendly because a lot of times the presentation software

that that's a big part of that what does that look like does it run on an ipad or does it require

a desktop you know maybe maybe some some in that space yeah so it um the program itself is going to

run on any desktop it'll run on macintosh windows or linux runs on all three um now you can access it

through the ipad um basically by going into settings and then using it an ipad to go through your slides

um it's pretty cool how it's set up you just um scan a qr code and then it gives you a web address

and then it connects straight to free show so free shows a server and then the ipad would be the client

that moves everything around you can use that to advance and stuff like that so there's not an ipad app

but it all works to the browser which um kind of a cool since we're talking to the techie crowd too

here if you wanted to um you can use the ipad as your stage monitor and so everything runs on html

um so basically just have a good connection and then you can uh have a stage monitor that is your ipad so

and that way uh definitely will work uh with the ipad but well i mean you you had me at ndi so thank

thank you for that uh once again the the the the million dollar people are yes like that some of

the digital missionaries may not be able to totally grasp that but definitely it's a powerful tool that

can play both both sides of the equation um and and like if somebody wanted to like go to a website to

to all of your software you know we're going to talk about some of the others but where do they go to

like find out more about uh the show software some of the others yeah absolutely so you can go to

churchapps.org um if you go there and list all of our software but for free show if you just want to go to

a free show it's free show.app um and then when we get into the other ones chums.org they all have

their own domains but everything you can find at churchapps.org yeah i i i am looking forward to

talking about chums i just love the fact that you bought chums.org as a domain name like making up

your own language man that's that's just beautiful all right uh so so we talked about about the show

what what other uh what what's next we're gonna talk about next what other software do you have

yeah so let's just jump right into chums so chums is kind of the database the the central of

everything that we have um even into free shows so you can you can uh so chums is a church management

software um and so you could set up let's say um a sunday morning service or or whatever you wanted to

in chums and then it connects to free show and then all the songs will show up into free show

uh free show also connects to planning center so you could if you're using planning center then you can

do that but planning center and chums are pretty pretty similar and and what they do um so chums is

where you would bring in all the people of the church and it doesn't matter um if your people are

let's say in a physical church or even in a digital space um you still probably need records of who's

coming to the church and then how can i follow up with them and from those records you can leave notes

on those records so you can kind of see what's going on but you can create a member directory um when you

bring people in it automatically makes a member directory um and then you can tie attendance you

know how many times have they come and then they can check in with the app that we have um so that

that automatically goes in um and then it has inside there is where you'll set up your giving for our

giving platform and so you can connect uh chums directly to stripe right now and um that way you'll have a

portal to anybody that wanted to give to your ministry can give um and then you also i'm trying to go

through them all people attendance and forms and so forms is pretty cool um so just like it sounds any

kind of form that you wanted to set up um if you needed a form for kids going to camp or you needed a

form for people signing up to go to an event and even if you needed to tack on let's say a payment for

the camp then you can put that in that form and then you can host it on um our website uh your website

for your church and all those are controlled within there so it brings data in to to chums so see if

you're going to use church app stuff man chums is a great place to get started to to have everything

there because it's probably all going to lead back at some point you're going to need chums because it is

the database of the church yeah you know it's interesting i maybe maybe four months back three

or four months back i i was on uh i was in one of our one of my communities one of whatsapp or discord

and i was like hey where do you all store your data i just like a poll open air question trying to see

what what what people were saying so i was curious like what what they were using and uh the general

consensus was they stored information on their iphone like in the in the address book and um

that's when i was like you know missionaries yeah they're they're on a budget but they we haven't

figured out scalability yet like okay we're going to store that email address and that phone number in

person one's you like phone uh phone book on their phone but now you're going to you know work with

person two or person three and you want to share that data like you're you're you're you're limited

you're boxed in because you're not not thinking large enough and solutions like chums where now you've

got the ability to uh to centralize that data in a in a cloud server access it via web browser and then

share that information uh among each among the volunteers of the people you're working with

like that's a that's an incredible uh opportunity to allow more scalability to uh to allow you to to

extend beyond the the ministry of more than just what what one person can do and so you know to have

uh um you know i don't know if you know crm is in the business world uh chms is in the church world

which is why i love chums so much it's like you kind of like you're built on chms the church

management software idea um you know what whatever abbreviation you want to go with the the fact that

you're centralizing that data making it available for others like it's it's a it's a beautiful um

opportunity now i know you're you're open source uh with this like if if i wanted to integrate

the form into something else or if i wanted to do something else with it like do i is there how

would i do integrations um to a uh another tool or to put the form into a nut to tie it into another

app or to pull data from some other other place like you know i know zapier works or zapier or whatever

it is works with a lot of the the larger databases how would i do third-party integrations if i was doing

something like chumps yeah i mean depending on your technical ability you'd be able to go in and

um if you hosted it yourself especially you could alter the code um to be able to use forms where you

wanted to use them right now what we do is we have another app called b1 and so you the forms are just

dropped into there so that would give you a web page and then you could um basically take that web page

and build it into uh like an iframe onto any other website that you had so you could bring information

in that that i think that would probably be the easiest right now um one thing that we've tried to

do uh to keep everything um secure is they're all different apis but they all work together

um and so i haven't messed around with zapier i've seen zapier can do some crazy stuff and now with mcp

servers um it can get even crazier i'm sure there's a way that you could make the make the two work but

i i did want to mention that that um a lot of open source stuff um that we saw in the market uh it was

it was really great and you could download it spin up your own server and then run it which is usually how

open source works to be honest with like that's that's the and that's where we're different than

that and so we actually we host on aws and so um it works just like it would work with any other

program you go right into chums you make an account and then um it it just works for for your average

person which is a lot better than trying to spin up your own docker server and get everything running and

yeah we've done all that now you can still do that if you would like to and run it for your church

um to run aws is not is not like what everybody wants to do and so and it's definitely cheaper if

we all come to the same one and then and i mean that's how businesses are able to do it and so that's

what we do the same uh level of security and everything that you would find from a planning center from a

breeze from anything we have we're we're running the exact same way yeah uh i mean the fact that you

don't have to have a data scientist on staff to uh to to set the thing up um and and to to read the

data from it is a is is a big step i mean you really are merging the idea of the uh open source

software with uh you know a cloud service because you're you're giving away accounts for free and it's on aws

hosting i think you just said yeah so it's hosted on amazon for stability and it's like it's a it's a

it's a really um solid solution what you know i know like even on this call we've got a lot of

international uh flavor uh multi-language aws amazon warehouse services pastor d um i think stability

like amazon.com amazon opens up their servers um uh multi-language um what does that look like is that

current is that on the road map kind of talk to me a little bit there it is there so um i can't remember

exactly how many languages 119 i think the last time i checked oh is that all why not why not more

wow 119 pretty much any country you're in you can uh download chums and and find a language that will

work for you um and it just works because it's a web service you know it's working on what your browser is

so if your browser is set to chinese then chums and chinese um and so okay that really opened up

a huge um a door for us that we wanted to be you know the capital c church and so we wanted to be

global yeah and so that was high priority to get that done once we had a stable product i'm i'm curious how

much is um you know taking us taking a step back how much of your business how much of your user base

is global versus you domestic us based yeah um so it is right now um about 60 40 the last time i had

checked so 60 global and 40 north american um and so we're trying to obviously grow both um as far as we

can um and then free show a free show has probably been the most lit on fire um with almost 2 million

downloads at this point um and it has just a ton of users and so that and that is really global honestly

like i would think pro presenter is probably winning north america i mean most people are using pro

presenter because it's just it's the best um but for a long time there hasn't been a great option for

um churches to say in third world countries um and free show is is meeting that because everybody

needs presentation software so it's probably where a lot of our numbers are coming from um but we're

seeing we're seeing that uptick a lot um a lot of uh you know we we do full support too and so

you know you have a question you have something that's going on we want to hear from you and and

we talk from people talk to people from india uh seems like india has been calling in a lot a lot of

churches uh jumping up in india which is amazing um and so and just a lot of asia um that and australia

um pretty much everywhere yeah yeah yeah we aside we've seen a lot of asia um a lot of africa

it's a lot a lot of africa i think on the stream today uh as well and so good good good good all right

so we've talked about free show free show is the presentation software and and we've we've talked

about chums c-h-u-m-s uh which is the the crm the church manager the database uh and so these are

are the user database these are the two um by the way uh do you have i maybe you said it chums do you

have like mass email tools communication tools built into that that database as well yes so um

basically what you do is set up groups and then from those groups you can uh send out notifications

um or emails and so we do not do text because there's not a free text service out there right now

um it's just not there but um when you download the app there's a b1 app on an iphone or android

you allow for notifications once you allow for notifications whenever you send one out to that

group it is small ding and then you can chat with them right there um so you can you can do the chat

or you can and send out like that um so it's not quite like a having a crm you know that's a hubspot

or something that's going to send out automated emails or anything like that but it is hey we're going

to put it on the calendar and we want everybody to know that the next meeting is coming up here

let's say you've got five people on your worship team you want to make sure that they're going to

serve all right they're in the plan it automatically sends out an alert that says hey do you accept or

decline when they decline it comes back to you so that you can find somebody else to play the base

so yeah so if you needed to get a hey troy troy checking in of course um so if you want if we were

offline we were talking about you like at what point troy you're going to actually show up to to say hey

um so i mean worst case scenario if you are looking for that mass communications uh tool

you know figuring out how to integrate in that database into like a mailchimp or something like

that um you know and uh if you were wanting to text there i mean there's there's so many of those

texting tools that are out there but they they cost and and that's it's one of the deals like i have

personally i have a love-hate relationship with text messaging because of that i would you know

app push notifications is is a much better uh solution or integrate this over to uh to like

whatsapp and use whatsapp for the the notifications uh things you lit up when i said whatsapp do you do

do you have like an integration or people that are tied into whatsapp yeah um i think that's a great

idea it's something that has not happened yet um but you know i mean that's why it's open source we want

people uh even on this channel that might hear it and say man that i'm gonna go after that um because

we i think that would especially worldwide whatsapp seems to be bigger than um even text message like i'm

you know old school text message i don't know why it's just what i do but everywhere else it seems

like whatsapp is is what's up yeah what's happens what's up uh well well done well played yeah i mean

there's there's two billion users on the planet who have whatsapp installed on their phone currently

active users uh and so we uh there's a there's a lot of use base in that so um it's interesting we may

have to to look into that um okay so we we've talked about uh pre-show no free show we've talked

about free show and we we've we've talked about chums um and both of these are available information

is available at churchapps.org uh but what's uh what's the third tool we're going to talk about

today yeah so we're going to talk about b1 and uh b1.church is the actual website that you can go to

and what the tool is called and the idea is that we should be one church right and so this this makes

a little more sense um uh as far as naming goes a lot of people don't get chums i'm glad that you did

jeff but only the the true techies and church techies at that really get that um so uh b1.church does

several things one of the first things that it does really well is if you were go to churchapps.org

that entire site was built with b1.church so it's a website builder and the nice thing about building

your website within our software is then everything works seamlessly with chums so those forms we were

talking about um you just have a box you click it and then you've got a form for your website so the

website um is specific to churches um so there's there's great things that are built just for churches i was

talking about those small groups so let's say you make groups that you're going to send messages to

well every time you make a group it automatically spins up another page for you so that you have a page

for that group um and smart things like that and and every uh website um basically every member of the

church that signs up has then their own portal and that portal is to where they can log in and they

can do their donations so they can give see how much they've given download the receipt if they

want to um at the end of the year or anytime they want to see it it's there but it also is going to

provide a feed and that feed is going to be specific to what they want so let's say you've got a family

that's got a fifth grader and a preschooler you really don't want to hear anything about what's

going on in the high school well automatically you're going to be opted out of those but if you

checked your child in which is something else chums does has its own check-in system to the fifth grade

class then you're going to get everything that comes across for fifth graders um and i'm just using

that as an example you can you can separate that out however you want to you know i mean we could take it

into gamers and you could have groups for hey these are uh the gamers that are playing these certain

games and we're putting them each into the group they're only going to see the information that is

related to to those games on on that uh portal and so b1 that's the first thing is a website builder

um and then it has an app builder too so basically um in the same way um you have your website you also

have an app and the app you can go download it now and if you want to see kind of a test church we use

ironwood christian church as a test um and but you would search on there your church and once you

made an account um then you could search the actual actual name of your church now if you name your

church first christian church you're going to be in a world of hurt i'll tell you because there's

a ton of first christian churches or first baptist or whatever it is so um that's been a problem so

make sure to name it something that is specific to um your church but then once you select that church

you do it one time now the app is set up just for your church you can log into the app and that's

where you'll see things like um if you're a teacher for that fifth grade class then you're going to

automatically see all the lessons and if you're using our other site which is lessons.church to run

your lessons all the lessons are going to be in there for you to look over before you get into the

classroom and then if you're a parent of that fifth grader the week after that lesson shows up in

the app you'll see that lesson so if you miss sunday you can watch it right there um and so

it's very specific we're trying to build a software and a system that doesn't just flood you with

information we only want what's going to be relevant to you i mean it's the same thing that facebook and

everybody else is doing and so that's that's kind of what we're following is just hey this is the very

relevant information for you and if you want to opt out of it then you can opt out of it and you won't

see it in your feed um so that's the app portion of b1 and then um in b1 is also the calendar so you

can set up a calendar and this is all the events that are going on the church that's gonna seamlessly

work into everything else and then sermons so um one thing that happens pretty much in every church

is every sunday there's a sermon that preacher gets up and preaching that's some great content

um and now most everybody's recording those um and they're on youtube somewhere you can go look

them up well we want people going to your site um to find them instead of youtube and so we made it

very super simple one you can do a bulk import so you just put your channel id in every sermon

every video you have will come right in go into playlist drops right into your website so it's

nice and clean um the second thing is on your live stream you can set it up to where it happens every

week that way after the sermon is done it automatically archives to the site and so you don't have to do

anything you just set it up once and it's done and um so sermons also includes live stream and our

live stream is pretty cool we have a block in our website where you can take a block and drop it over

any page that you want call it live stream it has an option to hide it if you're not live but

when you're live then it takes over the page yeah and so um that's all set up in b1 um and you can

you you really have to have chums but it doesn't matter when you when you sign up for chums or b1 or

lessons.church it signs you up to all the apps and within the web interface you can switch from app to

app you know what here i got my friend pastor d saying keep talking a few more features and i might

be switching and saving my congregation 200 a month um and you know it's funny pastor d i was actually

thinking about you as as we i was talking with him historically you know what um let's let's go and

do this let's go ahead and screen share a little bit because b1 you like the power is seeing it and i would

love if you want maybe i don't know what website you want to walk through maybe start to walk through

the website some of the features and and what that would look like so let me go ahead and press my

magic button and uh yeah you should you should be good so uh okay yeah go ahead i see that we're

we're on um chums right here and so i i would suggest anybody if you want to just kind of try it out

you can try out chums just by jumping into the demo and then looking through and we've got a bunch of

fake uh information in here and so um obviously you can edit all the information um and here's where

the donations are so if they had given anything then it would show up here this is their attendance so

that's people um and if we go to settings there's something that's pretty cool about um chums one is

forms you can create forms hey um i i think you're clicking let's back up i think you're clicking but

we're not seeing i'm on the wrong one there we go there you go so there's people no it's it's you know

what it's you're sharing the tab and it's opening a new tab or it's a module that's for some reason

it's i'm not seeing it um let me let me try this maybe share a browser yeah i'm seeing that okay

there we go sorry about that all right so there's the attendance i was talking about um there's a

groups so you can see that carol clark here is not in any groups if i wanted to edit her and just go in

edit all the information really just like any other church uh management system and then um if we go to

serving this is where you set up your ministries so there's worship and like we've got the march

schedules right here it's coming up and we click on there and these are all the people that are needed

so we still need a person for hospitality greeter if i click on a person i can just add them in

and then um right here we can notify them and that's where you're talking about the uh notifications

you just hit notify the volunteers and then it would notify obviously this is the test one so it's not

going to notify them um and then settings this is pretty cool um and from what i know the only

uh church management system that does this so um you can import export so you can import anything from

planting set planning center or breeze right into chums or you can take it out of uh chums and go to

planning center or breeze and you can also do csv so if you have a different um uh church management

software then you can export everything out csv and then import them right here and then rolls um this

is your permissions and so if you have someone that's doing all the accounting then we could set up

accounting and then add that person that we want to be the account uh just by searching see if oh there's

not a mic in there um but if they were there we just add them so roles is important because um you

don't want everybody seeing all the donations and so you can basically put out which ones you want which

ones you don't if you accidentally name your church go ahead yeah yeah i mean this this is this is beautiful

um we've got a lot of video visual type people on here um show a little bit on the uh the sermons

the streaming uh some of that that functionality is is the streaming based on um is it streaming youtube like how what

video um distribution system is it based on yeah um let me jump into it real quick so

uh these are all the churches uh that i have so i'm just going to jump into church apps okay

um and so from this i'm in b1 but i this is the portal that i was talking about that every member has their

own and then i'm going to jump into the admin so this is what admin looks like and like i said you

can switch apps right here so i can go to any of the apps chums b1 or less of my church um so this is

the mobile app and how you set that up you you can just add more tabs change the image put whatever

text you want um it's very simple to do and then the website well let's go into sermons you said sermons

so if we go into sermons um basically we've got sermons right here so i can add one sermon at a

time if i want to and i just go in i need to make a playlist um to put into it so i have to actually

go to playlist first i forgot about that and we'll call this the new playlist and you can add a sermon

series or whatever yep so you can add a thumbnail right here we'll just save that and then if i'm

going to add a sermon just one at a time i go right here there's the new playlist i can do from youtube

from vimeo from facebook or from a custom embedded url um so it will use uh if you're streaming to

facebook yeah the problem with facebook is that every time you stream into facebook it's a different

uh channel id right and so um youtube is what we suggest because later i'm going to jump in here go to

times and then i can set up my service on a sunday morning yeah and i can set up the time whatever time

i want it to be and then customize that when i go back to sermon then i can make it a permanent live url

and there's my you know channel id and it goes really cool or wanted to i could uh bulk import

which is right here import from youtube just grab a random channel here and i've obviously put in there

before let's see what we get and so these are um this is some church all of their everything that's on

their channel you can just click all the ones you want and let me see if i can switch us over i'll

show you what it looks like live um so i'll go to south side this is a b1 church um website and so

this is what it looks like after you have them imported and so their sermon live stream is right here

obviously it's not going yet at 9 45 it's going to start when it does start this will go live but

their archive is right here and so you can click into any one of them you can see that's a playlist

and there's all the parts of that sermon and you just dig down then you can watch that part yeah and

and that's just um i mean at that point that's just youtube so you're interface you're interfacing with

youtube uploading to youtube by the way steve um steve mentioned that facebook actually live videos it

doesn't keep longer than six videos they announced that maybe a couple months ago and so like if yeah

your stream facebook is not the long-term solution um forgive me and it's it's looking like steve is

steve is telling me did you see pastor d's question about pre-recorded videos um if i can do simulate

uh uh can you do simulated live i i don't i don't know the answer to that uh um so you could make it

go live yeah simulated live yeah in in youtube um yeah it would be what do they call it it's uh

premiere youtube premiere is is is uh is simulated live so in that situation you would have to schedule

be one to go to to start at a certain time and then you would schedule the simulated live video to premiere

at that time and play back yeah correct yep pastor d's happy uh i mean i'm just i'm telling you like

what they what this software is uh is incredible uh considering it's it's open source ian is uh very cool looks

like uh worth we're switching to uh i mean it really is just it's a very rich interface now a lot of

features now um we're going to get into lessons yeah so hey before you go do me a favor your window

kind of squish it in a little bit i'm giving you a 16 9 box and you're you're a little too wide if you

can uh make it narrower to more like a 16 9 window uh maybe a little more and then yeah that's good

okay oh no force me back out let's try that yeah you're good try that okay so um i'm going to go to

the main site on lessons.church so this is lessons.church um and basically what this is

is um a uh way that we created um a format of lessons so traditionally in in lessons or in curriculum

you're going to get a pdf and then if that pdf is wrong then they'll send you another pdf or you know

it's it hasn't been an online thing for most curriculums uh it's it's kind of online like oh

you can download it but it really locks you in so instead of doing that we made it all in code

so anybody that comes on lessons.church they make um all their lessons in in a certain format to where

we can manipulate it and make it work um for whatever we're doing so honestly we have enough material for

everybody in your church um everybody from uh that's older we have ozark christian college

we've partnered with them so we have 10 years worth of sunday school lessons for um just every topic

that's in the bible and then in youth ministry that's what i'm showing you right here is the

youth ministry uh it's four ministry resources as partnered with us and just i'm just this is all open

source so i'm straight on the site i'm not even um i'm not even i got an account or anything and i can

log in and because we've made everything to where it is um written in a way uh in code so all the images

all the text then we can format it any way we want and so you can print off a script version color-coded

lessons.church but even more importantly it works on your app and so all of this is a web portal but it's also working

on an iphone or an android and it also works on our tv app and so it works with android or amazon firestick

so lessons.church app and then you can schedule out lessons and then it plays

the media from those lessons or you can play it right here um on inside of a browser we don't

recommend it doing like this but you can if you want to um what we recommend is using this system

all right so i have to go back i've logged in too many times and see

back to church apps and lessons.church so classroom let's just name a classroom name uh class

and then uh we'll just save that for now oh what's it what access and i wouldn't learn api lessons.church

well i've logged in too many times you broke it i broke it yeah it's just this is a software demo issue

the problem is i think i uh went back and forth too many times i'm going to actually go into

the lessons and show you so these are classrooms that i've already made gotcha what's really cool

is um i've scheduled out here an entire well this is like three years worth of lessons but to schedule

something it's very simple so it picked up that i was doing on sundays picked up that we're using arc

elementary i can use any program that i want to and then let's say i'm going to move to upside

downtown okay great so next time i go in it's going to fill all that in now that's lesson two

and so you're just you're cruising um if you've ever done anything with children's ministry this is

this is a huge time saver but also with um any any um curriculum out there uh it is so hard to get

everything organized this makes it just simple and we're we're not just doing this um on the lessons.church

site just for us we really want the world to adopt and what we call an olf which is the open lesson

format so every lesson um that's built for church would be in the olf that way you could import it

straight in so external provider um would just be a url yeah so you could take that url put it right in

and then you've got your import the resources in yeah you can who's who's using the olf format at this

point so uh obviously we are um we've also um sent it over to planning center um and as them they're

looking at trying to go something like that and now they want to do something different that we would

we would adjust because the world needs um just a standard format for this stuff but also um there

is the nazarene church um the actual denomination they've made some lessons using the olf and it's

been very successful so if we go i'll get real geeky real quick go for it i think i can and we

let's switch over here to schedules i need to go to admin

maybe not

i i was going to try to switch over and show you the actual format

should ian's cooking out over the nazarenes i just wanted to give attention to that okay we're done

uh sorry yeah i was in the the wrong account that is the problem yeah uh so let me

jump into the right account here we go so right here

schedules admin so this is the back end

so these are all the lessons that are there that's that summer the max we're just looking at

and if i go into the venues and then here's all the roles and you can see everything is written in

here and so you just have to add an action which is a say do play download note or add-on yeah and then

you put it right in here and we're using markup to do all this and what it gives um the actual user the

ability to do is pretty cool because then they can go into their schedule um let's schedule a quick class

here and then i can go in as a user and actually delete out things that i don't want so if i don't

want that i can delete it just for this classroom or all classrooms this classroom and so it makes it

love it is this like and you can push it to tv apps you can push it to mobile like this can be a

web browser lessons this could be a a group lessons like at a home bringing people over like for a small group

um do do you i know with lessons as well as with streaming like there's there's an opportunity for

um chat interaction like asynchronous threaded conversations do you guys integrate that anywhere

into your your software yet so it's built on the idea of classrooms um so in the software it would work

because if everybody's on the b1 church app um and then they're a part of that class they can see the

lesson and actually go through it um with everybody else and there's so b1 has chat functionality

yes absolutely very cool yeah yeah and so it's really built uh too for for like a classroom so

when you schedule something um what it does on that on the tv app is it downloads all that information

so that on sunday morning you're ready to go um and you're not streaming it but the tv app also has a

streaming function so we have i think almost two terabytes worth of uh video curriculum that's there

and some of it um is really really um good even just um like the ozark stuff it's just professors

teaching it's great to watch so you can stream all that just by going to lessons.church app and go over

to the streaming side and stream it but the beauty is when you schedule now at every sunday morning

it's downloading everything you need so when you walk in the classroom you just click the button and

you're off and running yeah i you know i in physical church space i cannot tell you how much difficulty

i had with uh set up and tear down student ministries that didn't have access to wi-fi to download whatever

the video they needed for worship or like it just it was uh uh uh i i i'm i'm not exaggerating at this

point it was a big deal and uh just even hearing you say things like oh it downloads it to the to

oh i was like oh my gosh i just i love i love so much about this um because it's amazing how much

people's bodies take away wi-fi signal i can't explain it but when you get a lot of people in a church

then it's like everything drops so everything that we build we really build um for trying it's for the

church and it's people that are using it in the church um so yeah it downloads because we know that

the children's ministry has the worst wi-fi and if you set all this up then it's a it's a waste of

time but that's where that's where we really need help jeff is more people saying hey i want to use it but

that's great if you use it we want to hear your feedback like we want you jumping on github and

saying hey this is broken this doesn't work it would be awesome if it would do it this way if we had

chat here you know and that's that's what's making this project more move forward yeah and so you know

i i know i know that the the people here and they they love to share opinions and beat the crap out of

stuff because you know i do too and so you know i i personally i i think there's i think there's there's

two different audience right now that that's watching this video one you know i think i think

many of you like like pastor d is you know our minds are blowing right now with yes there's an

opportunity to do this save thousands of dollars a year um and have a powerful software solution

that may actually work better than what they had before um and so you know i would encourage you

church what's the best way to follow up with you churchapps.org yep churchapps.org and make an

account it's 100 free yeah you're not losing anything by doing that secondly i know some of

you are watching this and are intrigued anytime you know we have a beta culture here within the church

digital because we love feedback we love uh building and developing and and i want to encourage some of

you to um to to reach out as well and and start to provide that uh people that want feedback like ian

ian is saying accounts made ian is a great feedback guy um how does ian get the feedback to you like

what's what's the best way of communication to make this happen yeah um so the best way is github

um if you if you know how to make issues in github um and it's it's really simple um you can go to

churchapps.org forward slash dev um and if you want to if you're a coder and you want to get involved

um you can join our slack channel right there and and we'll we'll get to work we'll get you to work

if you want to get to work yeah if you know if you know github great if you don't know github

if if in a minute if there's a slack channel that they can interact with in before steve says what

slack slack is like discord or whatsapp but it's usually more in like dev slash programmer world

slash corporate um and so yeah that that would be great churchapps.org slash dev dev yep but if you're

just you know hey i just want to help out but i don't know how to do slack or church that's fine as

soon as you make an account you're going to get an email from our director and that's what he wants

and so you will personally email um him or you'll email a volunteer and they will get back to you

almost immediately and say hey thanks for that idea or um that idea has already been done check it out

this is how you do it um because we're not just going to drop you like this is this is full support

that you're going to have and we try to make our support just as good or better than any paid for

application yeah i i i'm every conversation i have i have with these guys i just i get more and more

impressed by it uh uh eva uh eva i'm sorry is asking here hey eva uh are you looking for volunteers

to work with how how can people volunteer with what you're doing or help what areas are you looking

for absolutely um like i mentioned before we're um i'm actually a volunteer for church apps we're

we're driven by volunteers um so if if you want to jump in um and help and support if you want to help

in um coding if you want to help in implementation if you want to help in marketing um we need it all

and so um to be honest with you for the last um two three years um we've got the google ads grant

which has been amazing um so we're onboarding about 20 churches a day and most of that's coming from the

google ad grant um and that google ad grant has been ran for three years by volunteers um which if

you know anything about google ads that's not an easy volunteer position um and just a shout out to

those guys that are doing that it's a it's amazing um but they see the mission and they they understand

that it is for the capital c church so um yeah if you want to email me directly um it's mike at church

apps.org uh we will find a place jump on a zoom call and see where we can uh work together yeah i love

that uh and so eva mike at church apps.org if you get lost reach out to us and we'll get you we'll get

you connected over there because uh there's man there's definitely a need and a benefit pastor d i'm

just kind of using her as the example uh i think that's every feature so you're uh 141 plus 52 a

month that you won't have to pay anymore and getting more features and control with that so um uh it it

looks like you've made a uh a happy client over here uh so well done yeah well and uh pastor d if you if

you're loving the service if it's working out for you a lot of our um the way that we're supported

is by other churches that are like hey this is a great mission and i want to pay it forward to the

next um next church and you know even a 25 donation a month goes a long way um our upward bill is

unbelievable um because we're squashing bugs all the time and and that takes it it does take money to do

that and we and so um any any uh donations that go towards church apps they go straight into helping

and making the program better and better and better and better and so uh we we appreciate people just

using it and giving us feedback that is of a huge value it really is the only reason that it is to where

it is today is because people actually said hey it would be nice if it did x y or z and so we're able to

follow through on that and then now we're seeing some churches that are are giving back and it just makes

life so much easier to be able to pay coders to be able to jump in and get some of the the bugs the

things that that open source community doesn't really like to do um they still have to get done we got to

do maintenance and make it all happen yeah man it is it's no small task it's funny people i've i've been asked several

times um you know about developing a software you know like a more of a a software platform around

the church digital instead of using the the free resources we have and uh available and and i i i am

i'm scared to death of developing a platform because of the cost of maintenance uh on those things like

it's it's no small task to you know even at an open source level all it's probably maybe more difficult

at an open source because you've got to keep all the doors open to allow other people to do whatever

they want instead of privatizing it and just keeping it you know locked up and so man congratulations on on

on a powerful tool i uh and there's you know just even looking at this there's a lot more um

opportunities i i think for for digital missionaries for digital churches uh to dig into is interesting

uh eva at one point asked early on if you had any vr ar tools in uh in church apps and so

i don't think they're there yet uh but uh who knows what the future holds with that we're open to

it i mean i don't even know where it goes but oh man uh yeah that that may be that maybe it's it's so

funny um you know metaverse ain't going away and uh i don't the i don't know we barely know what the

church looks like in the metaverse much less um how to support the church in the metaverse that's

that to be honest that's what i'm i'm discovering um the the pioneers are so pioneering like it's it's

the alpha mode i'm gonna get it done hell or high water uh it's it's the apostolics that are out there

they're doing it but um we haven't it hasn't settled enough yet to actually figure out how best to support

some of those movements uh and ar don't even get me started on that but this has been an incredible

conversation yeah vr and what you're doing in there is a huge mission field and people are there and

it's awesome if we can help in any way on the back end where you're organizing um that that's i mean we

built this in mind and when it really started taking places around covid um and we're thinking this is

perfect for house church yeah there's you can organize everything um you don't have to worry

about oh i'm gonna have to pay this no that yeah just start using it yeah if you're a if you're a

house church house church network micro church dinner church um uh digital churches you know in in

in a smaller scapey i don't i don't want to minimalize even a large scape like there's plenty of

opportunities i tell you if it just even if i were to poke the bear on the vr side just because i can

um the thing that would be interesting is if you if we could figure out okay so i attend a a virtual

reality uh church service um how do i give wearing a headset how do i share my contact info fill out a

form via headset um like what's the easiest way to integrate in i know this was like this i've had

this conversation with several other crms but it would be figuring out how to integrate in the form

functionality easily into you know a virtual reality world that somebody was building um you know i don't

i don't know that iframe totally works in vr um and that may not be even even your problem it may be

at the the software dev side but that would be a huge win is figuring out how to get some of these

frames easily accessible some of these forms easily accessible in vr so they could be in the database to

make for easier follow-up etc well that and and i mean honestly it's built i mean everything's built

in react and so um it's a lot easier than trying to use dot net to make something work with this

um so and it is open source so if there's going to be one church management software that's going

to be able to do it i'm going to put ours at the very top like i love it would love that would love

that be cool all right i uh it's funny uh i'll go ahead and post this steve says uh oh my i just

realized you actually went over an hour great conversation info it's so funny i'll go ahead

and say this this really went well not that i was expecting to go bad but um i mean we basically talked

about database for for like an hour um that's a hard thing to pull off and and make it interesting but

i mean the heart of this is this software is incredibly powerful um and and is designed in

a way to impact people like you and the ministry you're doing so take a look at church apps and uh and

and dig into it steve um man as we're wrapping up here today i'm sorry steve i'm looking at steve

on the screen michael as we're wrapping up today uh in any closing thoughts and uh just so glad to

be a part of this community i think i told you in the past i've been listening to church digital for

forever it's been such a huge blessing uh for me and and my ministry personally and so an honor to be

here um and and just thank you for for having me and and i hope that this is uh beneficial to

everybody that sees it it's so so good all right so check out church dot apps no churchapps.org

churchapps.org uh for more information on uh everything that we we talked about today

and if there's any questions uh feel free to hit me up directly and we can on discord or or

whatsapp and i can traffic copy you in the right direction but michael man thanks for being a part

michael michael michael now i'm wanting to call you steve and it's it's been i i jinxed it by saying

it's been a great conversation you know and now we're at like 70 minutes and i'm i'm cracking like

i don't even know what's going on but uh michael man thanks for jumping uh on this and in some of

these tools to you know equip and empower churches at a global level but we're going to wrap up uh for

michael michael this is jeff uh with the church digital thanks for coming on the stream tomorrow

night alan hirsch and hopefully i get his name right all right see y'all later bye see you guys