EP182: Jeff Hook & The Personalization of Discipleship via AI and Machine Learning

Welcome to the Church Digital Podcast, powered by Stadia Church Planting.

Through this podcast, learn about how God is using technology and innovation in digital

and digital environments around the world.

Our goal?

To help churches like yours learn to be the church digitally.

Our heart?

That churches like yours will discover a newfound focus on disciple-making that will revolutionize

your church.

And now, your host, here's Jeff Reed.

So, we're continuing on with this Season 2 conversation here.

Hey, Jeff, with the Church Digital, once again, powered by Stadia Church Planting.

Here with Season 2, we're highlighting the crazies out there, the crazy conversations, the innovative

people.

And this gentleman that we've got here, this guest on this show, is one of these innovative

people over the decades.

Jeff Hook is CEO of Communitas Software.

It's a CHMS, a church database.

And Jeff has been hugely influential in the church tech space, even going back to the early

days of Fellowship One.

Now, Jeff talks about his story, and you can hear some of that in the podcast, in the actual

interview.

But in a recent conversation with Jeff, the thing that kind of perked my ears a little

bit was we were talking about this idea of digital discipleship.

And if you listen to the podcast, you hear me talk about this all the time.

And so, I've got my conversation, and I know how other people talk about it.

And so, I'm constantly having the same conversation over and over again.

Now, Jeff took this to an area where I quickly realized I wasn't the smartest person in the

room.

And I sat back and listened.

By the way, that's why I love this podcast.

Because I get to sit back and listen and learn almost as much as you guys are and gals are

wherever you are, dialing into the podcast.

You see, Jeff, he starts talking about machine learning.

He starts talking about artificial intelligence.

He starts talking about personalizing, utilizing technology, personalizing what discipleship can

look like.

And all of a sudden, my mind is exploding at this idea of utilizing technology to better

disciple people.

Not because we can communicate better or not even the equipping standpoint, but how technology

can understand who people are and through that process, better shape what discipleship can

look for them.

By the way, some of you are already freaking out on me.

It's cool.

Hey, isn't that the pastor's job?

Hey, what if this could complement what the pastor is doing?

What if this can assist even lay people to better disciple other people within and outside

of the church?

Yeah, we don't hear about, you know, words like artificial intelligence and machine learning

in the Bible.

But if we can utilize the innovations that are here, if we can utilize this technology, man,

you can hear in the conversation, there's incredible potential that's available.

By the way, don't sleep on the whole data strategy piece that's kind of tucked in the

conversation too.

Incredible conversation here with Jeff Cook.

So I'm bringing into the conversation Jeff Cook, CEO of Communitas Software, myself, Jeff

with the Church Digital and of Stadia Church Planning, of course, in a conversation that I'm simply

calling machine learning, artificial intelligence, and the personalization of discipleship.

All right, everybody, here you go.

And hey, so Jeff, tell me about yourself.

Maybe tell us some of your best experiences and tell me a little bit about Communitas.

Thanks, Jeff.

Thanks for the opportunity to be on your podcast as well.

As you're aware, yes, I actually grew up a small town preacher's son, Assemblies of God,

and then got into computers and became a programmer, then a management consultant for 10 years.

I started running the Dallas office for Oracle Consulting, and then I was a COO of a supply

chain software company.

So I was well on my way to just corporate America.

And then I had the opportunity to actually start Fellowship Technologies.

And so that got me into the church space.

Subsequent to that, after selling that to Active Network, I was the COO of Parish Soft, which

is a Catholic-based software company.

And coupled with all that, once we sold Parish Soft to ministry brands and my non-compete was

up, we started Communitas Technologies, which is the next-generation platform approach to church

software.

So that's what we're doing now.

So just tell me a little bit, like, give me an overview.

What does Communitas do?

Like, what's the heart of this?

Why would a church be using Communitas software?

Right.

So the platform approach to church software includes not just church management, but it extends

that beyond what happens on Sundays.

We like to say, let's get beyond Sundays.

Let's get beyond the church building, and extends that beyond into the congregation and what their

spiritual life is all about.

So, you know, it's kind of ironic that churches are natural communities, yet the software they

use doesn't support any kind of community-type tools, right?

Churches have to rely upon Facebook and be subject to the algorithms of Facebook instead of having

their own platform where they can deliver content, i.e. YouTube thing, or in our case, we think the

churches ought to move to a private media network that is their own channel, if you will, and start

engaging with their congregation the other 167 hours in the week, not just the hour on the weekend.

And so what we've done is, if you know anything about digital transformation, right, there's

digital disruption that happens that's happening in this economy, and that's where Uber is circumventing

the taxi cab industry.

Airbnb is circumventing the hotel industry.

The churches are actually being digitally disrupted themselves, because if somebody goes out to an

abide or prayer.com, they're going to a solution to get part of what the local church ought to be

providing them.

You know, if they go read their Bible on YouVersion, and YouVersion is a great tool, love it, but

yet that the engagement with YouVersion is not being shared with the local church, right?

And so if somebody goes out and does a Bible study, let's say on RightNow Media's platform,

that information is not being connected to that congregant's profile so that we understand

what their spiritual walk is.

So if churches don't choose to step in and do digital transformation, they're going to be

digitally disrupted more and more.

So we're about trying to digitally transform the church and go with the church to actually

help their congregation live more functional Christian lives through discipleship, through

communication, and through some learnings that we call personalized ministry.

So this is probably going to be one of my favorite podcasts over the past year or so, because you

have said so many buzzwords that I'm in love with in that past conversation.

And I'll be honest, Jeff, I got an email from you talking about some different things.

And even in that email, you said some buzzwords that I was like, man, I want to think like

this, and I don't yet.

And I want to understand it better.

And so, Jeff, one of the things that you had talked about in that email was this idea of

digital discipleship, where if you're listening to this podcast, you know so much time is spent

talking about how the church needs to take advantage of digital discipleship.

We talk about equipping.

We talk about relational evangelism and utilizing digital to connect with people.

But so much of what we talk about, at least in context of the church digital, in context

of how Stadia is doing digital, really is centered around this relational approach and doing

disciple-making practices through it.

Jeff, the thing that intrigued me was you started talking about digital discipleship, but you

started saying words that I don't often hear in context of church.

It was like machine learning, artificial intelligence.

And all of a sudden, like, I know what these words mean.

I don't have a foundation of how that works in church.

So I'm actually operating a little bit here on a negative.

Explain to me, help me understand here, and the audience as well, because I'm sure they're

asking questions.

How can artificial intelligence be tied with digital discipleship?

What does this look like?

Well, let me correct you, though.

I don't talk about digital discipleship much.

I talk about personal discipleship or personal ministry.

It just so happens if you're going to do personal ministry, more of it's going to have to be

digital because you're not going to do too many personalized things from the pulpit, right?

So let's think about how do you reach somebody differently that's in a, let's say, a first-time

marriage.

And so let me back up to say I believe personalized ministry helps somebody get from point A to

point B, and we all are coming from different point A's, right?

So if we're all trying to live a more functional Christian life, but where did we come from?

Is our background that we were in church?

Are we unchurched?

Are we de-churched?

Were we burned by a church?

Are we in a first-time marriage with biological kids?

Or are we soon to be empty nesters?

Or are we in a blended family?

So churches have been known for years to do marriage classes, correct?

But the marriage class that you need when you're just starting out is very different than the

marriage class you need when you're soon to be an empty nester, which is very different

than the marriage class that you need if you're dealing with the issues around a blended marriage,

right?

And so the parenting class that you need when your kids are newborns versus when they're toddlers

versus when they're teenagers.

And by the way, any teenager parenting class that came out 20 years ago will not work today.

The teenagers today are very different than they were 20 years ago.

They know so much more than we did back then.

And I wasn't a teenager back then, but I can imagine, right?

But I was a teenager, you know, 50 years ago.

And so many times these people who are in control of ministry and they think back of, oh, here's

what I would have liked to have had back then, may or may not be valid.

So when I talk about personalized ministry, how can we look at some demographics?

And by the way, think about digital discipleship, right?

Digital discipleship will require an essence of data collection that the church has never

seen before.

Because when I see you on Sunday morning, I can size you up.

I know how old you are.

I know what color you, what race you are.

I know, you know, a lot of things about you just by looking at you that if a computer is

going to know that, it's going to need to be in the database.

I look at churches and the data that they have in their databases, including even Fellowship

One, we looked at it and it was very holy.

It had a lot of missing pieces because the system only needed enough data to check your

children in and to send you your giving statement at the end of the year.

That's pretty much it.

Maybe an email, but I didn't have to have that email to send you a newsletter because you

maybe didn't want to get the newsletter.

So I had to know how old your kids were and where your address was.

And that's about it.

But to do digital discipleship, I need to understand some deeper demographics.

When we say digital discipleship or personalized ministry, what about the psychographics?

What's your love language?

Because how can we help couples understand each other's love languages better so that the

divorce rate goes down?

That's an outcome, right?

Not an output.

How can we understand an Enneagram combination between a husband and a wife?

And then the machine learning comes in down the road of, oh, what kind of issues?

And I'm talking about once the system has some data and starts learning, what kind of issues

does an Enneagram three and an Enneagram seven have?

And how can we help them, you know, get ahead of those issues to stop any resentment that

might happen in the couple to then stop any kind of divorce issues?

What kind of conflict style does this person have, right?

So that we can actually provide some training on how conflict styles differ and how sometimes

that's frustrating in relationship.

And so how can we make people more aware of it so that everyone can start moving towards

that better conflict style called collaboration, not compromise, right?

Compromise is, if we compromise, it's a lose-lose.

Or if I dominate you or you back off, those aren't good conflict styles, but collaborative

conflict is a good conflict style.

In other words, Jeff, what do you need out of this decision?

Here's what I need out of it.

And can we meet in the middle?

So it's things like that, including even what we call spiritual graphics, a totally made

up term, but that goes into, okay, what religion did you grow up in, right?

What are some of the theology things that you believe so that then we can leverage that into

helping you understand your theology better, right?

Because we're trying to get somebody's belief to be very deep, not just superficial.

I'm sure you understand that if you water grass every day, the root systems in that grass,

in that turf is going to be minimal because it gets used to getting that water every day.

But there's got to be some drought every so often to get those roots deeper.

And so if you think about what the roles are within the family, if I'm a father or a stepfather,

that kind of information might dictate different content, different discussion groups for you

to be suggested to be part of, right?

So think about Dave Ramsey, how to get out of credit card debt.

But what if I'm a wealthy Christian?

Will Dave Ramsey actually help me?

Or should I be in a different kind of class on how to actually use my wealth for the kingdom?

So this is the level of sophistication that isn't required of the church staff to figure out.

They're going to curate the content, but the algorithms will actually, based upon the data,

help these people understand what groups and discussion groups and different classes that they ought to be a part of.

Because you have to admit, right, content is blowing up.

You think there's a lot of content available on the web now?

Just wait five years from now.

So if I can't get it through the church, where am I going to go?

Google?

That's interesting.

Actually, people do go to Google for spiritual answers, but that may be another conversation.

I love this.

What?

So you're utilizing artificial intelligence, machine learning, to process data,

to almost create a personalization approach towards discipleship.

The newly married couple with no kids isn't going to get articles, is not going to get content or resources or invitations towards parenting classes or information on the student ministry.

They're going to get something that's stylized, specific for where they are in life.

Direct them more towards conflict resolution or some of those things that you had talked about.

How much data are we talking about here?

It almost feels like it's overwhelming for a church to be collecting.

You talked about holes previously in Fellowship One and some of these other databases that aren't caring about that stuff.

Is the church going to have to pivot here and all of a sudden start to be a data hog?

How much are we going to collect and what's that going to look like in ministry?

Yeah, so in ministry, one of the biggest issues about Fellowship One, one of the biggest complaints is, wow, this takes a lot of data entry.

And back then, we didn't have the iPhone.

So who did the data entry?

The church staff.

And how did they do it off of a form, right?

So what we need to do is push that data collection out to the congregant and give them value for that information, right?

So if you think about the medical industry, the medical industry is trying to push it upon you to be responsible for your medical records, your health records, correct?

As a matter of fact, you have IoT and different things hitting that health record.

And over time, as this all gets sorted out amongst the health care IT companies, it'll get better and better.

But what about the concept of making you responsible for your spiritual health records?

And because you have a vested interest in that, right?

And so you want to live a more functional Christian life.

And that's a big deal to me from when I was a young boy in my father's church.

I would see these people coming to church on Sunday.

We were charismatic, so they'd be speaking in tongues.

And then they'd go right back to their family dysfunction because they didn't know any better.

There was nobody.

We were a small church.

We didn't know how to help them get out, right?

So there's really a level of ignorance that goes with dysfunction.

Now, you can be the most educated person in the world, and there still may be a level of dysfunction in your life.

But if we can squeeze that dysfunction out, and I call it dysfunction, but frankly, it used to just be called sin, right?

And if we can squeeze some of that out during the week, then we'll live a better life.

John 10.10 is my favorite Bible verse.

I came that you might have life and have it to the full.

We'll live a better life, not just for ourselves, but we'll live a healthier life for our kids, meaning they'll live more emotionally stable, more mentally stable.

We haven't really scratched the surface of the mental health problem this country has with their teenagers.

So how are we going to fix that?

Are we just going to fix the, I'll call it the symptoms and drug them, right?

Or are we going to let them choose their drug of choice, which looks like more and more it's cannabis, right?

Is that how we're going to deal with the mental health crisis and emotional health crisis of our teenagers?

Or are we going through the church to actually create more functional families by understanding how relationships and marriages ought to work, how friendships ought to work, and taking responsibility for ourselves?

That has nothing to do with IT, right?

But IT can help solve it because look at the impact that IT is having on this society.

And when I say IT, information technology.

There are some churches that are very technologically savvy.

You look at their stage, you look at their microphones, you look at their cameras, that's technology.

That's not the technology I'm talking about.

I'm talking about information technology.

And with that, we'll have to be a level of maturing within some of our churches around what is a good data strategy and how am I going to collect it?

I had a conversation not too long ago with an executive pastor from a very large mega church.

And his complaint was, Jeff, we can't get the people to share their information with us.

That's because their data collection strategy, that's part of their data strategy, is simply too dependent upon the Connect card.

And so that Connect card, please fill it out.

We know nothing about you.

You know nothing about us.

Would you please fill out this Connect card and give us as much information as you can?

Well, Jeff, when you and I first met, did I throw up my whole life story?

Did I tell you everything that you needed to know about me or was the level of trust not there?

And you would have thought it was pretty weird had I done that, right?

Going, wow, I didn't need to know about, you know, your ex-wife, Jeff.

But so churches need to learn how to get a little bit more information at certain contact points so that when somebody goes to a newcomer's class, what is that?

It's an opportunity to collect more data.

When somebody joins a small group, it's an opportunity to collect more data, deeper data, because that relationship is getting deeper.

And so that, you know, I love how some people say, oh, the church will never do what you're saying, Jeff.

And that may be true.

I may just go out and flame burn, right?

This company may go down.

But I remember being a consultant back in the 80s, and we were teaching small manufacturers about MRP2, materials requirements planning.

We got out the Ollie White books, and we taught them how to do master scheduling using a computer.

Is this going to be any different?

Yeah, I can count on one hand the number of churches I know that even have a data strategy.

I feel like I had conversations in this COVID season about how to make changes to their connection card to make it more viable that people will fill it out.

But, I mean, you're throwing away the entire connection card, which I'm a fan of, by the way.

That's very perceptive.

A lot of people look at that connection card going, how can we do this with the connection card, that with the connection card, until whatever solution is going to tear that connection card apart is going to be very complex.

Why not just tear it apart and collect certain things at different periods of time?

Boil the frog slowly.

Get what you can in that season to properly connect with people.

But don't, I mean, I've worked with churches that would have on that connection card the birthdays of all of their children.

And it's like, okay, you don't need that information right at the beginning.

And if you do want that information, to your point, there's ways to get that information where it would make more sense and not become overwhelming or obtrusive or, you know, overly, lack of personal, you know, trying to give some of that privacy is the word I'm looking for, trying to, you know, break that privacy.

So this is really interesting, this idea of creating that strategy.

If you were to ask, if you were to give advice, like how would a church, because there's a lot of churches that are on this road.

Okay, you just described, this isn't even really what I want to talk about, but let's hang out here for a second.

So you're talking about creating a data strategy for a church.

My church has no data strategy.

I'm not prepared to rip up the connection card into little pieces and disperse it all over the place.

What's the, what is the, what's an approach for somebody that's interested in developing a data strategy?

How do I even start in that conversation?

Well, you always start with the end in mind, right?

Covey taught us that.

So what do you want to measure?

Now, digital transformation, if you go out to salesforce.com, talks about looking at the customer, putting the customer and what they're trying to accomplish in the center.

And so as you would back up, looking at the, the, the, you're, the congregant, we don't call them customers, right?

I'm going to get, you're going to get phone calls.

I'm sure I'm going to get nasty emails going, we're not a business, we're a church.

That's a whole different discussion.

That's pretty, that's pretty enlightening probably for some people.

So to, to, to, to look at the end in mind, and there are probably a small percentage of people go to church because of this church has a budget of end dollars, or this church has attendance of this many people, right?

And so what is important to the customer or the congregant is that, well, you help me get closer to God.

You let me know who God is.

You help pass my faith off to, to my children.

There's a number of reasons why people go to church.

They may be at a loss.

They may have just lost a parent.

And one of the things that we emphasize is why don't you capture why they're there so that you can understand what part of your role is.

There's a, a, um, concept that came out of, uh, Harvard, uh, Clayton Christensen, at least carried the flag calling jobs to be done.

Have you ever heard of jobs to be done?

So jobs to be done is a framework, but it's not, it's not gospel, but it's a, um, lens that a business should put their, uh, their, uh, eye through to look at their own business.

Well, think about jobs to be done in church.

You hire out the church to do what, what do you, what did, what is the congregant hiring the church to do?

Because they're spending time out of their lives to do that.

Right.

And part of it is to be community.

Part of it is to hear the gospel and be reminded of the gospel.

Part of it is to learn how to be a better spouse or to be a better parent or to deal with money.

What does God say about money?

Right.

And so what job to be done did, did, did an individual hire the church to do?

And it's usually more complex than that, but it's an interesting way to look at it.

So if people aren't coming back after COVID, then did they get somebody else to do that job?

Right.

Did, did they, are they listening and getting enough, uh, uh, let's say spiritual guidance through a podcast?

Are they getting enough praise and worship off of iTunes, right?

But why do different people go to church?

And then are we fulfilling that as the church?

And if not, then we have to say, why not?

One of the things I want to, you know, you, you, you talk about the future of church a lot, right?

Future church is going to be the same as it always has been.

The church of the future will be very different, but the future of church is the gathering place for Christians.

Right.

But the church of the future might do it very differently.

The other thing.

So one of the things I didn't mean to do this on podcast, but I will.

You sent out, you know, the, the whole, uh, discipleship process, right?

And I think it's four steps and it starts with, uh, what, uh, would be referred to in my terms as Christ curious.

So we talk about data strategy.

What about content strategy?

And content strategy for a church needs to attack all four of those.

Yet it should also attack the one or two before that, especially in this multi-ethnical world where we, you know, just now the whole group of Afghans that are probably not Christian are coming into our country.

So before they're Christ curious, maybe they're God curious and maybe they're agnostic or atheist.

Uh, what kind of content do I have to drip on these people digitally because I want to segment my congregation in order to attract somebody?

So if somebody's God curious, you know, I think that's where we should start with everyone because let's get on common ground.

This creator who made this wonderful world, the more, you know, about quantum physics, the more it'll spin your head about how wonderful, uh, the, the, the Yahweh is.

But then when we get on common ground, then we can talk about, and by the way, he loves you so much.

He sent his son to die on the cross so that we can spend eternity with him, right?

So getting on common ground of God.

And even before that, if somebody's an atheist, well, let's talk about cosmology and how did this world get created?

And isn't it amazing, you know, and, and so get on common ground and then take them to the next level.

I love that.

And there's, there's, um, man, there's so many different approaches to this, but my pastor, uh, that I've attended recently is, uh, he's got like a negative 10 to 10 scale.

It's like negative 10 is like an atheist.

10 is like a disciple making multiplication leader.

Zero is somebody who's just now accepted Christ.

And he talks about how, you know, sometimes within the church, our jobs to get like a negative 10 to a negative eight and play that role.

It's not necessarily to go all the way across.

Um, and so what's, and we'll put a bill white is, his name is over at Christ journey church.

He's got a book on it just recently.

There are several other scales and kind of ranges that are, that are on that.

But what's interesting with that, and even creating some of this content, even some of the personalization that, that, that we're talking about here.

Um, there was just an article maybe within the past month.

It was a gospel coalition.

It came out on my birthday.

Happy birthday to me.

The gospel coalition is talking about how virtual reality church, excuse me, virtual church, digital church, our language is a, is a farce.

It's not real because it's so individualized now, you know, and I would look at that and I would say, yeah, we're, we're, we're connecting people in the community.

You know, there, you know, there, there's things like, you know, there, there's things like that within digital scope, what you're talking about here.

And I'm just curious your, your take, because you're, you're talking about creating content digested via mobile app digested via different methods that have distribution.

Uh, but essentially there, there, there's a little bit of, uh, there's a little bit of isolation in, in, in, in this context.

Is, is there any, when you're looking at discipleship, disciple making, utilizing this personalization approach, this personalization ministry, do you feel like it leans too much towards this, um, individualized?

Individualized lack of, of, of community, lack of ecclesia?

Like, how do you see that?

Yeah.

So again, it's, it's personalized ministry, not digital discipleship.

And, um, the reason I make that distinction is, well, one, the gospel coalition is looking at an or situation, right?

Instead of an and situation.

And if I'm talking about personalized content that is for where I need things in my life,

that doesn't mean I'm doing it alone, does it?

Because we don't have the technology, we're building it.

By the way, the machine learning stuff, the AI stuff isn't ready yet, but some of the foundational stuff is being built, right?

So we want to replace a church management system first and then build off of that.

But let's go back to, um, what if we had the technology of consuming that content and then discussing it either digitally or over Zoom?

Or in person, right?

So there's this reverse classroom approach that's coming out is you consume the content on your time and use that joint time, that synchronous time in discussion with others.

Right?

So that I'm, you know, this is synchronous, right?

So we could go pick out The Unseen Realm, which is a great book, a little Michael Heiser plug there.

But we could go through that separately, but discuss it digitally or in person.

But it would be once every other year or so if we discussed it in person, Jeff, because you and I, one, we have this relationship now, digital relationship.

But as far as I know, we've never met in person.

So let's say we become pretty good friends.

I don't get to Miami that often.

You probably don't get to Dallas that often.

So if we're going to disciple each other, then it would be some drought time in between, right?

So we can do certain things digitally that technology allows us to do that causes you to stretch and me to stretch.

But that doesn't take away from me being with my local church, the branch, and, you know, being in my small group together.

But it's an extension of.

So it should be an ant.

So I'm not going to say, you know, if the Gospel Coalition says it's got to be one or the other, well, I don't know which one would win then, because for certain people, digital will win, right?

And for other people, physical, and they go, I don't like digital.

And that's fine.

But it's kind of like Burger King, right?

Have it your way.

But try to be in community with other Christians, but that doesn't mean you have to wait for physical church in order to learn to be discipled.

If I had to depend upon the one hour a weekend, I'm afraid I'd be a pretty slow learner.

It takes me daily time in the Word.

It takes me listening to books about other perspectives, you know, and I get deep into it of, you know, Calvinism versus Arminianism.

I get into that kind of level because I want to learn about this God, this Creator who loved us so much to send His Son.

That's the kind of stuff that I get into that, frankly, is not going to be preached from the pulpit.

But it's that opportunity for my grassroots to get deeper and deeper and deeper.

Why do some people go through the dark night of the soul?

That's that drought that causes those roots to get even deeper.

I mean, what you're describing is the principle that we've been talking about.

I just don't know that I've applied it.

There's different ways to disciple different people.

And so how you disciple someone in a physical space is different than how you would disciple someone digitally.

And so we're working with digital churches that are discipling, utilizing tools like Discord to create asynchronous conversations, utilizing software.

But through those conversations, they're manually, relationally, person to person, connecting with people and helping answer spiritual questions,

going through material that are helping them better understand who Jesus is and what their story is in Jesus

and who needs to understand what their story is in Jesus.

And so we're doing that on an interpersonal level.

And what I'm hearing from you is now this is an opportunity to create a complementary maybe resource

that works alongside some of the physical community, the engagement community that's happening digitally.

But now we're creating an asynchronous, a on-demand resource that really gets to know people with some of the data that they have

And is able to start to provide resourcing, provide training, provide insights that maybe the person on himself or herself doesn't even realize.

Like you're able to understand who the person is based off of some of this data.

Like, and I've known organizations that have tried to pull some of this from social media, some of this like back channel type of thing.

Like, is there validity from this?

Is the church going to have to like ask point blank questions?

Like, what is the capturing?

What is the gathering of this data?

What is this?

What would this even look like?

Well, there's something called a conversational UI, UX, right?

How can I, you know, and you see it all the time when you go to a website and a little bot shows up

and they're trying to get in a conversation with you.

And it may be a machine that's trying to get in a conversation with you.

But that's the data collection that we see happening more than not.

Getting away from the forms-based collection of, oh, fill out this form.

But, hey, what's your name?

What's the best way to get a hold of you?

How can we help you, right?

And if I ask you when you come to a church website how I as a church can help you,

that relates into programs that we might have that I might want to plug you in on, right?

But one of the things we're also studying is how do we not plan out your entire journey?

We just need to plan out your next couple steps.

And so it's something we call dynamic journey-based curriculum.

So what happens in your life?

And so if you lose your first parent and you don't know how to grieve, that dynamic journey-based

curriculum will say, hey, based upon a prayer request, because we can mine text, right?

So let's use R or Python to mine the text of a prayer request to say, hey, based upon that prayer request,

you probably need to take this little corselet.

And so think about a content strategy.

All content within a church should not be long-form content.

The sermons or an entire marriage class.

There should be some mid-length content and some short-form content that's 30 seconds to two minutes that is being drip on these

people through the church app, you know, throughout the week.

And then if you see that they click through on something that is a mini form and you give them a short form,

and I believe in the future we will see a time that because of your MAPS technology on your phone, it says, wow, you've got 20 minutes.

Let me drip something on you for 20 minutes, probably audio, unless it's a self-driving car.

But let me fill in that time with some Christian content that has been curated by your church.

That's a key, too, is curated by the church, not curated by Communitas Technologies, curated by the church.

Now, I believe that someday we'll be a managed service provider and we will have people on our staff that says to a certain church,

hey, did you realize that you have, you know, 23% of your teens are struggling with this and you have no content in your content library to help them?

You have no discussion groups for them to discuss this thing.

And so you've left them either hanging out or they have to go figure it out on their own through Google.

And by then, Google probably had three pages of ads instead of just one.

I mean, so it's, I mean, you're almost setting up the picture like the, you know, I'm an iOS guy.

It's about like the health app where all these different tools pour into it.

Essentially, you're creating a church app that's taking in insight from RightNow Media, from YouVersion, from a church, XYZ, maybe historical churches, the current church where they're involved in.

And it's painting a rich tapestry of who a person is spiritually, maybe some of their strengths or weaknesses, maybe even, you know, taking a spiritual assessment test every, a survey every six months or a year.

What are some strengths and weaknesses?

How have you improved?

What are some areas that you need to improve in?

And so we're providing here some opportunities for churches to better understand the people, to minister to them.

And really, you're providing an opportunity for the people to better understand themselves.

And each other, themselves and each other.

So we're talking machine learning.

We're talking artificial intelligence, AI.

I'm willing to bet here, there's probably some churches out there, some lead pastors.

I don't even think they can spell AI.

And so, like, the understanding of churches to try to master this area, like, they're not going to be able to.

We were talking offline.

I actually, in my church career, I've tried twice to build a personalization ministry like this.

And actually had funding secured, but the funding was nowhere near necessary.

And the vision wasn't strong enough to actually, like, succeed in making this thing happen.

And so, as we're moving to the future, it's 2021.

COVID sped up the train.

We're seeing things move more quickly in a technological stance.

We're not done with digital because of Delta variants and some things like that even coming back around.

What needs to happen for churches to better understand?

How do churches get their head wrapped around maybe utilizing personalization ministry, artificial intelligence, machine learning?

Like, how do we get there?

Well, the machine learning side is going to handle itself, right?

So, the churches can – and probably a lot of the large churches will get there.

Maybe the small ones won't.

But I don't like the – you know, I don't like the term artificial intelligence.

I like it to be augmented intelligence, right?

So, if you went through the church database and tried to determine certain things – and let's say you have an average attendance of 300, which isn't a small church, but it isn't a large church either.

But the point being, their database is probably 3,000 people.

And how many of those people do they really want to count, right?

Are they going to – when do they drop off?

When is somebody who's a visitor who comes in, they fill out a contact card, they check their children in, they never come back to your church?

So, if you're going to try to be – this goes back to the data strategy.

What are you trying to measure?

Do you really want – oh, look at our database.

We have 3,000 people.

Now, you have 3,000 records, but you probably only have 800 people who have been there in the last year, even though your average attendance is only 300.

Now, there's a couple interesting things coming out of that discussion, right?

So, if your average attendance is 300, pastor, how big do you think your ministry is?

I've talked to a number of pastors, and they say, well, it's 300.

No, the average attendance has gone down to 1.8 times a month, and that was pre-COVID.

So, let's just use an algorithm of two.

If your average attendance is 300 and people come twice a month, then you have regular attendees of 600.

Do you realize that you need to start thinking of your church as 600 people?

Because – and how do I get to those other 300 the other two times a month?

How about digitally?

But the systems in place and what you measure and things, the processes, need to be thinking like you're a church of 600.

And how can I get that 600 to come more often than twice a month?

It's kind of just simple math, right?

And we have some concepts called front-door analytics.

Where are people coming from?

How many front doors do you have?

Is Facebook a front door?

Is it?

Or is it just a side door because you have no idea if anybody's going to your Facebook page or not, right?

And then backdoor analytics.

Backdoor analytics is why are people leaving?

Many churches don't even know.

But in the software industry, we call that churn.

And if your churn is too high, then you're losing more customers than you're getting or it's costing a whole lot more to get the customers in the front door.

When we had Fellowship One, it was a statistic that 70% of your first-time visitors came from people inviting you.

People inviting them, right?

Their friends, their neighbors.

How do people invite today?

Would I invite you, Jeff, to my church to come through the front door?

Or would I engage you with some digital content first to say, hey, here's something my pastor said the other day.

I thought it was pretty interesting.

We were talking about it over coffee.

What do you think?

That's an invitation.

That's an invitation to engage.

Now, one of the things that churches do very poorly is segment their congregation.

But somebody who is a first-time visitor who never comes again might be part of their community.

And I should drip on them digitally as part of their community.

And if you use the five C's of Saddleback, right, then you have the crowd.

Then you have the congregation.

Then you have the core of the committed.

Those different groups of people need to be taught to talk to differently.

Because as a committed person, I want to know more of the details of how I can help.

As a crowd, I may not even want to be part of your congregation.

I may have problems at home that stop me from being part of the congregation.

I love the vicar from Holy Trinity, Brompton, was talking about the alpha class and how he called himself out.

Gumbel is his name, I believe.

Nicky Gumbel.

Yeah, called himself out and said, I was wrong.

I didn't think we could do alpha digitally.

But, man, there are some stories coming out of digital alpha.

I think he mentioned specifically, and this was a conference probably 18 months ago, he said, some Muslim women came to alpha and accepted the Lord.

They would have never set foot in our church.

So what are the people saying that digital discipleship, that we don't want any part of it, what are they saying to these Muslim women or Muslim men or Hindu men?

I mean, we've got a big Indian community here in Dallas.

Are we saying that we're just going to not evangelize to them?

Well, it's interesting to me.

You know, it's funny.

I was literally on a podcast 30 minutes earlier today telling the same story.

I've got a friend, now a friend, a pastor I've met who's Iranian, who's literally a pastor of a church in Iran.

And the only thing he can do in Iran as a pastor is disciple people, do church evangelize evangelism training digitally.

Like he has broadcasts from satellite that connect with people.

And through that broadcast, he pushes them, he challenges them, he drives to a WhatsApp conversation.

And through that WhatsApp, he leads them to Christ, gets them to accept Christ.

And now you've got a person in a household that accepts Christ being discipled by somebody, by a digital pastor, by a pastor via digital methods.

And that pastor is now discipling this individual in the house to the point to share Jesus with everyone else in the house.

So now the church is being transmitted via WhatsApp into this new Christian who's creating a new church community by evangelizing, sharing Jesus, talking about all this in the house.

By the way, more often than not, when one person accepts Christ within the house, in Iran, the house accepts Christ.

They all get on board with it, which leads to the place of baptizing within the house.

And in Iran, the moment when somebody is baptized within the Christian faith is the moment that the Iranian government has the authority to kill you.

So literally, we've got a pastor discipling people digitally to the point of potential death.

Don't tell me digital discipleship can't work.

It's taking people to the point where others can kill them.

That's how strong the discipleship bonds of Jesus is happening through this technology.

And in Iran, they don't question it because it's like, that's the only thing we got.

If you take that away, we can't gather in physical buildings.

This gentleman that I'm talking with, this pastor, he would not turn his Zoom camera on with me for about 25 minutes because he was afraid that I was a narc, that I was something, that I was somebody who I said I wasn't.

And he wasn't sure he could trust me.

And there's enough people in Iran that want him dead that makes him live on that much on the edge in a moment of fear, that he had to keep the camera off until he felt like I was who I said I was when I was having this conversation with him.

So, yeah, discipleship works in so many different levels.

But you have a battle there, right, of digital.

Why not just switch over to my side, Jeff, and call it personalized discipleship or personalized ministry?

And we don't care how it happens, right?

Meaning, hey, it can happen in person.

It can happen digitally.

It's not, that's not the issue.

It's personalization, meaning the woman at the well.

What did Jesus do?

He looked into her and said, let me tell you about you.

He didn't say, let me tell you only about me.

And I don't care, you know, you're, let's, we've got to get away from this cookie cutter approach.

We've got to get away from this one size fits all.

We can't keep feeding the mature saints the same baby milk that we give new Christians.

We just can't.

It's, it's stifling.

Have you seen the reveal study?

It's quite old now.

But there are people walking away from the church because the, and they're dissatisfied with the church because the church isn't getting deep enough for them.

So we had this big movement into, into, you know, being what, seeker friendly was a term, right?

But a seeker friendly message isn't going to grow me deeper in my knowledge of God at my level.

I've been a Christian now for, you know, 57 years.

Okay.

55, 55 years.

Something like that.

Yeah.

But, but my point is I want some real meat as Paul would say, Hey, you know, if you, if you're now matured, you need some real meat, not the baby's milk.

But can you imagine giving a baby Christian some of the real meat and the scariness that we might have when we're, especially if we start tossing around the nomenclature of a church around sanctification and things like that, and just spin their head going, uh, we might as well talk to them in, uh, uh, in, uh, tech speak, right?

You, I mean, you're, you're right.

You're, you're speaking my language.

Um, I, I, you're, you're giving me a lot to think about here.

The, the, the personalization, maybe moving away from digital, um, you know, I, I, I still think there are those out there that, that'll question it.

Uh, you know, some of the, the gospel coalition talking about the, well, and honestly, I've been, uh, there's a lot of things within gospel coalition, at least their view of digital that I probably don't agree with.

But, uh, personalization ministry does seem to feel a little, little safer in that approach.

Well, Hey, this is, this has been a phenomenal conversation.

And I have, I have loved it.

I honestly, I don't know that there's many podcasts that I've had that I've walked away where I've said, okay, I've been challenged.

Maybe I need to change my worldview a little bit here, or at least some of my terminology.

So thank you for at least, you know, that sounds kind of ego, but I'm going to stick with it.

It's fine.

Thank you for, thank you for the opportunity.

I, yeah, I've, I've loved you being on here.

So if somebody wants to, yeah, follow up with you, we'll put your info in the show notes.

But, um, you know, if somebody wants to get in touch and learn more about Communitas, uh, what's, what's a great way for them to get in touch and learn more about what you guys are up to?

CommunitasTech.com is our website.

We also have PersonalizedMinistry.com.

Go Google Personalized Ministry.

You'll get our website and then you'll get the opportunity to buy name tags for churches.

Right?

So that's, that's what Google thinks of Personalized Ministry is, oh, for church readers, their name should be on there instead of the whole concept of personalized ministry.

Isn't that great?

But yeah, I'm just like you, uh, have people reach out to my cell phone, 214-668-9807.

As long as you're not selling any kind of, uh, drugs, right?

Uh, from Franklin Pharmacy, I'm good with that.

And if you are selling drugs, you can text me.

No, I'm kidding.

Don't do that.

I don't, I don't want that either.

Uh, that's awesome.

It gives it a, it gives a cell phone number on the, on the air.

I love that.

Uh, well, Jeff, sir, thank you very much for jumping on, on this podcast.

Uh, check out Communitas.

Check out the show notes.

We'll have, uh, all the information on there as well.

Uh, but for Jeff, this is Jeff.

Hey, cool.

Jeff Squared, uh, with the Church Digital and with Stadia Church Planning.

Thanks for jumping on the pod.

We'll see you next time here at the show.

Y'all have a good day.