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

So we're continuing on with this season two conversation here. Hey Jeff with the Church Digital, once again powered by Stadia Church Planting. Here with season two, 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 you know, if you listen to the podcast, you hear me talk about this all the time. And so like I've got my conversation and I know how other people talk about it, and so I'm constantly like 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 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 from the equipping standpoint, but how technology can understand who people are, and through that process better shape what discipleship can look like for them.

By the way, some of you are already freaking out on me. It's cool. "Hey, doesn't that—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 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 Hook. So I'm bringing into the conversation Jeff Hook, CEO of Communitas Software, myself Jeff with the Church Digital, and Stadia Church Planting, 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.

Hey, so Jeff, tell me about yourself. Maybe tell 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. Uh, 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 ten years. I started running the Dallas office for Oracle Consulting, and then was the CEO 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 CEO of Parisoft, which is a Catholic-based software company. And coupled with all that, once we sold Parisoft 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 is, 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? They have to—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, 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.

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—YouVersion is a great tool, love it—but yet 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.

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 it 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 it, 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 would you reach somebody differently that's in, 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 assumed 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 twenty years ago will not work today. The teenagers today are very different than they were twenty 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, fifty 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. But 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, 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 3 and an Enneagram 7 have? And how can we help them 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 to lose-lose, or if I dominate you or you back off, those are not good conflict styles. But collaborative conflict is a good conflict style. In other words, Jeff, what 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—you have to understand, 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. 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, isn't 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. Like you talked about Fellowship One and previously in some of these other databases that aren't caring about that stuff. Is the church gonna have to pivot here and all of a sudden start to be a data hog? Like, how much are we gonna collect and what's that gonna look like in ministry?

Yes. 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? And matter of fact, you have IoT and different things hitting that health record, and over time, as this all gets sorted out amongst the healthcare 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?

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 though 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 the 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's 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, there will 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 the executive pastor from a very large megachurch, 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. 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 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 newcomers 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, 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—material requirements planning. We got out the Ollie Wight 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 you're throwing away the entire connection card, which I'm a fan of, by the way. And that's very perceptive.

A lot of people look at that connection card going, "How can we do this with the connection card?" Now, with the connection card, until whatever solution is going to tear that connection card apart—it's 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 lacking in personal—you know, 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 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 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 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—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." But that's a whole different discussion. That's pretty enlightening, probably for some people. But 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 X dollars, where this church has attendance of this many people, right? And so what is important to the customer or the congregant? It's that, "Well, you helped me get closer to God. You let me know who God is. You help pass my faith off to my children." There's a number of reasons why people go to church. They may be at a loss. So 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 concept that came out of Harvard—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 gospel. But it's a lens that a business should put their 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, you know, 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 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 are coming back after COVID, then did they get somebody else to do that job? Right? Did they are they listening and getting enough, 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 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 podcasts, but I will. You sent out, you know, the whole 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-ethnic world where we, you know, just now a 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. 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 got 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 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 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 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 that I've attended recently, he's got like a negative ten to ten scale. It's like negative ten is like an atheist, ten 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 job is to get like a negative ten 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 we're talking about here, um, there was just an article maybe within the past month. It was, uh, Gospel Coalition. It came out on my birthday. Happy birthday to me. The Gospel Coalition's talking about how virtual reality church, should be virtual church, digital church, our language is, uh, 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 connecting people in the community. You know, 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 of distribution, uh, but essentially there there is a little bit of of isolation 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 lack 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 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 flipped 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, the 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 meet a stretch. But that doesn't take away from me being with my local church, the branch, and, you know, uh, being in my small group together. But it it's an extension of. So it should be an and. So I'm not going to say, you know, if 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 if if I had to depend upon the one day a week, the one hour a weekend, I'm I'm afraid I'd be a pretty slow learner. It takes me daily time in the word. It takes me listening to books, uh, about other perspectives, you know? And I get deep into it of, is 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 a 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 grass roots 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 is the principle that we've been talking about. I just don't know that I've applied it there. There's different ways to disciple different people, uh, and so how you disciple someone in a physical space is 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 synchronous conversations, um, utilizing software, but through those conversations they're manually, relationally, person-to-person connecting with people and helping answer spiritual questions, um, 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 in Jesus. And so we're doing that on a on an interpersonal level. And and what I'm hearing from you is now this is an opportunity to create a a complimentary, maybe resource that works alongside some of the physical community, 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, um, start to provide resourcing, provide training, provide insight that 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 of some of this data.

Like, and I've known I've known organizations, um, that that have tried to pull some of this from from social media, some of this like like, uh, back channel type of thing. Like, is there is there validity from this? Is is like the is the church gonna have to like ask point blank questions? Like, what is the capturing? What is the the, um, 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, 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, vote 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, um, 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 on that prayer request, you probably need to take this little courselet.

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 thirty seconds, two minutes. This is being dripped on these people through the church app, uh, 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 twenty minutes. Let me drip something on you for twenty 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 communized 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, twenty-three percent of your teens are struggling with this, and you have no content in your content library to help them? You have no discussion groups, group 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 the picture like the, you know, I I'm an iOS guy, but like the health app where all these different tools pour into it, um, essentially you're creating a, uh, a church app that that's taking in insight from, um, from right now 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, um, 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, um, 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, and 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. Um, but I don't like, you know, I don't like the term artificial intelligence. I like it to be augmented intelligence, right? So that there, you know, so if you went through the church database and tried to determine certain things, and let's say you have an attendance 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? 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. Know 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, 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 seventy percent 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. It'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, the committed. Those different groups of people need to be taught to, talked 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. Uh, was talking about the Alpha class, and how he called himself out and Gumbo is his name, uh, I believe. Uh, 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, this was a conference probably 18 months ago, he said some Muslim woman came to Alpha and accepted the Lord. They would have never set foot in our church. So what are the, what are the people saying? The 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, I was funny. I was literally on a podcast 30 minutes earlier today, uh, telling the same story. I've, I've got a friend, uh, 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 in, uh, 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 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 gets, 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 an ark, that I was something that 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. And 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 stifling.

Have you seen the Reveal study? It's quite old now, but there are people walking away from the church because they're dissatisfied with the church because the church isn't getting deep enough for them. So we had this big movement into, uh, into, um, you know, being, um, what, uh, seeker-friendly was a term, right? But a seeker-friendly message isn't gonna 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 yeah, but my point is I want some real meat, as Paul would say. Hey, you know, 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, just spin their head going, uh, we might as well talk to him in that, uh, in, uh, tech speak, right? You, I mean, you're, you're right. You're speaking my language. Um, I, I know you're giving me a lot to think about here. The personalization, maybe moving away from digital, um, you know, I, I still think there are those out there that that'll question it. The, you know, some of 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, a little safer in that approach. Well, hey, this has been a phenomenal conversation. I have, I have loved it. I honestly, I don't know if 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 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 up? What's a great way for them to get in touch and learn more about what you guys are up to?

Communitizetech.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 what Google thinks of personalized ministry. Oh, for church readers, their names 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 drugs, right, 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.

That's awesome. It gives it a give cell phone number on the air. Love that. Well, Jeff, sir, thank you very much for jumping on this podcast. Uh, check out Communitas. Check out the show notes. We'll have all the information on there as well. But for Jeff, this is Jeff. Hey, cool. Jeff squared with the Church Digital and we're Stadia Church Planting. Thanks for jumping on the pod. We'll see you next time here at the show. You have a good day.