EP283 - Pushpay's Aaron Senneff on AI, Virtual Ministry, and Digital Communities

Because I think to be honest Jeff, we we have a lot of room to improve in the church base and deploying and using technology to really effectively minister to people and do outreach. Welcome to the Church Digital podcast. Through this podcast we'll talk about the technological innovations within the church, but more than tech for tech itself, will address deeper questions. Is discipleship making possible digitally? How should we approach the digital mission field? Can a biblically grounded church operate in digital space? And where does the metaverse and artificial intelligence fit into all of this? Whether you're a big or small church, the Church Digital's goal is to help churches like yours learn to be a multiplying church digitally and physically. And now here's your host, Jeff Reed.

Hey, welcome to the Church Digital podcast. Jeff Reed here, founder of the Church Digital and host here of said podcast. Great to hang out with you here for episode 283. We'll get to that here in a little bit, but once again, episode 283 brought to you by Riverside. I just, I love saying that. Riverside is a remote interview software. It's used by a lot of content creators and churches. You should check this out. The quality of this software, the ability to connect, utilize artificial intelligence to find clips, to generate transcripts, oh my gosh, it's so good. Summaries. We, the Church Digital, we use it almost exclusively across all of our podcasts and YouTube shows. So do me a favor, go ahead, check out the software. Go to thechurch.digital/riverside. The church.digital/riverside, or find the link in the show notes and discover a little bit more about Riverside and what it can do for your church.

Okay, hey, let's get into episode 283. I'm excited. I'm excited about this conversation. This new relationship. You've heard me tease some of the stuff we're doing with Riverside. Love Riverside, but with PushPay and even coming up here somewhere with Resi as well. Now we're not going to get too much into the Resi conversation just yet. You got to hold on. It's not quite public yet, but I can keep teasing it because it's right around the corner. But on the PushPay side, PushPay is a CHMS, the church management system. It's a giving solution. It's an app. It's oh, it's so much. It's probably one of the largest, maybe in the top three, Christian tech companies in the world. Multinational, multi-continent. Like it's really cool to see how this thing has developed over time, acquiring Church Community Builder and acquiring Resi as well. And so like PushPay is a force to be reckoned with within the church base. And so when PushPay generates a report, does some interviews with churches, and releases what they call the State of Church Tech Report, well, hey, you know what? I want to learn what PushPay is learning in that situation. I want to get in there and talk about it. So here's what we're doing. They released this information. Once again, this link is in the show notes so you can go on there, grab, download the PDF, start to explore what you're learning, and then listen along as we've got the CTO of PushPay, Aaron Cuff, here on the Church Digital to talk about what the report is, who the churches are they're talking to, and what surprised him. And by the way, what does he think of all this hybrid and digital church and the stuff that we love here on the Church Digital podcast? So do me a favor, once again, go download that report on the show notes and jump into this conversation with Aaron Cuff, CTO, Chief Technical Officer of PushPay, and myself, Jeff, with the Church Digital, in a conversation that I'm simply calling the State of the Church Tech Report 2024.

Okay, everybody, here you go.

All right, well, hey, let's just open it up then. Go ahead and tell me about the PushPay State of the Church Tech Report.

Yeah, sure, Jeff. So about three years ago, PushPay started to do kind of an annual survey. And if you kind of remember where we were at three years ago in church, a lot of things were changing, particularly driven by the COVID pandemic. But that really, you know, from where we were at at PushPay, that really from our view was impacting technology decisions and really was kind of hard for us even to get our arms around because the pace of it was so fast. So three years ago we started this like annual benchmark survey where we just send a bunch of questions to thousands of churches and specifically the decision makers at those churches. Just ask questions about how they're processing through decisions around technology that they use in the church. And you know, our thought at the time was it would be helpful to us to try to figure out like, okay, what strategically is important to churches? What's happening in churches? What are decisions they're trying to make? How does that inform maybe how our company could respond to that? But it was just such a wealth of information that was so helpful. We've published those reports. We did it, you know, the first time, first report was a little over two years ago. We did it last year, and then we just on the heels of releasing our third annual State of Church Tech Report. And really kind of interesting survey. First, I mean, I think there are themes that fall out every year that are informative. So like, you know, obviously when COVID was going on, there was a lot of reacting and trying to figure out how to convert, so to speak, to a new world. Last year we asked again, and you could kind of see a lot of refinement happening. More like, okay, we're settling in, but we're trying to figure out how to make the most of our technology. And this year, you know, I wouldn't say it's a mammoth landscape change, but there are some things that I think have been kind of eye-opening as we go through that survey results. And one of the things that, you know, I think it's just to share with your audience, I think we're really at the point where the idea of in-person-only church is just severely waning. Like, sometimes we even use the word abandoning. So large swaths of the church survey are saying, hey, we're hybrid, whatever that means to them, and we're probably not going back, which I think is interesting. That's one of those changes that persists out of COVID. You know, I think another survey takeaway is there's a lot of insecurity among church staff that are making hard decisions about what technology tools really work for them or should work for them and how to make those decisions. But I'd say on the other end, like I think what's interesting about churches, a lot of them are very progressive, very future-oriented, and they're willing to take risks and try technologies, see if they work, and then kind of move back out of there if it doesn't work. So really interesting survey. I kind of love the takeaways. It's usually about two thousand to three thousand people. I think we had twenty-two hundred respondents this year that participated. We've interviewed more than six thousand churches as a part of the survey over the few years that we've done it. Really interesting, like repository of data about how churches are just thinking about technology.

Yeah, love it. We're going to get into some of the hybrid aspects, and there's some really interesting, I was surprised to be honest by several of the stats that came out of this. And so we're going to get into it in a second, but just from an overall perspective, like what were some stats that maybe surprised you or were some key findings that popped up in the 2024 report?

Yeah, well, we see this every time, and I would still say even in my role, my role is in technology that helps churches. That's what I do all day long. And I would say I'm still a little bit surprised, even humbled by the just the high importance that churches play strategically on the role of technology in their church organization. And that's encouraging to me because I think to be honest, Jeff, we have a lot of room to improve in the church base and deploying and using technology to really effectively minister to people and do outreach. So that's been true every year. That just that the primacy or the criticality to the mission is really evident. But I would say, and I'm going to come back to this again, we're going to talk about it some more, I think, you know, church has really changed, and in particular over the last four or five years. You know, I think you would probably say in a degree that change started a long time ago, but if you just took a blur of snapshot of what church looked like in 2019 and now, you know, hybrid was probably a little bit still of the exception even back before COVID started. When you look at it now, there's just almost like wide agreement. Ninety-one percent of churches would say our future is hybrid. Now there's a lot of variation in what hybrid looks like, but the idea of like church being in-person only, I mean, there are fewer and fewer churches that look at their ministry that way. And I think that's fascinating because I think for a long time we wondered, would we revert back to the mean? But I think what we're seeing is there's been systematic changes to how churches operate over the last few years that are persisting and are likely to persist into the future.

Yeah, and that ninety-one percent, like that's one of those. I think it was ninety percent that was hybrid. There was another stat that we'll talk about it, ninety-one percent live stream. Like that was shocking to me. You know, it almost caused, and there's some other things metaverse will get into, but there was just really surprised some of the stats that were pulled out of here. Where did you find the churches? Like how did you connect with the churches that you were interviewing out of these twenty-two hundred churches that reported in twenty-twenty-four?

Yeah, well, for it's a cross-section. So we survey, you know, I think just, you know, there might be some thought, well, these are big churches, right? Or these are progressive churches or these are the big multicampus churches that we hear about. The survey was all types of churches from you know what we would say are smaller churches all the way up to the very big ones across all denominational cross-sections, whether it's non-Protestant or following a denomination line. And you know, a lot of them are customers of ours. A lot of them are not customers of ours. We just know them because we're in the industry. And so I would say like when you look at the conclusions from the survey, this isn't, you know, for the most part, this isn't like a segment of the church that's starting to think differently. These are thoughts that seem to be pervasive across just a huge and wide spectrum of churches in the United States, which I think is interesting. There's a lot of consistency, especially to that hybrid topic.

Yeah, I love it. So you, I mean, you were saying hybrid here. I tend to like the figital word better. If you go back, you know, I get we talk about this on the podcast. I get ripped all the time for saying figital. Like I, and I know I was saying figital pre-COVID. You know, figital is a business term, you know, that being from the corporate side of this. But you know, I've had somebody tell me like Jake Crane at Saddleback. Jake rips me all the time. It's like, Jeff, it sounds like you're murdering somebody when you say figital. And I'm like, how is figital like the equation, you know, taking someone's life? I don't know, it's a long story. But so figital, you know, we definitely we've got a lot of audience out there that's in the hybrid scope. So why do you think we're stabilizing here at ninety-one percent? It's even a decrease of those that are considering leaving it from the report. Like we made it. Figital hybrid is here to stay. How, how?

Did we get here digital? It makes you sound smart to me, Jeff. It's like Greek. Like, it's thank you. So yeah, stick with that. Don't let the naysayers bring you down on that.

Um, I would say, you know, I think it's interesting because I think a lot of that decision making or realization just comes out of the practical benefits of hybrid. You know, I think a lot of churches have just realized there's reach there that they can't otherwise get. And it doesn't have to be, you know, there are churches that you and I know well that are shooting for the global reach or the national reach. They really want to have an organization that stretches all the boundaries. You know, there's a lot of churches that aren't thinking that way. But I think, you know, I'll give an example of a church I talked to last year, one of those big multi-campus churches. And their staff would say, "We are a physical church. We want to be in person. That's our goal." But they're still live streaming. They're still, you know, they're still using digital content. And so I asked, "Well, why is that?" And I think, you know, they kind of gave me a list. And the list was, you know, "Well, we're in a campus town. We have a lot of college students that come in and then they move out and they're alumni. They still want to participate. So we keep in touch with them. Or, you know, we realize we have some shut-ins in the community. They can't always get here. So in order to keep them involved, we're going to keep our live stream going."

I think even in that case, you have this, like, you know, physically oriented church that's also like, "Well, there's a reach here that matters to us, and so we're going to continue to invest in things like live streaming and connecting with our remote audience."

I think that's part of it. It's just the awareness that there's reach there. The other two, I think, it's, you know, here's my very casual observation: we are just shifting to much more of an asynchronous world in general. Like, you know, you might have been this way, Jeff, but weeks had a cadence to them. You know, like Monday through Friday, eight to five, that's work or school. And then Saturday is sports. And then Sunday morning is church. And Sunday evening was youth group. And then Monday comes and it starts all over again. And the week had a cadence. In my family, at least, that cadence is seriously disrupted, right? Because soccer games don't just happen on Saturday anymore. They happen on Sunday morning. And work doesn't just happen on Monday through Friday. Sometimes we're putting in a little extra effort, or there's something non-traditional going on.

And so it used to be in the past, you know, you'd maybe have to miss church for some reason. You go to church, and someone's like, "What did you hear? Pastor Mike's sermon last week?" You say, "Well, no, I didn't. What did I miss?" And there's no going back. But for a lot of families, I think that schedule's become asynchronous to the point that, yeah, we want to go to church on Sunday morning, but when that's not possible, let's just pull up the service at three o'clock this afternoon when we have some free time. That is just the reality of how families are operating. And I think it's a sign that churches are kind of moving to adapt to that a little bit. That's a theory, and mostly born out of my own family experiences because that's kind of how we are. And I know there's a lot of families like this.

But the last one, and I think this is probably the most compelling to me, is that—and I've heard you say this before, Jeff—but it's a very, very safe front door to approach a church for the first time through a digital avenue. That is just more and more how people want to interact with the church. It's just more and more rare, the younger you are, for your first experience to walk into a church and then try to decide, like, "Is this a place where I feel comfortable and safe?" People are going to do that online first. And I think there's just a real realization from churches: "We need that front door because that's our doorway into the world. That's not walking in." Does that make sense?

Love that. Totally, completely. I love that front door aspect. By the way, it's interesting. I'm actually preparing some material today—the day I'm doing this material—for I'm speaking at a PushPay event coming up soon. And, um, I ran across a stat. I'm actually going to use it. U Southern Baptist Convention found this—North American Mission Board—um, a visitor, um, a potential church physical attender will—54% of them will attend an online service four times before they visit the physical church building. Like, and it goes all the way up to like six times, seven times was what they, but 54%—the majority of people that would consider that are visiting your church building watched your church service four times online before they would come to it. Like, if for no other reason, to do broadcast and to do your church online service, yeah, that right there, to get people in the physical building. That's incredible.

But let me ask, because you said the word "asynchronous" like half a dozen times, and I love the word "asynchronous." Like, you're speaking my language. And, you know, I know Slack is big within Resi and PushPay culture. I'm in those channels right now. I'm beating stuff up on a regular basis with the team. Um, just, let's hypothetical here: like, why are we not seeing, or at what point do you think we see some of these asynchronous communities, these digital communities, start to be more effective or utilized within the church? I have not had the chance to participate in a church that does that well. So, like, sometimes you know, you're in a church, maybe the production team uses a Slack, or you see Discord and some, like, certain ministries. But, like, just as a church community, I haven't seen that. And in my own personal church life, I know Church Lick are doing it, and I would say I would love that.

And my experience mostly comes out of, you know, it does come out of business. But, um, there's a lot of parallels to sort of where business is at and where church is at. Because here, you know, PushPay is a big global organization with people all over the place. Very few of them sit near me. And so we're digitally communicating, whether it's through Zoom or Google Meet or Slack, regularly. And I would say if there's one tool that drives communication in our big remote organization, it's Slack. That's it.

Um, and if you know, some of your listeners maybe haven't used these or aren't familiar or just not sure where I'm going with that, so our, like, let me just give you a PushPay example. We have about 650 people in it. They're across two continents, five, maybe six time zones, probably twenty, twenty-five states. Um, and we're all in that together. And what I can say to every single person that I meet with in that 630-person company is that I am one Slack message away.

So, like, the way I think about that is, like, we, you know, you think of, like, the old six degrees of separation or the six degrees of Kevin Bacon, like the idea that if we just looked at our contacts, we'd all be six degrees away from somebody. But that's not very helpful if you want to reach out to Kevin Bacon, like you're not going to find those six degrees easily. But now you're on this big asynchronous community, and you're all there together, and everybody is one Slack message away.

So, first of all, I just think that's incredibly powerful. And then we talk about asynchronous communication. Um, I was doing some looking at our own Slack instance. So we have hundreds and hundreds of organically formed channels in our Slack instance. So, first of all, channels are basically just common interests. So it's pretty interesting to me, like, we have business-based ones, right? Things that are about what we're doing. It's like, "Hey, what are we? What's happening in sales? And what's happening over here in engineering? And what some new products we're launching?" And if you want to know about those things, you have these channels you can jump through that are, like, you know, help you understand what business is working on.

But this interesting thing that happens with Slack or Discord is you also get ones that are just about common threads that are even personal. Like, one of our biggest channels is the dogs channel, just because a lot of people are dog owners. So what happens, Jeff, is, like, I just think this is so cool. Like, someone joins the company, they get on a Slack channel, and they immediately find common interests with people and start joining up with these common interests. So you see groups forming. There's one over here for sports, one for dogs. They don't like talk a lot. There's one over here for cats. There's one over here for mountain biking. And immediately you see people start to integrate in the community. And, hey, this is the biking community. I got a bike. You guys got a bike? Do we bike around here? What's going on?

And I think about how fluidly that happens in a platform like Slack or Discord, and how much effort we put into churches into forming groups. Like, it's automatic in one of those platforms, and it's a process on the side of the church. And sometimes I just want to say, like, "Put Slack in my church, and then I will find the people I connect with. I promise you, I will find them."

And I also would say, just as a sidebar to that, and it's a benefit—it really is—those tools, the Slacks, the Discords, these, like, mass communication tools, they're good at forming connection digitally. They might be one of the best tools in terms of digital connection.

I was just a little checking because you can check Slack statistics. So I just looked in our instance, and one of the things it tells you is, like, who's the most prolific, like, Slacker, you know, who's the Slack-iest. So I was asking her about it, and she's like, "Well, look, part of my job is to stay connected with anybody, so I just use Slack a lot." But she also said, like, "And I'm going to be honest here, I'm a remote employee, and this is my way to stay connected with people I don't otherwise see."

And I think, like, those platforms would be incredibly powerful for churches with some digital reach because it's just incredibly good, like, community-creating, connection-type software. Does that make sense?

Totally, totally complete. Like, for me, I love everything about this. I love Sarah's 230 messages a day. That's crazy. Um, but what I see, like, if we're talking about hybrid, we're talking live stream, like, these are churches that are using Resi equipment to awesomely broadcast these church services out. And one of the things that we're discovering is that the content, the church service, um, is great at a lot of stuff. But unless there's a community in place, you're really not going to see discipleship happen. And so, like, discipleship always happens within community. And so, like, if you're broadcasting that church service, you're helping you get people into the building. But as you're broadcasting that church service, maybe people are outside of the reach of that building. Well, now you've got an opportunity to engage with them digitally, start to introduce them into a digital community.

It's so fluid because, like, how many times have you finally made the decision to walk into a church? We've moved a lot in our lives, always for a new church. You sit down at church. You like, "Okay, who here, like, me? Who would I bond with? Connect with?" And that is a needle in a haystack. But, like, you set up some of these messaging tools, and it is so fluid that it's almost effortless. It removes the friction and the discomfort around finding groups that you identify with. That is what a church is trying to do a lot.

Of times, tell you what, I'm going to send you a link. Are you a Discord guy as well, or are you multiple workspaces on both?

So yeah, Discord. I'm going to send you an invite to Lux Digital Church. It's a video game church. So me, hopefully you can get past that, but um, or work through that if you are a gamer. I don't know, um, but they are one of the best right now in how they're utilizing Discord, but how they're utilizing async for that. So check that out, get inspired.

And um, like, it's just I've always have thought that the asynchronous tool is that next step. It's that missing piece that representing that digital community. We can feed people into a physical community, but we've got to have a digital community. And even the digital community can boil the frog slowly, so to speak, to get people into that physical community. So really, really excited about that.

Well, let me ask. Let's move on. You know, it's 2024. Evidently, this thing called artificial intelligence is here to stay. And you know, I've often thought that AI, before AI exploded with ChatGPT, um, I was, nobody was talking about artificial intelligence being like a content creator. Correct. In my world, I was on panels. I was listening to technologists, sociologists. They're talking about how artificial intelligence comes on, it's going to be this revolution, this Renaissance era, because all the menial, the trash pickers, like all the simple jobs, we're going to, no offense to trash pickers, I'm sorry, but the simple jobs were going to be gone. And we were all going to be able to be artists and writers and cinematographers and just re-engaging in this whole new life.

Well, first off, that didn't happen because now, like, every AI is creating all the content. Like the regular content creators is worth nothing at this point because AI is cranking it out so easy. So I've always had this challenge. I'll get to the question in a second. I'm having fun. Um, I was always thinking that the church and organizations, they were not going to be utilizing AI like they are with the content, but it was much more powerful, built into the platforms. Yeah, built into tools that can, you know, we don't necessarily need them to be that cutting edge to understand how to write the code and the prompts, but understand how to utilize the software that's in place. How are what are you guys looking at Pushpay in context of artificial intelligence? Like, what's today look like? What's the future look like? Where are you going with all this?

First, I would just say it's hard to say. Like, I think there is not a technology in my lifetime that I have seen that has had a faster adoption curve, a faster mainstreaming than generative AI. Like, it is shocking. I just remember, you know, I remember when ChatGPT, I think it was three, came out, and it was for me it was still a parlor trick. So I remember sitting around, it was over Thanksgiving. I have a bunch of college students. They're sitting at a table. They're working on essays. And I was like, hey, let me write your essay for you. What's it about? And I look into OpenAI and I plug some stuff in there and read it to them. And there's like shock and awe. And you know, in that November, October, November time frame, nobody's quite aware of what it is. And I think by January, everybody knew what ChatGPT was.

And I started to ask pastors in groups. I would just ask, like, hey, who in here knows what ChatGPT is? And basically 100% of the group back then would be like, yeah, of course, everybody knows what it is. Like, well, it was less than six months ago that that came out or seven or eight months ago. And then we would ask, well, who's using it? And about half the hands would shoot up, like, yeah, I use it for email creation or help me along with my sermon notes or graphic design or whatever. So it's really pervasive.

Like, I think what's interesting about that is, you know, what someone told me today that I was like, yeah, that's probably true. You are either an organization that is using AI or you're an organization that doesn't realize they're using AI, but either one, you're definitely using AI, whether it's in your personnel and day-to-day workflow or it's just the tools that you use. You do your job in a regular email, whether it's on a regular basis, whether it's your email client or whatever. And Pushpay's product will go the same way too.

The interesting thing is we've actually used some machine learning for quite some time. We have a payments platform. We've used it for fraud detection for a long time. It's been around a while. It's just that this generative AI, this new kind of content creation side of AI, is still relatively new. And I think there's some things that we will look hard at to just improve the life of church staff members that are trying to do effective ministry.

And I'll give you just one example. Um, you know, we talked a lot about live streaming. A lot of times that results in stored content, so videos that can be replayed later. And one option is, sure, you can go to my church's website and I can pick the Sunday from six weeks ago and rewatch the message. But I think AI allows you, like, really easy tools to go assimilate all the videos, listen to what the pastor is saying, tag it, mark it, help contextualize it. And then what you can do is say, okay, like, here's what I'd really like to do. I want to put together, you know, maybe three to five to seven snippets of our pastor talking about prayer for maybe upcoming small group curriculum. And you can use some AI tools to do that pretty effectively to be like, okay, now just go scan our library, surface to me the two or three or five minute snippets that we've heard from him over the last 24 months. And then we can order those things.

Like, the big things that are heavy lifting, heavy investment, take a lot of time. I think you're going to see, not just from Pushpay but elsewhere, AI is going to attack those things. And hopefully the best we see from that is our own personal productivity and what we can create for end user just gets better and better.

And I'm not fishing for anything when I ask this question. I just want to preface that. But um, do you have anything ethically that you would not have AI do? Like, do you have any stipulations or boundaries in place with it? Like, have you guys wrestled with anything to that level yet?

Yeah, when you are building it into your product, you do get to set the boundaries pretty clearly. Like, a good example is, do we want to train on data that only we have? So we know where the data came from. We know that it's good data. We know who owns the data. We have chain of custody to it. So there's no question about where the response came from. Or is it a tool that trains on everything that's on the internet? Businesses like us can decide, right? Like, we can constrain that a little bit and say, well, for the safety of everybody involved, we're going to make it train only on these things, and we trust these repositories.

For an example, that's not true for every AI tool, and that's kind of a thing that the industry is wrestling with. You can go to ChatGPT and be like, hey, write a sermon on Romans 8 for me, and you might just get a script from Piper, and you don't know that you got a script from John Piper. Like, I think there's real concerns about copyright infringement and sources in some AI tools to be aware of. And to be honest, the industry is going to wrestle with those for a long, long time.

So for us as a business, with the concerns of liability and data accuracy, we'll make some choices about that when we use it to keep it safe.

Awesome. You know, it's not often we get a CTO here on the podcast, so I'm getting a little technical here. We're talking AI. Um, shifting gears a little bit. Evidently, there's this Apple device released called the Vision Pro. I don't know if you've heard of this, but evidently artificial intelligence is here to stay. Spatial computing is here to stay. There's a lot that's here to stay these days. It feels like. So, um, what are the implications for spatial computing? Like, what are your thoughts? Pushpay's thoughts? Like, I'm just curious what you guys are thinking as you're looking at some of the stuff that Apple's working on.

Okay, you have to go back a little bit for me. I'll just kind of communicate my bias. I was an early adopter of, I think it was an Oculus headset several years ago when they were new. And my feeling at the time was my hypothesis was I think the metaverse can really change things for people in terms of immersive experiences. It could be really valuable for business, for gaming, for churches. We got to figure that out. But I think it's pretty cool.

So I get an Oculus for work, brought it into work, and got a couple other colleagues, and we spent some time just using meetings like in a virtual metaverse environment. And my takeaway was this is onto something because I think my feeling was, as opposed to a Google Meet or a Zoom call, being in the metaverse was like a much more immersive, alive experience. It just felt a little bit more real. So my feeling was this could work.

The problem was, and it was partly the Oculus, partly the tools that are available, just very high friction to make that work well. You know, we're used to hitting a button and you're in a Zoom, and this was more like, okay, wait, what tool are we using? And how do I, do I have to sign into that? And then which room are we in? And how do we, and who made the environment? Do I have to make it? So the friction was really high.

But my feeling was, oh, this has potential. Like, it could. I could see it transforming both business and churches. And it cooled, like, a lot, right? Like, two years ago or a year ago, metaverse is everything we're talking about. And now you don't hear about it too much until recently. I think what Apple launched is so interesting because I would say it is different. Like, it's a different type of immersive experience.

What I think they did that was so good, I think, is the problem with like former VR headsets is you are either in the physical world or you're in the digital world. So I don't know if you've experimented, Jeff, but I'm, you know, I'm, you know, for research purposes, on a game in the living room with the Oculus, and I might like kick the dog or run into a wall because all you see is what's happening in the gaming environment you're in. And what Apple's doing is they're saying, no, no, they need to merge together. So your physical world is still going to be there. You're still going to be able to look around the room, see what's happening, but we're going to lay over top of that, you know, metaverse-like experiences.

And you know, I don't have one. That price tag is probably going to be a little bit of a barrier for something. I think it's like $3,500 retail. But boy, you know what I like? When it comes to like figuring out how to remove friction, I do not bet against Apple. So I'm really interested in what becomes of that product line over the next 24 months.

Yeah, I trust Apple far more than I do Meta, Facebook. Sure, like, I respect what Facebook has built and Meta has built, and they're doing what they're doing. And I was funny just last week. We had a podcast with the church digital's operation director, Andy Mage, talking about the Meta Quest. And I think the augmented reality, I think the mixed reality aspects are going to have a greater cultural impact than the metaverse.

than the virtual reality does. I know that's a controversial take, but I agree. I don't think people like to be blinded to the reality that's around them. It's interesting, some of the shorts that we actually put from the podcast on YouTube got ripped, you know, because it's comments on Facebook or YouTube. Like everybody's negative, but I just got ripped apart by a couple people because I was an idiot because nobody wants to be blinded by the reality that's around them.

Yeah, now augmenting, adding to that is a whole other thing. And so I love that Apple's in that space and I'm looking forward to the day that churches, how do I say this nicely, are willing, are capable, are able, are interested in experimenting and embracing that area. Like I think the 2D church experience is just not as good as the 3D church. It doesn't matter how much technology you put into it. And some of them are amazing and well produced, but you suddenly have the ability to try to in a compelling way recreate like an immersive 3D experience that really feels like you're there in the church without it being on a flat screen. I think that could be powerful.

Yeah, and then using something like that to feed into the community, into like a Discord channel or a Slack group, like that's powerful. That's what Stuart McPherson does. He's got Vector Church. He actually preaches in virtual reality, but he uses it, he feeds it over into his Discord. So that's exciting. I love some of the 3D experiences. I'm coming around to them, but the challenge with the 3D experiences is you don't get the community aspect. You're not sitting next to anyone. You're not having a conversation with an avatar. You're not engaging or dialoguing with somebody. And so the churches that do the 3D experience make sure it's supplemented with some sort of a community aspect that you're going to within your church.

Absolutely. Very cool. All right, so one of the things that popped up in the report, let's get back to the tech report. I kind of took us on a tangent there, sorry for that. So one stat and I'm going to read straight from my screen: 45% of those interviewed are not confident in adopting the right tech solution. Essentially analysis paralysis. I've been running into this problem for years where it feels like churches are excited, they want to talk about stuff, they get to the point where they gotta get the committee together, whatever it is, everybody's on the same page from top to bottom, everybody seems fine, and then it kind of takes time to cut the check and it's crickets or pulling the trigger. How do we overcome that? Like what is this idea that 45% of those are not confident in adopting the right tech solution? Like how do we deal with this?

Yeah, yeah, I think that's good. That was eye opening to me too, just the sort of the uncertainty and I don't know what the right word is, anxiety that some church staff and volunteers feel about making some of those decisions. And I guess I can kind of relate to that, probably just comes to my technology background. Because sometimes the technology decisions we make when we're making a product, I'll sometimes refer to the decisions like, is this a one-way door or is this a two-way door? Meaning we're going to make a decision, and if we go through this decision, if we go through this doorway, can we see what the room is like and can we walk back out of the door and make a different informed decision if we want to? Or is this a one-way door? You walk through it and the door slams and locks and you're now sort of stuck in that decision, or at least it's really, really painful to switch.

And I would at least like one encouragement I would like to just share: in reality, we think some decisions are one-way doors when they're actually two-way doors. Like there's not that many technology decisions that we make that are irreversible. I would say there's some that are harder than others. You know, I think, just speaking to what PushPay does, a donor management platform is hard to switch out. A CHMS can be hard to switch out. But even those, they're not locked one-way doors. They're just a little harder to get back through.

And so like one of the things I would just encourage people is, in the spirit of experimenting with what works and what doesn't, you make a mistake and decide it doesn't work. I am a technology professional that's been doing this for 25 years and we still do that regularly. We pick a solution, we try it, and we go, that just didn't work for us. Let's go back and revisit that. And there is a little bit of pain associated. I don't want to say that those are free choices, but it is okay to make a decision and either look back in retrospect and say, hey, that wasn't the right decision for us, or more commonly what happens is that was the right decision at the time, but we've changed. You can change. It's okay. You can figure it out. It's not always a one-way door even though it might feel like it at the time.

So that was one thing, like maybe just have to swallow hard and get brave because it's maybe not as bad as we think. But I think the other one is like the thing about technology. And you know, there's clearly a lot of churches using lots of different technology solutions for a lot of different purposes. And there's 300,000 churches, maybe 400,000 churches in the United States. You know, I would say maybe 50 to 70,000 of them are pretty technology oriented and trying a lot of things. They're all going to have a CHMS. They're all going to have a donor management platform. They might have an app. They probably have a website solution. They're probably using live streaming. They probably have a general ledger. They're probably using something for payroll. There's just a lot of technology choices being made.

And we can learn a lot from our network, right? Like we can reach out and just ask, how did that go for you? Was that a good experience or was that a bad experience? We can find churches that are similar to us that maybe went through a similar transition, made a different choice, maybe turned out that choice didn't work and then had to go through the process of backing out. I think that church network is really powerful. And by the way, that is like some of what we try to do in PushPay. You know, some of what we do is obviously try to sell and support our current products, but you've been a part of this. A lot of what we try to do is just connect church leaders to talk about those technology decisions and process through them together. And honestly, I think that network can be incredibly powerful.

Yeah, I mean once again that gets back to that asynchronous community. You know, even the ability to, you know, this is one of the conversations we're having even on the Resi side is setting up an asynchronous community to invite people into to be able to dialogue and share, to learn about the product, to learn best practices, to talk about what's working and what's not working, or even just outside of the technology, to connect at a ministry level, to be friends on mission together. Like there's, historically the church has been very bad at working with other churches. You know, in biblical context you don't see that. You see Paul on missionary journeys going around and encouraging and doing that and writing the letters. The Bible is filled with encouragement on that. But you know, in recent days, I know it's a little harder for whatever reason.

But to your point, like I think a good example that I went to the Church IT Network this year. That's a pretty substantial conference that happens every year in West Palm Beach. And guess what, they have a Discord. And all year, the conference is only a few days, but all year long those network of people are asking, hey, have you guys tried this? What did you do here? Anybody else figure this out? And it's this really kind of beautiful community that's, to your point, it's on Discord, totally asynchronous, and it just lives long after the conference.

Were you there? I didn't realize you were at that conference. I was there. I was there for at least one day, maybe two. We must have just totally missed each other.

You must just have missed it. It's gonna be in Discord. I'll just message you on the Discord and we'll connect. How's that?

Yeah, we'll connect up. It'll be good.

Another stat that kind of popped out for me on the report: 55% of churches allocate less than 10% of their operating budget to technology in 2024. What should that number be realistically, Jeff?

Of the questions you could ask about that survey, I think that's one of the hardest ones to answer. And I don't know. I was trying to think of like why is it so hard to put your finger on what that should look like? And I think part of it is because there are just so many different types of churches. Small churches, big churches, digital churches, more that are trying to be in person. And the reality is most of these churches would say we don't have unlimited budgets. We have building to pay for. We have staff to pay for. We have ministries going on that have expenses. We're supporting missions. And then, oh yeah, we got to support the technology as well.

You know, I probably would approach that decision. This is where like being an XP or in the business side of a church is really, really challenging. But I would say like business goes through the same thing. We have the same conversations every year: how much should we spend to do what we're trying to do? What makes sense to us? And I think what we try to do every year in this business, and businesses I've been a part of before, is to ask first, what's our strategy and what are we trying to accomplish? And then where is it best to apply the capital we have? Everybody has unlimited capital. There's everybody runs out of money eventually, even Apple. And so like thinking through, like, well, here's what's important to us and therefore here's what we're going to invest in.

And I like, I think, you know, you've mentioned Resi a couple times. I think if I mean I really love the Resi product. It is a wonderful product. It is very high quality, very high reliability, camera quality. It just serves churches really well because it's really simple. And if you're leaning into hybrid or digital, I would say look seriously at Resi. That's an amazing technology. But maybe like you might say, well, we have other products. Maybe we're trying to use email to connect with people and that's not working very well. And honestly, that's not going to be part of the strategy next year. Maybe we just don't need to renew our whatever MailChimp or Constant Contact. We're going to go to a free Slack instance instead or something like that.

But I think like it's really hard to put your finger on it. It's more about who you are and what your strategy is, and then you sort of back into, well, what do we feel comfortable supporting this year? So I think it's a hard question to answer.

Wow, that was a very long answer to come around to, I don't know. I don't know, Jeff. That's a hard question though, right? Because you know, you've got your mega, giga churches, 5,000, 10,000, multiple campuses. You know, they're going to have their answer to that. And you know, I currently attend a church plant that's about 200 people on.

A Sunday and so their approach is far different as well. Yeah, um, within Pushpay, like, are you—how do you serve churches with different expectations like within your product? Like, are you—is there something that a smaller church can engage with? Is there—are there features that the larger churches are clamoring for? Like, you're a tech company that's trying to reach, I mean, hundreds of thousands of churches in America, and I'm not even talking about the multinational aspects of what you guys do. So like, how do you scale and scope that?

Yeah, I mean, just really practically, every church is a little different. So when we're thinking about, when we're starting to engage with a church about like, is there a product from Pushpay's portfolio that's right for you, you first—there's a discovery process that goes on there so we can understand what the church is trying to do. We don't oversell them or undersell them something that maybe isn't that helpful to them. In that process, what I would say is like, I do think there's kind of a hierarchy of needs that you see as you go up the chain. I mean, the reality is right now every church has an online giving system. Like, that is just ubiquitous, and you want to make sure it's a good one and you use it. So almost any size of church that scales up or down, you know, we feel like we have a great industry-leading donor management product, and a lot of times we'll lead with that. Like, hey, this would help you, it would help your finances, it would help you just collect more of the donations that your churches are giving you. So a lot of times we'll start there, and that honestly is pretty universal up and down the size, and you know, horizontally across different types of churches.

Then you get into the ChMS. I would say a lot of churches as they grow start to realize that that's a pretty strategically critical tool. So as you go from like the small church—like, you know, zero to two hundred—maybe you guys have a lot of success and you wake up one day and you're up to five hundred, and you're starting to ask the question, who are these people and how do we organize our ministry? That's where a ChMS gets really valuable. And when we see that, then we'll start to talk to our, you know, our customer base about, well, how have you thought about, you know, merging your donor management with a ChMS solution? And you get all that data that's available to you. So I would say like, there's, you know, we know churches pretty well. We know what their—generally speaking, we know how to understand where they're at and get their needs out, and we try to meet them where they're at.

Very cool. Aaron, CTO of Pushpay, thank you for the time. This has been really, really good. You know what, there's one question that I wanted to ask, and you know, we—you deal with a lot of hybrid churches. We've been talking about live streaming and we've been talking hybrid and digital, and so the majority of your world is physical churches that are doing digital as well. You know, a lot of our audience is digital-only churches—churches that only exist in digital space without the physical building. The Lux digital churches, which I mentioned earlier, Hearts like His, Vector—I mean, there's so many at this point I could just go on forever. It's using digital tools only or metaverse, virtual reality tools only. Community is Discord, discipleship happening in those spaces, things like that. You're a tech guy—I mean, literally from top to bottom—and so I would love just a moment here to pick your brain. I know it's a controversial idea. Some people love it, some people hate it, but most of them will express their opinions online one way or the other. So I would love your take—pros and cons of a digital expression of a church, no physical building. What are you thinking?

Yeah, I mean, I think I have to remove my personal preference because like, I think—I mean, just, I do think this is kind of personal a little bit. Like, I prefer to work face to face. That isn't my reality, but when I can do it, I will do that. And church is similar to me. I can't always be face to face, but I'd prefer to be when I can. But at the same time, and you probably work with amazing people that are remote all the time and that are much more effective than I am. So I think like, that probably is true in church too. There are just people that are going to resonate and connect better with an all-digital church than they will showing up physically to church. And that's why I would say like, we need the Lux digital church, we need the Hearts like His—those are churches that we need room for in sort of the grand spectrum of churches.

I will say I think it's hard. Like, there's one really practical thing that's hard to overcome for all churches, but I think the bigger you get and the more digital you are, the harder it is, and that is anonymity. No, I would just say like, anonymity is a problem in a physical church too. Like, you could walk into visit, sit down, walk right back out, never talk to anybody, and no one is ever going to know you're there. But I would just say in digital, in general, that problem goes up. Churches are designed to minister, and you know, you need to know who to minister to do that. And like you said, really great progressive churches out there are figuring this out. And like we talked about, like Slack and Discord as an option, and there are others. There are ways to engage people without necessarily seeing them physically, but I think like, anonymity is a large problem in churches now. It prevents people from getting engaged and forming community connection, and I have a concern that as we move to more hybrid and digital without solving that problem, we're less effective churches. If that makes sense.

Totally, completely. The other one, and this one, like, I don't know about you—might not buy this one, Jeff—so but I'll just tell you a theory I have, and this is a very uninformed theory. I do think this part is true. Like, I think that there's an epidemic of loneliness and isolation in our country that we maybe haven't totally confronted yet. There's some really interesting studies about this, but like, even before COVID, about half of all US adults would say they feel some like meaningful or measurable amount of loneliness. And the thing is, like, look, we got every digital tool in the world to connect with people, right? Like, I have good friendships that are completely on WhatsApp right now or Snapchat or whatever. Like, in a world in which we are actually more connected than we ever have been, we are feeling more loneliness and isolation as a group of people. And that's a concern for me. I think that impacts our mental health, our physical wellbeing, sort of our social health. And the Surgeon General even kind of published a little report, which I think was interesting, that says it's even possible that where we're at is shortening lifespans. Like, consider this sort of an epidemic that's akin to like smoking every day in terms of your physical wellbeing, which I think is crazy and interesting. And I don't think we've confronted that. And so like, I think the obstacle of churches here in the digital space is to form connection, to somehow defy the trend of increased loneliness and isolation even in the midst of incredible digital tooling. I do think it's possible. I believe it's possible. But I do think that's also a challenge facing churches that are trying to figure out how to pull away from physical presence more and more.

So I would say I think it's likely we'll solve that, Jeff. Like, I don't think—I don't think you can't generate like human connection through a computer. I think that is possible. I think it's about how to do it well, and I think as a church, even as businesses, we're still trying to figure out how to do that.

Yeah, good. Well said. By the way, the Surgeon General—that report—I actually reference that all the time. I'll put a link in the show notes to it. Yeah, because one of the six things that he says we have to do to end the epidemic of loneliness, I think it was number four, was actually an increase and better utilization of digital community. Like, he's seeing that there's opportunities there that we're just not maximizing. We're not even talking about the church. I'm just talking about like public general usage. And so what a huge opportunity for the church to engage in that. You know, and that comes back to you—the content, the services, everything that we're doing online—it's got to drive either to the physical building, but what if we also drove to a digital context to allow people to connect in that space as well?

Well, sir, thank you very much for the time. Aaron, CTO—no, I'm sorry, CEO. You just got a promotion. Congratulations. Molly will be alarmed, but Molly's gunning for me now. Um, so CTO, Chief Technical Officer of Pushpay. So thank you very much for jumping on here. Maybe as we're landing the plane here, any closing thoughts?

No, I just like, um, I don't want anything I said to pour cold water on what's happening in churches. I think it's really exciting. Like, I think the digital transformation we're going through in the industry is really, really exciting. I'm totally on board. And Jeff, I appreciate what you're doing with helping spread the word of what's working and what's not and getting people educated.

Great for him. Love it. Thank you very much. You cannot—no one can say that the church has not made leaps and bounds from, you know, 2018, five years ago, 2019, four years ago. Like, we are—the church has improved from a technological standpoint so much. You know, the challenge is that there's so much still to go.

Yeah, and it's the—you know, it's the—I had a pastor friend of mine. I tell the story on occasion. I had a pastor friend of mine on social media, on an open forum, went on and said, hey, I'm selling my rack—my enterprise rack, mountain coder. Who wants it? And actually, I reached out to him because he's a friend, and I said, hey, what's going on? Like, I'm pretty sure I sold him that encoder, so I'm not really sure what's—I just wanted to check out. And he replied back to me. He says, you know what, I'm just losing interest in digital. And that—I mean, that's the obstacle. Is, oh, you know what, all we're just trying to do is just get the services out there for the people who are away on vacation. That's all we really needed to do. It's the put the digital in a box and set it on the side and say, this is what it is.

You know, I hope—you know, it's interesting you're talking about artificial intelligence. You're either using it or you don't realize you're using it. You know, I hope that we get to that place with digital overall where digital is so intertwined and baked into what our ministry is because of the scalability and the power that it has, that you're either intentionally using it or it's unintentionally happening as a result of the ministry being so intertwined into it. So I'm ranting. It's been a long day. But sir, thank you for jumping on the podcast. This has been great. But hey, we're going to wrap up. And so for Aaron, this is Jeff with the Church Digital. Thanks for jumping here on the podcast. See you next time on the show. You have a good day.