WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.240 Because I think, to be honest, Jeff, we have a lot of room to improve in the church space 00:00:05.240 --> 00:00:10.060 and deploying and using technology to really effectively minister to people and do outreach. 00:00:10.480 --> 00:00:12.500 Welcome to the Church Digital Podcast. 00:00:13.460 --> 00:00:17.340 Through this podcast, we'll talk about the technological innovations within the church. 00:00:17.700 --> 00:00:21.140 But more than tech for tech itself, we'll address deeper questions. 00:00:21.760 --> 00:00:23.380 Is disciple making possible digitally? 00:00:23.800 --> 00:00:25.840 How should we approach the digital mission field? 00:00:26.120 --> 00:00:28.720 Can a biblically grounded church operate in digital space? 00:00:28.720 --> 00:00:33.040 Oh, and where does the metaverse and artificial intelligence fit into all of this? 00:00:33.920 --> 00:00:39.100 Whether you're a big or small church, the Church Digital's goal is to help churches like yours 00:00:39.100 --> 00:00:42.620 learn to be a multiplying church digitally and physically. 00:00:42.920 --> 00:00:44.740 And now here's your host, Jeff Reed. 00:00:45.440 --> 00:00:47.700 Hey, welcome to the Church Digital Podcast. 00:00:48.060 --> 00:00:53.400 Jeff Reed here, founder of the Church Digital and host here of said podcast. 00:00:53.640 --> 00:00:57.620 Great to hang out with you here for episode 283. 00:00:57.620 --> 00:00:58.900 We'll get to that here in a little bit. 00:00:58.900 --> 00:01:02.920 But once again, episode 283 brought to you by Riverside. 00:01:03.040 --> 00:01:04.900 I just I love saying that. 00:01:05.020 --> 00:01:07.900 Riverside is a is a remote interview software. 00:01:08.100 --> 00:01:10.420 It's used by a lot of content creators and church. 00:01:11.000 --> 00:01:12.460 You should check this out. 00:01:12.560 --> 00:01:16.380 The quality of this software, the ability to connect, 00:01:16.820 --> 00:01:21.320 utilize artificial intelligence to find clips, to generate transcripts. 00:01:21.380 --> 00:01:23.300 Oh, my gosh, it's so good summaries. 00:01:23.800 --> 00:01:29.740 We, the Church Digital, we use it almost exclusively across all of our podcasts and YouTube shows. 00:01:29.880 --> 00:01:30.760 So do me a favor. 00:01:30.860 --> 00:01:31.220 Go ahead. 00:01:31.640 --> 00:01:32.460 Check out the software. 00:01:32.540 --> 00:01:35.520 Go to the church dot digital slash Riverside. 00:01:35.600 --> 00:01:43.680 The church dot digital slash 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. 00:01:44.340 --> 00:01:46.780 OK, let's get into episode 283. 00:01:46.900 --> 00:01:47.360 I'm excited. 00:01:47.800 --> 00:01:51.100 I'm excited about this conversation, this new relationship. 00:01:51.360 --> 00:01:55.840 You've heard me tease some of the stuff we're doing with with River, with Riverside. 00:01:55.900 --> 00:01:56.420 I love Riverside. 00:01:56.620 --> 00:02:00.760 But with Pushpay and even coming up here somewhat with Resi as well. 00:02:00.820 --> 00:02:05.440 Now, we're not going to get too much into the Resi conversation just yet. 00:02:05.900 --> 00:02:06.580 You got to hold on. 00:02:06.620 --> 00:02:10.940 It's not quite public yet, but I can keep teasing it because it's right around the corner. 00:02:10.940 --> 00:02:17.080 But on the Pushpay side, Pushpay is a CHMS, a church management system. 00:02:17.200 --> 00:02:17.860 It's a giving solution. 00:02:18.060 --> 00:02:19.180 It's an app. 00:02:19.340 --> 00:02:20.520 It's, oh, it's so much. 00:02:20.600 --> 00:02:28.360 It's probably one of the largest, maybe in the top three, Christian tech companies in the world. 00:02:28.760 --> 00:02:31.380 Multinational, multi-continent. 00:02:31.540 --> 00:02:39.240 Like, it's really cool to see how this thing has developed over the time, acquiring Church Community Builder and acquiring a Resi as well. 00:02:39.240 --> 00:02:43.940 And so, like, Pushpay is a force to be reckoned with within the church space. 00:02:44.060 --> 00:02:54.400 And so, when Pushpay generates a report, does some interviews with churches, and releases what they call the State of Church Tech Report, 00:02:55.120 --> 00:02:55.840 well, hey, you know what? 00:02:55.880 --> 00:02:59.760 I want to learn what Pushpay is learning in that situation. 00:02:59.840 --> 00:03:01.480 I want to get in there and talk about it. 00:03:01.720 --> 00:03:02.680 So, here's what we're doing. 00:03:02.940 --> 00:03:04.440 They released this information. 00:03:04.440 --> 00:03:07.080 Once again, this link is in the show notes. 00:03:07.180 --> 00:03:11.840 You can go on there, grab, download the PDF, start to explore what you're learning, 00:03:12.000 --> 00:03:22.080 and then listen along as we've got the CTO of Pushpay, Aaron Seneff, here on the Church Digital to talk about what the report is, 00:03:22.160 --> 00:03:25.780 who the churches are they're talking to, and what surprised him. 00:03:25.960 --> 00:03:34.220 And, by the way, what does he think of all of this hybrid and digital church and the stuff that we love here on the Church Digital Podcast? 00:03:34.380 --> 00:03:43.340 So, do me a favor, once again, go download that report on the show notes and jump into this conversation with Aaron Seneff, 00:03:43.500 --> 00:03:49.220 CTO, Chief Technical Officer of Pushpay, and myself, Jeff with the Church Digital, 00:03:49.960 --> 00:03:54.320 in a conversation that I'm simply calling the State of the Church Tech Report 2024. 00:03:54.900 --> 00:03:56.000 Okay, everybody, here you go. 00:03:57.900 --> 00:03:59.780 All right, well, hey, let's just open it up, then. 00:04:00.160 --> 00:04:04.300 Go ahead and tell me about the Pushpay State of the Church Tech Report. 00:04:04.860 --> 00:04:05.780 Yeah, sure, Jeff. 00:04:05.900 --> 00:04:10.280 So, about three years ago, Pushpay started to do kind of an annual survey. 00:04:10.540 --> 00:04:14.900 And if you kind of remember where three years ago we were at in church, a lot of things changing, 00:04:15.440 --> 00:04:17.380 particularly driven by the COVID pandemic. 00:04:17.640 --> 00:04:25.260 But that really, you know, from where we were at at Pushpay, that really, from our view, was impacting technology decisions. 00:04:25.740 --> 00:04:31.040 And really, it was kind of hard for us even to get our arms around because the pace of it was so fast. 00:04:31.040 --> 00:04:40.700 So, three years ago, we started this, like, annual benchmark survey where we just send a bunch of questions to thousands of churches 00:04:40.700 --> 00:04:47.800 and specifically the decision makers at those churches just to ask questions about how they're processing through decisions 00:04:47.800 --> 00:04:51.240 around technology that they use in the church. 00:04:51.240 --> 00:04:56.300 And, you know, our thought at the time was it would be helpful to us to try to figure out, like, okay, 00:04:56.460 --> 00:04:59.240 what strategically is important to churches? 00:04:59.360 --> 00:05:00.520 What's happening in churches? 00:05:00.700 --> 00:05:02.320 What are decisions they're trying to make? 00:05:02.740 --> 00:05:06.380 How does that inform maybe how our company could respond to that? 00:05:06.820 --> 00:05:10.360 But it was just such a wealth of information that was so helpful. 00:05:10.540 --> 00:05:11.900 We've published those reports. 00:05:12.020 --> 00:05:15.960 So, we did it, you know, the first time, first report was a little over two years ago. 00:05:16.020 --> 00:05:17.040 We did it last year. 00:05:17.440 --> 00:05:24.220 And then we just on the heels of releasing our third annual State of Church Tech report. 00:05:24.800 --> 00:05:26.740 And really kind of interesting survey. 00:05:27.000 --> 00:05:30.020 First, I mean, I think there are themes. 00:05:30.360 --> 00:05:33.300 That fall out every year that are informative. 00:05:33.840 --> 00:05:41.760 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. 00:05:42.180 --> 00:05:43.860 Last year, we asked again. 00:05:43.980 --> 00:05:46.460 And you could kind of see a lot of refinement happening. 00:05:46.460 --> 00:05:51.620 More like, okay, we're settling in, but we're trying to figure out how to make the most of our technology. 00:05:52.520 --> 00:06:00.640 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. 00:06:00.640 --> 00:06:16.260 And one of the things that, you know, I think is 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. 00:06:16.800 --> 00:06:19.180 Like, sometimes we even use the word abandoning. 00:06:19.320 --> 00:06:27.880 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. 00:06:27.960 --> 00:06:28.720 Which I think is interesting. 00:06:29.140 --> 00:06:32.320 That's one of those changes that persists out of COVID. 00:06:33.660 --> 00:06:46.620 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. 00:06:47.520 --> 00:06:58.260 But I'd say on the other end, like, I think what's interesting about churches is a lot of them are very progressive, very future-oriented, and they're willing to take risks and try technologies, see if they work, 00:06:58.260 --> 00:07:00.600 and then kind of move back out of there if it doesn't work. 00:07:00.600 --> 00:07:02.020 So, really interesting survey. 00:07:02.140 --> 00:07:03.580 I kind of love the takeaways. 00:07:04.640 --> 00:07:07.140 It's usually about 2,000 to 3,000 people. 00:07:07.220 --> 00:07:09.960 I think we had 2,200 respondents this year that participated. 00:07:10.260 --> 00:07:15.180 We've interviewed more than 6,000 churches as part of the survey over the few years that we've done it. 00:07:15.420 --> 00:07:21.440 Really interesting, like, repository of data about how churches are just thinking about technology. 00:07:22.360 --> 00:07:23.040 Yeah, love it. 00:07:23.080 --> 00:07:28.140 We're going to get into some of the hybrid aspects, and there's some really interesting, I was surprised, to be honest, 00:07:28.140 --> 00:07:30.600 by several of the stats that came out of this. 00:07:30.760 --> 00:07:32.540 And so we're going to get into it in a second. 00:07:32.640 --> 00:07:38.220 But just from an overall perspective, like, what were some stats that maybe surprised you, 00:07:38.280 --> 00:07:42.360 or what were some key findings that popped up in the 2024 report? 00:07:42.480 --> 00:07:44.880 Yeah, well, we see this every time. 00:07:44.880 --> 00:07:50.820 And I would still say, even in my role, my role is in technology that helps churches. 00:07:50.820 --> 00:07:51.780 That's what I do all day long. 00:07:51.940 --> 00:08:05.580 And I would say I'm still a little bit surprised, even humbled by just the high importance that churches play strategically on the role of technology in their church organization. 00:08:05.580 --> 00:08:16.980 And that's encouraging to me, because I think, to be honest, Jeff, we have a lot of room to improve in the church space and deploying and using technology to really effectively minister to people and do outreach. 00:08:16.980 --> 00:08:26.380 So that's been true every year, that just that the primacy or the importance of technology and criticality to the mission is really evident. 00:08:27.520 --> 00:08:29.820 But I would say, and I'm going to come back to this again. 00:08:29.900 --> 00:08:30.780 We're going to talk about it some more. 00:08:30.880 --> 00:08:34.200 I think, you know, church has really changed. 00:08:34.200 --> 00:08:41.300 And particularly 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. 00:08:41.300 --> 00:08:55.980 But if you just took a, you know, 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 the COVID started. 00:08:55.980 --> 00:09:00.200 When you look at it now, there's just almost like wide agreement. 00:09:00.460 --> 00:09:04.660 91% of churches would say our future is hybrid. 00:09:04.900 --> 00:09:07.060 Now, there's a lot of variation in what hybrid looks like. 00:09:07.520 --> 00:09:15.660 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. 00:09:15.740 --> 00:09:20.760 And I think that's fascinating, because I think for a long time wondered, would we revert back to the mean? 00:09:21.400 --> 00:09:29.180 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. 00:09:29.740 --> 00:09:30.140 Yeah. 00:09:30.260 --> 00:09:34.800 And that 90%, like that's one of those, I think it was 90% that was hybrid. 00:09:35.020 --> 00:09:38.440 There was another stat that we'll talk about at 91% live stream. 00:09:38.940 --> 00:09:51.860 Like that was, that was shocking to me, you know, and almost caused not, and there's some other things metaverse we'll get into, but there was just really surprised some of some of the stats that were pulled out of here. 00:09:53.280 --> 00:09:55.420 Where did you find the churches? 00:09:55.420 --> 00:10:02.860 Like, how did you connect with the churches that you were interviewing and out of these 2,200 churches that reported in 24? 00:10:03.260 --> 00:10:05.060 Yeah, well, it's a cross section. 00:10:05.340 --> 00:10:10.720 So we survey, you know, I think just, you know, there might be some thought, well, these are big churches, right? 00:10:10.720 --> 00:10:14.500 Or these are progressive churches, or these are the big multi-campus churches that we hear about. 00:10:14.700 --> 00:10:29.500 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 denominational line. 00:10:30.100 --> 00:10:31.680 And, you know, a lot of them are customers of ours. 00:10:31.740 --> 00:10:33.180 A lot of them are not customers of ours. 00:10:33.220 --> 00:10:34.660 We just know them because we're in the industry. 00:10:35.040 --> 00:10:45.460 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. 00:10:45.620 --> 00:10:54.480 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. 00:10:54.540 --> 00:10:57.180 There's a lot of consistency, especially to that hybrid topic. 00:10:58.120 --> 00:10:58.620 Yeah, I love it. 00:10:58.920 --> 00:11:00.760 So, I mean, you were saying hybrid here. 00:11:00.980 --> 00:11:04.240 I tend to like the fidgetal word better if you go back. 00:11:04.240 --> 00:11:06.460 You know, I get – we talk about this on the podcast. 00:11:06.740 --> 00:11:10.000 I get ripped all the time for saying fidgetal. 00:11:10.140 --> 00:11:12.080 Like, I know I was saying fidgetal pre-COVID. 00:11:12.600 --> 00:11:13.720 You know, fidgetal is a business term. 00:11:13.780 --> 00:11:16.860 You know that being in the corporate side of this. 00:11:17.120 --> 00:11:20.920 But, you know, I've had somebody tell me, like, Jake Crande at Saddleback. 00:11:21.020 --> 00:11:22.180 Jake rips me all the time. 00:11:22.240 --> 00:11:25.100 It's like, Jeff, it sounds like you're murdering somebody when you say fidgetal. 00:11:25.640 --> 00:11:30.060 And I'm like, how is fidgetal like the equation of taking someone's life? 00:11:30.360 --> 00:11:30.840 I don't know. 00:11:30.860 --> 00:11:31.480 It's a long story. 00:11:31.480 --> 00:11:38.120 But, so, fidgetal, you know, we definitely – we've got a lot of audience out there that's in the hybrid scope. 00:11:38.760 --> 00:11:42.200 So, why do you think we're stabilizing here? 00:11:42.280 --> 00:11:43.340 Ninety-one percent? 00:11:43.840 --> 00:11:47.460 It's even a decrease of those that are considering leaving from the report? 00:11:47.820 --> 00:11:49.880 Like, we made it. 00:11:50.120 --> 00:11:52.680 Fidgetal hybrid is here to stay. 00:11:52.820 --> 00:11:53.940 How did we get here? 00:11:54.480 --> 00:11:57.420 Fidgetal, it makes you sound smart to me, Jeff. 00:11:57.460 --> 00:11:58.040 That's like Greek. 00:11:58.540 --> 00:11:59.220 Thank you. 00:11:59.800 --> 00:12:01.100 So, yeah, stick with that. 00:12:01.700 --> 00:12:03.340 Don't let the naysayers bring you down on that. 00:12:04.960 --> 00:12:13.920 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. 00:12:15.100 --> 00:12:20.920 You know, I think a lot of churches have just realized there's reach there that they can't otherwise get. 00:12:20.920 --> 00:12:27.760 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. 00:12:27.840 --> 00:12:30.980 They really want to have an organization that stretches all the boundaries. 00:12:31.520 --> 00:12:33.840 You know, there's a lot of churches that aren't thinking that way. 00:12:34.580 --> 00:12:40.380 But I think – you know, I'll give an example of a church I talked to last year, one of those, you know, big multi-campus churches. 00:12:41.120 --> 00:12:44.320 And their staff would say, we are a physical church. 00:12:44.400 --> 00:12:45.340 We want to be in person. 00:12:45.560 --> 00:12:46.160 That's our goal. 00:12:47.140 --> 00:12:48.160 But they're still live streaming. 00:12:48.800 --> 00:12:51.520 They're still, you know, they're still using digital content. 00:12:51.700 --> 00:12:53.880 And so I asked, well, why is that? 00:12:54.020 --> 00:12:55.940 And I think, you know, they kind of gave me a list. 00:12:55.980 --> 00:12:59.080 And the list was, you know, well, we're in a – we're in a campus town. 00:12:59.080 --> 00:13:02.420 We have a lot of college students that come in and then they move out and they're alumni. 00:13:02.580 --> 00:13:03.400 They still want to participate. 00:13:03.720 --> 00:13:05.420 So we keep in touch with them. 00:13:05.580 --> 00:13:09.220 Or, you know, we realize we have some shut-ins in the community that can't always get here. 00:13:09.420 --> 00:13:13.780 So in order to keep them involved, we're going to keep our live stream going. 00:13:14.180 --> 00:13:23.600 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. 00:13:23.680 --> 00:13:28.000 And so we're going to continue to invest in things like live streaming and connecting with our remote audience. 00:13:28.000 --> 00:13:28.800 I think that's part of it. 00:13:29.360 --> 00:13:31.880 It's just the awareness that there's reach there. 00:13:32.700 --> 00:13:41.360 The other two, I think it's, you know, here's my very casual observation is that we are just shifting to much more of an asynchronous world in general. 00:13:42.020 --> 00:13:47.240 Like me, you know, you might have been this way, Jeff, but weeks had a cadence to them, you know? 00:13:47.340 --> 00:13:50.580 Like Monday through Friday, 8 to 5, that's work or school. 00:13:50.720 --> 00:13:52.460 And then Saturday is sports. 00:13:52.480 --> 00:13:54.040 And then Sunday morning is church. 00:13:54.060 --> 00:13:55.380 And Sunday evening was youth group. 00:13:55.380 --> 00:13:57.900 And then Monday comes and it starts all over again and the week had a cadence. 00:13:59.000 --> 00:14:03.280 In my family, at least, that cadence is seriously disrupted, right? 00:14:03.340 --> 00:14:06.000 Because soccer games don't just happen on Saturday anymore. 00:14:06.100 --> 00:14:07.160 They happen on Sunday morning. 00:14:07.160 --> 00:14:09.320 And work doesn't just happen on Monday through Friday. 00:14:10.060 --> 00:14:14.220 Sometimes we're putting in a little extra effort or there's something non-traditional going on. 00:14:14.940 --> 00:14:18.900 And so it used to be in the past, you know, you'd maybe have to miss church for some reason. 00:14:19.380 --> 00:14:23.460 You go to church and someone's like, why did you hear Pastor Mike's sermon last week? 00:14:23.960 --> 00:14:26.100 You say, well, no, I didn't. 00:14:26.800 --> 00:14:27.520 What did I miss? 00:14:27.540 --> 00:14:28.840 And there's no going back. 00:14:29.460 --> 00:14:36.400 But for a lot of families, I think that schedule's been become asynchronous to the point that, yeah, we want to go to church on Sunday morning. 00:14:36.400 --> 00:14:43.960 But when that's not possible, let's just pull up the service 3 o'clock this afternoon when we have some free time. 00:14:44.180 --> 00:14:47.220 That is just the reality of how families are operating. 00:14:47.360 --> 00:14:50.500 And I think it's a sign that churches are kind of moving to adapt to that a little bit. 00:14:51.020 --> 00:14:57.340 That's a theory and mostly born out of my own family experiences because that's kind of how we are. 00:14:57.420 --> 00:14:58.840 And I know there's a lot of families like this. 00:14:59.280 --> 00:15:06.640 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, 00:15:06.700 --> 00:15:14.160 but it's a very, very safe front door to approach a church for the first time through a digital avenue. 00:15:14.500 --> 00:15:17.400 That is just more and more how people want to interact with the church. 00:15:17.400 --> 00:15:23.140 It's just more and more rare, the younger you are, for your first experience to walk into a church 00:15:23.140 --> 00:15:25.880 and then try to decide, like, is this a place where I feel comfortable and safe? 00:15:26.240 --> 00:15:27.700 People are going to do that online first. 00:15:27.800 --> 00:15:30.960 And I think there's just a realization from churches, we need that front door 00:15:30.960 --> 00:15:33.540 because that's our doorway into the world that's not walking in. 00:15:34.040 --> 00:15:34.480 Does that make sense? 00:15:34.560 --> 00:15:34.860 I love that. 00:15:35.160 --> 00:15:35.920 Totally and completely. 00:15:36.040 --> 00:15:37.460 I love that front door aspect. 00:15:37.600 --> 00:15:38.660 By the way, it's interesting. 00:15:38.860 --> 00:15:43.040 I'm actually preparing some material today, the day I'm doing this material for, 00:15:43.040 --> 00:15:46.480 I'm speaking at a Push Pay event coming up soon. 00:15:46.940 --> 00:15:48.740 And I ran across a stat. 00:15:48.840 --> 00:15:49.820 I'm actually going to use it. 00:15:50.240 --> 00:15:52.360 Southern Baptist Convention found this, North American Mission Board, 00:15:53.440 --> 00:16:03.060 a visitor will, a potential church physical attender will, 54% of them will attend an online service 00:16:03.060 --> 00:16:06.280 four times before they visit the physical church building. 00:16:06.740 --> 00:16:12.340 Like, and it goes all the way up to, like, six times, seven times was what they, 00:16:12.540 --> 00:16:17.140 but 54%, the majority of people that would consider, that are visiting your church building, 00:16:17.280 --> 00:16:21.520 watched your church service four times online before they would come to it. 00:16:21.580 --> 00:16:27.700 Like, if, if, if, if for no other reason to, to do broadcast and to do your church online service, 00:16:27.700 --> 00:16:32.300 that right there to get people in the physical building, that, that's, that's incredible. 00:16:32.300 --> 00:16:37.460 But let me ask, because you've, you said the word asynchronous, like half a dozen times. 00:16:37.460 --> 00:16:42.200 And, and I love the word asynchronous, like that, you're, you're, you're speaking my language. 00:16:42.200 --> 00:16:47.500 And, and, you know, I know Slack is big within Resi and Push Pay culture. 00:16:47.700 --> 00:16:49.700 I'm in those channels right now. 00:16:49.940 --> 00:16:53.800 I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm beating stuff up on a regular basis with, with the team. 00:16:54.380 --> 00:16:56.960 Um, I just, let's hypothetical here. 00:16:56.980 --> 00:17:03.240 Like, why are we not seeing, or at what point do you think we see some of these asynchronous communities, 00:17:03.240 --> 00:17:07.620 these digital communities start to be more effective or utilized within the church? 00:17:07.940 --> 00:17:12.120 I have not had the chance to participate in a church that does that well. 00:17:12.120 --> 00:17:15.580 So like sometimes you, you know, you're in a church and maybe the production team uses Slack 00:17:15.580 --> 00:17:21.820 or you see Discord and some like certain ministries, but like, just as a church community, I haven't 00:17:21.820 --> 00:17:24.720 seen that in, in my own personal church life. 00:17:24.760 --> 00:17:25.760 I know church lives are doing it. 00:17:25.820 --> 00:17:28.540 And I would say, I would love that. 00:17:28.600 --> 00:17:35.340 And my experience mostly comes out of, you know, it does come out of business, but, um, 00:17:35.340 --> 00:17:39.740 there's a lot of parallels to sort of where business is at and where church is at. 00:17:39.740 --> 00:17:42.440 Cause here, like, you know, Push Pay is a big global organization. 00:17:42.580 --> 00:17:43.700 We have people all over the place. 00:17:44.540 --> 00:17:46.460 Very few of them sitting near me. 00:17:46.460 --> 00:17:50.780 And so we're, we're digitally communicating, whether it's through Zoom or Google Meet or 00:17:50.780 --> 00:17:52.640 Slack regularly. 00:17:52.640 --> 00:17:59.340 And I would say if there's one tool that is drives communication in our big remote organization, 00:17:59.340 --> 00:18:01.440 it's Slack. 00:18:01.840 --> 00:18:02.500 That's it. 00:18:03.500 --> 00:18:06.380 Um, and if, you know, some of your listeners maybe haven't used these or aren't familiar 00:18:06.380 --> 00:18:09.620 or just not sure where I'm going with that. 00:18:09.620 --> 00:18:11.540 So our, like, let me just give you a Push Pay example. 00:18:11.540 --> 00:18:13.160 We have about, we have a Slack instance. 00:18:13.160 --> 00:18:14.740 We have about 650 people in it. 00:18:14.740 --> 00:18:20.220 They're across two continents, five, maybe six time zones, probably 20, 25 states. 00:18:21.080 --> 00:18:23.340 Um, and we're all in that together. 00:18:24.620 --> 00:18:32.280 And what I can say to every single person that I meet with in that 630 person company is that 00:18:32.280 --> 00:18:34.400 I am one Slack message away. 00:18:35.720 --> 00:18:39.580 So like the way I think about that is like, we, you know, you think of like the old six 00:18:39.580 --> 00:18:42.560 degrees of separation or the six degrees of Kevin Bacon. 00:18:42.560 --> 00:18:47.500 Like the idea that if we just looked at our contacts, we'd all be six degrees away from 00:18:47.500 --> 00:18:52.040 somebody, but that's not very helpful if you want to reach out to Kevin Bacon, like you're 00:18:52.040 --> 00:18:56.020 not going to find those six degrees easily, but now you're on this big asynchronous community 00:18:56.020 --> 00:18:59.080 and you're all there together and everybody is one Slack message away. 00:18:59.540 --> 00:19:02.000 So first of all, I just think that's incredibly powerful. 00:19:03.420 --> 00:19:05.620 And then we talk about asynchronous communication. 00:19:06.260 --> 00:19:09.740 Um, I, I was doing some looking at our own Slack instance. 00:19:09.740 --> 00:19:16.720 So we have hundreds and hundreds of organically formed channels in our Slack instance. 00:19:16.840 --> 00:19:19.120 So first of all, channels are basically just common interests. 00:19:20.000 --> 00:19:21.400 So it's pretty interesting to me. 00:19:21.460 --> 00:19:23.520 Like we have business-based ones, right? 00:19:23.600 --> 00:19:24.700 Things that are about what we're doing. 00:19:24.760 --> 00:19:28.340 It's like, Hey, what are we, what's happening in sales and what's happening over here in engineering 00:19:28.340 --> 00:19:29.820 and what's some new products we're launching. 00:19:29.920 --> 00:19:33.740 And if you want to know about those things, you have these channels you can jump through that 00:19:33.740 --> 00:19:36.820 are like, you know, help you understand what business is working on. 00:19:36.820 --> 00:19:41.040 But this interesting thing that happens with Slack or discord is you also get ones that 00:19:41.040 --> 00:19:43.540 are just about common threads that are even personal. 00:19:43.540 --> 00:19:46.700 Like one of our biggest channels is the dogs channel. 00:19:47.720 --> 00:19:49.340 Just because a lot of people are dogs owners. 00:19:49.660 --> 00:19:52.760 So what happens, Jeff is like, I just think this is so cool. 00:19:52.820 --> 00:19:58.960 Like someone joins the company, they get on a Slack channel and they immediately find common 00:19:58.960 --> 00:20:01.660 interests with people and start joining up with these common interests. 00:20:01.660 --> 00:20:05.440 So you see groups forming, there's one over here for sports, one for dogs, there's one 00:20:05.440 --> 00:20:06.080 for cats. 00:20:06.200 --> 00:20:07.300 They don't like talk a lot. 00:20:07.300 --> 00:20:08.760 There's one over here for mountain biking. 00:20:09.360 --> 00:20:13.920 And immediately you see people start to integrate in the community and introduce you to, Hey, 00:20:14.040 --> 00:20:15.080 this is the biking community. 00:20:15.140 --> 00:20:15.540 I got a bike. 00:20:15.580 --> 00:20:16.100 You guys got a bike. 00:20:16.500 --> 00:20:17.460 Do we bike around here? 00:20:17.520 --> 00:20:18.380 What's going on? 00:20:18.820 --> 00:20:25.460 And I think about how fluidly that happens in a platform like Slack or discord and how much 00:20:25.460 --> 00:20:32.360 effort we put into churches into forming groups, like it's, it, it's automatic in one of those 00:20:32.360 --> 00:20:35.360 platforms and it's a process on the side of the church. 00:20:35.380 --> 00:20:39.260 And sometimes I just want to say like, put Slack in my church and then I will find the 00:20:39.260 --> 00:20:40.060 people I connect with. 00:20:40.120 --> 00:20:42.280 I promise you, I will find them. 00:20:42.280 --> 00:20:48.480 And I also would say just as a sidebar to that, and it's a, it's also a benefit. 00:20:48.620 --> 00:20:52.600 It really is those tools, the Slacks, the discords, these like mass communication tools. 00:20:53.500 --> 00:20:55.820 They're good at forming connection digitally. 00:20:55.940 --> 00:20:59.720 They might be one of the best tools in terms of like digital connection. 00:21:00.400 --> 00:21:06.800 I was just a little checking because you can, you can check Slack statistics. 00:21:07.140 --> 00:21:08.340 So I just looked in our instance. 00:21:08.840 --> 00:21:13.860 And one of the things that tells you is like, who's the most prolific, like slacker, you know, 00:21:13.900 --> 00:21:16.000 who's the slackiest, who sends out the most messages. 00:21:16.680 --> 00:21:18.060 And there's this one woman in my group. 00:21:18.140 --> 00:21:19.600 She's always at the top of the list, Sarah. 00:21:20.860 --> 00:21:21.820 I'll just give the math. 00:21:21.920 --> 00:21:24.740 She sent out 4,600 messages over the last 30 days. 00:21:24.800 --> 00:21:25.960 That's like 230 a day. 00:21:26.320 --> 00:21:28.140 And I was like, how? 00:21:28.880 --> 00:21:29.960 So I was asking her about it. 00:21:29.980 --> 00:21:32.740 And she's like, well, look, look, part of my job is to stay connected with anybody. 00:21:32.740 --> 00:21:33.880 So I just use Slack a lot. 00:21:33.960 --> 00:21:37.360 But she also said like, and I'm going to be honest here. 00:21:37.400 --> 00:21:38.260 I'm a remote employee. 00:21:38.660 --> 00:21:42.300 And this is my way to stay connected with people I don't otherwise see. 00:21:42.940 --> 00:21:55.560 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. 00:21:55.720 --> 00:21:56.260 Does that make sense? 00:21:56.760 --> 00:21:58.120 Totally, totally, totally, completely. 00:21:58.360 --> 00:22:00.180 Like for me, I love everything about this. 00:22:00.260 --> 00:22:02.460 I love Sarah's 230 messages a day. 00:22:02.540 --> 00:22:04.120 That's that's crazy. 00:22:04.760 --> 00:22:16.340 But what I see, like if we're talking about hybrid, we're talking in live stream, like these are churches that are using resi equipment to awesomely so, but to broadcast these church services out. 00:22:16.580 --> 00:22:29.940 And one of the things that we're discovering is, is that, that, that the content, the church service is great at a lot of stuff, but unless there's a community in place, you're really not going to see discipleship happen. 00:22:30.260 --> 00:22:34.060 And so like discipleship is either always happens within community. 00:22:34.180 --> 00:22:39.540 And so like if you're broadcasting that church service, it's helping you get people into the building. 00:22:40.060 --> 00:22:45.380 But as you're broadcasting that church service, maybe people are outside of the reach of that building. 00:22:45.580 --> 00:22:51.540 Well, now you've got an opportunity to engage with them digitally, start to introduce them into a digital community. 00:22:52.020 --> 00:22:56.700 It's so fluid because like how many times have you, have you finally made the decision to walk into a church? 00:22:56.700 --> 00:22:58.060 We've moved a lot in our lives. 00:22:58.140 --> 00:22:59.800 So we're, we feel like we're always looking for new church. 00:22:59.860 --> 00:23:03.640 You sit down in church and you look around and like, okay, who here's like me? 00:23:03.720 --> 00:23:05.800 Who would I bond with, connect with? 00:23:06.240 --> 00:23:07.780 And that is a needle in a haystack. 00:23:07.880 --> 00:23:13.380 But like you, you set up some of these messaging tools and it is so fluid that it's almost effortless. 00:23:13.380 --> 00:23:17.220 It removes the friction and the uncomfort around finding groups that you identify with. 00:23:17.660 --> 00:23:19.900 That is what a church is trying to do a lot of times. 00:23:20.340 --> 00:23:21.620 Tell you what, I'm going to send you a link. 00:23:21.820 --> 00:23:24.240 Are you a Discord guy as well or are you Slack? 00:23:24.480 --> 00:23:26.440 I have multiple workspaces on both. 00:23:26.640 --> 00:23:27.360 So yeah, Discord. 00:23:27.820 --> 00:23:31.980 I'm going to send you an invite to Lux Digital Church. 00:23:32.340 --> 00:23:34.220 It's a, it's a, it's a video game church. 00:23:34.780 --> 00:23:40.160 So hopefully you can get past that, but, or work through that if you are a gamer, I don't, I don't know. 00:23:40.920 --> 00:23:50.360 But they are one of the best right now in how they're utilizing, it's Discord, but how they're utilizing async for that. 00:23:50.460 --> 00:24:01.420 So, so check that out, get inspired and like, it's just, I've always have thought that the, the, the asynchronous tool is, is that next step. 00:24:01.420 --> 00:24:05.240 It's that missing piece, the, that representing that digital community. 00:24:05.600 --> 00:24:08.780 We can feed people into a physical community, but we've got to have a digital community. 00:24:09.220 --> 00:24:14.420 And even the digital community can boil the frog slowly, so to speak, to get people into that physical community. 00:24:15.220 --> 00:24:17.140 So really, really excited about that. 00:24:17.180 --> 00:24:19.340 Well, let me, let me ask, let's, let's, let's move on. 00:24:19.760 --> 00:24:20.780 You know, it's 2024. 00:24:21.140 --> 00:24:23.720 Evidently this thing called artificial intelligence is here to stay. 00:24:24.280 --> 00:24:41.000 And, you know, I've, I've often thought that AI is, you know, before AI exploded with ChatGPT, I was, nobody was talking about artificial intelligence being like content creator. 00:24:41.400 --> 00:24:41.880 Correct. 00:24:41.880 --> 00:24:45.600 In my world, I was, I was, I was on panels. 00:24:45.740 --> 00:24:51.540 I was listening to technologists, sociologists, like they're talking about how an artificial intelligence comes on. 00:24:51.740 --> 00:25:07.720 It's going to be this, this revolution, this Renaissance era, because all the remedial, the menial, the, the, the, the trash pickers, like all, all the, the simple jobs were going to, no offense to trash pickers. 00:25:07.760 --> 00:25:10.180 I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but it was the simple jobs were going to be gone. 00:25:11.020 --> 00:25:18.900 And, and we were all going to be able to be artists and writers and, and cinematographers and, and just reengaging in this whole new life. 00:25:20.520 --> 00:25:31.360 Well, first off, that didn't happen because now like every AI is creating all the content, like the regular content creators is, is worth nothing at this point because AI is cranking it out so easy. 00:25:32.100 --> 00:25:33.540 So I've always had this challenge. 00:25:33.540 --> 00:25:34.660 I'll get to the question in a second. 00:25:34.700 --> 00:25:35.260 I'm having fun. 00:25:36.200 --> 00:25:47.680 I've, I was always thinking that the, the church and organizations, they were not going to be utilizing AI like they, like they are with the content. 00:25:47.960 --> 00:26:02.360 But it was much more powerful built into platforms, built into tools that, that can, you know, we don't necessarily need them to be that cutting edge to understand how to write the, write the code and the prompts, but understand how to utilize the software that's in place. 00:26:02.880 --> 00:26:08.100 How are, what are you guys looking at push pay in context of artificial intelligence? 00:26:08.100 --> 00:26:10.680 Like what, what's the, what's today look like? 00:26:10.720 --> 00:26:11.640 What's the future look like? 00:26:11.680 --> 00:26:12.680 Where are you going with all this? 00:26:12.760 --> 00:26:14.480 First, I would just say, it's hard to say. 00:26:14.560 --> 00:26:26.940 Like, I think there is not a technology in my lifetime that I have seen that has, that has had a faster adoption curve, a faster mainstreaming than generative AI. 00:26:27.500 --> 00:26:28.580 Like it is shocking. 00:26:28.780 --> 00:26:37.360 I just remember, you know, I, I remember when chat GPT, I think it was three came out and it was, for me, it was still a parlor trick. 00:26:37.360 --> 00:26:40.480 So I remember sitting around, it was over Thanksgiving. 00:26:40.680 --> 00:26:41.660 I have a bunch of college students. 00:26:41.660 --> 00:26:43.500 They're sitting at a table, they're working on essays. 00:26:43.500 --> 00:26:45.020 And I was like, Hey, let me write your essay for you. 00:26:45.060 --> 00:26:45.520 What's it about? 00:26:46.220 --> 00:26:49.360 And I look into open AI and I plug some stuff in there and read it to them. 00:26:49.360 --> 00:26:50.420 And there's like shock and awe. 00:26:50.880 --> 00:26:57.620 And, you know, in that November, October, November timeframe, nobody's quite aware of what it is. 00:26:57.620 --> 00:27:01.280 And I think by January, everybody knew what chat GPT was. 00:27:01.320 --> 00:27:07.200 And I started to ask pastors in groups, I would just ask like, Hey, who in here knows what chat GPT is? 00:27:07.200 --> 00:27:11.860 And basically 100% of the group back then would be like, yeah, of course, everybody knows what it is. 00:27:11.920 --> 00:27:17.240 I'm like, well, it is, it was less than six months ago that that came out or seven or eight months ago. 00:27:17.440 --> 00:27:19.500 And then we would ask, well, who's using it? 00:27:19.500 --> 00:27:22.860 And about half the hands would, would shoot up. 00:27:22.860 --> 00:27:28.060 Like, yeah, I use it for email creation or help me along with my sermon notes or graphic design or whatever. 00:27:28.500 --> 00:27:30.160 So it's really pervasive. 00:27:30.160 --> 00:27:37.180 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. 00:27:37.280 --> 00:27:47.740 You are, you are either an organization that is using AI or you're an organization that doesn't realize they're using AI. 00:27:47.940 --> 00:27:55.860 But either one, you're definitely using AI, whether it's in your, like, your personnel and day-to-day workflow, or it's just the tools that you use. 00:27:55.940 --> 00:28:01.840 Do your job in a regular email, whether it's, you know, on a regular basis, whether it's your email client or whatever. 00:28:02.660 --> 00:28:05.080 And push-based product will go the same way, too. 00:28:05.140 --> 00:28:08.740 The interesting thing is we've actually used some machine learning for quite some time. 00:28:09.020 --> 00:28:10.120 We have a payments platform. 00:28:10.400 --> 00:28:12.320 We've used it for fraud detection for a long time. 00:28:12.400 --> 00:28:13.460 It's been around a while. 00:28:14.000 --> 00:28:20.160 It's just that this generative AI, this new kind of, like, content creation side of AI is still relatively new. 00:28:20.400 --> 00:28:30.120 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. 00:28:30.500 --> 00:28:31.460 And I'll give you just one example. 00:28:33.580 --> 00:28:35.440 You know, we talked a lot about live stream. 00:28:35.520 --> 00:28:38.160 A lot of times that results in stored content. 00:28:38.160 --> 00:28:41.200 So videos that can be replayed later. 00:28:41.780 --> 00:28:48.020 And one option is, sure, I can go to my church's website and I can pick the Sunday from six weeks ago and re-watch the message. 00:28:48.520 --> 00:29:01.340 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. 00:29:01.380 --> 00:29:04.060 And then what you can do is say, okay, like, here's what I'd really like to do. 00:29:04.060 --> 00:29:14.000 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. 00:29:14.660 --> 00:29:24.400 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 them over the last 24 months. 00:29:24.400 --> 00:29:25.460 And then we can order those things. 00:29:25.760 --> 00:29:32.020 Like, the big things that are heavy lifting, heavy investment, take a lot of time. 00:29:32.520 --> 00:29:36.900 I think you're going to see, not just from Pushbay, but elsewhere, AI is going to attack those things. 00:29:37.300 --> 00:29:44.400 And hopefully the best that we see from that is our own personal productivity and what we can create for end users just gets better and better. 00:29:44.900 --> 00:29:48.020 And I'm not fishing for anything when I ask this question. 00:29:48.080 --> 00:29:49.220 I just want to preface that. 00:29:49.220 --> 00:29:55.340 But is there anything ethically that you would not have AI to do? 00:29:55.620 --> 00:30:01.240 Like, do you have any stipulations or boundaries in place with it? 00:30:01.380 --> 00:30:03.440 Have you guys wrestled with anything to that level yet? 00:30:03.760 --> 00:30:03.860 Yeah. 00:30:03.940 --> 00:30:09.240 When you are building it into your product, you do get to set the boundaries pretty clearly. 00:30:09.360 --> 00:30:15.340 Like, a good example, is this something we want to train on data that only we have? 00:30:15.520 --> 00:30:17.040 So, we know where the data came from. 00:30:17.480 --> 00:30:18.500 We know that it's good data. 00:30:18.580 --> 00:30:19.460 We know who owns the data. 00:30:19.540 --> 00:30:20.720 We have chain of custody to it. 00:30:20.760 --> 00:30:22.960 So, there's no question about where the response came from. 00:30:23.040 --> 00:30:26.340 Or is it a tool that trains on everything that's on the internet? 00:30:26.840 --> 00:30:28.540 And businesses like us can decide, right? 00:30:28.580 --> 00:30:34.620 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. 00:30:34.620 --> 00:30:37.340 And we trust these repositories, for example. 00:30:37.820 --> 00:30:39.540 That's not true for every AI tool. 00:30:39.640 --> 00:30:41.760 And that's kind of a thing that the industry is wrestling with. 00:30:41.820 --> 00:30:45.720 You can go to ChatGPT and be like, hey, write a sermon on Romans 8 for me. 00:30:45.920 --> 00:30:47.760 And you might just get a script from Piper. 00:30:48.160 --> 00:30:50.500 And you don't know that you got a script from John Piper. 00:30:50.660 --> 00:30:59.440 Like, I think there's real concerns about, like, copyright infringement and sources in some AI tools to be aware of. 00:30:59.900 --> 00:31:03.800 And to be honest, industry is going to wrestle with those for a long, long time. 00:31:03.940 --> 00:31:11.700 So, for us as a business with, you know, the concerns of, you know, liability and data accuracy, we'll make some choices about that when we use it to keep it safe. 00:31:12.560 --> 00:31:12.960 Awesome. 00:31:13.520 --> 00:31:16.740 You know, it's not often we get a CTO here on the podcast. 00:31:16.820 --> 00:31:18.260 So, I'm getting a little technical here. 00:31:18.320 --> 00:31:19.520 We're talking AI. 00:31:20.480 --> 00:31:25.580 Shifting gears a little bit, evidently there's this Apple device release called the Vision Pro. 00:31:25.780 --> 00:31:30.500 I don't know if you've heard of this, but evidently artificial intelligence is here to stay. 00:31:30.660 --> 00:31:32.460 Spatial computing is here to stay. 00:31:32.820 --> 00:31:35.840 There's a lot that's here to stay these days, it feels like. 00:31:36.140 --> 00:31:42.120 So, what is, like, what are the implications for spatial computing? 00:31:42.580 --> 00:31:44.560 Like, what are your thoughts, push-based thoughts? 00:31:44.640 --> 00:31:48.720 Like, I'm just curious what you guys are thinking as you're looking at some of the stuff that Apple's working on. 00:31:49.220 --> 00:31:49.580 Okay. 00:31:50.260 --> 00:31:51.580 You have to go back a little bit. 00:31:51.660 --> 00:31:54.480 For me, I'll just kind of communicate my bias. 00:31:54.600 --> 00:32:00.540 I was an early adopter of, I think it was an Oculus headset several years ago when they were new. 00:32:00.740 --> 00:32:06.900 And my feeling at the time was my hypothesis was I think the metaverse can really change things for people. 00:32:07.060 --> 00:32:11.500 Like, in terms of immersive experiences, it could be really valuable for business, for gaming, for churches. 00:32:11.800 --> 00:32:13.740 We've got to figure that out, but I think it's pretty cool. 00:32:13.880 --> 00:32:20.560 So, I get an Oculus for work, brought it into work, and got a couple other colleagues. 00:32:20.760 --> 00:32:24.640 And we spent some time just using meetings, like, in a virtual metaverse environment. 00:32:25.000 --> 00:32:29.560 And my takeaway was this is on to something. 00:32:29.700 --> 00:32:39.220 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. 00:32:39.220 --> 00:32:40.500 It just felt a little bit more real. 00:32:41.040 --> 00:32:42.640 So, my feeling was this could work. 00:32:42.640 --> 00:32:50.520 The problem was, and it was partly the Oculus, partly, you know, the tools that are available, just very high friction to make that work well. 00:32:50.760 --> 00:32:52.500 You know, we're used to hitting a button and you're in a Zoom. 00:32:52.600 --> 00:32:54.980 And this was more like, okay, wait, what tool are we using? 00:32:55.060 --> 00:32:56.440 And do I have to sign into that? 00:32:56.520 --> 00:32:57.460 And then which room are we in? 00:32:57.520 --> 00:32:58.820 And who made the environment? 00:32:59.020 --> 00:32:59.600 Do I have to make? 00:32:59.940 --> 00:33:02.680 So, the friction was really high. 00:33:03.020 --> 00:33:05.160 But my feeling was, oh, this has potential. 00:33:05.660 --> 00:33:09.720 Like, I could see it transforming both business and churches. 00:33:10.620 --> 00:33:11.380 And it cooled. 00:33:11.960 --> 00:33:12.660 Like, a lot. 00:33:12.920 --> 00:33:13.080 Right? 00:33:13.180 --> 00:33:17.240 Like, two years ago, a year ago, metaverse is everything we're talking about. 00:33:17.340 --> 00:33:20.800 And now, you don't hear about it too much until recently. 00:33:21.200 --> 00:33:23.920 I think what Apple launched is so interesting. 00:33:23.920 --> 00:33:25.000 Because I would say it is different. 00:33:25.280 --> 00:33:28.820 Like, it's a different type of immersive experience. 00:33:28.960 --> 00:33:39.180 What I think they did that was so good, I think, is the problem with, like, former AI headsets is you are either in the physical world or you're in the digital world. 00:33:39.180 --> 00:33:46.740 So, I don't know if you've experimented with Jeff, but I'm, you know, I'm, you know, for research purposes, on a game in the living room with the Oculus. 00:33:46.940 --> 00:33:54.520 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. 00:33:54.580 --> 00:33:57.520 And what Apple's doing is they're saying, no, no, they need to be merged together. 00:33:57.620 --> 00:33:59.340 So, your physical world is still going to be there. 00:33:59.400 --> 00:34:01.580 You're still going to be able to look around the room, see what's happening. 00:34:01.620 --> 00:34:06.700 But we're going to lay over top of that, you know, metaverse-like experiences. 00:34:06.700 --> 00:34:09.680 And, you know, I don't have one. 00:34:10.120 --> 00:34:12.880 That price tag is probably going to be a little bit of a barrier for somebody. 00:34:12.940 --> 00:34:14.380 I think it's, like, $3,500 retail. 00:34:15.280 --> 00:34:17.200 But, boy, you know what? 00:34:17.520 --> 00:34:22.360 Like, when it comes to, like, figuring out how to remove friction, I do not bet against Apple. 00:34:22.540 --> 00:34:29.140 So, I'm really interested in what becomes of that product line over the next 24 months. 00:34:29.920 --> 00:34:30.080 Yeah. 00:34:30.240 --> 00:34:34.620 I trust Apple far more than I do meta Facebook. 00:34:34.700 --> 00:34:34.860 Sure. 00:34:35.060 --> 00:34:41.040 Like, I just, and so I respect what Facebook has built and meta has built. 00:34:41.280 --> 00:34:43.120 And they're doing what they're doing. 00:34:43.120 --> 00:34:51.420 And it was funny, just last week we did a podcast with the Church Digital's Operation Director, Andy Mage, talking about the meta quest. 00:34:51.680 --> 00:35:01.320 And I think the augmented reality, I think the mixed reality aspects are going to have a greater cultural impact than the virtual reality does. 00:35:01.320 --> 00:35:05.720 I know that's a controversial take, but I agree. 00:35:05.860 --> 00:35:08.800 I don't think people like to be blinded to the reality that's around them. 00:35:08.840 --> 00:35:09.360 It's interesting. 00:35:09.780 --> 00:35:18.620 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. 00:35:19.100 --> 00:35:26.460 But I 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. 00:35:26.880 --> 00:35:30.720 Now, augmenting, adding to that is a whole other thing. 00:35:31.000 --> 00:35:34.940 And so, I love that Apple's in that space. 00:35:34.940 --> 00:35:47.420 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. 00:35:48.580 --> 00:35:53.420 Like, I think that's, like, I think the 2D church experience is just not as good as the 3D church. 00:35:53.520 --> 00:35:55.400 It doesn't matter how much technology you put into it. 00:35:55.420 --> 00:35:57.840 And some of them are amazing and well-produced. 00:35:57.840 --> 00:36:09.200 But you have, 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. 00:36:09.320 --> 00:36:10.440 I think that could be powerful. 00:36:11.300 --> 00:36:11.380 Yeah. 00:36:11.740 --> 00:36:18.200 And then using something like that to feed into the community, into, like, a Discord channel or a Slack group. 00:36:18.580 --> 00:36:19.840 Like, that's powerful. 00:36:19.960 --> 00:36:22.020 That's what Stuart McPherson does. 00:36:22.400 --> 00:36:27.500 He's got Vector Church that, actually, he preaches in virtual reality. 00:36:27.780 --> 00:36:31.200 But he uses, he feeds it over into his Discord. 00:36:31.340 --> 00:36:32.020 So, that's exciting. 00:36:32.140 --> 00:36:34.780 I love, I mean, I love some of the 3D experiences. 00:36:34.960 --> 00:36:36.420 I'm coming around to them. 00:36:36.620 --> 00:36:42.340 But it's, the challenge with the 3D experiences is you don't get the community aspect. 00:36:42.780 --> 00:36:45.340 You don't, you're not sitting next to, you're not having a conversation with an avatar. 00:36:45.620 --> 00:36:48.100 You're not engaging or dialoguing with somebody. 00:36:48.320 --> 00:36:57.560 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 do within your church. 00:36:57.680 --> 00:36:58.260 Yeah, absolutely. 00:36:58.860 --> 00:36:59.020 Yep. 00:36:59.740 --> 00:37:00.160 Very cool. 00:37:00.420 --> 00:37:00.620 All right. 00:37:00.700 --> 00:37:04.900 So, one of the things that popped up, this in the report, let's get back to the tech report. 00:37:05.020 --> 00:37:06.120 I kind of took us on a tangent there. 00:37:06.240 --> 00:37:07.020 Sorry, I'm dying for that. 00:37:07.660 --> 00:37:17.680 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. 00:37:18.480 --> 00:37:21.060 Essentially, analysis paralysis. 00:37:21.380 --> 00:37:24.480 I have been running into this problem for years. 00:37:24.800 --> 00:37:24.960 Yeah. 00:37:25.040 --> 00:37:27.400 Where it feels like churches are excited. 00:37:27.740 --> 00:37:29.280 They want to talk about stuff. 00:37:29.580 --> 00:37:33.660 They get to the point where they got to, you know, they get the committee together, whatever it is. 00:37:33.740 --> 00:37:36.580 Everybody's on the same page from top to bottom. 00:37:36.700 --> 00:37:38.040 Everybody seems fine. 00:37:38.140 --> 00:37:40.360 And then it kind of takes time to cut the check. 00:37:40.480 --> 00:37:41.680 And it's crickets. 00:37:43.120 --> 00:37:44.000 Pulling the trigger. 00:37:46.300 --> 00:37:48.000 How do we overcome that? 00:37:48.000 --> 00:37:53.300 Like, what is this idea that 45% of those are not confident in adopting the right tech solution? 00:37:53.900 --> 00:37:55.980 Like, how do we deal with this? 00:37:56.540 --> 00:37:58.200 Yeah, I think that's good. 00:37:58.280 --> 00:37:59.740 That was eye-opening to me, too. 00:37:59.880 --> 00:38:09.460 Just 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. 00:38:10.500 --> 00:38:12.380 And I guess I can kind of relate to that. 00:38:12.380 --> 00:38:15.580 And probably, Jeff, it just comes to my technology background. 00:38:15.700 --> 00:38:27.560 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? 00:38:27.840 --> 00:38:28.920 Meaning we're going to make a decision. 00:38:29.440 --> 00:38:34.180 And if we go through this decision, if we go through this doorway, can we see what the room is like? 00:38:34.180 --> 00:38:38.860 And can we walk back out of the door and make a different informed decision if we want to? 00:38:39.280 --> 00:38:40.440 Or is this a one-way door? 00:38:40.520 --> 00:38:45.120 You walk through it and the door slams and locks and you now are sort of stuck in that decision. 00:38:45.120 --> 00:38:47.660 Or at least it's really, really painful to switch. 00:38:48.940 --> 00:38:59.500 And I would at least, like, one encouragement I would like to just share is, in reality, we think some decisions are one-way doors when they're actually two-way doors. 00:38:59.820 --> 00:39:06.000 Like, there's not that many technology decisions that we make that are irreversible, I would say. 00:39:06.080 --> 00:39:07.460 There's some that are harder than others. 00:39:07.640 --> 00:39:12.660 You know, I think, you know, just speaking to what PushPay does, a donor management platform is hard to switch out. 00:39:12.760 --> 00:39:14.640 A CHMS can be hard to switch out. 00:39:14.720 --> 00:39:17.880 But even those, they're not locked one-way doors. 00:39:18.060 --> 00:39:19.480 They're just a little harder to get back through. 00:39:19.980 --> 00:39:31.420 And so, like, one of the things I would just encourage people is, it's okay if you, in the spirit of experimenting with what works and what doesn't, you make a mistake and decide it doesn't work. 00:39:31.860 --> 00:39:36.340 I am a technology professional that's been doing this for 25 years, and we still do that regularly. 00:39:36.560 --> 00:39:41.740 We pick a solution, we try it, and we go, mm, that just didn't work for us. 00:39:41.860 --> 00:39:43.060 Let's go back and revisit that. 00:39:43.360 --> 00:39:45.280 And there is a little bit of pain associated with that. 00:39:45.300 --> 00:39:55.180 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. 00:39:55.240 --> 00:40:00.300 Or, more commonly what happens is, that was the right decision at the time, but we've changed. 00:40:00.960 --> 00:40:02.240 You can change. 00:40:02.360 --> 00:40:02.700 It's okay. 00:40:02.860 --> 00:40:03.660 You can figure it out. 00:40:04.040 --> 00:40:08.420 It's not always a one-way door, even though it might feel like it at the time. 00:40:08.680 --> 00:40:09.600 So, that was one thing. 00:40:09.680 --> 00:40:13.980 Like, maybe you just have to swallow hard and get brave, because it's maybe not as bad as we think. 00:40:15.180 --> 00:40:28.700 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. 00:40:29.360 --> 00:40:33.380 And there's 300,000 churches, maybe 400,000 churches in the United States. 00:40:33.960 --> 00:40:38.980 You know, I would say maybe 50,000 to 70,000 of them are pretty technology-oriented and trying a lot of things. 00:40:39.600 --> 00:40:40.820 They're all going to have a CHMS. 00:40:41.040 --> 00:40:42.400 They're all going to have a donor management platform. 00:40:42.500 --> 00:40:43.280 They might have an app. 00:40:43.360 --> 00:40:44.760 They probably have a website solution. 00:40:44.900 --> 00:40:46.180 They're probably using a live streaming. 00:40:46.480 --> 00:40:47.880 They probably have a general ledger. 00:40:47.980 --> 00:40:49.400 They're probably using something for payroll. 00:40:49.520 --> 00:40:56.580 There's just a lot of technology choices being made, and we can learn a lot from our network, right? 00:40:56.660 --> 00:41:00.120 Like, we can reach out and just ask, how did that go for you? 00:41:00.260 --> 00:41:01.220 Was that a good experience? 00:41:01.320 --> 00:41:02.500 Was that a bad experience? 00:41:03.080 --> 00:41:14.000 We can find churches that are similar to us, that maybe, like, 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 back out. 00:41:14.000 --> 00:41:21.260 I think that church network is really powerful, and by the way, that is, like, some of what we try to do in PushPay. 00:41:21.800 --> 00:41:26.140 You know, some of what we do is obviously try to sell and support our current products, but you know, you've been a part of this. 00:41:26.200 --> 00:41:34.280 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. 00:41:35.200 --> 00:42:03.520 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. 00:42:03.520 --> 00:42:10.520 Like, there's, like, there's, historically, the church has been very bad at working with other churches. 00:42:11.620 --> 00:42:14.240 You know, in biblical context, you don't see that. 00:42:14.340 --> 00:42:20.880 You see Paul on missionary journeys going around and encouraging and doing that and writing the letters. 00:42:21.000 --> 00:42:25.120 The Bible is filled with encouragement on that. 00:42:25.300 --> 00:42:30.000 But, you know, in recent days, I know it's a little harder for whatever reason. 00:42:30.220 --> 00:42:35.760 Yeah, but to your point, like, I think a good example of that, I went to the Church IT Network this year. 00:42:35.840 --> 00:42:38.780 That's a pretty, like, substantial conference that happens every year. 00:42:38.780 --> 00:42:39.060 Oh, yeah. 00:42:39.180 --> 00:42:39.820 From West Palm Beach. 00:42:40.000 --> 00:42:41.320 And guess what? 00:42:41.340 --> 00:42:41.840 They have a Discord. 00:42:42.520 --> 00:42:48.580 And all year long, the conference is only a few days, but all year long, those network of people are asking, hey, have you guys tried this? 00:42:48.640 --> 00:42:49.340 What did you do here? 00:42:49.440 --> 00:42:50.660 Anybody else figure this out? 00:42:50.720 --> 00:42:57.900 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. 00:42:58.860 --> 00:42:59.080 Were you? 00:42:59.160 --> 00:43:00.560 I didn't realize you were at that conference. 00:43:00.680 --> 00:43:01.200 I was there. 00:43:01.320 --> 00:43:03.240 I was there for at least one day, maybe two. 00:43:03.580 --> 00:43:04.960 We must have just missed each other. 00:43:05.060 --> 00:43:05.840 Totally incompleted you. 00:43:05.900 --> 00:43:06.820 Must have just missed each other. 00:43:06.820 --> 00:43:07.040 I feel bad. 00:43:07.300 --> 00:43:07.460 Yeah. 00:43:07.500 --> 00:43:08.100 It's going to be in Dallas. 00:43:08.100 --> 00:43:10.260 I'll just message you on the Discord, and we'll connect. 00:43:10.480 --> 00:43:10.820 How's that? 00:43:11.020 --> 00:43:11.140 Yeah. 00:43:11.740 --> 00:43:12.640 We'll connect up. 00:43:12.760 --> 00:43:13.400 It'll be good. 00:43:14.180 --> 00:43:23.260 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. 00:43:24.340 --> 00:43:26.980 In 2024, what should that number be? 00:43:27.660 --> 00:43:33.400 Realistically, Jeff, of the questions you could ask about that survey, I think that's one of the hardest ones to answer. 00:43:34.760 --> 00:43:39.820 And I don't know, I was trying to think, like, why is it so hard to put your finger on what that should look like? 00:43:39.840 --> 00:43:50.480 And I think part of it is because there are just so many different types of churches, small churches, big churches, digital or digital churches, more than that are trying to be in person. 00:43:51.640 --> 00:43:54.720 And the reality is most of these churches would say we don't have unlimited budgets. 00:43:54.720 --> 00:43:56.680 We have, you know, a building to pay for. 00:43:56.760 --> 00:43:57.780 We have staff to pay for. 00:43:57.860 --> 00:43:59.500 We have ministries going on that have expenses. 00:43:59.500 --> 00:44:00.420 We're supporting missions. 00:44:00.420 --> 00:44:04.540 And then, oh, yeah, we've got to support the technology as well. 00:44:05.300 --> 00:44:07.260 You know, I probably would approach that decision. 00:44:07.360 --> 00:44:12.640 This is where, like, being a, you know, maybe an XP or in the business ops side of a church is really, really challenging. 00:44:13.620 --> 00:44:15.820 But I would say, like, business goes through the same thing. 00:44:15.860 --> 00:44:17.060 We have the same conversations every year. 00:44:17.120 --> 00:44:19.980 How much should we spend to do what we're trying to do? 00:44:20.040 --> 00:44:21.400 What makes sense to us? 00:44:22.080 --> 00:44:30.260 And I think what we try to do every year in this business and business, I've been a part of it before, is to ask first, what's our strategy and what are we trying to accomplish? 00:44:30.260 --> 00:44:34.720 And then where is it best to apply the capital we have? 00:44:35.280 --> 00:44:36.960 Everybody has unlimited capital. 00:44:37.180 --> 00:44:39.280 Everybody runs out of money eventually, even Apple. 00:44:40.380 --> 00:44:43.040 And so, like, thinking through, like, well, here's what's important to us. 00:44:43.160 --> 00:44:45.180 And therefore, here's what we're going to invest in. 00:44:46.080 --> 00:44:51.000 And, like, I think you've mentioned Resi a couple times. 00:44:51.140 --> 00:44:55.220 I think if, I mean, I really love the Resi product. 00:44:55.380 --> 00:44:56.860 It is a wonderful product. 00:44:57.100 --> 00:45:01.360 It is very high quality, very high reliability, camera quality. 00:45:01.520 --> 00:45:03.580 It just serves churches really well because it's really simple. 00:45:03.760 --> 00:45:11.780 And if you're leaning into hybrid or digital or digital, I would say, look, seriously, at Resi, that's an amazing technology. 00:45:12.440 --> 00:45:16.260 But maybe, like, you might say, well, we have other products. 00:45:16.360 --> 00:45:20.560 Maybe we're trying to use email to connect with people, and that's not working very well. 00:45:20.640 --> 00:45:22.800 And honestly, that's not going to be our part of the strategy next year. 00:45:22.880 --> 00:45:26.600 Maybe we just don't need to renew our whatever MailChimp or constant contact. 00:45:26.820 --> 00:45:29.540 We're going to go to a free Slack instance instead or something like that. 00:45:29.860 --> 00:45:32.240 But I think, like, it's really hard to put your finger on it. 00:45:32.240 --> 00:45:34.380 It's more about who you are and what your strategy is. 00:45:34.660 --> 00:45:38.180 And then you sort of back in to, well, what do we feel comfortable supporting this year? 00:45:38.700 --> 00:45:40.280 So I think it's a hard question to answer. 00:45:41.380 --> 00:45:41.700 Wow. 00:45:41.820 --> 00:45:45.540 That was a very long answer to come around to. 00:45:45.700 --> 00:45:46.200 I don't know. 00:45:46.220 --> 00:45:46.560 I don't know. 00:45:46.700 --> 00:45:47.540 I don't know, Jeff. 00:45:48.260 --> 00:45:50.540 Yeah, that's a hard question, though, right? 00:45:50.540 --> 00:45:55.800 Because, you know, you've got your mega giga churches, 5,000, 10,000, multiple campuses. 00:45:56.820 --> 00:45:59.960 You know, they're going to have their answer to that. 00:45:59.960 --> 00:46:05.520 And, you know, I currently attend a church plant that's about 200 people on a Sunday. 00:46:05.820 --> 00:46:09.800 And so their approach is far different as well. 00:46:10.020 --> 00:46:10.080 Yeah. 00:46:11.220 --> 00:46:23.440 Within Pushpay, like, are you, how do you serve churches with different expectations, like, within your product? 00:46:23.600 --> 00:46:27.820 Like, are you, is there something that a smaller church can engage with? 00:46:28.080 --> 00:46:32.740 Is there, are there features that the larger churches are clamoring for? 00:46:32.960 --> 00:46:38.400 Like, you're, you're a tech company that's trying to reach, I mean, hundreds of thousands of churches in America. 00:46:38.400 --> 00:46:42.060 And I'm not even talking about the multinational aspects of, of, of what you guys do. 00:46:42.420 --> 00:46:45.420 So, like, how do you, how do you scale and scope that? 00:46:45.880 --> 00:46:46.120 Yeah. 00:46:46.360 --> 00:46:49.320 I mean, just really practically, every church is a little different. 00:46:49.320 --> 00:46:56.060 So we, 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? 00:46:56.380 --> 00:46:58.440 First, there's a discovery process that goes on there. 00:46:58.440 --> 00:47:00.220 So we can understand what the church is trying to do. 00:47:00.620 --> 00:47:06.100 We don't oversell them or undersell them something that maybe isn't that helpful to them in that process. 00:47:06.500 --> 00:47:12.360 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. 00:47:12.480 --> 00:47:16.380 I mean, the reality is right now, every church has an online giving system. 00:47:16.640 --> 00:47:18.360 Like, that is just ubiquitous. 00:47:18.460 --> 00:47:20.160 And you want to make sure it's a good one and you use it. 00:47:20.240 --> 00:47:28.000 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. 00:47:28.060 --> 00:47:29.200 And a lot of times we'll lead with that. 00:47:29.340 --> 00:47:31.220 Like, hey, this would help you. 00:47:31.320 --> 00:47:32.280 It would help your finances. 00:47:32.280 --> 00:47:36.800 It would help you just kind of collect more of the donations that your churches are giving you. 00:47:36.860 --> 00:47:37.820 So a lot of times we'll start there. 00:47:38.200 --> 00:47:46.220 And that, honestly, almost pretty universal up and down, like, the size and, you know, horizontally across different types of churches. 00:47:46.820 --> 00:47:48.380 Then you get into the CHMS. 00:47:48.680 --> 00:47:55.620 I would say a lot of churches, as they grow, start to realize that that's a pretty strategically critical tool. 00:47:55.620 --> 00:48:02.540 So as you go from, like, the small church, like you, zero to 200, maybe you guys have a lot of success and you wake up one day and you're up 500. 00:48:03.080 --> 00:48:05.620 And you're starting to ask the question, who are these people? 00:48:05.900 --> 00:48:07.860 And how do we organize our ministry? 00:48:08.000 --> 00:48:09.840 That's where a CHMS gets really valuable. 00:48:10.140 --> 00:48:18.180 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? 00:48:18.360 --> 00:48:20.640 And you get all that data that's available to you. 00:48:20.680 --> 00:48:24.240 So I would say, like, there's, you know, we know churches pretty well. 00:48:24.320 --> 00:48:26.360 We know what they're generally speaking. 00:48:26.460 --> 00:48:28.480 We know how to, like, understand where they're at and get their needs out. 00:48:28.500 --> 00:48:29.480 And we try to meet them where they're at. 00:48:30.480 --> 00:48:31.040 Very cool. 00:48:31.560 --> 00:48:34.100 Aaron Seneff, CTO of PushPay. 00:48:34.960 --> 00:48:35.860 Thank you for the time. 00:48:35.900 --> 00:48:37.200 This has been really, really good. 00:48:37.660 --> 00:48:38.100 You know what? 00:48:38.140 --> 00:48:41.280 There's one question that I wanted to ask. 00:48:41.280 --> 00:48:46.300 And, you know, you deal with a lot of hybrid churches. 00:48:46.780 --> 00:48:51.220 We've been talking about live streaming, and we've been talking hybrid and digital. 00:48:51.780 --> 00:48:57.080 And so the majority of your world is physical churches that are, you know, doing digital as well. 00:48:57.180 --> 00:49:06.520 You know, a lot of our audience is our digital-only churches, churches that only exist in digital space, you know, without the physical building. 00:49:06.520 --> 00:49:10.380 The Luxe Digital Churches, which I mentioned earlier, Hearts Like His, Vector. 00:49:10.900 --> 00:49:12.720 I mean, there's so many at this point. 00:49:12.760 --> 00:49:13.840 I could just go on forever. 00:49:14.060 --> 00:49:18.580 It's using digital tools only or metaverse virtual reality tools only. 00:49:19.320 --> 00:49:23.320 Community is Discord, discipleship happening in those spaces, things like that. 00:49:24.260 --> 00:49:25.440 You're a tech guy. 00:49:25.680 --> 00:49:26.940 I mean, literally from top to bottom. 00:49:27.260 --> 00:49:32.240 And so I would love just a moment here to pick your brain. 00:49:32.840 --> 00:49:34.400 I know it's a controversial idea. 00:49:34.920 --> 00:49:36.040 Some people love it. 00:49:36.080 --> 00:49:36.960 Some people hate it. 00:49:37.620 --> 00:49:41.660 But most of them will express their opinions online one way or the other. 00:49:42.200 --> 00:49:44.480 So I would love your take. 00:49:44.480 --> 00:49:48.440 Pros and cons of a digital expression of a church. 00:49:48.540 --> 00:49:49.360 No physical building. 00:49:49.540 --> 00:49:50.220 What are you thinking? 00:49:50.820 --> 00:49:58.620 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. 00:49:58.680 --> 00:50:01.080 Like, I prefer to work face-to-face. 00:50:01.200 --> 00:50:02.100 That isn't my reality. 00:50:02.100 --> 00:50:03.760 But when I can do it, I will do that. 00:50:03.820 --> 00:50:04.840 And church is similar to me. 00:50:05.280 --> 00:50:08.600 I can't always be face-to-face, but I prefer to be when I can. 00:50:09.160 --> 00:50:16.500 But at the same time, and you probably worked in two, like, work with amazing people that are remote all the time and that are much more effective than I am. 00:50:16.600 --> 00:50:19.660 So I think, like, that probably is true in church, too. 00:50:19.660 --> 00:50:26.160 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. 00:50:26.240 --> 00:50:29.820 And that's why I would say, like, we need the deluxe digital church. 00:50:29.920 --> 00:50:31.340 We need the hearts like his. 00:50:31.380 --> 00:50:35.800 Those are churches that we need room for in sort of the grand spectrum of churches. 00:50:36.800 --> 00:50:37.960 I will say I think it's hard. 00:50:38.940 --> 00:50:44.660 Like, there's one really practical thing that's hard to overcome for all churches. 00:50:44.840 --> 00:50:48.280 But I think the bigger you get and the more digital you are, the harder it is. 00:50:49.000 --> 00:50:51.700 And that is anonymity. 00:50:53.980 --> 00:50:57.060 Now, I would just say, like, anonymity is a problem in a physical church, too. 00:50:57.140 --> 00:51:03.600 Like, you could walk in to visit, sit down, walk right back out, never talk to anybody, and no one is ever going to know you're there. 00:51:03.740 --> 00:51:07.800 But I would just say, in digital in general, that problem goes up. 00:51:08.840 --> 00:51:10.200 Churches are designed to minister. 00:51:11.000 --> 00:51:14.480 And, you know, you need to know who to minister to do that. 00:51:14.480 --> 00:51:18.940 And like you said, really great progressive churches out there are figuring this out. 00:51:19.280 --> 00:51:22.560 Like, we talked about, like, Slack and Discord as an option, and there are others. 00:51:22.660 --> 00:51:25.740 There are ways to engage people without necessarily seeing them physically. 00:51:26.240 --> 00:51:30.720 But I think, like, anonymity is a large problem in churches now. 00:51:31.200 --> 00:51:35.900 It prevents people from getting engaged and forming community connection. 00:51:35.900 --> 00:51:46.080 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. 00:51:46.740 --> 00:51:47.680 Totally, completely. 00:51:48.220 --> 00:51:51.900 The other one, and this one, like, I don't know about, you might not buy this one, Jeff. 00:51:52.300 --> 00:51:56.300 So, but I'll just tell you a theory I have, and this is a very uninformed theory. 00:51:58.340 --> 00:51:59.840 I do think this part is true. 00:51:59.840 --> 00:52:13.180 Like, I think that there's a, there's an epidemic of loneliness and isolation in our country that we maybe haven't totally confronted yet. 00:52:14.200 --> 00:52:23.800 There's some really interesting studies about this, but, like, even before COVID, about half of all U.S. adults would say they feel some, like, meaningful or measurable amount of loneliness. 00:52:24.880 --> 00:52:31.080 And, you know, the thing is, like, look, we got every digital tool in the world to connect with people, right? 00:52:31.080 --> 00:52:36.740 Like, I have good friendships that are completely on WhatsApp right now or Snapchat or whatever. 00:52:36.920 --> 00:52:46.080 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. 00:52:46.160 --> 00:52:51.500 I think that, that impacts our mental health, our physical well-being, sort of our social health. 00:52:51.940 --> 00:53:00.780 And the Surgeon General even kind of published a little report, which I think was interesting, that says it's, it's even possible that where we're at is shortening lifespans. 00:53:00.780 --> 00:53:12.820 Like, consider this sort of an epidemic that's akin to, like, smoking every day in terms of your physical well-being, which I think is crazy and interesting, and I don't think we've confronted that. 00:53:13.060 --> 00:53:27.280 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. 00:53:27.840 --> 00:53:29.520 I do think it's possible. 00:53:29.620 --> 00:53:30.920 I believe it's possible. 00:53:30.920 --> 00:53:37.860 But I do think that's also a challenge facing churches that are, you know, trying to figure out how to pull away from physical presence more and more. 00:53:38.420 --> 00:53:42.500 So, I would, I, I think it's likely we'll solve that, Jeff. 00:53:42.660 --> 00:53:49.800 Like, I do think, I don't, I don't think, like, you can't generate, like, human connection through a computer. 00:53:49.880 --> 00:53:50.800 I think that is possible. 00:53:51.120 --> 00:53:52.980 I think it's about how to do it well. 00:53:53.180 --> 00:53:57.200 And I think as a church, you know, as businesses, we're still trying to figure out how to do that. 00:53:57.680 --> 00:53:59.220 Yeah, good, well said. 00:53:59.720 --> 00:54:03.260 By the way, the Surgeon General, that report, I actually reference that all the time. 00:54:03.320 --> 00:54:04.540 I'll put a link in the show notes to it. 00:54:04.540 --> 00:54:17.540 Yeah, because one of, one of the six things that he says we have to do to end the epidemic of loneliness, I think it was number four for him, was actually an increase in better utilization of digital community. 00:54:18.100 --> 00:54:26.420 Like, he's, he's seeing that there's opportunities there that we're just not maximizing and we're really not utilizing. 00:54:26.500 --> 00:54:27.580 I'm not even talking about the church. 00:54:27.580 --> 00:54:31.200 I'm just talking about, like, public general usage. 00:54:31.600 --> 00:54:45.100 And so what a huge opportunity for the church to engage in that, you know, and that's, it comes back to, you know, that you, the content, the services, everything that we're doing online, it's got to drive either to the physical building. 00:54:45.460 --> 00:54:53.000 But what if we also drove to a digital context to allow people to connect in that space to that, that as well. 00:54:53.100 --> 00:54:56.980 And so, well, sir, Aaron, thank you very much for the time. 00:54:57.100 --> 00:55:00.020 Aaron Sinef, CEO, no, I'm sorry, CEO. 00:55:00.240 --> 00:55:01.480 You just got a promotion. 00:55:01.740 --> 00:55:02.080 Love it. 00:55:02.260 --> 00:55:02.660 Congratulations. 00:55:03.040 --> 00:55:04.120 Molly will be alarmed. 00:55:04.920 --> 00:55:06.220 Molly's gunning for me now. 00:55:06.780 --> 00:55:12.040 So, CTO, Chief Technical Officer of PushPay. 00:55:12.180 --> 00:55:14.120 So, thank you very much for jumping on here. 00:55:14.240 --> 00:55:16.280 Maybe as we're landing the plane here, any closing thoughts? 00:55:16.700 --> 00:55:21.160 No, I just, like, I don't want anything I said to pour cold water on what's happening. 00:55:21.260 --> 00:55:22.200 Churches, I think it's really exciting. 00:55:22.340 --> 00:55:26.060 Like, I think the digital transformation we're going through in the industry is really, really exciting. 00:55:26.200 --> 00:55:27.300 I'm totally on board. 00:55:27.880 --> 00:55:33.080 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. 00:55:33.600 --> 00:55:34.180 Great forum. 00:55:34.960 --> 00:55:35.420 Love it. 00:55:35.420 --> 00:55:36.220 Thank you very much. 00:55:36.300 --> 00:55:46.360 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. 00:55:46.500 --> 00:55:53.220 Like, we are, like, the church has improved from a technological standpoint so much. 00:55:53.840 --> 00:55:57.640 You know, the challenge is that there's so much still to go. 00:55:58.460 --> 00:56:04.360 And it's the, you know, it's the, I had a pastor friend of mine, I tell this story on occasion. 00:56:05.040 --> 00:56:15.540 I had a pastor friend of mine on social media, on an open forum, went on and said, hey, I'm selling my Resi Enterprise rack mount encoder. 00:56:15.940 --> 00:56:16.940 Who wants it? 00:56:16.940 --> 00:56:22.880 And actually, I reached out to him, and actually, I reached out to him, because he's a friend, and I said, hey, what's going on? 00:56:22.880 --> 00:56:25.500 Like, I'm pretty sure I sold him that encoder. 00:56:25.500 --> 00:56:28.240 So I'm not really sure, like, what is, well, I just wanted to check up. 00:56:28.440 --> 00:56:33.580 And, but he replied back to me, he says, you know what, I'm just losing interest in digital. 00:56:34.580 --> 00:56:47.140 And in that, I mean, that's the, 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. 00:56:47.200 --> 00:56:48.500 That's all we really needed to do. 00:56:48.760 --> 00:56:54.600 It's the, put the digital in a box, and set it on the side, and say, this is what it is. 00:56:55.520 --> 00:57:00.240 You know, I hope, you know, it's interesting, you're talking about artificial intelligence. 00:57:00.240 --> 00:57:02.900 You're either using it, or you don't realize you're using it. 00:57:03.580 --> 00:57:14.400 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. 00:57:14.800 --> 00:57:22.860 That it's, that you're either intentionally using it, or it's unintentionally happening, and as a result of the ministry being so intertwined into it. 00:57:23.160 --> 00:57:24.700 So, I'm ranting. 00:57:24.880 --> 00:57:25.860 It's, it's been a long day. 00:57:25.900 --> 00:57:28.480 But, sir, thank you for jumping on the podcast. 00:57:28.480 --> 00:57:30.500 This has been great, but, hey, we're going to wrap up. 00:57:30.580 --> 00:57:33.400 And so, for Aaron, this is Jeff with The Church Digital. 00:57:33.520 --> 00:57:35.080 Thanks for jumping here on the podcast. 00:57:35.200 --> 00:57:35.980 See you next time on the show. 00:57:36.460 --> 00:57:36.940 You have a good day.