How Has The City Simplified Your Database? [excerpt]

Brad House, Mars Hill Church (Seattle); Shawn Wood (Seacoast Church, SC)

Brad House, Community Pastor from Mars Hill Church, and Shawn Wood, Experiences Pastor from Seacoast, share how The City gives them a new way of looking at data and how it can simplify managing data for anyone from church plants to large, multi-site churches.

“One of the things I tell church planters is don’t build a system that you’re going to have to remodel if you’re successful. So look at where you’re going and what you want it to look like when you get there and build the processes and systems you need to be successful. So I think The City is one of those tools where a small church can use it and build foundationally this is what community is going to look like and it can scale to however big you get.” ~ Brad House, Community Pastor, Mars Hill Church

Conversation Transcript:

Eric:  It’s interesting that you mentioned the management piece because a lot of folks seem to think The City is the just the front end social piece. I know when we talked to Seacoast cleaning up the database side and that was really church management which was a huge issue for you. I know for Glen that The City has been a pretty helpful tool. What has your experience been on that database management side and how that’s changed things for Seacoast?

Shawn: Yeah I think the main thing is that it has helped align our data management with our philosophy of what we believe community and church should look like. We had this database that was managing things that weren’t aligned and sometimes was exactly what we wanted to measure.

Now all of a sudden we have a very open sourced City that we allow anyone to come in but we have a very open source philosophy of ministry too that you find that passion, you find that mission. So that has allowed those to come together and to shape each other so that now in The City someone can really have the same level playing ground to put in a topic or communicate.

Then on the data side bringing that philosophy together too is we had to really think through what is it that we want to measure and to go back to the why, why are we collecting this data? We were collecting all kinds of data and we could run all kinds of reports but we had to ask the question, why? Why are we wanting this data? What will we do with it?

So it made us go to a ground zero for a while when we started looking at The City and go okay let’s talk about what we really want to collect from our groups, what we need and then what are we going to do with those pieces of information? So starting from zero and building up it allowed us to know everything we’re asking our people to give us, at this point, there is a reason behind it and a reason why we’re getting it. And if we add anything to that list, we will now think through and there will be a why behind it. Instead of having this big heap of data that no one really seemed to be able to manage. Now we have a very small piece of data that we are using a lot.

It’s a new paradigm, I think, for the data management side of it, a new paradigm with a different way of looking at data.

Eric:  Obviously you’re both pastors at very large churches. Is The City something that when you talk with some of the church planters that you work with, is it something you would recommend for them?

Brad:  I think it’s always good to be able to start off on the trajectory you want to end on. One of the things I tell church planters is don’t build a system that you’re going to have to remodel if you’re successful. So look at where you’re going and what you want it to look like when you get there and build the processes and systems you need to be successful. So I think The City is one of those tools where a small church can use it and build foundationally this is what community is going to look like and it can scale to however big you get.

Shawn: It was a big shift for us to get to The City. You guys know we did a lot of leg work getting in to it, a lot of launch stuff to get to there and it was hard work but it was very much worth it. I think for a church planter, you ease into that. You have maybe 50 or 60 users to put in at first instead of 8,000 users that we wanted to get in and did get in.

Yeah I would recommend to church planters. It’s the 1,500 to 2,000 that I think have to answer that why question first before they get into it but they really need to know why and not just let it be a fad. Okay well Mars Hills and Seacoast got on The City so we should too. But “why?” is a bigger question.