How Plaid answers the challenge issued by the new book from Greg Hawkins and Cally Parkinson of Willow Creek: 2 of 100 ways Plaid gets stuff done

I was reading Willow Creek Repents (which I think is an unfair title) and was fascinated by the findings issued by a new book from Willow Creek. This lead me to watch the video by Greg Hawkins where he explains the point of the book.

At the end of the video, he concludes:

Our dream is that we fundamentally change the way we do church. That we take out a clean sheet of paper and we rethink all of our old assumptions. Replace it with new insights.

At Plaid, we agree with this statement and believe that Plaid can assist ministries in this transformation.

Existing church software enables measuring discipleship through “participation”

Essentially, existing church management software reflects and promotes the “participation” model Hawkins describes. The software is focused on recording data that according the Hawkins does not contribute to discipleship.

For example, ChMS vendors are developing the “hottest” feature and churches are spending lots of resources to implement it. Check in or integrated attendance recording. That does not seem to be the place where innovation should be occurring.

The tools we use shape our thinking. If we do not change our church software, how we do church will not change.

Plaid answers the challenge issued by Hawkins and Willow Creek

Plaid is different. It does not record attendance. It measures “attention” or engagement of leaders towards its members.

Attendance shows how the members engage the church. A metric that Hawkins now questions and an assumption that Bill Hybles in fact says was a mistake,

Some of the stuff that we have put millions of dollars into thinking it would really help our people grow and develop spiritually, when the data actually came back it wasn’t helping people that much. Other things that we didn’t put that much money into and didn’t put much staff against is stuff our people are crying out for.

Plaid rather measures the engagement of leaders with members. Using attention data (what contact records they interact with inside the software: edit, add, comment, send email, organize into a list, etc.), we can help individual ministry practitioners discover who they “disciple”. Essentially, this is based on the idea found known as Dunbar’s number.

At Plaid, our quest is to give ministries new ways of measuring. I am not fool enough to think Plaid is a silver bullet, but I do believe that refactoring church software is one aspect of this change.