The Human Touch (Part 3): Building Real Relationships in an Automated World

The episode of the 'Healthy Church Staff Podcast' discusses the over-reliance on technology and automation in church operations, which leads to efficient communication but weakens personal relationships within church teams. The hosts emphasize the importance of maintaining the human touch and suggest practical ways to foster genuine connections amidst the tech-driven environment. • Technological efficiency in churches can lead to relational disconnects. • AI and automation are tools but should not replace personal connections. • The younger staff may struggle with relationship-building without tech. • Older staff might forget interpersonal skills due to reliance on tools. • Encourages scheduling time for personal interactions and relationship-building. • Practical suggestions include phone-free periods and face-to-face conversations. • Technology should enhance, not replace, human relationships.

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Transcript

When Updates Replace Connection

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Your worship pastor just texted the team about Sunday's rehearsal changes. Your children's pastor scheduled a volunteer meeting through the church app. Your youth pastor sent service reminders via automated email. Everything got communicated, but nothing got connected. We're coordinating better than ever before and relating, in many cases, worse than ever before. Our teams are efficiently informed and relationally started. If this sounds familiar, man, you're at the right place today because that's what we're talking about here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. Hi there, my name's Todd Rhodes, one of the co-founders, along with Matt Steen, over at chemistrystaffing.com. And what we're talking about today, this is happening in churches everywhere. This week we're talking about the human touch. We're doing a series on AI, automations, all different kinds of things that I actually love and implement every day in my work at Chemistry Staffing. And I realized that AI and automations and all of these kind of things are they're available in churches right now. And we are just identifying them, thinking, oh, this is cool, but we're not really thinking through what we're automating, why we're automating it, and what that actually does to our ministry work. So that's what we're talking about today. Today I want to talk about something I call the automation drift. Okay. AI schedules our meetings absolutely perfectly. We've got apps that coordinate our calendars absolutely flawlessly, texts that handle our logistics sometimes automatically, and nobody's talking anymore. We're losing the art of the random conversation, the skill of reading somebody's tone that you can't get through a text or an email or a notification in an app. The gift of an unexpected check-in. And here's the problem that I don't really hear anybody talking about. Your staff can coordinate a complex event without saying 10 words to each other. Let me repeat that because that might dig in maybe with some of the things that you're doing, even. You can now, with AI and automation, in many cases, coordinate a complex event. And by complex event, it could be your Sunday morning. You can schedule everything, everyone. Make sure everyone is confirmed and where they're supposed to be. You can do all that online without saying 10 words to each other. And they know everybody's schedule, but they don't know you don't know anybody's struggles. You're connected to the system. Everything's getting done. Matter of fact, everything's more efficient today than it was five years ago. You're connected to the system, everybody is, but you're increasingly disconnected from each other. The younger staff never learned to build relationships without technology. Think about that. Think about that. If you hired somebody that this they're tech native, and they know all the tools, they know how to connect everything, they know AI better than you, they know words that you they know these large model and clod and all the things that you the open claw, you all the things that maybe you've never even heard of. The younger staff knows about it and they know how to use it, but because they've grown up in this technology era, they may have never learned to build relationships without technology. And at the same time, your older staff, for as they start to use these tools, forget to connect, how to connect beyond just the logistics of getting everybody where they need to be. Everybody's efficient, but nobody necessarily is close. Now, listen, efficiency isn't evil. Efficiency is a great thing. Technology is not the enemy. AI, I know some churches and some pastors think AI is the enemy. I don't think that AI is the enemy. I think the enemy is sometimes that we've just outforced relationship building to technology and to robots. And if you think it's easy to do that now, wait another six months or a year or five years. It's going to be able to take away just about all those tasks that we do in ministry, but it will never be able to strip out the personal relationships and the connections that we have. You have to schedule relationship time, just like you schedule everything else. Matter of fact, that's really important. Make the first five minutes of every meeting just totally relationship focused. Ban phones during lunch meetings. Create space for the conversations that used to happen just naturally, but they don't anymore. Ask questions that can't be answered with a task, with a text. How are you processing last Sunday service? What's energizing you about this project? What are you learning? Where are you feeling stretched right now? Stop assuming connection will happen automatically because it doesn't. Technology can be very transactional and you can lose the relationship and the personality very quickly. So what does that look like? What does this look like, Todd? Practically speaking. It could just be, according to how far you maybe sunk down into this hole already, could just mean that you need a relationship reboot, right? Institute phone-free Friday afternoons for your staff. Have them put their phone away. Walk to somebody's office instead of sending that Slack message. Replace one weekly email update with a face-to-face conversation. End meetings five minutes early and use that time to actually connect. Ask follow-up questions to the follow-up questions, to the follow-up questions. When somebody says I'm fine, and you sense in your spirit, we talked about yesterday sensing the spirit. You sense in your spirit that they're not fine. Take, drop everything and dig in a little bit deeper. And when somebody shares a struggle, show up in person. Sometimes maybe just even create traditions or workflows that just can't be automated. Things like monthly coffee walks with different team members, quarterly dinners with absolutely no agenda. I mentioned this before when I was an elder. We had monthly elder meetings, but we would also have monthly breakfasts where the only rule was we would meet for breakfast. It was like six o'clock in the morning. The only rule was we're not going to talk church. We're just going to talk about how we're doing in our lives. Incredibly valuable. Bottom line, really, we've been hitting at this all week, but this is where it lands. Technology should enhance relationships, not replace them. Let me repeat that one more time. Your bottom line for today technology, AI, computers, apps, texting, Slack, all of that. Same bucket. Technology should enhance relationships, not replace them. So the challenge this week, have one conversation with a staff member that couldn't have happened over text. Maybe look at your text. Here's a simple way to do it. Maybe look at your text over the past week and look to see which one of those should if I'm gonna take this challenge seriously, which one of those texts should not have been a text? It should have been a quick check-in, a quick phone call, a quick face-to-face face visit. And when you do it, just take some time to connect. I know it's hard just to take a deep breath and connect, but ask them how they're doing. Ask them about their calling, ask them about their family, their fears, their wins. Sit in their office, look them in the eye, listen to their tone, and you're gonna remember what it actually feels like to connect. But your team needs you to be more than just a coordinator. They need you to be more than just the person that tells them where to be and when to be there and sends them a text or a slack message. They need you to be human. And that's something that AI can never automate. I hope this has been helpful for you. Today we're in the middle of a series I'm calling the human touch. Two more days of this, and I hope that you'll join me again tomorrow. Tomorrow, we're gonna be talking about. Oh, let's see, what are we talking about here? Creative problem solving that AI cannot ever touch. You're gonna want to listen, so I hope you'll join me again right here on the Healthy Church Death Podcast. Have a great day.