Dillon Kimmel for Messaging/Texting Story

Speaker: Dillon Kimmel, Lead Pastor, Salt Community Church

Dillon Kimmel: Hi, my name is Dillon Kimmel and I'm the lead pastor of Salt Community Church, a brand new church plant in rural North Carolina.

Dillon Kimmel: Hi, my name is Dillon Kimmel and I'm the lead pastor of Salt Community Church, a brand new church plant in rural North Carolina.

Dillon Kimmel: Hi, my name is Dillon Kimmel and I'm the lead pastor of Salt Community Church, a brand new church plant in rural North Carolina.

Dillon Kimmel: Why did we start using glue? Um This is a really good question. Actually, we had had a texting service. Um We really weren't all that happy with it and we were looking for other options, good ways to communicate and something that was comprehensive and met a bunch of different needs. And one of my mentors had mentioned, hey, I heard about this free church texting thing through glue. You should check it out. Nobody else had looked at it yet. Um And basically the same day that we started looking at it and we met with the blue team, we fell in love, we knew that they were outlining was everything that we wanted. Um And truthfully, we were still a little bit skeptical. And so we started putting it in play and immediately we started seeing it get used in the functionality of it. Prayer requests started coming in. Um And we started just seeing how all the different features of it were, everything that we wanted and everything that we really needed in this season to help grow our ministry.

Dillon Kimmel: So I use glue for a variety of things within the church. One, we communicate work projects that are going around the property as a church plant. We communicate events. We send out Sunday morning encouragement to wake up and get to church. We send out our reading plan. We use the prayer texting service glue really kind of covers all of our ministries in some capacity. We can update on children's ministry, we can update follow up questions after the messages. We send out links and picture updates as we outfit new spaces and we make new facility upgrades. Um And it's a great way for people to get involved that maybe you're too busy during the week to be a part of our work days or to be coming to the church to see things happening. We can continuously connect with the body throughout the week. And we realize especially in the area and the demographic that we're not. Everybody checks their email, it gets pushed into the junk folder or shoved to the side. But everybody in this consumer society has the time to quick check their phone. And so these text messages help us stay engaged. With a body of believers. But also as a family, it's a great way for us to communicate, for people to respond and pulls an idea whether it be about merch or outreach events or just basic needs that we see in the community and that we want to fill.

Dillon Kimmel: Glue really has had a significant impact on Salt Community Church. One is as we continue to budget for years of ministry. And um you know, we're only a couple weeks old. We've only been in North Carolina eight months having a texting service. That's this comprehensive at no cost is a huge benefit to us. We're able to do so much that it really almost pays us because we have an opportunity to save the money that we would normally be spending on the texting service. But also this level of engagement really really helps us reach and connect with the body. What we did is we took the prayer request Q R code and we made them into business cards and they don't really have any of our own promotional material on them. One side just says, how can we pray for you? The other side is the Q R code and we just try to scatter those in the community because prayer is not something that we're trying to market or capitalize on, but it's something that we believe so heavily and it's a way that we can battle and we can intercede and we can be praying for our community as a whole in our community individually, for people. So that would be one of the largest impacts we've had is, is being able to mobilize our prayer ministries through texting.

Dillon Kimmel: Advice that I would give other church leaders. We had already established a phone number and started with a different texting service prior to finding glue. And that truthfully can be really hard to conceptualize how do we change? Right. We've got to republish a number or maybe our number is already out there. So one of the things that we did is we rolled out glue on the back side of things started building it up, starting getting some of our prompt set into place how it would function. And then we began rolling it out rather than thinking just because we had to glue just, we had glue right now. We would just have to switch right away. But whether we rather we kind of rolled it out, we started sending out our communication from it and started to build in that response and really that transition went seamless. Um The other thing that I would give advice on church leaders for church leaders as far as glue goes is just go with it. It truly has changed so much for us, the functionality that my leaders, my staff people have different areas of access to it. And things that they're in charge of. And that's been so helpful for us, especially as we pray for people. We have women's ministry director and she kind of leads that section of it. And so she's able to connect with the women who send in prayer requests and respond to those. I'll assign some of our other prayer requests to different people on our prayer team. And it's just a way for us to help delegate and share. And so to be able to have access to that and glue makes it so seamless and so easy. And it's one of those things that I, I don't know that I can sing the praises and the and just truthfully the blessing that it is, especially as a church plant and for any of our churches that are going through a revitalization or church planting or maybe just trying to take your church to the next level. Having a streamlined, easy texting platform is one of those things that helps us reach the next generation. It helps us communicate better, helps the church be more open and honest and welcoming. And people can sign up for those text messages that aren't even going to your church. And so maybe you want to send out a clip from the message, you want to engage that way so that people can kind of window shop through your texting service. It's just a multi used platform and truthfully, I don't think that there's anything else like what glue offers on the market?

Laurel Swanson: Hi, my name is laurel Swanson. I am at Lutheran church for the cross in Altoona Iowa, which is just outside of the capital city of des Moines. Our most recent glue story that really struck me was a young lady who reached out because she was struggling with depression, anxiety, um some trauma in her life. And when I asked her if she had any resources to connect with first of all through her school to get some counseling resources, she mentioned that she was home schooled and wasn't aware of how to connect with other resources. So I sent her some information about community based resources but also invited her to our uh brain health night which was actually something we'd already scheduled for that coming week with our youth department and our youth leader had coordinated with lots of professionals to come in and just bring some hands on workshops for the kids in our youth program. But it was open to the community. So I invited her to come. She came, she brought her mom, they didn't stay for very long because her anxiety got the better of her, which is too bad. But she said when she left that she wanted to come back again and try another another youth night. So somebody from the community connected um with a real practical tool that we had available to her and now hopefully she'll connect um with more peers and people that her her age dealing with the same things. So that was a great connection for us through explorers