Deacon

Deacon is a coworker for church leaders, not a search box. Ask it a question or hand it a piece of work — an elder-meeting update, an email to households that look like they are drifting, a summary of what changed this quarter — and it looks up your own figures, reads them, and writes something you can use. It only ever works from a fixed set of lookups we build on the server: attendance, connection and serving totals, giving patterns, forecasts, the care list, care follow-up records, survey results that clear the five-response floor, and community comparison. It cannot run its own queries, and it is told to say plainly when the data cannot answer something.

For anything beyond a quick factual question, Deacon starts by stating a short plan before it touches any data: the goal it understood, the few things it intends to look at in order, and what you will end up with. That plan appears above the answer, so you can tell straight away if it misunderstood the assignment.

While it works, the status line moves in plain language — understanding the request, planning the work, gathering the figures, reading what came back, writing it up. Each lookup appears as its own step ("Looking at attendance trends…", "Checking the care list…") and stays attached to the saved answer, so any admin or pastor can open a step later and see the exact figures Deacon read. Deacon stops looking once it has enough; it never pulls every dataset just because it exists.

When something cannot be retrieved, Deacon says which information it could not get and what that leaves uncertain, then answers from what it does have. It never fills a gap with an invented number, never gives the church an overall score, never names anyone's giving, and never makes a theological judgment — the pastoral decision stays with you.

Campus narrative

What the last year looks like at a campus, or across the whole church: attendance, connection, serving, giving and who lives nearby.

What people are carrying

Themes across the pastoral notes your team has written in the last six months, so you can see what people are struggling with.

Stewardship story

How generosity has moved, where it is concentrated, and which funds are carrying the load.

Care sustainability

Whether the follow-up your team is attempting fits the people carrying it.

Every saved analysis keeps the exact figures behind it. Run the same analysis a year later and Deacon compares the two, describing what moved and what held steady — it will not call a change good or bad on its own.

Anything Deacon writes that you would keep or send is saved under Deacon → Work products: emails, briefings, plans, summaries, talking points. Work products belong to the church, not to whoever asked — any admin or pastor can open one, edit it, mark it final, copy it out or archive it, and the full revision history is kept. Each one links back to the conversation that produced it. Outreach is only ever prepared as an unsent draft for a person to review; Deacon never contacts anyone in your church.

Deacon separates how sure it is. It tells you what your figures actually show, the pattern across them, a possible explanation clearly marked as a hunch, and what your own data simply cannot tell you. Alongside most steps there is a "Show me" link that opens the matching screen with the same period and campus already selected, so you can check any figure yourself.

When the numbers show what changed but not why, Deacon says so and offers to prepare the question worth asking your congregation — the survey builder opens with the question, who to ask and a few suggested questions filled in. Nothing is created or sent until you decide.

Some questions take months rather than one answer. Deacon can open an investigation under Deacon → Investigations: the question, what your figures establish so far, what is still unknown, the next step, and every lookup it made along the way. Ask about it again later and it picks the thread back up instead of starting over. Investigations belong to the church, so any admin or pastor can open one.

Children's ministry is included now too: Deacon can look at how many children are checking in, guests and first-timers, households reached, and whether rooms were staffed, and connect that with what is happening in the rest of the church.

The page itself: Worth knowing and your Saved analyses sit in the left rail. Worth knowing is two to four things Deacon noticed in your recent data — calculated from the same figures as the Overview, never generated — and each one links to the page where you can look closer or drops a matching question into the box. Above the message box, a single "Try asking" idea rotates through suggested questions; tap it to use it. The plus button beside the message box is where the tools live — run a full analysis, put a question or report on a rhythm, check your usage for this period, or add more analyses if you are an admin. Conversations are saved for your church, so any admin or pastor on the account can open one again, pick it back up, or delete it.

Rhythms, under the plus menu, come in two forms. A question of your own — typed in, or carried over from an answer with "Email this on a rhythm" — is looked at again on the schedule you choose and the full written answer arrives by email, with a link to the same answer and its evidence in the app. A saved report runs one of the fixed analyses as before. Choose weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly, the day for a weekly rhythm, and the hour, in your own time zone. Yearly reports are the ones that line year up against year. Questions can be emailed to anyone on your team; when a rhythm reaches beyond Admins and Pastors, that run cannot read private pastoral notes at all. Saved reports stay with Admins and Pastors because some of them draw on those notes, and every list is checked again at send time, so someone who has changed role or left stops receiving it. "Send now" beside a rhythm runs it immediately so you can see what arrives. If your AI credits have run out the run is skipped rather than queued, so nothing is spent without you.

Usage: every church gets a monthly allowance, shown under Usage this period in the plus menu rather than on the page itself. A question costs a small fraction of a full analysis, and Deacon will not start an analysis your allowance cannot finish. When you are nearly out you will see a short note under the message box; an admin can add more from the plus button, and anything purchased does not expire while the monthly allowance still resets on the 1st.

Only Admins and Pastors can open Deacon, because parts of its work draw on private pastoral notes and giving patterns.

Where to click: Deacon, and Deacon → Work products