Introduction

Church small groups are one of the most consistent contexts for spiritual growth, yet the tools built to support them treat communication as the primary problem to solve. Platforms like Subsplash, Planning Center, and Realm do a reasonable job of helping groups coordinate — scheduling events, sending messages, managing rosters. What they don't do is design for formation: the slower, harder work of shaping how people relate to one another, to their church, and to the world around them. That gap is the starting point for Twelve.

The faith tech landscape is crowded at the surface but thin underneath. Most platforms compete on feature breadth — giving, events, messaging, directories — and church administrators evaluate them primarily on integration and ease of adoption. The result is a category that optimizes for operational efficiency rather than spiritual outcome. The opportunity isn't a missing feature; it's a missing philosophy about what the software is actually trying to do.

Discovery & Definition

Can an app inspire whole groups of people to become more generous? To serve others? To become more like Christ? Those are the questions I aimed to answer as I started defining what exactly Twelve should do. With these things in mind, I began drafting a Product Brief that would serve as tentative North Star as a navigated the realities of the problem I’d identified. Initially, my design philosophy looked like this:

1. Spiritual growth together is the priority. Twelve is a tool that helps leaders lead and members feel like they belong. This tool is meant to help people grow spiritually by enhancing their experience of Christian fellowship.

2. Communal service to inspire personal service. Twelve aims to make it easy for group leaders to invite their members to participate in service. These opportunites may be determined by the church admin or by the leaders themselves. And the app offers not just a way to coordinate, but also a unique way to experience and reflect on them together through group visibility into a shared timeline where pictures, recordings, and responses all live. Through greater opportunity to experience service together, we aim to cultivate the heart posture that leads to more personal service.

3. Communal generosity to inspire personal generosity. Twelve gives users the opportunity to participate in generosity in unique, intimate ways. Groups can unite to contribute toward focused, strictly church-determined financial needs (e.g. Raise $3,500 to send every kid in our church's youth group to summer camp this year). Through increased exposure to the joy of giving together, Twelve aims to cultivate the heart posture that leads to greater personal generosity.

4. Modular by design. Twelve is the small group layer that nests inside of whatever system a church already uses. It augments; it does not replace.

So the purpose of the app at this stage read something like this: cultivate spiritual growth by encouraging service and generosity, and make it all easy to integrate with existing church tools. This was a strong early concept that, as you’ll see, evolved rapidly as I learned more about the problem I was solving. Two things specifically dramatically impacted the trajectory of product: 1. The deeply fraught challenge of asking for and handling people’s money and 2. The variety of actual opinions and behaviors of the people who I intended would use it.

The Money Problem

For one thing, asking for people’s money is a challenge in any setting, but it’s especially so in church. There are theological and ethical constraints that influence the appropriateness of timing, tone, frequency, messaging, and more. In order for Twelve to maintain spiritual integrity, getting this right was of profound importance. Beyond that, if Twelve was going to handle people’s contributions, it would legally make us a financial institution which comes with a heaping burden of regulations that need to be considered and designed for. The Fund feature, a way for group members to anonymously contribute toward small-scale church-defined financial goals, is an ambitious and inspiring idea: anonymity respected privacy, church-defined goals maintained governance and trust, and groups could experience generosity together. Ultimately, the mission to cultivate generosity using Twelve would need to adapt to the challenges of theology, ethics, and industry regulation.

User Research

In the product brief, we identified three user segments: church admin, group leaders, and group members. Church admin could use Twelve to see which groups exist, how many members it has, demographic information, and which groups are able to accept new members. Leaders see the most practical benefits from the product. Leaders could use it to create a group, invite members, schedule events, and lead conversations that are then documented in the app. Members benefit from steamlined group communication that includes tools that help the group reach deeper levels of discussion, see upcoming events, as well as contribute to and revisit a shared history of the group’s time together. With these user groups identified and some feature offerings loosely defined, I designed a research plan that aimed to answer these core research questions:

1. What do people hope to get from small groups — and do they actually get it?

2. How do groups form and operate in practice?

3. What does it take to lead well — and what gets in the way?

4. What tools are groups currently using, and where do they fall short?

5. What are the biggest challenges pastors face in forming disciples and how do they currently respond to them?

I Interpreted each of these research questions to be better suited to each of the user tiers before recruting participants for interviews. The interviews revealed some incredible themes that caused me to rethink how I can safely expect people to use the product and what it ought to do for them in the first place.

Humility is the non-negotiable quality of a good group leader

Every interviewee named humility independently and with specificity. Not as a generic virtue, but as the thing that separates a leader who creates genuine community.

"They don't need to be seen or heard. They're not leading because they think they should — they're serving."
— J.W.

"Good group leaders are listeners. They are putting the people in their group ahead of themselves."
— M.M.

Connection beyond the gathering is the missing ingredient

Members and admin converge on the same gap from different angles. Mark frames it theologically — frequency of connection transforms. Briana and James feel it as a lived absence.

"I wish we could talk outside of gatherings. I wish we could do more things together as friends."
— B.L.

"If I was at a church that didn't have that deeper community, I'd feel detached."
— J.W.

"If all I did was talk to my wife for an hour and a half on Sunday, it wouldn't be much of a relationship."
— M.M.

Intrinsic motivation is the goal

Formation can't be imposed. The goal at every level — getting members to join, leaders to step up, people to serve — is cultivating a genuine want, not compliance.

"It's not about getting them to just show up on Serve Day and do it so they can move on. It's about getting them to the place where they want to do that and feel excited about it."
— M.M.

Groups are fulfilling the wrong expectation

Both members joined hoping for something specific — spiritual depth for Briana, family-level intimacy for James — and are getting something adjacent but not quite it. The gap is quiet and unspoken.

"Community yes. Spiritual knowledge, not really."
— B.L.

"The small group isn't everything that I'd hope it would be."
— J.W.

Psychological safety is essential

Briana's experience of her own group is shaped almost entirely by fear of being exposed as less knowledgeable. The formation can't happen if people are too self-conscious to participate. Creating safety is the leader's first job.

"I feel the enemy saying 'keep your mouth shut' because I'm worried I might say something wrong."
— B.L.

Family is the standard; group is the gap

James reaches for the word "family" repeatedly. It's not a metaphor — it's the actual aspiration. And his most pointed insight is that health is contagious: you can't form a healthy community by grouping struggling people together.

"Lumping unhealthy people together isn't as effective as inviting unhealthy people into a healthy group."
— J.W.

"A small group is how you join the church beyond just showing up for service."
— J.W.

Peak experiences ignite; consistent community sustains

James's formation began with a singular, undeniable encounter with God in a home church. But it required ongoing community to become a life. The spark and the fuel are different — and both are necessary.

"I experienced God in that group which changed my life forever. It shattered my reality. I was agnostic — didn't believe in spirits and miracles."
— J.W.

I have more interviews to do. Insights coming soon…