In the third episode of Connected, Ben Hollebon takes a deliberate swerve from the promised tools-and-approaches episode to talk about something more fundamental: how the Digital Transformation Programme is being run.

Four operating principles shape every decision the programme makes. The programme listens first, and keeps listening — fourteen Chair-level conversations across the Connexion to date, plus a wider mass-engagement layer that's now bringing voices in from districts the conversations haven't reached. It works in the open — drafts, thinking and decisions all out on the website as they happen, not when they're polished. It uses the tools that are available, including AI, in ways it can be honest about. And it's building everything to last beyond any one of us.

Ben names two pastoral concerns about AI authenticity that District Chairs raised independently this week, and explains why those concerns belong inside the programme, not outside it. He sets out the wider Church conversation on AI ethics — across the AI Working Group, and into Conference. And he shares the question that one colleague put to him in five plain words — "we ship it, and… then what?" — and why it shapes the way the programme designs everything it builds.

This episode is for anyone who wants to understand the working method behind the programme, and how to engage with it.

At the end of the last episode I said the next one would be about the tools and approaches we're exploring.

What a simpler way of managing a circuit might look like.

What we're thinking about for church websites.

How the Connexion might come to know itself better.

And then I sat down to record that episode and I realised something.

The more important thing at this point in the programme isn't what we're building.

We're early. Plenty of what I described today will change as we keep listening.

The thing that's worth your 15 minutes is how we're going about it.

Because there are some things about the way we're working that are genuinely different.

And they matter.

So this episode is a deliberate swerve from what I promised.

We'll get to the tools next time.

Today I want to talk about the working method.

This is Connected, the audio series about the Methodist Church's digital transformation programme.

I'm Ben Holleben and this is Working Differently.

The Connexional Council backed this programme because the administrative weight on churches had outgrown the tools we have to manage it.

The hope is straightforward.

Free people up so they can spend more of their time on ministry and mission.

And less on the parts of the job that drain the joy out of it.

That's a meaningful piece of work.

It's also a piece of work that could be done in a number of different ways.

You could buy a big system and roll it out across the Connexion.

You could write a long strategy and consult on it for a year.

You could hire a team of consultants.

None of those is wrong, but none of those is what we're doing.

What we're doing instead is what I want to describe today.

Four things really.

They sound small individually, but together they shape every decision the programme makes.

The first one is the one I've talked about most, so I'll be brief.

The listening exercise isn't a phase that finishes and then we start building.

It's the operating model.

We've now had chair-level listening conversations with 13 of the 23 districts.

Some of those have been lawn sit-downs with district chairs.

Three of them landed on a single Tuesday.

Some of them have been with circuit administrators, the people who actually keep the show on the road.

Some of them have been with local church volunteers, with a digital inclusion specialist,

with a youth and children's worker doing digital ministry on a shoestring.

Some of those conversations took an hour.

One took nearly two.

What I keep finding is that the picture only really comes alive when you hear from the people doing the work day to day.

The view from the centre is never quite the view from a circuit office on a Tuesday morning,

or from a district chair trying to keep an eye on 20 churches, or from a member who can't read the page they're trying to use.

So, earlier this month, we opened up a new way for anyone in the Connexion to tell us what they think,

without needing an invitation, without needing a meeting in the diary.

There's now a form on the website, methodist.org.uk/dtp-haveyoursay.

Please go and fill this form out.

Please encourage others to go and fill this form out,

because it allows us to hear from so many more people in a really accessible way.

In the first week, 33 people wrote in from 16 different districts.

85% of them said yes, please come back to me going forward.

That's a really warm signal for us.

It tells us the channel is doing what it was built to do, which is to reach people the conversations alone don't reach.

Sheffield, for example, is a district that hadn't been part of the conversation up to that point.

Two voices from Sheffield came in through the form in week one, and it gave us a way back in.

The principle is straightforward.

The programme is being shaped by the people it's meant to serve.

Not consulted, but shaped.

The second is the one I find people are most surprised by.

Most programmes inside organisations work in private until they have something polished to show.

The reasons make sense.

You want the thing to be good before you put it in front of people.

You want to manage expectations.

You don't want to embarrass yourself with an early version.

We're trying not to do that.

Almost everything the programme is thinking about is published as we think it.

The programme update page on the Methodist Church website, the workstream pages, this podcast.

Drafts that go to the Steering Group are usually live on the website before they're live in a meeting.

Why? Two reasons.

First, because the Connexion is enormous and the only way to keep enough people informed to actually contribute is to keep the picture out in public all the time.

Second, and this bit matters more, because trust is a function of consistency.

If you can see how the thinking has changed over the last few months, you can judge whether to take the next thing seriously.

If everything appears finished and polished and final, you have nothing to compare against.

So if you ever want to look at where the programme has got you on something, the answer is almost always it's on the website or it's in the next podcast.

We haven't got it perfect.

There's plenty I haven't got round to publishing yet and plenty I've published that needs an update.

But the principle is nothing is being built behind closed doors.

The third is one that I want to spend a bit longer on because I think it deserves a careful version.

And it's the one that's most live this week in a way that I want to talk about openly.

Programs like this used to be done by teams of people, a director, a couple of project managers, business analysts, technical specialists, designers, communication leads.

That's how digital transformation has typically been resourced in organisations the size of the Methodist Church.

This programme is being run differently. At the moment, there's me in this role.

And that's it.

Now, there's a wider community of colleagues that I work very closely with across the Connexional team who help with specific bits as they come up.

But it's a very small core than the kind of programme would usually have.

And what makes that workable is the tools that we're using.

And one of those tools is AI.

I want to be clear about what I mean and what I don't mean.

I'm not talking about something that runs the programme on autopilot or something that decides what we're going to do or something that writes things and sends them off without a human in the loop.

The decisions, the conversations, the relationships, the judgments, those are mine or made together with colleagues across the Connexional team.

None of that is delegated.

What AI does is what computers have always done, just a bit better.

It helps me read across hundreds of pages of conversation notes and pull out the patterns.

It helps me draft so I can iterate faster on something that needs to be clear.

It helps me investigate if I want to understand what other organisations have done with their digital giving or what the Methodist Church in New Zealand are working on.

I can ask and get back a useful answer in minutes instead of days.

It supports the thinking, it doesn't replace it.

The reason I want to name this openly rather than quietly use it in the background is twofold.

First, because using these tools well is one of the things that makes the programme runnable at this scale and pretending it isn't would be dishonest.

Second, because I think the questions about how AI should and shouldn't be used in church life are real and important.

And the way to engage with those questions is to be transparent about what we're doing, not to hide it.

I'll say something specific about that second part because one of those chair-level conversations this week landed on the same concern.

One chair raised a worry about the combination of AI and other pressures which might push the church inward rather than outward.

That's a really honest pastoral concern about authenticity, not an abstract one.

It's the kind of concern the programme has to take seriously, both in what we build and in how we talk about what we use.

There's a longer conversation about all this happening across the church right now in the Connexional team, in the AI Working Group and what they take into conference.

That's the right place for the doctrinal and ethical questions.

What I can promise here is that the way we use these tools in the programme is open, that the human judgement is human and that we'll keep talking about it as we go.

The fourth principle is the one I'm most deliberate about and I think the most important.

A common failure mode for programmes like this is they become dependent on the person running them.

The director knows where everything is, holds it all in their head, makes the decisions and when eventually the role changes hands or the team shape moves on, the programme either wobbles or falls over.

I've watched that happen in other places. It's a bad outcome and it's avoidable.

So from the start, this programme has been designed not to do that.

Everything we know is written down somewhere others can find.

Decisions are logged with the reasons attached.

The thinking behind each workstream sits on paper, not just in someone's head.

So that whoever picks this work up next, in whatever team shape, can actually pick it up.

There's a longer piece of work sitting alongside all of this called sustainable build practice.

The question it tries to answer is one I keep asking myself and one a colleague put back to me recently in five plain words.

We ship it and then what?

Meaning every digital thing the programme launches becomes, on day one, something that has to be maintained.

Who maintains it?

Where does the funding come from in 2027 and 2028 to keep it going on?

What's the route to retire something that stopped being useful before it quietly falls into disrepair?

Now those are unglamorous questions. Most programmes don't ask them seriously.

We're asking them now, while we still have time to design good answers.

The deeper reason matters.

The Methodist Church has been around for nearly 300 years in certain forms.

Whatever this programme builds out ought to fit into that timescale honestly.

Designed to be picked up by other people in other contexts long after the people who built it have rotated through.

That's the test. Not is this clever today, but will this still be useful in ten years time when it's nobody's pet project anymore?

What does this all amount to then?

Four things. We listen first and we keep listening.

We work in the open. We use the tools that are available, including AI, in ways we can be honest about.

And we're building it to last beyond any one of us.

Now none of these are revolutionary on their own. Plenty of programmes do one or two of them.

What's a bit different here is doing all four together and being deliberate about it.

If you want to summarise what I'd hope a Methodist member or minister or volunteer would take away from this episode,

it would be this is a programme that's trying to deserve your trust, not just ask for it.

You can see how it works. You can join in. The tools we build will be tested with people like you.

And if something doesn't help, we'll change it or stop.

If you've got a perspective on any of this, what you want from a programme like this, what's worked or not worked in your own context,

or just one thing about Methodist life that a better digital tool could make easier,

there are a few ways in. The form is at methodist.org.uk/dtp-haveyoursay

or you can email me at [email protected]

In the next episode, I'll come back to the tools, properly this time.

What we're thinking about for circuit management. What's happening with church websites.

The early work on a potential Methodist mobile app.

And the wider question, which we've started to open up properly in the last week or two,

of whether the right answer is for one app or a small family of them.

Less of the working method, more of the working.

For now, thank you for listening and thank you again to everyone who's given the programme their time and their honesty over the last few weeks.

We've now been able to speak to people across all 23 districts. We've had over 250 survey responses.

We've had more than 100 people in face to face conversations.

And we've had over 24 substantive listening exercises held with different groups of people.

This is being built on what you've told me by people you can hold to account in the open.

That is the working method and it's the right one for this programme.

I'm Ben Hollebon and this is Connected.

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