In the fifth episode of Connected, Ben Hollebon marks a milestone: the publication of the programme's Master Discovery Report.

In June, the Digital Transformation Programme published the full, single record of everything it heard during its discovery phase — every listening conversation, every survey and group, and research into what has and hasn't worked elsewhere. It went up on the Methodist website for anyone to read, and was sent directly to everyone who took part. This episode is a walk through what that listening surfaced.

Ben starts with the scale of it — over 100 in-depth conversations, more than 300 survey voices, seventeen of the twenty-three districts reached at Chair level, and all twenty-three engaged in some way. Then he sets out the report's five headline findings, each one traced back to what real people actually said. People are the glue holding disconnected systems together. The church on our screens isn't always the church we hold on record — a gap of integration, not knowledge. Compliance is eating the time meant for mission — the weight and the fragmentation of it, never the duty of care underneath. The Connexion is already adapting, with paid lay "operations" roles appearing in five districts independently. And adoption, not technology, is the hard part.

He's honest about what the report doesn't yet capture — younger voices, ordinary church members, Black-majority and diaspora congregations, and four districts not reached for a direct conversation — and about what happens now: the move from discovery into design, framed by five areas the evidence points toward, offered as possibilities to shape rather than promises. This episode is for anyone who wants to hear what the whole Church said when it was asked — and what the programme intends to do with it.

A few weeks ago, something landed that this whole programme has been building towards

since the day it started - the Discovery Report. The full write-up of everything you've told us.

You might have already seen it. It went up on the website in the middle of June for anyone to read.

And if you sat down and gave us an hour of your time somewhere over the last few months,

it came to you directly. It went out to everyone who took part.

So this might be me telling you about something already sitting in your inbox.

If so, thank you for reading it. And if you haven't yet,

that's the one thing I'd ask you to do after this episode.

At the end of the last episode, I told you the report was landing any day.

Well, it's landed. And it felt worth stopping to mark that properly, because it's a genuine

milestone. And because the report is the foundation everything else in this programme now rests on.

So that's what this episode is. Not the tools this time. Not the method.

This one is about what you actually told us. Gathered up, written down, and put in one place

where the whole church can see it. And I want to be careful about how I say this next part,

because it really matters. We didn't sit down in an office and decide what we were going to find.

We went and listened across many months to as many people and as many kinds of people as we

could reach. And then we wrote down what came back. The report isn't our opinion of what the

Methodist Church is. It's the Methodist Church's account of itself, its frustrations, its brilliance,

its exhaustion, its hope, handed back to it. My job was mostly to hold still and write it all

down faithfully. This is Connected, the audio series about the Methodist Church's Digital

Transformation Programme. I'm Ben Hollebon, and this is what you told us.

First, the shape of the listening. Before the findings, let me tell you how much listening

sits underneath them, because it's the thing that gives me confidence to say any of this out loud.

Over the last few months, we've had more than 100 conversations in real depth. An hour, sometimes

longer, one-to-one or in small groups. More than 300 people took part through the surveys on top

of that. And we opened a public channel so that anyone in the Connexion could tell us what they

thought without waiting to be asked. And hundreds more came in that way. We've got round to 17 of

our 23 districts for a proper conversation at chair or senior leadership level. And in one

way or another, every single one of the 23 districts has fed into this. We spoke with

superintendents, circuit administrators, property officers, youth and children's workers,

treasurers, learning network staff, lay volunteers keeping the show on the road,

and people right outside the church looking in wondering how to find their way to us.

I say all that not to impress you with the numbers. I say it because when the same thing comes back to

you from a superintendent in one part of the country and an administrator in another and a

survey response from someone you'll never meet, none of them having spoken to each other, you stop

treating it as an anecdote and you start treating it as the truth. That's what this report is built

on. Not the loudest voices but the most consistent ones. So here are the five things that came through

clearly enough from enough independent voices that I'll say them with confidence.

One, people are the glue. The first one is the loudest and once you've heard it

you can't stop seeing it. Across almost every conversation the same picture came back.

Somewhere in every circuit, every district, there is a person, usually more than one, quietly holding

the whole thing together by hand. They keep the membership records and the compliance and the

property paperwork and the Gift Aid and the statistics across a spreadsheet here, a system

there, a folder somebody set up years ago, an email chain and honestly their own memory.

None of these things talk to each other. So a person becomes the thing that makes them

talk to each other. People are the glue. One person put it really well. They said I want

to enter data once, not the same information over and over into system after system, none of which

know the other exist. Just one. And here's the quiet danger in it. When the knowledge lives in

one person's head or in a spreadsheet only they know is there, it walks out of the door the day

they do. I heard that story more than once. A person leaves a role and a circuit suddenly

discovers that half of how it ran lived in a document nobody else could find. So the loudest

single request across the whole listening wasn't for anything clever. It was three words

in a hundred different accents. Bring it together. One place, one way in. The right things in front

of the right person without having to hold it all together yourself. Two, the church on our screens

isn't always the church we hold on record. The second one is about information and I need to

be careful here because it's easy to overstate it and I don't want to. Let me be plain about what

this is and isn't. It is not that we don't know our own church. We do. Local churches, circuits

and districts keep good records of themselves. The trouble is that those records don't yet fully

join up with the picture the rest of the world sees and where they don't it shows. So a minister

appears online as still serving a circuit they left a year ago. A church that closed comes back

to life on the website. A building that was sold is still there on Find a Church Near You ready to

send someone to a locked door. We found several hundred records in the public directory that no

longer match anything on the ground. A lot of them tied to districts that stop existing after recent

mergers. The information isn't wrong because anyone was careless it's out of step because the systems

were built at different times for different reasons and were never properly introduced to

one another. The gap in other words is one of integration not knowledge. And the place people

feel it the most is search. This was honestly the single most raised frustration in the whole

exercise. One district chair said it better than I could finding anything is rubbish and every time

there's a new updated website you still can't find anything and sometimes it's just quicker to Google

it. Three different chairs in three different districts said a version of that to me in the

same fortnight none of them having compared notes. When someone searching for their nearest Methodist

church or a minister hunting for the right form gives up on our own site and goes to Google

that tells you something you need to hear. None of this is doom it's fixable but you fix it

by joining things up underneath patiently so that what someone sees matches what's actually true.

That's slow unglamorous work it's also the work that makes everything else believable.

Three compliance is eating the time that was meant for mission.

The third one is the one with the most feeling in it if you ask me what the single hottest pain

of the whole listening was it's this when I ask leaders chairs superintendents what they'd change

if time and money were no object they didn't reach first for a shiny new app they reached for relief.

One said it almost exactly like this we are burdened by compliance and administration

and we want to be doing more missional work but we don't even know what that looks like anymore

because we haven't got time to think about it. Another put a number on it the administration

they said had become the 80% and it should be the other way round. Now I want to be really careful

here because this is easy to hear wrong nobody I spoke to thinks the requirements themselves are

wrong safeguarding matters getting property consents right matter the duty of care under

all of it is real and good and nobody wants to throw it away the problem isn't the requirement

the problem is the volume and the fragmentation of it the sheer weight of it and the fact that

it's scattered across so many places that just keeping track of it is a job in itself

it's the load that's displacing mission not the duty. You hear it in the small things someone

described the property consents process as feeling like starting from scratch every single time

because you only touch it once in a blue moon. Somebody else described a form so rigid that it

made them feel their word slightly demeaning because it wouldn't let them do the steps in

anything but the order it's preferred. Someone in Scotland pointing out reasonably that a form built

around English law doesn't quite fit their part of the Connexion at all. None of this is a complaint

about doing things properly it's a grief about time time that people came into ministry and into

service to spend on something else entirely. Four the Connexion is already adapting.

The fourth one I didn't quite expect and it's changed how I think about the whole program.

We are quietly and locally already adapting to the loss of volunteers as it's got harder to find

people who can give their time freely circuits have started of their own accord to pay lay people to

carry the operational load. Somebody whose job is in effect to be the glue I described earlier

but as an actual role with a salary rather than a heroic volunteer running themselves into the

ground. What struck me is this same pattern surfaced in five different districts completely

independently nobody rolled it out no committee decided it it grew up in five places at once

because the same pressure produced the same answer. One person described their own job to me

and then said this is nothing like the job I applied for the role had quietly grown to fill

the gap. That matters enormously for what we build and here's why it would be easy to design

everything for the tired volunteer giving up an evening a week and we absolutely must serve that

person but there's now also a growing group of people doing this work as their actual job

day in day out who need proper tools that stand up to real daily use. We have to design for both

and crucially we have to design with the way the Connexion is already changing not against it

not pretending it isn't happening. The church is already solving this problem in its own way

our job is to help not to override. Five adoption is harder than technology.

The fifth one is the one I want the whole program to take to heart because it's the one that will

decide whether any of this works at all. Technology is difficult but it's not the hardest part and

never was. The hard part is whether people will actually pick it up and use it. Two things came

through together and they pull in opposite directions which is exactly why we have to hold

both. The first is that our volunteer base on the whole older and more tired than any single

conversation quite captures. People carrying a lot for a long time running low. The second

and this surprised me is that in places there's far more capability out there than we'd assumed.

People with real professional skill quietly getting on with it in a corner of a circuit somewhere.

So the challenge isn't people can't it's more subtle than that. One digital champion described

it perfectly people want it to happen they just don't want to be the one who has to do it and the

fallback is always that someone will have a grandchild who can help. Willing but understandably

unable and not always sure they're allowed to be a beginner. And here's the sharp edge of it

a bad first experience would end the whole thing. If the first time somebody opens whatever we build

it's confusing or it's slow or it makes them feel stupid they will close it and they will never come

back and no amount of it being good underneath will win them round again. So everything has to

be built for the person on their one evening a week first before it's built for anyone else.

Adoption isn't the sort of thing you sort out at the end it's the design question from the

very beginning. So those are the five and before I tell you what happens next I want to be honest

about the edges of this because a report you can't see the limits of isn't one you should fully trust.

There are voices we haven't heard enough of yet we've got to 17 districts for a proper conversation

at a leadership level not all 23 and the people who came forward were understandably the people

carrying the administrative weight which means we've heard less so far from ordinary church

members from people under 40 and from our Black-majority congregations that's not a footnote it's

the next piece of work. The listening channel stays open precisely so that picture keeps

filling in and I'd love this episode to be a nudge for some of those voices to come and find us.

So what happens now for the last few months we've been in what we call discovery the listening with

the report published we're moving into the next phase which is design turning what we heard into

what we might build the evidence points fairly consistently towards these five areas these are

possibilities we're going to explore not promises there's a ladder here and I want us always to be

clear which rung we're standing on what we heard then what we're thinking about then only much

later what we actually deliver today we're just off the first rung the five things briefly one

an integrated front door one place to go the right things by role instead of a scatter of logins

two data that matches the reality on the ground so what people see is actually true

three compliance relief easing the weight and the fragmentation without ever weakening the care

underneath four designing for the people actually doing the work volunteer and paid alike with

adoption leading and five carrying on working in the open and carrying on listening because

that's how trust gets built and kept and one honest thing about all of it we cannot do everything

not in the time we've got not in the budget we've got so part of the design phase is going to be

choosing deliberately and out loud the things that would make the biggest difference rather than the

things that are quick and easy I'd rather tell you that now than pretend we can do it all that's the

report or rather that's a doorway into it because the whole thing is far richer than I can do

justice in 20 minutes and it's written for you to read all 38 000 words of it let me say the most

important thing last everything I've just described came from you every finding every one of those five

traces straight back to a real person giving us their time and their honesty the report is

in the end just the Methodist church listening to itself and I count it a real privilege to have

been in the room for so much of it if you took part thank you genuinely you'll have the report

already and I hope reading it you recognize your own words in there somewhere handled with care

if you haven't read it yet it's on the website free for anyone and if you're one of the voices

we haven't heard enough from yet someone younger someone in the pew rather than the church office

someone in a congregation we've reached less of please come and talk to us the form is at

methodist.org.uk slash dtp hyphen have your say or you can email me directly at digitaltransformation

at methodistchurch.org.uk this is a milestone not a finish line the listening carries on

and the promise I made at the start of all of this still holds we build on what you tell us

in the open by people you can hold to account. Thank you for listening and thank you for talking

I'm Ben Hollebon and this is Connected.