Knowing your community. Knowing the moment.
Kairos Intelligence helps the elders of Churches of Christ see two things clearly: the community that surrounds the building, and the congregation inside it.
You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time? Luke 12:56, ESV
Jesus ends that question on one Greek word, and it is the word we are named for. Kairos is the decisive moment, the appointed season. Not time as duration — that is chronos: the hours on a clock, the date on a calendar.
The rebuke is not that His hearers lacked information. They had the same sky everyone else had. It is that they could read the weather and could not read the moment.
The same ability is praised in the Old Testament. When the tribes came to Hebron to make David king, every one of them was counted by what it could carry into a fight — shields, spears, thousands of seasoned troops. One was not. Issachar sent the smallest number on the list and no weapons at all: “men who had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do” (1 Chronicles 12:32, ESV). They were counted by what they could see. And the verse does not stop at seeing — it ends in a course of action.
That is the whole of what we do, and its limit. Both services are built specifically for Churches of Christ — elders, deacons, ministers and evangelists; the New Testament pattern for the local church; the vocabulary the church actually uses. Neither assumes a pastoral staff model, a denominational structure, or the borrowed language of other traditions. And neither one decides anything. They put what a congregation cannot easily see on its own in front of the eldership that has to decide, and then get out of the way.
The longer answer — Issachar, the two Greek words, and the three ways a congregation can misread its own moment — is on Understanding the times.
One looks outward, at the community surrounding your building. The other looks inward, at the congregation itself. They are separate services, and a congregation may take either one on its own. Together they answer the two halves of one question.
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Research on the community within about ten miles of your building, and evangelistic campaigns designed for the people who actually live there.
For a congregation asking: how much do we know about the people within ten miles of our building, and what are we doing to reach them?
A cycle the congregation runs
A structured reading of where the congregation stands across seven areas of its life, taken by the leadership and the members together.
For a congregation asking: where are we actually strong, where are we quiet, and do the leadership and the members see it the same way?
A congregation can know its community well and still not know itself — and it can know itself well and have no idea who moved in down the road. The two questions are genuinely different, they are answered by different work, and neither is a prerequisite for the other.
They are priced and run separately for that reason. A congregation wanting only the weekday brief is not asked to run an assessment first, and a congregation working through the maturity model is not signed up to receive campaign portfolios it did not ask for.
Where a congregation takes both, each supplies something the other cannot. The assessment reads Evangelism and Multiplication & Sending as two of its seven areas, and the outreach service is where a congregation acts on what it finds there. It runs the other way too: a campaign portfolio is only as good as the congregation’s capacity to carry it, and the assessment is what tells an eldership plainly what that capacity is. Research aimed at a congregation stretched thinner than it knew will sit undone, however good the research was.
That is why the two sit under one name. Understanding of the times, and knowing what to do — an eldership deciding well needs the community outside and the congregation inside in view at once.
David spent his career in information technology, working with several of the largest corporations in the world, and has recently retired from it. Alongside that work he has preached and taught God’s word in Churches of Christ for more than forty‑five years — in California, Pennsylvania, Texas and Alabama. He now puts that technical career to work on practical problems for the church, and this work grew out of that.
Harry is a serial entrepreneur whose love for God and for the church drives his commitment to strengthening congregations wherever he finds them. He is a constant encourager to the people around him.
David and Harry both worship at the Riverchase Church of Christ in Birmingham, Alabama. Between us the aim is a plain one: to strengthen evangelism among Churches of Christ.
We are glad to meet with elders or a minister to walk through either service, and to produce samples for your own congregation so the leadership can see exactly what arrives.
