I Know What It Feels Like to Be Invisible at Church
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Falling Through the Cracks
I know what it feels like to be invisible at church.
As a kid, I fell through the cracks. I wanted to get involved, to use my gifts and talents, but I didn't know the "right" people. The processes just weren't there. I got put to the side, overlooked—not out of malice, but because no one had a system to notice me.
That experience stayed with me.
Years later, I watched the same thing happen to my girlfriend, Bethany (now my wife). She was new to our church and actively looking for community—she wanted help finding like-minded friends, a place to belong. Instead, the church essentially put the work back on her. "Here are some options. Good luck."
She fell through the cracks too.
And then there were the emails. The text messages. Generic announcements blasted to everyone, relevant to no one. Nothing was targeted. Nothing was personalized. Nothing helped me grow spiritually or connected me to the next step in my journey.
That's when it hit me: Hinge knows who I might want to date. Facebook knows what content will keep me scrolling. Google knows what I want to buy before I do. These companies use data to create better experiences for their users every single day.
Why weren't churches doing the same thing to help people get and stay connected?
If we could use data to better minister to people—to find the lost, to care for the struggling, to connect the disconnected—why wouldn't we use every available tool to do it?
An Unlikely Path
Music is what kept me in the church.
Even when I felt invisible, worship was my anchor. I learned to play instruments, found my voice, and discovered that the church was where technology and creativity intersected for me.
For a long time, I thought my contribution to the Kingdom would be on a worship team. I studied recording production at Grand Rapids Community College. I worked at Apple. I thought my path was set.
But God had different plans.
In my mid-twenties, I ended up at Gateway Church in Dallas, Texas—a multi-campus church with over 300,000 profiles in their database. I started on the building services team, about as far from technology as you could get.
But our CTO, who had watched me for years, saw something in me. He kept trying to recruit me to his department. Eventually, I made the jump to the development team.
My boss Jonathan was direct: "If you're going to be on this team, you're going to need to learn to code."
He gave me the resources. He gave me time to figure it out on my own. And when I got stuck, he made himself available for questions. It took a few months of grinding, but eventually I got bit by the bug.
The rest was history.
What I discovered was that I could be creative in both music and technology. My talents weren't limited to playing an instrument—I could serve the church in ways I never imagined. And I started to believe that my impact on the Kingdom might be even greater than anything I could do from a stage.
The Problem Is Universal
At Gateway, I spent years building out the technology infrastructure, solving problems around data, engagement, and member care. We had systems. We had processes. We could see who was slipping away and reach them before they left.
When my co-founder Jason and I started Threefold Solutions, we began consulting with churches around the world—helping them migrate to Planning Center and build strategies for member engagement.
And we saw the same problems everywhere.
Every church we worked with was asking the same questions:
- Who are our people?
- How are they involved?
- Why are they falling through the cracks?
Pastors "know" in their hearts that people need help. They can feel it. But they don't always know who those people are. They don't have visibility into who's disengaging, who's struggling, who's quietly walking out the back door.
Technology can shine a light on people in need long before they leave.
I knew from my experience at Gateway that this wasn't just a Gateway problem—it was a universal church problem. And I knew it could be solved.
From Consulting to Product
Threefold taught me a lot. But I kept bumping into the same limitation: we could help churches implement better processes, but we couldn't give them the tools to see their data clearly.
Planning Center is incredible software—it's why we've built our entire practice around it. But the reporting and analytics capabilities have limits. Churches couldn't easily see the connections between giving, attendance, groups, and events. Their data lived in silos. The insights they needed required hours of manual spreadsheet work, if they could get them at all.
I wanted to build something that would change that.
When this journey began, I wasn't confident enough to go all in. Thankfully, I was able to build a few small apps that helped give me the needed confidence to go after the project God had put on my heart back at Gateway.
That project became Parable.
Spirit-Led, Data-Driven
Parable exists because no one should fall through the cracks.
Not me as a kid. Not Bethany looking for community. Not the single mom who stopped showing up and no one noticed. Not the college student who's quietly walking away from their faith.
Churches have more data than ever before—but most of it sits trapped in silos, impossible to access and even harder to act on. Parable creates a real-time data layer that transforms Planning Center data into ministry insights. We give church leaders the visibility they need to see what's actually happening in their congregation.
We believe in being Spirit-led and data-driven. The two aren't in conflict—they work together. Data doesn't replace pastoral intuition; it sharpens it. It helps leaders ask better questions, notice the unnoticed, and care for people before they slip away.
I've spent years in the trenches of church technology—managing a database with 300,000 profiles, building systems from scratch, consulting with churches of every size. I've seen what's possible when churches leverage their data well.
And I've seen what happens when they don't.
Parable is my attempt to give every church the tools that only the largest, most resourced churches have had access to. To democratize church analytics. To make sure that the next kid who feels invisible, the next Bethany looking for connection, doesn't fall through the cracks.
Because when we use every tool available to care for people, we're not being less spiritual.
We're being faithful stewards of what God has given us.
Michael Visser is the founder and CEO of Parable. He lives in Pensacola, Florida with his wife Bethany and their dog Walker. When he's not building software for churches, he's probably crafting cocktails or thinking about his next side project.
