About Mike & The Rock Church

Mike is the lead pastor at The Rock Church in Castle Rock, CO. His church started using Ava to make their services more accessible. Learn more through this video:

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The Rock Church's Experience with Ava

I'm Mike Polhemus, and I'm the lead pastor at The Rock Church. My main role is to speak on Sundays, but then I also do a lot of other things on the side.

We want to be a church, or a group of churches, that if we were to ever go away, we would be very much missed in the community. And I feel like right now, if the churches were to go away, the community wouldn't necessarily miss us.

And so we want to change that!

We want to be a body of churches that has a significant impact on the county and on the people around us that we're actually changing lives and helping lives, helping people. Some of our people that come to our church, have become hard-of-hearing in their older years, so they haven't learned American Sign Language. so with Ava we can also help those individuals and it really broadens the scope.

We have in the past offered American Sign Language translation during one of our three services in the past. It was really beneficial, but it was also a little bit limiting in that we only had the resource to offer it for one of the three services.

Now with Ava, we're able to offer captioning of all three of our services! It really helps broaden the audience that could benefit from that.

During pre-service, when people are just sort of hanging out waiting for service to start, we have slides of Information that go up on our screens, and there's one dedicated to Ava and how to connect to our host account here.

How do you create unity? You have to learn to communicate. And I found when you guys begin to present Ava. this was like; I can listen, I can read lips, and if I miss the word, I can go back and forth, so  having the transcript of everything at the speed that you're putting it out made my world.

I think once you implement Ava, you'll actually be surprised about the need that's really there, that maybe you just weren't aware of. That's actually been one of the most eye-opening parts of being involved with Ava.

We want to be inclusive of everyone in every way! So this is a great opportunity to include in a sense a group of people that would otherwise feel excluded.