From Spreadsheets to Shepherding: How Braden Murray Built a Tool That Turns Church Data Into Care

Every Sunday for 29 years, someone at Grace House has counted heads. What started as a simple headcount in 1997 has grown into an avalanche of data—kids ministry check-ins, baptism numbers, small group attendance, salvation records—scattered across spreadsheets, church management systems, and sticky notes nobody remembers writing. For most churches, that data sits untouched until board meeting week, when a pastor scrambles to build a report from numbers that are months out of date.

Braden Murray decided that wasn't good enough.

The Reluctant Pastor's Kid Who Found His Lane

Growing up as the son of Grace House's founding pastors, Murray heard the same question his whole life: "Are you going to be a pastor like your dad?" His answer was always a firm no. "That's not really where my strengths are," he says. "Up in front of people, talking, doing it every single week, being in the trenches with people—I'm an operations guy."

That self-awareness sent him to Purdue for a supply chain management degree and then to Cummins in Columbus, Indiana, where he helped build engines for the Dodge Ram. He wasn't a car guy. He was a systems guy—someone who found genuine satisfaction in moving something from point A to point C as efficiently as possible.

Years later, when the outreach role opened up at his home church, Murray took it—and kept collecting responsibilities the way operations people often do. Next steps. Guest experience. Membership. And eventually, metrics.

That last one changed everything.

A Problem Only an Operations Guy Would Notice

When Murray inherited Grace House's data, he found decades of numbers with no shared home. Each ministry tracked its own growth in its own way, on its own timeline. "Nobody was looking at the same scoreboard," he says. So he built one—first as an elaborate Excel sheet with VBA coding, then as something bigger.

That "something bigger" became Holy Insights, a platform now used by churches beyond Grace House to unify their data and finally ask the question that matters: not just how many people came, but is every part of the church—kids, youth, guests, giving—growing at the same pace as the whole?

A recent team exercise using Patrick Lencioni's Six Types of Working Genius gave Murray language for what he'd always sensed about himself: his geniuses are Invention and Enablement. He thrives without structure, free to create—and he genuinely loves helping people use what he's made. "There's this whole thing of, oh, you could make a lot of money with this," he says. "But I'm really trying to take the posture of, hey, I created this cool thing. I really want to help churches."

Automate Tasks, Not People

As Holy Insights grew more sophisticated, so did the questions around it—especially about AI. Murray doesn't dodge the tension.

"We want to automate tasks. We don't want to automate people... AI can have all the information in the world, but you can have no wisdom. I think there's a distinct difference in those two things."

That conviction shaped one of Holy Insights' core features: Max, a ministry analytics assistant trained not on the open internet, but on roughly 120 vetted studies and articles from researchers like Pew, Barna, and the Unstuck Group, and voices like Carey Nieuwhof. Instead of guessing at answers, Max compares a church's numbers against real, research-backed benchmarks. "You can be growing," Murray explains, "but you can also be falling short of a benchmark for what's considered a healthy church." The point isn't to hand pastors more data. It's to hand them the right data, filtered through wisdom rather than raw computing power.

Turning Numbers Into Names

Ask Murray about the ultimate goal of Holy Insights, and he doesn't talk about dashboards. He talks about people.

"Every number has a name, every name has a story, and every story matters to God."

His long-term vision is a care platform, not just a reporting tool—one that flags when someone who serves every first Sunday suddenly stops, or when a family's giving, attendance, and kids' check-ins all quietly go dark at once. "It's not a 'where'd you go?' kind of thing," Murray says. "It's a real opportunity for pastors to care for their people." The technology doesn't replace pastoral discernment; it points pastors toward the conversations that matter before a season of struggle turns into someone slipping away unnoticed.

What It Took to Get Here

The path from spreadsheet prototype to functioning SaaS business wasn't smooth. Murray's first version—sliders, filters, a slicker view of the same old data—flopped in four or five meetings. "It doesn't tell me anything," people told him. "Doesn't tell me if I'm growing." It was, in his words, discouraging.

He kept tinkering anyway. Eventually he had a version good enough that twenty churches bought it in his first year—for a thousand dollars a file, hand-delivered and taught in person. That scrappy, humble version became the seed of what Holy Insights is today.

His advice to anyone sitting on an idea they feel unqualified to pursue is simple and hard-won:

"I don't like the saying that every no is one step closer to a yes—if you're bad, you're just bad. But be persistent, be resilient. Get feedback on every step of the way. Find people who'll say, 'This is a real problem, I think you have a solution—would you want to try it out?' That's a good step. But don't shy away at your first no, because there's going to be a lot more coming."

An Invitation, Not Just an Interview

What makes Murray's story compelling isn't that he found a clever business model. It's that he took a genuine gift—systems thinking, operational clarity, a love for building—and pointed it directly at the church he grew up in, without ever pretending faith and excellence were separate pursuits.

For leaders wrestling with whether their professional skill set has a place in kingdom work, Murray's answer is clear: it already does. The only question is whether you'll build the thing you're uniquely positioned to build, or wait for someone else to notice the gap first.

This week, take one piece of scattered information in your church, ministry, or business—one thing nobody's looking at the same way twice—and ask what it would take to give it a single, honest scoreboard. That's where every good tool, and every good calling, tends to start.