Cura — care
Hospitalization, bereavement, overdue pastoral follow-up. Somebody is carrying something heavy.
Narrative Relational Intelligence
Make sure nobody is missed
Ministries fail members in a specific way: a family goes quiet, a case stalls in somebody's inbox, a promised follow-up never happens, and nobody notices until they leave. NRI notices.
Grace Okonkwo
Okonkwo household · primary contact
Cura
88
Someone is hurting
Onus
64
The case has stalled
Familia
41
Household complexity
Fides
22
Still in touch
Why 88, exactly
- +40 Hospitalization logged in the last 30 days
- +30 No contact recorded in 21 days
- +18 Open prayer request past its follow-up date
A score is the sum of the rules that matched. Add it up yourself.
Why "narrative relational"
Because those are the two things a spreadsheet cannot hold. A row tells you what a member's balance is today. It does not tell you the story that balance sits inside — that this household had a baby in March, a hospitalization in June, and has not replied to anyone since. Read as separate facts, none of those is alarming. Read as a narrative, it is the most important thing on your desk this morning.
And relational, because a ministry is not a claims processor with a warmer font. What is actually being tracked is the state of a relationship: whether it is being tended, whether it has gone quiet, whether a promise made in one conversation was kept in the next. Silence is the signal that matters most, and it is precisely the one that looks like nothing in a database.
So NRI reads the sequence rather than the snapshot, and it scores the relationship rather than the invoice. What it produces is not a risk score. It is a short answer to the question a staff member actually opens the software asking: who should I call today, and why them.
Four directions
A member can carry several at once, and that combination is the useful part.
Onus — case weight
Large amounts, stalled processing, denials without a basis, coordination nobody owns.
Familia — household
Dependents, caregiving, a household in transition — a new baby, an adult child ageing off.
Fides — engagement
Unanswered outreach, incomplete onboarding, a relationship going quiet before renewal.
A score is a sum of named reasons
That is the entire algorithm. Each rule that matches contributes a stated number of points, the reasons are always shown beside the score, and they add up. A staff member who distrusts a number can check it by hand and either agree or point at the rule they disagree with.
There is no model, no training data, and no learned coefficient anywhere in the calculation. The full rule set is published to administrators inside the app — every code, every weight, and the reasoning behind each one. A system nobody can argue with does not get trusted with pastoral care, and it should not be.
When staff dismiss a signal it stays dismissed — until the facts get materially worse. Somebody who dismissed "this member has gone quiet" should absolutely be shown "this member has gone quiet and is now in hospital".
What it is for, stated carefully
NRI does not make anybody more efficient and is not meant to. The pastoral hour it points at costs exactly what it always cost. What it changes is which hour gets spent on whom — the attention that currently goes to whoever happened to ring up, or to the largest number on the list, goes instead to the household the ministry can least afford to miss.
That is also why ties break toward the hurting person rather than the expensive case, and why nothing in the scoring touches whether a need gets shared. A ranking is a claim about where to look first. It is not a judgement about anybody, and the moment it starts deciding outcomes it has stopped being arguable — which was the only thing that made it safe to put in front of somebody doing this work.
See it against realistic data
Five seeded members, one for each thing NRI is meant to catch, plus one who is perfectly fine.