Whether it’s getting kids to bed at night or getting ready for work in the morning, many areas of our lives require a series of tasks intended to achieve a single goal. Spiritual growth is no exception. With Rock’s help, you can guide your attendees through customized steps along the path of spiritual development.

But before we dive too deeply into Steps, let’s take a moment to define a few terms and introduce you to some key features you’ll need to know.

A Step Program is made up of individual activities and accomplishments called Step Types. If the goal is to reach the mountain’s summit, then the Step Program is the mountain, and the Step Types are the basecamps on the way to the top. Let's cover some more fundamentals for understanding Steps.

Anatomy of Steps

Understanding how Steps are structured helps you create meaningful pathways for growth. Each part of the Step Type Step Program setup plays a unique role in guiding people through their journey while keeping your data consistent and useful.

Core Steps

Core Steps form the foundation of your organization’s process. They provide consistent information for reporting and analytics across Rock. Without them, it would be difficult to understand engagement or measure progress.

Think of Core Steps as essential milestones like Baptism, Small Group, Serve, and eRA. These built-in Steps can’t be deleted because they support long-term accuracy in reporting and future feature development.

When Step data stays consistent, you gain a clearer view of how people are engaging, where they need encouragement, and how to guide them toward their next step. Core Steps aren’t only for tracking progress, they help people see what’s next, build momentum and stay engaged in their journey.

If needed, you can move a Core Step to another Program using the  button in the Step Type settings.

Organizational Objectives

Organizational Objectives define the intent behind each Step. They ensure that Steps across your organization align with shared goals such as Outreach, Discipleship, or Activation. While you can rename objectives to better match your language, keeping their purpose consistent helps maintain accurate reporting and helps the core team develop features and reports based on objectives.

You can add new objectives as needed, but avoid creating too many. This keeps your data manageable and meaningful. Existing objectives cannot be deleted to preserve reporting integrity.

Engagement Type

Engagement Type determines whether a Step is a Milestone or an ongoing Rhythm. Milestones mark major moments like Baptism, while Rhythms track continuous activities such as Small Group participation.

If the Engagement Type is set to Rhythm, a person’s Status on the Step Type page won’t change automatically. Completed means the rhythm has stopped, while In Progress indicates that it’s active.

Impact Weight

Impact Weight measures how significant a Step is in a person’s overall journey. Higher values represent greater influence, allowing your organization to prioritize what matters most. You can configure this value in the Step Type settings.

Prerequisites and Completion Flow

Prerequisites define which Steps must be completed before starting another. They ensure a logical order in how people move through your process.

Completion Flow controls how participants progress through Steps within a program:

• Linear (Required): Steps must be completed in order. Custom prerequisites are removed.
• Linear (Preferred): Steps are ideally completed in order, but prerequisites are still enforced.
• Non-Linear: Step order is for display only, and prerequisites remain active.

Together, these settings help create a structured, data-driven experience that supports both personal growth and organizational insight.

Let’s explore these concepts further by looking at the program for Discipleship, which is available right out of the box. Once you understand this program, you’ll be able to change it or create an entirely new program to measure anything from your students’ spiritual growth to your volunteers’ progress through training programs, and more.