To Build a System Is to See a Person
On attention, incarnation, and why good infrastructure is a form of love
Simone Weil believed that attention was the rarest and purest form of generosity. Not attention as concentration or willpower — not the gritted-teeth effort of someone trying very hard — but attention as a kind of self-emptying. When discussing the love of Christ, Paul calls this kenosis (Phil 2:7). To truly attend to another person, she wrote, is to ask: “What are you going through?” And then to wait. To receive whatever answer comes without rushing toward a solution, without making the other person’s reality serve your own need to be helpful. Attention, for Weil, is love in its most basic posture: turned outward, waiting, present.
This is the hardest lesson I learned in doing pastoral care. And I think about it a lot when I’m building systems for pastors and churches.
It may seem strange to invoke Simone Weil in the same breath as database architecture or workflow automation. But stay with me. Because I’ve come to believe that the act of building a good system for a ministry — really building it, not just installing software or handing someone a template — is one of the more quietly pastoral things a person can do.
When I sit down with a church leader to understand how their ministry actually operates, I’m not primarily asking about their tools. I’m asking about their life. I’m asking what falls through the cracks on a Tuesday afternoon when three things are happening at once. I’m asking what they’re carrying in their head that has nowhere to live. I’m asking what they had to let go of last year, not because it didn’t matter, but because there was simply no time, no structure, no place to put it. I’m asking, in Weil’s language: “What are you going through?”
And I wait.
We may not always think of it in these terms, but we build systems for people we love all the time. I have a three year old, and everything I do for her, from packing her lunch to strategically placing her Ms. Rachel potty, is an exercise in attention and empathy. I think about what she will need and when. I anticipate her needs and place things where they will be the most useful for her, the most helpful, exactly when she needs them. And if I do this well, she won’t even know I’ve done it. The blessing and the curse of the attention of love is that it’s often invisible. But I watch her use it. I watch her enjoy it. I watch where the system needs gaps filled, and I keep iterating it as she grows, and that, too, is love.
The theological model I keep returning to is the Incarnation, in all its scandalous particularity. Bethlehem. Roman occupation. A specific family, a specific body, a specific set of material conditions. God did not offer humanity a general solution to the human problem. God showed up in the specific. And every time we try to generalize that messy story, we lose something of its potency. Because it’s not a doctrine. It is, and it calls for, attention.
Good systems work the same way.
A system built for your church is not a template. It is not a best practice imported from the nonprofit sector or a framework that worked beautifully for a congregation three states away. A good system is built for you — for your staff size, your budget rhythms, your culture, your mission, your particular shape of chaos. It is the result of someone paying close enough attention to your life that they can build something that fits it.
That kind of fitting is an act of love. It requires the builder to temporarily set aside what they already know — their favorite tools, their preferred methods, their instinct to jump to solutions — and first, simply, wait. Until they can see. See you.
This is harder than it sounds. Most of us, when we encounter a problem, move toward solution almost immediately. It’s especially tempting in technical work, where the tools are sophisticated and the urge to demonstrate competence is strong. But a system built without attention to a particular person is a system built for someone else — an imagined user, a generic church, a ministry that most likely doesn’t exist.
Weil was suspicious of this kind of helpfulness. She called it “a form of cruelty” — not malicious, but self-regarding. The helper who rushes toward solution is still, in some sense, attending to themselves: to their expertise, their efficiency, their need to be useful. The attention has not fully landed on the other.
To build a system that actually serves someone, you have to land.
Practically, this means the discovery process is not a formality. It’s the work. It’s my vocation. The intake conversation, the workflow mapping, the questions that feel almost too basic to ask — “How do you currently track your members? What happens when someone new shows up on a Sunday?” — these are not preliminaries to the real work. They are the real work. They are the moment of attention. Everything built afterward is just the attention taking a particular shape.
And when the attention is genuine, the person on the other side of the table feels it. Not because I said anything especially wise, but because I asked. And then, if I didn’t do my job right, I waited. I listened. And then I asked again. I took your actual situation seriously enough to let it shape what I built. What we built. I didn’t hand you a solution — we built one. Together.
That’s pastoral work. It’s just pastoral work that happens to involve a database and an AI workflow.
I started Systems for Ministry because I believe the church deserves infrastructure that takes it seriously. Not software sold to the church because it was almost right. Not a spreadsheet someone cobbled together at midnight before a board meeting. Real systems, built with real attention, for real people doing real ministry.
But I also started it because I believe the act of building those systems is itself a form of ministry — not just a means to one. Every discovery call is a pastoral conversation. Every workflow I map is a way of saying: “I see what you’re carrying. Let’s find a better way to hold it together.”
To build a system is to see a person. And to truly see a person — to attend to them fully, to let their reality land before rushing toward solutions — is one of the oldest forms of love we know. The best systems are built from the flesh of incarnation in the emptiness of kenosis.
Weil called it attention. The Gospel calls it incarnation. I call it the work.
For more on theology, technology, and the unglamorous work of building things that last, follow me on Substack.
Remi Shores is an ordained pastor in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), a certified data analyst, and the founder of Systems for Ministry — a consulting practice helping churches and ministry organizations with data analytics, AI workflows, grant writing, and operational infrastructure.
