The random number generator dropped me on Monday, May 11, 2009, and for once the archive immediately knew what was happening while I mostly did not.

I was working for The City, the church social-networking platform that had grown out of Mars Hill Church and had only recently become its own thing. I could remember the broad strokes of that part of my life: I trained churches. I traveled. I helped people figure out how to use this strange new piece of software we were building. My title wandered around a little, as did everybody’s responsibilities, because this was a startup and everything was still pretty loosey-goosey. I did training, onboarding, support, sales, troubleshooting, and whatever else happened to be on fire that afternoon. But May 11 itself? Nothing. No scene. No smell of the room. No moment where my brain went, Oh yeah, THAT day.

Gmail, on the other hand, would like to submit several exhibits.

That morning I emailed Rachel Freed because three people from Acts 29 had finally confirmed that they would be at our office at ten the next morning. My message consisted almost entirely of excitement: “They have confirmed that they will be here at 10 tomorrow morning! W00T!” Rachel’s email signature identified her as a Church Training Partner. Later she would become the more formal manager of the training and support operation, but at this point we were still very much figuring out what an operation even was.

The group coming in was unusually important. Three people were coming from Acts 29 and three from Mars Hill. In another email I described them as spanning group leaders, administrators, pastors and possibly bookkeeping. These weren’t six random customers. Mars Hill was essentially The City’s original laboratory, while Acts 29 represented an entire network of churches that could potentially use it. These people already knew the product a little. What we were really doing was teaching them how to become the people who knew it instead of me.

And the names turn out to matter.

On the Acts 29 side were people like Tyler Powell, Adriel Ifland and Derrin Thomas. I had already been working with Tyler and Adriel on The City for months. Adriel was also a real friend of mine, which made finding her in this particular archaeological layer much more interesting than simply discovering another customer-service email. Derrin is especially useful because of what happens immediately afterward: within days he starts showing up in the archive filing bug reports, investigating account problems and handling Acts 29 administration himself. An email a few weeks later identifies him as Tyler’s assistant. In other words, the training apparently worked. We gave him the keys and then the archive starts showing him driving the car.

The Mars Hill side included people I knew extremely well from my previous job. Preston McGee and Matthew Bodaly had been my helpdesk compatriots and office friends. Matthew was now the Helpdesk Lead, and the night before the training he told me that Sean Osterberg would be coming because Sean was going to be doing most of his job. Sean wasn’t a stranger either; we’d worked together in Mars Hill technology going back to 2007. So there were multiple handoffs happening at once. I had already left Mars Hill and carried a lot of its City knowledge with me. Now Matthew was handing work to Sean, while I was teaching the Mars Hill and Acts 29 people how to operate without depending on me.

The funniest evidence of how immature our training system still was comes from everybody else circling the meeting. Robbie Leib emailed me asking for forty-five to sixty minutes for a literal “brain dump”: admin backend, reporting, Gospel Coalition, Mars Hill integrations, the Acts 29 meeting, and my travel schedule so he could start joining me. There apparently wasn’t a binder labeled How Adam Does This. The binder was Adam.

Meanwhile Graham Stinson, an old friend who was designing The City, realized that six experienced users were about to walk into the office and asked whether he could use them for UX research. I essentially told him: absolutely—three Acts 29 people, three Mars Hill people, a nice spread of roles, have at them. The guinea pigs were becoming a focus group while they were becoming trainers.

And while all this was happening, I was inventing the next version of the process. That afternoon I sent Joe Day and Graham copy announcing the first official Training Bootcamps for Churches ready to implement The City. Seattle first, then Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles. Twelve churches at the first Seattle session. Two days of hands-on training. Meals provided. I had also asked one of our engineers to create bootcamp@onthecity.org earlier that day, because apparently the existence of the official training program and the existence of its email address were separated by only a few hours.

My subject line for the announcement was:

“I need style! And to be sent Today”

Startup culture, preserved in amber.

I still don’t remember sitting in that room on May 12. I don’t remember what jokes we made, what I drew on a whiteboard, who looked confused, or whether lunch was any good. That part is simply gone. I can remember traveling around the country later and training churches, but this first little group doesn’t produce much of an internal movie for me.

What survives instead is the structure around the missing memory.

Six guinea pigs. Friends and former coworkers. A designer stealing them for UX research. A new training partner. A developer creating an inbox. Robbie asking me to download my brain into his. An announcement for the first real Bootcamps being slapped together before the end of the day. And a few weeks later, the people we trained are already solving problems themselves.

Sometimes Random Date Archaeology finds a story I had forgotten.

This time it found something stranger: a day that mattered even though I still don’t really remember it.

And maybe that’s worth preserving too.