0:03

I love my Reform brothers and sisters. Mostly

0:05

Reform brothers, that's a little bit of a dig at them. But

0:09

they, you know, I've had them say, like,

0:11

you know, we've had conversations around invite culture and these

0:13

are private conversations. They're definitely, they're having me into their

0:15

church to talk about these things. They're not telling other

0:17

people that I'm there. And you know,

0:20

church leaders will say, they'll be like, man, if I,

0:22

if other church guys in my network were to

0:25

hear we were talking about this stuff, they would

0:27

shake their head because like we don't want anything

0:29

to do with attraction. And I would say, listen,

0:31

you are attraction. You don't think you are, but

0:34

you are like, look, you're in a building. You

0:36

have a sign outside your door. You,

0:38

you talk about you have actual music.

0:41

You, you car, you vacuum your carpets

0:43

on Sunday morning. Those are all

0:45

attractional church things. You're, those are all gimmicks. If someone

0:47

else's gimmick would know, why do you have to clean

0:49

your church? Why do you have to paint it? Why

0:51

do you have to have lights in a band? That's

0:54

all gimmicky. No, you chose to do

0:56

those things because you know, people will tell their friends

0:58

about them. Now you might

1:00

not want to do monster truck. That's fine. I

1:02

get that. I totally understand. I

1:05

get that. But what are, what can you

1:07

do that your people will tell their friends about? Welcome

1:14

to the Carrie Newhoff leadership podcast. It's

1:16

Carrie here and I hope our time

1:18

together today helps you thrive in

1:20

life and leadership. Well, we got rich birch

1:22

back on the podcast, man. You guys love

1:25

rich. Every time he comes on, you

1:27

listen. You share and we're going to talk

1:29

about what growing churches are doing right

1:32

now. Rich has got a unique

1:34

pulse on this studying the top 100 fastest

1:37

growing churches. The first

1:39

100 days of a new attenders journey

1:41

to live stream or not live stream

1:43

and how to create a compelling invite

1:45

culture at your church. So we're going

1:47

to get really into the weeds. Today's

1:50

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2:15

I want to thank all of you for tuning in today.

2:17

Hey, I know we got brand new listeners too. Welcome. I

2:20

want to thank John B. for the five-star

2:22

review on Apple. He said it was a

2:24

brilliant show. It's a great time to be

2:26

joined. 70 podcasts on my

2:28

saved list are from interviews that you have

2:30

heard here, John. Some

2:32

phenomenal insights and encouragement and

2:35

I love this. John, you say you're 28 and there

2:37

will be things from this show that will be tangible

2:40

two, five, 10 years from now.

2:43

Most recent episode I've listened to, John

2:46

Tyson, spot on. Man, a lot

2:48

of feedback to John Tyson. And

2:50

John Scott Galloway too. Remember,

2:52

when you share this program, when you

2:54

leave ratings and reviews, we get the

2:56

best guess. And that is my commitment

2:59

team. That's what I want to do. Well,

3:01

we're going to sit down with Richard just

3:03

a second, but as you know, he is

3:06

not only a really good friend of mine.

3:08

We live about 15 minutes from each other.

3:10

He is an early multi-site church

3:12

pioneer in North America. He led

3:14

the Terrigen Helping Meeting House in

3:16

Toronto. Grow to become the

3:18

leading multi-site church in Canada with over

3:20

5,000 people in 20 locations. He served

3:23

on the leadership team, the Konexis Church,

3:25

my church. Richard and I worked together

3:27

for a few years. Also,

3:29

he was the Operation Pastors of Liquid

3:31

Church in the Manhattan-facing suburbs of New

3:33

Jersey. He's on a mission to help

3:35

100 churches grow by 1,000 people by

3:37

helping churches increase their invite culture. And,

3:40

of course, he's the host of the

3:42

Unsominary podcast and he blogs at unsaminary.com.

3:44

He's got

3:46

a brand new book, Unlocking Your Churches

3:48

Invite Culture, that you should definitely check

3:50

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overflow.co/C-A-R-E-Y to learn more. And

5:44

now, my conversation with Rich

5:46

Burch. Rich, so good to

5:49

have you back. Welcome back.

5:52

Oh, Kerry, honored to be here. So, so

5:54

glad to be here. I just right off the top want to thank you

5:56

for what you do. I know there are thousands of

5:58

people who listen in. who are just

6:00

so blessed and honored by your podcast. Literally

6:03

this week I had three different

6:06

people say to me, hey, have you

6:08

listened to, and it was about an interview

6:10

you just did, have you listened to this

6:12

interview yet? That is mandatory listening. They use

6:14

the same thing. That's mandatory listening. And

6:16

so I know for you it's just, well, hopefully

6:19

today I'm trying to live up to that, but

6:21

you do this every week. You're more than once

6:23

a week where you help people with this. And

6:25

so thank you so much for all you're doing.

6:27

Oh, you're so welcome, Rich. And it's one

6:30

of those things you probably feel when people say that too.

6:32

It's like, you know, I have a podcast too, right? Like,

6:35

hey, over here. No, no, you do. You have

6:37

a great podcast. Listen, I'm happy to be

6:39

in the Kerry Newhouse cinematic universe. It's fine.

6:42

It's good. It's all good. One

6:44

of the things I like about us, we live 15

6:46

minutes from each other. Nobody knows that. If I tell

6:48

people that they're like, what, you live 15 minutes from

6:50

Rich? And here we are in our own studios. But

6:53

you and I have way more offline conversations

6:55

and we have online conversations. We go to

6:57

the same church. We're, you know, in

6:59

each other's lives. We'll go skiing, hot tubbing together,

7:01

stuff like that out on the boat in the

7:03

summer. So, but it's nice to

7:06

bring this to public air from time to time.

7:08

And I gotta tell you, you probably don't know

7:10

this, but your episodes always, always

7:13

outperform many others. Oh, that's

7:15

nice. That's kind of a good thing. They do. People

7:17

love hearing from you. So, you know,

7:19

last time we had Yan was a few years ago. I'd

7:21

love to know, because I talk

7:23

a lot about church trends, but the secret

7:25

sauce is I listened pretty closely to you

7:28

and you're always seeing things, I think 10 minutes

7:30

before I see them. What

7:33

are some of the trends you

7:35

are seeing in growing churches versus

7:37

declining churches these days? Well,

7:41

large churches are getting larger. So,

7:45

you know, as I feel like

7:47

for my entire ministry career, there has

7:49

been a dull war underneath that's been

7:51

saying, hey, you know, the church is

7:54

going to bespoke small. And

7:57

I know I'm probably stepping on people's toes right off

7:59

the top here. But the

8:01

reality of it statistically, our

8:04

friend Warren Byrd did that study

8:06

post-COVID that had showed there

8:08

seems to be a splaying in there or

8:11

a division happening in the church where there

8:13

are like larger churches are getting larger. And

8:16

unfortunately smaller churches are getting smaller. And

8:19

so I think there is a place for kind

8:21

of bespoke and small. But what we're

8:23

learning is that large is winning that at the end of

8:25

the day, people do actually want

8:28

to show up to a

8:30

large church. And I've seen this with the churches I work with

8:32

where I'm like, man, I remember the

8:34

days of like, is anyone going to come back?

8:36

You know, we're post-COVID, is our people here? Do

8:38

people want to go to church anymore? And it's

8:40

like, man, that's just not the

8:43

case. I was out at Mariners a couple of

8:45

weeks ago, spent some time out with them and

8:47

I'm walking around their campus and they're

8:49

figuring out how to do both. People want

8:52

to get, you know, gathered together on Sundays

8:54

for the kind of large experience, but then

8:56

they figured out how to unlock how do

8:58

you scale relationship at, you know, how do

9:00

you do relationship at scale and how do

9:02

you do that well? And I

9:04

think that really is the difference. I

9:06

think small churches do take a

9:08

lot of things for granted where when you become

9:10

large, you have to get strategic and think very

9:12

carefully about how do we move people from

9:15

the crowd, ultimately into the community, into the

9:17

core. And so, you know, I think large

9:19

churches are getting larger. In

9:22

some ways, I'm like, I wish that wasn't true

9:24

because it's like, it sounds good to me, the

9:26

like small coffee shop down the street that you

9:28

and I meet in. I love that coffee shop.

9:30

I kind of wish church was like that, but

9:32

it actually seems like Starbucks is winning out in

9:36

the church world. Yeah, you

9:38

know, it is. It is. It's funny. I

9:40

messaged Warren. I emailed him yesterday looking for

9:42

that study. I couldn't find it on the

9:44

Googles, but maybe you have a link to

9:46

that. But if I remember it correctly, what

9:48

Warren's research showed is that the

9:51

only growing churches in America these days tend

9:53

to be large, multisite churches that I'm not

9:55

saying they're the only church that's growing. But

9:57

if you look at like 90 percent. of

10:00

the growth by people attending church. Yeah,

10:02

way disproportionate. And then, you know, there's

10:05

two kinds of small churches, stuck church

10:07

of three, I guess, stuck churches, declining

10:09

churches and growing churches. Second

10:12

declining, they stay small. But

10:15

if you're growing small church, you're not going to

10:17

be a small church forever. You could be a

10:19

mid-sized church or a large church or eventually a

10:21

multi-site church, etc, etc. So what

10:24

else is changing in the church landscape? Well,

10:27

I think, you know, the other

10:29

thing I've continued to notice, and

10:31

you know this, every every county

10:33

across the country is

10:36

more diverse today than it was 10 years ago.

10:38

That's just true. And 10 years from

10:40

now, it will be more diverse than it is

10:42

today. You know, from a sociological

10:45

point of view, you

10:47

know, I love there's this guy, Prof G, who I

10:49

think you're going to have on your show. I'm going

10:51

to have him on the podcast. Yeah, we got away.

10:54

Prof. Scott Keller. I learned about

10:56

him through you. You were always quoting his stuff. And I'm

10:58

like, I better follow him. Yeah, he's great.

11:00

And one of the things that he has said

11:02

is, and this is from like a culture point

11:04

of view, he's taught, he talks about how, you

11:07

know, in America, we're about or they're

11:09

about to do something that's never been

11:11

done before, which is to make the

11:13

most ethnically diverse democracy in

11:15

the history of the world. Like we

11:17

are, we're we are embarking on something

11:19

that has not happened before, which is

11:21

this whole majority minority thing that we've

11:23

heard lots about. And so and I've

11:25

seen that in the churches that I work with that, you

11:29

know, there when I first started in ministry 20

11:31

years ago, diversity really was not a thing we

11:33

talked about. It was in fact, the only I

11:35

talk a lot about church growth, the only I

11:37

had one class, not like a whole course, but one

11:39

class on church growth. And it was the homogeneous unit

11:42

principle, which now when you teach that

11:44

it almost sounds like racist, like it's

11:46

like, yeah, this is it's like a

11:48

bad idea. And it doesn't work like

11:50

it's both of those. So your whole

11:52

church will be upper white,

11:54

upper class white people in

11:57

the suburbs. And that's your

11:59

homogeneous unit. Right. Was that the idea? That's

12:01

the unit. That's the idea of the homogeneous unit. You

12:04

know, and there was a whole wave of churches that

12:06

were built on the back of that. But what we're

12:08

seeing is that that just isn't that's not working anymore.

12:10

And, you know, people walk in younger folks. I love

12:12

you're always kind of pointing the next generation. But

12:15

particularly young leaders, they walk into somebody in

12:17

their 20s walks into your church. And it's

12:19

all all X, whatever that is, all white,

12:21

all, you know, brown, all Latino, like, and

12:23

they get freaked out by that because that's

12:26

different than the rest of their world. And,

12:29

and so strategic, you know,

12:31

well thinking, measured leaders are

12:33

asking thoughtful questions around how do we become

12:35

more diverse? How do we, you know, what,

12:37

how do we do that in a way

12:39

that that makes sense that and they're asking

12:42

the questions they're not, they're not

12:44

imposing, you know, it's not like the white guys

12:46

figuring out how to be diverse, they're saying, let's

12:48

have a conversation there. And you've modeled this so

12:50

well on your podcast over the years. But like,

12:52

let's get let's get leaders in that are different

12:54

than us and learn and ask the question, hey,

12:57

and admit, we're not good at this. And how do we

12:59

get better at that? Well, you know, we went through

13:01

one of these phases at liquid, this was years

13:03

ago, where, you know,

13:05

we realized, hey, a part of what I love about

13:07

liquid church in New Jersey, they've Tim Lucas is the

13:09

lead pastor there. And one of the things they've been

13:11

saying for years is, they believe that

13:13

they're called to saturate the state of New Jersey

13:16

with the message of Jesus. And they're wrestling with

13:18

what a question of like, what would it look

13:20

like for us to launch a campus in every

13:22

county, and every county is very different. And one

13:24

of the places when they looked, when we looked,

13:26

I was on the team at this point, looked

13:28

at ourselves and we said, you know, the

13:30

Latino population, the Hispanic population is

13:33

isn't represented in our church as much as

13:35

it should be in our in our state

13:37

and, and so

13:39

or it is in our state. And so

13:41

we got together a group of leaders and

13:44

and just admitted that it was like, hey,

13:46

we're we're just not any good at this.

13:48

What should we do? What how should we

13:50

and we listened to like shocker, like this

13:52

is not rocket science stuff here. We listened

13:54

to Spanish speaking friends and said, What should

13:56

we do? And and their solution was

13:58

different than what I would have I would of thought. They

14:00

said, you know, what if you just added

14:02

Spanish translation to what you do and add?

14:04

And at that point it was like the

14:06

headphones, like, you know, people at the back

14:08

of the room doing that. Because what that

14:11

says, this is what we heard time and

14:13

again, what that says is my mom,

14:15

when she comes, she can listen. And the

14:18

fact that you've created a place at the

14:20

table for her is an amazing

14:22

thing. Well, we did that kind of against

14:24

our, I'll say it me, I thought this

14:26

is a bad idea. Like this, like you

14:28

were thinking Spanish service kind of thing. Well,

14:31

I was like, yeah, what about a Spanish service?

14:33

Or like, maybe we should do like, maybe there's

14:35

a lot more, frankly, more complex things that we

14:37

could do. Well, sure enough, we did that. And

14:39

within a year, there was a noticeable uptick. And

14:42

now if you go to any of liquids campuses,

14:45

you know, they represent, they are way more

14:47

diverse than they were, you know, even, you

14:49

know, five, six years ago. And because we

14:51

just listened. And so what's one of the

14:53

things that's changing is I think prevailing churches

14:56

are asking that question strategically, are leaning in

14:58

saying, Hey, how do we, how do

15:00

we do this in a way that makes sense in our culture? Well,

15:02

even, you know, I'm seeing that at our church

15:05

connects this church, which you know, I'm the founding

15:07

pastor at, I had always tried

15:09

to be as diverse as our community. And

15:11

you know, living where we are, it wasn't

15:13

a particularly diverse community. But over the last

15:15

five, seven years, that's changed a lot, particularly

15:17

at our south, our broadcast location. And it's

15:20

been an absolute joy for me to

15:22

see that congregation transformed to look a little

15:25

bit more like what you find at Walmart

15:27

or what you find at the beach, or

15:30

you know, at the ski hills on

15:32

a winter day, which is, which is great. What

15:35

are some keys for churches that

15:37

want to get away from that

15:39

homogeneity, you know, that, that

15:41

sameness where everybody's white or everybody's

15:43

black, or everyone's Latino, or

15:45

everybody's from the suburbs, or whatever that is,

15:47

what are, what are some keys? You've hinted

15:50

at it already with liquid. Anything

15:52

else you'd say to leaders? I think listening is

15:54

a huge deal. I come from this as a,

15:56

you know, if you're not watching the video, like

15:58

I am a middle-aged. white man like

16:00

I had that that's who I am so I you know

16:02

I am I'm kind of the poster

16:05

child for non-diversity I have no hair

16:07

I'm like super pasty you

16:10

know I'll say this for me my own one of

16:12

my own personal turning points was it was

16:14

actually on my podcast I was talking to

16:16

Derwin Gray a great pastor who you've had

16:19

on your show as well transformation church and

16:22

we were talking about this issue and I was

16:24

saying to him help me like help me understand

16:27

help me get better at this Derwin I this

16:29

is like I feel this but I'm like what

16:31

do I do better and I was asking the

16:33

question from a marketing strategic

16:35

how do we represent I was I

16:37

talked about it in all the kind

16:39

of like sociological terms how do we

16:41

you know we want to better reflect

16:43

our community we want to you know

16:45

I want the percentage of people that

16:47

you know in our community is the

16:49

same in our church and all that

16:52

and he stopped me mid-sentence this was

16:54

on air he stopped me mid-sentence and

16:56

he was like the kingdom of God when

16:59

the kingdom of God comes it's diverse

17:01

it's not this is not a marketing

17:03

tactic rich this is not about like

17:05

we're trying to somehow and I

17:07

was like oh I'm being schooled

17:09

right now and that's

17:12

true right like at our core you know

17:14

when in you know in Revelation we know

17:16

that we're headed towards a day where we

17:18

will be standing in that crowd that

17:21

is too large to count where every tribe every

17:23

tongue and every nation will be standing together before

17:25

the throne and we

17:27

want that now in our churches that that really

17:30

should be and for me that's been a paradigm

17:32

shift where I'm like oh we need to think

17:34

about this differently than just how

17:36

do we what's the kind of latest marketing

17:38

trick and and and it's it's asking

17:40

the deeper question beyond like

17:42

do we have representation in our band like

17:44

you know if I can speak a little

17:46

bit you know and this is not I'm

17:49

not this not digging connects us or any

17:51

particular church but there we have gone through

17:53

a phase where it was like well we've

17:55

got X person on our band and so

17:57

that means we're good we've checked the box

18:00

No, no, that's not good. What we have to

18:02

do as leaders is we have to sit down

18:04

and actually listen, actually understand. And,

18:07

you know, I had, you know, a

18:09

number of years ago was convicted

18:12

in this area and was a friend

18:15

asked me this similar question around, you know,

18:17

black leaders. And he said, you know, you

18:19

gotta talk to a black friend,

18:21

a male black friend about ask them the question,

18:23

which I was like, this is crazy. But they

18:25

asked them the question when their

18:27

parents had the talk about cops.

18:30

And I'm like, what do you mean the talk about cops? And

18:33

there was like, well, yeah, have the conversation about one.

18:35

And I literally I was like, I didn't even know

18:37

what you meant mean by that. And so I

18:40

sat down with a dear friend of mine, we literally went out

18:42

for lunch. And I said to him, I'm like, listen, I'm gonna,

18:44

I'm gonna ask you what I think might be an uncomfortable conversation.

18:46

But will you go with me more friends? And I asked

18:48

them this. And to my dismay,

18:50

I was shocked that he was he talked about when

18:52

his parents talked about what it's like to be a

18:55

young black man. And when you get pulled over by

18:57

the police, and, and, you know,

18:59

and I was like, Oh,

19:01

I have so much to learn as a leader,

19:03

like, this is so much deeper than just, yeah,

19:06

do we have a, you know, insert whatever, you

19:08

know, group on our band, it's like, we've got

19:10

to create space for that. And I think as

19:12

a, as a leader, we've got to do

19:15

that. And so I would say when it comes back to

19:17

church landscape, what I hear is leaders having this conversation behind

19:19

doors, more and more trying to figure out, okay, what

19:21

do we do here, not from a marketing point

19:23

of view, but from a, how do we

19:25

actually have our churches represent the kingdom of

19:27

Christ in a way and the time is

19:30

more urgent than ever before, you know, we

19:32

the idea of you can just reach one

19:34

slice of culture. That's gone like that's a that

19:36

isn't you know, that's a bad idea. It's a bad idea is

19:38

the most diverse generation

19:41

in history, right? Because

19:44

it just is through immigration

19:46

through intermarriage, etc, etc. You're

19:49

just seeing a very diverse generation and

19:51

like, like, you know, as you hinted

19:54

for them, it's table stakes. Yes. Yeah,

19:56

if they walk into a church, it's not diverse. It's

19:58

all old white people. people, they're like, yeah,

20:01

we don't fit here. Yeah, what is happening

20:03

here? Yeah, exactly. Yeah,

20:05

it doesn't feel like the kingdom of Christ.

20:07

And I think, listen, that's a beautiful thing.

20:09

That's what we want our churches to be.

20:11

Like I remember,

20:13

again, roll the clock back when we started 30 years

20:16

ago, I remember going to like a conference that

20:18

was super diverse and I was like, you're brought

20:20

to tears, because you're like, man, this literally is

20:22

what heaven's gonna be like. Well, our churches should

20:24

be like that every single week. How do we

20:27

do that? You're on

20:29

the ground with so many churches. You were

20:31

at Exponential earlier this year, et cetera, et

20:33

cetera. Anything else you're picking up on

20:36

the front lines, because you're hanging out

20:38

with a lot of churches that

20:40

have actually not just bounced back from

20:43

COVID, but have exceeded any previous

20:45

thresholds that they had experienced

20:47

prior. So you're with that,

20:50

I hope we get some data on this this year, but

20:53

you're with what I estimate, seven to

20:55

9% of churches are experiencing, that

20:57

they're not only back, they're beyond. And

21:00

what are you seeing with those

21:02

churches? What are they

21:05

doing differently that other

21:07

churches maybe could take notes from? Well,

21:10

I'll tell you a conversation I keep having,

21:12

and this, so I've talked with, in the

21:14

last six weeks, I've talked with churches that

21:16

are in that growing category that

21:19

are of literally 200, 2000, 20,000. And

21:23

it's literally the same conversation, which

21:26

is how do we

21:29

streamline the new here

21:31

to volunteer pathway? How

21:34

do we take someone when they first

21:36

arrive? Give you an example, I was

21:38

talking to a church in

21:40

Boston, multi-site church, five

21:43

or six locations, and it

21:45

was like, listen, I'm a church geek, I

21:47

could talk about church and dive deep all

21:49

the time. And this guy was like, he

21:51

was my, we were like foiled, it was

21:53

great interacting with each other. And

21:55

I was asking him this question, what are you learning? And

21:57

he said, you know, we just did this huge data study

21:59

internally. where we looked at, they

22:01

actually used chat GPT and a couple of AI

22:04

tools to look at kind of a big data

22:06

set around first time guests. And

22:08

they were trying to figure out, there's like intuition

22:10

around, you know, if we have to get guests

22:12

to come one time, if we get them to

22:15

come back a second time, what's that like? If

22:17

we get them to come back a third time?

22:19

Well, they went on this whole basically year long

22:21

journey to dive deep to

22:23

understand what exactly is the path

22:25

that people take, what exactly is

22:27

the path that churches are on?

22:30

And the thing they came up with one of their takeaways was,

22:32

if they don't get guests to return before

22:36

17 weeks from their first

22:38

visit, the chance of them

22:40

coming to ever again basically drops to nil.

22:43

That if you can't get them to come

22:45

back, they basically will never come

22:47

back. If they don't, that was one of their

22:49

takeaways. 17, that's very

22:51

specific. Yeah, very specific. Well, it's 100

22:53

days. It's just over 100 days, 119 days. And,

22:57

you know, I was talking to another church. This is

22:59

a church in New Jersey, six or seven locations. There

23:01

are about 5,000 people. Literally, I was

23:03

asking them, what are you working on? Talking to the executive

23:05

pastor, what are you working on? And they said, well, you

23:07

know, one of the things we're convicted about is we had

23:10

3,600 first time guests last year. And this

23:12

year we're trying to figure out how do we contact

23:14

them? How do we get all of them connected in

23:16

the first 100 days? I

23:19

was like, oh, that's interesting. Cause I literally

23:21

had the same conversation last week with somebody

23:23

else. You know, this idea of, we've

23:28

got to streamline and get really,

23:30

what we can't do, I think

23:32

pre-COVID particularly, people were,

23:35

I don't know whether it was like

23:37

they were more willing to connect with us or there

23:39

was less social friction, but

23:41

there seems to be, we

23:43

have to, the way I keep saying is we have

23:45

to arrest, we have to take control of that process.

23:47

We have to, people raise their hand and say, I'm

23:49

at your church. They want

23:51

to be connected and they want us to take

23:53

a more active role in moving them along that

23:56

pathway. They, rather than saying

23:58

it's the old, you know. You remember

24:00

when we started, churches would say, we have 112 ministries, and that

24:02

was a good thing. You

24:05

kind of bragged about that. You were like, we've

24:07

got all these ministries, and you can do all

24:09

kinds of stuff, where now we're

24:12

much more like in an

24:14

outburger on the West Coast. It's like, we have these

24:16

three things. Take these three steps to

24:18

go to get plugged into our

24:20

church. And that conversation, I just keep hearing over

24:22

and over and over. We've got to do more,

24:24

we've got to be engaged more, we've got to

24:26

help people take those steps more. So what I

24:28

hear you saying is, when somebody

24:31

shows up in real life for the first

24:33

time, they want to get

24:35

plugged in, and they have to get plugged

24:37

in sooner. And

24:40

so I want to ask the question, because this is

24:42

something I've been teaching about when I'm on the road

24:44

speaking, the foyer moved, right?

24:46

Like if you think about where the foyer

24:48

was, it used to be the foyer in

24:50

your church, and now it's online. Do you

24:52

think that's because people have

24:54

already pretested the church, they followed

24:56

you on social, they've watched

24:58

a couple of messages, they joined your live stream,

25:01

I'm here, I want to

25:03

join the gym, get me working out, as

25:05

opposed to, I'm going to sit back, relax,

25:07

enjoy the flight for three years and see

25:09

if this is for me. Is that shifting?

25:11

Like what is going on? Yeah,

25:13

absolutely. So for sure, people arrive

25:16

with way more information about the

25:18

church than they used to. They

25:21

know who you are, they have a clear sense of

25:23

what the mission is. They're not just

25:25

tire kicking. Every

25:27

county in the country, I'll use that again,

25:30

is more post-Christian today than it was 10 years

25:32

ago, is becoming more that way. And there are

25:34

parts of the country, including where you and I

25:36

live, or part of North America,

25:38

where you and I live, that people don't

25:40

just stumble into church. Like it's just not

25:43

like- You're invading a private club,

25:45

right? Yeah, like what's going

25:47

on? You just don't do that. And

25:49

so when you arrive, man, you're

25:51

interested, you

25:54

want to get connected. And you've said this for years,

25:56

Kerry, and I've repeated this, but some version of, we

25:58

know that people are looking for- looking for a

26:00

relationship, like they want

26:03

that kind of experience. They're looking for connection. And

26:05

that's more true now than it was pre-COVID. They

26:07

show up, they're looking for connection. If they wanted

26:09

just your content, they would get it online. They

26:11

already have it. If they don't have yours, they've

26:14

got everybody else's. Yeah, they've got your content. I

26:16

mean, when they show up in person, they're saying,

26:18

I want some sort of relationship. Now we used

26:20

to say to them, well,

26:22

you can't get relationships here, go to small

26:25

groups. Like we did a bait and switch

26:27

with them. We would say, come

26:29

to church. It's a great place to connect. And

26:31

then they would arrive and we almost went out

26:33

of our way to make it

26:35

not friendly because we said, well, we

26:37

want anonymity. People want anonymity. We

26:40

don't want to bother them. We don't want them to feel. And

26:43

so then we put up these almost barriers and

26:45

we didn't say it that way, but that was

26:47

what we were doing. But now, gosh, man, you've

26:49

got to, I just was talking to

26:51

a church who would be in the kind

26:54

of, they wouldn't call themselves attractional, but

26:56

they're in that stream of, you know,

26:58

Christian church, similar to our similar connects

27:01

us who we were having this conversation and they say, you

27:03

know, we did a thing last fall where

27:05

they were like, okay, this is in their service. 2000

27:08

people in the auditorium, you know, after the rock

27:10

band, after the great compelling Ted talk teaching, they

27:13

were like, we're going to have

27:15

you divide into groups of three and you're

27:17

going to stop and pray for each other

27:19

right now. Like in the service, we're doing

27:22

that in the service right now. And

27:24

you would have never done that. Like 15, 20 years

27:27

ago, we would have never done that because we're

27:29

like, oh my goodness, that's going to make people

27:31

feel uncomfortable. And you

27:33

know, but man, that's just not the case anymore.

27:35

Like we, we've got to figure out how do

27:37

we make an accessible encounter? How do we, as

27:39

Jeff Brody, our lead pastor has been saying, how

27:41

do we move that kind of that

27:43

relationship earlier in the process? You

27:46

know, people are coming looking for relationship. We

27:48

can't replicate that in a room of 1500,

27:50

but we got to do something that at

27:52

least points towards that. You know, so Mariners

27:55

church in California, they, if you were to go to

27:57

a Saturday night, if you're ever in Irvine in, in.

28:00

on Saturday night, you need to go to what

28:02

they do and see. I think they're pointing to

28:04

the future of church on Saturday night there. You

28:06

arrive, there are, after the service, you've

28:09

got all kinds of food trucks, you've got

28:11

bounce houses for kids. It's a community event.

28:14

It feels like, you know what it feels

28:16

like to me? It reminds me of when

28:19

you travel to the developing country and

28:21

go to church. And after church, people

28:23

spill out into, like if you're

28:25

in Guatemala and you spill out into the kind of

28:27

courtyard out in front of church, it's

28:30

like a party. It's like we're having a meal together, we're

28:32

hanging out, it has that kind of feel. Now you can

28:34

do that in California. We have a hard time doing that

28:36

in our climate here. But

28:38

I just think that stuff, man, is so critically

28:40

important. And we used to think it was fringe,

28:43

but I think it's like

28:45

court of the mission. That's why people arrive. They're

28:47

looking for that in what

28:49

we offer. Yeah, and I mean, Mariners

28:51

is such a great church. I always call

28:53

it the spa church, sorry, Eric, but you

28:55

know that, you've heard that from me, Eric

28:57

Geiger. But I've gotten to know some of

28:59

the people at Park Hill Architects, Disclosure, they're

29:01

a sponsor for this podcast. But

29:04

that's some of the trends they're seeing is

29:06

if you're building now, you're not just building

29:08

anonymous rooms, you're building community space, lobby

29:10

space, connection space. I think that's a super

29:12

good trend because people don't know each other.

29:14

And yes, I'm a believer in groups, but

29:16

if you only know eight people at your

29:19

church, you wanna cross

29:21

pollinate a little bit more than that. And

29:23

community is what's rare, connection is what's rare,

29:25

content is everywhere. Right? Absolutely.

29:28

Okay, super cool, really helpful.

29:31

Any other best practices you're seeing

29:33

on the ground right now in growing

29:35

churches? Well, I

29:37

know, so there's 40% of church leaders

29:39

out there according

29:43

to Barna, think that their

29:46

live stream stuff is effective. I think that's

29:48

the statistic on that. I

29:51

think there is a question around that. We're seeing

29:53

that in churches. We've seen some high profile churches

29:56

pull out of doing live stream. I'm

30:00

glad we're going there. I was going to ask

30:02

you because this is we're recording this the week

30:04

that Bridgetown announced that it's recording

30:06

its live stream or not not ceasing

30:08

its live stream. Yeah, ceasing its live stream. And

30:10

I would say so that's definitely not in that

30:13

like the churches I'm coaching working with the closest

30:15

with that's kind of like the opposite of what

30:17

we're thinking. You know, it's there for sure has

30:19

been a trend there where you

30:21

know there were good friends of mine who during

30:23

COVID were like we're all going online and we're

30:26

never going back. I don't know who those people

30:28

could have been. But they

30:30

and at that point I found

30:32

myself saying like, I think

30:35

we're going to go back eventually like I don't I

30:37

don't know. But now I hear church leaders saying,

30:39

Oh, we're getting out of the streaming thing. We're not we're

30:41

not doing we're not doing church online. We're

30:44

going to make it hard. We're downgrading the experience. We're

30:46

trying to make it worse like deliberately make it bad

30:48

quality like weird stuff like that. And I'm like, wait

30:50

a second. Like don't do that. Like don't you know,

30:53

we want it to be a good product. You don't

30:55

want it to be you know, terrible. You want it

30:57

to be an engaging thing. So, you know, I think

30:59

there are in the

31:01

churches I'm working with there are so there are for

31:03

sure churches out there that are asking that question. And

31:06

I think we've all kind of right sized are spending

31:08

in that area. We've, you know, we spent a lot

31:10

of money over a couple years to make that better.

31:12

And we've we figured out the model around what that

31:14

looks like. But we're, we're

31:16

not dropping it. We're saying, hey, this fits in.

31:19

And there are a lot of people, frankly, I

31:21

was talking again talking to another church leader recently,

31:23

we're reflecting on the same thing. And they were

31:25

trying to gather core leaders together. And

31:28

these were like, you know, donors and core folks. And

31:30

they said, you know, there's a person who's who

31:33

had been in this case, it was a donor who

31:35

had given gives at a significant level or church. And

31:37

they haven't come back in person at all. And this

31:39

is we're four years out from the pandemic. Like this

31:41

feels like to go back in the water, ancient years,

31:43

like it feels like, you know, we're half a decade

31:46

away from that thing. And this person, they

31:48

finally got them on the phone, they've been ghosting them.

31:50

And they were like, I just kept trying and trying

31:52

and trying, eventually got them on the phone. And they

31:54

said, Well, I'll come to a zoom meeting. But I

31:56

won't turn on my camera. This person and I fell

31:58

for this person. I'm like, Oh, that's That's so sad.

32:01

There are people who live with anxiety

32:04

more now than they've ever done before. And

32:06

I think nobody who leads churches

32:08

has that anxiety. We're

32:11

used to being in front of people. It

32:13

doesn't bother us. We're out in front

32:15

of people. Even if we have to force ourselves to

32:18

do it, we do it, but there are people who

32:20

don't. And we've seen that. There's all kinds of statistics

32:22

that show that was one of

32:24

the permanent long-term damage impact from this

32:26

thing. And man, I would hate

32:28

to limit that experience. And I still think even

32:30

at its core, listen, I think Church Online is,

32:34

I think we're all asking the question. We haven't found the

32:36

answer yet. We're still not there. I've

32:38

said you've had Jenny Allen on your podcast. I need to say this

32:40

to her face sometimes because I keep saying it behind her back. To

32:43

me, what IfGathering is doing is the

32:45

future of Church Online. I've said that

32:47

for years, but I'm like, it's some

32:49

version of like online events,

32:52

in-person groups, like

32:54

large conferences. I'd

32:57

love our church to do, let's try to get all

32:59

those people to come to like a weekend conference where

33:01

it's like some, let's rent out at

33:03

a conference center and get everybody together. And

33:05

it's just our church, but it happens to be the

33:08

people that are also online. I think that group is

33:10

onto something there that I think that, when

33:12

you look at, Pilsong is very

33:14

similar to that. HTB, there

33:17

are churches that are kind of doing similar type

33:19

things that I'm like, I think that's closer

33:21

to what it looks like long-term. But listen,

33:23

I don't think that's going away. A

33:26

friend of mine said, it's like other big

33:28

announcement, Target closed their website and have told

33:30

everybody they just have to come into the

33:33

store. Like, of course that's not gonna happen.

33:35

Like, it's a part

33:37

of what we're doing. And I see churches, I

33:39

don't wanna just talk about Liquid all the time,

33:41

but what they're doing on their app is, or

33:43

Crossroads in Cincinnati is doing with their app. Or

33:45

Church Home. Church Home, what they're doing,

33:48

they're inventing the future there in a very

33:50

real way. That is trying, it's

33:53

not like, in the same way I have a

33:55

Starbucks app that

33:57

makes going to Starbucks better. So,

33:59

when I... use the Starbucks app,

34:01

it makes my experience, my in-person experience,

34:03

better. They're asking the question

34:06

around how do we make this, make

34:08

our in-person experience, and sure online, but

34:10

make our in-person experience better, which

34:13

is a different, it's not just a giving platform. You

34:15

probably have given platform people who are sponsors, so I

34:17

don't mean to step on their toes, but like it's

34:19

not just a place to give money. It's not just

34:21

a content dump. It's actually a place to connect with

34:23

community and connect with each other and journal

34:26

and all that stuff. Couldn't agree more.

34:28

So on the Bridgetown thing, because I raised

34:30

it, and I'll ask Tyler state in this

34:33

next time he's on, and please pray for Tyler.

34:35

He shared a health update that his cancer is

34:37

back, and I'm praying for him. So I haven't

34:39

talked to Tyler about it. I haven't talked to

34:42

John Mark Comer about this, but you know, when

34:44

I listen, and Rich, you're so good at this.

34:46

You're always dropping stuff into the art of leadership

34:48

academy, that membership. You're all invited, by the way,

34:52

and you said, hey, what do you

34:54

make of Bridgetown? It's a really healthy

34:56

discussion. My take on it, and

34:58

I'd love yours, my take is, I

35:00

think that's probably a good decision for Bridgetown. I

35:02

don't want to criticize them for it, because I

35:05

know when we have Tyler on, when we have

35:07

John Mark Comer on this podcast, they

35:09

have like a cult following, and I

35:11

mean that in the best way, like

35:13

you wouldn't believe. They wouldn't like that

35:15

phrase. No, no, but I mean, I

35:17

mean, they have followers around the world

35:19

that just like if they're speaking on

35:21

something, the tribe knows where to

35:24

show up. So my guess is, and this

35:26

is like 20 or

35:28

30 churches in America have this problem. So

35:30

this is not a one size fits all.

35:32

What they're trying to do is saying we

35:35

want the spectators from out of town to

35:37

get involved in a local church, because we're

35:39

not coming to you. We want the people

35:41

who are spectators at Bridgetown to get involved

35:43

at Bridgetown, you know, and

35:45

so we're trying to get you guys to

35:48

engage. Now, for most of us, I know

35:50

for Konexis, you know, Jeff Brody, who

35:52

I think is doing a great job leading us

35:54

through through this season, these times that we're in,

35:56

he says,

35:58

you know, we had a live stream. for eight

36:00

years now, we launched it eight years ago. We

36:03

were ready to flip a switch during COVID, not that

36:05

anyone saw that coming, but we

36:07

never shut down our live stream. And

36:10

now attendance, I know at the broadcast location,

36:12

higher than it's ever been, or really is

36:14

getting a new building, et cetera,

36:16

or having to add an auditorium at

36:18

our broadcast location. So never been higher.

36:21

And the online numbers are bigger than they were during

36:23

COVID when it was the only option. So

36:26

in other words, it's not a scarcity mentality,

36:28

it's not a mutually exclusive thing. And

36:30

half the people that connects this don't have

36:32

self-disclose, don't have a church background. They're

36:35

not regularly attending church. So to

36:37

me, to shut that down, it would be like

36:40

Target going, yeah, no more online shopping, no more

36:42

website, you gotta get in the store. It's like,

36:44

you're gonna slit your throat. So any different take

36:46

on that or a new one? The thing I

36:49

love about, and I don't know those guys really

36:51

at all beyond just see them

36:53

online and have had a few little interactions, but nothing

36:55

major. But the thing I love about what

36:57

they've done, which I think every church should

36:59

probably do, is we all got

37:01

online in March of 2020. Like

37:04

everybody got online, most of us got online. And

37:07

what I would strung, I love that

37:09

they stepped back and said, I love

37:11

their like, as Portland as in

37:13

heaven. And I'm like, they're letting

37:16

their vision and their values

37:18

drive their decisions. Like

37:20

that is amazing, good for

37:22

them. Like, and

37:24

I think that they're onto something. I

37:26

would say my own, like I have

37:28

personal, a lot of my coaching

37:30

around communication is you should just

37:33

do more, like more emails, more

37:35

letters, more call people, hound them,

37:37

send carrier pigeons. And I

37:39

struggle with that. I know

37:41

it works, but I struggle with that because it's like, and

37:43

I'll say to people, I'm like, listen, we live in

37:46

a busy world. People are super busy. So the

37:48

answer isn't therefore, from a communication point of view,

37:50

the answer isn't therefore stop communicating. The answer is

37:52

you got to make it a priority in people.

37:54

You got to communicate more. And I love that

37:56

they're like, man, we're going to take noise. out

37:58

of the atmosphere. Like we don't, you don't need

38:00

this out there. You got to, if you

38:03

want to see this thing, you should actually connect with real

38:05

people and do it. I'm like, good for them. Like I

38:07

think that that's real, that's super positive.

38:09

And so I think that my, to me, one of

38:11

the takeaways is maybe you should

38:13

step back and have the conversation and talk about how

38:15

does this fit into our strategy? What are we actually

38:17

doing here? How does this, you

38:19

know, does this make us, you know, how

38:23

does this help us fulfill what we believe God's

38:25

called us to do? And let's look closely at

38:27

that and make our decisions through that matrix rather

38:29

than just, Hey, everybody else is doing it. Let's

38:31

do it. Like that's not a great, that's not

38:33

a great decision. I would say I do

38:35

have, and this isn't them. My

38:37

friend Kenny and I did like a little quick follow-up thing

38:40

on it. And this isn't them by at all,

38:43

but there are, I would say

38:45

on the concern side, you know,

38:47

there's a, there's an undercurrent that

38:49

I think is potentially dangerous for

38:51

the local church. That is that's

38:53

saying really what we need to do is

38:55

retreat for the Hills. We need to, we

38:57

need to pull back from the culture. We

38:59

need to engage less. We need to be

39:02

more insider that the answer is

39:04

we need to just disciple people

39:06

more and stop engaging with un-church

39:08

people. And

39:11

I think that's a super dangerous and they're

39:13

not saying that. And so I

39:15

don't want to, I'm not saying that I want to

39:17

clearly say that that's, they're not saying that, but

39:19

there, you could see where people could take a decision

39:22

like that, that they've made. And I think she said

39:24

it and thing it's, it's descriptive, not prescriptive. Like just

39:26

because they did it doesn't mean you should do it

39:28

either way, but I'm a little bit concerned. And they

39:30

were not saying you should all do this. It was

39:32

like, no, no, no. Well, that's what I love about

39:34

it is they were like, this is for us in

39:37

the Portland family. Like they were like, oh,

39:39

even in their announcement, it was like, we're not

39:41

really talking to you people out there. Like,

39:43

you know, which is great. I like, that's

39:46

why they're so influential because we're talking about

39:48

their internal decisions. Right. Yes. And I think

39:50

that's helpful nuance. I agree with you. And

39:52

you know what, when you're in a declining

39:54

organization and you're a

39:56

minority in culture, one of the instincts is

39:59

to circle the And I think that's

40:01

fatal. I think that would be

40:03

an idiot. Yeah, I would say

40:05

that's the only, like, that segment of the Christian

40:07

world that I bump into that I'm like, Oh,

40:09

I don't want anything to do with you. Like,

40:12

I'm not like you. That

40:14

is that is an anathema to the message

40:16

of Jesus. Like, man, I'm very concerned about

40:18

that. And so I would

40:21

say I'm a little bit concerned that there's a that

40:23

because of their influence, that there will be churches who lean

40:26

that way, who will look to them and say, look, they

40:28

did it. Let's do the same

40:30

thing because, you know, it's

40:32

that's I think it's just super dangerous. Yeah.

40:35

OK, so when I was talking about what you wanted

40:37

to talk about, we were texting. You

40:40

said, let's talk about leading change at a

40:42

church when it comes to the diffusion of the innovation

40:44

curve. So I don't understand the question, but I'm going

40:46

to ask it anyway. Rich, what

40:48

do you mean? What do you mean? Tell me

40:50

more. That's great. So

40:53

first of all, I love that you're exposing the like, you're setting me up

40:55

here. I could talk about this all day long.

41:00

So there's a there's a

41:03

there's a popular sociological

41:06

model called the diffusion of innovation model. And

41:08

it's a bell curve. It's you

41:10

know, it shows any population that you look

41:12

at. It's it talks

41:14

through five different categories

41:16

of people and their likeliness

41:19

to adopt change or to adopt. You're

41:22

talking about innovators, laggards, innovators, early

41:24

adopters. Early adopters are familiar. You're

41:26

very familiar with this. A late

41:28

majority. People are. I wrote

41:30

a book, including that. OK, good. So

41:33

there's lots of insight there. So innovators are

41:35

two and a half percent. Early adopters are

41:37

three point five. Early early and late adopters

41:39

are early and late majority are 34 percent

41:41

each. And then laggards are 16 percent. And

41:44

this is not like a Christian thing. This is just

41:46

like a sociology thing. And to

41:49

me, this is one of those areas where it's

41:51

impacted so much of the way I think about

41:53

leading, because what this says is

41:55

the majority of the people in

41:57

your church, if you're trying to get them through.

42:00

adopt a new behavior, what

42:03

they need are other people to adopt

42:05

that behavior before they will adopt that

42:07

behavior. The

42:10

actual defining thing that moves early and

42:12

late majority people is early and late

42:15

majority people. They have to look around

42:17

and say, oh, are other people want

42:19

to be involved in this? And so

42:21

now the difficulty with this is most

42:23

church leaders, or I would say leaders

42:25

in businesses or organizations, they tend to

42:27

be either innovators or early adopters. They

42:29

tend to be. And so

42:31

we think about the world through our own

42:34

lens. We think about change through what would

42:36

it take for me to volunteer?

42:38

So let's say you want to get like

42:40

100 new volunteers at your church. And

42:44

this is like, and I love, listen, I've

42:46

been an executive pastor, been in those second seats. I

42:49

love lead pastors, but I also love to poke them every once in a while.

42:51

Most lead pastor solutions to problem is just

42:53

let me preach on it. Like I just

42:55

let me stand up and I'll preach a

42:57

really compelling message and people will join.

43:01

And so, and the reason why that is,

43:03

is because that works for them because they're

43:06

an innovator, they're early adopter. They just need

43:08

a compelling idea and they're

43:10

willing to try something even if it's

43:12

painful. That's what that's the definition of

43:14

an innovator. I'm willing to try things even

43:16

if it's painful, even if it's not great,

43:18

I'll do it just because it's new. Lead

43:21

adopters, they have some of that same kind of

43:23

behavior, but they're, they need to see a few

43:25

more people. So when we think about

43:28

volunteers, you have to, and

43:30

I saw this through the 13

43:32

campuses or 1500 volunteers I recruited

43:34

directly around launching campuses is

43:37

man, people join when other people join. And so

43:39

you've got to build a process that ultimately has

43:42

people looking around saying, oh, there's other

43:44

people doing this. There's other relationships in

43:46

here. There's other. On the

43:48

volunteer side, what that means is our

43:50

processes have to be built from how

43:53

do we get people to build friends

43:55

first, probably bet, then

43:57

they will end up joining

43:59

the team. The kind of experience of

44:01

being on those teams needs to be highly

44:03

relational. It needs to feel like, oh, this

44:05

is like a great experience for me. I'm

44:07

like, I'm building new, I'm

44:13

getting new relationships, I'm finding new friends

44:15

first, rather than, hey, I'm joining the

44:17

mission. We think that people, this

44:19

is another lead pastor thing. They're like, people are

44:22

so compelled by the mission. They're

44:25

compelled by a community that's compelled by the

44:27

mission. They look around and say, oh my

44:29

goodness, look at all these people making a

44:31

difference. This is why something

44:33

like Night to Shine works. Night to Shine,

44:35

Tim Tebow Foundation, the

44:38

essential ask of that is, will you give up

44:40

an evening to give a

44:42

kid, young adult who's never had

44:44

a prom a prom because of their special

44:46

needs. They have some sort of special

44:48

need and they've not been able to have

44:50

a prom. And the beautiful thing

44:53

about those is it takes more than

44:55

one volunteer for every guest. So if your church

44:57

is gonna have a hundred guests, you're gonna need

44:59

probably 150 volunteers to make that

45:01

happen. Man, you come to that thing,

45:03

you're a part of a team. You're like having fun.

45:06

You're like, this is an amazing experience.

45:08

Like I'm building new

45:11

friends. I'm a part of something amazing. And

45:14

that's why that thing has just grown

45:16

like gangbusters because it's a compelling experience.

45:18

It's time bound. It's

45:21

relationship focused. We see

45:24

this with donors. Like you see this, and

45:26

this is like goes back, it's like tail is

45:28

all this time. 1 Corinthians or 1 Chronicles 29,

45:30

building of the temple. I'm just like one of

45:32

my favorite passages on giving. You

45:34

have, they're building the temple. What happened

45:37

there? You see David gives first and

45:39

then his leaders and then the leaders around

45:41

them. And then what does it say? And

45:43

then the people of Israel were moved by

45:46

the generosity of their people, of

45:48

their leaders. And so they gave. So

45:50

instead of, again, the same thing. We should

45:53

be thinking, how do we go to innovators

45:55

first, then early adopters, then early majority, then

45:57

late majority, and then laggards. you

46:00

know, maybe we just ignore the laggards. I don't

46:02

know. Ignore the laggards. Yeah, that's my best strategy.

46:04

Yes. Well, and the interesting thing there, I think

46:07

we, if you've, if you study

46:09

the diffusion of innovation curve, so

46:11

there's 16% of laggards in any

46:13

social environment, there's only 2.5% are

46:18

innovators. So there's whatever the

46:20

quick math is, there's seven times as many

46:22

laggards in any environment than

46:24

there are innovators. And

46:26

that's true in the church. Anybody that's led

46:28

in the church, you know that there's, there's

46:30

lots of people underrepresented in innovators in the

46:32

church. That's my long theory. Oh, sure. Yeah,

46:34

that could be. Yeah, there's just not enough

46:36

because the laggards have speeded out of us.

46:38

Who runs the church? It's not a lot

46:41

of innovators rule. Yeah, that's anyway. Yeah, keep

46:43

going. Yeah. Anyways. So I just

46:45

think there's a ton there. And I think the key insight

46:47

for us as leaders on that is man,

46:49

stop thinking like yourself. Start thinking,

46:52

what's the difference between me and

46:55

an early majority, late majority person in this area?

46:57

Like what, what kind of information do they need?

46:59

What kind of, you know, how much

47:01

hand holding do they need? What kind of relationships do

47:03

they need? How, how can we bring them along the

47:06

curve? This is true in some of the work

47:08

I've done in invite culture where there's a small

47:11

percentage of our people who invite people to the

47:13

church. And it's probably two or

47:15

3% of our most churches.

47:17

There's like a hardcore group of folks.

47:20

And we've got to equip those people know that

47:22

there's a portion that does disproportionate

47:24

amount of inviting, but then

47:26

we've got to celebrate that. And we've,

47:29

we actually have to say we have to in

47:31

there, like when people are telling their testimonies or

47:33

when we're even just in our messages on a

47:36

Sunday, you can say, Hey, you know, I was

47:38

talking to my friend, Kerry, that guy is so

47:40

good at inviting friends. He was talking to these

47:42

three people in his neighborhood. And you know what?

47:44

He invited eight people to come to Easter and

47:47

only one of them came. And I'm just so

47:49

thankful. Like I just want to celebrate Kerry because

47:51

he invited seven people who didn't come. Like that's

47:53

amazing. What that does is that tells the early

47:56

adopter, early majority people, the people

47:58

farther down the innovation curve that like,

48:00

hey, there's other people actually doing this. It's

48:02

not, you know, it's, you know, we gotta

48:04

make it easy. We gotta put the cookies

48:06

on the bottom shelf for them to

48:09

make it so they'll wanna do that. And so

48:11

to me, that diffusion of innovation curve, we have

48:13

to keep thinking about all the areas that we

48:15

wanna see change. If you're not seeing the change,

48:17

I would think it's probably because you're

48:19

closer to being an innovator and

48:21

you're leading, you're doing what you need. And,

48:24

you know, all the times, like I've helped churches

48:26

on fundraising stuff. And I'm like, they,

48:29

and again, it's a little bit of classic rich purchase.

48:31

Like they, when they hear all the stuff I tell

48:33

them what we're talking about doing, they're like, that's a

48:35

lot. Do we really need, do we really need all

48:37

that? And I'm like, no, you don't need that. You

48:39

just need a back of a napkin. Let's sit down

48:41

over a coffee. And literally I will draw

48:43

down on a back of a napkin what we're raising money

48:45

for, and you'll give to that. But you

48:47

are not your people. Your people are, they need

48:49

more. They need more relationship. They need more, they

48:52

ultimately need to see there's other people engaged. They

48:54

need to see other people are, you know, want

48:56

to be a part of this thing. Well,

48:59

let's talk about invite culture. Let's shift gears and

49:01

go there. You've got a new book on it,

49:03

which is a great book, had a privilege of

49:05

reading it. Why

49:08

invite culture? Why is that a focus

49:10

right now? And then walk us through

49:12

maybe even the first step, because I'm

49:14

going to assume most people who listen to

49:17

a podcast like this are growth-minded leaders. Otherwise

49:19

you don't listen to podcasts. You probably want

49:21

to reach more people. I've been pretty clear

49:23

about that. You want to help churches reach

49:25

more people. So let's

49:27

talk about invite culture. Yeah, totally. Well, the

49:30

kind of the, so part

49:32

of this came out of leading in a fast-growing church.

49:34

So we were deemed a number of years ago as

49:36

one of the fastest growing churches in the country, and

49:38

they continue. Liquid continues to be that. And one

49:41

of the rarest forms of, so people that end

49:43

up on that list, the

49:46

typical trend is you end up on

49:48

the list, and then over time, your

49:50

number goes down. So you end up

49:53

like, you arrive at number 15, and

49:55

then you end up kind of bubbling down. And

49:58

so I've tried to pay attention, particularly to those... churches

50:00

that end up on that list and then actually

50:02

go up the list, which is because those

50:05

are really the fastest of the fast growing churches

50:07

because they have an accelerating culture,

50:11

something's happening there that's different than

50:13

what we normally see. What we've

50:15

seen over time is that growing

50:17

churches train, equip, and motivate

50:19

their people to invite their friends. They

50:22

don't just leave it to chance. Those

50:24

are very specific things. Train. They

50:27

talk about it. It's like the head

50:29

side of it. They talk about why

50:31

it's so important. They tell stories about

50:33

it. They teach from the Bible. They

50:35

give lots of examples. They equip. They're

50:37

giving them tools. They

50:40

literally are like, we're generating tools. And I was

50:42

talking to a church, one of those churches recently,

50:44

where last year at Easter, they used ChatGPT, which

50:47

is kind of a fun thing. They used ChatGPT

50:49

to build a custom invite tool for their website

50:51

because they couldn't find one online. And why is

50:53

this? Because they were like, we want to make

50:56

it super easy for people to invite. And so

50:58

we've got to equip them. We've got to give

51:00

them a tool. And so they built

51:02

this literally this texting tool that figured

51:04

out which campus was closest to them and all

51:07

that. And why do they do that? Because they're

51:09

trying to equip their people. And so growing churches

51:11

know they've got to give their people tools and then

51:13

motivate. There is a heart part of it. So it's

51:15

like head, hand, and heart. Like, what is your... This

51:18

isn't about... It's not about becoming a bigger church.

51:20

This is not about, this is not about, hey,

51:22

we want our church to be bigger because whatever,

51:25

you want a bigger car or something.

51:27

Like, it's about, man, there's a mission that God's

51:29

called us to be on. And where I would

51:31

say this is different than say, a tractional church.

51:33

I don't mind people. When people say like, oh,

51:35

you're from the attractional church movement. That doesn't bother

51:37

me. I'm like, I know in lots of circles,

51:39

that's not an insult. Yeah. I know in some

51:41

circles, that's an insult. For me, that's not an

51:43

insult. But where I would differ from, I would

51:45

say my earlier thinking in life is

51:48

I used to think we could do things

51:50

as a church, like as a leadership that

51:52

would attract people to our church. We will

51:55

do things, magic things, and people will show

51:57

up. But actually it's a discipleship issue. It's

51:59

actually about... about growing

52:01

our people to be the kinds

52:04

of people who will turn to their friends and

52:06

invite their friends, that they'll turn to people in

52:08

there and say, like, hey, you should come, good

52:11

things are happening. And so

52:13

we've got to actually disciple them towards that. And

52:15

so over these last number of years, it's

52:18

a little bit of a fixation where, you know,

52:20

we just haven't given up on it to try

52:22

to keep talking about that. And how do we,

52:24

and again, I'm just convinced that over time, you

52:26

know, fast growing churches, particularly, they don't

52:28

leave it up to chance. It's not

52:30

just happenstance. They have strategies to train, equip,

52:32

and mobilize, motivate their people to invite their

52:34

friends. All right, so what

52:36

is the first step in creating an invite

52:38

culture? Is that just being intentional about it?

52:41

Well, yeah, there's lots of ways to talk about the first

52:43

step. I would say maybe a way to rephrase your question,

52:45

which I know I don't like when people do that to

52:47

me on my podcast. What's the biggest

52:49

lever? Like, so we- Okay, what's the biggest

52:52

lever? There's lots of things that you could do. There's

52:54

lots of things you could do as a church, but

52:57

the biggest lever is teaching, is what

52:59

happens on the weekend. Like, so,

53:03

you know, and it's not just that you're

53:05

doing teaching. Every church is teaching on the

53:07

weekend, but it's that your teaching is shareable.

53:09

So we talk about shareable weekend teaching. And

53:11

I would say there's like a culture side of this

53:13

and a tactic side of it. So the culture

53:15

side of it, I would say to you, dear

53:17

friend, dear preacher, who is listening in, is

53:20

who are you inviting? Who are

53:22

you engaging with? Like, you know, are you,

53:24

who are the people in your life that

53:27

you think about that you're hoping show up this

53:29

weekend? And Kerry, this is one of those things

53:31

that you're just so good at this. Like you,

53:33

you know, you have actual friends who

53:35

don't attend our church. You actually know people who

53:37

don't, you know, who don't love Jesus. And

53:40

that's like a growing minority of church leaders. And

53:42

so the culture side of it for you if you're

53:44

teaching this weekend, if you want to make your teaching

53:46

more shareable, is, you know, you

53:48

gotta actually have people who don't follow Jesus that

53:50

are in your life. But then when

53:53

the kind of tactic side of it is the teach,

53:56

your teaching needs to be shareable. We need to

53:58

think about our teaching from... The

54:01

vantage point of what are we talking

54:03

about next from

54:05

that our people's friends and family will

54:07

want to be a part of. What

54:10

is coming up next? And this is, it's

54:12

a small tactic, but man

54:14

churches bump over this all the time. We forget

54:16

it. But it's like, remember there used to be

54:18

like in the 50s there was

54:21

like, I don't know, Zorro, or like

54:23

those old campy television shows. And maybe

54:26

at the end of Batman, they would like have

54:28

Batman and Robin would be on a cliff and

54:30

they're hanging there. And they're like, will

54:33

they survive? Will the bad grapple

54:35

keep hold them? Will

54:37

they, and then they'll say, find out

54:39

next time, same bad time, same bad

54:41

channel. Your messages

54:43

should have that kind of hook

54:46

in them. You need

54:48

to leave stuff on the table. Stop trying

54:50

to complete everything. Stop trying to tie it

54:52

all up in a bow. You

54:55

need to say, hey, this is where we're at

54:57

today. And next week, man, if you've got a

54:59

friend who's in, it's a simple tactic. You've got

55:01

a friend who's thinking about these three questions, you're

55:04

gonna wanna have them here because this are all in

55:06

the room. They gotta be in the

55:08

room. It's the whole tile and all and vitamins thing.

55:11

A lot of what we do is vitamins

55:13

preaching. It's like, it's good weekend,

55:15

week out. It's like, I'm supposed to take my

55:17

vitamins. I have them, they're in like a place

55:19

in my kitchen that I know my wife is

55:21

very good at taking them. I'm not so good

55:23

at taking them. I know over time, if I

55:25

take my vitamins, somehow when I'm 75, I'll

55:28

be a better person. But when I've got a

55:30

headache, or right now I've

55:32

got allergies, this is spring allergy season,

55:34

I do not miss taking my Allegra

55:37

D. It literally at 12

55:39

hours, it stings, and I take my

55:41

Allegra D. The same is

55:43

true with your teaching. How can we phrase our

55:45

teaching about what's coming up next? It's not what

55:47

we're doing today. It's what's coming up next from

55:50

how is this so shareable for your

55:52

people? What is it

55:54

that you're, what are you talking about? How

55:56

is it, not what's important for your people, but

55:58

for their... They're friends. We know

56:01

that people are looking for transcendent truth. This

56:03

is true statistically. We know that the people that come

56:05

to your church on this weekend, they want things that

56:07

are based on actual truth. This is a gallant that

56:09

is studying this number years ago. 75%

56:11

of people in your church are looking for

56:13

two things. They're looking for transcendent truth and

56:15

they want it applicable on Monday. You see

56:17

this in the culture. It's why like, I

56:19

was talking to a friend last week. He's

56:21

like, oh, my wife's into doing sourdough. Like

56:23

why is that happening? Like these like ancient

56:25

things that like these ancient practices that have

56:27

been happening for a long time. I

56:30

don't know how many our lead pastors have been saying this recently. Like you

56:32

see it all over the place. Why are people like building cabins

56:34

in the woods? They're like, I'm going off

56:36

the lid. Why is that? That's because people

56:38

are saying, I want something that's been true

56:40

for longer than 10 minutes. Like I want

56:42

something, I want transcendent truth. And the good

56:45

news is friends, we have transcendent truth. We

56:47

literally at its core, we have stories that

56:49

have been told for thousands of years that

56:51

have shaped culture. We get to tell

56:53

those stories and we get to apply them to daily

56:55

life. Man, we want to do

56:57

that teaching leads. It is core to what we

56:59

want to do. But the key is how do

57:02

we make it so it's shareable? So are your

57:04

people will, and there's lots we can do there,

57:06

but the big idea is how do we talk

57:08

about our teaching in a way that then our

57:10

friends will ultimately talk to their friends about it? So

57:14

that this I want to drill down on a little

57:16

bit because one of the things that has changed, particularly

57:18

in the last 10 years, not 20, but 10, content

57:22

was scarce. Now it's everywhere. You're

57:24

drowning in content. Ted talks, every

57:26

major church has, even if

57:28

they're not live streaming, their podcasts are

57:30

available on demand, audio, video. I mean,

57:33

content is everywhere, but you're saying, if

57:35

what I hear you saying is right,

57:38

the local church can quote, compete

57:40

or leverage teaching

57:43

if they make it shareable, even in the sea

57:45

of all the options, is that right? Yeah,

57:47

the key is absolutely. So 100%, I

57:50

actually think that our, I

57:52

think that we may be entering in

57:54

the greatest season for the church because

57:57

the plethora of content

57:59

that is available. available, what

58:01

we're learning, and you know this, friends,

58:03

is more content does not solve people's

58:05

lives. Just because

58:07

you have... So we've got 25 years

58:10

of TED Talks. You think we would finally figure

58:12

out how to get inspired and motivated to make

58:14

some sort of change. That's not

58:16

true. It isn't true. What we've

58:18

got to do is connect... And

58:20

it's the same with AI. Just

58:22

because I can ask chat GPT some

58:25

question and actually have a fairly interesting

58:27

conversation, I

58:29

still need a human to give me wisdom. I

58:31

still need someone to look across the table from

58:33

me and help me apply that to my life.

58:37

And the same is true. So what we

58:39

have to do, what I would say on

58:41

the kind of call, the stakes

58:43

that are at play here is

58:45

because there is more content than

58:47

has ever been before, if we're not

58:49

clearly articulating to our people why what

58:52

we're teaching matters to their

58:54

friends. We're doing this

58:56

series because your friends are confused about

58:58

insert A, B, and C. We're doing

59:00

this series. We've got next week's message.

59:02

You don't have to think about series

59:04

even. Next week, we're working through

59:06

the book of John, and next week we're in

59:08

John chapter And

59:10

you know what? Do you have that friend that's

59:13

got questions of Jesus but is a little bit

59:15

embarrassed to ever talk to anybody else about them?

59:17

Do you have that friend that

59:20

maybe is struggling with something and

59:22

wants to ask questions about Jesus but doesn't know

59:25

where to start? Where next week you should have

59:27

that friend here because next week we're going to,

59:29

I want to introduce you to this guy who

59:32

he came to Jesus at night because he

59:34

didn't want other people to know. He

59:36

wanted to hide away. So what I

59:38

want you to think about today is who are the friends

59:40

in your life who've got questions about God, who are maybe

59:43

a little bit embarrassed to talk about it, that friend at

59:45

work, and you need to get them here next week. They

59:47

need to sit here in the seat because we've

59:49

got the great, we got a great message for

59:51

them next week. We assume that stuff too much.

59:54

We used to, and what that's doing

59:56

from a content point of view is it's the

59:58

role of the curator is more important. important now

1:00:00

than ever before. Giving people a framework

1:00:03

to hang it on is more important. So you've

1:00:05

got to help them connect. In this case,

1:00:07

because we're talking about invite culture, how

1:00:09

does their teaching, how will it help their

1:00:11

friends? And how will

1:00:13

it, we got to package it up. We got to think

1:00:15

of that, get to help them to think about categories of

1:00:18

people and then say, Hey, this is going to help those,

1:00:20

you know, those people in their lives. That's

1:00:22

one of the enduring legacies when you and I got

1:00:24

to work together for a couple of years, you know,

1:00:26

I was lead, you were one of the XPs and

1:00:29

you were such a huge champion of

1:00:31

teaching. Just a huge, huge champion.

1:00:34

I'm glad to see that fire hasn't gone

1:00:36

out. And you were great at

1:00:38

getting me to finish messages with a bit

1:00:40

of a cliffhanger and then also saying, and

1:00:43

next week. So this is what this involves.

1:00:45

And I just did a preaching accelerator earlier

1:00:47

this week and we had a bunch

1:00:49

of people on that zoom call. And the

1:00:51

number one question was how do you work ahead? Because

1:00:54

if you don't know where you're going next week, you

1:00:56

can't say with a promise, right? If you're starting that

1:00:58

message on Tuesday, you lose that.

1:01:00

So you got to work ahead. And

1:01:02

I'm glad to know that still works. Anything

1:01:04

else on inviteable teaching?

1:01:08

Well, yeah, there's a ton there. Like I

1:01:10

think, well, first of all, just let me, I

1:01:12

just want to reinforce I what you said there.

1:01:14

I don't think we can underestimate too much. Like

1:01:17

your helping preachers get

1:01:19

ahead is it's

1:01:22

like that's one of those things that takes your church

1:01:24

from like amateur to pro like

1:01:27

it's, it's, it's from JV to, you know,

1:01:29

varsity like because, and from an invite culture

1:01:31

point of view, because what you want to

1:01:33

do is build a bridge to the future

1:01:36

and, and be able to articulate where you're

1:01:38

going to help your people think about who

1:01:40

they could invite for years at liquid. We

1:01:42

did a, we called them a look book

1:01:45

and they still do a version of this,

1:01:47

but it's like an online thing now, but

1:01:49

we produced an actual book, like

1:01:51

a literal booklet and gave it to people at the

1:01:53

beginning of the fall. And we were like, here is

1:01:56

where we're going this fall. Here's all the stuff we're

1:01:58

teaching on here. Here's the. weekends that are coming, here's

1:02:00

what's happening. Now at the time, this is one of

1:02:02

those things that I didn't realize kind of what a

1:02:04

big deal that was. But when I

1:02:07

look back on it, what we were doing

1:02:09

there was we were helping people think

1:02:11

about ahead, who are the people that I could

1:02:13

be inviting to this, you know, relationship series. Because

1:02:16

if you just tell them a week ahead, man,

1:02:19

you know, that's not

1:02:21

that helpful. You're decreasing your invite.

1:02:23

I love that. If you

1:02:25

release that ahead of time and you know

1:02:27

there's a relationship series or you're dealing with

1:02:29

depression or why God seems evil when really

1:02:31

he's good or you know, why do bad

1:02:34

things happen? You're at a summer

1:02:36

barbecue in July. You're like,

1:02:38

you know this is coming. You have this

1:02:40

conversation. Well, I would go to church, but

1:02:42

I think God's just mean or I think

1:02:44

he doesn't care. You're like, ding, I

1:02:46

know that's coming in November. I'm gonna

1:02:48

invite. And you know, I'm happy to share this

1:02:51

on another time, but I got to the point

1:02:53

where every sermon was, every series

1:02:55

was done before the first sermon was preached.

1:02:57

That was true 90% of the time. And

1:03:01

I had the entire year, next

1:03:03

year I had planned out probably by September,

1:03:05

October of the previous year. So by October

1:03:07

of 2024, 2025 was mapped out. Now,

1:03:12

lots of detail for the first quarter, you

1:03:14

know, sermon series concepts for

1:03:17

Q4 of the following

1:03:19

year. But that helps everybody so much. And

1:03:21

people are like, well, what about reliance on

1:03:23

the Holy Spirit? And that just assumes that

1:03:26

the Holy Spirit isn't present in your prep.

1:03:28

He's definitely present in your prep. So

1:03:30

I would just issue that as a challenge

1:03:32

to people to do that. So

1:03:34

on the creative programming or the service programming side of

1:03:37

that, like I would say, you

1:03:40

know, we wanna help our lead pastors

1:03:42

get as far out as we

1:03:44

can and that is a help thing. We've got to assist

1:03:46

them, but also understand

1:03:48

there could be that week. I just, I

1:03:51

don't know, I just have such high respect

1:03:53

for that role in the church. There could

1:03:55

be literally up to Sunday morning. The lead

1:03:57

pastor could walk in Sunday morning and be

1:03:59

like, We're throwing all that out. We're doing this

1:04:01

other thing. If they do that

1:04:03

every single week, like we got problems, but, but,

1:04:06

but like, you know, we have to hold that

1:04:08

stuff, you know, loosely and we're like, not,

1:04:10

not be so amped up about why don't we play.

1:04:13

Sometimes I'd change once in a while,

1:04:15

but you know what? The service programming

1:04:17

people are your creative people. They

1:04:19

love it because they have predictability. They don't

1:04:21

have chaos. Right. It's like, Oh, okay. We

1:04:23

can actually work on stuff a month in

1:04:26

advance or two months in advance. We don't

1:04:28

have to be guessing every Thursday. What's going

1:04:30

to happen on Sunday? But yeah,

1:04:32

I agree. You got to leave a little bit of

1:04:34

margin there, but, um, I just function better when it's

1:04:36

done. Okay. Um, we're

1:04:39

not seeing gimmicks in the church. Like we did 20

1:04:42

years ago, you know, driving cars on

1:04:44

stage, shooting people out of can and

1:04:46

stuff like that. Was that ever important

1:04:48

to invite ability? Any thoughts on gimmicks,

1:04:50

Rich? Well, so one man's gimmick is

1:04:52

another man's core strategy. So there you

1:04:54

go. There's

1:04:57

a takeaway. You know, so I, uh,

1:04:59

let me push you on this. I think they still

1:05:01

work if they're built into an

1:05:04

overall strategy. So what didn't work was you're

1:05:06

going to do one silver bullet thing. You

1:05:08

saw elevation did this thing. And so then

1:05:10

you pull it in and we're

1:05:12

like, okay, this is, um, you know, we're

1:05:15

going to do it and that's, that's going

1:05:17

to work. Let me tell you a story

1:05:19

about there's a church in Mattoon, Illinois called

1:05:21

the fields church. And

1:05:23

they do a thing in every

1:05:25

fall called pumpkin fest. And

1:05:28

this, this, this church, they're called the

1:05:31

fields church because like literally behind them

1:05:33

are fields are corn fields and they have a giant

1:05:35

field up behind them. And every

1:05:37

year, every fall they do this thing

1:05:39

called pumpkin fest and pumpkin fest of

1:05:41

core part of pumpkin fest. You won't believe

1:05:44

this Carrie, but they hire, um, monster

1:05:47

trucks. They do a monster truck show

1:05:49

at the church. It's in it. So

1:05:52

as an outsider, I've been

1:05:54

packed. Actually I lost a client over this because I

1:05:56

told this story once and they were

1:05:58

like, I don't want anything. to do with

1:06:00

monster trucks at my church. And they

1:06:03

were like, I think

1:06:05

we are a mismatch on culture. So

1:06:07

I know I might be losing you listeners right now,

1:06:09

but just listen to me for a second. So

1:06:12

the thing that they have,

1:06:14

and I'm happy to give you links to it so

1:06:16

you can check out what they've

1:06:18

done. Yeah, I'll put them in the show notes. It

1:06:20

works in their culture because of where they are. So

1:06:23

they are in ... That's not going to work in

1:06:25

suburban Chicago. It's not going to work in LA, but in-

1:06:28

Downtown New York. Yeah, Downtown New York.

1:06:30

But in Mattoon, Illinois, and in the

1:06:32

communities they reach, having people

1:06:35

show up for a monster truck show, man,

1:06:37

is a great ... It

1:06:40

really does attract people. Now wait, what it's not,

1:06:42

it's just not a one-off event. So when you

1:06:45

arrive there, you're literally registered like a New Year

1:06:47

guest. You've got to get tickets

1:06:49

to show up. And then you're dropped

1:06:51

into a follow-up process that then shocker

1:06:54

the next weekend, you're going into a

1:06:56

brand new teaching series that leverages off

1:06:58

of some similar kind of family-oriented. We're

1:07:00

going to give you some content because

1:07:03

they know families are going to show

1:07:05

up to that. Let's have

1:07:07

you show up and talk about

1:07:09

issues that are going to help you as a part

1:07:11

of your family. And then you're two months out from

1:07:13

Christmas, which we do know is one of those weekends

1:07:16

where people are more likely to fight their friends. They

1:07:18

use that as then a second recall out of that.

1:07:21

So where I think people, and they do

1:07:23

a ton of work underneath all of this

1:07:25

to collect data, to connect

1:07:27

with guests when they're actually on site,

1:07:29

to actually work the lines, to shake

1:07:31

a ton of hands, to create positive

1:07:34

impact from a visibility

1:07:36

point of view. Gimmicks

1:07:38

don't work when they're just a gimmick. When it's

1:07:41

just the like, we're going to shoot people out

1:07:43

of a cannon. Yeah, you're right. Absolutely. But the

1:07:45

reason why they do work or the reason why

1:07:47

something like Pumpkinfest works is it's like

1:07:49

the dropping eggs out of a

1:07:52

helicopter. We've seen a ton of churches do that.

1:07:55

The reason why that works at

1:07:57

an invite level is because people...

1:08:00

It's like a, it's a conversation that just falls off your

1:08:02

mouth. You laughed it when you laughed when I said it.

1:08:04

Imagine what kind of church would

1:08:06

have, um, you know, monster

1:08:08

trucks in their front field, ripping up their front

1:08:10

field of the church. What kind of church is

1:08:12

that? Man, that's the kind of church I

1:08:15

want to go to. That's the kind of church I

1:08:17

want to be a part of. That's like speaks normal

1:08:19

guy, Joe, you know, Joe guy in the town kind

1:08:21

of language. I'm a part of that. And I'll invite

1:08:23

my friends to that. I'll tell my friends about that.

1:08:25

My church is dropping 15,000 eggs out of what are

1:08:27

you doing for Easter weekend? Oh, we're going with our

1:08:29

family. Why don't you come to our service? Cause after

1:08:31

our service, we're going to drop 15,000 eggs out of

1:08:34

a, out of a, you know, a

1:08:36

helicopter you're doing what? Like people

1:08:38

will tell their friends about that. Now, if

1:08:40

you just leave it at that and you

1:08:42

don't, you don't think carefully around how it

1:08:44

fits into an overall strategy, then,

1:08:46

you know, Moody did this. He put lights in his,

1:08:49

in up in the church and a part of the

1:08:51

re I did evening services and rumor has it because

1:08:53

they were like, let's do service in the evening. Because

1:08:55

then we get to turn on the lights and people

1:08:57

will come and see the lights like, I don't care

1:09:00

why they show up. It's why, you

1:09:02

know, when they, when they come back, I've heard

1:09:04

that story. It might be apocryphal. I've retold it

1:09:06

too many times. Eventually, if I keep saying it,

1:09:08

maybe it'll be true. Heard it from reputable source.

1:09:10

I probably should do my research on that, but

1:09:13

it's, but you get the notion of that. That

1:09:15

like, Hey, why people, so gimmicks

1:09:17

don't work when they're just a gimmick. We've got

1:09:19

to build a strategy around it to try to,

1:09:21

how do we get them in? You know, and,

1:09:23

and listen, I've had the same kind of thing

1:09:25

happen. I love

1:09:27

my reform brothers and sisters, mostly

1:09:29

reform brothers. That's a little bit of a dig at them. Um,

1:09:32

but they, you know, I've had them say,

1:09:35

like, you know, we've, we've had conversations around invite

1:09:37

culture and these were private conversations. They're definitely, they're

1:09:39

having me into their church to talk about these

1:09:41

things. They're not telling other people that I'm there

1:09:43

and you know, church leaders will say, they'll be

1:09:45

like, man, if I, if, if other church guys

1:09:47

in my network were to hear, we were talking

1:09:49

about this stuff, they would shake their head because

1:09:52

like, we don't want anything to do with the tractional.

1:09:54

And I would say, listen, you are attractional. You don't

1:09:56

think you are, but you are like,

1:09:58

look, you're in a. building, you have a

1:10:00

sign outside your door, you

1:10:03

talk about, you have actual music, you vacuum

1:10:06

your carpets on Sunday morning. Those are all attractional

1:10:08

church things. Those are all gimmicks. If someone else's

1:10:11

gimmick was, why do you have to clean your

1:10:13

church? Why do you have to paint it? Why

1:10:15

do you have to have lights in a band?

1:10:17

That's all gimmicky. No, you chose to

1:10:19

do those things because you know people will tell

1:10:21

their friends about them. Now, you

1:10:23

might not want to do monster truck. That's fine. I get

1:10:25

that. I totally understand. You don't want to drop eggs out

1:10:28

of a helicopter. I get that. But what can

1:10:31

you do that your people will tell their

1:10:33

friends about? What can you do that ultimately

1:10:35

your people, how can you train, equip, and

1:10:37

mobilize them, motivate them to invite their friends?

1:10:39

You need to think about it from that.

1:10:41

People's brains are attracted to new. We are

1:10:44

pattern recognition machines. When

1:10:46

you do something new, people

1:10:48

look at it. If you always do the same stuff,

1:10:51

they're less likely to tell their

1:10:53

friends. All right.

1:10:55

There's a lot in your book and we won't get

1:10:57

to all of it. But there's one more I'd like

1:11:00

to end with. If you want to switch a different

1:11:02

subject out, go ahead. But

1:11:04

I want to talk about we all,

1:11:06

you know, because the common thing is

1:11:08

every Sunday is somebody's first Sunday, which

1:11:11

hopefully is true in your church. It's

1:11:13

been true in our church for years.

1:11:15

Very thankful for that. But you argue

1:11:17

that not all Sundays are created equal.

1:11:19

Can you explain that? That you're actually

1:11:21

suggesting that we put more effort and

1:11:23

energy into certain Sundays than other Sundays?

1:11:26

Why? And what's underneath? Oh, yeah. Well, thank you

1:11:29

for pointing this out, Kerry, because this is one

1:11:31

of those stories where I'm not the hero of

1:11:33

the story. So I don't like it. I don't

1:11:35

like talking about this. But for years, I'm just

1:11:38

kidding. For years, I and

1:11:40

believe that and have had the privilege, honor for

1:11:42

leading multiple decades where that has happened, where it's

1:11:44

like, man, wow, every weekend new

1:11:47

people show up. Isn't this amazing? And

1:11:49

for years, you know, longer than I like

1:11:52

to admit, I used to when

1:11:54

we talked about every Sunday, I would say,

1:11:56

man, I want every single week to be

1:11:58

the most inviteable weekend. We want to

1:12:01

do stuff every single weekend. It does not matter

1:12:03

if you're a new person. And that sounds good

1:12:05

on the surface. That sounds like, yeah, that's a

1:12:07

good idea. But there's a kind of

1:12:09

a bit of a dark side there, which is actually

1:12:12

when you look at human behavior, most

1:12:15

churches have three or four Sundays a year

1:12:18

where their people do

1:12:20

more inviting. And these are Christmas,

1:12:22

Christmas for sure, maybe Easter, maybe

1:12:24

Mother's Day, maybe the weekend

1:12:27

back in January, first

1:12:30

or second weekend, or not the first, second

1:12:32

or third weekend back in January. There are a

1:12:34

couple weekends when you look at your data, that

1:12:36

two things happen. And there's not a lot of

1:12:38

them. There are literally two or three, maybe three

1:12:40

or four a year where

1:12:43

two things happen. Your people are more likely to invite

1:12:45

their friends, and their friends

1:12:47

are more likely to attend. So some of this

1:12:49

is like cultural stuff. So still

1:12:52

in post-Christian Canada, across

1:12:54

the country, across America, Christmas

1:12:58

is one of those days where people are more

1:13:00

likely to show up to church. I saw a

1:13:02

statistic a couple years ago that 70% of Americans

1:13:06

would be willing to attend a Christmas Eve service

1:13:08

if a friend invited them. Think about that. 70%

1:13:11

of the country, we could get into church.

1:13:13

A couple hundred million people, we could squeeze

1:13:16

them into our churches if

1:13:18

we just invited them. People were

1:13:20

willing to come because it's in the culture. And for

1:13:22

years I kind of ignored that. I was like, oh,

1:13:24

well, it's just another... In

1:13:26

fact, I remember it was

1:13:29

like a badge of honor. And this was before we were

1:13:31

going to connect this. It was like a badge of honor.

1:13:33

We're not doing anything special on Christmas. What are you talking

1:13:35

about? It's just another Sunday. But

1:13:37

man, nothing's further than the truth. We've

1:13:40

got to do things that ultimately on those weekends,

1:13:42

people are more likely to invite their friends. And

1:13:44

so the benchmark for those is... We've

1:13:49

talked about... It's one of the ways actually to

1:13:51

measure the invite culture of your church is by

1:13:53

the number of people that come on those

1:13:56

big days. And because what that tells you is

1:13:58

that it tells you the people... that are

1:14:01

one relationship removed from your church. They know

1:14:03

your church. These are not, man, we have

1:14:05

a lot of people obsessed with Facebook ads

1:14:07

and like a lot of people obsessed with

1:14:09

all the people out there that are five

1:14:11

or six, you know, relationships removed. Well, how

1:14:14

many people came at Christmas Eve? Here we

1:14:16

are in, you know, early March. How many

1:14:18

people came at Christmas Eve to your church?

1:14:20

Now we've seen that our benchmark is that

1:14:22

your church should see at least double your

1:14:24

normal attendance. So if your church averages 100

1:14:26

people, you should be seeing

1:14:28

200 people attend on those weekends

1:14:31

and on those big day weekends. Now, if I was in

1:14:34

your church, after those weekends, there's

1:14:36

a moment, a very small window with your

1:14:38

leaders where I would ask the question, I

1:14:40

would say, hey, what do we need to

1:14:42

do? What do we need to change about

1:14:44

our church? So every weekend we can accommodate

1:14:46

200 people because we know those people, they're

1:14:48

in our church. They're in one step removed

1:14:50

relationship from our church. How, what do we

1:14:52

need to structure and change? I remember I

1:14:54

said that when I was at Liquid Church

1:14:56

and it was the first weekend, we had

1:14:59

5,000 people. It was one year at

1:15:01

Easter. We had 5,000 people. And on Monday

1:15:03

morning, I asked Tim Lucas, our lead pastor, that I said, man, what

1:15:05

do you think we need to change to be 5,000 people a weekend?

1:15:09

And he looked at me like I had

1:15:11

like four heads because it's like you come off a

1:15:13

weekend and you're like exhausted. Maybe not a great weekend,

1:15:15

a great day to ask that. But

1:15:18

the truth, the kind of pinch of that

1:15:20

question is still there. Man, well, you know,

1:15:22

we have to grow towards that. We know

1:15:24

those people. How do we build

1:15:26

towards that? That's one

1:15:29

of the ways actually to kind of measure the front door of your

1:15:31

church. We don't, we spend a lot of time thinking about the

1:15:33

back door of the church. But one of the ways to measure

1:15:35

the front door is actually looking at what

1:15:37

is your, what's the kind of attendance ratio on

1:15:39

those weekends. And most churches, if you're applying

1:15:42

consistent effort and appreciate you meeting the

1:15:44

book, we talk about strategies around big

1:15:46

days particularly to kind of increase your

1:15:49

invite culture. If you're not experiencing double

1:15:51

on Christmas, Easter, and maybe one other day during

1:15:54

the year, you're

1:15:56

not leveraging your invite culture enough. You're leaving stuff on

1:15:58

the table. We need to. to, you

1:16:00

know, we need to do more to get your people

1:16:03

to, we need to do more training, more equipping, more

1:16:05

motivating to move people to invite their friends on those

1:16:07

days. Another surprise for

1:16:09

me for a big day, and I

1:16:11

realized this, oh, you know,

1:16:13

too late in my ministry. We got to capitalize

1:16:15

on it for years, but I wish I knew

1:16:18

it, time changed Sunday. The one in

1:16:20

November. It's like the first Sunday in

1:16:22

November. For a couple of years, I was like,

1:16:24

why did so many people show up? We were in the middle of

1:16:26

a series, and then I'm like, oh,

1:16:28

time changed. We got an extra hour, and it's

1:16:30

just that convenience of like, oh, we can all

1:16:32

go. So we used that to

1:16:34

kick off our biggest series of the fall before

1:16:37

Christmas then, and November's a big day. But yeah,

1:16:39

I mean, I think that's right. Wow, there's still

1:16:41

much to do. Which is a little bit embarrassing,

1:16:43

right? Like that one's like a little bit, because what

1:16:45

that's saying is if we just gave people an extra

1:16:47

hour's sleep, they'd come to church, which is like, you

1:16:49

just don't want to think about that. That goes down

1:16:51

all kinds of dark nodes. But the good thing you

1:16:53

did there, and I would encourage people to do that,

1:16:55

is look at your historical data, and

1:16:57

look at it like, don't, just

1:17:00

look at the data. Don't try not to interpret

1:17:02

it first, and just where do you see the

1:17:04

peaks? There's a friend of mine in Philadelphia. They

1:17:07

were seeing the same thing in the middle of February.

1:17:10

And this is years ago. They were like saying, hey,

1:17:12

that second weekend in February, we're seeing a bump there.

1:17:14

So they've built, and they still do it to this

1:17:16

day, it's called Epic Day,

1:17:18

and it comes out of Christmas, and

1:17:21

they've built a whole day around it. They say,

1:17:23

listen, this is the day that we're going to

1:17:25

preach the clearest message of the gospel of the

1:17:27

entire year. We're going to preach it on this

1:17:29

day. They give away free t-shirts. They do fun

1:17:31

stuff. They do food and all kinds of crazy

1:17:33

stuff. And it ends up

1:17:35

being their largest non-holiday every year because,

1:17:38

and they just saw it in their numbers.

1:17:40

They just saw the like, oh, hey, here's

1:17:42

the thing here. Let's build a strategy around

1:17:45

that to try to drive, you

1:17:47

know, let's try to drive attendance and ultimately grow

1:17:49

our church. And again,

1:17:51

it's just cooperating with human behavior rather

1:17:53

than competing with that, right? Which

1:17:55

is so good. Well, there's a lot in the

1:17:57

book. Tell us where they can

1:17:59

go. get it. And anything

1:18:02

else you want to share before we wrap up? Yeah,

1:18:04

you're super, super gracious. I actually don't want people to

1:18:06

buy the book. I want to give them the first

1:18:08

two chapters. So if you could just go to unlock

1:18:10

invite culture.com/carry. So

1:18:13

unlock invite culture.com/carry.

1:18:16

I'll give you the first two chapters. So not

1:18:18

even the first chapter, the first two chapters. Plus, I want

1:18:20

to give you this other thing I was thinking, well, like

1:18:22

I, I love your community.

1:18:24

I love the Kerry Newhoff extended mafia.

1:18:26

There's an amazing group of friends. And

1:18:29

in the book, we gave away these, we call

1:18:32

them content upgrades. They're like these other pieces of

1:18:34

content that are outside of the book. And there's

1:18:36

one of them is called the invite culture litmus

1:18:38

test. We actually were talking a little bit about

1:18:40

it there with big days.

1:18:42

We have these three numbers that churches

1:18:45

can, that you have access to, that

1:18:47

tell you that is a way to measure

1:18:49

your invite culture. And by looking at these

1:18:51

three numbers, you get a sense of where

1:18:53

things are at. And so I would

1:18:55

love to give people that. So again, if you

1:18:57

just go to unlock invite culture.com/carry, hopefully that's okay.

1:18:59

You know, just drop in your email, we'll email it

1:19:01

over to them there. And if you

1:19:04

want to buy it, that's great. You know, that links

1:19:06

are all there at that same site or Amazon or

1:19:08

wherever. But you know, I'm I would

1:19:10

love to give those to them for free for sure. You're

1:19:13

generous, Rich. This is this is

1:19:15

fantastic. Thank you so much. And

1:19:18

you left me wanting more which is always

1:19:20

the best kind of interview. Thank you. Thanks

1:19:22

so much, man. Appreciate you, Kerry. Appreciate what

1:19:24

you're doing. Take care, buddy. I hope you

1:19:26

enjoyed that conversation as much as I did,

1:19:28

which always delivers so much value. And if

1:19:30

you were trying to take notes, I

1:19:33

want a little help, you can go to

1:19:35

the show notes, Kerry new half.com/episode 651. We

1:19:38

also have transcripts there would love for you

1:19:40

to check those out. And

1:19:42

I want to tell you what's coming up. The next

1:19:45

episode is something totally different. It's

1:19:48

going to

1:19:50

be shorter. And we're going to be talking

1:19:52

about how to rethink rest

1:19:55

strategies to sustain peak

1:19:57

leadership performance. A lot

1:19:59

of you've got a summer break coming up, I want

1:20:02

to talk about why that's not going to be

1:20:04

enough, what you can do to rethink

1:20:06

rest and actually optimize your leadership. It's a

1:20:08

bit of an experiment. Would love for you

1:20:11

to tune in. Let me know what you

1:20:13

think. But then back

1:20:15

to our regularly scheduled programming, we

1:20:17

have Matt Chandler, William Urie, one

1:20:19

of the top negotiators of our

1:20:21

lifetime, coming up. Ken Blanchard is

1:20:23

on the podcast. Phil Godara coming

1:20:25

back, Max Locato, Rich

1:20:28

Velodis, Priscilla Schreyer, Nikki

1:20:30

Gumbel, Charles Duhigg is coming

1:20:32

back and a whole lot more. Now,

1:20:34

before we wrap up, make

1:20:36

sure you check out what's happening over at

1:20:39

Glue and Overflow. You can get free

1:20:41

texting by visiting our partners at Glue.

1:20:43

You can go to glue.us slash free

1:20:46

texting and who doesn't love free. And

1:20:48

then with Overflow plus tap technology, your

1:20:50

church just taps their phone against the

1:20:52

seat in front of them and boom,

1:20:54

they're transported to your giving page, just

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like you would pay for something at

1:20:59

a store. You can get that over

1:21:01

to overflow.co slash carry to learn

1:21:03

more. And I got one more thing

1:21:05

for you today. Hey, I've got a newsletter

1:21:07

and if you find online a little

1:21:09

overwhelming, there's so much noise and very

1:21:11

little signal, you may want

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to check out my On The Rise newsletter. So

1:21:16

it goes out every Friday. It's one

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hundred thousand people who get it

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know, and the real name, like what was

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Pearl Jam's original name, stuff like that. That's

1:21:46

interesting. For something profound like Tim

1:21:48

Keller and John Newton or in an

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upcoming edition, I'm going to link

1:21:53

to an article from Seth Godin about how

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many books you can expect to sell if

1:21:58

you actually write a book. The

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news is kind of weird, I'll be honest with

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you on that. So it's stuff that really catches

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my attention. You can use it for sermon illustrations, you

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can use it for research, you can use it

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just because there's a lot of junk out there

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and I try to bring you the best stuff.

1:22:13

So it's on therisenewsletter.com. You can go subscribe

1:22:16

today, super easy to do. Hope

1:22:18

it helps you as much as it helps 100,000

1:22:20

other leaders who are

1:22:22

on the inside loop. Hey, thank you

1:22:25

so much for listening. I do not take this

1:22:27

for granted. I appreciate you so much. If this

1:22:29

episode meant something to you, please leave a rating

1:22:31

and review. Give us a shout out on social.

1:22:34

You can reach out to Rich Burch. He's

1:22:36

on social as Rich Burch. I'm Kerry Newhoff.

1:22:39

Let us know what made a

1:22:41

difference. And I hope our time together

1:22:43

today helped you identify and break a

1:22:45

group barrier you're facing.