multisite – unSeminary

From Struggle to Success: Evan Courtney on Revitalizing a Church Campus Amidst Challenges

Rich Birch — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 08:44:00 +0000

Thanks for joining us for the unSeminary podcast. We’re talking with Evan Courtney, the Executive Pastor at The Fields Church in central Illinois.

Have you ever experienced decline in your church or felt like everything was going wrong? Don’t miss this encouraging conversation as Evan testifies to the power of perseverance, overcoming obstacles that lead to new opportunities, and remaining faithful to God’s call.

The launch and decline. // When they launched their second campus, The Fields Church wanted the attendance at that location to be over 200, but that didn’t happen. They struggled to create an engaging Sunday experience and lacked strong leadership for the worship team. Then when COVID hit, they then lost their rental space. By the time the campus had found a temporary place to meet on Sunday nights, attendance had dwindled to 40 people who were essentially the volunteers handling the portable campus setup.
Finding leadership and a facility. // One of the things The Fields needed to put the campus on the right track was strong leadership to infuse their culture and DNA. Evan stepped in as campus pastor for eight months to be a consistent presence and help the campus move forward. Another thing the church needed was a facility that let them get back to meeting together on Sunday mornings.
Adjusting expectations. // It was still during the pandemic when The Fields began looking for a new location for their second campus. The expectations for finding a facility were a lot lower than the original launch of the multisite location. They no longer focused on needing a parking lot of a certain size or a certain amount of seating. Instead they focused simply on finding a building in which they could meet that had the minimum amount of space they needed for their Sunday morning service. Eventually they found an office building on a back road and converted it into a meeting space in about a week.
Relaunching the second campus. // Even though their second campus was on the verge of shutting down, the core group of people attending were committed to seeing the location succeed. They focused on inviting new people and saw growth from 40 to 200 people within a few months. Their growth was not due to any special strategies or magic bullet. They simply showed up, had services, and continued their regular activities in addition to training and motivating their members to invite their friends.
Breakthrough for the second campus. // During the pandemic, another local church approached The Fields about merging. After eight months of conversations, they decided to join forces. The merger brought in more people and a facility located on a busy street. As a result, their second campus saw significant growth, with 400 people attending Easter services and an average of over 200 people on Sundays.
Determine what you need in a campus pastor. // It’s hard to hire someone from a highly metropolitan area to move to a highly rural area, or vice versa. The Fields Church decided to hire someone from within rather than seek someone from outside the area. Campus pastors need to embody the mission of their church, have a heart for the community, and understand the culture and life in an area.
Three limiting factors. // As they look to the future, there are three limiting factors to growth that The Fields Church considers: Will the auditorium space, kids’ space, or parking at their current locations limit future growth? What would a launch and services in a new community look like for a third location?

You can find out more about The Fields Church at www.thefields.church.

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Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Hey, friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. Man, I am so glad that you have tuned in today. Ah you know every week we try to bring you a leader who will inspire and equip you and today I’m super excited to have my friend, Evan Courtney, with us. He is executive pastor at a church that you should be tracking with. It’s called The Fields Church. Started nearly 100 years ago, it’s a multi-site church with two campuses in Central Illinois, plus church online. They really have a desire to be influential in Coles County, the county they’re in, also across all of Central Illinois, and then eventually be a valuable resources for other rural countries across the midwest or other other rural churches across the midwest. And they’re just fantastic people. Evan, welcome to the show. So glad you’re here today.

Evan Courtney — Hey thank you, Rich. I appreciate the resources that you always provide to other churches and inspiration that you’ve given us over the years.

Rich Birch — I, yeah, this is a fun one. I was I was joking with Evan ahead ahead of time because like we actually know each other where sometimes I have to like pretend like I know people on the podcast, but Evan and I actually know each other and have been journeying together for a while, and I wanted to bring this story to you and you’re going to you’re going to love it today.

Rich Birch — But, why don’t you fill out the picture? Kind of tell us a bit more about The Fields, kind of you know what did I miss there as we kind of got this thing rolling today?

Evan Courtney — Yeah, so we are, like you said, we’re 100 year old church that probably for about 20 years all throughout the 80s and 90s was us was really kind of ah stagnant in attendance. So we averaged ah an attendance of about 150 for about 20 years.

Evan Courtney — Um, that wasn’t necessarily negative. What happened was leadership came in and was able to kind of clean and straighten up and kind of balance some things out, and kind of outlast some people. And so that was all that was all really healthy. Um, and so actually our lead pastor now, that was his father-in-law was here for 20 years. And then 2008 transitioned, he retired which was really good during that season. He realized that he was kind of at the cusp of, you know what, maybe he was downward trending as a leader. And so said instead of taking it, continuing to lead the organization down, he’s like you know what? I think I’m going to go ahead and pass this off.

Evan Courtney — And so we passed it off to our new lead pastor ,Travis Spencer. And since 2008 we took about two or three years to kind of look at our schedule and look at what the rhythm of the things that we were doing and we transitioned from being a church of ministries, of events, and we transitioned to being a church of a pathway a discipleship pathway that took about 2 years to do. And during that time attendance flat, which was okay, um, for us. And then coming out of that couple years you know 2010, since then we’ve just seen incremental, not explosive growth, but over the last thirteen years we’ve seen 5, 8, 10% growth every single year.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Evan Courtney — And so that’s kind of where we have been.

Rich Birch — Love it. And this is the kind of story I love because, you know, that kind of growth over an extended period of time, man, it really starts to snowball eventually. And it is um I don’t want to say easier but it is um, you know, it maybe is easier to get your hands around from a let’s serve people and integrate them. If all of those people, if you had 500 people all show up in one year, most churches would would you know wouldn’t be able to handle it. And so the fact that over these years you’ve seen that growth is is pretty amazing. Now we we connected a couple years ago when you guys were thinking about going multisite and ultimately that landed in ah The Fields launching a campus at another ah community ah, just kind of about the year before covid. Tell me that story, what, you know, kind of talk through what was the launch like and all that.

Evan Courtney — Yeah, so we actually weren’t even thinking about going into multisite. We were thinking about building a bigger building. Because we are running out of space and in the middle of conversations with the design build company, like the ones that we’re paying to build us million dollar building, they said to us, well have you guys, instead of building a building, if you want to reach people wouldn’t it be less expensive to just plant another location next to this neighboring community?

Rich Birch — Love it.

Evan Courtney — And it was interesting because it was coming from it as they essentially lost themselves business…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Evan Courtney — …by telling us, you don’t need to build million dollar building, you need to just launch into this other community.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Evan Courtney — And for us what it is there’s this community next to us that’s ten miles away. And so we launched the second location ten miles away. But because we’re in rural context, it’s a rival community. And so people from one community don’t travel to the other community, whether it’s sports, restaurants, they don’t do it. And so what we saw, we kind of looked at our data and we saw that we had 70 individuals that were attending our location from this other community. But all of those individuals, none of them were born and raised for that other community. They were all transplants. We had nobody coming, nobody serving, nobody giving, that was from, born and raised, in that community. And so that’s what we did was [inaudible] to gather your these people say, hey you know what? Let’s launch a location in your community. We know it’s ten miles away but there’s this invisible line that people aren’t willing to cross. And so we had a little bit of fear of if we launch a church that close, is it just going to take our attendance and just split in half?

Evan Courtney — Um, but what we have seen is that it really just is a whole different group of people.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s pretty amazing.

Evan Courtney — And so is new growth, not just dividing ourselves up.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love it. So the thing one of the things to underline here, friends, when we’re thinking about multisite is, you know, there’s like the stuff that’s on the map, like you can draw it out and it’s like the physical things. But then there are these like emotional, cultural, social, you know you know, lines on the map that don’t show up that really you only know when you’ve been journeying in a community together ah for a while. And you know there might be opportunity there that’s not that far away. 10 miles is not that far ah, but can be way too far for people to attend church.

Rich Birch — Now I want to kind of fast forward a little bit and um, you know, so the campus launched ah, you know, rah rah, we’re excited for that. But then at some point during kind of, you know, obviously you know we I had the first year anniversary, and then we ended up into covid, and there was like this this kind of sign that, Okay, maybe this isn’t going well. I don’t want to you know that’s me saying that. You know you’re you’re not saying that. But you know you came to the point where like, oh gosh this isn’t… can you describe what were some of the points when you look back and you say, oh this is evidence that maybe maybe things were not working, that you know we were we were struggling more in this this new campus than you would have envisioned. You know, we all do these things and envision them just exploding overnight, but that doesn’t always happen. What were some of those kind of points that brought you to the point where like, okay, this isn’t going well.

Evan Courtney — Yeah, so we is so when we launch, we didn’t launch at a higher number than we we thought. Like when we launched we wanted to our average attendance to be over 200 kind of be over that cusp. That didn’t happen. We don’t know why. I mean we had huge numbers at launch. But kind of looking back the the weeks and the months after that, one of the pain points that we had was we didn’t have great worship. And we kind of just pushed it out like, hey it’s okay, but really worship hurt us because we were doing video which was already, you know, is a little bit, is a lot different than live teaching. So the engagement’s a little bit different. And then our worship was really bad. We didn’t have a strong kind of a leader taking that. And in honestly a lot of it had to do with we couldn’t find a drummer.

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — And so I just remember we’re piping in drums on a soundtrack…

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — …and everybody in that room knows…

Rich Birch — You could tell. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.

Evan Courtney — …there’s no drums but I can hear the drums. And it just, you know what, it just like the the experiential of the worship was just a very low. And kind of it just it wasn’t a bang of a service every single week. So we knew that was a tension point. And then we were then right when we ran into Covid we lost that space, that the rental space that was at a school, and so we lost that space and now we’re online. And when here where we were out in Illinois, like we were only online for about two months, and then it was starting to ramp back up for us to be able to meet in person. And when we got ready to do that, I think just the amount of energy and the amount of work was going to take more to relaunch to launch.

Evan Courtney — And so what we what happened was we lost some leadership during that transition. And so now we had no facility, um, we had no leader, and so we’re trying to rally who do we have left? Like we didn’t know who we had left because we’re doing online.

Rich Birch — Oh man.

Evan Courtney — And we just and so we called every single church in the community and said, Do you have a timeframe that we could do a service? One out of 40 churches that we called and said, yeah you can use our space…

Rich Birch — Wow.

Evan Courtney — …on a on a Sunday night. And so we did learn during this time that Sunday night services don’t work when you’re portable. So we were bringing in port… so we had people show up 90 minutes before service, set up portable gear, ran service on video…

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — …from the morning service that they could have watched online that morning on you know Facebook and Youtube…

Rich Birch — Right, right.

Evan Courtney — …and then tear down and so people are getting there at 3:30…

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — …watching the video message of the person that was actually in the room, the lead pastor was in the room too because he had to help set up.

Rich Birch — Right. Oh gosh. Oh my goodness.

Evan Courtney — And they’re like, why is he not speaking? He’s in the back of the room, I can see him. But we wanted we were just in that rhythm like, Nope we said we were doing video.

Rich Birch — We’re doing this. We’re gonna do it.

Evan Courtney — And so that’s what we learned was like Sunday nights in our community didn’t work. Nobody wanted to be there. We had 40 individuals that were coming to service. And a majority of them were in their dream team their volunteer shirts and we’re like the only people we have is volunteers. So it was bad worship. We were forcing video teaching. And we had a bad time slot. And we we had 40 people.

Rich Birch — Okay, so friends, they’re just a bunch there. Like I think this idea of and sometimes this stuff is is clear in hindsight, understanding what is it that makes your experience, you know, understanding like, you know, we we launch these things and we try like, hey we’re going to try what we can on the music front. And ah but, man, it just didn’t live up ah to that. You know, we’ve got to think really carefully about those things, and sometimes they’re a bigger deal than actually we even know. They’re, you know, we we thought like oh we can make that work and it it doesn’t necessarily.

Rich Birch — So now there would be lots of churches I think at this point that, you know, so you’re down to 40 people, you know, video teaching, we got Travis showing up to set this thing up, mostly volunteers. Um, you know at that point there would be a lot of churches that would say, hey we’re just going to throw in the towel here. Like that’s you know that’s not going to happen. Well, you know friends, the reason why we have this on is obviously because they didn’t throw in the towel, and we continued. So walk us through what were some of what you know the milestones as you came out of covid that you look back on now and say, wow this was a linchpin decision change that led us to where now, friends, and we’ll get to where we’re at today. But things are way better today than than those 40 people. But kind of what were some of those linchpins kind of across the the the months you know after that?

Evan Courtney — Yeah, so the big one was leadership. We had to get somebody. We had to get our culture and our DNA back into that into that church, of being online, somebody else’s building, we were losing some of that. So we had to get a leader in there. And I actually jumped in and and let it for about eight months. We just needed somebody on our team that was consistent, a face that they had seen, a voice that they had heard over the years. So that was one was the leadership.

Evan Courtney — The second one is facility. We knew we had to get back to Sunday mornings. And so we had to do whatever it took to get back to Sunday mornings. So the third one was for us to do that, we had to find a facility. And so our expectations of a facility on, for what we called was our relaunch of relaunching this church, the expectations were a lot lower than the launch.

Rich Birch — Interesting.

Evan Courtney — Like the launch we had this we we needed a preschool room, we needed an elementary room, we needed a lobby, we needed an auditorium that at least I had 300 seats. We need to have parking for those, you know, we needed a hundred parking spaces. All of a sudden we just kind of threw that out the door and said, you know, we just need to find a space. If we don’t find a space we’re done.

Rich Birch — Right, right.

Evan Courtney — So those are the 3, the 3 main things.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, so on the facility piece, I love that idea of you actually lowered your expectations. You know, I think that’s that’s a keen insight. As you what what kind of did the minimum bar become as you were like okay, we’ve you know we we need to find something. Sunday morning obviously is the primary was you know the primary idea, but was it what else was in that mix of that conversation?

Evan Courtney — Yeah, we we just needed we needed to find us ah somebody that would rent to us during that time of covid. Coming out of covid there wasn’t a lot of spaces. We needed to find an auditorium that it could at least, or a space, that could at least hold a hundred people. A hundred adults.

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — And then two rooms for kids.

Rich Birch — Okay, that’s amazing…

Evan Courtney — We didn’t care about parking. We could figure that out, right?

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — Like most those places are gonna have some sort of parking. And we didn’t we didn’t worry about a lobby.

Rich Birch — Okay, so did you…

Evan Courtney — We thought: adult space, two kids’ spaces.

Rich Birch — Right. And so then did you go back to the 40 churches? What what happened next?

Evan Courtney — No, so what we did is ah we actually we just, somebody caught we we kind of pushed out to our team and said you know what, just pray. Let’s ask God to open places. When we first initially launched ah two years before that we had already looked at all the places that were available. We we knew everything. And so somebody reached out to our team and said, hey what about this office space out on this back road. I just passed it; I saw there’s a “for rent” sign. What do you think? So we showed up to it and it was just an open office. And so we looked at it, walked in, and and they said hey do you want this? And we’re like yeah, there’s nothing else. There was maybe 25 parking spots…

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — …open office and 2 break rooms. And so we converted that. We took a week and converted it.

Rich Birch — Oh my… turned it around.

Evan Courtney — We took all of our portable stuff.

Rich Birch — Got all [inaudible] paint out in way we went. Yeah.

Evan Courtney — Yep, got to… yeah, got, we it was it paint, and then we had all over our portable gear. We just we just went from portable…

Rich Birch — Wow.

Evan Courtney — …and installed all that stuff as permanent.

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — And so we used spandex to that we were using on hallways to to cover up stuff and we just created hallways out of the spandex. Used all of our portable chairs that we were using in elementary spaces and we just set those up. Um, it just gave us, we had to have a place for the people to go to that said, you know what? This is our church. And we actually ended up in a part of a neighborhood in this community that there wasn’t a church within a mile.

Rich Birch — How interesting.

Evan Courtney — And all of a sudden we put a sign up and people started coming and attending. And we’re like how did you, like how did you hear about us? We’re on this back country road.

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — And they said, we saw the sign.

Rich Birch — Right. Wow. Wow.

Evan Courtney — That’s it?

Rich Birch — That’s it.

Evan Courtney — And so we started getting people from that neighborhood saved…

Rich Birch — No fancy Facebook campaign. No, you know…

Evan Courtney — No, no. And it was ah it was a marquee sign.

Rich Birch — Oh wow.

Evan Courtney — Right. So I mean I was just sliding the letters in there, a service 10 am…

Rich Birch — Wow.

Evan Courtney — …and then just put our decal up. So.

Rich Birch — Wow. So the but you know part to underline there is I know there are a lot of churches that are portable. You know that this has been a challenging number of years. And I’ve said to multiple churches because they’re like we’ve tried everything we… there is no opportunity. And you know my pushback has been well, if the place you’re renting from today that’s substandard, if they called you tomorrow and said you can’t meet here anymore, you would you would get desperate and figure something out, right? You would figure out some sort of space. But because if you’re in this space that’s kind of almost working, like the Sunday night service was. It’s like it’s working but not really, you’ll just keep rolling until you draw a line in the sand and say no no, we we’re done. We have to find, you know, something else. So so then what happened next from there? So people start to show up. Ah you know things are looking a little you know, better. There’s like an uptick in excitement

Evan Courtney — Right.

Rich Birch — You’re still campus you’re still the campus pastor there. Ah you know what went on next?

Evan Courtney — Yeah, and so a couple of the other things to note real quick about the facility that we had to um, got were hard “yeses” before that became “it didn’t matter” was like ceiling height. It had it it had a nine foot ceiling. It was tile ceiling, and because of that we couldn’t do video anymore.

Rich Birch — Right. Wow.

Evan Courtney — Because you couldn’t get a big enough video screen. And so we flipped to live teaching out of the necessity of this thing is gonna die and we had to get it… It’s kind of like being in the ah ER. Ah, you’re just giving this thing, I see you’re giving this thing all the different hoses – the oxygen, the IV – and so we just said, hey if video is going to hurt this thing, let’s do live.

Evan Courtney — And so we started to do all those. And so what it was was we just Sunday morning continued to do Sunday morning, continue because of now you have your own building and it took work to create things into the building. We just saw an uptick of volunteers because they’re like, hey like they had their blood, and sweat, and their work equity into this building. So now is all of a sudden it became theirs. They became their identity where before they were at this rented school, they were at this borrowed church. All of a sudden it was like there ah an identity of, man, this is our place. And it didn’t matter that it was ah a bad looking building. It was actually the day that we put our sign up, the city called us and said, Evan, you can’t have church there. That’s ah, that’s zoned for high industrial.

Rich Birch — Oh my goodness.

Evan Courtney — And I said, well I didn’t I didn’t have a clue, like we were having this church and the church is dying. So what do you want us to do? And they’re like well you need to go through all this code paper. I’m like great, how long’s that going to last? And they’re like it probably takes three to four months. I’m like, well we’ve gotta meet. And he goes if you guys continue to meet, we’d have to shut you down, but that wouldn’t look good on the city if we shut down a church.

Rich Birch — Oh my goodness.

Evan Courtney — And I said, understood. And so we just continue to push forward…

Rich Birch — Wow Wow. Wow.

Evan Courtney — …and that’s kind of the momentum of people just continue to show. And they because they saw we only had 40 people, our church looked at each other and said if we don’t invite people, we’re done.

Rich Birch — So good.

Evan Courtney — And so that’s what it kind of was it like it was all these new people because they had all of a sudden they felt like like no, no, no, no, we launched this church. We’re not going to give up on this. And so it just began to invite people out of the woodwork.

Rich Birch — Wow.

Evan Courtney — And so we saw growth up to 200 people from that Oct…that September when we relaunched with forty, that easter we had 200 people.

Rich Birch — Wow.

Evan Courtney — And it was just it was it was I look at it now was it was we did average things over a considerable amount of time and it turned into above average results.

Rich Birch — Love it. Love it. What would be some of those average things when you look back in that period that you you know really helped reach people?

Evan Courtney — Yeah, so the the average things was like, every parade in our neighborhood or our area that was in our city we got into.

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — Just so they could see our name. Like that it was we we didn’t do anything spectacular – hay bales, throwing candy out, like nothing spectacular. We did that. Sunday mornings, no matter what, we’re having service. It doesn’t matter if there’s 20 people or 25 people – we’re having these teams, we’re having these monthly meetings. And so we just kind of went back to the grind that we were doing before just all these kind of ah small ah small events that we were doing.

Evan Courtney — We did a you know we do a halloween events that we typically did that was huge, and so we just scaled that back and said what can we do? Same with Christmas and Easter. We had to scale those back. But we just continued to do what we had always done before, and the kind of that just created those results and created those momentums.

Rich Birch — Yeah I love that. You’re speaking my love language. I know you know that, but you know like we have to just keep we have to keep doing these things. Keep keep pushing our people, you know we we talked about this so many times that churches that grow, they train, they equip, they motivate their people to invite their friends. And a part of that means as church leaders, we’ve got to keep thinking about it. What are we doing? What’s coming up that our people could invite their friends to? And you know all of those kinds of things are you know a piece of the puzzle.

Rich Birch — Okay, so now I know there was a significant “C” change here kind of as you continued. So you’re you know you’re at you know, kind of a weird place with the town. Things are like, okay, you got to get out. What happened next?

Evan Courtney — Yeah, so during this whole process of right before Covid and during Covid, a local church had actually reached out to us. They were in the middle of their pastor was retiring and they had conversations with us that they knew that either they were going to have to go and do a pastoral search during the middle of Covid to try to find a pastor…

Rich Birch — Wow.

Evan Courtney — …to hire a pastor that they wouldn’t really know anything about. Um or they knew there was an opportunity they can merge with The Fields Church who they didn’t like everything about, but they knew everything, you know, they they knew us. And they knew the goods and they knew the bads. And so we were in the middle of covid having this conversation. They knew we were at a weak point too at this office building that we had renovated. And so they kind of but they knew overall the growth of The Fields Church and the excitement and and they wanted kind of really hitch themselves to us and become a part of what we were doing.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Evan Courtney — And so we went through a timeframe about eight months of conversations with them of them joining into our congregation.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Evan Courtney — So you take us just continuing to do the path every single week and meeting, doing the average every single week. Them coming along and saying, you know what, we want to join you. And so a part of that was they had a facility…

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — …that was across from Walmart, which is the busiest street in town.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s amazing.

Evan Courtney — They wanted to gift that to us, plus all of their people, to give those people to us. And so we were already on this high and already riding this momentum, and then they came in added to that. And so both of those things added together just created a greater impact. It just launched us years ahead of where we would be.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love that. You know, the the thing to underline there that we’ve seen time and again is typically in these you know merger or rebirth scenarios, like with this other church, um, you know they typically have been engaged in some kinds of other activity. They’ve been thinking about something else and this is like in the mix of it, right? And they’re you know they were obviously trying to wrestle through what do we do with and the the lead pastor issue is all is usually ah or is a significant catalyst. It’s like okay, either someone’s retiring or they’d like to retire. Or they, you know, they’ve been looking for a long time and can’t find someone. Um and you know, friends, I’m hoping you’re listening today and you’re like you may be pushing against one of these walls and you can take inspiration from The Fields to say, man, we just maybe we just have to keep going, just keep walking in this in the in the right direction.

Rich Birch — Okay, so bring us up to date today. So you know you end up moving into that location. They end up giving you the building, all of that stuff. So what does it look like today? Here we are you know summer 2023 you know what’s that what’s that campus look like? What’s kind of what’s happening there now?

Evan Courtney — Yeah, absolutely. So they merged with us, joined together. We launched huge with them, remodeled their facility. And so today this past easter we saw 400 people…

Rich Birch — That’s crazy.

Evan Courtney — …came out to easter and we are averaging over 200 people um, on a Sunday which is huge, huge for us…

Rich Birch — Yep.

Evan Courtney — …in the community, probably the second largest church in that community.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Evan Courtney — And we’re beginning to see an influx of people that are coming from… so that location to the west of it is where our our our other location is, the location that’s 100 years old. And so on the opposite spectrum, on the east side is all of these people that are coming.

Rich Birch — That’s great.

Evan Courtney — And so we’re just seeing an influx of new people, of people getting saved. But we’re not doing anything different. Like there’s no throughout this whole process, Rich, there’s no there’s no magic bullet.

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — Like there was no oh like we unlock this special thing that nobody else knows about. I think it’s just like we’re showing up. Like we’re we’re showing up and having services, we’re doing Growth Track. We do growth track every single Sunday. You know, if it’s you know if it’s a on Mother’s Day, we’re doing Growth Track if somebody signs up for Growth Track. And where I think we’re doing less and we’re just continuing to do it, and kind of continuing to do our rhythm.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s amazing.

Evan Courtney — Um, and so that’s kind of what we’re seeing.

Rich Birch — Now it’s somewhere in there you ended up hiring Campus Pastor Mark – great guy – ah what how did you find that individual? I know I’ve heard you in other contexts like cheer for Mark, man, he’s been just such a critical piece of the puzzle. Talk us through that transition because you you know you listed leadership as number one reason, hey we got to fix that. You stepped in but then eventually we made a more permanent change there.

Evan Courtney — Yeah, so we’ve had… the the hard thing is we’ve had four campus pastors in the last in the since the launch of the location…

Rich Birch — Right. Yeah.

Evan Courtney — …in the last 3, 3-4 years. Some of that is covid, just you know we jumped in for a little bit. We had another leader that was their first season. And so I think what we’ve learned is that when we hired Pastor Mark, no pastoral experience. Um he had Fields Church experience, had been on staff doing creative ah creative ministries, had done facilities. But what he had was culture. Like he he knew the ins and outs of The Fields Church and loved the ins and outs of The Fields Church. Like he loved everything about The Fields Church. And we’re like well we can… and had the call to pastor, but had not ever been educated that way…

Rich Birch — That’s huge.

Evan Courtney — …or never had gone that season in their life. Had done military and was working at ah, a car dealership. Um, but who was volunteering and serving at The Fields. And we’re like, you know what? There’s something inside of him. He’s got the culture. He’s got the willingness to learn. And so we said, you know what, we can’t, it’s hard to hire somebody outside to move… I mean regardless, it’s hard to hire anybody right now, but to move to the midwest into a community, you know, that’s 2 hours away from any metropolitan area is very difficult. Um, so we were like we’ve got to look internal, hired internal. Um, and we don’t have the culture and the DNA push. Like nobody’s pushing against that of like I really don’t think we should be doing this. It’s more of a sense of like, okay I want to do this. How do I do? That’s a lot easier for us to lead as as executive leaders for somebody trying to push their own kind of agenda that sort of thing.

Rich Birch — Absolutely. Talk us through that um, kind of at a high level when you think about the percentages of… so I hear what you’re saying on the culture piece. Don’t miss that, friends. You know we’ve talked about that in other context that like campus pastors need to, you know, they need to bleed the church. They need to be like wow these people are fully they’re onboard. They love the mission. But then the other piece of this in this case, you know, Charleston’s the name of this community. They need to be Charleston people. They need to have the like kind of vibe of the community. If if you were going to be like 51/49, you know, 51% they need to be like Fields people type people, 49% Charleston type people or the locations you’re in or, you know, how would you kind of grade those two, or is it they just need to be both of those? Talk us through when you think about, you know, this this the kind of intangible side of campus leadership.

Evan Courtney — Yeah, so ours we would probably tip more towards the size of that community.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Of like they’ve got to they’ve got to have that feel. They’ve got to they’ve got to love living here.

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — It’s not a horrible area. But I mean they just, like anywhere, they’ve got to love they want to be able to envision them growing their family and their kids up into this area. If they can’t do that, nothing else is going to work. Like we even when we hire people that’s the first thing is like hey do you feel like you can fit in here? I had an interview once with a guy that was from Houston. And within the first couple minutes we had a conversation like, hey do you think you’d be able to move here and live here? And he asked me this – he goes, would I need to buy a jacket for the winters?

Rich Birch — Ah, yes, you… at least one, at least need least one.

Evan Courtney — Yeah, yeah. And so I’m like you know what, that was our last conversation. I go I don’t think this is this isn’t going to work.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Evan Courtney — It doesn’t matter how great of leader you are…

Rich Birch — Yes, yes.

Evan Courtney — …if if if you’re not able to adapt, or or to know or to feel or to love the place that you’re going to live is, you know, that’s that’s the big piece for us.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s a huge deal. And you know I think helping us and our, you know, our people get through those questions and understand that and to have the conviction around, you know, what what is it that makes leaders work in this part of the world. You know, I remember when I was serving in New Jersey, you know, very similar issues. You know, they looked a little different, but the same kind of thing. Man, you’ve got to like this kind of that in that case, it’s like northeast grind, you got to like the, like people here really do think that they’re like the most important people in the world and you kind of can’t fight them on that. Like if you’re from Georgia you can’t be up here and be like, well, you know people up here aren’t as cool as they are in Georgia. That doesn’t work. They’ll get shut down real quickly. And you know the thing is that’s a transferable principle regardless of where we are in the country. Every part of the country has that kind of cultural stuff that we’ve got to be aware of. And every part of the country—and I’ve I’ve joked with you about this before—every part of the country believes that they’re the hardest part of the country to hire people in.

Rich Birch — Like I you know I was with with some friends in Southern California and they were like, this is like really tough place to hire people. I’m like I don’t if yeah, that’s not true. Like you know, there’s lots, every every place has this. We all have this and, you know, I think it is true where where you are you know I’ve been in the communities you’re you’re in, and but it’s also true in lots of places. You know and and we and we sometimes, I think particularly if we’ve been in this community forever, it might be hard for us to get our head around how just how difficult that is.

Rich Birch — Okay, when we think about the future, so you look up over the horizon, either in this campus in Charleston, or future campuses or even in Mattoon, you know, what what what’s the future have for you? What’ll be some of the questions you’re asking, or things you’re thinking about as you look to future campuses, future locations, growth all that kind of stuff?

Evan Courtney — Yeah, so growth pinpoints that we’re looking at right now is facility, and becoming a concern. Three limiting factors that we look at: facilities, is is there a limit in our auditorium space? Is there limit in our kids space? And is there a limit in our parking space? And if we have a limit in one of those three, then the rest kind of falls apart. And so that’s one of the things that we’re looking at both of our locations right now is what are what’s limiting us from growth?

Evan Courtney — The second one is is what is this we know how hard it is and difficult it is to do the third location, and the majority people stop at that second, so we’re looking at what does that look like. And for us it is a lot different than us doing the second because the second one we were able to look at this we already had this mass group of people in this inside community and and it was easy to get, you know, 75, 100 people to launch. Now we’re looking at a community next to us and we don’t hardly have anybody.

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — And so we’re having to kind of reframe and think, okay, what does that look like? Does that look like us doing popup services for major holidays? Does that look at us starting small groups? You know does it look at us during outreach events? What does that kind of look like? So those are the two main things is that the facility and then and how do we launch this third location.

Evan Courtney — Because I feel like once we can get that third, the fourth is going to come easier. It’s going the third is going to help our our structure of our leadership and it’s not going to be of us versus them with the two locations, and the smaller and the bigger, but it’s going to kind of change the whole thing.

Rich Birch — I love it. So good. Well there’s… listen, friends, there’s so much we could talk about at The Fields. Um, you know we’ve focused in on this one story but there’s so many other things. I love what you guys do. The pumpkin fest thing I think is amazing. You know I’ve pointed people in that direction. I’m just going to leave that out there, friends – you’ll have to follow them to figure out what you know that’s all about. I think I think that your whole passion for and obviously it’s kind of been in the subtext of this conversation, but passion for these rural communities, I think there’s a lot of people who are wondering the same thing. Like man, there are, you know, none of the name brand big, very large multisite churches are going to plant a church in Charleston. It’s just not going to happen, right? And so the question is who’s going to say, we’ll take that. That’s ah our us. We’ll figure out how to do that. I love that your, you know, doing – there’s lots of stories we could we could tell there. But as we’re wrapping up today, any kind of final you know advice or anything you like to say to people as we wrap up today’s conversation?

Evan Courtney — Yeah, so if we as we look at this I think the thing is is to to not give up on really what you feel like called God has called you to do. And that you are gonna run into hurdles; you are gonna run into roadblocks. But if it is God giving you this call, and he’s going to work it out, and you’re gonna be stronger than where you were going to be before. If we wouldn’t have ran into these roadblocks, we wouldn’t have the loss of pastoral staff and leadership, we wouldn’t be where we are today with Pastor Mark, with this merge…

Rich Birch — So true.

Evan Courtney — …or with this building across the street from Walmart. So just continue to to push forward because you’re gonna run into roadblocks and just sometimes you go around them, sometimes you jump over them, sometimes you just just blast through it.

Rich Birch — Love it. Well I mean this has been fantastic. If people want to track along with you or with the church where do we want to send them online?

Evan Courtney — Yep. The easiest place is just to go to the website: thefields.church and then all the socials are on there and you can find out information, email us, all of that information’s there.

Rich Birch — Love it. Really appreciate you being on today’s episode – thanks so much, man.

Evan Courtney — Thank you, sir.

Lessons from Inside a Rapidly Multiplying Church with DeWayne McNally & Paul Schulz

Rich Birch — Thu, 22 Dec 2022 09:44:00 +0000

Welcome back to the unSeminary podcast. We’re talking with DeWayne McNally and Paul Schulz from Hill Country Bible Church in Austin, Texas. DeWayne and Paul both serve as executive pastors of ministry by dividing the responsibilities; DeWayne handles the operations, multiplication and family ministries while Paul takes care of the personal/spiritual growth related ministries, including the worship experience and multisite.

To reach people in our communities, our churches can’t just grow; they need to multiply. Listen in as DeWayne and Paul share how Hill Country Bible Church has used both church plants and multisite campuses to reach the city of Austin and how disciple-making starts at the individual level.

Spread out on each level. // Everything Hill Country Bible Church does is driven by their God-given mission to saturate and reach Austin. Their strategy is two-fold, including both the launch of new multisite campuses, and planting new churches around Austin. The original Hill County location is on the cusp of the suburban part of Austin, so campuses will be placed in locations that are congruent with the psychographics of this area. Church plants, on the other hand, are established in areas that might have a different makeup which Hill Country can’t reach as easily. Either way, the goal is for multisite locations or churches to continue to multiply.
Multiplication starts with you. // At Hill Country, multiplication starts at the individual level, then moves into small groups, and then becomes what they do at the church level. If you’re a disciple-maker who isn’t reproducing disciples, then you’re not multiplying. Start from that point and then raise up a church planter who will in turn infuse the DNA into the elder board of a new church plant. Here the church planter’s purpose is to reach the people close by, but also send out the next set of church plants.
Create a disciple-making focus. // Hill Country casts vision for multiplication on all levels of ministry. In addition to small groups there is a disciple-making initiative which is a more focused and intentional program. People either self-identify that they want to grow in this way, or they are invited into discipling relationships. The whole goal of these discipling relationships is to teach people to multiply and become disciple-makers.
Three step ministry philosophy. // Personal connection and discipling relationships are key to Hill Country’s DNA. DeWayne shares how he is currently discipling three men and they in turn each disciple three men which leads to exponential multiplication. This structure includes a three step philosophy of ministry where they ask: Who are you? Where are you at spiritually? How can I help you take your next step? All of these questions are explored within personal discipling relationships.
Are you actually creating disciple makers? // If you want to multiply, begin by looking at yourself and how you’re doing discipleship. Are you actually creating disciple-makers or are you just creating scholars filled with head knowledge? How are you multiplying your leadership? Now is the time to think about multiplication and create a strategy. Normalize it while your church is small and make it a part of your culture and DNA.

You can learn more about Hill Country Bible Church at www.hcbc.com and connect with DeWayne or Paul on the staff page.

Thank You for Tuning In!

Lastly, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, to get automatic updates every time a new episode goes live!

Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: CDF Capital

Since 1953, CDF Capital has helped Christians and churches embrace their part in this story by providing the 3 kinds of capital every congregation needs for growth—Financial Capital, Leadership Capital, and Spiritual Capital. At CDF Capital, we care about each of these components. When a church is properly resourced financially, spiritually, and in leadership, lives are transformed.

Sign-up to learn more about CDF Capital and how we can help your church grow. Receive a 50% discount on a monthly subscription to the CDF Capital Subscribe & Save Bundle.

Is Church Multiplication on the Rise? Don’t Miss This Conversation with Warren Bird

Rich Birch — Thu, 03 Mar 2022 09:44:00 +0000

Thanks for joining us for this episode of the unSeminary podcast. I’m talking with Warren Bird, the Senior Vice President of Research and Equipping at the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability.

It’s time for a fresh look to see what God is doing, especially coming out of the pandemic. If you’re wondering how church planting and launching multisite campuses have changed, you won’t want to miss this conversation. Listen in as Warren offers a sneak peek at initial findings of his currently open survey, New Faces of Church Planting, plus invites you to participate.

A new era. // Warren believes that church planting and launching multisite campuses has shifted in a number of ways over the last several years. Not only from the suburbs to a more multiethnic, urban context, but also from being the work of a solo church planter to being more of a team effort. It’s changed from being standalone enterprise to being very network supported. It’s significant to pay attention to these shifts because as goes church planting and multisite launching, so goes the rest of the church. ECFA’s current survey, New Faces of Church Planting, is examining current multiplication trends which Warren believes will ultimately shape the whole North American Church.
Initial findings. // The survey just opened in late February 2022 and some of the very early findings indicate shifts in church multiplication. There are seven things Warren is starting to see that seem to have changed in church planting over the last 10-20 years. The first is that a huge number of survey respondents identify themselves as missional, but even more significant is that the second most common way churches are identifying themselves is as being multiracial or multiethnic. Our communities continue to become more diverse and churches are moving toward being less homogeneous and embracing Revelation 5:9 where the kingdom of heaven is going to include every tongue, tribe, nation, and culture together.
Rent or own? // About one third of people who have responded to the survey so far own their facility. Coming out of the pandemic, Warren anticipates this number may shift even further. Many rented spaces closed during the pandemic or stopped allowing churches to use their locations, and churches realized how difficult it is if you don’t have control of your location.
Creating healthy disciples. // The number one thing churches are doing to create healthy disciples is helping their people with personal spiritual disciplines. A significant second response is service to the community outside the walls of the church. Third was helping people produce fruit in their lives, such as embracing justice, or forgiveness, or love, peace and joy, which would not have been as widespread ten or more years ago.
Primary ethnicity. // While the primary ethnicity of church planters was predictably Caucasian, the second most selected option so far is multiethnic or multiracial. The more this becomes the norm with new churches and new campuses, the more the broader church will shift.
Residency and internship vs assessment. // More than one-third of church planters or campus pastors did a residency or internship, and over half said that they had undergone assessment. A residency or an internship is a big commitment, but about 87% of multisite directors—those who are responsible for their church’s multisite campuses—said they preferred that their campus pastors have done a residency or internship.
Top things done online. // Coming out of the pandemic there has been a huge shift as to what churches do online. Whereas ten years ago it would have focused solely on broadcasting services, now the top things that churches do online also include small groups, staff meetings, prayer teams, counseling, children’s ministry, plus more.
Church multiplication. // More than one-third of the church leaders responding have been involved in planting one or more new churches. And more than two-thirds of the multisite churches have added another campus during the last three years. That seems to indicate that not only were there a lot of launches leading up to the pandemic, but also during the pandemic.
Participate in the survey. // At the time of this podcast airing, the survey will be open for a couple more weeks so you still have a chance to share your experience with church multiplication. The survey takes about 15 minutes. By participating, not only do you get a free copy of the final findings, you get invited to a webinar with Warren where he’ll answer questions about the survey results. Secondly, you’ll be entered in a drawing to win one of several Amazon gift cards. Plus, if you are in the US, you’ll receive the spiritual demographics for the zip code that you select which will help you identify needs that you can meet in that area in Jesus’ name. Finally, you’ll receive ECFA’s top five tools for church planting, such as how to start a new church or how to determine cash flow level – all for FREE as a thank you for participating.

Go to unseminarysurvey.com today to participate in the survey New Faces of Church Planting.

Thank You for Tuning In!

Lastly, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, to get automatic updates every time a new episode goes live!

Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Well hey everybody, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in today. You know every week we bring you a leader who will both inspire and equip you. This week we have got a friend – a personal friend – I love this guy. You’re going to love hearing today from Warren Bird. Warren, if you do not know him – Dr. Warren Bird – is from ah, he’s the Senior Vice President of Research and Equipping at the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability. Um, or that he’s a friend. He’s one of those people, and there’s not very many of them, who I say anytime you want to come on the podcast, Warren, you just let me know. And he reached out and said, I want to come on – I got something big coming up that I’m excited for you to plug in. Warren is a gift to the church. He’s a real friend. Warren, welcome. So glad you’re here.

Warren Bird — Hey thank you, Rich, and the feeling is mutual. I listen to unSeminary regularly. I encourage others to do it and I always ah learn something, so I look forward to today.

Rich Birch — Nice. Yeah, so so excited for this. For folks that don’t know, why don’t you kind of tell us a little bit about your role – you… I have I just have so much respect for you. I oftentime I’ve I know I’ve said this before when you’ve been on the pat on the program in the past I’m like, I play an expert on the internet; you are actually and a church expert. And so, so many times I’m just echoing what your research you’ve done or work that you’ve done so I just just, you know, we’re just so indebted to you. But why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background. Tell us about your work with ECFA. Kind of give us a ah who is Warren Bird/why should we listen kind of introduction?

Warren Bird — Well, the nickel tour is I love Jesus and I’m a frustrated evangelist and I wish I could win the world to Christ, but I can’t. God didn’t give me those gifts, but he did give me gifts to come alongside people like you and many others, especially pastors, and say, look if I put tools in your hand that help you make wiser decisions, bolder decisions, ah have more confidence, and and go for it, and so that’s led to me being, after pastoring for a number of years, the research director at Leadership Network, and now at the (you said it so well, Rich) ECFA -the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability. And for Canadian counterparts, there’s a CCC organization in Canada, but where where I get to, if you will find best practices and put them in people’s hands. And it so turns out that this whole idea of church multiplication we have like hundreds of ECFA members that are into church planting or multisiting. And so we said, well let’s do some kind of survey, clear the ground, show what the state of church planting, of multisite compared to church planting are today, and let’s see what we can learn and then put back in the hands of people so that they can lead the charge all the better.

Rich Birch — Yeah I love this. So friends, I want you to listen in. We’re going to ask you to take an action today but I want you to listen in. Um, for this whole entire conversation. You’re going to get some nuggets here that you’re not getting anywhere else. It’s going to be a great conversation. There’s… ah so one of the things, if you don’t know about Warren, over the years he’s done a number of these studies that are literally foundational to us understanding what’s happening in the broader church. They are incredibly thorough. This isn’t just like when I do a survey I send it out to a couple thousand people – you work on you know, just real research basis that’s you know, founded in like I say actual practices.

Warren Bird — Yeah, but this this would be the largest cross-denominational survey of church multiplication…

Rich Birch — Wow. Love it. Yes.

Warren Bird — …that anyone has done and when we launched just last week. Ah, we had fifty denominations and networks – Canada and the United States…

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Warren Bird — …all pulsing their people so that we really get a representative picture of what God is doing. And the last such national survey was one Ed Stetzer and I did that became the book Viral Churches, subtitle: Helping Church Planters Become Movement Makers. And so much has changed in the, by the time this comes out, 14 years since the research there.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Warren Bird — And it’s time for a fresh look and to see what God is doing, especially coming out of the pandemic ah has church planting has multisiting changed, and if so how? But you know how’s it how’s the funding? We just go a whole bunch of different directions, and the good news is we ask everybody just for 15 minutes. So, Rich, if you took the survey you wouldn’t get the same questions as Maria down the street as José you know across the the province or state.

Rich Birch — Mmm-hmm.

Warren Bird — Um, everybody gets a slightly different set of questions. But if you’ll give us 15 minutes – okay maybe it’ll take you twenty – um, we will then give you a report back so you can see the state of what’s happening. We’ll give you we got Amazon Gift Card incentives. we’ve we’ve got all, we’ll come back to the incentives, but but we’re your time is gonna pay.

Rich Birch — It’s amazing. Yeah, absolutely So. You’ve already got to this but I want to let’s dig in a bit more…

Warren Bird — Okay, yeah, and ah, we’ll spill the beans. Go ahead.

Rich Birch — …on the on why this study. So why do? Yeah, yeah. So let’s dig on on so it’s called New Faces of Church Planting. Why this study, kind of, what were some of your assumptions as you were putting it together? Why did you say, Okay now is the time for us to do this? Ah you kind of dug into that, but give us a little bit more on that.

Warren Bird — Okay, New Faces of Church Planting. I am convinced that church planting has shifted not only more from the suburbs to a more multi-ethnic urban context, but I’m convinced it’s moved from being the solo church planter to much more of the team effort in terms of launching. And that it’s it’s changed from being a standalone enterprise to being a very networked supported. I planted, Rich, years ago – the first church I planted I remember going to the bank and to to open up a bank account and they laughed at me. They said, you know, what kind of account do you want? I go, I don’t know. And and and and now today. There was no manual, there was no anything to help people, there was no Exponential Church Planting Conference, there was no unSeminary podcast.

Rich Birch —Mmm-hmm.

Warren Bird — And today people are much more networked. So um, the funding patterns, everything. We want to… I’m suspecting there is a new era and and here’s what I’m convinced: that as goes church planting, and multisiting for that matter, so goes the rest of the church in the years that follow.

Rich Birch — So true.

Warren Bird — In other words, the patterns, the experiments, the the things explored, the breakthroughs that these kind of pioneers – whether it’s the the local church plant or the the connected with your campus multisite – um as they find breakthroughs, others pay attention, are influenced by it, and they will follow as well. So this is going to shape the whole North American Church.

Rich Birch — Love it. So we usually a typical weekend the an unSeminary podcast, we have five-, six-, seven thousand (it’s in that range) listening. Um, who are you hoping will take this study? When you’re you’re looking for kind of a bullseye, who’s the person that’s listening in that you’re thinking, I really want them to to to jump on and take this survey?

Warren Bird — Actually I’m trying to have—let me let me say it two ways—one I’m avoiding the bullseye in that we use this thing called skip logic. So it’s like, well church plant. So when you start the survey you get like this initial fork – are you more church planting, or multisite? Well if you’re multisite, I want to know are you the multisite director, meaning like the executive pastor – someone who’s who oversees? Well I got a separate set of questions for you. Or are you the campus or location pastor? And if so I’ve got a specific set of questions for you. Or were you multisite and you’re not anymore?

Rich Birch — Okay, cool.

Warren Bird — I got a specific set of questions for you. So so there’s a whole kind of like multisite tree.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Warren Bird — Let’s say the trees’s got a big fork and the first fork is multisite with each with different branches and forks going along, or church planting? Okay so so are you in church planning? Were you in church planting? Were you maybe part of a church planter and you finish? If so, is the church still open? If so, I got a question for you. Or did the church close? Well I want to know why, from your perspective, as you look back, you know, help us understand what happened and and what can be learned from that. All right?

Rich Birch — Mmm, right.

Warren Bird — Are you, you know, actively church planting? Are you are you the founding pastor? Because sometimes you have a turnover of pastors in a church plant. Let’s say in year two or three or four – so so we want to parse that out. So so it’s all about the bullseye is multiplication.

Rich Birch — Yes, yes, so basically anybody that’s been involved in anything but…

Warren Bird — And I’m no matter who you are I’ve got a path for you.

Rich Birch — Yes, okay, so basically if you’re listening in today and you’ve been involved in multiplication, really at any level, you’ve kind of had any engagement around the issues of multiplication, church planting, multisite – whether you’ve been on staff or you’re the lead pastor, the founding pastor, you’re you know you’re a campus pastor – all of those well all of those people – we’re looking for you to take the survey. Is that is that is that…ah, a way to say it?

Warren Bird — Yep, and for all of you you get your own special branch, and you get, you know, it’ll be… I’m aiming at 15 minutes in terms of the question count. And you get to see the findings, you know?

Rich Birch — Yeah, this is great.

Warren Bird — Well, it’s it’s gonna be great. It’s it’s gonna really create metrics, um benchmarks, ratios, patterns—both pre and post pandemic—where we’re gonna have really a picture of where the church is now, and where it’s headed. And enter and… go ahead.

Rich Birch — Okay, so I’m gonna I was gonna say I’m gonna ask you an inappropriate question. Hopefully our relationship can sustain this, Warren. It’s been about a week since the survey’s been open. Man, I and I know this is like the worst thing to ask someone who’s who’s midstudy. Are there any kind of early, interesting findings? Early things that you’re seeing that you could let our audience in on? Kind of peek up under the hood a little bit? Again, you could turn me down.

Warren Bird — Absolutely. Done. Gotta do for you, Rich.

Rich Birch — Oh you love it! Let’s hear them. Ah great.

Warren Bird — Um because we h ave 1427 ah participants as of minutes before this call…

Rich Birch — That’s great. Love it.

Warren Bird — …So I prepped by looking over the initial frequencies, and and so first, you know, a lot of things I can I can tell you that that won’t surprise you…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Warren Bird — You know like okay we say well well, what about your facility? We asked this both for church planters and for multisites. Um, you know, do you lease it 24/7? Do you lease it with limitations? Ah. Do you own it? Whatever… Um lease with limitations is the is leader.

Rich Birch — Right.

Warren Bird — How old are you? The average person… I better not say that. Well I’ll say that. 42 years old. It is either the campus pastor, or the church planter which…

Rich Birch — 42; interesting.

Warren Bird — Which to me is very exciting because that’s much younger than the average pastor in North America. Here’s another trivia, and then I’m gonna get to so something that I think here that’s some changes that I’m seeing.

Rich Birch — Right, some interesting shifts.

Warren Bird — We asked um when did you or will you become self-sustaining, and of those who who are at least three years in it. Um, by year… end of year three, 43% were self-sustaining financially…

Rich Birch — Wow.

Warren Bird — …which is which is I I don’t think we knew that before and…

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s interesting. Yeah yeah.

Warren Bird — …that’s very encouraging. Now again, of those who aren’t, I got a path down there.

Rich Birch — Right.

Warren Bird — You know to say okay so how are you funded? And I got all kinds of funding questions and and it’s fascinating—I’ll just go that way for a second. Um top 3 leaders in terms of funding are ah—for church planters at least because multisite pastors tend to be on staff—but for church planters, their own contribution by earning or their spouse’s earning, their denomination, and or um churches that have sponsored them. Um, so so there’s skin in the game, but there’s others helping, ah which is exciting. So let me let me shift; let me really spill the beans and give you—I think I as I looked over the data I jotted down—here are 7 things that I think have changed about church planting and I’ll draw multisite parallels.

Rich Birch — Mmm.

Warren Bird — Ah, where appropriate. Over the last… definitely over the last twenty years, probably over the last ten years, and I’ll do him as a countdown. Number seven, we gave like 20 terms, you know, describe your either multisite campus or church plant and we gave them all kinds of words like, like including buzzwords like, are you hybrid? Well that’s barely used. Are you phigital? You know the mix of physical and digital. I I think ah five, eight percent so far have said we’re phigital.

Rich Birch — Ah, it’s that high? That’s crazy! I I don’t know anybody – I know we’ve been using that term, but I’m like I it seems like such an awkward term.

Warren Bird — Yeah I okay I’m I’m not prejudicing; I’m just telling you what people…

Rich Birch — Yes, yes.

Warren Bird — Are you are you ah virtual, or or meta church? And I got 4% saying yes on that. But the the win, the the top of the heap, are are you missional? That’s the word that people more—now this isn’t theology, I got another question about that—

Rich Birch — Yep. Yep; pe.

Warren Bird — …and missional is to degree theological, as all of them are in a certain way. But here’s here was the big surprise for for my number 7 countdown, the second most cited was multiracial or multiethnic.

Rich Birch — Love that.

Warren Bird — And you would not have had that years ago there’s an…

Rich Birch —No no. In fact I remember when I was in school, and I’ve said this before on other podcasts, I remember when I was on when I was in school the only—it’s ironic I talk a lot about church growth—I only remember like one ah like lecture on church growth stuff. So it wasn’t even a whole class. It was like one lecture and it was and literally it was about the homogeneous unit ah principle of church planting which is literally the opposite of multi-ethnic. It was like, what you need to do is be like—today I don’t even think you could get up and say that—you could what you need to do is everyone should be the same, like figure out how you get like the most narrowly defined cultural background um, and you know plant from that. And that’s in in my ministry career of two and a half decades that has completely turned upside down where that’s – I love that that’s exciting.

Warren Bird — Yes, but but I think homogeneous today is multi-ethnic society…

Rich Birch — Yes, right. That’s what people that’s what people are used to. That’s true. Good point.

Warren Bird — And and that’s what we expect the church to be.

Rich Birch — Yep yeah, that’s a good point. That’s a good point. Yep yes.

Warren Bird — And and so that becomes the comfort zone, which you know Revelation 5:9 the kingdom of heaven is going to be every tongue, every tribe, every nation, every culture together. So we’re we’re more into looking like heaven and we’ve been helped by society moving that direction.

Rich Birch — Yeah I Love that.

Warren Bird — Al right now number 6 is is small but I think it’s it’s happy. Do you own your facility? Do you rent it? What do you do? One third own it um, which which…

Rich Birch — Oh yeah, interesting.

Warren Bird — …In this era of well we’re all renting school buildings, and all ‘hell not in the pandemic anymore’. So I’m gonna dig deeper on that. But just to say that’s an area we explore and I think there’s gonna be some changes in that coming out of the pandemic.

Rich Birch — Yeah, you know that’s interesting because that is just anecdotally with the churches I’m talking to even on the multisite front, that is for sure one of those things that’s shifted in the last two years where we, you know, we there’s a lot more churches looking at owning or you know more 24/7 type things. I think one of the things that the—and I listen, I’m a big I’m a big proponent of portable but—one of the the things that really the pandemic pointed out to us was if you don’t have control of your location, it can be very very difficult, right? It can, you know, that creates extra potential grind, and the and at the same time, there’s interesting kind of confluence there with the churches I’m talking to. Anyways, there’s like the, can we can we actually do what we’re called to do, and we’re more interested in community service stuff and so we need space to do that. We need square footage to like run things that are that are you know helping in the community. So anyways, so that’s that’s cool number 6 I think.

Warren Bird — Well you you have read directly into number 4 in my countdown of changes over the last decade plus, especially in church planting. I asked, what are you doing to create healthy disciples? And other words yes, technically we all as soon as we follow Jesus we’re discipled so I guess we’re really looking at disciple-making, but what are you doing? Number one emphasis was the personal spiritual disciplines, you know, are we helping you in your walk with in your relationship with God, and your prayer life, and your reading scripture each day, and the like.

Rich Birch — Mmm-hmm.

Warren Bird — Number two, Rich, was service.

Rich Birch — Interesting, interesting.

Warren Bird — Service to the community, and beyond the walls of the church.

Rich Birch — That’s fascinating.

Warren Bird — I don’t think we would have seen that um and and again I gave about eight or nine options there. Um and that service was number two. Number three—definitely wouldn’t have been—was lifestyle of—and I gave 3 pairs—love, peace, joy, justice, forgiveness, and I forget the the last quality, but are you helping produce that kind of the kind of people who that’s the fruit of their life that they are living out, in this case justice? Whoa that would not have been wide as widespread ten or more years ago.

Rich Birch — No. So interestingly so I I launched a released a book four years ago, five years ago—Church Growth Flywheel—and we talk about five different things that—and this was based purely on my observation from at that point 300 interviews with leaders from the fastest growing churches in the country—and those churches that consistently, fast-growing churches, we’re seeing them do community service things. Like we’re seeing them do outreaches. We’re gonna mobilize our people – get out of the seats, into the streets – go do things. But interestingly over the years that chapter on community service is the one chapter that has done two things. One, it’s it’s got the most pushback – people are like, really is that really that important? And it’s the churches that actually said, you know, what we added that to our game and it made the biggest difference in what we were doing. We’re we’re doing, whether it’s Night to Shine, or we’re doing, you know, these kind of community engagement service opportunities. So that’s that for sure in my own little world, I’ve seen a shift in that where you know that it’s at the time it seemed like a. You know like a radical idea, but I love that it’s we’re seeing more and more churches actually do that actually say, hey how do we engage and and serve the community? That’s so good.

Warren Bird — And Rich, you didn’t ask me to say this but I read that book cover to cover and it’s like sitting down with Rich Birch for a couple of hours and getting his best takes on on problem solving and areas to explore in your church, so that that book’s gonna have a long tail for it.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Warren Bird — You know the bottom of the heap was, in the what are you doing to create healthy disciples? Teaching people to put God first in their finances.

Rich Birch — Interesting. Yeah, yeah.

Warren Bird — You know and yet you know the whole world is still struggling with living paycheck to paycheck and and being in financial debt and looking for that freedom that that I believe God’s principles can help people experience. Besides…

Rich Birch — That’s an opportunity.

Warren Bird — Yeah opportunity. All right that…

Rich Birch — Yeah, absolutely like over the years I’ve seen that with in the churches I’ve led when we’ve done Dave Ramsey or when we’ve done um, you know Joe Sangl stuff, like it’s amazing how those, you know, it’s it’s humbling frankly as we help people get their finances straight. It’s like other um, you know the other parts of their their kind of relationships and their you know their relationship with Christ – other things seem to come in line, which I guess makes sense. Money’s such a big a part of their relationship. But what else you – I cut you off there.

Warren Bird — No, no, no okay so we started with number 7 was the terms people use number 6 was you know your facility. Do you own it? Number 5 was what are you doing to create healthy disciples? Number 4 primary ethnicity. This is going to reinforce the multisite – number 1 predictably was Caucasian, number 2 was not hispanic, asian, or other ethnicities, but it was multiethnicity or multiracial. So again, this is becoming the norm and and I’m convinced as churches go, new churches new campuses, so goes the rest.

Rich Birch — Yeah, absolutely; love it.

Warren Bird — Number 3 is – I ask it two ways. One is I ask the individual taking the survey, if you are the church planter or campus pastor, did you do a residency or internship…

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Warren Bird — …in the last…I think it was the last five years before launching whatever you you help launch? And more than one third said yes.

Rich Birch — Really?

Warren Bird — And I’ll speak where you assessed and that was well over half. But you know assessment is like a weekend or a week long thing a residency or an internship is a big commitment…

Rich Birch — Absolutely, yeah.

Warren Bird — …and though that’s a game-changer. But let me before you comment. Let me tell you the the biggest game-changer. We ask multisite directors, in other words, those responsible for their churches’ multisite campuses: Do you prefer that your campus pastor be assessed? And so far… I’m sorry, do you prefer that your campus pastor have done a residency or internship? So far, you want to guess what what they’re saying? It’s high I’ll give you that.

Rich Birch — Yeah I was going to say, it’s high, like you know that that’s from your previous studies. You know I’ve said I think it was like 91% of all campus pastors are from within the congregation. So it’s a very super high so I would imagine this would be similar number. 80/90% I would say it’s quite high.

Warren Bird — Yeah, you got it. It’s 87% so far that did.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Warren Bird — So to me this is this is just this whole idea that’s bubbling all over of doing a ministry residency before actually planting/launching your campus. I just see that as more and more happening and moving that direction.

Rich Birch — Yeah that’s great. Well and on that particular one the interesting takeaway for multi-site churches on that particular piece is, I think so many times when we’re trying to hire people we look externally; we’re thinking like I got to go find people. And you know the the advice I, you know, and it’s because of your past work, I quote it all the time I’m like, stop thinking about that – the first if you’re going to have 10 campuses, the first nine of them are going to come within your church. The problem is you got to go find those 9 people now and start developing them. How do we, you know, we don’t let’s not wait until we need a campus pastor. We’ve got to start you know, who are the top 9 people that we think we might might potentially – 5 years from now – be a campus pastor. Let’s work on how do we develop those people now, and develop them from within – raise them up in the system. So yeah, that’s interesting that continues to resonate – that doesn’t surprise me at all.

Warren Bird — I remember the first survey I did on multisite when it was just, you know, words were just starting. And by the way in this survey, we ask, what do you call your person? And campus pastor is still overwhelmingly the top choice. Location pastor is 11%… ah, site I’m sorry – location pastor is 15%, site pastor is 11%, and other is 6%, so I’m going to use the phrase campus pastor, but if you need to translate, okay.

Rich Birch — Sure.

Warren Bird — But what way back to early on the very first survey I did of multisite when was first starting I asked, the following question was in there. And when people asked me about the survey, I said here’s the question that surprised me the most. We asked when you launched a new campus, did lay involvement go down, stay the same, or go up? And Rich, I think that’s the stat you were referring to that lay involvement. It was like 87% or 91% – it was something like that. I was such a surprise to me that the next time a couple years later when we did, through Leadership Network, another multi-site survey, I asked the same question again and got the same ridiculously, delightfully high number. And so all that’s great. You’re mobilizing your lay people. Go ahead.

Rich Birch — Um, yeah, absolutely well. And yeah I absolutely yeah multisite again ah the way I’ve said it internally is multisite from my own personal experience and taught… I’m working with so many churches, it is like the best way that I’ve seen to mobilize people, to get more people plugged into the mission, and obviously church planting does that as well. Ah, because there’s like this interesting, we gotta find people, we gotta get them plugged in, we you know we yeah, we have to get them. We can’t just have people sitting. We’ve got to get them. My son interestingly he’s in in college now and he started going to a church that’s couple years old—they launched right actually they launched fall 2019 right before the pandemic so they’re still very much in the in the church plant mode, and he’s like—the lead guy’s names Yesper—he’s like, Yesper, he’s like really good at getting people to volunteer. And I’m like yeah because he has to, like you you have to get people mobilized like if he doesn’t get it, there it’s not gonna happen. So love that I think you got a couple more. Don’t give us the number one yet I want to do something before we get to the number one yet. But yeah I think you’ve got a couple more before we get to that.

Warren Bird — Okay, and and let me just do it aside. Your leaders are so good when the campus is new at raising up lay peopleople and then when you start needing staff, that’s the big fork in the road if you hire staff to be doers instead of minister-makers, instead of leader-makers, instead of pastor-makers, then you move all this great lay power, you diminish it and you you change it into only the paid.

Rich Birch — That’s the temptation right there that is the temptation that so many of us fall into.

Warren Bird — Absolutely. Okay number 2 may seem obvious. But ten years ago if I had asked what are you doing online? At most you would have gotten, we broadcast our services. Um and let me just give you kind of I’m going to rank them in the order. We gave like 25 choices you know you, do you communion online, do you counseling online… Here here were the top ones: number one was corporate worship. Number 2 with small groups, which is I mean my wife and I are leading a couple’s ah small group, and it happens tonight and we’re going to meet 3 times in person. I live we’re we’re based in New York where things aren’t quite as as healing as in other parts of the continent and but but each week it’s on Zoom. And it’s working great – I mean we never would have imagined that. So small groups, then third staff meeting, fourth prayer teams, fifth counseling, sixth children, and on it goes.

Rich Birch — That’s amazing.

Warren Bird — And all these things that, you know, we just wouldn’t have imagined that we could do.

Rich Birch — No, it’s so true. Even personally like we, you know, we’ve been you you know, we have obviously journeyed together a little bit with Liquid and, you know, we started doing church online in 2009, and you know have a long journey there but in my own personal life, it really took the pandemic to convince me. Oh I can do stuff online like even coaching and like you know meeting with other leaders and and all of that. Even though you know I’ve we’ve invested a lot done a lot to get but there’s that’s something there.

Rich Birch — Before we get to number one, I want to encourage people to go to unseminarysurvey.com um, we’ll have the link in the show notes but we just want to make it super easy. You’re listening to the unseminary podcast, just go to unseminarysurvey.com. It only takes 15 minutes um and I know you’ve got some kind of benefits for people. You’ve got like if you I know you’ve got like draws for Amazon gift cards, and stuff like that. Tell us… through and you get access to the survey… tell us about a few of those things before we get to the number one thing you want to share.

Warren Bird — Let me tell you three of them – one is you get a copy of the findings…

Rich Birch — Okay, which is killer.

Warren Bird — …and you get invited to a webinar where I’m going to answer the questions a week later, so if you got specific questions, I I can’t wait to answer them because usually I learned so much as someone says, but did you compare this to that, or the people who said yes to this you know do they tend to be over there? I’m like what a good question and I go look it up and then I can say something helpful on the webinar. So so one, you get to learn…

Rich Birch — Love it.

Warren Bird — Um and and I can’t wait to share it with you, and ECFA does things with excellence I’ll be illustrated and easy to understand and so forth. Number two, yes, we do have those Amazon gift card drawings. I think we’ve got eight at $50 each and and we really do you know we use a randomizer to pick names when and I’ve done this in previous…

Rich Birch — Nice. Shocker.

Warren Bird — Well well I say that because when we write people and say you’ve won – this is not a joke you…

Rich Birch — Yes, yes. Yes, people are like is this what I has yeah that’s amazing. Yes, yes, that’s funny.

Warren Bird — What um, yes, it it spam? And it usually takes my assistant a couple of times to say, no, you really – we want to give you a Amazon gift card your name was randomly selected.

Rich Birch — That’s funny. Love that.

Warren Bird — For those in the US, we want to give you spiritual demographics of your zip code or you know the area that you select.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Warren Bird — We want to help you see you know how many how many single adults are there in your community, what is the racial makeup of your community, what are the what are the needs in terms of ah, parents at home – single parents and so forth.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Warren Bird — Um, that it’s going to help you identify needs that you can meet in Jesus name and it’s a tool that you can use with your team and all that.

Rich Birch — That’s great.

Warren Bird — So and I think there are 2 or 3 other incentives listed, but we want to make this worthwhile for you. Um, and…

Rich Birch — Yeah I love that. I…yes?

Warren Bird — …oh oh I’m sorry I’m sorry I would more we have the top 5 tools for church planting from ECFA like…

Rich Birch — Oh, right. Um, right. Yet. Wow.

Warren Bird — …like over the years we’ve come up with a bunch of resources and we picked the 5 most so like how to start a new church, or how to do the housing allowance for the for the minister, or campus pastor or…

Rich Birch — Mmm, right. Yep. Wow.

Warren Bird — …Or how to you know, set up a budget, or a you know, determine cash flow level. So so this is this is really stuff that’s going to help you and FREE for taking the survey. It’s.

Rich Birch — Yes, yeah, that’s great. Again friends, just drop by unseminarysurvey.com that’ll just just redirect you, take you right to the survey. I’d encourage you to do this; I would say it’s worth doing it. It’s only 15 minutes – it’s worth doing it just to get the the the one thing, which is just to get the results, is killer. You’re going to literally you’re going to be given incredible insights that’ll help you as you look to the future in whatever kind of way you’re involved in multiplication. But then all this other stuff is like just incredible gravy on top. It’s definitely worth your time. It’s worth your team, it’s worth encouraging your team as well, like if you’ve got people on your team, like if you’re the executive pastor, get your lead pastor to do it as well so that you know you might get a slightly different nuanced views on it which would be fantastic.

Warren Bird — Well, the executive pastor goes down a different path than the campus pastor.

Rich Birch — Yeah, which is wonderful. So want to do that. Now you said there were 7 – you’ve given us 6 of them -this is amazing. What’s number 1?

Warren Bird — Okay, has your church—and then I’ll bring in a multisite parallel, but if I’ll first do at the church level—has your church—and we give them involvement in other church planting and the top of the heap that we asked was—have you been directly involved in launching one or more churches? We also say have you been indirectly—like you know we give money to a fund, or we encourage, or we prayed for this, but—have you been directly involved with planting one or more new churches? More than one third said yes!

Rich Birch — Wow, that’s amazing.

Warren Bird — So far it’s 39% – almost four out of ten. That is a game changer if that ends up being true and what’s happened, and let me give you the multisite parallel.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, that’s amazing.

Warren Bird — Have you added another campus; has your church—that you’re a multisite campus—have added a new campus in the same same time period – in the last three years? Okay last one for church planting was 39%; this is two thirds – this is 65% have said yes.

Rich Birch — Wow, That’s amazing.

Warren Bird — So I can’t wait to dig and you know, kind of like because we ask when did you launch. And so I can do post pandemic or pre-pandemic.

Rich Birch — Yes, yep.

Warren Bird — But I’m thinking this is saying that there have been lots of launches both leading up to the pandemic but but during the pandemic. Whoa!

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, that’s amazing. Well and it also speaks frankly on the demographic side. It speaks to you’re getting the right people to take the survey, right? These are people that are actually engaged in this activity…

Warren Bird — You know that’s you’re right. You’re right.

Rich Birch — …which which is which is good, right?

Warren Bird — And and I paid an academic to to tear apart my survey and that’s one of the things he said you know you’re going to get the choir in there and they’re going to give you the rosiest point of view because they’re you know they’re all in and they’re doing what they believe in. Um, so you’re gonna have little bias.

Rich Birch — Yeah, but which is what you want though you want we want to know what those people are up to and so that showing you like hey there’s there’s good. You know you? you’ve hit the right market. That’s that’s great.

Warren Bird — Yeah, yeah.

Rich Birch — Well, Warren, this is incredible. Again, it’s unseminarysurvey.com. We’ll link it in the show notes; you’ll get an email about it, so we’ll pester you about it. As you know if you hang out with unSeminary, we’ve known to pester you from time to time. I really do want you to take this. Um Warren, anything else just says we kind of wrap up this episode anything else you’d like to share, or anything else we want to make sure we send people to? I’m sure this is like the big thing these days, but anything else you want to say as we wrap up?

Warren Bird — Now just thank you. Thank you for your investment of a few minutes is going to help thousands, if not tens of thousands of other people – just thank you. They’re hard questions. They’re not easy questions like I’m going to ask, you you know, your attendance different years, or finances how do so you have to think about it. It’s not just a yes/no, but we we try to limit the questions so that you can – if you if you move quickly – 15 minutes.

Rich Birch — Yeah, love it. Well one last question for you – can I get you to come back on, maybe in the you know, after the dust settles, and you’ve you’ve chewed on all the data, I would love to have you back on to to you know test some of these theories. It might be kind of interesting to see some of the early data versus you know, what actually ended up coming out. Would you be open to that, Warren – can I bend your arm to come back on the show?

Warren Bird — For you, Rich, who who bent my arm to spill the beans already…

Rich Birch — Oh nice. Ah sure. Good.

Warren Bird — …Let’s let’s come back and let your listeners be among the first to hear what people said. Yep.

Rich Birch — Good, great, good stuff. Well thanks, Warren – appreciate you, again. It’s unseminarysurvey.com – drop by there. Do it. You know, set aside the 15 minutes/20 minutes/half an hour. You know you got to have some focused thinking time – you can’t do this in the car on the way in the morning. Do that and and you’ll help not only your own church, but like you say thousands of other churches. Thanks so much, Warren. So glad that you’ve been here. Have a great rest of your week.

Warren Bird — Thank you.

Mega to Meta? Your First Step in Starting a Metaverse Ministry with Jason Poling

Rich Birch — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 09:44:00 +0000

Welcome to the unSeminary podcast. Today we’re talking with Jason Poling, lead pastor of Cornerstone Church of Yuba City in California. For the first ten years of Jason’s ministry as a pastor, he felt like he had been living in “maintenance mode.” While his church was experiencing growth, some of which was due to brand new believers, a lot of the growth came from the already-churched crowd. After a bold prayer for God to increase his faith, in 2019 God opened his eyes to the massive, unchurched population in the digital world.

Listen in as Jason talks with us about the mission field in the Metaverse, how your church can begin to reach the lost, and even establish a campus there.

Ripe for harvest. // The Metaverse is a unique space where especially younger generations who are digital natives go to build relationships. No matter how cool or relevant your church is, there are some people who will never attend a brick-and-mortar church. Yet the Metaverse provides an easy entry point for them where they can check out a service and interact with the other people there in a safe, low-pressure way.
What is VR church? // The Metaverse version of services at Cornerstone Church are very much like being at the in real life (IRL) location. Instead of seeing physical people, you’ll see their avatars. As you walk toward other people in the Metaverse, audio is spatially constructed and you’ll be able to hear them talk and enter into conversation, just like IRL. The one thing you need to participate is a VR headset. In the Metaverse, Cornerstone streams their services, similar to how they would on other platforms like Facebook or YouTube. In addition to VR, you can utilize Discord (similar to a beefed up version of Zoom) and Twitch (a streaming platform that goes beyond YouTube) to create a robust experience in the Metaverse.
Keep a connection. // Cornerstone Church of Yuba City treats their VR church as one of their campuses and maintains a connection between their IRL site and their Metaverse location. Talk to your IRL campuses about what God is doing in the Metaverse location, and talk to your Metaverse campus about what God’s doing in the IRL locations. Hybridize training and offer opportunities for things like bible study or small groups for your people both IRL and in the Metaverse. Make use of Discord and its ability to use a two-way camera to provide opportunities for more interaction between IRL and the Metaverse. Share vision and prayer requests across campuses.
Build relationships. // Remember that people primarily visit the Metaverse to connect. Serving people in the Metaverse can look like approaching them and asking them how you can pray for them. While it might seem creepy to approach a stranger out of the blue IRL and do this, it’s normal in the Metaverse. Many people might be discouraged, lonely or depressed and hungry for relationship. Even if people might want to be anonymous at first, in the end they are much more open to conversation in the Metaverse. There are always opportunities to share Christ’s love and encourage others.
A world of its own. // Jason suggests thinking of the Metaverse as a world that has different continents. Each VR platform (AltSpace VR, Rec Room, Horizons, etc.) is a different continent with different tribes that have had very little exposure to the gospel.
Test the waters. // You can experience the Metaverse world first by logging into the 2D version to find what might be attracting people on that side. Then pick up a VR headset, which currently is about $300 and talk with people. Explore the world and Metaverse church services to see what you can do and what the Metaverse has to offer.
Try out small events. // When you’re ready to set up a church experience, Altspace VR is one of the easier platforms to try out your first Metaverse service. Set up an event and it will show up to others who log into the platform. It will start small, but keep showing up, don’t get discouraged, and persevere in sharing Christ’s love and the community will grow.
Diving deeper. // Curious about the Metaverse and the mission field there? Rich will provide an Oculus headset to the first church leader who emails him and takes time to explore the Metaverse, as long as they provide a 500 word write-up about their experience there—the good, the bad and the ugly—to be shared on unSeminary.

You can learn more about Cornerstone Church of Yuba City at www.cornerstoneyc.com and find information about their virtual services there. Jason has also provided a copy of his article about diving deeper into the Metaverse world for download. It shares his story and offers encouragement for people who might be skeptical of the value of starting a Metaverse ministry.

Help Taking Your First Steps Into Metaverse Ministry

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Episode Transcript

Rich — Hey, friends welcome to the unSeminary podcast. Man, so glad that you’ve decided to tune in. Every week we try to bring you a leader who will both inspire and equip you and today is no exception. This is going to be a conversation that’s going to push you in some new directions. Super excited to have Jason Poling with us. He is from Cornerstone Church of Yuba City, a fantastic church in California. They have a location there in the physical world, but then also one in the Metaverse. So super excited to have you with us today, Jason. Welcome to the show.

Jason — Great to be here. Thank thank you Rich.

Rich — I’m really excited for this conversation because I feel like everywhere we go, we’re talking about the Metaverse and I’m excited to actually interact with a church leader who’s taken a few steps ahead for us and is leading and trying a few things and learning. So this is going to be a great conversation, but let’s fill in the picture. Tell us about Cornerstone. Give us a kind of a bit of the flavor of the church that kind of thing. And then we’re going to jump into all things meta.

Jason — Yeah, so we’re we’re just north of Sacramento but we’re in a small agricultural area – I mean it’s a bigger, everything’s bigger to some degree in California, and Texas of course but I lived in Texas as well so yeah I can say that…

Rich — Sure sure. Nice. Yeah.

Jason — but um, we’re in ah in about 150,000 people and at the in the in the area we live. Um, I’ve been at this church about 4 years it’s ah it’s a sort of a medium, small to medium size church. Um, you know when I came it was just ah was kind of struggling and God has really done a great work over the last 3, 4 years – been so thankful for that. And we just ah, it’s a church that you would not expect that would go into the Metaverse at all. If you came to my church, especially 3 or 4 years ago that would not even cross your mind.

Rich — Right. Yeah.

Jason — And so I will will of course go into all the detail details on how that happened. But it’s really been neat to see the church really get excited because the church that I’m at, they definitely have a heart for mission. They want to see people come to Christ. And so that is really been the driving force and impetus and and so allowed this church to do crazy, I mean crazy things right? The Metaverse! So it’s it’s been great. It’s been a great great experience. Great church here in Northern California.

Rich — So good. Yeah, this is a part of what I’m glad you brought this up because I was as I was doing some research you know, look digging into the church kind of seeing who who you are. Um this is like a normal church like you are you know, which which again I didn’t know how to say that I didn’t want that to be ah you know demeaning. But ah, which I which hopefully actually motivates people to be like hey this should be something we should be be thinking about. So let’s tell this story a little bit. How, why did you end up in VR or or you know Metaverse? What did that… How did all that happen? Tell me that story.

Jason — Yeah, yeah, so obviously everyone knows the pandemic. We know that that that happened that’s a reality and of course that pushed everyone digitally, so that did have a huge part of in the whole picture but we were actually moving that way and God again – God’s Sovereign – so thankful. Were preparing and moving that way well before the Pandemic. So I’ve always been involved in technology, very interested kind of geek out like that I love gaming. I remember even back in the day… I’m I’m ah older than I look – of course you guys can’t see me the podcast, Rich can see me – I’m older than I look. Um, but I I would be very interested in VR. I remember going to malls and they’d have these little little booths set up and you could do like a game or kind of a Dave and Busters kind of place where they’d have ah a VR. Of course it was really generic. It was like diving into like Tron, if you remember Tron…

Rich — Yes, yeah, yeah, yep.

Jason — Tron-type of quality of of graphics but it was still amazing. And so VR just never quite took off, never got to the commodity pricing and the ability to kind of mass distribute it. And then of course Oculus, and then of course Zuckerberg and Facebook and he took Oculus over and then of course now the Meta right? .

Rich — Yes, yes.

Jason — But anyway, um I’ve always been interested in technology. So when I saw about VR coming out, I was really excited just from a personal level. But as a pastor, I mean as you are, I mean we I just want to see more people come to Christ and as I began to look at the statistics, you know that all, everyone listening this podcast knows that we’re not on an upward track right? The the movement is not going upward in terms of seeing more people come to Christ in the United States and and people being churched. And so I’m like man. How do we reach them? And so it just, a bunch of things came together I’m like, the meta versus huge.

Rich — Mmm-hmm.

Jason — There’s you know literally billions of people you know, communing on the Metaverse, fellowshipping in their own ways on the on the Metaverse, in the Metaverse, and I’m like, this seems like a hand-in-glove situation.

Rich — Yes. Yes.

Jason — We could get out there and start reaching. And that’s exactly what we decided to do. And we got a team, we got a team together. Some, obviously some, younger people to start, but you know believe it or not we’ve got some older members of our congregation that are now involved in in the ministry in the Metaverse. But we did start with some younger that were more digital natives and we just started doing it. Um, we basically started April of 2020. So right right there at the at the pandemic. And we’ve been doing it ever since.

Rich — That’s amazing.

Jason — And been it’s been amazing to see the conversations the connections we’re making with people. Especially younger generations that have no connection to the church tell us time and time again they would never have gone. They say it. We would never have gone to a brick and mortar church. No matter how cool it might have looked or relevant. We wouldn’t, we wouldn’t go. And so VR just provided this a little bit more easy entry point for them. It just it feels a little more safe so because you can pop out quickly.

Rich — Yes, yes, yes.

Jason — You know you go and you don’t you don’t get stuck at a service where you’re nervous they’re gonna, you know, sacrifice chickens on the on the altar or something, you know, they can get out quick. So…

Rich — Yeah, yeah, totally totally.

Jason — It’s just an easier entry point. And then once they’re in, and you develop relationship with them, begin to share the gospel with them, people get saved. That’s that’s what we’ve been doing for 2000 years, right? So anyway that’s we just did that and that’s what happened so.

Rich — Love it. Dude, I love it. So good. So give us a sense of, so I think, you know, folks that are listening in.… we were joking about this ahead of time… you know, I would say are in that like understand in a broad sense what VR is understand in a um, yeah, like get us a little bit of a sense of what that looks like. Fill out the picture for us though. What is VR Church? What are, what…what kind of… what is your ministry look like in the Metaverse? How, what are the kind of… you say you have a campus in the Metaverse – what does that look like what is the kind of scale and scope of the ministry?

Jason — Yeah, it’s great question. And it’s it’s really, it is at this stage in the game it’s kind of interesting to see because most people that they just don’t have any idea… but it’d be it… I love trying to get people into it if I could get them ah get to wear a headset, just to try it out and see they would actually find. And if they came to one of our services they would find that it looks pretty similar to what happens in IRL, or what we call IRL is In Real Life church – physical church. Um, and that may be just the way that I have chosen to do it just for my own bandwidth. I I realize you know I can’t create something completely new here. I know it seems crazy to go the Metaverse. I’m like, I’m already preparing a sermon preaching twice on Sunday morning. I just want to kind of do the same thing ah without having to stress myself out. And so I wasn’t sure if that would work. But again people are people, and people are hungry for truth. And so what I what I we basically do almost the same service in the Metaverse. So the only difference that you might, would experience would be you wouldn’t see physical people. You would see avatars. But when you’re in the 3D experience it’s very immersive, of course, the whole point of 3D and Metaverse…

Rich — Yep, that’s the point.

Jason — …is it’s spatially constructed right? So you actually can walk over to somebody and hear them more clearly and if you walk away, you can the the audio is even spatially constructed and so it really creates exactly what you feel like when you walk into your church on a Sunday morning in real life. And so it’s really not much different. Now, there’s other ways to do VR ministry. I’ve got buddies that just go straight up ah, go evangelize. Well, that’s not much different either just going street evangelism right? They just go into they go into VR pubs and just strike up a conversation. So it’s not it’s, virtual reality obviously is replicating, it’s mimicking what we experience in in reality and so it’s not that different. I think what’s hard for people to get past is the the currently the quality of the the graphic rendering right? So some of the, if you watch one of our videos we post, someone you can see them on Facebook, Youtube, or our livestream ah from our VR services…

Rich — Mmm-hmm.

Jason — …it’s 2D and you can do it 2D but you’re you’re not going to get the immersive experience. And so when you watch it, it’s going to feel, it’s going to look a little cartoonish. It’s kind of hard for people to get past that. But if you can get past the idea that it’s not about the the quality of the graphics, the cartoonish nature of of the avatars, it’s the people behind the souls behind those avatars. Then then you can start saying oh this makes, this really makes sense. So I think it’s just getting over those hurdles…

Rich — Yep. Yep.

Jason — …of the unknowns. So yeah, it’s very similar what we do on Sunday morning IRL.

Rich — Yeah that’s great. Yeah that’s fun. And what um so what networks are people like, if someone’s saying, I want to, actually, how do you invite someone to the the VR version of your church? What does that actually look like how do how do you… how do you actually make that happen? How do I get somebody to actually attend one of your services, you know, in the Metaverse?

Jason — Right. So I mean one one thing is just go to our website. You can go to cornerstoneyc.com… cornerstoneyc is for Yuba City dot com and then slash VR so pretty pretty simple to get there.

Rich — Yes.

Jason — And then they can see where we’ve got the links to the two the three platforms that we’re currently on ah, VR. And then we also have our Discord… which I don’t know how much your listeners know about Discord’s like a Zoom on steroids. Really awesome robust platform and then our Twitch channel, which again I don’t know if these might be terms no one knows what that means. But it’s it’s it’s a streaming platform ah you know more like Youtube but even beyond that.

Rich — Yep yep.

Jason — And so we have we have access you can get into any of those places. Of course our Facebook, normal Facebook page, and YouTube page will show the streams of the services. So you can you can actually go and see it really simply. Now to actually go in the immersive side you do, at that point, need a headset.

Rich — Mmm-hmm. Right.

Jason — So that is the one obstacle to entry. But again, we’re we’re really trying to reach people that are already there, already digital natives in the VR Metaverse. Um, but you can go out and get one for what $299. So it’s not it’s not cost-prohibitive for someone to…

Rich — Yeah, totally.

Jason — And I would encourage anyone listening, I mean, if just to, I mean most and probably a lot of people you’re you’re you’re talking to probably have the budget in their church to buy a $300 headset for the staff and then just kind of dabble just kind of experience it…

Rich — Just experience it. Absolutely.

Jason — …and see see what it is so it’s not. It’s not really a loss actually – 300 bucks is pretty, that’s pretty nice. I mean you could you could start a church in the Metaverse; church plant for 300 bucks.

Rich — Yes, yes, yeah, come on that’s amazing.

Jason — That’s that’s insane. It’s insane.

Rich — Yeah, that’s incredible. How have you been casting vision for this in the you know in your real life church in the on you know in the physical space? Ah, what does that look like how how do you talk about this with people in your in your you know the physical you know location? What does that look like how are you kind of helping move people you know IRL into you know the virtual world?

Jason — Yeah, yeah, great great question. Of course you know, um it all obviously the the senior leader has to be excited about something and keep it in front of people, so that that’s I think one of the reasons why obviously it’s taken off here is I just talk about it a lot. I’m so excited about it and we tell stories about what’s happening there and so we always talk to the in real life congregation, the campuses about about what’s happening, and vice versa. We talk to the VR campuses about what’s happening IRL. So there is, ah there is a beginning, and not just the beginning, it’s really come to some maturity of ah of relationship. And there’s a few things that have happened. Ah, one one thing we’ll do is when we do trainings – um like I’m right now doing a bible counseling training. Um, you know we got about 50 people in in process with that. We’ve got we we did life group training…

Rich — Totally.

Jason — …ah preaching trainings, all that kind of stuff – we always hybridize it. So that was one of our initial goals is make sure this is not just this separate thing…

Rich — So good.

Jason — …Outposts that they have no connectivity to the in real life church. No, it’s hybridized. And so when we train, we’ll have them on Discord and that’s, again, a wonderful platform for that. And two-way cameras, speakers – we got it all set up to where it’s it’s it’s really awesome…

Rich — Yeah, yeah.

Jason — …that we can interact very…And so there’s a lot of relational development that actually occurs there. We’ve gotten a lot of our members on Discord here IRL so they’re interacting with people. Um, we in a VR family reunion where about twelve people… or maybe not quite twelve – a couple couldn’t come… they came out to northern California from our VR family to hang out…

Rich — Oh that’s fun. Love that.

Jason — …hang out with us for a weekend. And so they and they stayed at some of our IRL members houses just a lot of overlap a lot of fellowship.

Rich — Love it.

Jason — Um, just a lot of ways in which we, you know, we pray for each other all in the Facebook group together. So when a prayer request comes out, it’s VR or IRL. It doesn’t matter. It’s all the Cornerstone, as we call it, the forever family and and so we’re all in this together. So we’ve just really been strategic about making sure there’s ah, a connectivity, a hybridization between the campuses. So it’s not this outpost. Yeah.

Rich — Ah, yeah I love that one of the things I’ve been saying is I think ah, the our online ministry, you know so many of us have done, you know, church online. We’ve tried to figure that piece out and yeah, like we were… the pandemic…like gosh the ultimate, like man, we’re so glad we took those steps. But it’s still to me, and listen I started doing church online in 2009 – been doing it for a long time. We spent a lot of time, effort, energy, a lot of brain cells on it. Ah, but it still feels like we’re not quite there yet. It still feels like we’re um, it’s not quite. It doesn’t feel native. It doesn’t feel like it’s from the technology right?

Jason — Yeah.

Rich — It doesn’t feel like, it’s, it feels like we’re bolting something on. And I love that you’re trying to mesh the two to hybridize because I think there’s some magic there. What have you learned as you’ve tried to bring those two communities together? Any, kind of, steps that you would say hey you know we we should be thinking about these things if we’re trying to to take you know a step in that direction?

Jason — Yeah I want, well I should mention too one one thing we did do – and this is where you know your cost does go up if you want to go this far – and you know obviously to start you don’t have to do all this. It’s all 300 bucks and everything’s free…

Rich — Yep, yeah yes, yep.

Jason — …but we did hire a Metaverse pastor. So and I think he might be the first meta… like his title is Missionary Pastor to the Metaverse. Sounds so cool, you know…

Rich — Yes, yes, love it. Yeah, that is so cool.

Jason — …but he’s down in Fort Lauderdale so he’s the entire country away from us. I got connected…

Rich — Oh, very cool.

Jason — …I got connected to him through I don’t know if you don’t Jeff Reed in Stadia – Jeff, I think, is Exponential now. But anyway, ah so this guy’s Michael Uzdavines is a great guy and so he’s our Metaverse pastor. Um, but he comes out… we have him come out with some regularity to the church here and he’ll preach live. He also actually preached on our big screen to the whole congregation. That was really ,that was really an awesome experience too because he could see, he could see all of us right?

Rich — Yes.

Jason — …two-way camera while he’s preaching to the IRL congregation. So, anyway, that’s that’s one thing I forgot to mention that just kind of, again, brings the thing together a little bit. But um, you know I think we just, I don’t know if there was a strategy other than just constantly trying to bring the two together in every setting so in vision, visioning as well.

Rich — Yes, yes.

Jason — So we’re doing… I think I sent you this thing about in IRL… we’re trying to do this thing called our City on a Hill initiative to really kind of go to where the people are instead of trying to always get them to come to our church. Um, long story short, we’re like well how do we do that also in the Metaverse?

Rich — Mmm-hmm.

Jason — And so we’re we’re making sure that the the visioning that we that we cast, the vision that we cast, and the things that we’re doing, we try to replicate it both ways. And so we did thing called Love Yuba City,…Yuba City’s two counties that’s ah where we’re at, we’re just kind of on the line. So ah, we went out and and took a Sunday… a lot churches do this… we took a Sunday off and went and served the community in all these different ways. Well in the Metaverse we did the same thing.

Rich — Very cool.

Jason — So it’s not, you can’t do some of the physical things, but there’s a lot of ways that you can bless people believe it or not in the Metaverse. Um, and so we just kind of replicate those things make sure we’re all in the same page…

Rich — I Love that.

Jason — …when we’re doing ministry and so it all feels a lot more connected I guess. So I’m not sure we really I wish I could say we we mapped it out for years…

Rich — Yeah, yeah.

Jason — …and had this perfect strategy which I could say I wrote a book on it. No, we kind of just dove in and just had that concept of…

Rich — No, it’s good.

Jason — …IRL is so important. I do think still the physical, that’s how God made it it. It is superior. But it doesn’t denigrate or mean that we can’t do ministry digitally and try to bring the two together somehow. So we just had that as our kind of north star and and everything is kind of flowed flowed from there.

Rich — Love it. We’re going to come back that put a bookmark in that. Ah, but I want to talk about, I want you to flesh that a little bit more.. What were some of the things that you were doing to serve the community in the Metaverse? What did that look like? How did you again, you know you can’t… building wouldn’t necessarily be, you know, going and helping paint someone’s house is pretty easy – just click and you know change the color. So what, you know, what were you doing in in the Metaverse to help serve, you know, in those communities?

Jason — Yes, the first year we did we basically we started out and said, hey how about this Sunday morning – since we’re not gonna have service to this afternoon – go out into your local community and and serve in some way and then let us know, like tell stories, you love to hear story. What what did God do? So that was cool and of course they did that as well this year. But we also said why, in the Metaverse, why don’t we all go in together and we’ll go to all the different worlds together. And just, I think, they I was actually… I couldn’t be there because I was at the one here in in IRL… but Metaverse pastor had them all put on avatar, like their name, and then “how can I pray for you?” And so they go around to say, hey you, just want to know if…

Rich — Oh yeah, that’s cool.

Jason — …hey if there’s anything I can pray for you about. And believe it or not. It’s not as maybe creepy as it sounds because in the Metaverse people are there to connect. Like that’s why they’re there.

Rich — Sure.

Jason — And so usually people will strike up a conversation, they could pray for them, encourage them. There’s also things I don’t think anybody did this year, but what we want to do eventually is, there are, as you know, there’s a lot of digital, there’s a whole economy that occurs in the Metaverse. So right now we’re getting to crypto and blockchain and nfts, you know, so there are things that you can do that are tangible in that they’re economically related, ah to bless people where they’re at in the Metaverse. And so we’re kind of envisioning what would that look like to have something that was more tangibly beneficial…

Rich — Yep.

Jason — …to people to to the Metaverse denizens. You know what I mean?

Rich — Yep yep, Yep! Absolutely, love it. So good. Let’s pull back and talk a bit about the Metaverse. So I I was listening to, so I’m hoping, my hope is – because I’m gonna, I told you heads I’m gonna be a little bit of a devil’s advocate. My hope though, is exactly what you said – that people go out and buy a headset, and actually jump in, jump into Atspace, jump into… and and experience this. Because um, you know this goes back to Second Life ten years ago where we were, you know, Life Church was like, hey let’s put a Second Life campus on and it was like amazing.

Jason — Yeah, yeah.

Rich — Um, you know I think we’ve been scratching, culture has been scratching this itch for a long time, and it would appear like things are lining up and we’re going to actually end up in some sort of VR connected Metaverse here and so are, we’d be silly to not take these steps. So friends I think we should. You know we should do this. I heard recently, I heard ah a ah pundit talking about the Metaverse and said you… know like this year in 2021, so this is just going to go out in early 2022… but in 2021, it’s estimated that 16 million VR headsets were sold. In the same year 3 hundred million crocs were sold and this person was saying listen, like the the scale of this is still infinitesinally small…

Jason — Yeah.

Rich — …like it is it is… and I often joke about this… I know that a technology is reaching mass adoption when two things happen: when my when my wife, or my mom are interested. It feels like a long time until my wife or my mom will put on a VR ah headset…

Jason — Yeah.

Rich — I can’t imagine a day, but it it it seems like a long ways away. How far away from that kind of adoption do you think we are, or what will be some of the things that will need to happen before we see that kind of adoption, from your perspective, from someone who is working and living and playing in the Metaverse already today?

Jason — Yeah, the great question I do think it’s still and it’s it’s, you know, and there’s ah if you can do some research and stuff and yeah I’m not like heavy… and DJ Soto’s another guy is a great friend who started the first virtual reality church. He’s done a lot of this… I think it’s really interesting to see some of the trends of when something reaches a tipping point.

Rich — Yes.

Jason — And sometimes it gets, so VR is technically past this point where it it could, ah it could be a technology that goes the way of the dodo bird right now. It’s past that point but it’s still in the trough where it’s not taken off in a massive way but all all ah, all indicators point that it’s going to, like you just said.

Rich — Mmm-hmm.

Jason — I don’t know when that’s gonna happen, but one of the big players, I mean once Apple drops something then the game game’s over right? I mean it is, is that thing, that’s why I meant, I think because Apple currently is in development with, and of course top secret right? But it’s all, things get leaked…

Rich — Yes.

Jason — …but they do have some um AR/VR ah, glasses that they’re working on. It may not be something that is massively adopted because it’s probably gonna, you know, as Apple always does, cost a lot. Um, but they’re, Apple’s so good at creating a you know creating ah a a culture around some a product, creating an ethos, making something look good…

Rich — Yes.

Jason — …and work well. And so I think what I’ve seen in some of the early indicators it’s going to be not these clunky headsets, it’s gonna be real nice…

Rich — Yes.

Jason — …and trim. And I think once that happens… and I think that’s why Zuckerberg’s kind of trying to really get ahead of the game because he wants to be the guy who’s known as the Metaverse guy, not Apple.

Rich — Right.

Jason — …and and I yeah everybody else is gonna, once Apple breaks it, I mean I was in the cell phone industry back when the iPhone first came out and it’s crazy right? Like now it’s it’s ubiquitous. I mean like your your grandmother does have and ah iPhone now. And so it just happens so fast. I think once Apple does that I think we’re off to the races and it will just…

Rich — Yeah, that’s good.

Jason — …Will just keep accelerating. And of course you got to have on the other side—the software developers, the coders—as they get better at their craft and have more resources at their disposal, and it becomes ah just graphically rich, and it overcomes some of the obstacles that might be there, it’s going to be, it’s going to take over the world. Now some people, it can be a little dystopian when you start thinking about it…

Rich — Sure sure.

Jason — …and it might be, but you know this underview. We’re not able to you and I aren’t going to stop that and so we somehow have to not give over everything to it but yet reach into where people are at and that’s where they’re going to be so.

Rich — Yeah, totally. Well and I think it’s the same… listen friends, I for years, it’s amazing, like for years we were hounding people to get onto social media. It was like, friends, like your people are there and there are still a ton of communities… and these stats are like publicly available… there’s a ton of communities across the country where 60% of the population is on Facebook weekly which I know we all think like Facebook it’s old and it’s like, you know, it’s like old school that people aren’t there anymore. But when you think about that if 60% of the people in your town were doing something every single week, you’d be silly as a leader to not go and check it out at least – to say hey we got to do something there. And so where we seem to be I would totally agree with you on that I think from a future facing point of view, we’re headed here. This is not, to me, it’s not in the question of if, it’s just a matter of when…

Jason — Yeah.

Rich — …what, how are we and and folks like yourself, um, you know are leading the way helping us understand that. You know the other thing I heard which captured my imagination that I think I think is really true is in a lot of ways we’re already there. Like we are already layering over top of our physical existence a digital layer.

Jason — Yeah, yeah.

That’s ultimately what the Metaverse is about is it’s about layering on you know in a Ready Player One ultimately a sort of way, but we’re already doing that. If you own an iphone and you have a set of airpods with Siri connected you already are layering on a level…

Jason — Yeah.

Rich — …a layer, a level of data on top of your real world existence. It’s the same with with Amazon’s Echo – you’re layering in data in a way that was really inconceivable just a few years ago.

Jason — Right.

Rich — Um I noticed actually this this ah Christmas season that Amazon’s Echo headsets which are, it’s it’s a headset that you’re designed to wear all day long, so you never take it off and it’s an AR experience – that is trying to take Echo with you. And I I think those things all point in the direction of, oh this is where this thing is headed like we are, how do we use data to you know enhance our reality and I think there’s really something there. That’s that’s really what

Jason — Yeah, that’s wise. Yeah I think you’re right and and the Metaverse, yeah, basically it’s just trying to bring in other senses right?

Rich — Yes. Yes. Yep.

Jason — It’s trying to bring in the visual rendering of what you just described. I think you’re right on. We’re already doing it from the audible level right?

Rich — Yes.

Jason — …and and to some degree I mean I guess that’s probably the only sense that you’re necessarily getting in terms of the AR layering. But yeah, but what what VR is bringing or what Metaverse is bringing is is the visual I mean that’s all it’s happening.

Rich — Well yeah, and yeah, and you can see I think again I think on the audio side and I listen I’m not… you’re the expert in this area, I’m definitely not the expert… but to me it feels like that a udio is the back door ultimately to the Meta the Metaverse. If we can convince people or if as people get convinced, you know, what would be great would be to carry around the entire internet not just in my pocket, but in my ears, that I can talk to and have that thing either connect with other people, or play whatever songs I want to play, or you know in our case, hopefully you know recite this scripture verse, or you know connect with my friends…

Jason — Yeah, yeah.

Rich — …that it’s only one step further to a set of great glasses that help me connect you know with people who are in other parts of the world. It’s actually not a a giant step…

Jason — No, it’s not yeah.

Rich — …you know which is an interesting, I don’t know, interesting thing. Well so this is great, if people are listening in today I’m hoping again, they’re they’re convinced that they should pay, maybe take a take a run at this. They should actually take a step. What would be a couple of those first steps beyond the, okay so I’m, I’d like to I buy a headset and they’re probably on sale because it’s in it’s January when this is out, so I can get a good deal on one of those. What would be some of those first steps that that you know, kind of all of us should take?

Jason — Yeah, I mean definitely if you know you could check out like our website or or yeah DJ Soto’s VR church. You can kind of at least look at what it is. You could then go and see from a 2D experience the livestreams or what have you to kind of check it out. Then you could actually download, you can download most of the platforms and again think of the Metaverses in terms of this world that has all these continents and then there’s all these tribes on the continents, and basically it’s it’s a mission field. There are new tribes that have no, or very little exposure to the gospel. I’m always amazed at how little ah, the the folks the Gen Z-ers and Millennials on there just have no exposure. But anyway each continent is kind of like a platform. So for example, we jumped in first to Microsoft’s continent which is called Altspace VR. And then we also have one in VR chat which is not affiliated with any large tech company.

Rich — Mmm-hmm.

Jason — But Facebook’s got their Horizons now that just launched into -it was in beta for a while. You’ve got Rec Room which is massive. Rec Room is not connected to a tech, a large tech, well they’re large but they’re not known. But they but they’re great in that they have cross-platforming so you you basically reach everybody everywhere – cell phone, console, VR headset – everything.

Rich — Mmm-hmm.

Jason — But anyway any of those places you typically, typically… I know Altspace can do this… you can download in VR chat you can download um a 2D version so you can actually enter into the world, talk with people, all that stuff… kind of like what second life was basically that’s what it was… um so you could do that, you could experience if you if you didn’t want to spend any money you could do all that just to kind of expose yourself, go to go to a and I would encourage you get the headset, I mean it’s only 300 bucks and then go to some church services. Go to ours, visit us, visit DJ’s, visit the others, and and just kind of see what it feels like. Check out the world. Just kind of enjoy. Just have fun. Enjoy seeing what the Metaverse currently has to offer. And then from there if you’re like um, my goodness there is so much fruit in the harvest field out here, because I because I guarantee if you’re, if you even try to strike up a conversation, it so often happens within the first five minutes you’re gonna be in a deep conversation. I’m always amazed when I go in there because it’s not like the IRL. In that in the IRL it does feel like everyone’s on their in the Rat Race right?

Rich — Mmm-hmm.

Jason – And you might go to you go to church and after church you try to hang around talk, but people got things to do and they’re out.

Rich — Right right.

Jason — In the Metaverses people, the whole reason they’re there, the whole reason is to connect and communicate. And sometimes a lot of people are very discouraged, lonely, depressed, and so, and they also feel at first a degree of anonymity that allows a little more freedom of expression, but quickly the and um the anonymity goes to the wayside. It’s like this cool entry point. But then you you begin to know this person, deeply. And and so anyway, you’ll you’ll find if you even just try to open up a conversation and you can say hey you’re you’re from a church. You’ll start having some… now you might get some trolls, that there are some trolls if you know what trolls are…

Rich — Yes. Yes.

Jason — …ah and and God, Jesus loves trolls too. So but they can be pretty that can be pretty brutal sometimes but at the same time there’s a lot of opportunities for for… anyway. So you get in there ah, if you’re like wow this is awesome. The next step you’d want to do is is just literally let’s say you start an Altspace which is probably one of the easier places. Not the most populated; it’s it’s it’s actually pretty small in terms of numbers. But it’s it’s easier to get into and try it out. They have all these already made worlds for you.

Rich — Right.

Jason — So you don’t have to craft anything. All the coding is done for you and you can actually set up your event just like you would on on Facebook events or something. Super simple. And and if you’re a pastor listening you’re like man I I am nowhere near a digital native. I guarantee you there is someone. If you’re a large church, on your staff…

Rich — Yep.

Jason— …There’s someone on your staff that’s digital native that can do it in their sleep. I guarantee you if you’re a small church. There is someone in your congregation. Probably a teen, a millennial, that that um, that is a digital native. If you just…[unclear]…mission and say hey I got a mission field for you. I I’ll come alongside you and disciple you along the way. But here’s a headset, go in there set up an event. It’s super easy and that’s all free. And then it shows up and when people come into the world at the time that you do your event—maybe it’s a service; maybe it’s just a hangout—um, they’ll see your church on the events page and a lot of times they’ll check it out. Probably some somewhat to troll. Maybe.

Rich — Yeah.

Jason — Somewhat just because it’s like hey, I’ll check it out; I’ll talk. And you will start to have conversations. And it will start small. We started with like I don’t know three or four people. And now probably on a given Sunday in Altspace we probably get, I mean it’s not like, we’re not megachurch, by the way, I mean, and you you are limited a little bit on the amount of people that can be in just just because of the the coding, and the and space that you can have, so we probably get thirty forty people on average in our Altspace…

Rich — Yeah.

Jason — …we probably get I’d say sometimes we have 70 in VR chat but, you know, probably forty/fifty. So I mean but these are all all souls that don’t know Jesus, we’re trying to reach them so…

Rich — Absolutely.

Jason — …and and some of them do know Jesus there’s plenty of stories I can tell you about that. So anyway you just start the event. And then just then it’s just the old the old way of faithfulness. Just show up every time. Just keep showing up. Don’t get discouraged if for several weeks or for a while you’ve got three or four people. Those are three or four people, I mean, that you can reach for Christ.

Rich — Yep.

Jason — And then just watch it as as they start talking and they realize that you you love them. And and you know right? Friends friendships happen. That’s why they’re there…

Rich — Totally

Jason — …and then it will grow. It’ll just grow. Just just be faithful just show up in those in a free world. You basically spent 300 bucks. It’s that easy. So.

Rich — Love it.

Jason — I think once they start doing that and they start having those robust conversations around the gospel with these unchurched people, then then it just takes fire people get excited. You can tell stories to your congregation, your IRL say… Oh my gosh, like like the one I always love telling is the is the “future queen of hell” – that was her avatar name – came in a year and a half ago…

Rich — Love it.

Jason — …She told us later – the story has a happy ending – but she told us later that she came in to troll, to mock us. And she was just overwhelmed by how welcoming we were – we’re like hey, we don’t care if you’re satanist. You know we believe in Jesus, but you’re welcome here. We love you. You know you know and so she came, befriended, became ah very regular, came to every service, every event. And even helped us build – because she’s ah a coder -helped us build our newest campus in Rec Room – beautiful campus. And then a few months ago she became a Christian, is being discipled now, and got baptized in the in the world that she built. She got baptized there about a month or two ago. So.

Rich — So good.

Jason — Like when you could tell those stories to your church, it’s like… And she’s she’s in the UK, 23/24, told us that she would never ever have gone to a brick and mortar church. All of her family. She’s the first Christian in generations there. Almost all of them are new age or wiccan or what have you. And and still those are stories that resonate with with your IRL people…

Rich — Totally. Totally.

Jason — …and and it just takes fire. It just takes fire after that.

Rich — This is so good. So good. You. All You also provided a copy of an article. Um that we’re going to link to in the in the show notes. This is all about, um really it’s about the topic we’ve been talking about. You dive a bit deeper, you kind of tell this story, you know. Anything else you want to talk about this this pdf? This could be a great resource actually for church leaders. This is what I thought when I read it – I’m like this could be a great resource for church leaders like to pitch this out and say hey let’s think about this together, um, read this article and then let’s come to a meeting next week and talk about what should our first steps be into the Metaverse.

Jason — Yeah.

Rich — But but tell us a little bit about this article.

Jason — Yeah, yeah, so I got selected to come to a ah ah shark tank is what they called it, you know the the tv show. But Exponential to this future church initiative, and I was at the first shark tank in Austin this last year, and they actually had ah about four of us, five of us from the Metaverse…

Rich — Mmm-hmm.

Jason — …doing Metaverse ministry, so it’s really cool at there. Exponential’s getting really excited about Metaverse stuff. They’re they’re really pushing it. So we did the shark tank thing, and they you know did a podcast, did ah a thing on Outreach Magazine, and and of course this article they wanted me to write. And so yeah, that’s all it is is basically just to kind of tell my story, my journey. And I’m I’m not an author – I don’t have any books or – that’s about it.

Rich — Yes, yes yep.

Jason — So yeah, that’s my article, but I thought you know that is ah it just basically shares Ah what I think a lot of pastors will be encouraged by. And I think you’re right, if they just were to show that to maybe to the staff, or to the elders, you know skeptical people, and say, wow ah, maybe this is legitimate. Maybe it’s doable.

Rich — Totally.

Jason — So yeah, if they can use it to that end that would be awesome.

Rich — Love it. Well friends I’ve really appreciated… you’ve been just a huge service to us today, Jason.

Jason — Oh thanks Rich.

Rich — This has been so great, and in the spirit of what you’re talking about I’d actually love to offer anybody that’s listening in I’d love to offer up one Oculus headset. So…

Jason — Wow.

Rich — If you’re listening in, and you lead a church of less than 500 people, what I’d love you to do is to email me rb@unseminary.com and the first person that reaches out I’d be happy to send you one. But on this condition, you’ve got to tell us about your experience about it. So I’d love for you to actually do this, to take a step and actually see. And at least be willing to write a little bit – I don’t know – 500 words on what your experience was like good, bad, or the ugly. I’d love to publish that unSeminary and encourage people to actually take this step, because I think I’m with you, Jason, I do think that this is a is one of those areas that I think too many of us have been sleeping on. We were talking about this earlier I’ve heard this amazing statistic that one in three churches – 30% of churches – don’t have a website which is shocker to me that… none of these people that are listening in are in that… but um and we traditionally as a church have been really behind on these kinds of things and I want to encourage people to take that step. Anything else you’d love to share with us, Jason, as we kind of wrap up today’s episode, as we as we close things down here today?

Jason — Yeah, it’s hard, well I mean there’s is there is all, you know, there are the – and this isn’t really probably for today because we’re closing down…

Rich — Yeah.

Jason — but like obviously there are some issues people have obstacles with um, our ecclesiology are um, you know some of the traditions. Um, how do you… how do you do real church in the Metaverse?

Rich — Sure.

Jason — And so that’s another conversation and actually I always… again you know they can feel free to send your listeners to to talk to me if they have questions about how I process through that because that can be a real roadblock for people.

Rich — Sure.

Jason — They’re like how do you do communion? Baptism? is that even, does God approve…

Rich — Right.

Jason — …that in the Metaverse? And I understand there are different traditions that are listening even now that that’s just not going to work for them. And that’s fine. I got Lutheran brothers that that just not going to work. But you know there are other view views. You know like a Zwinglian view, one that’s a memorialist view, and so it works for us. So I just I think some people. Um I would love to help them think through without getting have the… sometimes the shock value of it all pushes us away from the opportunity to reach the lost.

Rich — Yes.

Jason — And and I understand there is legitimate concerns so we can’t yeah, can’t go into that detail, but I… that has been an issue, I’ll be honest with you, Rich, of adoption.

Rich — Mmm-hmm.

Jason — Many people are like. That’s just, I can’t even get past that…

Rich — Sure. Yeah.

Jason – And I’m like, I understand – I was there I struggled with it wandered through it. But I anyway, I maybe it can be of service to bring some some thought as I’ve of really processed through it theologically, ecclesiologically if that helps it all. So.

Rich — Um, yeah I love that. Listen I was in the same conversations 20 years ago when we were starting in multi-site and we started using video in in campuses and people were like, this is not real church. And and I would have never thought at that point…you know that’s estimated there’s there’s 5 million people today in the country who are at a video-driven campus of um of multisite. I would have never guessed 20 years later that’s where we landed – it felt like such a fringe thing. and in the same way I think that’s where we’re at with with VR church I think there’s lots of people are like there’s just no way. But we’re on the front end of what I think is ah is a change in culture…

Jason — Yeah.

Rich — …and and we’ve at least got to be exploring it as our churches. We can’t we can’t put our head in the sand on this one. So…

Jason — Good word. Thanks! Thanks brother.

Rich — Jason I really appreciate you being here. Where do we want to send people online if people want to track with you, track with the church, where give us those website addresses and all that again.

Jason — Yeah I mean just website cornerstoneyc.com. I mean that’ll opening you up to… of course you can check where you can connect with me there. Ah you can go to the VR obviously slash VR… but all the headings are on the website. You can find the online church offerings that we have but cornerstoneyc.com.

Rich — Great! Thanks so much for being here today.

Jason — Yeah thanks, Rich – appreciate it.

Going International as a Multisite Church with Tommie Bozich

Rich Birch — Thu, 04 Nov 2021 08:44:00 +0000

Thanks for joining us for this week’s unSeminary podcast. We’re talking with Tommie Bozich, the executive pastor of Trinity Church, a multisite church with locations in Virginia and also internationally. Tommie is talking with us about what led them to launch a location in Stuttgart, Germany, and what a church should think about when considering an international campus.

Problems and opportunities. // As Trinity began their multisite journey, they realized that with the help of video teaching, they could take sermon messages anywhere. They already had a few campuses in the Virginia Beach/Norfolk area, which has a huge military population. When some church members who had been transferred to Stuttgart, Germany lamented at the difficulty of finding an English-speaking church overseas, Trinity realized the opportunity to launch a campus serving the military and English-speaking community abroad.
Church plant vs church campus. // Launching a church campus is very different from planting a church and when Tommie went to Germany with his family, they were sent with the mindset that this international campus is part of Trinity. Trinity did not want to start up this campus and then check back months later, but there were still challenges with the distance that made this campus feel separate.
Thank God for the resources. // As the Stuttgart campus pastor, Tommie and his team had to rely heavily on video and remote meetings before that was widely popular. It can be easy to become resentful and feel left out when you’re so far away. But rather cultivate humility and thank God for all that you can do with the resources you have. Embrace being uncomfortable.
Find family. // An incredible family is created when you connect with other English-speaking believers in a foreign country. It teaches us a great deal of humility and breaks down many of the dividing walls that exist back in the USA. Everyone is looking for community, especially those who are moving to a new country and don’t know anyone around them. Tommie found that people who were not followers of Jesus came to the church so that they could find community and then were saved through that experience.
Love goes a long way. // The church in Germany started out primarily with American families living there, a lot of them military. But soon German friends and neighbors were invited and started attending, and they loved it. Love transcends a lot of boundaries and brings people together.
Identify similarities between locations. // Decide what elements of your international campus you want to be the same as your other campuses. At Trinity’s Stuttgart location, they had similar worship styles and branding, and were on the same sermon series. Make sure your central staff thinks about how teaching and kids content will translate in another context. Accept that some things won’t translate and incorporate the elements that will.
Reliance on God. // When Tommie and his family moved to Germany to help launch the campus, it forced him to rely heavily on prayer for everything. Nondenominational churches in Germany were practically nonexistent and God had to open the doors for the church to find a place to meet. As you lean on God in prayer, He will show up in ways you never would have expected.
More than one. // When sending people into foreign places to launch a campus, be sure to send them in at least a pair so they can work together. Their families can keep each other company and help each other through this new environment and life.
Mission over method. // Have a decent amount of flexibility both in the personalities of the people starting this new location and the church’s ability to allow them to minister in their context. The mission always has to be more important than the method. How do you need to shift the method to accomplish the mission?
Think outside the box. // Consider the possibilities of what can be done with technology and sending people out. Trinity now knows that they can equip a believer who’s in the military and going overseas to be a light for Christ and create community. This doesn’t always look like launching a campus, but it could be providing resources for a person to lead a small group and invite others to participate in church online in their home.

You can learn more about Trinity Church at www.trinitychurchvb.com.

Thank You for Tuning In!

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Multisite to Omnichannel: A Multiplication Strategy for Your Church Post-Pandemic

Rich Birch — Tue, 11 May 2021 08:44:00 +0000

We’ve all made the digital pivot. Remember those days in mid-March 2020 when every church became an online church?

It’s exciting to see that most churches across the country have kept their online ministries. As I talk with church leaders from congregations of varying sizes, we retell stories of how, through online ministry, our churches have been able to reach new people – people who weren’t being reached before. This has opened new possibilities and opportunities for us to see people connected with Jesus, take steps closer to our community and become devoted followers of Christ.

It’s an exciting time to be involved in the local church!

Pre-pandemic, there was a subset of the church already positioned for a post-pandemic world. Multisite churches are uniquely ready for the challenges that we face in the coming years. In previous posts, we’ve talked about how this would be an ideal time for your church to look at launching a new location. We’ve discussed how multisite churches have unique opportunities in this reopening season.

As we look beyond the pandemic and figure out where we go from here, there are opportunities for us to transition our churches from exclusively being in-person or online to becoming omnichannel ministries.

Too many churches live in a false dichotomy where there are only two options: either you’re online or in-person. When we think about the online world, we may narrow it down to a single channel or a single community. If you’re doing this, you may be missing an incredible opportunity to reach people across a wide spectrum of online communities.

You’re already doing the hard work of producing video content to put online, don’t limit yourself to just a single online channel! As your church plans the rest of this year and next, perhaps include transitioning your church to an omnichannel church.

What is an Omnichannel Church?

Dave Adamson wrote a blog post in 2019 predicting the future of the omnichannel church. It’s worth looking back to those pleasant pre-pandemic days when we would simply consider and surmise theoretical ideas. His article provides a good primer on what we should be thinking about when it comes to becoming an omnichannel church. But in its most basic form, omnichannel churches are churches that make their ministry available in a wide variety of environments, both online and in-person.

Oftentimes it is helpful to think about marketplace examples of omnichannel businesses to get an idea of how we might restructure our ministry. The multisite church movement was built on the cultural underpinnings of franchising that swept through the country between 1950 and 2000. The omnichannel approach asks: How do we take what we have, our core offerings, and take them to where people are at?

Multisite was (and is) about taking the church to the people. The omnichannel church continues this but in a deeper format both online and in-person.

Here are some marketplace examples that might help you get a clearer picture of what we mean by omnichannel.

Bank of America // This organization has physical branches across the country, offers a compelling mobile app experience, and has a great web interface. As a customer of Bank of America, you can interact seamlessly with them through any of these three avenues. Banks are not often considered as being on the cutting edge of trends! It’s worth noting that this approach to delivering a good customer experience is used by financial institutions worldwide.
REI // The adventure retail company has transformed itself into an omnichannel delivery juggernaut. Their channels include a traditional catalog that bridges the gap somewhere between a magazine and a shopping experience. Within each brick-and-mortar shop, they have an in-store kiosk that extends their product availability from the limited amount they can fit in their square footage. Their app not only provides a way for existing customers to engage with them but also invites new customers to live the adventure that REI projects. Then, they have their premium physical locations across the country.
Starbucks // The ubiquitous coffee purveyor has made a significant push towards moving beyond its traditional brick-and-mortar stores, which we’re all very familiar with. Over the last half-decade, they have added coffee that you can buy from a grocery store (previously considered sacrosanct for the brand), they offer home delivery, and they have outlets in airports and many other kiosk locations. Plus, their in-app and web experience are second to none.

What are the lessons that we can take from these omnichannel marketplace organizations? Each of these organizations started with a customer-first orientation and asked the question, “where are the people that we’re attempting to reach, and how do we get in front of them?”

Churches need to find where pockets of their community are online and insert their ministry into those locations.

Churches that will impact the communities of tomorrow aren’t obsessed with getting people to come to their “boxes”. They will engage people in places they’re already gathering – in person and online.

7 Channels Your Church Should Consider

At its core, being an omnichannel church is not about us, it’s about where our people are.

An omnichannel church does not ask people to come to them. With a missionary mindset, the omnichannel church wants to go to the people.

It’s about taking our culture, our teaching, and our community, and providing portals of access to it from a wide variety of locations. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but one that you should be thinking about as you look to the future of the omnichannel church.

YouTube // Many churches have already hit on the fact that YouTube is not only the world’s second-largest search engine but is also a compelling social network. This powerful combination of both search and social creates an ideal platform for churches to both host on-demand content and stream live experiences. Their chat feature is robust and provides an opportunity to connect with people in real-time.
Podcasts // I know it probably goes without saying, but a podcast is an incredible channel that you need to explore in order to expand your ministry. Podcasting provides a compelling content experience because it can be inserted into people’s ears while they’re doing other things, like cutting the grass or doing chores around the home. Furthermore, people are increasingly becoming more comfortable with podcasting while they drive. This kind of passive learning experience creates a great opportunity for our churches to help surround people with the message of Jesus wherever they go throughout the week.
Roku // Roku is a streaming set-top box that provides both a low-cost and small-form way of connecting with a wide variety of content. If you’re not familiar with Roku, this is a technology that has been gaining incredible steam over the past few years. In fact, in a lot of ways, they are at the top of the heap. There’s an opportunity here for you to have your content displayed next to other providers like Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon. Multiple churches across the country have already seen great success in using Roku as a delivery device. They use it not only for their core weekend content but as a way to distribute supplementary secondary content, including small group materials and children’s programming.
Twitch // Twitch is a live video streaming service that primarily focuses on video game live streaming, including many eSports competitions. This service is a subsidiary of Amazon and provides a compelling platform if you’re looking to reach a younger demographic (a demographic many churches are trying to reach). A fascinating aspect of Twitch is its evolution over the last couple of years. It was primarily a gaming platform but has evolved by providing a whole series of other “talk radio-style” content for the extremely online, 24-hours a day. This platform provides a compelling horizon for churches attempting to reach new people with the message of Jesus.
Facebook // Remember when Facebook was new and hip? Of course, many churches are leveraging Facebook to reach new people and help them get connected. Over the last year, Facebook has added multiple features to help churches reach their audiences, most recently including a prayer function within groups that makes it easier for churches to manage prayer requests. You should be leveraging this service if you aren’t already.
Clubhouse // This social audio app (that is either the hottest thing in Silicon Valley or about to die) provides some interesting new community opportunities for your church. Essentially, Clubhouse provides live talk shows where people from the audience can come “on stage” and connect others “in the room”. It offers some fascinating ways to build new audiences and stay connected with people. I’ve heard of multiple churches using Clubhouse as a place for volunteers, teams, or groups to meet and connect during the week.
Oh Yeah, More Campuses // Let’s not forget that in the middle of this omnichannel revolution, we should be looking at new physical locations. This could be your pre-pandemic campus expansion plans or new expressions of your church. You may be establishing smaller locations or niche communities, such as senior homes or prisons. This is a great season for you to think about new locations for your church to connect with.

Challenges Your Church Will Face Becoming Omnichannel Church

The future of the omnichannel church is filled with lots of opportunities, but at the same time, some challenges will arise.

Each one of these online communities has its own culture, codes of conduct, and approaches. Like missionaries going into a new community, every time we step into a new channel, we need to think carefully about how we customize our content and experience for that location. We shouldn’t just take a video stream from one location and blast it out to multiples. Ideally, each one of your channels should take a unique approach. This means taking your core content and adapting it to the culture of the community it is uploaded to.

But to do this, you’ll need to overcome some challenges:

Silos // So many churches already struggle with siloed ministries. Whether it’s in-person or online, kids’ ministry, youth ministry, and other ministries act as individual channels. However, they need to work together, not fight against each other. Finding ways to cooperate across the various ministry channels and finding ways to leverage learnings from one to help another will be a challenge as you go forward.
Kids’ ministry // Growing churches minister to families. Many online channels don’t lend themselves to reaching entire families. We need to think carefully about how we encourage entire families to connect with our ministries and not just focus on netizens.
Workflow // You need to find a way to take your existing content and carve it into multiple pieces to be distributed to each of these channels. Surely some of your content will end up on each channel but then some will only be on one or two. We need to develop a new way of “making content” that helps us speak clearly to these various “audiences”. Some churches have stepped out and developed some early workflows that we need to look carefully at, but this will continue to be a challenge as we look to the future.
Both content and community // Each of these channels has a unique expression of what content looks like. YouTube videos look different from Facebook videos. Your church’s content needs to reflect that. At the same time, however, each channel has a unique community culture, and we need to be careful that what we’re presenting reflects the culture of the people we’re trying to reach, rather than just a photocopy of what we’re doing in other places.
Tech catch up // Each one of these channels can present new technology challenges as we attempt to provide a compelling experience via different streams. We must keep on top of how we add these new channels to our offerings: it must be in an efficient and healthy stewardship way.
Mission confusion // One of the weird things about the multisite church movement is that for years we saw churches redefine themselves around the fact that they had multiple sites. Multisite is just a way to accomplish the mission of your church, it’s not the mission of your church. In the same way, becoming an omnichannel church is not your mission, it’s just a way to accomplish what you believe God’s called you to do. Make sure your main goal is kept central and use an omnichannel approach to reach more people.

Some Churches That Are Already Living in the Omnichannel Future

We’re starting to see viable models of the omnichannel church pop-up. Two churches worth following for insight on an omnichannel approach are:

Sandals Church // www.sandalschurch.com

This church in California has a multiplicity of locations and has done a lot of work to sort through workflow challenges to deliver their content and community in a wide variety of locations. They’ve created not only their church online experience but are re-expressing that in a multiplicity of online locations. Each online location feels like Sandals, but at the same time uses the resident culture of the channel that they use.

Crossroads Church // www.crossroads.net

Years ago, I remember hearing Senior Pastor Brian joke that Cincinnati is the cultural and technological epicenter of the Western world. I don’t know if that’s true, but Crossroads is on the front end of a bunch of innovations happening in the local church, including the omnichannel church revolution. Their online services are the best. Their visuals feel like they’re from the internet and they’re developing a robust community around them. During the pandemic, Crossroads has seen significant growth in their online ministry, and they continue to find new and innovative ways to see new people connect to their community.

Do you know of other churches that are attempting to be omnichannel? I’d love to hear who they are. This is an approach to church that is going to have a profound impact in the coming years.

Like any “new” approach to spreading the message of Jesus, the omnichannel church is simply about wanting to live out Jesus’ command to be his witness to the ends of the earth! [ref]

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Practical Strategy for Developing High-Capacity Volunteers with Danny Franks

Rich Birch — Thu, 29 Apr 2021 08:44:00 +0000

Welcome to this week’s unSeminary podcast! This week I’m chatting with a repeat guest, Danny Franks, Pastor of Guest Services at The Summit Church. The Summit Church has twelve locations around North Carolina and the heart of the church is set on sending. They continually want their people to be asking: how does God want to use me and send me?

As a church grows, it’s not uncommon for the culture and DNA to get watered down. The Summit Church realized that as they launched more campuses and moved to a central model, the guest experience looked drastically different from one campus to another. Listen in as Danny shares how to examine your church’s DNA and replicate it by developing high-capacity volunteers that will in turn invest in others.

We can’t send people that we don’t keep. // In order to be a good sending church, we first need to learn how to be a good receiving church. For The Summit Church this meant taking a good look at their guest services experience at each of their campuses. Guest services covers a person’s visit from the street to the seat and everything in between. It’s about making sure the church is doing everything it can to help its guests know that they’ve been expected, planned for, and that the church is excited to have them return.
What is your DNA? // To create a uniform guest services experience at each of your campuses, first ask: What is our DNA when it comes to caring for guests? It will be a process to talk through who the church is and what it looks like to welcome guests well and help them take their next step toward the gospel. After a lot of prayer and discussion through these questions, Danny developed a High-Capacity Volunteer Cohort to help communicate the church’s DNA surrounding guest services clearly to all the campuses.
Identify your high-capacity volunteers. // The High-Capacity Volunteer Cohort is an eight-month journey where a small group of two to five volunteers from each campus come together. At The Summit Church there are about thirty volunteers that are a part of the Cohort at one time. They meet each month for an hour and a half to discuss books and principles that help everyone understand what the church’s DNA is. The books cover a wide swath of topics and serve as a springboard for the monthly conversation and there is always a practical component to what they teach. Ultimately the goal of the Cohort is to equip volunteers to be better leaders.
Invest and Influence. // As the Pastor of Guest Services, Danny has a dotted line relationship with the Guest Services Directors at each campus. They report directly to the campus pastor and may be responsible for guest services as well as things like small groups and membership. Sometimes all of their responsibilities feel like an impossible task but when they are identifying high-capacity volunteers who are in turn trained, they are replicating themselves in a smaller group that can then go on to invest in and influence others. The Cohort process has allowed the Directors to be more like shepherds and less like administrators. And it’s empowered volunteers to find areas of need where they can pitch in and help with specific problems.
Where to begin? // You don’t have to be a multisite church or a mega church to start a High-Capacity Volunteer Cohort. Any leader should be looking for who their high-capacity people are and invest in them. The first question to ask as a leader is what’s the win? What are you trying to accomplish with this cohort? What is your timeframe? Your cohort doesn’t have to last 8 months – you can do a smaller, focused version over six weeks. Next define the parts of that DNA that you want to clearly communicate. If you have trouble identifying who your high-capacity volunteers are, that may indicate there is a problem with your leadership pipeline. Something needs to shift to make sure you are regularly identifying and bringing in those potential high-capacity people. Also be aware of not having a clear end goal in sight. For more tips on how to begin, download this PDF: High-Capacity Volunteer Cohort: A How-To Guide.
Resources for your cohort. // Danny has a wealth of resources on his website, including articles, workshops, training events, a coaching network and more, that you can access by visiting dfranks.com. In addition, a great book to read with your cohort would be “People are the Mission: How Churches Can Welcome Guests Without Compromising the Gospel“. In it Danny shows churches how to take a balanced approach to hospitality by developing ministries that are guest-friendly from the outset and gospel-centric to their core. Churches will learn not only how to effectively bring people in and convince them to stay, but also why our hospitality to honor the stranger doesn’t stand in opposition to honoring the Savior. Lastly, download this PDF for an overview of The Summit Church’s High-Capacity Volunteer Cohort: Guest Services 2020.

To connect with Danny Franks, reach out to him on Twitter @letmebefranks, and learn more about The Summit Church by visiting their website.

Thank You for Tuning In!

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Is your church ready? Are you re-opening? Ready to welcome MORE people to worship and grow with your church? Are you out of space or are your interiors dated and needing improvement?

Yes, Now Is the Perfect Time to Launch A New Campus for Your Church

Rich Birch — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 08:44:00 +0000

Campus expansion is the most effective way to both reach new people and release new leaders.

For over two decades, the multisite church movement has helped churches expand their mission, extend their reach, and care for more people than they’d have been able to if they stayed in one location.

To say that I’m bullish on the multisite movement would be somewhat of an understatement. I’ve been around this movement from its early days, have directly helped launch 13 campuses, and have coached dozens of other churches through launching campuses.

Like everything else church-wise, there’s no doubt that the multisite movement has been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. It would be reasonable for you to doubt if this the right time for your church to launch new campuses. However, I believe that this is a perfect season to fire up the campus expansion engines and look to the horizon, dreaming new dreams and thinking about the next steps in your multisite church journey. Whether you’re a mono-site church looking to add your first location, or you already have six campuses and are wondering if you should re-ignite plans to establish a few more, this is a perfect season to do so.

Something shifted in the body of Christ after Easter this year. In the last few weeks, I’ve had a significant uptick in conversations with church leaders across the country who are thinking about their multisite strategy and wrestling through various dynamics in their current locations. I’ve talked to multiple churches that are at varying stages of merger conversations. Some of these churches are looking at launching a new campus in the coming months, resulting from a rebirth of a church that was established a while ago. I’ve talked to churches who have understandably delayed their campus expansion since March 2020 when the pandemic hit and are now looking to get those efforts rolling again. I’ve even talked to a couple of churches who launched locations just before the pandemic hit and have had those campuses closed for the better part of a year and are now trying to relaunch them.

Now is the season to get back into campus expansion, the message of Jesus needs to go forward.

The multiplication mandate that we all believe is an important part of leading the Jesus-centered church must continue pushing forward.

Here are a few reasons that your church should use this season to launch new campuses. You may find that this is the perfect season for your church to follow this path.

5 Reasons Your Church Should Launch A New Campus Soon

It’s understandable that some churches slowed down their campus expansion efforts over the last year or so. But this is the perfect season for you to reconsider what it might look like to launch a multisite location.

The need is still great. // Pre-pandemic, 94% of all churches were losing ground against the growth of their communities [ref]. You may have heard this statistic in the more encouraging version, which is that 85% of churches are plateaued or in decline [ref]. If we look at them from another point of view, we realize how worrying the situation is: A minority percentage of churches are growing faster than the communities they’re in. Thus, we still need to build churches that are prevailing and helping people take steps closer to Jesus. This fact is still true despite the pandemic. The need to reach unchurched people is as great now is as it has ever been.

There is some evidence showing that this year, 8,000 churches are going to close across the country [ref]. This dynamic has been accelerated because of the pandemic. Many churches have struggled through this season. The fact that your church has survived and is considering adding campuses is a positive sign. But the severity of the overall situation means that you should look carefully at your next steps and consider the need that is so present in the communities around you.

Quicker, lighter footprint. // One of the lessons we learned through the pandemic is that organizations with an agile approach to leadership have not only survived but thrived! Finding ways to pivot over the last year has been an important factor in succeeding. Launching campuses that can move into a location quickly, reach new people in a shorter time frame, and work on lower capital costs and volunteer staff may be the best way forward when considering campus expansion.

We know that for the foreseeable future many of our churches will be looking at smaller venues rather than larger ones. It’s going to be a long time before people feel comfortable packing into a room of 1,500. So, look for spaces that hold 200–300 people and you’ll probably find that this idea is more readily received. This could be a perfect season to launch smaller, faster campuses in the communities you’ve identified.

God gave you those cash reserves. // In the past few months,I’ve talked to so many churches that have seen an increase in their operational reserves. This is fantastic news. Pre-pandemic, I’d often hear executive pastors talk about having a week or two of operational reserves on hand. Now, many churches have seen a dramatic increase in their reserves. In fact, some churches have accrued multiple months of operational reserves. This is great news because it will give your church confidence to step forward in various ways.

However, there can be a downside. You’re not in the business of stockpiling cash. God didn’t call you to start an investment fund. Those resources were given to you to push your mission forward. I think it’s reasonable for you to increase your operational reserves. I don’t think it’s reasonable for you to hoard cash. God gave you those resources, and I think you need to ask the question: How are we going to deploy these resources to extend our ministry long-term? What is it that God may be calling you to do to reach more people with the resources He’s given you? Now is the season for you to deploy that income and make a difference that could impact the next decade or more for your church.

Service providers are ready to help. // This may seem like a strange point to put on this list, but there is a whole constellation of support organizations and businesses who have grown up around the multisite church movement over the last two decades. Many of these organizations have paused, understandably, over the last year. However, they’re now ready to lean in and serve you. They’re eager to take a call from your leadership team. You’re going to get the best service ever from these organizations as they return to normal operations. They’ve got time to jump on the phone now and talk through whatever questions you have. Tap into their expertise. These people have seen many churches launch over the years and can help you think through the issues that typically arise.

Portable Church Industries. PCI helps churches like yours design and build systems to help you get in and out of a rented facility. They help plan everything from audio/video/lighting down to baby diapers and storage cabinets. Give them a call today. These guys are incredible experts.

CDF Capital. This organization helps churches work through financial lending issues that can arise when launching new campuses. They are also a great place to deposit operational reserves. They’ve helped hundreds of churches like yours and are waiting by the phone for your call. Plus, they’re simply great people, in general.

Injoy Stewardship Solutions. For decades, Joe Sangl and his team have helped churches like yours to raise more resources. We all know that this can be a complex environment to raise additional resources and I strongly recommend that you talk with them about what raising resources for opening a new campus would look like in this environment. They can assist in working through current issues and help you communicate the message that God’s given you to your community. With their help, you will be able to convey your plan clearly and compellingly. Reach out to them today.

We are still in the “risk-more window.” // There was, in those early months of the pandemic, a real flurry of innovation and risk-taking in the local church. It was so exciting to see churches try brand-new things, particularly in digital ministry. The onset of COVID-19 made us ask ourselves what the church should look like today? With many of us trying to figure out how to live the hybrid or omnichannel approach to church, it is understandable that we are still trying to cope with keeping up with the robust weekend online and in-person experiences we offer.

This is still a season for you to be engaged with your people and consider your dreams for the future together. You have a huge window of opportunity to take some risks and try new things. Your community will not only welcome but encourage new and innovative ideas. Now is the time to lean in and try to launch a campus or two, thus helping push your mission forward.

Looking for more multisite help? Download these resources.

Is your church thinking about launching new multisite campuses? Have you already launched a campus or two but are currently stuck getting the next locations launched? Are you ready to take the next steps in your multisite expansion but aren’t sure where to start? I’m releasing a FREE three-part video series designed to help your church reach more people through multisite church expansion. The lessons in this series come from my practical experience after being in the driver’s seat for 13 launches and from helping a multitude of churches like yours! Here is what we’ll be covering in the free video series:

Video #1: The Biggest Mistake Churches Make When Launching Campuses. Build an approach to launching locations that avoids this mistake, and your church will scale up to reach more people!
Video #2: Keys to Picking a Great Location for Your Next Campus. Apply the lessons in this video and you’ll find effective locations that will aid your church’s growth for years to come!
Video #3: 5 Dirty Secrets of the Multisite Church Movement. Finally, get an insider’s look at the underbelly of this movement to better inform your leadership as you move forward!

[Click here to sign up for the free three-part video series today.]

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Turning Obstacles into Opportunities: Church Real Estate Lessons with Andy Wood

Rich Birch — Thu, 15 Apr 2021 08:44:00 +0000

Thanks for joining us for this week’s unSeminary podcast. Today we’re talking with Andy Wood, founding and lead pastor of Echo Church in California.

Many times in ministry, the thing that should be an obstacle actually can become an opportunity if we think about it differently. Echo Church held strongly to this idea when it came to finding a building in the pricey San Francisco Bay area. Listen in as Andy shares how the spiritual and the strategic can work together to uncover God-sized opportunities.

Look for opportunities. // When it came to finding a location that the church could afford, Andy first turned to God in prayer. Echo Church held the mindset that if Facebook and Google could get into a building, they should be able to as well. As he sought God, the Lord began to speak to Andy’s heart to be like a Joshua or a Caleb in the Bay Area. This idea meant instead of seeing only the obstacles in the real estate market, they had to look for opportunities.
Spiritual and strategic. // Meanwhile on the strategic side, Echo Church looked at what kind of facility they would be able to afford so they could pack it out with services. The spiritual and the strategic need to work together in these situations. Use eyes of faith to see possibilities, and then on the strategic side look at your trajectory of growth and what you could raise in your budget.
Invest for the future. // Echo Church ended up moving into a 54,000 square foot building, though they could only afford to use 22,000 square feet initially. Yet they saw an opportunity there. They established a relationship with the owner of the building and asked if they could be the master tenant and pay the landlord what he was making to rent out the whole building, some of which was empty. Echo Church did a giving initiative, signed a 35 year master lease, raised the value of the property through improvements, and found companies in the area to fill the open 20% of the building. As the church grew it eventually brought the cost down so it could begin to invest in other properties.
Generosity begins with the leader. // It’s easy for leaders to lean too far toward the strategic and forget about the spiritual aspect of these opportunities and giving initiatives. The bottom line is generosity has to begin with the leaders. Andy has found that as he works on his own personal generosity, God moves to stir generosity up in the church too. Remember that your health as a leader influences everything you touch and everything you lead.
Fundraising. // The spiritual and the strategic partner in capital campaigns as much as in any other area. Raising funds needs to begin with prayer and working on your personal generosity. From a strategic standpoint, seek training on fundraising. Every time you’re raising resources or casting vision, however, it has to be deep in your heart and not simply strategic.
Be aware of the trade-offs. // The more aware you are of the different trade-offs in going into debt, the better decisions you can make. In some contexts it might be wisest to pay off all your debt, and in other situations it’s wisest to absorb debt. Extremes on both sides (having debt or not having debt) can become an idol. At the same time you don’t want so much debt that it cripples other areas of your ministry. Whatever your unique situation, recognize that there are trade-offs for every financial decision you make.

You can learn more about Andy, Echo Church, and leadership at www.echo.church/leadershippodcast.

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Moving a Fast Growing Multisite Church from Centralized to Decentralized Leadership Structure with Rachel Long

Rich Birch — Thu, 25 Feb 2021 09:44:00 +0000

Thanks for joining in for this week’s unSeminary podcast. Today we’re talking with Rachel Long, Executive Pastor of Families and Multisites at Emmanuel Church in the greater Indianapolis area.

Making the decision to go multisite and growing to multiple campuses will inevitably lead to a discussion about who answers to who on staff. The dotted lines and solid lines conversation can really get messy and at Emmanuel Church they found that it began to limit their growth and how they could serve the community. The answer? Decentralization. Listen in as Rachel shares about how to go about restructuring to a decentralized leadership structure in a multisite church.

Centralized and on-the-ground. // Early on Emmanuel’s staff realized the question of dotted lines and solid lines was going to get their staff all tangled, so they redefined it for their culture as they moved toward decentralization. If you’re a centralized employee without on-the-ground functions at one of the campuses, then your main objective is to bring excellence and continuity to the organization. If you’re an on-the-ground employee at one of the campuses, your main objective is to grow your campus both numerically and spiritually. Another change was that central staff reported to a central manager but on-the-ground staff now would report to their campus pastor.
Green light, yellow light, red light. // Previously the campus pastor had zero autonomy. But with the decentralized structure the campus pastor would be able to make their own decisions in certain areas. Emmanuel now uses a green light, yellow light, and red light framework. For green light items the campuses have full autonomy. Yellow light items are open for discussion with central. Red light items are centralized and can’t be changed.
Campus constants. // The team at Emmanuel also created campus constants. This looked like getting everyone around the table, team by team, and dissecting each of the roles within the team. The host team (parking, greeting, coffee, etc.), for example, no longer had a centralized person in charge of everything. Instead each campus had a person that reported directly to the campus pastor. Facilities, production, worship, children’s ministry, student ministry, small groups, and connections all were addressed. It took Emmanuel from May 2018 to August 2019 to fully decentralize everything and give the staff the framework. At first the staff wasn’t bought-in and it took round table meetings where people were face-to-face discussing and agreeing upon the changes. The staff needed to come to a place where they could walk out of that meeting room, ready to live out the mission and make the needed changes in order to see people come to Christ and grow in Christ again.
Working through the difficult transitions. // One area that was particularly tricky to decentralize was the weekend worship side of Emmanuel Church. The level of excellence in that area is expected to be super high and there were a lot of shared artists that were moving from campus to campus previously. With the new framework, certain artists would now only be at one campus. That was tough because it separated friendships and affected volunteers rather than only staff. Where Emmanuel landed is that there are worship teams at each campus, but also a central team that has the talent, passion and capability to travel around to multiple campuses and lead worship. When working through these particularly tough scenarios, leadership needs to have solidarity on the final decision or this won’t be handled well.
Heart Touch Initiative. // Like most churches, when the pandemic started the staff at Emmanuel transitioned to working at home. In order to better serve their congregation, they launched the Heart Touch Initiative during this time. Staff either called, sent handwritten notes, or Facetimed with people within the congregation (17,000 connections!) These touch points gave the congregation someone to connect with should they need pastoral care, and it kept people connected to their campuses and in the loop. The Heart Touch Initiative was so successful that Emmanuel continues to use it as part of their language and goals now.

You can learn more about Emmanuel Church at www.eclife.org and reach out to Rachel at her email address. If you want to learn more about Emmanuel’s Campus Constants, you can download examples of them for each team here. And here are documents focused on Emmanuel’s decentralization process.

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