How to Say No to Church Promotion Requests

The youth ministry needs a post. The women's ministry needs an email. The men's ministry needs something for an event that you're just hearing about now. And somewhere in between all those requests, you need an actual communication [music] strategy. So today, we're answering your questions about managing all of these competing demands and not losing your sanity in [music] the process. Let's dive in. >> Well, hey there and welcome to the ProChurch Tools Show. We're here to help you and your church navigate the biggest communication shift in 500 years. I'm Brady Sher, your host. I'm joined as always by my co-host. We call him Pastor Porqua. Alexander Mills. >> Hello. Hello. >> Today answering more of your questions. Pastor Porqua. Pastor Key. Pastor Kqua. I'm running out of French words. I don't even know if half of those were French. Whatever language you're using. >> One of them certainly was. >> We're going to be doing this in English. So, Alex, lead us into the first question please. >> Okay. We have to start with email today. I need your answers about churchwide email. Do you have u re do you recommend the churches have a marketing email list in addition to an internal email list?

This church says we have a lot of people who don't attend or give to our church that follow along online from other cities and countries. And so we've always had both, but we want to simplify. Yeah, this is probably something that a lot of churches can relate to. >> Even in your database, there are the people that come every week and then you look at your database and it's like 2, three, five, 10 times as big perhaps. And that's because there are people that are not in driving distance, let's say, or those that are semiconnected, those who were once connected, those who come once every year to trunk or treat, let's say, and otherwise don't show up. And so, email is one of the easier platforms to segment. >> Yeah. >> And create different groupings for. You can do this sometimes on social media. For instance, Instagram allows you to have close friends. That's one way to segment. Instagram allows you to have channels. That's one way to segment. Instagram you can think of as your entire email list and then close friends would be for like the people that attend on Sunday or channels you could have just for youth group or just for the men's ministry or whatever it might be.

Segmentation can be really useful in communication so long as you have a clear way that you plan on doing it. And so in the seven building blocks, building block number three is give each ministry a home. And the solution that we've built on Nucleus, our software platform, is post collections from this. And the reason I bring up this is because on Nucleus, you can have email subscribers and then you can segment them into different lists. And that way you can reach out to just the women or just the men if you choose to segment them in that way. But what we found over time was that it was hard to differentiate because it was just like people in a in a list. And and then you think, well, what am I going to say to them that's different? Shouldn't I just send one thing to everyone? And I think at the heart of this question, this person's asking like, I get it, but I also want to simplify it. What we've found is that when you have post collections and every ministry has digital real estate that belongs to them where they can build a list and then email them directly, it gives greater purpose and clarity to how segmentation actually could work. So let's give an example. Let's imagine you have a post collection for the student ministry and you can find this at you know your website/posts/ students let's say or whatever the URL is for it and it's there in that post collection where you keep updates for the student ministry maybe specifically

for the parents of the students to follow along and every month there's the roundup for what's happened at the youth ministry. We did this initiative and we had this meeting and here's a great recap. Here's some photos. Okay, great. I'm a parent. I send my kid I actually am a parent of a kid in youth now. >> Wow. >> Junior high. >> Wait, how did that happen? >> Grade six. Wow. I I feel like I was just saying I can't be a youth pastor. [laughter] >> I was just finishing my degree in youth ministry and theology and suddenly now my child is in youth group. Wow. So I'm a parent of this new junior high. I'm brand new to this. I'm a parent of a kid in youth ministry. So now I'm subscribed to the post collection and I'm getting updates that way every single month. Great. Well, now let's say I find the my kid comes home and she's like, "Hey, like um here's, you know, the newsletter, you know, they want you to like get subscribed to it." Oh, okay. So then I go to the post collection and I add my email list or I add my, you know, text and now I'm receiving that every single week or every single month depending on the frequency of how often the youth team wants to publish. Now you can do that for any other ministry that wants it. And this is why building block number three in our communications methodology is give each ministry a home. We don't want every ministry fighting for Sunday morning a stage announcement as the only way to get visibility. If the men's ministry has their own post collection and the women's ministry has their own post collection, now segmentation starts to make more sense because it's very clear

what the women would be getting in that email and where they would go to subscribe. This is the other angle to this. Previously, it wasn't clear what you were subscribing to. So, this person asking the question, they're going into their CHMS or their email database and they're saying, "All right, this person's going to be in this segment. This person's going to be in this segment. I know that these five are. Who else might be in this segment? I don't know." Because I'm the arbiter. I'm the one making the decision. Maybe I don't have all the knowledge of every single person in this database. Let's flip this around. Now, I'm the one subscribing to the student ministry post collection on the page. I'm entering my email. I'm the one that's opting into that. So, it makes perfect sense to me when I get the email from the ministry that I've opted into and I get the confirmation email from it right away versus let's say this person, >> Nancy, and she's the one that's like, I think this person is belonging in this list. I think this person is belonging in this list. >> Maybe downstream of that, they're not seeing the behavior that they expected because they're the ones that are trying to determine who gets what. Well, it makes no s it makes perfect sense when those people then don't behave how you would expect because they didn't opt into it in the first place.

>> Yeah. >> And so that's why I think segmentation in church is sometimes an effort that's doomed to fail from the beginning because you're trying to organize it the way that you think it should happen. Whereas it should be people opting in to get notifications and updates from what they want to be notified by. >> Yeah. You know, last week on the show we answered some some questions. cuz we're in the middle of three episodes in a row of answering um your questions cuz there was a backlog. >> Yeah. And um we talked about last week about when someone asked a question especially to our show it's like for me it's important to try and mine out what is the thing behind the thing here like why are we asking the question and the person who wrote in this question kind of says it in the in the last three words they say we're trying to simplify. So they're saying like, okay, I want to communicate to the people in our church, both who belong to our church and people who are connected to our church, maybe even like parasoccially. I want to communicate to them. I know I need to, but it's feeling complicated. And if you're using a tool, an email tool that doesn't make segmentation by behavior or by connection um clear or easy or those those tools aren't built in, then this is going to feel complicated to you.

when you want to send out an email just to one group or you want to send out an email to the whole group. [snorts] And I can't speak for any other tools because I don't work for any other tools or actually right now I'm not even using any other tools. I've used Mailchimp. I've used Planning Center to send out emails. Right now I'm doing it all through Nucleus because um Nucleus makes it really easy and simple to target particular audiences based on the subject. So I think the the thing behind the thing here is we want to simplify our communication. I don't think simplification means less email lists. I think it means more targeted communication. And so in nucleus you've mentioned we've got subscribe actions with posts. So I can email only the the parents from youth ministry when I've got something to say about youth ministry. But we also have connection types. So like I can target members. I can target regular visitors who are not members. Uh we have smart campaigns based off of um actions. So like giving or filling out a form or asking for prayer. I can send an email to people who have given to this fund in particular instead of just emailing all the givers or everyone in our church.

And so that's not less email segments. That's actually way more. But it makes it easier. My communication strategy way easier or to this question to this question more simple. Imagine that you're looking at your CHMS or your email tool and you see 1,000 email addresses and you come at it from this perspective. I don't want to email every single one of these people the exact same thing, >> but I have no idea how to segment them. That's historically how this challenge has been like approached. You're trying to solve it from there. That's the backwards way to do it. Instead of you trying to sort people, you need to let people sort themselves. Building block number three, give each ministry a home. The men's ministry has a post collection. The women's ministry has a post collection. The youth ministry has a post collection. On and on and on, whatever ministry wants it, their own digital real estate organized in a neat way on the site, not a page, but a place where they can update in a timely manner all the things that are happening in that specific ministry. So now the entry point is people sorting themselves by engaging with the post and then choosing to opt in so that they hear more or they're sorting themselves by attending the men's breakfast and the clipboard gets passed around and every person adds their email to the clipboard or there's an RSVP thing to men's breakfast and that becomes the entry point with consent taken into the post collection so that that way email can be distributed in that going way. When people sort themselves, they expect

messaging and they engage with it. When you try to sort them, you probably don't know how. It feels complex. And when it feels complex to you in the sorting phase, of course, it is going to feel anything but simple in the actual broadcast phase when you're trying to actually target people. And by by target we just mean there's so much happening in church because it is a mosaic of people with different interests and different ages and different genders and different ethnicities and different socioeconomic status and different backgrounds, different languages. And so what happens is that we have lots of different ministries for different people and then we all gather on a Sunday morning. So when I say target, it's not like the marketing speak that's like we're going to try to cold reach you and find the product to match you with to extract resources. No, we're trying to make you aware and interested of the ministries that are transformative in this church because we know when you're a part of them, you find community, you find hope, you find healing, you come into contact with the wisdom of scripture in the form of a human person that bears the likeness of God just like you do. That is the church at its best.

>> And we don't want you to just be a passive spectator on Sunday. We want you to be an active participant in the transformative work of the local church. That means being involved in ministry, giving and volunteering and groups and membership and all these things. And so when those things are happening, we want you to be aware of them and interested in them. And email is a great tool for that. >> But the segmentation has to happen. Stop trying to sort people. Let people sort themselves. We created the tool for this post collections. We're happy to build it for you. If you go to makeover.urch, you can get a free communications makeover from us. we will send you a proposal. >> We'll make a post collection for every ministry in your church. >> We'll make it. So that way we hand it off to you and you already have it. And then okay, all the heavy lifting has been done. All the grunt work has been taken care of by us. And if you want to learn more about the seven building blocks, we did dedicated podcasts in a summer series. You can find the playlist on our YouTube channel at the ProChurch Tools Show. One dedicated episode per building block. So there's seven episodes, seven building blocks. you can get a thorough understanding of this because we think that this methodology is what will once and for all solve the chaos internally and externally in church.

Every church struggles with communications chaos and you have to choose either a system or just live with the chaos. We created this system for you that you can install whether you use any of our tools or not and the podcasts are all free and if you're like seven episodes I have a real job or >> seven building blocks. >> Okay, great. You can also look on the Brady Sheer YouTube channel for the church communications master class. It is a speedrun through all seven building blocks with examples in about 30 minutes. But you need to be aware of the system. Otherwise, you will continue to spend way more time spinning your wheels trying to like solve one problem that is from one symptom and not treating the core issue. >> Isn't that how it usually goes? You want to simplify something, it actually requires you like installing something more that you didn't already have. more work in the short term for way less work indefinitely. >> Yeah. >> Okay. So that was like external comps church to church person. Let's bring it in the house now. What are the best strategies for man turning uh managing internal requests for events being promoted on social etc.

>> Best strategies for managing internal requests for events being promoted on social. So we could talk about tools like you could use Trello if you like that type of board where you just drag cards from like one state to the next. We could talk about Asana, Basec Camp, ClickUp, Monday.com. There are so notion. All right. There are so many different like planning tools. Those are all great. We use Trello. We like it a lot. We've built our own internal tools that we like. I have not enjoyed my time with Base Camp. I have not enjoyed my time with Aauna. ClickUp. I was ClickUp is intense. You can build so many things and so it can be a bit complex, but it does kind of give you the freedom to do ultimately anything you want. So I would say my experience with that is has been good. It just at the beginning it was like this is a lot and I can't I have had no firsthand experience with monday.com personally. >> Behind those tools is the actual structure that your church wants to use.

>> And I'll come right back to the seven building blocks. Building block number one. The first task is assign levels to every ministry. And this must be the prerequisite to any internal request system >> because if it doesn't exist, there will be misaligned expectations, hopes, and desires from different ministry leaders and departments expecting different things from you. And if you don't have a system that assigns those things or allows you to give out those distinctions, you become the ultimate judge and jury. >> And I will tell you this clearly, you do not want that role. and responsibility because invariably what will happen is that you will say something to someone that will set a precedent that you then must fulfill for every other similar request. Otherwise, you're just playing favorites and you know you can't do that. But guess what you just did? You created the worst chaotic system that you possibly could.

>> Let me talk about how this works with >> and that's the state we see so many churches in right now. >> 100%. 100%. >> Here uh let's let's use an example for announcements. Okay, here's how it happens with announcements. This works for social, it works for any distribution platform. So, a distribution platform in your church could be email, text, social media, stage announcements, the welcome desk, bulletin, whatever it might be. So, let's imagine Alex here. Got to love him. He runs the men's ministry at church. Okay? [laughter] And right now, the men's ministry, about 20% of the people that go to our church are involved in men's ministry in this hypothetical example. And let's imagine I am the lead pastor. Finally. Ah, roles are reversed. You like this. You like that, Pastor Porqua. Uh, I'm the lead pastor of this hypothetical church. That's a small church. So, I'm ultimately deciding what goes on stage or what doesn't. Or I'm the pastor that does announcements of a church of 700. We visited a church like this recently and there's a comms director that makes the call, but ultimately I'm the one that does announcements. Or I'm the pastor of a church of a thousand plus and I don't have anything involved in these. All I do is preach, but there's a team that runs comms and they're in charge. Okay.

Whatever your church looks like, I am the arbiter. >> And Alex is the one that wants a stage announcement. >> Alex comes to me. Men's event, steak, guns. >> Wow. [laughter] >> I don't want to be the lead pastor anymore. >> We're just going to the shooting range shot next Wednesday. Be there. But I need >> I need you to promote it cuz I need all the men there. >> All 20%. I want I want 50% of our congregation. I want all the men there. >> Okay. Um wow. I He mentioned firearms and that felt like a veiled threat in some way and so I feel like I have to give him a stage announcement. Okay. Alex, uh Reverend Rifle, you've got your you got your announcement on stage. So be it. Okay. Now the women's ministry comes along and they're like, "Did you give the men's ministry? Did you give Reverend Rifle an an announcement?" Okay. like not cool because like we haven't had a stage announcement for our quilting ministry in a long time and I understand we don't have firearms generally but that doesn't make our ministry any less important >> we're the other 50% of the congregation >> okay um but you're not only 20% of the people attend the women's ministry so that's not true but uh I mean you're right I've set a president I have to do it okay now here comes the student ministry here comes the missions ministry here comes the prayer ministry and each one of these small pockets is saying well we just do stage announcements Well, guess what? Now you've got seven stage announcements on average every single week, taking up seven minutes on average every single week of service, pointing people to nine

different destinations on average. That is the state of church communications based on more than 3,000 churches that we have done communications audits on. And guess what happens now in practice? Because that's a lot of hypothetical stories and a lot of numbers. I'm sitting in the pew of your church and I listen to seven minutes of announcements from seven different ministries and most of them do not apply to me. >> Mhm. >> Because yes, I go to the men's ministry, but I don't go to the women's ministry and I go don't go to the student ministry and I'm not part of the mission ministry and I'm not part of the prayer ministry. So, of the seven announcements, maybe two are relevant to me and this happens every week. Well, guess what? You've now conditioned me to tune out your announcements by the precedent that you've set. This is the paradox. >> By trying to plate everyone, you've created a culture where most of the time what's being communicated has no relevance to me whatsoever.

So now the time that is actually for me I'm not listening to because I'm tuning out all the announcements which is why announcements become the portion of service that I endure as the parishioner and you endure as the person that's giving them and we've created a terrible environment where the announcements are just disrupting service. They're not helping anyone and no one's actually getting involved or responding to the invitations because of it. This is the paradox where you need to be vigilant and assign levels to every ministry. Building block number one, level one for churchwide events that reach 80% or more of people and anything that's a bridge into the community. Easter, VBS, Christmas, >> not men's ministry, >> fall festival, precisely level two, core next steps, the indefinite min uh the indefinite rhythms of disciplehip that you want every person to go through. baptism membership giving child dedication groups, >> level three, nextgen ministry, students, kids, young adults, and level four, everything else. If level four is being treated like level one, everything falls apart.

>> That's what chaos looks like. Where there is equal promotion, time, volume into Christmas as there is the men's breakfast. >> And guess what? We looked at all the announcements. Alex has never been told this number before. What percentage of announcements do you think show up in more than one service? So you have an event. >> Mhm. >> Okay. What percentage of events get promoted more than once? >> And because we've never talked about this before, if that's unclear, ask me to clarify. >> Yes. So, I've got I've got men's ministry bullets and bacon steak event. >> Steak and chauna, whatever you want to call it. >> How often does that get mentioned in more than one service? >> Yeah. Like what percentage of announcements would show up in more than one service? >> Oh, >> meaning they're not just being proven at once, but multiple times. >> Sure. I'd say by the volume of announcements that churches do, I'd say it's maybe higher than I than I think.

So, I'm going to go with 40%. >> 16%. >> Wow. because there's so many announcements. You don't even get more than one because it's like every week we got seven new things. >> And so now I want you to think of how frequently people attend church. >> Yeah. It's two out of every five out of every 2.7 Sundays. >> So if people are coming to church one out of every 2.7 Sundays and an announcement gets a repeat only 16% of the time, good luck. Do the math. I think it's like 60% of the time people won't hear an announcement. So no wonder people aren't aware of things because Sunday is not your savior and also because we have no plan. It's all chaos. And if you just plate people when they come to you with a request, it doesn't work. And this is why you assign levels to every ministry. You create the hierarchy level 1 2 3 and four. And then downstream of that you figure out, okay, let's look at all the channels that we have in our church. Take inventory of all them. We do email, we do text, we do Facebook, we do YouTube, we do the website, we do bulletin, we do stage announcements. Okay. Now, for a level one ministry, the most important stuff, Easter, Christmas, your bridge events, fall festival, trunk or treat, VBS, how many stage announcements should they get? Well, maybe they should get this many stage announcements. Okay, great.

You're getting repeats. >> By virtue of that, that means something cannot get a stage announcement. And and this bleeds into the previous question and why building block number three exists. Give every ministry a home. Because if you create a promotional playbook where you decide level one events have to get a stage announcement for three weeks in a row. Let's say we want to talk about Christmas three weeks in a row leading up to it. Make sense? Well, what have you just displaced? Maybe you've displaced bullets and bacon. It's not getting a stage announcement anymore. Okay. So then how do people hear about that? Well, if every ministry has a home and the men's ministry has their own post collection, >> they're going to email directly, >> right? And all 62 people that have ever been involved in men men's ministry in your church are on there, then they can hear about it. And when they all show up, get everyone's email that didn't >> Mhm. >> have it on the email list last time. >> Yeah. >> And so now they're being hearing about it. Sunday is not your savior. Now the men's ministry doesn't feel desperate to get a stage announcement. Now, you know, actually 60% of the time nobody even hears it anyway. So I'm actually not even helping you. I'm placating you personally, but I'm not actually helping you fulfill the mission that you want for your department. And in the process, I am undermining the mission of this church.

>> That's not the trade that you want to make. >> Mhm. >> If this is all like again resonating with you, but you're like, "Okay, but how's how does it all fit together?" We've done these church chaos reports for more than 3,000 churches this year starting in May. If you go to church.com, send us three of your services and your church's website, we will look at that. We will give you our observations >> and that's where we got those numbers from >> precisely and then we will go through the seven building blocks and how like it works or if you're like I don't want to get that score. I was speaking at an event yesterday and the pastor came up to me and he was like I know you're doing these church chaos reports. I know we're going to score poorly. I can't have my team look at me and be like well well he's like I know that's what it's going to be like. Can you just tell me? I was like yeah just go watch the church communications master class on YouTube. That's an option as well. But you need the system and then everything starts to flow together because to the original question and I know this is a long answer that may even seem a little bit indirect. >> The internal tool will not solve the chaos.

>> Choosing base camp, Trello, ASA or Monday, that's not what solves the chaos. Those are just >> useful software tools if you are planning on using them on top of some type of scaffolding. If you have no scaffolding, if you have no structure, if you have no system, >> they won't solve the chaos. They'll just create a place where everyone logs in to observe the chaos. >> Right? And we said a lot about the hypothetical situation of placating to every ministry, giving a yes to every ministry. But what about when you find the courage to say no and to one person and they know that you've said yes to another or they see you say yes to another the week after. Now you're breeding this like interpersonal conflict because that person knows that there's no policy. There was no reason to say no because you're the sole arbiter. So when you install a policy in the form of ministry level assignments, you all just get to hold it up and say like, "You can't be mad at me because we've agreed on what a a level four ministry is." And this is what level four ministries get. That it doesn't matter what you don't get. Here's what you do get. And so the ministry leaders now feel empowered rather than slighted.

Okay, let's move on to the our third question for today. Um, what's a way that churches and ministries can expand on their content other than sermon clips and clipping long form content? So, let me walk you through one of the processes that we go through with the churches that we work with at social sermons.com every single week. We work with about 150 churches there. So, this first part was taken from podcasting culture. This is one of my f one of my favorite things to do, which is look at what other industries are doing and bring those into the church world. I know in the church world, we tend to be experts at copying other churches and then we're just kind of recycling the same old thing, which is fine, but if you want something that's novel, >> like look for fusion. fusion in the cooking world is when you take like Japanese cuisine and we combine it with Mexican cuisine and we have this synergy, this alchemy of flavors and cooking techniques that you've probably never experienced before and you're like, "Wow, that is >> unusual and new and great." That's fusion at its best. So, we were looking at podcasting culture and let's imagine that you would have a sitdown interview with Dr. Roger. Okay? So, there's a podcast and it's like we had a three-hour sitdown with Dr. Roger or we had a 45minute sit down with Dr. Roger and the title of the podcast is like, you know, episode number 75, you know, Jim talks to pastor or Dr. Roger, you know, it's something like that. And for

those that subscribe to that podcast are already part of that audience, they'll see, oh, episode 75, Dr. Roger. Great. They'll enjoy that. >> That, >> even with a pathy title, is not going to be the best for discovery. So what podcast producers have come to do is that they will look for individual segments within that long- form conversation, extract those individual segments, republish them either to a second channel or to the main channel, but increasingly more to secondary channels, >> give them a new thumbnail and a new title specifically focused on that. So maybe Dr. Roger in that long form conversation gets to talking about cholesterol and there's a segment of 11 minutes dedicated to cholesterol. The podcast producer might pull that and then give it a new thumbnail and a new title like why high cholesterol is actually good. And then someone that's searching for cholesterol related topics stumbles upon that. They're introduced to the podcast perhaps they subscribe and they become a part of the audience going forward that listens to the long form.

>> Mhm. Now, what we do is we take that same approach. Imagine a pastor is doing a three-point message. Pretty common, classic. Maybe the first point is dedicated to Jesus and Judas. And I'm using a real example of a church here. And so, we take that first segment. It's a 40-minute sermon. That first point ends up being 15 minutes. We take that part, we retitle it, how to handle betrayal. Nothing to do with scripture as the entry point >> and not just simply the title of the sermon. >> No, not the sermon series. Not just gravedigger part five, April 27, >> something that's like optimized for search. >> Correct. >> Yeah. >> And we'll keep the full length sermon or service up there either on our live tab or in the videos tab. And then we have either a secondary channel or a secondary publishing rhythm and this goes there. Now the original question was what can we do beyond just clipping? The reason I wanted to give this as an example is because that's the starting point. The next thing that we do is we take that 15-minute video, how to handle betrayal, and we transcribe it and we convert that into a long form blog post >> and the transcription itself is not a great thing to read because it's someone talking, but the subject matter is there. We reformat that. Now we have a blog post. Going back to post collections, perhaps you can have a letters from the pastor >> post collection where these long form articles live. How to handle betrayal now shows up in your post collection on the letters from the pastor or whatever

you want to call it a dedicated post collection for this. Now the next time someone has counseling and the topic of betrayal comes up you can point them to a book or you can point them to a resource but what better thing to point them to than your own church's >> exposition of the wisdom of scripture and its intersection with this challenge. You've already done the work. You can point them to the video if they like that. You can point them to the written blog post if they like that. You can print it out ahead of time and hand it to them as a resource and be like, "Hey, by the way, we have talked and taught about this topic and what the Bible says about it, and here we have it ready for you." And now they're leaving with that resource. Now, you do that every week. And what we've done for churches is we've taken now 52 letters over the course of a year and we've bundled it into like a coffee table style book or a year retrospective the journey of our church in 2026 whatever it might be. And now there's a hard copy >> of the sermons but in a form that's native to that medium. but it's also online and it's also being used as a spiritual counseling resource and it's also in a long form video dedicated to that topic indexed for discovery.

>> And I think if you're listening to this, you can probably be creative enough to be like, well, it could also be for this and it could also be for this. And the point that I'm trying to make is that effort of your pastor putting in a dozen, 20, 30 hours, whatever it might be for like repurposed and we can give legs to it and a lifespan to it beyond just the pulpit. Well, I think what's so wonderful about this strategy in particular is you've just described building a library of content and context for your church that is so much more useful than simply posting sermon reels on Instagram. And the pastor was not responsible for making any more content than they had made in the first place. Like all the pastor was responsible for was preaching the sermon, >> right? Like the pastor didn't have to sit down that week and then write a blog post and the pastor didn't have to compile a coffee table book of um some of the most important thoughts in the year or whatever. It's like no the the work was done on Sunday. Well, the work pastor did the work throughout the week.

delivered the work on Sunday and then through creative basically distillation you just re repackaged and reformatted that piece of content in many different forms to serve many different people that what a what a brilliant example of like using that resource as you know a lot of churches are offering like biblical counseling now to to to serve it as a as a a resource in biblical counseling from inhouse like from your pastoral team um and then yeah to serve your congregation with a year in view like just how wonderful without actually expending any more energy from your senior leader. You're you're leveraging what they've already given to you and repurposing it um in in a real like multi- kind of prronged approach. And think about how this could be cyclical. I'm just thinking about this now. You print out the how to handle betrayal blog post. You give it to your pastor. We talked last episode about walk and talk social media posts. You give it to your pastor and be like, "Hey, can you go and record a walk and talk social post? This is from your sermon from this long ago.

>> And I just want you to like start off by saying, "Hi, I'm Pastor Alex. I pastor Life Abundant Church here in Niagara." And then I want you to just talk about this specific talking point. You know, betrayal is one of the most devastating things that an individual can encounter. If you're watching this, you you surely know what it's like maybe on a grand scale, on a smaller scale. What's amazing about the wisdom of scripture is that it says like it can be now a 30 secondond, a 90-cond, whatever it might be, a single take. You're just walking outside holding your phone looking at it. It should be familiar to the pastor because it's literally from their sermon, >> but you've given them like a entry point for it where it's native to social and they'll feel comfortable delivering it. Maybe they take one, two or three takes max to get it right >> and now like it started with them and now it's continuing with them. Yeah. >> And now you can post that on YouTube shorts, on Instagram, on Facebook, on Tik Tok, on threads, on X. Okay. Now it has six more publishing spots. If you're a smaller church or if you're any church that feels like ideally we'd have more resources, >> I implore you, >> ideally my pastor would make more content for our social, >> right? [laughter] I implore you, repurpose everything.

Attention is more fragmented online than it's ever been. We already talked about social uh church attendance on average one out of every 2.7 Sundays. >> People are not seeing everything. I know you think that you'll be bombarding them with the same thing over and over again. I promise you that's not what happens in reality. What happens is you publish it 11 different places and 30% of people see it once. >> 8% of people see it twice and they're happy to because they're the ones that are most closely engaged to the church. And guess what? We've been hearing the same wisdom of scripture since we were kids. What is the Bible? It is wisdom for all people for all time. Which means so long as you're preaching from it, there is no it gets stale. There is no it's no longer relevant. There's no it's no longer applicable. So take that one thing and republish it, repackage it and reformat it as many times as you can. Let me give you one more hypothetical and this will serve as our last question. One more hypothetical that is a non-hypothetical from Alex's real church. You publish that on your post collections, your how to handle betrayal blog post. Now, I, [sighs] a non-believer in the city, have experienced betrayal in my life. And it's got me to the point where I'm rethinking things. And I haven't been to church in a long time or I've never been to church, but I had someone that went to the same barber as me and I heard they went to church once or I went as a kid and I haven't in a long time. And I just I've been talking to Chad GBT all about what I've been going through.

>> And at a certain point, I go, you know, maybe like faith is something that's worth exploring again. Are there any like churches in my area? And Chad has all the context on this person and their individually what they're going through. And now listen, I I'm not suggesting or endorsing people talking to Chad about their problems. >> No, but we just reverse engineer from the numbers. We see numbers roll out every week. It's like this is how people are using chatbot in your city. They're they're confiding their betrayals in this tech because it's it's safe and it's uh it's it's private and it's uh individualistic. It's catered to me. And so people are using the the tech in this wake. So, it's important for us to know that and and to uh respond to that with how with our our content strategies effectively with what we choose to put on our church website with the content we choose to produce and position ourselves so that when an opportunity presents itself for a chat to take your context and match it to another context in your city, your church is there.

I don't know how disruptive AI is going to be on the spectrum. We talk every episode about the biggest communication shift in 500 years. Chat and others like it could be so disruptive that the world looks dramatically different than we ever could have imagined. It could be disruptive for a period and then we go ah it was a little overblown not as disruptive as we thought. Somewhere in between. I think irrespective of how that plays out it would not surprise me at all if religion enters the forefront of society in ways that I have never seen in my lifetime. Because eventually talking to my phone about my problems is going to feel hollow. >> Eventually, as a human with a beating heart, I will crave human interaction. And if I have been searching and I've been talking [sighs and gasps] to Chad about betrayal, perhaps it indexes the churches in my area after I ask it about it. And it finds life abundant church that took a sermon that had a single point about betrayal and Judas and Jesus and repackaged it into how to handle betrayal and they published it in their letters from the pastor on their post collections which means there among every other ministry that has a post collection and every other letter >> talking about any other existential problem that all of humanity is prone to face. It says, "Ah, Life Abundant has actually talked a ton about betrayal and it had these ministry points and it had these places for pastoral care and it

had these big ideas around what the wisdom of scripture says about this." And now when I attend Life Abundant, >> I'm not just showing up to church cold >> with this was a church in my region and I looked and it said in a 5 mile radius these are the churches that exist circa Google 2015. I'm going with confidence that this place could be a spiritual home for me because my problem has already been validated through the chatbot that matched me with your church. >> I cannot think of the ramifications for that. >> Your church already has all the work being done. You just have to put in that little bit of extra effort to repurpose and republish >> and reformat. >> Yeah. And that's not a hypothetical situation. We're hearing stories like this come in all the time of of folks saying like, "Yeah, this person found our church or found our content because of a recommendation through their LLM of choice through Chad or Grock or whoever." And it's because that's what these bots do, right? They have the context of everything you've shared. And then when you ask a question, they just look for context on the internet and they try and they try and match it up.

And so a story like that happened in my church. There was a woman in in our area. It had context about the woman. when she asked a simple question about church, it grabbed context from our church website and it matched us up and it said, "You might you might enjoy this church." And so she walked into our church with high confidence instead of um reserved kind of uh suspicion that she was going to be she was going to um be a good fit there because the context matched. >> Um and so that's why it's so important that you know you could be pastoring a just a wonderful life-giving church and you are. I'm sure you are. Um, and you could have a website that says where you meet and when you meet and have a nice photo of your church on there and and that could be great, but without all of this additional context, and that's why the the postub strategy is so strong, this constant um evolving and growing archive of the life of your church, not just the events that you're hosting, but the things you're talking about, uh the things you're working through. Um you just there's just so much that we're leaving on the table if we're choosing to keep that off of our church websites for whatever reason. So, um, what a wonderful time the church is in where I just feel like our creative kind of juices and expressions of, um, the how we get to tell the story of Jesus online right now, I just feel like they're really flowing where, you know, early in the social era, there was just all this new way to to to communicate that the story of Jesus through through Instagram and and and Facebook and all the social avenues and and at a certain point, it's like that just got a little bit stale

because, you know, um, the the supply was outpacing the demand and now there's like this new technology that's offering new opportunities and it feels like a very exciting kind of creative time for me as a as a person and a pastor um knowing that oh yeah I can use um this moment to tell the same story I've I've been telling and will ever tell this is the one story that I've just you know all my >> all my bets are in on um but just in new expressions and meet new people in new ways with that story. Uh thanks to just the the moment we're living through that's exciting. >> Yeah. Biggest communication shift in 500 years. And when we first started saying that AI was nowhere near the horizon, we were talking about the internet relative to the printing press. And for the last two decades, for my lifetime, past three and a half decades, religion has been not at the forefront of society. I have been privileged to go around the world and you'll go to villages that and towns that pre-exist any thing on my continent and you'll see in so many of them at the center is a church with a steeple >> and it reminds you of how historically the church has been at the center of society.

>> Yeah. And this enlightenment period followed by the internet and like our knowledge of humanity and the world has made for many people the idea of faith seem foolish. And I see this future where LLM's and AI's pervasiveness in our world is going to create such disruption and such disillusionment that people are going to start looking at what was once deemed foolish and begin to re-evaluate that as something that is missing. And I in no way am looking forward to the pain that will precede that. >> And I'm pretty happy right now. So for my part, I'm happy to skip it. [laughter] But if that is where we go in whatever degree of extreme, >> I think that the church is going to get a spotlight on it in ways that again I have never seen in my lifetime. And I truly hope that we are ready to meet that moment.

>> We'll be back next week with some more questions. In the meantime, thank you for your time, attention, and trust. We'll talk to you then. And Rain Brady had the displays facing us, and I said, "Sorry, brother. You got to turn those around." Damn.