The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast
CNLP 23 - Why People Are Attending Church Less Often And How to Respond—An Interview with Will Mancini
(upbeat music) - Welcome to the Carrie Newhoff Leadership Podcast, a podcast all about leadership, change, and personal growth. The goal? To help you lead like never before, in your church or in your business. And now your host, Carrie Newhoff. - Well, hey, everybody. And welcome to episode 23 of the podcast. My name's Carrie Newhoff. I am so glad to be alongside of whatever you're doing today. Maybe you're on your commute, out for a walk, or a run, or out cycling, or at the gym, or maybe cooking dinner, or just hanging out. I don't know, but it's a thrill to be alongside you. And I really hope this podcast helps you lead like never before. And thank you to everybody who is just so awesome to leave a review or rating in iTunes. You keep doing it. It is so helpful if this podcast is helping you. When you do that, it creates something inside iTunes that actually gets the podcast in front of other people who otherwise might not have heard about it. And thank you for the honest reviews. I read every one of them. And if you're leaving a review on iTunes, Stitcher, Tune in Radio, thank you. And if you haven't, maybe you could do that today. That would be super cool. Today's guest is a guy by the name of Will Mancini. And Will and I are gonna drill down on a subject that I have talked to a lot of leaders about over the last few years. Because almost every church leader I know is struggling with this and it's the trend that even people who attend church are attending less often. I guess you could look at it this way. Fewer people are attending church. And even the ones who do attend church don't show up as often as they used to. Now, you probably noticed that in your church. No matter what region you're in, no matter what size church you're in, large or small. And even if your church is growing fast, you probably noticed, hey, you know, people used to come three times a month or, you know, every week and now they're coming once a month or twice a month or once every four months. And that is just a universal trend. And almost literally every church leader I talk to is noticing it. But nobody really knows how to respond. Like, what do you do? Is that just gravity? You can't fight it? Or is there something you should be doing to help reverse that trend? Is that even a trend you should try to reverse? Like what's going on? And that's why I'm really excited about this episode. And then next week we're gonna discuss a similar issue with David Kinemann. So this week with Will Mancini, episode 24 next week with David Kinemann. We're gonna drill down on this whole deal of why are people not attending church as much? And what do you do about it as a leader? So it's a little bit of a one-two punch, which I'm pretty excited about. I'm also blogging about it. And you can go to karaenuhoff.com and I've got my own thoughts in there and also some practical suggestions about what you can do. We've got some in the podcast as well this week and next week. But I just think it's a really big subject and I think it's something we need to have a dialogue on. So you might want to head over there and all those links will be in the show notes. And for this episode, it's karaenuhoff.com/episode23. And a big thank you to the Orange Conference who's this episode's sponsor. And you can head on over to the orangeconference.com and I hope you will, particularly the orangeconference.com/seniorleader because on that track, I've got some incredible stuff that we put together for you as a leader at the end of April. April 29th to May 1st, the Orange Conference happens in Atlanta, Georgia. It is an incredible gathering of leaders, world-class leaders. Donna Miller's gonna be there. John Acuff, Reggie Joyner, Doug Fields, Jeff Henderson, Judd Wilhite, Perry Noble. And then on the senior leaders track, you're gonna hear from people like Josh Gagnon, Jenny Catrin, myself. Also gonna hear from Jeff Henderson on the senior leader track. It's gonna be great. And we are just gonna help you, hopefully lead like never before. The Orange Conference is all about next generation ministry. It's an incredible three days. If you've never been there, it's a blast. It's also really good for your brain as well as for your heart. And it'll help you laugh as well. We have a great time when we're together. And you can get there for a very special rate because you're a podcast listener. So the price for you for a couple more days until February 19th is simply this $259 for the entire conference. It's a flat price, $259 and you get it this way by going to the orangeconference.com/seniorleader and entering this promo code OC15, CN podcast. That's OC15, CN podcast. If you're driving somewhere, don't worry. All the information is in the show notes carrynewhough.com/episode23. But if you can jump right over there right now, you can get those rates while they last until February 19th. So I am super excited about this episode just 'cause this is an issue that I think a lot of church leaders are facing. Will Mancini brings a lot of insight to it. He actually wrote a blog post on his blog at the beginning of this year that made me say, "You know what, I gotta get 'em on the show "and we gotta have this conversation." So link to that post is in the show. He is the president CEO of the Oxano Group. That's A-U-X-O-N-O. And they really help churches find extraordinary clarity and Will helps us find some clarity on this issue of what happens when people who attend church attend less often. So here's my interview with Will Mancini. Really excited to have Will Mancini today on the podcast. Will, welcome. - Thanks, Carrie. It's great to be with you. - Hey Will, so you're like a blogger, an author, a consultant and you help churches really, I think, find clarity. So tell us about how you got into that and what your work involves just so people can get to know you. - Yeah, well, I was similar to your leadership. Well, I was working at local church that followed Willa Creek and North Point pretty closely. And so it was in that context in the late '90s that as we were growing as a church, we were bringing in outside guys. I call them strategic outsiders, these consulting coach types. And I remember we did a, in one four year run, I think we brought in a consultant every year. And I found myself kind of in the ideal role at a local church kind of a cross between us, spiritual formation, leadership development role. And we, and I just kept thinking, man, I'm intrigued with that role on the other side of the desk. And probably a mentor of mine that influenced me most deeply is a prof Howard Hendricks at Dallas Seminary. And he had challenged us over the years to always ask the question, you know, what is God preparing you for? What is God preparing you for? He would say, find the thing that you must do for God, and the more opportunities you have, you know, you might get a little clouded on that one thing that God's really preparing you to do. And so I just asked the question at one point in the local church, you know, Lord, are you preparing me to step into a role to serve the broader church as this outside capacity? So in 2001, I experimented with that. And it took about six months to feel a sense of, wow, I think this is what God's call is for me. And then about a year into that, I felt how to, what I consider for me, I'm not charismatic type per se, you know, theologically, but I had a pretty dramatic experience where I felt the Lord validating and calling me into the work of a consultant. So that's how I got started. - Hmm, that's kind of interesting. You don't hear too many people say, you know, I felt the Lord calling me to be a consultant. And, but really the ministry, I don't want to get too theological or like crazy here, but that's sort of apostolic. I mean, that's what the apostles did. They would go from church to church and they would equip and prepare and help the local leadership. So I think that's really cool what you do. So tell us like in a nutshell, what do you do? What is Oxano is your organization, your company? What do you do? - Our core idea really is creating breakthrough clarity with church teams to realize their vision. So we, it is interesting that, you know, the word consultant, I don't really like the word consultant, we use it 'cause that's the position in people's minds. We think of our role as a navigator and over time, I've come to see that as a, again, prophetic, apostolic kind of wiring and the guys that do it well. So what we really do, our core experience or core process carry is really a vision, what we call a vision framing process. So it's a helping church leaders and it's been, as you know, a lot of, you know, a lot of franchising, if you will, or a lot of unstudied, I would say unthoughtful photocopying of church models and I would hold yourself as in high regard as someone who, you know, develops and works a very, very, you know, highly developed model. And yet many guys just will read a book or go to a conference and try to make a model work, but it doesn't really work. And so what we're trying to do is come alongside of churches in this core vision framing process, I really help them think more deeply about where they're located, about the strengths of the congregation and then to kind of frame up a model, if you will, of a disciple making model that is contextualized there. - Well, it's interesting what you say, you know, that some people just adopt an unstudied model. And I would say that's where I started. I mean, I started 20 years ago in 1995 and a couple of years in, I'd heard about Saddleback. I had started to hear about Willow Creek and I went down to a conference in North Carolina. And it was actually a guy who was serving in that capacity as a consultant. He was also a local pastor, James Emery White. I was in conversation with him. And Jim said to me, 'cause I said, "Well," he said, "What model are you doing?" I said, "Well, you know, kind of Saddleback." This was the 90s, kids, if you, a lot of you don't remember that. But anyway, never mind. I said, "Yeah, a little bit of Saddleback, "a little bit of Willow Creek." You know, it's kind of all the same thing. And he just looked at me and he went, "No, it's not the same thing at all." And I'm kind of like, "What?" And he goes, "You know, Carrie, "you need to become a student of models. "You really need to understand the model "because they're not fully compatible." And I've never forgotten that. And so I've become a student of models and I'm like, "Well, I clearly don't understand this." So you're right. I think there are things in actually episode 17 of the podcast when Josh Gagnon was on, he talked about adopting all of the models. He follows Life Church, North Point Elevation Church. He has a lot of mentors in his life. And, but he says, "Not all of it works in New England." And so he tries to figure out what makes it work. So I think that's really good advice and I love what you're doing. And so what we wanna do, speaking of incredible clarity, exceptional clarity to churches, I wanna talk about something that we started talking about at our church a couple of years ago. You wrote a blog post about it at the beginning of 2015 that really caught my attention. We will link to it in the show notes. But it's all about this trend that everybody all of a sudden is talking about, which is that people who attend church are attending less often. And you said it is the biggest trend to follow in 2015. Tell us a little bit about that. What does that trend involve and what are the implications? - Yeah, well, I think I'll tell you a little bit about how this bubbles up in my mind. I'm not a researcher by intention or trade, but just because of the lifestyle, the last 15 years have been in and out of, you know, pretty wide variety of kinds of churches. And I tend to do that at a pretty frequent pace. So I'm usually in working with the church team two or three days a week weekly. So I think what's happened is it's just become unmistakable, Carrie, that when we talk, we have a tool we call the kingdom concept and we take churches through a process where we help them answer the question, what can you do better than 10,000 others? And it's about, you know, six to 12 hours of processing time with the leadership team. And we have a really great time with that. And one of the exercises is answering the question about local predicament. What are the trends happening locally? And so I say what's happened is it's just become a given that it's gonna be a primary thread. I mean, it doesn't matter whether your church is 100 people and your, you know, charismatic church doesn't matter whether you're a mainline church running 400 of mega church. I mean, everybody's talking about this thing. And so it just, it's hit my radar and I think it's a, I think it's a very opportunistic pain point. Obviously it is a pain point. And, but I think we, I think we have an opportunity to think perhaps better maybe probe a little bit more some of the deeper questions of our church models, right? Of what I like to encourage church leaders to think about what are the results that we're really after. So challenging what I would say is kind of the functional mission of the church, which many times is about, you know, attendance or other things, not really the disciple making results that we preach. So we would say, for example, that, you know, your disciple making results are more a function of the design of your ministry than they are the intent of your preaching. And so, you know, when all of a sudden, you know, we're dealing with this big disruption of what's happening with attendance patterns, it becomes an opportunity to just to rethink about it. So that's how I've introduced the topic. It may be more clearly it's a, it's a thing that frightens us a little bit and we wanna know what's happening, but how can it actually be an opportunity? That's the provocative question, I think. - Well, I think one of the things that the leaders I talk to struggle with, and I mean, we struggle with this to a certain point is, you know, I always talk about buttons and levers, right? Like if you do this, this'll happen. And if you do that, that'll happen. And some of the things that maybe church leaders have done even five years ago to say, okay, it looks like we're losing a bit of momentum. Let's try this. Let's do a really big series or let's, you know, now let's do a social media campaign or let's do an email campaign or let's really encourage our people to come. They're not proving as effective as they used to. Are you finding that as well that we're pushing buttons and pulling levers, but at the end of the day, the trend continues? - Yeah, absolutely, Kerry. I think that's well said. I'm, you know, working with one church right now. I think they run around 15,000 attendance and, you know, it's been a nice 20, 25 year growth run and this is the first time they're experiencing decline, you know? And it's a big gulp factor when you just, you know, those numbers just don't dial up each year. And I think that, you know, more, I've watched, again, by name of dozen leaders that if you ask them what's happening with attendance, there's an awkward pause because they're still processing for the very first time saying the last 18 months that they want it. They want to say it's, you know, one to 3% growth, but in the back of their mind, they're going, man, we could be actually here negative one to 3%. And they're just dealing with that for the first time as an attractive model. - We had that too. We grew at 6% two years ago, 3 1/2% last year. And I mean, as a leader, that does not excite me. You know, you want to say, you want to add a zero. Hey, no, that was 30% growth or 60% growth. And there have been years, and I think we're going into a great year this year, we're moving, we're changing service times, we're adding a building, that kind of stuff. And so I think it'll be a higher growth year for us. But again, you can't do that every single year and the trend continues. I should clarify too, by saying, you know, buttons to push levers to pull. I don't, you know, I don't want to make it sound like a game. But in the same way that you're parenting, you have a leadership responsibility. There are things you do, right, to teach your kids. And then every once in a while, they hit a new phase and you're kind of like, okay, that doesn't work anymore. - That's right. - I can't, I can't sit them on the timeout chair. They're past that age. Now I need new strategy, and I don't know what my strategy is. And I think that to put a more sophisticated spin on that. - Yeah, and that's a good idea. - We all need the buttons to push and levers to pull, but you're right, the stage changes, something changes and the old things don't work. I like the idea that new levels bring new devils, you know, and you got it. (laughing) - I haven't heard that. That's good. New levels bring new devils, yeah. And it is a universal trend. I think that's a thing that's so surprising. This is like impacting successful mega churches, small churches, it's impacting mainline, evangelical, charismatic, independent. I mean, it doesn't matter where you are. This seems to be a universal trend. So let me ask the next question then. Why is it that even committed church members are attending less? Like is that a discipleship issue? Do you think that we're just getting all watered down? Is it a cultural shift? Like what do you think is happening? What's behind that? - It's so easy, Carrie, to find the voices of, you know, that are speaking to the discipleship or the cultural decline of Christianity. In fact, someone corrected my blog post and tweeted the eight real reasons why, you know, and we have- - That's always fun when that happens, eh? I don't have to know the rest. So the eight real reasons why you were wrong. - The sexual abuse, you know, that happens in churches to, you know, the lack of God's, you know, the Holy Spirit's presence. So, you know, we can, we can talk. So clearly, clearly we are in spiritual warfare and clearly culturally there, you know, there is a greater friction, if you will, or drag, I mean, it is a, there are discipleship, you know, dynamics. But I think it's a really important conversation, not just to put a generic glaze or coat of man, people are just less committed or, you know, in culture. So I don't think- - 'Cause that's what you hear, right? You hear that, like people are just less committed and back in the day, we all used to go to church. And if you really love Jesus, you would- - Exactly, you know, if you start probing, I think there's some very interesting things that we have to pay attention to. And I think the, you know, there's a lot we can share. I think the two that I would bring up are the, the first one is, does a little bit, this one fits a little bit more closely to the spiritual commitment, Carrie. I think every conversation in suburban America, not all of our churches are suburban, but, you know, there's a lot of conversation about the growth of kids' sports. And there have been a lot of changes and growth in the club sports arena. So what's happening, I've worked closely with upward sports. They probably work with, you know, up to 3,000 churches and have, you know, over half a million kids in sports. They've actually dramatically changed their strategy over the last few years to adapt to the fact that parents start their kids younger and extend their kids later. And there's such a gravitational pull to success of children. And the way that impacts, you know, attendance, clearly is unmistakable when you can actually see the numbers of involvement. And anecdotally, everyone has stories. I had one church recently. They, in this local predicament dialogue, they just literally had like 20 interviews at different stages of family development in their church. And the student and children's pastor came in and they were reporting back the average hours that their families are giving. And it was just, I mean, you're talking like 15, 20, 25 hours when you add up, we're in multiple sports. Our kids do music. You look at the extracurricular cumulative time every week and you begin just to feel the burden of the pain of how, you know, how our family's actually pulling this off. So it's a real preoccupation with that. That's one, I think, dominant thread. The, you know, the other. And the other, if we're honest. Now I've been apart, you know, of a, my home church, you know, runs four to 5,000 these days and part of that church for, you know, for since 1998. And at some point, you know, when you go to your first online thing, first online service, I think it was live church TV. And, you know, I, yeah, a long time ago. And, you know, when you do that, you actually can have more engagement through an online, a well done online service than you can a typical mega church in America. That's a, that's a pretty dramatic statement. I don't, it may make, you know, pastors, I think it should make us a little bit uncomfortable. Think about it. Most of our large environments as attraction churches, they're not conducive at all to intimacy connection. We're not trying to build relationships with that, that deal. And so actually when you can get in the chat room, still raise your hand, engage. I remember at, at, at, at life church, I remember just going through the motions. I put a request for something, you know, three days later, I get something in the mail. I mean, I feel more connect. I mean, no, no brick and mortar church ever had that good of a follow up. And I've given a lot of brick and mortar churches over, over, you know, the last 15 years, a lot of reasons opportunity to follow up. I do that as a secret worship or as a consultant carries. So. - Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. You're the secret shopper. - This follow up I've ever had in my life was through an online church experience. So when you look at that, and that's a, you know, specific example, when you look at the fact that what's happened through technology and communication, what we experience on Sunday morning can be delivered digitally. I mean, it has become somewhat of a commodity if I could use that term. If it's divorced or separated from, from, from community. So we, we just gotta, we'll get that as an opportunity in some ways and ask the question, you know, what does this mean for our, for our ministry design? - You know, that's really interesting. I'm glad you mentioned that because a lot of, and online, well, I'm sure we'll get to this in the interview, but online church is definitely, I think, part of the trend when you, when you talk to people. But, but people see online as being very anonymous. And I'm, I'm of two minds on, on church online. We're going to be launching one over the next year at our church. Not a lot of churches in Canada are doing it. So we want to, we want to kind of go there. But, you know, I'm, I'm excited about the front door possibilities of online church, but worried about the back door possibilities of online church personally, just as a pastor. But it can be very personal. I'll give you just a quick example. If you're a podcaster, you might know the names, John Lee Dumas. And I think a lot of people know Tim Ferriss and Tim Ferriss, four hour work week, four hour body, four hour chef, that kind of guy. I was on a webinar with John Lee Dumas and Tim Ferriss. And you got to submit questions. And again, in the chat role, 200 people were allowed on it. I got in and I asked a question. And so John Lee Dumas says, okay, Carrie Newhoff wants to know, Tim Ferriss, how do you blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, whoa, that was, that was like, so highly personal and so amazing. And Tim Ferriss personally answered the question I had, which was great. But like there are possibilities online that just don't exist in mass settings, you're right. - Yeah, that old question that Andy Crouch asked in culture making, what are the horizons of possibility? And the horizons of possibility are underexplored right now for technology in the church. We, there's a lot of chatter in social media, but we haven't really deeply thought about our disciple making results and how apps, how connectivity, how the internet can help us engage those results. And it's a knee-jerk response 'cause we're naturally so, naturally so, worried about eroding the connection to our local church and body of believers. I just look at it the opposite way. The definition and meaning of locality has changed. It has shifted. - Okay. - And so we can play offense with this or we can play defense with this. And 95% of all conversations in the church are playing defense and we're coming from a fear posture. Naturally so, we, I get that. I have the luxury of being out, step back and have the time to think a little bit more from the offensive posture. How can we use tools and, you know, let me get really crass. We can talk about sexting. Is sexting less of an emotional, is sexting less than real? Why would we say, why do we hammer against the fact that this isn't real? Yeah, I'm not condoning sexting. But it's the idea, it's people experience intimacy at a deep level through technology. And that's a human reality. That's not a bad thing. So why aren't we looking at how do we leverage all the opportunities for disciple making results with the same technology? So there's just a lot of horizons of possibility is what I'll say. Clearly care, it's gonna, people are gonna be de-localizing and people are adapting and adjusting. If you look at the growth of virtual work environments, for example, what happens is our, you know, our brain cells have changed, our expectations, our life rhythms have changed. So I am more likely year after year after year to positively engage a church I love, a pastor I love, connectivity to those people. And maybe we can use, I think, you know, you guys are, you know, you have a large group environment, worship experience dynamic on Sunday. Yeah, we do. You're not really trying probably to connect people intimately there anyway. So if it's not a result, it's not a primary objective of that time. We're trying to inspire, we're trying to worship, we're trying to, you know, communicate God's Word. You know, I just would ask the question, if I can get that result and not show up, why wouldn't I want to help thousands of people connect that way? - Some great insights there. I mean, delocalizing, I think that's a real, I haven't heard that phrase, that's a really good way to put it. I mean, even this conversation is an example of that, right? We were talking as we were getting ready. This is the first time we kind of met. And again, it's via video, audio, by the time it hits the podcast. But we've never actually met. We met online a few years ago. You've used some of my writing in your vision room and in Oxano's websites. And I mean, we kind of have mutual circles that we float in, but we kind of know each other without knowing each other, which simply would not have been possible a decade. - That's right. And just as another example, I'm working, you know, with a cohort right now, a personal clarity cohort of about 15 people. I'll work with them for 12 months. I've never met those folks face to face. But at the end of 12 months, I'll be, I'll have a deeper connection to those people and know more about their lives and then probably an average, you know, small group that would meet in someone's home over the same amount of time. - Right. And I think for a lot of churches, for us to, back to your earlier point, yeah, we want to gather people in a space. You know, we want to create a church that unchurch people love to attend. But our primary point of connection is through serving and through community groups. I mean, we have hundreds of people who gather in community groups. We have lots and lots of volunteers who serve at our church. And then we have the big gathering. And even, you know, one of the conversations we're having right now as people attend church less often is, well, what is podcastable and what is not? Like, is there, is there something when people gather that is bigger than just something that you can download or something that you can watch? Is there an experience that happens? Is God actually present differently when you gather in connection with other people than he is in other places? - It's a really interesting question. And I don't think there's a clear answer. - Yeah, I think it is a great question. I would just encourage, I would encourage the playing offense, not just defense with it. Look at it from an abundance mindset, not a scarcity mindset. Let's see what, you know, what is possible out there. Another thought just to throw out there, 25% of white collar workers in North America travel for a living. And so, let me just, you know, probe your thoughts, carry as pastor. There's worship gatherings you connect people through serving and community. Let me throw a curve ball to you. So if I'm in your church and my primary role, my primary vocation, which, you know, happens to be, I think, you know, God calling for me, has me necessarily, you know, a way that I can't connect in the same sorts of ways there. Here's a challenge. - I might connect to your church without feeling like a half committed church member. And here's my answer to that, from just my life, the church doesn't know how to do that anymore. And so the church, it's just a new problem to solve. We haven't had this problem to the same degree. So if I, you know, if I'm traveling a lot, and I'm just gonna see, you know, pastors really study that one pattern, you're gonna see it increasing, that's all. It's how do you help keep me engaged. And another way, another way I would say it is engagement. You can define and measure engagement more than just attendance at programs. So I can be deeply, deeply committed to a group of people, to a local church, to a movement, to a mission, to a value system. I love clear, clear, clear community church. It's my home church. And I'm deeply committed to that place that those people are guiding ideas, our vision in the community. And that is not always measured by whether I show up or not. And so that's just another opportunity. Now, I think we can create tools. I think we can do things. We can even maybe adapt our measurements a little bit to measure that kind of, that commitment. - Do you think, do you think, and I really appreciate what you're saying too, about running offense, not defense? One of the ways we're talking about it, you know, do you fight it or do you fund it? And the losers in history usually fight things. And it's a global shift that's happening. It's a cultural shift that's happening. And I think the creative people fund it. They figure out a way to cooperate with it and to move it forward. So I think that's a really good point. But do you think part of the pushback and part of the fear and part of the defense that a lot of leaders, I think instinctively want to run, comes from the fact that really the primary way we've measured, the paradigm we grew up in, was, you know, we gave out perfect attendance awards for Sunday school when you were kids. And there is for people, and a lot of church leaders were raised in the church, not all of them, but a lot of them were. You know, there was a guilt associated with not attending, that I think is vaporized in our culture. You talk to a lot of people, people who are new to church, and they don't feel guilty about not attending. - Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, from that standpoint, culturally, that's right. There's less to worry about, you know, culturally speaking. I like the way Ed Stetser has talked about, you know, convictional Christians, versus kind of cultural Christians. And then he's even got this kind of congregational Christian. So he divides the bucket into the whole church group into three buckets. And what's clearly happening today is that the number of people who just, you know, who aren't convictional, he says the number of people who are convictional is kind of the same, but the number of people who are gonna attend church out of just that cultural loose association, or the number of people who had a church that they would attend eight to 10 times a year. I mean, that's just kind of off the map now, you know? - Right. - And we've had a lot of that in the last couple of decades in America, we don't anymore. So, yeah, yeah. - So you get to see a lot of churches because of what you do, and you talk about running offense. Let's run with that metaphor. Where have you seen examples of churches doing a great job on offense? - Yeah, you know, the first church that comes to mind is a church called the Cove in Charlotte. And I know those guys are amazing. - Yeah, they are. - I do, I do. Yeah, I spoke to their team last year. Incredible people. - Yeah, they are incredible. And they, you know, they went through our process a couple of years ago and would have said, you know, part of the problem we solve is a general sense of your future is not enough. You really wanna get to a real specific sense of your identity and calling. So they had a great mission, they had some ideals, but they hadn't really framed it up. They had grown to about 4,000 in 10 years. And they would look back now and say, okay, we had a mission, but we really didn't have a vision. We walked through this process, what they were able to do, Kerry, is really crystallize a sense of a picture of where they wanted to go. And one of the beautiful parts about it was the, kind of the dream of what was early on called Church at My Place. And it was a dream of saying, you know, we cannot reach any more people by coming to the big box anymore. What if we injected the living rooms all across our community with little worship communities? And we literally brought the worship experience to the living room. And that would become, they're evolved to a concept where they talk about neighborhood campuses. And they have vision, kind of, you know, the 100 group size, meeting at a Y, meeting at a neighborhood location where you can do church together very granular, or they still, you know, talk about meeting at homes of 10. But as soon as you do that, you just have to reimagine. You can't, they're not necessarily gonna be able to count all that. And it changes the most important thing, but it's the idea of getting the word out, getting the movement out. So that's a very fun idea. And they've taken hold of that very robust vision to, you know, really, I think reach about 40,000 people in the community through a more distributed kind of church. So that would be maybe a more, you know, dramatic example. I'm thinking of-- - We'll link to that in, I don't don't mean to interrupt, but we'll link to that in the show notes. And yeah, it is a really inspiring vision. You should actually go to the show notes, click on that link because they really do like church, they envision, I think it was like 40 campuses in 10 years or five years or something like that. It's a crazy vision. But a lot of that is like, we're gonna launch it in homes, launch it in neighborhoods of like 50 to 100 people. And then there will be some other campuses that meet, as you say, in a box, you know, with a band and the lights and the whole deal. But that could 10x their reach. - Yeah, that's right. - By being innovative that way. - It's a fun vision, Kerry, 'cause you think about it in groups of, it's 40,000 in groups of 10. So it's one campus of 10,000, 10 campuses of a thousand, 100 campuses at 100 and 1,000 campuses of 10, which is pretty cool. - So it's just kind of a distributed, very fun, distributed dynamic, fun picture. - Okay, so that's a great example of somebody running offense rather than just, how do we get more people to show up on the same hour ever? - Yeah, I mean, it's, this is a little bit indirect, but I wanna, it just shows the possibility in a fun way. So Dave Browning's group up there, Christ the King in Seattle, they had a couple, they were doing some training overseas and they noticed that these, it was in Africa, these African pastors had old style cell phones connected to the internet and they're thinking about, you know, they have these training manuals, they have their content they wanna share. Well, they came home and they just decided to distribute to reformat their training in tweet size, you know, soundbites. Same training, just delivered through 140 character messages and they realized that we can train people in Africa through over Twitter every hour of the day, not just when we spend thousands of dollars, burn, you know, hundreds of gowns of fuel, get on a jumbo jet and it's just thinking, that's just fun, okay? Are we not trying to stand people going to Africa, but let's, you know, they just reformat their leadership training. So these, all kinds of, you know, horizons of possibility that are new. You think of the amount of hours that goes into a sermon prep and maybe the extra content, all the stories, all the accountability or training options, you know, that just happened around a body of God's word where we're bringing out application and why not just exploit that and, you know, utilize all the technology that we have to go deeper with people seven days a week, you know, in and around the inspirational, great teaching you get during that, that 30-minute message, for example. So just great opportunities to leverage the content. - Well, I'm glad you mentioned that. I mean, in terms of social media, I think most listeners who are involved in the local church would say, yeah, my church at some level has a social media presence or at least a website and a lot of podcasts and, you know, Twitter accounts, Facebook, Instagram accounts and so on. Do you think that's a real possibility of like expanding the frontiers of the church, both in terms of evangelism, but also in terms of discipleship, like what potential do you see with online venues? - Yeah, I think that the idea of digital, the pastor of a digital engagement is gonna be an increasingly important idea. I'm not, you know, I'm not thinking about it all the time, but when I run into, you know, examples, it's stunning. You know, a church, you know, buying, you know, search terms to intercept and bring the gospel to men who are searching for porn, for example. - Right. - And all of a sudden now, I'm using digital space, virtual space as a way to bring the gospel to a very specific point of need or moment of need. You know, so you talk from a digital evangelism standpoint, I know there are paratrooch organizations and people come to Christ every day because of the presence online with that. Two, I believe, again, just what I'm finding, you know, unintentionally almost through the necessity of a consulting network of people who we won't, we don't have the time to meet face-to-face. In other words, what could a small group look like? Not by trying to, we're not trying to, don't look at it as trying to replace face-to-face meaning to try to enhance support, how to create more consistent engagement through an app. You know, through stuff we are already using like Facebook and Twitter, but through specialized things that help us connect, help us, you know, accountability, whatever it is that we're trying to achieve as disciples. - Yeah, I like your word engagement. That's a phrase that's coming up around our leadership table at Kinexis where I serve and also with some of the other leaders that I dialogue with regularly. You know, the goal is to actually see people engaged in their faith and I think when you're not in the room that can happen and sometimes you can be disengaged in the room, I mean, that's happened before too. So, you know, one of the ways we're thinking of social media and our online presence is, you know, in a traditional paradigm a decade ago, I mean, you saw people on a Sunday, maybe you saw them midweek for a program or a small group or something like that, but that was it. You only had like one or two touch points a week, max. Now with social media, you can impact people's lives daily, sometimes two or three times a day in a really meaningful way that keeps them connected to God. So I think that's good. And, you know, a great example of ministries that are pioneering. You mentioned, you know, to the whole porn industry and people involved in porn, episode 14 of this podcast, we had Ryan Russell from triplexchurch.com and they're doing an unbelievable job of helping both sex industry workers and people who are addicted to porn find freedom. And that's all digital. I mean, you know, they have a few real life events, but that's happening. So online can be a definite thing. I know some churches that have actually shut down their internet campuses because it's competing within the box church attendance. Any thoughts on that? - Well, I think the most practical thing with attendance, you know, obviously we're gonna get that down to the money question and giving. So I think if we're playing offense, we've got to, if we're gonna play offense at all, what has to leave the offensive play is helping people make sure we're using every tool possible, levers and buttons to make giving accessible and make giving practical. So, you know, I tend to give in big chunks. I don't, I don't, and so, you know, how do people are like, well, you can give them my church then, if that's true. - I mean, yeah, I mean, I don't, you don't have a regular. - I know what you mean. - I know what you mean. - Like how quickly can I go? How quickly can I dial up your church and just, you know, to give online? How are we bringing, how are we using social media just to remind people of all the things we would typically do in our campaigns and preaching on giving and just getting that out there? So I think you've got to make sure, not making it more difficult to give if we start playing offense in other ways out there. Yeah, in some ways it breaks my heart that we're not, we're not advancing in that space because the culture is period. So that, I think in terms of that, be creative and take the risk versus, you know, do a refuge thing. I think the digital frontier is one that we must experiment with, go into it and play offense with. You know, one quick illustration, Carrie, that I would share to make it less about digital and more about disciple making results. And just to give a little, little example of that, I, you know, if one of the results we want in the lives of our people is deep biblical community. We can ask two questions that, you know, very different kinds of questions. I can ask the question, are you in a small group? And I can ask the question, how many 2 a.m. friends do you have? And what, what I think the, that's a great question. The purpose, or, you know, you have fun with it. You know, how many people have refrigerator rights in my life? How many adults will be up in the, will man see in his house without knocking and opening the refrigerator without asking permission? And the point, Carrie, is if you just take it out of the digital space for a minute, the point is this, this very commonly, it's an inconvenient problem. People come to our church less. Oh crap, what, you know, what's happening? Even for, for you, I think, and we've talked about this, this idea of grow towing. I mean, you can, you have more people, I think use the word cumulative in that. There's more people who connect to connect us cumulatively, but less that show up at any given time. Well, we got, we're growing, but are, so that's all great. So here, here, it's just a question I asked church leaders. If we're only asking, do you come to group, we're not actually measuring the discipleship output, we're measuring an input. The purpose of group always was and is, I don't think Jesus draws the line of biblical community of being involved once a week, you know, two hours and someone's, you know, house. It's obviously biblical communities deeper than that. And we can ask questions that reveal deeper levels of engagement. So does my church only care about whether I'm in a small group, yes or no, check the box? Or do they care about, you know, the, you know, the depth of quantity of to an imprint? But you can ask that question to Will Mancini on a survey and you can track your, the mission progress, the disciple making progress of a church with questions other than attendance based things. And, you know, just like you guys have clear strategies and environments and you have five faith catalysts. And when you ask a faith catalyst question as a North Point partner, you're getting to the result or the outcome of why the church exists, not a means or strategic programming means to that greater end. - So that's a really interesting question. Do you think some of the problems are just simply metrics? I mean, the way, let's just be honest, the way a lot of church leaders measure their self-esteem is when the stats are up and to the right, we feel better about ourselves. And when stats are down and to the left, we don't feel so good anymore. You know, we want it, we want to see trends that are positive and maybe we're a little bit too addicted to that and you said something, again, I've never heard anybody say before, which I think is really interesting. We are programmed to measure input. Like, okay, we have, you know, 962 people in groups or we have 92 people in groups. But we don't measure output. Like how do you, how do you measure output? Is that even possible or what are some of the things? If we're going to play offense with this and I mean, I don't think you have to measure everything. And I think for sure, some things can't be measured. They're qualitative, not necessarily quantitative, but how would a church begin to look and say, okay, we're still having an impact. We're still making a difference. What are some of the metrics we should be looking for in this new paradigm? - Oh man, there's thousands of them, Carrie. And that's part of the, you know, part of my primary work is working with the church to develop a lot of times for the first time. What are the result? What are our disciple making outcomes that we want? Again, we validate the mission with good intentions because we preach, love, God, love others. But we never measure that. I would say that is highly measurable. And so we've got to combat our initial resistance to that. It's very measurable. When we say qualitative, quantitative, one very helpful metaphor is to take off the scientific method hat and put on the judicial method hat. So today, all across the world, all across our country, we validate truth. We validate historical fact to be true or not through judicial method, which involves testimony. And verdicts are issued today, guilty, innocent. We determine fact based on testimony. And that's what we do is if we are making disciples, we make one big assumption. We can actually ask people meaningful questions and they can give meaningful answers. And if that is true, then we can measure anything. A couple of things, the obstacles to the output mindset are very simple. One is very basic clarity, baseline clarity. Most churches have never defined the disciple their church is trying to produce. They've never actually named it. And if you haven't named it yet, you probably are running less than 50%, optimum performance if a manufacturing company hasn't named this technical specifications of whatever it is they're trying to make, it's probably not being made very well. - And I know, forgive my manufacturing analogy there. That's not what the church is about, but it. - Yeah, and so we measure input. Well, there's 317. So that must be better than 314, right? But we haven't really paid attention to the quality. - All everyone knows at the end of the day is, I asked this question ever. Is it possible for someone to come to the next 10 years and be a part of everything your church offers and not really grow with Jesus? - And that's a great question. - It's a starting point to say, okay, we know, we know that there is a difference between input and output. And we can begin to talk about that. So the first barrier is the definition barrier. So that's a very easy to address. Every team I work with, within five minutes, an individual could write down a very basic good definition of what it means to father Jesus. The breakthrough clarity comes when we as a team share that definition. I mean, that's what we really wanna have. Now, the second barrier is what I call carry the comprehensiveness barrier. We cannot not engage the question because we'll never know someone's spiritual state comprehensively. We won't, we're not God, we never will. - No. - Here's the idea, we will never know it comprehensively, but we can know it truly. We can ask a meaningful question and get meaningful answers. And we can ask those questions consistently over time to really mark progress. To give you an example of one church that's close to me is we talk about our top five. Our top five is what we use to describe whether we have identified five people in our life who are far from God that we pray for on a regular basis, a daily basis. I can't communicate how powerful it is. My second son went off to college this year, Kerry. And so he's about four or five hours away. And he's checking in, we're checking in eight or nine weeks into it. And we're doing a little check in. And one of the things my son said to me goes, "Dad, I've got my new top five." I call him. - Oh, that's amazing. - And how on God's green earth is it possible for an 18 year old kid to fire off the college and to be that intentional about his walk with Jesus that he's living on mission for Jesus? And here's what I wanna tell pastor, Kerry, that is not because we have better teachers at our church. That is not because Will Manstein is a better dad. I guarantee you that. That is because something very humble, very simple, Joel grew up in a community of people who talked about outputs and measured outputs and we trained to outputs. And that's value. That's an outcome. And when you're engaging and providing that kind of value to people, attendance has a way of taking care of itself. And when you can measure top five, clear community church can put points on the board for Joel. He's still doing the top five out there. They could serve at that and be getting great results. You geographically can't be attending their church right now, but he's living on mission and having a fruitful life. So I just, I wanna give hope to pastors. - Yeah. - That you could actually have dramatic disciple making results and not have that dramatic up into the right attendance dynamic. That's a pretty wild and crazy idea. Could I go for a year to church, get incremental attendance growth? But what happens if I actually ask the question, how many times a week are you meaningfully engaging God's work? And on average, the national average is that 22% of churchgoers say they engage God's word every day. So what happens, what happens if we let a community of a thousand people carry in one year, where 50% of those people engage God's word every year? Would that be a worthwhile outcome to give our lives to for a year? That's spiritual life outcome. And could we celebrate that? Could we celebrate that? And hey, it wasn't an input result. So forgive me, I'm rambling kind of it on this input output thing. - No, this is good. This is good. - It's a fun opportunity to start thinking. - And I think what's really helpful about this discussion well, just as I can't, I can't believe the times gone so quickly, but one of the things that's so helpful about this discussion is I think like a lot of the conversations I've had with all kinds of church leaders, small church leaders, mega church leaders and everybody in between, as we've talked about this sort of behind the scenes, is when the ground is moving as radically as it is, there's no clear front runner. Like, you know, we've measured attendance for so long as a, you know, and not everybody buys into that as being a reliable indicator of anything. But, you know, we've measured it so long, when all of a sudden it doesn't tell us what we think we wanna hear, nobody's really sure about what's happening and the culture is changing very quickly. So it's hard to know, there's no super fast answer as to what to do, but let's leave it there. Last question for you and then we'll talk a little bit about how people can get in touch with you and you've got an idea about how something you'd like to give away as well that I don't wanna miss, but if somebody, if they're just waking up to this conversation or in the middle of it right now, what are one or two things that you think a leader could do to say, okay, this would be a helpful step in a new direction toward greater engagement of the gospel 'cause I think at the end of the day, that's what unites us all who are listening to this. So what's one or two practical things that people measure outputs, I think is really good? What's another thing? - Yeah, I think defining outputs maybe for the first time, how would we define that? I would encourage church leaders to think about two things related to that, you know, how are we adding value, not just creating more venues? So how do we create, how do I create more connectivity to the content of my sermon throughout the week? How do I create more value? One of the ways to create more value is by creating a tool, not just preaching. So if I'm preaching on prayer, I create a tool and I give a tool away, or I have a backdoor on a website and I create a level of engagement, you know, I have 10 minutes further of training, you know, work with the church called Faith Bridge and, you know, they do a nice 10, 15 minute follow-up to every sermon and the pastor gives further thoughts, further integration, further application. So there's an immediate step beyond just what you heard. That just creates more value, you know, around that particular venue or event. And I think the general perspective of moving from being teaching centers to training centers, you know, how, if you look at how adding value, an output orientation, and then becoming a training center, not a teaching center, great teaching is gonna be a, it is a commodity today. I don't need to go to church for the next year. You know that 'cause 50% of your messages that connect us are Andy Stanley, right? Communicating, preaching. So it's a delocalized, you know, delivery of that. So the opportunity there is how do we, that gives you more leadership bandwidth to create more tools and create more value around the content that Andy is delivering virtually. I think that's a huge opportunity there. So this gives you, how do we create value? How do we measure outputs? How do we do training? I would say this, training will never be a commodity. If you're helping people develop new life outcomes, new patterns, if there's modeling, training, evaluation, accountability around anything new that we wanna do for the life of following Jesus, that can't be replaced. - That's true, teaching will be a commodity, but training never can be. That's really, really good. Okay, I think that's helpful. Now, people are gonna wanna connect with you, people are gonna wanna learn more about you, and again, you can go to the show notes, but tell us about where to find you, and then you had an offer as well for everybody who's listening. - Yeah, Kerry, well, you guys can find me at willmancini.com, and you can learn a little bit more about Oxano, at oxano.com, so that's A-U-X-A-N-O.com, but you can obviously hop there for my blog. What I've done, I wrote a little book called Innovating Discipleship, and it's a great tool for that team conversation about results and output. And so, I think it has some challenging things, it has some very practical kind of group things you can do, and I've got a PDF of the first several chapters of that, so it's a pretty quick, I think, engaging read, and so that'll be available to listeners if they wanna-- - Okay, we'll put that in the show notes, so we'll make sure you head over there. Well, that's very generous of you, thank you. - Hey, well, thank you, Kerry. I'm a huge fan of what you're doing through Connectsys, love your content, appreciate your strong thinker who loves the church and wants to bless church leaders, and I'm just delighted to be connected and to have this little time together today, so thank you. - Well, it's been incredible, thanks so much, Will. Well, that was challenging, and that was awesome. First of all, thank you so much, Will, for giving us those free chapters of your book available for download. You can just go to the show notes, kerrynewhough.com/episode23, and pick them up there, as well as some insights from the interview, and a link to some of the blog articles I've been writing about this whole issue of when people attend church attend less often, so you can find those all in the show notes. And I was really challenged by what Will had to say. I loved his point about church leaders playing offense, not just defense, because I think what happens when you build up a church, and then, you know, suddenly you see things shifting in the culture, the temptation is probably to play defense, and I thought his point about playing offense was really good, and again, you can drill down on some of the practical aspects of what that looks like in the show notes. Next week, we come back, and I'm talking to David Kinemann, episode 24, and we are gonna talk about why people are attending church less, period. And he's got a new book with George Barna from the Barna Group, they are both part of that organization. It's called Churchless, and David shares some really fascinating insights on why church attendance is falling off a cliff, what you can do about it, and what some of the shifts in the culture are all about. So again, this is sort of like a two-parter this episode, next episode, so if you're interested in the subject, I'm super excited about next week. That'll be live next Tuesday, and again, you can get that on iTunes if you do the simple thing of subscribing for free. If you haven't subscribed yet to the podcast, just hit the big button that says subscribe, and then boom, they're in your inbox every single Tuesday, and for everybody who continues to leave ratings and reviews, thank you, thank you so much. Thanks again to the Orange Conference for sponsoring this episode, it's awesome, and I really, really hope you get down to the Orange Conference at the end of April. Again, you've got a couple days left on the special discount, just for podcast listeners, go to the orangeconference.com/seniorleader and enter this code OC15CNpodcast to get the entire conference for cheaper than you can get it anywhere else, but that expires February 19th, so OC15CN podcast is your code, and you can access that at the orangeconference.com/seniorleader. Thanks so much for listening today, I hope it's really helped you lead like never before, can't wait for next week, we'll talk to you then. - You've been listening to the "Carry Newhof Leadership" podcast. Join us next time for more insights on leadership, change and personal growth to help you lead like never before. (upbeat music) [MUSIC PLAYING]