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The church is growing fast right now. They're not doing more. Hey, it's Rich Burch here from Unseminary and I have spent 20 plus years in the front row seat to what's actually working inside growing churches. And here's what I just keep seeing. They've made invite normal every day expected. Not a special sermon series. A culture. If your big days spike and then everything settles back to where it is, that's the gap. And I want to help you close it. So on Tuesday, May 12, I'm hosting a free workshop called the Invite Culture Audit. You'll leave with a scorecard, a 90 day blueprint of your next step, actions and answers to your specific situation in a live Q and A. The link's in the show notes or go to unseminary.com friends I want to help you build your invite culture. That's on Tuesday, May 12th. Look for the links in the show notes or go to unseminary.com okay, picture this. It's the year 2000 and you're at a psychology lab at Cornell University in you're about to ruin a college student's life. A researcher. You hand that undergrad a T shirt and asks them to put it on. The student unfolds it and what is staring back at them? Barry Manilow. Not vintage cool Barry Manilow. Not ironic Barry Manilow. Just Barry Manilow. The kind of shirt that would get you roasted by your roommate before you even made it out the door. The student puts it on anyways. Well, this is science after all. And is told to walk into a room where a group of peers are already seated. Before they open the door, the researcher asks a simple question. How many people in that room do you think will notice your T shirt? This is a fascinating study. It's called the Spotlight Effect and it's a foundational psychological sociological study. The student thinks about it. They walk into the room and it feels like they're wearing the equivalent of a kick me sign. They predict that about half of the room will notice. They walk in, they sit down the entire they endure a few minutes of low grade social agony. Then the research pulls them out of the room and surveys the room. The actual number? Roughly 1 and 4. The student had overestimated by a factor of 2. They thought twice as many people would recognize this terrible teacher than actually did. The really fascinating thing comes next. When the researcher replaced Barry Manilow with the T shirt they wanted to wear. Bob Marley. Martin Luther King. The gap blew open wide. The students still predicted about half the room would notice, but the real number dropped to 1 and 10. A 6 to 1 overestimation. When the message was positive rather than embarrassing, people paid less attention. Psychologists, they call this the spotlight effect. We anchor our own vivid internal experience and dramatically overestimate how much other people are paying attention to us. And that is true with your church and with my church, when we attempt to communicate to them. When we talk about inviting someone to come to something at church, you put out a newsletter you mentioned in the staff meeting for the last month, but it feels like you've been breathing the drum constantly. But here's what the research suggests. Your church has barely registered a beat. And that's not that they don't care. It's not that they're not interested. It's because human beings simply don't absorb messages the way that communicators, the way you and I assume they do. The encouraging news is that the gap between where your church is right now and a genuine invite culture momentum may be smaller than it feels. Your people listen. We know they love the church. That's why they come. That's why they're a part of your church. They're engaged, they're already in the room. But we need to be fostered, more persistent in our encouragement, our training and equipping around inviting people. And in fact it's by a factor of maybe as much as 10 to 1. The difference between stuck and stagnant and growing churches is this. Growing churches persistently train, equip and motivate their people to invite their friends. They don't do it once a quarter, they don't do it just at Christmas and Easter and maybe Mother's Day. They do it all year long. There's a lesser known study from Stanford that might be the single most uncomfortable data point for anyone who communicates for a living. You and me researcher Elizabeth Newton asked people to tap out the rhythm of a well known songs on the table while the listener tried to identify what is true. Now the interesting thing, the tappers, the people tapping on the table, they said the listeners would get it about 50% of the time. They were doing simple songs like Happy birthday to you or Hot Cross Buns, this kind of thing, sports songs that people know. The actual success rate was 2.5%. That is a 20 to 1 gap between what the communicator heard in their head and what the audience actually received. This actually is happening at your church every single week. A Pastor spends maybe 20 hours on a sermon and it's full, it's a full symphony of meaning and nuance and application. This congregation hears a series of disconnected taps on the table. XP Pastor did a survey but about 200 leaders a couple years ago where they estimated that leaders estimated that 44% of people had forgotten the message by Monday and a whopping 94% by Wednesday. Church communication practitioners People that are thinking about communicating to your people consistently run into the same problem. People approach them after six weeks of announcing something, asking about the thing that they've been talking about for the last six weeks. If 94% of your congregation has forgotten this week's sermon by midweek, what happened to the invitation challenge you made three Sundays ago? The honest answer is that it has evaporated. And that's not then that's not a reason for despair. It's a reason to lean in harder and be more consistent than you thought you needed to be. And listen, we know that the channels are working against you. Facebook's organic reach has absolutely collapsed from an embarrassingly low 16% in 2012 to approximately 1.2 to 1.65% in 2025. A church with what does that mean? A church with 10,000 followers reaches roughly 130 to 165 people per post. Instagram not much better. It sits at about 3.5, and some studies show that it dropped another 30 or 40% last year. In 2025 alone, a church that posts once on Facebook and once on Instagram and considers their communication done has reached at best, maybe 5% of their online followers. Listen, email is, by me, by all means the killer app for communication still in most of your churches. But a recent study of about 91,000 church emails saw that the open rate was about 30%, which is way higher than what we just talked about there. But that means that 70% of your people are not seeing your thing that you just sent in an email. What does this mean? What is the takeaway? It means that a single mention in a single channel will barely register in your community. Repetition isn't annoying. It's how trust is built. There's this study that's done. It's called the mere exposure effect. It first demonstrated 1968 and it's been repeated multiple times. There was a meta analysis study done in 2017 that looked at what is called mirror exposure. This idea of simply getting a message in front of people repeatedly actually ultimately changes outcomes. People are more willing to take action on that thing. We've got to expose people to. In this case, inviting. We've got to come in front of them time and time again. You know the old marketing rule, I like to call it the rule of 7. 11. 7 contacts in 11 days. You've got to be in front of people consistently is what was originally birthed in the movie industry when they were advertising movies in the 1930s. In 2025, there was a study that's done that found because of this distracted nature of the people that we serve, it's probably close. It's more to 29 rather than 7. We've got to get in front of people repeatedly with this messages. Your church needs far more than a single announcement or a single Instagram post to shift their behavior towards invitation. I know what you're saying. I know what you're saying, but we don't want to annoy people. But you know what? What we found time and time again in studies and you can click the link below, check out the show notes. There are time and time again that people have a much higher tolerance for what we're sending them than what we think as communicators. In fact, actually unsubscribe rates go down as you send more emails to people. Actually, the more you're in front of people, the less likely they are to unsubscribe for what you're doing. In light of everything that we just talked about, what are growing churches actually doing differently? Listen, if all this research makes one thing unavoidable, it's that shifting the invite culture at your church requires consistent, persistent, long term pressure across a full breadth of the church's life. Growing churches don't mention inviting 1/4 or during a sermon series on evangelism. They weave it into everything. In fact, I like to call it the five years of invite culture. And there are these five areas that we see time and time again that church leaders reach out and are communicating with their people to invite their friends. Charitable weekend teaching is the biggest leverage. When your teaching is the kind of thing that your people want to talk about at lunch on Sunday and on Monday morning, you create raw material for invitation. Eventful big days are not the strategy on their own, but they serve as a training ground for invitation. Easter, back to school, Christmas. These are cultural moments that you should be building invite around captivating online conversations. Turn your digital presence into from a broadcast channel into a relational bridge. Social media that's built around genuine conversation rather than promotion. It's about having conversation online. Magnetic community service gets your people out of their seats and into the streets to make a difference in your communities. Churches that serve their communities together in a way that invites people to be a part of it are incredibly magnetic, appealing Volunteer experience maybe the most underestimated gear People who serve invite. People who love to serve love to invite. So the Barry Manilow spotlight effect is at play in your church and I want to help you understand which of your gears is stuck so that you can take a step forward in inviting. If any of this research resonated, if you read the tapping point tapping study and thought that's exactly what's happening with our invite message. We're talking to people about inviting, but they're not actually doing it, then the next step isn't simply to just communicate more. What we want to do is actually help you understand where you're at. And so we're hosting a free online workshop. It's called the Invite Culture Audit Workshop and it's coming up on Tuesday, May 12th at 12 noon Eastern, 9am for our friends on the Pacific coast. And it'll walk you through a practical scorecard around these five years to help you diagnose exactly where you're at. But more than that, it'll give you some steps that you can take this spring that will help you accelerate into the fall and later into 2026. You'll walk away to be able to start acting immediately. Check the link below for more information. We would love to see you there at the Invite Culture Audit Workshop. Thanks so much friends. Your people listen. They love your church. They're already in the room. With the right systems and sustained encouragement, training, equipping, motivating, they're closer to becoming a church full of inviters than you think. Let's figure out what's keeping those gears from turning. We'll see you on May 12th.