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unSeminary Podcast
From Attenders to Engaged Disciples: Building Ownership in Your Church in 2026 with Kayra Montañez
00:37:42
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- [00:00]
Kyra Montanez
The best way that I can explain this is with a gaming analogy, because I have teenagers and they love gaming. So if you go back to when we used to play Mario Brothers, you remember Mario Brothers? Mario?
- [00:13]
Rich
Sure, yeah.
- [00:14]
Kyra Montanez
Prescribed path where if you did not follow the path, at some point Mario would die. Like, if you stay behind and the camera kept moving, the character would die. You remember that?
- [00:25]
Rich
Yes, yes.
- [00:26]
Kyra Montanez
And that's the way that a lot of churches even today, approach helping people connect. There is a prescribed right path for you, and we're going to tell you what you need to do and what you have to do. Then Zelda came into the scene and Zelda is like, hey, choose your own adventure. You can start your adventure anywhere you want. And so I feel like Liquid, we've shifted in that we used to be Mario Brothers. Like, hey, here's a prescribed path for you. Here's all the things that you have to do to connect. Whereas now we've shifted over the past two years into like, hey, we have a lot of things that we can offer you. And there are many different things depending on your season of life, on your felt needs, on what you're looking for, on what you're interested in, on what makes your heart beat.
- [01:13]
Podcast Host/Intro
Growth, pressure, staffing questions, facility decisions, and the emotional weight of leading teams. That's the world executive pastors are navigating right now. Today on the Unseminary Podcast, we're sitting down with an executive pastor from a prevailing church to unpack what leaders like you shared in the national executive pastor survey so you can lead forward with clarity.
- [01:41]
Rich
Hey, friends, welcome to the Unseminary podcast. We've got a special episode on today where we're diving into some of the results from the national executive pastor survey. And today we're super excited to have Kyra Montanez with us from Liquid Church in New Jersey. And today we're talking all about engagement. One of the things that jumped out, well, one of the top tier results kind of concerns that came out. 10% of executive pastors in the open questions expressed fear around discipleship depth and volunteer sustainability. At the same time, nearly 12% said they lacked really visibility into participation and involvement data. Another 6% pointed specifically to volunteer and team metrics really being an unmet need, not knowing where they are. So what does that all that mean? Roughly one and five executive pastors are entering 2026 this year wondering really how engaged their churches. And Kyra's going to solve all that for us. Tell us about Liquid. Tell us a little bit about the Church.
- [02:44]
Kyra Montanez
Well, I appreciate the vote of confidence, but I'm not sure about that. But Rich, it's always so great to be with you and to be a guest on your podcast. Thank you so much for having me. So yes, we are in New Jersey, so our church is called Liquid. I get the incredible privilege of serving there as one of, of two executive pastors. And we are a multi site church. We have six campuses. If you know anything about New Jersey, one of them is the furthest one is in Princeton, New Jersey. A lot of people know Princeton. And then probably the closest one that we have up north is closest to New York City, about 30 minutes from the city. So that kind of gives you the breadth and width of how we're trying to saturate the state of New Jersey with the gospel of Jesus Christ. That is our mission.
- [03:24]
Rich
So good. And Kyra, I really appreciate you jumping in on, on today's conversation, particularly in this area, because I think, Ben, you're going to have so much to offer. You know, so many of our churches, we feel like the volunteer pipelines are thin. How are we getting, it's like people are underutilized. Maybe our, our follow up process are like overly complex. And you've done a great job on, on this area. So let's just jump, jump right in. Where do you see some of the biggest gaps today in churches? Whether it's Liquid or other churches, you interact between, you know, getting people to attend church attendance and actual engagement. There's a gap there. What, what's driving that? What do you, what do you think drives that gap in our churches?
- [04:03]
Kyra Montanez
So I see a couple of things, but before I get to that, you know, I just really wanted to start with something really encouraging because it's not in my nature to be discouraging. So one of the things that I have noticed, in fact, I was actually spending some time with other pastors from other states in the US and we were talking about like, hey, what is the Lord doing in the, in the big C church? What are you experiencing? And one of the things I think that was a theme for all of us is it feels like we don't have to work as hard to get people to come and be ready for what the Lord has for them. And that feels very exciting. And that's like a theme that I'm seeing repeated across the entire nation with all of my pastor friends from different locations. Having said that, there are still things that we have to do to get people from going to just attending to engaging. Like you were saying, I Think there's a couple of things that I saw. One of them is a big one, I would say is like this idea of attending versus belonging, right? So like, first people actually want to come, but they don't actually join people systems. So they come in person, they come online, but they don't actually join any kind of people system. So when I say people system, I'm thinking about groups or dream teams, a support group, a class. That's actually something that we started seeing a lot post pandemic, and I would say it's still here. So that's one gap that I see. The second gap that I see is digital versus relational. So obviously we at Liquid have spent a lot of in, we've invested a lot in our digital ministry, and we really believe online and in person can both thrive at the same time, and we're seeing that. However, online services, while they can remove barriers, which is good, it also helps people stay anonymous unless there's a clear bridge for those people to actually join in person community. And so churches that haven't figured out well how to do that will continue to see a gap between people who are attending, whether it's in person or online, but not actually engaging. There's also the people who just come for big events. Right. We're approaching one of them even as we film this podcast. Next week is Christmas Eve, so we joke, at Liquid, we have the CEOs. They come for Christmas, Easter, and other big events, but they don't actually have a weekly rhythm of attending and engaging. And then there's people who I would say are curious about serving and for the most part are open to helping, but are not really ready to make a serving commitment and actually take on a very consistent role. So I would say across the breadth and width of churches, that's probably something that would hit most people no matter where you are. Definitely we experience all of them at Liquid.
- [06:56]
Rich
Yeah, I, I, well, there's a lot there, which I appreciate, and I appreciate the way you've kind of diagnosed. I think there's multiple ways to kind of diagnose or kind of pick apart. Hey, here are different aspects here or different ways that we're seeing this kind of attendance versus engagement question. So maybe, you know, pick apart those attending versus belonging. What has Liquid done? What are you doing to try to help move people from just attending, actually getting into those people systems? What does that, what are you learning on that front?
- [07:25]
Kyra Montanez
Yeah, you know, we've had a major shift at Liquid, I would say, in the past two years, the best Way that I can explain this is with a gaming analogy, because I have teenagers and they love gaming. So if you go back to when we used to play Mario Brothers. You remember Mario Brothers? Mario?
- [07:44]
Rich
Sure, yeah.
- [07:45]
Kyra Montanez
Prescribed path where if you did not follow the path, at some point Mario would die. Like if you stay behind and the camera kept moving, the character would die. You remember that?
- [07:55]
Rich
Yes, yes.
- [07:56]
Kyra Montanez
And that's the way that a lot of churches even today approach helping people connect. There is a prescribed path for you and we're going to tell you what, what you need to do and what you have to do. Then Zelda came into the scene and Zelda is like, hey, choose your own adventure. You can start your adventure anywhere you want. And so I feel like Liquid, we've shifted in that we used to be Mario Brothers. Like, hey, here's a prescribed path for you. Here's all the things that you have to do to connect. Whereas now we've shifted over the past two years into like, hey, we have a lot of things that we can offer you. And there are many different things depending on your season of life, on your felt needs, on what you're looking for, on what you're interested in, on what makes your heart beat. Tell us what you want to do and we're going to help you. And so in order for us to understand what is it that people want, we created an event that we do every month called Connect and Conversation. The whole idea and the way that we market it is if you're new to Liquid or if you're not new, but you haven't connected yet, you haven't found your people, you haven't found something that you want to be a part of of. Come to this event, we feed you, we get to know you, and then we follow up personally with you. It's very high level concierge, kind of a follow up system where after we connect with you, we ask you, hey, what are you actually interested in? What are you looking for? Because your needs as an empty nester who's been married for over 25 years, you're parenting. Adult children who are already married are very different than mine who have two teen, two have two teenagers. One of them is about to go to college, right? And so that has actually produced incredible fruit from getting people who are attending now. I've actually offered them something they're interested in which is making connections with people. And then from there we follow up to offer what do you need. And everybody has different needs. Some people just want to join teams because they're Just like I just want to serve some people. They really just need a lot of care and so maybe they need a support group. And we're going to offer that to you. Some people may need marriage mentoring. We're going to offer that to you. So it really depends and what we've seen is people taking significant next steps once they out of that event. And that has really changed the past. In the past we would only be marketing teams and groups, rolling relationship join, you know, get into a role and connect with a relationship. And while that's still good, I'm not saying that's not good or not needed. Right. It's not the only thing that people are looking for.
- [10:35]
Rich
Yeah, that's interesting. Can we. I'd love to dive just a little deeper on that because I think there's a really key learning there for lots of us, this idea and you didn't say it this way, but where my brain went to, you know, I think we have, we have for sure in the past on the thing where it's like we have these giant funnels that we're pushing everyone through. And the only question we're really asking is where do you fit in our funnel? Like where, you know, and we, and we push and literally. And this is no, you know, kind of slam on other systems. But it's like this is the, you know, step one, step two, step three. Everyone do step one first, then you do step two, then you do step three. So the, the connect and conversation that feels like highly like it's volunteer intensive. You got to get a lot of volunteers in there because it sounds like you're having one on one conversations or something close to one on one unpack what that looks like. Maybe as a guest, if I arrive at that, what do I actually experience when I show up there?
- [11:31]
Kyra Montanez
So you, you can register up until the time that we have the event. So we do magical math with the food and the preparation so that we can just accept people who are going to come on the day of because we promote it obviously every week and then the day of we actually promote it. We get most people to show up the day of the event. Right. So people will come, there's going to be a lunch and then they're going to sit at a table with about five other people who have a facilitator at that table. And that facilitator is actually going to lead them through a series of relational icebreakers. Because the event is designed for you to first connect, you want to meet other people who are just like you maybe they're new or they're not new, but they haven't connected yet with somebody. And so there's going to be a lot of relational icebreakers at, you know, during the first part of the event and then after that we get into like, hey, what are you looking for? What are you hoping to get out of? What do you need? What are you interested in? We make notes. That facilitator takes really good notes based on what people are saying and then the follow up begins.
- [12:33]
Rich
That's so cool. I love that. That's what a great learning. You know, I think so many times we've seen that step and for sure I've. That echoes what I've seen in a number of churches. There's really a trend away from the class being the first step. It's like the stand that we used to do that thing where it was like, okay, someone stands up at the front and they're going to talk for 50 minutes about why we're such a great church. And you know, that really has gone away. I would, I would echo that, that we've seen that as a, as a best practice.
- [13:01]
Kyra Montanez
We do. Oh, sorry, I was say we measure the activity of everyone who goes to connect in conversation and what they.
- [13:08]
Rich
Oh, that. Tell me about that.
- [13:09]
Kyra Montanez
And so there's how we say it at Liquid is it's correlation, not causation. Like, I can't prove that if you go to this event, your next steps were a direct result of this event. But we can correlate that because you came to the event, you actually took these next steps, if that makes sense. So we've seen tremendous, tremendous engagement grow because of that.
- [13:30]
Rich
And that's on Sundays. You do it on campus after the last service, that sort of thing.
- [13:34]
Kyra Montanez
Yes, every month at every campus after the last service. We promote it up till the day of the event and we do it rain or shine, whether it's five people or 10 or 50. Obviously at our largest location, sometimes we have about a hundred people show up every month to these events.
- [13:52]
Rich
That's great. I love that. That's great. You're coming in hot, Kyra. Great learnings, you know, with friends. We've got through the first question, so yeah, and we're, you know, it's fantastic. So one of the, one of the things I'd love to hear a little bit about, you know, that when we look in the data, people's anxiety, there's, there seems to be some anxiety around or concern around discipling people. We offer these discipleship pathways or engagement pathways. And it's like we do this stuff, but then people don't actually take advantage of it. It's like we do. We offer small groups, but people don't do them. Or people. We offer classes and people don't actually engage on them. What are you doing to try to move to. To ensure people are actually engaging with the various pathways that you're developing at Liquid to actually get themselves?
- [14:39]
Kyra Montanez
This is a very interesting question in this particular time because at Liquid we're just about getting ready to. Or just ready to blow up small groups, basically.
- [14:48]
Rich
Oh, nice. Okay. I'd love to hear more.
- [14:51]
Kyra Montanez
I would say that small groups was the one metric that did not recover for our church post pandemic. So even though our volunteer pipelines at times felt thin, we were able to have incredible momentum around that. We can talk more about that later. How did we do that? There's. We recovered in attendance and giving baptism, but we were not able to crack the code on small groups. Well, we were at our all time low, about 20, 20% of our church.
- [15:20]
Rich
Oh, wow. Yeah.
- [15:21]
Kyra Montanez
Engage in small groups. Pretty low. And so we started serving people. We're like, what is it that people actually want from the small groups? Like, what is it that we're not offering that they're looking for? And the one. It was shocking to us that the number one thing, I mean, it shouldn't be shocking because we are a church, the number one thing that people wanted was to understand the Bible. For the first time ever, we have uncoupled relational connection from biblical literacy. In the past, our small groups, the thing that was in the driver's seat, I would say, was the relational connection. We wanted people to connect, to join a group so that they could make friends, do life together. We used to promote it that way. If you remember life together or the people that you're doing life together. For the first time ever, we're actually putting biblical literacy in the front seat, relational connection on the passenger seat. So you will actually make connections. But that's not the goal of this process right now. The process is for you to actually understand and read and study the word of God. In fact, our new tagline is to know the word of God so that you can love the God of the word.
- [16:37]
Rich
Yeah, that's great. So if you change the. The container that. That fits in or you Are you changing the.
- [16:43]
Kyra Montanez
Like we change the container. So we're offering people different levels of biblical literacy. The biggest vehicle that we're. That we just piloted this fall through the book of Revelations, if you can believe it. So we're like, why not start with the hardest book of the Bible? And what we did was we created a Bible study midweek on a Wednesday night where people would go in person and study the word of God in tables with other people. Now, obviously there's facilitators who have been trained and vetted. And once you join a table that was kind of like the table that you were going to go on this journey with. But it's not a small group. It's a, it's a short term. It was 10 weeks. We went through the entire book of Revelations, 22 chapters. We would do homework in order to get ready for this midweek study. We would come, we would have a conversation around, what did you put in question 10? What did I write? This was hard. I don't understand. And then there was teaching. And we also piloted doing that same thing with our high school students so that parents could actually come with their kids on the same day, drop their high school kiddos in their own cohort, and then they would go to their own biblical midweek, you know, Bible study. And that was to a great success. So we are trying to figure out, like, what are the appropriate levels of biblical literacy that we can offer a congregation that is increasingly illiterate in biblical. In. In the Bible. And deep dive, make no mistake, is the highest level. So that's not for everyone. And we understand that. And so the parts that we're trying to figure out is what's the. Was like the appropriate next level to that for somebody who's not willing to come in person 10 weeks to do homework and study, you know, the actual Bible. But it was fascinating to just uncouple those two things for the first time. And I would say it's in the right frame of, in the right approach. You're still making friends, you're just not. That's just not being the driver, right?
- [18:48]
Rich
Yeah, I do wonder. So we for sure have seen that. I've seen this conversation. I, I don't claim to be a small groups expert. I never have, like for 20, 30 years. It's always been a mystery to me. I'm like, I don't. It's like hard. It's a hard system to run and to, to build and. But for sure, post Covid it is, I would say that's a universal concern that it's like whatever we used to do, I see this all over the place. Whatever we used to do to try to get people into groups, we don't do that anymore. We're doing something completely different. I happen to be at Liquid this fall. I think you were speaking at a conference when I was there. Bummer. And I saw the deep dive. I think that's what it was called, deep dive that night. And I remember. I remember thinking, I was like, whoa, this is like, this is incredible. Like, you know, I don't know how many people were there that night. There was a ton of people all lined up and ready to go. I'm like, that's. That's cool. I love that. Well, let's pivot. You kind of flagged it there, the volunteer piece.
- [19:43]
Kyra Montanez
Yes.
- [19:44]
Rich
I'd love to know what you're learning on this front, you know, to rebuild volunteer culture. We had this kind of. I don't know when we'll stop saying post Covid. I don't know whether we'll be like that generation that was like, after the, like, war or like after the depression where, like, for 40 years we're going to be talking about it, but it does still feel like we're post Covid. I don't know what that is, but what have you done to kind of restart how. What's going well on that front? Externally, Liquid feels like an incredibly volunteer, you know, robust culture. Help us understand what's that looking like? What are you learning these days?
- [20:19]
Kyra Montanez
Sure, yeah. I mean, everything you said is still very much a factor. I mean, we are constantly having to work at this. This is never going to be a problem that I feel we're ever going to solve. It's really attention that we're managing. And sometimes attention feels better and sometimes it doesn't feel good. In fact, this year, I would say in March, we probably had like, our biggest crisis in the broadcast campus, where our church growth so far outpaced the amount of people that we're serving, that we were finding ourselves having to close rooms for Liquid family, not because we hit ratios, but because we didn't have enough volunteers. And that doesn't feel great, especially if you're a new here family, right?
- [21:01]
Rich
Yes.
- [21:02]
Kyra Montanez
And so we were like, all right, we need to do something really aggressive. And the best way that I can explain it is we did like a try before you buy.
- [21:11]
Rich
Okay.
- [21:12]
Kyra Montanez
Very low approach, low hanging fruit. We said, hey, we. We casted a vision, right? It's never about we need volunteers, but we actually told a really significant story of here's all the fruit that the Lord is bringing to this church. All the spiritual fruit that we're seeing. Like, people are getting saved. People are getting baptized, they're coming to get to know Jesus, they're studying the Bible. It was incredible. But we need people to use spiritual gifts. And so we came up with a campaign called for the One. And everything was geared for that one person. Like, who's. Who are you going to go serve? Who's the one that you're going to go serve? And the tribe for you guy was, we're going to give you a hoodie. We designed a hoodie. It was called. It was, you know, had the Tagline for the 1. And the key is you only get it after you serve a couple of times.
- [22:02]
Rich
Okay, that's cool.
- [22:03]
Kyra Montanez
Before you buy, you know, you're gonna try it out. You're not gonna go through the whole background pipeline, covenant process process, because we need people now and we need them quick. So you're trying before you're buying. But if you like it and we're gonna make sure that first serve experience is incredible for you, then we want you to buy it and we're going to reward you by giving you swag that's limited, exclusive. Not everybody's gonna get it rich. You would be surprised. Like, I'm still, to this day, I've been liquid. It'll be 13 years in April. And I am so shocked by how much people the gamification of playing to people's particular interests, whether it's fomo, they don't want to miss out. Whether it's the idea of collecting exclusive apparel. There's something here for everyone that just pull out. We had over 400 people sign up.
- [22:58]
Rich
Wow. Amazing.
- [23:00]
Kyra Montanez
It was incredible. And we were able to tell amazing stories of people who were coming and showing up and serving. Whether it was our special needs kiddos or high whatever you want to call it, we had it. And, and I would say the appeal of a try before you buy, how can you short change without. So this is key. You don't want to reduce the quality, but you do want to shorten your pipeline so that you can get people quicker to try it. And then once they actually feel like, hey, I really enjoy this, now we're going to get you through the whole, you know, rest of the process. Right. But you can still serve while we do that. So that was a huge thing. And then obviously, you know, like the free apparel swag, that always is a nice incentive to give to people.
- [23:46]
Rich
It's true.
- [23:47]
Kyra Montanez
It was very successful. And that's what I would recommend is like, hey, can you run try before you buy little events with like swag and like you, you get, you have people serve for a limited amount of time. Like, you don't give them the swag immediately. You make them work for it. They got to serve three or four times before you give it to them.
- [24:04]
Rich
Yeah, we did a similar thing last summer. Our kids ministry team did a similar thing last summer where we did the summer serve, which we hadn't done in actually a number of years. And they, they pulled that out and did summer serve. And it was the same thing. If you signed up, you got a T shirt, a specific T shirt for that. And then you. There was. They basically were asking you to serve once in June, once in July, once in August, like once a month if just for the summertime. And if you served, I forget exactly what the ratio was, but it was. You got entered in a draw for however many times. And basically so if you served all three, you got like 10 times the number of draw things to win. And it was all this stuff that you, you could win. And it was like really great gifts. And you would think that that should not motivate people, but it does. But it does it. And, and you know, and it was. And you know, they did it enough. Really fun. You know, hey, this is going to be a fun thing to be a part of. Talk to me about the, the. Because there's a friction thing there to learn around trying to reduce the friction, the kind of onboarding friction. I think over time that stuff can become, you know, it's, it's the. We actually are like our. We can become just too hard for our people. What did you learn through that process in, in trying to find that balance of like, we want to make it easier to onboard people, but we still want to. Is there any kind of lessons from that? When you look back on that, to.
- [25:29]
Kyra Montanez
Me, the lesson really is again, it. There is a tension between. You can't shortchange, especially when it comes to kids. I can't emphasize this enough, like all of these ministries and it would be not on my watch. Will. Will this happen? Right? So we have to be very sure that we're not short changing the safety procedures. At the same time, recognizing these things can take some time, right? Like we ask people to get a background check, they have to be interviewed, they have to sign a covenant, they have to have a reference. I mean, these things, this is a lengthy process and I stand by it. We have to do that. At the same time, can we actually live in a world where we are marrying our need to have someone in the room while also still doing all of these things simultaneously, not actually waiting for all of this to happen so that then they can come. And that's kind of how we figured it out. Our liquid family pastor came up with a process where she's like, okay, we can shorten it. This time they're only going to do these three things, not four, not six. But while they're in the room trying it, we're going to continue to do the other remaining four. It's messy. It's not always the best thing to do. In an ideal world you are not doing that. But when you're faced with crisis, then you need to come up with, you know, resourceful ideas. And so what I would say about the volunteer pipeline is this, it's a. There are short term problems that you have to solve while you're still working on this very long term. Like this is a culture that you have to create and in order for you to create a culture, you have to tell stories, you have to celebrate what you want to be repeated. You have to make people feel thanked, encouraged, appreciated, seen you. Those are all long term things that you have to be doing all the time. This is like non.
- [27:20]
Rich
You can't take the gas off that pedal for sure.
- [27:22]
Kyra Montanez
Pedal off that, gas your foot off the pedal. But at the same time, there are things that are short term that you really do have to also do. And sometimes that will require teaching from the stage where you're actually envisioning people about why this matters so much. And this is what we did in March with the four, the one. So I would say it's, it's both and it's not either or. And so if that's helpful, that's how I would approach it.
- [27:46]
Rich
Yeah, that's super good. That's good. If there was a church that was, if you were sitting across the table from an executive pastor, maybe you're at a conference or someone drops in your office and they're. They're feeling really stuck on this engagement issue. They feel low. Like it's. These people were. Maybe it's groups, it's teams, it's all of it. Like it's. We're not moving people through any kind of pipeline. What would be some of those first steps or first recommendations? First things you'd have them look at, maybe like a diagnostic or a first couple things that you'd have them think about.
- [28:14]
Kyra Montanez
Well, I would say if there's a way for them to know of the people who are attending and maybe they figure this out with new here. How many of those people Take one next step within the first month.
- [28:25]
Rich
That's good.
- [28:26]
Kyra Montanez
That would be one diagnostic that I would first see if I can do with the data that I have and the data that they collect. They actually figured that out. If they're able to do that, then the next diagnostic would be what percent actually move into a people system, whether it's a group, a deep dive experience, a dream team within 60 to 90 days. Right. Because if you do that, you're gonna find the blockage. You're actually going to discover. Maybe our attendance is fine, we don't have an invest and invite problem. But maybe what we have a problem with is our conversion rate. And so then you can start to identify what is it about our conversion that we need to fix. Is it that we have unclear on ramps or is it that our processes are too high friction? It's too hard for people to get involved. If you actually find like. No, actually people are taking next steps, great, but they're not sticking to it. Then you have a different problem. Then you can actually diagnose. Oh, maybe the first serve experience actually wasn't sticky enough, it wasn't welcoming. Maybe there were issues with scheduling. Maybe we didn't give clear information. So you can kind of figure out what the problem is based on how you're measuring it and what you're discovering. That's how I would start if I didn't know what the problem was. Does that make sense?
- [29:44]
Rich
Yeah, that's so good. That makes total sense. And you know, it definitely aligns with one of my bugaboos that I constantly driving with executive pastors. When you look at the actual numbers, I have not run into a church yet that this is not the case. Most churches actually have a front door problem. They don't have a backdoor problem. They their actual problem that we think we feel like, oh, like people aren't sticking and staying in groups, they're not staying in volunteering. But statistically that's actually not true. When most of the time if you look at, okay, all the people that end up in a group, what is the kind of churn rate on that? Whatever that number is. I've never seen a church where it's higher than the people were missing on the front end with. Exactly with what you said is how many people are removing from new here to taking the first step in the first month because that you lose a ton of people in that door right there. That is a, you know, by a multiple of 10 or 20. Like it's a lot more that we're missing out. And you know, generally in most churches.
- [30:44]
Kyra Montanez
Because I just encourage people like figure out a way to target your new here audience. So at Liquid, for example, if you come for the first time, not only do we encourage, highly encourage you to tell us that you're here for the first time because we give you an awesome gift. Lots of churches do this, but then we survey people who came for the first time and based on what they answer, they receive a custom follow up process for the first 30 days. We don't. So in that regard, like it is worth to look at that because you're going to find out a lot of information and a lot of data about what people are choosing to do, where are they going, why they're not sticking to it or why they're not even going in the first place. Like I'm shocked that I've been to churches sometimes to speak and they don't actually really do like a new here call out. Like they don't.
- [31:33]
Rich
Yeah, I was gonna say that you said, oh, churches do this. And I'll be like, kyra, I've been to way too many churches where they don't do any of that. And they're like, well, we're not really sure. And I'm like, this is a solvable problem. We can fix this. There's like real things you can do here. Actually, I worked with the church last year, a fairly large church in 2024 where they were experiencing some of these issues. And so, and I was, I basically said the same thing. I just said, I'm like, you're losing people on the front end. And they're like, they're like, well we do a gift. And I'm like, no you don't. And I said there's a, there's a few things to fix around that. In 2025, the year we just ended, they received, we made a few changes. Not about me, there's about them. They made a bunch of changes. They ended up receiving 5,000 more first time guests contacts than they did in 2024. Now they did not grow by 5,000 people, but it's just by focusing on that, right? It's just by like saying, hey, how are we? What are we going to do to ensure that that step goes well with folks? So anyways, there's huge opportunity there in lots of churches. Kyra, you've been incredibly generous to give us your time at this time of year. As you're thinking, kind of last question, as we're thinking about 2026, what are some of those questions that are floating around in your head as you think about Liquid, as you think about the future, what are some things that you're wrestling with that you're wondering about, that you're contemplating as we go into this year?
- [32:49]
Kyra Montanez
Oh my gosh, Rich. So many this conversation, you know, I really am interested to see what's going to happen with our discipleship model since we just blew it up, uncoupling all of that and changing the way that we even onboard leaders. Like, I'm really invested in seeing this through.
- [33:07]
Rich
Yeah, that's great.
- [33:08]
Kyra Montanez
I also totally unrelated to this, but we just launched, I think in the survey, one of the questions that was asked was, what's the best idea that you had in 22?
- [33:16]
Rich
Yeah, yeah, right.
- [33:17]
Kyra Montanez
And I was like, well, I feel like one of our best ideas was to use AI to launch a Spanish service. And I am really invested in that and seeing, like, how do we continue to grow that service? How do we continue to grow that ministry? We're launching new ministries in 2025. Oh, you're 2026. So that always feels exciting and daunting. So there's just, just. The work never ends and there's always. It is an exciting and fascinating time to be in the church. I'll say that.
- [33:45]
Rich
I would agree. I totally would agree. The. Yeah, it's the best, I would think, literally, I think this is the best season that I've been involved in ministry for sure. For folks that don't know what you're doing with Spanish ministry, give us the, the 62nd. Explain that again, because I think I keep pointing churches to you, saying, have you heard what Liquid's doing? You go and talk to them. So tell us about that.
- [34:05]
Kyra Montanez
We have a Spanish service. We do have live hosting in espanol. We have live worship in Espanol. But then we take our English message and we pass it through an AI service called hey Jen, which actually uses the communicator's voice and matches the words to their lips. And they're just preach. They preach it in Spanish. Even if they're not bilingual, they will preach it in Spanish. And it's like you, Rich, are speaking in Spanish. Your words match your voice. People get to hear the, the. The gospel and the message in their language. So it's been fascinating to learn who we're reaching, who's coming, who likes that kind of a thing. You know, as a Spanish myself, I'm like, would I go to a service where the message wasn't actually authentic Spanish and it's An AI generated. I believe in the quality of our communication so much that I actually have to say, yes, I would. Because like last year, this year, we took our entire church through the book of revelation. Tim spent 25 weeks, weeks teaching us the hardest book of the Bible. Fruit that that endeavor produced is incredible. And so when I think about what we're doing, I'm like, I believe in that so much that I do think this is a, this is a thing that's actually good to do. Even if people would think, like, why would they go to that and not like an authentic Spanish speaker.
- [35:20]
Rich
Yeah, interesting. And that. And you're, you've been a year, that's been basically almost a year you've been doing that, know, a year and, and you're continuing to do it. So obviously something's working. There's some sort of version of like.
- [35:31]
Kyra Montanez
Hey, we're seeing the fruit. We're seeing baptisms, People giving their life to Christ, getting baptized, showing up and joining teams, reaching families. We're reaching multi generational families where the parents go to the Spanish service, the kids go to the English service because it's simultaneous. Right. While the English is going on, the Spanish is going on. So family get to decide. It's just really interesting to watch. Obviously it's been challenging in the US to grow a Spanish service because of everything that's been happening, but it's just been really fascinating to see, like the dynamics of who we're reaching, who's sharing, like, who's excited about it, and then using technology to further the gospel.
- [36:09]
Rich
It's always, yeah, it's fantastic. I know I was goofing around with, hey, Jen a little bit. And the part that actually this was, you know, almost a year ago when you guys started doing that. One of the tests I ran that actually convinced me was so I was like taking videos of me and I would send them to like a friend who speaks Spanish and I sent to a friend who speaks, you know, a couple languages that it was doing. But then I did the reverse. I. There's a great church, Nouvelle V. It's a French speaking church, large church, be very similar to Liquid, but they're French speaking. And so I took one of the, the lead pastors from that. I took a clip of his message and translated into English and I was blown away. I was like, oh, my word, it.
- [36:50]
Kyra Montanez
Is getting better and better every day.
- [36:53]
Rich
I was, I was shocked. I was like, oh, that, that is. Yeah. Could I tell? Yeah, but this guy's an incredible communicator and you know, similar to you and Tim and the team at Liquid. I'm like, I could see that work. Anyway, so that's exciting. Kyra, it's so great to see you. Thanks so much spending time with us today. If people want to connect with you or with Liquid, where do we want to send them online?
- [37:15]
Kyra Montanez
Sure. So my name Kyra K A Y R A Liquid Church dot com. Happy to connect with anybody have questions.
- [37:22]
Rich
Thanks so much. Thanks for being here today.