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unSeminary Podcast
REPLAY: Church Growth Launchpad: 5 Levers Fast-Growing Churches Use to Multiply Invitations
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In this special workshop episode, Rich Birch unpacks the same five systems thriving churches use to move from hoping for growth to launching it. If you’ve ever felt like your church’s momentum is hard to sustain—or that your people love your church but...
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Foreign. You know, we've hosted a number of these webinars over the years, our online workshops over the years and this one we have had I like Elizabeth at 7.4.75. This one has had the largest sign up ever. So literally 3x what we normally do for a big, a big online event. So I am so honored that you are with us today. We are going to contain this whole thing within an hour. We'll get started here in a minute. It's going to be a great time together. Again, thank you so much for, for being here. It's so great to see where everyone's coming from. So again, take that poll. So how eager are you to see your church grow by strengthening its invite culture? One is like not eager at all. I would be like, why are you here? What are you doing? And then all the way through five extremely eager, ready to take action. Take that poll. We'll give it another 30 seconds just for everybody to come in. You know, it was the song. Brian, I appreciate you coming. If you got the song, may put a, a, a an emoji music emoji in the chat. It was a fun thing to say. Hey Peter, that's, that's hilarious. Tell Greg I say hi as well. Love you guys. Love your church. Well, let's end this poll, the opening poll here. So how eager are you people? Answered 3, 4 and 5. 1% said curious but cautious. I appreciate you being cautious. Don't want you just jumping in. It's okay. But then 40% said motivated and ready to learn. Love that you've got your notepad open. We're looking forward to helping you. And then this is what I love, lots of fives. You are my people, extremely eager and ready to take action. In fact, we're going to let you take action. If you didn't catch that song that we played yesterday in your email, we really did make a song and send it to you. So you go back and listen to that. So friends, today we have got a two prong purpose. Let's jump in. I want to give you as much value as I possibly can in the next hour. We've been talking about in the lead up to this that we're going to give you two things. First of all, we're going to talk through the five levers that fast growing churches use to train, equip and motivate their people to invite friends and we'll be doing that. I'm also going, I want to have like a cross table conversation like you and I were sitting across the table and saying of those five, which levers would you pull in the next 90 days? And then, so that's the first promise. We're definitely going to do that. And then the second promise is some of you are going to want to take more action. Some of you, some of you at the end of this are going to say, hey, I want to dive deep and I want to invite you into something called the church growth incubator. Now we really have not talked much publicly about this. This is really our first public thing and we're going on doing it for four years and have had incredible results. So friends, I am eager to get more of you into this. It's a one year coaching experience that I want to get in on with you. But again, no pressure, that's later in the call. For the next 45 minutes or so, I want to give you a practical map to really help you dive in and to help you reach more people in your community. Well, friend, the difference between stuck and stagnant churches and growing churches is this growing churches train, equip and motivate their people to invite their friends. Today is about moving from hope to a repeatable system. I know you hope that your people invite your friends, but, but what we've seen is that fast growing churches, churches that are reaching people and keeping them are training, equipping and motivating. What do we mean by that training? This is the idea, this is like the head. It's, they need to understand that they've got to invite their friends, that this is, this is why we talk about it being a, you know, that fast growing churches do this because it's like, it's a head piece of it. First think we're going to train them, give them information around why it's super important. It's a culture shift. And so they do need some logic. But we also have to equip them. We've got to give them tools. These are like practical things that they can use to invite their friends. But then third, we got to motivate. This is also about their heart. And this is why we talk about invite culture. This is not a tactic. There is no silver bullet. It's not one thing. I can teach your church, I can lead your church, I can help your church be a bigger church. I just can't do it quickly. You know, I joked about maybe calling this online workshop a larger church in a thousand days, but nobody would have come to that. Now, now, now you would have come to it because you're a good Christian. But Nobody would come to that kind of webinar, that kind of online workshop. But that's really what we're talking about today. It is a cultural shift. See, what we know is in the early stages of your church invites happens accidentally. And so if you don't, if you don't build systems, people will just invite their friends. If you're friends of mine are church planters and as they got rolling and you know, their people are excited, they're involved, they just accidentally invite their friends because they're a part of it. Now what we want to do is shift from accidental inviting to an intentional invite system to the point where it becomes instinctual. It literally gets baked in to your culture. That is what we're talking about. That your culture, it becomes normative. I said this in the pre roll. People like us do things like that. That is what culture. That's Seth Godin's definition of culture. And what we've got to do as churches is and church leaders is to move invite from this program, this tactic to. It becomes a part, it's an extinctive part of what our people do. Listen, I know your church. You probably feel like growth is sporadic at your church. It's like, well, we see a, you know, like in the spring we have guests that show up. We, you know, you might have these surges, but then you stall out. You know, you, it does. You don't sustain the growth over time. You know, your people love their church, but they're not naturally inviting. It's like they look at inviting as something only weird people do or strange people do. No, no, no. But it's not that they don't love the church. They love it, but the penny hasn't dropped from their head about. Or maybe it's the other way from their heart to their head of like, I love this. I should be inviting friends. They haven't yet seen themselves as a part of the mission. And finally, I know that your church that you're seeing your staff have more effort, your team has more effort, but you're really not seeing consistent engagement and growth. So there's a problem here that your church, it can feel like, man, we're pushing hard. We keep pushing all the time around trying to grow. We maybe try the latest tactics. In fact, I've seen this happen. I see too many churches assume that this problem, in fact I've heard some of you say it. You say things like, well, we just need like a better marketing. And maybe you see like you there's these people online that sell church Marketing. And in some ways they like kind of frustrate me because they'll have these like, grow your church, double your church in the next, you know, 30 days. And you know, that sort of thing. And what they're doing is they're trying to assume, sell you a quick fix. You assume that if you just had better marketing, stronger social media plant, maybe a bigger facility that you would grow. But that's not actually your problem. The problem is that your people are not inviting their friends at high enough rates. We've got to increase what we call the invite propensity. That is the rate at which your people have invited someone in the last 90 days. See, we see this in the early days of your church. That early on when you first, you know, get rolling, you know, there's high invite things. Get things. Your people naturally invite their friends. But then you hit a plateau. It gets to a point where if you do not go from, hey, I know the lead pastor or I am friends with the staff and people just start attending the church. Those people, unless we deliberately build a culture within them, they will not have the same invite drive as those people who were involved early in the life of the church. But if we can install invite systems in your church, we can literally explode the attendance of your church. We've seen this time again, time and again. We if we can install invite systems where we train, equip and motivate your people to regularly invite their friends time and time again, you'll see your church reach more people than you've ever reached before. Imagine in your church. I want you to kind of imagine the future. Think, kind of visualize, maybe close your eyes. Remember when you were in like grade school, I don't know if you did this in your grade school. Maybe it was just my strange grade school. Like you would, you would be in like gym class and the gym teacher would say, close your eyes. I want you to picture this. This is like a visualization. I want you to visualize what if your people started to naturally invite again. Like in the early days of your church. Your church would see brand new guests every single weekend, all year long. Every weekend. You, you would have people walk in the front door of your church who are brand new. It wouldn't just happen a couple times during the year. If your people invited regularly, that would happen. Your church would double the first time guests at this Christmas. If you had people who were energ to invite this Christmas, you could easily double your normal attendance. You could or triple or quadruple. We see that in the churches we coach. In fact, you could launch into January fired up and not exhausted because you have a fresh push at throughout the entire year of brand new people. You're not just like grinding it out, but because you have a flow of new guests coming in all the time, that bulb that results in all kinds of amazing stories bubbling up in your church. And what becomes can be the drudgery of week in, week out ministry. And to be honest, going back in January can be a drudgery. Right? We go, we, we have an amazing Christmas and then it's like, oh, we got to do this again. But if you had guests coming and inviting every single weekend, you'd have a ton of stories that you'd be excited to get back to it in, in the new year. And your staff would be focused on people, not just on programs. Because this is a discipleship issue. Ultimately. This is ultimately about discipling your people to get out of the stands and onto the field to, to invite their friends to invite more. Well, hey, friends, my name is Rich. If we have not met before, I'm on a mission to help 100 churches grow by a thousand people. I served for the majority of my ministry in three growing churches in xp, executive pastor or executive pastor adjacent positions. I and two of those three churches went from less than a thousand to multiple three, four, five thousand people when I was on staff there. Not because of me, but I had the privilege of being a part of those teams. About 15 years ago, I started a podcast and a blog. Remember, people used to blog. I'm still blogging, but remember, people used to blog where we were gathering up lessons. I called it unseminary stuff you wish they taught in seminary. And what we were doing there was trying to take away the limiters, take away the things on churches that hold them back. Well, three years ago, we launched something we call Church Growth Incubator, which is literally the culmination of those 15 years to help churches like yours reach more people. And now I'm giving myself full time to work with churches like yours to reach a thousand people or more, to grow by a thousand people. And I want to frankly help 100 people. 100 churches like yours reach at least a thousand more people. And we're chipping away at that mission. Why do I want to see churches grow? This is a settled issue for, for me, I know there's like this, there's kind of thinking out there that, like, oh, you know, this kind of like, big church is bad. I just don't believe that at all. I know that there are amazing things happening in your church. You are leading a life giving church. People are coming to know Jesus. Their lives, literally their eternity is getting turned around. We see marriages being restored in churches all the time where, you know, people were struggling. They have an encounter with Christ and their marriage gets turned around. Kids who were living in hopelessness are now living, living in hope. I know that your church is serving the community, making a difference with tangible needs in your community. And what I want to do is come alongside you and help that accelerate to see more of that happen. Why would we not want to see more of that happen? So I know there are some leaders who kind of, you know, whimper off in the corner and are like, oh, we're fine being our size. No, no. My job is to be a voice in your life to help you feel the discontent of wanting to reach more people and to do it in a sustainable way that doesn't burn out your people. That is all about culture. So you might be thinking, listen, you might be here thinking, listen, we already told our people to invite. But you know what I want to tell you, just telling them, hey, invite your friends is not training. That's not equipping, and that's not motivating. We're talking about a deep cultural impact. It's not just about, you know, what we have found is that churches believe that they've done this, but they haven't given the focus that it needs. And if you can give it the focus it needs over an extended period of time, it literally becomes the normative behavior of your people and literally growth becomes unstoppable. You know, you might be thinking, well, people just don't invite anymore. We live in a post invite culture. This is just not true. I put this stat in here that came out a couple weeks ago from Barna. Over 80%, I think they actually said 88% of people in our culture said they would come to church if a friend would invite them. Think about that. There's a stat that I love even more. It was from. It's an Australian statistic. I've served in lots of post Christian cultures, so I'm Canadian. Don't hold it against me. I was in New Jersey for a bunch of years. Those, those kinds of cultures. I work with churches all across the country, but those kind of cultures where people don't wake up in the morning and think, hey, on Sunday morning. And feel guilty for not going to church. I love working in those kind of communities. And we still see that invite works well. There this stat from it was an Australian statistic that said 40% of Australians, 40% in a post Christian, some would say pre Christian context like Australia said that they would go to Easter services if a friend invited them. Invite is where it's at. Friends, you know your. It is somewhere between depending on the statistic you read 15 to 25 more times more effective than marketing. My question is you, are you investing 15 to 25 times the focus that you spend on marketing or the energy that you would spend on even like having a website? We want to. Yes. Chrissy, I'll find that reference for you. Thanks for asking. Beth, if you can make that note, I'll get that reference and put it in follow up notes for you. You all right? Or maybe you might be saying, listen, we've tried big days before. We're going to talk about big days today. We're going to talk about kind of the difference they make. And some people just like boil this down to that. They're like, oh yeah, yeah, it's just about big days. You know, one event isn't culture. You can't say, yeah, yeah, we did Easter last year and invited a bunch of people, or we did Christmas last year and invited a bunch of people. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about 52 weeks of the year surrounding your people with the messaging. What are you doing to invite your friends? So, friends, what we want to talk about now are the five gears of invite culture. Now why, why do we call them the five gears of invite culture? One of my convictions is that the way to see your church grow is you have to invest in these areas time and time again. It's not one particular tactic. It's a bunch of activities. It's everything from mindset, how we think about these areas, how important they are, but all the way through to tactics and measurements in these five areas. And a number of years ago I did some research and was really looking closely at what fast, how fast growing churches encourage their people to invite. And what we saw was there were these five distinct areas that we repeatedly see particularly the fastest growing churches in the country come back to time and time again. I call them gears because what we've got to do is apply pressure on them consistently. It's like the flywheel. When I was a kid at my park, there was the merry go round. You had one of these, it was a large metal plate and you put your foot on it and you pushed one time around. It took a lot to push one time around. And in fact, it took like all your energy to push the first time around. And then you pushed a second time and it was like a little bit less, but you still were pushing. And then the third time, a little bit less, A little bit less. And you go from hardly pushing or you go from pushing hard to hardly pushing. At some point there's a phase transition where you literally go from I'm pushing so hard to not pushing at all. And then you're holding on for dear life. Well, that's what I'm talking about with the five gears. All of these areas we've got to apply pressure. And at the beginning it takes concerted effort. We've got to push time and time again on all of these areas. And when we see effort happening in all of these five areas over time, we see it then becomes unstoppable. We've seen this time and time again. So what I want to do is I want to explain what each one of these five areas are. We are going to take questions later, friends. So if you've got a question, please feel free to leave that question, leave the question there and in the chat and we'll come back to that later. And we will, we will come back to those questions, whether it's about this or anything else we're talking about. Again, Joe asked a question. Is it a. Which is, we'll label that as a question. Is it, is it effective to invite friends or strangers? We'll come to that. That's a great, great question. So let's talk about the five gears. So again, these are the, you understand what these are? These are the five areas that we see churches apply pressure to increase their invite culture. The first is shareable weekend teaching. Shareable weekend teaching. Three quarters of the reason why people attend your church is because of the weekend teaching. My favorite study on this is from Gallup because they asked people that attended all religious services, not just Christian. There is a number of Barna studies that actually say it's more than three quarters. But if you were to pull out 100 people from your church who have invited friends to your church and you were to ask them, hey, who would be. Yes, we'll send you the slides. We'll send you the slides from these or as well, you know, afterwards. But if you were to bring 100 people from your church and say, hey, what are the actual words that you said when you invite your friends? I'm convinced, and we've seen this time and again that actually people, the thing they're most likely to say is my friend Peter leads a church in Sarasota. If I was at his church and I was inviting a friend, I'm most likely to actually say, hey, you should come to our church this weekend, come to Hope City. Because Peter's got this great series coming on and it's about X or hey, we were talking about this stuff last weekend that really impacted me. I think it would be good for you to come and be a part of that. At its granular core, it's just about ensuring that people know exactly what's coming up next. I was at a large church, name brand church, you know, not to be named. They have a, a giant auditorium, more than 3,000 seats in their main auditorium. And I was visiting them for one weekend and I do these weekend visits where we'll go out and I'm help identify low hanging fruit for churches. And you know how the lead pastors of a church like that are, they're like driving, they want results now, which is wonderful. I love that. And normally what happens is we, I go to the church on Sunday, take a bunch of notes, put together a report, meet with them on Monday. Well, the, the lead pastor was like, no, no, come backstage, I want, after the service, come backstage, come backstage. I want to get your, you know, your feedback on what, what happened and how we can improve. And, and I was like, well, we can wait till Monday. And they're like, no, no, I want to know now. So I come backstage after, you know, the weekend and I'm like, well, we'll talk about it tomorrow. There's a bunch of stuff I think we could do. And they were like, no, no, we want one thing now. Shareable weekend teaching is as simple as this, is kind of as, as small as this. It can be a whole bunch more, but it can be as small as this. Do people know what's coming up next in your, in the, in your church? Have you told them, hey, next weekend? And this is what I said to this, these, this pastor. I said this was a great service, it was fantastic. But at no point in the service did you say next weekend. We're talking about this. And here are the three kinds of people in your life who might be interested and being a part of it, you should invite them to come back. Now it also includes things like ensuring that you're having invite cards available for them. It also is about ensuring that you have, you know, all the, that you're lining up your teaching in a way that sequentially makes sense, that people can predict what's coming up Next, it's about digital resources on your website. It's. It's about a number of things, but the first area, shareable weekend teaching. Critically important. Number two, eventful big days. So there are three or four times every week every year, three or four weekends every year where two things happen. Your people are more likely to invite their friends, and their friends are more likely to attend. I used to say, in fact, I said this for a long time in the churches I led. I would say, you know, every weekend is a weekend we want people to invite their friends. And. And I would be like, I would look down at the churches that did the big day thing, and I was like, oh, come on, what's that? That's like that. You know, every weekend I want people to be here. But then I looked at the stats and I listened to people around when they actually invite their friends. And what we found was that there are three or four weekends every year that your people are more likely to invite their friends. And so what we've got to do is we've got to build these weekends from the invite backwards. Don't surprise people. Tell them exactly what's going on. Tell them what's happening at your church, and use that to help them understand how they can invite their friends. So we've got Christmases coming up. That's typically one of them. Easter is one of them. Maybe Mother's Day. Maybe it's the second weekend in January. I know for our church for years. Actually, one of ours was time change Sunday. It just happened. Time change Sunday in the fall. People, we have a higher proportion of guests on those weekend and higher attendance weekend. So the idea of, from an invite culture point of view is that we're doing eventful big days. These. These days are big. They're eventful, they're big. We literally, it's like saying big, big in one sentence. And we're cat. And we're designing them backwards from the invite Number three, Captivating online conversations. So the difference between churches that are using online channels to make a difference and everybody else is that those churches that are leveraging their online presence. So what am I talking about here? I'm talking about their website. I'm talking about social media, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, church online is all of those environments are being used to drive conversation. That's what we see prevailing churches. You doing? They're driving their. They're concerned mostly about engagement, not actually about reach. They're not looking for, like, vanity metrics. How many people saw our stuff? No, no, no. It's how many people like commented, shared. It's ultimately about generating content that your people that are like these little tools that your people can use to pass along to other people. It's not about doing weekend content that just says like, oh, come and join us this weekend. It's not about doing social media content that's like a billboard on the side of the road that is like online ministry. Not even, you know, 1.0, it's like 0.5. That was like where we started. What you should be doing is leveraging your, all of your online channels to ultimately drive conversations. Because all of these channels, Instagram, that I just listed, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Reddit, these are all places for conversation. And the question is, how are we stepping into conversations that are already happening? There's so much we could talk about that, but I want to keep going because I'm on slide 28. I've got like 70 some slides to go through. Number four, magnetic community service. This is the idea that fast growing churches get people out of their seats and into the streets to make a difference in their community. Now here is, is the key shift on this, this is why you see churches like insert. I don't know who it is for you. Maybe it's Church of the Highlands with their serve days in the summertime. Or maybe there is, you know, maybe there are, maybe it's like Elevation with Love week. It's these mass mobilization events where you put a T shirt on everybody and everybody goes out and is out making a difference in their community. They're not only making a difference, but they're being seen making a difference. From an invite culture point of view, those are amazing places for your people to invite their friends. So your church might do a like a meal packing thing, which is fantastic. We see lots of churches doing that. It's actually a great thing to do. But the question is, are you using that to drive invite? Are you using that to, to get your people to invite their friends to come and be a part of it. Don't just do it, but use it. And because oftentimes when we look at the numbers, we often see 10x the number of first time guests come to that kind of magnetic community service experience than would on a regular weekend service. We see that at our church, we literally coming up against a meal packing thing. It literally happened in my life with my neighbor across the road. I've invited my neighbor to a bunch of stuff. Imagine being the guy. Imagine being the family that lives across from the guy. That talks about invite culture. I feel bad for my neighbors. I've invited them to so much stuff. They have never come to anything. And I've been discouraged. Personally discouraged. Oh gosh, I don't know. I don't know. Well, we came back around and we were doing a meal packing event here in a couple weeks. I texted them and said, hey guys, we're doing this thing. I sent the highlight video from last year. I would love to, we'd love to have you host you at it. It's going to be a super fun day. Didn't hear anything for a day. I was like, oh no again, I'm getting ghosted or whatever. A day later I get a text back, rich, that sounds fantastic. We already registered for this time slot. We're in. Wow, isn't that a Meg, isn't that amazing? Magnetic Community is service. How do we drive community service at scale to make a difference? There's lots we can talk about there. Okay, number five, appealing volunteer experience. So this is the idea that in fast growing churches they see the volunteer experience as integral to their growth. Growth. It's not too many churches think like, oh, when we get to a size, when we get to X size and it's usually like the next barrier, when we get to 500 to 800, to a thousand, two thousand, five thousand, ten thousand, we'll have enough volunteers to make it happen. Enough kids, ministry people to actually serve those people. No, no, no, no, no. That's not how it is. It's actually the other way around. In order to get to 500, 800, a thousand, 2,000, 5,000, 10,000, whatever the number is, you have to mobilize new volunteers in an incredible volunteer experience. That's what we say, appealing volunteer experience. In fact, there's a three to one ratio. This is the growth mechanics that are happening behind the multi site church movement. I've launched 13 campuses directly, coached a ton more. And why is that a predictable growth engine for churches? It's because you are sending new volunteers to volunteer in new locations. But you can do that in your existing church without launching a new location. I think you should launch a new location, but without launching a new location. You could do that by simply releasing new volunteers. Why is that? Think about it at the individual level. So you take people out of their stands, into the fields, into the fields, under the stands. Too many mixed metaphors. Out of the stands, onto the field to play on a team. And on Friday afternoon they're like coming to the end of the day, hey, what are you Doing this weekend? Oh, actually, hey, I'm going to be, I'm going to be volunteering at my church. You should come. I would love for you to be a part of it. If the more that you. The kind of work that it takes to get someone fired up to volunteer, the kind of vision casting that it takes for that to happen, is the exact same kind of vision casting that's required. In fact, it is. The vision casting is required to make people into deeper inviters because we know that connected people, engaged people invite and so appealing volunteer experience. So there's a lot there. Now you see how there's like those little spokes on each one of these. There's probably should be a lot more of those. My experience has been that your church needs a multiplicity of tactics that are in, that are attached to each one of these, that are driving those wheels forward, that are pushing them forward. And, and so really what I wanted to do in today's online workshop is say, okay, listen, if I was you, if you and I were sitting down for a meal, I literally was having dinner with my friend Peter a couple weeks earlier. Was that just last week? Man, it feels like a long time ago. It was literally a week ago today and we sat across from a table and we were talking, hey, what would you focus on out of all of those five in the next 90 days, what would you do? This would be my advice to you. This, this is where I would say you should spend your time. This is the 90 day plan that I think you should focus on again. We'll, we'll have these slides available so that you can come back and, and look at this so that you can apply this. There's a lot in these coming slides. So the first is eventful, big day. So Christmas is coming up. Christmas is your next big, your next best, biggest momentum builder. You need to plan backwards from that now. Now here's the thing. If you just have a big attendance at Christmas and you don't, it doesn't fit into some sort of system. All you're doing is swelling your attendance and feeling good about the fact that your room was full. What you need to do is work backwards from how do we make this a momentum thrust? How do we make this the kind of thing that pushes into, you know, our, our momentum for the entire year. The benchmark for you that you should be aiming at is 2x your normal attendance. So I would take, if I was sitting across from you, I'd say, hey, what's your average attendance that been this year? And you would tell me, let's say it's a thousand or let's say it's 500, let's say it's 500. Just to keep the numbers simple in my brain because I'm a simple man, I would Great. Your church needs to. The target should be to see a thousand people. If your church is a 500 to see a thousand people come to Easter this year, Christmas this year, that and that scales up for regardless your side. That's the table stakes. That's. That's not a thriving church. That's just like normal. Your church should be doing that. Now if last Easter, last Christmas you were not at 2x, then the difference between those two, let's say that you were, you know, one and a half. Let's say you were 700, let's say you were 750. If you're a church of 500, the, the amount of effort that you need to put in. I would be thinking about the gap between 750 and a thousand. Think about what you did to encourage your people to invite their friends last year. And you need to increase your effort by that much. You need to find new things to do to increase your, you know, your invite. So, so that's what I would start with. What was Christmas 2x3x? What was it the gap between. That's where you need to invite to invest your, your time and what you typically what happens is churches, if they're not at that they, they, it's not because frankly they're just not talking enough about Easter or Christmas. I keep saying Easter, I'm already jumping to Easter for you next year. So what we've done is we put together a resource. If you click on the files link, it is there for you. You can download it. It is a printable wall calendar. And this printable wall calendar literally has everything. If I was sitting across the table from you, everything I would say that you should do. If you look in more detail, you'll see, whoops, back up. You'll see that there's like a whole bunch of stuff in the last three weeks. I call it the three week invite. Right Push. And I would say do all of those things. If your church has not reached at least 2x, start with doing all of those, all of those items. And I've given you the dates to do them this year, assuming it's Christmas Eve or maybe Christmas Adam a couple days before. Do all of those things to invite your people to come to, to invite their friends not to come to invite their Friends to be a part of it. Now if your church did do 2x, you want to pour the heat on even more. And so I would look at this, I would download this resource again, click on the files tab, download that, print it off and ask are we doing all of these things? If you're at 2x and you, if you're at 2x already and you're not doing all of these things, add all of that in. Am I making this as clear as possible now? If you've, I doubt that you're doing all of them. If you're at 2x and you're doing all of these things and, and you want to grow this year, reach out to me. I'll give you more stuff to do. So pour the heat on now because you're here live now. How many people do we have live here today? We got a, you know, tons of people on this live call today just because you're live. I'm actually going to see all those little tabs. There's like all those little bullet points for what you should be doing in the three weeks before I call the three week push. Each one of those is a different tactic and we've got training on all of those. What, what you should do on those. What I'm going to do is actually send you the training on one of them. If you're just to the people that are live, I'm sorry that you didn't attend live. If you're watching the replay, you didn't get this resource. I'm sorry. If you know someone that attended, reach out to them. They'll give it to you if they're friendly. But you, this is literally a resource from within church growth incubator. So I'm literally just linking you, giving you a link. I've opened it up publicly. You can, you know, pick that up, you know, today. You'll all send that to you after we're done. It's one of those, one of those tabs, one of those little boxes for the three week push. So first thing I would do, double down on Christmas, Pull your people together, print this off, pull them together next week and say we're going to do all of this stuff. Next thing, shareable weekend teaching. So again we're going back to the five areas. I would say you need to be thinking very carefully around how you're lining up your January teaching. So this is the thing that too many churches miss at Christmas that then misses momentum. Christmas 2025 is all about an invite to 2026. So we're going to try to drive a huge crowd to be there. But that service needs to be designed backwards from how are we using that as a recall to get people to come back in 2026. And we got to put all of our weight, put creative energy into thinking. Okay, what are we doing to call back? And the two things, the two elements that if I was sitting across the table, I would get you to think about. One is core teaching, core message. So as a preacher, as a communicator, what is the thing that you feel like when you teach? It resonates with your people when you talk about whatever that is. Do that in January. Talk about that in January. And we will. We're gonna. We're gonna. Whatever we're coming back to in the new year. That's the thing that it needs to be core for you. But it can't just be that. There also needs to be some sort of free giveaway in January that you can talk about at Christmas Eve. So a number of years ago, we were talking about exactly this in church Growth incubator. And it's become infamous in our circles. Internally, it's become called the Hoodie Sunday because I was encouraging people to think about T shirts. It came from friends of mine, actually, Epic Church, who is on the call today. They do a day in. It has been in January called Epic Sunday, where they give away a free T shirt and you can only get that T shirt on that day, and they sell that T shirt. They talk about that T shirt at Christmas. So you've got all these people at Christmas. If you want this really cool T shirt, you got to come to Epic Sunday. I was teaching this and talking about this as, hey, that's a great thing to do. And a church within that. They. They took this idea and said, we're going to one up Epic and we're going to do hoodies. Which I was like, okay, hoodies cost more money than T shirts. And sure enough, they did it. They ended up 3xing their normal attendance on that Sunday. Had a ton of people come to know Jesus. It was an incredible event to the point where, yes, it blew their budget, but to the point where it's now a regular part of their outreach. Amazing, you know, opportunity for you. So now our church, we've done books, so we'll say, and we've done a different way. Some years we do, hey, we're kicking off a series on insert about relationship and that insert about relationships. You know, we're doing a series on relationships or we're Doing a series on parenting or whatever. And it seems like there might be a problem with the file tab. If there's a problem, we'll send that back. Beth can help you with that too if there's a, if there's an issue there. So if you're. So we've done books, so we do like a series and we're gonna say, hey, we're gonna give away this book to everybody who's, who's coming. Or we said we'll give it to all your first time guests. You know, we've done it differently, different years. So you need to kind of power those two things together. And then thirdly, when we're thinking about shareable weekend teaching, do your biggest social media countdown that you've ever done. Okay. We just launched this thing and if you follow me, you have been pestered. I've been on Instagram, we've been on email, we've done new podcasts, we've done a bunch of stuff that just model your launch to your series in January. Like that it hits January 1st, you're going to launch, say your series is going to start or that whatever. The thing is, the big day is going to be on the the 15th of January. Build a 15 day lead up to that. That's the second part of your 90 day plan. Third part of your 90 day plan is magnetic community service. I would start working now to build a, an early spring service experience where you're planning on getting people out of your seats and into the streets. And this is what's going to happen. We're going to have a huge Christmas attendance. We're going to drive those people to come back in January. And then in January we're going to start talking about a February or March community service experience. We really, the goal here should be to get people out of their seats and into the streets. We have to make a difference on, you know, a Saturday. Really the goal here. Or on a, you know, or you could do on a Sunday. Some churches take Sundays off. One of my favorite churches, Evangel in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, they actually do it every fall. Such a big deal for them. They call service for service. They literally cancel their service. And we've only done that once. But this idea about making a great, you know, that's great MLK Day service day for Nathan City Alliance. Fantastic day to motivate people towards. But the key here is it needs to be making a difference and it needs to be fun. So there'll be difference maker people in your church who want to do Something practical, make a difference in your church, which is fantastic, but it also needs to be fun. It needs to be the kind of thing that they want to be a part of. What you could do is actually go to a community partner. This is a critical piece of the puzzle that we've seen. We actually just did some research on this in fast growing churches and one of the predominant things is that everybody is partnering with someone else to help make this happen. You could go to the mayor, school board official. Actually schools are more open to this kind of partnership. They think hey, if I was to bring 500, 1000, 1500 guests for a day with X amount of dollars to help, how could we help? It might be meal packing, community cleanup. Maybe it's working. If you want to work way far out. A number of churches work that do the servilation serve day in the summer. So again social media countdown to that make this invitable. So a church that's been involved in church growth incubators, my friends, Forest City Church in London Ontario. I talk about London Ontario because you probably have never heard of London Ontario mid sized community in the pro, the post Christian, some would say pre Christian context. They were involved in the incubator for a couple years and they have played this playbook consistently and have seen results. So normal Christmas for them. They take a lot of time, effort and energy. They see 3x3 and a halfx normal attendance on Christmas. It literally it is the place to go on Christmas. But then last year they came out of Christmas and into an at the movie series highly invitable in January in snow barren Canada and they were 40% year over year attendance bump. 40% in January because they, they led strong. They had a plan there. One of the things we worked on was in the cohort was all around new here. Really made a bunch of new here improvements in their area and we made some adjustments. Most churches are actually losing people, they're losing guests as they first arrive. This is one of the things we deal with when you first join the cohort on the front end is adjusting those systems, making sure that they're fine. In fact we made a few adjustments with this church and they saw in the first 60 days after making those adjustments they saw 600 first time guests, registered guests where they actually, it actually caused a bit of a panic internally. They because they applied some extra effort towards that, that. So friends, you've got two options. I've just given you a plan. You could take this ball and run with it. In fact that's really the path a that you have, you could take these things I've given you at a high level what you should think about. But you can keep thinking and hoping that more friends come, that your people invite their friends and family. You could have a hope driven strategy or you could be convinced that hey, we want to intentionally build an invite culture that sustains growth in the long haul. I am hoping that I can convince some of you that 2026 should be the year of invite for your church. 2026 should be like an organizational goal at the highest level, maybe one of two or three goals for the entire year. And that's where what we said we were going to talk about. Church Growth Incubator comes in. Church Growth Incubator is a group coaching experience. The core of it is two calls a month where we gather like minded churches like yours and we do two in person retreats a year where we actually go on site at fast growing churches. I want to take a few minutes and tell you about it, kind of unpack it and show you how it helps. The thing that's been amazing about this again we've, I've talked about it privately, kind of behind the scenes, but never in as public a forum as this. And I want to invite many of you to actually join this, to come and join us on this. And here's the reason why. Because it's making a difference. We're seeing real results. So we do two calls a month, we do two in person retreats a year. I'll tell you more about those. But we also provide you all kinds of resources to actually fuel all of those five areas. So we consistently work on all of these different five areas and give you playbooks, you know, volunteer pathways, we give you, you know, resources, literally videos that you can plug and play, training resources, everything you need to make to, to make happen. So I talked about that. We do two calls a month. One of the types of calls we do are intensives. We do four of these a year. We only do four of them because they're intense, they're two plus hours long. And what we do is we actually take one of those five areas that we just talked about and we go deep. We spend a lot of time and effort and energy on that one particular gear. We bring in a third party expert from a fast growing church. This is not theory, this is what they're actually doing. And they coach you on what they're doing. In the past we've done stuff on mass community outreach around this idea of people getting people out of their seats into the streets. We've done Easter deep dives. We're months ahead. I bring all the resources from what churches have done on Easter. We bring third party experts like Jim Bergen from who actually some of the guys from Flatirons is on. Jim's been on calls in the past helping us wrestle with how do we talk so in so unchurched people will listen. So intensives. We do four of those calls a month. Month labs. We do eight of these a month. One of the differences between my coaching or church growth incubator coaching and what other church leaders do is we base it in the actual behavior of what fast growing churches are doing. So this isn't like based on theory. We go out and do the research on what actually fast growing churches are doing. We talk with them and boil it down for you. And we do this eight times a year in what we call labs calls. We've done things like plan your visit. We went and actually did 25 + plan your visits and walked through all of them. This is like on your site where you click through and like, you know, they, you actually plan your visit. We do all those visits, we go through all those communications, boil it all down and then serve it to you in a platter in a one hour call on exactly what you should do so that you can consistently install what people are actually are doing. Friends, this is a part of what bugs me about other people online who do what I do. I literally today saw someone else give advice online who's got a huge following, who. It's actually the opposite of what fast growing churches are doing. They're saying, oh, you should do this. And it's the opposite of what actually people are doing. It's not my opinion, it's what people are actually doing. We look, we've looked at top trending messages. We did a study this spring on Instagram. I can tell you exactly how you should structure your Instagram, give you the, you know, exactly what they're doing and we provided, you know, examples and so on. Another call is what we call fast action growth. Fast action Q and A. We do these six times a year. These are one hour calls. The goal of these is you bring questions that you're wrestling with, you bring the things that you're thinking through and then we take time to work through it together. And then finally the newest calls, we've actually just added these to the system. They're called growth mechanics. Now all of those other calls are about invite culture, increasing your invite culture. But then what we found is churches are growing and there's new questions that are coming up. And so we've taken the same learning model. We bring people who have actually worked at they're actually working today or work with the fastest growing churches in the country and they deal with, they kind of unpack their coaching. So like we did, we've done one on moving people to groups. What are fast growing churches actually doing to move people from their kind of new here experience into groups or growing their staff teams? What are they doing to add staff Again, they're adjacent to Invite Culture. They're helping churches that are growing. So you'll see on top of all that we provide a bunch of plugin tools. I'm showing this to you because it says hey, we got a bunch of things we want to help you. We're going to give you a handout in the follow up email that literally goes through the five gears and all the resources that we've provided for you. The advantage of you joining here three years in is we've made a bunch of resources that you can plug and play. Now there are churches that have been in for that entire time that continue to be in re up for another year. In fact, all the churches that I was wondering whether they were going to re up read up for this year, which is incredible because of the results they're getting. But the advantage that you have, don't tell them is that all those resources are there ready for you to jump in, dive in. Now we do in person retreats as well. I mentioned those. We do two a year. You get yourself to these locations. We always go and visit a fast growing church. So Mariners Pantano, we've gone to Liquid Church this, this February we're going to Coastal Church in Fort Lauderdale. You get access to the locations, we get a chance to visit them. But it's two days of all of that other kind of content in person. We have fun together. We'll bring in a third party expert. This one here. Actually this was one we did literally in my backyard like here in my. Well not my actual backyard in at our church. And we brought in every one of these. We bring in third party expert for this one. We brought in Jenny Catcher and she was with us for the two days ways really the way for you to think about this is that I am a fractional staff member helping you on invite Culture. That's the most consistent feedback we get and that's the way you should think about this. This is not another training resource. This is a fractional staff member. My job. Listen, I was an executive pastor at fast growing churches and there's lots of things I could help you with. But there's one pie of the puzzle or one piece of the puzzle that I want to help you with. It's invite Culture. And if I can come alongside you and apply pressure on you and your team to actually make effort in this area, you'll see results. Here's a bunch of quotes from three of the churches. We're going to send you more of these that have been involved. You can reach out to these people and ask them. It feels like Rich is on our team. It's like adding a first time guest strategist to our staff. One of the most helpful tools for our church. I love that one's actually from Herman, a friend of mine, Journey Church. He starts out by saying we did this thing and it was going to be on Zoom and I thought it was going to be terrible, but it's actually been super helpful. So this is what I want you to think about. If you were to join now, by the time we got to the end of January, we will have helped you audit your invite culture. We'll help you do that. We'll help you think through that, figure out what your first steps are. We're going to identify your next steps for increasing invite culture and we're going to build a five year action plan for 2026. Here are the areas that you are going to focus on. Now, some of you might be wondering, and this really is the question I have for you, what is holding you back from not doing this? I want you to do this. Now some of you might be asking the question around finances. How much does this thing cost? Listen, if you were to hire a consultant to come in and work with you directly, that would cost probably three to $5,000 a month. They would want to be at least a year or two with you. So that's like 40 to 60 thousand dollars a year. But because we do this in a cohort, you get all of that and the ability to interact with like minded churches. In fact, just yesterday I was on a call with one of the churches in the court and they said the biggest benefit is that I get to interact with so many other churches. So not only that are that they wouldn't normally bump their shoulders with, but they're churches that are wanting to grow. But because we do this in a cohort format, it's a much more economical way of doing it. So the church growth incubator is just $10,000 for the full year. Or you can choose to pay monthly a thousand dollars a month, but that's going to cost you an extra $2,000 over a year. That covers everything. That's your retreats. Just get yourself there, put yourself up. But once you get there, everything at the retreats, food, fun, all that, all the calls done for you, playbooks, the community, private support. I give personal feedback on your writing, on, you know, invite cards, whatever stuff you're doing around this area, I'm ready to give you that feedback. But on top of that, we've given a bonus for people who decide to join at this time of year. So if you join between now and November 19th, and here's the reason why we're saying this, I know church leaders that have a bias for action will actually see a change happen in their churches if they have a bias for saying I want to make stuff happen. So I'm trying to unearth churches that have a bias for action. If you join between now and. Or apply between now and next Wednesday, one week, seven days from today, we'll add it's a $3,500 value, me coming to your church for a day in, in the first quarter of 2026. So I'll actually come. You just have to pay. The flights and hotel won't charge you for me being there. We literally charge that 3, $500 a day. But I'll come and we'll work with your team. We'll bring everybody up to speed. We'll work on the five gears. I'll give you feedback on your facility, but that's only for people who apply in the next 12 days. Now you might be asking, what if our church is under 500 people? I've been saying 500ish. So that's your campus or your church. You know, if it's under that, we still want to help. We have churches joining who have multiple campuses. Their total attendance is over, is over a thousand, over two thousand. But their individual campuses are in that five hundred to a thousand range or five hundred ish to a thousand. We have churches that actually are getting great results in the, in the sub 500 range. This is for your whole team. It's not for one person. So actually the calls, we want to have somebody that's a primary contact, but you can bring multiple people onto the calls. In fact, I actually love that, seeing people sitting, talking amongst each other during the calls. You have to travel for the two retreats a year. We don't want you to miss it. Some churches choose to go to One and not both. But you do, we do want you to come to that. And what kind of results? Well, it really what we've seen is those, those leaders that lean in get the most out. So we're going to go to questions in a second. But if you are going to apply, if you want to apply, what I want you to do is you're going to go to apply. Let me put this link up. Here we go. You're going to go to, I think it's called the offers tab. Click that link, you go to apply churchgrowthincubator.com that will take you through. It takes about five to seven minutes to do that application. Chance for us to get to know each other. At the end of that, we can jump on a discovery call in the next few days to learn whether this is great and to figure out whether, you know, this is the right fit for you. I want to help your church reach more people. Go to apply.churchgrowthincubator.com Would love to have you be a part of it. Friends, listen, healthy things grow. Let's build your invite culture and really help you fuel an incredible invite culture to really see your church reach reach the next thousand people. And I want to remind you about that fast action bonus. Do not miss that. Okay, I'm going to pivot. We've got a bunch of questions and I'm going to pivot to those questions now. I'll stay around for, you know, the next 10, 15 minutes. That comes to the end of the kind of official part of the online workshop. So if you need to go, totally fine, you can go. We'll follow up with these resources actually for folks that have stayed as long, we're going to send you the two resources that are there. One is a proposal. It's literally a five page document that talks exactly what Church Growth Incubator is about. And those five gears, it talks what the training resources are available. You can get those in the files tab right now or you can also, we'll also email those to you. So a number of people ask that question. Yes, we will email you. The slides and the video presentation for you are the examples you can share of the best online conversations. Nathan asked this. You know Nathan, there's low hanging fruit actually. So yeah, we can share that. We do this. Like I said, we have a whole thing within Church Growth Incubator around. This is literally give it to your team. This is what you do with Instagram. But one of the takeaways I would say that I miss see A lot of churches missing is they're not doing sermon clips. And I think this is because you have like people who are like pastor folks teaching pastors are like, they feel like a little bad. They're like, I don't want to make it all about you. Well the reality of it is you're saying things on the weekend that will stir conversation with your people. Use a tool like opus clip or sermon shots to put together 10 different, you know, bites, bite size messages from, from the weekend and share those. That would be a great place to start. Joe asked the question, is it effective when inviting friends but also when it applies to inviting strangers? So here's the good news, bad news. The efficacy of invite is directly related, related to the relationship with the people you have with people. So one of the tools we have within Church Growth Incubator is a thing called how to be a change maker and it's literally a tool you could use with your people to help them walk through and understand. You maybe have heard about the invest and invite culture. You know, it's this idea of like hey, your church needs to both invest in people and then invite people them. And that's, that's great. I think it's a great framework, a great starting point. But actually I actually think there's a third eye which is include. We can't just see people as targets. We have to actually include people in our lives. And so like that friend across the street I was talking about, you know, he, I don't, I don't love them just because I'm hoping they come to my church. That's the only reason why I'm engaging with them. They're incredible people and we're trying to be in their lives and find ways to engage. We've got got to train our people to figure out how to, to actually involve the people in our churches in the lives of those people around it. So Joe, it is less effective for you to try to get your people to invite their friends or to invite their people they don't know. It's got to be friends, family, that's, that's ultimately who it is. The people that are the, the technical sociological term is loose ties. So they're people that they have some sort of tie with. It doesn't need to be like their tightest friends, but it does need to people that they have some sort of loose tie with. Chrissy, we'll share that reference. It was from a blog post I just posted recently. I'll remember that. So Steve asked the question how is this different from the Church Growth Flywheel mastercloud that we bought online. Hey, thanks for buying that. So I would say that's like the 101. This is like the master's level class because this, I mean your face twice a month with your team that taught you at a conceptual level, you should be involved in these five areas. This is going to give you the actual tools. Here are the resources to actually do this. Plus it gives you up to date research. Church Growth Flywheel was written, the bulk of that was written almost 10 years ago where this. We're literally based on what fast growing churches are doing today. So it's the difference between. So is it, is it similar? It echoes where we've been, but in the same way that I've given you everything you need to know, go and make it happen. But really what Church Growth incubator is saying is do you want a fractional staff member, me, who's sitting on your team twice a month on those calls, in those in person retreats asking you questions, asking you did you actually do it? Giving you follow up to push you involved? How many can be involved in the incubator from our team? Great question, Paul. I'd love to have you guys involved. We the best practice I think is to have like a person, one or two people. Usually it's an executive pastor, lead pastor who's kind of the lead there on most of the calls. That's a big commitment. I get that. But we tell you a few like at least a month out what the calls are coming up. I try to be more than that so that you can bring different team members in for most of it. That's why I'm doing these on site visits in the first quarter of 2026. I want to bring your whole team in on what it looks like knowing hey, I might call you in on these different things as we, you know, we get, we get in into that Niffin, what are your thoughts about serve days done with other churches? I think that can be great. I think it can. Obviously from a kingdom point of view, that's a great thing to do. From an invite culture point of view, I would love for you to do them on your own or at least to make sure that you're leveraging it as a way for your people to invite their friends, that it's a way for you to leverage that you're not just, you're not just like inviting the people who attend your church. You're saying, hey, you should be using this to invite people who you don't know. I would encourage that other church maybe say, hey, let's, let's use this in this day. If you're going to do MLK day, let's encourage them to do the same thing. What a better way to honor MLK than to have churches who are trying to invite their entire community to serve their friends. All right, friends, so are there other questions? If you've got questions, drop them in. We will make sure we get a chance to do it. Justin, Alan, I appreciate the kind words. Kyle, you know, so fun. Dan, Appreciate the kind words. Ron, Appreciate everybody you know jumping in. If you've got any other questions, let me know in the chat. If not, we're gonna shut it down again. We will follow up with you with these, this video. We'll follow up with you with, with some slides because you were on live. We're gonna follow up. Hey, Miles, we're gonna follow up with you with that resource, but we're not sending the people that watch the replay. Sorry about that. But I would love to to again drop by. Apply.churchgrowthincubator.com I would. I really do want to see a few of you join us this year. It's super limited. I can't take many, but would love to have you with us. All right, thanks, friends. Thanks for being a part of today's call. Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help. Help. My direct email is just rbnseminary.com I want to help you reach more people. I'm on a mission to help 100 churches grow by a thousand people. Thanks so much, friend.