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Stop buying church marketing. Start building inviters. Hey friends, Rich Burch here from the unseminary podcast solo episode today. Most churches, including yours, are overspending on visibility, but they're under investing in invitation culture. We're going to unpack that today on today's episode and I want to move you from thinking about marketing to thinking about invite culture. That's really what you should be doing if you want your church to grow. But first, a story about me. I remember back in the late 1900s. Yep, that's how long I've been doing this stuff. I ran a dot com. This was back when dot com was cool. It would be like today saying you ran an AI company. People actually used to like you saying you ran a dot com. And we were pre launch and man, we spent a lot of time, effort, energy, money on our marketing that included fancy logo. We obsessed over the color blue in our logo and you know, we spent this amazing kind of money on our website and we went, we launched and man, it was a flop. It did not deliver what we were hoping to deliver. And why was that? Was because we had the wrong focus. We should have been out talking to the people who we were interested in helping rather than thinking if we just build it, they will come. The same is true and you might be repeating the same mistake. You're thinking, man, I just need a new website. I need a better logo, I need to rebrand, I need to change our name. Chasing marketing tactics, tricks, hacks instead of mobilizing your peachel or your people. You don't need a new logo, you don't need a new site. What you need are inviters. Listen, this is the bottom line. If you want durable compounding growth over an extended period of time, stop building marketing and start building inviters. We've got a workshop coming up. It's a free online workshop I'm Hosting on Wednesday, November 12, 12pm Eastern. That's 9am for our friends on the Pacific coast. And this will help you move from just hoping for growth to actually launching. It is called church growth Launchpad. You can register@churchgrowthlaunchpad.com this is for you. If you are leading a church that's growing slower than you wish it was. If you feel like you're doing all the right things, like you've got great messages, you know, great weekend services, solid teams, but momentum just seems to be hard to sustain. Or you love your church but you're tired of carrying the weight all yourself. You sense that there's really a next level to your church's reach that you could reach more people but you're not sure what levers to pull. You should be coming to church growth launchpad. Just go to churchgrowthlaunchpad.com, register this week. Tell your friends to register. That's Wednesday, November 12, 12pm Eastern, 9am for our friends on the Pacific coast, we're going to be talking about invite culture unpacking for you, giving you a 90 day plan, giving you five levers that unlock the growth and we're going to talk about why church most church growth fall stalls. This is particularly helpful for people at churches in the 500ish to a thousand ish range. Churchgrowthlaunchpad.com, we're going to want to be there. Well, why? More marketing does not equal more reach. And this is the reason why friends, we live in an attention recession. You know this AI slop. There's so much content out there, more content, fewer results. You used to be able to do just a little bit as a church and make an impact. That is just not the case anymore. Trust in institutions has fallen off, has really dropped off the table. But trust in family and friends has skyrocketed. In fact, a study done by Nielsen and McKinsey showed that personal recommendations are the most trusted form of promotion. So the most persuasive ad that you can have as a church, the most incredible marketing, the most inspirational thing that will move people from being in your community to sitting in your church is a friend or family member who simply says hey can you come and sit with me? Invited guests stick because relationship is the glue. Not only is this a church growth tactic, not only is this a way to kind of grow the top end numbers, kind of first time guests, people coming to your church, but it's also a about seeing those people stick and stay. There was some research done that showed that if people have that have to have long term to stay to church, have to have at least seven relationships if they want to stick and stay long term. People who don't stay have less than two. And this is the crime of church marketing. We tell you spend some money on Facebook ads or on some latest TikTok thing. People come in, they have no relationship, they don't know your people, they came in but they did not come in from invite. They will not stick and stay as much as they would if they came with a friend. Listen, there's decades of data. The number one reason people attend your church, I cannot say it more simply than this is personal invite this is especially true for younger adults. Authenticity beats algorithms every single time. The bottom line is this. You do not need more ad dollars. What your church needs is invite culture. So I've been thinking about this thing recently. Invite propensity. Invite propensity. It's the percentage of your congregation who have invited someone in the last 90 days. How do you find your invite propensity? You ask your people, you survey them. Hey, who has actually invited. And we want to see the invite propensity number go up. This matters because it's a predictor of future growth. When your invite propensity goes up, it's a leading indicator of growth and it has compounding effects. When people invite friends, those friends come and they end up inviting other friends. It ultimately multiplies. And in fact, encouraging your people to invite their friends is like the best budget sane thing you should be doing to try to reach your to grow your church. In fact, you should be doing this way more than any other kind of marketing. It really costs next to zero to do most of this. It's about strategy and communication. It's not about slick marketing or spending money on some sort of tools. Invite invitation rides on relationship, the most trusted medium on the earth. So what I want to do is talk to you about four outreach myths that are draining momentum. That really are things that you believe that are pushing you towards marketing, that really we need to tear these down so that you can focus on invitation. The first one, the number one outreach myth that's pushing you towards thinking about marketing is your confusing visibility with persuasion. More impressions do not equal more impact. Just like dumping money into Facebook ads or boosting that post or doing another round of billboards on the side of the highway. All that's doing is increasing visibility. But that doesn't mean more impact. Awareness alone is necessary. It's something we need, but it's insufficient to grow your church. You can buy reach, but you cannot buy trust. So you can give marketing in disruption based marketing organizations, you can give them money to interrupt people, to point them towards your church. There's a long path between some stale ad and people actually showing out. If your comms strategy or if your marketing strategy ends with visibility, it's just brand maintenance. It's not mission advancement. You've got to leverage invite ultimately to drive your people to invite their friends. You need to shift your budget from to equipping inviters and really ultimately measuring personal outreach. That is the biggest thing. In fact, it's been said that for every one person that comes, and this is Statistically true. For every one person that comes because of an ad, 25 people come because of invite. Think about that. What that means to you from a budget spend point of view is you should be spending 25 times the amount of money on building the invite culture of your church rather than doing some sort of awareness marketing. If you're trying to figure out how to leverage those $10,000 that Google gives you in a Google grant every year, or sorry, every month, you should be. Before you do that, you should be thinking about how do we increase the invite propensity? How do we get our people to invite? So that's, number one, you're confusing visibility with persuasion. Number two, centralizing evangelism to staff. This is an insipid one. This is super dangerous. When outreach becomes a department, the body atrophies. There's a temptation. As our churches grow, we get people who think about these things all the time. They maybe start thinking about growth or thinking about reaching people, and we start thinking maybe we'll let our evangelism efforts be led by staff. But staff led evangelism can look efficient, but it's actually very weak. Marketing feels safer. And this is the reason why marketing feels safer is because you're behind a desk. You're in the safe comfort confines of your office. No one has to actually go and talk to anyone. But that's just simply not as effective. You can post instead of talking to people. The early church didn't hire a marketing firm. It mobilized a movement. I know that's like a tongue in cheek sort of thing to say, but what your church doesn't need to do is go and spend more money on marketing. What you need to do is invest in invite. You need to do what the early church did, which was to simply spread the good news, to tell other people about what's happening in your church, and to mobilize your people, train, equip, and mobilize them to invite their friends. So what's our staff's job? Their job is to do Ephesians 4 to equip inviters, to mobilize inviters, to inspire, to give them tools to invite, but to not do the inviting themselves. Obviously they should be inviting people, but we're not hiring a super, like a SWAT team of inviters who are on your staff team who go out and do this for you. And we call it marketing or we call it evangelism or outreach. What we need to do is motivate your people, train, equip, and mobilize them to invite their Friends number three, outreach myth. You are underfunding hospitality. Listen, your people won't invite if they don't trust the guest experience. I'm not gonna invite a friend. I'm not gonna risk inviting someone that I know, friend from work, or that neighbor from down the street, or my uncle who I haven't talked to in a little bit, or my brother who you know, I've been talking about faith things with. I'm not gonna do that if I think when they arrive, they're frankly just not gonna have a guest. A positive guest experience. There can be friction points around signage, around kids check in, around just simply entrances that will kill this sort of momentum. So what you need to do is audit your Sunday experience from a first time guest point of view. Because if your church is not ready, if they're not ready to receive first time guests, your people won't invite. And this, this is really a myth for you. It's like, well, if we had more guests, we would start doing these things. No, no, no, no, no. You have to start doing it now. You have to invest in hospitality now as a precursor to your people inviting your friends. Hospitality isn't a side ministry. It is a front door. You need to fund the experience your people are proud to share. So listen, you cannot underfund hospitality. You've got to fund this area. Your people have got to want to invite their friends. What are you doing to make the hospitality side of what you do? How can you do a better job on that? Let's be thinking about that. Okay? Number four outre is you're only celebrating conversions. We know this churches platform, the touchdowns, you know, those amazing testimonies. Maybe it's baptism. It's the story of the person who's journeying along and they have this incredible conversion experience and Jesus turns their life upside down. We celebrate that, but we don't celebrate the drive, what it took to get there. People start with conversations, not with conversions. When was the last time that as a church you stood up and told stories of people inviting people to your church? Whether or not they came or not? We know that people need to be invited multiple times. It's very rare that you reach out to a neighbor and say, hey, could you come to my church this weekend? We've got this special thing and that they'll actually show up if we only celebrate salvations. You teach your people that invitation doesn't matter. So we've got to connect the dots for them. We've got to show people how the invite path worked and ultimately Led. Led to salvation. As you're thinking about baptism testimonies, ask the question, what happened when you first came here? Who invited you? How did you get here? Celebrate courage and attempts to normalize the invite. So go out of your way. Celebrate courage. Celebrate courage and attempts normalize the invite. Tell lots of stories about how people keep inviting their friends and talk about you from if you're a preacher, talk about how you've invited friends and they haven't said yes today. But that's okay. You're going to continue to invest in those relationships and involve them in your life. These aren't people are. These people aren't a project that you're working on. These are folks you love and like. You share anything in your life. You want to draw them in. Listen, the old adage is true. What gets celebrated gets repeated. So let's celebrate invite in your community. So those are four outreach myths that are draining the invite momentum at your church and probably driving you towards thinking about marketing. Well, let's talk about the budget question for a second. Should you stop at all advertising? Well, not necessarily paid media can raise awareness, but relationships create action. I am we. I think that you should do some paid media. I think you should do some advertising. I think you should have that billboard on the side of the highway. But all of that should be in the context of a robust invite culture where you're actually talking to your people about the fact that you're doing these things so that their friends will see. Their friends will have awareness of the church. Although that's kind of like the air war that's getting the conversation started. We need boots on the ground. We need the ground war. We need them to actually go and do the inviting. Here's, here's a little bit of data. 79% of guests come because of personal invite. Let's just think about that 80%. This is the most pessimistic I could find. Multiple studies show even more than that. Invitations are 10 times more powerful than marketing. You should be spending 10 times as much on your invite culture as you are on your marketing. Therefore, don't kill your marketing budget, but let's repurpose it. Let's take those resources that you were spending on those things and let's repurpose it into a building an invite culture. In fact, on the upcoming workshop Church Growth Launchpad, again, you can just check that out@churchgothlaunchpad.com we're going to talk about how you can invest. I'm going to give you a 90 day plan. Here's the thing you should do to kind of finish this year strong, but then really look up over the horizon and talk about next year. What can we do to get ready in 2026 to reach even more people? I would love for your church to end 2026 much larger than it finished here. So the things you should be spending on, you should be spending on training, equipping and motivation. So this is like the staff and the systems, the tools for your congregation. These are things like invite cards, shareable social graphics, a mobile first landing page with RSVPs, that sort of thing motivating people. You should be telling stories that stick vision leaks. We know that we should be investing in great produced video that tells the story of people inviting. So friends, let's land this plane. The gospel doesn't spread through algorithms. It spreads through relationships. If you're buying attention, if you're spending money on marketing, all you're doing is paying rent to platforms. What you should be doing is building inviters. That's an asset that you will own. It's trust in the people that you're inviting. And ultimately you're building a community over the long haul that will fuel growth for years to come. The most persuasive message won't come from your webpage. It'll come from your people. So friends, stop buying marketing. Start building inviters. Drop by that website, sign up for the workshop. It's coming up soon. Churchgrowthlaunchpad.com that is on November 12, 12 noon Eastern. That's 9am for our friends on the Pacific Coast. Thanks so much friends. Reach out. Let me know if you got any questions. Love to help in any way I possibly can.