EP105: Savannah Kimberlin & Barna’s "6 Questions about the Future of the Hybrid Church"

Episode 105 of the Church Digital Podcast powered by Stated Church Planning. Jeff here. Um, Stadia has said we've talked a lot about Stadia, of course. I mean, hey, they're my boss and it's an incredible organization to work with, to work for, and I love their heart for the big C churches, not only here in America but across the country and around the world. And so here in this coveted season, they have been so aggressive and innovative trying to help churches learn how to thrive, grow, and multiply physically as well as digitally. It's not about being in the building and it's not about broadcasting services. It's really about creating those disciple makers, mobilizing and releasing them. The Great Commission digitally or physically, just do it. Mobilize and release these people out so that your church can even learn how to multiply in this season.

And so first off, right off the bat, if your church is interested in some of the stuff we are doing, some aggressive things in 2021 towards helping churches learn how to thrive, grow, and multiply, so check it out. Go to stadiachurchplanning.org/digital. P-H-Y-G-I-T-A-L. It's the strengths of physical and digital. Stadiachurchplanning.org/digital. Check it out. Head over there. The links in the show notes as well. Get signed up for a learning community in 2021. Find more of what it takes, what it takes to get part of this and how Stadia can help you, your church, learn how to thrive, grow, and multiply.

Tell you what, we're going to extend that Stadia love heading in here while we're doing episode 105 because in this COVID season, part of the innovation that we have done, Stadia, we've had the honor of partnering with Barna Research towards releasing a study on what digital church, what digital church looks like in and amongst this COVID season. And unbiasedly, I got to tell you, this is probably the best research that I've seen on digital church, period. Not to mention the best research that I've seen on digital church, what is actually happening inside digital church in this COVID season.

So for, I'll put this link in the show notes as well. The report itself is over at barna.com/stadia. Barna, B-A-R-N-A, dot com slash Stadia, S-T-A-D-I-A. Go and put the link in the show notes. No, we have nothing to do with Stadia gaming from Google. Just wanted to get that out of the way. Stadia is planning, completely separate thing. But barna.com/stadia is where you can buy this report, and it is a phenomenal report with stats and research, basically what the end user is experiencing and what their thought patterns are walking into this digital church season. Do they like it? Do they not like it? Are they turned off by it? Did what? How much do they want to do? Are they okay with communion online? Are they okay with discipleship? Are they okay with prayer? Like it was so rich beyond just the one hour on Sunday. I loved getting the feedback from what the people want to experience as a result of this.

And so the report was so good, I reached out to Barna, was like, "Hey, who can I talk with towards this idea of what we're doing with digital church here with the report?" So we're bringing into the podcast here Savannah Kimberlyn. Now Savannah's been with Barna a long time. She'll tell you about that here on the podcast. But here with this research journal, we're really drilling into the six questions about the future of the hybrid church experience. So when we're talking about physical and digital coming together with Barna, they're using that word hybrid, that hybrid church. And so we're digging in here talking about the six questions about the future of what a hybrid church experience could look like or where are we? What are we learning in this season today? Love this. Love digging in. Not only talking about where we are as a church and what we're learning across the big C church, but philosophically, what does this mean for the future of our churches here in America and beyond?

So for the conversation, I'm bringing in Savannah Cumberlain once again with Barna and myself, Jeff, with the Church Digital and Stadia Church Planning, essentially discussing the six questions about the future of the hybrid church experience.

Okay, everybody, here you go. Maybe even just open up. I'm Savannah. I'd love to, you know, know your ministry story, how you got plugged in working for a company like Barna. What's it like working for Barna?

Yeah, uh, firstly, Jeff, thank you for having me on today. This really is a privilege to spend some time and talk with you. Um, so my background actually, I was a math major in college. I love to solve problems with numbers. That's what I've always loved to do. So I decided to go to grad school and I actually studied decision analytics. So big data, the world of big data and all that is involved there. It's an ever-changing industry, that's for sure. So um, that was my career trajectory and path. And at first, after grad school, I was in the software development industry. Um, but long story short, when I was in grad school, I wrote my thesis on using big data to predict volunteer burnout at churches. How can we use, um, yeah, volunteers' big data footprints, yeah, to predict whether or not they're going to stick around as volunteers? And Brooke Hempel, who's our senior vice president at Barna, actually caught wind of my thesis. And we grabbed coffee, and a couple months later, I joined Barna. So that's what led me, led me to this organization, was actually just through my thesis and the fact that I've always wanted to do math and study the church and see those two things, those two passions of mine, walk hand in hand professionally. And I get to do it every day, which is unreal, that I'm able to do that.

Well, I tell you what, it would be a miss if I didn't pull that thread here a little bit. It's not all what I wanted to talk about on the podcast, but what were your observations centered around big data and volunteering and burnout? Like, what did you observe?

Yeah, so you can predict um behavior through big data footprints, which is wild. And that's why, you know, organizations like Target, you know, or other large companies, they'll look at your big data footprints to try to determine, um, you know, marketing strategies and the rest. And so I found that that actually was the case as well for volunteers. So there were certain key elements of people's lives. Um, looking, so we looked at a wide assortment of variables, and a certain few variables popped that if they appeared in a certain order or organized in a certain way, they did in fact predict burnout. So the result was we flagged all of the volunteers that were showing those signs, and then the pastors reached out to them proactively to shepherd them and just to check in on them. And so instead of responding defensively to burnout, they were able to respond proactively to burnout for the test church that partnered with me. So um, it was really interesting.

That's awesome. Big data to save the day. I know, a really cool story. All right, hey, so what we I really wanted to talk about here and I'm excited about this, Stadia is partnering um with Barna when it comes to the idea of releasing a journal uh centered around what digital church is and hybrid churches and how it's responding here in the midst of the COVID season. And yeah, it's been released. We'll put a link in the show notes. It's barna.com. We'll get you there. But it's six questions about the future of the hybrid church experience. And so um, the findings of it were just released, and so I was really excited about this, pouring into all, you know, all sorts of information and graphs, trying to discover what we're learning, what we're seeing, and really even from the audience perspective, what they're experiencing and processing here in this COVID season through the church. And I was honest, there were some things that I was really surprised by. There were a lot of things that I expected, but there were a couple curveballs that I was like, "Man, I did not see that coming at all."

So you know, Savannah, I want to thank you for jumping on here, you know, even just with Barna's perspective and starting to talk here a little bit about the data. Super excited how all this is coming together. Um, you know, just maybe even a major question for you right off the bat. General findings. What was something that was surprising for you when you were going into this? Did you have like, going into it, something in mind where you thought the results were? Did it line up or was it something completely different?

We went into this project trying to, one of our biggest goals was to really gauge openness. Are people open to digital alternatives for faith experiences? How open are they? Um, if we look at each of those faith experiences separately, like just gathering together or even just um baptism or communion, like if we really break apart traditions, discipleship, outreach, evangelism, so on and so forth, if we break apart those things, how open are people to each of those different um faith expressions or experiences? And why? Why are they open or why are they not open? And what I was, I was really surprised to find is there is a lot more openness than perhaps we thought.

One of my favorite statistics that emerged from this study is we just flat out asked people, "What type of church experience is going to fit your lifestyle the best after COVID? Is it a physical gathering, a digital gathering, both, or neither?" And so many churchgoers said both. They acknowledge that a hybrid model fits their lifestyle the best. And similarly, we saw openness for discipleship digitally and we saw openness for outreach digitally and communicating to neighborhoods and serving neighborhoods digitally. It was really interesting to see that um, one of our data points showed that especially because of the pandemic, openness has grown exponentially. And it really speaks to, I think, the moment that we're in, that on the backside of this pandemic, um, there will remain openness that was not there pre-pandemic.

That's great. Looking forward to unpacking even more here. I, one of the things that I love about Barna and just anytime you're dealing with big data, you're looking at the same data through different perspectives and wrestling with, okay, this vantage point versus this one and this one. And so you're very thorough with uh practicing Christians, churched adults, unchurched adults' perspectives there. Uh, generationally, uh, you know, Gen Z, Millennial, Gen X, Boomers, that perspective. Yeah, one of the things that I loved here was you also had the perspective of people who maybe had more of a bend towards technology and digital, digital. And so like digital church openness was a phrase that you used in here. And so you were looking at the results through people who were maybe open to the idea of digital church and others that maybe did not, or not even digital church, but just digital in general. Some people who maybe were a little bit less. Like, I would love to just know how did you um, how did you filter out whether somebody was like open to digital church or had that bent towards digital?

Great question. So we did a lot of analysis, a lot of robust analysis to decide what were the key indicators of openness. Maybe phrasing it a little bit differently, what were the key variables that if we cut the respondents by those variables, the divide would be as stark as it possibly could, right? We really wanted to create groups of people that looked different and had very defined traits and characteristics that made them distinct.

Them unique. So in our analysis, we looked at a bunch of variables and we found that some things that floated to the surface were, um, that data point that I had just mentioned—so saying that hybrid or digital church fits your lifestyle the best, which is a very personal type of question, a very reflective question. And so we found that that was powerful, um, for people to voice their real world practical needs.

We also found that, secondly, openness to discipleship digitally spiked. So that was very, very influential in determining openness. So if you were willing to participate in discipleship digitally or online, and then thirdly was that outreach piece that I mentioned as well. So if you were open to doing outreach digitally, then you were put into that high openness group.

Um, and then finally, the fourth characteristic that I want to mention was actually a pretty unique one, and I think for any listeners today, this is a characteristic that perhaps you wouldn't have thought of ahead of time. We found that churchgoers who said that generally speaking they're the types of people who are open to attending new kinds of gatherings that are different than what they're used to—that was very influential. It's a very influential variable. There are these types of people who are just open to new experiences. They're willing to put themselves out there. Um, as you might suspect, there are fewer—I'm not going to say few, but fewer—boomers have this trait, um, less so than other generations. That doesn't mean no boomers have this trait, but fewer boomers have this trait. Just having a general openness to trying new things, trying new environments and new communities. So those were four really defining marks of how we defined openness. So if you showed that you carried all of those marks, then you were considered high openness. You had high openness.

Yeah, and I totally believe that there are more people out there that have a digital leaning that the church just hasn't even recognized yet. And I'm beginning to see some of that even through some of the stats that are coming up, like you mentioned. Um, you know, digital discipleship or, you know, digital prayer being open to some of those experiences. Sure, practicing Christians—you know, right now one of the stats that came out of it—practicing Christians, 20 percent are open to digital prayer experiences. When it comes to, and I'm even combining digital spiritual formation with digital discipleship, you isolated them—you know, potentially 27 percent of people were open to something like that. So you're seeing people that have more of a bend towards digital discipleship, digital prayer, digital experience that's more beyond the one hour on Sunday. And there's really like a challenge, I think, for the church to kind of step up and embrace that from a digital perspective.

What, um, were there other findings that were coming out like volunteering digitally, digital children's, digital youth experiences? Where were there other things that you were looking towards as, "Hey, here's a tell sign of somebody that's wanting to be more aggressive in the digital space?"

Yeah, I think so. I think certainly parents that are willing to, um, disciple their children digitally was a telltale sign. Um, a lot—I would say though quite a few parents are hesitant to do so—or even their youth to have the church community alternative for young people today be digital solutions. And perhaps I think that reason is because we just need to get better at serving the youth of America digitally. You know, that I think that's a way that, um, churches are all looking to improve right now. And, um, but we found that parents that are open to that are more inclined to be digitally open for their own personal spiritual development as well.

Um, a couple other indicators—we asked a question about, um, do you struggle to focus during a service? And quite a few people said that they did struggle to focus. However, um, the few people that were able to kind of cut through the noise and really connect with the community—and what I mean by that is emotionally connect in the sense where they were showing signs of saying, "I feel cared for by my pastors. I feel emotionally connected and relationally connected to my community"—if they exhibited those signs, they were able to cut through that noise of being distracted or struggling to focus during a digital spiritual experience, and they showed more signs of openness because they were emotionally connected and were able to cut through those distractions.

Yeah, that was that was one of the surprises for me. And I don't have that slide up in front of me, but the high percentage of people that felt connected and cared for by the church, by the individual pastors, by watching that digital service—I wasn't expecting that level. I was expecting, you know, that they needed more engagement, more two-way conversation, more individual approach. But per your report, looking at the individual attenders, digital attenders, they felt cared for even by watching that online service.

Yeah, I think we were surprised by that data point as well. I remember having some conversations internally about that data point, um, but I think also we need to realize that the definition of what does it mean for a pastor to care for a congregation is different right now. And when we say "I'm connected to my community," that's different right now than even what it was nine months ago. And so although things are more difficult, I think congregants—my takeaway from that data point is that congregants are very understanding. They understand that pastors are doing the best that they can. And we saw in some other data as well that congregants are just appreciative that pastors are really trying right now. They're doing the best that they can. They're looking to innovate and grow. I mean, the number of churches that are innovating for the first time in years during this pandemic—it's really remarkable and admirable. Um, and congregants are seeing that and they feel cared for and they feel connected, even though it's different than what it was before the pandemic.

One of the bad things in the season is, or potentially bad—I don't know that it's bad for an individual church—maybe it's bad—that where individuals are attending more than one church. And there's a fear, "Hey, we're not gonna, we're gonna lose these people." Where that's grounded, you know, that's a whole other conversation. But from a data standpoint, what it looks like I'm understanding is roughly 20 to 35 percent, given age demographics, are attending multiple church services online. Was there any more understanding towards why or where or how many or what that looked like? Because I know that that's something as local churches are out there, you know, there's always somebody better on the content side. And I know there's fear that they're going to lose some of these people. So what can you unpack maybe some of what you learned through this, through these findings?

Yeah, absolutely. That's the question of the day, isn't it? Um, are my people watching my service or are there random people watching my service? As a pastor, everybody's wondering, "Who are my viewers?" Um, and that is a great question to ask because we want to make sure that we understand who we're serving. So it's a very understandable question.

Um, what we found in the data is that the majority of churchgoers are remaining faithful to the congregation that they were a part of before COVID. So that's great news for all of us, I think. Pastors, you can stop sweating it. It's okay. Um, some of them—it was interesting. We wanted to give them the opportunity to express what their attendance habits were looking like during the pandemic, and one of our response options was, I—it was along the lines of, "I'm remaining committed to my church, like my church that I consider to be my church, but I'm also sampling other churches." And quite a few adults selected that answer. They are sampling other churches. However, they were showing signs even throughout the data of remaining loyal to the congregation that they were attending before the pandemic. So although the number of views that some of these more advanced, larger churches are getting are spiking, that does not necessarily mean that loyalty in the hearts of these churchgoers is shifting from their pastor, from their local congregation, to that larger church or whoever else they are also watching on a Sunday.

So I think that's great news in the sense that even though many churches have not met in person for months and months and months, the loyalty is remaining steadfast for many churchgoers. Um, so that's really great news for the pastors of today. And there's always opportunities to expand the ministry beyond just that content, just that weekend Sunday piece, you know?

Sure. Looking here, like going back to the percentage of people that will embrace a digital discipleship angle, the number of people that are wanting to volunteer in online environments, um, digitally connecting with people—there's a lot more opportunity to engage. And so if we're just putting content to content, there's a risk. But when you create more of that church experience where you're giving people ownership and discipleship, like there's a lot more potential growth for somebody in those areas. And I think within that growth is where the loyalty comes into play.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, and I know one of the things that I'm excited about with you is, uh, with where Barna is going—is more than just a digital church. Like there, it feels like there's a suite where there's more reports that are going to be coming out digitally—evangelism, discipleship, right? You want to maybe update a little bit on those? Because I'm excited to see this whole thing develop.

Yeah, absolutely. So this Hybrid Church Journal is one of many that we hope to publish. So we are releasing a State of the Digital Church series because we know that so many things are disrupted, so many different facets of the faith experience are being innovated right now digitally. So we wanted to really explore them piece by piece.

So as of right now, the Hybrid Church was our first journal that we launched with Stadia. And then we are going to be releasing the first week of December, um, one on digital evangelism with Alpha. And then also we're doing a second one with Alpha in the new year on creating digital prayer experiences—how do we create hospitable environments and powerful corporate prayer environments digitally when you're not in person? So those are two more journals that we have teed up right now, and we hope to do even more in the future into 2021.

It's exciting because you're starting to get like a more richer picture of what church is—more than just that weekend service, creating that digital community, that digital discipleship, that digital prayer. Uh, oh yeah, we recently did a podcast. Uh, Greg Nettle, president of Stadia, he asks me every time I see him. He's like, "Hey, where have you seen the tangible presence of God happening online?" You know, and he's not asking for like the weekend service update. He's asking for where is God moving?

Yeah, it's that's more than just a content thing. And by Barna doing research and digging into the disciple making, into the weekend service or the, um, the prayer moments, we're starting to explore more of this space other than just what's happening kind of within that Sunday morning 9 a.m. look and feel. So that's really exciting.

Yeah, one one of the things I'd love to maybe pull the thread a little bit on is, and I don't know if that your stats show it or if you can provide any leanings towards it, the, you know...

You shared the stat with me, 75 percent of people attend a church that's less than 250 in attendance. You know, in this COVID season, pre-COVID by far the vast majority of people who are doing anything online had more of a mega, giga church mentality. But out of necessity in this COVID season, a number of churches pivoted and had to get online quickly, of all sizes. So my closest friends are lead pastors of churches, you know, under 100 that are doing something digitally. Is there any awareness or stats centered around the size of the church or how a smaller church is going to embrace an idea versus a bigger church? Did you get any findings in those areas?

Yes, certainly. So hybrid, the hybrid model or incorporating digital into the way that you did church in some form was already a part of the equation for many churches about 500 in size or larger. But all of the churches that were smaller than that, and for sure the churches that were 250 or fewer, very, very few of them had a digital strategy before this moment. And if they did, they were ahead of the curve. Reasons for that, I think we need to understand, you know, understand where these leaders are at. Their initiatives are volunteer-led. They have very small budgets to work with. Their focus is highly, highly pastoral, intimate relationship with their congregants and walking through life with their congregants in these smaller congregations. And we, you're right, Jeff, we do need to remember that three out of four people that go to church attend a church that feels like this, that's small, that's volunteer-led, that maybe has one person on staff, maybe the pastor, may very well be bivocational. So the transition to the pandemic certainly, our data has shown that it was more difficult for those churches because they did not have a digital strategy beforehand, and that made a large difference, not only for ease of transition for staff and for congregation, but also we did see in our data that those congregants who were exposed to digital church before the pandemic, they were far more likely to be open to engaging digitally with things like discipleship in children's ministry during the pandemic. They were already open to the idea beforehand.

So what does the transition to this pandemic moment look like for those smaller churches? It's been hard for sure to go digital. Many of them, you know, they just set up their iPhone on a tripod and stream themselves preaching on a Sunday, and that's the best that they can do. I think maybe as an example of that, some of our dearest friends are Methodist ministers in Mississippi, and they're in their twenties, and in their division all of the other pastors in their division are in their fifties or above. And so when the pandemic hit, they ended up forming like a small group with my friends who are in their twenties and all of those other pastors because the pastors were like, "I don't even know how to Facebook Live stream. Can you help me figure this out?" And all of those pastors that were represented on those Zoom calls pastored small congregations. They just didn't have resources. So it's been a struggle to go digital, and I think if we want to encourage these people to consider the hybrid church model in the future, even looking beyond just setting up an iPhone and listening to yourself preach, they're going to need some more help with getting over those technological barriers.

What does it look like to do digital discipleship when you only have a hundred congregants? What does that even look like? How do we do children's ministry or youth ministry when there are only a handful of children that you're ministering to week in and week out? What does that look like on a small scale? I think that's really something for us all to think through, and I'm not quite sure if we've cracked the code on that. Maybe Stadia has. I don't know. I don't think we have. But yeah, the small church thing is different. But I do want to say, Jeff, one final thing that we've seen in the data: one strength of the small church in this pandemic that the large church does not have is the connectedness and the strength of relationship between congregant and pastor has remained so strong. And so we've been asked the question a lot, "How do we replicate that in larger church environments?" Because these pastors of small congregations are able to call all their congregants, you know, and they're able to go knock on their door and check in on them, and of course socially distancing, but just, you know, how do we replicate that for a large church? And so any pastors of large churches who are listening, are you being intentional to build relationship with your congregants, or are you getting caught up in the digital production? When's the last time you sent an email that was not professionally designed with graphics? It was just from you with words on a page in your signature at the bottom to a congregant? That is something that I think pastors of larger congregations really can learn from smaller congregations right now.

Yeah, I had an early call, it was March, early April 2020. I had a giga church digital pastor, 20,000 pre-COVID attendance physically, not to mention tens of thousands online. I had that pastor tell me, "Jeff, I wish I was at a small church right now or able to do tangible physical ministry, individual ministry towards it." And so the challenge of churches today, and I think you just, you know, hit the nail on the head, Savannah, it's how do we do relational ministry utilizing these digital tools, absolutely, that can multiply our people and at the same time build relationships with people who are far from God and point them evangelically to God, which is actually it summarizes everything of what I'm excited about as you're developing this digital, these journals, these digital suite of addressing the ideas of, yeah, the weekend service is important, evangelism is important, disciple making is important. If we can figure out prayer is important, and if we can figure out how to do all of these things together digitally, if we can learn what we can do, the church has huge opportunities to do things digitally as well as physically.

Like, we're talking a lot about this digital, and for me, one of the stats that I found really telling in this is that people are not looking for a lone physical experience. Right? There's a percentage that is, there's a percentage that of smaller percentage that's looking for a digital-only experience, yeah, but the majority seem to be looking for some sort of hybrid where they can go back and forth between physically and digital. You want to unpack some of that?

Yeah, for sure. So one of the questions that we asked was, we asked people to agree or disagree to the following statement: "Would you say that physically, the physical gathering of Christians or the physical gathering of a church experience is very important to you? Like, would you say that?" And the vast majority of people agreed with that statement. I think we want to innovate digitally, 100 percent, but we cannot forsake or forget the fact that many, many Christians still do believe that the gathering is a very important piece of their faith experience. So we have to keep that in mind, that that's how people are feeling. That is what they're wanting. However, you're exactly right, Jeff. Alongside that statistic, I mean, 42 percent of millennials said that they are looking for a hybrid solution for their lifestyle, for their church engagement after the pandemic. 42 percent. So we have to understand that there's this need for connection, there's this need for gathering, of course, because we're humans, but at the same time they are looking for flexible solutions.

So I would say that was probably one of the largest findings of putting the digital and the physical next to each other and analyzing them side by side. Physically, we want our traditions that are dear to us, like weddings and funerals and visitations, and we want to gather with other believers. For many liturgical denominations, of course, we want to take the Eucharist together, right? Like, that is really, really, really important. However, we want flexibility. And on the digital side of things, we believe that innovation is totally the answer for the future because I can still get community and intimacy of relationship and a powerful worship experience. I can still get those things digitally. So I certainly, we saw respondents say, "I'm not willing to compromise really on either. I would like to have both."

You know, your boss, David Kinnaman, who I have the utmost respect for, you know, he just recently went through a loss of his wife to cancer. I'm blanking on the type. Brain cancer. Brain cancer, yes. You know, and so just seeing him go through that tragedy and just from the outside how he was, you know, still doing ministry and holding strong to Christ in that season was very telling of kind of the calling that he has on his life. He heard him say this a couple of times on different podcasts, and I've heard other people quote him on other podcasts, but essentially, you know, 20 percent of churches shutting down, but 30 percent of people are going to disconnect from the church as a result of this. And I've heard him use strong language like, "Mathematically, it's short of an act of God or radical disciple making. We're losing 30 percent of people out of this, mathematically." And so your report here speaks towards that church dropout, you know, and just I would love to maybe even just open it up here. What, as we're looking at these church dropouts, what are we observing? What trends can we do to turn the favor? Hey, that radical disciple making's an awesome idea, but what else are we learning here about these dropouts, this 30 percent that Barnes has been speaking of?

Yeah, well, that's certainly the question, isn't it? How do we win these people back? At the end of the day, when all is said and done and the pandemic passes, we're going to have to win some people back. And I think we need to be realistic about that. And I think a lot of pastors were perhaps short-sighted, even as they were trying to predict when they were going to reopen. We had lots of people say, "Oh yeah, it'll be March. Yeah, it'll be April." And my encouragement would be, let's prepare ourselves for the long game with winning people back maybe a little bit better than we did for preparing for reopening. So that's just one little piece there. But yes, the dropouts. It's an interesting group of people. So how we define dropouts in this journal is people that were actively connected to a church before COVID and say that they have never attended a service either in person or digitally during the pandemic. They haven't attended at all. And I think we need to be realistic and know that a good chunk of those people, they are distancing themselves physically for health reasons, and many people were not offered a digital solution for their home church during COVID. I believe it was 22 percent, if I'm remembering correctly, of people were not offered digital solutions. So yeah, so we just need to be realistic and again, probably a lot of those are very small churches. Many congregations are so small that they did not have to give up meeting together in order to observe precautions. Lots of reasons, of course. So there are those exceptions, and I just want to acknowledge those exceptions. Elderly people who don't know how to use technology, or you know, people who they were not offered a digital solution, so on and so forth.

Now let's talk about the rest of the dropouts, the millennials who...

Have totally disengaged the Gen Xers who they and their family and their children have totally disengaged. What are we seeing here? Well, one of our crucial data points that I want to call out is we asked the following statement: "Do you agree or disagree with this? I am rethinking my faith practices and their role in my life during this pandemic." And a lot of dropouts agreed with that statement. So what they are asking themselves is this: Is my life really better if I incorporate a faith practice of going to church? Is my life really better if I incorporate the practice of Bible study? You know, is does that actually improve my life? And we are at the point when many people—I think the statistic was it's about one in four of millennials, just in general, like not even the dropouts—are rethinking their faith practices right now. One in four millennials are rethinking their faith practices right now. Um, and we need to take that statistic with a grain of salt because the question to any pastor's listening is what are you doing with that? Like people are really wrestling right now. What is the value add of attending a church? Maybe we need to remind our congregants of why being connected to a body of Christ is so important. Really, how is your life improved by being a Christian? But not just being a Christian, but being involved in a faith community. What is the value add there? Um, so that's really interesting. But I also do want to just suggest that maybe not all hope is lost. We ask the question: "Um, do you plan on just returning back to your faith practices when the pandemic is over?" And a lot, a lot of the dropouts—the majority of the dropouts—said yeah, I'll return. Um, however, the jury is still out on whether or not they will.

Yeah, and I think we need to begin thinking now about what that re-entry is going to look like for these people. It's not just hop back into the middle of things. What discipleship or shepherding strategies are we going to need to innovate and dream up to re-engage these people? I mean, we're going to need to teach them to ride their bicycle all over again.

Yeah, there's a danger. One of the stats that was in here and I'm clicking through the slide deck trying to find that—I couldn't—but you would probably know it. Um, where there larger percentage—there was a very large percentage of people that were spiritually feeding themselves without um getting connected to the church body. I forget what the exact phrasing is. Do you remember the specific stat that I'm referencing?

Um, yes. I'm growing spiritually in ways other than attending church during the pandemic.

Yeah, and that's um that's incredible. That can be heavily encouraging because now I'm beginning to see multiplication happening. If in fact that's what's happening, or if it's uh now you know falling away from from spiritual things just out of laxness or or not. And so like to me, that was the great unknown stat. Like I would love to have asked maybe three or four qualifying questions afterwards to try to discover why do you feel that way? What are you doing uh to to to quantify that? Just so that we could get a gauge on what people are doing. If if they're diving into Scripture, if they're having these awesome prayer times, if if they're learning how to be disciple makers and getting out there and investing in communities and and reaching their circle of influence for Christ, that's a that's awesome. Like we need to celebrate that victory. Um, and and maybe that is happening, but I I would love to just be able to unpack that that one thing and say hey, if you're spiritually growing without the church, what what what is that? What does that look like? And what can we learn from you? Because we we may need some help.

Yeah, for sure. I think to something along those lines, when I when I saw that statistic, Jeff, was like okay, well people are still growing spiritually. I think my concern though was um are they going to get so entrenched in new habits that they think that their own spiritual development—like listening to podcasts or you know, or um watching YouTube videos uh from the Bible Project, which is they're fantastic—but but is that is that a supplement to the spiritual practice of attending church at the same time every Sunday? You know what I'm saying? Like like actually tithing that first day of the week to the Lord. Um, and I think my concern is Christians are keeping up with with their spiritual health as best they can. Great news. But are we sacrificing practices? Because they are two different things. And that's it. It all comes down to: Is church that one hour on Sunday? Or is church absolutely, you know, the the community that that meets 168 or that's part that's active 168 hours?

Yeah, and that's why that's why a full-blown hybrid strategy right now is even more important because we want to continue to communicate to these people: your church is an active partner in your spiritual development. It is not just coming on Sunday. And if the church can remain a consistent presence when we're talking about spiritual development—not just practices but spiritual development—then I I think that bridge to get back to quote-unquote normal, whatever that means, um is is going to be easier for these dropouts. Especially we got a long road ahead. Um, you know, it's funny. Back in March, I I remember I was speaking for a conference for American Bible Society or something like right when this thing hit. And um and it was hey, you know what? Could you imagine if we had two weeks? Two weeks where we wouldn't go anywhere and just could you imagine like how what we could make of ourselves if we really just spent two weeks on on our spiritual on our spirituality on delving into Scripture on our own? Uh, so that was the thing. It was funny at the time. Like the the heads of the conference, they were like we don't know that we want you to say the two-week thing because you know what if it's like two days? And it's it's like just the and now it's like you know, we're we're I don't know, months seven, eight in here, right? You know, 2021 and we're spiking in different areas and going up and and I don't know. I I think we're going to be doing this for for a while. And so church embracing that hybrid approach in those hybrid environments, the figuring out how to do the physical, figuring out how to do the digital, figuring out how to get them to work together uh is is going to be so important for your the church, your church moving forward because people are not just looking for a physical experience there. My physical church is is meeting right now and I'm not attending my physical church. That doesn't mean that I'm a bad spiritual person. That's not saying anything about my spiritual walk. It's just saying I don't feel safe in the building. And so as a result of that, I'm going to continue and my family's going to continue to engage in in digital space. And so uh Savannah, I just want to thank you and and Barna for for taking the time to shed some light on what's actually happening there. You know, so often we hear the individual stories, but now to have you know stats to really start to define what this looks like and for us to um interpret, learn from, and figure out the next steps is is is hugely important. So even just as as we're landing the plane here, did any any closing thoughts? Or or any like crazy stats? Something that I missed that was just a huge surprise for you?

Um, crazy stats. I need to think through that a little bit more. Um, but maybe as as one closing remark, um I would encourage any pastors or listeners today: if you want to unpack these six questions about the future of the hybrid church experience, I would highly encourage you to get the journal. It's it's 40 pages long, beautifully designed with lots of charts. You can read it in one sitting. So go to Barna.com and you can find that in our store. Um, but okay, Jeff, one crazy statistic. I I think I think for me, and and I guess this is a bit of a teaser for the report that we're releasing in January on prayer, I am shocked to see how open people are to prayer experiences digitally. They find they find it to be safe to participate digitally in a prayer experience. They're really interested, especially in the idea of one-on-one prayer digitally. Um, that's something that a lot of people, even unchristian people, are very open to right now. And so I think maybe a practical takeaway is: are you incorporating prayer into your digital strategy? Um, so maybe that's that's something that we can learn together alongside you guys in the upcoming months because that seems like a really critical piece of the puzzle that maybe a lot of people aren't considering.

Yeah, I'll be honest and completely speaking the truth here: the most in touch that I've been with God in the past six months throughout this COVID season was a digital prayer experience on Zoom with six guys from around the country. Um, it you know, and I'm a live production guy. I'm a video producer. And so part of me when I say that, it's like okay, the quality standards are ugly. There's got to be better ways to make it better, you know? And so like I start nitpicking on on what it was. And it's so yeah, it's not part of me wants to say it's not part of what a digital strategy should be. But I cannot get away from this fact: I felt more in touch with God when six guys scattered across the country we're going through a two-hour prayer experience.

Exactly. Which what you're describing. And so I think there's I think that we are just starting to scratch the surface of what's happening by doing our online services. And and the more that uh Barna, that you guys are pulling the thread on some of these other things, the more that we and Stadia side are kind of championing this, the idea of more than just the the experience that we're creating on Sunday. I think this is where we really start to create a church that can exist physically and digitally that coexists in that hybrid environment. And so Savannah, thanks, thanks for the time. For this, be sure and I'll put the link in the show notes. Like I said, uh it's Barna.com/Stadia. We'll get you straight in into that. Um, and that'll be a great place for for you to access to to buy this journal. Phenomenal stuff up and down throughout it. So Savannah, thank you for the time. Uh, yeah, for Savannah, this is uh Jeff with the Church Digital and State of Church Planning. Thanks uh for joining us today, and we'll see you next time here at the pod. You have a good day.