EP189: Matt Engel & The Uberization of Church

Well, if you listen to this podcast, you know that I, Jeff, I like to make up words. You know, sometimes I find that existing words that are like in the dictionary, there's so even though they're in the dictionary, there's some confusion on the application of those words. And so it's a lot of fun for me to make up new words and give them more specific application. I can literally define what a word means. Fidget is one of those examples, talking about the role of the church and how it can use digital discipleship to impact the church. Fidgetly multimodal, the opportunity for churches to launch multiple models of church. Well, in this podcast today, we come across another maybe made-up word, maybe it's an actual word. I don't know, maybe we can look it up in the dictionary and see. Uberization. We're having a conversation today about the uberization of church. And I'm willing to bet that you probably never thought you'd hear the word Uber in church in the same sentence. Yet here we are. And my favorite part of this conversation is I'm not the guy who made up the word. But as soon as I heard the word, I knew exactly what this conversation was going to be about, and I knew I needed to have him on the podcast.

We're bringing in Matt Ingle, who is with Glue. He is the ministry innovation specialist over there, leads the team of ministry innovation with Glue. And we are super excited about this conversation talking about uberization of church. Now, you're going to hear some words here. You're going to hear some words talking about platform. And in usual context with my church staffing career, platform for me is, I mean, literally the platform that the gentleman, that the lead communicator, that the speaker, that the preacher preaches on. And so a lot of times we use platform in context of how that person is going to communicate. But what's interesting is platform in the uberization of church. You're going to find that it's not about an individual. Uber is not about an individual. It's not a pipeline. It's more of how do we get a platform? How do we get others to do this? How do we equip others to maybe even be the church, which is this conversation. The uberization of church. Love this conversation. Love that we get to have it here with the Church Digital podcast. And I'm excited for you listening audience out there to dig into this and process it. Put on your thinking caps. This is a deep one for the conversation.

Once again, we're bringing in Matt Engel, um, ministry innovation specialist over with Glue, myself Jeff with the Church Digital and with Stadia Church Planting, in a conversation that, um, eloquently calling the uberization of church. Okay, everybody, here you go.

Yeah, so hey, maybe even just to get us started a little bit here, man, tell me your, tell me your ministry story. Like, how did you get to Glue? What did life look like before Glue? And how did you get there?

Yeah, so, um, actually my background, uh, started in the desire to be in some sort of law enforcement. Um, I didn't grow up in a bad neighborhood or any of that stuff, but I just had this aha moment when I was trying to decide what I wanted to do. I was like, a couple of my friends got busted for something, and I'm like, man, if the cops would have known six months ago what was going on in their home, they wouldn't have probably arrested them. They probably would have pastored them. Like, they would have done something different if they would have known just a little bit earlier what was going on that led to the six months later them being arrested.

So that was the initial track. And then, you know, the Lord just kind of opened up unique opportunities for me to work at one of the largest universities in the country, and it was all around how to improve the outcomes of students, both on the recruitment of but retention of. And then basically, as that worked and we did some crazy cool stuff that I wish we knew what we were doing back then, but now it looks pretty smart, the Lord said, hey, take that and apply it into the local church. And so that's really where we started really innovating, is taking some of the stuff that, you know, we just weren't smart enough to know that that's what we should have done. We just had an open mind and an open hand of like, hey, let's see if we can figure stuff out different. And honestly, we applied it into the church and it started working and doing some crazy cool things around outcomes versus just activity-based celebrations. And, you know, then from that perspective, I got, I was able to support some city work with a bunch of churches into geography. And then that's how I intersected Glue. And Glue's basically just said, you know, keep innovating. Like, let's figure stuff out. Um, you know, and I like to say, um, insanity is the same thing over and over expecting a different result. That's Einstein's quote. In the church world, insanity is the same thing over and over, doing it, expecting a different result. We just pray about it. And so like, how does how do we advance in that regard? From this, and we're in this unique time and space where we have the opportunity to really advance the kingdom through learning versus thinking that we all got it figured out. Holy Spirit, do something different this time. Holy Spirit, do something different this time. Holy Spirit, do something different this time.

It's, uh, that's how I'll have to remember that. I don't know that I've heard that one before. Um, in my gosh, your story there, even going back to like your early desire for the police, I got to tell you, I just had flashes back to Minority Report. I don't know, the Precrime Department. I mean, there's a little bit of a bit of that maybe lining in there. But honestly, like, that's the thing that I love about Glue, about the company Glue, is you guys are trying to be innovative, utilizing data that's readily available to try to figure out how to help churches be more effective in doing the things that they're doing. And the thing, honestly, the thing that I love about Glue, and I know people scattered throughout the organization, um, every time I talk with them, it's almost like there's like this, hey, Jeff, come over here, let me tell you about this new thing that we're doing. And it's like, I've never heard about this. This is awesome. When is this going to launch? And it's working into this project, and that, and like, there's so many different layers of what's happening within Glue. It's just awesome to see organizations and companies thinking outside of the box for churches and creating tools to help them. And, you know, oftentimes, churches try to, but they don't have the funding. They don't have the resources, or they can't gather enough of them together. And, you know, companies like Glue are paving the road to allow churches to do some really cool things in the future.

Yeah, we're fortunate from the standpoint of outside looking in and even inside looking out sometimes it's organized chaos. But, you know, I think that's the ability for us to just learn quickly and understand certain things. And then understand also like some core principles of like architecture that matter. That then the manifestation of the architecture, we don't know. Like, that's building something, testing, and learning. But architecturally, there are sound things. And the beauty is, those are actually based out of Scripture. So it's not like it's revolutionary and you have to teach all these people and pastors and church leaders like something different. It's like, actually, no, we're just putting words to something that we've never said in the past. But if you look through Scripture, it's true. It's like growth happens. Primacy of face-to-face interaction. Tech supports the gap between the two. Like, right, we're using technology to support our digital experience right here right now. But man, if you and I get in a room together, we grow ten times better because we're face to face. Well, that's architecturally true from Scripture too. You know, it was always about relationships helping catalyze growth. So things like that, it's like it's unique when we can stack hands on agreed-upon architecture and then, like I said, the technology and the manifestation of that, don't know. You know, maybe this little widget over here does that thing and it helps. But maybe it doesn't.

Love it. Hey, and I want to touch on a revolutionary thing, the heart of the podcast here that I want to do. You said something, and we, you know, we've bounced off each other in social media and intersected a couple times. And you said something on LinkedIn, which, by the way, LinkedIn is like growing to become my favorite network. I seem to have like conversation engagement with new people on LinkedIn, probably more than any other. Like, they're church people, their business people, corporate. Like, so it's not lost people necessarily from a ministry perspective, but just the networking opportunities of LinkedIn has grown in recent months in big ways. But anyway, I digress. The heart of this thing that you said, you said the word uberization of church. And it was funny. I saw that post, and I'm like, I have never heard that phrase before, but I know exactly what he's talking about. And it's just like, I wanted to, and it's this crazy radical. You used the word revolutionary earlier, and it's actually the same word that I've talked about that concept as well. It's this revolutionary concept that's not that revolutionary. It's what we were supposed to be doing. And I would love to unpack this idea. When you talk about uberization of church, what do you mean? What is this thing, uberization of church, actually mean?

So in essence, in essence, it really at the base level, it's helping the church think through itself more as a platform and less as a pipeline. So think of it through the lens of, and because sometimes that cognitive load's too high, think of it more like Uber and less like a yellow cab. A yellow cab, you have to own, control, and govern all of it, right? At the base level, it's the cab is yellow. At the base level, there is a fare. At the base level, all of these things are true. And then on the flip side of that, from a platform perspective or an Uber perspective, well, guess what? They're the largest transportation provider on the planet, and they own no cars. Their valuation is greater than GM, as General Motors, and they don't own anything. Airbnb is the largest accommodation provider on the planet, and they own no property. In this instance, can the church act more like a platform in that regard than it does in its traditional mindset, which is all around pipeline and supply? You know, and again, this is not an indictment on what's happened in the past. Like, I actually am supportive of all church leaders that grew up in the same economic model you and I did, which was supply demand, build a big pipe. It was always about, well, you know, there's people who don't know Jesus. Let's go get them to know Jesus. And we do that through this mechanism or economic model that was all out of the manufacturing days around pipeline theory. And it was just like, own, control, and govern everything and just build a really big pipe because that's what we're trying to do. Whereas platforms don't own anything. It's unlocking sort of a different source of supply and demand where you're just allowing what wants to happen to happen without having to own, control, and govern everything. So that's the high level of like, practically what does that look like? We can get into that. But at the abstract level, it's like we grew up in an economic model that was all around me standing on a stage shoving a...

bunch of content to a bunch of people all the time. That was a one directional flow of information pipeline, one direction. You know, it's interesting. Rick Russo, another glue guy we've had him on the podcast, and he was—I want to say maybe he was the first guy to really talk, at least that I heard talk about this idea of church as platform where church is not a pipeline where I'm trying to take a person from where an organization is trying to take a person from A to Z, from zero to ten, you know, whatever that process is. But instead, you know, and I've used the adage here on the podcast, it's not—we're past the stage of one person standing on stage behind a podium trying to exude his spiritual gift to thousands. But what if we, the church, we got our thousands to exude spiritual gifts to their ten, to their fifteen, to their twenties, to their hundreds, to the individuals that are in their life? And this starts to get towards this idea of being a church as platform. And so did this, like did the genesis of Uberization, church as platform, like is this something that you guys—you guys recruit is glue too, right? Like so do you guys just huddle around like a coffee house, like talking crazy church as platform? Or like where, where did where does the genesis of this mindset come from?

Well, I, I again, I wish I could say I was the, I knew what I was doing when I did it. Oh, own it, take it, like let it be you. No, okay, no way. I wish I was that smart. But where I would say from my perspective, where the genesis really took place, where I started then really digging into platform theory and this whole concept of Uberization of church was back at, so at my church, um, we had staff prayer. It was like Wednesdays at nine o'clock and we'd get together, we'd pray over all the prayer requests that came in. And one day I just, again, I have this, you know, switch where I'm like, what are we doing? Why are we doing it? And so I asked the question like, what are we praying for? And you know, the response in the room was like, oh, angle, you know, it's divorce, it's you know, cancer, it's marriage, it's this, it's this. And I was like, yeah, but like, what are we, what are we praying for, like specifically? I want to know. So I went through um three months worth of prayer requests line by line. I read every single one of them. And I'm not a researcher and I'm not a statistician. I'm not a data scientist. I like to say I'm more a decision scientist through the ministry lens than anything. And so I went line by line, read them all, and I applied in this instance just, I read the prayer and I applied a standard naming convention to the prayer. So if it said anywhere in their marriage, I put marriage. If it said relationship but I knew they were married, I honored the prayer request and said relationship. Then divorce and cancer and all that other stuff popped up. So I popped all of those prayers into a word cloud and it was like, that's what we're praying for. The number one prayer request was marriage. The second one was health. And I'm sitting here as an expositor, that's how I was taught as far as my approach to preaching was like verse, verse, you know, line by line. Well, we're going through the book of Acts during this season. Well, where do I cover marriage in the book of Acts? Yet, well, outside of Ananias and Sapphira, they both died for lying. So that's like my only shot at talking about the thing that three thousand people are basically, you know, surfacing. So so I do that, right? That's step one. And then step two, the other interesting factor was then when I cut the prayer request by men under thirty-five, because if you are a church that's solving for men under thirty-five in your community, you're gonna win as a church. That's just the research behind it. Uh, the number, the number one prayer request was mentorship and the number two was leadership. Well, I would regularly preach a message or, or you know, and I would say this, what the way I should, we should address—I've been blessed with spiritual gift to sarcasm for your listeners so that they know—but like, I would regularly say, you know, get out of your parents' basement, get a job, members of society to that demographic. Yet the people in the church that are the demographic are sitting there raising their hand telling us what they're looking for. So what we did, the second weekend, again, we weren't that smart, but we just showed everybody the word cloud and we're like, would you be willing to join us in praying for this word cloud? And overnight, people who were not prayer specialists at our church had the capacity to join into the prayer specialist movement in our church. And we're talking nine thousand people on a weekend. So that's the difference. Is overnight, Uber didn't exist before. You had six hundred thousand people the next day join this thing on becoming transportation specialists. That concept is very much biblical. We've just, our old motion was, well, no, you, they can't pray. They have to come at six thirty in the morning on a Monday and pray over everything and make sure that they do what it is we tell them to do. God forbid they say something wrong in their prayer. Like, that was a yellow cab moment. That would have been pipeline, all about control. Whereas this moment was like, hey, if you're willing and able and have a desire to pray, here you go. And we mobilized our people to become prayer specialists. So how can we do that across the board in that regard? How do we, how do we overnight unlock everybody's desire to contribute value into becoming a ministry specialist without having to own control and govern everything as the church?

Now I, I love this and you've said the word control forty-seven times in this conversation or some. And but like, really, that's the pain point, right? I mean, there's some level of things that Uber can control, but Uber doesn't want everybody being the same thing over and over again. Uh, they give freedom. Like some Uber drivers are providing water, some aren't. Some are talkative, some aren't. Uh, some are driving the, you know, the Kia type car, some are driving big black luxury vehicles or Suburbans. And so like, there's variances in the experience that are tailored to meet certain types of people. How much, how much freedom are we as a church, if we're really interested in this and empowering our people, is it, do we need to control for quality control to get a certain, are we releasing, are we letting people do what they want, moving more organic? What, what is, what are some of that control? What does that look like from a church perspective here?

Yeah, so some of the things that you know from the platform perspective that you would move toward is you would move toward resource orchestration versus resource control. And what we mean by that is how do we orchestrate things that allows for every person in the pew to be in the ministry specialist space versus you have to, in order to be a small group leader, you have to come to this thing and it's got to be these five classes and you've got to check the box and you've got to do it this way, et cetera, et cetera. It's like that's never been true. Like just because I checked the box doesn't mean I'm going to be a good small group leader, yes or no? I mean, or just because I have the badge doesn't mean I do or I don't. It's like, do pastors really think that they control the conversation around the water coolers at people's offices? No. Like, but our job should be to equip them to have healthy conversations around the water cooler. But I can do that through more of an orchestrated orchestrative motive or motion than than I could from a control motion. And so in this instance, that's really the, that's one of the bigger juggernauts that you have to get your mental head around. And so there's a church um, uh, here in Colorado that was like, well, Matt, so uh, you know, I had a, I had a young adult guy come up and wants to do a CrossFit thing. Uh, are you saying that we should, that he, we should do it because that we just can't take on all this stuff? I'm like, well, you shouldn't take it on. This is his mission and vision and passion for what something that the Lord's placed on his heart. You should help enable it to happen because that's his calling. So if that wants to happen, I don't have to control it. I don't have to control the fact that he's going to have a bunch of people in a spot working out and I'm not going to control what music they listen to or what conversations they have when they're lifting weights and all that stuff. I just need to ensure that the orchestration works to enable him to pour into the people that are in that thing. That's a very different thought. And that's where you get this, you know, back in the day was like, uh, you know, in the eighties we had an affinity group for everything. It was like, if you were left-handed and a female and eighteen, you were in a group. And then we swung the pendulum the other direction. It was like, it's all about simple church, just being a group and you're good. And I think there's this healthy balance in between the two that's actually like, no, like if if we truly are the church as a platform and we want to behave more like Uber, our job should be to help provide orchestration, not control. And even moving beyond affinity, like even if you're utilizing different methods of discipleship, you're going to a, um, you know, a female left-handed group is going to disciple different than something that's probably happening or a water cooler conversation at the workplace. There's going to be a different discipleship, disciple-making relationship in that environment or even in a digital environment, a digital-only church or a micro church or somebody that's doing something out of their home. All of this is going to look different when it comes down to the discipleship relationships. And that's not, that's not bad. You know, sometimes I think and I, I come from environments where I'm very, have been very centralized kind of in that discipleship, especially across multi-site campuses and online. And and really that makes you effective to reach a type of person, but it really makes you ineffective in reaching a whole lot of other people. And that the challenge is, I think, as a church, like we've become really effective in reaching a certain type of person, but we've become completely ineffective at reaching others. Which is why I love this idea of church as platform because at this point we're really, or even you know, Uber's Asian church, whatever the term is, because what we're saying is, hey, let us help you discover what God's calling you to, regardless of what that works looks like, and let's release you. Because by releasing you and giving you control, you're going to take us, the church, places that we're not going to be able to go ourselves.

Yeah, the mental model around pipeline versus platform and the yellow cab versus Uber concept is really, your mental model is around scarcity or abundance. Platforms view the world through abundance. Pipelines view it through scarcity. That's why they control and own and govern everything. Whereas platforms are like, nope, everybody has been given something by the Lord to contribute value to somebody else. Our job as the church, to your point, is to, and this is where I'll upset all your pastor counselor friends, but enable that to happen. Or let's church, if I equip it to happen, that's what we should be focused on is equipping the saint to do the work of the ministry. And an observation that I've seen in the past and in doing all this research on everything has been we've somehow twisted ourselves into the reality that somehow we as the staff are the saint in the story. No, you're the organization. And you know, I laugh at this term now just because it's the time reference of everything, but pre-COVID.

You know, it was butts, budgets, baptisms, and buildings post-COVID. It was like the weekend after COVID hit, the majority of church preached a very similar message, which was, "Remember, the people are the church, not the building." Right? And now we're all coming, "Hey, you got to be back in church. You got to. Four walls matter."

Well, buildings and organizations don't grow. People grow people. So if you're on staff at a church, you're the org, and your job is to actually scale the saint, who is the person in the pew that has been given something by the Lord that wants to contribute value to somebody else. That's the same.

So we have to structurally—and that kind of upsets some people, right? You've got your children's pastor sitting there going, "No, my job is to grow the kid." No, your job is to equip the kids to help grow other kids. And we have our identity wrapped up into a position in that regard, and it's actually just not been true.

So yeah, I mean, you're starting to pull the professional Christian thread where it's, "My job is to do the preaching. It's my job to bring people to salvation. It's my job to..." And then that's the way that, unfortunately, it's what church has equated to, or at least, you know, Western civ church over here where we are.

You know, I saw an interesting stat. I am very self-conscious right now because I'm afraid that I'm going to quote a stat to you and you are like the stat king and you're gonna call me on it. But I'm pretty sure I've heard this: 72 percent on average, 72 percent of church budget is spent on either building or payroll. Where 49 is payroll on average across America, and at 22, 23, somewhere around there is actual building costs. And what's interesting is what you're describing here with this. I don't know that it costs a lot of money to get people activated on mission. It's in—and it's certainly you're utilizing people in a different way, which are going to get you into different areas, and you're not necessarily saying, "Hey, come be in this big building." You're saying, "Go out into the towns, into the places, and connect with people where they are." It's much more of a "go and tell" than a "come and see" strategy towards this.

Yeah, I kind of say it like this for some of the church leaders. You know, those who ride with Uber can easily start driving for Uber. I mean, it's removed a ton of friction out of it. Those that are renting a room for Airbnb can actually become a host of their own Airbnb at their own house.

Well, my question to church leaders is, "Can those who receive the gospel easily share the gospel?" Right? Can those who are taught something easily teach others? Can those who participated in service easily include others in services? That's a different, just a slightly different way of looking at it versus what we're traditionally accustomed to as far as church goes.

And largely, when I tell—when I asked church, when I asked pastors that—um, they, it like hits them. They're like, "I'm not really sure I've been equipping that to happen yet."

What do you think that people that have just accepted Christ want to do? Go share it with people. Give them a tool that helps enable that behavior to happen, and guess what? Your church is probably going to grow because they're going to start having questions, and they're going to actually help grow people. And your job is just to provide scalability to the saint, which typically, the only hindrance that we have really toward that is better tools. We're just so focused on creating great content or using great content. It's like content alone is insufficient for growth. You have to have relationship, and the relationship side of the equation helps people grow. But the tool is what's used to actually curate the content into that equation.

So if we helped churches—I say this way for your creative teams at churches—they should be less worried about what graphic to show on Sunday about the upcoming series, and they should be focused solely on curating or creating better tools that enable people to actually go do what God's called them to do.

You may have cut a little close to home there, but I received that feedback well. Um, that is not an excuse to use Comic Sans font in any of your graphics. But you're right. We're not called to create really good art. We're called to make disciples. And how are we setting up people to do that? Um, and that may challenge—I mean, you're joking earlier about offending audience. That may offend a lot of audience right now.

Well, actually, all those people are already offended and left. The people who are probably still remaining are with you. They're the ones that question their salvation out the gate. You and me both, let's be honest.

Hey, is anybody actually doing this?

Yeah, so what's really cool—and again, I'm not thankful for COVID through the lens of people are hurting and dying and all that stuff, but I am thankful for the fact that it finally was the catalyst to disrupt the church space. The church space, by and large, survived the Uberization concept that really disrupted every other economy back in, right around 2008, 2009, is when things really started shifting. And fundamentally things broke back then. But in the church space, we survived that. So COVID really exposed the gap and it broke what I call it—broke our pipeline. And basically has this reconciliation moment where every church leader now has to decide: Do I want to go back to being a pipeline and Yellow Cab, or do I want to be more like an Uber? From that construct.

So what COVID—when COVID first hit, it's funny because I was with one of the largest churches in Michigan like three weeks before talking about the same concept, and it was just theory then. And then it was like COVID, and now everybody's calling, going, "Hey, Engel, I think we need to refresh her on what Uberization is because that was theory, but now it's reality. Like, what do we do?"

So here's a couple of cool things that churches that started embracing the Uber concept. Things like a church printed out, or a church created a little card that said, "My name is blank, my phone number is blank, my email is blank, and I live here." And it had no branding of church, no hashtag "Jesus loves you" or any of that other stuff. And they didn't even print the cards out. They just sent it to their church and said, "Hey, fill these out and pass these around your neighborhood and be a help to people." It led to the largest evangelism moment in the history of this church, and they didn't even print them out. They just created a really hacked—you know, a creative person would look at it and go, "That's a terrible, terrible image." But it's real. It was just real. It was not churchified or anything else. It was just—and so what did it do? It was a tool that helped me fill out some stuff, and you're my neighbor Jeff, and I come over to you at your house and I give you this card and say, "Hey, man, if you can't make it to the grocery store because you don't have toilet paper, like, let me know. I can help you, right?" And all that did was create opportunities to build trust and relationship between me and you. And guess what? Now that I have trust and relationship, you can actually grow, and I can help you do that.

And this church didn't tell me what to say. They didn't tell me that I needed to do ten houses versus three. They literally said, "Here is a tool. Go forth and do what you think."

Another example that I thought was really cool was some of the churches sent out sidewalk chalk to all the kids, ministers, all the kids and the families that were at home, knowing that the kids couldn't go to school and knowing that everybody needed to get out of the house. So working out and walking around the neighborhood was like a popular thing during COVID. Well, we're still in COVID, but you know what I mean. So the kids—they send them chalk and they send them some stencils as a tool to say, "Hey, just go write on the truck, right on the sidewalks." And all that did was create an opportunity for the family that was walking around the neighborhood to stop and look at the art and maybe have a conversation with the person that actually drew the art. Things like that. They didn't tell them what to say, how to say it. They didn't have badges that they had to fill out and forms that they needed to take in. It was literally just a tool that helped unlock their desire in their context to build trust and relationship with a neighbor.

I love that. I would almost—I mean, part of me wants to maybe like pour gasoline on that flame. I sometimes—I'm an extreme guy. I like to talk crazy. Um, and so part of me even looks at this and saying, "Okay, hey, we're doing things in the neighborhood, neighborhood ministry, the ability to connect with people. You know, your across-the-street neighbor that isn't even connected with a church at all, and you're going to be able to interface and connect with and reach that person in a better way than an organization like your neighborhood church ever would." And so huge opportunities there, man.

I also, just being the crazy guy that I am, I'm starting to see like, "My gosh, maybe there's an opportunity even for that guy to do a church in his neighborhood, like a Rob Wagner, Casey Underground, or you know, start to engage with people on social media in a different way and start to explore maybe a social media expression of church or a discipleship community or something like that where maybe we're starting to replicate church—not in the expression, but creating more stadium. We use the word multimodal, multiple models of it. Um, does that work at this like—I honestly, I want you—what's your opinion? Does that work at that extreme level where now we're starting to almost create new expressions of church even beyond what we're used to in our brick and mortar buildings?"

Absolutely. I mean, again, we would kid ourselves if we thought like the four walls of the building were the end-all be-all to everything. I'm not dismissing the local church. I think the local church has profound implications, and I think as more people are in the business of driving for Uber in this ministry construct, they're gonna gravitate toward a church to ensure that they are equipped to help do the ministry still. So I think it's going to be across the spectrum. Modality has shifted, and so yes, there are a variety of modalities that are going to be embraced. And it all comes down to the preference of the end user, knowing the person that they're trying to grow better than the organization.

I know my friends better than my church. So therefore, I'm going to leverage what I need to leverage to help my friends grow in Christ, and I'm going to pull from every tool in the toolbox. And some of it might be from this church, some of it might be that curriculum, some of it might be from a book that, you know, maybe my church is like, "You know, we follow the leadership model of this author." Well, I know my friend better than you do, and I know that he's gonna prefer that author, so we're gonna have conversations around this from that perspective.

That gate has been blown wide open, and now I think our blinders are off a little bit, going like, "Oh, that's always happened." You know, think about it from this perspective. You go to church, you know, and again, you know, church leaders don't necessarily...

Like when I say this, but it's like the end user is my—my question for the congregant in the church is: what are you hiring that church to solve? What job as the congregant am I hiring this church to solve? In some instances, it's their kids ministry. "Hey, I don't really like the teaching, the music's too loud, but our kids really like the kids ministry, so we hire this church to do kids ministry." But then I go home and I stream this church for my own development, and I go through this, my own Bible study for my wife and I's individual development together as a couple, et cetera, et cetera. We used to think, "Oh, well, they're coming to church, they're buying the entire package." That's never been true. But now our blinders are off going, "Oh, yeah, you know, there are reasons why people stay out in the lobby for fifteen minutes during music because the music's boring, and then they'll go in because the teaching's okay." That's the unfortunate reality.

You know, and it's funny, we were actually—I saw a Facebook post. I'll try to dig through and put it in the show notes if I can find it. But there was—I think it was in a Facebook group—and somebody was. The comment was something to the extent of, "There is so much more power and potential in—oh, I know exactly what it was. Small churches have so much to teach the big churches." Post-COVID, mid-post-COVID, big churches need to learn from the small churches. And it was amazing to me the number of comments and emojis that were attached to that. And I was—cause I just, I know the people—and it's like mega church, gig church, giga church, mega church, everybody thumbs-upping that. Because, and then from a relational context, the small church has so much more strength in that area than the big church who's overloaded. But really, I think the wind—and I would even throw this at you, which even gets back to this whole part of the Uberization of church—the thing that makes an individual church a local church special, the thing that a local church can do that really struggles in digital and online, or at least we haven't figured out the formula, is mission. Is getting people activated, giving them purpose. Yes, we need to figure out what getting people on mission looks like digitally, and there are some churches that are moving into that space. But by and large, that is what's happening at your brick and mortar local church. Or at least that's what separates you from, you know, I'm just dropping names—Rick Warren's, the Elevations, the Saddlebacks, the North Points—and so churches out there figuring out how to give people purpose, get people on mission.

You know, I've said it on here: a pastor, don't be upset that your people aren't in your building. Be upset that they have no purpose, no spiritual purpose when they're not in your building. And that's what I love about this so much is it gives people that spiritual purpose. And we talked about at the beginning, but like architecturally, this matters. So I say this way: we were designed by God to do two things at a base level—contribute value and be in community. And if you look through Genesis, Adam was put in the garden of Eden when it was perfect to do a job, to contribute value into something that was already perfect. "Go name the animals, go do this, go do this," right? So if that is true and we were designed to contribute value, and then the first time it is not good is when Adam's by himself—so insert Eve. You can go to marriage, which I typically do, but you can at the abstract level, I would argue community. So if we were designed to contribute value and be in community, how do we then help unlock the contributive energy in every single person? Because they're hardwired to want to do it. And then insert relationship or community. That's all we need to be focused on.

And you're right. The smaller the church, because of, in my opinion, the lack of resourcing that they typically have, they are solely focused on contributive energy—aka, they need, you know, the fifty people in the church to go down and do something, something, because they need the vault, they need the volume. And then they're focused solely on community. Whereas some of the other churches, some of the more giga churches, it's like, "No, you can go and you can hide and consume, and that's about it." And that's where COVID really helped expose some of the gaps there. Is we had a lot of people that thought, "Hey, the pastor's job is to do the discipline, not my job." When in all reality, my job always was to do the discipline, and their job was to help make me a disciple maker.

Let me expand on that analogy right there. So there's pastors out there who do think it's their job, and they've been for decades patted on the back and told, "Well done, great sermon, excellent." And they've been told, "Bring people"—not "go and tell," but "come and see." "Hey, you know what, listen, I've worked with a lead pastor who's literally said, 'Audience people out there, it's your job to bring people into the building. It's my job to preach the gospel to them.'" So there are—that mentality is out there. And now I mean, we're basically saying, "Hey, I don't know that that idea works in 2021. I'm not sure it's going to work in 2025, and we may need to change this philosophy."

So listen, I'm a lead pastor. I went to school that taught me one way. I've got twenty years experience that's taught me that way. You guys are now talking crazy—two people on a podcast—like, how am I supposed to process this? And thank you for this. Like, how should people be responding to this as we're challenging the world of their ministry worldview anyway?

So how I typically address this—because I'll be honest, a lot of church leaders hear the subtitle of "Uberization of Ministry" or "Uberization of Church," and they immediately go to, "Oh, Matt's going to talk about a digital app. Oh, it's Uber's just an app, okay?" So yeah, we're going to go find out about digital. They're missing the boat, okay? So digital supports the analog. That's the pecking order. The primacy of growth, which is what we do in church—grow people—is face to face. That's the number one way people grow. And tech supports the gap. That's the basic premise where I go with platform, and where I help pastors kind of reconcile what you just said.

It's not an indictment on what they've done. They grew up, and we did too, outside of, you know, the high school students that are in high school right now, maybe a little bit of the Gen Z-ers. They've now been exposed to platform theory as an economic model prior to, "Oh, wait, we didn't know a new economic model existed other than pipeline—pipelines, supply and demand, manufacturing." But here's the subtlety to what helps people begin to understand and sort of reconcile the new thing that's emerged. It boils down to trust, okay? The whole construct of Uberizing ministry has to do with where trust is originating now versus where it used to. And what do I mean by that?

So Jesus, back in the day, trust was hyper-localized, okay? I knew that you were a carpenter, so you could help me build certain things. That was localized trust. And in a small town perspective, small city perspective, I knew that your wife was a nurse, and so my kid scraped his hand, so I can take him over there. Trust was localized. Then fast-forward all the way to the industrial revolution. And trust—people say trust breaks. I don't actually necessarily agree with that. I think trust is malleable and trust moves. And in the industrial revolution, trust shifted from this hyper-localized thing to these monolithic pipelines. And what you did is you associated the size of the pipe with, "The more I can trust it." "Oh, wow, you know, fill in the blank—Kmart, Montgomery Ward, Sears, all of these things. Ford, Chevy, right? These monolithic pipelines. Insert your giga church name right now. The lead pastor at so-and-so." Trust shifted to these monolithic pipelines.

Well, what happened in '08 was trust shifted again. And you had all of these pipelines that got broke because, quite frankly, like if you look at things like Wells Fargo, they used to be a trustworthy bank until it found out that they were doing some shady stuff around mortgages, right? So all of these things—trust shifted again to what I now call in my head a distributed trust model. So I'll say this way: my wife exclusively shops on Amazon by ratings alone, not by brand, not by size of budget, and not by ads. Literally, a hundred thousand strangers are telling me, "It's okay to buy that thing." And if you think about it, Uber did the same thing. Uber solved for trust because fifteen years ago I was told to never get into a car with a stranger, and now I almost exclusively travel through Uber all over the place. But what happened? It wasn't because of an app—yeah, that made it easy—but what it was is because I could trust a hundred thousand strangers that tell me, "Hey, you know what, Jeff's a 4.9, great. I'm probably not going to have to worry, man. You know, Matt Ingles, a 2.3? I need a new driver, right?"

So in this instance, for churches, we have to understand that trust is distributed. And so we need the saints doing the work of the ministry in the neighborhoods and in the communities, and by default, the trust rating of that local church does improve. So that's the paramount, fundamental core. When pastors start to have to reconcile this, they have to understand and embrace: trust has now shifted. And you can have the biggest marquee sign on the side of the billboard or on a billboard on the street. You could have the biggest budget around marketing. But if you haven't solved for trust in your community, it doesn't matter. They don't trust you. They don't trust your brand. They trust a hundred thousand strangers that tell them, "I can get hope and healing at that location there."

So somebody's interested in doing this. Like, they're okay, I hear you, Matt. I'm listening. I want to—let's give it a shot. What does an experiment look like? How do I even get started? How do I shift? How do I convince my leadership of something like this? Like, walk me through maybe some of those early steps.

Yeah, so here's what I like to say: if your job title now is no longer pastor, but your job title is the chief platform architect of your local church, that's your new job. You have two functional things. Or that's your title. You have two functional jobs that you need to do: motivate people and provide better tools. That's it. So you have to still motivate people. You still have got to help cast vision. But it's not around, you know, me going up on a mountaintop, hearing the Lord saying, "Matt Angle, go therefore, do with this. Therefore, I'm going to come back and try to convince my entire congregation to do the same thing." No, my job is to motivate people to be the saint and provide them better tools to do that thing. From that perspective, that's it.

Like, there—and from that end, like the experimentation: did this tool help move the needle on people? And I'm—and the difference, again, the mental model is I'm not looking for everybody to do everything. I'm looking for the people who want to grab that tool, that have a willing and able and a desire to use it, to go use it. And then platforms do this really well, which churches don't do very well, is they close feedback loops. Platforms are constantly learning. And I'll give you this example: churches behave a lot like—

Like your local farmers market, farmers markets are platforms. They have producers, they have people that are selling goods, and they have consumers—people that come to buy those goods. The challenge is, is they're dumb. They're not smart, okay? And what do I mean by that? So my wife and I go down to the farmer's market here, and this weekend we buy tomatoes, cilantro, jalapeno, onion, a little bit of garlic. The next weekend we show up, we should be recommended to go to the salsa table because the smart analytic would say, "Wow, they just bought stuff that I can reasonably assume they're probably making salsa."

The next weekend we should recommend salsa to Matt and Denise Engel. In the same instance, the church—we don't do a good job of being smart like that. We just constantly assume that they're gonna, you know, we're just gonna spray and pray everybody and hope that they figure it out. It's like, let's get smarter about this from that perspective. So motivate people, provide better tools, and close the feedback loop around the tool. And once you do that—this is the beauty—once you do that, you can identify the pattern. And as soon as you see the pattern, you can actually help enable the pattern to spin faster. And that's the unique way. Like I like to say it this way: What if the scorecard wasn't the butts, budget, baptisms, and buildings that we're accustomed to, but the scorecard for a local church was the amount of time that it takes for the church to notice Matt Engel raising my hand saying, "I want to contribute value to what the Lord placed on my heart," and the church to come alongside me and equip me to do it? Versus, "Did Matt Engel attend? Is he giving regularly?" Blah, blah, blah. What if the scorecard was around that metric? How quickly are we identifying people's opportunities and calling on their life and enabling it to happen? And then closing feedback loops to ensure that that's happening? Because I guarantee you, your pastoring would massively improve if you started seeing the patterns that want to happen with your women that are forty years old with three kids, or men who are under thirty-five that are single. If you saw the pattern, you could quickly begin to pastor that pattern way differently than, "We got to get more people here," you know? So anyway, that was a long-winded answer, but that—in my opinion—it's that simple. I know it's that simple. That's all. What's the metric? What's success? Is it, you know, it's funny. We had Tyler Sansom's digital pastor up at Church Anywhere up in Indiana—Corydon, Indiana. And so we had his lead pastor on the podcast, and sir, I'm blanking on your name right now. I'm sorry. But we were—he was telling us, "Yeah, our church, we catalog and celebrate the baptizee and the baptizors—the people who have accepted Christ and the people who brought them to Christ." What's the metric? Are we celebrating the conversions? Are we celebrating the fact that somebody, you know, was involved and shared? Like, what do you think? What's the real moment?

I think we're where the scorecard is moving toward from a church—let me start by saying, from the church org perspective, I think our scorecard is really, "How many people are we flipping from consumers to contributors?" Or in platform talk, from consumers to producers, right? So I think that's at the church org level. At the person level, I think at the abstract level, I think our scorecard is, "Are our people growing?" That's it. Like, at the base level, I want to celebrate the growth of people, not necessarily the activities and outputs. I want to celebrate the outcomes and the impact associated with that. And that's really that saint getting to see their friend take baby steps over time to move closer to Jesus, right? Like, that—and that's what actually helps flip that person from like a growee to a champion of other people. So we in church world tend to try to rush people through like a process. And I like to say, growth is not tied to speed. Growth is tied to trust and relationship. And so it's not a function of speed of getting people through things. It's really a function of a person and a person that's trustworthy that moves that person, the mode that moves the growee on a linear motion for growth in the growth at the abstract level. So that's how I would be thinking the scorecards are starting to shift. It's like, "Are we moving people from consumers to producers or champions?" In my language. And then from the champion, the scorecard for the champion is, "Are the people that I'm involved with in their lives growing? Are we seeing a growth in that?"

Hey, sorry, I was distracted. I was trying to look up—it was Randy Kirk as the lead pastor at First Capital in Corydon. And I was like, "Dang it." Yeah, I got the name. I had to go back, and in fairness, that conversation was two and a half years ago, and so it took me a moment. But Randy, sir, it was funny. Randy retired on that podcast two and a half years later. He's still there, but it's so I think they're working through search committees. I don't know something. But hey, listen, Matt, this has been an awesome podcast. Thanks for jumping on here. Uberization of church, church's platform—it, you know, even the economic model of this, and that's a new perspective to me. I hadn't put that up to the economic perspective there. It, man, just as we're landing the plane here, any closing thoughts on your side?

Yeah, no, I mean, really, the paramount things are people cannot grow, and that is the core function of the saint, you know, helping somebody grow. You cannot grow if trust and relationship are not present. And so churches should be focused on, like, right now—you know, we're October, September, I guess, still—churches right now that are focused on providing tools to their people to develop trust and relationship with their neighbors for the hope that as trust and relationship builds, they could do an invitation for that person to come to church on Christmas. That's the difference in what we're talking about versus waiting until December and then asking all of your people to go invite a friend to church. They can invite somebody that doesn't have trust and relationship with them. So give them tools to be able to do that, and the byproduct is you're helping develop disciple makers. And a catalytic platform is the local church helping and enabling it to happen. So that's probably the big shift to be thinking through.

So many good thoughts here talking about this idea of church's platform, uberization of church, releasing control of the people and empowering, equipping—whatever e-word you want to throw at them—to help them, you know, get out there and be on mission with that. So hey, Matt, thank you for jumping on the podcast and spending some time. But for Matt, my pleasure, buddy. Hey, thank you very much. For Matt, this is Jeff with the Church Digital and with Stadia Church Planting. Thanks for jumping on the pod here. We'll see you next time on the show. Y'all have a good day.