EP031: Jennifer Miles & Marketing Church Online

So how are we gonna market church online? That's the question I wanted to ask in episode 31 of the Church Digital Podcast. And to that end, I brought in communication specialist Jennifer Miles to help us figure out what the answer to that question was. And while the answer she gave us was probably the one we needed, maybe it wasn't the one that we deserved, but ultimately it was definitely necessary to hear. Okay, set aside the whole Dark Knight DC reference. I'm really much more of a Marvel guy. But at the end of this, Jennifer's answer to that question—how do we market church online—cut to the core of what church online could be and should be, to really get to the power, to the heart, to the soul of what church online is, and therefore created an interview, a conversation that you, listening audience, definitely need to hear.

So I present for this conversation communication specialist guru, all-knowing Jennifer Miles, to the conversation and myself, Jeff Reed from the Church Digital, in a conversation that I'm calling the Marketing of Church Online. Everybody, here you go.

I'm Jennifer Miles. I work for Faithlife. I'm a project manager for their church products organization, and I work on upcoming features and supporting content for those, and then also work on user education guides and what's the purpose of our products. In addition to that, I am wrapping up my doctorate at Portland Seminary, and that is a—no one ever knows how to say it. I do. I'm doing a doctor in semiotics, which is essentially the study of signs and symbols and how things get their meaning. Signs and symbols are not just signs and symbols. Their words, their images. So a lot of it is like how does the church get its meaning and how do we talk about meaning in the church? I worked at Church Online at Life Church for about four years, consulted with about seventy church onlines for four years, and helping them with their marketing strategy, their social media strategy, and then their discipleship strategy. So that's kind of a little bit of who I am.

Wow, yeah, that's a great opening kickoff. Everything from Logos, Faithlife software, to signs and interpretations, all the way to Life Church. That's right. Yeah, they're very, very good. That's an interesting life. So what's your seminary? What's your degree gonna be in? Your doctorate?

So it's officially Doctorate of Ministry in Semiotics.

And so like, what? Where do you hope to get? I'm just curious because that's who I have. Like, where do you hope to go with that? Where does a semiotics degree take you?

Well, it might help to understand why I even started the program to know where I'm going with it. So when I started the program, I was doing consulting with a lot of different churches in their marketing, and I wanted to get better at communications and what did that look like in the digital world. And so I went online and literally just started looking for communications degrees in the church, and they don't exist. I mean, they didn't five years ago. You're starting to see more now. But do you know who Leonard Sweet is?

Of course. So Leonard Sweet changed my life. Straight up. Yes, yeah. Book 1999 made me—I mean, I'm not discounting the Bible. Next to the Bible, that's number two for me. Okay.

So then you'll get this. So I had read a lot of his stuff when I was doing church online and when I was doing my master's degree. And so my thesis for my master's was actually about church online, and I used several of his things. His program at Portland Seminary was the thing that showed up in my search results for Google, and he's the lead mentor for this Doctorate of Ministry in Semiotics. And it's subtitle is like a Google to Google Church or Church and Culture and Future Studies or something. But I was like, I don't care what the program is because I didn't know what semiotics was. I don't care what the program is, but this is the person who has influenced me through his books. I'd love to learn from him in person and have conversations like that, that are in his books, face to face, right?

So I ended up signing up for the program thinking, oh, this is going to help my communications world. I'm going to better understand theology in a digital space and really learn from this person who is probably fifty years ahead of everybody else. And he completely rocked my world. I closed my marketing business. I got to this point where I was struggling morally and ethically on: Is marketing church online the way that we do it today effective? One, is it a wise use of our resources? Two, and are there better ways for us to connect? Like, if the point of the gospel is to share Jesus and to build disciples, is marketing doing that? And I actually ended up closing my business.

And throughout this course of this program, I changed to wanting to really understand what does it look like to disciple people in the digital age? If people are spending more time online, are building more relationships through what we're doing right now, right, this digital conversation, and then bringing that face-to-face sometimes, how do you disciple people, right? If discipleship—so what's your definition of discipleship, Jeff?

A disciple to me, and I know we've had this conversation on the podcast, discipleship has many meanings, and so different people interpret it differently, which causes mass confusion. Discipleship, how we've interpreted typically on the show and me on a personal level, would be building a relationship with someone and empowering them with the gospel to the level that they can turn around and do the same thing to someone else. A disciple is someone who literally makes another disciple. And so it's that relationship between a person A and person B to the point that person B can now replicate that with person C.

Yeah, so there's a few things there, right? It's the relationship and the replication, right? And as I was doing all this marketing for church online, I realized what I was really doing was I was bringing in consumers to be consumers. And it then became very difficult to turn consumers into contributors in a church online space because they think very differently. And so my whole mindset shift—I realized that what I really was doing online was I was trying to find a way to build relationship and then go through those relationships, replicate what I believed and how I lived, or how that, whatever the church as I was working with, were what they believed and how they transferred the gospel. And what was happening was we were doing all these ads and we were getting people in, but then we didn't have a solid discipleship program for them. And so we were just throwing money at the front end, and there wasn't a lot of return at the back end.

And so that's why I ended up closing my marketing business, and now I'm focusing really on the what do we do as the next step? And a lot of the churches I talked to, that is the thing they struggle with. We have a lot of really good church marketers out there, but we're struggling with what do we do when we get these people in? How do we convert them from consumer to contributor?

Yeah, and that's arguably—I mean, that's a big churchwide issue. And I get there in a second, but I want to dive into this because I can relate a little bit to this, where I walked away from a church environment. I was from a church staff—fifteen plus years full-time church staff, twenty-five if you count high-level volunteers and volunteer board of directors, elders, like all just crazy stuff. And but I really felt the calling to kind of leave that and do something else. And so in there, it made me an emotional wreck, and there were ups and down seasons of that. Tell me a little bit about that story of when you realized, hey, you know what, I want to maybe walk away from the church marketing thing, walk away from this business, and instead try to do something that's more driven, more focused towards discipleship. Like, it was not doing in your life well?

There was a lot going on at the time from 2014 to 2018. My family and I actually traveled the country in an RV, and so we had a lot more flexibility than a lot of people. Like, a lot of people, they have a business and that business pays their bills. They need it, right? I didn't need it for me. Church marketing was something I enjoyed, and so it came down to this point. I sat there and I spent some time talking to my husband and some friends and some other church online pastors that I'd become really close to. I was like, I do have a heart issue with this, and just from a moral perspective, if I'm following Jesus, I can't continue to do something that I now think is wrong. And so for me, it was a really simple decision. It was, I didn't need it for the money. I could find another way to make money. I've always been able to change my businesses and do that or get a job, which is what I did. I went to work for Faithlife.

So I would say I didn't really struggle much with it. The problem I'm having now is I struggle with the we have to change the way we do discipleship, and that's the message that people are struggling with, not the church marketing thing. Because so many churches are ready—we're struggling with church marketing. I kind of joined the mainstream when I said I didn't want to do that anymore. It was the moving to discipleship that was no longer the mainstream. It was a Sunday service isn't the way you disciple people. Expecting them to come to your building isn't the way you disciple people, right? Like, that became the message that now I'm gonna get pushback on.

So I've really struggled with that part. I have a few friends that I talk to regularly about, am I still following the Bible? Am I still following Jesus? Or am I now something that I have to worry about? Have I become a heretic and saying these things aren't what our society says they are, right? Like, how do you handle that part of it? And I still struggle with it.

For me too, I'm also a female, right? And so a female in the ministry world is about as—I'm sitting here talking about discipleship. Well, I've already got, depending on the denomination, some strikes against me. So that's the stuff I struggle with is, am I doing what God is calling me to do? Where do I fit in the ministry perspective? If I go forward with some of the discipleship stuff I'm doing, is that okay? Not that I can close my business. That stuff wasn't the hard part at all.

Hey, this is the thing that I struggle with. I hesitate and then some of the things that I'm doing that I'm talking about because I'm—I don't want to say I'm the only one saying it, but it's by far the minority, right? It feels like you're the only one saying it, you know? And it's like I have people, and this is completely off-topic, but I have people all the time coming to me and asking me, hey, Jeff, when are you gonna plant a church completely online? And I'm like, I'm not even sure like that's theological because the whole abandoning community and in Romans and so like, there's still some of that that I'm wrestling with. And if I did it, it would be planning more towards like a micro model where there would still be physical, but it's like I just have this fear of—I'm okay, I'm okay being the first if God tells me to go, you know? And I read in Acts where some of the early church, they were doing things in the early church, would literally say, should we listen to God or should we listen to you Sadducees? Who do you think you're gonna listen to? We're gonna listen to God. Great.

And it's funny like what I have these conversations just at a personal level, but I'm like, hey, God, where are you? Where are you leading me right now? I don't hear yes. I don't hear no. It's funny. I've heard wait. And so it's funny. I'm like, wait for what, you know?

Like, what are you waiting for? And it's just, it's wait, you know, trying to find that I guess in God's right time and things. Personally, I'm a little bit like Moses where, hey, can I have, can I have somebody? Oh, you want to give me Aaron? Cool. Give me an errand, give me somebody come along this journey with me. That would be awesome. But short of that, it's scary when you feel God leading you down a road and like it's unpaved, it's untried, nobody's gone down there before. So man, I just I can totally relate to this idea of just walking away from the business, trying to do things you've got this established, but God's leading you somewhere else. And should you listen to the Sadducees or should you follow God? Who do you think we're gonna go after?

So right, well, at this point, I'm gonna follow God and I have no idea where he's taking me and that's okay.

Yeah, so it'll work it out over time. That's awesome. Well done. So Jennifer, tell me that's helped me connect the dots here because you've got, because what you're saying is that you know, we, you want to focus more on discipleship because you no longer want to focus on marketing. And you're implying that you know, discipleship is the solution to marketing. So connect the dots here, tie that in, help me understand a little bit how discipleship is really the solution for marketing online.

Yeah, so when you do marketing online, there's a few different ways to do it, right? We have Google Ads, we have Facebook Ads, we can do display ads, we can do YouTube ads. Like there's all these opportunities. One of the things that's happened in the last few years, if you followed kind of the marketing trends at all in the church, a lot of people started with Google Ads with the nonprofit program and those provided you search ads. You couldn't do retargeting ads with that, and then you could do, but you could do Facebook ads and you could retarget people with Facebook ads. And so that strategy played really well where you started with search ads and people looking for felt needs, and then you retargeted them if they showed up on a page using Facebook.

Well, over time, what has happened is Google now doesn't allow you to retarget at all any website that has Christian content or religious content in general. There's actually a few categories they don't let you retarget.

Wait, really?

Yeah, I had no idea. You can't retarget a church website anymore on Google.

For correct.

Okay, and that's been about two and a half years now.

Well, shows how much retargeting I did, right? So but you could continue to retarget on Facebook, which has been great. But about a year, year and a half ago, with kind of the fallout from their issues, they changed a lot of their targeting ability. So you could no longer target pastors. You could no longer target based on like self-identification categories. So like they were moved, seventy percent of the targeting that was helpful for the church. And so what was happening was you were spending all this money and you were really marketing to other Christians. You weren't marketing to people who weren't Christian. And so it became much more difficult to target the people that we were really called to go out to.

And so that's when I really started thinking about it. And if you think about it, God called us to go and make disciples, right? He called each one of us to go and have relationships. And when you think about how people do invites, I would, I used to do ads for like Easter and Christmas. Of course, every church wants Easter and Christmas ads. One, they're extremely expensive during that season. I would watch my ads go from like twenty-seven cents a click to like four dollars and fifty cents a click.

Wow.

Because you're now competing. Not only are you competing with every other church in the US who wants to get on the bandwagon, you're also competing with every business who's marketing for Black Friday, for Christmas sales, right? So you're, it's just that they flooded the inventory and whoever wins the bid is the one who gets it. So it becomes extremely cost prohibitive. If all you're doing is getting a click, and okay, let's say one person clicks, you now need, I don't know, a hundred people to click in order to get one person to attend your service. And so you're spending forty dollars to get one person to attend the service.

Whereas I can say, hey, my people, who are my members, you have a mission to go out and make disciples. What can I do to enable you to do that? Can I help you have conversations with people in your workplace, with people that you meet on a day to day basis? You invite people. Like, changing your cover photo is super easy and it's free, and that is actually more effective than an ad.

And so when you talk, and this the same thing holds true for the physical church, right? When you say, hey, we're going to have our Christmas service, do you do no-knockers? They work, but you can also say, hey, people, invite people. And if you have, you looked at those surveys where they talk about how do people come to church? Is it a Google ad or a Facebook ad, a mailer, right? What is the number one most effective thing? It's a personal invite. And it's like the seventy-five percent effective rate versus like a five percent effective rate.

And so when we talk about what does it look like to shift from a marketing model to a discipleship model, it's instead of me doing all these cold ads, now I'm gonna focus on empowering my people to talk to other people and invite people. And when you do it that way, you could now come back and support it with ads. I can do list marketing ads, and if someone has invited someone and they show up to my church slash Christmas page, I can remark it the Christmas page and now someone got a personal invite and they're getting a reminder on their Facebook page. Hey, Joe invited you to Christmas. Don't put a name in there, right? But we'd love to see you. And so now I'm doing it the opposite direction. Instead of trying to get cold people in the door.

Oh, we should probably talk about cold, warm, hot. Yes, for your audience. So a cold audience or a cold ad is someone who has no connection with you, who doesn't know you, who you have not established trust with. A warm audience is someone who has heard you, who has seen some of your content, who is beginning to understand who you are, and you have a little bit of trust equity with. A hot audience is someone who is sold out for you. They will pretty much do whatever you ask them to do. They are your cheerleader.

And so when you start looking at ads as this cold, warm, hot, cold ads are expensive. Sometimes it depends, and their effectiveness isn't great. But when you start looking at it and saying, I want my hot people to invite people, and then you target the people they have invited, those people have moved from cold to warm because they have a personal stake now. They have a personal connection. And so now you can retarget these warm people. And so it's shifting the paradigm, and instead of going cold, warm, hot, it's going hot, warm, and you kind of skip cold.

And it sounds weird when you talk about it because I'm trying to reach people who aren't Christian. I want all these cold people. Well, you do, but if you're talking about limited resources, you want to empower your people to reach people and you want to come behind them and support their effort. That's where I've really switched my mentality at this point.

Yeah, there's research that actually backs you up, Jennifer, on this. And we talked about this. That a lot, LifeWay 2016 did a report that I'm blanking on the exact number. I want to say it was sixty-three percent, sixty-two or sixty-three percent of people do not want to come to your church building. They are, they're just, they're not interested in the same way that I'm really not interested in going to a mosque. I've made a decision in my life of how things are going spiritually, and most people have. But eighty percent of people will have a conversation about faith with their friends.

And so empowering your friends, empowering the members and the attenders of your church to go into these discipleship level conversations, these gospel-grounded conversations, and if the endgame is, hey, this is important to me, let me invite you to the church building, if it's even to the level of, let me share the gospel with you one-on-one individually, you know, that's the effective way of doing marketing right now.

Like, even to the point where we had Seth Muse on a couple weeks ago. It's been a while and I'm blanking on the name of his church in Dallas where he's at. But they did a survey and where they found that the physical invites that people have, that people that the church has, they hand out, the up Seth was saying that people weren't picking them up anymore and they were just throwing away the physical invites, right? And so the church thought, man, we've got a major issue with an invite culture here. Our people are not inviting into church, and this is a problem.

What they did was they ended up doing a survey to see, and one of the questions was, how do you invite people? And what they discovered was that the physical invites weren't effective. Digital graphics, you know, a share your point, changing that profile photo or the timeline photo on Facebook or whatever, like those were the things that the church was doing eight times out of ten. And so while the church was looking at, okay, we have an invite issue because nobody's picking up the print assets, the digital assets were blowing out the door. We're getting far more exposure. Since the church just wasn't looking in the right way.

So like, this is great. And this idea of how we can shift our focus away from, you know, writing a check to like a Google organization or a Facebook to just cast that, and what that, what's the parable of the sower? You're your walking PhD, lowly undergrad, but you know, the casting the seeds, right? Yeah, you know, thorns and rocky and a couple hit the soil. By going through this discipleship level conversations, right? By going through something here, you're able to fine-tune where those seeds are landing, landing in at least making sure that you're throwing in the right direction, staying away from the rocky path.

Well, and the other thing that really convicted me when I was talking about, you know, cold ads, warm ads, it's when you look at the Pew Research surveys, the recent ones. I think there's one as a Pew Burner? No, it was Barna. More than seventy percent of the US associates as Christian. Like, they self-identify as Christian. Yeah, but only thirty-five percent actually do anything. Roughly thirty-five percent actually do anything that the church would consider a Christian behavior. Yeah.

And so me doing cold ads, people already know what Christianity is in theory. They're looking for a relationship. They're looking for a community. I don't need to say, come to my church. They're a cold ad. What I need is someone to say, hey, I go here. Will you come with me, right? They already know. We're not introducing some new concept to them. They've made a decision not to go. The question is, why have they made the decision not to go?

Yeah, and so that's the thing we have to look at and address. So how do we do that? How do we have, how do we have that level of a conversation with so much, right?

Well, and that's where that we have a lot of different things happening today in the church, right? The church is becoming known for what they're against versus what they're for. And so more people are stepping out for that. We have a lot of people who have been hurt by the church, and so they're leaving for that. And so honestly, it's again focusing on our people, teaching our people what the gospel says, teaching them how to live and how to act out the gospel in their daily life, right? It's not just the hour you're there on.

Sunday and the hour they are there on Wednesday it's 24/7 and then when you equip people well this is how this is how you can talk about the gospel comfortably you start kind of regaining that trust again with people who have left it's they need to see people who live out the gospel in a way that not I don't say is comfortable but is honest and is authentic and not just I went on Sunday and I feel better I mean that's the thing so when we were when we were traveling the world or traveling the country we do what we called campfire church and so we also had coffee church but it was every weekend we would be with any number of families it could be two families it could be 40 families on though in the wintertime it was almost 40 families for the whole winter and we would do Sunday service together as a group and the people who were not entirely comfortable with their faith wouldn't go to it right because it was you have your worship music you have your sermon it made them a little uncomfortable and so my husband and I did campfire church and what that was and we didn't call it that but that's in our mind that's what it was right is we just invited people to come to the campfire we were there almost every night it's like if you have questions we'd like to get to know you and it wasn't about you have to talk about faith with us they knew we were a Christian they knew where we stood but we had a lot of these conversations with people where I've left the church and I don't know if I'll ever go back and I thought you'd have conversations why did you leave what what would bring you back I mean do you see yourself ever going back or is your faith stronger or weaker today and a lot of them actually felt their faith was stronger because they left so like what does that tell us about the church I mean that we'd also have these conversations and they would say you know you're one of the few Christians we've talked to that didn't immediately condemn us again what does that tell you is that we have this perception issue right now yeah so that's much bigger than marketing that's we have to work on hearts we have to work on how do you talk about your faith even understanding faith right when you look at there's a website called theology on the web and they do they show the results of the systematic don't say systematic theology that's not really it but when we talk about statements of faiths and like you know is there a Trinity is there it is Jesus Christ is Jesus Christ human or God like when you go and you look at this theology on the web and there's I think there's 60 to 80 questions and it's a survey of where do people stand as far as biblical sound theology we're not doing so hot right and so you have to teach your people what does the Bible really say for me personally I'm at a point where I'm understanding that digital has changed the way we do things the way we learn the way we remember things we don't read anymore like we used to and when we do read we're so distracted we don't comprehend it there's an organization it's a really long name I think it's NAACP that does the reading the literacy tests around the world and they do it about every 10 years and what they have found is that in the United States only 49 percent of people actually have the literacy and comprehension rate to understand what they're reading to summarize it and to assimilate it into their belief system Wow so if you talk about that I mean 49 percent of the U.S. is unable to read the Bible and comprehend it and we are expecting that's how people learn you go on Sunday and then you read your Bible well only one and two people can do that we're missing a huge part of our market right and so when we then talk about what digital enables us to do that right it's video it's story and so this is right like I've talked a little bit with you about this Bible telling organization that I'm going to in October and Bible telling there's a few different organizations to do that and essentially most of them do international missions where they have created a story set of the Bible crew and story runners is the one that I first worked with and they have 48 stories if they literally have put together and it teaches the entire gospel from creation to Revelation each story is two minutes long and it really helps build a Christian worldview when you are going in to another country that does have a written word and they then teach these stories and then they build basically it's micro churches right it's it's our model of house church if you will where it's they have these ten to twelve people once you get to like fourteen split and do it again and it's been extremely effective overseas we haven't done a lot of that in the U.S. and where I am right now I'm like I would love to know my Bible better I mean I'd read the Bible but it's not necessarily I mean I think if I'm honest and I think if other people are honest too like you read the Bible but you don't always know how to bring it into your life you don't know how to make it relevant for today you don't know how to share it with people right and oftentimes you'll sit there and I have a horrible memory so I can never remember verse chapter look well I was like well there's this place that it talks about this thing right and one of the things that's really great about Bible story is that you don't have to remember where it is you just get to tell the story it's been really interesting my husband and I did the story runners class a few years ago and right you'd think I know the Bible really well I could recall it on memory I have all these years of experience I can't my husband grew up Catholic and in the Catholic Church you typically don't read the Bible really well or frequently you'd rely on someone else to share it with you and so he doesn't have the background that I have when we did this story runners class it was amazing because he came alive he was like this is the first time I've heard the gospel in a way that I connect with that I can relate to like it was living and then when you start having that conversation he goes there are times where I'll be sitting with a co-worker and they'll share something with me and I'll remember from four years ago this one random story where we talked about you know like the woman at the well and it applies to the situation so I can share this story in a really non-confrontational way and I'm not like well you know in the New Testament Jesus went on this trip and he talks about this thing with this woman it's like hey can I tell you a story like it's from my Bible but I just want to share I think this might apply to you and it's a very low-key way just what you believe and the more stories you learn the more you start to understand how they impact your own life and then how you can share them with others without feeling like you're proselytizing like it's a very different mentality that we've experienced in the last few years and campfire church is the thing that really led us down that path and the feedback we've gotten from people who have felt condemned by other Christians has been really positive because we've changed the way we frame the scripture it's now living it's now story versus this law that I'm sharing with you does that make sense Oh totally and it takes and let me assist it takes a lot of transparency on your end to do that right I mean there's a lot vulnerability that that that's involved in that right how does like how long does it take to learn a story is it just memorization like what does that process look like well so in the Bible storing community there's actually an organization called international or allottee Network and they kind of coordinate or I don't want to say oversee but they're just an umbrella organization that has a lot of these different Bible storing groups and there's just like there is with denominations there's multiple views on how you do Bible story some are you need to do it word-for-word some are it's okay to paraphrase so it just depends on who you learn from if you will my mentality because I went through story runners is two minute stories are about the best you can remember almost anything that's two minutes long paraphrasing as long as it's accurate and so always making sure that you understand what the scripture truly says as you create your story I mean it's a big difference one of the other gentlemen I follows whose stories are longer they're 5 to 7 minutes I honestly have a hard time following them because I lose interest after two minutes but but I really respect what he does he does an amazing job he's done 200 and like 65 stories out of the Bible so it's almost it's almost the entire Bible if you think about it seven over 70% of the Bible is a narrative so it's really easy to divide the Bible and the story and then to do like a two minute or a three minute story and for me it's just going through and figuring out okay what's the next what do I get a lot of questions about is it drinking is it just difficult relationships is it depression right and so what story in the Bible might answer that and then I go and I figure out how can I tell that story in two minutes and sometimes I can do it more word-for-word and sometimes it has to be more paraphrase but I'm always really careful to keep it accurate that's great so you're you're you're sharing you're having these conversations you're are you coaching at the same time or you're helping the person okay so here's what this story means and you're helping them apply to their life are you trusting that God's doing that on their own like what what is what is landing the plane kind of look like oh so here's the when you start doing Bible telling again there's a wide range if oh no you have to tell them what it means and they've kind of it's interesting because I think people who started that way have backed off a little bit they've realized that what you think is really important in the story may not be what they think is really important in the story and so they go through this model of like you know what do you what do you learn about God what do you learn about man how can you apply this to your life like you lead them through conversation but you're not telling them what it means people are pretty smart and people are pretty intuitive you don't have to tell them the point of the story and I think they also could start to think they think about it right and so they're having to interact they're having to internalize what they're hearing versus being told when you tell someone it stays superficial they don't really have to interact with the narrative when you ask them to interact with it and tell them ask you ask them what they're getting out of it they not have to interact they have to put it into the narrative in their head that already exists their worldview and then they have to decide does this meet up does this align with what I already believe does this change what I already believe and then they to figure out how does it change it right and so it's yeah I don't tell them what it what it means it's like what do you think it means what's your background it's gonna change based on what that is I mean it's well you're trusting God in those moments right right where it sits hey let God rule in this and help the person apply how it can and going out on unfaith with that that's that's some powerful stuff right well and I mean I can't do it that's that's what the whole experience for so a lot of the pushback I get when I talk to pastors about this as they do they worry about well don't I need to tell them what it means like how do I know

That they're gonna keep it scripturally accurate and they're not gonna then change the story and do something different with it. And I've gotten to the point where my response is like, I'm pretty sure that God can keep a story biblically accurate if the Bible was passed down for how long orally, and the Holy Spirit was able to maintain its integrity. I think it's okay to do one or two stories and allow the Holy Spirit to work in that. You've got this. That's a really interesting angle of that. That's very true.

Well, awesome. So how does this, how does this fit, how does this apply to like a digital technological world? What would it, what does that kind of look like?

Yeah, for me the big thing is we have an amazing platform to share the gospel with people online. And like I follow a lot of churches digitally, and some of them have church online, some don't. But my definition of church online is honestly any form of digital ministry at this point. I feel that the church is two or three people that can happen in a structured church online or that can happen in a very just a small conversation, right? And so for me, if you are trying to figure out how to share the gospel as a church or as an individual, starting these stories that you know your friends are asking questions about and then just posting them, like literally it's like here's a two-minute video that I just throw up on YouTube. That hey, I want to share a story with you today. I'm learning this thing. And you can be transparent and say I'm trying to understand my faith better and so I'm learning how to tell these stories. And that by itself is a way to engage online in a way. And I'm gonna sound really bad and I'm sorry I'm gonna say this, but hey, which coffee is your favorite, right? You know, the memes, the images where it's like pick one through eight, which coffee's your favorite? Or the so it's a meaningful way to get people engaged with the scripture versus just doing something for engagement.

Gotcha. That's it's a really interesting idea. And by the way, my coffee is always black. But that's not what you want to do.

I'm milk. I have some coffee with my milk.

Yeah, I don't even like milk for milk. Put it in Coke. Why mess up coffee anyway? Another conversation. But the idea of getting engagement out of that, not engagement for engagement's sake, but engagement with intentionality towards that. And it's funny like you do the coffee post because you're trying to work the algorithm to manipulate the system to get it to do what you need to do. And maybe there's times to do that. But then there's also this flip side of the coin of what if we trusted God in this to pull people's hearts, to make it work towards what we needed to? And instead of manipulating the system to get the agenda that you want and the results that you want, what if we trusted God in this season to connect this to the people that needed to do the resources that we have available to? Right? Sometimes growing slow is more healthy.

Yeah, yeah. I've been on, believe me, I've been on both sides of the coin. I've worked in churches that, you know, I felt like I was on a jet rocket flying at a hundred miles an hour. And I've worked at churches that were like snail's pace. I think we're running faster than we were. And in both of them, you know, both of them I think God was using both of them. I feel like was making it making a difference. But at the end of the day, being connected with an organization that's following the Spirit, that's an organization that's led by prayer, that's led by devotion towards discipleship and creating, not a butts in seats mentality, not you know, come in here so it's your number, but having a relational connection with people that are in turn relationally connecting with others, you know, I believe is key.

Someone is wanting to do marketing and you've just thrown out at them, hey, we should really focus on discipleship instead. Like, that's okay. So I'm a web guy and I just heard that. I'm a communications director and I just heard that. That's a hard, you know, bait and switch. Jesus juke, call it what you want. What are some practical steps? Like, how can I go from hearing this to say, okay, you're not wrong, it's something we need to explore, but I got an entire, you know, leadership team above me who's expecting the other thing. How do I proceed?

Yeah, well I think there's probably let's say three things you should do, right? The first one is understand your cold, warm, hot. So you understand who you really are trying to market to. The second is you have the ability to set up your website to do remarketing. If you're going to do ads, focus on that first. And so set up your pages so you can remarket, build Facebook campaigns around remarketing, and be really strategic about it. If someone goes to your nursery page, do remarketing ads about the nursery. Don't just do these broad ads. And so it's okay to do ads, just do them appropriately. Do a gun for people who are warm or who are hot. So the third thing is now that we've talked about this, this cold, warm, hot, and who our audience is, and now we're going to start remarketing people who are coming to our pages for certain things, how do we get more people to interact into the community? So now it's that discipleship track, right? Like, how do we talk about the events we're having? It's the three steps. How do we talk about the events we're having and getting people to invite and waking pages? You as the communications director making pages that share the information appropriately that your congregation will feel comfortable sharing. So here's my invite page for Christmas. Here's all the things you need to know, right? What time are the services? Where do I park? What activities are going to be well? What can I expect when I get there? What service should I go to? Maybe that you have a service that's really busy versus a service that's not. Like, what do I expect for my kids? It's that kind of thing. It's more than just their ads out there. It's all the work that comes before that that you need to really work on fine-tuning the marketing, you know, empowering some people around you to start to carry some of that messages as well and get out there and connect with people utilizing some of the digital assets to connect with that at a personal level. Do that share, but also do a personal follow-up. Share that digital file, but also, you know, message it maybe directly to or text them so that there's a personal touch as well. All of a sudden you can start to see stickiness to it. You can see some of that the marketing that you are doing is starting to go towards more of a warmer audience instead of one that's so cold, right?

That's that's some great stuff. How was it, how was it? Oh, this is off topic and maybe this will come back around or something, but how was it being under Leonard Sweet for four years?

Amazing. Oh my gosh. So I, I honestly like have done research. I didn't remember it being that school, but I did research in descend it was that impactful. I was the same way. I was like, yeah, I want to go work studying under him.

Yeah, he's at several different seminaries. I think Duke is another one and I think there's another one as well. Because the one at Portland Seminary, they only accept fifteen students a year in. He keeps his cohort really small. I never knew where he was going to go next. So his breadth of knowledge, his insight into things is just unbelievable. And he doesn't just muse. Like there were times where we'd be sitting in his, but one of the cohorts ever is his house. And so we were sitting in his house watching music videos from YouTube. I mean, that's not something you'd expect from him. But he's like, yeah, let's look at what's the number one likes piano. It's the Esposito. But we're sitting there watching YouTube videos talking about the semiotics of these YouTube videos and what we can learn for the church. We're watching movies that are, you know, not faith-based at all and probably in some ways most Christians would be like, why would you watch that? And it's like, what can we learn? What are the semiotics of this telling us? And how do you apply it to the church? Or we look at these paintings from, you know, a hundred years ago, two hundred ago, three hundred years ago. Okay, now what is this telling us about what these people believe in their faith? So I ended up having much more respect for like when you go into an old cathedral and all the images on the wall, and if you actually follow them, they tell the story of the church. They tell the story of that particular community. And it's like things you'd never think about until you really stop and are asked to let's dig deeper in this. So when his knowledge, like I, as we were as I was learning under him, one of the things that I really learned to love was like the Jewish culture and the Jewish history and how much that impacts what we read in the Bible. I think about that before? I mean, right, I've been a Christian for twenty years, but it wasn't until he was like, okay, let's stop and really think about like, what does it mean to go through the Shepherd's Gate? What does it mean to like be a rabbi? What does it mean? Like all these questions that you don't even think about until you start looking at the historical perspective of where Jesus grew up and Jesus lived and that faith community.

Wow. So if you have a chance to do it, I recommend it.

Wow. I seriously, I don't think I'm smart enough. I remember like when it, when I was, I was out of college and I was reading. I read it like my senior year and actually like reading his book, I started a dot-com in nineteen ninety-nine. I graduated December ninety-nine. So two thousand, I literally started a dot-com doing web design just because he made this statement that there is more technology in a Casio Iron Man wristwatch than the entire Apollo eleven space mission. Yet we, the church, have not changed how we're using technology at all since, you know, the seventies or sixties or whatever. And it was like, I wanna, I'm doing. And so literally I started a dot-com doing web design, had over a hundred clients that I was building websites for and Flash and CD-ROM development and hosting and like it was just awesome. But it was always based off of this man's book. But I swear like reading that book, I could only read like one or two pages at a time because it was so thick with references and it was so well educated, you know, that it just, and I saw he actually sought follow him on Facebook and he posted it's the twentieth anniversary of Soul Tsunami and they're talking about re-releasing the book and I'm like, oh, I gotta get that because it is. But like even I Soul Cafe, he did a Starbucks parallel that was really good. It's like I've probably read four or five. It stopped. Yeah, he just, he has a new one now that's, and I can't remember the title of it, but it's about the Ring of Fire. That might even be the title. But yeah, it's always thought-provoking.

Oh, that's that's good. I love that. Hey man, I want to thank you for the time and I appreciate the conversation. Jennifer, if you jumping on with me today.

Oh, absolutely. Love being here.

Yeah. May be in any thoughts or anything is related in the plane? I think the big thing is like trust your people, right? Empower your people to do things. Give them the assets they need. I mean, you don't have to do everything and be everything. So the more you empower them, the easier it is to do marketing for the church.

Wow. Trust the people around you. That's that's some really good advice, especially in some church environments. So well done. How can people find you on social media?

Yeah, so I'm on what, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, pretty much everywhere. Jen a miles is my handle on all of them. So J-E-N-A-M-I-L-E-S.

Excellent. Well, Jen, again, thanks for the time. Appreciate it. Listening audience, great to have you on and we'll see you next time here in the Church Digital Podcast. Thanks everybody.