EP088: Matt Lombardi - What Do You Mean Your Church Won’t Experiment?

Hey, episode 88 of the Church of Digital podcast, powered once again by Stadia Church Planning. Jeff here. Have you noticed in this COVID season that all the playbooks got thrown out? Like, all the plans, all the Vision 2020s? Hey, raise your hand right now, even if you're driving in a car. Raise your other hands. One wheel, one hand on the steering wheel. Raise your hand if you had a Vision 2020 campaign. Like, every church I knew of was doing Vision 2020, and I was just curious in this year 2020, where are we with all that? Like, none of it matters. None of it stuck. None of it is relevant, even at this time, because COVID, God bless it, changed everything.

And so in this new season, in this new reality that we're in—mid-COVID, coming out of post-COVID, maybe we're going back to the beginning of COVID's, depending upon where we are. We here in Florida, we've got problems. Yeah. So the idea is for church, we need to learn lessons, yes, but we also need to experiment. We need to move on. I had a church tell me, "Jeff, I can't pause ministry anymore. I need to get started. We need to get going. We're church is stuck and we need to get unstuck. How do we do that?" And really, that's where this idea of experimenting comes in. Iterating, taking small steps, seeing what works and what doesn't, learning in the season. There's no solid answers. Maybe there were solid answers pre-COVID, but now let's cover it. It's happening. Church, if you're going to survive, we need to be experimenting in this season.

And so often churches are asking me questions like, "Jeff, who should I hire? Jeff, what should we do? Jeff, what should our org chart look like?" And these are important questions, but oftentimes they're churches that are asking them. It's the wrong question because they don't know what they're doing yet. And you're going to hire somebody that's not the right person because you yourself, church, don't have clarity on the road that you're on because you haven't developed those plans with COVID. And really, this brings in this conversation that I wanted to have today to talk about church. Maybe we should be experimenting with things in this COVID season. And to that reality, maybe we shouldn't be hiring staff people. Maybe we should be contracting. Maybe we should be working with volunteers or bringing in experts in a short-term project-based instead of hiring a long-term solution. Maybe we should be experimenting with something a little smaller of a project that's a safer sandbox, really, to play with.

And really, this is where we are. We wanted to bring into the conversation Matt Lombardi. Now, Matt is a digital strategist for a church out in the Texas area, Wimberley, Texas, if you're keeping up with that. But Matt also runs a company called Share. It's literally a company designed to help churches get connected with creatives. You know, those video editors that you're so desperate for, those graphic artists, those social media people, those illustrators? Yeah, like he bridges creatives and churches together so that they can work together, not in a staffing basis, but at a contract level. You know, it's contract level where it's safer to really experiment with. And so that's the heart of the conversation here. We're bringing in Matt and myself, and we're talking about, "Hey, how can we experiment? How can the church experiment with this? What are the issues that the church struggles with pre-COVID or mid-COVID when it comes to experimenting with trying things new? And how can we overcome these things so the church can have freedom to experiment, to test things out without having to release staff, move things around, and just get entirely messy as an organization?"

So here's where we are. We're bringing in Matt Lombardi from Share.work—S-H-A-A-R dot work. We'll put a link in the show notes and myself, Jeff, with the Church Digital and Stadia Church Planting in a conversation that I'm simply calling, "What do you mean your church can't experiment during COVID?"

Okay, everybody, here you go. Tell us a little about yourself. Tell us what Share is. It's interesting like you pronounce it Share—S-A-T-A-A-A. Is there some uniqueness with that? Walk us through a little bit about you and Share.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm happy to. So yeah, it all starts with the funny name that looks like it should be "Shar." It's actually from the biblical Hebrew word "Sha'ar," which is the gate to the marketplace. And we're a tech company, so we had to do the trendy thing that every tech company was, which had a weird spelling for their name. So we pronounced it "Share." The biggest reason just being that we are that kind of online marketplace for churches to connect with freelancers and kind of contract workers who can help them build a remote team. And we really want to push on that marketplace idea, right? We really want to lean into the fact that really anything a church could need can be found on Share. So whether that's video production, whether that's a graphic designer on the creative side, or that could be something like an accountant or a bookkeeper. Or, you know, every church, the bane of their existence is keeping their CMS updated, right? Like someone to help with that kind of stuff. So that's really what the product is.

And I had spent the better part of the past decade working for and around churches, also as a freelancer. So I had seen both sides of it. And really, the two big experiences for me that I can think through that kind of started this—one was in seminary. I was trying to put myself through seminary, pay the bills with my wife, and I would go to thrift stores. I would buy old suits and I would flip them on eBay to try to make extra cash to just like put, just hustling, right? Putting myself through seminary. I remember thinking, "There's got to be a better way. Like, I'm learning Greek. I'm learning Hebrew. I'm learning all this great theology, and I'm in this area where I can't really apply it in a local church setting that much because we're in New England, right? Not a lot of evangelical churches." And so I remember thinking, "I wish I could actually use what I'm doing to like make money. It would like serve a church somehow."

So that kind of always was in the back of my mind. The other one was when I was serving at a church up in New England, and it was this old 200-year-old church of about 15 people, right? And we just flat out did not have the talent we needed or the resources or anything to actually start to grow the church. So from that experience, I actually ended up kind of having a mini burnout very early in my ministry career from that, that made me think through, "Okay, why is it that we have this amazing body of Christ? There's all these amazingly talented people all over the world who are connected with technology. Why can't we figure out a way for a local church to work with someone who isn't in their local congregation?" So that's kind of where the idea initially started, and we launched our product about three months ago after kind of working on it for about three before that. So yeah, that's a little bit more about Share, a little bit more about our story.

Really, the heart of the conversation that I really wanted to get into is the fact that churches are hesitant or fearful, that don't know how, or they don't know how to really experiment. You know, I've had some side conversations recently with this idea of—and it's going to be a technical conversation, maybe it applies to churches—but it's a hardware mentality versus software. Apple comes out with a new iPhone, right? Once a year, and they spend so much time and there's so much rigidity into developing that hardware. The goal is you got to solve everything from the beginning and design the same to perfection, and that's great. But then there's like the developing software mentality of, "Hey, we just want to launch this thing as soon as possible, right? We're going to learn some things through that. We're going to adapt. We're going to change," and it's much more agile as opposed to more of like a waterfall structure towards it.

And it's really, and even tying in into your business with the contractors coming in and utilizing some of that—"Hey, church, don't try to hire somebody with you have no idea what even road you're on. What you're hiring? Get somebody on contract. Experiment with it, right? Try out what you want to do. Try it. See if you like it, right? And then if you do, cool, develop the full long-term plan to get somebody on staff, right? And grow." And so even what you're talking about here, how churches are hesitant to explore, to experiment, like, kind of what's your heart? What's your experiment? What's your experience? What are you kind of learning in this season through it?

Yeah, the first phrase that comes to mind is one that gets around out a lot in kind of the software tech space, which is "fail fast, fail often," right? Like, that failure is not something to be feared as a church. Oftentimes, as church leaders—because, you know, I work in a church currently and also in founding this company—oftentimes in church world, we're so afraid of what everyone's gonna think, right? Like, "Well, what if we launched this program and it fails? Or what if we try this new thing and it fails?" And the people in our church care far less about that than we do. Oftentimes, they're really judging us that hard on it. But what you do is you actually figure out who you are, what you do really, really well, what your team does. The more you fail—and the only way to—like, there is no short-circuiting that. There's no hopping around failure to get to the good stuff, right? Like, you have to fail in order to do that.

I love your like the way you're thinking through hardware versus software because that's with what we're building with Share. I mean, so many of the things we've learned building this have come directly from just launching something before it was ready, being open and transparent about that, saying like, "Hey, guys, this is a beta test. It may not—it's gonna break, right? We know that." But things like, for example, we have the ability to add an introduction video for yourself as a freelancer. We didn't come up with that idea. That was something that we just launched the product. Like, one of our freelancers was saying, "Hey, it would be really cool if I could upload a video of myself talking to churches." Cool, let's build that. Like, let's see how that works. And then the ability to—hey, you know, churches would say, "We'd really love to find someone based on our denomination because we're pretty unique with the way we do things." Cool, let's try that out too.

And I think more churches having the ability to just try things, see if it works—if it doesn't, like, not every process or system you build needs a funeral. Like, move on to the next thing and just keep going forward because ultimately those little actions are going to teach you more, and those little failures are going to teach you more about who your church is and what is going to be effective for you than whatever if you were trying to master plan it in a room on a whiteboard session.

Awesome. So like, just tell—so you're working primarily with creatives? Designers, video people? Yeah, right? That is that the primarily the focus of Share, of who you are, who you're serving, who you're helping to serve churches?

Yeah, so early right now it is. Because so many churches, mine included, are all trying to figure out, "How do we do this digital world, right, that you talk about all the time? How do we get more content out there? How do we make those processes quicker? How do we make sure we have an excellent online product?" Because in the past, like, that's been a nice addition. Now it's, you know, front and center for everyone. So right now, that's been the big focus. But there are—our vision is really that...

We're gonna actually be able to start to connect churches with even skill sets they've never imagined that they could use before. So for example, the average church pastor right now probably doesn't have a sermon research assistant. That's kind of the thing reserved for those like mega churches and like the pastors of the big stages. But we're trying to figure out, man, there are thousands of seminary students across the nation. How can we connect them with a local church pastor who needs them for two or three hours a week? How can we democratize a lot of the things that help churches work smarter by using technology?

I love that. And by the way, even your research system aside, all that, that's really interesting down the road. I could see you having that grow more and more as churches kind of regrow out of this COVID season. But even the idea of the creative right here in the season of COVID, where churches are struggling to create the amount of content they need or spending people who are better off in the ministry context are now trying to edit videos on their own. Like, I don't know how many times I've heard a lead pastor tell me, "Yeah, I've had to learn video editing in this COVID season," and I'm like, "Why? You're doing this? You've got other things you should be doing as a pastor, then editing video. Let's go find somebody to edit video for you."

"Well, Jeff, we don't want to. We don't have anybody on staff that's right. That's good to do this. And so who else is going to do it?" And it's like, contract some guy, bring somebody in, find somebody local, a volunteer that you can train up. There's a thousand better answers for our church.

So this is a phenomenal thing. Like, what's been the response from creatives? You were doing this pre-COVID, right? This was not in response to COVID. So like, how has COVID affected your business overall from a church standpoint, from the creative standpoint? Like, what has that done to the conversation?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, obviously it's changed it significantly. So when I would pitch, you know, what we were building pre-COVID, the response was always a very, "Oh, that's neat. Neat idea, right?" And now the response has been, "Oh, that's a necessity. That's something that we have to have." And so for our business and kind of God's providence, the timing just worked out really, really well, to be frank.

And so what we started to see though is more churches say, "Okay, we see content creation as a priority." So the things you're talking about—video content, writing, right? I mean, as much as there are social media companies out there that you can hire new content for you on a daily basis, the voice of your church is so unique. Every church has a unique voice. So you really almost need a human being who can understand that, comprehend that, ask questions, and then craft messaging appropriately. That's not something that you can necessarily just automate away and say, "Oh, well, they're gonna give us thirty free social media posts a month. That's fine." But for a lot of churches, they're saying, "No, we want something a little bit more than that. We want to really create content that's discipling people. That's not just filler so we can say we're doing social media." And that's where they've seen the value of having a person like we can offer on Chair.

So for the freelancers, it's also been great because now for the first time they have kind of a central place where they can set up their profile, put their portfolio, and then churches come to them, right? Like, they're going and scouting a million Facebook groups, always having to comment and say, "Hey, I can do the service for you," or, you know, cold calling anyone. It's just, "Hey, it's all in one place. Churches come to them," and they're able to get kind of extra juice in there in their business. And then also for churches, churches don't have to post those, "Hey, we're looking for someone. Anyone know anyone?" There's just real transparency now in the process because of it. And so we're just really fortunate that God's timing worked out the way it did.

That's amazing. And it's just so much demand right now and people who are willing to jump in. But before I even met Matt, and I've told you the story, I was one. I'm trying to find—I'll just be honest—through the church digital, I was trying to find somebody to contract to bring in on video editing. I've got some people that I've used in the past, and I was like, "Hey, I'm really interested in finding somebody towards this," and I just, I made a comment, I think in a Zoom to a buddy of mine who's at a church, and he's like, "Oh, I'm looking for somebody too." And so I just I threw out on Facebook, "Hey, I'm looking for somebody who can edit some videos. Simple stuff, not complex editing. Just, you know, it's going to be consistent. Meeting somebody come in and do this. Like, if you're interested, reach out, send me," or whatever.

Yeah, I was thinking I'd get, you know, two, three people. Honest to God, I probably had thirty people before I stopped counting.

Yeah, and what was fascinating, even on top of that, was I was getting direct messages from churches. Like, a dozen churches. "Hey, when you're done with compiling that list, could you send it our way?"

Yeah, I'm like, "Wait, I'm not trying to like do a thing here."

Yeah, I'm just trying to find somebody, and my friend here was looking for, and suddenly I'm like, "Well, crap, I'm gonna have to like assemble and put together," and in my mind I'm like, "I don't want to do this. There's got to be a better way." But as I was looking around, I couldn't find anything. And the irony is, is literally the next day I have a meeting with Matt, and he's telling me all this stuff that he's doing, and I'm like, "Thank God." I literally, the night before, I was building a Facebook group that was gonna function as a contractor type of thing. And then obviously in my mind I'm like, "This is going to be horrible," but this is the only solution I can have to try to help churches.

I didn't even know you were out there. And so you're like doing this and trying to connect, you know, there are churches that need to experiment, and they're fearful of experimenting because they're afraid of commitment. And there's an opportunity here for them to separate from the commitment, to work through contracting people, trump contracting experts that can come in and be and can speak into how the ministry works online and can help you get places, right? And the good news is, is if it doesn't work out, it's on contract. You figure out how to move and try something else on. You get to rent the experience to Lisa instead of feeling like you got to move somebody across the country, you know, and just deal with all that mess and context.

So right, love what you're doing here. Let me ask you, as you're talking with churches and engaging, because you're engaging on the contract side, you're engaging on the church side, is the general approach like, are they pro-contract? Are they struggling? Do they look at it like an experiment? Like, what's the posture? And speak to that kind of the posture of churches in this season.

It really is across the map. I wish I could say there was one, you know, kind of central. They all kind of feel this way. But as you know, every church is a little bit different. Some have had experiences contracting in the past, and so they're more comfortable. They say, "Oh, yeah, we know what this is." Some are, "Hey, we've never really hired someone outside. How does this work? Like, are they gonna be shady?" Yeah, like, so many questions that come up with it. We'd have to a lot more education. So it really has been across the map.

One of the central themes that has come back though, time and time again, whether it's a church who has used contractors before or not, though, is that by having kind of a service in the middle, it is clarifying and simplifying the process, right? So it's becoming a process that instead of, "Okay, well, maybe I'll find someone online, and I hope that they really are who they say they are, and I hope that they really have the skills, and if they don't work, like, how am I gonna pay them? Do I send them a check? If you're a 1099, if you're in California, that's a huge pain, right?" And so every it's just always different. Whereas what we're able to do is just say, "Hey, here's one central, easy-to-use process. We're gonna make it. If you've never used a contractor before, really simple to get up and running. We literally do an onboarding call where we help figure out what are the two or three big projects that can free up a ton of time for your staff. And if you've done it before and you just need to scale up your team for a season, you can do that too. And we make that possible by saying, 'Hey, you know what you want? Cool. Let's add another video editor to your team of video editors so that you can get a little more, a little more help in seasons where you need it.'"

Because that's the other thing about staffing, you know this as someone who's in a church, Jeff. Every season of ministry is different. So leading up to Christmas, right, things are extra crazy, and you need more hands on deck. And leading up to Easter, you need more hands on deck. And oh, that mission team project popped up, and now we need extra help with that. So ministry is not this just like throughout the year steady state of like almost staffing energy. It's always in flux. And so by being able to scale up or down, exactly like you said, on contract, when you need it, it's experimenting, but it's also giving you just complete flexibility in your staffing to not be rigid in any way, shape, or form.

Where do you find the creatives? Like, tell me the relationship, the experience that Share has with that.

Yeah, so when we started, it was, and this is just kind of the way we just cold emailed like two hundred fifty freelancers, just saying, "Hey, this is a crazy idea we have. Would you be interested in signing up?" And we did some early, just like LinkedIn data scraping, so we just figured out who were people who were already doing this, who worked for churches, who had great experience, and then we would just reach out to them, cold email. And then that started to build kind of this organic sense that, you know, creatives kind of have their own community, right? Where they know someone who knows someone who knows someone. And so then since then, it's just been word of mouth and kind of really nice organic growth. You know, we post on Facebook, and we're active on social media, so that's attracted some folks. But really, a lot of our growth on the freelancer side has been organic word of mouth.

And we've tried really hard to foster that community by making, you know, Facebook groups, making that a place where we can really be the central organization that's trying to speak into this issue of being a Christian freelancer. Because it does, I mean, it's its own set of issues. Like, there's its own set of ethics that come along with that of working for churches and its own set of challenges. And so we want to be there to walk alongside those freelancers. We see them as just part of our team. They're really a community that we value and love. And so we're just trying to put a ton into them.

So with Share, you're logging on and scouring a database where you're seeing potentially videos. You mentioned audio profiles, portfolios to see examples of work, things like that. And so you find the fit that you think, or I guess you can dialogue and engage with to try to find, you know, somebody that really has the voice, the feel, the connection at the church level. That's exciting.

You know, you said you started with around a couple hundred or so. Like, how many artists, creatives are you up to at this point?

Yeah, so well, we sent emails to about...

Uh, 250 early on, and that's gotten us up to, you know, we're a few months in now. So right at last count, I think we had 232 users as of this morning that have signed up. So that's been exciting for us. So, you know, most of those are freelancers that are on there and have profiles. Kind of they're setting up, and, uh, everything from, like I said, social media managers to video editors to, um, you know, accounting and bookkeeping. Really, anything. We have, uh, 16 different categories for the church. And so, yeah, a little bit of everything on the creative side. Though, that's really where a lot of the magic is happening early on.

What types of churches are working with you? Are they, I mean, there's everything from megachurch to church plants that are listening to us. I can tell you, you know, highly urbanized areas. I can tell you, um, the Boonies, the rural type environments that they have dial-up still for internet. So, like, what's the field for you guys?

Yeah, so we actually recently did a pretty big kind of survey trying to gather some data on what churches would be using us, and the results were pretty interesting, both of that survey but also what we've seen so far. We see a lot of churches who are approaching what I'd call growth barriers. Who are starting to see, okay, we could use some outsourced staffing. They're looking for ways to grow their team. So whether that's the church coming up on 200, right? They're 150, 160 people. They know they need more staffing. They need more capacity. But they're not sure. They don't have it in the budget yet to actually do that. So they're saying, huh, well, what if we outsource someone and brought in the extra talent on a budget that works for us, a timeline that works for us, and then we can scale up or scale down as those growth barriers kind of break through? Right before that thousand range, we've seen that a lot too. Um, and then really, uh, one of the kind of key niches that we've tapped into early are churches who are in more remote locations but are larger churches. So the church has over a thousand that happen to be, you know, in an area that, let's just be honest, probably doesn't attract a ton of creative talent because maybe it's a smaller town. Like, maybe they're not in San Francisco or Austin or, you know, some big city that has a huge influx of creative talent. And so they're saying, well, we have a larger church. We need the staffing. Um, but we don't have the people here in our town necessarily to do what we want to do, or it's really hard to find them. So those have been kind of some early sweet spots for us. There's people around growth barriers, and also there's churches who are in locations that just don't naturally attract a ton of creative talent.

Let's swing over to the church, um, because at the heart of this is the idea of, hey, let's experiment. Let's try something new. Um, what are the obstacles that hinder a church from experimenting? You know, even as we're looking, people are trying to get back to the building, possibly hinging back over to trying to get to whatever the way that it used to be. Talk to me a little bit. Like, hey, what's some interesting concepts? What do you think some churches are doing at possibly exploring, experimenting, doing something new or different with some of these creative tools that you're offering?

Yeah, so, um, just kind of break that down. The first question I'll answer, sort of why churches aren't maybe experimenting or what are some hindrances that keep them from experimenting. Um, I think the biggest one is just there's this sense that we have, I think for too long cultivated in the American church, of performance. That performance is the key metric to everything. And if you don't perform consistently every single week, or if everything isn't a success, then somehow that means that, oh, you failed, and that's a reflection on you personally, right? Our creative friends always say this: you are not the work you make. And so I think church leaders, we have to get a little more comfortable with, okay, cool, we tried this thing and it failed. That's not a reflection on me as a leader. That doesn't mean that, like, I'm a failure. It means the idea failed.

Um, early on, one of our advisors told me, he's like, don't fall in love with your own children. Like, that's a weird thing to say, because he was talking about ideas, right? He's talking about don't fall in love with your own ideas so much that you won't abandon them if you realize this is a bad idea. And I think as leaders, it just starts with, I mean, a spiritual posture of humility. I'm gonna try some ideas. They're not gonna work, and they're gonna fail. But that's okay, like, that's part of growth. And so it's sometimes just a cultural, spiritual issue of you gotta be okay with your identity not coming from you just being a success all the time, but in you actually just being a child of God and a disciple and a follower of Jesus. So that's a, that's not a really highly technical answer, but I think that's a lot of times what's going on behind the scenes for us as leaders. Uh, and I feel the same tension that most pastors out there are gonna feel as far as what we're seeing with churches starting to experiment.

Um, some of the big things that we're starting to see are the church going from this idea of being a place to a platform. Uh, so no longer is it just, okay, well, it's a place where people show up, or even just a gathering, you know, in homes or anything like that, but now churches are wanting to test out this idea of, could we be a true platform for content and all different forms of discipleship in a digital sort of a way? So what that means is practically, churches have to start staffing up in the area of content creation. And what they're building out through the platform. And so you're seeing this with, you know, every church now is, you know, if you've experimented at all with, like, the Church Home app, which I know has been really, really popular, uh, up here in the Pacific Northwest at least, um, a lot of churches are thinking through how do we create a ton of content around discipleship? And so I know, for example, the church I work for, we're thinking through a lot right now how to create custom curated content so that we have different discipleship journeys for every type of person who would come in. So in traditional marketing terms, we talk about customer avatars, right? So, you know, your church may have a customer avatar, or a target, you know, a tender avatar that is the dad who is 40 years old and has 2.5 kids and lives in the suburban neighborhood, right? And so you may have an entire discipleship pathway online for that particular person coming into your church online for the first time, and you're going to have customized content for him. So I'm seeing a lot of churches think more about platform in that way and how do we create custom curated content on our platform that can hit people exactly where they are in their stage of life?

Yeah, I, it was funny. I love the example. We've had Mark Venti, uh, on the podcast at least once, and he's a friend that we talked a lot about the success. He's the executive pastor over at Church Home, yeah. And, uh, just really have loved watching that church kind of thrive in this season. Two years ago, I mean, literally Fox News is running articles calling Judah Smith like crazy. Yeah, Judah Smith thinks he can pass through people via mobile app. And now, like, every church in America is trying to do that and wants to be them. And it's like, how dare you get such a good head start on this. But, right, and those that are trying to copy, yeah, you know, this whole Church Home model. And I know the story of how Mark and we will put a link to it in the show notes, but how Mark connected up to launch the platform and kind of what that process is and the people that are involved in it. And, like, it's not a cheap, nor is it an easy thing to do. And so it's fascinating for me when I talk with churches and they're like, yeah, we want to develop a content platform like this, and we want to be the next, we want to be the Christian Netflix, right? And, you know, all this sort of stuff. And I'm like, okay, hey, cool. And they're already starting on, like, wireframes and software development, right? Right, and all this stuff to build the platform. And I'm like, hey, so the platform is built. That's actually the easy part, right? That's the easy stuff.

Yeah, the hard stuff is actually creating the content. Do you guys create content? No. Do you like creating content? No. Does your lead pastor think about content? No, no. Um, okay, so, like, let's start there. Like, look at YouTube. Absolutely. Let's contract some people. Try to get familiar with it. See if your church actually likes creating content. Yeah, yeah. I was on staff with a church, and it was the same thing. They were like, yeah, we want to be the content kings. And it was like, okay, well, let's actually see if we like creating content. So let's create some videos. Let's create a discipleship pathway for a type of person. Let's create regularly. I couldn't even get the church to, like, blog, right? It's like, you watch Church Home, right? I mean, it went one piece at a time. But it was interesting. It was in that discovery period before we invested a ton of money. It was like, no, let's stop and let's figure out if we actually like the way this feels before we really go down the road. So let's experiment before we pave the cement pathway and start writing giant checks and hiring people to come in and do that.

This is so crucial to this idea of what Share is doing with connecting with contractors, to just test the waters and learn with experts in this season. This is so cool.

Yeah, and I want to touch on something, an idea that you brought up earlier, which I love, which is this idea of software versus hardware thinking. Uh, and so I'm gonna throw something out there. I think the future of church staffing and the way that we work as church is both. I think there are going to be hardware pieces that are always in place, right? So that's your on-the-ground ministry pastors. Those are your, you know, that, like, I'm probably not going to do pastoral care via Zoom if someone's just been through trauma, right? Like, that's just not, I don't know that that's the wisest way to do it. Uh, there are certain things you're always gonna have that hardware-based. But what if you're able to have a hardware team and a software team? That software team being the ones who are constantly rapidly evolving, and you're changing them out. So just like a new operating system, or just like Adobe releases their new products and it's different than the last one, it's iterating. Cool. So you have your hardware team, great, that's on the ground. But you have an entire software team too that's constantly changing pieces, or maybe you have some core pieces there that then are going to get upgraded every year or so, or every two years. But you have to have the ability to run hardware and software. Otherwise, the computer is useless. And so your team has to be that same sort of, yes, you're going to have on the ground, you're probably going to have physical again, hopefully at some point. But if you don't have a strong software piece, then that's really, I mean, that's where the magic happens for your church. And that's the thing that's going to drive everything is having the software that's constantly able to adapt.

Yeah, I mean, you used the language fail fast, still hard earlier, um, towards that, you know, I had a Gary Vee quote, Gary Vee, marketing out here locally. If you're not aware, I'm not going to link to them in the show notes, but he said a line in a couple years ago that really impacted me. It's like, version one is better than version none, you know? And actually, I use this podcast as an example. I, for three or four years...

I was mulling over in my head, "Hey, I want to do a podcast," and I even got to the point where I was like talking to musicians about creating like this custom core at the beginning. I need somebody to score this, and I want to buy like all the right gear up front because I'm a gear head. And so like, I just had this vision for what I wanted, and honest to God, I stalled for almost three years because I couldn't get all the pieces together for this perfection idea to happen.

Ray the Armist is a co-host on the podcast a lot, and I've said this before. Ray's actually the reason I started because Ray basically slapped me over the head and said, "Stop being an idiot. You're losing impact by not doing this. Just get started. Get started with what you have." And it's funny, this mic—if you're on YouTube, you can see the mic—this is actually the fourth microphone I've ever used on a podcast because I had one and it was nice for a season, and then I was like, "You know what, I'm going to upgrade," and that was nice for a season, and once again I'm rotating. Ray actually is using one of the mics that I used to use because I just pass them on to different people. But it's like, get started with whatever you have with it, learn through the experience, and then grow into it.

I had a church tell me recently, you know, in the midst of this COVID season—I think we talked about it on the podcast—but they said, "Hey, our lead pastor just told us that three weeks from now, maybe it was four weeks from now, four weeks from now we want to launch our micro location watch party setup for the church. COVID, it's you know a thing, and so we're trying to gear up for it four weeks." And it says, "Well, actually we got to communicate to the volunteers what's happening, so four weeks is actually probably three weeks, and then like we've already lost three or four days this week, so it's really like two weeks. So we've got to figure out a long-term strategy for our church and how to do micro locations in the next two weeks. Can you help us get started?" I mean, that's literally the conversation that I walked into, and I was like, "Okay, time out. You don't have to solve the world's problems in two weeks. Absolutely, you've got to figure out how to get two weeks in two weeks. So where do you want to start?" Yeah, and it just kind of coached them through. Okay, you get to that point, you start there, and then you build on top of it.

I'm like, you—I'm in the trenches. I work at—I'm director of digital innovation for a church in Texas, and I do that remote. So in some ways, like I get high on my own supply, right? Like I am doing the thing that our business is all about. But we feel that pressure all the time. There's such a pressure on us as church leaders right now to feel like we have to get everything done tomorrow, and oh my gosh, like it's pandemic and it's urgent. And I just try to encourage our team, but also any church leaders out there, just breathe. But like, breathe. It's okay. God's still in control. He's not driving an ambulance. He—like, your church is going to get to where it needs to be. But there are so many steps between where you probably are with your platform right now and content creation and church home. They're like a million steps between there. So don't try to think you need a national audience tomorrow. You need to pass through the audience God's already given you. You need to create content for the audience you have. That's like number one rule of social media, you know, this, Jeff, right? Like, you don't wait to engage until you get an audience. You engage with the people who show up day one. And so if you're a church leader right now, if you're not faithfully using digital content to shepherd the people already showing up to your Facebook Live streams or already showing up to your Sunday, you know, online gatherings, you're not gonna do it when you get another ten thousand people. You're just gonna have chaos. And so it's you gotta take the first step, and it's not gonna be great right away. That's okay. Your people love you. That's why you start with your own church first. They'll give you a little more grace than people who don't know who you are. And so yeah, that would be my encouragement for pastors out there: don't feel like you have to do everything all at once despite the tyranny of the urgent.

What are the challenges that a church would have with contracting? Like, I'm even just thinking conversations that I've had, maybe it's—okay, so I'm contracting somebody that's not in the same city. I'm not breathing in the same space. How do I hold them accountable? How do I know that they're—that she's not gonna disappear on me, kind of, when you're having those conversations? What obstacles are you feeling, and then maybe like organizationally, how can we overcome that to get to this place?

Yeah, that's a great question because there are, you know, I try to be fair about that. It is not using 1099 contractors is not, you know, this mythical thing that just solves all your problems. There are definitely challenges. The biggest one is communication. If your team doesn't communicate well right now, then you're not gonna communicate well with someone who's fifteen hundred miles away. Yeah, communication has to be the key to everything with working someone outsourced. So that's, you know, for a lot of ours, we're gonna encourage it—minimum, if they're working on more of a long-term project, at minimum a weekly check-in. Ideally a Slack channel where they're communicating almost on a daily basis, like, "Hey, this is what I worked on today. Here's questions about this." It's just a constant communication, just like you would if that person was in the office right next door to you. They just pop in and, "Hey, question about this or that." Have Slack open, have, you know, use a text chain, use an email, whatever you want to use. I prefer Slack, but be in constant communication with that person. And you can do that even on Share. We have a messaging as part of it, so you can constantly be communicating with them on platform. So communication is the number one thing.

The second one is setting expectations. Setting expectations for exactly what's the work to be done here. The number one challenge most churches I see face, outside of communication, is that they don't know what they really need. They say, "Oh, well, we want social media to be better," and you ask, "Well, what do you mean better?" "Well, just better, like them, you know, like this other church that's doing it really well." So you have to kind of drill down and take ask those second level questions of, "Okay, what does better mean to you? Like, how do you want to communicate?" You really do have to get some clarity around what the job is to be done because what you realize when the person isn't in staff meeting with you every single week is that they don't just pick up naturally on the culture immediately because they just hear it in the air all the time. So you really do have to go a little bit overboard with setting expectations early of, "Here's exactly what we're looking for in this," so that there's no sort of tension around, "Oh, well, you know, you didn't deliver what we thought."

So on Share, the way that we do that is we have a section where you post a project and you have to outline as a church what the clear deliverables are. So these are the things we expect to get. So if it's, you know, if it's a social media person, we expect to get three custom design graphics each week and five posts on Facebook and seven on Instagram. Like, you clearly define those so that it sets the expectation early on of, "This is what's going to be delivered for this price point." It can be an awkward conversation for churches because a lot of times we don't like to talk money in churches, but you kind of—if you're working with someone, you need to set those expectations just to be honest and fair up front. That's 100 percent the biggest key.

I love that, you know, and having that consistency. There is—it is—it is per project? Is it like regular recurring? What types of deals are you working with?

So we do both, and that's kind of to work with the needs of churches. Because I know that there are certain roles like you were talking about with the video guy or video gal where it's, "Hey, I just need someone every single week. It's super consistent. It's the same thing every time, and I need that until we decide to completely change our strategy and not do content anymore," right? And so we have it so that you can do recurring jobs and you hire the person, find them, and then every single month you can just set up so it automatically takes the same amount out of your checking account. You're good to go. It's just on autopilot for you. You work with that person. But then we also do understand that a lot of times churches are going to want to try either a one-off project or it's just a big push. So, you know, a church the other day I was talking to—they have, you know, they're trying to do this online kids VBS thing, and they want to do all the branding around it and their graphic design and video team is just strapped right now, have no flexibility to add that onto what they're already doing. So they're saying, "Well, why don't we outsource that specific project? All the creative elements that need to be done for this online VBS." And so they're able to use that one-time project and say, "Great, that was a good experience, helped our team in the short term. If they decide to come back and use it for something else in the future, they can." So we have both just to be as flexible as possible for churches.

And so you're learning. Churches, church out there, you're learning things along the way. You're building relationships with artists. You're discovering what you like and what you don't like through that. And so, I mean, you're—when you initially, when you eventually hire somebody, or maybe you just even keep it contract—and I've actually known creatives that were on staff who wanted to, "Hey, you know what, instead of being on staff and dealing with this, you don't need staff, you need a contract. Let me step back to be contract, give the artist even freedom to do that," and then it gives you the ability as a church to pick up multiple contracts with different specialties, absolutely, instead of just the one person that's carrying all the weight that does not—it probably is not aware of all the different specialties and nuances of the things that they're doing.

Yeah, one of the perfect examples of this is we talk with churches all the time who are like, "Any graphic designer," what they really need is an illustrator. But what they don't realize is that graphic designers are not the same thing as illustrators. And so they'll ask a graphic designer, "Oh, we want this cool illustration done, this cartoon sort of thing." The graphic designer quickly is saying, "I don't do illustration," and they're like, "Wait, but you're a graphic designer," and it's like, "It's a different thing." And so, yeah, you're right. Being able to hire exactly who you need, not just, "Oh, well, he's our jack of all trades creative guy or gal," is super important.

Yeah, so definitely love that, especially, you know, when you ask your illustrator to edit videos, you know, that's where it gets a little fuzzy, right now.

Yeah, exactly. Probably need to find a different plan towards that.

Yeah, well, I tell you what, man, Matt, this has been awesome. I've loved hanging out. I love what I'm seeing over at Share, and I've been pushing—even as people are approaching me—over to Share to get connected. Churches to get connected with artists, artists, you know.

Continue if you really want to resource churches, cook up with organizations like Share that are going after churches and that are being kind of that middle man through it. So tell me this: if somebody wants to get connected, either on the side or the church side, absolutely, are they getting connected to you?

Yeah, super easy. Go to www.share.shaar dot work. Actually, so dot work, dot work. Super easy. If you're a freelancer or an artist, creative or admin, anything like that, it's gonna take about ten to fifteen minutes to set up your profile because we're going to ask for what categories you're in and your portfolio and experience, and churches really get a clear picture of who you are. For churches, it takes less than two minutes. There's no sign up fees. You don't pay anything. It's literally just, "Hey, here's name, here's what we're looking to do," and then once you set up your profile, you can post your first project. Should take, I don't know, five to ten minutes actually to post it. But really the work is going to be on, hey, figuring out exactly what your needs are. So yeah, that's where churches and also creators can go and sign up: share dot work. S-H-A-A-R, which comes from, you said it earlier, Char. That's phenomenal. That is a deep cut right there. That's my seminary days, man. That's hats off to that.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm like, "How, how am I, what is this, how am I supposed to pronounce this?"

Yeah, oh okay, yeah. So there's a historical context.

Yeah, absolutely. Sure. I thought you were quoting Klingon or something. That's another part, that's another story. I don't care about. So that'll be our Star Trek podcast. That's awesome.

Well, hey, Matt, as we're landing the plane, any closing thoughts or anything else on your side?

Yeah, I mean, I would just encourage, encourage churches and pastors out there with the same thing we started with, right? Like, fail fast, fail often. Don't be afraid of failure in this season. The only way to approach uncertain times on certain futures is by being willing to adapt and change on a daily basis, if necessary, right? The more nimble, the more flexible and agile you can be, the more likely you're going to come out the other side of this stronger. And so that would be my encouragement for leaders out there.

Awesome. Church experiment, learning this season. First off, coming out of mid-COVID, post-COVID, whatever your opinions are where we are right now, the rule books still aren't valid. Like, whatever the playbooks we were operating in the past, the past is not going to operate for it to tomorrow. And so we're going to have to develop new plans and new strategies. And Stadia is doing a ton of work towards digital and helping churches gain the strengths of physical and digital. But the stuff that we're talking about here with experimenting and learning, all of us, all of our churches, we need to be wrestling with that. So work with, check out share dot work, and start to experiment, learn, bring some wisdom in. Don't try to hire, don't try to develop the four-year plan until you can figure out kind of what the next four months looks like. And what better way to wrestle this up and down season than by bringing on some contracts, developing some projects, learning from that, and start to get more wisdom for what digital, for what communications can look like in the coming weeks, months, and years.

So hey, Matt, thanks for jumping on this, for, Matt, this is Jeff with the Church Digital. Glad you were here for the podcast, and we'll see you next time here on the show. Y'all have a good day.