Thanks for tuning in for this week’s unSeminary podcast. We’re chatting with Kyle Isabelli, the lead pastor of Avenue Christian Church in the western suburbs of Chicago.

Wondering how to connect with hurting people in your community who might not venture through your church’s doors? In today’s episode Kyle and I have a fantastic conversation about the church’s community outreach efforts using the He Gets Us campaign and the Gloo platform. Listen in to hear how you can use these free digital tools to connect with and care for your community.

• Gloo and He Gets Us. // Since COVID, Avenue Christian Church has utilized resources that Gloo and Barna offer to churches. In addition to church health and spiritual health assessments, Kyle and his team began to explore the He Gets Us campaign and the connection that Gloo provides to it. The He Gets Us campaign invites people to get to know the real Jesus. It communicates that Jesus understands them and that whatever people are experiencing, Jesus faced it too. He Gets Us became more widely known after two of their ads aired during the Super Bowl in 2023. In addition to being on TV, their ads are also online and on billboards.
• The local church partnership. // The He Gets Us campaign messaging engages people in areas where they are struggling and invites them to reach out for help via text. When someone reaches out with a question or a need, the Gloo platform then forwards the messages to local partnering churches. As a partner in the campaign, Avenue Christian Church receives messages from people in their area code seeking help or encouragement so they can respond with practical care.
• The response. // As a He Gets Us partner, Avenue gets an average of two to three messages per week forwarded to them. They then respond to the person, letting them know who they are, the church they are from, and that they are available to talk. When they reach out, they have a 50% response rate, with about half of those interactions leading to phone conversations or connecting individuals to the church through attending a service or coming to a small group. 
• Behind the scenes platform. // Gloo has an online platform that your church can sign up for where all of the contact data is stored. You can send a text message or make a phone call through Gloo and track when you were last in touch with your contacts. If the contacts have opted in to receive communications from your church, you can also export the data to Excel and use it in your church management software. In addition, Gloo offers a host of other high quality resources including prayer prompts, sermon tools, reading plans, discussion guides and more.
• Less promotion, more care. // Working with Gloo has helped remind Avenue Christian Church that their digital strategy has to be less about self-promotion and more about how to provide care for people in the community, listen to what their going through, and meet their needs while sharing the gospel.

You can find out more about Gloo at gloo.us and how to partner with the He Gets Us campaign at hegetsuspartners.com. To learn more about Avenue Christian Church visit www.avenuechristian.com and connect with Kyle at www.kyleisabelli.com.

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Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: CDF Capital

Since 1953 CDF Capital has helped church leaders and individuals bring light to the world through the thoughtful stewardship of their capital. The Church, including your church, requires more than just financial capital, it also needs spiritual and leadership capital. While separate in purpose, these three forms of capital are intertwined and inseparable for the cause of kingdom growth. Together, when we partner with the Lord to bring spiritual, leadership, and financial capital to a church, the results are transformational. At CDF Capital our ministry is simple: we lend money to churches.

CDF Capital, in partnership with Barna Group, conducted a research study to better understand what happens in churches after a new leader comes in. Barna Group interviewed 111 pastors online who have experienced a leadership transition within the last 12 years. Click here to get your free download of the study.

Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Well hey everybody, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in. Man, I’m really looking for to today’s conversation. In fact it’s been probably six months in the making; really been looking forward to today’s call. You’re going to want to lean in for this one. We’ve got Kyle Isabelli – he is at Avenue Christian Church. It’s a multi-generational church that represents the western suburbs of Chicago as they ah help people live their best life with Jesus in charge. Kyle, I’m so glad you’re here. Welcome to the show. Thanks for being here today.

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, thanks Rich. I’m excited to have this conversation with you today.

Rich Birch — Yeah, why don’t you fill in the picture about Avenue? What is tell us a little bit more; give us a kind of a flavor, a sense of the church.

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, Avenue is a church that has been in the western suburbs for over 60 years. It was originally started in suburbs a little bit closer to the city. And then the mid 60s it it made its way out to Clarendon Hills which is, some people may not know, it’s Downers Grove, Hinsdale for about 30 minutes outside of the city. And they’ve had a heart to really reach the the community, and really be a light in the community. And I’ve been the senior pastor here now since January 2020. And prior to that I was here as a youth pastor, started in 2017. So I’ve been here six years. And it’s been cool to be a part of a church that really is multigenerational, that we have new, younger families that are here, but you also have people here at our church that have been here longer than I’ve been alive, you know. So it’s it’s such a blessing to be able to lead in this context and to see God work and move in really helping more and more people find new life in Christ.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love it. This um, so today what we want you… we got connected on Carey Nieuwhof’s online community called The Art of Leadership Academy. And you posted in there about your church’s participation in the He Gets Us campaign. If people remember this Super Bowl 2023 a big ad on that, a whole campaign built around that by our friends or powered by our friends at Gloo and, you know, associated other folks. And so today we’re going to dive in this is kind of we’re going to open up the hood take a look at what happened at Avenue understand ah you know, kind of lessons learned, that sort of thing. But why don’t we start with, you know, what led you to say, hey this is the kind of thing we want to be a part of? What kind of got you to that?

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, our our church throughout covid had been utilizing a lot of the resources that Barna and Gloo had been sharing with churches. We used a lot of the church health assessments. And the Summer 2022 we had our entire church take kind of like a spiritual survey to gauge their spiritual health as as well as like ways that we as leaders in the church can do a better job of caring for our church. So we’ve been utilizing Gloo for quite some time, Barna quite some time.

Kyle Isabelli — And so we began to hear about the He Gets Us ads which actually launched in March of 2022 during the and NCAA college tournament, the basketball tournament. And so you see a few of these ads coming out, you’re like what’s all this about? And so Gloo then begins to share how these ads are posted on social media, and if people text in saying oh that resonates with me, or I have a question about that, or something speaks to me in that way, they text in. And what Gloo does is then sends those text messages to local churches.

Kyle Isabelli — So for instance, if someone has an area code that is close by our church—so here in the western suburbs it’s a 630, a 708 or an 815 area code—um our church then would receive that text message. So for instance, someone struggle with anxiety, and they see the ad about anxiousness and they want some help or encouragement with it, they’ll they’ll text in: hey, I need help with this; I’m feeling anxious. And we get that message to our platform through Gloo. And so then we’re able to start a conversation with them. We’re starting to text them and and be able to, you know, engage in conversation. And this has been so incredibly helpful because over these last few years in our polarized society um churches and pastors especially our credibility just within society has kind of decreased. I think leadership in general…

Rich Birch — True.

Kyle Isabelli — …our credibility has gone down for better or for worse…

Rich Birch — Sure, sure.

Kyle Isabelli — …whether we did that to ourselves or we’re just a byproduct of being a leader or a pastor or church. Um that’s just the reality of where we’re at. One of the things in Barna, ah Glenn Packiam in his book about being a resilient pastor, he shares that like 55% of people have little to no trust in pastors and church leadership. They don’t they don’t view them as a credible source.

Kyle Isabelli — And so now to overcome that um, people are able to, you know, get connected with the pastor or church with that. They probably wouldn’t have thought of before, but they’re willing to have a conversation about what they’re struggling with it. And it opens up this this gateway to, hey this is I’m a pastor um, from this church. Can we let’s just talk about your anxiety. Let’s just talk about whatever is going on. And so it’s allowed us to kind of reach into our community even more despite people not having the best thoughts or feelings about a church whether for better or for worse.

Rich Birch — That’s interesting. Can can you give me a sense, so we’ll start with the kind of anecdotal story like you know, maybe somebody that you’ve ended up connecting with as a church and the impact the kind of positive impact either through He Gets Us or pre-, you know, He Gets Us with the other work you’ve done with Gloo.

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah. I mean for instance I met with a guy a few weeks ago. He texted, he said he was having marriage problems, he was on a second separation. And so I texted, said, hey, you know I’m really sorry to hear that. Would you be willing to come in and like have a conversation with me? I’m not a marriage counselor, but I can least have this initial conversation with you. And so he came in. We began to talk and um, you know, shared the gospel with him. And said, you know, I I hope your marriage can be restored and there’s some things that you definitely have to work on. But like I want you to know what’s really going to make a change in your life and hopefully from that spiritual change in your heart then you can see changes in other parts of your life. And he’s like he’s like, I went to church growin’ up. No one’s ever told me about Jesus in this way; I don’t read my bible. And so I gave him a bible here at our church. I said, hey start reading through this.

Kyle Isabelli — And um, so now for these last couple weeks I’ve met with him once or twice, we talked through, he’s attended one of our church services. Um, still working through his separation, working with the details of that, but um, just trying to help people out. And I would have never…

Rich Birch — Right.

Kyle Isabelli — …had that conversation with him apart from him clicking on an ad from He Gets Us on, I think it was on Tiktok.

Rich Birch — Right.

Kyle Isabelli — I dunno which ad it was…

Rich Birch — Sure.

Kyle Isabelli — …but he clicked on it. We got the message. And the conversation and the relationship really started because of that.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s amazing. So this is what I love about our friends at Gloo. Like they’re, you know, they’re empowering churches. They’ve developed tools. You know, there’s a number of things that they’ve tried to do to help people, um you know, help church leaders connect with their community. And there is often, you know, a lot of their solutions are built around this idea of providing actual care for people, which I think is amazing, is fantastic. So what about on the kind of, I’m sure there’s people that are listening in that are like, what about so how many, is that like the one conversation you’ve had? You know, what’s that look like? Or do you have a you know a phone center now, you got 25 people all day long texting people back. What’s that look like?

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, so where we’re at um at our church, we started in October of 2022.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Kyle Isabelli — So now we’ve been doing this for about—today’s June 1st—we’ve been doing it, you know, eight, nine months. Um we average about 2 to 3 messages per week. Some weeks it’s less, some weeks it’s more. And out of those messages we get about a 50% response rate. So…

Rich Birch — Okay.

Kyle Isabelli — …if we text back right away saying, hey, this is who I am. I’m a pastor here in the western suburbs of Chicago. I’m a partner with He Gets Us. Thanks for reaching out. I hear this is what’s going on your life. Would you like to share more? We leave it at that. On the bottom of it it says like, hey this message comes from Avenue Christian Church., You can you can, you know, text n…

Rich Birch — Check them out or you…

Kyle Isabelli — …or text no to get out of opted out or whatever. And so about 50% of people do engage with us, um at least over texting. And I would say out of that 50% probably another half we’ve been able to have phone conversations, get connected in our church and have them start coming to some of our, you know, life groups or small groups at our church. Get them… Some people I’ve had to refer them to counseling, you know, and say, hey, let’s we have some we have some counseling services that we partner with in the area. This is something that’s probably above my pay grade…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Kyle Isabelli — …but let me let me help you out. It’s above my training, let me help you out and point you in the right direction.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Kyle Isabelli — So you know some people would look at that and say oh only 50% of people respond back to you. But these are people we would have never connected with in a million years had it not been for being a partner with Gloo and being ah a He Gets Us a partner.

Rich Birch — Um, and then how how is that working, so like you talked about the six is it 630 area code? Um…

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, there’s three different area codes that kind of are generally within the Chicagoland area where we’re at…

Rich Birch — Yep.

Kyle Isabelli — …that we’ll we’ll get those coming to our feed I guess.

Rich Birch — And so obviously on the backend there’s a little bit of like ah like there’s obviously multiple churches in 630 or in those areas that are engaged. They’re doing something to root calls to, you know, various different churches. You have a sense of how that looks? And and is that are they scaling it based on the size of your church or how does that work?

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, I don’t know how they scale it. My my guess from from my initial conversations and then also talking with a couple other churches in the past six months that are in this area is that it’s almost like a checklist.

Rich Birch — Sure.

So it’s just like all right, we sent this one to Avenue today and…

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kyle Isabelli — …and like I know Community Christian is another one and they, you know, they get the next one that comes up. And then the next one that comes up. and so I think it might just go on to rotation. I’m not 100% sure, but we’ve never myself and another staff person handle these initial contacts, and it’s never been like this overwhelming thing where like you said, there’s a call center now…

Rich Birch — Yes, yes.

Kyle Isabelli — …there’s 25 people, you know, time of thing. So um, yeah, so all I know is it’s based on area code.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Kyle Isabelli — It’s based on where they’re coming from. And and like getting capturing people’s information, you know, you get ah in a church setting to capture a first time visitor’s information is so hard some days, you know?

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so…

Kyle Isabelli — It takes them like six weeks…

Rich Birch — Oh, yeah, yeah.

Kyle Isabelli — …to finally a write down their email, you know? And now it’s like we get their phone number and email immediately before even having a conversation with them.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s amazing. Like so if, you know, doing the math quickly, you know, there’ve been somewhere around 200 contacts, which is amazing. Like that’s if you if, you know, eight months a couple and a half, you know, two and a half a week um…

Kyle Isabelli — Yep.

Rich Birch — …you know, 50% of those you actually hear back from. So there’s like a hundred legit kind of conversations. They’re all legit…

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah.

Rich Birch — …but a hundred conversations you’ve been engaged with. And then, you know, some some people that you’ve actually and then other 50%, so you maybe moved 40, 50 people to actual phone conversations, which is you know, pretty amazing. Tell me what’s the size of your church? Like what’s the I’ve tried to get a sense of scale for people that are listening in.

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah.

Rich Birch — Because it would to your point to even even if you whittle it down to that 50, even if you say okay, the 50 who kind of followed the bottom of the the funnel, for a lack of better word. The people that you you know, actually end up getting on the phone, man a lot of churches would do a lot of work to get 50 contacts…

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah.

Rich Birch — …like that would be a tremendous amount. So yeah, give us a sense of that.

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, I mean we’re we’re a church of about 400 on Sunday.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Kyle Isabelli — And you know, with you know people come in once or twice a month…

Rich Birch — Yeah, absolutely.

Kyle Isabelli — …you know, probably more would call Avenue their home. But that’s our average attendance. So we’re a mid-sized church. So to to your point to have 50, 40 to 50 contexts, you know, 10 to 15% of our weekly attendance that we’re able to engage with people in the community, like I don’t know an outreach strategy, a digital outreach strategy that has that type of return on investment, if you want to put it in those terms. Like it’s it’s pretty remarkable. Um, and and such a blessing for for us to be a partner with them. So it it to me the the numbers, the math as we kind of broke it down, it just it makes a lot of sense. Especially because it’s something that they give to churches for free. Like that doesn’t cost us…

Rich Birch — Yes, yeah, you can’t beat the price.

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, you can’t beat the price of that.

Rich Birch — Yes, yeah, and how much does all this cost? Well they give it to you.

Kyle Isabelli — Yes.

Rich Birch — So yeah, absolutely. Just to put that all in context context, friends. So a church of 400 people, you know, the industry average, the kind of ah thing that we would typically would love to see us driving towards from a first time guest contact information, that would average 8 a week. Like we should be seeing somewhere in that range typically. And I don’t know where where you guys are at, but when you even put it in that context, if you think three contacts a week are coming in on average through through the the internet that are above and beyond that, that’s a robust number, again, considering all the work that it does you have to do to to gather contact information from people who attend on a regular basis. That’s that’s incredible. So when you know the interesting thing, so did you see as the actual Super Bowl went through a spike? Did that was there a lot that week? Has it been pretty consistent? Yeah, give me a sense of, you know, as as it’s trickled on do you still get contacts? How’s that going?

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, I would say Super Bowl saw a little bit of a spike. Um you know in Chicago in particular for most of the fall and then now this new baseball season ah, the Chicago Cubs and the Chicago White Sox they consistently have He Gets Us ads in their ballpark. So in Chicagoland it’s probably been more prevalent. I don’t know how that is compared to the rest of the country. So we didn’t see too much of a spike for Super Bowl and the weeks after because it had kind of been a part of everything we’re doing. Um, but I will say that um I just think about the dollar amount that goes into creating these ads.

Rich Birch — Oh yeah, that’s huge.

Kyle Isabelli — Like as ah as a church our size like we would never have the millions upon millions of dollars to to create these amazing amazing digital ads, get them advertised in multiple platforms. Like we don’t have the the team, the resources, we can’t do any of that. And so to have that type of resource and for your church just to be a benefit, ah it’s huge. And so it just it makes sense for any church anywhere to utilize it because people are on social media, people are on the internet, people are streaming, and these He Gets Us ads are everywhere. And so it’s it’s such a blessing to be a part of it. So yeah, so not too much of a spike when the two big ads did show. Um, but we, like I said, being in the area that we’re in we I think it’s been more consistent because it’s been here a lot longer.

Rich Birch — Interesting. Yeah, I think Chicagoland is one of Gloo’s—I’d have to look, but—one of their focus communities. Like they have a number of communities across the country that they’ve ah they’ve said hey we’re going to put disproportionate effort in, for sure, which makes sense. Yeah, that’s that’s fascinating. All right so.

Kyle Isabelli — Um, yeah.

Rich Birch — when you now are you able to, ah so you get the text and email you get their phone and email which is amazing. Um, have you put those into another follow-up sequence? Are you allowed to do that? What are the restrictions around that? Can you continue to, you know, be proactive? Obviously if Ppeople opt out then, you know, obviously you can’t keep going. But if if what what does all that look like?

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, so Gloo, the the nice thing about Gloo is that um there is an actual online platform that you can utilize that your church signs up for. So all of their data is is stored in there. So if we want to do a phone call or send a text message, we can do it through Gloo obviously. But if we have something else going on in our church and they’ve opted into communicating with Avenue Christian Church, we’ll send that to them. You know, we can ask them, hey, we we send out a weekly email of our church… because some people even do um have reached out because He Gets Us started a campaign of saying like, hey, it’s time for you to come back to church. Pandemic’s over; start coming back to church. Do you need to find new church home? So we’ve had quite a few people have responded “looking for a church home”. That’s been their kind of one sentence prop. So um, we’ll we’ll put them in our database, you know.

Kyle Isabelli — And and Gloo ah, you can export it through Excel. So we can load it to our database which is you know CCB, Community Church Builder. And everything’s very seamless. If we want to use more of that data we can import it into our own database, but Gloo has a great online platform that makes it very simple to see everything, all the contacts, when’s the last time you’ve connected with them, what’s the last message that you’ve had with them, so on and so forth. So it it really is a one stop shop – their online platform.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s that’s fantastic. So what would be your advice, so I’m sure there’s church leaders that are listening in that are like, man, we’re missing the boat here. We should get involved. What would be ah, you know, beyond—and we’ll get to links and all that in a bit but—like what’ll be your advice for a church that’s maybe just starting? Or is there a piece of this that you wish you know back eight months ago, oh we should have done this differently when we got the ball rolling?

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, I think um I think there are probably many churches like ours that coming out of the Super Bowl ad um, did a series based on like the He Gets Us ads. And that’s another um thing about the online platform is they have sermons and discussion questions that go with some of their ads. So for our Easter series, and it started palm Sunday went through Mother’s Day, we would show one of the He Gets Us ads as a as a bumper video, and then we would you know teach on that topic about Jesus and how it relates. And there are sermon outlines, guidelines that if, you know, you need to use you can utilize them.

Kyle Isabelli — So I think many churches probably started there and just kind of left it, like oh this is a cool thing. Let’s talk about it. Whereas I wish we would have done that in October so that by Christmas of 2022 we would have been really honing into saying like, here’s our promotion, here’s what we’re talking about and then a month later in February it just it continues on. You know, so it’s it’s continuing on people’s minds in our community. It’s on the mind of our church for them to say, oh yeah, our church was talking about this this this Christmas and this fall. And we’re starting to engage with people and and they’re sharing it on their social media and stuff like that. So I wish we would have done that before, but even still connecting with our Easter services, connecting it with some of our big, you know, Palm Sundays and Mother’s Day, continually following up with people in that regard.

Kyle Isabelli — We did a stations of the cross like prayer experience where we tied in the last week of Jesus to different those different videos and and different, you know, scriptures and different reflection questions that came from Gloo, like you can make it your own. But I wish we’ve just done that a little bit earlier. But it’s it’s not too late. Like you can still do it. He Gets Us is continuing to put out more ads and and they’re creating new things and more people are donating, so it’s still free. So I would say jump on and try to figure out how it can help your church’s community outreach moving forward.

Rich Birch — Yeah I love it. If you log on, again you just can can go to Gloo.us if you’re if you’re um, a church, you just log on create an account. It’s super easy. Super fast to do. But you’ll see in there in the He Gets Us resources there’s prayer prompts, sermon resources, reading plans, discussion guides – all kinds of content that even if you were not thinking about like even you’re like, I don’t know do I want to have somebody answering text messages. Even if you weren’t interested in that, man, there’s a great opportunity to leverage those resources. They’re well done, high quality. Um, yeah, that could be really really helpful.

Kyle Isabelli — Yep.

Rich Birch — So as you look to the future, how do you think this will shape your, you know, your church’s approach? You’re kind of, you know, where you go from here?

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, I think it has reminded us of our need to engage in some of these tough conversations with people, to really get over the fact that maybe the church doesn’t have the best reputation overall.

Kyle Isabelli — And say, you know what, we’re gonna be a church that creates our own reputation in our community. And we’re gonna do that by caring for people’s needs, listening to them, helping them where they’re at. Um and through the through our conversations, through showing them the love of Christ like their hearts will be open to the gospel. Their hearts will be open to attending a church service, or coming to a program, or you know taking their next steps in their faith journey. Whatever it is this is getting us outside of our walls um and helping us understand and see even our own personal digital strategy has to be less about promotion of, hey this is what’s happening at our church, and here’s what we’re teaching on! And it needs to be more about like how are we helping people in our community meet their needs…

Rich Birch — Right.

Kyle Isabelli — …and and hit their pain points and and talk through the things that they’re going through. So it’s it’s really kind of flipped the script for us in a couple different ways and I think that’s going to continue to drive some of our outreach strategies moving forward.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s fantastic. This has been just a really, you know, great conversation. Is there any part of this that you look at or like yeah that just actually hasn’t been that great? Or it maybe hasn’t met your expectations or you know it kind of just is like maybe more not negative, but just a little, you know, maybe it just hasn’t been as fantastic as it sounds on this box, you know, kind of thing?

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, um, the platform is easier to use on a phone than it is ah than it is on a computer or laptop.

Rich Birch — Okay, yeah.

Kyle Isabelli — Um, which is that that’s a small thing. And for me…

Rich Birch — Fascinating.

Kyle Isabelli — …as I was sharing earlier with with you, Rich, is that I’m not I don’t like being on like social media as much.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Kyle Isabelli — I’m not really into like having the apps on my phone; I would rather do it on a desktop. Um and just kind of put my phone away a lot of times, until the fact that it really is a lot easier to communicate with people on the phone versus the desktop. It’s a downside. If you’re fine using your phone, um, go for it. It’s not a big issue. But for me, there’s some kinks in there when it comes to the desktop version. So but that’s you know it’s such a minor detail. Otherwise it’s like ah, you know, I would say one more thing.

Kyle Isabelli — Some of the ads, you know they’re not always my favorite ads all right? Maybe I don’t fully agree with the message, or I don’t really like how they talked about Jesus in this way. Like sure that’s that’s going to happen. But that’s not the point of it. The point of it is that it’s connecting with someone who doesn’t know Jesus, or is far from Christ and it’s given you an opportunity to talk with them. So it doesn’t matter if I don’t fully agree or fully like the ad. Or you know you see a lot of hate that’s on social media over these last few months about He Gets Us. Like there’s so much more good and redemption that can come out of it, even if you don’t one ah hundred percent like the ad. So.

Rich Birch — Right.

Kyle Isabelli — I would those are two small things that’s like, oh could be a little bit better, but otherwise it’s it’s been such a great blessing for our church.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s cool. Yeah, I wonder if um, there was you know there has been pushback on that side on the messaging side. And since you brought it up, I didn’t bring it up, um, you know, maybe just go into that a little bit more. Like it it it has been, you know, it’s an interesting time in our culture where, you know, the way I read that is, you know, if if this was 20, 30 years ago and ah Billy Graham was coming to town, they used to do a lot a lot of ads Billy Graham would, you know, they would do all kinds of ads to, you know, advertise. And you know, I I put it in that category of like you may not love all those ads; you might not love all of that, but at the end of the day you’re like, yeah, it’s Billy Graham though. It’s going to be okay, like it’ll all work out in the end. Um, that’s kind of how I read it was I was I’m like, yeah, I not sure I would have you know you know, but but but it doesn’t seem we live in such a polarized era that it’s like people get so worked up over stuff.

Kyle Isabelli — Yep.

Rich Birch — Um, yeah, maybe talk through that a little bit more. Is there anything else on that front that you know, kind of sticks out to you…

Kyle Isabelli — Absolutely.

Rich Birch — …um, you know, as you think about the, you know, at the at the actual messaging itself?

Kyle Isabelli — I would say that, you know, even in our church after we we shared about it and talked about it and then did the series, you had some people like, I didn’t really like that ad; I don’t agree with it. And or I don’t I’ll just be frank – I don’t like that certain companies are donating to Gloo and funding some of it.

Rich Birch — Right.

Kyle Isabelli — And I don’t like where their money’s coming from. And I don’t agree with their political stance on this company.

Rich Birch — Right.

Kyle Isabelli — And so it’s like I get it. And you can go down that rabbit trail with any type of nonprofit. You can go down that rabbit trail with any type of corporation that’s trying to do good in society. And so I said just look at how it benefits the local church, look at how it benefits the mission of of making disciples. We would never have these conversations with these people. They wouldn’t they wouldn’t give church a chance in million years apart from seeing an ad, sometimes at like one o’clock in the morning…

Rich Birch — Yes, yeah.

Kyle Isabelli — …because they’re discouraged and depressed and they don’t know what to do with their life. And this random ad showed up as they’re scrolling through social media. And now we get to have a conversation with them.

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s so good.

Kyle Isabelli — Like we don’t get that we don’t get that if they didn’t see that He Gets Us ad. So let’s, you know, at our church we like to say—and I can’t remember who’s the, if it’s Francis of Assissi or someone else, but—our mantra is in the essentials we want to have unity, in the nonessentials liberty, and in all things love. And so our digitals outreach strategy to reach people in our community to me is a nonnessential.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Kyle Isabelli — So let’s have liberty. Let’s show grace to one another, and in all things let us show love to one another. So that, yes, I I get the point, but the the pros so much outweigh the benefits…

Rich Birch — Right.

Kyle Isabelli — …and we’re not forsaking the gospel message. We’re not watering down the gospel message. In fact, we’re getting an opportunity to clearly articulate the gospel…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Kyle Isabelli — …to these people who are in need.

Rich Birch — Yes, yeah. And yeah, that’s very well said. And you know, the other piece I would add to that is, you know, you got to look at the form. These are these are quick spots. They’re, you know, you talk about a Tiktok ad.

Kyle Isabelli — Yep.

Rich Birch — Like, man, I feel bad for people who are saying, hey we’re going to try to make a thing that’s like in 4 seconds it’s going to get people’s attention. Like good luck with that, dear pastors. I’m like you know you know, could you if you were restricted to ah to a sixty second thing on a Sunday morning ah, how would what would you do with it? You know, how would you do that? And so, you know, I think on balance, all the stuff I’ve seen, I haven’t watched it all but all the stuff I’ve seen and been like, man, that’s clever. It’s interesting it. And it does it it does what it’s supposed to do, which is move people to do exactly what you said is, hey, I’m struggling with my marriage. I’m, you know, I’m I got this issue, this is this is bugging me, and to reach out. And really then the ball’s in our court is to say, hey, we’re going to pick this ball up and and run with it. So yeah, love that. This has been fantastic. Anything else you want to share just as we wrap up today’s episode?

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, once again, Rich, thanks for for having me on. And and I would just once again, encourage pastors and in churches go to Gloo.us G-L-O-O dot U-S and sign up. And become a free partner and start getting connected with people in your community who are hurting, who are in need, who are looking for hope, who are looking for healing. Like you have an opportunity to to take a step forward and reaching more people in community. So don’t waste the opportunity. Yeah.

Rich Birch — So good. Yeah, love it. Well this has been fantastic. Where do we want to send people online to track with the church or with you?

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, our church’s website is avenuechristian.com. And then if people want more about me and my family and my life and my journey kyleisabelli.com that’s I-S-A-B-E-L-L-I.

Rich Birch — Love it. This has been fantastic. Thanks for being here today.

Kyle Isabelli — Yeah, thanks, Rich. Appreciate it.

Do you struggle to engage Gen Z in your church? Do you want to invite younger generations into ministry, but aren’t sure where to start? Saint Clement is a dynamic Catholic community in the Archdiocese of Chicago which is having an amazing impact on its community. Listen in as Father Peter shares the unique approach of the 125-year-old church as they engage younger generations.

• Get to know Gen Z. // Reaching out to different generations has its challenges. Despite their differences, both Millennials and Gen Z have a longing for spirituality, community, and to contribute to the common good. However, unlike Millennials, Gen Z didn’t refuse to be part of the church. Rather they never had the chance to be part of the church because their parents never brought them. Recognize that Gen Z doesn’t care what church they go to as long as you listen to them, provide opportunities to serve, and invite them to come and belong before finding Jesus.
• Experiencing God through community. // Along with Millennials, Gen Z is one of the most isolated generations so community and belonging are critical for them. Take a step back and ask yourself are you focusing on your way of doing ministry and your preferences, or the preferences of Gen Z and what Jesus wants us to do with younger generations? Keep learning about younger generations and how to create as many openings for them to experience God through community as possible.
• A place of belonging. // To engage the younger generation, Saint Clement has implemented strategies that focus on creating an environment on the church campus that is inviting, full of life and important to a lot of people. They are also passionate about belonging, and have signs everywhere that invite people in. As people explore Saint Clement, they are also invited to engage in conversations about identity and purpose which are relatively foreign to young people today.
• Identity and purpose. // Part of the way Saint Clement invites people into the conversation is by engaging them about themselves before talking about Jesus. In July they hold a special program called Theology on Tap, a four-week lecture series for young adults where they enjoy beer and pizza and hear from a guest speaker, in this case, about purpose. They don’t have to become a part of the church at this point; they can simply come for the program to discover more about themselves and to meet other young people. As a follow-up, the parish then offers a three-week course developed by Alpha that’s called Ever Wonder? which helps create a place for people to have comfortable conversations about identity and purpose. It includes a 15 minute video and 30 minutes of discussion in a small group context. These community-based opportunities lead into Saint Clement’s fall programming which includes Alpha.
• Create space for young leaders. // Father Peter shares that over 90% of their leaders at Saint Clement are under 35. These vibrant programs which engage hundreds of young adults were birthed out of a small group of young people who were invited to minister to their peers. If you want more young adults to get involved in your ministry, step back and ask yourself: Do we really need them? Are we going to empower them and really listen to them? Are we going to be okay if not everything will be perfect and they make mistakes? Create that space for them to learn and grow as leaders in your church. Let them know that they are needed even if everything doesn’t work out as planned.
• Look into what makes disciples. // When people are ready to grow in their faith, Saint Clement offers Alpha Bible courses, catechism classes, and also uses The Chosen series as a tool to help people learn more about Jesus and the characteristics of discipleship. During this time they watch an episode of The Chosen and then are divided into small groups for 30 minutes to have a discussion about what shifted in people’s lives because of their interaction with Jesus.

You can find out more about Saint Clement at www.clement.org.

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Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Hey everybody welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in. You know every week we try to bring you a church leader who will both inspire and equip you and today it’s our privilege to have Father Wojcik with us. He is at St Clement Parish; it’s a dynamic Catholic community in the Archdiocese of of Chicago that really strives to accompany people in a transforming relationship with Jesus and his church. They offer support, prayer, community groups, including Alpha which is actually where um, you know Father Peter and I bumped into each other was at the Alpha Leadership Conference in London. And I’m really excited to have you on the show today, Father. Thanks for being here.

Father Peter Wojcik — Oh thank for thank you for having me. And I’m super excited to have this conversation with you.

Rich Birch — Nice. Good. Well fill out the picture. What did I miss about the parish? Kind of give us a sense of the community; talk us through that.

Father Peter Wojcik — Absolutely. So you know Chicago obviously it’s a large city with a lot of different communities serving different markets, if you will, different parts of ah of Chicago from Latino to African American all the way to um, the community that I serve which is in Lake Home Park. So that’s kind of close to downtown Chicago. We are close to the lake in ah in a quiet, ah old neighborhood and it was a historically German community that established church 125 years ago. And it really was an immigrant community that was rather poor and living at what at that point was really a rough part of city. And they had this dream of creating a community in which the children will be safe. They can educate their children and come together in faith. And we’ve been continuing that and somehow by God’s grace over the last, you know, 125 years this community just kept growing and and and attracting different groups of people.

Father Peter Wojcik — And in about 70s and 80s it became kind of a hub for a lot of ah, people who didn’t quite feel connected with the church ,or especially in the Catholic Church who didn’t quite find their space. And um and they loved it here, and they now became our older population, if you will. And ah, but but they really built a foundation around few principles. The first one is that we welcome everyone.

Rich Birch — Right.

Father Peter Wojcik — We we actually do believe that everybody has the right to come to Jesus and and and that’s how the faith and conversion journey starts is by experiencing his love and mercy. So they they were very they were really passionate about making sure we do that. The second thing was you know inclusivity, knowing that that everyone not only was invited to be part of it, but everybody was invited to be a leader. And so I think the diversity of our leaders was really important.

Father Peter Wojcik — The third one was really empowerment. You know, ah one of my predecessors, Father Fahey, was just a brilliant man when it came to just allowing people to do new things. And when I hear the stories of this community, it was at that time that they really try some very new methods. I mean this was one of the first communities in a Catholic Church here in Chicago that constituted the lay council of people…

Rich Birch — Okay.

Father Peter Wojcik — …that helped the pastor actually to make all the decisions and so forth.

Rich Birch — Wow.

Father Peter Wojcik — So there were a lot of things that they started doing early on. And so my job now as a pastor is to make sure we don’t screw it up and we keep doing this.

Rich Birch — I love it. How long have you been at the at St Clement?

Father Peter Wojcik — So I’ve been a pastor here this is my third year…

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Father Peter Wojcik — …running the place. And but eleventh eleventh year of living here.

Rich Birch — Okay.

Father Peter Wojcik — I I moved here eleven years ago so I had kind of a really great benefit of living in in the parish and helping here on the weekends as I work in the Archdiocese. And that three years ago I transitioned into…

Rich Birch — Love it.

Father Peter Wojcik — …serving here full time.

Rich Birch — Love it. Well you know, Father Peter, there there was a bunch that I heard you talk about at the conference that that grabbed my attention and, you know, I was, you know, really struck again that, you know, wow, like all churches may look different. We might have, you know, slightly different approaches to our worship experience or whatever that is, but man, we’re struggling with the similar things. You know, we’re trying we’re trying to figure out how we can point people to Jesus. What does that look like in our context? And and and one of the things that that struck me was particularly your church’s focus on ah, next generation – reaching out to young people. Can you tell us a little bit of that story? What’s what’s happened there over these last few years?

Father Peter Wojcik — Well first and foremost I think there is a distinct difference between Millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha. I think not all the young people are the same…

Rich Birch — Yess.

Father Peter Wojcik — …and you got to kind of step back and recognize it first as a church leader and say well which which which which group do I have? You know, what are the Millennials in my community? What are the Gen Zs? What what is Gen Alpha, the youngest generation? And ah you know and and kind of figure out first those those those groups. You know, I I would summarize them um in a very simple way and it’s a very generic way. So there’s probably more expansive ways to do it.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Father Peter Wojcik — But but but but in many ways I think um Millennials, by and large, are post-christian generation in least in the United States, at least in the cities like Chicago. They chose not to be part of organized religion.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Father Peter Wojcik — They don’t see organized religion as a pathway in many ways to experience God. They experience God in in different ways, if they entertain that thought. and so there’s this hardship of breaking through all those shelves, if you will, of why not to engage with God, specifically throughout organized religions. That’s one approach, and we try that; we we keep going at it.

Father Peter Wojcik — But but with Millennial ah with Gen Z is a little bit different because I would really talk about them as pre-Christian generation. They they were raised by people my age. They are not um, they’re not really deeply religious by any stretch, but they are longing for spirituality. They are longing to be recognized. They’re longing to contribute to a common good. They want to do good things. They actually do like the sense of community and belonging. They are the most isolated generation together with millennials that we know of. And so there is this natural longing. And unlike millennials they didn’t refuse to be part of the church; they never had a chance to be part of the church.

Rich Birch — Oh that’s good.

Father Peter Wojcik — Their parents never brought them to church. So when you start with them and you work with them you have to recognize that as a starting point they actually don’t care what church they go to as long as you offer belonging, as long as you listen to them, as long as there’s opportunity for them to actually serve bigger community. And then that you really authentically want them to move in the right direction, which for us Christian leaders is a direction toward Jesus, right? If we actually do it in ah in an organized and thoughtful way I think there is a great opportunity for us to engage that generation.

Father Peter Wojcik — And so that really has been our story here at St Clement, you know. Because it’s Lincoln Park we have this incredible number of Gen Zs around, young people who are coming off college or year two years post college are in our neighborhood. And you know we we just simply keep saying, come and belong. Just try belonging before you try faith, before you try your belief in Jesus, just come and try belonging.

Father Peter Wojcik — You know, Alpha became such a big tool for us because we’ve seen the consequences of it. We’ve seen people coming and kind of just strolling in um, you know because they saw signs, or our welcomers were outside welcoming people to come to Alpha, and they would talk to people passing by and they said what what are you doing? And they’re like well we we run this course and they said I’m not Christian but I can come. And so every course we run we got people actually from the sidewalk in…

Rich Birch — Oh that’s amazing.

Father Peter Wojcik — …because they were just kind of interested. Now I would never do that, I am a huge introvert. You know, I’m in my 40s; there’s no way I would go to it.

Rich Birch — Yes, yeah I get it.

Father Peter Wojcik — But that’s the difference and you have to pay attention. Just because you as a leader wouldn’t do it…

Rich Birch — Oh that’s good.

Father Peter Wojcik — …that doesn’t mean that Gen Z won’t do it. It’s not about your preferences. It’s about them and their preferences. And I think that’s what’s so important is to step back as Christian leaders and ask ourselves, you know, are we focusing on our way of doing ministry? Are we focusing on what Jesus wants to do with that generation, and try to keep learning about that generation. How to create as many openings for them to experience God through community as possible.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love that. I love this idea of you know, hey we’re asking we’re inviting Gen Z to really—and you didn’t quite say it like this but so correct me if I’m if I’m wrong—but it’s like hey, we we’re inviting you to belong before you believe. And I think there was a previous generation, right, where it was the other way around. It was like you’ve got to believe these things first before we’ll let you in the building. I just I think that’s great. What what else how else have you done that as ah as a church, as a communit,y to try to create an inviting place, create an inviting culture where people can belong, where those Gen Z folks can can be a part of the community?

Father Peter Wojcik — We’ve we’ve done number of things that were pretty systematic and we hold ourselves accountable to those forces. You know, just the outside appearance of the place. You you might think it’s not important but actually it is. If you know if you worship space in our, you know, we have a historic church. If the church looking from um, outside inside looks dead, if there’s, you know, if our dress is dead and there’s no flowers and so forth, what it shows is that it’s a place that is actually not important to anybody…

Rich Birch — Oh that’s good.

Father Peter Wojcik — …that nobody cares about that place. So first strategy we had is our campus looks great. And it doesn’t just look great for the sake of the campus. It looks like a place that is very important to a lot of people. That’s one.

Rich Birch — Oh that’s gold.

Father Peter Wojcik — Second second thing that we’ve done is we have signs all over the place to simply say, you know, everyone is invited, we are passionate about belonging, and we want to invite you into to be part of the conversation, right? So before, again, um I think that was so important with what you said, before we jump into um conversation about Jesus we start a conversation about themselves, right?

Rich Birch — Right, right.

Father Peter Wojcik — What’s your purpose, your identity, who who you are.

Rich Birch — Love that.

Father Peter Wojcik — And and and listening to them first. Third one is we, especially around summer, we have a lot of summer opportunities here in Chicago, we develop something we call Theology on Tap which is really kind of a beer evening, and so we have pizza and beer and wine, and we invite young people to come for four weeks in a row – in our case, it’s Tuesdays in July. And basically we say, hey come, we’ll have a big party, and then we have a speaker. And this year our topic of those four weeks is purpose. Um, how to find purpose. And 70% of young adults don’t know their purpose is.

Father Peter Wojcik — So this is one way in which we want to help them. Whether they choose to be part of our congregation or not, we kind of don’t care. We feel like as the disciples of Jesus we are co- responsible each other to have good lives anyway. And so our way to do it is to simply help young people to reflect on how to find purpose and how to discover purpose for themselves. So we’ll spend four weeks. Out of that, so so we usually get somewhere between um, a 190 to 300 people…

Rich Birch — That’s amazing. That’s amazing. That’s incredible.

Father Peter Wojcik — …an evening [inaudbible]. And that’s a nice way of introducing them, helping them to meet other young adults, especially we focused on new people in the city, right? Trying to invite them to participate so we push it as much as we can through social media and and other channels. And then as ah as a follow-up to it in August we have a three week course that actually Alpha developed um, that it’s called Ever Wonder. And it really is developed for that generation for Gen Zs, and it’s belonging, purpose, and identity. And so it’s very similar to Alpha. You come, you watch a video for 15 minutes—it’s very short video—and then you have a 30 minute small group conversation. And again we’ll do it outside and and it’s just a way for people to get more comfortable talking about what is in their hearts with other people. Because what’s interesting is the younger generation folks that are great at technology. They’re not great at talking about themselves with other people.

Rich Birch — That’s good. That’s good.

Father Peter Wojcik — And so we create a space for them to really have comfortable conversations. And that really leads to our fall programming. So we we have four Alpha for people who want to you know, engage in exploration of faith. We have we have our Lydia course, you know, taken from at the Acts so specifically for professional women. It’s it’s it’s a way for professional women to grow in community. We have about 600 women in that group.

Rich Birch — That’s incredible.

Father Peter Wojcik — And then and then the last one is the men’s executive speaker series and again and kind of will continue this topic of finding purpose as as men and in leadership. And so so there’s pathways in which we try to build on the sense of belonging, and welcome, and keep inviting people to return, but also keep inviting them to bring friends because it’s an easy way to get engaged.

Rich Birch — There’s so much there – that was like a master class. I love that. I love the the intentionality. I love the, hey, we’re kind of building through the summer. I love the idea of the church as a social platform. Like I think that is a powerful idea that I think um, you know, I think so we we may forget about that in in a lot of our churches that something like, you know, Theology on Tap—know a number of churches to do things like that—that that obviously there’s a lot going on there, but a part of that is actually just providing a way for for people to connect. And then I love how you’re kind of weaving purpose through all of those to kind of lead people from one, you know, to the next. How did this start though? Like so you know that’s a tremendous tremendous amount of momentum that’s already begun begun. There has it just always been the case? I love the history, the fact that, you know, St Clement has been an innovative parish, has been a kind of church that that is trying new things. Was there any innovation that kind of got this ball rolling, that ended up saying you know hey we’ve kind of been in an inflection point to reach more…

Father Peter Wojcik — Sure.

Rich Birch — …you know, younger generation?

Father Peter Wojcik — I think COVID in many cases accelerated the need because you’ve been reading so much [inaudible] about how high was the level of isolation. And ah and loneliness in especially among young adults. And the surgeon general here in the United States just published study on isolation. And it was a striking thing. He said he said in it, you know, um, being isolated equals, healthwise, to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s, wasn’t that crazy? That was unbelievable. And I saw that. Yeah, that’s unbelievable.

Father Peter Wojcik — Isn’t that something? Like that that really is the impact loneliness have on your heart and your life.

Rich Birch — Yes, yes.

Father Peter Wojcik — And we felt really passionate to say, listen we we are going to do anything we can to keep saying you are welcome. We want you to be part of the community. And we want to meet you whatever you are. And so part of um that that really was was the beginning of it. And second thing is we we really engage a small group of young adults—I would say about 30 of them—and we really started a listening to them, talking with them, and praying with them.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Father Peter Wojcik — And we said what would it look like for you to minister to to other young adults, right? And and that group from 20 grew to about 120 young leaders now which is doing incredible amount of work every week. And so you can see how now they they’re shifted right from being customers of services, which really struggle in the Catholic Church – a lot of people come and they, you know, they kind of treat the church as a provider of services. So they come when they want a service and there will be a customer and then when they don’t need the service they’re out, right? Versus then being part of the community that develops and changes, and and fosters a spiritual life. And so that was our big goal and young adults is to move them from what the culture teaches them they are, which is customers, to really being kind of collaborators in bringing mission together. And it was incredible to watch that shift early on about two, three years ago when they really started driving, you know, first courses, Alpha, book clubs, all the stuff that they fought was relevant for young people their age. And now they they really are driving and building more courses around it…

Rich Birch — Love it.

Father Peter Wojcik — …and you know after Alpha we have 3 different choices people can choose from um, as as to engage more in faith, for more in community. And the beauty of it is that at this point I would say at least 90% of all our leaders are younger than thirty-five.

Rich Birch — Wow. That’s amazing. That’s incredible, Like that’s very unique. That’s ah, you know, there’s lots of churches that would love that, but haven’t been able to engage at that level. That’s incredible.

Father Peter Wojcik — Well I think it’s it’s really empowering people and calling them to it. I really believe every church can do it but where you have to step back is to say, Okay, do do we really need them? Are we going to empower them and really listen to them?

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Father Peter Wojcik — And third are we going to be okay with the fact that not everything will be perfect, that they will make mistakes? They’re young adults in their 20s. There are some things they will do really well and there are some things they won’t do well at all.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Father Peter Wojcik — But that’s part of the collective learning. And if you don’t create that space for them to learn how to do ministry better if you only want to keep rescuing them, and fixing, and improving, then what happens is they get discouraged and they say, well you don’t need us.

Rich Birch — Right. Wow. That’s good. I was going to ask that – was there in that listening process or maybe as you’ve been launching, was there either like a surprise that you’re like, I wouldn’t have naturally thought or I wouldn’t have come to that conclusion that they kind of they tilted the ministry towards. Or is there been like a a stubbed tone moment that’s been like ooh maybe it didn’t go quite as well as we were thinking it would.

Father Peter Wojcik — Ah, there there were a number of those moments We we actually just recently served as some of our leaders specifically as we are working on our strategic plan. And ah and we were able to dig into some of the data and it shows a great difference between how young adult perceive faith, religion, and the role of the church versus other generations. I’ll give you a few examples.

Father Peter Wojcik — So one of the example was to um, propose some of our values that they think are very important to our community. And so everybody over 50 as one of the top five values selected ah “progressive”. None of the young adults selected “progressive”.

Rich Birch — Interesting. Huh.

Father Peter Wojcik — Um, and it was very interesting. Because again and and then we dig in into conversation with young adults and we said, why was that? And they said listen, the world as we live in is crazy enough. We don’t want now the church to become equally crazy. We actually come here so we find some enduring presence of God. So we find connection to a bigger history. So we find here some connectivity and deeper sense of belonging to something that is tradition-driven and that is 2000 years old…

Rich Birch — Right, right.

Father Peter Wojcik — …versus three months old. Like we are just done with trends that change every three months.

Rich Birch — Wow.

Father Peter Wojcik — And so that is a very large driving, I think, energy for young adults is they’re really not attracted by flashy new technologies because that’s what they have on their phones every single day. What they’re looking for is really a thoughtful space when they can come and really have a conversation about things that don’t change. Because those are the things you can build your lives around. Not the things that change every single year because those are so fleeting that they’re just tired of it. So so we’ve learned that that, you know, what we have to do with young adults is we have to lead with with really a little bit more teaching and and leading them into understanding why we do certain things and that there is a meaning in all of it. And as they praise the meaning as they unpack some of those topics and conversations, it seems like they’re very willing to invite other people.

Father Peter Wojcik — The other thing that was just blew my mind is the fact that for, I think, Gen Zs and Gen Alpha now, religion is not private. In United States religion has been private for ever and ever.

Rich Birch — Yeah, true. Yep.

Father Peter Wojcik — But the problem is technology, right, took all the privacy away from things that were always private. Kitchen was private. There was never a doorway kitchen.

Rich Birch — That’s a good insight.

Father Peter Wojcik — Now kitchen concepts the kitchens are all open.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Father Peter Wojcik — Anybody who comes here your house sees your kitchen first. That was private thirty years ago.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Father Peter Wojcik — What you eat was private. Now it’s, you know, how your closet looked like was private.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Father Peter Wojcik — Now everybody has, you know, videos in their closets with their clothes. So all the things that traditionally were private are not private anymore.

Rich Birch — That’s true. Yes.

Father Peter Wojcik — That is the opportunity for the church to say, listen your kitchen is not private so isn’t your religion. Your religion actually is pretty up there in a public square. And so why don’t we engage in this conversation in ah in a much more public way. And I think Gen Zs are actually not afraid to do it. We see it with Alpha. They keep inviting their non-churchgoing friends with no problem the way that I would really hesitate, and they don’t.

Rich Birch — That’s interesting. I love that. That’s so there’s some fascinating insights there, you know, that I’ve that resonates with some of the the work we’ve done and then some of the research we’ve done and stuff you know I’ve seen with the churches I, you know, work with, particularly you know this whole invite culture thing is a massive deal. You know the difference and we, so we say in our circles, you know, the difference between a plateaued or or stuck church and a growing church is growing churches train, equip, and mobilize, their or motivate, their people to invite their friends. That they you know they they don’t just leave that the chance. They try to find they try to do things and frame things in a way that makes it easy for them to invite. Um and it sounds like you’re seeing that definitely with Alpha and other aspects of your ministry. Maybe talk more about that. What is what does that look like for your for your church. You know, how you know how are you cultivating that kind of culture? Is there what what are you doing to try to encourage you know Gen Z or Gen Alpha to to invite?

Father Peter Wojcik — Well in order for them to invite they have to be comfortable that the places they invite people will be embracing them as they are, and will really focus on listening and respecting their perspectives, right? Where people won’t invite people is to places where they think they will be put down or disrespected or somebody would be unkind to them and so forth. And so I think um, you know, in ah in a Catholic Church from the tradition I’m coming from part of our um struggle always was that we had a lot of programming that was very deep theologically and rooted in our tradition. And therefore if you were deep theologically you had a lot of options to participate and deepen your faith. But if you didn’t, there was really no starting place for you, right? There was just no easy entry point. And so um I kind of use the analogy of the pool and I would say, you know, if you don’t have somebody who knows how to swim they would never jump into ten foot pool because that’s ten feet deep they would just drown. But if there is ah you know ten inches of water, they would put their their feet in it. And I think that’s what happens with the churches. The the churches have to have some really shallow entry opportunities that are very important for community creation, for belonging, for comfort that will keep leading people deeper and deeper and deeper into sense of belonging.

Father Peter Wojcik — And for us we kind of discovered through our own trial of an error way of doing things is that basically people are there just kind of three basic entry points for for us here. One is alpha; that’s our biggest one. Second one is the specifically around women and men ministry, just because our spirituality is so different. And what we found is that when the men are alone, they share much more freely.

Rich Birch — Right.

Father Peter Wojcik — And also that the professional women really appreciate a place where they are not compared to professional men. They just are being focus on their own and and appreciate that for who they are. And so so so those are kind of, this is one one place is Alpha. Second would be kind of those gender based ministries that that also are social, the social element, there’s community element, and there’s small group element to it.

Father Peter Wojcik — And the third one is service, right? That that we do actually a lot of service here, a lot of opportunities. But we, out of service, try to invite people into engagement in the community. So we do some kind of service every single week…

Rich Birch — Love it.

Father Peter Wojcik — …around St Clement or in one of our partner organizations. And we just keep inviting people to engage in that. Or engage in sports. We do a lot of open gym, and a lot of sports. And so that’s another way for people to jump in. So it’s social or service.

Rich Birch — Yeah…

Father Peter Wojcik — And what we discover is that once people get into one of those basic ways of engaging and out of that we can invite them to a deeper kind of sense of belonging. And and what we recognize is that, you know, when when people go through this first step, usually what they have kind of three different desires that we try to meet. One is they really want to learn more about the word of God, scripture. So we have we always after Alpha offer bible courses as a way for people to actually learn more about ah, the word of God.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Father Peter Wojcik — Second is we come to recognize that people really want to do more learning about Jesus. And so we use The Chosen series. We design a curriculum around it and and it’s called Following Jesus and so we we kind of look at characteristics of discipleship.

Father Peter Wojcik — And the third one we specifically look, you know, in in our own tradition around kind of some principles of Catholicism, of sacraments and stuff for people who really want to develop more of an understanding of who we are as a church. And so it seems like we we highly encourage, after the entry points, if you will, people will stay together as a small group as much as possible. And I think right now about 70% of our Alpha groups actually stay together for the next offering.

Rich Birch — Oh wow. That’s amazing. I love that. I love the I heard you mention The Chosen um, you know what you do there. Can you unpack that a little bit more because I that’s a really innovative idea and, you know, I seem that would seem like a great kind of next step out of Alpha for sure. Talk to us a little bit more about that.

Father Peter Wojcik — Well we, you know, everybody and when Chosen, came up everybody love Chosen.

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s unbelievable. Yeah.

Father Peter Wojcik — And and talk about it a lot. And we thought, well why don’t we use it the same way, as a tool we use Alpha. And so we we kind of precisely the same thing. We, it starts, you know, we welcome people. We have hospitality – for our evening group we have dinner. For morning group we have breakfast. Then they watch the episode of Chosen. And then we divide them into small groups for 30 minutes and they have a discussion. And as Alpha is an entry to ah Christianity, Chosen we we treat Chosen as an entry to discipleship. So we kind of look at different episodes, and people’s interaction with Jesus and we say okay, what shifted in people’s lives because of their interaction with Jesus? What changes in the life of the disciple? And then therefore what should change in our lives once we encounter Jesus? So it becomes more of a discipleship course when we are invited not only to observe what happened to other other lives and and you know people who lived in the time of Jesus, but also what would do this, you know how our lives will shift because of our encounter with Jesus today.

Rich Birch — Yeah I love that. That’s so I’m like probably bad because I’m like cynical of so much Christian media. I’m like it’s just all so terrible. And so when The Chosen came out I was like I was a latecomer to that; I was like dragged into it. But I find it so compelling. It is so it just, you know, sucks me in and and it sends me back to scripture, and sends me back to my relationship with Jesus. And you know, I find it I get moved emotionally when I watch it. That’s what a cool cool idea. I just think that’s that’s fantastic.

Rich Birch — Um, can you talk a little bit about the community service thing. That’s a common trait we see in in lots of growing churches is they’re not the kind of place… I think there’s this common notion that which is not true the stereotype of like a growing church is the kind of place that’s like they’re just all about themselves or inward focus. They’re, you know, they’re just it’s just trying to gather people in a box somewhere. That’s not the case. They’re actually places that are that are moving people to actually serve. Talk to us maybe just unpack that a little bit. What does that look like for you guys?

Father Peter Wojcik — Absolutely. So so you know what we we actually seriously try to live out Matthew 28. I think the Great Commission is not only go and make disciples by proclaiming Jesus Christ – that is extremely important and we try to do it every day. But also by ah, really helping people to recognize how Jesus cares for them.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Father Peter Wojcik — And it’s very you know when you go to shelters when you go to um, serve the homeless, before you talk to to them about Jesus you you have to kind of ask them simple questions. You know, do you need the doctor? Do you need help? How how are you feeling?

Father Peter Wojcik — And all those basic questions that that that Jesus will ask first before he tells them about other. We have examples of it in the scripture. And so so I think Jesus modeled all of that for…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Father Peter Wojcik — …all of that for us. And so I think that’s what we try to do we. We do believe that in order to grow, we always have to be outward focused, that that…

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s good.

Father Peter Wojcik — …the only reason why we form disciples, why we lead them into transformation transformation in Jesus is so then they can help others to encounter the same the same gift. And it it is exercise in generosity. And so St Clement was very blessed to partner with other Christian churches about thirty years ago to establish a Lincoln Park community shelter. And we’ve been one of the partner organizations that started that organization and we’ve been supporting it ever since. So we have groups that do meals and help in the shelter. We have legal clinic that helps refugee um communities. We partner with Catholic charities and and sponsoring refugee families, and so we have meals. Right now we have a whole train meals that delivers meals to folks in in our police stations where the immigrants are leaving really…

Rich Birch — Okay.

Father Peter Wojcik — …to cross the border and were brought here on the buses, and now they have no places to go. And so so there’s many ways in which every day young people ah can engage in in really very practical and necessary service. And then here on our campus every Friday morning. We welcome our homeless neighbors for hospitality for breakfast, and then we have lunches for them. And and again it’s it’s, you know, because we have a Catholic school, it’s a great way for our young kids in the school. We have our middle school kids not only make sandwiches, but I also serve breakfast or homeless friends and so forth. And so it’s a way really for community to say listen, that’s what discipleship is. You come, you get to know Jesus, you worship Jesus, the worship transforms your heart, and you cannot help but you overflow with generosity. And you have to, you have to recognize that generosity toward other people, especially those who are less fortunate than you are, if you are a disciple of Jesus.

Rich Birch — Love it. This has been so fantastic, Father Peter. I really appreciate your generosity of being with us today. Um is there anything else you’d like to share just as we kind of wrap up today’s episode?

Father Peter Wojcik — You know we we always love to serve. So if there’s people who kind of listen to it and say, I’m intrigued and it makes absolutely no sense to me. Well welcome to my cloud. That’s what my teams does every single day when I tell them something. They said it sounds okay, we don’t know what you mean. Um…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Father Peter Wojcik — But that’s why that’s why we have a great team. So if if anyone, you know, needs support or or kind of unpacking, just reach out to us, we’ll be happy to walk you through it. But but I just I really believe that the revival is happening, that the holy awakening a church to a new chapter, leading us to 2033. And and I do believe that there is this outpouring of the Holy Spirit that is fresh, that is new, that is really renewing the church. And and I just hope we we are humble enough to recognize it, um interested enough to enter into it, and trusting enough follow the movement of the Holy Spirit. And I think it’s for the whole church. That’s the beauty of it.

Rich Birch — So good. Well, where do we want to send people online, Father, if they want to track with you, track with the church, where where do we want to send them?

Father Peter Wojcik — So we just visit clement.org is our website. We we have you know, social media. You can follow us on our social media. It’s @chicagopriest – I don’t know how ah in the world I got that one…

Rich Birch — Oh that’s amazing.

Father Peter Wojcik — …but I was I guess early in the market. Ah, and and then our website clement.org, there’s a lot of information, you can pull our information, reach out to us. We love to help anybody who needs help.

Rich Birch — Thank you so much, sir, I really appreciate you being on today. Thank you for your time.

Father Peter Wojcik — Well thanks for having me.

Thanks for joining us for the unSeminary podcast. We’re talking with Evan Courtney, the Executive Pastor at The Fields Church in central Illinois.

Have you ever experienced decline in your church or felt like everything was going wrong? Don’t miss this encouraging conversation as Evan testifies to the power of perseverance, overcoming obstacles that lead to new opportunities, and remaining faithful to God’s call.

• The launch and decline. // When they launched their second campus, The Fields Church wanted the attendance at that location to be over 200, but that didn’t happen. They struggled to create an engaging Sunday experience and lacked strong leadership for the worship team. Then when COVID hit, they then lost their rental space. By the time the campus had found a temporary place to meet on Sunday nights, attendance had dwindled to 40 people who were essentially the volunteers handling the portable campus setup.
• Finding leadership and a facility. // One of the things The Fields needed to put the campus on the right track was strong leadership to infuse their culture and DNA. Evan stepped in as campus pastor for eight months to be a consistent presence and help the campus move forward. Another thing the church needed was a facility that let them get back to meeting together on Sunday mornings.
• Adjusting expectations. // It was still during the pandemic when The Fields began looking for a new location for their second campus. The expectations for finding a facility were a lot lower than the original launch of the multisite location. They no longer focused on needing a parking lot of a certain size or a certain amount of seating. Instead they focused simply on finding a building in which they could meet that had the minimum amount of space they needed for their Sunday morning service. Eventually they found an office building on a back road and converted it into a meeting space in about a week.
• Relaunching the second campus. // Even though their second campus was on the verge of shutting down, the core group of people attending were committed to seeing the location succeed. They focused on inviting new people and saw growth from 40 to 200 people within a few months. Their growth was not due to any special strategies or magic bullet. They simply showed up, had services, and continued their regular activities in addition to training and motivating their members to invite their friends.
• Breakthrough for the second campus. // During the pandemic, another local church approached The Fields about merging. After eight months of conversations, they decided to join forces. The merger brought in more people and a facility located on a busy street. As a result, their second campus saw significant growth, with 400 people attending Easter services and an average of over 200 people on Sundays.
• Determine what you need in a campus pastor. // It’s hard to hire someone from a highly metropolitan area to move to a highly rural area, or vice versa. The Fields Church decided to hire someone from within rather than seek someone from outside the area. Campus pastors need to embody the mission of their church, have a heart for the community, and understand the culture and life in an area.
• Three limiting factors. // As they look to the future, there are three limiting factors to growth that The Fields Church considers: Will the auditorium space, kids’ space, or parking at their current locations limit future growth? What would a launch and services in a new community look like for a third location?

You can find out more about The Fields Church at www.thefields.church.

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Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Hey, friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. Man, I am so glad that you have tuned in today. Ah you know every week we try to bring you a leader who will inspire and equip you and today I’m super excited to have my friend, Evan Courtney, with us. He is executive pastor at a church that you should be tracking with. It’s called The Fields Church. Started nearly 100 years ago, it’s a multi-site church with two campuses in Central Illinois, plus church online. They really have a desire to be influential in Coles County, the county they’re in, also across all of Central Illinois, and then eventually be a valuable resources for other rural countries across the midwest or other other rural churches across the midwest. And they’re just fantastic people. Evan, welcome to the show. So glad you’re here today.

Evan Courtney — Hey thank you, Rich. I appreciate the resources that you always provide to other churches and inspiration that you’ve given us over the years.

Rich Birch — I, yeah, this is a fun one. I was I was joking with Evan ahead ahead of time because like we actually know each other where sometimes I have to like pretend like I know people on the podcast, but Evan and I actually know each other and have been journeying together for a while, and I wanted to bring this story to you and you’re going to you’re going to love it today.

Rich Birch — But, why don’t you fill out the picture? Kind of tell us a bit more about The Fields, kind of you know what did I miss there as we kind of got this thing rolling today?

Evan Courtney — Yeah, so we are, like you said, we’re 100 year old church that probably for about 20 years all throughout the 80s and 90s was us was really kind of ah stagnant in attendance. So we averaged ah an attendance of about 150 for about 20 years.

Evan Courtney — Um, that wasn’t necessarily negative. What happened was leadership came in and was able to kind of clean and straighten up and kind of balance some things out, and kind of outlast some people. And so that was all that was all really healthy. Um, and so actually our lead pastor now, that was his father-in-law was here for 20 years. And then 2008 transitioned, he retired which was really good during that season. He realized that he was kind of at the cusp of, you know what, maybe he was downward trending as a leader. And so said instead of taking it, continuing to lead the organization down, he’s like you know what? I think I’m going to go ahead and pass this off.

Evan Courtney — And so we passed it off to our new lead pastor ,Travis Spencer. And since 2008 we took about two or three years to kind of look at our schedule and look at what the rhythm of the things that we were doing and we transitioned from being a church of ministries, of events, and we transitioned to being a church of a pathway a discipleship pathway that took about 2 years to do. And during that time attendance flat, which was okay, um, for us. And then coming out of that couple years you know 2010, since then we’ve just seen incremental, not explosive growth, but over the last thirteen years we’ve seen 5, 8, 10% growth every single year.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Evan Courtney — And so that’s kind of where we have been.

Rich Birch — Love it. And this is the kind of story I love because, you know, that kind of growth over an extended period of time, man, it really starts to snowball eventually. And it is um I don’t want to say easier but it is um, you know, it maybe is easier to get your hands around from a let’s serve people and integrate them. If all of those people, if you had 500 people all show up in one year, most churches would would you know wouldn’t be able to handle it. And so the fact that over these years you’ve seen that growth is is pretty amazing. Now we we connected a couple years ago when you guys were thinking about going multisite and ultimately that landed in ah The Fields launching a campus at another ah community ah, just kind of about the year before covid. Tell me that story, what, you know, kind of talk through what was the launch like and all that.

Evan Courtney — Yeah, so we actually weren’t even thinking about going into multisite. We were thinking about building a bigger building. Because we are running out of space and in the middle of conversations with the design build company, like the ones that we’re paying to build us million dollar building, they said to us, well have you guys, instead of building a building, if you want to reach people wouldn’t it be less expensive to just plant another location next to this neighboring community?

Rich Birch — Love it.

Evan Courtney — And it was interesting because it was coming from it as they essentially lost themselves business…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Evan Courtney — …by telling us, you don’t need to build million dollar building, you need to just launch into this other community.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Evan Courtney — And for us what it is there’s this community next to us that’s ten miles away. And so we launched the second location ten miles away. But because we’re in rural context, it’s a rival community. And so people from one community don’t travel to the other community, whether it’s sports, restaurants, they don’t do it. And so what we saw, we kind of looked at our data and we saw that we had 70 individuals that were attending our location from this other community. But all of those individuals, none of them were born and raised for that other community. They were all transplants. We had nobody coming, nobody serving, nobody giving, that was from, born and raised, in that community. And so that’s what we did was [inaudible] to gather your these people say, hey you know what? Let’s launch a location in your community. We know it’s ten miles away but there’s this invisible line that people aren’t willing to cross. And so we had a little bit of fear of if we launch a church that close, is it just going to take our attendance and just split in half?

Evan Courtney — Um, but what we have seen is that it really just is a whole different group of people.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s pretty amazing.

Evan Courtney — And so is new growth, not just dividing ourselves up.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love it. So the thing one of the things to underline here, friends, when we’re thinking about multisite is, you know, there’s like the stuff that’s on the map, like you can draw it out and it’s like the physical things. But then there are these like emotional, cultural, social, you know you know, lines on the map that don’t show up that really you only know when you’ve been journeying in a community together ah for a while. And you know there might be opportunity there that’s not that far away. 10 miles is not that far ah, but can be way too far for people to attend church.

Rich Birch — Now I want to kind of fast forward a little bit and um, you know, so the campus launched ah, you know, rah rah, we’re excited for that. But then at some point during kind of, you know, obviously you know we I had the first year anniversary, and then we ended up into covid, and there was like this this kind of sign that, Okay, maybe this isn’t going well. I don’t want to you know that’s me saying that. You know you’re you’re not saying that. But you know you came to the point where like, oh gosh this isn’t… can you describe what were some of the points when you look back and you say, oh this is evidence that maybe maybe things were not working, that you know we were we were struggling more in this this new campus than you would have envisioned. You know, we all do these things and envision them just exploding overnight, but that doesn’t always happen. What were some of those kind of points that brought you to the point where like, okay, this isn’t going well.

Evan Courtney — Yeah, so we is so when we launch, we didn’t launch at a higher number than we we thought. Like when we launched we wanted to our average attendance to be over 200 kind of be over that cusp. That didn’t happen. We don’t know why. I mean we had huge numbers at launch. But kind of looking back the the weeks and the months after that, one of the pain points that we had was we didn’t have great worship. And we kind of just pushed it out like, hey it’s okay, but really worship hurt us because we were doing video which was already, you know, is a little bit, is a lot different than live teaching. So the engagement’s a little bit different. And then our worship was really bad. We didn’t have a strong kind of a leader taking that. And in honestly a lot of it had to do with we couldn’t find a drummer.

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — And so I just remember we’re piping in drums on a soundtrack…

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — …and everybody in that room knows…

Rich Birch — You could tell. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.

Evan Courtney — …there’s no drums but I can hear the drums. And it just, you know what, it just like the the experiential of the worship was just a very low. And kind of it just it wasn’t a bang of a service every single week. So we knew that was a tension point. And then we were then right when we ran into Covid we lost that space, that the rental space that was at a school, and so we lost that space and now we’re online. And when here where we were out in Illinois, like we were only online for about two months, and then it was starting to ramp back up for us to be able to meet in person. And when we got ready to do that, I think just the amount of energy and the amount of work was going to take more to relaunch to launch.

Evan Courtney — And so what we what happened was we lost some leadership during that transition. And so now we had no facility, um, we had no leader, and so we’re trying to rally who do we have left? Like we didn’t know who we had left because we’re doing online.

Rich Birch — Oh man.

Evan Courtney — And we just and so we called every single church in the community and said, Do you have a timeframe that we could do a service? One out of 40 churches that we called and said, yeah you can use our space…

Rich Birch — Wow.

Evan Courtney — …on a on a Sunday night. And so we did learn during this time that Sunday night services don’t work when you’re portable. So we were bringing in port… so we had people show up 90 minutes before service, set up portable gear, ran service on video…

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — …from the morning service that they could have watched online that morning on you know Facebook and Youtube…

Rich Birch — Right, right.

Evan Courtney — …and then tear down and so people are getting there at 3:30…

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — …watching the video message of the person that was actually in the room, the lead pastor was in the room too because he had to help set up.

Rich Birch — Right. Oh gosh. Oh my goodness.

Evan Courtney — And they’re like, why is he not speaking? He’s in the back of the room, I can see him. But we wanted we were just in that rhythm like, Nope we said we were doing video.

Rich Birch — We’re doing this. We’re gonna do it.

Evan Courtney — And so that’s what we learned was like Sunday nights in our community didn’t work. Nobody wanted to be there. We had 40 individuals that were coming to service. And a majority of them were in their dream team their volunteer shirts and we’re like the only people we have is volunteers. So it was bad worship. We were forcing video teaching. And we had a bad time slot. And we we had 40 people.

Rich Birch — Okay, so friends, they’re just a bunch there. Like I think this idea of and sometimes this stuff is is clear in hindsight, understanding what is it that makes your experience, you know, understanding like, you know, we we launch these things and we try like, hey we’re going to try what we can on the music front. And ah but, man, it just didn’t live up ah to that. You know, we’ve got to think really carefully about those things, and sometimes they’re a bigger deal than actually we even know. They’re, you know, we we thought like oh we can make that work and it it doesn’t necessarily.

Rich Birch — So now there would be lots of churches I think at this point that, you know, so you’re down to 40 people, you know, video teaching, we got Travis showing up to set this thing up, mostly volunteers. Um, you know at that point there would be a lot of churches that would say, hey we’re just going to throw in the towel here. Like that’s you know that’s not going to happen. Well, you know friends, the reason why we have this on is obviously because they didn’t throw in the towel, and we continued. So walk us through what were some of what you know the milestones as you came out of covid that you look back on now and say, wow this was a linchpin decision change that led us to where now, friends, and we’ll get to where we’re at today. But things are way better today than than those 40 people. But kind of what were some of those linchpins kind of across the the the months you know after that?

Evan Courtney — Yeah, so the big one was leadership. We had to get somebody. We had to get our culture and our DNA back into that into that church, of being online, somebody else’s building, we were losing some of that. So we had to get a leader in there. And I actually jumped in and and let it for about eight months. We just needed somebody on our team that was consistent, a face that they had seen, a voice that they had heard over the years. So that was one was the leadership.

Evan Courtney — The second one is facility. We knew we had to get back to Sunday mornings. And so we had to do whatever it took to get back to Sunday mornings. So the third one was for us to do that, we had to find a facility. And so our expectations of a facility on, for what we called was our relaunch of relaunching this church, the expectations were a lot lower than the launch.

Rich Birch — Interesting.

Evan Courtney — Like the launch we had this we we needed a preschool room, we needed an elementary room, we needed a lobby, we needed an auditorium that at least I had 300 seats. We need to have parking for those, you know, we needed a hundred parking spaces. All of a sudden we just kind of threw that out the door and said, you know, we just need to find a space. If we don’t find a space we’re done.

Rich Birch — Right, right.

Evan Courtney — So those are the 3, the 3 main things.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, so on the facility piece, I love that idea of you actually lowered your expectations. You know, I think that’s that’s a keen insight. As you what what kind of did the minimum bar become as you were like okay, we’ve you know we we need to find something. Sunday morning obviously is the primary was you know the primary idea, but was it what else was in that mix of that conversation?

Evan Courtney — Yeah, we we just needed we needed to find us ah somebody that would rent to us during that time of covid. Coming out of covid there wasn’t a lot of spaces. We needed to find an auditorium that it could at least, or a space, that could at least hold a hundred people. A hundred adults.

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — And then two rooms for kids.

Rich Birch — Okay, that’s amazing…

Evan Courtney — We didn’t care about parking. We could figure that out, right?

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — Like most those places are gonna have some sort of parking. And we didn’t we didn’t worry about a lobby.

Rich Birch — Okay, so did you…

Evan Courtney — We thought: adult space, two kids’ spaces.

Rich Birch — Right. And so then did you go back to the 40 churches? What what happened next?

Evan Courtney — No, so what we did is ah we actually we just, somebody caught we we kind of pushed out to our team and said you know what, just pray. Let’s ask God to open places. When we first initially launched ah two years before that we had already looked at all the places that were available. We we knew everything. And so somebody reached out to our team and said, hey what about this office space out on this back road. I just passed it; I saw there’s a “for rent” sign. What do you think? So we showed up to it and it was just an open office. And so we looked at it, walked in, and and they said hey do you want this? And we’re like yeah, there’s nothing else. There was maybe 25 parking spots…

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — …open office and 2 break rooms. And so we converted that. We took a week and converted it.

Rich Birch — Oh my… turned it around.

Evan Courtney — We took all of our portable stuff.

Rich Birch — Got all [inaudible] paint out in way we went. Yeah.

Evan Courtney — Yep, got to… yeah, got, we it was it paint, and then we had all over our portable gear. We just we just went from portable…

Rich Birch — Wow.

Evan Courtney — …and installed all that stuff as permanent.

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — And so we used spandex to that we were using on hallways to to cover up stuff and we just created hallways out of the spandex. Used all of our portable chairs that we were using in elementary spaces and we just set those up. Um, it just gave us, we had to have a place for the people to go to that said, you know what? This is our church. And we actually ended up in a part of a neighborhood in this community that there wasn’t a church within a mile.

Rich Birch — How interesting.

Evan Courtney — And all of a sudden we put a sign up and people started coming and attending. And we’re like how did you, like how did you hear about us? We’re on this back country road.

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — And they said, we saw the sign.

Rich Birch — Right. Wow. Wow.

Evan Courtney — That’s it?

Rich Birch — That’s it.

Evan Courtney — And so we started getting people from that neighborhood saved…

Rich Birch — No fancy Facebook campaign. No, you know…

Evan Courtney — No, no. And it was ah it was a marquee sign.

Rich Birch — Oh wow.

Evan Courtney — Right. So I mean I was just sliding the letters in there, a service 10 am…

Rich Birch — Wow.

Evan Courtney — …and then just put our decal up. So.

Rich Birch — Wow. So the but you know part to underline there is I know there are a lot of churches that are portable. You know that this has been a challenging number of years. And I’ve said to multiple churches because they’re like we’ve tried everything we… there is no opportunity. And you know my pushback has been well, if the place you’re renting from today that’s substandard, if they called you tomorrow and said you can’t meet here anymore, you would you would get desperate and figure something out, right? You would figure out some sort of space. But because if you’re in this space that’s kind of almost working, like the Sunday night service was. It’s like it’s working but not really, you’ll just keep rolling until you draw a line in the sand and say no no, we we’re done. We have to find, you know, something else. So so then what happened next from there? So people start to show up. Ah you know things are looking a little you know, better. There’s like an uptick in excitement

Evan Courtney — Right.

Rich Birch — You’re still campus you’re still the campus pastor there. Ah you know what went on next?

Evan Courtney — Yeah, and so a couple of the other things to note real quick about the facility that we had to um, got were hard “yeses” before that became “it didn’t matter” was like ceiling height. It had it it had a nine foot ceiling. It was tile ceiling, and because of that we couldn’t do video anymore.

Rich Birch — Right. Wow.

Evan Courtney — Because you couldn’t get a big enough video screen. And so we flipped to live teaching out of the necessity of this thing is gonna die and we had to get it… It’s kind of like being in the ah ER. Ah, you’re just giving this thing, I see you’re giving this thing all the different hoses – the oxygen, the IV – and so we just said, hey if video is going to hurt this thing, let’s do live.

Evan Courtney — And so we started to do all those. And so what it was was we just Sunday morning continued to do Sunday morning, continue because of now you have your own building and it took work to create things into the building. We just saw an uptick of volunteers because they’re like, hey like they had their blood, and sweat, and their work equity into this building. So now is all of a sudden it became theirs. They became their identity where before they were at this rented school, they were at this borrowed church. All of a sudden it was like there ah an identity of, man, this is our place. And it didn’t matter that it was ah a bad looking building. It was actually the day that we put our sign up, the city called us and said, Evan, you can’t have church there. That’s ah, that’s zoned for high industrial.

Rich Birch — Oh my goodness.

Evan Courtney — And I said, well I didn’t I didn’t have a clue, like we were having this church and the church is dying. So what do you want us to do? And they’re like well you need to go through all this code paper. I’m like great, how long’s that going to last? And they’re like it probably takes three to four months. I’m like, well we’ve gotta meet. And he goes if you guys continue to meet, we’d have to shut you down, but that wouldn’t look good on the city if we shut down a church.

Rich Birch — Oh my goodness.

Evan Courtney — And I said, understood. And so we just continue to push forward…

Rich Birch — Wow Wow. Wow.

Evan Courtney — …and that’s kind of the momentum of people just continue to show. And they because they saw we only had 40 people, our church looked at each other and said if we don’t invite people, we’re done.

Rich Birch — So good.

Evan Courtney — And so that’s what it kind of was it like it was all these new people because they had all of a sudden they felt like like no, no, no, no, we launched this church. We’re not going to give up on this. And so it just began to invite people out of the woodwork.

Rich Birch — Wow.

Evan Courtney — And so we saw growth up to 200 people from that Oct…that September when we relaunched with forty, that easter we had 200 people.

Rich Birch — Wow.

Evan Courtney — And it was just it was it was I look at it now was it was we did average things over a considerable amount of time and it turned into above average results.

Rich Birch — Love it. Love it. What would be some of those average things when you look back in that period that you you know really helped reach people?

Evan Courtney — Yeah, so the the average things was like, every parade in our neighborhood or our area that was in our city we got into.

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — Just so they could see our name. Like that it was we we didn’t do anything spectacular – hay bales, throwing candy out, like nothing spectacular. We did that. Sunday mornings, no matter what, we’re having service. It doesn’t matter if there’s 20 people or 25 people – we’re having these teams, we’re having these monthly meetings. And so we just kind of went back to the grind that we were doing before just all these kind of ah small ah small events that we were doing.

Evan Courtney — We did a you know we do a halloween events that we typically did that was huge, and so we just scaled that back and said what can we do? Same with Christmas and Easter. We had to scale those back. But we just continued to do what we had always done before, and the kind of that just created those results and created those momentums.

Rich Birch — Yeah I love that. You’re speaking my love language. I know you know that, but you know like we have to just keep we have to keep doing these things. Keep keep pushing our people, you know we we talked about this so many times that churches that grow, they train, they equip, they motivate their people to invite their friends. And a part of that means as church leaders, we’ve got to keep thinking about it. What are we doing? What’s coming up that our people could invite their friends to? And you know all of those kinds of things are you know a piece of the puzzle.

Rich Birch — Okay, so now I know there was a significant “C” change here kind of as you continued. So you’re you know you’re at you know, kind of a weird place with the town. Things are like, okay, you got to get out. What happened next?

Evan Courtney — Yeah, so during this whole process of right before Covid and during Covid, a local church had actually reached out to us. They were in the middle of their pastor was retiring and they had conversations with us that they knew that either they were going to have to go and do a pastoral search during the middle of Covid to try to find a pastor…

Rich Birch — Wow.

Evan Courtney — …to hire a pastor that they wouldn’t really know anything about. Um or they knew there was an opportunity they can merge with The Fields Church who they didn’t like everything about, but they knew everything, you know, they they knew us. And they knew the goods and they knew the bads. And so we were in the middle of covid having this conversation. They knew we were at a weak point too at this office building that we had renovated. And so they kind of but they knew overall the growth of The Fields Church and the excitement and and they wanted kind of really hitch themselves to us and become a part of what we were doing.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Evan Courtney — And so we went through a timeframe about eight months of conversations with them of them joining into our congregation.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Evan Courtney — So you take us just continuing to do the path every single week and meeting, doing the average every single week. Them coming along and saying, you know what, we want to join you. And so a part of that was they had a facility…

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — …that was across from Walmart, which is the busiest street in town.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s amazing.

Evan Courtney — They wanted to gift that to us, plus all of their people, to give those people to us. And so we were already on this high and already riding this momentum, and then they came in added to that. And so both of those things added together just created a greater impact. It just launched us years ahead of where we would be.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love that. You know, the the thing to underline there that we’ve seen time and again is typically in these you know merger or rebirth scenarios, like with this other church, um, you know they typically have been engaged in some kinds of other activity. They’ve been thinking about something else and this is like in the mix of it, right? And they’re you know they were obviously trying to wrestle through what do we do with and the the lead pastor issue is all is usually ah or is a significant catalyst. It’s like okay, either someone’s retiring or they’d like to retire. Or they, you know, they’ve been looking for a long time and can’t find someone. Um and you know, friends, I’m hoping you’re listening today and you’re like you may be pushing against one of these walls and you can take inspiration from The Fields to say, man, we just maybe we just have to keep going, just keep walking in this in the in the right direction.

Rich Birch — Okay, so bring us up to date today. So you know you end up moving into that location. They end up giving you the building, all of that stuff. So what does it look like today? Here we are you know summer 2023 you know what’s that what’s that campus look like? What’s kind of what’s happening there now?

Evan Courtney — Yeah, absolutely. So they merged with us, joined together. We launched huge with them, remodeled their facility. And so today this past easter we saw 400 people…

Rich Birch — That’s crazy.

Evan Courtney — …came out to easter and we are averaging over 200 people um, on a Sunday which is huge, huge for us…

Rich Birch — Yep.

Evan Courtney — …in the community, probably the second largest church in that community.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Evan Courtney — And we’re beginning to see an influx of people that are coming from… so that location to the west of it is where our our our other location is, the location that’s 100 years old. And so on the opposite spectrum, on the east side is all of these people that are coming.

Rich Birch — That’s great.

Evan Courtney — And so we’re just seeing an influx of new people, of people getting saved. But we’re not doing anything different. Like there’s no throughout this whole process, Rich, there’s no there’s no magic bullet.

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — Like there was no oh like we unlock this special thing that nobody else knows about. I think it’s just like we’re showing up. Like we’re we’re showing up and having services, we’re doing Growth Track. We do growth track every single Sunday. You know, if it’s you know if it’s a on Mother’s Day, we’re doing Growth Track if somebody signs up for Growth Track. And where I think we’re doing less and we’re just continuing to do it, and kind of continuing to do our rhythm.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s amazing.

Evan Courtney — Um, and so that’s kind of what we’re seeing.

Rich Birch — Now it’s somewhere in there you ended up hiring Campus Pastor Mark – great guy – ah what how did you find that individual? I know I’ve heard you in other contexts like cheer for Mark, man, he’s been just such a critical piece of the puzzle. Talk us through that transition because you you know you listed leadership as number one reason, hey we got to fix that. You stepped in but then eventually we made a more permanent change there.

Evan Courtney — Yeah, so we’ve had… the the hard thing is we’ve had four campus pastors in the last in the since the launch of the location…

Rich Birch — Right. Yeah.

Evan Courtney — …in the last 3, 3-4 years. Some of that is covid, just you know we jumped in for a little bit. We had another leader that was their first season. And so I think what we’ve learned is that when we hired Pastor Mark, no pastoral experience. Um he had Fields Church experience, had been on staff doing creative ah creative ministries, had done facilities. But what he had was culture. Like he he knew the ins and outs of The Fields Church and loved the ins and outs of The Fields Church. Like he loved everything about The Fields Church. And we’re like well we can… and had the call to pastor, but had not ever been educated that way…

Rich Birch — That’s huge.

Evan Courtney — …or never had gone that season in their life. Had done military and was working at ah, a car dealership. Um, but who was volunteering and serving at The Fields. And we’re like, you know what? There’s something inside of him. He’s got the culture. He’s got the willingness to learn. And so we said, you know what, we can’t, it’s hard to hire somebody outside to move… I mean regardless, it’s hard to hire anybody right now, but to move to the midwest into a community, you know, that’s 2 hours away from any metropolitan area is very difficult. Um, so we were like we’ve got to look internal, hired internal. Um, and we don’t have the culture and the DNA push. Like nobody’s pushing against that of like I really don’t think we should be doing this. It’s more of a sense of like, okay I want to do this. How do I do? That’s a lot easier for us to lead as as executive leaders for somebody trying to push their own kind of agenda that sort of thing.

Rich Birch — Absolutely. Talk us through that um, kind of at a high level when you think about the percentages of… so I hear what you’re saying on the culture piece. Don’t miss that, friends. You know we’ve talked about that in other context that like campus pastors need to, you know, they need to bleed the church. They need to be like wow these people are fully they’re onboard. They love the mission. But then the other piece of this in this case, you know, Charleston’s the name of this community. They need to be Charleston people. They need to have the like kind of vibe of the community. If if you were going to be like 51/49, you know, 51% they need to be like Fields people type people, 49% Charleston type people or the locations you’re in or, you know, how would you kind of grade those two, or is it they just need to be both of those? Talk us through when you think about, you know, this this the kind of intangible side of campus leadership.

Evan Courtney — Yeah, so ours we would probably tip more towards the size of that community.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Of like they’ve got to they’ve got to have that feel. They’ve got to they’ve got to love living here.

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — It’s not a horrible area. But I mean they just, like anywhere, they’ve got to love they want to be able to envision them growing their family and their kids up into this area. If they can’t do that, nothing else is going to work. Like we even when we hire people that’s the first thing is like hey do you feel like you can fit in here? I had an interview once with a guy that was from Houston. And within the first couple minutes we had a conversation like, hey do you think you’d be able to move here and live here? And he asked me this – he goes, would I need to buy a jacket for the winters?

Rich Birch — Ah, yes, you… at least one, at least need least one.

Evan Courtney — Yeah, yeah. And so I’m like you know what, that was our last conversation. I go I don’t think this is this isn’t going to work.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Evan Courtney — It doesn’t matter how great of leader you are…

Rich Birch — Yes, yes.

Evan Courtney — …if if if you’re not able to adapt, or or to know or to feel or to love the place that you’re going to live is, you know, that’s that’s the big piece for us.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s a huge deal. And you know I think helping us and our, you know, our people get through those questions and understand that and to have the conviction around, you know, what what is it that makes leaders work in this part of the world. You know, I remember when I was serving in New Jersey, you know, very similar issues. You know, they looked a little different, but the same kind of thing. Man, you’ve got to like this kind of that in that case, it’s like northeast grind, you got to like the, like people here really do think that they’re like the most important people in the world and you kind of can’t fight them on that. Like if you’re from Georgia you can’t be up here and be like, well, you know people up here aren’t as cool as they are in Georgia. That doesn’t work. They’ll get shut down real quickly. And you know the thing is that’s a transferable principle regardless of where we are in the country. Every part of the country has that kind of cultural stuff that we’ve got to be aware of. And every part of the country—and I’ve I’ve joked with you about this before—every part of the country believes that they’re the hardest part of the country to hire people in.

Rich Birch — Like I you know I was with with some friends in Southern California and they were like, this is like really tough place to hire people. I’m like I don’t if yeah, that’s not true. Like you know, there’s lots, every every place has this. We all have this and, you know, I think it is true where where you are you know I’ve been in the communities you’re you’re in, and but it’s also true in lots of places. You know and and we and we sometimes, I think particularly if we’ve been in this community forever, it might be hard for us to get our head around how just how difficult that is.

Rich Birch — Okay, when we think about the future, so you look up over the horizon, either in this campus in Charleston, or future campuses or even in Mattoon, you know, what what what’s the future have for you? What’ll be some of the questions you’re asking, or things you’re thinking about as you look to future campuses, future locations, growth all that kind of stuff?

Evan Courtney — Yeah, so growth pinpoints that we’re looking at right now is facility, and becoming a concern. Three limiting factors that we look at: facilities, is is there a limit in our auditorium space? Is there limit in our kids space? And is there a limit in our parking space? And if we have a limit in one of those three, then the rest kind of falls apart. And so that’s one of the things that we’re looking at both of our locations right now is what are what’s limiting us from growth?

Evan Courtney — The second one is is what is this we know how hard it is and difficult it is to do the third location, and the majority people stop at that second, so we’re looking at what does that look like. And for us it is a lot different than us doing the second because the second one we were able to look at this we already had this mass group of people in this inside community and and it was easy to get, you know, 75, 100 people to launch. Now we’re looking at a community next to us and we don’t hardly have anybody.

Rich Birch — Right.

Evan Courtney — And so we’re having to kind of reframe and think, okay, what does that look like? Does that look like us doing popup services for major holidays? Does that look at us starting small groups? You know does it look at us during outreach events? What does that kind of look like? So those are the two main things is that the facility and then and how do we launch this third location.

Evan Courtney — Because I feel like once we can get that third, the fourth is going to come easier. It’s going the third is going to help our our structure of our leadership and it’s not going to be of us versus them with the two locations, and the smaller and the bigger, but it’s going to kind of change the whole thing.

Rich Birch — I love it. So good. Well there’s… listen, friends, there’s so much we could talk about at The Fields. Um, you know we’ve focused in on this one story but there’s so many other things. I love what you guys do. The pumpkin fest thing I think is amazing. You know I’ve pointed people in that direction. I’m just going to leave that out there, friends – you’ll have to follow them to figure out what you know that’s all about. I think I think that your whole passion for and obviously it’s kind of been in the subtext of this conversation, but passion for these rural communities, I think there’s a lot of people who are wondering the same thing. Like man, there are, you know, none of the name brand big, very large multisite churches are going to plant a church in Charleston. It’s just not going to happen, right? And so the question is who’s going to say, we’ll take that. That’s ah our us. We’ll figure out how to do that. I love that your, you know, doing – there’s lots of stories we could we could tell there. But as we’re wrapping up today, any kind of final you know advice or anything you like to say to people as we wrap up today’s conversation?

Evan Courtney — Yeah, so if we as we look at this I think the thing is is to to not give up on really what you feel like called God has called you to do. And that you are gonna run into hurdles; you are gonna run into roadblocks. But if it is God giving you this call, and he’s going to work it out, and you’re gonna be stronger than where you were going to be before. If we wouldn’t have ran into these roadblocks, we wouldn’t have the loss of pastoral staff and leadership, we wouldn’t be where we are today with Pastor Mark, with this merge…

Rich Birch — So true.

Evan Courtney — …or with this building across the street from Walmart. So just continue to to push forward because you’re gonna run into roadblocks and just sometimes you go around them, sometimes you jump over them, sometimes you just just blast through it.

Rich Birch — Love it. Well I mean this has been fantastic. If people want to track along with you or with the church where do we want to send them online?

Evan Courtney — Yep. The easiest place is just to go to the website: thefields.church and then all the socials are on there and you can find out information, email us, all of that information’s there.

Rich Birch — Love it. Really appreciate you being on today’s episode – thanks so much, man.

Evan Courtney — Thank you, sir.