EP189: Matt Engel & The Uberization of Church

Welcome to the Church Digital Podcast, powered by Stadia Church Planting.

Through this podcast, learn about how God is using technology and innovation

in digital and digital environments around the world.

Our goal? To help churches like yours learn to be the church digitally.

Our heart? That churches like yours will discover a newfound focus on disciple-making

that will revolutionize your church.

And now, your host, here's Jeff Reed.

Well, if you listen to this podcast, you know that I, Jeff, I like to make up words.

You know, sometimes I find that existing words that are like in the dictionary,

even though they're in the dictionary, there's some confusion on the application of those words.

And so it's a lot of fun for me to make up new words and give them more specific application.

I can literally define what a word means.

Digital is one of those examples, talking about the role of the church

and how it can use digital discipleship to impact the church.

Fidgetally, multimodal, the opportunity for churches to launch multiple models of church.

Well, in this podcast today, we come across another, maybe made up word, maybe it's an actual word.

I don't know.

Maybe we can look it up in the dictionary and see.

Uberization.

We're having a conversation today about the Uberization of church.

And I'm willing to bet that you probably never thought you'd hear the word Uber and church in the same sentence.

Yet, here we are.

And my favorite part of this conversation is I'm not the guy who made up the word.

But as soon as I heard the word, I knew exactly what this conversation was going to be about.

And I knew I needed to have him on the podcast.

We're bringing in Matt Ingle, who is with Glue.

He is the ministry innovation specialist over there.

Leads the team of ministry innovation with Glue.

And we are super excited about this conversation, talking about Uberization of church.

Now, you're going to hear some words here.

You're going to hear some words talking about platform.

And in usual context with my church staffing career, platform for me is, I mean, literally the platform that the gentleman, that the lead communicator, that the speaker, that the preacher preaches on.

And so a lot of times we use platform in context of how that person is going to communicate.

But what's interesting is platform in the Uberization of church, you're going to find that it's not about an individual.

Uber is not about an individual.

It's not a pipeline.

It's more of how do we get a platform?

How do we get others to do this?

How do we equip others to maybe even be the church, which is this conversation, the Uberization of church?

Love this conversation.

Love that we get to have it here with the Church Digital Podcast.

And I'm excited for you listening audience out there to dig into this and process it.

Put on your thinking caps.

This is a deep one.

For the conversation, once again, we're bringing in Matt Engel, ministry innovation specialist over with Glue.

Myself, Jeff, with the Church Digital and with Stadia Church Planning in a conversation that I'm eloquently calling the Uberization of church.

Okay, everybody, here you go.

Yeah.

So, hey, maybe even just to get us started a little bit here.

Man, tell me your ministry story.

Like, how did you get to Glue?

What did life look like before Glue?

And how did you get there?

Yeah, so actually, my background started in the desire to be in some sort of law enforcement.

I didn't grow up in a bad neighborhood or any of that stuff, but I just had this aha moment when I was trying to decide what I wanted to do.

I was like, a couple of my friends got busted for something.

And I'm like, man, if the cops would have known six months ago what was going on in their home, they wouldn't have probably arrested them.

They probably would have pastored them.

Like, they would have done something different if they would have known just a little bit earlier what was going on that led to the six months later them being arrested.

So that was the initial track.

And then, you know, the Lord just kind of opened up unique opportunities for me to work at one of the largest universities in the country.

And it was all around how to improve the outcomes of students, both on the recruitment of but retention of.

And then, basically, as that worked and we did some crazy cool stuff that I wish we knew what we were doing back then, but now it looks pretty smart, the Lord said, hey, take that and apply it into the local church.

And so that's really where we started really innovating is taking some of the stuff that, you know, we just weren't smart enough to know that that's what we should have done.

We just had an open mind and an open hand of like, hey, let's see if we can figure stuff out different.

And honestly, we applied it into the church and it started working and doing some crazy cool things around outcomes versus just activity-based celebrations.

And, you know, then from that perspective, I was able to support some city work with a bunch of churches in the geography.

And then that's how I intersected GLU and GLU's basically just said, you know, keep innovating, like, let's figure stuff out, you know.

And I like to say insanity is the same thing over and over, expecting a different result.

That's Einstein's quote.

In the church world, insanity is the same thing over and over, expecting a different result.

We just pray about it.

And so, like, how do we advance in that regard from this?

And we're in this unique time and space where we have the opportunity to really advance the kingdom through learning versus thinking that we all got it figured out.

Holy Spirit, do something different this time.

Holy Spirit, do something different this time.

Holy Spirit, do something different this time.

I'll have to remember that.

I don't know that I've heard that one before.

And my gosh, your story there, even going back to, like, your early desire for the police, I got to tell you, I just had flashes back to Minority Report.

I don't know, the pre-prime department.

I mean, there's a little bit of that maybe lining in there.

But honestly, like, that's the thing that I love about Glue, about the company Glue, is you guys are trying to be innovative, utilizing data that's readily available to try to figure out how to help churches be more effective in doing the things that they're doing.

And honestly, the thing that I love about Glue, and I know people scattered throughout the organization, every time I talk with them, it's almost like there's, like, this, hey, Jeff, come over here.

Let me tell you about this new thing that we're doing.

And it's like, I've never heard about this.

This is awesome.

When is this going to launch?

And it's working into this project and that.

And, like, there's so many different layers of what's happening within Glue.

It's just, it's awesome to see organizations and companies thinking outside of the box for churches and creating tools to help them in that.

Oftentimes, you know, churches try to, but they don't have the funding, they don't have the resources, or they can't gather enough of them together.

And, you know, companies like Glue are paving the road to allow churches to do some really cool things in the future.

Yeah, we're fortunate from the standpoint of outside looking in and even inside looking out, sometimes it's organized chaos.

But, you know, I think that's the ability for us to just learn quickly and understand certain things.

And then understand also, like, some core principles of, like, architecture that matter, that then the manifestation of the architecture, we don't know.

Like, that's building something, testing, and learning.

But architecturally, there are sound things.

And the beauty is, is those are actually based out of Scripture.

So it's not like it's revolutionary and you have to teach all these people and pastors and church leaders, like, something different.

It's like, actually, no, we're just putting words to something that we've never said in the past.

But if you look through Scripture, it's true.

It's like, growth happens primacy of face-to-face interaction.

Tech supports the gap between the two.

Like, right, we're using technology to support our digital experience right here, right now.

But, man, if you and I get in a room together, we grow 10 times better because we're face-to-face.

Well, that's architecturally true from Scripture, too.

You know, it was always about relationships helped catalyze growth.

So things like that, it's like, it's unique when we can stack hands-on agreed-upon architecture.

And then, like I said, the technology and the manifestation of that, hey, don't know.

You know, maybe this little widget over here does that thing and it helps, but maybe it doesn't.

Love it.

Hey, and I want to touch on a revolutionary thing, the heart of the podcast here that I want to do.

You said something, and we've bounced off each other in social media and intersected a couple times.

And you said something on LinkedIn, which, by the way, LinkedIn is, like, growing to become my favorite network.

I seem to have, like, conversation engagement with new people in LinkedIn probably more than any other.

Like, they're church people, they're business people, they're corporate.

Like, so it's not lost people necessarily from a ministry perspective,

but just the networking opportunities of LinkedIn has grown in recent months in big ways.

But anyway, I digress.

The heart of this thing that you said, you said the word uberization of church.

And it was funny.

I saw that post and I'm like, I have never heard that phrase before, but I know exactly what he's talking about.

And it's just like, I wanted to, and it's this crazy, radical, you used the word revolutionary earlier,

and it's actually the same word that I've talked about, that concept as well.

It's this revolutionary concept that's not that revolutionary.

It's what we were supposed to be doing.

And I would love to unpack this idea of when you talk about uberization of church.

Well, let's just start there.

When you say uberization of church, what do you mean?

What does this thing, uberization of church, actually mean?

So, in essence, it really, at the base level, it's helping the church think through itself more as a platform and less as a pipeline.

So, think of it through the lens of, and because sometimes that cognitive load's too high, think of it more like uber and less like a yellow cab.

A yellow cab, you have to own, control, and govern all of it, right?

At the base level, the cab is yellow.

At the base level, there is a fare.

At the base level, all of these things are true.

And then on the flip side of that, from a platform perspective or an uber perspective, well, guess what?

They're the largest transportation provider on the planet, and they own no cars.

Their valuation is greater than GM as General Motors, and they don't own anything.

Airbnb is the largest accommodation provider on the planet, and they own no property.

In this instance, can the church act more like a platform in that regard than it does in its traditional mindset, which is all around pipeline and its supply?

And again, this is not an indictment on what's happened in the past.

It's like, I actually am supportive of all church leaders that grew up in the same economic model you and I did, which was supply, demand, build a big pipe.

It was always about, well, you know, there's people who don't know Jesus.

Let's go get them to know Jesus.

And we do that through this mechanism or economic model that was all out of the manufacturing days around pipeline theory.

And it was just like, own control and govern everything and just build a really big pipe, because that's what we're trying to do.

Whereas platforms don't own anything.

It's unlocking sort of a different source of supply and demand where you're just allowing what wants to happen to happen without having to own control and govern everything.

So that's the high level of like, practically, what does that look like?

We can get into that.

But at the abstract level, it's like we grew up in an economic model that was all around me standing on a stage, shoving a bunch of content to a bunch of people all the time.

And that was a one directional flow of information, pipeline, one direction.

You know, it's interesting.

Rick Russo, another glue guy.

We've had him on the podcast and he was I want to say maybe he was the first guy to really talk, at least that I heard, talk about this idea of church as platform, where church is not a pipeline where I'm trying to take a person from where an organization is trying to take a person from A to Z, from zero to 10, you know, whatever that process is.

But instead, you know, and I've used the adage here on the podcast, it's not we're past the stage of one person standing on stage behind a podium trying to exude his spiritual gift to thousands.

But if what if we, the church, we got our thousands to exude spiritual gifts to their 10, to their 15, to their 20s, to their hundreds, to the individuals that are in their life.

And this starts to get towards this idea of being a church's platform.

And so did this, like, did the genesis of Uberization church's platform, like, is this something that you guys just, because you guys, Rick Russo is glued too, right?

Like, so do you guys just huddle around like a coffee house, like talking crazy church's platform or like, where does the genesis of this mindset come from?

Well, I, I, again, I wish I could say I was the, I knew what I was doing when I did it.

Oh, own it, take it, like, let, let it be you.

Okay.

No way.

I wish I was that smart.

But, but what, where I would say from my perspective, where the genesis really took place, where I started then really digging into platform theory and, and this whole concept of, of Uberization of church was back at, so at my church.

Um, we had staff prayer, um, it was like Wednesdays at nine o'clock and we, we'd get together, we'd pray over all the prayer requests that came in.

And one day I just, again, I'd have this, you know, switch where I'm like, what are we doing?

Why are we doing it?

And so I asked the question, I'm like, what are we praying for?

And, you know, the, the, the response in the room was like, oh, Engel, you know, it's, it's divorce, it's, you know, cancer, it's marriage, it's this, it's this.

And I was like, yeah, but like, what are we, what are we praying for?

Like specifically, I want to know.

So I went through, um, three months worth of prayer requests line by line.

I read every single one of them and I, and I'm not a researcher and I'm not a statistician.

I'm not a data scientist.

I like to say I'm more a decision scientist through the ministry lens than anything.

And so I went line by line, read them all.

And I applied in this instance, just, I read the prayer and I applied a standard naming convention to the prayer.

So if it said anywhere in their marriage, I put marriage, if it said relationship, but I knew they were married, I honored the prayer request and said relationship, then divorce and cancer and all that other stuff popped up.

So I popped all of those prayers into a word cloud.

And it was like, that's what we're praying for.

The number one prayer request was marriage.

The second one was health.

And I'm sitting here as an expositor.

That's how I was taught as far as my, my approach to preaching was like verse by verse, you know, line by line.

Well, we're going through the book of Acts during this season.

Well, where do I cover marriage in the book of Acts?

Yeah.

Well, outside of Ananias and Sapphira, they both died for lions.

So that's like my only shot at talking about the thing that 3000 people are basically, you know, uh, surfacing.

So, so I do that, right.

That's step one.

And then step two, the other interesting factor was then when I cut the prayer request by men under 35, because if you are a church that's solving for men under 35 in your community, you're going to win as a church.

That's just the research behind it.

Uh, the number, the number one prayer request was mentorship and the number two was leadership.

Well, I would regularly preach a message or, or, you know, and I would say this flippantly, I should, we should address, I've been blessed with spiritual gift of sarcasm for your listeners.

So they know, but like, I would regularly say, you know, get out of your parents' basement, get a job, be productive members of society to that demographic.

Yet the people in the church that are the demographic are sitting there raising their hand, telling us what they're looking for.

So what we did the, the, the, the second weekend, again, we weren't that smart, but we just showed everybody the word cloud.

And we were like, would you be willing to join us in praying for this word cloud?

And overnight people who were not prayer specialists at our church had the capacity to join into the prayer specialist movement in our church.

And we're talking 9,000 people on a weekend.

So that's the difference is overnight Uber didn't exist before.

You had 600,000 people the next day join this thing on becoming transportation specialists.

That concept is very much biblical.

We've just, our old motion was, well, no, they can't pray.

They have to come at 630 in the morning on a Monday and pray over everything and make sure that they do what it is we tell them to do.

God forbid, they say something wrong in their prayer.

Like that was a yellow cab moment.

That would have been pipeline all about control.

Whereas this moment was like, hey, if you're willing and able and have a desire to pray, here you go.

And we mobilized our people to become prayer specialists.

So how can we do that across the board in that regard?

How do we, how do we overnight unlock everybody's desire to contribute value into becoming a ministry specialist?

Without having to own control and govern everything as the church.

Now, I love this.

And you've said the word control 47 times in this conversation or some.

And, but like, really, that's the, that's the pain point, right?

I mean, there's some level of things that, that Uber can control.

But Uber doesn't want everybody being the same thing over and over again.

They give freedom.

Like some Uber drivers are providing water.

Some aren't.

Some are, are talkative.

Some aren't.

Some are driving the, you know, the, the Kia type car.

Some are driving big black luxury vehicles or, or suburbans.

And so like there's, there's variances in the experience that are tailored to meet certain types of people.

How much, how much, how much freedom are we as a church, if we're really interested in this and empowering our people, is, is it, do we need to control for quality control to get a certain, are we releasing, are we letting people do what they want, moving more organic?

What, what, what is, what are some of that control?

What does that look like from a church perspective here?

Yeah.

So some of the things that, that, you know, from the platform perspective that you would, you would move toward is you would move toward resource orchestration versus resource control.

And, and what we mean by that is how do we orchestrate things that allows for every person in the pew to be in the ministry specialist space versus you have, in order to be a small group leader, you have to come to this thing and it's got to be these five classes and you've got to check the box and you've got to do it this way, et cetera, et cetera.

It's like, that's never been true.

Like, just because I checked the box doesn't mean I'm going to be a good small group leader.

Yes or no.

I mean, or just because I have the badge doesn't mean I do or I don't.

It's like, do pastors really think that they control the conversation around the water coolers at people's offices?

No, like, but our job should be to equip them to have healthy conversations around the water cooler.

But I can do that through more of an orchestrated, orchestrative motive or motion than, than I could, uh, from a control motion.

And so in this instance, that's really the, that's one of the bigger juggernauts that you have to get your mental head around.

And so there was a church, um, uh, here in Colorado that was like, well, Matt, so, uh, you know, I had a, I had a young adult guy come up and, and wants to do a CrossFit thing.

Uh, are you saying that we should, that we should do it because that we just can't take on all this stuff.

I'm like, well, you shouldn't take it on.

This is his mission and vision and passion for what's something that the Lord's placed on his heart.

You should help enable it to happen because that's his calling.

So if that wants to happen, I don't have to control it.

I don't have to control the fact that he's going to have a bunch of people in a, in a, in a spot working out.

And I'm not going to control what music they listen to or what conversations they have when they're lifting weights and all that stuff.

I just need to ensure that the orchestration works to enable him to pour into the people that are in that thing.

That's a very different thought.

And that's where you get this, you know, back in the day was like, uh, you know, in the eighties, we had an affinity group for everything.

It was like, if you were left-handed and a female and 18, you were in a group.

And then we swung the pendulum the other direction.

It was like, it's all about simple church, just being a group and you're good.

And I think there's this healthy balance in between the two.

That's actually like, no, like if, if we truly are the church as a platform and we want to behave more like Uber, our job should be to help provide orchestration, not control.

And, and, and even moving beyond affinity, like even if you're utilizing different methods of discipleship, you're going to a, um, you know, a, a, a female left-handed group is going to disciple different than something that's probably happening or a water cooler conversation.

At the workplace, there's going to be a different discipleship, disciple making relationship in that environment, or even in a, a digital environment, a digital only church or a micro church or somebody that's doing something out of their home.

All of this is going to look different when it comes down to the, the discipleship relationships.

And that's not, that's not bad.

You know, sometimes I think, and I, I come from environments where I'm very, have been very centralized kind of in that discipleship, especially across multi-site campus campuses and online.

And, and, and, and, and really that makes you effective to reach a type of person, but it really makes you ineffective in reaching a whole lot of other people.

And, and the, the challenges I think as a church, like we've become really effective in reaching a certain type of person, but we've become completely ineffective at reaching others.

Which is why I love this idea of, of church's platform, because at this point we're really, or even, you know, Uber's Asian church, whatever the term is, because what we're saying is, hey, let us help you discover what God's calling you to, regardless of that works, looks like.

And let's release you because by releasing you and giving you control, you're going to take us, the church places that we're not going to be able to go ourselves.

Yeah. The, the, the mental model around pipeline versus platform and, and the yellow cab versus Uber concept is really your, your mental model is around scarcity or abundance.

Platforms view the world through abundance. Pipelines view it through scarcity.

That's why they control and own and govern everything.

Whereas platforms are like, nope, everybody has been given something by the Lord to contribute value to somebody else.

Our job as the church, to your point is to, and this is where I'll upset all your pastor, counselor friends, but enable that to happen, or let's churchify, equip it to happen.

That, that's what we should be focused on is equipping the saint to do the work of the ministry.

And an observation that I've seen in the past in, in, in, in doing all this research on everything has been, we've somehow twisted ourselves into the reality that somehow we, as the staff are the saint in the story.

No, you're the organization. And, and, you know, I, I, I laugh at this term now just because it's the time reference of everything, but pre, pre COVID, you know, it was butts, budgets, baptisms, and buildings.

Post COVID. It was like the, the, the weekend after COVID hit, the majority of church preached a very similar message, which was, remember the people are the church, not the building.

Right. And now we're all coming. Hey, you got to be back in church. You got to, four walls matter.

Well, buildings and organizations don't grow people. People grow people.

So if you're on staff at a church, you're the org and your job is to actually scale the saint who is the person in the pew that has been given something by the Lord that wants to contribute value to somebody else.

That, that's the saint. So we've, we have to, we have to structurally, and that, that kind of upsets some people, right?

You've got your, the, the, you know, children's pastors sitting there going, no, my job is to grow the kid.

No, your job is to equip the kids to help grow other kids.

And we, we, our identity has been wrapped up into a position, uh, in that regard.

And it's, it's actually just not been true. So.

Yeah. I mean, you're, you're starting to pull the professional Christian thread where it's my job to, to do the preaching.

It's my job to bring people to salvation. It's my job to, and then, and that's the way that unfortunately it's, it's, it's, that's what church has equated to, uh, or at least, you know, Western Civ Church over here where we are.

You know, I, I saw an interesting, I am very self-conscious right now because I'm afraid that I'm going to quote a stat to you and you are like the stat king and you're going to call me on it.

But I'm pretty sure I've, I've heard this 72% on average, 72% of church budget, um, is, is spent on either building or payroll, um, where 49% is payroll on average across America.

Uh, and at 22, 23, somewhere around there is, is actual building costs.

And what's, what's interesting is what you're describing here with this.

I, I don't know that it costs a lot of money to get people activated on, on mission.

Um, it's, and it's, and it's certainly, you're utilizing people in a different way, which are going to get you into different areas.

And, and, and you're not necessarily saying, Hey, come be in this big building.

You're saying go out into the, into the towns, into the places and connect with people where they are.

It's much more of a go and go and tell than a, than a come and see strategy towards this.

Yeah.

I, I, I, I kind of say like this for, for some of the church leaders, it's like, you know, the, those who ride with Uber can easily start driving for Uber.

I mean, it's, it's, they've removed a ton of friction out of it.

Those that are, are renting a room for Airbnb can actually become a host of their own Airbnb at their own house.

Well, my question to church leaders is, is like, can those who, who receive the gospel easily share the gospel, right?

Like can, can those, can those who that are taught something easily teach others?

Can those who participated in service easily include others in services that that's a different, just a slightly different way of looking at it versus what we're traditionally accustomed to as far as church goes.

And, and, and largely when I tell, when I asked church, when I asked pastors that, um, they, it like hits them.

They're like, I'm not really sure I've been equipping that to happen yet.

What do you think that people that have just accepted Christ want to do go share it with people, give them a tool that helps enable that behavior to happen.

And guess what?

Your church is probably going to grow because they're going to start having questions and they're going to actually help grow people.

And your job is just to provide scalability to the same, which typically the only, the only hindrance that we have really toward that is better tools.

We just, we're, we're so focused on creating great content or using great content.

It's like content alone is insufficient for growth.

You have to have relationship and the relationship side of the equation helps people grow.

But the tool is what's used to actually curate in the content into that equation.

So if we helped churches, like I say this way, for your creative teams at churches, they should be less worried about what graphic to show on Sunday about the upcoming series.

And they should be focused solely on curating or creating better tools that enable people to actually go do what God's called them to do.

You may have cut a little close to home there, but I received that feedback.

Well, um, that is not an excuse to use Comic Sans font in any of your graphics, but you,

but, but you're right.

We're not called to create, um, really good art.

We're called to make, make disciples.

And how are we setting up people to do that?

Um, and that, that may challenge, I mean, you're, you're joking earlier about offending audience.

That may, that may offend a lot of audience right now.

Well, actually all those, those people already offended and left the people who, who are probably still remaining are, are, are, are, are with you.

They're the ones that questioned them by salvation out the gate.

You and me both, let's be honest.

Hey, is anybody actually doing this?

Yeah.

So what's really cool.

And, and again, I'm not thankful for COVID through the lens of people are hurting and dying and all that stuff, but I am thankful for the fact that it, it finally was the catalyst to disrupt the, the church space.

The church space by and large survived the Uberization concept that really disrupted every other economy back in right around 2008, 2009 is when things really started shifting and, and it, and fundamentally things broke back then.

And so COVID, and so COVID, and so COVID, and so COVID, and so COVID, and so COVID really exposed the gap and it broke what I call, it broke our pipeline and basically has this reconciliation moment with every church leader now has to decide.

Do I want to go back to be more like, do I want to be more like, do I want to go back to being a pipeline and yellow cab or do I want to be more like an Uber and from that construct?

So what COVID, when COVID first hit, it's funny because I was with one of the, one of the largest churches in Michigan, like three weeks before talking about the same concept.

And it was, it was, it was just theory then, and then it was like COVID hit and now everybody's like calling going, Hey, Engel, I think we need to refresh her on what Uberization is because that was theory, but now it's reality.

Like, what do we do?

So here's a couple of cool things that churches that started embracing the Uber concept, things like, um, a church printed out or a church created a little card that said, my name is blank.

My phone number is blank.

My email is blank and I live here and it had no branding of church, no hashtag Jesus loves you or any of that other stuff.

And they didn't even print the cards out.

They just sent it to their church and said, Hey, fill these out and pass these around your neighborhood and be, be a help to people.

It led to the largest evangelism moment in the history of this church.

And they didn't even print them out.

They just created a really hacked, you know, a creative person will look at it and go, that's a terrible, terrible image, but it's real.

It was just real.

It was, it was, it was not churchify or anything else.

It was just, and, and so what did it do?

It was a tool that helped me fill out some stuff.

And you're my neighbor, Jeff, and I come over to you at your house and I give you this card and say, Hey man, if you can't make it to the grocery store because you, and you don't have toilet paper, like, let me know.

I can help you.

Right.

And all that did was create opportunities to build trust and relationship between me and you.

And guess what now, now that I have trust and relationship, you can actually grow and I can help you do that.

And, and this church didn't tell me what to say.

They didn't tell me that I needed to do 10 houses versus three.

They literally said, here is a tool.

Go, go forth and do what you think.

Another example that I thought was really cool was some of the, some of the churches, um, sent out sidewalk chalk to all the kids, all the kids and the families that were, were at home.

Knowing that the kids couldn't go to school and knowing that everybody needed to get out of the house.

So working out and walking around the neighborhood was like a popular thing during COVID.

Um, well, we're still in COVID, but you know what I mean?

Um, so the kids, the kid, they, they, they, they, they sent them chalk and they sent them some stencils as, as a tool to say, Hey, just go, go right on the chalk, uh, right on the sidewalks.

And, and, and all that did was create an opportunity for the family that was walking around the neighborhood to stop and look at the art and maybe have a conversation with the person that actually drew the art.

Things like that.

They didn't tell them what to say, how to say it.

They didn't have badges that they had to fill out and forms that they needed to take in.

It was literally just a tool that helped unlock their desire in their context to build trust and relationship with a neighbor.

I love that.

I would almost, I mean, part of me wants to maybe like pour gasoline on that flame.

I sometimes I, I'm an extreme guy.

I like to talk crazy.

Um, and, and so, so part of me even looks at this and saying, okay, Hey, we're doing things in the, in the, in the neighborhood, neighborhood, you know, ministry, the ability to connect with people.

You know, you're across the street neighbor that isn't even connected with a church at all.

And you're going to be able to enter interface and connect with and reach that person in a better way than an organization like your neighborhood church ever would.

And so huge opportunities there, man, I also just being the crazy guy that I am, I'm starting to see like, my gosh, maybe there's an opportunity even for that guy to do a church in his neighborhood.

Like a, like a Rob Wagner, Casey underground, or, you know, start to engage with people on social media in a different way and start to explore maybe a, um, a social media expression of church or a discipleship community or something like that.

Where maybe we're starting to replicate, um, church, not the way, not in the expression, but creating more stadia, we use the word multimodal, multiple models of it.

Um, does that work in this?

Like, I, I, honestly, I want your, what's your opinion.

Does that work at that extreme level where now we're starting to almost create new expressions of church, even beyond where we're used to in our brick and mortar buildings?

Absolutely.

I mean, again, I, I'm, we, we, we kind of kidded, we, we, we would kid ourselves if we thought like, you know, the four walls of the building were the, the end all be all to everything.

I'm not dismissing the local church.

I think the local church has profound implications.

And I think as more people are in the business of driving for Uber in this ministry construct, they're going to gravitate toward a church to ensure that they are equipped to help do the ministry.

So I think it's going to be across the spectrum modality has shifted.

And so, yes, there are a variety of modalities that are going to be embraced and it all comes down to the preference of the end user, knowing the person that they're trying to grow better than the organization.

I, I, I know my friends better than my church.

So therefore I'm going to leverage what I need to leverage to help my friends grow in Christ.

And I'm going to pull from every tool in the tool chest.

And some of it might be from this church.

Some of it might be that curriculum.

Some of it might be from a book that, you know, maybe my church is like, you know, we, we follow the leadership model of this author.

Well, I know my friend better than you do.

And I know that he's going to prefer that author.

So we're going to have conversations around this from that perspective.

That gate has been blown wide open.

And now the, I think now our blinders are off a little bit going like, oh, that's always happened.

You know, think about it from this perspective.

You go to church, you know, I, I, and, and again, you know, church leaders don't necessarily like when I say this, but it's like the end user is my, my question for the congregant in the, in the church is what are you hiring that church to solve?

What job as the congregant are, am I hiring this church to solve?

In some instances, it's their kids ministry.

Hey, I don't really like the teaching.

The music's too loud, but our kids really like the kids ministry.

So we, we hire this church to do kids ministry, but then I go home and I stream this church for my own development.

And I go through this own, my own Bible study for my, for my wife and I's individual development together as a couple, et cetera, et cetera.

We used to think, oh, well, they're coming to church.

They're buying the entire package.

That's never been true.

But now our blinders are off gone.

Oh yeah.

You know, there are reasons why people stay out in the lobby for 15 minutes during music because the music's boring.

And then they'll go in because the teaching's okay.

That's the unfortunate reality.

You know, and it's funny.

We were, oh, actually I saw a Facebook post.

I'll try to dig through and put it in the show notes if I can find it.

But there was, it was a, I think it was in a Facebook group and somebody was, the comment was something to the extent of, there is so much more power and potential.

And, oh, I know exactly what it was.

Small churches have so much to teach the big churches post COVID, mid post COVID.

Big churches need to learn from the small churches.

And it was amazing to me the number of comments and emojis that were attached to that.

And I was, cause I just, I know the people and it's like mega church, giga church, giga church, mega church.

Everybody thumbs upping that because, and then from a relational context, the small church has so much more strength in that area than the big church who's overloaded.

But really, I think the win, and I would even throw this at you, which even gets back to this whole part of, of uberization of church, the thing that makes an individual church, a local church special, the thing that a local church can do that really struggles in digital and online, or at least we haven't figured out the formula, is mission, is getting people activated, of giving them purpose.

Yes, we need to figure out what getting people on mission looks like digitally.

And there are some churches that are moving into that space, but by, in general, that is what's happening at your brick and mortar local church, or at least that's what separates you from the, you know, I'm just dropping names, Rick Warren's, the, uh, the elevations, the, the saddlebacks, the, the North points.

And so it's church out there figuring out how to give people purpose, get people on mission.

You know, I've said it on here, a pastor, don't be upset that your people aren't in your building.

Be upset that they have no purpose, no spiritual purpose when, when they're not in your building.

And that's, that's what I love about this so much is it gives people that spiritual purpose.

And, and, and we talked about it at the beginning, but like architecturally, this matters.

So in, I say it this way, we were designed by God to do two things at a base level, contribute value and be in community.

And, and if you, if you look through Genesis, Adam was put in the garden of Eden when it was perfect to do a job, to contribute value into something that was already perfect.

Go name the animals, go do this, go do this.

Right?

So if that is true and we were designed to contribute value, and then the first time it is not good is when Adam's by himself.

So insert Eve, you can, you can go to marriage, which I typically do, but, but you can, at the abstract level, I would argue community.

So if we were designed to contribute value and be in community, how do we then help unlock the contributive energy in every single person?

Because they're hardwired to want to do it.

And then insert relationship or community.

That's all we need to be focused on.

And you're right.

The smaller the church, because of, in my opinion, the lack of, the lack of resourcing that they typically have, that they are solely focused on contributive energy.

A.K.A. they need, you know, the 50 people in the church to go down and do something, something because they need the, they need the volume.

And then they're focused solely on community.

Whereas some of the other churches, some of the more giga churches, it's like, no, you can go and you can hide and consume.

And that's about it.

And that's where COVID really helped expose some of the gaps there is we had a lot of people that thought, hey, the pastor's job is to do the discipling, not my job.

When in all reality, it was my job always to do the discipling, and their job was to help make me a disciple maker.

Let me, let's, let's even, let's expand on that analogy right there.

So there's pastors out there who do think it's their job.

And they've been for decades patted on the back and told, well done, great sermon, excellent.

And they've been told, bring people, not, not go and tell, but come and see, hey, you know what?

Listen, I've, I've worked with a lead pastor who's literally said, audience, people out there, it's your job to bring people into the building.

It's my job to preach the gospel to them.

So there are that, I mean, that mentality is, is out there.

And now, I mean, we're basically saying, hey, I, I don't know that that idea works in 2021.

I, I, I'm not sure it's going to work in 2025 and we may need to, to change this, this philosophy.

So how, listen, I'm a, I'm a lead pastor.

I went to school that taught me one way.

I've got 20 years experience that's taught me that way.

You guys are now talking crazy to people on a podcast.

Like, how am I supposed to process and thank you this?

Like, how, how should people be responding to this as we're challenging the world, their ministry worldview anyway?

So, so, so how I typically address this, because I'll be honest, like a lot of, a lot of church leaders hear, hear the subtitle of uberization of ministry or uberization of church.

And they immediate, immediately go to, oh, Matt's going to talk about a digital app.

Oh, it's Uber is just an app.

Okay.

So yeah, we're going to go find out about digital that they're, they're missing the boat.

Okay.

So digital supports the analog.

That's the, that, that is the pecking order.

The primacy of growth, which is what we do in church, grow people is, is face-to-face.

That's the number one way people grow and tech supports the gap.

That's, that's the basic premise where I go with platform and where I help pastors kind of reconcile what you just said is again, it's not an indictment on what they've done.

They grew up and we did too, outside of the, you know, the high school students that are, that are in high school, you know, probably right now, maybe a little bit of the, the Gen Zers.

They've now been exposed to platform theory as an economic model.

Prior to 08, we didn't know a new economic model existed other than pipeline pipelines, supply, demand manufacturing.

But here's the subtlety to what helps people begin to understand and, and sort of reconcile the new thing.

That's emerged was back, back in like Jesus day, it, or let me, let me start by saying this.

It's, it boils down to trust.

Okay.

The whole construct of Uber rising ministry has to do with where trust is originating now versus where it used to.

And what do I mean by that?

So Jesus back in the day, trust was hyper localized.

Okay.

I knew that you were a carpenter, so you could help me build certain things that was localized trust.

And in a small town perspective, small city perspective, I knew that your wife was a, was a nurse.

And so my kid scraped his hand so I can take him over there.

Trust was localized.

Then fast, fast forward all the way to the industrial revolution and trust.

People say trust breaks.

I don't actually necessarily agree with that.

I think trust is malleable and trust moves.

And in the industrial revolution, trust shifted from this hyper localized thing to these monolithic pipelines.

And what you did is you associated the size of the pipe with the more I can trust it.

Oh, wow.

You know, fill in the blank, you know, Kmart, Montgomery Wards, Sears, all of these things, Ford, Chevy, right?

These monolithic pipelines, insert your, your giga church name right now, the, the lead pastor at so-and-so.

It, trust shifted to these monolithic pipelines.

Well, what happened in 08 was trust shifted again.

And you had all of these pipelines that got broke because quite frankly, like if you look at like things like Wells Fargo, they used to be a trustworthy bank until it found out that they were doing some shady stuff around mortgages, right?

So all of these things, trust shifted again to what is, what it now calls it in my head is like a distributed trust model.

So I, I'll say it this way.

So my wife exclusively shops on Amazon by ratings alone, not by brand, not by size of, of budget and not by ads.

Literally are a hundred thousand strangers telling me it's okay to buy that thing.

And if you think about it, Uber did the same thing.

Uber solved for trust because 15 years ago I was told to never get into a car with a stranger.

And now I almost exclusively travel through Uber all over the place.

But what happened?

It wasn't because of an app.

Yeah, that made it easy.

But what it was is because I could trust a hundred thousand strangers that tell me, hey, you know what?

Jeff's a 4.9.

Great.

I'm probably not going to have to worry.

Man, you know, Matt Engel's a 2.3.

I need a new driver, right?

So in this instance for churches, we have to understand that trust is distributed.

And so we need the saints doing the work of the ministry in the neighborhoods and in the communities.

And by default, the trust rating of that local church does improve.

So that's the paramount, like, fundamental core.

When pastors start to have to reconcile this, they have to understand and embrace trust has now shifted.

And you can have the biggest marquee sign on the side of the billboard or on a billboard or of the street.

You can have the biggest budget around marketing.

But if you haven't solved for trust in your community, it doesn't matter.

They don't trust you.

They don't trust your brand.

They trust a hundred thousand strangers that tell them that I can get hope and healing at that location there.

So somebody's interested in doing this.

Like, okay, I hear you.

Matt, I'm listening.

I want to, let's give it a shot.

What does an experiment look like?

How do I even get started?

How do I shift?

How do I convince my leadership of something like this?

Like, walk me through maybe some of those early steps.

Yeah.

So here's what I like to say is if your job title now is no longer pastor, but your job title is the chief platform architect of your local church,

that's your new job.

You have two functional things, or that's your title.

You have two functional jobs that you need to do.

Motivate people and provide better tools.

That's it.

So you have to still motivate people.

You still have got to help cast vision.

But it's not around, you know, me going up on a mountaintop, hearing the Lord say, Matt Engel, go, therefore, do with this.

Therefore, I'm going to come back and try to convince my entire congregation to do the same thing.

No, my job is to motivate people to be the saint and provide them better tools to do that thing.

From that perspective, that's it.

And from that end, like the experimentation, did this tool help move the needle on people?

And the difference, again, the mental model is I'm not looking for everybody to do everything.

I'm looking for the people who want to grab that tool that have a willing and able and a desire to use it, to go use it.

And then platforms do this really well, which churches don't do very well, is they close feedback loops.

Platforms are constantly learning.

And I'll give you this example.

Churches behave a lot like your local farmer's market.

Farmer's markets are platforms.

They have producers.

They have people that are selling goods.

And they have consumers, people that come to buy those goods.

The challenge is they're dumb.

They're not smart.

And what do I mean by that?

So my wife and I go down to the farmer's market here.

And this weekend, we buy tomatoes, cilantro, jalapeno, onion, a little bit of garlic.

The next weekend we show up, we should be recommended to go to the salsa table because the smart analytic would say, wow, they just bought stuff that I can reasonably assume they're probably making salsa.

The next weekend, we should recommend salsa to Matt and Denise Engel.

In the same instance, the church, we don't do a good job of being smart like that.

We just constantly assume that they're going to, you know, we're just going to spray and pray everybody and hope that they figure it out.

It's like, let's get smarter about this from that perspective.

So motivate people, provide better tools, and close the feedback loop around the tool.

And once you do that, this is the beauty.

Once you do that, you can identify the pattern.

And as soon as you see the pattern, you can actually help enable the pattern to spin faster.

And that's the unique way.

Like, I like to say it this way.

What if the scorecard wasn't the budget baptisms and buildings that we're accustomed to, but the scorecard for a local church was the amount of time that it takes for the church to notice Matt Engel raising my hand saying,

I want to contribute value to what the Lord placed on my heart and the church to come alongside me and equip me to do it versus did Matt Engel attend?

Is he giving regularly?

Blah, blah, blah.

What if the scorecard was around that metric?

How quickly are we identifying people's opportunities and calling on their life and enabling it to happen?

And then closing feedback loops to ensure that that's happening because I guarantee you your pastoring would massively improve if you started seeing the patterns that want to happen with your women that are 40 years old with three kids or men who are under 35 that are single.

If you saw the pattern, you could quickly begin to pastor that pattern way differently than we got to get more people here.

So anyway, that was a long-winded answer.

But in my opinion, it's that simple.

I know.

It's that simple.

That's all.

What's the metric?

What's success?

You know, it's funny.

We had Tyler Sansom's digital pastor up at Church Anywhere up in Indiana, Corden, Indiana.

And so, but we had his lead pastor on.

I'm blanking.

Sir, I'm blanking on your name right now.

I'm sorry.

But he was telling us, he's like, yeah, our church, we catalog, we celebrate the baptizee and the baptizers,

the people who have accepted Christ and the people who brought them to Christ.

What's the metric?

Are we celebrating the conversions?

Are we celebrating the fact that somebody, you know, was involved and shared?

Like, what do you think?

What's the REA moment?

I think where the scorecard is moving toward, from a church, let me start by saying,

from the church org perspective, I think our, our scorecard is really how many people are

we flipping from consumers to contributors or in platform talk from consumers to producers,

right?

So I think that's at the church org level.

I, at the person level, I think the, at the abstract level, I think our scorecard is our

people growing.

Like, that's it.

Like, like, at the base level, I want to celebrate the growth of people, not necessarily the activities

and outputs.

I want to celebrate the outcomes and the impact associated with that.

And, and that's really that saint getting to see their friend take baby steps over time

to move closer to Jesus, right?

Like that, that, and, and that's what actually helps flip that person from like a growee to

a champion of other people.

So we, in church world, we tend to try to rush people through like a process.

And, and I like to say growth is not, um, it is not tied to speed.

Growth is tied to trust and relationship.

And so it's not a function of speed of getting people through things.

It's a, really a function of a person and a person that's trustworthy that moves that

person that moved, that moves the growee on a linear motion for growth and the growth at

the abstract level.

So that's how I would be thinking the scorecards are starting to shift.

It's like, are we, are we moving people from, from consumers to producers or champions in

my, my language?

And then from the champion, the, the scorecard for the champion is, are, are the people that

I'm involved with in their lives growing?

Are we seeing growth, um, in that?

Hey, uh, sorry, I was distracted.

I was trying to look up.

It was Randy Kirk, uh, is the lead pastor at First Capital and Corden.

And I was like, dang it.

Yeah, I, I, I got the name.

I had to, I had to go back.

And in fairness, that conversation was two and a half years ago.

And so it took me a moment, but Randy, sir, it was funny.

Randy, Randy, um, Randy retired on that podcast two and a half years later.

He's still there.

But, uh, so I, I think they're, they're working through search communities.

I don't know something, but Hey, listen, Matt, this has been an awesome podcast.

Thanks for, thanks for jumping on here.

Uberization of church churches platform.

Uh, it, you know, even, even the, the economic model of this.

And, and that's a new perspective to me.

I hadn't put that up to the, to the, to the economy perspective there.

Or it, man, just as we're, as we're landing the plane here, any, any closing thoughts on

your side?

Yeah, no, I, I mean, really, really the, those paramount things are people cannot grow.

And that is the core function of the, of the saint, you know, helping somebody grow.

You cannot grow if trust and relationship are not present.

And so churches should be focused on like right now, you know, we're, we're October, September,

I guess still, um, churches right now that are focused on providing tools to their people

to develop trust and relationship with their neighbors for the hope that as trust and relationship

builds, they could do an invitation for that person to come to church on Christmas.

That's the difference in what we're talking about versus waiting until December and then

asking all of your people to go invite a friend to church.

They can't invite somebody that doesn't have trust and relationship with them.

So give them tools to be able to do that.

And the by-product is you're, you're helping develop disciple makers and a catalytic platform

is the local church helping, enabling it to happen.

So that's the, that's the, probably the big, the big shift to be thinking through.

So, so many good thoughts here talking about this idea of, of church's platform,

uberization of church, releasing control to the people and empowering, equipping, whatever

you want to throw at them, uh, to help them, you know, get out there and, and be on mission

with that.

So, Hey, Matt, thank you for, for jumping on the podcast and spend some time.

Uh, but for Matt, thank you very much for Matt.

This is Jeff with the church digital and with Stadia church planning.

Thanks for jumping on the pod here.

We'll see you next time on the show.

Y'all have a good day.