EP031: Jennifer Miles & Marketing Church Online

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So how are we going to market church online? That's the question I wanted to ask in episode 31 of The

Church Digital podcast. And to that end, I brought in communication specialist Jennifer Miles to help us

figure out what the answer to that question was. And while the answer she gave us was probably the one

we needed, maybe it wasn't the one that we deserved, but ultimately, it was definitely necessary to hear.

Okay, set aside the whole Dark Knight DC reference. I'm really much more of a Marvel guy. But at the end of

this, Jennifer's answer to that question, how do we market church online, cut to the core of what church

online could be and should be, to really get to the power, to the heart, to the soul of what church

online is, and therefore created an interview, a conversation that you listening audience definitely

need to hear. So I present for this conversation, communication specialist, guru, all-knowing Jennifer Miles

to the conversation, and myself, Jeff Reed from The Church Digital, in a conversation that I'm calling

The Marketing of Church Online. Hey, everybody, here you go.

I'm Jennifer Miles. I work for Faithlife. I'm a project manager for their church products organization,

and I work on upcoming features and supporting the content for those, and then also work on user ed

guides and what's the purpose of our products. In addition to that, I am wrapping up my doctorate at

Portland Seminary, and that is a, no one ever knows how to say it. I do, I'm doing a doctorate in

semiotics, which is essentially the study of signs and symbols and how things get their meaning.

Signs and symbols are not just signs and symbols, they're words, they're images. So a lot of it is

like, how does the church get its meaning? And how do we talk about meaning in the church?

I worked at Church Online at Life Church for about four years, consulted with about 70 Church Onlines

for four years, and helping them with their marketing strategy, their social media strategy,

and then their discipleship strategy. So that's kind of a little bit of who I am.

Wow, yeah, that's a great opening kickoff, everything from Logos books, Logos software to signs and

interpretations, all the way to Life Church. That's right.

Yeah, very, very good. That's an interesting life. So what's your seminary, what's your degree

going to be in, your doctorate? So it's officially doctorate of ministry in semiotics.

And semiotics. Okay. Yeah. And so like, what, where do you hope to get on? I'm just curious,

because that's who I am. Like, where do you hope to go with that? Where, where does a semiotics

degree take you at a doctorate level? Well, it might help to understand why I even

started the program, to know where I'm going with it. So when I started the program, I was doing

consulting with a lot of different churches in their marketing, and I wanted to get better at

communications. And what did that look like in the digital world? And so I went online and

literally just started looking for communications degrees in the church, and they don't exist. I mean,

they didn't five years ago. You're starting to see more now. But do you know who Leonard Sweet is?

Of course. Soul Tsunami changed my life straight up. Yes.

Yeah. That book, 1999, made me, I mean, I'm not discounting the Bible. Next to the Bible,

that's number two for me. Okay. So then you'll, you'll get this. So I had read a lot of his stuff

when I was doing church online and when I was doing my master's degree. And so my thesis for

master's was actually about church online. And I used several of his things. His program at Portland

Seminary was the thing that showed up in my search results for Google. And he's the lead mentor for

this doctorate of ministry and semiotics. And its subtitle is the few, it's like a Google, a Google

church or church and culture and future studies or something. But I was like, I don't care what the

program is. Cause I didn't know what semiotics was. I don't care what the program is, but this is the

person who has influenced me through his books. I'd love to learn from him in person and have

conversations like that that are in his books face to face. Right. So I ended up signing up for the

program thinking, Oh, this is going to help my communications world. I'm going to better

understand theology in a digital space and really learn from this person who is probably 10, 15 years

ahead of everybody else. And he completely rocked my world. I closed my marketing business. I got to this

point where I, I was struggling morally ethically on is marketing church online, the way that we do it

today, um, effective one, is it a wise use of our resources too? And are there better ways for us to

connect? Like if the point of the gospel is to share Jesus and to build disciples, is marketing doing

that? And I, so I ended up closing my business and throughout this course of this program, I changed

to wanting to really understand what does it look like to disciple people in a digital age. If people

are spending more time online, are building more relationships through what we're doing right now,

right? This digital conversation, and then bringing that face to face, sometimes how do you disciple

people, right? If discipleship, so what's your definition of discipleship, Jeff?

A disciple, me, and I know that we've had this conversations on the podcast, discipleship has

many meanings. And so, uh, different people interpret it differently, which causes mass confusion.

Uh, discipleship, how, how we've interpreted typically on the show and me at a personal level

would be, uh, building a relationship with someone and empowering them with the gospel

to the level that they can turn around and do the same thing to someone else. A disciple is someone

who literally makes another disciple. And so it's, it's that, um, that relationship between person A and

person B to the point that person B can now replicate that with person C.

Yeah. So there's a few things there, right? It's the relationship and the replication.

Right. And as I was doing all this marketing for church online, I realized what I was really doing

was I was bringing in consumers to be consumers. And it then became very difficult to turn consumers

into contributors in a church online space because they think very differently. And so my whole mindset

shift and I realized that what I really was doing online was I was trying to find a way

to build relationship. And then though through those relationships, replicate what I believed

and how I lived or how the, whatever the churches I was working with were, what they believed and how

they transferred the gospel. And what was happening was we were doing all these ads and we were getting

people in, but then we didn't have a solid discipleship program for them. And so we were just

throwing money at the front end and there wasn't a lot of return at the back end. And so that's,

so I ended up closing my marketing business and now I'm focusing really on the, what do we do is the

next step. And a lot of the churches I talked to, that is the thing they struggle with. We have a lot

of really good church marketers out there, but we were struggling with what do we do when we give

these people in, how do we convert them from consumer to contributor?

Yeah. And that's, and that's arguably, I mean, that's a, it's an, a big C church wide issue and we'll

get there in a second, but I want to, I want to dive into this because I can relate a little bit

to this of where I walked away from a church environment, from a church staff, 15 plus years,

full-time church staff, 25, if you count high-level volunteers and volunteer board of directors,

elders, like just crazy stuff. But, but I really felt the calling to kind of leave that and do

something else. And so in, there was, that made me an emotional wreck. Um, and there, there was,

you know, ups and down seasons of that. Tell me a little bit about that story of when you realized,

Hey, you know what? I want to maybe walk away from the church marketing thing, walk away from this

business and instead try to do something that's more driven, more focused towards discipleship.

Like what was God doing in your life?

Well, there was a lot going on at the time. Um, from 2014 to 2018, my family and I actually traveled

the country in an RV. And so we had a lot more flexibility than a lot of people. Like a lot of

people, they have a business and that business pays their bills. They like, it's, they need it, right?

I didn't need it. For me, church marketing was something I enjoyed. And so it came down to this

point. What that I sat there and I spent some time talking to my husband and some friends and

some other church online pastors that I'd become really close to. I was like, I don't have a heart

issue with this. And just from a moral perspective, if I'm following Jesus, I can't continue to do

something that I now think is wrong. Um, and so for me, it was a really simple decision. It was,

I didn't need it for the money. I could find another way to make money. Um, I've always been

able to change my businesses and do that or get a job, which is what I did. I worked, went to work

for faith life. Um, so I would say I didn't really struggle much with it. The problem I'm having now is

I struggle with the, we have to change the way we do discipleship. And that's the message that people

are struggling with not the church marketing thing because so many churches already were struggling

with church marketing. Um, I kind of joined the mainstream when I said I didn't want to do that

anymore. It was the moving to discipleship that was no longer the mainstream. It was a Sunday service

isn't the way you disciple people. Um, expecting them to come to your building isn't the way you disciple

people, right? Like that became the message that now I'm going to get pushback on. So, and I've really

struggled with that part. I have a few friends that I talked to regularly about, am I, am I still

following the Bible? Am I still following Jesus? Or am I now something that I have to worry about?

Have I become a heretic and saying these things aren't what our society says they are, right? Like,

how do you handle that part of it? And I still struggle with it. Um, for me too, I'm also a female,

right? And so a female in the ministry world is if I'm, if I'm, as I'm sitting here talking about

discipleship, well, I've already got depending on the denomination, some strikes against me.

Um, so that's the stuff I struggle with is, am I doing what God is calling me to do? Where do I fit

in the ministry perspective? If I go forward with some of the discipleship stuff I'm doing,

is that okay? Not that, can I close my business? That stuff wasn't the hard part at all.

Hey, this is the thing that I struggle with. Let me say it this way. I, this is what I struggle with.

I hesitate in some of the things that I'm doing, that I'm talking about because I'm the, I don't

want to say I'm the only one saying it, but it's by far the, the minority.

Right. It feels like you're the only one saying it, you know? And, and, and it's like, I have people,

um, and this is completely off topic, but I have people all the time coming to me and asking me,

hey, Jeff, when are you going to plan a church completely online? And, and, and a, like,

I'm not even sure like that's theological because the whole abandoning community and, and, and Romans

and I, and, and so like, there's still, there's some of that, that, that, that I'm, I'm wrestling with.

Um, and, and if I did, it would be planted more towards like a micro model where there would still be

physical, but it's, it's like, I just, I have this, this fear of, um, I I'm okay. I'm okay.

Being the first, if God tells me to go, you know, and, and I read an ax where, you know, some of the,

the early church where they were doing things in the early church would literally say, should we listen

to God or should we listen to you Sadducees? Who do you think we're going to listen to? We're going

to listen to God. Right. And it's funny, like when I have these, these conversations just that at a

personal level, but I'm like, Hey God, where are you, where are you leading me right now? Um,

I, I don't hear yes. I don't hear no. Um, it's funny. I've, I've heard wait. And, and, and so

it's funny. I'm like, wait for what, you know, like what, what, what are you, what are you waiting

for? And, and it's just, it's, it's wait, you know, trying to find that, I guess in God's right

time and things personally, I'm, I'm a little bit like Moses where, Hey, can I have, can I have

somebody? Oh, you want to give me Aaron? Cool. Give me an Aaron. Give me somebody to come along

this journey with me. That would be awesome. But, but short of that, it's, it's scary when,

when you feel God leading you down a road and, and like, it's, it's unpaved, it's untrod. Nobody's

gone down there before. So, man, I, I just, I can totally relate to this idea of, of just walking

away from the business, um, trying to do things. You, you've got this established, but God's leading you

somewhere else. And, and should you listen to the Sadducees or should you follow God? Who do you think

we're going to go after? So, right. Well, and at this point it's, I'm going to follow God and I have

no idea where he's taking me and that's okay. Yeah. So it'll work it out over time. That's awesome.

Well done. Uh, so Jennifer, tell me this, help me connect the dots here. Cause you've got,

cause what you're saying is that, you know, we, you, you want to focus more on discipleship because you no

longer want to focus on marketing and you're implying that, you know, discipleship is the

solution to marketing. So connect the dots here, tie that in, um, help, help, help me understand a

little bit how a discipleship is really the solution for marketing online. Yeah. So when you do marketing

online, um, there's a few different ways to do it, right? We have Google ads, we have Facebook ads,

we can do display ads, we can do YouTube ads. Like there's all these opportunities.

One of the things that's happened in the last few years, um, if you follow kind of the marketing trends

at all in the church, a lot of people started with Google ads with the nonprofit program. Um,

and those provided you search ads, you couldn't do retargeting ads with that. And then you could do,

but you could do Facebook ads and you could retarget people with Facebook ads. And so that strategy played

really well where you started with search ads and people looking for felt needs, and then you retargeted

them if they showed up on a page using Facebook. Well, over time, what has happened is Google now

doesn't allow you to retarget at all any website that has Christian content or religious content

in general. There's actually a few categories they don't let you retarget. Wait, really?

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

On, on, for Google.

For Google.

Correct. Yeah.

Okay. Wow.

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

Well, it shows how much retargeting I did.

Right. So, but you could continue to retarget on Facebook, which has been great,

but about a year, year and a half ago with kind of the fallout from their issues, um,

they changed a lot of their targeting ability. So you could no longer target, um, pastors.

You could no longer target based on, um, like self-identification categories. So like they

removed 70% of the targeting that was helpful for the church. And so what was happening was you

were spending all this money and you were really marketing to other Christians. You weren't marketing

to people who weren't Christian. And so it became much more difficult to target the people that were

really called to go out to. Um, and so that's when I really started thinking about it. And if you think

about it, God called us to go and make disciples, right? It's, he called each one of us to go and

have relationships. And when you think about how people do invites, I would do, I used to do ads for

like Easter and Christmas. Of course, every church wants Easter and Christmas ads. One, they're

extremely expensive during that season. I would watch my ads go from like 27 cents a click to like

$4 and 50 cents a click. Wow.

Because you're now competing. Not only are you competing with every other church in the U S who

wants to get on the bandwagon, you're also competing with every business who's marketing

for black Friday for Christmas sales, right? So you're, it's just that they flooded the inventory

and whoever wins the bid is the one who gets it. So it becomes extremely cost prohibitive.

If all you're doing is getting a click and okay, let's say one person clicks, you now need,

I don't know, a hundred people to click in order to get one person to attend your service.

And so you're spending $40 to get one person to attend the service. Whereas I can say, Hey,

my people who are my members, you have a mission to go out and make disciples.

What can I do to enable you to do that? Can I help you have conversations with people in your

workplace, with people that you meet on a day-to-day basis? Um, you invite people like changing your

cover photo is super easy and it's free. And that is actually more effective than an ad.

And so when you talk and this, the same thing holds true for the physical church, right? When you say,

Hey, we're going to have our Christmas service. Do you do door knockers? They work, but you can also

say, Hey, people invite people. And if you, have you looked at those surveys where they talk about how

do people come to church? Is it a Google ad, a Facebook ad, a mailer, right? What is the number one

most effective thing? It's a personal invite. And it's like a 75% effective rate versus like a 5%

effective rate. And so when we talk about what does it look like to shift from a marketing model to a

discipleship model, it's instead of me doing all these cold ads, now I'm going to focus on

empowering my people to talk to other people and invite people. And when you do it that way,

you could now come back and support it with ads. I can do remarketing ads. And if someone has invited

someone and they show up to the, my church slash Christmas page, I can remarket the Christmas page.

And now someone got a personal invite and they're getting a reminder on their Facebook page. Hey,

Joe invited you to Christmas. You don't put a name in there, right? But we'd love to see you.

And so now I'm doing it the opposite direction. Instead of trying to get cold people in the door,

oh, we should probably talk about cold, warm, hot for your audience. So a cold audience or a cold ad

is someone who has no connection with you, who doesn't know you, who you have not established

trust with. A warm audience is someone who has heard you, who has seen some of your content,

who is beginning to understand who you are, and you have a little bit of trust equity with.

A hot audience is someone who is sold out for you, is they will pretty much do whatever you ask them

to do. They are your, they are your cheerleader. And so when you start looking at ads as this cold,

warm, hot, cold ads are expensive. Sometimes it depends. And their, their effectiveness isn't great.

But when you start looking at it and saying, I want my hot people to invite people, and then you

retarget the people they've invited, those people have moved from cold to warm, because they have a

personal stake now, they have a personal connection. And so now you can retarget these warm people.

And so it's shifting the paradigm. And instead of going cold, warm, hot, it's going hot, warm,

and you kind of skip cold. And it sounds weird when you talk about it, because I'm trying to reach

people who aren't Christian, I want all these cold people. Well, you do. But if you're talking about

limited resources, you want to empower your people to reach people, and you want to come behind them

and support their effort. That's where I've really switched my mentality at this point.

Yeah, there's, there's research that actually backs, backs you up, Jennifer, on this. And we talk about

this, that a lot. LifeWay 2016 did a report that, man, I'm blanking on the exact number, I want to say it

was 63%, 62 or 63% of people do not want to come to your church building. They are, they're just,

they're not interested in the same way that I'm really not interested in going to a mosque. I've

made a decision in my life of how things are going spiritually. And most people have, but 80% of

people will have a conversation about faith with their friends. And so empowering your friends,

empowering the members and the attenders of your church to go into these discipleship level

conversations, these gospel grounded conversations. Um, and if the end game is, Hey, this is important

to me. Let me invite you to the church building. If, if it's, if it's even to the level of, let me share

the gospel with you one-on-one individually. Um, you know, that, that's the, that's the effective way

of doing marketing right now. Like even, even to the point where, uh, we had Seth Muse on, I don't

know, a couple of weeks ago, it's, it's been a while and I'm blanking on the name of his church in

Dallas where he's at, but they did a, uh, they did a survey, um, and where they found that the physical

invites that, that people have that people that the church has that they hand out. Um, Seth was saying

that people weren't picking them up anymore and they were just throwing away the physical invites.

Right. And so the church, the church thought, man, we've got a major issue with an invite culture

here. Our people are not inviting into church. And this is a problem. What they did was they ended up

doing a, uh, a survey to see. And one of the questions was, how do you invite people? And what

they discovered was that the physical invites weren't effective. Digital graphics, you know, a share to

your point, changing that, that, uh, that profile photo or the timeline photo and Facebook or, or whatever.

Like those were the things that the church was doing eight times out of 10. And so while the church

was looking at, okay, uh, we have a invite issue because nobody's picking up the print assets,

the digital assets were, were blowing out the door and we're getting a far more exposure and the church

just wasn't looking in the right way. So like this, this is great. And this idea of how, um, we, we can,

uh, we, we can shift our focus away from, you know, writing a check to like a Google organization or a

Facebook, uh, to just cast the, and what the, what's the parable of the cat? You, you're, you're the

walking, uh, PhD. I'm a lowly undergrad, but you know, the casting the seeds, right? Some of them are

going to bounce off, uh, you know, thorns and, and Rocky and a couple of hit the soil by going through

this discipleship level conversations, right? By going through something here, you're able to fine

tune where those seeds are landing, landing, and at least making sure that you're throwing in the right

direction, staying away from, from the, from the rocky path. Well, and the other thing that really

convicted me when I was talking about, you know, cold ads, warm ads, it's when you look at the Pew

research surveys, uh, the recent ones, have you seen that there's one, is it Pew or Barna? No, it was

Barna that, um, more than 70% of the U S associates as Christian. Like they, they self-identify as

Christian, but only 35% actually do anything, roughly 35, 35% actually do anything that the church would

consider a Christian behavior. Yeah. And so me doing cold ads, people already know what Christianity is

in theory. Um, they're looking for a relationship. They're looking for a community. I don't need to

say, come to my church. They're a cold ad. What I need is someone to say, Hey, I go here. Will you

come with me? Right. It's, they already know we're not introducing some new concept to them. They've

made a decision not to go. The question is why have they made the decision not to go? Yeah. And so that's

the thing we have to look at and address. So how do we, how do we do that? How, how do we have,

how do we have that level of a conversation with someone? Right. Well, and that's, that's where we

have a lot of different things happening today in the church, right? The church is becoming known for

what they're against versus what they're for. And so more people are stepping out for that. We have a

lot of people who have been hurt by the church. And so they're leaving for that. And so honestly,

it's again, focusing on our people, teaching our people, what the gospel says, teaching them how to

live and how to act out the gospel in their daily life, right? It's not just the hour you're there

on Sunday and the hour that you're there on Wednesday, it's 24 seven. And then when you equip

people with this, this is how you can talk about the gospel comfortably. You start kind of regaining

that trust again with people who have left. It's, they need to see people who live out the gospel in a

way that not, I don't want to say as comfortable, but as honest and as authentic and not just,

I went on Sunday and I feel better. I mean, that's the thing. So when we were, um, when we were

traveling the world or traveling the country, um, we do what we called campfire church. And so we also

had coffee church, but it was every weekend we would be with any number of families. It could be two

families. It could be 40 families on the, in the winter time, it was almost 40 families for the

the whole winter. And we would do Sunday service together as a group. And the people who were not

entirely comfortable with their faith wouldn't go to it, right? Because it was, you have your worship

music, you have your sermon, it made them a little uncomfortable. And so my husband and I did a campfire

church and what that was, and we didn't call it that, but that's in our mind, that's what it was,

right? Is we just invited people to come to the campfire. We were there almost every night. It's like,

if you have questions, we'd like to get to know you. And it wasn't about, you have to talk about

faith with us. They knew we were Christian. They knew where we stood, but we had a lot of these

conversations with people where I've left the church and I don't know if I'll ever go back.

And so you'd have conversations. Why did you leave? What, what would bring you back? I mean,

do you see yourself ever going back or is your faith stronger or weaker today? And a lot of them

actually felt their faith was stronger because they left. So like, what does that tell us about

the church? I mean, that we'd also have these conversations and they would say, you know,

you're one of the few Christians we've talked to that didn't immediately condemn us. But again,

what does that tell you is that we have this perception issue right now. So that's much bigger

than marketing. That's, we have to work on hearts. We have to work on how do you talk about your faith,

even understanding faith, right? When you look at, there's a website called theology on the web and

they do, they show the results of the systematic, I don't want to say systematic theology. That's not

really it. But when we talk about statements of faith and like, you know, is there a Trinity?

Is there, is Jesus Christ, is Jesus Christ human or God? Like when you go and you look at this theology

on the web and there's, I think there's 60 to 80 questions. And it's a survey of where do people

stand as far as biblical sound theology? We're not doing so hot, right? And so you have to teach your

people. What does the Bible really say? For me personally, I'm at a point where I'm understanding

that digital has changed the way we do things, the way we learn, the way we remember things.

We don't read anymore like we used to. And when we do read, we're so distracted, we don't comprehend.

There's an organization, it's a really long name. I think it's NAACP that does the reading,

the literacy tests around the world. And they do it about every 10 years. And what they have found

is that in the United States, only 49% of people actually have the literacy and comprehension rate

to understand what they're reading, to summarize it and to assimilate it into their belief system.

So if you talk about that, I mean, 49% of the U.S. is unable to read the Bible and comprehend it.

And we are expecting that's how people learn. You go on Sunday and then you read your Bible.

Well, if only one in two people can do that, we're missing a huge part of our market, right? And so

when we then talk about, well, digital enables us to do that, right, it's video, it's story. And so this

is where, like, I've talked a little bit with you about this Bible telling organization that I'm going

to in October. And Bible telling, there's a few different organizations that do that. And essentially,

most of them do international missions where they have created a story set of the Bible. Crew and

Story Runners is the one that I first worked with. And they have 48 stories that they literally have

put together and it teaches the entire gospel from creation to revelation. Each story is two minutes

long. And it really helps build a Christian worldview when you are going in to another country that

doesn't have a written word. And they then teach these stories. And then they build, basically,

it's micro churches, right? It's our model of house church, if you will, where it's, they have these 10 to

12 people, once you get to like 14, split and do it again. And it's been extremely effective overseas.

We haven't done a lot of that in the US. And where I am right now, I'm like, I would love to know my

Bible better. I mean, I've read the Bible, but it's not necessarily, I mean, I think if I'm honest,

and I think if other people are honest, too, like you read the Bible, but you don't always know how to

bring it into your life. You don't know how to make it relevant for today. You don't know how to

share it with people, right? And oftentimes you'll sit there and I have a horrible memory, so I can

never remember verse, chapter, book. I was like, well, there's this place that it talks about this

thing, right? And one of the things that's really great about Bible storying is that you don't have

to remember where it is. You just get to tell the story. It's been really interesting. My husband

and I did the Story Runners class a few years ago, and right, you'd think I know the Bible really well.

I could recall it on memory. I have all these years of experience. I can't. My husband grew up

Catholic, and in the Catholic church, you typically don't read the Bible really well or frequently.

You'd rely on someone else to share it with you. And so he doesn't have the background that I have.

When we did the Story Runners class, it was amazing because he came alive. He was like,

this is the first time I've heard the gospel in a way that I connect with, that I can relate to.

Like, it was living. And then when you start having that conversation, he goes, there are times where

I'll be sitting with a coworker and they'll share something with me. And I'll remember from four

years ago, this one random story where we talked about, you know, like the woman at the well,

and it applies to the situation. So I can share this story in a really non-confrontational way.

And I'm not like, well, you know, in the New Testament, Jesus went on this trip, and he talks

about this thing with this woman. It's just like, hey, can I tell you a story? Like, it's from my

Bible, but I just want to share. I think this might apply to you. And it's a very low-key way

to share what you believe. And the more stories you learn, the more you start to understand how they

impact your own life, and then how you can share them with others without feeling like you're

proselytizing. Like, it's a very different mentality that we've experienced in the last few years.

And Campfire Church is the thing that really led us down that path. And the feedback we've gotten from

people who have felt condemned by other Christians has been really positive because we've changed the way

we frame the scripture. It's now living. It's now story versus this law that I'm sharing with you.

Does that make sense?

Oh, totally. And it takes, and let me ask this, it takes a lot of transparency on your end to do that,

right? I mean, there's a lot of vulnerability that's involved in that.

How long does it take to learn a story? Is it just memorization? What does that process look like?

Well, so in the Bible storing community, there's actually an organization called International

Orality Network. And they kind of coordinate, or I don't want to say oversee, but they're just an

umbrella organization that has a lot of these different Bible storing groups. And there's,

just like there is with denominations, there's multiple views on how you do Bible story. Some

are, you need to do it word for word. Some are, it's okay to paraphrase. So it just depends on who

you learn from, if you will. My mentality, because I went through story runners, is two minute stories

are about the best. You can remember almost anything that's two minutes long. Paraphrasing, as long as

it's accurate. And so always making sure that you understand what the scripture truly says as you

create your story. I mean, it's a big difference. One of the other gentlemen I follow, his stories are

longer. They're five to seven minutes. I honestly have a hard time following them because I lose interest

after a few minutes. And so, but I really respect what he does. He does an amazing job. He's done 265

stories out of the Bible. So it's almost, it's almost the entire Bible. If you think about it, seven,

over 70% of the Bible is a narrative. So it's really easy to divide the Bible into story and then to do

like a two minute or a three minute story. And for me, it's just going through and figuring out, okay,

what's the neck? What do I get a lot of questions about? Is it drinking? Is it just difficult

relationships? Is it depression, right? And so what story in the Bible might answer that? And then I go

and I figure out how can I tell that story in two minutes? And sometimes I can do it more word for

word and sometimes it has to be more paraphrased, but I'm always really careful to keep it accurate.

That's great. So you're, you're, you're sharing, um, you're having these conversations. You're, um,

are you coaching at the same time where you're helping the person? Okay. So here's what this

story means and you're helping them apply it to their life. Are you trusting that God's doing that

on their own? Like what, what is, what is landing the plane trying to look like?

Oh, so here's the, so when you start doing Bible telling again, there's a wide range of,

oh no, you have to tell them what it means. And they've kind of, it's interesting because I think

people who started that way have backed off a little bit. They've realized that what you think

is really important in the story may not be what they think is really important in the story.

And so they go through this model, um, of like, you know, what do you, what do you learn about God?

What do you learn about man? How can you apply this to your life? Like you lead them

through conversation, but you're not telling them what it means. People are pretty smart and people

are pretty intuitive. You don't have to tell them the point of the story. And I think they also could

start to think, they think about it, right? And so they're having to interact. They're having to

internalize what they're hearing versus being told. When you tell someone it stays superficial. They

don't really have to interact with the narrative. When you ask them to interact with it and tell them,

ask you, ask them what they're getting out of it. They now have to interact. They have to put it into

the, the narrative in their head that already exists, their worldview. And then they have to decide,

does this meet up? Does this align with what I already believe? Does this change what I already

believe? And then they have to figure out how does it change it? Right. And so it's,

I don't tell them what it, what it means. It's like, what do you think it means?

What's your background? It's going to change based on what that is.

I mean, it's, well, and you're, you're, you're trusting God in those moments, right?

Right. Where it's, it's, hey, let, let God rule in this and help the person apply how it can and

going out on, on faith with that. That's, that's some powerful stuff.

Right. Well, and I mean, I can't do it. That's, that's what the Holy Spirit's for.

So a lot of the pushback I get when I talk to pastors about this is they do, they worry about,

well, don't I need to tell them what it means? Like, how do I know that they're going to keep it,

scripturally accurate and they're not going to then change the story and do something different

with it. And I've gotten to the point where, or my response is like, I'm pretty sure that God can

keep a story biblically accurate. If the Bible was passed down for how long orally and the Holy

Spirit was able to maintain its integrity. I think it's okay to do one or two stories and

allow the Holy Spirit to work in that. He's got this.

That's a really interesting angle at that. That's very, that's very true. Well, awesome. So how does

this, how does this fit? How does this apply to like a, a digital technological world? What, what,

what does that kind of look like?

Yeah, for me, the big thing is we have an amazing platform to share the gospel with people online.

And like, I follow a lot of churches digitally. And some of them have church online, some don't,

but my definition of church online is honestly any form of digital ministry at this point is I feel

that the church is two or three people that can happen in a structured church online, or that can

happen in a very, just a small conversation. Right. And so for me, if you are, if you are trying to

figure out how to share the gospel as a church or as an individual, starting these stories that you know

your friends are asking questions about, and then just posting them. Like literally it's like,

here's a two minute video that I just threw up on YouTube that, Hey, I want to share a story with

you today. I'm learning this thing. And you can be transparent and say, I'm trying to understand

my faith better. And so I'm learning how to tell these stories. And that by itself is a way to engage

online in a way. And I'm going to sound really bad. And I'm sorry, I'm going to say this,

but Hey, which coffee is your favorite? Right. You know, the, the, the images where it's like,

pick one through eight, which coffee is your favorite or the, so it's, it's a meaningful way to

get people engaged with the scripture versus just doing something for engagement.

Gotcha. That's a, it's a really interesting idea. And by the way, my coffee is always black.

Uh, but that's not what you wanted to know. I'm milk.

I have some coffee with my milk.

Yeah. I don't, I don't even like milk for milk. Put it in Coke. Why mess up coffee? Anyway,

another conversation. Uh, but, but the idea of, of getting engagement out of that, not engagement for

engagement's sake, but engagement with intentionality towards that. And, and, and it's funny, like you do

the, you do the coffee post cause you're trying to work the algorithm to manipulate the system to get

it, do what you need to do. And, and maybe there's times to do that, but then there's also this flip

side of the coin of what if we trusted God in this to pull up people's hearts, to make it work towards

what we needed to. And instead of, um, manipulating the system to get the agenda that you want and the

results that you want, what if we trusted God in this season, uh, to connect us to the people that

needed to do the resources that we have available to us. Right. Sometimes growing slow is more healthy.

Yeah. Yeah. I've, I've been on, believe me, I've been on both sides of the coin. Uh, I've,

I've worked in, I've worked in churches that, you know, I felt like I was on a jet rocket flying a

hundred miles an hour. Uh, and I've worked at churches that were like snails pace. I think we're

running faster, uh, than, than we were. And, and, and, and both of them, you know, both of them, I think

God was using both of them, I feel like was, was, was making it, making a difference. But at the end of

the day, being connected with a, with an organization that's following the spirit, that's, that's an

organization that's led by prayer. That's, that's led by devotion, um, towards discipling and creating, not,

not a butts in seats mentality, um, not, you know, come in here so that you're a number, but, uh, having a, every

relational connection with people that are in turn are relationally connecting with others, you know,

I believe is key. Someone is wanting to do marketing and you've just thrown out at them. Hey, we should

really focus on discipleship instead of marketing. Like that's okay. So I'm a web guy and I just heard

that I'm, I'm a communications, um, director. And I just heard that that's, that's a hard, you know,

bait and switch Jesus juke, call it, call it what you want. What are some practical steps? Like, how can I go

from hearing this to say, okay, you're not wrong. It's something we need to explore, but I got an entire,

you know, leadership team above me. Who's expecting the other thing. How do I proceed?

Yeah. Well, I think there's, there's probably, uh, let's say three things you should do, right?

The first one is understand your cold, warm, hot. So you understand who you really are trying to market to.

The second is you have the ability to set up your website to do remarketing.

If you're going to do ads, focus on that first. And so set up your, set up your pages so you can

remarket, build Facebook campaigns around remarketing and be really strategic about it. If someone goes to

your nursery page, do remarketing ads about the nursery. Don't just do these broad ads. And so it's okay

to do ads, just do them appropriately. Do them for people who are warm or who are hot.

Um, so, and the third thing is now that we've talked about this, this cold, warm, hot, and who

is our audience. And now we're going to start remarketing people who are coming to our pages

for certain things. How do we get more people to interact into the community? So now it's that

discipleship track, right? Like how do we talk about the events we're having? It's, it's the three steps.

How do we talk about the events we're having and getting people to invite and making pages,

you as the communications director, making pages that share the information appropriately,

that your congregation will feel comfortable sharing. So here's my invite page for Christmas.

Here's all the things you need to know, right? What time are the services? Where do I park?

What activities are going to be available? What can I expect when I get there?

Um, what service should I go to? Maybe that you have a service that's really busy versus

a service. It's not like, what do I expect for my kids? It's that kind of thing. It's more than just

their ads out there. It's all the work that comes before that, that you need to really work on.

So, um, fine tuning the marketing, um, you know, empowering some people around you to, to start to

carry some of that messages as well and get out there and connect with people utilizing some of the

digital assets, uh, to connect with at a, at a, at a personal level. Um, do that share, but also do a

personal followup, share that digital file, but also, you know, message it maybe directly to, or text them

so that there's a, a personal touches as well. Um, all of a sudden you can start to see stickiness to

it. You can see some, some of that, the marketing that you are doing is, is starting to go towards

more of a, of a warmer audience instead of one that's so cold. Right. So that's, that's some great

stuff. How was it? How was, and this is off topic and maybe this will come back around with something,

but how was it being under Leonard Sweet for four years? Amazing. Oh my gosh. So I, I have, I,

I honestly like have done research. I didn't remember it being that school, but I did research

in, in this, in this, like, he was that impactful. I was the same way. I was like, yeah, I want to go,

go work, study under him. That's incredible. Yeah. He, he's at, he's at several different seminaries.

Um, I think Duke is another one and I think there's another one as well. Um, because the,

the one at Portland seminary, they only accept 15 students a year into, he keeps his cohort really

small. I never knew where he was going to go next. So his breadth of knowledge, um, his insight into

things is just unbelievable. And he doesn't just use like, there were times where we'd be sitting in

his, cause the, one of the cohorts is his house. And so we were sitting in his house watching music

videos from YouTube. I mean, that's not something you'd expect from him, but he's like, yeah, let's

look at, um, what's the number one, like Spanish. It's the Despacito, but we're sitting there watching

YouTube videos, talking about the semiotics of these YouTube videos and what we can learn

for the church. Uh, we're watching movies that are, you know, not faith-based at all. And probably in some

ways, most Christians would be like, why would you watch that? And it's like, what can we learn?

What are the semiotics of this telling us? And how do you apply it to the church? Or we look at these,

uh, paintings from, you know, a hundred years ago, 200 years ago, 300 years ago.

Okay. Now what is this telling us about what these people believe in their faith? So I, I ended up

having much more respect for like, when you go into an old cathedral and all the images on the wall,

and if you, if you actually follow them, they tell the story of the church. They tell the story of that

particular community. And it's, it's like things you'd never think about until you really stop and are

asked to let's dig deeper in this. So it, when his knowledge, like I, as we were, as I was learning

under him, one of the things that I really learned to love was like the Jewish culture and the Jewish

history and how much that impacts what we read in the Bible. I don't know. I didn't think about that

before. I mean, right. I've been a Christian for 20 years, but it wasn't until he was like, okay,

let's stop and really think about like, what does it mean to go through the shepherd's gate? What does

it mean to like be a rabbi? What does it mean? Like all these questions that you don't even think about

until you start looking at the historical perspective of where Jesus grew up and Jesus lived

and that faith community. Wow. So if you have a chance to do it, I recommend it.

Wow. I don't, I, I seriously, I don't think I'm smart enough. Um, I remember like when, when I was,

I was out of college and, uh, I was reading, uh, I read it like my senior year and actually like reading

his book, uh, I started a.com 1999. I graduated December 99. So 2000, I literally started a.com

doing web design just because he made this statement that, um, there is more, um, technology

in a Casio Ironman wristwatch than the entire Apollo 11 space mission. Yet we, the church have not

changed how we're using technology at all since, you know, the seventies or sixties or whatever.

And it was, it was like, I want to, I'm doing, and so literally I started a.com doing web design,

had over a hundred clients that I was building websites for and flash and CD-ROM development

and hosting it. Like, it was just, was, was awesome. Um, but it was all, it was based off of

this man's book, but I swear like reading that book, I can only read like one or two pages at a time

because it was so thick with references and it was so, um, well-educated, you know,

that it just, and I saw, he actually, I follow him on Facebook and he, uh, he posted, it's the

20th anniversary of soul tsunami. And they're talking about re-releasing the book. And I'm like,

oh, I got to get that. Cause it just, but like even a soul cafe, um, he did a Starbucks parallel

that, that was really good. It's like, I've probably read four or five of his stuff and it's,

yeah, he just, he has a new one now that's, and I can't remember the title of it, but it's about

the ring of fire. Like that might even be the title, but, um, yeah, it's, it's always thought

provoking. Awesome. And that's, that's good. I love that. Hey man, I want to thank you for the time.

Uh, and, and I appreciate the conversation, Jennifer, with you jumping on with me today.

Oh, absolutely. Loved being here. Yeah. And maybe in any thoughts or anything as we're landing in the

plane. Uh, I think the big thing is like, trust your people, right? Empower your people to do things,

give them the assets they need. I mean, you don't have to do everything and be everything.

So the more you empower them, the easier it is to do marketing for the church.

Wow. Trust the people around you. That's, that's some really good advice, uh, especially in some

church environments. So well done. Hey, how can people find you on social media?

Yeah. So I'm on, uh, what Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, pretty much everywhere. Um, Jen,

a miles is my handle on all of them. So J E N a M I L E S. Excellent. Uh, well, Jen, uh, again,

thanks for the time. Appreciate it. Uh, listening audience. Great to have you on and, uh, we'll see

you next time here on the church digital podcast. Thanks everybody.