RX 24 - Clearing the Path for Movement - Jason Castelli

Transcribed Content

Let's give a warm Rock Community welcome to Jason. Well, thank you everybody. So good to be here. My name is Jason Castelli, and I serve as the central next steps director at LCBC Church. And so we'll talk a little bit more about what that means in a few minutes here because that language isn't necessarily intuitive. Right? But essentially, if you think through adult discipleship, that's kind of the space I get to live in. And so we've 23 campuses, physical locations across the state of Pennsylvania. And our model's pretty weird. So we range from our largest campus, our kind of our original one in Manheim, Pennsylvania. That's about 6,000 people. And then we've got campuses that range from 2,000, one thousand, down to a hundred And so we kinda run the gamut in terms of like size and scale. And it makes things complex, and so we do everything we can to attain that complexity. And so I've been in ministry for a man about, I guess, about eighteen years now and started with students, found out that that wasn't my jam and kinda learned my skills and gift sets and started working with adults probably about twelve years ago. And so I've been married to my wife Katie for going on fourteen years and that's a picture of our family there. So we are busy. Fourteen years, we've got four children. So our daughter Evelyn just turned 10, our son Judah is eight. And then after we we've been at LCBC for about seven years, so we moved down, got settled in for about a year, moved a couple hours away from friends and family to be part of the mission there. And we found out we were pregnant. And about twenty weeks in, we found out it was twins. And so we laughed and we cried and then we cried some more. And five and a half years in now, we are finally past survival mode I think. And so it's a busy, busy life. I used to have hobbies. I don't have any anymore. Church and family, those are the two things that I do. And so again, my role is to oversee next steps. And so kind of the way we break this down is we actually put our model on a a napkin. We're kind of encouraged to do that. So I'll show you what that looks like in a minute. But our mission, the way we talk about the mission that God has given us is LCBC exists to introduce people to Jesus and then together fully follow him. And actually this afternoon, we have another session where we kinda unpack and talk more deeply about, hey, well, do we define discipleship? And it's really both of those things. As a church, we lean very heavy unapologetically on introducing people to Jesus. And so our church is made up of a lot of people who are exploring faith, but we take that second half equally as serious that we our job isn't to just introduce people to Jesus, it's together fully follow him. And so here's how we kinda talk about what that looks like. In our church, you'll see our mission there. And then we accomplish our mission of introducing people to Jesus and together fully following him through what we call engagement. And so again, this afternoon, we're gonna unpack a lot more about what that engagement strategy looks like. And then we hold each campus, each ministry department to what we call core. And then through core, we really have two teams. We have campus and we have central. So our campus teams are the people who are boots on the ground out there leading people. And so their job is to lead their teams, lead people, execute core with excellence. And then our job centrally is why I'm sharing this with you is our job is to create products, processes, and training that really support them well in the efforts to go and fulfill the mission. And so we have to work together in partnership. Recently, we introduced this new thing called regional coaches, which again, just help us partner together with that, to accomplish the mission. And so again, that's our mission. That's what we're all about. And so we use the word next steps very intentionally because we believe that faith is both a process and a partnership. And so let's just talk about that for a minute. Faith is a process. I love how Paul puts this in Ephesians chapter three. He says, not that I've already obtained all this or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that which for Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it, but one thing I do, forgetting what is behind and straining towards what is ahead, I press on towards the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. Alright. Faith is a process. And sometimes in churches, let's be honest, we forget about this. Right? Somebody comes to faith and we just expect, cool, they're gonna have all their stuff together. It doesn't work that way. It doesn't work that way for our people. It doesn't work that way in our own lives when we sit back and examine it. Faith is usually one step forward, two steps back. That's just how it tends. And so we need to remember that it's a process, that as long as we have breath in our lungs, we have a next step to take. And you guys know the whole like theological stuff behind that. You've got the idea of justification that we are made right with God in a moment. That when we accept Christ's forgiveness, that we're made right with God. We're fully acceptable to him. But then there's this process of sanctification. Right? So the whole idea of becoming more and more like Jesus. That takes a lifetime to unpack. And then one day, finally when we die, I don't know how it all works, we get this idea of glorification that we're made fully who we were supposed to be. So we get this work of getting to partner with people in this process. And what a privilege that is that we get to be a part of that process of helping people to become more and more like Jesus. So it's a process, but it's also a partnership. Again, Paul says this in Ephesians, Philippians two, dear friends, you've always followed my instructions when I was with you, and now that I'm away, it is even more important. Here's what he says, work hard to show the results of your salvation, obeying God with deep reverence and fear. For God is working in you, giving you the desire and the power to do what pleases him. And so I hope that you feel that tension in there. Right? We're told to work hard. That, you know, God's not going to just make us into the people we wanna be without us putting in some effort. And so we have to help our people put in the effort. Alright. It's becoming more like Jesus. It's just it's not a natural thing because everything inside of us goes the other direction. Right? But we're saying, no. We've gotta put in the work and yet it's God's holy spirit prompting us to take those steps. It's not of our own desire. So it's a process that takes place over time and it's a partnership really between the individual person and the Holy Spirit, but also the work that we get to do and come in as a church. And so really what we wanna talk about today is, hey, how do we help that partnership? How do we create meaningful tools and systems that will actually help people take those steps towards growth? Because that's what you want for your people. That's what we want for our people. So how can we do that together? And so as we get started today, I'm gonna just share two really simple principles that will help us and then we'll look at some tools that we use as a church. And again, what I love is that I'm on the ministry side of things. I don't know where you sit in the whole tech world. I mean, I'm glad I could check my email. I have Facebook. That's about it. I'm not super technical. We've got a great team. Adam, our digital director is in the back of the room. We could answer some of those technical questions. What I'm trying to give you is a framework for how we use these tools essentially to just help people grow. Alright? So first thing we want to do is clear the path. Alright? And the second principle is point the way. These are the two principles we're going unpack today. We want to clear the path. We want to point the way. So clear the path is all about this. It's just a question of where are we taking our people. Essentially, you know what you want for your people, but we have to clear the path. We have to determine ahead of time what success looks like. And so this is why this is so important. As churches, we're gonna be pulled in a million different directions. Actually, our digital team talks about this all the time too. People will come to you with all kinds of ideas of what you should do, of what the church should be involved in. And we can't do everything. Okay, you already know this, but we're gonna be tempted to do everything. And so we have to determine what success looks like. It's about bringing focus and clarity to people so they know what to do. Okay? And I'm preaching to the choir here a little bit. I told you already that I four children. Alright? And I'm gonna be honest, working at a church is way more intuitive to me than being a dad. Like being a dad, being a husband, that's the hard work. Right? It's like, how do I do this well? How do I not screw up these little lives? And my wife is always reminding me because they'll do something like, you know, one of the twins will punch each other or they'll pull hair or they'll say something they shouldn't say. Right? Like, if you were here last night, was like, we don't what you're not gonna do is say shut up. Right? That's what we do. Like, I'm really good at saying don't do this thing. But she quickly reminds me, that's not enough. You can't just tell people what not to do. We actually have to show them what to do. And people don't know. It's not intuitive to them. So what we have to do is get really clear on what we're gonna do to make that happen. All right? And so by the way, if you have any ideas about what to do, instead of saying shut up, come find me later because I need all the help I could get. All right? So focus and clarity is the goal. So again, I'm gonna share with you what we do. This may not be what you do, that's okay. I'm gonna share our discipleship strategy. I'm not gonna unpack it here at length in this session. We'll do that this afternoon. But there's really a couple things that we focus on. And as we do, here's some guiding questions for you. I'm from Scranton, by the way, so I'm gonna insert Dwight Schrute wherever I can. Alright? Some guiding questions. How does a person grow at your church? Alright. How does a person grow at your church? What are the pursuits or benchmarks that help indicate someone is actually making progress? Alright. These may sound like really simple questions, but I guarantee you if you go back and you ask some other staff or maybe somebody who's part of your congregation to answer these questions, you're gonna get a million different answers. You know how I know? Because I do this every time I do a job interview. I do this every time I'm onboarding a new staff who's been part of our church for years, which means we have work to do in gaining clarity. I'll just say, hey, what do you think we do? Like, how would you define our discipleship strategy if you want to get real technical? Or, hey, how do you think a person grows at this church? And you would be like, oh, this is going be so simple. I'm going feel so good. I'm going get all the right answers. You get a million different ones and you're like, okay, we have some work to do. So as we're going through here today, I'm gonna share what we do. It doesn't have to be what you do, but I want you to think through, do you have clarity around these questions? What does how does a person grow at your church? And again, what are those pursuits or benchmarks? So here's what they are for us. It's super simple. Here's our pathway. We talk about gathering consistently with other followers of Jesus. Alright, that's essentially the weekend, it's your church gathering. Connecting in Christ centered relationships. So again, this is the idea of intentional connection with other followers of Jesus. Serving. And for us primarily when we talk about serving, we're talking about serving within the context of our local church. How do we unlock gifts and passions to help you use what God has put in you? And then we also have an external, component of serving that say, how are we making a difference in the community? And then inviting. Again, a clear indicator if someone's growing in their relationship with Jesus is this idea of they're gonna make disciples. Part of how we do that is people inviting other people both to church, but then also into a relationship with Jesus. And then living generously with what God has entrusted to them. So really these five things are our goalposts. Everything we do as a church, and I'm not being hyperbolic, comes back to these five things. And you might have noticed that, well I didn't say things like, what about milestones like trusting Jesus or baptism or personal disciplines like reading the bible or prayer. Do we care about those things? We absolutely care about those things. We absolutely resource around those things. Alright? That's part of the work of the local church. But we really believe it's all these five things working in tandem over time because faith is a process and a partnership that's gonna lead to someone growing in their relationship with Jesus. And what I love about this, if I had more time and I invite you to do this exercise elsewhere, is as you think through those five things, I think you will see in your own journey that these five things have played a role as you've learned to follow Jesus. And I say this so passionately because even as I stepped out of the church at LCBC, my first role was groups. Any groups people in the room? Anybody responsible for groups? A few of you. What you hear all the time, right, people are always like, oh, groups are how we do discipleship. Know, groups are the thing. And it's like, yeah, that's a piece of the puzzle, but it's not everything. Right? But everybody essentially wants to take their silo or their thing and say, hey, this is the most important thing. What we're saying is no one of those things on their own is the most important thing. They all have to work together. We have to get people in these environments. And as we do, we believe that God's gonna use that time and that space to grow them to be more like himself. Alright. So that's our pathway. So then let's talk about pointing the way. So clearing the path is about clarity around those pursuits. Then how do we point the way? And as we talk about pointing the way, it's really this idea of how do we remove as much friction as possible? And so show of hands, and this again, this is a little bit whatever, but how many people had to travel to get here by plane to get to RX 24? Right? Absolutely. And then you rented a car, you hopped in, you got to your hotel. Right? This is a testimony to the effectiveness of airport and road signage, right? Because no one of us intuitively knew how to get to this place on our own, okay? Unless you're old school and you just memorize stuff and you just got the path down. You gotta rely on those things. And so pointing the way is all about how do we create clarity around that? Because nobody likes to be lost or confused. So this is me back when I had hobbies. Remember I told you once upon a time I used to do stuff. So I used to go like mountain biking and rock climbing and hiking. And so I was out on a trail somewhere in Podunk, West Virginia with a buddy, and this was the signage that we saw over there. That's me in that picture. And it's not clear. Right? It's not clear. It's real confusing. What's the right path to take? I have no idea. A good trail marker there on the other side, you'll see is super clear. It's super prescriptive. And essentially, that's what we want for our people. We don't want to create confusion. We wanna create clarity. We wanna create focus. And you'll know that any time you start a new habit, it's hard. It's hard work, right? And there's just natural friction. And what I want you to remember as we're talking here today, as we get started, there are natural friction points for people who are coming to our church for the first time. We forget because we live in that ecosystem. It's just it's become natural and intuitive to us, but it's not natural or intuitive to anybody else. And so if you think about, like, you wanna start a new habit like jogging, right? You gotta remove the friction. And what you gotta do is set an alarm and then set off your clothes the night before so that when you wake up, you see your running shoes and your shorts so you don't have to think, oh, I can't find anything. I'm gonna give up. Or if you're gonna do a diet, it's like, I'm gonna stop buying the chips and the Twinkies because I'm gonna intuitively go to those things first. And so pointing the way is all about removing as much friction as we can. And so we do that through some different tools. And so clearing the path, some some markers there. How do we create markers and tools that take away the guesswork? Alright. Well, how do we create markers and tools that take away the guesswork? How do we create tools that facilitate the process with as little friction as possible? And again, wanna remind you, some friction is okay. That's just part of the process. People have to be willing to engage with some friction. We can't make it so easy for them that there's no friction because that's not how spiritual growth works. But we should remove all unnecessary friction so that we're not creating unnecessary barriers for people who are pursuing a relationship. So self reflection, again, as I share with you some of our tools, here's what I would love for you to think through. What are the things you want for your people, really? Like what are those things? And you have to take the time to answer this because there's a million different answers. But for you, your church, your unique context, this could look different. Answer those questions. What are the things you want for your people? Are you actually telling them what's important? Are you assuming they know? Again, we can make a lot of assumptions. I encourage you don't do that. We have to tell our people what's important. It's gonna feel so, so, so redundant to each and every one of us because we're gonna feel like we're talking about it all the time. And I guarantee you, there's people in your church who gonna be like, I've never heard that before. It's like, that's cool. You've been here for a decade. I don't know what you've been doing, but it's not news. And then do we have easy and clear on ramps? So think through these questions as we go through. Again, what we're gonna do for the rest of our time is I'm just gonna share some of the tools that we have. And I wanna let you know they're gonna point back to those five pursuits that we talked about of gather, connect, serve, get out, and live generously because we are super intentional about this. So much of you're gonna make, this feels kinda boring. It feels unoriginal. That's okay. We've been doing this for thirty years now, and it's effective. It just takes time, and it takes space. So Gather. Gather. That's our first one. So what do we do for Gather? One of the ways we facilitate this is by checking in. And my team made sure they say, hey, listen. Every church thinks they do check-in, right? So make sure you clarify this. So for us, when we talk about check-in, we're talking about adults checking in to a gathering. So this isn't about kid ministry check-in, right? You all have those numbers. Every week, we actually ask our people to check-in. It's part of what we call our vision and offering time. And so every week we ask them, we talk about a few things. Again, it feels redundant. We say, hey, check-in because we don't want you to just be a face in the crowd. This is one of the ways that we could care for you as a church. And so we've been doing this again for over thirty years where people have used, again back in the day, was just the program and their seat backs of just filling out that form each and every week. And by the way, that habit was easier to do back then because this church started as 150 people. Right? So when you're 150 people, it's a little easier to institute a habit than it is when you're 20,000 people. Right? But we started it then. And before COVID, we actually had about a seventy percent adoption rate of people letting us know they were there on the weekend. And then post COVID we hover between fifty and sixty percent. So how do we do this? Again, we wanna remove friction. So in our app, you'll see right at the top there, circled it for you, we have a check-in button. As you check-in through our logged in app experience, my profile pops up and it just says, hey, who's with you today? And I check-in my wife because she's joining me in the gathering. Our kids have a separate check-in process that we check them into their environments, but this is letting us know what adults are with us. And I love the intentionality behind this. Again, it wasn't my idea, I can't take credit for it, but because as an organization we value this, after you check-in, that's the next screen you're gonna see. We want you to keep the momentum going. We want you to take a step. So join a group, start serving, invite someone, give now. You'll see those are the other four engagements or those other four pursuits that we actually want for people. We're gonna continue to reinforce that. So that's the thing they're gonna see each and every week. Now with every digital solution we offer, we also offer analog, okay? Because the right tool is the one that works. So you're gonna have people in your church. You want everyone to go digital. I get that. That's awesome. We're at a digital conference. We should invest in those things. But don't forget about some of the other people. So you gotta have multiple ways for people to engage in these things. All right? And so we still do the old school program where people could let us know. And we don't get a lot of check ins that way, but we get some consistently. So by and large, our app facilitates that process for us and it works great. So that's how we have a tool for Gather. Then Connect. For Connect we have Group Finder. So when I started at the church seven years ago, we had more of life group model where groups met together till Jesus came back and you know, it's kind of like you guys have experienced maybe group link or group launch where again you get people, complete strangers in a room together and you speed date. And I'm not doubting that. If that works for you, like that's awesome. The right tool that works is the one that works. And for a season of our church, that worked really, really well. And then it didn't. And we started having diminishing returns on people joining a group, and probably for a number of reasons. So we changed a whole bunch of stuff about how we do groups. So right now we do groups in a semester model, so they start and stop four times a year. You're joining essentially for that four to six to eight week commitment. Again, the goal is to help facilitate relationships with people. So if people choose to stick together, that's awesome. We want that for people. I have to remind my team of all this, so that's why I'm telling you right now because I have PTSD. Because they're like, don't you care about people having long term relationships? Yes, we do. And a group is one of the ways we do that. And so we want to make it accessible for people. So one of the first changes we did, one of the first tools we implemented through Rock was our group finder. And so we actually have a video of how that works. See if that works for us. Go back. I have to do it this way. Technology, I told you. So our group finder essentially just lets you browse by categories. So we have different categories, meeting location, kids, the campus that you meet at. We're trying to add in a whole zip code search because again some of our campuses are pretty close together. And we think it's great if a group of people from another campus wanna connect with other people from a different campus. Like, that's not a barrier for us. But when we set up the tool, we didn't set it up that way. And so groups meet primarily through off-site, on-site, or online. So they're either at our church, they're in the community, or they meet online. So you could filter by any of that stuff. Again, are kids welcome, are they not welcome? What day of the week? And then you could filter by keywords and different things like that. So again, our goal is to put groups in front of people and make it as accessible as possible. So at any time during the year, people could go on Group Finder and find groups that are available. We do have four, again, focused windows of promotion time where we're saying, hey, we've got a bunch of new groups starting. You're likely to find, again, more groups to jump into. But we wanna kinda, again, limit the window for when people are looking for connection. In our old model, it was like, cool, we'd love for you to join a group. Come back in six months and we'll try to get you connected. And that just doesn't work on people's time frames. That's our group finder. You go to our website and explore that for yourself. So we gather, we connect. The next one is serve. See if I get this going again. Alright. So the other thing we do, I told you we have a digital version and we have, again, an analog version for everything. So this is what's set up in our atriums during group seasons. Again, try to make sure that you can't miss it. So we're gonna put a lot of signage. And right now, kind of the way we talk about it, our groups are for you. And so groups are for introverts and extroverts and activities and bible studies. They're for anything under the sun, and we want you to find connection. And so we make sure that in those promo seasons, we're gonna make sure that you can't miss the fact that we have opportunities to join a group. All right, on to Serve. So for Serve, again, within our church, we have what we call our Serve Finder and some other products. And so, again, sometimes people come and they share all the fun tools they have. And it's like, oh, that's great. Wouldn't that be awesome if we could do that? We're not hitting it out of the park at everything, and if there's one we have room to grow in in this year, it's Serve. I sit on what's called our central ministry team, and so we're kind of one of our focuses for the year saying, hey, how do we strengthen the culture and the value around Serve at LCBC? So right now, I'll be honest with you, our experience, on our website for getting people to join a Serve team, it's lackluster. Like, I'll share with you the stuff we have here today, but we're not happy with it because it doesn't give a lot of vision about what are the ways that I could use my gifts to serve. It's essentially a web form that people get to fill out. I have it there. So it's not bad. I'm not poo pooing it, but it's not where we want to be. So ready to start serving. Again, we make it simple. We remove friction by you. Just let us know. Contact us and we start a conversation. So they fill out a simple form and then someone from our team, follows up with them. And so again, it works well. We just think we could do that better. And so we're not satisfied where we're at with that. But what we have spent a lot of time and focused on over the past few years is making sure that when people raise their hand to serve, that we're giving them a great experience. And so we created what's called our volunteer onboarding process that lets every person who raises their hand to serve go through a very similar experience. Before this process was in place, it's like if you wanted to serve with kid ministry, it was very well defined, very well ironed out. Wanted to serve on the worship team. It was a completely different experience versus being a group leader. And so now we're saying we all follow the same framework, which is a matter of volunteer interest form, a conversation, an application, a test drive experience, and then ministry training. And so everyone follows a very similar framework so that you have a unified experience across ministries. So that's what we do for serving in house. We also have serve tools. So again, outside of a digital version, what we do is we have some different tools. We have what we call a passion card that we put out sometimes on seats that people could say, hey, here's what I'm passionate about. Here's what I'm interested in. And we try to match them up with opportunities around that. The picture there on the far right is a serve board, and so that just has different ministry environments like, hey, have guest experience. Do you wanna work indoors or outdoors? And so essentially red cards represent an opportunity. Again, super simple. You could do this. Someone comes, has a conversation, says, I wanna take a test drive. They write their name. We flip the card over. So, it's a good visual representation to help people know, oh, there are actually opportunities for me to serve in this church and and look at what those opportunities are. On the other picture there is a group of people taking what's called a serve tour. Alright? And so that's just they get to go around and experience different ministry environments. Again, the right tool is the tool that works. And so some people are gonna lean digital, some people are gonna lean the other way. And our job as a central team is to say, how do we resource this well for our people? One of the things we've made a lot of great progress on is serving outside of LCBC. So our digital team actually built a tool for us. They're gonna do a presentation on it tomorrow for a day we called Impact PA, which was just an all church serve day. Okay? So we encourage people across our state to get out and serve on May 18 from nine till noon. And this tool that was created actually had all the sign ups there. So you could again search by campus, by zip code, by area of interest, all kinds of fun ways to do that. And what was fun is we used this tool alone and we had over 9,500 people sign up to serve that day. And then we did a check-in experience. We had over 9,000 actually show up to serve. And so we were never done that before, so we were super pleased with that. But again, the tool removed those friction points for us. And so each year, we encourage our people to serve with local nonprofits. Really throughout the year, we do that through groups, we do that through focus serve efforts. One of the ways we do that is coming up, we call it easy to see in the fall. And so we'll use this tool where every campus will say, hey, we've got nonprofits that we partner with. We want you to go fuel their work through volunteering. And they'll be able to go on our website and find those opportunities so we could remove friction. Then we invite. So we gather, we connect, we serve, we invite. And so again, we've made this super easy in our app. Again, if you're on our home screen, you'll see the invite tool up on the right because we want to reinforce these behaviors for people. We want to make it easy. And so when you click invite, you can either send a digital invite to someone. So it'll create a social media post or DM them, or you could share a message. So if you're sitting through a weekend teaching and you're like, oh, so and so needs to hear this, you could actually go on and in that moment share that with the person so they could check it out. And so that's the digital invite mechanism behind it. We also have for years done paper invites. And so specifically, three times a year, we make this a big deal where we do, again, Christmas, Easter, and then in July, we do at the movies. And so all throughout June, we're encouraging our people to get, invites out to their friends. And what's fun is July has become our highest attended nonholiday attendance where we just see tons of new people show up because our people are doing the work of inviting. We've equipped them to do that. In fact, with, at the movies, we actually give them a box of movie theater candy, stick the invite to that, and say, take as many as you want and go invite friends. And so when when you get free candy, makes it harder to say no to an invite to church for what it's worth. But again, you'll see in everything we do, we wanna make sure we're putting these things out in front of our people. And so typically for three, sometimes four weeks, we'll keep these invites out to just say, hey, we're gonna create experiences that are compelling that you can invite your friends to. We're gonna hold to that, but you have to invite. You have the relationships. And so our people, they just do that. And it's really the reason that we're a growing church. It's because our people are inviting their friends and their families and their coworkers. And then live generously. All right, so live generously. Digital platform, we want to make it accessible. So for us at our church, we use Pushpay. Again, there's a bunch of great vendors out there you could use. Pushpay for us has just worked real, real well, and we want to make it accessible. So on our website, again, you're going to see multiple ways to give, online or mobile. Most of our people give through automated giving at this point, but again, we have the giving boxes in the back of the room. Some people still give by cash or check because that's gonna be their preference. Again, the right way is the way that works. And so just create opportunities and options for people. But you can't miss it. So we wanna make it accessible, and we wanna teach them how. So a few years ago, we went through Financial Peace University. We've been offering that as a group for years, but we did a concerted effort where we said, hey. For this season, we're all gonna do FPU. And, consequently, it was right before the pandemic, and we took 10,000 people through FPU. And it was so cool to see providentially how people got their finances in order and were prepared for that emergency because of the work that we did. But we wanna teach them how. So FPU is one of the tools that we just recommend for that. We also have the ninety day tithing challenge. So again, you guys all probably do this, but we just a couple times a year through Vision and Offering say, listen, we talk about giving here every week and we know that that's a step for you. And if you haven't done that yet, try the ninety day tithe challenge. And then again, we'll tell people, I don't if you do this, but we say, if you don't see God show up, we'll give you your money back. Alright? Then again, people are skeptical, that's fine. Say, you give to another church, that's great. We just want you to give. But make sure you be clear that if you give to another church, we can't give you your money back. So that's up to you. But again, we wanna teach them how because we're getting people who this is foreign for them. They don't know how to do it. So how do we remove friction? And then be upfront and transparent. So again, on our Giving page, just have a list of FAQs because people are especially skeptical in the area of finances. That's just the way that it works. And so we want to make sure that we are clear and transparent with them. So those are our five engagements. Those are the things that we focus on, we resource around. But I told you we care about spiritual disciplines, we care about Bible reading. So I just want to real quickly show you some of the things we do for that. So Bible reading. Again, in our app on our website you'll find a bunch of different Bible reading plans. Tyler, who's a part of our communications team, just shared in the last session about how we have a content strategy to reach people. But again, we wanna make it accessible, so we put Bible reading plans in the hands of our people. So this month, as a church, we're going through the book of Proverbs. So if you open up our app right now, it actually takes you through a guided process of reading that, self reflection, you could save your answers. And again, because there's people who just don't love digital, we actually gave out paper copies of that same Bible reading plan. And I'll tell you, they didn't move. There's still a bunch of them sitting around, but we made them available for our people. And so that's a little example of what that looks like. And then spiritual formation, because we get this question a lot. So we have a thing we call growth track, and it's different from how I think other churches use Growth Track in that it has no tie to becoming a partner or a member at our church. This is simply for people who are learning and growing around specific faith competencies. And so we developed essentially eight different four week small group curriculums where people could learn more about the foundations of what it means to follow Jesus. Primarily right now this happens through a group environment because again, that's one of our values is that people connect in intentional relationships. But even as we learn about the tools becoming available to rock, like you heard the learning management system this morning, we wanna move this to on demand when that's a tool so people could access the content, again, for the way that works for them. So our preference is gonna be group. But if somebody wants to sit down with their spouse and do that on their own, that's awesome. We're not gonna stop them from doing that. And then the last is partnership. So partnership for us used to be a series of four classes. And we really automated this to, hey, if you've come to First Steps, which is our environment, which is if you're new to LCBC, how do you grow here? Where we actually just talk through everything we just talk through. We walk them through hey, here are the tools that we have for you. Here's how we set the table. Because we want them to know how to interact with those tools. But then if they want to formally say hey, I want to be a part of this mission because partners have a part to play, they have responsibility. Or members, they get perks. There's no perk being part of the church, right? It's like you're gonna be part of the mission that Jesus has called us to, so you're gonna work together with us. So we've I'm already a partner. So in my logged in LCBC experience, you could see the workflow up top that I worked through. It says when I became a partner. But if you're checking out partnership, this is what it would look like if you haven't taken that step. So there's a workflow on the left that says partnership track. There's essentially, you watch a video from our lead pastor, you learn how to share your story of life change, you fill out your application, and then you have a face to face conversation with somebody who's part of our church. And our elders actually review each and every partnership application because we care about the people who are partnering with our church. Again, we're 23 physical sites plus church online, over 20,000 people, and yet every person who partners with us, we review their application because we care about that. And since we've moved to this on demand model, we've seen partnership grow exponentially. More and more people are actually engaging with it. And so that's a little bit about what we do. So these are just tools for the traits. Let me close with this, then we'll answer some questions. So just this is the reminder from Peter. Be shepherds of God's flock that is under your care. Watching over them, not because you must, but because you are willing as God wants you to be. Not pursuing dishonest gain, but eager to serve. Not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being an example to the flock. And I just wanna encourage you, these are some of the tools that we use to shepherd the people that God has given to us. Okay? And so the question for you is, what will you do to clear the path and point the way? As we wrap up our time today, you gotta take time to figure out what that looks like in your context. How do you clear the path, and how do you begin to point the way?