651: If You Build It, Will They Come?
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A reporter named Eric Mann all told me this thing a little while back, but I found totally fascinating. I knew nothing about it all. Eric was raised as an evangelical in Florida and works these days at Gimmel Media, and he's been reporting on this one part of the Christian world for a while. There's this whole Christian version of Silicon Valley, only instead of creating apps and tech products, what the Christian world is trying to do is use the tools of Silicon Valley to create churches. They'll call them church startups or church plants. And so what are some of the tools that they use that are the same? I mean, it kind of runs the gamut, right? If you can find it in Silicon Valley, it probably exists somewhere in the church-planting world. For example, there are bootcamps, where for maybe three or five days of your time, you can go and learn everything that you need to learn in order to start a new church. They have these big incubators, there's one in New York City, where over the course of two years, you'll come to get this product off the ground, this product, of course, being your church. And the same way that tech companies are obsessed with their origin stories, one thing you hear a lot is how they've gotten their start in garages. Church plants have their own origin stories. Over two decades ago, my wife, Amy, and I started Life Church in what was then a little two-car garage. That's from a video off one of these church's websites. They also have conferences. We're gonna go ahead and get started, glad you're here, we'll give you one minute, kind of our background. So this is a session at the biggest church planting conference in the country, it happens every year in Orlando, it's called Exponential, it's sort of the tech crunch disruptive of church planting. So we ease, again, our goal, our target is on church people, high conversion growth, right? So we're targeting them, so we're easing them in to the process of church. Now there's two gathering models, if you will. So they sound so jargony, like high conversion growth rate means they're trying to convert non-church people into church people? Yeah, it's really interesting. You actually kind of see this like blending of like techie jargon with Christian jargon in this world. I feel like in this particular seminar, they talk about kingdom return on investment or evangelistic networking is one I've read, or corporate renewal dynamics. Launch is a big word that they use in both worlds, right? They talk about launch Sundays and launch budgets and church planting. And the framing of what they're doing is in business terms, right? This is from a website from one of the gurus of this movement. His name is Tim Keller, I've actually heard one pastor call him the Yoda of church planting. He founded this incredibly successful church in New York City called Redeemer Presbyterian Church. And it's like also formed its own church planting organization called Redeemer City to City. So this is a video about planting more churches in New York City. And it's described entirely through business terms.
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