**Prayer Time Heir Waves episodes are edited for clarity and conciseness. Transcripts are generated using Machine Learning. They may contain typos, misspellings, omissions, and misheard words. Accuracy is not guaranteed. Please use for reference only.**

2024-01-24 Prayer Time - Jared Roth and Sprout Digital

Jared Roth: Let's start with prayer. Holy Spirit, we invite You to come and be Yourself in all of Your fullness. Give us words of wisdom and understanding and prophecy and faith and direction and help. Challenge us, break away old calcified thinking and put in fresh new ways of viewing things. Give us the sight of the Spirit, give us the taste of the Spirit, give us the Voice of the Spirit today.

Chad Williams: Thank you.

Jared Roth: Give us the courage to respond appropriately, in Jesus name.

Chad Williams: Amen.

Carl Nicolson: Amen.

Chad Williams: Amen. 

Jared Roth: Most of you here in the room or on the call are familiar with Sprout Digital and the work that that we've done. And most of you know that Anne and I discovered that we were too old to have credibility giving the results.

And our God-send is Chestly Chestly is going to facilitate most of our time today. Chestly Anne and I travel in some of the same circles. And we ended up meeting around digital events that were national or international events around digital ministry. And Chestly is a pastor.

He has apostolic gifts. He's had a variety of vocational ministry experiences. He's also a business guy and he is he is a noted presenter at business conferences and groups, seminars, that want to have somebody who understands Gen Z for marketing purposes that also has a faith point of view. And Chestly and I we met up for coffee a few months ago.

He was here in Portland at one of those events, hosted downtown at Convention Center. And so he has this broad range of experience. Chestly is for Ann and me a voice and face for Sprout Digital, and now as Sprout Digital is closing because we have finished our mission of the five projects Chestly is the beneficiary of the intellectual property and he's moving it forward as God will.

Thank you. leads him and he's at a variety of national interventional events this year as he's sharing this information and making that a part of the portfolio of Backgrounded services that he has to provide for others So just a touch of background about why we're interested in doing this stuff You know probably for most of us one of our favorite verses is what we call the Great Commission Jesus said, as you're going into all the world, make disciples.

And he said that as the incarnated and now resurrected Christ. So the incarnation and the resurrection did for us something that theologically, in terms of forgiveness and salvation and eternal life. The incarnation also, in Jared's opinion, demonstrated God's interest in sociology. Yeah, and hence mine.

When God decided that he was going to present himself in human form, he chose to be a Jewish baby. Yeah. That grew into a Jewish man, that was considered a rabbi, that had a following which was religiously and sociologically, culturally consistent with how rabbis presented themselves in itinerant ministry, et cetera, et cetera.

You all know this stuff. But God chose to present Himself in human form, the Incarnation, God in flesh, God in human form, not just physically, but in human form culturally as well, linguistically, culturally, and in human form. And so as God calls us to go into all the corners and nooks and crannies of the world to make disciples, it follows that the sociology of that is always a part of the Gospel message.

Missiologists have known this for centuries. If you're going to go to a place that's geographically, linguistically, and culturally distant, become a student in the language, in the culture, and in the geography so you can go there and present the gospel in a way that's intelligible to the people. Those of us who are local, though, don't tend to think as missiologists as naturally.

And we tend to think from our local, cultural, institutional base, how can I get people that aren't exactly like me to come be a part of my thing? So as a pastor, how can I get Gen Z ers to attend my church regularly, mature in their faith in their young adulthood, and stay as followers of Jesus in Christian fellowship?

And we know how that's working. Some studies suggest about 70% of kids that are being raised in churches regular churchgoers now leave church participation. They may or may not leave faith, but they are leaving fellowship. And so our question for kids that are churched is the study group that we looked at was 16 to 26 years of age.

The following generation is, are the Alphas, but Gen Z, how can we help them transition into young adulthood and continue in celebrating and practicing their faith in the context of community? And the second bucket of the population we were interested, how about people that aren't followers of Jesus, aren't?

Aren't in fellowship, but are spiritually interested and open and pursuing spirituality. That's our second bucket. How can we meet them? There's a third bucket, obviously, which are the people who have no spiritual aspirations in the generation. But generally, we wanted to look at the first two buckets.

Chestly's going to be differentiating somewhat between those two buckets. And we left the third bucket out on purpose, not because God loves them less, but because that wasn't the focus of our study. Sprout Digital's interest was, how can we understand the the merging of the spiritual aspirations of Gen Z?

And the technology preferences of Gen Z and how those merge into a way that we can create new churches, church planting, that will intersect with where they are culturally and how they behave naturally. And then secondly, how can we start churches or design ministry for Gen Zers that are not followers of Jesus but are spiritually open.

And so that's the context. Those of you that have watched the story, two of the studies were international, three of them have been national now. The rigor for this is the same rigor that Galliford would use, the Varna study uses, a PhD student would use this in his or her research. So the results that we've gotten on this national study are robust and and we can count on as as being at least statistically sound.

So with that, Chestly. Much better face and voice of Sprout Digital. 

Chestly Lunday: I'm not so sure about that. You're a pretty looking guy, no I appreciate you, Jared. And obviously everybody here has a lot of honor. I could tell for what Jared's done and I am right there with you guys. I came to Jared a couple. It was probably a little over a year and a half ago now, when I was in Portland and said, Hey, I got this idea.

I've been in innovative digital ministry. And I was having the same problems that him and Ann were talking about where when you talk about digital ministry to church leaders and church adjacent leaders. Like their eyes would glaze over and I'm like, I think we might be missing the point. Digital is a tool.

It's a means to an end. It's not the end itself. And so we need to put some academic rigor behind the why. Why digital? And I believe it has to do with unlocking Unlocking opportunities to serve Gen Z and Millennials, specifically Gen Z, but I'm a Millennial, so I'm a little selfish. I want, I still want my generation to be reached too.

We went on that journey and did our first two studies together about leadership and technology. And so I'm gonna, I'm gonna talk a little bit about that and then we're gonna get into our newest study. Jared, talk to you a little bit about The quantitative validation, we had about a thousand people in our surveys on this last one, not about, we had a thousand surveys taken from 16 to 40 year olds.

So what you're about to see is a snapshot of the nation as a whole with faith open. Individuals, 16 to 40 years old. This is what they think about faith right now and how they're thinking about it will shape the next 5 to 10 years. And so we found in our first set of studies, I'm gonna I'm gonna share screen with you guys.

We found in our first set of studies really something that I found very interesting. We believe that the future of faith is 1 of 3 things we found 1st. That is Omnichannel and what Omnichannel means is, it means when somebody wants to interact with you, they want to interact in any platform that they deem.

Convenient for them. When I get asked what should we be, which platform should we be on? Social media, Facebook, YouTube, email, text, and the answer is yes. Which is not easy to do without automation and some other tools that are at your disposal. Hence, digital strategy, which everybody needs, whether you're in business or in the church.

The next thing is decentralization. Decentralization is being forced into the limelight with all of our institutions, not just because of religion, but because of our social needs at the moment are being shaped by digital disruption. Do you guys remember Napster at all? Yeah. Napster was the first time that you could bypass a middleman and have basically individual sovereignty and and get what you needed for yourself without asking for permission from a gatekeeper.

And while the music industry sued a lot, the reality is that piece, that principle has begun to expand in every aspect of our society. And Gen Z has never grown up in a time that hasn't had that at their disposal. Just think about that for a second. We used to go through a process, and I say we, I was at the very end of this because I'm a millennial go through a process to be ordained with with ministries or get credentials and go to business school and you would have these spots along the road where you like, you had to meet a gatekeeper and you had to pass through their process to be deemed credible.

That isn't the case for Gen Z. They're actually hearkening back to what what I would call a rabbinical model that was in the first century. Your credibility in the first century was your life and your message. And so today we're coming back to what is your credibility as a person? It's what is your reputation and what are your skills, period.

I don't care about the paper on the wall. Now some people do, and some institu and most of them are institutions. But, what we're finding is young people are bypassing the institution and say I can do it myself. And my results will speak for itself. And so that's what we mean by decentralization. The next thing is relational.

We found that people didn't want to listen to a sage on the stage. They wanted to listen to their friends. They wanted to listen to their family members and somebody that they had an equitable relationship with. Now those are the three mega trends we find in the future of faith. Can you imagine what faith is going to look like?

And this is for any religion in the U. S., not even just faith open Americans. Like it's going to change the landscape over the next five years. And so we had some questions out of the first study that were like, Oh, we want to drill down on that more like psychological psychological training and mental health and emotional health being a part of spiritual formation.

We didn't know that was going to come up and be in the fruition. Some of our cultural messaging over the last few years is heading that direction just as a society. But it was a big deal. And so we wanted to drill down on what does that look like? What do they actually mean when they say that?

We got a really big what I would call yellow flag from institutional leaders. When young people say, we don't want a person in charge. We don't want hierarchical leadership. We want everything decentralized. They're like, What does that mean? Do we not want leaders at all? The answer is no. It's way more nuanced than that.

And so we got those answers in the, in this past study too. And so I want to share the three megatrends in this latest study that we have. And that is the future of church in America will be personalized. It will be smaller, and it will be holistic. That, while we say that a lot as pastors, that to be to care for more people we have to get smaller, the reality is, we don't do a good job of practicing that.

This next generation demands it, and and if you don't do it, they're not going to make a big fuss about it like other other generations. They're just not going to join. They'll do their own thing. Personalized means it's going to be highly customized to them and what they need. No more blanket messaging.

They're not used to that any other place than in the church, on a stage, on a Sunday morning. It's the only time we get, oh, this message should be for everybody. The reality is, in our lives, we have customized message every other place. And the truth is, the church needs to get on board if they want to reach Gen Z.

Second is smaller. They want it smaller. I'll just tell you a story. I was, when I started down the digital pathway, the one of the things that I realized really quickly with Gen Z as I was serving them in my church I had a young teenager sitting on my couch in my room. I could tell visibly something was wrong.

And so I said, do you want to talk about it? And they said no. And part of the reason is because we had a crowd of people. But she was not very she was not very vocal anyways, she was shy. So we had been beta testing a digital community app. And I said, why don't, if you feel comfortable, why don't you just DM me?

Five minutes later, I get a ding on my phone, it's her. With three paragraphs long of things that I didn't even want to know. And it was at that moment that I'm like, Oh, we're doing this wrong. It's things are shifting and we don't even know it. These Gen Z ers. Require a safe relationship with somebody before they opt in to a public relationship with someone that is huge.

What that means is you're going to have intimate spaces and relational spaces and that requires small. The next thing is holistic. This is not just about their spiritual life. If spirituality is done correctly, and we believe this anyways, we say we believe it, but the reality is they're asking us to practice it, that faith should be about every part of your life.

It should be as practical as it is ethereal and theological. And we're gonna, I'm gonna show you the five areas that we dug into. And just pull out some of the stats and then I want to go through it pretty quickly. We'll make sure that everybody gets the deck. And then I really just want to have a conversation because nobody wants to hear me talk for 50 minutes.

I don't even want to hear me talk for 50 minutes. Yeah, so we'll get started. So spiritual formation, what we found here, like I said, spiritual formation cannot be a cookie cutter process in the future. The leaders most effective with the next generation will focus on a customized approach that will focus on the whole person.

Now, while we're talking about spirituality, I believe this reflects culture as a whole. As a leader in a business and in the marketplace, this is still true. Any development shouldn't be a process that is like you just, that is generic and everybody goes through this. They're looking for a customized process to go, how do I fit in this place?

So if we want to be a better, more effective leader, this can work cross cross the market, cross religion, cross

The next thing we saw was active and non active Christians. So what we did is we split what is active Christianity look like versus non active. Even though your faith open, where are you at? We felt like it was very important to say, okay, I'm open, but I don't, I'm not active in my Christian faith or I'm open, but I don't believe it.

And then we rated what is a level of participation and activity and engagement. And so we went from zero to five, five being the most engaged, and that's they're coming twice a week, they're serving, they're inviting their friends, and they're giving regularly. That is our highest level of engagement in the church.

And so when you see a five in engagement with these kids, that means they're more engaged than even most Americans on a Sunday morning. That being said, the overwhelming majority of our cases were in the somewhat active. Or the, I'm a believer, but not active. There's an opportunity for us to re engage them in faith.

What we found was they talked about learning sessions in our first study. And they said, we want more learning. We want to be able to be trained and taught. And one of the things we found was, the top three things that they said they wanted, was they wanted to learn how to create a life of peace. They wanted to recognize God's voice, and they wanted to discover their personal purpose.

Now, when we split this up between active in their Christian faith and non active in their Christian faith, this was really interesting. Still coming in number three for non active was, how do I hear God's voice? I find that great, because that means they're still looking. And obviously, if you're less active, you still want to create a life of peace and you want to discover your personal purpose.

So it doesn't matter if you're it doesn't matter if you're active or inactive in your faith, those three things cut cross culturally. If you talked about those three things in your faith community and your small groups as a leader to younger people, you'll hit people all over the spectrum. Now while we talked about faith open Americans, I believe this is true, at least discovering your purpose and how to create a life of peace is also an evangelistic message as well.

People that aren't even looking for God are looking for the answers to those questions. And asked some other questions what about how to study scripture, community prayer, develop spiritual practices. Those were, those had some some engagement with those, but not not nearly like the top three did.

The next was, yes, sir. Yeah, 

Jared Roth: say for the sake of those who are on on a smaller device where you just Read through, for example, that list of factors that we looked at.

Chestly Lunday: Yes, sir.

Jared Roth: Go ahead and vocalize the list in the left hand columns. 

Chestly Lunday: Okay. Yeah. The the types of learning sessions that we we threw out and said, "Here's some options." Here are the options that they had:

How to create a life of peace.

How to recognize God's voice.

How to discover your personal purpose.

How to study scripture.

Community prayer.

How to develop spiritual practices. 

How to build lasting friendships.

Financial health. 

Emotional intelligence coaching.

What the Bible says about sex. 

And then "None of these."

Or "Others, please specify."

So yeah, they were a broad range of subjects and we, I think we had a pretty clear winner on all, on the top three, the next thing we did is we we talked about mental and psychological development. Now the slide that I'm showing, we split it up into we split everything up, every question up into how active they were.

But I found this one super interesting. The reason why is because it changed the more active or the less active you were in your faith. And yet, there were some things that were cross cutting. And I really want to hone in on, on one in particular. If you were to say what sort of psychological development activities would be best for growing your faith that a Gen Z and millennial would want to engage in, what do you guys think it was?

I'm just, I'm asking, so I want to hear, I want to hear answers. It's not rhetorical. 

Carl Nicolson: I'm embarrassed to say I don't know. 

Chestly Lunday: That's fair. Thanks for the vulnerability. 

Chad Williams: I would probably throw out the relationship building and then working with stress and anxiety, because they seem like they're big time into performance, and they want to succeed, excel, and everything they do. And so with that comes some anxiety because did I do it the right way? They know they're also probably going to be, evaluated because so much is happening on social media, etc. I'm thinking coping with just anxiety and then relationship building because a lot of their life is in a digital world.

So there may be less contact with people sometimes. So when I work with a lot of, probably Gen Z-ers, they're in the gaming world and things like that, and they always tell me that when they're not in their gaming world they struggle a bit more to connect with people and build relationships.

Chestly Lunday: Yeah that's really good insight. So when we asked them, they had they had, a list of things they could choose from, and the number one thing we found was life planning.

Chad Williams: Nice. 

Chestly Lunday: None of us saw that coming. By the way, , I work with Gen Z too, and none of us saw it coming.

Jared Roth: Mental and psychological development will most help you develop your spirituality.

Chestly Lunday: So I believe that the church has an opportunity in this, but businesses have an opportunity in this. You want to develop. The young people, they want help planning their life, and if you'll actually take some time to do that, man, it'll be a game changer for them, and I have this saying, that "people endear themselves to those who empower them."

Period.

I believe that the more you empower an individual, the more they'll want to stay with you. So many leaders are afraid that if I train them and I pour into them, they'll leave. Maybe, but if you don't, they'll stay. That's a joke, that's a joke. Yeah, but no, the truth is, actually, if you pour into them, they might want to stay even more.

And then you have that much better of a leader to hang around with, and you move to like Jesus calling his disciples friends instead of followers, and we have that opportunity what we found is life planning was the number one thing that Gen Z and Millennials were asking for when it came to psychological, mental and psychological development that would help them grow in their faith.

The beauty of life planning, you. Is all of these had this in one of their, one of their spaces and four of them in particular had life planning within their top three goals. So I find this wonderful. If you're somewhat active in your faith, it wasn't even close. 38 percent of people that were somewhat active in their faith said life planning was great.

Stress and coping, stress coping skills was up there. Relationship building skills were up there, and that was also cross cutting. Mental wellness coaching for people that said, I'm a believer, but I'm not active. The reality is, if we can get them in community, I think some of that will dissipate.

And and then one of the other things we found is for young people that weren't believers, they wanted addiction support groups because they know they have problems. This is also one of the reasons why I think the light show and the fun concert is not working anymore. They did that and they have that in every part of society.

It's not that it's not it's not that they don't want it. It's now a permission to play. Does that make sense? So they're looking for something more, but they expect a level of excellence because they've had it. Boomers were growing up, when you had electric car, electric guitar on the stage, that was something new and amazing.

For us younger people, that's just church. As it always has been. So they're looking for more now. They're looking for something more substantive. They now have the style, they have the sizzle, now they need the steak, right? The next thing was gatherings, and I'm gonna move a little bit quicker here. So young faith open Americans are adamant in their desire for small groups and are only willing to give more time to their spiritual formation once they are bought in.

And while that's okay, Captain Obvious, it's still a huge deal. They're not going to give more time until they're ready to commit to you. And so when we try to get more time out of them before they're ready, we're actually doing a disservice to us. The other thing that I felt is really important for us to look at is how they want to gather.

So we gave them a couple of options. We said How would you like to do it? In person small groups, in person one on one, in person medium groups, online small groups, online one on one, online medium groups, in person large groups, online large groups, in person very large groups, online very large groups, or none of these.

Or if you want to tell us what your idea is, then you can, which is the other please specify. So here's the deal. They said the overwhelming majority of them said they only want to meet once a week. Spiritual formation, and then the overwhelming majority of them said, I want to do it in an in-person, small group. . 

And then the next choice. So that was 49% of them. 43% of them said in-person one-on-one. Then it went down to in-person, medium groups to 38%. Then online, small groups at 37%. In fact, when you parse this out, based on their activity, their faith activity. Online small groups were one of the best ways that not engaged unbelievers said they wanted to meet.

Why? Because it creates anonymity and it gives them the ability to stay distant relationally and feel psychologically safe until they're ready. And so we find that digital is still a really good front door into connection and relationship with other people. And I will go, I'll put on my practitioner hat.

I believe communities of practice and learning communities are one of the best ways to do that. Find something that they need to learn, i. e. life planning, put a course together and they'll backdoor themselves into a community and want to spend more time with people and they won't even realize it.

That's good. The next is organizing structure. Young Faith Open Americans want leadership that empowers them and model, and then models what they say they believe. That's obviously, we, that is true. We all want that, right? 66 percent of young faith open Americans want a clear leader who oversees the health and direction of their faith community, but empowers others to lead where they are gifted and passionate.

So in our first study, we saw, we don't want hierarchy. We don't like it. It's way more nuanced than that. When we actually drilled down on it, they said, actually, we want a hybrid structure. We want somebody that oversees the health and direction of the faith community. But we want people to, we want them to empower other people to lead.

We don't want you to be the star all by yourself. And we're going to see more and more of those leaders that are community designers and empower people rather than just sages on a stage. While that's important and it has its place, there's going to be more communicators, I believe, in the future, especially if we move more digitally.

The next thing we did was generosity. I could talk all day about generosity and what we found because we found that you can step it up in specific ways to actually engage people that have never given and aren't even connected to the church, believe it or not. You do that well and then you'll boost the giving and you don't have to wait the mandatory two years from somebody coming inside the building to giving their first time.

You don't have to wait that long. You just have to go right, engage them, engage their heart before, beforehand. What we found, 77 percent of young faith open Americans have given their personal money to a church, religious group, or faith community. Guys, this is huge. This is People think that young people aren't as generous as old people, and what we're finding is that is not the truth.

We parsed this out because we asked, okay, would you give to any non profit organization? They said yes. And then we asked the question again would you give time, talent, and money to those non profit organizations? Yes. And then we find when we got specific about church, religious group, or faith community, it was still 77%.

That is huge. Huge. Engage their hearts. You will get their pocketbook. I promise you that. And you also better tell them where the money went, because they are big stricklers on that. Yes, sir. That is very true. Oregon State had a big fundraising day about three months ago. And they raised, I don't know, 15 million dollars or something crazy.

But they looked at who gave the most. For a class, for a graduating class, not the amounts, but how many people gave, and the top three classes were the current students. Wow, that's incredible. Anyway, I, you have guessed it. Yeah. The powers that be keep overlooking millennials in Gen Z. When comes to giving they gave 10 bucks.

15, 15, but they gave numbers were huge. I'll tell you a quick anecdotal story. When I was a young adults pastor at my church in Phoenix, we had a had a young. I always have young people at our house and one of them I asked that we were talking about giving and she's I don't give I'm like tell me why.

I'm not going to tell her that she's not doing a good job. Part of it was we were having a generosity sermon at our series at our church. And she's I net 100 a month after all my classes are taken care of. She's I don't have enough money to give. I said how much could you comfortably give?

She's 2. 2. 2 She's but they don't want my money. Not when it's only two bucks. I was like first off, it's not about the church's money, whether they want your money or not. It's about you and your relationship with Jesus. But Why do you feel embarrassed about that? She's because it's only 2.

So I said, so it's better that you don't give at all. Generosity. This same girl a couple months later, we had a young guy. That's 1 of our still volunteer staff. I don't like calling them volunteers, but for sake of clarity he came to a youth event and then he got robbed. His car got broken into all of his tools got stolen and he's an electrician and this is right in the height of COVID.

He, he was gonna, he wasn't gonna be able to work, and so I got on a text message to all of the people in my ministry sphere and said, Hey, let's raise some money so we can go buy him new tools. Mind you, he had never had new tools in his life. He never had new tools, so this was really great. She gave 25.

The person that said she couldn't give 2 gave 25. And then we had 800 within two hours. And we were able to buy him brand new set of tools for everything. And it was a great God story. People will give, they need a need. They want to see what it actually does. And it makes a huge deal in their community.

And so while young faith, open Americans are open to being generous within a faith community. They must be given appropriate on ramps based on the level of faith activity, which I already said. And we can, if you want to know more about generosity and how to do that, I'd be love to show you in depth research. later on, but we don't have the time.

Personal branded leadership. Now, this is a fun one because every time I talk about personal branding with the leaders, they get all bit out of shape. But the reality is the digital world matters so much that digital marketing is so important for reaching the next generation.

And it's actually, believe it or not, it is important if you're in a business, it's important if you're in a church. Why? Because the more people need trust for your relationship with them, the more a personal brand matters. Your reputation is what people think of when they think of you. And if they don't know you, they do not trust you.

How do you get known? You get on social media and you become a consistent player on social. This is actually, there's research out there that I started listening to, which is why we decided to do this for churches. That is in the business space that I'm like, Hey, I think this is really important cause I'm seeing the level that millennials and Gen Z said mattered was way higher.

Gen X and Boomers . So if you wanna be successful in any arena you're at as a leader, you need to have a personal brand. That doesn't mean you can be arrogant, and it doesn't mean that you can act like you're God's gift to the world. Yeah, they still want humility. They still want authenticity, but they do wanna know you 'cause that's important.

So 62% of Americans say religious or spiritual groups could reach young people if they better use technology. I believe after spending over 30, 000 of learning digital marketing, when they say better use technology, that's what they're talking about. Is understanding how to use digital marketing in a way with the infrastructure that digital technology gives you to begin to communicate one to one.

With each person at scale. So what do I mean by that? Digital technology allows us to have mass communication to one person, not mass communication to millions. While that is the case, we as the speakers feel like it's mass communication. But you guys are experiencing me one to one, not one to a million.

So if I talk to you like I'm talking to one to a million people, we're not gonna connect. Digital technology allows us to talk one to one where you feel like you're building a relationship with me over time. And while we've always had this with celebrities The truth is we have this more now than ever before through digital marketing channels, YouTube, social media.

We need to be able to leverage it well to reach the next generation. Why? Because 57 percent of young Americans open to getting involved in a Christian faith community would trust their Christian faith community more. If their faith leader had an established and meaningful personal brand, that's huge.

That's almost six out of ten. And the four are people that actually need real relationships. So they're still going to end up finding you. And so that is why it's important. So those are the five areas that we found are important. My kids are getting help with school, so they know to be quiet though.

It's snacks. You can see her climbing, getting snacks. Say hi, Kizana. 

Jared Roth: Chestly, it's Jared.

Chestly Lunday: Yes, sir.

Jared Roth: While we're here I'm going to ask you to address a paradox, an apparent paradox. We started out with we want we don't like hierarchy.

Chestly Lunday: Yeah.

Jared Roth: But we do want structure.

Chestly Lunday: Yep.

Jared Roth: We do want a facilitating leader. But we don't want that leader to do most of the stuff and we want the leader to have a personal brand. Can you wrap that into a model that, what that might look like? Because to me it's confusing. 

Chestly Lunday: Yeah so here's what I would give you an example right now that you might know. And that's Dave Ramsey.

Dave Ramsey's model, I believe, is with some tweaks, will be the new model for Church in the Digital Age. Dave doesn't have a lot of authority for how things are done with all of the classes that are being done with Financial Peace. But the reality is he's the one bringing the overarching content on a daily basis.

He's doing it three hours a day on his radio show. And now he's developing other voices because he realizes, I think he realized late that he needs to have a succession plan. And the reality is, even at 37, I need to have one. We need to be raising up new voices and new leaders. But I have a principle called frequency.

That means that I can say the same thing as Donald Trump. And I'm using him. I probably, that's probably the worst example ever. But the truth is, we could say literally the same thing. And a portion of the population will despise me and love him, and another portion will despise him and love me. We could say the exact same thing.

Why? Because of frequency. And I believe it's important to have more voices in our messaging. And then, but beyond that, so what do you see is he's got a set of steps to help develop financial peace in your life. Most churches do not have a fully developed transformation or discipleship plan. It can't even define it.

Like you go into a discipleship group at a large church, and the people that are paid to do this, and ask them what their common definition of discipleship is, and you get eleven different answers from nine different people. And we gotta do better at that. I believe Dave Ramsey does that well, the seven baby steps to financial peace, right?

And then what he does is he empowers leaders. That have bought into the DNA of Financial Peace University. That run the class. He's not there, right? He's not doing any of it. He recruited a bunch of people in churches where he found a bunch of pools of people that love the message, have followed the process and now want to help other people follow the process as well.

Now, I believe there's digital infrastructure that can go along that, that can actually help. Connect people even in towns that don't realize that these small groups getting together are actually connected with one another. And so I believe there's a digital component that can be done there. And whether you're in a building or outside of a building, I believe that's the new model for church going forward.

That has a lot of challenges with it, to be honest with you. It's not cut and dry, it's not a continuum of this is a more holier model. I don't believe that. I believe all models are flawed. Some are useful, and this is probably the most useful one going forward. What that means is that the leader that's setting the culture doesn't have a lot of authority to make sure things get done.

What they have a lot of authority to do is to engage you and empower you on the mission and give you a pathway. To to follow and so that's where the, that's where the paradox comes. You have a lot of a relational authority and no institutional authority, and Dave Ramsey does this well.

His institutional power is based on the 500 people that work for him to serve the thousands of people he's serving. If they want to walk away at any moment, they can. And so he doesn't have, I believe he has real influence, but he doesn't have power. And so he has a message, and the message has power. +And as long as he's a good steward of that message, it's going to go well.

So that's the paradox that I see there, Jared. 

Jared Roth: And if you use that as an example It you, it's telling that you didn't go to I'm using this word understood here, you didn't go to the church to find a current example of this. The church institutionally is designed around the small business model, which includes real estate and salaries.

And the income is around conviction rather than need or fee for service. 

Chestly Lunday: Yeah.

Jared Roth: And Dave is not in the church, and he's in this other cultural fee for service community, and he's created a very profitable economic model. which is not available in our current church structure, so that's not a problem, it's just to acknowledge that it's very difficult for an existing church to figure out how to morph this way, again, because the economic structure of it, and the ecclesiastical structure depending on the church, which weights authority and power toward the top, are both antithetical to the model you're describing. 

Chestly Lunday: Yeah, I think if you look at the prevailing model of the church, and I'm a product of that model, so I'm not saying I, Anything against it? Just the pro.... The primary product of the prevailing model of churches is Sunday morning, and what I see moving forward, the primary product of the church moving forward should be the discipleship pathway.

Carl Nicolson: . Yeah. 

James Autry: Yeah. I keep hearing the words and I've heard of for the last two or three years. Jesus said, "Go, and make disciples." And he said, "I will build my church." 

We decided it would be better for us to build the church and let him have somebody else make disciples. That's the Holy Spirit's job. He didn't say that.

He said, I'm going to build my church. You go make disciples and I'll bring them together to be an _ecclesia_ that's going to change the world. And we've opted his job and forgot about what he commanded us to do.

Chestly Lunday: Yeah, at the heart of Dave Ramsey's system, and this is true of all influencers and creators online, is it's not an institutional model, it's a relational one.

And while Dave doesn't have a physical one-on-one relationship with everybody that he's serving, they have a relationship with him. And we're just going to have to be mindful of that moving forward and we'll have to have some structures in place that help with the, that I believe the spiritual and mental health of the leaders that are doing it because it's content heavy, but it's content heavy in a different direction.

If that makes sense. Like it's content as currency, not as king. So the pulpit used to be inside to the people that were coming. Now it's outside to the world. And which brings a lot of cool things that happen with it from an evangelistic perspective. It also brings in our current culture a lot of scrutiny.

That a lot of people can't hold up to. And so character is going to be, character formation is going to be huge over the next few years, I believe.

Carl Nicolson: Yeah. 

James Autry: Yeah, when we were doing the Christian Chamber, we had a gentleman give us a presentation on a postmodern culture. And what I got was, oh my gosh, we're no longer in freshwater.

We're now fishing in saltwater. We've got to change the bait. We've got to change the strategy. Because you can't fish in a pond the same way you fish in the ocean. They're totally two different worlds. And that's the strategy, and that's where God's calling us. "Come on out. Get out of the lake and get into the ocean."

"It's a different world out here, and you're going to have to do things differently to reach people, but you're still going to be able to be fishers of men." And I love that. We had a millennial scientist, researcher, got his name, Ron Fry works with him, Jonathan Seale, and he said the attitude of believers, no, the attitude of particular Portland people, And he said that most Portland people are, the phrase that sums them up is, "I don't believe in God, but I sure do miss Him."

Chestly Lunday: Yeah. Yeah, it's true. 

Jared Roth: Chestly: Jared. I took us way out there to what new models might look like. Thank you for your response there with an example. Somebody who primarily is a personal brand with a process. And Dave is everywhere. He has a massive TikTok following. He has found his way to different platforms to validate and to extend that personal brand.

If we were a group of church planters, it would be very fun for us now to sit around and ideate, not only ideate about new models to experiment with. So that's the church planning thing. Most of us are probably part of an existing church. And I just wanted to bring it back in and give my own opinion.

I think that 99.5% of what we discovered in this study and others, and by the way, Chestly, thank you. It you have given us about 3% of the material that we gained in this last study all by itself. So it. It's phenomenally rich and deep, but you've creamed some really helpful stuff.

Chad Williams: I want more.

Jared Roth: My, my belief is that about 95, or 99. 5 percent of what we learn in the study is immediately applicable to an existing church, whatever form that has. If it has an interest in reaching Gen Z and just simply moving toward toward topics and moving toward venues available to people that are riding the wave of that generation's culture are easy adaptations for us to make.

And now now Jared the preacher wants to say this one thing. Because occasionally I get some feedback about, this sounds like watering down the message or that we've all heard the stories right? That's war against culture. I just want to say this, Jesus favorite question was, "What do you want me to do for you?"

And if Jesus were asking this survey, his question is, "Gen Z, What would you like for me to do for you?" And she would say, I'd like for you to help me with life planning, relationship development, and reducing my anxiety and stress.

And Jesus response would be, "Okay." 

And then He would do that. 

His favorite response was, "As is your faith, be it unto you."

"If you have faith to ask me to help you with that problem. You're going to get what you ask for." And sometimes in Scripture, they ask for the wrong problem to be solved. And He solved that problem on His way to solving the real problem. So He healed the guy and forgave his sins. So it doesn't mean that we don't get the sins forgiven when we answer the problem that's being asked to be solved.

And so this study, again was hopefully a way of asking the Jesus question of this generation in America: "What would you like for Jesus to do for you?" 

Pastor Addy: I was just about to hit you with that question you just answered. That's the question I wanted to ask you. What is your goal, especially for the second group of people, the unbelievers?

What are you really after? Is it just gathering them, or getting them married, getting their needs met? What is it at the end of the day that you're trying to achieve? If you just answer that for me. 

Jared Roth: Excellent. And if I could, Pastor Addy, to go back to my opening remarks, I started with a scripture. It's all about the mission. As you're going into all parts of the world, all the nooks and crannies, all of the geographic, linguistic, cultural, religious, social, generational pockets, make disciples.

That's the goal. The major is disciples made. And you can't make the disciple without the incarnation. And the incarnation is God coming into human forms and participating there to bring regeneration of life into those forms and out of them. Transformation.

Carl Nicolson: Wow.

Chad Williams: Awesome. I'm so excited. I love this Gen Z, because I feel like, based on some of you guys findings, that they're taking us back to being a New Testament church, because I feel like so much of what they desire was markings in our New Testament church. Discipleship, one on one, small groups, et cetera. I don't know, it gets me super excited. Thank you for sharing today.

Chestly Lunday: Yeah, you guys are in Portland. And John Mark Comer is a friend. Somebody that I listen to and read. I would love to meet him in person one day. But he

Nilaksha Fernando: I can make that happen.

Chestly Lunday: Yeah, can you? That'd be awesome.

Nilaksha Fernando: Yeah, definitely.

Chestly Lunday: Yeah he I just picked up his new book today actually yesterday practicing the way I, what I wanted to say about that is he says most of digital actually is is not helpful.

And while that is the, there is the case from a psychological and neurological perspective where our brains are being reformed by our technology. The truth is, The underlying philosophy of decentralization is what is causing this generation to want those things. I mean that by going this influencer model is the rabbinical model of the first century.

It is. And science and spirituality are the new religions political ideology. So whatever ideology you have now, social media has given you the marketplace to talk and get on a soapbox. This is the new way of doing things. And it's the also the old way of doing things when you have that massive cultural shift to really a 1st century model, then the models have to change to be able to to solve the problems. And what we find is in the rabbinical model. It is the small groups as which is why they're asking for it. It is the relational way of learning. Schools are having to deal with the same issue. It's going to be teachers that teach everything I believe in the future. Just because of all the other research that I'm seeing, we're going to go back to that model. In a lot of ways, 

Jared Roth: Thank you. We're going to have to bring it to an end here. You did mention that this deck would be available. Chad and Chestly, what's the best way to make that available for interested participants? 

Chestly Lunday: I can email it to Chad and everybody can get an email. Yeah. And if you guys want to talk to me, I'll give you my personal email. Not the 1 that's actually on the deck.

It's Chestly, C H E S T L Y, so think adjective, and L, Chestlyl at gmail. com. Okay, so Yeah. Okay. And let me make sure that you get that. Okay. 

Nilaksha Fernando: I think we should you should repackage this and go talk to businesses as well because it's applicable to me from a business owner perspective because I'm dealing with Gen Zs on a daily basis. This is great information.

Chestly Lunday: Yeah. And Neil, I would love to sit down, maybe get a Zoom, maybe 30 or 40 minutes and actually work through that because our last, we have some leadership stuff in our last study as well that I felt like, man, this could be super helpful for nonprofits for other leaders as well. Absolutely.

Nilaksha Fernando: Yeah, we have project manager group. I would love for you to spend half an hour and just download what we, what you just talked about. .

Chestly Lunday: Yeah, I would love to do that.

James Autry: I work with another guy named Patrice Sagay, and he has a ministry teaches biblical entrepreneurship, and he started a new course this mon this morning at 7:00 AM we had 700 people from 45 nations.

Chestly Lunday: Wow.

James Autry: No. 900 that signed up for it. And it's just he needs this content as well because he's talking about the business life cycle and how do you engage people. So this would be core content for him to get out to his community. Yeah.

Nilaksha Fernando: Absolutely.

Carl Nicolson: Thank you so much.

Nilaksha Fernando: Thank you very much. Really enjoyed that.

Chestly Lunday: Yes, sir. Definitely.

George LaDu: All right, let's wrap it up,

Chad Williams: Good job. Thank you, Pastor Jared.

George LaDu: We sure appreciate your time and we have to have you back, so get ready. Okay. Let's pray.

Father, thank You for this time together. Thank You for revealing Your heart and Your mind that You would give us creative ideas and witty inventions to be able to reach the generations, Lord.

Thank You for what You're doing and how You've called us together to partner with You to see Your kingdom come, and Your will be done here in this place where we live, in Jesus name, amen. Amen. Amen. Thanks, everybody.

Carl Nicolson: Wow.

Angela Nicolson: Good to see you guys

Chad Williams: today. We'll get you a link to the session and also all the information. 

Angela Nicolson: Aw. See you, guys!

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Produced with love by Carl + Angela Nicolson of klaario.