This is the final installment of a three-part series on what a hybrid-informed strategy for church growth entails. I’ve written an entire book exploring this titled, Hybrid Church, but let me introduce its depth in a simple way. Again, here’s our six-step strategy.
Meck’s Six-Step Hybrid Strategy
- Hi!
- Come and See
- Get Connected
- Cross the Line
- Grow
- Make a Difference
To introduce how a hybrid approach changes things, we started by looking at the first of the six steps – “Hi!” – which you can read here. Then, we examined how “Come and See” plays out when you have a physical and a digital approach, which you can read here. Now let’s talk about step three.
Step Three: Get Connected
Most churches would think about their own strategy like this: You build a relationship with someone, you invite them to explore, then you invite them to cross the line of faith.
We would encourage a rethinking at that point.
The third step is to invite them to get connected. The fancy word for this is assimilation.
It used to be that this would come after inviting them to cross the line of faith. But that has changed. Today, people want to belong before they believe. You need to get them connected as soon as you can after you invite them to come and explore, because only if they are connected will they stay long enough to consider embracing the faith. They need time to move down the line – getting answers to questions, accumulating information to fill intellectual voids – to be able to even consider embracing the Christian faith responsibly. If they don’t connect with two or three people during that time of exploration, (say, the first six months or so) they will drift.
So you have this tension: You’ve said “Hi,” you’ve invited them to come and see, and they’ve accepted, but then it takes time for them to explore and connect the dots. And if they don’t get connected to the community, the “come and see” begins to fade. They begin to drift before they’ve made a decision for Christ.
Which means that while you are intentionally evangelizing, you have to be intentionally assimilating. The good news is that not only can you do that online as much as you can in person, but you can also use digital technology to enhance assimilation for everyone in your orbit no matter how they attend. We just need to change our way of thinking about assimilation.
We need to move away from a focus on gathering and move toward a focus on connecting. We’ve bet the farm on gathering people together in a building. That’s a bet that won’t play out in the days to come. Instead, we need to invest in connecting people in whatever way they are willing to connect with us.
So let’s talk about getting connected.
First, the best way to connect new people is to connect them to other new people. Most of your core are the core because they are well-connected. Think of them like a Lego block that has every connection point taken. They don’t have any more relational space available for filling.
You might be familiar with the work of Oxford psychologist Robin Dunbar, who spent his entire career studying the complexities of friendship. What he found, essentially, is that people have a relational capacity. He found that we can recognize about 1,500 people, have about 500 acquaintances, maintain about 150 meaningful contacts, have about 50 people we would consider friends, 15 of which can be good friends, ending with an inner circle showing around 5 loved ones.
So the key to assimilation is connecting new people to new people, or new people to those who have capacity for new relationships. There are many ways to do this, such as periodically offering social events that group people in similar stages of life, potentially birthing small groups out of those gatherings.
You should also continually invite both online and in-person attenders to step into community—into a serving team, a small group, a community service experience, a community event. Even something as simple as creating “linger” events that foster connections, such as food following a service, can go a long way.
But one of the most strategic efforts (and this works for both in-person and online attenders) is to run a “drip” campaign. The idea is to automate a series of contacts with someone, via text and email, in relation to next steps they can take. The more information you have about them, the more personalized this can become. But the idea is to connect with them in some way every few weeks, encouraging them to attend an online class, continue their attendance through the online campus, volunteer for a service project, or explore a series of YouTube videos that answer questions related to the Christian faith.
Each person’s “drip” is going to be different based on what you might know about them, such as gender, age, marital status, the presence or absence of children, or spiritual background.
But the goal is clear:
Get them connected as much as you can, as fast as you can.
There is so much more that can be said for the first three steps of this strategy (not to mention the final three) in a hybrid model that will add immense fuel to any church’s growth. If you are interested, I would encourage you to read Hybrid Church. But the point is that adding the digital to the physical is awakening the power of synergy in your church’s outreach efforts.
Two horses can pull around 9,000 pounds. How many pounds can four horses pull? No, the answer is not 18,000 pounds.
Try more than 30,000 pounds.
Now consider what adding the digital to your physical efforts will do.
James Emery White
Sources
James Emery White, Hybrid Church (Zondervan), order from Amazon.
“7 Shifts Churches Need to Make Because of the Coronavirus – Episode 142: The Unstuck Church Podcast,” Tony Morgan Live, April 22, 2020, read online.
About the Author
James Emery White is the founding and senior pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, NC, and a former professor of theology and culture at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, where he also served as their fourth president. His latest book, Hybrid Church: Rethinking the Church for a Post-Christian Digital Age, is now available on Amazon or from your favorite bookseller. To enjoy a free subscription to the Church & Culture blog, visit churchandculture.org where you can view past blogs in our archive, read the latest church and culture news from around the world, and listen to the Church & Culture Podcast. Follow Dr. White on X, Facebook and Instagram at @JamesEmeryWhite.
James Emery White is the founding and senior pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, NC, and a former professor of theology and culture at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, where he also served as their fourth president. His latest book, Hybrid Church: Rethinking the Church for a Post-Christian Digital Age, is now available on Amazon or from your favorite bookseller. To enjoy a free subscription to the Church & Culture blog, visit churchandculture.org where you can view past blogs in our archive, read the latest church and culture news from around the world, and listen to the Church & Culture Podcast. Follow Dr. White on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at @JamesEmeryWhite.
This is the second installment of a three-part series on what a hybrid-informed strategy for church growth entails. I’ve written an entire book exploring this, titled Hybrid Church, but let me introduce its depth in a simple way. Again, here’s our six-step strategy.
Meck’s Six-Step Hybrid Strategy
1. Hi!
2. Come and See
3. Get Connected
4. Cross the Line
5. Grow
6. Make a Difference
To introduce how a hybrid approach changes things, we started by looking at the first of the six steps – “Hi!” – which you can read here. Now let’s move on to the second step.
Step Two: Come and See
As a step, this isn’t novel to anyone’s thinking. You build a relationship, and then invite them to attend. But what do you invite them to attend? For Meck, for years this was an invitation to a weekend service. During that service we would do everything we could to have it be welcoming, engaging, explanatory and inviting.
This is the secret power of the Church in regard to penetrating the world. It always has been. The late Michael Green wrote a treatise on the explosion of the early Christian Church in the first century. Let me give you the CliffsNotes: They shared the gospel like it was gossip over the backyard fence.
It’s how any growing church grows. For example, for more than three decades of outreach at Meck we’ve tracked why first-time guests come to our church. Every first-time guest who lets us know they attended is asked four questions in a follow-up survey:
- What did you notice first?
- What did you like best?
- How could we have improved?
- How did you hear about the church?
The number one answer for that final question has never changed. The most cited reason for attending has always been, “Invited by a friend.”
But what has changed is what we first invite them to. Our guests are still saying they are invited by a friend, but that first invitation now tends to be to an online event or service. Whether a visit to a website or an online campus, the front door is no longer physical, but rather digital.
Here are the new assumptions: First, people want to check a church out online before attending in person, just like they want to check everything else out first online. Second, they may attend or view online for months before an in-person visit—if even then. Third, they want to be able to interact online. Finally, they are accustomed to being served digitally in almost every way.
This is how they want to be engaged; this is the only way the vast majority will even consider being engaged. We will either open that front door or leave it firmly closed to them.
So is it open at your church?
Can someone check you out online, engage with you online or attend online? Can your current attenders invite their friends to begin online? Think everything through digitally the way you have currently been thinking everything through physically.
For in-person events, you have signage, greeters and welcome areas. You create an atmosphere and experience designed to serve the needs of first-time guests. It’s no different for your online presence.
Then encourage your church to invite their friends digitally. Make not only the “Hi!” but the “Come and See” hybrid in nature, involving both physical, in-person invites and online, digital invites. And make no mistake—digital invites are easier to make and respond to than physical invites. “Come to church with me this Sunday at our campus on Browne Road” is vastly different than “Hey, you ought to check this out online.”
Put yourselves in the shoes of an unchurched person and ask yourself which is less intimidating: showing up for something in person or online? We know, don’t we? I can’t begin to tell you how many times (as in almost every week) a first-time guest on our online campus will pop up in the chat room and say, “I can’t believe I’m here for this—I would never have shown up in person.”
Now here’s what we have found happens when you open the digital front door like this. The physical and the digital begin to organically intertwine. That’s the real nature of hybrid. Not solely physical or solely digital, but instead both—coming together in a synergistic way. This is when the “Come and See” reaches its full potential.
For example, we are finding that there is community-based outreach that happens through an online campus that cannot happen in person. We have groups gathering to watch in company conference rooms during lunch breaks, at breweries and through house parties. One online attender who works at an Amazon shipping area told us they put the service on the sound system for their dock.
One of my favorite stories is how a small group began attending through our online campus at their downtown office building during their Tuesday lunch hour. Word spread, and soon more and more people began attending with them—many who were not Christians. There were Hindus, Muslims, “nones.” It got so large that at around 50 or so people, they had to break up and meet in three locations.
They all call Tuesday their “church day.”
A day that would never have been called that apart from a hybrid approach to outreach.
Which brings us to step three in the six-step strategy – “Getting Connected” – which may have already surprised some by being put third instead of later on in the game.
Part three of this series will explain why it must come next, and how doing it in a hybrid way is a game-changer.
James Emery White
Sources
James Emery White, Hybrid Church (Zondervan), order from Amazon.
Michael Green, Evangelism in the Early Church.
About the Author
James Emery White is the founding and senior pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, NC, and a former professor of theology and culture at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, where he also served as their fourth president. His latest book, Hybrid Church: Rethinking the Church for a Post-Christian Digital Age, is now available on Amazon or from your favorite bookseller. To enjoy a free subscription to the Church & Culture blog, visit churchandculture.org where you can view past blogs in our archive, read the latest church and culture news from around the world, and listen to the Church & Culture Podcast. Follow Dr. White on X, Facebook and Instagram at @JamesEmeryWhite.
James Emery White is the founding and senior pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, NC, and a former professor of theology and culture at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, where he also served as their fourth president. His latest book, Hybrid Church: Rethinking the Church for a Post-Christian Digital Age, is now available on Amazon or from your favorite bookseller. To enjoy a free subscription to the Church & Culture blog, visit churchandculture.org where you can view past blogs in our archive, read the latest church and culture news from around the world, and listen to the Church & Culture Podcast. Follow Dr. White on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at @JamesEmeryWhite.
The idea of a hybrid church is simple. When we talk about a hybrid vehicle, we are talking about something that uses two or more distinct types of power, such as a submarine that uses diesel when surfaced and batteries when submerged, or a car that runs on gas and electricity. When we are talking about a hybrid church, we are talking about a church that is also harnessing two types of power—the physical and the digital.
The digital revolution has taken place. There’s no going back. Churches will either embrace the new world – which means the new mission field and the new way of reaching it – or become obsolete, irrelevant, and completely out of touch with the world they are trying to reach.
But what does that mean? What would a strategy, based on this, look like? I’ve written an entire book to answer that question, titled Hybrid Church, but let me introduce its depth in a simple way. The church I founded more than 30 years ago, Mecklenburg Community Church (Meck), has always had a strategy. And, for more than 30 years, it hasn’t changed.
The steps themselves are probably not new to your thinking, but the way they are applied – at least, in a truly hybrid model – may be. By truly going hybrid, Meck is growing faster now than at any other time in its history. Our average in-person attendance from January to June of this year compared to January to June of last year has increased by 40%. Our online attendance has increased by 50%.
So what are we doing differently as a hybrid church? First, here’s our six-step strategy:
Meck’s Six-Step Hybrid Strategy
1. Hi!
2. Come and See
3. Get Connected
4. Cross the Line
5. Grow
6. Make a Difference
Now, to explain how becoming hybrid changes things, let’s detail the first three steps, beginning with “Hi!”
Step One: “Hi!”
The first step is to reach out to a post-Christian, unchurched world and say, “Hi!”; meaning, introducing ourselves to who it is we are trying to reach. The first thing we want to do is initiate some kind of relationship with people, some point of contact.
That’s been at the forefront of Meck’s strategy from day one. We build a relationship with someone who isn’t involved in a church and/or who isn’t in a relationship with God. This used to be done solely through personal interaction. We would talk about the importance of intentionally building relationships outside of the church. For example, I did it through coaching my son’s basketball teams and getting to know the parents of the other kids. Or through strategic patronage—building a relationship with a barista or the person who cuts my hair. Reaching out to neighbors, friends, coworkers, family.
This has been foundational to our thinking and our way of living out our mission, and it still is. Without a doubt, the way someone far from God draws close to God is if someone close to God goes far to reach them.
But in a hybrid world, you need to have the digital come alongside the physical. The online with the embodied. So starting with “Hi!” means not only a physical hand across a backyard fence, but also a digital hand across an online fence.
The importance of this can’t be overstated.
James Carville was the lead political strategist for the successful election of Bill Clinton, then governor of Arkansas, to the Presidency of the United States. He distilled the campaign to three messages: “Change vs. more of the same,” “Don’t forget health care,” and most importantly, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
The U.S. was in the midst of an economic recession, and the incessant focus on the economy by Clinton ended with his unseating of then President George H.W. Bush. This despite Bush earlier polling a 90% approval rating following the invasion of Kuwait. If you didn’t live through that like I did, it’s hard to convey how stunning that political turnaround was. But Carville was right in seeing that the real issue – what mattered most to people – was the economy, and then painting Clinton as the one best able to turn it around.
If I had to distill a message to pastors, church leaders, and any and all others interested in the vitality of the church in relation to the practice of ministry, it would be this:
“It’s the internet, stupid.”
It’s where we now say “Hi!” It’s where the majority of the people you are trying to reach live.
Americans, on average, visit more than eight websites a day, amounting to more than 3,000 websites per year. As the chief marketing officer at Squarespace said, “Browsing the web plays a central role in our daily lives.” One could even argue that it plays the central role.
Yet one recent study found that only 21% of church leaders agreed that they have a “well-defined digital ministry strategy to engage with people who are outside the church and outside the faith.” Which means, of course, that almost 80% don’t.
So step one in our six-step strategy is to say “Hi!” to the unchurched world, to build a relationship, and to do it both in person and online.
And the ways you do that are not complicated. You have an online presence – an online existence – that is interactive and welcoming. And you make sure your website, your postings on Instagram and TikTok and X, your digital marketing, an online campus and services are all designed to reach out.
But then, of course, comes step two: “Come and See.” And in a hybrid world, that has changed, too.
And that’s what we’ll explore in the next blog.
James Emery White
Sources
James Emery White, Hybrid Church (Zondervan), order from Amazon.
Kate Mabus, “Online or In-Person? Gen Z and Millennials Find Digital Life More Memorable, Study Shows,” USA Today, July 1, 2021, read online.
Carey Nieuwhof, “3 Shocking Statistics That Show How Quickly, Radically (and Permanently?) Church Has Changed Since 2020,” read online.
About the Author
James Emery White is the founding and senior pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, NC, and a former professor of theology and culture at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, where he also served as their fourth president. His latest book, Hybrid Church: Rethinking the Church for a Post-Christian Digital Age, is now available on Amazon or from your favorite bookseller. To enjoy a free subscription to the Church & Culture blog, visit churchandculture.org where you can view past blogs in our archive, read the latest church and culture news from around the world, and listen to the Church & Culture Podcast. Follow Dr. White on X, Facebook and Instagram at @JamesEmeryWhite.
James Emery White is the founding and senior pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, NC, and a former professor of theology and culture at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, where he also served as their fourth president. His latest book, Hybrid Church: Rethinking the Church for a Post-Christian Digital Age, is now available on Amazon or from your favorite bookseller. To enjoy a free subscription to the Church & Culture blog, visit churchandculture.org where you can view past blogs in our archive, read the latest church and culture news from around the world, and listen to the Church & Culture Podcast. Follow Dr. White on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at @JamesEmeryWhite.
