Communication Challenges Every Church Faces and How to Address Them

Today we're going to talk about communication challenges that your church may be facing and how you can overcome them. Are you ready? Because it's time.

You're listening to the Church Digital Sidekick Podcast, part of the TCD Podcast Network.

Hey heroes, my name is Tom Pounder and this is the Church Digital Sidekick Podcast. This is the podcast where we bring on ministry leaders and we talk about how you can do ministry more effectively in this very digital and online world. And we're going to talk about church communications because let's just be honest, church communications are so vital for your ministries or your whole entire church. And having the right communication structure in place is so important. And the reality is, most of the communications that you are experiencing now are all digital. So how can you do church communications right, especially when you're facing certain challenges? The reality is we all face challenges, whether you're a big church or a small church. We all face challenges. So how can you overcome those challenges? Well, to talk to me about that today is Seth Muse. Seth is a great guy. He's been in church comms world for a really long time. In fact, actually, he was a worship minister and a student minister as well. He'll talk about that before. He's been on my podcast before. So that's been good, not for a number of years, but he's been on my podcast. And so we talk about how you can take those challenges that your church is facing and how you can overcome them. And so I'm really excited to hear from Seth today. But before we get into the interview, I do want to highlight thechurch.digital. At thechurch.digital, we've got tons of podcasts and blogs and resources. and coaching tips and tools and cohorts and one-on-one sessions that are available for you and your church. So if you've never checked out the Church.Digital, go there right now, check out all the different things that are happening there and sign up for a cohort or coaching or just listen to a podcast or a blog. They're going to be really helpful for you in particular in your digital and online ministry. all right so now let's get into the interview with seth muse talk about overcoming church communication challenges for your church all right with me right now is seth muse seth how are you i'm good man thanks for having me on the show yeah well as we just said before we hit record it's been way too long since you've been on the podcast so yeah i'm glad to be back All right, Seth, well, again, I know who you are, and a lot of people listening to this will know who you are. You are quite, you are everywhere on social media and everywhere in the Church Comm world, but someone may not know who you are, so tell everyone who you are.

well my name is seth muse i have been in youth ministry worship ministry communications ministry in the local church for over 20 years and now i am the co-owner of a company called churchcom team where we help churches take the chaos of communications and manage it into clockwork making things work smoothly so that you can communicate clearly that's essentially what we do we offer a lot of services for that but that's what i'm doing now so in other words i also blog and podcast seminary of hard knocks podcast and blog at seth news.com and just kind of try to help the community of church communicators to be able to get their messages out and using all these available tools and making sense of it all so that's what i spend every day doing and honestly some nights and weekends that that's awesome well again you and i've talked before about student ministry stuff is there anything that you miss about doing student ministry now that you've been out of it for a while being that age being 20 something being 20 something you eat a whole pizza and like i stay okay you know and i don't like get up in the middle of the night because it's not agreeing anymore you know things like that i miss like the being the young guy in the youth ministry i don't know actually i miss like leading the uh the worship teams i always did that with uh and i'd pull students into the into the group and teach them how to play instruments and how to be in a band and how to lead worship and that was always really fun for me because i developed these real close discipleship relationships with these kids that were artists and creatives and you know i always gravitated towards that stuff anyway and so if i miss anything about it i miss that is just get together with a bunch of kids and teaching them watching the light bulb go off you know yeah they learn new things and as they kind of settle into the fact that they can actually do this they can volunteer at our church and play an instrument and not just consume you know it's cool it was always fun that's awesome that's awesome uh and how long have you guys been doing the church comms team um we've been doing let's see we you know like everybody who succeeds we started right before the pandemic that's right that was my next question yeah so like early 2020 um we launched with this great easter giveaway thing and then right about easter yeah we realized we weren't going to be able to meet churches were closing down uh you know country was closing down people were dying, you know, it was just this like, whole crazy time. And we so we modified, we adjusted. And thankfully, God brought us some, some clients that we can, you know, develop our system with and, you know, work through that whole time. And then along the way, you know, really, honed in on what we're doing and so now we're like we're taking on clients and you know really it's a smooth process so um we've been doing it since early 2020 so we've had about two years of you know really fine-tuning everything we do and making it very usable for people on the ground because that's what we were you know my paul fleming is my partner in this so um he runs church inc and all kinds of other stuff but that's cool yeah

cool well we'll wrap up our conversation talking a little bit more about your team and what they do and how they can help how you all can help churches uh but i want to talk today about uh this thing we we're talking about four communication challenges that every churches face and what you can do about that and how actually you guys can help them with it as well so we're gonna in the podcast we're gonna hit on two of them and then we're gonna share the link in the show notes of where people can find the rest of them uh yeah but i want to hit on knowledge and talent okay let's kick us off here let's start talking about knowledge what what do you mean by knowledge and and how does that impact the communication challenges

yeah uh like you said there's the of the four you know it's strategy systems knowledge talent and and knowledge is is like kind of a starting point for all of it is is that you get into this place you're a comms director you're part-time you're volunteer you're full-time whatever your situation and or or maybe you're an executive pastor and you're like I'll take over overseeing the communications and you have nobody there helping it, or you have to ask the youth pastor to step in and help. And you're like, I don't even know what to tell them to do, you know, much less get it done. Right. You know, am I doing it right? I don't know. So there's a lot of that, especially after pandemic. Cause one of the things we. we first started you know it was it was like come on guys you need to be in the digital world and now it's and then it was like hey guess what you're gonna be and that's the only place you're gonna be for a while and so it was like this really huge paradigm shift and so everyone had to figure out how to do all this um it's just knowing what to do and how to apply all that knowledge and it's a challenge because there's honestly there's so many options there's just so many things you could do and it's deciding what should you do so um this is kind of what we do we you know we found some solutions to that and one of them is coaching it's just getting somebody that you trust that can actually help you learn about what is specifically going on at your church and learn about what your specific church is geared best to do what are your limitations what are your uh what do you have as far as talent you know things like that how do you use all these resources to apply to what it is you're actually wanting to do and we found that with many churches that the comms director is is they're going we need to figure out what we're trying to do and everybody else is like we're trying to reach people now let's go you know and it's like well hold on yeah so we're trying to help leaders understand the slow down to go faster principle of, you know, getting someone in to show you how, what's the tech stack need to look like? What is, do you need MailChimp or constant contact? Or, you know, what's your website platform? What are you trying to do with your website, you know, all that kind of stuff is part of the coaching. And also, the other part is modeling. So we actually show you how to do all that stuff and and we feel like that's really important so what we're trying to train communicators to do is to be that for their staff to as we coach you you coach your staff so you are the modeler you're the one that has to take this and go hey guys here's how you do it here's how you put in a request here's why this is important um because that contributes to other people knowing like what are we doing and why are we doing this why do i have to put in this stupid request now i don't have to go to this form now can i just call you can i just tell you yeah you could just we could all just suck at this you know so i'm like yeah you could and it'd be you could just be chaos you know um but we try to help with that because we train that comp director if there is one or somebody on that staff and if they don't we do um and which leads to the third it's the training yeah you know training is important and that and that's more to like what are you doing to invest in yourself conferences books podcasts where you what are you learning

um we find that's a that's a good solution to the knowledge problem yeah of knowing how all this works and what to do with it well i would think that this is really an important thing uh because especially during this time of covid where churches were losing staff people i know my church in particular we lost a yep probably about 35 to 40 percent of our staff over COVID. And that meant more responsibility on other people to fill out, to pick up the slack and more responsibility that you've never had before. So I would imagine there were a lot of new online pastors that came about during COVID, but I would imagine there's a lot of new church communicators that came out because exactly what you said, digital was the only way that you could communicate and digital was basically the way forward.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think every church would probably report similar things. Maybe not in that excess, but they lost people, you know, they lost to either, you know, they lost people to COVID, or they lost people because of COVID. And, you know, whatever the purpose, whatever the reason that, you know, we, we see a lot of lean, lean church staff, and a lot of lean church attendance as well. So The problem with all of that is that to do communications in this extremely noisy digital world that did not get leaner, that got more robust. And so now with a leaner team, you've got to actually try to do a little bit more and focus more on that. So it is a struggle. And that's why talent is one of the challenges as well, because you do need people to help do this, which I'll get to in a minute. But honestly, if you don't know what you're trying to do or why you're trying to do it, um or what you need to stop trying to do that's a big one um you find yourself throwing spaghetti at the wall and just trying to and you just waste so much time and energy and that's why i really recommend the coaching it like it's somebody comes in and it really goes uh and if it's not us it's somebody you know have somebody who's in communications and digital marketing that connect cares about the church they can actually come in and say hey as a church you don't have the resources to run this many facebook ads or you don't have the resources to have social media be fresh and brand new every day yeah you know you need to get this service or you need to get this what whatever And if you don't have someone that's speaking to you on those terms, helping you get that, that ministry message out, you get lost, you get lost in that. And then all you do have to focus on are those that actually show up, which are few, far fewer than were before. So if you really want your ministry to continue expanding and

reaching new people um you know just digital is a must yeah yeah i i think you're right on on this and the coaching is so important because i know when i i went to college and i got a degree in christian education and you know that helped me with my student ministry years but guess what when i moved to online ministry uh years ago They said, Tom, you're on Facebook, you're on Twitter a lot. You should be our online minister. And I'm like, okay. But because of that, that's when I had to start doing the research and finding people to connect with. That's when I found you. I found other people that were doing church communications. I was like, I need to learn from you. And so the simple fact that you offer coaching to really work with someone like me who had a ministry background, but not in communications or not in anything digital, to have someone who's been through the trenches like you, I think would be tremendously valuable.

Yeah. And what informs that coaching and going forward is really the last solution to the knowledge challenge is reporting. It's data. know it may or may not shock you that churches are not great at measuring things accurately um you know with and i don't just mean like counting numbers in in things but like did this event succeed Yes or no? What's the answer to that question? Well, define success. We haven't done that. I don't know what we were trying to measure to see that it did succeed. Is it number of baptisms? Was it people in seats? Was it how many signups we had? Was it how much money came in? Was it how many stories we collected at the end of salvation or of life change? I mean, what was it you were trying to accomplish with this event, much less how are you going to measure it in the communications world that we succeeded in some way? um and so when we report we often report like on digital stuff you have those numbers you have access but often we don't we don't pull those and we don't make sense of them because because if you know honestly the last two years have taught us anything is that most of us don't know how to read data for nothing and so you know having someone that knows what these numbers mean they can kind of show you okay this is why this number is important this is why this is a concern or this is why this is a win that's super valuable and you know having somebody on your staff or that you're contracted with to help you with it like us um is super valuable um the meetings we go through we go through a meeting every week with each client and every fourth meeting is a reporting meeting and i walk them through facebook instagram website and email marketing and then we just kind of look at anything else we wanted to measure over that month i'm telling you it's like that informs what should we do next month what's working what doesn't work you know that kind of stuff and that's just the knowledge being enhanced and the more you do that as a pastor the more you learn what to look for yeah and how to measure and then it's kind of more intuitive for you to go i feel like that was good and be more accurate to feel that way you know because you know what you're looking for why you're looking for it so the knowledge piece is a huge challenge and you really need somebody who knows this space interpreting all this and giving this to you because any any executive pastor that's been charged with being the comms person too will tell you they probably hate it. They probably are like, my God, please find someone else to figure out all this stuff. Yeah, because it is a lot and making it all make sense together is a challenge. And you just need don't be afraid to admit you need help. You only help

Yeah. Again, if you're looking at these numbers and you could just run yourself dizzy, just like because it's confusing, especially when you don't even know what you're looking for and you don't you see all these lines up and down or numbers up and down. It's like, what do they mean? You need someone to kind of walk you through it as you get comfortable. So that's awesome. All right. So let's go into the second one. You talk about talent. What does that mean?

Man, talent is the one that we all kind of know, but we don't know how to handle. We don't know what to do. um having the right people in the right place you know is second to only maybe to knowing like what people you need in the first place just having them and having them in the right place and so one of our solutions to the problem with talent is i mean obviously we offer our team you know with our with our clients and stuff to help you get things done but even though we come on and we have a team of people we still focus first and foremost on very clear job descriptions I am shocked at how few churches have this nailed down. I'm shocked. It's like you hire someone, and you might even write down here's a job description for the, you know, for the for the post, you know, to go on like church jobs or something like that. But then when that person comes in, the onboarding process may give them that and then you never visited again, we never look at how that integrates into everything else going on. And sometimes even if you have a job description that says you can do XYZ and decide these things. You have somebody else with an unclear job description getting in their way and taking that ability to make that decision correctly out of their hands because their job description isn't clean. And so when we get together, we always go, what is your youth guy responsible for? What is your worship person responsible for? But ultimately, how does that all interact? What is their interaction with communications? What are they trying to do with your comms director? Do you have a project manager? What is it you don't know? uh that you don't know and and so we try to help you figure that out with clear job descriptions and we find that that is often a tedious and eye-opening and healthy process for everybody we do that with yeah well go ahead it helps a ton i'm just gonna say it just helps a ton to bring clarity of like here's what i do yep and and i'll tell you anybody that's ever been frustrated in their job it comes back to this question what can i decide And if you don't know what you can decide on without anybody else, if you have to make a judgment call, what can you decide? If you don't know the answer to that question, your job description is not clear.

This is right on. Again, it sounds so simple, but you don't understand how many people I've talked to that go into a job and their job description immediately changes once they sign the contract. I was actually just talking to somebody this week. He's the student minister, and he is trying to get somebody in the creative department to make him a flyer. He said to me, aren't they supposed to do that? They're in the creative department. I said, yeah, but not this person. because this person is the project manager and she doesn't do flyers she doesn't and he said just because she seems like she can do it and doesn't mean that she is doing and that's not her job or just because she actually can do it doesn't mean she should do it

yeah and that is huge with job descriptions because it keeps that clear and you got to have from top down back you know support of what these things are and keeping it clear so that people when they say i can or can't do this or how about we do this instead you don't have staff going well who's this person to tell me i can't have this in my ministry right like they're the comps director that's their job you know it's like if that's clearly defined then that fight is over before it starts and you have a little bit more harmony on your team now if there's a constant bashing obviously you're going to have to go and address that that's something else but if there's something a job description can define then it should define it because that gives your team the guardrails to work with inside of you know when they work together and it also speaks into the second solution for the talent issue which is documented processes We often don't even get to that because we haven't even done the job description. But how does a person ask for a graphic? How does a website page get changed? How does an email get approved and sent to your whole church? Do you know how that's supposed to happen? Much less, do you know how it happens now? uh not not even supposed to but what we'll do is we we visualize these things so we make like a flow chart of this is requested this is given here's what you do then we give it back to you we write it and then you approve it and now we get the final say and then we move it out and it looks so obnoxious tom it the whole thing just looks like my god we're thinking so hard about how do we send an email yeah because you're trying to drive a busload of people somewhere and you've got to make plans because you can't just turn a bus on the dime you've got a system that has to be in place even if you only have five people in the car you're still in a car you can't operate like you're on a motorcycle you've got to be able to involve in people in the conversation you got to communicate and plus it's just kind to do that to each other to help each other out so documenting the process how does something happen at our church in communications how does something get posted on social how does someone like who approves what and what do we do in a crisis situation let's say someone on our staff is accused of sexual assault what do we do what's the email do we have copy already do we have a a list of people who get contacted you know this elder and these staff members and these this is the person that talks to the press if we have to you know what do we do yeah these processes need to be in place covid was a good example Are we coming back to church? Are we staying away? Are we wearing masks? Are we not? Having those kinds of prepared communications ready to go in the event that your pastor on Saturday night goes, we're going to let people come in without masks today. we're gonna start um like oh okay email's ready boom we're going how do we do that you know crisis communication is super important so documenting those processes and having things in place ready to go it's just a must today with all the things that could and probably will eventually happen at even the smallest church with five people on staff

I would imagine the biggest pushback you get from this are churches that have never had these processes in place. And for that very reason, why do I need to fill out a form to do a social media grabber? Why can't I just go to this person? So I would imagine you get a lot of pushback there.

All the time. All the time. And my question is that... well the problem that what we're really talking about here is not the question the problem is with with that is that it assumes that we're already doing things the best way we could and and we're not and it basically says i have nothing else to learn about how to work with other people and take five minutes on Facebook, and you can tell nobody has that right to say that. So we can all learn, we can all grow, we can all experience better. We always give this presentation when we first start about that process, and we say it is an efficient system fueled by empathy. And that's what we try to... apply is that when i give the creative team a heads up it's actually an act of empathy and a show of love for that team as a christ follower that i'm putting myself in their shoes for a second and realizing that for me to take five minutes to think about this event i want all these things for and sending it over with them enough time to actually get it done means i will get one higher quality materials two i'll get time in case something changes we need to make a move make a change and three i will show them that i care about their contribution to our church's ministry as well as mine And so when they do that, they then want to work for you faster. They want to make you better stuff. They want you to succeed. Not that they didn't before, but it's so much easier to go, I am coming through for Tom. Tom set me up. He's given me plenty of time. He gave me all the info I needed. I love working for Tom. Here, Tom, here's your graphic and a couple you didn't even ask for that I think you're going to need. It's like that's so much easier to do. And don't you want to work in an environment like that?

Yeah.

you know that's the kind of thing that when someone says i cannot just go to that person you could you could as andy stanley says any plan will work if you'll work it yeah but it doesn't mean that one plan doesn't work better than the other and you know i think at this point it's about clarity it's about empathy and it's about understanding that your actions affect other people as well

Well, and I see this a lot too, again, because of my position at the church that I'm in as well. By having these processes in place, like for instance, we have a thing where we say, if you're leading, giving the sermon this week, you need to have all your notes in by noon on Thursday. And if not... And if you give it to us on Friday or even Saturday, you may get those notes in there. But again, the goal is that. And so we have that because again, it's not gosh, what's the word? You're not honoring your other staff members by giving them notes on Saturday and expect them to get it. Saturday is often a rest day.

Exactly. And I'll tell you, the way that you can honestly love your pastor is as a communication director you know that he has to have that on thursday on wednesday set up a reminder in your project management tool to automatically remind him and send him a note hey here's an update tomorrow a proof is due of your notes so that he knows oh yeah i need to get this in and then the day of it has a reminder for both of you hey today's the day for this thing stuff like that you can do with people that don't work inside your project management system is a way that you can use these digital tools to actually help people remember stuff yeah and stay on deadline because a lot of times that that scenario that type of thing happens because pastors get busy they got to put out fires things pop up and suddenly i'm working and i can't remember i don't know i got to send an email out yeah an email we do every week why do we send it i don't know i'm just supposed to write this email so there's no no excitement no interest which makes me go why again back to the knowledge why are you doing that so that pastor's not going to think about that and so if you're constantly needling them for stuff at the land hey i need this today i need this today you're just another fire to put out yeah you're not helping them so using these kinds of digital tools you can look for forecast ahead talk with your pastor about this too because this could you know with the automatic stuff they could get annoyed by that but you have to have an agreement i'm helping you you help me to help you get this stuff out so those processes are really important who can submit requests is another one we we ask people to do for each department you define an admin person that's going to take notes in those meetings that you get all excited about wouldn't it be cool if we did blah blah blah yeah yeah it would be cool who's writing all this down who's writing it down the person that turns in requests is writing all this down and they have all the info they have the logistics the stuff you don't want to talk about in a meeting but they got it they're going to go turn in the request so documented processes means who's turning a request who's doing what a huge part of the talent deal but i'll tell you the big the big one that churches don't tap into that is readily available to them is ready to work players it's a solution for this as well and of course that's where churchcom team comes in you hire people to come in and like if you've got one person on staff and you could hire one more you could get our whole team for that same price and have web social everything where you can hire one person that has a particular talent, like a designer, something like that. But whoever you're hiring, you can also contract out your own people like Upwork or Fiverr. And you can give a budget for your comms director to have each month that they can spend certain amounts of money, especially for those moments. Oh, no, we need a graphic tomorrow. Well, hire a Fiverr designer for that or Upwork designer and tell them what you need and then you don't have to do it. now of course you got to be really clear when you get those those directions and descriptions out yeah highly recommend giving them inspiration pieces to look at maybe even throwing together a garbage design of your own in canva if you want and say like this but better you know that do something yeah but the the ready to work players is hiring that person that can actually help you and where we see this struggle the most is with photography churches need photography churches need videography and they often have no organized way to do either they don't have they have tons of people in their church they have fancy cameras that can use them really well that would love to volunteer they just don't know how how do i volunteer and it's just a simple setting up of the system finding ways to get them organized and in one place and how to get them tasked and how to get those photos back and we have we've set up a whole system for that uh trying to get our church clients to use that is a struggle even though there's a system because you have to pay attention you have to talk to people you know some comms director just wants in their office kind of do calm stuff just like a pastor sometimes wants in his office and just study you know there's comms people that never want to get out and meet people and because there's so much to do anyway yeah but you've got to get out there and talk to some folks but no it's a solution for the talent problem

Well, and I think that's right on there, because again, I think one of the things that COVID revealed to us, too, is that, you know, to serve in the church, you don't just need to do hospitality like where you greet people or in person or where you're holding babies or helping out with the student ministry. There's a lot of tech stuff that you can do. I'm glad you hit on photography's key camera. There might be some people in your church that are in the data stuff and they could totally work for you for sure. So there's lots of opportunities tech wise that I think COVID has revealed to us that I think, again, you need to think outside the box on these things.

And we need to be willing to give it over to give it to them. Let them do it. Let them have it. It seems like this is like a huge hurdle for us is that they may not do it as well as a paid person and we can't afford a paid person. well then you can't afford a paid person but you still should try i mean there's there's social media people out there that just get tick tock they just get instagram bring them in tell them what kind of content you want to post and then let them do it know guide them coach them but let them drive it and now you've got social media that's worth something you know instead of just this pre-made graphics and you know announcements and the random boring stuff that churches post that nobody cares about you know so find these people that just love these areas and you create our system stop for a minute and this is this is the real issue tom is like I get it that we have such a massive amount of stuff going on that we feel like we cannot stop and do anything that is strategic. There's too many fires to put out. Sometimes the right answer is to let it burn. Just let something burn and do the thing you know is going to make the other thing you're working on really successful. And then when you can go back to the thing that burned and just build it better because it was probably garbage anyway. If it fell apart without you, it wasn't very strong anyway. So just let it burn and focus on those things that you need to focus on and stop being in such a hurry to make everything peaceful. You'll never have peace that way. So talent and knowledge, those two things together, I feel like are huge issues. Obviously, strategy and systems are another, but I guess for another day.

Well, yeah, or we will just send it to your site to download the resource. Okay, so this has been awesome. Fantastic stuff. Say someone wants to connect with you. Talk to me a little bit about the team. What do you guys do? Do you guys have different price points and all that kind of stuff? Talk to me a little bit about what you guys do.

Yeah, right now we are adding on a whole bunch of products with what we do. It's churchcomteam.com. And you can go get the freebie. We got a little PDF downloadable free thing for the four challenges and the four communication challenges that every church faces. So you can get all this, everything I've talked about here and all the other two as well. And we're working on some things where we can actually help you identify some of those weaknesses and do something about it. what we do right now um is we actually have a a retainer kind of partnership so i meet with our say you're our client i meet with you one hour a week same time same day every week we talk through a range of things from what's coming up to what initiatives we need to push to how is your first impressions going to, you know, are you tracking people correctly to reporting to social media strategy, everything, just everything we would do in communications. And I meet with you for an hour, we talked through big initiatives, what's happening, and then I give you some pointers, things we need to do. And then I'll take information to my team. every client gets their own project manager we bring you into monday.com we set you up in all these different boards that have automations for different things your project manager will take requests as they come in we put a form on your website your people start to use i i will come and train virtually your whole team on how to use it. I'll do that empathy, efficiency and empathy presentation for them, explain how to do it, how to walk through all those things. We train you, we do deep dive, get to know your church up front. I mean, it is a full deal. And then when we get through all that in about 60 days, 30 to 60 days, we start doing all of this for you. We create your whole social plan. We have designers that design all the designs for it. We have a project manager making all of it happen. We update your website. Basically, everything we do in the deep dive audit right at front, we go, here's a 90 day plan and then we put it in our project and we management system and we start going and we start doing it.

That's awesome.

um every you know web email we write your emails for you every week it's just all kinds of stuff we basically help you do communications at your church now i said we it's less than the price of one full-time employee a year so our prices kind of vary depending on what you need but um it's it's not a uh it's not a 49.99 kind of deal But it's very affordable, and I know budget season's coming soon. So it's something, if you're serious about getting with us, we definitely have helped several churches from Florida to Colorado to Texas, serve them remotely in creating better communication systems. Honestly, man, we've just, it's been super exciting to get to work with. I started to get to feel like I just know these people there. I'm on their team. It's very much a, an intimate kind of partnership as we try to help them communicate what's going on, what God's doing at their church and help them to see the lay of the land and stop at least for one hour a week and look up and go, what's going on. And that's helpful all in itself, you know, cause that's the coaching part of things.

Yeah. And I would imagine for churches to have this taken off there, the weight taken off of them to have a team of people, not just Seth working for you, but a team of people working for you. And again, for in the grand scheme of things, a very reasonable price. Yeah. You know, it's well worth it to do this.

Yeah. And a lot of people think, too, that if they hire us or an agency that they can just go, OK, you got communications go and I can just forget about it. but it's your communications you know your church so there's still an element it's just changing your mindset over what your job is you know yes we are taking over the doing part of a lot of stuff but you still have to like approve things answer questions give us direction on things we ask about so it's very much a partnership but it it takes the stress off of at least half of the job off of you you know where you don't have to figure out what to do and do it all and get all the people working on it. You know, it's like we do that. But the big plus is knowing what to do. We come in with experience and knowledge and help you figure out what the best thing is for you to do next and what you need to stop doing, especially. And, you know, it is it is a different shift, you know, and the people that are working with us will tell you that. I got one guy who we processed in this last year of 270 some odd requests. And that's just the ones that came in, not the ones that he talked to me about. And I was like, okay, let's try this. Let's do it. And I actually had to put something in for him, which happens sometimes. But yeah, it's a highly efficient system.

and even though you feel like i'm still answering questions i'm still involved yeah but the capacity of what you can accomplish is just astronomical because of the system so anyway you get that rest of that in the pdf yeah there you go good well seth this is awesome and again we will highlight uh the church comms team uh on this uh show notes and also encourage people wait oh social media, if they want to connect with you on social media, which one's the platform that you want to connect with?

Yeah, I'm on Instagram at Seth Muse, but probably the best thing to do is join my Facebook group.

Yes.

I have a Facebook group based off of my podcast. We don't really have a group for our company right now, but I do talk a lot about this kind of stuff in the group. So the Seminary of Hard Knocks Facebook group, if you go to my SethMuse.com, it's the Facebook link. You'll find it.

I'll definitely include all those links in the show notes. So it's a great group. It is definitely a great group. So, and your blog is great too. So those shower thoughts are always a winner.

That's what I hope. Honestly, man, the email, joining the email list, when you get that freebie that's on my side, I'm giving away our major messaging calendar on my website. So if you go there and download that, you'll get on my email list. And I think the email that I give is probably the best thing that I do. uh personally it's fun it's helpful it's like tech you know social media tech comms news and stuff that's coming out and uh i try to keep it light try to keep it fun yeah that's a fun thing to join the shower thoughts are great it's worth it just for the shower notes so that's good all right seth well thank you as always uh for being on the podcast and uh i'll talk to you soon my pleasure thank you

All right, so what did you think? It was great having Seth on the podcast. Again, it's been a number of years since he's been on the podcast, but he's a great guy and he's got a great heart for the church and for getting communications right for the church so that you can be reaching more and more people for Christ. So I'd love to hear what you thought. I'd love to hear your questions or other ideas that you might have. share them with me. You can either comment below or go to on Twitter at TAPounder. I would love to talk to you a little bit more about this so that we can be doing church communications better. And again, as I said, ultimately reaching more people for Christ. All right, heroes. Well, thanks so much for joining me again for the Church Digital Sidekick podcast. As always, you can go and subscribe to this on YouTube, on iTunes or Spotify. You can also go to thechurch.digital. It's on there. And you can also find this on the Digital Bootcamp Facebook group, the group on Facebook that we take all ministry leaders and we teach about digital tools and trends that are happening around the world and how they apply into our ministry in this particular world. We live in a very digital online world today. And so at the Digital Bootcamp Facebook group, we talk about how you can take all those things and apply it into your ministry context. I would love for you to check out all that stuff today. All right, here's where I hope you have a great rest of your day. Until next time, have a great one.