SPEAKER_00 0:11

Welcome back to the Build the Church podcast where we help you gain momentum, grow your church, and go the distance in ministry. I am your host, Josh Rovery. In this episode, I get to sit down with my good friend, Pastor Noah Heron, to talk about one of the things I'm most passionate about, connecting people to the church in a brand new way churches can do it. Here's why this is important. We can pour everything into a great Sunday, but if people slip through the cracks before they ever get connected, we miss them. So I'm always looking for tools and ideas to help churches close that gap, and Noah has built one more talking about. If you don't know them already, Noah is the lead pastor of their communicator based in Nashville, Tennessee. In 2023, he and his wife Maddie planted Way Church in the heart of Nashville, and in just over two years they've seen more than 1,200 people say yes to Jesus. He's the best-selling author of Holy Habits and Walking to Mandarin. He hosts the Way Deeper Podcast, and he's the founder of ChurchGrift, a tool helping churches automate and simplify how they communicate and connect with people. And I'm excited for you to hear. Someone said the two greatest days of your life are the day you're born and the day you discover why. Let me ask you do the people in your church know their why? Do they know how God inspired them and where they're meant to start? That's exactly what I want to tell you about your team.church. Your team is a digital assessment that helps every person in your church discover how God created them, what he created them to do, and how they work best on a team in a way that's innovative and genuinely fun. The church even gets a unique URL with your own branding for you to put up in your next steps class and a volunteer dashboard that connects to Planning Center. You can try your team pro for free right now for 30 days at your team.church. Now let's get into it, my friend Noah Heron. Noah, I'm so happy to be talking with you today. Thanks for jumping on the podcast. Josh, you're the best. It's an honor. Thanks for having me. Well, this is your third episode on my podcast. So I think you get a special trophy or something. I can't believe you asked a third time. I'm very grateful. Before we get started, how are you feeling about the Georgia Bulldogs?

SPEAKER_01 2:09

You know, Josh, I'm feeling pretty confident. I would say that I am a little frustrated with the state of college football at the moment. And so honestly, this is the least excited for a season I've been since Kirby Smart took over. Not because we're not talented. I think our team's going to be really good. I just don't like how quickly players are leaving teams and all the NIL stuff. But I have high expectations and uh I think a lot of people are uh sleeping on the Georgia Bulldogs. You don't want to sleep on the Georgia Bulldogs, Josh Rovery. You don't want to do that.

SPEAKER_00 2:40

Well, you're you're a passionate Georgia Bulldog fan. I appreciate that about you. And uh, but you're a well-educated college football fan. You're not just locked in on your team, you know what's going on. And so I always appreciate that about you and think about you. Not to say that I'm cheering for the Bulldogs because now they're so good. I don't really cheer for them that often, but I do think about you every time I see them run out in the field. So tell us a little bit about what's happening with Way Church right now and what you're excited about.

SPEAKER_01 3:03

We are launching our second location this September, which uh is just crazy. Very, very excited, proud of our team. We hired a campus pastor and his wife, they've been crushing it, doing all the they went through an ARC church plant training. Yeah, I met them. They're awesome. They're amazing. They're we're two and a half months out from the launch, and they're almost to a hundred adults on their uh on their launch team of their campus, which we're really excited about. They've been doing all the interest parties and stuff. This Sunday, if we see two salvations, then we'll pass 1,700 salvations in uh just under three years. That's the thing we're most excited about. We're doing this thing in September called Way Revival. It's our second year doing it. It's kind of like a mini conference that we're hosting. And yeah, just there's always something to be excited about in Nashville, Tennessee, and at Waychurch. So we're we're really grateful. Well, tell me about Way Revival. Who's coming to that and when is it? Okay, September 25th, 26th, 27th. It's a Friday um evening, Saturday evening, and then a Sunday uh all four services at Waychurch. So we'll have Sadie Robertson Huff is gonna be speaking one of the sessions, Levi Lesco is gonna be speaking as well, and then I'll be speaking one of the sessions. Yeah, it was last year. We did it for the first time. We we weren't sure if it would be a yearly thing or not. We had Pastor Chad Veach and Pastor Jonathan Bakluda, and it was just such a hit with uh the church, like primarily. We had people come from outside of our church too, which we're gonna have the same thing this year. We'd love it. But our church was just so fired up by it that we were like, we gotta keep this going. So we're moving it to a bigger venue, downtown Nashville, and uh we're fired up. We have the capacity to fit 2,600 people at the new venue, and right now we're about halfway there with tickets, and so I think we're gonna fill it up this year, which will be awesome.

SPEAKER_00 4:51

That'd be really exciting. It sounds like you've got a great, great list of people coming in, and I'm glad that it's been such a hit for you guys. You've have always been really good at gathering people together, even before you planted a church and now Way Church, people can look on social media and see that people are gathering. But if we make that our goal of just getting a lot of people in the room and not see them connected and disciple, people begin to slip through the cracks. So, how do so many pastors get that wrong?

SPEAKER_01 5:18

Yeah, I think you the main thing I see is just assuming that it's what works for one person is gonna work for someone else. So just blanket, this is our strategy, and this is our communication flow. And we're just we're just hoping that it's gonna work for everybody. And there's if you're doing church right, then people that walk in the door are gonna be very different. You've got to think with that in mind. How do you communicate differently to a 30-year-old mom who's a single mom? It's gonna be a lot different than the way you communicate to a 20-year-old college student who loves your church. Um, and it's gonna be a lot different than the 50-year-old couple that just became empty nesters. Like there's just a lot of different things that they're looking for, a lot of different ways that you need to talk to them. And so the big thing I would say is you just gotta make sure that your strategy is not just a one-stop shop or you're gonna constantly be missing a certain demographic of people.

SPEAKER_00 6:12

There are some churches that aren't prioritizing connection enough, and there's some that are, and they're just really struggling to see people come in. And, you know, if you talk to any pastor for more than a couple minutes, they'll talk about that that that famous phrase, they're trying to shut the back door. What are some things that you've seen work for you guys to shut that back door and to make more connections?

SPEAKER_01 6:33

I think everyone knows this, but it's like the thing that's gonna shut the back door. There's really two things at every church, doesn't matter what kind of church you're a part of, it's either community or it's mission that's gonna shut the back door. So as quickly as you can get someone into community or a part of your mission, the less likely they are to leave. Now, there's a bunch of different ways that you can do that, but just really practically, I think you've got to give them an opportunity every single Sunday to be a part of that. So it's why I'm such a big proponent of the weekly growth track. You know, we call ours weight track. If you're only doing that once a month, or if you're only doing that once a quarter, you are severely hurting yourself when it comes to shutting the back door because it's such a massive amount of time for someone to be kept out of community and kept out of mission. So I think you got to be consistently giving people an opportunity. You got to consistently talk about the importance of getting plugged in and how they do that at your church, like clear communication from stage. And then I think you got to constantly be celebrating the stories of people who did take the risk of going to that growth track or going to that small group. And so if you come to our church right now, we offer Way Track every single Sunday. And every single Sunday, we are trying to fight for a creative new way to promote it so that it's not the same stale announcement of please go to Way Track. It's like, no, no, no, we're gonna bring a couple on stage that wasn't sure about going through Way Track. They went through Way Track, they met their best friends, now they're plugged in at the church, they're leading a small group. It's like those are the things that move people. Um, but you got to get them in community, you got to get them in mission as quickly as possible.

SPEAKER_00 8:13

I heard someone recently remind me of this idea that if you could imagine if um businesses ran their businesses the way that churches run their churches. So you go in to buy a car, you find the car you want, and the the salesman says, Hey, we only sell those cars on the third Friday of every month. Uh that Friday just happened. So come back in six, five, six weeks, and that car is yours. Uh that the dealership would close down. And that's why I love having a next step that's clear for everyone each week. And you guys do such a good job at connection. Uh, you do a good job at gathering, but your goal isn't just to gather and to connect people. Your your end goal is to create disciples. And I think that's what makes Way Church so special is that you're just not you're not just growing out, but you're also growing people up and make and fulfilling the great commission. And you developed a tool that's really helping churches do that. And I'd love to hear you just kind of tell me the genesis of where did this idea for church grids come from and what is it?

SPEAKER_01 9:12

Yeah, so basically, before we launched our church, uh our executive pastor and I, his name's Connor Crumpton. Without getting too much into the story, we were kind of an arranged marriage where we had a mutual friend who was like, Hey, Noah, uh, there's some things you do well, there's a lot of things you don't do well. And I know this guy who does all the things you do poorly, really well. You guys should do this church together. I was a little nervous about that. It ended up working out amazing. I think he is the greatest executive pastor on the planet, and he's become one of my best friends. But but his background was the business world, the marketplace. Um, he did a lot of work in logistics, in sales, in software. And so he brought all this experience over to the church base. And he was just hyper obsessed with what he would constantly call our new person pipeline, really just assimilation. He was just hyper obsessive over the whole process, which I loved. I just didn't, you know, know how it was all going to work when it came to like software and stuff like that. And about two months before we started the church, he came to me super frustrated and he said, Here's the problem. He said, We're paying all this money over here to do ads, we're paying all this money over here to do database, we're paying all this money over here to do texting and communication. And he was like, We're paying so much money and none of these things are syncing together. He was like, if you could just give me 10 hours a week for the next year, I think I can build something that's gonna solve all the frustrations and problems that we have. And I was like, You mean that you have? Because I don't know what you just said. Fourth of the words, 14 of the words that you just said didn't make sense to me. And so that's what we did is basically he spent 10 hours a week for about a year just trying to solve the problems that we were experiencing. And really plainly, what what church grids is, is we identified four stages of a new person at our church or just a person at our church that they could be in. And those stages are this it's it's the seeker, so seeking stage, there's the attending stage, there's the connecting stage, and then there's the belonging stage. So a seeker, that's the new person, classic new person at your church. That's the person that they tried it for the first time, or maybe they've come a couple times, but they haven't really made the decision that your church is where they're gonna go to church. It's not their tribe. Um, they're looking for community, they're looking to see if they like the pastor, they're looking to see if they like the programs that you do. Then there's the attending. It's like, hey, I am gonna start going to Way Church, but I haven't really made any commitment outside of I'm gonna come to Sundays 1.7 times a month. You know, I'm I'm in the seat, I vibe with it, but I I'm really not taking a next step. Then there's the connecting stage, which is, hey, I'm gonna go to Way Track. I'm interested in what you have to say. I think that I want to take a next step. I've made a couple friends. I came to something outside of a Sunday, whether that was I attended a Way group or I attended a serve day, I attended Way Revival, whatever it is, there's there's been a next step taken. And then there's the belonging. And for us, we're constantly tweaking the connecting and the belonging at our church as far as what that qualification is. But for us now in this season of our life, our church's life, someone who is belonging, they're either serving regularly once every six weeks at our church, is what we define as regularly. They're serving at least one time every six weeks. They're attending a small group regularly. And then the third one is they're regularly giving. So if they meet one of those criteria, it's like, okay, if they're serving, that means they belong here because they're they're on a team, they're here every week, whatever. If they're in a group, our groups are hyper-relational, they're extremely deeply rooted in community. They belong if they're regularly attending a group. And then finally, if they're giving, it's like, well, where your treasure is, your heart will be also. And so their heart's clearly in this. And so we identified these stages. And basically, what we started this conversation with of like, hey, you got to watch out how you communicate to different people. That's exactly what Church Grids does, is it allows us to communicate to these different stage people in very different ways, offer them very different next steps, and even offer them different types of communication where they're getting videos from Maddie and I uh as a first-time guest saying, you know, we're so excited that you're here. Here's a little bit about our church. We're we're honored that, you know, you would try us out. Uh in the belonging stage, it it feels a lot more like a family group text, you know. Hey, it's Pastor Noah and Maddie. Just appreciate you serving today at church. You know, it's it's just it's different communication for different types of people.

SPEAKER_00 13:55

Man, I wish I would have heard you explain it to me that way the first time I heard about church grids, because to be honest with you, I thought you were saying church grits. And I just figure you were really leaning into the whole Southern thing, and you just felt that that like, you know, there is a double meaning by being gritty about connection, uh, Southern food, you know, Georgia, Tennessee, Tampa, you know, but it's grids, it's four grids, and it's absolutely genius. Thank you, man.

SPEAKER_01 14:24

Yeah, we're we're super pumped. It's it's um, you know, we started it because it just solved the problems that we're facing, and it does a lot more than communication, but that that was kind of the first problem that it solved for us. Um, and then we started having churches come visit us to see, you know, what God was doing, or they just want to come by and and see how we do different things. And we would tell them, oh yeah, like they would ask, what do you do for ads, or what do you do for for email marketing, or what do you do for automated, you know, kind of pipeline assimilation stuff. And we'd be like, oh, well, we use we use church grids. And they'd be like, What is that? And we're like, oh, we built it. And then after about 20 people saying, could we use it? We finally decided, okay, let's make this into something that other churches could use. And I think we have 32 or 33 churches that are now using it, which is uh pretty awesome.

SPEAKER_00 15:13

So not every church has someone like Connor that can come in and figure all this out. A lot of times, you know, it's a pastor trying to figure out preaching, meeting with people, and then doing this connection thing at the same time. So, how does this help that that pastor be able to manage this area of his church better?

SPEAKER_01 15:29

Yeah, I think it's that's really the reason we decided to um to make this into something that other people could use because we are thinking about 99% of churches where they don't have a Connor on staff who can build out solutions to their problems. And so it really is plug and play. Um, just what it offers, and then I'll I'll kind of talk about like how this is a game changer for that pastor, is it offers everything from Facebook and Instagram, ad integration. So if you're running ads at your church to try to get first-time guests, it it does all that for you. It keeps track of contact records, it makes it really clear, shows you how many times they've texted, how many times they've emailed, how many times they've signed up for you know, whatever groups you have or whatever insets you're offering. It's a complete email marketing suite. It stores unlimited contacts. There's a mobile app, there's automated church engagement templates. So if you're doing like a baptism Sunday, like we've built out, hey, seven days out from Baptism Sunday. This is the video that you need to record and drop here. This is the text message that's gonna go out three days before. This is the text message that's gonna go out to the person that didn't show up, that signed up to be baptized. We've kind of built it all out so that it really is plug and play, and that pastor might be thinking about those things for 30 minutes a week versus not having anything to offer in those areas. And so it's a game changer. If if we didn't have Connor on our staff, I would be, I would be using this and very relieved because those things stress me out a lot. I don't know how any of it really works, and he's just done an amazing job of of making it simple for people.

SPEAKER_00 17:09

Well, it sounds like it's a turnkey communications and connection platform for pastors.

SPEAKER_01 17:14

Exactly. You just said it so much more clear than I did the first 23 minutes of this podcast.

SPEAKER_00 17:20

Well, I I love that. I love what you're doing. I'm super passionate about connection. I know it's a it's an area that when pastors are concerned about it, they seem to struggle, and I desperately want to help people get traction. And this is an area that maybe they haven't had the time to think through. How am I actually connecting and communicating to people in the different phases of our church? Uh, do you have any stories that you've heard from churches of this going well and this helping them out?

SPEAKER_01 17:44

Yeah, I mean, it what's crazy is we knew that this was gonna help the churches of like less than three, four hundred people, just because typically at a church of 300, you're you're very low on staff. You definitely don't have someone who can help you with ad integration or mass communication, stuff like that. But what's been really cool is the amount of large churches that are now using it and how it's working for them. Um, just recently, another ARC church that I've preached at a couple of times up in Virginia, they've got three or four locations. You know, um, they're in the thousands of people in attendance every uh every Sunday. They're running it at each one of their locations, and they've trained all of their location pastors on how to run it, how to implement it. And um, they're constantly reaching out with, hey, we just went up by this percentage of conversions in our growth track. And uh the executive pastor called me and was like, hey, before we started using church grids, we were measuring how many people would come through the door. They do the Highlands version of growth track, and we could see that we were roughly about 40% conversion as far as this is the amount of people that would would sign up to join a group or to serve. And he said, we've been using church grids, and where we've seen it matter the most is in the follow-up from growth track. So those people that, if they didn't sign up, would kind of just fall through the cracks, are now a part of our database and they're now getting these automated engagement templates that we're running. And he said, we've actually gone from about 40% to over 65% conversion just from those templates. And so that really fired us up because those are people, you know, those are people that are gonna join a group, they're gonna serve, and Lord willing, they're gonna be a part of that church for years and years, and it's gonna impact their family and it's gonna impact their lives. And so that's the stuff that fires us up.

SPEAKER_00 19:36

Incredible. Well, let's come back to church grids in just a second. I want to, you know, diverge a little bit into your podcast that you do. So you have a podcast, the Way Deeper Podcast, and it's a little bit different from other podcasts that I've seen because you actually talk about hot topics. And uh, you know, I when I was uh a teenager, someone gave me a Bible. It's really how I fell in love with reading the Bible, and it had these little sections in it called hot topics, and it's like topics with spell with like an X, you know, and I would read the about the hot topics of the day, and it really got me reading the Bible. I want to talk about your podcast, but two, I'd also just want to take a second because I think you're doing something really, really important, and that is there's there's a maybe a generational shift on how pastors are communicating with people, and you're kind of dealing with some of the hard things up front that maybe some people say, oh, you shouldn't talk about that. That's gonna scare people away. Do you notice that you're doing that? And you know, what are what are your thoughts about that?

SPEAKER_01 20:34

Yeah, you know, I think the philosophy on it differs from person to person, and I have so much admiration and respect for so many people who are approaching it in the complete opposite way. I I think that there are really great biblical reasons to approach it in both ways, and it really just depends on your personal calling. But our church is so young, the average age attender is probably 26, 27 years old. And that generation of person, they are so hungry for clarity around what you believe, why you believe it, and why they should care. And so we were deciding on a podcast type. We knew we wanted to put something out for the members of our church. That's really where it came from was like, how can we disciple the people in our church well as the church continues to grow past what you know I can have in my living room? And so we started talking about ideas, and really like the idea for cultural topics came from me feeling jealous of sports podcasts. So sports podcast, I don't know if you've ever thought you've I'm sure you've thought about this, Josh, but I'm sure that there's plenty of people who aren't as as into sports who've never thought about this. But they're like, sports podcasts never run out of content. They never have to like go come up with something to share because they're just reacting to what already happened, they're just giving. Takes based off of their perspective, their sports view. And so they're not like sitting in a room and having to write content for three hours before they record the podcast. And I just told our team, I was like, hey, I think this podcast is going to fail if this becomes another sermon I've got to write every week. Like I just think it's going to fail. And then I said, and I also think that the people in our church, what's going to move the needle the most in their life is teaching them how to react to cultural things because many times the church is pretty silent on the cultural things and the world is pretty loud on the cultural things. And so what if we just reacted to a bunch of these things and tried to give a biblical um perspective on it? And so it kind of went hand in hand with feeling like we need to be more clear on issues too in the church. And so here's like my whole philosophy on it. I we could get five years down the road and I could look like a total fool for this. But currently, this is what I feel led by the Lord to do. It's to be really clear and say, um, hey, we we put our statements of faith on the website for anybody to see. So if you want to know what we believe about any of the hot button issues, they're there. And the reason we're doing this is because the 26-year-old typically is not gonna come to church, go to church for a year, and then find out what you believe about homosexuality or about money or about any of these other things, they're not gonna find out about it a year down the road and be like, aha, okay, sign in now. Like they're not gonna do that. Like, so what they want, even the ones who maybe disagree with us, they actually respect that we are willing to tell them up front this is what we believe. And by the way, if you disagree with us, you're absolutely welcome here. It changes zero as far as you being welcomed at our church. We just want you to know, because we believe it's loving, um, that clearly this is what we believe, and this is the kind of church that we are. And um, it's been, it's, it's been received really, really well. Um and so we're going, we're going at the issues in the most clear and loving way that we can. And um the main reason we're doing that is because Gin Z has a very low biblical literacy rate, and they're asking the the question. They're they want to know what the Bible says because they don't know, and we're trying to answer it.

SPEAKER_00 24:19

Well, I'm so glad that you're doing it. I love your approach to it. I think it's so important uh for those issues to be talked about, for people to hear the other side of the story instead of saying, hey, get to know me for a year, and then I'll tell you the reality about that. And I just wanted to take some time on this episode and tell you thank you for doing that. You know, like you said, every show has to take a theme. And my show's grown. It started with Believe Again, where I wanted to just kind of inspire people to think differently, to overcome challenges. And it's grown into where I'm like, I just want to live in the practical space because that's where my life is. I'm helping pastors every day. Uh, but I'm trying to serve pastors really well in this area. And so we stay really practical, and that's why I think having you on talking about church grids is so important. I think just pastors understanding those four grids is a teaching in and of itself. And so if someone's on the fence saying, hey, you know, I don't know if I can spend money on that, I don't know if that's something that I need to invest in at this time. Uh, what is something that you would tell them to get over that hump and a next step they would take to get started with church grids?

SPEAKER_01 25:22

Yeah, so at the the risk of sounding salesy, um, before I even sound salesy, let me just say it is severely underpriced. And we've done that very intentionally. It's because our heart is to help as many pastors as possible. It's why there's so many churches of a couple hundred people that are using it, and now there's churches of thousands that are using it. It's because we we uh we made the price as cheap as we could possibly make it for people. But that being said, um, it would be crazy to say something like, I want to get healthier physically this year, and to try to do that without investing time and money into it. I think it's also crazy to be like, we need to get better at assimilation at our church, or we need to get better at first-time guest communication at our church without also investing time and money into it. And so I just really, really believe in the product. I believe in the ROI. I think that you will immediately see results with it. Um it's it's we're constantly tweaking it. And the reason we're so passionate about it is we've seen firsthand how it's worked at our church. Um, and I I realize like what God is doing at our church, it it's um it feels it feels amazing like to see what God is doing, but there's a real practical like edge to our team. And it's not just like it's not just we're hoping that we grow. Like we're we're really taking practical steps uh to try to constantly get better. And I think you'll see that in church grids of like, man, like this is not just a thing that works in downtown Nashville. This is a thing that could work in rural Kentucky too. And so I'd highly encourage pastors to try it. You can try it for a month, and if you hate it, stop using it. But uh, I think that you'll I think you'll want to keep using it.

SPEAKER_00 27:10

Well, no, it's been so good to have you. You've been such a good friend to me. Uh, White Church is just such a lighthouse for the gospel. And thanks for being on here today. It was an honor, man. Thanks for having me. So grateful for Noah for jumping on. I love that he's not just talking about connection, but he's actually built a tool to help churches do it. If any part of this resonated, go check out churchgrids at churchgrids.com and book a demo and make sure you subscribe to Noah's Way Deeper Podcast wherever you listen to. If you've enjoyed this episode, I hope you go to wherever you get your podcast and leave us a review to let people know that this show is making a difference. This episode was brought to you by your team.church. Your team is a digital accessible platform church is used to connect volunteers to a team where they thrive. Your church gets a unique URL with your own branding to use right in your next step class, plus a volunteer dashboard that syncs the planning center. Help your people discover their why and their place on your team and try the Pro Tier 3 for 30 days right now at your team.church. Thank you for joining me today. Can't wait for you to be here next time until then keep building and believing strongly.