Improving Announcements and Communication For Our Church Services w/ Brady Shearer

Alex Enfiedjian 00:11 Hey guys and gals Welcome back to another episode of the worship leader training podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in for being a part of this podcast. It really means a lot to me and I counted a privilege to spend time with you each month. wanted to let you know if you hadn’t heard already, we launched worship leader training com last month worship leader training calm, it’s a resource for you and your teams, you’ll find articles, you’ll find podcasts, you’ll find reviews, and training material there. So a couple of recent posts that we have there battling discouragement as a worship leader, why you should smile while leading worship, what is musical excellence in worship team members. So that kind of gives you a taste for what kind of content you’ll find there. So please bookmark that and go to it often. And hopefully, you’ll be helped by that. In addition to the website, we also launched a couple new social media channels. So we’re now on Facebook, and Instagram. And our username is worship leader training. So if you go to facebook.com, slash worship leader training, same thing with Instagram slash worship leader training, so come be our friend, because it’s pretty lonely over there right now, we just launched them, we don’t have very many followers, and we need you. So do that. That’d be awesome. Today is Episode 28 of our podcast. And we are talking with Brady Shearer who is the founder of pro church tools, and basically a company that helps churches do Communication and Media better. And we’re talking about crafting compelling communication for our worship services. You know, most of us are in charge of more than just music, we’re actually in charge of the whole service flow and the feel, and the songs before the service and the lyric slides and the graphics for the announcements and we hopefully are coaching our announcement people so they’re not boring, and they’re actually having an effect on the people that they’re giving the announcements to. So that’s really what we’re covering today is how do we maximize the communication in each element of our services, so that we bring about the desired results from our congregants. It’s a great interview, I’m excited to share it with you. But first, we’re going to thank our sponsors, core sound pads. Thank you guys for sponsoring our show. If you haven’t already done so check out core sound pads. They are that ethereal sounding background, fluffy stuff that makes your worship band sound way cooler, and more modern and gels things together. And again, I’ve tried all of the worship pads out there on the market. And these are by far the best you can try them for free. If you just check out the link in the show notes. And if you decide to buy the deluxe bundle, you can get $20 off by entering w lt podcast at checkout. So check out core sound pads. Thanks for being our sponsor this month. Alright, let’s get into our great interview with Brady Shearer and I’ll catch you at the back end.

Alex Enfiedjian 03:07 Hey, everybody, I am super excited to be here with the one and only Brady Shearer Brady is the creator of pro church tools and pro church Academy. These are websites that he developed to help churches communicate better through excellent media. Brady, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. Hey, Alex, thanks for inviting me on. It’s gonna be a blast. Yeah, it’s gonna be great. Brady, so this is a podcast mainly for worship leaders. And worship leading usually spans more than just music, a lot of us are in charge of planning our entire service order in our service flow, including things like pre service graphics, the announcement portion of our service, lyric slides, and oftentimes video. So I am asking you to help us improve the communication aspect of our services. So first of all, before we get into kind of the practical, nitty gritty stuff, I would love kind of a broad overview and some definitions. So Brady, how would you define excellence in communication? And why would you say that it matters for our services?

Brady Shearer 04:14 Well, we’re living in an interesting time, Alex, where the amount of communication that each of us has to deal with on an everyday basis is incredibly, incredibly increased from even just five years ago, not to mention, you know, 1020 years ago, I’m still a pretty young guy. I’m just 25 years old. And so even at that age, though, I still remember what it was like not having this many amounts of communication to sift through. I mean, right before we hit record on this podcast, you said to me how, you know, you turned off notifications so that you weren’t distracted at all that, you know, there were no interruptions for any of our listeners. And and that just speaks to the world that we’re living in right now. You know, to have a conversation one on one with someone, we have to silence all the potential interruptions that could come in between that and so communication has become increased. More important, because there’s so much noise that we’re dealing with that if we’re not able to communicate clearly and the way that you put it communicate with excellence, then we’re not able to actually be heard by anyone, we can’t get their attention. And the question is, is, how would I define excellence in communication? Well, the way that I would define excellence is excellence, you know that you’ve accomplished that when you’re getting people’s attention, I like to say that attention is the most valuable commodity that your church can earn from your congregation. And the reason for that is that without attention, you’re not going to be having anyone taking action, you’re not going to have anyone engaging in worship, you’re not going to have anyone listening to the message. And you’re not going to have anyone signing up for events, registering, or even really being an active part of your church. The great thing about church is that we all come together to be the body of Christ and push forward the kingdom of God as one unit. But that requires each of us to be playing an active role. And one of the, you know, unique challenges that we’re facing in 2016. And going forward as the global church, especially in North America is that there’s a lot of people that are just spectators that are not actually engaging in our local churches, and really to move people from being spectators to being active participants, you need their attention first. And so when it comes to a definition of excellent communication, there’s so many different ways to accomplish that so many different vehicles to get us to that destination. But the destination itself is Attention.

Alex Enfiedjian 06:25 Attention. That’s really good. Yeah. And reception, right? Because I feel like a lot of times, I’ll talk to my wife, and I’ll say something, and she’ll hear a different thing or, you know, and that goes across the board. So it’s like landing the intended message to an attentive audience is a successful form of communicating, right? Absolutely. Yeah, that’s really good. So here’s a question then, in broad principles, meaning, this applies to all forms of communication, our slides, our videos, our website, verbal announcements, in broad principles, what are some of the key elements of excellent communication?

Brady Shearer 07:04 Like, do you like what you said about reception, because the first step is getting people’s attention, the next step would be having them actually take action, receiving what you’ve said to them, and then moving into a place of action. So let’s talk first about, you know, the key elements of getting someone’s attention, we’d like to say that attention is the most valuable commodity that your church can earn. So well, how do we actually do that? Well, the best way to do that we’ve found is through storytelling, a storytelling has been proven to be the only form of human communication that causes our brains to focus and focus and attention go hand in hand. You know, this will probably sound very true once you hear it. But we don’t think about this actively. The fact that we spend up to a third of our waking hours in a daydreaming like state, meaning up to a third of our waking hours are spent thinking about something else than the present moment. So you might be listening listener right now to this podcast, you’re hearing the sound of my voice. But really, you’re thinking about finishing that Netflix series that you’ve got just a couple more episodes to go? Are you thinking about what’s for lunch? What’s for dinner, and surely you’ll have seen this when you’re communicating. In a Sunday morning at a church, you’re leading worship, you’re sharing a message from stage and, you know, you can see a bunch of people who are engaged. But then there’s a large handful of people that are also you know, they’re there, but they’re not really in the moment, up to a third of our waking hours are just spent kind of daydreaming floating through life. Well, storytelling is the only form of communication, Alex that causes us, subconsciously, to break out of that state, and start paying attention. And once you know this, and you’re able to recognize that you’ll see it happen all the time, you’ll be listening to someone talk and they start telling a story. And suddenly, you’re paying more attention to them. And what they’re saying, then you were just a moment ago when they were just talking in a non storytelling form. And so storytelling, we like to say, is one of the key elements of excellent communication, because it’s just proven to work. But there’s another big component behind excellence in communication. And that is understanding your why. And this has become a buzzword, sadly, in the way that we talk about leadership and communications over the last couple of years, because people talk about it all the time. But the reason it’s a cliche, and the reason that it’s become a buzzword is because it’s very, very truthful. And that is that if you don’t know the desired outcome that you’re wanting to see happen, if you don’t know your why the purpose behind your communications, then you won’t be able to actually take inventory of what’s working and what’s not. And you won’t be able to have any clarity when it comes to what you’re communicating. Because really any response to you would be a good response. You’re just hoping for a response at all. If you don’t have a defined why you can’t really zero in on a clear form of communication, a clear message. And when you don’t have a clear message, really any response is a good response. But is it really well? No, it’s not because you’re not actually meeting a goal. There’s no criteria that you’re aiming to hit, right. And so those two things combined understanding what you’re trying to accomplish, and then pairing that with storytelling would be two key elements that are very, very big parts of excellent communication. So great ready,

Alex Enfiedjian 10:01 I think as you were talking, I was thinking about, that really means we have to be intentional about every single thing that is presented at the church from the slides before service to how we’re praying during the song sets. I’m not saying to be, you know, inauthentic, but it’s like, what is the purpose of this moment in our service? And really thinking that through? And okay, if that’s the outcome we desire, then how can we craft this communication to bring about that desired outcome. So that that means a lot of us worship leaders are gonna have to get more intentional about thinking through every single element of our service. So thanks for that, that’s going to be challenging, but I think that’s going to be super helpful.

Brady Shearer 10:42 Yeah, like our church, our statement that we always come back to is that we’re all about inviting people into a life that matters. And so that’s kind of our do north on the compass. Every time that we communicate in service online, during a worship set, we’re always coming back to that inviting people into a life that matters, and how are we bringing more and more people aligned to that? Why? That’s our why. So just just having that do north is so important. And then once you have that, you’re able to say, Okay, so the goal of this year are some, you know, things that we would see that would say this has been accomplished, we are on the right track. And then once you have that, why it just opens up, the the amount of creativity that you have, it’s actually funny the way it works, the more limitations that you have, the more creative that you are. So it’s very important to have that why because in so many walks of life, we have kind of clear defined outcomes before we begin communicating. But it’s easy in church, especially because there’s always another Sunday coming and there’s just so many vehicles of communication that we’re using to forget about that why we’re just like, how can I get through this?

Alex Enfiedjian 11:46 right and and you know, you were talking about having like a desired outcome. So we know our why and we know what we want to accomplish. But I love how you brought in that storytelling element, because it’s not just like we stand up there and say, come to this four o’clock, this is what will happen there. That’s not very compelling. That’s not compelling communication. But if you bring in a story about how someone’s life was changed because of this event, it will evoke emotion in our listeners to want to be there, and it will bring about the desired outcome. So I think you’re totally right on, when you say that the two basic principles of excellent communication is the emotional storytelling aspect paired with what are we trying to get them to do at the end of this communication? So that’s really good. Now, can I ask you, Brady, you work with a lot of churches that come to you for help and advice and consulting on their communication tactics, out of all these churches? What are some of the ways that you are seeing churches fail? in their media? And in their communication strategy? What are some common mistakes that you see,

Brady Shearer 12:54 there are basically three, three big mistakes that we see most most commonly. The first one has to do with overload. I mentioned at the top that, you know, when we all know this, we’re dealing with so much noise, so many forms of communication that are coming at us expectations of us do this, do that, by this by that sign up for this. So as a church, you don’t want to be adding to that noise. But what we see so many churches and ministries doing is overloading their congregation with information overloading with events, overloading with do this, do that. And the more that you add, the less effective things become what we found when it comes to announcements that really, you know, and announcements, at least from a video announcement standpoint, you want to keep your video announcements to around two to three minutes. And this is a good example, every time that you get beyond that mark, let’s say you’re at three minutes, you’ve kind of really hit the edge of how long they should be. And every time you add another announcement beyond that, not only is that new announcement, not going to be effective, but you’re lessening the effectiveness of all the announcements that came before it. So it has this kind of like reverse effect that is completely negative. So you don’t want to overload your church with stuff. That’s the first big problem that we see. The second biggest problem that we see is something that we like to call consequences and promises. And this applies to the word that we’re actually using a lot of the times churches will say something like this, don’t miss it, we’ve got this great event coming up, it’s gonna be life changing, don’t miss it. And what you’re doing is you’re setting up this consequence, and it’s a subtle little egg verbage thing, but we’ve found that it actually has a big, big effects. You’re saying to someone Don’t miss it? Well, really, that’s hyperbole, because what’s gonna happen if they miss this church event? Well, almost definitely Nothing will happen. Like when I was in school, and I would get something from my professor, you know, and they would say something like, there’s a due date Don’t miss it. Well, that has real consequences if I missed that due date. I do not want to miss that. Lest I fail that specific assignment. But in church world, we say look, we’ve got a great men’s breakfast coming up. Do not miss it. Well, what’s gonna happen if I miss it? Well, nothing. I’ll get to sleep in a bit more or I’ll miss out on some bacon, you know, like, there’s not that much Just going to happen if I miss thing. So you know, things like consequences, you never want to use consequences in your communications, don’t miss it, hey, you’re gonna be you’re gonna feel left out if you don’t attend this event don’t use consequences. Jesus never did. And it’s not something that really spurs action. Or if it does spur action, you’re doing it from the wrong place, you’re doing it from this place that people don’t want to be left out what you want to really inspire people to attend your events, you want to inspire people to take action, you don’t want to threaten them, and have them take action out of like fear that something will happen, and they won’t be a part of it. And then the second part is promises. There are so many things going on in our churches that relates to the first problem that we see happening overload. And what can happen is we always want to make things seem like the biggest thing ever. So we’ll say this event is going to be life changing, this event is going to blow your mind we’re bringing in this world class speaker, it’s going to change your life. Well, the thing is, you can never predict when things are going to be life changing, you can never predict when you know, things are going to be epic. So we also don’t like to make promises with our events that we can’t keep. Namely, we don’t say that this is going to be life changing. We don’t say that you need to be a part of this. We don’t say that this is going to be the best small group, this is going to be the best worship set. This is going to be the best night of worship that you’ve ever attended. Because those things cannot be predictable. And they can’t be proven. What we can say is we can promise like this event is going to contain x y&z and this is why we think that you should attend it. So when it comes to actually structuring your announcements, structuring your communications, structuring your promotions, consequences and promises, at least false promises are things that we definitely stay away from. And then third thing, the third problem that we see with church communications, is when you’re in a church, and you’re communicating from stage, we have this assumption that people are listening to what we’re saying. The sad truth is Alex, no one is listening. No one is listening to what you’re saying. The truth is, they’re probably just making it through the announcements into the message, or they’re probably just making it through this kind of little talk. And so you get in start the next song, you can’t assume that people are listening. And the reason I know that churches think people are listening is by the content that they’re sharing within their announcements. Here’s what I mean, a lot of the times someone will share an event, they’ll share a promotion, and they’ll talk about the information, Alex will say, okay, we’re having this men’s breakfast, it’s at 9am, it’s being held at this restaurant, on this date. If you want to sign up, email this person or call this phone number, well, each of those five pieces of information will be remembered by absolutely zero people. Because information is very difficult to remember. Now, if you inspire me about this men’s breakfast, if you talk about the camaraderie of what men’s breakfast is all about, if you talk about a story of what happened at the last men’s breakfast, this hilarious thing where some person showed up late and then all the bacon was gone, and then everyone got angry, but then they were able to find more bacon, you know, something, even just a small anecdote that’s gonna inspire me, I’ll remember that feeling of being inspired by the messaging. And then I might be compelled to take action. But if all you’re doing is sharing information, first of all, I’m not going to be inspired to take action. And secondly, I’m just going to forget that information anyway. And so it’s really just a waste of stage time to share all that information, because no one’s remembering it. And it’s not inspiring people to do anything about it. So those are the three biggest things we see overload consequences and promises. And assuming that people are listening, whether or not

Alex Enfiedjian 18:18 that’s so good, and I think what you said at the end, that little bacon story, you know, I captured my imagination right there on the spot. And it’s like, what you’re saying is use our announcement time to inspire our people. And then just let them follow up with they can look in the bulletin for the for the informational side, or we can say, this great story about blah, blah, blah. And if you’re interested in signing up, go to our website, x, y, z church, comm slash men’s breakfast or something like that they can get the information. But our job is to inspire them to take action through through storytelling and through the emotional component. Right, exactly.

Brady Shearer 18:54 And allow me to share a practical example because I realized, I’ve been talking a lot about like, what you shouldn’t do so far. So here’s an example of how to do this. Firstly, storytelling is great. But storytelling can sometimes feel like I don’t have any good stories to share. But it’s not really that threatening at all. It’s very, very simple. And here’s an example. So a couple of weeks ago, we had this big baptism service at my church, and I’m the one that does all the announcements at church. I’m the host, every most weeks and so I’m up there promoting baptism. So here are the things that they gave me to talk about baptism. Well, it was happening on I don’t remember the exact date, let’s say it was happening on November the fifth, it was happening in all three services, you could sign up at this website and at this place in the lobby. And here was the information needed to know about it when it came to you know what time to show up. And, you know, here’s the shirts and clothing you need to bring in. Here’s like the preparation that you can take. And I said, You know what, I’m gonna throw all of that out. And what I did was all I did was I walked on stage, and I told the story of when I was baptized. And I talked about how I grew up in this really small church, Alex, it was the small Baptist Church in Canada, which is where I live I’m a Canadian, just like 30 people in this church. And you know, it was such a small chapel that we met in that we didn’t have a baptismal tank or anything like that. So when I was baptized, we actually went to my pastor’s home. And in his backyard, he had this inground pool. And so when I was baptized, I was around 10, or 11 years old, and I got baptized in the pool in the backyard of my pastor. And that’s where my baptism happened. And I talked about, you know, it was a meaningful experience for me. And if you’d like to be baptized, we don’t have an inground pool, we’re actually doing it in our church, here’s where you can go to sign up. And this is the announcement formula that we always suggest that you use. So here’s, here’s the communications announcement formula that we always use inspiration plus a single call to action. So in that respect, the inspiration was me talking about me being baptized, and then the single call to action was go to this website or go to this area in the lobby. That’s the way that we do it. So we don’t say, you know, call Nancy or stop by Jim’s house, or come by the office or affiliate, you’re connected, just like one single call to action. And that’s the announcement formula that we always use. And you’ll notice that that baptism story wasn’t really that over the top, it was just me talking about when I got baptized. And it can be really simple. Storytelling doesn’t have to be this epic, you know, intimidating thing. It can just be simple anecdotes,

Alex Enfiedjian 21:13 I love that single call to action. So listeners Listen up single call to action, keep it simple. One thing I want to touch on too, before we move on from this topic is you had mentioned overload, information overload. And I wanted to ask how Brady, do you determine what gets announced? Because as we were talking earlier about every single thing, in our service, having a purpose and having a desired outcome? I thought, well, maybe that also applies to the entire service in general. So what do we want our service to be about? And what do we want it to accomplish? Well, that’s also going to limit what we announced in our services. So what have you found helpful? What rules have you found helpful in determining what gets announced on Sundays?

Brady Shearer 22:00 Yeah, absolutely. So what we do is we, here’s a rule that we kind of use as a guideline, we say, if this applies to 50%, or more of the people in attendance, it is eligible for an announcement. So if someone comes to me and says, look, we are having a men’s breakfast, there is perhaps reason to assume that that could be eligible for a stage announcement, because it could apply to 50% of the people or more, if someone comes to me and says, We’re having, you know, a senior’s event, and we’d love for you to share an announcement with us. If that only applies to 10% 20% of the church, it doesn’t warrant a stage announcement, that’s kind of the guideline that we use. And so there are so many other ways to communicate that don’t involve using precious stage time, you know, our church services have generally gotten shorter for the most part over the last, let’s say, half decade. So my church runs just a little bit over 60 minutes. And every time we add an extra announcement, for a group, that is not the majority of the people in attendance, it’s just a waste of that time, there’s so many better things that we could do in a live event, then share an announcement that applies to one out of every 10 people. And so that’s the guideline we use, does this apply to 50%? Or more? If it does not, we won’t share it publicly from stage at that event. But there are so many other ways to get that information out to that group of people.

Alex Enfiedjian 23:16 That’s so cool. And who determines the direction and vision of communication? Is it the senior pastor? Or is it the worship leader is the communications director? How do you guys kind of wrestle with, you know, setting the vision and setting the direction who’s in charge of that?

Brady Shearer 23:30 Well, probably comes as no surprise coming from a communicator, and a guy that works with churches in the realm of communications, that I wish more churches had communications directors, people that were skilled in this, the biggest challenge that I see church staff people facing is that they’re entrusted with things that they know very little about. And this is perhaps no more true than with worship pastors with worship leaders, where, you know, they’re very skilled in leading worship, leading people via music into worshiping God. And then they’re tasked by their senior leadership to also be graphic designers. And just because why? Well, just because that they aren’t able to hire someone else to do that. And you know, you work full time in the church. So hopefully, you can figure this out. And that’s a really, really sad place to be in because you don’t feel equipped to accomplish the task that you’ve been asked to accomplish. And what happens then is most likely poor communication. So in that respect, we poor graphic design, when it comes to communications, it’s it’s, it’s poorly done. So when it comes to who’s actually accomplishing that, that’s a church by church basis. I wish there was a communications director who was very skilled and was kind of looking at a macro level of how the church wanted to communicate and then executing it on a micro level.

Unknown Speaker 24:41 You know, I

Brady Shearer 24:41 try I try to take that role in my church as much as possible because I know a lot about that my church has also has several very highly skilled communicators. What’s interesting is that I see a lot of lead pastors, senior pastors, that are pretty poor communicators. They might be able to deliver a sermon, but when it comes to understanding human And especially in 2016, they’re just not very skilled at it. So one thing that you shouldn’t assume is that your senior leader always knows what’s best. Because we found that a lot of the time that they don’t,

Alex Enfiedjian 25:10 that’s really good. So find somebody who is talented and plug them into the role. I’d love to switch gears for a second, this has been super helpful already. Talk to us a little bit about visual media because we live in a super hyper visual society now, how can we as worship leaders, because unfortunately, like you said, a lot of us are in charge of our slides and our graphics and our videos and our web design. What are some of the best practices for visual communication visual media? Well, here’s

Brady Shearer 25:41 a super practical tip that I can share with you. And that is, the, the the difference and the balance of positive space and negative space in your visuals. So positive space in a visual, whether that’s a motion background, a lyric slide, or bullets in a promotional graphic, or a sermon graphic, positive space would refer to anything that is an actual element that’s taking up space within the graphic text, graphical elements, stuff like that. And the negative space would be anything that’s just simply background, or whitespace. And you always want to have a good balance between negative space and positive space. Churches are notorious for taking visuals and stuffing them with as much elements as they can possibly fit on, there’s a little room here throwing the date here, there’s a little room here add an extra cross, there’s a little room here, what if our logo contained 14 different elements? Well, you want to have a balance between negative space and positive space. 5050 is a great balance. So when you look at your lyrics, here’s a very practical example, for worship leaders, when you look at your lyrics on screen, are you trying to fit like eight different lines on the screen, and stuffing that, you know screen as much as possible to get as much to fit as possible? Well, that’s not what you want to do look at the positive space and the negative space. Okay, two lines at the text size that we use is a pretty good balance between positive space and negative space. Or maybe you have bigger screens. So you can put on more text, maybe four lines is great. But you want to look at that balance, there’s a really practical tip, positive space versus the negative space. negative space is a good thing. It allows the graphic to breathe, and allows your visuals to be balanced and not feel overwhelming. You know, there’s something very, very common that that’s talked about in the design world, like where does your eye go? First? You know, where is the focal point of this visual? Well, if you don’t have a balance between positive space and negative space, you can’t actually have a focal point because everything is the focal point. And so striking that balance is extremely important. And churches are usually almost always balancing too far in the positive space direction. So really the best question to ask yourself, Is there enough negative space in this visual? And if not, how can we rectify that?

Alex Enfiedjian 27:46 Yeah, that’s really good. And I know you have a lot of really, really helpful resources on your website. So I’m going to go ahead and link some of those in the show notes for our listeners to just be able to click on read about this and improve their skills. And do you have any other resources? Do you have like font packs or things that they can get on your website to improve their visual media?

Brady Shearer 28:05 Yeah, you know, we have more than 300 free resources when it comes to podcast articles, and videos that we release a new ones every week that are 100%. Free. So you can search by category. If you want to learn more about design. If you want to learn more about communications through web communications, through video, it’s all there sorted by category. Awesome. Yeah,

Alex Enfiedjian 28:23 we’ll link several relevant articles. And then we’ll give them the link to your website where they can just go crazy and search. And I do at this. I mean, we’re not done with the interview yet. But I do want to plug pro church Academy super helpful. So check out Brady’s resource that he created for churches to train you in this stuff. I wanted to know what you think about this. Brady. One other resource I found that I found helpful in designing my churches announcement slides is Canva canva.com. It’s like an online visual graphic design thing. Do you like that tool?

Brady Shearer 28:55 Yeah. Canva is absolutely great. And it’s you can get it free. There’s like a paid option that you can get free as a nonprofit. So normally, it costs 10 bucks a month, but as a church, a licensed nonprofit, you can get it for free, which is very generous of them.

Alex Enfiedjian 29:08 Yeah. So yeah, guys, improve your visual media. It’s important in this day and age, you don’t want to look like you’re from the 80s or 90s that will scare visitors away. Hey, Brady, where do you see church media moving in the future? And how can we prepare for that?

Brady Shearer 29:24 I see things becoming more and more digital and online. In a good way. I always try to in a good way. You know, I’m also pretty young. Like I said, I’m 25. And so I feel pretty native to this. But I think I see things moving less. I think moving more away from live event focused right now our churches are very live event centric. So we’ve got this one hour every week. That’s the center of church. But I think as we become more and more digitally native, that’s going to become less and less the focus, you know, you can connect with people now. 24 seven around the clock throughout the week. It doesn’t have to just be through this one hour. Or in real life on a Sunday morning. Now, that’s not to say that live events are going to disappear. But I don’t think they’re going to be the prime focus moving forward.

Alex Enfiedjian 30:07 So really, you’re saying that the church will become more of a communication hub that spreads out its information and disseminates it via online resources, is that what you’re saying?

Brady Shearer 30:17 You when it comes to the teaching aspect, at least now, I don’t know if you can accomplish community that well through that. And, and that might also be something that we see in the future where people are feeling less and less connected with the people in their church. And we see a return to more community focused events and community focused groups of believers. And so that’ll probably be another part of it. But when it comes to teaching, and especially, you know, the way that we’re sharing information about the gospel, I mean, I’ve, I’ve got a dozen podcasts that I’m still listening to this this week, Alex, you know, I don’t need to go somewhere, and sit down and listen for 60 minutes, as a pastor shares a message, that’s something that’s going to be, you know, less and less, I guess, less than less obvious when it comes to younger people. And you know, we’re still in this space where there are so many baby boomers that are still alive and being the prime influences in our churches, especially the smaller ones. But that’s going to be changing over the next couple of decades. And so I really think that over the next 10 and 20 years, really 510 and 20 years, we’re gonna see some of the biggest changes in communications as a culture that we’ve ever seen. And that’s going to, in no way be avoided by the church, and we’re gonna have to figure that stuff out as we go.

Alex Enfiedjian 31:25 Is there anything we can do to prepare for that?

Brady Shearer 31:27 Yeah, I mean, begin already focusing more on how are we accessible at all times, like my business, for instance, isn’t is entirely online. And so I, I come from a place where obviously, this is a part of my daily reality. But you know, if the biggest thing you’re doing is this once a week live event, that’s great. But start to ask yourself, if people weren’t attending this as frequently as we wanted them to, which is obviously already happening continent wide? How are we being able to interact with those people outside of this event? How can we be less live event focused?

Alex Enfiedjian 32:00 That’s really good. Because what you’re saying there is you’re not saying it’s not important to gather, because Scripture says we should gather, but what you’re saying is how do we reach the people who have scattered or who have not come to gather with us? How do we still influence people? And the answer is via online. So I’d love to just ask before you sign off for today, do you have any final words for our listeners,

Brady Shearer 32:25 I just want to encourage you to, to keep doing what you’re doing. I know how lonely it can feel working in the church. I know, as a worship pastor, how it can feel to just be overwhelmed by the amount of things that you have to do. And you know, there’s so many of us that are doubting with our own faith and doubting if we’re in the right place. And just to give yourself some grace and know that you know, the work that you’re doing matters. And you don’t have to be perfect or have everything figured out to be doing things that are helping people in their in their walk every day. And so just be encouraged in that respect.

Alex Enfiedjian 32:57 That’s really good. Brady, where can people connect with you online? You’re in a lot of places. So tell us where we can find you.

Brady Shearer 33:03 Yeah, our main hub is pro church tools.com. All of my and all of our social channels are linked right on that page. You can find them in the footer. So if you want to connect with me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, they’re all linked there. Our home base pro church tools calm.

Alex Enfiedjian 33:18 Yeah. And I just want to encourage our listeners right now, go find Brady’s podcast, pro church podcast, go find that and subscribe to it. Because obviously, this guy has tons of wisdom and knowledge to impart to you and me. So subscribe to that and stay connected with Brady. Brady, thank you so much for being here and for taking time to bless us today. It’s been a blast, Alex. Thanks for inviting me. My pleasure.

Alex Enfiedjian 33:46 That’s it for today. Thank you so much for listening. I hope this episode really helped you to think more intentionally about how you’re communicating to your church during your worship gatherings. If it was a help to you, please help us by forwarding it on to a friend. And please check out our new website worship leader training comm for articles resources and reviews. Again, thanks to our sponsor, core sound pads, check out their free bundle, I promise you, you will love it. And thank you again for being a listener for being a faithful follower. We would not do this if it weren’t for you. And we hope that you’re being helped by all of this content. God bless you guys. And I will see you next month for another helpful episode. Take care