Hello Listeners! In celebration of the new year, we're looking back to our top 3 episodes that you downloaded and listened to the most in 2023! We'll be back with new content on January 22 - until then we hope you enjoy re-experiencing these wonderful stories of HOPE or experiencing them for the first time! Here is your number two downloaded episode: Episode # 1 - Let’s Grow - Relief, Recovery, Reformation. ------------ How have the last two years led us to where we are now? And why are we doing a podcast? In this episode Rick Court & Jeff Bills talk about where we have come from so we can look ahead, including a new three year challenge for HOPE we're calling, "Let's Grow."
Podcast on church attendance -- "Are People Coming Back to Weekend Services?" by The Unstuck Church Podcast.
Thanks for being a part of the HOPE community as we continue conversations about faith and hope! You can learn more at meethope.org or find us on socials @meethopechurch. Join in for worship on Sundays at meethope.live! Have a question? Contact us at podcast@meethope.org.
Hello Listeners! In celebration of the new year, we're looking back to our top 3 episodes that you downloaded and listened to the most in 2023! We'll be back with new content on January 22 - until then we hope you enjoy re-experiencing these wonderful stories of HOPE or experiencing them for the first time! Here is your number two downloaded episode: Episode # 1 - Let’s Grow - Relief, Recovery, Reformation. ------------ How have the last two years led us to where we are now? And why are we doing a podcast? In this episode Rick Court & Jeff Bills talk about where we have come from so we can look ahead, including a new three year challenge for HOPE we're calling, "Let's Grow."
Podcast on church attendance -- "Are People Coming Back to Weekend Services?" by The Unstuck Church Podcast.
Thanks for being a part of the HOPE community as we continue conversations about faith and hope! You can learn more at meethope.org or find us on socials @meethopechurch. Join in for worship on Sundays at meethope.live! Have a question? Contact us at podcast@meethope.org.
Speaker 1:
Hello listeners, in celebration of the new year, we're looking back to our top three episodes that you downloaded and listened to the most in 2023. We'll be back with new content on January 22nd, but until then, we hope you enjoy re-experiencing these wonderful stories of hope, or experiencing them for the first time. Here is your number two downloaded episode, episode number one let's grow. Relief, recovery, reformation.
Speaker 2:
Hello Jeff, how are you? Great, Rick, how you doing? I'm doing good, yeah, and want to you know excited about this is our first ever podcast together. Yay, and you know we're still trying to come up with a name and we're playing around different things. We right now think we're going to call it the Meet Hope podcast.
Speaker 3:
Conversations about faith and hope.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, yes, that'd be fun. We're here in the Digital Cafe at Hope, so if you hear some noises in the background, it may be kids running through the building, might be parents picking someone up, staff moving through. Yeah, so you might hear some sounds and we have typical Thursday afternoon. Yeah, we have Ashley and Andrew out here behind cameras and we're excited that they can be here with us and we're hoping that there's some listeners and viewers who are thousands.
Speaker 2:
Yes, this is going to be a big deal. Yeah, so this is really interesting. It's the new era of ministry, right, this digital age. I'm sure you remember taking podcast 101 in seminary it was, you know, a required class?
Speaker 3:
Not at all.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, that was a required class and so we hope that, as you're listening, you guys enjoy our fumblings as we figure this thing out. But we have some exciting things and we're looking forward to sharing what's going on. And the reason we want to do a podcast is we want to broadcast an exciting new challenge that we're about to embark on. It's a three-year ministry campaign and it's a challenge for the whole hope community and you want to share what that title is, what we're calling that.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, so we're calling it let's Grow, and that's a reference to really what our core business is. We talk about all the time that we are in the business of making disciples and disciples as individuals, followers of Christ. We're all called to spiritual growth, to become increasingly mature, and so the growth is about your growth as an individual Christ follower and together as a community of faith, our growth as we move forward together to be the body of Christ.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, and that is new for the church. It isn't new for hope, even now, our current tagline one church, two expressions and growing influence. So before we get too far into there, we want to look at how we got here right. So we're kind of on the other side of the pandemic and you remember that early in the weeks of the pandemic I think it may have been in the first or second week of the pandemic I read an article that I passed on to you called Leading Beyond the Blizzard, and I know you remember that article and we pass it on to the lead team, we pass it on to staff and others as well, because when I read it first it was a disturbing article it was. It talked about a month's long pandemic, right, and it talked about global changes. It talked about economic hardships and man, it was really disturbing and depressing, and we were only a couple of weeks in.
Speaker 3:
At that point we were thinking like what?
Speaker 2:
Yes, is this for real? It turned out to be really a prophetic article, right, and I know at some point during the early on we made a decision as a staff and as a lead team and as a church that we're going to look at this as more than a two-week pandemic and it really has turned out to help us as we move forward through this and the article spoke about three likelihoods, and it turned out that they were not only possibilities, but they became, I think, realities, or movements, as I've been calling them as well, and the first one is the idea of relief.
Speaker 2:
Right that in March 2020, the world needed relief. We had people dying at a fast rate, we had the economy had stalled, people were home from work, figuring out all the things that had to do with the pandemic and trying not to get sick Right. Yeah, businesses closing, it was yeah, and hope made a quick pivot then and we focused on a few things, and you know what those are. Why don't you share those things that we focused on right away coming out into that pandemic?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, so our own relief efforts were we were just concerned about caring for our congregation and making sure that folks were okay and not alone, and so as a church, we did a number of things. We had a phone campaign where we called every household at the church and sometimes we talked to people. Sometimes we were just leaving messages, but we reached out to every household to let them know hey, we're here. If there's anything we can be doing for you, please let us know. We had a letter campaign where we sent out handwritten letters to every household. That's when we started the weekly or the daily prayer email. That started right in that same timeframe, and so it was all about just bringing some level of relief to folks.
Speaker 3:
Oh, another thing that was really cool is we had A couple of folks who came to us. They put together a fund of $10,000 and said we know that there's going to be some small business owners here that may not have any work and we want you to be able to use this money to help these folks. And wow, what a great relief that was for a number of our people here who had small businesses that we were able to provide some income to.
Speaker 2:
And did you mention the food pantry?
Speaker 3:
The food pantry took off as well.
Speaker 2:
Right, and that was a primary way for us, to one of the primary ways we showed relief or brought relief to people right 100%.
Speaker 2:
So, that was the first movement and that was from March through several months of the pandemic. And then the next movement that this article talked about was recovery. And recovery, I would say, was like from 20, somewhere in 2020 through 2021. And while the relief was kind of like a blizzard, where we kind of all hunker down right when the storm comes, you kind of wait it out, the way that this article described recovery was that it's like a winter season and there's like this season of storms that we go through, and so not only did we have COVID, but during that time of 2020 and 2021, we dealt with the protests of the Black Lives Movement, we dealt with the masks no masks issues, the vaccines, the election results and election protests, and all those things were taking place during that same period. And here at Hope, during recovery, we were figuring out how to do online ministry, how to do it well and how many weeks. We thought we were two weeks, right Two weeks.
Speaker 2:
Two weeks behind, the camera turned into how many? 60. 60 weeks.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, 15 months of nobody in the building, certainly on Sundays, and very few people during the week. And it was initially Rick, you recall. There was I think four or five of us here on a Sunday you, me and at that time it was Steve Hoadley doing some music.
Speaker 2:
Eventually we brought Josh in and Marilyn was doing a text Behind the cameras. Yeah, our very first one was on Marilyn's iPhone, remember that.
Speaker 3:
That was our very first service in March, yeah, and we could at that time and again, it's hard to go to remember what that was like, but when we first heard about it, thinking, oh my gosh, we're going to close for two weeks with no Sunday service, what's that going to be like? And so, to your point, it was 60 weeks of no in-person worship. So, yeah, the recovery then was figuring out how do we do something we had been doing at that point for 30 years, which was in-person worship, and at the same time, do a online version of that, and churches were across the country. We're trying to figure out the best ways, best practices, to do that. We made a decision at that point that we were going to do live stream and not do two different services, and I think that was a really important decision.
Speaker 2:
We knew it was going to be important at the time and we're still living into that Right and during that recovery we focused on themes like community unity and it's better to be loving than right. All of that because we knew that not only was the church, going through these experiences. But each individual was having a different experience connected to all of these social issues that were taking place, as well as the pandemic. So the first phase there is relief. Then then was recovery and then the third.
Speaker 3:
And just not to interrupt here, but the recovery also involved how we were going to be doing ministry going forward. So our children's ministry had been all online. So how do we reintroduce an in-person children's ministry? Our youth ministry had to figure that out, our small groups ministry had to figure that out, and so that really we're still kind of in that late recovery.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, and that's where we've talked about how these these relief, recovery and reformation is that is this third movement, that it's not. There's no clear lines that you kind of move in and out of each of those, and so, as we continue through recovery, we also are looking at how can we reform things and change things, and so that's kind of 2022 and beyond and and the article described that is like an ice age that, as the seasons have changed, it's turned out that the landscape is different. Yes, so now that the landscape is different, it's a permanent change, and how it's a new normal. Yeah, so how do we grow things in this new landscape? How do we grow things in this new climate? And that's where we have, are excited that hybrid ministry and hybrid worship that, being physical and digital, we think, is one of those ways that's going to grow in this, in this new landscape, and it's a way for us to grow, influence and expand our influence.
Speaker 2:
That's kind of where we've been right. So do you want to move quickly now into where we're going? And what I'll talk to you about is in a message you gave a few months ago now, I guess it would be. You talked about attendance and engagement and I wrote it down because I thought it was really poignant, really important, and it really think it speaks to where we're headed in this next era. Do you know what you said about attendance and engagement?
Speaker 3:
Yeah. So attendance is the way we grow and engagement is the way we influence, and so this idea of attending attending a worship service, attending a small group, attending, being present as we attend two things we support them, we are encouraged by them, we grow through them, and so forth. But it's that's the importance. It's not that we, as a church, want to have big counts. It's not about counting right, yeah, no, it really is about growth.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I would even call it the community piece that we attend to. Community. Yeah, that's a great way.
Speaker 3:
And then engagement. Yeah, so the engagement is how we serve and how, and it's the way we volunteer and the ways that we serve outside of the church, and that's how people influence others. So when you're volunteering here at Hope, you're having an influence on all of the people who are touched by that ministry. And when you're outside of the church and serving in all host of different ways but you're doing it as a Christ follower and motivated by a love for God, you are having a level of influence in that way.
Speaker 2:
Right, and that's how we stay connected. When you're engaged, you're going to be connected.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2:
So we find those to be very important metrics for our progress and our growth, and so the staff has been working really hard on systems to better measure those things, and we'll be rolling some of that stuff out in the future and we'll move forward to that.
Speaker 2:
But in the next few years we've landed on an important opportunity, an important moment for Hope, and that's what we're calling this three-year campaign. Let's Grow, and it's this idea of one church to expressions and growing influence that we're building community and connection as a church. And why is that so important at this time? The growing influence, yeah, why would it be important for us to do this kind of campaign?
Speaker 3:
Oh yeah, well, you know there's so many ways to talk about that.
Speaker 3:
I think the thing for me is we have been separated for so long and and struggling really since March of 2020 and and honestly, and you know this, the church as a whole not just Hope Church, but the church across the country has been struggling with declining attendance and declining influence, and we saw not dramatically, but we began to see some of that here at Hope, and then we went through the pandemic and all those other things that we've named, and it's really been devastating to the church Again across the country. And so, as we're coming out of this pandemic season, we wanted to give people a reason to be excited again about the church and to re-envision, to reimagine what the church is all about, and and not just the church as an institution, but their involvement and and what it means to be a community of Christ followers, and so for us to help define that and to create some energy around that and create some Metrics around measuring that, we thought would be really helpful to get us back up and and running again, not just not just mucking along, right.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, and you know I this is not in in anything we prepare, but I was listening to a podcast this morning and Something you said it was exactly what this other church leadership a Professional was saying is that while church attendance continues to be a struggle, and across the nation, people who attend church now attend once a month and I'm I was. When I first heard that I was really surprised. So it's lowered from what it used to be, which was like one, one and a half times 1.7, whatever that number was right that it's actually gotten less and I was happy to hear that that I don't think that's the reality for our hope community now. But then, secondly is he said, come out of the pandemic. The best thing a church can do is begin something new, and I was thinking right away to this campaign. What an example like. Oh, we are right where we should be beginning this new campaign and this new season just to energize people. And, yes, I'm excited about it and I think it's gonna be a neat thing and everybody has a role to play.
Speaker 3:
That's the exciting.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, you know.
Speaker 3:
So this isn't just about a one ministry or another ministry or a few select people. This is something everybody can be and and we want to see involved.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, and so we're not gonna talk about that till the next episode. But teaser, yes, is a big teaser, so we're making sure everyone's listening next to the next episode, but I do want to. You know we're calling this the me-to podcast, and so we're gonna end each podcast with a question. And so, jeff, for you today is what has you hopeful today?
Speaker 3:
You know, I am so hopeful right now as Sunday mornings come and knowing all of this other, you know hard stuff that's going on in the church and watching these young families coming into the church the church is now 32 years old and and to see these next generations of people coming in, and the kids are excited, you know, and they're doing their thing and running around and, and then seeing the numbers that we have online yeah, you know, the attend, the online attendance. It just is thrilling to me that that this church has stayed together through these difficult years and and and now a new growth is beginning to happen, even before we we launched this initiative. So I'm I'm Just I'm really hopeful.
Speaker 2:
That's great, and so listen. We hope you've enjoyed our first episode of the meet hope podcast. I enjoyed it.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I did too, yeah, and you know we're gonna do more of these conversations about faith and hope, so we want you to watch or listen. Next, in two weeks, that's our next. Next podcast will be in two weeks, and we want to encourage you to share it on social With as many people as possible. You can find us across all social media platforms at meet hope church, our next episode. We're gonna be talking about hope strategies, which we've talked about before, but we're gonna talk about what makes them strong and we're gonna introduce two challenges, and so we'll get some more details around this ministry campaign for 2023 and beyond, and so that's a wrap. Good work. See you guys soon. You.