5 Things I Learned At Life.Church
Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to accompany my friends at Churchfront for a tour of Life.Church. For 3 days we had insider access to the people and systems that make Life.Church function the way that they do.
If you’re not familiar with everything Life.Church has accomplished, here’s a quick list:
First major church to pioneer the multi-site model. They now have 36 physical campuses.
First church to invest in a true online campus, which now reaches over 90,000 people in over 100 countries every single weekend.
Creators of the Bible App, with over 400 million downloads to date
Creators of the Church Online platform, a free online platform for churches to host their services.
If you haven’t already seen it, the Tech Tour documentary is on the @churchfront YouTube channel, and it’s awesome. My job on the shoot was to make sure everything looked and sounded right — in industry terms, I was the Director of Photography (DP). We got to use some great cameras (Canon C300, Panasonic S5, GH5), which made my job a lot easier.
Life.Church is a unique place, with a unique approach to ministry. Somewhat polarizing, they’ve decided to use a “franchise” model for their physical campuses, borrowing heavily from retail giants like Target. Because of this, they are virtually unmatched when it comes to efficiency and growth rate.
While you may not agree with their model, you have to give respect where it’s due. Life.Church has paved the way for countless other churches to grow more effectively, make an impact online, and they’ve brought the Bible to nearly half a billion people worldwide.
Below are 5 things I took away from my time with the Life.Church crew that I think you’ll find useful in your own ministry.
5 Things I Learned at Life.Church
1. YOU CAN DO MORE THAN YOU’RE CURRENTLY DOING
There probably isn’t a leaner church staff anywhere in the world than at Life.Church.
And, honestly, if there was, I think it’d be unhealthy.
Life.Church has spent many years finding that EXACT point where payroll, output, and staff turnover are maximized. Per Craig Groeschel’s admission, a number of years ago, they were missing the mark on turnover by asking too much of too few people, so they adjusted. The result is a staff with surprisingly small teams, but great execution and commitment.
Even now, when you compare what they expect from their teams to what most churches expect, it’s pretty startling. There’s a church in my area that runs about 3,000 per weekend (pre-Covid) that has a staff nearly as large as the entire central support staff at Life.Church… who reached over 100,000 people in just their physical campuses each weekend pre-Covid.
Now, you can’t just cut half your staff and expect the same output or results, obviously. There are some things that come with scale… and that’s exactly the point. Life.Church’s model and method ALLOW them to be lean… which is a leadership thing.
One of the hardest-working guys in church production.
Unfortunately, many non-profits (like churches) don’t think about margin the way businesses do, because you’re handed money and just told to use it the best way you can each year in your department… but make sure you use it all, otherwise next year you’ll get less. This “use-it-or-lose-it” budget mentality creates a dramatically different mindset than a “maximized-margin” mentality, for lack of a better term.
Life.Church has adopted the business budget model instead, focusing on the minimum number of staff, equipment, square feet, and time needed to accomplish their mission. The result is a church with exponential impact per staff member compared to the average US church.
Some of you reading this have been taught that any mingling of church and business practices is sacrilege at worst, and unwise at best. I would challenge you to think more deeply about whether such things as efficiency, focus, and goal-setting are actually an affront to God… or whether they’re just good stewardship.
2. MORE GEAR ≠ MORE IMPACT
I’ll cut right to the chase: Life.Church has 5 cameras.
Not 5 cameras per campus… 5 cameras TOTAL.
Are they better than yours? Yeah, they are.
2 of the 3 robotic cameras controlled from backstage.
But despite having the resources to do pretty much anything they want, they’ve decided to keep things simple. They actually, believe it or not, want to maximize the ROOM experience, despite having the largest online church audience in the world.
The result is that they don’t have any flying cameras, any jibs, or tons of camera operators on stage during service.
They have 3 robotically-controlled cameras that are designed to minimize the disruption to people in the room attending live, and 2 additional cameras that get used on stage during worship.
Yes, robot cameras are pretty fancy. But they didn’t do it to “flex” their budget… they did it on purpose: they didn’t want camera platforms with operators to block the view for sections of their room.
They do have a sweet control room, and nice sound studios for mixing and recording… but not the nicest in the world. They have what they need to create a great experience, and nothing more. They upgrade their gear every decade or so. Again, for them, everything comes down to getting the greatest impact as efficiently as possible.
Yeah… you probably can’t afford this camera. Or lens. But the good news is you don’t have to.
If you’re in the habit of thinking that 6 or 7 cameras is going to make your live-stream EPIC, that you need to look at a Dactyl cam or jib to be big-time in broadcast, that you need a $100,000 DiGiCo board to sound good… you might need to slow your roll.
Online church that makes a difference is more about HOW you minister to and engage with people online than it is about WHAT the end product looks or sounds like. Spend as much time and resources on staffing and building up your online ministry as you do getting the best gear possible, and you’ll be amazed at the impact you start having.
3. ALIGNMENT IS EVERYTHING
Both individually and corporately, most churches under-perform, to be totally honest. As someone who has worked on a church staff for numerous years, and works with different churches almost every day, most churches I see are over-staffed, and most people on staff don’t use their time as effectively as they could.
Now, before you get all mad, I don’t think this is primarily an effort thing. I know that most pastors and even support staff work long hours and deal with a lot of job-related stress.
The primary reason most churches get less done than they should comes down to focus. It’s just sad how rare it is to find a church that’s fully aligned with ministry vision and purpose across all their ministries and departments. It’s far more common to see different goals, tactics, and levels of investment from kids to youth to worship, with a general sense of unease on staff about where things are headed and how to get there.
At Life.Church, it’s very clear that results are expected, and risk-taking is normal. They have a singular vision for where they’re going, and HOW they’re going to get there, and there is just so little sideways energy spent criticizing or second-guessing the mission and vision of the church. Instead, the staff are focused on doing their part to make things happen, and because of that, their collective output is incredibly high.
The other aspect is expectations. Having stepped out of full-time ministry into the entrepreneurial world for a few years now, I think too many churches and church leaders have lost any sense of urgency about their mission. When you need to win in order to survive, being cautious and moving slowly are fatal flaws. The problem I see in most churches is that they’re focused on not losing, instead of winning. There is a difference.
How does this not get you excited?
When you’ve hit a certain size, it’s natural to want to protect that growth. Hence, many church leaders are more focused on retaining the people they have than they are with reaching the thousands of people in their local community they haven’t yet.
Spend any time around Life.Church, and it’s abundantly clear that their focus is on reaching those they haven’t reached yet, no matter how big they get. They continue to innovate, continue to take risks, continue to be aggressive in their approach, and because of that, they continue to grow.
Even if being that “front-porch” church isn’t your mission or vision, you aren’t exempt from asking more of yourself and your church around ministry alignment and focus.
4. GENEROSITY IS THE BEST INVESTMENT
Life.Church gives an amazing amount of stuff away for free.
Ask anyone inside the organization, and they’ll most likely point to this as the key reason why God has continued to bless and grow their church. Not the music, not the teaching or the personalities, not the quality of their live-stream… but generosity.
They even have their own term for it: Radical Generosity.
If they charged just $1 for the Bible App, they’d be funded for the next decade. If they charged for the use of Church Online, they wouldn’t need to take an offering for months, maybe years. If they charged for their stock footage, their Kids and Youth ministry resources, their Life Group resources, or anything else that they give away for free… you get the idea.
But deep down, they’re a church committed to making the biggest impact possible for the capital “K” Kingdom, and that makes decisions about things like this pretty simple for them.
5K LED wall… a great way to need new cameras.
That’s easy to say when you really just want to be a big deal and have people recognize you. It’s another thing when you exist solely on the dedicated giving of your local congregation, because you’re fundamentally committed to providing free resources to churches everywhere.
Case in point: When the COVID quarantine first started, the demand for Church Online went up exponentially almost overnight. Within days, the server space was maxed-out (which many of you probably experienced.)
To buy tons of terabytes of more server space, Life.Church could have started charging a nominal fee, and nobody would probably have blamed them. But instead, they went to their church body, asked for a special offering… and received 98% of the exact amount they needed.
When you’re fully committed to building the Kingdom, special things happen.
5. REDUNDANCY, REDUNDANCY, REDUNDANCY
I was stunned, seeing how much equipment there was in the control room, the audio room, and the production desk, just how much of it existed purely for the purpose of redundancy.
Nearly every system of significance had at least one backup - 2 full video switchers, multiple HyperDecks for simultaneous recording, backup audio feeds for broadcast… even for multi-site broadcasting, they have redundant feeds over Resi, plus a video file backup of the sermon loaded in ProPresenter… PLUS an old-school satellite dish, just in case everything else fails.
While it may seem like overkill, I think it’s just a smart realization that churches have a lot more in common with SpaceX launches and football teams than they do with brick-and-mortar retail. Essentially, it’s an event-driven existence. Fail at being able to create and execute the event, and it’s hard for anything else you do to be successful.
Fail repeatedly, and not only are you going to lose momentum, but you’ll start losing trust as well.
It’s easier to yell at your camera ops when they’re in the control room with you.
Delivering a consistent online experience (or multi-site, if that’s your model) is equivalent to consistently having the doors unlocked, lights on, and coffee hot when people show up to church.
When you approach your online experience with this same sense of necessity, you make sure even your backups have backups.
All in all, seeing the inner workings of Life.Church was an amazing experience for me. I was plenty familiar with them from being in the church world, but when you see the people, the passion, the systems, and the vision up-close, it’s hard not to be inspired.
I know not everyone agrees with how Life.Church operates or wants to be exactly like them, but I hope you can see past that and appreciate the difference one church in central Oklahoma is making in the world, and maybe take something from them to your own church or ministry.
Thoughts? Leave a comment below!
