14 Brady Sticker | ThinkNEXT ChurchCandy.com Sponsor Highlight

Andrew Estes (00:14)

Welcome back to the Nexus Church Planting Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Estes.

Twice a year, we gather leaders from across our network for an event we call ThinkNEXT It's a time to step back from the pace of ministry, connect with like-minded leaders, and refocus on the mission of making disciples who make

This episode comes from our most recent ThinkNEXT gathering. Our theme was From Maintenance to Multiplication, Reframing Your Mindset to Allow the Gospel to Replicate. Together, we explored how the gospel spreads not through complexity or control, but through simple reproducible practices that ordinary believers can pass on from day one. We hope this session encourages you and challenges you to help you lead your church toward multiplication.

Let's jump in to today's session.

Nexus: Church Planting & Leader Care (01:05)

Hi guys, I am super excited to introduce to you guys Brady Sticker. I am constantly looking for more and more resources to be able to offer to you guys, be able to, you know, equip you guys to do really remarkable things in ministry. And this brother's mug has been on my feed for a really long time. So he's really good at marketing. Maybe you've seen his beautiful face on Instagram or wherever else and just love the ministry that they do at churchcandy.com.

we're gonna give him a little bit of time to walk you guys through some of the intentionality that they do behind social media marketing. So would you guys welcome Brady Sticker?

Hey guys, can we give it up for Andrew? This is an incredible session to love. Love the whole idea of jumping out in faith, running with scissors. It's amazing. My name's Brady. I'm the founder of Church Candy. I love church planting. I'm a lot like you guys not long ago. I was a church planter. I was one of the pastors at a new church that was planting in the Woodlands, Texas, right? North of Houston. And we were in a season of, we launched the church.

and we just wanted to reach more people. We wanted to reach the city. We had maybe 150 people we would see in there on a Sunday, which praise God for that. And my pastor said, Brady.

What can we do on social media, on Facebook and Instagram to get some people in the door? This was coming out of the COVID season, out of the pandemic. And I said, all right, Pastor Michael, I'll see what I can do. And I played around with some Facebook ads and he gave me $500 to spend. So I was like, all right, all right, God, I believe in faith. And I was promoting a specific event for the church.

And no one showed up. And I was embarrassed. I was ashamed. Several years before, I just felt God call me and say, Brady, I know God, or I felt God call me and say that the local church needs social media and to reach people on there. And I'd been doing some of that in my day job. And so I remember asking God in that moment, whenever no one showed up to our first event that I ran for our church, I was like, God, what's?

What's going on? Granted, we had people there, just no one from the ads that I was running. The $500 was just, it was basically burned it. And thankfully my pastor, he didn't give up on me and he allowed me to, hey, let's keep learning. Like I believe in you, I believe in this and.

Luckily we were able to jump in and actually we started seeing people. I remember one Sunday I was preaching and a guy stops me in the lobby and he says, Pastor Brady, Pastor Brady, man, I don't know what it was, but I knew God was calling me to your church because every time I turned around on Instagram and Facebook, I just kept seeing you guys. And that was the first person I'd ever met that found our church.

specifically from the social media campaigns we were running. And I just like smile, was like, amen brother, like I believe God was calling you here too. And so how many of you guys are believing for that in your church, in your ministries that you know that God has called you to reach people in the cities? some people almost get a little uncomfortable when you talk about.

church and marketing and the whole title of my session is the church growth funnel out of 10 extra new guests in 2026. That's a very like it can you know just make you feel a certain way and I get it but just like the gentleman sitting over here with the signs that says hey see the harvest 100 million plus open but no church can I ask you a question sir why are you wearing that?

Yeah.

Yeah, and so you knew that God had a calling in your heart and wearing that lets them know about it, right? Guys, we have the power to do that for our whole cities, because our whole city, right now we're in this room, they're staring at this thing right now. The average screen time in America for Gen Z and millennials is right about nine hours a day on their phones. Nine hours a day, isn't that crazy?

⁓ If we look in Luke, let me just click our work, there we go. ⁓ There's this verse in Luke that says, use your worldly resources to benefit others. And a lot of what we're gonna be covering today, these are like some strategies that these businesses use to grow their business. Why can't we use that as the local church to reach people for the gospel? I think the best news, Jesus, right? And so that's what I'm gonna be going over today, a little bit about Church Candy. We're on a mission to connect a million.

to a local church. And as of today, we've connected over 350,000 people to over a thousand churches all across North America. Can we praise God for that? 350,000 people connected to a local church from exactly what I'm show you today. And these are gonna be like practical things you guys can take back home. This isn't just a, if you hire us, you get this. No, like these are gonna be tangible things that you can apply going back home into your local church.

⁓ I've got over a hundred testimony videos of pastors that share their stories on how God has used social media in their church. ⁓ And I'm showing you this not to just be like, yeah, look at me, look at how great this is. No, no, no, this is to show you what God can do. This isn't theory, this isn't just an idea. These are real pastors all across North America ⁓ that God has used social media.

to bring people into their church. People are getting saved, people are getting baptized, people are joining the church. And I'm just so excited about it. so churchking.com slash proof has all of those. And do I have audio on here for the video? There's gonna be a video I'm about to play in a second. So that's the macro level. And all that's great, I showed earlier, what was it, 350,000 people connected to a church. That's great. But every single one of those people, God created for a reason.

had a purpose in mind whenever they were made before in their mother's womb. And I wanna share with you one of the stories from someone that got connected to a church from an ad that we were running. Let's take a look at this.

Hey guys, my name is Tyler. I am a proud member of PromiseCo and I just wanted to discuss briefly what they've done for me. So the fact is, whenever I responded to the invitation I got on Facebook, I was honestly strung out on drugs and alcohol and didn't even remember replying to it. But ⁓ since then, the pastor's reached out to me. He's surrounded me with a very...

loving church family that supported me through thick and thin. They have showed me Jesus and ⁓ it's completely turned my life around. I'm six months sober. I'm back in my children's lives. ⁓ I'm gainfully employed. I'm in management at Cefco and I have peace that surpasses all understanding. And even when the world is around all around me, I know that Jesus doesn't always stop the storm, but he does walk with me through it.

Praise the Lord, love you guys, bye. Amen, so Tyler here, someone who's addicted to drugs, unemployed, didn't have relationship with his kids. And then what happened, he saw an ad on Instagram or on Facebook and got connected with a local church. So much so that he didn't even remember filling out the form the pastor told me. He's like, don't even remember seeing this church online. I just got a text the next day from the pastor because he connected with them.

And there are hundreds of thousands of people just like Tyler all across America. And there are hundreds, if not thousands of people in your city that are just like Tyler, who God is waiting for you to take a step and get connected with him, amen? All right, so how many of you guys have heard of the ⁓ framework or the strategy, plan your visit? Has anyone heard that before? Okay, cool, so some people are familiar with that. I actually wrote a book.

called The Plan Your Visit Playbook. And we give it away for free on our website, so you can go and download a copy of that. But it walks you through how you're able to use social media ads to invite people to church. And instead of just saying, hey, we would love to see you, hope to come Sunday, you give them a direct next step right there and say, hey, we know it can be intimidating visiting a church where you don't know anyone. So if you click below and fill out a form,

You can plan a visit and our team will reach out before Sunday so you and the whole family feel welcomed. And you give them a reason to fill out a form right then. And as soon as they fill out the form, you or someone in your team gives them a call, shoots them a text, and you're able to connect with them before Sunday. And that's the whole 30,000 foot view of the plan your visit model. That's what a lot of what I'm going be covering today is based off of. And so let's go ahead and jump right in. If we're going to 10x.

your new guests in 2026. That's a big promise. Now, I promise you that you're probably not going to 10X your new guests in 2026, but we've seen God do some really, really cool things. And I'm going to show you the amount of things that you can do to help you go in that direction. I was talking to a pastor this week and last year in January, their very first service, they saw about 160 people a Sunday.

and they ended 2025 with over 800 people in their church for their last service of the year. And I talked to another pastor today. Whenever he first connected with us, there were about 30 people on a Sunday, and I think seven or eight months later, now they just crossed 100 people at ⁓ their church on a Sunday. And so God can use things just like this to grow the local church. so. ⁓

Let's talk about meta ads. When I say meta ads, I'm referring to ads on Facebook and Instagram. So one of the easiest things you can do with ads on social media is actually record a video inviting someone to church and then have multiple different intros or so what you might call a hook. And so you could record a video and say, hey, my name's Brady. We'd love to invite you to church.

We're all about this and this this. We meet at this time and this place. We'd love to see you there. You can plan your visit below. You record that, but you record multiple different intros, things that are going to get someone to stop scrolling on social media. And so here's like a visual of what that would look like. So you have multiple different intros, but then the rest of the video is the same. And so I want to give you guys a couple of ⁓ hooks or intros that you could record in this video. And these are things that you guys can do literally on the next break.

step outside and record these videos. And so we have a framework for actually recording the videos. And so it's the triple F framework. The first one is faith. And so this is where you talk about faith and you say, hey, do you wanna grow in your relationship with God? Are you looking for a church in the Shawnee area? Are you looking for a church in the Springfield area? That is a hook that talks about faith. so anyone that is having these questions about like, man, I kinda wanna grow in my relationship with God.

Maybe they were raised in church when they were younger and they moved off to college and just kind of stepped away from their faith. If that is the first thing you say in a video and they see that, that's gonna speak to them immediately and Holy Spirit is going to draw in them and they're gonna say, I don't know what it is, but I need to watch this video. I need to see what this guy is trying to say. So that would be a faith hook. Next one would be family. An example of a family hook is, hey, do you wanna raise your kids with strong biblical values?

but feel like the culture is working against you. That's something that I guarantee you as a parent of two young kids, those are things that are going through my head constantly. My wife and I just had to make the hard decision on like, okay, are we gonna homeschool our kids, are we gonna put them in public school, are we gonna find a private Christian school? These are things that parents are consistently thinking about and whenever you call out the thoughts and the things that are keeping them up at night,

That's gonna get them to stop scrolling and actually watch your video about your church. And then you go on and say, you know, here at our church, we're all about family values, our kids' ministry is amazing, da-da-da-da-da, right? And then from there, we also have fellowships. Family faith fellowship, I feel like that might be the name of someone's church in here, family faith fellowship church. Hey, doing life alone is no fun. That's why here at Crossroads Church, we're all about community, right?

So many studies that have been done since the pandemic that loneliness, anxiety, depression is like in an all time high. People spend more time on their phones than they do sitting across the table from one another. ⁓ Loneliness, all of that being at an all time high, the local church is one of the greatest places to be connected with other believers and have that community. And so we're able to use that to our advantage and talk to people and say, hey,

Doing life alone is no fun. That's why here at our church we're all about community, right? So you wanna stop the scroll with a strong hook. That's the very first step. And then when you're making that video inviting them to church, you wanna inform them about your church. A problem that a lot of churches have is when they inform them about the church, they will spend like two whole minutes just informing them about the church. And people have like ADHD mentality when it comes to social media. They have the attention of a goldfish, so.

You just need to keep that quick, short to the point. Give them your mission statement or what makes your church unique. Tell them why they would want to visit your church. And then from there, you wanna meet them where they are. This is where you say, hey, I know it can be intimidating visiting a church where you don't know anyone. And that's why when you plan a visit, we'll connect before Sunday. This is incredibly important because it enters the conversation that they're already having in their head.

Recently, I was looking for a new gym. And I don't know if anyone in here does CrossFit or you've heard of CrossFit. You probably have a friend that does CrossFit and you know it because they don't shut up about CrossFit, right? And my sister was telling me that CrossFit's amazing, you should check it out, Brady, it's great. So she lives pretty far away from me, so was looking for a CrossFit gym near my house. And I'm looking on their Instagram, I'm looking on their website, I'm thinking, okay, this looks cool, but I'm a little intimidated.

I'm not in the best shape as I used to be. And all these guys on the pictures, they look like Marvel superheroes. They're jacked, they're in the best shape of their lives. And then at the same time, you would think it's a church because they're talking about how they're a ⁓ CrossFit family, join the community, they're using similar language as to what we might use in our churches. And I'm thinking, man, I don't wanna feel like an outsider showing up to this tight-knit CrossFit community. I don't wanna be like.

the one guy that doesn't know anyone. I was thinking to myself, I wish I could connect with a trainer from the church. That way, like I knew someone, or I wonder if someone in my neighborhood goes to this gym so I can actually go before checking out the CrossFit gym. Well, that's when I realized churches are the exact same way. That before someone visits your church, if they're not like a church person, they're intimidated because they think,

that all of us in this room are more spiritually fit than they are. They don't understand God's grace, and so they're thinking to themselves, man, if I walk into a church, I feel like God's gonna smite me with a lightning bolt from all the things that I've done, from my past, from the baggage that I'm bringing into the church, and then they don't wanna feel like an outsider. They don't wanna feel like they're gonna be the person sitting on the outside of the tight-knit community, and because there's so many people that.

would go to church if someone that they knew invited them, right? You guys have seen the stats where it's like 80 % of people that you invite to church, if you say, hey, I would love for you to sit next to me at Easter, there's like an 80 % chance that they would actually come and sit next to you. Why? Because they know someone. And so whenever you meet them where they are, you are overcoming the objections that they're having in their head by saying, we know it's intimidating visiting a church where you don't know anyone.

And that's why when you plan a visit, which is the next one, invite them to plan a visit. When you invite them to plan a visit, that gives them the next step and let them know, plan a visit and our team will connect with you before Sunday so the whole family feels welcomed. Does that make sense? You guys see how this framework works? And I have an easy acronym for you guys to remember this. It is SIMP, S-I-M-P.

When I was dating my wife or trying to date my wife, you might say I was a simp for her. That's like a Gen Z slang. It means just like a guy that's like chasing after a girl. But I'm married now, we got two kids, and God is good. So in this context, simp, you want to stop the scroll with a strong hook, inform them, inform them, scroll, wow, that doesn't make sense. Inform them about your church. Inform them about your church, meet them where they are, and then invite them to plan a visit. Simp, sorry, there's, I'm a,

The typo on the slide is there on the I, but it's stop the scroll with a strong hook, inform them about your church, meet them where they are, plan a visit. Guys, this is the exact strategy. Everything I just covered for you, this is what we teach our church planters and pastors to do with their video ads. This is incredible because it's simple and it's replicatable. And whenever you do this, guys, I promise you people are going to engage with it and it is a great way.

to reach people. you run this, make a video just like this and run it as an ad in your city, you're going to get a ton of people to plan a visit. Another thing that works really well at getting new guests is local SEO. I want to show you guys an example of that. Is this like Spanish? Does anyone know what local SEO is? Does anyone even know? No, cool. All right, let me explain it. ⁓ So you go to Google and you're looking for a restaurant.

Right? SEO stands for search engine optimization. So it's where does your church show up if someone's looking for a church? So I want to do an exercise with you guys. Here's an example of a church. If you searched for churches in Tomball, this is how they were ranking. This is where they were showing up. So you can see they were like on the fifth spot, the 11th spot, a little bit further out. They were like 20 plus, like not showing up at all.

with local SEO and using some really cool strategies to actually get them, get Google to show this church higher. Now, they're like number one, number two, number three, when someone's searching for a church in Tombaugh, they are showing up at the top of Google. And this honestly takes 90 days, sometimes six months to see results like this by just working with Google. And.

Here's the difference between Google versus social media. The number one difference here is intent. See, no one's going to Instagram, no one's going to Facebook looking for a church. But they would go to Google looking for a church. And so we're going to do a little exercise. I want you guys to all pull out your phones right now. Everyone pull out your phones and open up your internet browser. So a lot of you guys have got an iPhone. It's going to be Safari.

and we're gonna do a test to see where your church ranks. So what you have to do is you might have to open an incognito or a private browser. You can ask someone at your table to help you with this. It might look like that on the screen. But you wanna do a private browser because your phone probably knows that you're on staff or a pastor at your church. And so what you're gonna do is open it up and I want you to search this phrase. Churches in, and then your city name. So for me I would say churches in,

The Woodlands, Texas. And what we wanna do is see, and call it out, like tell me where you see your church. Specifically, you wanna look on this section, the maps. And you might need to click the show more.

And so call it out whenever you have it. My church is the first one there. It's the fifth one. Third, great. First, six, okay.

Okay, the reality is if you're not in the top three of the map pack, no one is finding your church on Google, or very little are.

Most people don't click the see more. They just look at the top three. And so in reality, local churches are kind of fighting for that top three spot. And I had a pastor tell me once, Brady, I'm not going to put any effort into this. We're just going to let Holy Spirit run its course. whichever one it decides to show first, show first. I like, I hear you. But like Google's algorithm, if you just put some things on your Google business profile,

you'll show up there at the top too. And so I don't think it's gonna hurt to do that. So there's a couple of things you guys can easily do to show up higher on Google. Number one is get reviews. There's a Christian comedian, John Crist, who has a whole bit and he'll make videos making fun of Google reviews on churches. This might sound silly, but just get some people in your church to leave reviews. Even if you get, if you have one or two right now and you reach out to people in your church.

and you get it up to 15 or 20, that's gonna help tell Google, hey, people like this place, people are leaving reviews. One thing that we've done is added it to our next step classes. We just ask people when they go through our membership growth track, we just ask them, hey, you love it here, we're glad you're joining the church, would you take like two seconds real quick and just leave us a Google review? I know it sounds silly, but it just helps us reach more people. And literally anyone, if they're joining your church, you're like, yeah, absolutely, I'll leave a review. It's a very low pressure ask.

And then the second one would be using or posting photos and videos on your Google business profile. And so the Google business profile, that's your Google map listing. If just like once or twice a month, you guys just update new photos and post some videos on there. If that's all you do, you guys are going to increase your Google ranking and you're going to have more people that find you guys.

from Google. And so a lot of you guys might be thinking, Brittany, we have great pictures, we have good videos, like we don't have a team that does that. There's two things I can give you. Number one, there's an app called Snapper. It's basically like Uber for local photographers. So you go on Snapper and find a photographer for like 150 bucks. They'll come to your church, take some photos and send them over to you. It is very, very affordable way to get high quality images. And then I actually have, this is the shot list.

that we give to all of our churches that we work with on, hey, here's good photos that you need to take. It's churchcandy.com slash shot list. ⁓ It will give you all of the photos and things that you need, ⁓ examples and things like that. And then an easy thing you can also do is update your description on your Google business profile. Here's a prompt that you can give chat GPT or give to AI that says analyze.

my church's website, vibranthtx.com. Please write a Google business profile description that will help increase our SEO slash Google ranking for keywords like, and then you would replace this with whatever would make sense for you. So for us, it was churches in the woodlands, Montgomery County churches, non-dominational church, a spirit-filled church. When you do this, it's gonna spit out a...

description for your church online that it's gonna use your tone and it's gonna scan your website to like learn what you guys are all about and learn your voice and then just take that and write this that you can copy and paste into your Google business profile description that will then tell Google, hey, this is a church, they're local and help increase your ⁓ ranking there. Now real quick, I'm low on time so we're gonna

I I'm already talking fast. Follow up. Okay, people see your ads online. They plan a visit to your church. They go to your website from Google and they plan a visit on your website. Well, now you have people that, you know, they're interested in going to your church and then your church is over here. How do we bridge that gap? Right? They've already shown interest in your church. They may be planning to visit. What's next? How do we get them to actually show up? This is a problem that a lot of churches we work with have.

is they get a lot of people that are interested in coming to the church. Sunday rolls around, they have a list of all these people that filled out a planer visit form. Sunday happens and none of them show up. And so you have to bridge the gap and actually follow up with people that plan a visit. So that bridge has to be you or someone on your team to be able to follow up with these people and make them feel seen, make them feel important. A lot of you guys might have heard the seven minute rule from this book.

by Nelson Sears, that you have seven minutes when someone pulls onto your church campus to make a good first impression, because within those first seven minutes, they're gonna make a decision whether or not they wanna come back to your church next week. And so, what if you could make a great first impression with these people before they ever even pull onto your campus? What if you could make a great first impression with them by just connecting with them before they visit? I did a podcast with this pastor, and their church went from 150 people,

to in just six months. And I was blown away with it. I didn't believe him. I was like, Pastor Ken, are you lying to me? Because most churches we work with, they don't see this kind of fruit. And what he said was, Brady, we're running the same ads as you do for the rest of your churches. But what was happening is people would plan a visit, and then we might only have 10 % of them actually show up. And so what we did is we built a team in our church that any time someone planned a visit,

that someone from that team would be notified and they would text them, call them, connect with them as soon as possible. And when they did that, they went from having 10 % of the people that planned a visit show up to now over 80 % of the people that planned a visit to their church actually show up. And so there's a couple of principles that we teach now with our churches when it comes to following up with people that plan a visit. The first one is to contact quickly. You wanna contact quickly.

Harvard Business Review did a study that whenever someone connects with your business or in this case church, they connect with your organization online, they are most interested as soon as they press submit on that form. And so if you can contact them, within five minutes you have a really high likelihood of actually connecting with them and talking to them on the phone or getting them to respond to a text. Whereas if you wait until more than five minutes, the likelihood of you actually connecting with them and them responding to a text or a phone call,

drops by 900%. And so it's really important that you contact them quickly. On top of contacting them quickly, you gotta connect deeply. It can't just be an automated text that says, hey, this is Vibrant Church, thanks so much for planning a visit. We'd love to see you Sunday, see you there. No, that's not deep. Another podcast I did was with the associate pastor at Elevation Church, one of the biggest churches in America. We've all sang their songs on Sundays.

And one of the things that I asked him, I was like, you guys are such a big church, what are you guys doing to connect with people? I feel like I would get lost walking into such a big church like Elevation. And what he said was, we teach what's called the one day principle. We assume every new person that walks into a church that they're walking with a lot of baggage, a lot of hurt, and this is possibly the one day that they're giving church another shot. And whenever they have that mindset and they coach their greeters and their.

a hospitality team on that mindset, they dramatically see a shift in the way they behave. Because if someone walks into your church and they were an atheist their whole life and they're ready to give up on life and end their life later that day, but they said, I'm gonna try church one more time, how would you act? I would go above and beyond. I would make sure they got a parking spot up front.

I would make sure like the greeters are nice and smiling and they're opening the doors. I would make sure they know where the kids ministry is, if they need to check in their kids, right? And so it's all about our mindset with this. And so you wanna connect deeply with these people. If you know this person that shows up on your phone because they planned a visit, if this might be the one day they're trying church again, how would you respond? It might be kind of hard to see this, but this is a testimony that a pastor sent me. A girl visited their church.

and posted this on Facebook and she said, I remember when I found Ramp Church online, I filled out an information form, which is the plan your visit form, and the pastor personally sent me a video inviting me to service. So Pastor Evan recorded a video and actually said her name. It wasn't just, ⁓ he recorded a video once and they sent it to everyone. He recorded a video specifically for her inviting her to church. Then Sunday came around and I wanted to sleep in so bad, but the pastor called me the day before.

And I said I would be there, so I got up. That right there is discipleship. That right there is Pastor Evan pastoring Ava before she ever showed up to his church, before she ever served in his church, before she ever gave any money to his church. He was discipling her. How's that discipling? Because just calling her, reminding her, like hey, you said you're gonna be at church, you're gonna be there, that's discipleship. That's helping her take a next step.

and it's creating accountability because she said, yes, I would be there. The next day she wanted to sleep in, but her pastor who she's never even met before is already holding her accountable.

You gotta connect deeply and you wanna commit to this long term. Galatians 6 9, let us not become weary in doing good for the proper time we will reap a harvest if we will not give up. ⁓ This takes a lot of work, guys. If you wanna reach people online, it's not easy. At Church Candy, we'll help you with a lot of this. We'll build out everything for you, but the biggest thing that you have to do is this right here, is follow up with people. We'd love to help you.

would even be open to giving you a free month of Facebook and Instagram ads where we would set it up and manage it for you. You scan this QR code, what it's gonna do is it doesn't automatically sign you up. This is just to schedule a call with our team to see if it's a good fit. We also have Abraham for my team back there. We would love to help you guys. I have a heart for church planters, I have a heart for the local church. I'm a local church guy. ⁓ And we're just on a mission to connect a million people to a local church and we would love to help you guys too. That's all I've got.

But really quick, can I invite Pastor Landon up here, Pastor Landon Orring, can you guys give it up for him?

Now I get the mic. gosh, that's hot. Hello. So this is my friend Pastor Landon. ⁓ We helped them launch their church and we've been helping them with some Facebook and Instagram ads. I would love for you to share your experience and how God's used social media ads in your church. So I actually reached out to another ad company first and he wouldn't say this, but let's, you'll probably have to edit this for your website. ⁓ They were way nicer and way less arrogant than some other guys. We talked to another guy, my wife and I did on the phone.

And it was, we know better than you, listen to us, what you're doing is wrong. ⁓ And they were like, all of my interactions with Church Candy was, hey, you know your people better than we do, you know your community, you've studied, you've done the research, let us help you utilize that. And so we started having some interest meetings and I planted a church and I didn't get our first extrovert. Let's see, we started meeting in my house in February, September maybe, Sarah?

whenever Rodney came and so it was me and a bunch of extroverts who didn't know like who were babies in their faith who needed to go out and I needed to empower them to go out and do stuff so that but they were scared right and so when we worked on that we realized they weren't inviting their people they wanted to but they were scared to do so and so I was like we got to figure out how to do something I'm not I don't want to launch a church and get to this point so we reached out to church Keeney and said hey

I've been senior ads, I've been thinking about doing this, let's pull the trigger. And so we did it, we ran the first month free. The first month that we ran this, we did two different, so the planter visit and then the coffee of the pastor ads. The first month we had so many people reach out, I had to shut it off because I did not have that much time to meet with people. ⁓ I also was consuming so much caffeine. It was great. like, they don't have to get coffee, you can just get a water. yeah, Robbie's paying for it, it's fine. And so.

⁓ Yes, you don't have to. I learned that after like six cups of deep. Anyways, we had some people come and it was amazing. And we have, let's see, we had a guy come to our church who has significant, and we reach a lot of high trauma individuals, but a guy had a significant amount of trauma in his life. And he had some stuff happened and he had really never even been to our church yet. He came to my house ⁓ one day. He was having a hard day. He's like, can I come? I'm like, yeah, sure. I'm building out our trailer.

He came and he helped with the trailer and he just had this breakdown in our garage. He's like, man, I've never talked to a pastor before. I've never felt comfortable doing that. But you guys seem so approachable. We've had so many people do that. And so we actually have an 80 % success rate. If someone will come sit down with us, they will come to our church or another church once, which has been phenomenal. And I would say personally, I think it's worth it. We believe in let you pause it. So like we've had ours paused because I wanted our people to feel the tension.

of when it's not being there, but we'll start back up this week. And it's been exponential. Robbie, the head of ACPN, he's in the back, he led a small group for us, because we didn't have a lot of mature believers. Every single person from that small group was someone who came because of Facebook and Instagram ads. One of our couples back there who is here with us, who are emerging leaders, are here because of Facebook ads. We have some other people who I think might be future elders who are there in our church right now because of Facebook and Instagram ads.

Praise God, that's amazing. Thank you so much, Landon. All right, guys. Hey, love you. I'll be hanging out for a little bit and Abe from my team will be here. So I appreciate you guys so much. Thank you.

Nexus: Church Planting & Le... (37:42)

Thank you for checking out the Nexus Church Planting Podcast. We hope this conversation was helpful and inspires you to lean deeper into your calling. If you want to learn more about Nexus, visit us at nexus.us. There you'll find church planting resources, upcoming trainings, events, and more. We also want to encourage you to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Leave a review or rating to help others find us.

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