Transcription
It is so good to be here with you today. I'm honored to be here. You guys speak my love language when you talk about multiplying, talk about growing things, leveraging influence, reaching people with the gospel. Those are the things that I'm passionate about, and so I get excited about being at an event like this where we get to talk about that and dream about that and pray about that and believe for that.
And I just want to challenge you today. I want to encourage you today. How many of you know that if we're gonna reach people that no one else is reaching, we're gonna have to do some things that no one else is doing? Are you with me? If we're going to reach people that no one else is reaching, we're going to have to do some things that no one else is doing. We're gonna have to do some new things; we're going to have to innovate; we're gonna have to think differently. If we're gonna pursue the mission that we have, we're going to have to come up with some new approaches and some new ideas to be able to reach people. And it starts oftentimes with a purpose that we're pursuing, a passion that we have, and even a problem that we're trying to solve.
Now, I went back through my life because I've been known to be innovative or start things; it's kind of the way that I think. Earlier this year, I started to think about what was the first time that I could remember where I did something innovative, where I came up with a new idea. And I started to kind of take inventory and go back and think about what the first place was. I could remember what was interesting when I did this, just earlier this year, is I realized that I can't think of a single time where I had a new kind of innovative idea that preceded the moment where I became a follower of Jesus. Like it was as if somehow when I started to follow Jesus, God just kind of unlocked something in me that I didn't know was there. Because the very first time that I could remember doing something new or innovative or a different approach was when, after I followed you, I began to follow Jesus. I want to reach my friends with the gospel. Now I was between my eighth and ninth grade year in school; I was getting ready to enter high school, and I, all of my friends listened to rap music, so I thought maybe I should write a rap song. And if I wrote a rap song, that that would be a way I could share the gospel with my friends and tell them about Jesus. And so that's exactly what I did; I wrote a rap song. Now it turned out that people liked the rap song. I didn't even know that I could rap; never written a rap song before, but I went on to be a Christian rapper for five years. I had like a whole ministry doing Christian rap that started with me just trying to solve a problem. You believe I can rap? I look like I don't look like I can rap. I get it. You want to see me rap? All right, I will do a quick rap for you, just just to provide some evidence. I mean, you can go to my Instagram and look, and about a year ago I posted a picture of what I used to look like as a Christian rapper. I don't have the photo here, but you can go to my Instagram account, see it. I had braided hair, and I looked a lot different back then. So I'll do a rap for you really quick. You still with me?
It's the craziest thing because I'm standing right here in the middle, and Ella and everybody is looking on the side; nobody's looking actually at me right now, but you're looking at me. I get it. All right, here we go. Hmm. With you guys have camera phones out, hold on just a second. They've already got cameras in the room. You guys look, I'm sorry. Okay, well, I'm not on a mission across the ocean, just letting the world around me see my devotion to Christ. You see, it's not what I say, but it's how I walk and live my life every day, 'cause I'm on a mission in my feels right here. Stand the truth to your ear, so don't just you are the worst, but listen to my heart, 'cause we've got to start showing the whole world the love of Jesus Christ by inches in every day live it is love on our life. So many people are searching for the truth, but they never find it, 'cause we had inside of us. It's time to let your light shine out because it's the love of Jesus Christ that it's all about. So now if you've gone to Him, it's time to get bright, 'cause whoever finds God in you finds life. You kind of, you kind of get into a rap mode. I don't know how to explain it; it's like a whole different personality; it kind of comes out. So anyway, but you got to do some new things; you got to reach people no one else is reaching; you have to do some things that nobody else is doing; take some risks to do it.
Now, I have a crazy eclectic story of how I made it into ministry. I don't have time to share all of it with you today, but I went from being a Christian rapper to being an entrepreneur. I was a business guy; started tech companies in the 1990s, and I had early success in business. I was 23 years old and went from not having very many—I mean, I had 83 dollars to my name—to where I all of a sudden had more resources than I knew and never expected to have. And I thought, this must be what God created me to do. But in God was just using that to set me up for what I didn't realize was going to be a role in ministry, serving at the church, which actually today, August 1st, is actually 18 years of vocational ministry that I've been on staff at a church at Life Church. And through this journey, over and over again, you know, I've found that we just need to seize these opportunities, moments to be able to reach people and new and in different ways. And one of the techniques of one of the things I've learned along the way is if we're gonna do that, oftentimes what God uses in my life to help bring new ideas and new innovative approaches is He actually changes—I have to change my perspective oftentimes. Because what I found is if we keep looking at things the same way, if we keep looking at the problem the same way, if we keep talking about the problem the same way, we're not going to get new ideas. That we oftentimes have to change our vantage point, look at things from a different perspective, and many times when we do that, it's amazing, but God just sends to unlock these new ideas and new opportunities and new ways of approaching it. And so I just want to challenge you today to kind of think about this.
In 2006 was one of these kind of pivotal moments for me, where where I saw something and I saw it in a different way, a different perspective, and God began to use that to kind of unlock new opportunities for me. I'll show you this graph that I saw back in 2006, if we have it somewhere—there it is. Um, this graph, it actually represents the growth of the population for the last 2000 years, a global population. Now what's interesting is I've saw that graph before, but back in 2006 I saw it in a different way. Because if you put on top of that graph this the sliver of time that you and I occupy on the graph approximately, you can recognize without being an expert at interpreting graphs that there's something special going on in that space in time. It's not like any other time; it's unique. And when you layer on top of that the fact that at that same moment in time that you and I occupy, there's been this explosion of tools, technologies, and things that have the potential to knit us together as a population like never before in human history. And then combine that with the fact that we have this mission to go into all the world with the gospel, you could begin to look at that and say that's a huge opportunity. But see what reframed my perspective was, I thought, you know, it's actually not an accident that God placed you and me here on that timeline at this spot in history. And if it's not an accident, it's for a purpose. And so for me, it didn't become simply an opportunity to leverage this moment and to occupy this space that He put us in, but it became a responsibility, because it's—it were here for a reason, for a purpose; it's not kind of an optional thing for me. And so I began to take all of these experiences I had with business and and just anything that I had access to and just said, how can this be applied? How can we leverage this moment? How can we occupy this space and time in history? And so I began to think about different ideas, and one of those ideas was what I was thinking about—how could I—we could use technology and use this moment to help me read the Bible more consistently.
So later in 2006, October of 2006, I was in the O'Hare Airport in Chicago. I was in a long TSA security line. If you've ever been in O'Hare when it's a really, really long security line—this particular—this is before TSA PreCheck; this was when the line went back and forth and back and forth, and just when you think you're to the front of the line, you realize that it turns and goes into a different room, and it keeps going. You know, it's the most frustrating thing. And normally those are the most frustrating experiences for me, but for whatever reason that day in October 2006 in that security line, I was thinking about a—wonder if there's a way we could use technology in a way that could help me read the Bible more consistently. Because even though I was on staff at a church, I was a below-average Bible reader, and I had lots of excuses, and the excuses don't really matter, but the reality was I wasn't in the Word the way that I wanted to be. And I thought maybe technology could help me. And so I had this idea there in the security line for YouVersion. Now many of you—you know, as I say, many of you—some of you might say, "Word, the name YouVersion came from?" It actually came from the fact—the original idea was different than an app. I'll explain that here in a second. And I just tell people that we had 800 feet of careful market research that went into that name, and because it was just the best name I came up with for that original idea between the security line and a gate at the airport that day. There was nothing special about it; I get it; it's a terrible name, you know, but nonetheless it's exactly what God gave me in there at the airport. And I'm an activator, so I actually registered the domain name YouVersion.com at the airport that day at the gate in Chicago. So it all happened really, really fast. Now that was a problem I was trying to solve, and I went back to our team, and I have lots of ideas. We don't obviously do all the ideas that I have or that other people have, but I went back to the team, and I begin to share this idea to get feedback from him and my peers, my pastor Craig and the other existing—I think is—I think this is something we should do. So I was blessed to go do it. Now what I mean, but being blessed to go do it meant back in 2006—what are actually about 2007 at this point—was go do it. What it didn't mean was you have a budget; it didn't mean they have any staff; it didn't mean they have any dollars to hire contractors; it meant stop talking about it and go do it. And that was exactly what—what happened. I had no resources, no budget, no staff, no time—you me. So how would you do it? It's like I had a vision, and I had a voice, and I would begin to talk to people. I begin to share this idea. A lot of times when we're trying to pursue new things, we face obstacles, and sometimes we think because we don't have enough resources that we can't pursue new things, we can't pursue new ideas. But I'm telling you right now that innovation is birthed in limited resources; that's actually a key ingredient for it. It is—I mean, if the disciples had four thousand loaves and four thousand fish, they would have needed some paper plates and napkins; they wouldn't need a miracle; it's—that's where the miracle happens; that's where the new ideas come. Because if you have all the resources that you think you need, you're not going to have innovation; you're just gonna buy a solution. And so these types of excuses, you know, that we like to come up with—what we can't do new things—are actually the key ingredients that we have; it's just about changing our perspective and being able to see it differently. And so I asked people to volunteer their time to work, you know, in addition to what they were doing on evenings and nights to kind of pursue this idea. We ran into obstacle after obstacle that you could imagine. I didn't even know at the time that other people owned the Bible; that was kind of a new revelation for me. So we had to get rights and and licenses, and I had to somehow convinced people that sold the Bible for $25 a copy digitally that they want it—they should give it to us for free so that we could give it away for free. It's a really compelling argument, and and it just took—it took vision casting; it took leadership; it took influence; it took using anything that we could to try to convey the importance of this. And little by little, step by step, God brought every single resource, every single relationship, every single thing that we needed to be able to launch this late in September of 2007.
Now I told you the original idea wasn't for an app; none of you probably realized that. The original idea for YouVersion was actually a website. And the reason that none of you realized that is when we launched it in 2007, none of you went to that website; it was a failure right out of the gate. We put all this energy into it, launched it, and within a few months we realized that the only reason we were using it was because we created it, not because it actually was helping us engage in Scripture, and people that went to the website simply weren't coming back. Now one of the things that we built in our culture, and if—and this is necessary if you're going to—gonna be somebody that wants to do new things and wants to take a new approach as a ministry, wants to reach people that no one else is reaching, is you're gonna have to have a willingness to fail. That's not a popular thing to talk about in the church world, but it's the truth. And so because we had this built in our culture, I knew that in spite of—in spite of what went into this—that this was not working, and it did fail. And it was through that process of evaluating why it failed that we—that led us to the idea that ultimately became the app. Now many people talk about the fear of failure, and they talk about it in a way that says that's the fear that keeps us from being willing to start something new because we're afraid that we might fail, so we don't want to take that risk or take that step. I find that in the church that's usually not—words—the fear failure presents itself not in the unwillingness to start things; we're pretty good about starting things; it's the unwillingness to stop something that's not working; that's where the fear of failure really finds itself. Because as long as we don't have to stop doing it, we never have to acknowledge it failed; we'll just keep it going forever. Sometimes it's a good thing, but not up to expectations, not what it's supposed to be, and many times it just simply doesn't work, and everybody else can see it, but but you don't want to see it because that would admit that—admit that it failed. And so the emotions and everything about it were just as real—I mean, you guys can appreciate this; you're all leaders—all those people that I asked to volunteer to give their time, all that energy I spent trying to convince publishers and others to let us have the rights to use the text, all that—that energy that went into that, my own sense of pride and ego that I kind of put myself out there with an idea that didn't work, all of that was real, and I felt every bit of it. But I knew that if I'm gonna learn anything from this failure, I've got to be able to acknowledge that it actually did fail, which is what we did. And through that, begin to realize that one of the reasons we felt like it failed was because we were using our computers less and less; they weren't a part of our lives all day long, but our BlackBerrys were. We had the CrackBerrys back in 2007-2008 with us all the time, and we used them to do everything. And and I thought, what if we just redesigned the website so that it could display on a BlackBerry? Now if you remember—if you even know what a BlackBerry is—if you remember what a BlackBerry looks like, it has just—if it had just like a few lines of text back then. So there's nothing about this that honestly makes any sense when you think about it—let's take the Bible and let's put it on screen this size—but it was profound how naturally we begin to read God's Word more consistently in places we hadn't before. And the traffic to our website from people using their BlackBerrys began to go up, and we could see it. And right at that same moment in time, Steve Jobs announced that he was going to make it possible to develop apps for the iPhone, and they were gonna create something called the App Store. So we just thought, what if we could build an app and submit it to Apple and have it become a part of the App Store that they're going to create? Now we didn't know how to build apps; I—I had no idea how to build an app. So we found a 19-year-old on our team who loved Apple—those are the only two requirements—so you had to have—which—to be 19 and to love Apple. And we said, can we build an app? And so as a part-time project—nights, weekends—kind of work to build this Bible app. And I sat with him, and we kind of talked it all through and worked on all the details. We submitted it to Apple; had no idea if they would even accept the app. We submitted in June of 2008, and in July of 2008 they launched the App Store. On the day that the App Store launched, the Bible app was among the first 200 free apps that were available that day in the App Store. We were honestly shocked that they approved it, but that was a Thursday, and by Sunday morning we saw 83,000 people that had installed it on their iPhone. And for us, that just literally blew our minds; we had no idea that that was gonna happen, that God was gonna do that. But one thing I've learned is when you see God move, when you see God do something unexpected, you know you've got to put your resources and and realign your priorities and push right behind it. That's another thing I think sometimes we miss in the church; we—we have things that are working, and we're too busy trying to fix the things that aren't working to put the resources behind the things that are. And so what was a part-time job for that 19-year-old when he left on Friday was his full-time job on Monday when he came in after we saw those results that Sunday. I mean, we're gonna move quick; I don't know what he was doing before; I think he was working on a camp registration website or something, but I—I was like, somebody else is gonna figure that out; I don't know; we'll just have to deal with that; this is where the priority is. And and so I'll fast-forward the story, but over the last 11 years we've seen God do something incredible where He's brought together a coalition of partners—churches, publishers, Bible societies, Bible translation groups, authors—just you name it; He's brought together—there—the thousands of partners to—to where now we've seen—as you heard—those 83,000 devices that had the Bible app installed have grown to almost 400 million devices today and growing at a pace of almost 5 million per month; 5 million new devices every month installing God's Word. And and it's just really blown our minds at what God can do, and it's given us a huge amount of faith for what we believe we could see happen in this generation with God's Word because we see—not a survey—but data showing that millions of people are spending billions of minutes engaging in His Word, and it's available. And today we have it in over 1,300 languages; it's used in every single country. And I want you to hear this: the Bible app is actually able to penetrate into countries where people are smuggling Bibles across the border; it literally—the Bible app just walks right across the border and onto people's phones. I mean, it is no restriction to be able to get in, which is incredible when you think about it. And and we just believe that this is just a very beginning of what God's want—at once—what God wants to do.
But what I want to challenge you with is I want to share with you this pattern that I just described kind of in the YouVersion story is something that I've seen multiple times with new things that we approach. It doesn't obviously always reach 400 million devices every time; that's not the point. The point is that we start with a problem that we're trying to solve, with a passion that we have; we—we have a vision, an idea, a solution to the problem; we meet predictable resistance; you know, we kind of run into doubt; we run into challenge; it doesn't—it's not obstacle-free; there's usually all kinds of obstacles that we overcome, but we have to be willing to take a risk to step into it; we have to be willing to take a risk to even fail and recognize that—that if we're going to try to reach people that no one else is reaching, we're gonna have to do some things that no one else is doing.
Now I want to encourage you, but I want to challenge you because I think that the church today—we've—we've got to occupy this moment that we have, and it's not simply about technology. I—I'm using technology in part because that's sort of been my history and my background and experiences that I've had, but the concept of new and the concept of innovation is not a technology concept; it's a concept of—of doing exactly what it said—finding a problem or trying to solve—looking at it from a different perspective—finding new ideas. And I—and I believe the church today—our churches have to continue to do that, especially if we're wanting to reach more people, if we're wanting to grow. And unfortunately, I think sometimes we're getting stuck in the problem part. And you may say, "What do you mean?" I said, well, I—I kind of see sometimes we're really good at identifying a problem to solve—that part we get—we just miss the solve part of it; we get kind of stuck on the problem. And there's a phrase that I've kind of coined called problem casting, and this is what I—what I see starting to happen in some ministries, and and I'm even susceptible to it, so I just want to encourage you and challenge you—perhaps if you're stuck here—problem casting is a lot like vision casting, except it doesn't have a vision; what it does, it just kind of circles on the problem; it sort of motivates people with fear, but it doesn't draw them to a vision. It's not okay—it's okay to identify a problem; it's not okay to stop there. Well, we as leaders have to do is we have to bring a vision; we have to bring a compelling idea. The vision doesn't always have to come from you, and I think that's sometimes something that's difficult for some leaders to understand. Sometimes the idea, the vision might come from somebody else, but—but your—whose
God's put in a position to champion that vision, to convey that vision, to be the person that brings that vision. But we cannot get caught in problem casting. See, problem casting leads people and points people to the leader, but vision casting points people to the vision. And, and I, and I want to challenge this as a church because I see ministries do this—problem casting. You can raise money with problem casting, but, but, but we need to be about vision. We need to be a church that's about new ideas, a church that is pushing forward, a church that's not caught up talking about the problems from the past, but does believe that the best days are ahead and is mapping a vision toward what lies ahead.
I'll give you some examples. Sometimes when I hear pastors talk about church attendance and talk about church attendance being down, you know, I've noticed a trend line—a trend line—sometimes where we start to say, "Well, it's really not about church attendance anymore." Most people that say that, say that when the church attendance is down. I don't hear people when it's growing saying, "Well, it's really not about attendance anymore." It's not what it's about, and it isn't just about attendance; don't hear me wrong on that. But a lot of times we want to kind of, and we want to kind of recast things in a certain way, or we say, "The reason that people don't come to church today is because they're watching things—they're watching my message on a podcast or on YouTube—and that's why they don't come to church anymore."
And I want us to have a different perspective, because if we really listen to ourselves, if we're saying that, what we're saying is that we've cheapened the role and the purpose of the church to content delivery. That's not what the church is. If we think the church is simply about content delivery, then yeah, we have a problem, because there's a lot of ways to get content today. But that wasn't what the church was created for; it wasn't. And so we should be bringing new ideas to leverage what the church is really about—the community, the people. Yes, it does deliver a message, and yes, it does deliver content, but that's simply what it's about. And, and I think the new ideas, again, they don't have to be technology solutions; in fact, in most cases they won't be a technology solution, and sometimes they'll be the opposite of a techno-solution. But we need new ideas. We need to say, "We're not going to settle for what is; we're gonna change."
Now, these are not actually—this is not actually a new problem. Even what I just mentioned isn't even a new problem. Do you realize that back in 1890, the Presbyterian Church voted to ban the use of bicycles on Sunday because they were concerned that people riding bicycles was going to keep them from coming to church? Right? That when the VCR was invented, everyone said, "No one's gonna go to a movie theater ever again because they now can get a movie in their house." Yet, just a month or two ago, we had the all-time record set for box office revenue at a movie. Yeah? Did movie theaters have to change? Sure. But did movie theaters realize kind of the unique attributes that a movie theater brings that a VCR or a DVD or a Netflix video doesn't bring? Absolutely. And that's how they adapted. And I think the same thing holds true for the church. There'll be changes; there'll be new ideas. We need to be the ones leading what those new ideas and new changes are and not simply wallowing in the problem and problem casting.
And I believe the best—it sounds—I'm not complaining; I'm actually trying to challenge us, you know? I want us to—but I'm also not here trying to give you the new ideas, because I want that to come from within the church and within your churches. And I don't have all the ideas, quite frankly. I just kind of bring ideas to the problems that are in front of me. But I want to challenge you to think differently about the experiences that you create, the environment that you create, the moments that you create, and the remarkable 'ti of what you do in your church, so that when people leave there, they go to talk to somebody else and they say, "I want to tell you what I experienced, but you know, I can try to give it words to it, but you really had to be there to experience it." Those kinds of things are the ideas that I want to challenge you to think about.
And I also want to just challenge your perspective, even about the church as a whole. I mean, a lot of times I see us kind of get caught up in what God has already done, and there's a lot to celebrate, and we should celebrate it. And sometimes we're caught up in our legacy, in the history, you know, of our churches. But just want to challenge the prospective hack, is what I call it—just hacking your perspective. I, I believe that there's no such thing as a megachurch; that the term megachurch is only a term that you can use if you're trying to compare the size of one church to the size of another church. But if you really think about the size of your church in comparison to the need in your community, in comparison to the reach that we have in this world, every single one of our churches is a micro-church, right? But we better have a mega-vision. The moment that we start to believe that we're big, the moment that we start to believe that our history is big, the moment that we start to be proud of yesterday's successes, is the moment we stop taking risks because we have everything to lose and nothing to gain, right? No, we have nothing to lose and everything to gain, because the vision, the mission, the opportunity is outside the walls of our church, and that's where our focus—that's where ideas need to be; that needs to be what's propelling us forward.
I, I wasn't planning to share this, but I have this way—I see this in my head, and maybe it's another perspective hack that maybe will, will help you or challenge you—it's that I believe that the things that we give mind share to, our thoughts to, they take mass in our minds. Just kind of imagine it for a second: if we are thinking about the past, if we're thinking about what was, if we're thinking about what is, in our minds it takes a certain scale, a certain size. If we're thinking about the future, if we're thinking about a vision—we have a vision that is much, much bigger than our past and much, much bigger than our present—then it takes a certain size in our mind, and it's like gravity: whatever has the biggest size in your mind is where you're gonna be pulled towards; you're gonna be pulled forward or you gonna be pulled backwards. And so if your focus is on what is or what has been, if you're trying to recreate what was and, and focus your attention to all of what used to be or what the past success was, and you don't have a vision that's so massive and so compelling and so much bigger than your past and your present, then you will be pulled backwards. And for words—it's just the word—where your attention will be drawn; well, you'll be drawn in your leadership. And so if we're gonna reach people that no one else is reaching, we have to have a massive vision; we have to have a compelling vision; we have to have something that is pulling us to the future, pulling us to people that are that need to be reached, and we have to occupy this time that we're in in history.
And I want to just challenge you today. I believe—I really believe—and I'm confident that the best days for the church are ahead. I, I'm one because I've seen so many times where people roll out all the, the data and the surveys about how many people don't read the Bible anymore, and how these are the least Bible-engaged cities, and how this, this and that, and that negative all over the place. And I'm telling—well, the same time I'm reading these stories, I'm watching the trend line go up, and I'm seeing this grow, you know, by millions and millions of people that are reading God's Word, hearing story after story of lives that are transformed by the power of his word. And I just believe that that's not even true; that what we see happening is reality, and what everyone else is talking about is problem casting; that's what I believe. And I believe this same thing for the church: when we talk about people leaving the church, people not—church attendance is this, and churches are dying—the church—yes, there is a reality to it, but I'm a guy—I know a lot of churches that aren't, and I know a lot of momentum that's happening, and I know—and just believe the best—because I see the reality of the trend line going up and up and up. And I want you to believe it with me, for your church, for your community. And, and I'm in—what it's going to take—it's gonna take us bringing new ideas; it's gonna take us taking some risks; it's gonna take us being willing to fail. And, and I believe if we can just allow God to change our perspective just for a moment, that he'll do exceedingly and abundantly more than we could ever ask, think, or imagine. It's what I believe for the church; it's what I believe for God's Word. And I believe we're at this unique time in history; we have to occupy this space, and I believe that God's gonna do incredible things to your ministry. Thank you so much for the opportunity to come and share with you today.