Modern Church Leader
Hear pastors share what's working in their churches. Welcome to Modern Church Leader, a show for church leaders to learn business strategies, leadership skills, church tech tips, and generosity. Tune in for powerful interviews to help you grow your church to be more effective, efficient, and powerful for the kingdom of God. For more information, visit https://www.mclconference.com/
Modern Church Leader
Transforming Church Marketing with Visual Media w/ Carl Barnhill
Discover the transformative power of visual media in church marketing as we sit down with Carl Barnhill, a seasoned Christian entrepreneur and founder of Church Visuals. Explore how engaging visuals, especially video, can revolutionize your church's outreach efforts.
For more information on Church Visuals, visit www.churchvisuals.com
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Hey guys, Frank here with another episode of Modern Church Leader. I am with Carl Barnhill talking about all things church marketing today. Carl, how's it going on, man?
Speaker 1:What's going on, Frank man, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think this is round two. I feel like we did a podcast, like years ago, because I remember the background and everything and obviously we've chatted other times, but I feel like this is round two.
Speaker 1:I know I've probably had you on ours and I don't know if I've been on yours, so uh, um, I think you need to put me on the payroll by now, I think it's talent, talent line item.
Speaker 2:That's right, that's right talent talent line item. That's right.
Speaker 1:Talent line item Always a pleasure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's great to have you on. I mean, you've been a Christian entrepreneur, business guy for a long time. Why don't you give us a little bit of the story? How did you get into doing church visuals and fast forward into the of the company you have today?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I kind of started my career. I mean I did kind of the normal, you know, restaurant round when I was a teenager. But I really started my career at a place called Precept Ministries International. It was a lady named Kay Arthur was a Bible teaching, a Bible teacher. It was like a, you know, older ladies Bible teaching program, that that's a kind of a not TBN but but almost kind of kind of Bible teaching program on one of those kinds of channels.
Speaker 1:But I came in as a junior editor this is in Chattanooga, tennessee and then within like six months a year, we had a team of probably 10 or 15 folks on the media team and this is an international ministry. I mean the show went to like 100 million homes. I mean it was like huge. And so so I came in as just like a junior editor with huge beta tapes. I mean we were sending this, is you know 20 years ago, your editor with huge beta tapes. I mean we were sending this, is you know 20 years ago we were. I had this whole uh you know room where we're duplicating tapes and mailing it off to TV stations and stuff like that, so that that kind of environment is where I started, uh, but uh, within six months or a year, like my, my boss left and then his boss left, and so I find myself like a young 20 something. Um, they, they ask me to take over the media department. And I'm like what, what are you thinking? Like I have no experience to do this.
Speaker 1:And so, there, there, I was producing and directing this TV show and then I led a team of probably 10 or 15 folks all older than me, probably 10 or 15 folks all older than me. But it taught me a lot on how to treat people, how to lead, how to lead when you're younger and things like that. And so then I went from Precept to a large church in Mississippi and that church was running probably 20, 25,000 on a Sunday or so, probably, uh, somewhere around there for four campuses, five campuses, and I was like the, the main live production guy on the main campus, and this is before like resi, this is before like some of that stuff. So we would record a center screen and a side screen, separate cameras, and like, put it on hard drives. Then put the hard drives in like a suitcase, like nuclear football, and like drive it across town and hook it up at another campus. No way.
Speaker 1:It was hilarious so, but I was the, I was the live production guy at this church and then I was the only content creator. So so I realized at this church, if I'm at a church of this size and I'm like the only guy, there's no way a church of five thousand, two thousand, two hundred Right, is going to afford a guy like me, or, you know, even think about hiring a creative staff. So this is probably, you know, 15 years or so ago, and so that that's what kind of percolated, this idea of God, kind of laying in me a heart. For how can a lot of churches have high quality media content affordable to them? Have high quality media content, uh, affordable to them? Um and so and again this is before all you know a bunch of the marketplaces were out there and stuff, uh.
Speaker 1:So that's where the idea started and then. So I kind of dabbled on the side and then went to a new spring church in South Carolina, served there for a little bit, but uh, kind of grew the business on the side Uh, and then, uh, the boat was close enough and so I jumped and so it was me for a little bit and then my wife and I, and then it grew quickly after that. So it was started out with just me and then now there's about 30 of us all together designers, video folks like that but it's all about helping ministry leaders communicate the gospel using visual media. So not about entertainment, but more about how can you have high-quality visual media to communicate the?
Speaker 2:gospel. I love that. That's a cool story. A cool story. Things have come a long way from 20 years ago or 15 or so years ago, when you had the idea and started doing it. What have you seen? How have things changed from your vantage point on all of this in the last 15 years?
Speaker 1:Man, it's been interesting. I started the company in 2015. What were you?
Speaker 2:doing in 15? What kind of things were you doing for churches at that point?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so church announcement videos were big right, okay, so they would. You know, I had churches that would shoot their talent at their campus and send it to me talent at their campus and send it to me, and I would produce all of their announcement videos, motion graphics, and put it all together for their thing every every sunday. So I had a okay slew of those uh, and then, um, a lot of lyric videos. So I uh seeds family worship was a was a big client. That uh came along kind of early uh for me, and so they had like 12 albums worth of word for word scripture and so they had me create lyric videos to every single one of their songs.
Speaker 1:So, and then it became a lot of, like sermon bumper videos and testimony videos and things like that. And then it quickly got to where, like, I couldn't keep up by myself. And now, to be honest, I rarely do, I still dabble a little bit, but now it's mainly running the business and kind of overseeing as opposed to actually getting in the dirt. And yeah, my, my, uh, my Adobe suite's probably a couple of versions behind. I'll put it that way.
Speaker 2:I mean as it should be. As you grow a business and you know you guys expand and you, you know, give yourself the ability to serve more churches, um, but it's so 15 years ago. You're doing, uh, announcement videos and some sermon bumper stuff and things like that. Like, what are you guys doing today? Like how has it changed? Or has it changed much, uh, in that sense, over 15 years?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would say church announcement videos aren't as big of a thing. In fact, we kind of talk to churches that are considering that and going, is this the most bang for your buck? Like, are people watching this, or could you spend your money on life change story videos? Or or could you spend your money on life change story videos, or you know things like that that would be a really big impact for you.
Speaker 1:So now we do a lot of what we. We serve the church with ready made media, which is like pre pre made stuff many movies and series, kits and things like that, and then custom media. We serve a lot of churches but we also serve a lot of really large ministries. So folks like Awana or Answers in Genesis or Outreach or you guys that are doing larger things, so like, for instance, answers in Genesis, we've worked on their VBS for the last probably seven, eight years building out lyric videos and graphics for units and drama videos and Bible animated Bible story videos and all of that kind of stuff. So, yeah, multiple curriculums and multiple like big, huge kits or big, big build outs, that sort of thing. Smaller churches as well or smaller, you know, single projects as well, but that's a lot of what we do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Why does this stuff like matter? Like maybe go back to the origin of it, you know, but like a lot of churches, I don't think think about marketing and think about the types of pieces of marketing. You know, um, obviously churches are trying to, you know, get people to come in the doors and, you know, hear the gospel and get into the bible and get into, you know, community and hear about jesus and all that right, like that's a thing and, uh, you know how they do. It has changed over the years and, like the visual and the online aspect of it is a big deal nowadays. But I'm just not sure if a lot of churches think about it, uh, or even think about marketing. You know, sometimes you hear people talk about marketing in a negative way, uh, associated with kind of the church and whatnot.
Speaker 2:So yeah, what's your take Like why does this stuff matter and what's it all about?
Speaker 1:Man, I would say your visuals matter and you hit on this. Your visuals matter because the gospel matters. If we're and I'll get to kind of a marketing some marketing stats for you, but we create, we partner with churches and ministries to not to entertain your audience, that is not what we're about. You can find, you know, high quality stuff in other places or you can we partner with you to help you visually communicate the gospel. I only hire believers. I don't really go like a Upwork or Fiverr route Not that those things are, you know, not bad in certain instances, but I, you know it's not like you know, I'm hiring an international team that's going to do it for cheaper and then I'm pocketing the money. That's not. I mean, I'm not saying that that's the case always, but I'm just saying we only hire believers that are all about the church, that are all about helping you, as the ministry leader, communicate the gospel. Because if we put a video together like, you have to have the Holy Spirit in you to know not only how to kind of script that but also the visual components of how to tell that story. If you're not versed in the Bible and not really following Jesus, the visuals are going to come out a little wonky and you can kind of tell whether that's a denominational thing.
Speaker 1:I'll give you a practical example. If I see a Mary with a halo or a baby Jesus with a halo, I know that that's more of a Catholic bent, not to say that some Catholics aren't Christians. But I'm just saying that there's a bit that we serve kind of a certain denomination. We probably kind of stay in the, in the Baptist, methodist, more, um, assemblies of God, those kind of mainstream uh denominations that, like you can just kind of tell how we're crafting the story, if that makes sense, uh, and so you kind of have to have the Holy Spirit. So there's that From a marketing aspect. I'll give you a couple of stats. So millennials is a big question that I get at. How do we reach more young families, millennials, to bring them in? Because our church is trying to grow.
Speaker 2:Millennials are old now we're old.
Speaker 1:That's true. That's true, that's true. How do we reach the next generation? True, that's true. How do we reach the next generation? That's probably a better question. And millennials, especially though let's pick on them for a second Make a purchasing decision. This is in the secular marketing market 85% of millennials will make a purchasing decision based on watching a video. Now, is the Holy Spirit a product that we're trying to sell? No, not really. That's not what I'm saying. I am saying, though, that if you want to reach younger people, the stats on using video are through the roof. I mean, the video consumption is crazy. Through the roof.
Speaker 2:Video, video, video is the way to go crazy through the roof, right, video, video, video is the way to go. I mean, if you're not, you'd have to have your head under a rock and not be paying attention to the fact that you know instagram and tiktok and youtube shorts video, that's where people spend all their time. Maybe facebook, right. Kind of video reels now right, but, like, the video content on those platforms is what you know, all the young people and not even just young people. I mean, it's going to everyone now, but, yeah, young people, short form videos where it's at.
Speaker 1:You know we, yes, on social, definitely In our churches, though I am kind of surprised because the stats are. I mean, I do a workshop where I kind of go through the stats on this and you know if a picture's worth a thousand words, right? Well, there's actually an argument that the stats show that our brain processes visual media 60,000 times faster than text. So we're understanding a visual 60,000 times faster than reading a word or hearing a word. And that makes me think, like man, we're really talking a lot. Our pastors are not that I don't love a good sermon. Our pastors are not that I don't love a good sermon, but 30 to 40 minutes of every single Sunday is you talking and me listening, with very little visual content. To help me understand that, if you were to add more visual media, I think that the chances of that gospel sticking more would be a lot greater for you.
Speaker 2:That's a great point. I don't know the stats on it, but I'm assuming, even if you looked into it right. Like we know, different people learn in different ways and some people learn by reading, some people learn by writing, some people learn by watching, some people learn by doing. There's like lots of forms of people learning and so if you walk into any church you're going to get that whole spectrum. So it just makes sense that you're trying to kind of incorporate, like all of those elements, and visual and media being a big part of it.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah. So I just took my family on a vacation to Universal Studios and some of the coolest rides were those that that hit all my senses, right the Spider-Mans and the Transformers and stuff like that. That, like, I'm, my body's being moved. You're you're, you're engaging me visually like crazy. I'm wearing 3D glasses. You're, you're engaging me visually like crazy, I'm wearing 3d glasses. You're spraying water at me. You're spraying the wind at me. You know it's, it's, it's very immersive and I knew what to tell you. Right, like I. Spider-man and transformers, right like. Those are the ones that I remember the most because they engaged. Where am I? I think there's an argument for that Like, engage. There's a lot of people that that uh, learn visually and uh and process visually, and so even a, even a picture or a video or something like that would on social media and in your worship experiences, would, would go a long way.
Speaker 2:I mean I can't wait to see the church that introduces wind and water misting into the seats to go along with the preaching.
Speaker 1:Or zappers or like vibrating. Yeah, the seats move. It's one of those.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, that would be crazy we did universal uh a year or so ago and uh, it was awesome. I remember I don't remember spider-man, but I remember transformers for sure. Yeah uh, the kids love that one yep yeah, it's good times, but are you guys doing much on the social media side of things with churches are? Do you get asked about it a lot? Are people curious on how to do well over there?
Speaker 1:Yeah, they are. I think we do get a good chunk. But I would say that there are a lot of AI tools out there, that instead of reinventing that wheel we usually partner with churchtech or with a. I know you guys have some AI tools or sermon shots. You know my buddy Corey Aldrin over there. You know folks like that are doing some really interesting things in the space. When it comes to sermon clips and kind of clipping up your thing, your longer form piece, that I mean that's probably a route that I would go. I mean we're glad to do it, but I would probably go that route. When it comes to your clips, what we usually do is like a longer story and then clip that up into bits.
Speaker 2:Okay, Got it.
Speaker 1:They have us do a, a church has us do a promo video or a or a testimony video or something like that, and we we can chop it up into smaller Right, and we would. I would highly suggest that, like, if you're going to, you're going to spend the money on custom media, get as much legs out of that thing as possible. You know, put it, put it, put it, air it on your worship experience, put it in your countdown, put it pre-service, put it on social media everywhere.
Speaker 2:Right, People aren't going to remember it If you're going to spend money uh on, uh putting on a Sunday service and having someone preach and then maybe having visuals go along with, like their sermon on a screen and maybe that's got pictures, maybe it's got video, maybe it's got testimony, like all of that, like that whole thing is a big piece of content that can be like chopped. I mean, that's the beauty of these like sermon clip kind of platforms right, they can help you extend that sunday sermon onto social and you know, even out like just direct to your members throughout the week.
Speaker 1:You know it doesn't have to just be on social, but in your newsletter, on your website, all those kinds of places, just make sense and I think you bring up a good point that I think that churches need a mixture of produced pieces and raw pieces. What I mean by that is, like your sermon bumper, your promo video. That probably needs to be more produced from a team like us. Your daily devotion from the pastor's office I'm going to expound on my sermon. That needs to be your iPhone from your desk and put on social.
Speaker 1:Have a mixture of those things on your platform.
Speaker 2:I totally think more pastors, church leaders, should do that kind of thing Right, like do the daily or weekly or you know whatever, like devotional type of thought or like something where you just bust out your iPhone and you, yeah, you can script it, you can think about it, you can kind of have something, but, like you know, just bust it out and then post it on your socials and your congregation, like the people who are, you know, going to your church, want to hear from you.
Speaker 1:And I would say take your 40-minute message that you're used to preaching and shave 10 minutes off of it. Let that 10 minutes of content be your social media content for the rest of the week. Like plan for it. You're already writing it. I've written five points, four of them we're going to talk about on Sunday. I'm going to give you the fifth point this week.
Speaker 2:I love that idea. That's such a good idea and you could build from there like, oh, you're going to get the fifth point on Monday or then maybe on Tuesday. It's like we're going to talk about the small group discussion format based on it. I'm going to share a couple of points. I'm leading a great small group based on the topic this week and you know you could kind of build on where, yeah, two, three, four, five days after the sermon, you have things that are just coming from the sermon.
Speaker 1:So you could do it live, which would be awesome, or you could sit down on a Sunday afternoon, record five of them and hand them off to your team, right? And there's your reels one a day for the next five days, right. You know, that's how I shoot our podcast. My podcast is I shoot in both Like that's the only way I can survive. Right Is is is batch, batch stuff. So you know, I mean you can go live intermittently but like produce bat, you know batches worth of stuff.
Speaker 2:right, that's fine yeah, totally north coast. Uh, a big church in town. They do like the daily devotional um, I'm forgetting the name of it right now, but they'll, you know I'm almost certain they produce them in batches related to the sermon series that's going on. They have a bunch of different pastors from the church kind of take theirs. You know, okay, you're gonna do the next five. You're gonna do the next five yeah, and they send out, you know, every day, throughout the week.
Speaker 2:Um, they use their app, they send the push notification. I'm sure it goes out via text and email too, but they do a great job with it and I think it's such a great. I saw that, you know, a few years back. I'm like it's a great idea because it's like daily content from the church and they're able to do it on a big budget, big church. But you know, it doesn't have to be done like that. It literally can be done just with your iPhone and and some foresight into what you want to do, right and kind of thinking about it, and once you've done it a couple of weeks in a row, it'll just be like clockwork because you know you'd be comfortable at all.
Speaker 1:Get into a rhythm of doing it. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think that you know, with the, with AI, with your phone, there's a lot more tools now obviously to use. Yeah, I still think there always will be a need for a person, a creative. You know creatives in the mix there needs to be, you know, if AI is a robot, there needs to be somebody programming the robot, training the robot, telling it what. This is our voice, this is our brand, this is how we talk, this is our theology, this is our you gotta. There always will be humans involved to craft, uh, that, um, so yeah, yeah, what?
Speaker 2:what's your? I don't know how I can't tangent on AI, for you? Yeah, no, I mean, you brought it up. So what? What tools? You mentioned a few. Are there any others that you're like, oh man, we're using these, you know, at my firm or you're seeing churches use them, or you're hearing pastors talk about them, like what? What kind of AI stuff is out there in the wild? Ai stuff is out there in the wild.
Speaker 1:Man. I think that I don't think that a lot of churches have fully embraced it. I think some have. I mean your mid journey, your Leonardo, your, your ideogram, your chat, gpt obviously your your thing, things like that are definitely out there. I think that the biggest and churches are using those. I do think that there's still some learning of prompts, learning how to do this, and then it doesn't do text right, which floors me. I don't understand how AI can't do text. Well, you can scour the Internet and come up with you know, I want to picture an image of Tom Hanks and it's going to scour the Internet of all these Tom Hanks and give you Tom Hanks.
Speaker 1:But I can't write, you know hello, which is hilarious to me, but when AI can do text, it's. I think it's going to be another big game changer. But but I mean, church tech is a is a big tool that that we're partnering with now, that that is used a lot for sermon prep, and so you know, you can put all your information in there. You guys have a tool as well, right? I think you do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, we did a little. You know, yeah, we did a little side project. It's called sermonly. There's another one that's kind of gaining steam, called pulpitai, I think. I think they're doing some cool stuff over there, yeah, but yeah.
Speaker 1:The next step in that and I'll kind of peel back the curtain a little bit for people is to integrate media content with those types of tools. Right, that's what we're working on now is how do you move from a sermonly or a churchtech where I'm crafting my sermon and my sermon series and then now it's auto-populated with all the imagery that I can use for my sermon Right, based on my content that I'm training my robot to put out?
Speaker 2:Yeah, like it's kind of taking the outline you've written and it's taking maybe the key verse and your key points and some of the you know things Again, just taking your outline and it's like, oh, you're doing a sermon and like you're using scripture about Moses and so I'm going to give you some visuals, correct kind of go together, you know that's right they may be good or bad, but you get to choose. But we're going to surface some stuff for you, uh, to go along with you.
Speaker 1:That's right, yeah that's what we're working on now is yeah, can I put in I'm doing the gospel of mark. Here's my passages, here's a da da da, and we, like from our library, we've already done 17 series on Mark. We're going to give you all of these pieces that you could pull in and now you know is integrated together.
Speaker 2:I think you're going to see more and more of that.
Speaker 1:Like all the this piece works with. This piece now works with this piece. Like you know, I think you're going to start to see all that kind of come together, right, but man, lightning speed, how fast the AI. You know, I think you're going to start to see all that kind of come together, right, um, but man, lightning speed, how fast the ai. I you know, I, I, um, when I we built a new website last year and I was in writing a course that I just couldn't finish, we had other things on the plate.
Speaker 1:That was an ai course so I'm still kind of in the middle of writing it, but I've had to go back and write it again and write it again.
Speaker 2:Yeah you, you might as well scrap it. Just start over from the beginning.
Speaker 1:I know right, Because it's hilarious how fast stuff's moving.
Speaker 2:Are there any tools that you guys are using at your agency, like? What kind? Of AI tools or exploring maybe Like what's going on there.
Speaker 1:So we've used MidJourney, we've used oh shoot, uh, runway. Ml is another tool that we've used. Uh, we have toyed with some ai voice work. Uh, man, that that that gets kind of scary, especially like hey, jen, and places like that that. Um, I put in one thing where, like, I used my, my podcast and I put in clips from my podcast as a reference point, right, and it spit back out a video and I put it in a script and it spit back out a video of me saying that script with my mouth moving to the script scary, so you put it I never, I didn't shoot that at all.
Speaker 1:Right, I didn't say that, any of that, but it I mean it was kind of clunky, but like I'm like man, the next step or the next step on this is gonna be right freaky so you took like a bunch of youtube urls, popped them in to feed it and then said here's the script.
Speaker 2:Have the you know, put it together, boom, and it was like here's my right in this studio.
Speaker 1:so it knew my, the studio and it's, you know, trained on me and then trained on my mouth and then went to the script and change, you know, made me talk those, those words in my voice.
Speaker 2:That's crazy, I don't even want to do that, and then I could go translate to Spanish.
Speaker 1:That's where we're going to get to.
Speaker 2:I've been hearing from different pastors mostly big churches talking about the translation thing. You know like, take my YouTube video, the sermon from last week, translate it into 50 different languages.
Speaker 1:I think that's going to be fun? Yeah, totally. That's where I think we can use the tool to our advantage. I do think I mean, you have to be very careful. We haven't like gone full bore into creating a bunch of graphics or video content using AI simply because of the legal end. I mean, obviously, just like you guys, like we want to operate with as much integrity as possible, right, and there's just so many questions surrounding it right now still, that it's kind of hard to like. Do we want to go full bore? Right? When is it legal? Go full bore Right? When is it legal to do this?
Speaker 1:Yeah, especially when like Getty Getty's being sued and you know, I mean I'm like we've done a few things. We did this really cool um, like this fantasy uh author uh has a group of of books that we did some pro promotional um like trailers for Right. Um, it was really neat Cause we use this, uh, we used runway ML and some other tools and created like an AI world of these fantasy dragons and stuff, kind of like Narnia meets Lord of the Rings kind of thing, right, which was neat because the studio saw it and now she's under contract with you know and like could be a TV show or movie.
Speaker 1:That's so cool so it's neat, but it's also like, ah, how much, how, how much do we want to take the human element out of the mix? You know, right, yeah, I think we just got to kind of pick and choose those projects.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it goes back to your point earlier. I mean, you, you know you still need the thinker and the, the human, and in our context, you know, the, the Christian filled with the spirit, who is, you know, bringing that to the whole thing. You know, like I, that that can't go away. It's like the day that goes away, like then we, then everything is gonna get weird right.
Speaker 2:So absolutely true, yeah, absolutely we could talk ai for a bit. What, what I guess you know, just so we don't take all day here. What? What are you guys thinking about next? Are you thinking mostly AI stuff? Are you? Are there new things emerging with church marketing, church visuals that you're you know getting into more? Like where are we headed?
Speaker 1:company we're headed to. I think the I hate to be kind of political, but the like the, the economy landscape is is in a much different place right now. And so I think that churches are constantly looking for yes, we want to enhance our visual media, but we want it as cheap as possible. Uh, so I'll always kind of say, like you, you, like you know, I think churches are after like a Ruth's Chris experience on a McDonald's budget, and so how do we get there? So I've kind of fought that for a while, that like, hey, you know, you're trying to do something that's over your budget. Well, instead of fighting it, we've kind of leaned into it and said, ok, how can we do this? And so we've.
Speaker 1:We just launched some custom media plans that include our library, that include our training, to just try to make it affordable for the church. Because I mean, either churches are seeing creative staff stay for under three years is the going rate. I mean they're not staying long for under three years is the going rate. I mean they're not staying long. So how? And they're like, man, we really need a graphics guy and a video guy and that. So how can we afford that?
Speaker 1:And so we're trying to kind of come into the market and say what if we did all of it for you for less than a part-timer? And it's really high quality? So we're trying hard to do that. So that's where we're headed as a company is to make high quality visual media affordable for a church of any any size. Right, I would say kind of the next iteration of what we're I mean AI is definitely, you know, on the radar. I would say probably, to go back to the integration that's probably some areas that we're headed down is how do we use AI tools and visuals together? Can those tools come together at all? That's probably a big next step that we're about to take. That gives you a little bit.
Speaker 2:Well, I look forward to you doing your session on AI at the conference in October.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'll have to rewrite it the night before I do it, just to make sure.
Speaker 2:Just do it the night before It'll be ready AI and church visuals how they're meeting together. Do some cool demos of whatever new product showed up the day before, that's right. And it's going to be fun. Man, Do you have a topic thought out for the conference in October?
Speaker 1:So I think one thing I'm really thinking about is that why do your visuals matter? Why should you use more visual media content in your worship experiences and on social and just kind of lay out the stats for that and just kind of show people from from adults to students to kids the stats on video.
Speaker 2:And you know if.
Speaker 1:I hear it constantly of you know, either our church is declining or we want to reach our community. Shockingly, I've heard some revert like, oh, we don't really want to grow. I'm like, well, you should be wanting to grow.
Speaker 2:In some way, like you know like we should all be growing somehow.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Doesn't have to be, numerically Right, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:And so you know, I think the stats on video are overwhelming in order to do that. So that's what I'm kind of percolating right now. But you know, we're a few months off, so so we'll, we'll see if I can. We'll see if I can bring the heat.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we got time. What? What uh as we wrap man, where can folks go to check out church visuals?
Speaker 1:Yeah, Churchvisualscom is our website. New website, brand new website. Yeah, we rebranded last year so we were 1230 media and so now we're church visuals, and so we rebranded to just kind of make it simpler what we do and what we want to be known for, and that is your visual media content. And so, yeah, churchvisualscom. And then you know, just to kind of go back. It's interesting that, like, we're not about helping you look great or save time just for the sake of those things and the more kind of pastors that we see with moral failures and congregations that are declining and stuff like that. And the gospel is so important that it's not about entertaining people, it's about sharing the gospel with them, and so visual media is a way to share the gospel where it will really stick. And so that's what our team is about is kind of partnering, getting in the trenches with and getting down and dirty about how can we be creative with visual media so that you can reach people for Jesus.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so love that man, love what you guys do. Huge fan and definitely everybody watching. Come to Carl's session at the conference, but also go to churchvisualscom and check out what they're up to. Carl, closing words man, where should folks check you out? Are you on the Insta?
Speaker 1:Yeah, Carl Barnhill everywhere on social. Man just I have to say parting words. Man, we love you guys, so we connect a lot at conferences, mutual friends and folks on your team and we do some custom media work for you guys and just have been great partners over the years. So love what you guys are doing and just kind of. I know you guys are keep expanding and keep coming out with new tools, so it's it's really fun to be partnered with uh with innovators uh, you know, let's look ahead.
Speaker 2:So way to go, absolutely, man. No, I appreciate that, always trying to grow. And uh, yeah, you've been a great partner too. I know Justin and the marketing team on our side love working with you guys. It's been a blast. And again, if you're watching man, go check out Church Visuals and that's a wrap. So, carl, thanks for coming on the show today.
Speaker 1:Thanks, Frank.
Speaker 2:Cool. See you guys. We'll check you out next week on another episode of Modern Church Leader. Bye-bye.