Engaging Technology Signals with Steve Lacy (Special Compilation Episode)

In this special compilation episode of The Signal Cafe, we bring together two separate podcast conversations into one extended discussion. First, Chris Forbes and Matt Tullos interview Steve Lacy from StreamingChurch.tv about AI, church technology, streaming, and recognizing emerging technology signals. Then, in an episode originally recorded for the Church Solutions Podcast, Steve Lacey and Phil Thompson interview Chris Forbes about strategic foresight, signals, trends, drivers, the Three Horizons, common grace, and faithful stewardship. Together, these complementary conversations equip ministry leaders to navigate technological change with wisdom, discernment, and confidence in God's sovereignty.

 © 2026 Forbes Nonprofit Strategies. All rights reserved. Signal Café is a podcast of Forbes Nonprofit Strategies, and Incite Futures Labs is a foresight training offering. Music generated using Suno AI, lyrics adapted and produced for Signal Café

Transcript

SPEAKER_06 0:00

Okay, open double stuff, just double change from the past building, take it, what is where it breaks, where it's signal cafe, signal signal cafe, we don't think it fruit.

SPEAKER_04 0:22

Hey, and welcome back to the Signal Cafe. I'm Chris Forbes with Forbes Strategies.com and the Insight Futures Labs. I'm here with Matt Tullis. And Matt, I have I'm detoxing right now.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

You're detoxing, are you like uh is it vegetable beets and uh tomato soup and and celery juice?

SPEAKER_04 0:43

No, um it's a different kind of purge. I have uh I'm going to abstain from the personal use of south of social media from uh July and August. Uh wow. Trying to break the July and August? Like you're gonna go two months. I'm gonna try.

SPEAKER_01 1:01

I mean, you like teleport recovery group or something? Yeah, I might need that.

SPEAKER_04 1:08

The first the first step is to admit you have a problem. Uh and what one of one of the things I do is like the last this is like my seventh year to do it in July. And I noticed that about the you know, it takes me a while because I still instinctively reach for the cell phone and then I'm scrolling something and I'm trying to break that habit and just be in the moment and then and you know look at other things, look at books and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

So uh instead of just waiting for this Kindle count, do you have to use hard copy books in this little?

SPEAKER_04 1:43

I just basically am staying away from social media. I cannot not do technology. I gotta watch MATLOC or something. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 1:50

You know, are you yeah, so are you uh so so you you are using Netflix, you don't have to use your DVD player?

SPEAKER_04 1:58

Uh use Prime. I don't have Netflix. Okay, good. What I I don't I'll I really don't watch a lot a lot of television anyway. So I mean that Angel thinks I do, but I don't.

SPEAKER_01 2:08

One of the things that we started using was this uh it's it's like an app, and you put in all of your your streaming services and it cuts out all of the cuss words. And so basically what I've got basically is a silent pictures thing for most. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 2:24

Well, you can always provide your own. That's what I like. Right. You just kind of fill in. I think it'd be great if you could just walk around with a thing that beeps randomly and makes it sound like you're cussing, but you're not.

SPEAKER_01 2:38

Yeah, that that would that would be awesome. Yeah, I guess so. Get away with it.

SPEAKER_04 2:43

Well, anyway, so I'm trying to I'm trying to, you know, it's kind of this uh usually uh about the time I get the hang of being off social media, it's the end of July. So I decided to push it through to August and see if it helps me. And uh technology can, you know, it can it can draw us in, it it's useful, but it can also become like a distraction. And so that's why I want to talk today about some technology, actually. Yeah, maybe it's because I'm going to I'm going through withdrawal, so I have to talk about technology. I can't use it, so I might as well talk about it. But um, and I do post this, I will be posting this on on our social account. I just don't scroll. So speaking of technology, Matt, I you know, I thought, you know, since I'm going withdrawal, I might be good to talk to uh Steve Lacey from uh streamingchurch.com to uh talk about uh the use of technology and emerging signals. He was early in the streaming church uh space, and he uh also has a lot of technology background. And so I thought we'd just kind of chat about uh signals of change through emerging technology. So welcome to the show, Steve. All right, glad to be here. So uh not everybody uh in our audience, you know, our dozens of people know about um uh your your company. So can you tell us a little bit about yourself and you know how you got started?

SPEAKER_03 4:12

Uh sure. So I'm uh always been somewhat of a tech guy. I'm an engineer by degree, went to work in the aerospace business, and then started a project at my home church um many years ago, and then transitioned full-time to that. I don't know, it's a little over a decade or more, um, to that. So we our primary product, we have uh several different products that we've created over the years, but our primary product is streamingchurch.tv. And we just got involved with that um primarily because my home church. We we were we started off with putting a camcorder in the back of the sanctuary and recording the service and then making that recording available to people. And we were at the time meeting in a high school, and we eventually got our own building with our own internet access, and we started. I said, well, let's take one of the products that um I had some components of some products that I had, and create a streaming church um environment so that you can do church online. So we've got chat rooms and Bible and private chat and prayer and web hosts and all the kind of things you would see coming to a physical church. We try to replicate online.

SPEAKER_04 5:39

That's cool. You know, one thing in uh Foresight we talk about is how uh signals start early and they look weird and they're weak and um they aren't uh evenly distributed. So maybe not a lot of churches were doing exactly what you were doing in terms of the camcorder thing, but certainly if you were early in on developing that kind of a space, but over time ideas kind of emerged from innovations to adoption to becoming mainstream, and I I would imagine, I don't know, but an external uh force is often push in on emerging signals and change. And I would imagine that the COVID period kind of became an opportunity for you.

SPEAKER_03 6:31

Is is that a good take on uh that's an opportunity is an interesting word there. We went from an environment where some people said, Oh, how do I tra how do I stream my church services? Where there were about 20% of the churches actively streaming and doing streaming prior to March 15th. And then after that weekend, everyone said, We're you know, we're having to shut our doors. What can we do? What's the streaming thing about? And so it was um somewhat chaotic uh on our end. Yeah, because yeah, initially uh we had like over 10 times the audience that we've had the prior weekend. Wow. So our infrastructure was just stressed and starting to break at the seams. In the meantime, we had hundreds of churches are saying, I want to get started, I got to start today.

SPEAKER_04 7:32

Yeah, so yeah.

SPEAKER_03 7:35

So we were adding uh more accounts. Uh it just it went, we're just a small group here. I think we had four, maybe five of us at that time, and from developers to bookkeepers to marketing people, that sort of thing. Yeah, and everyone became a customer service person.

SPEAKER_01 7:59

So no, not only were you having to deal with all the stress of COVID, but this wave of new clients.

SPEAKER_03 8:09

Yes, exactly. And wondering wow, we're adding all these new clients. The system was completely stressed out last weekend and people were having issues. How's it going to be this weekend? You know, and so we went through some very stressful weeks and um putting together, you know, contingency plans if things get to their 98% load levels, you know, what do we do and that sort of thing?

SPEAKER_04 8:35

Hey, I was go ahead. I'm sorry. Had you already gotten to that point in uh in 20 uh uh 2020 when you were also using the streaming for other kinds of like small group gatherings and prayer things and stuff like that, or is that something that that kind of grew out of that period?

SPEAKER_03 8:56

Uh well that we were doing some of that at at with some of the churches and at my my church as well. And but uh Zoom was greatly accelerated after COVID.

SPEAKER_04 9:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 9:11

And everybody became everybody knew what Zoom was. Yeah, and Zoom was in a good position because they had figured out a lot of the things that caused a lot of people problems when you're doing online meetings and that sort of thing. Right. One of the the chief ones was the a feedback loop where people wouldn't have headphones on and you'd get these runaway audio loops. This is prior to COVID. So, but but Zoom had a I guess a good solution for that. So they didn't run into that problem. They just got really, really popular.

SPEAKER_01 9:44

So when was I take taking you back to that period right before COVID? When do you remember when it all just sudden became reality for you? And you said this is real, and what was what was oh yeah?

SPEAKER_03 9:58

It it was, I remember going to a business meeting on March 13th, the Friday the 13th, and everybody's all masked up and we're wondering, should we be there? And um it was, I was like, hmm, interesting. And then that Sunday morning or that Saturday, I think they said they all the churches said we're not, we're closing our doors, we're not having service. And so that Sunday morning, which I thought was just going to be a normal, you know, Sunday morning with our hundreds something churches streaming, it was it was just chaos. It was it very much went from zero to a hundred over that weekend, over those two days.

SPEAKER_01 10:45

Did your mind start rolling before that as far as when you first got that signal of something's going on in China or Seattle? I remember that first uh little case that they had over there on the West Coast. Did that start triggering your mind about your business? Uh, really didn't, no. Really?

SPEAKER_03 11:04

Yeah, yeah. I I I guess I didn't have an appreciation that I had no understanding that they're gonna shut everything down. Yeah, you know, that that you couldn't buy toilet paper anymore. And you know, it's all the things that were just impossible to predict. Um, I didn't in my wildest dreams, I never would have thought, oh, we're gonna shut everything down, the churches are gonna close their doors, they're not gonna let people in. I did not anticipate that at all. I was thinking, oh, we've never had a pandemic before. I've heard about this thing going around, but you know, maybe, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 11:42

Matt, of course, Matt is all about the B day, so he didn't it didn't impact him at all, but yeah, that's a whole other topic for another podcast. But um, I had a uh someone I worked with, and we were actually working on some kind of a marketing proposal. I was a marketing and branding person for a denominational office in my state. And one of the leaders there, we I was we were pitching, you know, hey, we're gonna do this kind of this cool communication strategy, kind of a rebrand, but it's some research and stuff. And it was, you know, it's really, you know, we had all the bells and whistles of stuff and why we wanted to do it. And he just kind of sat back in his chair and he said, I, you know, I I want to wait, I want to see, because I'm not sure if churches are gonna be meeting in the spring. And I thought, what in the world is he talking about? And he said, This COVID thing, uh, you know, we don't know what it's gonna do. And then we kind of like were marveling, like, how is he getting that? And then later, of course, it happened, and it dawned on me he had been a school superintendent for uh a long time, and it was on his radar because he's used to that kind of stuff, epidemics, snow days, weather closings, stuff like that. So the idea of closing was not was um he had a place in his frame to see it. And I think that's kind of what foresight does. It kind of opens that frame so you can kind of see things that are kind of outside your peripheral. Uh, we're so good at focusing on what we know, kind of get this educated incapacity where we're good at what we do and the last to notice the things on the outside of what we do. We're good at operational success. And there, I there I bet you know, retrospectively, you might be able to look and see other signals of change that were driving people to want to stream. Uh, do you recall seeing those before? Like, what was the driver before COVID?

SPEAKER_03 13:43

I actually we were um I mentioned that I've I've got young, I've got kids that were getting married, and people were starting to stream their weddings. That was kind of a new thing back in 2019. And so I thought, wow, let's let's look at possibly just pivoting over and adding a product that would be available to the wedding environment. And actually, we had scheduled to be at a wedding conference here in our town, and we were going to um go and you know, kind of hang up our our shingle and and we registered streaming wedding.tv and uh was gonna go explore that that whole avenue. And as soon as COVID hit, they they the the big conference was scheduled for like two weeks towards the end of March, two weeks later, and they canceled it. I was so busy with the whole with what I was already doing that just kind of abandoned that whole idea. So there was, I mean, there's indications out there that people were moving towards streaming, um, but I had no idea that this accelerant was going to hit and things were gonna go from you know zero to a hundred real quick.

SPEAKER_04 15:02

So when you started early on, you started in 2001. When did you start streaming?

SPEAKER_03 15:08

So we started streaming in 2008, 2009 time frame.

SPEAKER_04 15:13

That's really early. So I mean, because like bail people were barely bandwidth was hardly there for that. What was what was the impetus or the signal or whatever that kind of told you that was the time?

SPEAKER_03 15:28

Um well, we had a another product that had some components that we transitioned over into Streaming Church. And um I think it was just the fact that that it was now possible. I mean, the the upload speed is the whole you know marker there. And so you could, if you had one megabit up, your you could stream. So um back then that was really fast. I remember our church had a uh a T1 line that I think we're paying several thousand bucks a month for, and that's one and a half megabits up and down back then. So that was actually when COVID hit, we still had our T1 line. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 16:19

That's you know, um, they they had this expression that the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. And thinking back to that period, you noticed some early signals that others weren't noticing, and it wasn't fully realized as far as streaming, and it error streaming wasn't everything that it will would be later back in 2008. You know, people still Netflix or heading over to Blockbuster and didn't not see that. Maybe Napster was kind of there, and you could saw the deep see the distribution of uh media through that. But those kind of signals kind of all around you, maybe intuitively because of your nature, you were able to respond to them, but maybe not categorize them or whatever. But you were it this is just me looking at this, you were early because you were alert and you were seeing this the future already being uh, you know, visualizing what it could be. And that's kind of where we are, you know, in a lot of ways now. And do you see anything like if you were to like to back up now and say, you know, this is early, it could be 10 years, it could be more. Do you see anything that's it's on your radar now that that is early in terms of technology and ministry?

SPEAKER_03 17:43

Well, I draw the the parallels of the internet getting popular back in the the mid-90s to where we are now with AI.

SPEAKER_04 17:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 17:56

And I think we're on the front end of this whole AI revolution and some of the indicators that um you know the internet was out there, and people were talking about things like banking online and just the fear and the caution and uh the you know, the all of that was going on, and it's the same kind of stuff that you're seeing now with AI, the concerns, and you know, now it's just commonplace that um I could dial up an Uber and uh have somebody to my house or have some, you know, go somewhere or have something delivered. It's just uh second nature. But back then, there was that was just so foreign.

SPEAKER_04 18:45

Yeah. But um one one thing about AI, uh so we see uh churches are getting on board, and that some of the signals we had were that uh it's jumped 80% year over year in the last year, uh with uh 45% of churches using it. But also you see a kind of a counter signal with uh Gen Z and younger just kind of having that kind of fatigue about it and suspicion of it as far as we see that in graduation ceremonies.

SPEAKER_01 19:21

If someone mentions for college graduation from the the lectern, you know, AI students boo.

SPEAKER_04 19:30

Yeah. Or it was reading their names as they graduated and they couldn't load the AI, and some people didn't even get their name mentioned because the AI was reading it. So it's kind of weird. This that tension there between those two items. And um one thing about church, and probably Steve knows this, is like usually the church is the last to jump onto something. And is it a signal that AI is in our future, or is it a signal that AI is rounding the circling the drain? I don't know. I think I think you're right, though. I think to I think AI is like something, it's not going to be like just, oh, there's no matter AI. We're all tired of that. It's a fad, you know, it's gonna be around. But I think how people, how th everything become as as things become more digital mediated, and like I'm kind of late, uh late boomer age, so like born in the late 60s, early 60s. So um to me, if it looked, if it didn't look slick, if it wasn't professionally done, it just seemed chintzy and cheap. And and so like I would like grew up really wanting to try to really spiff up the brand, spiff up the the image, the productive production value and stuff like that. We've kind of gotten we're kind of maybe arcing that because anybody can do that now. Anybody can make something slick, anybody can make uh you know you can sit in your the pew and make a better song um than on the platform right now, just you know, using Suno or something like that. So what what are your thoughts on that? Like you have you you've you've operated in an institution or uh uh an enterprise in in a kind of a contested uh technology environment. What's your gut on on those kind of topics?

SPEAKER_03 21:29

Uh I would put us if we're just you know parallel this with the whole introduction of the internet, I'd put us at 1996-97 time frame where the the initial buzz is starting to wear off and people are starting to. Oh, there's a pets.com out there. What's that all about? You know. Um, I would I kind of put us in that phase with the whole AI thing. I think there's gonna be some capabilities. That are going to be, you know, incredible tools for doing ministry, for doing work, for entertainment. And you know, I think we're right on the beginning cusp of that. I think, you know, we talked about a lot. The the uh Eric Schmidt actually was at in Tucson at the University of Arizona commencement thing. And he's one of the guys, he's a former CEO of Google, got booed when he started talking about the AI futures. They're all thinking it's gonna be a really great popular topic topic, and everybody's excited about it, and they get started getting booed.

SPEAKER_04 22:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 22:36

And I think there's misunderstandings around um some of the you know potential downsides. Um, I think there's you know, the the I've got a daughter-in-law that works for the U of A, University of Arizona here in town, and she's works in the environmental department. And so they're really tuned in to the whole environmental side of things and are kind of anti AI because that's going to use more resources and we need to conserve those resources. But I think um I think that uh it's not going to be as disastrous as some may foretell for uh from the environmental impact. Um I think there's a great opportunity here. Um I listened recently to uh an interview that Mark Andreessen did talking about the whole how you know how many jobs this thing's gonna create, and that we need to move forward with it. Other otherwise another country or another part of the world will and we'll get us, we'll get left behind. So uh I'm a big advocate of it, and I need to proceed with caution. Yeah, but it in the end, I think it's just a tool. Yeah, I don't think it's going to, you know, I use the analogy of um I'm not afraid that my cruise control in my car is going to accelerate me to 100 miles an hour and go where it wants to go. I'm I'm in control of it. I can turn it off. So I kind of look at some of the fears around AI and says, we can turn it off. You know, we don't have to listen to what it says. We are in control of it.

SPEAKER_04 24:29

So anyway. So and and on that, on that note of turning things off, I, you know, that's one of the reasons I, you know, this kind of digital fatigue of just um fidgeting with my phone and stuff like that is one of the reasons why I kind of take this sabbatical from social media and try to kind of reboot. And then you see young people uh doing some of the same things, uh, you know, um trying out uh analog things more, try uh using um uh books and film cameras and vinyl records, and you know, trying to recreate what they think the 90s lifestyle was like. I you see like uh some young families that are uh using VCRs so the kids won't be, you know, the algorithm won't keep feeding them more and more films. Once Dumbo is over on the tape, it's time to go play in the yard, stuff like that. So um I think those counter signals. One of the things I I think we do in uh in foresight uh often if we're thinking about the future, we try to pick one and kind of bet on it instead of just kind of like you said, cautiously look at it and also consider the the counter signals. When when you think of the those ideas, like and then another aspect is church young people looking for things that are not AI and things that are not this um um expressive individualism where everybody just kind of creates their in their own image and their own brand, their own identity, and then tries to pick the one that has the most grievance value so that you can be the victim and complain, you know, that you're somehow being discriminated against. So, like part of that is just that kind of that fatigue of uh being able to just kind of be constantly on and constantly pressuring your your identity. As you look at that, does does that ring any bells for you or any thoughts for you as an entrepreneur?

SPEAKER_03 26:44

Oh yeah, I I just it's um you know, we'll uh we'll have my kids over to the house. They're all live here in town, and everyone will gather and there'll be a lull in the conversation, and the first person will pull out their phone, and then pretty soon everybody's looking at their phone, and everything just stops. And I think that people are gonna yearn back to the days where there's these awkward silences, and people go, Huh, I'm gonna say something, or I'm gonna ask a question, as opposed to I'm gonna withdraw from this room full of people that I love and go to my phone. I think that uh like what you were talking about, I think there's gonna be people that the culture is gonna want to drive towards more real and uh intimate situations, and they're going to revive the um the lost art we were talking before we went online, that my uh mother-in-law was the master of small talk. She could talk to anybody and get them talking. And that skill is just it's it's kind of gone with that generation, you know. Uh, because people go, oh, we're done. I'm just gonna look at my phone. And I never developed that skill to be able to, you know, initiate conversation or draw stuff out.

SPEAKER_04 28:11

They they uh they talk about this, and I think they overdo it, but the idea of the Gen Z stare where the the young people are used to curating everything on their phone, and then when they're a live situation, they don't realize that they haven't uh they don't have an expression on their face because they're usually scrolling and and so they're not interacting in a in a personal way. And I I was I'm working through my you know during this period some books, and uh one of the books, maybe this is digital, but I'm listening to the book, The Power of Strangers and the Benefit of Connecting in the Suspicious World. And in that book, uh they said they did a lot of research on people, and they did it in the UK and uh United States, and they gave assigned a group of people the uh assignment to uh they kind of enlisted people to try to kind of scavenger hunt and find a person and then go and talk to them, and then a group of people just to kind of notice them and do what they normally would do, carry on with their day uh if they happened to notice them, and then the other people to not to intentionally not talk to anybody. And they found that the people that that uh did take this had the assignment to engage people, like, oh, this is a guy with a funny tie, let me go talk to him, uh, they they underestimated how long they would talk to the person, and they uh they underestimated how gratifying it would be to uh to have a conversation. They ended up having long conversations, nice conversations, but nothing, you know, earth-shattering. And then they also found that if people connect with people but based on loose connections, like the guy at the coffee shop, the the barista, the uh you know, the the Uber driver, the person sitting next to you on the plane, or whatever, if you engage them in conversation, people felt a lot more connected and more hopeful and more uh uh encouraged if they did that than if they just kind of ignored each other. Kind of like the idea is that we see others as kind of a commodity that we need to navigate or an obstacle that we need to navigate, and so we don't engage them. And um that's you know one of the one of the things that uh I think for ministry is being able to make the small talk gives you the opportunity to talk about not only just trivial things but important things at some point. So anyway, that um I think you're right. I think that that uh analog retrieval is definitely kind of an early signal. The digital fatigue, it uh it kind of feeds into that. And human human-mediated use of technology and not uh and leaning toward that more than uh uh algorithmically, I think that's the part that fatigues you the most when it pops up. Like um, did you ever see that one video where the the ladies were talking about how they uh they're out in the I don't know, Seattle or somewhere, and they saw a bear, and the the daughter said, She's you know in her 30s, that's a such a cute bear. And then the mom says, Oh, bears are dangerous, stay away from the bears. And they had a little kind of uh a little banter to each other, uh, incidental. Like she said, oh no, he's so cute, but he's dangerous. Anyway, they get back to the hotel or wherever they're staying, and the mom and the daughter are laying in bed, and and the social media feed on the mom is all showing all these dangerous bears, and on the woman is showing all these uh uh cute bears and how bears are fun. And she said, That's I could see how the algorithms are encouraging us to be kind of uh at each other because like it reinforces my uh presuppositions. And how do they even know that I talked about bears? That's the part I think that will frustrate people. They're tired of that, they're tired of like you know, you're watching uh, you know, Prime or Netflix or whatever, and um something you just surf for on, you know, Walmart or whatever shows up as ad. And I think that's where people uh they want that um data uh sovereignty, uh they want that privacy, uh, and the algorithms are just amassing so much through chat. Anyway, I don't know, I just kind of went off on a rant there.

SPEAKER_03 32:51

Any any other any other thoughts that uh you know that relate to technology and you know emerging technology in your in I don't know there there may be opportunities for the digital side to enhance the analog side or to set up the analog side. Um I'm not sure what that may may mean, but uh rather than living in you know living my social life in this digital world, maybe there's a way that the digital world can enhance my in-person real face-to-face conversations and stuff. Maybe identifying who I should connect with, you know, that shares a common interest or something.

SPEAKER_04 33:34

Exactly. Matt's recording this all through his uh uh Facebook glasses right now, I think those look like.

SPEAKER_01 33:41

So if you look at we talked about COVID and and from the time of COVID to now, what area of growth uh are you seeing in your business? It or new things that you're doing now that you weren't doing back then. And then I'd ask you, you know, what are what are some of the big shiny things that that may be out there in the future?

SPEAKER_03 34:07

Yeah. Um the landscape has changed. So initially it was I've got to stream my services, let's go to streamingchurch.tv, start streaming my services, to the point where um the whole uh where YouTube and Facebook and the other services are providing live streaming for free, and people thought, oh, let's just migrate over to a free service. And I think uh so I've definitely we've definitely seen that. And for those that were, you know, just the the the live streaming is just kind of a another thing I do, but it's not a real serious ministry part of my church, right? That would be appealing to you know some churches because and there's and they're willing to take on some of the cons that you get with the free services with lots of distractions and you don't own your content. And we have we do have churches that come to us after being there because their worship song uh was uh they're playing copyrighted music, which all the music in the church is copyrighted, and Facebook just took them down mid-service. So anyway, I've seen we've seen a migration towards some of the free services and a more kind of a more sterile environment with that. Um where we're our whole goal is you know, how do we do ministry online, how do we do church online, where we only serve the church. So that's kind of we've seen some of that going on. Um as far as shiny that that's out there, um we have we we've we've embraced the AI early on. Um if you're familiar, but Glue does uh an AI hackathon every year, and we were part of their first year of doing the AI hackathon. And so we've kind of stayed in tune with opportunities to be able to use AI to enhance ministry. Uh, we recently launched uh a uh product that would allow you to take your sermon and have it presented daily and through daily devotions based on the sermon from the past week. So people can kind of take bite-sized chunks of the sermon and just do them in five to you know seven minutes or so.

SPEAKER_05 36:45

Right.

SPEAKER_03 36:46

Um, and AI is just allowed the opportunity to do that. Otherwise, it before AI, that would have taken staff, you know, 20 hours to put something together. And now it can be done in just a few minutes. So yeah. So there's we're staying in tune with um trying to keep our ear to the ground. And I think a lot of the opportunities are going to pop up through the AI landscape. Um, we're we just had a meeting with uh another company that was doing that does live translations. So they wanted to be able to work with our churches and provide within seconds the uh you know the Spanish version or the Korean version of the translation as they watch the service. So and without AI, that's just not possible.

SPEAKER_01 37:35

So that would be audio and video.

SPEAKER_03 37:38

Yeah. Yeah, they would do audio and video. That's actually the second year at Glue. Two other companies came and introduced that that feature. So that was back uh now a couple of years ago.

SPEAKER_01 37:55

So and so you can really kind of see that that that would have some impact even in our ability to do world missions.

SPEAKER_03 38:06

Oh yeah. And the yeah, the whole translation world, I think, has just gotten a major boost up so that you know the the live translations through your phone and that sort of thing have become a lot more usable. So yeah, it's definitely opportunities in that area. So I think we're just getting into there's just starting to get um really good at images and now video. Uh so there's probably some opportunities there to uh create, you know, the church to create content, um, video content that they can use.

SPEAKER_04 38:46

One um, you know, when uh early internet was you know disruptive to the music industry, the the film industry because of uh streaming meet streaming music and streaming film and stuff like that. This kind of decentralized it away from Hollywood and Nashville. And um, we see that kind of happening with uh technology where people are leveraging uh technology to uh you know, churches can have a footprint as large as a denomination now or used to be able to have, stuff like that. But at the same time, there's this kind of a convergence where there's only so many providers with the uh uh with the AI tools, so many providers with the uh streaming platform or the uh the the platform. And we had one instance where uh a church was using Stripe as a way for people to make donations, and the AI flagged them uh to uh and canceled, where you know, basically deplatformed them from being able to process donations because of sermons about I probably Islam or something, I believe. And that uh they had to go through this whole rigor to kind of get that open back up. And so not only are we just decentralizing, but we're also under and putting our content and our uh our ministry through we're funneling it through systems that we don't govern that have embedded governance. AI has embedded governance. Um, these platforms, banking and these other things have platforms, have have this governance. So that's one area I think um maybe uh uh what do you call blockchain and these other kinds of technologies may end up becoming tools that are used to um kind of protect digital sovereignty and stuff like that. One thing about Foresight is when you talk about it, you know, it what timeline are we talking about? Like say if I say digital fatigue and mediation and analog retrieval, I don't mean it's happening. It's happening now because the future is happening now, but it's just not evenly distributed, but it's probably not peaking now. I think the period between now and say 20 years out is very contested. So it's churches creating more content and people getting tired of created content, it's people expressing their individualism and people looking for something collective, it's people uh using AI and using uh um uh these kind of uh avatars and stuff like that, and people craving embodied real experience. Uh it's people using platform to preach from, but people eventually it's contested craving that the table to sit around with people and um and do spiritual formation. You see that kind of emerging through um kind of people revitaliz, revising our um evangelicals merging toward even liturgical kind of stuff because they're looking for something more grounded, something more ancient, something that wasn't invented uh a couple weeks ago by somebody, or something uh fabricated on AI. And you can see young people already noticing and uh having aversion to that. But on the timeline, we don't know where that is. That's kind of what Foresight does, kind of keep an eye on the signals and kind of look for how signals can uh isolated things could uh merge together to form trends, and those trends could merge together with other trends to kind of create these kind of momentum, these drivers that we can't stop, and we just have to navigate. Yeah. Well, that's a lot.

SPEAKER_03 43:05

And yeah, I can see that what you were talking about, where people getting deplatformed and that sort of thing, but I think that's gonna also drive some other change. That's gonna create opportunities for other companies to come in and say, I'm going to support this this group of people. Um, and you know, and it's probably it may lead to some more division, but uh it's there's also some opportunity available too.

SPEAKER_04 43:33

So yeah, it's a good point. They you saw that even in X with uh as it as Musk not saying, I'm I don't understand everything about Musk, but one thing he did was he did buy a platform that was uh deplatforming people and created that kind of that created an opportunity for him. Um and where the Christian mediated networks, I think, are probably something. That may emerge, you know, of necessity. But uh well, uh Steve, I really appreciate your your time and uh giving us uh your insights. And um, you know, we're uh often talking about futures and off uh talking about strategic uh change management and stuff like that, but I mean you're doing it. That you know, that's your bread and butter, and if it doesn't happen, uh you don't eat. So uh it's a whole lot different than maybe some of the academic stuff that I'm attracted to. So that's when I really I really appreciate your balancing that out. And I also appreciate the other day um uh a few weeks ago where you let me come on your podcast and uh just kind of talk about foresight and and you know how uh we use it in in ministry. And oh uh I have kind of an approach to foresight that I call uh moral realism foresight because most foresight is secular and it's kind of brackets out the supernatural and the metaphysical. Uh and it kind of from the secular framework where truth is negotiated, and I believe there are many truths that are received, and that there is such a thing as right and wrong. Not everything is black and white, but there are things that are right and wrong, and there are uh so like I'm trying to adapt foresight to the ministry context so ministry leaders can kind of see and be more like the men of Issachar who understood their times and knew what the Israel should do. That's kind of that's the vision that we're trying to do here in uh the Inside Futures Labs. But I wanted to go ahead and include that episode in this episode. So, like as soon as we tag out from here, it'll open up uh that that uh that episode, and hopefully people can listen to your podcast. Can you give more of a plug to your podcast so that people they can hear a sample and you know know that there's a whole whole lot more interesting episodes than the one I'm yeah we've uh yeah, we call it Church Solutions Podcast.

SPEAKER_03 46:12

We uh uh two have been doing this for a long time. We got into the streaming in in 2008, so we started live streaming a weekly little program that was before podcasts had become popular, and we just kind of transitioned that weekly thing into a weekly podcast. So, yeah, Church Solutions Podcast.

SPEAKER_04 46:32

If you're looking for it on your favorite podcast provider, and you're like at episode 500 and something, and that's the most recent ones, you not even including the ones from way back, way back when you were.

SPEAKER_03 46:45

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh Phil's our host, he's a former radio guy, and you'll know it when you listen to him, and you'll figure out who the radio guy is. So he's a former radio, he started some Christian radio stations and uh was uh DJ on those stations as well.

SPEAKER_01 47:03

Yeah, it's a great podcast.

SPEAKER_04 47:04

Yeah. Okay, well, we we appreciate your time and uh uh don't uh don't go away, stick around and hear the rest of this uh podcast from Church Solutions, and then uh at the end, you know, we always end with a song, so get ready for a little um 70s rock and roll. All right, God bless you, and thank you so much, Dave. All right, thank you.

SPEAKER_02 47:34

How does a ministry leader build a strategy that doesn't just survive on disruption, but actually thrive through it? Well, today we're talking about the future of faith-based leadership, and our guest is Dr. Chris Forbes, a strategic foresight consultant and founder of the Future Commission 2050. With over 25 years of experience, Chris trains leaders to test their assumptions and spot emerging global trends before they arrive. It all happens next on the Church Solutions Podcast.

SPEAKER_00 48:04

It's the Church Solutions Podcast brought to you by StreamingChurch.tv. The Church Solutions Podcast is all about helping you and your church with technology and other resources for your life and ministry. Now, here are your hosts, Steve Lacey and Phil Thompson.

SPEAKER_02 48:23

It's an inside joke. Oh, hey, we're we're we're on. It's the Church Solutions Podcast. My name is Phil Thompson. And I'm Steve Lacey. We will introduce our guest in a moment. Thanks, folks, for joining us. This is episode number 523. Count them. 523. And a lot more that uh we don't uh we have a we have no idea where the other ones are. We did some years ago and they're out there floating around somewhere uh on the interweb, I guess. I don't know. But uh how are you, Steve?

SPEAKER_03 48:52

Uh I'm doing great. I'm the bachelor this week. Your white district.

SPEAKER_02 49:00

Yeah. Well, uh, you know, I'm sure you'll be fine. I'm sure. Uh do you do you still have the daycare center going though?

SPEAKER_03 49:08

Uh I'm gonna be in charge of uh small daycare this weekend, so yes, it's gonna be me on my own, which I haven't done before.

SPEAKER_02 49:15

Ooh. Steve has Steve has lots of grandkids now, and they're all little and they all run around and tear the house up. So I call it the I call it the Lacey uh childcare. All right, so uh where was I going with it? So uh we have a guest, and without further ado, let me read his bio. I'll read a an edited version of it because if I read his whole bio, we'll be out of time. But uh I'll I'll read his bio. Our guest is Dr. Chris Forbes, and he is a strategic foresight consultant specializing in faith-based nonprofits, global missions, and leadership development. He trains ministry leaders to recognize emerging trends, test assumptions. I have a lot of assumptions he could test, and build forward-looking strategies that remain steady throughout disruption. And there's lots of disruption, right? He's uh he is the founder of uh the Future Commission 2050, an initiative uh exploring the development of moral realism futures as a practice among ministry leaders. I have no idea what that means, but I'm gonna ask him. Uh I do have a little bit of an idea what a strategic foresight consultant is, but I want to ask him here in a moment, and Steve and I will ask him a bunch of questions uh related to this. But anyhow, uh welcome uh Dr. Forbes to our Church Solutions podcast. How are you?

SPEAKER_04 50:39

I'm well and uh appreciate just you can call me Chris. You don't need to call me a doctor.

SPEAKER_02 50:44

All right. Well, you know, uh yeah, all right. Yeah, well, that's good. We're thank you for being with us too. And and uh I know you have no clue, you have no clue who we are. This uh podcast is sponsored by StreamingChurch.tv, which is uh one of our products, and so just wanted to get that out there. But let me so I know Steve's chomping at the bit to ask you questions. I'm gonna ask you a couple right off the bat here, okay? Uh I'll ask you two uh twofold question. First of all, what is a strategic foresight consultant? How does that apply to people involved in ministry? And if I'm a pastor watching or listening to this podcast, why should I care about this whole topic of future and all that? Because God's in control. Why should I worry about the future?

SPEAKER_04 51:32

Well, okay. It's about three questions, but uh if I can remember, just remind me if I if I get lost. So uh what a strategic foresight consultant uh means to me is um I work with ministry leaders in helping them recognize the signals, trends, and drivers affecting the future around them. And uh Foresight uses a systematic method methodology to look at the signals, trends, and drivers. And a lot of people, everybody thinks about the future, but very few people have a system for understanding the future. We see things happening around us, but uh not every signal that we notice is on the same timeline. You know, it might mature five years out, ten years out, twenty years out. Not everything has the same importance or impact on our ministry. And so uh what I do is I try to help people learn how to recognize the signals of um the future uh that are present now. And um the future 20 years from now, signals of it are visible now. Uh it's just weaker. And uh signals in the next decade, kind of that transition period between where we are now and where we're gonna be 20 years from now. We're in this kind of what I like to call the crossfade period in that middle section. And uh it's sort of like uh, you know, in audio, since you have a lot of people maybe are technical, you know, as you fade down one, you know, you're listening to one song and you fade down that one song is like a DJ would, and you're and then you're fading in the new song, there's that kind of that moment between where is it the beat of the last song or the beat of the next song that you're hearing the most? And that's kind of the period that is, I believe, is the next decade of of lots of transition. Um so um my goal in Foresight is to help people think like futurists and apply that in the ministry context.

SPEAKER_02 53:43

Okay, so as a pastor listening to this, um how how does that practically apply to me?

SPEAKER_04 53:51

Well, for well, first of all, all churches engage in uh futures thinking because all churches plan. We all uh plan with assumptions about where things are going to be. And I I've worked a lot with in denominational and missions work, and we have these long-range visions to engage by a certain year, or we have uh people with tendency to project where things are now onto the next 10 years, or we have uh people setting um uh kind of predictions out there, like uh and those are all based on assumptions. Short-term projections um assume that the variables of today are going to be still around and they may not be. And so what uh what I try to do is help people kind of slow down and think about the the future. Um since uh since the future is present now, it's not a big rush to think if it's gonna happen 10 years from now. So like uh I know there's a lot of things going on in the ministry, and in ministry we always have this term, the tyranny of the urgent. We're all you know, we're all got a lot of things. People come in our office with their hair on fire, we gotta solve that problem, we gotta think about those things. And so, what often in my Insight Futures labs, uh, people come and say we never really give ourselves time to think about these things, to think strategically about the future because we're always so reacting. Um, there's a word that uh in Foresight we use called uh our term called educated incapacity. That is that uh kind of that condition where we're really good at what we do. Operationally, we're very successful, and we know how to fine-tune all the things that we do in our ministry. And I'm sure that on your listeners, some really highly skilled leaders. But one of the problems with uh what educational incapacity is, is uh we're so good at what we do that we're the last to see the things that are uh outside of what we do. And so uh what Foresight does is kind of gives you a method to look outside and see what those drivers of change are that are pressing in that could affect the future and uh could impact your ministry uh in all the plans that you have. So, like I think for a ministry leader, uh the the value is mostly creativity. Uh Jane McGonagall from the Institute for the Future says the real value in in foresight is not prediction, but it is creativity and uh being able to anticipate. You know, like you've heard the expression get ahead of the curve. Well, there's literally a curve, there's an adoption curve with new ideas that kind of emerge as innovations, and then they become early adoption, early majority, late majority. A lot of times in ministry we're we're a little behind the curve, and so we kind of see things when they're already obvious. And uh, what Foresight does is helps you kind of see what's coming and kind of align your ministry that way.

SPEAKER_03 57:14

So I was encouraged that that, you know, initially I, you know, the skeptic in me is like, we're having a futurist on the podcast, you know, is what why is his opinion any better than ours? So I was I was encouraged to hear that you say you guys have a system that takes all of the signals that are out there. And uh I'll have a secondary question here, but one of the first ones is there's there's the signal-to-noise ratio, right? Because there's there's a bunch of signals out there that could send you to the left and you're you're end up going to the right and all that. How do you how do you discern these signals? And do you weigh them with a certain amount of gravity and throw them into some prediction model, turn it around and have it um, you know, say, here's what's going on, or what how does that happen? How do you discern those signals and what are some of those signals?

SPEAKER_04 58:13

Well, that's a good question. Uh, one thing uh I would say uh my while I'm a futurist, I'm a futurist is someone who uses the method of strategic foresight for thinking. It's not that I'm an expert in the future or in uh, you know, particularly whatever ministry leaders' context is. What I bring is those those, like you said, those tools and those frameworks. So one way to filter out the noise is we start in foresight with kind of a domain map. Uh and we maybe not used to thinking that in terms of this, but uh thinking in terms of our ministries as part of a system. Uh, and so there are aspects of our ministry that have uh uh systems that uh need to survive for us to continue doing our ministry, and so what we do is we try to nail down what those are. Uh, system thinking in the Bible would be where uh Paul says we are part of a body, and not everybody is the same part of the body, or we are a temple, you know, we're a building, we're a structure. So there are aspects of of uh this kind of thinking. And so what we do is we filter for those things that have uh that um would have the most probability of impact, and then we rank them. And so uh for what I do, insight futures is to insight provoke a conversation about the future with leaders. So uh a ministry team, a uh strategy team and a mission board or um you know some other nonprofit like a like a school or whatever, those leaders get together and they start brainstorming what are the signals that could impact the domain, and then um we rank them, excuse me, we rank them according to probability and impact. So if it has even if it's high probability but has a low impact, low low impact is not something we worry about. So I mean there's a lot of things out there that have a low impact. You know what those are once you have the discussion with each other and you share that creativity. Uh there are also things that have a high could have a high impact, but there's a low probability. And those are wild cards. Those are things that we just keep an eye on, but we don't know. It could be a global war, it could be another pandemic, it could be, you know, some other topic. But we that's a kind of contingency plans for those kind of things. Then there are those things that I it it never fails. I've never been in a lab where ministry leaders weren't able to come up with a litany of signals that could impact their future. And there's the high probability, high impact. Uh those are things you should work on now. So when I talk about the foresight and thinking about the future, those high probability, high impact things, we know they're coming. Uh, one time I did a lab with a group of leaders and one that is like a vice president of a ministry, and he said, Wow, we're not working on any of those. And I'm like, hey, well, take a picture of all those things or write them down or something because you know they're coming, you know. But there's also that kind of thing where it's the high impact but medium probability. We don't know when, but it's probably pretty likely that it's going to impact us, so we gotta, you know, kind of look for those things. So that is kind of the matrix as far as the probability and impact, and then also the timeline, because not everything is going to be on the same horizon. We think in terms of three horizons. Horizon one is the system that we're currently in, and those are things that usually are kind of at the top end of their curve or kind of the back end of their curve. They're slated for losing their strategic fit over time and probably in the next five, 10 years. So we know what those things are intuitively. We can talk about those and kind of plot those. There's also the H3, those are things that are early, they're weird, they're strange, but they we know they're coming. AI, uh, robotics, uh, you know, these other things that they're not fully there yet, like uh hydrogen fuel or or uh you know economic changes or whatever. Those are things that we can kind of keep an eye on for the future. And that's the and but horizon two, that's the next decade or so. That transition, like I said, the crossfade, that is what I try to help leaders develop scenarios and understand. Um Bill Sharp uh is a British guy and he developed the three horizons, and uh uh he set calls that moment in between that crossfade period, he calls it the kairos moment. And if you if you know from your maybe seminary days, the kairos is a kind of uh a term for time. Uh there's chronos time, which we all know is like you know, chronology, you know, your watch time. There's also that kind of opportune time, the kairos moment. And it's what we're Christ referred to when he says you understand the aspects of the of the world, of nature, but you don't know what kairos you're in. And what my goal is to help people recognize that Kairos moment. I think that's a a partnership with the Holy Spirit, that's a partnership with prayer and uh discernment. Um and ultimately it's an act of stewardship because leaders have to, like Jesus said, count the cost and realize whether or not they have the what it takes to complete.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:57

That's probably a long answer, but I let me jump in here real quick, Steve. I'm sorry, but it's let's talk a little bit about time, okay? Like Luke 12, 56, you know, interpreting the present time. So what in your opinion, Chris, what is that one trend, meta-trend or whatever you want to call it, that's shaping the world that most churches are just missing it?

SPEAKER_04 1:04:24

Well, uh, first of all, I think technological revolution is a it's more than a trend, it's a driver, and it's going to shape a lot. I think that one thing that people are underestimating is the impact AI is having on anthropology and how people perceive what it means to be a person. And I think uh over time we're gonna have a lot of confusion about what it means to be a person. And uh so uh what ministry leaders need is a thicker account of what it means to be human, and that is something that uh, you know, that's our that should be our forte, human formation, discipleship. The other thing that AI does, and this is probably touching into the area where you are, it uh it has the ability to produce high quality um what you know people like to call them deepfakes or whatever, but it's really just uh content. It's a it can create a lot of content, it can create a lot of videos and create audio, and people can write somebody could sit in the pew and write a better song that's on the stage right now. And so what happens in that context is when in and in a world where uh um it uh expressive individualism is so rampant that people you know are trying to do their own personal branding and become an influencer and whatever, and our content looks like another kind of influencer, and then it can be easily replicated by AI, it turns that performance. aspect into something that people won't want that anymore. And so where I think the future is heading is while digital digital we'll move from a digital mediated environment to a person mediated digital environment. And so what happens not on the platform is what happens on the platform is not as important as far as attracting people, like that, you know, that kind of attractional model as it is for what happens around the table and deeper formation around around the table. Because when the question is not only what does it mean to be a person, you know, because of robots and because of AI, but also what is real? Are you real? Like like I had recently uh I was doing my audio book uh and I was trying to get an audio version of my book. So I worked through the audio book company um audible you know to uh audition a voice talent and you know I'm working with this guy Terry from Iowa I'm great he's he's doing a great job but then when they ask when Terry asked me to pay him I'm sending a late uh a payment to some lady I I don't know this name and I'm like this is really confusing to me so I go back to Audible and say hey I don't understand can and they said don't pay let's see and it's AI it was AI. So what I'm saying is that is a big trend anthropology formation table and we've been geared up for attraction for broadcast for uh influence for content more content is not what people are going to be looking for if you understand I'm saying um human real human experience and you see that already with young people they're migrating toward uh you know uh liturgy they're migrating toward ancient like Bible cells are up print Bible sales are up like 2000% people are wanting tactile real and so they're gonna want to get in in relationship with people in real like there's very few places where you can sit around a table and talk about meaning and that one place is church and so there's a great opportunity a kairos moment coming for for us in that so I would I would say that's a that's a big one um uh there are more I don't know if I want to so dominate all on that one topic but yeah so how do you go about um I mean we you just talked about one of the signals out there and there's a signal out there like we're gonna become more AI centric and then everyone's a lot of people's responses to that they assume a bunch of stuff and I just got I just listened to a a bio of uh the uh founder of um Nvidia and he was talking about they were doing some trying to build this kind of supercomputer kind of thing out of out of GPUs and one of the first companies or people to take it up was the radiology area and because they found the radiology can do it faster better than any you know anybody could and so there was this big prediction that all these people entering med school and stuff don't go into radiology.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:30

He says it's going to get wiped out by AI. Yeah and and but then he he said fast forward a few years up towards today what happened was completely the opposite he said that they were able to do the radiologists were able to do much more radiology work.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:48

Yeah they using radiology on everything they they became much more productive and so it made their job much cheaper which encouraged the doctors to prescribe more let's do another MRI you know yeah and the whole the the productivity level went up and in the meantime he said those that were all scared from getting radiology didn't go into the business and now there's a major desire because that that whole area has boomed and they need more radiologists because it's become a much more productive and lucrative which was the exact opposite of what how people initially reacted to the signal so how do you avoid reading a signal and antifore I'm gonna you know what I'm trying to say here I know what you're saying exactly and working with ministry leaders I found that that uh they will pick a they'll pick a future a projection a promotion a um you know uh probability and they'll stick with it and what we do in Foresight is we think in simultaneous multiples okay so instead of one future what we do in in the labs is um we gather together and we develop we we sort the signals we identify the drivers and then we take those drivers six to eight or however many are really determined to be the most impactful on the domain and then we develop scenarios kind of heuristically we will take the baseline and we will project out what the drivers look like in a baseline future then we will take one in a disruptive future a collapse future that's the one you know people most people don't want to consider the collapse like but you know you know consider like the bad stuff could happen too so we actually play out a scenario of the drivers how they would impact if things were to collapse what would what would push that way and then also a transformation and and not transformation like the future we prefer but how it might like like what you just described how a game changer could emerge for like the radiology well there are lots of so these are all three descriptive heuristic scenarios that we kind of use and what we do in our labs in our we would take those back to our stakeholders play them out in conversations and then kind of think through if this were to happen what would we do or what or do you see any of this happening? You know kind of play that out and then we come back and use those scenarios to develop not only an awareness and reshape those we also then kind of develop what is a preferred future what is the future we want to pull toward there's a lot of push in foresight there's the push of the the push of the future there's the weight of the past the weight of the past is what kind of uh you know churches can intuitively know what I mean you know like an uh the the shape of the institution in the past and then what can we pull toward there's the pull of the future that's where we want to go so that's one of the reasons why I call it the Insight Futures Labs. It's insight because it's inciting it's provoking a conversation but there's also kind of like an aspect of change there is that remember aspect that we're so good at in church and we should be because we don't want to lose sight of those the uh the fundamentals of our faith we want to be honored we want to honor those who stood before us and you know and carry those some a lot of our traditions together but there's also a a revolt aspect of the future where it's change and nobody likes change so the idea of insight is also there uh a different way of thinking uh you know I've worked in ministry for 35 years and we are the probably the ones who coined the phrase in ministry we never did it that way before and so like the idea is let's consider what would happen if we didn't do it that way. So I think that's where it is and then what you do is like as you have those scenarios what you do is then you kind of watch for the triggers what like that you discussed like these are the these are things that could pretend like um you think of the church in the you know local it's been in a part of the metro area and then the metro area around it has changed and most of the members are not from that area they drive in and you know they become like this island uh in you know a completely different neighborhood and then at some point they decide oh we better move out by the highway or you know whatever we do uh I'm not judging any of that I'm just saying that we're so in ministry kind of the last to notice like one uh I you know come city I was working with one group didn't realize that in the last 10 years the last decade between then and the last census we became the 20th largest metro area in the United States no one even knew that so you know so I hope that what that does is like thinking in different multiple futures so uh future studies is about multiple futures all right um if I'm a pastor listening to this and I could only do one thing this week to be future ready what would be the one thing this week that you would would recommend I think the the biggest thing you can do is slow down as soon as you see something you think that has impact for your ministry just slow down and assess it think about it. That's one thing I do when I look at a signal is I try to analyze it in different ways before I decide what it means. So okay is it am I getting the straight skinny on this or is there some overlaid narrative that's being pushed on me is um what is this okay it looks like it's gonna impact the future but when when when will it be at its peak? Is it early? Is it in the middle is it you know where is it um there's a quality of it so and I don't have time to go into all this but there is kind of this theory of panarchy you know like the uh Ecclesiastes says to everything there is a season a time for you know all these different things everything is either at a place of is it is it uh a place of beginning is it a place of organizing is it at a place of conservation where it's growing is it a place of collapse where things are coming apart so uh you know it's like a forest you know uh a forest grows and grows and grows and becomes more and more successful and the more successful it becomes the more brittle it becomes and and potentially you know with all the leaves on the floor of the forest and all the broken branches one lightning strike and it's a deal changer and then what happens to the forest well it starts over and new things emerge new plants begin to uh succeed and strive uh thrive new species begin to form so like a signal has that kind of a quality uh it could be a collapse signal it could be a uh a signal that things are going to keep going uh and then kind of once you do that you've put it on a timeline you thought about that then you think about the impact is it really something that's going to have an impact or is it just fascinating to me like I might I get way into politics I get way into lots of issues that you know are just distracting because I I find them you know fascinating but they may not necessarily have an impact on my ministry.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:02

So slow down. Well I think that's great advice go ahead Steve I think it's excellent.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:09

I I'm I was gonna ask regarding you know talking about slowing down it kind of points to what's the time frame that what's going on what with in your work it's not six months from now is it or a year from now or is it five years 10 20 do you I mean because there's certain trends going on right now and pastors are going to be uh anxious to possibly jump on them. And is that what is the time frame in your work?

SPEAKER_04 1:18:43

Well you're right it is subjective uh what I do is uh for I I have the Insight Futures labs there are three labs and they take uh like we take a two-day lab uh it's like six hours two days in a row and I teach foresight literacy so what that does is it helps people recognize and understand what the tools of foresight are are so they begin to look at um those signals and begin to place them and plot them in that way and then uh we brainstorm a lot in a group and then we start then we take a month off and we go look for those signals that we brainstormed and other signals so I would say foresight timeline kind of emerges out of that that conversation and then the third lab is uh foresight so that's foresight practice we come back and develop our scenarios and we develop the kind of understanding what the drivers are then develop our scenarios and then we test them take them back and kind of stress test them wind tunnel test them with real life people real life situations usually that takes about a month or so and then we come back in foresight planning and that foresight planning includes that that preferred future and it includes what we call backcasting and so what we would do is go out so that's where your timeline you know I'm answering your question in a long a long way but is uh you know are we going out 10 years or are we going out 15 years we're going out 28 years we look back as far as we look forward to see kind of where we are and then we develop a backcast plan. If this is where we're gonna be in 2050 probably because of the scenarios what does it look like in 2045 what does it look like 20 2040 2030 all the way back and then we have kind of a roadmap that we can kind of kind of work with generally when I use foresight I have my three horizons and this is just how I do it. It's not like the orthodox way there's not one way some uh there's a uh if you ever read a book called uh Good Ancestor they think 200 years out so um what I do is I kind of have like the 2020 to 2030 because I go back as you know that's H1 and then I have 2030 2040 that's kind of the horizon two and 2040 and beyond 2050 that's kind of where I place it um as we get further out the variables change that's why you use the scenarios there's more variables now like five years out you you have a very tough time finding people who don't know think they know what's gonna happen the next five years ten years you'll find a lot of people who have projections probably a big one that I predict is coming is uh more and more people will pick up 2033 as kind of the goal because that's 2,000 years since the resurrection you know that'll be you know that that sells you know it'll be I remember when and I'm Baptist so we had we're gonna reach everybody by the year 2000 and then what happened in the year 2000 we you know Y2K and everything was distracted and then oh vision 2020 nothing sells better than vision 2020 come on I mean it's vision and it's 2020 come on and then what were we doing in 2020? We were wondering where our next roll of toilet paper was going to come from because we were locked in our houses because of COVID. So I don't like 2033 2050 I those are just kind of timelines to help us start thinking and looking at signals so like I I don't I don't obsess about you know when it's going to happen as much as I kind of try to see what the what is the Kairos moment for now and what is the one that's coming.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:25

I I wish so this stuff is very fascinating to me. I I don't know there may be some pastors that have tuned out by now but I don't care but uh we could just keep going but I mean I would love to pick your brain on politics we don't do that here right you have a podcast what's the name of your podcast and what do you talk about on the podcast?

SPEAKER_04 1:22:46

I generally don't talk about politics there. I just talk about signals uh and uh we sit down and talk uh with you know topics like that maybe maybe we could do a podcast about politics together if that's what you want to talk about. Oh I I'm no expert at it I just want to talk about my podcast is called Signal Cafe and it's just uh people thinking through the different things like I just did a dropped a podcast on is your uh chat is your AI chat bot sentient and we talked about that and then we talked about the idea of um environmental because ministry leaders are often not you know they're suspicious of environmental for good reason environmental politics and ideology and stuff like that but we talked about there are there are there is a thing such a thing as creation care and what does that look like so we talk about different kind of kind of topics like that um whenever I do my Foresight labs I don't bring uh my opinions I try to bring the tools and let people have the conversations all right so it's Signal Cafe Signal Cafe okay that's the podcast what where can people can people find you on a website somewhere I mean I found you on LinkedIn but tell me some ways people can you know see more of what you're doing and stuff. Okay well I I I'm off uh I'm posting a lot of time on LinkedIn with some like just some signals and some just analysis for my own scanning I try to do horizon scanning all every day share a little bit of it but my website Forbes Nonprofit Strategies is Forbesstrategies.com my name is spelled just like the magazine only I don't have that kind of money or any kind of money when you come to think of it just a forbes you're in ministry that's why yeah I do signal I I do list my signals I think forbes are you know forever doomed to making lists so you know so um okay so uh signal cafe and then the website one more time on the website strategies.com all right okay all right we've got that going on there uh Steve anything else before we let our guest go back to doing what he does appreciate you being here yeah it's very interesting to me too yeah yeah uh Steve is actually our founder and CEO of streamingchurch.tv the company's JSL Solutions and twenty we're it's 25 years ago I think Steve right in July it'll be 25 years that you started JSL Solutions August all right well who's yeah August July stop being so specific.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:17

But anyhow uh I just want to say hats off to him Chris because he was very good at thinking ahead and and well he was I mean the stuff he did with myflock.com uh which um I'm I'm good at uh being ahead of things my timing is my timing is usually too early well we're talking about you've talked about the curve you know yeah it's like we yeah but with with with what we did at myflock.com or what he did I was involved in some small degree and then streamingchurch.tv in 2009 or whatever and then we've done mobile apps we've got other things going on too a lot of it's AI stuff and uh uh but you know it's it's sometimes it takes a while for people to catch up and uh anyhow I I'm rambling on here but uh Dr. Chris Forbes has been our guest today on the Church Solutions podcast I find it fascinating and I do agree with what you were saying uh pastors you know people in ministry you got to take some time out this week you know and just really spend some quiet time and and uh I know we talk about quiet time in ministry all the time but but you know get specific about it and spend some time and uh and and let that uh happen and and again uh we'd love to have you on again sometime uh Chris thank you so much for your time today thank you all righty well uh if you have not subscribed to the Church Solutions podcast folks what are you waiting for you can get it wherever you get your favorite podcast check us out give us a rating let us know what you think you can always go to if you want to reach out to us one of the ways is streamingchurch.tv which I mentioned earlier you can chat with us and uh uh you know reach out to us there so uh we're done here thank you Dr. Forbes thank you Steve Lacy I'm Phil Thompson and thank you for watching or listening to the Church Solutions podcast please take care of yourself and each other and we'll catch you again on another another episode

SPEAKER_10 1:28:01

We're trying to solve what's right before our eyes. We're finding every answer, every plan, every design. But beyond the edge of what we know today. Signals, trends, and drivers quietly reshape the way.

SPEAKER_09 1:28:30

Operational success can narrow what we see.

SPEAKER_10 1:28:38

Educated in capacity comes so naturally.

SPEAKER_09 1:28:46

Slow enough to notice changes taking form before they reach the center and become a new normal. Not every signal deserves belief. Learn to deserve, learn to see. But the future is in us to govern the offer governments time. One horizon fading, one horizon coming through. Standing in the cross fade. Learning what we're called to do.

SPEAKER_07 1:30:00

Small beginnings rarely make a louder sound.

SPEAKER_09 1:30:11

Waiting for attentive leaders willing to engage. One tomorrow isn't enough to guide the road ahead. So we test assumptions holding every forecast light. The model is not the truth. Hold your place with open hand. We proceed with caution. We scan the distant line. But the future is in us to govern the author government's time. More than one unfolding future. More than one imagine way.

SPEAKER_08 1:31:42

What are we missing? Be on the edge. Weak signals grow stronger. Small beginnings changing everything. See beyond the urgent moments.

SPEAKER_09 1:31:57

Look outside your own domain. The future's for me. Long before everyone calls it shame. We scan the distant line. But the future is an us before governments time. Under his dominion alone. Hold convictions, walk by faith instead of sight. The future is an ask to master only ours to stew right. Signals, trends, drivers, discern the times. Proceed with caution. Remain cautiously optimistic.