The Right Way to Say No: Offer a Plan

Welcome back to another episode of the unSeminary podcast. Today we’re talking with Luke Cornwell, Communications Pastor at Realife Church in Indiana. Founded in 2007, Realife has grown into one of the fastest-growing churches in America with two thriving campuses, a STEAM Academy for preschoolers, and a partnership with Southeastern University. Luke brings a unique blend of strategic communications and pastoral care, helping Realife stay aligned, relational, and mission-focused as it grows.

Is your church struggling to keep everyone on the same page as you scale? Luke shares how Realife Church builds clarity, connection, and communication systems that foster alignment and strengthen relationships in a fast-growing, multi-campus environment.

• Scaling communication as your church grows. // When Luke joined Realife three and a half years ago, the church had 15 staff members. Now that number has more than doubled, and the need for clear communication has become critical. As the church prepared to launch its second campus, they realized the importance of everyone “speaking the same language.” Luke explains that while systems matter, relationships must remain central. Realife intentionally invests in both structured communication and personal connection to keep unity strong.
• Tools that simplify communication. // Internally, Realife relies heavily on Slack—not email or text—for 95% of staff communication. Slack channels allow focused, real-time collaboration across teams while reducing clutter and missed messages. Email is reserved for non-urgent updates, while Slack is for action and discussion. This separation helps the team stay responsive and organized as the church grows.
• Leading with relationships, not control. // Luke emphasizes that communications teams can’t function as “brand police.” Instead of saying no, Realife’s communications team focuses on collaboration and clarity. They regularly check in with the lead pastor and executive leaders to ensure alignment before major changes or campaigns. The key is keeping leadership informed, not blindsided. When communication is proactive and relational, trust grows and silos shrink.
• Excellence defined by stewardship. // Realife defines excellence not as perfection, but as doing what you can with what you have. The communications team works hard to balance production demands with spiritual priorities, asking God to bless their efforts. Excellence means faithful stewardship and surrendering outcomes to God.
• Strategy over noise. // In an age of constant distraction, Luke urges churches to communicate strategically rather than reactively. Realife maintains clear “lanes” for communication. For example, text messages are used for personal contact while emails are for reminders and responses. The church limits communication frequency and ensures each message adds real value.
• Knowing your audience. // Realife uses tools like Community Church Builder (CCB) and Nurture to understand their congregation, track engagement, and identify people at risk of disengagement. Their volunteer team includes captains who care personally for others, ensuring no one falls through the cracks. This data-informed, relationship-driven approach helps the church shepherd people well—even as attendance multiplies.
• Discipling between Sundays. // For Luke, communication isn’t just about promotion—it’s about discipleship. His team’s goal is to “disciple people between Sundays” by creating content that reminds, inspires, and challenges people to grow in their faith. From social media to email, every message aims to connect people with opportunities to take next steps toward Jesus.

To learn more about Realife Church, visit realifechurch.org (that’s Realife with one “L”) or email Luke directly.

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Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Hey friends, Rich here from the unSeminary podcast. Pumped to have you listening today. Really looking forward to today’s conversation. We’ve got a communications expert on the phone, on the call. And you know that communications is critically important for your church as you try to gain alignment and clarity with your people and ah move the mission forward. ah Today, we’re talking to Luke Cornwell. He serves as a communication pastor at Realife Church, which was founded in 2007. It’s one of the fastest growing ah churches in the country. And if I’m counting correctly, they’ve got two campuses in Indiana. They exist to create a place where Uh, people love, so they will experience a loving God and something that really for the entire family.

Rich Birch — They, they include they, sorry, I’m stumbling. I’m talking to communications guy and I can’t talk straight today! What’s happening?!

Luke Cornwell — We all we all have that problem.

Rich Birch — They’ve got Realife STEM Academy for pre-K age and under and a partnership with Southeastern University. This is a fantastic church. Luke, welcome to the show.

Luke Cornwell — Yeah. Thank you for having me. This is a privilege.

Rich Birch — This is going to be good. Realife is one of the fastest growing churches in the country, as we said. For leaders who may not know the story, kind of know about the church, can you give us a snapshot of Realife? Tell us a little bit about that and tell us about your role as communications pastor. What does that cover?

Luke Cornwell — Absolutely. So, ah Realife Church started in 2007, like you mentioned. And, um you know, it was a slow start. Everybody has this dream that, you know, out of the, but you know, out of the gates, your your your church is just going to grow.

Luke Cornwell — And it took some time. And Pastor Adam and Kristen, our lead pastors, um founded it 18, 19 years ago. And you know, it took years to grow um to the point where it’s like, yeah, this is a a church. You know, we feel like a church. It’s it’s it’s not a constant grind.

Luke Cornwell — And um it really wasn’t until um about 2018 that, you know, numbers aren’t everything, but they give you a metric, right? You know, numbers aren’t everything, but it wasn’t until about 2018 where they started to cross over the 5- to 700 mark, which is a really good size church.

Rich Birch — Yep, yep.

Luke Cornwell — And, you know, it took that’s that’s like, you know, that’s 11 years.

Rich Birch — Right.

Luke Cornwell — And so since then, um it is just catapulted in both number and impact in the community. And this year we are averaging more than we ever have on our weekend services. This February, we launched our second campus. So our primary campus is in New Palestine, and our second campus is in Greenfield. And this last week, we are so we have 500 people attend our second campus nine months in.

Rich Birch — Wow. That’s amazing. That’s huge.

Luke Cornwell — So this is nothing that we’ve done. It is all God and God. We’re excited for what he has for us in the future.

Rich Birch — Nice. Well, I’m looking forward to learning from what God’s doing in your midst and…

Luke Cornwell — Yeah.

Rich Birch — …and particularly around this communication stuff.

Luke Cornwell — Yeah.

Rich Birch — It’s so critically important. And, you know, one of the downsides, people like the idea of being inside a quick, fast growing church, but it’s like it’s difficult having lived in that space. And communication complexity is really one of the the and problems that we deal with.

Luke Cornwell — Yeah.

Rich Birch — Particularly as a church’s growth accelerates, it’s like, man, there’s a lot to pull together. What challenges have you run into as the church has been growing or that you’ve seen other churches ah that are you know making sure that everybody knows what’s going on?

Luke Cornwell — Yeah.

Rich Birch — What have been some of the complexities of growing quickly from a communication point of view?

Luke Cornwell — So when I started three and a half years ago as the communications pastor for Realife Church, we had about 15 full-time employees, full-time staff members. And we were just starting the STEAM Academy that you mentioned earlier.

Luke Cornwell — Now we’ve more than doubled that. So one of the first things that we recognized is just our internal communications was just in dire need of tightening up. And so as we prepared to launch this campus, we had to make sure that we were all speaking the same language, that we were you know all working towards same goals.

Luke Cornwell — And this is not to say that we weren’t before. We had a really tight knit group of staff. But as we grew in staff numbers and weekend numbers, we realized that we had to be on the same page, even more so. You know when you’ve got 10 or 15, it’s really easy to get into a room…

Rich Birch — Right.

Luke Cornwell — …and to just talk things out. But when you’re at 30, 35, where we’re at now, like it’s hard, like it’s a it’s a large group conversation. It’s no longer a small group.

Luke Cornwell — And so there are have been a few things that we’ve had to do. We’ve had to change the makeup of um of our teams. We’ve had to have smaller meetings and then larger meetings. And we’ve had to prioritize just making sure that we ah keep our relationships strong through all of that noise. Because, you know, we all know systems are great. But it’s all about the people. And it’s all about relationships ah within those systems.

Rich Birch — Well, I want to come back to the relationship piece in a second, because I think that’s critically important. But talk me through ah how from a communications kind of keeping your team all on the same page, you talk about small, you know, small or small teams, large teams.

Rich Birch — How do you think about ensuring that you’re from a kind of system point of view, we’ll get to relationship in a second…

Luke Cornwell — Yep.

Rich Birch — …but from a system point of view, kind of keeping everyone on the same page and ensuring that the right people know the right things at the right time?

Luke Cornwell — Yeah. So over time, we have implemented a series of, and this is going sound horrible because not everybody loves meetings, but really connection points throughout the week where we make sure we talk through our weekend services, where we’re planning of four, six months ahead on large events and you know just strategically thinking through what it looks like, what our calendar looks like.

Luke Cornwell — Most people don’t realize that, but a church’s calendar can really dictate the ebb and flow of what is going on in the church. And so we’ve had to create some of those rhythms um and recreate some of those rhythms as we’ve grown, and as we’ve hired staff and brought people in.

Luke Cornwell — And so even today, you know we’re having conversations about what do our teams look like? What are the structures? And so making sure that everybody is in sync with that.

Luke Cornwell — And then we use simple tools like Slack.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Luke Cornwell — We don’t text each other. We Slack each other.

Rich Birch — Right.

Luke Cornwell — And that helps us to keep everything focused. It helps us because we can have lots of small groups, if you know about Slack.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Luke Cornwell — Slack has allows you to have channels and different groups. And that allows us to keep each other all the time in the loop and in the know of what’s going on.

Rich Birch — Yeah, so so I’m assuming that also would include ah like you’re not emailing internally either. Like any internal communication really is on Slack. You’re trying to cut down the total number of channels, get a focus on Slack.

Luke Cornwell — I would say 95% of our communication is all in Slack.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah that’s interesting.

Luke Cornwell — Emails—so we look at it this way…Email is like, hey, you’re on vacation. I need to send you something…

Rich Birch — Right.

Luke Cornwell — …and I want you to see it, but it doesn’t need immediate attention. Slack is like, hey, and I need you to respond to this.

Rich Birch — Right. Yes, please see it and engage with it.

Luke Cornwell — Please see. Yes.

Rich Birch — Can you talk us through what the your kind of weekly or like the regular meeting rhythm looks like? You mentioned like, hey, we’ve got, you know, meetings throughout the week. What does that, what are those, what’s the kind of form of that take? What’s that look like?

Luke Cornwell — Yeah, so for the entire group, um every week we have a time of worship and what we would call our chapel on Tuesday morning. And that’s a time for us to ah get into God’s word with a short little devotional, to pray together, to sing a few songs, and to really just bond spiritually together and seek God for you know ah whatever we have going on.

Luke Cornwell — And so there’s a lot of times where our lead pastor, Pastor Adam, will get up there and say, hey, yeah let’s let’s pray together about these things coming up because they’re important to us and we can’t do this without him.

Luke Cornwell — And then after that, we have a time of just connection. Our executive pastor will lead a one church meeting ah that allows us to hear from both sides, from our two campuses and what is going on in those places.

Luke Cornwell — And then ah we break into smaller teams at that point. Our pastors and directors get together and we discuss um what is going on detail. Our dream team, our volunteer core, what are some things that we’re ah maybe ah roadblocks we’re running into and and how do we how do we ah retain and and how do we recruit? And we’re talking through those things in a smaller core for our campuses.

Luke Cornwell — So that’s just three of the things that we do every week.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love that. And even, ah you know, listeners, the thing I love that’s built in there is um there’s like an there’s a natural um kind of echoing out cadence there. It’s like it’s naturally set up for like, hey, here’s ah here’s kind of a big direction thing. Let’s talk about it in a little more detail. And then we’re going to get down into small groups, into our individual teams and talk about it. Not that that’s necessarily the structure you’re going to follow every week. But we’ve got to cascade our communication, make sure that people…

Luke Cornwell — Yes.

Rich Birch — …you know, understand and get a chance to talk about it. Even just in your weekly meetings. I love that that’s, you know, set up already.

Luke Cornwell — Yeah. And so another form of that is our executive leadership team meets on Mondays.

Rich Birch — Okay.

Luke Cornwell — So it’s a real, again, it’s a great cascading of information and then it just sets our week up to to succeed.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great. Love, you know, love that. Well, let’s loop back on the relationship piece. You’d mentioned this, I caught my eye. So true. You know, I think as a church grows, like when you were all, you could all sit around one table, you know, order a box of pizza, everybody knows what’s going on.

Rich Birch — And it’s not just that information falls through the cracks, but actually you can, you know, step on people’s toes, lose relationship there. How are you keep keeping focused on the relationship side as you continue to grow?

Luke Cornwell — So one of my roles as a communication director is to keep alignment with anything that is internally, but also you know primarily going out. And so that includes working with our worship experience pastor and what is happening in our Sunday and weekend services.

Luke Cornwell — That includes working with our lead pastor, making sure we’re carrying his vision through what’s printed, through what’s on the web, ah through what’s in our social social markets, Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and all those different things.

Luke Cornwell — And so one of the things that like I hold near and dear to my heart is this um passion for people and passion for relationships. So, you know, I mentioned Slack. My Slack is full of DMs and people. I’m constantly talking to almost every one of our pastors every single day about something that is going on in their world.

Luke Cornwell — And our team, our goal is for our comms team is that we’re facilitating their ministry. So yes, we have our directives, um but we are not living and working in a silo. So we may own something, but we’re not working alone.

Rich Birch — So I’m sure this never happens at Realife, but sometimes comms departments um can be seen internally as like, those are the people that just say no to things.

Luke Cornwell — Yeah.

Rich Birch — Like those are the people that are like, no, you can’t get an announcement. No, we can’t make a video for you. No. Or like you did this thing that was off brand and like, stop it. You know…

Luke Cornwell — Yeah.

Rich Birch — Like, it’s like, they’re like the communications police or whatever. How do you ensure that you’re not that for Realife?

Luke Cornwell — That is a really good question. And if if you have a miracle drug, um I would like to know, because I think that plagues every communications team in some form or another.

Rich Birch — Yeah, sure.

Luke Cornwell — I don’t think you ever are perfect at it. But what we do is we you know, yesterday I had a phone call with our lead pastor. I said, Hey, I need five minutes your of time. I have a very specific question to ask you.

Luke Cornwell — And he said, sure. So I’ll call you about, you know, 11 o’clock or whatever time it was. And he called me and I said, Hey, I have this very specific question for you. I want to ensure that what we’re about ready to do, you are okay with.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Luke Cornwell — Not because we’re going way out of the bounds of our values, which are super important to us. Not because this is against our mission, because it’s a tiny little change, but it’s highly visible. It’s changing a name.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Luke Cornwell — And it was just a small change of that name. So we had ran that up through our executive pastor, our comms team, our events person, all in agreement with it. But I wanted to double check before we put it in print that our lead pastor was okay with it. So a two-minute conversation over the phone ensures that, one, he’s aware of it.

Luke Cornwell — Two, if he has any concerns, he can speak into it. Now he was like, hey, I’m good with it. We’re good. Let’s double check this but and that, but we’re good. And that allows us to stay aligned, keeps him informed, and then allows us to proceed with confidence.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.

Luke Cornwell — So if you do that across all of your channels and have that respect up and across peers, then it really helps to break down those those conversations that you end up having of like, hey, you went off base here.

Rich Birch — Right. Yeah, that’s good. ah that That aligns with ah some advice I recently heard um where like similar kind of advice that, you know, lots of times lead pastors, particularly, they’re they just they want to be they want to know what’s going on. They don’t necessarily need or want to even be able to like change everything, but but if they’re operating in a low information environment if they don’t actually know what’s going on they’re going to be more likely to step in and micromanage that actually by by doing lots of informing…

Luke Cornwell — Yeah.

Rich Birch — …that you know gives them the opportunity to kind of see what’s going on…

Luke Cornwell — So true.

Rich Birch — …a sense of what’s there which I thought was, you know, I think that’s good. That’s good.

Luke Cornwell — Yeah. Yeah. And I’ve had to work at that. And I’m not perfect at that. Our team, we’re not perfect at that.

Rich Birch — Sure, sure.

Luke Cornwell — Because what we want to do is we want to ah we want to tell them, hey, we’ve got this taken care of. You don’t need to worry about this.

Rich Birch — Right.

Luke Cornwell — You worry about lead pastor stuff. We’ll worry about comm stuff. But the truth the matter is we the the church is a communication platform.

Rich Birch — Yes, yes.

Luke Cornwell — Everything is communications.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Luke Cornwell — And so we really have to work hard ah to make sure that we’re aligned in that.

Rich Birch — Yes. Yeah, that’s good. Okay. So how how are you balancing? To me, there’s these two kind of tensions in communications that we deal with in particularly fast growing church. There’s like the urgency of needing to promote what’s coming next.

Luke Cornwell — Yes.

Rich Birch — Like there’s always something coming down the pipe, right?

Luke Cornwell — Yes. Oh, so all the time.

Rich Birch — Like it’s like, and, but doing that in a way, the other side of the tension is like, we want to reinforce our culture. We want to reinforce who we are. And we we want to build, we want to use the communication that we’re doing that to kind of build that culture. How do you, and and those, they can be at odds sometimes they can be kind of, there’s an inherent tension in that.

Luke Cornwell — Sure.

Rich Birch — Talk me through what that looks like.

Luke Cornwell — So it really comes down to how you define excellence.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Luke Cornwell — So we we strive for excellence. I believe that’s one reason why God has blessed our church is because we strive to be excellent in everything. We’re we’re not trying to be more than he wants us to be. We’re just trying to be excellent in whatever that we’re doing.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Luke Cornwell — We don’t want to allow things to fall through the cracks. We don’t want to do things halfway. And excellence, in our words, is defined by doing what you can with what you have.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Luke Cornwell — And so when it comes to to the communications department, that’s rough. Like that’s hard. Because we we see what’s available to us via social media. We we see what other churches are doing. There is always something more that a communications department could do if they had the time.

Luke Cornwell — You could always do one more video, one more social post, ah one more print piece. And so balancing the “enough” is difficult. And so some of that, I’ll I’ll be honest, some of that is a God thing. It’s like, okay, God, what is enough? We need you to bless what we have. We need you to bless. We need to bless we need you to bless what we’re doing. We’re going to do our best. We’re going to be as excellent as we can.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.

Luke Cornwell — And then leaving it in his hands.

Rich Birch — That’s good. Yeah. How do you, as a communications person, it’s kind of a related issue, ah maybe adjacent to that. We live in a very noisy culture. Like there is, you know, our people are, you know, they’re distracted all day long. And so I think we’ve got to raise the value in what we do.

Luke Cornwell — Yes.

Rich Birch — It’s our responsibility to to push that up in their priorities to make it you know important for them. How do you balance that off with not just contributing to the noise that is you know the kind of broader culture? How how does that work out for you as you think about that with with the people at RealLife?

Luke Cornwell — I think ah there’s a couple of things that are in play here. You need to have a strategy.

Rich Birch — Good.

Luke Cornwell — And by strategy, you need to know why you do what you do and then follow that. You need to have a plan. When you don’t have a plan, everybody is sending communication this way and that way. And, you know, the the average person in a church um is many, many, has many, many faces. So they’re a parent. They’re a a husband, they’re a man, they’re a, um, a giver. You know so like the the possibility of them getting multiple pieces of communication a week is super high.

Luke Cornwell — And so one, you’ve you’ve got to have a strategy and a plan and two, you have to bring value. I think you said that before, you’ve got to bring the, it can’t be just a reminder.

Rich Birch — Right.

Luke Cornwell — And then the last thing I’ll say is you need to keep certain lanes for certain things. So keep lanes clear. We will not text people just because that’s what they answer. We reserve text for personal contact. We reserve email for responses to something that they’ve done, but also reminders. And then we don’t send over, we over-send communication.

Rich Birch — Yeah, what what would you say, how else would you define the kind of certain lanes? That’s a, it caught my attention. That’s kind of certain lanes for certain things. Are there any other kind of boundaries you follow there?

Luke Cornwell — Sure. We try to balance so we don’t send more than one email a day.

Rich Birch — Right, okay.

Luke Cornwell — So if if kids are sending an email to the parents, we try not to send a giving email. We have a weekly midweek update that goes live goes out and goes live every Wednesday night, Wednesday afternoon, evening. That’s a reoccurring. So people know, hey, let’s not send an email unless we have to Wednesday. We try not to overlap.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. That’s good. Yeah, there’s definitely the kind of the air traffic controller part of your job, which is the like, hey, how do we try to coordinate all of that? That gets to the kind of the no, you can be the no person, ah you know, like or the not yet person.

Luke Cornwell — For sure.

Rich Birch — How do you balance, you know, that off at the kind of the intersection of staff expectations and then congregational or your church attention? You know, what have you learned about saying no, maybe there’s a new comms director that’s listening in. You do actually have to do that sometimes. What’s the right way to do that? How do you do that in an elegant way so that, you know, you don’t create enemies internally?

Luke Cornwell — So true, so true. The best way is to not say no. The best way to communicate no is not in what you’re not going to do, but in what you’re going to do.

Rich Birch — Oh, that’s good.

Luke Cornwell — So, hey, we we have a new strategy for email. This is what our plan is.

Rich Birch — Right. That’s good.

Luke Cornwell — Does anybody have any issues with the plan? You know float it through leadership, you know wherever you need to go with that. Float it horizontally to your peers, to other pastors, or to other directors. Hey, does this work for you? Is it okay if on Wednesdays? It’s not that you’re looking for their approval. You’re looking for their collaboration. And they might see something that you didn’t see.

Rich Birch — Right.

Luke Cornwell — And so having that opportunity to float that up or float it horizontally allows you kind to kind of prepare them again, communicate with them, but also keeps you from having to say, oh, I’m sorry, we’re not doing that. Why aren’t we doing that? Well, we’re doing this and they don’t have to ask as many questions when they’re in the know.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. but So as you think about, you know, there’s a lot going on here to try to, you know, pastor the communication side. It’s not just like, hey, we’re trying to be good at communications. We’re really trying to move our organization closer to Jesus.

Luke Cornwell — Yeah.

Rich Birch — How do those two sides of your role intersect?

Luke Cornwell — Yeah.

Rich Birch — The kind of communication piece and the pastoring piece? How does this help us push people towards relationship with Jesus?

Luke Cornwell — So our goal for communications is to disciple people between Sundays.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Luke Cornwell — So that’s kind of what our overarching big goal. Then we partner with small groups and we partner with our dream team, our volunteer pool, and our next steps directors and pastors. We our goal is to partner with them to help their ministry succeed in the communications, in the technical side of things, we’re not really here for ourselves. We don’t have our own silo. We’re really just helping bring everybody together and to kind of be that glue amongst the church leaders so that we can really, like you said, we want to bring people closer to Jesus. And so that that is our goal. Any social media post that we do, any email is to either remind them, to inspire them, or to push them closer to Jesus, give them opportunities to draw closer to Jesus.

Rich Birch — What’s your, so this is like ah um ah bit of a a slightly different direction. What do you see that’s like a low hanging fruit problem that lots of churches are getting wrong on the communication front that like you see it consistently, you’re like, oh, it’s man, where we keep fumbling this ball. Is there anything that you see that we’re we’re just not doing well that from your seat we should be doing better?

Luke Cornwell — Yeah. That is such a good question, and it could go so many different directions. So many different directions.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Luke Cornwell — You know, there’s a couple things that are popping into my head. So from a graphic side, consistency. You know, when you’re a small church, it’s like, Hey, you’re just happy to have a graphic to stick up there for the potluck on Sunday afternoon.

Rich Birch — Right. Yep.

Luke Cornwell — Or for the the ladies night. And you’re just, you’re just happy to have it. But as you grow larger, people expect things ah like graphics and they expect them to be unified. They don’t look the same, but they expect to have the same feel.

Luke Cornwell — I will say probably one of the biggest things that I feel is low-hanging fruit is just truly understanding their demographics and their church, their people. Because if you know who you’re talking to, you change the way you’re talking.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.

Luke Cornwell — We’re in the process of creating some ah some drip campaigns for different demographics in our church. You know, after an event, we want to communicate consistently over time with our ladies, with our men, with our married couples, et cetera, ah from different events that we have at the church. And so like, What, who who are we talking to? What value are we adding to them when we send them an email and say, hey, you know, it was great having you at our ladies night. And here’s a short devotional, or have you considered ah these small groups, ladies? um This would help you build community in your church.

Luke Cornwell — So knowing who you’re talking to, your demographic is completely, knowing who your church is made up of. So, you know, again, this, you know, you go from like, what…

Rich Birch — How do you do that? How do we do that? How do we, you know, beyond a couple hundred people

Luke Cornwell — Yeah.

Rich Birch — …it can be really difficult to understand who’s in our church. What what are you guys doing to try to understand your people better?

Luke Cornwell — Yeah, so we have a um a bunch of tools that we use. One is our ah CCB, Community Church Builder. We use that to manage our people. So we are integrally in part of and in CCB, understanding who our people are.

Luke Cornwell — We’re also using a new product called Nurture, um which helps us identify people helps us identify those who are at risk of going out the back door. Because, you know as your church grows, so do the number of people. And it’s super easy for somebody to come in on a Sunday morning and really not feel noticed, really not feel known. And it’s easy for them to walk out the back door. They had a hard week. You know, maybe they struggle with some kind of addiction. And you know, you know They love Jesus, but it’s just easy for them to stay home and not come on a Sunday.

Luke Cornwell — Or maybe it’s sports. You know sports is like the number one killer right now of people coming to church without opportunity because they go, hey, we’ve got stuff going on this weekend. Sorry, we’re not going to make it.

Luke Cornwell — So knowing your demographic and who those people are and then using tools like Nurture, your church management software. And then we, our volunteer team, our dream team is made up of captains who care for people.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Luke Cornwell — And so we are constantly training and meeting with them, having them care um for those who are underneath them and making sure that people don’t fall through the cracks.

Rich Birch — That’s cool. That’s great. Yeah, I think that’s ah that’s a real issue for so many of our churches, for sure. Again, slightly different category. You mentioned it at one point, the STEAM Academy.

Luke Cornwell — Yeah.

Rich Birch — This caught my eye ah you know, and and how does it all, tell us what that is.

Luke Cornwell — Yeah.

Rich Birch — And how does that fit into the kind of overall family ministry strategy at the church or kids ministry strategy?

Luke Cornwell — Sure.

Rich Birch — How does that all fit together?

Luke Cornwell — So when we moved into our new building just a little over three and a half years ago, at the time, our county, Hancock County, is one of the fastest growing in Indiana. And just exponential growth happening all around us. Like out my door here is is a cornfield. You know, so we’re surrounded by cornfields, but we’re also 20 minutes from Indianapolis.

Rich Birch — Okay, yep.

Luke Cornwell — And so it’s one of the fastest growing areas. And one of the biggest needs in our area is a preschool childcare ministry. Call it a daycare if you’d like, but it it really is, it’s a childcare ministry. And so ah when I arrived, they had been in talks with the County and different groups of like, how could we do this? And within gosh, three months of my arrival, in 2022, we started the STEAM Academy. And we’re actually in a construction phase right now to double the size of our STEAM Academy.

Rich Birch — Wow.

Luke Cornwell — Right now we have 65, 70 kids every day that are dropped off to our building. And so not everybody goes to our church. So this is it’s available to the community.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Luke Cornwell — And our goal is to double that over the next three years or so.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Luke Cornwell — And um we see that as a huge ministry. And we’ve seen both teachers um that work in the academy, as well as um parents begin coming to our church, get baptized, give their hearts to the Lord, ah because we have this environment for them that is good for their kids.

Rich Birch — That’s cool. And what does it run like five days a week? What’s the kind of frame of that?

Luke Cornwell — It’s five days a week. It’s Monday through Friday all day.

Rich Birch — That’s incredible. That’s good. I love that. You know, one of the things I find interesting about communications is from my from my seat, communications is a professional discipline like accounting or bookkeeping. You know, when a church is is starting, ah there might be somebody like a volunteer, somebody who’s doing the accounting, or maybe it’s even, you know, it’s like the you know pastor’s wife or the pastor’s spouse is doing it or something like that.

Rich Birch — But then eventually get to the point where the church grows and you’ve got to bring on some help. You get a bookkeeper, maybe an accountant, eventually a CFO, that sort of thing. But communication for is exactly the same. The church grows to a certain size. And I think because pastors talk for a living, they think they’re good at communications. But communications is more than just like getting phraseology right. Like there’s a whole strategy, a part of it, that it it demands, you know, um an expert like you to really help draw this thing together.

Rich Birch — If you’re thinking about a church that’s out there today, that’s maybe listening in, maybe they’re a church of a thousand people. So they’re, you know, that’s a sizable church, but they feel like things are just scattered and like, they’re, they’re not clear. They’re not aligned. What would you, what would be some first steps that they should take to try to get some more clarity, get some more alignment?

Luke Cornwell — Yeah, I think that is so true. Communications is so broad. You know You could say, well, video is communications.

Rich Birch — Right.

Luke Cornwell — And print and design. These are all different disciplines within the communications. And then you’ve got you know some churches have their next steps programs under communications. Ours is separated out, but um we work very, very closely together because that’s texting and emailing and and those different things. And so you’ve got all of these micro-disciplines within this idea of comms. And it is super easy to kind of get lost in all of that and go, what do we need?

Luke Cornwell — And I think um I love Pat Lencioni’s Working Genius Assessment because it helps us know how we work together. And making sure that you have not just disciplines, but also things like, you know, creative people and people who are tenacious, and people who like to help with things. And looking at your staff and your volunteer base and saying, do we have a complete package of people who are furthering the gospel?

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Luke Cornwell — Now, disciplines, you know, I can teach you how to use MailChimp. If you’re a smart person, which, you know, you’re a smart person.

Rich Birch — I might be able to figure out MailChimp.

Luke Cornwell — Yeah. I could teach you how to use MailChimp. So it’s easy to learn some tools. What’s difficult and what you’re not going to do is you’re not going to change people’s personalities. And so making sure that you have a staff or a volunteer base that’s well-rounded to fill in those blanks, I think is great.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Luke Cornwell — And then just growing your knowledge. um So looking at what the disciplines that your church requires. Some churches love videos. They want to do story videos.

Rich Birch — Right.

Luke Cornwell — Other churches don’t. So if that’s something that your church is your church values, then maybe a second or third hire is a full-time video person, you know. But if your church is um somebody who values ah weekend services more and and it’s more auditory-based, maybe you you hire an assistant or a copywriter, somebody who can help write and help ah be creative in that.

Luke Cornwell — Now, you know, these days we have AI and everybody’s an expert, but it still takes a skill set…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Luke Cornwell — …to even work you know the chat GPT to get what you want and make it sound good. So there are a lot of things, but I believe this. This is how we lead it Realife. And that is people are our biggest asset because they have God-given gifts.

Rich Birch — So true.

Luke Cornwell — And yes, ChatGPT can write better than all of us, but nobody can channel the Holy Spirit like his creation.

Rich Birch — That’s good. That’s good. Well, just as we’re coming to land today, what any other kind of final advice – this has been really good. I’ve got a page of notes here, some stuff to think through on, you know, on our side, but, but anything else you’d like to share just as we, we wrap up today’s conversation.

Luke Cornwell — I just want to encourage the communications pastors or maybe maybe the person who’s out there who’s just their job is communication. They’ve found themselves in that because yeah, maybe they were good at the video editing, or they were good at the design and it’s a a side thing for them, or it’s a gift that they’ve been given.

Luke Cornwell — And I just encourage you to continue to focus on your relationship with Jesus and those around you. And like collaborating with people is the best way to see God’s vision and plan for your lives and for your church to succeed. And so I think that is the the biggest thing that I’ve learned over the last couple of years.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. Well, look, this has been great. Super great, helpful, challenging. If people want to track with you or with the church, where do we want to send them online?

Luke Cornwell — Sure. They can go to realifechurch.org. They can hit up our Instagram or our Facebook and watch it. Both handles are Real Life Church. By the way, that’s Real Life Church with one L.

Rich Birch — Oh, nice.

Luke Cornwell — So R-E-A-L-I-F-E.

Rich Birch — Nice.

Luke Cornwell — And so that that is different. There are there are a couple of those and there are other churches where it’s one word and Realife.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Luke Cornwell — And that’s a ah whole nother story for another day.

Rich Birch — Love it. Love it.

Luke Cornwell — But autocorrect you know saved me many times on that.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Luke Cornwell — But yeah, so they can meet us there. And then I’d be happy to field any emails…

Rich Birch — Sure.

Luke Cornwell — …at luke.cornwell@reallifechurch.org. And my email is on the website. So.

Rich Birch — That’s great. Luke, appreciate you being here today. Thanks so much for your being on the show.

Luke Cornwell — Thanks.