Leading Into 2026:
Executive Pastor Insights

Momentum is real.
So is the pressure.

This free report draws from the largest dedicated survey of Executive Pastors ever, revealing what leaders are actually facing as they prepare for 2026.

Why staff health is the #1 pressure point
Where churches feel hopeful — and stretched thin
What worked in 2025 and is worth repeating
Clear decision filters for the year ahead

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Welcome back to another episode of the unSeminary podcast. Today we’re sitting down with an executive pastor from a prevailing church to unpack what leaders like you shared in the National Executive Pastor Survey so you can lead forward with clarity.

In today’s episode, we’re joined by Kayra Montañez, Executive Pastor at Liquid Church in New Jersey. Liquid is a fast-growing multisite church with six campuses stretching from Princeton to communities just outside New York City. In this conversation, Kayra helps unpack one of the biggest concerns surfaced in the National Executive Pastor Survey: the growing gap between attendance and engagement. While many churches are seeing people return, far fewer leaders feel confident that those people are truly connected, discipled, and serving.

Is your church seeing full rooms but thin volunteer pipelines? Are you unsure how engaged people really are beyond weekend services? Kayra offers practical insight into why that gap exists—and what churches can do to close it.

Attendance is up, engagement is unclear. // Kayra begins with encouragement. Across the country, churches are seeing renewed spiritual openness. People are coming with expectancy, ready to encounter God. At the same time, many leaders sense a disconnect between attendance and belonging. Kayra identifies several common gaps: people attending without joining “people systems” like groups or teams; online attenders remaining anonymous without a clear bridge to community; seasonal attenders who show up for Christmas and Easter but never return; and potential volunteers who are open to helping but hesitant to commit long-term. These patterns aren’t unique to Liquid—they’re widespread across the church landscape.
From prescribed paths to personalized journeys. // One of Liquid’s biggest shifts has been moving away from a rigid, one-size-fits-all connection pathway. Kayra compares the old model to the video game Mario Brothers, where everyone must follow the same prescribed path or “die.” Instead, Liquid now operates more like Zelda: a choose-your-own-adventure approach that honors people’s seasons, needs, and interests. Rather than telling people where they must plug in, the church focuses on learning what people actually want and helping them find a meaningful next step.
Connect and Conversation. // This shift comes to life through a monthly experience called Connect and Conversation, hosted at every campus after the final service. New and not-yet-connected attendees are invited to a meal where they sit at tables with others like them and facilitators. The event begins with relational icebreakers to help people connect naturally, then moves into guided conversation around what attendees are looking for—community, care, serving, support groups, or spiritual growth. Facilitators take detailed notes, which drive personalized follow-up in the weeks ahead. Kayra describes it as “high-touch, concierge-style ministry,” and the results have been significant movement from attendance into engagement.
Measuring what matters. // Liquid tracks what happens after people attend Connect and Conversation—not to claim direct causation, but to see correlation. They monitor whether participants join groups, teams, or discipleship environments in the following months. That data has helped the church refine pathways and remove unnecessary friction. Kayra encourages leaders to examine two key metrics: how many first-time guests take any next step within 30 days, and what percentage move into a people system within 60–90 days. These numbers often reveal where engagement breaks down.
Reimagining discipleship. // One surprising insight at Liquid came from surveying the congregation about small groups. While relational connection mattered, the top desire was biblical literacy. In response, Liquid “blew up” its traditional small-group model and launched a new midweek Bible study format called Deep Dive. Rather than prioritizing relationships first, these environments put Scripture front and center, with connection as a natural byproduct. The pilot—an in-depth study of Revelation—drew hundreds of participants and revealed a deep hunger for understanding God’s Word.
Rebuilding volunteer momentum. // Like many churches, Liquid faced a volunteer crisis as growth outpaced serving capacity—especially in kids’ environments. In response, the church launched a short-term campaign called For the One, built around a “try before you buy” serving model. New volunteers could serve a few times with a shortened onboarding process (without compromising safety) and then decide whether to commit long-term, scoring exclusive team swag. More than 400 people stepped in to serve, helping stabilize teams and reignite volunteer culture.
Short-term fixes and long-term culture. // Kayra emphasizes that engagement is both a systems problem and a culture challenge. Churches need short-term solutions to address immediate gaps, but long-term health comes from storytelling, celebration, appreciation, and consistently casting vision for why serving and community matter. Engagement doesn’t happen accidentally—it’s cultivated intentionally over time.

To learn more about Liquid Church, visit liquidchurch.com, or connect with Kayra directly via email.

Watch the full episode below:

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Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. We’ve got a special episode on today where we’re diving into some of the results from the National Executive Pastor Survey. And today we’re super excited to have Kayra Montañez with us from Liquid Church in New Jersey.

Rich Birch — And today we’re talking all about engagement. One of the things that jumped out, well, one of the top tier results, kind of concerns that came out, 10% of executive pastors in the open questions, expressed fear around discipleship death depth and volunteer sustainability. At the same time, nearly 12% said they lacked really visibility into participation and involvement data. Another 6% pointed specifically to volunteer and team metrics really being an unmet need, not knowing where they are.

Rich Birch — So what does that all that mean? Roughly one in five executive pastors are entering 2026 this year, wondering really how engaged their churches are. And Kayra is going to solve all that for us. So Kayra, welcome to the show. Tell us about Liquid. Tell us a little bit about the church.

Kayra Montañez — Well I appreciate the vote of confidence but I’m not sure about that. But, Rich, it’s always so great to be with you and to be a guest on your podcast. Thank you so much for having me. So yes, we are in New Jersey. So our church is called Liquid. I get the incredible privilege of serving there as one of two executive pastors. And we are a multisite church. We have six campuses. If you and know anything about New Jersey, one of them is the furthest one is in Princeton, New Jersey – a lot of people know Princeton.

Kayra Montañez — And then probably the closest one that we have up north is closest to New York City, about 30 minutes from the city. So that kind of gives you the breadth and width of how we’re trying to saturate the state of New Jersey with the gospel of Jesus Christ. That is our mission.

Rich Birch — So good. And Kayra, I really appreciate you jumping in on on today’s conversation, particularly in this area, because I think, man, have so much to offer. You know, so many of our churches, we feel like the volunteer pipelines are thin. How are we getting? It’s like people are underutilized. Maybe are our follow-up process are like overly complex. And you’ve done a great job on on this area. So let’s just jump right in.

Rich Birch — Where do you see some of the biggest gaps today in churches, whether it’s Liquid or other churches you interact, between, you know, getting people to attend church attendance and actual engagement. There’s a gap there. what What’s driving that? What do what do you think drives that gap in our churches?

Kayra Montañez — Yeah. So I see a couple of things. But before I get to that, you know, I just really wanted to start with something really encouraging because it’s not in my nature to be discouraging. So one of the things that I have noticed, in fact, I was actually spending some time with other pastors from other states in the U.S. And we were talking about like, hey, what is the Lord doing in the in the Big C Church? What are you experiencing in your context?

Rich Birch — So good.

Kayra Montañez — And one of the things I think that was a theme for all of us is it feels like we don’t have to work as hard to get people to come and be ready for what the Lord has for them. And that feels very exciting.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Kayra Montañez — And that’s like a theme that I’m seeing repeated across the entire nation with all of my pastor friends from different locations. Having said that, there are still things that we have to do to get people from going to just attending to engaging, like you were saying. I think there’s a couple of things that I saw.

Kayra Montañez — One of them is a big one, I would say, is like this idea of, attending versus belonging, right. So like first people actually want to come, but they don’t actually join people systems. So they come in person, they come online, but they don’t actually join any kind of people system. So when I say people system I’m thinking about groups, or dream teams, a support group, a class. That’s actually something that we started seeing a lot post-pandemic, and I would say it’s still here. So that’s one gap that I see.

Kayra Montañez — The second gap that I see is digital versus relational. So obviously, we at Liquid have spent a lot of, we’ve invested a lot in our digital ministry, and we really believe online and in-person can both thrive at the same time, and we’re seeing that.

Kayra Montañez — However, online services, while they can remove barriers, which is good, it also helps people stay anonymous unless there’s a clear bridge for those people to actually join in-person community. And so churches that haven’t figured out well how to do that will continue to see a gap between people who are attending, whether it’s in person or online, but not actually engaging.

Kayra Montañez — There’s also the people who just come for big events, right?

Rich Birch — Yep.

Kayra Montañez — We’re approaching one of them, even as we film this podcast, next week is Christmas Eve. So we joke at Liquid, we have the CEOs, they come for Christmas, Easter, and other big events, but they don’t actually have a weekly rhythm of attending and engaging.

Kayra Montañez — And then there’s people who I would say are curious about serving and for the most part are open to helping, but are not really ready to make a serving commitment and actually take on a very consistent role. So I would say across the breadth and width of churches, that’s probably something that would hit most people, no matter where you are.

Rich Birch — Yeah, for sure.

Kayra Montañez — Definitely we experience all of them at Liquid.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I there was a lot there, in which I appreciate. and i appreciate the way you’ve kind of diagnosed. I think there’s multiple ways to kind of um diagnose or kind of pick apart – Hey, here are different aspects here, or different ways that we’re seeing this kind of attendance versus engagement question. So maybe, you know, pick apart those attending versus belonging. What has Liquid done? What are you doing to try to help move people from just attending, actually getting into those people systems? What does that? What are you learning on that front?

Kayra Montañez — Yeah. You know, we’ve had a major shift at Liquid, I would say, in the past two years. The best way that I can explain this is with a gaming analogy, because I have teenagers and they love gaming.

Rich Birch — I love it.

Kayra Montañez — So if you um go back to when we used to play Mario Brothers, you remember Mario Brothers?

Rich Birch — Sure, yeah.

Kayra Montañez — Mario Brothers has prescribed path where if you did not follow the path, at some point Mario would die. Like if you stayed behind and the camera kept moving, the character would die. You remember that?

Rich Birch — Yes, yes.

Kayra Montañez — And that’s the way that a lot of churches, even today, approach helping people connect. There is a prescribed path for you, and we’re going to tell you what you need to do and what you have to do. Then Zelda came into the scene and Zelda is like, hey, choose your own adventure. You can start your adventure anywhere you want.

Rich Birch — Right.

Kayra Montañez — And so I feel like Liquid, we’ve shifted in that. We used to be Mario Brothers, like, hey, here’s a prescribed path for you. Here’s all the things that you have to do to connect. Whereas now we’ve shifted over the past two years into like, hey, we have a lot of things that we can offer you. And there are many different things depending on your season of life, on your felt needs, on what you’re looking for, on what you’re interested in, on what makes your heart beat. Tell us what you want to do and we’re going to help you.

Kayra Montañez — And so in order for us to understand what is it that people want, we created an event that we do every month called Connect and Conversation. And the whole idea and the way that we market it is if you’re new to Liquid, or if you are not new, but you haven’t connected yet, you haven’t found your people, you haven’t found something that you want to be a part of, come to this event.

Kayra Montañez — We feed you. We get to know you. And then we follow up personally with you. It’s very high level concierge, kind of a follow up system, where after we connect with you, we ask you, hey, what are you actually interested in? What are you looking for? Because your needs as an empty nester who’s been married for over 25 years, you’re parenting adult children who are already married are very different than mine who have two team have two teenagers.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Kayra Montañez — One of them is about to go to college, right?

Rich Birch — Yep, yep.

Kayra Montañez — And so that has actually produced incredible fruit from getting people who are attending.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Kayra Montañez — Now I’ve actually offered them something they’re interested in, which is making connections with people. And then from there, we follow up to offer, what do you need?

Rich Birch — That’s so cool.

Kayra Montañez — And everybody has different needs. Some people just wanna join teams because they’re just like, I just wanna serve. Some people, they really just need a lot of care. And so maybe they need a support group and we’re gonna offer that to you.

Kayra Montañez — Some people may need marriage mentoring. We’re gonna offer that to you. So it really depends. And what we’ve seen is people taking significant next steps once they go out of that event. And that has really changed the past. In the past, we would only be marketing teams and groups, role and relationship, join, ah you know, get into a role and connect with a relationship. And while that’s still good, I’m not saying that’s not good or not needed.

Rich Birch — Right.

Kayra Montañez — It’s not the only thing that people are looking for.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s interesting. Can we, I’d love to dive just a little deeper on on that because I think there’s ah a really key learning there for lots of us. This idea, and you didn’t say it this way, but where my brain went to, you know, I think we have, we have for sure in the past done the thing where it’s like we have these giant funnels that we’re pushing everyone through.

Rich Birch — And and the only question we’re really asking is where do you fit in our funnel?

Kayra Montañez — Correct.

Rich Birch — Like where, You know, and we and we push and literally, and this is no, you know, kind of slam on other systems, but it’s like, this is the, you know, step one, step two, step three, everyone do step one first, then you do step two, then you do step three.

Rich Birch — So the the connecting conversation, that feels like highly, like it’s volunteer intensive. You got to get a lot of volunteers in there because it sounds like you’re having one-on-one conversations or something close to one-on-one. Unpack what that looks like. Maybe as a guest, if I arrive at that, what do I actually experience when I show up there?

Kayra Montañez — So you you can register up until the time that we have the event.

Rich Birch — Yep, that’s great.

Kayra Montañez — So we do math you know magical math with the food and and the preparation so that we can just accept people who are going to come on the day of. Because we promote it, obviously, every week. And then the day of, we actually promote it. We get most people to show up the day of the event.

Rich Birch — Right, okay.

Kayra Montañez — So people will come. There’s going to be a lunch. And then they’re going to sit at a table with about five other people who have a facilitator at that table.

Rich Birch — Okay.

Kayra Montañez — And that facilitator is actually going to lead them through a series of relational icebreakers because the event is designed for you to first connect. You want to meet other people who are just like you. Maybe they’re new or they’re not new, but they haven’t connected yet with somebody.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Kayra Montañez — And so there’s going to be a lot of relational icebreakers you know during the first part of the event. And then after that, we get into like, hey, what are you looking for? What are you hoping to get out of? What do you need? What are you interested in? We make notes.

Rich Birch — How can we help? All that kind of stuff.

Kayra Montañez — That facilitator takes really good notes based on what people are saying. And then the follow-up begins.

Rich Birch — That’s so cool. I love that. That’s what a great learning. You know, I think so many times we’ve seen that step and for sure that echoes what I’ve seen in in a number of churches. There’s really a trend away from the class being the first step.

Rich Birch — It’s like the stand that we used to do that thing where it was like, okay, someone stands up at the front and they’re going to talk for 50 minutes about why we’re such a great church. And, ah you know, that really has gone away. I would I would echo that, that we’ve seen that as ah as a best practice for sure. So let’s talk…

Kayra Montañez — When we do measure…

Rich Birch — Sorry, go ahead. No.

Kayra Montañez — …oh sorry, as I was to say, we measure the activity of everyone who goes to Connect in Conversation and what they do.

Rich Birch — Oh, that, tell me about that.

Kayra Montañez — And so there’s, or ah how we say it at Liquid is it’s correlation, not causation. Like I can’t prove that if you go to this event, your next steps were a direct result of this event…

Rich Birch — Yes. Yes.

Kayra Montañez — …but we can correlate that because you came to the event you actually took these next steps, if that makes sense.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Kayra Montañez — So we’ve seen tremendous, tremendous engagement grow because of that.

Rich Birch — And that’s on Sundays. You do it on on campus after the last service, that sort of thing.

Kayra Montañez — Every month. Yes, every month at every campus after the last service, we promote it up to the day of the event…

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.

Kayra Montañez — …and we do it rain or shine. Whether it’s five people or 10 or 50, obviously at our largest location, sometimes we have about 100 people show up every month to these events.

Rich Birch — That’s great. I love that. That’s a great. You’re coming in hot, Kayra. Great learnings, even you know, with friends, we’ve got through the first question.

Rich Birch — So yeah, and we’re, you know, it’s fantastic. So one of the one of the things I’d love to hear a little bit about, um you know, that when we look in the data, people’s anxiety, there’s there seems to be some anxiety around or concern around discipling people. We offer these discipleship pathways or engagement pathways. And it’s like, we do this stuff, but then people don’t actually take advantage of it. It’s like, we do, we offer small groups, but people don’t do them. Or people we offer classes and people don’t actually engage on them.

Rich Birch —What are you doing to try to move to, to ensure people are actually engaging with the various pathways that you’re developing at Liquid to actually get them to use them?

Kayra Montañez — So this is a very interesting question in this particular time because at Liquid we’re just about getting ready to or just ready to ah blow up small groups basically.

Rich Birch — Oh, nice. Okay. I’d love to hear more.

Kayra Montañez — Yeah, so I would say that small groups was the one metric that did not recover for our church post-pandemic. So even though our volunteer pipelines at times felt thin, we were able to have incredible momentum around that. We can talk more about that later. How did we do that? We recovered in attendance and giving, baptism, but we were not able to crack the code on small groups. We were at an all-time low, about 20% our church…

Rich Birch — Oh, wow. Yeah.

Kayra Montañez — …was engaged in small groups, pretty low. And so we started surveying people.

Rich Birch — Yep.

We’re like, what is it that people actually want from the small groups? Like, what is it that we’re not offering that they’re looking for? And the one, it was shocking to us that the number one thing, I mean, it shouldn’t be shocking because we are a church.

Kayra Montañez — The number one thing that people wanted was to understand the Bible. So for the first time ever, we have uncoupled relational connection from biblical literacy. In the past, our small groups, the thing that was in the driver’s seat, I would say, was the relational connection. We wanted people to connect, to join a group so that they could make friends, do life together. We used to um promote it that way, if you remember. Do life together. Where are the people that you’re doing life together?

Rich Birch — Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

Kayra Montañez — For the first time ever, we’re actually putting biblical literacy in the front seat and relational connection on the passenger seat. So you will actually make connections, but that’s not the goal of this process right now. The process is for you to actually understand and read and study the word of God. In fact, our new tagline is to know the word of God so that you can love the God of the word.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great. And is that so if you change the the container that that fits in or are you changing the like, like…

Kayra Montañez — We did. We changed the container.

Rich Birch — So what’s that look like?

Kayra Montañez — So right now we’re offering people different levels of biblical literacy.

Kayra Montañez — The biggest vehicle that we’re that we just piloted this fall through the book of Revelations, if you can believe it. So we’re like, why not start with the hardest book of the Bible?

Rich Birch — Yes.

Kayra Montañez — And what we did was we created a Bible study midweek on a Wednesday night where people would go in person and study the word of God in tables with other people. Now, obviously there’s facilitators who have been trained and vetted. And once you join a table, that was kind of like the table that you were going to go on this journey with, but it’s not a small group. It’s a, it’s a short term. It was 10 weeks. We went through the entire book of Revelations, 22 chapters. We would do homework in order to get ready for this midweek study, we would come, we would have a conversation around what did you put in question 10?

Rich Birch — Yep.

Kayra Montañez — What did I write? This was hard, I don’t understand. And then there was teaching.

Kayra Montañez — And we also piloted doing that same thing with our high school students so that parents could actually come with their kids on the same day, drop their high school kiddos in their own cohort, and then they would go to their own biblical midweek you know Bible study.

Kayra Montañez — And that was, too, a great success. So we are trying to figure out like what are the appropriate levels of biblical literacy that we can offer a congregation…

Rich Birch — That’s so good.

Kayra Montañez — …that is increasingly illiterate in biblic in in the Bible.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Kayra Montañez — And deep dive, make no mistake, is the highest level. So that’s not for everyone. And we understand that. And so the parts that we’re trying to figure out is what’s like the appropriate next level to that for somebody who’s not willing to come in person 10 weeks to do homework and study, you know, the actual Bible.

Kayra Montañez — But, it was fascinating to just uncouple those two things for the first time. And I would say it’s in the right frame of, in the right approach. You’re still making friends.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Kayra Montañez — You’re just not, that’s just not being the driver.

Rich Birch — Right. Yeah, I do wonder. So we for sure have seen that. I’ve seen this conversation. I don’t claim to be a small groups expert. I never have.

Kayra Montañez — Me neither.

Rich Birch — Like for 20, 30 years, it’s always been a mystery to me. I’m like, it’s like hard. It’s a hard system to run and to to build. And, but for sure, post COVID it it is, I would say that’s a universal concern that it’s like, whatever we used to do, I see this all over the place, whatever we used to do to try to get people into groups, we don’t do that anymore. We’re doing something completely different. I happen to be at Liquid this fall. I think you were speaking at a conference when I was there. Bummer…

Kayra Montañez — I was, I missed you. Yeah.

Rich Birch — And I saw the deep dive. I think that’s what it was called.

Kayra Montañez — Yes.

Rich Birch — Deep dive that night. And I remember, i remember thinking, I was like, Whoa, this is like, ah this is incredible. Like, you know, I don’t know how many people were there that night. There was a ton of people all lined up and ready to go. I’m like, that’s, That’s cool. I love that.

Rich Birch — Well, let’s pivot. You kind of flagged it there, the volunteer piece.

Kayra Montañez — Yes.

Rich Birch — I’d love to know what you’re learning on this front, you know, to rebuild volunteer culture. We had this kind of, I don’t know when we’ll stop saying post-COVID. I don’t know whether we’ll be like that generation that was like after the like war or like after the depression where like for 40 years we’re going to be talking about it.

Rich Birch — But it does still feel like we’re post-COVID. I don’t know when that is. But what have you done to kind of restart? How what’s going well on that front externally? Liquid feels like a incredibly volunteer you know robust culture – help us understand what’s that looking like what are you learning these days?

Kayra Montañez — Sure. Yeah. I mean everything you said is still very much a factor. I mean, we are constantly having to work at this. This is never going to be a problem that I feel we’re ever going to solve. It’s really a tension that we’re managing. And sometimes tension feels better and sometimes it doesn’t feel good.

Rich Birch — Right.

Kayra Montañez — In fact, this year, I would say in March, we probably had like our biggest crisis in the broadcast campus where our church growth so far outpaced the amount of people that were serving that we were finding ourselves having to close rooms for Liquid family…

Rich Birch — Ooh.

Kayra Montañez — …not because we we hit ratios, but because we didn’t have enough volunteers. And that doesn’t feel great…

Rich Birch — No.

Kayra Montañez — …especially if you’re a new here family, right?

Rich Birch — Yes.

Kayra Montañez — And so we were like, all right, we need to do something really aggressive. And the best way that I can explain it is we did like a try before you buy.

Rich Birch — Okay.

Kayra Montañez — Very low approach…

Rich Birch — Yep.

Kayra Montañez — …low hanging fruit. We said, hey, we we casted a vision, right? It’s never about we need volunteers, but we actually told a really significant story of where’s all the fruit that the Lord is bringing to this church, all the spiritual fruit that we’re seeing, like people are getting saved, people are getting baptized, they’re coming to get to know Jesus, they’re studying the Bible.

Kayra Montañez — It was incredible.

Kayra Montañez — But we need people to use their spiritual gifts. And so we came up with a campaign called For the One. And everything was geared for that one person. Like, who’s who are you going to go serve? Who’s the one that you’re going to go serve?

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.

Kayra Montañez — And the try before you buy was, we’re going to give you a hoodie. We designed a hoodie. It was called, it was, you know, at the tagline For the One. And the key is you only get it after you serve a couple of times.

Rich Birch — Okay, that’s cool.

Kayra Montañez — So this is the try before you buy. You know, you’re going to try it out.

Rich Birch — Yes.

You’re not going to go through the whole background, pipeline, covenant process because we need people now and we need them quick.

Rich Birch — Yeah. Yeah.

Kayra Montañez — So you’re trying before you’re buying. But if you like it and we’re going to make sure that first serve experience is incredible for you, then we want you to buy it.

Rich Birch — That’s so good.

Kayra Montañez — And we’re going to reward you by giving you swag that’s limited, exclusive. Not everybody’s going to get it. Rich, you would be surprised. Like I’m still to this day, i have been at Liquid, it’ll be 13 years in April. And I am still shocked by how much people, the gamification of playing to people’s particular interests…

Rich Birch — Yes. Yes.

Kayra Montañez — …whether it’s FOMO, they don’t want to miss out, whether it’s the idea of collecting exclusive apparel.

Rich Birch — Yeah. Yeah.

Kayra Montañez — There’s something here for everyone that just draws people out.

Rich Birch — It’s true. It’s true.

Kayra Montañez — We had over 400 people sign up for the one.

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

Kayra Montañez — It was incredible. And we were able to tell amazing stories of people who were coming and showing up and serving, whether it was our special needs kiddos or high school whatever you want to call it. We had it. And and I would say the appeal of a try before you buy, how can you shortchange without? So this is key. You don’t want to reduce the quality. But you do want to shorten your pipeline so that you can get people quicker to try it. And then once they actually feel like, hey, I really enjoy this, now we’re going to get you through the whole, you know, rest of the process, right? But you can still serve while we do that.

Kayra Montañez — So that was a huge thing. And then obviously, you know, like the free apparel swag, that always is a nice incentive to give to people. So that was huge.

Rich Birch — It’s true.

Kayra Montañez — It was very successful. And that’s what I would recommend is like, hey, can you run, try before you buy little events with like swag, and like you you get you have people serve for a limited amount of time. Like you don’t give them the swag immediately. You make them work for it.

Rich Birch — Right. Yes.

Kayra Montañez — They got to serve three, four times before you give it to them.

Rich Birch — Yeah, we did a similar thing last summer. Our kids ministry team did a similar thing last summer where we did the summer serve, which we hadn’t done in in actually a number of years. And they they pulled that out and did summer serve. And it was the same thing. If you signed up, you got a t-shirt, a specific t-shirt for that.

Rich Birch — And then you, there was, they basically were asking you to serve once in June, once in July, once in August, like once a month, just for the summertime. And if you served, um I forget exactly what the ratio was, but it was, you got entered in a draw for however many times. And basically, so if you served all three, you got like 10 times the number of draw things to win. And it was all this stuff that you, you could win. And it was like really great gifts.

Kayra Montañez — Yes.

Rich Birch — And you would think that that should not motivate people.

Kayra Montañez — But it does.

Rich Birch — But it does.

Kayra Montañez — It does.

Rich Birch — And and you know and it was and, you know, they did it in really fun, you know, hey this is going to be a fun thing to be a part of. Talk to me about the, because there’s a friction thing there to learn around trying to reduce the friction the kind of onboarding friction, I think over time that stuff can become, you know, it’s, it’s the, we actually are like our, we can become just too hard for our people.

Kayra Montañez — Yeah.

Rich Birch — What did you learn through that process in, in trying to find that balance of like, we want to make it easier to onboard people, but we still want to, is there any kind of lessons from that when you look back on that?

Kayra Montañez — To me, the the lesson really is, again, there is a tension between you can’t shortchange, especially when it comes to kids. I can’t emphasize this enough.

Rich Birch — No, yeah, absolutely. Yep.

Kayra Montañez — Like I oversee all of these ministries and it would be not on my watch will will this happen, right?

Rich Birch — No, yeah, yeah.

Kayra Montañez — So we have to make be very sure that we’re not shortchanging the safety procedures.

Rich Birch — Yeah. Yep.

Kayra Montañez — At the same time recognizing these things can take some time, right? Like we ask people to get a background check, they have to be interviewed, they have to sign a covenant, they have to have a reference. I mean, these things this is a lengthy process.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Kayra Montañez — And I stand by it. We have to do that.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Kayra Montañez — At the same time, can we actually live in a world where we are marrying our need to have someone in the room while also still doing all of these things simultaneously, not actually waiting for all of this to happen so that then they can come.

Kayra Montañez — And that’s kind of how we figured it out. Our Liquid family pastor came up with a process where she’s like, okay, we can shorten it this time. They’re only going to do these three things, not four, not six. But while they’re in the room trying it, we’re going to continue to do the other remaining four.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great.

Kayra Montañez — It’s messy. It’s not always the best thing to do in an ideal world. You are not doing that. But when you’re faced with crisis, then you need to come up with, you know, resourceful ideas.

Kayra Montañez — And so what I would say about the volunteer pipeline is this. There are short-term problems that you have to solve while you’re still working on this very long-term. Like this is a culture that you have to create.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Kayra Montañez — And in order for you to create a culture, you have to tell stories. You have to celebrate what you want to be repeated. have to make people feel thanked, encouraged, appreciated, seen. You those are all long-term things that you have to be doing all the time. This is like nonstop.

Rich Birch — Yes. Yes. Can’t take the, you can’t take the gas off that pedal for sure. Pedal off that gas.

Kayra Montañez — Correct. You cannot take your foot off the the pedal. But at the same time, there are things that are short term that you really do have to also do. And sometimes that will require teaching from the stage where you’re actually envisioning people about why this matters so much.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.

Kayra Montañez — And this is what we did in March with the For the One. So I would say it’s it’s both/and; it’s not either/or. And so if that’s helpful, that’s how I would approach it.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s super good. That’s good. If there was a church that was, if you were sitting across the table from an executive pastor, maybe you’re at a conference or someone drops in your office and they’re, they’re feeling really stuck on this engagement issue. They feel low. Like it’s people were, maybe it’s groups, it’s teams, it’s all of it. Like it’s, we’re not moving people through any kind of pipeline.

Rich Birch — What would be some of those first steps or first recommendations, first things you’d have them look at, maybe like a diagnostic or a first couple of things that you’d have them think about in this area?

Kayra Montañez — Well, I would say if there’s a way for them to know of the people who are attending and maybe they figure this out with new here, how many of those people take one next step within the first month?

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Kayra Montañez — That would be one diagnostic that I would first see if I can do with the data that I have and the data that they collect and they actually figured that out.

Rich Birch — Yep. Yeah, that’s good.

Kayra Montañez — If they’re able to do that, then the next diagnostic would be what percent actually move into a people system…

Rich Birch — Yep.

Kayra Montañez — …whether it’s a group, a deep dive experience, a dream team within 60 to 90 days, right?

Rich Birch — Yep.

Kayra Montañez — Because if you do that, you’re going to find the blockage. You’re actually going to discover Maybe our attendance is fine. We don’t have an invest and invite problem, but maybe what we have a problem with is our conversion rate. And so then you can start to identify what is it about our conversion that we need to fix?

Kayra Montañez — Is it that we have ah unclear on-ramps? Or is it that our processes are too high friction? It’s too hard people to get involved. If you actually find like, no, actually people are taking next steps. Great. But they’re not sticking to it. Then you have a different problem. Then you can actually diagnose…

Rich Birch — Yes, yes.

Kayra Montañez — …oh, maybe the first serve experience actually wasn’t sticky enough. It wasn’t welcoming. Maybe there were issues with scheduling. Maybe we didn’t give clear information. So you can kind of figure out what the problem is based on how you’re measuring it and what you’re discovering. That’s how I would start if I didn’t know what the problem was. Does that make sense?

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. That makes total sense. And, you know, it it definitely aligns with one of my bugaboos that I constantly driving with executive pastors. When you look at the actual numbers—I and I have not run into a church yet that this is not the case—most churches actually have a front door problem. They don’t have a back door problem. They their actual problem that we think we feel like, oh, like people aren’t sticking and staying in groups, they’re not staying and volunteering. But statistically, that’s actually not true. When most of the time, if you look at, okay, all the people that end up in a group, what is the kind of churn rate on that? Whatever that number is, I’ve never seen a church where it’s higher than the people we’re missing on the front end with exactly with what you said is how many people are removing from new here to taking the first step in the first month?

Rich Birch — Because that you lose a ton of people in that door right there. That is a, you know, by a multiple of 10 or 20, like it’s a lot more that we’re missing out. And, you know, generally in most churches…

Kayra Montañez — And can I just [inaudible] to that?

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Kayra Montañez — Because I just want encourage people, like, figure out a way to target your new here audience.

Rich Birch — Yes. Yes.

Kayra Montañez — So at Liquid, for example, if you come for the first time, not only do we encourage, highly encourage you to tell us that you’re here for the first time because we give you an awesome gift.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Kayra Montañez — Lots of churches do this, but then we survey people who came for the first time.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Kayra Montañez — And based on what they answer, they receive a custom follow-up process for the first 30 days.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great. Yeah.

Kayra Montañez — We don’t, so in that regard, like it is worth to look at that.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Kayra Montañez — Because you’re going to find out a lot of information and a lot of data about what people are choosing to do, where are they going, why they’re not sticking to it or why they’re not even going in the first place.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Kayra Montañez — Like I’m shocked that I’ve been to churches sometimes to speak and they don’t actually really do like a new here call out. Like they don’t.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I was going to say that. You said, oh, churches do this.

Kayra Montañez — Maybe not.

Rich Birch — And I’d be like, Kayra, I’ve been to way too many churches where they don’t do any of that. And they’re like, well, we’re not really sure. And I’m like, this is a solvable problem. We can fix this.

Kayra Montañez — Yes. Yes.

Rich Birch — There’s like real things you can do here. Actually, I worked with a church last year, a fairly large church in 2024, where they were experiencing some of these issues and so and I was like I basically said the same thing I just said, I’m like you’re losing people on the front end. And they’re like they’re like well we do a gift. And I’m like no you don’t. And I said there’s a and there’s a few things to fix around that. In 2025 the year we just ended, they received we made a few changes it’s not about me there’s about them they made a bunch of changes, they ended up receiving 5,000 more first-time guest contacts than they did 2024.

Kayra Montañez — Wow. Just like we’ve always told it to do.

Rich Birch — Now they did not grow by people but it’s just by focusing on that, right?

Kayra Montañez — Amazing.

Rich Birch — It’s just by like saying, hey, how are we what are we going to do to ensure that that step goes well with folks? So anyways, there’s huge opportunity there and in lots of churches. Kayra, you’ve been incredibly generous to give us your time at this time of year. As you’re thinking, kind of last question, as we’re thinking about 2026, what are some of those questions that are floating around in your head as you think about Liquid, as you think about the future? What are some things that you’re wrestling with that you’re wondering about that you’re contemplating as we go into this year?

Kayra Montañez — Oh my gosh, Rich, so many. After this conversation, you know, I really am interested to see what’s going to happen with our discipleship model since we just blew it up.

Rich Birch — Yes, yep.

Kayra Montañez — I’m helping all of that and changing the way that we even onboard leaders. Like I’m really invested in seeing this through.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great.

Kayra Montañez — I also totally unrelated to this, but we just launched, I think in the survey, one of the questions that was asked was what’s the best idea that you had in 2025?

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, right.

Kayra Montañez — And I was like, well, I feel like one of our best ideas was to use AI to launch a Spanish service. And I am really invested in that in seeing like, how do we continue to grow that service? How do we continue to grow that ministry? We’re launching new ministries in 2025, or 2026. So that always feels exciting and daunting.

Kayra Montañez — So there’s just the work never ends. And there’s always it is an exciting and fascinating time to be in the church. I’ll say that.

Rich Birch — I would agree. I totally would agree. Yeah, it’s the best. I would think, literally, I think this is the best season that I’ve been involved in ministry for sure.

Rich Birch — For folks that don’t know what you’re doing with Spanish ministry, give us the 60 second, explain that again. Because I think I keep pointing churches to you saying, have you heard what Liquid’s doing? You go talk to them. So tell us about that.

Kayra Montañez — So basically we have a Spanish service. We do have live hosting in Español. We have live worship in Español. But then we take our English message and we pass it through an AI service called Heygen, which actually uses the communicator’s voice and matches the words to their lips and they’re just preaching, they preach it in Spanish. Even if they’re not bilingual, they will preach it in Spanish. And it’s like you, Rich, are speaking in Spanish. Your words match to your voice.

Rich Birch — Yes. Yeah, it’s it’s amazing.

Kayra Montañez — People get to hear the the gospel and the message in their language. So it’s been fascinating to learn who we’re reaching, who’s coming, who likes that kind of a thing. You know, as a Spanish speaker myself, I’m like, would I go to a service where the message wasn’t actually authentic Spanish and it’s an AI generated?

Kayra Montañez — I believe in the quality of our communication so much that I actually have to say, yes, I would. Because like last year, this year, we took our entire church through the book of Revelation. Tim spent 25 weeks teaching us the hardest book of the Bible.

Kayra Montañez — The fruit that that endeavor produced is incredible. And so when I think about what we’re doing, I’m like, I believe in that so much that I do think this is a this is a thing that’s actually good to do. Even if people would who would think like, why would they go to that and not like an authentic Spanish speaker?

Rich Birch — Yeah, interesting. And that, and you’re, you’ve been a year, that’s been basically almost a year you’ve been doing that now.

Kayra Montañez — A year. A year.

Rich Birch — And, and you’re be continuing to do it. So obviously something’s working. There’s some sort of version of like, Hey, we’re, we feel.

Kayra Montañez — We’re continuing to do it. we’re seeing We’re seeing the fruit. We’re seeing baptisms, people giving their life to Christ, getting baptized, showing up and joining teams, um reaching families. We’re reaching multigenerational families where the parents go to the Spanish service, the kids go to the English service because it’s simultaneous, right? Well, the English is going on, the Spanish is going on. So families get to decide. It’s just really interesting to watch. Obviously, it’s been challenging in the U.S. to grow a Spanish service because of everything that’s been happening.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah…

Kayra Montañez — But it’s just been really fascinating to see like the dynamics of who we’re reaching, who’s is sharing like who’s excited about it, and then using technology to further the gospel. It’s always exciting.

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s fantastic. I know I was goofing around with Heygen a little bit. And the part that actually, this was you know almost a year ago when you guys started doing that that, one of the tests I ran that actually convinced me was, so I was like taking videos of me and I would send them to like a friend who speaks Spanish. And I sent to a friend who speaks, you know, a couple of languages that it was doing, but then I did the reverse. There’s a great church, Nouvelle Vie. It’s a French speaking church, large church, be very similar to Liquid, but they’re French speaking. And so I took one of the, the lead pastors from that. I took a clip of his message and translated into English. And I was blown away. I was like, Oh my word. Like,

Kayra Montañez — It is getting better and better every day.

Rich Birch — I was I was shocked. I was like, oh, that that is, yeah, could I tell? Yeah, but this guy’s an incredible communicator. And you know similar to you and Tim and the team at at Liquid, I’m like, I could see that work anyway.

Rich Birch — So that’s exciting. Kayra, it’s so great to see you.

Kayra Montañez — Thank you, Rich.

Rich Birch — Thanks so much for having time with us today. If people want to connect with you or with Liquid, where do we want to send them online?

Kayra Montañez — Sure. So my name Kayra, K-A-Y-R-A at liquidchurch.com. Happy to connect with anybody have questions.

Rich Birch — Thanks so much. Thanks for being here today.

Leading Into 2026: Executive Pastor Insights

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Leading Into 2026:
Executive Pastor Insights

EP. 07 | Indigenous Infrastructures of Worldmaking, with Lesego Bantsheng and Awande Buthelezi