Green Sky

The Storyteller's Perspective

CONNECT YOUR INNOVATIONS TO THOSE WHO NEED THEM MOST.

The Half-Circle Wall

A Parable

The Storyteller's Perspective

"The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values and agenda of an entire generation that is to come."

- Steve Jobs, former CEO of Apple

If I could read my wife’s mind, it would save me a lot of trouble. Most disagreements we have are the result of poor communication. We don’t express ourselves clearly enough, even though we think we have. Or somehow the other person interprets a completely different meaning than what was intended. I am quite certain there have been times when my wife heard the exact opposite of what I am sure I said!

We spend so much of our lives engaged in some form of communication. Our days are filled with conversations, meetings, emails, texting, and engaging on social media. These activities are all about sharing and deciphering meaning. With so much practice, you would think we would all be perfect communicators! Yet we still often experience confusion and miscommunication because we do not know what is in the mind and heart of another person. This happened to the women in our parable. They thought they were clearly and openly communicating with one another about something they both cared deeply about. But each listener brought assumptions that were not revealed in their conversation. Their resulting actions undermined each other. Because neither woman knew where the other was coming from, their shared connection was false. This happens in our ministry work too. We have something we are trying to accomplish in the world, but our effectiveness often depends on how well we can communicate that goal to others. We must help others see our story, as well as see how they can be a part of it.

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We all have stories that we believe about ourselves and about the world. We align our actions with those stories. But we cannot assume that the story we see tying everything together is the same story another person sees. You and I can experience the exact same event and take away something totally different about it depending on our perceptions, life experiences, and beliefs.

We must learn to be careful listeners. We need to get to know other people and the things that have shaped them. We need to realize what they care about and what they need. When we set aside our way of seeing things, we can more fully grasp what the world looks like to them. All of this happens naturally when you spend time with others developing a friendship. If you have listened well, you unconsciously construct a framework for how others think and feel. You might be able to anticipate what will upset or excite them. You may guess their reactions and feelings. The more you know them, the more accurate your predictions become. Few things are more precious than being known and understood.

Ministry innovators must build genuine connections with people who will join us on our journey. Doing that with even one person can be difficult, let alone with the hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people you might be trying to reach. However, the principles of good communication apply regardless of your audience’s size. Effectively communicating an idea requires understanding what you want to say, the audience you want to say it to, and how that audience will receive the message.

The storyteller’s perspective is a powerful tool to help us do this. “No one would have followed Martin Luther King Jr. if he had said ‘I have a plan,’” says author and business leader Simon Sinek. “They followed him because he said, ‘I have a dream.’” A dream is compelling. It is an opportunity to bring an imagined reality to life. It is a story that may or may not come true. It is a journey you choose to take one step at a time. You have dreams for your ministry and for the lives of those you are seeking to reach with the Gospel. You dream of the life transformation that will occur when their eyes are opened to the truth. You long for this to happen and for God to work through you to shine light into the darkness and speak life to a broken and hurting world. Maybe, like Martin Luther King Jr., you can see what and no one else can see yet.

It all starts with the story you tell.

Wrestle with Your Why

Why is one of the most powerful words in the world, especially when it is used as a question. Why? This simple word quickly cuts to the heart of a situation. It prompts us to seek truth. Knowing our why reveals both what we are and what we are not. However, it can be a scary question to ask of ourselves and our ministries.

I’ve asked pastors this before: “Why does your church exist?” I was driving through an unfamiliar town one time when I saw two large churches directly across the street from one another. I asked myself “Why?” Why does this town need two churches on the same street corner? Why did someone decide to build a church when one was already there?

Pastors sometimes have difficulty answering this question. They quickly tell me what they do. They talk about the many programs they have and how many people attend each Sunday. Some churches focus on outreach and missions, while others have excellent children’s programs to engage families, or incredible praise and worship. These are all good things, but these are not why the church exists. These are their activities, not their core purpose. So I simply ask it again: “Why?”

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” This is what author Simon Sinek says. In his TED talk “How Great Leaders Inspire Action,” he shares that leaders do not inspire by discussing the what or the how, but rather the why. People don’t follow leaders because they do great things but because they have great vision.

I was so inspired the first time I heard OneHope’s founder, Bob Hoskins, share the story of our ministry. Bob was called into public ministry at the age of seven and filled with the Holy Spirit, who enabled him to preach with the vocabulary and maturity of an adult. Many people were saved through his crusades around the world. In 1986, at the age of fifty, Bob received a distressing vision from God showing the devil’s plans to destroy an entire generation. Bob was shown how the children of the world would be attacked through all manner of evil such as human trafficking, abuse, AIDS, and being put into armies of child soldiers. The vision was so dark and terrible that he wept for days. He asked God why he was seeing this, and God answered.

God told Bob that the only thing that could save this generation was His Word and it should be delivered through leaders. So Bob immediately went to work. He reached out to world leaders requesting permission to bring Bibles for their nation’s children. He assembled a team to produce Scripture engagement resources and partnered with churches to deliver those products around the world. Today, OneHope continues with our mission to give God’s Word to every child. That is our why: to affect destiny by providing God’s eternal Word to all the children and youth of the world. That why is what drives us and what we lead with when sharing about our ministry with others. Hearing Bob’s story of why we minister to children is far more powerful than hearing some statistics or facts about what OneHope does.

Organizations that lead with their why are more successful than others because they offer people the chance to connect with what they do on an emotional level. Other ministries may do similar things or have similar programs, but the story behind your purpose is something that nobody else can copy. Your story is a unique part of God’s story and what He is doing in the world. We are the branches connected to the vine, and Jesus reminds us that “apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5).

Facts give credibility, but stories drive memories and engagement. Interest will always outweigh information. Story creates emotion, loyalty, and commitment. Stories are memorable and meaningful. That is why being a storyteller is a critical part of your work as a ministry innovator. It should be a priority to communicate your story well, especially to those you encounter for the first time.

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We tend to forget information we have learned, but stories we hear stick with us. There is a reason for this and it comes from biology. Lisa Cron, author of several books on this subject, explains why stories are so powerful. She presents research on how our brains function when interacting with narratives. Surprisingly, our brain reacts in the same way to an event in a story as it would to an event in real life. This is incredible! When you listen to a story, your brain lives it out and responds accordingly. You identify with the character, searching for ways to overcome the challenges they face.

“We don’t turn to story to escape reality,” Cron says. “We turn to stories to navigate reality.” It turns out that story is like a playground for our brain. We crave stories because they are how we learn about the world and how to live in it successfully. We can internalize the lessons characters learn without suffering the dangers they face.

I was taught in school that it is fairly easy to write a story. All you have to do is create a plot, or series of events, that follows this formula: context, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. But when I followed this pattern and made up people and events to fit into it, the stories I wrote were not amazing. Now I know why. Cron says that it is not the plot that drives your story. Reading about one event after another does not activate our brain.

The heart of a good story is not what happens. Rather, it is what those events mean to a specific person. A compelling story shows us how the plot affects and eventually changes the main character. At the start of a good story, the character has a defining misbelief about themselves or the world. The events of the story help them discover this misbelief and overcome it to reach a goal that would have been impossible otherwise. Over the course of a good story the characters grow and evolve. It is the internal struggle of the characters and their ultimate victory over the struggle that holds the meaning of the story.

Let’s look at the story of Noah from Genesis as an example. Here’s the plot:

God tells an old man he needs to build a boat to save his family and a bunch of animals from a flood. The old man builds a boat, and God sends the animals. Then it rains for a long time and floods as God said it would. Everyone not on the boat dies. After many days at sea, the old man and his family find land, release the animals, and repopulate the earth. God sends a rainbow promising to never flood the world again.

A lot happens in this story! But this description is boring. Now let’s look at it not from the plot perspective, but from the character’s perspective:

Noah was an old man who loved his family. The world was dark and sinful, but he still hoped and believed in God. One day he heard God’s voice speaking to him specifically out of all the humans on earth. God said there would be a flood, which Noah couldn’t imagine. What would the whole world look like covered with water? His family’s safety depended on his ability to build an impossibly large boat. He faced a choice to either believe God and obey Him or ignore Him like the rest of the world. Noah chose to believe God and followed His specific directions for how to build the boat. Sometimes he felt doubt as people around him called him crazy. The project was massive and he was old. Would he even finish the boat in time? Sometimes he secretly wondered if his family thought he was crazy too, even though he was doing this work for them.

Noah worked and strained for a long time, hoping his faith was the right choice. He hoped he had spent his time and effort on something that would matter. Trusting God, he finished the immense project, and miraculously, animals began to show up in pairs. He herded them onto the ship along with his family. In his heart, hope was rising that it really was the voice of God he had heard. Storm clouds began to rage in the sky and it began to rain. All the people who had said he was crazy for believing in God were suddenly desperate to get on the boat with them, but God had closed the door. The flooding lifted the ship and for forty days and nights they were set adrift in a vast, endless ocean like they had never seen before. When they finally made it back to dry ground, Noah kissed the earth, wept, and prayed aloud his thanks and love to God for sparing his family. He knew God to be real and saw that His justice and wrath were deserved. Yet in His mercy, God provided a means of escape from judgment. Noah’s family would forever tell the story of God’s personal loving care for them. God set a rainbow in the sky so that every time Noah saw it, he remembered God is a merciful Savior.

We all know what happened to Noah, which is exactly why I chose this as an example. I wanted you to see how different it is just to read the plot versus seeing how the events affected Noah. It becomes a compelling story when you see Noah’s emotions, doubts, and ultimately trust in God that saved his life and ours too. After all, we would not be here if God had not called Noah to play this part in His story!

The most powerful way to draw someone into your ministry is to tell them your story. People commit to things they feel matter. Your story communicates that significance to them. Consider how you can invite people in to experience your story for themselves. How can they feel the emotions, urgency, and passion you feel? Avoid the temptation to focus on facts, numbers, or even what you’ve accomplished. None of that matters if people don’t know why you’re doing it. Story is what creates connection and helps people look for ways to participate in God’s mission.

Storytelling is not just the job for your ministry’s founder or your church’s pastor. You have probably heard them tell the story of your ministry through the lens of their own experience. Maybe it feels more powerful than your story because they lived through some incredible experience. Like Bob receiving a vision from God and starting OneHope with nothing but faith. But you have stories too. You have your own story of how God called you into His work and what He has done through you. You have stories of challenges that felt impossible to overcome and how God miraculously provided for you. Maybe you have a story you don’t see the end of yet, but are still waiting and praying to see what God will do next. Own those stories and tell them to others.

Being a storyteller is important for the work of innovation because it is the key to drawing people into the journey with you. Story is what will make others care about the things you feel passionate about. Story shows where you’ve been, where you’re trying to go, and what kind of help you need to get there. Trying to win people over to an innovative idea or ask them to take action without understanding your why is a losing battle.

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At the end of the day, the Gospel’s why is very clear: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Jesus knew His why too and prayed it passionately: “Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world” (John 17:24, NIV). Incredible, isn’t it? Jesus’s why is to be with us. He laid down His life so we could be reunited with God in the beautiful fellowship displayed by the Trinity.

Ultimately, that is the story we are telling and the why behind everything we do in ministry. We exist to communicate God’s message of hope to a deeply broken world. God’s why holds the answer to why we are here and what we should do with our lives every day. As you practice the storyteller’s perspective, you will be surprised at how much easier it is to invite people to join the work you are doing and ultimately to join the kingdom you are a part of.

You Can Only Choose One

Once you’ve wrestled with your why, it’s time to tell your story to the world. There’s just one not-so-tiny problem: you can’t talk to everyone at once. Hold on, you say, of course I can. The Internet and social media give me access to almost anyone. All I have to do is blast my story out into the world for everyone to hear. This is true, but practically speaking, it doesn’t work. It would take more resources than any ministry has to reach everyone effectively.

Technology gives us access to more people than ever before, and that means we need to customize our message more than we ever have. People are flooded with information competing for their attention. Every day, they see advertisements targeted to them specifically by businesses hoping to capitalize on what they care about and search for online. To cut through the noise, we must show how our story is something our audience should care about deeply. We also have to find the right people who will care about our why.

As we think about who to reach with our story first, imagine the process of starting a fire. This is the analogy Greg Stielstra shares in his book PyroMarketing. To build a fire, you don’t hold a small match to a great big log. It takes far more heat than the match can provide to light a log on fire. Instead, you start with something smaller. Dry grass and tiny twigs catch fire easily. Then you can slowly add larger sticks and small pieces of wood to build the blaze. You feed the fire until eventually it is strong enough to burn the large log.

Building a fire is a great picture for reaching people with our message. Stielstra says to look for your driest tinder. These are the people who perfectly align with your mission and who will love your product or program. They are the evangelists who will convince others to believe in what you do. Your driest tinder are your passionate champions who will bring people in who might not have been interested otherwise. Those people will then point you to others, and as momentum builds, eventually no log will be too large to withstand your fire. Your message will reach even people who were previously not interested in what you had to offer.

Stielstra offers us a valuable lesson in this example of building a fire. We don’t need to reach everyone with our message, we just need to focus on reaching the right people first. This is great news because as ministries we don’t have unlimited resources for promotion. We can be efficient and strategic by looking for our driest tinder—the people we have the best chance of winning. If we’ve done the work to make our why clear and powerful, it will be easy for those people to share our story with others and spread that fire far and wide.

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So how do we find the people who will be our initial champions? This process is called audience segmentation, and it is critical work that cannot be skipped in our ministry innovation efforts. Segmenting your audience means looking at all the people you want to reach and dividing them into smaller and smaller groups until you have one very specific group to focus on.

I do this work with OneHope’s teams around the world. It is always challenging because after all—the Gospel is for everyone. We want everyone to hear it. But I remind our teams that if your message is for everyone, it becomes too general to connect deeply with anyone. Your story has to be for someone specific to be understood.

The Apostle Paul gives us a good example of this in his ministry. God called him to share the Good News with everyone and fulfill the Great Commission Jesus left us. The Gospel is for the whole world and intended for every person to hear. But how did Paul go about spreading this message? He writes in 1 Corinthians 9:22, “I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some.” Paul chose to become a lot of specific things to a lot ofspecific specific people so that they might hear and understand his message. Even though the Gospel is for everyone, he did not take a one-size-fits-all approach. He took time to think about the cultures and people he was trying to reach and looked for entry points to share the truth.

You must have absolute clarity on the person you are designing for and speaking to. You should know what they care about, what they fear, and what their challenges are. You should be so specific in your approach that when the person encounters your ministry or program, they breathe a sigh of relief. They think, “Yes! This is what I’ve been looking for all along!” When that happens, they will not only embrace your solution for their own lives but share it joyfully.

Our audiences—the people we are trying to reach—are multifaceted and diverse. Many times people tell me their target audience is pastors. But take a minute and think about how broad that really is. There are lead pastors, campus pastors, youth pastors, and children’s pastors (to name just a few positions). Pastors come in all different ages and nationalities and serve a variety of denominations. They speak different languages and have different educational backgrounds and training. Pastors have different passions and focuses for their churches. Think about the difference between a young youth pastor in a big city versus a middle-aged church planter going to a remote village that has never heard the Gospel. If you were to have a conversation with each of these people, it would sound completely different. You would recognize that each person has unique needs and challenges in their ministry work. The resources and help you might offer to each would be very different.

We must get more specific and understand pastors in greater detail. You don’t take an apple and swallow it whole. It’s easier to bite if you cut it in half. It’s even easier to consume if you cut it in smaller pieces. Like with an apple, you can slice your audience into segments of any size. Segments are based on shared attributes. A helpful way to get started is to think about a room full of people you want to reach. If you were to walk into that room, how would you divide everyone into smaller groups you could talk to more easily? What characteristics do people share that would help you group them? You can think about who they are, where they are, what they believe, or how they act. You can be as specific as you like with your slices or combine attributes to form larger groups. Audience segmentation helps us narrow and focus our efforts. Remember, you are not going after everyone. You are looking for the audience segment that will resonate with your story and what you have to offer. You are seeking your driest tinder that will most easily catch fire and spread that flame to others.

As you do the work of understanding and segmenting your audience, you will come to the inevitable and painful decision point: you can only choose one. You may have dozens of audiences you feel are important to reach. But you can only focus on one to go after first. It is challenging to tend many fires at once, so ultimately you cannot keep them all burning. You must simplify and clarify your efforts. Who is the most important audience? Imagine yourself back in that room full of people. They are no longer one big group but are now nicely divided. You understand what each smaller group cares about, and now it’s time to tell them what you care about. It’s time to share your story and invite them into the journey with you. For a short time, you have the gift of their undivided attention. But you can only choose one group out of the entire room. You can only approach one and share your powerful message. Who will it be?

This is a difficult decision for most ministries, and it can feel counterproductive. We want to make our resources go as far as possible to reach the most people with our message. But to do our best work, we have to focus our efforts on our most important audience and let go of others. Too often, we jump straight to creating solutions without stopping to ask the foundational question: “Who is this for?” Who will care about what we are creating? The answer cannot be “everyone.” It is tempting to make the mistake of going after too many audiences. Perhaps resources are limited and we want to maximize our project’s impact. But if we are not designing with a specific person and their needs in mind, by the end of the process, we might find we’ve made something nobody cares about.

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Your ministry’s why helps you prioritize what you work on and who it is for. This is a powerful tool for the ministry innovator. Let your why guide you. Let it define what you do and especially what you choose not to do. In ministry we can easily go too many directions. We can have a hard time saying no to opportunities or cutting programs or products. Everything is needed. Everything is speaking to a broken world. But we can be easily overwhelmed trying to do everything and lose sight of our most important work. When we become distracted from our core purpose, it is called mission drift.

What are the things God has called your ministry to do that only you can do? Pursue those things. As you start each new project, have absolute clarity on why you are doing it and who it is for. You may need to have the courage to let go of things that have a long legacy and history of success in your ministry. If they are not helping you reach the people you are called to reach in the future, then carefully consider if it is time to let go of some of those things. Knowing your audience and knowing your why will guide you.

We must avoid the temptation to just start working and figure it out later. The time you invest in audience segmentation now will pay off later on. The more time we spend getting this right, the less time our audience will have to spend figuring out how they fit into your story. The opposite is true too. If our message is not clear, even to ourselves, how can we expect others to grasp it? We can only communicate a clear message when we know who we are talking to. And we can only talk to one audience at a time. Who will you choose to share your message with?

Marketing Your Ministry

I remember when I first noticed that my smartphone was listening in on my daily life. I would have a conversation about something and then later that day I would see an advertisement for that exact product on Instagram. Initially, it seemed like a coincidence. I assumed I had visited a website or searched for the product online before. But it became undeniable when something I had never even heard of before was advertised to me after having a conversation where it was mentioned. It was a little scary to realize how easy it is for advertisers to reach me. However, it also shows we are in a new era of marketing. Businesses no longer have to guess what I care about. They can show me the exact product I might be interested in within moments. They can intersect with me at my point of need and show me potentially helpful solutions.

Marketing might seem like it doesn’t apply to ministry. After all, we are not businesses trying to sell products. But advertising and selling is just one slice of marketing. Marketing is a much larger discipline, with communication and connection at its core. It is about helping people connect with what they need.

Think about what a market is. It is where people go to exchange things of value. Everything has a cost. Money is just one way of representing value. Even something that’s free, like church, costs people time as well as physical and mental effort. People who value church are happy to exchange their time and effort for the benefits of being in that community. Sharing why they should do so is the work of marketing.

Branding and marketing are often closely associated. Branding is not just for businesses; it absolutely applies to ministry. Your brand isn’t your logo. It is the perceptions, thoughts, and feelings people associate with you. Your brand lives in the mind of your customer. We all have a brand—whether we are being intentional to build it or not. Have you thought about what your brand communicates to people? What impressions do they have of you?

Building a brand means working to create positive thoughts and feelings in your audience when they encounter you or anything you create. We all exist in the global marketplace of ideas and resources. What will make people want to come straight to you and not to another brand? Hopefully it will be because of your reputation for excellence and the story people associate with you. These are what create trust and elevate the perceived value of your offerings.

Advertising catches people’s attention. Branding is your reputation in people’s minds. But both are part of the larger discipline of marketing—of making connections. Marketing is about helping the right people find you at the right time. It is connecting our story to those who want to hear it. Many ministries have suddenly found themselves in this new reality of digital marketing. It can be a confusing and strange place to be. There are many things to learn about advertising, algorithms, and analytics. You may need specialists to help you get started with some of the complex tools and programs available.

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The scope and access digital platforms enable is incredible. Suddenly you can talk to almost anyone in the world and put your message directly in front of them (for a fee). In today’s digital economy, ministries have the same opportunity and access to people as any big brand with millions of dollars to spend on advertising. This is both encouraging and intimidating. What do you say? How do you catch people’s attention as they go about their busy lives?

Digital marketing, and any marketing really, is not hard if you have clarity on your story and on your audience. It is everything we have been talking about so far. Start with your why and let that why shape the story you share with those you are trying to reach. Then leverage online platforms to put you in touch with those people. Digital marketing helps us greatly because it is easier than ever to locate our audience segments and put our message in front of them. This is invaluable. But the opportunity is only as good as we make it. We must do our best to ensure the brief intersection people have with our ministry is a powerful one.

Sun Tzu wrote the following in his book Art of War:

If you know your enemies and know yourself,
you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles.

His writings in The Art of War were about military strategy, but his thinking is just as relevant to today’s digital strategy conversations. Here is how I would update the saying:

If you know your audience and know yourself,
you will not be misunderstood in a hundred interactions.

Marketing is, after all, good communication. It is communicating what we have to offer to people who might want and need that in their lives. Digital platforms put us directly in our target audience’s path. It puts us in their space and in their lives in ways we could never accomplish on our own. What is critical is what we do once we get there. Harry Beckwith, author of Selling the Invisible teaches that the best marketing for a service is the service itself. I want you to remember that marketing is much more than advertising. Promotion is one aspect. But once we have attracted people to us, the most important thing is how we serve them well.

Digital gives us access, but access does not guarantee relationship. Digital marketing makes initial connections, but it is up to us how we nurture and build on those connections. People take different approaches depending on their industry and goals.

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Companies who provide products focus on making their products the best they can be. Their goal is to take something from an idea to an item on a shelf for people to buy. Many product companies are masterful storytellers. Their advertisements cast a vision of the lifestyle you could have if you just buy their product. These companies use marketing to help create a pool of customers they can sell to and then come back to with their next great idea, and the next. But once the product is out in the world, the job is basically done. The customers either buy the item or not, but they don’t interact with the people who made it. The customers and business don’t really expect to have an ongoing relationship outside the point of sale.

In contrast, a company that provides a service depends entirely on relationships. No product is involved, just the interaction between the business and customer. Doctors, lawyers, and teachers are examples of service providers. The mindset is long-term and two-way. If you see a doctor, you want them to really care about your health and continue helping you until you recover. If you work with a lawyer, you hope they can solve your problem. If you are taking a class, you appreciate a teacher who works with you personally to ensure you succeed. The mindset behind providing a service is one of journeying. The customer should have an excellent experience from the moment they first encounter you all the way to the end of whatever journey you take together.

Ministry is a service much more than a product. The Great Commission doesn’t say to just get the Bible into people’s hands and then we’ll be all done. It calls us to make disciples. Discipleship means building relationships and serving people well. We are to be God’s hands and feet in the world sharing the loving message of salvation both through our words and through our actions. Relationships are key. We are sharing God’s story and inviting people to explore what the Gospel could mean for their lives. This is much more serious than selling any product. It requires the highest level of care and excellence. We must plan and prepare for how we will serve our audience and journey with them long-term.

It can be easy to have a short-term mindset when it comes to ministry initiatives. Urgent needs are everywhere we look. When we see a need and feel called to respond, we work hard to create the perfect resource or program to address the problem. After a lot of time and effort to make it as great as possible, we launch it into the world for people to find. Then it’s on to the next need and the next program. It’s easier to design something to be distributed in huge numbers than it is to journey with people for years. Sometimes we prioritize the efficient rather than the effective.

OneHope has been growing tremendously in this space, shifting from a product orientation to a service orientation. We started with a single resource for children called the Book of Hope, which we translated into Spanish when we launched our ministry in El Salvador in 1987. We quickly translated it into more languages for more countries. We developed new versions of the Book of Hope for other cultures, ages, and specific heartfelt needs. We created films, apps, and websites. As we started reaching people through new digital media, we began to realize how the relationships with our partners and the next generation needed to change. We started to design programs that allowed us to stay connected rather than reach out one time. Journeying alongside churches, families, and children has shown incredible fruit, but it requires us to think and work differently.

The Gospel is not a product to be packaged and sold, but a way of living that reveals Christ and invites people to begin a relationship with Jesus. We carry living water to a thirsty, broken world. It is the way we serve people and love them that they will ultimately remember. This radically reorients our approach to ministry. It reminds us what we should focus on, like when Jesus gently reminded His disciples they should care about every person. Jesus taught that it was worth leaving the ninety-nine sheep to seek the one lost sheep (Matthew 18:12). Jesus prioritized individual relationships over huge numbers, and we should remember to do the same.

Crafting the Journey

I watched a documentary about the re-opening of a Michelin 3-star restaurant in New York City. The attention to detail was like nothing I had ever seen. Everything was planned and nothing left to chance. Waiters practiced how they would set and clear the tables and how they would speak to customers. Chefs cooked the menu over and over again while being timed and evaluated on taste and presentation. The owner himself tested the chairs to ensure their comfort. Because of the restaurant’s reputation for excellence, customers made their dining reservations over a year in advance!

“What we’re doing here is special, we have the ability to help people celebrate some of the most important moments in their lives,” the owner explained. “I don’t think we’re in the food business . . . we’re in the human connection business.”

The team was able to create an incredible experience for their customers because they had clarity on why people were coming to their restaurant: to celebrate special occasions. Knowing the personal journeys of their customers enabled the restaurant to optimize everything they did to meet their diner’s needs and expectations. It guided every decision they made from what they served on the menu to how loud the music was and how dim the lights were.

Now think about a completely different dining experience: fast food. These restaurants intersect people at very different moments in their lives. Drive-thrus serve busy people who need inexpensive food fast. Some fast-food restaurants offer indoor playgrounds so parents can take a minute to relax while they eat and their children play. Red and orange are popular colors for decorating because they stimulate the appetite. Chairs are usually hard and uncomfortable to encourage people to eat quickly and leave.

All of these are intentional design choices made because these restaurants also understand the people they are trying to serve. A fast-food restaurant is completely different from a fine dining establishment in New York. Both are places to get food, so they serve similar purposes. But the experience is totally opposite because of the personal journey that brings the customers through their doors. Knowing what someone expects of you and why they are coming is critical to serving them well.

Understanding an individual’s life journey creates the critical foundation for the design decisions you will make in your innovation work. Audience segmentation got us started thinking about the unique attributes of the people we are trying to serve. To craft a journey that is personal and compelling for that segment, we must dive deeper into understanding who they are and what they care about.

Creating a persona to represent your audience is a great exercise. A persona is a detailed description of a typical person you are trying to reach. It helps us further narrow our focus. Start by giving your person a name, age, and any other biographic information that you identified as part of your audience segment. Then think about their inner life—their thoughts and experiences. What are their goals or desires for the future? What are the things this person is afraid of or anxious about? What do they believe? Who is influencing them? If you are having trouble answering these questions, you should go out and conduct interviews. Choose a few people from your target audience and ask them these questions. Hopefully, they will feel comfortable answering openly and honestly.

Besides their inner life, you should also find out about their actions. Your goal is to understand what they are doing and how it’s going. What are they specifically doing to accomplish their dreams? What has been successful? What barriers do they still face? Ask them to share victories and challenges, as both represent opportunities. If you know what a person’s goals are, you can be ready to celebrate with them when they achieve those. If they haven’t seen a victory yet, you might be able to help them overcome the barriers standing in their way. All of this information is deeply useful. Don’t worry if you can’t see the immediate applications to your ministry work. The goal here is understanding and empathy. That is where we must start before we ever consider asking someone to do something. Take the first step towards them before you invite them to step towards you.

Once you have deepened your understanding of your target audience, you can turn your attention towards the journey you will invite them to take with you. You are inviting people into a story they must decide they want to be a part of. We cannot force people to join us, but we can make it easier for them to participate. This is important no matter who we are reaching, but especially important for those we are connecting to in the digital space. Digital spaces can help us get our message in front of people, but there is a lot of competition. Just because we can reach people online doesn’t mean they will want to reach back. We must put in the hard work to lay out the steps that will naturally build the relationship.

We do this intuitively every day with the people in our lives. You spend time getting to know people and helping them. You know who you can ask for help when you need it. You also know what kinds of requests are appropriate for the level of relationship. For example, you would not ask a casual acquaintance to do something really hard like help you move furniture all day. Nor do we propose marriage to someone we’ve just met. But for some reason, in our ministry work we can be quick to jump straight to big commitments. We need to slow down and think about the right first step for our audience to take. How will they encounter us? What will their first impression of us be? What expectations might they bring to the interaction?

These kinds of questions help us build our user journey. A user journey describes how people will get from one place to another. It is typically used in digital technology design for apps and websites. But we should think about the user experience in any kind of journey. Where do they start and what steps will lead them to our end goal? If you don’t know your end goal, then you know at least one thing you need to work on!

I sketched out my very first user journey when I was sixteen and was hired to build a website for a local law office. I drew a simple diagram on paper showing each page of the website as a different box and lines between them to show how they were connected. My job was to ensure that people could find all the information they were looking for and didn’t get stranded on a page with nowhere else to go. My drawing was basic, but it worked for what was needed. This was the early days of websites, where they were primarily just a place for the business phone number and address in case someone wanted to look them up online.

In today’s digital world, user journeys have become much more complex. Someone can encounter your ministry for the first time in any number of places. They might meet you through your own content or information others share about you. It may be important to have a presence on multiple social media platforms. In addition you probably have your own website, email list, digital ad campaigns, and more. This doesn’t even account for all the things you might be doing to reach people in person. How are you going to ensure all of those efforts are coordinated and cohesive, following a logical path to move people towards your end goal? That is the work of crafting user journeys.

There is no magical solution to create perfect user journeys. It takes time and effort. This has been a big part of my job with OneHope recently. I have been working with our regional teams to think through their target audiences and the user journeys for each one. It is like trying to solve a big puzzle. OneHope’s work over the years has continued to grow in many different directions, and our teams always have more opportunities than they have time for. It has been very clarifying to see how all those many parts must work together to form the journey we are creating. Sometimes we found areas that didn’t make sense and lacked clear next steps for our audience. At other times, we discovered we were investing too much energy in activities that didn’t move people towards our goals.

Here’s the thing about journeys. If you don’t plan them purposefully and well, they will still happen—but they will happen accidentally and poorly. A clear user journey is the difference between someone connecting to your powerful message or leaving in confusion.

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One helpful framework for mapping a user journey is called the Circular Funnel. It looks like a bullseye with five circles. Everything you do probably falls into one of these stages: Encounter, Explore, Engage, Believe, and Champion. This is not the only way to think about a user journey, but it makes an excellent starting point. Write out everything you do as a ministry and then categorize it into one of these five stages based on where it falls for your user.

Encounter is when someone first discovers that you exist. It is when they form their first impression of you or your ministry. Explore is what happens when they seek out more information about what you do. They might go to your website, social media accounts, or look at anything publicly available about your ministry. Engage is when they let you know they are interested. They might follow you on social media, leave a comment, or give you their email address to download a resource. At this point, they become known to you. They may have been aware of you for much longer, but you are just getting to meet now. Engagement may continue and deepen for a long time until they reach the Believe stage. This is when the person makes a higher level of commitment. They might make a donation, attend an event, or take some other action that shows they see what you have as valuable for their lives. They are taking a significant step into your story. Finally, they may become a Champion—someone who identifies with your cause.

Once they arrive at the champion stage, which is the end goal, the person starts spending their own time and energy to further your mission because it has become something they care about deeply. They share about you with others, partner with you, and perhaps volunteer their time or finances. Your story has become their story too. Not everyone will become a champion, but everyone should have the opportunity and a clear pathway to take that journey. Each step should build on the one before it, guiding them further into your story and giving them opportunities to deepen their commitment.

Ensure there is always a next step people can take no matter where they enter the journey. You might have heard this referred to as a “call to action.” A call to action can be as simple as liking a photo on social media all the way up to inviting someone to give their life to Christ. Think about what calls to action are appropriate at each step of the user journey. Take into account where that person might be on their personal journey as well. Why will your user want to respond? How does your offering match up with their life and their needs?

Think about the journey from start to finish and look for areas that might feel confusing, as those are likely where you will lose people. Data analytics can help us see this very clearly. Almost everything we do online provides data. You can see where people come from and where they decide to leave. You can see what kind of content gets the most engagement. You can even find out if someone opened and read an email you sent. Use this information to help you understand how the journey looks from the user’s perspective. What parts do they find difficult, boring, or irrelevant? If your audience is not responding to your calls to action, take time to consider why. This is humbling but deeply valuable work. We cannot expect people to take a journey we don’t even understand ourselves.

Understanding user journeys also helps you prioritize your work and your team’s capacity. You can’t do everything, so ensure you are doing the most important things. It is critical to know the change you want to see happen and the path you are laying out for your audience to achieve that change. Which steps need the most attention? Focus on those first. Align and realign your efforts to your user journey. This also helps us ground the work of ministry innovation, which by its nature takes us in new directions. We should be very clear on how those new directions support our overall journey.

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This work requires going deep, and it might feel slow. It is not comfortable or easy, and it might show us things we find discouraging or confusing. But ultimately it is the right work. We are entering into people’s lives and thinking hard about the challenges they face. We are presenting the Gospel in ways that speak to their deepest needs at their darkest moments. We are inviting them on a life-changing journey to put their trust in Jesus and receive the gift of eternal life!

This is the path we are taking together. It is worth spending the time to get it right.

Culture Maker