Attract or Multiply: Transcript

Hey, everybody. Hope you're having a great day. My name is Drew Provence, and I'm with Upward Sports. I'm excited you've joined us today for this conversation. I've got some great friends with me. One is Christopher Nelson. He's an Upward volunteer coach, a network leader, and a church strategist. Chris, we've been wrestling with this question: is my church built for attracting or multiplying? We've got a great guest to help us think about this, Dr. Matt Engel. He's the pastor and founder of the Center of Excellence for Ministry Innovation, one of the largest networks of innovation-minded churches in the U.S. He's affiliate faculty at Colorado Christian University, teaching executive leadership courses, and he's a speaker and co-author of 14 Fridays. Great to have you, Matt.

Hey, guys. Great to be with you. I'm super excited about the conversation today, so thanks for allowing me to join in.

Matt, there's another 14 Fridays book in the works. Is it too soon to mention that?

It's in the works. We decided on another 14 Fridays. We wanted to really switch it up. It's going to be good. We're excited about it.

That's awesome. So Matt, kick us off as we think about this topic of attract or multiply. You're working with a lot of innovative churches and a lot of growing churches. How are they processing through this?

In the history of the church here, even over the last forty to fifty years, you had an older discipleship model. Then in the late eighties, early nineties, even the two thousands, we had this big shift toward the attractional model. So attract and multiply are known language. What we built is called the Church Engagement Framework. We did research across 250 to 300 churches and asked: what are the jobs, quote unquote, that every church has to solve for?

We get this from the business world, from Clayton Christensen and his jobs-to-be-done model. The example I like to give: if I need to put a nail in the wall, I could hire my hand to hit the nail. I could hire my cell phone. Or I could just hire a hammer. The job is getting the nail into the wall, and then we hire tools or capabilities to solve that job.

In this model there are five jobs. Attract: do people know you exist as a church? Get: can you get somebody to show up one time? Keep: are you retaining them? Grow: are they growing? And then Multiply.

In this conversation we wanted to talk through the two bookends. Attract: do people know we exist? And then Multiply: are people actually living out the mission, vision, and passion of that local church? That's really the definition of multiplication, from how we've defined it and how we see it across the churches we work with.

The other way I like to frame multiplication: it's a lot of consumptive activity until you're multiplying. Once you're multiplying, you're actually contributing value into the community or into your context. So the question is, what is the church doing around attract versus multiply? And is it really "versus"? It's more of a dial. Some churches lean one direction, some lean the other.

That's great. You're working with a lot of churches looking to add a new ministry. What jobs are they hiring for right now?

That's the big question I get asked a lot. A church says, "We're going to start X ministry." I usually say, "Great. What are you actually hiring it for?" I've seen this happen a lot. A church hires somebody, they come in and launch X. Then that person leaves in three or four years. Does the ministry die? Does it stay? Do we know what to do with it now that the person who started it is gone? Framing it this way helps us understand this isn't just a person bringing in a ministry. We're hiring this ministry to solve a particular job.

It evens the playing field. Why should we do a backpack drive? Tell me what job you're hiring it for, and then we can evaluate it and hold it accountable. It's not a good idea or a bad idea. Let's hold it accountable to the thing we think it's going to solve. Is it an attract function? Great, more people know we exist, so let's do backpacks. Is it a multiplication thing? Then it's a way for people who don't currently do something in our church to get in the game.

I hear "multiply" being a big buzzword with churches and pastors right now. A lot of the churches that are growing and thriving are building multiplication frameworks that align with what you're talking about. Chris, I think about deploying people, getting people from the pews into the game, becoming contributors versus consumers. You've got an interesting story of going from somebody in the pew into the game. Tell us about that.

Thanks, Drew. Our family moved to Georgia a few years back. Being new to the city, we didn't have a lot of friends, and we hadn't started serving at a church yet. We weren't even sure which church we'd land at. Our kids were going to preschool at a church that had a soccer league powered by Upward, so we signed them up. They were looking for coaches, and I raised my hand, even though I'd never played soccer and didn't know much about it. But my kids loved it. I wanted a place to serve. I wanted to pour into my own kids, and I got excited about meeting other families and wearing an evangelism hat.

One of the cool things about Upward is that they equip you to share the gospel and do devotions at practices and games. Those are core values for me and for my leadership in our home. Upward does a really good job of equipping people who want to get in the game but aren't sure where to start. I didn't even know it at the time. I was just trying to help out with the soccer team. I got to pour into my own kids, which turned into their friends on the team, which turned into a whole community looking to me as a coach. Not only to care for their kids, but to spiritually impact their broader families. That was a real gift.

So good. There's such an opportunity in churches where there are people like you. Maybe they're coming to church two or three times a month, they're involved, but they don't really have a role to play. Talk more about the people in churches who care about the church but don't feel like they have a role.

I think about men's ministry. I'm a men's ministry guy. I have active text threads from fifteen or twenty years ago where we're still chatting. Part of it is life and family, but a lot of it is sports. I'm a Vikings fan, and my friends make fun of me for it. These are guys we've done life with, and part of the ongoing conversation is sports. It's a fun way to stay engaged.

So how many guys in men's ministry are activated on a Sunday morning? Maybe some of them. But how many others are asking, "Where do I fit? How do I get involved?" and aren't even sure where to look? It's not just men. There are moms who played college sports, love sports, and want their kids to enjoy the benefits of getting in the game, physically and spiritually. Sports have done so much good in all of our lives that often doesn't get unlocked on a Sunday morning. There's a huge opportunity for the church to partner in the community and unlock this passion for people looking for a place to lead.

Thanks for sharing that. It highlights the opportunity: there are people already in our congregations waiting to be activated into their calling. Matt, talk more about churches. Where are they getting stuck with attract and multiply?

In church, we do a lot of recruiting to chores. In the network I work with, we call them chores. We rarely unlock passion. What I just heard from Chris is: we could recruit you to a chore. You could serve as an usher, in parking, or in kids ministry. But that might not be your passion. So the language we use in our network is: how do we help unlock that capacity in everybody to contribute to the value of the kingdom? Adam was put in the Garden of Eden to contribute value to something that was already perfect. We're wired for contribution. So we have to change the mental model.

Some of the data we're seeing: 96% of pastors say they want their churches to be healthier, but they're saying the laity needs to stand up and take more responsibility. I think some of us as pastors have to actually unlock that. Sometimes we say, "No, we'll take care of it, we're on staff," when in reality you have a boatload of Chris Nelsons going, "I want to change the world too." And they're raising their hand.

Some of the latest data on being stuck, from a multisite perspective, and I work with a lot of multisite churches, is that they don't have the leadership development pipeline. I say this regularly: your impact on your community is directly proportionate to the rate at which you develop people. If we're getting stuck, it's often because we want to launch a new campus but we have nobody we're developing. I can look at a church's leadership development pipeline and tell you a lot about its health.

And only 9% of pastors say they're effective at developing new leaders. That seems like a big miss when I look at Scripture. Our job is to equip the saints to do ministry, and the saint is that leader. So how do we help unlock the Chris Nelsons of the world to go out onto a field, lead people, and encourage kids, without a seven-week equipping class? That's where I see a massive opportunity to be a multiplication church, which we know also solves the attract problem. The better equipped our saints are on the ball field and in the community, the better known our church is in the community.

That's where sports fits into the equation. Take somebody like Chris, or others I work with who run sports ministries. We have a lot of potential in our pews, and they're passionate about it. Compare that to the chore of "We need people on our tech team." I'm not discounting that. We do need people to run our tech team. But why don't we put the same energy into equipping the people who are already spending a disproportionate amount of time out in the community?

Some other research I came across in prep for today: Axios reported about a 10% drop in parents' religious participation from the mid-2000s to 2024. Meanwhile, sports participation among kids is up to 58%. So we're talking about 17% of parents involved in religious activities versus 58% of kids involved in sports. I think we've been getting this wrong in the church by thinking it's church or sports. I think it's both. If we equip the people showing up at the court, the ball field, or the ice rink to be equipped saints who share the gospel and make disciples in their context, it's not an either/or anymore. What I like to say is, we become a tactic in their strategy, not the other way around. That's where sports has a unique opportunity to show up as a multiplication strategy for pastors and church leaders.

That's great, Matt. Chris, we both come from the Upward Sports world. Upward helps churches connect with their community and develop new leaders. Talk about why sports is a fit for churches and why it's relevant right now.

As a dad of an eight-year-old and a ten-year-old, youth sports is huge. We ran into a stat that youth sports is bigger than the NFL, around a $40 billion industry when you count travel clubs and everything else. Think about the hours parents spend driving kids to tournaments. It's also impacting Sunday attendance. It's not just one kid missing church, it's the whole family.

When you combine sports and church, here's what happens. A kid is on a team. They're wearing the jersey. They have a role. Somebody is giving them feedback: here's your position, here's your job, here's what success looks like, here's where we can get better. They're engaged. They're playing with their friends. Their parents are most likely cheering on the sidelines. So from Matt's view of attract, it's a great way to build community and get kids physically active.

But I also think about the pew, Drew, from your earlier question. A lot of people come on Sunday and just sit there. They haven't unlocked the passion God put in their heart, maybe because it hasn't been offered or unlocked by church leadership, and they feel like they don't fit. Look at how fanatical our culture is about sports. This past summer with the World Cup, we were glued to the TV, and I'm not even a huge soccer fan. Now think about that same passion sitting in the pews on Sunday. Those people want to impact the world for good, impact the next generation, and make disciples. They just aren't sure how to do that while they're sitting in the pew.

So on both sides, you have the chance to build up kids with a biblical worldview, and you have the chance to unleash adults onto the field to coach. I told you guys about sharing the gospel for the first time. It wasn't just with the kids. I was sharing it with their parents and extended families, and that really impacted my faith. A handful of years later, I got designated as the football chaplain on our team. We've seen over 10 kids come to faith and get baptized over this last year. It's a rec league, and it's a special community. Kids pray for each other after games. We pray with the other teams after games. It led to my own two kids, Lucas and Olivia, being baptized.

How many other stories like mine, which started with Upward, are out there waiting to be unlocked? The church just hasn't figured out how to bring sports into what it offers, not only to the community and kids, but to the leaders looking for a place to get involved. It's so important and so needed. I love what Upward is doing.

Right on. Praise the Lord, that's awesome. Let's get practical. Let's walk through some tips on how we develop leaders through sports. The first one: set the play.

A volunteer knows what a win looks like before the season starts. Yes, we want to get better as a soccer team. We want to learn the skills and come together as a team. But the bigger score is: are we impacting these kids to be better students at school, better neighbors, and better kids at home who listen and help with chores? There's so much a coach can speak into that parents may get tuned out on. The coach with the whistle has their attention: here's what we do on the field, and here's what we expect when you're out there representing this team. I had great coaches over the years who instilled that in me. You earn the right to do that when you're part of a team. Sports matter.

I think part of setting the play is equipping people with the tools they need so they can feel confident. As an Upward coach, I'm equipped with an easy-to-understand devotion I can feel confident stepping into, and an easy framework for building relationships and connecting with people. If we're going to set the play for leader development, how do we make sure we're equipping and supporting well? Is my equipping strategy actually developing people? Number two: coach in the moment. Honest feedback without shaming, in front of the kids and parents.

We've all seen news clips of a parent who's gone wild at a sporting event, swearing, attacking a ref, fights breaking out. From a Christian perspective, how do we coach in the moment? We're passionate, but we're not out of control. We're not using offensive language or physically attacking somebody over something that happened on the court. There are boundaries, referees, and rules. Coaches set expectations for the team and communicate them to families. What better model than Jesus for caring for people? Being patient, kind, and honest. Telling somebody, "You did this really well, and here's where we need to improve." Iron sharpens iron. I've had multiple conversations with parents upset that their kid isn't playing. Coaching forces you to handle high-friction situations while honoring Christ and the community you're serving.

Sports is the perfect environment for that kind of growth. You bring in competition and everything that comes with it, so there are tons of opportunities for learning, growing, and healthy feedback. The third one is calling them up. The coach has been growing, learning, and getting more comfortable. Now they're ready for their next step, and we have to be intentional in calling them into their next phase of leadership. Matt, in the multisite research you shared earlier, one of the stats says the most effective way to recruit a leader is a shoulder tap. So have the conversation with your key potential leaders: "I see in you the potential to take your next step in your ministry journey." Is there a culture of shoulder tapping in your church? We see it all the time in sports. Coaches step in, young or old, for their first time leading in ministry. They build confidence, they experience God at work through their service, and they step into a larger role as a league director or even a pastor. There's a pastor in Knoxville, Tennessee, John Mark Harrison, pastor of First Baptist Concord, one of the most thriving churches in that area. He felt the call to become a pastor from coaching Upward basketball. It just takes a leader to say, "I see in you." Matt, any other thoughts?

That's our big thesis right now across the church landscape: how do we wire that motion into the system of the church? It's easy to talk about, and it's one of those nice-to-haves. But unless it's designed into the system, it doesn't happen. That's one of the big shifts we're starting to see: how do we architect this multiplication mindset into the operational structure of the church? Just because somebody has a passion to coach a team, let's not put them down. Let's enable them to live that calling in their context and share the gospel with other people. It starts with knowing kids' names, knowing parents' names, knowing what position they're going to play. Like Chris said, giving feedback: you did this really well, here's one thing to improve. If they can do that the way Jesus would show up for that kid, that's the church being the church in every context, not only on Sunday. That's a powerful shift, and I'm excited to see it across the landscape.

One thought. In John 10:10, Jesus talks about life to the full. So often Christians get to a certain point in their walk and get comfortable. What I've experienced is that there's more, and a lot of the time it looks like a step in a new direction or into a new role where you keep growing. Calling somebody up, Matt, I love that idea. I think to flourish on this side of heaven, we have to keep growing and taking steps of faith, because that's what we see throughout the Bible.

I agree. That's so good.

As we wrap up: where do we go from here? We've got a few resources for you. Take the discussion guide on this page to your next team meeting. Look at your community with a scouting report. And review the Church Engagement Framework Matt walked us through at the start. I think those will be helpful as you think through attract or multiply, where you live today, and what your next step in ministry is. We're grateful you took the time to join us today. Thank you, Matt and Chris. Chris, would you close us in prayer?

I'd love to. Heavenly Father, thank you for Matt and Drew. Thank you for what you're doing through sports, in my life and in all of our lives. Thank you for the 1,500 churches running Upward to impact their communities for good. Lord, I can't help but think about the pews in these churches, where there are more leaders looking for a way to get involved and to have their passion unlocked. I pray for more opportunities through sports for these leaders to get involved, to impact other lives, and to be impacted themselves. Thank you for sports. Thank you for ministry. Thank you for letting us do the work you've called us as Christians to do. Bless the people who hear this conversation, and continue to guide your church in all its ways. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

Amen. Y'all have a great day.