VOUS CONFERENCE 2019: How to Turn a Crowd Into a Community

my name is adrian and i am a location director over at vu church and um i've been on staff now for it's been just a little bit over a year um michelle and i michelle is my beautiful wife come on put your hands together for michelle molina mission i love you michelle she's a brand new mom by the way five months we had our first baby baby boys names maddox monroe molina um i'm i'm i think i'm i'm trying to um prophesy that he's gonna be the 53rd president of the united states i don't know if that's like i don't even know what number we're at now so like mathematically i don't know if that adds up um he'll be 17. um but yeah michelle and i have been part of the vu story from the very beginning and um we actually gave our lives to christ at rendezvous which is where vu church is birthed out of a tuesday night young adults ministry and um we joined the welcome team then the growth track team but the the crew world the small groups world has something that has been something that really impacted us from the very beginning so we jumped on board with that too so um now it's really awesome that we get to serve in that capacity and uh michelle serves in that capacity at a at kind of like a pretty high level she is a crew captain on there um so i don't know if you want to explain a little bit about what being a crew captain is all about yeah so um basically so kyle over here cal graham he's our crew director he does an incredible job so my role as crew captain is basically just to support him in his role um with us as much as he might need and um underneath crew captains we've got crew coaches and then under our crew coaches we've got crew leaders so we've kind of set up like this um this system of levels so that people can just be held accountable and know who to reach out to when when things are necessary so that's my role yeah absolutely feel supported and have different layers of people um just really like michelle said holding him accountable but accountable in the sense of making sure that they have somebody to count on um and the most important man here mr kyle graham our crew director come on put your hands together forum i got to give a shout out to my wife she's the beautiful one sitting right there really cruz run because of her not because of me um yeah but yeah i love it so crew kyle he's our our crew director and um avu church we always say um that we are not a church with small groups we're a church made up of small groups so for us the whole vision behind what we do at church is really focused on two things like sunday attendance that's awesome and and um you know sunday's spike and the and they come down and we're always looking at that for sure but what we care about most is people in small group and people on team because if you're if you're invested in something then really that's where the impact in your life starts to happen so we're always trying to push people to small groups always trying to push people to join team and encourage them the different ways of doing that um so crew has been part of the vu church narrative from the very beginning we actually launched vu cruz which um is what our word for small group so if you're wondering what crew is it's our word for small group but we launched vue crews before we even launched sunday services so kyle was kind of there from the very beginning so maybe you could kind of just talk to us a little bit about that journey how we started and then really what what crew is and what it means to us yeah um just like adrian said um cruz is a big a really really big part of our church a huge part of our story and we launched cruz probably a year before we launched sunday's services and part of the big reason for that is because we always say that we're um church is not a place it's a people and so we were always trying to make sure people understood this like i don't have to go to church on sunday to be the church i can go and do it monday tuesday thursday tuesday morning and be the church with the eight different people the 12 the 15 different people that i'm in crew with um but so our very first week it's kind of cool to like look back and just you know see where we came from thank god you know for what he's done but we launched four crews that very first like the very first week and i remember we had 37 people in it and we were so pumped about that we were excited about that um into in every season and we'll kind of talk about that in a minute but uh we continue to add more and more leaders more and more crews and so currently we have 139 crews and we see probably well over 1500 people in small groups each week and so it's really really cool to see where we came from um and then it's also really fun to see where we're going but the reason or another big reason why crew is so important is it's because it's a place where we develop culture and so at vu we always say culture culture happens by design and not default um and so we are very very intentional about the culture uh language things that we're saying um and we and so as we pick crew leaders these are all things that we're looking at because we want to develop the right culture within our church within our small groups and so there's a handful of ways that we do that we'll probably touch on it in a minute but that essentials booklet that's in front of you that is all culture for us some of the things that are in there are good cultural statements bad cultural statements so these are things that like we want our crew leaders to be saying things that we don't want them to be saying we don't want them to be saying like man i have to be here uh we want them to you know say things like i get to be here uh we we have another thing called the culture god and again that's another booklet for of cultural statements um things that we believe and things that we profess here at vu but our uh each crew night is is structured and again all of this is by design nobody can just you know do whatever it's all structured and i think michelle's gonna talk about that in a little bit but really the goal is to develop to develop healthy culture healthy relationships within crews yeah absolutely and michelle kind of hit on this a little bit earlier but um within the crew world we we kind of figured really quickly that we needed to systemize the way that we did things because if we didn't then it was kind of gonna get out of our reach um so within the crew department although we only have really one staff member that oversees it which would be kyle he's got an entire army of people that are supporting him an entire servant leader base that's really supporting him and those are our different layers so michelle was talking about how there's crew leaders so crew leaders would be a a pair a pairing of people so um co-ed cruz is one of the avenues that we have so a man and a woman leading together we have um uh gender-specific crews so men leading together women leaning together we have vuhi crews which are um for our youth our uh high school students and our junior high students and then we have college crews so crews that we do here on um and do at fiu but above our crew leaders we would have what we call crew coaches so crew coaches are people that oversee probably four to six different crews in a season and i'll define what i mean in a second just by season but these crew coaches are crew leaders in and of themselves who have graduated into this next level because they've had a successful crew for such a long time so now their role is not only to steward the people that are within their crew but they've kind of got another small crew to take care of which is all the different crew leaders that are in underneath their leadership so they would support them from a pastoral component they would support them from material from resourcing um if somebody's having a difficult time gathering people and having a difficult time leading discussion they would actually go and coach and mentor and sit in the crew and help them lead discussion and help them flow through the different night uh of what crew looks like which we'll talk about and then above crew coaches we would have our crew captains which is what michelle was talking about so crew captains we have about four of them uh every season give or take and these crew captains are like kyle's department they're like kyle's staff so uh crew's really cool in the sense that it's it's built kind of a structure in and of its own like its own organization it's got an admin function to it it's got a recruitment function it's got um a resource and development function to it and then it's got kind of like this pastoral care function so when i say function it's actually teams of people made up of different crew leaders that fit within these four different buckets and the captain's job is to help oversee these four different buckets along with kyle so when a new season is coming and we need to ramp up and launch some new crews kyle is leaning on his captains to work within the recruitment bucket and the admin bucket to look at people that we've been resourcing people that we've been developing people that we want to bring up on the journey as crew leaders or if in the middle of the season we're noticing that there's specific trends like we're for example right now in vue church what we're noticing is that the average or not average i'm sorry but the the biggest demographic that attends a vu crew would be uh single women from the ages of 25 to about 33. so what that tells us is that tells us that we have an opportunity there by having by having that data by capturing that data we have an opportunity to launch more uh just female-based crews but also we use vu girl now as a platform to push more women into crew because who's going to voo girl single women between those age groups all women of course but that's the majority of people that are going so we're trying to capture as much data as possible within the small group world to help us make more intelligent decisions in the different avenues of our church different aspects of our church um but we also have like a we have a seasonal model so you want to talk a little bit about that yeah so we do crew every other week um and so what we seasons are defined is uh three months so january february or march we would call an in season april would be our off month may june july in season off month august september october november in season december off month really uh the reason we do that is it gives crew leaders the opportunity to rest and so on that off month we have no cruise our crew leaders get to rest gives us an opportunity to evaluate um for crew leaders it's cool because they can say i'm signing up for a season if for whatever reason i can't do it the next season um they know that the off month is that time where they can say hey you know i can't lead next season and then that gives us a chance to you know to figure out in this third area is launch new crews and to fill in spaces where crew leaders you know may just have to step out for a season and so um some of the things that we do on the off month we have this thing called coaches huddle that's an opportunity for all of our crew coaches all of our crew captains to really come together to really rally and get ready for the uh for that upcoming season it gives us an opportunity to digest some good information it gives us an opportunity to really um have a leadership development moment and it gives us an opportunity to really celebrate uh what all god's gonna do in the upcoming season yeah absolutely and that seasonal model it's just not specific to the crew world that seasonal model applies to our church in general so for us seasons we have three a year january february march and then an off month in april um then we have may june july and off month in august and then september october november and off month in december so in the off month we're still gathering on sundays and we're still doing church but basically our midweek programming stops and the whole point of that is like kyle said to create rest but also to evaluate and then talk about what we want to launch in the next season so that's what we would do in the crew world but in addition just to the structure michelle and in addition to our seasonal model we're also pretty intentional about trying to resource our crew leaders as much as possible so why don't you talk to us about different ways we do that yeah absolutely so during our off month what we do is we gather all the new crew leaders that are going to be stepping out to lead their own crews within the next season and we do something that we call crew coaching and it's really exactly what it sounds so we bring them together and it's pretty much like an in-depth training a play-by-play of what's expected in crew we talk about everything from ccb which is our church database and how to send out invites how to work through process cues how to take attendance for the night and we also go through the flow of a crew night what that should look like what kinds of conversations we should be having and um it's really like kyle said we're just taking that moment to just get excited for the season to come we're building culture um we're big on culture we're big on making sure that everyone has gotten around the same language that we're using in our crews and um so that's crew coaching and again that's during the off season but then something else that we do which is relatively new for us as a church is something that we're calling right now coaching 2.0 and i love this because we're not just equipping our leaders right before the season starts or right at the end of the season we're equipping them in the middle so we're having conversations about let's say a more in-depth training on a ccb our database it takes a few of us some time to really get a hold of that some people have that spiritual gift of administration so you know not all of us do um so that's an example of something that we might step into for coaching 2.0 or maybe we just want to have um a real conversation on how to handle the tough conversations that come up in cruise or or how to make sure that your discussions don't veer off topic and how to revert them back to what it is that we're talking to so it's just another opportunity that we get to really just speak into the heart of our leaders equip them and empower them for the rest of the season and then the last thing that we do which is probably one of my favorites and we call this crew catch up and actually for the last couple seasons we've done it like in some of the biggest nightclubs in miami which is like so radical that like we're stepping into those spaces and and really what we do is we celebrate all the wins of the season so here who church we say that we honor up we honor down we honor all around so we never want to miss an opportunity to step into a space and honor our crew leaders so our crew leaders are invited to that event our co-leaders are invited and really it's an opportunity to just celebrate everything that's that god has done we give out awards and we wish we could give out awards to everyone but we give awards like our fast starter award and that's really for like the new crew leaders who've just stepped into a space and they've owned it they've got tons of people coming out to their crew they send their attendants in on time they're constantly reaching out to people they're persistent about inviting people to crew we've given an award out like turn up the turnip crew award and that's awesome so that goes out to a crew that's just got like their own mini church happening on a crew night like you'll see like 30 and 40 people showing up so we love that and we also really get an opportunity to share some powerful stories that have come through about what god has done in people's lives and how people's lives have been changed so those are pretty much the three things that we we hold at least to to equip our leaders throughout the season yeah absolutely and so that crew coaching happened at the beginning of the season the people that are that are expected to attend that would be brand new crew leaders so if it's your first time leading a crew you would get invited to crew coaching and it's about an hour blocked out on a sunday where we would bring in food and we'd do some training coaching 2.0 like michelle said is brand new to us and honestly it's something that we're just trying to figure out what we realize is like with our servant leader base so server leader is what we say for volunteer with our servant leader base we we resource them a lot we have team nights every season we have team leader meetings we have um a team conference we have a different we have a lot of different ways that we're resourcing them but we we aren't actually resourcing our small group leaders nearly enough so 2.0 is our effort of doing that so there's so much awesome content that we're getting from pastor ridge from pastor john cheri and just different resources even on staff our staff meetings and leadership content that's shared that now we can package and we can provide to our crew leaders on sundays so that's really our our idea behind 2.0 and then like michelle said catch up is really a fun event to come and celebrate so it's not so much a an event for you to come and get trained but just to honor the crew leaders in the house to say hey you are the church you're the hands and feet you're the ones that are doing the work out in the city you are the ones that are that are changing this city and it's a moment to celebrate them to honor them and there is a teaching in it there is a a preaching moment to it there's a worship moment to it for sure but really that's the heartbeat behind it it's to celebrate them and honor them and uh we michelle said something she said the word co-leader so within our crew world we have these things that we call building blocks and it's in here so you could find it in a little bit but what are our six building blocks within a crew and why did we decide to go that route yeah we're always trying to help our crew leaders and we wanted to create a system where they could look at that'd be easy for them to just say hey this is the way that i can build a team around me uh one of the things that i believe so much is that if you're going to do a job try to get as many people as you can to do it with you and so crew is no exception to that so we call these the six building blocks i personally believe that um the crews that do really really well have these six building blocks the ones that struggle a little bit tend to not have them um and whenever people call and say hey you know like what is one thing in crew that you really really value something that you've learned i always say uh the six building blocks were a game changer for us and so every crew leader by default has two leaders so that'd be like me and my wife leading our crew on thursday nights and then we tell all of our crew leaders hey get two co-leaders these are the people that you're training up these are the people that you're helping uh run the night and ideally these are the ones that are gonna be leading crew hopefully the next season if not the next um the one after that and so that's four right there if you can get the uh the two co-leaders and then um we wanted somebody to be the cultivator this person is the one that is bringing the ice breaker um this one this is the person that's outgoing because um if if crew becomes a little stale at some points the cultivator is the one that brings it back they're the one that has the outgoing personality defining stories of real life change within their crew and so um so you have the two leaders you have two co-leaders you have the cultivator but we also have the calculator um we don't like to call them the admin so we call them the calculator and this person is the one that's doing the attendance they're submitting the crew report at the end of the night they're the ones that are writing down the praise reports and the prayer requests every single crew you know we open up the floor to you know to praise god for different things to to pray for different things um so they're doing all that and they're also getting all the new people's information um first names last names phones emails address just so we can um you know follow up with them making sure that we're sending invites to them and stewarding those people uh you know the way that we're supposed to and so i always tell our crew leaders if you have the six building blocks ideally you'll have more than six at a crew um but if you don't have six building blocks then it's gonna be kind of a struggle throughout the crew season to get people to your crew so again for us it's all about rallying and getting a team around you to help you know again develop leaders and then uh you know with the intent that they're gonna lead crew the following season yeah exactly so the heart behind it is to start in strength the heart behind it is to rally a group around you so that you feel supported all of us have probably at some point been to a small group or maybe even led a small group and it's like it's pretty difficult to lead that discussion and it could be a little bit awkward to talk about things that might be counter culture but if you've got people around you that are supporting you people around you that are buying into people around you that are advocating for you then you feel like you're starting in strength but it's also a way to make sure that we are developing people for future crews so the reason that we were able to go from four to 139 in just a short amount of time are because of those building blocks because every season if i've got five people or four people underneath me in my crew and i'm intentionally pouring into them and having them lead the discussion along with me or having them do the icebreaker having them lead any component any moment of the crew it's preparing them for the next season so maybe after they've done that a couple seasons they're ready to step out and lead their own crew we also decided to crew in public spaces so maybe talk a little bit about why we decide to do that yeah i i think for us um on unlike i guess the leadership level it gives us the ability to have a little bit of quality control um so that's i don't know so that's one of the reasons um but i think an even more exciting reason is it gives us the ability to really be a light in a in a place that maybe doesn't see light very often and so all of our crews meet um in coffee shops they meet in restaurants um they meet in different places that have food we're really big on having a party with food so currently none of our um crews are meeting in homes we may get to a point where we do them in homes but right now the model that we that we're run with has been working and so we don't want to shift and lose momentum on that um but that's really the big reason why that you know we do cruising in public spaces yeah and we're open to it for sure we've had i mean our church demographic is changing right so michelle and i a year ago were just recently married but now we're recently married and have a baby so in a couple years we're gonna want to have a crew that's conducive to that right so right now michelle and i meet kind of like at a bar so it's a little bit difficult to bring our five-month-old along with us there so as the demographic of our church is going to change then we're going to make sure that we pivot along with that so we've had plenty of conversations about having crews in homes we're just trying to figure out what the healthiest model of that looks like for us where we are right now and then the last thing that we can go through is um an epic crew night so at your table you have this little sheet that kind of runs through our flow but michelle maybe you could guide us through what a crew night looks like yeah i'm excited that you guys are able to take this home with you just because i know it's helped adrian and i out tremendously when we're leading our crews it's it's helped our the people that we've got in as our building blocks uh just because we can follow this along um all season long but i'll run through it really quickly but you can see that we start out with uh arrival and preparation so we're constantly encouraging our crews to well and so you know our discussions are based off of a sunday message and usually it's the sunday before and so what i love about that is that any crew that you step into so you can have you can attend a consistent monday night crew and if you couldn't for some reason you got to go to a tuesday morning crew you know that whatever they talked about monday night they're also going to be talking about tuesday morning so that's quality control right there but we always just like to prepare in advance we don't practice on people right so uh that's super important we also have this crew kit that we've created and we give that out to our crew leaders and that's kind of just got like a little table stand because in the past we've heard that like people start like waving random people down and they're like not sure like do i know you no but are you coming to crew um so that's awesome that's part of the crew kit then we mingle and eat and i think that this is such an important part of crew because before the discussion ever takes place we've got people walking in who've probably never even stepped in a church before which we've seen is usually the higher statistic that people are coming into crew who've never stepped in a church so what we do is we encourage our our building blocks we're like hey let's let's really step out let's not just continue to connect with people who are our best friends and crew let's step out and reach out to those people who are coming to the first time make them feel welcome make them feel like they're at home because they are and through that we continue to build our relationships so that's what the mingling and eating portion is all about so i love that it literally breaks it down time by minute by minute and so you know our goal all around as a church is that we've structured our cruise by a total of 90 minutes so you've got this here um to help you out with that next we would do just a quick welcome we introduce ourselves we talk about what is crew and i was just chatting with kyle about this that i love that at every single crew we start that way and i know it sounds silly because maybe we've got people who have been crew goers from day one and you're thinking well why are you constantly sharing what a crew is with people who already know what a crew is but what i love about that is that it just builds culture and it builds language so next next thing you know those co-leaders that you got who are stepping out and leading their own crews like they know how to talk to people about crew they know how to invite people and um it's just really good to to build culture around that so welcome we talk about when we meet for crews we honor people who are attending maybe for the first time then we step into our icebreaker and uh those should take about 15 minutes those are always a blast and we we just like to keep them light and fun um we've done things before like someone's created a little jeopardy game on their tablet their ipad and they'll like click little topics and pass it around the group and it's like you know what's your dream vacation or tell me about a childhood memory that you'll never forget so some awesome little tidbits of icebreakers like that and then we go into praise reports just because we always love to be celebrating what god is doing in our lives and that's special because the crew before people will be praying for things and then they'll come back the next crew and they'll have something to share about what what god did and and it's it's really fun to to celebrate with people with that and then on the back side we go into our crew discussion so i love there really quickly we've got a 30-70 rule so we say that our leaders should really only be talking 30 of the time and and really we encourage everyone else in crew to speak not that they have to and if they don't that's totally fine silence is good sometimes so if there's those moments where it's it's quiet in a crew that's all right just get the gets the flow going and then we do prayer requests so we basically tell everyone a crew that this is just because we want to get everyone gathered around as a community as a church praying for the needs of our house our pastors are praying for that our leaders are praying for that we believe in the power of prayer and we know that nothing is too small for god so we really take a moment to just take some prayer requests our calculator jots those down we pray and then we go into announcements so this is just not to be redundant not to just share hey you know we've got growth track happening or we've got an i love my city community outreach happening or baptisms are taking place but again it's because we want to bring as many people on the journey as possible so we want to give them the information on how to get plugged in in church what next steps you can take to get on this journey alongside us and then we honor people and then after crew we just thank people for coming out and and connect and just continue to build relationships there on out yeah exactly so our programming for crew like michelle said is 90 minutes so at the end of every crew we would say hey crew is officially done but no one has to leave i just want to let you know that if you want to leave you're definitely free to go you are always free to go right but you know what i mean um and uh yeah cruise over but we could still hang and people usually mingle people usually hang i would say another 30 minutes or so so our crews um are uh monday night so at 7 30 to 9 00 p.m and then we have tuesday morning cruise we offer tuesday morning cruise at 7 00 a.m and then 9 a.m and then um we have crews on tuesday night now a 7 30 crew all of our night crews are always at 7 30 and our morning cruise are at 7 00 a.m or 9 a.m so for us we do monday night tuesday morning tuesday night we don't have anything on wednesday because wednesday as a church we do team night so we don't want to like make those things conflict with one another and then on thursdays we have thursday morning thursday night friday we have friday morning and friday night and that's kind of new for us we haven't really done that in the past we just really started with the morning cruise recently and it's been working out um especially with so many young professionals being able to go to crew in the morning before work or maybe people that have their manage their own work schedules we have a lot of entrepreneurs or creatives and different people that it might be harder for them to do something at night because maybe they're working on some sort of assignment but they could do a crew at 7am or 9am they attend those crews um so why don't you put your hands together for this team come on good job so really this space is we're we're hoping that like we we're providing at least something that's resourceful for you but definitely the intention of this space too is to open it up to questions we want to have a conversation with you so we still have plenty of time to be able to do that so that's what i want to do now um anyone who feels comfortable and has a question maybe something that you're you've been wanting to ask pertaining to small groups something you've been wondering that we can be a resource to you for we'd love to answer that even if it's just about blue church in general if it's not pertaining to small groups but you have a question in general we'd be happy to to answer any questions you have so does anybody at this point have questions yeah in the back there on page 26 it says yeah yeah absolutely so on page 26 talks about how a team should swat and um for us evaluation is something that we take very seriously um because one of our staff values is to make it better so we're always celebrating but after we celebrate we're looking ahead right so even right now 2019 boot conference we're in the moment we're loving it but we're already okay next week next year we're at the watsco and this is what we have to do different or this space needs to look like i walked in this space i said next year this space is going to look different and i'm going to put it on my swap because i'm thinking about 2020. so all of our servant leaders all of our teams all of our crew leaders we teach them how to swat and then we kind of culturally just create this expectation that we're always swatting after gathering so a swat would be a strength so what what was strong about what you were a part of whether that was a team night or whether that was a crew night or that was you serving on the welcome team on sunday what are some strengths that you saw weaknesses what are some areas of opportunities that you saw um oh opportunities would be like what can we improve for the next time and then threats are kind of things that are like outside of your control um so a threat good example a threat is that it's a seven minute walk from the watts go to here and that it could rain that's a threat that is outside of my control however now that i know that that's a real threat for the future for 2020 i have to build a plan in my mind now how to get 1 500 people from there to here if it were to thunderstorm at that time does that make sense so swat is something that we're always talking about we turn in every week and we're always asking crew coaches crew captains and crew leaders to think that way about their night so michelle and i on the drive home from our crew will say all right what do we do good today what do we not do so good what can we do better next time and then like what what was the threat oh the restaurant was playing the music too loud is that in my control or not in my control how can i fix that i hope that helps other questions yes sir uh first off happy father's day oh thank you that's me yeah you're the first person to tell me that thank you this second is kind of a two-part question uh to whether it be uh on all three levels but so leaders co-leaders uh attendance or dedication to being you know a certain leader you know participating in being a co-leader or leader or whatever how do you overcome that nutrition right and then the second question is how do you overcome the nutrition of people coming to cruise um maybe some of the people aren't christians for sure you know they're they're just coming from fashion you know how do you open their contributions on both sides yeah not like really yeah yeah so so the first question was the leaders right yeah i think what we've really discovered pretty quickly is that every season um i mean i go into the season and i'm like in initially i'm like man like this is gonna be the best season all these people are dedicated and at the end of the season if they drop it doesn't mean that they're not dedicated um but i'm like you know we're not gonna lose any but what we've quickly realized is that every single season you know people are gonna drop uh it could be for a number of reasons a lot of very valid reasons you know work school moving and so uh what we've really decided to do is as we've decided or we've started to keep data on this so we can look like okay season 1 2019 we lost 10 of our leaders you know season two what is that gonna look like well if we're adding new crew leaders there's a strong chance that that could get a little bit bigger and so every season we put together a big list of all of our co-leaders so we um one of the things that we do and we just finished doing uh this last week was we sent out a building block form to all of our leaders saying hey we want to know who your co-leaders are uh your calculators your cultivators what that's also going to ask is are they ready to lead the following season if they say yes uh and and just so everybody knows we don't just um pick leaders we always ask uh for the opinions of their crew leaders is this person ready because a lot of times they know a lot of things that we don't know about these people especially as we grow these are kind of the things that we're trying to do to again um continue that culture that we've developed um as we get bigger and so um we'll get that list back we'll we'll start developing a big list of season uh so right now uh season three leaders so we have a big list already um and so as leaders start you know telling us hey i can't lead next season uh the first thing that we want to do is if adrian and i are leading the men's crew and an adrian or myself can't lead the idea is that our co-lead is gonna step up and take that sometimes that doesn't happen so we're always trying to go through that list um and see who can who can fill that slot um now regards to like crew crew attendance um one of the things that we've noticed too is that the more intentional you are the more that you value the people the more the people are going to want to come back and i know it's so it's so um cliche but people really don't care how much you know until they know how much you care like they really want to feel valued as they come to crew one things that we tell them is like our crew leaders is that if you're gonna text a person they have crew and like say hey you know we have crew tonight give them two weeks and you're probably not going to see them again because they're not just a number like these are people and and i just believe so much that we're called to steward them and so we um talk to our leaders a lot just about the off weeks following up staying engaged i'm always texting guys in my crew just saying hey how you doing i want you to know i love you i'm praying for you this week and so it really just develops that culture now sure there is a lot of times when um you know crews start to get smaller and those are individual conversations that we you know begin to have with with our crew leaders some of the ways that we uh get people into crew i think the first way is through personal invitations what i've discovered so much is that people are wanting to come to crew and people will come to crew they just want to invite not because they can't get to themselves or they don't know where to go but they just want a connection at crew when they get there in order to go to a crew you don't have to sign up you can just go um and so we'll have conversation with our leaders we'll ask them hey are you inviting people uh who's your building blocks are they inviting people do you have your invite list can i see your invite list some of the other things that we do is again sundays you know people sign up on connect cards that's ways we funnel uh people in the crew um social media is is a big way that we funnel people in the crew but we're always for us it's it's it's those individual conversations with specific crew leaders on getting more to the root of what you know what's going on uh obviously a lot you know some people are more gatherers than others but we're always trying to encourage our leaders to you know invite people we all have access to people on sundays in the courtyard and so um biggest way we're trying to get people in the crew is is inviting them yeah yeah and in terms of i think maybe stewardship of like people so volunteers and then you're also crew leaders i don't know if that was kind of like the heart of a part of the question too we never did that before so people were burning out and people were falling through the cracks like crazy and we're like what what's going on why are people burning out so what we just started doing was actually like a tier system at our church for for leaders so a tier three leader would be somebody who is at this level in our church a tier two leader is this level in our church a tier one leader is this level in our church so tier one can do x x amount of things at once tier two can do x amount of things at once tier three can only do this does that make sense so crew captain right is a volunteer role that's a tier three role so a crew captain cannot be a team leader number one for their health but number two for the health of what they're over right so we never we never did that before but in order to prevent all the attrition that's something that we started doing too um other questions yes sir do you have uh measurables for like helping know when a co-leader is ready to become a leader who don't self-identify but you can see them before what are those yeah so we we don't have it necessarily like um it's not uh uh there's not like an evaluation or a ranking there's not an objective measurable it's a subjective measurable um but it would be that they've led x amount of discussions they've been in crew x amount of time for us at church what we're looking for is we're looking for people who are on team who've graduated from the growth track who attend sunday at least twice a month and who are faithful attenders of a small group so if if you were doing that and you're my co-lead and now you've led discussion for two seasons i'm gonna tap you on the shoulder and say hey i think you're ready brother like let's let's figure this out or what do you feel like you need in this next season in order to prepare you for the for the one after does that make sense yeah other questions yes um i was just wondering how do you guys run growth track at future yeah yeah okay so um growth track we we you know pastor mike todd just said how he ripped stephen pastor stephen ferdick's message we ripped growth track from church of the highlands so we yeah we just exactly what they did yeah exactly they they do it the best so in my opinion so that's what we do but growth track is on sunday and we offer it two different sessions at one of our locations and one session at the other location it's an hour and it's four steps you don't have to go in order but if you go in order it's great it's step one it's about knowing god step two finding freedom step three discovering purpose step four making a difference so step one is all bible jesus salvation step two is about connecting with the ministries of our church we talk about what we believe why we believe it step three is discover it's about you so you take a personality assessment spiritual gift assessment um and then that's given to you um and then step four is making a difference so the way that we do that we we feel is to serve other people so we provide a space for you to meet with our different teams and join team in that step uh four month yeah every sunday yeah every sunday the only time that we wouldn't is if there's five sundays in a month so for example i think in in june or july there's a fifth sunday so we'd go step one two three four fifth sunday we'd take off but we try to take advantage of that sunday not take advantage but you know what i mean right so yeah yeah do something with it we'd have like crew coaching on a sunday like that right we do a crew coaching coaching 2.0 or we do a growth track training so like for the team leaders we do some sort of training on that sunday because people are they're used to gathering at that time anyway so if you're already going to commit that time let's make it beneficial for you yeah two questions first do you use a document to structure the discussion of the sermon for your groups and then i see um immediately after proof you submit your career what can you talk about yeah so our crew report so we have access to a church community builder so we can do that online or we've got um through the app it's called the lead app and uh basically we would give our calculators access to go into our group so like adrian and michelle's crew so by i'd say like 9 10 p.m so our crew ends at 9 00 p.m they would have already entered into that app and it'll ask you it'll show people who are in our process queue so those are people who have been consistently coming to crew and it you just check off people as we go we would input everyone's prayer requests and we would input their praise reports we'd talk a little bit about how the night went so we'd say you know what um lauren led the icebreaker and adrian led the welcome michelle did the discussion and we'd say a little bit about how that went we might put the swot in there as well and then um we'd put some not an um what am i not important like important notes but yeah like if there's some like a pastoral care need or something that comes up that was we'd make notes for that just so that when those reports do come in we can make sure that we've got some someone from our leadership team reaching out to people about that and um and we'd submit that yeah yeah and there is a template so every crew leader would get a template that kind of looks like like this so our our communications team they do all the writing at our church so they would listen to the sunday sermon and then our blog team would write a blog on it our communications team would write a crew outline on it yeah and we i'm sorry go ahead that we post our crew discussion so it's available to everyone you guys can even access it yourself so we tell everyone at crew that they can go to vuechurch.com forward slash crew and they can pull it up on their phones so our design team has done a great job of doing that and making it accessible for everyone right and the crew discussion it would have a introduction so hey we're talking about uh check your circle pastor rich preach check your circle a couple sundays ago check your circle the bible verse an intro to what check your circle's all about and then two to three points and each point would have a question associated to it and then a summary and then that's it so it'd be a one-page document that would help guide you in that discussion yeah so uh we'll usually send it the thursday before crew so we'll start crew this monday and we'll send it or we would have sent it yesterday and then um um the backslash crew and would get updated uh just as quickly you had a question sir i do um i want a two-year-old church planner and i kind of want to know how why do you test your net when it comes to leaders and kind of feel me and help me out with that because i truly want to notice that we can guess as wide of that as possible without compromising sure yeah i appreciate that question i appreciate um you know you being transparent with that and i think you guys are in the right place so you guys are going to keep going in the direction that you're going it's going to be good and i'm really believing for you i think it'd be cool if we connect after this i'd love to like hear more about you no way what's your name oh what's up drew yeah we have talked on the phone it's awesome wow that's cool um we don't have that figured out you know so if we i'm not alone right yeah come on put your hands together if you're in the same boat we we we don't have that figured out and if we did like i i yeah it would be awesome and i'd package it and sell it um no but we don't we don't have that figured out we we try to cast we try to cast a wide net because we all of us are on the journey for sure um we try to cast a wide net because miami is very unchurched because there's a unfortunate there's a unfortunately there's a pretty bad narrative down here on what it means to be a christian or what it means to be part of a church that's true probably everywhere right but just yeah yeah totally yeah exactly so i think like every area has got unique things that you're going through so we try to cast a wide net in the sense that here's what we're always very clear on jesus is our message people are heart you don't have to believe to belong you don't have to behave to belong you belong here that's what we say always but we do have convictions in terms of who we allow to pastor people and lead people so for us crew like food church doesn't have until now really until like this last season we didn't have a pastoral care team we didn't have people that were just focused on pastoral care so the pastoral care of vu church were our crew leaders because they're the ones that are in other people's lives and really figuring out what's going on in people's lives and speaking into situations in people's lives so we take that very seriously so we have questions all the time about who can lead and and why they can or why they can't and for us it's not it's never a blank statement we we don't allow this and we do allow this it's always a conversation so hey where are you on the journey let's talk about it let's figure this out do you think it's in the best interest right now yes or not why and that's that's kind of where we're at does that help but we can talk more about it for sure yeah yeah off of that um what do you got how often do you see a crew leader that you thought was ready took the race to put them in the position and then they almond yeah and what do you do that's how you guys handle mistakes and failure and stuff like that yeah um i think it happens you know uh i guess we'd probably lying if we didn't say um it happens again i what adrian says is or not what agents said but what adrian just said is is is it's always a conversation um and so it i think being a new church it kind of helps us in in in seeing maybe some of the blind spots that we didn't identify um i think what we try to really do a good job of again is is um talking to their crew leaders beforehand uh i'm never gonna or we're never gonna say hey this person's gonna lead and we're not gonna ask their crew leader for their opinion for their write-off whatever we're always having conversations with the crew leader um tell me a little bit more about this person um tell me a little bit about this the journey this person's on um how often are they coming to crew are they a co-leader and this gives us a lot of information whether or not we realize it um and so if if things happen if they vomit i like that i like that terminology i'm gonna start using it um yes we have conversations around it um again we have convictions there's things that you know that that were that you know that we stand on um but we're always having good conversations with those crew leaders um just again where are you in the journey um tell us a little bit more about this uh we never want to come across as like you're you know you're bad you don't have the ability to lead anymore um and we're and we're never gonna tell a leader you know you can't lead anymore because of x y and z that just happened and so i think those are kind of the things in the way that we would approach it but again it's i guess every approach is unique just because every person is unique and so um yeah i don't know if you have anything to add yeah like every every season there's people that you pick to lead and that they they struggle every single season and so the way that we know that is we keep really clear data on what people are doing in terms of attendance not because we're counting people but because people count so we want to make sure that like we we want to pay attention to that but it also helps us understand who we need to have combos with so every single season you're going to see people that you expect that are going to start really high and then they don't start high um what we've found for the most part is that they're just not running the play so like we are very simplistic down to back to the basics run the play this is what we do this is how we do crew this is how everybody should do crew why because it's it's proven it's tried it's successful um so if somebody's having four or five people in crew it's awesome but we're gonna have a combo around did you send your invites when did you send them out how did you send them out do you have building blocks what are your building blocks doing for you all these different questions and what you end up finding out is that there's gaps so the attendance is a reflection of the gaps and then also you said how do we support it we support it with the layers of leadership so that's why crew coaches exist that's why crew captains exist it's like hey i'm struggling i'm having a rough time getting people here all right we're gonna we're gonna dispatch our coaches to go and support you in your crew and in this season uh right next to you had a hand up yeah so as far as what is it that you um for in that person like are you looking for a passion that needs to be enthusiastic or does it kind of like vary depending on the person like do you guys have like a set thing that you guys use in order to take those people so you're talking about like building blocks like how do we know to find like who's going to be our co-lead cultivator calculator how do you how do you like when you visit somewhere i don't know if you like take those people from others to create their own i think it's a combination of things um i think speaking from adrian and i's experience within our own crew it's never that we've like just had one person in mind i think we've just kind of use our discernment to like build relationships with people and then you find out that like people are just willing and people are able and people just want to take their participation and crew to the next level and it's really just starts by having a conversation and like seeing the potential in someone if they're speaking up in crew or they're they're asking how can i get more involved or or how can i potentially lead my own crew i love when we get questions like that and we're like hey if you want to one day lead your own crew like start here you know start with the small stuff if it's bring in an icebreaker you're going to crush that icebreaker you know or being a calculator or being a co-leader and potentially leading a discussion one day i think it's just making yourself available you know and um i think that's that's what we're looking for and everyone's got the potential in them you know and and it's just a matter of empowering people and seeing that in them speaking that kind of life into them and and then you going from there i hope that answers that yeah so like the ability is important because like yeah discussion but availability i think for us would be more important um so like i i didn't know what was in me until pastor rich called it out of me so there's guys in my crew that are timid to lead a discussion and i'm like all right homie next week you're leading a discussion and it's i'm calling it because i see it so i'm calling it out of him and allow giving him this the space to fail the space to mess up but then now a space where people love them and where it's a free space it's a judge free space and we're going to encourage it so that it's not like hey we're looking for this package we're just looking for people who want to commit to the journey right right so i know that doesn't really answer but kind of answers you had a question yeah these are always fun i think i think i i think we're pretty flexible the the question was how do we choose a location of where to have crew yep yeah uh i think we're pretty flexible like what we always tell leaders is like it needs to be a place that has food it's got to be a place that you know because a lot of times in miami people are coming straight from work after a long day and so we want um people to have the ability to eat to hang out we just think that fellowship happens so so much naturally over food so that's really the first thing probably the second biggest thing is noise level um i can't tell you how many times you know even bree and i have uh thought we found an awesome location and then we get there thursday night and um we didn't realize but the music is blasted loud because it's karaoke night and so we're always like having that conversation okay you know does it have food um does it um what's the noise level but then for uh geographically we're always we're looking at places uh that we don't have cruising so maybe hialeah we don't have a ton of cruise in maybe we have it on a thursday night and a monday night but if we don't have it on on a friday night we want to identify that is as a place to to launch a new crew so we're going to look at our hialeah cruise we're going to say hey you know is there people in this crew on monday or thursday that could potentially launch a thursday crew we also go through our database and pull information on where um there's a lot of people that are coming from church so again if we're seeing a lot of people coming from let's just say aventura area coming to church and we only have one crew there then that kind of gives us the opportunity opportunity to say okay we might need some more cruise up in that space and so that's kind of the uh way that we would i i guess answered it in two different ways but that's kind of the way that we would look at it um [Music] i think i think we try to develop good relationships with with each venue uh we don't want to just be a place that uh you know takes their space and so we wanna you know let them know that hey i'm you know we're gonna be meeting with 10 15 people here and we want you to know that we're gonna you know bring business we're not just here to take your space and so uh we always encourage our crew leaders to you know to develop good relationships uh you know with the managers with the restaurants that they're that they're going into awesome all right well it has been an hour and we okay one more come on how do you take what you learn in crew and put it into action for us crew is about community so crew is a it's a an event right that vu church is orchestrating for people to gather but the intention behind it is for people to gather outside of just the events that we create so we want to create a vessel space a platform for people to gather but the whole heartbeat behind it is to meet your friends that you want to do life with so the application of crew is now me and kyle raising our kids together like the application of crew is michelle and i having a couple from our crew over for dinner um so the crew department is a department that's going to kind of really inspect our leaders as to whether they're doing that or not we're also looking at who goes to a crew at our church um that doesn't serve on a sunday and encouraging them to serve who goes to crew at our church that has not graduated from the growth track and encouraging them to do that so those are easy reports that we're able to pull and now if we're able to resource our crew leaders with that say hey you've got 50 of your crew that doesn't go to the growth track maybe you should push the growth track this sunday or the next time that you gather for crew and get people to participate in that does that help awesome all right well why don't you put your hands together good job everybody so our breakout is officially over um but we're gonna hang out if you guys have any questions our next session doesn't start till 7 30. so we love you guys

Channel: VOUS Church

Views: 6,135

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: vous, vous church, vous conference, sermon, conference, miami, no one else is coming, faith, church, rejection, evangelism, people, love, Future, 2020, 2019, richwilkersonjr, wilkerson, DC, dawnchere, sisterhood, strength, rich wilkerson jr, miami church, How to Turn A Crowd Into A Community, Community, Crowd, Turn A Crowd Into A Community, staff

Id: zfemeZcy6yQ

Length: 55min 34sec (3334 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 24 2019