Category: The Edge of Innovation

A Church on Capitol Hill With Pastor Mark Dever

August 6, 2019 / / 0 Comments

On Episode 97 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with Mark Dever, the senior pastor at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington D.C.

Sections

Introduction
A Church on Capitol Hill
About Mark Dever
What is a Church?
Are All Churches Equal?
Why Do People Go To Church?
Who Is God?
More Episodes
Show Notes

A Church on Capitol Hill With Pastor Mark Dever

Introduction

Paul: So, welcome to the Edge of Innovation. Today were talking with Mark Dever from Washington D.C. Mark, I usually put in there the owner of ABC company, but I’m struck. What do you do?

Mark: For a quarter of a century now I’ve been the pastor of a church on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C.

Paul: Okay, so you’re a pastor. What kind of church? I mean is it Buddhist church? Help me out.

Mark. It’s a Christian church. It’s a Baptist church. It’s been around since right after the Civil War.

A Church on Capitol Hill

Paul: So, you’re in Capitol Hill. That sounds like a very interesting place to be. I know a bunch of different people that live in the Washington D.C area and do you suffer from the same myopic view of the world that other people in D.C. suffer from? Because I’m in Boston and people are listening to us from all over the world and I imagine that D.C. has a sort of realty distortion feel. Is that a part of your life?

Mark: People seem to think that is the case. That, you know, if you live, as we put it, inside the beltway, that your absorbed with things that go on here. I think the nature of my work takes me outside the beltway more than most. So, I might be a little less absorbed than the guy who works five blocks away in the Capitol Building.

Paul: Okay.

Mark: Behind the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress. Five blocks just east of the Capitol Building.

Paul: Very cool. So that must be neat. Now you have a church and it’s been there since, you said the 1800s. that’s quite a long time. Do a lot of people go to it? Is it a thriving church? Is it a healthy organization?

Mark: We have about a thousand people on Sunday mornings. And yeah, about a four million dollar, not quite, 3.5 million dollar annual budget. The congregation’s average age is probably about thirty. Yeah, it’s a delightful congregation to be a part of. It has a lot of transiency because were in the middle of the city. A lot of young people come here to work after college and then they meet a spouse, start having kids, find D.C. in the middle is too expensive to live in so they either move out to the suburbs or back up to Boston or someplace.

About Mark Dever

Paul: I see. And so now, you’ve been there 25 years?

Mark: 25 years.

Paul: Wow! Is this what you, when you were young, is this what you envisioned you’d be doing?

Mark: Interestingly, you assume I’m not young but no, in fact, it’s not. I thought I would be a professor.

Paul: A professor of what?

Mark: A professor of historical theology, which means what people in the past have believed.

Paul: Okay, well that’s a whole interesting thing we should talk about. But let’s continue down our path. So, you were going to be a professor.

What is a Church?

Paul: A thousand people at a church. Is that a lot? Is that a little? Is that how you measure the success of a church? You know, I have a small business. We have eleven employees. And that’s a small business. A very small business. But then you’re talking, you know, Boeing. It has thousands of employees, tens of thousands. So, how do you rank that or how do we even discuss that kind of thing?

Mark: I think the average church in America is fifty to a hundred people. So, I think this would be a large church but it’s not what they call in the press, a mega church which is like two thousand or five thousand or ten thousand. This is just like a thousand. It’s a big church.

Paul: I imagine church has something to do with faith and there are many different faiths. How is a church different from like the YMCA or a club or a fraternal club or things like that? Is there a difference?

Mark: Yeah, I think a sociologist or an anthropologist could look at them and see some similarities of them being voluntary social organizations but certainly, from inside a church, it’s very very different because a lot of our members of our church will be members of other organizations. Like, for example, the ones you just named. Or maybe they’re an engineer and they’re part of an association of certain kinds of engineers or they’re a doctor or a they’re teacher and they’re part of a teacher’s union or part of the faculty of the local high school.

But no. A church is distinctive in that it’s specifically a grouping of Christians and it would be people who understand themselves to be taking on special responsibilities for each other and having others take on special responsibilities for them. So, for an example, when we had an older woman in our church a number of years ago, who had never been married and had no children and she grew older and became more infirm. She had worked in our church back in the 1950s and 60s on staff. In retrospect, we felt we had not taken good enough care of her back then, so we simply absorbed all of her costs of her last years as she moved into a home and needed medical attention. We simply as a church, paid for all of that.

Paul: Interesting. And so, does that happen from the leadership….? So, you mentioned you have members of the church. I’m thinking I’ve been a member of a photography club for years and we certainly don’t help people with their needs. We tell them their photo doesn’t look good or you need to do this, or the lens goes away from you when you take the picture and push the button. But this sounds very different.

Mark: Yeah. It’s probably more comprehensive. We would understand that a good local church should be at the center of each Christian’s life and it will help them think through everything from their marriage, to their own relationship with God, to their children, to their job, their education, their neighborhood. Yeah.

Paul: Okay, that’s interesting. So a church is a – I’m just going to repeat back to you what I heard – an organization much more holistic than a photography club, to use that example, that really is concerned with the wellbeing of the people within it? Is that fair?

Mark: That’s certainly fair. We’re also concerned that the basic understanding of God and the relationship we come to have with him through Jesus Christ, is something that he wants everyone to have so we understand that we are under obligation to make this known to others outside our church and even around the world and faraway places like Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

Are All Churches Equal?

Paul: The church has so – I’m stopping myself here because there are lots of different types of churches. You mentioned that you’re a Baptist church. I’ve heard of the Catholic church. I’ve heard of Lutheran, Methodist, you know, Scientology as a church. I don’t even know much about that but what are the differentiators between these? Are they all churches equal or are they different?

Mark: Well usually if there’s a different name attached to a church, there’s some difference behind it that gives rise to that different name. So, Christian churches would be those churches that are Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant, those churches that maintain that God became a man in Jesus Christ. That would be different that something you mentioned like Scientology which would not be that. Or even “The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints” – the Mormons – who would teach that every person is an incarnate potential deity. So, Scientology, Mormonism, would be very different.

Our church would be in the strain of Greek Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, Presbyterianism, which would believe very much in Jesus Christ at the center. We would be different than the old strains of Greek Orthodox or Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic. We’d be with the Protestants in that we believe the way we’re basically made right with God is by trusting in Christ. It’s not by anything we do to cooperate with the church. It’s just our faith in Christ. But that leads us to be a part of local churches which is what all Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, and Congregationalists have historically believed.

Paul: So, it sounds like you have a bent towards understanding the history of the church?

Mark: I did my PHD in Cambridge on history.

Why Do People Go To Church?

Paul: So, I’m struck by… there’s lots of different labels that we’re talking about and they mean different things. Like if you were talking to me about computers or a certain type of technology, I would understand those labels and I guess you’re saying that the belief… Why do people come to your church, Capitol Hill, as a oppose to a church down the street? Is it because you’re a good CEO or what is that?

Mark: I’m sure there are as many different reasons as there are people. Maybe because they like the preaching. They like the singing. They have a friend that comes here. It may be because they’ve found their life changed by this specific teaching that they hear here, or someone at another church that they had been prospering in spiritually, recommended they come here when they moved to D.C.

Paul: Now do you have a sign – not in reality – the idea of a sign that says “Here’s why you’d come to Capitol Hill Baptist church?” What are you advertising? What are you selling?

Mark: Yeah. We wouldn’t actually be in competition with other churches that have the same gospel as we do. So, there would be many churches in Washington D.C. and we would understand that there is no great difference between you going to them or you going to us. We would say the important thing is you going to a church where the Bible is understood and taught.

Paul: Okay, and now you’re The Bible, the Christian Bible which I guess is the Old Testament, New Testament, as opposed to some of the other religious books that have been out there?

Mark: Right. The Hebrew scriptures plus the twenty-seven books of the New Testament.

Paul: Okay, so you’re a place where that is believed, championed, it’s a good idea?

Mark: All of those things. Like if you read Justin Martyr writing in the middle of the second century. He will talk about how on the first day of each week all the Christians gather, and they hear the Gospels read and then they have someone explain it to them. That’s exactly what we do. We read the Bible and we talk about it. We sing and we pray. So, we do what Christians have always done and that’s what so many Christians around the world do every Sunday.

Paul: So, is that different from let’s say, reading the newspaper every Sunday?

Mark: Yeah, because we don’t understand that the newspaper comes from God, whereas we understand that the Bible comes from God.

Who Is God?

Paul: So, you’re saying that the Bible comes from God and who is God in this? I mean, there’s a lot of different definitions and I imagine if you lined up twelve people on the street and asked “Who is God?” you’d get different answers.

Mark: Yeah.

Paul: In your world, in Capitol Hill Baptist Church, in Mark Dever’s world, who is God? Is he…?

Mark: If God exists, He exists regardless of how you or I perceive him. So, regardless of whether we’re in Mark Dever’s world, we’re in God’s world. We can close our eyes but He’s still there. He’s a sentient being who made everything that is and He has made people especially to be like Him in His image and He’s given us His will and His word and His law and He calls us to follow Him. And by nature, we tend to follow Him some but also we break His law. We do what is wrong. We do what the Bible calls sin.

And that’s where Christianity comes in. We understand that God sent his only son, Jesus Christ, to live a life of complete trust in Him and then died as a substitute sacrifice on the cross. You’ve probably seen the cross and associated that with Christianity. That’s how it is at the center. That’s the sacrifice that we understand that Jesus made to assuage or satisfy God’s wrath against us for all we’ve done that’s wrong. Jesus took that punishment. He died in the place of all of us who trust in Him. That’s the good news that we as Christians share with people in our church and really all truly Christian churches.

Paul: Okay, but couldn’t God just overlook that? I have children that do things that are wrong and sometimes I discipline them for that but many times I overlook it

Mark: Well, you say “couldn’t” like that is an ability and to not do that is something like a disability. But when you’re talking about overlooking that which is good and overlooking that which is evil, that would not be good on God’s part. It would be an evil thing for Him to ignore injustices that were done. So, it’s really, it’s a problem with our language that we speak of God as being able to overlook that which is evil. That would really be a disability of God’s.

Paul: Okay. So, you’re not talking whether He’s able or not, but whether He would.

Mark: Yeah. He will not because He is good.

Paul: Interesting.

So, we’ve been speaking with Mark Dever, the senior pastor at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington D.C.

Thanks for listening and we’d love your feedback!

More Episodes:

This is Part 1 of 3 our interview with Mark Dever. Stay tuned for parts 2 & 3, coming soon!

Show Notes:

Finding the Right Digital Marketing Platforms to Grow Your Business

July 23, 2019 / / 0 Comments

On Episode 96 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with entrepreneur Joshua Sturgeon, about finding the right digital marketing platforms to grow your business!

Sections

How Josh Got Into The Marketing Field
Growing Up With Entrepreneurial Tendencies
Advice For Somebody Starting Out As An Entrepreneur
Is SEO The Right Fit For You?
Finding Underutilized Paid Channels
Facebook As A Marketing Platform
EmberTribe – Working In A Remote Environment
Conclusion
More Episodes
Show Notes

Finding the Right Digital Marketing Platforms to Grow Your Business

How Josh Got Into The Marketing Field

Paul: So here today, we’re with Josh Sturgeon of EmberTribe.

Okay, now EmberTribe. How old is this company?

Josh: EmberTribe is about three and half years at the time of this recording. We started the end of 2015.

Paul: Did you go to school to become an EmberTriber? What do you call yourself?

Josh: That’s my actual degree. No, I didn’t. I fell into this world out of a hybrid of necessity and curiosity and interest. I graduated into the heart of the recession in 2007 and at the time I also had a full load of grad school work and so I really just needed to find ways to make money and my geek way into all of this was through a dying phonebook company, where I was actually a door to door salesman and my one job was to try and introduce this digital offering to keep the company alive. And spoiler alert, the company went under. I didn’t go beyond three months there, but what it did introduce me to, was this idea of digital marketing, specifically SEO or search engine optimization.

And it just blew my mind that you could show up for just for specific things, you offer it as a business, and that people could find you for those things on the web and just do business for you. That just ignited a passion and excitement for this and now twelve or thirteen years ago and I …there was no formal education for it and so it was a lot of reading blogs and like building your own website and seeing what worked and didn’t work. So, I did that for a while.

Eventually, I worked for a larger agency and got to do this at a larger scale with companies like Staples, Thermo Scientific, and Unilever. But then I really learned the most when I was building a business with my wife at the time and needed to kind of put our own money on the line and figure out what was going to be the best fit for us as a small business. And so that’s where I think my learnings really took off because I was in the trenches so to speak, spending my own money. And yeah, that’s kind of the genesis, I guess, of how I got into all of this.

Growing Up With Entrepreneurial Tendencies

Paul: When you were a teenager did you say, “I’m going to be in digital marketing”?

Josh: No, not at all. When I was a teenager and even into college, I was very into music. I was very into that more creative side of things.

Paul: You wanted to be a rock star?

Josh: I wanted to be a rock star! No, not necessarily. I was more like singer, songwriter. I also taught music too, so I ran like a little music studio and I taught kids how to play guitar. So basically, I was really into that but I think that created an impulse, not the reality of the real world and I sort of channeled that creativity into how to make money and how to do that in a flexible way because time was constrained for me.

Paul: There are certain people, you sound like you have entrepreneurial tendencies. Would you agree with that? How did that surface itself when you were really young?

Josh: When I was really young, I was hustling. I was selling rocks at the end of my driveway.

Paul: Right, okay.

Josh: Selling rocks that I thought were cool. I probably called them crystals or something too just out of innocence but yeah. Then I started a handyman service when I was a kid. Look, I think everybody has that “I sold lemonade at the end of the street story” but…

Paul: Well, no. Not everybody. It is a difference in wiring from what I’ve seen.

Josh: Yeah, that might be.

Paul: So, what did you think? You were going to be an entrepreneur? Were you going to go work for somebody?

Josh: You know, it’s funny. I didn’t really frame it that way in my mind. Like throughout highschool and throughout college I found ways – because I was really into music – I found ways to fund my own recording and lifted albums and all of that was kind of an entrepreneurial journey in and of itself. I don’t think I possessed the language yet to understand like, “No, I don’t want to work for the man. I want to do my own thing.” It was more out of a matter of necessity and circumstance that I ended up working for myself in the beginning.

But yeah. Then later I came to realize that some of my core values are to have freedom of lifestyle, to have independence, to be able to have open horizons. As I’ve gotten older and self-reflected more, I’ve been like, “Oh yeah. This has been in my DNA for a long time. I just couldn’t label it back then.

Advice For Somebody Starting Out As An Entrepreneur

Paul: What would be one piece of advice to somebody that was starting out now, as sort of an entrepreneur? I know you do some mentoring. In doing mentoring, you can’t be as honest as one might want so we’re anonymizing everyone out there. What would be your anonymous advice to people?

Josh: Man, I’d say you probably have a vision in your head and in your heart about what this could look like. That might be ten years from now. I would say, divide that by a thousand. What’s the one step that you can take now? I think the biggest mistake that I see with a lot of entrepreneurs is that they so badly want to be in business for themselves, but they so badly want this product to come into existence, that they are afraid to see it not work and therefore, they never start.

Paul: Oh interesting. So, they never fail.

Josh: They never fail because they never start. And you see people working on a logo for six months and you see people doing whatever but putting off the hard thing and the hard thing is usually talking to somebody who isn’t your mom or your dad or your friend or your girlfriend and getting them to give you money for the thing that you want to produce. And that’s not greed or that’s not anything else except validation and you need to get validation for what you’re trying to build otherwise you’re going to spend a lot of time building something that nobody wants.

Paul: Right.

Josh: You might feel good about what the future might possibly hold but when push comes to shove, there’s no business there.

Paul: I’ve also found when you, the entrepreneur, engages with anybody, most people don’t want to hurt your feelings.

Josh: That’s true!

Paul: And so, they’re going to say, “Oh yeah! That’s great!” And if you shift the conversation, “Well, will you give me twenty dollars right now and I’ll deliver for you in six months? “Oh, I’d never pay twenty dollars for that!” And you start to get to the truth of the matter.

Josh: Or I need to talk to my wife first, you know.

Paul: Yeah, exactly. That’s really what you want to get to. And also, to have other people to ask on your behalf. I have a friend who’s doing this.

Is SEO The Right Fit For You?

Josh: Is SEO the right fit for you? It really depends. I mean, a lot of startups that we work with, like they’re inventing a new category so there’s nobody even searching for what they’re doing so SEO would be the wrong fit for them until they’ve generated some demand for the new category.
So, rather than just take a pre-ordained checklist of different marketing channels that somebody else is recommending you do and then retrofitting that to your business, it’s better to kind of have an understanding of where you sit in the market, who you’re trying to reach, and then prioritize your spend on marketing from there.

Paid is usually a really great option so start with that because you can learn very quickly and then you can build the content and then capture the SEO traffic over a longer period of time but at least start with renting. It’s almost like going to the customer and asking for the money now. Then you’ll know now if it’s going to work or not.

Paul: Yeah. Well, I think an important take away for me here is this identification of the importance of the different channels because SEO isn’t bad but it’s really hard to rule the world in SEO. But advertising, I can always buy an ad to my target market. Then it becomes, do I offer something that’s quality?

Josh: Right.

Paul: Is that fair?

Josh: That is fair. I mean, and I want to be fair and give paid the same treatment and to say that you are competing in an auction, right?

Josh: To give you a very specific example. We have a client who’s going up against Salesforce and Blackbaud in Google search, those paid ads. That’s expensive man. Those guys are spending millions of dollars in search. And so, the big innovation for that client was finding another paid channel that was underutilized at the time, for business to business, which was Facebook and we reduced their cost probably by eighty percent by making that change.

Paul: That’s interesting because both of those are very business oriented, very C level finance-oriented products. And you got to those people through Facebook?

Josh: On Facebook, yeah.

Paul: When was this, timeframe wise?

Josh: This was probably 2016 going into 17.

Paul: Okay. Is that viable today?

Josh: It’s still viable but there might be better alternatives depending on what your business is.

Paul: Maybe LinkedIn?

Josh: LinkedIn is very expensive but also very targeted.

Facebook As A Marketing Platform

Josh: But here’s the takeaway though. Although Facebook has now more limited business to business targeting options than it did before they removed some of those things, what they do have is two and a half billion people in their ecosystem, so just statistically your audience is there. If you consider even the internet in the population of the world, that’s a massive market share so the chances are that the people that you want to reach, is probably on that platform or in that ecosystem somewhere. It’s just a matter of, can you get to them the most efficient way possible. It’s worth a shot.

Paul: My questions have always been around, will those people make buy decisions in that context? Sort of like if you’re swimming, you’re not interested in buying a TV. It’s sort of like that just doesn’t make sense. Whereas, if I just finished lunch, I’m not interested in looking at restaurant ads. So, I’ve never been able to understand how we go to a Facebook where… I use it for figuring out how my family’s doing and friends and then all of a sudden, I see something about a technology ad, I’m a geek. Those two don’t give necessarily.

Josh: Yeah and I think one key distinction and strategy for using these channels is to not necessarily go for the sale in one click. Statistically, we know that over ninety-five percent of the people that visit your website will never return again unless you’re given another opportunity to. So, there’s different tools that we can use to give you multiple – what we would call maybe “ad bats” to try to buy.

But one major strategy especially in the business services side is just capture tension and capture a point of contact so even if they’re not ready at that part of their buyers’ journey to buy from you or to even schedule a sales call they might be interested in some piece of content that you created or something else in exchange for an email address or some other information so you can email them later or message them later. That’s a good way to come off it.

Paul: Cool!

EmberTribe – Working In A Remote Environment

Paul: Well we’ve been talking with Josh Sturgeon of EmberTribe. Where are you based?

Josh: Yeah. Oh, that’s a loaded question. So, I’m here north of Boston. And I have a business partner who’s in North Carolina but the rest of our team of about twenty people, is spread about nine different states across the US. We’re a completely distributed team.

Paul: Oh, that’s cool. Now do you service clients all over the world or do you just work in one city in Alabama?

Josh: No, it’s all over the US and Canada and some of those companies are multinational so they’ll have different locations but for the most part, no, it’s not constrained by location at all. And, just like as our team works together in a remote environment, we’re working virtually with a lot of these clients as well.

Conclusion

Paul: Well, there’ll be ample opportunity in the shownotes and links for both Josh individually and for EmberTribe. And I just wanted to thank you for coming in and it sounds fascinating. It’s never as simple as we want to make it but it’s also not as complicated, especially with a Sherpa like you, guiding us through it.

Josh: Yeah, definitely my heartbeat for anybody is, just start. Just try. Your upside is so potentially high that it could transform your business in a way that you could never have imagined it’s worth at least at test to run.

Yeah, Paul, thanks for having me. This was a great conversation!

Paul: Absolutely, alright. Thank you.

More Episodes:

This is Part 3 of 3 our interview with Joshua Sturgeon.
If you missed part 1, about how to spark growth with digital marketing, you can listen to it here!
If you missed part 2, about how knowing your customers will help you with digital marketing, you can listen to it here!

Show Notes:

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