welcome to the collision of church leadership & pop culture.

If you’ve ever left a church staff meeting thinking, “That felt like a scene from The Office,” you’re in the right place. Welcome to church leadership.

This platform exists because church leadership is all at once, unique and also weirdly familiar.

It’s people and preaching, sure – but it’s also story, culture, product (yes, I said product), guest experience, volunteer pipelines, brand consistency, change management, internal politics, and the ever-present question: “How do we do all of this with excellence and stay on mission (and under budget)?”

And the truth is… we’ve been trying to answer these questions with church-world jargon for decades – and church-world jargon is just duct tape with a Bible verse on it.

Meanwhile, some of the most influential organizations in modern history have been quietly (and not-so-quietly) answering them in public – with movies, devices, fandoms, theme parks, keynote presentations, and the occasional billionaire meltdown.

“pay attention to pop culture as case studies – not to copy it, but to learn how it works and leverage its lessons for the sake of the gospel.”

It’s true that the Gospel doesn’t need case studies and pop culture references. And subjugating the Gospel beneath pop culture for the sake of relevancy, cheapens the power of the Gospel message. It is also true that God has chosen the Church to build His Kingdom on Earth, and the church is led by fallible, finite people whose gifts, personalities, knowledge and skill are all brought to bear for the sake of the advancement of the Church. Therefore, we would be wise to learn what we can from the world around us.

Church is very different than publicly traded companies, and popular franchises; and pastors are different than CEO’s. But, as with everything in life, we can learn from them still. Just as a missionary learns the language and culture of the people they are trying to reach, pop culture is the language of the people we are trying to reach. Pop culture is full of subcultures with their own languages, their own customs, their own memes and catch phrases. And the largest companies define pop culture at scale and provide infinite lessons for us to learn about how to build an organization, how to lead teams, how to present a message with creativity, and so on.

We need to study pop culture not because the Church is a business (it’s not), and not because we’re trying to turn Sunday morning into a product launch (please don’t). But because organizations like Disney, Apple, Marvel and Pixar (among others) have shaped culture at scale – and they’ve done it through decisions that church leaders also face:

• What do we prioritize when everything feels important?
• How do we build a culture that outlasts a charismatic founder?
• What happens when we lose focus?
• How do we recover from a flop?
• How do we create experiences people actually want to bring their friends to?
• How do we keep the “magic” without faking it?

This platform is for church leaders who love Jesus and also know the difference between the Infinity Saga and the Multiverse Saga. For leaders who take discipleship seriously but can still admit that The Manalorian somehow made them cry over a puppet.

We’re going to explore the collision of church leadership and pop culture – with a special focus on cultural empires that function like modern mythmakers: Disney. Apple. Pixar. Marvel. Star Wars. And a bunch of others. Not because they’re perfect (they’re not). Not because we worship them (again, please don’t). But because their histories are full of moments that reveal how culture is built – and how it’s lost.

Pop culture can serve as a leadership textbook… with better graphics and fewer acronyms. It’s not just entertainment. It can help inform our discipleship engine.

That sentence might make you uncomfortable, but look around: people schedule their lives around release dates. They form communities around fandoms. They find identity in stories. They quote lines like scripture. They wear the symbols. They pass it to their kids. Fandoms disciple people daily. The Church gets Sunday. Plan accordingly.

If you’re a church leader, you should probably pay attention to the things shaping the imaginations of the people you’re trying to shepherd.

But even beyond cultural awareness, pop culture companies are basically giant laboratories for organizational strategy. Their successes and failures are documented in interviews, biographies, documentaries, shareholder letters, box office charts, and obsessive YouTube breakdowns.

They’re case studies in real time.

And unlike church-world case studies, they don’t always wrap everything up with a bow and a worship song.

• Sometimes they fail publicly.
• Sometimes they pivot awkwardly.
• Sometimes they over-expand.
• Sometimes they forget their “why.”
• Sometimes they get saved by one brilliant decision.

Sound familiar? Let’s go!

dc.