ThinkNEXT – Spring ’23

Leadership Summit

Feb 28 – Mar 2 – Dallas, TX

Join Us For ThinkNEXT!

Engaging Culture

Generations are leaving the church in droves, creating many heartbreaking statistics that indicate our nation is increasingly abandoning the Christian faith. Our culture is post-modern, post-Christian, and pretty much post-logical. It’s difficult to know how to engage our culture as a church leader. But we still have one thing on our side: The Gospel!
The world has always been crazy and lacking direction; now is our time to lead it. The church is an unwavering force when unified and in pursuit of making a loving impact on people in our communities. Even though most people in our culture aren’t interested in attending church anymore, they are still interested in having spiritual conversations about Christ. We simply need to adapt and learn to speak their language.

Main Speakers

Join us at ThinkNEXT this Spring to hear from two innovative servants who are engaging the lost using modern methods with tremendous effectiveness.

Damon Kerry Snyder

Kerry brings to Gloo more than 20 years of ministry experience to help churches become more Spirit-led, Christ-centered, and data-informed. He is a creative communicator and speaker who thrives on helping people discover, understand, and apply God’s word. At Gloo, he works with some of the most influential churches in the world on vision casting, ministry strategy, and technology initiatives to capture the attention of various audiences and move them deeper into their faith journeys. He is passionate about helping churches create healthy staff cultures, develop leaders, and be a trusted voice and coach to pastors and leaders. He resides in beautiful Colorado with his wife Robin, and two boys.

Chris Abbott

Chris Abbott is a YouTuber and the co-owner of Church Marketing University with Ryan Wakefield. Chris is the creator of the Plan Your Visit Model and the Prayer Ads System, and he is one of the leading experts on Facebook Ads for Churches. His experience as a pastor and entrepreneur helped him discover a way to use Ministry-Based Marketing to grow his church, and now he helps other churches do the same.  He and his team have helped over 50,000 pastors and church leaders through Church Marketing University, free ministry resources, and online coaching programs. You can find him on his YouTube Channel where he teaches pastors how to use Ministry-Based Marketing and simple tools like a Visitor Growth Engine to get the word out, attract a steady stream of new Sunday morning visitors, and ultimately make Heaven crowded. 

Watch Sessions Live Online

Session 1

Forged from work with hundreds of churches, the Church Engagement Framework designed by Kerry Snyder and others from Gloo was created to help church leaders identify the 5 primary aspects of ministry.
Attract –> Get –> Keep –> Grow –> Multiply

Session 2

In marketing, it’s easy to focus on yourself or your organization when communicating with outsiders. For the Church, we definitely need to flip that on it’s head and see ourselves as a service bringing real hope to a hurting world.
In this session, Chris Abbott will share with us some intentional “marketing” strategies that will bless our communities and focus on outsiders.

Session 3

The number of communication options to promote your ministry is larger than ever. It can feel overwhelming sometimes, and often, the ways in which church leaders utilize them are often ineffective. Kerry Snyder from Gloo will dive into several strategies that are seeing fruit across the country. Anything from Facebook ads, to targeted mailers and even the He Gets Us national campaign. This will be a great conversation around engaging culture creatively.

Session 4

With all of the options in marketing a church launch, it can be hard to know the best place to invest your money. Chris Abbott is an expert in marketing for churches and will share with us his strategy if he were to plant a church in today’s culture to attract launch team members and attenders.

Session 5

Often when we measure success in churches, it revolves around the superficial. It’s the ABCs (attendance, buildings, and cash) or the three Bs (buildings, bucks, and butts), or the three Ns (nickles, nails, and noses), but none of these give us accurate measurements on what really matters.
Measuring the heart, or a disciple’s character traits and competencies, isn’t easy. But there are tools we can utilize asking specific questions that could give us tremendous insight!

Session 6

Every time we gather is a great time to cast vision for our church planting network. God is doing great things in and through Nexus, and we want to equip, share, and inspire you with what’s coming next! Join us for this session with our director, Phil Claycomb.

Event Sponsors


Feeling called to plant a church? We can help!