Sean Dunn, Founder and President of Groundwire, joins Greg Leith, Convene CEO on our podcast to share what we need to know about how the younger generation thinks if we desire to move them toward faith in Christ. As a business owner, CEO, parent, or grandparent, Groundwire can give you tools to help you share authentic hope.
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Watch the episode here
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Jesus & Media: Connecting Millennials And Gen Z To Their Faith And God’s Purpose For Their Lives With Sean Dunn
We’re excited to have Sean Dunn coming to us from Colorado. Sean is the founder and president of Groundwire. You may not have heard of it, but in a while, you’re going to be excited about it when we get to share. Sean has worked with youth for over 30 years as a pastor. He began serving in the youth ministry at church. He began traveling full-time, and he started saying, “How do we reach the people who don’t want to be reached?” Which is a great question. He studied the trends, he prayed, he looked at the culture, and an organization called Groundwire was born.
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Sean, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Greg. It’s great to be here with you. I love Convene. I love you. Excited about our time together.
Thank you. Sean, Belief in God is on the wane. Biblical literacy is on the wane, church attendance is down in the United States anyway, not in places like China and Africa, but the Barna survey says young people are leaving the church. Your work is about having conversations with people who are hurting or seeking. This is not just a little idea that has got 500 people talking to you on some chat site from somebody’s bedroom.
Millions and millions of people are visiting your websites. There are almost 700,000 professions of faith, and 129,000 people you’ve talked to. I want to find out more because there could be business leaders talking to their employees, and they feel like they’re having a foreign conversation. I think you’re going to help them to be able to understand some of their employees. Let’s get at it.
I would also say, Greg, too, that we talk to people all the time who are trying to figure out their employees, but also people are trying to find it, figure out their kids and grandkids.
There you go.
There’s another application point for what we’re going to discuss.
That’s a great point. In honor of our time together, I was a good guy and I posted on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook one at one of your websites and got your note in the mail yesterday appropriately, and 586, is that a million commercials?
Yeah, January through June this year, our commercials have been seen 586 million times.
Reaching Out To The World’s “Apathiests”
All from a small set of offices in Colorado. That’s pretty amazing. Let’s talk about what we need to know about how the younger generation thinks, if we want to help them move towards faith in Christ. Just enlighten us.
The first thing I would recommend is that we need to recognize and realize that a nineteen-year-old is very different than the way we were when we were nineteen. One of the reasons that we struggled to relate to him is that we assume that they know what we know. We assume that they believe what we believe, and they’re very different. As you mentioned already, Barna identified Gen Z, which is high school and young college students.
He identified them as the first generation in our nation that is truly post-Christian. By post-Christian, only 4% of them have a biblical worldview. A biblical worldview starts with two concepts. Number one, the Bible is true, and Jesus is the only way to get to God. Only 4% of the young people in our nation have those beliefs. What’s very unique about this generation is that they don’t deny God, even though the ones who do are the loudest.
Let me just share with you real quickly the way that I frame it is on this side, according to the stats, and we deal primarily with millennials and Gen Z, but 13% of Gen Z and 15% of millennials love Jesus, love church. It’s where they find their identity, and it’s where they find their purpose. On this side, you’ve got 7% of millennials who are atheists, and 13% of Gen Zers are atheists. In the middle, there’s this group of people.
I’ve heard it called the movable middle, which you can influence the atheist. They don’t want to be reached. We actually refer to a word that was created in the Urban Dictionary. The Urban Dictionary came up with a word for a young person. Here’s how they define it. It’s a young person who believes in God but ignores him. The word that they used was apathiest. They believe in God, but they ignore him.
When we’re dealing with young people, I think it’s important to know that 71% believe in God, 68% believe in heaven. They believe in God, but they don’t do anything. He’s not their priority. They’re going to get to him when they can. Our opportunity is that we don’t need to convince them that he’s real. We need to stop pounding the table and say, “God’s real.” They believe that. What we need to do is we need to remind them that he’s relevant.
We need to stop pounding the table and insist to young people that God is real. They already believe that. What we need to do is remind them that He is relevant. Share on XHe becomes relevant when he becomes personal, when he starts to interact with that piece of their heart that is broken or they’re trying to find purpose. When they discover that Christ has a purpose for them, you speak that into it. Understanding that they’re different, that they are apathiest, but they’re looking for the relevance of Jesus. They haven’t said, “I don’t want anything to do with Jesus.” They’re just saying, “I don’t see a purpose in him yet.”
Taking Advantage Of Young People’s Media Obsession
That is a stunning thought. “I believe in God, but I ignore him.” I was just talking with a leader for a couple of hours in my office, and their own children were in that exact spot. It’s rough. Convened leaders are getting together soon in Pennsylvania. We’re bringing, let’s see if I can get this right, Jodie Berndt, who wrote the book, Praying for Your Adult Children. Tell us about your ministry, though. You take a different approach to communicate with these people now that we’ve identified them, apatheist. How do we reach them?
What really grabbed my attention was that I was building a ministry, and I was loving it. My pride loved it. I was speaking to 150,000 people a year, standing on stages with 25,000, occasionally 50,000. I loved it. I started to realize I’m only influencing people who want to be influenced because heathens don’t go to Christian events.
I really started to ask the Lord, “How do you reach the ones that don’t want to be reached? How do you reach a generation that doesn’t want to be in the same room with you? How do you reach a generation that plugs their ears every time you disagree with them?” Came to realize that it was their media obsession that gave us that opportunity.
The 70% believe the American church is irrelevant. I know that we want him to go to church, and we really want them to get involved and engage with that community. The point of the matter is that we might not be able to get him to go to church, but we cannot get him to put in their phone. There’s an opportunity there, the same way that, as a business owner, if you’re selling to a 17 or 22-year-old, your best bet is to get to them through their device.
That’s what we do is we can communicate, we market to them. We don’t communicate a theological point because they’re not thinking theologically. They’re not even thinking logically. They’re thinking emotionally. They don’t wake up and say, “No, I’m going to hell.” They wake up and say, “No, I’m going through hell.” Our content is set to interrupt that thought. One of our keywords is interruption. We don’t invite, we interrupt, but we show up in short segments, another thing that, as adults that we really need to grasp, not that millennials aren’t adults, but as older adults.
A millennial has a twelve-second attention span, and Gen Z has an eight-second attention span, which makes it a challenge. Our content is literally 12, 15, and 30 seconds long. Anything more doesn’t work for us. We show them what’s going on in their heart, and we invite them into a conversation. Twenty-four hours a day, we have volunteers just like your business owners, just like their wives, just like their parents, sitting there engaging.
They’ve been trained. Somebody logs in and says, “I saw this commercial. When life hurts, Jesus cares. Is it true? Please tell me it’s true. I need hope.” They’ll start a conversation, and those people will say, “I recognize that I need a relationship with Jesus. It’s been amazing just to see what’s happening right now.”
How soon after somebody engages with the platform do they talk to a real person?
As quickly as they want to. It’s like looking at the numbers. The first 87% of our chats are picked up within the first 30 seconds. Again, the model has to be impulsive because they’re reaching out on an impulse. They’re not going to come back at 9:00 in the morning on Monday morning if they want to have a conversation, they want help, they want hope. Friday night at 3:00 in the morning, we need to be there for them. It’s a pretty quick process for them.
Helping The “Nones” Truly Discover Jesus
A number of people have heard in the last five years or so, from I guess, Barna, about the nones, not the kind that wear black and white, but the nones. Talk about them.
That’s interesting because a lot of people in the Christian community are freaking out about that word. I actually see it as an opportunity. The reason is the nones. Basically, it means I haven’t decided what I associate with. It’s really a woke word for agnostic. The difference is that when our generation said we were agnostic, we said, “I don’t know what I believe, but I have to figure it out.”
When they say that they’re not associating with anything, that they’re a none, they’re saying, “I don’t know what I believe, and it’s okay that apathy is kicked in.” I see it as an opportunity because what we’re seeing is, as I said earlier, they haven’t rejected Jesus. Most of them have never been exposed to it. We get asked questions that prove it very clearly.
We get asked questions like, “Now that I’m a Christian, how much is it going to cost me to go to church?” They’ll ask questions like, “Is there a book I could read about Jesus?” It just blows me away that there are people in our nation who don’t even know that the Bible exists. When our volunteers bring up the word “Have you heard of the Bible?”
We get two responses. The first response is “The Bible. I thought that just meant like a really important book, like the Bible for mechanics.” The second response we get is, “Jesus is in the Bible?” Doesn’t that blow you away that people don’t even recognize that Jesus is in the Bible? Here they are, they’re not associating, they’re not addressing, they’re not running to the church, they’re trying to figure out all of their life.
What they don’t know is that Jesus is really what they’re looking for, because he meets everything. He checks every box. The one who will love them unconditionally. He’s the one who will offer them peace and offer them hope, but they’re not looking to him. I see it as an opportunity because when they discover who Jesus is and all that he offers, they don’t go crazy. They’re like, “That’s amazing. Jesus paid the price for me?” They’re blown away, and they want a relationship with him.
What the “nones” do not understand is that Jesus is what they are looking for. He meets everything and checks every box. Share on XHow Groundwire Trains Their Online Volunteers
Not that we need to run down every theological trail here, but what would your team of volunteers, I’m assuming they’re volunteers, say to somebody who said, “I don’t feel like much of a sinner,” or “I don’t know if the Bible is really true.” Are they trained to respond to those questions?
They are. It’s hard to train somebody who doesn’t already come with some basic conviction in those areas. Yes, everybody who becomes an online volunteer force goes through what we call the groundware training academy. They’re given the tools. By the way, one of the things I want to clarify is that it’s not a phone call. That’s an old methodology.
Young people don’t pick up their phone and put it to their ear. They pick up their phone and wear it out with their thumbs. It actually works better because that way you cannot hear accents. You can manage multiple conversations at once. If you’re on a phone, you can talk to one person. When they’re on that software where they’re communicating with these other individuals, there are tools on the right-hand side.
If somebody wants to come on and talk about abortion, there are actually scriptures and some videos that they can utilize or push into the conversation. If they want to talk about suicide or if they have theological questions about the Trinity, it’s all there for them. They don’t have to be an expert in everything. They have to have a willing heart and know how to have a logical discussion.
That sounds really great. How many volunteers do you have?
Not enough.
Not enough is the right answer.
What we measure is we measure how many volunteers log in and engage daily. We’re measuring, we’re averaging about 110 a day and no more than that, but probably about 120 a day. That’s grown 71% since. This is a disappointing miracle, Greg. We only saw 192,000 people come to faith. Isn’t that sad? The way, George Barnett says the average church in the US sees one person a year come to Christ. We averaged 527 a day. We’re going to top 300,000.
That’s absolutely astonishing. I know that you would say this is by God’s power and his grace and his sovereignty and a whole lot of hard work on your part. Congratulations.
Thank you. I did say earlier that when I was standing on stages, I was very prideful. Now it’s really interesting. You cannot be prideful because you cannot take credit for it. You know that it’s God. Our job is just not to screw it up.
How A Business Leader Can Utilize Groundwire
I guess there’s no applause in cyberspace, per se, so you cannot let it go to your head that way. How could a business leader utilize a ground wire? Somebody might be listening in and saying, “I love what I’m seeing. In fact, from a giving perspective, that’s more than most local churches in America are experiencing in terms of results. You’re helping lots of people. How could I connect with my millennials and Gen Z that work for me to have conversations with you all?”
We do have some tools that can be utilized. We actually have some businesses that have asked us to private-label a chat button to their site, which we can do. It just looks like, “If you ever need prayer, click on this button,” or “If you ever want to have a spiritual conversation.” It’s anonymous, which makes it very attractive to them. They might not walk into their supervisor’s office and say, “I’ve been wondering about some things, but they’ll get online and they’ll do it.”
We’ve done that from a partnership perspective. One of the things I love is that there’ve been a couple of convene members who have made it available for their team members who wanted to be volunteers to go through the training, and then a couple of hours a week during their work week, they gave a couple of hours to serve, leading people to Christ on our chat system. We’ve done that with multiple partners as well.
Control Every Conversation Through The LETS Framework
That’s really cool. I remember in an earlier iteration of a ministry similar to yours, probably fifteen years ago. We were doing some work with them at Biola University, where I was there at the time as an employee and brought the president, Clyde Cook, who’s listening to our conversation now from heaven. I sat him in front of his laptop, and he was all of a sudden engaged with somebody in another country talking about Jesus. From that moment on, we connected Biola students sitting in their dorm rooms with seekers all over the world. There’s a tip for you called Biola University for volunteers. Any final advice you’d have for somebody who’s saying, “My daughter, my son, my grandkids, my office, what could I do?”
Let me give you one quick tip that we teach our volunteers. We teach our coaches an acronym to control every conversation. When you want to have a meaningful conversation with some people like sometimes Thanksgiving doesn’t go well. They shut down. You bring up something. I’ve noticed the older we get, the more direct we are in some of those things. We need to learn to be a little bit softer.
The acronym that we use is LETS, which stands for Listen, Encourage or Empathize, Transition, and then Share. What we found is that genders tend to gravitate towards one of these, and they have to be taught or reminded to do the other. Females love to listen and encourage, but they’re never looking for that opportunity to transition. Therefore, they never get to share what’s on their heart. Men tend to just want to share, and we don’t like to listen.
The skillset of just asking the right questions in a way that doesn’t make them defensive is something that can be learned and embraced. When I was traveling, I loved standing on stages, but I also loved finding kids in food lines. I would ask them, 1 on 2, or 1 on 1, or 1 on 3, or 1 on 4, questions like, “What one word would you use to describe your spiritual life?” I would get this incredible insight into who they were and what they were struggling with.
I would ask, and I’ve done this with my kids, I would ask them the questions. If you could change one thing about your life, something that’s really hard, you could just say, “God, make this easier for me.” Whether it’s a battle I’m fighting or a thought process, just tell me, what is it? You ask your grandkids that, or you ask people when you’re sitting around the office that, you’re going to get an understanding of who they are and the way that they view themselves in a way that you can truly come alongside them, then encourage them, and then transition to some of those conversations that you want to have.
Remember that, LETS, listen, encourage, or empathize, transition, and then share, and be intentional. We did a training, and I had some grandparents say, “I’ve already written down a list of eight questions and I’m putting them in my drawer. Next time my grandkids come over, I’m going to pull it out. I’m going to be ready to ask them meaningful questions.” The more you ask questions, the better the conversations are going to be. They don’t want to be entertained. They want to be heard. They don’t want to be entertained. They want to be heard. Asking questions and listening to what’s going on in their life.
The more we ask questions to young people, the better the conversations will be. They do not want to be entertained but to be heard. Share on XGet In Touch With Sean And Groundwire
I love that. I think that speaks to a lot of driven type A business owners who are probably wanting to say at Thanksgiving something like, “You are going to church, aren’t you, Junior?” which is certainly not listening. It’s certainly not empathizing. For those of you who are listening who haven’t heard of Convene, we’re about business leaders, helping business leaders to work on their business and do it all on a biblical platform. You can find out more about Convene at ConveneNow.com. Sean, that reminds me, we should talk about where people can find out about Groundwire?
Feel free to contact me directly at SDunn@Groundwire.net, or you can check out our sites. Groundwire.net is a site that’s really the brochure for the ministry, but the forward-facing ministries are like JesusCares.com, WhenLifeHurts.com. What’s the point? Those are some of our sites that are that we’re using to engage in conversations with millennials and Gen Z all over the nation.
Prayer For Parents Struggling With Their Kids
Would you close us out with some prayer for people who are struggling with their kids?
God, we know that you can relate that you have kids that cause you sadness or that aren’t doing the right thing. Lord, our hearts are sometimes moved because we long for our kids and grandkids and even those people that we love that maybe work with us or that are in our neighborhood. God, we want them to know how good you are and how amazing you are. We see them causing themselves pain and turning and blaming you.
God, I pray in the name of Jesus that you would begin to move on the hearts of some of these young people. God, you’ve heard the prayers have been prayed. God, we anticipate the answers will come. Lord, I pray that you’d give wisdom to everyone who wants to have meaningful conversations. Show us how to ask the right questions.
Show us how to listen to them. Show us how to make our faith so meaningful and attractive to them that they want what we have, even if they’re not listening to what we say. God, I pray that you would in this day and in this season, God, we need to see people turn back to you. God, I pray that the blinders would come off the eyes. God, I pray that the understanding would begin to open up and that these young people would begin to understand that you are the King of kings and the Lord of lords.
You’re the one who can heal their heart. You’re the one who gives them purpose. You’re the one who can give them hope. God, you’re the one who meets every need that they have and answers every question that they’re asking. Lord, would you draw them close? God, would you continue something very unique in this generation in our nation? God, more and more people come to you. The harvest is ripe. The gospel is still powerful, and God, you are still good. We love you and we trust you in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Thank you, Sean. Thanks so much for taking time out of your day to be with us at Convene and to talk to executives from coast to coast. We’re very grateful.
Thank you. I appreciate it very much.
