Your church isn't competing with other churches.

Let me call myself out before I call anybody else out. There was a season in my ministry when I could tell you, every Monday morning, how full the parking lot was at the church across town. I checked. I told myself it was research... it wasn't research. It was scoreboard-watching, and I dressed it up as strategy. If their lot was full and ours wasn't, I carried it all week. (I'd love to tell you I prayed about it. Mostly I just stewed.)

Pastor, maybe that's never been you. I hope it hasn't. But somewhere along the way a lot of us absorbed the idea that digital strategy is a market-share war between congregations... that getting findable means somebody else's church gets emptier. And everything in you flinches at that, because it should. If your neighbor's church is packed this Sunday, the Kingdom won.

I've sat with enough pastors to know that flinch is real. Nobody says it out loud... but it walks into the room every time somebody says "SEO." It sounds like marketing. It smells like competition. And competition between churches feels gross because it is gross.

So let me say the thing plainly, because everything else in this post hangs on it.

You are not competing with the church down the street. You are competing with the world's answers.

Who's answering your city's questions at 2am?

Somebody in your city is going to ask a real question tonight. About grief. About a marriage that's quietly dying. About anxiety, purpose, God. They won't ask it in your lobby... they'll type it into a search bar, or ask an AI, at an hour when your building is dark and your staff is asleep.

And somebody will answer. An algorithm optimized for their attention. An influencer optimized for their affirmation. A stranger in a forum who happened to answer first. A model summarizing a hundred sources, and not one of those sources is your pulpit.

Will they take the first credible answer they find? Almost every time. Not because they're shallow... because they're hurting, and the first answer is the one that's there. Nobody in crisis scrolls to page two looking for better theology.

And let's be honest about what they'll get. Some of it is fine. Some of it is genuinely wise, even... the internet is full of decent advice on grief and marriage and anxiety, written by people who care. But decent advice isn't the gospel. A breathing exercise can calm a panic attack at 2am. It cannot tell anybody why they matter. The world's answers can soothe... they were never built to save.

The world's answers show up. That's their whole superpower.

Want to see the empty chair for yourself?

Run the experiment in your own city. Open a browser and search the questions your people are actually asking. How do I forgive my father. What happens when we die. Why does God allow suffering. Now count how many first-page answers come from any church at all... not your church, any church.

In most cities? The chair at that table reserved for the gospel is just sitting there. Empty.

Now flip it. Think about what your church said out loud last Sunday. Somebody on your stage answered one of those exact questions... with Scripture, with care, with years of pastoral scar tissue behind it. And by Monday afternoon that answer was gone. Not archived. Gone... locked inside a room that emptied at noon.

I can already hear the pushback. "Church doesn't work that way. We're a congregation, not a content company." I get it... I've said it. But Jesus didn't tell us to wait for people to find the building. He said go (Matthew 28:19-20), and in 2026 an awful lot of the going happens inside a search result.

That's the competition. Not the megachurch across town. The empty chair.

What changes when you actually believe this?

Start with your content. When the enemy is the empty chair, you stop writing announcements and start answering questions. Sunday's sermon stops being a one-hour event and starts being Tuesday's search result... the transcript, the devotional, the blog post that meets a stranger mid-crisis. You already made the answer, Pastor. You made it last Sunday. Multiplying it is the easy part.

Then your posture. When another church in your city ranks well for "hope in grief," what do you honestly feel? For years my honest answer was a twinge of envy... which is embarrassing to type, but there it is. The right answer is relief. Every faithful answer any church places in that conversation crowds out one more answer that leaves God out entirely. Their win is your win. Kingdom math doesn't keep a loser column.

And if this whole conversation makes you tired... breathe. I'm not handing you another job. I'm not asking you to become an influencer, launch a podcast, and dance on Reels. You already do the hard part every single week: you open the Word and answer real questions for real people. The question is whether that answer lives for one hour in one room, or all week in every search.

Which brings us to urgency. Let me say it this way: the road a searching person walks is Search. Seat. Savior. Surrender. It starts at a search bar, and by God's grace it ends in surrender to Jesus... but if the church isn't present at Search, we never get a voice in the rest of the journey. What if your church answered one question this month? What if the answer sounded like your actual pulpit and not a press release? What if the person who found it sat in a seat two Sundays later? None of that requires a bigger church. It requires a present one.

This is the first movement of Multiply... Find... and honestly it's my favorite one, because it's where a 200-seat church in Miami now shows up in searches where the biggest churches in the city don't. 200 seats. That's the whole room. They're not out there to beat anybody. They're out there so the gospel has a seat at the table. So, what is your city asking this week... and who's answering? Run the search. And when you do, I'd genuinely love to hear what you found.