A Letter to Pastors

Why I Started MBSGG Global Network

Wardell Williams Jr.  ·  Pastor and Executive Director, MBSGG Global Network

My story begins with a calling. Through my years as a musician, songwriter, minister, producer, and entrepreneur, I have met people with gifts, messages, and stories that deserve to be heard. Those experiences helped shape the purpose behind MBSGG Global Network.

Personal loss, kidney disease, and dialysis brought that purpose into sharper focus. Through those challenges, my faith remained constant, and I found myself asking, “How can my story help someone else?”

That question helped move me toward building something that could serve others.

MBSGG began with a focus on independent recording artists. I wanted to help creators develop their gifts and understand what it takes to bring their work into the world. Creating a song is one part of the journey. Learning how to protect, produce, broadcast, distribute, and preserve that work is another. I wanted artists to have support through that journey while retaining ownership of what they create.

As the vision grew, I recognized that the same need existed beyond music. Churches had ministries to share. Nonprofits had missions that needed support. Entrepreneurs had ideas that needed development. Families had histories and memories worth preserving. People were doing meaningful work, and they needed ways to connect with an audience and invite others to participate.

MBSGG Global Network became a way to bring media, education, technology, and collaboration together around those needs.

Our guiding principle is simple: “You Create It. We Build It.”

To me, that means investing in people—helping them learn, grow, collaborate, and move their vision forward. It means creating opportunities for someone watching from the sidelines to become a participant, a contributor, or a creator.

I started MBSGG because I wanted my experience to become useful to someone else. I wanted the lessons, relationships, creativity, and faith that carried me to help open a door for another person.

That is the purpose behind the network: helping people use their gifts, share their stories, and build something that can continue to serve others.

Wardell Williams Jr.

Wardell Williams Jr.
Pastor · Executive Director, MBSGG Global Network

About This Edition

A Magazine of Its Own.

Pulpit & Platform began as the church section of the premiere edition of Signal & Song, MBSGG Global Network’s magazine. Churches and independent artists both deserved a magazine built entirely for them, so Signal & Song now serves artists, and the church reporting lives here.

Every feature in this edition first ran in that premiere, and the hymn stories on page 19 come from our sister channel, Second Row Sundays. The questions are the ones church leaders keep asking: why people really stop coming, whether streaming empties the pews, what the law says once a camera is on, and how a church with one volunteer and a phone can show up online every week.

The standard has not changed. Every statistic is attributed to a named source. Vendor-produced figures are labeled. Where the research is disputed or was withdrawn, we say so.

In This Edition

Contents

Premiere Edition  ·  Fall 2026  ·  How pastors get heard. How congregations grow.

Pulpit & Platform  ·  Feature

They Didn't Leave Over Doctrine. They Moved.

The largest religious shift in American history was driven by U-Haul trucks, work schedules, and second marriages — not by arguments about the faith. Which means the fix is not a better apologetic. It's a better address.

Pulpit & Platform Staff  ·  Church Growth

If you have sat in a leadership meeting in the last five years, you have heard someone explain the empty seats. The culture. The politics. The phones. The kids today. Every one of those explanations has the same comfortable feature: it locates the problem outside the building.

The largest study ever conducted on why Americans stopped attending church says something less comfortable and far more useful.

Researchers Jim Davis and Michael Graham, working with political scientist Ryan Burge, surveyed roughly 7,000 people across three escalating phases to understand what they named the Great Dechurching: about 40 million Americans who stopped attending in the last twenty-five years. It is the largest and fastest religious shift in the nation's history — bigger than the First and Second Great Awakenings combined, in the other direction.

Then they asked why.

The top three reasons

Not doctrine. Not scandal. Not the sermon.

1. "I moved."
2. "Attendance became inconvenient."
3. A change in family structure — marriage, divorce, remarriage, a new baby, a new schedule.

Only 12% cited political disagreement with their clergy or congregation as a significant factor. The overwhelming majority — roughly 30 million of the 40 million — are what the researchers call casual dechurchers: people who drifted, without a fight, without a wound, without ever making a decision to leave.

Nobody stormed out. They just never found the next one.

They did not reject the church. They relocated, and the church did not follow them into the search bar.

Now the part that should get you out of your chair

51% of the dechurched say they are willing to return. Sixty-two percent still believe Jesus is the only way to God. These are not deconstructed skeptics who need to be re-argued into faith. These are people with an intact belief system and no current address.

Continued from page 6

So What Actually Happens When Somebody Moves to Your Town?

Picture her. She is 34. She grew up in church, she still believes, and she just took a job four states away. On her second Saturday in the new city she picks up her phone and types four words into it.

"church near me"

What she finds in the next ninety seconds determines whether your church ever meets her. And here is what the research says she is looking for, in order: service times, then activities and events, then directions, then what your services look and sound like. Not your doctrinal statement. Not your history. Times, location, and what to expect.

That ranking comes from Grey Matter Research's church-website study — and we will be honest with you, that fieldwork is from 2012, so treat the specific percentages as historical. But the order has been corroborated by everything since, and it matches how any human being evaluates any unfamiliar place they are considering walking into alone.

The findability audit nobody runs

Grey Matter also did something almost nobody has repeated: they audited nearly 8,000 individual church listings across 123 Protestant denominations to see whether a person could actually find a local church through official channels. The success rate was 32%. One in five links was broken or wrong. Half of the listings in denominations that did offer web links had no link at all — including for churches that had a perfectly good website.

That study is from 2015. If your reaction is "surely that's better now," we would gently suggest you go check your own listing before you assume so. It takes four minutes.

What to do Monday

• Search your own church the way a stranger would. Open a private browsing window and search "church near me" plus your town. Note where you appear, and what shows.
• Claim and complete your Google Business Profile. Hours, address, phone, photos of actual people, and a link that works. BrightLocal's 2025 small-business survey found only 35% of small and medium businesses have a Google Business Profile at all — a cheap, wide-open gap.
• Put service times above the fold on your homepage. Not in a PDF. Not on a third-level page. In the first screen, in a font your grandmother can read on a phone.
• Build a "Plan Your Visit" page. Where to park. Which door. What people wear. What happens to your kids. How long it lasts. Every one of those is a reason someone talked themselves out of coming.
• Ask an AI assistant about your town's churches. Then fix whatever it got wrong about you.
• Fix your denominational listing. Call whoever maintains it and confirm your web link is present and correct.
• Apply for the Google Ad Grant. Eligible 501(c)(3) organizations can receive up to $10,000 per month in free Google Ads. Most churches have never heard of it.

A church that is easy to find and easy to re-enter is not doing marketing. It is removing the exact obstacle that 40 million people tripped over.

The theology of this is not complicated. The parable of the lost sheep is not about the ninety-nine reorganizing the pen. It is about going out to where the one actually is. In 2026, where the one actually is — at the moment she is looking for you — is a search box.

Pulpit & Platform  ·  Feature

Your Livestream Is Not Cannibalizing Your Sanctuary.

Somebody on your board is convinced that if you stream it, they'll stay home. Twenty-four thousand churchgoers were asked. Here is what they said.

Pulpit & Platform Staff  ·  Broadcast & Streaming

It is the single most common objection in American church leadership right now, and it always arrives in the same tone of reluctant wisdom: "I just think if we make it too easy to watch from the couch, people will watch from the couch."

It sounds like stewardship. It is, unfortunately, wrong — and we can now say that with a sample size instead of a shrug.

The Hartford Institute for Religion Research's EPIC Attender Survey asked more than 24,000 churchgoers across the United States about their actual worship habits. Its headline finding is stated plainly enough that we will quote it directly:

Offering a live stream does not reduce in-person attendance, nor does it erode the importance of belonging to a faith community. Hartford Institute for Religion Research, EPIC Attender Survey

What the 24,000 actually do

Eighty-five percent of the people surveyed belong to congregations that offer online worship. Of those:

• 26% regularly engage with worship online.
• 19% alternate — some Sundays in the room, some Sundays on a screen.
• 4% attend online exclusively. And this group shows lower engagement and lower giving, which is precisely what you would expect from people who were already at the edge.

Four percent. That is the entire population your board is worried about — and the evidence suggests they were never the ones filling your third row.

Meanwhile 87% of online attendees report being satisfied with the experience, and 46% of them connect with more than one congregation. Read that last one carefully, because it cuts both ways: your people are sampling other churches, and other churches' people are sampling you.

Continued from page 9

Then Where, Exactly, Should You Stream It?

Churches burn an enormous amount of volunteer energy debating platforms. The debate is usually conducted on vibes. It does not have to be — Pew Research Center publishes exactly the number you need, from a nationally representative sample of 5,022 U.S. adults.

That chart settles more arguments than any opinion in this magazine could. YouTube and Facebook are the only two platforms that reach a majority of American adults. For a church trying to reach its literal geographic neighbors — not a national audience, not a brand following — those two are the evidence-based core. Instagram is where your under-40s are. TikTok is a discovery layer, not a foundation.

The tradeoffs nobody puts in the brochure

Cover Story  ·  Pulpit & Platform

The Exemption Ends Where the Camera Begins.

Your worship team can legally play that song for the people in the room. The moment you point a camera at them and press "Go Live," a different body of law takes over — and most churches have never been told.

Pulpit & Platform Staff  ·  Copyright & Licensing

There is a sentence buried in U.S. copyright law that every church in America relies on without knowing it exists, and a second sentence right beside it that almost none of them have read.

The first is 17 U.S.C. § 110(3), the Religious Service Exemption. It exempts the "performance of a nondramatic literary or musical work or of a dramatico-musical work of a religious nature, or display of a work, in the course of services at a place of worship or other religious assembly." In plain terms: your band can play it, your congregation can sing it, and you owe nobody a license for that.

The second is in the congressional revision notes that accompany the statute. It is one sentence, and it is the most important sentence in this magazine:

…the exemption would not extend to religious broadcasts or other transmissions to the public at large, even where the transmissions were sent from the place of worship. Congressional revision notes, 17 U.S.C. § 110

Same song. Same team. Same sanctuary. Same Sunday morning. Exempt for the people in the room. Unlicensed for the people watching at home.

Nobody wrote this rule to trap churches. It was written in an era when "transmission" meant a radio tower and a budget. Then a pandemic put a camera in every sanctuary in the country, and roughly 86% of American churches walked across a legal line they did not know was there.

Three things the exemption does not cover, which will surprise you

1. Reproduction. Typing lyrics into your presentation software or printing them in the bulletin is not a performance and not a display — it is copying. Different right, different license.
2. Recording. Capturing the service to a file is reproduction too. Christian Copyright Solutions puts it flatly: "Recording or 'reproducing' music is not a performance or display."
3. Anything outside the service. Vacation Bible School. The youth lock-in. The fundraiser concert. The fall festival. Music in the café or the gym or on hold when someone calls the office. None of it is "in the course of services," so none of it is exempt.

What it costs to be wrong

Statutory damages under 17 U.S.C. § 504(c) run from $750 to $30,000 per work infringed. Willful infringement goes up to $150,000 per work. Innocent infringement — where the infringer "was not aware and had no reason to believe" — can be reduced to no less than $200, at a court's discretion.

And here is a detail worth knowing: § 504(c)(2) contains a mandatory remission of statutory damages for good-faith fair-use errors by employees of nonprofit educational institutions, libraries, archives, and public broadcasting entities. Churches and religious organizations are not on that list. Being a nonprofit is not a safe harbor here.

None of which is to frighten you. Practically speaking, catastrophic judgments against small churches are rare; what is common is muted audio, blocked video, a dead stream on Easter morning, and a channel with strikes on it. Turn the page for the fix — which is genuinely cheap and takes one afternoon.

Cover Story  ·  Pull This Page Out

The Church Licensing Decision Matrix

Find what you are actually doing in the left column. The right column is the license that covers it. Print this and put it on the wall of the media booth.

The two systems, side by side

Cover Story  ·  Continued

Being Licensed and Being Un-Flagged Are Two Different Problems.

Here is the fact that no licensor puts in its marketing, and that every church media director learns the hard way at some point:

YouTube's Content ID system does not recognize your CCLI license. Neither does Facebook's.

These are automated matching systems. They scan every upload and every live stream continuously against a fingerprint database, and they make no distinction whatsoever between authorized and unauthorized use. Your license is an agreement between you and a licensing body. Content ID is a robot that has never heard of it.

So you can be completely legally correct and still get muted on Easter morning.

Claims are not strikes — know the difference

This distinction matters enormously and almost nobody explains it:

• A Content ID claim is the normal outcome. The copyright holder is identified as a match, and typically monetizes your video with ads. Your stream keeps running. Your channel is fine.
• A strike is the serious outcome, and it generally happens when you dispute a claim and lose the dispute. Multiple strikes can suspend or delete your channel entirely — three or more can terminate an account.

The practical consequence: an unexamined dispute-everything policy is riskier than living with claims. Churches that handle this well keep a pre-written dispute template citing their streaming license, file it deliberately, and accept that some copyright holders will monetize anyway.

During a live broadcast, a match may produce a placeholder image over your stream, a warning, or an outright interruption. If your Sunday depends on the stream, build a plan for the moment it goes dark — a backup platform link and someone whose only job is to post it.

The part that is about integrity, not law

Christian Copyright Solutions raises a point that has nothing to do with liability and is, we would argue, the better reason to get this right. On most social platforms, churches cannot report song usage. Which means the songwriter whose worship song moved your congregation to tears on Sunday receives nothing for the ten thousand people who heard it on your Facebook page.

Somewhere there is a worship writer with a day job, whose song your church has sung forty times this year. Reporting your usage is how she gets paid. That is not compliance. That is honoring the laborer.

And if you want the other half of that story — how a songwriter actually gets paid when churches sing their song, and why most independent worship writers have no idea the mechanism exists — our sister magazine for artists, Signal & Song, explains it at signalandsong.com.

Your one-afternoon compliance checklist

• Confirm which CCLI licenses you actually hold. Log in. Many churches hold the Church Copyright License and assume streaming is included. It is not.
• Add streaming coverage. CCLI Streaming, Streaming Plus if you use tracks, or CCS WORSHIPcast if secular music touches your stream.
• Report your song usage. Every service. It takes minutes, it is a license requirement, and it is how writers get paid.
• Audit your non-service music. Café, gym, lobby, hold music, youth events, the fall festival. None of it is exempt.
• Write the dispute template now, before you need it at 9:40 on a Sunday morning.
• Check your Bible translation's streaming permissions. Publisher by publisher.
• Ask CVLI directly about streaming film clips rather than assuming your video license travels online. It generally does not.
• Have an attorney review the whole stack once. One hour of counsel is cheaper than one claim.

Center Spread  ·  Pulpit & Platform

Rented Land vs. Owned Land

Social media is not your audience. It is a place where your audience is currently standing, at the pleasure of a company that owes you nothing. Here is the difference between reach you borrow and reach you keep.

Center Spread  ·  The Playbook

The Four-Hour Church Content Plan

Built for the church whose "media team" is one volunteer with a phone and a Tuesday evening. Do not add platforms. Add consistency.

Match your platforms to your actual capacity

Tiering adapted from practitioner guidance published by church communications consultancies. Presented as professional advice, not research findings — see the note at the foot of this page.

The content mix

The seven mistakes we see most

1. Using the feed as a bulletin board. Announcement dumps with no image and no human being in them.
2. Posting children's faces without written parental consent. This is a safeguarding and legal exposure, not a style question. Get the release.
3. Arguing with commenters in public. Nobody has ever won one of these.
4. Sharing something unverified. Your credibility is the whole asset.
5. Using photos you don't have rights to. The same copyright logic from page 12 applies to images.
6. Starting a fifth platform before the first four are consistent.
7. Abandoning an account mid-stream. A page whose last post is fourteen months old actively tells a visitor you closed.

The website page nobody builds, and everybody needs

• Service times, first screen, large type. The single most-sought item on any church website.
• Address with a working map link. And which door to use.
• "Plan Your Visit." Parking, dress, childcare, length, what happens when you walk in.
• One recent sermon, playable without an account.
• Photos of your actual congregation. Not stock photography. People can tell, instantly.
• A giving link and a contact a human answers.
• A claimed Google Business Profile with current hours, photos, and responses to reviews.
• Mobile-first, always. Look at it on a phone before you look at it on a desktop.

Church Spotlight  ·  Premiere Edition

Believers of Glory in Jesus Christ Church

Eight people on a good Sunday. Thirty churches at the walk. What a congregation this small learned about getting other churches to move.

By Pulpit & Platform  ·  Belton, Missouri

Once a month a few people from a church that seats eight on a good Sunday load up and drive to somebody else’s sanctuary. They set up at the front. By the time they leave, that congregation has a mental health ministry of its own. Peculiar. Raytown. North Kansas City, then south. At the end of the year, thirty churches walk together.

Believers of Glory in Jesus Christ Church has been in Belton, Missouri since 2017. Six to eight people attend in a given week. It has no paid staff and its pastor is not on payroll. On paper it is the smallest church we looked at for this edition. In practice it has put a mental health ministry into more sanctuaries than congregations a hundred times its size.

What they did

The decision that made it possible came first, and it cost Pastor Damon Brewington something. He was a Baptist preacher. He planted Believers of Glory as a non‑denominational church deliberately — so that he could network across denominations rather than within one. That is not a small thing to give up, and it is the reason everything else works. A ministry that belongs to no denomination can walk into any of them.

The ministry is called “Let’s Put A Face to Mental Illness,” and it is directed by Minister Beverly Brewington. Once a month it travels to another church and helps that congregation stand up its own mental health ministry inside its own sanctuary — not a referral, not a pamphlet, a ministry that stays after they leave. The church runs it alongside work with The Sending Project, the Justice & Dignity Center, Trauma Healing, the Cass County Ministerial Alliance and the American Bible Society. Its youth ministry meets Saturdays — Bible study, then basketball, two o’clock to half past three.

Let the church say amen. Pastor Damon Brewington

What it cost them

Nothing, if you ask what they charge. The monthly mental health meetings are free. There is no paid staff. The pastor takes no salary. The volunteers are people who wanted to do it.

The real number is the gym. Youth basketball costs forty dollars every Saturday in court time. Held every week, that is more than two thousand dollars a year, paid by a congregation of six to eight. “God has not failed us yet since 2017,” Brewington says. He also notes, without being asked, that a church this size has been able to give to ministries larger than its own.

What happened next

Brewington reports that people who came in with suicidal thoughts came out the other side, that members carrying grief, depression and loss found help, and that panel discussions were set up specifically for younger people. Parents of adult children, he says, found ways to cope that they did not have before. These are his accounts of his own ministry rather than clinical outcomes we can verify, and we are printing them as such.

What can be counted: the church’s media page averages 200 to 400 viewers a week, roughly forty times the number of people in the room. The annual mental health walk now involves thirty churches. The congregation is still six to eight people.

Asked about the size, Brewington points at the arithmetic of the thing — Jesus worked with twelve.

The Pulpit  ·  From the Second Row

Seven Hymns, Seven Stories.

Every one of them started with somebody’s story. Here are seven worth telling from the pulpit, the next time the congregation sings one by heart without knowing where it came from.

From Second Row Sundays  ·  An MBSGG Original

1. Blessed Assurance

Words Fanny J. Crosby, 1873 · Music Phoebe P. Knapp, 1873

Fanny Crosby lost her sight as a baby and went on to write thousands of hymns. One day in 1873 her friend Phoebe Knapp played her a brand-new tune on the piano and asked what it said to her. Fanny answered, “Why, that says, ‘Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!’”

2. Sweet Hour of Prayer / I Need Thee Every Hour

Words William W. Walford, 1845 · Music William B. Bradbury, 1861 · Words Annie S. Hawks · Music Robert Lowry, 1872

Two prayers in one. The way it’s been told, “Sweet Hour of Prayer” came from an old blind preacher in England who made up the words in his head, and a visiting minister wrote them down. And one June morning in 1872, a Brooklyn mother named Annie Hawks was going about her housework when the words of “I Need Thee Every Hour” came to her.

You don’t need a pulpit to pray. A kitchen will do just fine.

3. In the Garden

Words & Music C. Austin Miles, 1912

In 1912, C. Austin Miles sat in his darkroom reading John chapter 20, where Mary goes to the tomb early in the morning and then hears her name. He said he could see it like he was standing right there in that garden. He wrote the words as fast as they came, and that same evening he wrote the music.

4. Leaning on the Everlasting Arms

Words Elisha A. Hoffman & Anthony J. Showalter, 1887 · Music Anthony J. Showalter, 1887

In 1887, Alabama music teacher Anthony Showalter got letters from two former students. Both young men had just lost their wives. While he searched for words to comfort them, he thought of Deuteronomy 33:27: “The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.”

When you can’t stand up under it, lean.

5. His Eye Is on the Sparrow

Words Civilla D. Martin, 1905 · Music Charles H. Gabriel, 1905

In 1905, Civilla Martin and her husband visited the Doolittles in Elmira, New York. Mrs. Doolittle had been in bed for nearly twenty years, and Mr. Doolittle went to work every day in a wheelchair. They were the happiest people you ever met. When Civilla asked how, Mrs. Doolittle said, “His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me.”

If He watches the sparrow, He sees you too.

6. What a Friend We Have in Jesus

Words Joseph M. Scriven, 1855 · Music Charles C. Converse, 1868

Joseph Scriven knew sorrow. He grew up in Ireland, and the way it’s been told, the woman he loved drowned the day before their wedding. He started over in Canada. Years later, when word came that his mother back home was sick and he couldn’t get to her, he wrote her a little poem to keep her company. He never meant for anyone else to see it, and now the whole world sings it.

Take it to the Lord in prayer. That’s what it’s for.

7. It Is Well with My Soul

Words Horatio G. Spafford, 1873 · Music Philip P. Bliss, 1876

In 1873, Chicago lawyer Horatio Spafford sent his wife Anna and their four little girls across the ocean ahead of him. Their ship went down, and all four girls were lost. Anna was pulled from the sea and sent him a telegram that began, “Saved alone.” The way it’s been told, as Horatio crossed that same ocean to reach her, he wrote these words.

If he could say it, you can too.

Back of Book

Be in the Next One.

Pulpit & Platform  ·  Premiere Edition, Fall 2026  ·  A publication of MBSGG Global Network LLC, Missouri. Journalism and education, not legal advice; see page 4.