Global Doctrine, Local Stewardship: A Roger Mitchell Reflection

I keep seeing headlines about how young people are returning to church faster than at any point in recent memory. Not for God necessarily. For meaning. For reset. For the feeling of coming home. Roger Mitchell knows exactly why - he spelled it out to Grant Williams and Demetri Kofinas last week.

He said it plainly, in terms of his experience and what this feeling offers:

Roger knows that church-going experience doesn’t exclusively belong to him. So he’s not surprised at all why younger people are fast discovering church. In the most Roger way, he boils it down to how the ancient religions have been focus-grouped longer, better, and more tightly than any product available on the internet's infinite shelves.

If you're lacking meaning in life, ancient rituals like religious services have already solved for that. All you have to do is get exposed.

Which isn't even just a religion thing. That’s what breaks my brain here. There are so many other examples if you start looking too. Young people aren’t unique in realizing they’re hungry for this. It’s universal. It’s just revealing in how young people are the ones most willing to abandon the current scripts to look for it (i.e. why I haven’t started going to church again, admittedly).

Roger was on Just Press Record almost a year ago, and he told Jason Buck and me something that reframes the whole church conversation in my mind:

Church isn't exactly business, but it's related. Flip the church to a sports stadium and you can see it. People always have an appetite for local accessibility.

The English Premier League (soccer, EPL for short) is a great example. Teams are hyperlocal, right down to neighborhoods in cities and suburbs. However, the sport itself is global, the biggest teams have reach and therefore brands to manage, and I am a short drive from watching a game with fans of any club in the top flight all the way over here in America.

It's the sport equivalent of a denominational church with a neighborhood sect.

Restaurants provide a parallel example here. Scaling, beyond a point, kills the thing that made the original worth visiting. This is why a McDonald's feels like a McDonald's everywhere in the world, and a million experiential miles from the otherwise easily missable food truck you heard people whispering about on the subway.

A real restaurant owner knows her regulars’ names and what they order. Same for the wait staff. A franchise manager too often is just following a manual. It’s social media versus a social medium. One is stewarding community and the other is managing a spreadsheet.

Same principle - global brand framework. But, the local instantiation either has the freedom to serve its specific community, or it doesn't.

The key is that there has to be a global framework you can tap into with a local freedom element.

If you have the global framework but you enforce community-based compliance, this is why it feels emotionally empty (hello McDonald's, and watch out Manchester United).

If you have the global framework but you maximize local freedom, this is why it feels like a magical, hidden secret (hello corner bars that open early to show EPL games stateside, which - I need one in NEPA so I don't have to drive to Philly or Harrisburg).

It's worth examining the McDonald's problem more closely, mostly because they've done a pretty decent job of staying relevant. Just ask any 3-14 year old where they want to eat.

The key here is the family or friends who goes with/takes you there, on top of the budgetary constraints, are what makes the actual experience. McDonald's has outsourced meaning-making entirely to the customer at this point. The franchise owner, the employees - they're just executing a script behind a giant iPad for the most part. No one is stewarding this as your community's gathering place, but they are offering you a space to make your own.

But here's exactly where it becomes risky if not altogether hollow.

What happens when the people you've outsourced meaning to don't show up? When a kid eats alone. When a teenager sits with his phone and nobody else. When there's no parent, no friend, no familiar face - then it's just a meaningless shell serving meals it markets as happy. Fine if you need a quick bite on a budget before or after a shift. Not fine when you miss the community purpose beyond those economic reasons.

I’m sure the franchise owner has some freedoms and responsibilities here too, but by making employees invisible, even if you provide them work and take care of them in those ways, you still have little reciprocal care for your clientele. There's no stewardship in touchscreen ordering. There's (literally) no one saying: you belong here.

The experience of stewardship isn't the experience of compliance. The church figured it out centuries ago. McDonald's is keeping their employees as far out of the way as possible in search of the same goal - but they've gutted the very thing that makes it work.

Where it all falls apart, as Roger can tell you best, is when the super-entity at the global level has no agency to care about your specific local situation. That's the scaled-up problem social networks have found themselves in. That's the demographic panic new churchgoers are finding answers out of.

In our - candidly, pretty awesome and amazing modern times, for how post-history they can regularly feel - we can access anything globally. But we still can only belong locally.

That doesn't mean global frameworks no longer matter.

It means global frameworks only matter if they're stewarded by someone with the freedom to serve their specific community.

We have access to everything globally. But we can only build meaning locally. The question isn't whether global frameworks matter - because they do. The question is: who's stewarding yours? And maybe more importantly - are you willing to show up enough to let them?

The kids are just starting to figure it out. Roger isn’t alone in picking up on the opportunity in experience shifting. Sure feels crazy not to find a way to join them, especially when this is so much bigger than church…

Ps. Check out Roger’s work on Albachiara. Get his book, Sports Perfect Storm. Bug him on the internet (on twitter/X and LinkedIn).