// About
You know the drill
by now.
A motivational keynote from a pastor with a 15-person creative team. A breakout on social media tips you knew in 2019. Then the main stage session that turns out to be a software demo, and by day two you realize the whole conference exists to sell you postcard mailers.
Meanwhile, search got rebuilt from the ground up. People find churches through ChatGPT now. And church marketing conferences are still teaching Canva.
Marketing changed.
Church conferences didn't.
We did something about it.
What we deleted
- Keynotes
- Breakout sessions
- Vendor booths
- Beginner content
- Swag bags
- An audience
What's left
- One room.
- Thirty practitioners.
- Laptops open.
- Real websites on the big screen.
- AI search, schema, AEO, GEO.
- The work, done before you fly home.
// Who's Behind This
Not a company.
Not a church.
Not an agency.
It's built by Chris Mefford.
Chris spent years leading marketing for The Rock Church — one of the 15 largest churches in the nation — managing a $3 million budget across multiple campuses. He learned what works at scale. More importantly, he learned what works without the budget.
He's the author of the Amazon bestseller Leadership Is Overrated, served as VP of Marketing for Dave Ramsey, and now directs SEO for one of the largest websites on the planet — 1.1 billion pages. Most of his time now goes toward how people find things through ChatGPT, LLMs, and the new Google — the AEO/GEO shift that's rewriting how churches get discovered.
His church marketing course on Udemy holds a 4.7-star rating across 45 reviews — 71% five-star — with hundreds of completions. His focus isn't helping churches market more. It's helping them become impossible to miss.
But here's why this exists: Chris has a deep, serious passion for helping churches grow through marketing. Not theory. Not inspiration. The actual work of helping families find a church and helping people find Jesus — wherever they are.
This conference is his way of getting the right people in a room, consistently, to make a greater impact for the kingdom.
// About Our Venue
Torrey Pines Church
Torrey Pines Church has been here since 1959, when it opened as the first Christian church in La Jolla. And its story is one every church communicator should know. After decades of growth, the church hit the same wall a lot of legacy churches hit: declining attendance, tight finances, and hard questions about the path forward. In 2016, it joined the EastLake Church Network and rebuilt, renovating its worship spaces and reinvesting in reaching its community.
In other words, we're hosting a conference about church communication problems inside a church that actually faced them and lived to tell the story. That felt right.
And yes, that Torrey Pines. The same name attached to the golf course where Tiger Woods won a U.S. Open on a broken leg, the rarest pine tree in America, and some of the best coastline views in California. The church sits up the hill in La Jolla, a few minutes from the cliffs. We will take a hike there the morning before day two.
Getting here is the easy part. The church is about 20 minutes from San Diego International Airport, minutes from the beaches, trails, and restaurants of La Jolla, and surrounded by some of the best weather in the country. Come a day early or stay a day late. You will not regret it, and we won't tell your elder board.
The other 29 people are the conference.
You've been the best marketer in the room at every church conference you've ever attended. For two days, you won't be. That's the gift.