The Stranger at Your Door with Jonathan Malm

Who Is Jonathan Malm and What Is Sunday Social?

Jonathan Malm grew up as a pastor's kid and missionary's kid. When he came home for college, his father had just been brought in to pastor a church that was a million dollars in debt, hit by a lawsuit, and still healing from a devastating church split. Jonathan got to watch a broken church get healthy again, which he's quick to note is not the typical story.

Along the way he built ChurchStageDesignIdeas.com, a resource site for church creatives that grew large enough to sell. He co-founded Sunday Social, now a full platform for church social media with a content library, scheduler, and growing software feature set used by more than 4,000 churches. He also co-hosts the Church Staff Book Club podcast with Jason Young, and has written more than a dozen books on church hospitality and ministry effectiveness, including Unwelcome: 50 Ways Churches Drive Away First-Time Visitors and The Come Back Effect: How Hospitality Can Compel Your Church's Guests to Return.

Where Do Churches Miss the Mark on the First-Time Guest Experience?

The most common mistake Jonathan sees is churches focusing on how they want to appear rather than how guests actually feel. The VIP instinct, with its reserved parking spots, celebrity treatment, and over-the-top welcome, often backfires because most first-time visitors don't want to stand out. They want to be anonymous. They want to belong without being spotlighted.

A first-time guest is already managing anxiety. They may have argued with their spouse on the drive there. They don't know where the bathrooms are, where kids check-in is, or whether their kid's noise will cause a problem. Layering a performance-level welcome on top of that anxiety doesn't address the real need. It just adds more stimulation to an already overwhelming experience.

The real job of hospitality is to remove friction, create safety, and get out of the way. When people feel safe, connection happens on its own.

What Does a Scene-by-Scene Guest Journey Look Like?

Jonathan's practical framework: walk your campus five minutes before service on a Sunday morning, as a first-time guest would. Park in the general lot. Walk in. Look for every moment where a visitor has to make a decision under uncertainty. That is an anxiety point, and it is an opportunity to serve.

Is the lobby so full that it feels like navigating a crowd? Are there ten greeters positioned to hug people who don't know them? Is kids ministry signage clear enough that a parent coming alone for the first time isn't left guessing? The same logic applies on the way out. Walk the path and mark every moment where a guest feels unsure, then put something there to give them confidence.

Is the Sunday Morning Service the Most Important Thing a Church Does?

Jonathan draws a line that COVID made impossible to ignore: the service is more like an excuse to gather than the main event itself. When churches went online during COVID, a lot of people fell away, not because the sermon was bad but because what actually kept them wasn't the service. It was someone looking them in the eye and asking if they were okay.

"I can get a great sermon on YouTube," Jonathan points out. "I can get phenomenal worship on YouTube." What you cannot get on YouTube is the person who notices you look tired and stops to pray with you. The early church was built on breaking of bread, prayer, and community. The apostle's teaching was one piece of four. Churches built entirely on production quality found that out the hard way.

How Did COVID Squeeze What Was Already Inside Churches?

Dave brought the orange analogy into the conversation and Jonathan ran with it. When you squeeze an orange, orange juice comes out, and not because of who is squeezing, how hard, or what day it is. Whatever is inside is what surfaces under pressure. COVID was the vice on the orange for every church at once.

Churches running on fear, performance, or image had that exposed. The loudest, most fearful voices dominated the headlines. Jonathan is careful to say that's not a fair measure of the full church. Joy is quiet, peace is quiet. But for any church where the internal culture hadn't been consistently fed, the pressure made the problem impossible to ignore. The question it leaves every leader with: when your organization gets squeezed, what comes out?

What Does Fear-Based Creativity Look Like in Ministry?

When an organization puts everything on one piece of communication, whether that means so much copy on a poster that nobody reads it or so many events on one mailer that nothing stands out, that is usually fear-based creativity. Fear of leaving someone out. Fear that the one clear message won't be enough.

Jonathan connects this to how Paul actually wrote. Every letter was addressed to a specific community. The book of John was written to Greeks, opening with the logos they already understood. Paul wasn't writing to everyone. He was writing to someone, and trusting that God could use it beyond that audience. Knowing exactly who you're writing to isn't exclusion. It's faithfulness to your calling.

Dave frames it the same way in marketing: a sniper rifle beats a machine gun. The machine gun wastes energy and rarely hits the target. Fear-based creativity fires in every direction hoping something lands. Faith-based creativity takes the shot it's supposed to take.

How Is AI Changing the Way Jonathan Builds Sunday Social?

Jonathan is vibe coding product features for Sunday Social now, building and shipping updates in a week rather than months, using AI to develop the systems, scheduler logic, and internal tools. He's genuinely excited about AI as a system builder.

But he draws a hard line on AI-generated ministry-facing content. His rule: if only ten people will see it, or it's clearly a joke, AI might be fine. If it represents the church or the message, a human should make it. His reason isn't just quality. It's dignity. God gave people a creative voice, and AI-generated graphics erode that without the creator realizing what they've given up. "AI doesn't have instinct," he says. "And instinct is where most of the real creative value lives."

What Future Is Jonathan Malm Fighting For?

Jonathan has three kids: five, two, and one. His five-year-old is scared to stay in his room at night. And Jonathan is spending time right now teaching him how to take control of his thoughts. Not to suppress fear but to recognize it and decide what to do with it.

Most adults never learned that skill. The opportunity he has with his kids in these early years is to prepare them for a world that mostly doesn't teach it. His goal for all three of them: kind and brave. That's the future he's building toward, in the company, in the books, and at home.