Grandma is on TikTok, and she just might be the cheapest person your church can reach online. I sat down with Pastor Chris Moore to talk about why the platform almost no church is using could be your biggest opportunity yet.
Let me be honest with you. When it comes to social media marketing, I've always felt like I belong with the fifty-year-olds. Maybe a little old school. So when I sat down with Pastor Chris Moore to talk about TikTok, I came in as the guy who needed help, not the expert.
And what Chris shared kind of blew my mind. Because here's the thing he told me that I can't stop thinking about: Grandma is on TikTok. Not just teenagers doing dances. Grandma. And she's finding churches there, signing up to visit, and saying, "Wow, there's God on this platform." If that surprises you, you're going to want to keep reading.
"TikTok is really the wild west of social media, but it's also possibly the place to find the greatest returns today." — Pastor Chris Moore
Here's the reality Chris laid out: almost no churches are investing in TikTok. We're all crowded onto Facebook and Instagram, running the same kinds of ads through the same partners, and the space is saturated. But TikTok? It's wide open. And because so few people are competing there, it's cheap to make a real difference.
I'll admit, I had the same assumption a lot of pastors have, that TikTok is just fourteen-year-olds and dance trends. It's not. There's TikTok Shop, where small businesses build entire companies. There's education, culture, people rebuilding historic homes, farriers cleaning up horses' hooves (don't ask me how I fell into that algorithm). Everyone is on TikTok. And that means your community is too.
Chris took the exact same talking-head ad he was running on Meta, posted it on TikTok, and it performed three times better. In a major metro like Phoenix, he was seeing "plan your visit" sign-ups for as low as seven to eleven dollars, when those same results on Meta were running twenty dollars or more.
And the biggest surprise of all? The cheapest audience to reach on TikTok is the fifty-plus crowd. The people we'd assume aren't even on the app are the most affordable ones to reach. That's grandma finding your church.
This is the part I think every pastor can run with today. Chris's best-performing ads weren't overproduced. In fact, he says when you over-produce them, you stop the scroll less, not more. Here's the recipe he shared:
Grab your phone, find an attractive background (for him it was the top of a parking garage with the whole city behind him), and just talk to people like they're standing right there. Something simple like, "Hey Phoenix, my name's Chris Moore. I just launched a church here and I'd love for you to be a part of it." Most people have never talked to a pastor, never texted one, never met one. So you showing up on their phone, being real and inviting them in, that's a killer ad.
"You don't have to overproduce it. Most people have never really met with a pastor. So you, right here, inviting them to your church. That's a killer ad."
If you want to run TikTok ads yourself, Chris gave some hard-won advice. First, the platform is not exactly user-friendly. He joked it feels like you're about to download a virus on your computer (you're not). Just push through it. Second, and this is the big one, don't go over forty dollars a day, and spread your spend out over time. If you dump it all in one chunk, TikTok just shotguns it out to anyone. Stretch it out, and the platform gets better at aiming at the right people, which means a better return on your investment.
One more thing that caught me off guard: TikTok now supports photo swipe-throughs, not just video, and they perform at a high level. So if your church is already creating organic content for Instagram, the easiest move is to just start posting it on TikTok too. And if you have a pastor who's great on camera, encourage them to post from their personal account. Chris pointed out that on almost every platform, a pastor's personal page tends to out-perform the church's page.
We got into Facebook groups, and Chris dropped what he called a gatekeeping secret. He owns local groups like "Free Stuff in Phoenix," which has grown to 25,000 people. He can message that entire audience anytime, "Hey, here's something free going on for Easter." He built audiences he actually owns. I have a feeling a lot of you are going to go start a group for your own city right after reading this. I know I'm tempted.
If you're a pastor sitting there feeling behind, here's my encouragement: you don't have to do all of it. Pick one thing. Maybe it's posting your existing content to TikTok this week. Maybe it's filming one simple phone video inviting your city to church. Maybe it's just downloading the app and paying attention to what's actually there. Small steps. You've got this.
And if you'd rather have help, Chris and his team at Good and Faithful Studio do done-for-you social media for churches and can set up your TikTok ads with you. Whatever you choose, just take a step.
I loved this conversation, and there's so much more in the full episode, including the wild story of how Chris went from youth pastor, to selling bulldogs online, to building a marketing studio that's crossed a million dollars in revenue. Watch the whole thing below.
Keep believing and leading strong,
Josh Roberie
The Build the Church Podcast helps you gain momentum, grow your church, and go the distance in ministry. New episodes drop regularly, subscribe wherever you listen: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or watch on YouTube.
