BETA18: Defining a Digital-Only, Location-Independent Church (Clubhouse Edition)

Hey, we're going to get you to that podcast in one second, but before we get there, I, Jeff Reed, the Church Digital, Stadia Church Planning, I wanted to have a conversation with you, churches that are out there. One of the greatest things I arguably think that I've done in my life, other than married and kids, okay, that aside, one of the greatest ministry things I've ever done is this idea of the fidgetal learning communities that we are offering through Stadia Church Planning. We want to help you, we want to help your church learn to thrive, grow, and multiply fidgetally, physically, as well as digitally. We've seen about 200 churches go through this already, and it's been a phenomenal result of it.

Culture is changing within these churches. They're understanding what it is to thrive. They're understanding how to grow people, how to grow their church, even in the midst of this COVID, not COVID, wherever we are in the season. And they're even starting to understand what it means to multiply in fidgetal space. There's no secret sauce to doing a digital strategy. There's no secret sauce to doing a fidgetal strategy. There's no secret sauce to making your church thrive, grow, and multiply. It takes work. I'm not going to lie. But through the framework, through the questions, through the learning communities, we connect you with churches. We give you some content. We coach you along the way to help you make the decisions that you need to make so that your church's strategy can thrive, grow, and multiply your church along the way.

This is a great opportunity for your church. We would love to have you be a part of it. For more information, check out stadiacchurchplanning.org slash fidgetal. Stadiachurchplanning.org slash fidgetal. P-H-Y-G-I-T-A-L. All right. Hey, that's it. We're going to get you back to that episode right now. Hey, welcome to Clubhouse here. My name is Jeff Reed, and I am director of digital church planting with Stadia. It's literally my job with Stadia Church Planting to help plant churches in digital-only space. Now, it was funny. I just got off a talk with Exponential. They're doing their future church kind of thing. And my talk in the Q&A was all centered around a digital-only expression of church, churches that do not have physical buildings.

And we're going to talk with Chesley, Angela, Daniel. There's probably some other guests that will come up, and we'll take some Q&A and stuff. But this is a very aggressive, forward-facing thing. This is not, hey, we've got a church at the corner of XYZ Street and ABC Avenue, and we're doing digital ministry. This is the conversation we want to have here is a church that exists entirely in Facebook or entirely in a digital platform called Roblox. So it's an aggressive point. What was fascinating was after the talk, even in the Q&A with Exponential, it was kind of stuck in that physical-digital dual relationship, which, hey, you know what? That's a necessary thing to have for churches. With this specifically, we want to hang on the nuance of a digital-only expression of church for the conversation.

And by the way, we are recording this. We're very intentional towards saying that. So there's lots of people with – I run a podcast with the Church Digital Podcast. We've got hundreds of people listening on social media as well. And there's a following of people who are very excited about conversations like these, and some of them don't have Clubhouse devices. They don't have accounts, or maybe they're on Android or they're in other countries. And so there's a lot of FOMO centered on a lot of the conversations that we have in context of Clubhouse. So we are recording this, and I'm going to turn this into a podcast probably within a week. So just know that going in advance, Clubhouse is very particular that I have to say that.

So I've said that. Clubhouse, don't sue me. All right. Hey, so let's get in here and dig into the conversation. We've got a couple panelists on stage that – it's interesting. They're in different stages of life, even in context of planting, starting, and running a digital-only expression of church, just kind of going in no particular order here. We've got Daniel Heron down beneath me on the Clubhouse chart. Daniel started a church called the Robloxian Christians. Maybe – I guess it's probably been about 10 years at this point now, Daniel, right? And so Daniel's voice is going to sound very young in a second because Daniel's 21. So if you do bad math, he started a church when he was 11 years old on a platform called Roblox.

And we'll get more into Daniel here in a little bit. Angela Craig just popped in. Angela is lead pastor of a church called Pursuit Church Live. It's a Facebook-only church. Arguably, I think it's the first social media church, at least for the Assemblies of God, if not in general. And so Angela is impacting thousands of people a week across – last I heard, I think it was 46 countries, 43 languages, something like that, coming out of Pursuit Church Live, 1,500 small groups a week. Some ridiculous stats that are happening through Angela's digital-only church. DJ Soto, probably – and DJ, we'll get to this maybe, but DJ Soto, through his virtual reality church, is actually kind of well-known. BBC did a story on his virtual reality church, a church that exists entirely in virtual reality, talking about the goggles and stuff like this.

DJ got a story done by BBC, I think Fox News, CNN, a couple news sources picked him up. Even the Comedy Central daily show did a story on him. But as a result of that, I think this birch baptism that was done in virtual reality, I think was actually probably the most well-known or the most viewed virtual baptism ever that year, if not even since. It's because so much attention was drawn towards it, and we can have an entire conversation of whether baptism counts if it's done in virtual reality. I tend to think, yes, we can dialogue through that later. Chesley Lundy's in here as well, who is starting – planting a new church in digital space. Chesley's wanting to plant a church through a social media network that's targeting and aimed towards young professionals.

And so lots of conversations here, part of Clubhouse, we want to get into dialogue. We want to get into part of questions and answers. And so if you've got some questions coming into this, go ahead and raise your hand. I do want to let the speakers give a chance to kind of talk up front, share their story, maybe share some of the pros and cons and why they chose a digital-only expression of church, a church without a physical footprint. But raise those hands, I'll bring you up to the speaker level, and then we'll include you in when it's appropriate or able to. So let me ask this question up front. And DJ, let me get you to go first, and then we will open it up and let the panel kind of answer it.

So, I mean, by far the majority, there's 330,000 evangelical churches in America today, not even talking globally. Like, there's a ridiculous number of churches. They all exist in physical space. DJ, you decided to go digital. You decided to even go avatar-based, which is a little different than digital, a lot different than digital. But the idea is you kind of went a different approach by going digital. Why would you go? What was the motivation for you? What were you seeing for you? Why do you think God was leading you to do a digital-only expression of church? Hey, Jeff. Thanks for having me. So long story short, my wife and I were pastors at a physical church for many years. We led one of the campuses at a church in southeast Pennsylvania, helped launch one of their multi-site campuses.

And it was about 2016 where we felt like God wanted us to do something new and didn't know what that meant. And so we thought that meant playing physical churches. That's what we set out to do. And it was about the same time that the Oculus Rift came out. And that name is starting to become a little bit more familiar. It's owned by Facebook. You start to see it at Best Buy. You can get it on Amazon. And it was the first time where VR, this new technology, was available to the masses at a consumer level. I mean, VR has been around for a long time, but not at the consumer level where you could order it from Amazon or Best Buy. And so our family, we're a bunch of gamers, geeks. We had Fortnite, Overwatch, you know, all the MMOs.

We just love to play all these games. And so we're kind of tech nerds. And so we got the virtual reality headset, the Oculus Rift, you know, not thinking ministry-oriented. But it wasn't too long into owning one of these where we discovered the metaverse. This whole new digital universe where you can think of it like living, breathing cities where people exist in avatars, three-dimensional spaces, immersive environments. It was just unbelievable the first time I experienced, it's called Altspace VR. It's now owned by Microsoft. And it was the first time I experienced anything like that. You know, I thought I'd seen it all, but I'd never seen anything like this. Went into that space. And just a few days later, I was like, you know what?

I'd love to try experimenting with church and virtual reality. So it was just an experiment. A few days later, we had the first church service in VR. My first visitor was an atheist from Denmark. And he came in and he said, you know, man, I don't believe in God and all, but I'm just curious to what this VR church is all about. And the light bulb came on at that moment. I was like, this is unbelievable. I've never, you know, all the churches I've been a part of, big and small, you know, launching multi-science. I've never had the first guest ever been an atheist. And so from that moment, we just started experimenting with church and virtual reality. And it took a little bit of time. It was probably about May of 2017 where, like, the light bulb fully came on.

And we said, oh, this is a living, breathing church in the metaverse. This is no different than a physical church on the street corner. And we made the shift to plant churches in the metaverse. And so that's what we've been doing. Ever since. That's awesome. I love the fact that we're planting churches in the metaverse. Like, that's maybe a crazy concept or a new concept to some people in the audience. But the reality is, is that there's community in these digital spaces. And I've had conversations with people who are in the metaverse, so to speak, where that's the only real community and the access to community that they have. And so, DJ, you've got a lot of, like, you know, I've met people, Alina, as one who has medical issues that are engaging in the virtual reality church.

And she's one of those that it's like, Jeff, this is the only church I could get to in virtual reality. But DJ, talk to me a little bit, just a follow-up question. Talk to me about, like, who else is accessing and engaging with the virtual reality church? You told me at some point there was a large percentage of atheists, of agnostics that you guys are engaging with in this digital church, maybe in a virtual reality church, maybe that aren't engaging, not wanting to go to a physical church. What is the ministry? What is evangelism? What does it look like at the virtual reality church, VR church, maybe doing some of this evangelism? Yeah, it's just mind-blowing in so many ways. The community is very eclectic, very diverse.

Like I said, you know, atheists and agnostics that visit, Wired Magazine did an article and the reporter, you know, just started talking with a group of people and a couple of them were atheists. And so it's certainly that, it's certainly people who have severe social anxieties. There's reason why people physically can't get to church. So I've heard some criticism, you know, more of that pre-COVID where they were like, you know, people should physically go to church. I was like, yeah, you know, that's great and all, but some people actually physically can't. Or perhaps there's an emotional or a mental disorder that prevents them from doing so. And so I think that we've seen just the whole gamut of people who are homebound, severe social anxiety, some form of autism.

And it's just, it's just these digital online virtual reality churches, whatever you call them, just provide an opportunity for many people, millions of people that, you know, just physically can't attend. And so it's quite eclectic. It's very unique. People ask me, well, why do atheists attend a VR church? And I said, well, I still think they're very interested about faith. You know, many, many of these atheists, at least that I've had conversations with, used to be a part of a church in some form or fashion. And so it's still, it's part of their history. It's part of their childhood and they still just want to talk about it. So, yeah, so that's, I think that these opportunities we have for these online churches is just groundbreaking.

And I'm just really looking forward to see what it becomes. I feel like we're just scratching the surface. We've just started this whole thing. And the more that the church gets on board, so to speak, with the idea of digital ministry, online churches, I think that the better we'll be for it. Awesome. Love that. Let's shift gears. Let's keep it in the avatar world, or at least somewhat avatar world. Daniel Heron is a former, I guess. I don't know, Daniel. You can tell me if it's still current or former. But he started a church called the Robloxian Christians. And Daniel actually just, I may have been like the first succession plan of a digital church, at least that I know of, where Daniel has handed the church over to some other individuals.

And so, Daniel, I'll let you explain that here in a second. But Daniel's doing a church on a platform called Roblox. Now, I, as a 43-year-old person, really had no idea what Roblox was until my kids told me what Roblox was. My son, who's 10, probably spends about an hour and a half a day playing on this Roblox platform, talking with people. He's got his iPad with Zoom up, joking around with his friends while they're engaging on this, with his laptop in this platform, playing games and things like that. And so, Daniel, like close to 10 years ago, started a church there and has actually successfully handed it over to another organization to run. So, Daniel, talk to me a little bit here. So, Daniel, kind of what was it you that stirred into starting this digital-only expression of church in Roblox?

Yeah, thanks, Jeff, for putting this together. And I really like what DJ said when he talked about sort of just stumbling into it, into the buying a VR headset and getting into it. I mean, Roblox is not VR. It's not in the headset. It's like an online game that I was playing, you know, with my friends just after school when I was like growing up. And like when I talk and talk about this, I don't talk about like an intentional like plan to start a church. It was really a little bit more organic growth from wanting to have a place to talk about faith and pray with my friends online. And I guess over time it took shape and became more organized with an actual like structure of young people coming together to care for and support other young people online.

And I think that's something that really defines our church because it Roblox is special because it is a platform where young people are at in mass. And there's just like you were just saying, your kids are on Roblox. I'm sure if you ask most parents with kids that are between 10 to 18, they would probably say, I have some recollection of what Roblox is or what Discord is and these platforms that our kids are already on. I was on there too and having a space on there that's reserved and a place where they can be supported and find God and come to be loved and love each other and it's like a safe environment is really special. I think contributed to the success that our church has had. It's awesome.

If you're not, Roblox is, and I should have said this up front, if you've never seen Roblox, Google it, it's worth the time. I think it just went public stockwise or it's going public in the next couple of days. But essentially it's a cross of maybe Minecraft with Lego and it's kind of in that environment where your kids can build virtual worlds and play around and just like be very creative within the space. And so I've loved, honestly, I've loved seeing my son and some of the creativity that he's developing by programming and building some of this stuff with it. And the idea that maybe, just maybe through the community of Roblox, we're able to connect with kids and students in a new way. Side note, like when we're struggling in this COVID season, student ministry doesn't work.

I honestly would love to see more churches even get into the Roblox space and start to maybe build some of these churches as well and start to explore doing ministry in that space, going to people instead of broadcasting services, student services online. But that's a separate thing. Daniel, let me just follow up here real quick. Talk to me about like the succession. So you built this thing. You ran it for 10 years. By the way, reaching tens of thousands of people. The number varies and grows. But it's probably safe to say 40,000 plus have been influenced over time as a result of what's happening in the Robloxian Christian church. But Daniel, you're kind of stepping away for that for a time period and you've handed over to some others.

What was some of the logic? Why were you kind of transitioning out? Yeah, that's a good question. I think as funny as it sounds, a large part of why I was trying to step away is like I've been doing this for 10 years and it was 10 incredible years, like life changing and built relationships to last a lifetime. But as funny as it sounds, I was growing too old to be leading on the Roblox church because something that made our church special was the fact that it was youth serving youth and entirely youth led. So as I right now, I'm a junior in college graduating next fall. I'm looking forward to like what's coming next in my life. And I was like, you know, I don't know if I can continue to lead with the same dynamic of young people giving their time.

And because when it's when it's your peers that you're talking to and your peers that are there supporting you, there's a really different dynamic than perhaps when you're a young person in a youth group talking to a youth pastor that's 10 or 15 years older than you. There's just a different trust and a different bond that is there. And my stepping away is sort of wanting to respect that bond and allow that to continue on with leaders that are a little bit closer to keeping that relationship intact. Yeah. He aged out of Robloxian ministry at the age of 21. I just find that beautiful. You know, and even the ability to hand that over to others and to transition on looking at multiplication, they still got some things to work out organizationally.

But, you know, love the fact that probably the oldest digital only church, at least the oldest that I'm aware of, which interestingly, and Daniel told me this recently, like out of their church, they've actually grown and developed and multiplied into other Robloxian churches. There are other groups and entities that exist in the Robloxian space. And a lot of it comes from that leadership of this initial Robloxian Christian group. Awesome. Angela Craig is on as well from Pursue Church Live, which is this Facebook-only Assemblies of God Church. And I've loved her heart for ministry and how she's doing things on that social media platform. So, Angela, why did you get into the Facebook Pursue Church Live?

Maybe what was some of the motives heading into this? Hi, everybody. We're so glad you're here today. And thank you for inviting me. Oh, my goodness. It's hard to tell you why I wouldn't have gotten into this. Before Pursuit, Pursuit is about four years old, I was working in my local church. And I was also a director of and coach at the Northwestern Ministry Network. It's basically the Assemblies of God. If you're familiar with that, we have network offices that train the pastors and leaders. And so, I was coaching leaders and the pastors were all saying, you know, I would say, what's your biggest need? And they'd say, getting people to come to church. So, I was also doing some, about seven years ago, I started doing some Facebook groups because for that very reason, I couldn't get my leaders to come to in-person meetings anymore.

And so, I started using Facebook groups and to equip leaders. And what I found through that was that there was a large percentage of people coming that said, I love Jesus, but I don't have a local church. I don't, there's just not one in my area. And 40% of our groups, we ended up having about 500 people join that Facebook group in six months. And 40% of those people did not, were not attached to a local body. And my heart was always for people outside the church. In my local church, you know, I was asking the same question because so many people didn't feel like they fit. Whether they were divorced or, or whatever it was, there's so many reasons that people are held back from, or maybe a religious experience before.

And so, I just went to our network and I said, hey, I want to try seeing if I could do church online. And they were like, okay, well, the Assemblies of God is not going to approve that, but you go ahead because you have Jesus' approval. Chesley, why don't you go ahead and share, you're starting a new church in digital only. So, share me a little bit what's happening there. So, I guess my backstory was, I was a church replanter in Omaha, Nebraska a few years ago, about four years ago. I was by far the youngest pastor in the room in this particular denomination. And I asked the question, probably a little unwisely, what if the church didn't have a building? And I got laughed out of the room. And I was told that I was young, thinking that I should be thinking more about the church that God's given me at the moment, rather than thinking about these silly little things.

And then, fast forward a couple more years. Oh, there we go. Go ahead, Chesley. Sorry. No, you're okay. You're all right. Several of us had tech issues, it looks like. Sorry, Angela. Angela, we'll come back to you in a second. Yeah, so, fast forward a few more years. I'm in a new place in Phoenix, Arizona, as a youth and young adult pastor in a much larger church. And I began to realize that Gen Z needed interaction online. We would have conversations in groups, and they weren't transparent on the things that they were struggling with. But the moment we started creating a forum online for them, they would tell us things we didn't even want to know. And so, I began to experiment. Now, we are helping churches in three different time zones from youth ministry.

And God put it on my heart to start thinking about church planting digitally when COVID happened. I felt like, hey, we have something here. I'm not crazy. There's proof of concept. And so, I went looking for digital church planting. And I had to find – I had to go through 14 pages of Google until I found one dude, and that dude was Jeff Reed. And so, he's not on the 14th page of Google anymore. I think I'm pretty sure you're page number one, aren't you? Yeah, okay. So, maybe COVID brought some awareness up and some credibility along the road. But, yeah, it's been fun towards that. And, honestly, I've just really enjoyed helping plant churches, helping church planters like Chesley, even in this COVID season, plant a church.

And this is really the heart of what Stadia is wanting to do and plant a digital-only expression of church. Angela, we cut you off. You and I both had tech issues at the same time, which tells me there's something wrong with the Clubhouse platform with that. So, sorry, audience, towards that. Yeah, that's okay. What did you actually hear? Can you hear me now? Yeah. So, just maybe the heart of – I tell you what, Angela, let's shift. I want to ask you the first question. And then I want to ask this question of the others. Tell me a story. Tell me something that's happening within context of your church. Because a lot of the people who say a digital-only church cannot be a real church because it doesn't do this.

Honestly, when I talk with you and with DJ and Daniel and some of these others, I hear the stories that actually goes against what these people are saying. Because the relationships are authentic, because the discipleship is real, because people are willing to be open and transparent digitally and maybe not in doing so physically. So, tell me – kind of open up here a little bit, Angela. What's – tell me a story or two of what's happening through Pursuit Church Love. Okay. I'm just trying to think which one I should start with. I – oh, goodness. When COVID hit, I wrote a little book called Online Jesus. And it kind of tells how to disciple and care for people online. But – and I wrote a lot of stories in there.

But I'll – I just want to tell you – I'll tell you a story of Dee. She sticks out in my mind. And Dee is actually from Colorado. She has MS. And the way that we look – you know, we're engaging with people is when we see people engaging, they like, they share, they comment, we reach out to them. And Dee was a person who was always on, always watching, always cheering. And so, I invited her pretty quickly to be on our – what we call our impact team or encouragers. Basically, they're just – they're there daily to see, you know, like, who can I encourage? Who can I pray for? Who can I like their comment? That kind of thing. And then she started – she started in one of our small groups, Bible Studies.

And she – then I asked her to lead the impact team. And she did that for two years and was just absolutely phenomenal at it. And just constant presence always for people. Her and her husband came to our – I don't know if I got cut off, but I was talking about our in-person meeting we had. And they came from Colorado. And that was the first time we got to see them. She has a hard time traveling. And it meant so much to her to be part of community, to meet the people of the church that she and her husband came. And then she has such a heart for people that have chronic illness. She's starting – she started a micro-community, which that's, like, our next phase as far as pursuit is to have people either in person or online.

And the original vision was they would be in-person groups. And anytime someone wants to go to a church, we always – we have a partnership with a lot of churches or we'll find someone in church to go to. We're not opposed to that, obviously. But the micro-groups we have had start are digital. And so she started a micro-group serving people that have chronic illness and has gone back to school. And she would tell you that her life has changed because she was always on the outside. And she's written blogs about it. And she's talked to our community about it because she was always on the outside of the church looking in because of her MS. She wasn't always able to be in a church. And she hasn't been to church in years now.

But she said that people just dropped her like a rock because she couldn't go to church. But here she is, this person who's thriving in her faith and wanted to have a purpose in building God's kingdom. And now she has that chance because of technology. So I don't know how to sell it better than that. But God changes lives. And He has given us an incredible tool. And it just is really heartbreaking to me when I've seen people kind of insult church because they're really insulting the people that I love. When they say that digital is not real community, they really are insulting the people that I love. And I get pretty riled up about it. I mean, that's a powerful story there. And I'm sure it's one of many, many more.

And it's interesting, even with the health issues, that that stands out as, man, I'm able to connect with people, reaching people that aren't able to get into the physical space. I'll tell you, another example of maybe a physical, just yesterday, maybe it was Tuesday, sometime this week, I had a conversation with a digital only planter, or a potential planter, who wanted to plant a digital church in ASL, American Sign Language. The, you know, that community, the deaf people, hard of hearing people, they're scattered across the country. They go where caregivers are able to take them. They're distributed among family members. And often they're not able to stay in a physical location. And because of their conditions, they're not easily able to connect within a hearing world.

And so even looking to do things, do a church, reaching, you know, American Sign Language people that are deaf is an incredible option to do that in digital space with services and communities and tailoring it in ways to meet deaf people. And so it was really encouraging for me, even just to hear the story of another health abnormality. I'm not sure how to say that appropriately, but somebody who's struggling with a health issue, but we're still able to challenge them with the gospel. We're still able to challenge them to be on mission for God, even beyond that, utilizing digital tools. So that's a very beautiful story. DJ, what do you have story-wise? Yeah, there are so many just beautiful stories that, you know, we've experienced.

And one is just the nature of the technology of virtual reality allows people just to come into the space and experience it at their own pace in a very comfortable way. And so just one guy that I think of is a gentleman from Spain. He was an avowed atheist and just decided to come check it out as a technologist. I'm just curious about virtual reality and what's faith doing in the space. And then just started to come each week. He was really connected with the community. And just over time, you could just see his interest in wanting to help out and volunteer. So even before coming to faith, which he did recently, he was one of our volunteers, a greeter. And it blew me away one time. He was like, hey, pastor, can I pray?

Was that a prayer gathering or like a small group or something like that? I was like, absolutely. So he prayed in his language in Spanish. And I know Little Spanish was this beautiful prayer. And it wasn't too much longer after that where he got me in the – we have digital offices. He got me in the virtual office and said, hey, I just want to let you know that I've come to faith in Christ. And that was just a beautiful moment. You know, those stories that you have, those things that you experience that, you know, makes it all worth it. And so this gentleman in Spain was just such a powerful story for us. So now he's actually – I just totally forgot about this. I just remembered it right now. He helped our teaching team on Sunday.

Pastor Alina was preaching, and he brought up this gentleman to teach a couple of verses that impacted him in this particular chapter that we were studying. And so, I don't know. That's one of the ones. Wow. And what's fascinating is with this digital technology, it often – it looks like some of the knock against it is that it's – you're unable to do authentic relationships. You really don't know who these people are that you're engaging with, that you're talking with online. And here you're hearing two stories that go against that idea. Yeah, we know these people by name. We see the fruit of what's happening. We know the challenges in their lives with it. Daniel, and you've been a guy who's been engaging a lot with younger generations through these Roblox platforms.

Tell me about a story of something that you're seeing out of your church. Thanks, Jeff. And I think that all of us have these, like, really incredible stories that they are just the natural harvest from the seeds that we're planting online. Before I share a story, I just want to say I think that something that's powerful is just a reminder that God gave us the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit is present online as much as the Holy Spirit is in the physical world. And I think that just remembering that God is the Alpha and the Omega and he is present in all things has been a reminder to me and to the church that, you know, even when it seems like we're just doing this work, God is present here.

It's been a powerful reminder, but in Roblox with young people, I think one of the biggest issues with my generation, and I talked a lot about this pre-pandemic. I think it's probably been exasperated by the pandemic, but it's just these issues of depression and anxiety. They are just, they are killers. And I have seen so many, how hard it is to just, just to live and just to, you know, exist. And when they come and they get involved and they get plugged in and they, it's not that their depression is cured, but it's more that they are coming and they're talking about it, talking about it in ways that, you know, they might be hiding it in other places. So there have been stories that I could share many, many, many, but what comes first to mind is a girl named Taylor.

She lived in Alabama. I mean, this was back in like 2015 and 16. And she, she plugged in like anyone. She served on our welcoming team and just was on fire. But what was more hidden was the family situation that was going on behind the scenes, behind the screen where her, her parents were divorced and it wasn't a pretty divorce. It was pretty not good. And she was hurting, deeply hurting. And it led to her trying to kill herself, which is horrific that really that anyone, especially young people, have these thoughts. But the issue is not with Taylor alone. It's endemic in my generation. I think that that's heartbreaking. And in our church, I don't have a story that says, oh, she was healed and cured and she wasn't depressed anymore.

But I do have a story that says that she was, she found community and was able to talk about it. And when she was in a really dark place and said, hey, I'm thinking about hurting myself and tried to hurt herself, she told someone from our church from, that was not near her, that lives, she lives in Alabama. She told her friend that lives in Wisconsin. And he does not, out of the relationship they had built, he was able to contact and get help for her, from her family and from the local people in Alabama. By making those calls. And if that is not the pinnacle definition of the kind of bond and intimate relationship that you can build online, I really don't know what is. And I think that that is powerful in and of itself.

And that's just one small, like, that is happening in all of these online spaces and online churches every day. And I think that Angela and DJ can both attest to that as well. Yeah. Awesome. And Chesley, I know you're starting up, but even with some of the things you've been doing with student ministry, doing things with digital ministry with students online. Man, tell me a story. Do you find that, like, similar to Daniel, where students can engage online, where they're being transparent, even with some of these, you know, suicide on depression things? Do you see, do you find it? Talk to me physical and digital, because you can really speak to that. You're doing physical ministry right now. You're doing digital ministry as well.

You're starting to plan a church. What's maybe the tension with that younger generation, physically and digitally? Well, it was really funny. So we didn't do well at the Zoom game. Other people have. So what we did was we started doing watch parties at our place. One week, we had a high school student sitting on my couch. I could tell she was having a really difficult time. And I'm like, what's going on? She just wouldn't open up. There's other people there. And I'm like, hey, why don't you DM me on our app? Our organization has an app you can download in the app store if you're a teenager. And so she did. And she literally told me way more than I even thought was going on. And it's just a reminder that they're not telling the whole story when they're face-to-face with you.

And we've got to give them safe spaces to open up. And so we were able to have a conversation. We got some female leaders to pray with her. But I was reminded of a story last week. I'm sitting in a student pastor conference. And while one of the guys was up there speaking, the Holy Spirit said, contact one of my best friend's son. We call him Little Jeremy, even though he's not little. And so I texted him. And I said, hey, when you get a chance, I got an idea to run past you. So he literally FaceTimes me right then. And I said, hey, if I could help you reach all of your friends in your school in the next two years for Jesus, would you be okay with that? And he literally looks at me. He's like, dude, I got to show you something.

He's like, he shows me his Bible. He's like, I've been sitting here and praying and saying, hey, God, how can I reach my friends? And you just texted me out of the blue. And we're both, like, blown away by it, right? And I'm like, cool, that is amazing. I've got stuff for you. How old are you? He's like, I'm 13. And I'm like, that's amazing. Like, we can get 13-year-olds in the game. And the way the church has been is the professional pastors are doing the bulk of the work and we're burning out at a record rate when all of us could be in the game at the same time. When we could actually do what Ephesians 4 says, which is equip the body of Christ for the work of the ministry. So us, you, quote, unquote, professionals can get out of the field and start letting other people be the superstars for once.

I think it's cool. I think it's awesome. The fact that we have the ability to do that on a scalable level where even we can get our weekends back and hang with our families is really a positive, too. That's awesome. Yeah, it's all about – I'm not saying it's all about the weekend. Let's not get that idea out there, the fact that as a digital pastor, you can claim your Saturdays and Sundays back. But sometimes it's an added benefit to that. Hey, let's – I do want to open this up for questions. So if you've got questions, raise your hand. I'll bring you up happily to the speaker level and dialogue. Or if you've got thoughts on this, we'd love to let others speak into it. So feel free to raise your hand to come on up.

But let me just ask this maybe for the room while others are thinking through questions. And not directed at anybody. Literally, just feel free to jump on. What are some challenges? What do you guys face as you're doing this digital church, even with the launching? You know, is it casting vision to individuals? Is it getting, you know, church support, getting understanding organizationally, financial fundraising challenges? Kind of like what's working and what's not working? We'd love to maybe spend a minute talking about that, and then we'll take some questions from the audience. Yeah, one thought that comes to mind real quick is as we went into digital church planning or specifically virtual reality church planning, what we did is we tried to replicate the church.

And so, you know, there's some utility to that, but there are some things that we had to revamp and renew because we realized, you know, God wanted us to actually reimagine the church. So, as you get into, like, digital church planning, virtual, whatever you want to call it, reimagination over replication is a very important principle to keep in mind. It's not that you don't carry things over, but what I've noticed in COVID is churches try to go one for one. What have we done physically? Okay, let's take that one and create the equal experience online. And some have, I think, to our detriment, and some have adopted very well. And so that's just one thing that I thought about is, like, what was one of the pains of VR church is that we tried to plan it like a physical church instead of thinking in new ways.

And so a lot of the things that we have in our methodology of church is exactly that. It's just methodology, but it's been integrated for so long. It seems like theology. So that's one thing that we have worked on, one thing we've shifted and pivoted in that has benefited us greatly. And we're just at the beginning of that because that's something that just happened this fall. So we're excited to discover what that reimagination is going to lead to. I love that. Don't recreate, reimagine that. And honestly, that's been a challenge for the church overall in this COVID season as we tried to recreate initially and it didn't work. And now, even to reach some of the younger generations, some of the things that you're hearing, Chesley and Daniel talking about, we're having to reimagine through that.

Let's take one more. Addison, I got you up here. We'll get your question and thought in a second. One other observation from the panel otherwise. Challenge, obstacle, celebration kind of thought towards a digital standpoint. I'm happy to go. I agree with DJ about the methodology versus theology. I think before you start, you have to figure out the difference as far as defining church. And then also recognizing that what others do. So if someone was to come and try to just mimic exactly what we do at Pursuit, that might not be a great fit for them. And so, of course, some of the bones will work. But I know for us, like we had a very large Facebook group and that absolutely didn't work for our church, but is working really well for a lot of other digital only spaces.

And so that's one thing I would say because you hit on the money thing. Everybody always wants to talk about money. This is not something I've done well. And Pastor Jared is actually here and is pastoring at Pursuit Church Live as well. And so I would say for fundraising that you need to have a good coach and a good strategy. And for us, it would, for instance, we, starting out of the gate, we decided we would be all bivocational and then we would give the money back to our community because our community was largely in a population that had no money and really had huge needs. And that was the way that we decided to move forward. That's one model for sure. But another model, and realistically, you will have to pay people and you should also be paid.

As much as there's this argument that vocational ministry is outdated or going away, you will need to pay for things. And so one way to do that would be to look through the lens of partnerships with other churches like a missionary would. So you could, we have a lot of church partners. And so we could potentially go to them and say, hey, we're doing this work in the field. And so would you partner with us financially? Just like a missionary goes to a church and says, would you give us $100 a month? So that would be one model. So there's a whole, in fact, Chesley and I were just talking about how that would be a great digital only conversation to have around generosity and talk about also just other forms, funnels that you could do.

Yeah, Chesley, sorry, Addison, we'll get to you, I promise. Chesley, why don't you speak to that? Because you're literally in the midst of this right now. Yeah, well, so I'm treating it from a physical standpoint, the best way you could compare apples to oranges is through like a launch large model. And so I've been building a war chest thinking like a Silicon Valley startup, who can I get to invest? And so we've worked on that and then we are looking, I mean, and I'm probably the worst at this, Angela and DJ can attest to this. The first question I ask every one of the digital church planners that we've talked to is like, hey, what's your, what's your, we have an organization that we've got to run and keep moving forward.

And so that's important. So I'm looking at some really interesting things. A college girl that I was talking to a few weeks ago, she's like, I net $100 a month. And every time I'm at church, I feel guilty because they want 10%. And I'm like, well, okay, can you do two? Obviously that's $2. And she's like, yeah, I could do two. I'm like, do you? And she's like, no, I get so guilty that they want 10. And I, well, there is a way to give $2 through digital, like digital platforms. There's a thing called Patreon for content creators on YouTube to really get micro donations. And so we're looking at that piece. There's a couple of other pieces through like crowd funding, which probably most of you have heard of Kickstarter.

Kickstarter is an amazing platform that says, hey, we're going to do this thing. And we have a plan for it. And if you like it, we would love for you to invest in it. However, not like a venture capitalist. And so we want to be able to expand reach and look at how do we build a platform that's like Kickstarter and like Patreon on our, for our digital church. So people can do micro donations. So there's a couple other ways, but those are some of the biggest that we've talked about. Love that. Sorry. Go ahead, Daniel. I didn't mean to cut you off. No, it's all right. I just wanted to add one thing just in talking about the money. You know, in the physical church, I think if you think about what the largest expenses are, clearly it's personnel and then it's paying for the building, probably.

I don't know if there are other major expenses, but online there is no building and personnel is basically your only major expense. But I just think it's an incredible opportunity to like the dollars to impact ratio that you see online is astronomical in comparison to like a physical church. So I just thought that was helpful. Yeah. I mean, that's a great point here. You don't have the building necessarily. You know, Chesley's developing, I mean, literally a social media network. So his is probably one of the more financially aggressive when it comes towards the digital only plans. You know, I mean, I've got we're working with digital planners on Stadia that are probably more on the co-vocational side of it as well.

There's a girl that's wanting to plant a church in a video game called Black Desert Online. And so basically she has to pay for the software and then she's just being relational in the game. And so the cost of that, yeah, I mean, she needs to put food on the table and care for herself. So there's some of that at some level. Honestly, a lot of the conversations, we had a conversation with the guy in France that was a IT director, excuse me, a guy in Canada. He was an IT director for a Fortune 500 company. And he says, I don't want to quit my job, Jeff, but I want to do this digital thing on the side. And so even there are a lot of planters that we're talking with, probably the majority of them, honestly, through Stadia, where they don't want to give up the job.

They don't want to give up and go full time necessarily ministry. Now, there are people like Chesley and others. Christopher is actually in the room. Christopher is another one of our planters. We'll bring him up in a minute. He's in Kentucky wanting to do some ministry kind of in the Kentucky, Tennessee, Cincinnati kind of area. And so like that's another type of thing. We've got some of these upper echelon. Hey, guys, we want to go full in with this church. And then there's this other level of more of a co-vocational. Hey, I want to reach people. I want to multiply. But my strategy is not trying to get the church to pay for me my salary. So anyway, it's an interesting kind of question and quandary.

Addison, you've been the most patient clubhouse person I've ever met. Thank you for waiting all this time. Question or thought? What are you thinking off of this? I actually misunderstood one of your earlier questions. I thought you were asking that last question for like what struggles do you run into? And it actually pushes you further into what you're already talking about. So is it okay if I do that? I don't want to. Yeah, go ahead. Why not? Yeah. We'll see what happens. I guess it's like we're launching kind of – well, we launched last year and then COVID was like survival mode. And so now like as we come out, we're kind of launching in earnest, I would say. And in other words, we're launching without it being like our main place.

Hold on, baby. And the other piece is – and I guess what I find is as I'm transitioning into it full time, I feel this tremendous pull to not be like as you guys are being. Like being so weekend focused. I don't know if that really makes sense, but like building out the digital space of Grace Community Church and not necessarily like building the online ministry of Grace Community Church. And I would love to hear us when you guys have navigated that tension, if you've experienced it. Yeah. Let's spend the question this way. Let's talk about – I would love to talk about Discord for a second. So DJ, Daniel, you guys have experience on this. Talk to me a little bit why – what's the role of Discord in context of your large gathering?

Can one of you two elaborate on that? Yeah, sure. So I'm going to say a grandiose statement. I think Discord is one of the most powerful and underutilized social platforms out there. And I think that if – I don't know if it's a generational thing, a gamer thing. I don't know what it is. But if you look under the hood of all of that and you see the technical aspects and the community building, the powerful community building experience, I would rank that above anything. And I know there's amazing things happening in other platforms, but I'm just saying from the perspective of how underutilized it is across ministries. But it's a major part of Virtual Reality Church. I don't know what percentage, maybe up to 50%, we use Discord because it's the glue between our live and small group events.

So we get into virtual reality. We're fully immersed in our headsets. We're experiencing Sunday large gathering. Maybe we're experiencing a small group or a prayer gathering. And then when we're out of VR, how does spiritual life happen? Well, that's Discord. It's the glue. It just kind of connects it all, all our campuses and metaverses that we have. It's just so powerful. It just brings us all into one roof, so to speak. And even our team this past week has been talking about how even though there's activity and we use it, quote, unquote, well, we think it's underutilized for what we could be doing in ministry, discipleship, so many areas. And so we're rethinking that whole, there's a new initiative with that platform.

And I'm just looking forward to what that's going to produce. So, yeah, I think Discord is huge. It's definitely for us. And then I just wish more churches would get in on it to see the powerful community building tools behind it. Yeah. I mean, the takeaway, and Angela, I want to ask you the same question about how you do that on Facebook in a second. And by the way, if there's other questions, raise your hand from the audience. We'll move you up. But the thing with Discord is that when he says it's like 50%, 60% of what he's doing, that essentially is beyond – that's engagement beyond the one hour on Sunday. And in DJ's context, it's also beyond small groups. So, like, think about this from a physical standpoint.

50% to 60% of what DJ's doing in virtual reality church is not a service, nor is it a small group. In a physical environment, 80% – I mean, I don't know what the number is, but the majority of the ministry is either the physical service or it's the small group. And with VR church, the majority of it, I believe he said 60%, has nothing to do with those two. It's the gel that adds more emphasis, that amplifies what those two things are. That's beautiful. Actually, we had another planner. He's not on. He's one of the planners that State is working with. I mean, his plan – his plan was 85%. Other than what he's doing in Twitch and with the streaming, 85% of his ministry is planning to be in an online Discord environment.

By the way, if you've not checked out Discord, you really should. It's similar to Slack. It's much better than WhatsApp, but it's a great option there. Angela, I'm curious because Facebook is probably a platform that more churches are familiar with. So talk to us a little more specific. Digital only, but I think there's probably some other established churches in the room. How do you draw attention beyond the weekend service during the week? How are you utilizing that platform to connect with people? What does that look like? All right, I'm here. Well, there – like I said before, there's over 3 billion people coming a month. And so we connect through daily posts. We're doing a daily, every day at 8 a.m., which I think is a really smart idea just to pop on and connect with people.

People are connecting through our different groups, whether that's the Bible app, the YouVersion Bible app, or in our small groups, Facebook groups, the prayer room, or the women's group. And so in that way, we can then engage with people, and we really have this one-on-one model. And so, for instance, last night, I was introducing to Pastor Angie and Pastor Jared a new person that came in through our prayer group. She was invited by someone else, and she's a person of mature age. But she's actually living – I don't know what they would call it – a senior living shelter right now and really has jumped right in to our communities. And so we were just one-on-one introducing her to the pastors, to getting connected.

You know, what do you need? Where can we get you plugged in? And so we're always kind of going after that one. We have a saying called, who's your one? And so I hope that that helps with the question. But I think that we do have an upside-down strategy as far as most churches, like when I was at my church, 90% of my time was spent on working for Sunday, getting the Sunday service up and going and getting teams going. And now it's really the reverse of 10% of my time is worked on video stuff, and the other time is really just spent engaging and figuring out how I can meet one-on-one with someone or get a team member meeting with someone. And so that's really changed the way that we do things. That, by the way, is something I hear over and over again with people who are successful doing digital ministry and are making these connections.

It's not pouring all the energy into how to make the online service better. And even the challenge, honestly, with the digital is how do you even emphasize a large gathering? It's more in line of how do we get one-on-one as quick as possible. We actually did a podcast on this just recently. If you don't know me, I do a podcast, a church digital podcast. There's a link in my bio that can help you get there. But Beta episode 13, Beta show episode 13, we asked the question, what's a successful church? We asked a couple of lead pastors, a multi-site campus pastor, and honestly, I forget who the third guy was at this point. But the answer was, I was a Stadia employee, Craig Whitney. The coming out, the final solution was we need to get one-on-one as quick as possible.

And that was in a physical environment as well as a digital. And in digital-only environments, this is what I'm saying. Like the digital platforms allow for that one-on-one conversation easily. You can get one-on-one. You can get real with people. I'm reflecting back to Chesley. The girl sitting on the couch, probably not wanting to talk much. Give her a phone where she can type in and DM through an app. And all of a sudden, she's much more transparent and open and real because there's safety, a perceived safety in these devices that we're using. And if we can utilize that, if we as a church in physical or digital space can figure out how to disciple people digitally, and that maybe digital discipleship looks different than physical discipleship, I think you're going to see the church explode because we are ripe and open for these types of relationships.

The church just hasn't figured out that it's possible yet. All right. So I would love to take some other questions. So talking about digital-only expressions of churches here, anybody from the audience, feel free to raise their hand to kind of contribute towards this. Let me ask one question, maybe even just to stall here a little bit. Hey, I've got somebody. That's awesome. I don't need to stall. Scott. Scott, I have been wanting to meet you. I've been seeing your name recently. So let me bring you up and welcome. What are you thinking here talking about digital-only expression of church? Hey, I had a question for Chesley, actually. I was intrigued. I've been thinking a lot about the up-and-coming generation and kind of the youth as it relates to digital ministry.

And so just hearing you've had some experience in that area and had some success with kind of engaging the youth in deeper conversations, what platforms and stuff have you found? I mean, what channels have you found that have really worked well for that sort of engagement among younger generations? Yeah, thanks, man. Obviously, if you're looking at mainstream, TikTok is always going to be one that comes up with Gen Z, Instagram, and Snapchat. I find that YouTube is really interesting because it's the second largest search engine in the world, and it will surpass Google in the next 10 years. And if you look at my kids, which are six and seven years old, they're actually moving towards YouTube at a heavy, heavy pace.

There's another guy in our room, Jordan. He's doing some pretty cool things with students, too. So, yeah, definitely connect with him. But I find that if you look at spaces like Facebook and TikTok and Instagram and all of that, you're renting your space, meaning they own the space that you're in. And back in 2017, Google decided to change their algorithm. And if you look at a lot of the influencers that were banked on in, like, Facebook, they lost over half their audiences because they stopped being able to reach them organically. And I just, I don't know. I want to own the community so that we can create our own culture. And so there's places like Mighty Networks is where we host our digital church on.

And then we have another one that we host our student ministry on called Honeycomb. And the reason why I've done Honeycomb is because of privacy and data laws. We can see everything on the back end that our mentors and our students are talking. And so that's super important. Privacy and data is going to be coming up a lot in the next five years. And so that's important for us. But I also find as you start moving into this next generation, it's going to be really easy to start tribalizing a lot. And you see this on platforms already. Facebook is all the legacy people. So it's all boomers, Gen Xers, and old millennials. Younger millennials hang out on Instagram. Gen Z hangs out on Snapchat and TikTok.

Everybody goes to YouTube, which is why I like it so much. But one of the things that you can do by creating your own social network, and I'm big about that because I'm doing it, but you can take down those walls. And when you meet somebody, say, hey, come and build community with us in this other space that they don't already have a preconceived notion about. You get to create whatever notion that is for them based off of what you're doing. That being said, you're not going to be able to compete with those big guys. So you've got to think of what's the one core interaction that I want to hang out with them. I hope that helps, Scott. Yeah, well said there. Thanks, Chesley. This actually came out stats.

I want to pour on the YouTube and the importance of that. Barna, 2020, December, came out with a digital evangelism report. What they discovered, Barna, 80% of people who are called to Christ, people who are not Christians, they don't care about your physical service. They don't care about your digital service. They're not interested in going to either one of those. It's interesting. When they asked them, well, what do you? If you had spiritual questions, person who is called to Christ, person who is not a Christian, Barna did. Where would you go? Where would you go to get answers for these questions? 40% of them responded that they would go to their friends that were spiritual, that they saw spiritual in them and ask them questions.

So 40% of people who are not Christians want to go talk to Christians to get the answers towards spiritual things. This is the importance of evangelism today. There's another 40%. They're going to go to Google. They're going to go to YouTube. They're going to go to a search engine. They're going to go to the internet to find the answers. And we are not, as a church in physical or digital, we're not taking advantage of YouTube nearly at the level that we should. Our organizations, our institutions aren't. And so even like posting a sermon online, a 40-minute sermon, and thinking that's going to get the YouTube traffic, that's not the answer. Google Dave Adamson. And so you can start to explore some of the stuff that he's doing.

By the way, Stephen Fogg, who's in the room as well, this is going to segue very well to him, is really smart when it comes into some of these YouTube SEO, some of these strategies towards that. Jesse, Jesse's a new contact. I just had a conversation, Jesse, today. No, we emailed like a couple months ago, but just had a conversation with Jesse today about a digital-only church. So, hey, Jesse, let me throw it at you. What are you thinking about? What questions do you have coming off of this? Yeah, great conversation, and you guys have actually addressed some of the questions I had. And probably my vision, it looks the most like Angela's at this point. But one thing I'm curious about, does worship music play much of a role in the digital-only church?

Do you sing together? And I don't know that that's a huge part of even what I'm thinking about. It just came up as a question. What role does that play? How does worshiping together maybe look different in the digital online world? Angela, you want to take a stab at that? Hey. Hey, Jesse. Thanks for that question. Well, we look at worship kind of in the broader sense of biblical worship, gathering together for the adoration of our Father. And that can look anything from like a content post of asking people how they're engaging with God. Like, what is God doing in your life right now? To having live worship, for sure. That happens. But I think just the best advice I could give is just to look in Scripture and see how people come together to worship God.

So that could be coming together for Bible study or coming together for prayer. And so it looks more like a New Testament gathering than a regular traditional church gathering, I think. Maybe somebody else have ideas about that? Yeah, let me speak to it a little bit. I think this is an opportunity to reimagine what worship means. I think for hundreds of years, church has defined worship as musical. And not to mean or limit that, but there's an opportunity to really define worship as more. If we look at biblical, there's a lot more challenge to what worship is. There's a lot more ways to express that worship beyond just the musical representation and the large corporate gathering and singing. So, really, it would be more towards, this is even borrowing some language from DJ.

Let's not recreate what's happening in the physical building. Let's reimagine what it looks like. What would a spoken word, what would a story, what would a testimony, what does it mean digitally to present our bodies as a living sacrifice? How do we present that in such a way or how do we challenge our people to do that? It's funny. Just recently, I noticed that Spotify now allows you to play any Spotify song on a podcast. So, essentially, you could create a musical worship podcast and distribute it to your people where you can create a worship experience for them to ingest that internally as they're driving to work each day. Create a worship podcast and take them through something, some expression, mix in some scripture, and it's completely legal and legit.

Like, your license is already covered. Spotify is doing it for you. So, you've got opportunities to create things in that space to solve some of the musical issues. But there's an opportunity to even change and redefine what that looks like. Chesley, you tell me. What does worship look like with some of the things that you're planning on doing? Yeah. So, one of the things that we've been thinking from a theological perspective is that when people define worship in a church setting, they're usually talking about music. And so, we want to delineate between praise and worship. Praise is what we do with our mouth and our bodies towards God. And through musical instruments, worship is what we do as we live our lives.

And so, one of the things that we can do even with our praise, like our worship, is start doing that 168 hours a week. And we can do that by moving towards an outward focus in our musicality and our creativity. And we want to empower artists and creatives to start building community. Angela knows a friend of mine named Zan. She was on The Voice on Season 18. I reached out to her. This type of church can give those types of people a voice and a platform to share the creativity that God has given them. And she's really crossing over. She does, you know, if we're going to call a sacred-secular divide, you know, in the church world. She's, in this digital world, you don't have to have that. And so, she's doing a hybrid of worship and what would be considered traditionally as secular music.

But it's all coming from the same place to glorify God. And so, we're really blurring the lines between praise and worship with what they do creatively. And we can give them a platform to do that to more people in the faith community and outside in the world. Because we want to empower and equip them as well. I love that. Chesley, I don't know if you know this, but Zan actually did her very first live ever on First Church Live. So, you can go back and get our lives. It's really cute. And I would say worship, well, praise, as I think Chesley put it really well. If you're going to have people singing online, that that can be bad. So, I would, very often we just say we're just not doing that because we can worship God in other ways.

We made a playlist to Spotify. There's other ways to be able to help people to worship, praise, singing together. I'm just thinking of my college group, Angela, that got together. And it's like, now we're going to do worship. And they're all sitting on the couch going, I ain't singing. Are you? Yeah. So, it does look, that part looks different, but there is nothing like getting someone to go off your page except when they come across someone who's off tune. Because unless you're in a studio, it's very hard to have perfect pitch on a live video on Facebook. So, even if you're Zan. So, I think that's an important consideration when you're spending time to build something. That is so good. And I think it's really cool coming, too, from the assemblies, which I've been a part of some of those services.

In their traditional service, the music portion is usually a really huge part of it. So, to see your expressions of worship in so many different ways and reimagining that in so many different ways is inspiring and cool. So, thanks for your input. Absolutely. Yeah. I think, Chesley said this, Jeff said this, is our life is a witness of worship. And so, to teach others how to show, worship God, like in their service, in the way that they act, in the way they're applying what they're learning daily in the Bible, is really integrating faith into your daily life. It's something we can do online and do it much quicker than when people come to church once or twice a month for 30 minutes. So, a great opportunity to step in.

Sorry about that, Angela. And that right there is a great, lofty, philosophical, theoretical, this is where the church should be and how we should look at worship in a digital environment. Maybe let's spin it a little bit practical here. And so, I wanted to invite Christopher up to the panel. Christopher is also one of our Stadia planters in his process of doing that. And so, they're utilizing, Jesse, they're utilizing the Facebook platform as well. They're not doing regular services, but periodically, they'll do worship things. And I think they did a big Christmas service and planning on an Easter thing as they're just kind of ramping up and starting getting towards a launch point with their digital church slowly.

So, Christopher, talking about worship, I know you and Christy, who's also in the room, or was in the room, I think, she might still be around. Yeah, she's still there. You know, you're doing worship at some level. But one of the things I like, it's simplistic, it's minimal, it's executed well. So, I would love for you, if we're just even talking about musical worship at a minimal scale, how did you achieve that? Kind of like, what was the goal? What has musical worship been for you and your digital church? Yeah. So, when we got started really doing stuff on digital platforms, it was pretty much at the beginning of COVID. And at the same time, there popped up this group on Facebook called Praise on Your Porch.

And it was, it eventually kind of got taken down. But people from all over the world would just come and they would list a song and everybody would sing the song. And so, we just got on there and started singing and whatever. And then we took that idea to what we was doing with Relate. And we just have a very minimal, just kind of little worship setting. It's usually just me and Christy with my guitar and we play and sing. And it is the whole, you know, the whole time and throughout all of this, because what has been said already tonight is very true. Worship is more than just a song. And so, even as we are singing, we are talking this. And especially in our area, the whole idea of doing church online even still is fresh.

It's new. And people are having a hard time. Well, some people are having a hard time even understanding how we can come together digitally in worship. And when we come together in that place where we're all in the same mindset, we're all in the same focus that we can lift God up, whether it's through spoken word, through testimonies, or through music. I mean, we're just worshiping. On our bigger services that we have done for Christmas, you know, we brought in YouTube videos. We contacted another church and said, hey, you guys got some great, greatly produced music videos. Can we borrow those? And so, we threw those on there as well. But for the most part, yeah, it's just very minimal what we do.

And we engage with what's going on. We do it Facebook Live, and there's comments and there's conversation going on the whole time that we are in this worship setting. Do you guys do worship live, or do you do worship, like, pre-recorded and then live it? What's your method? No, we do it live. Really? We do it live so we can have that interaction. Okay. And it started out, and at one point in time, we kind of started getting big, and Christy would play the piano. We had a buddy, he'd come over, and he'd play the bass and all this kind of stuff. And at one point, we just kind of looked at each other and said, you know, this is not what we were wanting to put on a show. We want to kind of get this intimate setting where the camera's up close, where we can see.

You know, up until recently, we have been shooting off of Christy's phone. And where we can see the comments, and we can respond to the comments, and have this conversation right there as we're going. And in that dialogue, back and forth, you know, there's people that are praising God in the comments, and giving testimony in the comments, or prayer requests in the comments. And we can engage with those in real time. Okay. Yeah, that's interesting. It totally makes sense in context. You're right. You get the ability for the closer. My quick thought was, if you were doing it where you could simlive it, where you could, like, pre-record it, it's easier to get the quality up. But the heart of what you're doing with doing it live and engaging with that, definitely love that.

Hey, so, would love to open it up. Any other questions? We've got a couple people up at the speaker level now. We're happy to bring some others up. Questions or thoughts centered around digital-only church? Probably going to wrap here. Maybe one or two more questions. Ah, good friend, Stephen Smith, jumping on here. Stephen, we were talking about you a couple minutes ago. We were talking about the beta show that we did where he was, and for some reason it didn't work. Let me try to get you up this time, Stephen. Stephen was the head of multi-site for First Baptist Houston. He's been on a couple of, what are these called, clubhouses with me. And we did something recently talking about how to be a successful church.

All right, Stephen. So, you're established mega-giga church in Texas. Oh, my gosh. Multi-site, setting you up. Talk to you, what are you thinking about here? Hey, are you still sunburned? I am still sunburned, thanks. And I'm at another baseball game, so it works out. Hey, I've got a question maybe for the group. I'm so interested in the digital-only space, and I just, I wanted to see what you found over, you know, over the history of your meeting together like that. But what have you found has been the, I'd say it like this, what's the best time during the week to gather? And then how many times do you gather your congregation? So, that's my question. Can I take this? Great to be involved in this conversation.

Yeah, go for it, Chesley. Sorry to cut you off, Stephen. The beauty of online is that you can think church as platform rather than church as pipeline. And so, what that means for us is it's on demand. So, we might go live at a particular time. But what I find for what we're trying to accomplish is we want people to meet at their convenience. I see. That's great. To build in their own rhythms throughout the week. And so, that's super cool for us. We pre-record everything because of that. And so, we'll drop it on a Friday night, let people have it Friday night, Saturday, Sunday, because that's when most people have off. Yeah. And then if people want to do it on a Wednesday, we've got one group that is hanging out on a Tuesday evening, you know.

And then one group that is hanging out on a Saturday evening. And it's like, we don't have to control one day of the week anymore. We can rule the week. So great. Yeah, I would echo that. You will, if you are creating energy, if you are successful, let me say it this way. If you're successful, you're going to get more views and potentially more engagement in on demand than if you do it live. Now, right now, a lot of the tools, like the Church Online platform and some of the established existing churches lean more towards a watching it live engagement because they value those, the chat and chat rooms and some of those things. There are tools to have that engagement on demand. You can look at software like Intercom.io.

You can Google that, Intercom.io. And it can give you the ability to integrate some of that chat even into on demand. And easier points to allow people to engage with someone in real time. Even look at some of the stuff that Church Home is doing. Church Home is a church out in California. And I guess Washington, they're multi-state, multi-site. But they have an incredible mobile app that allows for engagement in real time and have even have restructured their church to have, I think they call them mobile pastors, pastor chat. They even have, like, pastors where their job is, hey, I need you to shepherd people in the chat room. Even to the point, one of them was quoted. I had this conversation with her where she said, Jeff, I'm doing 10 times more actual ministry in pastor of chat than I was when I was a campus pastor or whatever her role was previous to that.

It was in the physical church environment. So, once again, it's the digital church is allowing some of this ministry to happen, probably more tangibly than you do in the physical space. Hey, I've got, and I may be a little biased there, but I've got, looks like Randall's wanting to come up. Randall, I don't know you, sir. Nice to meet you. At least I don't think I know you. What are you thinking? Hey, yeah, appreciate you having the room. No, I don't think we know each other. We do follow each other here on Clubhouse. But, yeah, great stuff. We're in the very process right now of planting an in-person church, but we definitely see and want to have the online, not just presence, but we've sort of built ourselves as an online church with an in-person presence.

I don't know if that's actually possible, if the in-person will suck all the oxygen out of the room to let the other breathe. But my question was, how do you foresee or what would be a way to use Clubhouse in this, in the church planting process as one of the platforms? Wow, that's a great question. First off, let me back up. I love the idea of you being a church at Stadia Digital First. Lots of people use the language, but we use it at Stadia Digital First. So you want to think digital first. Now, the tension is that physical is going to suck a lot of energy out of that. In lots of churches' reality, they want to be digital first. But the tension of having to do the physical ministry and the strain of set up and tear down or building maintenance or whatever tends to put that tension and to pull people away.

Fight that tension and see. It is possible to be digital first. What I love, Randall, about your specific situation is you're a church plant. You're new. You don't have decades of established DNA. You're probably relatively new if you're considering yourself a plant. And that means that you're flexible. Be flexible. Create that new culture, that new DNA, and figure out how to interweave physical and digital together to utilize the strengths of it. So this is great. Stadia is doing a digital innovation conference. It is a meetup. It's free. And so, Randall, we're actually doing some breakouts specifically on that exact question. For more information on that, it's March 16th. I want to say it's noon Eastern.

It's stadiachurchplanning.org slash innovation. Feel free to check that out. You can sign up for it there. Like I said, it's a four-hour meetup, online conference, breakouts, interactive questions. It's not a Zoom webinar for four hours. You're actually talking with people face-to-face. And so, stadiachurchplanning.org slash innovation. Check that out. Now, let me ask your clubhouse question. I think there's several wins, and then I'll open it up to other people to kind of dialogue into it. And actually, we had Ray Diarmus, who's usually on here with us, Digital Pastor of Christ Fellowship Miami. Just, I'm literally reading from his blog that he published on the church digital on this topic. Four ideas.

Close small groups. So, the opportunity to do small groups in this environment. Yes, you're not looking face-to-face, but you do have the ability to have multiple people talking at the same time, as opposed to Zoom, where it really kind of gets broken down if it's less than one. The idea that you can be more portable in the small group doing it audio only. You know, Stephen's out at the ballpark right now engaging in this. If Stephen was on Zoom, his arm would be really tired from holding his camera up to his face. So, it's things like that that make it a little easier. Post-message discussion boards, discussion rooms. And this is one of the things I think Ray's actually experimenting with this week, where he's going to have Clubhouse open, like, for four or five hours all day when they run through their three or four services live.

And he just wants to continually funnel people in to be able to dialogue, ask questions. What do you think? What was the win for you in this message, kind of dialoguing through that? Not just creating rooms, but dialoguing and engaging into other rooms, other environments, other cultures, learning things. For me, it's one of the wins of Clubhouse, is the opportunity I can to really learn about what other people are thinking. Don't just be creating rooms to promote what you're doing, but take a moment to learn what's happening, even in rooms that you're not creating or that your church is not creating. In special interviews, a church can facilitate interviews with leaders in the community to answer questions.

One of the big wins, and this for me, this is the win of Clubhouse. It's funny because this is actually the most I've talked pretty much all night. But I would rather look at Clubhouse to be the platform to ask questions than to make statements. And I think if we posture ourselves through Clubhouse to allow others to speak, and it's through that openness that we can engage into the conversation and help them see what's happening. If we only talk in periods, and this is just culturally speaking, if we only talk in statements, and we don't allow others to speak, we're going to be surrounding ourselves with people that aren't interested in us because we're not giving them a voice and an opinion.

We're not a place to share their thoughts. Clubhouse is one of the reasons I love the platform. It allows others to talk into it. And through that conversation, that's where we can build relationships, share about Christ, move on to whatever the next thing is. And these are some major wins, at least that I think here, talking about Clubhouse in context of the church. Open it up. Anybody else? What did I miss? What's an idea with Clubhouse? Anything resonating? Or if there's any other questions, raise your hand and we can move on. And I probably just got time for maybe one more after this. Go ahead, Justin. Yeah, I think for this medium, one of the coolest things that you guys could do, even in a physical space, is get your staff together and have a conversation.

But oftentimes, we don't get to know, from a church person perspective, we don't get to know the staff on a personal level. And this really gives the opportunity to have those conversations with Q&As where we can actually get to talk to you guys. So I think that would be an opportunity as well. Well said. Well said there. And that is a win. Just a relational connection. I've been so impressed with this platform. Honestly, I've been, crap, I don't know, a decade. Instagram's been around a while, right? I can't remember actually when that started. But for me, it's like that level. Because you get an opportunity to listen, to talk, to meet people. Randall, nice to meet you. Looking forward to connecting with you more along this.

So last call. Any questions from the room? If not, I'm going to wrap. It's been a great night. Well, let's do this. Let's wrap. So we've got Chesley and Angela from the initial panel. Some of the others had to rotate off. This has been a great conversation so far, talking about these digital-only churches, the expressions of church that are happening out there. Angela, as we're landing the plane, any closing thoughts or anything on your side? Well, I was just writing down like 10 ideas this gave me. So I appreciate everybody who spoke today and who came forward with questions. And I look forward to continuing. But mostly everybody who is doing digital-only, digital-first, digital, whatever it is that God has called and anointed you for this very time.

And the fact that he's put this dream on your heart. Don't be discouraged. Tap into resources like this, that you surround yourself with other thought people that are thinking kind of broader. And it's really okay to join the fail club, as I would say, for my team. Like, you have to be okay with failing and moving forward. And luckily, technology moves fast enough that you can do that. So just be encouraged today. Well said there. I mean, it's okay to fail. And especially post-COVID, we, the church, we have to be innovative. This is why Stadia is doing an innovation meetup. I've been a ministry guy my entire life. There were years where I felt alone, that people didn't. I felt like nobody thought like I did.

And as a result of that, there was something wrong with me. I've come to find out there are tons of people who think like I did. I just needed to meet them and help them get connected to others so that they could be encouraged by that. So if you're wrestling with some of these ideas, hopefully you're encouraged as a result of this and realizing, hey, even post-COVID, I'm going to need to experiment. We're going to need to try things and to iterate, to fail, to move on to the next idea. Because the quicker we can call something a failure, the closer we get to actually doing that success. And what's interesting is I think the quicker we get to the failure, the more malleable and shapeable we are before God, who's helping us and guiding us on this journey.

So, Chesley, as we're landing the plane here, any closing thoughts? Yeah, there's a book called The Innovator's Dilemma by Dr. Clayton Christensen out of Harvard Business School. And he talks about the opportunities that are present when we move into a disruptive, that's what the internet was, that's what social media really was. And when you're in that arena, the things that made you successful in the old one will be the things that make you fail in the new normal. And so, don't be afraid to experiment, but also lose the old paradigm. You can't put new wine into old wineskins. So, you got to create a new wineskin. I was wondering at what point we were going to do the wineskin analogy. I'm kind of embarrassed it took us 100 minutes plus to get there.

But well said, sir. You know, and one of the hearts of Stadia here is the heart to disciple people in different environments. What we do in a digital space is different than in a physical space, which is different in a micro space. In churches, in micro churches, in house churches, and things like that. It takes these varying, these different wineskins to do things in the different environments. So, I would challenge you. If you're a digital-only church, you have to think different. If you're a physical and digital church, you're a fidgetal church, you've got to figure out what works physically. And you need to start wrestling with, man, I've got to do things differently if I want to be successful in that digital space.

And developing that strategy where both of them work together well. And so, I do a lot of work towards that. Either way, if you're a physical church that wants to do digital ministry, if you're a planner that wants to plant a digital-only expression of church, I, Jeff, I'd love to talk with you, meet with you, learn your story, and see how I, the church digital or Stadia Church Planning, can help you on this journey. So, my contact information is on my profile, my bio, you can book time with me straight on my calendars available on there, along with all sorts of other resources available for you. So, I want to thank you all for the time here. By the way, we do this every Thursday, 5 p.m. Eastern.

At least I do. The next show we have coming up, I had a conversation with one of the cohorts I was in, and one of the guys said in the cohort, at what point do we realize that small groups just don't work in physical or digital? Eight to 12 people sitting in a living room was a model that works for the 90s, and we just need to blow up the entire model and start from scratch. And so, I looked at the guy and said, that's an awesome statement. I don't have near the time to unpack it, but let's do it on Clubhouse. So, we're doing that next week. What would happen if we actually blew up the entire small group model and started for scratch for 2021? I have no idea where we'll get to, but I guarantee it's going to be an interesting conversation.

So, come back next Thursday for that, 5 p.m. But for Chesley, for Angela, DJ, for Chris, I'm trying to thank all the others who Daniel, Aaron, were on today. This has been an awesome Clubhouse. My name is Jeff at The Church Digital, State of Church Planning. Thanks for joining us today, and we'll see you next time somewhere around here on Clubhouse. Y'all have a good day.