BETA26: 7 Reasons Your Church Still Needs Phygital

Hey, we got the beta show. I'm Jeff with the Church Digital Podcast. Uh, once again it's powered by Stadia Church Planning. It's been a while since I've been in this format here with you, by the way, here at the beta show. Uh, we are answering your online ministry questions. You go ahead and text them in to 484-324-8724. That is literally my cell phone number. Yes, I am giving away my cell phone on the internet. 484-324-8724. Texting online ministry questions. We will answer them in future episodes here with the Church Digital with the beta show. And so we've been experimenting with some different things, tried some things in Clubhouse, tried some things in different formats. Hey, we're gonna come back here for a while and kind of hang out doing this stream live with you here with episode 26: Seven Reasons Your Church Still Needs Fidget. That's right. Hey, we're going back to the building. Let's all do a collective yay.

I had a digital friend. Um, you know, I'm a digital guy, and so I had a pastor ask me recently, "Jeff, as we're going back to the building, aren't you upset?" And we're gonna get more into that here in a little bit because this isn't the end of digital in context of church. It's really the beginning. We'll get to it.

Hey, let's talk about what's happening in our buildings right now collectively. This is a non-scientific poll. These are things that I've observed through some Facebook groups. Sixty to seventy percent of pre-COVID attendance seems to be the mean. It's the average of what is back in the building. It ranges from fifty all the way up to one hundred, but at this point sixty to seventy seems to be the national average of that. You can check out some of the comments there at thechurch.digital/fb. I'll get you to that Facebook group.

Another one, this is interesting: seventy-five percent of churches right now, masks are optional. This is a poll that's actually going on right now in that Facebook group. So if you want to vote for it, go ahead. Thechurch.digital/fb will redirect you to that poll. Once again, this is non-scientific. I'm just a guy in a Facebook group, so it's great.

Hey, listen, it's not time to be done with digital just because we're going back to the physical building. Um, there is still a role for digital within your physical worship service. This is a lot of what I wanted to focus on here at the stream today. Let's remember up front: physical should not be in competition with fidget, with digital. After all, physical is part of what fidget is. We need to figure out together, and this maybe even really separates. Um, well, let's even back up here a little bit. Let's talk about what, when I say fidget, what is fidgeting mean?

Defining fidget: fidget is physical and digital working together. It's not overlapping. It's not in competition. It's not a fight. You know, just today, just right before I pressed go live on this, I was reading a Facebook post of a pastor who's tired of broadcasting his services because it feels like broadcasting services online is in competition with getting people into the building. And that mindset is completely missing the role of digital in context of your church.

So what I want to give here is seven reasons why physical and digital, how it can work together in a physical way, and seven reasons why your church should be doing this today. So we're gonna get started. This is gonna be a lot of fun.

Hey, and we're gonna do this quick. It's just going to roll.

Number one: Physical digital worship services. Honestly, this weekend experience that we've created continues to lose effectiveness for evangelism. I know that's hard to hear. The purpose there is purpose behind the weekend experiences. There is purpose behind that service, but I'm not sure effective evangelism is really happening there. By the way, I'm not the only crazy guy saying this. Uh, Barna essentially is saying eighty percent of people called to Christ, pre-Christian, lost, whatever your terminology is, they're not interested in physical or even digital worship services. Like, if people have spiritual questions and they are not Christian, they do not believe in Jesus, they are not going to go to the building. Eighty percent of them are not going to go to the building to engage in those questions.

Ultimately, fidget is more than an online worship service. So as we're thinking about what fidget can be in context of our church, what do we do with it? Let's look here. People called to Christ who have spiritual questions, they're going to go ask a friend or they're going to go to Google or YouTube. So we talk a lot about this here through the Church Digital. Your new evangelism really comes in place of training people to have these conversations, and honestly it goes towards utilizing better search engine, uh, techniques, SEO. YouTube Pastor Google did a podcast on that. So look, right up front, uh, we need to be thinking beyond the weekend worship services context of fidget.

Number two: We can potentially reach a different type of person in digital spaces. The fact is reality. Uh, some of us won't make it back to the building. We know that some of us aren't coming back. Fact is as well, some of us can't make it back to the building. Let's look at this: unchurched, de-churched, health issues, social issues, people who can't work or who work weekends and can't make it to the building. There's a large chunk of people that are not able to make it into your physical environments, and doing discipleship and engaging with people digitally allows us to be the church in digital space, that reaching a type of person that our physical buildings cannot reach.

Just, just within the past month, I have a digital pastor friend of mine. It's a digital-only expression of church, and he saw a salvation of a guy who had not set foot in a physical building in ten years. And so, and a very de-churched crowd out there, unchurched crowd as well. And so there's opportunities abound to engage with a different type of person than the physical building can reach.

Let's look at number three here. Traditionally, physical discipleship struggles while digital discipleship is becoming more and more effective. So let's talk about this. If you really look at, you know, even well, here let's do this: twenty-five percent of Americans are active in the Christian church. Numbers are decreasing annually within the church. We've forgotten how to make some of these disciples. What we're doing, even pre-COVID, if we really analyze this, I'm not sure it's working.

And so the heart of this gets to this place of what does it mean to make a disciple, and are the methods and the processes that we're doing in the building, are they working or are we having issues even pre-COVID? So if we're going back to the building, that's great for going back to the old strategies. That's great. But were those strategies effective? Is it effective in gathering people? Okay, maybe. Even though we've seen, you know, massive decreases over time, so I don't know it was really effective. Is it effective in not just gathering people but in making that disciple? Is our ekklesia creating disciples or is our ekklesia gathering people? That we really need to start scattering in diaspora. Do we need to start pushing people out of the nest, so to speak, through that discipleship process? I don't know that it's working in physical space, but I would say this: uh, the strength of digital, well, honestly, let's just go ahead and go to number four because it's going to get there real quick.

Number four: Fidget helps keep people on mission using physical and digital methods. Once again here, the strength of digital is equipping, it's training. It leans very strongly into this idea of disciple making. This is a radical concept, but digital in itself is very strong towards making the disciple-making processes, which is really the weakness of many of our physical churches that are out there.

Which gets us to number five. Reason why you should be doing digital: churches report that digital is easier and quicker to go through the discipleship process. I literally had this conversation with a skeptic lead pastor just this past week. Uh, discipleship that was happening in digital meetings, uh, is how oftentimes happens twice as fast. They meet twice a week as opposed to once a week meeting physically.

So my skeptic pastor friend here, not a fan of digital, is open to different ideas and ways, and he noticed that some of the people that were in that discipleship process that were in those meetings, they started asking, "Hey, this is fun to do digitally. This is easier. I don't have to worry about traffic. Can we meet multiple times a week?" And so they were going through the systems and the processes. They were understanding. They were adapting to the culture change quicker because they were able to process it digitally instead of physically.

Number five: We're seeing that the reports are that people are able to do this quicker utilizing digital, which is complementing what's happening in the physical space.

Number six here: COVID season is not a rejection of digital. It's a rejection of the lack of balance for the established church. We need to find that balance. Yeah, listen, we can push all in on digital and people were freaking out because they can't handle that much. I totally get it. I understand. I agree with it. I'm a digital guy, and even I'm like, I want to sit at a sushi restaurant with my family. I would love to get a side hug from somebody. Like, I, there's a physical aspect to who we are.

And going all digital in 2021, there are churches that can, there are people that can, but it's not for everyone. Similarly speaking, individuals, we are both physical and digital people. We operate in both sides of the equation. And so we need that physical engagement. We need that digital engagement. The trick is to not get it to conflict with one another. The trick is to figure out how to get it to complement, to work together with it.

Established churches, honestly, they need that physical and that digital approach. They need both in order to function correctly and properly here in 2021.

Number seven: Digital leans towards multiplication. It creates immense opportunities to scale it. It helps start a movement when it's done correctly. And this really gets down to even like Seth Godin. Many of you have heard me tell this story. Seth Godin, uh, is probably one of, at least here in America, one of the top marketing minds, very innovative, engineering thought leaders. And so somebody asked Seth on his podcast maybe a year ago, "Hey, how do I get my message heard around the world?" Seth Godin basically responded by saying, "A billion people don't care about anything that you have to say. One hundred million, ten million, still don't. One hundred thousand, ten thousand, look, you want to get your message heard around the world? You take your message. You craft it specifically for someone. You tell them that message. You get them to own it, and then you get them to tell someone else."

Seth Godin, not Christian, Jewish actually, basically described the way Jesus started his church two thousand years ago and described what we today would call disciple making. And so the heart for us as we're looking at how digital can lean towards multiplication, create opportunities to scale, start a movement, it's not working with platforms speaking to many. It's really working with individuals, and from that point getting it to multiply. It's not working in the mass. It's working in the small, in creating more of those multiplying opportunities at the small level.

So did you catch it? Like, look, I just went through in record time. I can't believe how quick it was. Seven ways the church needs to be fidgeting. Seven reasons why the church should stay fidget. But absolutely none of them had anything to do with physical or digital worship services. And so as...

A church, we bank so much of what we're doing on that Sunday morning service. We're wanting to fight for, okay, that needs to be done physical, and we can't do it digital. Digital is going to compete. It's going to take away from what's happening in the physical space. Honestly, I don't mean to demean the situation, but that's not the right conversation.

I had a church yesterday. I spoke at an Exponential Conference in a Q&A, and the guy stuck around afterwards and hit me up on Facebook and was like, "Hey, um, my church, my elders—there are two elders—and they don't want to do digital. The church staff, many of the high-level volunteers, were all excited about it, but a couple of the elders kind of get in the way, and they just refuse to budge."

Hey, what are they concerned about? What are the elders concerned with?

Well, Jeff, they're concerned that people are going to—and I said it earlier—people are going to look at digital as a reason not to come back to the building, okay? So you say to the building, you mean the specific worship service?

Yeah, they don't. They're not going to come back to that specific physical worship service. They're going to be, quote unquote, lazy and stay home online.

Cool. Listen, don't even broadcast the worship service. If your church wants to highlight what's happening in digital space, now I'm all for broadcasting worship services. I've broadcasted thousands of them and would encourage churches to do that. But if they're not wanting to embrace this idea of digital because they would rather prioritize what happens in the physical building, give it to them. Don't worry about broadcasting services. Put all the eggs in that proverbial basket for a season and focus on that digital discipleship and really expand that complementary approach of doing digital discipleship coupled with the physical service and see what happens.

You see, I think so often we fight on this battleground, and the act of this physical battleground is not in the weekend service. It's in disciples creating disciples who are making disciples who are making disciples. Let's take our focus. Let's take our attention there. We can fight all day long, and even when we talk about it, people who are fighting on the digital side towards the church—why we need to broadcast services—we're also at the same breath saying, "But it's not about the sermon. It's about this discipleship and that disciple-making peace, okay?"

I love that. I agree with that. That's right. Let's let go of broadcasting the service if it means, "Hey, we need to be physical with the service," but what we're going to do outside, we're going to take that scalability. We're going to take that emphasis. We're going to take that speed that we can do in digital versus physical, and we're going to embrace that on that discipleship side. That is the win.

So here you go: seven reasons why your church right now needs to be fidget, and it has nothing to do with the service. It is all about that disciple-making peace. Once again, if you've got questions and I see some comments have come in—I didn't even see that blip on the screen—if you've got questions moving forward, text us at Jeff with the Church, 484-324-8724. Once again, in Stadia Church Planting—by the way, check out Stadia. If you've got more questions on this, on how to be fidget, on how to improve your digital disciple-making process, check out stadiachurchplanting.org slash digital. State of Church Planting dot org slash digital. We'd love to help you on that journey. See y'all later.