BETA37: Creating a Digital Discipleship Pathway

All right, hey, welcome to the Beta Show. Here it's episode 37. Uh, my name is Jeff with the Church Digital. Once again, all this, and I love this, all this is powered by Stadia Church Planting. Here at the Beta Show, we answer your digital ministry questions live on the air. So if you've got digital ministry questions, and oh, let me tell you, you got digital ministry questions, go ahead and text those digital ministry questions to 248-432-4872-4. This is literally my cell phone, by the way. I keep dropping my cell phone. It's cracked like crazy, hoping that Apple's gonna come out with the new iPhones here a little bit so I can upgrade, but it still does take your text messages. 248-432-4872-4. So go ahead and hit us up at that.

So here with the Beta Show episode 37, it's gonna be a long episode. We're gonna pack it in tight. I'm gonna be like that guy at Micro Machines back in the 80s, talking really fast, creating a digital discipleship pathway. If you're watching live on the air, feel free to go ahead and comment in whatever the social media platform that you're on. Go ahead and give permissions to Stream Yard to do whatever the magic is that they do so we can see it. But we definitely would want to engage with you at some point here in the show.

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Beta 38 is next week, Nashville edition. I'm actually going to be hanging out in Nashville uh with some digital pastors and doing some stuff with Exponential. I have no idea what the topic is going to be, so you will see me in a hotel probably somewhere in Nashville doing this thing live. Give me a topic once again, 248-432-4872-4.

Stadia is doing an innovation meetup towards multi-modal churches, churches that want to do multiple models of church. It's going to be Tuesday, 8-17, online, Tuesday, 8-17, noon to 4 p.m. Eastern. Uh, lots of speakers coming in, not only from the church but also from the marketplace, sharing about why multimodal and why multiple strategies are helping organizations be more effective in their goals. Check out stadiachurchplanting.org/innovation to sign up and for more information. By the way, the breakouts are incredible for this. There's going to be lots of things happening. Stadiachurchplanting.org/innovation for more there.

All right, hey, but let's dig in here. Beta 37, creating a digital discipleship pathway. Look, I'm going to be honest. I'm going to give you two answers here to this question. What is a digital discipleship pathway? How do you do a digital discipleship pathway? What does it need to look like digitally for our church? There's a safe answer and then there's a radical answer. There's the answer that your church probably wants to hear, and then there's the answer that may get you fired. No, I'm kidding. Well, yeah, you may get fired, but you're definitely going to challenge some things with the second approach. Um, but before we get into the crazy stuff, and it'll get crazy here in a little bit, let's talk about it. What is a discipleship pathway? Now, discipleship pathway, engagement pathway, like paths, plans, like there's so many different languages and terminologies here, and I don't want to get lost in that necessarily. But at least how I would define a pathway, a discipleship pathway is the process of taking someone far from God to a place where you're bringing them closer to him. It's that pathway of meeting someone that's new or that's not even a Christian, that's called to Christ, and getting them to the place where they have a better understanding of who Jesus is and maybe is even multiplying and telling somebody else about what that, what Jesus means to them. So that's that pathway, the process that a Christian develops to get to the place of multiplying.

Now, your church may have a different definition, and I don't want to get lost in the weeds on that. Whatever your definition is is great as long as it's effective towards multiplication. And typically, the majority of the churches out there, it looks something like Rick Warren's Purpose Driven Church. Thank you very much, 1990s, where it's that connect to God, connect to others, connect to uh, serving, connecting to on mission. Rick Warren had the baseball diamond where it's like first base, second base, third base, home plate. Connect to God, the weekend service was first base. Let's get everybody to that. And then now let's get them to serving or to others, to small groups. Let's get them serving on campus somehow to make the experience better. And then let's at home plate, the end game is to get them on mission. And many churches have different definitions here, whether that's um, you know, uh, serving in the community, uh, witness, evangelizing, being comfortable sharing their faith, going on global mission trips. The definitions can be different, varying per church. But the goal was to make a disciple through getting them all the way around Rick's baseball diamond analogy back in, like I said, the 90s. And that's awesome. But there's a problem. This doesn't work digitally.

Why does this not work digitally? Well, let's just address this up front. It's too hard to discover who these people are that are watching our church online services. If you've heard me tell the story, you probably have a similar story. I have a friend of mine here in South Florida, digital pastor, who has told me that he had over half a million viewers, 500,000 viewers for his Easter 2020 Easter service. Half a million people. Now there may be multipliers involved, and I don't know what the formula is, and at the end of the day it doesn't matter. What you need to know is there's a whole bunch of people who logged on to watch a video stream of a church service in Easter 2020. But when I asked my uh, digital pastor friend, "Hey, how many connection cards did you get to follow up on?" His answer was 11.

So he had half a million viewers. Only 11 people actually filled out the card to engage in dialogue to start in some form of a discipleship pathway or plan. You see, it's very hard to pull people out of church in isolation, and we need to understand that up front. We're going to address maybe some solutions to that, but it's hard to meet people in digital space compared to meeting people physically.

By the way, another reason why a digital engagement pathway, some of the struggles that we'll look at, is this idea of serving on campus. Digital doesn't require near the serving footprint that a physical campus does. Just think the number of people that are necessary to execute that physical worship service, from the worship band to the production team to the speakers to the guest services, even the people that are cleaning the facility and getting it ready. Like, the physical footprint, the volunteer and the staffing is huge. Digital doesn't have that burden. So what do you do with those people that are wanting to serve? Or what does serving even look like in digital space? It's a question and a concern.

Number three here, uh, getting people on mission. Well, you know, how do you live digitally in community? Questions come up. How can I serve locally if people are distributed across the country? Okay, I'm trying to get people to serve locally for my church here in Miami, but I've got this guy that lives in Orlando or Tampa or Austin or California or Timbuktu, wherever they are. It's challenges start to come up where I'm trying to get people to serve locally within their communities, but I only know my physical community here in Miami. What do I do with people that are outside of the physical community of where my church is? I just happen to live with Miami. So you can see here that Rick Warren's Purpose Driven Church model, yes, it works physically, and whatever engagement pathway your church has, I'm just using Rick's as an example here, there are challenges because a lot of the assumptions of the physical engagement pathway indicate that we're serving, we're connecting, we're doing ministry physically within the space. But digitally, there's some challenges because digital is different.

All right, so that was all set up for the safe answer. Safe answer. We need to shore up this basic process and make it digitally friendly. Remember, this has to be about relationships. Digital church has to be about relationships for it to be effective.

So improvement number one, start thinking above the funnel. Now this analogy start to get screwy because I've been talking about Rick Warren's Purpose Driven baseball diamond, and now I changed it to a funnel. So pretend there's a funnel here. In the top level is that weekend service. In the physical church, the first place that we start to track people physically is that weekend service. And I would suggest to you that if we really want to be effective digitally, utilizing the same model, we need to start tracking people not at the weekend service, above the weekend service. We need to start doing things like landing pages, like uh, social media, engaging with people, dialoguing with people, building relationships before they come to the building, utilizing YouTube to gather information on people through all of this. Please note that CTAs, call to actions, are your friend. We need to start collecting information. We need to start engaging and dialoguing with people before they make it to the service digitally.

I would also suggest this would also help in a physical space, but we need to start thinking and doing ministry above the funnel, above that weekend service, and meeting people there. By the way, another suggestion here, jump in Facebook groups that are hyper local to where your church community is or groups that are hyper focused on what your church's target audience is. Build relationships through digital communities that represent the physical communities or the physical, the type of people that your church's is aimed at. And once again, build this database of knowledge and build these relationships that then can funnel, that can connect people to that physical church service.

Perfect your content. Now this gets weird. I'm just, perfect your content to the point of getting names of converting as many as possible to build relationships with people as much as possible. The content is only as good as it is connecting you with people. And so what content do you need to create to make it more engaging that allows you to start to build relationships with people? And so if we're really wanting to create that disciple digitally, one of the first challenges that we're going to face is how do we meet these people? And all effort needs to go in right here. All the stuff I'm talking about is above the funnel, before it even gets to the church service. So the goal is meeting and dialoguing with people before it even gets to the church service.

Number four here, use all of this information. Remember, like I said, to build relationships with people before the church service happens. Now remember, this is safe answer here. This is the safe answer. We're going to talk crazy here in a little bit.

Safe answer improvement number two, not just thinking above the funnel but before the church service and after church service, build these relationships. Be a real person. Like, it's so easy to talk behind the brand and to kind of use the brand language and the brand terms. And brand is cold and distant. But to be digital, we need to be more engaging. How can I pray for you, man? If we don't start every conversation with that digitally, church...

We're missing if there's one thing that I think that we missed in this COVID season or coming out of this COVID season, wherever you think we are, it was this idea of digital prayer. That people want to be prayed for. Even people called to Christ, if they think you care about them and you believe in this Jesus and you believe in this power of prayer, then we need to be praying for these people. This is the challenge that we have before us. How are we praying for these people digitally? All right, and so I just lost the screen. Hopefully you heard all that. That was really scary on my side.

The other thing is that we've got platform agnostic. Realize that wherever you're reaching people, the challenge for us is to connect with them in digital space. So if somebody's reaching out to you on Facebook, don't send them an email. Don't build a relationship via email. Don't try to text them. Follow back up with them. Engage with them in whatever platform they're in. So if they've reached out to you on Facebook, utilize Facebook Messenger. Don't try to call them. They're wanting to dialogue with you via texting and social media. Don't break out the phone. Don't try to get them in a Zoom room. Build the relationship using the tools that you have with them. And this may seem even stupid again, but once again, play a game with them online. Use these devices. It's so easy to play. I mean, I'm gonna date myself here. Words with Friends or Pokémon Go or whatever it is that that's your thing, or try to find a new thing for others to start to and involve them. Invite them into a place where you can build a relationship even via playing mobile app games. Because the ultimate goal here is to boil the frog slowly. I keep using this analogy and I apologize for it, kind of the crudeness of it, but take your time online building these relationships. Don't rush to turn on the webcam. So often I hear from a church, it's like, yeah, we're doing the church service and we've got these people that have filled out the connection card, and then the next step that we want to do is we want to get them in a Zoom room with the pastor so the pastor can talk with them. And it's like, okay, you just went from complete isolation to now there's an opportunity for them to meet the pastor, who's this, you know, could be this very intimidating. Or the idea of somebody called to Christ meeting the pastor is very intimidating, and they're gonna have a face-to-face conversation. Whoa, pump the brakes a little bit. Figure out how to boil that frog slowly. How to develop those relationships. Now there's value in meeting the pastor. There's value in learning more about the church. But if you're gonna do that quickly, if you're gonna jump real quick out to that point, you're gonna lose a bunch of people and you're going to get people disconnected. Because really, the relationship is what's going to keep them tapped into the church. The relationship they have with you. The relationship they have with people that they respect that are in the church. The relationship that they'll grow eventually with the church. But that is going to take time to develop and get there.

Remember, like, in with all of this, utilize the text-based platforms. Once you don't rush into the webcam, you there's plenty of tools out there that you can develop relationships with without having that webcam on. Things like Facebook groups. Before you get to the Zoom small group rooms, you're doing a YouVersion Bible reading plan. There's ways to engage with hundreds of people using a YouVersion Bible reading plan, and you're literally going over Scripture together, getting people's insights through that. So if you've got people that aren't taking that leap to get into that Zoom small group, boil the frog slowly. Figure out how to do a WhatsApp prayer group, a GroupMe session where you're now starting to gather people together and build that relationship. Facebook Messenger groups. I mean, there's so many different tools that are out there that involve something more than just jumping into a Zoom room and having that face-to-face conversation.

All right, so this is what you're starting to see with this idea of the safe answer, where we're building on to this strategy of how we're doing things physically and we're recognizing, hey, there's a weakness above small groups or above the services where we don't know who these people are. Let's build relationships before they even get to the service, and we can carry it through. Or maybe there's a weakness in the services to small groups. We got to build more relationships there and do some other things other than just try to throw them into straight into a Zoom small group. So you're starting to use digital to shore up the physical strategy.

By the way, this would help in the digital church as well as in your physical church. These are some examples of what I've talked about where maybe even building relationships with people physically before we invite them into the service so that way there's a relationship that can pour upon what happens within that service. It's not a bad idea to do physically either. But all these are the safe answer. All this is like, hey, this is within the reach of what my church is already doing, and so it's a safe bet that if you do these things, it's going to help you immediately.

Now what I want to challenge is that there's a different approach, and this is what I wanted to talk about here. This is where it gets a little crazy here because we're going to start talking about this idea of radical. And I would suggest, and I don't say this lightly because I'm actually the guy in my life. I produce tens of thousands of church worship services in my lifetime for multi-site churches, mega churches across the country. And there's a challenge that I would say I think the radical answer to this idea of digital discipleship is that we need to get out of the church service business and we need to get back into this idea of disciple making, whether physical or digital. Digital, whatever the term is, we got to get back into the church disciple making business.

Radical thought number one here: the church service, they're losing their effectiveness as the front door of the discipleship pathway. As we said earlier, relationships are key, yet we always seem to be pouring more and more energy and effort into what's happening in that physical service on that one hour on Sunday. Yet we're recognizing that and we're even seeing stats and we're hearing Barna. People called to Christ don't care about your digital service, nor do they care about your physical worship service. Eighty percent of people called to Christ, if they have spiritual questions, they're going to go to their friends and they're going to ask their friends spiritual answers. Hey, we think that you're a spiritual type of person and you care about this. Tell me the answer to this. They're gonna go to their friends, or number two, they're gonna go to Google. They're gonna go to YouTube to find spiritual answers. So people who have questions about Jesus aren't going to the services, yet our services are the primary place where our strategies focus on evangelism, and it just doesn't make sense. Our church services are losing effectiveness as the beginning of our discipleship pathway.

Now I've not said that the church services are bad. I'm not saying that our large gatherings are not necessary. They are. They're crucial. But we need to understand what role they play in that. See, we need to recognize that society has changed. And I've also told this. I've often told the story here about Billy Graham. Billy Graham, 1995, preached one sermon. It was literally heard by a billion people around the world. That's with a B. I don't have time to go into it, but at the end of the day, in '95, Billy Graham stood up on a podium. His message was broadcasted, you know, bounced off a bunch of satellites, translated in real time in different languages, spoke to twenty percent of the world's population at one time. Incredible. Twenty-five years later, that was '95, 2020, 2021. There's no way you're gonna do that. Time's done. Yeah, technology, I've got the power to speak to a billion people literally in my pocket. But culture's not going to listen. As a matter of fact, the top marketing guy, at least here in the U.S., Seth Godin, and I've told this story before, hey, you want to get your message heard around the world? A billion people don't care about anything that you have to say. There's no way you'll get a billion people to listen. One hundred million, ten million, one million, listen. You need to tell the smallest number of people possible an idea. Get them to listen. Not only listen, get them to actually hear it. Not only hear it, get them to understand it. Get them to own it. Get them to tell someone else. And so while Billy Graham in 1995, and Billy had an incredible ministry standing up on stage preaching in front of tens of thousands of people, millions of people around the country, crusades, all sorts of stuff around the world, it doesn't work like that anymore. It does not work that way anymore. And so we need to stop thinking broadcast. We need to start thinking individuals. The strength of digital is not about reaching masses. It's about reaching individuals wherever they are, which feeds in awesome to this quote from Alan Hirsch.

Radical thought number two: I'd rather have twelve disciples than twelve hundred consumers. And actually, we see this in the life of Jesus. Like, this isn't an Alan Hirsch or a Jeff Reed thing. People talking crazy. Go read John 6 and dig into that. By the way, I don't have time even to dig into this, but the church.digital slash John 6. There's a blog that's written at that website. For there, the church.digital slash John 6. The end of the day, John 6:66, Jesus chases away his disciples literally by dialoguing with them. He chases away because he was challenging them to the place of doing something different. And as a result of that, we're even discovering, man, it's better to have people that are tapped in and are being multiplying, that are sharing their faith, that are ready to go. I don't want that consumer. I want a disciple. And Jesus through John 6 goes through a process of weeding out a lot of the consumers and digging into the place of having the disciples, the core crew that was left, that would eventually the church of Acts would be built upon, the people that would literally be the foundation of the church that we have today.

The greatest untapped resource that we have in your church, that you have in your church right now, is literally sitting in your pews. They're the consumers. The church has a phenomenal human resource available, yet we really don't know what to do with them. Which gets me to this point of radical thought number three. And this is a work in progress, so you tell me if you like this or if this is horrible. We need to recruit, equip, develop, excuse me, deploy, and encourage. Let me say that again: recruit, equip, deploy, and encourage.

Number one, we got to recruit people. We got to recruit people that are already in our physical and digital churches, the ones that are already sitting in the pews, and we got to activate them. We got to get them equipped. We got to send them out with the gospel. We've got to train them utilizing systems like the Timothy Initiative, like Four Fields, Disciples Made, Zuma training. There's so many of these resources out there. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. It's more of taking these resources out there and activating people, equipping them with the understanding that they are capable of being more than just a consumer. By the way, the strength of digital right now is training and equipping. So the fact that we, the church, aren't taking advantage of digital in context of discipling and getting the message out is ridiculous. We need to not broadcast our messages to thousands. We need to start having individual

Conversations with the consumers of our church, with the people that want to be activated, with the people that are looking for spiritual purpose, and give them something. And then once we give them, once we train them, once we equip them with this, we need to deploy them. We need to send them out to reach their oikos, to reach their circle of influence. We need to start physically and digitally reaching people. We need to create digital missionaries. We need to give purpose to people out there in digital space. And once we deploy them, once we send them out to reach the people that God has empowered them to reach, we need to encourage them. We, the church, need to encourage them continually in their disciple-making process as they start recruiting others.

Church, we need to focus on multiplication here. As much and as powerful as our weekend services are, and we've created incredible experiences for the kingdom, there is an innate power that our churches have that we've not taken advantage of. It's getting these people empowered with the gospel and sent back out to tell somebody else. And our job is not to hold them accountable as much as to encourage them to take those steps and walk with them in their journey.

And so the effectiveness of a disciple discipleship pathway—well, shoot—it's really measured in this: how effective we are, not at making disciples, not reaching people for Jesus, but how effective we are in getting them to reach someone for Jesus. We've forgotten this multiplication piece. And in this next ministry season, mid-post-COVID, wherever you feel like we are, and in the future to come, it is going to be crucial for us to continue to equip others and help them reach others.

By the way, how much money would this radical cost? Like, how much is this going to cost, this radical approach that I'm talking about? What am I talking about? Zoom accounts, like Facebook Messenger. Like, so much of this is cheap. So much of this is free. So much of this is scalable. Like, if you really want to be effective as a church, it's not by that new building. It's not buy that new property. It's figure out how to more effectively use the people that we have, and then let the ministry scale digitally and physically.

We talk so much about this in multimodal church innovation meetup, all this stuff within Stadia. You definitely want to hear this and be a part of it. So as we're looking at this radical thought number three, what if we as a church—what if we focused? What if we started? Let's make it easy. What if we started an experiment? What if we said, "Hey, you know what? I'm going to take twenty-five people. I'm going to take my elder board. I'm going to take my key leaders. I'm going to take a couple ministry teams, and we're going to do this approach. I'm going to recruit them. I'm going to equip them through some training that's already out there—Four Fields, No Place Left, Disciples Made. There's so many options that are out there. I'm going to equip them with some of this training, and then I'm going to release them. I'm going to deploy them to tell other people, and I'm going to encourage them on the way. I'm going to pray with them as a church. We're going to encourage them as we send them out, and we're going to see what happens. Test God in this."

Listen, there's an idea here that is a radical shift away from what we're doing with our physical church services. And I believe in time, as you allow the crock pot to cook, so to speak, you're going to see a radical approach that happens. Listen, at the end of the day, church online works best not when the church does ministry, but when the church empowers others to do ministry. And I think for many of you out there, there's an opportunity here to look at this digital engagement pathway not as a quick fix to validate what's happening in a physical church service, but to revolutionize, to change the focus of how your church overall works.

And yes, that may be a radical approach, but some of you out there are willing to take a shot at it and go down this road. Okay, if you've listened to everything that I've just said and you don't think I'm crazy, first off, thank you. I appreciate that very much. Secondly, I understand that Stadia—we want to help you in this. As radical as this conversation that I just had, we have people that want to walk alongside your church and help your church understand how to do this. We want to help churches learn to thrive, grow, and multiply in hybrid environments. Go ahead and do this. Swing over to stadiachurchplanning.org slash digital—P-H-Y-G-I-T-A-L. Jump in a digital learning community. We literally have this conversation regularly with churches, and we help churches go through this process of understanding disciple-making and multiplication in your churches. And so your next step is to jump in one of these digital learning communities and start. For you, maybe it's an experiment, but start to journey towards recognizing how disciple-making can revolutionize what's happening in your church.

Hey, all right, I've got some feedback that's coming in. First off, I love this. "Let's get radical, Jeff. Love hearing that." Do you have an example of a digital discipleship pathway? "Meeting with our discipleship pastor next week. That's awesome."

Hey, you know what? Yes, yes, I do. I will post in the thread here some examples of that. I would look at what Tyler Sansom is doing at First Capital Christian Church in Indiana. Church Anywhere—some of the stuff he's doing is great. I would look—oh, you know, I tell you what, I'll do this. Go to digital.church slash—oh man, I can't pull this link up in the top of my head. Jason Morris. I think it's digital.church/jasonmorris. He's got a presentation that he did for Stadia on that, and you can see Jason. God bless Jason. Jason T has a very rich presentation that's online for that, talking about all the stuff that he's doing. Some of it may be overwhelming, but digital.church/jasonmorris. I'll make sure that that link works later here.

Tyler Sansom—S-A-N-S-O-M. Great tip: "The Bible App plans are our most successful text-based conversations." I love hearing that. The Bible App is not recognized in its ability to be a community. Individuals have it. Millions of individuals have it. The Bible's one of the most downloaded apps there is in the app store, and it's a walking community that's available for churches to utilize. So I love this tip that's out there, and I love the idea that people want to be radical in this. So let's continue to be radical.

Hey, you know what? I'm going to address some more of these questions offline. We'll do it later. If you have questions, go and hit me up. Dear Fudge—I mean, I actually can't get this off the screen here. You go, Derfudge—D-E-R-F-F-E-J. That's me on social media. Find me anywhere. Hit me up, and would love to dialogue with you more on this.

So I'm Jeff with the Church Digital. For me, Jeff, and my Stadia church planting family, thanks for joining us here for the Beta Show. We'll see you next time. Y'all have a good one.