BETA38, Nashville: What Waffle House Taught Me About Digital Church

All right, hey, welcome to the Beta Show, episode 38. Hey, it's Jeff with the Church Digital once again. All of this is powered by Stadia Church Planning, and I am not in my office. I'm not broadcasting from where I normally have you literally see the word "connection" wrong hands over here on the side. I'm in Nashville, Tennessee at Brentwood Baptist Church up here with an Exponential thing. Man, it's hard backwards mirror on an Exponential thing. The software I'm using is not reversing right now, and so it's convoluted.

All right, hey, so we're doing a thing up here with Exponential. I've been up here for about a week, which is actually the heart of what I wanted to talk about here with this Beta Show because I had a ridiculous experience Monday that really shed some new light for me, and I want you, audience out there, to gain some understanding here of what my Monday looked like. But before we get there, Stadia Church Planning on a Tuesday, September—August 17th, literally next week. Literally, if you're listening in broad on podcast tomorrow, August 17th, Stadia is hosting an Innovation Meetup. Stadiatrixplanning.org/innovation for more information. But the heart of this Beta Show is really getting into multimodal churches—churches that are running multiple strategies, how to be more effective by running multiple strategies, doing multiple types, multiple models of church out of your organization, future-proofing your church as a result of it.

So literally, I'm leading a breakout, "Future Church: How to Prepare Your Church for Tomorrow Today." The future is not tomorrow. The future is right now. What do we need to do to get started on that? There's plenty of multimodal stuff, there's plenty of insourcing leadership development. How do we develop a leadership pipeline? How do we develop systems and structures that can—not where we have to bring people in from the outside, but we've got the next best people already within the organization, maybe even some of those people that are sitting in those pews on Sunday morning. How do we activate them and grow and develop some phenomenal stuff coming out of Stadia Innovation Meetup, Tuesday, August 17th, noon to 4 p.m., 100% free. Stadiatrixchurchplanning.org/innovation.

All right, let me tell you about Monday. Monday was crazy. I flew in. I was in Miami, woke up, got on a plane, flew out here to Nashville, Tennessee, landed about 10 a.m. Took out my phone. I wanted to be in like the Brentwood-Franklin kind of area because that's where the church is going to be and my hotel was, and so I just literally opened up Apple Maps and I typed "coffee house Brentwood," ended up at a place called the Well.

Now, the Well as a coffee house—it's not Starbucks. And let me tell you, when you go to an actual coffee house that's not Starbucks, you realize how crappy Starbucks actually is. Sorry, Starbucks fans. It's been the majority of my life at a Starbucks. I've been a Gold Club member at Starbucks for years, maybe even a decade plus, but it is subpar compared to a really good coffee house. And the Well was a really good coffee house. Walked in, it was a great environment, lobby-like feel, wall-to-wall people. It was kind of weird—nobody was wearing a mask. It's the first time I've really been in a room with no masks, and I know Delta variant's going crazy in Florida, especially Miami right now, and so it's kind of weird feelings. Put that aside, and oh my gosh, the coffee. I had a hot chai latte. It was the best liquid I put in my body in years. The iced coffee, slow drip, just how I like it. Oh my gosh, it was an incredible, incredible experience.

But even when I'm looking around at these people that are in—like, all every pastor that is in the Franklin-Brentwood area is in this coffee house all at the same time. Everybody is talking church, ministry, retiring from ministry, what's next, what are you preaching this Sunday? Like, it was freaking heaven in a coffee house that served incredible chai latte. And so, and it was completely random. I didn't want to go to a place like that. I literally let Apple Maps define for me where to go, and that was the top billing that it sent me. And so I had a couple meetings there, caught up with some friends that I've been doing ministry with over the years, and so it was an awesome time hanging out there in that area.

And a third meeting—with this one, I went to another location. I drove two miles. I think for two hours—an hour and a half, I think—east out to an area called Cookeville. And so met with the third guy in Cookeville, Tennessee. This is not far away from Nashville. These are still Tennessee people. There's not a radical shift of what's happening here, but the type of person, the environment that we met in in Cookeville—we met at a Waffle House.

Now, I love waffles. I mean, IHOPs, like some of those places—this isn't like me going critical on the environment. Um, there's a homeless guy sitting at the bar, and at one point he was drunk, and at one point he got up from the bar to go get in his car. And long story short, dude, like, lost control of his car in the parking lot and jumped the curb and came within probably three inches away from hitting the literal building. Like, he almost rammed the Chevy 1500 into this building. And I'm like, looking at this bumper in the booth where I'm sitting where I almost got like concreted in in a Waffle House.

And other situations where there's a couple over here, a husband and wife with two kids. Mom and dad are just going at it the entire time, yelling, fighting, verbally abusing each other. The kids, AirPods, a Switch, iPhone, or maybe it was an iPad, completely ignoring, completely oblivious. I don't know what the thing is, but there's obvious tensions in there. We even asked the waitress at one point, "You know, how can we pray for you?" And the waitress started telling this like the sob story of her daughter was the cook, but her son lives somewhere else. He has COVID, very bad. She can't afford to go visit him, and she can't get off. Like, there's lots of drama.

I'm not painting this picture clear enough to the audience here. There's lots of drama in this Waffle House in Cookeville. By the way, coffee—I mean, let's be honest, it was Waffle House coffee. There's better, but it's honestly maybe it's better than Starbucks. But let's really hone in here to what I wanted to hit on: two different environments, two different places.

Oftentimes, what the Well looked like—hey, there's people there's Christians all over. We're talking about all this stuff. There's no drama. It's all clean. It's all simple. It's all pretty. Ironically, the Well, this coffee house, the first place I went to, is literally owned by a church. There's an organization, and they use it for like—um, was it—it's like coffee to clean water. And so you drink coffee, and then they invest the money, some of the profits, into clean water organizations globally. So I literally went to a church without realizing I was going to a church.

But isn't that what our Sundays look like where we're in our physical buildings? And I don't want to be critical of the physical buildings. I'm literally sitting in one at this moment, Brentwood Baptist. But we sit in these buildings, and everything's clean, everything's simple, everything's pretty. Um, and we all put on the Christian faces, the Christian conversations, Christian dialogue, and we just live in that Christian environment where everything's simple.

No, it's fascinating. For some of us that are doing online ministry, we're realizing it's not simple—anything but simple. And oftentimes, online ministry and the messiness of what online can look like, just like the messiness of what Cookeville looked like for me out in Tennessee—it's a turn-off to some people that are more interested in the claim. It's a difficulty. It's an obstacle. It's something that we should not get into because it's so different than what we typically see in the pretty, simple, Christ-centered environments that we're in.

But what's funny is there's more. The waitress at Cookeville—she was open to prayer when we asked her, "How can we pray for you?" She was very open with the things that were in her life. She didn't stick around for the prayers. She just said, "Hey, if you're a praying person, I need you to pray for this. My son's got COVID. He's got it really bad. I don't—I can't afford to see him. I can't go over. I'm a mom, and I'm struggling with the emotions of what that means." She was like, she was old on the older side of the equation, so I feel like it was a younger son. I'm just waving to the altar. Live people, by the way, it's awesome. Ultralive.com. If you've not hooked up with them yet, but there's this opportunity that we have to do ministry different, to connect with a different type of person, to get in the mud a little bit, to get in those situations.

And yes, you may put your life on the line. You may have to get dirty and almost get hit by a Chevy F-150 or a Chevy 1500 that's driven by some drunk guy that doesn't know where he's at. Um, and the proverbial word war that happens as customers start to cuss this guy out because of the situation—like, it was a mess. But the point is, that's what life is in 2021. That's what life is. By doing digital ministry, it's not all pretty locks. It's not all mega-giga buildings. It's not coffee that's served literally at the church. Sometimes it's an opportunity for you to get messy.

So the challenge that I have for you today, audience out there: when you're doing digital ministry, are you getting messy? Are you getting dirty? Are you getting so involved in people's lives that they know you care, that you're walking with them even in those hard times, those difficult times? Or for you, is your church more about—man, listen, I just want to broadcast. I don't want to get dirty. I just want to get it out. Are you getting dirty digitally?

Maybe I should buy that dirtychurch.com. Dirtychurch.com. 30-30-30.church. That just got weird. Somebody's actually probably bought that just right now.

Hey, so we're going to wrap here. Innovation Meetup, Tuesday, August 17th. You guys have to be there. It's going to be an awesome session here with Exponential. By the way, and I haven't said this publicly yet—um, Exponential's doing some regional events, and I'm going to be traveling around. I've got like five or six locations here in 2021 up until Thanksgiving '21 where I'm going to be meeting up with people and talking digital church, digital church, church planning, all that stuff. So if you know an Exponential regional event is coming to your area, sign up. Look for information. Let me know. Let me get you connected with some of the pre-conference stuff that we, Stadia, that we're doing. And we'd love to meet up with you at those regional conferences. We'll be in Orlando too in—uh, what is it—March something or other '22. But definitely want to connect up with you all. Hit me up on social media. Dear Feds, Jeff Reed backwards. You all know that drill. But for Stadia Church Planning, for Exponential—yay! For—uh, man, I did it again. I pointed to the wrong side. Yay! Dang it. Yay! This is harder than it looks. It's like shaving without—like, anyway. For everybody of these people, I'm totally going along. Uh, this is Jeff with the Church Digital and Stadia Planning. Thanks for jumping on the Beta Show here, and we'll see you next time. You have a good day.