BETA41: Why My Church Should Think Digital First

All right, hey, we are live with the Beta Show episode 41. Here I'm Jeff with the Church Digital podcast once again. All of this is powered by Stadia Church Planning. Hey, we got a great episode. We are wrapping up the Beta Show here a little bit. We haven't made this public knowledge, talk about it here a little bit, but here with Beta 41, here we are going to be talking about why your church needs to be thinking digital first. Why your church needs to be thinking digital first. If you've got ministry questions, digital ministry questions, we want to answer them here on the Beta Show. Go ahead and text us 484-324-8724. That's literally my cell phone number, and so I don't have my phone in front of me. One of those weird times in life right now. So go ahead and text me ministry questions. Maybe we'll answer on Beta Show or something else coming up along the way.

Hey, like I said, we are wrapping up the Beta Show. This is one of the last Beta Show episodes we're gonna be doing for a while. You know, as we iterate, experiment, try things, change, and as a result, season two is coming. Excited about the Church Digital season two returning to a new outlook for the Church Digital. So keep your eyes open for that starting right around the corner, September 13th. By the way, speaking of September 13th, I'm gonna be hanging out with my Exponential friends at some regional conferences. I'm gonna be meeting Tom Pounder for the first time in real life. I'm going to be in Washington DC, looking forward to hanging out there. We're going to be doing a pre-conference Stadia is doing a pre-conference track on digital, physical and digital, how those work together. So if you're interested, if you're in the DC area September, we're going to be there September 13th and 14th. Go and check out the website exponential.org and be sure to sign up for the Washington DC, but also the pre-conference gonna be in other areas: Houston, Chicago, a couple spots in California. I'll be, I will be at all of them. So be sure if you're gonna be out at that area, interested in going to the conference, stop by and say hello. Would I love to hang out with you at these conferences. By the way, 42, as we're wrapping up, the next Beta Show here, we're going to be talking about the secret to online small groups. Yeah, there's something they've been holding back on. We're going to be talking about that here in the near future. But hey, you know what, here's what I want to get into today, episode 41. This idea of what does it mean to think digital first? Beta 41. What does it mean to think digital first? And I want to give you all out there a couple tips right off the bat.

So tip number one: why you need to be thinking digital first? Well, let's just be honest. Digital has too much potential to get scraps. Okay, maybe I'm speaking a little bit from ego right up here off the top. I confess that. Put it up here openly. But the idea is that digital just has an immense potential just to be left over and getting the scraps. Here's the reality of it where we are in this mid-post-COVID season, and I'm not getting political. Don't send me hate mail. Not everyone. The reality is not everyone has come back to the building. You know, it seems like the average consensus that I've heard is about 60 to 70 percent of pre-COVID attendance is back in the building. And remember where we were in the building February 2020? We were at a 20, 25-year decline where organized religion, organized Christianity, lost something like 25 percent over those 20 years. And so listen, we were trending down. And go COVID, listen, Delta variant. I just read something about the Mu variant. Everybody keeps talking about all these new variants that are around. Okay, maybe Loki's a different thing, but the heart of this is wherever we are in this COVID journey or wherever you think we are, there is not a general consensus among the public, and there is not churches that I'm hearing that are saying, "Oh yeah, we've got 90, 100. We've even grown in this season." So we need digital to continue to engage. We need digital to still be on task of reaching these people. Realize this, and let me throw a slide up here. Yeah, 40 percent of your people are still not in your building. So let me ask this question: why is digital getting less than four percent of your budget and four percent of your energy or attention? We need digital to be on task, and oftentimes, well, putting it as second, yeah, we're all, well, we'll get into more of that here in a little bit. But we need digital to still be that connection point with people that are not yet in your building. If you think that buildings are important for discipleship and your strategy leans that way, you still need to be reaching out to people that have not made it into your building.

Second reason why digital is important, why we want to think digital first: if you don't think digital first, you likely won't think digital period. Now there's a lot of reasons why here. I mean, let's be honest. After several hundred years of doing church physical only or physical first, the majority of us as staffs, as leaders, as pastors, we don't think digital. Let's get back to that building. Let's get back to normal. Let's get back to the way that it was as quickly as possible. And but the practicality here is that by thinking digital first, we are able to work through issues upfront with digital. We're able to, instead of, you know, okay, let's just get it done as quick as possible. By paying that attention upfront, we are aggressively working through digital challenges as opposed to neglecting it and limiting it as more of an afterthought. So that's the challenge number two with that.

Number three, flying through here: thinking digital first will help your organization scale. Think complement. Think multimodal. Think different. By forcing a harder conversation at the beginning, digital first, you're making, you're moving away from this idea of physical first, and that's making you, when you're fresh, when you have that attention Monday and Tuesday and not when you're exhausted on a Thursday and Friday trying to rattle through this. Look, you know, and I'm not much of a gym guy. I have been in my life, but it's like leg day. It's very easy to ignore leg day, and you've seen these guys at the gym where, you know, they're huge up top, muscles ripping, but their legs look like Q-tips. And there's this intentionality of, hey, you know what, we even need to make leg day work for the digital church. Somebody tweet that out there. You need to make leg day work for the digital church.

I had a pastor tell me here. This is a good friend, um, Ray Hudson from City Center Church in Berkeley, California. Our church, this is what he says. He actually did this at an Exponential. Some stuff we're doing for Exponential. Our church does five things really well. In a weekend service, to be honest, are number five. It's the fifth thing overall in priority. Hey, yeah, the service plays a part, but for Ray Hudson, lead pastor at City Center Church in Berkeley, it's number five. There's other things that come first before you get to it. Why? Because you want everything to be in balance. You want everything to be strong. You don't want that strong upper body and weak legs. You don't want a strong weekend service and weak discipleship. You need to be thinking multiple facets. You know, there's lots of adages kind of in the COVID season where the strength of the week in service, the strength of the church was gone, and we need to be using other body parts. We need to be growing strong in discipleship, in groups. We need to figure what on mission had looked like, and there was all this challenge to do things differently in COVID. And yes, the buildings are important, and yes, for many of us we need to get back to them as quickly as possible, but not to forsake the things that we've learned along the way. Ray, thank you for this. Then what? Great insight there on this quote. By the way, number three here, it's not like leg day. Thinking digital first will help your organization scale, complement, think multimodal. Ultimately, it's going to help you force those muscles and grow those muscles to think differently.

All right, let's go number four. I promised you three. I'm going to give you four just because I can. It's not that digital needs to be your number one priority. It's that physical church services can no longer be your number one priority. And so the heart of this idea of thinking digital, of thinking digital first, is really this muscle reaction that we need to move away from the church service being number one. Our buildings are losing influence. Our services have not the evangelical outreach potential that they once had. Yet there is a ton of people in those pews ready to be activated and mobilized for the kingdom in church. We've got to figure out how to do that. And oftentimes, and I'm not talking about by thinking digital first, we need to broadcast our church services online. That's not the solution. I'm getting to instead. Maybe it's more if we need to figure out what to do with these people and how we can get these consumers activated to the place where they're being on mission.

By the way, we stayed here. We wrestle with this all the time. We talk about digital. We've got Fidget learning communities. We actually did the trademark, but you know, if we're even thinking digital first, maybe Fidget, which is physical and digital, maybe that's the wrong word. Maybe we should have, instead, maybe we should be calling it Digical. I don't, and maybe I'm joking actually. Somebody out there needs to buy, just go buy Digical dot church. Oh wait, I already did. So never mind. But the heart of this is listen, whether you're saying Fidget, whether you're saying Digical, the heart of this is we need to be thinking digital first. We need to be thinking different first. We need to be breaking this rhythm of it's all about the weekend service, and instead realizing that the weekend service is part of what we're doing, but your church may be doing five different things, and for you the weekend service is just a part of it. And even like I said, maybe it's the fifth part. Maybe it's the pinky, and some of your other muscles within your church need to get the atrophy off and start to be more involved in this thing.

Hey, I love this quick Beta Show right here for the weekend. Beta 41. Why your church should think digital first. Beta 42 coming up next week, we're going to be the secrets, the best kept secret to your online small groups. We're going to hit that. And do not forget we Stadia. We want to hang out with you at that Exponential regional conferences. Exponential.org to find times and locations. When you register, I will be in DC, Southern California, Northern California, Houston, and Chicago. I'm going to be doing a lot of traveling here before Thanksgiving, and it's going to be a blast. Can't wait to meet a lot of you in person. And when you sign up for that conference, sign up for the pre-conference, the Stadia track, talking physical and digital, Fidget, and we will see you there.

Hey, season 41 coming up real quick around the corner. See that in a couple weeks. Next week is the last Beta Show. I'm saying it publicly right here. Beta 42. And we're calling it quits. This is Jeff at the Church Digital and Stadia Church Planning. Thanks for jumping on here. We'll see you next week. Y'all have a good day.