EP102: Essential Ecclesiology Enabling Digital Church Planting

All right, everybody, we got episode 102 of the Church Digital Podcast powered by Stadia Church Planting. Jeff here. Before we get to 102, I want to remind you real quick we have started a new show here at the Church Digital. It's called Beta Show. This is literally where we're giving you, the audience, an opportunity to ask questions. We're answering your questions live broadcast on Facebook Live and YouTube. Phenomenal conversations, phenomenal content so far as we've been talking about how to make your digital ministry, your digital church, your church online, your fidget church, how to do it better, diving in even to the discipleship in the most recent episode. And so text us your questions. We need to answer questions and we want you to give us your questions. Text us at 484-324-8724. It's literally number four, the church, if you speak telephone alphabet: 484-324-8724. Send those questions in. Check us out at Beta Show. It's Wednesdays on Facebook and YouTube on the Church Digital channels, and Thursday it's over at, uh, on the podcast here where if you're listening to the Church Digital Podcast, great stuff. All right, hey, let's get back to episode 102.

So I'm having a conversation recently with the nice people over at Exponential talking about digital-only church planting. By the way, if you're interested in more information on how to plant a digital-only expression of church or even what that means, go swing over to the church dot digital slash planting. More information is there, and it's even what Stadia is doing. But in context, I'm talking here to the Exponential people and they were like, "Hey, have you met Ed Love?" And I was like, "No, I have not met Ed Love." Hey, Ed, what do you do? And he tells me he's like, he's the director of church multiplication with the Wesleyan Church, with the denomination. And so we start dialoguing here, and I'm discovering that at that end, essentially, and this is even going back to like 2017, we talk about it in the podcast, so the Wesleyan denomination basically reworked, revisited their ecclesiology, their biblical functions, how they're interpreting scripture to lead towards how church looks in the future. They wanted to make it easier for different models of church to exist. They revisited the scripture to see if a digital-only expression of church would work. They revisited scripture to revisit whether micro expressions, churches, micro campuses, if those would work. And so they revisited, they delved into the scripture, they examined it, and they came out of it with an essential ecclesiology, basically a different format, function of how they felt that scripture was leading them to define church.

So so often we have this conversation of, "Is a digital church really a biblical church? Is a micro church really a biblical church? Is a house church really a biblical church?" And it's fascinating. The Wesleyans, evidently under Ed's guidance, had this conversation like back in 2017, and it's phenomenal insights from them. And so realize coming in, you've got a denomination, an organization that's reshaping, maybe not taking away from scripture, but revisiting the scripture and reanalyzing it for the world that we're in today. Great conversation. I am so excited from a digital-only perspective that you get to hear it.

So here's where we're bringing in, we're bringing in Ed Love, director of church multiplication, as I said, for the Wesleyan Church, and we're bringing to myself, Jeff, with the Church Digital and Stadia Church Planting, in a conversation that I'm essentially calling the essential ecclesiology for enabling digital church planting.

Okay, everybody, here you go.

Well, hey, maybe just to give us a little definition and background into who you are, Ed, just maybe tell us a little bit about your day-to-day, your ministry life now with the Wesleyans. What does ministry look like for you these days?

Yeah, well, I serve as a director of church multiplication, and that means I've got responsibilities over the church planters and also the church multipliers, like those sending churches, the multiplying churches, and developing both of those realms, developing the systems that help churches continue to multiply and also produce healthy, thriving new churches. So that's primarily my focus now. I've been a church planter, so I know how that life is, and I've been a church multiplier, a church network leader, and you know, I love seeing the church just rapidly reproduce and expand.

Yeah, this idea of multiplication in church planting and how that fits together, man, that's it. It's an exciting time. It's an exciting opportunity. We're seeing churches pivot more and more that way, and honestly, Ed, like you, I got connected through to you through the Exponential crowd. Um, we were like, I guess we're speaking at a conference or something together, but um, what a couple of those guys were telling me about how you guys, how the Wesleyan denomination has been reworking the ecclesiology and starting to open up some of these things, and it started just to peak my interest, especially considering some digital church, and we'll get some of that down the road here in a little bit. But maybe just even to open up, um, explain to the audience some. Most people have heard me say the word ecclesiology a bunch, but you're more educated than I am, so you tell me here. Like, ecclesiology, what essentially are we talking about when we use this term?

Ecclesiology is essentially the study of the church. I mean, that's what we're talking about here. It's our view of the church. When you have, when you hear the word church, what are the mental models that you think about? And I know when I was a kid growing up, you know, we had that little, uh, saying in our, I don't know, Sunday school class or something, you know, you put your hands together and you're like, "Here's the church, here's the steeple, open the doors and look at all the people," right? You know, it's this fun little thing we do. Um, and but believe it or not, that was forming part of my ecclesiology because I was getting a view of the church. The church happened within a building with the steeple and people, and uh, that was part of our view. So everybody's got a view of the church, and you know, I think we go through different seasons and epochs within the church at large, and we need to reanalyze our view of the church. And so that's what we're talking about when we're talking ecclesiology: defining it, clarifying what it is in our current cultural context.

Wow, so so you guys are, I mean, is it safe to say you're redefining what church is? You're reshaping it? Like, is there, with the biblical context, like, what, so as you're revisiting what this church is, kind of what are the checkpoints that you're looking at and comparing it to? What role does scripture play in this?

Well, the scripture is a huge part. Uh, and I hesitate to even use the word redefine because what we're trying to do is go back more to the original definition. If that's what you mean by redefining, is we're just going back to the original, closer to the original definition. That has been our pursuit and our goal. I think, you know, it's helpful. It's always helpful, you know, it's like making a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, and then eventually you're like, "And I'm sure this is a little fuzzy. What is this?" And so you got to go back to the original copy, the original. And so I think that's been more of our focus, and scripture obviously is the guiding framework for that, and understanding what Jesus really wanted the church to be.

And let's let's start there. Were there symptoms within the Wesleyan denomination? Like, what caused this revisit? What was maybe the motive that started this, "Hey, let's revisit, let's go back to the original"? What were the symptoms you were seeing within maybe the existing ecclesiology that started this movement?

Yeah, so in the Wesleyan Church, it's a denomination, right? I mean, it's a well-established denomination and it's done its thing. It's organized well, and by most measurements in the denominational world, like it is a healthy denomination. Like it's actually not experiencing great decline. Um, but it's also not experiencing, you know, the level of movement and multiplication that our heart really desires and that we feel like God is calling us to be. So I think there was a little bit of this holy discontent, you know? I mean, going back just three, four years, there's a change in a lot of leadership, and that's when I started my role, got invited into that. And so, you know, I think that was a lot of it was just kind of this holy discontent, just feeling like there's got to be more. Um, you know, is our goal just being a healthy denomination and kind of surviving the denominational era, making it, um, or you know, are we really going to be open to what the Holy Spirit wants for us and see the church unleashed? And so I think that was the marker for us was just, you know, we just kind of had to put a stake in the ground, just say, "Hey, we want to be a multiplying movement." So what does that look like for us? And that starts a whole another series of questions, right?

Yeah, it was funny. Just last week here on the podcast, we had Jim Tomberlin on, and Jim's Multi-Site Solutions, I think he's with Unstuck Group now. He's chief of staff at Christ Fellowship Miami, a church that I used to be on staff with. And he dropped this phrase. He's, and Jim's great at these like one-liner mic drop things like that's just like the world that he lives in. But he said, "The goal of the church is not to grow as big as possible. The goal of the church is to grow big enough so that it can multiply, and then grow big enough so that it can multiply again." And so there's this intentionality that comes towards multiplication even from the beginning. And it sounds like with this pivot that you hate to use the word pivot, everybody says pivot, but with this change in the ecclesiology, it feels like you guys are making an intentional shift more towards this idea of multiplication. Now, when I look at it as well, it feels like there's a lot of different opportunities for different types of churches to maybe pop up more, more micro, more, um, you know, digital expressions, which is something obviously we talk a lot about here. What was their intentionality towards these different models? Like, were you seeing an opportunity to expand there within the denomination?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. And that was a big part of why we had to kind of push that conversation ahead. And I mean, you can imagine like having the, you know, we call it essential ecclesiology. Um, some use the term minimum ecclesiology. Having that conversation at a denominational level is uh, not easy, right? There's a lot of people who feel like they got a say in that. And so we actually did in our process of defining that, we did involve a lot of layers of people: professors, denominational leaders, district leaders, local pastors. So we had kind of a diverse group going after it, which was helpful. But I think, uh, for us, you know, we were recognizing that our apostolic multipliers, our leaders that were really going after it and had that kingdom vision, uh, they were dreaming about church in new ways already. So it's kind of like we're responding to what's already going on in the field and wanting to make sure, you know, as a denomination, we want to make sure we're clearing the path for our multipliers and apostolic leaders, not, you know, creating more confusion and clutter that they have to wade through.

So and if it goes in our discernment, we just recognize like we got to have this conversation. We got to nail it down. We actually had an event that we pulled together about three years ago. We called it Unleashed, and it wasn't like a conference. It was, it turned out to be more of like an upper room prayer experience is what it was. But we just, we just kind of, you know, invited the apostolic leaders that we knew of in our tribe and said, "Hey, we want to have this conversation and, you know, we want to experience a greater measure of unity as a church and focus around this idea." And so we need you to come together. We need to have this meeting, kind of a coming to moment, a Holy Spirit moment, and where we move this mission forward. And so that's where it actually began. And we got the sense of like, as we unleashed our leaders, like they were thinking at a whole nother level. You know, they were thinking very creatively, all kinds of different church planting models, and even a little pushback on like, even the current traditional model, right? I mean, it was just kind of like, "Yeah, we've done that and we really don't see the fruit that we would like to see, you know, would have liked to see." And so we got to make room for some more models. And so that's what really sparked the conversation.

And so in a way, it was, you know, I'm a proactive leader, so I like to think that we were proactive. But I think our leaders in the field were the ones actually pushing it forward, and then it was the denomination level just kind of responding and saying, "Hey, we want to clear the path for you." Yeah, and if our definition of church is holding you back for some reason, or if we've got some systematic things that are holding you back, we want to work at those. We need to know what they are and then work at them so that your path is free to go. And so that's been really cool to see, you know, all kinds of new things happening and leaders feeling more freedom. That gives you more opportunities, I think. I don't want to use the word reshape because you're going, you're falling back on that original, but you're able to shape things almost like clay to make it look different. And so you can take this—I love your phrasing of essential ecclesiology. You know, minimal feels like, "Oh yeah, we're cutting stuff out and it's less than," but yeah, I mean, you're really with this word essential. Like, there are things that may not be part of the essential. Here's the core of what we're trying to establish. And if you're able to do more, or your model has stronger, you know, has more strengths in this area and another has strengths in another area, it's not good or it's not bad. It's just we need to really get established on what this core is, on what the essential piece of it is. And so this is really exciting.

You know, even when I looked about, when I looked at it, and we'll put information here in the show notes that you can kind of see their finding as well, but the essential ecclesiology I think comes down to discipleship, mission, and community. So these are the three foundations that you are considering part of your essential ecclesiology. Is there, and I'm just curious, Ed, overarching view—was there a reason why you went with those three? What didn't make the cut? Like, just give me a brief synopsis on that particular finding.

Oh, I think we were just, we recognized like we wanted to come across as simple but it needed to be strong and legitimate. Incredible. And so I think that's why, you know, we needed these three kind of broader categories. Some people use, you know, up, in, and out. I mean, that's a simple way of phrasing it. But, you know, to be able to just have those three categories there is really helpful for leaders to think through, you know, what does it look like in each of those categories? And then, I mean, we ended up creating this evaluative document, which is really just nine questions like that you would ask your new church that you're starting. You would ask those questions about your church, evaluate it, have a plan for those, you know, be able to answer those questions and have a plan in place for it. And then there's a lot of freedom in that, though. You know, and what we also recognize is some of the things that we're starting, they don't need to begin in the early stage. They don't need to begin with a full set of criteria. They may work towards that. And at some point in the course of their ministry run, a leader who's overseeing that should be able to ask them, like, "Hey, what you're doing is a little bit more than just an outreach effort of our church or our network. I think this is actually a church. Let's have this conversation." You know, so it's allowing leaders to have the freedom and space to do some new things without having to define it specifically as an official established church, right? And be able to work toward that is really helpful.

That's what I think is unleashing the movement. Where we're seeing, you know, the Wesleyan Church, right? We trace our roots back to John Wesley, you know, Francis Asbury, the lay-led Wesleyan revivals. I mean, that's like our heritage. And yet it's like, "Where's that at?" You know, like, where are the movement makers? John Wesley was great, and Francis Asbury, but they're not the ones that actually did the work of the movement. I mean, they did their part in establishing and sending and creating that culture, but they had hundreds and thousands of, you know, lay-led leaders being unleashed all over, starting these movements in all kinds of places and pockets in the world. And so, you know, we wonder, "Where is that at?" You know, and where's that lay movement? And so could our definition of church actually be holding those people back because it's too high of a bar?

Wow. And so we got to recognize that there are these pioneering leaders that are in our churches just sitting there, and they're probably a little bit bored with, you know, just the normal operations of church. So it's like, "How do we engage them and then empower them for the movement?" And they might start doing something if they're empowered, and it may turn into a church. And that's what we're seeing. I love it, and that just gets me really excited. So this is beautiful.

When you readdressed this, you took into mindset priesthood of all believers. How do we get this into lay people? Like, I love that, that is so beautiful. I'm just curious, because sometimes I have this conversation with churches and with denominational leaders, national leaders, and some people love this idea of priesthood of believers. And I'm not gonna lie, we talk about on the show, some people are not a fan of this priesthood of believers idea. I'm just curious, like, within the denomination, within the leadership, was there pushback towards releasing some of this control towards this shift in ecclesiology to make it easier for lay people to address?

Oh sure, there's always pushback. It wouldn't be leadership if there's not. But I think the majority of people, you know, are excited about that, want to lean into it. I think that the hesitancies just come with, you know, being concerned about, you know, what are we doing for future generations? And, you know, what's, you know, how do you engage young people and kids? And so you got all these like practical issues you're working through. But by and large, I mean, people are really excited about, you know, being a movement again, you know, and leaning into it. So it's a great conversation.

And I notice it does take a lot of time. So just like anything in denominational work, it takes, you know, ten times longer than what you thought it would take. But, you know, it's had, it's been at least three years now, and we're seeing the culture finally really changing. I mean, you're talking about a complete culture shift, and that doesn't happen overnight. It doesn't happen with one conference or speaker message. It takes a lot of time and a lot of different arenas that you have to have these types of conversations in. But everywhere I go, I mean, I am way more encouraged and supported than not, right? So it's a good space to be in, and good conversations are happening at all different levels. And super excited, like, even in our universities—like, we've got five Wesleyan universities and seminaries. We've got a seminary, Wesley Seminary, and I teach a little bit for them. And so we've had these conversations there, and it's like, "Wow, you know, full support across the board." And, you know, they're leaning in and doing their part to serve the movement. So it's really exciting.

So my understanding of what you just said—and I didn't realize this—this is a three-year-old process. Like, you started this 2017, 2018?

Yeah.

Wow, I didn't realize that. So by doing the three years, I mean, at this point it's part of culture, at this point I would imagine where people have adopted this. You're, it's part of the DNA of what you guys are doing. It's not really an add-on at this point.

It's getting, yeah. I can see that. And what's cool for me to watch is like, I hear other leaders in their own spaces, or we've got a couple groups of leaders like pulling off their own conference and things. They're actually speaking the same values in their settings on their own, and it's not like I didn't tell them to say those things or do those things. That's when you start knowing that the culture is really changing, right? And you've made some progress. You know, I mean, we still got a long ways to go, don't get me wrong. But, you know, there's more and more ground being taken every day. And, you know, it's exciting watching people lean in.

That is very exciting. With somebody owning a piece of this and reproducing, replicating it even in their own, I mean, you're talking about leadership. That's when you know you're being effective when somebody else is picking up your mantle and carrying it.

Hey, so let's unpack. I had a couple questions here. The essential ecclesiology comes down to discipleship, mission, and community. Now, you know, here on the podcast we talk a lot about digital-only expressions of church. And so the idea of an essential ecclesiology and digital space—like, we talk about this with planters who are wrestling with the same sort of stuff. So it's really exciting for me to see a denomination three years ago being forward-thinking enough to try to make this easier. Whether digital was in your mindset in 2017, whatever the adjustment with this is, is very helpful towards moving towards a digital expression of church. So I really, I wanted to get your opinion on something. Because for me, discipleship in digital space—this is going to become my mantra for 2021. Like, the church, COVID, we made massive hurdles towards getting churches online, doing broadcasting services, things like this. But the pain point for many churches has been this idea of discipleship, you know, I use the phrase disciple-making. You can plug in whatever your language here. But it's this idea of disciplining, growing someone to the place where they can grow someone else—great commission kind of moving forward towards that. At least in my opinion. So when I'm talking about discipleship and digital discipleship, do you have or have you experienced within the denomination churches that are doing or planters that are doing disciple-making, discipleship well in digital space? Are there challenges that you're seeing where that may not happen digitally? Kind of what's your opinion on this idea of discipleship digitally?

Personally, I love it. I mean, I think it's, you know, it's part of the future and I think, you know, we're seeing more and more now leaning into that and figuring it out. And I think COVID would just, like, I mean, I just sped up the process by like probably ten years.

And so every church leader is basically forced to figure it out, whereas before, like, it would probably be a choice. Like, "Ah, do I want to do this?" Or, "Yeah, I'll just keep doing what I'm doing," right? And so now everyone's kind of forced into it. So we've seen some great things coming out of that, and I'm watching some great, you know, leadership development start happening. It's been really neat even watching leaders doing, like, they're doing different studies and whatnot all on digital platforms and they're getting their message across to a lot more people. And, you know, I think of it as much more than just broadcasting like a service or teaching, but it's the actual engagement that is the part that is where discipleship actually, you know, I think is legitimized in those environments. And you could probably make a case like there's actually more discipling and potentially more disciple-making happening in a digital context versus physical sometimes. You could say there's a lot of interaction and learning, relationship. There's some things that the physical space is still great for, but if you use it right. But oftentimes, it's, you know, in church life, I mean, it's kind of a "come see what we got" and sit and watch it. And where the digital space really just forces you to interact. I mean, yeah, that becomes more and more the go-to. Like, "Let's dig in. Let's go somewhere together."

Definitely. And I just want to publicly say I did not prompt nor script him to say any of what he just said. Oh, Ed, you don't know, but you're paying me. Oh, no, that check's gonna bounce, my friend. I hate to tell you that. Wow. But that just, I continually say things like that, and sometimes people are like, "Yes, that's incredible. Yes, I agree," and some people are like, "You're crazy." But it's amazing to me how much this is bifurcated, how many people would, or it's just fifty-fifty. It's divided. Normally, when I speak on digital church planting, like, I'll ask up front, "Who thinks this is a great idea and who thinks this is a horrible idea?" And it's typically fifty-fifty, sixty-forty, forty-sixty, somewhere, you know, back and forth within there. Where even like the organizations who bring me in, they know there's people in the room that don't agree with this. And it's an unproven concept. There's success, but we're not seeing it at a large level yet. So I get it, you know? I understand that. But I love your heart. And, hey, you know what? We can actually probably see better results of discipling people in digital space than we can in physical. And that "come and see" approach has been very pervasive in our physical space. And that if we can be intentional in overcoming that digitally, you're right. I think that's a big win for the digital church.

Talk to me a little bit here about this idea of community. Because you're really, by doing this digitally and even here, you're really redefining community. You're making it easier for micro-gatherings, for digital gatherings, which once again can be a very controversial thing from an older denomination that's used to having things done a certain way. Has that been a controversial move? Maybe what was some of the logic that you used? What was some of the scripture that you used to maybe justify redefining some of that community?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think there's certainly, that's where, you know, you go from the ideas of like the Unleashed event that we held, right? There's a lot of ideas out there, and then you get into the practical, like, "We're actually going to do this, and we want approval, or maybe we'd like money." Those sorts of conversations. That's where it's like, "Okay, we gotta really dig in here and talk about what this is," and, you know, hopefully have a permission-giving atmosphere around that and encourage it to move forward. But I think that's where, you know, when you're defining the community differently and the results are untested, like, you're just not completely sure about this. Whereas some of the older models, we might have a formula. Like, I mean, we've nailed it, you know? We know the church-planting formula from, you know, the nineties and early two-thousands. Like, we know how to do that form of church planting, and it'll create, you know, a product. Like, you'll know what you can expect. Whereas when you're talking about micro-church development and network micro-network development, we're not entirely sure about what will happen in that space. But we know we need to do it. So we have to experiment in those realms and give people the freedom to go and do that to reach the people that aren't just showing up to their church. And so it's going to those places where, and doing things in a creative way that's going to reach people that feel uncomfortable with basically the established church as it is, or have no real knowledge or care for it. And so we're actually, we've said it for years in the church, like, "We gotta go to them. You know, they're not coming to us. We gotta go to them." But now we're actually doing that and creating these contexts for that to happen. And that's where I think you're leaning into the pioneering leaders who are going to start new things. And that's kind of the space. It's kind of the space in between a disciple-maker and a church planter. And what we recognize is there's a gap right there, you know? It's hard to just go from, like, "I'm a disciple-maker. I'm making disciples in my church, and this is great, and I'm influencing all these people," but then to have a church-planting conversation with them. "Well, you might be a church planter." You know, that's a big jump. And so you need something in between. And we've kind of described that as a pioneering leader. So we're leaning into the word "pioneer," and it's interesting. Before we used the word "church planter," before, like, the nineties, back in the eighties, seventies, and eighties, I think we used the word, you know, "church pioneer." Like, that was our language in the church. And, you know, because you're doing, you're blazing a new trail. You're going a new way. And you're pioneering these new things. So I think for us, the micro-church development is really a great space for the lay-led pioneering leader movement. And it helps kind of take someone beyond just the disciple-making category, but then you're talking about, "This is someone who's going to be starting new things and more of a movement-maker in their context." And then you can talk about the next level is someone who's overseeing all of those types of people that would be pioneering leaders. So there is still that sending church, that catalytic leader that is needed. And so I think that's where, you know, you start getting into these creative options. And then you have, you know, the digital space becomes a conversation. You know, like, "I started something, and it's using these digital platforms, and I kind of want to keep that going. I want to see this expand more and more." And so that's getting interesting. And then having, you know, the full, like, right now there's a hybrid that's pretty well accepted within the church at large. You know, we're gonna have digital as part of our ministry operation now. But there are churches who are leaning towards, like, "We're actually going all in. Like, this is an entire virtual church," which is, you know, a whole kind of another level beyond the hybrid. Which is kind of your space. So we're leaning into you for that. So, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a whole lot. That's a whole other conversation. But in this, ecclesiology really sets the standard for that, you know? So often, previous ecclesiologies, I believe, at least this is my opinion, previous ecclesiologies really didn't lean so much into the scripture as much as it was people's opinions to create that weekend experience. I don't think that it were a physical experience in a building on a Sunday morning. I don't know if there's anything malicious in this. It's just years and decades and centuries of a particular method, and that just gets ingrained into who we are. But really, if you look back at that Acts 2, you know, a lot of, if not all of what we're reading, can be done in digital space. It just looks different. And instead of taking your biases towards a particular method and saying that it has to be that way, well, I mean, just look globally. I tell the story: Korea has some of the biggest mega-churches on the planet. India has, like, one to three people huddled up under a palm tree. So you've got the huge extremes of church, and both of them are very popular. Both of them are very effective within their regions, as much as, you know, government and things will allow. But at the end of the day, they say that one is more godly than the other. I don't know, short of, like, God, that we have the authority to kind of lean into that. So that's what's surprising for me. I say "surprising" in a good way, you know? A denomination like the Wesleyans, three years ago, starting this conversation of, "Hey, we need to adjust our ecclesiology to allow for other methods." Like, honestly, when I first heard this conversation, I thought it was in response to COVID because COVID is changing so much of the models. We gotta loosen this up. But you were tracking this way in 2017. That tells me how forward-thinking you guys were as a denomination. And so, like, that's incredible. Um, so well done, well done, Wesleyans. Like, I'm giving a virtual clap because I don't want to clap louder in my mic. But, you know, thumbs up for that. There's a lot of ways to go, but make them cry. At least you're on the journey and you're taking the right steps.

Hey, there was one other thing that I noticed here in your document, the "What is Church?" And we'll make it available in the show notes. But you said something in the document. You know, for the discipleship, mission, community, you were actually kind of paralleling it to the "called out ones," where "called" would be discipleship, "out" was mission, and then "ones" was community. Which to me put discipleship first. And on the document, you had discipleship like that was your number one, and then mission was number two, and then community was number three, which is actually backwards from probably the average church. Because the average church is probably putting community number one. If they can get community, people on mission, that's a win. And if you can really get them down to that discipleship, disciple-making, well, it's a very small percentage of people, a very few percentage of people that actually get to that point. I was just curious, like, was there intentionality in that order? Was it just, "Oh, that's just how it came out?" Because the "called out ones," were you leaning into the scripture to kind of get there? Like, what, when it came to that order, was that intentional focus?

Yeah, I'd say it was intentional. It just, I think there was a moment where we just saw it, and it's like, "Oh, that actually makes a lot of sense." You know, so it was intentional, but maybe not as strategic as we thought it was. It was just an observation that we noticed. And you think about it, you know? Like, isn't disciple-making the place to begin? I mean, that's what Jesus called his disciples to do. And I love the fact that he told his disciples, like, when he first called them, think about this. When Jesus walked up to Peter and Andrew on the boat, right? They're out there fishing, and he gives them that line, "Hey, come follow me."

Me and I'm gonna make you into fishers of all people, right? And so there's that line Jesus told him: the end result from the beginning. And sometimes I think we need to do that with our peoples. Just like, hey, the end result here is actually you're going to be a fisher of people.

And yes, the inner spiritual work is going to be important. Holiness is going to be important. But the end result is still going to be, you know, actually reaching new people. So I think that that ends up being the conversation starter, the conversation we wanted to have. And it's really helped us, even just in the document that we use to kind of frame this—what's a church—that ends up giving people some good categories to think through and to prioritize, you know, what's most important? What did Jesus think was most important, you know, when he was teaching his disciples? And so that's where we wanted to begin.

Awesome. Well, hey, thank you, thank you for the time here. This has been a great podcast. And just as we're landing the plane, wrapping up here, any closing thoughts on your side, Ed?

Well, I'm super encouraged, even by the path that you're kind of blazing for the church world. I'm super encouraged by the digital spaces and what God is going to do in and through this. I think, you know, there's been a lot of challenges through the COVID season that we're in, but I see God doing some new things and he's mobilizing his church in a new way that I think is just preparing it and deepening it, maturing it, so that the future of the church is going to be even stronger. And it's going to be my hope that we see more—like the assumption is that churches will multiply. Like, this is what they do. They continue and just reach more and more people and send them out on their journey, helping them reach people who need to hear the good news of Jesus. And so I love what you're up to. Keep at it. And super excited, just to even learn more from you. So thanks for allowing me to be on your podcast today.

Oh yeah, awesome. Loved every second of it. I mean, it's funny. I've been talking about ecclesiology and reshaping this, and it wasn't until, you know, the guys over at Exponential were like, hey, you know, the Wesleyans already did this, right? No, no, I did not know that. That's a great conversation to have. So thanks for this, and thanks for jumping on the podcast. For Ed, this is Jeff of the Church Digital and Stadia Church Planting. Thanks for joining us today, and we'll catch you next time here on the pod. You have a good day.