EP127: Dave Ferguson & The Ecclesiology of a Phygital, Digital-Only and/or Multimodal Church

Are you ever have one of those conversations where you realize, "Hey, you know what? I'm just gonna sit back and listen and learn because I actually don't have anything to contribute here?" That is this podcast you're listening to right here.

Hey, it's Jeff with you once again with the Church Digital Podcast powered by Stadia Church Planting, of course. And this conversation is one of those where you're just going to sit back and listen. You're going to get out a piece of paper. You're going to write down some notes. You're going to check out the show notes. You're going to buy some books because the knowledge that's dropped on this podcast, the different way of thinking, is phenomenal.

We're bringing in Dave Ferguson onto the podcast here. Dave is a lead pastor up at Community Christian Church in Chicago. Awesome man, author, well-published, involved with the Exponential Network, leader of the New Thing Network. Like, he is so busy. He is doing so much in the kingdom for the kingdom. And honestly, the thing that I respect about him the most is that he is constantly innovating. He is constantly trying new things. He's got to make a gigantic shift. You sit back and relax? No, don't do that. Let's work on microchurch. Let's work on planting multiple models of church out of this existing church, Community Christian. It's a beautiful thing that he's doing out of his church.

And so we wanted to talk about it. We wanted to talk about the biblical ecclesiology. How do you do multimodal church? How do you have one church that has different modes, different models coming out of it? What does that even look like? This is what we start to scratch the surface with Dave here.

And to make the knowledge more complete, by the way, we're bringing in Craig Whitney. Craig Whitney is with Stadia Church Planting, VP of Planner Development. He planted his first church when he was, I think he said, twenty-six years old at one point. He told me, and he has been involved in church planting since then. And by the way, he's not anywhere near twenty-six anymore. I'm not going to date the guy, but he's on the old side. And so there's lots of wisdom and experience in this podcast.

So when I tell you I'm just sitting back here to learn, honestly, that is the God's honest truth. And it's an incredible conversation here. Once again, we've got Dave Ferguson, lead pastor Community Christian Church, Exponential, New Thing Network, authors all over the place. We've got Craig Whitney from Stadia Church Planting. Myself, Jeff, with the Church Digital and Stadia Church Planting, in a conversation that I'm simply calling "The Biblical Ecclesiological Functions of a Multimodal Church."

Okay, everybody, here you go.

So Dave, it's been a year. Like, what are you—what's the lesson? I joke, any context it would be crazy of me not to ask this. What have you learned in this COVID season? Personal, church, whatever the context. I'm just curious what's like the big lesson in Dave Ferguson's life in this COVID season?

Two things come to mind, and I learned it from different people. We had Wayne Cordeiro come and join us at a staff meeting. I think you guys both know Wayne, and probably a lot of your listeners too. Brilliant, brilliant leader. He wrote the book "Leading on Empty." And one of the things he said about crisis—he says during a crisis you always want to focus on the five percent. And then he said, "And the five percent is doing only what you can do." And he said, "Make sure you do those things." And he went on. He said, "Even during a crisis you could be a great husband. Even during a crisis you can be a good dad. You're the only one that can do that." And then he kind of brought in a little too. He said, "And all right, maybe narrowly said, and during a crisis you're the only one that can take care of your body. And you're willing when they're in a crisis that can take care of your spirit and your soul." And so I mean, it was just because in that time when everything feels like it's out of control, to have a guy like that who's, you know, he's gone through some stuff, to say, "Hey, here's how you manage Christ." That was super helpful. That was super helpful to me.

And the other thing I'd say real quick was, um, I think you guys know Steve Stroope. Steve's a brilliant, brilliant leader. So early on, I think it was probably the first week, like early in March of 2020, I'm talking to Steve on the phone and he kind of coaches me on some stuff. And he used this phrase, and we just adopted it as a slogan for our church, really for a whole year. And it's this: "He says we're fierce. He's a crisis. Faith sees opportunity where fear sees crisis. Faith sees opportunity." And just that mindset shift for me, it kind of shifted things right. And I just began to pray. I mean, literally every day, "Okay, God, give me wisdom not to miss the opportunities during this year." And um, I think God was faithful to that prayer. And I think we're going to have a chance to talk about some of those things. But uh, those are the two things for me that I really kind of took away, going, "Okay, how do you lead during this crisis?" It came from those two guys.

Yeah, "Faith sees opportunity where fear sees crisis." We will definitely be getting into that here in just a minute.

Craig, you know, once again, would love to hear your intake. What's the big lesson? What's big takeaway for you for COVID?

Well, I would say that "faith seeing crisis, facing opportunity" was one of the big lessons, both for me personally and in working with church planters. I think there's a surprise for me, and I'm not trying to throw people under the bus, but I can kind of think of church planters as these, you know, faith opportunists, kind of category of people. And maybe more so. But it was interesting for me to observe that even amongst that very, you know, forward-looking, risk-taking group, like the faith and opportunism was not universal. And so there were people who were feeling fearful and were seeing crisis. And just, how do we help navigate people through that?

I think for me, one of the lessons was, I would just say this: innovation is not as easy or frequent as we sometimes think it is. The pandemic and like the things that forced us into really required innovation, required us to think about how do we do something in a way that we've never done it before. And finding those answers wasn't easy. And what I realized is that we're maybe just in church world, maybe people's general, we're far better at iterating than we are innovating. We take a good idea and we think, "Well, I could make it a little bit better. I could personalize it, you know, to my world or my people, my church." But to really come up with a new idea that's never been done before, it just doesn't happen very often. Yet I think sometimes we talk like, "Oh, we're innovating all the time," and we're not really there. There's a cultural application to that too. It's like if you come up with a new idea, but culture's got to buy into it. It's got to be accepted. It's got to be, um, you know, brought in so that they can own that principle. And that's also kind of pulls the thread a little bit on what I think we're gonna talk about here.

So, um, long story short, this whole podcast came about. We were on a Twitter thread somehow. Dave Ferguson and I got tagged into this conversation with some people at a Transformation Church, I think up in North Carolina area. And they were talking about microchurch and how it's similar to digital-only church planting. And both of these, by the way, present the premises of their church, of church, not very accepted. I think pre-COVID. Now mid-post-COVID, wherever we are on this, I maybe it's a little more accepted. But both of these are still kind of, okay, microchurch, maybe a little bit like the house church of the seventies, and there's still a negative on that. Um, when it comes towards digital, uh, only churches, yeah, that's not on many or anybody's radar really in this. But there's some similarities in context of how they work together.

I would love to maybe dialogue here and start to explore, okay, so we got these micro locations. Like, what is microchurch? What is a microchurch? You know, Dave, through Exponential, we're doing a lot of these, and you're great at Exponential of exploring these fringes and helping us figure out how to get more in those spaces. So at Exponential, what does microchurch look like? What does a microchurch expression look like?

Well, I'll tweak that question a little bit if you'll allow me, because really, I mean, at Exponential we just kind of affirm every kind of church. And so probably my own laboratory for church planting ends up being either New Thing or Community Christian. In this case, it's Community Christian Church. So I'll speak from that context.

I mean, for us at Community Christian, I mean, we see a digital—I mean, we see a microchurch as just a smaller but a full expression of church, often led by volunteers, where you live, work, or play. So that's probably a simple definition we give it: smaller but full expression of church, often led by volunteers, where you live, work, or play.

From a practical standpoint, I'm just curious from either one of you guys, what does that look like? Where I live, work, and play? Um, I'm a hiker, so I'm going to be church out on a mountain. I run marathons, so I'm doing church on the road. Like, what's the practicality of this? I mean, could you jump in real quick, and then Craig, you can probably give some examples too from some of the things that happened in Stadia?

Um, one of the innovations for us, I think, and I think it'd be fun for us to talk about that word "innovation" again too, um, that came out of this last year for us at Community Christian, the church I had to leave in Chicago, is we started giving—we started training and releasing these micro sites for microchurches. And so our first cohort, we now have five that we're getting ready about, literally we're commissioning next, or this coming Sunday. And uh, three are in Spanish, two are in English. Um, four in Chicago and one's in Mexico City. Um, most of them are actually going to be where people live, in their homes. One of them, I know, is already going to be in a restaurant. But they're just finding their own places where their friends, neighbors, coworkers can gather. And they're using, and maybe this is part of our conversation too, a lot of the digital technology, our digital content that we're able to create from a larger church, but we've completely empowered them to use it however they can to reach kind of their own, uh, their own kind of, uh, circle of influence.

Dave, would you say in that description of "live, work, and play," is that about where a microchurch meets, or is that really more about who the focus, like the missional focus of the group is?

It's probably more the missional focus of where the group is.

Yeah, I yeah, I think, um, because it may be, hey, most of the people that are coming to this group are families from my kid's little league team, or it might be most the people are actually people that I work out with. Um, it could be those kinds of things. So they may not necessarily meet there, but that's where the affinity is.

Yes, that's good distinction, right? I was just, I was curious. We've been working closely with, you know, a good friend and partner, Rob Wagner. So kind of all of us share kind of that common relationship. And you know, some of their stories, and that's just been an observation on my part is as they've talked about various microchurches that have emerged in KC, the initial most common focus was a neighborhood focus. But as they began to multiply, someone become a part of a neighborhood group, then realize, "Hey..."

My affinity group is at my workplace and so that became that person's missional focus. Or my affinity group is that, you know, soccer team or whatever that thing is that I do. And so I think in this—and this is where this conversation is going to go—in some ways some of those groups may have resorted then to digital meeting spaces because of pandemic or even sometimes just convenience. But the digital meeting space didn't necessarily drive the missional focus.

I was going to say because, like, for example, one of our new 3C communities really got birthed out of what was a watch party at a restaurant. So like over the last year they were consistently having the watch parties on Sundays at this restaurant and they were—I mean, lots of people were showing up and they're sharing food. And they're like, this totally works. And there and then so when we offer this opportunity to be trained, they're like, yeah, let's do this and let's keep going.

Exactly right, through the through the networks and the options that you have. Community Christian, New Thing, have you guys explored much of this digital-only, you know, expression of church? Has that been a thing for you? Has it been more on the physical side? Forgive me, I probably should have known that in advance, but I haven't kept up. What are you guys doing and exploring in the digital-only space?

One of the things that's happened for us—again, I'll speak at Community Christian Church—is coming out on the other end of this last year and kind of that idea of like, hey, we're fierce. He's a crisis. Faith sees opportunity. We would say that we went from being one church with multiple locations. So now we'd say one church with multiple expressions. And it's specifically four different expressions. And so there are physical locations that we have in the city and suburbs of Chicago. That's one. The second that we would say would be Community Online. And, um, Jeff, this won't be any surprise to you, but I mean, like, the number of people that we've reached to this last year, it's just been—I mean, a ridiculous number. And I mean, you know, all fifty states, one hundred fifty-three countries, all that kind of stuff. Like, everybody. We're also figuring out, okay, how do you actually then turn that into real engagement? And we're having—in fact, I just came from a Barna cohort right before I jumped on here—the hybrid, the time of hybrid church stuff. So that's the second expression. And we do think—and it would be fun to talk about this—we do think, no, that could be a full expression of church online. Then thirdly is what we call Community Freedom. We currently have three locations in prisons across Chicago. And then the fourth one is what these micro expressions called 3C Communities. And so those are our four different expressions: at locations in person, you call it physical; online, be called digital; and then we have Community Freedom in prisons and then also our micro sites.

So really, it's quite a bit different than where we were fourteen months ago.

Yeah, I think for me—and that's that's beautiful. I love that. I would love to even unpack what it is for you guys as you're trying to get engagement across fifty states, one hundred fifty-some countries. Like, there's—and I would—and I would love and I would love to get your coaching.

Well, we'll have that conversation off here. We'll lock it in. Oh, I don't know. I might pick your brain before we're done.

When we talk digital-only, it's it's an opportunity. And I'm not here to convince you necessarily, but to even start to draw this parallel: the way that Rob Wagner would look at Kansas City or to look at different areas, communities around, and say, this is a community that's worthy of the church. We at Stadio, we've got digital planters. I've got a digital planter that that just launched the church on Twitch. It's a church not for video gamers but of video gamers. And he's doing services and he's doing discipleship using platforms like Twitch and Discord. And we've got mutual friends and there's all sorts of people that are doing Discord church, that that are doing Twitch, that are doing Facebook, that are doing social media, virtual reality. Like, there's the conversation go on and on. We talk about them all the time. But what's what's interesting in some of these contexts is it's the same passion that a microchurch planter would look at at a community, add a neighborhood, add a, you know, a church on the block type of approach. We see that same thing in in digital space, even to the point of, hey, it's my job in this church, in this micro church, to have a conversation with someone, to share faith—highly evangelical—but then to get them on mission, to release them to share with others. That multiplication piece. Really, when we look in the digital context, we're seeing that same type of approach where it comes down to that disciple-making, down to that multiplication.

As you know, and you alluded to it a little bit here, where the church, your broadcast of your services through, you know, what you're calling Community Online, you're reaching one hundred fifty-three nations. There's a whole bunch of people in there who are their names—like, I mean, I'm I'm asking facetiously, you know? You don't—you don't know. It's so easy to have people kind of get lost in isolation. And that's one of the reasons why you're feeling that pain point of, hey, I've got to engage with these people. I got a dialogue. I got to meet them. I got to take that first step to the disciple with it, you know?

Arguably, with the micro, that's far more relational towards that. And you're not using technology to broadcast your message to millions or hundreds of thousands. You're using it to to kind of fine-tune into a conversation with dozens or even individuals and having that one-on-one conversation where it gets more towards that disciple-making and multiplication-friendly. So the similarities between these are are huge. It's how do you—and just some some struggles kind of kind of come up.

Well, let me ask: as you've done through Community Christian, what with the multi—with the micro site, with the micro church locations, what are some of the challenges? And like, what what do you bang your head on? What's what's the pain points that that you kind of struggle with at that micro spot?

Well, I mean, let's let's let's let's keep it real here too, because I mean, like I said, we're getting ready to launch our first cohort. So it's not like I'm an expert, but I can—I have some thoughts anyway.

All right. Um, I anticipate—because one of the things we like through New Thing and through Exponential, I've been able to see things and community. I've seen things scale. So like, at this point, New Thing, we have three hundred eighty-eight small networks around the world in forty countries, close to six thousand churches that are a part of those networks. So I've seen that kind of go from like one church we planted in Denver to go, oh my goodness. I think one of the things that we're really trying to watch is, okay, how do we make this scalable? Because we we actually had the conversation with our lead team meeting this morning going like, okay, so we have five of these. And actually, it's kind of a brass tacks thing. Okay, from a financial perspective, if this costs us anything, if it grows in time, we won't be able to afford it. So the question—so the question is, okay, how do we make this thing actually build a scalable? And I think I think the financial part of that, how do we continue to you know provide great coaching, how do we continue to provide great content now, and we didn't know this was gonna happen. We didn't know we're gonna—that that three of the five were going to be in Spanish. That's just like, I'm like, what? Because we only have one location that really is really focused on a Spanish-speaking community, physical location. So I think that's—I think that's actually a significant issue.

Um, um, I think what what Rob is doing in in KC and Underground is is great. I'm trying to figure out though how do I not have to raise money for this? And if these are really gonna—it's really gonna be scalable, I think that's that's one kind of question.

There's always the other thing. I was listening to Tim Keller um recently, and and Tim is not a huge fan of of microsites. And part of the reason he says that is because he says, well, we live in such a mobile society, and that if these micro expressions aren't connected to an institution, they—people, you know, if you have two or three families move away from one of these microsites, pretty soon you've gutted the whole thing and you've got nothing. And so you have to—he says you have to multiply faster than people kind of transition. So I think again we're kind of going, okay, how do we keep them close enough to the institution of Community Christian Church so we can help them, okay, find apprentices? How do we also make sure we embed this multiplication so they actually multiply faster than they—because we don't like to think about this. I'd like to think every one of them is going to give birth and then go on forever and going to be wildly successful. But the truth is, there's going to be some—there's going to be some some that aren't going to make it. So how do we actually do that? So I think those are some of the things that we're really kind of thinking through.

Dave, I'm curious. I want to take you back a little bit. You, um, in your definition of microchurch, you use the phrase "full expression of church." I'm curious how much—whether as leadership, just you know, people who are part of community—like, how much of a wrestling match was there over "full expression"? And there's got to be a reason that was included in the definition.

I think our—I think our understanding of, to use a more technical term, a minimal ecclesiology is pretty simple. Because if you ask me what's a minimal ecclesiology, and for anybody, if that's a new term, then it's just kind of what's what's the least you have to have to have a church? I mean, I would say if you have a community of people where Jesus is Lord and they're on mission, you have a church. I know a lot of people want to attach, you know, some of the sacraments. They want to attach, you know, eldership. They want to attach polity, church policy, those kinds of things to it. Um, when I look—when I look in the New Testament, that's kind of what I see: you know, a community of people where Jesus is Lord and they're on mission. And so when you start with that kind of a mental ecclesiology, and it it's it's not hard to go like, no, these could be a full expression, although smaller, that are laid—often led by people where you live, work, and play. So probably our understanding of minimal or minimal ecclesiology allows us to get there pretty quickly.

No, that's great. And I, I, I would—okay, Craig, I want to hear from—I want to hear from you, Craig. What's your thoughts on that as far as minimal ecclesiology?

I would agree with you. We, um, we've been wrestling with that at Stadia. And one of the challenges for us is we've been helping people plant churches globally and, you know, here in the US. And ecclesiologically, they look very different. Uh, you know, it particularly some of the work that we're doing, um, Southeast Asia, you know, a church is a leader, um, who has, you know, a certain number of disciples, and you know, they are together on mission. I mean, it fits your definition. Uh, and so we've kind of said, hey, that, you know, there's a community, um, there's Jesus as Lord. I think we've added like a third leg of, you just like, biblical, you know, foundation. I'm not sure that you, you know, Jesus is Lord, biblical foundation, you know, and you kind of is that redundant, right? Uh, but then a lot of the stuff that would, you know, again, the the, you know, how is the church governed, how is the church, you know, funded, like those are not part of that minimum ecclesiology. And so if we're going to—

Call those works that we're doing over their churches, then we really have to have that minimal ecclesiology. The stretch has been to then come back over on the U.S. side and say, "Okay, then we're going to call the same thing a church over here," where really historically, that's not—at least at a pragmatic level, we might have said from a definition level, "Well, that's still true," but then we tended to add a whole bunch of things, you know, particularly in the realm of church planting, to get to, "Okay, that is, you know, a church. It has to have certain things and look a certain way."

For us, I think a minimum ecclesiology to kind of connect some of this conversation leads to digital. So the question, you know, "Can you—can digital only be a church?" Well, with that kind of minimal ecclesiology, I think it's a lot easier to get to yes, right? You know, is there a community? People? Is Jesus Lord? Are they on mission together? So we take our digital-only church on Twitch. If we can answer yes to those three questions—really quick: check, check, check—it's a church. We start adding other things, and that's where we start getting into, "Oh, digital only can't be a church," and it's really because we've expanded the ecclesiology that creates the problem.

Yeah, I mean, two things come to mind. One is, I think what you hinted at there, and I want to go back to it, is really important for our listeners. At Stadia, you've had experienced interaction with global leaders from the East, just like New Thing. So I'm immediately thinking of Albert Tennyson, who's in India, who last summer, under his leadership as not just a network leader but a movement leader, helped plant a hundred churches, okay? And so we bring him in and we sit and we listen to him go, "Okay, tell us how you did it," and this is a core part of it. Or I'm thinking about a woman from Uganda named B3, same thing. I mean, who's rapidly reproducing these expressions of church. And as you begin to understand how they're doing that, I think it does—we need a little more humility here in the West to go like, "Hey, this—we're not the center of Christianity anymore. It's either in Africa or some places over there, and we need to learn from them." And I think as we learn from them, then I think we do begin to shift our minimal ecclesiology.

Because the second thing I'll throw at you too is, I think one of the things for us at Community Christian, even as a church in the West that was a launch that originally was a launch-large strategy—the way we've always talked about the church is in terms of relationships. And we always talked about it in terms of three relationships: your relationship with God, relations with the church, relationship with the world. And we call it celebrate, connect, and contribute—the three C's. That's why we call them three-seat communities. Well, if you look at that minimal ecclesiology—a community of people where Jesus is Lord, that's on mission—what it does, it articulates all three of those relationships. Your relationship with God: Jesus is Lord. Your relationship with the church: okay, a community. And a relationship with the world: it's on mission. And I think those are the three primary relationships that grow a disciple and also grow the church and actually define a church.

But I think what you said earlier too, about learning from some of our friends in other parts of the world, is crucial, crucial. And partly that's why we're doing this like five at a time, you know? We're doing this kind of slow. To start with, I mean, every part of me like is "go big," you know? But I hopefully have enough sense at this point to go like, "Okay, I don't know what I'm doing yet, but we're gonna do this." And I have had enough experience scaling things that once we get it right—or at least it's not even right—once we get it closer to right, then we can scale it.

I think, Jeff, as you continue to have this conversation with people, that more and more that conversation's got to come back to minimum ecclesiology. We just—particularly here in the West, you know, the things that we think of as church, particularly culturally, but even I think within churches—it'd be interesting, you know, maybe you've taught well enough, David. I know you're a great teacher, so that's like, you know, the people at Community are really buying that. But my guess is you could go talk to, you know, some people that's in the lobby on a Sunday morning, say, "Hey, tell me what church is," and you'd probably hear a whole bunch of things that aren't a part of those three critical things. And so changing that mindset to realize or to help people recognize those are the three things that make a church a church is some work that we've got to do, because we've created churches that we're so much more, and so people have then naturally assumed that all of these things that we do must be essential, rather than seeing them as just optional or they serve a purpose. But there's a difference between serving a purpose and being essential.

What's your thoughts on that, Jeff, as far as a minimal ecclesiology related to a digital church?

Yeah, I mean, three of the pillars that we look at—and it's been taken from lots of different places, but I know Intentional Churches has used it—is that large gathering, is the groups, and its own mission. It was funny, just this morning I was having breakfast with some guys from out of town, and they were, you know, more of the Rick Warren baseball diamond, you know, as that's like their ecclesiology. And it's like, "Well, serving looks different in digital," which is one of the reasons why we don't necessarily emphasize that, because it's, "Well, you're not serving, so your limits what you can do." And even at a micro location it looks different. And so if to say that serving's not important, but maybe it's not emphasized as much.

You know, the Acts two, hey, they did—they did communion. You know, I've done some crazy things in my life as a digital pastor. I stood on stage once and said, "Hey, you know, broadcasting," and said, "Hey, you don't have grape juice and a cracker? Go get a Coke and Snickers, bring this together and do it." And the church, you know, probably wasn't very happy at the moment that I said, "Get a Coke and Snickers," and they criticized me for, you know, being defaming to the Bible, and that I'll have a conversation with God one day and apologize if I need to. But at the end of the day, it's—it looks different in digital space. And so taking that freedom, recognizing the biblical mandates and the challenges of what we're doing, hey, hold to that standard. Just let's figure out how to do it differently in digital, because not everybody's gonna have grape juice and a cracker. So we've gotta figure that out, because we're not gonna stop a movement of God because of not having a cracker, just in my opinion anyway.

I mean, like, for example, at Community Online, we still do communion every week on Community Online. And I mean, there are some of the fifty weeks when we weren't meeting—the truth be known—I, when we would get to that part of the service, I was actually participating at my home with my wife, you know? What she might grab a piece of a scone and a hot tea, and that, and that, you know what? And you know, I think Jesus was glorified in that. I think he was grateful that we had that celebration, that moment.

Yeah, there's all sorts of interesting stories. Well, I was at a church once. We're doing micro locations through the church online service. So we had guys—we're in Miami, Florida. We had guys up in New York City that were creating a micro church network. And they actually recorded a baptism that was done in a New York City apartment, like a run-down, tiny New York City apartment where, like, they're in a bathtub, and the bathtub is like a sink. Um, and so they recorded it. And when they took the guy down, they didn't take him away from the nozzle. They took him towards the nozzle, and it was like this far away from banging his head. And so, like, there's all sorts of drama centered around this. The water splashes out. Like, it's just beautiful, but it's this really telling video of these guys who were on mission, activated in New York City, out there, and we're changing lives. We're evangelizing and discipling people in unique ways. And it was funny—like, I took that video and I texted it to every person on staff. And fifty of the people on staff at the church that I was at said, "This is the coolest thing that I've ever seen. We need to do more of this." The other half of the people: "We should never do this. You can't do this. Is that person authorized to baptize? Are they—have they been approved? Are you sure that person accepted Christ?" And it was beautiful, the bifurcation of a different movement where half the people were like, "Do it again," and half the people were like, "This is biblically wrong. You should stop now."

So there's that tension of, "Hey, like," and that's one of the things, Dave, honestly, when I'm looking at some of the stuff that you're doing, your church has figured out—and we at Stadia, we use this term "multimodal," because there's four different—there's multiple different types of churches, different types of churches reach different types of people. You list it off: you're doing physical, you're doing church online through Community Online, kind of the broadcast, small-group type of model, you're doing prison ministry now, you're developing this E3, which gets into that micro level. I love that there's not a lot of churches that are able to separate the, "Hey, you know what? It's okay for somebody to get baptized in a bathtub. We want that. We want to encourage people to baptize other people. It's not the sacred where the professional Christian has to be the one to do it. We want to activate people, empower people with this ability to lead people to Christ and to baptize." It's beautiful, but it's rare.

What's some of the mindset with your organization, with Community Christian? How did you get to that place? Like, what were some of the pain points? Tell me the story of how you went from the church that you were, maybe one mode, to really starting to appreciate this idea of a multimodal approach?

I mean, again, there's plenty of things to list where we screwed it up, okay? So we'll talk about a few other things since it's a podcast to help you before we got it right. Um, I think, again, by God's grace, um, we've always had a history, I think from day one, where most the people who became Christ followers, and we're very evangelist and very outreach oriented—our mission is to help people find their way back to God. Um, when they would say yes, the people that would baptize them were the people in their small group. I mean, so and that was—and we even talked about that's kind of like that's the payday. And so I mean, we—the person who gets baptized, the person does the baptizing, we always give them a T-shirt, and they get to be there, and they're the ones doing the baptizing, not the staff.

So and even, and I think this was kind of by God's grace too, it—the last Sunday before we met, whatever that was, uh, March whatever that was, seventh, fifth, whatever that date was, back in 2020, before we end up closing up for our physical building, that expression for fifty weeks was actually our commissioning Sunday. And we do this every year where we oftentimes will teach our best practices, and I'll give a little plug that's the book that I just wrote that kind of explains these five missional practices that we teach our people. Um, but we taught on that, and then we said, "If you have a..."

Person or a place. If there's a people group or a place that you feel called to, we want you to know that we are behind you and we want this to be your commissioning or your, or really your, we can get away with this because we're non-denominational, your ordination. So you come forward and we want to, and we'll actually anoint people. We anoint you and we want to pray over you and we're going to send you back out into the community, back to that, that, that people group, okay, or that particular place. Maybe it's a neighborhood or wherever it is that you feel called to reach. And I mean, it is an awesome Sunday because people come forward and our staff we anoint them and then we pray for them and we send them out. We had no idea that that would be the, you know, the sun, the last Sunday we'd actually meet in person for the next fifty weeks.

And so one of the hurdles we don't have to overcome as much a community is there's already a mindset that every person is on, should be on mission. And here are the missional practices that we use. And that when you get to see someone find their way back to God, you're the one that gets to baptize them because you're the one who led them on that journey. And then you get to apprentice them into leadership. Um, so some of those obstacles that you might find in other churches we don't have. And I think that has, that has made it easier for us moving towards these four expressions.

Does simplifying the ecclesiology like lend towards more acceptability? It's not what we're defining church isn't this forty-seven step thing. It's really this three core components. And we can do things to it. Like I would imagine that would be easier for lay people to get behind, to understand, and even get towards replicating and multiplying. Like, is that what you've seen out of Community Christian?

Yeah, I think you're on to it, Jeff. And I think one of the things that happened too, so our key metric at Community is discipleship now. But and a lot of people say that and that's good, but the way we actually measure is what we call those three C's of celebrate, connect, and contribute. How many people, you know, are celebrating the relationship with God? How many people are connecting, doing life and communicating? How many are contributing either inside our physical spaces or in their neighborhoods? And so whatever that number is is by far the, that's way more important than attendance. That's way more important than offering. That's more important than anything because we feel like if we get that one right, everything else will follow.

And I think, and I think maybe talking to you all's made me realize this. I think because that's how we define discipleship, these three C's, these three relationships, that it only, it's a very logical conclusion that when you bring a group of disciples together, that why would you, why would you define it any differently? That's what a church is. A group of disciples doing what disciples do. You know, Jesus is Lord. We're doing community together and we're on mission.

Yeah, my observation was similar, but it may be just a different angle. And I'm a, you know, a distant observer of Community, right? I've never, I've been there, but I've never been a part, never lived in Chicago. But have had the privilege of kind of following the story with occasional inside glimpses. And I think one of the things that I would say as an observation is the clarity of mission is exceptional. You know, I'm not a part of Community. I know your mission is to help people find their way back to God. You know how many people can name the mission of their church? Okay, I'm in the business, but but still, like, that's just, you've made that crystal clear.

But I think the other thing you've done is that's Community's get it, communicated in a way that that's not somehow Community's mission. That's our collective mission. That's my mission and your mission and our mission. And we're all on it together. And with the Greg, I wanna, I wanna hug you right now. Yes, yes. But with the clarity of those two things, then to come and say, hey, we're gonna do digital, we're going to do micro, we're going to go into, like, where if I get those two things, what would my points of resistance be? I mean, at worst it's, okay, that's not for me. I like it, right? But where would I find the foundation for we as a church or those people should not be doing that? It doesn't, because of the clarity of those two things.

And I think probably for many churches that have kind of in this season kind of been pushed into some different forms, pushed into digital, oppression, pushed into micro expressions by external circumstances, in the absence of that as a core, then you get all kinds of chaos as you begin to move in that direction. And it's easy to place the blame on micro doesn't work or digital doesn't work, right? Right. And so but at the end of the day, that's not where the root of the problem is. The root of the problem is back at the core of mission and strategy. And so if you're a gathered church and that's what you do and you want to go micro, you want to go digital, you're gonna have to spend some time resetting people to mission and strategy that encompasses those things. It's just never going to work, which at which trying to do that in the middle of a pandemic is a really hard thing to do. It's a hard thing to do anyway.

But here, let me let me throw this out too, Craig and Jeff, maybe just kind of a leadership tip to some of maybe some of the leaders are going like, oh my gosh, now I feel frustrated. I don't, I'm not, I'll never be able to do it well. Here's here's one of the things that maybe you remember this name, Craig. Remember Lyle Shaller? Yeah, okay. So Lyle Shaller, he was a guy who wrote, uh, wrote our author by one hundred books on church life in America. He used to tell me this. He would say, count the yes votes. Count the yes votes. Or, or Bob Buford. Bob was a mentor of mine. Bob would always say this too. He'd say, work with the willing and with what wants to happen.

So now, because your listeners might get the impression like, wow, everybody at Community is for this, this is how does that happen? Well, I'm sure everybody at Community isn't for it. But guess what? I didn't ask them, all right? And so what you do is find, count the yes votes. Who wants to go start a microchurch? All right, we're going to invest because we do. We'll do ten weeks of training. We do ten weeks of training and we'll give you, then we'll give you great coaching and then we're going to also give you all our creative content and we're going to, we're going to do this thing together. And so you count the yes votes or work with the willing.

And I do believe, and I think that's why we're having this conversation, Jeff, because I think the digital and I think the micro is something that is especially now more than ever wanting to happen. So, um, for any of your frustrated leaders out there, you don't have to get everybody on board. In fact, I mean, you remember the innovation curve? I mean, look for that top, that that two or three percent of the, you know, the innovators, and find those people in your church and just work with them to get this thing started and get some momentum. And then then we'll scale it kind of like what we're trying to do now.

You probably remember my church playing mentor Dean Pence. Um, I'm sure somewhere along the line you met Dean and his phrase was go with the goers. Same thing, yes. So yeah, it's all these different expressions that communicate the same thing. And I think back to where you started, you know, Steve Stoops' wisdom. Now, you know, another great leader that you know, in fear sees crisis. Faith sees opportunity. And if you're spending your time focused on the people who are in fear, you're going to be in perpetual crisis. And so you really have to make this decision, uh, to operate in faith and to, you know, go with the goers, work with the willing.

There is probably a place for pastoring and caring for, you know, people who are in fear. We don't probably, we'll get in trouble if we talk about, you know, completely ignoring them. But I don't think you want those people to drive the agenda, right? Right. And a lot of them have prophetic gifts where, I mean, you know, pay attention to them because they're gonna, because they'll ask the tough questions like, well, how are you gonna pay for this? You know, I heard a phrase this way. We kind of like everybody to go wow, but there's too many people that go how. And I, I think you can, you can listen to the how question. You listen to the how question and then go, okay, that's good. I need to think about that because I mean, I lo, I mean, I get an adrenaline rush every time we get a new idea. I love it, okay? And I think, you know, a younger version of me would have just, I would have said, okay, we need to start a hundred of these right now. But I think the first two seasons we start five and then five and then ten and then ten. We'll get to a hundred within two or three years and it'll be freaking awesome. But I think asking some of these questions is, you know, so I think those people can also play an important part. But but I would agree, uh, you know, the turning the ship, regardless of the size of the ship, is never easy.

Um, and you're recognizing that as a leader. And, uh, you know, metaphorically, it's a lot easier to take a few adventurous people and put them in, you know, a little boat to go on an excursion, uh, and you know, and support and encourage that, uh, without having to try and turn the whole ship. But then recognizing, you know, some of those, some of those are going to fail. Some of those experiments, some of those risks, they aren't going to work. That's okay. Uh, but the ones that do, those people come back. They get back on the ship and man, they, they are so excited about what they've seen and what they've experienced that, you know, when the excursion wants to go out on the next side, right? There's twice as many people in line to go on that excursion, right? And then they come back and celebrate. And pretty soon the whole ship is going that way.

And I think sometimes we want to turn the ship before anybody wants to go to that new destination. And and then we wonder why kind of the whole thing doesn't work. And you're describing a strategy that just from a leadership perspective makes much more sense. You've got some willing people, support them, encourage them. I think the other thing too we ought to do is is also think of it not just about your church but about the kingdom. Like, so I've been doing this long enough. I remember when we first went multi-site like twenty years ago. And one of the first gatherings that Leadership Network ever had of multi-site leaders was at our in Chicago. And so, you know, we're there, Life Church is there. I mean, you know, so I mean, I kind of feel like, yeah, we were one of the first ones in. We didn't do it nearly as well as Life Church. And guess what? That's okay. And even this microchurch thing, you know what? If we're one of the first large churches in the U.S. to give it a shot and then everybody else kind of goes like, oh, well, Ferguson tried it. Let's try it but make it better. That's awesome. That's freaking awesome, right? So I think you have to have a little bit of that mindset too, going like, hey, we're all in this together. And if if we it up the first time, then you make it better. That's awesome. That's great.

I would go back and I would say that my earlier comment on innovation, I think uh, that's a difficult mindset because the one of the characteristics of true innovators at the end of the day is a willingness to fail. Uh, that they are okay with failure. Doesn't mean I won't, I don't paint the picture like that. Innovators like failure or get excited about failure. But there's something about an innovator's mindset that recognizes that creating something new is is going to become at the end of multiple failed experiments. And they're willing to endure the failures to get to the end. And there's far more people who are innovative or who are iterators who watch what the innovator does and say, oh, I could.

Do that too so it's what you just described. I mean, you have an innovator's mind, heart. That's the way you, you know, you are the way you've led community. That's a great benefit to the kingdom. Um, and so it just, it, we need those people, and in this season we need even more of those people, whether on small scale or large scale, to just go try things. A whole bunch of them aren't going to work. It's okay, you know. I mean, one of the things that has helped me on this, I think about innovation. Um, this is an old book, but it's a classic by Peter Drucker, and it's just basic, and it's on innovation. And I have read through it again because this season, because who's not thinking about it? And he defines innovation a little different way. He says innovation is the reallocation of resources from those things that are unproductive to those things that are productive. And all of a sudden you're going, hold it. So innovation is just moving my energy and money from things that aren't working to things that you think might work. And also, when you do that, all of a sudden you go like, hold it, I might be able to innovate. And he just, he just, I mean, he wrote again a kind of a simplification of, oh, okay, so that's what it looks like.

And so I mean, we had a conversation with our lead team this, I mean, because these 3C communities written at launch, and we got a way now, I think financially to make it scale, but it needs a little bit of cash to get it off the ground. So the guy came with a proposal, and so we're going, okay, we're going to take this money from here, and now we're going to put it into our 3C communities. And then you get on a podcast and they call it innovation. Are you comfortable? I'm just curious, because we talk about pioneer, persevere, parish. You know, it's the same. If you're going to pioneer in some area, you've got to kill something off. And so I can tell you there's a number of churches that want to do this, this micro, this, this E3 thing that's similar to what you're doing. Excuse me, 3C thing that you're doing. Um, what'd you kill? Can you say? Are you comfortable saying that? What did you stop doing?

No, that's a great, that's a great question, Jeff. And if my lead team was here, they'd go like, yeah, yeah, what did you stop doing, Dave? Um, and I think, I think there haven't been enough of those. But what you're saying is right, okay? So I mean, I think that's, uh, that's, that's, that's not a strength. I kind of do like to hang on to some things, you know, because, oh, we thought. But I think you were absolutely right. So people are listening in, yeah, if you're gonna start doing these things, I think it is, especially if you're talking about reallocating resources, that means you're stopping doing some of these things. So you're still in the experimental phase?

I didn't mean to put you on the spot.

No, no, no, no, I think you make a really good point for the leaders listening that if you're gonna do this, it also means stopping some things. And I, I would just admit, I don't think I've done a great job of that yet. We're gonna, but that's, it's coming.

Yeah, we've, that would be another lesson I would say we learned in this season is, uh, and this is I think Cotter, you know, that changes loss, and thus change results in grief. And one of the things we realize in the season is that there were things church planters were losing, not by failure, not by, you know, poor planning, poor vision, they were losing them because the entire, you know, circumstances, the world had turned upside down. And, um, the to a certain extent, the better we could help them grieve what was lost, the better they were going to be at moving, you know, at adopting new and different and moving forward. The worst thing to do was to get stuck in the grief of what was lost, uh, because then you're not going anywhere. And, and that, and you know, anybody that's experienced grief in their life, nobody wants to live in grief. That's a terrible place to be. Uh, and so that, that's hard to just embrace that grief of the thing that's being lost, but that's part of what it takes to move forward.

Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right. Hey, yeah, this has been uh a solid conversation. I don't know, there's like nine books that I've written down here. We'll include all the links in the show notes. I'm gonna do some digging into Cotter a little bit there to find the exact book for the quote, but we've got it all. It's fine. And never mind all the name drops that have been happening in this podcast. It's really been an interesting run. Um, hey, so Dave, with uh community, so you're obviously very forward facing, you're very future, you're thinking multimodal, four different approaches. Uh, I have wanted to ask you the question: hey, if I wanted to plant a digital only expression of church, that would give you five. What would that process be?

We'll talk off there about that. Maybe there's, let's do it. Let's do it. The answer is yes. The answer is yes. But let me ask this. Um, so you know, there's a pastor that wants to go back to February 2020 because February 2020 was the golden age of church. Uh, we could side hug, you could hang out with people, shake hands, kiss babies, you know, that that was like next to like Jesus' second coming, that was the perfect time. Um, what advice would you give them?

Um, I think I'd probably hitchhike on what Craig said. Um, pastoral, I'd, if if social distancing was issued, I'd give him a hug, and then I'd say, you know, tomorrow is not going to be February of 2020. Tomorrow is going to be, you know, June of 2021, and here's what June of 2021 looks like. And I mean, it's interesting, brought up Lyle Schaller. He used to actually always say that because Lyle was a futurist, and his joke would always be this. Because he worked with lots of denominations, he'd say, well, if tomorrow is, you know, 1995, everything should be just fine. But it's not gonna be. We can't go back. And um, in some ways I think we were already, we're behind. And so I think it's forced all of us, especially when we're talking about digitally, to catapult forward to the current reality. And um, I mean, yeah, I think I help them work through that grieving process that Craig talked about, because they're just, they're just missing the past, and it's not coming back, not the way it was.

Awesome. Well, well said. Uh, work on the grieving and mourning portion of it. You gotta let go of models and realize maybe the end game is something different and embrace some new ideas. The idea of the innovation, um, going with the edge, you can't get everybody to buy in, but go with what you can, set that example, celebrate, tell those stories, uh, and then let the others come along. Is that a beautiful picture?

Well, gentlemen, thank you for this conversation. Uh, thank you for the time. Uh, I know uh it's ha, I'm believing it's hard to get you two together at the same time with schedules, and so I'm very appreciative of the limited time that we had. Dave Ferguson, sir, thank you for joining on. Craig, uh, once again, uh, it's it's always a pleasure.

Hey, thank you, Jeff, for what you're doing too, because I feel like in many ways you are kind of leading the charge in this conversation for the church here in North America. So keep it up.

Dave, great to see you. Appreciate your leadership.

Thanks, man. You too, Craig. See you, buddy.

For Craig, for Dave, this is Jeff at the Church Digital Stadium Church Planning. Thanks for being here. We'll see you next time on the show. Y'all have a good day.