EP128: Jared Roth & Defining the Success of a Physical, Digital and/or Multimodal Church

Butts and seats and nickels and noses. We talk a lot about that, right? That's how we measure the successfulness of our churches. Is that the right stat? How is it even antithetical? Is it wrong for us to measure the success of a church? Like, is that downgrading and degrading the act of the Holy Spirit involved with what's happening within our communities?

Hey, it's Jeff here with the Church Digital Podcast once again powered by Stadia Church Planting. This is one of those conversations again. I just want to sit back and listen and learn because we're bringing in a lot of brain power in here, and the conversation as it goes was deep and very, very impactful. We're bringing in Jared Roth into the conversation now. Jared is a co-lead pastor of Evergreen Christian Center in Hillsborough, Oregon. The guy's older, and so he's getting ready to retire at some point. Crazy, crazy bio. Like, I'm looking here: director of operations for DFW Airport, director of human resources for Bush International Airport in Houston, VP of Southeastern University in Lakeland, Florida. This man's obviously very wise, and he presents that way here in the podcast.

Now, what's fascinating and how I've connected with him is that he's actually, as he's, you know, normally lead pastors are starting to like retire at this point. He's gearing up, and he actually started a digital research company called Sprout Digital because he is enthralled with this idea of a digital-only church and is doing research towards helping, resourcing digital-only churches. He and his wife Ann are phenomenal, and literally the wisdom that's coming out of this podcast, I just had to stop several times and tell him thank you. Like, my brain's exploding just off of hearing some of the stuff that he's talking about.

And so bringing Jared on to the conversation, bringing on Craig Whitney as well once again, VP planner development here with Stadia Church Planting. Another wealth of wisdom. Craig planted a church when he was 26 years old. I wanted to say Jared planted a church when he was 23.

Like, the wisdom and the experience coming out of this podcast is incredible, and it's all centered around this one topic: How do we measure success in a multimodal church? I mean, it's one thing to try to figure out how an individual church's successful, but if we're really going to evaluate success within the big C church, well, how do we get everybody to agree on something? How do we find measurements that work multimodal? Work with multiple models of church. Work with physical established churches. Make it work with multi-site churches. Work with small churches. Work with digital churches. Work with digital churches. Work with micro churches. Work with prison church. I listen, I can keep talking churches all day long, but how do you get all those people on the same page? And what's the role of the Spirit in any of this anyway?

These are just some of the conversations. This is just some of the threads that we start to pull, and I guarantee there's going to be a couple times in this podcast you're going to say, "Oh wow, never thought of that."

So here we are, bringing into the conversation Jared Roth from Sprout Digital, Craig Whitney from Stadia Church Planting, and of course myself, Jeff, with the Church Digital and Stadia Church Planting, in a conversation that I'm simply calling—well, maybe not so simply—but measuring the ecclesiological success of a physical, digital, and/or multimodal church. That's a mouthful, but it's worth it.

Here I'll go. Well, Sprout Digital really is the outcome of what has been a whole lot of life, and I'm embarrassed to tell how many years because that dates me. But Ann and I started a church when we were 23, six months after we were married, and we were launched out of a local church that started 60 churches in 12 years. And we just thought that kind of apostolic movement was just, you know, what a good church probably would do. And of course, we discovered later that it was not unique, but it was unusual.

So church planting is very much a part of our formation, and all across our life of ministry roles and business, we've always used those platforms as opportunities to advance church planting in some form or another. At this point in our life, we're asking ourselves the question: What project could we do for the next five years that could make a significant difference? That could be completed in five years. That would be toward the leading edge of what God is doing with church planting and could go away after five years and still have left a major contribution in its wake?

And Sprout Digital is the answer to that. So we asked the question: Given our experience and our interests and our skills, what space may there be in emerging church planting that we could answer to in some small but helpful way? And as we looked at our life and our skills, we said, "You know, it seems to be that this just wonderful emerging area that God is doing in church planting is digital. And could we contribute our experience and research skills into that emerging environment and potentially make some research discoveries that people can take that data and knowledge and use in a wise way to advance and accelerate church planting, especially in digital spaces?"

It's fascinating for me right here, and I don't want to put an age on this, but you're on the back half of life, and you and your wife, like, you're talking, you're saying the word digital. I'm always surprised when I meet people in that later generation, and I really don't mean this to be ageist, but typically people of that age aren't interested in digital. Why are you? What was the impetus really to get you thinking digital?

Well, I will just out ourselves. We're 65. And so when we think about a five-year project, it's 65 to 70. And we kind of think this is the last big deal we're gonna do before we play a lot. We have lots of plans for the next 30 years after 70, so that's filled space with dreams, and we're going to totally goof off. You all have a good time. This is our hurrah.

Yeah, so a couple of things. One, we really like to think of ourselves as lifelong learners, and we are both futurists and we're both strategists and we're both maximizers on the Strengths Finder. And as a result of that, we like to live in the future. So we've kind of been pulled along. We also, by calling and by practice, we like to develop leaders. And so we hire young with the intention of sending out young. The 94-year-old church that we're currently leading sends out a pastor or a planter every year. This year we're actually, this summer, we're planting three churches. We're having triplets this summer. But we hire young. So, for example, just in the last six months, we've hired a 20-year-old worship pastor, a 20-year-old social media influencer to come and help us with various platforms. Our media tech guy is 22, and he's a gamer, and we hired him substantially because of his hobby interests.

All that to say is that we have intentionally surrounded ourselves with successive generations. And now that we are aging boomers, we're actually down three generations. So we learn and stay fresh, and simultaneously we get to continue to invest in the development of people in their late teens and early twenties and send them out, often by their mid-20s, into their first significant ministry leadership roles.

God bless you. I'm looking forward to seeing triplet churches born of a 20-year-old social media influencer. I honestly can't think of many people at that retirement age that are thinking that way. So love kind of this idea of passing that knowledge on. But, and by the way, one of the reasons why I wanted Craig in this conversation—and honestly, the impetus really started with Craig—this is like the type of conversation that I'm going to like step back and you guys are way smarter than me. Like, there is a whole lot more knowledge—not going ageist here—but there's a whole lot more knowledge there that I really want to soak up and learn from as we're talking about this idea of, you know, the scoreboard, what makes a successful church. And Craig's put a lot of energy and thought into this, which we'll get into. And Jared, I know some of the conversations that we've had centered around this have been incredible as well. So looking forward to digging into this.

And this is actually very similar, Craig. We just had a conversation with Dave Ferguson out of Community Christian Church and Exponential and New Thing and just all sorts of different things that Dave does. And that was almost like the prerequisite to this conversation as we're talking about in that conversation with Dave Ferguson just recently. We'll put it into the show notes. But it was this idea of all these different models, all these different modes of church. And Jared's talking about his triplets that he's working on here in 2021. Dave out of Community's got four. Like, I think it was a physical, or excuse me, I think there was a physical, there was a broadcast, there was a prison, and I think maybe a workplace was the fourth.

Well, they're doing micro. Micro was the fourth. Workplace and so like that was their four therefore multimodal approaches towards church. And kind of what one of the challenges is: How do we deem what is successful if we're going multimodal? As we're going multimodal, as we're doing these different models of churches, you know, I think the pre-COVID, and maybe it was a bad answer even before, the nickels and noses really kind of is no longer effective. Butts in seats is a nice thing to look at from the stage, but is a horrible metric for the successfulness of what's happening with the church.

And so Craig, you really started this conversation, really spending some time working on this document, speaking towards the effectiveness and ineffectiveness of church. We've got links to the show notes and that as well. But Craig, maybe you want to open up, just kind of talk about that, maybe some of the things that you were wrestling through and what that looks like.

Sure. Well, the reality is for Stadia, you know, through 2018, maybe beginning of 2019, we were planting physical churches, primarily churches that would have, you know, Sunday gatherings, you know, what we sometimes call the typical or predominant model of church in the United States. And so because we had really the single model of church that we were helping to start, then we had really adopted what have been the predominant metrics for those churches, which were the nickels and noses. And you know, which you know, how are they doing and how are they progressing?

But we began then to become multimodal ourselves in terms of the churches we were working with, really around the same time Jeff you came on board, and we began moving in this arena of digital only. We formed a partnership with Casey Underground with Rob Wagner and what they were doing to be on helping people start networks of micro churches. And so all of a sudden, these metrics that we had been using for our physical churches no longer applied in these two new modes.

And so as an organization, how do we evaluate the effectiveness of these models? And so it just became really clear for us that we needed to go back and rethink definition of church and we need to go back and rethink definition of disciple and really on top of all that, really come to a conclusion of what were some ways that we would measure the effectiveness of a new church that could then be compared across these models. And I know that comparison is

Dangerous, you know, we tell church planters all the time, you know, don't compare. You know, because then you're always comparing yourself to someone who is doing more and then you feel bad about yourself and about what God's doing in your context. But I think for an organization like Stadia, there's a stewardship responsibility in that comparison to say, you know, are we doing digital only just because it's new and novel? Are we doing digital because we can demonstrate that it effectively makes disciples? Are we doing micro, you know, all of these things? Or where should our energy and our resources be focused?

Stadia has a huge vision and our vision is that every child on the planet would have a church. That's a lot of churches, it's a lot of people, a lot of children. And so just the idea of effectiveness is really critical to the accomplishing of our mission and our vision. That's why we're doing all these different models of church, but we haven't yet really figured out how to effectively measure the effectiveness of each. And so what I've created that you're going to share in the show notes, Jeff, is really more pointing out, hey, here's what we've been doing and here's why it's broken. Here's some ideas of what we think is needed. But we, by no means, are at the place of having an answer. Certainly not the answer. We're really just hoping to begin to wrestle through with many of our partners and our planters, with people like Jared and Ann and Sprout Digital. What are the answers to these questions and how do we identify them in a really useful way in order to facilitate our own efforts, but also in order to help others that we're partnered with, networked with, and our church planters? No, are we being effective? Are we making disciples?

As, um, it's so, I gotta, I would imagine like trying to get commonality in language even, that hey, are we effective in making a disciple? You know, there's a running joke here on the show. You line up ten pastors, you're going to get twelve definitions of what a disciple is because at least two of them aren't going to be sure. They're going to give like, how do we even start to maybe bring that together to get that common agreement? Because if we're trying to evaluate successfulness, or do we even need to evaluate successfulness for the big C church? Like, how do we get agreement here on things like what a church is? I know we wrestled with that with, um, with Dave just recently, or even what a disciple is. How do we need to get the common ground?

Well, you know, I wrote in this paper and kind of that the ideal of getting to common ground, and Jared and I have, we've exchanged back and forth, has kind of pointed out that my hope is probably a little bit idealistic. That the reality is when we look at centuries of church history, there are a lot of definitions and a lot of disagreements, a lot of divisions that have come over these things, and it's probably unrealistic for us in this time to think that somehow we're going to overcome all of the human factors that have led to that in the past.

I do think though my hope would be that we can really help people at the minimum define their own definitions. I think the reality is you would be very, very surprised if you went to churches in America, whether you, you know, talked to the pastor, went to the church's board or elders, or you know, governing body, and said, hey, what is the definition your church uses of disciple to determine whether or not a person who is connected with your congregation is or isn't a disciple of Jesus? And unfortunately, in the vast majority of cases, people would simply look at you with a blank stare. They actually have no idea.

So it's not the fact that a common definition is missing. It's really much more the fact that there's no definition at all. And so we're not, you know, even an individual church is very rarely working towards a very specific definition of, hey, we've made a disciple. We were joking off air before, probably all the stuff you're going to cut out, Jeff, about coffee, because I'm a coffee snob. Well, imagine if I'm going to start a coffee shop, right, and I have no definition of what a good cup of coffee is. I'm serving one person water and another person grounds. Like, it's just like it's all over the map. Yet we have lots of churches whose mission is to make disciples but can't even define when they've done that.

Um, and so common definition, probably pretty idealistic. Um, individually owned definitions, absolutely necessary. Um, if we're gonna accomplish the work that Jesus gave us to do.

Jared, you're launching, by the way, don't say Starbucks to Craig. Like, when he says coffee, it's not Starbucks. I mean, that's the only thing guaranteed to be endlessly harassed.

Yeah, yeah, that's fine. Moving on. Jared, like, and I'm curious here because you're launching triplets at sixty-five. That's way too old to have triplets, but good for you. Um, talk to me here. Like, what's the, what's the common, like, are you evaluating with these triplets commonality? Like, how are you finding common ground among these different models and types of church?

Oh, that's such a great question. And I'll tell you, we are in a royal mess, and the answer is no. We are, we're swimming in mud here, and we love it. In fact, let me complicate it exponentially. In addition to the triplets, each of which are in a very different model, I think I may have mentioned, they're physical, one is a hybrid, micro, and the third one is digital. In addition to that, our ninety-four-year-old congregation is digital. So we don't even know how to measure our results for the existing congregation that is dramatically morphing, and now, and as far as we project, we'll indefinitely into the future, have far more people online than will in person.

None of the old creaky metrics worked well then, and they certainly don't work now. So honestly, you know, as practitioners, we're right in the middle of four simultaneous experiments. One of them just happens to be ninety-four years old. As we are sorting our way through, and what we're noticing is, um, just preliminarily, and by the way, I wish I had answers. I'm so far from that. I'm just asking, finding out some better questions to ask, right? Which, I guess in some theories, is eighty percent success if you have that question to find. So I'm feeling good about that.

But one of our questions is, what do the three daughter churches have that are distinct in terms of metrics? And then what do they have in common? And we think that if we can, among those three malleable baby churches, find out what they have in common, that that may be the most effective way to inform what the ninety-four-year-old fidget church can use to define itself moving forward. It's much easier for us to think clean slate, brand new baby. We're forming this thing. We're architects and to come up with some metrics in this new environment than to look at ninety-four years of history and be so bound to the old metrics to have to do the change management thinking to actually get free to think about what are the new ways to measure this congregation going forward. We're going to benefit from the babies and pick up DNA from them.

Okay, so my brain just exploded. I'm totally expecting, you know, and maybe it's, you know, just the decade of multi-site. You got to get it from the mothership. You got to create the good DNA and then pass it from, you know, the middle hub down to the spokes, you know, whatever your analogy is. You just flip the script on it where you're finding healthy practices not with the ninety-four years worth of established church. You're finding healthy practices with the new plants, with the things that are free to run, and then you're going to pass that up into the ninety-four-year-old church that that's incredible.

Yeah, I mean, I commend that, Jared, and it makes a ton of sense. I realize, Jeff, it's not what's common, but if you really pay attention to innovation, you know, read, study innovation, innovation always happens at the edges. It doesn't happen in the old established, you know, companies. If they want to establish companies that they want to innovate, they got to create skunk works, you know, because innovation is just it gets squashed in this large thing. And so, yeah, I mean, that's super exciting, and it actually, to me, it makes a lot of sense. A lot of people just aren't willing to take the risk of giving those, you know, those three babies and in your case probably some, you know, leaders who, in fact, are much younger and much less experienced and much less wise than you are. I mean, let's just call it what it is, right? You know, I love getting to meet John and Ed because you planted a church when you were twenty-three. Mandy and my wife planted when we were twenty-six. You're one of the few people I know who were younger than we are. We were idiots when we planted a church. We knew like we had no idea what we were doing, but you know, we learned a lot. And, you know, your three, you know, baby churches are gonna learn a lot, and not just for their own benefit, but for the benefit of the larger whole. And it's such a great perspective to not just allow that to happen, but to enable it and to be very intentional about it.

We're trying to adopt a similar mindset at Stadia in which we're recognizing more and more that innovation is being created by our church planters. You know, Stadia really sees ourselves as innovators, but at the end of the day, we're accelerators of innovation, not creators of innovation. We have this privilege to work with hundreds of church planters who are creating new expressions of church and new ways of making disciples, and many of them are being innovative, are identifying new strategies, new methods, new ideas.

Jared will realize this. He and I can both date ourselves. You know, in our early ministry careers, to find out about what some innovative pastor or church or organization did, they had to do it. The church had to grow to be a mega or giga church. The pastor then had to write a book about it. They then had to get invited to speak at a conference, and then Jared and I would get to show up and hear about it. The problem was by the time that happened, whatever the innovation was, was no longer innovative and not really, not had already lost its freshness and relativeness to what was needed.

And so for us, we're looking at it as the ability to say, hey, there's an end of idea, and we can spread that through this ecosystem tomorrow, not five years from now when the book is written and, you know, the conference is hosted and all of those things. And so that's really just kind of that role of accelerating innovation that I think is a critical piece, again, in an environment that is just rapidly changing. But that also comes back, kind of, to bring it back to the topic, Jeff, that that's the need for better metrics, right? Is when we look at that innovative idea that one of our planters has, are we like, oh, that's a great, just because it, you know, whatever, it's like, hey, we've never, it's new, it's novel, it's interesting? Or is it a, is it really a, not just a new idea, is it really a better idea because somehow it's contributing to disciple making in a more effective manner than what others have been doing?

Um, instead of this new way, I mean, let's call it out for what it is. Um, nickels and noses. We're joking about it earlier, but what's the, where does that fall short? Because I, or does it, like, the view of how many people are attending a physical service, how many people are allegedly watching a service online, online metrics can be squarely, sometimes we've talked about that previously, um, the amount of money that's coming in, the amount of...

Money for an organization, people that are willing to contribute to. They're bought in at the level. Like some of these things I think are grounded in truth and instability, but is it good? Is there other things? Like what's the struggle with this idea of the nickels and noses being the metric that we're evaluating?

Well, I probably have a contrarian point of view on those. I actually applaud nickels and noses. So I've decided to redeem that in this sense, and this is a helpful model for us. This is old language, but it's still helpful because community, incorporation, and to think about the local church as a cause, as a community, as a corporation. And in the Venn diagram, you want the sweet spot where all three of those are equally contributing to create a core that is institutionally sound, that is relationally healthy, and that is missional in its cause effectiveness.

So we're using that language with the babies and with the mother fidget church to find areas of commonality and areas of difference. So as it relates to corporation, nickels and noses is a legitimate and helpful corporate metric. Now, when it comes to how many people and where are they and how much money should they generate for what budget, that is entirely model specific. So the digital church will have a very different corporate set of needs than the physical church plan, and the mother fidget church has a distinct set of corporate needs because of the model.

So the commonality is that we have a legal corporate organizational design. That design takes time, effort, and money. And being a good steward of those resources means that we are going to measure things that look like time, effort, and money. But we also must measure the cause. And by the way, I think in these four little experiments that we're doing, the mother church and the three babies, I think the cause is going to have the closest alignment: disciple making. But when it comes to community and how we measure community among these four very different venues, we're probably going to have different metrics that suggest as KPIs or key performance indicators, at best approximate or suggest success.

I think that these four churches are going to have very different KPIs for community health measurement because their venues are so different.

Yeah, I don't know that I'm in that much different place than you are, Jared. I have a little maybe a different twist or perspective, but I think the problem with nickels and noses isn't that we count nickels and noses. I think the problem with nickels and noses is that we assign the wrong meaning to those measures. In your description of corporation, if you've built a structure that requires dollars, whatever other global context you're in, marks, springs, pounds, you know, whatever it is, in order to function well, then you probably need to count how many of those you have, right?

But they're not a measure of the success or the effectiveness of your church in making disciples. This helps you understand what are the financial resources that you have and the sustainability of various activities and so forth. So how in the world could you not count nickels if nickels, you know, are a part of your model of sustenance? You have to. And I would say the same thing about attendance. It's not that even, you know, a physical church that gathers should never count how many people are there. I always say if you don't know, if you aren't counting how many people are there and you don't have any idea how many people are going to be, you know, how do you know how big a room you need? How many seats it should have? You know, how many cups of coffee you should make? How many children's volunteers you should have? Like, you have to count.

But from my perspective, I've tended to use kind of mission, strategy, tactics as layers of metrics. So you know, tactical metrics are things like, hey, how many cups of coffee did we, you know, in cups and napkins, right? Because we need to make sure that we have enough of those if we're in a physical space. I don't know what exactly the comparison would be that could be just bandwidth or seats or something in a digital environment, right? If we run out of that, well, you know, tactically, right, we haven't planned very well. And so those are things that should be counted for that reason.

There are strategic measures. You know, in a gathered church, people coming on a Sunday morning is a key part of the strategy. And so I would want to count it because it would inform me about, hey, you know, is that piece of our strategy moving forward or going backwards? The problem is when that's, even when that's part of our strategy, the simple fact that people are in a seat doesn't answer our mission question, which is, are they becoming a disciple? And so it's not that we need to throw out nickels and noses. It's that we need to apply nickels and noses appropriately. And really, from my perspective, the problem is that the mission metric is missing. And because it's missing, we're relying on the strategic and tactical metrics to answer questions they were never designed to answer.

I think that's so helpful, Craig. Entirely. And I think that in our experience, the disruption of the pandemic and our evolution or transformation toward digital, with great help from Stadia and being a part of a fidget cohort, our team just continues to benefit so much from that. That in our experience, it really did indicate to us that things that we used to feel good about, I don't know that we celebrated them, that we felt good about them, which were those very corporate metrics. It was the annual report. It's what the annual video of the church. So much of it, you know, did have to do with that, the denominational reporting that we do, et cetera.

We were so comfortable with these because all of them indicated that we tended to be growing, right? By the way, if your metrics aren't increasing, change the metrics, right? You just change the basis. Every organization does it. Just change the basis. It's awesome this year. But having said that, it really revealed to us that those were inefficient, ineffective.

One of the things that's, of course, this is obvious, but I just want to state it: that we're so aware of when you read through the New Testament, we do find numbers. So there's quantitative data in the New Testament. It tends to be around how many people showed up, or it tends to be descriptive of the relational size of a particular group. So Jesus had the multitudes. He had the seventy. He had the twelve. He had the three. He had the one. Well, those are social group descriptions that sociological study has indicated for us have very particular dynamics. And those social sizes are very good for certain kinds of experiences.

But when it comes to the metrics of discipleship in the New Testament, in my reading, we have vague approximations. Certainly we don't have quantifications. So we have some qualifying statements. These are qualities of an elder. There's one hundred references to "one another's" in the Bible, fifty-nine specific applications for commands to do or not to do. So but those are behavioral. They're not even qualitative. They're actually process items that apparently, if you're in that kind of environment, indicate the likelihood of growing, maturing discipleship.

But even the one-anothers are not directly connected to the outcome of discipleship. So I'm not arguing at all against, I am all in on helping come up with metrics. I think it's critical for us. But I'm just wanting to acknowledge that, you know, my preference, and probably for many of us, our preferences, to go to Scripture and say we're measuring this because we have this example. And again, in my reading of Scripture, it's process-oriented, qualitatively described, and almost never counted.

And so our challenge is, how are we going to measure approximations that may indicate that there is discipleship-making success? A metaphor that's helpful for me is an fMRI. An fMRI actually measures blood vessels and increased blood flow in the brain. It's believed that those blood vessels are approximate to neural pathways. So the fMRI, which says we're measuring neural activity and taking images of that, is actually measuring blood flow and inferring neural activity. And so it's that kind of approximation of health that I think we will want to discover and probably have to be satisfied with measuring.

Oh, as I think one of the, I agree with what you're saying, and I think it's super insightful, Craig. But I think one of the challenges when we think about those, we think about one-anothers, and either this, there's a challenge for us in that we can't create what we could. But if we create every one of those one-anothers as the standard definition of disciple, a little self-revelation here, you know, the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience. Like, I'm in trouble because I am a very impatient person. Still, does that mean that I am not a disciple of Jesus because that piece of my character is still being formed, right? Does that prove that I'm not a disciple? And so there is this inclusionary, exclusionary kind of thing as well that we look at. And so it complicates it because even as we, you know, unwieldy as a one-hundred-point checklist would be, the reality is probably all of us would agree that that can't be the standard because no one can check all one hundred of the boxes.

And so I think that's the, I think that's part of why many people don't have that definition. Is, you know, we really in many ways need to make it as small and simple as possible. Like, what are the absolute essentials? But whenever we begin to have that conversation, everybody wants to add another essential. And by the time we're done, we're back to the one-hundred-point checklist that no one can live up to. And so we kind of, my observation, so then we give up on the exercise and we just persist with substituting inadequate measures rather than to really wrestle through and come to the kinds of definition and understanding that would allow us to say, hey, there's a person who's a disciple of Jesus who, last year, you know, five years ago, whatever, you know, was not. That is the accomplishment of our mission. And somehow we have to be able to do that in a with some level of confidence.

Well, the futurist here wants to go out and play in the future for a minute. And so let me share my preference and my expectation. Actually, it's a prediction. And then I'll come back as the practitioner and talk about how I help to contribute short-term to this long-term issue.

By the way, I think that we are in a reformation of the church. I think that this is wildly turbulent. I think that church is going to be dramatically changed on the other side. So I'm exposing my own belief that this season is the dawn of a reformation of the church that in many respects will be as dramatic as the Reformation in the fifteen hundreds.

So given that background, and maybe I'm way overstating it, but that's my frame of reference. Given that background, I then look to other social groups, and I'm asking the question, how are they dealing with this? So I look to business, reading books, for example, "Work Disrupted," recently published by Jeff Schwartz, who is an esteemed leader in the field of work internationally. Learning from him, how is work being reconstructed? And how is work being redefined? And how is effective work being re-measured?

So there's the business community that informs us. Secondly, there's the educational community and transformation. And education is not, as far advanced in my opinion yet as work is, but it will be because educators are forced to create metrics for a whole variety of reasons. And I look to business and to education primarily because

Those are the two social institutions that the church has primarily modeled itself after. So we're built on the small business model—that's how we do church, especially in the west—and we educate people in graduated systems and groupings that are modeled after educational theory and philosophy. And what I'm discovering in those two environments is that big data is one of the, if not the most helpful source of information.

So here's the little fun about the future, and then I'll come back to the present. I noticed that, and I've been playing a bit with, I think it's Casey Underground participants—there do a lot of their work on the app, and that app allows a person to self-report her experience. So she's reporting process and engagement experience. Let's assume that she is also asked to report subjective experience. In this last year, your goal has been to grow in patience. Give us three examples of how you intentionally engaged in developing that Christ-like virtue in your life. Subjective reporting.

So here's my dream: in ten years, most Christians are engaged on apps. They are self-reporting their experience—objective behavioral and subjective ascents—and that is rolling up into big data information for us to manage and manipulate and learn from, just as big data is in many helpful ways using this individually generated piece into these billions of bits of information.

And so the futurist in me says individual self-reporting are going to be the primary source of information from which we gather data, that we develop knowledge, and then apply with wisdom.

There's a lot there. Um, thank you for all those words. Let me ask, because we're saying words that I don't typically hear in context of discipleship. We're saying big data. We're saying small business model. We're saying a hundred-point checklist, which I know was kind of tongue-in-cheek. Strategic, data-informed. What's the role of the Holy Spirit in this? I mean, out of context, I've had conversations with some of my organic friends that are allergic to a lot of the things that we've just said, and it's, "Hey, we need to be following the Spirit, and not everything we just said." Um, how do we respond to that? Like, what's the role of the Spirit in context of this conversation?

I guess I'll go first. Jared's probably gonna have a better answer than I do, but from my perspective, I would say cause and effect is critical. Um, and so if we believe that the user of that app who is reporting her progress, or the work that she's doing around growing in patience, and all of those things—if we think that it is the app or the reporting or any of those things that is causing her transformation, we're—I mean, we are now over here in a humanistic-driven self-improvement model, whatever title or label you would want to give it.

The premise of discipleship, the premise of human transformation in the New Testament, is that it is only made possible by the redemption that comes in Jesus, through Jesus, and the transformation that is empowered by the Holy Spirit. Those things are causes. What we're talking about is how do we measure effect? Um, and if the cause exists, then it should be evidenced by the effect. So it's not a denial of the role of the Holy Spirit. It's just recognizing that, and again, I go back to the fruits of the Spirit, right? You know, the fruit of the Spirit is not some ethereal awareness that the Spirit is there. I'm not saying that doesn't exist, so don't someone send me hate mail. But all I'm saying is, you know, what Craig Whitney at stadiachurchplanning.org—but what the Holy Spirit inspired Paul to write was that the fruit of the Spirit are these observable characteristics in a person's life. Fruit.

And so, you know, in the same way that we can't really see the biological mechanisms inside of a tree or a plant that causes the fruit to exist, we see the fruit and we pick it and we taste it and it tastes good and like it's supposed to. So we say, "Well, that's a healthy tree, right?" And so it's just—I think sometimes I would just say I understand kind of the concern and I understand the danger in these measures of making, going too far and making them the cause. But when I hear what Jared's describing, I don't hear "the Holy Spirit doesn't have a role." I hear there are these things that would allow us to—and I think the self-report is important—to gather the evidence that a person is self-reporting about what the Holy Spirit is accomplishing in their life. And in the same way that we would taste the fruit and say it's good and the tree is healthy, we would observe the fruit and we would say it's good, and thus the Holy Spirit is present and the person is healthy.

I think about my marriage with Anne. I think that the substance of our years together has produced what is a wonderful relationship. To measure it, to describe it by quality, to even describe it by effort that we make on working on it, to describe the context of life that we've put ourselves in, to talk about our personal budget—does nothing to take from the substance of the spirit of the relationship. It simply is an effort to describe it from different points of view.

My—and this is a theological conviction—my conviction is that there's very little that we can do to thwart the work of the Spirit. I do know Paul writes in one place, "Don't quench the Spirit," as he's talking about some particular practices in a local congregation in Corinth about behavior that they excluded. But I think that good-hearted followers of Jesus that are humble and seeking his way probably are not going to be much of an obstacle for the work of the Spirit.

I just have great confidence in the power of the Holy Spirit to work among us and in spite of us. And so for me, the danger to thwarting the work of the Spirit is to sanctify methods and models and things that end up competing with supremacy of the Spirit. And for me, measurements can become those. They can become idols. They can become worshiped. They can become focused on. They can become the points of celebration. They can become the ego drivers, and all of those supplant the leadership and the supremacy and the work of the Spirit.

But if we see these simply as measures to describe—back to the metaphor—Jared and Anne's exciting and healthy marriage, then we're just finding ways to describe it that may in fact be encouraging for others to consider choosing some of those patterns too for the purpose of coming to that kind of healthy relationship.

So I trust the Spirit wildly, and I doubt that he is very much bothered with my smallness, including my little small things that might be a little hindrance along the way.

That's beautiful. So we're talking fruits of the Spirit—you know, Craig, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Jared, you're talking supremacy of the Spirit and letting him rule over all things. These are great attributes for how we're evaluating—not the butts in the seats, but discipleship, and maybe even just some of the characteristics of what a disciple is within a church.

Now, how do we get from that disciple towards more of a multiplication angle? Someone that's sharing their faith, a priesthood of all believers, a church's platform approach, more towards multiplication. What contextually does that look like? How are we engaging that successfulness? What does metrics need to look like? How do we get somebody from that disciple-making place, from discipleship, from being a disciple to being a disciple maker?

Just briefly, one of the things that's been very interesting for me to consider—and by the way, I just want to again self-disclose: I'm a fan of programs and products. So if I can buy a book that I don't have to research and write, I really like that. If I can buy someone else's system that is written and proven, I really like that. So I have no problems benefiting from other resources.

In light of that, I'm really intrigued by the idea of different kinds of things that happen in different spaces, and I want to give a shout-out and acknowledgement to the recent book "The Spider and the Starfish," and one of the things that those three authors mention is that they focus on what they call a content-flavored—um, and they talk there about the different kinds of social spaces that activity and work is done in.

And we're not there. I'm not an expert. I just am sharing an opinion. But we want to be particularly thoughtful about how do we engage people in spaces—the one-on-one, the three, the twelve, the seventy, the masses—and how will we in these various models find ways for people to engage in all of those spaces in a meaningful and helpful way, both for their benefit and for their contribution?

And we think that if we can in these four little models that we're playing with here locally think across those spaces, resource those spaces, and then measure people's engagement and experience in those spaces, that we may have discovered some things about what effective discipleship pathway looks like across those.

So we're going to be more measuring than we are prescriptive about what we expect the outcomes to be. But we think that the spaces have a lot to do with the effect that we'll have.

Our concern—my observation about experiments is, and by the way, this is an affirmation and a critique—experiments in innovation generally are very narrow. And so in that narrow experience, for example, if someone was going to do a microchurch, they might think only about what does it look like for our small unit to be together. To me, ultimately, those people I would want to engage one-on-one, in groups of three, and in groups of twelve, and in groups of seventy, and large as well. That's my own bias.

My hope is that in research we can find the best of what's happening in these various venues and stitch it together in a comprehensive way that then suggests models that can inform, especially church plants, to say, "You know, here's what we have learned from others, and you might think strategically about covering all of these bases in the planning for this, because it seems like the Holy Spirit does different and good things for people in these different spaces."

Just clarification—you didn't specifically say it, but the one-on-one, the groups of three, the groups of twelve, the group of seventy—that was the number of people that Jesus interacted with at different points in his journey, in his ministry. Individually with people, what was it? Peter, James, and John were the inner circle. The twelve disciples. The group of sixty-three to seventy that was like the core component of what would eventually become the church. And then, you know, when he would preach and do things to the masses.

Jay Crandall, interestingly, you know, has a four pillars. His isn't quite as biblically sound. Jake Crandall over at Saddleback—I'm gonna message Jake that Jeffrey just recorded a podcast that your model's not biblically sound, calling him out publicly. His is more—but it's one-on-one self-directed, it's small groups, social space of twenty-five, and then, you know, the full. Anyway, it's more designed towards what the church typical model would be. But I love this idea of grounding it, and I've heard others—Jason Morris has talked a lot about kind of that four or five groupings following Christ's ministry. I mean, that's a beautiful approach to.

It um, and what I find interesting is you're even trying to scale that within your three daughter churches that you're starting here, Jared. Like you're creating a model for a digital-only church that can reach thousands. Um, you know, we were just talking off air about the Hughes—Jared and Angie Hughes—who have started a digital ministry in March of 2020 called Hope City Church. No real experience with digital planning, just did a podcast with them recently, and within like fourteen, fifteen months have one of the largest churches, a digital-only expression of churches here in the Western Hemisphere. And so how things scale, how things grow in digital space. But that's mass. Isn't huge. And you're also working on micro. And so we've got all these different kind of models of church where disciple-making, discipleship is going to look different in a mega gig of physical environment, in a fidget church, in a ninety-four-year-old church, in a digital-only expression of church. And so how do we find and measure consistencies across all of these different approaches? Stadia, we're encouraging go multimodal, try different approaches, try different things. We need to figure out a commonality of language. You need to figure out a commonality of vision. But as we're doing disciple-making differently because of the different contexts, like how do you even start to find that commonality, specifically in this idea of getting people on mission on disciple-making?

I would say, Jeff, one of the things that I think the recognition—and I think, you know, you and I are working on what is this model of multimodal, and we're kind of, at least for now, we're kind of thinking about is this, you know, we've got this digital-physical spectrum that's one axis, and we've got really this social spaces that's the other axis. And the recognition that those exist in both digital and physical space. And so we end up with these quadrants. But I think I'll just say this from my own experience: I think the way being on mission has been defined in my life and experience has been pretty mono-specific. Like it's been a very singular. And so it's kind of this personal evangelism, share my faith with my coworkers or my neighbors kind of thinking. And I'm not by any means saying that that's wrong. I've certainly done those things throughout my life, and as a result of that, I've seen, you know, friends, neighbors, you know, people come to faith. I'm not very grateful for that. But I think the notion that that's what it looks like to be on mission for every single person who is a disciple of Jesus, it's probably not the best way of thinking.

And so, you know, are you a one-on-one disciple maker? Are you a group of three disciple maker? Are you a micro small group disciple maker? Like, you know, I mean, did you kind of go to the other end? You know, obviously my line of work, we all, you know, the work we're on, we know lots of pastors who are great communicators. I mean, I've watched people that I personally know speak to large groups of people and observe many, many people in that group say, "Yeah, I want to follow Jesus because of the, you know, the large group teaching." That same individual may be pretty lousy at leading their neighbor to faith one-on-one. Like, we don't—if it's not something we really want to like, we ever really talk about. But I think if we recognize these spaces or these relationships, we've got to define being on mission and being a disciple maker in broader terms or in some way that makes it possible for a person to be on mission and be a disciple maker without being a single—without exhibiting a singular kind of behavior. Because not everyone is created for, gifted for, skilled in that singular model. And I think that's again where the concept of multimodal is very beneficial, as it may open up opportunities for people to say, "Hey, I am being a disciple maker, but I'm doing it this way," which actually I love. And all my life I've thought to be a disciple maker I had to do it this way, which always felt incredibly, you know, awkward and uncomfortable to me.

I think that we will continue to learn from lots of different approaches. Um, I'll take a moment to share one of my biases as it relates to a basis to describe discipleship. Um, and while there are differences in opinion and perspective, I'll just mention Alan Hirsch's APEST model. And what he's really referring to is what does it look like for those named gifts among us in Scripture to influence how we are informed, how we engage, and the kind of mature effectiveness on the other side?

One of the few places in the Bible that I recall that the idea of the word maturity is used is in Philippians 4:11 and 12. In that passage, that tells us that there are gifts among us that are inherently Spirit-inspired, phenomenally able to produce certain kinds of results. They teach the rest of us who do not have those inherent giftings and proclivities and abilities how to do the things that approximate those results. And if we take all, let's say five of those general ideas and allow those gifts to inform us, we can put together prototypes for how church can be done in any of these various modal settings, being informed by saying there needs to be evangelism, there needs to be the prophetic, there needs to be the pastoral, there needs to be the teaching, there needs to be the—and so the model in my mind, designed around the APEST giftings, however that's applied, is a nice starting point to describe the kinds of engagement that we want people to experience, productivity and growth in their own life, and potentially measuring measured outcomes on the other side.

My experience with lots of local churches is that they tend, over time, to be a kind of local church that primarily exudes the giftedness of their lead pastor. Or if it's a church with a long history with an elder kind of board, whatever the culture of that church is, so it's really good at evangelism or the prophetic or the teaching or the shepherding or whatever. And my interest as a person engaged in church planting over the years has been to find church planting models, or at least ways of helping planters design a church across those various giftedness so that they were all addressed. And I think for me that is a fundamental way that informs however I think about a discipleship pathway. I think about where are we going to intentionally engage these kinds of emphases, training, teaching, and experience? And then if we can measure some participation, which is a very blunt but helpful measure, and output, which is more subjective but more helpful, we might be well on our way toward metrics—participation and output.

Output, yeah, you're right, that gets subjective. But having some sort of qualitative data, I guess, would help to kind of complement what's happening in the quantitative side.

Jared, you and sir, you have collectively blown my mind for the second quarter of 2021. You're—I'm not gonna start singing like Chicago, "You're the meaning of my life, you're the inspiration," but you really have. Some Craig's really happy right now. He's like an old audiophile guy, and the fact that I just threw a Chicago reference in there, I didn't even realize it, but he's grinning ear to ear right now.

Um, hey Craig, so let me unmute you just so you can—I can spin that. I can spin that vinyl for you if you'd like. Right behind me.

Yeah, I may have been like, you know, two when that came out.

All right, so but seriously, I mean with this idea of going to the children and letting the children establish a DNA—never been there. You connected me with a book, and I'll drop the reference here: "Multi-Church" by Brad House and Greg Allison. We were kind of talking about that off air via email, and that honestly has also challenged some of my preconceived notions. I thought I understood multisite. I read that and it was like, "Oh my gosh, so like there are challenges and all those frustrations that I've had, there are other ways, there are other models, there are other ways to do that." And it's even challenged some of the way that I'm looking at digital-only church. And so man, you—I just want to thank you for the little amount of time that I've known you. You're actually like kicking my mental butt here a little bit and making me kind of rethink the way some things are done. So thank you very much for that.

I do want to also add that you mentioned the Star and the—the Spirit. Excuse me, the Spider and the Spirit, which is a Rob Wagner book and Alan Hirsch and—who is the third one? Lance Ford, yes, of course. Um, Rob Wagner, just while we were having this podcast, I got the email. Rob Wagner confirmed we're set to do a recording for that, talking about the Spider and the Spirit and how that applies towards digital-only expressions of church. Um, we've got some mutual friends that are excited about the digital-only piece, and so we're going to be doing that podcast in the coming month as well. So get to kind of expand that idea even of decentralized ministry of how that looks in digital space.

But this has been an awesome conversation. Appreciate the time. But we're going to wrap up. We're going to land a plane. And so, you know, I'll Craig, I'll throw it to you first, man. Any closing thoughts here as we're wrapping up the podcast?

I was just, for you know, for listeners who are listening to, looking for something practical to take away from this, it would just be, you know, even—you know, we can't land on "Hey, here's your definition of disciple, go, go, you know, run with that." But hopefully out of this you can take away some thoughts that maybe help you begin to wrestle with, as Jared said earlier, eighty percent of it's asking the right question. That help you begin to wrestle with: What are we measuring? How are we measuring it? And is it telling us whether or not we are being effective in helping people become, you know, followers of Jesus? You may arrive at some conclusion, some way of doing that, that's completely different than anything we have talked about today. Totally fine. Having some conclusion, some mental determination on your part of "that's what we're going to do" will be infinitely better than relying on nickels and noses alone without any thought to how to actually measure that.

Yeah, well, from the sublime to the immediately practical, I do think that we are in a reformation of the church. I think that it is a societal upheaval that will have the same traumatic and wonderful impact that the printing press had in the 1500s. I think the digital age is going to similarly affect the church—not theologically, but it's going to be a reformation of ecclesiology and organization and communication and models.

One of the sayings that Anne and I love is that beginnings are necessarily messy, and we should feel like we're in a mess, and we should feel reasonably okay about that. We don't even know the questions to ask, let alone the right answers. This is messy, of course it's transformational. Everything's on its head. We don't even know what's going to transpire. To anchor to in the future where it's messy business, and so let's enjoy this. What if the Lord tarries? This is going to be looked back to as a transformational and wonderful time in the church. Let's enjoy the mess and follow the Spirit every day as he leads us through it.

So that's the sublime back to the back to the practical. I have found this: that even pre-Christians in my life know what God is doing if they have a spiritual sensitivity to ask someone.

In this last year, it seems like that you have become more interested and acquainted with Jesus. Tell me what that's like for you. They will describe the work of the spirit in them. We call that pre-evangelism. As church professionals, I call pre-evangelism what I do to people. It's marketing. It's engagement. It's conversation. It's content. They don't know that pre-evangelism is what the spirit is doing in them, and they tell me what that's like. Well, I've just felt like, and I've taken this step and I reached out here and I did an Alpha thing and I've had this conversation with a friend. And my recommendation is interview the people in your life. And if you're a church person, interview the people across the spectrum of your church and ask them what's the Holy Spirit been doing in your life this past year? And they will tell you what the discipleship pathway looks like in their experience.

I think the experience of people, the testimony of Jesus in people, will better inform me than anything else I can do about the discovery of fresh discipleship pathways that are the work of the spirit. And then we're going to figure out how we can measure those things so that we can intentionalize them to create even better pathways for more people.

Wow. Ask the question and find new pathways. Don't take it on us to create them, to manufacture, but actually ask the question and listen and allow others to speak into it. You know, we talk here on the podcast of the power is not within the organization as much as it is within the individuals. And so listening gives you the opportunity to expand what you're doing to be more effective. It's almost that experiment. You're crowdsourcing it down to the individual level and letting them tell you how the Holy Spirit is leading in that moment. So I love that. By the way, the whole beginnings are necessarily, as I almost said it wrong, beginnings are necessarily messy. That may be tattoo worthy. My wife won't let me get a tattoo, but if I did, that would be on the list of quotes for that. It's a long list at this point with the podcast, but that's definitely on the list.

Well, we're going to land the plane. Um, it's, if sometimes it sounds like Craig, there actually is a plane landing in your outside where you are. The jackhammer came back on. I apologize.

Yeah, no worries. The great thing is we're going to edit a lot of that out and then filter it, so the guys who produce this, I'll give a shout out to Garrett. Garrett, leave this in. Garrett Silje produces the show for me. He does a phenomenal job. Him and the team, Christopher Diaz is the audio guy. They will make you sound incredible. So I'm not worried about it. Any digital enhancement makeup or, yeah, well, I don't know. I don't know that anybody's that good. But um, we'll see. So for Garrett and Chris, thanks for doing what you do. For Jared, for Craig, I'm Jeff with the Church Digital, and for State of Church Planning, thanks for joining us here on the pod. We'll see you next time on the show. Y'all have a good day.