EP129: Church Plantology - A Convo with Peyton Jones

Okay so at some level I think Peyton Jones, we were we were separated at birth. I think we're twins. Well, the guy's older than me so maybe that's not possible, but I think we're distant relatives. We're we're connected somewhere in the gene pool. Um, maybe that's not true, but man, I just love having a conversation with him and learning from him, sitting back and understanding the years of experience that's led him to where he is right now.

You see, Peyton Jones just wrote a book, Church Plantology. It's it's been called, at least by the Exponential Network, it's been called the modern church planting textbook. And so lots of insight coming off of years of experience as he's been planting multimodal churches, different types of churches. Now we talk about digital. He hasn't had a lot of digital experience, really spent a lot of time talking about it. We had a recent connection on a webinar which led to this podcast because like the idea is kind of wrapping around all our brains towards digital and melding together some of the things that he's talking about in Church Plantology, some of the things that we're talking about at Stadia. Like there's a connection here and some things that we're going to continue to explore.

But I love some of the lessons we're pulling out here. We're talking about following the Book of Acts. We're talking about learning best practices from the global church and figuring out how to apply that. These are conversations we've had too recently with Sam George and Justin Murph. And so you're starting to hear that, learn from the global, move that into the US. You're hearing that multiple times. Take a note of that.

Honestly, there's a big conversation here in this podcast where we're talking about co-vocational. And even in my own life, I've seen a number of friends who are on church staff move away from church staff in order to be more effective in engaging in ministry. And so we'll have more of those conversations in the days and weeks to come on that co-vocational side.

And so really, when you look at some of the stuff here that Peyton Jones is talking about in this Church Plantology book, he is laying out the foundation for what a church is going to look like in the future. And this podcast is really just kind of scratching that surface.

So we're bringing in Peyton Jones, obviously author of Church Plantology. Find the link in the show notes, grab a book. And myself, Jeff, with The Church Digital and with Stadia Church Planting, in a conversation that I'm calling simply put, Church Plantology: A Conversation with Peyton Jones.

Okay, everybody, here you go. But hey, just to kind of open up the conversation here, Church Plantology. Um, you know, is a book recently just released. Excited to talk about this here. Tell me about it.

Yeah, so Church Plantology is actually, I would say, the convergence or overlapping of three circles. So if you remember from being in philosophy class or like a Venn diagram where you find three circles overlapping where all three circles converge in the middle, it would be called the sweet spot. And I think for church planters, what's happened is there's been a lot of talk of church starting but not a lot of talk of church planting.

So church planting is what Paul did, where he infiltrated the community, he discipled, he did all the things that we're talking about today, whereas church starting is kind of like, hey, get a sexy logo, get a public venue, rent it out, hang up your shingle, you know, do some online marketing and hope a bunch of cheesed off Christians come from other churches. So a lot of people that start churches wonder, well, how come no one came to the best church ever started?

But you know, church planting by default is something that has been successful for thousands of years. It does the hard work of rolling up your sleeves and getting involved with people. So those three circles is we look at what the apostles did, because that's what church planting was for us. That's our first model is what Paul does in Acts. And most people graduating from seminary don't even know how to do that stuff.

So the second circle would be best global missionary practices today, things that missionaries are doing today that still work and still impact and transform communities. And then the third circle is kind of like a logical, well, if we see it in Scripture and missionaries are still doing it today, then obviously during movements of kingdom advancement, discipleship movements, movements of the Holy Spirit throughout church history like the Moravians, the Methodists under John Wesley and others, surely in church history we would see a return to these principles.

So where all three of those circles overlap, that's what we call a Church Plantology principle. And the tagline to that is, if you follow these principles, you could plant anytime, anywhere with anyone. Anytime, anywhere with anyone.

Um, did you, did this come out of where did this come from? Did it come out of experience? Did it come out of observations of others? Like, where are you pulling this insight from?

I love that. So that's a really good, that's the first time I've been asked that question in a lot of these interviews. Yes, really, really good question. Because um, part of me, I'm a punk, so part of me wants to go, my brain. But uh, but no, I was a missionary for twelve years. My wife and I, um, we, I would say that we retroactively or reverse engineered what was in Acts. We learned the hard way, right? Like most of us read the New Testament through our own lenses and our own backgrounds and experiences, and I think we miss a lot of what's actually there.

So I have learned now, like, you know, when you've got the epistles and all the greetings and preachers, God, I don't know how to do that, do I skip that on a Sunday? To me, that's solid gold because that's where Paul outlines his apostolic movements, what I call apostolic agility, um, his strategy really comes out in those farewells. You know, and hey, so-and-so, come here. If you put all that together, which the book Church Plantology does, um, we really unpack his strategy.

Even Jesus, Jesus was way more strategic than what we realized. He sent twelve on that mission. You know, hey, go into all the villages of Judea. Then he sends seventy-two for deeper gospel saturation. And we don't really look at why did he do this? And this is one of the things that the book is really trying to get to.

But yes, reverse engineering. I accidentally planted my first church in a Starbucks. I had accidentally planted a few before then. I'd been in Hungary planting, I'd been in New Zealand planting. Those were all trips or I was a part of a team. But when I started planting, it was accidentally. And the things that I did were public space ministry. You know, you read the Gospels, you read Acts, it all happens outside. You know, they're infiltrating people's space, which is what I love about the digital conversation is it's that same principle. It's saying, hey, what if instead of waiting for them to come to us, we invade them? And in this case, you're using a digital platform.

For me, I accidentally planted a Starbucks around a Dan Brown Da Vinci Code one night only discussion group that turned to two night, three night, and eventually became a church. So for me, as I start looking, I'm like, oh, that's kind of like what Paul did on Mars Hill, where he went into the synagogue to reason. Which again, there's a lot of crossover. Digital space, we can create these conversations through digital media and ministry. So that's what we kind of started to discover, to discover was being European missionaries. Okay, nothing we did in America was working over here, so we had to kind of discover and fumble and bumble our way into it like Kung Fu Panda.

But I'm also a great lover of church history. Um, I actually, you can't see it behind me, but I served at Lloyd Jones's church. His pulpit Bible sitting right up there, it's one of my trophies. You can check it for five ninety-nine, get a holy blessing. And uh, you know, five ninety-nine, that's a great, great bargain, Jeff. Um, just teasing. But the reality is, for me, I'm a great lover of what God has done through people meeting their challenges in the past. I think the story of church history is a story of the Holy Spirit breaking through in the church's limitations. And so that's what I want to see today. And I know your passion about the same thing.

I'm totally going to ask what the tattoo is on your arm. I just saw that on video. I saw it yesterday. We were, you know, so I want to ask about global best practices. We'll come back to the best practices, but what's that?

Okay, what's that one? You know this one, right? Do you know this one? Blurry, is that Avengers? Is that what is that?

No, this is uh, this is uh, the Hobbit. So that's uh, Lonely Mountain with Smaug. Yes, okay, all right, I'm with you. So my other book was Reaching the Unreached, Becoming Raiders of the Lost Arts. You'll see like an Indiana Jones. Yes, Zondervan did that. It was great. But um, I constantly use in ministry a lot of the stuff we ended up doing. I felt like Bilbo and Gandalf was trying to get me, you know, out of the Hobbit hole, like, hey, go out there and actually do the stuff that you read about in the Book of Acts.

So that's that tattoo. And then this one is the ultimate nerd tattoo right there. It looks awesome. Um, it is actually from the GI Joe cartoon of my childhood, and it is the Snake Eyes ninja clan. So I, uh, yes, it is. Yes, it is. And I, I actually, uh, I call it the kind of planning I do where I plant, raise up leadership, move on. I call that ninja planning. So a ninja plan on branded, you know, ninja clan branded forever. Very good.

And then ninja ministry, I've seen that, ministry ninja. I've seen that. Peyton Jones dot ninja is your website, right? I think I saw that too.

Yeah, actually it's uh, that's my old one. I got to disable that one. My new one's ministryninja.com. I need to, I need to probably take care of peyton jones dot ninja.

Hey, the ninjas ninja domain was open. I had to take it. Totally off topic. I don't know if you realize this, Cobra from GI Joe, the first round of Avengers, early on with Marvel, they were not doing Hydra. They were going to have Cobra be that military evil force. Honest to God, Google it. Cobra was supposed to be Hydra. And at the last second, they decided to keep it separated and to let Avengers have another villain, Hydra. All that, so instead of Madame Hydra, it could have been, um, you know, Cobra Commander. Anyway, this is not what we wanted to talk about, but you, that, that too took us there. So we have to, we have to focus on that. Don't edit this out. This is gold.

No, no, this is not edited. This is what we do on the podcast. We talk, talk crazy. This is why people listen in. What's what's the stupid stuff Jeff's going to talk about today?

Um, best global practices. Okay, so I'm looking at your little Venn diagram. I love them diagrams. Book of Acts. Oh, we talk about that all the time. Uh, you know, it's so the ecclesia, the gathering, that we rarely talk about the diaspora. But hey, it's all about that ecclesia, it's about that gathering, it's about that X2. Awesome. Um, you know, logical thought, I totally recognize that. And we're seeing your talk, you want you want the church to learn something from like Iran and Germany and China? You want me to learn from others? You want to be meek? I, I, no, like, how does that conversation go? Like, are people receptive to this idea when you talk about it?

I think people are beginning to realize that we have a lot of baggage. Like Alan Hirsch says, you know, we, the Western church has, you know, we're it's kind of like Jesus said, you know, it's hard, hard for uh, hard for a camel to go through the eye of the needle. You know, we've got all this baggage attached to us. And there's this kind of...

Of sense in which, like, you know, you study discipleship movements that, um, that happen. Uh, the statistics are it's never happened, um, you know, in the West over the last few hundred years. And the reason why they would say is because of our all of our ecclesiastical, um, baggage. And so if I go to Bangladesh, if I go to, um, different countries, if I go to Colombia, the amount of churches being planted on a daily basis, the you talk to leaders there. I was just there with a guy who, um, you know, probably millions of people will be in heaven because of the ministry he does in Latin America. I mean, he is a ninja extraordinaire. And you talk to these guys and you're like, I have no idea what I've done with my life. But they're in Colombian prisons. They're, they're, you know, you talk to people from the underground church, which I do because of some of the missionary organizations I work with, um, because I do church planter training. Um, you know, some of them will be like, "Hey, Peyton," and this, this reinforces the principles of the book. They, they basically say, "Hey, Peyton, we we started doing all this other stuff like discipleship and giving tools and translating tools into different languages, and now we found ourselves in the church planting business by default, by proxy, by accident. Um, we did not go into church planting." And so some of the conversations I'm having right now are with organizations that are, "Hey, we're fumbling our way through this, but church plants are happening because these other things are happening." That's what I would call church plantology principles. Um, and so they're doing the things that they did in the Book of Acts. And the way I put it in the book is, "First century practices will bring first century results." That's what these other groups have, that's what they've tagged and bagged. This. So, um, that's what that's what we're trying to get people to do is to embrace those principles.

Wow. You know, I mean, early on in just some of the research that I've done through the Church Digital, we were, we were, you know, observing Korea and the megachurch movement that that are happening there. Some of the largest churches in the planet are happening in Korea, and there's tons of lessons coming out of there. We look over to India, and a friend of mine, Mike Christian, used to be a missionary in India. He had planted, I don't know, something like 400 churches in India before India kicked them out for being too effective at church planting. They removed the passport literally. In his churches, it was like three or four people under a palm tree, like just mud hut, you know, very much kind of that micro approach. And what's interesting is, like, you know, we're seeing God do things globally in Korea. We're seeing God do things at a micro level and multiplication in India. Uh, and for us to say, "Is the church okay? The gig is not valid. The micro is not valid." It is God's doing incredible things there.

I was just going to say, like, you sparked me because one of the books that that I was tagging into was one that was from Africa. It's a church planting book, and they had listed as their places, venues to me, and one of them I kid you not was a baobab tree. And I just thought, "Man, this book is worth its weight in gold." And you know, in Tanzania, some of the planters that have contacted there, um, there's a guy there that runs a church planting multiplication training program, and it is all like in the bush. It's not, it's not like they do gather together and then he sends them out like Jesus sent the 72. And then their final exam for this like year-long program is to plant a church that has planted a church. And obviously, like I said, they don't have all the baggage. These are communities of believers, but they've trained like Paul. On average, Paul spent three to four months in one place, but he left people behind. And so they're trying to rediscover those first century tactics like Paul and Galatia. He didn't leave people behind on his first missionary journey. It was just him, Barnabas, and John Mark. And so a year later, he goes back to Antioch. He's back doing ministry in Antioch for about a year. One morning, he reads his newspaper and spits his coffee out because he gets his mail and it says, "Hey, they're in heresy now." You know, and he goes, "Wait a second." So on his second missionary journey, he goes back there and starts, you know, putting in new strategies. Like, now I got to leave people behind, which means I got to pick up guys like Timothy and Silas and train them along the way and Titus. And then play leapfrog. You plant with me, you watch me, you go to the next one, then I leave you behind. And so retapping into those strategies is no joke because everybody wants to go faster in multiplication. And you know, but we also want to be safe. And so trying to learn that balance. And, and I, I would say that Paul failed forward if you really read the Book of Acts. So it's encouraging for us. But sorry, man, I went off on my own tangent. But, uh, but you just sparked me with when you're talking about different planters and stuff. It, it's fascinating, and I love it.

Totally. And, and I'm imagining some of these lessons, you know, that we, we in the Western Hemisphere that we're supposed to learn looking at the global church. I would imagine that would open up like a plethora of these different options, uh, models, strategies. Uh, you know, what, what does, you know, Casey, underground, mutual friends, Rob Wagner. Rob's going to be on the podcast in in a couple weeks. Rob's doing a lot of work towards micro and seeing that micro church work not only in Kansas City, but he's, I mean, literally creating, I don't know if disciples is the right word, but the, the idea of kind of mirroring that model across the planet. We're seeing through Stadia, we're seeing micro church networks, not not one church, but a network, a multiplication, a disciple-making process getting started in cities across the country. Um, you know, one of the one of the things that I get blessed with is the ability to to start planting digital-only churches, churches that only work in digital space. And I've, I've told this story before. Um, there was a, there's one, a church planter, uh, who's, uh, Muslim-converted Muslim, obviously he's a Christian pastor now, church planter through Stadia. And I was having a conversation with him, I don't know, maybe a month ago. And, uh, he says to me, "All right, I tell him about all this cool digital-only expression at church, all this bleeding-edge stuff that that Stadia is doing." And he just stops, pauses, and looks at me and says, "Hey, Jeff, you know who's really good at, uh, at digital church? Who's like doing phenomenal stuff? And you need to go learn from them." And hungrily, I lean in, and I'm like, "Tell me, tell me. I want to hear. Like, introduce, can you introduce me to him? Who is it?" And his response was, "Every pastor in Iran, because digital is the only thing they have." And so you're trying to prove that something is possible here in the Western Hemisphere. In Iran, that's like the ABCs. This is basic to them because their only strategy is satellite broadcasting stuff in and trying to connect people to WhatsApp. And that's how they disciple and evangelize and grow. It's through satellite broadcast to TVs and WhatsApp. And it's like, "Oh my gosh, how do, how do I learn? How can I start to learn from what they're doing? And how can that help?" And so we're seeing these different models pop up. Like, how, how does that look for, for the future of the church? Your, your plantology ideology and the systems, how is it breathing life into these new models of church?

I love it. I love that you mentioned that because, um, years ago talking with some Iraqi planters where they had started off with like 25 people and they were in the thousands. But it was, they had to move around from apartment block to apartment block. And if you've ever been to the Middle East and some of these, uh, countries that are close to the gospel, you'll know that there's a lot of high-rise apartment buildings everywhere. And so they had two-stage birthday parties that met in small little gatherings. And we would, we would call that microchurch. I mean, a lot of what we did would now be called microchurch in Europe. Um, a crowded house, years ago, with, I'm trying to remember his name, Steve, the guy who led Acts 29 there. I can't remember his name. But for years, they, they did, you know, living rooms and missional communities. But, but no one knew what to call it back then. That, that again, it reinforces what you're saying about these are principles that that the church met in temple courts and house to house. And so the microchurch, I always tell people, microchurch is not a church model. It's actually a function. Any church, you could be a traditional high church Anglican congregation and still release your people to function in microchurches throughout the city, um, you know, during the week. That's that's something that that would be very much, I mean, all of the, the, uh, the microchurches have this process of centralization and decentralization, which we see in Acts chapter 5, verse 42. But that they met daily in the temple courts and house to house. That's a microchurch movement. And so we want to continue to see these principles.

I, one, one of the reasons that the, the front of the book looks like a high school science textbook, there's a bit tongue-in-cheek in that. Um, when you get to know me and I think you already do, Jeff, a little bit, I think it's deep calling to deep here. We're, we're a bit punkish and corny and, and you know, tongue-in-cheek about stuff. We laugh a lot. But you know, the, the reason why is that these science, I believe that there's a science. I, I'm not a methods guy. So this is what I love about digital space. You can take the principles. Principles are something you can adapt. So when it says the art and science, the science is the principles. The art is how you apply it, right? Wherever you go. So that's what what I love about how the Holy Spirit told us about church in the Book of Acts. He doesn't give us a prescription. He gives us a description. We mine those principles out, and we go, "Okay, these are things that that I can apply. These, these principles, not methods. Methods are finite and fixed, but principles are things that you take and apply in in all different things." Think of like a medical doctor. You train in what they call first principles. So when you come to a disease, you apply those first principles of how the body works, and that tells you, "Okay, this is the prescription." So the prescription is the art part, right? The principles are the, are the guiding, the, you know, just what you're gonna hold on to and adapt. But, um, but yeah, I love seeing all of these. Um, like I said, the, the science textbook in there is that we are rediscovering. That's what scientists do, right? Um, inventors make new things. I'm not smart enough to be an inventor. I can't invent anything on mission that hasn't already been devised by the Holy Spirit. But like Newton said, "I am thinking God's thoughts after him." We are rediscovering what's always been there in the Book of Acts, what's occurred through church history. But again, it's about having our lenses change.

Oh my gosh, like when the Book of Acts finally cracked open to me, it was because I was a missionary reading a missionary book written by missionaries. It took me becoming a missionary to actually understand it. One, one of the guys I think goes Roland Allen, that I quote in chapter one of the book, he says the missionary reads a different version of the Bible than anyone else because you actually are connecting with what and how and why it was written. When you understand the whole New Testament was written in the context of church planting, not about church planting, but it was written by church planters in a context of church planting, the whole book. It's like you go from two dimension to three dimensions. You start seeing everything a little bit different. And I...

I think our generation has really leaned into that with the missional movement. But I think there's more. Yeah, I think there's a—what's fascinating, you're talking about principles, not a map. And I think COVID actually did a really good favor to the church because all the playbooks, all the maps got thrown away March 16th, 2020. Like, everything went in the trash. And we, the church, were called to innovate, figure something out. I mean, guys like me, I've been doing digital ministry for twenty years, so like this is not a surprise for me. Let's go, let's figure it out.

Now, guys like me are few and far between. I'd actually had a conversation back in 2019 with the lead pastor, and I guesstimated that in 2019 there were probably twenty-five full-time digital pastors in America where that was the only thing they did. Oftentimes, digital pastors do, like, you know, social media, website design—like, it's multiple. But my only job is to shepherd and care for people. It was not a lot of people in the grand scheme of things. And so obviously there's been pivots, and we're understanding digital now. And what's unfortunate is, I think—and this is not a church planning thing, sorry for the tirade here—but I think there's this, no, I try. This is how I interview. Yes, just try to go back to the playbook. Let's go back to February 2020. February 2020 was so great. We could side hug people. We could high-five. We could invite the kids over and swim in the pool. Like, this is what we want to get back to. This is where the church thrives when we can ecclesia, we can gather together. And unfortunately, Gallup tells us like we're at a twenty-year decline in February 2020.

I don't know if you know these stats, but at, you know, February 20—or excuse me, um, somewhere in 2021, we're at forty-seven. February 2021, Gallup released forty-seven percent of Americans are now attending some form of an organized religion—church, not, I mean, this is American says Christianity. This is mosque. This is Jewish temple. So I just did a podcast for somebody else, and they referenced a Barnes that saying twenty-five percent of Americans are now involved in church. That's had a decline at a massive level going back twenty years. In 1999, the number of people that were involved in organized religion was seventy-two percent, and we've gone from seventy-two to forty-seven. Twenty-five percent is Christians. And we've got a mess. But no, let's go back to February 2020. Let's play that playbook again. We can keep doing side hugs and we'll figure out how to do the picnics again. And so this way of like learning from a global perspective, like I just want to sit back and marvel because it's like there are lessons there, but we need to be humble and meek enough to actually learn it, you know?

I have a section in chapter one actually in the book where you talked about maps, and I mentioned that Edward Cornish—he wrote a book called Futuring, and it's trying to predict what's happened in the past, like things like the Spanish influenza, to try to predict what happens. And what he says is we are ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent ignorant of what comes. But the whole practice of futuring is to help us come out with, hey, what would we do in this? So looking at that with the church, I mean, we can't say what's coming next, right? Like something else is going to come and it's going to throw the church off again. I would say in the sixties, the sexual revolution absolutely put the church to bed, and it didn't know what to do with that. And in each case, the church keeps getting, you know, that we're always late to the party, right? In times where even like Jesus said, you know, you can predict the sky, you can tell with the weather, but you can't, you don't know the signs of the times. And I think that to a certain degree, there's a part. I always feel like when a missionary comes back from the field, there's something timeless in missionaries like Roland Allen, Jim Peterson, Newbigin—these missiologists. They come back, and I think the reason is they've been so used to analyzing the culture that they're in that when they come back, they become church reformers because they can't stop analyzing the culture. And now that they've been on mission, they're seeing the disconnect between the mission of the church and the structure and form and function of the church.

And so in this book, what I talk about is a practice. I'll just read you a quick quote here about maps because I say, yet God did not leave us without a map, so to speak. Likening the practice of navigating an uncharted future to the famous explorers of the past, Cornish describes the poor maps and tools that some of the most famous exploration expeditions had to work from, describing the crude, vague, and untrustworthy maps that Captain Lewis of the famed Lewis and Clark Expedition studied. He writes, at the time, maps had almost no information about most of the territory the expedition would be exploring. But whatever there was, Lewis got hold of it. By the time the expedition set out, now, like in this, to what happened in the last year, right? He knew all there was to know about the Missouri River and what lay west of it. This error-prone knowledge enabled Lewis to make excellent preparations for the journey. With the great result that Lewis and Clark Expedition became one of the greatest crimes of American history. He concludes, use poor information when necessary. Acts may at times look like a crude map. Church history and the periods of the kingdom advancement, such as the evangelical awakening under Wesley or the Jesus Movement, may at times see crude, naive, and primitive. Every generation suffers from what Lloyd Jones calls chronological snobbery—the view that subsequent generations are superior to their predecessors. But it is important to remember with humility that although they have their collective blind spots, other generations have gotten right what we have gotten wrong. For example, Lewis and Clark did not possess the cloud-based satellite maps that we possess in our mobile phones. Even if we could have delivered such technology to them prior to their journey without roads or airplanes, they still would have to navigate the journey personally, climbing ice sheets in the Rocky Mountains, braving native hostility, and evading grizzly bears. We have superior technology, yet we ourselves today still could not traverse the wild country as skillfully because we are not the explorers they were. A phone in the hand is no substitute for grit on the ground. Having the information on a satellite map would not be enough to open the transcontinental passage alone. We may have better maps, but we are not better pioneers.

So when you think about that, like these guys were pioneers, and I think that's the emphasis in this digital challenge that we have. Like, talking fidget, is nobody has a map for this. Nobody has a map. We have the principles, which might seem like crude maps, but we have to be the pioneers now going forward, taking what we have. So guys like you that are going into the fidget space and saying, hey, guys, this is the new frontier, this is the new pioneer—that's what we have to look at. Is we going to be bold enough and brave enough to take the principles, not a map, but a crude map, you know, at best, that helps us prepare? And can we apply what the apostles knew to the challenge in front of us today, like Wesley did in his day, like the Moravians did in their day? I mean, you, the list just goes on and on, right?

Yeah, how do you convince people to follow you? Like, what's interesting is, I mean, like, let's just draw it out. Like, I've had tons of, I've got tons of crazy ideas. There are so many crazy ideas coming out of me. The Stadia team literally, they're like, Jeff, filter it back. Like, when a crazy idea gets crazy and executable, let's talk. But sometimes, I mean, it's just crazy. It's okay. I'll call myself out. I think the apostolics, um, they have this gift of faith. So like, you know how, like, in Romans, Paul talks about the gift of faith? Um, I don't think that's like some weird prosperity gift of faith, give me money, yada yada. That it has to do with mission. So imagine Paul, right? There was something about Paul that was inspiring the people around him because he did the stuff he talked about. In fact, um, Paul has like scathing, you know, he calls the false teachers idol talkers, right? He's basically saying, here, you talk a bunch, but you don't do anything. And I think that what happens with anything, even you in digital space, like you have to just go do it. And when people just see you going and doing this crazy stuff, the people that follow you are the people that see that faith, and it's somehow contagious. And so it's like that drunk dancing guy video, that TED Talk. Like, your first followers, they're golden because they're the ones that go, oh, cool, you know? And they give, as the TED talker says, they give legitimacy to your craziness, right? Namaste. The crazy in me recognizes and bows to the crazy in you, and then we go on and do the crazy dance, and then we start a movement.

And I think that that is probably, um, for me, I, this is kind of a crazy thing. When I church plant, I don't like a lot of Christians with me because usually I'm doing very frontline type of stuff that, um, requires a lot of interaction, a lot of discussion. And if you drown out the voices of unchurched people, I've got two whole chapters in the book which would definitely apply to digital, but two whole chapters that have to do with leading conversations. Like, I've got open mic night in the gay coffee house. That was one of the things we did in urban Long Beach in the rainbow district. Then I've got, um, you know, what it was like to lead a collegiate discussion group, leading them to Christ over starting with on night one, does God have a sense of humor? Two, leading that, um, Starbucks book discussion group. I've got two whole chapters because I'm convinced, I know you believe. You said something. You and I were on a webinar yesterday where you made this statement, and that was fascinating. The whole webinar to me, I was like, I'm here to learn. I'm not here to teach. But what I loved was, you know, you said on in everything I do, it's to get people to that first discussion. I was like, yes, that's exactly it. So that whole idea of having those discussions, um, is to me so crucial.

That's beautiful. Well, I mean, you set me up at a webinar. You said I was smart, so like that was the perfect thing to say. Always butter up the host. Yeah, but butter up, suck up as much as possible. But I mean, it was interesting. He's just coming off that webinar yesterday. I just come off a conversation with our friends at Glue, and they, we were talking about, hey, what are we learning? And so my friends over there were like, hey, so here's some interesting stats that we're learning from some argument of our key holder churches that they're seeing that if a person makes a solid can and makes two solid connections within the first sixteen weeks, they're going to stay connected into the organization. Now, that that's like one of them is a service. One could be giving. One could be small groups. One could be serving. But if if a person just has one connection, just serving or just small groups, whatever, just a single connection within sixteen weeks, they're eighty percent likely or something to disconnect. Similarly, if if a new person is shares something about the church, maybe it's a social media graphic, maybe it's a text invite, an invite card, where there's something where it's a, I'm actually sharing about Jesus, I'm a new Christian sharing about Jesus, or, um, sharing about the church, if they do that within three months, um, they'll do it again and again and again. It's part of the DNA. If they don't do that within—

The first three months of being a church or being a Christian, they're not going to do it. It's not established in part of that DNA, and there's like an eighty something percent chance that they'll never actually get there. And when we look at some of the stats now where it's like if we're going to be effective in reaching people, Barna has shared some of these thoughts. Like it's not our services. The services are no longer the evangelism center. Eighty percent of people called to Christ don't care about it. It's training up people to have those conversations. And it's, you know, and this even gets towards some of the thing looking at the global church because the global church is growing relationally. It's growing in that one-to-one. Digital church's physical church is growing in that one-to-one relational thing, and that's where people are. So like we need to start thinking that way. And it's different models of church. Even like the relational aspects of a microchurch, the relational aspects of a physical church, of a digital only church, the relational aspects of a guy that's doing workplace ministry that's working, that's realizing he's more effective as a minister. I've heard some of those stories lately. Guys that are backing off of full-time at church staff, quitting their jobs or even going part-time just because they want to get more out in the world to actually build these relationships to do ministry. Peyton, that was you. Tell me some of that story.

Yeah, so I actually I've been everything from a barista. I was a barista when I started that church. Now I was triple professional. I've been a firefighter and an RN. I mean, you know, I have an MA in theology. I don't present as that kind of guy, I suppose, but you know, it's funny because I was fully supported. Like my career, I started mega church. I had a very coveted position in Huntington Beach, was leading a mega church in the nineties, very young. I had a preaching gift that far exceeded my maturity level, and God knew that and God was calling me off to the mission field. So I kind of walked away from all of that years ago. But I found my, that's how I ended up at Lloyd Jones's church as the evangelist, and I was supported by my home church, fully supported for about a year and a half. And then 9/11 hit. So I was overseas when that happened, working in the dockside, you know, steel working town of Port Talbot, Wales, which again I was at Lloyd Jones's church there, and it was a rough place. So like I tell people, like right there, that's not a wrinkle. The rest is wrinkles. That's a scar from when a guy put me down in the street and beat me into unconsciousness, put me in the hospital. Um, so you know, it was a rough place, and that was only like ten weeks in that town. And I used to go out and film people and talk to them about the gospel on Friday nights, and people in the church are like, "Dude, you're not doing that, are you?" And I'm like, "Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna do that." And I wasn't obnoxious. I didn't get beat up because of obnoxious gospel presentations. That's a whole another story. But the thing is is that I was for a year trying to do all of the evangelism with no fruit, right? Like zero fruit. All the hard stuff, all the crappy stuff, all the stuff nobody wants to do, I did it, and I hated it. I didn't like doing that kind of evangelism any more than anyone else, right? It was like, "Well, they're calling me the evangelist. I better go out and do this stuff." And um, but again, I hadn't rediscovered the ways that Paul was doing things yet. And um, and I don't mean like open air preaching, you know, he did that very little. We tend to think that's what he did all throughout Acts. That's actually not what he did. The majority, he entered discussions. He entered the synagogue as was his custom and reasoned with the Jews. He was more conversational evangelism. Athens was kind of like a one-off, right? So when I ended up having 9/11 hit, my support dropped in half, and I couldn't pay my bills. And so I went to work in the steel. Well, actually not the steel works, a different factory, but with a huge chunk of the population that was there. It was an easy job. Manpower hired me, and within a few weeks, like six weeks, three people had come to faith on the assembly line. And I went from there to be a firefighter because of my RN background. I went from there to be a clinical troubleshooter. There right now are probably hundreds of people as a result of that because there was a thing called the housing consortium with like eight hundred people with special needs, and they ran this company. Ran South Wales. Soon as we got one of the heads of one of those homes saved, um, a chain reaction just started and started moving throughout the whole movement. They started leading their friends to Christ. Other people that ran homes started bringing the patients. Some of them started coming to faith. It was nuts. And just, you know, for me, I learned a lesson then because I remember being on the assembly line early on just going, "I'm meeting more people by Monday lunch than I did full time in a week as a pastor." And that changed everything for me. It was a no-brainer. So I kept working with my hands. In fact, when I was planting churches, the elders of the church plants were like, "We need to pay you," and I'm like, "No, I don't want that. Don't pay me right now." Eventually I would go in and out of full time, but usually every church that I planted, it's usually my final year before I'm ready to move on that I finally take it. And that's so I can reproduce myself. And that's the quote Hugh Halter, who said, "If you want to be full-time, the New Testament model is to reproduce yourself. That's why you're full time." And so that's what I did.

You know, I've been interested in the co-vocational model. We've been talking a little bit about it on the past with Jared and Angie Hughes, who basically have, excuse me, Jared and Angie Hughes, uh, who have running a digital only church called Hope City Church. They're co-vocational. I want to say their church is like fifteen, sixteen thousand. It's one of the largest digital only churches in the Western Hemisphere, and it's on, um, in their, their both of them, they're co-vocational co-pastors. Give me some, like, I've literally have a friend of mine, Radio Armist, co-host here with the Church Digital on the podcast regularly. He just stepped down from Christ Hillary at Miami. He's going back to, uh, to school. He's got an MDiv. He's going back to school to learn how to be a medical technician. His mission field, he feels called to the hospital. We're going to talk about her on the podcast later. I don't want to like out-ray, but it's been announced at this point and it's on social. Um, talk to me a little bit about people that are, give some advice because co-vocational is at my heart. And when I look at budgeting here, digital only churches, we're advising be co-vocational. And because you're reaching a different type of person that may not be funding this thing the way that you're thinking, talk about that co-vocation. I'll talk about that workplace a little bit.

It's so funny you ask that because when I work with North American Mission Board, Mac Lake and I and two other guys, we really kind of helped build this whole cadillac of training. Most of it was Max, but Mack was like, "Bring this to it," because he goes, "Look, when we first built this, it was launch large stuff. He goes, ninety percent of planters out there are bivocational." So what we did was, um, we, you know, I kind of took from my own experience when I was at Starbucks. I'll just give you a quick little tidbit here. When I was at Starbucks, I made minimum wage. I worked a forty-hour week, and I worked, um, but I saw everybody like in a country it rains every day that borders books. May they rest in peace. Had a Starbucks in it. That's when I launched, accidentally, the church out of. I was reaching so many people in my community by being a central figure in that hub. So, but, and what I'll tell people is if I had a bar graph, which in my training I have these little bar graphs, I have minimum wage, maximum hours invested, and maximum reach. So that's okay, but it was hard to pay all my bills on minimum wage. Now remember, I was a triple professional, so I was finishing up my MA, it was Starbucks, it was a job, and I think too much about it. But then my church planting partner, not my wife, but the one I wasn't married to, my other church planting partner, um, ended up saying, uh, "Hey, I'm a window cleaner. Come work for me two days a week. You'll make double to triple what you make." So imagine this now on a bar graph. I've got double to triple what I made before. So maximum income. Then the third, the second column was time investment. Two days a week, that meant now I'm so minimum time investment. "Hey, come on, more money for less time. I'll take it." But I mean, exposure to my community off the charts. And here's why. When you're a window cleaner, real estate agent, there's so many different jobs like this. I literally had an excuse to knock on every single door in my city because in the country it rains every day. Window cleaners are very busy. And so you don't think that, but when it rains a bunch, your windows get dirty faster. So I literally was knocking. I literally led people to Christ in the church I was planting because I was their window cleaner. In fact, jokingly, years later, I asked one guy, "Hey, write me a review as a, you know, a church planter, yadda yadda," and he's now in leadership somewhere else. But he got saved during that time, and he wrote, "Pink news, best window cleaner I ever had. Sorry, he's full-time in ministry." So you know, the thing is is that, um, that right there is huge. And so I would always say to people, um, like same thing. You're making awesome money. You're a forklift driver, but you're in the back of a warehouse, you know, interacting with a guy named Bob and a guy named Gary, and maybe you lead them to Christ. Maybe they lead a bunch of people to Christ. But that's not going to give you the exposure. So to me, there are always those three factors that for bivocational guys, uh, you need to juggle. And of course, um, I would be remiss to not throw Brad Briscoe out there, who, um, Brad Briscoe, just a genius in this stuff. Um, definitely check out his books. He's got one called "Co-vocational." He's got a Facebook group on that. He's really good. Hugh Halter has a book on bivocational. My book, "Church Plantology," has two chapters on this because what I lay out in here is something that maybe adds to the conversation. And that's what I tried to do with the book. I tried to add to the conversation, not just rehash what everybody else says, build off that, maybe add some new things. So like, um, one of the things I talk about is Paul's multi-source income model. So he had a multi-variable source income. He had, um, he occasionally raised funds. He talks about that, and I lay those scriptures out there. He goes, "Hey, need some money to get, I need you, Philippians chapter four, to get me on where I'm going next." Right? Second Corinthians chapter ten, he's got all these passages where he says, "I'm coming, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask for money from you. This in the collection for the poor Christians of Jerusalem. This is for you to further my ministry. I took nothing from you when I was there, but now I need you to pay it forward for the next group of people I'm going to." So Paul did raise funds. So I've always had a fundraising component to it, um, to what I do. So if you went to newberrynetwork.org and you're like, "I want to fund Peyton Jones," that is there for you. Um, but then also I worked with my hands. I still work with my hands. I work other jobs. I work for something called throughtheword.org, which is a Bible chapter summary of every job. That's how I pay the bills. And then lastly, if I'm planting, I have a scale for multiplication, like a system that's one.

Of the other things is church multiplication bottlenecks behind a minister's or leader's salary. So I've got a system hardwired into the book of how I made it so I could leave churches, be a ninja planner and move on. So in that, I would have the church would pay me a set amount. Like I said, my final year I would be full-time and that would taper off as I multiplied. But we don't really have time to go into it here, but it's kind of what I think Paul used with these three sources of income. And so I encourage planters to not just go bivocational, not just get paid by the church. Mission dictates how I'll do that. So again, using a bar graph: is it the church that's going to pay me more right now? Depends on what the mission dictates. Is it my support that's going to pay me a little bit more for the first thing? Depends on what the mission dictates. Is it me working with my hands full-time? And then these other two are supplemental. Depends on what the mission dictates. So to me, as you go through Churchplantology, I think it's the same with Paul. Paul let the mission dictate where he took. So I would say there was a bar graph, and as you follow Paul's trajectory in the New Testament, there's sometimes he's taking more from one and one from the other, and that's based on what the mission was at hand.

So when he goes to Ephesus and he creates this old church planning church planter factory where the seven churches of Asia are planted out of Ephesus during those three years, he stays there. He was pretty much taking support during that time. He was living off of the ministry, was not working with his hands at that time. That's beautiful. Um, sorry, that was a lot.

Yeah, my wife just had a heart attack just hearing that. Um, but that is the amount. I'm just thinking the amount of humility to say, you know, I'm going to regulate my paycheck based on the season of where God is. Um, so some seasons I'm gonna, I've never occurred to me to wash windows, to like meet people. So for a season I'm gonna wash windows. For a season I'm gonna, you know, that worst case scenario, I'm gonna be the barista and I'll get huge exposure, but I gotta work lots of hours and make, you know, less than ten an hour. There's just so much humility and faith that's involved in that to kind of walk through and do something like that just to let God, you know, almost as you're talking about, day by day, deny self, take up the cross and follow. I mean, you're painting a picture that honestly a lot of pastors may have forgotten. Honestly, and so thank you even for that reminder.

No, and it's great because one fringe benefit to it, Jeff, is you know, when I was planting churches again, I was planting primarily with unbelievers. And then when believers would be like, hey, you know, you're supposed to be my pastor, so I'd be like, hey, I don't work for you, man. I don't, yes, I mean, I, but you know, hey, I work a full-time job like you and I'm doing the best I can to hobble this together. And I would always have a team because you can't be bivocational without a team. This whole book is team planting. But it takes the weight off. Between that, you people kind of, and it sounded cold that some of you was like, hey, I got a marriage and I got a family and I got a full-time job. And yes, you're right, your needs are important, but people kind of get it when they realize, oh, so you're not like my other pastor that, you know, I wonder what he did all day, but you actually have. And it would cause them to go, oh, and of course the church models that we would set up with microchurch, that's body on body ministry anyways. So people coming from other churches, they would get kind of reprogrammed a bit like, you know, oh, so you're just a normal dude like me? Yeah, I'm just a normal dude like you. I'm leaning on Jesus like everyone else. In fact, my job is really just to equip you, right? I'm a terrible shepherd, by the way. I'm apostolic. So I'm the mobilizer. I'm learning you're talking about, you know, taking the money to multiply the self, and then, like, you're literally working yourself out of a job. But for that season when you're multiplying, you're saving up the money because you're about ready to leave and you're gonna have nothing, so you could have something in the bank, which makes sense from a ministry perspective, you know, it challenges, you know, some honestly Western civilization philosophy. But I'm not saying Western civilization is right either. So let's do this. As we're wrapping up here now, we're, you know, I'm a digital church guy. We didn't talk too much about digital church. Your breadth of planting, you know, and obviously with the Churchplantology, literally like the modern textbook for planting, not just digital church but really in any model of church, is huge. Looking forward to that. You know, once again, check out the show notes. We'll have a link to it in there. But I did have, you know, this question. Um, and so I'm gonna set you up to be negative here, but you're learning digital church. Like, we've had some kind of preliminary conversations. I'm not looking for expertise here. What challenges do we have to face? You're understanding multiple models. You're understanding kind of like what the church defined is. I'm not looking for the expertise because I don't know that your breadth in that covers it, but give me some negative. Like, take, put on the punching gloves, take some shots here. What do we need to overcome in the digital space?

Well, and what I definitely I can answer that. Let me say first off that I literally, you guys, yesterday I ended up on that webinar panel wondering why am I here? Of course, the stuff I'm doing through the Word, we're working all over the world to create digital discipleship tools. So maybe I don't know, or maybe just somebody was being kind to have me on there. But you guys got my gears turning so much yesterday that I was going nuts. It was everything I could do not to say like, and I was like, nope, you're not gonna say this. You gotta, I gotta go away and process. So the stuff you guys were popping off there was such a synergy between what I was saying in the book and where you guys were at. I was so encouraged. I went, well, you guys just, it was like Lion, Witch in the Wardrobe. I just saw the wardrobe open. I see Narnia on the other side of this thing. So that was rad for me.

But the challenges, to answer your question, that I see are, as we go digital, it's the same thing with analog. That all these pastors, when they suddenly realize they could do a Zoom meeting, it's like they've stopped and said, that's enough, you know? Now I can get online offerings really well and I can run the show digitally. I'm good, right? Butts and bucks, man. Now I just got eyeballs and credit cards, right? It's just a digital form of the metrics they're using before, which you and I would agree is not good enough. That's just not good enough. And so what, where I can see the challenges is basically two things. Number one, from the digital side of church, we've got to really dig down into how do we recover the interactivity that the early church had? If there's thirty-two one and others, we know those didn't happen staring at the back of each other's heads in rows. We know that they ate together. We know that the spiritual gifts are practiced. Now I've got something in the book about that on an analog where we would sit in half circles so that discussions could happen. People got discipled in those. People got prayed for on those. People learned to evangelize in those. So all of the discipleship that I was hopefully trying to train them and model for them was happening on Sundays just simply because of simple ways that we re-orchestrate a service and set up the geography of the room, right? Just those few simple tweaks and people were interacting.

Um, so I think interactivity. How are we going to get people to use their gifts online? And I don't mean the weird gifts. I mean just the gifts of encouragement, the gift of teaching. How are we going to get people interactive? This next generation that's digital, they are all about interactivity. They watch a movie, this movie is lame. This cupcake, look at it on Instagram. How do we leverage that? Because I believe that the church is wired to be more interactive. Like this hunger for community that COVID really clicked into and highlighted, the church is perfectly wired for to meet that need. So if the church can enter that digital space and really wrestle with what does it mean to be interactive in a digital space, that's huge. If we conquer that, I think ninety percent of the church's problems go away because it leads to what I'm actually getting to, which is releasing every believer and activating them and deploying them in their gifts. I don't care who you are. When your spiritual gifts are activated, you immediately become evangelistic.

So that, and then secondly, um, this is where my mind, because I'm apostolic, for me it's all about frontiers. It's all about going where the unchurched are and mobilizing the church to follow. It's not about come to where I'm at. Um, digitally, so yesterday you guys got me thinking so much that my mind apostolically, and that's what the little A, it just means missionary if you're hung up on that. I don't have superpowers. Um, it's the New Testament word apostolos for missionary, sent one. So for me, going well, I'm sent to people outside of church. I'm on the periphery. I'm thinking now, how do I leverage digital space not for church but for mission? You mentioned Iran. That's what they're doing. How do I leverage that? Um, and I think there's an open door that I haven't, I think I need to go through the wardrobe and have tea with Mr. Tumnus. That's what I think is happening right now through talking with you guys yesterday, but leveraging creative, innovative, the what I've, all the stuff I've done on the ground discussion-wise, leveraging that out there in digital space. How do we bring those things together? That I couldn't stop thinking about it after our webinar yesterday.

Awesome. Love, love that. That was inspirational. Love, you know, some of this insight, the heart of a digital church. We talk about it all the time, and actually I stole this language from Jay Crandall over at Saddleback. Hey, Jay, I love Jane. Yeah, I love Jay. Jay's great. It's online to offline. The gospel that we hear in our online world, it has to influence it, has to affect us in our offline relationships. Otherwise, we're creating consumers. And so because the consumer of a product is somebody who's digesting something but not putting action on it, the action is what gets more towards that creating that missionary. And so your words of equipping and releasing, you know, like you said, and you're activating, I love that word activation. We need to use that more as a church because really that's the heart of this. It's not one guy exuding a spiritual gift behind a pulpit for thousands. It's getting thousands to exude their spiritual gift to ten and releasing them to go do that and whatever that context looks like, physically and or digitally. So that was some awesome insight. We're gonna make you a digital guy sooner or later. We're gonna get you there either way.

Yeah, I think you are making me a digital guy. I think you are, honestly. I love this conversation. This is great. The transformation's happening. You witnessed it here.

Well said there. So hey, we're gonna land the plane. Thank you for this. Any closing thoughts, Peyton, as we're wrapping up here? Um, no, not really. Just, uh, you know, thanks for this.

Having me, man. Like I said, there is a bit of a transformation happening and you, your conversation yesterday has contributed to that. I'm going to be—you got to check in with me and kind of say, "Hey, Peyton, what's kicking around?" because this is going to be something I'm going to be thinking about for my foreseeable future. I have ideas, but yeah, I'm going to be processing and praying this through. Ideas get scary around me, so don't—don't—don't. If you share them with me, I'm going to get excited and then all of a sudden it's happening. You're like, "Whoa, that escalated really quickly."

So hey, Peyton, thanks for jumping on here. Check out the book—Church Plantology, right? Yeah, that's it. I'm seeing the picture in the background. Check out the book. We got the link in the show notes with that. So Peyton, sir, thank you for the time, for Peyton. This is Jeff with the Church Digital and with Stadia Church Planting. Thanks for jumping on the podcast here. We'll see you next time on the show. You have a good day.