EP130: Pastor SouZy - Understanding the Twitch, Streaming, Video Game Culture

All right, I'm going to tell you right now. I'm going to tell you the mind-blowing moment for me in the first ten seconds of this podcast. The average age of a video hardcore video gamer in America is thirty-three years old. Now I'm forty-three. I'm ten years away from that. So don't hear any judgment in this, but I don't understand how a thirty-three-year-old person in the age and stage of life that they are actually has time to sit down and be a hardcore video gamer. Like, I remember me at thirty-three, life was crazy. Ministry, running businesses. It was not, dude, I want to sit down and play Halo or, you know, for me it was actually probably GoldenEye on Nintendo 64. That was the last game that I was probably really hardcore on. And so, but that was, oh my gosh, that was like twenty years ago. I was in my twenties. I wasn't in my thirties. And so it's fascinating for me, honestly. Right now, I don't—a confession hour here on the show—I don't understand the video game culture. And so I wanted to solve that. So I went and I met a new friend. I met Pastor Susie Matt Souza from God Squad. So it's a digital-only church that exists on Twitch. It's probably one of the oldest Twitch churches as near as I can tell. But Pastor Susie has a passion to be the church for video gamers, and he understands that video game culture. He understands that Twitch culture. He understands how to engage with people on Discord, and these are all things that I'm like, "Pastor Susie, tell me. Teach me. I want to learn here. How you're effectively engaging with people?" And maybe, maybe even there's lessons for other church planters and other churches that are out there on how to better tap in and engage to effectively reach this video game culture that is so allergic to the gospel right now. And so we brought in this conversation Pastor Susie from God Squad. We also brought in Mark Lutz, who's the lead pastor of recently launched Lux Digital Church, another digital-only church that's effectively not being a church for video gamers. Mark was very clear on this. He wants to be a church of video gamers. And so doing some awesome things there. Brought these two guys in, man. Let's just sit back and learn something and better figure out how we, the church, can engage in this culture. How can we maybe even start streaming? What does it look like to be a church that is effectively reaching this video game culture? Pastor Susie, Pastor Mark Lutz, and myself, Jeff, with the Church Digital in Stadia Church Planning, in a conversation that I'm simply calling Twitch Streaming Community in the Video Game Culture.

Okay, everybody, here you go. Matt, let me start off with you. I would love to learn more about video game church, God Squad. What is it exactly that you guys are doing there through God Squad?

So we have set on a very, very interesting mission to really reach a very specific group of people to reach gamers. And so God Squad Church is a church that we started back in 2016, and it started off very interesting. It was exclusively online, which is relatively normalized in today's world, but we started online church back when online church was of the devil, right? Like, when it was back in the day when it was unheard of. We started five years ago with a very specific mission to reach a group of people that we believe nobody else was reaching. You know, I come from a background that's, you know, in church background that's heavily always promoting missions and mission fields and sending out missionaries to go into a specific group of people, learn their language, learn their culture. And the reality is the same is true for gamers. The three billion gamers worldwide who are online—it's the world they live in. They escape from the realities of life and they go online. And when we started finding out that online live streaming was a potential area of ministry, we had to dive right in. We learned that three billion gamers were online spending one point five-six trillion hours playing video games a year. And sure, you might have mixed feelings about that or are gamers playing too many video games? In a lot of cases, they are. But as the body of Christ, I believe we're called to love people the way that they are, but then love them too much to let them stay the same. And so we just started asking ourselves, how do we get the gospel to people who don't leave their house? How do we get the gospel to people who aren't already in local churches or aren't people that go to hang out at Starbucks? And how do we get the gospel to people that are online? And so we set on a venture five years ago with God Squad Church to have a place that could evangelize and reach gamers online, share the gospel with them. And our vision statement is gamers winning together. We are reaching gamers. We believe that the ultimate win is what Jesus said: to live life and life to the fullest. The ultimate win is not to be rich. It's not to have a ton of fame. The ultimate win is to know Jesus. And we believe that faith is better done as a multiplayer than it is a single player. It's not meant to be done alone. It's meant to be done together. And so it's very, very different than, you know, a lot of different ventures back then because we did it only online, but we stand on the same mission that many people have to make disciples of all nations. We've just chosen our nation to be the gaming community. And God has really, really blessed us. And going into a certain community of people that are normally ostracized by the church—gamers are normally ostracized by the church—we have had stories. Because, honestly, when I first started streaming, we can dive into that a little bit later if you'd like, Jeff, but when I first started streaming on Twitch, it wasn't really supposed to end up being a church. It was really just a form of evangelism. And I ended up encouraging people like, "Hey, go get plugged into a church in your local area. Go find a church and go in." And people started doing that, and they would walk into church with the Dungeons of Dragons t-shirt. And to be honest, Jeff, I started having more horror stories than testimonies of people saying, "Yeah, I wore a Dungeons and Dragons shirt, and they told me I had to change my shirt before I could come in." And we started having, like I said, more bad stories than good. When we realized maybe just promoting people to go to a bunch of churches that we don't know, have never heard of—because most Christians know that just because your church doesn't necessarily mean that you're the kind of church that I would want to send my friends to—and so we said, "You know what? If this is going to keep on happening, let's just become the solution to the own problem we're having. Let's start a church online with a mission to reach gamers far from Christ." And we've done so, and God's blessed us. Our church has reached thousands and thousands and thousands of people. Many people have given their lives to follow Jesus, and it's been a very, very different journey, which we can talk about. But that's really been our goal: to reach people that no one else is reaching, which I think is every follower of Christ's goal—to reach people that no one's reaching.

That's beautiful. Life is—life is better played as a multiplayer, not single player. Like, that's tattoo-worthy right there. Um, Pastor, Pastor Susie, I may put your name on my body. I'm just saying it. It'll—but I don't know that my wife will agree. But there's a list. There's a list. And that was a great quote. Now, Mark, one of the things that I've loved, and we've talked about Lux Digital Church, and we've had you guys on in the past with some of the other Stadia planners, but you had this nuance, and I want to maybe park on this a little bit and get both y'all's take on it. As I recall, and I don't mean to misquote you, um, Lux Digital Church is a church of video gamers and not necessarily for video gamers. Am I saying that right? Is that the heart behind it?

Yeah, something we've always said with Lux is that Lux is a church where gamers are. Um, and so we're not necessarily a church that is specifically for gamers and gamers only, um, but we are a church that exists where gamers already are, which gives us that proximity, gives us the capability of doing a lot of evangelism primarily inside the gaming community. We're using the tools and the language of the gaming community. But we had a lot of people sort of early on in Lux, as we were in the planning stages before we launched, we're like, "Hey, can I come and be involved? I am not a gamer." And what we've found is that there are a lot of people, and if it isn't them, is not a gamer, their spouse or their partner, whoever that is, is not a gamer, and they want to do it together. So like our friend, my friend Corey, who's a team lead—his wife Chantelle is not a gamer. Brendan, his wife Mackenzie, not a gamer. You know, Haley and Chad—Haley's on our team, she's not a gamer. Um, in fact, I just know this personally from talking to Matt, but I know his wife really wasn't a gamer before everything with this, and my wife isn't. And so we were communicating pretty early on like, "We're a church that exists where gamers are, not a church that's exclusively for gamers." It's been more helpful communication to let people know that they're welcome here even if they don't play video games. For us, Matt, does that kind of align with what you guys are? I'm just curious, because in my mind I was thinking, "Oh yeah, this is all about video gamers," but what Mark's describing is not, you know, exclusivity as much as an aim and then allowing more in. What does that look like with God Squad?

Yeah, sure. So I think any church that seeks to be like exclusive, obviously, is in my opinion contradictory to the gospel, right? But we do have a very specific target, and we have really kind of targeted something that is very niche because someone else isn't reaching them. So we wouldn't say that we're a church only for gamers, but we would say that our church is so heavily just involved in gaming culture. I use a lot of gaming analogies and things in my sermons that if you are a gamer, you're instantly going to be connected. And if you're not a gamer, I speak in a way that people can still understand. And we really make it evident that a church is built on Jesus Christ, not on gaming. But that entry-level conversation, especially being a church that's founded on Twitch, which is ultimately a video game website, we have been more intentional to target those gamers. And so where we might differ than Lux in this—Mark, this is why the internet needs you. That's why every church needs to exist to fill in the gaps that other people aren't hitting. We are definitely targeting those gamers, where it's more like we're on a mission to reach gamers, but if you're not a gamer, you're also going to be welcome for sure. We believe like the tighter we can make that niche, the more we can hit that target.

Yeah, yeah. I love that. We use the language a lot of the one like, "Find your find your target audience." That's the specificity of what is billions of people on the internet. You're not going to—like, I'll—you, I mean, you quoted three billion gamers online. Like, you got to have some sort of a niche to reach for. Which I want to put you on the spot here. Um, yeah, so you said there was an illustration involving gaming. I'm not a gamer. I would love to hear, though, um, what's an illustration that would tie to a gaming something that you would use in a sermon? Do you have anything like out on the top of your head?

There's so many. I think one that I love to reference all often is the idea of tunnel visioning. And so in the gaming world, for those that might be listening, tunnel visioning is where you have obviously an entire gameplay happening in your screen, and there's lots of things like you got to keep track of how much ammo you have. You got to keep track of your map that showcases—

Where enemies are, you got to keep track of the entire screen where you can see what's in front of you, but in the top left peripheral there might be an enemy hiding in a corner with a sniper. And obviously you have the dead center where you're actually aiming. And what a lot of people do is they tunnel vision only on that one aspect, and you only can see what's directly right in front of you and you miss all the other details that are happening around us. And in the same way, I think we television our faith. That we tune a vision on just the negativity of what's happening right in front of us, and we forget that if we would look outside of the little aim in the middle of our cursor, we would see that God's right around the corner. And so that idea of tunnel visioning and just that idea of how can we take video games and implement into our faith is one that we really find very, very beneficial to connect with our target audience.

That's good. I haven't played, honestly, I haven't been good at video games since like GoldenEye with the N64. And so like that was my platform, and then pretty much everything after that went downhill. Used to do some like Halo parties, you know, in student ministry, but yeah, those guys were so much better. The kids were so much better than me at that point. I just basically aged out. My son's ten, and he kicks my butt in pretty much any video game we play at this point.

What are some challenges? Okay, so like you're a digital-only church. You're with video gamers. Your audience typically—I don't want to call this out, I don't want to be rude—but maybe some socially awkwardness. Not necessarily clearly communicating well as a general rule. And then you get them on video games and things like this. What are some obstacles that you guys face as you're doing ministry aimed at video gamers?

Yeah, sure. As the guy who's been doing it for four weeks versus the guy who's been doing it for five years, he was like, "I'm really glad that I'm on the show today." But you know, I think that I'll just speak just very openly and about just today. I mean, literally today, somebody who was new to our community, and it was close to my heart, right? Because it's one of the first people to come to faith in our community, and that's important to me. You know, peace out of every way that I could contact him easily, just gone. And in the online world, if this was the physical world, if somebody knew who had come to faith, I would actually probably consider trying to bump into them, right? I might have their phone number. I might try to get to their house. I might try to swing by if I know their address and knock on the door and just say, "Hey, what's up? If we've done something to hurt you or offend you, we just want you to know that we love you. And if you're moving on, that's fine, but we just want you to know that if something was misunderstood, we want to be able to correct that."

And you don't have the luxury of that in the digital world. People can come and go, and they choose. Like, everything is up to them in terms of how engaged they're gonna be. You don't get to dictate that. And in the physical church, there's a—you don't get to dictate it, but you get a little bit more control over how engaged an individual is because you get them in the building. You get them a little bit more locked in. You can kind of get them into that face-to-face conversation, and that makes a big difference in terms of moving people along a sort of intentional discipleship pathway.

The online world, if they're not going to engage, they're not going to engage. And there's just nothing. You cannot do anything about that. There's some perks to that and there's some negatives to that. But the negatives are kind of—I'm going to be honest with you—the negative parts of that are daunting. Like, they're not small. They suck pretty bad. And so they're, I think, one of the things that in the limited amount of time that we've been doing ministry with Lux, that's something that I've already run into. And it's like, okay, it's just not as easy to move people in this. And we all know a lot of times people don't move, not because they don't want to move. It's just because they've forgotten. They're too busy. They're too stressed. They're too anxious with anything else that's going on in life to move. It has nothing to do with a lack of desire. And if you were able to maybe have a conversation, you might be able to propel them forward. And sometimes you don't get that opportunity, or at least not as easily.

What's that look like for you, Matt? What are some of the obstacles and challenges doing ministry with video gamers?

Sure. I think for us, I mean, there's so many different obstacles that it faces, but I think for us some of the biggest ones are, especially when you're first building entry-level relationships with people for the first time, there is so much that you have to work. You have to work exponentially harder to get to the same point of rapport with someone that you would if you guys could sit down and have a cup of coffee. And that can work itself out in so many ways. One, because you're just meeting and they're online. Two, they might just be talking through text message, through Discord messages or email. You haven't reached the point where maybe you've done a voice chat or an audio chat with them. And that can lend itself to so many different difficulties.

Wonderfully, what they call in the gaming culture, what's called the keyboard warrior. The fact that when you don't know someone super well and they're in maybe a general chat, they'll say things that they would never say to people's faces. They'll engage in certain levels of drama that, you know, someone's not going to walk into a church lobby and just start yelling about random topics, but they might do that in a public chat. And so you're going to run into those difficulties of having conversations that you might never have with people in person. But that can also be a pro, not just a con, because some people are willing to be more vulnerable and honest because maybe you can't see each other face to face.

But on top of that as well, because it's an entry-level relationship, you can't see them in person. Sometimes it makes it more difficult to be able to read body language, to see facial expressions. And what I mean by that is sometimes it can be difficult to tell the authenticity of a conversation. And sometimes online, what's called troll culture, where people are being disingenuous, you might end up having a forty-five-minute conversation where your heart is broken for a person's story and situation, only to find out they've actually been lying to you. They're like, they're just wasting your time. They're just joking around. They think it's funny. So they're causing all this drama, only to find out like it's actually just some college kid who just kind of is bored and wants to stir up trouble. And so that can be very, very difficult, not only because of the situation itself, but then the effect that it has on you.

And we have to be very intentional to train ourselves as pastors and leaders and train our staff not to let those situations make us go into every situation going, "Is this even real?" And so we have to be intentional to train ourselves like we are literally going to believe what we hear and give our hearts in compassion toward that person until we have a reason to believe it's not. Because if not, your heart just starts growing emotionless. Everything you hear is like, "Oh, this struggle? It's probably a troll. Ah, this problem is probably not real." Because you can't see their face at the very beginning, entry-level conversations. Those kinds of things can happen, and they definitely make human connections a little more difficult for sure.

What's the percentage of those types of, you know, borderline troll-like conversations? How much of that are you facing?

If I were to put a percentage on it, I would say maybe somewhere like thirty percent. So not the majority. There's a lot of trolls on the internet. There's a lot of trolls that will spend time making up stuff. We've had people make up full-blown stories. And I'm talking thirty percent of people that would maybe go to the extent of like saying things that are not true. If we're talking about people that are just going to cause trouble for fun, it'd probably be higher. It'd probably be higher than that. But I'm talking about the people who like, they come in and say, like, "I've got a certain problem," or whatever. I would say probably somewhere like two to three out of ten people are being disingenuous about something. And so you have to work harder to get to the heart of that.

But in those situations, Jeff, I'll be honest, they can actually end up being so beautiful because when you are able to talk that through with someone rather than just banning and removing them, and actually work through like, "Why? Why did you find the need to do this?" It's fine. Let's find the part of your heart that is broken, deep rooted. And when you work through that, the level of deep trust they now have for you and your church and organization is higher than if someone had to come in with no problem and you were just nice to them. So we can actually end up really turning around in the favor of the kingdom for sure.

I mean, I'm talking out of my league here, but what is that? That's like, what's the—it's not fishing, but it's something like fishing, right? With what? That's called—it can have a bunch of different terms.

Yeah, the different terms. Yeah. But the heart of that, if somebody's doing that, then they're reaching out for something. They're—it's a cry for attention. And so minister, I mean, you know, when I tell churches all the time like trolls need Jesus. And so work through that. And so the fact that it was—I just, I'm shocked that it's that high of a percentage for whatever reason. That just was not the thing I was expecting you to say right there.

Yeah, it's just so easy to say things that aren't true on the internet.

Mark, have you seen that ratio? Like thirty percent?

I don't know. I don't know. But I do understand it. So there's a benefit, and that is, I mean, I so I think we had one this week. It's really hard to tell because you just don't know. You oftentimes just don't know. So it's someone who stopped in at the end of service during our post-show Q&A time and said, "You know, hey, like I have a body count," which is, you know, body count represents how many people they've slept with, of over a thousand people. And you know, they gave their age. And you know, "Does God still love me?" And then you know, their immediate response afterwards was something that made me feel like this is off, right? Something here is off. I don't know if this is true or not.

Keeping in mind that the online world and the gaming world are a little different, right? The online world, like people troll just because that's what they do. Like it's not uncommon. There's a larger concentration of that in the gaming world, and especially in Twitch culture. That's a very strong thing in Twitch culture. You're not going to show up at your average online church stream at church, you know, at whatever.online or dot church, and show up and have that experience at nearly as much. But Twitch, sort of, that's part of what goes on there. That's part of the culture of it. And you know, like for me, you know, I live stream nowhere near as much as Matt does, but even in my live streams I'm open about being a believer in those live streams. I'm open about Lux. I'm very real during those live streams. But we've had people who came in, and you know, their only thing is like—

They create a name that if you say it correctly will come across as something vulgar or nasty. And I'm usually really bad at pronouncing names, so kind of like the ongoing joke is when people jump in and try to get me to pronounce something, I'm actually immune to that because of how bad I am at pronouncing words. But that does happen, right? It does happen. And the beautiful thing is the way that you interact with that, even if you don't reach that individual, right? Even if that person came in, realized that you're not really going to bite on it, they're going to get a serious response when they were looking for an outraged response. They're only going to pop in for a couple of seconds and then they're going to peace out. But the way that you interact with that does matter for everyone else who's viewing. And everyone else is there. It matters to them because it allows you to display the grace and love of Jesus Christ in a way to the rest of your church or the rest of your viewership that you couldn't do if the troll coming through with something preposterous wouldn't have brought that up. You would not have been able to respond in the way that you got a chance to respond. And so I think there's cool opportunities that can be found in there. I think sometimes you just have to realize that when the troll comes in, the person that benefits isn't them. The person who benefits is everyone who's in the stream but them, because you get to interact with them in a positive and a loving and a graceful way, and it gets to sort of set that example for others. I think that's a good thing.

Yeah, that's a solid conversation about handling a troll on Twitch and Facebook and anywhere. That was beautiful. Pastor Matt, how have you been? You've been doing God Squad. Did you say five years? How long has this thing been going?

So the church launched in 2016. I started live streaming on Twitch in 2014. So I'm going on seven years of live streaming on Twitch. Correct?

Yeah. So this was back. You spent two years, you said earlier, you were doing evangelism and not church, and then you decided to do the church a little bit just to be more of a center place for these kids to land where you've trusted the environments instead of sending them. Talk to me about that. Like, what was the evangelism not a church? What was that season like? How did those conversations go for you? What's the difference maybe between that evangelism being that digital missionary versus now you're calling yourself a church and you're operating as a church on Twitch? So what, just spend a little bit on that experience.

So when I started streaming on Twitch, Twitch under that name was still relatively new, and I'd never heard of it. My quick Google search on a way to connect with gamers live, whatever, led me to Twitch. And I found a streamer, the name of Summit1G. He had 25,000 viewers watching him. And I instantly knew, can you imagine if this guy was sharing the gospel with these people live where they had an opportunity to ask questions and to engage, not only with him but with the story of faith? And so I just literally asked my wife, like, would you be comfortable with me dedicating a few nights a week to be able to do this? I was working full-time at a church as an associate pastor. And she's, you know, for her, she had no idea what I was even talking about. Sure, you can try it, you know, as long as you're not dedicating too much time to it. You can give it a try. And I started going on Twitch and just literally engaging with anyone and everyone that I can while I was playing a game called Halo that you mentioned earlier. So like, literally while I'm in the video game, like shooting people in the game, telling people about Jesus, whether it's through voice chat, telling the people that I'm speaking with or the people who are watching. And I would make my title, you know, because back then there was way less streamers on Twitch. A pastor playing Halo. And some people would come in because I thought it was a funny joke. Some people would come in because they were in disbelief. And some people came in for curiosity. But regardless of the reason they came in, once they were in, I was engaging with them, building relationships, sharing the gospel. And we would have moments where we would literally pray right then and there. And sometimes over voice chat, sometimes in the actual stream chat, people would be saying yes to make a decision to follow Christ. And we just saw more and more and more people giving their lives to follow Jesus.

People literally having addictions from pornography being broken because it's common in the gaming community. I know it sounds crazy, but in the online world it is not uncommon. And if you're going to dive into the world of online church, be prepared for the moments where there are people literally watching pornography while watching your service. So these people are engaging in all kinds of content on their second monitor, third monitor, and you're literally coming into their lives at a moment where their addiction is literally being played out. And you're sharing the gospel with them while chains are being broken mid-act. And it's like real, getting down, like boots on the ground, put your gloves on type ministry because you just have no idea what they're engaging with.

And so we started seeing people being set free from addiction and people giving their lives to follow Jesus and literally sharing with their spouse and their spouse getting saved. And then, like I talked about earlier, where we started hitting the roadblock was when we started trying to get into the discipleship. Because while I was trying to do Bible studies and stuff in the live stream, Twitch chat, and really, like, how can I go from evangelism to discipleship? Then people started coming in, and the dichotomy I started facing was while I'm trying to teach people deeper things about God's word, there's tons of new people coming in like mid-Bible study. Like, when you're having a small group and you're focusing on teaching God's word in that small group, there's not a bunch of new guests walking in the room in the middle of the group. So there'd be people joining the chat being like, God's fake. God's not even real. And I'm like, well, I want to address that more evangelistic question, but I'm in the middle of answering this guy on, like, I'm reading the Bible for the first time, don't understand what this verse means. The two are difficult to accomplish at the same time.

And so I was like, you know what? Let's just focus on evangelism and let's send people elsewhere for discipleship. But then what we started running into was, like I mentioned earlier, these places where they could get discipleship, where they could have their own pastor, their own shepherd, their own flock. We were just getting more horror stories and good stories. And we started realizing, like, unless I can call every church on the planet and like interview your pastor, understand your theology, understand the heart and the culture of your people, I don't know what's out there. I don't know where I'm telling you to go. I just don't. And it ended up being really damaging, not only for that individual but then for us, because it started coming back to bite us. Like, oh, Pastor Susie sent me to this awful church. And then it started to come back and bite me, making me look bad, like I knew that this church was bad and I was like, go there anyway. Like, I had no idea.

And so we really just started finding out, like, one, for a lot of these gamers, these negative situations are happening. But then two, a lot of these gamers, for many reasons, and this is what I started learning about online church as a whole, there are some people who won't thrive in a physical location. There are some people that for whatever reason maybe don't thrive in large settings. We encounter a lot of people that have social anxiety. Some people that deal with things like autism, and maybe for them large groups are intimidating. I mean, there are people literally on Twitch that have like Tourette's, and like that would be a struggle if you're sitting in a large group of a hundred people and you're just kind of blurting things out. But when you're sitting alone in your room, that struggle doesn't become a distraction for the people around you. You can hear the word of God without other people turning and staring at you.

And so we just started learning overall the benefits of online church, and we just knew if we're going to reach gamers, let's be the beginning and the end. And what I mean by that is, like, let's do the evangelism and the discipleship, not one or the other. Let's be a one-stop shop for people to come to know and really know Jesus.

Yeah, a lot of questions. Like, I really want to ask how is that transition? Or what does that even look like to be that full-fledged church? But let's dig in a little bit. So you're reaching a different type of person, and you highlighted that, and that's so beautiful. We talk about that all the time. Digital church reaches a different type of person. Stadium church reaches a different type of person. We're doing all these different models to be more effective in reaching different people. There are people that will never go to the building or were burned by the building and aren't interested in going back in. So we've got to do something different to reach them. I would love to dig into a little bit here. Like, how is digital? How is Twitch church? Where is it easier to connect with, you know, the penultimate model of what a Gen Z, sixteen-year-old, thirteen-year-old? Like, what's your target? And then maybe how are you doing a digital church? How is it more effective? You both have ministry experience. How is it less effective than in the physical space? So like, who are you trying to reach, and where is it easier and harder necessarily to do that in digital space compared to physical?

Sure. So our target audience is literally the average age of hardcore gamers, thirty-three years old, which might be a surprise to many people.

So you're not even Gen Z at all? You're smacking the middle millennial?

Yeah. So a lot of people like, oh, that's so great, you're doing kids ministry. I'm like, you don't understand this at all. Yeah, the average age of hardcore gamer is thirty-three. So by thirty-three, most people are already in their profession, already married, and already have small children. And so that's really the people that we keep in mind. And like, so that's why, you know, I think there's a large, obviously, generation within the gaming community. There's obviously lots of teenagers. The misconception that people have is that most gamers are not teenagers, but teenage gamers have the most amount of time to be playing video games or to be sitting there and watching Twitch. So there's a lot to understand about the nuances of that. But for us, literally our target audience is we want to reach that gamer who has either been burned by the church, does not understand God at all, and literally would never set foot into a church. They would just never step foot in. And we just want to go exactly to where they are.

If you literally scroll through Twitch, there are rules that pop up on a stream. Most two most popular rules are don't talk about politics and do not talk about religion. Those are the number two rules of just...

It's not actually a Twitch rule, but the streamers will establish like culturally, "You want to talk about religion? Go do it somewhere else. Get out of here." And so that's the people reaching. How can we break through the barriers of helping people to know Jesus, even though they currently hate Jesus? It's not even for most people that don't believe in him. Most people hate. Like in the gaming community, most people are like, "Whatever Jesus is, I don't like him." And so that's our target of like, how can we build deep relationship with people first that just starts with like our common interest in a game or in just a culture of, you know, nerd culture and movies and all that kind of stuff? It always normally starts there. And then once we've built a level of trust, then people are willing to go there with faith.

Because if I'm being fully honest, my gamer name used to be Pastor Susie. And what I found out through relationships with some of my other successful streamers was, "Man, Susie, like I got a chance to know you and I love you, but my viewers won't watch you because of what they think you're like." And so I actually took the word "pastor" out of my name. And it's exponentially opened up more opportunities for me because people are coming in already with a negative preconceived notion that they hate God or they hate pastors. And those are the people that we want to reach, but we weren't able to because of those limitations in the way.

Mark, have you experienced that?

I mean, yes and no. Um, first off, if you are interested in Zoa energy drinks, that's really how you connect with Pastor Matt. If you watch his stream, the first forty minutes of his stream every day is him raving about Zoa energy. Pretty much every stream.

I didn't pay him to say that, by the way.

Yeah. Um, yes and no. So I mean, my evangelism inside of the online gaming community started a year and a half ago through podcasting. It didn't start through live streaming. So live streaming was something I aspired to but didn't own the equipment for, didn't feel like I had the time to do. And um, now I'm doing it a little bit. But honestly, you have to go to where God gives you, where God is at work in your life already, right? And so for Pastor Matt and God Squad, like for him to not stream the amount that he does would be an enormous mistake in my opinion because of the amount of influence that he's been gifted in the streaming community, partially because he started seven years ago, which was a great time to start on Twitch. Um, starting in 2021 is really quite honestly it's a terrible time to start on Twitch, just because discoverability is so horrible, horrible, horrible.

So God gave us blessing through the online community through podcasting. And what I have found is that I typically will close every three or four episodes where I'll say something either about our church or about the fact that I'm a pastor. And I say, "I'm here for you." And so there's just an open door if you want to talk. What I have found is what we have connected to more because of that is people who have left the church and have no intention of returning. Not so much people who have never ever been to church before. And I have encountered a lot of people who found it to be intriguing. And those are typically people from Europe. Like there are people from Europe who have just found it intriguing. They've literally never been to a church, and they don't necessarily have a negative conception of church either.

Um, so there's a cultural thing there. I think a lot of the negative perception of church that I've encountered is US-based. A lot of people from the US, North America specifically, maybe Canada, just really, if you're a pastor, there's something really negative that goes along with that. Europe is not so much. It's actually been so de-churched that there's something about it. It's like, "Oh, you're a pastor? It's kind of intriguing. Like, what do you do?" You know? Or they'll say, "Oh, you're a father," and it's like, "Well, I'm not, I'm not." But they don't have any understanding. So I, that might be rambling a little bit, but you know, I don't know how much we've encountered a natural disdain for the online stuff. But we're also very new. And Pastor Matt and God Squad indeed plant from a place of a more significant platform than what Lux is planted from. Time will tell. We'll see what happens when it goes. There's always new opportunities, like even in twenty-twenty-one.

Hey, so Pastor Matt, tell me, so you made the shift away from evangelism, twenty-fourteen, twenty-sixteen. You started a church aimed at thirty-three-year-old males. That's also the age that Jesus was when he died. So I don't know that there's a parallel, but there's something there to maybe unpack at a later point. What makes it a church? Like in your mind, just curious. Not judging. I'm actually very interested in ecclesiology. Like, I have these conversations all the time. But for you, when you're like, "Hey, this is what makes this a church compared to what it was before," what you said discipleship. Let's put more definition around that discipleship word earlier. So what is it? What makes God Squad a church?

Yeah, and this was a question that honestly we took very seriously and we still do till this day, but especially when we first started launching. Because I'm just not a guy that's willing to do something cool and new and innovative just for the sake of doing it. It always needs to be biblically rooted in God's word. And so you can't just do something and call it a church, right? It needs to be biblically approved by what God, the creator of church, has described to be a church. And so that's why we first started with just evangelism. Like, it doesn't matter that I'm opening the Bible to read it. It doesn't make it a church. And so for us, there are some things that you need to cross off the list in order to make sure it's a church.

One, there needs to be the sacraments. There needs to be practicing of the sacraments. So one that is easy and another one that is very difficult. One that is easy is communion. Communion is very simple. You just encourage your community to pick up their own supplies, you know, crackers, do so, whatever they might be, and a practice can communicate with you. That one we finally be very simple. Honestly, for us, what was a little more difficult was practicing water baptism. If you're going to be an online-only church, how in the world are you going to do water baptism? And we really wrestle with this. And it just came down to our understanding of Scripture. You know, we see the baptism of Jesus. And in my opinion, there's four things present there. There was a person who was willing to be baptized. And obviously, not in Jesus's situation. Jesus didn't make a decision to become a follower of Jesus. He was Jesus. But in our baptism, there's a person of repentance making a decision for Jesus who wants to make that public declaration. We see obviously that there's the presence of the Holy Spirit. We see the dove that descended. But obviously, if God is not present at your water baptism, you're really just going for a swim. There is obviously the presence of water, right? You really kind of can't have water baptism without water. And the fourth element we found was there was some sort of other person, whether you want to use the terminology officiating the water baptism, someone else was present there. And today we see that that'd be someone who's dunking you in the water.

And we ask ourselves, okay, what can we do online? We can have a person who's made a confession for Christ. We can have the Holy Spirit because God is omnipresent. Could be in your body of water. Could be with me in my room. It is obviously the presence of water, which is, you know, that's accessible to most people. But I can't be in the same room as you. I can't touch you. And Jeff, we really had to ask ourselves, are we important enough? Am I as a minister, as someone that could dunk you in the water, do I matter enough in an experience that is between you and God? That if you are a person who's made a confession to follow Christ, you do have an opportunity to make a public declaration of an inward transformation because we can provide that through the online audience. There is the presence of the Holy Spirit. You are in a body of water. But have I convinced myself that I'm important enough that because I can't touch your shoulder, your baptism doesn't count? And Jeff, I'll be honest, I couldn't convince myself that I mattered that much. I just couldn't do it. I couldn't convince myself that I was that important that I could take that away.

And so it might seem a little strange, but what we do is we have a heavy vetting process because things could go south, and you'll begin to understand that as I say this. But we have people that will gather in a pool from their neighbor, in a lake. But we also let people literally go in their bathtub and dunk themselves in the water, publicly making a confession before Christ. The Holy Spirit, I believe the Holy Spirit can go into your bathroom. I know it sounds strange, and it might sound funny. But we're giving literally, we had a person from the Netherlands at one o'clock in the morning because of the time zone difference who did not have a local church in his area that was truly preaching the Gospel. He did not. His house only had a shower. He did not have a friend with a pool. So what he did was he spent a few hours cleaning out his trash receptacle, like the big ones you put in front of your house when trash day comes, filled it with water, and dumped himself in it to be baptized.

And I know that that might sound outrageous, but I was like, what more of a beautiful story are we seeing of true life change, of repentance? People don't put themselves on the internet in a trash receptacle unless they've truly given their lives to follow Jesus and they want to make that publicly known. And so having those sacraments first is just absolutely, absolutely imperative. You can't just be a church without having those.

But really, the biggest part where it comes down to is community. Church needs to be a community. There needs to be discipleship. There needs to be iron sharpening iron. That's why we really, really heavily rely on things like small groups. We call them experience groups because one, we want people to experience the presence of God. We want people to experience faith. We want people to experience them together. But our slogan is, "Right gamers gaining experience to level up in their faith." Like I mentioned earlier, Jeff, faith and life are much better done as a multiplayer, not a single player. And so getting people to be together through video chats and voice chats and asking questions and praying and studying God's word, I believe those are just so easily accessible online. You could do that all different times of the day, before people go to work, after they get home, during their lunch break.

But without community, you're not a church. And this is where I struggle, honestly, Jeff, with the online church becoming a new fad of churches just sticking a camera in the back of their room and being like, "Hey, people at home, just watch what we're doing. You're watching the service, but you're not part of the body of Christ. You're not serving. You're engaged. You're not giving. You're just a spectator, not a participator." And that's where I think the key of online church really needs to exist.

Now, you told me off air, you know, talking about that gathering, talking about that community, talking about the importance of all that, in twenty-twenty, you guys were aiming to do a physical location as well as like the God Squad, the virtual, the digital stuff, the Twitch.

Stuff, talk to me like, what, what's the heart, maybe some of the mindset behind the, uh, the physical? Yeah. So our long-term vision is to extend our online presence into multi-campus physical locations where we will differ than most churches is what's happening in the physical location will have a different experience what's happening in the online location. And so you'll even see some larger churches today when it comes to transitions and, you know, the greeting and the offering of communion, they'll, they'll shift to a different person and that person, and I see the benefits, they can cater to the online person only. They can read the chat. What we do is we engage with the chat and the people in person. We make it one all-inclusive experience where when it comes time to get prayer, there are people that can walk up to the front of the room and pray with a prayer worker, but there's also people that can type in the chat and talk about what they need prayer. And by having all of it be done in one experience, because what we do as a church is after service, we all hop on a video game that's not really a gaming platform, but a voice and text chatting topic called Discord, where everyone, no matter if your physical online, can talk to each other. And what's happening is you might have been sitting in the physical location, but then the guy on stage read someone in the chat, "Hey, my grandmother diagnosed with cancer." Now the person sitting in our Virginia campus goes, "Wait, my grandmother's been diagnosed with cancer. Now when I get on Discord, I'm gonna go talk to that person to connect." So it's truly all the locations really coming together rather than, "I'm from this location, that location." We're just one church in many locations all experiencing the same experience. And the reason we want to also add additional is because we believe that online church is a true expression, expression of church, but I believe that it's not for everybody. It's not for everybody. Some people can't thrive in an online, you know, what might feel to them like an impersonal, uh, location. And so we just want to have both to be to meet the needs of both the people that we're reaching.

Oh, that's, that's, that's beautiful. You're, you're doing the physical, you're doing the digital. Now you're digital first in the way you're thinking, in the way that you grew the thing. And so digital is a higher priority, I would, I would speculate.

Yeah. So like doing that, but then adding the physical to to help connect with with a different type of person there. It's, it's a stated we would call that a multimodal approach. You're doing a video game church and through Twitch and then eventually doing that in physical space. By the way, I can't wait to see what that physical space video game church looks like with a bunch of thirty-three-year-old hardcore video gamers. And, um, yeah, like that's, that's intriguing to me. That's, that's really good. Um, hey, so we're gonna wrap, uh, because this has been a great conversation, uh, and we're gonna have to do it again because I'm really intrigued, uh, on Twitch and and even just, uh, hearing from from both you guys. Anxious to see how things continue to develop with God Squad. Obviously, Lux Digital Church has has a special place to my heart, and, um, and anxious to see how Mark continues to grow, uh, the ministry there. But let me ask this just as the land of plane. There's some there's some churches out there, maybe it's physical churches, maybe it's Mark, maybe you're talking to the next digital-only planter that really wants to get into into Twitch and and reach, uh, be a church of video gamers and not necessarily for video gamers. So let's, let's close with this piece of advice. Next step, where to start. Uh, somebody's coming into this thing cold. How, and they want to do something in in Twitch. Where, how do they get started? Which, what advice would you give them? Uh, Mark, why don't you go first?

I mean, honestly, if I had someone who was coming in literally cold, they had no experience whatsoever, they themselves either were a gamer but don't have anything in streaming, uh, experience, or they, they aren't a gamer and they're that, you just gotta start. Like, you gotta start by hanging out in streams. Um, it may sound wild, but the streaming culture is an entirely different language, and you have to be able to speak it. And I'm learning to speak it right. And I've spent a lot of time in streams over the past couple of years, but I am learning to speak it. It is its own subculture. It's its own thing. There is going to be so much language and inside joke type stuff that you just don't have any comprehension for. You don't like, keep Wikipedia close by because that's going to be how you're going to understand a lot of the stuff that comes through your chat that otherwise you just, you're not going to understand because the language is is just different.

If you're genuinely looking to get started, you need to spend some time on Twitch.tv. Go find some streamers that you enjoy. Watch some big guys, watch some little guys, and start hanging out in some streams and participating. See how they interact with their chats. Um, see how a big streamer versus a small stream interacts with their chats because that's very different as well. Um, and, uh, and honestly, like, go, go look at people who are using like decent equipment and and kind of have what they're doing. I would encourage you actually to go hang out in MatchStream. Um, Twitch.tv, think Susie Live. Um, and I know he streams. He can tell you, but he streams, you know, throughout the week. Um, but his stream is a really great example of how to sort of engage with, um, a community of people, um, and and still be a video game stream, but he offers such a multitude of different things between real talk questions, his faith-filled Fridays, all these different things that he has going on, um, that is, that is really helpful. And but then also, like, go hang out in Tim the Tatman stream. Like, see what that culture is like and see why forty, fifty thousand people come and hang out with them. Study Ninja, one of the biggest streamers ever. See the difference between when he was streaming to a hundred thousand people and now he's streaming it to fifteen or twenty thousand people and the huge personality shift that's happened in him over that time. But do a little bit of digging because I think that that would be a great place to start and spend some time there.

Cool. We'll put some links in the show notes to that. By the way, I mean, maybe do what I did. I did, I was like, "Hey, I want to watch some streams, engage some streamers, learn on some things, clicked around." I think I saw the people talking about like the whole Bitcoin, uh, GameStop. I think I saw that stream before it actually happened. Honest to God, uh, because I just, I remember some of that conversation, and then like a week later it's like, "Oh, look, it just did it." Uh, and then the other thing that I found, and I'm not necessarily proud of this, I managed to stumble my way into a porn star's Twitch channel. Um, I mean, just like, and, and honestly, I watched the stream for probably an hour and a half before I realized, "Oh, crap, she's a porn star." Uh, and then quickly called my wife and said, "Hey, I'm sorry. I just, you know, long stories you don't need to get into it on air." Uh, but yeah, get engaged into some of that culture. Uh, Pastor Susie, I should have been watching your stream. That probably would have been cleaner than the porn star. But, but y'all tell me, Pastor, um, what, what advice would you give to somebody starting out?

So if anyone is looking to get in the world of digital church, my first thing that I would encourage them to do is to build and maintain one relationship with someone they do not know in real life. What I mean by that is if you want to have a church that is engaging in building relationships with people that you don't know physically, you have to know how to do that first, and you have to be someone that even wants to do that first. I think one of the biggest struggles that churches are having adding additional campuses or, uh, digital campuses, or just becoming an online church is they're not the kind of people that truly see the value or believe that you can actually have a relationship with someone you don't know in real life. And so you got these pastors that are encouraging people, "Hey, guys, get engaged online," but they don't actually engage with online stuff. But they're, they're not actively on social media. They don't know what it's like to have a friend they've never met. And now they're asking people to be a part of a church with a bunch of people they've never met. And it's super important and it's real, but I mean, you will live out the things that you truly believe in. And so I think if you're going to try to start a church of online people who you might never see their face, you might actually never hear their voice, you will for some of them if they were willing to go to video and voice chat with you, but that'd be my first step. If you want to learn how to shepherd people online, build and start one relationship with someone you've never met and maintain that. And if you can do it, you're probably cut out for online ministry. And if you can't, you're just unfortunate. You're probably not because you don't believe in it enough. You don't believe that relationships can be had online. And if you can't, you know, online is probably not for you.

I got to tell you, I don't think I've ever heard anybody give that advice before. Just start with one person. Start with one person, build that relationship, do that shepherding, follow it all the way through. And if you like that model, if you can do that, if you relate well with it, then, then multiply that, grow it. That, that's, that's beautiful. That was great. Um, I may make that another tattoo-worthy statement. So, hey, we're good. We're good to go here. This is, this has been, this has been fun, but we're gonna land the plane. Um, Pastor Susie, we'll have to bring it back. Mark, well, once again, we'll have to bring you back. Uh, but for, uh, for Mark, for, for Pastor Susie, this is Jeff the Church Digital and State of Church Planning. Thanks for jumping on, uh, the pot here. We'll see you next time on the show. You have a good day. Bye.