EP200: So, We're Launching a Digital Church Network

All right, hey, welcome to episode 200. This is Jeff with the Church Digital, and I can't believe we've done 200 of these episodes. I'm really looking forward to the conversation that's at hand, but let's take a moment here and celebrate the fact that we have done successfully 199 podcast episodes.

And it has been an awesome learning experience and an awesome opportunity, at least for me, to really start to explore what's happening in the idea of digital church and meta church and digital and in the digital discipleship. And there's just so many topics that we've hit. Mental health and the capacity that digital and meta will do for that, so many topics, so many challenges. I could not even go back and today, honestly, list out my top 25. Like, there's just been so many solid conversations along the way.

So for the many guests that have been on here with the Church Digital podcast that have helped us get to 200, I just wanted to take a moment and say thank you for that. For my producer Garrett Silji, Deanna Spallone, who's worked the back end of this, the data side, for so long, thank you all for helping to produce this thing and to make it happen time and time again. It's been an incredible experience, and looking forward, okay, and also we're going to talk a little bit here in a minute. We're looking forward to the next 200 and where the Church Digital is going in the near future.

By the way, we are coming into a new season here with the Church Digital podcast and in other areas, and this really gets at the heart of what I've wanted to talk about here in episode 200.

Episode 199, or 198, let's even go back. We talked about meta and Leadership Network and the role that I'm taking as their director of meta, really championing the idea of meta church within Leadership Network and the relaunching of that organization. 199 was a fun conversation. I discovered literally five seconds after I recorded episode 199 that I do have COVID, which is fun. And I'm coming off it right now, but I'm still tested positive this morning. And so I can tell you my cough is horrible. I've got a cough button over here. I'll click if it gets bad in this recording, and it's bad. But aside from a cough and brain fog—like, I'm not actually sure what day it is right now—aside from those things, life is getting okay, and we're trying to get back to normal.

But with 199, what we really started to focus on was the role of the Church Digital helping the established church by launching the Equipping Store, by bringing on more people that are going to start to create content that can help you on your digital, your physical, whatever that journey is. We want to help established churches expand into that. And as a matter of fact, we're bringing into the conversation as we get into 200, we're bringing in one of those people: Chesley Lundy, lead pastor with King City Church.

So hey, Chesley, why don't you take a moment and introduce yourself?

Hey, guys, I'm Chesley, and I think this is my third or fourth time on the Church Digital podcast. You know, I was actually trying to remember. I think this is your third. Let's detail it out here because I couldn't remember. Number two, one we had you on talking about with some of the other Stadia planters planting a digital church. I know it was the second one was Rob Wagner when we were talking about Starfish in the Spirit. I think this is the third. Am I missing one, or is this really three?

No, the third one was the best podcast of 2021. Oh, that's right, just January, as talking about the podcast network and that. And so, man, tell us a little bit about what you do and do a tease towards what you're doing with the podcast network.

Yeah, so I'm a part of the Church Digital's podcast network. I'm super excited about it. I love innovation, and obviously we all know that we are living in a time of disruption. And so disruption in the business world is awesome. You want to be a disruptive company. In the church world, yeah, not so much. Disruption causes a lot of problems, and we're trying to keep up with those. And I think the only way we can really keep up with digital disruption is to innovate ourselves. And innovation is taking inventions that may or may not have been used for our current industry and begin to creatively use them to make our places of worship better.

And so I'm taking opportunities to talk with people outside of the church industry and say, hey, what are you guys doing that actually can help us succeed better? So my first podcast drops next week, actually. I'm talking to Carrie Melissa Jones. She wrote Building Brand Communities. You'll have to excuse me. I also have COVID right now. If we are recording, so if you hear me like coughing or whatever, same issue. But Carrie Melissa Jones wrote Building Brand Communities. She worked for Sephora, worked for two presidential campaigns, Nike. One of the best community consultants out there in the business world. And she begins to talk to us about how we might be able to implement that in our church. People like that, man, and then also people like you who have problems that need creative solutions. We're gonna have you on the podcast as well, so we could be able to talk about those problems and help give you innovative solutions. You guys get to use them or you guys don't have to use anything that we talk about, but hey, maybe it'll be good listening. I'm excited to be a part of this network and excited to have fun today in our conversation about where we're headed.

Yeah, thank you for not giving away the tease. I could see he said Chesley was going that way. It's like, wait, that hasn't been officially said. We're gonna wait for it. That was beautiful, well executed there.

Hey, so here's where we're going with 200. We, the Church Digital, we're launching a digital church network. Like, we've talked about this, we've teased this, but here's the backstory here. Within Stadia, by launching digital churches, and I love Stadia, love that organization, love how they're championing and doing things, and this is not anything against the organization of Stadia, but there were problems that I personally observed while trying to help launch churches. And it's the large fact that we were addressing 75 percent of people that we were talking with about planting churches were probably looking at more of an organic expression of church that didn't necessarily fit within the model that Stadia was using to plant churches.

I literally, over the span of two years, had 200 conversations with people that were wanting to plant a digital church, but it was not something. The majority of them didn't fit the model that Stadia was working with. And to, I, to honestly, I just felt led to kind of step out of that environment. Love Stadia, step out of the environment and try to figure out maybe there's a different way, a more organic approach to launch a digital church. And it's ironic. Within maybe two weeks of me making this decision, or at least the mental capacity of maybe this is an option, I started having conversations with people coming out of the woodworks. Hey, Jeff, what would a digital church network look like? Hey, Jeff, I'm really thinking about launching a digital church. Hey, Jeff, have you ever thought about what micro and digital would look like if they kind of overlapped? It was ridiculous, the amount of people that were having conversations with me virtually overnight. And like, every one of these conversations quickly became affirmations that, hey, you know what, this is the road that God has us on. I need to pursue this.

And so, you know, as much fun as helping the established churches in the Church Digital, as much fun as it is to make some noise about meta and maybe rock some boats through Leadership Network, the real heart for me in doing this is centered around helping churches really get into this idea, helping individuals, maybe even recognizing that the pastor of the future is going to look much more bivocational than full-time at an established church. And maybe even as a network here, start to endorse and build out a different model of church than what we typically would see on any given Sunday morning at any given physical corner of your town or neighborhood.

So yeah, we're kind of rocking the boat a little bit here. But the interesting thing is, like, I personally have had conversations around the world with people that are jacked up and excited about this. Just today, we'll talk to this in a little bit, but just today I get some woman who schedules a meeting with me at 4:00 AM her time. By the way, she's in Cape Town, South Africa. By 6:00 PM that night, she's talking to me. She's telling me she's literally saying, Jeff, I have this crazy idea about doing church in the metaverse. I don't necessarily understand what I'm doing. I Googled, and you're like the only person on the internet that's thinking this way. Can you help me? That's literally a conversation that I had, and it's been phenomenal to see how much interest there is in this area and the opportunity we have to maybe reach a different type of person through it.

And I'll tell you, Chesley has been one of those. Just even to throw it back at you, sir, there's a, he's been, was one of those guys early on that's like, hey, I'm thinking about starting a digital church network. I'm not sure what that means. And you know, I looked at Chesley as well. It's like, it's funny. I'm actually feeling like those same questions. I don't know what it means either, but we need to work together to do this because it's one thing to be two crazy people. It's one thing to be like two crazy people who have COVID, by the way. But if we could figure out how to bring that together and work together, which is really our heart here with the digital church network and some other things, is to kind of bring the crazies together and get them to work through that.

So Chesley, even just talking digital church network, like, maybe what's some of the appeal for you? What's your story in this and how you've kind of felt led to this moment?

Yeah, I think, you know, my story starts a few years ago when I was like, what if the church didn't have a building? What would it look like? And then lo and behold, COVID happens, and I'm one of the guys that starts talking to you going, hey, I'm not crazy, you know? And we've been at this for about two years now, and realizing because of the beauty of what digital platforms provide us, there's this unique moment I think in our history here where we can be the ekklesia and diaspora simultaneously. We don't have to gather and then scatter. We can be gathered and scattered all at the same time. And for me, that's amazing. And I'm asking the questions of what does that do to maybe our institution and the way we've handled this in the past? And I think it might look in the future a lot more like a digital network than it does a typical church building. So that way we're all the church and we're all part of the same community all at the same time.

Now, maybe that's a pipe dream of mine, but I could see worldwide like the network makes the most sense in a world where it's completely decentralized and connected all at the same time.

By the way, that actually may be my favorite podcast was Sam George talking about God moving through the diaspora and that we need the diaspora. We need the break.

We need that separation to allow God to traverse from one ecclesia to another ekklesia. It's the creating of the ecclesias that God moves through. And so that was a beautiful life-altering conversation that just kind of happened on a whim. You go back, we'll put a link in the show notes to that podcast.

So guys, listen, we're literally—I'm literally titling this podcast: "If COVID doesn't kill us, we're launching a digital church network." Congratulations to episode 200 here. And so here we go with that. Well, let's kind of work through the framework here. In this conversation, what does a digital network do?

You know, to be honest, that was—I can remember early on having a conversation with other network guys, people who run physical networks, and saying, "Hey, so I feel like God's leading me to run a network for digital churches, but I'll be honest, I have no clue what you actually do. Can you tell me, like, what you do so I can figure out how to apply that digitally?" And so this is very much a learning thing for me. But it's coming down towards being a training, helping with training, helping with apprenticing. Basically, what I'm discovering is of those 200 conversations that I had, 95 of the people I were talking with had no sending organization, no denominational connection, no sending church. You know, a lot of times these meta people, they're alone in this. And in the digital planters, they're alone in this. And so it's all about providing, yeah, almost a community aspect for the digital churches.

You know, I was talking about the woman today who was in Cape Town, and she stumbled on one of the cohorts that were, and she was asking about some funding resources towards that because there was cost to the cohort. And just being in South Africa, she couldn't afford it for whatever purpose, which was an interesting conversation about even the economy differences and how do we support globally. But really the thing that I was challenging her with was, "It's like that's not actually a thing that's going to help you. This is the help that you need." And as I started talking to her, her eyes just lit up.

You know, for me it's like we want to try to figure out, you know, what is this? It's Proverbs 27: iron sharpening iron, right? Like that's the biblical kind of parallel with that. What does that look like in digital space? How can we get you connected with other digital pastors and meta pastors that are in that space? What lessons can you learn from each other? How can these ideas that you have—how can they get beat up? How can they get formed better? How can they be iterated in such a way? And who's helping you on that journey?

More often than not, what I'm discovering are digital pastors, digital planters, are alone in this. The ones that are on church staffs, they don't get the support or even the vision with among their church teams for a digital church because there's so little true understanding beyond broadcasting, really just that service on Sunday, which even just scratches the surface of that.

I don't know, Chesley, as you're wrestling through some of this, like what are the things that are exciting you as you're looking at like digital church network and really trying to be that resource for churches, for pastors, for planters?

Yeah, I think one of the biggest things that I see is going to break through in the next few iterations of what the church can be is probably this idea of fivefold making its full-fledged return. When you look at the apostle, the prophet, the evangelist, the pastor, and the teacher in the American church, it's been very much about the pastor and the teacher. We celebrate those two. We don't have a nice box to put the apostle, the prophet, and evangelist in.

But when I'm looking at the metaverse, pastors aren't the one to go into that because pastors are the ones that are about the in, not so much about the out. And so the out function of the church is always about reaching to the margins, and the metaverse is absolutely the margin. So what we're seeing—probably everybody that we're calling pastors that are in the metaverse aren't actually gifted as pastors. They're probably more gifted as evangelists, for the most part. I think there's some apostolic people there, but what I notice is you got guys like Jade Earhart that on Twitch, you got guys that are in the metaverse that I don't even know—maybe Pastor Brock is one of them. But they're in these places where you know they are in a culture that is inundated by sin and inundated by people that don't know God at all. And one of the things that makes them come alive is that they're able to talk about Jesus to a place that has never heard of him.

And so the metaverse is one of those areas that to me is the mark of an evangelist. Now, if you look at Scripture, what happens after the evangelist goes and saturates the place with the gospel? That's when the apostles would come in and begin to organize. And so I'm beginning to see some of that coming right behind these guys on the edges.

And what happens when you start organizing? Well, there's a prophetic backing that needs to happen because there's a lot of spiritual warfare, a lot of lies that come in in the middle of this. They're going to be arguments because we're disrupting the way the institutional church is formed. And so what we're gonna see is we're gonna see the emergence of the three out of the five gifts that have been relegated to the back of the bus in American Christianity. We're going to begin to see those emerge again, and that really excites me.

Yeah, totally and completely. That to me is one of the things that I think excites me the most as well. Seeing, you know, within the physical church—where Stadia would tell you this—it's one of the things that when the first lessons that I learned there, like the typical planter that's planting churches within a physical environment, you know, Stadia calls them as the characteristics of being a catalytic leader. This is the type of person—the characteristic—they're gonna stand on stage in front of thousands of people. They're gonna say a message and they're able to communicate and lead people towards action from a physical stage or platform.

And what's fascinating is in the typical physical environments, the catalytic leader is very high. It's a very high skill or quality for people that are leading in these large physical and even small physical environments. I mean, to stand up in front of 250 people and get them to change—it takes a catalytic leader to even work in a smaller or a medium-sized church.

But what's interesting is that we all have influence, and we all can leverage that influence. Like, for me, it's not one person. I've said this a lot. It's not one person standing behind a podium on a stage exuding their spiritual gifts, their leadership in front of thousands of people. It's a much more interesting and I think a much more beneficial, much more healthy environment if we're all—if those thousands of people are exuding their spiritual gifts, if they're being the church to their tens, 20s, 50s, or even even 100s. Like, if we cannot turn our rooms instead into a place where we're consuming product but we're exuding a product for others, we're being the church for others—man, it's such a great opportunity to multiply into that.

And I think this is a big thing that's missing within the current church today. And there's opportunities as we're seeing people exodus from church staffs, the great exodus of people leaving the pastorship. You know, we've talked about this even with Radi Armus in a prime example. Here's a guy, former—by the way, I should thank him for episode 200. Ray was phenomenal. Ray was the reason we started with episode one. Oh my gosh, Ray, I can't believe I didn't mention you. I feel bad right now. Well, I'll mention you here so it pays off.

But with Ray, like Ray walked away. Ray had a Master's of Divinity. He had literally spent, you know, graduate-level time to get the degree to be that pastor. And what Ray discovered is that, "Hey, my mission field is not in the church building. His mission field is actually a hospital. That's where God's calling him to be." And he's going back to school to get the medical technician degree so that he can get assigned to a church and so he's setting one master's degree aside and is reinserting himself back in to really go towards more of a co-vocational approach where he's going to have a job and that job is going to be the mission field that he's actively searching in.

And I think you're going to see more and more trends this way, moving away from catalytic leaders, but really what we start to see more in digital and meta churches are not people that have that high catalytic leader approach, but it's really more of a relational approach. It's much more of a network approach where you're able to connect with different people. With that, the relational strength plays very well in digital space. There are models that work for catalytic, and we'll talk about some of that. I know Chesley's passionate about this influencer approach with that. But I guess my statement here would be we have an opportunity to empower different types of people to do a different type of ministry through digital and meta methods. And that's really what excites me here.

So what do we want to do here? Here's really the nuts and bolts of this. Through the digital church network, we're going to champion this meta and digital disciple-making, how to utilize digital tools and meta tools to really start to pioneer in disciple-making. I use that word intentionally—multiplication towards that. We want to champion the idea of digital and meta as a mission field, the idea of utilizing digital tools to connect others with Jesus or even to engage in the metaverse.

You mentioned Pastor Brock. Pastor Brock's a great example of this—somebody who is actively evangelizing, actively sharing Jesus in the metaverse. Jade as well. Like, there should not be any controversy surrounded around the metaverse. You want to—you would have controversy around the ecclesiology of a digital or meta church. We can have that conversation. I get that. Metaverse—these first two—discipling people, utilizing these tools, engaging with people in those communities for the purpose of Christ—that's not controversial.

Chesley, let me—and you get through King City. I mean, you're doing this. You're engaging with people through disciple-making into the mission field. Like, tell me some stories, tell me some engagement points, maybe even some challenges that you're facing here in that space.

Yeah, so one of the things that we're doing is we're using Brian Phipps' Followers Made, Leaders Made—what his company is called Disciples Made. And so we've got groups from all over the country. I've got two in particular that I'm thinking of right now. The leader of one of our Followers Made courses groups is basically he lives in Arkansas whereas the majority of his students live in Arizona where I'm at. And then I've got another group that's doing recovery. They're all over the map. They're in New Mexico, Arizona, Missouri, North Carolina. So we are able to come together all over.

I think the difference for me is I'm not so much on a platform like a gaming platform. We connect with people on Facebook, but I use it more as my "nice to meet you, let's go on a date" rather than "get married." Once we have a relationship and

We're trying to push you to face to face as much as possible. So like a Zoom, like we're doing right now, I love, I love seeing people's expressions. And these guys, they love each other and they go and try to figure out a way to hang out with each other offline as well as online. And so we're seeing that happen from people all over the country that want to be a part of these groups. So digitally, we're finding people, you know, on social media and then we bring them in through a marketing funnel into our community, which is own space rather than rented space on social. So that's, you know, that's a nice fast snapshot of some of the things that we're doing at the moment.

Yeah, I love all of this, by the way. We're going to put, I'm, we're going to go through some notes and stuff here and kind of talking through this. We're going to put this in the show notes of the Church Digital and we're going to put all this on digitalchurch.network. We're going to go ahead and launch out a landing page. And so if you're interested in more information, want to be a part of this, maybe if you're interested in supporting and being one of our supporters, this nonprofit is, is we're literally launching this and building it while the plane's flying and figuring a lot of this out. And Chesley and others are going to be so instrumental in that process. But yeah, feel free to check out the show notes or digitalchurch.network.

And so obviously, digital as and meta as that disciple-making tool, engaging in that mission field, getting face to face as quickly as possible, that that is always the challenge inside of Chesley's heart. Spot on there. And even this idea of doing, and this may be a little more controversial, okay? We're doing church in the digital and in meta space, and we're encouraging a, you know, call it essential ecclesiology in that space. You know, we've talked in the past, Ed, love, uh, thank you, Ed, with the Wesleyan Church redefining the ecclesiology for the Wesleyan denomination because the Wesleyan Church wasn't seeing multiplication. Why is Wesleyan Church not seeing denomination multiplication? Because there are issues within their ecclesiology that are preventing it. And by the way, those issues aren't biblical. They were opinions that were just placed in as fact over the decades. They're bureaucratic or institutional.

Yeah, I mean, listen, I'm not going to point fingers, but all I can say is the committee that the Wesleyan denomination put in place realized, hey, there, these things are limiting us and we need to move past them or figure out how to reimagine them. And by the way, that Wesleyan conversation had nothing to do with digital. And so for us to come in and to reimagine some of that ecclesiology, to experiment with some things, to understand these universes, these metaverses, these tools, these digital communities better, and to reimagine the ecclesiology mapped in there, that's our hope. And so we want to help planters that are wanting to reimagine in that space.

Yeah, I mean, obviously, disciple-making, a mission field on a digital platform, that is not controversial. We'll go where people are going and we'll do anything short of sin to reach people for Jesus. I think when we look at the church as a whole and we're asking ourselves, what does something look like? What does it have to have? The minimal characteristics of what makes a church a church? That's when it becomes a controversy. And I think that's probably the next war. We had the worship wars. I think the ecclesiology wars are coming because what we look like, what we look at is when you have the minimal essentials, which is devotion, community, and mission converged, we can do that online. And so now it becomes, okay, how do we nuance that out? And I think that's a tribal thing. I think that's a denominational, community, covenantal piece, and we agree on how we see that. But at the end of the day, we have these three pieces of community, devotion, and mission. And when those things are done online, I think Jesus might be in the center of it. And so I think that's the conversation we're going to have a lot more in the upcoming years.

Years is a great point there. I truly do believe that we, the big C church, is not going to agree or embrace the idea of a digital and meta ecclesiology. I think it's going to be decades. I would love to go into Marshall McLuhan. So this is not a new idea. This is a man from the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan, who, if you're a marketer in the marketplace, you know who he is, but if you're in the church world, you don't. But he was a Catholic and he was a language professor that saw what TV was doing to the young minds. And he said, by the time that the flower children, which were boomers, have their children, which are millennials, everything will have shifted. We will move from left brain, a left brain acoustic society that's about auditory and logical learning, to a right brain holistic approach to learning, which is about vision. And he said the problems with that that are going to occur are here. It says McLuhan sees three trends dominating what he calls the global village. He coined that in the sixties before there was anything called the internet. And he said these three are what's going to happen: decentralization, software prevailing, meaning information dominating technological hardware, and role-playing rather than goal-setting. These three pieces are changing the way we see what the church, the church as the church. The church in his mindset as a Catholic, although he has a different ecclesiology, what he saw was that now the church is one. It's one community, one body, not a hundred million different communities and bodies all over the planet. Now they can embody one essential group, one community, like never before. And I think Marshall McLuhan in the sixties was on to this. Like, we are going to obsolescence in the old way of doing ministry because we haven't understood what digital has caused us to do, which is I can be very close in a relationship with somebody in China right now. I can build a relationship where we're one in spirit, one in values, one in community. The only thing we're missing is physical proximity. But that's where the metaverse comes in, and that'll be ten years down to ten, twenty years down the line. They're going to figure it out how to be in somebody's house without actually being in somebody's house. But what we're seeing is we're taking an old framework that is obsolete and we're trying to apply it to the digital platform, which is more holistic and not logical. So we've got to think from four sides instead of just one. And Marshall McLuhan in the sixties was picking up on this just when they had the TV, not including social media, digital platforms, the internet, and the internet of things. And just wait till we actually get hypersonic travel when we can physically be somewhere across the country in thirty minutes to an hour. It's going to shift everything we know to be true about humanity. We're going to have to do a reworking of our frameworks. And I think that's what's happening today, and we're going to continue to see it more down the line.

And what's fascinating is, you know, thank you, Chesley, we'll put a link to the show notes for the book. God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Like, no one is questioning that. But our strategy needs to change because our strategy is how we, the church, engage with culture. Culture is shifting because things are advancing. We, the church, have to change how we are addressing culture, how we're connecting, what those strategies are. And so this is why having a fresher, this is why a book written sixty years ago all of a sudden for the Catholic Church is so telling because he was already seeing some of these and was suggesting changes sixty years ago that need to be addressed today as a church because we're seeing something that he was suggesting, something that he was forecasting, something that he was seeing coming in the future is the reality of where we are now. And similarly, we church, we need to get ahead of that curve. The experimental people that want to do digital church should not be ridiculed. They should be encouraged. They need to be trained on the ecclesiology. What does the Bible call the church to be? And let's not box you in, but let's encourage you to reimagine what that can be biblically and what that can be in the metaverse and what that can be. What does a biblical church look like in the metaverse? Great question. Let's explore that and dig into that.

And so here's where we've been talking about it. The environments that we want to pioneer this decentralized, organic, almost micro-church approach. We want to see this happen in the metaverse. You know, DJ Soto doing the thing that he's doing, Jake, Pastor Brock, J Poe with Cornerstone VR, Stuart doing what he's doing through Lakeland VR. Like, there are so many people. I say so many. Oh, at least a dozen that I know of that are doing this in the metaverse. That's a lot of people. I mean, okay, yeah, we need a lot more.

And what's interesting is I'm having conversations now internationally and in multiple continents about what metaverse church can look like. And for we, man, I want to help platform people. I don't want to, it's funny like that. We, the model of power has shifted. It shifted a wave. There was a season where power was all about control. The more control that I have, the more that I can micromanage you, the more pawns and pieces that I own and that I can dictate influence over, that's where power is from. And so, but I think that model has shifted. I think we're moving more towards a releasing and an empowering model where it's not about controlling. It's about equipping and multiplying into. And so with the Digital Church Network, we want to multiply what's happening in the metaverse and we want to start to equip and empower others to be churches in the metaverse. But in addition to metaverse, there's digital now. Look, I know, I would even say this. I think that right now I'm going to list out four silos, and in 2022 I think they're silos. In 2025 I don't think these are silos. I think it's all one melded idea because I think the metaverse is going to bleed into the digital space and augmented reality is going to bleed into physical, and all of a sudden, you know, all of this is really going to be thousands of shades of gray more than distinct areas that we're trying to highlight. It's a much more nuanced conversation moving forward because you've got the idea of the metaverse, the virtual reality, the augmented reality, the avatar communities that exist. But in addition to that, you've also got the idea of digital communities where it's more like Facebook and it's more like social media and it's helping planters, potential pastors, individuals understand their circle of influence that they may have. Maybe it's a bunch of college roommates that are connecting together via IG Messenger, or maybe it's somebody that wants to maybe do something in the TikTok realm and to really build out a digital church in that space. But it's people that are using non-avatar communities to start to build a community that can point people to Jesus and eventually point people towards a church in that space.

Just with those two, Chesley, is anything, uh, virtual, you know, the metaverse communities, the digital, anything kind of jumping out at you?

Yeah, I think, uh, just thinking through the methods that'll work there, I, yeah, I learned something: non-avatar communities. I'm like, yes, that's exactly what I do. You know, so I don't think it'll take until 2025, but I'm looking at meta, digital, and fidget, and I see very much an ability.

To you need training, you need to be able to be sent out as a missionary. And we're all looking for what the method should look like in being able to pull that off because we're trying to create a bunch of different communities that are all attached to one community. And I think what Kansas City Underground is doing with the decentralized model and hubs are probably the best way to connect those. As I'm hearing what you're talking about, yeah, I'm excited about the KC model. We're going to dig into that here in just a little bit.

So we've got this idea that with the environments, the metaverse, the digital—he mentioned digital—where it's this idea of, and we're borrowing the word from Stadia, thank you very much. Stadia, they literally trademarked the word "fidget church." What a great—well, I told them too, so it ended up working well. But I still get to use the word, which is exciting. So the idea of fidget, we're really trying to champion this idea of people utilizing digital tools, maybe even to create a physical community. So we're even looking at like how a microchurch would work in your physical neighborhood or in your workplace. But it's reinforced, it's reinfused, it's running off of a digital method of discipleship. Or maybe it's a mixture of physical relationships and digital relationships, and what that looks like. And so once again, all of this is different shades of gray more than it is strong silos of one or the other, because it all kind of blends in. And that actually comes into play very much here as we get to this fourth category: metaverse, digital, physical digital, and then number four, this influencer approach. And I know this is something Chesley's really passionate about with some of the stuff that he's doing. So Chesley, won't you describe to us a little bit this idea here of the influencer?

Yeah, what I have been seeing is the emergence of previously unknown people creating a community around a message. And that message can be anywhere from Charli D'Amelio on TikTok, which is dancing, to guys on YouTube that are playing, you know, playing World of Warcraft. I mean, that's an old one, but Roblox is another one. You know, multiple types of communities around a message. And people tend to follow messengers now. I think of Oprah Winfrey as being somebody that used to do it in just the TV age, but we have some kids that are, you know, eighteen, nineteen years old that have millions of followers on TikTok, on YouTube, on Facebook, on Instagram, on Snapchat. These guys are creating a following there where they can tell them, "Hey, be a part of who we are," and "Oh, buy my stuff." And I'm saying, what if you harness the power of that to create a church community?

I'm watching this is how the prevailing model of business is done online anyways. You create a personal brand that spreads a message. That message is usually built around a product, and you build a marketing funnel. Churches can do this and create a funnel into your community through discipleship or through development and coaching. I don't think very many people have learned how to do it. Some people have stumbled into it from the influencer side, just gaining a lot of notoriety and a lot of awareness around who they are and what their message is. But nobody has harnessed the marketing to create an actual community because nobody's thought about it before or hasn't like went mainstream with it. But you have to understand, like, there is pros and cons to every one of these models. With this one, I think will be the prevailing model moving forward for digital. And it can be in the meta, it can be in the digital sphere, it can be in fidget space, the digital sphere as well. It'll inundate every one of these, but it's the one that people will attach onto the most because it's the way to gain a community. It's just a matter of, um, with great response, or you know, great power comes great responsibility.

Oh dude, way to play the Spider-Man card, man. With great power comes great responsibility. Uncle Ben is now rolling over in his proverbial grave. That's hard. Yes, we're talking about church, and it is the same way. I mean, you could think of a guy like Billy Graham, man. He never harnessed this to build his own community. He built a bunch of others. And in a decentralized model, that's so much you could do to pull that off. Or you can go probably another direction: Mark Driscoll, same guy, same amount of reach, powerful, talented. And we all know how the character flaws ended up coming in there and rooting out Mars Hill. And so this is dangerous and it's powerful, but I think it's the one that people are going to gravitate more towards once they understand you have the leverage to be able to build a community in it.

So here's what we're doing. If you are interested in learning more about these, and we're going to continue on the podcast here, but just a commercial break because I can: if you're interested in being part of groups as we're starting to ramp up trainings and resources centered around how to be an organic, decentralized expression of church in the metaverse, in digital communities, with a digital approach, or even this influencer model of what he's talking about in these types of environments, man, we want to hear from you. Swing over to digitalchurch.network. Digital church, period, network. And so on that page, there's a landing page. The links are in the show notes for this as well. And so you can connect with us, and we want to have conversations. We're going to start cohorts. We're linking together discipleship processes that are influenced by the Kansas City Underground, Rob Wagner, some other partners that we're working with, and individuals that are helping us to really create a digital disciple-making process that's going to help you get started on this journey.

And so Chesley, with his influencer approach, is breathing into it. We're already talking with leaders about leading some of these cohorts that are very familiar with the individual environments that we're talking about here. And we want to create some prototypes. We want to create success stories. You know, it's interesting. The lady that I was just talking with this morning, she was in—she's interested in meta churches in Cape Town, South Africa. And she's like, "Jeff, I want to be a huge influence. I want to understand this for myself so that I can turn around and I can help churches in Cape Town understand the power of the metaverse and start to build into those." And my answer to her was, "Yes, please. Let's bring you in. Let's have some of these conversations so that you can understand the power of a metaverse church and that you can be platformed to help others understand the metaverse church."

I don't, in Cape Town, South Africa, like, I don't know that I gain any brand recognition or award by platforming her in Cape Town. But I do see kingdom benefit as a result of what's happening even on the other side of the country. And so I'm interested in having those conversations. You know, my plan wasn't to go ahead and open it up global, at least in twenty-two, but hey, why not? Wherever you are, and I've had conversations, like I said, with people all over the country, all over the planet. And so if you're interested in really getting serious with this, from the guy in Saskatchewan to the guy in, freaking, Philippines—Philip in the Philippines, I'm talking to you right now. If you're interested in being a part of this, swing over to digitalchurch.network. I had so many domains just about come out of my mouth right then. They were all wrong, but the right domain is digitalchurch.network.

Hey, listen, and like I said, we're what we're doing is we're partnering this up with, we're going through some already established methods, and a lot of what we're doing, Chesley and I were actually with Rob Wagner. We went up to Kansas City and spent maybe three or four days up in the KC area, actually going through one of their intensives through KC Underground, meeting with their team. I also spent a lot of time, you know, individually, just kind of whiteboarding through some stuff digitally with their team and brainstorming with some others, kind of with that Brian—oh my gosh, I'm blanking on—Brian Phipps. Brian Phipps is where I was going. Brian Johnson was in my head. Both Brians. We talked with, and yeah, others. But you know, there's a method that's involved that we really like, and it's the organizing identities is kind of the structure of what they're going through. And I know Chesley, you're far more of the expert on Rob's system than I am, but you want to maybe highlight some of those organizing entities and maybe how that ties into digital?

Yeah, we all know expert means I'm only like two steps ahead. So in twenty-twenty-two, expert would be one step ahead. That's still an expert. One step ahead. There we go.

Yeah, so missionary leaders. So these guys are missionaries where they live, work, learn, or play. And obviously in twenty-twenty-two, we play online. So we have the ability to become missionaries where we live, work, learn, and play. Now, missionaries may—the word missionary may scare you a little bit. That's okay. That's all right. What we want you to be is somebody that can take the message of Jesus to your friends and your network of relationships. And so the first organizing identity for the Underground's model is training regular, normal people to take the gospel to their network of relationships. So they call them missionary leaders.

The second one is, as these missionary leaders go and saturate their networks of relationships with the gospel, the Holy Spirit, we believe, activates in that network and creates a smaller community of people that are coming to Jesus and wanting to be more like him. When that happens, the missionary leader is beginning to take them and huddle them and say, "Hey, there's more. Let me show you how to do that." And out of that emergence emerges what the Kansas City Underground calls a microchurch.

Now, these microchurches are extended spiritual families that are on the mission of Jesus together. So they are learning to care for one another, pray for one another, become family with each other, and then help each one of them find their masterpiece mission that God has placed on the inside of them, has wired them for through their gifts, their passions, and their story. And through that, they will begin to become a missionary leader themselves.

But when you have tons of missionary leaders that come out of the missionary leaders that have planted the gospel and created microchurches, you're going to need a training hub—some a team of people that will begin to train new people that want to be a part of this decentralized network as it grows and becomes more viral. And when that happens, you need an organizing structure. You need to be able to build communities within communities. Every city has townships. Every township has neighborhoods. Every neighborhood has these cul-de-sacs. And so we understand a microchurch as a cul-de-sac. We understand what's called a collective as a neighborhood. And the collective is like five or six of these microchurches getting together, sharing your relationship and community with each other and sharing what we would call eldership. So these are like enclosed communities that have sent like leadership for each of these networks so that they can care for, love one another, train each other, while the hub can focus on training and sending and equipping like a missions agency would.

And so those are the four organizing identities: missionary leaders, microchurches, hubs, and then as the hub creates more and more of those microchurches and—

Missionary leaders, you're going to have to need—you're going to need the collective. So I believe that as we, as the work, as the underground grows larger and larger, you're going to see more and more of those collectives, even in Kansas City. And with the idea of digital, there's a possibility that you have a collective on Twitch and you have a collective on Facebook and you have a collective, and maybe you have ten tens of collectives in those, and one hub for each one of those, and they're all decentralized network that builds a community that is all for each other and being missionaries on each one of these digital platforms.

Yeah, love, love all of that. And, uh, what it's interesting for me is this idea of like a network of networks. We're not wanting to control individuals. There's supports, there's standards as minimal as possible, but standards that'll be in place with that. But you know, I'm actually reflecting back on what's funny—we've been talking, people's names, dropping names, Jade Earhardt, uh, recently had a conversation with Jade, and he was like, yeah, I'm actually working on multiplying myself into other streamers. Like, he is creating, discipling, growing, multiplying streamers that are flying under the new—I'm sorry, love clan banner that he's creating. And that to me, that's awesome. Like a digital planter is, once we get it figured out, we need to be multiplying. And even if we don't have it figured out, we still should be multiplying and letting others help us work through some of the problems that may be existing. And that's really, I mean, it's part of this idea of the hubs where we're establishing and then growing and expanding into other areas and regions. Like, I had someone tell me, I had a, um, influential leader here within the western church, definitely global—I would draw, I'm not going to drop names on this, but if I did, well known. He's been a guest on the show, and one of my favorite guests on the show anyway. I've set it up. It's weird. I just need to tell the story. I told, I was talking to him about this idea of the digital church network, and he said to me, says, Jeff, you know, if this thing works, you're bigger than the Catholic Church. And I, you know, I'll be honest, I that I thought it not come to my mind at that level. But the idea of an organic movement, decentralized, empowering, spread at a global level—yeah, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Maybe God blesses this, maybe it grows into something else. Time will tell and we'll see God in that.

The larger question is more of how do we structure, how do we support something that grows at that level? The support model of a fifty church or one hundred church network is going to look different than a five hundred church or a thousand church. And so now being able to adjust in time and having some of the freedom to adapt towards this, meanwhile praying that God blesses it. You know, Chelsea, honestly, I think the best thing that we said really in this podcast was this idea of, um, is Jesus at the center of this? It's very easy, and it's confession hour for me here with episode two hundred. It's very easy for me to become the control freak and just muscle things through. But what's funny is that I've really felt in this season—just, and we talked about it when one ninety nine is—just I need to let go. I need to release because the release allows other people to influence decisions. But what's interesting is the release also allows God to move in that decision beyond what I am capable of doing. And so just like God moves through the diaspora, I feel like God moves when we release control. I just, I've had so many people in my life, hey, Jeff, you want to kill a movement? Try to control it. And so how do we release in that and really put God first?

Well, in a decentralized environment, control doesn't work. Like, in a decentralized environment, control doesn't work in this new way of relating with each other. And this isn't just in church. This is the business sector. This is a marketplace. This is the digitization of our entire existence as humans. In a decentralized environment, those that empower are the ones that people endear themselves to. If you can equip and release people, you will be—people will endear themselves to you because you empowered them. If you control them, they'll leave. They don't need it. They don't want it. It's not how they're wired anyway. That's reason why we have the great resignation going on right now. The more you want to clamp down and control, the more people will say goodbye. I'm out. People endear themselves to those who empower them, and that is true now more than ever. And so what do we do? We have to do something different. We need to test new wineskins and see if it can hold the new wine. And that's literally where we are today.

We are, I mean, quit my job trying something different. Chesley's moving into a new environment as well with King City Church and even porting into different areas in addition to that. And so both of us collectively, along with the others, the volunteers that we're working with, are championing this idea of starting a digital church network. And so if you are—and I'm shifting into commercial mode here, sorry—if you're interested in being a part of it, if you're interested in working with us, with being one of these planters, or maybe you're an established church or a digital church that wants to support it with manpower, with training power, financially, we would love to hear from you. All the resources are going to be over at digitalchurch.network. You can check out that link. You can also swing by the show notes here for this podcast and check that out. If you're on YouTube, we'll include the links there in the description. But would love to hear from you. Right now we're looking for, um, honestly, we're looking for people to guinea pig on, jump in here, be part of this process, and be that first wave that prototype for the meta environments, for the digital environments, for the fidget environments, and for the, um, for that influencer approach that Chesley was talking about earlier.

And just to be blunt, we're looking for financial support. And I can tell you that money is not going to Chesley or I. Like, I've worked very hard to set this network up so that at least in the year two thousand twenty-two, I am not pulling a salary from it. And I know similarly, Chesley has structured his life as such as well. And so the money's going into the ministry for championing this new wave of digital churches that's moving beyond just broadcasting a church service. That is embraced and solidified with the idea of at least discipleship, digital in meta spaces, moving towards recognizing a mission field as well as recognizing that churches can exist in that space.

And it's funny, even while I've been having this conversation, I received a text from Jason Polling, Japo as I called him earlier. He's lead pastor of Cornerstone Church, small church, three hundred people, Yuba City, Northern California. They run a virtual reality church. And so they made an investment, an initial investment of two headsets for their church, totaling six hundred dollars. They came back, they ran some of their numbers, and as a result of that six hundred dollar investment, they have connected with over eight thousand people in the metaverse, sharing the gospel with them through their church services and things like that. And that's, that's not—that's maybe it's more of a meta church model as opposed to an organic model of what I'm describing with the decentralized. But that information just coming in now from two thousand twenty-one tells you the power of what's happening in the metaverse, of what can be with the metaverse if we would really recognize meta as the mission field that it is. And these are people that are not coming to your buildings. These are people that are in a completely different culture and environment than what you are. And so it's so important for us to engage in that space and to support people like Japo and to train people through this network and provide resources that can help them address it.

You know, one thing we didn't even mention earlier was like the, uh, when I talk with people about digital or meta and some of the stuff that we're doing, there's a lot of, um, mental health concerns. Jeff, is it healthy to be in a church that exists only in the metaverse? Is it healthy to not have a physical component that complements that? Um, you know, and to be honest, I mean, I have an opinion, but one of the things that we're already doing here through the network is working with experts to try to come up with an answer because I think right now it's so soon. We don't have, um, scientific data on that. What we've got is opinions. And so how do we make sure that we're asking the right questions to get to the right place? How do we get with the experts that can? And so we're already asking that of mental health experts and talking with soul care people that deal with, you know, those types of issues and trying to come up with a solid answer that's grounded in fact that can help all of us as we're trying to figure out what's best to utilize, how we yield, wield these digital and meta tools.

So lots of this and more coming up here through this idea of the digital church network. So hey, Chesley, as we're wrapping up here, landing the plane, any closing thoughts or anything on your side, man?

No, oh, we fit a lot today. I would just, I would say this: um, as you begin to think in your own context, maybe you hear something that we have that you like, or maybe you're like appalled by over half of it. I'd say if you could take anything, do take this: that in this upcoming era of the church, control is going to be a four-letter word. And so create an environment where you empower people, and they will endear themselves to you. If you do not do that, you're going to continue to show—you're going to continue to lose people like we've been losing people through COVID. That is what I would say. We're in a different era of what the church can be and what the church is and what human existence is, and it is all based and predicated upon this decentralized environment. So take empowerment to heart. The killer of movements is control. And to me, I think this is actually the biggest obstacle in the church world today. And what's funny is the Jeff Reed from four years ago would have laughed in Jeffrey twenty-two's face because this has been a lesson that's been literally learned in the firestorm that has been COVID twenty-twenty.

I, even starting the podcast, like, I just, in that season, twenty eighteen, when I walked away from CF, it was I was very much a centralized mindset guy. And what's interesting is just the more that I've seen the extremes of that model, the more that I realize that that model doesn't hold up in those extreme seasons. I do believe this, and I hinted at it earlier: I think there's different methods for different seasons. And I think like how you run a church of a hundred is not gonna run at a thousand or five thousand or ten thousand. A church plant is not the way that you're gonna run a two hundred fifty person church. There's different methods that change and adapt through it, contextualizations. And I think that contextualization is key. But the larger part of this is, and pastors out there, because this is not just about digital or organic.

Expressions here. Let's talk established for a second. I really believe that you've got people in your church that are ready to do incredible things for God, and you've got them serving coffee Sunday morning nine o'clock. Now I don't want to disparage or discredit anything that's happening within your physical buildings. They're necessary.

But there's also a mission field outside of that building, and sometimes service, as in serving God, gets replaced by serve us, serve the church building. And so my challenge for you is maybe there's an opportunity to start to empower other people to do the ministry that God's calling them to do as opposed to being the people that are doing the ministry or that are serving in a capacity that's just within your building, not the mission field that God's leading them to care. A little bit, empower them, help them in what God's calling them to do, and maybe see what happens. Maybe it doesn't fit within your centralized model. Maybe it's an opportunity to plant and do something different. If in involving digital meta or fidget spaces we want to be a part of that, and so feel free to send that conversation our way. Digitalchurch.network.

Well, hey, listen, Chesley's not going away. We're going to take a little break here. With 201 for the month of February, really we're going to dive into the digit—that, that's sorry, once again, the Church Digital Network. I've got too many domains on the head. COVID fog's not good. I can normally keep it straight. Digital Church Network. We're gonna highlight for the next couple weeks different podcasts through the Digital Church Network. Next week, for example, we're highlighting Tom Pounder, who's been doing TCD Sidekick podcasts, and we're going to bring in a conversation and we're going to bring in Tom, talk about it, and highlight one of his podcast episodes. Chesley's coming up here, I think in a couple weeks after that. And so really the month of February 2020, we're going to be highlighting different conversations that are centered around a lot of this podcast network. Andy Mage as well, John Pyle, and giving an opportunity to explore some of that. And then we're going to kick off season three of the Church Digital podcast in March, which is going to be Chesley Lundy and I really digging in to the philosophy that's centered around this Digital Church Network. We're doing a podcast takeover. The Digital Church Network is, and so we're gonna really spend season three focusing bit by bit on the philosophies and the strategies and maybe some of the background stories centered around the idea of the Digital Church Network.

And so once again, if you have any questions on Digital Church Network, feel free to find me on social media, send me an email, Jeff at the Church Digital. All that information will be in the podcast show notes, or you can hit me up on digitalchurch.network.

So this has been an awesome experience. I cannot think of any better conversation to wrap up episode 200 than with you, Chesley. So thanks for jumping in this. But we're gonna land the plane and we're gonna wrap up. So for Chesley, I'm Jeff with the Church Digital and with Digital Church Network. Thanks for being on the podcast here. See you next time on the show. You have a good day.