EP205: Andy Mage, Gamer Culture, and Breaking the Fifth Wall Takeover

All right, hey, welcome to episode 205. Here, this is Jeff with the Church Digital Podcast once again, and it is my pleasure to be here with you today. We are in the middle of the Church Digital Podcast Network takeover. Uh, we have for the past couple weeks we have been letting different people take over the Church Digital Podcast, and we're going to get to Andy Mage a little bit. Excited about his takeover and what's been going on in his neck of the world. We're going to get there in a little bit, but before we do, let me tell you a little bit about some of the things that's happening over here with Digital Church Network. As you know, I left Stadia. Awesome experience. Love them. Really set out for this challenge of launching a Digital Church Network. Over the hundreds of conversations that I've had with digital pastors, with digital church planters, people interested in exploring the metaverse, digital, physical and digital house church, what a microchurch network looks like complemented with digital. Man, there's just so many opportunities to champion a different type of church, a different model of church, still grounded in Christ, but just operates differently. And that's the heart of what we're trying to do with Digital Church Network.

And the one thing that I know after having hundreds of conversations with people just like you, literally just like you, I have come to this conclusion: doing things in digital ministry or planting a digital church is often a lonely experience. For whatever reason, we don't have those connection points. Oftentimes we don't even have the support among coworkers, among staff, among the pastors and leaders of churches or denominations. And so really, that's the heart of what we're trying to do with Digital Church Network. We're trying to create a family. And as a result of that, we've already got an online family with, I don't know, probably 250, 300 people already included in that family. Okay, look, it's a big family and we're just getting started.

Here's what I want you to do. I would love for you to connect here with this online community that we have. It's at fam.digitalchurch.network. Go swing over there. We're running Mighty Networks if you know what that is, but it's the first three letters of family: fam dot digitalchurch.network. Join the community, jump in some round tables. We're actually going to move the Church Digital Podcast. We're going to move it live here in a couple weeks. We're going to start broadcasting the show live before we air it on podcasts and YouTube and those things. So look for that. But you know what, all that stuff, if you want to keep up with what's going on, you're joining the family. Go to fam.digitalchurch.network. And commercial over. That's awesome. Thank you very much for that. I appreciate it. Let's shift over and let's start talking about Andy Major. Andy, man, it's great to have you on the podcast, man. I love the stuff that you're doing. Uh, it's always a pleasure to connect with you. But maybe for some of the people that don't know you out there, let's tell a little bit about yourself to the audience there, Andy.

Absolutely. Yeah, I'm part of the fam, Jeff. Thanks for having me. Uh, yeah, I am. I'm a digital pastor down in Tampa, Florida. Actually, I say down. It could, I don't know where you are in the world, but yeah, a digital pastor in Florida. I've been doing this for around about almost three years now. Uh, so before the pandemic, I was one of those kind of bleeding edgers that was helping other churches kind of get on board during the pandemic. And uh, just been super interested in church content for such a long time and how we can actually do church in different expressions. I think that's the hot term that everyone's using right now. I was a worship pastor for about ten years prior. I lived all over the country, up in New Jersey and Atlanta, and now most recently down in Tampa. And I'm super excited, A, to be with uh, just kind of being able to do podcasts and talk to people on the internet and this crazy thing we call the internet, but more than that, I'm super excited to actually get to the heart of what it looks like to do church around the world. Uh, we have just technology springing out of every pore it seems like, and Jesus tells us to go and do. And so I'm stoked to be able to get to go and do and really to bring the message of Christ all over.

That's awesome. Well said. And so Andy, by the way, you are up for me. I may actually want to be the few people in the country listening to you that Tampa is up. I think everywhere else Tampa is probably down, but down here in Miami, it's up. So there you go. Uh, but you know, Andy, I mean, I first connected with you, man. We were doing like an online Bible study or maybe it was something that I was doing pre-COVID, right? It was, was that the first? It was online, maybe we crossed over to conference or something. But was really kind of new in the relationship, and it's been so much fun. The thing that I love about Andy is, and this is going to sound weird, but the quality of content that the guy produces, uh, like his just understanding and mastery of the technical aspects and producing is really beautiful. But even beyond that, it's understanding that the content's not the end game. The content is a core component of the disciple making, of the relationship, and a lot of the health that's centered around there. And so it's not content for content's sake. And sometimes when you talk with content guys, you know, content's the end game. But really, my love for this conversation and the situation is that it doesn't stop with that content. It really moves beyond that. So, and you, Andy, also, he works with, maybe I should say this, I can say this right, like he works with Altar Live a lot. You know, uh, the Altar Live platform, and he's been doing some great work uh there helping to create content to bring awareness to that in training and resources and live shows. And definitely we'll put a link to all Altar Live uh in the show notes. We're moving uh, we're in the show notes. We're moving a lot of Digital Church Network over to Altar Live uh as well, doing a lot of um shows and things like that in the space. Matter of fact, I never use Zoom anymore. Like I'm about ninety-five percent Altar Live right now, and it's a good thing.

Yeah.

Uh, but cool. So, man, Andy, tell us here a little bit. You're starting a new show called Breaking the Fifth Wall. Set it up for me a little bit.

Yeah, uh, we are getting a couple of episodes of Breaking the Fifth Wall under our belt, and uh, I've actually had a couple of conversations with people going, "What is breaking the fifth wall?" You always think about, uh, when you look at particularly you're watching, let's say, a two-camera sitcom show like Friends or Seinfeld or something like that, you've got the three walls of the set and then the fourth wall. You always hear this term breaking the fourth wall, and that is when a character will look at the camera and knowingly glance at the camera because they know that the audience is right there. And so they're, you know, they're using you as the narrative voice to kind of break that thing down. And so they're the fourth wall ideally is the camera, and so you're breaking the fourth wall. But there's a fifth wall as well that has kind of been theorized and philosophized about, and that fifth wall is the why behind what we're receiving. It's kind of the wall that is our own intuition and our own intellect. And so breaking the fifth wall is really doing that. It's breaking down the why of creation. It's breaking down the why of what we're creating.

And Jeff, you kind of set it up there in the intro. I love the production aspect. I'm a production nerd at heart. I'm a tech guy at heart. I'm again a worship pastor for a long time, and I was always about stage production and live production and started turning that more into digital production around about fifteen years ago. And a lot of people will just create because they feel the urge to create, and there's never a why, and there's never anything. It's just the end is, well, I did that thing, and I'm going to move on to the next thing. But God, at the very beginning of all things, set humanity up to be creative people. He set Adam and Eve up to create, to create names for animals and to go and be fruitful and multiply. And even after they got kicked out of the garden, they were told to go and create farms and create civilizations. And Jesus tells us to go and create disciples. And on and on and on. And there needs to be a why behind that creation, not just because, oh, the Bible says so, but to really connect with people and really to help people grow. And so my task and my job in this podcast is to try to get to the bottom of the why of content creation. And we're going to talk to worship pastors. We're going to talk to uh digital ministers. We're going to talk to bloggers, and we're going to talk to all manner of content creators, YouTube creators, on down to Instagram and TikTok influencers, things like that, and really get to the why. And my passion is really finding the why behind what people are doing, particularly in the church space. We're seeing a lot, especially coming out of the pandemic, the why was just, well, I need to connect with my congregation, and that's fine. Uh, but there needs to be something deeper there. How are we connecting people with the gospel? And most importantly, why do you continue to get up in the morning and feel that urge deep in the pit of your stomach to go and do things for the Lord? So that's what the podcast is all about, and I'm inviting all of you on the journey. You can uh, links will be obviously in the show notes and all over the place. You can hit us up on our socials. I'm super stoked uh to just get this journey going.

Yeah, those are some great questions to ask, and I gotta believe that right now there's there's a lot of people who are listening to this that don't understand their why, or you know, and I've heard this a lot like their why doesn't line up with their leader's why or multiple leaders' why. It's funny. Somewhere between where I live and you live, there's a church somewhere in Fort Lauderdale, and I had the opportunity to do some consulting with. I'm not going to tell you the name of the church, but the digital pastor was, um, the thing that he was really, and he had multiple hats, multiple roles. The thing that he was really excited about and like his why in doing this was, um, man, I want to like get relational with people. I would love to like start creating micro locations, and he was really excited about that kind of online to offline philosophy, right? And so that's the thing that he was really resonating with. The executive pastor, the person that he was answering to, felt that digital is a complete waste. We should not do, like literally he said this often, digital is a complete waste. We should not do anything with digital. We should just ignore it and just throw it aside. You know, y'all put on pants, come to church in a big building. I'm not kidding. That's the conversation. And so that's completely different. By the way, that's the executive pastor. The lead pastor, his why was, man, I want to see people in like Ethiopia and Egypt get baptized as a result. I want my message heard around the world. I want to become a movement globally. And it's like, okay, there's three different people in the conversation with three completely different whys. And so I mean, I love what Andy's even starting here by helping us process through what we're seeing in other ways to help us even discover what our why is, to help us have these hard conversations as we're moving upstream. So uh, yeah, this is solid stuff. Hey, Andy, with this episode uh, we're taking over here, who are

We featuring what's going on. Yeah, I actually had the privilege and the opportunity to interview Mark Lutz from Lux Digital Church. Now, a lot of you haven't heard of Lux Digital Church. They were actually a startup back during the pandemic, which is insane to start a church during the pandemic, but there's this unique twist on what Lux is doing. They are actually solely gathering on two different platforms: Discord, which a lot of you, if you're in the digital space, you already know about Discord. It's kind of a perfect analogy to what Slack is doing in the business world. Discord is kind of doing with gamers, but really just a bunch of people all over the place. They're gathering on Discord, and then they're leading live online services on Twitch, Twitch.tv.

Now, if you don't know anything about Twitch, Twitch is basically the hub for all things gaming. It's full of streamers and people just hanging out, live streaming, and kind of sharing videos on demand, and really creating a community around gaming. And Mark himself is a gamer. I am as well, and so I immediately was interested in what Mark was doing. He's a gamer. He was also a pastor, and you'll hear about his whole story during the interview. He was also a pastor for a very long time and felt called to go create this digital church, and then the pandemic hit and they kind of had to accelerate plans. And he tells the story much more elegantly and beautifully than I am doing it right now. But Mark brings a wealth of knowledge and theological discourse to what somebody is doing with video games, and I was blown away by some of the things that he was kind of talking about and some of the things that were resonating with me. So I can't wait to let you listen to this, and I'm excited to see what the outcome is for all of you as you're kind of processing the things that he has been going through.

Awesome, yeah, love it. Mark is no stranger here to the Church Digital family, and I love the fact that we get to let him take over the episode here with Andy. So hey, if Breaking the Fifth Wall, we're gonna obviously put links in the show notes. Feel free to subscribe to that. We'll have socials for Andy on there as well, and so you can dig in and start to follow the stuff that he's doing in that space. But for this episode, we're featuring Andy with a takeover and good friend Mark Lutz from Lux Digital Church, really in a conversation centering around gaming culture in a digital church. Okay, everybody, here you go. You're listening to Breaking the Fifth Wall, part of the TCD Podcast Network.

Well, hey everybody, welcome in to episode two of Breaking the Fifth Wall, the number one podcast for content because that's more of what you need—content in your life, right? You're not overloaded already with content and things that keep flying into your podcast feeds and into your Google readers or whatever you're using for your RSS feeds and your Twitter timeline. I don't know, I could keep going on forever because there's a million different types of content. Hey, thanks for joining us on this episode. Episode two, like I said, it's quite cool to be able to interview people, and obviously if you joined us in episode one, you heard our interview, my interview with Mike from Bay Hope Church talking about worship and content. If you missed that, you can actually head back into the podcast feed pretty soon. We're actually going to start putting these up on the YouTubes, so stay tuned for that. All that information will be in the show notes, and we'll be tweeting and taking care of all that with the Church Digital.

And speaking of the Church Digital, if you haven't checked out the website and kind of everything that's been going on over there, I highly suggest you pop over to thechurch.digital as soon as you can. Obviously, keep listening to this podcast if you're on your phone or on your laptop. You can multitask because you are so talented. Head over to thechurch.digital and check out everything that's going on, especially with Sprout Digital's 67-page research report on digital churches. I'm actually clicking on it as we speak, and it is fantastic. It's got a ton of stuff from a ton of digital pastors out there, a ton of church leaders. At 67 pages, of course, and it's really kind of a state of the union of what the digital church looks like. And not only the digital church, but the metaverse church, the fictional church, fidget church, and kind of the state of digital church planting—something that we're sort of really passionate about at the Church Digital. And we're here to help you. We're here to help your church. We're here to obviously bring content into your life again because that's more of what you need, but we're also offering courses and really some one-to-one coaching and some consulting work that is really going to help you with establishing your digital ministry, keeping it afloat, really creating engagement with your people, and most importantly, fulfilling the Great Commission because that's what we exist for.

And as part of the Church Digital, we are now starting the Digital Church Network, which is this idea that was birthed by Jeffrey a couple of years ago and has really started to pick up the pace. And I'm clicking on it right now. You can actually head over to digitalchurch.network or just click the link on thechurch.digital and join the network. We've got a lot going on. We actually were in our Slack a little bit earlier today talking about some live shows that are going to be rolling out on one of our platforms called Alter Live, and it's going to be a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to getting you in community with us. But enough about that. You're tired of hearing me yak. Actually, I want to introduce you in this episode to an incredible pastor that I had the chance to meet a couple of months ago for an interview I was doing with another podcast that I was doing. And this guy and his wife and his team around him started a church solely for gamers, really on Twitch. His name's Mark, and he formed Lux Digital Church. And I'm excited to get you in the fold with him and his team and to see what they're doing. It's something that I'm super passionate about—kind of allowing gamers and the gamer subculture, of which I am a part of because I am a gamer nerd. I'm really super excited to see ministry happening in that field, and Mark and his team are doing an incredible job. And I really wanted to bring you this episode and kind of bring you on the journey a little bit of how they got started, what they're doing in terms of preparation and content, and most importantly, the why behind what they're doing and who they're really trying to reach.

So with all of that being said, here is my interview with Mark.

Well, Mark, from Lux, it is so good to have you here on Breaking the Fifth Wall, man. Thanks so much for joining us here on the show today.

Andy, it's good to be here. Thanks for having me on the show. I appreciate it, and it's always great to have an opportunity to talk about what I'm passionate about.

So absolutely. So before we get to what you're doing with Lux, back us up. Back the entire audience up. Who are you? Kind of family, origin structure. Give me your origin story, as I like to tell everybody.

Sure. Um, I mean, the origin story of me and ministry or the origins, like pre-Lux, or like the origin story of how we came to do kind of like what we're doing right now?

All of the above.

All of the above. Okay. So, um, well, so I'm born and raised in Western PA, just north of Pittsburgh. I've been part of the church pretty much my whole life. Went to Reformed Presbyterian school, studied youth ministry. Took a gig working part-time as a youth and children's director for a non-denominational church in a small town of about 1,200 people north of Pittsburgh. I worked there as the youth pastor and then for six years, and then in the same church as the head of discipleship, assimilation, and care for adult ministry for an additional five years. Um, so my ministry—I'm like denominationally I'm a mutt, but in terms of full-time ministry, I've only, like post-college, I've only ever had one job before Lux. I worked for the same church for 11 years. Kind of rare for a millennial, but I just landed in a really, really good church. Like, I just happened to land in a really supportive, really awesome church that gave me room to grow and expand and stuff. And um, was literally just sharing this with another online church today, actually, and I was just saying, you know, I came into that place as a 22-year-old, you know, with a lip ring and tattoos. And I, you know, I walked out, you know, theologically more sound. Um, and I, you know, with a wife and two kids and a house, and you know, a decade of ministry experience under my belt in a wide variety of circumstances. You know, when I started, we had a school and we were packing up every day. We rented a little house on Main Street of our town to do youth ministry, and we had eight kids. And when we left, you know, we had 120 plus kids in youth ministry. We had grown from a couple hundred people to almost a thousand in our small town and built two beautiful, you know, million-plus, two-million-plus dollar church buildings. So got the honor to be part of several building projects, hired, you know, three of my close friends as the youth pastor, executive pastor, and children's pastor to come work for us there. Um, and uh, just, and my wife and I still attend that church on the weekends. Um, the lead pastor of that church is mainly like our theological covering for what we're doing now.

And then in 2019, through a podcast, God began to work on our hearts. And I can get into more detail. I don't really need to get into all of it, but realistically, pre-COVID, God began to move us in the direction of breaking our heart for people in the gaming community. It's a group that I love, and I've always, you know, I've been a part of throughout pretty much my whole life in varying degrees. And just really broke my heart for people who are looking for truth, searching for hope, and there really wasn't anybody out there offering them a whole lot more than sort of this—I don't know, I don't even know what to call it—but there's this real strong mentality inside of that culture to sort of pick and choose what you want from all various religions and beliefs and ideologies and piece them together and become, you just kind of become master of your own universe, right? In many ways, you become a god. And um, we're just like, wow, these people really need a church like, and they're never showing up to church, right? So if we don't bring the church to them, they're never coming. Um, and uh, we can get into sort of some of the theology or ecclesiology of that, but basically in 2020, we decided to start a church. And um, that was right before the pandemic. And then the pandemic hit, and we went from trying to launch in 2023 or 2024 to being like, well, maybe we changed what I was in seminary. Like, maybe we changed what my seminary degree is. Finish, wrap this sucker up quick, uh, and let's, like, if there's someone who's going to write a check to support an online church, it's right now. So it's one of those strike-when-the-iron's-hot type of things. But God has really blessed it. So we launched Lux after working with Stadia Church Planting and our sending church and a bunch of other organizations. We launched Lux in March of 2021. So we're celebrating, as of this recording, I don't know when this will go live, but we're about a month out, about maybe five weeks out from our one-year anniversary as an entirely online church.

Your sending church was okay with you guys starting Lux? They were supportive and everything behind the scenes?

Yeah, so there was a lot of conversations there with our sending church.

Church at first, you know, I recently met with a pastor, well a year ago, and he said there's something that happens when you turn 30. Between 30 and 33, where God, if you look in the Bible, it's pretty true. God did something in Jesus' life in his early 30s. He did something in Joseph's life in his early 30s. There's something that happens where God moves you. And so I think with my sending church, it was one of those things where it was like I was ready to lead, but the space wasn't there at the time. And so I was just, you know, and I think if I had maybe listened to God earlier, maybe we would have done something sooner. I'm not sure. But, you know, there was a point in which it was sad and we love our church and we're so glad there was a mutual blessing, I think, in both the sending and the releasing there. That, you know, I was, it was just clear through a wide variety of circumstances that God was leading us to do something. We just didn't know what that thing was. And when there's a sending and a pulling, it makes that transition a lot easier.

Our church, the church I came from, has always been, you know, pretty open to innovative ideas. So they liked the idea and they were actually open to being sort of part of them. But it became clear to me that I wasn't really interested in leading an online venue or an online campus for an established church. We were called to a gaming community and this our church wasn't right. And so it was gonna be very difficult. So we ended up, like, we are part of their network but we're not under their umbrella. So we are our own separate entity. But it was a big blessing. They sent us out, you know, commissioned us, prayed over us. We're still a part of that church. You know, we're still friends with many of the staff members and the members of that church. You know, they're major parts of our lives because, unlike every other church planter that typically moves towns and changes all their relationships, I didn't go anywhere. I still live three miles from the church I worked at for 11 years. So I'm in the community. My next-door neighbor, who's my accountability partner and a youth leader at the church, is still my next-door neighbor and my accountability partner. So, you know, some of those things, you know, just didn't change. So it was just easier for us to stay at the same church on Sunday mornings even though we're leading a completely different church throughout the week.

So you started talking, very briefly about, you said a podcast. Through a podcast, God started changing your heart and your mind. Talk me through that process. And I guess the bigger question then is, how was your wife with this entire kind of start into what you're doing right now?

Oh man, you know, there's so many parts of this last year that have been so beautiful and so awesome, and there are so many parts that have been so painful. And so, like, what? Name, let's list them. Let's go. You know, I think that we had really believed that we wanted to be part of the team that we were on for 30 years. And, you know, the church that I came from, the senior pastor who's on our board, is retiring in the next couple of years. They just made that public announcement. One of my best friends who I hired there is lined up to be the next lead pastor. And that probably should have been me, like at one point, or it could have been me. And so for us to go through this transition as that church is going through that transition has been hard on my wife and me because it's a lot of like, well, God, why didn't you let us do that? Like, that's what we wanted to do. But when you decide that Jesus is Lord of your life, you don't get to have preferences anymore.

So the podcast started in 2019. I just picked up a microphone and started. I had done some podcasting for leadership and covering video games before, so I enjoyed it. It was like, my discipleship pastor position wasn't very creative. It was a lot of managing people and it was like tedious and boring and frustrating for me. And so as someone who has this bent to build things but also has a creative bent to him, I just wasn't able to exert that in any way. So I started with podcasting, simple prayer: God, take my love for gaming and use it, redeem it in some capacity. And so I just started asking people who came on the show, and I was covering like an obscure digital card game video game at the time, and I just started asking if I could pray for these streamers and podcasters and YouTubers, and they let me. And then God started answering those prayers.

And I started offering at the end of the show closing thoughts, and I was just dispensing biblical wisdom from the book of Proverbs without people knowing it. And we started getting reviews and people joining our community saying the best part of this show is closing thoughts. And then so we started saying, hey, at the end of the show, I'm a pastor in addition to doing this podcast. If you need someone to listen to you, I'm willing to listen to you. And then we started having people from all over the globe come out and say, I'm in a really dark place. I'm going through divorce. I'm having a kid. I am going through a breakup. I'm depressed, whatever. And I would meet with them and pray with them. And then God started answering those prayers.

And we were reading a book by Henry Blackaby at the time, and I loved doing that by the way because it gives all the people who listen to the podcast, and they're like, I don't like digital church, and then, and then, like, this guy is a new age liberal or something, right? And then you're like, oh, and then, and then you mentioned Henry Blackaby, and they're like, hold the phone. I like Kendra Blackbeard. Bye, John. This young man is reading Henry. And so I don't want to mock anybody, but seriously, that's the reaction I get.

And in Experiencing God by Blackaby, he says, don't just do things and ask God to bless them, but look and see what God is doing and partner with him. Yeah. And it was God was answering more of my prayers for this online community full of atheists than he was the prayers that I was praying for my church. And so I was like, he's at work here. I'm okay. I'll, I'd like, this seems cool. I'll do this.

And keeping in mind at the time I wasn't online. Like, I played video games to escape people, not to make friends. And so, like, I would go to work and just be emotionally exhausted as a pastor, you know, going into hospital rooms and stuff, and then I would come home and, you know, I'd kill people on the internet just so that I didn't have to talk to people. Yeah. And I didn't have, I was off the grid. I have social media for five years before I started blocks. So it really wasn't my bag. I was always the house church person. I didn't stream. It wasn't really my thing. But God had just sort of moved my heart in that direction with this community.

We experienced Discord for the first time. An atheist reached out to me and asked if they could create a Discord server for our community. I began to realize that there are more people who live, they don't just use the internet as a tool, they live part of their lives there, than I knew. And I started building these deep, deep, transformative relationships with people that I truthfully thought wasn't possible. Like, I was the type of person who would come in and say God's plan A is the local church and God doesn't make plan Bs. And I said that many times throughout my ministry. And then I ate those words because my local church was suddenly spread all across the globe. And I was like, I would meet with people and I would pray and I'd watch the Holy Spirit hit them 3,000 miles away from me. And I was like, well, if God is omnipresent and his spirit is omnipresent, the internet is the closest thing that I get to experiencing that, to know what omnipresence feels like. And so I was like, well, I can be present with these people if the Holy Spirit's willing to fall in Turkey while I'm sitting in Pennsylvania and praying for somebody. I can do this. Like, yeah, we can disciple people. The Holy Spirit's at work. We can build community. Lives can be transformed. These are all the, like, okay, we can do church.

And so then the dream really broke out to start a church, which I thought was heretical at first. And God really dealt with me over the course of about six weeks, walking me through scriptures as I took our dog for a walk, and helped me to realize that maybe it wasn't as heretical as I thought it was. And maybe my view of the church had a lot more to do with what made me comfortable than what the church actually was.

Yeah. There is there's an interesting thing you said there, and I kind of want to back up real quick as we lead into the next question, sort of a weird paradoxical thing. But you talked about older, kind of the conservative, quote-unquote, church leaders looking at you reading the Blackaby book and saying, well, you know, Experiencing God's not for you, you liberal, whatever, young person. I actually went through the same thing. And then I was a worship pastor for about 10 years. And then right in the midst of that, I was reading Experiencing God and felt God pushed me to go start a gym, a non-profit faith-based gym, like a CrossFit gym in my community. And we started it and we ran it for like two years. And it was still going up until I passed it off to somebody and got back into worship leading. And, you know, it covered, killed the gym because COVID killed lots of gyms. But it would have still been running today because we were simply partnering with what God was doing.

So the question I want to ask is, in terms of what you're doing now on the internet, it's not three songs and a message that you're streaming via YouTube or via Facebook or whatever. Because whenever we think online church now, we think, okay, it's just a window into what people are doing in the building. Talk me through what you guys are actually doing in terms of content creation, in terms of quote-unquote service structure, fellowship, everything around your church.

So I think the difference is intentionality and focus. A lot of what we're doing looks similar to a church, but our intentionality and our focus is different. So I don't have an in-person people, so the online audience are not second class to me. Yep, they are my church. Let's go. And I treat them as such. We have this really, we have this really unhealthy view of the internet inside the church where we view someone's number and screen name and we devalue them to humanize them and refuse to recognize them as a person with a spiritual journey and a story. And I refuse to stop at screen names and profile pictures because every screen name and profile picture represents somebody who has a genuine story, who's growing in some capacity spiritually or dying spiritually, and they have needs. Like, they're real people. And I was just like, no, I'm gonna figure out who these people are. I'm gonna get to know their stories. And I'm gonna figure out who they are. I'm not gonna stop at keyboard warrior. You know, I'm not gonna stop it just, you know, throwing tweets back and forth at people.

And service isn't just going to be a broadcast. So our church looks different in that capacity. A lot of the typical things that you would see part of a church, prayer, preaching, worship, the Lord's Supper, the sacraments, right, giving, those things are part of our experience as a church. By the way, our church is on Wednesday nights. So if you want to come and experience it, we're live every Wednesday night at Twitch, T-W-I-T-C-H dot TV slash Lux Digital Church, 8:30 PM EST. So if you want to come and actually experience it for yourself, you can. But like in the beginning...

The first 15 to 20 minutes of our live service, it's just me and my wife sitting on the couch talking to our church and they're typing to us and we're talking to them. We have a question of the day, we're going over announcements, but it's a lot more laid back. And we're sort of hanging out with people, right? And also, it's usually pretty humorous. Like, we're cracking jokes, there's a lot of laughing. And it was kind of like, yeah, if I knew that there was going to be a pretty good comedy sketch at the beginning of every church service, I'd probably be more prone to go to church as well.

And so, but we just have fun with them and we're very transparent. You know, one of our cultural values is authenticity is greater than image. And so we're just very transparent. And then we kick things over and we have a worship song. And worship looks different for us. It does. But we believe that worship is the opportunity to prepare our hearts to receive the most from the word of God and the preaching that we can. So it doesn't look like an upbeat song, a kind of upbeat song, and then a somber song brings about reverence. A lot of that is just they're reflective. And we ask people to bring up prayer concerns during it. Then we go through a time of prayer where we have someone who prays for every prayer concern that comes into our church. So we believe one of the most important things that we can be doing as a church is praying for one another.

And then I teach. And that teaching usually lasts, you know, 20 to 40 minutes, usually 35. And it's gonna look a lot like teaching, except I'm interacting with the church. There are people who are asking questions. I'm literally answering those questions. Like, if someone raised their hand during your service and you took questions, I can do that. And then afterwards, we do a post-service experience where I'm back on the couch by myself. We do AMA, ask me anything. And I just answer questions. So last night, you know, I preached on one of our core values. Last night, rhythm is greater than religion. And afterwards, I spent 15 minutes answering questions about gap theory and creation because the church was just asking questions about it. Nice to answer questions. So that's what our normal service looks like.

I think a lot of people who come from physical church mindset have a hard time grasping that because they've never seen it, right? But if you're part of Twitch culture, you see it every single day. Yep. At any given time, the most popular category on Twitch—just as a heads up, Twitch is a website owned by Amazon, owns about 70 percent of the live streaming on the internet. There's about a hundred million unique viewers on Twitch every month, about 3.5 million unique broadcasters every month. It's a big thing. It's not a small thing. You know, there's a lot of streamers who stream 40 hours a week to 20, 30,000 people a day. This is their living. Lots of people who stream to smaller numbers, this is their living. And there's many people who go there looking for truth. And the biggest category on Twitch is not video games. It's just chatting. So just chatting sees anywhere from 300 to 600,000 active viewers at any given moment, 24/7. And that's the category we're in. That's almost always the biggest category unless there's a big esports event going on. So that's where people are. They're actually not even going to watch video game content. A lot of them are going just to connect with people.

So we're doing the same thing. We always say that Twitch is our sanctuary and Discord is everything else. So if you think of your worship center, that's Twitch for us. Discord is our Sunday school rooms. It's our bulletin board. It's our welcome center. It's our prayer rooms. It's our small group rooms. It's our team meetings. Everything else happens over in Discord. That's where we're hanging out. We're posting devotionals over there. Our Bible studies are going through there. All of that stuff. The typical rhythms of the church and the spiritual disciplines are happening a lot in communities happening through Discord.

Do you feel that the ground is more fertile because you are speaking the lingua franca, the language of the culture at that point? By, you know, we've you and I have talked about this before, but you're using an SM7B and you've got board games in the background and you come from gaming culture and you look like a streamer. Do you feel—I mean, you are a streamer—but you know, you've got the look, you've got the camera angle, you've got everything. Do you feel like the ground is more fertile to have conversations about faith, or are you finding a lot of pushback from, you know, internet trolls, for lack of a better term?

We don't get a lot of trolls. We're not big enough for that. If you ask somebody else, maybe, but I don't get a tremendous amount of that. You know, is the ground fertile? Yes. But is it hard to till? Yes. It's like, here is a really dry patch of ground that hasn't been worked like ever. And there is enormous fertility. Like, there's so much there that can be nourished and grow. There's so many people so hungry. But it's also wildly hard work, right? And so you don't walk in. There's no like, there's nobody in our church that comes to faith and they're like, oh yeah, I know what the church believes. Like, you know, I come from reformed background, right? So I'm, I feel theologically, I'm like, you know, 80, 70 percent reformed in my theology. I'm conservative in my theology. And so, you know, everything in terms of interacting with LGBTQ community, how we do all these things, like we're going to hold to a lot of very typical what you could see is conservative Christian principles and values. And so, but I don't have anybody who comes to my church who doesn't know about church, comes to faith who assumes those things. So like, you have people who come to faith and their beliefs are wild, just crazy. And you have to work through that with them, right? And it's a process. It's like people don't come to you with a preconceived understanding of what the church is. We're in the physical church. A lot of times, the people who came to us, they were just coming from another church. Yeah. So I mean, they were partially discipled since kids. For us, and so you're like, oh yeah, you're here. Welcome. Come to our new members class. Let's get you plugged in. And it's like, nah. Like, you can't do that here. Like, yeah, the people that we're encountering haven't been to church in 10 years at best. A lot of times, you know, and so it's just different.

When you are creating sermons, post-show wrap-up, pre-service type stuff, what's the—that's the question I always ask everybody—but what's the why behind it? Like, do you have an ideal person in mind or ideal three people that you're looking at the camera or talking to? Or is it just kind of, um, take what the Lord is giving you on that on your heart for that week and let's expound upon it?

Yeah, sure. So I mean, we have, you know, we have a Saddleback Sam. Everyone likes having a Saddleback Sam. Um, we don't. Ours doesn't have a name. Ours is a 27-year-old male gamer working a dead-end job. He doesn't necessarily believe in a whole lot of anything. He's not happy with his life. But he comes home, he jumps on Discord, he plays games with his friends every night. He goes to bed at night feeling like he's wasted another evening. But he can't really drum up the energy or the ambition to change anything about who he is or what he's doing. Um, that does. Like, but what he always say is like, we have a one, but we try to—we do everything in our power to be faithful with every person that God sends us. So we have that, but we also have Janie, who's in her 60s and doesn't play any games. We also have John, who plays games. He's a 63-year-old retired police officer from Australia. Like, we also have McKenzie, whose husband is a gamer, but she's one of our team leaders. And she doesn't game at all. And she's, you know, she's just finishing up her doctoral work right now. So, um, you have a one, but you're faithful with whoever God sent you. So yeah, we have people in mind and we funnel it through both of our values. But we also realize that our one is a multifaceted person. And I think people think of gamers and that's all they do. Like, oh, you gave that's all that you do. Your whole life is gaming. And that's not true. Like, gamers have a spiritual life as well. Gamers have jobs as well. Gamers have relationships as well. The average hardcore gamer is in their 30s right now. So we have kids, for goodness sakes. Like, we're a hardcore gamer, but we also have kids. People think that all that you're reaching is 15-year-olds. The vast majority of our church is probably 27 to 32.

And so, you know, that's not the type of person that we're reaching. We're reaching the millennials that left your church 10 years ago and the Gen Z that never showed up, right? And so, and are never showing up. Literally never. And, uh, and I think one of the confusing things—like, the physical church becomes threatened by the digital church's presence sometimes. But the thing is, is that like, the digital church can reach a person that the physical church can't. And it doesn't—it doesn't mean that like, we should compete with one another. It means that there are people within driving distance of amazing, faithful, beautiful churches who are passionately following Jesus and preaching the truth all across the globe that will never show up at your church. Just never coming. Doesn't matter how comfy the seats or anything. And you're never going to meet them, right? You're probably never going to meet them. But we can, through the screen that's in front of their faces, you know, some of them six, eight hours a day. Yeah. And so, you know, it's not that we're reaching, pulling people from the bride of Christ. It's no, we're bringing people into the bride of Christ that never would have stepped foot through a brick-and-mortar building.

Have you gotten pushback from quote-unquote brick-and-mortar churches or even online churches? Any pushback saying you guys are taking butts and seats and nickels and noses from us?

It's not so much nickels and noses and butts and seats. They are like, the physical church is like reeling from the fact that, you know, 40 percent of their people have come back post-COVID. Oh yeah. Yeah, they're too focused on that right now, which I get. It's more pushback of like, uh, during COVID, I had to live stream and I hated it. So it sucks and no one should do it. It's not so much like, it's just like, you know, I literally had, uh, so one of my main team members is a youth pastor at a Southern Baptist church in Tennessee. And he serves with us as a small group leader. And he got into an argument on Twitter. A guy said, if you want young adult males to quit playing video games, go pick them up and go on an adventure. And, um, he responded by saying, which isn't a bad idea. It was like, fine. I mean, most of them don't want to go on adventure, but that's fine. And he responded by saying, like, well, what if you started a ministry that actually reached them through the games that they're playing? And the guy just responded by saying, nope, will never work, right? It's just like, it's a very thoughtless mentality and it's very dismissive because it's foreign and it's threatening, right? I don't understand it. And there's this fear that if I acknowledge it, um, then I have to do it. And I don't want to do it. And I don't think it has as much to do with feeling like my people are being taken and going to your digital church as much as it has to do with, um, I don't personally like it and it personally makes me uncomfortable. And I don't want to go through the process of thinking critically about whether or not it's legitimate. So I just dismiss it. I mean, it's just like the—

Church has dismissed people who play video games for years. That's nothing new. I've been dismissed by the church forever for that reason. So it's not new territory. But I think the churches that are smart, like a lot of pastors who are smart and are willing to be open-minded a little bit, are exploring that. Like Elevation Church, Life Church, just launched their first VR campus. Elevation now has a big streaming network. A lot of other churches are coming and saying, "What are you doing?" So for us, it's like we move with the movers. It's like there's always going to be naysayers out there. When you're on the spear's tip, like there's always going to be more voices who dismiss you than voices who encourage you. And we've just said, "Well, we're going to listen to Jesus. We're going to listen to God. We're going to be in conversation with him. And then after that, we're going to listen to the people who are behind us. And the rest of you, like, you know, if you don't want to have a realistic conversation, it's like I don't know. I probably shouldn't say it. It's like go pound salt. That's fine. Like, I just don't come in and tell me to stop."

But you know, absolutely, we're reaching people and I'm happy. I say we start a Twitter war right here. Hashtag pound salt or hashtag down with the organization.

I want to switch gears real quick as we get to kind of our final couple questions. Give me like a blue sky two to three year. What does Lux look like in two to three years for you guys?

Two to three years, we're self-sustaining. I think that's the goal of any church plant. Our church plant doesn't look any different than what any other church plant does. If after our one year and two more years, at three years, like we have grown up and our church has like put on their big boy pants and said, "We believe in this thing. We're going to financially support this thing." That would be a huge win for us.

I think if you asked me where am I at in ten years, right? Our long-term goal is to plan everything digital goes physical and everything physical goes digital. There's no person who's exclusively a physical being. If you listen to this podcast, guess what? You're partially digital. I just happen to be more digital than the average person, right? And so for us, though, we also recognize that exclusively digital lives are wildly unhealthy. And so our goal, like a pastor who gets on stage and preaches a sermon, right? You hope that your people will apply that to their lives and they won't go home and act like a complete tool on Facebook, right? That's your hope because you hope that the physical transformation also transforms the way they interact digitally. We hope the exact same thing. It's just flipped. We interact with people digitally and we hope that that transforms the way they live physically. Because if you come to faith in Jesus but then you're not compelled that your neighbor and your coworker and your friend and your family who don't know Jesus won't go to hell, then have you really decided to follow Jesus? Like, probably not, yeah.

And so we want to equip people to live out their life as missionaries actively. So our long-term goal is to plant a dispersed network globally of house churches. So like the ultimate end of our engagement pathway is a church planter. So you come into our church as a lurker. You leave our church trained as a missionary, equipped to reach the people in your context to bring ten to twelve people into your house for a Bible study. We equip you with a web of people all across the globe with digital resources that prepare you to disciple and pastor the people inside your church. And then you raise up church planters from within, train them as missionaries, and then you release them.

And we build a web that's connected digitally but that has physical footprints. So hopefully in ten years when we gather for worship, there's a couple hundred nerds behind their computer screens, absolutely leverage the power of the nerd. But hopefully there's also, you know, a church in Moscow and three churches in South Africa and five churches in Missouri and three house churches in, you know, Delaware and, you know, one in Pittsburgh and one in LA. You know, hopefully we also have house churches that are building all over the place. That's our long-term vision.

I love it. That's awesome. Big and expansive. I'm going to go last question from me. Top five games of all time, whether they board, video, whatever it is, mobile. You top five, go five to one for me. I know it's a Sophie's choice because like even as I was writing the question to you in the email, I was going like, "I don't know that I can narrow just five down." So if you want to give me a top two or three, then I will. You and the rest of the army here will be forgiven.

The hard part about that question is the sheer amount of games that I've played. It's not an easy question to answer. So let me just, we'll do at least four, maybe five. And let's go with genre. Let's do it by genre because it's just too hard.

I'm actually more of a tabletop gamer than I am a video gamer. I prefer tabletop gaming. So my favorite tabletop game, board game, for a long time has been a game called Blood Rage, which is about Ragnarok during the end of time in Viking mythology. It's a phenomenal game. No one will play it with me anymore. Everybody at it, a close second is a game by Ryan Locket in Red Raven Games called Near and Far, which is one of my wife and I's all-time top favorite games to play.

If we went to tabletop RPGs, I've been playing Dungeons and Dragons and other RPGs for, you know, twenty years. I've been playing with the same group. I'm playing with a guy tonight that I've been playing with since sixth grade. Actually, dang. Did you guys stick over to fifth?

Yeah, so we're playing fifth right now. Okay. But we went during fourth edition, we went wide in different RPGs. So one of my all-time favorite RPGs is a really brutal system called Burning Wheel. A close second is a more collaborative storytelling model by Forged in the Dark, which is called Blades in the Dark. And it is, that was really, if you guys ever listened to the Adventure Zone, they did Blades in the Dark for a little bit as well, yeah? It's this post-apocalyptic Victorian England setting. It's a really, really fun game. I actually have my characters that I played, I had artwork done. I commissioned artwork done of my characters that I played because I loved that game so much.

If I had to choose a top video game of all time, and there are some really, really good games out there, I think that I would have to choose, oh man, I, you know what? Like it's hard for me not to choose Skyrim, only because of the obscene amount of hours I put into that game in college and longevity. I mean, it's on every platform since the PS2. It feels like it's been on every platform three times. So yeah, re-release, yeah, yeah. So there's that.

And you know, if I had to pick a favorite card game, and this sort of bridges into video games, I played a lot of digital and physical tabletop card games. I'm currently really enjoying a game by Fantasy Flight called Marvel Champions. But I also podcasted and played Elder Scrolls Legends competitively for a while. And not real competitively, but slightly. And that was where my podcast started. It covered TESL when I first got started. So that was one of my all-time favorite card games. I'm a big Elder Scrolls fanboy. I still play Elder Scrolls Online.

How do you feel about all the stuff about Six coming out right now?

I guess I'm clueless. Did they release some new information about Six as of late that I missed?

Well, all the Reddit scuttlebutt says that all some of the Microsoft takeover is actually pushing Six back. And so the thing I've always had, but my brother and I were both, well, not my brother so much anymore, but I'm also an ESO guy for a while. And I started reading Reddit just for the lore on Six. And then all of a sudden I went, "Oh crap, Microsoft." But oh my gosh, that's right. This thing's going to get ruined. So I don't know if you had any thoughts about that.

You know, I think that the acquisitions of Microsoft and Sony, because Sony just bought Bungie, and I'm a Destiny 2 player as well, I think that, you know, it's a power game. It's a movement. Nobody wants Elder Scrolls Six to fail, including Microsoft. And so if they're wise, they'll let the people with the greatest passion about the game and the biggest devotion to it continue to develop it. So I don't have any reason. My hope is that Elder Scrolls Six gets delayed only because before with Bethesda, they were running out of resources and we're going to have to push the game out partially made. And with Microsoft, they can push the release date back and actually polish the game because they have the financial resources to do so now.

That's my hope. And you know, I've been waiting eleven years or whatever for that game. You know, at this point I'll just take Breath of the Wild too. I'll just take it worth the while too. And that's the other one they're doing. Starfield is that the other one they're doing?

Starfield, yeah. I'm not a huge sci-fi guy. I've always just had a bigger attraction to fantasy, fantasy games. So you know, I don't know how much I'll play Starfield. But supposedly that's going to come out this year. We'll see. Hopefully the NPCs actually have faces and stuff once it does come out.

Yeah, hope you can't you just, you know, put books down and then they just launch into outer space after that.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Cool. Mark, thanks so much for this conversation, man. I appreciate it. We are going to have all of Mark's contact information, all of his social information, excuse me, all of Lux's socials, everything, all the links are going to be in the show notes for this and in the description below. Super stoked for what you guys are doing. Love to have a love being able to catch up with you, man. Thanks so much.

Yeah, awesome. Thanks for having me on the show, Andy.

Absolutely. Well, thanks again to Mark and Lux Digital Church and everything that they're doing. I, after that, I jumped right into their Discord and was hanging out with everybody and have been hanging out with everybody. I am a huge proponent of what they do on Wednesday nights, but not only that, of what they're doing with their small groups, with their entire model of how they're doing discipleship. And it's interesting to see, you know, some of what the conversation unraveled around and really rolled back up on was how digital churches and how digital church ministry is so much different and yet almost the same as in-person physical ministry. And I'm just excited to see how they're going about ministry. I'm excited to see what they're going to be doing. And most importantly, I'm excited to see the content that they're putting out because it is good content. It's not your standard typical run-of-the-mill look at a camera for forty-five minutes and preach. There is worship and it is introspective and there are announcements and there is a live prayer time and there's interaction happening between the camera and the Discord. And there's, you know, what I like to call chucklehead time at the very beginning with him and his wife, for him and a partner or him and a brother-in-law or whoever's in town as they just sit on the couch and talk. And I love the laid-back, relaxed atmosphere of everything happening there.

So Mark, thanks, man. Thanks for joining us here. And to you listening, thanks for joining me here on Breaking the Fifth Wall. It's like I said, episode two. We've got a lot more coming.

We've got live shows coming, we've got YouTube shows coming, a whole bunch of stuff, so stay tuned to this channel, stay tuned to our socials. Until then, love you, talk soon.

All right, and we're back. Hey, Jeff here, and I've got Andy Mage here, part of the Breaking the Fifth Wall takeover.

So Andy, you've probably heard this episode, you know, multiple times at this point. Man, are there any lessons, are there any takeaways that are still sticking out for you here?

It's interesting the way that Mark and his wife were able to form a church coming from another church. And obviously they worked with Digital Planning, Stadia Digital Planting, or, you know, Stadia Planting, excuse me. And they were able to kind of get some backing from different donors and different kinds of givers. But their sending church, his home church, the church he had worked for for umpteen years, were not only excited but were supportive of him and helped kind of lift him up.

I don't know how many times I've heard church planters come in my own travels say, "Yeah, we had to go plant because X, Y, and Z was falling down around us in the church." And that's interesting to me because Mark, what they're doing obviously is such a huge thing, and yet at the same time, that church didn't want to really reign it in as one of their quote-unquote ministries. They actually wanted to send and plant a church. So the rarity of that is astounding to me.

Also, the fact that Mark really kind of started this from a podcast just proves that podcasts really are changing the world. And the idea that the passion and the drive and the desire to connect with people that were like him, that were lost, coming from starting a video game podcast, from streaming on Twitch, and most importantly, just being in and of the culture—I think that speaks to me a lot. In that I'm a pastor, I'm a musician, but I'm also a techie, but I'm also kind of a digital guy, but I'm also a fitness guy and all these other things. And it made me sit back and reflect on how I could in my own circles start to reach people more for Jesus.

So just some of the things that are being pulled out, I think it's a fantastic interview, and I just love the way that he was able to communicate so efficiently and so clearly, even through what some people might find theological draws as we kind of talk through, you know, Reformation and all sorts of stuff. He just kind of picked that up, set it to the side, and said, "No, we're just going to talk about Jesus for a little bit." So good on you, Mark.

He definitely knows the audience and how to contextualize for that. And really, the contextualization, the aiming—okay, I'm speaking to this type of audience, so I need to speak in languages—language that they'll understand. I'm not talking English, I'm talking like theological depths and guidance. There's places for that, but sometimes in digital-only churches, when you're dealing with a bunch of new or non-Christians, that's really not the place to go deep. And Mark understands that really well.

And I do love my Stadia family. I was involved in the planning process with Mark, and I have loved seeing him succeed. My gosh, that was maybe a year, a year-plus at this point now. And seeing it, seeing how he's been successful with Lux Digital Churches, is a great thing.

So well, hey Andy, as we're landing the plane here, man, any closing thoughts?

No, I'm like I said, stoked to be just getting this podcast up off the ground. It's been sort of a passion project, and something that, you know, I've got a million different things running, and it's good to be able to sit and focus my why through this podcast. And hopefully, you know, niching down as the term is that we're kind of thrown around in the content circles now, hopefully getting into this niche of helping other content creators really blossom in their whys is something I'm super passionate about. So I'm just thankful for the opportunity to be able to be with you guys and on this podcast.

And we're gonna land the plane. Be sure to check out Breaking the Fifth Wall. Links are in the show notes. Hey, who are you bringing up next? What's the next guest we've got coming up here in the next week or so? What can we look forward to?

Yeah, we have two main guests actually, but one of them I can't really talk about because he's kind of a big-time streamer, and we're going to kind of keep that on—I know that's a tease right there. We got to kind of keep that on hold so we kind of go through some channels and things like that. But we do have somebody young in the ministry. His name's Austin, and I've had a privilege of working with him. He's kind of across the country right now, and he is starting out streaming, and he's been streaming card games. And I'm interested to see how the streaming of card games has led him to share the gospel a little bit, kind of in the vein of Mark, but different in that these card games aren't actual games, and you'll see more what I'm talking about in the next couple of weeks.

Awesome, I can't wait to see it. So check out Breaking the Fifth Wall. Links are in the show notes for Andy, for Mark, somewhere out there. This is Jeff with the Church Digital and Digital Church Network. Man, thanks for jumping on the podcast here. We'll see you next time here at the show. Y'all have a good day.