EP213: The EPIC Church Experiment

Maybe people meeting in homes together doing church together will give them the gift of time with each other and they'd be able to create real relationships with one another. Now the other thing we thought was we think this could be a really cool way, a missional way to reach people because instead of having five locations around the city we could have 15, 1600 locations around the city which, man, you know, I mean yeah they're in homes but I'll take that, I'll take that all day long, you know. We think reaching every person in the city starts by reaching every person in your circle.

Welcome to the Church Digital podcast. Through this podcast we'll talk about the technological innovations within the church, but more than tech for tech itself will address deeper questions. Is disciple making possible digitally? How should we approach the digital mission field? Can a biblically grounded church operate in digital space? Oh, and where does the metaverse fit into all this? Whether you're a big or small church, an established church or a startup church plant, the Church Digital's goal is to help churches like yours learn to be a multiplying church digitally and physically. Our heart is that churches like yours would discover a newfound focus on disciple making that will revolutionize your church. And now here's your host, Jeff Reed.

All right, hey, we got episode 213. Hey, it's Jeff here with the Church Digital podcast and excited about this conversation. We were at Exponential and so I had brought this church in, brought him down to speak at one of the tracks we were doing, and they shared so much in so little of a time I was like, oh, we gotta dig in deeper, we gotta have more of a conversation. And so excited to bring in Epic Church into the conversation here on episode 213 of the Church Digital podcast. I think I said all those words right, hopefully. But we've got, hey, we've got Kent Jacobs, lead pastor there with Epic Church in Philadelphia, Justin De La Cruz who operates as the executive pastor of campuses, locations, something like that. And it was my first exposure to this church was in COVID. Like I knew them by name and somehow we got connected during, or maybe early, mid-21, early 21 in COVID, and they were thinking some crazy ideas. Oh, like listen, a lot of churches were thinking crazy ideas, right? And so they were thinking some crazy ideas and some of them was like, that's awesome, do it. Some of them were like, that's awesome, I don't think you should do that, but here's if you do, here's some things to be wary of. And it was really fun just to hear maybe some of the lessons, the observations. Did the craziness work? Where were there takeaways from that, you know? So many of us we were doing crazy stuff during the COVID season, but to actually take and learn something from it and try to figure out even how to apply some of those lessons to where we are in 22 and beyond, that's really the heart of this. So guys, thanks for jumping on the call. Kent, Justin, appreciate y'all being on here.

Yeah, yeah, very cool. Well, hey, just to open this up, Epic Church, talk a little bit about this. What is Epic Church? What's the vision? Tell us a little bit about who you are.

Yeah, so we started Epic in Philadelphia 13 years ago in a movie theater. To this day, when I smell buttered popcorn, I'm ready for church. It's a thing, it's in me, there's no getting that out. My favorite location even today is the one that meets in a movie theater. I think that's just a fun place to have church. So there's that. Our name, Epic, actually it wasn't meant to be pretentious or arrogant in any way at all. It actually stands for something. Epic stands for Every Person In the City. And that's because our vision is to see every person in the city follow Jesus. When we started the church, it wasn't because Philadelphia needed another church. What Philadelphia needed was a different kind of church, a church that wasn't just for church people, you know? And I, it takes me back to when I first became a follower of Jesus, I was 12 years old, and I remember just being so amazed that you could know God, they could have a relationship with God, and I remember thinking, man, I want everybody to know God like I feel like I've had a chance to know God and I've just never lost that. So all these years later we started a church and with that same kind of heart to try and create a place where people who were far from God would discover that they didn't have to be. So that's what our story is. The church grew over the years from one location to five locations in and around the city, and one thing is really cool about the church is because we're in the city, we're a reflection of the city, and the church is super diverse, so racially, socioeconomically, just in every way, and it's just a beautiful community of people on mission together to help reach every person in our city. So that's our story in a nutshell.

I love that. I love gathering people together, racially different people mixed together and getting them on mission together, like having that be the shared, unified value is just a lot of fun. Justin, you were going to say something?

Yeah, I joined the team in 2013 and I got to learn about multi-site as we cut our teeth on what that looks like and how to innovate in that direction. And I just want to say, Jeff, thanks for having us, having us on. We love talking shop, we love talking church and innovating, and we're learners, we are learners to the max. And so we listen to all the stuff you put out there and everybody else and we're trying to figure out the best way to do things and experiment with stuff. And that's what we're gonna get into, some of the experiments we've made today. But one of my favorite things that shows kind of the DNA of what we do and even what led us into the stuff we've tried throughout the pandemic and what we've learned is, you know, we always wanted to create space for people who weren't there yet and make sure that we were going to try innovative ways, whatever we could to do that. And so once our first venue in the movie theater got filled up, our very first venture into multi-site was we opened up another location directly across the hall. And so at the same time, the same service, we had two bands directly across the hall, two hosts during the service, and then when Kent got up to speak, we would type that over onto the other screen happening at the same time. And so we just tried to make the most of all the theater spaces we could. That was our first venture into all this stuff. And since then we've been trying to innovate and do whatever we can in the city. So it's been fun.

Yeah, that was back when it was like, you know, some bubble gum and some tape. That's how we figured out how to stream from one location to, you know, to the other auditorium. And yeah, it's been cool to see, you know, how things have changed.

Oh, it's a lot of fun to do church like that, level church, that craziness of a church in a movie theater like that. That just takes me back. We were in a story for another day, but we were streaming from one theater to another. We were like, let's create a whole other service in another theater in Spanish, so we're like bilingual out of a, okay, so Frank Hopkins, you're not listening to this, but I love you, thank you. Like he was the campus pastor at this church and the man was borderline crazy here at Christ Fellowship Miami, you know? And it's just, yeah, good times, good times back in the day. I used to pray, this is funny. I used to pray at the end of the service and as I was praying I would be walking up the aisle to get to the other auditorium because I was the drummer in the other auditorium to close the song. So I had to run, jump on the kit, I'd say amen and we jump into the song. It's just, wow, you know, do what you gotta do, do what you gotta do, man. Listen, if you're multi-site, that's what, whatever it takes, it's just gonna happen and you probably have, what'd you say, which was the line, bubble gum and tape? That's probably the budget to make it happen.

Well done. Hey, so listen, we talked, you know, as you said in the intro, like you guys were experimenting with some things. So you were told me off there. You were five campuses at one point, now you're three, so you've restricted some things during the COVID season, like many multi-site churches have just kind of restructuring and trying to get to a place of health. But so talk to me a little bit. Like what was, what is what happened to your church? What was some of your experiences? What's the story of your church kind of in the COVID season?

Yeah, so during COVID there's a couple things that were, well, first of all we got thrown into online church like the deep end of the pool, just like everybody else did. Prior to that, our online church experience was just an upload of the thing we captured on Sunday and we'd upload it at some point on Monday. And so all of a sudden we had to figure out what online church looks like because we're not able to gather and meet together. And so we got thrown to the deep end of the pool on that and started to innovate and think about what that should be and what it could be going forward. Quickly also had to shift and make the pivot to online groups and Zoom groups and all of that stuff, and you have to try and retain some sense of community and connection with people. And then during COVID another big part of what the church looked like was it was so cool to see the church in action. Food insecurity is a big challenge in Philadelphia specifically. One fourth of residents of Philadelphia live under the poverty line, so a family of four living on less than twenty-six thousand seven hundred a year. And so, you know, that became a big priority for us. It was so cool to see so many churches come and stack hands together around making sure people had food, particularly the elderly in our community who weren't able to leave their homes at all to access food banks and things like that. So, you know, everybody kind of jumped into action. We're trying to figure out online church, trying to figure out online groups, and we finally kind of settled in with some online stuff that we were pretty excited about. And then, which led us toward the end of the COVID season where we could begin to start gathering again, and that's when we kind of got into some of the experiments.

Yeah, we faced some challenges specifically in Philly. Things were locked down, shut down, close up shop. We were meeting plus all of our locations meet in rented facilities, places like performing arts theaters, movie theaters, high schools, which we were just, we're not getting into those anytime soon. And so while some churches had options of utilizing buildings to reopen, we didn't. And so we had an extended period of time, a long time, so we even couldn't even get into talks about potentially returning to a physical venue. And so we had to get creative, and that led us to some of these other things.

Awesome. So let's unpack some of the other things. Like you, so you're all online, you're feeling tension where you can't open up the building, you're on lockdown over a longer period of time. Let's unpack here. What were some of these experiments? What were you guys trying?

Yeah, so the first big thing was all the online church stuff. So I mean that came with a ton of experiments like service times. I remember we first started, we were like, yeah, ten service times, that's what we'll do. And so yeah, we like staffed them and you know figured all that out. And then we're like, wait, we can leverage this.

On demand thing, and you know, so we kind of settled in on service times, figuring out, experimenting with different platforms. You know, do we diversify and throw our stuff over like three different platforms or do we consolidate and bring it down onto one platform? We ended up landing on YouTube as our primary spot, and there's a bunch of reasons why we landed there.

And then even experimenting with what online church looks like for us, it related to the content, you know, like what does this online church service look like? Because you can't just do what we did in the building and throw that online and expect that to, you know, let's shorten the service, shorten the sermon by a little bit and think that's gonna be okay. It's a completely different platform. It's experienced in a completely different way, and so it needs a completely different product.

So we did a lot of experiments with that. I think the bright spot coming out of COVID was looking back and saying that really worked for us, and I think we landed on some things that we're really proud of and some things that are we know are going to be a big part of our future going forward, 2022 and beyond.

So there's an online church experiment for us. The other side was we did this experiment where we thought, man, what would happen if, as we're able to regather, what if we met once a month in person and then we had people use the online church experience and meet in homes together the other weeks of the month? And there's a couple reasons that kind of led us to saying, man, maybe this, maybe this is a better way of doing church going forward, or at least this season that we're in affords us the opportunity to experiment with this, which we never would have had we not gone through the pandemic and been in that situation.

So a couple things that kind of led to that: one was we really sensed wanting to create an opportunity for real community. You know, one of the challenges with a church like ours is you can walk in the building and you can see someone who kind of knows you, you kind of know them, you wave at each other, you have the service, and then you leave and you call that community. But come on, like that's not real community. That's not life on life. That's not, you know, real community is you got refrigerator rights. You come to my house, you get something out of the fridge, and I'm not gonna fight you. You know, but we call it, you know, we call this thing that we've settled for in our kind of church as community, and there's just something so much more. And so we thought, man, maybe people meeting in homes together doing church together will give them the gift of time with each other and they'd be able to create real relationships with one another.

The other thing we thought was we think this could be a really cool way, a missional way to reach people, because instead of having five locations around the city, we could have fifteen, sixteen hundred locations around the city, which, man, you know, I mean, yeah, they're in homes, but I'll take that. I'll take that all day long. You know, we think reaching every person in the city starts by reaching every person in your circle. So we thought, man, let's leverage this tool and see what could come of it.

If you were to ask me, did it work? So we did this for six months. My answer back to you would be like, not like we hoped. It didn't. And there's a couple reasons why. In fact, there's probably a bunch of reasons why. But the bottom line for us, what we walked away with was this: number one, not as many people met in homes together as we hoped would meet together. Part of that had to do with, you know, we were in the middle of a pandemic still, and how comfortable people were allowing others into their homes. Secondly, getting families together honestly could be a little bit like herding cats as far as schedules and all that kind of stuff. We found that to be a challenge.

So because not as many people were meeting in homes together as we hoped, we weren't more connected. We were less connected as a result of that, and that wasn't an overall win for us. The other thing that was a bottom line finding for us from the experiment was going from fifty-two weekends, fifty-two opportunities for someone to come and bring a friend or a family member, and reducing that down to once a month to twelve. Man, that just really affected our front door and really limited our ability to reach new people. And for us, that's just, it's just not, this is not okay. You know, we're driven by our mission to reach people who are far from God and people who don't know him yet. And so, you know, that's where we landed with those two things.

Yeah, I can totally see going from fifty to twelve being like a drastic jump. You know, it's funny, like I had a little bit, just a little bit, you know, I had some friends. I've known some churches, a potential church when it was Flamingo Road, I think down here in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. They went through a stretch where it was like different people were invited to the main building and then other people were invited to watch online. Like they rotated. If it's your Sunday, you come, but if not, it's others. And so it was like every other week. And so trying to communicate that and cast that vision, you know, Eris is a good friend of mine. He was the executive pastor over at production, and so he would tell me horror stories about how that was just a bad idea from the beginning.

But this, I think, is cast in a place of where there's potential for this, right? Like, man, if we can get people to live missionally within their environments, if we can get people to catch a vision of being the church with their neighbors, of utilizing their circle of influence, like from a missional, from a disciple-making standpoint, there's a lot of interest there. There's a lot of potential in this idea.

Do you think they really understood the why? Do you think that they really, the people of your church, they catch the vision of that? I don't want to out anybody, but did they see that, or was it more of just the comfort of being able to watch church on their own at home?

Well, I'll tell you what, Jeff. We spent a lot of time considering the options and the strategy behind this and the whys and the benefits and the drawbacks. In fact, we had pages and pages full with our staff of what this could look like, why people wouldn't like it, how would we help them engage, all that kind of stuff. We tried to anticipate questions in advance. Then we rolled it out to our leaders, and we tried to anticipate questions and drawbacks in advance. And then we spent an entire four or five week message series teaching on this and why and explaining the reason and the shift and rolling it out and saying, here's what we're gonna do coming in August. We're gonna do this. And we tried to get the heart behind it and meeting with people and explaining it.

And did they get it? I think in general, something like that is such a radical shift from what regular church is that it had to keep being explained over and over again. Like, so what do you, wait, what do you mean? What are we doing? Once a month or this is what this is just for this time? You know, like it got a little confusing for people because everyone's just ingrained like, this is what church is, and this is how it happens in America, right? And we, this is the thing. And so the education of it, although we felt like we did a decent job of it, multiply that times five. It probably was necessary in order to really communicate what was going on and why.

Yeah, I think, Jeff, I totally agree with you in that I think that the idea has merit and the idea has a lot of potential, but I don't think, I don't think it's too radical of a shift for a church of our size and to do it like we did, which is like, here we go, you know? And in the season, still being in the pandemic, so I think that had a lot to play in some things too.

I think this is the type of change that you either have to build slowly over time with a core group of people who are bought into that idea and that just celebrate them, celebrate what's happening over time, and let that thing grow organically, or if you're starting from scratch, maybe there's an opportunity to give this idea a run.

Yeah, we're still a fan of people meeting and gathering in their homes, and we actually see that as a part of the strategy for the future in areas of the city where maybe the location isn't right near them or something like that. But for the entire church and for everyone, it didn't seem to catch on.

You know what's interesting, even with planters and we work with digital churches and micro, and in a lot of those fringe cases, digital church planting, that type, and even like some of my coaching with them is make sure your people understand the vision. Make sure your people understand the vision, because you may, the pastor oftentimes is coming in with a very disruptive mindset, but that doesn't mean that the people, that his high-level leaders, his volunteers, her audience, that doesn't mean that they still see that vision. Yeah, you can tell them once, but there's for some of them twenty, thirty, forty years of this is what church is, and now you're changing that paradigm. Yes, I understand it conceptually, but my default is falling back towards more of a consumer mindset or something like that. And so it's so important as you're doing these experiments to keep that, the why in front of people. Like, this I know I love that.

Let me ask you guys a question. How do you, because so what I'm hearing is we experimented, we involved the entire church with the experiment. It didn't work like we thought it would. We learned some lessons from it. We'll get into some of that in a little bit. How do you experiment without involving the entire, could you have done this like in a sandbox? Could you have done this at a smaller level? Like, what do you do? Any idea what that would have looked like? I'm just curious, because it's so massive with, okay, so we're like, we're gonna shut down one campus out of our three and we're gonna tell the theater campus that they're online, oh, for three weeks out of four. Like, what would a phasing experiment possibly look like on this for y'all?

Yeah, I think had we approached it with pitching the idea, there would have been a certain group of people that are really probably a little more missional minded, and even those people who just have the gift of hospitality and you know, they're just gatherers on their own. They just have people at their house all the time anyways. Those are probably the people that would be like, yeah, I could give this a shot. And had we given people the chance to opt in instead of just telling everybody you're all in, that might have been a better move. And then grow with those people. So I certainly think we could have taken a slower path and experimented with a smaller group to see what could come up, and I think that we still will going forward because there are people who loved the experiment and there's people who were like, man, this was great. I loved that we did that. And little kind of, you know, bummed out that we're not doing that anymore. So pulling these people together would be a good path forward.

There's also a unique time for us in Philly. Still is a unique time.

For us in Philly, two over two years later and we're still facing challenges related to covenant in the pandemic. But you know, as we were rolling this out, we're talking August 2021 when we began this experiment, so a well over a year beyond when the world shut down because of COVID.

Right, and we were still in the heights of everything around us is different. Schools aren't normal. Everything is nothing was normal. Nothing. And so I think that those factors certainly played effect into it, but it also gave us the opportunity to say, well, since nothing's normal, this is the time to experiment with something. But why? If everything's already broken, we're not worried about breaking anything. Let's just try it. Like, whenever do you get a chance to just say, you know what, we're going to try something completely different than we ever did before? When could we ever have stopped weekly services and said, let's try what once a month looks like and tell you why and give you a chance to taste that and try it out? And I think it just kind of goes towards our DNA and the type of risk that we're willing to take to experiment, to try to do things. Everyone says they want to do things no one else is doing, to reach people no one else is reaching. But they do their church is exactly the same as every other church. Exactly the same, right? Like, and so I think it was time for us to put our money where our mouth was and say, well, all right, like, we're dissatisfied. As, look, if you really put the pressure point on most pastors, they're dissatisfied with the community that's happening in their church and they're dissatisfied with the people that they're reaching in their church. And they're like, we gotta, we've got it, someone else has got to change, we gotta do something about him. We were like, well, if we're dissatisfied with that state of it and we don't want to return exactly to what it was, then let's just break the box and strategically try something different over a calculated period of time with, you know, laying it out in a strategic plan. But through that, we definitely learn things and we'll take those learnings and we'll take what we experienced into the next seasons that we do. And I pull back from that season and there's some things that we walk away with like, man, ouch, don't ever do that again, that I feel like we learned. But then there were some things that I walk away with and go, I thank God that we walked away with this because this is such a big part of our future going forward.

And so like, some of the ouches was this is funny. I legitimately thought that if I told everybody the dates each month and even put it on the back of their t-shirt, which we literally did, we gave people a t-shirt with all the dates on there, that those dates would be like sacred and that, you know, there's no way they're gonna miss church that day. Nope. I couldn't have been more wrong. I tell you what, so here's what we learned. People take every weekend as it comes and either decide what they're going to be doing that weekend. We learned that some people love being in the building and they want every opportunity to be in the building. And we learn that some people love being online and they want to be online all the time. And we love that there's a lot of people who like both and like the option of both and like the ability to be able to be fluid between both of those things.

In fact, it's funny. The people who want church in person every week, it's not that they're going to be there every week. They just want the option of being able to be in person every week. They're only going to be there once a month, but they want that option every single week. You can't tell me which week I come. I come when I want to show up, right? Exactly. Isn't that true? But isn't that the day we're living in? Isn't that kind of culture? Like, how we do everything has changed. It's a hybrid world. And we do like having all the options. And so trying to pigeonhole everybody into one thing is honest, it's a little silly to do that, right? Which is why on-demand is so brilliant too. Like, let's go take advantage of those other 160, whatever other hours there are in a week for people to be able to connect and grow in their faith. And those things too, you know. So why just say it's just the one, just one hour? There's so much more opportunity ahead of us than that.

So that was one thing we learned. We also learned that it's almost impossible to build teams if you're only ever meeting once a month. That was tough. If you only see each other once a month, it's hard to get some momentum going on a team for in-person church. But like I said, everything's changed.

Some positives though is that because everything's changed, we're totally sold on hybrid church. And what that means for people and people's ability to move fluidly between an in-person experience and an online or digital experience and back and forth. We think that's a big part of the future. We also think that online church needs to be platform specific. Like it, you can't just take what you do in the building and throw it online and think that that's sufficient because it's not. It's a, you know, there's similarities between soccer and basketball. They both have goals, they both have a ball, but you play those games very differently. And I think that's how it is with online church and in-person church. They need to be different experiences.

So that means for us, like, we've got to be a student of internet culture. Our creative director, Rack, I love this. He says, you know, he says we know how to create and have a great church experience, but when we're online, we also need to learn how to make good internet. That's how he says it. I don't know if that's correct or not, but I think that the idea is right. Is that it also has to be good, has to fit the platform that it's created for.

And then probably one more like positive takeaway is, you know, some people ask, they say, uh, you know, aren't you concerned that if you're doing an online thing that you're competing with like all the other national ministries, you know, across the world, like, you know, Northpoint and Life Church and Elevation? And I'm like, no, we're not competing with them. We have a distinct advantage in that we get to be hyper-local. You know, when we say we're for Philly, we talk about Philly things. We make fun of Cowboys fans unapologetically because it's that, that is a good, godly Philadelphia thing to, and that's okay, right? In our context, it works great. And you know, we get to talk about serving our city and caring about things that Philadelphians care about. And ultimately, we want to be the church that Philadelphia never knew that they had. It wouldn't be that church family they didn't know they had.

And so the online experience gives us an opportunity to be able to do that and be hyper-local at the same time. So those are some of the takeaways that we've had from all this stuff. My favorite part was making fun of Cowboys fans. Let's go. I got to tell you, like, that, yes, I lived in Dallas for about nine years and they were not some of my good years. Not a Cowboy. I'm a Miami Dolphins fan. And so like, the only people get made fun more than the Cowboys are Dolphins fans. So you know, I kind of like that. We just feel sorry for you.

Yeah, no, I'll take the pity. It's cool. Thank you. Um, go Philly. Like, uh, listen, I'll cheer for anybody. That's it.

Yeah, very good. Let's go, Jeff. All right, hey, so much, so much good there. So many lessons. Let me ask this. Um, you said digital, you're learning that digital is different than physical. Your creative director's talking about good internet. That's a great line. Um, is there any practical? Have you guys wrestling with that now? Like, how is digital? What are you thinking about in the future? What are some of those tensions on how digital and physical really are different?

Yeah, so you mentioned in the beginning, I'll jump in here, Jeff, that we have gone from five physical venue locations in the city in the Philadelphia area to three currently right now. And part of that has been a strategic shift for us to make sure that we're moving our manpower and our staffing around to best support where we want to go. And so we staffed a full-time pastor over online and see that as a location and want to be able to support the people in that. And we shifted my role from overseeing locations and leading one to just overseeing locations and creative and online to put even more intentionality and emphasis behind the strategy of what we're doing and supporting the team that's doing it.

And so I think for us, really practically, we realized like, all right, this isn't, this is the future. This is the future for us as a part of how we church. And therefore, we need to shift our resources and our staffing and our energy and our processes around that. And so we've made those shifts. Really practically, also, we decided another thing that we decided to do was to create a completely separate online experience than our Sunday one. And so that takes a lot of time and resources. And so we have service plan for Sunday services, which we call Epic Live, and then we have service planning for our online weekly episodes experiences, which we call it Epic Everywhere. And so we have to arrange everything we do strategically in those weekly things between our weekly live experiences and our weekly show of Epic Everywhere. And that's something we've had to learn and practically do. And it's afforded us a lot of opportunity to be creative. And so we find that is actually it's fun. There's a lot of opportunity to be creative creating the online thing, which gives you different opportunities than you would with Epic Live. And trying to lean into those and take advantage of those opportunities.

Yeah, and so like, you know, pragmatically, you know, we think like I said, it's not enough to set a camera up the back of the room and send that to your online thing. It's like, no, we're gonna record this early. There's gonna be host scripts. We're recording the message ten days out so there's time to do all the editing and all that kind of stuff during the message.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I'm sorry. Hold, pause, pause, pause. You record the message ten days out?

Yeah, we're doing the, we're ten days out on the message. And then we do the hosting the week of. And the reason the only reason we did the hosting the week of is because there was a time when like, you know, every other week the world was blowing up and there was something else in the news that we needed to address from our mind. And if we did it, if we recorded too early, we'd have to re-record everything. So yeah, so we're doing the hosting the week of, pulling the show together for each week. And then like I said, you know, like, you know, being a student of internet culture, it changes things. You know, so there, we call them episodes. You know, it's not just church services. Um, there's we ask people to share instead of asking people to invite because you don't invite online, you share online. You know, it just changes language. It changes how you approach things, changes how you do things. Uh, we do one song. Um, because I don't know, it's a little weird just stand up in your living room and sing to the TV. Um, and so you know, we do one song and that works for us. Sometimes too, if we're doing like a closer or something like that. So it just being student of internet culture and allowing that to then influence and impact how we make decisions, I think is an important part of creating something that will thrive when it's online.

So I got to tell you, I have much more respect for you. Not that I didn't have respect before, but it extremely elevated you being.

10 days out. Thank you. Yes, on behalf of your creative departments, your production departments, and anybody else who works in communications, thank you. That will go a long way in helping them do what they need to do. Like, that's just beautiful. Your digital pastor, you're online, whoever's like that, that's just incredible.

I can remember hearing a sermon for the first time Saturday night, which didn't even go the direction that it was supposed to on script, and then basically having to re-film all of it. We used to—I would pay a contractor to stay up overnight Saturday night to Sunday to edit this thing out. And the fact that you guys are 10 days out, I'm stuck on that. You said so many other great things, but that's just incredible. Thank you for that. That's really good.

Give me a ministry win, okay? So we've talked a lot about what it wasn't. We talked a lot about the lessons that we learned from it. We talked a little bit about how it's influencing what we're doing now. What was something that was like, yeah, but this was cool? There's got to be a ministry story, a win, something in this season.

Oh, we both got stories. Jeff, now you're going to tell it. You know, you asked the pastors to tell the—one of my favorite moments was when we were actually able to host some baptisms. We did some baptisms during the pandemic, mass stuff, all you know, try to do as much as we can, and then we hosted some when we began live again. We've got to baptize people that their very first time walking into a physical building was the day they were being baptized. Because they made it, they connected with us online, made a decision to follow Jesus, and you know, we hear the stories from churches around that this has been happening. And to be able to be a part of it, experiencing that, is something really special. And to know that the difference that it's making in their life, far, you know, wherever they're at—we've had people going in from different places around the country, the city, and even around the world saying like, hey, can you baptize me? Or hey, I want to follow? Or that kind of thing, which is pretty neat.

We have another cool story. Philly's a very high college city, so lots of colleges, a lot of young people, young adults. And so we have a lot of college students. One college student has been connected to our church, but her mom back home in New Hampshire hadn't been connected to a church, especially during the pandemic. And so they were able to share the online experience together—the daughter in Philly, the mom in New Hampshire, watching the same church episode at the same time—and have a shared experience together that brought their faith together. Such a special thing. And the daughter actually had—or the mom, not sure which one—got connected to start serving online with our social team and our street team and getting connected that way. And it's really neat to provide opportunities for people to connect even though they're distance-wise. They're having that same spiritual shared experience, which is pretty cool.

Yeah, it's neat to see the opportunity for digital missionaries. Is that what we're calling this now, right? So for people to be able to share their faith digitally with the people that they love. Just this past week, I saw a dad and a daughter. The daughter had been connected to Epic, and her dad had walked away from church a long time ago. And so they started watching during the pandemic together, even though they lived different places. And then, you know, he gets baptized on the backside of all of this. And I saw them at church. When I saw him, they had come to something called a welcome party, which is an experience that we have for people who are new to Epic where they meet some of our pastors. It's like a Zoom call kind of thing. At any rate, I got to hear some of their story, and then he got baptized. And I'm just like, how cool is that? That this—that's her, that's his daughter's story now—is that she got to be such an integral part of him making a connection to God and to faith again. And it all happened online. I think that's the coolest thing.

You know, truth is that online church is the new front door. People are going to watch online before they ever come in person, regardless of who they are—whether they're a non-believer or they've been a believer forever. They're going to watch online. And so what we put online really matters.

And another thing that's really cool about it is, you know, the online church experience has expanded our reach incredibly because it goes beyond buildings, borders, and time barriers. You know, with the on-demand thing, I mean, I don't know what it is about Thursday night, but people love doing church on Thursday night. Like, that's the thing. So, you know, we're able to leverage that for good, man. That changes the game.

And then probably the biggest one—and this is probably the biggest, the biggest win. If this was the only thing that came out of the whole experiment and everything that we've been messing with lately, this would be worth it. So in 2000, people went to church once a week. Average regular church attendant went to church once a week. In 2019, that number had moved to 1.6 times a month. Then you take into account the pandemic. Did that help or hurt that stat? Well, obviously it hurt it, right? And so the question is, can you make a disciple if they only ever engage with you and your content or your community once a month? Can you make a disciple once a month? No. And so if our strategy is dependent on people engaging with our stuff more than once a month or showing up in our building more than once a month, that's a failed strategy across the board. It's a failed strategy.

So something has to supplement or change that. And that's what I think online church does. It creates the opportunity for greater engagement. Because yeah, you're only going to show up once a month, but man, I'm going to get you at least two more times that month where you're going to watch online. Maybe three. Maybe three, because it's on demand, it's in your pocket. You can pull that thing out. You can do it with a friend. You can do it while you're at the gym. Like, man, that just increases the opportunity for discipleship, you know, at least four-fold. So that's the game-changer. That's the big win, I think, for the church with leveraging online.

Yeah, and even just pulling that same thread, as you're opening up and exploring more in the digital discipleship side now, scaling church into different campuses, different environments, more aggressive in digital space, more even aggressive into metaverse and VR and some of those things—because now your discipleship system is in digital space, the opportunity to multiply these churches but feed into a centralized discipleship—now you're talking about these church services, really being the front door. I'm sorry, yeah, church service. Our church buildings are our virtual programming to really be the front door that leads into this discipleship structure that's operating in a digital space.

No, I love the stuff that you're talking about here. Yeah, and Jeff, to be clear, the we'll be talking a lot about our Sunday experience, whether that's live or that's online. But of course, that is not the only thing that church is, right? That's what's for the iceberg. There's one aspect. Like, the church of the iceberg—everything else has been revolving around making sure people show up at this time, for this hour, on Sunday. And so now we've expanded that to say, well, you don't have to. If you don't have to do that, now you can access an experience made for online at any point during the week. But that's still just one show on the channel. There needs to be a lot of other type of opportunities for connection and community. And all the community doesn't happen by watching that together. It's usually not watched together. It's most of the time watched on demand anyway.

And so for us, our strategy moving forward includes innovating around and thinking through the best ways to build community online, digitally, to build community hybrid—to where all of—we have an online pastor that pastors everyone who is connected to us online, outside the Philadelphia area. Our other location pastors are not in-person pastors. They're pastors, period. Whether you engage online or you engage in person, so they're connecting with people online and in person. So technically, all of our pastors are online pastors. And if you live in their region, they're pastoring you, no matter if you attend online or in person or a mixture of both. They're your pastor.

And so our whole strategy is about connecting people in groups. Our groups have been hybrid. Kid stuff, Athens, hybrid. Everything has to happen hybrid. Everything has to be run through that. Even serving, providing opportunities for that. Even serving community outreach. With in Philadelphia, there's ways for people to do that. Or we want to research where you're at. And so we don't have all the answers. And I know a lot of churches are trying to innovate and learn in this. How do we do all these other areas? We've figured out so far a good track for us on the Sunday experience, our Epic Everywhere. And we are leaning hard into all right, all these other avenues. How do we make the most of that too?

And can I bring it really personal to you, you know, you guys? I've asked about the wins before. I had a family member, a relative who lives in New Jersey and doesn't do church ever, really. But saw one of our online things and decided to give it a watch. And her reaction to that was, wow, very different. She had only been used to Catholic, right? And she was so surprised. Like, wait, this is church? This is like, I actually watched the thing and understood it and it made sense and it made me want to ask more. And she then had follow-up questions, not about can I come in person or all that, but she had follow-up questions about real-life faith stuff, right? Like about parenting and about, you know, faith, God questions, and all that.

And so I think that online opportunities like our weekly services and other things open up doors for real-life conversations to happen where the win isn't just to get them to watch it. The win is to get them to start considering their own personal faith and taking steps in that direction. And so I've experienced that within my own family members, and I know that that's happening, you know, times a thousand, around, you know.

What's interesting is, like, the whole—for you, digital was an experiment. Now it was a forced experiment as a result of COVID, but it was something that you had to do. You know, for churches that are out there listening, how many other stories like that would we be able to hear if we were experimenting and trying different things and not falling back into the same laurels, the same processes, the same systems? The weekend plays a role, but the ability to do other things, to experiment, and to reach a different type of people utilizing different methods, empowering different people, and discipling in different ways—yeah, like there's an incredible opportunity for us if we would try to do something different. And whether it was six months of celebration or sheer terror or some mix in between, like it's awesome to see a church that's going for it and learned maybe a lesson for the future.

Well, let me ask, like, how—what does the future look like for Epic?

And maybe how did some of this influence what that future looks like? We talked about some lessons, immediate implications or long-term implications. What are you finding?

Yeah, well I think one thing is that this just underscores an idea we've had since the very beginning, since the days of the duct tape and the chewing gum and figuring out how to stream across to the other room. It just underscores this idea that everything's an experiment, right? And that gives us permission to try some things. And whether it was a huge success or we're like, "Oh, that's a failure," it's a—however you want to describe that—we tried it and it's a lesson learned and we're going to take that and it's going to make us better going forward to finding the thing that is most effective.

What would be a failure would be not trying. Would be sitting back and just say, "Let's do what we think has always kind of worked, but we kind of have problems with it because we don't—you know, we think it could be better, we just don't know how, so we're going to do nothing." I would rather be on the side if we're going to shoot for the stars and hit the moon and we're going to make progress and we're going to take a hill together.

So I think that's part of it. I think the future for us is—I really do believe that hybrid church is the future. What exactly that looks like, you know, there's a lot of innovation to be done and there's a lot of lessons to be learned. And, you know, the church as a whole is going to be better as a bunch of us, a bunch of different churches, are innovating and playing in the space and learning from each other what some best practices are.

So I think hybrid church is the future. I mean, at the end of the day, our mission hasn't changed. It's still we're on a mission to see every person in the city follow Jesus, every single person, and that's because every person matters. And so we're going to keep innovating and keep learning and keep trying to pick up best practices from everybody we can get best practices from so that we can be as effective as we possibly can in accomplishing our mission.

You know, the old cliché, you know, it's the method changes, the mission stays the same. But I think really being willing to lay your methods on the line opens the door for God to do things that we couldn't have come up with on our own.

Awesome, so so true. Hey guys, this has been a phenomenal conversation just talking about this experiment of shutting the doors and going online, three weeks of four, throwing some micro, some vision, some Y in there, but definitely love y'all's heart for going for it and the vision for hybrid moving forward. You know, a unified system going in between physical and digital, strengthened by digital discipleship processes, is a strong vision for the future, at least I think so. Well done.

Hey, as we're landing the plane here, any closing thoughts, Justin? You and go first.

Sure. You know, when we were planning this, we talked to everyone we could think of to try to gain some insight and try to gain counsel. And is this a terrible idea? We would ask that specific question. I think that we called you, Jeff, and we were like, "Jeff, is this a terrible idea? Just tell us, be honest, right?"

Can I tell you what my answer was? Because I remember you asking me that question.

Yeah, do I—I actually think it's a great idea. I've had a but I've had a dozen people tell me they were going to do it. None of them actually have the guts to do it. So if you do it, congratulations, let me know how it works out, because a lot of people are talking about it, but nobody—yeah, to my knowledge, no. There may be a couple, and I know a lot of places did a push for micro. I don't know anybody that closed the doors. And so you may be like the ones that I would tout and say, "Hey, these guys actually did it," when everybody else was just dreaming about it.

I don't know if we should be proud or like, "Nah, lesson man. We're always learning, always learning."

When we ask that question to Warren Bird—who I mean, smarter than all of us put together—we are like, "Warren, is this going to work?" We give him our best pitch, and he says, "You know what people want? They're going to want both. They want all of it. They want every option. They want all the flexibility. Maximum flexibility." And I think that's one of the key things that we've taken away from this.

So we had to go through the process, get our scraped knees, learn to learn it. But we have felt, all right, if we're going to try to create opportunities for people to know Jesus, every person in the city, then how do we create the ultimate flexibility for people? Create the best online experiences, create the best in-person experiences, create a mixture of both, and do it with the resources we have. And so that's the challenge, I think, for every church: to be able to think through their strategy, do it with the resources you have, do it where you're called to do. But man, we would encourage people to not leave out online as a part of it and to be really strategic about including it and not making people feel bad if they watch online or they connect online.

It's not a secondary, less than, "Oh, I couldn't get to the real thing, so I do the secondary thing." No, you did the real thing. Like, you're connecting, you're growing, you're making steps, you're taking strides. So we never make people feel bad about that. We applaud it, we celebrate it. "Way to go, you came to church. You texted it online, came to church." And that's something we learned: flexibility wins in today's day and age.

Any closing thoughts?

Yeah, I think I'd say this, and just, you know, talking to myself probably more than anybody, but to other pastors or leaders who are listening: I don't know. I mean, I've been in ministry twenty-plus years, and this last two years has been hands down the most difficult, hands down, no doubt about that. That said, I think the thing that's encouraging to me is that God chose us to lead right now. Like, of all the times in history to lead and all the times to be a pastor, God chose us for right now. Last I checked, He doesn't make mistakes. And there were—there's a good reason why He chose us for now.

So He chose us to take on these mountains, to climb these hills, to take on these challenges. And you know, I believe—I still believe that, you know, the hope of the world is the church. And, you know, Jesus is at work, God's at work. And so to know that we've been tapped on the shoulder for this time, that's encouraging to me. It's like, all right, even in moments when I maybe don't believe in myself, there's a God in heaven who believed in me enough to tap me on the shoulder to lead right now.

And so if you're a leader, just know: let's go. It's go time. Let's get it, man.

You just—you just preached. That may be one of the first times I actually got a sermon here on the Church Digital podcast. Like, that was solid, man. Thank you, sir.

I appreciate that. Listen, there is so much, you know, there's so much pivoting right now, right? And it can be overwhelming, it can be taxing. But that's what truth right there—God equipped you in this time to do what you're doing. And so thank you for sharing that. And with that, we're going to land the plane like this. This has been a fun time, great conversation. Thank you, Justin. Thank you, Kent. Epic Church, appreciate you all coming in.

Yeah, definitely. It's been great. But we're going to end. Hey, this is Jeff with the Church Digital Digital Church Network and a whole bunch of other fun stuff. Thanks for jumping on the podcast, and we'll see you next time here at the show. Y'all have a good one.