EP230: Seacoast's Secret Project

If we're going to be willing to innovate what church is going to look like in the future with this digital revolution, we're going to have to be able to let go of some of those things. A lot of people look at the younger generation and they think because they spend so much time on screens that they're anti-social. And I heard somebody else say this online—I can't remember who to give credit to—but we're like, no, you're younger kids that are spending all this time on screens. They might be a lot more social than you are because they're interacting with their friends, they're doing community. They're just doing it differently than what you're accustomed to in your generation.

Welcome to the Church Digital Podcast. Through this podcast we'll talk about the technological innovations within the church, but more than that, we'll protect itself. We'll 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? And where does the metaverse fit into all this? Whether you're a big or small church, an established church or a startup church, 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 everybody. We've got episode 230 of these things here with the Church Digital Podcast and Digital Church Network. My name is Jeff Reed, and of course it's a pleasure. Let me tell you, I've been looking forward to this conversation ever since I met this guy. So I had a conversation with this church—we'll get into here in a little bit—and I'm not kidding, maybe thirty seconds into the conversation I'm grinning ear to ear because finally, finally I found the church that kind of saw things the way that I saw it and was starting to experiment and aggressively head down a road that honestly I was just surprised that there was a church of the stature having this conversation.

So listen, I'm really excited to bring into the conversation some of my friends over at Seacoast Church. Seacoast is a megachurch, multi-site church in the Carolinas area. So let me introduce first off—let me introduce Ryan Scott. Ryan is the campus pastor, the online campus pastor for the Seacoast location. And then I also want to bring in Gabe the Walk. So Gabe, Ryan, hey, thanks for being part of this conversation.

Honored to be here, Jeff. Thanks so much for having us, man.

Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Now, so if you're watching on YouTube, like they got the podcast set up with the multiple mics and the rig, and so obviously Seacoast is making an investment into digital and seeing potential for that in the future. So excited about that. It was funny off air, Brian, you were talking about like a podcast you guys are getting ready to launch through Seacoast in the fall, right? Do you want to maybe talk about that for a minute?

Yeah, it's just called the Seacoast Podcast, launching August 22nd. It's already discoverable wherever you find your podcast. I think we've got a trailer up right now, but officially launching August 22nd. It's not just going to be like uploading messages from the weekend. It's actually going to be conversations that you don't typically hear, or you know, on a Sunday. So it's kind of trying to capture some of the conversations that we have maybe behind closed doors, you know, amongst the staff. And we bring in some people—some influencers, some people we have relationships with—we talk about some current issues and whatnot, and it's going to be really exciting.

Yeah, and so the thing that I love about Seacoast is you're moving beyond the Sunday morning service. Now, I mean, virtually every church in the planet probably has a podcast, right? And it's a forty-minute sermon. It's once again throwing that weekend content out there for more people to process. And most churches' digital strategy is either get people into the building or reinforce the people that aren't in the building, making sure they have access to the content of the sermons and whatever's there. But what I love, even with the podcast, is you're moving beyond the Sunday morning. You're starting to do some other things. And this is what really intrigued me—Gabe, I think booked something through my system for a conversation, and I had no understanding of anything that was going on with Seacoast. And Gabe started to tell me some of the things that he's working on in Discord, in creating and really utilizing asynchronous communities in a unique way. So Gabe, maybe do you want to just maybe tip your hat a little bit here and tell us a little bit about King's Tide and what you're kind of heading up in that space?

For sure. Yeah, I've been working here at Seacoast for about a year and a half. I've been going to school here for two years. The way my school works is you kind of have to pick a project, I guess, to go along with your school work, so it counts for college credit. And I've always just been in the Discord space, been in the online community space. I have friends that are all around the country that we're at one point all here but have moved on, so it's just a way that we connected with each other. And I thought, you know, it'd be really cool if we took that kind of brotherhood that we have online and expanded it out, you know, to something that the church can use. Because a lot of the younger generation and a lot of, you know, just people like us, digital is the only way that they can connect with each other.

So I started looking into streaming on Twitch, starting a Discord for our student ministry here at the church, and we worked on that for about probably six to eight months working on streaming, working on the Discord, connecting with students in the online space. It was new to our students because most of them already used Discord, but it was like, you know, they couldn't attend Sunday, but they could still, you know, go on there and connect with their friends, you know, pray for each other, be a part of an online small group. And then I guess come February, we transitioned our model from just being a singular Discord server to partnering with Christian influencers—whether they're YouTubers or Instagram, Facebook influencers—partnering with those people and saying, hey, we understand that you're maybe just one guy running this substantial page of followers, a general Christian audience page. How can we, you know, best serve your community and apply what we've been doing at our church to your ministry? I will say that I don't know if all influencers see their pages as a ministry. You can run a substantially large Christian page and have a substantially large Christian audience and not see that as a ministry. But we just kind of said, here's all the things that we could bring to the table. Here's how we can care for your people, and we'd love to partner with you and push forward.

So one of those conversations made it all the way through, and we were able to start a Discord server for an influencer on Instagram. And he was kind of our funnel, I guess, for this community. So he brought the people, and we brought the ministry, I guess, and applied that same Discord model to his page. So kind of looking at it from a broad perspective, the Discord server carries the mission of our church. If you don't—I'm sure most of your listeners know what Discord is—but it is just the best way to describe it is just an online community of text channels and voice channels, each serving their own unique purpose. So yeah, so we started doing ministry in the Discord server, and it really took off. And I think now as we look at our own communities as a church and we look at our influencers' communities, we want to kind of push out and expand a little bit more and continue applying this model moving forward in the future.

What I love about it that fits in with, you know, kind of what Jeff was saying, talking about the podcast a minute ago, is you know, for years we've been doing—I mean, Seacoast has been doing church online for a long time. I think somewhere along the way I heard that we were maybe the seventh church to get on Life Church's Church Online platform back in like 2006 or 2007 or something. But for the majority of those years it's been about content distribution, right? Trying to just share our weekend service with as many people as possible. But the vision that's driving what we're doing with Gabe, with Discord, with the podcast, and some other things we're working on is to try to ensure that we remain a church who's doing digital ministry, not just distributing content, but trying to create community. And so that's what I love about what Gabe's created with Discord is, you know, that influencer that he's partnering with is putting out content, and that's a great thing, and people are getting that. But maybe it sparks something within them that they're looking for community, and that's what he's kind of brought to the table to be able to partner with them is, hey, here's where you can plug those people into some community to continue to support them.

Yeah, this is a great idea. I mean, what it does is it positions the church as a discipleship authority, and it's working with content creators and influencers that are reaching a different type of person than the person that's coming to the building. And so like, Gabe, I just love this idea so much. Where did this idea come from? Like, is this you sitting around with some guys talking, you dreaming, you saw it somewhere? Like, how did you come up with this collaborative idea of working with other influencers?

So I guess it was kind of a roundtable discussion between me and some of the guys that helped me run King's Tide. But we just kind of, after six months of working on Twitch and working on our own Discord server in the church, we kind of just took a step back and looked at the work we were putting into it. But also we were focused more on kingdom impact. Like, how can we impact the kingdom the most? Because we didn't feel like, for us, being in the spotlight, I guess, per se, like streaming on Twitch, you know, twice, three times a week to retain our audience, just wasn't where we saw we—I guess we just didn't see that in our future. So we said, you know, how about we just find people that already have the community built up and just apply our model? And that way we can make more of a difference, do more of what we're passionate about, and connect with more people all at the same time and kind of accelerate the growth. I think that if we wanted to get to the place where we are now, if we only used our own channels and our own resources and our own content and building off of our own time, it would take years to establish the base of people that we've already been able to impact, to pray for, you know, funnel into small groups. And I think that's kind of where our heart was when we came up with this idea and we started applying it for the church.

Yeah, it's this really interesting relationship. Like, Gabe, I've been the guy that's been talking to streamers, that's been talking to influencers, and I've been trying to coach them on an asynchronous discipleship model like what you're building, what you've built and are building now upon. And I've had just, I'll just be honest, I've had a really hard time trying to convince a streamer to take that approach because they're not gifted that way. They don't think that way. They don't understand, you know, the big picture.

Picture and the potential of this, or just seems so overwhelming. And so I've even been trying to like connect Discord people that do see that with others and trying to collaborate here because I just, I didn't even in my furthest imagination could I think of a megachurch that would take the time to build something like this, catch that vision, and start to work with streamers like you have. And so this is, I mean, literally when you started talking to me on this thing and tell me what you were doing, if you know me, I'm rarely speechless, but I was pretty close in that moment because I just I couldn't believe a church had actually done this on their own. Like, this is beautiful.

What, um, talk to me, do you like maybe a story or some relationships? You know, some churches would say, "You know, Jeff, digital discipleship, discipleship needs to happen in physical space." Hey, Jeff, some of those relationships, um, that you're doing digitally, yeah, that's not discipleship level. Um, can you talk a little bit about like some of those relationships, some of those people that you've got in King's Tide that are in this asynchronous community?

When we approach an influencer, it's, um, I would say it's less relational. We do establish a relationship with them, but it is more of, "This is what we want to do for your people, and we understand that you can't do this on your own, so just kind of let us step in and do what we do." Um, and usually it's just an, "Okay, cool, like this is great. I'd love to have this. This will put me leagues ahead of my competition or other, you know, people that are, you know, posting on social media with the same goal as me. This just establishes something else for my community to keep my users retained."

Um, so that's kind of how we approach the influencer. Once we get people into the server, you generally start off as what we call a member, so you can interact with people, you can do pretty much everything the server is intended for. But we also have forms built in, so if you want to become a leader, if you want to, we carry the mission of our church over into our Discord server. So part of that is make a difference. So we really push making a difference. Like, you can make a difference here on this server that you otherwise could not. So use the people, like use the resources in front of you to kind of, you know, you can step into a leadership position and you can disciple people.

Um, so our process for that is we connect with them one on one. We usually do about two voice calls, and we ask them a series of questions just about, you know, what their, how they're looking to use our platform. If you know they're an actual legit leader, I know that finding people strictly from online is difficult for some people because you never know who could be on the other side of the computer. But um, once they get connected, it really just establishes a basis for them to take charge of, um, you know, it helps them grow in their own faith like answering difficult questions or, um, you know, interacting with people who are difficult in and of themselves.

You've got the one streamer right now, right? Um, that's the influencer that's coming in. Yeah. As you have, you been looking at expanding, bringing others in? Like, kind of what is the roadmap of where you want to take this thing?

We're pretty aware of our capacity. Um, so as I was talking about like with the leaders, like we do, um, I'd say we get about three leaders a week who want to serve in a higher capacity. Wow. Um, but a step above that we have administrators. And administrators, we don't allow our leaders to have, you know, permissions to, you know, change things. We just recently allowed them to start deleting messages as long as they report it to administrative staff. But the administrators are really the base of what keeps the King's Tide moving. They're the ones that put in the hours, add new channels. They're the ones that, like our friend Diego in the studio, create the branding. They put in hours on their own time as volunteers and they kind of take the leadership role, but they also take it to the next step. Um, and they help manage crisis or whatever could pop up.

Um, but as we're looking at expanding, growing our administrators is where we're really focused on because we can't manage more people without more administration. It would just get to a point where, you know, it could kind of just run away from us, and that's not what we want to happen right now. Our administrative team is in a good place, and we recently just came to an agreement with another influencer who's on Instagram. Um, not a content creator, a content reposter. Um, just maybe posting like a cool Bible verse, something like that, if I could best describe it. And he has 150,000 followers on Instagram. Um, so we'll coach him on how to use his page to best funnel people into the server. And just like we did with our other influencer, we'll create a community and start building it from scratch.

So I think we started that one last week, and we have about thirty people in it now. Um, the way the Instagram algorithm works is different. Different people, I guess, interact with different pages in certain ways. You know, you may have a page where people go straight to the Instagram bio, and another page where people never look past the description of a post and never click in to see a story or whatnot. So it's working with them to establish, you know, what's the best plan with the algorithm and how we're going to get people into this so we can really kick it off because kicking off a community with just a few people is really hard. It's hard when you only have twenty-five people in a server to get them all to interact with each other because they can't hide behind the mass of the more extroverted people, you know, talking every day.

Um, so yeah, it's kind of once we get to that point, working with our influencer and seeing how, um, we can funnel people into their community.

I love this. This is incredible. And of course, this is, you know, branded Seacoast all over the place. Um, no, I'm kidding. It's not. It's called King's Tides. So, um, you know, uh, let's let me ask this. Uh, Ryan, as we look at like Seacoast's relationship of this, how, what, as online campus pastor, is this part of the online campus? Is this branded like, what is Seacoast's posture been with this, if anything? Just a sponsor for Gabe?

You know, like he said, he started with this idea when he was in school, and that's a partnership with Southeastern University. We're kind of one of their extension sites. I know a lot of churches around the country have got that. But great school. But um, but when he came up with this idea, he was also kind of working on a practicum project and stuff. And uh, and he first brought the idea to me, and I was like, "Dude, this is above my head. I don't know what Discord is. I have no idea what you're talking about."

Um, and so I said, "Listen, here's the deal. I don't want to, the last thing I want to do is micromanage or take over and squash what you're trying to build. So let me just support you, keep me informed. We'll meet once a month or something like that." And um, and so over time, you know, seeing how it's built and whatnot, and when the first influencer relationship came through, it just started exploding. And I'm just blown away by what this guy has created and his team has created.

Um, but to me, it's a cool example of, you know, like, I'm Jeff. I'm forty-three. I've been doing ministry about twenty years. And uh, we over those twenty years, we always have these conversations in the church about, um, we're losing the next generation. We're losing the next generation. We've got to, you know, stop this mass exodus of the younger people from the church, right? And we like to talk about innovating. Um, but the cool thing to me is that like the ones to reach the next generation are probably going to be the ones in the next generation who are believers and are going to come up with ideas like this, borne out here, to reach their generation.

And so, you know, Gabe being a young guy still in school and whatnot, and his team is mostly young guys. Um, you know, they're going to be the ones that are going to come up with a great idea as borne out here to reach their generation. And so just trying the best we could to not squash any ideas by trying to micromanage it, just supporting them, and honestly learning from what they're creating the whole time.

Um, you know, I could not have built this, you know, um, but the cool thing, like you asked about branding and stuff, and you know, it doesn't have to have the Seacoast stamp on it, right? It doesn't have to have our logo everywhere because what matters most is the culture of our church. Um, Seacoast is a welcoming church. We always want everyone to feel welcome here. You don't have to dress up. You don't have to posture yourself to fit in here. Everybody's welcome. And we're seeing that borne out in the way the community is run at King's Tide.

Um, so it might not have the Seacoast name on it, but it's got the Seacoast vision and mission and the lifeblood and the culture because all the guys that are running it bring that with them as they develop this community.

First off, like not squashing the joy, uh, not squashing the idea, releasing it, realizing that hey, the kid may know more than I do in this space. I don't need to own it as much as I need to help him do it. Um, that's beautiful, man. Like, we don't see that enough in churches, and often lately I've been talking a lot about like missional imagination and maybe it's time for us not to own every idea as much as help others do and execute their ideas. Um, you know, God is capable of doing things even beyond what we can imagine. Ephesians, I think it's six. And so like, there's an incredible opportunity to really empower some of these people that have imaginative ideas, missional ideas that can help reach a different type of person. And so like, hats off to Seacoast for running down this road.

Um, is that something that's within the culture of Seacoast? Do we see that in other places? Uh, is this something that you're hoping to grow and foster? Like, what does this look like within the church?

I want to take a second and honor our leadership. So our founding pastor, Greg Sarat, and now our lead pastor, Joshua. You know, over the years I've been on staff at Seacoast twelve years, and I've always seen this. They hold people, ideas, ministries with very open hands, right? If God gives us something and trusts us something, um, we're not gonna hold on tight to it because it might just be ours for a season, whether it's a person, whether it's a ministry, whether it's an idea. Um, the point is not to use it for Seacoast's glory. The point is to use it for God's glory and his kingdom. And so that has always been a part of the culture here at Seacoast.

You know, for instance, just in your physical campus ministry scenario, you've got somebody that'll come to the church and say, "Hey, I've got a great idea for a new ministry. Seacoast really needs to do this." And there's always been the response of, "That's a great idea. How about you take the lead on that? What can you do with that?" You know, and put it back on people because the point is not for those who work at the church or paid by the church to make a difference in the kingdom. It's for all of us, right? The church is all of us. So that's definitely been a part of the culture throughout Seacoast, and just grateful for our leadership that's always had that in their minds.

That's great. Um, I just, I just love this idea of, of, you know, empowering and even the fact that the leadership being open-handed with some of these ideas, it's atypical and it's beautiful when you see it happen that way.

Um, well, let me ask this, Gabe. Um, it sounded to me like the weakness in this thing is the

Ability to get Discord admins to get leaders in the system to manage the hundreds to thousands of people. I'm just curious, let's, and I don't want to talk numbers for numbers, but numbers to define, you know, scalability. Like, how many would you say it's like one leader for a hundred people? For two hundred? Like, what do you feel like a leader in admin can manage in Discord?

Yeah, so I'd say our largest community at around twenty-six hundred, it takes about ten dedicated leaders to run that server. That's my best, that's my best estimate. It's sometimes it's a little more, sometimes it's a little less, just depending on traffic, growth rate, and whatnot, but I think it averages around ten. Um, that looks like a leader being at least three leaders being available, male and female, twenty-four hours a day. Um, so, you know, Discord is on the internet, so even when I go to sleep, I have to go to sleep knowing that when I wake up it's not all gonna be terrible. And I have to have people I trust, people we trust to manage it and manage. Um, and I'd say for about every ten to fifteen leaders, about one administrator is what we shoot for. Um, and the cool thing is a lot of our leaders and a lot of our administrators, they follow our new servers. So like with our current largest community, all of the leaders that established a basis for this community and all the administrators that established a basis for this community came out of our youth group's Discord server. So they were all people that said, "Hey, I'll step up and I'll help you get this thing kicked off." But yeah, most of our administrators follow our servers, so you'll see a lot of the same administrators no matter what server you're in. And then we delegate our responsibilities and stuff of that nature amongst ourselves.

You said twenty-four hours a day. I'm just curious, what, A, how do you solve that problem? How do you get somebody at four a.m. Eastern? And, B, how much traffic are you getting at four a.m. Eastern? What is the conversation that early look like?

Um, so I'd say just looking at our audience, about sixty percent of our audience is in the U.S., and then forty is outside the U.S.

Wow.

Um, I guess it's a blessing. One of my buddies who is an administrator for me was stationed in Hawaii and is now stationed in Okinawa, Japan. So he was doing this whole thing with us before he got fully into the military, um, but was able to help us kick off our basis of running this thing twenty-four hours a day. So as soon as, you know, we go to bed, he kind of woke up and kind of took the reins on managing people who might be from outside the U.S., um, or just people from the U.S. who like to stay up late or wake up early overnight.

I would say, because forty percent of our traffic is usually more active overnight, I would say we get about five hundred to six hundred messages in twelve hours, and then during the day can range from a thousand to two thousand in our largest community. Um, but we always have one administrator and then a few leaders active at all times to help manage the flow of people coming in and communicating with each other.

And you're getting the global reach that you're getting because the influencers that you're working with have that global reach. I mean, that's the reason you're pulling from these people. That's great. Um, so how many, like, what does it look like? Because I'm hearing some hesitancy from you, which is great. You know, you've got the opportunity to bring on some other front doors. How many leaders, admins, like, what's your recruiting process before you bring on something else? Or do you feel like you've got enough now to onboard a second influencer, second front door?

The process will be just like for the first. We pulled several leaders and administrators from our two previous communities to help establish a basis. But most of our, one thing that's cool about having a centralized model like the King Side is we can run events and we can run Bible studies in sync between different communities. So you may be in community A or you may be in community B, um, but this Bible study is happening on Tuesday at nine o'clock on our website. You can come sit in, and then we're going to put it on the church online platform and play it twenty-four hours a day. So that if you miss it, you can go back on and you can watch it like it's being watched live, and a leader will be in the chat to meet you and communicate with you like you're, so you can actively participate in the Bible study without having. Um, so event-wise and server-wise, um, we have, I guess, um, kind of a list of, um, you know, a big part of Discord is keeping your community engaged. So like, sometimes, if with smaller servers especially, if you don't send out announcements or you don't send out conversation topics or have somebody who stimulates the conversation, the conversation will just fall off and people won't, I guess, people won't come back to communicate, or they're just like, "You know, the server's dead. I'll move on to another server with more active communication." So keeping our servers active is a big, is a big part of a leader's responsibility or an administrator's responsibility, making sure that the community is healthy.

I'd say if a community didn't have constant, a community of that size, if it didn't have constant traffic, if it didn't have constant, you know, people talking back and forth, if it wasn't being used for its intended purpose, then I would call that an unhealthy community. And we have a plan to nurse a community back to health if in some case it drops off, or, you know, maybe somebody has a busy week and they can't, you know, send out the announcements like they should. So, um, keeping the communities healthy and centralizing our events allows us to scale our leaders and our administrators to work on more things and also work more confidently between all of our servers.

So you've got all of these servers, and you just said, I thought I heard you say that you centralize events among all the different servers. What else are you centralizing?

Uh, so small groups, uh, will be something that we start centralizing. One thing that Pastor Orion and I talked about is that a lot of church lingo doesn't translate into the Discord space. Um, and small groups was one of the first things that we discovered that that kind of didn't really work well with, um, Discord itself is a very relational platform. And I feel like that if you're involved in Discord and you're talking to maybe a group of three or four people, you know, every week, and you're praying for each other and you're doing life together through digital means, then that would be classified as what I would say is a small group. If you're all getting in a voice call together once a week, so we kind of shifted our lingo from small group to focus group. I'd say in our largest community, we have about five or six focus groups of people that just intentionally connect with each other. Um, and they even communicate on platforms off of our Discord. We noticed that they started creating group chats, and they were like, "Oh, join my group chat on Instagram. We're all gonna, you know, move this to somewhere that we're a little more familiar with," because a lot of our users are brand new to Discord.

What are you learning from this that's applicable to Seacoast Online Campus?

The biggest thing I'm learning is, you know, we in ministry, we like things to fit the way we expect them to fit. Um, you know, we've got our structures that we're accustomed to. Um, but when we, if we're going to be willing to innovate what church is going to look like in the future with this digital revolution, um, we're going to have to be able to let go of some of those things. Um, a lot of people look at the younger generation, and they think, because they spend so much time on screens, that they're antisocial. And, uh, and I think I heard somebody else say this online. I can't remember who to give credit to, but we're like, "No, your younger kids that are spending all this time on screens, they might be a lot more social than you are, because they're interacting with their friends. They're doing community. They're just doing it differently than what you're accustomed to in your generation." And stuff. And so learning that, um, community, which is the whole point of doing this, you know, trying to make sure that everything about the church that happens outside of Sunday, you know, people doing life together, encouraging each other, praying for each other, discipling each other with the word and everything, um, that's the point of all this is to make sure that that life-giving aspect of church is happening within digital spaces too. Um, and so we're learning that people want that and people are attracted to that, and they're going to pursue that even if it looks different than what the church is used to that being structured as. Um, and so, you know, I think about a minute ago when Gabe was talking about the influencers, I was like, "It's kind of cool this partnership, because those people, you might think that an influencer is just developing an Instagram channel because they want to make money. Well, maybe some of them, but some of them really care about the people that they're influencing." And when Gabe comes to him and says, "Hey, we'd like to support those people with community in a way that you can't really do on that same platform," um, they're attracted to that idea. They, you know, it's another way for them to make a difference, um, with the people that are following them. And, um, I think it speaks to the desire of a lot of people out there to make a positive difference and to be responsible with the impact that they're having on people.

Gabe, what's the biggest obstacle that you're facing with this? Um, I mean, we talked a little bit about, you know, duplicating training, training leaders, but what's another hurdle that you're facing or a challenge you're trying to figure out right now?

I guess I would say the biggest obstacle, trying to get the old guys like me to figure out what, what... No, no, I'm just kidding. We all have that problem. So I'm actually older than you, so I find that funny. But, uh, what do you think?

I guess my big, I would say my biggest obstacle in myself and I think for my team is that we're young, which is why, um, working with Pastor Ryan is such a good, not option, but it's such a good partnership between us, because real ministry is happening online. And being twenty years old, I am not yet equipped with all the tools that I need to be in charge of such a large group of people. Um, maybe be in charge of them from an administrative perspective, but not from a ministry perspective. I don't know that if, and this is also a conversation we had to have early on, is that my leaders were uncomfortable being nineteen, twenty, twenty-one years old. If somebody were to come in one of our servers and say, "You know, I'm gonna commit suicide," um, God forbid that ever happens, but, um, having the pastoral backing of Seacoast and Pastor Ryan equips us to deal with difficult things, because ministry is difficult, and it's still difficult online. You know, we may have established our system, but, you know, people still have people problems, and those translate into the digital world. I would almost even say sometimes it's more difficult online, just because one of the things I've noticed over the years is people are so much more comfortable sharing openly in a digital space what maybe they would not share in person. You know, so you guys might, you guys probably come across people sharing things like that of a heavy nature, maybe more often than we do in person.

So yeah, yeah. So I guess, um, the biggest challenge for us is just, I guess, maybe our age or our journey as we're continuing to grow in ministry ourselves is dealing with those challenges. Um, but that's why having our relationship with Seacoast work so well. I mean, that's why the relationship with Seacoast is so necessary. Um, and by...

The way I just want to like reach through the computer screen right now and hug you. Like, that was the best answer to that question. You are 20. You're 20? Is that literally how old you are? Is that just a number? You are 20 years old?

Um, hey, when I was 21 years old, I started an online company, a dot com called e-believer. It was an online community. It was literally the year 2000. Uh, we had 30 to 40,000 people in the online community around the world. Uh, this was before Facebook. I think Facebook was just college students, but social media was nothing. It was nowhere near 2.0 when we launched this. And um, incredible first online Bible study I thought was in the year 2000. I was a 21-year-old kid, and you're exactly right. I didn't know anything. I, if actually I had this conversation the other day with a friend, if I knew today, if I knew that when I was 20 years old, 21, like it would be a completely different thing.

Um, but don't let people look down on you because you're young. That's an opportunity for you to speak out, to reach a different type of person. But also realize with humility that you don't know everything and that there's wisdom that you need to contextualize. And that's why I think this relationship with Seacoast is so beautiful because Ryan's smart enough to realize he doesn't want to hold you back, but you do need some things from him. And you're smart enough to realize you do need some things from him, but he doesn't need to drive the boat. And so that the humility of that situation really opens up far more potential to reach a different type of person and do ministry differently than what each of you are used to in your own individual context.

Both of you together will equal a sum far bigger than two because of this working together. That's why I want to hug you. Like, this is just a beautiful moment. I'm getting all this. This is great, right? Ryan, do you have any thoughts on that?

Well, yeah, that's just another aspect again, just honoring the leadership at Seacoast. Like, that's that's true of me. I've been in ministry 20 years, but I still have a lot to learn as a pastor, right? That never stops. And so I'm grateful to have several pastoral mentors here that are 50, 60, 70 something to build into me and to continue to help me learning and growing. And now it's exciting to get the opportunity to pass that on to somebody who's 20. You know, and the cool thing about Gabe is, you know, the technical side of things just comes naturally to him. But I'm excited that he's already got a handle on that so I can focus on helping to grow him on the spiritual side of things because he's definitely got a heart for ministry. He's not just doing this thing for fun. He wants to reach people. So love it. This is an incredible conversation.

Gabe, what's another idea? You said you've got another idea you're sitting on. You haven't shared with anybody yet. What else you got? I'm kidding. I'm not going to put you on the spot. Gabe just freaked out on me right now. His face. Jeff, I got to ask, is that your dog barking in the background?

That was my dog barking. I'm sorry. I got two dogs now. Uh, we just recently picked up a second dog. My first dog was very docile and calm before we got the second dog, and now that we've got the second dog, the one dog feels like she needs to like prove that she's alpha. And so she's now far more yakity. And that's she wants to be heard on your podcast. She wants her voice. Where she's tackled me? Well, actually, there's like video of her like hitting me from the side, wrapping me up in my chair, kind of rolling out of the scene. She's a an emotional dog. Ray Ray Skywalker Reed. If for those interested in that, we're Star Wars people.

Um, yeah, listen, this is beautiful. I, when I look at the nuance that I have talked about, and I'm actually curious looking at your experiment here, um, Gabe, because what you're doing is a little different than how I envisioned it. And once again, I'm going to be really transparent here, and I want to ask your opinion, your feedback. So the way that I envisioned this is not what you're doing where you're spinning off an individual server for every influencer. I actually was viewing it more as a shared server that gave you opportunity.

I just did this talk recently, um, several times, but where like you're feeding in the physical church, you're feeding in the church broadcast, you're feeding in a virtual reality church, you're feeding in a couple influencers for stream. Like I saw it more of a large server as opposed to creating minimal smaller servers. I would love feedback. I don't know that I'm right. I'm a theorist. I sit around and I just talk all day. As somebody that's in the space, that's on this road, what do you think? Like, what are the challenges in doing one server as opposed to breaking it up the way you're suggesting?

So I'll say this first, I guess. I think that all ages want to connect digitally. It's not just young people. It's not any certain type of demographic. I think every demographic and every age of person wants to connect digitally in some way. And I think where we approached it from is that Discord has its limitations, I guess. Um, that we're not going to get, you know, I guess older generations in the Discord server because, you know, Discord wasn't always as a company, you know, a dedicated community platform. They were once a gaming platform exclusively. So I guess my mindset for creating the individual servers is that I don't, I don't know. I just, I think with interacting with each influencer, they just want to have their own community. I think that they want to keep their audience retained. And I think with each influencer, each has a different audience and each audience has different needs. But in some cases, Discord can't always meet the needs of the audience that the influencer brings to the table. And I don't necessarily think that Discord meets the needs of the physical church all the way when looking at every type of demographic that exists regardless of where your church is positioned.

Um, my mindset on how to deal with that is creating our own platform, which comes with its own challenges and limitations as I'm sure you know very well. Um, but I think creating the individual servers better helps tailor to the needs of the audience that's in the server. You talked about how there's like a minimum effective size for a server, right? In terms of the number of people, right? Um, like if you don't have at least a critical number of people, the interaction's not going to be enough and whatnot. But do you think there's also like a maximum number to where it's like it's better to start another server than to have it grow so big that people are just kind of lost?

You think that's? Yeah, I mean, there's I think there's a minimum number for certain Discord requirements if you want to be a Discord partner, if you want to be on their server discovery page. Um, so there's those requirements. But I do think, I mean, there are Discord servers I believe that have the largest is over 300,000 users. Wow. Like, how does one even company like maybe it's like the Minecraft Discord or something? But how does one company manage that many people?

Yeah, I think it's for us it'd be close to impossible. So I think as we look to grow more and follow more people into these communities, keeping them, keeping them large but small is important.

Yep. Since we've got a ministry heart behind what you're doing, you know, you want to make sure that we're able to minister to effectively to as many, yeah, as larger percentage of those people in each server as possible. So yeah, you get too big, you know, too many people get missed. And part of the agreement we make with our content creators and influencers is that if at any point you want to go a different direction, if you're like, you know, influencers get burned out, YouTubers just quit all of a sudden, all sorts of things, what happens if the lifeblood of the server just decides to not funnel people anymore or go a different direction? Then we say you can either take the Discord server with you or you can leave it with us. Um, but we do specify that we want to, if our relationship ever comes to an end, that we want to leave your server in a place where it's going to be healthy, that there are real people in these communities. Um, and you know, exiting in a way that would um not benefit both parties may negatively affect people's lives because for some people this is all the ministry that they get to interact with.

Let me ask, um, you mentioned, hey, you know what, you're not going to get old people on Discord. You're not wrong. Um, it's funny. Every once in a while I'll see um some 20-something that's like, hey, my entire church should move to Discord. We're going to move everything to Discord. And I'm like, good luck with the soccer mom. Good luck getting, you know, my grandma. You know, it's just you're not, you're not going to. And so it's funny. I was actually, I've been talking about asynchronous communities a lot lately. And um, the most common question I get when I talk about digital expressions of church, uh, not physical buildings but like digital church, virtual reality church, metaphors church, asynchronous communities, community, like doing church without the physical building, it seems like the thing that most people are hung up on, uh, besides like, you know, not meeting in physical space, is what does generational worship look like? Like, you lose the ability of an older person connecting with a younger person. You're 20. What does it look like for you to be mentored and discipled by a 65-year-old? You have the luxury of having a relationship with Ryan because you all work together, Gabe. But you know, somebody else that's in a digital environment that doesn't have access to a physical relationship with Ryan or like a church. Um, I'm curious because you're 20. Um, a, what's your response to that? Like, is do you see negative? Do you see value in generational? Do you see a solution maybe to that problem that that problem? What are you thinking about this when you think digital?

I guess as I said before, I think uh, looking at our Discord community, uh, we pull numbers from the people that are interested in being in focus groups, uh, like what age group they're in. And I think out of 100 of our responses, less than 10 is anybody over the age of 30 years old. Um, it's not really a problem I've even realized we may have in the future. Um, but I do think that pushing towards maybe not our own, I feel like there has to be some other kind of platform out there where, and I haven't found one that I like yet, that meets the needs of this kind of ministry. But I feel like moving in the direction of a different platform, I think Discord is a good short-term solution, but it's not a good long-term solution, and it's not a good solution to scale.

Um, I think I may have heard you say this, but or somebody at the Church IT Network conference say this, but if people are going online to connect, then they're gonna by nature just go to whatever's flashiest. I don't know if that makes sense. Like, whoever has the biggest stage. Like, if I'm going online to watch church and I'm just a digital participant, like I don't attend a physical church, then I'm gonna go to whatever one looks the best, easy come, easy go. Yeah, like I wanted to have good quality. I wanted to have, you know, great production. Um, excellence.

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I think, um, Jeff, you know, my thought on it is of course this thing that Gabe has built is blown up so much faster than we expected. But um, the advantage of being a part of a church like Seacoast with its resources and with its people, people resources, is you know, I can start to recruit from our online community to say, hey, you might, you might not already be on this platform. It might be a little...

It's a bit unusual to you, a Gen Xer or, you know, 50-something-year-old person, but there's a younger generation that needs to be built into, and I'm sure we can come up with some people whose passion it would be to interact with and do community with some of these younger folks that we're reaching. And so it's kind of the heart of our church to be a multi-generational. The technology might be a barrier between the generations, but I've seen enough to know that there are a good enough number of people in my generation and older who are willing to overcome that technology barrier, the discomfort with a new platform they're not familiar with, to be willing to do that, to invest in some younger people. And so to me, heading into this fall, heading into this next year at Seacoast, that's kind of one of my priorities is to start recruiting for that opportunity specifically.

Yeah, I mean, casting vision towards that. I thought the story a lot. My mom, my mom's a small group leader online at the church. My dog's still barking. I don't know. But my mom's a small group leader. She's 70-something years old and she teaches three online small groups. The first small group I actually recruited my mom to teach online, there was three college students or young young graduates. One was studying to be a doctor, one was studying to be a lawyer, and one was in a company working her way up to be a CPA. So they were all young professionals, and I recruited my mom to teach the study, to basically disciple these three young girls. My mom was a former VP business executive, so in a way she's like, Jeff, these became my daughters in the ministry opportunities that happened as a result of that. Several of those women are still teaching, are now teaching online Bible studies. They've multiplied them. My mom's actually multiplied into, I think, three groups at this point. And so it's really interesting to see how that's developed.

And my mom, she's, God bless my mom, and she may be listening, sorry to say this, Mom, she can't even print on her computer. Like, she's not technologically advanced. I'm actually adopted. That's where the tech came from. It's not from my parents. It's birth parents. But the result of that is that Mom fell in love with the idea, not because of technological advancement, but because of the relationships. And so I think when you're recruiting and talking to the older generation, it's always about that relationship piece.

And I'll go and throw this as a side note. Hey, PushPay, Rezzy, Glue, I know you're out there. I know you're listening to this. I'm friends with you. You all need to develop an asynchronous digital discipleship platform. You need to find ways to provide the solution. The average church does not know they need this solution, but the stuff that Seacoast is doing right now, and they have banging of the heads into Discord, the things that we're all doing on some of these other platforms, there needs to be a solution that's more effectively created for a church. So I'm going to challenge you guys here publicly on the podcast. Help us come up with a solution because no churches know they need this, but once it's created, thousands of churches will jump all over it because they don't have the vision for it today, but they will once they see, hey, when you know the success stories of Seacoast, but also how easy it is to do some of this stuff when there's a platform that's already created. So we're going to, and I'm friends with those guys. I love them, but there's just so much opportunities, and what's interesting, they're all floating around it right now. They're all asking those questions. They're all wondering. So this is good.

Yeah, I think the next couple of years are going to be super exciting just to see what cool ideas come up, man. It's an exciting time to be in ministry. If there's a takeaway, church pastor, listen to your 20-year-old. Actually, like, don't discredit them. Don't blow them off. Actually listen to the ideas. Some of it may be good. No, I'm not saying that Gabe needs a two-million-dollar check, and I don't think he's going to get that funding at least at this point. But there's got to be ways to give Gabe and people like Gabe opportunities to explore, to experiment, and especially if they can show results of reaching a different type of person than what Gabe is, then like, Gabe is a different type of person than what's in the building. Then that's a win.

Here's another good point about all this. Gabe, how much money has been put into this?

Zero dollars, because it's Discord. It's free.

Yeah, other than your time and your team's time, which is all volunteer.

Yeah, so church, what you can do with very little money is pretty amazing if you're willing to think outside the box. That was a great point. I love it.

Hey, as we're landing the plane here, let's have Ryan. As we're landing the plane, any closing thoughts on your side?

Closing thoughts, man. Just, I mean, you summed it up really well. Don't be afraid to let the next generation innovate because, like I said before, they are probably going to be the ones to come up with the ideas to reach their generation. And don't be afraid to hold things with open hands. What is somebody else I should know who said this, but it's amazing what you can do if you don't care who gets the credit, right? Churches need to apply that, I think, more in their ministries and stuff. But that's literally Ronald Reagan said it. I have a bobble head on my desk of Ronald Reagan. I know you know for that one. For that one quote, there's no limit to the amount of good one can do as long as he doesn't care who gets credit. Huge Reagan fan for that one thing. So thank you. I'll keep going. I'm sorry.

No, that's it. That's good.

Beautiful. Exciting time to be in ministry. Thanks for having us, Jeff.

Oh, listen, my pleasure. Gabe, on your side, as we're wrapping up here, any closing thoughts on your side?

If you're listening and you're somebody like me, you may be in your church. If you're a younger individual, take this just as inspiration. You know, lots of the people that helped build this type of ministry aren't even in ministry. We were just a group of guys that got together and worked up a cool idea. So if you're somewhere out there and you think that you can make a difference being young without a checkbook, you can do it.

I love it. So I am going to invest stock. If I could buy stock in Gabe, I would buy stock in Gabe, man. I love what you're doing.

He's spoken for. Back off.

No, that just happened. I love it. Very cool.

Hey, listen, let's go toe to toe. But listen, seriously, love what you're doing. Keep doing, man. Keep leaning in. Don't let people look down at you because you're young, but be humble enough to listen to the guidance that's around you. And I can't wait to see what develops from this. So keep us in the loop here, and we'll have to have you back on in six months or a year or so and start to tell stories of what 21-year-old Gabe's working on and how the communities Kings Tied is in that network is flourishing. The collaborative network of this is just so beautiful. This is great.

Hey, but we're going to land the plane for Gabe, for Ryan. This is Jeff with the Church Digital Digital Church Network. Thanks for jumping on the podcast here. We'll see you next time on the show.

Yup. Good day.