EP288 - Navigating Asynchronous Community - Gabe DeWalk and the Kingstide Journey

Take the time to connect with your people one-on-one in a digital sense. Because not everybody has the opportunity to do that during the week. And to just be active and involved, like maybe your church has a Facebook group and you're a lead pastor, go in the Facebook group and just say, "Hey, what's up everybody? How can I be praying with you?" Those are great ways to start promoting active community and asynchronous community in your organization.

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's sake, we'll address deeper questions. Is disciplemaking possible digitally? How should we approach the digital mission field? Can a biblically grounded church operate in digital space? And where does the metaverse and artificial intelligence fit into all of this? Whether you're a big or small church, the Church Digital's goal is to help churches like yours learn to be a multiplying church digitally and physically.

And now here's your host, Jeff Reed.

All right, episode 288 of the Church Digital Podcast, brought to you by Riverside. We are going to get to Gabe the Walk here in a second. I love this. We got a couple things I want to share with TCD family right up here at the top. First off, this is brought to you by Riverside, and I got to tell you, I love working with Riverside. Every week I discover some new feature, some new idea, some new concepts. And let me tell you, this is like the unofficial Riverside. This is what I don't think Riverside tech support is going to broadcast this idea, but this is what I've discovered with Riverside.

I got to tell you, I love it. I'm doing some work coming up with some other companies, and you're going to see Resi, PayPal, make some announcements after Easter and start to move forward with some things. I've been teasing this for what feels like all year, but we're almost close to launching what we're working on. And long story short, I'm going to do a series of online events with our friends over at Resi. But the platform we're using is Adobe Engage, I believe. And it's a very powerful engagement platform. It's very powerful for online events. But we were looking at the video recording of it, and it's really low res. And this is not knocking Adobe Engage. It's like, "Dude, if for my video long term and the work that I want to do, putting the interviews and stuff like that online, I need more than 360p. Give me something here."

And Adobe Engage just for whatever reason wasn't worth it. Now, through Riverside, you can stream through the platform. You can stream to Twitch, you can stream to Facebook and YouTube and a lot of the other popular RTMP solutions. But for whatever reason it wasn't working. Adobe Engage is not one of those platforms, which makes sense. It's a little more obscure. Adobe Engage is. But also with that, it's just not as common. And Adobe Engage, you would try to do the manual RTMP and it just didn't work.

But I discovered something. I can do Adobe Engage and have Riverside running in the background, web browser open, and both record at the same time. And so because it works through the Chrome web browser and it just works seamlessly, I said Riverside tech support's probably not going to tell you, "Hey, why don't you try this?" And we're actually testing it now into deeper, longer time periods to record to see if it could work. But I could send video and audio from me to two separate applications simultaneously—Engage as well as Riverside. And that makes my job so much easier in post-production of this online event.

So hats off to Riverside. Literally, I'm wearing a hat. If you're watching on YouTube, man, that guy's bald. Hats off to Riverside for what they're up to.

And hey, Gabe, we're going to get to you in a second, Gabe. But I got one more leak that I want to share with the fam now. Gabe, this is funny. We got Gabe the Walk coming on. Gabe may be one of the top asynchronous community guys in the country when it comes to church space. And so looking forward to having him in this conversation as we're talking about the church in async.

But if we're going to talk about the church in async, then why don't we talk about the Church Digital in async? You know, the Church Digital, we've been on asynchronous community for a while now. We've been using Mighty Networks and Facebook. And I love to hate Facebook groups. And Mighty Networks are, I guess, okay, but there's some challenges to that. And as we circled the wagons as an organization maybe a month ago, "Hey, we got a new website coming out. What are we doing? Where are we driving people to? What's the one thing?" Well, we want to drive people to community. Okay, if community is that big, if our connections in digital space are driving people to community, then we've really got our own community. And if I'm honest, Mighty Networks just isn't doing that for us right.

So what are we going to do? And Andy Mage says we should move to Discord. And to be honest, our leadership agreed. So we are moving to Discord. We are soft launching, literally as you are listening to this podcast, the Discord community is being built. We're pre-populating it. It's an invite-only crowd right now. And you podcast listeners are the literal invite-only crowd that we are bringing into the TCD Discord for us to kind of test out the permissions, the borders, and make sure we're doing it all right before the website launches and everything goes public here in a couple weeks, like April 5th, 2024.

So here's what I need from you, TCD family. Open up your web browser. Go to discord.thechurchdigital.com. Discord.thechurchdigital.com will take you to the Discord signup page to get in there and create your account, sign up for our server, and get into Discord and start to discover what Discord is or the Church Digital. Andy Mage is running that. He is super, super excited. I've heard some of his plans about what community is going to look like in that space, and I think it's going to be great. So I'm looking forward to Andy contributing and engaging in the community over there.

We've got some other awesome things coming up with the Church Digital in the days to come, so stay tuned with that. But right now, TCD family, discord.thechurchdigital.com.

Okay, so we talked Riverside. We talked the Church Digital launching Discord, moving that direction. Really excited about both of those options. Teased a little bit of Resi, some of the things coming up. I still haven't told you what's going on. It's cool. Coming soon.

Let's get into Gabe the Walk. So Gabe's no stranger here to the Church Digital or to the podcast as well. He's been on before. We did a podcast where Gabe was like the nineteen-year-old intern, eighteen-year-old intern, I think at the time, who was running async for Southeast Coast and had a lot of success. Maybe a lack of vision, understanding the potential of what was there. And so Gabe spun that off, what he was doing with Southeast Coast, and actually turned it into a digital church. And so I'm looking forward to Gabe sharing his vision for that.

I'm not going to let the cat out of the bag too much, but here you got a young guy, it's twenty-two, twenty-three maybe. We talk about it on the podcast. But him, you got newly married, just bought a house, still works for Southeast Coast as the marketing team managing some of their ad accounts, but huge vision for what the church can be in digital space.

So hey, I want you to listen to this conversation with Gabe the Walk as we're diving into asynchronous community in the church. Okay, fam, here you go.

You know, last time we talked, you were at Southeast Coast. You were an intern at Southeast Coast. Catch us up. What are you up to these days at Southeast Coast?

Yeah, so last time we talked, I was just doing a little bit of IT work for Southeast Coast, also doing some internship stuff through the college that they have at the church. Since then, taking a little break from school. Got married this last year, bought a house, just a ton of life things. So just putting that on hold for a while. But right now I'm doing marketing for Southeast Coast. My official role is digital marketing manager. So I manage all our in-house marketing accounts, our Google Grant, and I just help manage the campaigns week to week, month to month, and help with our live streams on Sunday.

So I'm a part of the Southeast Coast digital team.

Well, very cool. The little intern grows up, gets married, buys a house. He's got a dog. And digital marketing manager for Southeast Coast. What I saw on LinkedIn, you're four years, three years? What's your anniversary? Did you just hit at Southeast Coast?

I think it was March 10th. I just hit three years.

Awesome. Well, congratulations on three years. That's very cool. And so we can talk about Southeast Coast, but hey, let's talk about Southeast Coast another day. Let's kick into King's Tide, this digital church that you're running. You know, so tell me a little bit about it.

So King's Tide started as an idea between me and a few friends a couple years ago. Basically, our church campus got shut down during COVID. So we came together just to think of ways that we could start reaching people online. We started doing some stuff through the student ministry at Southeast Coast, creating like an online network for their students to communicate with each other across campuses, stay informed about content and updates and stuff. And we've just kept expanding since then. We went from student ministry to launching our own separate Discord servers where we're hosting up to nine thousand people at some points on different servers.

So basically, over the years, me and my friends have just been kind of on the edge of digital ministry, just thinking of ways that we could impact the community, use our relationships. I like to describe the relationship I have with my buddies who are also some of my board members, some of the people that work really hard to make King's Tide what it is. What we have is a brotherhood, and we like to kind of extend that into the ministry that we do.

Well, hey, let's drill in a little bit. I think I heard you say you had nine thousand people on different servers, and then you talk about the intimacy of a brotherhood of doing ministry. So how are you able to pull that off? What does intimacy with nine thousand people look like?

So if you've ever used Discord before, you know that it's like a combination of both text and voice channels, right? It's a way for people to communicate on the internet that may be a little more advanced than some of the other social platforms that we use day-to-day. You can categorize things. You can separate things out by block, just make it super organized. When you put a lot of people into a Discord server, a few things have to happen, right? So Discord is a place for people to communicate. So naturally, when people come onto Discord, you know, they're talking about this, talking about that. So we set our servers up to be Christ-focused. We want everything to point back to Christ. We have people, we have places for people to pray. We have places for people to talk about the Bible. We have places just for people to talk about life in general. So it's a place that you can come to do life together with other Christians that's online.

Only so you don't have to, you know, attend a physical location to do this. You don't have to, um, leave your house. We want to meet you right where you are with King's Tide. Um, and we take the aspect of that brotherhood and we mix it into a ton of things, right? Um, just the way that we disciple our volunteers. Um, we like to have, you know, a close-knit community of volunteers um that are always on call and always ready to serve. Um, we do Bible studies over Zoom, which is a great way, um, to, you know, develop relationship online. Discord has a great bunch of online features um that um help us connect to the community. Um, I don't know if you've ever used Discord stage features before. That essentially allows you to, you know, hold uh what I think of as like a live podcast episode where your users can contribute and stuff like that. So really leveraging Discord social features um to impact the community. Um, and really we just want to encourage people to connect with each other. Um, it's not always our place. Our administrators are volunteers. Don't always have to be active in a specific conversation. That's what's beautiful about Discord is that it's asynchronous, um, like we talk about sometimes, um, which means that when it starts growing, it kind of just keeps rolling by itself like a snowball rolling down a hill. Um, and how I like to describe our Discord growing is it started as a small snowball at the top of a hill and very quickly started rolling down the hill. Um, so we had to start building a lot of that infrastructure.

Yeah, we're going to get into async here in a second, which I think is really the heart of the conversation. Where, where did, before that though, where did the idea of King's Tide come from? Like, you know, I, we talked about this a little bit on the last uh podcast episode you were on, I think, but um, give give us a little background on on how King's Tide came about to be.

We created our first uh Discord server with about 300 people in it. Um, and then uh slowly started growing that over time. Um, the the idea really came is how can we foster connection in our greatest capacity? Um, so I know last time I talked a lot about Twitch. We were live streaming on Twitch a little bit, and we just thought, you know, man, it is really hard to reach people on Twitch organically. How can we speed this process up? Um, so then we had the idea of partnering with influencers, and partnering with influencers was really the backbone of our ministry. Um, when we first started, still is a big piece of it, and I'll get into that a little later. Um, but part, partnering with influencers who already had our demographic nailed down. Um, our demographic is ages 18 to 30. Um, if you're wondering. So partnering with influencers that create content for that demographic allowed us to funnel those people into our communities in a way that had a very successful conversion rate. Um, if you look at digital, I do digital marketing all day long, and we uh really focus on conversion rates. So how much you spend on a certain platform versus how many people click through all the way to get to the destination. We were seeing very high conversion rates from um our influencer connections, and some of them were even almost too high at some points to where we couldn't keep up with with people that were coming in. Um, so that's kind of where the idea came from, and then we pieced it all together. The community aspect, the aspect with the influencers, um, to create uh what King's Tide is today.

So you're working King's Tide. You're working with um influencers, Christian influencers that um are loosely connected to your community. There's a partnership of of sorts that are that's there, and then with that partnership um they utilize their influence to drive their followers into your King's Tide community. Like, is is that my understanding of which is your King's Tide community is running on on Discord? Um, what, and that's been working to the equivalent of as high as 9,000 individuals in a uh dis, in a in a single Discord community?

Yep. Over the course of one year too. Um, which was the biggest thing for us. It was almost every month we entered, you know, another category, right? We had 100 people, which was a lot, and then we had 500 people, which was a lot for us, and then it went straight from 500 to 2,000, straight from 2,000 to 5,500, and straight from 5,500 uh to 9,000 over the course of a year. So um, looking at the year in quarters, I guess, from January to December, almost every quarter we doubled in growth um over the course of one year.

You're utilizing the connection to drive people into a community. The influencer connection. You're using to get these people connected to a King's Tide community. But to what end? To what point? What, why are you doing this? What do you do with these people once you get them in the King's Tide community?

People connect online in a lot of ways. Um, not everyone likes coming to, you know, a physical space to connect with other believers, especially if you know uh their faith history may be checkered uh anything like that. So when somebody comes into a King's Tide uh community, um, we want to do a couple things with him. We want to provide prayer if they need prayer. We want to provide community if they need community. Uh, we want to promote evangelism within the community if they haven't heard about Jesus um and the good word. Um, and then we also want to provide, you know, events and types of things for them to connect. So we want to provide resources um um to connect with people that may not have any type of Christian media. Um, so if you look on our website now, you can kind of get a feel for what that looks like. Um, we partner with a bunch of uh podcasts. Um, we also do articles and topics to provide those resources. Um, but eventually, once somebody, you know, goes through the steps at King's Tide, right, you know, they you know get involved, they find community, they receive prayer, get pastoral support. We eventually want to refer them to a local church um in their area. Um, so we're working uh with our partners now to develop uh what we're going to call our church map uh of the United States and maybe a few other countries of after somebody connects with King's Tide, how can I take that step further and get involved in a local church?

Interesting. So do you consider yourself a church or you're just a a step to help somebody get connected into a church?

I I would consider us a church uh in the ways that we serve people. Um, so you know, praying for people, um um, you know, providing that pastoral support. Um, that was a big thing last time we talked. King's Tide was not its own separate organization, so we were relying on SEOs to help us provide the backend um pastoral support for our communities. Um, so that's been a new thing um for us. Um, but it's it's all working out so far and it's been good.

Okay, hey, so let's let's drill in um to some details specifically on the idea of async. You know, the heart of this. We we talked about in introduction where um, I mean, to be honest, I I believe that asynchronous community is is an untapped gold mine for the church. You know, we've had the the chief technical officer of Pushpay talk about how he wishes that there were churches that were utilizing Slack in communities like Slack to help people even get connected within the church. And so you're what you're experiencing is actually a great example of this as well, where you, King's Tide, has, you know, up to 9,000 people um doubling almost every quarter in in number um and getting them a eventually connected to a physical church, which is awesome, but b being the church in that digital space um throughout that that transition. You know, I I would love to maybe get some knowledge and and some insight from you on the async. So you're you're using the connections of the influencers, yes, to come, and then you're you're building community. Mm, what, like, what do building community look like? Like at a at a granular, at a I can't talk today, at a granular level, at the base level? Like, are you doing movie nights? Are you sharing memes? Like, what is the thing that keeps people connected into an asynchronous community?

I think what really keeps people like, just like you have, you know, churches that have different, you know, building layouts and stuff, what really makes an async community unique, especially on Discord, is that you can customize it however you want to meet uh the needs of your demographic. Um, so for 18 to 30, there were a few popular channels, and I'll just read through a couple of them, and these will kind of give you a feel to how uh people, you know, interact in our community. Um, so a lot of these channels too were user uh generated. We did not think of these ideas. The users thought of these ideas over time, and we added them to our server because that was something they wanted. Um, so a couple things that just keep people engaged during the week, right? You join a community. You want to introduce yourself, right? We have a place for you to introduce yourself, and that's also where volunteers can reach out and connect with you for the first time. Um, we have a place where you can just, you know, talk about your day. Lots of people log on to Discord either at the beginning or the end of the day, and they know say, hey, this is what I'm doing today. Would would you maybe pray for me? Um, I need some strength in this area. Um, we also have a couple fun channels like for gaming. Uh, people can come on our server and talk about games with other Christians that also play the same games. That's a powerful thing. Um, because, you know, uh, I'll just explain this. What one aspect of uh me and uh my friends, like one thing that makes our relationship so great, I think, is that we play games together. That's how we uh interact with each other most of the time is over games. Um, and so we have that place in the server for games. We do have memes. We have uh all the Christian channels like prayer wall, Bible talk, daily verse. So we're constantly sending notifications out to people's phones from a number of channels, and all those channels put together really provide couple options for people just to dive in and connect.

Okay, so the content you're sharing isn't even like exclusively your content. You're you're pulling in partners uh from the outside. So just like at at a granular level, at a detailed level, with Discord, um, like, is that, is it just an RSS feed that you're pulling in, and any everything they post just comes in automatically? Like, what does that look?

I'll take the chance uh just to say uh that we're launching our mobile app soon. Um, we are making the transition away from Discord, um, which is important because that will allow us to um portray our, you know, topics, um, which is just essentially a blog with devotionals, articles, things to help you grow in your faith, um, podcast. Um, so yes, we do partner um with a bunch of people. We're going to be pulling in RSS feeds from podcast. Um, we're going to be taking contributors to write um all of our articles and topics. Um, so all of our content um is generated by people who want to reach um our online community. Um, so and we approach it from the heart of we want to be able to provide you with the best of the best. So um, kind of the tradeoff is King's Tide does marketing to grow our communities. Um, we get high quality content from people that want to contribute, and those people um get users from our communities uh to go to their websites and listen to their podcasts uh through King's Tide. So we're we're just kind of like a collection of different Christian resources um that people can use, and then they can follow those uh to their home of origin and get connected with the ministries we partner with.

Okay, very cool. So you're you're moving away from Discord within the next soon? Like, how how soon are you you launching the separate app?

The app is on the...

App Store now you can download it. It's uh King Tide app um on Apple only right now. Um we still doing a couple updates and stuff just a soft launch right now. Um so it's not the finished product but it is on the app store right now you can download it check it out just kind of get a feel um for what the King Tide community is going to look like. We have our groups included on there we have our events included on there our topics our podcast um and also uh just uh general like account settings and stuff like that. Um your King Tide account will now follow you uh from our app to our website so we have some congruency there. Um a lot of great features um and we're really excited about it um and hoping if we can get all the changes done uh to launch mid next week sounds good. Yeah so this this will be published when the podcast launches go ahead and U we'll put the link in the show notes to the cool to the App Store. Now you said Apple is it on Android? Uh not yet. Uh I I don't know if you've ever submitted an app to the app store before but it is a complicated process uh just for Apple alone we went through three different stages of review it took over 45 days for them to approve the app uh to get live on the store. Um so as soon as we're ready on Apple we're going to um do Google do Google and hopefully have that one up in the next two or three months as well. So it's not that the iPhone users are are more important but um you just decided to go to the Apple first so you know whatever. Um all right so hey do this give me a pros and cons um what Pros on on Discord cons on Discord Pros on on moving to this new system when we took a set back um and mid last year to kind of establish our legal foundation and stuff we thought about a couple things right. Um and I'm in marketing so I can provide some testimony to this it's really hard to rely on a giant company a giant uh secular company um to run your entire ministry off of um and not only is it hard it may not be super smart. Uh Discord is a great tool to connect with people and stuff like that but we didn't want to since our you know model is primarily only online we treat Discord like we would a physical campus we don't have you know other platforms to fall back on or we didn't at the time. Um so what we did is uh we created one. We're still going to have our Discord server uh with a couple things on it um it will be available for people to use um but we really just wanted to develop an in-house solution uh and deliver the same things that Discord allowed us to um in a in a more personal way that we could know stay on top of and that we could be in charge of. Um so you know uh the example I use is I do marketing with SEO Google ads all the time right uh and Google has some pretty strict religious policies um regarding ads and it makes it difficult for churches sometimes to run those ads. Um and you know that's just that's just one example of big tech you know coming in and establishing uh rules just right off the bat that you know you have no control over there's no warning for it you know tomorrow Discord could decide that they don't want religious content on the platform anymore um and that's their decision to make but we just wanted to put ourselves in a position um that uh we could move forward and grow organically without having to worry about it. Are you um can you get into details on on how you created like what what the the backbone is on the on the app? Yeah so we used uh Wix to build our app. Um I'm a web developer uh and Wix by far isn't my favorite platform to develop on um but what Wix does have is great um what I touched on earlier is great pass through from the website to the app. Um so what was important for us is that we didn't want a website where people you know were able to give but that account wouldn't be tied to the app we wanted something with some congruency and Wix was a really solid platform uh to help us do that. Um the some of the design elements and stuff you know aren't aren't up to par with other web developers and stuff um but it allowed us to deploy our structure very quickly um and it looks really good. Um we're we're really happy with it. Um I would definitely recommend checking it out if your church doesn't have an app. Um I would just go in and and give it a look. Um it would probably rival some some of the other application companies that you see. Okay do you does it have the community aspect like like you know with like an async like a Discord where you're able to to chat so fluidly what what does that look like on Wix? Uh so the groups are essentially the same uh the only thing that isn't the same is content moderation that has to be done manually where on Discord you can do that automatically. Um uh you can create uh groups in like pretty much the Discord server style format you can add rules to these groups um you can add permissions to these groups you can assign badges to people you can move them from group to group um you can create pretty much as many groups as you want and you can even allow the community to create their own groups that's not something we're going to start off doing but we may explore it um as we go down the line. Interesting I I I'm intrigued by this so how much are you paying for Wix to be able to get a website in an app that's that's seamlessly it's it's a little under $200 200 a month? Yeah 200 a month I mean still that's 2500 a year I mean that's that's not not bad for for technology if if it works like you're describing so very cool and then uh essentially you're going to drive all of these influencers and their connections they're going to try to drive people to the to the mobile app like what's the what's the funnel what's the circle of trust look like here for this? Uh so a couple of the funnels uh and I'll walk through what our planned funnel structure is we want to do three different types of funnels we want to do our influencer funnels which we touched on um having you know the influencers send people um to our app and now those influencers can create you know their own community on the app for just their people to go on there and connect. Um kind of think of it maybe as a Instagram broadcast channel I know they launched that feature um maybe last year or this year just you know a place for them to you know send push notifications to their community members um just uh get a little more personal um with them. Uh we can also have our podcast hosts create groups um so as they uh get listeners they can drive their listeners to the group groups to discuss the episodes discuss the topics. Um and then our third funnel which I haven't talked about with you yet um we are launching something that we're calling our Jesus City campaign and the Jesus City campaign is a super simple marketing campaign that focuses on one city at a time starting off uh where we live in Charleston South Carolina and essentially um it's a marketing campaign that reaches the unreached kingside wants to reach people that are unreached uh in the Charleston area. Um so one way we're going to do that is by launching uh marketing campaigns that are geo fenced into the Charleston area so what we can do for this is we can create a group on our King Tide app that essentially drives people from the Charleston area into a consolidated group um on our app so people from our city can connect with other people in our city. Um and we want to work with our benefactors to say hey if you are able to donate this much money then we can take that and put this into a campaign and we can deliver back to you you know kind of a realtime tracking of how you were able to make a difference um in the city that you live in. Um so uh I'll just use an example real quick James Island is a island just uh off the peninsula of Downtown Charleston right. Um so if I were a benefactor from James Island I'd be able to uh donate to King Tide being geofenced in to the King Tide marketing campaign I'd be able to see week to week and month to month how my donation was reaching people in my area so I could see that if I gave $100 then you know that garnered you know 20,000 impressions and 500 clicks um to go into the King Tide app and those people went to the King Tide app they consumed the King Tide content and then they were referred out to a local church in the Charleston area so it comes back full cycle. Um we want to be able to work with benefactors in our city um to really drive change with data and analytics we really want to provide the backend support to say like hey how are my dollars going to use um how are they making a difference and an impact in the Charleston area. Um so that's something we want to do that's our Jesus City campaign. Um and then for each city that we do over time it will be Jesus Charleston or you know Jesus uh Greenville or um Jesus Wilmington. Um we'll probably start expanding out from the Charleston area into other cities near by. That's that's a big vision man uh I mean that's essentially it's a maybe it's a little simplified version of what he gets us is and some of the stuff that um uh Glow has been doing with their um Explorer campaigns. Um like have you have you had much interest uh with benefactors and people that want to contribute to campaigns like that? We do um a lot of interest um from individuals uh that you know donate to the church on a a regular basis that just want to see you know like one thing about the Jesus City campaign is that the analytics for the donor campaign they they're just really good like you can see almost exactly you know where your donation is making an impact like um we we have heat maps you know to see the city so you can see you know exactly which parts of the city are interacting with our content. Um we have you know analytics to show like how many times they come back um what conversion actions they took what actions they took on the application and on the website so we have um really good uh data analytics to to track that stuff. Um and uh we have that all in our privacy policy in terms of service as well and in order to legally capture that data. Wow okay and so and then so you're you're building out campaigns you're helping people get connected to churches and you're building out the King Tide Kings Tide brand all at the same time. MH what's a success story for King's Tide what's what's a win? We'd really like um and this just this goes back to our Jesus City campaign I think a little bit but our three categories Community evangelism and Legacy those are our three I guess pillars of King's Tide. Um a success story is you completing the goals for each of those um pillars our goals for Community are to um build up our app I think I think we want to hit 10,000 users um over the next 12 months. Um so our vision for the community aspect is to kind of grow our community up to 10,000 see how it feels see if um we can get you know a good volunteer base to care for those people uh because you know we don't want to grow too fast either. Um there's only so fast you can you know disciple people. Um you know uh get volunteers. Um so we want to grow on grow at a steady basis to start reaching the community. Um the evangelism pillar uh we want to reach more people with our podcast um and we want to reach more people um uh through prayer. Um so we have a couple goals of you know um uh I don't want to say you know like specific numbers if we want to pray for this many people um but we have goals to you know uh pray for all the requests that come in you know no matter if it's 10,000 prayer requests or you know 200 prayer requests we want to position ourselves um to be ready for an influx of prayer so we really want to you know disciple Prayer Warriors and you know be a trusted source for people that you know if they they need prayer they can come uh

And receive prayer almost instantly is what we want to be able to provide. Um, and then our Legacy pillar. Um, it and I'll just dive into this a little bit, but we are a fully online digital ministry. Um, and as a part of our Legacy, eventually we would like to have some physical location. This would not look like a typical church location. The best way I can describe this is, uh, kind of the ultimate usable Christian space, per se. Um, this will have a studio in it, um, to record content, help deliver content to the app, uh, faster. We want this campus to have access to the Christian research field so we can invite, uh, students from universities to come, uh, to Charleston, uh, whether it's for, you know, uh, Christian science, marine biology. Um, we really want to, you know, take care of our city as well. Um, and then we also want to be able to use this for you in-person events, um, weddings, uh, funerals, um, whatever we can. So it's just kind of an open concept, uh, space that we'll use, um, probably also as our offices, um, to help us drive, keep driving change with the King Tide app.

Gabe, how old are you? Uh, 22. That's a very large vision for a 22-year-old. Like, I mean, well thought out, um, different perspectives, three different pillars. Um, like, is this coming from you? Is this coming from your team? Um, who's who's around you that that's helping you develop this and, B, helping you execute it?

So we do have an accountability, uh, board here at King Tide, um, as I'm sure most churches do. Um, uh, our accountability board is just kind of a collection of, uh, ministry leaders, um, and just also people that we grew up with, uh, spiritual mentors and stuff like that that help us kind of nail down what the vision for King Tide is. Um, when we, when we put in the work, you know, to establish our legal foundation, we also wanted to put in the work for vision. So we wanted to have really good vision so that when somebody, you know, takes the time and, um, is generous to give to our ministry, we want to be able to say, hey, here's the roadmap, here's where we're going. Um, but yeah, uh, all of these, um, all the vision came internally, uh, from our team, uh, and was talked about and discussed with our accountability board. So everyone's on board, um, and we're super excited to pursue this.

That's incredible. So is the goal of King Tide to grow the one community as big as possible? Is there an opportunity to, to multiply, to create multiple communities? Like, what, what is that scalability or multiplication look like for you?

I'll be honest, I really don't know yet. Um, you know, just because I don't know what it's going to look like, we're launching our app now. Um, I don't know how many users are going to be in it in the next year. I, I have hopes and I have goals and I have, you know, data to help me measure that, but I really don't know how it's going to look in 12 months and how many people are going to be using it. If the King Tide community ever gets to a place, uh, maybe the 10,000 people marker is what we're shooting for, uh, then we'll really start to look at, you know, do we want to continue growing this community or do we want to, you know, start creating sub-communities. Um, just whatever's, um, whatever's the best way to connect with our users that we determine. This will take, you know, a lot of, a lot of data, a lot of time to see. Um, but the point where we're no longer effectively able to communicate with somebody, like somebody downloads the app, um, and has a volunteer reach out to them, is able to receive prayer instantly, is able to access our topics and resources, as soon as that begins to grow to where, you know, our team can't manage that influx of people, that's when we'll start to look at, you know, maybe we'll slow the growth a little bit on the community, maybe we'll create a sub-community and train a team of volunteers to run that by themselves. Um, so we do have some contingency plans for that, um, and uh, we're just ready to see how people interact with the app and how, um, it's able to grow over the course of a year.

Are you anticipating any issues or challenges getting people from Discord to, to the app?

Uh, no. Uh, we, we have most of our Discord contacts, uh, ready to go. Uh, we, uh, from our previous website, we were able to gather, like, you know, mailing lists and stuff like that. Um, I, you know, the conversion rate will probably be somewhere in the 30. I think about 30% of the users will download the app. Um, that's just a guess. It could be a little more, it could be a little less. Um, or a lot less. But, um, I, I think the conversion action off Discord is around 30% for people that would, you know, follow it through, um, all the way. Um, so you'll take a little hit, you'll lose some people in the process, and then, and hopefully rebuild it back up.

Yeah, and one thing that's important to know about Discord is that, you know, you may have a lot of people, you know, click into your server, but it is partially, um, or we believe it's partially our responsibility to get those people, you know, communicating and engaged in the community. Sometimes people just don't take the first step unless somebody messages them, hey, how you doing today? Or, you know, welcome to King Tide. Sometimes they'll just, you know, be a passive user, and we don't want passive users. We want people to be active. We want people to be growing. We want people, um, to be connecting with each other. So, um, keeping those users, uh, active rather than passive is also a goal that we have.

And you've got volunteers that can support that, can do those, those direct DM messages, kind of trying to, to pull people out of their shell to engage?

Yeah, yeah, and we're not above that either. Uh, the, my, my board members and my, my team, people that help build all this together, we take intentional time to make sure that we're active in and involved in the community as well. Um, we don't ever want to get to the point where, you know, volunteers, because I mean, it's possible to completely automate this entire system and have, um, you know, volunteers run everything and we just, you know, sit back and watch it grow, like somebody would watch a, you know, a regular app grow, like not taking any action. But it's a goal of our team to intentionally spend time every week, um, like communicating and, you know, that kind of, you know, goes to what I think is great for churches right now is take the time, uh, to connect with your people one-on-one in a digital sense. Um, uh, because not everybody has the opportunity to do that during the week. Um, and to, you know, just be active and involved. Like, maybe your church has a Facebook group and you're a lead pastor, go in the Facebook group and just say, hey, what's up, everybody? How can I be praying with you? Those are great ways to start, um, promoting active community and asynchronous community in your organization.

So what, how many volunteers? I mean, you mentioned board, you mentioned volunteers. Do you have any contracts or, or employees? Like, talk to me a, a little bit about your org structure.

Yep. Uh, we don't do any, um, we don't have any employees. Um, so we all do this. Uh, well, I guess we, our volunteers a little bit, but we all love doing it. Um, we each put in about 20 hours a week, uh, to King Tide, um, on top of our day-to-day jobs. Um, some of my team are still college students too, so they put in about 20 hours a week, um, on top of all their school work or, um, and stuff like that. Uh, for volunteers, we have, you know, all the processes and stuff that a normal church has for onboarding volunteers. Um, we have our church management system, uh, run background checks, stuff like that. We like to have about 10 volunteers for every 10,000 people, and that leaves, um, you know, one per 100. Uh, and that's because, you know, we may need more at in some cases, like whenever we do an event or something like that, but during the week when the community is just, you know, flowing steady, uh, people, you know, interact on the app at different times during the day. Not everyone, it not all 9,000, right, are using Discord at the same time. It comes as a trickle. Some people use it in the morning, some people use it at 10, 11, 12, throughout the entire day. Some people only use it at night. Um, so that one to 100 ratio is really good for just the kind of passive, um, Discord model.

And so you've got, you've literally got, if you got 9,000 people, you've got 90, employee, 90 volunteers?

Yes, that are interacting, that are moderating, that are answering, that are building relationships with people on Discord and, and now hopefully over on the mobile app.

Yep. Wow. Where'd you find nine volunteers?

Uh, we, we pull them directly out of our community. So we have a spot, uh, when you, whenever you're getting connected, uh, Discord has great features for, like, uh, some conversion, conversion actions, like popups and stuff, actions you can take once you get onto a server. Um, we ask people right off the bat, hey, do you want to volunteer with us? We get tons of ministry leaders. Um, we have tons of them in Atlanta, we have tons of them down in Florida, we have some in Europe. Uh, ministry leaders, people who are used to serving in a church environment and, um, you know, some people have, you know, gone their entire lives serving in a church but may be in a situation where now they can't serve as much as they used to or they want to serve more in a greater capacity and there's just no room for them to do that at their church. Um, that King Tide gives them the opportunity to do that. You can serve anywhere, anytime, 24 hours a day, um, through King Tide. Um, and it's all categorized and logged, um, so we can see everything. Um, and that's how we do it, and it works really well.

What percentage of volunteers you've never met physically?

Uh, I, I have never met any of our volunteers physically. Uh, we made plans with one of our high-capacity volunteers, uh, to travel down to Charleston to say hi, um, hang out with us for a couple days. Um, so hopefully, uh, there'll be some follow through on that. But, but, uh, we've, we've never met, uh, any of our volunteers in person. We do have voice calls and stuff with them to verify, you know, that they're real people and and stuff like that. Um, but we've, we've never done a physical meetup.

Ever been burned? You ever been catfished or anything?

A couple times. Um, not, not like burn or catfish, but like, um, we've had volunteers, you know, who have said that they agree with our, you know, beliefs and stuff like that, and then maybe over time have shifted to other beliefs and stuff. Um, couple challenges like that that have been difficult to navigate. Um, but other than that, people are just hungry to, to serve. Like, they, they enjoy, like, they're hungry to pray for people. They're hungry to pour out, um, into people. Um, and King Tide being as simple as it is with our, you know, with our prayer and Bible chat and stuff, it's really easy just to go on there and respond to somebody's questions. Like, you have a new believer who's like, how many times should I read my Bible a day? In the Discord server, that's a really easy question, uh, for, you know, a volunteer just to go in and answer, and it doesn't take much time.

Okay, so let me ask this. You are, um, you are a digital, do you consider yourself a pastor? I don't think I've asked that.

Uh, on paper, I am a pastor. I'm still doing a lot of what I think I'm a pastor with King Tide just because we are a church and stuff like that. I do act as the lead minister in some capacity, but I do rely on mentors and other pastors to help me in areas that I'm not fully, um, haven't fully grown in yet, I guess is the way to say. I was looking for another word for grow, but, um, you know, uh, there are things that I'm, I'm, you know, really good at and gifted at, and there are other things I'm not, and that I'm still learning. I'm still learning, um, some pastoral care things and stuff like that. Like, um, I, I really rely on the relationships I've built through Southeast Coast, um, and just in life in general to help me, um, as I finish my pastoral training.

Listen, dude, I'm 46 years old and I'm still learning, so don't, don't feel bad about still learning.

I'm, I'm, you're, I'm literally twice as old, more than twice as old as you, and I'm still, I can't believe you're 22 and doing this, man. This is incredible. Um, so you've got a unique perspective. You're doing King's Tide now. You actually tried to run King's Tide inside of SE Coast, and it didn't work for whatever reason, and I don't necessarily want to get into the weeds in that unless it's helpful. Um, but the really the question that I want to ask is, is there an opportunity in your opinion? Is there an opportunity for an established church, mega church, multi-site church, midsize church, whatever the context is? Is there an opportunity for asynchronous to work in that space? What do you see as pros and cons on that?

Um, let me just say this first. I think it's the church's job to be innovative in the way that we reach people. There is definitely an opportunity for churches to get involved in digital ministry that is greater than the capacity that most churches do it now. Um, I would say that most churches now have social media pages. They have live streams on Sunday, um, and things like that. But now is the time to be innovative. Um, because platforms like Discord are growing and they're growing rapidly. Um, and it's media that people consume on a daily basis. Um, and we, um, we think about this a lot at King's Tide, right? That there is an enemy that moves against us, um, even on online. We call, you know, our Discord server is essentially what we call a silent war, right? Of, you know, people looking to connect with Christ, um, in a place that's, you know, new, but also has, you know, just the world in general has, you know, places that people can do the opposite of connect with Christ, consume media that's not, um, Christlike and stuff like that. So we really envisioned this as just, um, you know, kind of our duty to be in this space and to reach the unreached. Um, because there are thousands, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people that cannot find Christ in the normal context of just attending, uh, you know, attending a local church. Um, there are tons of situations, uh, that people would use, um, uh, an app like King's Tide or an asynchronous community, and your church could very much leverage the opportunity to reach people in a way that's more relational online and has the opportunity to grow, uh, grow steadily, grow strategically in a way that really, um, benefits your church in the long run.

What's the percentage of people now? Okay, so you have Christian influencers that are driving people into the King's Tide community. You've got up to 9,000. You probably don't know the exact number, but rough guess. What's percentage of people that are active in a local church in that community versus not active or not going to a physical building church? Just off the top of my head, it's probably about 50%. Um, just from the people that we ask, we do polls and stuff sometimes, and those usually come out about 50/50. Sometimes local church as much as like 65%. So at least 45% of the people we're reaching cannot connect with the local church in a context. They're using King's Tide to accomplish something, right? There. And whether that's, um, community or, you know, prayer, these people need something spiritually, and they're coming to King's Tide to receive that. So from our eyes, about, you know, uh, 45% of those people cannot receive that from their local church, and that's where we want to step in and fill that gap.

Yeah, I mean, if that's 9,000, 45%, it's roughly 4,000, give or take. Yeah. Um, so that's impressive. What do they say? Why they're not connecting to the building? Is it that they've been emotionally burned? There's not a church near them? They don't fit in? Like, what's the negative perception? Why they're connecting with you instead of the typical building?

There are tons of reasons, right? Some people's work schedules don't line up to a typical Sunday, and their church does nothing during the week, um, that they can, you know, connect with people and stuff like that. As some people live in countries where they don't have access to local churches like we do here in the United States. King's Tide is a global ministry. Um, about 50% of our users are outside the United States, and not all of those users have access to local churches. So that's super important. A couple other reasons, and I'm also thinking through the lenses of SE Coast here, of like, you know, why we get people that watch online. They like a particular church, and they don't, you know, they don't want to go to another church, so they watch online when they can attend on a Sunday. Um, and then we do get, you know, the story of like, you know, I was hurt by a church, um, and you know, King's Tide and Discord is a great place to come if you've been hurt by a church because, you know, you don't have to use a real name. You can use a username. Like, people can portray themselves, you know, however they want online. Um, and so some people just, you know, could be scared or maybe not want to come to a physical church. Maybe they have church hurt. Um, and King's Tide and Discord gives them the opportunity just to come as they are, wherever they are, um, and serve, um, receive prayer and stuff like that.

So this is fascinating, and you said 50% is outside of United States. Did you try to go international, or did you like find influencers that are international, or did that just happen organically?

Uh, it just happened organically. That, um, for our largest community, that just happened to be his demographic was, um, and at some points this was a lot less too. At some points this was even as low as 30% United States, only 70% outside the United States. Um, it just happened to be his demographic. He was a global brand, so, um, he was able to reach people all over the world.

Yeah, man, this is fascinating. I, I love the story of King's Tide. I mean, I've always, you know, had respect for the, I think when we talked you were 18, 19-year-old intern. We talked, uh, maybe a couple years ago, and to see how things have, uh, developed, uh, with King's Tide, you know, moving forward, it's been exciting to just hear the stories and see the development. Um, asynchronous is an incredible opportunity for churches, uh, and, um, to build that relationship slowly. And, um, I hope that others, you know, see what you're doing and know, take advantage of it. We'll put links to the Discord. We'll put links to the, um, to the mobile apps as well in the show notes. And, um, maybe one day you'll care enough about the Android audience to do it.

I know Apple. Android's coming soon. Don't worry.

Yeah, Apple's a pill to get through on most things on iOS. So very cool. The one thing that I would, the thing that I'm going to be watching to see how it works with you all is getting people to download the app. Um, so high in the trust process, so like you want to go from the influencer straight to the app. Um, I would be curious if you have enough trust built or established at that point to get an 18 to 30-year-old male, uh, to take the time to download an app to do that. I mean, it's incredible if you do, uh, but that's a big ask, uh, to make that happen. Um, but maybe you've got the thing, so it'll be interesting to see how that develops.

I know people use this terminology all the time, but they say I'm on, you know, car TikTok or I'm on, uh, you know, whatever. Like, uh, when you're on consuming reels and TikToks, you know, you get certain categories. Um, have you ever like, uh, gotten what I call like the young Christian men category on TikTok or Instagram? Have you ever seen what that's like?

No, I probably have not seen the young Christian male TikToks. That, even the phrasing of that scares me.

I know, but it has really blown up like in the last couple years. Like pages that are coming out of nowhere that all they do is just promote like, you know, um, a lot of them, you know, promote like strength and stuff like that. Like some of them are like weightlifting things. Some of them are like, you know, AI overtone pages where like a narrator will read like a super powerful like Bible verse and stuff. And it's really appealing to my generation. Um, and almost my entire feed is filled with like these pages that have hundreds of thousands of followers that are reaching young people in a creative way. Um, and we like to reach out to these pages and just be like, hey, you want to partner with King's Tide because you're reaching, um, our demographic? So even if you think there's not because it's not popping up on your feed or whatever, there is likely a, there's likely many influencers, maybe even a thriving community in areas that you would want to explore for your asynchronous community. Um, there are huge amounts, huge amounts of Christian influencers right now blowing up on Instagram and TikTok. Um, and that has been really beneficial to us, and that could be beneficial to other churches as well.

Well, and it gives purpose. I mean, I don't want to say this too harshly, but it gives purpose to TikTok. Like, you're not going to be able to disciple somebody on TikTok, but through TikTok you can build a relationship to drive them into digital community. For through that connection, you're driving people into into community where, and that within that community is where discipleship can happen. And so, uh, definitely love that. Are you, would you say your influencers are more TikTok or more Instagram?

More Instagram.

More Instagram? Yeah. So you're not worried about the House of Representatives shutting down TikTok in the United States? Um, and then as a part of our organization as well, like I know we talked about, you know, setting vision and stuff like that, we have, you know, our different channels, right? So we're no longer just going to be doing our influencer marketing. We've done the research and the analytics and stuff, and we're ready to move into other forms of marketing as well. Um, so we'll be doing, you know, our own social media marketing, building our own social media pages. Um, we'll be, uh, doing, you know, Google ads. One really effective tool with a super high conversion rate we like to use is, uh, Google Performance Max campaigns. Those are like Google ads that pretty much spread out to almost every Google service. They can retarget people really well. They have like in some cases like 25% to 40% conversion rate. We've seen from some of our campaigns, which is very promising.

So is that what you're using for the, uh, for the city campaigns?

Yes, we'll be using Performance Max. That sounds like that would work awesome.

Well, cool, man. Hey, listen, I've loved hanging out with you as we're landing the plane here. Any closing thoughts?

I don't think so. It's been great talking to you, Jeff. Um, I'm, I'm, it's just always a pleasure to, you know, talk about what we do, uh, with online ministry. You know, sometimes it's so specific that it's hard to, you know, communicate with people on, um, just, you know, topics and stuff like that. So it is just refreshing to, um, talk through online ministry stuff. Um, and, uh, really thank you for having me on today.

No, listen, it's been great. And, uh, I always love, you know, nerding out with a 22-year-old, somebody half my age, uh, that is doing phenomenal work, uh, in digital. So excited about King's Tide, excited about the city campaigns, excited, man. I'm excited about what you're doing at SE Coast and even expanding and marketing in there. But, um, you've got a, you know, I said it, you know, the first time we went on the podcast together, like you've got great potential. You've got a great eye. And, um, um, you know, God's been giving you a great vision, and I'm excited to see how that continues to develop here with King's Tide and beyond. So hey, with that, we're going to land the plane for Gabe. This is Jeff with the Church Digital. Thanks for jumping on the podcast here. We'll see you next time on the show. You have a good one.