EP303 - Wait! That's a Church? - Opportunities to Think Differently

Why I start recruiting leaders is because I don't want it to be a monotone. I don't want it to be a personality driven. By all means, so I don't want people to just look at me. At the past, when we're having conversations at the church and they recognize leadership, they just don't point to me. They point to the other people with me, which I think is great.

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 discipleship 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 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.

Hey, everybody, welcome to the Church Digital Podcast. We are in season eight. Wait, that's a church. Joey, I think I got that one right. That may be like the cut, copy, paste that they were gonna do from now on, but this is episode 303. 303 of the Church Digital Podcast. Barbara Carrero is excited about the little eight-bit avatar Jeff jumping up and down in front of a cathedral as it morphs into a bar. Like, she, um, anyway, that is a reality that's going to happen. We had that conversation, and that's a throwback to 302 if you missed it. But here in season eight, wait, that's a church, we're hanging out with Joey Santos. Initially, and we'll bring some other people in in some future episodes, but really doing a deep dive into the idea of church at a bar.

Joey is a former digital pastor who resigned from his job as a digital pastor at an established physical church to basically continue to run a church, a micro church, that operates out of a bar location. It actually became the operations manager, operations director for said bar. And what an incredible story. I think we're episode three in on this. You know, Joey, I do think this is going so good. Um, we, I think I can officially say we're going to spin this off into a separate series. I just, I really love hanging out with my friend, and you know, we've been getting some good feedback on it too. To be honest, I have no idea how I'm going to manage like all the administrative stuff on all this, but you know, knowing me, it's like fake it till you make it. So we're just going to run until, you know, somebody smashes or crashes or, you know, whatever. If somebody can do it, that's a you job.

Yes, yeah, and in the absence of leadership, someone will arise. Would somebody please arise at this point? That would, no, I'm kidding. This is great. I love doing this. So, but hey, so let's review episode 301. Um, if you're new to this conversation, the first episode we really focused on kind of operations, basically, what we're doing at the show, and the idea of wait, that's a church. So it's really kind of an intro to the whole thing, as my pharmacist calls me, which is awesome. Episode 302 was really more focused on the bar itself and Joey's story of how that worked. So you can go back and listen to episode 302 of that. And then episode three, 303, where we are now, man, like Joey dropped a bomb last week and we kind of glossed it over just because of time. But where Joey was talking about how he is looking at extending the bar into new locations, multiple locations, and the bar is opening up a new, what's it called? Monkey, what's Monkey Bar? Monkey Shines? What's the name of the bar, Joey?

Monkey Bar and Grill. Monkey Bar and Grill is opening up a new location in, um, or they're like four or five miles away. So what would a multi-site micro church model look like? A network of churches? And even, you know, getting into the question of as we're talking about multiple models of church, like what exactly is a church? So these are some of the things we're going to get into here in the conversation today. And Joey, I have done a lot of talking up here at the front and not much of you. So, man, you got anything you want to say up top here as we start with the show?

Yeah, thanks, Jeff. I think these episodes have been really good. It's first, you know, episodes have been really good actually. It helps me to remember things that we've done that, you know, sometimes you forget. It's good to look back and kind of refresh our memory on some of the things that we've done as this church to bar. I think for the audience though, for the people listening to us, it's so important for them to understand that this is not a statement about any kind of expression of church. Actually, it's the opposite. It's us like looking into first of all the mission of the church. And regardless of the building where you're in, it doesn't matter. It's just, you know, are we accomplishing the mission? And I happen to have an opportunity to do this inside of a building that happens to be a bar, right? So we focus on just let's accomplish this mission of making disciples. What making disciples looks like in this environment. So I think it breaks from the traditional, that's for sure. And I think in the next few episodes, people are going to start meeting other expressions of church out there. But I think there's even a possibility that we're going to discover through this podcast is people having different expressions of the church inside a traditional church building, which makes a very interesting twist to the whole thing. Because at the end of the day, it's really about the mission of the church and are we accomplishing that mission through any of those expressions, including digital, right? I just happened to not be doing digital the way I was doing before, but I deeply believe in the digital. I still to this day help churches in conversations on digital platforms in digital churches and what they're doing because I believe in the mission. I believe that you can accomplish the mission through digital platform, but this season for me happens to be a micro church model, which I've never done before. That's the most like, I never ever crossed my mind to ever do this or anything remotely like this. So I think it is important though. But again, Jesus, he set the example, right? He multiplied before he distributed. Before he gave away, and that's what we're looking at, you know? Can we, what we need to do to multiply the experience that people are having in this location? And I would say, Jeff, I don't know about you, I'm curious to hear from you now. Is when it comes to multiplication in your mind, what do you think should be the first step of every leader? What they should think first? When, what do you think that is?

Oh, man, I feel like this is a trick question. You're putting me on the spot here. I'm supposed to be interviewing you. Um, and so, yeah, I mean, I would say, well, you know, it's interesting actually. I told somebody this the other day. It's if I'm gonna train somebody, I never want to train one person. I always want to train two or three at the same time. Um, I just have a very, well, I've trained that one person before. I've invested a year in that person, and that person doesn't pan out. And so like, for me, it's I would rather train two or three people at the same time. Um, and when I say train, I mean that can be training on a technique, a technical technique. That can be, you know, that can be investing in a marriage or relationship or, you know, that could even be just full-on discipleship and walking through that person. Um, the intent is, you know, especially focused on multiplication. You know, is your disciple capable of making a disciple? Can they reproduce this idea? Which for me is like when you said last week that you were wanting your church to multiply, not just the one bar location but multiple bar locations, and that was like an urgency now. To me, that was like that was like angels singing in the background because I mean, to be honest, we don't see that a lot. And it takes a lot of coaching to get planters today to overcome the growth mindset and go to a multiplication mindset. And so like, to me, that's the big difference with multiplication is I'm going to invest time in my best person, not to become my associate to make my life easier, but actually to hand it off to be my, not competition, but somebody who's going to be taking my leaders and making my life really much harder.

It's interesting there. I'll shut up after this, Joey, but I heard a guy on, um, oh my gosh, I forget what podcast this was. Um, it was a leadership podcast, a couple years ago, and he was interviewing a pastor in California. And this pastor, you know, Ian's in the crowd. Ian, this is actually a great story for you. Um, this guy was at a 150-person church somewhere in California. I want to say Northern California. And he said they worked really hard to grow the church to 250, 300 people, and he said the staff and the people were miserable at 300. Their discipleship model fell apart. Nobody knew each other. There wasn't the fellowship and the community aspects. It wasn't there. Like they couldn't do 300. And so what the church decided was anytime they got to 250 or 225, they'd start to split. They'd figure out who was going to go lead the next church. And that church, as I recall, planted seven campuses, seven standalone churches. 150-person church planted seven churches as a result of, hey, we're too big. Somebody go. We're too big. Somebody go. Who's next? Where you want to go? Okay, let's go there. Who's going to go with them? Like that, multiplication is beautiful, Joey. I have no idea if that's what you were looking for, but that's what, no, no, I really am trying to pick your brain on it because I remember when we first started this idea in implementing this church at the bar. Um, it was so interesting to me because I remember, you know, the bar being there is a gigantic building for a bar. Oh, yeah, in a restaurant. So just like I said, the patio alone we can have 800 people there on a Friday night. That's not even inside the building. Inside the building is another 400 people. So when we first started, we started with a megachurch mindset. We started the church at the bar thinking, how can we put 400 people inside this bar? And we'll figure out what to do with them when they come in. That it's very interesting because it didn't take too long for me, that was there almost every weekend, to realize that that's not a goal. Like, to me, that was not the goal for the church. It's still like that's what we want to do. We want to fill this place with people. But as soon as I start really getting into the weekly activities with the church at the bar, I learned very soon, very fast, that's like that's not the way. We'll lose momentum really fast in the church at the bar if we grow too fast. If we grow too much, that means we are meant to be a small group of people who want to get a better relationship with each other and God. And anything beyond that, we need to go to a different place. So like, we got to think multiplication. And that's when that in my mind shifted immediately. So the first thing I did, a year and a half ago, I invited two people to join me on a teaching team, and they start. I start developing them into that position. Um, which, you know, it was one male, one female. Which they, yeah, we have a female teacher.

In our church, the bar, but the goal for them is like, listen, the idea is for you guys to eventually go out and then we train more. The new location actually that they're going, we're going to start building at the end of this year. We start building the new location.

One of the teachers, you know, the leaders, it's closer to his house, so he's like, "I'm taking down one." I said, "Perfect. You, we got things started. You go, you take that over there." And I think that's that has been like, again, something new for me to dive into and explore what this really looks like.

But here's a challenge, and I think it'll be great to hear from more other micro church pastors because of it's such a small group, it's a tight group. The last thing this group wants to think about is split up into different groups because the way to build a relationship, right? It's like when you happen to find the perfect small group in a church, you don't want to split up to grow. But the church, you know, the church leadership is like, "No, if you want to grow, we got to split your group."

Well, it's a very relationship-based. I don't want to split up because we have a relationship. So we have been having this conversation at the church, the bar, with the group that we have, saying we are the starting point of this. That means eventually we have to have such a missional mindset in this church that we're going to have to go out and lead other people so we can grow as a ministry so we can actually impact more people, not just here. And that's what we talk about constantly there.

So we put in people's minds, you know, the whole time they're there, that you know, you may not be here for too long because you're going to be doing the mission someplace else because that's the calling here. And people, they seem open to it. I think it's going to be different when you know it happens, but we're going to cross that bridge when we get there.

But I think that that's going to be our biggest challenge in multiplication because I want the multiplication. I want to see a multiplication that's not so organizationally strong structure. I want to see a multiplication that it happens in a way that just like happens at the church, the bar, where it's completely relationship-driven and not much as organizational structure-driven. If that makes any sense.

Yeah, the, um, so the average church in America with the growth model, you know, they've got a, I'm using a building, it's not really about the building sometimes, but it's about, um, you know, utilizing the resources that you have to make that pop. And so the goal is to make the building, the services, the people, the seats, like maximizing the potential of what's in that building, the resources that are in that building. You know what you're describing is almost like another level above that. You know, I'm thinking like, you know, Rob Wagner's Casey Underground, Tampa Underground down here, Lucas Pulley, um, Texas, uh, Church Project, Jason Shepard, you know, those guys are not as concerned with what is happening in any one location as much as getting and reproducing more of the leaders and the people to fan out. They're focusing more on individuals to reproduce something, um, to grow them to the place where they can stand on their own as opposed to compiling and growing a location or a spot or a brand. You know, I don't want to equate physical churches to brand, but often at least in my experience it is a lot about the brand of that, and in the misinterpretation of what branding actually means. But um, I do think it's a different level of what you're describing. It's higher than a single location and now vision to your people. It's not about what happens here on the corner of Fifth and Maine. It's now about how can we empower others to do that? Like at that point, Joey, I love the fact that you have a teaching team because essentially you're moving into the place higher up the ladder where it's like, "Hey, I just want to see this idea spread. What are you going to do about it?"

You know, um, within the within the movement system, I don't, you know, here with the church digital, I don't teach the movement system. You know, Flat Cap and Jason do that. You know, and so I don't have to. I can be higher up now. I want to be involved, but to the point of there are people that are doing that and they're reproducing themselves. This conversation I had with Jason today. And so like the idea of seeing growth and expansion, but to do that, I feel like we as an individual, we as the leaders, we can't find our identity in doing the work. You know, so often when I talk about flying higher and empowering others to lead well, "Jeff, I really love insert X. I really love preaching, and so like I'm not, I want fifty weeks a year, Jeff. I really love, you know, having the conversations, and so I'm going to do it myself. I don't need to apprentice or disciple anybody into this." And that's where I feel like it's a mistake because our pride actually keeps us from releasing and raising up the potential of somebody else.

Oh yeah, that started for me. Started in Kansas City when we had a cohort meeting on digital church planting where I was literally first introduced to the conversation of what decentralized church would look like. Like I really caught that in that meeting, and I really start to study that and explore that, uh, and reading books about it because I think fundamentally it's where the church finds itself in a not a conflict but in a really challenge because the satellite model does not allow decentralized church to work, right? It's a very centralized model, even in a satellite campus style of a church. Yeah, he cannot be decentralized.

I remember even like in a church like I used to work, when I brought the conversation about, you know, we gotta, we got to change the format in the church to bar because it doesn't work the same way being here in the building. And you know, we can't, we cannot have, we cannot try, it's not going to work. And in many conversations was like, "No, no, no, we got to, I remember even like a sermon series that we're doing on finances, and one of the conversations were we got to do there the exact same thing we're doing here." I was like, "You know, let me, what we're trying to accomplish, let's see if we can accomplish it in a way that fits that crowd different than here because here you have chairs facing one way, you have a stage, you have lights, you have, you know, everything is set up for what you're doing. But when you get in a bar setting where tables and chairs and people sitting in morning the community environment, they're having conversations, what we do in a building in a church, traditional church building, is not going to work in a different environment."

So all you have to do is like, "How, what goal we want to accomplish, let's accomplish the goal, but it might not look the same the way we do it." And the tension was that the tension was, "It's not going to work if you don't do exactly the same." I was like, "Okay, so let's do exactly the same," and it's, you know, we actually tried to replicate every single aspect of it, and it did not work, and it didn't get the results.

And you know, let me back up a little bit because I know sometimes when I talk about the centralized, um, I get eyes glossing over, but I think this is an important principle because I've actually worked in a centralized multisite and a decentralized, uh, both. And so like I can literally testify to the strengths and weaknesses of both sides.

So a centralized church is going to be something like Life Church, um, uh, where Life Church has a, or Elevation, and it's not about size, um, it's more about they want the same experiences across the board, whether it's um video teaching, um, same worship sets, uh, same small group material, same discipleship process. Um, and and that that's great, by the way. Life Church actually has like a customer profile, uh, a couple year, this is this is old data, this goes back pre-COVID, but lots of churches want to become Life Church. Life Church would not even consider going to the small town or the city that the church was recruiting unless there was a Panera. I'm sorry, not a Panera, a Payway. If there was a Payway in this in the area that the church was at, that was the metric that Life Church would consider to go into that town because Life Church knew what the customer was, and this customer of Payway was the same customer that would go to a Life Church. It was the same type of person. And so Life Church was really good at reaching that type of person and would only go where that type of person existed. And there's a strong level of centralization and control because the central church is controlling what's happening out at the, you know, Joey used the term satellites at the other locations.

The other issue, the other model is a decentralized multisite where that's, it's more like a um a network of churches that work together and less like Starbucks franchises. Uh, so a decentralized model is like, "Hey, um, why don't you go over there and why don't you go over there and you go over here?" Okay, I'm in an area that's very urban in downtown. You're in a very redneck rural area. You're in a very Hispanic area. Okay, let's work together. Let's share HR resources and other things to try to centralize as much as we can, but it's important that, you know, whatever you guys need at the ministry level to succeed, that's what you should do. And so it's not about decentralized is not about control as much as it is empowering others.

Now what's interesting is like I hated the decentralized model when I was centralized, and when I got to decentralized I hated central. Like, you know, there's so many strengths and weaknesses in both. It's like, um, it was a nightmare being a communications director in a decentralized church model. I'm telling you, it's the hardest thing on the planet.

Oh man, you've got, can I imagine? Look, you've got six churches all doing their own thing, and you've got to figure out what to communicate from the main brand.

Yeah, you know, and how many campus pastors were fighting me to get their church, their preaching online, and like it's just like I said, it was a nightmare. Um, but now man, I love the idea of what we're seeing Joey do and others where it's not about brand, it's not about trying to centralize something that's decentral. It's more about, "Man, how do I empower this guy that lives in this area to create a church in a bar with a bar that we're building?" What would it even look like to start to partner with other bars? I'm hypothetically speaking, of course, here. Like to me, it's really exciting. Like I know people who own bars, and I'm thinking, "Oh my gosh, I need to introduce them to Joey because they would love the idea of this church at a bar thing." Like we could scale this thing.

Oh yeah, because and it's going to be different uh in different locations because it's different people uh and it's different leaders. Like see, even even that alone, uh, one of the things why I start recruiting leaders at the church, the bar, in a very small group is because I don't want it to be a monotone church. I don't want it to be, um, I don't want it to be a personality-driven. By all means, so I don't want people to just look at me as a pastor. And it's interesting, right now, because when the church makes, uh, when we're having conversations at the church and they recognize leadership, they just don't point to me. They point to the other people with me, which I think is great. They don't just recognize me as the only teacher. They recognize all three of us, which I think is phenomenal.

Without me ever ever pushing that, just by putting them up front and leading conversations, and all three of us, we don't lead the same. So for example, here's how we do this, and this is going to—this is going to make some pastors really probably twist their arms on this one. But the way we do it is like we actually met last October and planned the whole 2024 teaching plan for the whole year, except one thing though. What the weekends I teach, I prepare myself. I chose the team, the theme, but each one of us do our own way. We don't follow the same format. We don't follow the same. I'll tell you this, Jay. Not even—we use the screen, the big screen behind us. We have a big screen that we use for, you know, to show sports. So we connect our computer, but now even our presentations look the same. Like it's not like we have the same template for presentations and all. Why? Because we want people to know the teacher, to know the speaker for who they are, for their style. And I think that's so important in a church environment, right? People like if it's going to be decentralized, I even look at us like the leadership. Our leadership is very decentralized, right? We agree on a mission, where we want to go, but we don't want to, you know, and I actually thought it's interesting because branding seems to be a dirty word in church sometimes. But even to be decentralized, you gotta brand that, right? You gotta brand the decentralization of your model. But I think there's so much good when we actually prepare leaders to be who they're called to be, yeah, and allow them to lead well.

Flat cap in chat here, by the way—we're hanging out in Discord. I don't know if I said that earlier. We're broadcasting this live in Discord, doing a live podcast recording. Discord.thechurch.digital, come join. Um, okay, so Flat cap in the chat here says "set them free versus control them," and that's an interesting question. So decentralized, we want to empower people in the field. You're talking about this guy that lives in this area. You want to see him succeed, and so you're training to release. Um, what is a non-negotiable like in micro church network terms? Minimal ecclesiology—we talked about that a little bit in episode 300 with Alan Hirsch. Um, what is what defines the church so much that in your terms that's not on the table?

Well, that's a little question, isn't it? Um, you see, I—it definitely is not the style of service. It's what defines the ecclesiology of the church. The bar, for example, is not the style of the service. That's one. And I would say, Jeff, one thing is the Bible is the only authority in the room. Um, that's it. Like for us, I like I said, I mentioned that before. Um, I mentioned that before. I said, you know, I tell the church the bar, "I'm not the authority here. The Bible is the authority. I'm just a mall cop. All I have is a flashlight. I cannot arrest anybody. I can't take anybody down." That's how I am. And people kind of love that at the church the bar because they feel like I'm not trying to impose anything just because I'm a pastor. I'm the authority over them. And it really relaxes them to be part of the conversation. But I think what the main thing for us—because we don't do anything traditional, we don't have a worship in a sense of the music side of it. No, we don't have a worship team. Uh, so we don't do music like we do in a traditional church. We don't do, um, if you look at the most traditional things that we have in a service, we don't do. We don't preach the same way, right? Because we do more like a conversation style. We ask questions. We allow people to participate. Um, so I think when it comes to what the things that are non-negotiable for us—look at multiplication—is that we're never going to deviate from teaching the Bible. And I not say only teaching. I would say practical teaching. That's another part of it at the church the bar. So when we prepare the message, when we ask the questions, the fundamental guide to ask questions—that questions have to be fully related, life-related. So we teach the Bible and then attach to a life question so I can make the association. So Jesus was very—Jesus was the master in practical teaching. He was not just the teacher. He was not just the rabbi. He was like very practical in his teaching. That's why we look at the parables, right? That's why we look at how he tells the stories and how he always had a gift to relate to people, right? Immediately, because it was practical. His teaching was for people to really understand, right? He came down to people's capacity to understand because that's how much he cared for people. So I think part of the in the church the bar is that we look at—we're not going to only teach the Bible. It's going to be a very practical teaching of the Bible so we can actually apply right now. And we don't ask questions that are not—I mean, we're talking about right now these few weeks. We're talking about what's church at the church the bar, and the last Sunday, the first question I asked right off the bat was "What do you fear the most about church?" Which is a very real question to ask. But it was amazing. We usually have five minutes for an answer. We spent almost ten minutes on that because everybody had something to say. Because in reality, people have fears when it comes to church. Because at some point in their lives, they got hurt by the church. And people are very open. People are very honest. And it was so interesting to hear that the two major—the top two on the list—was a fear to be judged. Like people go to church, but they very much fear to be judged. The second one is the secrets that are behind the scenes. And, uh, and I think, you know, just as a reference, you got to understand that in the location we are at, um, a lot of people that go to church, any church or even Church the Bar, they started their church experience in the Catholic church. So a lot of people made the reference, say, "Hey, I was going to church every Sunday, and here's what happened." Yeah, and I know there's secrets behind. But there's people that just went to a regular church and got surprised by also pastors who end up falling. So I think making the Bible the center of your teaching and not deviating from it and making that very practical has been a really good recipe for us in terms of—that's a non-negotiable. We're always going to be by the Bible, what the Bible teaches.

Yeah, let me go a little more practical. I love that answer. Uh, we can spend all day on that, but um, let's say location two wants to do music. Are you okay with that?

Oh yeah, I'm not opposed. I just don't have the structure, the talent to do it. So I'm not, you know, I'm not going to force it. Okay, and people are okay with that, right?

Absolutely. If we have, uh, if somebody opens a location, say, "Hey, my son is a really good singer and can really do the worship," like, go for it. Do it. I'm not going to regulate any of that in any location. Um, if it really works for the group, right? I mean, if somebody that cannot hold a tune and doesn't know the guitar has like, think the guitar has having strings instead of like six—or I mean, it's going to be complicated, right? Uh, or yeah, I remember doing worship auditions in church, and this musician came in. Like, "I want to play in a worship team." And she started playing the keyboard. But like, "Let's play this song together." And she said, "Uh, can we transpose to F because I can only play songs in F?" We like, "Well, like, this day, thanks for coming by. Yeah, here's the number for the student ministry worship guy. Why don't you go connect with him?" That's funny.

Um, exactly. What, um, you know, it's interesting. You know, just I feel like we're focused on music, but yeah, it's interesting that your music is not like music is typically on the radar for, uh, you know, an essential for worship. I for church, I would say, you know, somebody's going to quote "Make a Joyful Noise" and tell me fifteen Bible verses involving musical worship and David, uh, which is why they think that music should be part of a church service. And so you taking it off the table is interesting. Um, is there anything like—I don't necessarily want to call that a radical idea, but is there anything else that you've kind of adjusted off the table from what the typical model is?

Um, yeah, I think enough. But I know I think the music was the bigger one because even in the beginning, we used to—when we first started, we used to broadcast the music from the main campus. Yeah. Uh, but it's interesting enough. Just like we have these discussions before in online church, digital church—when we stream music to your church, I invite you to just go and look at your analytics, look at your analytics per minute, and see what happened in the worship during our live streaming. You know, people are making sure the pancakes are not burning and making sure, you know, the diapers are changed and all that, and they're waiting for the message to kick in. And when message comes in, you see the uptick on the audience. Why? Because at home on the broadcast, music is just not that relevant that people want it to be. It's just not that engaging because I'm not in the room. See, the worship that we do in the room is built to provoke a reaction, a response, right? So that's why we have the lights and projection and all that. All that environment's built for it. But in my house, I'm just listening. I'm just watching a show. I'm watching music, and I don't want people to get offended with that. I know the intention is not to be a show, but I'm sitting in my house watching nice music on TV, and then I'm going to start consuming the message, which that's what I'm coming in for. So we, by watching people at the bar watching the music and not having any response to it, when we transitioned from video to live, I was like, "There's no reason to bring music if we don't really have music to offer."

Yeah. Um, one of the ways that I do that though is we take communion, and when we take communion, I actually play a worship song for people to reflect as they're taking communion. And that's kind of like our music portion of it. But one thing—I don't know if there's anything else that we removed. We changed so much from the traditional way of doing church, uh, besides the music, because the music is the big one, right? I mean, the two biggest portions of your service is going to be message and music. Uh, and we use that time mostly for the conversations that we have on the Bible.

Yeah, that's big. Um, I could see—oh, some other—that's what I was going to say. Excuse me. Some other ways. It's interesting, even cutting worship out. Um, I mean, there's more than one way to skin that cat. There's more than one way to scratch that itch. Let's be a little less gross. There's more than one way to scratch that itch. Uh, provide a YouTube playlist, um, put it on your weekly website where they can digest it on their own or Spotify, yeah, where they can take it with them and they can worship in the car as they're going. Um, we actually do a lot of that with some of the micro stuff that we were doing back pre-COVID out of the church that I was at. And so we had micro church networks around, and they didn't have—I mean, they would watch the canned worship half the time, and sometimes it wasn't working. Some would bring in a guy with a djembe and a classical and an acoustic guitar to play. Um...

Know some would do their own YouTube playlist and do Casting Crowns and whatever. Like, once again, we were very decentralized with that, which I got a lot from a centralized church leading a decentralized micro church network. But that's another conversation. Um, but the idea of, hey, be creative with it. Just because you've seen it one way done in a corporate environment at your, you know, mega church on the corner doesn't mean that's the way. It's the only way to do it. And you know, there's always ways to reimagine some things. And so I mean, I give joy, you know, pats on the back and praise for, hey, we really can't do this well. Um, so we're not going to, but we're open to if somebody else would. Um, that's great.

Man, is there anything else we need to cover today? Is this good?

I think that's a great conversation. There's so much here that we can keep talking. We will the next few weeks. But I think it's been good and I think a lot of people would love to join this conversation through comments and messages. Just say, hey, here's some thoughts on this, because we have not all figured it out. We're still learning. We're still exploring. And we love to network on this because I think that's a big part of it.

Yeah, Simon says in chat here. Simon's in Germany, by the way. Love what you do. A friend pastor of mine opened a jazz bar in our village in Germany reaching people that would never attend our church. So love that. Simon's actually a pastor of Beta Church, a digital-only church in Germany as well, and is starting a Cloud Church, which is a digital church network up there. Simon, we need to talk. Not appropriate for this podcast, but I need to—I'll DM you and let's find the time to get together. But no, this is good, man.

I have Tall Skinny Kiwi. I will listen to Tall Skinny Kiwi is typing something right now. I'm going to stall for Tall Skinny Kiwi.

Tall is from New Zealand. That's why I stalled, bro, for you to say hello from New Zealand. I was going to say you're from New Zealand. I didn't need you to type it in there to stall the ending of the podcast, but it's—I was expecting some wisdom. Tall Skinny Kiwi is a VR guy, and so looking forward—yeah, we'll have to have him on sometime talking about VR church. We do want to get into—we've been spending a lot of time on the micro model, which is due. I mean, Joey's a friend and has done great work and understands digital. But we'll be expanding this into digital, and we've got some digital guys on tap in the VR as well and some others. And so we are excited to explore unique expressions of church and fresh expressions of church here in 2024 and beyond.

And so, hey, we're going to wrap it for the Church Digital episode 303. For Joey, this is Jeffrey. The Church Digital. Thanks for jumping on the pod. We'll see you next time on the show, y'all. Good.