EP323 - The Right to Share Jesus Digitally is Given or Earned in Community

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.

All right, hey everybody, it's Jeff here, founder of the Church Digital, and we are talking episode 323 on the Church Digital Podcast, highlighting the digital missionary. You know, I call it a framework. I'm starting to test this other language of flywheel as we're starting to explore maybe doing something different and reaching different people by doing ministry in digital space. And so, hey, I see some people are jumping on us. By the way, I'm streaming live on YouTube. Hey, to our YouTube friends, go ahead and jump in the comments and let me know if you're watching live on YouTube. And I'm also on Instagram. And so I've got Peter N and I see jumping on, so excited to see Peter. Thanks for doing this, jumping on. So I'm talking to my phone at the same time as the camera, trying some different things here with season 11. Once again, season 11, talking digital mission. Let's go flywheel. Now it's funny, I've not really said flywheel. I'm kind of shopping this language around, seeing if it kind of works. The flywheel. And so you guys are my guinea pig. Can I say that? You guys are my guinea pig, guys and gals, people out there that are watching this stream in real time. I have never done this before, and so this is—I tell you, if you're watching this stream, you are always getting the raw stuff. And so that's what we're talking about here with this flywheel. Because framework—it is a framework when we talk about the framework of contextualizing the digital missionary framework of connect, community, equip, and mobilize. But one of the things that we don't talk about is it's a lot of work to get the framework built, but once you get it built, it turns into a flywheel where it almost like multiplies into itself. It almost sustains itself. It's hard to get it going. Maybe you don't know what a flywheel is, and so maybe you should like even back up and shop some of that language around. And so, you know, in typical Funko fashion, let me present to you my friend here, Leonardo da Vinci. Some would say, "Hey, Jeff, you look a little bit like Leonardo, wearing the dark hat and the beard." Dude's got a pretty hefty beard. I don't know that I'm there, but seriously, Leonardo da Vinci. Not—some of you are expecting a turtle with a Leonardo. Was the sword guy, right? With the blue? The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle? So no, that's not this one. The Vinci—he actually invented the flywheel. And I happened to go to an exhibit here in Miami a while back where they were talking about the flywheel and a bunch of Leonardo's. He was a known artist, but he's also a known inventor. And this exhibit was highlighting like all of his early inventions, hundreds of years ago. And somehow he figured out the physics of the flywheel, where it was this device that you would crank at the top. And as you were cranking it, there were four weighted pieces of wood that were spinning around. And what Leonardo discovered with the flywheel is once you get it spinning, and once you get those four things in—I don't know what the language is—centripetal force? Somebody in physics, centripetal force, whatever. You guys tell me. But once it starts moving and sustaining in a circular motion, it sustains. It continues on. And I would argue, as we're looking at digital ministry, as we're looking at digital mission work, that these four elements that we're going to talk about are these four pieces that go in the circle. It's these four wood blocks that once you get all four of these working in context, and once you partner with people and all four of them are sustained, you're going to see your ministry explode in digital virtual space because it's built into a reproducing format, a multiplying format, to be honest. We're seeing that right here with the Church Digital as we're now seeing the four elements in TCD context work for us, and we're even seeing that now start to explore in global space as we're starting to expand out and multiply into some different regions and contextualize it in that space. And oh, it's so much fun. But hey, here's what we're talking about with the flywheel. I said there's four pieces, right? Piece number one we've got coming into it is this idea of connection. Connect. You know, this is what we see. Well, let me just give it. It's connect. It's community. It's equip. And it's mobilize. Connect, community, equip, and mobilize. So basically, you know, the connections that we have, we want to feed them into community. And within the community, we want to build relationships. And through those relationships, establish trust, evangelism, discipleship. All of these things are super important. But in the community, it has to have a purpose more than just building the relationships. What do we want the community to do? And for the flywheel to sustain itself, okay, that community we're going to talk about this today—it's got to feed into some sort of an equipping model, some sort of a tool where you're equipping people. In the Church Digital's context, we're equipping people to find their purpose. What's God calling them to do? And literally, through the Church Digital, we're helping them do that. We're sending them out to do that as a digital missionary sending agency. We're equipping people to be digital missionaries, and now we're sending them out to be digital missionaries in their context. And so that's the goal: connect, community, equip, mobilize. And just like my friend here, hey, da Vinci, just like he spun that flywheel and discovered the science of those four elements that now have the force around it to sustain ongoing movement, so would you guys and gals, if we utilize the connect, community, equip, mobilization model, all right?

So let me get into this here in a little bit. This is what we're talking about here in this season, digging in here. So connecting—if we are connecting, if we are doing blogs, we're doing podcasts, if we're doing streams, if we're doing games, if we're engaging on social media, if we are engaging in these digital connection points, but we're not driving them into a digital community for a deeper relationship, well, I hate to say it, but there's really no power in that. I mean, sure, you've got lots of followers. You could have hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands, you have millions of followers. And but that's an influencer. Are you able to speak into somebody's life digitally? Are we able to share Jesus at that level? Are you able to change somebody's life at that mass number? It's not about connecting with people at a superficial level. Now, I don't mean anything rude about connection. We talked about that in the podcast last week. We did a deep dive on the connection. But the connection for connection to itself—there's more than just connection, right? This is where community comes into place. So connection without community is powerless. I would suggest community without equipping, community without some sort of purpose behind it—if you don't have a purpose behind your community, I would argue it's kind of pointless. Like, why even bother with community if the community is not going to end up doing something to have a larger purpose? And for me, for the Church Digital and the missionaries that we're working with, we're encouraging this idea of equipping, feeding into mobilization, equipping, feeding into helping these missionaries we're training, helping the people that we're discipling find their spiritual purpose and equipping and mobilizing them to go do that in physical and digital space. So that's the 40,000-foot view. That's the elevator pitch for connect, community, equip, mobilize. I hope that's starting to resonate with you. You're going to hear me this season say that a lot because it is the core foundation of what we're doing inside the Church Digital.

So last week we did a deep dive on connection. And it was interesting. Last week, if you listened to the live, I was not feeling well. I just actually, right after the podcast recording I did on Tuesday in the live stream, I mean, I didn't like crash my car, but I literally crashed, and I was out for like three days almost. It was brutal. I just was broken, physically. My body just was like, "Yeah, you're done." And it was funny like I wasn't really beat up. It wasn't extreme. I have no idea what caused it. I'm feeling much better now. My point being is that if you watch this on podcast, you're not seeing the live take, and so it kind of condensed it down, did a simpler take for episode 322. But even that, it's really focused on this idea of connection. What? How? What does it mean to connect with people in digital space? What are the strengths of connection? What are the weaknesses of connection? What can connection do? What can connection not do? And so I would encourage you to dig back into 322 and explore that. But it's important to remember that connection left to itself—if all we're doing is connection, I'm sorry to say this, but it's most likely shallow and superficial. Now somebody's going to say, "But Jeff," and give me some like extreme situation where they can connect at a deep level involving X platform. And sure, okay, you know, I'm not going to fight the battle. Maybe you're using that platform not at a connection level, but maybe you figured out how to jury-rig it to a community level. But the fact is that platforms like Twitter—excuse me, like Twitter—it's hard to get to a deep level. You only got so many different characters that you can type in and replies. It's cumbersome. It's not designed for a relational approach. You know, Instagram is kind of the same way. Even as I'm streaming right now on Instagram, looking at this camera, you're all you're limited in some context with who you're really able to connect with in a two-way conversation. And so we start to rethink what digital community is looking like. This is where we start to now recognize that connection without community, there's no power in it.

Now, as I talk about the flywheel, you know, start to think about this idea: digital missions, digital missionary work. The majority of what we do is digital missionaries. I mean, if we're really honest, it's grounded in community, to be honest. Like, the major—let's not even make it about—shoot, let's take that out of the connection. It's not even about digital missionaries. The idea of anything in missionaries, digital or physical, church digital or physical, it's all about connection and it's all about community. Let's take your average physical church. Now, it's interesting. I would suggest connect, community, equip, mobilize. It's the same playbook your physical church is doing, just different context. So you've got these people, and they are the ones that are sitting in the pews of your church. Let's just say they're in your neighborhood around your church. You just planted a new church plant in, I don't know, I'm downtown Miami, okay? So you planted a church in downtown Miami. You want to connect with the people in your context, ten miles around where your church is located in downtown Miami. Oh, look, there's a giant skyscraper apartment complex right across the street from your church.

I want to go shake the hand of every person in that building and I want to invite them to church. I'm connecting with them because they're within range, physical reach of the church. Meeting them and yes, in some physical context, you know, it is possible to pray with a person, to share Jesus. The Holy Spirit can open something and do something incredible at the connection level. He does that in physical and digital space. Far be it for me to cheapen the impact of God in this context, but it's important to realize I would suggest that it's not just the connection. It's, "Hey, why don't you come join us for church on Sunday?" Now that's the playbook in the physical space. We want to get him into that physical community to build a relationship in the physical space.

I would argue that digital community is actually maybe even more effective than engaging with people in the physical community, especially when you're dealing with people that are called to Christ. Because digital community gives a safe space for people to have those hard conversations without feeling the pressure of physicality. And so the opportunity in physical or digital, to use digital community to establish trust, to build relationships, to deepen relationships. Digital evangelism we actually find is very effective in digital community. Digital evangelism is very effective in digital community. Why? Because of relational approaches. We find that, and we'll talk about this here in a little bit, relationships are crucial for digital mission work. And the more that we can build relationships, not at the superficial level of connection, follow the Holy Spirit, but as he guides, get these people, get the people you want to do ministry with in community, and there establish trust, build relationships, evangelize, connect them to Jesus, and even disciple in that digital community level. There's so much that can be done utilizing digital community.

You know what's interesting? The U.S. Surgeon General, I'm blanking on his name right now. I'm assuming he's still in office. You know, here in America, Trump just took office yesterday, and I actually I'm not sure if the dude got picked up again. Actually, I need to look that up. But in 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General here in America wrote a deal on the epidemic of loneliness. This was a big deal. This was a 150 to 200 page report, as I recall, citing the major issues in Gen Z and Gen A on how they are isolated and separated and alone. They don't go on dates and they don't have any friends. We've got all this connection and no real relationships. You can, you know, Google the report, "Epidemic of Loneliness." I promise you, you'll find it in a whole bunch of commentary centered around it.

Now what's interesting for me is that the U.S. Surgeon General, who is not a Christian by any stretch, I believe doesn't profess to be, we've got mutual friends. He says that there's seven ways, there's seven ways in America we can address the epidemic of loneliness. Three of them actually utilize digital. But the one that I really want to cite today on how to address the epidemic of loneliness, it's funny. I would think, okay, all the teenagers need to trash their phones because that's what normal culture would say. Well, they just need to get rid of their phones and start having conversations like normal people. That's not what the Surgeon General said. The Surgeon General said that we, corporations, we organizations, we institutions, we churches, we need to do a better job of utilizing digital community. The Surgeon General, to address the epidemic of loneliness, that's engaging in the next generation in Gen A and Gen Z in America today. The top medical guy says, "Hey, digital community is crucial, and y'all suck at it. We need to do better." And so even the Surgeon General recognizes there's power in this digital community. We just haven't utilized it yet.

So what would it look like to actually utilize this thing to establish trust, to build relationships, evangelism, and even at the discipleship level? And actually, I'm reminded of a book that I wrote way back in the day. Somewhere over here I got my finger right. It's not showing up on Instagram right there. That is so hard to do. You know, you can't see me on Instagram, but I'm pointing with my finger, and it's like, "Mirror, rea." It's just mind-blowing. But I wrote this book with Dr. John Harris called "Sharing Jesus Online." And then we take this idea centered around "Bless." You may have heard Dave Ferguson write the Bless practices, which is a very relational approach towards evangelism. Begin with prayer, listen, eat together with someone, serve that person, and share Jesus, share your Jesus story.

Now Dave and his brother John, they wrote the book and they developed the framework in physical context, right? And so this is where I am going to connect with my neighbor. I want to go share Jesus with my neighbor. I want to build a relationship with my neighbor to connect with him about Christ. And so I am going to, before I do anything, I'm going to begin with prayer, all right? I'm going to pray it up. "God, help me in this situation. Give me the words to say and help me connect with my neighbor." And then I'm going to go connect with my neighbor, and instead of talking, the first thing I'm going to do is listen. "Hey, how is your day? How's your wife? Tell me what's going on." Let's, and you are letting that neighbor, letting that person talk. You're listening. You're engaging him, and you're building that trust by listening. Even at the listening level, you're already in community because community is two-way conversation, not one-way. Connection is you talking at people. Social media posts, blogging, podcast streaming, what I'm doing right now. Like, I've got Steve Reed on here. I've got Peter. I've got Tall. I've got people that are processing this stream with me. But to be honest, I'm having a lot of one-way conversations here. I'm not really engaging in two-way. This is connection. But by blessing, by beginning in prayer and listening, you're in community, two-way. And that's the opportunity now to listen to people and strengthen that community even more by eating together.

"Hey, man, this is great. I'd love to talk more. Let's go grab coffee." And what's interesting with eating together in physical space, now how do you eat together digitally? We'll get there. But eating together in physical space, there's a level of intimacy. There's a level of trust. Like, if I'm at war with someone, if we're having verbal abuse towards each other, I'm not going to trust them enough to go sit down over Starbucks. Or if I am sitting down at Starbucks and having that conversation, well, that means that I am attempting to overcome the struggles and make myself more accessible. There's a humility that's involved when you sit down and eat that vanilla bean scone in front of their face. And so there's this opportunity to eat together through the process and deepen that relationship by eating together.

And then, according to Dave Ferguson, you serve them. Like, you know, "Hey, man, I'm sorry to hear you're having a hard time. Can I mow your yard for you while you're traveling? Oh, you're going to be out of town helping your mom? Do you need somebody to house sit or check your mail?" Show up at their house. It was funny. I heard Dave tell me the story once of how he showed up with, he went to like the special bakery in Chicago, and he showed up at his neighbor's house with like a special loaf of bread that you can only buy at this one bakery that's really good. Like, "Hey, I got two loaves. Why don't you and your family take one?" Like, it's simple to do, to serve physically. And so that, but once again, you're establishing trust. You're building the relationship. And then you share your Jesus story.

So like, when you go through begin with prayer, listen, eat, serve, and then share your Jesus story, you'll notice the bottom, the last step, share your Jesus story, is really the point where you are now speaking. The rest is you taking action to build a relationship. Now it's interesting that Dave didn't choose the words like, oh, I don't know, like, you know, jump on a soapbox and tell them everything they're doing in life that's wrong, or that it's not, you know, something like stand on some theological mandate and just start, you know, slapping them upside the head. It's not soapbox, and it's not slap. It's share your story. "Hey, let me tell you what Christ did in my life. I was at a time similar to yours, and Jesus really met me in a big way. Can I share with you how that went?"

So that is Bless in physical space. Now I'm here to tell you, according to that book, begin with prayer, listen, shared experiences, serve, and share your Jesus story. That is an incredible relational framework that works beautifully in community to share Jesus and to bring people to Christ in digital and in virtual space. Like, we are seeing it time and time again through the church digital. And I want to encourage you to start to recognize the power of community, the power of relational evangelism, and add to that relational discipleship. Once you bring that person to Christ, you want to be part of that discipleship process with them.

By the way, I'm not speaking to like pastors here. You know, it's funny. The majority of pastors that actually watched my stream through the years, majority of those people are gone. Like, they're not keeping up with what I'm doing because I'm not talking about like how to get their church service to look great on stream. Like, I can have that conversation with you. That is so not interesting to me, by the way. Helping normal people become digital missionaries, to utilize their influence in digital and virtual space for the cause of Christ, to create a movement of normies that are helping change the world and to come to the understanding, power of the gospel, and understand their humility and the power of the kingdom. Yes, please, sign me up for the humility of the kingdom.

By the way, I am all about that. And so for us normal people, bivocational ministers, people with nine to five jobs that have nothing to do with ministry, that are just, oh, on the side, "Hey, let me do a little ministry here in digital or virtual space, and let me see how God can use this." God can use this. It's a powerful, it's a beautiful thing. And so engage in this idea of relational evangelism. Engage in this idea of once they know Christ, continue the relationship, relational discipleship.

Now the beautiful thing about the flywheel, the beautiful thing about the framework, this connect, community, equip, mobilize, connect, community, equip, and mobilize, is that it can be contextualized. I'm using big words today. I feel like, you know, this may be the deep end of the pool for some. This can get contextualized. You know, I've had hundreds of conversations with people, and they would say something to the extent of, "Jeff, just give me a formula. I just want four easy steps. Can you just tell me what to do and I'll do it?" Jeff, if you can come up with four simple steps to launching a digital church plant, it'll revolutionize the world. Unfortunately, it's not that easy because of the word contextualize. You want to launch a Facebook group church to reach the retired generation. You want to launch...

A video game church on Twitch to reach some twenty-some gamers. You want to figure out how to start a discipleship movement for Gen A, Gen Z. You want to do something in virtual reality that's engaging with people in Morocco and some of the MENA region. You want to do something in Africa, you want to do something in South America, you want to do something in Oceania, you want to do something in the Middle East. Like, it don't contextualization. That's why the church, the physical church, that's why the American church, really, I mean, this is why I said the American church was lazy. Actually, I said they were cowards, but lazy may be a better word. Because contextualization is hard. Because contextualization isn't scalable. Because they have their audience, they don't want to put in the effort to find a new audience. They just want to scale what they're doing more effectively. And that's that, may not be a bad idea, but I don't want to be critical of that model and of that play. If I was investing millions of dollars into a certain type of model with a certain type of person, I would want to maximize the ROI on that as well. The problem with that model is that you only reach a certain type of person. And this is where I say digitally we have the opportunity to reach someone different by doing something different. I say it again: we have the opportunity to reach someone different by doing something different. And it's leaning into these contextualizations. It's leaning into adapting that flywheel: that connect, community, equipping, mobilization. That's why it's so important.

I've got my friend here, New Zealand, tall, skinny kiwi. I have no idea what time it is on your side of the planet, my friend. Contextualization is why nobody should take a "how to start a VR church in three days." It takes a long time to figure out a new digital culture and be a redemptive part of that.

Yeah, it's interesting. No, no shots intended. I know somebody actually does have a VR church in three days, and I would, I've had the conversations. It's not three twenty-four-hour periods, okay? Like, let's let's back off the food train there. It's more of like the, it's okay, look, I don't want to get like, did God create the world in seven days or seven time periods? I'm not saying it was, you know, seven twenty-four-hour periods versus seven time spans, but yeah, it's it's never as easy as three simple days.

Well, and to be honest, tall skinny, that's one of the reasons I don't think I got it's popular. I could have been a lot more popular if I'd said, "Oh, it's four easy steps. You guys can do this in seventy-two hours, no problem." You know it? I actually, I've told this story. I had a global organization with a globally recognized lead pastor ask me, "Hey, Jeff, how do we get our, how do we get one church for every planet, one church for every hundred people on the planet globally utilizing digital tools?" Like, there's a lot of desire to see this move, but the importance to contextualize, even what community looks like. Like, you know, it's interesting. I've been even wrestling with this in a global context here in the past week. I had a call from Utope. Yopee, if you're watching this, is awesome. Like, don't, Yopee sometimes second-guesses himself when we talk. And, you know, it's funny, he, we were on this call and I'm like, "Hey, so how's how's EDM going? What's going on?" I was getting like, you know, updates from him. And, you know, Yopee is in Nigeria. He's been involved with us for the church digital five or six years now, seven years prior. And he starts like wanting, talking about changing things. And, you know, you know, ever having those conversations with somebody and they're like dancing around what they want to say because they're afraid they're going to hurt your feelings or, you know, they don't want to like, it's like broken glass or eggshells, and they don't want to like, you know, do too much damage, but they really want. And I'm like, "You, Tope, don't dance around it, man. Just just just say it. Just say it." Like, contextualization requires that you say it. Yopee, I invited you into the conversation to recognize that how we think in America is different than what's going to be effective in Nigeria. The conversation, so to speak, between he and I is that I am a huge, and my team for the most part, the Church Digital team, is a huge proponent of flip the classroom, that method of teaching and then how we utilize community on the backside to reinforce the teaching that's in play. Yopee, in his experience through what he's taught and what he's actually done as participant, it's like, "Hey, Jeff, flip the classroom doesn't work in an African context." Lesson learned, bro. What do we want to do instead? Come up with a proposal. Think outside the box. Dream big. That's what contextualization is.

Actually, I told my leadership the other day, you know, talking about EDM as we're talking about, we're going to get into the outposts, some of that later, but I was like, "There's there's nothing in contextualization, there's probably something that's off the table." There is. I don't want to say nothing's off the table. At this point, I cannot think of something that I would say, "No, you're not allowed to do that." You know, like, I almost want to say like the Life Church model, the Craig Gross church, everything short of sin for the kingdom is okay. Like, I don't, I don't know what I would say no to. There's probably something, but if you're not stretching the limits, if you don't think you're stretching the limits of what I would approve, you're not thinking big enough.

I've had multiple of those conversations this week, and it's so, I love, I love this. I love seeing, I've been looking at people like on a Zoom call, a Google Meet, we use Google Meet, Google Meet call, and their eyes, they just start to widen when they realize, "Wait, he really means like, shake, break it up, shake it up." I've been using the language of deconstruct, deconstruct this baby and rebuild it, like when I'm talking contextualizing. It's you're not, there's not four easy steps. It's we're going to help you establish the steps you need, realizing that what Utope needs in Africa is different than what Simon needs in Germany and in Europe, which is different than what someone is going to need in the Middle East, which is different than what Ebe's going to need, Rafi in the Middle East, Eie in Southeast Asia, which is different than Oceania, which is different than like, you know, insert. And I haven't even gotten to the platforms. How do we talk about Gen Z and Gen A and gaming? Oh my gosh.

Twenty-five. I sat with my, I sat with the chair of the board today. I had breakfast with him, Charlie. I, I, breakfast with Charlie probably a couple times a month, once every couple weeks. He lives here in Miami. We go way back like a decade or so. And, you know, I can, hon, like the dreams of twenty-five, I, to this day, I'm like, "God, I don't, I, this is my prayer. God, I don't know how I got here, and God, I don't know how you are equipping me. I don't know how you are expecting me to do what you are asking me to do, because this is so out of my league. But God, I'm going to obey you, and in obedience to you, I'm going down this road."

You know, I don't know, I'm to the level of God. I can't, I need your brother, but, you know, the Moses-Aaron deal, but it'd be nice to send some people along the way that can help. And, you know, everybody on the team at this point has serving such an important role, and it's fascinating. I, I, I literally, I can look at these people and I can say, "You are, we just brought on Stacy to handle member care and some mental health stuff." And I was sitting down with Stacy, and I was like, "You are literally, I've rattled off her resume over the past five, seven years. I was like, you are literally created by God to do the role that I'm asking you to do. Like, everything that I know of your history, we can talk about your other history pre-once I you got on my radar, but everything about you has built you to the point where you can do the job that I'm asking you to do." And it's amazing. Time after time after time, the people that I'm talking with right now, it's that same way. And what's fascinating is that, you know, APEST, they all think different, different motivations, they're driven different. And this almost gets back to, this is off topic, but, you know, don't surround yourself with yes people. Don't surround yourself with people that agree with you. Surround yourself with people that don't agree with you and challenge them to make you better, and be humbled to listen to them when you need to. It's a hard lesson.

All right, so what does it look like? What does it look like? I'm raining this back in. That was a diversion. I got to come back here a little bit. What does it look like to contextualize community? All right, you know, I, last week, oh my gosh, I don't remember who had the conversation with, live last week. But we did a deep dive because they didn't agree with some of my perceptions of Twitch. I view Twitch more as a connection platform. I, to be honest, I've never really seen Twitch, the platform, as community. Now, I can cite, you know, it's a streaming, it's a one-way. I can't actually hear the person I'm seeing, texting coming back. And so that's that's my biases, that's my opinion. I am not God, nor am I anyone that watches Twitch on any regular basis, so I'm not an expert on how Twitch can be used for digital missions and context. If you want to talk with anybody that understands how to use Twitch in digital context, you're hanging out with, with, with Flab. You're hanging out with Andy, Chino, Mage. Like, there's a ton of people inside TCD that know to do Twitch far better than I do. I am not a streamer. I, I fake this on, literally, I play a streamer on TV. Think about it. And so I'm not, I'm not the one to say what can and cannot be done by community. But that's also part of contextualization. In my context, I can't use that tool in that way. In your context, maybe you can. And start to ask yourself these questions: Can the platform, you know, Twitch in this example, can it allow for two-way conversations? I would say that the benchmark for a digital community to be an active part of the flywheel, in order to build trust, in order to establish relationships, for digital evangelism to be effective, for digital discipleship to be effective, if we want to see that happen in an effective digitally digital community, if we want to see that happen in digital community, there has to be some level of two-way conversation. And at what varying degree does that happen?

Now, a lot of the Twitch people I know, like, Twitch is part of what they're doing, but they feed it into Discord. And so they've got the Twitch, they've got the Discord as well. What would it look like for you to use a platform for a while? And does that sustain itself, or do you need to feed into something else? Like, globally, we're in Discord for a lot of our community. In our context, though, is removing more global. We needed to do something more than Discord, and that's when we we headed into WhatsApp. And now that we're in Discord on WhatsApp, we've got to use YouTube instead of what's built into Discord. And so we start to build some complementary tools, start to wrestle with some of this. How does this look in your context moving forward?

The other thing that I would suggest to you, and we hit on this a little bit earlier, is what is the purpose? What is the purpose? What are you really trying to accomplish with your digital community? Are you trying to get people to do something? Are you trying to...

Just get people to hang out. Are you creating a safe space? What are you handing off to in and through the community? If the only thing you're doing with the community is reinforcing what's happening at the connection level, so you're creating a connection community, connection community, connection community loop, and there's nothing at a deeper level. I said it before, man. That's really pointless. I mean, at the end of the connection community, uh, infinity loop that's happening there, yeah, you're building up a lot of followers. You are building up people. You're gaining followers, but I mean, to pardon the Biblical term, I don't know that you're making disciples. And even if you're promoting connection and community, until you're equipping them specifically and immobilizing them and empowering them to do what God's calling them to do, is sending them out. It's spiritual milk when they should be eating solid food.

What is your community's purpose? Start to wrestle with that. Think through that and be challenged to think outside of the box in some of these ideas. Look at different ways that you can utilize community to accomplish something. What's the purpose beyond that connect community loop? Give it some sort of a purpose. If you're in our system, it's equipping because we want to see people empowered, on fire, digitally. We want to give people purpose. We want to get people on the solid food. We want to get people off the spiritual milk. And I can tell you so many stories around that.

Um, there is, it's interesting. Here, Tall Skinny Kiwi. Let me zap this real quick. With the very first short-term mission team, Jesus told them to leave their bags behind. Yeah. Also, I've got Steve here. Kiwi, we need to hang out. Kiwi, dude, I sent you a DM on WhatsApp. I, on, uh, not on WhatsApp, on Discord. We got to talk. I need you. Literally, I had three of our people together and, um, I said, who else needs to be involved in this conversation? And, uh, uh, 100% voted we needed Tall Skinny Kiwi. So let's figure that out. Check your DM. I'll tag you after this.

Steve Reid, one of my new friends here in, uh, in TCD. Um, it's one of the things I like about your format. Nothing's off the table. Oh, yeah, yeah. If we're not challenging people, um, we're not doing it right. And Kiwi says hello. I love that. Good morning, Kiwi. Is 15 hours away from me. It's 1 p.m., so it's 6:00, 7 a.m. your time, bro. Good morning, Kiwi. Millenias, um, I'm listening too. So Millenias is around. Yeah, we're starting to get some love here from the YouTube crowd.

I, I'm going to be honest, and, and, and I apologize for this. This season, um, I'm going to be more talking, less dialoguing. Uh, next season, what's coming up, uh, next season, we're going to really focus on questions. I'm going to be engaging a lot more. Uh, in this season, though, I'm going to be kind of banging the drum and getting through this. Tsing and Kiwi's 8 a.m. in New Zealand. So I hope the coffee's good. I'm sure it is.

Listen, some of you are listening to me monologue through all of this, and you're probably thinking, well, dang it, Jeff. This sounds like a lot of work. I'm not a community builder. That's not what I'm called to be. I, I'm, I'm a content creator. I don't know anything about Discord. I don't know anything about community. I'm not interested in this. I don't have time. If that is you, congratulations. You're a normal person. Partner with somebody. And that's what really is fascinating about the digital community, the digital mission space that we're in right now. The collaboration, the willingness to work together is phenomenal. And so take this opportunity right now and maybe start to find some people to work with.

I'll tell you one of the things that I actually would invite you to do is even with inside the church digital, our communities, there's always an opportunity to connect and talk with people at a large scale. But more than that, take our EDM course, Equipping Digital Missionaries, and start to connect with a cohort of people that are in a similar space and similar calling. And maybe you'll find somebody that wants to partner up. Or maybe there's an opportunity to even work through one of our outposts in different contexts and meet up people in that space. Like, the church digital exists to be a resource for people like you that are doing digital missions work. And if you're only going to operate at the connections level, you need to find the people that can operate at the community.

I cannot tell you how many connections-only churches, how many connection-only, um, missionaries I've seen dry up. I've seen burn out. I've seen get fried because they don't have an accountability. They don't have a relationship. They don't have a community to feed these people into. So important to think through a multiple-tier, this flywheel model. It's so crucial for the digital ministry space.

Tall Skinny Kiwi: I'm thinking through new ideas of a first-person virtual church vicarious model based on streaming and watching a single avatar go through an interactive church experience. Love to chat through that.

I swear I freaking love Kiwi, man. He's just always, always thinking outside the box. He was thinking outside the box on this stuff before, I don't want to say before I was born, but yeah, I mean, dude's been doing it a really, really long time.

Digital Ministry Podcast Yopee: Hey, Jeff. Hey, everyone.

Yopee, I actually was talking about you earlier on the show. You have to go back and inscript to get caught up on it. Um, but this is the core of it, you know? Last week we talked about connection. In this flywheel, uh, of how do we get perpetual motion, centrifugal force. I'll discover how to say that word at some point. But how do we keep it spinning? How do we get ministry going? It takes a while to get started. It takes some work. May take some partnerships. But the idea of connecting with people, uh, using social media, using blogs, using podcasts, using streams, using gaming, using whatever it is, is, and use that to feed into a community.

The community is where we establish trust. We build relationships. Evangelism, discipleship happens best in community. And then with all that, feeding them into some sort of an equipping process. The church digital will give you ours, Equipping Digital Missionaries. And, and that, and so you're starting to know, train them on how to do this and then mobilize them and send them out. This is an incredible opportunity for people to do effective ministry digitally that can be contexted, they can be white-labeled, they can be reshaped in all of this.

And so, hey, this past week was connection. Today was community. Next week we're going to get into equipping. I'm excited about this one. We're going to let some of the, sorry to say, the cat out of the bag. We're going to let some of the secret out of the sauce. I, I don't, I hate cats, and, um, I get secret out of the sauce. That's not bad. Really feel like that needed to get worked on better. I have no idea how to transition out of this.

So, hey, I'm just going to wrap. I, man, I hope this was a good one. Thanks for coming in and hanging out with me today. Uh, but for me and everybody else who is hanging out here with the church digital podcast, thanks for jumping on here, and, uh, we'll talk with you later. Bye.