EP338 - Jeff Teases What's Next

All right. Hey everybody. Welcome to the Church Digital podcast once again. Doing a live stream here on a Tuesday afternoon, at least here in the States.

Jeff Reed here, founder of the Church Digital. And if you've been listening to the stream, or not listening, watching the stream for the past 20 minutes, you know that the music was muted and I wasn't aware of the music being muted for 30 minutes until like 10 seconds ago. And so sorry to make it kind of boring as you were hanging out here a little bit on the pre-show.

And so hey, um, got an interesting conversation coming up. If you're in chat, say hey. But we've got some really kind of random things we're going to be hitting on heading into the stream today. I was excited. By the way, Troy says hi. Evidently Troy is skipping school, not skipping school. It's so hard to tell. Troy is working while at school and still takes the time to say, "Hey, Jeff." Every Tuesday, love it.

Troy graduates high school in a couple weeks, I think. And so, man, Troy, hey, good to see you. Hope things are going well today.

And I'm praying for you, my friend. I want to get an update how it's going with your teacher. DM me on Discord or WhatsApp. Slack, what is that? Where did that come from? Discord or WhatsApp? Slack. I haven't opened up Slack in months. I had a vendor that I had a contract with that used Slack and that was the only reason I used Slack.

Anyway, conversation for a different day. But I'm excited about what's coming up for the Church Digital. And so I thought I'd gather together and maybe just do a little bit of a tease talking about where we're going in the weeks ahead with the Church Digital.

It's so interesting. Even Steve here is like, "What Slack?" Okay, Steve, there's a reason we haven't exposed you to Slack. Don't worry about it.

Slack is like WhatsApp, but for business people, but it doesn't have near the exposure of business people and it doesn't have any community based around it, unless it's the community you build in. Like WhatsApp has community built around it, but Slack is more isolated in the approach. But it's another asynchronous community. Troy is saying today is Leighton. That's Leighton, L-E-I-G-H-D-O-N black cap. That today is when the EDM starts.

So we're excited about that. I'm excited to get beta three kicking off of equipping digital missionary cohort. We'll be talking about that soon.

We've had, for what it's worth, we've had about maybe 150 people want information on this most recent EDM cohort. And in total we've had about 300 people register overall.

And so at this point we've graduated maybe 75 people from the course. And so, you know, some of the ratios we're as an organization we're trying to figure out how to make it more sticky, how to adjust some of it. We're going to talk some about this in the weeks to come and roll some of this stuff out.

Honestly, we've had some onboarding issues, some database issues over the past three or four months and so working through getting some resolution on that as well.

And the team's working hard on that, but we're excited to see people like Troy kick off. And actually, Steve is starting to teach equipping digital missionaries as well.

Steve and Troy are in different cohorts. As I think about it, I think Steve is actually going to be teaching the, or co-teaching the Tuesday cohort, the Wednesday cohort, and Troy's in the Tuesday night cohort.

But it's very exciting to see EDM is going and growing with Leighton. We're doing a couple cohorts in America. We're actually doing a Middle East cohort as well.

Tariq is starting his first EDM cohort, equipping digital missionaries cohort, tomorrow, and so he's putting finishing touches on that right now. Germany is going well as well.

We've got our friend Simon has been teaching a language-specific German digital missionary cohort literally as we're speaking. And so he's been doing it for a month or so.

He's actually wrapping up, I think, the German version of that. And then my friend Yopee, I'm so excited about this. Utope's cohort has been going great.

Now, this is actually a great example of, you know, we talk in the course about digital imperialism. We talk about, yeah, not one passport needed. You know, equipping digital missionaries is global. Steve says, you know, it's global. We don't even need a passport to do the stuff that we're doing.

That's beautiful, Steve. Thanks. You know, this is digital. We're talking about digital imperialism. You know, imperialism is, you know, back in the old days, it was you would battle, one country would overrule another country in war and then you would inflict that culture.

Even goes back to biblical times, the Babylonians taking over things and inflicting their culture on the surrounding. And so Jason Morris, we've actually theorized and talked about digital imperialism about how we want to enforce, even subconsciously, not meaning to do it, but subconsciously enforcing your local culture, your national culture in digital spaces where it could impact other cultures, even secondhand. And what's happening in Africa is actually a really good example of that.

And so I almost want to take an example here. Ian's jumping on and saying another colonialism. Yeah. Digital imperialism, digital colonialism. Yeah. There it does kind of both feel that way because what was happening in Africa and we knew, we knew it was going to be a stretch.

Um, I'm going to make a confession here on stream. I may not say this publicly. You're going in the deep end here on the Church Digital podcast right now.

I don't know that I've said this in a public-facing anything yet. So I taught the beta two. I just finished my second digital missionary cohort in Africa and so Utop did one.

The first one kind of had mixed results. I jumped on. I was like, "Hey, let me co-teach, let me get an experience of what's actually happening, let me see it with you." And so he and I taught one together. I have a confession. We invited maybe 30 or 40 people to do this cohort with us.

Subsaharan South Africans primarily. Out of that we had maybe 10 or 11 people commit to doing the cohort with us. Go ahead and ask me.

Hey Jeff, how many people actually completed the African cohort with you and Utope? The big giant goose egg. Zero. Like it. I don't even think we made it into week three.

Like it was horrible. And this is nothing racially against the subsaharan South African people, nothing culturally that we, you know, I'm not demeaning them in any way.

We, the Church Digital, had not figured out how to engage and connect with them. And so I, you know, Utop is like, "Hey, I want to try something." And I love this.

I love this about Utopia. Utop's been hanging around with us long enough. The experimental nature he's got is beautiful. And says, "Hey, I'm going to do this.

I want to, I'm going to cut all videos out of this thing. I'm in and I'm just going to talk. I just want to teach it myself. No watching videos in advance. No flipping the classroom. Flipping the classroom, Jeff, I've never seen it work in an African context.

Any of the other cohorts, flipping the classroom doesn't work. Let me do it." Okay, you run with it. Dude had like 12 or 13 people show up for his cohort.

Man, I am so excited. And engagement's been high. And so once again, it's, you know, for us at a subconscious level and we were, we knew it was coming.

We just had to experiment through it to find the way. It wasn't that our way was the only way. It's the deep end right off the bat with the Church Digital podcast today.

How we were doing equipping digital missionaries, how we were teaching. It's very important for me to say today that how we're communicating, how we're teaching, how we want to equip, like it's as we're working with outpost leaders globally and different people even on different platforms, like it's we don't want to change the philosophy.

We don't want to change the message, but we're completely fine changing the delivery. It was so funny.

I was actually, we were interviewing another ministry partner yesterday. So Monday morning, 8:00 a.m. Eastern, first meeting of the day. It's an international organization.

We'll probably talk about this later today, if not next week at town hall, but so excited about some of the doors that this ministry partner is opening up.

And in one of the email conversations I said, I was like, I really want to dig into what you're comfortable with for us to contextualize your message.

And you know, anytime you say contextualize to an author, to a content creator, to someone like even a organization that does the curriculum that they do, like okay, when you say contextualize what do you mean? Like are you gonna rewrite our stuff? Are you going to theologically misalign? Like you get your concerns, right?

And with this particular ministry partner, I was like, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don't want to change what you're saying, but I do want to change the delivery because, you know, your context, you know, may be different than what's happening in digital and it's definitely different than what's happening in virtual reality."

You know, it's funny. We look at, I'll take Alpha as a no, let's do, um, yeah, I mean, let's do Alpha, why not Alpha? Um, you know, in physical space, Alpha is like a 45-minute video, longer, and you have dialogue, you know, as you're in physical space dialoguing through Alpha. By the way, if you've never looked at Alpha USA, um, definitely look at Alpha USA, it's, or anywhere, any of the Alpha global ones, an incredible ministry opportunity for digital missionaries. Incredible.

We often thought that we, the Church Digital, we should be hosting like Alpha talks on this. Oh my gosh, so much is happening in chat right now. I can't even keep up.

But um, and so Alpha, 45 minutes, physical. Awesome. Watch a video, talk about it. Cool. Do it. Um, when Alpha moved digital, actually the student version of Alpha became the more popular version digitally because it's shorter videos.

It's more engaging cuts and edits and it's the, you know, the music soundtrack kind of what you're listening to now. It drives and it keeps people engaged for a longer period of time.

And so we've actually seen that the youth version of Alpha is incredible digitally and it's very successful to bring people in to have a spiritual conversation to be open to dialoguing about, you know, things of faith.

People that are called to Christ can engage with a 15-minute video and then talk about it. Like that. That's acceptable. That's acceptable digitally.

In virtual reality, people don't want to watch a 15-minute video. Like they want to watch a 30-second video and talk about something because in VR it's much more important that people talk than than watch or listen.

And so how do you get them talking and how do you lead them through the talking? How do you do active listening? And so as I was talking, you know, all the way back to Utope, you, Utope, clearly understood who he was trying to reach in subsaharan South Africa better than a white bald man with a beard wearing glasses could do in Miami, Florida.

And he is adapting it. And so internationally, if you're watching this, that's what we want.

We want to be very open-handed with our content, with our training, with our ideas, with our relationships, and empower people like you watching this to help us create digital missionaries globally.

Realizing how we create digital missionaries in America is going to be different than how we create digital missionaries in Africa or Europe or the Middle East or Oceania or Asia Pacific or Russia or South America or, you know, insert place here, which is going to be different than virtual reality, where Mr. Pete is, which is going to be different than, and don't even get me started on some of the generational breaks in platform cultures, cultures, platforms as places. Like, the idea is not to create a way to train. The idea is to create a framework that can be adapted to best work for you, and that's what we're doing.

Hey, we've got some incredible stuff on EDM that I wanted to do right off the bat, but all that by saying that, um, what's his name? My friend Troy is starting Leighton's EDM tomorrow night. And so coming on the chat, uh, Mr. Pete is jumping in as well.

Mr. Pete, we are in big screen. So I love this. Mr. Pete grabs our stuff all the time and now broadcasts it in real time in big screen. And so if you're watching in big screen hanging out with Mr. Pete, uh, do that. Mr. Pete, I got to get with you soonish. Maybe in June. We've got some stuff coming up with the digital missionary conference and I want to loop you in on that.

Life on mission. My new friend Jose. Jose, man, thanks for stopping in. Good to see you. Um, Jose, we're, I'm excited. I've been thinking about you. I've been talking about you, Stacy, past couple of weeks. We're going to have some things to talk about here in the months to come.

Um, you know, Tom says, "I want to change what I'm saying. I have no idea what that means." Um, probably made something sense at some point, but, uh, well, I mean, that's assuming that Tom makes sense at some point, and that right there is a big assumption.

I love Whitebeard. Just saying. Tom, glad you're hanging out with us. Appreciate it. Uh, Mr. Pete's letting us know that we are in VR EDM or we are in VR now. And uh, Jose is in EDM. Jose, are you in Tuesday or Wednesday? Who's your leader? Are you with Ian or are you with, um, Flat Cap?

He's got too many names. Flat Cap, Flap in Discord says, or excuse me, Size. I've been mispronouncing it for years. I found out the other day, Size, uh, in WhatsApp and Leighton, like when I see him in the face, and so like, it's, uh, he's got an identity crisis, so to speak.

Yeah, Stacy, I'm telling you, Jose, he's going through. I'm excited, Jose. I am definitely, definitely excited.

Okay. Hey, listen. Um, that was a lot about EDM, guys. I was working on the interview, and gals, excuse me. I was working on the interview of interviews that I really wanted to happen today.

Like, I have been, accidentally working, accidentally may not be the best way to say it, but I've been like, um, putting, trying to work on an interview for a couple months, and, uh, there was something happened in this past week and I was like, we got to do it. We got to do it. Now's the time. Like, this is hot. We got to break this. And, uh, and timing just didn't work out. So let me tell you what I'm working on.

And we're, this is going to happen May 27th. I don't know if you know this, there is actually a huge movement of digital missionaries within the Catholic Church. Like, this is, this is, dig, excuse me, digital missionaries, influencers, this is global, this is discipleship, this is, uh, gospel-oriented, um, within the Catholic Church.

And, uh, it was funny. I ran across them almost organically while I was working on putting together the spring digital missionary conference. One of our speakers was like, "Oh yeah, I actually have been working with, uh, digital missionaries over in the Catholic church." And I was like, "Wait, what?"

John Packard. Josh Packard. Josh Packard was like, "Yeah, I've actually been working with, like, the Vatican on developing theories for the Catholic Church." And I was like, "Uh, I didn't know such things existed." And he's like, "Yeah, actually I know the leader. Have you met Jose? Would you like me to introduce you to Jose?" And I'm like, "Yes, please."

And so Jose, uh, dear you, I'm probably mispronouncing the last name, but I've been WhatsApping with Jose, uh, who lives in Dallas, Texas, uh, for the past, uh, maybe three or four months, like, um, probably this year, uh, building a relationship. Jumped on a couple Zoom calls. It's the Hispanic Catholic version of Jeff Reed.

Like, honest to God, we have the same stories. We have the same struggles. Um, in some ways they're a little more. The Catholic is a little more, uh, advanced than us because the Catholic, uh, religion is more centralized. They all fall under the pope. And so the previous pope was a huge fan, was a huge supporter of digital missionaries. The problem really became convincing some of the regional, uh, what is it? Um, cardinals to kind of dig into that.

And so I've been wanting to have a stream with Jose, and we just had been struggling trying to get, Catholic denomination. I'm sorry. Uh, Tom is correcting me. I apologize. That actually is the right word. It is a denomination. And listen, there are some people that are going to send me hate mail because I'm talking about Catholics in that.

And cool, like, there, I do view it as a denomination. Um, there are Catholics that get it. There are Catholics that don't. Guys, I hate to tell you this. There are evangelistic churches that get it and that don't. Uh, and so, you know, scripture is filled with references to, uh, some will say father, father, and I will say, who are you?

You know, there's lots of references towards the fact that some who claim to be Christians are not. And this should not be a surprise to anybody.

So I'm having this conversation, and this guy's incredible. And, uh, I was like, man, I really want to share some of these ideas and almost encourage our people and realize there's a whole other network out here of Catholics that are wanting to do the same thing that we're doing. And we're trying to figure out how to work together and align on some projects.

And so I've been like, "Hey, let's do a stream. Let's do a stream. Let's do a stream." You know, and then unfortunately, you know, the Catholic, uh, the pope dies. Uh, there's a new pope, an American, a Cubs fan, is now, you know, embraced as the new leader of the Vatican and the Catholic Church. And he's now, uh, and so I reached out like immediately and I was like, "Dude, let's have this conversation." And, uh, he's like, "Okay, let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. I'm, he was actually WhatsApping me from the plane as he was flying to Rome, uh, to try to figure out, you know, what was going on and all this." And, uh, and so he's still in Rome right now, and he thought he was going to be clear, and, you know, it's leadership, an organizational leadership change, lots of in-and-outs, lots of meetings, lots of things happening, and, uh, he just, he didn't have time to get free. And so we're going to do it the 27th.

And so if you're interested in learning what the Catholic Church is doing in the digital missionary space, I'll have the, um, I don't think he is the top leader in the space, but he's one of the people in that team that's recognized even at the Vatican level who's leading and representing digital missionaries literally at a global level. And so super excited to have Jose on the 27th.

Some of you, I had hinted that it was going to happen today. I was this close. Literally, we were dancing around it up until this morning. And this morning, or during the night last night, he's like, "Dude, I just, I really can't because I can't step out of this thing." And it's like, "Okay, no problem. We'll punt. Let's do it. Let's do it later on. Excited about that."

So that's going to happen on the 27th. Now, let's talk about the 20th, and I want to invite you all to a sneak peek. I'm going to invite you into a sneak peek for something because next week we are going to do our town hall meeting.

Now, as you know, and I'm actually going to click this button, and that worked. That worked. Yeah. Yeah. It's just a little, it's not centered. Let me do that. And that'll be better. Yeah, it's good enough. I, um, GMO. Good enough to move on.

So we do a town hall meeting every couple weeks. We gather together. We talk about, uh, this through our town halls. This is where we want to learn from you what's working, what's not working at a global level, and essentially how can we help?

I can tell you like it's clear as day. I had a conversation with God and asked God, is it my turn to plant a church? You've heard me tell this story. God, is it my time to plant a church in digital space? And every time I ask, he clearly says, "Nope, sorry." And then he says, "Help." And so I want to know how we, the church digital, can help.

So here's what I'm going to do. You know, normally in the town halls, I've done these things like live in the moment. And so we're actually going to release the survey, the poll early. And so you can zap that QR code that's on the screen right now, or you can go to thechurch.digital/poll. The church.digital/pole because I literally right now want to hear from you.

Now I'm not going to publish the results today because this is for the town hall meeting in a couple, in next week, a week from today, the stream this time next week. But over the course of this week, we're going to ask at a global level for the people connected with us to contribute to this so we can get a more accurate picture of what's happening globally.

So if you are watching this live, you know, zap the QR code that's on the screen. The URL, the shortcut is thechurch.digital/pole. P-O-L-E as opposed to P-O-L-E. The church.digital/pole. And that's going to get you in.

But couple questions, and you should have the ability to answer these questions right now. Once again, zap the QR screen if you haven't. You're not going to see the results. One person has already voted. Uh, but responses are hidden because I'm holding this back. But feel free to contribute at least once to this. The church.digital/poll. Zap the QR screen.

Where are you from? You like the little map here on the screen. This is so cool. I, um, you'll see the graphic throughout. I asked ChatGPT to create a world map in the style of the church digital brand. And so it created all the squares and kind of quote-unquote pixelized the global map. And so I was like, "Yeah, that's cool." My wife looked at it and she's like, "Jeff, Hawaii's only one island. Like, come on. You can only do so much with a giant square."

Generalized. Think it's GMO. It's good enough to move on. So feel free to jump on that. Let us know. The church.digital, excuse me, thechurch.digital/poll. Where are you from?

The next question, we want to know favorite platform or community. Well, I guess I didn't turn that off because somebody said Discord, which is cool. We love Discord. Do I need to press H to hide that? I'm kind of curious why that showed up. That's okay. We'll figure it out later.

Favorite platform or community. Feel free to vote on that. Next question. Who are you? I feel like I want to sing. Who sings the "Who Are You?" Who? Who? Uh, somebody's got to know that. Um, Tom has got to know that. Tom, I'm kind of, is it, is it, um, oh my gosh.

Who does sing the "Who Are You" song? It was the song for, um, for years for CSI. Uh, it's an older band. It's a classic rock band. I'm flabbergasted I cannot come up with this right now. I feel like I'm a failure at some level because I cannot figure out Rolling Stones. All right, let's pop up ChatGPT. This is more important than anything we got going on.

Who sings "Who Are You?" ChatGPT to the rescue. Searching the web. The British rock band The Who, released in 1975. Thank you, ChatGPT, once again saves the day.

I, to be honest, I use ChatGPT exclusively at this point for searching. And I would say, oh yeah, Ian comes in after the fact. Where were you, bro? The Who. I've got Jose the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland. That's not exactly what we were looking for, but ChatGPT did come in and save the day. Ian, you were technically a little late, but I'll give you credit because of delay. So, "Who Are You?" Ra, fill in the gaps there.

Uh, missionary, church staff, employee, missions organization. Uh, normie, you're a normal person. Well, we're all normal at—well, okay, except for Whitebeard. Everybody else is normal.

Uh, and filling in the gaps there, Ian's kind of a little off, uh, a little bit. All right. Recent missionary success. Um, recent missionary success. That's what we're looking for here. Tell me a success story. I want to know in your missions work digitally. How's it going? I want to see some wins in here. So share that success story there. I also want to know what your biggest challenge is today. What's not working? Tell me the story of where things are working, and then concisely tell me what's not working.

Now, it's funny. I actually thought about um being able to type like multiple things. Uh, but then I figured some of you would like list out fifteen, twenty different things and just like blow it all up. The one thing, the top thing, maybe it's like two or three, but really like what's the one thing that's not working for you? Would love to know that.

Following up as well, equipping digital missionaries, the cohort. Uh, it's awesome. I took it and it was great. I loved every second of it. I think it's awesome. I'm gonna take it soon and we'll let you know. I really wasn't that interested in it, which is cool if that's where you are. And some of you may be like, "Equipping digital missionaries, what are you even talking about?" And if you—that's you, that's cool. I'd say, you know, read an email, join a community. But if you don't know what's going on, like then we need to do a better job communicating. And so I want to know who you are and where you are in that.

This is a fun one too. I wish the church digital would what—um, what do you want us to do? What is a action step, a takeaway? What is a need that you get solved? What is something we can do to help? Like, I'm Jeff, I'm giving you the keys. What do you want from us? How can we best help you? "I wish the church digital would do this." That's what I want to hear.

Now, you know what? We are going to be publishing the results of all of everybody that we're going to be, you know, we're going to run this. We're going to announce this poll today in the communities. I'm announcing it here for the first time this morning. Announce it in the communities today. We're going to be running it in emails through our entire network over the course of the week. We'll be beating it in social media and other places. And we're going to share the results of it in the town hall meeting Tuesday, May 20th, 1:00 p.m. Eastern New York City time on YouTube.

So we're going to be streaming on the church.digital or—excuse me, YouTube.com/thechurchdigital. I don't know why I do that. I always want to do the church.digital. I don't want to do that for any of the other social media. Like I have no idea why I always—every time, every time I want to do the church digital, but it's not. It's YouTube.com/thechurchdigital.

What's the—when you're playing baseball, uh, the yips, you know, where you do something for so long and then you screw it up once and then you can't ever do it again. What was the guy's name in baseball that screwed it up and then Luke Garry took over his job? That was the other thing. Oh my gosh. And then, you know, Luke Garry played however many—oh no, it was Cal Ripken. No, Cal Ripken beat Lou Garry. But it was Lou Lou Garry was the story. You know, Luke Garrick, the baseball player. He played like, I don't know, a million baseball games in a row until Cal Ripken beat his stretch. But there was a guy that took the day off for like some lazy reason and Lou Garry took over his job. Um, yeah, Chuck Knoblauch caught the yips uh with the Yankees. There are a lot of people that have caught the yips with the Yankees. Uh, that's another conversation toward that. Uh, and then, you know, I could make a joke about A-Rod, but I'm not going to do that. So that's cool. We're gonna move on.

Um, all right. So hey, we're excited. The town hall is going to be Tuesday, May 20th, 1:00 p.m. Eastern New York. And so we're gonna roll out the results of that. Uh, feel free to send, uh, you know, invite people into it. Uh, send the link around to others as well. Uh, get them to church.digital/poll. We'll redirect you there to get their opinions.

Um, listen, there's a lot of things that we're going to roll. The town halls are always, yes, we want to listen to you, but I'm gonna be honest. Some of the things that we're doing right now were actually because we listened to you three months ago in January, February. The reason we moved to a digital missionary model was because we listened to you all a year ago and realized, hey, there's not churches hanging out with us. It's digital missionaries. It's individuals. It's normies hanging out with us. It's so funny. Ian is like, "Normal. How insulting." I love that, Ian. Thanks for sharing that. But, you know, he's okay. Ian is probably more normal than the rest of us. But the thing is, is that by listening to these town hall meetings, by recognizing who's in the community, we realized that there was a need for us to pivot organizationally and even equipping digital missionaries that came about as a result of having people like you in the town hall meetings say the biggest thing that we need help with is equipping. And some of the things we're going to roll out in the town hall meeting next week are directly related to some of the lessons that we learned from the last town hall meeting. And so realize that, you know, uh, we do—unlike the Yankees sometimes—we do actually learn from past experiences and want to aggressively help you in that instead of like the Yankees spending, you know, having the writing the biggest checks and trying to buy what they think's the best names even though they crash and burn on occasion.

So, hey, town hall meeting next week, um, here, same channel, same place, the church—oh, shoot, I did it again. YouTube.com/thechurchdigital. Uh, I can tell you this, we're going to be teasing some things coming up with EDM. We're going to be teasing a lot of things centered around the equipping. The future is bright. I said this in the past, I'll say it again. 2024 was the year of connection and community for the church digital. Uh, new branding, new website, new missionary awareness. Um, a lot of change happened at the connect in the community level. 2025 is the year of equipping. And what we started with, um, what we started with equipping digital missionaries is the first step of many things to come.

I may have—I may have lost a relationship with Jose. Jose says I'm going to turn the other cheek this one time. Leave my Leanks alone. Fair enough. It's fair. Actually, honestly, I haven't watched one baseball game uh this year. Like, I just—I've not—I've not—this is—uh, I haven't talked about this publicly, I don't think. I actually played baseball with Alex Rodriguez uh in high school. And so I was uh I was on the baseball team in a high school Westminster. Uh, played baseball and football. Alex Rodriguez was actually my quarterback. Uh, he was a sophomore. I was a—no, no, he was a junior. I was a sophomore. And so I was a center—quarterback. And so um had a—had really a—I mean, a—I wouldn't say a good relationship, had a decent relationship with him. He was a baseball star more than football at the time. And uh, you know, he of course went on to do great things. Uh, and so I really don't mean to demean, but I just am not into baseball like I was. I we can unpack that at some point. Uh, Jose, that might be fun. Cool.

All right. Listen, some other things coming up and I'll go ahead and make this announcement now. We, the Church Digital, um, we're going to be, uh, rolling out a new podcast season starting um, after the town hall. So, is it Tuesday the 3rd? Uh, what's the Tuesday? What's that date? I meant to look that up and get it in my head before we got to this point. Doo—Tuesday the 3rd. Tuesday the 3rd, we're going to roll out a new season and we're calling it uh, "Empowering Tools."

Now, so many—I, this, the one thing that I've learned from the um, from the conference was that so much stuff is happening globally. Like, there was so much interest in the breakouts and so many people were like, "Oh my gosh, Jeff, when you did the rapid fire thing at the end with all the breakouts, that was my favorite part because I got to hear what these people were doing and I had no idea this was out there." And so we're kind of pulling from that a little bit. And over the course of the summer, we're going to be featuring uh, a number of ministry partners, a number of organizations that are creating powerful and effective tools that can help people like you doing digital mission work, whether it's uh, an AI that does—that can do evangelism for you or a um, or an assessment to help you uh, better understand who you are as an individual and who the leadership people around you are or or maybe it's an evangelism tool or a technique that's available to engage with Gen A and Gen Z. Like, there we're already having conversations across the board with a number of organizations, software, databases that are available to help. And the people that we're inviting to this conversation are, how do I say this? Cost effective for the budget setup for digital missionaries. Like, we're not talking about the big bucks here. Oftentimes we're not even talking about small bucks. Some of these organizations are nonprofit or are offering product for free because they want to help um, small churches, church planters, missionaries really be effective in their spaces.

And so, listen, I started making calls last week. "Hey, you want to jump on? You want to jump on?" And it's been, you know, rapid fire. People coming on and wanting to help share the resources that they have to help you become a better missionary. And so we're going to have "Empowering Tools," uh, the podcast series, the stream series launching on June 3rd.

By the way, my wedding anniversary is June 4th. That'll be my 26th. 1999 to 2025, that would be 26 years, right? I think. Yeah, we're good. We're good. 26 years. We're 26 years. Tell my wife. Uh, I'll be at the stream Wednesday—Tuesday. I'm taking Wednesday off. It's cool. Uh, and we're going to go have some fun.

All right. Uh, what else I want to talk about? EDM3. Already talked about that. Uh, and oh my gosh, there's some other things. I'm not going to get into it. Jose, I was going to get into it today. I feel like we need to um, you and I need a healing moment before I roll out the next thing.

I'm really excited about the next thing, but I did some damage. I hurt you about the Yankees. And so I apologize. Um, I do have some, you know, hurt feelings over the years where, you know, the Marlins, my Florida Marlins would win the World Series and then like the next year, you know, all of them would go and be recruited by the Yankees. You know, we used to joke that the Florida Marlins was basically like the step above spring training. It was the farm league. The Florida Marlins were the farm league for the Yankees. We didn't have any money, but the Yankees did, and they knew how to write big checks for multiple years. The Marlins could always write a big check for one year, but they couldn't do multiple years in a row. But good for them. Glad it works out. Is Jeter still alive? I swear I never hear from that guy anymore. But I don't, I don't pay attention to baseball. What do I know? All right. Hey, you know what? Uh, I think I'm going to wrap up. It's a little early. Forty to forty-five minutes on the stream. That was a yips right there. I was stuck. Forty to forty-five minutes on the stream today. Keeping it clean and simple. We have a lot of fun stuff coming up next week. So stay tuned on that. If you did not jump on the poll for the town hall meeting, please do that. The church.digital/townhall.

You know what? I'll go ahead and I'll throw that graphic up here one more time. If you manage to make it that far, it would be that button. And so the church.digital digital slash town hall or you can just zap that QR code that's on the screen right there and that'll take you to Mentometer which will get you in. You should be able to self-direct you through the talks or the different questions. There's a next button I think you can click through. If you got questions feel free to ask it in there. We'll be addressing questions at some point during the talk towards the end. But this is our opportunity to hear from you. So go and take the time to do that. Let us know. Drop questions in there and we'll be addressing them throughout the town hall meeting. So next week, one p.m. Eastern, New York, the church.digital YouTube. I did it freaking again. That's three times that I've done it on this and I'm self-aware of it. YouTube.com/thechurchdigital. Uh, we want to hear from you on that.

Okay. All right. And with that, at a forty-two minute stream, we're gonna land a plane. So for Jeff with the Church Digital, this is Jeff with the Church Digital. Thanks for hanging out with us today on this Tuesday Town Hall. Next week, bring a friend and we'll see you all then. Talk to you later. Bye.