EP342: Jeff & Marilyn Adamson Talk Evergreen Content, Reaching GenZ & GenA, Digitally

All right. Hey, Jeff, with Church Digital episode 342. As I was sitting here listening to the uh the music, uh I realized episode 350 is a couple months away.

Actually, I think it's right around my birthday, August 18th. Going to have to have some fun uh with uh the 350th uh stream coming up.

We got to do a town hall somewhere around there. I wonder I wonder if that lines up. We'll have to we'll have to figure that out for another day.

Not not for now. I got enough going on in my life. Uh but hey, I am excited about this this conversation uh coming up.

Uh we've got Marilyn Adamson uh from Every Student coming on to share. There's some phenomenal stories, some phenomenal resources uh that are right around the corner that are available for you.

And some of the stories that I've been hearing are are ridiculous. And so I cannot wait to uh to get in to to share some of these resources with you.

We are digging into a season here with the church digital uh equipping partners and empowering tools. And what we're seeing from from Marilyn and every student is um well it's it's it's exciting, you know, and and I want to call out my friend Ian Kirk who uh who's chiming in in in the chatter. You're excited just about every conversation. That's a good thing. Yeah, I do. I get excited a lot. I'm like a woo girl except uh I don't woo and I'm not a girl.

So you can do with that what you want. I'm sure somebody in social media will clip that. I'm like a woo girl. Yeah, I said it twice.

You got two different takes. So you can find a way to make uh that work for you. But it's going to be really good.

Hey, I tell you what, another exciting thing. Um we have been uh neck deep as an organization working through the fall digital missionary conferences.

We are doing four uh half-day conferences in uh September and October. It's conference season in the fall. We've announced three of them. Uh there is uh there's actually we've done some title changes.

We've done a focus change and and so you can go to uh you can go to the website missionary.digital to get more information on three of the conferences that we've announced.

But the fourth one, well, we decided to keep it a secret, but we're going to announce it. It's going to be really cool. Next week, Wednesday, uh, September 18th, we are doing a a live stream, uh, with Allan Hirs, uh, probably one of the the fathers of of modern church planting.

Allan Hirs, uh, the incarnational guru himself, who happens to be, uh, a strong supporter of digital missionaries and digital church planting. Now, I'm not actually sure how incarnational ministry and digital go together.

And to be honest, that's the conversation we're going to have with Alan Hersh next week as we're trying to figure out what incarnational does with digital and how digital can influence incarnational.

Uh our friend on the board, Jesse Carbo on the TCD board wrote an excellent article that was published uh in MSIO Alliance I think a couple weeks ago and uh Allan was was quoted in there and just a lot of good conversations with him around that.

So, hey, September 18th, jump on this stream uh with us. There's more information uh coming to you via email in TCD um WhatsApp and Discord.

I for the life of me, I can't think of the time right now. It's in it's an afternoon or evening stream because Allan is like literally in Australia and so it's going to be Thursday when we talk to him.

But that's coming up right around the corner. And we will announce the four conferences. That secret fourth conference that we've yet to announce. Uh we will announce publicly uh on Allen Hirs.

It's going to be worth it. It's worth coming around for it. So I you know what? I guess that's it for my commercial spiel.

I what was that? Three or four minutes. I don't I kind of hate doing those things. Like you know I'm as as excited as I am about people, I really am not that good about promoting myself.

And God's actually done a good job promoting TCD along the way. And so I'm just sitting back and smiling uh like I'm sure uh Marilyn is uh with some of the things she's going to share.

So let's go ahead and bring Marilyn on for the conversation. Hey Marilyn, how are you doing? Are things going okay for you? Yeah. Yeah.

Doing well. I really appreciate this opportunity to be on. I love what you're doing. Yes. Now um Marilyn, she lives in No, you're not in Orlando.

Yeah, you are in Orlando. with the crew. She's she's in Orlando. She's about four hours away from me. Um I'm I'm down in in Miami and a lot of the the crew team uh is based out of Orlando for whatever reason.

One of their headquarters is there, but Marilyn um connected with me starting to talk about some of the stuff that she's doing and things that are happening over with every student and a lot of the really exciting resources that are now available uh for people to to really reach Jana and Gen Z.

And so um Marilyn's got a presentation that we're going to walk through here in a minute, but before we even even get to that point, Marilyn, you know, tell us a little bit about yourself.

How did you get connected and how are you doing this stuff digitally? How what's your story? Yeah. Yeah. Well, actually my story really does play into u my creating every student.com.

Uh I had been an atheist and uh then I met a Christian who really walked with God, really trusted God in her life. And so I began to wonder if it was possible that God could exist.

Um I couldn't understand how somebody as smart as her could believe in God. So I was challenging her, but I wasn't mean about it.

We debated for uh I bet a year and a half. I'd ask her questions almost daily. And finally she gave me a book that had um information in it.

And when I was away from her, and this is key, you know, when we think of being online, when I was away from her, all my defenses could come down and I could be honest.

And that's when God really spoke to me. And it was I was into philosophy, but it was science that spoke to me. Um, the earth's position to the sun and the properties of water.

So, and then I saw evidence for Jesus being God. But um bottom line is when I asked Jesus into my life, he really changed my life in a dramatic way and I just wanted everybody to know him.

And so um after I graduated college um I had a degree in journalism uh and advertising and it turned out uh I became friends with a web master who was able to work with me to build the site.

And this was back in it launched in 2000. Yeah. I don't I don't think they use the word web master anymore. I I don't I don't think that's the they they've moved away from I I have been a web master in my life and Yeah.

That that's good. That's funny. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's a dated term. You're right. Well Well, cool. Um so, and so you're going to talk about every student and and and walk through some of that phenomenal uh story with that.

So Marilyn, I'll go ahead and fire the slide deck if if you're ready. And uh let me just mention one thing for your audience.

Uh the purpose of this time is to help you see ways that you can very comfortably and very quickly get into conversations about God with people when you're online, whether it's live online, uh you know, if you're in gaming or in Discord or or even if you want to post something in social media, but uh any direct messaging, any of that. There's a quick way that you can begin to have conversations with people about God in a way that's comfortable for them.

And I'm going to be showing you a couple websites that can really help you in your evangelism and your discipleship. So that's what this is about and I I think it'll be really useful to you.

Awesome. And so, you know, I know we've got some people in chat. Feel free to throw questions in there or comments. We'll we'll put them up and and address them uh throughout the presentation.

And if you're watching on on demand, of course, feel free to to put comments uh in chat as well. I I personally interact with all the YouTube comments.

Okay, I'm like a week or two behind, but normally I'm really on top of my game. It's it's been uh it's been a rough week.

U you know, Stephen, Steve, good insight. I'm meeting Jesus went alone. We should probably have a a choice of hand. Oh, you know what?

Steve, slow down. Slow the roll. Uh let's let uh let's let Marilyn get into what she's she's showing. So Marilyn, you ready to get started on this?

Yes. Thank you. Awesome. Here you go. Hey, the magic button worked. Good. Uh this I love this verse. It's what has motivated me. It's in uh Philemon and in the RSV it reads and I pray that the sharing of your faith may promote the knowledge of all the good that is ours in Christ. And to me that's a definition of evangelism. We get to tell people the good that is found in Christ. So this is how the world lives.

This makes it very easy to help non-believers. Um, most non-believers I found don't know who God is or what it's like to know God.

And that's why I build every student.com. It's a safe place to explore who God is and what it might be like to know God.

Everything on the site uh is about God and everything is worded to non-believers. It's for them with reasons to begin a relationship with God.

So, John was one of the people uh I visited your site last year and it has been a life-changing experience. I came to know about the love of God and the relationship we can have with him.

I do not have words to explain the joy I'm experiencing today. Wow, that's so cool. Uh every student.com is in 50 languages now. Each is its own website.

Uh and you can find those by scrolling down the homepage of every student.com to this word cloud. It'll show you all the URLs. Uh just during last year more there were more than 80 million visits to the site.

So God's really drawing a lot of people to the site. And more remarkable, I think 1.5 million people told us that they asked Jesus into their life while on the site.

So you had 1.5 million people um I mean that's like two percent of people two percent of people that visited your site last year accepted Christ.

And that's like them reporting letting you know that uh yes we have um we have about twenty percent of the articles actually include the gospel.

Wow. And if they do there is a link at the end of these articles and they're long articles. Uh and there's three links at the bottom.

One says I just asked Jesus into my life. And that's what we count. Another one says I may want to. Can you explain this more fully?

And we take them to another page. And then there's also a link where they can ask a question and someone will personally reply to them.

Yeah, that's that's a that's a those are strong numbers. Um I'm curious, one more question. How how do people find you? We're doing a lot of Google and Facebook advertising.

Okay. So, um SEO, uh social media marketing, social, uh search engine marketing to to get people there. We pretty much gave up on search engine optimization a long time ago.

Yeah. Just skipped over it. Wasn't worth the effort. I almost want to have a side conversation on that. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it's becoming even more so with AI now, you know.

Okay. So, if you do the math on the 1.5 million people, that's more than four thousand people every day who ask Jesus into their lives while on the site.

It's crazy. It is crazy. And and most of them are in closed countries. Uh this is tough to see, but you've heard of the 1040 window, and that's that's uh a latitude, right?

Latitude section of the earth where you've got a lot of Muslim, Hindu, uh we have a lot of people come to the site from Vietnam which is communist, atheist uh and and this is mostly where we are running ads in Google.

I'm running campaigns in 14 languages in Google. Uh, so it it's fun to be able to go into countries where it's not easy. It's not safe for people to talk about Jesus and yet they can come and safely explore without them being at risk.

And I love that. So, here's the what we've seen over the years in terms of the number of people who are coming to Christ. I mean, it's God's just had his hand on it and I'm I'm just watching it like anybody else even though I'm so you started this thing in 2020 2002 20 years ago and you were like double digits 10 15 people two people no people looks like the first year did you have any idea this would happen like when you first got started what was what was the hope what was the dream what was the ridiculous fantastical goal yeah I was in the campus area um of crew in the United States.

So I was doing it for university students in English in the US. But what happened is as our staff in other countries around the world began to know about the site, I started being asked to speak at global events and then even more staff became aware of the site and all 50 languages came about at the request of our staff in various countries. And are they are you using AI to translate? Is it manual? Like manual be ridiculous the number of articles?

No, we we've mostly done manual. Um really? Yeah. Yeah. I'll send Yes. We'll have staff send in. Rarely have we hired. Mostly it's been our staff who have found people to translate.

And it's it's been a lot of work. There's volunteer like act of love to to do the translation. Well, because they really wanted the site in their life.

They wanted to use it. And so um that was that's what I asked of them. We built it. We have um a web designer.

Yeah. Who has built all the sites? I learned. That's funny. It's beautiful. And you're mostly enclosed countries. Yeah. Oh, did I I went the wrong way.

Wrong button. My fault. There you go. That's okay. So, I wanted to read this one because this again is typical. Patrick wrote uh he's in Ireland.

He said he was doing just enough drugs each morning to get through the day without killing himself. And then he sent a really long email.

This is an excerpt. He said, "I went to my computer and Googled starting a new life with God. It led me to your site.

What I read made the most perfect sense. In a life trampled by confusion, I found clarity. You have offered me a gift which has changed my life.

I feel indebted to you for making the information available in a way a complete novice like me could understand." And and that's what we hear most is that first of all, the site doesn't mention crew, doesn't mention any church or organization.

It really is all about God. And it's worded very uh simply and persuasively. Um and so people who know nothing about Christianity understand the site and and it helps them.

Uh so this is again for my own background but as you know online is comfortable. It feels safe. They're in control. No one is challenging them and so their defenses can come down and they can be honest.

It's the perfect environment for God to speak to someone. Uh here's what this person posted on her blog. This is for the article, Is there a God?

Um she said, "The funniest thing happened when I read the first paragraph of the article. I wanted to read the next. And when I did, I wanted to read the next and the next.

You should all look at this article." Something made me want to believe again. I mean, believe. Just reading the intro to the article gave me a newfound respect for Christian thought.

I'd been looking for a reason not to be disgusted by Christians I didn't know. Interesting comment, huh? I've taken another step closer. I read the article and saw God coming to me from a place outside myself.

That is revealing himself to me from the actions of others. The faith I had that he existed was suddenly renewed. So good. Uh and this was I met this guy in Jordan.

He said he went into an internet cafe to search for scholarships for his PhD and landed on our Arabic site. every Arab student and he said here I was a Muslim reading article after article and thinking this is true this is true.

I sent the site to my friends praying that God would speak to them and many became believers. And and he told me that over two years he saw four generations of believers where people that had come to Christ through his email, you know, they led others who led others who led others.

Wow. And I mean it's so cool to see because people share what has an impact in their life. So even if you talk to just one person online, you have no idea what God will do in that person's life to impact others.

Uh, so not all sites do this, but on ours, each article or video page has its own URL. So that means you can copy and paste it into a message or or just use their icons.

Yeah. Sharability. We talk about evergreen and the sharability of that. It's really smart to do the uh unique um URLs for that. Mhm. Mhm.

Um, everything on the site is worded to people who are yet to know God. Its goal is not to inform or educate, but to seek to give people persuasive reasons to begin a relationship with him.

Dig into that 30 seconds. Yeah. Well, not informed, but I've seen a lot of sites um where they give they give an accurate presentation of what's true.

Okay. Um but it's it's like reading an encyclopedia. It's just information and it's nothing that would necessarily move someone to action. So I said my background was advertising and so everything in the site is written in a persuasive copy format.

In writing you've got news reporting, you have um novels are written differently, education is different. This is persuasive writing. And so it means um you start with attention, build to interest, lead them to a decision, show them how to take action, and everything is designed that way because the goal is to help them begin a relationship with God, but also give them um reasons to do so. And we have a lot of scripture that's in the articles and in the videos.

Mhm. Um because I want I know the power of God to speak for himself. So good. Yeah. Uh so here's um every student is useful in helping people who are asking questions like these.

How do you know God is real? If there is a God, why is life so hard? Does God really answer prayer? If I were to have faith in God, what could I expect God to do for me?

And why should I believe in Jesus? I mean, we cover many more than that, but uh so on this, I just want to give you, you can look at these yourself.

I'm not going to read them all, but um Jeff, if you could just show some of the page, some of what we covered. Yep.

Uh I wanted to focus on this. This is a email series. It's seven parts. Comes every two days and it's written for skeptics, agnostics, people that aren't sure that God exists.

And when they fill out the form, the the only thing they have to fill out is their email address. And and this is key in that we don't ever we don't do things on the site for our benefit.

Um so I'm not trying to assemble an email list of people or get names or cities or any of that. This is for them.

So even after somebody has completed a series, I go through, we use Aweber as our sending company and after people have gone through email series, I will delete their email address because I really care about their privacy and we tell them if you sign up for this, this is the only thing you'll receive and you won't be put on a list or anything. So privacy has always been important to me. This is not a new thing.

We've always done it this way before GDPR came in. You know, Uganda, this person said, "I never thought I would understand about God and faith like you have made me.

I now have a reason to live today." And this is the kind of thing you can help people with, right? is yeah give them reason to live by knowing God.

Uh this person from Nigeria I was in I was a good performer but deep down I was breaking into pieces. Life was becoming harder and harder.

Countless sexual partners, bad company, lots and lots of lies. Sometimes I would just sit sit down alone and cry. My life was a mess.

You introduced God to me in a magnificent way. It has transformed my life. I breathed a fresh air, a breath of liberation and freedom.

I was finally born again. That's God thing you might hear from people, you know. Um, so here is how every student can help you in your conversations with people who are yet to know God.

uh how we talk to people through text message. It's really no different than how we talk to them in person. So, this carries over.

I'm going to give you some examples of me talking to somebody face to face, but I've also had the same kinds of conversations online.

Okay. Oh, sorry. My fault. There you go. Okay. Here is your full training. It's in one uh slide here. As you chat with people online, you can simply say, "I'm connected to a site that takes on the hard questions about life and God." Like, "How do you know God exists and why is life so hard?" Here, let me give you a link to it. Okay? It's that simple. All right? So, I'm going to give you examples of how this works.

First of all, when you do that, when you resource somebody, people appreciate that you're just resourcing them with something that can answer their questions.

They sense that you care about them. You're not trying to control them. You respect their ability to decide for themselves, and they're very grateful.

So, here's an example of a conversation. Uh I was in a fast food line at a on a university campus and it was a long line and um a student next to me started chatting with me.

We both happened to look up from our phones at the same time and so you know so then we started talking because it was too awkward not to.

Um so I asked him about his major and it was computer engineering you know. So, we talked about security and web browsers and all sorts of stuff.

And then I told him a little bit about every student.com. He said, "I'm agnostic, but my fiance is a Christian." I asked him, "If you saw sufficient evidence for God's existence, would you want to know God?" He said, "Yes." So, I pulled out my phone and I had him sign up for the spiritual adventure pack, which is that seven-part email series. And you find it um just look for the little hiker icon and you'll be able to find it.

Mhm. And so, this is what struck me the most about our conversation. It was only 10 minutes long maybe, but three different times during our conversation, Daniel grabbed my hand to shake it and told me how grateful he was that I would talk to him.

Wow. Um, and part of that is because he's got a fiance who's a Christian. This could make his life a whole lot easier if he became a Christian, you know.

Um, okay. another example of a real conversation that just as easily could have been online. Um, and let me just say, when you're equipped with this site, God's going to bring people your way.

And here's an example. I was in a hotel lobby. Standing next to me was this woman, and she asked, "Are you with our convention?" I said, "No, I'm with a site that takes on the hard questions about life and God, like, how do you know God exists and why is life so hard?" She said, "I'm an atheist, but I'm searching." I said, "You will love this website because it will give you reasons to begin a relationship with God and show you how you can start that relationship with him today."

And she had tears in her eyes when I handed her the card and she thanked me for it. Um, so Caroline's another one who signed up for this series for atheists.

Uh, the site does more than just speak to atheists, but it's useful that way. Uh, she said, "Although you don't know me, I feel like you've taken my hand and led me on a very special journey these last few weeks.

The information you provided answers many of my questions. You have led me from complete denial of God's existence to not just believing in him, but knowing that he is there.

The evidence you give was sufficient to convince this 33-year-old lifelong atheist and not an easy challenge. Wow. And Dominique was another, thank you so much for your website.

It's been so nice how much sense it makes. It helped me find Jesus, God, our Lord. I love that because she's so new. She's not quite sure how to address him.

Say it. Yeah. She's trying to figure out words. Yeah. She said, "Of course, as I am new to it, I used to be agnostic. I still have little doubt, but that doubt is fading away quickly. Your website has provided believable proof and such eye-opening material."

Um, so let's say you're talking to somebody online and you say something about what you personally know to be true about God. After that, like you might say, "You know, I'm sorry you're struggling with whatever they shared with you." And you could say, "You know, I've been in tough times before and I found that God gives me a peace that's beyond what the circumstances would call for."

Then after you say something about God, you can say, "I'm wondering if anyone has ever shared with you how you could know God like that." Okay, so the key point of this is you're not blaming them for being ignorant. You're kind of blaming somebody else that maybe they never shared with them how they could know God like this. Okay. So it's very a disarming kind of way to say it. Um, that makes them comfortable. So, "I'm wondering if anyone has ever shared with you how you could know God like that. Let me give you a link that explains how you can start a personal relationship with God."

All right. And the two I list here, one is an article that goes through the gospel and the other one's a video that goes through the gospel.

Sure. Um, so to help, you know, I've given you a couple examples of when I've been in conversations with people, but if you'd if you're willing to go through, this is free, free email series. And as you know by now, this is all you'll receive. You won't get anything else if you sign up for it. Um, but you, this is a site that I'm going to tell you about in a minute. It's a site for new believers or struggling believers. It's called startingwithgod.com. So, if you go to studywithgod.com/conversations, um there's a series you can sign up for that will give you further motivation and coaching on how to interact with non-believers when you're online.

That's beautiful. Let me I want to pause here for a second. I love, I love your the stories you just rolled through. Now, all of them were physical interactions and you're working primarily with digital here, or at least we are working with digital. What I love about what you're doing is even when you're standing next to the college student in line to get whatever, um, you are personally interacting with that person.

Um, like this is not a, you know, if I'm going to parallel it in the college, university physical realm, you didn't print a thousand flyers and wallpaper every light post on campus. You're having a personal interaction with someone. You know, so often in digital we think about like if I'm paralleling that to digital, oh my gosh, let me just create a social media graphic and I'll post it on my feed and that'll get hundreds of people to click over to whatever the URL is I'm trying to drive them to. And some people will go, but that's a shallower response and it doesn't convert, so to speak, marketing term, as much as it is a personal interaction, sharing that DM, starting that conversation with someone digitally, going a little further in building that relationship. You know, we talk about BLESS in using this in your sharing your Jesus story segment of BLESS as a way to start a conversation with someone even shared experiences. "Watch this video and let's talk about it" in, um, you know, remotely async or let's jump on a Discord call or a Google Meet or Zoom or whatever to interact. Like there's ways to not just give this resource and then it's gone. Like in your situation, um, you know, you're telling stories of people you meet and then they're they're they're gone.

Yeah. I won't see them again. Right. In in our in a lot of our situations that may be true, but there's also an opportunity to relationally use this as a stepping stone to further the conversation along. And I think that's where I look at like some of this conversations starters and conversations God starts where you you're still part of the play even after you release them to the website.

That's right. And um as conversations happen, there's lots of um pages that you could share a link and say, "Take a look at this and then let's talk." Yeah.

You know, I love that. All right, let's keep going. So, this is where you would find it that there's icons on startingwithgod.com and it's it's this one's called Conversations God Starts. And this series is because I really believe when you're equipped, God will bring people your way. One second. There you go. Yep. Um, both every.com and startedwithgod have got great search boxes, way better than Google's. They're really good and you can easily find anything you need. So the search, this is where they're located, whether you're on laptop or mobile.

Um, so you're also going to find believers when you're interacting online and you can help them also. Startingwithgod.com is the site we built for new believers or struggling believers, either one. Uh there's a free email series for new believers. You know, there's a whole bunch of series and they go in a particular order, but um I thought the best way to share with you what they are was through a story um that I'll share a little bit later.

U Morgan said, and many of you might relate to this. She said, "As a teenager, I feel like there's all this focus on getting saved and following the thousands of rules, but I was never given any guidance after accepting Christ." For months, I just went through the motions. One night, after once again hopelessly trying to understand, I came across this. Thank you. I would never be where I am in my relationship today if God hadn't led me to this.

Wow. Um I'm g I'm wondering for time if I had to skip a couple of these. Sure. Go ahead. Let me skip a couple of these.

But there are people just saying how with the impact this site has had on their lives as new believers. Okay. So let me tell you this story in closing.

This guy, his name's Yared. Not really, but his name is Yard. I wanted to protect him. He grew up Muslim in northern Ethiopia and he received Christ on everystudent.com and then he went to startingwithgod.com and signed up for the first follow-up series called the Spiritual Starter Kit.

Um, and in this series, it showed him how he could be sure Jesus is in his life, that God drew him, um, what God's unconditional love is so different from conditional love, why God won't leave you, what if you sin, does God forgive you still, how to find a church, and Christians.

Okay, so that's what's in that first series. Mhm. And then at the end of it, there is an invitation to sign up for another series, but a person has to sign up again.

Um, and this series is called Skip the Stress, and it's all about living under God's grace, not feeling like you have to perform for God or be the perfect Christian.

Um, so he signed up for it and then he said, "Thank you very much. God bless you forever. Please do not stop teaching me. I now understand the concept of faith." So then at the end of that series, there's one that takes someone through the Gospel of John so they can actually know more about Jesus and learn how to notice what scripture is saying.

He signed up for it and then he wrote me, "God bless you. I am very happy. Thanks to God for being with you on this very amazing study. I got a compass to see Jesus in the Bible and wisdom for my journey. Each part is removing blindness from my life. Thank you."

So then there's one more series um on how to talk about God with other people and he signed up for it and then he wrote me this.

"My eyes are opened now through your lessons. I started to teach your lesson on WhatsApp to all new believers." Wow. And I thought, what new believers?

He said, "All glory belongs to God. Thank you. Go extra with Jesus." So I asked him about these new believers and he said, "This website everystudent.com is my journey. It is satisfying their questions and doubts. It is strength for the believer's faith and a way for non-believers to come to Jesus." Okay. So I asked him more and he said this study and websites and he's referring to both startingwithgod.com and everystudent.com these websites continue to bless many lives through me. I am reaching Muslims on WhatsApp. I tell you the truth, more than 700 people have been blessed through this and now new believers around 33 and their numbers are increasing daily.

Wow. So I didn't know a lot about it about WhatsApp at the time. So I asked if he would invite me into the group and I took this screenshot and then whited out parts and what he was doing was sharing what he was learning on everystudent.com and on startingwithgod.com and I started looking up the area codes you know there was 966 and 968 and stuff and realized he was reaching people all across the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Sudan, Egypt, UAE, Libya. And I asked him, "Where did you get the idea to do this?" And he said, "You told me to." And how to talk about God. He said, "Share this in your social media." So that's what I'm doing. That's what he's doing. I love that. So, you know, this is you don't you don't even have to train people once they see what the two sites are offering. They know how to share it with somebody else. So that's the story of Yard. So um on the next slide I'm giving you uh here are the two sites and then uh I'm giving you my email address on the next slide. If you have any questions, please feel free to email me. Marilyn, that was so cool. I'll leave I'll leave that slide up for a second.

Um actually, I'll come back to it. I do have one question. So, here are I've got more than one question, but here are the four things that were on um started start starting conversations. Um how long are these four? So, um he went through all four of these email series like the entire gospel of John, he learned salvation, spiritual starter kit, like what was the process? How how many months how many years of learning are we talking about here? What what does this actually look like? You mean to write these and to for him to read them?

Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, um, Gospel John was 36 emails long. Okay. And they come every three or four days. So that, you know, three months, three or four months on that.

Yeah. These are easily over six months. And then to be honest, I started another ongoing series called you'll find it on startingwithgod.com called the Findables.

Yeah. And you're welcome to join that group. Also, there's 6,000 findables around the world that I write to every 10 days. And to be a findable, I ask uh I I tell people, I'm going to ask you to take faith steps and try some things. You're not obligated, you know, but I just want the freedom to ask them to try things. And so the findables are people who want to help make Jesus findable to millions of other people.

And uh you're you're welcome to sign up for any of the series. I I love that. We'll we'll we'll put the links in in the uh the YouTube descriptions and and we'll we'll put this out there.

But I I love the idea uh that uh you said Yared uh here has uh you basically six months of training and is um is owning what he's learning and is then distributing it out. You know, you were referencing generations earlier. He's he's naturally moving to WhatsApp uh and and getting connected with people across in his context the Middle East.

In his and his relationally engaging these people like this is that this is an incredible story of, um, sorry, Planning Center just called me. I have no idea why Planning Center is calling me. Anyway, um, I don't even use Planning Center, but I just I love this story of how somebody is owning the teaching and moving forward.

What? All right. So one other question because also this is one of the best examples of evergreen content I've seen. Yes. Where you're creating stuff once, it goes on a server, you create a mail list, it goes into a platform and over years it multiplies up and to the right in its impact. Like some of the stats and stories on this are incredible. The sites that are in other languages.

So starting with God is in 30 languages and in Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, a whole bunch, French, a whole bunch of languages. They've taken at least two or three of the email series and they've created it. They translated it. They changed anything that I shared that was personal about me. They made it true about them for the leader of that language site.

And so you can have an impact in all sorts of people's lives who don't even speak English. Yeah. I the scalability of what you're doing is incredible. The content now you said you didn't pay for a translation. Volunteer acts of love. Love that. Actual writing the content. Have you paid for any of like the author's writing?

No. Um, and so you're I mean you're hosting HTML files on a server and your YouTube is your video source, I would assume. Uh, that's YouTube's where you put all your videos. Yes. And the two videos that go through the whole gospel, one is about, is strictly about how to know God personally. The other one is um what God offers you in difficult situations. And uh both of those videos were created by a Findable who did them for free.

Wow. So you connected with people, they shared ideas, and you experimented with it, you tried it, you learned from them, and then they as an act of service, as an act of love, they own the vision of it. They're replicating it out. Like this is beautiful. And uh like I don't mean to be rude, but this is very cheap. Like there's not a lot of money in your model here. Yet we're seeing 1.4 million people globally uh through 50 languages accepting Jesus in 2024. Like this is uh when you told me this I was like this is unbelievable. And when I'm hearing it a second time I'm like my gosh it the model worked.

Well let me add to since we're talking numbers and cost. We're seeing people come to the site for less than three cents a person. Uh and we're seeing people indicate that they've received Christ for under two dollars a person. Okay. So cost per click is three cents, less than three, and the actual conversion to get to, is the conversion accepting Jesus like filling out that form. So to get to that point is less than two dollars. Wow. That's unbelievable. Um, and it's and it's mostly, you said, in the 1040 window, kind of in that Middle East, uh, in the hot zone area where so much of this is needed. This is beautiful. So I can tell you I'm looking at chat and Steve Reed uh is blowing up right now cuz he has been trying to figure out what to do and I know he was inspired by some of what you've said today. I'm just curious like somebody that's starting out is wanting to do something like this, what advice, what counsel, what would you give them as a directive or what's a lesson that you learned that oh my gosh, it was so hard and you want to save somebody from that?

Wow, that's a big question. Um, first of all, you know, I've been working on this for a long time and so it takes a lot of years to produce something like this. Um, I think to be really honest, God has simply brought people my way at the right time. Uh, he's brought the opportunities. I mean, God really has built this and had his hand on it.

But I will say there's a lot of things about Google that I have learned in Google advertising. And one is do not let Google choose websites where you show your ads because it's wasted money. There's too many fraudulent sites out there. Search has also declined as you know with AI. And so the most successful thing I've done the last half a year is building new Google ad campaigns where I choose the sites and I use ChatGPT to help me find reputable sites of news and sports and lifestyle kinds of sites in other languages. And then I've personally gone in and looked at every one of the sites to determine if, I mean as a double check. Yeah. Plus we have a click fraud company we hire just to be because I don't, I don't want, I have to know these are all real. If I'm going to spend my time on it or ask anybody to give financially to it, I need to know they're all real. Yeah.

So Facebook has been useful also. Yeah. You know, Steve, uh Steve, let me reshape what you heard. Uh Google ads are not bad. Um Google ads is a tool. Uh but you have to direct it well. Um and you tell Google what you want as opposed to Google using the algorithm uh to tell you what it thinks you want. That's that would be uh the lesson and the takeaway on this. Yeah, Google's been great for us. I mean, I've loved being able to reach people around the world. So yeah, I'm not, but it was funny in this call, in this literally while I was on this stream with you, uh Jesse, who's doing my uh some of the Google work for the church digital, is like, "Hey, I want you to look at these campaigns before we roll it out." So I mean, we use it as well in some context.

Oh, beautiful. I would love that. Um, let me ask um how do you, this the biggest problem we have is fundraising uh as a general, not just the church digital but digital missionaries. Uh a lot of bivocational um and you have a relationship with Cru and so I know fundraising is a big part of what you guys do anyway as missionaries through Cru but how do you like how do you fundraise? Is there a secret or a tip maybe you could share on what that looks like for you personally or organizationally?

Uh the results that we're seeing are pretty uh speak for themselves. Yeah. Yeah. I mean yeah I mean that's significant. 1.5, 1.4, whatever it was million in 24 is significant. And so that does deem, man, there's a lot of opportunity to invest in that and all those clicks, you know, it's just just to be honest, it's just going to keep going up and to the right. Like you, we talk about the flywheel and you were patient enough in the early years to stick to the guns to allow the flywheel to multiply. And now you're in the next couple years, you're just going to be living on that flywheel. Especially if your ads kick in and gasoline on the flame. Man, I believe you're going to see some explosion on that.

After somebody accepts Christ, what do you do? Is there a followup? Is there an email? Is there a community? Oh yeah. Well, when somebody clicks on that link on every.com that says, "I just asked Jesus into my life," if they land on a hidden page that uh invites them to go to startingwithgod.com. So they have to, they have to go there. They have to actually go to the effort. Um we don't automatically send them there. And that's another way for me to see if these are real. So what I have seen is there's an absolute parallel between people that receive Christ and people that go to starting with God when that goes up. I mean it's just uh it's a confirmation to me uh a little bit. But yes, they, we have an email uh page and someone personally replies to them in any of our language sites. We don't use bots and as long as I'm directing it, we will never use bots. It will be an individual who prays about how to answer the person and care about the person and give them a good answer.

Yeah, it was funny in Discord the other day, we had, we do use bots. We use people too, but we use bots and people simultaneously. And uh we had a non-friendly bot person join Discord and he was kind of upset at the bot. So I totally get that. Yeah, I love throw rocks at it. It's just a personal, it's not like it cares. It doesn't know. But there's, it's fun.

Um, oh my gosh. So good. I would love uh to have more conversations with you. I'm intrigued about what happens afterwards. Uh like there's a really strong uh opportunity maybe to introduce some digital churches uh in the space. People that aren't in a position because of persecution or whatever to get connected into a digital environment or, you know, create a WhatsApp community similar to what um the individual was that people could join yard. Yeah. Yard uh could join in uh and um in dialogue with like I just I'm intrigued because you've really got that, you know we talk about connect, community, equip, mobilize. You've really got that connection well and my gut is if there was a community uh peer community where people could bake on it together and um and dialogue great, you know I I bet you would see you know even more conversions at the community level through that and so you know you may after I think after this week you may get an email right now it's all about my daughter's dance recital like I'm not going to kid that it's that's tonight and so that's like number one priority in my life right now is I got to be sitting at a high school auditorium in about two hours, three hours. But after that, I do want to have a conversation with you about this. So check for an email on that.

Uh but hey, this has been beautiful. As we're wrapping up here um in any closing thoughts? No, I'm happy to answer any email that someone sends me if there's uh questions you have or other ways I could help. I mean, I can't really review everybody's Google ad campaign. That was only today. That's awesome. I get to do a couple. My uh my friend Jesse's got a guy that that I pay to do this. And so, uh you know, uh I don't think she can handle doing all that for free. But, um it has been an absolute pleasure. Marilyn, thank you for jumping on the stream. Uh for if any questions on Marilyn uh it's on the screen. Marilyn Adamson, everystudent.com is her information there. And uh for that we're going to land a plane. Uh hope you enjoyed the stream uh as we're digging into uh equipping partners and empowering tools. Marilyn, thank you uh for today. Uh next week I have no idea what's coming up. And then we've got the um uh the stream Wednesday with uh Alan Hirs. I you know, I'm normally an organized person and I'm not going to lie. The past two to three weeks have been pandemonium. Like I have no idea what was going on and and uh I just I want to thank Marilyn. Uh she sent me like all of her notes and stuff Friday and I didn't actually reply until like thirty minutes before the stream started and she's like, "Are we doing this today?" I it's just it's been a mess in the head lately. But Marilyn, thank you for the time. I appreciate it. Check out every student uh there and we'll have all the links in the show notes. But for Marilyn, this is Jeff with the Church Digital. Thanks for hanging out today and we'll see you next time on the show. Y'all have a good one.