EP037: Joe Radosevich & “Small Church” Church Online

Episode 37 of the Church Digital Podcast. We're taking a different approach. We're gonna look at things on the small. Normally when we talk about small, we're talking about micro locations, small groups, things like that that are happening in church online. But honestly, I was called out recently by our guest on Facebook for having a different view with church online.

You see, historically I, Jeff, I've been working with multi-site churches that are mega church, even giga church level. And so just transparently, my view of church and even church online is more of this mega, giga church level. It's a much larger church. Here's a fascinating stat that I've just discovered here recently: eighty percent of churches in America today are under two hundred in attendance any given Sunday. Well, I've been focusing, and I'm transparent here, I admit this. Well, I've been focusing on the big church. Come to find out that the majority of churches that are out there aren't big. The majority of the people that are attending aren't big. They're attending the small. And there's this whole other level that we should be reaching at the small church and helping smaller churches are discovering how smaller churches are utilizing technology, how are they utilizing church online? And to this point, I bring in our guest for today, Joe Raditz of Itch, who is a pastor of a church plant in Belgium, Wisconsin. Belgium Community Church is a small church plant up there. And Joe's got a big heart to reach the people in his neighborhoods. He's got a big heart to impact people with the gospel and create disciple makers who are capable of creating other disciples. And it was a pleasure to have this conversation with him today as we dove into this idea of small church, church online.

So for this conversation, I'm bringing in Joe Bereta Savitch, obviously church planter and lead pastor there at Belgium Community Church. I'm bringing in Tom Pounder, who of course, any time Tom comes into the show from YM Sidekick Podcasts and Digital Boot Camp and all the things that he's doing, man, it's always a pleasure just to hang out with him. While bringing in Ray, the Armas. Ray is a common guest host here at the Church Digital and of course online pastor at Christ Fellowship in Miami. And of course myself, Jeff, with the Church Digital, to have this conversation on small church, church online.

Hey, everybody, here you go. This church was actually started twenty-five years ago, but long story short, after a period of hell, it declined to do so. They closed their doors. So they closed the door strategically for a year and a half while looking for a pastor. The denomination chipped in money to renovate the building. And so basically, it's more like a church plant that has a building. There's some history, but basically we have a new name. It's a new church. And it's in a community that's really surrounded by communities without churches, without gospel evangelical churches. Even mainline and Catholic churches are closing up in this area. So there's half a million people within twenty-five miles of us, but they're made up in small towns and their little towns where oftentimes there's not, there's no church at all, or there's no church that's preaching the gospel. And so anyway, so we're kind of coming out of the church plant circle, looking at a town, looking at a series of communities, and saying, how do we reach these people? And quite honestly, the front door of our church is online. We know that. We know everybody has a mobile device. They've got computers and TVs and smart stuff all over the place. How do we use these things to get our front door as closely as we can there, as close to people as we can get it, so that's kind of where we come at the church online livestream kind of conversation is using it to disciple the people that we have and using it to reach people that are in our community and wouldn't be reached in any other way.

Let me ask this question, Joe. How long have you been there? You're relatively new at the church Belgium Community. Where so I moved up here June of 2017, so two and a half years. The church we started a little over a year and a half ago. So the first six months was a helter-skelter renovated building, gather a core team, launched a church. Yeah, so two and a half years, and I'm realizing that was a pretty breakneck pace for the first two and a half. So did you move there for this specific church, or a de Guise a serious kind of backstory? So you moved up to Belgium, Wisconsin with visions of rebirthing kind of this existing church area?

If I had known it was a church plant, I would have run. I thought it was a church revitalization. That's what I thought it was. You know, had what a failed church plant in Illinois. The Lord used it to really teach me and grow me, prepare me for some things. But if I had known this was a church plant, I would have run away. But I'm actually glad I didn't because I really found a lot of my gifts in the middle of all this. So anyway, so I this was a position that I thought was a revitalization. And so we moved up here and said, okay, and I really wanted to go north because I wanted to go to a place where we're not just another flavor of church, which I realize that's even changing in the South a lot. Churches are closing super fast and people are not hearing the gospel. But I want them to go to a place where people go, I've never heard this before. This is really good news. And really, that's what I found here in Wisconsin. I've never been to Wisconsin until I interviewed for this position. But to hear people go, I've never heard this in my life. What are you talking about? And for the people in our church to get division for that and go, yeah, there are people in our lives that thought Jesus Christ was just a swear word. They didn't realize he was actually a person. And that we have a message and that there's good news. Wow, for me, that's super exciting to be able to be in a place. I call it be a big fish in a small pond in the sense that it's not just, hey, we've got a better, got a way better worship band, a better preacher, a better something. It's a we have something that you've never heard before and you need it. This is good news for you.

I'm not much on numbers, and if you listen to the podcast, like we make fun of numbers on a regular basis. But I want to put a number on this to help define to the audience that the scope of who you are and kind of where you are in your ministry journey. Well, like, what type of, what's your average attendance on a Sunday? Like, what does this actually look like?

Well, like, what type of, what's your average attendance on a Sunday? Like, what does this actually look like?

So we had fifty-five on Sunday. I think average is more like sixty. Okay, that was, that's probably our current average. What's interesting, and this is a stat that I just discovered, somebody told me maybe a week ago, eighty percent of churches today are under two hundred attenders on average. And for me, that is, that's an area that I've just transparently been in, and I've said it before. Like, I wasn't as aware of these small churches. Probably I should have. And working with Ray and some others like the Church Digital, we're going to start to turn the corner and work more towards not only a mega church, not only a multi-site church, but also start to create some resources towards the smaller church to help them because the majority of churches by far, the majority of the churches are more like you, Joe, and in the, you know, two hundred and under range, then the big gigas and the omegas that are out there.

Yeah, so several years ago, I read something by Seth Godin where he was saying, what's the best way? And I don't even know what his point was, but he said, what's the best way to reduce car fuel consumption? And he said, is it to increase like the miles per gallon that the top end cars go to, so that the cars they go fifty miles per hour? Or I'm sorry, they go fifty miles per gallon and said get sixty-five or seventy-five? Or is it to take those trucks that get seventeen and increase those by four? And he said you can make a bigger difference on gas emissions by just increasing the low end a little bit, much more than taking the cars that get fifty miles per gallon and increasing those. He was saying you can make a bigger difference on that low end. And when we look at the church landscape and there's three hundred thousand churches of the United States, thirteen hundred of them are over two thousand. Let's say ten thousand of them are over a thousand people. Then if you just increase those three hundred thousand other churches by ten percent, fifteen percent, you would see a massive difference in the Christian landscape across the country just by empowering those smaller churches to reach ten percent more than they're doing, or for some of them, reaching anybody. But anyway, so anyway, I just think of that analogy, that reaching, like really equipping smaller churches, a church like ours, it'll be a lot easier for us to double in size than it would be for one of you guys to double in size, right? The kinds of things you guys talk about help me. A time. And so we've got people to follow along and say, hey, we've been following you guys online for months and we finally decided to come in the door. And then we get the chance to disciple them and walk with them and equip them to begin reaching the people in their circles. That's powerful.

So what digital tools are you guys leveraging right now at a church your size? There's a bunch. So this week we're really getting ready for Christmas. We're doing some community Christmas of being involved in other community events for Christmas. We use our website. We use Facebook. We use Instagram. We use a livestream. We use digital invites. We use a mailing list of every guest that's coming through our church. And then we really build a series package like a larger church would do and use that to invite everybody in our community. So we use Facebook ads. Another camp of what we're using right now is creating a, for us, we have that good enough designers. We've got really high-end designers who attend our church, and that's part of their day job is as a graphic designer. But for us, they basically see this as a ministry tool. So they create motion graphics as both a sermon series bumper but also as a Facebook invite for our community. Nobody does anything custom for anybody in our community. And so when we like reach out with our stories within, we reach out with the same kind of tools that they would see online for any other kind of company. People in the community kind of sit up and go, hey, this might be worth paying attention to. So they're kind of leveraging all of those tools to make sure that our livestream is a front door for people to connect with us, that we can do Facebook invites or our people in our community.

Some of the stuff that I kind of learned from you guys is I think you guys have had discussions about front door, side door, and only door. Only doors not really part of our strategy just because we don't have the resources or really the need. We would rather say, hey, let's let larger churches like Christ Fellowship and Elevation and Life Church. Let's let them reach the people that the only door they'll ever have is online. But can we use video of either all or part of our service so people can kind of get a flavor of what it would be like to come to our church before coming? And we're kind of, we're part of the discussion I started with you guys was to be figuring out what can we do better because this has been helpful to us, but what can we do to make it even better? Because it's been a front door for so many, whether it's guests that kind of come in and then just kind of come in once every six months or people that are kind of lurking and kind of saying, is this place for real? Is this a place that I want to go to? We also take those video and then we've turned them into video clips. The part of the idea for us is since I work hard on my sermon anyway, can we use that the rest of the week to be a blessing and to be an encouragement, not just to go slap it up on YouTube and it's full, you know, length, but to go, is there like thirty?

Seconds or a minute and a half that could be really encouraging for somebody that needs to hear that God's not done with them. And so we kind of go through and take all of the, you know, Adobe Creative Cloud to take motion graphics and to take video clips and to make graphic and podcasts and do all of those things. And so all of those things helped us try to disciple during the week and connect people to our church so that they can grow as disciples and then be a part of the mission of reaching this community.

Because really what we're after is, can we reach and disciple people to reach the other people that will never come our doors? Not just to, hey, let's add 15 people, let's add 20 people. Let's try to be 120 or 240. Our vision really is every block, every community, every people. Can we get to the point where we have a family in our church discipled and engaged in the mission of everybody else on their block? We can't fit all of them in our building, so how do we use digital tools and the in-person, you know, relationships that we have to equip them to reach everybody else?

So okay, how are you now? How are you managing some of those tools like the livestream and the podcast? Is that volunteer-driven or are you the person behind the scenes making a lot of that happen? How's that working for you? It's balling. It's mostly volunteer-driven. I spend some of my week on some of those things because I'm like, hey, if I'm gonna spend that much time preparing a sermon, I might as well make sure it's in a good form for a video clip or a podcast. So something that I've learned myself, but it's mostly volunteer-driven. So like I said, we've got some really, really capable volunteers who are like, wait, God can use my gifts for the kingdom. Let's do it. And so they just take things far beyond what I could ever imagine.

That's awesome. And then, you know, not that we're just kind of plugging a particular tool, but what kind of tools are you guys using for that so that other churches can learn on what kind of livestream tools are you using? What are you guys using for podcasting, et cetera?

So it's funny because this week I found out there is a church Christ 15 miles away that's spending a hundred thousand dollars upgrading their cameras, and we had spent less than a thousand dollars, but our volunteers are good enough that our quality is higher than a hundred thousand dollar camera system. But the big thing, so we use a, I don't even know the name of it, it's a small Canon HD camera that we said, hey, this is going to probably work. It's gonna give us enough of a zoom to work. But most of it is really built around Adobe Creative Cloud, which because of the nonprofit discount, I'm like, it's absolutely worth it too because it's just so much easier and the volunteers can do it. But we've also used things like Audacity, free music editing tool for podcast, that's super helpful.

Because what I find is in this community where people largely have a family religious background, even if they don't practice, they would never come in the door of our church as a first step because that would be to reject their family. And so they will actually download our podcast every week and listen. But they haven't taken that step ultimately to follow Jesus. They're going to have to reject their family to follow him. But at this point, I'm like, a well-edited sermon podcast, which this may be something helpful to small churches, is we do them in series. But then we package the series both with our graphics with an intro and an outro for every sermon so that it feels like I could binge-listen to this series. We called it "Adorn," you know, lives that make the gospel attractive. It was a look at the book of Titus. But it's like, oh, I could listen to five sermons in this series, or "Failure is Not Final." I could listen to four sermons from that series. And you get a music intro.

A couple of other tools that we use that I love is SoundStripe. It's a music subscription. I think it costs about a hundred and thirty dollars per year, but it gives you a license to use custom music in video projects, podcasts, and things like that. And that really ups the level of our production. Or like I said, invites, Facebook ads, video sermon bumpers, our livestream. We're trying something new. I was meeting with my volunteer after talking with you guys to say, hey, what could we do that would improve our livestream? And we said, you know what, an introduction from somebody in our church just doing a video to say, hey, we're so glad you're here. This is a series that we're in right now. Run the sermon bumper that we've already made, and then goes into the service. And then leave that helps kind of give somebody a connection point of, oh, there's some intention to this. And at the end, they ask me to reach out and give their contact info.

I love what you're doing here, Joe, in the sense of you're making it very personable. And again, I think there's a lot of churches, my church included, we all share our sermons online on podcast. We use actually SermonNet, so I'm not the brains behind that, but I'll just share that if anybody wants to know that. But we just share our sermons. The fact that you're doing an intro and an exit to that really makes it personable, and someone can really kind of maybe identify with that a little bit more. Same thing with your livestream. You know, having someone welcome everyone and greet everyone. We stream, aren't we livestream our church services? But you know, unless I'm, you know, because I do a lot of the mid-service stuff and the end announcements, unless I'm directly talking to the people online from stage, which is kind of weird because we've got people in our campus right there, but you know, we're I'm talking to the people in the state in the auditorium and also the people online. But I like how you're making it very personable, and I think that that draws a connection. So there may be when they do come in through the front door, they can maybe see that person and say, oh yeah, I saw you online. And they do say that. And so that's kind of my help for having other people in the church get featured. But they will say, oh, we know you because we've seen you on your website and we've watched the videos. Like, we know you, Joe, even though I, you know, I've never met them before. And so we actually got the idea for the intro and outro and stuff from stuff that I saw you do, Tom. Is I was like, there's more in there livestream, and it's super helpful. So how can we make our livestream not just a video of our service? Hey, just watch a video of the service. But instead, hey, please connect with us. Like, let's make this personal. Let's make this intentional.

The other thing that may be helpful to other small churches and is to get to think through all of the stuff that you guys talked about. So you guys interviewed leaders who talked about pop-up churches and some other things to begin to think through all of those things through the lens of, how am I actually blessing and equipping people right where they're at right now? So that instead of it in the church world, we can easily be, hey, look at me, come here, come and do this. We try. I've tried to tell our people regularly, like, let's maybe once per week invite somebody to something. Let's instead try to figure out how do we bless them and encourage them right where they're at right now? Let's look the livestream be a current blessing, not the livestream as an invitation to some kind of youth event or some kind of other event. Use every digital tool to say you can actually hear about Jesus today. You don't have to wait to hear about Jesus on Sunday. Your marriage can be benefited today, not later down the road.

So are you purposefully driving toward the next step for the folks watching the livestream as well? Encouraging not just people in the room but the people on the livestream and saying, hey, this next step is for you to like, are you directing that as well at them as well?

That's what we talked about this week where we said, hey, how do we, there already you know, connecting and watching the livestream, we've got faces, we're trying, we've got fairly good production quality at this point. How do we use that to not just drop the ball and say, well, hopefully, hopefully we see you again next week, but to say, hey, can you connect with us? Can you give us your contact info so we can reach out if we can pray for you? Can you let us know? The answer is right. We're trying to head in that direction.

One of the things that we've done at CF and Jeff as part of this too is we've created a standardized URL that leads to a form. It's basically our online connection card that we leverage both in our on-demand services and also at the end of every livestream where, hey, if you want to connect with us, go to CF Miami dot org slash online or slash connect. For us, it's been online. And it drives towards that connection card. I even got it as a pop-up as soon as I hit that site. Boom, it's in their face. And it gives them the same options that they have with a physical card in our context as well, just to drive towards that next step of, hey, we want to connect with you. Or in some cases, hey, you know, if you want to, you know, if you prayed a prayer to receive Christ, you know, and you want to take that next step in baptism, we want to connect with you. All that stuff is there so that it gives them an option to connect with us. And then from there, we've got to do the follow-up. We've got to do the real-time pastoring of exactly like what you guys do when you receive data. When data comes into your context live at church, that it drives towards that next step of helping them get connected. And that's worked out well for us.

That makes sense. And that's an easy thing to do. Any so anybody who's listening, listen, is in a small church. I recommend Squarespace for a number of reasons, but one of which is the thing that Rages talked about is something that you can easily do. We do that for Easter series. We do that for any big series that we do. We can make a landing page that gives contact, yeah, ability like that. And so yeah, that idea Ray just had is easy to work on, especially at a small church. Squarespace means you can do that as many times as you want.

Yeah, exactly. And I think having one standardized URL that you're leveraging the entire time, this way, you know, no matter what series you're in, the URL stays the same. So you know, in our context, for CF Miami dot org slash online, it's just been that communicated over and over and over again. And it's been like a driver so that no matter what episode they're listening to as they're binging it, it's the same thing over and over again in their ear. I got a connect. I got a connect. I got a connect. And I know where to go.

The good thing that cool, that's a good tip. What is the URL with you guys? Is it CF Miami that works? Let's connect it slash online. We used to do slash connect, and actually slash connect actually drives back to online because I was like, alright, so for all of our former episodes, I've got to make sure that we've got it like all working together. And it works great. And it's actually helped increase the amount of engagement that we get online. Like, we get more small groups. Honest, we're getting more. We're getting more engagement in terms of people wanting to connect. More and then for us, we're even taking further next steps of treating them like a first-time guest like we would live. And so in a lot of cases, I'm even sending them, you know, like our first-time guest gift is possible. You know, like if they give us the data, if they engage with us, also it will in our context, we do a mug for like a first-time guest. But we've also leveraged free content like a song download from our worship team, you know, or or maybe Joe, if you've got something that you, hey, here's like an extra.

Bonus sermon from me that you want, that you can get it anywhere else. That stuff that we've been toying around with it for to give extra added incentive. And that idea, that idea kind of sparked from, you know, kind of the old days when we would listen to, you know, people on the radio, messages on the radio, and say, "Hey, if you connect with us, we'll send you a book." I was like, "Well, they might not want a book, but they might want extra bonus content for free." And that's stuff that we got. Let's just leverage it in Genesis.

Yeah, that's a really good idea. I've toyed with that, a kind of an idea just surrounding our community being the hub for our community, like things to do or something. But that would actually be pretty easy to figure out because, you know, in churches we come up with material all the time for all sorts of different purposes. And it would be easy to package a PDF of something.

Absolutely. Yeah, if you could give them like a quick download, like, "Hey, here's my ebook." I love that. We've toyed with that. I think we actually did some of that back, back in the day. With, I mean, in the, so it's so easier to do this now. We're, but we had a back in the day we had a, like a, I want to say she was a ninety-year-old lady who would literally type out the message. The manuscript messages of it. Would you move her name? Ray, what was her name? She, a man, na, na, we were, Emmy. Literally was this ninety-year-old lady who lived in, I want to say, Oklahoma City. And she would watch the messages online. She would, doubt, she would like recorded on a cassette player. And she had one of those like transcriber machines where she'd type it. And then like use the foot pedals to pause the audio tape and literally just type this thing out. And we started giving it away as books like at the front desk. And then ended up turning it into like PDFs that we would give away as well. And that was, that was well-received for a season.

You can go to Temi.com, T-E-M-I.com, and it's, it's what I used to manuscript out my podcast. It's essentially like ten cents a minute to get it typed out. So if you're preaching a twenty-minute message, it's two bucks. That the way, yes, huge win. And it's like eighty-five, ninety percent accurate. The majority of it's, you know, I pay somebody like fifteen dollars to go in and clean it up. But it's, it's very good. Temi.com. And so, but once you get that text and you can turn into PDFs and ebooks and whatever you want to put on a webpage, the reason I put it on all my blogs is SEO value is huge. And so a lot of these blogs that I've done, people are searching for, and it generates a lot of traffic to the website basically because I taught, did a podcast on it and I use the word a bunch. And then I turn that into a manuscript that Google could pick up. So that would actually be super helpful to that, uh, to making your series like bin jabal. Because if you had on your sermon page, a, you had both the audio, video, and the transcript, and maybe some study guide questions, that could be super useful to people down the road because then they have every kind of format that they want for that. You can use it. Somebody could use it as a small group curriculum. That would be super helpful to put in a place like on your podcast, but on your sermon page instead of just having audio, you could put all of those things. Make it visible. For me, one of the things that that I kind of look at when I look at some of these online small churches better that are doing this, honestly, and enjoy, like, I've not seen your stuff, so I don't want to be like labeling here. But it's, it's low quality video. And I'm a video guy. And there's, there's a high level of forgiveness on video. But a lot of times smaller churches struggle to, to pull something off live that, honestly, I don't know that has to be live. Like, there's ways that you can simulate it or there's ways that you can fake the liveness or pre-record something in an easier format that doesn't necessarily have the audience in the room, audio, like, or the, the wide shot that that's further away. Like, so if you're not, like, if you're not wanting to do worship in the broadcast, you know, one of the things that I thought, I've talked with, with pastors in the past on, Joe, and I'm just curious, how long's your message typically? Between twenty and twenty-eight minutes.

Well, that's actually on the short side. I honestly, I'm just going to be transparent. I don't know that I've met a pastor who's preached a twenty-minute message so well done. The majority of the pastors, right? Yeah, the majority of pastors I talk to, you know, thing that forty range. My church that I, that I attend, Christ Journey, Bill preaches about thirty to thirty-five. But previously it was forty to fifty. And so, you know, I would encourage a lot of times to preach a shorter message online, you know, maybe it was like the opening and the point one and point three in the closing. You cut out point two. Or sometimes some of the longer stories or illustrations that can kind of get cut to, to make it more, uh, easier to digest for an online, especially if you're trying to reach that front door person, that visitor, that person's probably in. If you're a longer sermon, that's the person's probably not going to hang around for a forty-minute broadcast. But if you could preach a smaller sermon on a Thursday, on a Friday, on a Saturday, just even considered at a rough draft, a trial run on the message, preach it, and then you can bookend creative video for like front door people around it. Maybe it's a two-minute welcome that shows, you know, the campus, your church, and how to check in kids, or, you know, something else that that's more designed to help people get connected to your church from that front door status. You can record all this stuff before the Sunday morning service and even in a, a much more creative, welcoming environment than like the worship center would be. The camera could be much closer to get your detail of it. And then render that video down. There are services like Restream.io that is where you can upload the to the cloud. And you can use Restream to actually schedule the playback of these, of that video file. Christ Fellowship, Ray, uses it every week.

Yeah, yeah, I want to say you've been, of one year, two years? I think I did that before I left. So yeah, you've been on Restream for two years. We're essentially weird. Yeah, they are. They upload and I'm gonna let the cat out of the bag, sorry Ray, but they upload their Saturday night service. And, and they, they edit in announcements and things like that. And then upload it to Restream. And that plays back Sunday morning like at the time they specify. And so it, it feels live. It looks live. But it's got content outside of what happens in the service. And so your content, you can even spend some of your message to really aim more towards those front door people without having to sacrifice what happens in the worship center. That kind of makes sense?

You ever thought about something like, Jojo? Yeah, so when we started having that conversation last week, I've just began brain throwing, man. What are all the different models that you could do? Because different churches have different needs.

Yeah, some of them have that too big of a wide shot or the pastor is preaching specifically just to the people in the room. And that, so that makes total sense to kind of break the mold and say, "Hey, what are the different things that we do best? And that could communicate best to other people?" If, if you're cutting like just straight up, if you're cutting worship out of the mix, using a Restream in my opinion is a lot cheaper than doing something like a Wirecast where you're going to start to, to time slip that message around other sim-live elements like a pre-recorded, you know, welcome to visitors. And guess that's different than the live. Like, live is easy to do when you've got a solid block of content that is live. But if you're trying to mix live with pre-recorded, it just gets, especially on a small church, because I'm assuming, you know, most small churches, they want to keep it, or they should keep it simple because things tend to like roll on top of, and all of a sudden you're over budget for what you're trying to do. You know, try to either keep it all live or keep everything pre-recorded. And then figure out a way to, you know, pre-record some sort of a simple message. But it was fun. Like, there was, there was a one of my clients was a small church. I say it maybe, maybe two hundred fifty, maybe two hundred people. It's probably the average church in America, honestly. It was a church plant, five years old. They met in a basically like a theater lecture hall. And so if the camera was in the back of the auditorium, and that was maybe a hundred, hundred and fifty foot like shoot. And so we had to get a very big lens to get close to it. They ended up spending a lot of money and for this, but it was still was like it was a head to toe shot. And actually they had a screen above them that they wanted to work in. So, you know, the actual teacher was very small on this lockdown shot. And the teacher was was walking around the stage. And we'd look at their Facebook stats, and they'd get one hundred fifty, maybe two hundred fifty views. And it just, it wasn't, it wasn't great, but it was okay. They thought it, they thought it was as good as it was gonna get. There was, there was a month where the camera broke. And instead of using that wide shot, this the university actually had like pan-tilt-zoom cameras built in. And so they paid a little extra to utilize those cameras. Well, the cameras were further up, and they had a much tighter face. And the, the engagement on those videos we're like fivefold. It went from one hundred fifty to two hundred fifty to like seven hundred fifty to twelve hundred. And same, same, same preacher. So it's not, this, it's not like it's paid advertising that drove it up. They treated the videos the same way. Everything was related to how the video looked in the frame. And I know a lot of times, you know, you're trying to, in trying to have a camera in the back trying to be unobtrusive, and that being further away doesn't give people the emotional connection to the face, to the detail, to the person speaking. And that if you get that much closer, I, and I've seen it, you're gonna get a much better product out of it. People are going to engage in a much higher rate.

Absolutely, that's good. I actually think it would be worth it for you, I don't know, in some form written or video or something, to explain some of those video practices for pastors or in churches and small contexts. So our, our main volunteer was, you know, doing a bunch of research, figure, "Hey, what's the best way to film? How do we, you know, what's the angles that we want to be at? How do we even want to control the camera for the best effect?" Because you can have a really nice camera, but if you control it poorly, then you just don't get your money's worth. So that would be totally worth discuss or some kind of a tutorial because, yeah, being up close just makes a big difference. I get tired of seeing my own face on our church's stuff, but people want to see a face.

Yeah, absolutely. And so we just keep doing it. Try to include other faces as possible as well. But people want to see a face. And if it's super far back, then they can't visualize themselves going into that church. They don't have any pastor is what it looks like. And that would be the luxury of pre-recording this because that camera can get much closer and I have to worry about audience in the room. Audio gets much clearer because you're probably just utilizing a microphone that's on me straight to the computer pack instead of going through front of house, instead of a bunch of other RF that could conflict. And if there is issues, I can just stop and start back over instead of kind of struggling with any issues that pop up in the live in you. I pitched this to a pastor once, and he's like, "Well, it feels inauthentic." And I'm like, "Really? Like, the average..."

Person's gonna really pick up on that. I know sometimes it's difficult to preach to a lens. I've been down that road and I know that pain point, but I think you get a much richer quality kind of running out of this. So anyway, right, what do you got?

Well, I was gonna say, Joe, do you interact with the camera at all as you're talking to your online audience?

No, not right now, not at all. And that's something that I would encourage big-time—obsessing the people looking straight into the camera and addressing them as well, because it lets them know. And believe me, for those of us who are watching on the back end of the screen, it feels like you're staring us right in the eyes and that you're talking right to us. And so like Jeff said, moving the camera up will help, but then as soon as that camera has moved up and you're addressing the camera directly, and now it feels like you're talking to me almost like we're having a cup of coffee. And so that changes the engagement way up in terms of, "Ah, Joe is talking directly to me and this message is for me." I'm telling you that that'll be a game-changer in terms of your online preaching. It'll be huge.

When I normally vies, if you do keep the camera in the window worship center, I know a lot of teachers they'll pick up five or six spots or people in the room and they just dance back and forth. The lead communicators will dance back and forth between those five or six, just looking, because that's their pre-programmed spots. Make one of the spots just stop on the camera. And so even if you're even if you get ten percent eye contact where you're drilling in on that camera, that's a huge win to that audience because they're feeling like you're connecting with them live.

And if you're doing the pre-recorded stuff, man, just drill into the camera. There's even teleprompters that you can get setups and iPads and software for that. And Teleprompter Plus is one that we've used in the past. I'm not sure what Christ Fellowship's used these days, but basically like, it's the teleprompter just smack in front of the lens and I'm literally reading from the teleprompter at the same time that I'm looking at the lens and people can't even realize that I'm, you know, faking this. Like, it's so easy today compared to, you know, ten, twenty years ago when you had to pay all this equipment. And it's really, it's an iPad, it's an iPhone, it's stuff that you already have.

So right, the other thing that it does show is that it definitely adds credibility to the people who are listening in the room to encourage other people to watch online. That's kind of like the weird spin-off that it does is it helps create a relationship between that online and offline audience. Folks who are engaging because people are in the room are like, "Oh, wait a minute, I was talking to them too. That's serious. Maybe I do need to share this with somebody else." And then for those who are watching online, they're like, "Oh, he does see and care about me. He does know that I'm listening and watching."

I'm curious with this, what percentage of people do you think are front door versus side door right now with your broadcast?

Well, question. It's yeah, you're ninety percent front door. The reason is, and I'm going to kind of put some numbers and some of this stuff in context, so we're a small church growing from like a handful of people, but we're also dealing with some of the things that small churches deal with—relational issues, what are the leadership structures need to look like, you know, like what does excellence look like when volunteer base is loaded. We do with those kind of things, but our last service has been viewed two hundred forty times. Which I don't love Facebook stats because I sometimes I don't know what, how many seconds they're counting, but if I look at it, it's saying two hundred forty people have watched our last service and we had fifty-five people there. So there's no question that the people that are watching our service right now don't come. I want to give most of them don't come on and get them today. So if we have an average attend, like if we if everybody came in the same week and we're at like, yeah, probably eighty to ninety, you know, something like that. But if we're in a given week normally having one hundred fifty to two hundred fifty people watching our service either live or during the week, then that tells me most of our views are front door views.

Yeah, the reason I asked is because there was a Carey Nieuwhof article that popped up on my Twitter feed today where he's quoting a Rich Birch article talking about how church online is a distraction to the majority of churches that are out there. And I've just says this is an older article, I think it's been around a year or so. And historically I've gone from, "I'm furious," to "I agree with him," to "Like, he's not even understanding the concept of what church online could be or refuses to acknowledge it." But the point that he's trying to do with proof, what we're just trying to show, a church online being a distraction, is that there's no purpose in church online with the majority of churches that are doing it. They're broadcasting their services merely because they can.

The thing that I like about you, Joe, and what you're describing is you're describing intentionality towards utilizing church online to be the front door to drive people to attend your service. What you're talking about shows more intentionality than I think I see from a lot of even some of the smaller churches, but also some of the bigger churches that are out there. And I'm just curious, like, do you feel that tension of what that intentionality looks like? Or how did you, as a church plant pastor, as a, you know, rejuvenating a campus, how did you come to this conclusion that we have to have church online to be the front door, as opposed to it's a distraction, it's going to keep people out of the building, which is probably what the average church your size would respond with?

Yeah, so the biggest thing is coming into this situation, really it was really while I was finishing school down in Louisville. My wife and I were just like, "We just we want to find a place to go, make a circle on the map and say we're gonna reach into these people right here. We can't worry about anybody outside of that. We're gonna reach the people that are right here. We're gonna make sure that the people in that circle get the chance to hear and experience the gospel through our lives and through the church." And so just having this intentionality of, "These are the people that we're responsible for. This is what we're gonna reach. These people that might mean a small church, it might mean a large church. We don't know what that looks like, except we're just going to draw a circle on the map. This is our responsibility. We're going to take that responsibility seriously."

And so then we come into this situation and I never thought video was going to be my deal. I kind of wasn't inside part of that failed church plant also had visited. I was working in business and personal training and I worked in sales and marketing in the middle of all that and ended up realizing so much is happening online, business-wise, marketing-wise, attention-wise, that we cannot ignore that and just hope that people will walk in the door of our church. And so we just kind of came into and said, "What tools do we need to use to reach the people that we're responsible for?" And we could have a Wednesday night prayer meeting, or I could spend some time and make a ten to fifteen minute video with a devotion and people that I know from the chamber of commerce, the doughnut shop, and our church are gonna watch every video that I make. You know, they're gonna mine members have on my street have never attended a service. None of them have. Several of them said, "Oh, we follow exactly what your church is doing and we know exactly what you're doing."

And so I just I realized I don't want to rely on line as a cop-out, but more as a magnifier of the ministry that we can do. You know, I want to preach a good sermon on a Sunday, but the point is not to reach a good sermon on Sunday. It's actually to preach and disciple in such a way that people make a difference in the lives of the people in our community the rest of the week. So digital stuff is a tool for that.

And when I look at like large churches or larger churches with lots of resources and they like aren't using it, and not saying, "Hey, we can use this to reach all of the people in our community in a way that we never could have before," it makes me want to pull my hair out. I'm like, "Are you kidding me? Like, you guys have the potential to reach so many of the people that are in and around your congregation." And you know, I just think that it's worth it for those kids in our community that will never hear about love if we don't tell them about God's love. The people dealing with shame and guilt will never get to know the remedy to the shame and guilt that they carry if we don't tell them. And so we'll use all of the tools that we can do and to do that faithfully.

That's a great perspective from a smaller church. Like, I just I've not I don't hear a lot of that. It's more of what's in front of me as opposed to the larger kingdom aspect. The thing that I think has impressed me most, and we didn't even really drill into it, is this idea of trying to get people on their blocks. Like, you want to get someone to get out there and disciple the—what was the term you use for it? The family on every block almost approach, right? Like, where did that idea come from?

So man, I kicked and screamed about the vision process. I was like, "Every church has the same vision: love God, love others, reach the world, connect with God, connect with others. Every church has the same one." And I hope I'm not stepping on you guys' toes by quoting your visions. And I was like, "This is a stupid process." And kind of my, you know, the my superior, the guy from our district office who's kind of helping me with the church planting, held my feet to the fire and said, "No, you need to really work on this."

So we worked for two years to really understand the cultural context that we're in, understand really what is, what kind of congregation, what kind of people is God creating for this location, and what does it look like for the mission of God? That love God, love others—what is the mission of God that doesn't change? How does that collide with our cultural context? What does it look like for the mission of God to happen here?

And so out of that, I took two years and when we finally like hit on it, honest, when we finally hit on it, it was like people would jump across the table and say, "I'm gonna be a part of this. This makes sense. This is it."

And so we, I don't usually share this, the vision behind the vision is to engage in—I'm sorry, to quickly engage ten percent of our community's permission with Jesus. Really, the idea that if we can reach and engage ten percent of the people here in this community and ten percent of the people in the next community, those ten percent can reach the other ninety percent. I think kind of that missions context, and we have little towns all around here with no gospel witness. People, one man said he'd never heard that anybody loved him. He was fifty years old and that's when he heard about the love of God. And I'm again, we're gonna try and make sure that doesn't happen again to a kid. And so we are looking at this area and saying, "It might take three churches, it might take five churches, might take ten churches to reach a specific town, but our goal is to reach the ninety and the people that God gives us." That's actually the seed of that. They know they're not all going to come to Christ. We know that. But we can make sure that they get the chance to hear and experience the gospel.

So anyway, so we were kind of really saying we think that's what it looks like for the gospel, for the mission of God to happen here.

Be lived out here in our context and in the middle of that just somebody said every block, every community, every people, which is really a concrete way of saying if we have a family loving the people and actually let me tell you this, Ricka, that phrase comes from a man in our community.

Said how big should your church be? People are kind of skeptical. I mean, I know I'm a young guy. Rural churches don't usually have young guys come in and stay. They, I know that they're skeptical. That a guy comes up to me and says how big your church be? And I said I think I know what you're getting after. And I hadn't really thought about the answer deeply, so that kind of came from my soul when I said I think I know what you're getting after. But if we actually believe that Jesus loves every person living on every block in every community in every street in our community, then we need to care more about loving, having somebody living on every block, loving the people that Jesus loves, then we care about how many people can we fit in our building on a given Sunday.

Well, so we're actually on mission with Jesus in this community. And so that's where that every block idea came from. Where we just said, you know what, our Sunday attendance will be just fine if we have a family praying for their block. If we have a teenager in every classroom praying for that classroom and joining Jesus on mission in that classroom. If we have every team of every workplace has a person intentionally saying Jesus, where you at work? I want to join you here. If we have that, Sunday attendance will take care of itself. We won't have to worry about that. We need to be more concerned about equipping and engaging people in the mission of Jesus than we do about giving people a place to come to on a given Sunday.

And so then we began to say every community. You know what, it's not enough for us to reach this community. Every one of the four hundred and fifty-five thousand people around us needs a church nearby. You should reach them in that same way. And so we're gonna join with other churches and begin praying and working to see churches like ours that are loving and living out the gospel to reach those communities. And then ultimately we said our vision can't be smaller than Jesus's vision. And if he says go into all the world, then we need to go into all the world with every people around the world. So that's where we say every block, every community, every people.

And when I share that, the graphic designer is an art director, jump across the table because I said I can help use my gifts, make sure that everybody in this community gets the chance to in a relevant way hear the gospel. We can make sure that, you know, I bought in my volunteer in my life and my this. And so people getting to begin to concretely go, you know what, there's a lot of things I can't do, but I sure can make a note of everybody in my neighborhood and I can pray for them by name. And I can reach out to the, you know, family that's hurting and I know mom and dad are about to go through a divorce. I can reach into the lives with hope and with love and with compassion. And so it really gives a concrete idea to people in our church that, oh, this is what it means for us to live out the gospel here.

And then online stuff becomes a tool because we're so clear about what God's called us to do. Our Sunday service becomes a tool to disciple people who go during the week to reach the neighborhood. I love that. And once that vision is realized and once your people buy into it, you will be, I believe God will do something big with in your cities. And you're not going to be the guy that sub-200. Because, and not that it's about numbers, and I hate that even brought up numbers, but God does something when his people understand that they are disciple makers. And that when the hero of the story is not the pastor saying come to the building, but it's when the people who are going out, in our understanding that it's their, their role, it's their personal mission to share, to disciple, to create other disciples in the areas where they are. Like that's that's an exciting vision for your little area in Wisconsin, man. I love that that you're starting this off.

Yeah, this last Sunday a guy, I looked at, no thing, I've never seen that guy before. And I met him afterward and he's an intern in a workplace here. And one of the guys in our church that's been excited about what God is doing had regularly been inviting this young man to come to church with him. And the guy said I haven't been to church in a really long time and I was afraid if I come in late what's gonna happen. And all, and I was like, that guy trusted me to share the gospel with his friend and trusted our church enough to say, hey, this, I want you to hear the hope that I have. Come to church with me. And so I, you know, wrote him a note this week to say I am so grateful that you trusted me in our church enough to invite him into what God is doing here. And as people begin to say, hey, you know what, everything else is my concern, but boy, my block, my team at work, and that has, that begins to pick up some momentum. I see some of that just so excited and so grateful to be a part of that.

Well, man, I'm looking forward to hearing more from you, Joe. I know one of the things that we're looking, we'll talk about this in later podcasts, but we're expanding the church digital. Ray has been an awesome asset and will continue to be. But I'm looking forward to bringing on some other writers and people. And so we've asked Joe to come on and help write from a small church perspective. Dude called me out and said that I wasn't thinking small church, and he was right. So what better way to solve that problem and to bring a small church guy to come on and actually be the voice. So man, I'm looking forward, and 2020 is gonna be a great year just as collectively we work through what church online, what discipleship online looks like and can be. So Joe, thanks for the podcast. And guys, as we're landing the plane, any any closing thoughts? Tom, you got anything?

I've got nothing. No, just kidding. I just sit in learning. I know I think that a lot of what Joe is doing is fantastic. And I think it gets me really encouraged. And again, I think all about the personal connection. I love how he said early on about, you know, just having people share about stuff online. And I like to use the phrase digital missionary. People say different things, but we all have the opportunity for missionaries. And whether you're in a big church or small church, you mobilize your team and mobilize your churchgoers. They can all share about what's happening. And then people are, the more people in your community, they could see what's happening. Like, oh my gosh, look at my church or look at this church in the community. Look what they're doing and see the different things, the different opportunities that they're providing. I think goes a long way. And then it also goes on to lead to some conversations. And you know, again, it's those one-on-one conversations, whether they're online or in person, that really go a long way to helping someone discover God. So I think what Joe is doing is, and I just get so encouraged every time I hear from him about what's going on. I mean, there's some great stuff. And he's really utilizing those digital tools to help more people hear about Jesus. So I love it.

I'm really encouraged by the fact that you're leveraging volunteers to help create resources for your people. And that you're not using size as an excuse to put your stuff out there online. A lot of folks might look and say, well, you know, you guys are still young in the life of your church. But you're leveraging this. Setting no, this is this is the primary way that people are going to find out about us. And this is gonna be a great tool for us. And I think other churches as they're listening may want to stop and consider about how they can leverage digital tools at any size. It doesn't mean you have to leverage all the same things that big churches are using, but you might want to stop and take a look at how you can repackage some of the same content that you're spending about forty hours a week creating in terms of your messages to leverage themselves. They last longer and reach more people and go further, farther, and faster for cheaper.

Awesome, man. Joe, any thoughts on your end?

No, I just, I love the things that you guys do and it's helped me reach people in this community that haven't been reached, that won't be reached otherwise. So I just kind of want to return to that story I told at the beginning from Seth Godin. If small churches thankful to the gospel took the principles and some of the stuff that you guys are talking about and each one of them grew by five or ten people, like that has a major effect across the country because there's so many of them. And these tools help people do that. Like Ray said, farther and faster. And so I just, I love this stuff because it gets the good news that we have to more people. That's a big, that's a big challenge, right, man? If we could get every small church in America to grow ten percent, all the problems that would be solved by that. So man, I'm looking forward to it. I'm even moving forward and a different mindset of not just big is great, but wider, smaller as well. Church online is not a distraction. Big churches, small churches, regardless of the size, as long as there's strategy and vision for it. And Joe, I think what we see here is you have developed a great strategy and a purpose. You know who your audience is, your front door, your side door. You're not interested in the digital and the broader audience that digital door. The only door people. And as a result of that, you've been able to fine-tune what you're doing. Now you're still making strides and trying to figure out what a service looks like without worship and what a broadcast looks like without worship. And so these are great questions that you know you'll be kicking the tires on and experimenting and trying different things until you get that balance. And then when you get the balance, you'll come back and tell us all about how it's the best thing ever. And we'll get other churches to start to catch that vision as well and try to do something. So it's all gonna play out in the end.

So hey, Tom, Ray, Joe, man, thanks for thanks for jumping on the podcast. For all of these guys, I'm Jeff with the Church Digital. Thanks for being with us here this time. I will see you next time here at the Church Digital podcast. You have a good day.