EP053: Stadia & How The Church Can Survive Coronavirus Culture

Alright, episode 53 of the Church Digital podcast. I got to tell you, I wish this one was being sent out in better circumstances. So yeah, we're on lockdown. Like the church where I'm at, that I work at here in Miami, we are not having services on Sunday. We are broadcasting entirely online. We had to cancel evangelism training and discipleship training. I'm actually, when I do this recording right now, it's Saturday, and all this is done where we're not doing any of this stuff in the physical space anymore.

What's great for us is that we have a structure in place to move and to swing to do this online. And so really, this is the challenge that I want to throw to a lot of you out there in this season. When we are no longer able to do ministry in physical spaces, let's look at doing it online. This is not a pump the brakes and we're just waving the white flag, giving up. This is our opportunity to embrace online and do services through church services. But don't stop there. Do discipleship, do ministry online.

And so this is what we're bringing here in the podcast. This episode, we're bringing in a webinar. Actually, I filmed this back on Thursday before the lockdown happened, before the world went crazy. Okay, maybe the world's kind of going crazy, but before it really got crazy. We did a podcast, a webinar with some people from Stadia. So we brought in Will Greg Metal. Let's just open with that. The president of Stadia is jumping on this webinar. We brought in Nathan Hawkins, who's one of the regional guys who works with churches up in the Pacific Northwest. Ironically, his church was actually shut down a week ago. But interestingly, as it spread from across the Pacific into America, his was one of the first churches, one of the first areas up in Seattle impacted as well. We're bringing in again, excuse me, Ben Kuchera, who is one of the churches who partners with Stadia, but he's also on the board of directors with Stadia church planting. The heart of who we are with Stadia, as well as the Church Digital, is to help you church out there figure out how to do effective ministry online.

And what's interesting is for years we were just defining effective by that one hour on Sunday. But we are literally locked down, and there are no opportunities to discipleship unless we're embracing this digital front. So the challenge that I want to throw at you, listening audience out there, is to embrace these digital methods. Now, chances are if you've been listening to this podcast a long time, you've got all this figured out. Thank you, God, all this figured out. But here's the reality: there's a ton of new people that are embracing this content. The website, the Church Digital, we've seen a 700% increase, growing increase in traffic week to week during this, and it's not leveling off. It's spiking up here in the most recent days since virtually the entire country has gone on lockdown.

So churches, friends and family, yeah, we'll go ahead and leave that in the podcast. Friends and family of the Church Digital, because you guys are my family, help us get the word out. And this is not for self-gratification, but this is more for helping churches get aware of this. Here's what I want you to do: if you know churches who are struggling, who are interested, or even if you just want to throw this on social media, the Church dot Digital slash COVID-19. All the resources that we're creating, all the links, everything is gonna be on that webpage: the Church dot Digital slash COVID-19.

So we're gonna go ahead and go to the episode here. This is episode 53: The Church in Coronavirus Culture.

Okay, everybody, here you go.

Hey, friends. I'm Greg Metal, and I serve as president of Stadia Church Planting. Thank you so much for joining us for this webinar. Sorry it's under these circumstances, but we feel like God, in advance, kind of uniquely prepared Stadia for such a time as this. About six months ago, Stadia convened a gathering out in Colorado of tech leaders from all across the country, both in the business world and in the church world, to kind of explore the idea of what technology is available to us for new church planting, specifically, and further, just in general expressions of the church, how to make disciples, and as we left that gathering, we were absolutely convinced that it would be imperative for us to pursue digital technology to advance the kingdom of God, to advance the gospel.

What we learned was the potential to reach people all over the globe, throughout the United States, is unprecedented in our time. And even further, with what's coming with 5G technology, as a result of that, we formed a team at Stadia. We brought some new staff on board with our team to launch our digital church planting kind of operation. Jeff Reid, who we're gonna be hearing from, if you have the LeBron James of basketball on your team, that's Jeff Reid in the digital world. So being a Cleveland guy, you know, I appreciate that analogy. Anyhow, hopefully you West Coast people will also. But you're gonna hear from Jeff. He's absolutely amazing. Jeff's difficult for me on how to start digital expressions of the church. He'll be an incredible resource for you as well.

I'm gonna pray for us in just a couple minutes, and after that, we'll turn it over to Jeff, and then Nathan Hawkins, who you've heard from already. Nathan does an incredible job for Stadia out on the West Coast. But here's what I wanted to say to you first and foremost about what we're all facing with what's happening with the coronavirus. It's really easy for us to look at this as, "Oh my gosh, we might not be able to have weekend gatherings," or "Oh my gosh, what are we gonna do about finances?" or "Oh goodness, how are we gonna disciple people? Or how do we do children's gatherings?" And those are all legitimate, valid questions, and just so you know, we're asking them here locally and in our home church as well.

But here's what I want to say to start this off: I believe we need to reframe this. I believe this is an incredible opportunity for the church to advance the good news of Jesus Christ, because when things are at their worst, the church is at its best. It's when people need us the most, when they need the church. But let me say it even further. There are millions and millions of people across the United States that never would have stepped foot in our doors of our church building this weekend, even if the coronavirus had not happened. They would not have stepped in. Far fewer are going to now. So how about if we take this opportunity? What if we develop our teaching series, or we use our online platforms to answer the questions everyone in the country is asking right now from a biblical perspective? What do we? Where's hope in all of this? Why do bad things happen like this? Where's God in all this? What do I tell my children about the coronavirus? There are a zillion questions we have the answers to. And if we could teach from that perspective, we could reach people in the unchurched world in a way that no one else, including ourselves, ever could have, because those people won't come in our doors.

So let's look at this as an opportunity to reach others. Perhaps looking at it as an opportunity to experiment with digital, online expressions of the church. It's coming anyhow. This is a great opportunity to begin experimenting for that, with that, and building for that online disciple-making. We have to be doing it as a church anyhow. This gives us the opportunity to jumpstart that. Children's ministry, we're gonna be talking a little bit about that. Incredible opportunities with that. So let's go into it with that mindset rather than looking at this as a negative. How about if we look at this as a positive opportunity for the gospel?

Let's pray together. Amen.

God, I am so grateful for every person on this call. You've entrusted them with leadership with caring for the beautiful Bride of Christ. God, would you help us to be sensitive and reasonable, but also bold and risk when you call us to take steps of faith? Father, I pray for Jeff Reid, for Nathan Hawkins, for Ben Kuchera, as they pour into us today. And I just pray that you'll bless our time together. It's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

Amen. Thank you for that, Greg. Just reminder, if you're just tuning in, please go ahead and mute your microphone, and we would encourage you to select the speaker view on the top right corner so you can see who it is that's communicating to you. And then encourage you to make use of the chat function for your questions. We will reserve some time as we wrap to address some of your questions, and we want to be able to respond as much in real time as possible.

Greg said my name is Nathan Hawkins. I get the privilege of serving Stadia partners here on the West Coast. I'm based in Seattle, Washington, the epicenter of this outbreak, at least in the United States at this point. Our church was not able to meet last week, and our schools have been cancelled. And as many of you are now experiencing, we're just a little bit ahead, so we'll offer some insights and perspective from that. But we want to hear from the experts. So Jeff Reid leads in the digital, online church space. Jeff, what are some of the very first steps that we need to be taking, things that we can be thinking about as this opportunity Greg identified?

Awesome. Hey, thanks, Chivo. Nathan, appreciate that. I'm gonna call him Chivo on the broadcast because that's just how it's programmed in my head. I apologize. I'm excited to be here under weird circumstances, but I want to try to help us figure out some simple and practical steps of how to improve our online ministry, our church online, as we're feeling pressure and as we're even being limited on how we're doing ministry physically.

And so the first step that Nathan alluded to is let's talk about how to broadcast our church services online. And so there's a couple, there's gonna be some slides that are going to come up, and it's going to reinforce this. Also, let me go ahead and tell you that a lot of the notes that we will have available is online, and a lot of the links and the vendors and other resources are currently available at the Church dot Digital slash notes. So if you want to pull that up in your web browser, you can follow along with a lot of the vendors and examples that I'm talking about, because at the end, here at Stadia and the Church Digital, we want to provide resources to help you figure out how to take these next steps.

But let's talk specifically about broadcasting our church service and what that looks like in an online context. Really, there's two different types of platforms that we're gonna land on. So the first platform that we can land on is social media, and then the second is going to be more website-based. And let's talk a little bit about the difference between the two.

When we broadcast on social media, it is probably the easiest way right now to broadcast a service online. So whatever the time is your service, you can broadcast the super easy way is something as simple as a phone device that's showing it. There's some quality issues and some things that may come up, but if you were really trying to do it super easy, super simple, your broadcasting that to social media. Things like Facebook Live, YouTube Live, Periscope, which is connected to Twitter, and people, your audience is engaging with that service, watching it online.

Now, if you just did the phone device, you may have problems with audio. It may not sound good. Video maybe pixelated and hard to receive. In addition to that, social media itself, the platforms actually try to drive away from long-term viewing. So think about it like if you're watching a Facebook video, you're getting other push notifications that are popping up on your phone of other things that somebody else is saying or other videos that are happening. Same with YouTube.

Thing with the other platforms because in the end Facebook isn't concerned with someone watching a full 70 minute service. They want people to ingest as much communication as possible, so they're literally throwing distractions in amongst the broadcasts to pull people away from it. The average Facebook watch is probably 2 to 5 minutes.

YouTube it gives a little longer, maybe 5, 7, 10. And so because all of these distractions happen, that's why platforms like Church Online Platform, which is released by Life Church and is a free option to you guys, are basically operate as a standalone website or even broadcasting it to your own website where there are no distractions. People who broadcast to a more controlled environment like Church Online Platform report 20 minutes, 40 minutes, 50 minutes, 60 minutes—a much longer engagement because there's not all the distractions of social media. Social media plays a part because you're getting a lot of audience, but utilize the social media to route to a controlled environment like Church Online Platform. All of the links are available on that notes page with that, and so you can definitely check out those. But the next thing I want to talk about—just let me just interject there so I can clarify. So what you're saying is social media is potentially a great first step if we're not already sharing our content online, and there's some ready-made applications that we're familiar with—Facebook, Periscope, YouTube. However, you're encouraging churches to create their own system on their website in order that people can remain focused and engaged longer. So you're gonna talk more about how we do that, correct?

Correct. So Church Online Platform—there are at this point probably 15,000 churches out there that broadcast their video to this standalone website, and the Church Online Platform could be your church domain that has it. So it's branded, it's your color palette, it's your logo, it has your look, it has your feel. But the difference is, and it actually looks very similar to how Life Church's weekend services look like when they broadcast—it's the same based technology. But as a result of that, it's a controlled environment that's not distracting away from other things.

So whether we're using social media or a tool that will allow us to share to our own website, what are some easy tips that we can start with in terms of where do we focus, what do we do for the sound, how do we want to frame that, what's important for people to see? Here are some of the things that we need to look at in context of what the video and what the audio looks like. The best way to get quality on the audio is to pull it from the board, and you may have some technical aspects of that, but you can take a feed from the sound board and run it into the camera. There's a number of devices and cameras that we can look at, and if we can go to the equipment slide, we'll kind of reference some of that here. Thank you very much, Josey, for running the slides on that.

There's some equipment options, and we're looking at solutions like Living as One, we're looking at solutions like Mevo and Switcher Studio. There's different levels of buy-in on these encoders. Your process is basically that you're going to take audio from a sound board, video from a camera, and you're gonna run it into these encoder devices that are going to broadcast it online. And depending upon what your budget is, how much money is available, is really gonna dictate, and the quality that you're looking for is really going to dictate the next steps that you want to do.

So the Living as One option is $1,200 to $4,000, and it really depends. $1,200 if you're just broadcasting online, $4,000 if you are a multi-site church and are interested in doing campus-to-campus broadcast. So that's really the difference on that. But that's going to give you probably the best quality and the most stability of any of the vendors out there.

There is a Mevo, which is an independent camera that is more of a prosumer level—it's not quite professional, it's not quite consumer, it's kind of that mid-range, which is an excellent video quality. But it's also, and then audio can't work as well with that. A consumer level product is Switcher Studio, that has a small monthly fee to it, but essentially Switcher Studio uses your camera phones, and so you position six or eight cameras—iPhones—literally around your worship center, and then somebody's on an iPad basically switching between the phone cameras and then broadcasting that live. I've got several clients who use that.

And then there is a solution that's called OBS, which is open sourced, which means it's free, which means it's also very technical and it's difficult. If you have technical savvy people on your staff, maybe they can get OBS to work. If you are kind of a novice in the technical field, pay some money and go with something easier and more stable.

It is important to notice here on this before we shift that the Living as One option is the only one that can broadcast to a separate website like Church Online Platform or even your separate website live. All the others are social media only. So there is some ease ability to that, but you also lose the stability of having it on your branded website as opposed to just random Facebook that's throwing distractions at you.

Go ahead.

Anything? Thank you, Jeff. So the key is that we will need some sort of encoder device. The basic level is what's available on our phones that allows us to access social media. However, you're recommending churches consider something that allows them to stream and/or broadcast directly to their own domain website, primarily so that people can be focused and stay engaged longer, can be a part of more of that service as opposed to the distractions that we encounter in the social media space.

So that's step one. It's making available what we're familiar with, what we are accustomed to providing at a baseline level on a weekly basis. The next step is really to engage our community online, and that's different than simply broadcasting. Jeff, talk to us a little bit about what does it mean to start to engage our community online.

Yes. So one of the things that we're looking at when we do engaging—the word engagement literally means that we want to have two-way communication. The biggest purpose of what we want to do is with step number two here is to keep our people on mission even if they can't physically gather in the space.

So let's talk about this. There's an opportunity for us, and this is outside of the weekend service. We have captive—potentially, as this thing gets worse and worse, and if we do as a church, if we do experience the inability to gather physically, that doesn't affect just us, the church. That affects culture around us, and that's already happening. Looking at the NBA no longer doing games, looking at March Madness with the move that they have here in Miami where I am, to major events—Ultra Music Festival, which impacts hundred thousand people, was shut down. Kyocho, which is a Hispanic thing which impacts a million people, was shut down. And so as a result of this, we're getting the situation where our audience isn't distracted by the stuff around them. In these lockdown situations, they have an opportunity. We have an opportunity to be a strong voice at them, towards them, and engage and have conversations.

So one of the things that I want to challenge us on—the church—is how do we keep them on mission through this? So there's definite challenges with how to do this on the adult side, and we won't get to that here in a little bit. But I even—because I know Greg and his passion for doing ministry with kids and Every Child a Church—I love this passion that Stadia is all over. All has a great—Matt, would you love to just share some ideas with us of what that would look like?

Yeah, I think you know a couple things that come to mind when we think about children is we don't have to be ultra slick. Take advantage of some opportunities. I'm thinking about my 11-year-old son, Elijah, who it looks like Ohio schools are gonna be shut down this afternoon. The governor is addressing us as a state, and Elijah is going to be home from school eight hours a day with a strong desire to play Fortnite for eight straight hours. I would love a church to have a set time every day—let's say 9:00 a.m.—we're there together for 30 minutes, children to pray together online. What an easy thing to do, and the powerful prayers of children will affect much.

What if an hour every other day or every day? Parents will love us for this as the church if we had some kind of kids club online. Because see, children are gonna be missing community if their schools are shut down, if they're not able to go to, you know, the trampoline place, Skyzone. What are they gonna do? What if we create a community for them online? So again, let's take this as an opportunity to create discipleship spaces and fun spaces for community for children and begin thinking the same way. How does that transition into adult world? Create times where parents and children are coming together to read a Bible story. Again, nothing slick. Have someone from your church volunteer to be the story reader. Have children read the Bible stories. Do different things like that. But keep caring for children even when you can't necessarily gather on weekends. But even if you can, we have to start thinking this way because our children and grandchildren are all online already.

Indeed, indeed. So the key takeaway there is that step one is to share some of what we're already doing, and we talked about doing that live, but we're also able to record content and then make it available on demand. And that's a capacity, Jeff, I'll invite you to speak to. But we've already also pivoted to engaging with people, which you noted is about the two-way communication, not just broadcasting but also receiving and facilitating communication. So there's some different platforms that we recommend. They have pros and cons each of them that allow for something like that. For example, we're all using Zoom right now in what we call an online meeting room. However, Zoom also has webinar capabilities. Jeff, what are some of the systems and tools that you recommend for this?

Yes. So let's talk about some of this two-way communication. Zoom is obviously the platform that we're on right now, and so we've got the opportunity. It looks like there's 90 people in this space, and I love that. Typically in this type of environment, we are not utilizing this platform, Zoom, this type of room for 90 people. The average engagement is more of like 7 to 10. It's a much more smaller, intimate gathering with that.

There is a webinar platform that Zoom has, and that others have—we'll talk to in a little bit. But when you're having some of this two-way communication, it's an opportunity for us not to all be muted but to talk together. In reality, the way that we're doing it today, we were spinning this up quickly in order to get the conversation, this information to you. But realize, and some of you may have experienced something like this where you're literally just sitting in a room having a conversation with your kids or your grandkids on a device like this, you'll find, and with the Bible studies in the community that I lead, there's a very strong face-to-face. There it's easy to engage that way. I do find this with the online Bible studies that I read—people are far more comfortable in having conversations virtually. There's something about the webcam, there's something about the monitor, the separation, the distance, the idea of judgment, the idea of "I'm safe in this environment."

Can be open and transparent. I'll be honest, and in the Bible studies that I've led, I've actually been able to get deeper in the virtual ones than I have in the physical ones because people tend to hold back when they're physical. They don't trust because there's that physical judgment that's capable. I don't know what this person sitting next to me is thinking. But when we look at engaging online, before and before we get into even the other platforms, I do want to follow this slide here. We have an opportunity to connect with people within the neighborhoods with that. In addition to how we're engaging in the community, there's a lot of neighborhood touch to that.

I wrote a book and this is on your notes page. It's called "What Happens When Church Online Grows Up," and it's this idea of following a discipleship process of how we're moving people from our services in the small groups and into being on mission. And so there's an opportunity here to connect in physical community physically. So things like we see churches like Elevation who do watch parties where people gather together to watch the service. Saddleback uses the term "home gatherings," and where they gather people together to watch the services. While people may not be able to gather in 250s or plus in some areas like where Nathan's at, people can gather in much smaller areas in homes to watch this stuff.

Within that, what happens when church online grows up, I actually tell the story of a church that I was at where we had house churches that were operating three, four, or five hours away as well as three to four or five states away, and how we were seeing ministry happen within the community there. There's a great opportunity to ask some of your people to do some of this ministry, maybe within their neighborhoods. Obviously, do what we need to do to clean up the house and make it healthy and take care of the health precautions with that, but turn homes into small locations to do ministry.

In addition to that, I think there's an opportunity for us to connect to the physical community virtually. I look at Nextdoor mobile app. I look at which is, I don't know if you guys have it, but it's literally an app that's designed to get our neighborhoods connected together. And so using Nextdoor as a way to connect with neighbors to hear what's going on, Ring mobile app, that is the Ring doorbell I've got at my house, and it's amazing within the community how much the people within the two miles around my house are constantly talking to each other and engaging in that. Invest through the technology into those already existing cultures. Even Facebook community groups is a great way to talk face-to-face with people, to talk texts-wise with people, and build relationships there.

There's a theory that we're coming up to, and it's called "online to offline." And this is it: the gospel that we hear in our online world should affect our offline relationships. And it comes from this idea of James 1:22. Where it's, let's go to the James 1:22 slide because of course I'm blanked on it as soon as I said to do it. But essentially it's, "Do not merely listen to the word and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says." And often what we do, kind of just with this online to offline idea, do not merely listen to the word online and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says in the real world. So hearing this stuff, go ahead, Nathan.

Yeah, just an example of that. I jump in back to something you said earlier. I think an opportunity to do just that are these watch parties, which I think, as you noted, we can do in person by gathering in small groups in people's homes where that's still allowed, and/or you can actually have an online watch party where you might use a platform like this or otherwise, or perhaps even just all access something at the same time, and then you know engage via text chat or something to that effect. We talked about making services available on demand in addition to streaming so that people can access them really taking advantage of the opportunity that the digital provides us for the both and. These are some really creative opportunities to facilitate these types of connections as you know in the real world offline, taking the church online into real life.

Say a little bit more about some of those different platforms or tools specifically that facilitate that. You mentioned Zoom, which we're using here. There are a couple of others, and they each have some pros and cons. What are they and how do we use them?

Yeah, so Zoom by far right now, industry standard, is probably the most stable. Skype is available as well, but obviously here with Zoom we've got ninety people in this room at the same time. Stratton and Zoom has a much larger roof of the people that can fit in. Skype is limited to the number of people that can have simultaneous conversations, but Skype should be on the list as well.

There's an option called Talky dot IO, and Talky IO is actually very similar to Zoom. It's web-based, they're not app-based, but it's free. And so if you go to that website, Talky, that might be a good inexpensive option. In context of Zoom, I think the starting account is fifteen dollars a month, but that's for the leader. And so if you were doing small groups, there's an option for each leader of the small group would need the account.

Google Hangouts has is also a very popular option. A lot of people have Gmail accounts, and if they have a Gmail account then they have access to Google Hangouts and can log into that. It's easy, and I believe at some level it's free on the Google Hangout, but I think you may have to pay for some of the larger features.

One of the things that I recommend for churches overall is that they be platform agnostic. And agnostic is a scary word, but what I mean here is I don't know that I care what platform somebody's using to have the conversation. If you have a bunch of soccer moms that all have Google accounts, let them use, you know, the Google Hangout. If you've got a bunch of video gamers and Millennials that want to use another platform, let them. They're already there. What I normally recommend to churches is that they have one platform that they utilize, but if somebody wants to go a different route, that's fine. I'm more concerned about what we're talking about from a pastoral context than I am the platform that they're on.

So those are some great options for you guys to investigate. Some of those platforms are virtual and can function in both capacities. So a situation like this where we have a large group of people in a room, we might normally use a webinar system, but we could use even Zoom. In fact, this is something that Stadia is quite familiar with as a virtual organization. Gregg, maybe you would share with us a little bit about how this is similar to a Stadia team meeting and one of the ways that we would leverage Zoom at this scale to have breakout rooms and go from a large audience like the one we're in right now to smaller discussion-based opportunities.

Yeah, I don't know if I would have been so convinced everyone about online community had I not been immersed in a leadership role with an organization that is one hundred percent virtual. In other words, we literally have no offices anywhere. So this is what our staff meeting looks like when we have a Stadia all-staff meeting. This it looks like this. It's multiple screens. And so I'll spend part of the time casting vision and talking, and then immediately what I love about Zoom is Jay Nima happy clicks a button and we split automatically into groups of six. And we have discussion questions that are printed at the top of the screen. Someone facilitates the discussion. They can be very intimate questions, you know, feisty discussions. And then ten minutes later we're clicked automatically back into the large group and we can report out if we so choose.

My point is is that I'm absolutely amazed at what we can do with disciple and with inspiration in this kind of gathering. And for us this is just normative.

So as you said, there's a real opportunity to go from the large-scale broadcast to the engagement, the two-way communication back and forth. And Jeff shared with us a number of different tools and resources that are available to us to do that. I want to take a moment however and step back from some of this technical and talk a little bit about the pastoral. This is obviously a unique time, and we as a church are uniquely positioned to speak into some of the anxiety and concerns that people hold. And so to hear from that perspective, we're grateful to welcome Ben Kuchera, the lead pastor of Mountain Christian Church in Joplin, Maryland. Ben is a Stadia board member, and they have been a fantastic partner with Stadia. And so Ben, to offer us some insights on how we can be pastoring to people, past poorly in these days.

Yeah, our team is doing the same thing that probably everyone on this call is doing. We met this morning, yesterday, watching the news, trying to get a read on what's happening locally for us. What that looks like is, you know, the local community college just shut down. The local schools are going down. Everything is shutting. So for us, it's definitely sort of culturally tone-deaf for us to hold the line that we thought we were gonna hold and say we're gonna be meeting this weekend. That was what we came into this morning saying, and just in a matter of hours it's like, "Ya know, we would, that's, that's not cool. We're being really advised against that." So we're shifting quickly. And we were gonna be trying to figure out digital for next week. Turns out we're figuring out this week.

So I'm over here scribbling notes from everything Jeff is saying. You know, as we've thought about this, the same way I'm sure other churches are, kind of things I thought about, things in maybe three categories. One, at one kind of the general posture, which I think's been well articulated already. But then some super pastoral things that might just kind of get your juices flowing on how you can respond. And then some practical stuff as well.

But just the posture, I don't think it can be overstated. I think there's a huge need for us as leaders to cast some vision around how we respond to this. The posture being, as Greg articulated so well and Jeff has said so well, we're really gonna step into this moment. It's not like, "Hey, we're probably going to cancel something and we're withdrawing," but we're gonna step in and seize this moment as a leverage point for strong positive leadership. We're not going to go dark. We're going to communicate probably more rather than less and see this as huge opportunity.

I think back to some of the real critically defining moments of our church. They have been these crisis moments, whether it was a hurricane or a shooting of a local police officer or whatever, where we got opportunity to contest, yeah, and and purposeful urge. But for so, I would, you know, and we've got me right now, it's like, "You know what, the coronavirus isn't gonna stop our church," you know, I mean, not to be melodramatic, but you really need to kind of bring that kind of perspective to seize the moment. The gates of Hell aren't going to prevail, and that sort of thing. So strong positive leadership. It makes me remember that, you know, Rodney Stark, that sociologist, talks about how the church flourished like never before in the first few centuries for, you know, what, forty decades in a row at ten percent growth or whatever. They didn't have buildings. They didn't have, not just smoke machines. They didn't have anything. They didn't have a Bible, and they flourished. And so in those kind of settings, I mean, this really provides an opportunity, and we have digital at our disposal.

So just some of this set posture, I think I wouldn't overlook the importance of conveying, "Hey, what a great opportunity that is," and that strong positive leadership. And the second thing, just that kind of...

Talking about pastoral, I think there's plenty of people now that are telling everybody what to do about washing their hands and, you know, keeping their hands out of their mouths and all that. I think what we need to provide is it's not so much, you know, what to do as much as how to think and be. And so we traffic in hope. So I wouldn't shy away from just unapologetically stepping up and providing the things that we do best.

I do think of 9/11. I remember that event happened on a Tuesday. We all scrambled and had a service on Thursday, and our church filled with people that we didn't recognize who were saying, "You know what, I am interested in kind of coming together around something of faith and hope and hear what has to be said right now." And it kind of positioned our church as we gave this calming effect and this sort of "let's hold together here." I gave a message of hope, a biblical message of faith. It positioned us, and for years we had people come back to our church, and their first exposure was then at that 9/11 deal.

Well, we can't gather now, but we can go to them. And so I would just say as you prepare your—I love the distinction between doing what you normally do online, which isn't gonna reach a ton of people other than who you normally touch, but really be thinking about how can we package this and present this in a way that truly engages new ears? Because there will be people that will look to your church now that don't normally and wouldn't otherwise. So it's a real opportunity that way.

Just, you know, some of the things pastoral—we need to bring our peace. Jesus talks so much about peace in all circumstances. That's a radical concept our culture doesn't apparently understand very well based on the levels of anxiety. So you're going to talk about and bring a sense of peace to people that helps them see that only to be freaked out. The presence of Christ is another basic Christian teaching. This is a time to talk about the presence of Jesus. And perspective is another big deal.

You know, historically the church has been through a lot of stuff over the years, and I find myself—I just wrote a blog post about the 14th century when the Black Death killed, you know, millions and millions and millions of people. And it was the Christians who rose up and just had their finest hour loving people, you know, better than anyone. And, you know, kind of posted that on my blog, and people were like, "You know, that perspective was really helpful."

You know, Max Lucado has got a great book called "Anxious for Nothing," and I just did a short video yesterday where I stole an illustration he uses. It's the scene in Jaws where they're out there, everyone's scared to death about the circling shark, and this very bad special effects shark comes up and scares them all. And they're in the great line that the sheriff gives them while they're out there. When he sees the size of the shark, he says, "You're gonna need a bigger boat." And, you know, the implication is clear. If they're on a battleship looking down at that little tiny—it's gonna look like a minnow. You know, and so we've got all these circling sharks of fear and panic right now with the stock market and whatever, but aren't you glad that we're on a bigger boat? You know, just these basic analogies that remind people the size of our God and the size of our faith are important.

Gene Apple was just saying this morning, "This is a good time to pull out John 14: 'Trust in God. Trust also in me. That's the recipe for my peace. I give you.'" And we need to give that kind of word to our people.

I think I'm looking for passages in the Psalms which talk about the firm rock that we stand on in times that feel shaky to people. You know, there's lots of language about quarantine going on right now, and it's like, "Yes, if that's what has to happen, be great, but they do that, but be safe." But think of all those passages that say, "God is my refuge and God is my fortress. He hems me in, and I'm safe there." So, you know, I think those are the kinds of things that I think of pastorally.

And then, you know, Psalm 112 is just a great one that we're using on the close of a lot of our notes right now. Psalm 112:7 says, "Don't fear about news. Though the people of God confidently trust in the Lord to care for them, they're confident and fearless that they can face any foe triumphantly." So you all are experts at this, but sometimes it's helpful to hear, you know, what others are grabbing on to. So those are some pastoral things.

Just quickly then, maybe some practical things. We want to jump in there? Please go ahead.

Okay, so practical for us—we have made the decision this morning that we won't be having services this weekend. So we're busy right now, another roomful of people getting our communication plan all together, a sequence of ten or twelve communications. But one of them will be a video, and rather than a written note or something, I think it's important that we try to be physically present as much as possible and demonstrate the power of media and digital rather than sending out an email. And so that way they can hear your tone of voice, and you can pastor and lead in a way you can't through any email or something.

But we're not going to say we're canceling services. We're going to say our worship gatherings are all online this weekend. We've been waiting for this opportunity to sort of use necessity as the mother of invention to help more people get that this really works and counts. And we feel like God's given us this opportunity. So we're gonna say all our gatherings are moved online this weekend, and we're not gonna be gathering together in public space.

We're pre-recording that, and it will be an abbreviated service just because we don't want to just sort of say, "Hey, Mountain people, let's go online." We want to say, "You have a friend that probably needs to hear what we're gonna say." And I'd rather have them invited to a thirty-five-minute sort of loop than a seventy-minute one as a first touch. So we don't want to just do this for our people. We want this to be a moment. By God's providence, we jumped on the bandwagon months ago and said, "Let's do the 'Anxious for Nothing' series." That series has been done by a number of people. There's a host of great resources. There's a book by Lucado. There's free resources from Groeschel. Ashley Wooldridge did it. I just completed it. Gene Apple's done it. Tim Harlow's done it. So, you know, how this works—we all steal everybody's stuff, and it's all good. Give credit where it's due. But the timing could not be more beautiful.

So we just ended that series. We were gonna launch a new series. We're pivoting, and we're gonna continue with "Anxious for Nothing." There's plenty more that the Bible has to say about this, and be able to just talk about that from a real practical standpoint in light of the current reality. So that's our plan.

There's a separate video recording we're gonna do for kids and a separate one for students. And though, and the kids is going to continue immediately after we're finished with the recording for the sort of main service, which is going to include time of, you know, talking about how to be faithful to God and gifting and ways to talk about that, and also a home communion. You know, just will have that kind of prepackaged get-together with friends if you want to, but in your home participate with this worship. We're gonna have a message. We're gonna have some and worship together that way. Follows immediately with a kids presentation that our student ministry and kids ministry is doing, and then a link to what the kids are doing, and that will happen separately.

Then in addition to that, we'll be saying in an email today, "Hey, this is our decision of what we're doing. Go to the website. That's where you'll link to the experience." But in addition, "Hey, here's some new things we're doing, and if you don't know anything about Mountain, we'd love to have you join us." And we're just gonna do some pop-up Zoom groups. We'll do one that's just like Greg gave us a great idea this morning—Greg Nettle—we're gonna do one just on how you talk to your kids about, you know, stress and anxiety, what's going on, how do you talk to your kids about coronavirus? You're gonna have some time at home with them with schools down. And so that's just going to be a pop-up kind of Zoom, and we'll just put the invitation out for people to join us and spread that social media-wise.

We'll have like pizza with the pastor, except buy your own pizza and eat it in your house, and we're just gonna talk through a passage of Scripture and do those kinds of things.

Now all of our other groups are encouraged to either avoid canceling but to postpone or go live on some digital. And our large groups we're gonna do those on Zoom, and the rest are group-specific. So the group, if they're more comfortable with Google, they can do it that way. But the groups will decentralize and decide how they're gonna do that online.

So those are some practical things we're thinking about. We just got something come across the wire there locally. They're wanting to train a bunch of people to deliver groceries to the elderly. So we're gonna let our people know that and say, "Hey, here's a way to do that." As things unfold, I think it's going to be really obvious that we're gonna have some new opportunities to love our communities wherever you are through these kinds of ways. And but we've just kind of today made that shift to saying we were holding on, holding on, saying, "Hey, if you want to come, come." We were advised by some medical professionals that because of the delay in the symptoms, you've got people that are going to be asymptomatic. They're gathering, and they're healthy, but they sneeze and they give it to someone else who goes and gets sick. They're gonna track that. They're gonna say, "Where were you?" They're gonna say, "We were at Mountain Church." They're gonna come back, and they very well may quarantine everyone who shows up, which is not the kind of press we want.

I don't want to get into all that jazz, but in our area it's clearly the right thing. And so rather than regretting it, we're just we're going for it and saying, "Hey, this is a great opportunity."

So, you know, just hopefully some of those categories will get your juices going in the things that are important to you. And you're setting your posture is important. Some of the pastoral touches and the language of Scripture—this is our finest stuff. You know, this is what we have to offer. And then the practical stuff about engaging deeply. And the last P obviously would be prayer. You know, I think people who don't pray regularly are willing to pray now. So we're gonna do some online prayer meetings and see if we get better attendance at those than we can when we do them in person.

So hopefully some of that is helpful. Amen. Thank you so much, Ben, for both the pastoral and practical insights—just that posture of maintaining a calming presence, pointing people to the rock, the peace that we find, the hope that we have in Jesus. All of those are really critical, and those are ways that we as the church can embody the church even if it's not physically, if it's done virtually.

So we just have a few minutes left in our time. I want to encourage people to continue to make use of the chat to direct specific questions at Jeff, Gregg, Ben, or others. Also to be sharing some of your insights. Many of you may also have some unique ideas. I know our team has designed some just potential crazy ideas, things that we could be doing that would be a servant to you. But as we look at ways to go from simply broadcasting to facilitating engagement, to facilitating connection, to creating these types of environments with some of—

The different tools that we've talked about, this is going to prove really helpful, and I believe this is going to be an opportunity for the church to truly shine. Um, Jeff, what are some of those ideas that we've talked about? Examples of things that you've seen in other churches, ways that churches are leveraging technology, particularly for engagement? Those are some things that I think we could all use insights from.

Yeah, I love that. I love what's been said. I'm actually, somebody texted me when they said it was a great idea, the whole student ministry pizza thing that was awesome. Some crazy ideas, some things that just might work with y'all. I can tell you, it seems like in discipleship, it's the 101, 201, 300, and 401, and kind of like the baseball path. Nobody ever gets to the home plate, that being on mission, that discipleship for that evangelism piece. Offer some of those classes online, utilizing a webinar or a Zoom thing. You got to realize that our audience, to Ben's point, it's a captive audience as this thing rolls out. They're not gonna get distracted by a lot of the things in the physical realm, and so we've got an opportunity to speak in, and some of that stuff that never really gets traction in your church because everybody's just too busy doing other stuff, do it here. Or do a book club with moms or a friend's reading through a Christian book, or maybe even a book of the Bible. You know, just an opportunity to do something different.

Yeah, I try to like a book, but like, gather them together virtually and give them an opportunity. Maybe it's trying something different than what you're more of a felt need as opposed to more of what you may be typically do. Try a different technique. Train parents and how to disciple their kids.

Yeah, so I got two kids, nine and eleven. I mean, I'm not saying I'm gonna get stuck in the house with them, but if I do get locked in, I'm gonna run out of stuff to do at some point. There's only so much like Nintendo I can play. And so maybe start to help me understand how to minister to my kids so that I can be that spiritual leader. That would be awesome.

There are services online like Vomo.org and on Flourish, and these are actually crowd-sourced volunteer things, like databases where people post opportunities to serve and the churches and organizations can partner with them and then do those service opportunities. And sometimes it's like large numbers of people, sometimes it's individual people needing help in a situation. Maybe it's just making aware of utilizing services like this and doing that within the communities where you are.

Here's what I do know is that, you know, oftentimes our staff are so busy creating that experience, that forty-hour a week driven towards that week in service. We've got an opportunity to be highly relational with this. And sometimes when we do technology, there is a level of, okay, the technology is cold, and so it's non-responsive, it's distance. What I would argue is there's an opportunity for us to be highly relational, highly personal when it comes to the technology. And so the more high-tech we use, the more high-touch we need to be in those environments to build those relationships, to utilize the technology for individual conversations and crazy ideas like this, man, that'll help get you started on that.

Even just recognizing, as you said, there are platforms been mentioned, hearing from their city that there was a need for people to do groceries. If we're paying attention online to some of those websites Jeff pointed us to or other community forums, we talked earlier about Nextdoor or Facebook groups or different community groups where people are going to begin posting needs, and the church has an opportunity to respond to those needs. And to me, the church again embodying the church and the Gospel message, the hope that we bring, even when it starts online, to take it back into the real life experience.

We just have a few minutes left. I want to open it up for some questions. Maybe it could be on some of the technical aspects of the different tools or services that we've talked about up until this point, or to share different ideas that we're hearing from one another in terms of how we can be engaging. I know it's difficult to take advantage of that opportunity, particularly when we're in this space virtually, to come off mute, but recognizing that Zoom gives us that opportunity, go ahead, Jeff.

Yeah, I tell you, one of the things, Randy Aramis, who's a friend of mine, hey, right, and if we hadn't said this, but do a prayer service, gather together virtually on Zoom and pray. I'll tell you this, yeah, I'll go ahead and say it. One thing that I've always wanted to do, and maybe this is the catalyst that actually launches it, but there's an opportunity. What if we spent a couple days and just read the Bible together? Like reading it, not like studying, but doing a one-off conversation, but like starting at Genesis and just take turns rolling in and out of an open Zoom thing, studying the Word of God. You got to realize, like, there's opportunities to be incredibly creative. The best ideas are ones that you guys with your teams will talk through and find out. But there's opportunities to engage and do things because they're not getting distracted with everything else. It's our turn to come in here and utilize online to push our mission forward.

And in the future, Nathan?

No, absolutely. It's just recognizing the opportunity that exists before us. And just as a reminder of where we've been and where we're going, we've talked about the importance of making content available, whether it be streaming and/or platforming content that people can download or access on-demand. We've talked about the importance of creating opportunities for engagement, for that two-way communication, particularly as people may become more isolated. Especially I think about someone like my mother, who is less technically savvy and is less comfortable, and recognizing introducing her to like Zoom or some of these other platforms we've discussed, maybe unfamiliar but really helpful. And so taking advantage of the opportunity we have now to help get people set up with those types of systems will be really helpful to facilitate that engagement as it becomes difficult.

The key being keeping on mission, even if we're not able to gather in large groups as has already been mandated here in Washington State and likely will be in other states as well. Again, I love the way Ben reframed that. We are not cancelling. We are not discontinuing. We are going online. The church is going to continue to be the church. We're just gonna do it in different ways given the situation and the context that we find ourselves in.

Once again, all these resources, the links, the tools that Jeff has pointed us to, Gregg and others have mentioned, they're gonna be available in the notes that are on our landing page. And I'll invite one of my teammates to just share that link directly in the chat if you're dialing in and you're not able to see that. You can go to stadiachurchplanting.org forward slash corona resources, also the church dot digital forward slash notes to speak to some of these opportunities.

As we begin to wind down our time, I'm gonna invite our president, Greg, to pray for us, and then I want to just let you know that Jeff and I and a few others will stick around. We welcome some dialog if you have some specific questions based on your context or you want to know what's going on in another part of the world. As we said, we're leading out here on the West Coast. Those of you in the East and in the Heartland are going to be following, I suspect, so we'll make that available.

So closing thoughts, Jeff or Greg, as we begin to wind down?

Yeah, what's the licensing they need to do this stuff online? Anything?

Yeah, so that was a great question, whoever said that in the thread. One of the challenges with Facebook is that they have their own DRM, digital rights management, and oftentimes worship music gets flagged as being illegal. Not illegal, but you don't have permission to play that. Not to get technical, but it's specifically when the band is using what's called a loop or a track underneath their music that they've specifically taken from another band. So if you're singing a Hillsong, it's not a song, it's not a problem. But if you're singing a Hillsong song and you're using Hillsong's kind of drummer and beat, believe it or not, Facebook's figured out how to recognize, hey, that's your, you're singing a Hillsong song. And even though you have all the legal rights to perform it in the building and you may even secure the rights with other places to broadcast it online, Facebook is doing their thing to lock it down.

Now you can tell Facebook after the fact, no, I do have rights, and they'll open it up for on-demand. But at the moment with the live broadcast, it will literally black you out. And if you're a repeated offender, they'll block you out like over extended broadcast. So yet another reason to go ahead and create those systems to share that content on your own church's website platform.

Yeah, we can start with the social media tools that are available at our disposal, and if that's all we have the capability to access, go ahead and do that. But for this reason and a myriad of others, we want to encourage churches to go online themselves and make use of their website so they can serve their community.

I do want to respect our time. Greg, please.

Yep, what? How can they? You're gonna stay on. They can ask more questions about licensing after you. Have one-day seminars coming up? You have cohorts starting? How do they get involved in those?

Yeah, so great. Thank you for Greg and Nathan. I have loved this. So through the Church Digital as well as Stadia, we are offering several resources available for you guys. First off, I understand that as a church, we're under the quite literal gun as we're trying to figure out how to proceed quickly. If you need help specific, like one-on-one help through Stadia, we are offering individual consulting towards that. If you go to the church digital slash notes, at the bottom you'll see a form. As we have availability with consultants and people who know online ministry very well, we can connect you with them. And through Stadia, we can help get the needs met.

In addition to that, we are offering long-term cohorts and strategy sessions. The next one's going to be, I think, June 23rd, where we are going to be meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio for a twenty-four-hour bootcamp essentially to help you develop your strategy for church online, how it so that it matches, so that it complements, so that it can effectively help you as you're doing your church ministry. This isn't just a band-aid job to get you through, you know, coronavirus season, but it's more of strategically how can we help you develop church online so that it's effective part of your ministry?

There's information as well. We can put the Stadia link in there, or you can fill out through the Church Digital either way, and we can get you connected. More information on that, I provide a number of resources online, blogs and podcasts through the Church Digital, and I would love to invite you into that. As through the Church Digital and through Stadia, we're coming together literally in real time here, helping people like you develop effective ministry so that we can create disciples in virtual space.

So thank you for this. Back to y'all.

Okay, so here's the deal, real quick. We're wrapping up. We have less than a minute here. Here's a couple things we've learned about these big Zoom meetings. There's a reason we're popping back and forth from person to person talking. You need to do that as well in digital space. It's really difficult to listen to one person.

For an hour, okay, even if it's Ben Kuchera, sand as good as he is, the optimal sermon and listening time is actually going to come down typically be shorter than what you can do in your weekend gatherings. And so, you know, be aware of that. Use a host, use multiple speakers, things like that. And people aren't going to engage in a large group like this. They don't in the all stadia staff meetings, but they wouldn't in our weekend gathering at River Tree either with a thousand people sitting in the auditorium. If I said, "Does anybody have a question?" very few people are gonna ask a question. Same on line. The questions have to come in smaller groups. And when you break people out, okay, thanks for your time. Let me pray and bless you as we go.

Father, so grateful for these leaders and the church, your church, that you've entrusted to us. God, I pray that you give them supernatural wisdom in making the decision to gather this weekend or whenever they gather, of what, you know, digital platform to use, of all those difficult questions. God, I pray that you protect your church. That you pray, protect the health of these leaders and their families. Please bless them in Jesus' name. Amen.

Have a great weekend, folks. I let some Nathan, can we address maybe some of these and other questions if people want to stick around?

Absolutely, absolutely. Jeff, start us off. You've got some great insights on this.

Yeah, if you all have questions and you're interested, I probably got ten, fifteen more minutes, so I would love to address some of that as you're interested. Somebody's asking about what worship looks like in context of broadcasting it live. The biggest concern that you're going to have, the biggest problem with broadcasting worship, is the mix, especially if you're mixing like for the audience and not for the online people. For example, if your drum is live on stage, not in a box, a drum cage, but in the room, chances are your mix for the house is very low because the drums are acoustically loud. Now, if you listen to that online, it might sound weird. Just, it's gonna be a unique mix. Figure out ways to overcome that. Hopefully your sound engineer can help overcome that. So just recognizing even that there's a difference between that mix for live versus something that would be either streamed and/or recorded and made available offline. That's a great first.

Yeah, one thing that's also, and we didn't really hit on this much, we just kind of flew past it, is this idea of pre-recording and on-demand. So there are, when I was online pastor at a church, we recorded our services Saturday night and then we were able to adjust it on Sunday. Now you guys may not have the opportunity, but there's also an opportunity to record things live in an empty room and to make adjustments to it utilizing technology and then scheduling it to play back at a later time or just making it on-demand overall.

Here's, yeah, I see I see the advantage to making something available on-demand as opposed to live. I'm almost questioning what's the value of a live stream? Is it primarily so that people can engage with one another in real time, perhaps as they're watching? And if that's the case, how do they do that?

Yeah, so it's, it depends on the environment and the people that you have. So I can't give you a solid answer, but I can tell you this: you'll receive more views on-demand, which means people watching it Monday through Saturday, then typically what would happen on today. However, the ability for you to engage with people, talk with people, chat, hosts, do ministry in that space, it's much more effective on that Sunday live broadcast. In other words, like I may be at the workplace. I'm like, "Hey, man, let me put on the service. Whose great service from this week? I'm just doing some work. Let me put this on aimlessly in the background." That's what often times your on-demand viewer is on a Tuesday afternoon, whereas maybe like actually engaging with that person and driving them towards a discipleship process, a lot of that happens more on the Sunday service. And so, plus your Christian audience and the people who are more used to physical ministry are more used to attending on a Sunday. And so they're more likely to engage with your content. Just realizing, "Hey, it's Sunday nine o'clock. I need to go to church, but it's not at the physical space because I'm on lockdown. So let me let me go watch it online."

There's opportunities and there's benefits for both. It's just knowing the context of what you're trying to achieve. And the nice thing about digital is that we don't necessarily have to choose. We can do both. We can make available content in real time in order to engage with people, in order to facilitate those types of chats, whether they be via our own systems or something like a messenger group chat or we talked a little bit about WhatsApp, some of these different tools. But then also utilizing digital to make either that same content or something similar available on-demand, whether it be a podcast or a video cast or even our church here in Seattle is pre-recording services, uploading the file to a link that churches that members can download in their homes. And they're encouraging us to watch that not only as a family but with our neighbors. And you know, Ben said earlier, they're even customizing what they're doing at Mountain in order to make it more accessible and to say, "Hey, why don't you come over? We're gonna hear some encouragement in these troubling times from our pastor," and making that available to engage your community to continue to be on mission. I love that.

Somebody's, somebody's asked here. Sorry, I'll just cut you off. I apologize. Michael's asked how to handle worship when you have to do off-site because you don't have access to the building. I have seen people, small churches, literally set up a good acoustic guitar and a djembe in a living room, have three people on a couch and lead worship that way. That specifically was a good Friday service. It was done by a friend of mine last year, but super unplugged, super low budget. I'm not, the phone, the camera may have even been a phone, but it was a worship environment that that was created. If you're in lockdown, you can't even enter the building, your audience is gonna appreciate you're on lockdown and you can't even enter the building. Just find ways to be creative in that or maybe even here. So here's a step to challenge: do you have to do musical worship in that environment, or can you be more creative with doing some things with that? Maybe, maybe worship in that context looks different. Maybe it's more of a prayer service than it is a whole musical expression that we're typically used to seeing. Be creative with that space as your ear check it out.

I know a lot of churches will put together a virtual set list, their worship set, but then they'll just go ahead and, you know, tag the actual artists on Spotify and or you know Amazon Music or iTunes or whatever system you use, that you say, "Hey, these are the songs that we sang or we were going to sing or we're singing together, but you can listen to them directly, you know, view the artists." There's something neat, however, about the personalization. Yeah, maybe Hillsong music sounds better than the team at my church, but being able to see and hear from them, particularly in these times, I appreciate. I know a church that is a multi-site and they're actually recording services uniquely for each one of their locations, utilizing people from each of those distinct locations in order to reflect their community, their respective communities. So it's not as if they're only going to take advantage of, "Hey, the one that has a centralized location," they're sharing that. And that might be a way that churches that do have physical space could share with those of us that don't.

There are a lot of church plants, obviously, that's our wheelhouse, who don't have the twenty-four-seven space and an existing church or an established church with the location being willing to open up their space, even maybe share some of their technical equipment so that a church plant can do that and make those services available to their congregation. What an opportunity for us to band together as the church, as the body, and share those resources.

Some of the other technical questions we saw Jeff speak to more on on platforms and systems, processes. We can get in the weeds now.

Yeah, man, I don't even know where to start. Somebody throws systems question in here if you've got it, but let me address, 'cause this this was close to my heart. Scott, who's up, it's seriously testing questions. I'm open. Scott, he's out of, he's out of school. It may be shutting down, trying to figure out options. So the church that I attends in the same situation, Scott, we, one of our campuses is at a high school. We actually received an email, maybe not as strong as which you have, but that the contracts are being invalidated as we speak because of this situation. We are not officially getting kicked out, but there is grounds to the county has basically ripped up all the contracts as a result of it.

Once again, as stuff like that happens, I think there's opportunities to be creative in the space. I think your audience is gonna recognize that there's this problem and that they're going to appreciate what you are trying to do as a result of it. I don't know that I would challenge anybody to go against you know leadership, leadership sin place by God, their Romans. We can have that conversation, but essentially I think there's an opportunity for you to look at it at it differently.

Yeah, in many cases that decision is being removed, but for those of you that are wrestling with it, it's still our decision to make. We haven't been told we can't gather yet via the states because we're a larger group of people or via whatever facility you may be renting space from. That's where you're gonna have to really pray and discern because there are advantages to coming together corporately. There's a reason that we want to do that. And what we've tried to talk about here today are what are ways that we can continue to connect, continue to convene, to gather people, even in this sort of disembodied virtual way. That's where the contextualization is going to be really critical.

One of the things I'm excited about, our neighborhood, since our schools and churches have all already been closed, we're seeing a lot of activity on social networking sites where parents are banding together and saying, "Hey, let's let's pool our resources to care for or continue to educate our children," and you know, making our homes and places of worship available for those types of gatherings, particularly to the community that may be in search of spaces that they could gather in, again in deference to whatever the guidelines are locally with regard to what what's being asked by the authorities. But if we can continue to gather in small groups to make the spaces that we have available to others, presents an opportunity to be a real witness and a source of hope and encouragement.

All right, everyone, let's close in prayer. Father, thank you for this opportunity to reach the world for Jesus. Thank you for this opportunity to be the church, your church, in our community, to care for people by bringing them food. God, to enter into even their illness and care for them. Mother, I pray that you'll protect our, your church, that you'll protect us as your church caretakers. But Father, I pray also that we will boldly go where you ask us to go and that will lead so that people look and all they can say is Jesus showed up. We pray your blessing on every single person on this call, Father, as they lead and make hard decisions in the days and weeks to come. May you empower them and lift them up in Jesus' name. Amen.

Amen. Thanks, everyone. Thank you all for joining us. We appreciate the desire and the intention that all of you have to continue to be the church in these tumultuous times. We will make the notes available on the web links that have been shared.

Here in the notes section as well as the landing page as we leave this Zoom room, and encourage you to check back in and follow along. Share your insights, what are you learning, and what resources would you make available? Thanks to those who have already done that in the chat space.

Yeah, the church is the hope of the world, and we will continue to be that and provide that hope even in these times. So thank you all for being with us today. God bless you. Let's be the church.