EP075: Adrienne Feldmann & Launching Watch Parties Quickly

Episode 75 of the Church of Digital podcast, once again powered by State, a church planting. Jeff here, and I am excited about this episode. I seem to be excited any time we talk about micro locations or watch parties, and so this is a great episode here. COVID, crazy right? Like some building, some states, churches are meeting and everything seems to be getting back to normal. Other areas are slowly starting to kind of open the doors again, and there's lots of stringent rules about how we can gather. And then there's other areas that it's like, yeah, the governors—there's no way we can even meet like five people in a space because the governors are more stringent on what the rules are. Needless to say, it's a very confusing time for the church. And even if we can meet, churches find themselves asking, well, just because we can, should we? Is it the socially responsible thing for us to meet in those gatherings? And we're seeing the reports, the news reports coming in, we're COVID is continuing to spread as a result of some of these churches that are still gathering in this season. It's a confusing time, but we're—we feel called, we feel drawn to meet together physically. And to this end, I wanted to bring this conversation into play because I think there's an option for us to missionally connect together into smaller locations, micro locations, watch parties, house churches, use whatever terminology you want. But it's an opportunity for the church to stair-step, to meet physically without having to go all the way back into the building and to get our people on mission, connecting relationally with people in maybe ways that they hadn't done before. And to this end, I'm bringing in Adrian Feldman into the conversation. Adrian is an online pastor at Northeast Christian Church and really is just in a very short amount of time spun up these micro locations. As a matter of fact, this week they have just launched with almost a hundred micro locations at their church, with even more coming up down the road as things get better in Kentucky when it comes to the COVID season. Phenomenal stories coming out of this. And so if you're written in micro locations, you're interested in watch parties, if you're not wanting to open up the building yet and you're trying to figure out what's next, what you can do in the meantime, take a listen to this episode. I think you'll get a lot out of it. As a side note, I tell a couple minute story at the beginning about my caffeine addiction. You can skip past that if you want, but really, really stay around to hear the heart of what this podcast episode is going to be.

So for this conversation, I'm bringing in Adrian Feldman, once again online pastor from Northeast Christian Church up in Kentucky, and myself, Jeff, with the Church Digital and Stadia Church Planting, in a conversation that I'm calling launching watch parties quickly.

Okay, everybody, here you go. So I wanted to tell you just real quick, this is my dirty chai latte story. So because you did say your favorite Starbucks drink is that? Is that the dirty chai? Yeah, okay. So there is—I'm doing bad math in my head—go back a decade, 2010-2011. The dirty chai is my favorite drink. Like, I'm drinking at minimum one, if not two to three of these a day, okay? And so it's a venti dirty chai—chai, you know, hot, with milk, chai tea with quad, four shots of espresso. And I would get at like I said at least one. If it was a hard day, two. If it's like midnight, three. And this is when I was working crazy hours for a church production director, multi-site, crazy, just crazy lifestyle. If you know me, I don't sleep at night. That drink was what kept me, kept me running. Well, I was living in Miami at the time, and I took a church job in Austin. But I just—I got really sick, and like I was coughing and always phlegm and always cold, and like just for like almost a year I was going to doctors and they couldn't figure out what was wrong with me. And what it came down to was I had esophageal reflux. I had so much chai, so much espresso, that it burned a hole in my throat and stuff's coming up into my system. And it like—and they were like, "Jeff, you got it. You got to give up. You got to give up Starbucks. You got to give up dirty chai latte. Like, what? What?" And so cold turkey. And it was amazing, cutting Starbucks out cold turkey. I dropped like almost thirty pounds right off the bat. Oh yeah, well, me, my wallet kind of got heavier. But when I drink that, when I drink that dirty chai now, I don't sleep for like thirty-six, forty-eight hours. Like the amount of caffeine that's in that, it keeps me up like multiple days straight through. It's crazy. I—well, so I always—that's my like, whenever I have a free drink at Starbucks, that's what I get, because I don't like spending all of the money on it. It's like really frustrating to me. So I'm the blonde espresso, um, but just as an Americano. So it's just only caffeine and water anymore.

Well, hey, we—I wanted to—don't want to talk about the home gatherings, the micro locations. What do you guys call them? We're calling them watch parties. Watch parties, okay. And we were really intentional with that verbiage because it was starting to get really muddy. You know, can call it a church plant, can call it micro campus, we can call it a million different things. But watch party was not intimidating. And so our messaging is very—it's as easy as pressing play, invite your people over, and press play.

Well, and you know, and it's the language is interesting because there's even some implications even in the language of a house church versus a watch party. The complexity, the expectations. You got—you were thinking about doing this, this house gathering, the watch party stuff pre-COVID, right?

Yeah, you know, it was on my docket. It's part of my like vision board for 2020 was to start trying to get these off the ground. The coolest thing about 2020 for me personally as an online campus pastor is that 2020 saw everything in my five-year plan delivered within six months. So six months vacation, you're done. It doesn't work that way. That's awesome.

So like, what—so you, what—why did you guys want to do the watch parties? Like, what was the thing even pre-COVID? This was not on people's radars pre-COVID. You were already trying to track in that way. What was it about your church and kind of the culture that kind of got them thinking about this? Or even what was the view of online even before COVID? Like, tell me your church's story. How you guys have grown through this COVID season?

So it actually starts a few years ago with a really, really brilliant videographer on our team who went to leadership and said, "Hey, we got to start putting our church services online. There is such an opportunity there, and we really need to make it happen." So they started streaming services, and it was a very—it was very much just streaming. There was no full church experience. It was just a stream, and it was good, and people were watching it, and that was great. But about I guess a year and a half ago now, maybe before that, they started dreaming about it becoming our online experience, becoming a campus, becoming a true expression of the church online. So actually, they didn't hire me. They brought me in as an intern last January, and my project as an intern was to write a plan. What does it look like to take us from a stream to an online campus? What do we need? What do we need to implement? What needs to change in the way we see church online for this to be a full expression of the church online, not something that people can just consume?

So I started working on that project, and when I was done—I'll put that in air quotes—but when I was done with my project, they said, "Great, do you want the job?" And I said, "Yes, of course." I had no idea that this could ever be a thing. So I set to work in kind of implementing this plan the best that I could inside our existing structure to start building out actual church online, not just something that people watch. And so as I studied, and of course getting in touch with people—shout out to Church IT Network Conference—and getting together with people and learning what that looks like, right? What does discipleship look like online? What does community look like online? Started having those conversations with people and realizing that our absolute goal was for people to connect with each other, because that's the best way for people to connect with Jesus. And so whatever that was going to look like, whether it was, you know, Zoom rooms, which were not as popular then as they are now, or, you know, watch party gatherings, all of those things needed to take off.

So actually, here's a fun story. There is this challenge going around on social media right now where people are posting their pictures of the last thing that they took when life was normal. Have you seen this challenge going around?

No, I haven't seen this.

I haven't seen this. It's amusing because you see pictures of like concerts people have gone to or, you know, a whole bunch of kids on a crowded playground, things that we're just not doing right now. The last picture I took before everything changed was actually a picture of my computer screen with our very first online group gathering. So we were just favorably ahead of the curve, not far enough that we had full systems in place, but we had started down that path. And boy, thank goodness we had already started to get our minds around what it was going to look like to build out church digitally, because it's a different world than it was.

Wow. But that's an interesting challenge. I just—I went back myself while you were talking. I shot a video of my daughter playing basketball. She didn't like this no-look shot behind her back and made it, like, she did like eighteen tries, but I got the video of one of the eighteen where it didn't even look and she like freaks out. So that was my—and then everything went downhill from there. Like, it was just—even small groups, you weren't doing really. It was in your plan, but you hadn't really implemented it pre-2020, or even—what sounds like even pre-COVID, all this has been kind of drinking from the fire hose quite literally for you, spinning this up. And in Northeast Christian starting to address this, how has that been for it for your church and in leadership and in the body? Like, what? Tell me some stories there.

Well, the coolest thing about our leadership, and I just—I could shout out to them all day long, is that they are very—I don't know if I want to use the word visionary. Yeah, I mean, they're pretty visionary when it comes to leadership, and they're really willing to try new things and see what sticks and see what happens. And so one of the things that I did early in 2020, again way before COVID was a thing, was I brought in my plan and I laid it out. And of course it was like a project manager's dream, right? This Gantt chart that plots out all of the things and how I wanted to work in the calendar. And I said, "I want to launch virtual groups, and I want to launch watch parties, and I hope to have public microsites that we're working with." You know, there were all these little pieces that I put in there. And instead of saying, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, hold on," they said, "Okay, go." And so when this time came, it wasn't a big challenge for them to wrap their minds around all of these ideas. But what they did, which has turned out to be a really huge blessing for me personally, what they did was they took all of those things that we talked about doing and they broke them up and they put them out to other teams and got things going. And it has been amazing, absolutely incredible, watching our entire church staff get their heads around online ministry and just knew it.

We've been talking for years and years and years about how in the world are we gonna get kids ministry online, and you better believe our family teams were online within a week because that's what we do now. And so leadership has been overall just extremely supportive and extremely just open to trying stuff and seeing what works and seeing what sticks. And then as we started to move forward into what our thing's gonna look like now, you know, cause right now we're talking about watch parties and launching all of that and what that's gonna be, we had to have the conversation like, are we gonna open our building or are we gonna see what we can build out in this? And this is your term. They, you know, what does digital look like for us? You know, how are we gonna marry the physical and the digital to give people the full actual experience of church wherever they happen to be?

The idea of digital, trying to get the physical and the digital to work together pre-COVID, you know, if you would have told me, "Hey, Jeff, how do you, how do we staff the church for the future?" pre-COVID, I would have said, "Yeah, I want to move away from you using the language 'online campus' because online campus even boxes away from the physical campus. Because so they're people at your physical campus, the lady who lives across the street from your physical location can benefit from church online, small groups online, online sermon series or sermon archive. Like, there's resources online for them. So let's stop using 'online campus' and let's start calling them a digital pastor."

And really what COVID did for me was a really fast-tracked this whole idea of, yeah, online is more than one person's job. It's all of our jobs. I never would have imagined pre-COVID. I was doing, I asked, and within Facebook groups and all over the place, "Hey, who's been doing kids ministry online?" You were talking about kids ministry. I asked the question, "Who's done it? I want to do a podcast. I've done kids ministry." I can tell you we did kids ministry online maybe four or five years ago. It was really cutting edge, bleeding edge kind of at the time. It wasn't real received. And so it's like, "Hey, who's done it recently?" Nobody. It was crickets. And now all of a sudden, COVID, like the pendulum has swung. And instead of the perception of online, "Oh, well, that's just, you know, this one guy's job over here to kind of maintain it," it's really become more of, "This is our church's job to do. All of us are buying in and owning to that now."

In this COVID season, it's been very digital-first mindset. It's gonna be really interesting as we get back to whatever the next normal is, when things level off to wherever it's going to go. When we get back to our buildings, are we still gonna have that digital-first mindset? Or are we going to kind of find ourselves going back to the way that it used to be where physical is king and online is that kind of red-headed stepchild?

Yeah, so anyway, within context of Northeast, and Northeast Christian, as you're feeling that tension, do you, where do you guys talk about the future going to be? Is it more centered around physical, digital, fidget, all? Like, what has your approach been? What are you wrestling and learning within this season?

Well, so we actually just started talking about those long-range plans today. So awesome. That comes in fresh. In fact, I have an assignment to come back with plans for what does this look like forever. But actually, I said the word "digital" in one of our meetings last week, and our lead pastor thought that was like the coolest thing he's ever heard in his entire life because we are really interested in this idea of that marrying of physical and the digital.

So first of all, for us on a normal weekend, we see somewhere between three and four thousand people. So we know in a COVID season where things are reopening slowly, it's not going to be safe for all of our people to be in the room all at the same time for who knows how long, right? Like, you know, we can open gatherings to fifty people or a hundred people, and that's still a tenth of the people who would normally be in our room on a weekend. And we're trying really hard to put the commandment to love your neighbor ahead of any ideas of like, "Yeah, legally we should be able to gather," but we believe in loving our neighbor. And sometimes loving your neighbor means doing everything you can to stop the spread of disease. So we have that peace there.

Um, and so we knew that we had to come up with something for the really long term. And I hate to say really long term, but at least for several months that looks like doing something that is digital. We have talked about, well, and our early pastor said this in his sermon this weekend. He said, "If we were to reopen right now, we would bring all of these people into our room. It would take nine services to get me appropriately distanced with the number of spaces that we have. We wouldn't be able to open the bathrooms. We wouldn't be able to have any kids ministry. We wouldn't be able to mingle in the lobby. There would be no coffee, and that would be tragic for our people."

There are a lot of things that we just couldn't do. And then we'd have to sanitize it all in between. And he said, "I've got a lot of energy, but I can't preach nine services every single week. So you would be coming into this room and watching a screen. How is that better than what you're doing right now?" He said, "It's not better. It's not better than what you're doing right now."

When you start to gather in smaller communities on top of it all, you're going to be able to build relationships with people that you may never have been able to build in the room. So going forward, we're look at the very real potential that a lot of our watch parties, not a lot, but at least several of our watch parties will probably continue. We see the potential for people who are not interested in attending a megachurch being interested in gathering with a community of believers. And I mean, we, it's in Matthew 18:20, right? Where two or three are gathered and Jesus is there. So there's no reason to believe that what we're doing in these watch parties can't be as spirit-filled and as impactful to discipleship as our gatherings on the weekend.

Wow. So like, when you're starting this off, how many are you launching with? Are you cataloguing them? Is it more organic growth and movement? What's the infrastructure surrounding these watch parties right now?

The messaging that we're pushing to our people is just "press play." It is as easy as just pressing play, gather your people, and press play. But if you sign up, then we will provide you with resources every week and encouragement every week that's going to make this a little bit easier on you. So we have created a forum where people are signing up and letting us know if they plan to host a watch party. And we know some of the people who are signing up are actually, I heard today, it's about fifty-fifty. Some of the people are not going to start straight away. Some of them aren't ready. They don't feel safe yet. They don't feel like they can until the first of July or whatever. But all of them are signing up. And then after that, every week we're gonna provide, I mean, I said that already, where we'll send out an email that says, "These are the current CDC guidelines. Here are some tips for sanitizing your house. We can get you masks if you need them. We've got communion for you." All of those things that we want to provide for them, we can do because they have signed up and they provided us a little information.

One of the things I'm really pumped about is we have put together an encouragement team, and it's just a whole mess of staff people who are getting in touch with these watch party leaders every single week. So they're calling them. They're saying, "How many people came to your watch party? What can we help you with? What questions do you have? How can we troubleshoot that?" And then we're going to in some cases show up at the watch party and surprise them, like, "Hey, we brought you good snacks for everybody," you know?

And one of the things we're excited about is that this becomes a real opportunity for this person who stepped up in leadership in a really difficult time to have a personal relationship with a pastor, to start growing that way, so that they're ready to lead well. And then they can start helping other people learn how to lead. And that's such a great model of discipleship.

This is so cool. And never your watch party, you know, the staff, they're making the calls, the showing up, like I'll be honest, as I've talked about watch parties for years, it's never occurred to me to do something like that. It's so like your spin of that is awesome. And I bet that's gonna pay off. And what's interesting is you're getting other staff people excited about this idea. It's not, this is really the challenge with even like the online pastor work. The online pastor is over here doing his thing, and the rest of the church is oblivious to it. Like, I used to joke that I was like one of the best-kept secrets of the church. I was online pastor because nobody had a clue of what I was doing. I was kind of like working in a silo. And into the, as a result of this COVID, we're tearing down the silo. And as a result of it, like the church is getting excited about this now.

This isn't, it's not about numbers. And listen, the podcast, you know, we really never talk about numbers, but I want to, I want to ask this question because I want us to give context. So like you said, fifty-fifty, fifty percent of people are like ready to launch, fifty percent are like, "Hey, you know what? I'm excited about the idea. I don't trust COVID, so we're gonna wait." Next week is week number one for you guys, right? How many churches are you going to be launching with? How many of these micro, how many of these watch parties will be launching with?

As of this afternoon during our meeting, we had a hundred and eighty-eight people signed up.

Wow, yeah, isn't that great? So if we take fifty percent of them, then we're looking at, well, then I'm a pastor, not a mathematician. Fifty, seventy, seventy-two. Yeah, the answer is nine. Our way, I'm not even gonna edit that out just for this year. No, I'm kidding. All that, it actually, I'll probably leave it in. I don't know. Um, so no, tiny, four times two is one eighty-eight. So you had ninety, you're gonna launch with almost a hundred churches, right off the bat?

Yeah, that's exciting. That doesn't include our plus seven audience who hasn't seen the service yet and chosen to sign up. So we should be, yeah, looking at close to a hundred.

Wow. And so like he said, the expectations initially is more like, "If you can press play, do this. If you're, you know, it, as you're going, may be doing more." Some of the people you're providing resources for, like, talk to me a little bit. Like, okay, so a lot of times when I have these conversations, people are like, "Hey, this is just a small group, right?" I'm like, "Well, it's a little different. I think. And it really depends upon how you're spinning it and what the church is expecting to get out of it." So just tell me a little bit. How are you preparing in the short term or maybe even long term? How are you preparing these people? And what resources are you providing for them? Because the churches out there are wondering. There's something, is, "Hey, how can I create a hundred micro locations to launch with?" So how are you helping these people to do this?

Once they understand the vision, well, so first of all, just to share a cool vision piece that we got to share with our church this weekend, it was really, really cool. And we had a whole service where what we talked about was just really how biblical the model of gathering and small groups and people's homes is. And so we wanted to make sure that people understood this is not a lesser version of church. In fact, this is exactly what the church is. And it was so cool for me as an online pastor who's been beating this drum.

For so long to hear that from the stage and to hear all of our people hearing that and responding to it so, so well. So a very, very first thing that we had to do was make sure that we cast that vision really clearly so that people could get behind it and would want to learn more about what to do. And then beyond that, our training takes on basically two tiers, and we are not even calling it training because we don't want it to feel that formal. It doesn't have to be that hard or that prescribed. So we put together a quick video that says, "Hey, it really is as easy as inviting over people who may be, you know, the person you keep wanting to invite to church but you think they'd be intimidated in a room with a thousand people. You know, inviting them to your house is way easier than that. Bring some people together, set up in your driveway, and then put the sermon on."

Now, if you want to do more, we'd love to encourage you to do more, but you don't have to. We want you to get together. Our minimum is, you know, be in the word and pray together and take communion. We want that for all of our watch parties. And then beyond that, I've mentioned it a couple times before, but what we're sending out is a guide that is time-stamped with the YouTube version of our sermons. So in each section of this guide, it'll say like, "At this point we're doing worship. You can click on the time-stamped part of the worship and watch what we've provided for you." But if you want to do worship on your own, if you've got people in your space who play instruments or who sing or who can plug in a karaoke track and you want to do your own worship, here's a video of our worship leaders walking you through how you could do worship in this space.

And so there's a training video that they can access that teaches them how to do that. Same thing for communion. Here's where you can find communion in the service, but if you would like to lead communion in your own space, we believe that you can do that, and here is a video of one of our pastors walking you through how to lead communion and how to do that communion meditation.

And so what we're trying to do is empower people to take on as much as they're comfortable with, to really pastor the people who are there to participate in their watch party, but to not make it so that they absolutely must. And our hope is that over time, these groups of people who are gathering, did you church together, will start taking on some of that leadership and really making it their own.

I mean, this gets down into the theological kind of point of the priesthood of all believers, where, you know, the job of the church—at least in this theological line—is the job of the church isn't to do it, but to empower and mobilize others to do the ministry in these acts. And so even things like communion, 29% of churches right now—we know this from Varna—29% of churches will not do communion even online. And so the idea of, "Hey, we're doing communion online," where we're going to step further and we're empowering and training people to lead these communion elements in their own home and to be the pastor, to be the shepherd for others—like, there are some churches whose, you know, brains just exploded merely at the suggestion of this.

When working with your church, what was that kind of priesthood of all believers? Was that already in place? Did the church people, did they already understand that kind of coming into this, or was this a new concept maybe before as a result of COVID?

So yes and no. I guess they did kind of believe that, but no, we weren't really practicing it to that complete extent up to this point. We are a church that is very—and we've been saying this for five years—"You are the church. You are the church. You are the church. We want to empower you to lead. We want to empower you to start ministries. We want to be behind you. We want to help you, but we want you to be the church."

You know, I've been at Northeast, just attending, for six years, and so I've been hearing them beat this drum for several years now. But they'll say, you know, if somebody calls the church and says, "Hey, we need somebody from the church to go solve this problem," the response that people get is, "Great, when can you show up to help them? You are the church." You know, so we have started kind of casting that vision for people and saying, like, "Church is gonna be where you are." And so this weekend, we took it a little bit further by actually—our lead pastor did like an ordination prayer over all of these watch party leaders, and he basically unleashed them to go and pastor these groups. And it was, I mean, it was incredible. This idea kind of taking root all of a sudden for everybody, like, "Hey, our role as pastors is to empower you. That's what we believe, and we believe that that's biblical." So it's, I think, the next step in a journey that we've been taking for a long time.

Can I get a link of that sermon? I'd like to actually hear that myself, and I want to include it on for others because I know, like, even how does leadership spin that? Oh, that's this has been a conversation that I've had a lot of in recent weeks or months.

Well, so if it's in the DNA and you're giving this a shot, and I know you're trying to figure out the long term, but like, you're one to do this even pre-COVID, like, this the micro model and the watch parties and stuff like that. And so this is going to—you think this is going to extend on? Is this something that gets worked into the strategy moving forward?

I really hope so. I really hope so. So right now we have two campuses plus our online campus, our Northeast Anywhere, and our main campus is massive. That's where we're seeing, you know, 3,000 people on a weekend. I know, not the biggest churches that you talk to, but where, if we're not small, and our second campus is actually very small, and they have a very different culture. And one of the things that's been really cool to see is that people who really appreciate, say, the type of worship and the sermons that we have in the larger campus context but prefer to be in a smaller campus are going to that other campus because we believe that all kinds of churches can reach people.

And so what I'm excited to see as we go forward is us kind of opening up this arm of this other expression of the church that really connects with people. I mean, it's such, such an opportunity for us to reach people who don't like the small church, like a small-town church feel, and they don't like the mega church. What they like is being in somebody's living room. So yeah, I mean, I see it going forward, and I think that it very much matches who we are as a church.

It'll be interesting to see, and I've seen different churches take a different spin on this, like the role of small groups, how small groups like exists either within the watch party or separate from it. Or our way is to kind of incorporate it in. And you're right, I do think you reach a different type of person. And so the ability to have some of those is just to reach that different sort of person.

Daniel M talks about, you know, having two different classifications, you know, like a large group gathering, medium-sized group gathering, and individual gathering. And he has this thing called social space that he calls, but it's basically that's that 20-person, that 10 to 20-person group that, you know, and in his words, the church never really has reached that 10 to 20-person group. Well, we're really good at the massive, really good at that, like tiny, but it's that 10 to 20, which is what I really think this watch party, you know, post-COVID when we can actually gather together, really I think that that watch party has that interesting possibility of reaching those 10 to 20 people.

Well, let me ask this, because there are people—I mean, shoot, I had conversations today where people were like, "Yeah, watch parties are the thing that we're trying to figure out." So you've done this. So tell me this: what challenges have you overcome in this season? What was difficult? What was easy? Like, what were the challenges that you had to face in getting these watch parties launched?

Biggest challenge, and I think that we rose to this challenge really well, and I mean all the credit to the first of all the leadership that went before me and our senior leadership, but I think one of our biggest challenges was vision casting. There are a lot of people out there—I mean, I live in Kentucky. People are dying to get back into the churches. We are the kind—I mean, this is God's land, and we get into the church, and it's hard for people that we're not gathering together. And so the, I mean, just weeks of beating that drum that says, "Hey, this is church. We are together." I think that the hurdle was people are desperate to get back to church, but I think that we were able to kind of circumvent that by being real intentional about that vision casting. It couldn't just be as simple as, "Hey, just have a watch party," and then not talk about anything else. Like, I think our lead pastor said, "Sign up right now. Go to this website right now. Sign up, sign up, a hundred times in the service last weekend," because that's how important it is. Like, it really is that important that we gather, but that emotional experience that people are having right now without just desperately wanting to go back to their church because it's what they know and that's where they feel like they have to be to encounter God—I think that's been one of the biggest struggles because some people only know experiencing God inside a mega church. And so when you kind of ripped that away from them and say, "Your choice is to do church at home," that's been kind of painful for people.

And so we're trying really hard to collect the stories of successes we have had. We've heard a lot of feedback from parents who are getting an opportunity to disciple their adult children who wouldn't come to church anymore, but now they're at home together, and they starting to call their parent and say, "What am I coming over to watch church on Sunday? We're gonna eat breakfast and do church." And what a gift for these parents who have been praying for these kids for who knows how long, right? All of a sudden have this opportunity. But if we hadn't ever made it past the hurdle of, "It's just devastation that we're not getting into the building," we wouldn't be able to hear those stories back.

Wow. Once again, like the adult parent discipling the adult child—not heard that story. I mean, that's a phenomenal opportunity for the for people to utilize the guide or to catch this as an opportunity to maybe connect with people that they haven't connected with before. It's been a while. That's great.

You know, when you said vision, I was actually expecting you to be—man, it was really—and I'm not calling your lead pastor out, but I would say I was expecting more of, "Man, it was really hard to cast this vision because our lead pastor, you know, really wants to get back in the building, and he's just wanting to try to, you know, get things back to normal, and he really just wants to preach into the room and see people, and he's trying to get back to that." And so the fact that you used the vision wasn't directed towards leadership, but it was more getting people to catch the vision—that's just, that speaks very highly of your church and your pastor who has maybe some forethought into empowering the people instead of trying to get back to the old normal. With that, it's really exciting.

Has that been with the lead pastors? I've been like a constant kind of thread with him where he's wanting to engage and empower and taking a more missional approach maybe with ministry?

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And I have, um, so we actually have co-lead pastors, our executive pastor and our, I don't know, senior pastor. They are...

Like on the same level, and they are both those kinds of people who are all about empowering the church to be the church. And so whenever it comes up, anything that is about casting that vision and encouraging people to go out and do it, it's very natural for them. None of this has seemed foreign coming out of their mouths, which is something that I think helps our people get behind it. Right? Nothing, none of this sounds weird. None of this sounds unexpected. We are walking around saying we're the love the village church, and if we were chomping at the bit to get back into the building no matter how many people that hurt, it wouldn't—I mean, it would damage our witness that we have been so intentional about building.

It's exciting to me to hear a church that wasn't even doing online small groups pre-COVID or was just ramping it up right in the midst of COVID, you know, starting to get the whole community, the online thing figured out, has gone not just to doing community online but taking it a step further and figuring out how to do community through online in physical space. Like, I mean, essentially your church online is spinning up locations, physical locations, around where people are gathering together. And as a multi-campus, multi-site, you know, people who go down this road like the Jake Randos, Saddlebacks, the Elevations, the Crossroads up in Cincinnati, like the common theme for years was, okay, we're going to cluster these micro locations together. We're gonna spin up an eventual campus maybe in the area once we get critical mass. You know, and even in my time at Christ Fellowship Miami, we tried that where we tried to, and for some people it worked, but for a lot of others it didn't. And so for a while, the micro locations, the smaller locations, really took a hit because people were trying to say, oh, this is going to launch our future campuses, so therefore it has to do that. That's the judge of being successful. But what's interesting, you know, even in your context, getting a person to understand their mission or responsibility to invest in their neighborhood, into their friends, to be a shepherd to their family and the people who live around them, even to the point of like leading communion and being that pastoral voice, that's exciting. That's a win unto itself. And as you get that to replicate and multiply, you know, that's where I think Northeast Christian sees a movement happening through this hundred plus, not even counting the second hundred that's going to come on gradually over time once those people get vision of this and can move forward. I mean, yeah, I'm really excited about what's happening up in Kentucky evidently. So well done. Thank you. Big team working to make it happen, and it's just incredible to watch. It's really, really incredible.

Hey, so if somebody wants to get started, let's assume a couple things. Let's assume it's a small to medium, medium-size church. Not to put a number on a medium-sized church. They are doing something in context of small groups online, whether it's moving physical over to the church like that. They're really interested in learning about this and doing this. Like, where do they start? Point them in the right direction.

Oh, the right direction is that Facebook group called Online Plus Digital Church Leaders. That wealth of information, everything you could ever possibly need to know, has already been said. They're like, I have learned more and I have passed along more to leadership from that community of people who are already doing this than probably any other place I just have been so blessed by that collective. Not just that collective, that group of people who are willing to share their resources. I know I keep coming back to my own leadership and saying the thing that I love the most about working in church online is that it seems like people who lead in church online are very open-handed with everything that they have. I haven't needed to fight and stress and work to find information or to network with people who can help me get to where I need to go, and that has been so important. And in the end, when I needed people to pour, when I needed people to pastor me at the beginning of COVID, that's where I turned. And you know, I mean, you heard it. Jason Morris preached a whole sermon to me in the comments because I was just losing it, right? So just find somebody who's doing it already and start asking the question. And consequently, that is what we're telling a lot of our people. We know that when they start hosting their watch parties, the biggest thing that they're going to ask us is, how do I get the sermon on the TV? And one of the things that we're coaching them is, find your person. Find your person who understands the tech, because you can build that relationship with someone because they will be able to walk you through what you need to learn, and you'll get more specific answers to what you need. And so linking out to somebody, making a connection, building a relationship with somebody who is a step or two down the road or who is doing something that you really admire, I think is the best way to get started.

No, I love that. And you know what I really love is that you guys launched. You know, it's so often in the church land it would be, we got to get this perfect. We got to coach. We got to over-develop. We got to over-train. This has got to be the perfect environment. They've got to be able to do all of these things. And there's value in being prepared, but there's also value. And I'm gonna quote the great theologian Gary Vee. I actually don't think he's a theologian. That's a joke. But version one is better than version none. You know, therefore don't worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble for its own. Matthew 6:34. I can't quote that. That's biblical. So but getting started, like actually doing it, and once the boat's moving, steer as you're going. In this COVID season, it's very easy to look and say, oh, we can't do this. We can't do this. We can't do this. And it's funny. They can't stay overwhelmed and they pile on top of, and you feel like you're stuck. You know, sometimes I myself get in this cyclical loop where it's like, I don't know how to get out of this because I'm overthinking the situation instead of analyzing and saying, okay, what can I do today? How can I win today? And then figuring out how to build from there. And in the fact that, yeah, you know what, at this point, let's just press play on the proverbial technological VCR. That's all I need you to do. Press play and clean your house because I'm guessing probably some level of cleaning your house is involved. But and then after that, growing in and developing with it, which sounds like from the DNA of your church or your not that far away from, is continuing to cast vision for what these smaller locations, for what these watch parties can be, centered around Kentucky. Like, this is super awesome. I'm excited to. I want to hear the sermon. I want to get updates. I want to see what's going on. You had some, and I saw this in that Facebook group, you some resources that I think you're providing. It's like, was it a chat host and then the other thing? You know, I'd love if you've got an updated copy that I'd love to share that. So I'm sure some other churches would be interested in getting that as well.

Hey, as we're landing the plane, any closing thoughts? And you're in Adrian. You know, my biggest closing thought is everything is changing. Like, everything might be different in six months than it is right now. Everything may be different in three weeks than it is right now. You know, we had an announcement, what was that, last week, that was like, all places of worship are essential. They must be open right now. Everything is changing over and over and over and over again. And so I just have to be patient with ourselves, and we have to be willing to be agile because it can be really easy to get fixated on what your plan is. And I don't, first of all, I don't think God works that way. But when you get fixated on one really specific plan, it makes it really hard to adjust with the changes. We did a Facebook Live to explain our watch party model last week. We took our team of people who've been developing the whole thing, and we just answered questions and we talked about what we were doing. And one of the things that I got to say to our people was, the beauty of all of this is that we're doing it with you. We're in watch parties too. And so we're gonna keep learning and we're gonna keep adjusting, and we're gonna update all of your materials so that you know more as we know more. And so my big encouragement to everybody is just hold on, trust that God is going to do something amazing with this season, and be willing to make changes as necessary.

Yeah, agile is such a good word. And actually, dropping names, that was Carey Nieuwhof referenced that as like one of his seven effective churches post-COVID. The work was agile. And it was funny. I thought that was weird for a second. I was like, agile? That's like software developer code. But it really does come down to, you know, we can't. I mean, people, churches, I think are going to struggle if they're locked on the models in this season and thinking that the model is the finish line as opposed to they go and make disciples, Matthew 28. And every church needs to be analyzing whether or not what we're doing is effective for the season, not tradition, not what we were in the past, not what we were February 2020, but what's effective moving forward. And so but even that goes back to Matthew 6:34, that do not worry about tomorrow. And agile churches is just gonna tackle what it's got in front of us. It's not going to try to adjust for it for tomorrow and the stresses and the struggles of that. It's gonna launch with what it can. So, man, that's a very good word to wrap up with.

Well, hey, I'm excited about your church. I'm excited about this door that you're on getting ready to open up. And so we'll have to have you back on at some point, even just to celebrate what's going on, to learn what you're learning through the season as you're growing your church and hundreds, plus or minus, micro locations, watch parties, right at launch. That's awesome. So for Adrian, this is Jeff with the Church Digital. Thanks for joining us, and we'll see you next time on the show. You all have a good day.