EP084: Christopher Benek, Virtual Reality, and Moving Beyond Church Buildings

All right, you got episode 84 of the Church Digital Podcast, once again powered by Stadia Church Planting. Jeff here. I love this episode. I love this conversation because we get hypothetical, we get theoretical very, very quickly. We're bringing in, and every time I talk with this guy, we end up getting hypothetical and theoretical because that's just a bleeding edge tech guy that he is. So we're bringing in Christopher Benek. Now Chris is actually the lead pastor at First Presbyterian Church here in Miami. His facility, his campus, is located in the heart of downtown Miami right off Brickell Avenue. It's a historical landmark building. And so, you know, when you think Presbyterian Church—no offense to the Presbyterians—when you think of this historical landmark facility, you don't always think of a bleeding edge tech guy, which is really the grounding of what Christopher is. Which makes this conversation so fascinating because as much as he's in this, you know, call it an older facility, more traditional facility, he's already thinking and imagining how to transition and how to move these things into the digital sphere, virtual reality. And as a matter of fact, Christopher was more than just even being the lead pastor of this church. He's been working on developing virtual reality platforms called Churches Plus so that other churches can get on board with virtual reality and doing a number of other areas, or involving a company that he runs called Co-Creators. All of a sudden you're starting to see we're more than just a conversation about a church. We're talking about some trends of where we are going as a church, which is really the heart of this conversation. This is not practical as much as it is theoretical and keeping yourself in check. What are the steps that we, the church, are doing mid-COVID? Here, maybe coming in post-COVID? Maybe not. What are we doing today? What steps are we doing today that can help us to become the church that we need to be for tomorrow? So here's who I'm bringing into the conversation once again: Christopher Benek, who's lead pastor over at First Pres Miami, as well as Alfredo Armas, whose co-host once again with the Church Digital Podcast, but also digital pastor for Christ Fellowship Miami, and myself, Jeff, at the Church Digital and Stadia Church Planting, in a conversation that I'm simply calling "Getting Beyond the Buildings of Today." Okay, everybody, here you go.

Probably, oh boy, it's been maybe a year and a half ago. And, well, you know, a year and a half ago, maybe there's an opportunity. I've written on VR for a long time, right? So I, what, back when I was doing my sort of a doctorate of theology, or a Doctor of Ministry in theology and science from Pittsburgh Seminary, and that program was the first of its kind in the world, and I was in the first cohort. I think I was the youngest person in the cohort. And so that's where I really kind of got into more intentional conversations about emerging technology. And one of the things that I was doing early on was just started blogging. There weren't many people really blogging about the intersection of, you know, science and faith and tech at that point. And I wrote a piece on VR, and I had looked at, you know, kind of what existed, and I talked about what would that look like for the church? And a gentleman who was in Europe actually somehow stumbled upon this, found this article, and within a week and a half I was having—I was in a YouTube seminar that they were doing. They're supposed to be doing it in VR, but it literally crashed the platform they were on. And so they had to move it over. I don't know what it was at that time. I don't know if it was Skype or Google Hangouts or I don't even know if those were around. But Philip Rosedale was one of the guys that had developed Second Life. And so here I was, like, just kind of, you know, waxing philosophically on some of this stuff, and all of a sudden then immediately I'm in a conversation with somebody. He's at—they've done it. There were real limitations if you saw Second Life. They were real limitations to it. And part of the limitations were is it wasn't a stable platform. And part of the thing is if you actually pay attention to VR and you're in VR, it's the VR world is pretty crazy, right? So if you can, you know, if you can imagine it, you can do it. And people can imagine a lot of bad things, is what I figured out. And so I was looking at, like, well, what would church look like? But it looked to me like there weren't any platforms that you could actually do this in without having chaos. And so, you know, later down the road, David Soto, DJ Soto, you know, started doing some VR church stuff. And there had been other attempts at this. I knew people who had done stuff in Second Life, and it was like they had a small group, but everyone kind of felt like it was hokey. And you know, you could have somebody just run in and be really disruptive, and there was nothing you could do about it. And so it was just like people could troll your church all the time. Then DJ, you know, got into this, and DJ actually came down not too long ago and was in Miami and was talking with me. Said, you know, it's really interesting because before I did any of this stuff, I saw the stuff you were writing about VR in church. And so it was kind of prophetic for me. And then, and now, you know, we all look at DJ and go, man, DJ's done all this great stuff in VR and kind of been a pioneer in that space. But he, he was really, you know, he was just trying to get his head around what would this look like? And then all of a sudden he got in that space. And we all know, you know, anybody deals with tech knows it's great to like think about this stuff and what it could be, but actually in practice it's way messier, right? I mean, it's just, you know, and everyone's looking for the quick fix, and it's like there is no quick fix. Tough breaks. You have to learn stuff because you have to know how to troubleshoot because that's going to be a problem. And so I was looking at this, and you know, I think he's just a great guy, really respect him and the work that he's done. But what I was noticing was this: there wasn't a lot of work being done in Reformed churches on this subject. And there are some pretty hefty theological issues when you start getting into virtual church and what that means, particularly with regard to sacraments. And you know, people always raise questions about, well, what about incarnation or ministry? What does that look like? And I thought, well, nobody's really talking about this in Reformed churches. So how do we get people in Reformed churches to talk about it? And so I applied in the—I'm in the Presbyterian Church USA. And the Presbyterian Church USA is kind of a mix of people from very liberal to very conservative and everything in between. And admittedly, the church was just struggling to figure out how to do new church developments well. And so they started this initiative called 1001 Worship in Communities. And anyone could apply for it if you had essentially a worshiping community that was getting together and gathering. And I knew somebody who was doing that in Charleston and doing a great job with it. And they would give you a little bit of money if you did it. And so I did a pitch to them and said, look, I don't have anything yet, but I have an idea. And they essentially wrote back to me and said, we'll give you the initial grant to get the equipment. We don't think you can do anything with this, but if anybody can make it happen in virtual reality, you're the person in our denomination that would be able to do it. And so they just kind of took a risk and threw a little bit of money at me. And so I was able to afford to go out and buy the equipment to do that. So I started going out, and once I started looking, I'm a sustainability guy. Like, I do not like to build anything without a system behind it. I think churches do a terrible job of this across the board. They don't look at sustainability as particularly important. And you know this: if anybody does like now that everybody's in this digital platform mode, they're just throwing stuff at the wall. They're not even looking at their mission. They're not looking at, you know, they're not looking at their long-term. And so for me, I started looking at it and going, well, from a sustainability standpoint, this is really difficult to be in VR. And I really tried to pay attention to what DJ was doing and hearing kind of some of the critiques that he and other people had about their experiences in VR. And one of the things that we figured out was that stability of the platform was a huge issue. You could go in and be in, you know, preaching a sermon and just mid-sermon get thrown out, which is disastrous for a preacher, right? Like, if you're setting up a problem and then you cut out, you leave people. You rip their tent down and they have no place to live, right? Like, and so it's just horrible. And then the second thing that we saw is, look, there were no quality controls on any of this. And then the third thing we found was that it was almost impossible to replicate anything in the real world that people would have a sacred tie to, to have an expression of it in the digital world. And you know, not everyone—like, I am fortunate to be part of, to be the pastor at First Miami Presbyterian Church. We have a beautiful piece of property on Brickell, downtown in Miami. But people can't experience that in any real way if they don't live in Miami. And so what about the person in Singapore or, you know, Australia, who wants to actually see something about our church? And so, so all this to say, we started getting into this deeper conversation. And my initial thought was, well, I'm gonna create a version of the church. But then how do I actually have some protection over the sacred site, which we value, and have a way that it's stable to actually be able to create a message? And so what we started doing is start talking to some people and start talking to some developers. And we said, well, if you can dream it, we can do it. And we found the right people to put it together. And we just said, we're not just gonna build one church. We're gonna build a platform so we can have infinite churches. And so this conversation goes well beyond Reformed theology, but it opens up the conversation because there's all sorts of theologies that enrich the kingdom. And how do we enable people to be in this space technologically to be able to do that? And then beyond that, we are crazy as a church universal if we're not going to evangelize online. You know, there's seven point seven billion people or something in the world. Three point five billion of them at least are online, and two point two billion of them are gamers. Like, you know, I don't know what local churches' evangelism plans are, but that's a pretty big area to be able to pull from. And even if you just pull in percentage odds off that, there's a way to build sustainability for your church in a way that people haven't thought of before. So, you know, looking at that, and then I think the big thing beyond that is, you know, there's also a lot of churches, and we're a historic church. They have overhead issues. So if your church planting, like, you know, what's an easier way to church plant than to have a digital version where you don't have overhead? It's in the cloud. Your pipes don't break. Your roof's not going to get blown off by a hurricane. You have those issues. And you can make your worship as dynamic as you can imagine in VR. So, you know, now don't get me wrong, VR is there. There's still some limitations in VR. You have a little bit of the uncanny valley things still with avatars.

Totally get that, but as far as the physical structures that you can make in VR, I mean they are unbelievable. They're beautiful. And you know, when we did the first Miami, if you go to church plus—so it's CHVRCH.plus.com—and you look under our services, you'll see that there's a picture of the first Miami build. And we did it kind of in a medium resolution, almost like a cartoony field. But if you look, there's bushes there. Do you actually look online at our church? There's no bushes in the front. What we wanted bushes so we could put bushes in front of the church. When you go into the narthex, we have these old terrible doors that are then, you know, replaced forever. And they look like they're made of leather. And we wanted to put glass doors there forever. Well, we made them in glass in the VR. But we can do all our upgrades right now. And so it's like it's a pretty awesome thing. So I'm excited. We are gonna do here in a couple months. We're gonna do the formal launch in VR of that site. It's already built. It's ready to go. But part of this is getting it out there so people know. And this will, we'll invite some people to come in and we'll do an initial worship service in that space. But our hope is to help people to create kind of these stable environments there. And slowly we'll be having people come over. I know DJ has done some small groups on our platform right now. And so it's good stuff. We're really excited.

So literally in this world where the buildings are useless, you went and created a virtual building church and are getting to roll it out in the AR where people can experience what would a service, what the environment is and feels like at First Pres here in Miami, which by the way, like the building itself is glorious where it's at on Brickell Avenue. It is honestly probably one of the most premier location churches in all of Miami, just literally sitting on the water. You know, I can remember I sat down and had lunch with you at a bunch of food trucks overlooking, you know, I guess it's the bay right there, the water. Walking around and it's just an incredible physical experience. But that you've replicated now in virtual reality like the church overall, what's been their take on this so far? What's been the reaction? How are the people? Because it's an—let me ask this question maybe even before that. What's the demographic of the church? It's a much older building and I know you've gone through some restoration. Like, so what demographic and how are they responding to this new technological approach?

Yeah, so our demographic is actually we're pretty young. The average age of our leadership is like forty in our church, which is pretty young from I think most churches. Yeah. But that represents Brickell where the average age on Brickell is like thirty-seven years old. So you know, at forty-four I'm like an old man in my church, right? But and we're very—probably the best thing about our church is we're very multi-ethnic church. So we have people from all over the world. You know, I know at one point we had more than, I don't know, thirty-five countries represented. And this was when I got there about a year ago, you know, just about one hundred people active membership. I mean, not a very big church, small church. We've about doubled that here in the first year. And so it's really grown. So we're in Brickell. Brickell, for people who don't live in Miami, is the financial district in Miami. They call it the Southern Wall Street. And we are literally our church is right in the center of the highest population density south of New York City. So we're in a really interesting place. And what a lot of people don't know about South Florida is it has become like a startup mecca in the United States. I think it's like second only to, I think it's on Inc. Magazine, that can only distill Silicon Valley now. So there's a lot of people in startup culture there. And so we have a lot of people who they get that. They get that mindset. You know, I've kind of got most of my press actually around artificial intelligence because I talk about automation a lot. And I talk about, actually I talk about automation crisis a lot. And so the stats on automation crisis projections are that the best support in the world essentially says by 2030 we'll have eleven to twenty-two percent unemployment from automation. And it's not that there won't be new jobs. It's just that we have to retrain people to do those jobs. Automation percentages only go up. So in like say a church, you know, most little churches, the vast majority of churches in the United States are one hundred members or less. And the reality is with that automation issue is that you're gonna have all these churches that are struggling to even have a pastor. They're struggling to pay for their overhead. And if they lose even eleven percent—okay, eleven percent unemployment—think about that. So they lose eleven percent of their income, not because people aren't generous, just because they don't have it. Then all of a sudden what's gonna happen to them? Well, they're gonna fold. Is what's gonna happen. And it doesn't mean that the church universal isn't going to exist because we know the church is not our buildings, right? We know it's the community. But what is gonna happen is this overhead that we have, these costs that we have, they're gonna kill the institutional church. And so we're gonna have to think about new ways of being and doing church. And so I have been talking about that all over the world. People are invited to speak in different places and I go and I talk about this. And I talk about what our church's sustainability plans are. Because if you don't have a sustainability plan, I mean, twenty-two percent unemployment is three percent less than the Great Depression. And those numbers only rising, right? So people think coronavirus is bad. Coronavirus is just the taste of what's coming. We have hope. We know it may be a year, but we have hope that eventually, you know, a vaccination will happen and we'll be out of the coronavirus thing. With automation, you're not going to be out of it. It's only going to continue to happen. And people are gonna have to continue to be retrained. So so I say all that is to say, last year at Easter, I actually, when I preached the service, I was talking about the church's future. And I said, look, these statistics, they're real. Like, as far as we can tell, this is real. And you don't have to believe me. You guys are all in the finance district. You saw this happening when ATMs happened. You go to Costco now and you saw, you know, or you go to Sam's Club. Like, we, my wife and I have a membership at Sam's Club. When we started, there were thirteen people on registers. Now there are two people on registers and there are eleven registers that are automated with one person overseeing them, right? This process is happening. And you can look around and there's just example after example. And some of these things are great. They're your Roomba cleaning your floors. You don't want to do that anymore. But we can't deny that that stuff is happening. And so I preached about it in my worship service and my people, like, I had a line. I had more people wanting to talk about automation and AI than I did about anything else. They want to know what's going on. They want to see what's going on. So my what my experience has been as far as kind of talking about emerging tech is these folks in my congregation, they are all very interested in this. They understand that this is important. It may not be their wheelhouse depending on what they're doing, but they're excited about it. And so when I talked about the virtual reality piece with them, they've started to say, well, I don't necessarily know. I don't know a lot about virtual reality, but I know that it's a thing. And once you give them data and statistics and say, look, you know, there's two point two million gamers out there and you know the percentage of people that are younger coming to the church is continuing to lag, like they start to take that data and then they go, yeah, okay, so let's try something, you know? I mean, and if this is a way that we can get in caves, let's figure it out. And so the response I've had from people is they want to see their pastors talking about tech. They want to see technological development happening in their churches. And there's almost an expectation that that happens at this point. And if we don't do that, we look like we're, you know, like we're Luddites or something. And the reality is that they're using tech all the time, right? They've got more computing power right now on their phone than generations have before. And so for us to just ignore that stuff, we'd be crazy. And so that's kind of our whole thing is we're saying, okay, well, where can we step this up in real emerging ways?

This is good, Chrissa. These are like next-level, bleeding-edge thinking for a lot of folks, even for some of our audience. And so what I would ask is, so when you talk about thinking through reallocation of resources towards what's next, what are some of the recommendations that you're giving churches in terms of how do we tool for the future considering this automation crisis that you're talking about?

Sure. Well, certainly, I mean, and you guys are on the front of this, but certainly getting people into a digital mindset. And part of what we've tried to do is say, look, this is very contextual. It's not one-size-fits-all. And that's why you have to have conversations about. I had somebody yesterday from a major camp and conference center say, look, we're not gonna be able to do any conference programming for youth this summer. What can we do in virtual reality? And the first thing I have to say with them is, it's like, look, you're building a digital platform. Your digital platform. And I think some of those, we have to start training people to talk about digital and virtual different because we say virtual all the time. We're not meeting virtually right now, right? We're meeting digitally. But if you're talking about fully immersive virtual reality, right, or we can make those distinctions. And I don't even like the term virtual. I've said that I think it's an alternative reality, you know? I don't think it's actually different from our physical reality per se, right? And so anyhow, so part of this is figuring out, okay, how do we start to build a plan for our particular context? And so I think that's different if you're a small church, for example, as opposed to a large church. So there are large churches around us. They've been streaming for a couple years, right? They have borderline television programming. We're a small church. We don't have that tech. When I got there a year ago, they hadn't invested anything in that. And trying to get them to understand the value of that when they have other immediate needs, it's not really a priority. Is the truth. Well, obviously now it's a priority, right? They get it. They need it. And so for us, live-streaming every week, that's not what we're going to do. What we've done is we've created a digital, we call it a digital liturgy. And we created all the liturgical parts. And if you go to our website, you'll see what that is. And so I do certain parts of that liturgy. Other people do certain parts of the liturgy. Our worship persons sing some songs. But then we let people take their phones and they upload, you know, they upload their part of the liturgy to the liturgy. And then essentially what happens is you see the multi-ethnic faces of our community, right? It's not just a couple leaders doing it, but the benefit of that from a structural standpoint is this: then we have built a system where we are...

Not trying to fumble with stuff livestream, we are pre-recording everything for people because data is telling us that more people are paying attention to our stuff over time and they are just jumping on doing that. So if you look at that, that's a systems thing, right? So if you're looking at systems for your long-term sustainability, the questions are: what are your value propositions of your local church? Where are the things that your church can begin to identify on what the needs are of your community, and how can you create digital solutions?

So I think, for example, there are a lot of things that are out there. Churches are good at identifying problems and actually coming up with solutions for problems. Tech is good at aggregating data and doing things to scale. So if you take those two things together, you can actually identify problems, aggregate the data, and fix the problems to scale. And churches aren't going through basic ideation processes to do that with their congregations.

What's happening is leaders in the church are saying, "You're gonna do this, and this is the path we're gonna go." But what I don't think we're doing is we're not actually looking at the giftings of people and saying, "Okay, so you know, Bob or Sally is good at X, and they're identifying a problem. How can we take what we know about technology and integrate it with that to create something that's sustainable and create a value proposition?" And so I think what we need to do is we need to start looking more entrepreneurial, kind of what is out there for churches, and create sustainability that way.

So if churches have property that's very valuable, they need to leverage their property. You know, they need to leverage their property to endow themselves, quite frankly, at this point. If they're tech savvy, they need to start leveraging and creating products. If they're service savvy, they need to figure out, "How do we create sustainable service mechanisms?" But not be afraid to charge, because I don't know. I mean, ask churches now that they're online—is their plate gonna be the thing that sustains them long term? And I would say no. Well, it depends, right? Because that depends on a systems thing once again. If they've onboarded people to online regular giving versus, "Hey, like, are you suggesting like, hey, you know, to watch services, like there's a subscriber fee?" Or what are you suggesting there?

I know. I think we need to get away from the concept that the church shouldn't be entrepreneurial and creep and charging for services. So I think if we plant—look, if eleven to twenty-two percent automation happens—I mean, eleven to twenty-two percent of people lose their jobs—it doesn't matter if you've onboarded people just to giving, because if they don't have the money, they can't give it to you. And so the partners do, yes. So it's a part of what—so part of what I'm getting at is I think the church has to start looking at different ways to create revenue, and what that, how you do that, is gonna take a very localized approach, right? Because some churches are small. They don't need as much revenue to actually sustain themselves, but they have to figure out what's their value proposition in a real way.

And I think that we think that what we're doing presently is just enough because we're like, "Well, look, I preached every week, and you know, and I make some phone calls to people to take care of them." And I would say that might not be enough, quite frankly. That's an old model, and it's not that preaching the word is not important—it's obviously central in the Reformed tradition, right—but it's how are we preaching the word, and what are the mechanisms which we're going to do that? And maybe the old way we've been doing it isn't the most effective way to do it. And so we have to think about that.

The other way is, are there other ways to spread the gospel than from the pulpit? And can we integrate those gospel messages into our tech? I have like no time for people who just want to critique Facebook all the time from the church. "Facebook is evil, blah blah blah." Yeah, well, what have you done? Is the church actually increased faith? Facebook's virtue ethic—that's on us, you know? I mean, that's on us. Like, if we care about having virtuous tech, we need to invest in people who are in tech to create virtuous tech, right? And so we haven't done those things.

So that's a value proposition, for example. You could have a whole thing where a church could set up essentially consulting to tech organizations to help them create products that meet the needs of their wider community. And you would say, "Well, maybe they don't need that. They can get—they can aggregate data on it." Yeah, I would say what I found is that the fact that I have "Rev." in front of my name means something to people. It still means something to people. And people say, "Okay, well, he's a pastor, so he knows something about questions of ultimate meaning, and as that pertains to our products and whether people view those as moral or not."

You know, when the Pope puts his blessing on something, you know, the Pope is working—you know, they put out the Vatican put out this statement on artificial intelligence, and the thing that everyone was shocked about was not that the Pope put something out on artificial intelligence, but that they were working with Microsoft and big companies, right? And so it's like, "Well, that's because they understand like if we're gonna shift culture, we actually need to be engaged and have real conversations with these things."

So where's our opportunity to do that? So every church has a different value proposition, and they—it's based on the people that are there. And part of that is we have to evaluate, "Okay, how are we gonna pivot in a digital world to bring that value proposition closer?"

Let me ask something. I love this idea of the pivoting in the value. Let's go. You're talking, you said twenty, thirty, ten years down the road. I would even suggest maybe as a result of coronavirus, I think technology has gasoline on a flame at this point. And I think that's broad. But let's use twenty-thirty as an example. In your mind, does every church have virtual reality? Is every church within ten years, within twenty years? Is it a method just like a church online services, broadcasted, live stream? Like, what is the role of VR and immersive technology at the church level? Be a futurist. Tell me what's going on there.

Sure. Why? I mean, if you've seen "Ready Player One," right? You see what the Oasis is, right? And so the Oasis in "Ready Player One" starts in a gaming community. It's set up to actually be gaming-oriented. So the platform we've created—it isn't just we are launching it because we want to have a value proposition first. So we're launching it with churches, but what we can do is not limited to churches by any stretch of the imagination. And so I don't think it's just churches that are gonna be in VR. I think it's globally. Like, I think I don't think we'll have this conversation like this anymore down the road.

I think that when we can have VR that feels real and is more and more accessible to people, if I can feel like I'm sitting in the same room with you and having a sensory experience that way, why would I not do that if it's—so we're just on the front end of that tech, and that's why we're not using it as much because, you know, it's like live streaming. If you've never done it before, people think, "Oh my gosh, this is so crazy. It's so hard." Right now is the opportunity like you've been forcing opportunity to figure that out.

And so I think there's huge advantages to virtual reality that you don't have in your local church right now. And one of them is as far as your physical environment, you can change what it looks like all the time. You can change it radically. Like, "Hey, I want our walls to be different colors, different shapes. I want the choir to have a thousand people in it and to be perfectly harmonized." Like, you can do that stuff long-term in VR.

The other thing is I think what we're forgetting is there's a huge percentage of the population right now that are homebound or they're disabled, and they don't have a way to get to church. And if you look at statistics for people who are in VR, there's a high percentage of folks who have disabilities. And so they're able-bodied in other ways, but not in ways that the church currently meets their need. And so we're able to actually reach out to more people. We're actually having more multi-ethnic conversations with people because you have different cultural experiences.

I mean, to me, that sounds a lot closer to, you know, the biblical vision of the kingdom of God than, you know, our—and I've served in these churches, you know, our all-white church in rural Ohio, right? And so if you can have that virtual presence, and I also think it's long-term—it's not going to just be that people have virtual components. They'll still have physical components in many places, but I think those will be integrated with augmented reality.

So right now you have a lot of churches that have empty pews, right? But if you could actually see the people who are online and you were in a physical place, and they could see you in a virtual reality, but you could see an augmented version of their avatar from VR in your physical space, your people who were showing up would actually see more of the cloud of witnesses around them, right? And it would literally be in a digital cloud at that point, projecting into the physical space.

But I think those kind of things are things that will come over time. Right now we understand, like, you know, churches are there—there's gonna be a lot of churches that go, "This isn't for me right now." I get that. But I think it's important for us to be leading and pioneering in this area. And churches that are serious about creating long-term digital platforms for their church—this is a space they should be in now because what they're learning in this moment is they should have been live-streaming five years ago. That's what they're learning right now. And they wouldn't have the problems they have right now. They would have had a digital plan five years ago.

Any good ministry is gonna take you three to five years to build. Now is the time to get in and start learning how to do this so that as this develops, you can be in this space. And so I do think it'll be pervasive, but I don't think that's just a church thing. I think it's understanding it's a cultural thing. The church has—we have been, you know, behind the times, quite frankly. You know, even as you and I talked, Jeff, I mean, you're saying a lot of times to it. You're telling people with stuff that people are doing in business, you know, ten years ago, and people in the church are like, "Is this gonna work?" And it's, "Yeah, it's been working. You just aren't aware."

You know, like, so part of that is kind of getting people—what I'd like to see is the church pioneering this stuff as opposed to being behind on it. And that's why, you know, our goal is really from a VR standpoint, you know, to get ahead of the pack if we can. And I think that's really—that's always created some love. That's real good, Chris.

I just as I'm thinking through this and I'm thinking of the crowd that you're coming out of and the crowd that you're communicating to, you know, how are the Reformed community, how is the church, how are the Presbyterian, you know, reacting to these things? Because this is, you know, high church, highly steeped in tradition, you know, in terms of the encounters that I've had, and that's not to—

Say that a lot of them, especially now, you know, post-coronavirus, aren't experimenting with digital forms and in tech. But man, it's just in serious opposition. Even before you came on, Jeff and I were talking about a blog post about, well, you know, church online, cool, but Lord suffer. Know, wait, yeah, oh, we're having that conversation right now.

I mean, my thing is like, look, I, my wife's Catholic, practicing Catholic, goes to St. He's here and then comes in as part of our worship service. So we have to be pretty versed, you know, just in our relationship is the sacramentality. And you know, I think that this is part of why I wanted to get into these conversations and to push this is is one. And you know, in my tradition, it's not just for me to say, "Hey, here's what we're gonna do." We have to. The community needs to be prayerful about that and discern, right? But it doesn't mean that people aren't to have a prophetic voice into that and to speak about what may be coming and to try to get the community to decide, you know, how they should move.

So, you know, our denomination has actually said that it's possible for us to have communion online, but they've kind of made it only like, only in crisis scenarios like coronavirus, right? So they've not actually addressed it. They've just addressed the crisis. And I think part of what we need to do is say, "Hey, how are we gonna have a conversation about that?" And then you really get into, like, when you start kind of getting into the scientific side of it, it's like, okay, so you know, we've talked about, like, in our tradition, we talked about these are common elements, but they're common elements of bread and fruit of the vine, right? Like, right. So in other words, wine or juice is easily what we're referring to. So the question is, is at a molecular level or a particulate matter level, what is significant about the, you know, what is significant about the constitution or ordering of those elements and the way they are that matters to us as we do this?

So is it significant that Jesus picked out a certain molecular structured object for us to participate in? Or, or even at a sub-particulate matter, is that significant? No one's having that conversation. And the question is, is like, well, then, you know, as we think about who we are made in the image of a creator God, is this the only form that we think we can have as human beings? Is this the only way we can be our incarnational? Because as I understand the Trinitarian God, at least out of my tradition, is you have a creator, a redeemer, and a spirit God that, you know, are, you know, three and one, right? And so, you so what does that mean to be spirit, you know, made in the image of a spirit God in a digital world? Like, we've not talked about that.

So, so I think fundamentally we have to start having conversations about the nature of existence and who we are. What I've proposed, and kind of has this is what I've got kind of more popularity for us, like I, I've take it from a perspective of artificial intelligence. And you don't even have to buy my AI argument to buy this, but I essentially say we're not God, right? That's most Christians are going to agree to that, or else they're gonna, there pass, there's gonna set up a time for counseling. So we're not God, right? We're not God, and it that means we're God's AI. That makes sense, like we're not God, that means we're God's work. We're something God created us. We're God's AI. And I don't like to say we're artificial intelligence. I think that's an inadequate word. I think it's better to say alternative intelligence because I don't think my cat is artificial, for example. I actually think it's a living entity and it shows me affection, you know, and so I think it's an alternative form of, you know, intelligence.

And so if you buy into those two things, and what I would say is all matter, everything we experience and, you know, in our existence, all physical matter is divine technology. And we're called to be stewards, caretakers, I would say co-creators, like a child with their parent, of divine technology. And so if you start looking at that, then when we start looking sacramentally at things, it's like, what does that mean if this is divine technology? Why does the ordering matter and the way that it is? And some of those things we might have to leave that to being a mystery and be okay with that right now and leave that mystery there and say, you know what, in humility we don't know why Jesus said this. And so, you know, we're gonna err on the side of caution. And that's where I think the community of faith has to speak into it. All the things we might say, you know, we don't know why, and so we're going to move forward in a spirit of love and ask for forgiveness if we're wrong, you know?

I had a professor at Princeton who said he was really sick and he thought that he saw an angel at his bedside. And his, what he found out later was it was his wife. And I said, "Well, professor, how did you know it was your wife? Maybe it really was an angel." I mean, you know, and he says, "Well, if I get to heaven and God said it was an angel, just apologize, you know? It was an angel." Like, like, do we think God is, you know, if we make a mistake, God is not loving enough that God's gonna take care of us? I make mistakes left and right all the time, right? And so, so, so how do we have forgiveness in that? And I think when we go into that peace, then it's helpful for us to kind of have that balance where we're talking about, okay, you know, as a community, are we willing to, you know, are we willing to have, are we willing to risk ourselves in this way to have the conversation? Or, or, you know, are we gonna live kind of out of a presupposition of fear? And I don't see the gospel telling us to live it, live out of a preset position of fear.

So, so, yeah, are there gonna be things that happened? Sure. We've had, I know a lot of people would have their Zoom conversations act with inappropriate materials. Should that, is they stopped having Zoom conversations? No. They should learn better protocol for how to initiate mercy, right? Like, you know, and yeah, that's unfortunate and they made some fires and they're gonna have to deal with that down the road. But that's part of the learning curve. Better to learn it now when you don't have a, you know, a thousand people trying to pay attention to what you're do. You weren't Zoom calling and live-streaming to a million people on Twitch, you know? I mean, better to find out now while you're learning, right? And it's the same thing.

So, so I'm encouraging people to get engaged. The nice thing about VR is there, say younger commune, it's there. And so it really is an investment for people to engage in in the future for their church. It's it's a present investment, but it's also a long-term strategic investment where a lot of the things I see people responding in coronavirus right now, they're a band-aid. And what I ask people is, how many of the things are you doing right now? Are you doing them in a way that you'll continue once you're able to go back to your, your, you know, kind of typical situation? Are you gonna still do what you're doing? Are you gonna throw all that aside and just say, "Hey, that was for a second"? Because if so, you're not building sustainability, right?

You know, it's ironic, Chris, is that I think many of them think that this is a band-aid, but I think when they return, they're gonna see that there's a new normal. And if they're gonna have to go back to some of those structures that they established during this time period, yeah. Well, and the other thing that I keep, you know, I've got some people who kind of deal at high levels with some of this stuff, but the thing that I keep hearing is saying, "Yeah, well, we might come out of quarantine for a little bit, but we might have to go in a couple times to quarantine." Yeah, and the question is, what's your game plan, you know? And so, so if people are looking at the sustainability and taking an opportunity to do that right now, you know, I think long term it, if you're gonna see the effects of this long term on your ministry, if you don't have that game plan.

But I'm telling you, by 2030, people are gonna have way to give to you. So if you're not looking at a bigger piece, and one of the things that being in a digital environment helps is, look, your audience is exponentially bigger that you can pull from, right? So if you can create a culture of giving online, even if you lose 11 to 22 percent, if you get of that, you can engage those people still and giving, you're still doing that. But can you pick up 11 to 22 percent globally among the population that will still have jobs? Will they see value proposition and what you're doing? And I think that's really important because you're probably gonna lose it in your community. You're gonna lose it in your current immediate community. And you're gonna have to find ways to evangelize. So that's that's not to say that people can evangelize other communities, but I've been in church. I've seen church as I know churches that are in an extremely poor state tuitions in their community, but they've got flourishing ministries because they reach beyond their community. And and what they do is they reach outside word, you know, the places where there are money to bring it back into their community to help their community to grow. And that's an opportunity with the digital church, obviously.

So there's there's a great potential for churches to reach out into this. And I love, you know, I love everything about this conversation, even down to like being involved in micro businesses and finding other ways. It's funny when we go overseas, when we help churches when overseas, we train them on how to create micro businesses and ways to generate revenue to come in. Things cost money. But when it comes to here in America, there's often it's it's taboo where you're not allowed to get into that area because it has to be offering based. And so I love that the challenge that maybe some of the stuff hadn't put that together and didn't even think I was gonna get there in a conversation about virtual reality, but love that that we'd to get to that place.

I wanted to ask this question because you're, you've created, my understanding is you've created a separate platform. DJ Soto, you know, he's doing his stuff on all VR. I don't know a lot about virtual reality. I know I think he's got two or three different platforms and all they are that he, two or three different churches that are meeting in virtual reality. Dude, essence owns, I know there's Rec Room. There's probably more VR type in solutions. Are you utilizing those or are you building a, so we have a separate environment. But what we do is so we'll actually have a larger, you're gonna see, and if people kind of pay attention to what we do over the next, you know, nine months, you're gonna see we're gonna start releasing some other things. But we're gonna have actually a larger platform launch in the fall is the plan at this point. And so that's gonna actually have other elements that I don't want to give away what they are yet. But I think that'll be, whatever, 100 people, yes. But but we're pretty excited about that. We're not worried about people being on the platform long term. But again, we want to make sure that we are creating stable environments right now. Like what we're what we're creating is environments that you can easily double. But really we don't think there's a limit to the possibility on how many people you can have in it.

So what happens is in most these platforms, almost every one of them, you can't get more than 40 people in a room, which is really limited. And so then that's a stability issue. And so we've created stability so that that that number becomes kind of exponentially server based. So but but what we're offering to

People is we can actually create for them a stable environment and then we can actually create and we can create a copy of their church if they want to put in these other, these other platforms. Now they, it won't, it won't be as high-res, it won't be as nice and the other platforms because they're not as stable platforms, but they'll be able to use those if they want to go do evangelistic work and then bring people then over to our platform if they want stability or they want to do things more in volume. And so part of that gives them the ability to do that. And that's why right now we're only focusing on custom builds for people. We're not, you know, just kind of making open-source anybody can do whatever they want to do in the platform because that stability piece is important.

So it's the way to think about it is Church Plus is really kind of the equivalent of the physical church and some of these other spaces right now are the evangelical, you know, spots, the spots where we go out to do our evangelism, right? So they, it's kind of like the world and the church. And so our goal is eventually though to create an opportunity where we create enough services where people like the Oasis and so that's a little foreshadowing of what's to come. If you think about how that was created, so there they're able to come to the platform because they want to actually be able to see the other things that can happen. And so that's what we're excited about is because, you know, I've had somebody recently talk to me about what would it look like to do, because we have Miami Fashion Week, what would it look like to do a fashion show in VR? What would it look, you know, what would it look like if we create all of our camp and conference stuff? So we really replicate our whole camp and conference facility where people can play virtually in it all year round, even when they don't come. That doesn't eliminate what they're doing, you know, I mean, those those kind of things are building communities where people come and they build communities and in their space. We want people to be able to grow healthy communities that, you know, they're not just getting trolled all the time. That's one of the challenges of current VR. And so, so in other words, you can you can have that option depending on what your goals are.

So one of the things we ask you is if you want to build a virtual church, we ask you what your ministry goals are because some people, they want current people, they have to be in that space, they want to use it. Some people want to do, talk a lot of people that are interested in like historically preserving their building in a digital way, right? So you have people that have historic buildings and they know that their historic building might not be there in twenty years, so they have decided that, hey, let's make a virtual version. Maybe they want to sell their property, they make a virtual version and then they could sell their property, you know? So there's all sorts of options for people to, as they think about that, based on what their context is, you know? And so that's what we're looking at. But yeah, DJ has been doing, I know DJ has been doing some small group stuff and we love to do like stress testing because we love to see where we can push limits on stuff. We're hoping, we're hoping here and a bit pushed some world records in VR. And so we've been doing some of that stuff. And I know DJ and some other pastors have actually been helping in that process. So it's really good.

So it's awesome, love that you guys are working together in that. And DJ is a good friend and we need to get him on the podcast to talk more about what he's doing. But great, so like if somebody's got questions on the SVR, if somebody's interested in the platform, somebody wants to wax theoretical about how we are God's AI, which it still just blows my brain every time I hear it, just trying to even unpack that, how can people get in touch with you?

So the easiest way is two things. They can go to Church Plus. If they're interested in developing a VR church or kind of putting their toe in the water on that, so that's CHVRCHPLUS.com. And then if they're interested in some of the work that I've done specifically, they can go to my website, which is christopherbenek.com, B-E-N-E-K, and they can learn more that way and reach out to me that way.

Awesome, yes, so we'll include all that in the show notes. And man, this has been, you know, I knew when I would bring you on I knew it would be a challenging podcast just because we've not been thinking, you know, with that you have to start thinking with the scientific mind and maybe a futurist approach with some of the things that you are wrestling with. And this was right on par for that. So man, thanks for jumping on the podcast, Ray.

Just as we're wrapping up, any last thoughts?

Absolutely. You know, I love Chris's pioneering spirit in terms of pushing boundaries to work not just for the church kids but where the church should be in so church family that are out there and listening to this, I want to encourage you, you know, to adopt the same spirit. Stay open as to where God could take us next, especially in this time we're in the midst of a crisis. All bets are off in terms of where we're headed next. And so if we're gonna keep reaching people, we need to consider any and all methods. And I think Chris is doing a bang-up job with virtual reality right here.

Yeah, so true right there. Chris's word landing the plane here. Any closing thoughts?

Just to say I think it's great. I mean, I think it's great that you're doing the podcast, that people are, you've got people who are engaged and they're thinking about that, you know, to raise point, just to say, you know, don't underestimate the potential of the church. I think we've for so long worked from a position of scarcity and we need to start understanding that, you know, Abraham Kuyper has this quote that, you know, says something effective. You know, every square inch of existence is Christ's dominion over which he cries mine. And you know, there should be no exception for that with regard to technology. This field, this is Christ's. And so we as co-creators, caretakers, stewards of the cosmos, we have to believe that God will equip us if we're willing to listen to what God has for us, collaborate together, you know, use the spiritual discernment of the church to lead the world into that new redemptive reality that Christ has called us to participate in. And so I think that's a reason to get excited about waking up every day because it gives us this wonderful opportunity of bringing new creation into the world. And so pretty awesome thing.

What a great challenge. Our church building structures may be broken temporarily as a result of the COVID situation, but we as a church, we've got an opportunity to shift a little bit. And God has dominion over it all. That's what, man, what a great line right there.

So hey, we're gonna wrap on this podcast. Christopher, thanks for jumping on this. Appreciate this.

Exactly. Thanks, Chris. Ray, this is Jeff with the Church Digital. Thanks for being here and we'll see you next time here on the podcast. Y'all have a good day.