EP009: Eric Geiger & The Theology Of Church (Ekklesia) Online

Hey everybody, welcome to the Church Digital podcast. My name is Jeff Reed and it is a pleasure to have you join us again today. We've got a great episode and I'm excited about today's guest. Once again, I do have Raid the Armas joining us as a co-host. So hey Ray, you want to say hey to everybody?

Great to be with you guys again. Excited. Great. He's got such an amazing podcast voice. I appreciate that, Eric. Thank you. Good stuff. Hey, oh, we already tipped about though. You're gonna play another game. Yes, the host that was guest. The guest. So hey, guest the guest. That's weird.

Hey, we've got Eric Geiger, Reverend Eric Geiger from Mariners Church, lead pastor on the podcast today. I am moving up in the world. I called in a bunch of favors to get this guy in here and I'm acceptable. And it wasn't that hard. Then listen, Eric, Eric has—we used to work together at Christ Fellowship Miami back in the day, before even Simple Church was a thing, or maybe Simple Church was coming a thing. I'm not actually sure. All that rolled. Yeah, it's around the same time. And also work on that. Yeah. So Eric was executive pastor at Christ Fellowship Miami where I was production guy underneath them. And Ray, you had some—you had some time with Geiger down there as well, right?

Oh, absolutely. I consider Eric to be a huge influence on my life in ministry. Just phenomenal. Very good stuff. Thanks, both you guys. So we're gonna do a little surprise here. Let's play the game of best Eric Geiger story. No, I'm kidding. We're not gonna, because yeah, I mean, Jeff, there is a problem. You, I think you were the one to coin the phrase the curse of the Geiger.

Yeah. Mike's kept going bad whenever I spoke. I will attest to this that I have never seen anyone with this much bad luck when it comes to tech as Eric Geiger. Yeah. And as much as the bad microphones are, it's not nearly as bad as Spanish soap opera on the screen. That was crazy. Middle of your best preaching, a Spanish soap opera popped up on a screen behind me.

Oh my God. Really? No audio, just the video. Theologically now, Jeff, you weren't in charge of that at the time. You know, I was not. I was a mere volunteer. I cannot be out reporting. But James, who was at the time, who's a great guy, I mean, he even looked at me like I have no. I just never in my life I ever thought that would happen. So theologically, it's either the Lord loves me a ton and he trusts that I can be sanctified by those things, or and the enemy's really out to get me because I'm being used by the Lord, or or I just have a whole lot of sin in my life. You know, it's like one of the two things, right?

Or the Lord wanted to reveal that Carlos, once a famed soap opera star, is a member of Christ Fellowship. Yes. And show him in all of his glory. Oh yes. Show him during a sermon. Maybe a little bit of humility and involved in the conversation. But we'll just roll on from there.

Yeah. Hey, so here's what we wanted to talk about here at the Church Digital podcast and try to have some semblance of conversation involved in this. So Eric, I feel like I'm gonna call him Geiger for the episode, and I apologize. That's what I've called him for a decade plus. He wrote an article in response to Dave Amundsen's article about Omni Church, and it was this great thing. And I read the article. I was like, man, I gotta get Eric on here because I want to really hone in on a couple of these points talking about Omni, Omni channel, and in Geiger transported into moving Omni channel in the Omni Church, which I love. But hey, I know Raid the Armas is like every time we talk about Omni channel, he like lights up and goes crazy here on the show. So Ray, man, a two-minute overview. What is Omni channel?

So the idea of it basically is that you're looking at your online church and your local church and Eric, feel free to correct me here, just a little bit more unified light in terms of the way that people are encountering and experiencing not just a sermon content but even some of your discipleship content. Different organizations like Home Depot. I love using Home Depot as an example. When I buy something from homedepot.com, when people ask me where I got it, I say I bought it from Home Depot, whether I went into the store or whether I got it from their website. It's to me it doesn't matter. I just tell them where I received it from. And so in the same way, churches, not just through their content but even through community, have some pretty unique opportunities by keeping their discipleship process and everything aligned in digital spaces and not just in physical spaces.

And so Eric, can you tell us a little bit more as far as how you view omni-channel in the church and how some of that's broken or you kind of changed your mind on things?

No, no, you described it perfectly. So, you know, omni-channel would be—it was a word initially designed for e-commerce and marketing, saying hey, doesn't matter where the customer interacts with Home Depot or Best Buy or any company. They don't care which channel you're in as long as you do commerce with them and have a relationship with them. So if you apply omni-channel to the church, you wouldn't necessarily, to the extreme degree, wouldn't you wouldn't care if the person connected to your church via some social channel. As long as they interacted with the same content, you wouldn't care if that was live or via social. You just wanted the interaction to happen.

The deeper layer, which I didn't spend a lot of time talking about in the blog, you don't have time to really process it, is even an omni-channel strategy like Warby Parker, for example. If you look at them selling glasses, they opened up brick-and-mortar. So they started online and they moved to brick-and-mortar. So it's not only brick-and-mortar companies like Home Depot who then moved online. You have online companies that moved to brick and mortar. And the reason they moved to brick-and-mortar is because their research has told them that the conversion rate is higher in order than it is online. So online, you might have a conversion rate, you know, if you go to Warby Parker's site, you might have a conversion rate of eight to ten percent. They use the word conversion different than we would in the church, right? Sure. But meaning that somebody goes to Warby Parker's site, it would purchase maybe eight to ten percent of the time. But in a brick-and-mortar store, it's usually fifty percent or higher. And so they're like, man, we got—we want to have that. We want to have that level of engagement. So even in e-commerce, and you'll hear more of a term called unified commerce now instead of omni-channel, which is basically all the channels are unified, but even they are like, hey, look, we need—we want brick and mortar because of the high level of engagement that it produces.

So if you apply it to a local church, it wouldn't make you want less face-to-face interaction. It would make you really still value face-to-face interaction because you have some that started online and are moving to face-to-face because they realize the value of it. That's one. The second thing, and I did mention this in the article, Jeff talked about—I do think we have to be careful with the term. It's a helpful term. I'm not against the term. I use the term. But every example you and I have given, we are looking at companies whose role is to have a customer. I don't—I don't want—I don't want to view the kingdom like we're creating customers or that a church is about a customer. You know, the listen, I'm using the term. I'm using the term. I'm just saying we need to carefully use the term because we really are—

Well, I think Jeff Reed's got a famous tweet about, hey, if all we're doing is sitting around, if you're not making disciples, we're just a bunch of guys throwing—what's that tweet, Jeff? Come on. If we're not doing discipleship, we're just a bunch of guys sitting around throwing parties on the weekend. I mean, I'm not saying it's a powerful tweet, but it lives out there. And this is the thing, man. Like, we just fast forward it to the end of the podcast. I was saving the stuff towards the end. I'm sorry. I just—let's just don't jump in the deep end, man. It's great.

So like, I would say to this that you're right. Church as a whole, when they're doing church online, we're creating content, and as a result, because it's content, we're creating consumers online. But when we try to say things like, hey, I can't tell you, got Eric, how many pastors I've talked to has said, no, we're not doing small groups online. That's not my job. I'm not responsible for disciple online. You can't do that. And so it's like, you, we can't do ministry, but ministry is what validates what we're doing with our content to make it a viable opportunity to change somebody's life for real. And I want to be consistent. So like, I'm gonna kind of sound like I'm talking on both sides. I'm a little bit because I'm really just want to be consistent. So the reality is some of our worship services create consumers too. So we have to—so we have to be careful that if we're gonna say that about online, that we also don't say, well, I mean, really, what how different is it really then the worship service that we have? So I'm cool with the creating those conversations now. If the worship service is not only about content but there's times of prayer and there's times of connection and there's times after where there's relationship building, then it is more than about just the content. But if the worship service is designed only for the content, then you really can't look at online as if it's inferior. You know, it's very true.

And it's difficult for people to understand that because even for instance, you know, we're saying content a lot of pastors would struggle through that and say, but I prefer the theological term sermon or something along those lines. So I start with exactly. And it may be indifferent to us, but even they struggle in terms of the theological implications of how some of that lines up and how it hits somebody. Can you talk about and just kind of give a view in terms of the theology behind why this is a great idea to put our content or our sermons online and why we need to provide a next step for people in terms of what's next for them in their spiritual growth, even if they're not in the room?

Yeah, so I always respect when people are consistent in their theology. So for those who are against quote-unquote online church and they're consistent, they don't put their sermons online. And they or they think they're just really careful to be sure it's not called church because they theologically are, hey, the word ekklesia means the gathering, and this isn't a gathering. I respect the consistency of that view, you know? So that's where they're coming from is that, hey, the—it's not truly church because it's not a gathering. You know, now typically that view also believes that a church shouldn't have multiple services even because a church really is one gathering of a group of people. And so if you have multiple services, it's not one gathering. So it's really like multiple churches, you know? So that's that argument.

For me, I look at it as just want to be sure I separate missiology and ecclesiology. Though for sure, we—I don't think we would want to say there's any problem with putting your services out there from a missionary context. Like when the radio went live for the first time and C.S. Lewis ministered to a bunch of people during World War II and helped people wrestle with the claims of the Christian faith, or when television went live and Billy Graham started being—

Broadcasting the gospel, people, no one, no one criticized that, you know, I don't think so. And so online, yeah, it really is. I mean, everyone's walking around with smartphones now, and so we have an opportunity to put the gospel in a context that's super accessible to people. It's just a question of if you're gonna use that as equal to the physical experience. In your opinion, what's the negative? It would church online, like, so if church online is less than, and you've not said whether it is or isn't, and so let's just pretend that's not Europe. You're, I'm not gonna date you, but you're older than me, so your expertise, you're welcome for that. And so you're like your senior pastor, and so people in your age range, some have issue, some don't. What are the issues that church online needs to overcome? So what are the negatives that's keeping it from having being the same as a physical expression of church?

Yeah, I think, you know, the first would be the theological. So in just to realize that there's a can of people who are, who would have it, who do make a great solid argument that it means gathering, and therefore it can't be, it can't be digital, right? So there's that. But I don't think, Jeff, you'll ever win with the, you know, but online is gonna win with those. So so put the theological, that's one group. And then there's the just the practical. It's people who are like, man, I just know personally I'm not super connected. Or I know personally I passively watch a television show, not, and I don't want people to passively watch my, you know, a sermon, you know. Or I know that when I watched something on Netflix, I'm vegging, and I'm not like connecting with a whole lot of people. With those who theorized aren't looking at this from a theological struggle, they're looking at it from a practical struggle. What online, sir, there's just got to overcome is helping people connect, not just listen to content. But even to the theological crowd, I'd say, hey, can we be on the same page? That putting the message of Jesus out into a whole lot of places is, can we put, can we all agree from a missiological standpoint, like just getting the message out, it's good? And I believe most are like, oh yeah, absolutely do that. It's just when you then move it from its missiology to its actual church, right? That's when then you first have to have the theological conversation. And then if you get over that hurdle, there's then the practical conversation.

So the theological definition of church would be more centered around the one hour on Sunday. Ekklesia is really the word for church. The New Testament, there's no, it actually means the called out ones, but then it also means the gathering. So like there's a, you know, I'm not saying that people haven't already gone public with, like Mark Dever, who are who I respect at Capitol Hill Baptist, like he's against the multiple campuses, which you know, I'm not against, and because he believes that the church means he's the pastor of a gathering. So he would only have one service. He wouldn't have more than one service. I'm saying the because the church, the church has to be able to gather together.

I guess the thing that I would wrestle with with this, and I know it's different, and I have five friends who are connected with whatever in that school of thought, and I don't know, make it about Dever, but it's the where does discipleship come into play with this? Because yes, church is the gathering of coming together in a corporate body, but do we not have a personal mission and a calling to go and share and create community on our own? And whether that's bringing it in or going out and investing, like where is that? Where does that lose its flavor in context of online? Because everything that we've talked about, it's still centered around this one-hour service, which is funny. I would actually say that my church isn't the church where I'm sitting in a pew for that one hour on Sunday. My church is the collection of six or eight people that I connect with on a regular basis and live life within context of the Bible and learning about that. So like, what's the word where my theology logically not lining up in context of online? Or is it just an evolution where some people aren't gonna get it, and we're theologically okay on the other side?

Yeah, I think that it would be like, hey, just you know, I want to respect people where they are theologically on that. And I, person where I am, I want to use the tools of the day. You know, Titus 1:2, the pure, all things are pure to those who do not believe nothing is pure. And so basically, that the online can be used for pure things, and it can be used for not pure things. And I absolutely, I want to, I would love to use it for pure things. And I think the church is for sure the mission of a church. And then obviously I want to wrestle with wisdom on how the tools are used to fulfill functions of the church, right? So functions of the church: the church gathers for worship, the church gathers for community that lives on mission. What, how can the online tools be used to help those functions? You know, I'm great with those conversations, and I think those were the right conversations.

We're in a different, we're in a really crazy day now where the average attendance of a church used to be someone who went like twice a week, you know? Like when I got in the game twenty years ago, and I was, you know, a twenty-year-old youth pastor, you know, a good church member went twice a week, you know? You used to tell people in semi-morons, don't only be a Sunday morning Christian, you know? I plugged into something else. That was a normal thing to say. Now, man, the data is just really staggering. If a pastor will look at it, the best way to track it is to just pull out, pull out because you check in your kids every week, is to pull up the number of kids in your church and see how many, like, look at the last sermon series you did, and then look at the percentage of people who came all five or six weeks of that sermon series. And I promise you, you're gonna be overwhelmed with, unless you've already done it, you're gonna be shocked at the people who are just not as consistent as what you perhaps think that they are, right?

So do you want to use online to keep that? Like, if you worked your tail off as a senior pastor in a sermon series, do you want that content to be accessible to people outside of the gathering? Just look at the data, and you probably will. You probably will want that, you know?

Yeah, I know I do. You know, Eric, one of the things that I appreciated about working underneath you is that you always have a strong drive towards guiding people through the discipleship process. And you talked about how people are maybe once a month or twice and others in terms of their regular times. How can folks leverage that online content to help people take next steps to maybe increase their opportunity to being there on a regular basis?

It's the right question, and I think it's something I'm wrestling with here. Our team's wrestling with here. We want to do more than just like use online as a way to rebroadcast our sermons, which we are doing that. But look, how can we use things that we're creating to help people take an even additional step? And so we're testing some things. Like, I did a series in Romans 8, and the third week was the famous, "He gotta kill sin or sin will kill you." And so it was a forty-minute message, but there's a lot of stuff you can't really hit on that weight of a topic in forty, so we did a Facebook Live additional content after the message for people to tap into. And it was like twenty minutes of walking through the famous book by John Owen, "Bigham Mortification of Sin." So we want, we actually didn't just rebroadcast the content, but we provide some additional content, and we view that as a next step. But that's just one test. I don't know if anyone's really nailed this yet. We do need some churches to nail this so that we can have some examples, and I don't know if we'll be one that does or not. At least I don't know if we'll be a pacesetter or not, but I want to, I'd like to use the tools to help people take next steps.

Well, I mean, I tell you what, you know, Garrick, just even one thought. How many multisites are you, you know, there at Mariners?

Well, we see, I mean, some of them are plants that don't have a name Mariners now, and we spun something off. So that carry Mariners name would be three. Others, okay, well, and even on even on the plants, I'd like to, me, I would look at church online as a way to plant campuses and or churches. You know, start to look at the equations of locations to see where you're getting people together. And so it's not how hard, like, I'm actually asking for, want to know myself, but also if I'm a regular, I'm thinking about regular pastors like me, you were listening to this. How hard is it to see those demographics? You know, how hard is it? Is it back in tools on your website?

So any web, any web host can tell you where they're watching it from.

Yeah, I mean, Google Analytics can drill into that, and that's Google Analytics is free. You just put embed code on your website and back into CMS, and Google gives you those reports on a regular basis. And so any given Sunday, you can know where people are pulling from. Now there's other stats and other things like how long they watched, some of that stuff that you can pull in from other sources, but that's a good, yeah, that's a good step. So if you, if I'm a senior pastor listening and I'm like, man, that would help me with my strategy, that's something that they could contact you on, and you could, you could, you could, that's something you could solve somebody on, like, hey, let me look at your, let me set up Google Analytics for you. This is gonna help you know where you could launch something in the future.

Sure, that. And so part of this also is as a result of that, once you know where these people are, start to cluster them together into like a micro location, a house church, a microsite, meeting and meeting in a home, meeting in a conference room or a conference room in this different area, and start to cluster whether it's small group curriculum, whether it's actually doing church services, watching and experiencing it together, doing a watch party or something, you're creating these physical locations. You know, you're talking about recklessly as a separation from you. It's lacking the community and context of online, whereas I would actually pitch there options where online births these ideas around these communities around. And whether you're clustering this for a church planter or microsite, all of a sudden online is the vehicle that's helping you create these pockets of growth instead of pulling away from and hindering.

So if it's truly a unified experience, if you so if you take omnichannel church, that's that idea to the furthest thing here yet, you're committed to a discipleship process. So hang, you ain't your, you'd have both. You'll believe in the tools, and you have a process. You could have somebody who every week they watch at home, every single week. That's that's the service they attend, right? Yeah, their next step to be in a group, and they then aren't they, that they've been show up on Tuesday nights to a physical group, right?

Yeah, I've been there. Step is to serve or to do outreach in the city, and they so I, you know, truly on my channel church would be they can even flow between physical and online environments throughout the whole process, correct? And still feel.

Like they're part of the church, actually, which is significant. But the wrestling currently is most people when they hear online church, they're only thinking the weekend service. They're only thinking one step of the discipleship process. They're not thinking the whole thing.

Yeah, and let me just throw this out there. Sorry, not sorry. Is that not even a fair statement? Let me, let's just be honest. Is that not even a fair statement in context of church where churches itself defines itself a lot by that one hour on Sunday? And maybe not so much. Maybe it's not to the extent of church online, but there are churches out there.

Yes, your uncle with an audiology degree. I think that's why I said you would have to be a church that's coupled with like church for us is not this one thing. It's an overall discipleship process.

Yeah, and that's where, and I'm glad Jeff brought that up because that's some of the struggle that we've seen overall. And I think in the last few years is there are a lot of people who've considered church just, hey, I come for the content, I come for the worship and for the word, and I don't necessarily have any kind of interaction with believers throughout the week or there's nobody who's necessarily helping me grow in my faith in Christ. It's just this one hour of interaction. And this is where not just church online, but church in general can become a dangerous place where I've even really come to appreciate like the work that Robbie Galloway has been doing and just trying to help people grow in their faith by getting them into community even where they're at and helping people take those next steps. That's why those things can be so crucial, whether it's through an online platform for our folks who travel because we've seen that, or whether they're able to gather in person, just because of the accountability.

Yeah, that's good. How do you as a lead pastor, so I mean in Mariners, which is huge in the context of size, California, you've got a wide varying range of people that attend, different demographics, different. How do you make a decision for something like this? Like theologically I'm agreeing with this, I'm not agreeing to this. Once again, I'm not. I don't want to put you on the spot for a decision in that direction, but more of what decisions. Because realize the people that are listening to this are technical people that need to convince someone like you of what the way that they think. And so coach me through here. How can we connect with us as a high level leader to show you some of these things to get you to understand?

Hmm, that's a great question, man. Hey, everybody, this is Jeff with the Church Digital. We're gonna break the interview right here. That was a great question. The answer was even better, honestly. And so rather than go through an entire conversation here as Aragog eloquently answers that question and all the conversations afterwards, we're actually gonna break the episode. We're gonna come back because we just had a great episode in context of omni-channel and unified church. But the conversation that's coming next as we talk about how to talk to your leadership about church online, honestly, it's just a whole other episode in itself. I honestly thought I was landing the plane with something simple, and yeah, it wasn't, but it was awesome. So you definitely want to check out the next episode. We're gonna wrap episode nine right now. Episode ten, Ray, the arm is from Christ Fellowship Miami. Aragog, our lead pastor, Mariners Church, and myself diving into that. How to talk to your leadership.

Hey, if you got any questions on this past episode, check out the show notes. Don't forget while you're there, subscribe to this podcast, man. Support it. Feel free to leave a review as well, as that helps us get the word out and helps us get this content in front of other eyes. But for Eric, for Ray, my name is Jeff. Thanks for listening.