BETA32: Four Types of Digital Only Churches

Hey, welcome to the Beta Show. It's episode 32. Once again, my name is Jeff with the Church Digital Podcast. As always, powered by Stadia Church Planning, we're going to be talking a lot about Stadia Church Planning in this conversation today. Here at the Beta Show, of course, we answer your digital ministry questions online. Go ahead and feel free to text those questions in: 484-324-8724. I'm literally giving you my cell phone number on the air, by the way. If you're watching on YouTube, which is awesome, you can tell that I totally have tape all over my cell phone because I cracked the screen and I'm waiting, waiting for that new iPhone coming out in the fall. So trying to get this one stretched out as much as possible. And I'm too cheap to get the glass fixed. Welcome to the life of being a digital guy. You're always stretching out, trying to hold on as long as possible for that next thing.

Um, let's, I digress. Hey, with the Beta Show, we answer these shows live on air every Thursday. So right now, Thursday, noon Eastern, you can watch this. If you're watching on demand or you're listening on YouTube, Facebook.com/thechurchdigital, as well as YouTube.com/thechurchdigital, check out the Beta Show live. And if you are watching live out there right now, throw in your questions, comments, thoughts, and whatever the social media platform you're watching it, I would love to engage with that during the show as well as afterwards. I actually am seeing a comment right now. Facebook user, I am so sharing this somewhere. Not sure who that is. You got to give permission for us to see the name, but love the fact we're already getting comments coming in on that. By the way, if you're listening on podcasts or anybody else, feel free to text in comments and thoughts as well: 484-324-8724. Once again, that is literally number four, the Church alphabet. Number four of the Church. Type that in on your phone and yeah, give me a call sometime. Text me. That'll be great.

Next week, we are talking seven foundations of a physical church. If we're really going to be effective in digital ministry, what do we need to have? What are the foundations that a physical and digital ministry needs to have for your established church? We'll dig into that next week. That'll be a fun conversation to have.

Ultimately, realize this: Stadia wants to help you find digital purpose in your ministry in this post-COVID society in the culture that we live in. We still, church, established church, church planter, we still need to be thinking digitally. We still need to be thinking physically. So if you're a digital-only church planter, you want to start something from scratch without a building, you want to be a fidget ministry person, you want your established church to understand how to do digital discipleship, you want to go multimodal, your church wants to run different strategies throughout the church, you want to be a physical church, you want to also really understand how to use Twitch, you want to understand how to do kids ministry and student ministry differently using some of these platforms that are out there, look, Stadia, we want to help you. Swing over to thechurch.digital for next steps on all this. And by the way, I freaking have given my cell phone number out multiple times, so there's no excuse to call one more time: 484-324-8724.

All right, specifically with this show, Beta 32, four different types of digital-only churches. Look, digital, there is, is a tool just like physical. And so the building can be used in many different ways. You can have a very charismatic church. You can have a very traditional church. You can have a rock show. You could have everything. I don't know what the opposite of rock show is, but a very organ-driven, choir-based. These are all just tools. And in the same way, in the physical space, the digital is a tool as well. And so you can use digital in different ways, and there's different strategies in place for it.

So right now today, I'm going to highlight four different types of digital-only churches and give you some examples of some churches that are already out there that are trying it out, that are seeing some success, even in this early stage.

So here you go. Number one: four different types of digital-only churches. Digital churches that are aimed at affinity or at people groups. Look, here we go. We've talked a lot about the video gamer church, the trucker church. I've worked with a church planter, a digital church planter in the Philippines who wants to reach millennial creatives in the Philippines and Gen Z creatives. Like, we're talking graphic artists and video in the Philippines. Like, that's what he's designing his church for. I've been talking with a guy who wants to plant a church for Nigerian refugees. He himself is a first-generation Nigerian refugee, and he wants to create a church digitally that connects with displaced Nigerian refugees across the planet.

Look, we're talking about things here. Yeah, okay, video gamers. Maybe that's self-serving and you may have opinions on that. Reaching Nigerian refugees, displaced, like, this is a noble cause. This is things that you cannot do in context of the building. I had the conversation with the trucker church guy just this week, and when I heard it, my head, I'll be honest, I exploded. It exploded a little bit, a little emoji, because it never occurred to me: hey, you can do a trucker church. And this guy's out there and he's trying it. And we're giving him resources and training on how to use in his context Facebook as a platform to better reach truckers. And what's interesting, we'll get into it, it's more than just truckers. You'll hear that in a little bit.

By the way, here we go with this, with this idea. Some people tell me with the idea of reaching affinity groups: look, First Corinthians nine. I've become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. Paul's talking here, and the idea is, Jeff, we really shouldn't focus on specific people groups. We, as a church, we need to be everything to everyone. And here's kind of the challenge: yes, we, the big C church, need to be everything to everyone. But in 2021, I don't know that we, an individual organization, needs to carry the burden of being everything to everyone. Because as a result, really what comes up, and this is a marketing principle, this isn't like some theory, we see this in real life. By being everything to everyone, effectively what we're more likely to be is nothing to no one. Because by making these messages so large and so vast and by trying to reach everyone, we're not actually effectively connecting with anyone.

For it, by the way, and this is what I was hinting to earlier, these, this church of video gamers, or for video gamers, you're not necessarily crafting things specifically for video gamers. This is a conversation that I had specifically with the trucker guy just this week. The truckers church, for truckers, you can search it on Facebook and find it. He's really, he's like, Jeff, I can't just be for truckers. Truckers are married, and so like, I want to be for truckers and for trucker spouses. And so it's not just for a people group, but it's ultimately a group of these people and now possibly even reaching into the circle of influence of who they can reach. Yeah, Gen Run may be truckers. Gen 2, that's next level. Who is within the circle of influence of truckers, and how can you help them with the gospel as you grow and as you multiply your affinity group, your people group church? You may find that you're stretching the limits beyond what your initial impression was. As a result of this, you're going to find that you're ultimately not going to be a church for a specific people group, but you're a church that's made up of that specific people group.

By the way, I want to give a shout out to Mark Lutz, who's the guy that taught me that just within the past couple months. He's doing Lux Digital Church, Twitter Church, and it's phenomenal to see some of the things happening there. Mark, if you're watching, I love you. That was beautiful.

Um, Seth Godin craft messages in such a way that it's not for everyone. Crafted in such a way that it's for someone. You want to get your message heard around the world? It's not tell a billion people. It's craft message in such a way that it's for an individual and get that individual to tell somebody else. Get them to own it and then tell somebody else. We beat that up all day long, by the way.

Uh, we talked about this. Uh, this is a blog I've not talked about this one in a while. What Seth Godin, the Beatles taught me about disciple making. It gets to this idea of you want to craft a message specifically for someone. Do you know the Beatles? There's never going to be another Beatles. And I don't even like, I love them. Ringo, awesome, great. At the heart of this, right now, if there are 40 Google lists, 40 different sub-genres of rock and roll, so even if you're a rock and roll guy, you have 40 different options to be passionate about. And the idea that we can have another Beatles that's out there, probably the closest Beatles we've had at this point is Coldplay, maybe, and Imagine Dragons. Nickelback, okay, I'm kidding, not Nickelback. But at the heart of this, we're becoming such a diversified, a bifurcated society. Thank you very much, social media. It's got to be for someone. Check out thechurch.digital/beatles. You'll find a blog on that.

Okay, that was a lot I just threw in there, specifically talking about number one: affinity groups. Let's get into number two here, and I love this. I just had this conversation yesterday. Digital-only churches, four different types of digital-only churches. Number two: hyper-focused on local, specific areas.

Yesterday, I had a conversation with a digital church planter that wants to hyper-focus his ministry in Los Angeles. He's very passionate about reaching the city of L.A., and what I love about this guy is he does want to do physical things. He's thinking about renting out restaurants and connecting people in regionally in Los Angeles in specific spaces. But he realizes, Jeff, I want to build churches. I want to reach people in the northwest quadrant, the southwest, contra, northeast, southeast. Oh, my hands were totally wrong there. But he wants to reach people in the entirety of Los Angeles, and he can't do that by buying a bunch of buildings. He has to do that by building a digital strategy that's going to connect those people and then doing pop-up events and regional events and strategically doing events as physically as he has the ability to do that.

And so if we're really thinking about reaching cities, especially expensive cities, holy cow, like Los Angeles, would be, yeah, we need to do stuff digitally. That's similar conversations, Pacific Northwest. There's a whole bunch of people thinking this way. I'm often thinking that maybe I should move up to like Oregon or Seattle and like be with the digital church people because it seems like they're all kind of up in that quadrant. Kansas City is another one. I've talked to several people that are wanting to do micro church movements, similar to what Rob Wagner is doing with, ironically, with KC Underground. But they're wanting to use digital as that foundation. And it's like this digital-first that follows up with a micro church, a small gathering strategy within certain regions. And so you can definitely see that happening.

By the way, how much cheaper is that than having to pay for the AVL or the physical building that you're only going to use for that one hour a week? So definitely love that. We've seen, I mean, honestly, I can tell you stories of church planters thinking digital-first by going digital-first. There's a church planter we're working with. There, he's wanting to plant a church in South Africa in physical space. He's not even in South Africa yet. He's living in other countries. A lot of his leadership's kind of scattered around the planet at this point. And what

This planner by Thinking Digital First has successfully launched small groups in 25 countries, something like 75 to 100 cities scattered across the planet. And especially if you're talking about this idea of it's not necessarily ecclesia, it's using digital to be the diaspora, to be the scattering of the church, only to create new ecclesias where they are. My plan, my South African planter friend here, has a start to reach 25 nations, and the dude hasn't even officially launched one physical location yet. He's just thinking digitally first. There's huge opportunities to do things in a big way, and this really gets to the heart of this.

And we actually, I woke up this morning before I got out of bed, I got thrown into a Facebook group that was having this theological conversation about the validity of digital church. Thank you, Matt, and the others that were in there. It was funny. It was not a group that I'm regular in. I think it was like a large church communication group, but I saw a lot of friendly faces when I was in there hanging out.

Digital church is not the abandoning of ecclesia, and so much that's the knock theologically against it. And even what we're doing here with being hyper-focused on a local area using digital, we're not abandoning ecclesia. We're embracing this idea of diaspora, of breaking up the church, breaking up the gathering for the purpose of starting new ekklesias. And so don't look at this as we're abandoning what God but the Bible has called us to, but it's more of we're actually doing what the Bible has called us to by breaking up that diaspora and regathering and starting something new in physical and or digital spaces. This is not a step backwards. This is a step forward that we, the big C church, the Western civ church, that we need to understand.

Okay, I am going way slower than I was planning on going here. Number three, four different types of digital churches: platform-specific churches. We're gonna fly through this one. This is gonna be great. Hope City Church is arguably probably one of the largest Facebook churches, Facebook-specific churches in North America. They do all of their streaming, the broadcasting, all of it through their discipleship. They're small groups. They're using Facebook Messenger, the accountability, the live broadcast, the on-demand stuff, the small group, everything is on Facebook.

Now, look, there's huge wins. They don't have to pay for the platform. There's challenges. If you're not paying for your platform, if you're not paying for the product and using that, then you are the product. And so Facebook controls a lot of the algorithms and things like that. And there's challenges. You got to know how to work the algorithm. Sometimes you get bit by it. What if we, the church, we lose the ability to do church on Facebook? What if they're blacklisted? Do they still have access to the 16, 17, 18,000 people that they have listed within their Facebook platform? These are things that you got to wrestle with. These are not reasons, by the way, to run away from Facebook or any other platform.

There are other platforms. There are other people that are doing things. Robloxian Christians, we've talked a bunch about that. It's a student-led organization, a student-led church that exists in Roblox. If you don't know what Roblox is, your elementary kids probably do. And they've reached 50, 60, 70,000 people. And that's a small number, probably much larger than that in the 10 years they've been around. Why not do church in Roblox? Why not figure out how to do that? I started with a kid who was 10 years old trying to figure out how to do this smarter in all of us.

Lux Church, Love Clan, these are our churches that exist in Twitch. By the way, two different churches run by two different pastors with two completely opposite strategies. Complete opportunities to do church the way that Lux Digital Church is, which feels more like an established church service that he does weekly on Wednesday night, 8:30 Eastern, I think something like that. And then what we see with Love Clan, completely opposite. He doesn't do church services. What he's doing over there, Jake's doing over there, he streams I don't know, 50, 60 hours a week. Honest to God, anytime I wake up in the middle of the night, I open up Twitch, see what he's doing, and kind of throw a chat in there and make fun of him because the dude's operating while the rest of America is sleeping. Because that's when the Twitch people, the streamers, are up. And so he is building relationships while the rest of us are sleeping, which means while the rest of us are working our nine to fives, dudes probably, you know, crashed out trying to catch up on sleep.

You're understanding how these platforms work, and you're taking the biblical view of what a church is, and you are applying that to the idea of doing a church in a social media platform, in Twitch, in YouTube, in Roblox, in Minecraft, in whatever your target audience are, the type of people that would use that. That's the heart of where we're going here. By the way, who needs a building? Talk about this all the time. I'm actually going to be doing a talk at a social media church conference doing just a quick plug here: how to be a church completely on social media. We're going to dig into the theology. We're going to dig into the practicality of this. More information on the conference is socialmedia.church. Dig into that to get more information and to sign up for the conference. We'd love to get you connected there.

Number four, four different types of digital-only churches. Number four is going to be avatar church. Now, some of you with avatar church, you're probably thinking this. Then a V people. Thank you. Was it James Cameron? I don't know of any movie franchise that really doesn't want to get made as much as Avatar. Here is when you hear avatar, this is probably the first thing that you think. Some of you are probably thinking this: Avatar: The Last Airbender. I'll be honest, I don't. This is not my world. Don't really understand it either. But this, when you hear avatar, this is what you're thinking. Hopefully, some of you are thinking this: the whole goggles, the whole virtual reality world.

And ironically, this is DJ Soto, lead pastor of VR Church. Good friends, talk with him a lot, love the stuff that he's doing here. Because essentially what DJ Soto, lead pastor of VR Church, is recognizing is that these people right here, these avatars, the people that are represented by these avatars, these people deserve church. And believe it or not, for whatever reason, and yes, you may think it's weird, but that doesn't make it wrong. Is that these people that are in here are comfortable in this virtual reality world. Yes, some of you watching this probably are not. Arguably, the majority of you watching this are not. But there are enough people in that virtual reality world to make it worthwhile.

I've had conversations with people in virtual reality. I'll be honest, and I've told this story a couple times. There was one in particular: hey, let's jump on a Zoom, let's have a conversation. And it was arguably the most awkward 30 minutes of my life because this person was not comfortable communicating in a physical realm. Even a Zoom realm was uncomfortable for this person. Had a follow-up meeting when talk about some other things, and hey, and this time let's meet in virtual reality. And I gotta tell you, it was night and day because this person was more familiar with doing things in the virtual reality. She was more comfortable literally in her avatar skin than she was when I was looking at her face to face.

Does that, is that a healthy thing? I don't know. There's just probably some things we need to work through on that in the end time. But what's important is if I wanted to get Christ, the idea of Christ, to a person like that, rather than forcing them to come to a building, why don't we go to where they are and meet them literally where they are in virtual reality? Crazy idea, yes. Does it make it wrong? I don't think so.

So we see guys like DJ Soto, VR Church. We also see established churches doing this. We've got guys like Jason Polling who's with, I'm Jason and blank, and I am Cornerstone Church up in Yuba City. We've got lead pastors like Josh Amstutz with Lakeland Church that have established physical churches but are launching completely separate multimodal virtual reality churches reaching a different set of people. And it is a different set of people. Jason Polling will tell you that through his virtual reality church, 80 to 85 percent of the people that attend the church in virtual reality are de-churched. They have been so burned previously by church experience that their first step back to the bride of Christ is through goggles and headsets and virtual reality.

DJ Soto would tell you through his VR Church it's 80 to 85 percent lost people, people that have no understanding of Christ, atheists are coming into his church. Atheists are actually part of serving through VR Church, and it's this beautiful picture of what the church can be as a community. And through that community, we are connecting people to Christ. We need to be okay that there are different types of people, and we need to use tools like digital-only churches to reach people that would only connect with the church in digital-only space.

You know, so the real question is: is an avatar community, is a virtual reality community, is it worthy of a church? Is it? Would you connect with it? Is a completely separate question. The heart of all of these is not: is it effective for you as an individual? Some of you out there, and I have these conversations regularly, fight this idea of a digital-only church. Jeff, why are you leaning so hard into this idea of digital-only? Such a few percentage of people are engaging with this. We're finding right now that Barna is saying 10 to 15 percent of lost people out there, people disconnected with the church, would be interested in the digital-only. Jeff, we need to pour more of our energy into physical and other realms because that would be more effective for today. And you're probably not wrong.

What I would say is there's enough people today that buy into a concept of a digital-only that we have to address it, that we have to swing to it, that we have to embrace the idea of digital, of multimodal, of having different strategies. We have to look at these types of churches and recognize that there are more people to reach that will not go to that building. And we have to see that the pendulum is shifting that way even more so. COVID was an accelerant. And where we're going to be in 22, 23, 24, 25, 30, 35, you are going to see digital become more and more as the culture looks at digital community as a community.

The question that we, the church, have to answer is not: is digital church a community? What we have to answer is: is that community worthy of a church? And the answer I believe wholeheartedly is yes.

Well, hey, we went a little long. I hope this was a good conversation. Four different types of digital-only churches. Once again, Stadia, we want to help you find your digital purpose in ministry. The Church Digital. For next steps, there: 248-484-324-8724, literally my cell phone number. There are many ways that we can get you connected. There's many different approaches that we Stadia are doing, and I would love to usher you and help you in that. Let's get you started on your journey.

And so for that, we're going to wrap. Oh my gosh, there are 19 comments. I don't even know how to get started in 20.

We're still blowing up. I didn't even look at this screen and it's going good. I love this. I'm just going to pick a couple right here before I hang up. Andy Hill: digital is not a threat to physical. It's a complement. Andy Hill again. Jay Earhart is amazing.

He is, uh, look, arguably one of the smartest people I know. Jake, uh, and so love what he's doing. Facebook user, no building here, uh, but now converting pastors third car garage into the church studio. I know couples that have done a couple churches that have done that. Lead pastors kind of working with what you got, and that's the thing with digital. It's so cheap. Why not? It's so inexpensive to do this stuff. How much? I mean, look, I've got a nice rig. I'll be honest, I spent a couple thousand dollars in this coveted season slowly building together even the rig that I'm using. Why not try something? Why not embrace some of this stuff? And do it. Cost is not limited to it. Uh, just because it's weird doesn't make it wrong. Uh, that, um, that I may get that tattoo. Like, I just, I need to follow up on that. That's good stuff. Hey, uh, and some other people are coming on. Stacy, uh, was one of the Facebook users that are out there. Stacy is, and Stacey, I'm honestly on my notes, I meant to reference the church that you guys are doing, literally doing micro church strategy on Zoom. Zoom churches, looking at that platform. Clubhouse churches, others are going into that platform. You're seeing this platform-specific idea come into play to reach a different type of person. Why would we not embrace this idea? If you're a pioneer out there, and we're going to wrap with this, this is beautiful. Thank you all for the comments. If you're a pioneer out there, if you're looking at what's happening in the building, in the rush to go back to the building, and which is not wrong, but if you're thinking to yourself, man, there's something different. There's something we can do different here. There were lessons that we learned in COVID, and I want to figure out how to do that even as we're going back to the building. Numbers on the screen: 484-324-8724. Love you guys. It's been a great conversation, longer than I wanted, but this has been healthy. Jeff with the Church Digital and State of Church Planning, man, let me know how I can help you in your digital ministry. You have a good day.