EP108: DJ Soto - Virtual Reality, Final Fantasy XIV, and the Church

All right, we got episode 108 of the Church Digital Podcast powered by Stadia Church Planting. I'm excited to share this episode with you. We're bringing in probably one of my favorite digital-only church planters. Actually, check that—we're bringing in one of my favorite avatar church planters. Now that's a new term. For bringing in DJ Soto, let me back up and explain this idea of avatar church.

So we've got three different models of church. You guys have heard me talk publicly about two. We've got this idea of the established physical church, the church that's at every street corner, the church that's in your community. It's got a physical street address. The 99.99 percent of people attended these churches pre-COVID. And so like, this is the physical church. Now I would probably suggest at this point in 2020 that every church should be phygital. There's a physical footprint and there's a digital footprint of that church. That's why Stadia—we use the term digital, P-H-Y-G-I-T-A-L. And so all these churches are phygital. But I think there's a second model of church, and the second model of church that I would suggest is these digital-only church plants.

Now, we've brought some of these people on the podcast. You've heard from, you know, Angela Craig, Pursued Church Live, who's running an Assemblies of God church on Facebook. We've even just recently heard from Jade Earhart, who's running Love Clan, this video game church through Discord as well as through Twitch. And so like, these are digital-only expressions of church. There's no large gathering in a building. There's no physical footprint. They're aimed at digital community because when they look at digital community, they see a community that's worthy of a church. And so they want to insert church into video games, into Twitch, into Facebook. And so that's the second model.

The third model here is what my friend DJ Soto is doing by creating an avatar church because he's doing this in virtual reality. Now, as I've been studying the three models—the physical slash digital, the digital-only, avatar—to be honest, this virtual reality thing is completely different than the two. It's completely different than the digital-only plant. It's completely different than what's happening in the physical phygital model. Like, what it takes to run, what it takes to operate, what it takes to lead, how do we manage this? And so it's this completely different approach to church.

Now listen, coming out of this COVID season, whatever the next normal is, we need to be multi-modal. There's going to be all sorts of different churches that are going to be created. There's all sorts of different ideas that are out there. And honestly, there needs to be in this season. There's so many different ideas we're all just trying to find our rhythm and trying to subscribe to one specific plan. Well, I think COVID accelerated us away from that idea. And now coming out of this multi-modal, I think you're going to see—out of this COVID season, you're going to see phygital churches do their thing. You're going to see digital-only church plants start to rise in popularity. And I think you're going to see avatar church. I think you're going to see that blow up in the next couple years.

And DJ Soto is a pioneer in this area. And so in this podcast, we dive in: What's going on in VR church? Where are you growing? Where do you expand? What does multiplication look like? How are you doing what you're doing? What does Christmas look like at VR church? Some really interesting conversations centered around virtual reality. And then I pull the thread a little bit, and I'm excited about this one: What is the bleeding edge guy consider bleeding edge? So DJ's already on the edge doing the stuff in virtual reality, creating these avatar churches. What's the crazy idea that DJ's thinking? And by the way, it's awesome. It gets into this idea of—yeah, you know what, I'll go and tease. I'll tell you: MMO video games. How can we use Final Fantasy 14 to connect people to Christ? It's a radical concept. I listen, half of you don't even know what Final Fantasy 14 is. The other half are Googling MMO right now. And when you're realizing what I'm talking about, you're probably freaking out because you can't do church in a video game, are you kidding me? Actually, I don't think I am. I think there's some legs to this, and we're going to talk about it here in the podcast.

So hey, for the conversation, I'm bringing in DJ Soto, lead pastor, Virtual Reality Church, VR Church, in a conversation that I'm simply calling "Virtual Reality, Final Fantasy, and the Church."

Okay, everybody, here you go. Having you—ain't even getting to know you outside of, you know, through some of the contacts with Stadia—but tell us here a little bit. Some of the audience that's listening, tell us about what VR Church is. Maybe they don't know. Maybe they haven't heard some of those older episodes. And so yeah, like, you're doing church in virtual reality, and somebody's head out there just exploded. So tell us a little bit like what VR Church is and maybe some of the improvements, some of the expansion that you've done maybe since the last time we talked.

Yeah, VR Church was started in 2017. I guess technically 2016 is when we first started holding church services, but when it transitioned into a community, that was in 2017. I was a pastor of physical church for many years. I felt God called me to do something new, and what I thought new meant was physical church plants. But about that time in 2016, the Oculus Rift came out. This is the first consumer-level virtual reality. And VR has been around for a while—I don't know, there's different eras of VR—but not necessarily to the degree where you could walk into Best Buy and go to Amazon and purchase it. That's new. We've never seen that before. And so in 2016, when VR was made to the consumer at a very compelling level, like an Xbox or a PlayStation or iPhone—it's very functional and very user-friendly, used at home—we jumped into it because we're a family of technologists. And we got into it and just discovered the metaverse. You know, people from all over the world in their avatars in this immersive setting, walking up to them, shaking hands, saying hello, experiencing these events. And that's when VR Church started to form because I saw this unique opportunity that I thought was extremely compelling to experience the life of a church in virtual reality.

So it is, in short, we launched Virtual Reality Church. It exists entirely in the metaverse. We don't have a physical location. And so at the time, that was pretty, you know, ridiculed and or disregarded—maybe is a better word. Maybe not necessarily ridiculed, but it's interesting to see now how the attitude has changed quite a bit as far as virtual reality church is concerned.

And so yeah, it's been a unique and awesome journey. We fundamentally—my wife and I are at the core—our church planters. So we've been planting multiple churches within virtual reality. So you can think of them like virtual cities. If you see like New York, Paris, Tokyo in the same way, but different in VR, there's these metaverses: Alt Space VR, VR Chat, Rec Room, Facebook has their own city that's coming out. And so we plant in all these different cities. And so fundamentally, VR Church at its core is a church-planting movement in virtual reality.

And so we've been doing that. If we want to borrow physical church terms, we have five campuses, or maybe we call them church plants. So we have five church plants across the metaverse, different time zones—some for the European, some for UK—all English-speaking at this point, but we're working on an international service as well. It's been in the back of our mind. We've experimented with it, and it's just fantastic. It went really well. It's just a matter of getting it integrated into our systems and our capacity.

And so yeah, that's where we're at. We went through a big reorganization this past fall—big one. And at the core of that was: when we started VR Church, we tried to replicate the physical elements of the church, the physical structure, the physical construct. There's not necessarily anything wrong with that, but we're in a different universe. And so what we felt like God was leading us to do is not replicate but reimagine. So we've just been—we went through a big reimagination process this past fall. And there's a lot, you know, people may wonder what's that about? And I think it's just the way that we approach church. I don't know the attitudes are in our attitudes, but the way we express it is definitely been different in the metaverse. And the way we deliver sermons—they're not on stage. We experience them. We build these worlds so that reimagination is leading us to many beautiful things. And we're still seeking what that means. I don't think we've answered the question we were asking. What does it mean to reimagine? I think we've begun to answer it, and we're starting to see the fruit of that.

So yeah, this fall was pretty hectic, but looking forward to where we've set things up now for the future, I think is really good. It's really going to be just positive and exponential.

Well, I tell you what, COVID certainly helped with accelerating and getting more people engaged in virtual reality and more people engaged with a digital church and things like that. And I want to pull a thread here a little bit because we were, you know, obviously you hinted towards it—it's a reimagining that are recreating it in virtual reality. And I steal that language a lot from you. I give you credit half the time. I want to tell you when I'm talking towards like planting digital churches—example, like, you know, Jade Earhart, who's a mutual friend actually, was on the podcast just last week with some of the stuff he's doing with Love Clan. So like, even what Jade's doing with creating a digital expression of church, there's certainly a level of reimagination getting into some of the stuff that he's doing with Twitch and using that as a front door to feed into disciple-making. And so there's a level of reimagining towards digital churches. But I haven't really talked about this much. There's like this third category that I would say where you really get into avatar because the jump between physical to a digital-only expression of church, I think, is one jump. But even how avatars operate—as I've been more, you know, getting connected into that culture and hearing stories and seeing what's happening—it's avatar is a completely separate thing than the physical or even the digital-only. Would you agree with that?

Yeah, yeah, it's different. And so here's, and this is where it's tough to have this conversation. I was talking about this with somebody: oftentimes, like, virtual reality or let's say digital churches get pitted against physical. So we're always trying to compare the two. And I'm trying to get away from that. I'm trying to get a way that they all—that maybe, you know, especially in COVID, we've come and evolved to the understanding that they both can exist and they don't need to say which one's better, which one does this better. We can just do well in physical, we can do well in digital and virtual reality.

So that's just a long way of saying: when I say, when I talk about avatars and interactions, it is a superior experience. And again, the reason I say when I bring that qualification is because I don't want it to sound like it's better than physical. It just stands as its own as a superior experience. And that's because you're meeting people face to face again. You think of like just walking up to someone, seeing them, you know, shaking hands, saying hello.

It's just that immersive face-to-face elements that I believe church online is going to evolve into because church online right now is in a 2D environment, you know, where we're consuming a broadcast and perhaps there's a chat with interaction, which is fantastic. I love that form of church online. But then church online in the future is going to evolve into 3D interactive virtual reality environments and perhaps even augmented reality environments, and maybe there's a mix of two, and you know, we could throw on terms like mixed reality would probably be a better term. So I think that people when they haven't experienced VR and they don't know much about the avatars, they think it's weird because it is. When you see like a 2D image of your church, it doesn't seem that compelling. But when you're there, it's completely different. When you're walking up to people, you see Jim on the other side of the room. You see over there, you want to go talk to her. It brings back that serendipitous interactions that perhaps a 2D broadcast is limited to. And so I think I've talked about that before, like those avatar interactions. But one of the things I haven't talked about is the sophistication that these avatars are being developed. So right now, or no, things have evolved. There's kind of like a version two of avatars happening in the metaverse across all of them. But version one kind of looked like the Nintendo Wii's characters, not very, just kind of like polygon, you know. And I think when you looked at it, you go, "Oh, that's not very interesting." Version two is becoming more expressive with eyes and facial interactions. And then what I've seen some glimpses of avatars that look like photorealistic, like skin tones, you know, just elements that were just mind-blowing. And that's where we're going. So sure, in the early years of VR, the avatars don't seem that interesting. But the evolution and the glimpses that we've seen, you're gonna have a photorealistic image of yourself. Like this past Sunday, and this has actually happened, this past Sunday, President Barack Obama was at church. Not him himself, but an avatar, photorealistic, just looked like him in real person, I mean, as close as you can get at this point in the tech, was at church. And so it's just those elements that make it all that more immersive. And then another level to talk about is people will say, "Well, what about the tactile experience? Like, you know, you can't hug people, you can't, you know, shake hands." But I just ordered a haptic vest and that's coming in, you know, hopefully before Christmas. And so that haptic vest I'm gonna put on is gonna create, like, if somebody taps me on the back, you know, I'll be able to, "Oh, someone's, you know, right next to me." And so the technology is evolving quickly and in a way that's just something that we can't even, you know, kind of, you know, measure. And in the future, 2030, can you imagine? You know, VR is going to be a little pair of glasses. You'll have a light haptic suit on. You'll shake people's hands in VR and you'll feel the feedback in the haptic environment. So yeah, it's pretty wild.

Yeah, there's a lot to say about avatars. You're just taking me all the way to Ready Player One right there.

Yeah, I remember a couple of those scenes. That's like that's one of my daughter's favorite movies right there.

Okay, hey, yeah, I love this idea of the virtual reality as you said, it's gotten much easier. It comes down to the place I think the Oculus, instead of, I think it's the Quest 2, is now the model that's kind of out this Christmas that seems to be like that was it, like the $199, the hot Christmas gift to really get into the entry-level virtual reality.

Yes, yes, I think it's $299. And if people ask what, there's a there's many different headsets being developed. I mean, some like these 8K resolution, you know, wide, you know, field of view, but fundamentally I think there's two leaders and that's Oculus and Valve. Or, and so generally speaking, for most people, I would say Oculus Quest Two that just came out is the one to get. It is fantastic. It is untethered, which means you don't need a phone or a computer to connect to. You can just use it wirelessly, or you can connect it to your PC if you wanted to for more higher-end VR experiences. So it's a multi-purpose unit. It is fantastic. Rave reviews. People that were like one of my elders was real reluctant about it, and then he got it. He was like, "I was totally wrong. This thing is amazing." So like this Quest Two, for hardcore users, man, because there's people out there they're like, "Man, I'm a technologist. I want the best and what the most powerful," and that would be the Valve Index. And so that was a little more pricier. I think at a thousand dollars for the Valve Index, and you need a really good computer to run it. So you have to do a little system check on that to make sure you can handle VR. But yeah, for the Valve Index, that's another level. And that's like full control of your fingers. Like I'll see people like, you know, moving their fingers in virtual reality. I was like, "Oh, they have a Valve Index." And so full body motion as well is compatible with the Valve Index. So for me, I use the Oculus. So generally speaking, my avatar just rotates. I have head rotation up and down, six degrees of freedom. My hands have six degrees of freedom. So there is like a torso, head, you know, arm interactions. But the Valve, and if you get the, I forgot what they're called, the, some like motion points or something like that, but you connect them different parts of your body. And when you see those people, you can, you know, immediately their full body because they're just so fluid. Like every part of their leg moves, their knee bends, that's what their avatar does as well. So yeah, I mean, we're talking about like some groundbreaking technology that's pretty wild. And so like through you, through VR church, you're planting five churches essentially at this point. It's, you know, I know through all VR you've got one like in the Americas, I believe Europe, I think Asia Pacific, just like time slipping time zones to make it more appropriate for those areas. And you're in Rec Room, which I think gets you into a PlayStation VR if I'm familiar, right? Like what are the different platforms that you're on?

Yeah, yeah, so AltSpace VR, that's owned by Microsoft, and they're accessed by most headsets. There's VRChat, which is like Ready Player One. I mean, Ready Player One is here in VRChat. It's but it's still like the wild west. I usually don't. I usually when people want to come for the first time, I tell them to go to AltSpace because VRChat is definitely the wild west of VR. It's an amazing place but just wild. And then there's Rec Room, and Rec Room is interesting. I think that's the dark horse of this internet or this metaverse race. So you think of like, you know, the browser wars, you know, back in the day it was Netscape and Google or Chrome, and you know, all these nets, you know, back in the day. Yeah, and then social media, like, you know, Facebook, Snapchat, and so there's this metaverse race. I don't know if it's anyone's pointed that phrase, but it's just my observation where you have AltSpace by Microsoft, you have VRChat, you have Rec Room, and then Facebook has their own called Horizon. So people might not even know about Facebook Horizon. That's in beta. It hasn't been released yet. So you have these different social media, for lack of better words, social media virtual reality platforms. And so those are the ones that we are across. Rec Room is very interesting because it's the most accessible. Like it's on the Xbox, the PlayStation, the Quest, the VR, and you can do it. It really is an incredible platform. We've been keeping an eye on that for sure. So these are the terms that sound a little bit enigma at first, but in the future it's gonna be like Google or Facebook. It's just gonna be terms, you know. Even though right now you're like, "AltSpace, what?" But later on in the future, you know, we'll be using those words quite a bit. That's exciting. And so you're planting a church, I mean, just like you would like a church in New York City, you're planting a church in Rec Room. And there's independent teaching, video teaching, like what? And you mentioned earlier like the world buildings and stuff like that. So like tell me a little bit about what an experience would look like in virtual reality.

Yeah, so we started out like at the very early on, like 2016, trying video teaching out just because, you know, I was just transitioning. I didn't necessarily have time to prepare sermons. And so we tried video teaching, but it really, I mean, you don't go into the metaverse, you don't go into virtual reality to watch a video. You go in there to experience things. So we quickly transitioned into live teaching and then eventually world building where we're creating these elements of scripture for people to experience. Like imagine walking through the Red Sea, and then we'll recreate that and walk through it as a church. In one sense, it's almost like a tour or a ride, amusement park, right? In one sense, where we don't just sit in the building, we're actually out there moving about and experiencing things. And so there's elements that are familiar. Like if you come to VR church this Sunday, you'll spawn in, you'll see, yeah, and the in the front door you'll see the building there. You'll hear music. You'll see people milling about. If you come in, you know, there's a countdown going, and then after that there's, you know, announcements, vision casting, worship music, and then we do a sermon. So there's definitely familiar elements. But where it becomes unique is when that sermon starts to kick in and we leave the building and we start to go to these movie sets, if you will, to experience VR church. And so that's where VR shines because VR represents the new era that we're coming into, which means the information age is coming to a close, but the experience age is about to begin. And the experience age is that of VR, AR, mixed reality, and all those things. And so VR church reflects the experience age where church is experiential and tactical. That's what churches are gonna move into. And so your, maybe your stage design team is gonna evolve into, by 2030, let's say, you know, who knows what year, but just for sake of argument, 2030, into a world building team. You're going to be designing not just props on stage, like world, you're going to be building worlds with your mind, kind of like in Inception with Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page where they're just building. And so in the same way, church is going to evolve into that, and church is going to shift, hopefully, you know, I know churches we have struggle, you know, getting into new technologies, but they're going to shift into that experience age, and the services are going to reflect that. So like, so for you, is your experience maybe even what you're doing for like Christmas 2020 here, like are you going overkill on like red balls and green balls and Christmas trees and ornaments, or are you like recreating the Bethlehem with the star? Like what's the level of imagination are you guys bringing at least today in 2020 when it comes to these world buildings?

Yeah, I mean, certainly decorations, but yeah, fundamentally that's where we're going is recreating Bethlehem. So, you know, I was just working on the design a couple weeks ago. So I just write down some notes. I read the scripture. I write down some notes. Usually we try to build out a month ahead. And so I think they're building even tonight for Christmas, and it'll take anywhere from, I mean, four to eight hours, just depends. Our world build team works very really quickly and a lot of great.

Tools in these metaverses, so I'll jot down some notes. So I said, "All right, loot two looks like, you know, um, there's a decree. So let's have a building like a sign that says, you know, census, or, you know," and then I said, "Okay, there Mary and Joseph are on a journey. Let's create that road. Let's cart a donkey, you know, all that stuff. Let's go, let's get the end, let's do it." It says no entry, and so we're creating that tour, that experience, or that ride all the way through to these epic moments where we have the angels in the shepherds field, you know, singing, you know, "Glory to God in the highest," and then we have, or certainly we have the manger. Just we're going to be able to walk in the manger and hang out with, you know, the animals and the nativity scene. And so all that is experienced. We'll read the scriptures. We'll experience it. A lot of what we do is try to cast them out, imagine you're there. Because here you are, we're walking into Bethlehem right now.

And so that's like AltSpace, or the Rec Room build team has their own. They're gonna do their own thing, and it's gonna be very similar. They have a lot of unique tools where they can do some really epic things. VRChat, the one that's like Ready Player One, we'll be doing some more character-oriented because each of these churches are very different. In the VRChat one, we are going to find characters like the Mary and Joseph and the angels with like wings. So this is more than just like, you know, maybe you've gone to a Christmas cantata or whatever they call it, where, you know, there's an angel costume. I mean, this is like, you know, like a ten-foot angel in VR with animated wings and lighting effects. And so, yeah, there's so much you can do in VR. The, um, you know, the sky is the limit. I mean, you can just, there's just so much to think and do, and we just have a really creative team and they do an amazing job. So yeah, we're looking forward to Christmas. I think it'll be a big event. I think for physical churches, their biggest Sunday is Christmas, but ours tends to be, even though we'll do a big Christmas for sure, ours tends to be the week after, or the couple weeks after, because everyone unboxes their VR and gets it charged up, discovers VR church, and then, um, so we've noticed the past couple years that, you know, Christmas is good and good attendance, and um, and then the next couple weeks are just like boom, there's like ton of people there. Um, so that'll be fun again to see, especially with the Oculus Quest 2 out. I mean, yeah, everybody's everybody's breaking out their new toys. That's awesome. Yeah, how do they, how do they find you? They just like, is like, how do they VRchurch.org? Like, how do these people with these new headsets, oh hey, look at this for your church?

Um, a couple of different ways. I mean, we've had a unique story that's unusual just because we've had received a lot of press. So a lot of people have heard about us, you know, maybe through Wired magazine or through BBC or the Today Show, and so they've it's in the back of their mind that there is a VR church, and once they get VR, they've come. So that's definitely an avenue. We've had a couple of collaborations with some YouTubers about VR shirts that have reached like a million and a half views or over a million views, and so a lot of people discover us that way. Um, and once they get VR, um, but and then real quick asterisk, all these platforms have a 2D mode. So I think people think, you know, they can't come to VR church unless they get VR. Um, but though you can come in with as a download client on Steam. If you have Steam, you just download AltSpace, VRChat, Rec Room, and you can come to VR church. You'll be in 2D mode. It's a different experience, but very still very interactive, still very interesting. Um, and so yeah, they'll discover us, you know, through YouTube, through some news articles. Um, if they discover AltSpace, we're on the calendar of events, so they'll go and they'll say, "Oh, there's a VR church here on Sunday." Um, and so, you know, they'll discover us that way. So there's multiple different avenues where people discover us, and it's funny to see. I mean, we've been around technically since 2016. Here in 2020, when people discover like, "There's a VR church," like blows their mind. You know what, there's a VR church? I was like, yeah, yeah, come visit, you know, you'll have a good time. That's crazy.

And there's even, I know personally I'm working with a couple churches that are wanting to start a VR campus. I mean, they're really wanting to create another expression of that. We recently did a podcast with Jason Polling. I know another mutual friend who's with, um, it was a Cornerstone Church, I think up in the Pacific Northwest. I think, yeah, yeah, Pastor Jimpo. Yeah, yeah. And so he's doing, um, I'm not, I'm not in with him like you evidently. I don't know the J-Po thing. That's that's okay. That's what I have to tell them. Um, but yeah, and so like, they're they're doing virtual reality live services and physical buildings, but then also creating a completely separate virtual reality experience. And so like, even JPo evidently has been telling me, "Hey, he's like, yeah, I'll preach the service live in the building Sunday morning, and then he'll preach live in virtual reality Sunday night," uh, and just creating that that completely separate experience for that.

Let me let me throw a curveball at you. I just want one to see what are the challenges? Because I know you've got a background of physical, uh, you were a lead pastor as I recall, right? And I know you've done a lot of campaign. You were a campus pastor. That's right. So you're you're a campus pastor. Obviously you understand, um, you know, the megachurch multi-site model, the physical church environment. What challenges is somebody going to have that if they're going from like a physical ministry to wanting to create like what JPo did, creating a separate virtual reality call it a campus? What, what, uh, challenges, our issues, they're going to face? What do they need to think about heading into that?

Um, what do they need to think about? Yeah, that's a great question. Um, I think that they're gonna, uh, maybe it depends how open and close they are. Like, if they make it really limited, like only our church members, which might not be a bad idea to start because we're used to accustomed to dealing with trolls, disruptions. It's actually we don't even think about it. Um, so there is an element if you're just getting into it, you're opening up your service to, um, you know, everybody, which, you know, people in their chat, you've seen trolls come in into an internet chat, you know, church chat room and do whatever they do. And so you're going to see that in VR as well. And so I think just getting prepared for that mentally, I don't know that it's a hurdle or a challenge. It's just just being prepared. And there's a lot of great moderation tools to deal with that, to mute, to block. Um, and they've been increasing those tools even more and more. So particularly our AltSpace service, I mean, is very moderated, very can we can control it very, very well. Um, VRChat still has some work to do with anybody from VRChat watching. I love your platform, but it is, man, you got some broken tools there. Rec Room's great too as well. So, um, and everyone, everyone at VRChat knows that it's kind of like everyone knows this is a, this is glitchy and uh, have some issues. But, um, I think that's that's one of the main things. I think, and it just is the next step for church online in my brain. If you have a church online experience right now, uh, virtual, a virtual reality campus is a no-brainer. And that's something that could be started immediately. I mean, I'm sure maybe you want to build a team around it or, you know, cast some vision, but it's it doesn't need to be five years from now. You can get a small VR team going, um, you know, headsets are only 299.

And it just makes complete sense to take your experience uh from a 2D chat interface into a face-to-face interaction. And so I'm actually kind of surprised that we haven't seen more of that. JPo is the leader in the hybrid model, and he's been doing, they do, they did a phenomenal job. But I hope, man, I would love to see some other churches get and get involved in in virtual reality, a campus, small groups. I mean, you name it. Something I think is inevitable. I think the technology is inevitable. And hopefully they do. Hopefully, I know, and I'm not talking about everybody, but just generically speaking, the church goes kicking and screaming into new technology, you know, the website. You know, internet's evil, let's not do a website. All social media's evil, let's not do. And you know, we just keep going down this line. And um, unfortunately, that attitude has really left us, and again, I'm speaking generally, unprepared for COVID. You know, there's a scrambling and this desperation that's happening that didn't need to happen at all. And so in the same way, I think as we look into the future of next-generation technologies, okay, sure, it might be years out, but start experimenting with it. Start getting some headsets. Get a little crew going. I mean, you don't have to announce or launch anything. You can just start experimenting. And I think that's key so that when the time comes, you're not starting the conversation. You've already had it. You've already experienced it, and you're ready to start, you know, integrating it. And so I think it's really important.

Yeah, I mean, that we'll put a link to the JPo episode, um, in the, in this, in the show notes. Phenomenal conversation. It was, I joke, I joke with him. Uh, he couldn't spell VR, and seven months later he had a VR campus. Yeah, yeah, and it's just, it just, it was seven months. Hey, this is interesting. Let me dig into it. And some volunteers were interested. And I think he said he spent five thousand dollars, eight thousand dollars. It was it was under ten.

But to create this, this, uh, you know, opportunity to connect with people, phenomenal story. And it's like he's a, he's a three-hundred-person small church. Like, it's not like it's a multi-giga. This is just like, this is a passion go for it. He almost had an easier time, I think, than than some of the, some of the larger churches.

Let me bring up a quick point if you don't mind. Um, and that's that speaks to technological leadership. Um, that's what, when we're looking into these next-gen, man, maybe not even next-gen, maybe just this current social media, live streaming, maybe just start there. We need to be looking for the technological leaders in our church, and that doesn't necessarily mean IT. Just because someone can do, you know, set up a server, amazing, and run a network doesn't mean they have technological vision. They might, but I've interacted with a lot of great IT guys that don't have that vision for next-generation technologies. They're great at implementation. Um, and so the reason I say that is that I don't know that you would, you know, take a quick glance and see, "Don't just say, all right, give it to the IT," you know what I mean? That may or may not be a thing. But look for technological leadership. I think that's a distinction, and again, it could be the same. But, um, and so look for that leadership and empower them. And so I've had, we have people come to our church that, you know, they've gone to their pastor and, you know, pastor says, "You know, how can you help us out here at our church?" And they're like, "Well, I can do 3D modeling, and I can do this, I can do that." And the pastor's like, "Oh, we don't got any of that, right?" And so you have the people in the church with the vision and the technology, and we just, you just need the leadership for it. And so what surprises people is that I'm not really very technical to the degree of, I don't know, Unity or Blender or all these, or Maya. I don't, I don't know all these things. I wouldn't know how to build a world. Um, I have other people.

Do that for me but what I do shine in is in technological leadership, you know, passion for the tech, um, the capacity to lead people forward. And so I think that's—I think that's powerful. So it's in the churches, you know. So when you think of current technology and next generation technology, it's there, man. You just got to find it and encourage it, empower it.

So if a church was one—I was totally not even thinking we were gonna have this conversation, but it's fun. Let's just keep following the rabbit trail. But church is one to start a campus. I mean, obviously the world building, the technology, get the headset, understand the culture of the people. Um, there's challenges. There's things we're gonna have to overcome because, once again, it's not recreating what's done physically digitally. It's reimagining the ecclesiology and doing it within virtual reality.

So maybe what are some steps? What are some challenges? What are some of the differences between the physical and more practical? Yeah, technological definitely differences, but more practical. How's that pastor going to preach in virtual reality? What do those small groups look like? How do you create community with virtual reality where you can't hug people and they can't afford the haptic suit? Yeah, like let's make some practical insight here.

Yeah, that's some good questions. Um, my brain's running through a couple of different things. Um, and so one of the things I think—and this is not necessarily a bad thing—but when you think about virtual reality, you're looking for individuals that are going to dive into the tech. So I know some physical church pastors that are amazing pastors, kill it, do an amazing job. They would be horrible digital virtual reality pastors. They couldn't manage like the tech or whatever. And so what I think—the reason I say that, maybe I'm getting off on your question here—is just a kind of a thought I wanted to go on. Um, is that there are people that could be amazing digital virtual reality pastors that might not be good physical pastors. So um, it's just kind of viewing things through a different lens to see who those people are. So to not just look at them and go, "Oh, they wouldn't be able to lead a church of a thousand." Well, no, no, but they could lead a thousand digitally, hands down, easy. Um, and so um, I think that's an important part, you know, just to mention as well. But um, I think I got off track on your question. What was the core of what you're asking again?

Just what are some—by the way, I love that. I'm—let me back up to your offshoot. I have thought—it's one of the things with Stadium where we're evaluating digital-only church planting, like planters that want to plant digitally. A lot of that assessment, um, I think in the experiments so far have showed that the assessing for a physical campus pastor is completely different than assessing a digital campus pastor or a digital pastor. Physical pastor, digital pastor, lead pastor role. Because the comfortability, the communication styles—you're not standing in front of a stage speaking in front of thousands. You're building relationships with individuals, and it's more stronger on the disciple-making piece. And I would imagine that's even amplified even more so that you need to be more relational in virtual reality because you're overcoming that coldness of the technology. You really can't be distant in virtual reality. You have to lean in into those relationships and into those people. Virtual reality and digital church planting as opposed to, you know, maybe if you're preaching, you're lead pastor of a thousand-person church, you can probably have some more anonymity there.

Um, it's interesting. Let me—I want to ask you this. I forget the other question. There was a—I was having this conversation with Jade last, uh, literally the podcast episode from last week, and he made this statement. He says, "When I'm on Twitch and I'm broadcasting, I admit that sometimes the number of people get so big I cannot communicate with them effectively, and I feel bad that I'm not ignoring them because I've got so many people following me I can't give them adequate attention." And this is why he wants to, and he's in the process of training others to broadcast. It's not "I want a million people watching my broadcast"—and I may be overstating here—but he wants a hundred thousand people broadcasting to ten. And so it's more of a smallness and intimacy versus having the big giant broadcast following, right? I'm just curious, and I don't even know where this is going to go, but what does that look like in VR, in virtual reality? You've got five churches already. Was there intentionality of, "Man, we really want to keep the church this size and we just want to multiply out that size," or are you—is it more scalable? What's your track record on that? What do you think?

Here's what I love, and it's not necessarily by our design. It's because I think it's a platform designing us. Meaning, um, each platform is different and it has different constraints. So our AltSpace church tends to be our megachurch model. It's just a large event, you know, screens, you know, it's just kind of the lights and the smoke almost element to it. Um, Rec Room has limits on their room number. So in AltSpace we can technically have unlimited people in our service, you know, hundred, a thousand, whatever. Rec Room limits to like thirty. VR Chat has a network limit. I think you can have it up to forty, but network limits up to twenty. And then now you have Facebook Horizons where eight are in a room. So we have these different limits of how many people can be in a room, and so that's been dictating us in a beautiful way, in a good way, where we have different models of church in the metaverse—megachurch all the way to the house church model. And that's when we go into Facebook Horizons, it's going to be like a house church model, small gatherings, house to house type of thing. And so I think that for us it's both. We're able to focus on a handful and we're also able to have those large-scale events. So I think we're blessed to kind of be in both worlds, you know what I mean? We don't have to be just the house church and we don't have to be just megachurch. We can actually be all of it. Um, it's pretty awesome.

Yeah, and I love it. I love that. Um, I love that we're experiencing church that way. When—yeah, I don't think you said when does Horizons, Facebook Horizons come? Is there a street date on that?

Um, I don't know. They haven't given a street date. It's in beta right now, closed beta. So some of us have access and we've been exploring the worlds and hanging out, and so it's been cool. But I don't know when that's going to be, and I don't—you don't seem to see it on Facebook much, so I don't think they're talking about it just yet.

But in beta, is it—is it attached to—I mean, it's your Facebook profile? It's your account? Like, it's like you're the mobile app and Horizons are all linked together? And it's a social—me like that is intriguing to me. And I, I would—this is kind of going off, and this isn't necessarily prepared thoughts, but just a thought—is I think it's going to do wonders for Facebook in the positive way. I think Facebook has a lot of negativity directed towards it, you know, and maybe maybe fair enough for good reasons or whatever. But you know, there's comments can tend to be negative, you know, misinformation, you know, there's all these things swirling around Facebook, you know, anger. But what Horizons does is it puts you back face to face talking with individuals, to hanging out with a group of people, and there's an immediate sense of camaraderie that I've noticed. So sure, there's a troll here, there's a troll there, but that's a—those eight people interacting in Facebook Horizons VR is different than say eight people interacting on Facebook, you know, the website version. And so I think when we think of social media, I feel like when people talk about the ruin of us, but VR Facebook Horizons, I think is where we're going to see the turn go upward because now we're face to face having those interactions. And so I didn't see this in Facebook. I saw this in AltSpace where I've seen people with two diametrically opposed positions. They're having conversations, and yeah, sure, it was heated, it was tense, but there was this element of understanding because you're hearing their voice, you're seeing their face, you're seeing their emote, their reaction. And um, you are more empathetic now. Take that same conversation and put it on the website, and that's going to go down real quickly. So I think—I don't want to say I don't want to say VR is the savior, right, but I think it's going to shift social media into a positive experience.

Awesome. I cannot wait. I will definitely be—I guess I wasn't blessed. I'm not cool enough to get into the beta. Actually, I'm not that much of a VR guy personally. I've got the set and I do explore it, but um, I cannot wait to dive into that to try to see, yeah, Facebook ties in the social media networking and puts all this together. I, I too, I think that's going to be—it's a revolutionary concept. I can't wait for, um, you know, the mixed reality. That's a whole other conversation. I don't want to follow that rabbit trail today. We will one day. Today's not that day.

But and I do want—because I really, I want to have another conversation where we've—it's funny. You're the bleeding edge guy. Like, you've been bleeding edge. You launched this thing in 2016, 17, and so like, you've been doing virtual reality for a while. And but the, you know, 99.9 percent of church followers, whatever, they may know you, they may not know you, they may not understand virtual reality. The majority of people, you're light years ahead of everywhere else. You're on that bleeding edge. Um, and what's interesting is I just, I've been blessed to be part of some conversations with you talking about like the next—what the bleeding edge guys do when they even want to get more bleeding edge. And it's centered around this idea of MMO, of creating churches in these guilds. And so like, it's exciting to me. I've told the story. I've been blessed to speak on digital church, and I've teased this idea out in front of people, the idea of like doing church in, um—and well, shoot, why don't you talk about it? Like, how does that go? Do you get like glazed—like, look, I mean, that has to be like, "Wait, my wife was talking about the other day. She's like, 'You're doing church with MMO?' That's like, you know what I mean?"

Yeah. Um, well, and what's interesting is some of these games—Final Fantasy 14, like, it is one of these types of games. Now, my understanding—and once again, this is, I'm not of this culture. I'm supporting of this culture, and I'm screaming from the rooftops we need to get churches in these environments because this is where people are. So this is my understanding of Final Fantasy 14. Correct me if I'm wrong because I'm—this is like Google and Jeff working out here. Final Fantasy 14, there's 22 million people that are still actively playing this game, Final Fantasy 14.

Now, my understanding is that Final Fantasy 14 is ten years old. Um, it might be like seven. I thought it was 2013 or maybe—I don't know. I'll have to look. Anyway, either way, 22 million people are playing a seven-year-old video game. Yeah, yeah. And it's not because they really want to—

To beat up on the big bad, it's because that's where community is. That's where their guilds are. That's where their friends are. That's where they're doing the farming, the fishing, whatever. That's where they found community. And so for me, community is the key word.

Their community, yes, definitely the key word. And for me, it's intriguing because it's like that's where people are finding community. So how can we encourage people? How can we send people? How can we disciple people to go into Final Fantasy 14 to be the church? Maybe not start the church. Maybe church looks different. Maybe we're going back to a biblical ecclesiology, more of what church is as opposed to the US American model of 2019, 2020, pre-COVID. And we're doing something different. We're reimagining what's happening in Final Fantasy 14 and what a church could look like in that.

Now, this is of course, there's so many other games that are MMO. I'm not even sure I know what MMO means, I'll be honest. But there's so many within that genre that it's like I could see a whole generation of Christians coming about out of video games. Like, it's an unbelievable untapped resource. And I'll answer your question now. When I have this conversation, fifty percent of the people love every word that comes out of my mouth, and fifty percent of the people are ready to call me a heretic and light the stake. And so like, it's a very mixed bag. I know when I get to that part of the conversation, there's gonna be lots of thumbs up emojis and lots of angry face emojis, because that's just where we are, unfortunately. Because it's so bleeding edge and it's so unproven and it challenges so many things within our church today, that it's like there's going to have to be experimental groups that are going to have to celebrate stories that are going to have to show life change to validate that this is an effective method for others to get excited about and to jump into.

So I mean, listen, I just spewed a lot. Like, does that line up with you? Like, when you guys think about how to do church and MMO and how to reach, I mean, somebody told me the other day that video gamers is one of the largest unreached people groups in America. I never actually thought of it that way, but yeah, I mean, let's have that conversation. Yeah, what are you guys thinking about this?

I was actually just about to say that's how I was going to start it, as far as unreached people groups. We think of unreached people groups right now in our ecclesiology as geographic locations. And there's nothing wrong with that, by the way. I'm just making an observation. You know, China, Africa, you know, we need to send people to Estonia, you know. So that's a thing and that's important. But what we're seeing, what's evolving, and this metaverse has quietly been growing over the past twenty years, is now that the greatest unreached people groups are now going to be in digital, virtual reality cities, metaverses. These are more than just games. These are communities of people interacting with each other at high levels, deep interactions. And so what I think you're going to see, or I hope the church evolves into, is this understanding that it's not just geographically or they're the largest unreached people groups, but it's also digital. It's also virtual reality. It's also things like Final Fantasy XIV or Rust or Black Desert Online. And so we're working on an initiative. It's not something that we're like officially announcing, but it's kind of quietly working on behind the scenes called MMO Church. And so VR Church is planting what's called MMO Church. We're exploring, not just exploring, we're continuing our church planting vision to plant loving spiritual communities across the metaverse, which includes things like Final Fantasy and World of Warcraft.

So for people that have never played an MMO, I mean, that's a whole other podcast just to talk MMOs, because there's such a uniqueness to them. It's not just like a Call of Duty where you come in for a quick match and yell at a couple people for about five to ten minutes, or Fortnite where you just come in for a five to ten minute match. I mean, you journey with these individuals for hours, for months. You join a guild. It's very compelling and very interesting. Deep relationships have been formed. It is not unusual to hear marriages coming from MMOs, people that have played together, met in real life, and got married. That is not unusual. And you wouldn't see that like in Fortnite or maybe Call of Duty, but you see these deep connections being made in these different MMOs.

So we have some theories. We have some vision. And that's why VR Church is thinking MMO Church. And we don't have a ton to say about it, but we are moving forward with that vision. And as a matter of fact, I've been talking to the church via our church today, or it's actually I've been talking about him for months, but it's been more official in the past day or so about how we're going to move forward with MMO Church and inviting them to come along in this journey.

So that's kind of where we're at. If you think of software development as like alpha, where it's not ready for the public at all, and beta, it's getting there, then gold, I would say MMO Church is kind of an alpha right now. We're exploring. It's experimenting and exploring. We're inviting people to come along in the journey to explore and experiment with us. And then yeah, I think we'll just be on this journey for months and maybe even years and see how it evolves. We're gonna let the platform shape us. And yeah, we're just gonna be looking forward for opportunities. And the little that we've done, and it's like under ten hours, has been interesting so far. The couple relationships that we've already made, the vision that we're gonna have, it's really interesting. I didn't think off, you know, starting right off the bat, maybe even less than ten or maybe like five hours, that we would see some connections already. We've already seen that. Surprised me within my first day of kind of experimenting with MMO Church. And so yeah, we're working on a launch team and we're doing some other elements. And so yeah, it'll be fun. Really looking forward to it.

And I told the church, I was like, I don't have answers for you. You probably have a ton of questions. I was like, I don't got answers. You know, we'll get those over the months and years. But yeah, we think it's going to be something powerful and beautiful, and we're really looking forward to it.

Yeah, it'll be interesting. Just even on the outside, once again, being one of the bleeding edge guys, is that a full ecclesiology or a minimal ecclesiology of a church? Or is it a mission field that we're going in and sending missionaries and trying to feed into something else? And it's in a really, I guess it maybe would depend upon even the video game and the platform and what's capable. And I think there may be contextualization based on the game environment itself and how it operates. And there's really like, it's funny. Like, even before the podcast, I told DJ, I was like, man, I just want to be the fly on the wall right now and just watch how this develops. And even how we're empowering people and how we're equipping people and sending them out, how we're training people, what type of person is effective in these video games, in these MMO games, to connect with people, what those relationships look like, and how Final Fantasy 14 can bring glory to God. Like, that to me, it's one of the exciting things for me to come out of this COVID season. I don't know that we would have gotten there. I think we would have got there eventually, right? I don't think this conversation would have had near the relevance if we were having it, if not for COVID. COVID just accelerated that timeline so fast, like it just got us there quickly, where now we can really have some fun here talking about how we can do church in some really unique spaces.

So by the way, I just fact-checked myself. Google Final Fantasy start date, September 30th, 2010. 2017.

2010, man. So that, I think it went through like a rough patch and then came back, but yeah, that sounds right. 2010, yeah, the release. Yeah. May 2013 was the second release date I'm seeing here. Thank you, Wikipedia. Hopefully it's accurate.

Well, I just want to say, if you haven't watched this on YouTube, I'm literally seeing DJ in front of a virtual backdrop with Stanley from The Office working in the background. Exactly. It's like one of the scenes out of The Office. So it's been nice. Stanley's been like working really well. He's been working in video, looking up every once in a while. That's doing the sales job, man. Yeah, yeah. That's so good.

So good, man. Hey, well, thanks for jumping on the podcast here. This has been a great conversation, covered a lot of territory, man. I'm always excited whenever I get to hang out with you and learn more about what you're discovering on that bleeding edge, diving into this idea of virtual reality. It's funny. It's not bleeding maybe for the rest of the world, but it's bleeding edge for the church and what this looks like. And so thanks for challenging, for being out there, for, well, half the room thinks you're crazy, still doing what you're doing.

Yeah, yeah, we've had plenty of those conversations as well. So hey, as we're landing the plane, man, any closing thoughts on your side?

No, I don't. I have one of my elders telling me to get into Final Fantasy right now. He's waiting for me. So I'm gonna go do some church stuff over there in my world. So yeah, that's about it.

How many other churches out there having an elder saying, hey, go play Final Fantasy? Yeah, I'm waiting. Let's get church started. On the clock. Crack the whip. Let's go play games online. That's awesome.

Hey, for DJ, this is Jeff at The Church Digital and Stadium Church Planting. Thanks for jumping on the pod again, and we'll see you here at the next show. Y'all have a good one.

Thank you so much.