EP115: Digital Discipleship thru Timothy Initiative

All right, so we are going to talk discipleship, disciple making today. This is not going to be a technological conversation. Go check out the beta show if you want updates on Clubhouse and all the awesome things that are happening over in the tech world and in social media. We're not going to dive into that today here on the Church Digital podcast. What we are going to talk about is the idea of doing discipleship in digital space, doing disciple making in digital space, and what discipling someone, what that actually means.

So for the conversation, we are bringing in Ricky Bailey. Now Ricky, um, is arguably probably one of the most humble people I've ever met in my life, and that drips through this podcast conversation entirely. Ricky has been very influential in my life. He's significantly younger than me, which is interesting, but his heart towards disciple making, his heart towards evangelism, his heart towards obedience-based discipleship has revolutionized my life entirely. Well, I probably believed this stuff when I was like eighteen to twenty, but I'll be honest, I forgot about it somewhere along the way. We talk about it on the podcast a little bit, but it's amazing how sometimes—well, you know, I don't get into it. You'll hear it on the podcast. It's awesome.

So we're bringing Ricky into this conversation. We're doing Stadia church planning. We are doing digital church planning cohorts, digital discipleship cohorts right now where we're helping digital church planters wrestle through this idea of obedience-based discipleship, obedience-based digital discipleship, helping them have a foundation, a reproducible foundation that's going to help them plant churches in digital communities and digital spaces. It is an awesome time to be alive, and audience, I'm glad you get to join us in this conversation. So check it out. We're gonna talk about Timothy Initiative. We're gonna talk about some other resources. There are links in the show notes towards all of these things.

This podcast episode—this is one of those conversations that could change the life of your ministry. This could change the life of your church. Like, I don't want to sell that short. I want you to recognize that this conversation deeply impacted me four years ago, and it has the potential to deeply impact you as well. Take this conversation in prayer and look and see what God is leading you to and see if this lines up with maybe where God was already placing you in this COVID season.

So for the conversation here, I'm bringing in Ricky Bailey, helping out with Stadia with some digital church planting cohorts as well as very active in workplace ministry, as am I, Jeff, with the Church Digital and Stadia church planning, in a conversation that I'm calling digital discipleship through the Timothy Initiative. Okay, everybody, there you go.

Hey, so here's why I wanted to have this conversation, and what, audience, what you need to realize is I would probably put Ricky on a short list of people who have deeply impacted my life. And I don't know, I don't even think Ricky truly understands the level of this. And Ricky's significantly younger than me, which is not a bad thing, but in context of his passion for discipleship, for disciple making, um, for helping people find personal mission, I saw life differently up until about 2015. And I had a couple conversations, a couple relationships with a couple millennials. I don't think I should apologize for that, Ricky, and another guy. And truly, um, my worldview perspective kind of—and I don't want to say it changed because it honestly was, oh man, all that stuff that I believed twenty years ago, yeah, I need to believe that today. It was almost like it was a refreshing reboot of my life, going back. And so I really, even in context of how I view um digital church, digital discipleship, like all of a sudden things looked different after kind of having some conversations here. And this is just a little bit of what I wanted to scratch the surface here with with Ricky.

And so, Ricky, just to open it up, um, you can line up ten pastors and ask them what discipleship means and you'll get twelve different definitions because a couple of them, uh, well, they'll just tell you different things, multiple things. So in just to get us started here, what does discipleship mean for you? What does that look like for you specifically?

Yeah, I think everything that, you know, I've learned, or the main thing that I've learned, I guess in the short time I've been doing this, is keeping it as simple as possible. And the more simple it is, the more reproducible it is. So we typically would just say discipleship is teaching other people how to follow Jesus. Because the different definitions tend to come from everyone has a different goal of discipleship. You know, some churches' goal is to get people serving on Sunday. Some people's goal is to go to the mission field. And really, if we say teaching other people how to follow Jesus, um, you know, that drives them to the Bible. Um, and you're giving them a model that's easily, easily replicated because if they follow Jesus like the Bible tells us to follow Jesus, then there's no escaping that we have to continue to make disciples who in turn make disciples.

Yeah, that it's interesting. Oftentimes, you know, you talk to a pastor and they're talking about like a lifelong following, and I don't want to single out pastors, church staffers. You know, you said simple and reproducible. Where oftentimes I'll also hear from other church staff like that the vision is lifelong following, uh, kind of a pursuit that never gets accomplished. Um, what do those two ideas coincide, or what's really the motivation that separates the simple, reproducible model opposed to maybe what some of the others are?

I think every—I mean, every pastor that I can remember meeting was had amazing intentions, and you know, for the most part were amazing men. Um, but I think that there's so many different ideas of what a Christian should be, um, and we're so tied to Sunday morning. And I think I kind of love Sunday morning. I love, you know, serving and doing all this stuff, but we're so tied to Sunday morning that we've created an identity around what happens on that hour, to our window. Um, and so that, I think, has influenced a lot of what we call Christians. Um, so because we're used to good preaching or we want good preachings, we think every Christian should be a, you know, amazing theologian. Um, you know, things like that. So we've created a more knowledge-based, I think, discipleship versus obedience-based.

And essentially, you know, I feel like that it's like everything in business and church, whatever. You have a goal, and at first when you make your plan, it's very complex. And the main goal, or I guess maybe the things that separates a lot of great leaders from average leaders is being able to take what's complex and make it simple. And that's what made Jesus so great, you know? There was no question on what his disciples were being asked to do. Or, um, they know they were seeing it modeled. They were seeing, um, you know, Jesus was teaching them all the things to do, and it was just very, very simple. So much so that after three years he dies, he resurrects, and then he sends them, and they're praying, and when the Holy Spirit comes, we know exactly what to do. And it was more about waiting on the power to do what he had commanded them to do versus waiting on direction. He'd already been given direction.

That's fascinating for me, this idea, and even looking in this COVID season, this idea of digital disciple making, figuring out how to make a disciple digitally, how to find, how to help people multiply, reproduce themselves in the digital space. I think this is the challenge really of 2021. 2020, COVID hit March. None of us knew how to broadcast services. Everybody was freaking out, and we, as quickly as possible, leveraged to get the broadcasts happening so that we could do church services when, you know, the US government and the whole world was shutting down large gatherings. And so now 2021, we're coming back to it. I just read something in the news recently that I think two percent of the US has the vaccine. Um, interestingly, and I don't even want to make digital discipleship about, you know, COVID, but life doesn't get back to normal, whatever normal is, until sixty to seventy percent of people, at least according to, I believe, the World Health Organization. So like, we're not rushing here. Like, this is still going to be a sprint or still a marathon, a journey. But what's interesting is churches are trying to get back into the building as quick as possible and are hyping and are rushing to kind of do that because that's this model that they know. But the people aren't ready. It seems like the average church at this point has twenty to thirty, maybe forty percent of physical attendance pre-COVID coming back to the building. And so that leaves a lot of people disenfranchised, disconnected, disassociated with what's happening in the church. And unfortunately, we taught them that, hey, we need the church as the spiritual tent pole. You do this on Sunday for the one hour, and if you can do that, that's going to carry you through for the rest of the other hundred and sixty-seven hours still pending. Um, but there's this idea that maybe instead of doing the church service, that's the temple that may or may not even be working in physical space, what if we spent our time or a portion of our time or a portion of our energy and resources towards doing discipleship, disciple making, evangelism, relational evangelism in this digital space?

And so like, I love this idea of reproducible systems, and it's one of the reasons why um Ricky's actually starting to work with Stadia on helping us lead some cohorts that's designed towards digital-only church planting in digital discipleship. And so for us, it's the goal of, you know, it's—well, Ricky, tell us a little bit. You know, in context, we're doing this Timothy Initiative material. Um, talk to us a little bit about Timothy Initiative, what the purpose of this is, and kind of what the journey of somebody who's going through this process, what does that look like for them?

Yeah, so I think that um I could kind of introduce this something that as you were talking about what's happening in churches and um you know, COVID had made everyone digital, you know, kind of in a sense, is it's kind of caused us to realize that what we do, what we were doing online is really not that much different than what we were doing in person. And we have to ask whether that's a good thing or not. And what I mean by that is, you know, for most of our church members, we're asking them to show up to watch a sermon, to watch people. I mean, yeah, they're singing along. They might say amen or reading their Bibles out or whatever, but largely they're not participating in what's happening on Sunday morning. They're watching. And it may help you grow, and it can help you, and you know, whatever, but um, you know, I was talking to my pastor about this a few months ago. It's like, you know, what our members are doing on Sunday morning, the only difference is they're in PJs and they're watching it on the computer.

And so the whole idea of discipleship is to move someone from spectator to participant because that's exactly what Jesus—like, when you read through the Gospel, it feels like every time Jesus got this huge crowd, he would do something to turn them away. Like, I remember reading John 6, um, I guess like our freshman year of college, and you know, there's these, you know, thousands of people there. And at that time, I was committed to being a megachurch pastor, you know? That's what I wanted to do. And then all of a sudden—

A sudden Jesus runs them off, even to the point where his disciples, his closest disciples, look at him and they're like, and he, and he looks at them and he's like, "Will you go away too?" You know, we get the, you know, to wherever we go. And I think the only reason that Peter was able to say that is because he had been participating in the mission of Christ and had bought into the mission because he was there. He was doing it. He was, you know, you read through, you know, Luke 8 through 10, and you see this progression of Jesus, you know, going out to heal the sick and to preach the gospel. And you know, it's Jesus doing it, then there's just a few disciples doing it, then he sends a 70 to do it. And so the whole idea of following Christ is actively participating in the mission that God has set before us.

When I was in college ministry, a question I would get a lot is, you know, "What does it mean to walk in the Holy Spirit? How come I never feel the Holy Spirit? Or I never feel like the Holy Spirit is doing something miraculous through me?" And the question is always, "Well, are you being obedient? Like, are you putting yourself in situations where you have to be obedient and rely on the Holy Spirit?" And most time the answer is no.

And so the Timothy Initiative, um, which is based on four fields, which came out of India, and training for trainers, or a lot of you may know what is T4T, which came out of China, it's kind of taking those principles and creating tools, um, for different cultures. I mean, they're all over the world, but there's a specific one for American culture as well. Um, so creating tools to invite people on the mission that Christ has given us. And the whole premise of this belief is by participating, we will grow. By everything that we want to be as Christians, everything that we hear preached about on Sundays, we can become that by participating in the mission that Christ has given us. But not doing it alone, doing it with a community of people that we can grow close relationships with. Not just someone, you know, my church is small, and I appreciate that for a lot of reasons. Like I feel like I'm going through life with people. But I've been a part of big churches before where I'm literally sitting beside someone, like on one side is my wife, another side is a guy that I've never met and may never see again. And that's kind of the disadvantage. Is yeah, it's great to gather people to hear the message of the gospel, but Christ called us into mission as a community, not as individuals. So we have to have those people around us. And that's kind of the whole point of TTI is, how can we get people actively participating in the mission of God in a community that holds them accountable and encourages them? And, you know, Hebrews 3 exhorts them so they don't lose the faith. And, you know, things like that.

So you've said you've said obedience-based discipleship a little bit here, a lot, a lot, a lot here, a little. I don't know, I'm, we're recording this at the end of the day. I apologize for not making any sense. But obedience-based discipleship, what, what help me, um, because you know, I may not know this term. Um, what from a practical standpoint, like what does that actually look like?

I think, and there's probably other categories we can create, but typically what I have seen through churches from, you know, East Tennessee backwoods Baptist churches to megachurches everywhere, there seems to be really only two pathways that believers are being offered. Is what I call knowledge-based discipleship and obedience-based discipleship. Knowledge-based discipleship gauges your spiritual maturity based on how much you know. Now that could be something like, you know, how many Bible verses did you learn in Awana? Or that could be, can you, you know, speak intelligently about predestination? Um, you know, whatever that would look like. But typically our Sunday schools, our small groups, it's always been based on learning more about the Bible, learning more about God. And obviously that comes from great things. But obedience-based discipleship says essentially that we can't let our knowledge outpace our obedience. And that's where, you know, and being a product of like the Bible college seminary world, it's really hard to do sometimes because I love learning about God. I love learning all the things that no one else cares about about the Bible. But once our knowledge outpaces our obedience, we create this illusion that we're more spiritual than we really are because we can talk about these things. When obedience-based discipleship is literally what Jesus did. "Hey, I'm gonna send you out, sheep among wolves. Go figure it out. And then report back to me. We'll talk about it and we'll debrief." So he was teaching them absolutely, but he was giving him a mission. He was letting them watch him. He was sending them out to practice what he had commanded them to do. And then they came back together after it was all over to learn from the moments, to learn from the things, to celebrate what they did, and to learn about the things that they weren't able to do.

And when you, when you really focus on obedience-based discipleship, what you tend to see is that your obedience level and your knowledge levels tend to go hand in hand, which is amazing because once you have the knowledge way up here and obedience down here, it's really hard to catch up.

Um, you know, one of the things that I think I don't know if I'm gonna share this with you or not, but David Nelson's, the guy who started the Timothy Initiative, for whatever reason I still don't know to this day, started spending a lot of time with me and kind of mentoring me in different ways. And we went to the circuit in Knoxville, the circuit of churches. He was sharing this mission with, and there was a guy from Chattanooga from a small church down the road that came with us. And it was a long day. We're all tired. It's like nine, ten o'clock at night, and we're praying that, you know, I think I'm driving, so we're praying I don't fall asleep and kill those kind of thing. And Roger, like, he's in the back seat. He puts his hand on my shoulder and just kind of leans up where he can look at me. And he goes, "I'm going to tell you something, Ricky, because I'm 62 years old." He said, "And I've had a lot of people come through my church and I've created a lot of pastors. I've made a lot of Sunday school teachers." He goes, "But until a month ago, I've never made a disciple." And I remember kind of just being taken aback. And he started explaining how the Timothy Initiative had impacted him. He's actually out in Nevada, I think now, at an Indian reservation as a missionary. But he, um, he said, "I always thought the more someone knew, the better they were going to be. But now I realize it's about what they do." And we all say that, but you know, as ministry leaders, we tend to be more in the knowledge camp. And we, whether we do it wittingly or not, we try to create people that look like us sometimes more than what looks like Jesus.

Yeah, I mean, I've heard stats like this, and I'm gonna butcher it. You may have the exact one, but it's something to the extent, if a new Christian doesn't share Christ within the first month, two months, ten days, some very short period of time, they don't do it quickly, they're never gonna, um, do you actually know what that exact stat is or have you heard something similar to that?

I've heard six months and I've heard three months, um, but I don't remember where they came from or, yeah, I can't ground it. But the philosophy though is, man, like if you don't make that practice part of your life right off the bat, it's not gonna catch up. And like you said earlier, when your knowledge gets to be so high but you've not established that culture of obedience, all of a sudden your discipleship is dependent upon that knowledge without the action. You are, you're not doing the church. You're not doing discipleship, but you're very strong, able to speak into it. And unfortunately, you know, I think that's the state of a lot of churches today. And the physical church is definitely, even in this COVID season where they've not been able to connect with people, to exude that knowledge. When if in this COVID season, if we were able to pivot or if we had pivoted before and not be driven off of creating environments for knowledge to be passed, but instead looking at it as opportunities to exude that obedience discipleship, following the commands of Christ in real time, physically, digitally, fidgeting, whatever, like I think the world would look a much different place had we pivoted away and we're looking at it more towards obedience over the past, I don't know, year or so.

Yeah, and I don't think I got that until, um, is my, I had an internship with a church in Miami. I think you were probably still in Texas then because we don't think we had met yet. And um, I was working with a, with a guy who's is part of an organization called Nova Place Left, which is extremely similar to Timothy Initiative. And we're doing the whole training. And you know, here's a model to share the gospel. And so we did the whole thing, and then it was kind of like, "All right, you guys got it. Practice it." Like we were going around practicing with each other, pretending, you know, we're the lost one. And he's like, "All right, cool. We're downtown Miami. He's like, 'You guys got an hour and a half. Go share the gospel.'" So I'm like, "Okay, well, you know what? I'm not gonna just be brave. Go do it." Well, I happen to have another guy with me who was much more experienced with this at the time. And we were at the, uh, is it Government Stage? Is that the government center? Is that the big government center?

Yeah, so we were at Government Center. And we had just, um, got off the Metro Loop into the Brickell Loop. And we're waiting on the Metro to come by, um, which for if you're not from Miami, the subway, that's our subway, like, you know, the 20 feet in the air because we can't go underground, public transportation. And we shared with this guy. And we had shared, everybody had said no. And we're getting ready to go back. And we start with this guy. And we're like, "You know, is this, you know, do you feel like this is something you want to believe?" And he's like, "I've been waiting on this all day." Really? "Oh, okay." He's like, "So what do I need to do to follow Christ?" So we share the gospel with him again to make sure he gets it. He goes, "I believe that. Can I pray to Christ?" We're like, "Yeah, man." So he prays. And then the God beside me, he goes, "All right, I got a question for you, man." He's all right. He goes, "Can you tell me what we just told you?" Talking about sharing the gospel. And the guy repeats it almost verbatim. And then he goes, "Now, who in your life needs to hear this message?" And he names three people. He's like, "Where are they at right now?" He's like, "They're actually at the public library. I just left there. And I want to go back. Can I go share this with them right now?" And so like, as soon as the guy came to faith, the first thing he was asked, "Okay, do you understand the message well enough to repeat it?" Yeah. "Okay, so now we know he gets it. And the next question is, who else needs to know this?" So literally from that point on, you know, unless he ends up getting involved with some community that doesn't practice this, he thinks evangelism is the normal part of his being a Christian.

Yeah, and I think that's where we felt as a church, we've not made that. We talk about it a lot, but it's like, "Okay, now you're a Christian. Come to our church class. You know, our new member class. Here's the history of our church. Here's, you know, a New Testament survey." And those things aren't bad, but they've been in their church for months before they're ever told to go share the gospel. So what they've already normalized is true Christianity is exempt from a lot of the obedience, you know, or the commands that Christ has given us. And there's so much more, um, faith and dependence on Christ in situations like you just described.

Prescribed, you know, I remember you're alluding, I think, to Scuba Steve. Scuba Steve's been on the podcast. Go back, we'll put a link in the show notes to the episode. But the first time I met Scuba was probably 2018. I'm having lunch with him near a mall that's down here in Miami, and after we finished our milkshakes, he's like, "Hey, let's go across the street and let's go evangelize." So I'm literally walking across the parking lot mentally trying to figure out how I can bail out of this as quickly as possible. I'm like, "Dude, I got 30 minutes." And so while I'm praying, "God, get me out of this," he's praying, "God, bring me somebody." And we had two conversations with two different people breaking down at the point of tears in public that neither of us had never met before. And I'm sitting back, the skeptic of the situation, looking at it and saying, "God is so much bigger and so much more powerful than I even realize at this moment. We just need to prepare to be obedient towards him and not trying to do things under our own volition or under our own knowledge, but be dependent on him."

And I wonder how different our churches would look if instead of having the consumers, instead of having the John 6 followers, the clingers-on that are hanging on to the crowd because Jesus was doing signs, miracles, wonders, and meeting physical needs—literally doing food—and instead of trying to build a church based off of those people, what if we built a church based off of the people who were left after Jesus chased them off? After Jesus said things like, "Eat my flesh, drink my blood," and started challenging physical paradigms that, as a result, all of a sudden, what was left was this core foundation. I talk about John 6 so much in this podcast they've heard it, but what was left after that initial reach, once Jesus started engaging, was the core component of the church that was built. These were where the movement happened.

And my fear is that in this year 2021, at least the Western civilization church, the church of America, has relegated itself away from multiplication, away from revival, away from a movement. And instead, even when the world is falling apart and saying, "No large gatherings," we're trying to go back to the way that it was, which is going to set up some form of—I don't know that you're going to see multiplication. I don't even think that you're going to see growth out of this model because let's be honest, February 2020 was not that great of a time in the church life. We were on a ten-year decline according to Barna and others, and we want to go back to that. We want to celebrate that as, "This is the dream. Let's get back to that way." Or why don't we pivot and try to do something different? Look at how to create a movement, how to empower people with the gospel, and teach them that this is what God commanded, this is what Jesus commanded, so we should be obedient to that.

And so I love, I love, I love the heart behind this. What are you thinking, Ricky?

The paradigm shift—I think this goes well with digital. I'll give a physical example and then kind of transition because I think the digital platform has given us even better opportunity for this. But when I was doing college ministry in Miami, you know, the first university I started with, the guy that was before me was like Gus. Gus was an incredible guy, like super discipleship-minded, but he had left, right? I came to replace him because he was going to another church. And a lot of the students that I had, I think that I kind of fell into the trap of, "Okay, we've got to maintain what this incredible guy who's years ahead of me, who's much more mature than me, knows what he's doing. I don't know what I'm doing. Like, I've got to maintain this." And so what that looked like was, "Okay, can I do more events? Can I—what can I do to get more people in the gathering?" Because my thought process is, "If college students see a lot of people gathering for something, they'll be interested and they'll come see what it is." And it continued to fail.

And eventually, after about a year into it, I realized like none of my students were sharing the gospel. Like, I was really the only one doing that, other than maybe one other person. And Catherine, who also worked with us at that time, she was an evangelism beast. But we made the shift. My last three years in Miami, we never focused on gathering Christians—or sorry, that's not gathering Christians, but bringing Christians into it. We never did an event. We never planned anything for our ministry that was designed to draw Christians. Everything was focused on the lost. And the thought process was: one, this is what Acts looks like. Like, this is modeling more effectively what we see in the Bible. Number two, it'll attract the Christians we want to be with because, you know, so many—like what you were talking about—is in February 2020, and now, like, everything's shut down. We're trying to go back to normal. Some of these churches will grow, but they're going to grow from other church members, from church members from another church. And that's not the kind of growth I feel like—that's not the growth I'm interested in engaging. I want to engage people coming from lostness, from darkness to light.

So we made that shift, and what we saw was something incredible. We had one guy who shared the gospel with someone. This guy believed. He shared the gospel with someone a few weeks later, led this guy to Christ, and about a month later, this guy shared the gospel. And we were starting to see generations multiply. And then we saw Christians who were even of a different denomination see what we were doing and they said, "I want to be a part of that because that looks like what I'm reading in the Bible." And so we did have Christians come over, but they were ones we loved working with and ones that wanted to be a part of what we're doing.

And the beauty of your digital platforms is most people that you're engaging digitally—like, they're not—if they are believers, it's not something they're putting out there. You know, if you're gaming or if you're on social media, you know, most of the people that you're engaging are lost. So you really have fewer options if you're trying to build a church with saved people, which I think has been a mistake that a ton of church plants have made: get a team together, start a church with lost people, and show them how to follow Christ throughout that process.

Yeah, so we're doing a lot of that with Stadia and trying to help digital churches, help plant digital churches based on a lot of these obedience-based disciple-making practices in unleashing, mobilizing, training, equipping, and releasing people digitally. And phenomenal stories—even before Stadia was involved with digital churches—connecting with lost people. Like, I can tell you, we—these are stories that have been told on this podcast. DJ Soto, VR Church, connects three continents, five platforms at this point: Alt Space, VR Chat, as well as Rec Room. Eighty to eighty-five percent lostness—specifically unchurched. A very high level of atheists, evidently, are involved in virtual reality. And he has a constant inflow where the first time an atheist is engaging with the church is not a physical building. It's in virtual reality. Even to the point that the presenter—the equivalent of the virtual reality presenter operator—DJ's told the story before—is not a Christian. He's an atheist. He likes the community. He's asking questions. You may be a Christian at this point. I think last night—I'd heard a couple months ago he was really close but was wrestling with a couple points. But the overall argument there is you can build those relationships digitally, safer than maybe you can in physical space.

Another guy is telling me Cornerstone, up in the Pacific Northwest, Jason Polling—J-Po, as people like to call him—he's about eighty percent de-churched. So all those people that get burned by the physical church and swear they're never going back to a church again, eighty to eighty-five percent of what they see in virtual reality at Cornerstone Church—the first step of those people who were burned by the church, the first step back towards the bride of Christ, is happening in digital space.

And so equipping people—individuals like, you know, co-vocational, sure; by-vocational, sure; even church staffers—to equip their ones of the church to have a voice out. I told a church this recently. Today, the day that we're recording this, I was doing a coaching session with the church, and the question was, "Okay, well, Jeff, our organization has like this particular model, the persona, the target audience—like, this is who our church is trying to reach." And he didn't tell me what it was. I was like, "Let me guess. It's a thirty-year-old male." And he's like, "Well, actually, it's a thirty-three-year-old male with two kids." And I was like, "Yeah, every church in America has that organizational one. That's who you're trying to reach. I'm not saying that's bad, but realize that your organization has never lost, has never had as little power as it does right now. Its voice has never been as soft as it is right now. And you, your church, trying to get out there and do all those things—it's nice. The power is not within the organization. It's within the individuals."

And actually, I would throw up just as another example: look at everything that's happening with the whole GameStop, the Reddit, the crashing of the new economy once again. I mean, the reason this happens so often is that the power is not with the organizations. It's not with the corporations. It's with the individuals.

And so church—as much as we want to own and say, "Our organizational one, our target to try to reach the thirty-three-year-old male with two kids, to kind of create that persona and reach that person"—that's nice. If we really want to be effective, it's not even the church's organizational one. It's really more about these individual ones, the people who are attending your church, the religious hangers-on that were in John 6. How do we get them to pivot to not be the consumer of a product? How do we get them to understand how to be released, mobilized, and how to share their faith within their circle of influence? Power is not within your organization. Power is more within your organization empowering individuals to speak the gospel in these situations. And that's why I love so much of what's happening around the Timothy Initiative and a lot of this.

So we're wrestling with how to do this digitally. We at Stadia, we, the church digital—if we, as the church body, can figure out how to do digital discipleship, disciple people, mobilize people, release people in digital space, I believe that's when we find revival. And I'm praying for those situations to happen through our church planters and churches outside. And so it really does come down to the heart of this: how do we disciple people in digital space?

So much so, Ricky—you know, I'll brag on him in a little bit—he's doing a cohort with me. We're connecting him with eight digital church planters and guys that need training in digital discipleship. It's seven digital church planters and there's a microsite guy. The microsite guy needs to understand digital disciple-making. So we're kind of bringing them into that as well. It's going to be a great time. But what's fun is that it's all sorts of different approaches. I mean, one of these guys is an IT director for a nationally recognized company in Canada, and his goal is not to—I mean, he wants to do his job. He likes his job. The job pays the bills. He wants to do ministry. He wants to start a church in digital space. He doesn't want a—

Brick and mortar building, he doesn't, he doesn't want the headache. For him, he wants to do discipleship. He wants to create a movement, and he's wanted to do it in digital space.

Another person that we've got in the cohort, ironically, she's also from Canada. She's a twenty-something who's really passionate about a video game called Black Desert Online. Now I'll confess, I've never played Black Desert Online. It's an MMO. It's one of these games that there's like this huge community in there. It's not about beating the big bad. It's about being in a community and having friends within the community. And she talks to me a lot about her guild and how her guild needs Christ. And as a matter of fact, her guild just merged with another guild, and so now there's three times as many people that she's building relationships with towards the end of connecting them to Christ. And she wants to start a church in a video game, which is freaky and scary and awesome all at the same time.

And so these are just some of the people that we're working with in trying to teach them, hey, the importance of obedience to discipleship. And it starts with them obedient. Obedience. That's horrible. Obeying the words, diving into the scripture, sharing who are the people within your circle of influence? Who are the people within Black Desert Online, within your guild, that need Christ? And how can we share them the gospel with them? How can we share these easy, reproducible systems with them? That's the heart of what we're trying to do with Stadia in context of the digital church.

And Ricky's been hugely influential heading into this season. What do you think, Ricky? With all this, interestingly enough, digital ministry was never really a thought until I mean, I couldn't have thought, you know, share the gospel on Facebook or, you know, if you're gaming, tell people about Christ, kind of thing. But it's beyond that. I never really thought about it until I think it was 2017. I read the novel. I think the movie came out. Ready Player One. Oh yeah. And I just remember, I think I read it in like two days. I'm sitting there at three AM in bed, still reading it. And one is like, it was entertaining and a good book, but the whole time, all I could think about was, man, like, you know, maybe not in the same way, but what's happening in this novel? It's like Ray Bradbury in the nineteen fifties almost with Fahrenheit 451 and things like that. Like, what he's writing about, not all of it, but a lot of it will become our reality eventually. And too often, the church has kind of been reactionary instead of being proactive. And I'm like, man, what can we do digitally to start engaging the people who are, you know, not in a bad way necessarily, but going down the rabbit hole? Yeah. What can we do with that?

And so, you know, super exciting about that. I was trying to find the document. I can't remember it now. But one of the things that gets me most excited about digital church planting, there's a book called Beyond the Local Church, and it kind of talks about the relationship between local churches and para-church ministries. But one of the things that it really talks about a lot, and I don't remember the exact stats, but it talks about things that kill movement. And one of the number one things that kills movement is clergy. And it's not the presence of clergy. I'm not anti-clergy. But hiring clergy, because the moment that a movement is taking place and churches are starting to grow, the moment you hire someone, whether people admit it or not, there's a subconscious thing that happens where it's like, okay, we've got a full-time guy now. He can take care of some of that. And so it talks about the hiring of clergy. It talks about the maintenance of buildings, where sometimes churches have to choose: do we repair the roof that's going to be leaking water on our heads soon, or do we send someone to an unreached people group to share the gospel? And that's an unfair position for any church to be in. And I'm not saying that all churches have put themselves in this position. Like, we have been given these models, and we go with it. But a lot of the things that we call church that we give our money to, they're typically movement killers rather than movement spreaders.

What's happening on digital, there's no roof to repair. There's no electric bill. You know, like all those things, there it doesn't exist. And we can actually give digitally if we know of a need or we know a missionary or we know something like that. People can pull in together and give so that aspect is still there. Like you're giving to mission and you're giving to needs. But you know, there's no overhead with that. And if it's something that's simple and reproducible, you don't have to have clergy. Like you might have some guy leading a network as a resource to people and helping them through that. But in the average church, there's not someone paid to do that with this model. And it doesn't really kill the movement so much because, you know, everyone realizes it's on us, not on him, not on her, not on me. It's on us to complete this mission that we've committed to.

Yeah, I'm a fan. And thank you for those words. I love the idea of a digital-only church and the scalability of what can happen. I've had that money conversation more times than I can remember. I can tell you digital pastors who have intentionally said, I'm not going to make a penny off this church because the moment I get paid, the movement dies. You know, even to the point where guys like Jade Earhart, who have gone through church planting initiatives and things like that, don't want to be called pastor because even he thinks that's a movement killer and wants to be more theologically. We can argue that. I don't care for that argument. I've already had it. So like, the idea of doing something different here in a digital-only space, I think is incredibly exciting.

My comment would be, what do you do with the money? If you're not paying for the building, like, and you're not paying for salaries, and you're not like, this money that wells, does it have to go to the church? Like, can it go straight to the issues within the community? Can you help people that are in need? Can you do the things maybe that we're called to do in Acts 2? Acts 2 doesn't say pay for the mortgage. Acts 2 has a much higher standard when it comes towards what we're supposed to do with the money. And I think there's an opportunity to do those things if you're in a digital church environment.

Now, for our physical churches, I'm a huge fan of the physical church. That's why, if you can see the TV behind me, it literally says the word physical, P-H-Y-S-I-C-A-L. So physical church, you have a place, you have a role, and there's even an opportunity for you in this season to be successful for the future.

Yeah, digital-only expressions of church is a radical concept. Digital discipleship in itself may be radical for your church. But when it comes to obedience-based, when it comes towards empowering individuals with the gospel and then releasing them as your mission force within your city, that's how we need to think. That's how culture is going to receive the gospel.

Barna, 2020, December 2020. Barna tells us that eighty percent of the people don't care about our physical worship service or our digital worship service. I butchered this. That eighty percent of people called to Christ, eighty percent of people who are not Christians, don't care about your physical or your digital worship services. So that main vehicle for evangelism that you've been touting and that we've been riding that horse for years, Barna has got cold stats on it right now in the midst of this cold bit season that we're not going back to it. It's not working. And so we need to shift. And that's where I think the importance is for us. Even carry-on churches that are going to be successful in 2021 are the ones that are empowering, that are equipping people. And so church, our institutional, our organizational ones, need to take a back seat. And instead, we need to start empowering others with that gospel, with this training and equipping them to have these conversations within their circle of influence. This is how we win in 2021. Not fighting on the battlefield, but coaching, cheering on warriors that we're equipping on the battlefield.

And I think what it boils down to, and I'm careful how to say this because I feel like I could easily be branded as like, you know, physical church, mega-church enemy. It's really not true. But most of the pushback that I've got for trying to do simple and reproducible, I think Frank Viola calls them just organic churches or organic groups. You know, you can define organic however you want to. But simply reproducible is we've made church so complicated that, you know, all the things, all the questions that you tend to get with these smaller gatherings that are reproducible, very simple. It usually boils down to it's not complicated enough. So it just doesn't. And then no one uses that language obviously, but that's what it comes down to. Is how do you handle giving? Well, we've made gifting such a complicated thing in churches on how we do it, how much it should be, when really the New Testament, the model given for the New Testament is give generously, give sacrificially to the needs of the community and to the mission of God. Like those are really the two things that you see people giving sacrificially to.

You know, even eldership, like we've made this so complicated that, you know, it doesn't have to be that way. You know, and I'm not saying we just throw anyone in there, but the Bible gives us a model and it's really not that difficult. It's very simple. And so I think that's one of the things that we're dealing with. But at the end of the day, like we're all trying to go the same way. I'm sure that, you know, twenty years from now we'll have a conversation and I'll be like, man, I was so wrong about so many things. But at the end of the day, like we're all on the same team. We're all heading in the same direction, and we absolutely all want the same thing. Like we want to see the kingdom of God made known and expand across the entire world. And we don't care if it's, you know, a guy walking through the desert sharing the gospel with whoever he meets or if it's online playing Call of Duty, whatever. Like this is what we're going to. And I think that, you know, what you're doing with the church digital, what Stadia is doing, like all these things, the tools that you guys are providing for churches, it may not be used now by so many. But something I've realized in the past few years is typically what happens on the mission field is what we start doing, you know, twenty years. You read a church planting book from, I'm not going to name the book, but I read a church planting book that was released in 2016, and I read a book about missions from the nineteen eighties. It's like the same content. It just took us, it took us that long. It took us a couple decades to get there.

Yeah, it just took us that long to be willing to adjust and to listen to our brothers and sisters who are serving in countries that don't have the resources we have. They had to figure out something different. So the problems that they're solving, you know, twenty, thirty years ago, we're just now starting to approach having to solve. You know, so that's what encourages me about this is, yeah, there's a lot of churches doing amazing things online. Fidgetly. But in ten, fifteen years from now, you know, just because a church came to the party late, it doesn't mean they're not part of the party. It doesn't mean we're not going to see them succeed.

Don't support them, we don't pray for them. You know, at the end of the day, like, you know who knows, like, but I guess only God knows where we're going with all of this. But um, I don't know, it's just it's exciting to see, you know, what's happening now. Amen.

Well, hey, we've been talking about this for a stretch. Let me say this: if I'm putting on the commercial hat, um, if you've been listening to this and you're like, "Hey, I'm interested in doing a church like this, a church in digital space, um, I want more information on what digital discipleship is," so here's what I'm literally gonna give my cell phone number here on the podcast: 484-324-8724. There's a myriad of ways to get connected with me on social media. Take advantage of that. Hit up the church.digital, contact me through that. I don't care, but let's say all of that you're unable to do it, my cell phone, text me 484-324-8724, and let's have a conversation and let's get started talking about what a digital church like this, like what we're talking about, what a movement in digital space would look like with you being part of it. Like, that's for me, it's exciting, just even to start to help people understand how God can use them in digital space. So would love to have that conversation.

Um, Ricky, hey man, thanks for jumping on the podcast and going through this as we're landing the plane. Any closing thoughts on your side?

I appreciate the opportunity. Um, I appreciate all the kind words. I feel like I don't have very much to offer, so um, but the same thing you said, I mean, um, if I can help in any way, text me, call me, email me, whatever. Um, yeah, same thing. My number: 865-223-3367. I don't care, whatever I can do to help. Um, you know, I don't have a whole lot to offer, but what I do have, I probably know someone who does, so I can at least point you in the right direction.

That's awesome. I've never had another person give their cell phone number on. Mad respect right now, bro. I mean, it's not like there's millions of people who listen to this, but you just threw down that. That was impressive. And one of the things that I've loved about Ricky is the humility of it, like he's in his calling now, what he's doing through Stadia and working in workplace ministry and starting the Champion, more of that idea. Um, there's not many individuals of higher caliber in him being able to speak and take the time here with this, um, and even being a part of what Stadia is doing in digital means a lot. So reach out, get in touch. We'll put Ricky's contact info on things like that in the show notes on social if you want to engage with them there. You'll have to memorize the cell phone number. I'm not gonna put that. Google would not be friends with that if that was there anyway.

We're going to wrap, we're going to close, we're going to move on to whatever is next for Ricky. This is Jeff with the Church Digital and Stadia Church Planting. Thanks for joining us here on the podcast, and we'll see you next time here at the show. Y'all have a good day.