EP116: Collin Jones & Owning Your Platform

All right church, this is going to be an interesting conversation today. We're going to get into DeLoreans, we're going to be very future-minded, we're going to be looking at what's to come. Hey, Jeff here with the Church at Digital podcast once again. It's powered by Stadia Church Planting. Love working with this organization. Just celebrated my one year anniversary just recently and it has been awesome helping churches and church plants go full plant digital only expressions of church. We're going to be talking more about that in the coming weeks, but love what's happening and the innovation that we're seeing out of Stadia.

Here today, and I love what's coming down the road. Hey, so speaking of coming down the road, let's pivot here and let's talk about this episode. Here's where we are, church. Let's just, if we really look at the reality of the situation, we are creating strategies in real time for our churches to do digital ministry effectively, and we're utilizing it on borrowed platforms like YouTube, on borrowed platforms like Facebook. Like most of social media now, I'm saying "borrowed," and what I essentially mean by that is church, we don't own the property that we're doing the ministry on, at least in the digital perspective. We don't own YouTube. We don't control YouTube. We don't control Facebook. It's interesting with Facebook, everything's with an algorithm, so we even post something up there and the people who are following us may or may not see it based upon how the algorithm behaves.

And you know, it's interesting in this COVID season, even paralleling it a little bit here, the physical multi-site churches. Physical multi-site churches. I was at a church that actually launched a multi-site church two, three, four months before COVID hit, and then when COVID swept through, the landlord that we were renting the property from for that multi-site to exist, he ripped up the lease and said, "It's no longer valid. You're not welcome here." It was the right decision, mind you, but what was interesting was we didn't have the church didn't have a choice in that situation. We no longer have the option, the opportunity to do ministry in that space.

And my fear is, church, and hear me as I don't want to be like the controversial guy. I'm not trying to like be all prophetic or anything like that, gloom and doom, but I think there's a time coming when we, the church, we're not going to be able to do the ministry on the Facebooks, on YouTube, maybe even. And I think there's an importance here, really, if we are looking future-minded at where, at least where I think culture is going and how it intersects with, you know, the church. I think it's important that we own our platforms or at least that we have understanding towards owning those platforms. And so where we're broadcasting to, where we're connecting with, it's great that we're able to utilize the Facebooks and the YouTubes, and I don't give away the conversation, but I think it's important that we have some other hurdles, we have some other options in place. Otherwise, that mad dash of March 2020 when everybody's trying to figure out how to broadcast online, I really think that's coming again when we're trying to figure out how to broadcast online when the Facebooks and the YouTubes and some of those other organizations, you know, won't let us broadcast on their platforms.

No, I get it. I probably sound like a religious nut job, a zealot, you know, some of those things. And honestly, if you know me, hopefully you know I'm not. My track record, I think, would speak to that. But I think it's still something that we should be looking at and aware of and planning for how to overcome these. And so this is what the conversation is. We're bringing in Colin Jones, who's president and CEO of Rezzy, used to be Living as One. And so Colin has been a great friend and supporter of the Church Digital over the years. And when I'm thinking about, hey, how do we own our platform, Colin is the first guy that came to mind just because that's the heart of how he's building and designing his company, Rezzy.

We're also bringing in Ray, the Armistice, digital pastor over at Christ Fellowship Miami, and co-host once again, Jeff with the Church Digital, myself and Stadia Church Planting, in a conversation that I'm simply calling "Owning Your Platform."

Okay, everybody, here you go. You know, even just kind of to open up, you've transitioned from Living as One to Rezzy. Maybe why? How is that transition gone? You know, what has it been like kind of transitioning the company, the marketing, all that shifting over towards the different approach?

Yeah, it's been great. You know, we had a lot of credibility issues or just like a faith-branded company that now are removed, which is great because we have the world's best video engineers, but that wasn't seen in the front because most times faith companies, they really don't spend enough on engineering, right, because they don't have the resources. And Rezzy has always been someone, you know, we're the only mainstream writer that hasn't gone down during Corona because we have all these insane, you know, developers and standards that we set with that because of our mission, right? So our mission is very much the same. It's the John 17. We're doing communication worldwide, right, with millions and millions and millions of viewers. We're now the largest streamer at Facebook and by Watchmen, it's Church Online Platform and all those things. And so now it's about stewarding the audience. And so like our main mission was to unite the global church. It still is today. We just believe the best way to do that is by having a lot of corporate customers as well. However, the kind of the heart of the company hasn't changed at all. And so yeah, it's only been a good thing. I think, you know, the people kind of expected it, and we're like, this probably should happen ten years ago or two years ago, you know, and which Jeff has been telling me that we should probably do that, you know, for a long time too. Living as One definitely felt like that dating service, right? You know, it's like, this completely, oh, you do video streams? Oh, that's nice.

And I actually, and I want to give testimony here, and Colin hasn't paid me to say this. We, I, on a side, help some churches here in South Florida area figure out how to do broadcasting, the technical aspects, and I've got guys that kind of serve along with me just serving the church. And so there's one particular church that maybe eight, nine months ago in the middle of COVID season asked for a video upgrade. And so we went in there, helped him with the technical aspects and designed the system for them. But one of the things that we did, we wanted to upgrade them from the system they were using to Living as One. Like, I don't think it was Rezzy at the point. It was the Living as One system, same thing. And they were like, no, we want to cut budget. We're okay with what we have. And true testimony here, I specifically said to the lead pastor, "You will come back around in six months and you will say, hey, yeah, we do want to go ahead and get the Rezzy in here."

And so it was funny. It was almost five, six months later that church did call back around and said, hey, we do want to upgrade. We have had failures. And so the product stability of what's coming out of Rezzy is phenomenal. So super excited of what they're doing and the friendship that we've had with Colin over the years because it's right, like, man, the stability of it has been phenomenal in the season where lots of other systems are failing and crashing under the weight of just all the traffic of the church season. Like the investment over, as he's been, been solid.

All right, so commercial over. Let me segue into this. So like, a lot of my concern here with the conversation, we, I'm trying to even figure out how to start this, but when I look at the potential of what we're at least what we're currently doing with church online, I get this feeling that we're utilizing a lot of borrowed platforms, platforms that we don't necessarily have control over. And this may be a good thing in some contexts. It may be a bad thing. This is really what we want to explore. Like, we're broadcasting on Facebook, but you know, and Ray struggles with this all the time. The lead communicator wants to show some sort of a movie clip or a clip of a music video that Facebook's gonna, you know, say the DRM is gonna say no, you don't have the ability to do that. And it's cut. It's he's blacklisted. And if he does it too many times, he's like not allowed to go on. The funny thing is like Ray and Ray's leadership, they want to pay for the rights to do it. It's not like they don't want to pay for it. There's just there's no option to. You can say same things about YouTube. I think YouTube's more insert commercials friendly as opposed to the other, but both of them kind of control what's happening. Even in context of who has accessibility to watch it, the algorithms may or may not be fighting against you. And really, we, the church, we've lost control over a lot of these things.

And so I mean, I'm even struggling a little bit as I see churches who have pivoted like we went from ten percent to like seventy percent of churches are broadcasting online now. But we're doing so on platforms that we don't control. I mean, what are some other kind of negativities? What are some struggles, challenges with broadcasting our services on these borrowed platforms?

Yeah, and the question really is twofold, you know? You've got your own audience to steward, right? And you've got, you know, obviously you're a church already and you have people that are attending, right? For the majority, people listening, and you're sending them these platforms, right? And so then there's that. And then there's also the standpoint of the growth story. There's all these people that you want to reach that are on the internet, right? A lot of them are on social medias. A lot of them are Googling. A lot of them, you know, there's all of these kind of different destinations, right?

And so when we, I think more so the question becomes, what is our strategy for long-term retention and growth, right? And then how do we, you know, how these platforms see the world and how we see the world and how do we interact with that and make strategic decisions out of that? So I think there's a lot to that question. Like, the first one is, you know, I think we've had a ton of questions from it since, you know, Parler got taken down, right? And it wasn't about the politics of it or anything like that. It was, I think, kind of eye-opening, and like, whoa, we could be taken down, right? Like, where we built our entire audience from in the snap of a finger, we could have zero, right? Because it's not, we don't own it. It's not our platform. And it's not even the social medias. It's, you know, AWS. So like, which is like why Parler's still not up today, right? And so they don't have app stores. The app stores, it was the CDN, you know, it was the content delivery network that's who actually hosts their content. So there's wires and servers behind all of the stuff that we're doing today, and there's only a few of those providers in the world that house most of the data going through the internet. AWS being probably the biggest one, or definitely the biggest one. They took them down as well. So it wasn't only, you know, Google and, you know, all of those, you know, Android and then, you know, Apple, but it was also the CDN providers behind that. And I think some Russian companies, which is awkward. But so if we think about, you know, Facebook, YouTube...

Those are all, you know, Instagram, where do people stream their messages and where is content from. What we always have encouraged churches to do is build your own experience online, right, with things like Church Online Platform and, you know, Rezzy powering that. Because Rezzy's a fake company, we're actually going multi-cloud now because of this problem, right, of like, well, if a CDN takes us down, it won't affect us. Who cares? Um, and so, however, like, streams still to the social medias. Obviously there's a ton of benefit from that. Just try to transfer your audience to something that you own.

And you have the two competing ideas that me and Ray and Jeff talked about earlier, which is probably a good thing. The next one is like, you know, do you want to own your own audience or do you want to reach people? And I think there's a way to do both really well. But that's kind of the fight here. Of, you know, normally you have the triangle. You can only pick two. This is like, you know, you have two. You can probably do a hybrid of them. But that's the rub. It's like, hey, I want to be on YouTube. I want to be where all the people are. I want to be on Facebook. I want to be on Instagram where all the people are, right? I need to grow. Um, but where do you stay in your audience? And I think that can be different. That's very helpful, Colin.

Now, quick question for both of you. Is this something new or has this always been the case, you know, what I'm saying with utilizing somebody else's platform? Because, you know, for my aunts and uncles and for family members that are new to tech, you know, they're all in an uproar. They're like, hey, you know, we feel like this is wrong. And I'm like, hey, welcome to me. It doesn't feel so new. So give me some of your perspectives on this in terms of how platforms use the user term agreements, you know, against their own users in some ways.

Sure. Yeah, and you really have to think about, you know, you have the user agreements and you have what they're, you know, PR, right? So if you're a social media company, if you're a CDN, the way that you think about the world is whatever makes me the most money for my shareholders long term, right? And so no matter what mission statement that they have, that's what it is, right? And so if you think about it from a Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, any streaming company provider out there, you've got to ask the question first of all, what is their motivation high level, right? And it's to make the most money over the long period of time, right, for all of those organizations, right? And then you gotta ask, will it ever be at odds with what I'm doing, right? And so with Facebook and YouTube, if Parlor asked that question, right, or any of those other kind of Google, et cetera, basically what Facebook and YouTube decided was that we will make less—we'll make more money over time because of the PR problems by taking them down, right? And there's also some safety and all that that I don't, you know, no arguing about, right, that they argued for. But essentially, that's what these platforms are asking the question of every day. Is do I make more money by, you know, how they make money is driven by public perception, right, public usage? Um, and so do I have more customers that I would gain or keep from taking these people down than I would lose from taking them down, right? And that's the question that they're asking.

Um, and so I think like, and then you have the user agreements that back that up, right? Basically, the way that the user agreements are written, people can take you down for anything, anything they deem hateful. It's very subjective. Um, it's the same way with, you know, Facebook's user agreement, Vimeo's, you know, any different company. Um, it's very scary to read that stuff because there's no assurance. There's no assurances, right? Zero. Um, it's basically, you know, that problem that we talk to. If they think that for some reason they can make more money by taking you down, they will. Um, and the user agreements are their support to that. Um, and, um, yeah, are very scary to read. We've had a lot of people, you know, comment on the user agreements of the different things. And, you know, we, nobody ever reads them anymore. Um, and what you're agreeing to is quite big. And you had an experience, you know, you just talked about, is in person. Um, but, you know, where the user agreement saved your world, right? And so they're actually pretty important things.

Yeah, that's absolutely the case. So for those who don't know, um, I was—Colin and I were having a conversation before we started recording the podcast, and we were kind of talking about how this kind of thing happened. I, before I became the online pastor at Crest Fellowship, I launched a physical campus and we rented a government-owned building. And, you know, we were going through the manager. We didn't think anything of it until the local municipal government got wind of the fact that a church was meeting in one of their facilities. And, uh, and they didn't like that. And so it's not that they were trying to toss us, but they turned down other religious organizations for some of their other facilities. And so they wanted to revisit our deal. And if it weren't for the manager of that particular facility, we might have been gone. Our campus, which is still meeting there by the way, might have been gone. And we have a very unique deal that says, and it's in the fine print of the contract, that only Christ Fellowship can rent from this particular facility as a result of all this. Um, because we were grandfathered in by God's grace and God's grace alone, because it would have been very easy and they would have been within their right. We don't own the facility. It's their facility. But because it's a very public facility, much in the same way as YouTube and Facebook are very public platforms, it enabled us to reach a bunch of people that we normally wouldn't reach, having being inside a church building that's separate, you know, we're talking about a theater that's there on a very public avenue, a very public street in the midst of Miami. And so it enabled us evangelistically to reach people that we would have never reached before. But at the same time, because it's not owned, because it wasn't property of Christ Fellowship, we would have been subject to whatever the owner deems us, right?

Exactly. And the government was saying, hey, wait, it's not worth the risk. The gain of this, however many thousand dollars a month, is not worth the risk of the public perception. So then they came back to you and said, hey, you got to get out of here. And then the contract saved you, right?

Absolutely. And I think, you know, you have people on different sides of the issue. I think, you know, the thing that got it, you know, you have, um, Christians that, you know, would say that, you know, there was no hate speech going on and therefore they shouldn't have been taken down, right? And then you have Christians that say there was hate speech going on, that's why they took them down. I shouldn't be worried about censorship. And then you have, you know, non-believers say these crazy Christians, you know, um, they were doing some crazy stuff. And then they, you know, why would they be worried about that? And it really turns them off, right? And so I think it's a divisive issue in our world of this censorship feel.

Um, and you know, I think in general, you know, you have the churches that, like, don't care about censorship at all, care about reaching people, which I think is a really good thing. And they probably should care a little bit more about censorship. And then, you know, because we want to keep their audience over time, right, and make sure that they never have potential to do that because of maybe what Christianity, on the other side, does, right? Because it's still the same Christianity as the world perceives it. And then we have people on the other side of the boat that, you know, are, you know, scared that, you know, what they, um, could potentially say or do or whatever could be construed as hateful or, you know, whatever it's written in their master user agreement that they would actually be taken down at some point, right? And I think you have those two kind of buckets.

Um, and so, yeah, Jeff, would love to get your perspective as you're thinking on online. Obviously, you have, you know, tons of different churches that you relate with and you're helping them do content online and so many different platforms, right? Um, and so kind of what point of the organization do you think, like, hey, I'm planning to diversify my platforms? Or like, you know, obviously for a big church, that's obvious, right? But for a smaller one that's starting, you know, what would you say in like diversification of platforms or how to manage their audience?

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I don't think it's time to abandon ship on the rented platforms. And hear me, like, the Facebook has a huge win, um, utilizing it. But it's understanding the purpose of that platform and maybe utilizing it in a different way. Broadcasting a seventy-minute service on Facebook's probably not going to get you, um, the in-game result of getting your, getting in front of ones, getting in front of people who are called to Christ. Having that shareable product, um, which is I think the strength of what Facebook could be. And so, um, utilizing it for its strengths, I think would be a plus.

Now, you're ninety-nine percent—the people who are loyal to your church right now, they are watching the services on Facebook. Um, but now, like, in Rey's situation where he's trying to show a clip of a video or maybe we're concerned about censorship or getting removed from those platforms down the road and not being able to communicate with our ninety-nine, which was similar to what was happening March 2020 where churches were afraid they weren't going to be able to effectively communicate with the ninety-nine, you know, it's let's have a separate platform that we control more aggressively that does that. And so that's where I look at, like, what Rezzy is offering, linking in with the Church Online Platform. And we're seeing some other solutions other than Church Online come up. Alter Live is an incredible resource that we've been—Stadia, we've been working more closely with and doing some experiments with. You know, I know Colin and the Rezzy guys have been working, uh, with them as well. And so there are opportunities here, I think, to own your digital house, so to speak, where you control what's happening there.

Um, you know, and the good thing about, like, uh, Church Online Platform, the good thing about Alter Live is that those platforms are more designed to get people connected into discipleship, get people connected into ministry, get people connected into whatever the next step is for the church. And so it's utilizing Facebook for its strength of evangelism, of getting out in front of people, but not letting Facebook be the only thing. Like, for me, when a church says the only thing I do is broadcast on Facebook, I'm fearful for them. Because for me, they're putting all the eggs into that one basket, assuming that Facebook, as the big tech organization, is going to play fair. And maybe they will for a season, but there's a day where they're not. There's a day where something's going to change, whether it's nefarious or they're just doing what they think is best for their organization. And because we don't have any control over that platform, we, the church, is going to be stuck. And I would much rather, you know, okay, yeah, so I'm using Facebook for evangelism purposes, for getting content in front of others. I would rather just have to adjust that small part of my strategy. Okay, I need to figure out a better way to do evangelism by the way. There are better ways to do evangelism digitally. I just need to figure out that little piece better instead of, oh my gosh, I'm back at square one. It's back like February 2020 where I have no digital infrastructure because Facebook took it all away from me.

Me, so that I mean, that's the heart. It's sort of this like diversification in this season and trying to figure out how to get the different platforms to work towards the strategy. What do you guys think about that?

Yeah, I'm happy to share what some of our customers are doing that I think is really effective. And Ray talked about this earlier: is this a new problem, right? Is this because censorship and the stuff, or is this problem always been there for other reasons, right? And like, you know, you should diversify your platforms for everything else. It's just like, you know, investment strategy. You want to diversify. It's all over Proverbs, right? Diversified, don't keep eggs in one basket.

We get a lot of pushback from the really small churches that are just streaming on Facebook, even though they have hardly any viewers compared to their church size, from like the seventy bucks a month that it costs, you know, to have your own stream on Church Online Platform or Ultra Live or your website or any of those other platforms, you know, Brushfire, all great platforms, and Ultra Live's a great one too. And when you think about that, you know, like how much do you spend in the in-person environment to have people come to your own building, right? Like you're not sending them to a Chick-fil-A on a Sunday morning when, you know, if, or I should say McDonald's—I shouldn't use that because they're closed on Sundays—where they can kick you out anytime or for just because that, you know, something happened, right? Like you're sending them to a place that you want to control the experience of, right? And so I think we talked about, you know, the censorship stuff and the worries of Facebook and YouTube taking you down. However, we haven't talked about what's most beneficial strategically, right? And so like, what we've always communicated people to do is: hey, Facebook and YouTube are really great, but their whole monetization platform is built on keeping people on their platform after your service. And they know you guys have all watched, you know, the Social Dilemma. That they have to change your attention very frequently to keep you on the platform, right? And so you're sending people to Facebook, you're sending people to YouTube. They're getting a ton of negative distractions, right? They're getting a ton of people commenting on their Facebook group, people commenting on this, people liking X, people watching these videos. I'm scrolling, same thing with YouTube. All these other videos, right? There's links everywhere for other stuff. There's a search bar that doesn't have your church's content in it at all, right? It's got everything else because they know in order to make more money, they've got to keep you on their platform long term. And they know that they have to change on Facebook. They have to change your attention every fifteen to two minutes, right? Fifteen seconds to two minutes. They've got to change and change it so you keep giving, build the maintenance. You know, YouTube's the same way. It's longer, but if you look at average watch times across the platform, and this has been true ten years ago, right, Facebook, you know, I've never seen higher than like three minutes for a church, right? It's like people are watching for a minute on average. So someone will say like, "Hey, I've got fifteen thousand people viewing." Yeah, but they each watched, you know, a minute. So how do you measure that? That's great for marketing, but those people aren't attending your service, right?

And then YouTube's the same story, right? It has a little bit higher average watch time. It's got typically between ten and twenty minutes, which is pretty, which is a long time. But on your page, like if you do Ultra Live or Church Online Platform on your website, it's forty-five plus, right? They're watching like eighty percent of the service. So if you can convert those people from those different audiences—Instagram, Facebook, YouTube—to that, that's the ones. We have a lot of churches that stream the first, however long, of the message on Facebook and they cut off. They watch on my site or YouTube so they get the benefit, right? Or they have their pastor record something on Instagram Live saying, "Hey, we're streaming live right now here. You know, please share this with other people," so they get the sharing benefit, same thing with Facebook and YouTube, but watch on my site, right? Like come to our thing where we have chat and you can join community groups, you can talk with people, you can, you know, that way they have positive distractions like giving, join a community group, things that will actually impact their life for the better rather than, you know, their aunt commenting on their photo or, you know, the YouTube video that they're interested in, right?

I think there's an opportunity here to even revisit what that outward-facing video. You're right, like have the pastor doing that Facebook thing where I'm not worried about DRM, I'm not worried about, and I can play to the strengths of the platform like like you're alluding to where, hey, people are only going to watch thirty seconds of this video. Let's make the thirty seconds of the video work. I'm working with the strengths of the platform and using that front door to onboard them into the service wherever it's at. And if that's the approach now, I can have numerous, like dozens of forward-facing onboarding opportunities. Hey, let's, I mean, this is crazy. I've been spending some time the past couple weeks working with Clubhouse. Let's figure out how to turn Clubhouse into a front door to onboard people into a church service. I have no idea how to do that. I'm just talking out loud, but there's an opportunity as new things open up. Don't look at, start thinking above the funnel, maybe approach here. Don't look at the church service as the top of the funnel digitally. Let's try to figure out how to work above there, connect with people, and then drive them into the church service that's on your digital platform, on your property, as opposed to borrowed from somebody else where you don't control it.

Yeah, there's lots of things here, right? So, first, as a side note, like Jeff talked about DRM. What we started doing is we started cutting movie clips all together and inserting a slide of the clip and just like explaining it for our audience so that we don't get taken off of a platform. So for those of you churches that are still suffering through, then we want to do at the movies or our pastor is just adamant about, you know, putting a clip in or whatever else, talk to them about the possibility of just inserting a slide so that your live audience can still enjoy the clip, but that your online audience, it's not as bad. It's not as good. I'm going to start off there. It's not on your website too, so you might, you can have different streams, you know, where you're streaming it to the website, but so you can say, "Hey, watch on the website if you want to see the clip." That's exactly right.

But the other thing, and I think Colin alluded to this really well, is you have to play to the platform's strengths. You really have to understand what the platform is good at, and then from there allow that to drive people from content. We talked about this a lot on the show: go from content to community. Like it can't just be about engaging with the content. So, you know, if it is Facebook, you know, and YouTube is your video server, then leverage YouTube video chapters. They're there. You can take like a small clip of the message. Elevation does this really well with their swipe-up feature. You can do this with Facebook and just have a link right there in the video and say, "Hey, click here for the full message," and it'll take them right to the same spot to pick up where they left off in the midst of the message, and they can continue from there to the end. They don't need your introductory story. They don't need your illustration. They were already, you know, wrapped into whatever point you were making with that one clip. And that's a good way to use one platform to link to another platform to just kind of absorb them in. Or even better, if you're doing what Colin and Jeff are talking about, drive them to your archive. Get them to binge. You know, we binge-watch so much content now, and just give them the full series right there and say, "Yeah, this is part of chapter two of this series. Keep going, keep watching this stuff. You're already here." Leverage that to your capability as much as possible to try and draw them in because every platform has its own individual strength. But they're not really meant to be a duel, are they, Colin? Or am I overthinking this as well?

Oh yeah, and I think there's also, yeah, what exactly we said. One hundred percent agree with there's also the demographics of the different platforms, right? And so there's not only exactly what you said, which is every platform has a purpose. Like if you, you know, if you think about, you know, everyone's going to watch your sermon on a minute, you know, that's a scary thought for most pastors, right? Because in any minute that they could come in, they're like, "Wow, they could really miscontrue something that I said and then never come back, right? And be turned off from Christ Fellowship or Life Church or whatever it is, right?" That's a scary thought. And so like, to put your whole service, you know, on platforms where people only watch for a minute or fifteen minutes or whatever, that's a big risk too, right? It's not necessarily an acquisition strategy, right? Like if you want to acquire more, you know, people, which is evangelism, but in marketing terms, if you want to acquire more views, right, which is people that don't know Christ or people that are struggling or whatever, right, is that the best strategy?

Demographically, it's true too, you know? Facebook, hardly any young people are going to watch your live stream on Facebook, right? Hardly any males are going to watch your stream on Facebook, right? On YouTube, hardly any females are going to watch your stream. It's mostly male, right? And so, you know, churches normally have this: "Hey, I'm going to try to trend towards this audience, right?" And so that's why YouTube has been so popular amongst the biggest churches is not only do they have a lot of viewership and people that come to watch content like that, but the same thing is true is like, "Hey, you know, that's only reaching a certain demographic." With exactly what you know, Ray and Jeff both alluded to, the platforms have a purpose, right? So YouTube is much better at the five to ten minute clip on an exact topic, right? So what if you did that and then said, "Learn more about it on my website. We're streaming live right now, right?" We're streaming live right now, right? And so like, if you can have your pastor kind of record these, you know, wherever the biggest audience is, and for those things to trend and go big, and there are some exceptions. So I should say that like, you know, like people have been really successful doing campus-specific or kind of group-specific Facebook groups or, you know, like the biggest churches like Bethel and Red Rocks and Elevation and Hillsong do great on YouTube because then they can trend, right? So an argument for them: say, "I'm going to send my congregation there so that they can trend so that I'll get hundreds of thousands of views, right? Where I really only get fifty thousand or whatever." But you really have to be a certain size to do that. And the question still comes with that: is like, what's your long-term strategy? Sure, those people, hundreds of thousands of people are watching on YouTube. How does that impact your funnel, right? So what are you funneling them towards? You probably don't want to just funnel them to more YouTube videos because they're not going to be watching your content, right? It's so many negative distractions.

So yeah, I totally agree with both of what you guys said, and demographics is a part two. Yeah, by the way, let me just totally do another.

Commercial here. Like, this is all the stuff that we unpack in Stadius digital learning communities—developing that funnel, understanding the platforms. And so if you're listening to this, forgive the commercial, and we'll return to regular programming soon. But if you're listening to this and you're like, "I have no idea what they're talking about," or "I think I know what they're talking about, I need help taking these steps," Stadia churchplanning.org digital. We've got incredible content aimed towards helping you develop the strategy. We've got community of people that help you develop that strategy and get you connected with similar churches so you can learn together with other churches like you that are wrestling and asking those same questions. So Stadia churchplanning.org. Commercial over. Let's get back to where it works.

I'd love to add to that commercial. We've had churches that have gone through that that have taken their audience from, you know, crazy different numbers. And you know, a lot of them start using Rezzy as well, and part of that process because they are using something crappy right now that's not helping them on the digital perspective. But I mean, that program is so helpful, and you know, Jeff has been doing online church for so long that if you're struggling with this or want to get more viewers online, want to impact more people, I yeah, absolutely recommend it. We've seen awesome results from our customers. Awesome.

Love that. Having that strategy is so important though, especially moving forward. And this is not even—and listen, I can have the conversation fighting for a digital-only expression of church that does not have a physical footprint. And if you've listened to the podcast, you've heard me have that conversation. I'm not having that conversation today. If you are in the physical building, it is so important for you to even have that digital strategy moving forward and wrestle with some of the stuff, have understanding of what the platforms are. And if you are the digital guy in a church that's surrounded by physical-minded people, fight, cheer on, celebrate. Don't give this up because it's so important moving forward. Let them see, let them understand. I know I personally—I'm telling my own story here—there have been seasons where I've been discouraged, where I've been frustrated, where I've been angry, where maybe I internalized it a little too much. But you need to continue on because what you are trying to do is so vital for the future of the church. Continue on in that struggle with helping them understand. Maybe "fight's" not the right word. I may take back the word "fight," but don't give up that struggle.

Ray, you like that word "fight"? What do you—I mean, listen, we've talked about this. CF is not a digital-first church by any stretch. You know, and with my time there with Ray times, I don't want to call out CF on that, but what do you think here?

Well, I mean, there's—we're trying to get more in that direction, right? And so you know, the thought of hybrid church, I think, has a lot of people inspired, or digital churches—we call it on this show—is kind of where a lot of folks want to go. But it's so hard to break the paradigm of what happens in the room is what matters most. And it's funny because I've heard stories, and you've heard stories, Jeff, of you know, of how Charles Stanley's church understood what happens in those cameras impacts more people than what happens in the room. This is before the age of the internet because they were doing TV ministry, and they were understanding, "Oh, wait a minute, we have the greatest possibility for reaching people for Jesus just by looking into that camera." And so it's funny how that doesn't even have to be a new thing. It's just so hard because we invest so much in our physical structures and our physical buildings, and they cost a lot more, right? And Colin, talk about that—like the cost of what happens in the room versus what happens digitally and how churches struggle through that. Why is that such a tough tension to break?

Yeah, we're actually—so we did a digital campaign at our church where we raised money just for digital, and it was so funny because we had to put like a physical component in it. And you know, like we would—we had this really awesome volunteer at our church who probably works twenty hours a week, and he's all these Fortune 500—he owns all the digital and all these Fortune 500 companies work with the biggest companies in the world helping them reach people online, right? Move, how do we help the digital age, right? How do we take advantage of it? And he asked our pastors. He was like, "Hey, if I told you, you know, 'Hey, we're gonna—I need two million dollars to do this building, to do this campus, and you know, in three years we're gonna have eight hundred people in it,' right? Then you know, would you do that? Absolutely, that'd be amazing." And he was like, "You know, if I—okay, then told you, 'Hey, I'm gonna spend a million dollars, then we're gonna have eight hundred more people viewing online every week. Would you do that?'" And they're like, "You know, um—" And it's, you know, the money difference that you think about putting online just because of the paradigms we have around it are, you know, dollar for dollar, like online is exponentially, right? Has a much higher return than a physical campus, right? But because we have the paradigms, and it's kind of funny because I remember sitting in so many—I don't know how many sessions we've done together, Jeff, with different things—but like each one before Corona, you know, obviously these are all before Corona. We—I haven't done any session since Corona. And we would have people on every topic like really fight against us with the online thing, especially fight against—yeah, because I was just the tech guy and Jeff was the guy. Yeah, I'm above the pastor. Everybody wants to fight Jeff. Step off, come on, man. Yeah, about you know, theology online, why you shouldn't do it or what. And then now no one does that. I haven't had a conversation biting someone theologically online forever. I hope and pray that you know, these churches that have gone online have seen the benefit of reaching people online and will not just stop doing it, right? I don't think we'll have a lot of that. I think that's only pretty archaic organizations. You know, I think for most people it was, "Hey, we knew that this was probably a thing that we needed to do," and we need to go in there. And Jeff is looking at me skeptically, but I really, really hope we don't have any of those.

Yeah, I honestly—I think the next battlefield, you're—I mean, you're right. The churches who were fighting pre-COVID, I mean, I've told the story before. We're a pastor, a friend of mine here in South Florida, told me November, December 2019, "Jeff, you are sinning by helping people broadcast services online. You are taking people out of the bride of Christ, the church." That was the conversation, 2019, December. March 2020, "Hey, Jeff, we're really in trouble over here. Can you help us figure out how to stream?" Like, that's a four-month sway. COVID doesn't change theology. Now the conversation that I hear—and then I'm literally like nationally recognized speakers have had me on their podcasts and have derailed me over this one point: "Hey, yeah, digital is appropriate for now, for a season, but we need to get back." And so I think there's a subculture at some point—I don't know what percentage—because I am seeing so many churches are learning lessons in this season. And so I'm not saying it's going to—the pendulum is going to swing back to the way that it was February 2020. But there's a percentage that that are saying, "Hey," and I don't even know that I want to die on this hill today, but like, there's a percentage that's saying, "Hey, we want to go back to February 2020. We want to go back to the way that it was and not acknowledge that digital piece. We have Zoom fatigue. We don't understand what digital discipleship actually means. Digital is only for consuming a product, and that's not what the church is." And rather than building a disciple-making vehicle in digital space, we just want to go back and do it all in physical.

Ray's laughing at me just at the thought here. I'm laughing only because—and we've quoted Ed Stetzer on this, you know, before in our podcast—where we build our churches like theaters on Sunday morning. And so the reality is that whether we're showing up live for content consumption or whether it's happening in our homes, if it's content consumption, it's just content consumption versus being the body of Christ, right? Which, go to Acts 2, go to you know, all of Paul's letters—involves so much more than just merely sitting around and listening to a guy talk for forty-five to forty-five minutes or two hours, depending on your denomination, right? So that's where we've got to, you know, readjust our doxology and our theology in terms of what does it actually mean to be part of the body of Christ and the practice of it, you know? And what does it mean to be a practicing believer in terms of community with that? Because technology, you know, in my—at least, you know, what it's done for us during this COVID season, and when I say "us," I don't just mean Christ Fellowship, I mean even in terms of my own family, because I'm sure like many of you guys, you haven't been able to get together physically with a lot of your family. Yeah, but that doesn't change the fact that I that I love them, I care about them, and I still long to gather physically with them. But if this is the best option I have, and you know, even though, you know, in many cases I can regather with my parents and with my sister and my brother-in-law physically and we do, this is how we interact throughout the week often because this is our way of keeping up with each other. It's not just a family dinner once a week or once a month kind of thing. We keep up with each other through technological means, and then when we can gather physically, we do.

So yeah, and it's really, you know, you would think that we would learn to not go the way the dodo bird after all the Blockbuster stories, right? Of, "Hey, let's focus on stores," which is what we're doing right now. I'm focusing, you know, or what that subculture is doing. And I do agree, I think it's a much smaller percentage. Like, we think, you know, because a lot of people are really invested in this. You can't just stream, you know, I think the churches that haven't invested in it or just streaming from a phone or doing a video and posting on the website are probably the ones that, you know, are not seeing much fruit from it. And it's easy for them because they were very reluctant anyways. And then now they're not seeing proof from it, so it's gonna be easy for them to go back, right? Um, to the physical. But I really do—I mean, if you can ever be as sure as anything, I'm really sure that it'll go the way of the Blockbuster, right? You will, you know, hang on to that store strategy, and there'll be one left in Alaska, right? And the problem is your church will get older and older and older, right? And then it'll be hard. We—everybody that you want to reach is on the online space, right? And we can't ignore the online space. It's the digital. It's a new frontier, right? And it will always be, and it'll transform every day, right? Things are changing, and it's scary because of that, right? And we get that. But it's our job as believers, you know, to reach people that haven't come. And really, you're asking your congregation, you know, a really hard thing to do too if you're telling them that they need to come every week. You know, people used to come to church 3.4 times a month. There's 3.8 now. They come 1.4 or whatever. And it's like, you know—

It's not bad people, right? It's the soccer mom that has to choose whether her kid's going to play soccer or not, right? Or go to church on Sunday when, like, she volunteers during the week, goes to community group. Like, why is the theater on a Sunday important when she's experiencing community and doing all that? She'll watch online if during her kid's soccer practice, right? So like, why is that wrong? And coming together as believers, like, and that was never, you know, I don't think Jesus ever said that we can't come over the internet, right? And it's like, and I get that people, you know, it's being together and what you define that as. Um, I really hope that people continue and whatever expression doesn't have to be an online, you know, whatever it is that we don't ignore digital, right? And we don't go the way of the Blockbuster or the door or whatever. Um, and that we actually think about how Jesus would express, you know, church in this culture.

Yeah, the other thing that I know that a lot of churches are afraid of is the comparing and contrasting between, oh, but they can watch any church online on a given Sunday morning. And when I think of that, I think of the whole Popeyes versus Chick-fil-A thing that happened a couple years ago. Oh, Popeyes is coming out with the sandwich. Oh, it might be better than Chick-fil-A's. That lasted about two weeks, and then all my friends were running back to Chick-fil-A because they were like, dude, they ran out of the sandwiches. The lines were too long. The service was terrible. I can't believe this. I went running back to Chick-fil-A as fast as possible. Didn't matter how the Popeye sandwich tasted because I wanted the full experience that I got somewhere else. And so the question becomes now, church is it just about your sermon content, or is there something greater that keeps your people locked in? That keeps them coming back? That makes them feel like they're part of a family? And so it can't just be about that good content.

Yeah, I agree. And I think that's even more of an argument to own your own platform to a degree, right? Not only for the censorship of the student, but like, if you're able to influence people's experience, right, on your site or something like that, or even if it's your communication directors on Facebook or whatever, right? Like, if you're able to shepherd, you know, wrap community, you know, church online always says community around content, right? How do we wrap that? And, you know, how to, and Jeff always talks about discipleship, right? How do we disciple people online? How do we add community and discipleship from online? And that's a very digital, you know, right strategy. That's a very, you're just taking the on what you do online and you're putting it in person. Um, and there's nothing, there's not nothing really that scary about that, right? We're not going all the way that Jeff's saying we should have online-only churches. I agree that we're not, you know, that that scares those people that are online-only, which, you know, because you didn't want to die on that hill today. But the, um, what we're, what really we're saying is digital people, um, that have fought, and if you're at your organization that the ones that's like, yeah, I get this, right? Which is probably the people listen to this podcast because the other people stopped listening a long time ago. Um, is, you know, do things to influence the digital impact at your church. So some of what our customers do that are pretty cool is they put up, you know, there's a, you know, stage display or whatever, whatever you normally do for lyrics, put another hundred TV up there, two hundred TV or whatever you want, right? And have it be the analytics but online stream that's watching live and put that in the green room too. It's very easy. You can get that from the Resi platform. You get that from YouTube. You can get that on Facebook, right? Um, and we update ours every sixty seconds. So when the pastor is up there, whenever, when there's not that many people in the room today, right? They can say, hey, you know, I'm impacting people all over the world who are watching right now, right? And they're in the room. Um, you know, spiritually just like they are here, right? They're listening to the service. They're praying through it. They're being impacted, right? Um, they're praying on their own. They're texting their friends during services to watch it, right? Um, and we did that in our green room and on our stage display, and that really helped leadership and worship kind of see it, right? Um, and see like, hey, wow, there's like, you know, each one of these like little dots is a person. Like, there's a lot more of those than that we're in the room. And like, each one of those dots is like hearing, right? And like, our pastor will pray over them before he walks out and do things like that, which is just just the cool thing to do. Anything you can do to kind of put digital in front of leadership and say, this is the impact, right? Like, stories are always helpful. That data and not just giving them data after the service, but like, letting them pray over it, right? Like, it's live and, you know, experiencing it like they would pray over the room, right? Um, and yeah, I think there's probably other things that we could add there that help. Right now, when the digital person is winning, he's the pastor. I mean, he's the strategic team. He's the, you know, he's doing everything right now. In a couple months or a few months, however long, the balance of power will change. So how do we convince people with digital today, right?

Yeah, I never thought of me about putting that the algorithm, the analytics like public, you know, on an or something like that's a great idea. Hey, I want, I want to challenge Rezzy. If if anybody can figure this out, you can figure this out. I want the Microsoft engineered NBA Orlando LED TV wall. Like, when they had, you could you could be the fan in the stands watching the game happen like like at the same time the fan cast. What is that? What they called it? That's what they called it. I want that in church, bro. Colin, you got to figure it out. Like, I'm told they had three hundred million dollars worth of engineers working on that project. I'm willing to bet to take you guys what, well, maybe a week or two?

Yeah, I mean, we'll definitely do it. Um, in the future, there's, you know, VR will gain a lot more traction, right? And, you know, and those type of platforms, and we'll do it. We tend to not do bleeding edge things, but like, until the technology is scalable. And today, the technology is not very scalable, but it will be in the future. And that'll definitely be one of the ways that we consume church, right? Is, you know, hey, I can talk to the person next to me. And there's already examples of VR churches today, and that'll run just on browsers, right? Not, yeah, it's a VR. So like, we'll show up. I'm gonna connect. I'm gonna connect to you and Stephanie over at Alter Live, yeah? So you guys are gonna, we're gonna start, Rezzy and Alter Live coming up with the solution because I want to virtually see the people watching at home. I I want to stand from the stage. I just, I think I just think that's so beautiful to be able to show that, to be able to have that represented. I think would be awesome.

Go ahead, right? Well, to give credit to a church across town, the Vue did that a lot during the pandemic, and they leveraged Zoom rooms and they put them on TVs out there. Like, they had like a spacious, spaced audience live, but then they also had TVs around the room with the Zoom screens full blown up. And they had the people in there. And then the people who were watching on Zoom were watching, you know, the elite pastor Rich, and they were, and they were seeing each other live like in the moment as well. And that was just an exceptional way to kind of get people in the moment. And so, you know, they would, they had, you know, the ability, they had a link that would go live, you know, so you could enter into the Zoom room. They obviously had moderators at the time making sure everything was kosher and making sure everything was okay. But that was actually, and I got to give them a lot of credit because the tech didn't exist. Like, Jeff, you were saying you were talking about FanCast. So they like leverage what little bits of tech they merged them together and they made that kind of thing happen. Just really cool to see Food Church do that kind of thing to keep that live feel, but at the same time, this whole within this whole digital space. And so props to them, man. Good stuff. And they did it without three hundred million dollars worth of engineers.

Yeah, it didn't. They didn't pay the big bucks for that, Colin. You take you a weekend, man. Come up with something.

Well, what they did there, and they were Rezzy customers, so they streamed out their normal stream just like any other church. And then they did, you know, the Zoom rooms of people that can see and talk in a physical space and they're watching, even though it's slightly off of what they're watching, it doesn't matter because people are still interacting with it, right? So pretty cool.

Yep. And they're saying, yeah, I think anytime you can do anything like that, you know, leadership-wise, it just helps bridge the gap of understanding, right? Like, um, we have, you know, most of our pastors today didn't grow up on their phones, right? They didn't. Um, and and it's a challenge. Um, and yeah, hey, so we're gonna, we're gonna rap. We're gonna land the plane. This has been a great conversation. Love this. Hey, out there, own your platform. Own your audience. I love that. Don't, and develop strategies for the different platforms that you're on. The Facebook strategy is maybe different than the YouTube, which is different than the Twitter. Figure out what you're going to do with Clubhouse and and and the TikToks. Oh my gosh, if we could figure this out, this is for me, this is the thing that I'm wrestling with today. Um, Twitch. How can we connect Twitch? This idea of streaming, um, not a church service. I don't want to stream a church service in Twitch, but use it as an onboarding device to get people connected in. I think there's an opportunity there. I'm exploring, and we're going to have some podcast conversations about that soon. But but love this idea of owning the audience and and and really not dependent upon some of the CDNs and and and that for for the distribution of this. So hey, let's uh, let's just land the plane here, Ray. What are you thinking as we're wrapping up?

Yeah, as we talk about, you know, and kind of circle back to where we're at earlier in the conversation, as we talk about using other folks' platforms, I know that a lot of churches, especially right now, are probably scared. They're like, man, I I think I need to run away from some of these platforms because I'm afraid of how it's going to be impacted, whatever else. But let me just remind you, uh, you know, go back to the New Testament. Paul stood up on public steps, preached, and yeah, he got tossed. He got cancelled. He got, you know, a whole bunch of stuff, but it didn't stop him. He would just keep getting right back up there and preaching as well. And so don't be afraid to engage with these platforms, however long as we can, you know, and and if that's ever taken away from us, that's okay. But don't let that be your only place, kind of like what Colin and Jeff are alluding to. Make sure you got a great sermon archive on your website. Make sure that you've got a strong website, a strong website presence. Does it, you know, you don't have to use one of the big boys. You can use something easy like Squarespace or Wix. But no matter what, make sure and point people back towards that community and point them back to where they can find out more about your church. That's the bigger deal. Don't host it with YouTube because that's the same thing. But yeah, exactly. Yeah, a lot of people have.

A certain archive on their website, but it's YouTube, so people watch one video and go to YouTube. I don't know that's good. Calling before, before you go on with that, it and I think this is kind of an important thing. You know, with the internet, nothing is ever truly free in the sense of cost, right? And so we need to just kind of understand that too as a church. Wait, oh, Facebook's free, YouTube's free, yeah, to us. But it could eventually cost us something in the sense that they can decide whether or not they want to host our content for free. And that's how some of that works. And the reason why it's free is because they're making millions off of the viewers that you're sending them. And so, isn't it a better picture for you to have more giving dollars from the people that you're sending them, right? Like, if you do it on your thing, you have more giving, more retention, more people over time, right? So if you own your platform, right, you're giving it to them, they're there, they're listening to ads, paying for stuff or whatever, right? I'm staying on those platforms viewing. So yeah, I totally agree. And those viewers are worth something to you too. Um, not only for the kingdom, but also for the giving and the things that make your church sustainable, right? The more viewer hours you get, um, the more giving that you have, right? The more people and community groups that you have, um, etcetera. And so I think we hear free. Exactly, like you're right, and we're saying okay, let's, I'm all in on free, right? Who's not? It's great. But then we don't think about the costs. And Facebook and YouTube are very smart at defining free and how to make money off of free. And churches should be as well, right? Um, and uh, so yeah, in closing, I think we've already said it. Really thankful for Jeff and Ray's leadership in this space and all the things that you guys are doing to provide George's content. It's extremely helpful. And we'll, it'll be a really interesting time as we go back to, you know, the hybrid types of services. And hopefully everybody keeps awesome. Love it. Hey, it's always great hanging out with Colin. Um, and looking forward to more conversations like this in the future. Church, uh, just be aware that what we're unintentionally doing may have consequences down the road. I love this. Like, nothing is free. These giant tech companies didn't get to be giant tech companies by giving away free services. Uh, and so as a result, there are things that will cost. And I'm not even talking dollars and cents necessarily here. Uh, and so there are challenges in some of this that will likely be an issue in the future. So, um, know that, develop that strategy, be aware of some of this going in. Because the massive stress ball that was March 2020 can very easily happen again, uh, should season shift, should people shift, should situations shift, which they're likely to do in culture today. So be aware, be thinking about this, and start to develop a plan that's maybe not so dependent upon these free platforms. Your lifeblood should not be on a free thing. Work and develop. There are options to kind of get you more stable, more secure for the road ahead. Not to mention better strategies for it. So, uh, happy to help through that. Hit me up on social media if you guys have direct questions. You can text me at 484-324-8724 or comment on anything on social media. And glad to help. So, hey, Ray, thanks for jumping on this. Colin, once again, thanks for coming in as well and taking the time. So for Ray, for Colin, this is Jeff with the Church Digital and Stadium Church Planting. Thanks for joining us today. We'll see you next time here at the pod. You all have a good day.