EP194: Lee Coate, Complementary Content & an Experimenting Culture

Welcome to the Church Digital Podcast, powered by Stadia Church Planting. Through this podcast, learn about how God is using technology and innovation in digital and digital environments around the world. Our goal? To help churches like yours learn to be the church digitally. Our heart? That churches like yours will discover a newfound focus on disciple-making that will revolutionize your church. And now, your host, here's Jeff Reed. So yeah, any time I can get Lee Coat to jump in a podcast conversation with me or to sit down and just talk about things, it ends up being a good day. Lee, well, he's kind of a straight shooter. He says what's on his mind. Filter may not always be there. It's not always in check.

And honestly, it just makes for a really rich, really deep conversation. Some of you, if you remember back to the Clubhouse days of the beta show when we were hanging out on that platform called Clubhouse, Lee and I had a conversation about the Peloton version of small groups and why the entire small groups model was wrong and blah, blah, blah. We talk about it here in the conversation. But in the midst of some of that really birthed this idea of, hey, maybe we need to do something different or something complementary to what we are already doing. To just keep doing the same thing over and over again and it's not working, well, that's insanity, right? And so the thing that I love about Lee is not only does he talk the talk, but he puts the walk in there as well.

And so Lee, through the Crossing Church in Vegas, they put some meat behind Lee's talk. And through the experimental culture that's there, they created an experiment called Sessions, which is really the heart of this conversation. Now, we do talk about Sessions and this idea of the complementary content that goes alongside the discipleship strategy and what that looks like. And to be honest, and I realized this literally in the conversation, Lee hadn't even finished version one of the experiment. And so even jumping on a podcast when I was trying to schedule it, maybe we should have waited a couple of weeks to finish Experiment 1 and to get official. But even, you know, Lee being Lee already had a lot of the stuff, figured out what the next versions needed to look like.

So there's, in this, we do talk about Sessions, but it's not just about Sessions and it's not just about the complementary content. The larger theme and what I love about the crossings in Vegas is this idea of an experimental culture within a church where we're going to try something different. We're going to learn from it. We're going to iterate. We're going to try again. And it's one of the wins that I think makes Lee so adaptable and the crossing so healthy in this COVID season because people are willing to experiment. The church as a culture is willing to experiment and learn lessons through it. And so that's really the thread that I wanted to pull in this conversation. We're bringing in Lee Coat, executive pastor with the Crossings Church.

He's also with the Growmentum Consulting Group, as well as myself, Jeff with the Church Digital, in a conversation that I'm simply calling Complementary Content and Experimenting Culture. Okay, everybody, here you go. Hey, so just even as we're opening up a little bit, tell us about your role and what you do at Crossings or the Crossing at Vegas. Yeah, Jeff, thanks for having me. I've served for the last 15 years at the Crossing. It's a 20-year-old church, so we love to still think of ourselves as a church plant, but in reality, we're not. We just passed that 20-year threshold during our favorite season of all time, COVID. And I've been there for 15 years. And my role really is, the best way I can describe it, is really to lead out our ministries, which involves a lot of strategic conversations, trying to kind of work alongside our lead guy to bring vision to that, while at the same time over the last couple of years, working with an organization called Grow Minim, where we're kind of doing the same thing that I'm doing with my team, but on an expanded basis.

And so we're working with churches all across the country to have those kinds of strategic conversations. And even the conversations that you and I are going to dive into a little bit today. And so I love being able to do both the work that I do here in Las Vegas, but also the work that I get to do all over the place with other church leaders. We use the term in the Grow Minim organization I'm with, we want to balance the working in it with the working on it. And so a lot of what I get to do with other churches is become sort of that work on it guy when I'm in the room or I'm on a phone call and just remind them to get out of the in it a little bit. And so I get to do the same thing though, day to day with my team.

And so I'm hoping we're having a little bit of a work on it conversation as well, you know. No, I love it. It's such a small difference, nuanced phrase, right? To work in it and then to work on it. But it's amazing so often, and I don't want to die on this hill, but in my ministry career, there's just seasons where it's been in the middle of it and everything's running, you know, and the next church service is 167 hours away and there's so much stress in it that you almost don't have that ability to step back and really look, especially in this COVID season. It's been really hard to step back and see the big picture. Yeah. And one of the very simple and obvious ways that we coach teams and they love the reminder is I think you have to be intentional around the on it.

And that even dials itself down to, and I have to do the same. It even dials itself down to whether it be a percentage of a rhythm of gathering that you do as a team that is set aside, whether within one meeting or within a series of meeting that you literally, and I've literally done it before where you literally say this is a work on it conversation that we're going to have because the reality is we're always going to drift to in it. Someone's always going to want to have a conversation around who did this and who did that and why didn't we do this and this calendar and this ball got dropped. That's always going to be our default. So the work on it opportunities have to be intentional in order for them to even happen.

And you referenced it, Jeff, so well. We are in a season, especially when we're in a season of disruption where the working on it becomes even more vital because we're not even clear what we're in. So true. And it was in one of those seasons. It was a watershed moment for me. And I'm actually, I'm trying to remember the context. I think we were in a coaching call together with a group of churches we were working and I was working with Stadia. And you started talking about this idea of small groups that the model, you know, I don't think you used the word broken, but it was more in line of is this even working not only for the COVID season, but just in general. And then we, I remember we jumped on a clubhouse and started talking about this idea of Peloton with small groups.

And what happened to clubhouse? What happened to clubhouse? That came, oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Well, now everybody's doing clubhouse. You know, I just, I just saw that Facebook's doing audio only and Twitter's doing spaces. And, and, and, and it's like, yeah, I mean, and I love clubhouse for the season, but it was so hard to get clubhouse to get my audience to clubhouse. And now everybody else picking it up. I feel bad for clubhouse, but I guess it's, I don't, is it still, is it, I guess it's still around. I haven't, I haven't been on it in a minute or two. I would only go on because you were there, Jeff. So when you stopped, I stopped. So there you go. Oh, thank you so much. Oh, so much love in the room.

I appreciate that. But I mean, it just, if nothing, clubhouse gave the opportunity to talk crazy, to start to talk outside of the box. And, and, and I've loved some of the conversations we've had in coaching and, and, and, and in that talking about this idea of, man, small groups were struggling to really see that as, as a viable piece of, of, of discipleship moving forward. And, and I know, you know, through there, I know in this conversation, maybe six months, a year ago, you were, you were thinking some crazy stuff and wanting to experiment with some things talking about what is now at the crossing called sessions. Yeah, I was, I was ranting a little bit. I was ranting a little bit, Jeff. Was that, was that what you would call that?

Holy ranting. Okay. Holy ranting. Okay. So maybe talk, talk a little bit about this. What, what were some of the pain points that you were feeling centered around small groups? I think, you know, I want to dive into that conversation, I think to just give a little context and you and I were tracking because we were in a lot of conversations, especially during that season. I think that, I think the context of what became sessions is really about reframing the question more than trying to figure out the answers. And I think what, what really was troubling to me was, you know, the, the Peloton experience, which you and I both participated in to some degree, you know, and just kind of looking at that and going, what, what code have they cracked that makes me wake up at four 30 in the morning to get on a ride with thousands of people all over the world and do it happily and then receive the benefits physically in my health if I do it consistently.

And, and as we began to bounce things around, I began to ask the question that probably we don't really want to ask around reframing the question of what is the objective of what we have created the concept of community groups, life groups, small groups, home groups, whatever we call it, what is the primary objective? And if I was trying to accomplish this primary objective in the season we're in, would this be the methodology in which I would do it? That's really outside of the ranting that I did, really the, the, the onus of the conversation because Peloton can, in a sense, I'll use the word guarantee. In other words, if you and I are faithful to their platform and we ride diligently, even if our, even if our diet is not that improved, we will, we will be healthier.

It is beneficial to us. We will gain some benefit. I was frustrated with some of the continual framing of small groups, small groups, small groups, small groups with our context, not as a, not as I love small. I love the idea of small groups. I love the idea of people being in community, connecting deeply. This, that's not what it was about. It was about, was that really happening or were we just continually pushing something out that failed to reach the objective, but yet we had no ability to ask a new question around what could be. And so that, that was the, the sort of like, okay, what do we do now? As I talk about sessions, a couple of things I want to say right off the bat, and then we can dive into the concept.

Number one, we are in the first season of it and we are learning in the midst of it. The things that we theorized have not all been true. The, the, the, the things that we are experiencing, experimenting with, we have had many learnings and we can talk about those, Jeff. But I think what we did well with it, and I probably should explain it and then tell people what we did. What we did well with it is we did not blow anything up in order to do it. Let me say that again for your listeners. We did not blow anything up to innovate. And I realized that sometimes you just have to innovate. What we decided to do is sort of that three box theory that, there was a book written a few years ago called The Three Box Solution.

Basically, the concept was keep doing your primary thing and innovate over here and figure out what, what's, what's the win in the innovation and then integrate it into your primary thing. And so, we've kind of taken that approach with sessions and what it is. And now you want me to say, what is it? Yeah, no, no, no. I feel like we talked about the three box thing. Last time, I actually did a podcast with you. We had to link back to that. I love that. Yeah, okay. So, fine. Make me ask the question. What is sessions? Like, what, what were you hoping to accomplish here with some of this experiment? Yeah, so about six months ago, we sat down and made a commitment as a team, put a person, a couple people primarily in charge of producing it.

And the concept is, is that we would develop 15-minute video podcast that would be around a variety of topics with a variety of, a variety of perspectives that would be provided. Our tagline that we created was tap into growth wherever you are. And the concept was to use a app-based platform to produce 15-minute video media podcasts that would then be pushed out to people at specific times. So here's a couple of the nuances or the platform, the foundations that we were working off of our theories. Number one is we wanted it to be initially app-based. Number two is we wanted it to have a community, i.e. a chat feature that would go along with it so that people that were watching at the same time would watch.

Thirdly, and most importantly, we wanted it to have a scheduling aspect. So we wanted it to be something that on our weekend gatherings, our primary time, whether in person or online, people were focused on the crossing, that we would have people intentionally schedule the time that they would carve out to do that. And then they would show up during that time, there would be interaction through the chat, they would view the video or listen to the video. It wasn't necessary that they view it and that they would interact and be able to be a part of it. So we launched it in September. Some of the topics were I did a leadership and faith lab where I did interviews with local faith, local leaders who had a faith path and how that intersected.

We did one called Popaganda, which was pop culture and kind of a podcast dialogue around pop culture. We did one that was sort of, sorry, Dave Ramsey, it was kind of a compressed money conversation. We did one around the book of 1 John. So we had one of our teaching pastors just do basically a Bible study format around that. And we launched it in September, pushed it out really hard to our church and encouraged them to say, hey, we are going to innovate together. We actually use that term. We let them know that we are trying to discover some new things with what we're doing. What we're, I mean, it never occurred to me when you're experimenting, like tell your audience, your people, hey, we're innovating, we're trying something new here.

Did they give feedback? Was it positive? supportive? Like what were some of the responses? You know, and you're two months in, right? September, so relatively new, at least when we're recording this. Yeah, we'll finish, we'll finish next week and we already, we will, we have already done some things within it that have tweaked it a little and we will debrief and make some decisions around what the future of sessions is in the next few weeks. I will comment on that a little bit. Of course, we got feedback. Of course, we got, you know, helpful feedback from, from, from our participants. Couple things. Number one, we did make the decision. We felt like someone, someone may be listening to this and going, well, isn't there things like right now media or, you know, can I just go on and listen to podcasts and just encourage my people?

And of course, those things are there. We, we felt like the incentive for our people was for the content to be known to be our, you know, our intellectual property and to have faces and conversations with people that they would relate to. And so we, we made that effort. That was the, that was the bulk of the work for our team was the time that was spent pre-recording those. So we made some decisions to actually pre-record that content and then play it and roll it out on a week-to-week basis, which will be part of our debrief as to whether we do some things differently in the future as far as that goes. I would imagine as much work goes into the content though, the community aspect, the engagement through the app, the commenting and things like that, that's, that's really where you get the payoff.

That, that's where you, you are winning the losing the battle. What was the, you know, I would love to dive into the content piece, but what was the engagement? What did that, what does that look like so far? So we learned a couple things that we learned because obviously this is a digital podcast about the church. We learned that there are some amazing things that you can do with app platforms and there are also limitations. So we learned and are working with our developers just to try to eliminate some of those limitations there because the, the conversational chat piece was actually one of the most challenging for people intuitively to be able to interact with the video and have that chat piece.

So one of the conversations we will have going forward is does our media, does the actual content need to live on another platform and access the content from another platform? What we love about the app based and we'll stay with it is it is the, we believe that the app is the portal because we, we would get up, we will get up every weekend as a part of our normal blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we will say make sure that you schedule your session this week and, and get that on your calendar. And the easiest way for people to do that is to interact through the app, through our, our app and to make that happen. The media itself is still, is still a little problematic through the app and it's not as intuitive for those who are not as tech savvy.

And so some of the feedback we got was just the challenges that people had doing that. And so we'll continue to innovate, we'll continue to tweak and we're kind of committed to try to figure it out. I love that, that commitment, you know, a lot of, a lot of churches probably would have, you know, hey, here's free church app.com, see if you can get it to work out. Oh, look, shockingly, it didn't work out. Okay, let's move on to the next thing. And, you know, your, your church, your organization has always been one of these innovative, experimental, you know, and there's a, there's a commitment here specifically with this. I mean, you're, you're one version in and you're not even done with the first round and it's like, okay, here's how we're going to improve it.

One of the decisions we made, Jeff, in the middle of it that I think I want to insert here is, normally, I think you would kind of run something, you'd create something, run it. We did make the decision about three or four weeks in that because it was an eight-week run that we were going to innovate a little bit within the, the first run. We didn't want to just let it go knowing that there were potential tweaks or problems and then deal with it later. We felt like with the eight weeks if there were known things that we wanted to pivot on, there's the word, if we wanted to, if we wanted to pivot on that we should do it within the season so we could evaluate it. And so even in this, I believe this is the seventh week as we record this, we're still pivoting in small ways within the platform to try to solve some problems and make it more accessible for people.

I love it. What's the win? Like, do you have a goal? What's the scoreboard on this? How are you measuring success? Right. So we are obviously tracking, we are tracking the metrics of people that are interacting. What are the views? I think we are evaluating, I think we are okay, I think we're happy with our views, we're not blown away with our views and so we're looking at that and going, okay, how do we improve that? The one caveat of that is sort of like as we have had this conversation about Sunday metrics and who's watching and how long are they watching, I think the one caveat is we believe that when people are watching, they are watching. Does that make sense? Because it's very intentional, you're not going to stumble onto these sessions, so if there is 100 people that watched Leadership and Faith Lab, they watched it, like they most likely interacted with it in a deep way.

So we're tracking metrics not only for what is working but also to see what people are interested in. So we have seven different sessions that ran and we're going to be able to look at, you know, we thought this was a great topic that people cared about and nobody chose it and so it's going to give us some feedback on what, doesn't mean we'll eliminate it forever but what are people most concerned about? What are their felt needs? How can we directly, biblically and through our content address those? Are you concerned at all with, okay, so weekend services, I'm just curious, this is going to be a build-up question, weekend services, physical, digital, pre-COVID, what percentage is back in the building right now with Crossing?

So we are just about in the high 50% range, so somewhere between 55 and 60% in room. Our online has continued to be a focus of ours and we have not drifted drastically from that. I'll just make a comment on that, Jeff, is, you know, I think we are theorizing and I know you're having these conversations. Our theory is that 20% of our people are gone, of our pre-COVID people. Like, they're just, they may be able to be reached again but they are not like sitting there still waiting to come back. They're just gone. Their habits have changed, they've, whatever. We believe there's probably another 15 to 20% to get us to that 60 of where we are now that are still sort of ghosts. They're still hovering out there.

They're giving. They might even be participating in some way but they're not showing up in the building currently. We know some of that because they're continuing to do some of our other engagement things even though they're not necessarily showing their face at the larger gathering, i.e. giving. Some of them may be even participating in a small group or in sessions but not doing the showing up. We also think our rhythm, if we used to say people would come once every two to three weeks, we think that rhythm has changed as well and so the frequency that people are actually in the room is probably impacting some of that attendance figures as well. What do you think it is? Do you think it's less than a month at this point if we reached 0.8?

I think it's still probably once a month but I think the largest percentage of your people are not coming. Yeah, they're not coming over 50% of the time in a particular month. But again, I have no basis of that. I have no way of really putting any data around it. It's just my gut. So 50% of your pre-attendance, 50 to 60% of your pre-COVID attendance is back physical. Crossing has been very strong digitally. Now you're moving small groups once again, you know, or maybe that's another question. Is this complementing the small groups? Is this complementing the small groups? So, as I said earlier, we made the decision to not disrupt small groups. So we're a rooted church. We run rooted as an on-ramp to our small groups.

We did that this fall. It was a pretty successful fall, surprisingly, and we had a couple online rooted groups that did very well. They continue to run. Our small group communities in homes continue to run as best they could, though they've obviously taken a hit with pandemic concerns. I think one of the post-beta session conversation will be how can we now move this, assuming we continue, how can we move this so that our small groups can align with it? I.e., you know, we need to have some conversation around can small groups access this content within their small group and then use it as a launching point for their collaborative conversation as a group. So there's going to be some conversation around how do we create that environment.

Yeah, and that was, fear is not the right word, so I would be okay with it, but there would be a lot of tension of, okay, so this is another self-directed, automated, being church in isolation type of tool. And as much as people are freaking out about, you know, the Hebrews, don't abandon the gathering of this, there's, I could totally see having that conversation, you know, I'm, honestly, I'm more okay with it because I'm a digital community guy, but I know that there'd be a lot of concern with that within the church, within the experiment. And it's funny, like, oftentimes I feel that church leaders are more concerned about that than church lay people. Lay people, like the actual people, your audience, your attenders, people you're discipling, I don't think are nearly as concerned about these issues as much as we church leaders tend to be.

Have you seen any of that in this experiment? Well, I've seen it in my, I've seen it in this experiment, mostly just in the sense of, I think, in fairness to our team, mostly, I don't think there's a problem with the digital aspect of it. I think we've had more conversations around the ROI. You know, with the amount of work and the amount of execution that it takes, we just have to have hard conversations is the return on investment there. And so, we'll continue to have those conversations. Again, my role is to kind of be that advanced strategy guy. So, I want to be careful that we don't cut something before it actually has a chance to bloom and blossom. So, I'll probably be the guy continuing to push for, let's continue into this, while others may just look at it and go, well, we didn't get enough eyes on it, so let's move on.

And I think that is probably, that conversation is probably happening in a lot of churches I work with with Gromentum, where now that online has, you know, as regathering has happened, I think that's some form of that conversation I'm dealing with with some of my interactions with people of like, well, let's look at online. It's not really what it was back in April when everyone was locked down in their house. So, you know, let's, how much energy do we want to put into it? Unfortunately, I think that is, that's the missed opportunity, right? It's, how much do we want to invest in developing an electric car 15 years ago and going, yeah, let's not waste our time because no one's driving them. And, I think that's the moment that the church is probably in when it comes to digital right now is we could just continue to build gas engines and then wake up five, 10 years from now and go, man, no one's driving our car anymore.

No one's buying our cars anymore. So, I think that's the tough responsibility we have is we have to run that innovation digitally probably alongside the stuff that we continue to do in this season of disruptive flux. Awesome. So, I'm going to take that clip and I'm going to play it for like 5,000 senior leaders. Do it. Because that was, that was very well said. Thank you for that. Um, how, how do you get your church to even have that, that mindset? Like, I'm joking here, but that, that this mindset is, is very rare in, even in 2021 post COVID. Like, there's just so many churches want to try and revert back to quote unquote normal. Uh, February 2020 was the golden age of church. Let's, let's get back to however it was pre COVID.

And, and, but your church, the crossing and you as, as a senior leader, you've, you've always been, um, at least in the amount of time that I've, I've known you very forward that faith thinking, very innovative, very creating that, that, uh, experimental culture. Yeah, there's ROI. Yeah, you need to justify some things and that actually makes the experiment better. That's not a hindrance. It's an opportunity to, to perfect and to expand. How do you get that culture? How do you keep that culture in a church like the crossing? I would say a couple of things to your question of innovation. Number one, as we mentioned earlier, I believe that you need to find, you need to allow space for innovation in a way that will not be disruptive of, of your core competency.

I want to repeat that because I think that's where some senior leaders can be okay with innovation. If they feel like, okay, you're still going to let me get up. You're still going to want people to be in the room, right? I think where I'm dealing with senior leaders that are pushing back is because the, all the Uber innovators are trying to convince them that having people in the room doesn't matter anymore. And I think they're not there and will not be there. I think that's, I think that, you know, that's like saying we're not going to have cars anymore. We're going to float around like the Jetsons. I don't think maybe we will. I don't think those that are leading are there yet. And so I think to be able to allow them to continue to, experience the things that are the normal and then the senior leader's responsibility is to continue to allow the innovation to happen.

But I would say to the innovators out there, be okay innovating over here. Don't be in such a hurry to move your innovation into the mainstream because you may not ever get to innovate. Secondly, I think, I think every team needs an instigator. They need an innovative instigator and they need somebody who's going to speak for change, creativity, what could be, right? Because if you look at the cycle of COVID or any disruption, it's sort of that idea of what was, what is, what was yesterday, what is today, and what can be tomorrow. And I think if I'm a senior leader, I'd look around the room and go, who are the, what can be, what, who are the tomorrow thinkers? And if you look around your room and they're not there, I would, I would go back to, I would go back to my space and try to figure out how to get some of those in the room.

Even if that's not you, or I would actually say, especially if that's not you and you're wiring, I would make sure that you have them because I think we're in a, we're going to be in a decade of, of, of innovation, both digitally that Jeff care, you care a lot about, but also I just think dynamically in the role of the church and the role of church in culture is going to continue to just be crazy. And so to be able to have someone who's a, an innovative instigator on your team would be key. And it's, it's funny, like I've, I've spoken, I mean, obviously I've, I've been championing digital for 20 years, 19 years, 18 years of it, I don't think anybody cared and all of a sudden it's a big deal now.

But, one of the things that I often get told is, hey Jeff, you're really championing disruption, but you do it humbly. Like, for whatever reason, it just, it was funny, I was speaking out at California at Saddleback, name dropped there, sorry, but, and as part of that coming along, I had a global leader come up to me and she's like, you were much more humble in that presentation than I was expecting you to be because it was very disruptive, you know, some of the stuff that I'm talking about, the idea of a global church digitally, but then it was also framed around, am I right here? Make this better. Give me feedback. I want, I want insight from you, global leader. You understand the global perspective better than I do and, and by inviting people into the conversation, it was not me passing some crazy directive along as much as me inviting them into, you know, your language, that one of the three boxes, the sandbox that I can experiment in and now invite others to come play with me and so I just at a personal level, I have found a lot of success in that because it's not, it's not my experiment, it's our experiment.

Come, come be part of that. Let me be open-handed in this season with you on that. Jeff, that's so great. I love that so much. I think some of the backstory of sessions, whatever it becomes, is when someone, when someone tells the story of the birth of it or even just, hey, remember when we did that and we thought it was cool or whatever, the birth of it is really a series of conversations happening in the hallway and over the coffee machine, the Keurig. It really was. I mean, part of, as you talk about humility, part of my innovative strategy is I tend to just come up with an idea and talk about it with anybody I can talk about it with and by the time we get in the room to actually formalize it, everybody's already on board.

So sometimes you can innovate in the hallway and then you go down and have that other conversation and sessions was that way. It was like, what do you think about this? What do you think about this? And what if we did this? You know, and then we get on the, we get on a call with our app person, Subsplash, name drop there, free, free, free marketing. We get on with Subsplash and we say, guys, we have this idea. Can you guys help us make this happen? And fortunately, they're innovators as well as many of these companies like them are. And they're like, absolutely, because if you guys can pull this off, it will help us with our product. And so we innovated alongside a known product that we were already using and it just helped us.

And I think, I think your words are good because I think a lot of our, a lot of innovators are very confident to what makes them good. But I think that arrogance can destroy that innovation, especially in a local church context. Guys, listen, if you're listening to this, there are senior leaders that are sitting in an office and they're watching the bottom line and they have people that they are accountable to and you get a paycheck every month if you're employed by the local church and their response, they feel that responsibility. So they have a lot of other things that they're juggling while you're out there dreaming about changing the world. And so just at least be empathetic to that and allow your innovation to work, have a degree of empathy within your innovative mindset.

All right. So let me ask this. There's some guy out there right now, some gal, somebody has heard this. They're like, I want to create a sandbox in my church to work on. I understand that I can't launch this to the entire church. My church doesn't have that culture, but I really want to figure out how to create one of those boxes that I can work in separately. Give them some advice. How do they get started? How do they even approach this? Senior leadership may not even be on this page. How do they get started? Two things I would look for. Number one, I would look for within the area that I'm specifically responsible for that I have some degree of autonomy in. I would look for ways in which I could innovate there.

If there are opportunities that are not as macro, I would look for micro innovations that are there. I think secondly, I would actually be very senior leader aware. I believe senior leaders are going to be more open to innovation if you're solving a problem that they care about. So if you're innovating because you listen to Jeff Reed's podcast and you think your church needs to have this, but your senior leader doesn't care about it, you're going to have a harder time. If you can identify some of the areas that your senior leader is sleepless about and lay over innovation and help them solve those problems, you're probably then going to, here's what you're going to do, you're going to begin to build the sandbox that will allow you to do much more creative, innovative ideas.

But I think too often we make too large of a leap and we're not solving a problem that anybody in our senior leadership actually sees as a problem. So I would have some awareness there for sure. Yeah, very much so. And that's really the, you know, the core of almost leading from the second chair. Find ways for you to get your win and your senior leader to get the win as well. And this is something, I mean, it's just a name drop episode, Eric Geiger over at Mariner's Church. I was under him at Christ Fellowship Miami and this is probably one of the greatest lessons Eric ever taught me. Jeff, use the language of your senior leadership. Like, you may be thinking differently, but you need to frame whatever you're thinking in the terms that your leadership understands.

And so as you get that, your mindset, you're in their language, in their framework, in context of the direction of what they're thinking, you're far more likely to get that engagement piece. And so that's beautiful. And just love the idea of, you know, you're probably not the decision maker, but you need to get the decision makers on board. And so that's some great advice, Lee, with that. Well, I tell you what, great conversation. I'm going to have to say hey to the people over at Subsplash. I know they've been excited to work on this project and I've been getting kind of updates, at least from their perspective, along the way with what's going on. So excited that you're moving on. I love the fact that you're not even done with V1 here and moving on.

All right, one more question and then we'll land the plane. Did you feel like you rolled this out too soon? Or, because a lot of times, you know, it's like, you know, you want it to be perfect at launch and, you know, I'm always the guy that's like version one is better than version none. If you're not embarrassed by your first version, you know, you've waited too long. So you're almost done with the first take. Where are you sitting in the chair now? Would you rather have waited to perfect some of this stuff or do you feel like maybe you waited too long and you should have started earlier? What's your take right now? My take at the moment is not having debriefed officially with the team and looked at it.

My take is at the moment is we did what we rarely do and that is that our timing was pretty on point. And that doesn't happen all the time because I tend to be impatient and discontent and want to move. But I think what we did well is that this idea really emerged last spring and we gave ourselves six to seven months of both time to develop the technology alongside Subsplash but also to develop the content. This content that we're putting out was it. it was a massive task and part of our debrief will be we cannot we cannot sustain the that form of content creation over the long term. So some of this the ability to sustain sessions as an idea will need us to innovate in the way that we deliver that content or create that content I should say because the way we did it all summer long three, four months of ongoing content creation is not sustainable for us as a team and so but I would say if we did if we if we had waited any longer we would not have had the window to create the content but if we would have waited longer I believe the energy my sense is the energy around the idea probably would have waned and the level at which so here's a learning the level at which it demanded engagement on our team I don't think we would have been able to justify or get the level of ownership that we got six months ago with this idea today I think as the world continues to move forward if I would have walked in and said let's try this there would have been more pushback based on the speed at which ministry is accelerating again and so we found that perfect window where ministry wasn't accelerating at the speed it is now or the demands of ministry that allowed us to pull this off and now we'll talk about how do how do we sustain this what does a sustainable model look like based

on what we learned for example I don't think we'll do eight weeks again I think we've learned that eight weeks is pretty tough for anything I think a lot of churches learn that right eight weeks is kind of the extent of it and I'm curious and Jeff you're the question but I'm going to ask you a question I'm curious whether something digital has eight weeks of sustainability or not we're seeing the drift at the end that you normally would get of anything I think we're seeing that elevated because it is virtual and digital to some degree so I think we're going to go back and probably look at maybe more of a four to six week role which then will eliminate some of that content creation demand as well I would agree with that and even groups that want to start online small groups the first small group you should join is four weeks three weeks super short super easy super safe test the waters experiment and learn for them I think in hindsight we would have done it probably four weeks would have been a better beta to just have a lot of energy around it have it come and have it be done you know like go go go go everybody's about it and then it's over and then they're going man we want more

of that I think that's probably a miss on our part to try to do as much as we've done not a miss but it just it's probably something we won't do again well and if you're if you're running a beta in physical space eight weeks is the right answer and so it's it's once again physical and digital are different and even recognizing I can't just port logic from physical into digital space there's an opportunity to rethink okay digital you know it's a much quicker much more in and out much shorter sometimes in presentations lots of options lots of options out there lots of noise a lot of distraction I love the fact that you're observing that you have to think different with yeah let me say this with the people that are even pondering what we're doing I want to go back and before we wrap up our conversation and remind there are so many other ways probably to that people are thinking right now what we're doing in the sense of content in front of people I want to remind them that our objective was not that that our objective was to create a crossing centric virtual weekly interaction that would help people tap into growth wherever they they are at a time that works for them but scheduled

and intentional and I think that's very very important for people to understand because there is lots of content out there we could have directed people hey go watch this or here's all eight weeks at once watch this eight week deal and we were committed to the systematic rollout of it now were we right or wrong it's to be determined but but we stuck to what we what was the initial belief around why sessions were created now we just have to evaluate whether what we believed actually was true or not we shall see I love this I love you know part of me was like man I should have scheduled this podcast two weeks later once you got past the experiment period but I love that fact that we're having this conversation even midstream and definitely want to keep up with what's going on so we'll have to bring it back at some point maybe learn even after you know version two where you at what's going on with this as the idea is moving on but Lee thank you for the time literally probably 630 in the morning what are you mountain right mountain yeah Pacific yes so 630 in the morning 630 Pacific so God bless you for jumping on with a morning cup of coffee and jumping in here hey as we're landing

the plane any closing thoughts no I just again I would just say I encourage you wherever you're out there whatever size church you're in whatever team you find yourself being a part of I think right now the biggest challenge the biggest challenge I would give you is not to drift into default that in the midst of disruption that default is going to be our drift and so as you're sitting there listening to this right now pull your car over grab a pad of paper and just look at ways in which the drift to default is going to be damaging and in whatever role you can play continue to encourage your team your senior leaders if you are a senior leader continue to provide that space for discovery to happen within your church context and I think the kingdom is going to be better because of that and so I just encourage you in that as hard as it is it's an amazing ride to try to do these things that could potentially change the impact of the church don't default or don't drift back into default very very well said that may be tattoo worthy it's been a while since I've played that card anytime there's a good quote that I hear on the podcast it's like that may be worthy of getting a tattoo so

congratulations I'm considering getting Lee Coates name tattooed on my body I don't know what that does for you but just let me know where okay I'll send photos hey so we're going to land a plane this has been awesome Lee thank you for jumping on the podcast with us audience thanks for coming as well and we'll see you next time here at the church digital podcast y'all have a good day