EP263: Flatcap, Physical Pastors, & Twitch

Welcome to the Church Digital podcast. Through this podcast, we'll talk about the technological innovations within the church, but more than that, we'll protect itself. We'll address deeper questions. Is disciple making possible digitally? How should we approach the digital mission field? Can a biblically grounded church operate in digital space? Oh, and where does the metaverse fit into all this? Whether you're a big or small church, an established church or a startup church, plan the Church Digital's goal is to help churches like yours learn to be a multiplying church digitally and physically. Our heart is that churches like yours will discover a newfound focus on disciple making that will revolutionize your church. And now here's your host, Jeff Reed.

Hey everybody and welcome to this episode of the Church Digital podcast. I am your replacement host, Mark, because we are still sitting at Exponential here in Orlando, and Jeff, the normal host of the Church Digital podcast—which is the first episode that you're listening to, go back and listen to some of the awesome episodes that Jeff has. There's so many of them that are right here on the feed. But Jeff is off doing lots of things with metaverse and cryptocurrency and blockchain. Something I don't understand what that is. I just picture cement blocks connected with chains, and evidently I'm wrong. And so he's doing all of that amazing stuff. So I'm subbing in for him here in season where we're talking about gamers and the church and Jesus, how those things are coming together, and what God is doing in magnificently beautiful ways inside of digital space, specifically we're looking at Twitch and Discord. We've interviewed some amazing digital missionaries, digital church leaders, and we've already seen kind of like what is God doing in these spaces and how is God at work. And you know, we talked to Aki, we've talked to Jay, we've talked to esports with Jono, and today the guest that we have with us is a flat cap dapper pastor. I call him flat cap. Um, and flat is a fiscal church pastor, and uh, but you very uniquely have found your way into the Twitch ecosystem, not because you're a gamer, um, necessarily, um, not because you're like a heavy techie or an early adopter of tech necessarily, but instead through an interesting journey on invitation, um, through a friend that kind of got you exploring it. So flat, I would—what I'm so excited about in this interview for the Church Digital is that there are a lot of pastors who are listening to the Church Digital who are in your shoes, or at least where your shoes were, yeah, two years ago. So tell us a little about the journey and like why you're on this and why you took this journey or now in the world of Twitch.tv.

Yeah, that's a—it's a long story. We've got an hour, so let me get into it. I'm just kidding. Uh, so I have done pastor networks for some time because, you know, go to John 17, read the whole thing. We're supposed to be in unity, and if we can't be in unity as pastors, how would we expect our people in our congregations to ever do that? How would we expect the church to ever do that? So I've been doing that for years. And uh, a guy that I know has been on the podcast a few times, and he's in a life transition right now, but was Pastor Brock VR. And Pastor Brock was in my group. We would get together every other week, we're talking about what's going on in our lives, we're talking about all that, and get to that later if you want to. And be clear, Pastor Brock is a—he was a physical church, yeah, physical church. It was doing virtual reality ministry, yeah, on top of that, right?

Right. So he would come in and he'd say, "Hey, I just did this thing on Sunday night and VR. I bought this Oculus and I put this on, and I'm sitting there and having conversations. I walk up to someone and say, 'Hey, what's going on in your life? What's important to you? What do you think is important in life?' And they just go, 'I don't know.' And he'd say, 'Well, I got to evangelize, gotta do all this stuff.' And I'm like, 'Yeah, it's great, man. You're young. You got kids that are in elementary school. I remember it was like to be there. My kids are older. Great. You go have fun.' And he just kept talking about it and talking about it for like two years. And then he just kept talking more things he was doing. And I'm like, 'That's great. I'm a senior pastor. I have no time to do any of this stuff. I am not gonna go jump in and do this.' I mean, at the time I was, I was probably only playing uh, Assassin's Creed, probably the only game I was playing. And I actually—it's a good game.

Yeah, it is. I actually had a group of pastors in a previous place that I lived where the six of us got together and all of us were Assassin's Creed guys. So okay, so we would just get excited about that. But that's like the only game I played for years. And then hadn't been playing for a while. And so I'm like, "Man, I'm not doing anything. Yeah, Twitch. My kids have talked about that a few times, and I watched them, and I'm like, 'Why are you watching someone play a video game? I don't get it. Why don't you play?' And I just had no clue what was going on."

I kept hearing him talk about it, talk about it. In the middle of COVID, a lot of transition, a lot of things happening, and I found myself resigning from the church I was at, sitting at home, kind of depressed, kind of feeling sorry for myself, going, "God, what do you have? What am I supposed to do next?" And I'd go and meet with Pastor Brock in our group, and you talk about, "Man, Sunday was so amazing. We just did this and this and this." And, "Yeah, I'm not meeting as a church, but I'm still meeting with these people." And I go, "All right, I'm gonna go check you out. I got nothing else to do." So I made a Twitch account just to watch him. And I'm sitting there in that, and I could not believe how people in the chat were engaged in embracing everyone that showed up. I'm like, "I don't get welcome like this at church." And I come back the next day, and they don't know a thing about me, and they're just like, "Hey, you're back. Great to see you again. Bye." What do you mean, "See me again?" I—it took months of sitting there, of watching and watching and watching. And then as I shared on—I don't know which order this is going. If this one's first or the one we did yesterday, it'll be first. But I shared that he just kept saying, "Hey, go follow him. He's gonna do this." And I'm like, "Man, ain't no way I'm doing this. I don't know what. I don't know how to do this. Every time that the tech thing jumps and stuff, I kept finding myself in ministry going, 'I don't know how to do this. I don't know what to do. I need to find a shortcut. I need to make it happen. We don't have anybody.' So I've created, you know, web streams. Uh, I was doing YouTube streaming like ten years before the pandemic, but that was because—well, I just wanted to reach our people that were sick. I just wanted to reach our people that went to Florida for the winter. I was only thinking of digital space as reaching the people I already knew."

Yeah, well, and you know what? Those of us who live in Snowbird States, yeah, have known that pain before. Everyone who lives somewhere warm. Oh, yeah, right? Because Snowbird States, you just exit a portion of your population of your congregation every winter, and usually all of those people were the biggest givers, right? So yeah, and so you're like, "Let's find a way to keep—let's make sure they can still come to church in the summertime."

Yeah, so a lot of us in Snowbird States, we actually were on it. We were online, right? We were live streaming to be able to connect our snowbirds during the winter months. Yeah, yeah, not all. Not everyone was doing live. We just happened to already be live. But it was, it was just, yeah, we had it set up. We had our stuff. Um, actually, I might have been actually using Streamlabs OBS to do our our uh, service stuff. But what's interesting is what you're saying is as a physical church pastor, not only did I have a lot going on, I didn't really want to learn this space.

Oh, yeah, no, I had. And every time the tech jumped, I felt overwhelmed by it and felt like, "I don't want to go to wherever you're going. Let's just get what we need and ship it, right?" And I think the cool—what's exciting to me about that is that that resonates throughout the church world, right? Like, oh, you're not—it's not like you're the only one with those feelings. Uh, yeah, every physical church, yeah, you know, like, I wouldn't have been the pioneer that said, "Hey, uh, let's go out west and let's see if there's gold." I would have said, "Oh, there's something going on at Sutter's Mill, and people are going, and I know people going, and I, all right, I might check it out." I'm I am not going out rushing into brand new things and getting there before people. If I'm there before people, it was by accident. I mean, not that I don't like to innovate, not that I don't like to think outside the box, but the more and more I'm learning is what I think is outside the box is still leaning on the box. I'm not way outside kicking and screaming that you can't even identify where I'm at. You know, I just stepped out of the box. So uh, so I'm watching him, and I start having people follow me. And then I started working uh, temporary with churches that are struggling. I got invited into that from a friend who knew me and said, "Hey, I have a church that's struggling. Can you come alongside of them? And this is just a temporary thing. And will that work for you?" And I just, "Okay, I think I can do that. It's just part time. It's just temporary. I'm still healing. My family's still healing. We need to do something, and I need to get off the couch." But what I didn't realize is in that six months of time where I'd been sitting there, um, I was watching six to eight hours of Twitch a day, and I had built relationships with people. I had engagement with people. Uh, they cared about what was going on in my life, and I never met any of them except for Pastor Brock. And so as I started doing things, they kept saying, "Well, when are you gonna stream? What are you gonna stream?" Like, "Man, I'm not playing video games. I don't have the setup to do this. I'm not a PC-based guy. I'm an Xbox-based guy, and I'm waiting for the next game to come out, and I know what it takes to set it up. I don't want to make that investment." So finally, they said, "Why don't you just stream what you do for preparing for your sermons? We'd like to know what you're doing. Uh, Pastor Brock does some stuff like that. Why don't you do that?" So Fridays, I just started streaming. "Here's my sermon prep. Here's the passage I'm looking at. Here's what I'm thinking of." Like, all the behind the scenes of what I was doing to prepare for Sunday morning, I was streaming that and talking through my process, talking through what I think I'm going to talk about on Sunday. And then I asked me the next week, "Well, how did it go? Or what were you? What did you talk about? Did it actually go in the direction? What were things that came up?" And as I got to the end of that year in December, someone was talking in my stream. I had people in my church talking about reading through the Bible in a year. And then the conversation turned to, "I've never done that. I don't know how to do that. It would be great if somebody would guide us to do that." And I went, "Well, I've been thinking about how do I go from one day a week to more than one day a week at streaming?" So a year ago, I committed to, "I'm going to read through the Bible in a year on stream. I have no idea how this is going to work." I had to go through the whole transition of a live audience to talking to a camera. But I'd already made that transition before I got into streaming because we were doing that live. We were doing that because we're doing that in COVID. So I'm also already learning how to connect digitally and build relationships just through a chat without—you're not even the one on the camera. They're not on the camera. Beginning to build relationships, yeah, anyway.

Yeah, so I started doing that and I want to say I don't know, month, two months into just doing that alone. Which, if you're not on Twitch, go in there and saying, "Hey, I'm going to go and read the Bible on Twitch," is not what people are lining up to do. They're wanting to play video games and yeah, watch YouTube. Yeah, yeah. The it is very, um, it I wouldn't say that it's opposite of the culture because what you're doing and stepping into was deeply relational, personal, and close, right? And what is anti-Twitch culture is when you're not paying attention to the people that are actually watching. Like, they're not just there to spectate. They're there to engage. So it was very culturally sensitive towards why people are there, but it was very different than why people—it was a very different type of content than what people usually come to see.

Well, yeah, I'll just say this. When I was going to do things on YouTube or wherever we were streaming live with whatever church I was at, we were only looking to engage people that were already watching our stuff. Yep, from our church. So goods and services, right? So had I jumped into Twitch thinking I was going to go do that, it would have never been anybody watching what I was doing. I'd have been wasting my time and energy. What I was doing, so I didn't know it, but that six months where I just sat there watching was really what Paul does at the Areopagus. He goes in, he's observing the culture, he's learning what they're doing, and when he's understood what that culture is, he then says, "I've made these observations about you. You are a very religious people. You want to know who God is. You have this statue overhead here that says 'to the unknown God.' I want to engage you in a conversation about who I believe is the real God that you have inadvertently found." So I stumbled into that observation and was embraced by people in the culture so that I knew the culture before I started doing anything in the Twitch atmosphere. So I brought all of that to what I was doing with reading the Bible. I interrupt where we're at to engage people in chat. I interrupt what I'm doing if someone says, "Hey, I have this happen and I need prayer." I mean, what I'm doing is not important. The people are what's important. So that's a whole different mentality than, "Hey, our service started and it's going live, and when we get done with the service, we'll have questions afterwards."

Yeah, so what we stumbled into here in this conversation, which I think is really powerful, is a lot of people who are thinking about live streaming and now they're considering Twitch because you're listening to this podcast. The question has become like, "How do we stream on Twitch?" and that isn't really the question that should be asked. And what we stumbled on is an hour ago I was sitting with a guy and he said, "How long do I need to spend on Twitch before I can understand the culture enough to come and plant and be part of it?" And that was the right question to ask, right? And I totally—I don't know, I was part of Twitch culture every day for seven years pretty much before we started our church. But what I love is that Leighton's like, "I was just—I was here for like the last—I just used your name. It just docks to me, man."

Oh, that's yeah, and those that don't know, that's when you give information about somebody. Yeah, revealed themselves. So so since you've done that, in case people do actually—we're going to flip you out. We can flip it out. No, that's all right. It's all right. Uh, if you do want to know, since my wife hates this, so the fact I'm going to do this will be fun. So when I introduce myself and my name and this I do this every time I've ever gone to a church and I get up and I'm going to introduce myself, and my name is Leighton Sizemore and it rhymes with Satan lies. So it's easy to remember. She hates that I do that. But when I was like, because he was Ace Satan lies and go, he absolutely does. I'm glad you acknowledge that. So well, what I love is that you spent—you spent six months, oh yeah, sitting in Twitch culture learning it. And when people ask me that question, I don't know, I spent seven years. And what you're saying is, no, I spent six months. Six months. And you work—I don't know that you would say that you were intentionally being a student of the culture or going out. No, no, I wasn't. I wasn't intentionally there to learn the culture. I was there spending six months, and like I said, about six hours a day being ministered to in many ways, not only by Christians, but one of the things is you leave and you go somewhere else and you bring your group, your tribe, with you—whoever you want to refer to—the people in your stream. You bring them somewhere else to someone else that you are saying, "Hey, I trust. I know this person. They're going to respect you. They're going to treat you the same way that I do. They might not be the same as me, but I have a relationship enough with them I would trust them with you." Great. So I got handed off to other people and I, so I didn't set out to observe the culture. I just got embraced in the culture, and as that happened, I wanted to spend more time in it. Yeah, and that is—it is such a powerful thing for folks who are listening and they're saying, "I've been listening to the Church Digital podcast for a while. We're in the season on Gamers, and like, I know it's important. You know, my son, my grandson, my daughter, my granddaughter, whomever plays. I play, whatever. And you're like, I know it's important. I just don't know how to pair the ministry side." I went on Twitch. I have no idea what's going on. You know, Jeff told me in episode one of this season I need to go start a Twitch account. I started a Twitch account and I got on there and like, I don't know, I don't know what's happening on Twitch, but it seems like debauchery because the stuff that got posted—like, I was like, "Oh my gosh, I'm out of this place." And like, what I love from this is Flat saying, "Like, embrace it and envelop yourself in it for a season and learn it." Yeah, and I think even if you're a student of it, like if you're going there with intentionality to be a student, right? Right. And you're engaging in the community, it might take you less than six months to really learn the culture. Um, it certainly won't take you seven years of it, sort of like, no, you're learning it over time. But it is an entirely different place, and when you're not of Twitch, like when you're not of that people and not of that tribe, they sniff it out instantaneously. Yes. And um, Flat, you do a really great job of in your live streams, which I'm lurking in all in mornings pretty frequently. I'm grabbing my coffee, I sit down with my planner, look at my day, pull up Twitch, see who's online, and it's always Flat. He's online, right? And so I'll swing in and to watch how you are engaging with both believers and non-believers who are coming into your chat and people who are directly opposed to what you're talking about, people who are there every day because they also want to read through the Bible in a year and they're on that journey with you. Tell us a few, um, stories about how, like, you know, I think pretty typical for you to see anywhere from ten to twenty-five people who are popping into your stream on every single day. Every morning you're seeing recurring names and you're seeing new people. Yeah, on a very regular basis. Um, so just tell us and we've all heard the story of Alice. I love the story of Alice. Um, but I also love the fact that your unique approach and each of our unique approaches is touching lives that aren't Alice's as well. So tell us a story or two about people that you've just encountered and how you've seen God change your life just because you're willing to flip open the laptop, turn on the camera, and hit go live. Yeah, there's—well, when I first was like, "Hey, I'm gonna do this," I had people that lined up and said, "Hey, I want to—I want to be in your stream. I want to commit to your stream. I want to moderate for you." And for those who don't know, that's a person who's there to help make sure that the decorum that you set up and establish for your stream is managed. They're there to welcome people when they show up. So if I'm in the middle of reading and I didn't see the chat, they're doing all those things. So immediately I had a couple of people that do that, that's what their call in ministry is—is, "I'm going to go and mod for people. I'm gonna go do that. I'm gonna be there." And I was like, "Wow, so you care enough about me?" Miss Jelly Beans is one of those. Uh, Sunshine S Games—there's another one. And they mod for a number of people. Uh, Sunshine also streams herself. Uh, a stay-at-home mom. Uh, Michelle Levine's retiree. Uh, so both opposite ends of the spectrum. And they're like, "Hey, I want to invest in you. I want to invest in your community and help it succeed." And I've been around here in the culture enough to help and guide you. So that was—that's a really cool thing that happened right away. Uh, there's also, um, I just think of those who are not Christian. And my target is not necessarily trying to just be evangelism. I'm not—I am. I, I my name has Pastor in it, sure. I put the tag on there. It says I'm Christian. I put in there we're reading the Bible. That attracts people that come in to say, "Hey, are you real? Are you genuine? Or who you are?" And uh, I had someone come in. I can't remember their name. They've only come a few times. And right away I could tell they weren't buying what the Bible was saying. They were questioning things. They were pointing fingers at things. And then I accidentally said something that I knew instantly offended them. Uh, I said, "Well, that's a bias," which honestly it was. But they felt like I attacked them as an atheist. They hadn't identified themselves as an atheist yet. I said something about, "Well, even if you're an atheist, you're coming at it from a bias. When you read the scriptures, you can't come to anything without a bias. Sure, I have a bias as a white male. I can't get outside of that bias. I can be aware of my bias. I can treat people differently based on my understanding of my bias. I can't leave it." Sure. So I was trying to go in that direction, and then I had accidentally offended them. And so I immediately apologized for that. I re-incidentally understood that they misunderstood when I was using the word bias to not mean it was judgmental or it was a problem. I was just saying, "No, it's just a natural part of life." And so they stayed. They engaged. Two hours later, they said, "I'm gonna put a follow here. I'm gonna put a follow here. You have enough credibility and enough clout, and you are honest in where you're at and what you know and what you don't know, and where you're going to put the—and you treated me with respect after you accidentally did something you shouldn't have." And so put the follow in, been back a few times. I don't have a good relationship yet, but I have proven myself credible to that person. Yeah, that they'll come back. Uh, and another one, I just—I love this guy uh from Denmark who is a Sikh. And he is in my stream at least once a month. Uh, I don't remember his actual streamer name, but his name is Nico. And I just call him Nico the Dane. And uh, he comes in my stream, will engage in scripture, and he'll say, "Hey, that reminds me of one of our holy books or one of our holy men and what they said. Can I share?" So he's respectful of stream, and I'm respectful of his stuff. And I'll say, "Yeah, that aligns with what the scripture says. That was a great thing to bring up." And so he's regularly in there. He's engaged in my community. He embraces people that come in my community, and he's his views are different than mine, but there's something about it that he's like, "I'm drawn to it. I want to be there." I can't be there every time. There's time differences. There's all those things. But when I can fit it in.

My life, you're valuable enough that I'm gonna go hang with you. Yeah, and that's just an awesome thing. Yeah, and what I love—I love flat cap. I love those stories because they're showing not only did I start and I instantly had a team of people who wanted to serve. So if you think, "Who am I going to have? How am I going to get?" Like, there are people who are in this community who are so passionate about it. You don't—I think much of the church world doesn't realize that they're not like heading into an oasis, right? Or a desert. A noise is the exact opposite of what I meant. A desert, right? Um, when they explore in the digital space, I love seeing the eyes open and they're like, "Holy crap, like I didn't—there's a metropolitan city here, right? There's a city here, and there's a thriving, growing grouping of believers who are in this space who see it as a mission field who want to serve and sacrifice."

And you're also saying I'm finding ways to engage with people that would typically never, ever, ever go through the doors of a church. Oh my goodness. Safer said this in our last episode where he said, um, you know, there's people who'd rather gamble at the gates of hell than darken the doors of a church. And you're seeing that, and we're seeing that too, right? Like all of us who've been on the show, we could give you story after story after story of, you know, atheists who are coming in and just saying, "I just like how I feel when I'm here."

Yeah, but I wanted to cycle back to something that you said right towards the beginning, which is, "I came in a broad stream and I felt really welcomed." Because I have a story echoing that. A member of our community, Janie, who's in her sixties, been a faithful member of our church, has never missed a week since we started, right? She wrote a message in our Discord the other day saying, "I went to a physical church. I sat in the front. I waited for somebody to greet me. No one ever greeted me. I wanted to see if someone would greet me. I hung around afterwards. I stuck around. No one ever greeted me. I've never felt more greeted than I did here." And she's very rarely met anybody who's from our community. And so you had that experience as well. Why do you think that is? Or just speak a little bit more about the power of that welcome in that digital community for people?

I'll speak it from two different sides. One, as a pastor, I remember when people would be absent on a Sunday, and that was an abnormal thing. You would know where they were. You would know what was going on in their life. And if they were gone, you would welcome them back when they came back. However, as things have changed, when you try to welcome the person back, they feel judged. Like, "Oh, you noticed I was gone. I didn't have a good excuse. Are you judging me?" And so as a pastor, I've gone, "Maybe I shouldn't say something when I notice somebody's gone because maybe they were sick, maybe something they didn't freely share information with me. I'm not going to embarrass them by welcoming them back when they come back." So that's not addressing the person who's just a visitor. That's a separate thing. But I've had that in the back of my mind. And even when I go on vacation as a pastor, I don't always go, "Oh, hey, why was your vacation? What was going on?" I don't get welcomed back. I don't get—I get, "Hey, it's great to have you back. What are you doing today?" It's just normal back to life.

But I'll give a different example too. And like I said, this is Twitch culture. It's not just Christian on Twitch culture. Absolutely. Just I just want to say that. So I watch a streamer in Australia, and time change happens. We go an hour one way. Time change happens. They go an hour the other way. They just went to streaming at three in the morning. I'm not getting up at three in the morning to watch them. And then I wait until the time change happens. We switch back in the spring, which we're coming up on, and I'm actually looking forward to it because I haven't seen them since November because they're at three in the morning.

And when that happened the first time, I showed up in the stream, and it wasn't them saying, "Hey, where have you been?" It was this person in the chat, this person in the chat, this person in the chat said, "Hey, great to see a flat cap. It is so great to have you, Mr. We've missed you." And I just felt, "Wow, they cared about me. They're not judging me for what was happening or why wasn't I here or I was gone or anything like that. It was just totally embracing and engaging me." And I went, "That is totally different than what the church is doing."

And I'm wondering if this is part of it too. At church, for the most part, for most of us, it's one day a week for one hour. Now, some of you might be more. I remember when I was a kid, it was three to thrive. It was Sunday morning, it was Sunday night, and it was Wednesday night, and the doors were open. My family was there. Those days are gone. So if you are only there one day a week and you missed some point two times a month—right, right—I'm sorry. Even if you are the person that's there once a week, you're only engaging with people. You're only the gathering together of us like for four hours a month. And I'm spending four hours a day with people. When I'm gone, they know it. When they're gone, I know it. I know those who are regulars. If they're not there every day, I need to check in with them. If they're a "hey, I'm a monthly person," I know that. And so I check in with them. It's relational on a different level.

So I've been spending time because one of the things I kept hearing throughout COVID was, "Don't forsake the gathering together yourselves, like some are," like so that would be the attack on churches that said, "We're gonna shut down. We're gonna do things." It was like, "No, don't forsake the assembly of yourselves together." And as I went back and I looked at that, I'm like, "Wait a minute. In the text, it says they gathered in the temple gates daily. They gathered to the temple gates daily. I've never been in a church that did that in my life."

I have a stream that does that Monday through Friday, unless I'm on vacation, unless I'm here at the conference and unable to do it. And my stream is like, "Going, we miss you. We don't want you to be gone. When are you getting back? Because we need you here. We need to be part of our lives. We need to engage." And I'm like, "You know what? What if the assembling of yourselves together was intended to be a daily thing, not a one hour on Sunday thing? And we've totally misunderstood what scripture was saying?" And Twitch has it, and I can go over there and have it, and I can be a part of that and be embraced and be part of people's lives. And if I'm there long enough, then depending on their situation, they start to give me more and more information and allow me more and more into their life. And I've never had that in any physical church I've ever had.

And just, and to keep in mind, if you're listening right now, right? You got your ears in, or you're driving in your car, or you're listening on two-time speed in your podcast while you're riding your bike, which is what I do. Yeah, but you're sitting here and you're listening and you're saying, "Oh, yeah, this is not gathering together. Oh, it's fine. Whatever they want to talk about. What? Everyone? It's not gathering together." Just keep in mind that that is very likely what flat cap would have said two years ago. I might have been a little bit too. I guess that was COVID, right? So okay, let's say pre-COVID, right? 2019, 2018, something like that. And you would have said, like, "Ah, I get it. You're engaging with people online every day. That's engagement. That's not gathering," um, because that's, honestly, 2018, that's what I would have said.

Yeah, yeah, right? Like, and many of us, or I might have said, "That's okay, but it's not enough." Sure. Yeah, I might have been willing to go with, "That's okay. It's not enough. You have to do the physical too," which frankly, I have been having a blast this week seeing a bunch of people I've never actually physically been in the same space with. It's been great. But you know what? Our relationship isn't built on we're in the physical space together. Go, we gotta come here and pick up. Our relationships are built on sharing our lives together, of getting to know each other, of being out. Well, some of us, it's being in mission and ministry together, of what we're doing for others, just being a relationship and helping people to be into the—for me, being in the word together, which is just amazing.

Which, can I share something else? Yeah. So, uh, I think this was even stream. I'm trying to think of how much I was streaming. Yeah, I had started streaming. So one of the things I started to notice as I was on Twitch was a bunch of Christian streamers out there who might feel isolated from their church. They didn't feel support. They didn't feel all that. And I'm like, "I don't know how to help that." And then I started to notice a bunch of pastors. Now, some have "pastor" in their name. Not every Twitch streamer does. You make your own decisions about how you're trying to approach things, who you're going to reach. You make all of those with—I'm sure a lot of people spend time in prayer figuring out. I know I did. What am I going to make my name and how am I going to do that?

So I started noticing. I started having conversations with pastors saying, "I don't have support for my denomination. I don't have support for my church. Hey, I'm a youth pastor, so they'll let me go do this thing, but as soon as this thing interferes with what they expect me to do, I still gotta go do all of that." And I just started going, "Hey, that thing I was doing with Pastor Brock in real life," and that actually had come to an end because he moved away. Um, another pastor in the middle of COVID was going towards retirement, and he's just like, "I'm just too busy. I can't do all this. I can't." So the group I'd had for like four years came to a natural end.

And then I was—I don't know if everyone does this. I have these conversations with God when I'm like driving or I'm riding my bike, and sometimes they're just one-sided, and then sometimes I shut my mouth and then I hear God talk to me. So I know exactly where it was. I had been having this thought of like, "Man, it's been a month or so. I'm missing the group. I don't have this pastor connection. I'm not in ministry. I wonder what they're doing. I wonder what's going on." But I'm over here on Twitch. I'm doing this stuff. And then I shut my mouth, and then I heard—not an audible voice, but I heard—"Hear that thing you've been doing in real life? Why don't you do that in digital space? Why don't you do that in digital space? Because you saw this pastor over here. You had a conversation about how they were hurt. When you had a conversation with that pastor over there, how they didn't have support. And you had a conversation with this pastor about how they were getting attacked by trolls, and that's people that come in to cause problems in your stream, and do all these things, and they're just feeling isolated and alone. Why don't you gather them together? Why don't you network them together? Bring them together. They're all digital. They understand that experience, that environment."

And so Mark and I have been in a group almost a year now. Yeah, I'm in one of those groups. Yep, he's one. He's one of the groups I gather people together. I gotta figure out time zone stuff. Boy, that was a new thing. Figure out time zone. There's no travel, so that makes it easier. Don't have to worry about who's hosting. But we get together and we share our stories, our whole story. Now, the first time we do that, we spend about forty-five minutes to an hour. Somebody sharing their story. We pray with and for one another. We get to understand what you're doing. And then we every—

Time we get together we check in what's going on in your life. I love hearing about what's going on in your church. I love hearing about what's going on in your family. I'm engaged with you outside of here. If I never stream again, you and I are going to stay connected.

Sure. That's just how that's going to happen. So we do prayer for one another. We read the Bible, but not from "hey, I'm a pastor and I need to tell you what the Bible says." It's more of a "hey, I was just reading this week and this stood out to me and I like to share it with you because it was pretty cool." So we share scripture. That's what we do. We get together and we do those things.

So started doing that, got a couple of groups going. I'm hoping to get some more going. So if any of you are in Twitch, I'm right on Twitch now. I haven't gone and branched out to other platforms to look for digital pastors. So if you're digital in a different space, you can reach out to me. I'm cool with that. I just might not have a network ready or a group of guys ready to go. But if you're in Twitch at all and you say "hey, I need to get connected with a group of pastors that we can carry burdens together," I'm there. Let me know. I'll get you connected. If I can't do it, I'll get connected with somebody that can.

And then just along those lines, I thought this was pretty cool. Last fall I was sitting at the Exponential Conference in Chicago. So I was sitting there and I'm thinking about all the pastors that are in my network and praying for them. And then like an hour later, I just had this thought: "You pray for Pastor Mark. You need to pray for him." So I do, and I just shoot him a text, said "praying for you. Don't know what's going on. God's got it." And then I don't know, a couple of days later, you said "hey, I was sitting in the hospital."

Yeah, I was with my daughter.

Yeah, yeah. And I'm like, I had never done that before. I was thinking digitally. I started doing that after that, where when I was praying for a pastor, I shoot him a text message, shoot him an email, or I'm on Discord and I say "okay, praying for you today. Just prayed for you." I don't say anything else, but I hope at that time it was a comfort in the middle of what was going on.

Sure. It's letting me know that God was touching other people's hearts, think about me and my family at that moment.

Right, right. And I just stopped in the middle of what I was doing because I felt the need to pray for you. So that's why, just the power of those groups. Yeah, this is the first time we've been together in a physical space.

Yeah, but we've had a relationship. We have had a relationship over a year and it's grown. It's great. Yeah, and I know Flat Story Flat knows my story, right? Like we've been through that together. And we know the stories of four or five other people who are in the group. We know their ministries and their bivo, kovo, full-time missionaries, pastors, and online influencers, right? Like we know their stories and their approaches are very different than mine is, which is different than Flat's, which is different than the next person's. And that hasn't stopped us from connecting with one another. And it's very good to see those things that we may even think are kind of normal in church world, right? Like things that we see, yeah, we're part of networks. We're part of the ministerium. We're part of the pastor group, whatever. But to see those things come to bear because God is speaking to the hearts of people in this space as well, we're getting some of those support systems that maybe we would have had in physical space. We're now beginning to see those come out in digital space because God's speaking to hearts and people are responding, which is really powerful.

We're going to be wrapping up this episode of the Church Digital podcast. If you guys want to get connected with Flat Cap, come over to the Digital Church Network. He helps people get plugged in to that digital community. If you're not like "I don't really want to do the Twitch and Discord thing yet," like just come lurk in Flat's stream in the morning. It's twitch.tv/flatcap. Dapper Pastor. I think we can probably put a link to that in the episode for this. You can come by and just sort of hang out on your stream and begin learning a little bit about Twitch culture and see how those relationships are developed and understand why this is such a deeply relational experience. And there isn't a ton of tech that you suddenly have to understand. There's nothing that's, and this isn't a slight to what you're doing at all, but there's nothing that's particularly like a tech marvelous thing, you know?

There's, you're not insulting me at all. There's nothing tech marvelous on my screen. It's very simple, but it's wildly authentic and it is enabling you to build deep relationships with believers and non-believers all across the globe in the same space in a way that a physical church can't do. I'm not criticizing. I'm not trying to say your church isn't. It's impossible for you to do this, but it is truly and genuinely a unique experience of how the gospel is manifesting. It's in some ways I couldn't reach people in Africa before the digital age without going to Africa. So if there are people there and I felt compelled to reach out to them, I had to go do something. I couldn't just sit in my church and do it. Said I didn't. Nobody would expect that to happen. So in the same way, there's a digital space where people are. If you want to reach the people in digital space, you got to do that.

Yeah, and but not everyone was going to Africa. Some people had to go to India. Some people had to go to China. Some people had to go to wherever there were people that needed to be reached. Not everyone should be on Twitch. I wouldn't have picked Twitch. I came over there by accident, and now that I'm there, God said "yeah, this is where you're supposed to hang out for now. This is what you're supposed to do." I've got more things for you to do, but right now this is where you're at. This is what you're doing. And when God says it's time to go to the next place, I'll say okay.

Yeah, and if God's not calling you to Twitch, well, I'll just say this: I didn't go to Facebook because I thought Facebook was a great thing. I went to Facebook because I had college students at the time that would not answer an email and they said "Facebook me." And I went "what are you talking about? Facebook you?" I thought Facebook was an, you know, an online website. How am I? I mean, they're already turning things into verbs at that time and I didn't understand it. So do what you can where you can. Allow the Holy Spirit to lead you into the things. The other thing is, if someone in your church comes up to you and says "hey, I'm wondering if God is calling me to do that," pray with them. Unleash them. Try to equip them. Or say "I don't have any idea what that is, but I know someone who might." And that's one of the things I love too. I don't know everything, but I want to introduce you to somebody who will. I want to connect you with somebody who's able to do that. So if you reach out and you say "hey, I'm thinking this and this is crazy," I'm gonna say you might be right. But so was leading, you know, slaves out of Egypt. That was pretty crazy. You know, starting with twelve people and saying "hey, I'm going to bring the gospel to the whole world." That sounds pretty crazy. But we serve a God that uses people to do some things that I would never say "that's what I want to do." But when God says "I want you to do that," you might argue with him or wrestle around, but you kind of know that Jonah went to Nineveh no matter what happened.

Amen, amen. Well, guys, on that note, which is an awesome note, we want to thank you for listening to this episode of the Church Digital. From me, Mark, from Lux Digital Church in the Church Digital, and from Flat Captain Pastor from twitch.tv/flatcap. Dapper Pastor, and from the Church Digital Network, thank you for listening to this episode. Be sure to come back and listen to the next one as we continue this journey about gamers, the church, and Jesus, and what God is doing in this beautifully wonderful digital space. Have a great day, everybody, and thanks for listening.