EP264-Online Church Blueprint Takeover

Hey friends, Jeff here with the Church Digital Podcast. We've got another podcast takeover episode. As many of you know, the Church Digital, we run a podcast network. We've got a number of episodes, a number of shows that we've been featuring here on the Church Digital Podcast for the past month or so. And we've got another great show that we work with here that we wanna feature today here on the Church Digital Podcast. And of course, I'm talking about my friends over at Online Church Blueprint. So here's the deal. We've got Andy Mage, we've got Mark Lutz, and we've got, hopefully I pronounced the name right. Sorry, Mark, if not, I think it's probably Lutz. I don't know. At this point, I give it up.

And we've got my friend, Tyler Sansa. We've got these three guys that individually, they are incredible with digital ministry. But when you unite them together, when their forces combine, they are Captain, well, not quite Captain Planet. Okay, maybe they are better than actually than Captain Planet. But these guys are incredible together. And it's a great show that really mixes together this balance of physical church doing digital ministry, like many of us are doing. But it also brings into attention a lot of the potential that's centered around digital church planting. Like it's not just physical, it's in church, it's not just digital church planting. It really unites the two together. And in what I believe is a really special way.

And all three, Mark, Andy, and Tyler are incredible digital pastors with a ton of experience that they bring into the conversations at hand. And so if you've never heard Online Church Blueprint digging into digital ministry from a practical standpoint, you need to listen to that. So go check out Online Church Blueprint. You can find the link at thechurch.digital slash podcast. And also while you're there, check out a number of the other shows that we have at the digital, thechurch.digital slash blueprint. You can ignore the fact that I just screwed up my own branding. That was horrible. But we're going to leave it in. It's going to be great. That's what podcasts are all about. It's all about the nuances and the screw up.

So check out Online Church Blueprint and the other shows at the Church Digital Podcast Network at thechurch.digital slash podcast. All right, hey, I'm going to get out of the way. Andy, why don't you take it over? Well, welcome back to the Online Church Blueprint. This is kind of the holiday special, if you want to call it that. And just a little bit of a warning going into this one. It's long. I'm Andy. I'm one of the hosts here. And Mark and I really sit down for a chat on, kind of building on the last couple of episodes, we start to talk about how to run online services. And it turns into a philosophical debate about, not really even a debate, just to talk about online church and, you know, things that we can do during online church and best practices and all of that.

But then it quickly evolves into talk about church on the whole and, you know, the difference between physical church and online church and the difference between running services in both of those and kind of the things that cross over. Mark and I both have a very long history with, you know, doing physical church. I've been a pastor for 13 or 14 years. He's been, he was a pastor of a physical church for 10 or 11 years. And so we've got a lot of experience in this and we both have kind of differing viewpoints, but, you know, it's a, it's a fascinating conversation. And so I just invite you along for the ride there. And like I said, this is a long one and I apologize. We don't typically go this long.

But I was trying to kind of cut around some of these things and really, I just, I thought it was all going to be worthwhile and all beneficial. So whoever you are, whenever you're listening to this, I would love to hear any thoughts on your ideas of church and your thoughts on how to run services, both physical and online, either or. We're always looking to improve and we're always looking to form up with our community. Now, before we also get going, two quick things. Number one, Altar Live is really the best place that you're going to be able to find all of the handy dandy tools and engagement tips and tricks, and really a platform that is going to encompass every single thing that you want to be doing with your online church.

You can head over to altarlive.com for a free 14 day trial, and you'll be able to try out things like our meetings and our rooms and our amazing lobbies that really open up before and after online services. And then, oh, by the way, we also have a fully fledged, fully built out digital church area and, you know, streaming live services into Altar Live is extremely simple. Like I said, head over to altarlive.com for a free trial there. Also, if you're on our YouTube page right now, youtube.com slash altarlive, you'll be able to see kind of all of the use cases and the things that Altar Live is used for. The links will be below as well, so you can kind of check those out. Number two, we will have our handy dandy checklist of the five main items that we talk about.

That's also going to be linked below if you are watching this on YouTube. And if you're taking us along for your, let's say, your holiday journey, let's say you're traveling or something like that, everything will be available in the show notes as well. Don't do it while you're driving. Don't look while you're driving. Maybe wait until, you know, you get off the plane or somebody else is driving or you get to where you're going to get to. But hey, buckle up for a kind of intensely long episode of the Online Church Blueprint. And oh, by the way, Merry Christmas. All right. So we are back for episode three of the Online Church Blueprint. And as you can see from Mark's festive setup, and I've got, you know, lights, but I don't have the actual, like, Christmas light setup that Mark has.

So it's very Christmas here. Well, does it smell like Christmas in that studio? No, it should, though. I could get, like, we have one of those, like, wall-mounted heater air conditioner combo rigs. And if I just hung some, like, pine-scented car fresheners in front of it, though, it would reek of Christmas. Maybe, like, one gingerbread, one pine. One side of the studio smells like a pine tree. The other, it smells like a gingerbread house. I think that would be dope. Yeah. Do you guys have in your grocery store... So, by the way, welcome. I'm Andy, and that's Mark over there. I am in Tampa, and Mark is up in Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh area. And I don't know about you guys, but, like, when it hits September, October, you walk into your grocery stores, and all of the grocery stores have those, like, cinnamon broom things out in the lobby.

Do you guys have that up there? Cinnamon? What's a cinnamon broom? So... Is it, like, the... Is it the shape and size of a standard broom? No. So, it's, like... And maybe this is just a Florida-Georgia thing, but, like... It is essentially a picture, like, a three-foot thing of, like, branches that are tied to look like a broom. So, it's, like, tied at the bottom and kind of fans out and then goes straight up, and there it's tied off. You know, like, let's think of, like, an old-school medieval broom. Like a broom. Yeah, like a broom. We're thinking about a broom here. But it's also cinnamon-scented. And so, you walk through the lobby of these... You know how the grocery stores have, like, the outer door, like, and then the airlock type thing, and then the inner door, and then in the airlock is, like, where the carts are and all that stuff?

Sure. In there, it will smell like cinnamon. It will reek of cinnamon for, like, two months, maybe three months. And, like, the first couple of days, like, ah, cool. We're in the holiday season. And then by, like, mid-October, it's like, man, I hate the smell of cinnamon. I can't believe you guys don't have that up there. So, you're saying if, like, if you're an individual in Georgia or Florida and you're allergic to cinnamon, you literally can't... Oh, that's... Yeah. Like, you die on your way to get food. A hundred percent. Yeah. You got to go in through the pharmacy area. Like, I don't go out or do things with around... Like, I talk to cameras over microphones. So, um, if that is a thing, like, if we've started a cinnamon broom transition, it's happened in the last couple of years here.

You probably, I mean, if your wife went out to go get food, you would have smelt it on her. It's, it hangs on them, like... It's that bad. Yeah, dude. It's like a cheap robe. It just kind of hangs off of them. It's, it's gnarly. Um, yeah. My wife does, my wife went to, uh, the grocery store today and she did not come back reeking of cinnamon. So, I think we're in the clear here. No cinnamon brooms in PA. Can't do something. In, uh, in the comments below, let me know if you are in a, an area where you have the cinnamon broom scourge of, uh, of the grocery stores. And I don't know, maybe we can get like a change.org petition to get, you know, ShopRite and Publix and Meijer and Kroger to get rid of those things.

Cause I think, you know, I'd be all over that. Hey, um, we, uh, we are in the holiday season and before we get going on with the online church blueprint, uh, I, I realized throughout our last, our first couple of episodes, which you can check out in the comments below, we, uh, we were all business, man. It was just straight to the, straight to the business talk, straight to the church talk. No banter. There was no banter. There was no filler. And I have started doing this thing in all of the podcasts I host of the many, and it's just essentially this sort of like, I ask a question or two of the day. None of that, like, Hey Mark, how's your day been, man? None of that. Cause that's like this open-ended crappy question.

Instead, I have a question I want to pose to you and then post everybody listening and you can answer in the comments. You can do whatever you need to do. But Mark, question of the day today is when does Christmas music get old? Like, when are you done with it? Uh, it only takes a couple of days. Like it, yeah, it's like, it's like, oh, okay. Yeah. We're after the holiday, after Thanksgiving, we turn on Christmas music in the house. Now I will say this, there is some, there's like, because it's just rinse and repeat, right? Like it's, it's the same exact freaking five songs and four of the five songs suck. So, but there's two albums that never get old for me. Michael bubble Christmas. I love that.

I love that Christmas album. Very good. And, uh, and there are now three or four Christmas albums put out by stream beats, um, which are just like lo-fi, no vocals, just chill background Christmas music. And I do really, really enjoy those. So I'll listen to those. Um, but the thing that I love most at Christmas time when it, when it comes to media is, uh, the fireplace on YouTube, uh, the, the live fireplace. It's the only time of the year that I do it. Uh, if I wake up before my kids, which is literally almost impossible to do, it happens once a Christmas season now where my kids don't figure out what time I'm going to wake up and get up five minutes before me to ensure that they ruin my morning and prevent me from reading my Bible in peace.

That one time that it happens though, I turn on the fireplace, uh, in the living room and, uh, and yeah, I feel, I feel rich, man. I feel like a person who can afford a fireplace one morning a year. Let this be a lesson, everybody. YouTube.com slash fireplace people or whatever the, whatever the channel is. Uh, and it's going pretty much like the whole season, right? It's live. Yeah. It's like live right now. Like as you're listening to this, unless this is well after Christmas, it's live. So perfect. And you can tell that Mark is an actual streamer. He's like a professional gamer and professional streamer because one of his top two Christmas, uh, songs is by Harris Heller, uh, from stream beat.

So there you go. Congratulations. You nerd. Uh, I'm a real pro. Yeah, you are. I'm a, I'm a real pro guys. All right. Uh, we're going to take all our professional experience and we're going to turn to episode three today. And we have done a lot so far with talking about the digital experience, the digital church experience, kind of what needs to happen in your online church, uh, talking about groups, talking about raising up group leaders. And that's really the community aspect. We're going to get back to engagement. We're going to talk a little bit more about community and, you know, everything that you can do to help form community in later episodes. But we wanted to shift to kind of program aspect because when people think church, they automatically think a couple of songs, a guy yelling at me from a stage, maybe somebody asking me for money, and then I'm going to go eat lunch or go home.

That's automatically what most people think of church. And that's positive and negative. Uh, there are connotations to both sides, but the idea behind holding online church services is one of those things that we need to kind of get a grasp on. We need to get a hold on because you do need to have a linchpin every single week. And for Western church, that is our church services, whenever we're going to hold them Sunday morning, Wednesday evening, Thursday evening, yada, yada, yada. So Mark and I today wanted to have kind of, kind of a candid conversation and give you the lovely listener and or watcher of this show, a couple of tips on how to best hold your online services. So first and foremost, and you'll be able to follow along with the handy dandy checklist that we've been providing below.

Literally, it's going to be five points with boxes that you can check off as you establish whatever you're doing with your online service. Step number one, and this is going to be a repeat of everything we've told, talked about before, is to clarify the why. Why are you doing online services in the first place? What is the thing that you are kind of gathering around? Are you just holding online services because that's what every other online church does? Or are you trying to fulfill some mission, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Mark, with all of your expertise with Lux, why do you hold Wednesday night online services? That's a really great question. And I think this has a certain amount in which this changes based off of your setting, right?

If you're listening to this and you're the online pastor at your physical church, which Andy is, he's a director with us with Lux and a digital expression church, but he also works full time at a church where he's the online pastor of a large physical church, right? And so I think the why do you do an online service changes a little bit depending on where you are, because one of the reasons you might do an online service is because your senior pastor told you you were doing an online service and you don't, you don't know that's, that's the answer. So it's like, okay, well, even if I don't want to do it, guess what? I'm doing it. So I got to make the best of that situation. I think there are legitimate reasons to not do a live stream service to explore on demand expressions.

And I think honestly, in most cultures, when it comes to digital expression, I think that actually makes more sense, uh, in a lot of cases because people genuinely don't like they flick through their phone at all different times of the day, right? They watch stuff on their computer at all different times of the day. Very, very rarely do you have something where it's like everybody gets on to do this thing at the same time. Now that's different for the church that I serve and lead because our culture is different. Our culture is baked into Twitch culture and Twitch is a live streaming platform, evergreen content. So like YouTube content, stuff that's going to stick around that people can watch later doesn't even exist there.

And that's not even why people go to it, right? People go to Twitch because they want to interact live and see how people respond to them and talk to streamers, all of that sort of stuff. It's a very unique culture in that way. And it, that's what's expected, right? And so for us, why are we doing services? It has a lot to do with identifying who, who our person is, right? Who's our one, who's our Saddleback Sam or, or Saddleback Sally, or I don't, I don't know, whatever it is that, you know, your church might call it. If you're unfamiliar with that terminology, you can find it anywhere on the internet. So go look it up. You're probably not unfamiliar with it though. And so our one, like the person we're trying to reach watches live streams.

Like that's where they are. They're part of Twitch culture. They've probably replaced TV with Twitch for the most part. They're usually watching a stream in the background while they're gaming at night. And so for us to reach people, like I'm, I'm talking to people, we're talking to people who are very used. It's common for them to watch three, four hours of Twitch a day. Right. And so because of that, it just makes a whole lot of sense for our culture, for our church to have live services. The flip side of that is you have to work with what you have. Right. And so when we left the church that I was at, it's, it was, it was pretty clear that one of my personal primary giftings is in the leader of this, this new church was going to be my ability to speak my ability to preach.

And so we didn't want to take what we felt like God had gifted me most in and sidelined that just because we were doing something different. And so for us, it was like, no, it makes a lot of sense. And who's, who's your target, right? So our target is de-churched for the most part. It's people who left the church 10, 12, 13 years old, haven't been back for a decade. So for us, a church that's structured in such a way that has a live service, it gives them something that's very fresh and new and different. And so it draws them in because it feels like it's of their tribe, but at the same time, there's some familiarity with it. And they're like, I understand this a little bit and grasp a bit of what to expect.

So the, the buy-in isn't super, super high. Um, they can kind of come and, you know, become part of the community pretty easily. And they kind of understand, you know, even if they come from a vastly different background, theologically speaking. So that's one of the, that's some of the reasons that we do it, but I am kind of curious as to why, you know, why Bay Hope has a digital service because you, you know, you guys have a whole digital branch to your church as well. That was very professionally done. Are you sure you're not a pro internet guy? You're, you're, you're a professional at internet. I, I, I thought about a lot of these things. I'm really bad at the internet, um, but I thought about a lot of these things.

That was a, that was a, that was a great setup. Uh, it's so different from, well, the easy answer and the answer that most fidgetal, physical, digital, I hate that term fidgetal, but we're just going to kind of live in it right now. The, the reason we do it is because that's what the church has done for umpteen thousand years. And the advent of the internet is a sneeze on the timeline of what church has been doing. So there's a long list of the online service, the reasons to do an online service. It is typically when all of the saints gather together, if we want to use the biblical term, all the saints gather together on the Lord's day or on a Saturday evening or whatever. Uh, it helps to promote community coming together.

It's easy to easier to invite somebody to a church service than it is to a scary small group. It is, you know, you can go down the list of all of the typical physical reasons for an online service like ours. We are, I'm, I am constantly trying to push Bay Hope and push our department and push our team into how can we make this unique? Because the why behind it is, okay, well, we kind of have to do it because most of the people that are joining us are used to Sunday morning services or whatever. But as we're going to explore in just a little bit and talking about engagement and time constraints, the, the actual things that happen inside of that can be a little different. So we're almost piggybacking on something that has been happening for a long time.

Anyway, we're different than Lux Lux has the beautiful opportunity to establish when and where and how it wants to do things, which is a blessing. It's kind of a curse at sometimes as I'm sure Mike and Mark can attest to, but it's a blessing in that there's a more agile, agile response to how you want to do things. Which kind of leads us into our second, second thought here, and you can follow along with your handy dandy checklist. But after you've clarified the why, now you need to clarify the who. And so this, for a physical church, this is pretty simple. The who is everybody that's going to normally attend a Sunday morning services, service, usually adults, usually, you know, post-millennial adults or Gen Xers, boomers, that type of person.

The people that are used to attending on a Sunday, that's pretty simple. But what if you want to do church services like during COVID? And even now, Bay Hope is experimenting with student services. How do you do an online service for students online? It's pretty different. How do you do an online service for youth? How do you do an online service for college kids? How do you do an online service for singles and for care groups? And we've kind of sorted some of those out, especially with care groups and those things. Students, we still haven't figured out. Mark, you would have a better handle on that. But by clarifying the who, we've kind of been able to form our community or our services around that just a little bit more.

We've been able to tailor some of the engagement stuff that we'll talk about in a minute. Mark, when we, you talked about your, you know, your one, your Saddleback Sally, or I don't know, we need to come up with a different name for Lux. Like, is it going to be the Lux Luthor? Yeah. Lux Luthor is kind of funny. That's actually pretty dope. Yeah. So for the Lux Luthor, like what, who is, who is the who for Lux? Yeah. Well, I mean, I mean, we can get deep into that. And I think that maybe even in a future episode, we can have some conversation around like, how do you actually form that and sit down and be really intentional about the person you're trying to reach? I think that when it comes to clarifying the who, I think the more interesting, because you can look like, I would just say this, like pick up the book, Intentional Churches, read through it.

That'll really help you define some of that stuff. And so like, you know, we have a 27 year old male who's working a dead end job who comes home and games most nights. He's not really involving his life in a whole lot of anything, but he's semi passionate about the LGBTQ community because he feels like that's the thing that he should defend in today's day and age. He's probably, you know, leaning left politically, but doesn't honestly could, could really care less. It just doesn't, you know, just doesn't want to get in arguments. And so, you know, that's kind of the person he's not really on a deep spiritual journey, probably spent some time in the church at one point, but has left the church, found it to be either irrelevant or hypocritical and hasn't been back.

Now, the way that we do church directly tailors to that person, right? That's who we're trying to reach. And I think that it's important to ask, but I think on a larger scale, specifically if you're a physical church, who's looking at what is our digital footprint actually look like? I think the larger scale picture is to ask who, like, not just like the details, but like, let's get 10,000 foot and answer like some really, really basic questions. Are we, are, is our job, are we trying to reach and provide a service for people who would be at church, but can't be right now? Because the way you structure a service for that person looks, I believe, I believe very different than how you would structure a service for say, I'm trying to reach somebody who's out there on the other side, who would, who would maybe they're getting a chance to get to know Jesus for the very first time.

They've wandered into my stream. Now, let me just unpack that very quickly. For example, Sally, who can't make it to church this week because Sally's a shut-in or Rob, who can't make it to church this week because he lives in Western PA and he's at camp every single weekend all summer, but still wants to be at church. A, they're not watching on their phone, probably. They're probably not doing it in a way where they can actually interact with you. So engagement is really terrible. Two, they don't actually want to engage with you. They're not super interested in engaging with your online host. They're probably threw their thing up on the TV. And so they don't even have the opportunity and they can't even see your chat, right?

The next thing is they're not, they're not looking to get something that's outside the room. They don't want something that's been prerecorded, produced and provided for them, right? They want to feel like they're actually at church. And so they want to be in the room where you are. And so simple, easy to set up, easy to do. The flip side of that is like, you're looking to reach this person who doesn't know Jesus. The way that you structure your service looks way different. This is like, hey, we have to be able to interact directly with these people. We want to be able to ask questions and have conversation. All of those things become a heck of a lot more important. And the way that you go about having that interaction and structure your service looks different.

You might have a polished service. It might not be from your stage. You might not want your camera on the other side of the room from the person that you're filming. It might be a lot more work and a lot more staff time, you know? That's interesting. You, when you're talking about the, excuse me, you're talking about the who, it's almost interesting. And I don't know if Lux has run into this. Have you ever thought about doing separate, separate services or separate large scale gatherings for different types of people? So, for example, have you ever thought about doing something a little bit more expository? We're going to go deep into a thing and we're going to open it up to a large group for those that know Jesus and have been following Jesus for a little bit.

And then we're going to, and I'm going to use the term seeker and I don't mean it, you know, I hate the term, but like, are we going to do something a little bit more seeker friendly, a little bit more Christianity 101 and kind of do that regularly? Yeah, that's a good question. I don't, I don't think that we've ever kicked around like doing other large scale services like, okay, this service is for the advanced class, right? And this service is for beginners. Welcome to church. I think like most churches who are intentional about reaching people who don't know Jesus or far from God, especially digital expressions that are trying to reach people that maybe have literally never been to church before.

Because like the digital expression allows you to dip your toe into communities that no physical church has the ability to dip their toe into, right? And I think that there's something really cool about that. But the unique thing is, is that those people do not come with any sort of an intact biblical worldview. And so even when they come to faith, they have just literally no idea. And that's been one of the experiences that we've had, right? We've had someone who came from a Muslim faith who came to like, just no, no basis for it. Just didn't know, right? We have people from other countries who've like come into faith and they're primarily, you know, a Hindu country. Like, I don't have no idea.

And that's okay. Like, we got to start with the basis. And then I think like most churches who are really intentional about reaching the lost, their live service, their event, right? Their thing that they're trying to invite people into. It always, it is built to keep the cookies on the bottom shelf and challenge the people who are reaching for the top shelf, right? Because in this case, you put the thing that I don't like about what church does very typically is they, they take information and they put it on the top shelf and then they take responsibility and they put it on the bottom shelf for everybody, right? And so they come to this extra Bible study, come to this extra. And so there's all of these additional things that you have to do.

And for us, it's like, how can we take the info, like the, the, the education? Can we put that on the bottom shelf and can we take the responsibility and let's put that on the top shelf, right? And so we're always calling our people to apply stuff. Most people in church don't need more expository preaching. They need to apply preaching that they've already heard. And especially people who are in week in, week out, they don't need another aha moment. They need to act on the aha moment they had. And so for us, that happens primarily through then the context of relationship and small groups, right? Community nights, um, discipleship meetings, like those sorts of things where we're trying to help people then grow to become more like Jesus.

But so it's so often we just believe that growing to become more like Jesus just has to do with more information about scripture that you have and more Greek that you've heard preached about. And in my experience, becoming more like Jesus has to do with acting more like Jesus and acting like Jesus is actually not terribly complex, right? Um, that's something that somebody who's brand new to the faith and someone who's been walking with walking, quote unquote, walking with Jesus for a really long time can do. And so, uh, I don't think we've ever really explored the idea of like, Hey, how do we, how do we split this up? Um, it's an interesting concept. It's an interesting concept. It's just not one that we've really entertained.

Um, let's move to kind of topic idea number three here. Uh, and it has to deal with the overall service itself. Um, the big headline I kind of wrote here is clarify the engagement and engagement is that big buzzword that we've been taught to throw all of our metrics and all of our money behind. And most people don't actually understand what engagement is. Most people think that engagement is a statistic that is reported back to you by Facebook or YouTube. Um, most people don't realize that engagement is actually just kind of what Mark and I are doing right now. And that's talking together. That's just really engagement. Uh, it's tough to talk one-on-one when you've got hundreds of people lined up with their cameras off or the ability to not even turn on your cameras, which I need to plug right now, alter live a place that you can actually do digital services and all of the things and allow people to turn their cameras and microphones on and actually have one-to-one conversations with people during a service.

It's this wild concept that actually works in practice. Um, but when you're clarifying the engagement, taking it back to the why, you need to kind of ask yourself and ask your team and leadership if it, if it comes to that, the serious questions, those questions being like, do we just need to parrot in the physical sense? Do we just need to parrot what the church itself is doing? Do we need three songs and a message? Do we need an extended announcement time? Do we need, you know, the boring quote unquote things for online? Why are you doing those things when most people are just simply a click away from watching a football game at the same time or going to YouTube and having you pulled up in another window and, you know, they're watching, I don't know, Casey Neistat or something like that.

Like, you know, it's, it's one of those things. Um, how, how can you structure your service so that people are actually talking to you? Mark, when, when you are designing a luck service, especially when you first started really, cause I feel like, you know, you're 92, 93 weeks into luck so far. And I only know that because I have access to the Google drive and I literally just was working, cutting, cutting a video that said week 92 on 93. Um, but, uh, but, you know, so you've done this 93 times and then some, how did you guys clarify the engagement when you were first designing a service? You know, Twitch gives us some stats that are really helpful, I think. And I don't know that I don't stream on other platforms, so I don't know these things other places.

The, the hard part about digital is we think we can equate reach to attendance, right? And then we can equate, I don't, I don't even know. Like, and then we say, okay, engagement is, and we think that engagement in some way, shape or form is like, okay, X amount of people said something or responded or raised their hand or signed up for something or filled out a connection card. And I'm, I'm just not convinced that that's engagement and, and you're not structuring most people, most churches do simply just do not structure, um, their services in a way that actually provides for engagement, right? They are broadcasting what's happening in a room where people were there physically and still not engaging, right?

It's not, you know, it's like, why would you expect people in the online world to engage while you're preaching when you don't even expect the people who are physically in the room to engage with you in any capacity? And so I think that there's, there's some challenges there when it came to structuring a service for Lux, we really studied what a just chatting stream looked like on Twitch. And we said, why is it that somebody can sit in front of their computer and stream to four or 500 people, sometimes 15, 25, 35,000 people and see hundreds of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, thousands of messages in a couple of hours come through and see people actually really genuinely engaged emoting, like crazy responding, like nuts.

Like to the point that once a stream grows to a certain point, like the streamer literally can't even engage with it. The problem is not that there is the, it flips, right? Because originally it's like, we, we have people to engage with the people who are out there, but none of them will engage and actually flips in, in Twitch where it comes to the point that there are so many people watching, trying to engage that the streamer actually can't engage with them. And he has, they have to completely disconnect from the chat and just allow it to be what it is and have their mods run it. And so we said, what do those things look like? And so that's why for us, our structure is our first 15 minutes of service is dedicated to just sitting in a chair and talking to chat.

We just interact with chat. That's it. Sit there and interact with chat. And we give a couple of announcements and we laugh like humor is a staple and a major part of our church. That first 15 minutes have to be engaging and funny, like, and it's not skits. It's not, it's just us, right? It's just us making light of ourselves, enjoying the company of the people in the chat and just hanging out with them. And that's welcoming people, all of those sorts of things. It's saying hi to first time guests, all of the stuff that you would think maybe would happen before a service that happens in the first 15 minutes of our service. And then we do one worship song. I'm not saying that we wouldn't like to do more in the future.

We might not change that, but at least for the first two years, we've done only one. And the real reason for that is because I don't know if you've ever sat at home while you watched worship happen on your TV. It sucks. You don't sing. No one's singing. Like, I'm not saying that we shouldn't sing. I think we should. I'm saying that the reason behind why we worship and why we sing, if we're honest about most church services, is to move people into a place where they can receive the word, right? And that might be a terribly Calvinistic thing for me to say, right? That might be like super Calvinistic. But I think that that was like, that's my understanding of one of the main reasons that we worship and why we sing.

I think that every aspect of life can be worship. And I think that as long as we're giving honor to God and glorifying him with our lives, and I think the aspect of singing and reflecting is also this part of moving us into a place where we can receive from the spirit. And so we thought that a song was good for that. And that's what we use it for because the longer it gets awkward online, just to be honest with you. And then from there, we do prayer. Every week, we have people raise prayer concerns live in chat, and then we live actually pray for those things. It's not just like a, hey, guys, thanks for raising your prayer concerns. Here's a pre-recorded prayer by the pastor. We actively read those things and pray for each and every one of them.

And then engagement during the sermon looks different because it's harder to be engaged and preach. But we try to structure it in such a way where we're asking questions during our sermon and giving other times. For a while, we did a thing where like in the first third of my sermon, I actually asked a question, and then I had my team copy the responses and send them to my phone over texts or over Discord DMs. And then in the second half of my sermon, I would read them at some point, and it would enable us to really engage. They would pick out some of the best ones for me, and then it would actually feel like I was engaging with them in a slightly deeper level. And then in our post-service, like after we're done with everything, you know, service is over, Lord's Supper's done, whatever for that week, I'm back on the couch and we're just answering questions.

And I will take breaks from a sermon to welcome somebody. I will take breaks in the middle of a message to answer a question that comes in, because my goal is to engage with the people who are actually at church live that week. One of my favorite times in all of the week is the first 15 minutes of a Lux service. And if you have never had a chance to join, I invite you to twitch.tv slash Lux Digital Church or, well, we don't ever put the, it's in VOD, so if you want to go to twitch.tv slash Lux Digital Church, you can watch it anytime you want. It's not on YouTube. We clip out the sermon and put that on the YouTubes. But it's one of my favorite things in the world, and actually I started, and it was one of the things we were doing at Bay Hope for a while, kind of opening up, so our service is kind of bog standard, not bog standard, it's, you know, a song or two and then announcement time, you know, it's your typical Sunday morning church service.

But I got hired in June of 2019 and kind of took a couple of months to get my feet under me, figure out the lay of the land, figure out the community and the culture and all those other things, and then this fun little virus called COVID-19 hit, and it shut everything down, and it kind of accelerated all of the plans that I had already been in process and progress to really start to derive a bit of engagement out of our services. Through that, our church went from meeting about 800 or 900 online every single Sunday to 5,000 online, just in the blink of a hat, drop of a hat, and it slowly started to settle down, as COVID settled down, and once we opened back up... I want to blink a hat. You can try...

It might hurt. I think it might hurt. I want to blink a hat. Yeah, I think it might hurt. Well, it's like Mario. Do you ever play Mario Odyssey? I think he had a blinking hat. Yes. Yeah, the one... It's a great... Yeah, it's a great game. Where was I? Yes, so, blinking hats. So, when we opened up the church again, we actually, our lead pastor, rolled up into our kind of leadership team and essentially, like, said, hey, before we open, we need to build a TV studio, which I was like, oh my gosh, yes. Like, this is what I've been asking for. So, and then just walked away. Like, I was essentially just rolled this hand grenade into the room and then walked away. And meanwhile, left all the finance people just flabbergasted, like, how are we going to pay for this money, supply chain, all this other stuff.

God blessed it. It happened. Spent a lot of money on a TV studio. And that's where my office is, is in this TV studio. And we, over the last year and a half-ish, have gained the ability to run a one- or two-man show in this TV studio to where we can live drop in and drop out whenever we want during a Sunday morning service. So, typically, what we are doing is we're spending the first couple of minutes doing exactly what Mark was doing. Less laughter and less sort of in-jokes and less, you know, gamer talk because we're talking to anywhere from 25-year-olds to 70-year-olds. And so, a lot of them have no clue who I am most of the time. But we're on camera. We're talking with the chat. We're engaging with people.

We're going to live worship. We're coming back into the studio to do announcement time and communion time and any other, you know, there have been a couple of Sundays where I've had to write a message in 15 minutes and preach because all of our camera equipment, all of our switcher equipment died. And so, it's just me preaching to 2,000 people with a message that I prepared on the way in, which is totally fun. Stuff like that. But we have that ability. And my exhortation for people is what I'm always telling churches that are doing this. Find some way to get somebody to talk to a gosh darn camera. Find some way to do exactly what Mark and I are doing. Look into the lens of a camera and talk to the people that are on the other side of that.

Because you're not just, you're not talking to a house full of people that are looking back at you. You are talking to a glass eyeball that may have 1,000 people on the other side of it. And if your service is not structured to do anything about that, and if you are not used to engaging people on the other side of a glass eyeball, you are going to be lost. You are going to lose your people and they're going to go do something else. They are going to completely write you off. The engagement portion of that, clarifying the engagement, clarifying the people that are behind that. It's this building block of the why behind the service, the who you're trying to reach. And now you can look into that camera and you can say, man, it's so good to have you look down at your laptop, see that Dorothy and Timmy and the Thomas family are online.

Man, Dorothy and Timmy and the Thomas family, good to see you guys. Thanks so much for being here. How was your weekend? Ask them some stupid question. Hey, do you like ham or turkey at Christmas dinner? Both? That's awesome. I do too. I love meat. Okay, we're going to go out to our service now. See you in a little bit. Boom. You have now made a personal connection with somebody. You have now designed your online service to give you a quick and easy win. You have looped those one or two people in. And here's a little fun little tidbit. You have actually made a number of people jealous in a good way. And I don't mean jealous like, oh, that person didn't talk to me and it was on the camera. But now people are going to be more incentivized to type into the chat, hoping like, hmm, maybe Pastor Andy's going to say something to me next time.

Maybe I should put a funnier, wittier, maybe I should put my prayer request into the chat or something like that. Somebody else is going to see that in the chat and respond to it. Somebody else is going to respond to it. It's going to take a long time to build up that snowball. But I tell you what, over three and a half years, we have way more active chatters than we had when I first started. And that's simply because I took the time to clarify my engagement and clarify who I'm talking to and clarify the big why vision. Mark, any response so I can kind of step down off my soapbox here? No, I think that when it comes to working with physical churches who are asking some of these questions, some of these ideas can just be really overwhelming.

Like, where am I going to find the team? We can't build a TV studio. And it's like, that's okay. Like, that's okay. I think there's two pieces. One, you don't need a TV studio to actually create engagement, right? You don't really need a lot of fancy tech to do it either, to be honest. You need a little bit. Like, you need a little bit. You know, there is a way to get a camera set up in a separate room that, you know, end up with a mic and somebody can sit there and they can actually talk and chat with your folks and get them to respond and have conversation there prior to service. And I think if your goal is engagement, then you have to get away from the online host thing, right? Not like the person on the other side of the camera, like the person on the other side of the keyboard host.

The person is just not going to prompt people to message because most of them aren't looking at the keyboards. They're not looking at the chat. And so, um, if you're trying to drive engagement, like you have to show that you actually care that those people are there and you on the camera care that those people are there. And it's got to be more than like, Hey everybody, welcome to new generations church and online family. We're glad that you're here with us too. Now let me never look at the camera again and talk to all these people. And in some capacity, it even has to be better than like the Craig Groeschel. Like, man, that guy's drilled in. Like he looks at this camera for these three lines, that camera for those four lines, that camera for that line back to this camera for six lines, right?

Like he knows exactly what he's doing and it's done so well, but you don't have to compete in that space, right? If you are organic and natural and it doesn't, it's actually so it's, it's just not even super expensive anymore because COVID one of the things that COVID did was put insane pressure on companies who are making microphones and cameras because there were new competitors in the space who were making more efficient and cheaper products. And so like, there's a lot of equipment out there that you can learn about and get your hands on that works really, really well. That comes from not the online broadcast world. It comes from the gaming community. It comes from the streaming community because you don't know this, but you know, you don't need a giant soundboard to do this.

You need a GoXLR mini or a Rode podcast interface and, you know, a half decent microphone, right? And a boom arm and you could do a lot of stuff and someone can run your stream in a way that's actually engaging. The flip side of that is sometimes it's like, if you're a pastor and you're feeling pressure to do online ministry and you're like, I don't want to do it. I do not care about it. I think it's stupid. And my church is still trying to figure out if they're doing a traditional or a contemporary worship service. Fine. Like, that's okay. Like, I think it's genuinely okay for some churches to come into this segment and just say, this isn't us. And I think it's going to have to be every church that really wants to thrive with the next generation.

I really believe that. But I also don't want to put a bunch of undue pressure on pastors who don't have the time, energy, or desire to learn any of this. And their churches – I don't want to encourage a bunch of pastors to go into another battle to build a TV studio, right? I think that there's ways that you can do engagement really well without all the bells and whistles. And I think there's some churches that just need to have a really honest conversation. And just because everybody has their service on the internet does not mean that my service has to be on the internet. And there's some extent where that's okay, too. Because I think this – just the idea of how do I structure my online service is overwhelming to a lot of pastors that might be in smaller mainline denominational churches that just feel very overwhelmed by the prospect of even dipping their toe into this.

That's good, and that's – But you're probably not listening to this podcast. Well, and maybe, because there is a number – there are a number of pastors and leaders that I've talked to that are – have gotten the directive from their online pastor, hey, we need to – or from their lead pastor, hey, we need to do this online thing because everyone's doing this online thing. And then you're right, they get super overwhelmed and go like, well, I can just set up my iPad and broadcast to Facebook Live. And it's like, well, no, I mean, you can. You're not wrong. That will get you on the internet pretty quickly for free. But there's no – we're not deriving – there is no why behind that. There is no who behind that, and there's no engagement behind that.

The other side of that, kind of everything, is that we then get the chance to – when we talk about these things, we get to use some of these free and some of these paid tools to do good. In ways that I don't think they were originally designed to do. So, like Twitch. Twitch was not designed to minister to people around the world, right? But it's free. It's a free platform for us to use. Obviously, some of the tools are not free, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. AlterLive, not free, but definitely cheap compared to other things that you could be using. These tools are out there to where now we can start to have these conversations of, okay, so let's move past just the – let's innovate just a little bit.

Okay, cool. So, I set up a camera in the back of my worship center. Cool. Now, how do I, with minimal amounts of money, buy a $200 switcher and talk to this camera and then talk to these people? That's a conversation – that's a cool conversation to have. That's a conversation that's actually driving the mission forward instead of, how do I add another song to the end of my worship set to get people to respond by doing X, Y, and Z? Because I think you're moving away from what you actually need to be doing as a church, which is community, which is engagement, which is making people understand that they are disciples of Jesus, meaning followers of Jesus, meaning students of the Master. So, I think you're right to point out, and I get a little overzealous when I start talking about the studio, and I forget that, like, hey, most churches aren't going to go build a TV studio because they're just – they're not going to.

Most lead pastors, if you're one of those out there that has a lead pastor that does not see the value in digital, I'm very sorry. There are those out there. They are slowly going away, which I think is a good thing. Sure. There's some shift in perspective there when it comes to the digital space. I think some people are seeing – I may have said this on the last episode. Did I talk about the church that's doing communion only in person in the last episode? I don't think that I did. I had a conversation with a really large church on the other side of the country, and it was really interesting because I'm having this conversation with this pastor. It's really, really big, right? And a bunch of their people left during the pandemic, and they went to other states.

And he said, I know that the online world is working because these people continue to give, and they continue to be here every week. So their hearts are still in it in some capacity. And he said, but what we're doing is we're doing the Lord's Supper every week, but we're only doing it in person. So the people who come in person feel like they have that special perk, that opportunity. And it was like – for me, it was this moment where it was like I see a guy who something is clicking, right? Something about the digital space is clicking. He's seeing. He's like, this is real. This is actually impacting people's lives. I didn't think it was going to, and it wasn't my jam before. But now I'm seeing it.

It's impacting people's lives. People are still committed. But I still really want everyone just to come back to the building because we have this building, and I would really like it to be full of people. And I think that there is a lot of that going around, right? I think there are – when it comes to lead pastors, there are lead pastors who are just coming out, and they're saying, we need to put our church on the internet. I don't care. Put our service on the internet. They're not really interested in having a conversation about changing what you're doing or changing the structure of a service or doing something very different, which all are going to be necessary in order to do this effective.

If you want to do this effectively, and it's not just for Sally, who's a shut-in, to be able to watch your church service on Facebook on Sunday mornings, if you want to do this effectively and actually reach people who don't know Jesus, then you have to completely restructure. Like, it has to look different. It can't be the same. It does not work online. It just literally doesn't. It's like planting a church where you're speaking the language that no one can understand. And at the same time, there's also these pastors now who are kind of like they're getting it, but they're also really not, right? There's – it's like, oh, I understand. Like, I think I see the value, but every day I'm immersed in this fill the physical building thing.

And so, like, what can we do to get people to come back? And instead of like, oh, people's lives are being transformed and they're still bought in even though they're not here, there's something unique about this. How do you actually lean into that? Because there actually may be a chance for us to have reach in thousands of communities instead of this community. And what does that actually look like? And I think that it's been really interesting to watch different senior pastors at different stages in this journey of what does digital industry look like for our church. And that's not to vilify those pastors that are saying, like, I don't see value of digital. I don't – you know, they're – oftentimes their community has not lent itself towards that.

And they might have an aging congregation. They might have a congregation that just has no digital prospects whatsoever. Also, a lot of pastors just – that's just what they've been doing since the beginning of their pastoral ministry. And a lot of them only know one or two ways. And getting a pastor to kind of change midstream is tough, man. It is one of the toughest things in the world. It's like getting – you know, you need an act of Congress to get certain pastors to do things to, like, even change the carpet or to spend money. And that stinks, but it's also like, okay, well, work with it. If you're a guy or a gal that sees the necessity of digital, keep pushing. Keep knocking on the door.

Keep telling them, like, hey, we can do online services this way and this way and this way. But we're – Well, I think the reality is a lot of it isn't senior pastors who are midstream, right? In midstream, you're navigating rapids. You're communicating with your team, and you're trying to make changes as you go down to keep the boat up, right? And we got a lot of pastors who are – some of the only ones that lived out COVID are in the delta, right? They're at the end. It's calmer waters where we are, right? And we're not looking for rapids, right? I can't tell you – I've talked to a lot of pastors who have just flat out said – and I don't know – I just – I'm trying to remember where I heard this, and I just want to be really careful.

But I – there's another pastor. It's a really large, influential church in our country. And he just said, I don't – like, I know that this is important. I just don't care. Like, I don't want to learn it. I'm just at a stage in my ministry where I know this is important, but it is the next generation's thing to figure out. It's not mine. And I think there's a lot of pastors who are in that stage who are finishing well, who are finishing really well, right? They're in their – you know, they're in their last handful of years of leading. They've shepherded their flocks very well. They've grown really influential churches. They've done really amazing stuff. And they're literally just saying, like, I know that this is a switch, and I just don't know that I'm built to make the jump.

And it's got to be the next generation that has to be able to do it. And I think we'll see transitions. We're looking right now at the generation of boomers and older gen Xers who are handing their churches off to millennials right now in spades. Some of the biggest churches in the country and most influential churches in the world are in the processes of doing that right now. And as they're working towards their transitions, I think we will see more creativity and engagement in digital space than what we have before because I think there are pastors who genuinely know that this is necessary. It's just – they just don't feel like it's their calling. And I've talked to a lot of senior pastors who are in that vein.

That's where they are right now. That's good. We just took a long road around what we were actually talking about. So I appreciate the time there, Mark. Again, going back to what Austin said about you, that guy knows his stuff. So that's you. You know your stuff. Thanks, Austin. He listened to it last episode, too. I didn't get any notes from him, so he hasn't gotten his red pen out yet. He will. Well, he thought I knew my stuff episode one and episode two. He was like, yikes, bro. Too quick a call. It was too quick a call. Yeah, you're not wrong. The last little point here, and then this is the easiest one, but you need to clarify your time constraints. That's just pretty simple. For a lot of churches, it's an hour.

I think a lot of churches, a lot of physical churches, the fact that they're doing online services, just kind of putting up a camera in the back of their house or, you know, producing an online broadcast, it's way too long for a digital service. Because, like Mark said, listening to three worship songs, that's a long time. Most people are bored. By the end of the first song, you're not singing along. It's just, you're watching a musical performance at that point. There is no connection to the Lord. Sermon, you know, I've heard differing statistics about sermon length that can be anywhere. It should be, you know, 15 minutes. It should be 35 minutes. You can go an hour because if you're engaging the camera and talking to chat, like all those things.

Mark, where do you fall on that, by the way, the sermon length argument? Once again, this has to come back to your other answers, right? This has to come back to your why and your who. So our why is we want to reach people who are gamers for Christ. We want to reach the Twitch community. Like, we want to be a light for every dark place. And that starts with our community at Twitch. That's our tribe and our language. And our who is people who are watching streams for three, four hours a day. Therefore, the length of our service doesn't bother you nearly as much, right? I'm actually okay with our service being relatively long because my people and my one is used to watching long. If your one is on Twitter, they're not.

They're not used to reading bodies of texts that are longer than a handful of characters, let alone tuning in for a long period of time for a service. If your one is a Facebook user who's flicking through stuff, like thumb flickers, if your one is a thumb flicker, right? And that's where you're trying to catch their attention is through thumb flicking. A long service might not be the bet, right? On YouTube, that might be different. If you're doing YouTube live, there are people who watch a lot of YouTube, right? And yeah, people don't always click through long videos, but sometimes they do. Like, it's more likely there than it is on other platforms. So I think it has a little bit of a question about, like, what platform are you on?

What are you actually trying to accomplish? What I love about Twitch is that I feel as though we could stream for two hours, two and a half hours, and I don't think we would lose people just because they're used. As long as we are consistently engaging with chat, we're not a talking head. As long as they're able to respond and we're able to read and interact with them throughout, I don't think our time is nearly as limited as – I don't think our time is as limited as the physical church's. I think people will give me more time on my platform than they will in your physical world. That's fascinating. But that's a unique, a very unique aspect of the culture and the person that I'm trying to reach.

That isn't true of every place. And so I think that that's just an important thing to have in the back of your head. Like, the why and the who have to really define the engagement, the time constraints, the structure, all of the order of service, all of those things. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, I echo all those things and just say, hey, if you're in a physical church, shorten your services. Just trust me on this. Twitch is a different animal, like Mark just said. Maybe you need to start thinking about some ways that you can shorten your service. Maybe that is, if you figure out a way to drop in on the third worship song, maybe just float that around and play with it. Just saying. We can have those conversations.

Mark, anything to add before we get out of here on episode three? The only thing I'll say is pre-plan in your order of service that you are opening opportunities for people to step into conversation and share their story. So, part of the structure of your service needs to be, if you're in altar live, the service doesn't end when the live stream is done. It goes to the rooms, right? If you're on YouTube or Facebook, it goes to Zoom calls. It's whatever it needs to go to, like there needs to be an expectation that the party's not over just because the worship service is done, that now we're moving. So, we move into Discord afterwards and we have conversation there and we hang out after church and we have our prayer rooms and all of those things.

A live stream service isn't just hit live and then hit end, done being live. Your service isn't like that either. People come into church and they mingle and they talk and they find a place to sit and then afterwards they leave and they grab coffee or they hang out with people or they chat with someone they wanted to catch up with. You need to give people room to do both of those things as well and that 15 minutes of conversation, 10, 15 minutes at the beginning where you're engaging directly with them and then the chance to come and be face-to-face with you over calls and voice chats afterwards are really important elements of what it means to be a church and what it means to get to know people and drive engagement as well.

So, you need to open up opportunities for those two things on the front and back end and those aren't in addition to what you're doing. These are part and integrated part of your service. Stop thinking about church on Sunday morning in your physical building as when we start at 8.30 and when we end at 9.30. That's not when your church starts and ends. Your church starts before 8.30 when people start showing up and your teams are here and your church extends an extra half hour as people are making their way to the parking lot. That's your church service. How do you embody the parking lot, the coffee stand, the conversations, the tall tables, the next steps area? All of those things have to be part of your digital service.

If not, you're giving them a portion of your service, not your service. All of those things have to be part of your service. All of those things have to be part of your service. All of those things have to be part of your service.