EP291 - Jeff Celebrates 5 Years of The Church Digital Podcast

Thinking outside of the box, doing something different. Well, everything I just described to you today is commonly referred to in 2024 as Christianity Today, movie reviews, music reviews, sermons online, community discussion board forums. It's nothing new under the sun. On that, welcome to the Church Digital Podcast. Through this podcast, we'll talk about the technological innovation within the church, but more than tech for tech itself, we'll address deeper questions. Is discipleship 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 and artificial intelligence fit into all of this?

Whether you're a big or small church, the Church Digital's goal is to help churches like yours learn to be a multiplying church digitally and physically. And now here's your host, Jeff Reed.

Hey, listen, it's great to be here with you today. We're going to get into some celebrations here in a little bit. Mentioned earlier, the Church Digital Podcast, TCDP, the podcast celebrates its five-year anniversary yesterday, April 15th. Yeah, it's tax day, and I decided to launch a podcast, the Church Digital Podcast, five years ago. So that would have been 2019. I had been doing the Church Digital less than a year when I decided to do the podcast and publicly talked about this. Actually, texted with Ray today and thanked Ray because Ray the Armis is the reason I'm doing the podcast because Ray told me to basically shut up, stop talking about it, and actually just do it. And that was the words that I needed to hear.

Ray, you know, I had a vision. I was a live producer at for church, and so I had this ridiculous vision of what I wanted the podcast to be, and I didn't want to do it until it was perfect. And I'll never forget, Ray tells me, "Version one is better than version none." And you know, I've heard that from a couple other people too, but you know, get out there, get going with it, get started, make it happen, and improve. And we did, and version one was nowhere near the quality of what I wanted at the beginning, but it was still pretty dang good. And so, stop waiting for somebody, stop waiting for your best opportunity, and just jump on it and go get started. That, at least, would be my advice, and that's how I've lived. As you can obviously tell through the Church Digital, we change so much stuff here on a regular basis. We're always innovating and experimenting and implementing and iterating, and all those really long, complicated words that you normally hear when you talk about goals.

There's an interesting conversation on Discord today. I don't know if you guys saw that about, you know, goals and the usefulness of it. And so, like, I always found that when I was in my twenties, I hated goals. I felt that goals were restricting and limiting to where we were going. Melanie, you were talking about that a little bit. I always felt like goals were restricting for where I wanted, for where I thought we were going to go. It's like, well, what happens when God pivots us? And so, kind of negative on it, I guess, a little bit. In my thirties, I discovered that, and especially the more that I worked with this—Melanie, this is me, don't—I'm not saying anything—but the more that I worked with teams, the more that it was more than just me, the more that it was like, okay, the goals are necessary, if just to keep everybody aligned, to make sure that everybody understands the purpose.

Because I'll never forget, I'll never forget working on a staff, and it was a church staff, as a matter of fact. And we asked the church, Eric Iger was executive pastor at this church. Eric Iger, author of Simple Church, if you're familiar with the book. The church that I was at, Christ Fellowship Miami, actually was the first Simple Church. It was the book that he wrote the book at. And he said, "Okay, hey, so what do we expect people to do after they attend the weekend service? Like, what's next?" And I swear, six different people in the room came up with six different answers, and it all had to do with their area, and it was not holistically aligned at all. And it was like, okay, like, we don't—nobody in the room has a clue. They're all just self-centered on their own thing and not seeing the big picture of what we as an organization are trying to do. And so it was really interesting to see how goals, like that season, was really where goals made more of a clear understanding for me.

But we'll get into that here in a little bit. Hey, couple announcements coming up. Some things coming up. So, you know, I work with the Church Digital, obviously founded that. We've got a great team here with the Church Digital. New website, by the way, check it out: thechurchdigital.com. If you have not seen that yet, take an assessment. Learn if you're wired, if you're gifted. Well, you know what? What is it? What are you thinking about this idea of planting a church in digital, virtual space? And are you equipped for that? There's an assessment there on the website for that and other things and other Easter eggs you can dig into. Just check it out: thechurchdigital.com.

Very cool. Hey, so one of my other gigs is, as I work with a company called Resi, Resi, Push Pay, kind of work within their ecosystem. And they have a webinar series of webinars that I'm leading for them called the Resilient Church. Now, there's a lot of physical churches, there's a lot of digital church planters in here, and so I'm going to be honest, guys. The webinar is really, really not for digital church planters. It's much more towards physical churches doing digital ministry. Physical churches, how they can utilize digital, like what's the why of that. We're calling it the Resilient Church. And so if we've got any of our physical church friends on here, we'd love to have you check out this webinar.

We've got, you know, a lot of you know, Tyler Sansom, lead pastor of First Capital Christian in Cordon, Indiana, is coming on, and we've got another church as well, Mosaic Church in Nashville, Tennessee, somewhere in Tennessee, is coming on as well. But we're going to be talking about connection and community. What does it look like to connect with people digitally? And what does digital community look like? You know, Resi does an incredible job with encoders in the technology aspect, but what we're really trying to do is try to coach their customers as well as others to use Resi almost every day. Whitebeard, that's awesome. But Whitebeard, what are you? Hardware or are you broadcasting out of a Pro? Video Pro? ProPresenter? They, you know, we do a lot of the streaming, but a lot of the customers, they really don't understand the technical or the ministerial points. And so really spending some time with Resi and the customer base over there, starting to help them understand the base of it.

So the first webinar is going to be April 24th. We're doing a series of six webinars: April, May, June, July, August, and September. For more information, you can go to resi.community-connection. That's a mouthful, I know. They don't make it easy for streamers. Well, Jeff, nobody ever says this out loud. "We don't need a vanity URL." Nobody ever says this out loud. It's always on social media. Yeah, but you got streamers. I mean, resi.community-connection. RSVP, come hang out with me at the webinar. It's going to be April 24th. I want to say 1:00 Eastern. Hopefully on the website.

Number two thing coming up here, right around the corner. DK Hammond, you know, DK Hammond's a guy that's been doing digital ministry a long time as well. And he is an African American, and he has been doing a lot of work for the African American church in digital space. And he started posting some stuff on Facebook the other day, and I just immediately was like, "Hey, we need to hang out and have that conversation," because I know, and actually, L. Michelle had this. I did a podcast with her on that a year ago, year and a half ago, starting to scratch the itch on African American church, some of the challenges, some of the opportunities, some of the obstacles that's really in view of the African American church and their struggle to adapt to technology, their struggle to, in the church context, I should say, at least. It's interesting like they, well, I don't want to get into it. Let we'll let DK do that.

So hey, we're gonna do it. It's gonna, we're gonna experiment again. We're gonna do it live here on Discord. And so my friends here on Mighty Networks, come over to Discord. We're going to do a podcast live Friday at noon. We're going to record it. We're going to delay it and play it back like a week later down the road. We'll schedule at some point, but a live podcast recording. DK Hammond talking African American church. We know we're going to be talking through this format and live podcasts, and Andy's wanting to do some streaming in here. I think Flat Cap is actually streaming in here tomorrow, I want to say. Flat Cap, if you're around, shout at me one way or the other so I can say it. But you know, we're a week into the Discord thing, and I love it. I love the community. I love the conversations. I love the technology of it. We still got to fine-tune some things, okay?

So Flat Cap is going to try to do tomorrow, tomorrow noon Eastern, I believe, right? Confirm for me, Flat Cap. Tomorrow, he's going to try to stream on Discord and Mighty Networks together. So he's going to do the same thing I am. It's really clunky in the first like thirty seconds because you got to press go on one. You can't press go on both at the same time, and there's work you got to do once you press go, and it's, yeah, it's just be awkward for the first thirty seconds, and then you'll be great.

So very cool. Yeah, so those are the announcements. We got the Resilient Church webinar series that Resi's putting on with me: resi.community-connection for more information on that. And then DK Hammond coming right back here. We're going to be in the live stream Discord, TCD Discord channel, noon Eastern this coming Friday. So you don't want to miss that, okay?

Hey, so it's the five-year anniversary of the Church Digital Podcast, and you know, like I said, Ray Armis really was the impetus behind this. Resi, Ray. Well, Ray, Resi. That was funny. For some reason, I just had this vision that I was going to name my dog Resi because I've named my dog Ray, but my dog, it's not Resi. It's Ray. Medicine Woo. So, you know, it was really funny. Ray, Ray told me when he's like, "Hey, Jeff, do the podcast." He's like, "Hey, you know, Jeff, so like, get ten podcasts, call it a limited series, get it done." And you know, just be done with it, just get out there, get, do something with it. And it was funny like I told Ray, this was 2018, this is early 2019, and I told Ray I was like, "Ten? I'm going to do more than ten. I mean, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to launch with five." And he's like, "You're gonna do more than ten podcasts on church online?" Like, "Yeah, sure, I mean, that's not going to be hard." And so he didn't believe me. And so we're doing 291 right now, literally recording 291 as I'm talking. And so we've done a lot of conversations with a lot of really friendly people, a lot of really wise people, a lot of pioneers, a lot of brave people getting out there trying new things, taking some heat for some things. And so, um, check that.

Out, um, it's uh, the the church digital. There's all sorts of information on there. You know, it's interesting even for myself. I um, I am like the worst on entrepreneur business person on the planet. I, I just, I, I, I, I want to like disclaim that about myself here. Um, when you like, when you grow a podcast, your goal is to make the podcast as big as possible and and just like, you know, if do two days, do three days, do five days, like you want your audience to be huge. And and for whatever reason, I just always had the antithesis idea. Like it's not about growing the podcast big. It was about um, multiplying podcasts and creating a podcast network and and distributing the wealth among others. And and it was, it was kind of like a a more of a distributed model. And to be honest, that's that's why we signed with um, well, I mean, that's the distributed model is is what's what you think the goal is. That's interesting, Whitebeard. It's a good comment. Um, you know, the idea of breaking up um, leadership and saying hey, let's um, let's go with the distributed model of leadership like we are now or um, or to be honest, even the idea of the movements um, that we're working with, you know, I mean, my job title was literally metaverse church next director. Um, and when I was in that season, we we recruited and and started developing tsunami student uh, to to be the really the Stewart McPherson to be the voice of of the metaverse for the church digital because it's was like, it's not, it's not going to be me. Let me let me get somebody else that that it can be. Um, and it was, you know, I don't, I don't know if that's huh, um, that's probably not the wisest financial decision. Um, but I've never been bright financially. But it became more of a of a of a of a ministerial play of a of a of a context depend, depend on what our goal is, you know, our goal was not um, our goal was not to create a million-dollar company. I had a, I actually had one of my mentors year was 2019, 2020, year was 2020. I'm sitting my one of my mentors is a lead pastor here in Miami. And I'm sitting in his office. I'm gonna lean back. I'm gonna get a little comfortable, guys. Um, yeah, but um, so Whitebeard says Patreon is the best way to make some money on a distributed podcast network. I mean, you're not wrong, Whitebeard. But when you've got, you know, one, 200 audience, 500 audience spread across um, you know, each podcast and you've got six, seven, eight podcasts on your network, uh, I mean viewers are distributed across all of them, you know, as opposed to like um, you know, I'm just talking out loud like Carrie Newoff, who's got million downloads and however many hundreds of thousands of viewers. And and like we just, you know, there was there was an option. Let's go with a let's go with a popular idea or let's go with what Jeff's thinking about digital. And um, you know, we went with this rare idea of movements in digital space and digital discipleship and digital church planting and and the thing that nobody was really talking about and and really getting into. Um, and so that's what I think really made it unique. It was interesting. This guy was telling you about one of my mentors. He's a lead pastor in Miami. And I'm sitting in his church and he's in front of a whiteboard and he's he's helping me strategize some things out as we were looking to transition a wait, this is 2020, mid-2020, late 2020, looking to transition away from Stadia. At the time, I was uh, director of digital church planting for Stadia. Was looking to start what would be digital Church Network, which is now the church digital, uh, part two of the church digital. And so but I'm I'm sitting there in in this pastor. I I, he's like whiteboard everything that you're doing. And I literally, I I, just every, every connection, every relationship, every side job, every opportunity, every conversation, like it was, it was, it was mammoth. Um, and I'll never forget this pastor friend of mine looks at me and says, Jeff, you gotta, you got a billion-dollar business here. You just don't, you don't know how to do it. You don't know how to run it. And uh, he's not wrong. I don't know how to run it. I don't know it's a billion-dollar business yet. I think, I think we're, I think we're the pioneers paving the way so someone else gets rich. But hey, you know, somebody should say that, you know, that pioneers get shot, settlers get rich. You you know, we talk about on the podcast like I should get a, the the tattoo anytime this just tattoo-worthy conversation. I think I've said that enough on the church digital podcast that it needs to get tattooed. Cool. So uh, the podcast is five years and um, 300 uh, episodes. Um, got some really interesting conversations coming up. DK Hammond talking African-American church. Excited about that. Um, Peyton Jones, trying to to line up Peyton Jones. Peyton Jones is the church ninja. No, he's written, he actually is the church ninja. He's like um, obsessed with ninjas. Uh, he's obsessed with GI Joe. His den is more eighties pop culture than my uh, than my backdrop here. He's got a, if you're GI Joe, he's got a Snake Eyes tattoo, like the the Snake Eyes kind of language that Snake Eyes got on his arm. Peyton Jones has the exact same thing. So that's why I'm going to do a podcast with him on the church digital podcast because he likes GI Joe. No, I'm kidding. Uh, Peyton Jones probably wrote what's commonly referred to, he wrote it with uh, Ed Stetzer, but um, he commonly referred to as the textbook for church planting called just called Church Plantology. We did a podcast with Peyton Jones where he was talking about his book um, and app. We and I I did this maybe two, three years ago and we were applying that book to um, digital church planting. And so you can go back into the archives and check that out. The church digital podcast, um, Peyton Jones. I'll I'll look it up at some point, but you you know, Google works. Peyton Jones, Church digital podcast. There you go. Uh, but what was interesting coming about that was um, a couple months, a couple weeks ago, I guess, uh, Stu started texting me out of the blue. He and I, for some reason, we text each other to get each other's attention. We we don't Discord, which is weird because he's a Discord guy. But you know, my first inbox is always text. And um, but Stu tells me, he says, uh, he's like, Jeff, have you ever heard of Peyton Jones? I was like, yes, he's he's he's a friend, mutual actually. Chesley, I believe now works for Peyton Jones. Um, there's a throwback. But um, what um, so Stu started like really getting into Plantology, getting into the book and really started getting excited about applying some of these ideologies into virtual reality church planting. And so I was like, oh, Peyton, we got to, we got to get the crowd together. And so Peyton, tsunami, and I getting together for a conversation talking about Plantology, arguably the the modern textbook, least Stadia considered it. Uh, Craig Whitney, who is has planted more churches than I've attended in my life, um, credits uh, Plantology as the modern textbook. So I I um, looking forward to that conversation. And then we talked a while back about Steve Addison. And so I'm trying to uh, Steve Addison is um, um, one of the the current movement um, missiology, uh, you know, does a lot of work. He's he's in Australia. He lives in Australia. Met him here in America, hung out with him at West Palm Beach, oddly enough. I just exchanged emails with Peyton last week. Yeah, that's very cool. Thanks for sharing that. Um, the um, so uh, thanks, thanks, Paul. The uh, Steve Addison's another guy. He just wrote a book on movements and Acts in the book of Acts, biblical movements. Uh, and so um, really excited about um, what's coming up there. Um, looking forward to that conversation. Like Steve, it was interesting. I hung out with Steve for like, I'm totally going to get into that, Whitebeard. The the UCF, uh, hung out with Steve uh, at a at a Starbucks and West Palm for um, couple an hour or so, maybe ninety minutes, ninety minutes to two hours, talking digital, talking movements. Um, you know, he's got a lot of insights publicly. And he said, he's like, 'cause I asked him on the podcast when we were hanging out. And he's like, Jeff, I don't, I I, man, I don't, I don't, I don't know digital. I I really am not comfortable speaking into that. I was like, nobody knows digital. I don't, I don't want you to talk digital. I want you to talk movements. Let me let me apply it to digital. Um, but you know, let my audience figure out how to apply it to digital. But you just come on and just be you and talk about that. So looking forward to that that conversation. It's interesting. I I mentioned Whitebeard, I'm I mentioned Ed Stetzer and passing. Ed's a friend. Um, you know, I haven't texted Ed in in a while. But Ed, Ed used to speak, was a guest speaker, regular guest speaker at Christ Fellowship Miami, the church that I was the um, the weekend producer for. And so I did uh, I worked very closely with Ed for a number of years over there. And um, there is a CPFF exponential and church planter leadership forum. CF have announced uh, some sort of an agreement uh, which is interesting. Um, because CF is is a it's a very good organization. And so Whitebeard, I'm going to tell you a story uh, and we'll eventually get into what I want to talk about. But let me tell you a story about Ed Stetzer and CF. Um, so 2020, uh, I I literally January, I January 26, this is the year COVID hit. January 26, I start my job working for Stadia. Now pre-COVID, had six weeks before COVID hit. So they were on board me and then COVID hit. And my stock, you know, went up one thousand percent um, in Stadia because, you know, they had a digital strategist that wasn't attached to a church that understand how to do um, digital ministry and streaming and the tech and the discipleship and all aspects of it. And so like, you know, Stadia was was banking on it. Um, and so it was, it was a, you know, mutually beneficial relationship. Um, because of Stadia's exposure, a lot of, I mean, exponential. I remember meeting Dave Ferguson. And Dave Ferguson was like, you know what, everybody knows your name. But no one has a Jeff, but no one has a clue who you are. Who are you? Where did you come from? Because you were nowhere and now thanks to COVID, you're everywhere. And that was that was just a the reality of being in the right place in the right time and being used by God. I am a nobody. I am not um, anything special. I'm I'm barely a guy that should be in front of a camera. And that's not the meds talking. That's that's genuine. Um, but God used me in in that season. And God continues to use me to to his pleasure and for his benefit. And so um, one of those was u a relationship that I developed with uh, CF where uh, be when I got hired by Stadia, but before COVID, CF Church Planter Leadership Forum. Now let me back up. Church Planter Leadership Forum, this is a a think tank of um, forty of the top US and or global-based church planting organizations in the country or the planet. I'm not sure if it's US-based or if it's international. But this is like invite-only crowd. This is like super legit. This is like, you know, you don't even really talk about how you're you're going there kind of thing. It's it's like a secret. And and um, um, I got invited because I was director of digital church planting for Stadia. What's a digital church, Jeff? This is pre-COVID. Before COVID hit, I get invited to come speak at this thing. And so the super secret, super elite, uh, in front of the top forty, like, you know, and so my my friends at Stadia, I remember when when Craig Whitney and uh, Jeff Bennett, the two guys that I really worked for when I was at Stadia, um, when they found out that they invited that I was invited to go speak at this thing, they were so jealous. There, the Jeff Bennett was like, Jeff, I've attended that thing for a decade, every year for a decade. They've never asked me to speak at that thing once. You don't even know what CF is, and they asked you to speak at it. And you're asking us if it's a good idea? Yes, it's a good idea. Get over there and speak. And so I did. I I ended up speaking at this thing. And so um, Daniel...

Oh my gosh, who did the Q&A for me? Um, there was—it was. I, the format was I had 30 minutes to speak. I was allowed to speak for 20 minutes on a monologue, like go through slides, and then I had um 10 minutes of Q&A. Now the Q&A was already established.

Like the person—I think it was Daniel Yang. U forgive me, Daniel, if it wasn't you. Daniel Yang went through the Q&A questions with me in advance so that I was on the same page with him. He made sure that I had all the good questions, everything was resolved. And so um, you know, I come on this thing. I am—this is early in COVID, so I hadn't done a lot of public speaking yet. I am super nervous. And um, for the first time I have major tech issues with my slides where I can't get it to work and some popup keeps popping up on my screen on how I'm sharing my slides. And so nobody can see the slides and people keep messaging me that there's a problem with the slides and my mic keeps cutting in and out. My—like, this is the worst presentation I have ever made. I, I take that back. This is probably the top three of the worst presentations that that I've ever done in front of this uh super elite crowd. And um, and so I go 15, 18 minutes. Daniel Yang, whoever it was, forgive me. Um, you know, cuts me off like he said he would. And it's like, okay, hey, you know what, let's get into some questions here. Um, and and and so he asks me the question. Now what you need to understand is this is in Zoom, but this isn't like Zoom webinar where I can't see the crowd. This is Zoom um call, so I can see every every person. I can see their squares on the on the grid. And uh, when the first question comes up, Ed Stetzer is in the room. Ed Stetzer turns his his camera off. I noticed it because Ed Stetzer was on my screen, but I didn't think anything of it. Ed Stetzer turns his camera on again. Ed Stetzer turns his camera off again. On again, off again. And then finally, about 90 seconds into my me answering the first question, Ed Stetzer turns his camera on and he unmutes and says, "Hey, Daniel, I'm gonna go ahead and interrupt this this here. Hey, hey, Jeff, good to see you again, my friend. Um, hey, I really appreciate the the conversation uh Jeff. And uh, Jeff, I love how you're using scripture to to prove a a digital ecclesiology. We all kind of got a chuckle out of that. Hey, Jeff, you know, we've had this conversation. You and I have had this conversation for years about digital uh the effectiveness of of digital church. Daniel, would it be okay if if I just like ask Jeff some questions myself? Because you know, he and I know each other real well. And so we want to I would rather just like ask my questions than than listen to to yours." And you know, Daniel's like, "Okay, Jeff, is that okay with you?" And I'm like, "It's your show, man. If if you're okay with it." And so Ed Stetzer proceeds to drill me for 25 minutes. Now this is not like um, this is not like two friends sitting around Starbucks drinking a drinking a latte. He's swinging hay makers at me. He's like taking elbow shots to my chin. He's like doing cup checks. He is is physically um verbally physically attacking me. And that's not possible, but you understand what I'm saying? Like the idea of digital church. And you know, for the first 30 seconds I thought, "Okay, I've got to respect this guy because it's Ed Stetzer. I mean, it's Ed Stetzer. I can't I can't take shots of Ed Stetzer in his own house." And then I was like, "Screw that. He's not gonna stop. He's going to keep taking shots at me and at digital doing this." And so I started taking shots back at him and being very um sarcastic. Very um—yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, did Jeff go out? No, no, Jeff's still here. Hopefully Jeff's still here. Um, yeah, it looks like it's good for me. Um, it looks like uh, Mal is having some problems with the internet. So man, I'm I'm like taking shots back. The chatter in the in the in the chat explodes. People on both sides of the equation—Ed Stetzer supporters, Jeff Reed supporters, Team Ed, Team Jeff—taking shots at each other. It's like the it's like the cage match affected the entire auditorium. My phone starts getting texts from people, "Way to go, Jeff." People that are in the room that want to make sure that I know that they they saw me are are encouraging me. And and it's just like it was it was this ridiculous kind of 30 minutes. Like it went went long. I apologize to the guy afterwards. Um, it just was so funny. This whole thing went down. Um, for I just apologize because it took so much longer than than we were scheduled for. But um, as soon as I hung up, as soon as I got off that call—this is honest, the guy truth—as soon as I got off that call, Ed Stetzer texts me, "Jeff, that was great, man. That was awesome. I I loved it. That was so good, man. Thanks for being a part of this. Thanks for being a part of CPFF. K, would you want to do that on my podcast? Why don't you come on my podcast and let's do it again on my podcast over there for everybody else?" Okay, Ed, so I literally went on his podcast to get attacked, to bulk up, to fight back, to argue, to prove points. Points so funny. Um, I don't know what the moral of that story was, but CPFF's a great organization. Exponential as well. And and they will they will uh they'll do well together. Um, excited to see how things develop there. You know what, Ed actually, somewhere around this time, 2020, probably pre-COVID, you know what, it was probably late 2019, knew had a better chance of growing than old. New churches had a better chance of growing at a faster rate, at a larger rate, than old churches. I mean, you can take with that what you want. Um, it's one of the reasons why Stadia is such a proponent of of planting, dig of planting churches. It's why I love planting. And and I've spent time, you know, supporting the idea of multiplying churches. And a lot of that's been multisite too. But you know, even multi-site is new um at some context, which is why church plantology is huge now. You're right, Whitebeard. So so true there. Um, and so I wonder what it would take to get Ed Stetzer back on the podcast. I did a podcast with Ed. Um, man, he was maybe episode 50 or 60. I tell you what, if you can go to—actually, it's probably not there anymore. It used to be the church.digital. Eded the church. Digited. Ed said in his podcast, the podcast I did with—he did on my show. Um, whatever this Jeff Reed guy is talking about, you need to be doing it. Like, it was the it was the best endorsement I could ever, which is so funny because that guy was like ripping me a year later. Um, so very cool. Hey, so we're celebrating the five year of the podcast, which is awesome. Excited about that. There's some other celebrations that we've got coming up. Um, we have um the—and this is this is more a me thing—but the 24 year anniversary of the Church of uh, excuse me, of eeli ver.com, of my first business, my first DOC, actually launched um April 15th as well. And so you know, I told I told a little bit of the story uh but I've never I haven't gone into great detail on it before. And so I figured, hey, you know what, I'm gonna I'm going to take some time today since it's the 24 year anniversary and actually talk about it here a little bit. So um, you know, I've told this story. Usually when I public, when I speak publicly, I talk about how I graduated from college December 1999, Texas Christian University, degree in radio, TV, film. And you know, in 1999, you know, 20 days before Y2K, I was stupid enough to think, "Oh, I'm going to go get a job as a digital pastor. Surely some church in America is smart enough to hire me, looking at what the internet could be in the year 2000, uh, to hire me to be a digital pastor." And for some reason, no church would hire me in the year 2000 to be a digital pastor. And so I set out to screw you all. If you're not going to hire me, then let me give you a proof of concept and show you why you should hire me and show you why the internet uh of what ministry can look like for the internet. Now, I was not smart enough to call this thing a church. I don't even know if it was a church. We can actually, you know, have that conversation later and actually drill into it if it was. Was not uh, yeah. Uh, Whitebeard, graduated from PBA with broadcast journalism, 1988. Yeah, you're you're Gramps compared to me. We had we had a guy uh we had a guy your age that was a college freshman when I was a college freshman, Whitebeard, and uh we called him Pops cuz dude was old. Just saying. All right, coming back. And I'm older than him now. So and I'm great and my body's falling apart. And oh, so many things. But we started this uh, I built this e.com. We started January, right after Y2K, literally January 2nd. You know, the end of the world did not come. The economic systems did not crash. There was a little bit of a—if you if you remember, if you're if you're old enough for Y2K—coming out of that, there was a little bit of a of a tech boom. Um, and uh, companies like GeoCities and Hotmail uh, a lot, a lot of the early.com, you had a lot lot of success um and found a lot of funding really quickly. Now all that exploded. That exploded somewhere around April 1st, 2000. If you if you remember, yeah, thank you, Melanie. W, wise choice. And so my my company publicly launched April 15th after the crash. So we weren't able to fully take advantage of it. But we had um, it was a was a Christian online community. This is before Facebook. Facebook was still, I think, in colleges. It wasn't even at uh public level. Myspace was kind of a thing. You know, it was really more Napster. Netscape was around. Uh uh, AOL was still a thing. Um, and and so this is before it's the social media. This is for web 2. So I started, I started an online community way before web 2. We were doing our our technology stack. Um, we we were buying third-party applications, CGI applications, and installing them on a Unix server. So we were using Ultimate Bulletin Board for our discussion boards, basically our Facebook walls, because Facebook walls didn't exist. So we had to install Ultimate BB to to be that for us. And then we wanted to have give away email addresses. We gave away eeli ver.com email addresses, web-based. And so people would do that. We actually let people design websites uh and so we installed like a a GeoCities uh type of of thing where people could build their websites on e.com. Actually, some of the earliest youth group websites were going to be what what we did were were based off of our system. And so um, we were even then we're really trying to be more of a distributed type model. Online Bible studies. Um, first Bible study I ever did online was we took 75 people through the book of uh James. Uh, I did uh, Iniversity Press, the little um like little little paper thin booklets, maybe like 20 pages uh that you can buy for like $7 at the Christian bookstore back then. Uh, and so yeah, we it just I would, you know, we would read a chapter, read a section, and then I would ask some of the questions in the discussion boards and people would answer. This webcams, webcams weren't a thing. And so it was all text-based. And it wasn't it wasn't Discord. It was more like, you know, more like Facebook wall type of stuff and more more of of that forums, which is really what that really is, more of than than some of the async tech that where we are today. And so uh, movie reviews. I I would go. I would watch. I would watch movies at at either Thursday nights. I would get permission uh from the movie theaters that were near me where we were in Fort Worth. That lifeguides. That's exactly what that was. Um, lifeguides. We would show uh, I would go when uh the movies were being shown Thursday nights uh the the the employees would get me in or I would go and and watch them Friday at noon. And I'd sit with a legal pad and I would just make notes. The world's worst handwriting. But I have a degree in radio, TV, film, so I'm used to writing in the dark. And so I would take notes on what it is. And then I I would write WR reviews and um, movie reviews, music reviews. I would email some of the the Christian music

Scene at the time and basically asked permission to, you know, do music reviews and post MP3 clips or even post entire songs online. And some said yes, some said no. Remember, this is the year 2000. Like, this is way before any of the stuff was out there. And, um, like, there was everything was great. No black and white. There were no laws and rules centered around this. Um, and it was funny. Like, I remember, um, Tooth and Nail. Tooth and Nail said thank you for being willing to review our music and sent me a giant box with every Tooth and Nail publication previous of the year 2000. Like 2000 and back. Literally, it's like 75, 100 CDs. I still have them. Um, and so it was so cool to kind of see how they leaned into it. Some leaned into it. Like I said, some didn't. Um, you know, at the beginning I did all the work and it there wasn't like this whole database systems and CRMs and Squarespace that have, or CMSs I should say, not CRMs. Like content management systems. Um, like that didn't exist. I'm coding pure HTML. Um, you know, maybe I have Adobe PageMill. Um, but very, very little of it. And you know, heaven forbid if using Adobe PageMill, which is before Adobe CyberStudio, which was, uh, GoLive CyberStudio. Which was, I mean, there's so many layers of like archaic. Um, but heaven forbid I change the template because if I change the template I have to make that change on like a hundred pages because it didn't sync up. Um, the precursor to Excel? I don't. I'm not that old. Dreamweaver? No, yeah, no, no, yeah. Dude, Dreamweaver is new compared to some of the stuff that I'm talking about. Macromedia Dreamweaver. Um, Adobe bought Macromedia Dreamweaver. Before that, Adobe, uh, bought, uh, GoLive. Uh, CyberStudio Fusion. Um, which was a crash and burn. Before that, Adobe came out with their own product which was called Adobe PageMill. And that was what I coded this thing on.

Sean, shoo, shoo, man, you're throwing me back here, my friend. Thank you for that. Uh, this is a great conversation. Uh, Mistala is asking some good stuff too. Um, but yeah, it was archaic. And I found myself, well, I found myself digging big holes that I couldn't fulfill. And you know, just like I did with, uh, with the church digital, I mean, to be honest, um, I kind of was like, all right, let's get some people to help. Um, I don't have any money. I, I have, um, I can give you free CDs. And so that's what I did. I, any college student at Texas Christian University, and I went to my friends, any college student that would review a CD for me, I would, uh, um, I'd give them the CD. And so it wasn't the Jeff Re show. I started platforming some others. Any pastors who wanted to put their, give me their video teaching or their VHS, their VHS tapes so I could encode them into RealVideo. You remember RealVideo from Broadcast.com? Before Windows Media, before QuickTime? Yeah, RealMedia. There you go. Um, we were encoding VHS into RealMedia and publishing that on. And that was some of the first video teaching files. That was from some of the first sermons online. This is before YouTube, guys. And so we were out there talking about bleeding edge. You know, talk about, uh, pioneers getting shot. This is what we were doing.

My brother-in-law was a, um, was a B student. I don't think he ever did seminary, but very, very educated, very trustworthy, very theologically stable. And the idea of him, I asked him, hey, would you mind teaching some Bible studies online? He loved it because he saw that he was impacting hundreds of people around the country, around the planet. Like, there were dudes. It was fun. I was hanging out with him Christmas, and, um, he mentioned the guy's name. I can't think of the guy's name right now. But there was a guy in United Arab Emirates that always did his Bible studies. And he's like, oh, he's like, oh, yeah, man, I found what's his name on Facebook the other day. And, uh, he started lamenting and reminiscing about that. And, um, twenty years later, twenty-three and a half years later, almost twenty-four years later, still thinking outside of the box, doing something different.

Well, everything I just described to you today is commonly referred to in 2024 as Christianity Today, movie reviews, music reviews, sermons online, community discussion board forums. It's nothing new under the sun. On that biblical, by the way, nothing new under the sun. You know, sometimes I think that a lot of the times the way people get offended over the church in technology, it's more grounded upon what their opinions are and what their preferences are, not so much of what the ecclesiology is and what the Bible actually is, what the Bible says. And so I do, thanks. We smuggled, oh, this is interesting. Shoo, shoo. We smuggled King James Bibles on computer chips for handheld electronic dictionaries in Saudi back in the day. Yeah, cool. That is really cool, man. Thank you for sharing that. I don't know if, um, I don't know if I want to ask who you are now, but that's a really interesting story.

My, uh, my mother was smuggling Bibles into Romania, um, in the eighties and nineties. And, uh, she was actually in a horrific car accident in Romania as they were trying to kill, as the Romanian secret police or whatever was trying to kill the leaders of the organization that was trying to smuggle Bibles in. Um, and I've got, I've got friends that are smuggling Bibles, digital Bibles in Cuba, um, using Bluetooth and low-powered beacons. And, oh my gosh, so much, so much fun. Which really just reiterates the point. God is doing so much around us. I mean, look around. The stories that are in here from old school web design. I launched a hundred websites before the year 2006. Ninety-eight percent of them, easily, um, were churches and nonprofit organizations and, and, uh, par-church organizations, church groups, college groups, uh, denominations, organizations, Christ-centered groups. Um, you know how much heat they got for having a website twenty-five years, twenty-four years ago? You know how much lack of support I've gotten over the years? I remember launching that community. By the way, we had eeliver.com. We had thirty to forty thousand. I don't remember the actual number, and I don't have those records anymore, but it was somewhere between thirty to forty thousand active users. Not active. Active is an interesting word. I don't remember the stats, but we had thirty to forty thousand registered users in the system, hits by the thousands per day. Like, it was phenomenal. Um, because there's nothing else out there. And when people were looking, hey, what happens if I search for God in AltaVista? Oh, look, here's the site called eeliver.com. What yesterday was so controversial, today, well, yeah, everybody's got a website today. You want to do what in virtual reality? You want to do church where I don't, I don't know that it's that controversial anymore.

You know, it's interesting. Um, Jim Tomberland is the father. I don't think I've ever told this story on the podcast. Jim Tomberlin. Oh, this was, this. Well, he told me this story on the podcast. Jim Tomberlin, somewhere around episode 101, as I recall, maybe before then. Jim Tomberland is arguably one of the early forefathers, one of the founders of the multisite movement here in America. One church, multiple campuses. You know, either video teaching or team teaching. Um, but Jim, um, you know, he really founded this idea at a church in Colorado, um, implemented it at a very large scale for a small church. You all have heard of, probably, here in America, called Willow Creek in the nineties. Um, and then went on to create multisite solutions, which company I used to work for. Um, and I worked for Jim when he was at Christ Fellowship Miami as chief of staff as well, where he was chief of staff and I was live production and so digital strategies and a whole bunch of other things. But Jim would say that anytime the church adopts, church struggles to adopt technology. Church struggles to adopt any change. You know, so often, you know, I want to say church ages technology, and maybe it does, but it's not just technology. Church ages change. Case in point, no committee will ever decide to change the carpet color in the worship center. Never going to happen. But, uh, what Jim would say is that there's three different stages. One, two, three. Three different stages for, uh, changing culture, um, for adopting, uh, and changing culture a church. Uh, it's one's the cool phase.

Oh my gosh, Whitebeard just found it. You did, sir. Very good. That's it, man. That was me. Um, Whitebeard just posted a photo of, um, yeah, archive. I was going to do it. I just didn't take the time of, of eeliver.com. And so, um, music reviews, movie reviews. You can see there's a Netflix DVD. That was how we were making money. Um, was affiliate programs. Um, I had one sponsor that paid me a thousand dollars. Um, was worship.com or worshiptogether.com. I forget which one. But they paid me, um, sponsorship to be on the homepage. And we had them for a season. The cross there in the upper left was, um, DHTML. And so dynamic HTML. And so you would like mouse over and then it would pop up. Like, it was, I mean, HTML-wise, it was pretty impressive. This is all pre-Flash on the coding, of course. But yeah, that's what we did. And, um, and that was so much fun.

But the three phases for adopting in technology is, um, is churches that are cutting edge are going to adopt it. When a cutting edge church adopts something, well, why is it called cutting edge? Cuz you're going to get cut. And there's going to be blood. And you're going to bleed. And so it's going to hurt. And so a lot of times adopting, being one of those first adopters, one of those early adopters, you get shot. You get hurt. You go over budget. You're not planning on that. Not necessarily going to have, you know, smooth systems to implement on the backside. And so it may be twice the work. I mean, there's plenty of reasons why cutting edge hurts. Uh, and bleeding edge bleeds. Uh, and so bleeding edge, cutting edge, like cutting edge is that first wave. And then he would talk about how beyond cutting edge, then it gets to cool. Well, now all the cool churches are doing it because the cutting edge figures it out. Now cool is an interesting word. You know, Life Church is a cutting edge church. Life Church is a cool church. And you know, a lot of the larger churches, the churches people have heard of, they're perceived as cool. They're, you know, and so I don't want to get like judgmental with the word cool, but it's the idea that a second wave comes in that still has a lot of money, that still has a lot of patience. It's probably churches that you've heard of. Um, and they're doing it to try to stay in the forefront, to try to, because they're in a position where they can experiment and do something. And so you got cutting edge, you got cool, and then the third option is commonplace. It's where the idea becomes saturated and now everybody's doing it.

Broadcasting church services online has become a commonplace idea. In 2018, when the church digital started, I would probably guesstimate there were maybe two hundred churches in America that were broadcasting their church services online. Maybe a couple thousand, but two hundred were doing some sort of online Bible studies. This comment was about broadcasting. So maybe two thousand in 2018 when we first started TCD. Twenty twenty, obviously, or twenty nineteen, I would say a lot more came on, more and more as the idea was becoming more and more cool. Um, but the idea became commonplace. Thank you, COVID. We now, um, Pushpay tells us ninety-one percent of churches in America are broadcasting their church services online, live streaming at some level. And so what you're being ridiculed, what you're being criticized on as you know, so.

Cutting edge, so bleeding edge, so hurtful, so damaging, so it's just a matter of time before somebody else does, before somebody's some guy named Whitebeard Punk monk is pulling up a gif of you from archive.org and showing it off to the people at the time saying hey, look, this is what this guy was talking about. You know what's funny? When shots from the outside hit, shots from the outside hurt. Even the Ed stuff, like Ed was a friend and I knew Ed had a purpose behind what he was doing, but at the time it hurt. I'm not going to lie about that. The flip side of it though is like when the shots come from your friends, your family, um, when there's not understanding, even with your spouse. I mean, I understand that, I get that. I've been part of that. I remember my, um, it's not directing my wife. My wife actually has been really supportive, but um, I, it's funny. I don't know that she understands everything that we're doing now, but she's supportive in it. Um, and she's supportive through it. Some of my other family has not been. Um, you know, I can remember conversation and comments like, hey, when back when I was doing eBelieve and building out that online community for thirty, forty thousand people, hey, so when are you going to quit this and get a real job? When are you going to actually do something for God in the church? I actually took a church job and ran eBelieve at the same time, um, because I felt like I was being judged harshly for not working for a church by the people I was working with. Um, just my own hangup. Interesting. When you're going through hard times and you need somebody to reminisce through and talk through, somebody who, uh, oh, what's the word I'm looking for? Empathy. It's not empathy, but empathy. Yeah, I feel you. Would love to catch up. Yeah, uh, you're not the real, you're not really a missionary. Yeah. Whitebeard, you've been fun to listen to today. Um, you know what's funny? eBelieve went down in a flaming ball, like crashed and burned. Oh my gosh, I haven't told this story in so long. I got to do this. And I got to go, um, I was, it was 2003 Thanksgiving. I had for three and a half years I built eBelieve from the ground up, launched one hundred websites like I said. Um, at the same time that was how I made money was building websites for Christian organizations, hosting CD-ROM, flash, graphic, uh, graphic design, flash animations, video work. We were more agency that just ran the committee on the, ran the community on the side. And uh, and it was fine, nothing wrong with that. Um, we were uh, heading back, uh, we were my parents, we were my wife and I, no kids. We were living in Fort Worth, Texas, and my parents were in Miami. And for Thanksgiving they invited us to go up to their, my parents had a place up in the mountains in North Carolina. They, we hadn't been up to it in years because I was just focused on my work and she was doing graduate school. And so like we just hadn't done a vacation with my family. And so, you know, we were quote unquote pressured into going. So we went on vacation. And so for Thanksgiving went up into the mountains. And when I say mountains, I mean freaking mountains, like cell signal didn't work and Wi-Fi didn't exist and my parents didn't have internet. Like I am unplugged. And by the way, these companies, when I say like we built, I built, I mean I had contractors, I had freelance guys, I had people I would sub jobs out to, but at the end of the day, I, it's me for accountability on this work. And so I, um, I go on vacation, arguably the first vacation I've had in at least four years. And I was in college before then. Up to the mountains. And uh, and turn the phone off, disconnected auto messenger on email. If there's problems, I'll get back to you on Monday. And um, after Thanksgiving, and I'm, we're flying back Sunday. And I remember we fly from, no, we drive from Carolinas to Atlanta. And I'm at the ATL airport. And I turn my phone on for the first time, not a smartphone, but I could check my email on my phone. I turn on my phone for the first time Sunday afternoon in a week. And um, for some reason I don't, um, get my email. Like one of one of my domains, Jeff at eeBelieve.com, the email is not working for it. Now this is before you hosted through like Gmail. This is like it's hosted on your POP3 server on your web server. And I thought, huh, that's weird. Um, but a lot of my other websites were up. Um, and so I couldn't figure it out. And then I started getting voicemails and voicemails and voicemails. Hey, Jeff, my website's down. Hey, Jeff, my uh, my email's not working. Hey, Jeff, hey, Jeff, hey, Jeff, hey, Jeff, dozens blowing my phone up. Hey, Jeff, where are you? Why aren't you calling me back? Hey, hey, Jeff, things are so great. Why, what's going on?

Um, I had um, taken a vacation on a very bad weekend. My primary server, I actually had two or three web servers at the time, but my primary server, um, uh, eBelieve.oneprop.domnet, which housed sixty-nine websites ironically, um, crashed. The hard drive crashed. Hard drive failure. Well, it's a good thing I paid this company, I'm not going to tell you the name of the company, it's a good thing I paid this company tens of thousands of dollars to host my server, uh, to back up my server, and and to maintain it. So I called up that company and I said, go ahead and install this, the backup, sir. What do you mean backup? You know, the thing that I've been paying you for it to do? You've got twenty-four seven, three sixty-five maintenance and backup. Um, sir, we don't have any backups. What, what, what do you mean you don't have any backups? You just lost sixty-nine websites, not including the entirety of eBelieve.com. My entire online community. I'm talking email. Like I'm not even talking email addresses. I'm talking emails. Hey, your Gmail just shut down today. Could you imagine your entire church saying that their Gmail just shut down today? Can you imagine sixty-nine churches worth of Gmails shutting down in one day?

You ever been F-bombed by a pastor? I have. Actually, my, my, um, I now understand what um, lace check means. Um, because several of my friends thought I was suicidal. Um, because I lost sixty-nine websites. I lost the entirety of my online community. I lost everything uh, from a five-day vacation over Thanksgiving 2003. I actually sold my business for pennies on the dollar, literally. I, I, I gave it away six months later, practically speaking, um, just because I, I didn't want to do it anymore. I was so, I was so sick of technology that was actually my, um, uh, what's the word? Lite phase. There was, there was a phase of maybe a year or two. That's when I owned the Christian bookstore. It was, it was, you know, I'm, I'm sick of the technology. I don't want anything to do with it. And uh, eBelieve in many ways kind of brought me to that point.

By the way, make sure you trust your partners, the people you partner with. And and I mean this to my partners, to my planters here. Don't go in alone. Find somebody else that can walk on the path with you, if only for your own sanity. You don't need somebody to be high-tech. You need somebody, maybe you need somebody to be high-tech. I don't know what you need. For me, I didn't need somebody to be high-tech. I just needed a companion. Like Ryan for me, when I started the podcast, the Church Digital. When I started the Church Digital, Ryan was the companion for me. He, when I left Christ Fellowship Miami to, to, he became digital pastor. He took over my job for me. And um, and really just became, you know, really enveloped in what the Church Digital was. And I'm super excited about what he's doing now. I hung out with him a little bit on Sunday at church. He and I go to the same church, Reality Church in Miami. And and he's actually getting his PhD and some really exciting things are in store for him. Um, PhD and medical PhD. I say all this to say is that it's very easy to be isolated and alone. And I would challenge you that today you don't need to be alone. Um, find somebody to go along these paths with you that believes in what you're doing. Um, if you can't find somebody, you know, you're going to be hard pressed to convince somebody you don't know. And so I would challenge you, find, before you get going and really building out what you're doing, find somebody that can join you in your walk, in your journey, in your path.

Cool. Hey, I keep going longer and longer. I'm going to start turning into a two-hour stream guy. I, I, I don't even really mean to. It's just telling stories. Hope this has been fun for you. Um, if there's, um, wrapping up here, if there's anything I can do for you, let me know in that. Let me look and see who's on here. Uh, guy, Taylor, Hector, Thomas, Paul, Paul, good to see you again. Chris Caputo, always good to see you, man. Alexander, thanks for hanging out uh, with that as well. And over on the Discord side, um, Whitebeard, flat cap, Shada, Shuhada, and Melanie, Shuhada, Shu. Okay, man, appreciate you guys. I hope, I hope this has been fun, entertaining for you. Um, coming up on the podcast, who knows? Oh, Friday, I'm, I'm doing that interview with uh, DK Hammond. You want to come back for that? And then get more information on uh, the resi, uh, um, resilient Church webinar series. All right, thanks everybody. Cool to hang out with you. Talk to you later.