EP293 - Andy Mage & Building Deeper Relationships Embracing Asynchronous Community

But all you really need is some sort of pastor or communications director to set up a Discord server, set up a Slack channel, set up, you know, whatever, and simply just check in with people once in the morning, once at night, once in the morning, once at night. You're going to be shocked at how quickly people get used to that rhythm.

Welcome to the Church Digital Podcast. Through this podcast we'll talk about the technological innovations within the church, but more than tech for tech itself, we'll address deeper questions. Is disciplemaking possible digitally? How should we approach the digital mission field? Can a biblically grounded church operate in digital space? 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.

All right, hey, welcome to the Church Digital Podcast. We got episode 293. By the way, we are doing this recording live, so we are hanging out currently live in Discord doing this broadcast, and through the beauty of Riverside, by the way, TCD Podcast is once again brought to you by Riverside. The Riverside software is currently broadcasting this at the same time from not from Discord, but at the same time we're in Discord, it's broadcasting it into our Facebook group as well as YouTube. It does have streaming, so it's really built in. We're doing Riverside and Discord at the same time, and we've been doing it that way for feel like a month or so, have not had one issue whatsoever. Incredible. Knock on wood. Knock.

So you're saying I jinxed it? Are you saying I literally jinxed it like right here, right now? All right, you did it. We're all we're going downhill right now. That was me mouthing. If you're on YouTube, you got that. But I realized this is an audio podcast too, and somebody's like, what's going on? Um, no, listen, it's Riverside has been awesome. And actually, I was talking with Andy off air right before we got on here. Every time I log on Riverside, it's like I find some new button. I get an email about some new feature. Like, for the first time, I'm utilizing their script teleprompter software feature that's built into the software, and like, I'm really impressed with that. Normally I would like to have to put my notes here on a side thing, but instead now I can use the teleprompter and just, you know, look at Andy's face and at the same time the notes are just right above. So like, Riverside, check it out. Um, whatever your context is, I just found out Tom, uh, Tom Pounder with the TCD Sidekick is moving his show over to Riverside, and his church is moving over to it. Had a conversation, another church. What other church? Oh, D. Uh, D, was it DK Hammond? No, somebody just told me there were some other podcaster, somebody part of TCD was moving their church over to it. Wasn't Tom. It was somebody else. Oh, oh, I know. No, no, no, was Fred? Fred, the guy that was part of, um, oh yeah, uh, the, uh, gosh, the webinar we do with Resi? He's moving his church over to it. His pastor is doing like a weekly podcast out of his house, and so they got a simplified Riverside. And Riverside's just such a simple platform to do so. Check it out. The Church Digital Riverside. The Church Digital Riverside. Okay, so I guess that's it for the opening. We got Andy Mage, of course, Chino Mage, been chiming in already here with the TCD. So Chino's operations director. He is, what's the title? Operations director for the Church Digital? What's the title with Lux? Things fluctuate. I, uh, I am, yeah, I'm the creative pastor over there. Creative pastor at Lux Church, Chief Operating Officer for the Church Digital, and, um, dad and husband at home. Dad and husband at home. So those those were probably in the backwards order of priority, you know? Let's let's put dad and husband. Depends on the day. Maybe, maybe got to pay the bill at some point. But, uh, but very good. So it's awesome to have Andy on here as we are kicking off season seven. And the great thing about season seven here with the Church Digital is every week of season seven, I'm probably gonna come up with a new title for season seven because I'm gonna announce season seven title right now, and I'm gonna tell you right now I don't like the title that I have. So we're going to come up with new title probably for next week, and I'm probably going to like that one. Change it because, you know, here with the Church Digital, we just, you know, fly, fly, you know, build a plane, fly. I guess, yeah, ex, let ride, run and gun. Yeah, who cares? Uh, but here it's digital opportunities. Here with season seven, we're going to be talking about five different opportunities within context for your church. Five different ideas that digital can help be implemented in your church. And guess what? We're gonna give you some practical ways that your church can actually take some steps forward into that space. I'm going to give you the sneak peek right now. We're going to come back and talk to this later, but the Church Digital, we are launching into some learning communities this summer. Uh, you're talking about building the plane as it's flying. We get Barbara Carero in in position as connections and communication. We launch the new website. We're already changing a whole bunch of stuff on it, but the fact is is that we want to help churches like yours take some practical steps here in 2024, even getting into the summer. And so we're going to be launching five different learning communities through the Church Digital to offer for churches to come alongside, get connected with other churches that are asking similar questions, and take some practical steps into implementing the new strategy in your church. We're talking about Andy Mage in here doing a synchronous community. We're talking church communications. We're talking virtual reality. We're talking mental health and digital ministry. We're even going to get into some like microsites in hybrid, what that could look like at a hybrid church. And so lots of opportunities for your church to implement, to learn something here, and it's a definite opportunity in digital for your church today. And so over the next five weeks here with season seven, we're going to dig into all five of those topics. Async today. Barbara Carero coming up next week with church communication. Tsunami coming up in two weeks with virtual reality. The week after that, we're going to be, it's going to be Megan Carter on mental health and digital ministry. And to wrap it up, it'll be me and a guest to be determined. I don't know who yet, but talking about the idea of microsites in a hybrid church. And so look for those conversations. By the way, all of this, everything we got coming up is now on the TCD Discord event channel. And so check that out. There's all sorts of stuff. At least what I've got coming on, we got to get some of our other guys. Andy, when he's on, flat cap J, Mo. Actually, did an open office. I hung out with J Mo doing an open office on Friday that was like a really cool thing. So man, I, that was a lot of announcements at the beginning of this thing. You're like, I'm, yeah, you're doing a church service right now. You need to take a nap. Yeah, yeah, I mean, is there anything else that we actually have to say today in this live podcast recording? No, all good. Just looking at the chat and people are talking about drugs and koalas doing strats. So I think we're I think we're right on par. I actually have no idea how to respond to that at this moment. Good. Yeah, that's how I close everything. Cool. All right, so hey, let's actually get into the podcast. Um, that was a mouthful. Thank you for that nap time. Oh, Jop, so good, man. Um, Andy, what do, do, so you resign like, let's let's actually, I actually want to get into the life of Andy Mage. So Andy was a, Andy had like five jobs, but he was a full-time pastor at the brick and border. Um, and so was a digital pastor there and stepped down January of this year, right? Was it early, early, early twenty-four? So and that, so now you're doing the Lux thing, creative pastor. You're doing the operations for TCD. Uh, like, what do you do when you get up in the morning? What does your day actually look like?

Uh, I get up very early, usually fiveish. Um, Bible, journal, coffee, bat for forty-five minutes, hour, reflection, prayer time, all that. I work out because I'm a fitness buff, enthusiast guy. Uh, and then it's immediately into whatever the day holds, whatever my Todoist app tells me that I need to be doing. Uh, usually with creative pastor of Lux, I'm doing a lot of preaching and a lot of graphic work, a lot of, um, video work, a lot of content around that. I'm also, um, putting together a worship team. Well, have already been putting together a worship team, a, you know, we're talking about asynchronous, so this is an asynchronous worship team, uh, literally around the world. We've got people in Guam and Dallas and San Diego and Pittsburgh and Michigan and Tampa, and putting all those together and post-producing a bunch of stuff for worship. And that's for Lux. And then, hand, you know, hanging out the community there, playing games with them and being in community and doing all that. Lux digital church dot com. Head over there. Discord dot gg slash Lux digital church as well. But and on the kind of other hours of the day, I'm also the operations guy for the Church Digital, formerly the Digital Church Network. And uh, I am moderating and handling our Discord server. I am editing podcasts. I am on podcast. Uh, I am recording lots of video with lots of people. I'm constantly having a camera stare at me, uh, looking at a teleprompter all day. Um, it is, it's a very fun and interesting world, and every day is a little bit different. Um, with Church Digital, I've been kind of helping to spearhead the new phase that we've been in. Um, you may have noticed a lot of changes that have come about in the last, ah, three or four months, um, with website and look and feel and logo and all those things. And that's been with the help of Barbara Carero, War Revolution, but also, uh, that's landing on my plate. And uh, it's it's been a lot of fun, and every day has, I keep, I keep saying this, every day is a lot different coming from a brick and mortar where I was a worship pastor for ten years and then I was a digital pastor for five years, uh, where every day everybody said every day was different, but it wasn't. Every day you kind of got in a routine. This is this is completely wild, and I love it. I would not have it any other way.

Yeah, uh, it is working for yourself kind of like, you know, out of your home is completely different than, you know, showing up to the office at nine o'clock and clocking that nine to five or that eight thirty to four thirty. Uh, like that, that to me is, is, is the surreal approach to that. And so hey, and by the way, uh, DCN, uh, rest, rest in peace. RIP. Um, yeah, so it's it was funny like I, I have some stickers actually here in my office. I found them on Friday when I was cleaning up, and I was like, oh yeah, sorry, Digital Church Network, miss miss you. Like, occasionally I'll find, I'll find like a graphic somewhere on like our Facebook group still has the DCN graphic. Actually has an old TCD graphic on it too, and I was like, oh yeah, gotta gotta get that updated. So yeah, pour went out for the homies. Yeah, yeah, my LinkedIn was like, it's I stopped working for Digital Church Network in December thirty-first, twenty twenty-three. I was like, no, Digital Church Network lives on. It's not actually dead. It's not like I quit that job. It just lives on in the Church Digital. It's absorbed. Absorb. That's such that's such a great word. Well, I am need to create a morph video. Jop is fire today in the chat. That that is so good. Um, all right, hey, so so let's get into this, Andy. We want to talk about async. Now, I of all of the topics of twenty twenty-four, I think

I am more excited about the potential for churches to utilize asynchronous community. That's probably the thing that I'm most excited about today, more than anything. Like, I have been waiting for this conversation. I'm looking forward to this. I cannot wait for this learning community. There's so much potential for the church in this space, and it is foreign to me. Like, it is beyond my mind. I don't understand why no churches, very few churches—like half a dozen churches—are utilizing this space well. I cannot believe it. And so like, I want to actually, I want to go through, um, like we're going to go 101. We're going to go elementary. We're going to go preschool here at the beginning because we got to get churches on this idea of async and how, whether you're physical, whether you're digital, whether you're hybrid, wherever you are in the process, like async can help you. And so let's walk through this kind of at a very elementary level. Let's walk before we run, and hopefully we're sprinting here by the end of the thing.

So basic question just to kick off right here, Andy: what exactly do I mean when I say asynchronous community or async? The original asynchronous community was, if you look in the Bible, you look at the letters that Paul was writing back and forth. That was asynchronous community. Paul was literally doing asynchronous community two thousand years ago. And that right there is kind of striking when you think about, oh, this dude, you know, we often hear, and I might get a little not slanderous, I might get a little irreverent when it comes to some of the brick and mortar type pastors who don't believe in the power of digital. And that's just me, sorry. But they often say like, well, you can't actually form a synchronous community. What is that? That's just email and there is no life there. And I would push back and say, well, Paul was doing that two thousand years ago, and he seemed to have a pretty good grasp on what was pretty much, you know, what was happening with the spread of Christianity in Europe and Asia at the time.

Asynchronous community is literally people that are not synchronous with each other. Not on a Zoom call, not on a Discord call, not face to face, not talking on the phone. It is text messages. It is Discord messages. It is Facebook. It is Instagram. It is all of the social media things. It is anywhere that you are landing with a community of people that are your tribe, that are your people, that you can identify with. Those that you can automatically scrape away that layer of dirt that happens when you meet somebody new. That is asynchronous community. That is 101.

I feel like we're doing the thing on Reddit right now, ELI5—explain it like I'm five. That is exactly how I explain asynchronous community. It is anything that is not immediately synchronously connected.

That's interesting. You paralleled this to like Paul's letters and going back to there. You know, we actually were talking about this in a Discord stream maybe last week, you know, and about how the letters were distributed gospel. And it's like we're using the internet the same way to distribute the gospel out. And how like Paul wasn't able to go, and he would send Timothy with the letter and would say things in the letter like, hey, I'm sorry I want to be with you. I can't because, um, I think my joke was I'm either in prison, I'm sick, or I'm sick of being in prison. That was typical Paul's response. But as a result of that, hey, I'm sending Timothy. Show him a little respect. And then he would tell Timothy, hey, Timothy, don't let him look down at you because you're young. You know, just stand your ground, stand your ground. And so that was that distributed model where the gospel is being sent out. And you're right, asynchronous community with the distribution of Timothy along the way allowed for that two-way conversation. Hey, this guy Paul's talking about this crazy stuff. We, the church that, whatever, Corinth, we don't agree with that. And Timothy would say, well, blah blah blah, and they would say blah blah blah, and there would be a dialogue. There would be a conversation about that in real time. And this is what we get the opportunity to do, to have these conversations in real time now.

What's interesting here is, what's the difference? And it's interesting, Andy. I don't know how you're going to respond to this. What's the difference between asynchronous community and like social media? Because you can have that dialogue in social media, but what makes asynchronous community special compared to the quote unquote community that we can get in social media?

I think community is that thing. It's thrown around a lot as like a buzzword, kind of like that back, you know, right around COVID. It was engagement. Oh, we got to get our engagement up. We got to make sure our engagement metrics are there. And like, what does that actually mean? And then you'd have fifteen different people give fifteen different answers. And kind of what it is today, like a lot of the, I do a lot of consulting on the side. I help churches kind of get their, not social media presences, but get their digital church presences up and running. Um, I help small businesses also do it. Actually, I have one of my clients actually just signed up for a Riverside yearlong subscription with the Church Digital link. So thank you, Laurel Slade, uh, for, yeah, thank you for the little kickback there, Laurel.

But the thing that often comes up in those meetings is, well, how do I get my community out of my, well, ex-followers or my Instagram followers? And it's like, listen, that's not community. That is call and response. That is conversation. Community is the deeper level of conversation. Community is that thing that you can again scrape away the dirt and know that that's your people. I don't know most of the people on Instagram. Anybody that comments on anything that we're doing on TikTok or Instagram, I don't know them. I might maybe possibly know their screen name because I saw it four or five times, but they're not providing me any social connection. They're not providing me a support network. They're not providing me spiritual growth or guidance. They're not encouraging me to find healthier lifestyle and make better choices. They're not offering support during transitions. They're not, you know, facilitating involvement and service and doing all the things that we do as community, right? That's just that's call and response. That is a literal conversation, sometimes just fifteen words and then an emoji. Community is that deeper felt need. It's that thing that we try to derive from in all of our church engagements. It's the thing that we're all searching for. It's the quote unquote God-shaped hole. Yes, we need community with God, but we also need community with other people around us.

And the difference is that the asynchronous community that we try to form takes it to that deeper level. That's why if you go into our Discord, we have, you know, we've got general chat, we've got Q&A, and we've got all these other things, but we also have channels for tech and art and music and movie and TV and memes and food and gaming and metaverse and all these other things. And then prayer requests and devotionals and discipleship. The reason that we have those things and are fleshing out those channels is because that's what community does. We take it into those deeper levels. We take it into your people, your tribe, your group that you can automatically know that those people are for you.

Yes, good. It's interesting. Just this morning I found an article. We'll put it in the show notes. But there actually, J-Mo, Jason Morris, put it on LinkedIn. It was a Seth Godin blog. Now, I'm honestly a huge Seth Godin fan. Um, Seth Godin's not Christian. I probably quote Seth Godin regularly if you've heard me speak publicly. I tell several different stories regularly about Seth and some of his strategy. But the idea of this blog with Seth was that not to be focused on the top of funnel, but instead to be thinking more about the bottom of the funnel. Like, it's not just, in a lot of what we do, is hey, let's just get more followers. Let's just get more viewers. Let's just get more and more, and it's all about getting people on the top. And instead, that's like, hey, focus on the bottom piece. And it's interesting, even paralleling that, J-Mo is quoted here in the Discord, saying community equals, or for community, it's more about quality than quantity. And utilizing the community to build, I would read into that a deeper relationship. It's more about what you know about someone rather than, oh my gosh, I have, you know, a million followers. Instead, it's, man, I know these people really well, and I speak into their lives. They speak into mine. And there's trust. Like, it's very hard to get trust of millions of people, especially if you're trying to get them in, like, I don't know, a disciplemaking relationship. But if you take time with individuals in a community or something like this, yes, it can look like that. So very, very interesting here as we're getting into this idea of community.

Now, it's, I mean, you're talking here, Andy. Let me play devil's advocate, okay? So you said things like movie channel and TV channel, meme channel, yeah, okay? You maybe validated some things by saying prayer requests and stuff like that and devotionals. But man, this isn't this still isn't real community. Like, this is, I mean, we on Discord, that's like for video gamers. That's what they use to play video games. How can you have real relationships in that space?

I would push back very, very hard on that notion. Um, obviously you are playing devil's advocate, and obviously we wouldn't be here if we, yeah, I did disclaim it up front. It's the devil's advocate. Yeah, good. If we weren't fully bought in, and, uh, Whitebeard in the Discord chat says the difference between community and communitas. Yes, communitas is kind of the acute point of community. It is like that's the, in my opinion, talking about the Seth Godin idea, that is the bottom of the community funnel itself. You want to get to communitas after community, but we're neither here nor there right now.

The idea of being real in community, so I'm a nerd and I am a gamer, and I was a, um, this about back in between two thousand and two thousand six, two thousand seven, I was playing ranked Halo. Halo is a video game, one of my favorite games of all time. I was ranked on the MLG circuit. We were MLG's Major League Gamer. We were playing a lot, a lot, a lot of Halo. We were doing competitive tournaments, and we were doing the whole thing. We didn't have Discord at the time. We had a thing called TeamSpeak, and then after a little bit, Microsoft's own Xbox Live Chat got good enough to where you could actually be in there. So I was doing a lot of Halo 2 and a lot of Halo 3. Well, I got saved in two thousand five and didn't really know what to do with that. And so I was still playing Halo, still kind of hanging out with the same sort of degenerate amount of people. And the part that human, Christian, Christ-seeking part of me was like, I want to try to turn this into something. And so I joined up with a couple of guys that were not of my clan, and I had found them on actually chat. We had message boards back at the time, remember those? And we had Halo message boards. And so I joined up with

with a couple of guys and we started doing Bible studies in some of our we'd create custom lobbies every Tuesday night, right around 7:30 Eastern. We would all log on. We would do a Bible study for about half hour, 45 minutes with just two or three of us, all synchronously. And then we would go and play Halo for, you know, we'd do head shots for the next hour and a half to two hours and kill each other and bring people in and just have a lot of fun.

That grew from two to three guys into about 15 to 20 guys over the span of about a year and a half. And I never met these people, and yet I had some of the most deep conversations that I've ever had in my entire life over a headset on my Xbox controller, looking at a Halo lobby when nothing else was happening and a Bible in front of me. And to this day, never met. I have actually, I've met one of the guys in person out of the 15 people that were in the end. I met one of them. Fourteen of those, well, 13 of those people, never met. And yet I still remain in contact with all of them. They are all friends with me on Discord. I have all of their, I can hit them up right now in their various stages of life and they will drop everything to talk to me, and I will drop everything to talk to them.

Now, that is not asynchronous. That is very much synchronous community. The asynchronous part comes in when we start messaging back and forth. When I do realize that, hey, John, he's out in San Diego and John has been having a rough couple of months. His wife got pregnant again and it was kind of a little bit of a surprise. He's got a ten-year-old, he's got a twelve-year-old, and now all of a sudden, oh boy, he's going back in. He thought he was out of diaper mode and now he's back in diaper mode. And asynchronously, he is asking me questions. Hey, how did you do this? What do you do about this? How can I pray for you? We're doing all of those things. That is a very real, very real thing.

Now, granted, that is based on years long emphasis of playing video games and a shared experience. But there is something interesting about setting a table for those type of experiences where you automatically, all of a sudden, I keep using this term, you brush the dirt away. You brush that dirt away and all of a sudden you find a common foundation with somebody. And it just takes just a second to brush that dirt away and there you are. And we are now in a relationship with people.

One of the things that also tends to happen when you open up channels like food and gaming and metaverse and memes is that you're setting that table for somebody to brush that dirt away. I can share, you know, I think Leon Flatcap shared a meme about the Kool-Aid man run through a brick wall. Love that. But like, if I wasn't of a stage of life that I didn't understand that, I'd be like, yeah, okay, that's funny, okay, brick wall, and then something about. But I understand that, and now even if I didn't know Flatcap, I would be like, hey, this dude's my age, probably, just innately. Like, this guy's probably my age. He understands what's going on. That is a synchronous community at work without you even knowing it. That's interesting.

So, you know what's funny is it took me days to figure out that meme. Like, I don't know what I don't know what that says about me. We'll put the meme in the show notes too because, look, I'm looking at that and you, I looked at it on my desktop and I couldn't zoom in on it and I was like, I don't get it. I really don't get it. I don't call myself out because like I don't get it. And like, later, a couple days later, I could zoom in on my phone and I was like, oh yeah, that makes sense now.

So, you know, and really, community, at least the way that we're utilizing it and the way I would suggest that churches utilize it, is a mix between sync and asynchronous. Now, let's actually, you know, I want to be once again, let's have an elementary conversation. Get them to walk before we can run because a lot of time I talk about async and sync and they're like, well, what's the difference?

Okay, synchronous would be having a conversation with people at the same time. So like, synchronous communications would be doing a Zoom call, getting like a small group in a Google Meet. You know, even at some level what we're doing currently on Discord, where you know, Andy and I are talking and then there's a chat with like eight people running and we've got a Rocky and Flatcap and Ian and Jop and Mel, melanous, and Whitebeard and DWR and Purposeful Paul. We've got people in there and they're communicating to us and Flatcap celebrating because we're talking about his Kool-Aid meme. Like, literally, and yeah, he just posted it in the chat so that everybody can see it. So like, that at some level is synchronous. We're all communicating at the same time.

Asynchronous though is like, I post at 11 a.m., Andy reads it at 11:45 and responds. Somebody else sees it and replies to both of us at 12:30. And so it's outside of time. Asynchronous. Asynchronous kind of communications in asynchronous community. And Flatcap, that was an incredible meme. I just, I gotta celebrate that and hand that off.

So like, you're talking about your buddies on the Bolton board way back in the day. You know, that was what we actually used to start EB Believer. You know, message boards and all that. Were you around for like the dialup modem BBSs? Oh yeah, was that you? Yeah, my dad, my dad is a, well, was and still is, he was a computer programmer. He used to actually write video games for a company called Epic Software, which wrote games for the Commodore 64. He actually, if you Google his name, he's got three or four different games to his name, some of which I still play off and on through emulators. My mom wrote the music for them. Like, they were, oh wow, they were big games. Oh yeah, yeah, big games. TRS-80, absolutely. And they, but so we had this, this is going way back, but 1991, 1992, we actually had a T1 line, Doug, for us because my dad was working from home. And so we had a direct connection to the internet. And then we moved to Florida in '95 and we had to go back to dialup. And just I remember just sitting there going like, tapping my fingers, going, why is this so slow? All I want to do is get my Depeche Mode pictures and my Korn downloads. And Korn, not the other, not the P word, Korn, K-O-R-N, the band. I wanted to get those downloads and like, why is this taking so long? This thing's just yelling at me.

So yeah, I unfortunately remember that. Yeah, there in chat right now there's actually a conversation to see who the oldest guy is in chat right now, trying to like throw out the old school stuff. And my money's on Whitebeard.

Punk monk, we just need to go back to Zork. And so Whitebeard is our resident theologian for the church digital. I feel like basically needs the tattoo of the old guy saying get off my lawn. And yeah, get off my Bible. And every time I see him, well, a Rocky, y'all coming in with the chat as well. Yeah, you know what, that actually, oh, I don't know. A Rocky, Whitebeard, may win because of his beard alone. But at the two of you, both of you know who not of this world is. Like, I just want to call out a Rocky, Whitebeard, if you two have not had a conversation with the two of you, that would actually be really interesting for the two of you to connect up. You're both, every time I describe Whitebeard, I say he's eclectic. And Rocky, you're kind of eclectic too.

All right, hey, let's get back to the conversation. By the way, DWR actually posted something in Discord as well that I thought was very interesting. Doing some asynchronous missions training right now with a student getting ready to serve in Asia. That's what we're talking about. That's amazing. I'd love to hear a little bit more about that because that is, that's amazing. Also, I think that's Jack Nicholas giving me the thumb or giving me the hand that he wants to punch me. It looks like Jack Nicholas. That's weird.

Okay, hey, so DWR, if you can share some more what you can share ethically, yeah, you know, feel free. Would love to talk through that. But, um, I do, hey, listen, by the way, you're hearing us talk a lot about chat here. Um, come hang out with us on Discord. Like, here with the Church Digital's Discord. We'll talk more about it. There's lots of community. We're talking about asynchronous community. Come see it in real time. This go to the website discord.thechurch.digital. That'll walk you through getting your Discord account, downloading the software, and subscribing you to the Church Digital's Discord server. And you can see in real time actually what this stuff looks like and how churches like yours can take advantage of it and jump into conversations in real time like this.

By the way, we're broadcasting right now on YouTube and Facebook. And so if you are over there on those platforms, hey, thanks for watching over there. But, um, y'all need to come over to Discord because Discord's like where we have fun. Like, I, to be honest, I just, I can't keep up with so many chats. And so like, I'm, we're broadcasting over there. I, to be honest, I don't even know if I'm really looking at it that much. But we'd love for you to come over here and hang out with us. So once again, it's discord.thechurch.digital. Come over here and hang out with us.

Flatcap says, I remember when we got our first color TV. That may be the get off my lawn right there. Like, of everything, man, I don't, I don't know about that.

All right, um, so we were talking about gaming. Somehow I set up, we're talking about BBSs and I got off topic. My fault. Um, how are, but are relationships real? Like, I'm talking about Flatcap. Flatcap, you know, Andy, let's talk about you. I, we've been in physical space at the same time twice, maybe five times, maybe five. That many? Yeah, maybe four. Yeah, couple of expos and then a day in Orlando. Yeah, and a church network maybe in there. So three, Tennessee or something? Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

Flatcap, I've seen once. Um, Barbara, I've seen once. Um, Whitebeard, I've never been in physical space with, but I've had one Zoom call with the guy. Um, like, so it's, are these relationships real? Like, let's put a label on it. Are these relationships real enough to get to the place of discipleship, of entering into that level, that quality, that authenticity level of relationship? Yes, in a word.

Um, if you think about what discipleship actually is, it is being a follower, right? Like, you're a disciple of metal music or you're a disciple of mathematics or whatever. And all that means is that you are simply following the principles and tenants as closely as possible. Being a disciple of Jesus is literally following as close as you can to Jesus. Getting the, what is the old thing, getting the dust of the rabbi to cover you. Like, walking so close to him. That's what discipleship is.

And so it, we, as church leaders and church workers and pastors and, you know, bishops and deacons and all that, we're called to be disciplers and to make go and make disciples. I go all the way back to my very first comment about the Apostle Paul using letters to do asynchronous community. He was a pretty good discipler. He was making disciples asynchronously and synchronously, yes, but asynchronously all across the ancient world. He was using a system of roads that had been created by Rome to get from place to place to place. Rome had gone.

Before him for hundreds of years and they had been paving and making sure that, you know, highways were safe and all this other stuff. And Paul was simply utilizing those highways and byways to get to different places to make disciples. Well, we now have legitimately a series of tubes connected called the internet. Perhaps you've heard of it. Al Gore created it back in the 80s, and it is—this is our Roman Road right now. We have the opportunity to make disciples, to become disciplers ourselves with this, literally this thing in our pocket.

I do a podcast called the Hybrid Disciple. You should go check it out. We're at youtube.com/theHybridDisciple. We are also part of the Church Digital Podcast Network with our good friend and buddy Ashley Lagos. And part of the Hybrid Disciple is we are bridging the gap between digital and physical discipleship. How do we make, and how do we entertain, and how do we really constrain ourselves within the physical limits of discipleship while also expanding and being part of digital discipleship? And I have to tell you, it is a both-and thing. The digital relationships are absolutely one million percent, one trillion percent real. You can have an amazingly in-depth conversation. You can do all of these things in person. I am proof positive of it. You are proof positive of it. Every single person in this chat and pretty much everybody listening to this is proof positive of that.

And when I get asked that question, "Well, it's not real, right? It's just a screen," and all those other things, I direct them to my children. I've got a twenty-year-old, just turned twenty yesterday—happy birthday, Austin. I have a seventeen-year-old daughter. She'll be eighteen in July. And I've got a fourteen-year-old son. Now the fourteen-year-old doesn't have social media because we're not allowing—we didn't allow social media till seventeen, eighteen anyway—just because I know the dangers and evils of social media and all that. But regardless of the fact, my twenty-year-old and my seventeen-year-old have screen names. They have handles on Instagram and on TikTok, and they use them interchangeably with their digital and physical relationships. There is no barrier between digital and physical. What they see on their phone, what they grew up with, that's what they know. And that's not for better or for worse, that's just—that's what they know. And so why would we not want to utilize these tools to form real relationships digitally when we know that physical people are going to be affected all throughout this?

Yeah, so good. I'm going to quote here. By the way, Whitebeard says that he had Christmas dinner with Al Gore at the United States Naval Observatory. I actually, a couple days ago, I referenced that "Al Gore invented the Internet" joke, and to my kids—my kids are very—right over their head. My kids are very intelligent. Like, they're very smart. My daughter's like number one in her class, high school freshman. My son's in seventh grade, and both of them said, "Who?" I'm like, "I just—he spelled potato with an e." No, that's not that one. It's the other one. That was—what was his name? Oh my gosh. Oh gosh. You keep talking. Somebody in chat will post it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dan Quayle. So good. Thank you for that, Whitebeard. Whitebeard is all over it. He's Jeopardy 101. But DWR1138, which is a reference to THX 1138, I hope. If not, that's really interesting. But DWR says he does an online course that he gets to moderate and had context-specific discussions, and he's working with students doing an online course, which I think is a great option.

What, you know, look, thinking of like an online course like a Thinkific or something like that, which is an option, which is asynchronous. You don't get a lot of the—I mean, you don't get the memes channel. You don't get like a lot of that goofiness kind of stuff in something like that. In an asynchronous, is the goofiness really necessary? And how do you balance like the goofiness with the serious discipleship level stuff? That is honestly a great question.

We over at Lux, we have to deal with that same thing. Lux is a church that was started by Mark Lutz, who many of us know, and it was started three years ago by gamers, for gamers, and it's since expanded a bit. But the core demographic is really a gamer-centric church. It's awesome. Love it. I fit in. It's my people. It's my tribe. That's my community, and parts of it are my communitas there. And the thing about gamers is that we're all inherently trolls—not like ugly, nasty, gross people, but we're all inherently—we like to get in a chat and make people laugh and poke fun, and do—that's just that's part of the gaming culture. Sometimes it can be taken too far, and then there are other keyboard warriors that decide that they want to blow up everybody's spot and make things real bad and all that. But by and large, it's just for fun. And there's a ton of goofiness there. But there's also a switch that can flip at Lux, and it immediately goes from, "Hey, we're joking and laughing about something, some meme, some gaming channel thing," and then all of a sudden somebody hits with a prayer request, and it's like, "Oh no, we're down to business." And it's a switch that just automatically flips.

Now, that's built into the culture there. Building into this culture here, we—you know, Whitebeard pointed out that goofiness builds camaraderie, and that's absolutely it. We need to have these types of things. We can't just—we can't be one hundred percent. We are geopolitical spiritual savants that are serious one hundred percent of the time. In fact, we probably shouldn't be serious even twenty-five percent of the time because, you know, I look at the example of Jesus, and like, I'm pretty sure Jesus spent a lot of his time walking around with eleven other dudes. And guess what? Like, dudes are dudes. And most of these guys were ordinary, unschooled fishermen. You know, they had some things going on, and there was probably some farting and probably some burping and probably some like off-color jokes. And I guarantee you there was a lot of laughter there. Had to be. To be following around Jesus, there had to be a lot of laughter. Else that three-year intensive thing where there's—if it's just only healing and only, you know, this serious sermonizing—like, there's no way nobody would have followed Jesus that long.

Jesus dabbing or, yeah, doing the dab there, in the chat from Flat Cap. So we need to have that, but we also need to build into our culture that, hey, this is also a place to come and share and be vulnerable and know that we are on shared mission with you. This is a place that we can understand that there's going to be people in your life that are not going to understand what you're doing. There's going to be people in your life that are going to get sick and are going to get hurt and going to get injured, and that you're going to need prayer. Your mental health is going to struggle, and your physical health is going to go. We need to make sure that part of our culture also is establishing that realm, which, you know, the coolest part about Discord is that it breaks up into channels. And so I'm not necessarily going to have all of that stuff in our tech channel. Now, in our tech channel, we're talking about AI right now, and that's pretty cool. But we can go to our prayer request channel, and we've got Leighton sharing some praises like that's very cool. Discord allows us to do that.

Yeah, I love the channels aspect, and you know, the ability to mute, ignore, turn off. "Hey, you know what, man? I'm really not into podcasts," and I'm kidding—this is a podcast—but you know, "I don't want to keep up with that," or, you know, there's even been stuff that I'm like, "Yeah, I don't want to get notified about this or that." And so Discord has so many permissions to be able to filter out what you do care about and what you don't care about with that. And so, yep, I do. I love that ability to kind of filter that back.

Well, you know, with—and you guys have heard me talk about this, and if not, you're going to hear me talk about it more—but it's this idea of a digital church flywheel or a framework or, "Hey, if we're going to do digital ministry," and this works for digital. This honestly probably works for physical as well. But it's this simple framework of the connections that we have. And in digital spaces, would be social media connections. This would be your email database. This would be, you know, any of these—even personal relationships. The connections that we have should be led into community, and within that community is where we see discipleship happen.

Now, what we understand is that the people that are watching our church online services—I mean, yeah, they're engaging with us, you know, an hour a week. And I was just actually on a call earlier today with a church, and they were like, "And so they have like their online church broadcast service and they have a physical church service. They weren't able to get their small groups—like, they stopped doing small groups. 'It's not working.' And they just recently started one-on-one discipleship through the Navigators, and so it's been working well." And so it's like, in physical space, they've got—okay, so they got a physical church service. They're building relationships within the physical building community, and then eventually they're getting down into—excuse me—and eventually they're getting down to one-on-one discipleship. And they're like, "Well, how do you do that online?" And I was like, "Okay, it's going to be really hard for you to get somebody watching an online church service and to get them immediately into a one-on-one relationship like that. There's not that trust that's in place digitally like there is physically."

We started talking to them about microsites, about digital communities, even like Facebook groups and Discord, like we're talking about here with asynchronous, where you can build the frog slowly, so to speak, where you can build that relationship over time in that community. And then what we're finding is a great way to get connected, you know, deeper into that community is—once you're getting deeper into the community, that's where you start to get into discipleship-level conversations and even feeding into the one-on-one.

It's interesting. Daniel M—I've been blanking on this guy's name for weeks. I've been telling the story and I could not remember who it was. Did a podcast with Daniel M, and he was talking about the difference of social space and about how the US church doesn't utilize social space well. This is like a medium-sized group. The church—they do big-sized groups well. Consider that Sunday morning, whether you're a one-hundred-person church or a ten-thousand-person church, your big meeting probably goes pretty well because you put a lot of effort into that. By the way, that's top of funnel. Even falling back on the Seth Godin blog. And then your discipleship—most churches do discipleship somewhat well. Like, even the church I was referencing with the one-on-one discipleship or the small groups, like, whether or not your discipleship strategy is effective, you're pouring resources into discipleship, and to your standards, it's probably operating the way that it should. That's not a knock. It's just everybody's different. But what is not well, and this even gets back to some of the Seth Godin stuff, is that mid-size community, that social space. Even if you look at the life of Christ, I'm sorry, Andy, I'm going on a tangent. Even if you look at the life of Christ...

Look at the life of Christ. He had all three levels. He had the early church when Jesus sent it up to heaven. There were 68 men and women, and that was the Church of Acts, pre-Pentecost, 68 people, and they were hanging out together like that was the church that is the top of the funnel, so to speak. Bottom of the funnel in Jesus's ministry, well mid-funnel social space, Jesus had his 12. That's that middle group that was the disciples. And then the group that Jesus was really close with, the people that he was intimately discipling, really gets down to the two or three. So I would actually question Andy whether Jesus was farting in front of all 12 or just the three, side conversation. I don't know that we need to get into that one for today. But the fact is that we now have this opportunity to see community pull people deeper down the funnel because ultimately this community builds trust, and that trust allows us to get deeper into that. You know, Andy, I have, let me ask you this question. I have been, you know what, I think I actually heard Jason Morris say this first. This goes back to 2017, 2018. This is, I first met J-Mo when I heard him say this. See if you agree with it. Digitally, people find community before they find Christ. Do you agree with that?

Yes, yeah. I mean, look at the way that we are structured in a lot of our Discord servers and in a lot of our social media stuff like that. The already convinced are going and saying amen and putting praying hands and doing things like that on a lot of these other things. But the exacerbation of loneliness that happened in 2020 with a worldwide pandemic and people in certain cases being locked inside their houses for a while, and you know, the fearmongering that was going on in a lot of people's hearts was because they didn't actually have a community around them. That's not a political statement or anything. That's just there was a lot of fear going on, and there were not a lot of people that actually have discourse outside of that fear. And those that didn't know Jesus were finding community in a lot of places. And I will tell you, and we're using that word community again loosely, but Discord usage skyrocketed over that time, and that's where it started to turn a little bit from being a gamer-centric thing into being a little bit more widely accepted. You can go back and look at a bunch of studies that have been done and usage rates, and even monetary values of Discord from 2020 on. You can see that there's more money being poured into it because people are recognizing the value of things like it. And inside of that, there's a lot of people that don't know Jesus that are seeking to just talk, just hang out. We get a lot of people in our Lux server that they heard about us from a friend or they saw us on a stream or something like that from somebody else's stream, one of our stream partners, stream allies, and they'll pop in and they're definitely not believers. I mean, some of their screen names that pop up, you can definitely tell they are not believers. And yet they want to hang out and they want to play League, you know, League of Legends, or they want to just listen to some music with somebody or they want to just be there like that. That is an overwhelming majority of people that join into Lux that do not know Jesus. They'll join and then they'll meet Christ there.

Yeah, and what an incredible, once again, opportunity missionally to start thinking about, you know, digitally engaging these people, inviting them into a community, not to judge them or ridicule them. Because, you know, actually I'm thinking of, you know, Alice in the Palace. You know, it's just a resident story that I feel like we tell a lot, but it's a perfect example. You know, Alice's screen name pre-Christ in virtual, in Twitch and Discord, I think was Alice Queen of Hell or something, Queen of Satan.

Queen of Satan, yeah, something to that extent. And she, through an eight-month relationship, six-month relationship with half a dozen or maybe two or three different churches, a whole bunch of different people in virtual reality, you know, Jade Aart, a digital missionary in Twitch and VR, you know, led Alice to Christ. And so she changed her name from Alice, excuse me, Alice Queen of Satan to Alice in the Palace. You know, her parents were not hardcore Satanists, but neopagans is the word I'm looking for, you know. And so she changed from that lifestyle and found Jesus. But she found it not like through a comfort invitation where she raised her hand when the pastor preached a sermon. She found it as a result of a long period of time of relationships that were being developed in virtual reality, in Twitch, in Discord. And so it's incredible to see the opportunities of things like that happening in real time.

Speaking of in real time, I think I just got kicked out. Um, can you can you see me or can you add me? Um, Andy, I think I lost you.

Yeah, uh, sorry, I'm coming back.

Okay, all right, I'm back. Um, yeah, I got disconnected. That was a really important line, you know. I butchered Alice and Alice Queen of Satan, Queen of Hell, whatever. And automatically, you know, spiritual warfare attacks Discord. Um, and some, I literally just said, you know, you are now off the stage, and I was like, well, I didn't click my mouse. How did I get off the stage?

Yeah, come back, come back, Jeff. I'm back, everybody, calm down. I didn't go anywhere.

You know what, it's software. It's gonna kink up every once in a while. Um, all right, let's so let me ask this. Let's get practical because we've done an elementary walkthrough of, okay, this is what asynchronous is, this is the community. You know, digital, you know, I've heard Mark talk about this, that what he does for Lux, you know, what he does on Twitch is the equivalent of the Sunday morning service. Um, what he does on Discord engaging the community is the equivalent of Monday through Saturday. It's like the discipleship, it's the relationship. It's being the pastor versus being the public speaker, so to speak. So let me ask you this. For a hybrid environment, how would a hybrid church, a physical digital church, how would they even start to begin to utilize something like asynchronous? That's something we did at Be Hope, um, the church I was at for the last five years. Um, I found in the first eight months that I was there, so I started in June of 2019, so before the COVID pandemic, and in the first nine months that I was there, the first six months were really just getting my feet under the desk, you know, processes. And it's a big church, you know, multisite church. And so there's a lot of bureaucratic and process-driven things. And so just trying to get that there. And what I found was that I had landed in a place that we had a lot of, we had, you know, a couple people that were streaming us and connecting with us every single Sunday, and then we're dispersing for the other 167 other hours of the week. And so I'd have them for an hour and then I wouldn't have them. And that's a little Messiah complex from me, thinking that they needed to stay in contact with me outside of emails and text messages and all that. But that's really the point of church community is to make sure that you're there to support and encourage and again strengthen and share, you know, live a shared experience with somebody.

So I started building out, we had a large Facebook group that wasn't being used. So I started building out the Facebook group. And then, you know, COVID hit and then the world got turned upside down. And what I found was we went quickly from being a stream or a live multisite church that was streaming at services to all of a sudden we were a digital church, completely digital church for about three or four months. And then it turned into a hybrid church. And I continued that Facebook group and then I opened a Discord server. And we had a Slack channel for a little bit, and Slack didn't really take off. And the thing that I kept noticing was that people were apt to go into Discord on their lunch breaks, and they were going into Discord on their way home. Obviously they shouldn't have been typing on their phone, and yet they still were. They were checking into Discord before they went to bed. You know, the average person was checking into Discord two to three times a day. And these are definitely not gamers. They're people that you wouldn't think would ever want to check into something like Discord. And yet they'd open it up on their phone because they wanted to stay connected with their friends and their family that were also there. You know, when I left, we had a Discord server of 150 people, something like that. Not huge, not small, but not huge. And I was pretty proud of that.

The thing that I kept noticing was a step that we have to take. You know, Whitebeard said setting up a campus pastor and then having something like Discord to follow up on things is, yeah, for certain churches they're going to have the resource to be able to hire somebody. But all you really need is some sort of pastor or communications director to set up a Discord server, set up a Slack channel, set up, you know, whatever, and simply just check in with people once in the morning, once at night. Once in the morning, once at night, you're going to be shocked at how quickly people get used to that rhythm. And it will be rhythm. You're going to have to, you know, that you talk about a flywheel, Jeff. To start a flywheel, you have to put a lot of energy in at the first part. So like, if you think about when you're starting to pedal a bike, it takes a lot of energy to pedal a bike. But once you get that bike going, you don't really necessarily have to put as much energy in to keep that flywheel going. Upfront, if you truly feel that you are called into a hybrid, sort of asynchronous lifestyle, which spoiler alert, you should be, but if you truly feel like this is the way forward for you, it's gonna be a lot of effort for you. You, as the communications director or a campus pastor or a church leader or whoever's listening to this, it's gonna be a lot of effort. But you're going to realize very quickly it's going to pay off in spades. You're going to notice also the people that are super passionate about your community, that are super passionate about staying connected. And you're going to be able to utilize their strengths and resources and gifting and talents in your community as well.

So my biggest practical advice is, man, just start. Just do. Take the first step. Like, get off of your hands and take the first step. Whatever that first step is, is it opening up your Facebook group a little bit wider? Cool. Is it just simply posting in the morning and at night? Cool. I'm not saying you need to go hire a Discord admin or anything, although the church.digital, if you want to talk a little bit more about that, we would love to have that entertain that conversation with you. But take that first step and start posting, get a little bit more regular about it, open up that door, and allow people to come into your community.

Yeah, so so good there. Um, so good. And so learning communities is a great way, you know, I'm just doing a quick commercial for the churches to get plugged in to start to learn how to do what we're talking about. And that's there's lots of questions that come up.

On this, talked about it earlier. Andy is actually leading an asynchronous Community Learning Community for hybrid churches, for digital churches, to better understand how to take advantage and utilize this. And so if you're interested, landing page—if you go today when we're doing this live broadcast, landing page isn't up yet—but if you're listening next week when this conversation goes public, the church.digitallearning community. The church.digitallearning community, all one word on the Learning Community. Check it out. That's a great place to get more information about this. But once again, it's not up currently for this live recording.

And so yeah, it's interesting. Some chat, purposeful for Paul, most churches are already doing some sort of asynchronous email lists and texting. It's important. Like, I just want to reiterate this. That you are—that it's easy for people to talk to the church. Like, I think the reason I like asynchronous the most is because it's so easy for the church to receive feedback, to receive conversations. Like, digitally, it's better to ask questions than make statements. To get up on a soapbox and preach something is not nearly as effective as building a relationship and listening. And so if that—yeah, Whitebeard says it. Email and text tend to be one way, and for purpose of Paul, I'm sure has a purpose more interactive forms of async. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're on the same page. But just for those that are outside thinking about this, like, the importance of asynchronous is the ability to listen to that and build a relationship by listening, not by talking. And that's really what you want to get to in digital space. Not—to be honest, that's one of the things that Andy does so well.

The other part is, oh my gosh, if you do asynchronous well, your volunteers are leading it and running it. Like, as a pastor, you don't need to be hands-on, or you can get—you can do once a day or twice a day hands-on checking at lunch and at the end of the day, and that's all you need to do. Because your volunteers are so excited about what's happening in that space. Why? Because you're finally doing something that's up their alley.

There's a—Andy, do you have—have you heard of this? Um, introvert economy. Has that phrase been—this is a new thing. I just became aware of it a couple weeks ago. Introvert economy. This is interesting. Bloomberg, Bloomberg.com, published an article in January, and as far as I know, that's the first time that I've been able to find the reference to it. But basically what they're saying is that the socioeconomic status changed post-COVID, and ultimately people don't like being in social spaces, and instead they're wanting to do stuff from their home. And so as a result, economies are shifting where now it's like, how do we get the last mile? Like Uber Eats is far more—is far better than cooking or going out to eat. Restaurants are making more delivery and smaller footprints without having to worry about all the seating spaces and stuff like that. And so what's interesting from a church level is some of the stuff that we're talking about with digital community. Well, shoot, you may have some introverts that aren't really good in social space that would be awesome doing something like this, which is interesting. Even talking about Alice, queen of hell—like, she is much better in a digital community and engaging and dialoguing with people than she is in physical space. And I've had many conversations with her to know that to be true. And so it's understanding how digital community maybe can help you reach that different type of person that your physical community can't do. And having a hybrid, having digital community and physical community ones that complement, work together, is really the way to go. That's some of the stuff that we're going to get into here within the learning communities that we're doing.

You know, Andy, I'm curious. Maybe you touched on this. You know what, let's pivot. Let's get into this toward the end. I want—listen, and I say this, just the fact that I started the conversation with "I want" tells you there's ego involved in this statement. Um, there's a couple things in my life that I feel like I'm really early on, like leading the curve, ahead of the ball game, okay? You know, I'm the guy whose first online Bible study he led was in the year 2000. I was talking asynchronous community before Facebook existed in the marketplace. Like, so I'm used to being ahead of the curve here. Digital church, little ahead of the curve. COVID accelerated things and made it common place. Asynchronous community, I kind of feel like we're maybe a little bit ahead of curve, really working with that bleeding edge here, a little bit, maybe more of the cutting edge coming in. As we do have, like I said, maybe half a dozen churches that are exceeding well in this space. But I really want the church digital to be like the paramount example, the pinnacle example of an asynchronous community. I would love to hear from you because you are responsible. You are like the community guy for the church digital. That's your job. And you launched Discord a month ago, ish. And we are flying. We are rocking and rolling. I'm doing a broadcast here, live recording of this currently in Discord. It's been a lot of fun the past month. Um, let's give a sneak peek. You know, I love leaking stuff here on the podcast, especially at what—where are we going with this? What's coming up here with the church digital? We've got Discord. Two big things coming up.

Um, so you've noticed that we've kind of already started this where we have had live streaming like we're doing right now, plus some live office hours. Jeff's been doing it, flat cap's been doing it, J popped in a little bit. We are going to be expanding that a little bit. I'm actually going to be streaming into our Discord server, and the idea behind streaming is we're not gonna play video games. We can play video games if you want, but the idea is I am—I've been streaming a long time. Flat cap has as well. But I've been streaming a long time on Twitch, and I kind of love the idea of just getting together with a bunch of people. And so one of the streams is literally going to be kind of just a—I say co-working loosely. Everybody says, oh, co-working is like a thing that we all get in together and just hang out and don't do work. But I want us to just be able to have people around. Um, I am an introvert, and yet I have an extroverted nature when it comes to some of those things. And I like having people around when I'm working. And if a lot of you are like me where you are on a computer or you have a phone or something along those lines and get your kind of head down and you're working on some things, it's nice to have people in there. And so we want to be able to lock arms a little bit during the work day. And so once or twice a week, just for maybe an hour, hour and a half, maybe two hours, we're going to start doing some co-working streams. And that's literally, hey, bring what you got. If you got questions, come on in. This is not office hours. This is more just we're going to be working alongside each other. You work on whatever you want to work on. I work on whatever I want to work on. We're going to try big old grand old experiment.

Um, one of my favorite streamers, her name's Asia the Girl. She is on Twitch. She's also on—she's got her own website. She works for a company called Live Streamer, and she does co-working streams. They're some of my favorite streams. She puts on some like lo-fi music, and she just works, and she just talks with a couple of people that come on into the stream. They come in and hang out. There are people that are devout Asia the Girl followers, and I want us to have that kind of community, just to come hang out, chill type of community. So that's number one.

Number two, the big one, is you're going to start to see a lot more—um, I'm going to say interaction, and I don't mean it that way—but as our flywheel starts to turn a little bit more and as people kind of get our humor, you like the fact that people are sharing Seinfeld memes in our live streaming chat right now makes me feel very, very happy. And that's exactly what I'm talking about. As we start to see these things pick up, as we start to get a little bit more of our humor and a little bit more of our goofiness out there, the real personality comes out. And then the true test of who we are as a community is really going to be shown. And I think we have a lot to offer the rest of the world in terms of how do we actually be disciplers, how do we actually be movement leaders, how do we actually help people stay on mission while at the same time having personality and not being scared of that. And so that's honestly the biggest thing that you're going to start to see out of our Discord.

Um, a lot of the things that you will also see in Discord channels is that people try to force community, and they try to force personality, and they try to force culture. And you can do that a little bit. You can guide it. But anytime you try to force a culture, you end up with a company like Twitter, and we kind of saw what has been happening with Twitter over the last year where you're trying to force a culture of anti-authoritarianism and all sorts of things. There—sorry if you still use Twitter. That's on you. Twitter. Yeah, X. Oh, yeah, sorry. Yeah, the art formerly known as Twitter. Yeah, yeah. So the biggest thing, the biggest thing you're going to see is a personality start to come out. And I, for one, want to be the curator of that personality. We don't want to guide it. I want to hold that personality in my hands very loosely and go, okay, world, I release you into the wild. And so just the church digital Discord, it's going to be the place to be.

Yeah, I love it. I'm streaming Tuesday—Tuesdays and Thursdays every Tuesday. I'm streaming. I'm doing several different open offices. One is going to be more casual, and one is going to be, hey, bring your questions, let's talk ministry-wise. And so I've got all that on the Discord event board. And um, I just would do that. My streams, by the way, like if I'm not doing a recording like this, my streams are very casual. Like, I've been—I put some of those streams on my podcast recently, and I was—I think the last one I did, I was like, man, I'm not even going to put—like, it was so relaxed and chill. It's like, yeah, I'm not going to publish this. Like, it's a lot of fun, but I'm like sitting around having conversations with people. Like, it's not really like podcast meat. Like, this was a great conversation. We got to, you know, goof off with the chat. The chat at this point is not even listening to us. Like, they are so off in whatever is happening right now. Yes, we are. No, you're not, Whitebeard. Come on, Whitebeard. Go watch Friends and Seinfeld. Whitebeard has only watched five or six Seinfeld or Friends, and I know you're missing out. Yeah, that is literally the—get off my guy, um, right there. Oh my gosh. Friends. What's the guy upstairs? Um, that's always like stomping down beneath, and they're always like doing the broom thing up. Um, come on, come on. Somebody, somebody pull that. Um, Mr. Rickles. Mr. Heckles. Mr. Heckles. Yes, there you go. Oh my gosh. Whitebeard is Mr. Heckles. Oh, is—

So so good man. I'm sorry you had to die though. Um, sad, sad, sad. Spoiler, spoiler, spoiler. Nope. Yes, yes, so good. All right, so hey, listen, we, we, the church digital, we want to set the example for asynchronous and what we're doing here through the church digital and providing consulting to other organizations, conversations we're already having and working with churches through learning communities and otherwise, we want to help understand organizations figure out how to better utilize the funnel, so to speak, to get better conversions down at the bottom leading towards discipleship, discipleship making, and in evangelism. Like, it's so important and it is such a missing piece for the problems of the church today.

So information on, hey, listen, we're going to have, once again for the live recording, we're going to have an after party here in a little bit. I'm wrapping up the broadcast, so stick around, you all. Don't leave because I'm hanging up. For those of you who are not listening in live, check, keep an eye on Discord, keep an eye on our social media as we start to broadcast and really get out there when we're doing these live recordings. I know I've got five or six or seven, I think almost listed here in the next couple months. Like, I'm leaning heavy on the live recording things. Would love to have community in, and so you can be posting whatever Kramer gifs and all the other stuff and deal with the chaos that's in here.

So information on the Discord server or to sign up for the Discord server is at discord.thechurchdigital.

Uh, and so definitely want to be a part of that. Information on the learning communities as we're wrapping up is, uh, so the learning communities are going to be June, July, and August. Um, dates are pending on that. Um, Andy's doing his. Like I said, we've got five different topics that we're going to be hitting with five different facilitators. And so cost on the learning, the learning communities are eight weeks, all online. Uh, cost is, and all going to be Discord based. You see how I keep stalling on the cost? Like, that's kind of intentional but not really. Yeah, it's eight weeks, um, all on Discord. So you're going to be learning how to do this, you know, and you get access to private channels on Discord. It's gonna be a lot of fun. But uh, the cost is going to be $797. It's normally $997. $997. Instead, we're making it $797 for this first round. And so we want to get churches to get wins out here. And so if you're serious about experimenting, kicking the tires on a learning, on asynchronous, you want to get the tips and the tricks and the secrets from Andy Mage, um, you want to be a part of it. Uh, check, uh, actually it's, yeah, it's going to be thechurchdigital/learningcommunity. We'll have all that up here by the time this conversation goes public. Awesome. Yep. Hey, so as we're wrapping up here, Andy, any questions, any closing thoughts?

I should say that was. I have no, I got no questions for you, Jeff. Thanks. Um, one of the things that uh, I love that we're doing in Discord is kind of just being, you know, getting to read all these gifs and all those other things. But uh, one of the biggest things is that just be on the lookout. We have, we've got a vision here. Uh, Jeff kind of talked about it very briefly, and you're going to start to see it flesh out a little bit more over the next year. We've got yearly visions, we've got monthly goals, and then we've got weekly conversations that we're going to be starting in May. And so I just invite you to start being encouraged and really being engaged in those conversations. You'll see a little bit more starting next week as those start to roll out in our general chat and throughout some of our channels. But everybody that's been here in the audience, thanks so much. Uh, we love you, and uh, continue to invite your friends to a wacky place like us where we can talk about Britcoms and the IT Crowd and, um, you know, just have a lot of wacky, weird fun.

Confession hour. I've never watched The IT Crowd either. Isn't there an English version as well?

A, I mean, there's a British and there's American. The American one's fine. The British one's real good.

Is it real, real good?

Yeah, it's real good. I'll do it. Like, I watch the British Office. Actually, I love British humor. Just for whatever reason, I never got into, um, like, to be honest, Whose Line Is It Anyway? The British version, so good. I would watch that old, like, when it was on Comedy Central decades ago. I would, I wasn't even alive when it was filmed, but just listening to those guys talk about whatever the crap they were talking about, which made no sense to me, but their accents, I could just watch that show all day. Like, there was literally a summer when I did nothing but had Comedy Central on 24/7, 365. This was before South Park, so it wasn't like gross, crazy stuff. I personally don't get into South Park, but I know others do, but I'm not judging, but I just don't. But um, everything else, Andy, I love South Park, as I recall. Like, that's not a direct shot of him, but I don't call you out. But are you that guy, or is somebody else?

No, no, I used to, and then I grew out of it.

Oh, I know who it is. My brother-in-law. My brother-in-law is a huge South Park guy. He looks like you, which is why I put the two together. So forgive me. Okay. Um, but and I have a lot of respect for my brother-in-law as well, so I respect both of you. I got you confused in my head. Casey, you're not listening to this, but I do appreciate, you know, everything you've done for me. Thank you very much.

Hey, we're gonna land a plane and we're going to swing over to the after show. So Discord, feel free. Don't go anywhere. Throw questions in chat. We'll bring you up and we can talk about this. We're going to stop recording and thank you all. Hey, for Andy, for the podcast, this is Jeff with the Church Digital. Thanks for jumping on the live recording here, being part of the show. We'll see you next time. You have a good one.