EP030: Andy Mage & The TikTok Revolution

Okay well let's pause here for a second. I just want to tell you I can't believe we've done 30 of these things and I want to thank you listening audience for your reception and your comments and a lot of the shares that we've been getting here on the Church Digital Podcast. I hope this has been rewarding for you as together we wrestle with what this idea of church online and digital church is. Essentially, because I don't know that we all have the answers, but together I think we can get to the answer.

So here's where we are with episode 30. I was doing an online Bible study with some online pastors a week or so ago and I was just asking the question, "Hey, tell me something great that happened this week." One of the pastors, Andy, made from Bay Hope, raised his hand—that's weird in an online environment—but he started telling us a story about all the success that he's had through his church. His church has had in the context of TikTok. Well, that brought me pause because, you know, I don't hear a lot of church success stories in the context of TikTok, and I'm always interested to talk to a church that's doing something different. So I reached out to Andy afterwards and said, "Hey, let's get on a podcast and just dig deeper into this."

So here's where we are. We're bringing in a conversation on TikTok, throwing in some YouTube, and just a lot of what I call unconventional video strategies in the context of church and church online. So we're bringing in Andy Mage, who, like I said, is the online pastor over at Bay Hope Church in Tampa, as well as Jessica Spivey, who is the social media director there for the church, coupled with Brady Armas from Christ Fellowship Miami. Once again co-hosting the show, myself Jeff with the Church Digital, in a conversation that I'm calling the TikTok Revolution.

Hey everybody, here you go.

So I started the TikTok roughly about a month ago. Actually, on Friday is our one-month anniversary. Hey, happy anniversary! So back in the summer, my daughter, who was seven, went to cheerleading camp and she came home talking about TikToking. It's like, "What in the world is she talking about?" She's like, "We really gotta watch the videos and make video sauce." Like, okay, I'm gonna make an account so that I can monitor—obviously she's seven—I'm gonna monitor what she's looking at. So there are certain people that we follow that she can watch, only the following page, not the before you page, and that kind of thing. So we did that, and as I was scrolling through, these Christians started to pop up in my feed and they were like, "Hey, here's the verse of the day" or "Hey, let's pray together today." Really cool, positive things. And I was like, "Wait a second, there's a spot for a church here." And so I came into work and I said, "Hey, I want to do this thing. I want to start this TikTok." And our communications director was like, "Okay, but don't like waste a lot of time on it in case it flops." Okay, not exactly what he said, pretty much. Here we are a month later. We've been repurposing content that we already had—existing quotes from messages, bits of our worship team, various different bits that we've been repurposing for TikTok to not spend too much time on it. And we have 3,500 followers as of this morning, which is crazy. We have one particular video of our harbor pastor, him giving a bit of his sermon that he gave a month or two ago, and that video is seen over 40,000 views. So that's incredible.

This is one of the benefits, I think, of not being maybe first to market but maybe one of the first as far as a lot of that's concerned. So tell us, I know you said you've taken some quotes from messages. What else were you guys leveraging for content and how often are you posting content?

So I'm trying to post roughly once a day, and I'm experimenting with this. Morning do better? Afternoon do better? A lot of people are on their phones at night on TikTok, so we're seeing if I'm posting in that three to four o'clock afternoon range, that we see more views through there. There, unfortunately, with the analytics not being what they should be for brands yet—we will—it's different to see, you know, does the time of day matter? Do the hashtags that I use matter? Do so it's a very labor-intensive process to see why did this one do better than this one? To go back to the day a ton, you know, the time of day that I posted, because that's not something that TikTok holds. They do hold what day you post, but not the time you post. So it's there's some you have to do manually currently, but I think they'll get better at it as they branch out into these brands and companies using TikTok.

I'm a bit of a nerd on TikTok. Like, I see something funny, I like, I want to do that. Like, I want to have, you know, a song and like it's the thing from Guardians of the Galaxy and people are jumping into pools and like I want to be one, you know, I want to be one of the Avengers type thing. But she's kind of tempered that, and she has been able to show that like, hey, if we post, you know, simple stand-ups of me or some of our younger people saying, "Hey, it's..." We just posted one on Monday and it was me standing in our coffee house saying, "Hey, Sandy, the online campus pastor, and I just want to, you know, it's Monday, know it's gonna be a long week. How can we pray for you?" That type of thing. And people filling up the comments and liking the thing. And you know, it's not as much as we like this video of the Harbor Master Chris—40,000 views. It's got, I don't know, four thousand hearts or likes on it. I mean, something, it's ridiculous numbers. And the engagement, the service level engagement, the comments, and she's pulling it up right now so we can actually get it.

So it's 11—oh my gosh—well, 11 point 1,000 likes, 114 comments on it with 47,000 views on just one video from less than a month ago. And people are commenting in "Amen" and "Hey, I needed to hear this," and you know, that type of thing.

We, you can see in the development of Snapchat, to start it is like this thing for 18 to 25 year olds, maybe 16 to 25 year olds, and then the brands caught up to it and it expanded, and now everybody else is on board. So old people like us are on board, so young people, brands, everybody. And that's kind of what's happening with TikTok right now. It went from being this, you know, sheepherders what wanted to download it. My daughter, she's 12—well, she's 13 now—when she was 12, she came home and said, "I want to download this app called Musical.ly," which Musical.ly ended up turning into a form of TikTok, right? And my wife and I said, "No, absolutely not," like we, because I was scrolling through it's like, "Well, there's girls in bikinis and there's dudes without their shirts on and they're singing Will Smith songs and then there's like Cheney and all sorts of stuff. Like, no, we're not going to have that." But we're watching TikTok evolve from just this lip-sync thing like, "Hey, we're fun," into almost this other social media platform. And I'm interested. I know she, as the social media coordinator, I know she's interested to see how we can actually start to draw not just analytics but engagement out of that, more than just a one-way conversation—me talking to you. How can we enter into a conversation that isn't, is more than just a heart on a screen? That's good.

Are you guys engaging people with next steps that we take topic like, "Hey, you know, catch this clip, walk it on YouTube," or how does that work?

So yes, there's a couple of ways that we're doing that. When they are Big Horse, your team recently released a new song. Yes, I directed them to YouTube. However, TikTok wants you to stay in TikTok. Yes, you can't link outside, right? Basically, you're telling people to go search for something on YouTube. Now you can connect your Instagram page and your YouTube page in your profile, so those you can say, "Go to the..." You put our YouTube channel, our profile, so those two things are nice to have, but you can't direct them to a specific video. It's not like Instagram where you can say we can buy our or that, you know, it's not directly. So there's several steps, which is a marketer or don't love because they're like, the fewer number of steps means that, you know, they're actually gonna get where you want them to get. Yeah.

So he, we're trying, especially on like Saturday, I post a video clip or a music clip and I'll say, "Join us someday." Yeah, the next day, hoping that people see it overnight at 9:30 or 11, and I include our website in text over the video of where to go see, because they can't click it anywhere. That I posted, they're not gonna click it. So that I hope that that changes, but I understand TikTok wanting everybody to stay in TikTok.

And she's the real genius behind all this. Jessica's been, she spearheaded it. She's been the one kind of talking about all this and she's coming up with all these bright ideas and I'm going, "Yeah, man, like this is your, you're the genius and all of this. I'm just along for the ride." It's great. It's awesome to watch.

That's great. And I'm glad that you guys are working together as a team. Jessica, let me ask, how much—I don't want to call it like overproduced, but like really produced—content you guys, you know, you just taken, you know, moments of the sermon or you little bit literally holding up your device and recording on the spot for a lot of this content?

No, so I'm downloading are, and I do this for our social medias as well. So basically, it's kind of a repurpose of the content. I download our service from the streaming from Stream Monkey, and I chop it up and I pull, you know, quotes from this past weekend. Like, I have a quote that's set up. Hold that. I'm getting somebody to add text to because I don't know how to do that yet. I do, but they don't trust me to hand it off. Anyways, you're gay. So so I pull the clips and then I'm using that way. I'm also posting them on our Facebook and our Instagram as video clips for the, you know, provoking question or whatever, to say, you know, what was a key point from the weekend that you caught? So I'm using it in multiple different ways. I'm assuming on TikTok that they probably don't go to our church, so I'm not going to ask that question of how did you reflect on the weekend? I'm saying, "Here's a clip from our weekend message. Go watch the full version when they ate bagel calm." That's how I'm using a Danzig cup.

That's great because not all of us—and this is even speaking, you know, at a large mega church with a lot of sites—not all of us have that kind of swag that we're getting a swipe of feature on Instagram. Like, seriously. And so this provides to me, just based off of this conversation, this provides another method to help draw young viewers and to push them. It's just some of those next steps. Now, out of curiosity, the clip that's got all this crazy amount of views, what was what was the subject matter?

The subject matter, he starts off his quote. He says, "Get alone with God. You know, we spend more time on SportsCenter than we do in our in the word." And he carries it on a little bit further from there. But basically, he's challenging, you know, this notion that, you know, all these other things are important. You know, we'll wake up earlier, we'll stay up late for a for a game or whatever, but we won't wake up 30 minutes early to read our Bible. That's that was the challenge. And so I think because it was more of a challenge than it was just a passive quote, I think that's part of what what it did. I also in that particular post used a—whenever you post a video, it shows you the top three hashtags. So you're one of those hashtags, and it was making awesome, not exactly related to our content, but so every time that I post, when I try to use one of those top three, making sure make sense with our content, so that that engagement is a...

Little higher, figuring out what the rhyme or reason behind the algorithms and TikTok is is a little bit of a mystery right now. He's Aaron. Yeah, so tell me about that because this right here is an interesting conversation to me because hashtags can either be very insider focused or you can leverage them to help reach folks within content that they're driving towards. And so tell me a little bit more about how you've been doing it. And I agree, and actually your question challenged some of the hashtags that I've been using. You know, on TikTok, we're assuming that this audience is younger, probably doesn't attend our church. That's the direction that we're the audience that we're speaking to. If I'm using hashtags like faith and Jesus, people are probably searching those, probably already know Jesus. And so it may be, you know, using whatever the popular ones are, but even thinking through having a rough day, you know, I mean, thinking through those other hashtags that could be used to really reach that audience is a good one. I always use hashtag Tampa because that's physically where we are, but that doesn't mean that obviously we can't connect with somebody outside of that. So that's great. Have you guys seen an increase? So like the sermon you posted, the clip for forty thousand, forty-seven thousand views, reference YouTube to watch the full sermon. Have you guys seen an increase in traffic on like YouTube on some of the others? Are they following through? So YouTube's a different thing for us right now because we have two different YouTube pages. We have one for the main church and then we have one for our worship team. And your team, and we can talk about that in a second. We've seen an enormous increase in the worship team, but I don't think that's from TikTok. That's from some advertising, some other things that we're doing. She's been spearheading that, and I've just been able to be like, hey, I'm gonna look at these conversations because these are great. But in terms of looking at the stream, the video on-demand views, they uptake slightly. I mean, maybe I'm talking to the treatment of maybe ten to twenty a week. I can't tell if that's because we're also growing the online campus community around it. I can't develop directly related to TikTok. There's no one-to-one that I can look at inside Street Monkey. Well, because there's no way to link in TikTok. We can't throw off a link. I hope that Khan slash TikTok fought to track any of that traffic to see where are they actually coming from? Yeah, that right there is interesting because TikTok right now, it's actually a younger demographic. I saw somebody tweet this out yesterday. You know, yesterday Ellen DeGeneres posted her thing about hey, how we can get along with diverse perspectives. Somebody tweeted this out. They said the people on Facebook are mad at George Bush for hanging out with Ellen. The people on Twitter are mad at Ellen for hanging out with George Bush. And the people on TikTok have no idea who either of those. I read that same thing and I laughed like I laughed so hard because it was like, hey, you're absolutely right. Because if you look at the demographic on TikTok, and the interesting thing to me is that the videos that have the most reach were there were two references in near Chris's. So you know, he's a good-looking dude. He's young. Guys, well, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty. Run. They're charismatic, all that other stuff. Thirty-five? Okay, so he's just a little bit whatever. I look weathered because I'm bald. Um, he, you know, like I said, decent-looking dude. The demographic of TikTok is what, sixteen to twenty-two-year-old girls, mean for the most part? That's what you see when you're scrolling through, or these quote-unquote thirsty guys that are trying to, okay, yeah, I'd like trying to hook up with these girls. It's like, man, you are on the wrong platform for this, my friend. Like you talking about how good you look with your shirt off? Like delete. Like get out here. But so that that's the interesting thing. But the flipside, I had a pastor for me, and this is the thing that has gotten me fired up, and I think got her fired up too. I mean, I've just, I'm going back through James Emery Light's Gen Z, a brilliant look. If you've never read it, James ever her. Wait, it's like he said, I want to high-five that dude and give him a bear hug all at the same time because he's touching him in this back from 2017. He's touching on something that I don't think churches for the most part are recognizing and realizing. And referenced it just a second ago, we're not worried about the people that are already safe. The hashtag faith people that are Googling and searching hashtag faith are for the most part dyed-in-the-wool, or you know, there may be newer believers and stuff like that. That's fine. I'm not worried about them. On TikTok, we're not worried about them. We are worried about the people that we can feasibly take and start having a conversation about God. Because what James Emery talks about, this Gen Z generation, the generation just behind her and I, is open to spiritual conversations. They're not like Millennials where it was just this antagonistic atheistic or atheistic stroke agnostic view. They're open to spiritual conversations. And that I had this like brainwave couple weeks ago. Apple released a new iPhone. I don't know if you guys need that, but I, it's iPhone season. This is my favorite time of the year. I've had every iPhone since the first one. I missed one. It was the 3GS. I missed it. But every single one I've had because I'm a nerd. And I was in the AT&T store trying to figure some stuff out. And I was talking with a twenty-five, twenty-six-year-old sales rep right after I finished this meet Gen's ebook. And we were just sitting there wrapping a little bit. And he said, what do you do? And I said, well, I'm a pastor at a church of the road. And he, his eyes like lit up. And he turned to me and he said, oh, you are, huh? And I said, yeah, like, you know, if you want to talk something spiritual, and I was just kind of throwing it out there joking because I've got tattoos and stuff. And that's like, yeah, I want to talk about some spiritual. And he looked at me dead in the eyes. And we had a forty-five-minute conversation in the Apple store, or in the AT&T store, excuse me, about his faith journey, about the fact that he had tried Catholicism. And he was a, he grew up Baptist, but then he turned Catholic. And then he was Hindu. And then he looked at Buddhism. And then he gave me the whole, you know, I think every religion is looking at different parts of the same God, you know, that that apologetic. And I'm sitting here going, wait a minute. These are the people that we can reach on TikTok if we can just figure it out. Is this guy right here and his generation are being represented on this app that you can earn fifteen-second sound bytes. How do we do something with that that's good? And so you guys aren't necessarily pushing the people inside your church to follow you on TikTok. You guys are leveraging this for more missional work. Like, hey, we're just about the only discussion that that we've had is internal. If you only used to go, are you on it? Or you asked, I'm thirty-four. So you know, my teenager of a twenty-year-old stepdaughter, she doesn't even have TikTok. So it's this weird, some of them are on it, some of it see it as cringy. It's kind of a mixed bag. But that that right there is already a shift in thinking because, you know, most of the time whenever we launched something, and maybe I'm looking a little too internal in my space, we think, oh, we're gonna promote this internally as well. You know, you guys aren't really saying a word. You guys are allowing this to just continue to spread virally, literally like through different channels through this channel, and allow it to just kind of organically tick on its own, its own life. And that might be, it's funny. Our per boss, our communications director, yesterday, and we were talking about a number of different facets of online and you know, TikTok and social media and all this other stuff. And just kind of talking about where we could line that up within the online campus realm. But what I drew from that is I think one of the reasons we're not promoting is that we're a little scared of it. We're a little scared it could become or the flop that it could be. And you know, I think the innovator, you know, who was the light bulb was invented ninety-nine times before hundred sign was the correct one. Like sure, we we don't want to be but more results-oriented people who were a results-oriented society. And we want to be able to hold this thing up to everybody and say, look, look how awesome it's doing. We don't necessarily want to fail. But I think on the flip side, to her, more than anybody else, is taking a huge risk. I mean, like I said, she's the, she's the brains, the brains behind this entire operation. She's taking a huge risk in this by even bringing it to her boss and say, hey, I'll try this. Cool part about the church culture we're in is that there's a lot of spaghetti being thrown at walls and see what sticks. And so we're allowed, where we have the opportunity and the resource and the time and the managerial capacity over us, to say go ahead and try it. Just make sure that you know you're staying on track as well. Sure. One of the things that you know, as Jeff and I have talked to different folks, we see this in so many different spaces. And so that's where you know, I want to encourage you guys, and I think it's wonderful that you're trying that out, is you know, a lot of us are trying to just throw the spaghetti at the wall and see if it sticks. We have, we're riding away, we don't know where it's gonna take you. You know, and I think it's wonderful that you're doing that as you ride this wave. And thinking, I mean, I know that it's difficult because you guys are looking at this in purely evangelistic form. Has there been somebody who's like, hey, how can I take a next step with your church? Has that happened yet where somebody's turned a corner on this? It's not yet. We've had several that have come into that, you know, I went back through last night and saw several. My grandmother passed away. I'm interviewing for a scholarship and I'd love prayers for that. Several different comments of that nature. The first one popped out today. What was it? Last night? Remember the first one punch out recently? That was, hey, I'm in Trinity, and I love seeing this in my in my for you page, which was really cool. Trinity Tampa is literally like fifteen minutes away from where we are. So super excited. Now, of course, I had, I did open our messaging option. I was a little hesitant to do that. I didn't know what would come through. And I did message her and just say, hey, do you have a church home? You know, if you do, you know, she hadn't responded yet. But if you do, great, awesome, don't you know, a colony to leave there. But if you don't, need for you to be part of our whole family. So I think tiny there's twofold. Listening to those comments and then responding to them if possible, it's going to be very, very integral. Both has to receive a comment or a somebody asked for prayer. And so, and I haven't done this yet, but I think the next step in our journey right now, I've just been commenting, we're praying for you right now, please follow up with us, or you know, we'd love to hear how this situation turns out. But is to send them a message with a prayer, like literally what I'm praying written out for them. I think that would be incredibly, incredibly powerful. So I think that's kind of the next step in this engaging these folks up in this sphere. I've had a lot of conversation, and it's funny, she brings that up. I was having this conversation with somebody meeting with yesterday, and they're distrusting of the carried about just released a podcast and they're...

Were they bringing it up with how the guest that was on Newhouse podcast was saying that, you know, he's come full circle on online church and how it can't actually be an online thing because, you know, how can you? When it comes down to it, how can you really buy somebody a cup of coffee online and that type of thing? Which I think is completely spurious. I understand what he's saying and I understand the full circle he's come on, but at the same time, I grew up as an online gamer and some very good friends of mine that I still talk to, I live across the country and that's just from playing, you know, World of Warcraft when I was younger. So all about to say what we were talking about with this idea about the prayers and stuff—we were actually talking about it in the Church Online platform that we use provided by Life Church and all that. We stream into that and there's a live prayer button and that's become more and more active over the last couple of months as we've started to put a little bit more engagement into our chat room and say, "Hey, all you gotta do is click that like prayer button," and people honestly feel like they're being prayed for because as I'm sitting there typing out prayers or I see even that she was handling it up—she's sitting there praying this prayer that she's typing out—and people are more apt in today's day and age to receive that as, "Hey, there's an actual person there that's caring for me and loving on me," then I think they would have maybe five years ago. And so the idea of an eighteen-year-old or whoever this was in Trinity—I'm saying eighteen because that's just that they're on the driver got out of my head—this person in Trinity, if she, if Jessica can open a conversation and open a dialogue with these prayer requests and actually pray for those people, how much more are they going to feel the Spirit of God upon them even just through a text chat then five years ago? I think we're in an interesting environment right now. I'm interested to see where it goes.

So do you guys remember? I think it was a Steven Curtis Chapman song—"Let Us Pray"—hmm, Baptist church I saw was like on repeat for us. So but I think in this day and age people say, especially in the church, "Great, I'll be praying for you." Do they really? Are they really? Didn't you know, follow that through with you know, sending me positive vibes and like there's a whole culture of, "Yes, I'm sending you positive things," but until we actually do it, it doesn't mean anything to them. We may be going back to pray for them, but if they don't know it, the value's not there for them. And I think it was really uncomfortable the first time I did online campus and somebody puts in the prayer—was like, "I don't even know what to do because I am not pastoral background. That's not it." So typing out a prayer was strange and it was for me. I don't know on the receiving end how that feels or what that feels like, but it was weird for me. But doing it, it caused me to stop and pause to think about, "Okay, am I praying? What am I praying? What they would want prayed for?" You know, "Am I really directing my prayers in the way that, you know, am I really representing their request accurately?"

Yeah, it's not surprising that a guy in going back to the Newhouse podcast—a man who is very popular in context and very knowledgeable in church growth—is not going to identify with church online. Yeah, because church online is, I think, it's a whole other thing. And the thing that really struggles for church growth is therefore church online is that we're trying to get these organizations that are used to in church growth first to identify with this completely separate model. You just prayed with somebody online by typing into a text box in a web browser. And the person who's watching, utilizing the Church Online platform, is engaging with that and receiving that. You are connecting on a spiritual level and making a difference in that person's life. And none of that is reconcilable by an organization that's counting butts and seats as the model for success.

Oh, you know, a lot of the tensions that you're even like trying to figure out in context of TikTok—like TikTok for a church growth organization—it's not gonna, you can't reconcile that. It's kind of like your communications director saying, "Hey, just you know, don't waste a lot of time on it," okay? Because at the end of the day, the metrics to try to figure out, "Okay, was this a success? Did it get butts in seats? Did it get people into the next steps?" Like that, it's hard to reconcile that because the platform is so young.

Yeah, right, right. The numbers do help and they give you the context for it, but really I think it's going to come when we find that those people that maybe they're physically here, maybe they're not, but they start connecting with our online campus. They join in and say, "Hey, I'm John TikTok," or we, you know, what the conversations, the messages even within TikTok—when those start to show results of life change, I think that's gonna be our—it's not a number and that's what specific, but that's gonna be our proof in the pudding, if you will. That's gonna be the, "Okay, this is working. We're really reaching people and people are really seeing Jesus," you know, in what we're hosting.

The thing that I love about all of this is that it's a great way to—one, we've got to ask ourselves, "What is the real mission?" and two, "How are we officially accomplishing that?" Because you guys are repurposing content. What's more efficient than that? Like, it's not like you are spending a draft. So I would all of the videos that we had done in the last six, eight months and I just uploaded them as a draft so they're all sitting there in this bucket. All I have to do is make the, you know, create a caption for them to push out. That's it.

Really, if a church is looking to move in this direction, even if it's just as an experiment, you know, there's a lot of really cool features. TikTok is really cool because you can even in the draft you can already put in the caption. I didn't happen to do that. You can set up the hashtags and all of that in the caption. You can set the cover photo—so the photo that people will see when they're scrolling through—so you can set all of that, have it in there. You do have to manually push it, obviously. There's no scheduler for TikTok yet, but I mean, I can't look. There will be one day, maybe. HootSuite has integration later. It'd be great.

All right, so HootSuite, if you're listening, you know, make a note. And we, we get a cut to prove we're teaming. Oh yeah, we're teaming all this right now. We're gonna mail a spot that's ourselves. Please do. Awesome.

So this has been a bit a lot of TikTok, which which is awesome. Where, where are you guys? How are you doing YouTube? Like, what? There are some takeaways from that. What successes have you seen in that area?

Well, okay, so with two lanes of YouTube right now—three technically, but one of them is my own personal one—so the first, the two church lanes we have our regular Bay YouTube page and it doesn't have a whole lot of followers. Maybe 300, maybe less than that, maybe 400. Not a whole lot for a church our size. So that is, you know, through Stream Monkey we stream services to Church Online platform to Facebook and to YouTube and it's just a way to kind of catch all. And then on Mondays, either she or it's usually you, go in and chop up the sermon and just make sure it's there with a hashtag live or something. "Hey, this is a live service. Go look at it." And that provides long-form content. It also is a laying the main church page is also a landing place for a lot of our short-form stuff. So we're doing Bible stories with our curriculum developer who's this amazing lady named Lynn. We're using it for what stories of care and things like that.

Yeah, anytime that there's a story that's shown weekend in our weekend message, I generally like to share that on our social media, YouTube included. So that's a two to three minute video that tells the story of somebody here in our church. So we just recently did a care week—basically is what we called it—and we had five different stories for five different days. It sounds like every single day I posted a new care story. It was how they were reached via the care ministry or how serving on a care team has impacted their lives. So those stories are there. We've got some of our kids ministry stuff there as well. It kind of lived there before I came on board and that's the milestone. So the things that they thought, the presentation, those kinds of steps that kids take through the kids ministry process—those are all live there. And I had different playlists for them. But yeah, I mean, every Monday I come in and I change the title because it's just a big blood stream or whatever Stream Monkey pushes through. I change it to the title of the message, you know, whose to be spoken. I always put hashtag live because that's how our executive director of creative pulls all those reports for the actual live audience views. And so there's bad lane. So that's the main church visibility lane. And then we have a separate YouTube page for our worship team and Bammo Worship is becoming a thing and it's been a thing for a little bit, for a couple years. They've been recording music and recording albums and all this, but recently—so what, back in March, maybe back in March—they did a gigantic worship. It was the kind of the first real genesis of this type thing. And this is, you know, every church in the last fifteen years, I've every big church in the last fifteen years has done an album and all that's been done special for art for our church. So I'm special for our congregation, special for particularly my family because my brother and sister are kind of leads in the worship area. So for us it's been great. That for the church it's been even more edifying because now they're able to chop all these songs up. We're releasing them one by one every two weeks or so. It goes up on Spotify. It goes up through YouTube and then it goes into we're into Apple Music is probably. And then through YouTube we're just cutting in these videos and we've got an amazing videography team and you know everything's getting mixed down and it looks real professional and we push that out and there's big promotion than hoorah and festivals and all that behind each single that goes out. But we're also, and this and she can speak more to this, we're putting money behind that worship page specifically because worship music is huge, obviously. It's one of the most searched Christian things on YouTube, Christian sites. You know, the rise of Bethel and Jesus Culture could be intimately tied to the rise of YouTube as well. I can sit here and make a case for that. I'm not going to, but that there is that case. And so I don't know how much money we've been throwing at it, but enough. I don't know. I do not create the ads. Our video guys really kind of wanted to lean into the YouTube all of that and it's not my area of expertise. I don't mind learning, but if you want to give it a try, and so he's really been leaning into it. He's promoting specific videos as the suggested video after you watch something. So and I don't, I don't, I've never seen the back side so I don't know. There's criteria that you give it and you know I'm sure there is criteria that you give it to then you know it's gonna follow something of a light content. It's not gonna follow something that's super inappropriate. I don't know, maybe it should. The most recent video that got released but two Fridays ago has upwards of fifty or sixty thousand views on it already and it's jumped. It's jumped hundreds of subscribers. We're over a thousand, well over a thousand. I think so you're doing it on a separate page organizationally. Why not do it on the church pages as well? So that's an...

Interesting, interesting question. And I raised that as well because that was created before I was here, that split. I'm just actually probably before this, the split was there before me. And so I have operated in this space of like, our students have an account of their own. Do they really need one of their own? So our, but when I came on board, there were multiple accounts, all these things. So we've really tried to curtail that down because if you're, if you're throwing this, you know, if you're pushing out content on ten different places with these little teeny-tiny audiences, your reach is obviously less.

But if you've got in place, and so I would say we're doing that because it is before we arrived. I think ideally it would be a conglomeration. If a church is looking to do something like this, that it would be one channel, all of that. You have a playlist that would be your music stuff. Now I do have a playlist on our main page that reflects the videos that they post it as well. So we kind of circularly point that. Yeah, that's good. If I'm putting on the online campus via church online hats, if I'm putting on the church online hat, now I'm thinking, okay, well, if I can use these paid music ads to get them to subscribe to the main campus, to the main feed, and then from there funnel them into next steps or something like that. So yeah, that would be ideal. And you know, of course, everything's a work in progress, right? When you come on, you know, and Andy, you've been there for months, even Jessica, two years. Like I know that that's it's a slow process sometimes to work through.

Fun stories and involving myself where, um, I came on. I was working for another church and I'd been there like six months, and the executive pastor called me in and said, "Hey, Jeff, you're doing a great job changing culture around here, and we never really thought that you'd be able to change it as fast as you are. So thanks for doing a great job. But if you make another woman cry over something, you know, if I hear about that, you're fired."

Oh, nice. Yeah, so sometimes, you know, valuing people in the process and going slowly is better than just cramming change down there. Yeah, yeah, but that's completely separate podcast. And I actually loved working there. Um, so it was a great church.

What are your next steps? So you're doing the thing with YouTube and pushing in that direction. You're doing the thing with TikTok. Three months from now, six months from now, like where do you see yourself going with these platforms?

Boy, the interesting thing is that, and this is a quick little inside baseball story. When Jessica made the TikTok page, we actually had a conference like three days after that, and I was helping lead worship at the conference and up and do kind of set up and tear down, about an hour or so away from here. And she came up and she's like, "Hey, I'm doing this TikTok thing." And I was like, "I'll help you, whatever you need. Like, let me know. I'll, uh, this is fantastic." And I made some short little crappy little video, and it was fine. But the, so it's been it's been kind of this seat of our pants type stuff until really the last two weeks or so when she and I met last Monday in my office and said, "Okay, let's codify this a little bit. Hey, I need you to do this. I'll take care of this," et cetera, et cetera.

I think once we figure out the follow-up aspect to TikTok, once we start deriving a little bit more conversational tools out of it, like she said she just opened up the conversation stuff like last week, maybe? Yeah, the messaging. You have to be able to connect it to an actual phone number. It has to have text messaging. So we have a Google number that was how I was able to open all those things up for us. But otherwise, you can't message people. Yeah, yeah.

So I think the, if we can continue to work the conversational tools and then work them depending on where they are, but I'm a bit biased and I have a ministry that would love to reach people all over the country and all over the world, and it is doing so. I think our best bet is to start to funnel them to the online campus simply because of the time investment that is not needed for somebody to log into a website and join us in a service or join us in on Facebook page, you know, our on a Facebook group, that type of thing. I think that could be the largest next step that we take.

I think to get there though, we need to open those conversations and whatever avenue possible. And so that's gonna take. She says she doesn't have a pastoral heart, but she definitely had a pastoral leading, which is a pastoral heart. And so that takes a pastoral heart to really reach out and say, "Hey, I am praying for you. I do care for you." Once people can feel that, I think the ball starts rolling a little bit more downhill.

Yeah, absolutely. And I would say in the next couple of months, one of the things that I'd like to explore, once you hit a thousand followers on TikTok, you it opens up the door for a lot, kind of like the, so I clap on a Mr. Right now, this features unlocked for us, which is a really cool thing. So does that mean that we live stream one of our services? The difficult technical thing is, okay, great, we're gonna put it somewhere, but how do we comment back with people? And like the logistics of that are gonna be interesting. But it may be something to explore. This, you know, what is a live service look like on TikTok?

Now, there are two other gentlemen that are doing what they call TikTok church, literally TikTok church. They do music, they have a word, and then they pray for people. There's a guy that does it at seven o'clock Central Time, and he does it every single week. So it's happening kind of. I do think that we're on the forefront of it. There are other churches that, was one of the questions at our communication director, actually say, "What are other churches doing? Whatever kinds of content are they doing?" And some of them, and I found one church in particular that is posting videos, but they have the comments turned off.

Hmm, and I was like, "What? Why? That's death. Why are you here? You're wasting are you racing somebody's time that's posting videos?" So there are other pastors out there that are on there, but he does the same thing we're doing. He's repurposing videos from their message series on TikTok. So I would say some curated content, so some content that's specifically for TikTok, whether we're using the fun new sounds, putting a spiritual twist on it, that that would be fun. The hard part is that those sounds are popular for about thirty-seven seconds. By the time that we see they're popular, we come up with an idea or work with the videographer to get it shot, it's probably not popular. So that's, you know, we're not compromising quality, but it may be something that we look at. You know, let's create a couple of original content videos that may be shot just with phone, and they're not shot with the big fancy cameras, so that we can experiment to see if they were valuable.

I do think the live option is something that we should look into. You know, we've never, we've not done a live on there yet. Unfortunately, the videos disappear once you're done with them. They don't live anywhere. So being able to go back and pull and converse with those people, I'm not sure how that would look. But I think those are two things that we need to look towards.

Finally enough, I'm doing, I'm teaching the class tonight on campus here, and I'm doing just setting my computer up Facebook live and then setting my phone up and doing Instagram live or just my own personal one for the teaching. So I almost wonder if we can't try something like that, just to do an hour-and-a-half class just to see what happens. I mean, it might not be the best entry point, especially for TikTok. Nobody wants to sit there and listen to me talk about Gideon for an hour and a half. But who knows?

No, yeah, I mean, I love the idea of experimenting with some of this stuff. He's just setting up a camera with a tripod. Part of him is even trying to figure out, okay, how can I gain like computer access to the phone so I can be typing on my laptop screen? I'm like, I know there's like software SDK stuff I think they can do some of that. And forgive me for putting all my technical hat on, but I've already been down that road. There's a, there's an Android emulator that I'm almost wondering, like, how can we bust that open and start using some of these tools?

Yeah, service and then also be interacting. Absolutely. I think those tech items are extremely important. Yeah, I started to be a smart. I can be like, "Android, what's that?" But Apple and I are having a small feud right now. So it's okay.

Yeah, well, it's a later conversation. So hey, but this has been, this has been really good. I love, I love how you're experimenting. I love how you're being on the edge of a lot of this stuff. And you're right, sometimes when we try to do something professional and try to get to that perfection level, a lot of times, especially in online environment, like the fads already past, the messaging opportunities gone. And so I had a guy on a podcast couple weeks ago, and he was quoting Gary Vee, you know, version one is better than version none.

Yeah, and so whatever you can get, you know, get it, throw it out, throw it out there, and let it be used. Mark Vincey quoted a guy last week that said, "If you're not embarrassed by your first version, you've waited too long. Just get out there and do something with it."

So church out there, while we're trying to figure out, you know, the full completion of how TikTok can fit into your overall strategy, you're missing the opportunity to connect and engage with people. Get out there, do something with it, and figure out how it fits later. You know, the digital world is, yes, people can screenshot things and so forth, but worst case, if it's really bad, you just delete it. Like, even if it implodes and comments go crazy and you can't delete comments on TikTok, you think just goes down this rabbit hole that's not good, you just delete it.

Yeah, you know, and it's even, man, I would, there's a whole other conversation about if bad comments or good comments, how to handle that. A lot of times I've seen that, like the crowd will defend the bad comments. Like they will circle around the wagon. It protects you. You don't even need to protect yourself. So, um, you know, church, get out there and do some things.

Well, Jessica, Andy, that's been a great podcast, and I really appreciate the time. Any thoughts as we're landing the plane here?

Yeah, I think you said it best. Get out there and do stuff. The digital, the fact that as a church, sometimes we get so stuck in, well, our outreach looks like we're gonna have somebody say yes to Jesus, and that we're gonna do this, and then we're gonna have that walk through this class and do that. I think the time has, that's still there, and there's still a necessity for that. But I think also the time has come upon us where we need to be quicker, more agile, and we need to be less of a cruise ship and more of a speedboat as we're turning things around.

Well, cool. Hey, thank you, Jessica, Andy. Thank you for being on. Love what I'm hearing from Bay Hope, and looking forward to hearing more in the coming days, weeks, and months. I'll be, uh, I will have to, how do I find you on TikTok? Do I search for Bay Hope and you just pop up?

It's at Bay Hope Church. It's like other social platforms.

All right, so I'm gonna download my account. I'll get my phone set up. I've got the account at dear feds, Jeffrey backwards. But I will, I'll take the time to reinstitute it on my phone and keep an eye on what's happening at Bay Hope Church on TikTok.

It's five o'clock. We'll be the old man on TikTok, the quiet old man over in the corner there.

You go on TikTok. There's an older gentleman that he's been doing like dances from the...

70s, but it's older, and he's doing a huge foments. So there's a place for that. That's what I think I'm learning is that there's a place for everybody. I have no response to that. Okay, hey, so it's been a great podcast for Furry, for Jessica, for Andy, for Ray. I'm Jeff at the Church Digital. Thanks for jumping on, and we'll see you next week. Have a good day.