EP032: CITN & Redefining the Why of Church Online

All right, we got episode 32 of the Church Digital Podcast, and this is gonna be a fun one. This one was recorded live from the CIT in Church IT Network conference. So we've just recently had in Kansas City, Kansas. Yes, we were on the Kansas side of Kansas, not the Missouri side. I checked my phone several times to make sure I didn't work between states throughout the conference, but we were on the Kansas side, and it was a great conference by the way through the Church IT Network. We had 25, 26, maybe 27 breakout sessions strictly designed towards church online and online ministry. It's a phenomenal conference if you've never done it before. If you haven't checked out the Church IT Network as a church tech crew, as online ministry, as church online people, you should definitely check that out.

I led a panel of four at the Church IT Conference specifically discussing how to redefine the why of church online. Joining me on the panel was Tyler Sansom from Church Anywhere/First Capital Christian, no stranger to the podcast. Jason Morris from Westside Family, once again no stranger to the podcast here either. Randy Green, who is actually from Church of the Resurrection, the church where the conference was at by the way, who has a Master's in Divinity and his thesis was specifically written on church online, which I found awesome. And then finally, Jan Tuch Barry from Christ Fellowship. No, it's not the Christ Fellowship in Miami or the one in West Palm Beach. This is the Christ Fellowship in Dallas. Yes, there are a lot of Christ Fellowships here in the church online realm anyway.

The four of us get together, we have a phenomenal conversation with some great questions from the audience to respond to, and it really was just a great panel as together we discussed how to redefine the why of church online. Now, audio here isn't the best quality we've ever done, and we please ask your forgiveness on that, but the quality of this content—maybe not the audio quality, the fidelity, but the quality of the content you're hearing—is awesome. And I personally definitely wanted you all to experience this. So here you go.

My name is Tyler Sansom. I'm from a church in Corydon, Indiana, which I don't expect any of you guys know where that is, but it's around outside of Louisville, Kentucky, and the church is called First Capital Christian Church. But I'm the lead of a ministry called Church Anywhere.

I'm Jen Tuch Barry. I am the online campus pastor at Christ Fellowship in McKinney, Texas, not to be confused with any of the Christ Fellowships all over the other places, and although it's confused all the time. And I have been doing church online for about the last ten years.

Hey, I'm Randy Greene. I'm actually on staff here at Church of the Resurrection. So welcome to Church of the Resurrection. Glad you all can be here. My role here is kind of the lead of all of our digital marketing and engagement. So this is my first time at Church IT Network because I'm in our communications department, not our IT department. And so I'm like expanding the worldview of what I do to be with you all today, but I'm excited. I mean, I also have a Master of Arts and theological studies degree from a seminary here in town. And so what we're talking about today is something that's very close to my heart—this integration of what it is between the digital world and the church world and how those aren't necessarily separate spheres. So yeah, thanks for being here.

I'm Jason Morris. I'm global innovation pastor at Westside Family Church, just about 30 minutes away from here. I oversee the digital expression of Westside Family Church and use it to catalyze global church planting movements around the world.

Awesome. So let's just dive into this thing. So we're gonna redefine the why of church online. First question we're gonna ask and see where we go: Why does your church do church online? Sub-note: It's more than just so some lazy guy can watch church in his underwear, right? I'm hoping, right? I wrote it because that's the conversation I am packed with. I've had pastors say, "Hey, can we not broadcast within like 15 miles of our church because we don't want people to stay at home in their underwear?" Yeah, but there's more to church online than just to let this guy stay at home in his underwear, right? So open for the room: Why do you guys do church online?

Okay, alright. So for me, church online is so important and so primal to what we do because Jesus said go into all the world, and that's what we get to do. So basically, that's it. Cliffnotes, that's it. I believe that Jesus gave us technology as a force multiplier for the gospel, and we need to use it, and we will be held accountable for not using it if we don't. That includes the Internet, including social media, all of technology that Jesus has given us to extend his kingdom. So I would feel really scared for not using it. I'm seriously standing before Jesus one day and he's like, "Dude, I gave you the Internet. You know what you do with it?" So like, for me, that's why we do what we do.

To answer the other part of this question is another conversation, but these guys speak into that. Oh, I will address the lazy guy. Okay, please. Because I think anybody who's been in the online church sphere has heard that come out of somebody's mouth in your leadership at your church. And what we pretty quickly found at our church is that yes, some people are gonna say, "Well, we just felt like being lazy and watching church online in our pajamas." Yes, but that's not the majority. And what we found is for people who cannot get there—whether it's because they have sick kids or they're traveling or whatever the life circumstances that prevent them from walking into the brick-and-mortar—it allows them to stay connected.

The question I feel like equates dress code with laziness, yeah? And we shouldn't. I don't care if you're in your underwear or not. Are you a soul that needs Jesus? Yes. So I don't care what you're wearing. I think the question, the underlying question, is the laziness part of it. And for whatever reason, there is this weird stigma that I don't think is as true today as it could have been five or ten years ago because today, literally, there are people that are intentionally gathering their families and their neighbors, maybe in or not in their underwear, I don't know, but they are there. They are intentionally being missional right where they live. And to say that that's lazy, I think it's an insult to the vision that some people have in using church online.

Let's just say that's successful. Easy is taking the vision of what God had for the church period way out of context, right? It's actually more lazy in some cases to come large and do that to church and do nothing for us. We are an exceptionally small church to be doing online ministry. You don't—you don't think of a church our size doing that. Jason's actually been there. This is the worst possible location for a church. I'm not exaggerating. We are on a dead-end street in a nail neighborhood where everything's been built around us, but we're like way away from the expansion of the town. And the town's only 3,000 anyway. It's like a super small town. So for us, we started doing online ministry because that's where people were. We were in a town where fortunately we're drawing a lot of people from our area, but we figured a lot of other people needed the gospel as well. And so we're doing everything we can to one day look at Jesus and him say, "Well done, good and faithful servant."

Yeah. So in the process of redefining and reshaping what church online is, we really find ourselves maybe reshaping what the word church is, which will get us to the question: How do we define church? Go for it.

So this has been something that's reshaped for us at First Capitol over the last two years. A lot of people for a long time have looked at church from the Acts 2:42 perspective of the gathering and eating together and praying together. And that's a hundred percent what church can be. But I think church started back in Acts 1:8, which is you get the Holy Spirit and it gives you power, and then you go out and be a witness. And I think for a long time we've turned church into something that's very consumeristic because when you meet together and you pray together and you eat together, that's great, but it's filling you. And I think the church was meant to go out and be a witness, and the byproduct of that is this community side of Acts 2:42.

So for me, church is followers of Christ being the witness and spreading the good news, and then the byproduct of that is you have other followers that are doing the same thing. So you have this community and this network of people. And I think that's what church is. I think there's really powerful. And with what you were describing a minute ago of like people coming together in their homes and just being in community in that sense, whether they're in their underwear or not, that is a very much a sense of community to me.

And when I think of church and what it means to be the church, I think, you know, we come to a church building for like an hour or two hours a week or something like that, but I think of the other six days and 22 hours. And to me, that's the real embodiment of the church—what we do when we're not in the building, what we do when we're out in the community and out living the rest of our lives. That is how we be the church.

And so when I think of what it means to be the church, I think of the ways that we're taking what happens in that hour or two, or the ways that we're filled in that time, and the ways we're pouring that back out into the rest of our lives.

So when you say the word church, there are so many definitions. It's a complex word because when Jesus said that was what he was going to build, you find so many different metaphors of that because it's much bigger than just one thing. Sure, you find the church being described as the bride, as a body, as a family, as a body. There's so many different metaphors because not one size fits all, not one word fits all. How expansive the church actually is.

And so when we talk about what is church, immediately most of us think about what is a church service. And I think we need to discern the difference between the two because if we're talking about how to do a church service online, well, we would answer that question very differently. And you know, it's a use your point a lot of times. The church service tries to do all of those things in one event, which I don't know that the passage really says that they did all of those things in one event. Or which could be, you could do it in using different events, different things at different times. It also says they met every day, so maybe there's another way of describing that. But what is true, definitely, is that there is a sense of belonging, there is a sense of family, there is a sense of unity and belonging that can't be denied, whatever metaphor you happen to use. And the church service is just an outpouring of that community.

So if we're talking about what is church, I think first of all we need to do is decide what we're talking about. Are we talking about your service? Are we talking about the church? And if we're talking about the church, then we can talk about the church online, or we can talk about the church service online. And I'm not really clear as to what which one you're gunning for. I'm just stirring the pot like that.

Okay, the endgame is that I would suggest that a lot of churches today define that church by the one hour on Sunday, right? Yes. We talked with you know what staff, at least as I've talked to staffs about, you know, pouring some energy into other things or going away doing something else with that because there's more to a church than just that one hour on Sunday in the physical space. But in our virtual spaces, there are five to ten...

Thousand churches each week that broadcast their services in some context, whether it's Facebook Live, whether it's Chop platform, YouTube, whatever—we're broadcasting the service. But when it comes to, you know, that next piece of doing some sort of a small group of biblical community, disciple-making process, and that, "Oh no, no, discipleship can only exist in physical space. It can't exist virtually," which kind of gets us to, which really segues nicely into this next question of, "What are the perceived weaknesses of church online? How do we answer these weaknesses? How can we enter this weakness? And how is your church going to overcome that?"

I think that a lot of the perceived weaknesses are from people who don't understand church online, chiefly because they've never attended a church online service. I.e., a lot of the leadership who have, they're so focused on what happens in the hour on Sunday, that church online is church light, right? It may or may not count for doing church that week or being part of the church. I think that education is a huge piece of helping people understand that there can be very dynamic discipleship and relationships and deep connection with biblical truth and all of the things that we desire for people to experience when they are a part of our church. All that can happen in the online space if your mind is not stuck in the box, mortar, brick and mortar box.

But what you're describing is a lot of the things that when people talk to me about it, about some of the real weaknesses when you're dealing with just textual communication. But this is not a new problem for church online. We have the same problem that you can find in the Bible when they criticize the Apostle Paul for his letters being harsh, but when he shows up in person, he's real nice, you know? And so that this particular problem of losing information when you use pen and ink or when you use words or text is not a new phenomenon. It's as old as the Bible. In fact, you know, the other criticism is, "Well, people can be anonymous and they can just write whatever." Well, again, this is not a new phenomenon only related to church online. Even in the New Testament, you find the Apostle Paul. "Look, I'm writing in my own handwriting all this other kind of stuff," because there were other people writing in his name that really weren't to him. This is not anything new.

So the whole idea of using anonymity as a problem for church online—well, that's a problem for the church. If you're talking about people missing through textual communication, that's a problem for the church. It's not really a problem for church online. And what I think many times happens with church online is that it surfaces the inherent weaknesses, not of church online, but our predominant model of doing church in general.

So many times people say, "Well, they're just numbers. They're anonymous. Well, how many names? How do you? How many people do you know by name who show up, you know, in your on-site campus? Do you really know?" You know, there's so many other aspects of this that really root down into actually surfacing really wonderful conversations because church online is a force multiplier and it magnifies the good and the bad of whatever you're doing.

So if your discipleship process on-site isn't great, online it's going to make that worse. If your service isn't that great, online is going to make it worse. You know, if your preaching is not that great, online is going to make it worse. But if you do have systems and processes and pipelines that do work well, online it's going to make it better.

So that for me is, yes, church online has weaknesses, but I don't know that they're any more the weaknesses than what church on-site has. And here's the weakness that I think needs to be overcome—a couple of them, actually. One is a proper scorecard. That all of us struggle with with church online because break that down. What's a scorecard? Well, that the metrics of trying to compare what happens online with what happens on-site is it apples to oranges comparison because what happens online, you can measure attention way better than you can measure attendance. But on-site, you measure attendance, but you can't measure attention.

And so what happens is you have like thousands and thousands of people who show up for fifteen seconds, right? That doesn't count. Yet for the person who shows up, puts his butt in the seat, totally ignores everything, and it's like looking at all the cute girls and checking out his fantasy football, and then maybe tunes in for the one time when the pastor says, "If you don't hear anything else, hear this," you know, says it for thirty seconds. That thirty seconds of attention that does count, when all the rest of it is inattention. Does it? So you're measuring different things to begin with. And to get those two scoreboards to jive together, I think is a weakness and a challenge for all of us online because of the different types of scoreboards that we're working with. That's one thing.

The other thing that I think is a weakness that I see on most of what happens with church online as it relates to comparing to church on-site is the lack or the weakness of kids ministry. Now, that's not to say that that's really a problem because three hundred years ago, nobody had kids ministry either, right? Somehow the church survived, right? And so for the family who's in their underwear with their PJs with other kids that's trying to do church as a family, integrated as a family, and doing that church online, that says more to me for the parents and their intentionality of what they're trying to do with their kids and taking ownership as the spiritual leader of their household. That says more to me for that family. And if we don't have kids ministry in the way we have kids ministry on-site, I don't know if that's a weakness or not, but it is an apples to oranges comparison.

Well, I mean, at minimum it's an opportunity, right?

Right. Now we, as a church expressing ourselves online, have a responsibility to empower that parent. I got two kids, nine and eleven. I would love for a church to empower me with resources to allow me to better disciple my kids rather than, you know, shuffling them off to children's church to enable me to be the spiritual father, you know, in that environment would be awesome. So if you're writing that down, take a note: Jeff Reed wants help to disciple. Thank you, sir. I appreciate that note.

Hey, so let's segue into this with that. What is your physical church's vision and how does church online help meet that vision? This is hard, and some of these may be a work in progress, but we get a little bit here into the strategy part of this, right? So church, a physical church has a vision. Your church has a vision. What role does church online play?

Our church's vision is to help people find and follow Jesus. Super not original, and a lot of people have that. But the thing that we've done is on-site and online in the net at our micro sites, we have this linear discipleship pathway. So one side of this is the find side, so that's how strategies to help people find Jesus. And we want to take someone who's just looking to like getting to know us, then there's a conversion line in the middle. So at some point we hope to have like pop the question and they decide to make Jesus Lord their life and they really are, you on one knee for that, like, "Yeah, yeah, it's just we do this," and there's like the Jesus heading the land. So you've got Cougars become first line, and then you have someone who's digging deeper and then all in.

So get the follow side. But we've been very intentional of having a strategy that like one, if this is church here and this is church anywhere, which is what we call our church online, they can intersect at any point. So through this little break out on this, by the way—yeah, Jason and I will be talking about this a little bit later today—but this pathway has really focused us on helping people meet the vision of finding and following Jesus no matter where they enter that timeline and no matter if they're in person or we have a virtual relationship with them.

By the way, to give you guys context, he's in a town of three thousand. But how many do you have a church? About twelve hundred. Wow. And how many are in church anywhere? Physical bodies in church anywhere?

So these are micro sites somewhere around eight hundred.

Okay, so put that in perspective with a town of three thousand. So and then in church online is a different category for a private? Yeah. Okay. It's amazing what happens when you take church to the people instead of making the people come to church.

All right, so anybody else want to chime in here? Church lines the new vision?

I we just tightly aligned our online vision to the physical church vision. I think it should be that way. So for us at Westside, it's loving Jesus, becoming like Jesus, and sharing Jesus. And what we do online is helping people love Jesus, become like Jesus, and share Jesus online. We kind of use that as a qualifier, but I don't even think it's necessary. That's what we do.

For us at church in the resurrection, our big kind of purpose is to build a Christian community where non-religious and nominally religious people are becoming deeply committed Christians. And so, you know, there's a lot you can unpack with that, but for me, the real like the real power behind online church is the idea that we can develop that community of deeply committed Christians. We can ask people to go deeper and deeper within their Christian faith at any point throughout the day. Like they're up throughout the week. So it's this thing like it permeates their lives. So instead of asking them to come to a service for an hour once a week, we can throughout the week be a presence in their lives, you know, asking you, "How can we be praying for you? What do you have going on that we can be in ministry with you?" and just those kind of things. So it's just the perpetual access that we have to continue to work with people to become more deeply committed Christians.

I love that, which segues excellently into the next question: "I'm broadcasting my services online. Later, isn't that enough?"

Well, yeah, if church were just a church service, yeah? And some churches aren't like that, and if that's all it is, then fine. But most people I talk to, most pastors I talk to, while that one hour can tends to consume a lot of their time, all of them would say that the church is much bigger than that. It's not just a church service because if it is just at your service, we should all be in our underwear and watch TV on Sunday morning if that's all it is, which goes back to the why.

I mean, if your church is there, then you're not—you're doing something wrong with the church online. It's like, for example, you get everybody have a cell phone like in your pocket right now? Okay, I'm assuming you don't only have that cell phone in your pocket at ten forty-five on Sunday morning for an hour, correct? And so like, if we can't help people find and follow Jesus in our case for the rest of the hours of that week with things that you literally have in your pocket, then we're not fulfilling the vision of our church. That's not entering the church. We're just simply doing something because other churches are doing it on Facebook.

I love this. "My pastor says that church online is wrong because church is only in physical space." Exclamation mark, exclamation mark, exclamation mark. By the way, I hear this a lot. Hebrews ten twenty-five: "Do not abandon meeting together." So how somebody out there is thanking this, I guarantee somebody's had this conversation with leadership. How do we respond in a situation like that?

Give a personal release. Last week, two weeks, two Saturdays ago, I preached a funeral of a lady named Betty. And the first time I ever saw her in person was in the casket. So if you can tell me that I was not meeting with her because I was only talking to her online, that would discredit the fact that like she had said I was her pastor and had requested knowing she...

Was sick, had requested me to do that funeral, and so there's a real argument to be made that our culture is arguing past the point of community only being thanks to face. Jeff, I would consider you a friend, and we've only seen each other first of twice ever, but because of FaceTime, because of constant communication, I believe absolutely that we've met before besides the two times in physical space. And so I don't think there's a whole huge argument for that one. I think that's just pastors being a little behind the culture.

I also think that we have to consider even Church Online has morphed so much over the last ten—I don't know how long his life church been doing. I feel like they're like years, but I feel like over the last ten years, even what a lot of us who've been in that space has as morphed as culture has changed in technologies and moving so fast right now. And people who are not even willing to try to keep up are gonna miss the boat. We are raising digital natives right now. That's all they know. They don't know a world without it. And so if we are not figuring out—and I think what you are doing, we need to go have lunch or something because I really want to talk about what you're doing—but what you're doing in it's not Church online, it's the church online, and that's the key right there. That's awesome.

I was just gonna ask the question. It's been said that Generation Alpha and the Millennials are the first generation that may never enter physical church doors. We have a purely digital. I'm curious how churches ostrich. They're already sand. It depends on the church. I think there's a movement. There's a really interesting conversation I don't want to have it here, but what would it look like if a church lived only digital space? How can a church move away from a weakened service-oriented ministry plan to a discipleship-oriented empower the people to be the pastor plan and become a much more multiplication, duplication process of enabling not the pastor to be the hero of the story but the people to be the hero of the story? And like I said, if you're interested in that conversation, tomorrow I think there's like a micro location conversation panel I'm leading. We're going to get into that over there because that is a completely separate conversation.

But at the end of the day, you're right. The Millennials, Millennials are—I do think that the generations underneath that, I think there's an opportunity to engage a little more. Millennials have been damaged by ISIS worse. Yeah, I mean, you're a lot more honest with your lack of sleep, but I do think there's an opportunity for the church to turn it around. And what's interesting is I think you need different models to reach different people. And I think the existing model, the physical church, will continue to exist and will continue to be successful. I do think we need another model, and I'm looking forward to seeing that model develop because we need to do something else to reach other people. He can't cram everybody into this physical really fast.

I dress that question, and Randy said something about it earlier about how online we have a unique opportunity to engage people more within the service. So that's really, really made my church rethink the way that we do physical church as well, along with the micro sites that we have and things like that. But three weeks ago we launched our very first—I'm going to loosely call it a millennial service, but we would never tell our people that—oh, but we tried to take what we've learned through micro sites and the fact that we can engage people throughout the service online and see what that would look like to build a service around that type of community in person. And it's been unreal how quickly the growth has happened. So this week alone, we've almost matched the amount that is in the regular auditorium within this new type of service.

It's literally like table groups. You do worship together, but like there's a break every ten minutes in the sermon. We have four minutes of discussion about what you're talking about. A lot of other elements I'm not going to go into, but people are always going to crave community, period. We are designed to have community regardless of your generation. Our job as leaders in this field, though, is to figure out ways that we can implement strategies to reach different generations with community.

I will say I think going back to the question about the strengths of church online: sure, we live in a society that has no margins anymore. Yes, we are planned to the hilt. You've got most families who both parents work. They are without their children for nine, ten plus hours a day. They pick them up from wherever they are—soccer, school, daycare, whatever. They come home, they feed them, they maybe have an hour of time, and then they're putting their kids to bed. And traditional church is saying, "Oh, by the way, come to a life group," or "Oh, by the way, come to this class at the church," or "Oh, by the way, fill in the blank." And people are voting with their lack of presence.

And so is it not our job as the church to give them the opportunity to still engage in biblical community, get the teaching and the discipleship and the knowledge that they need to live out Christian lives wherever they are for all of those hours a day? And should we not be looking at the digital space to do that? Because otherwise, people are going to be missing it because they literally do not have the time.

I look at this question when you're talking about leadership pretty much the way that I would engage the leadership in a conversation like this is to pick whatever century they happen to be familiar with. Like, honestly, it's like, okay, if then I asked him the question, you know, "Did you call your mom on Mother's Day?" And then most of the time they'll say yes. And I'm like, "Did your mom feel slighted that you didn't show up in person?" You know, because that's his century of technology he's probably familiar with, right? Well, she might be. She might be like, "You didn't show up." Now, is showing up better? Absolutely. But does that keep you from calling her? No. And so it's no different than what we see in Second John, where he says, "I'm writing with pen and ink now, and I'm not gonna write you everything because I want to come and visit you face-to-face so that our joy may be full." Well, that didn't stop him from writing the letter. So he's not saying that everybody knows face-to-face is better, right? I'm not saying that it's not, but that can't stop us from doing something right.

And that's if we're going to be so purist about it, then we're not going to do a lot of things. So if again, you know, the guy that's like, "If only your physical meeting works," ask him if he's ever prayed with someone over the phone. And if he has, well, did that count? You're physically together, and then there's this other passage in scripture where the Apostle Paul says, "I can't be with you, but I'm with you in spirit." Well, what does that mean? We say that word all the time, and I honestly believe that the spiritual realm, the Holy Spirit, transcends time and space in ways that we don't understand. And if you've ever been online and prayed to someone online and ministered to someone online that's across the world, you know exactly what I'm talking about because it transcends all of that. When you are connecting at that spiritual level, and you know, if you haven't experienced it, it's hard to explain. But sometimes if you pick the right generation or the right century of technology, then they start to get it.

I am going to shift a bunch of stuff because I really want to have this question. I may come back. The year is 2029. Know what is church online look like? Okay, I think one of the things that we don't think about a lot is that we are very young in what the digital world looks like. Like, this shift that has been brought about through social media and things like that is like this seismic shift in our culture. Like, I've heard a lot of people compare the Internet to like the printing press and how it revolutionized the distribution of information, but I don't think that's big enough to describe what we're actually seeing. What we're actually seeing is like the cultural change that happened when written language was created. Like, when we go from an oral culture to a literate culture, that transforms the way that we think about time because we can record events that don't have to be communicated interpersonally. They can be recorded and they can last for centuries. It's just the way that we think about relationships because we can communicate with people who don't live near us by writing them letters and things like that. So like, the transformation that happened when we went from an oral culture to a literate culture is, I think, very similar to the culture change that's happening that we see right now, and we are participants in the very, very young infancy of this change.

And so when we look at 2029, that sounds like it's so far away. That's ten years away, but that is nothing in the amount of time that's going to take to really live into what this new culture looks like. And so I'm not really answering the question here, but I think that it's important for us to recognize the scale of this. It's going to take multiple, multiple decades. You know, I like, I'm thinking a hundred years from now we might have a good grasp of what it means for us to exist within a physical and digital context simultaneously. And so until then, there's ticked off. Until then, there's who else? Um, I think I don't know what it's gonna look like. I didn't know like three years ago, but I believe that it'll be more important than we can imagine.

So if we're looking back at Acts like five, so this is after ten, aghast, and like after everything's kind of going well, the first believers they would meet and Solomon's colonnade. And I think the first says something along the lines of they would meet there, and even though they were well regarded, no one would dare meet with them. So what that tells me is that they used to meet someplace, and even though they were welcomed, rounded once I started to grow, people resented them. But then the Bible says right after that that their numbers grew every single day. So people didn't want to come join them, but still their numbers grew.

And I feel like we live in a culture where we're consistently growing into this resentment. Face nothing that you see culturally, you would say, "Hey, let's lift the church up." Anything you see that, let's listen them even more. Eventually, we're going to reach the state of persecution to where people would not dare join us in person, but because of our online avenues that in the baby stages, that's gonna be so much more important to help fulfill the part of being added to daily we see in Jason. I'm sure you see it a lot more than I. Oh yeah, overseas already happened. That is how the gospel is being fulfilled overseas is through the internet. And I think that's coming here. Look, what we're doing is so important because of that.

I would be surprised if first stop, you know, wouldn't search them. What does church online look like in 2029? I think it just looks like the church because it will just take over the church because I don't think there will be having these discussions in 2029 about church online because it will be the primary expression of church, and the secondary expression is, "Oh, when do you guys get together? Every now and then? When's your meetup?" That will be the question. Whereas that's what I think is going to be happening where we will be living in the online space that we already do anyway. We'll be living in the online space, and our sense of—

Identity, belonging, and family will be technologically leveraged. That we will occasionally get together for meetups to have fun and parties and stuff like that. That won't be happening every Sunday. They'll be happening once a quarter, once a year, kind of like how we're doing this gathering right now. And this is a lot of fun and I really enjoy it. And this is kind of, we are beta testing what I think the church will become. Because you, we're all in the Facebook group together. We all message each other and Slack and we all, you know, text each other and all that kind of stuff all throughout the year. And then we get together and give each other a hug. That's what church will be.

Yeah, and here's the tension though. Is we have to be okay with that. Yeah, we can't push back like we currently do. There's so much resistance to church online. That's why there's like three questions about it in this panel. But until we get to the point where we're okay with it, we will not be able to effectively do ministry well. I think they will become okay with it once it just dies.

Yeah, it's gonna be a hard process. Or it gets regulated out of exam. I mean, like, put some numbers on this just for kicks. Three hundred twenty-five thousand evangelical churches in America today. That's rough. Maybe it's more than that. Arguably five to ten, maybe twelve thousand are broadcasting each week. Like, that's a massive transitionary shift because the majority are saying it's not acceptable. I agree with you, Jason. I just think it's gonna be an ugly transition from 2019 to 2029 where that's not the standard.

I'm working with a pastor and this is a true story. Pastor up in New England area. And he is in the process, thousand person church, New England. He sees up maybe a hundred twenty a week. He's got this massive campus. Nobody comes there. Nine his numbers. He tells me ninety, ninety percent of the people in his area don't want to come to church. They don't even like church. There's very strong biases against Christianity. He's in the process of wanting to sell off his buildings, wanting to go down to a completely digital microsite model, set up a broadcast center somewhere to broadcast a message out and empower people not to come sit in the pew but to go out and to do church in the homes like that. That's the model this guy's come up with entirely on his own, basically out of survival. Because if that doesn't happen, he can't afford the mortgage and the maintenance on this facility and he's gonna have to shut down. And it's gonna be a scary, you know, I always hate to be the prophetic guy because I'm really not, but it's gonna be a scary transition in the next five to ten years as we start to feel some of that persecution. As we start to, oh my gosh, church no longer has tax-exempt status. Oh man, we got to pay property tax on all these massive buildings and campuses. Like, it's there's going to be a world of pinch and the church is going to feel itself transitioning more and more to a digital expression of worship. I mean, I can't get my head around what that looks like.

Yeah, yes sir. DJ, great point. I think that to just speak into the regulations of and people broadcasting and things like that, it really goes back to what is church? Because like, if in our definition, if church is really going out on being a witness for the gospel, doesn't matter if you can broadcast your service or not. If you can go out and use whatever tools available to spread the gospel, then like, they can regulate all they want with it, a broadcast, but you still have the gospel to fall back on. But when we take our church online vision and make it all about a weekend service, we run the danger of becoming regulated. I think there's so the world around us is already trying. They're working to figure out what it means to create a community within an online context. I mean, that's what Facebook is. On Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, even, I don't understand TikTok. Tinder. Like, they're working. I mean, you start online. Like, they're like, what, what terrifies me is that we, the church, might say we don't want to be a part of figuring out what the what Christian community looks like. We don't want to be a part of shaping community within an online context. And that's like the resistance that I feel right now. We're saying we don't think it can happen, so we're not going to do it. But the world is gonna do it. And so are we gonna be voices in that shaping of what community is within an online context? And I think we have to drop the mic.

Yeah, what questions? I mean, at this point I'll open it up.

Oh yeah, please. So as I think it sort of has to do with your question about what to find who you are. Oh, I'm Daniel Herron. I lead a totally online youth blood church in robotics. Yes, in Roblox, which is a virtual video game. We're totally online and entirely young people. So they answer your questions well about engaging Gen Z and Millennials and what the church might look like. I think as one of the few Gen Z people here, part of what we do online is focusing on reaching people where they're at. And I think that's something that you guys have voiced is really important. But as we, there are so many churches out with it, like it's in my denomination. I'm part of the Presbyterian Church and we don't nominate. I can't think of a single church that broadcasts those services like in the denomination. We just, there's no no pressure or like encouragement to go online. So I think a lot of the churches that are going online right now are churches that yes, don't necessarily have as a nomination and supporting them like financially, or they are losing members rapidly. And I think a part of this, like in a longer churches, I'm assuming that you're losing members in general or losing young members. And I think a big portion of this, and you guys said too, was meeting people where they're at and not just going on Facebook and live-streaming your services. There because young people are on Facebook. Some people, some younger people are leaving Instagram. Like, the church is so slow to reach like where people are at. They don't know where people are getting. People on Snapchat and they're on almost a TikTok. Younger people things like Fortnite. Like, I don't know. There's no churches there. But like, if I'm in history were to like somehow we reach out to them and like, there's just these major platforms that are hubs for young people and finding ways to, you know, reach people there. And I didn't like, like, necessarily do ministry there, but if you're trying to market your church or like get people to find out and come out in person or whatever it looks like, just actually having a presence, I think is, yeah.

I think that there's an interesting opportunity. If you look at church not as the one hour on Sunday and you can have an existing ministry that it exists on platforms like TikTok, but the goal of being on TikTok isn't to drive them to a church service, virtual or physical. The platform literally restricts that type of communication. And so because it's designed to keep it within, so you're on TikTok, you're engaging with young people to build a relational connection with them to drive them into a discipleship, disciple-making, forming relationship. And this has nothing to do with a service, but there's everything to do with impacting a life so that it can in turn impact another life. And that's where, honestly, when I look at the next ten, fifteen years, twenty years of what church and what church online is, the digital expression of this is going to be much more relational. The strength of online, at least in my opinion, is not the broadcasts of the service. Billy Graham in the nineties broadcast a service, bounced it off thirty-four satellites and literally one message was heard by a billion people across the world. That was thirty years ago. Twenty years ago, whatever the math is, nineties, that's thirty. Right, yeah, thirty. We're there. I appreciate the laughs. Thank you. I mean, I was thirty years ago, right? And he managed to do it, getting a broadcast around the world. That's old news. Being able to relationally connect with somebody on another continent to the point that he's now impacting people in are spreading out and doing things and impacting the gospel in different ways. That's far more attractive, at least to me, in context of what the church can be.

Well, I tell you what, yeah, open up for questions. So what do you got? A service. I personally know, let others answer in a second. I personally think the existing model of church will continue. I think there's gonna be a new model that will come forward. I think you need both models to reach different people. There is a generation, there is a type, there's a personality that will not connect to a big building as much as this underlying thing that we're talking about now. Do you guys have an opinion on that?

Well, we've, you know, a lot of us Gen Z people who've been doing it for the past ten years, you know, that's a ten-year mark. It was the next ten years ago. Yeah, when we started ten years ago, nobody even knew what we were doing. And it was just like, you, you do what? Ten years later, they still don't know what you're doing. There, ten years later, people are like, oh yeah, well do that. Yeah, no big deal. It's ubiquitous. But it's on the verge of becoming the preferred method of doing church. That's the difference. And where before it was like, oh, this is a cool option for like fringe cases, ten years ago, now it's become very commonplace where it's like, if you don't have an online presence or something like that, you're a little bit backwards or maybe, but I don't know, but so whatever that is, it's soon. It's like, well, why not, you know? But because now it's shifting into the preferred method. And what, and that's why I feel like it will in ten years become the primary expression of church.

Any other questions? I just want to encourage everyone. I'm sure we'll talk about more, but doing ministry online when you're reaching people is so much cheaper. So much cheaper. For example, in my church, we reach twenty-four thousand people, seventy countries, been doing for eight years. Further in the first six years, our annual budget was less than three hundred fifty dollars a year. I mean, there was no personnel, but like, the total operating cost was so little. So I just, my encourage you guys with that. It's a big, like, it's a lot of work, but it can be done. And it's, yeah, don't let your financial person talk you out and saved through expensive pushback on that.

Yes, ma'am. Any, all one take a crack. Well, I think, okay, like, let's say future, future. It wouldn't surprise me if we all just end up with some kind of blockchain identity so that it becomes less of a factor altogether because everybody is going to be known and they want to be. The problem is today people are creeped out by all of the weird marketing and the ugly side of identity. When in all reality, if you're gonna advertise to me, I would rather have a targeted advertisement anyway. It advertised to me about something I care about, not all this stuff that I don't, right? Don't give you a Victoria's Secret. I don't care about that, you know? Or at least I should. So the point, the point I'm making is is that I, that we will have this ubiquitous identity that will translate across the social fabric of which we live. And by that, everyone will be known all the time and everyone will be okay with it. The the point where the digital natives of Gen Z, they're on all these platforms and they understand how to manage their privacy much better than their parents do. And so the awareness of the digital native toward their own personal privacy is much more acute than what we're used to. And where the shot comes for us, I don't think it's going to be the case in the generation that comes because it'll just be a part of life. I've never seen a Gen Z or millennial person post like, copy and paste this because Facebook's changing their craft gonna be thirteen ninety-nine tomorrow. That doesn't happen. Real. Once I think the the power thing is not in a broadcast out. The power is an individual until a...

Lot of times the privacy issue in the future, I don't think it's gonna be a problem because I think it's I'm having a conversation with a friend. LifeWay research tells us this right now: sixty-three percent of people are not interested in coming to your building. Just in the same way, honestly, they're probably not interested in going to a mosque. I already have my spiritual identity formatted. I know what I think, I know, and I'm living my life that way. The majority of people already feel that way. Eighty percent of people will have a conversation about their faith with their friends if they see that their faith is important to their friends. And so the empowering of others to have those conversations is where we are going. We are already transitioning today, and I think that's just gonna continue on in the future.

Yes, sir. Yeah, catch us on, you know, like say you like it, but it's to be honest, sometimes some of this stuff is a distraction. And so I don't think, and I'm all about and encourage churches to be innovative, but I don't think that the goal is not to be innovative, to be on every form, to do that. The goal is to find where your ministry are, where your people are, where your audience is, and reach that. Now in the context of your physical church, if the goal is to get people who are already connected to your church engaged in the physical building in a church growth model, you're going to hit the Facebooks and in that because that's where they are. And the other Daniel behind you situation, he knows where his platform is. It's Roblox. And in he's building within that context. Maybe you're a church that actually has a vision towards reaching YouTube and the community of YouTubers that exist. Well, then I want to engage and dive in and own that that area.

We were talking earlier about our church. DJ Soto's the question in the back there is five or six VR platforms. And in DJ's mission, he treats every one of those VR platforms like a multi-site campus. And so he has, and I don't even know what the names are because I don't do they are, but he's in like this primary one and then he's over here and they needs over here and then somebody else spins up another VR platform and he's recruiting and building up teams to like expand into that other area almost like a multi-site campus expressing the church differently. I think you hone in with what your audience is and you figure out where they are and then you empower them to reach people from a discipleship standpoint in those areas.

Once again, it's less important what you and we live in the social media age. This is truth. It's less important of what your organization says about itself, and it's far more important about what others say about you. The power is in others going out rather than you broadcasting your single message out to others.

Can I speak to that, please? So I think that it's a hard lesson to learn though. If we're at this conference, we like technology. We like new things. We're usually, you know, first adopters of most new things technological. I find in my space that I'm one of the only ones on my staff that is like that. And so trying to figure out what is a distraction versus what is and should be part of our church growth strategy is that delicate balance that we play. And so I think that what I've learned over the last ten years is that you have to look at your unique church DNA and you have to learn how to work within that to become the digital expression of your place where you are and what you're saying about finding out where your people are super important.

I do think that it's important to also bring new innovative things to your church leadership and say, "Hey, here's what our strategy is right now. Here's what I would like to add to it." But because technology moves so fast, I think the danger is, and looked at this and less have this and let's at this, and you're diversifying so much that you can't do anything really well. And so I think focusing on, "Okay, here's what we need to do now, and now we've got this under our belt, and now let's add this thing, and then let's add this thing," and do those things really well. At least that's what I'm hoping starts working for us.

One second. I got a question here. Yes. There's an interesting connection between those two questions because you're both saying, like, where is technology going, right? What is society gonna decide about privacy? And what are people using? And I think in all of these, the church is going to be the church, right? The church's mission is to preach the gospel and make disciples. We're going to be using whatever technology the world around us is using, right? In the same way that we're using electricity to further the sake of this church's building, right? We're gonna be using whatever technology society is using because that's where people are, right? And so the church in ten years, in the church in fifty years, we can't predict the future. We don't know what the technology is going to be then, but we know what the church is gonna be doing, hopefully reaching and making disciples, right? And so we'll use whatever tool people are using them wherever they are. If they go back to YouTube more than Facebook or TikTok or whatever, great, whatever any of those, pick your audience, church. I think that's true for, for I hope that's true for most churches, but I think most people would agree that in the church, in what, and Christianity, and a lot, whatever, I mean, you think about Christian movies and Christian creativity, we are so far behind the norm of society in creativity, and it's sad to say that we are that far behind. And so even when we're talking about the church of 2029, I think you look at at technological leaders now, the church is just gonna be getting there in ten years, you know? And that's unfortunate. I think it it's that I'm not even gonna comment. Yes, yes. So the church of 2014, I, and I think, well, my prayer would be is that this is sixty-three percent of people that don't want to come to your building. They would absolutely be redefined, understand what the true Christianity would look like. There's a reason why that sixty-three percent don't want to come. Hmm. And that's because every person in this room possibly has a different definition of what they think the Bible is or what the gospel is or how they shared it. And there's a distortion that's happened over the years because of lack of information or lack of truth or whatever it is. And why not use the platform to tear away all the things that have been built up and reach the people who are actually need to be reached?

Very true. Yes, are frequently are just screws that were in the transitional stage as well. And what role does finances play in threat towards the traditional? Yeah, people paychecks, you know? It's very, it's very threatening. And I wonder if not pleasant. That's that's a great question. I think Daniel hit that really well. So we've got eighteen micro sites ranging from fifteen people to three hundred plus people. And like, if you can start with, we started a three hundred person micro site for six hundred dollars. Granted, that's not including like my position technically. That's a prison the taxpayers who pay for the building. Okay, fine. Let's go to non-prison. Let's start a fifty person church in a neighborhood and for six hundred bucks. Like that church planting model is so inexpensive. I think that we just center so in technology that we we see this upfront cost as being like outrageous. But where's one or two faiths that into like, what's your goal? Like, if your goal is really to just go out and make disciples of all nations, you can do that pretty inexpensively.

Well, let me let me unpack a little bit because there's this other level of our people at a fifty-person micro location. Are they hiding? Are they giving? Which I think's more of where you're wanting to go. Here's the challenge that I would say is, if you didn't have to pay for the five thousand person campus, could you imagine what you could do with the money to invest that back into the community to make a difference where people are?

I wish I was in, I was in Colorado. I'll tell the story. I was in Colorado over the over a couple days ago, and I'm with the new bird driver, and I'm having a conversation with this guy. And this guy's not a Christian. I know this because he had bomb like twice on the drive, and maybe I'm assuming that could be faster, but he was before that, he was showing me an example of a church. I'm not gonna drop the name of the church, but in Colorado, there's a giga campus over here to the left. And and I said something about working with churches, and he started talking about churches, and he's like, "Well, like this church over here that's got all the money. Like, look at just how much money they have." Talking about the movies, like, yeah, all the talking about this building. It's like all they have is money. And if what the perception is, he, the church was using the money for themselves to build this giant building and not pouring it into the community where this guy lives, and it's a mess. Where we have an opportunity to do something with with our giving selflessly, not selflessly to build a better building, but selfishly. And I say that this is a glorious building. I don't want to knock this place, but there's an opportunity for us to do things with it in the community as well.

Yes, but our slow to change. Ten years in, if they finally get on board, they're gonna miss, you know? Oh, then the next thing comes, and it's, you know, I would take it missiologically first, not this is the next new tool. Because if you look at the history of the church in the past fifty years, you've got, you know, church growth movement. You've got Willows, seeker-sensitive kind of deal. You got multi-exciting. You've got the micro sighting. You've got church online. All of these things are tools to do the Great Commission and to figure out, okay, for a lot of people doing online ministry is an extension. A lot of these other tools that they're standing on the shoulders of giants so that, but that's not to say that should be that way, but that's how it commonly is. So a lot of multi-site churches that have decent production and are more attractional in nature tend to open up an online campus more easily and readily than ones that don't have that infrastructure and that history. So I can't really properly answer the question, but what I can say is that if you're trying to do online ministry of an online service, you don't necessarily have to do it with that attraction or model and with that particular ministry stack in place. You can have a different online church model that is different in the way that it expresses what you do have, but let it express what you do have and instead of trying to make it your, because your, what you're asking sometimes for some churches is to not only start an online church but to accept the entire ministry stack that went with it. And that is, I don't think wise because God calls us. God calls different churches to be different things for different people. Let your online expression be of what Jesus is calling to do first, and then just whatever Jesus is doing there.

Hey, okay, so we're gonna break the podcast right there. I love this, and this idea that church online is more than just a broadcast, just like a church should be more than its service. It's one our service on Sunday. There's a challenge to live by for us to look at our church beyond what our building is, to look at the what the future is gonna hold, and how we as a church body can do Christ's proud by seeking after and expanding this idea of discipleship by helping people grow deeper in their faith so that they can in turn help others.

Church, here's the challenge for you. I would love for you to look at your church online as who's the hero of this story. Mentioned that briefly in the broadcast. The hero of your story oftentimes is the pastor. What if, and just what if, we shifted gears where the hero of your story wasn't someone who's paid to do the job, but what...

If the hero trained others to be the hero, what if a pastor shifted a little bit and made others to hear of the story? What if we empowered others with evangelism, with discipleship, with generosity so they could go out empowered to go out and be the person that God called them to be?

What if the church wasn't about us as pastors and staff? What if the church, what if the church online was about them? We'll see you next week here at the Church Digital podcast. Y'all have a good day.