EP033: Rob Wegner & the Mission of Microchurch

Well, I tell you what, hey, we're on episode 33 of the Church Digital, and we've got a special treat for you. And I've not even said this publicly. I've never told this story before publicly, so listening audience, you are the first one to hear this.

So I was at the Church IT Network conference a couple weeks ago. I spoke it and help them coordinate a lot of the breakout sessions, and it was a lot of fun and really got to just love on and encourage a lot of the online ministers and online pastors that are out there at the church doing things week in and week out.

One of the sessions that I had, you know, scheduled myself to teach was this idea of merging Church online and micro locations. And if you listen to my podcast, you know that we talked about micro locations all the time. So I have a talk, I've written blogs upon, and I've written ebooks on it. Like that's just one of my sweet spots.

Then I find out they were very excited to tell me that Rob Wagner was gonna be one of the keynote speakers for the conference. Now, if you don't know Rob, Rob is part of this underground movement of churches. There's KC Underground, which Rob has been very passionate about working with and in helping this, not a service-oriented, but a discipleship-oriented movement of church happening in the Kansas City area, which is actually spun off other locations. I know Tampa Underground is existing and is going very strong, and there's even talks up starting to do something here in the Miami area. Oops, maybe I shouldn't have said that. But it's been really fun to see this idea of underground church, of a house church, of a micro location, of a family being passionate about reaching into their community on their own and empowering these people to do this level of discipleship.

And so I was scheduled to talk about house church, a micro location, but instead I'm like, I would rather listen to this guy, Rob Wagner, over here talk about it. So I'm not gonna do my talk because I just want to listen to him, the expert, the guy who's really doing this, go into detail.

And so it was a phenomenal panel. We had some others on there. Rob was very humble to jump in here, and the others as well. But we painted a picture of what it means to move away from a service-oriented discipleship structure and instead move towards a discipleship structure where we empower people, where we make disciples, where we empower others in sharing their faith and discipling them to a greater understanding of who God is and what God has for them.

And I'll tell you, at the end, I think the audience had a far greater understanding of how the micro locations worked and how just maybe, just possibly, the church of today can exist in and help build these micro locations around through church online.

So here's what we've got. We had a panel set up, of course, Rob Wagner from KC Underground, mentioned that earlier. Is there. We brought in Brian Phipps to the conversation. He is with an organization called Disciples Made. It's their discipleship pathway that really ties in with the KC Underground movement. And just that both of those guys are phenomenal. We brought in Tyler Sampson from Church Anywhere. Once again, no stranger to this podcast. It seems like every time we're talking micro locations and church online, I'm mentioning Tyler's name. And then we brought in Jason Morris, who also is from the Kansas City area, who has a long history with doing micro locations, especially in context with his church, Westside Family.

Okay, so I want to apologize here. The recording of this, the audio quality isn't the best compared to what we normally have. The fidelity just is off. The main device we were using, long story short, didn't work. And so we had to fall back on a backup, which didn't have us as crisp a recording. The content, what we're discussing, the messaging here, honestly, is one of the better podcasts that we've created to date. And so I present to you Rob Wagner, KC Underground; Brian Phipps, Disciples Made; Tyler Sampson, Church Anywhere; Jason Morris, Westside Family; and myself, Jeff, from the Church Digital, having a conversation about micro locations and church online.

Hey, everybody, here you go. I'm gonna, Tyler's handsome. I work at a church in Coordinate, Indiana, called First Capital Christian Church, and we do a ministry called Church Anywhere.

Twelve seconds. That was awesome, right? Well, done leaving me. Yes, sir. Awesome. Brian Phipps up in Kansas City for about ten years. Pastor for about twenty-five years. Last ten was at Westside Family Church, where I was the Next Steps pastor. Disciple-making structures developed some structures that got more result than we ever thought. Short version became being stepped up to do that about a year and a half ago. It's called Disciples Made, and we deliver online technology and coaching to implement it well.

I'm Rob Wagner. I was on staff at a church plant in Granger, Indiana, which is near South Bend. Was there for almost twenty-five years. And then about five and a half years ago, moved here in Kansas City. I was also on staff. I came to church at these guys. But last year, I've been a part of founding something called the Kansas City Underground, which is a network of missional leaders, disciple makers, and micro churches in Kansas City, which we'll talk a little bit more about that later.

I'm Jason Morris, Global Innovation Pastor at Westside Family Church, overseeing the digital expression of Westside to catalyze church planting movements globally around the world and microsites wherever they happen to be.

Awesome. So a lot of what we're talking about, hopefully talking about, is how this idea of a church online can connect with and start a micro location or a physical location around. And so there's a difference between a campus, a multi-site campus, and then like a micro or a house church or a watch party. And through churches around America, the ones that are doing this, like they use different terms of what those smaller locations are. I'd love to maybe just pick apart here a little bit. Casey Underground, like what does expression of church look like? Church Anywhere, what does that micro expression of church look like for us?

Well, we talked about a micro church. Our one-sentence definition is it's an extended spiritual family that's led by ordinary people. The goal is to live in everyday gospel community, and they own the mission of Jesus in a particular network or neighborhood.

So break it down a little bit for us. Micro church is a missionary endeavor. So we're not like organizing people that already go to churches into groups. It's like an assimilation strategy. Usually, it's a couple or people partnering as what we call a missional team that feel called to a certain context. Sometimes it's a neighborhood. Sometimes it might be a people group. Like, there's Algerian refugees that are in Olathe, which is about twenty-five minutes from here. Like, one of our micro churches is among Algerian refugees. We have others that are embedded into the youth rodeo circuit of Kansas, for example, or a travel baseball league. One of them has even become a for-profit business in Bonner. So there's different contexts, but you've got people making new disciples. And as you multiply disciples, we believe that's when you have the church. And the church at its most fundamental level is an extended spiritual family. And then the goal is not a meeting. So a lot of times, house churches, for example, it's people trying to take what is typically done in a weekend service inside of a big box somewhere, and they just do it in somebody's living room. Now, I'm all for that, but the goal for us is actually a community on mission, living into the gospel as a community, not meeting weekly. Are there weekly meetings? Absolutely. But there's so many different touches between the meetings, and then there owning the mission of Jesus in a particular neighborhood or network.

So there's a very, like, fiercely local focus on owning the mission of Jesus. We're in a subdivision called City View Farms, and so on my creature, CH is owning the mission of Jesus in about a two to three block radius of that neighborhood. Our micro churches have that kind of mission specificity because if you're going to actually live like a great missionary, you can't do that very well in multiple contexts. Like, you have to kind of pick a primary where you drop down deep and really live out missionary rhythms. So that's what our micro churches are for us.

And then we have different rhythms. We have what we call it: two out, two up, two in. So two out is about once a month. You're getting one of your outs is going to be some kind of socially inclusive party. Another one's going to be serve-oriented. The two up is within your extended spiritual family. You have like an immediate spiritual family that's your missional team that's owning the mission with you. You want to be meeting with them at least twice a month, and that's orbiting around a meal, discovery Bible study, prayer, planning, permission. And then two in, and the two in is underneath all these micro churches. We have what we call a hub. And the hub is the mission agency that trains the leaders in the micro churches. So we have seven equipping teams in a hub, and those provide all the services needed to launch and sustain and coach and multiply micro churches. So we're saying at least twice a month, you want to be connecting with your hub so you're not some disconnected sort of cancer or cell that's reproducing out there. That you're under governance and you're being coached and supported.

So said get at it. Oh yeah, I mean, that was pretty rich, right? That's everybody taking notes on that. What's interesting, I don't want to like go down this rabbit trail, but like there was a really thick strategy there in context of what perception on the outside might actually be. It's very organic. And so it's a really interesting tension of where you've got that hub, you've got, you know, all these infrastructures and this plan in place. There's the two out, two up, two in. I'll have some glad I got that recorded. Excited and writing to that down. But there is there is intentionality behind a lot of that, which I just, when the outside man, I really appreciate that.

We were a CLE committed to like grassroots and kind of organic growth, but like if you have a garden and you have a tomato plant that's growing and you don't have some kind of structure to hold it up, it'll lay down on the ground and rot out and die. And that's what happens with a lot of organic church stuff. It's like first generation, and then it tends to rot.

Hmm. So we're trying to create a structure to support that organic growth without controlling it or micromanaging it.

Awesome. So Church Anywhere is an initiative-based micro-site strategy that we have in our discipleship pathway. So when I say initiative-based, our goal would be to take someone from an unbeliever all the way to conversion and then from conversion help them find their purpose that will eventually help people find and follow Jesus. So their purpose could be, I'll give you a real-life example. A purpose one of our Church Anywhere leaders was, she was exposed to some orphans in our area and fell in love with these orphans. So she felt like her purpose and passion was to go and help these orphans find Jesus. So she has created a Church Anywhere location at a local orphanage. As resulted this year in three of those kids finding homes. So they do like a church service-ish with them. That's the technology piece of it. But we always train our leaders to say that relationships trump technology every single time. Main goal is to go out and build relationships and inspire confidence. We, one of the keynote speakers mentioned us, and we had never thought of us in that way.

This context before that makes total sense. He said we're like the Dollar General of Georgia because we're rural. We, our main mission is to have people find their purpose and go out and serve underserved people. And so Dollar General thrives and most people like Walmart and Target because they're serving the underserved. And so that's kind of who we are. We want to empower our people to go out and be pastors to the underserved by utilizing technology as the tool to get in that door. It's awesome. The Dollar General, right? Very Dollar General Church dot com, right? Jason, I don't have you for the slide. They know you were coming, but jump in. Maybe share a little bit how does Westside treat my group? We have two flavors of small one is our church planting movement that we have internationally, and those average 42. So that's relatively small, but we keep it small and reproducing on purpose. And that's a just full-blown church planting movement that gets empowered through a lot of tools technologically that helped them get the job done. One of the cool things, just so that you know, just got back from India last week and was at the graduation at the Rockland group that Casey Underground supported. In 18 months, now we have 80 new churches and know God. And he just wanted, he not want to say thank you. So anyway, a lot of what we do is partner with other churches to create those linkages to people on the ground that are actually getting the work done and to help them to just multiply Jesus everywhere. That's one flavor of microsite. Another flavor that that's really probably more explaining in a house church scenario, but we do a lot of online tools to empower that. That's primarily global, right? Yes, yes, globally. One of the neat things is that some of our global partners are now using the same online tools that I have used with them to further their efforts. Like, for example, because you guys know who he is, yeah, was on a motorbike going to three different countries all the time, rarely ever home. Today I've got video of this. It's really cool. He's doing online church planting training with a Facebook group in his language in Thai, you know, with the church planters that are in Laos and Myanmar and a lighter stuff. So that kind of stuff, killer. Love that guy. So that's the flavor of microsite as a church. The other flavor, which is a little bit in contrast to what you mentioned, was taking the what we do online and giving it freely available to anyone who wanted to use it as a watch party, either online or on-site in their neighborhood, wherever they happen to be. We have a microsite in France that God want to say no Tony. Oh, we've got one in Mexico now. There's a lot of different places that they somehow are connected or associated with Westside that love it so much that they don't have something like that where they ended up moving to or something like that. And so we just tell them, well, hey, we can help you be Westside wherever you are. We call that Westside Anywhere. So we've even, you know, messed around with the idea of a center calling it Westside Online because online really doesn't mean anything anymore because everybody's online. It meant something a year ago, ten years ago when that was the differentiating factor, but today online, that doesn't really say much. But if you say Westside Anywhere, then that sparks a little bit of creativity and people to think, oh, I could have Westside in my home or my neighborhood. But what if I'm on the east side? You know, you're always on the west side of something. So anyway, those are the two flavors of microsizing. Awesome. Yeah, so let's hone in a little bit on this idea of in the global, the micro, the church planting, like that, that's awesome. But let's try to keep, yeah, domestic. Sure, that may trickle over in our international. Sure. For this, so let's get practical. Gear, whether online or physical, like let's define what a micro location, microsite is. Who are they? What are they doing? Where are they going to be? Where? What are some examples of micro locations that are around ours? Are because it's passion based, because it's this initiative based, there are all over the spectrum with the possibilities of what it could be. So for example, there's a lady and her husband who are very passionate about special needs adults. They realized that the people that are not getting the attention of the workers, so the people that are driving these special needs and bills around, they're caring for them. And so while especially the adults hang out in one room of their house on Sunday nights, they do church together in the living room with the workers. So that's like one example of a micro location. So that's empowering to people from our church that said our passion is this to become the pastors of house search. Another example of that though is I shared this yesterday, but it's the coolest story ever. An inmate at one of our locations decided that after he found Christ, his passion is now to reach out to other people that were in his similar situation. So not necessarily just an inmate, but he's a convicted murderer. So he's serving 65 years, and he's like, guys, I love what you're doing, but you will never reach the hardcore people in this jail with like praise and worship music and a sermon. And so what he's decided to do is something that he's gone hardcore church. And so we helped him learn how to edit video. So he's creating his own videos. He's using former gang members testimonies, that kind of thing, and he's recruited like cell leaders. So he's got his own team working with the chaplain at the jail. And I went, I went on Sunday to be there for him before that service on my way here, and they had like 307 inmates that that were not the normal people we or two in that jail. And can't stress that enough. Like that's not, and that double-dipping, there's 300 completely separate inmates. So for us, a micro location is empowering a normal person to lead a church that could be 15 people. Give me 300 people. I would basically echo your answer. For us, a micro church is again, it's a spiritual extended family. It's led by ordinary people, and we wouldn't call like a microsite per se because again we see it more as an extended spiritual family. But they would have locations that they're called to. Some examples that I just mentioned a few minutes ago, one of them, chat announcement chambers, they've embedded into the youth rodeo circuit. These are kids that are, you know, middle school, high school age, and every weekend there's a different rodeo. And there's about, you know, a couple hundred families that are making this circuit. So they started making disciples in that kind of traveling band of gypsies that follow the rodeo. And like four weeks ago, that two women get baptized. Like they're leading particulars, right? Yeah, it is. It's amazing. And what happens is when they're at the rodeo now, they've had so many people come to faith that they actually have a public service, and they'll have more than a hundred people who show up for that gathered service. But then outside of the rodeo, we also do, we call discovery Bible studies. So these, it's a very simple discovery-based way of engaging the Bible. So they'll spin out discovery Bible studies in the hometowns of the people that are a part of this larger micro church as a way to multiply potential new micro churches. Another family, the Bonds, they're kids are in a travel baseball league, and then their daughters in a travel volleyball league that's become kind of the feeder system for their micro church, which is located in Piper, which is a rural community. And they've grown to where if they throw a party, they'll have a hundred people show up. But within that, there's six or seven families that kind of make up the core of the family. For us, a micro church is going to have, you're going to have the presence of worship, community, and mission, and you need to have that balance of all three in our mind for it to actually be a church. Like a guy who is passionate about the homeless who's like feeding them and then reading verses and then kind of goes home, that's fantastic. It's not sure itself, right? So when you have a community and it's built around the person of Jesus, they're practicing community, mission, and worship. And for us, they also have to be willing to come under some kind of governance. Like for us, it's pretty simple. Jesus is the head of the church. Amen. But then there's also elders and deacons, you know? So when they're connected to the hub, they're connected to a network of micro churches where there is that kind of government that's where they're gonna experience a history of Jesus, their eldership, and so forth. A lot of what we're talking about that they're very so positive. You've got PDI six or seven families doing a thing connected to this sporting. I honestly I've never thought of that, gathering a hundred people together but having a core family of six or seven that are in control of their own spiritual growth, spiritual development. A lot of times when talking with churches, there's an underlying negativity, maybe a perception when it comes to a house church, somebody that's kind of controlling their own spirituality or, you know, they're so disgruntled with the big C church or a local church expression, and they're kind of doing something on their own. What is that tension really like? Like, how do you answer some of those concerns? Or what's your perception of reading of a situation of a family who arguably another church would look at it like both are isolating themselves from being part of a larger community instead doing this together in their own neighborhood? Okay, for us, I think whenever there's any kind of movement, the first part of the movement is always reactionary. So missional has been a movement in America for what, 15 years? So I do think early on there are a lot of people that were angry, and not unjustifiably so. There's probably some legitimate reasons for their anger. There's been a lot of like spiritual abuse and corruption, and we all can name one leader or another who built their brand around their personality and then it collapsed, and a lot of people have been hurt by that and disillusioned by that. But what I see a lot more of happening right now is actually like mature expressions of missional. Like what's happening with church anywhere, like the folks that are a part of the Kansas City Underground. Many of them discovered this passion for mission in the context of the prevailing model. Like Westside was a fertile environment where they were learning how to become a disciple maker. They were experiencing missionary formation. They were growing as leaders, discovering their calling, meeting the single mission. So when we launched that of Westside, it was actually a really positive experience in that a bunch of people who have been developed this way now we're launching out a new expression of church that isn't just action against the old. It's more like an extension that in order for it to reach its full potential needed to break away from the prevailing model. So what we do to keep it from being reactionary or getting toxic is like we have like a north orthodoxy, kind of irreducible minimum that everybody agrees to, which is like the Apostles Creed, those on covenants, and then we have 18 values that are part of what it means to be the Underground. The hub also provides like support and coaching and governance. We feel like, and I've been in the prevailing model and very successful churches for 25 years, like I feel like we have better eyes on and we're more informed about what's happening in our micro churches on a daily, weekly basis than.

Most churches are about what's going on in their small box. It's just like there's a—I can second that too, and I'm flirting with my wife right here because we have this website. It's great. I have to talk about it. It's a kingdom incubator. You know, it allows for expressions of kingdom work to go beyond the four walls of the website, you know? Disciples made with you, great example. Undergrads, great example. The point I'm trying to make is that my wife has been poured into. She told me this. She's like, "I feel like I've been poured into more in the past year or two than I had in my entire life before Priska."

Hmm, that was the last piece I was gonna say. He didn't say it this phrase, but what gets elevated to this level and answers your question specifically is the level of soul care. Maybe I buy it to these folks because the folks that step out—if you step out angry, whether you step out angry to plant a church or you step out angry to start a micro church—if you start out angry, you're going to end up shriveled. The antidote to that is meaningful soul care under the governance support of the elders and deacons, and you can't keep going underground. You'll find your way out.

Yeah, got every new micro church leader, and it goes through a really immersive assessment yet where we're checking into like how you would your most important ships with your spiritual, emotional health. Hi, actually doing financially? And then we do really deep assessment on their calling. Everything from the GPS assessment we developed to Enneagram, StrengthsFinder, and DISC. And every single micro church leader gets like a personalized coaching plan that's like probably years worth of spiritual direction. And then we're meeting with them to kind of follow through on that. So all that kind of stuff keeps it healthy, keeps it on mission, and not reactive.

And if there's—there is a thing. If you're hearing a lot of this, it's like, "Whoa, that's a lot." And yes, that is true. And I also believe that because of the way that this is being approached, it is getting close to why you can take an ordinary person and release them into the ministry. It's because of this backup stuff that you guys are doing.

One of the prevailing statistics that gets talked about a lot is that the best way to get gospel saturation, have more people get baptized, more people come to Jesus, is to have new church plants. And I think that that's not necessarily causation, but a correlative stat because I personally believe that the reason why people get saved and people get baptized and more people get saved and baptized in a new church plant is because the church planter was the only one that got really discipled. So if we were to really disciple to this level everybody, what would happen? That would change the statistic.

Let me interject one thing because we've used this word "discipled" I don't know a dozen times in the past fifteen minutes. The site book means a hundred things to eighty different people. So let's assign it's actually defined right now. What discipleship means in our usage of using it, gentlemen? What is exactly discipleship?

Well, I mean, I think one of the biggest issues is that the discipleship we're making—you're pointing it—lacks definition, and it lacks a definition that includes a motivation for people to want to be a part of it. And I believe that Jesus offers the most extraordinary invitation that's filled with motivation to be a disciple of his. It's in John 10:10. It's like, "Let's leave the stuff that's broken. The thief killed, stole, killed, and destroyed. And let's walk into a fully alive life." Anybody had fully alive already? Anybody like to have a little bit more of that fully alive tomorrow? Yeah. And everybody in the world is saying the same thing.

So if Jesus has that kind of invitation to being his disciple—come live fully alive and leave the brokenness of the thief—then what does that look like? And the Holy Spirit, I believe, is the source of transformation in a disciple's life. So we ought to ask the question: How does the Spirit then practically change the life of a person into a more fully alive life?

Amen. And to me, yeah, I'm with you. And so I mean, you look at the scriptures. Everything boils down to these two ideas. One: he's going to bear spiritual fruit in your life. If you're not more loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, self-controlled, faithful—whatever—the other one is, if you're not bad, and you can parse Romans, you've missed the point. And we're not helping people cultivate that fruit. But a definition of a disciple is one who's becoming filled with the Spirit. Evidence of the Spirit, and the other part of the Spirit's influence in our life is what the Bible calls spiritual gifts.

You know, a lot of people try to take disciple-making and boil it down. It's not what you're doing. It's who you're becoming. Or it's not just what you're becoming. It's what you're doing. It's a hundred percent both of those things. And if we really aim at disciple-making around those two things—we call them character, fruit of the Spirit, and then our personal calling, which is largely informed by the gifts of the Spirit, but there's more to a personal calling—but we found in our disciple-making efforts is when we cultivated fruit, that developed gifts, that created an impact in the people, and then through the people that made people predisposed to doing the kind of activity that these folks are talking about. It's almost like it created a space for a new creativity, a new imagination about how they can be priests in their own pulpit, whether that's serving on the way they have or the Algerian folks or whatever.

I mean, the Spirit is infinitely creative in how he wants to give people. So definition: character times calling equals impact. Motivation intrinsically—there we were born to be people who are in relationship with people. And by the way, we develop the fruit of the Spirit. Your relationships get a whole lot better. How many of you would have better relations with your kids if you were more patient, self-controlled, gentle about with your spouse? I don't have to go far. You want those relationships, and Jesus to say the thief broke them, and I've come to fix them all right? And then he'd say everybody's dying for the significance answer in their life. We're talking about legacy. We talked about wanting to be an intimate part of whatever is good in the world. And if you've been given spiritual gifts from heaven that the Father says I'll infuse with my our to go beyond what you can do on your own to make a difference, then why not sign up?

And by the way, those two deep-seated passions that are ours—to become better people that have loving relationships and to be people of significance and influence—are wired into our IT soo to them. See, I tried that discipleship guy. I tried to go into your world. Don't let me pick myself back up here. God hard-coded into you at your creation those two desires. When he said, "Be fruitful and multiply," what does that take? Intimacy. How's it restored? Through the Spirit. And he's also hard-wired into you the have dominion over my creation. It's right there in the creation mandate: be fruitful and multiply and have dominion.

So we're gonna go ahead and call the ushers forward. I'm gonna bounce off what you decide to answer this question. So for most of you in this room, you're not in the context of something like the Underground. So you have a governing body on top of you, very similar to my situation. We are a church, not like a movement. And so it's significantly harder to talk to leadership about the negative impacts of doing something like house church because if you say, "Hey, let's have our people go be the church outside of the building," naturally the building's a lot more empty. And so complete urge leadership across the country looks at that and says like, "Are you crazy? Like, we're not gonna let people not come to the church." Just hit the tension point right? If it's intimate. But here's the thing though. Whenever you empower people to go be like Jesus, that's really attractive. And we've noticed—and it was a shock to us—but like, when we got out of the mindset of everything's about us, I have this tattoo that says "not the kingdom of Tyler." This is this constant reminder like, "Hey, it's not my kingdom." And so when we got out of the mindset of like, "It's all about building this physical building of the people in this church," I got three or five Oliver Street in Corbin, Indiana. Our people became so attractive because they're living like Jesus on mission, on purpose, that our physical campus grew as well.

So wait a minute, Tyler. You're saying I'm saying that a people that some more like closer than handed and generous that God don't give more? Somebody probably taught that at some point. But the vibe drives—we thought with the negativity was actually a positive. My product for us. So not only did these micro sites grow, but then our community of believers that were not in micro sites also began to grow because they saw our church going into the community, which is part of what we're called to do.

Another tension point that's like the numbers on the weekend is also giving some people their concern like, "Okay, the gaming's gonna get just go to the wind." Like our experience in the Underground, I have a very, very close friend. He's actually my spiritual father who planted a kind of a traditional model church at the same time as the Underground. And if you would compare our giving—like our internal giving through the micro churches towards the hub to sustain everything—is actually outpacing the giving that's coming in in the weekend services in the traditional model. Andy's up to three hundred people a weekend. And so that's been an interesting sort of like experiment that we've been sort of running concurrently.

To make the same logic applies: whenever you're living on mission and on purpose, you're becoming a better disciple, which will lead to more generosity too. It all comes full circle there. We've somehow for a long time kind of just stopped the ball rolling and focused on butts in seats. That's true.

So what are the tensions? Because we live in a world, and I put a slide up—us, a church is often driven by large buildings and butts in seats. I didn't know he was going to say that. Those are like the intestines. Is there a place for predestined? All right, is there a place for microsites? Like the goal of the people in here is that they're doing the large. We need to go from large to small. What tensions is an organization that's used to large going small? What tensions are they going to feel?

Jason on staff at alert stricken? Yeah, I can tell you about. Okay, on a personal level, I can tell you about the tension in our family. You know, because I'm a pastor at a large prevailing church with a, you know, an online campus of thousands of people, and my wife really felt like healthy out Underground. And so there are two different—and don't get me wrong, Underground isn't—I think has been launched from Westside. We call it divided and partner though. The expression in order for it to be what it needed to be, at some point when the teenager gets old enough, they need to leave the house. Yeah, hey, they're not. It's not best to keep them closer in the basement. You got a lotta. And so that's what I feel like, you know, simple Church and Casey, no, all that's the moon with disciples made. At some point, you gotta launch it for it to be what God wants it to be because it's not our church. It's Jesus' Church.

So at the end of the day, the way that things happen is so radically different in the KC Underground context and everything that Maria was used to. It was major whiplash because she had to unlearn so many things in order to be able to even know how to function inside this environment. That it took a while. She kept thinking that was the leap Baxter. We don't have any pastors. Like everybody who leads.

A magnet church is a pastor, right? But we don't have pastors on staff, right? You know, probably the first three or four months I had correct report, but that's enough. I'm not only pastored Lisi, and that's that. Actually, services one of the tensions is the confusion because we tried to have simple church and Casey on the ground coexist inside the big box environment. And what we created was a lot of confusion for people because the discipleship pathways were so radically different from one expression to the other. People were just confused and they didn't know what to do, and they would. It wasn't working.

It wasn't working well. I can share another tension point as well. When it comes to developing volunteers, you know, everybody has the scramble. Even I see folks has to scramble to have enough volunteers to carry out the work on a given weekend. Like I was in charge of all the systems for first impressions and small groups and everything else. So we had our own roll call every week. And when we started developing our people, we realized that their personal calling actually led them out of our department. You know, and I don't know about what you call it, but that's called customer acquisition. You paid a price to get those people in your department, and now you're gonna send them off to the worship team or God help us the IT team or you know, whatever else. And I can remember the very first time they know my very first group to cycling this way. We're the guy. It was pretty evident didn't really care as much about leaving small groups as he cared about his microsite, which was investing in folks that were on the autism scale to help them find employment and to maintain employment. And he's changing the industry and that whole thing now. And I remember that tension point of asking, well, do I let them go into their personal calling out of my space, even if that makes me recruit more? And I answered that question quickly because God graciously gave me a conviction that it's about the people and not about me. Like I need that tattoo. I can give you one way, okay? But that wasn't the case all the way around. You know, when it came to opportunity for other folks in other departments to decide, will I do I let these people go? Then you've got that same tension point. While I try to hold on to people or while I release them to this? And that became a tension. Well, did the person seats model of the only answer I can give you to this? I don't know what else I could say beyond this. But we have brought more people into the kingdom and baptized more people at microsites this year than we have on site. So that's in my grand scale of things that completely destroys that argument in my mind, man.

Yeah, I think it's if your goal is actually gospel saturation, which to me is like every man, woman, boy, and girl being able to see, hear, and experience and respond to the gospel. Like the more, whether you call micro churches or microsites or ministries or whatever ministry, it's like we're each time we're increasing the mission mosaic, right? They're like pieces of a mosaic. Yeah. And so if we want to actually see the entire metro Kansas City area, in our case, it's like, well, we think it's gonna take twenty thousand micro churches because that would be about one hundred people for every micro church. And we think a healthy micro church, and it's kind of what we call spheres of influence and touch, and really be a gospel presence for about a hundred people, you know? Well, you can't do that from one location, even if it's core, which is amazing, and there's nineteen thousand people here, but it's still a drop in the bucket, right? And if we keep doing and trying to scale up this very expensive model where it requires buildings and lots of professional staff, it's like we're never gonna scale out to gospel saturation. It's too expensive. There aren't enough high-level leaders who can manage the complexities of this thing. I thought when church is like twenty people in my neighborhood and planning for mission is planning the next party and inviting three new neighbors, it's like, okay, millions of people can do that. And if discipleship, like, when we create robust experiences but they're simple for an ordinary person to lead and replicate, like, that's the game changer. Teams and stuff that's powerful right there.

Let me ask this question because when you mention a story, art, when Jason mentioned story of his wife, and you said there's no lead pastor, I switched a little bit. I confess, and it's in it. Honestly, it's the chapter verse on faster. So let's listen. Listen at a biblical level, or what is a what's a challenge? Where does microsites struggle? Or does it not? Is there anything that a microsite the Bible calls us to be? Here's what I think it can easily be less than. Like, there's, okay, if I had a whiteboard and draw this, like, okay, at this end of the funnel and its widest, I think a hundred percent of God's people are called to be missionaries and disciple makers. That's your birthright as a child of God. Then you, the funnel gets a little smaller. Within that group, there's a smaller number that are able to lead a team of people or group of people. Are you with me? Yeah, right. And then within that group of people that can lead a group or a team, there's a smaller number that can lead what I would call a church. And there's different models of church. If you're leading a micro church, there's tons of people can lead that. But now if you're going to get to like the prevailing traditional model, now suddenly your funnel is getting like very, very small.

So what I'm saying is if my biblical ecclesiology, like I think the strongest case is the definition I've given. Like, if you look at what the church was in the New Testament reality, like from the best historical data and also in terms of like just biblical studies, most of the churches in the New Testament are probably twenty to seventy people that were in over Louis, a network that was converted basically to a church, and they continued to meet like in their homes and they became like little networks of these home churches in a city. Now when the church could meet, bring everyone together, like they could have Jerusalem, they would, you know? And then Paul rented a hall, the whole of what Terrenas Legolas, right? And brought people together. So I'm all for the public gatherings, and we actually have a space for public gatherings even in the underground where we bring micro churches together as kind of a congregation to meet together. But if you have to get down to like what is the essential ecclesiology, to me it's like it's a spiritually spiritual extended family that's led by what the Bible calls elders. And Paul didn't set up lead pastors. He set up teams of elders in cities, right? It was a plurality of leadership. And then there's the other layer of deacons that came in with the Church of Jerusalem. Those are pretty much family offices. So for me, it's not a church if there's no eldership. Like to me, it's like you're it's a great Christian group, but if you're not under any eldership somewhere, then you've chosen not to really be under the full headship of Jesus because like to me it's like you see elders and deacons. So for it to be a micro church in my mind, you have to be bred, seen community and worship, and we all kind of know that may pass just for those Great Commandment, Great Commission, right? But then you also have to have those offices in place somewhere. Now that doesn't mean every micro church has to have its own circle of elders, right? But over this network of micro churches, their elders providing oversight.

You just alluded to elders, deacons over a network, and I'm just curious, it's not even on my list of questions, but how, what does a network look like compared to like a one-off? Like, what's the stability of something of a family doing it versus creating a larger theologically backed network of house churches that are running? Like, give me a give me a pros and cons kind of both.

Well, I just think if you're one-off, you're completely vulnerable. It's not going to be sustainable. It's unbiblical because you're not connected to any other ship. When if the Bible clearly teaches that the way that we're doing it right now, this first year, the underground again, we're still an infant, okay? So but we decided the first year we're just gonna do like one hub, and we're going to support and create multiple networks of micro churches. So we have like one network that's forming in Shawnee and one that's open Piper and Bonner, and then another one that's forming in Overland Park and Olathe, like where these networks of micro churches that are forming. So we just started a task force that's going to do elder training so that like probably the middle of next year, well, the elders for each one of these networks, and then we'll formalize that, and we're gonna call them collectives, okay? So a collective is a network of at least four or five micro churches, and they have eldership. They will have ownership of kind of like sustaining themselves and replicating themselves, all the signs of maturity, kind of thing. They will choose to gather as much as they want. So the networks might say we want to meet with all the micro churches once a month. Others might say, you know what, we're gonna meet every week, and we'll leave that up to the elders in those regions.

So you've been talking about this, you've got this leader, you've got this person in your funnel, you're driving them deeper in, and you want them to be the master of your house church. You used to turn campus pastor for your microsites. Like, how do you prepare someone? How do you grow someone to the point where they're spiritually mature enough to shepherd, to lead, to guide a healthy church of thirty, fifty, a hundred people?

So we we do a one-on-one teaching basis. So the first, the first couple that we launched our first two microsites with, I chained them for a while, about six months, going over a lot of the stuff that we cover in our discipleship groups that rooted things like that, spiritual rhythm, spiritual disciplines that they're going to need in order to pastor these people. And then from then on out, they have served as pretty much the gold standard and the trainers. So whenever we launched a new one, we kind of send them to that microsite to like shadow these people for a while before we launch those out. But there's like there's no like a, you, how many of you guys went to Christian college? How many of you really were prepared to do ministry when you got to like, you don't, you don't know how to do ministry until you do ministry. And so we are comfortable with empowering people to use the gifts God's given them, realizing that there might be for some failures, but the pros outweigh the cons in that every time for us.

For us, we've got like a suite of tools and training that go from informal to formal. Um, and our hub basically, you've got that personal discovery calling team that helps you discover your calling, do kind of a deep dive on your own spiritual, emotional, relational health. You get spiritual directions, so Peter, that's provided. We have a startup coaching team that meets with new potential leaders to help them basically put together their business plan for their new kingdom initiative. We have an ongoing coaching team that helps to optimize the ongoing micro churches. And then we also, I'll let you go ahead and talk about, we have what we call intentional disciple-making environments, which is is actually kind of an overall, it would take you three years to go through this training. But like Tyler said, it's on-the-job training. It's not like you're doing this all beforehand, and then when you're finished with this, you'll go. It's like, no, you're doing this along the way. So when you talk about the IDME, basically I created a couple of things, Wes. I

Was really good at reaching the lost and equally good at losing the found. If that makes sense, we could get a lot of folks there, but we could help seekers become believers, but we weren't systematically helping believers become followers and followers become influencers. And so it created a couple of experiences to do that. I'll unpack those in just a minute, but at one point I was asked, "You can't take the tools, Brian, that you've created into a third world environment where we're doing some of our global work. So what are the irreducible minimums?" And out of that has come our language for intentional disciple making environment. And it's really three phrases that summarize it all well.

The first one is outcome focused. We relentlessly focused on the outcomes. And what are the outcomes? If you recall, character and calling. So we're always revisiting, "How are we doing? Are you more loving and joyful, peaceful? How is the calling going? The development going?" Not just determining what your gifts are, but your area of passion is and serve in that area of passion with your gifts. So we're relentlessly focused on those two things. So it's outcome focused. It's habit fueled. Habit fueled. It's not content fueled. Learning things doesn't make you different. It just helps you realize the gap between where you could be and where you are, which is a problem, right? I can't go to a CrossFit gym, open up their manual and read it and get more fit. But for whatever reason, we have allowed content to kind of remain king inside the church, thinking that if we deliver the information, the practical applications will be made and the outcomes will be accomplished. I think that that's not working here.

So it's outcome focused and it's habit fueled. And what's important is to marry the habits to the outcomes. Oh, I don't want to go to a CrossFit gym as I can demonstrate without any further investigative research, right? But there have been seasons of my life where the outcome of a more fit body got me into the gym and will get me back because it tastes good when you get going. So what if we did tie the spiritual habits to the spiritual outcomes that helped you get there? And everybody gets it. You know, if you want the reps, you want the apps, you got to do the reps. And it's the same thing with spiritual formation. Somehow the enemy has tricked us into believing that the habits are about legalism. Like it could be further from the truth. Outcome focused, habit fueled, and then content flavored. The content is adjusted based upon where they are in their spiritual formation. You don't teach systematic theology to folks that are searching for Jesus, but you don't teach Craig Rochelle's same six week thing for people that are wanting to really grow. If that makes sense, there's content that can serve folks of different areas of formation.

So that's our idea. That's our intentional disciple making environment. And we have one that's six months long that basically reorients its people around the missional rhythms of dependence upon the spirit to actually change and character and calling. Called Followers Made. Folks that have done that, and you have to be serving somewhere in Jesus' name, they actually get into these things. And it's a high bar, exclusive invitation, limited duration. What are some of the other dynamics that are unusual about Followers Made? The length of it. Most people are shocked. You can get someone to do six months? Yeah. And then everyone in it, it's built on shared leadership. So not only are you learning to be a disciple, by the end of it you're ready to make disciples. And we average 30% reproduction rate. Thirty percent of people that go through Followers Made end up actually making disciples. Wow. And it is crazy. And another distinctive of it is we encourage groups of up to twelve because Jesus kind of modeled that. And then we break the group. We simplified the group's into triads. And it's all done all at the same time. And our technology that we delivered, we actually, our tech company that depends on tech, we deliver these experiences in a way where you're actually reading the scripture like YouVersion in our app. You're actually journaling an "I will, I believe in, and I will" statement. Like, what did I learn? What am I going to do about it? Within the app. And you have two other people in the group of up to twelve that are actually seeing your journals and holding you accountable to them. So it's not just the frequency of the journaling that you're required to keep up with. It's the actual actions that Jesus led you to in that app.

So Followers Made. There's a ten and a half month Leaders Made that optimizes spiritual influence and spiritual leadership, servant leadership. And then we have one called Missionaries Made, which takes those folks that are already mature in Christ, either after Followers Made or after Leaders Made, typically not all the time, that helps people really deep dive into the blessed rhythms where they're fully engaged with their neighbors and God is creating spiritual activity in and through them in their area. And then Micro-Church Learning Community is a twelve-month process that helps you actually move from just having that spiritual activity into more organized and trained into the whole system that lends to a network of thousands and others.

So you've got Disciples Made. Then that's the six month. Well, that's the initial one, right? Your cycles made. The umbrella that all four. Okay, so which which is one? Sorry, what's that? Personal Followers. Followers. All right. So Followers Made is at first bucket, the six month. Like, what percentage of people that are involved in any given house church, micro location, go through Followers Made?

Well, again, we have this embedded suite of tools. We have informal tools, which are things like we have a set of like eleven different shapes or symbols that are each around a key area of life. And it's the kind of thing where you can share them in like two minutes with somebody, or you could have a two-hour conversation about it. Or we have Discovery Bible Studies where you can spend six weeks on it. We train all of our micro church leaders in how to use all those tools because they typically end up starting by using these informal tools. Then we teach people how to do Discovery Bible Study, which is a very simple way of engaging the scripture as a community. That bakes in obedience. It bakes in reproduction. So we teach people how to do Discovery Bible Study. And then we have these Followers Made, Leaders Made. So we're again, we're under a year old. We have just launched like one new Followers Made, one new Leaders Made, new Missionaries Made, and a new Micro-Church Learning Community. So right now there's four of those operating, but it's just the first round. Like all three visas, it's not the first round for Disciples Made stuff. No, underground it is. In Disciples Made, I mean, you guys are in NewSpring Church. You're like lots of other motor stores and about forty or fifty churches so far. We're very young, very small. About over five thousand people have come through these experiences.

So you've got tools that you know, cold too hot. Maybe you've got some of the organics, two minutes, two hours type of things to get someone who's maybe cold to Christ or cold to the idea and come warm them up into the process and eventually get them in a more rich pipeline of Followers Made and others. Don't yeah. Like we would tell people it's probably gonna be at least twelve to twenty-four months, yeah, before you actually see a really sustainable extended spiritual family in your community. And that's at the point where you can start looking and going, "Okay, maybe I'll start off. I was made with my microchip." You know what I mean? And so it's interesting. You got two different paradigms here, and I don't want to tug on the thread too hard, but twelve to twenty-four months over here with Followers Made. I know Rooted is probably ten to twelve weeks. And there's obviously strengths and weaknesses in both models and challenges to overcome. But what's interesting is both of them have a pathway to go through to create an efficient and intentional disciple model.

Well, there is a common denominator, which I'll go for. It's not it's their discipleship strategy is not one and done. It's coaching on top of just-in-time training. Just-in-time training. Oh yeah, cool. Yeah, you guys use that to build leaders and to prepare them for that like a two or three minute. Okay. So the initially, no, because we we started church anywhere before we started doing or in another church. So we're two and a half years in the church in America at this point. We started Rooted about a year and a half ago. So now that's the funnel. Before it was like I said, the one-on-one teaching, the one-on-one and come along with me to a hospital call, that kind of deal. But now we have a much better like funnel. When we started it, like nobody else was doing that. So we had no idea we were doing the emergency yesterday. So I was like the Wild West, really shooting whatever just to see what happens. And that's kind of how he did it. So we we knew we wanted to push our people to be the church. We just didn't have a great strategy to make those disciple leaders yet. And now we do. So we've been doing Rooted now for about a year and a half or so.

Interesting. Nate just had a conversation with the church leader on Spokane. He's a new thing network leader out there, and they used Rooted as the front end of their kind of discipleship pathway. And they're about to adopt Missionaries Made as like the phase two part that's like four months. He was saying that. I was like, and I can marry together. So I was like, "I think it's gonna, it seems like they'll actually really come." We just worked with Rooted development as well. So we've piloted the first online Rooted group. And so through that they developed an app where everything was like right on there. You can have community within it. You can read the material. You can stay connected. That kind of deal. It's like hardly familiar. Yeah, yeah. How we did it before was so scattered because he like Zoo, Marco Polo, Facebook. Yeah, but now it's all in place.

Yeah. One of the things that I hope you guys are noticing is that the conversation that we were having about church online five, ten years ago was about the Sunday service. A lot of the new tools that you're seeing and what people are putting their energy toward is the more important discipleship stuff that's at you. And the tech that we need to make the discipleship work. The online ministry that we do, the Sunday service is such a small portion of that, right? That's. When I come to this conference I have to get my mind back around like, "Okay, we need to focus on the Sunday service," because I spend so much among like week not focusing on the subject service and doing ministry in other ways. Yeah, I don't know. Anyway, it's aside. Sorry, I don't wanna get lost on this.

So somebody out there is thinking about doing this. Like, how do they get started? What I need to do? They probably have a conversation leadership. How sad co? Like, what next step for somebody out there who's interested in micro locations? What would that look like? If you're thinking about micro church, Brian Sanders is he leads the Underground Network, which is a larger network or a part of. He just released a new book. It's called Micro Churches: A Smaller Way. I would read that book as a leadership team because I think it's the best thing I've seen out there. And then more importantly, I would ask you to think about how you can be a better missionary where God has already sent you.

So like when I'm talking with church leaders, I'll walk through the bus rhythms and say, "Really, the best thing you can do is like spend six months actually really trying to live these rhythms deeply in one context and watch what Jesus does in your own life." You know, I would start there. Yeah, I can't stress enough how it's one thing to talk.

About doing the sack of ministry in theory, another thing to actually, even though I'm the like that facilitator of all of church anywhere within our context, like it is, it has changed my life. But really, I have a seventeen-year-old daughter now because of church anywhere, and so I can't stress enough it's like adopted, adopted. Yet you have to be a part of it. Like you have to allow God to take your colony and do the same thing. And so start there. So even if you haven't had that conversation with leadership yet and you're still tossing this around, nothing is stopping you from going out and doing missionary in your neighborhood or in a local school system or wherever you're passionate about with us.

The quick answer to us is, you know, we would actually if you're interested in and using disciples maids more formal tools like we were talking about, we actually encourage you to start small. We don't want to go big. We encourage you to start with one pilot group. Let those stories invite other people because it is a different way that does create tensions over time. And I would invite you to do it more small with leadership. But I can give you a little poker chip we have that's my business card. We've got videos on there to kind of unpack the IDE followers made leaders made that you can share with leadership if nothing else just to help turn the dial more in the direction that we've discussed today.

Yes, sir, they're acting. You had one as well, sir. You know, my ventures that came from that tried to launch a mission on communities a couple years back. And I hear all four of you talk about micro-expressions. Typically, people who are focusing a majority of their time and effort being a part of that community. So are the members of these micro churches also members and largely committed to macro expressions of the church? Are they committing their time, their family, specifically to these myocytes?

So ours are, are so are a model. Yeah, and our micro sites would consider themselves part of First Capital Christian Church, for example. There's an inmate at Branchville Correctional Facility named Jerry. He sends us a ten-dollar check every single month because he believes he should be tithing to his church, and that's not an uncommon thing for us. So they feel part of our family. So it really is like a like an extension of what we do in the building, but that's just being the church outside of the building.

Oh, can't see the underground. Most of the people in the micro church would see that as their primary church. Some of them though are also connected to other congregations. So we have like various partnerships in the city. Like there's a large church in our city called Heartland, probably church of about three thousand, and they have freed up a staff person to help develop micro church leaders in their congregation. So they see their congregation and their churches of the hub, you know, and they want to build out the equipment teams and they're a part of the underground. So right now we're providing all the services for their people while they raise up the first round of micro church leaders, and then over time can build their own equipping teams.

It's a nice to be a philosophy chef because we would consider ourselves, we wouldn't say the hub, but our church vision is shift its function way of like our churches and so if the leadership can't make that shift, there's gonna be some serious tension and you're gonna get into some problems of well, these people are leaving. They're not the actual church to do now scourge that either. Do you feel like those implementation of this philosophy can bill you try and have two feet? You know, we're going to be it our leadership and our vision is gonna be up about macro church, and the thing I love about First Capitol Church Anywhere is the vision is intricately tied to it. That's what I guess, and they can, they are reaching people that are not coming to the building. And so I think if your audience overlaps, that's where you're gonna have problems. Because your mic, it's the same thing with church online where church online is allegedly taking people out of the pews. Find another audience. Find a strategy place where it makes sense and allow both to complement and help each other instead of constantly fighting and conflicting and robbing Peter they point out that military philosophy should. Yeah, there will be tension, which is in the leadership is the audience. And so that's, and I know some have a conversation if some of you guys are really considering this, it's a leadership, it's a strategy decision. You're just rolling dice and launching something without having that strategy buy-in.

Yeah, it's not gonna work. It's going to be too much tension. There's gonna be too much. I'm taking away from this. I don't want to give it the attention if there's some philosophical shifts for this to be done well that need to happen and that leadership has that strong buy-in for it. Yeah, I wouldn't. My experience having helped you churches transition and then like that I was personally on leadership team at and then I felt literally hundreds of other churches with this is if if you're trying to make a traction alla missional, I can't do it. Attraction-el requires a certain strategy. Missional requires a certain strategy. Sometimes they are literally cross guard, and that's just the reality of it. So you have to decide which is going to be the major. And I think you can decide. You're the one. You can say we're going to be primarily attraction-el, but we're going to create some space over here for RMD to do some great missional things. Or you have to say no, really, we're attraction permission all. So now we're going to restructure so that this is the primary and the attraction of supports it, which is what I think you guys a little bit of my product of making admission the interaction will be part of what we do is is that it's not people, not necessarily like what we put on the stage. So it's still attraction. You can't. There's not enough time. Yeah, but you can leverage those volunteer positions as incubators for developing people's personal calling.

We actually created a measurable on our data sheet for the first impressions team. We had two hundred and thirty volunteers or so in any given time. We had a line item in our measurables every year. How many people did we graduate out to a better step of personal calling? Like they, what they went from being just people that came to people that serve. That's a smaller pool. If there's people that serve, how do we help develop them and influence in that area and disciple them and then disciple them out?

So one of our, you're always filling in what were microsites is at an elementary school. And the lady started, and she'd see the teacher where she started serving in our church in the elementary department, like the kids department. But when we released people two years ago to like go down beat an hour to be the church, like she, we've cultivated this passion within her for elementary kids for years. And so it was natural for her to step into the role of volunteer campus pastor for us elementary campus in behind her kids leadership.

The concern is, yeah, we had some, but we should did. Like I said, we shifted our entire vision of the entire church. So you're gonna, you're obviously gonna have accomplished back with that. We knew we would take some loves, but as people started to see results, and it's a part of the thing we do is will videotape baptisms like at the other side. When you start showing that stuff on the weekend like, hey, this is so-and-so from two hours or, and these people we sent out to be pastors just baptize them, check this out. Like people started talking the way they feel about things pretty quickly.

There's a transition bell curve that saved my soul Jesus, and then the transition because it helps you see, and this is a sociological proven think that's and businesses. Anytime you bring change into an organization, you've got the innovators. You've got the early adopters. You've got the early majority. The late majority and then the laggards. And there's percentages of people. And here's what I've learned: it's the stories of the innovators that attract the early adopters. It's the story that early adopters that gain the trust of the early majority and so forth. And then the last sixteen percent, the laggards, they never come. And so there will always be pushback. There always be sixteen percent pushback regardless. Yeah, for as long as you do it until they're gone. And if you disciple right, you're well beyond that sixteen person disciple right. That's why we actually say start small and let the stories of the first group or two or three, yeah, start to leaven uncommon in the flower, you know, just grows over time.

So for us, that sixteen percent pushback became very quickly outweighed by the like one hundred and three percent life change compared to in person. But you can Google that bell curve and see those stats, and it's so helpful.

We're gonna break the podcast right there. Many of you guys are considering this shift to a micro location, and having done them, it is at a very exciting part of ministry. And the ability that we have to impact a disciple, to help people go deeper in the faith, even using online to create a virtual network of discipleship across the country and around the world, man, it's just awesome. And I pray for churches today, and I've been encouraged more and more as more and more churches are realizing that that church online needs to replicate itself in physical areas. And they're using this idea of the micro model really to kind of start to foster and grow these micro locations all around the country. And so it is happening. It is a model, and we will see it continue to grow and prayerfully succeed.

But this idea of getting leadership on board is so key, and I just wanted to reiterate here right now with as you're developing these plans, a philosophical shift like a micro location is definitely something that your leadership, that your senior pastor, that your elders, whatever your structure is at your church, they need to understand and catch the vision of. There are some things in church online where, you know, I've had pastors tell me in the past, I don't care what you're doing, Jeff, just go out there and just make it happen. That's awesome. I trust you intimately. The idea of a micro location is not something that you can just get a free pass on. But in finding that strategy where you can can reach out and impact people through the micro location, that that isn't impacting your physical campus locations or fine-tuning it in such a way that both can coexist, that's where you're gonna see the physical church is going to understand the most of what church online can give you, where you're not just impacting the local areas in your town but you're expanding your church's reach far beyond the fifteen to twenty miles around your building to where God leads you and where the Holy Spirit can direct you.

Micro locations goes two step further. It takes the lid off of the church, and all of a sudden you can see yourself spread, you know, in a richer, deeper, and further way. And we discussed in many ways in this podcast why micro locations can help the church, and there's certainly more that we'll be talking about soon.

Well, it's been a great podcast. We've loved being here with you guys, and we look forward to seeing you again soon here at the Church Digital podcast. Y'all have a good day.