EP345 - Talks Digital Missionary Summit(s), Super Secret Projects, 2026

All right. Hey everybody. Welcome to the Church Digital podcast. This is Jeff hanging out with you this Tuesday afternoon. You want to make God laugh, make plans.

I guess, and because I was planning to do a really interesting conversation centered around artificial intelligence and the use of artificial intelligence for evangelism. We ran across a vendor, part of Luzison, someone who's created an artificial intelligence that, long story short, it's actually like programmed with the gospel, and is very strong scriptural oriented in quoting scripture and helping people find Christ.

And so yes, the Matrix is helping people find Jesus. Oh, and it's in like I don't know, 110 languages. Like this is really interesting.

You know, when the guy told me, I was like, and he's, and I invited him on the podcast. I said, "Now I want to warn you. We've got some incarnational crew hanging out here with us here on the Church Digital. Like you're going to find some ardent supporters and you're probably going to have some naysayers on the stream," and he's like, "Welcome to my Friday." And so like, you know, whatever your stance is on that, we will look forward to having that conversation. Not today, because we had a last minute cancellation and a shift.

And when things cancelled, it's been like, you know what, it has been so long since I just jumped on a stream to stream, you know, hang out with y'all for an hour or so. It's like I just want to do it myself. And so, yeah, you know, hold my hat, hold my beer, whatever the phrase is. I just want to hang out with you guys for an hour or so. So thank you. I appreciate that.

I see Leighton is in the room. It's a light crowd, maybe a couple people, which is cool. I mean, it's summer. Summer is here. Everybody's schedules are whacked. My wife is actually in Fort Worth, Texas getting some college board certification to teach AP for high school courses, whatever, blah blah blah blah blah.

Long story short, I joked with my wife, "Hey, congratulations, you're going to nerd camp for adults," to which everyone in the house laughed, and my wife is now at nerd camp for the week. And she's really excited. She's kind of a nerd. Like it's in the world of academia. You know, she got her dose and she got my dose too. Like I am, I don't test well. I really didn't like school, which is weird because, you know, my wife loves school. My daughter and my son actually attend the school my wife teaches at, the school that I graduated from. When I graduated, I swear I never walked back to that place. And now I drop my kids there off in the mornings and my wife gets her paycheck from there.

My daughter texted me today and said, "Hey, daddy. Some woman, the head of marketing for Westminster, says that your high school reunion is coming up in October and you need to go." I was like, "Yeah, that's not going to happen." Simply put, no.

But anyway, I have no idea how I got on to that, but schedules are crazy. So we're happy to hang out here. Looks like we got flat cap. You know, flat cap once again. I don't even know what's happening here. Hand orange covering eyes. Is it, okay, so as I'm reading this, are you holding an orange in your hands over your eyes or are your hands orange covering your eyes? Like I just don't know how to represent this, Leighton. You know, I may need some help. Leighton, by the way, is saying just go and promote the Church Digital.

No, you know, it's funny. I told one of my son, I was like, "You got to get me connected with one of the Bible teachers. Some Bible class somewhere wants to listen to me talk about how we're planting churches in video games." Like come on. Come on. How crazy is that? Planting churches in video games. Come on. Somebody wants to hear that story. So we hear from Leighton. Orange color hands covering hands at wife leaving you home. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. God rest the children. We went and saw How to Train Your Dragon yesterday. For dinner we ate three large buckets of popcorn. That was pretty much dinner. Oh, and my son went swimming in the swimming pool over at the grandparents and forgot to put on sunscreen and now is red like a lobster is red. Maybe is blue like a lobster is blue. Like it's hardcore. And you know, it's common knowledge that my son, who has a black belt and is now working out with a black belt in taekwondo, and it's working out with the football team, he can kick my butt. But not today. Today I own him. I just have doubt. Boink. And he's crying like a little school girl. All right.

Flatcap once again saying wear your Discord as it is in heaven t-shirt. Yes, of yeah, I would. I would. I got to get in there. I got to find some high school teacher. Like definitely the seventh grade Bible teacher is also the esports guy. And so maybe that's the best way in.

Steve Reed jumping on as well. You know, once again, hey guys, I'm glad you all are here. It's going to be a casual talk. You know, we're going to see some people hit this up on demand and happy to do it. I spent yesterday drawing up a bunch of proposals for what I wanted to do in 2026, like some of the things that I'd love to see the Church Digital get into or some of the heavy conversations I'm starting to get with volunteers in 2026, and it's man, it's really exciting to look at the road ahead and start to dream through some of these proposals. And so I start geeking out about that. I may talk a little bit about that here. But even as we're starting to fill out maybe one or two last positions within the Church Digital, we've been short-handed for a stretch and looking forward to get that going. Looking forward, digital missions project. Digital missions. The digital missionary conference coming up in September and October. And you know, the lineup of speakers is starting to solidify. I think we probably got 75 to 85 percent of the speakers lined up. It's just really a couple left in gaming and a couple left in recovery still to book. But it is a solid lineup around the corner. Just all over the place on it. Tell you what, let's do this. Let's walk through some stuff here. What do I want to do? Let's go ahead and make this. Let's see if I can do a screen share. Let's go to missionary.digital. So I'm excited about this digital missionary conference. We launched, oh, you know what, I'm not sure I built this out. I'm going to push this. Let's see what happens. Hey, it does work. I didn't undo it. That's exciting to me. All right. So the digital missionary conference. We launched the website a couple weeks ago. Congratulations. You are looking at the digital missionary summit series. So missionary.digital is the new website. Well, it's the old website, but it's the new website on the old URL. And I love this. Coming up in September and October, we're doing four unique summits.

You know, it wasn't like one digital missionary conference. I mean, shoot, we did that in the spring. But what can we do to up the ante? Well, let's do four over the course of a month. You know, it's funny. One of our strategic partners, she heard we were doing four conferences and she's like, "Jeff, aren't you worried about like overwhelming your team?" And I was like, "Yeah, but we're going to do it."

And you know what's fun is how this is rolled out strategically. Individuals have stepped up to own different parts of the puzzle. Word Revolution, Barbara's team, has been so awesome in developing some of the branding and some of the language and some of the graphics. And you know, the average conference is like, "Hey, let's design one look for a conference." And I'm like, "Oh no, no, we're going to do four conferences, so let's do four separate looks." And so that's what you're seeing here is you're seeing four separate looks for the digital missionary conference. Let me make it bigger there. And so we are doing, right off, kicking it off September 17th. This is probably the larger of the four, which I would suspect would be the larger of the four, is the digital neighborhoods. The digital neighborhoods. This is the most unspecific digital discipleship is the theme. Digital as physical, platforms as places, you know, some of the language that we talk about. Like this is what we're doing here in this conference. September 17th. And so I'm excited about this. Jason Morris is talking this conference. But you know, so many, so many, let me highlight two speakers.

First off, we've got Jeff Vanderstelt. Jeff Vanderstelt with Saturate has written 360 Discipleship. Jeff's going to be coming on and talking about gospel saturation. No, I'm sorry. Gospel fluency. That was, I was not prepared to do this talk today. Can you tell? Gospel fluency. And oh my gosh, like if you've not read Jeff's book on this, it's so good. And so we asked him to kind of pull the mothballs off the talk and do it in digital space. Jeff's been a huge supporter of digital church, of the Church Digital, digital church network historically, and the digital missionary work that you all are doing out there. He has been one of the highly respected leaders within the Exponential ecosystem, has written a number of books. His discipleship organization Saturate is phenomenal. It was funny at some point we were actually, Jason Morris was actually like, "Hey, Jeff, why don't we like, you know, adapt Jeff Vanderstelt Saturate digitally?" It was actually a very interesting conversation for a stretch, but a conversation for a different day.

And then, oh my gosh, Bekele Shenko. Now I met Bekele, who is highly like vice president and crew global. Like this guy's phenomenal at the crew level. Bekele directly is responsible for something like 2.4 million churches planted globally. Like it's ridiculous the numbers that I'm hearing connected to him. I actually met Bekele with Finishing the Task, the thing that Rick Warren was doing a couple years ago, and Kelly got me interested, got me invited into that, and was working with him and some others with Crew and some other organizations with the Rick Warren deal. And I mean really a lot of the work that we now do, that the Church Digital now does with Crew, is because Kelly got us in the front door, which was so helpful and so appreciated, you know, these years later. And so Bekele is going to be talking about volunteer leadership training, leadership development towards that. And so it's really exciting to see how the digital neighborhoods thread's going to be developing here very soon. We will have breakouts. We will have sponsored tables.

We will have tables as well. All the tech issues that we had with all the conferences before, uh, thank you very much Hubalo. Uh, Hubalo is going to be the platform of choice for our conferences moving forward. And uh, to say, to quote the great Andy Mage last week during our onboarding with Hubalo, Jeff, I am very excited. Uh, yeah, Barbara was smiling too. Like, a lot of the stability issues and a lot of the functionality that Alter Live was just missing, Hubalo, which has been around for some 20 years as an online event platform, Hubalo is rocking it, baby. And so it's going to be a phenomenal experience.

So September 24th is our next conference, and this will actually be on Hubalo as well. Uh, and so we're calling this one Control Alt Recover.

Now, this may be the most creative name of all of our conferences, of all of our summits. Control Alt Recover Summit. Uh, and long story short, we're digging into the recovery, Christ-centered recovery, and what Christ-centered recovery looks like in digital spaces.

Now, it was funny. I was talking with Stacy last night. Uh, Stacy just got a new job in, uh, Cal—no, Arizona. Sorry, sorry, Stacy. Arizona. And, um, I am excited for her, but like, now, like, some of our meetings are really weird hours because, you know, she's onboarding, which is fine. But, um, you know, we're really excited about this conference.

Recovery is not just for the addicted. Uh, recovery is for all of us because at some level, all of us are marginalized. All of us have, uh, personality issues. All of us have pride or ego or are centric to self, or have put other things—our kids or our pets, our jobs, other things, other idols—in the throne where God should be. And recovery is the opportunity to stop and evaluate and work through the issues that you have to allow Christ to become center in your life.

Now, you know, for some, that can happen not in recovery environments. I'll just tell you, I, having gone through a recovery environment, it changed my—a, it changed my life; b, it changed my relationship; c, it changed my ministry. And this is one of the reasons why I am such a big fan of recovery and what that recovery mindset can do, because it made me a better digital pastor. By going through recovery, I learned empathy. By going through recovery, I was able to shine the light on myself to work through my crap. So now that I can shine that light in the darkness, confident without fear of reciprocity, without fear of what it would expose from me.

Um, you know, ultimately, we need to—it's going to be so funny. My kids listening to this are going to be like, "Daddy, I can't believe you said that. We need to own our crap." Like, we've got this junk that's in our lives. We all do at some level. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Biblical. And control recovery, Christ-centered recovery, is an incredible opportunity for you to recognize what that is in your life and maybe start to work through that.

TCD, the Church Digital, we're going to be launching recovery groups, digital recovery groups, in the weeks to follow in October 2025. And so really excited to get that launched. We're going to be talking more about that through the conference. Uh, but we've got, man, some phenomenal speakers. Uh, Nate Grey Bill, uh, executive director of Regeneration. Uh, Nate's been on the podcast a lot and has done a lot of work with me historically on mental health, digital mental health. And so Nate's coming on speaking about the church's role in recovery. Um, we're going to have Laura How from Hope Made Strong coming on to talk about the role of recovery in digital missions work. I'm so excited for Laura to do this. Uh, we've got, uh, we're still working on details here, but Project Exodus, our strategic partner in this area, is coming on and leading a breakout. We're excited about the role of recovery in digital and virtual spaces, not only as a mission opportunity to extend the reach of how we're engaging and discipling people, others.

To be honest, I'm more excited about what it's going to do to you. Um, to be honest, I have learned to be very excited about what it did for me. It was a hard process shining light on yourself. It was a humbling process shining light on yourself. Uh, but I pray many of you will—um, what do I want to say there? I pray that many of you would benefit from humbly shining light on yourself and allowing God to do with you what he will. Yeah, I think I can say that.

Cool. More on that conference coming up. Stacy is owning the Control Alt Recover conference. Jason has been influential, heavily influential. He's actually kicking off the Digital Mission Conference, the Digital Neighborhoods Conference, on the 17th. And then we got Simon. Uh, Simon Durk's out in Germany, the European Digital Missionary Summit. This one's crazy. Uh, you know what? Um, Simon, I think's got like 10 or 11 keynotes. Like, if you're my age, maybe like 20 years ago, Leadership Network—I think it was Leadership Network—they did this online conference 20 years ago in the day when nobody was doing online conferences, but they called it the Nines. And what it basically was was everybody had nine minutes of a keynote, and it just bounced from a nine-minute keynote to a nine-minute keynote to a nine-minute keynote over and over and over again. And so that's close to what the European Digital Missionary Summit's going to be. They may get like 11 minutes, maybe 12 minutes, but he's got a ton of keynotes.

Um, and what I love about Simon in this conference he's putting together is it's a global reach. Like, he's reaching and connecting to—he's platforming people from like Romania and France and Germany, obviously, and Scandinavia and Spain and like, it really is a cross-section of the countries that are existing in Europe and highlighting the ministry that's existing in that space.

Um, and so what this is—an incredible networking opportunity if you're doing ministry in Europe and you're curious what's happening in that space, or maybe you are neighboring and just want to see what's there, or maybe you're stateside and curious what they're doing on the other side of the pond. You know, go check out the European Digital Missionary Summit. It's going to be August—October 1st. Excuse me. And then the most fun conference—now, you know, different titles, most creative, most number of keynotes—like, each one has their own characteristics. Leighton and Andy have been working on the Gaming Summit, and I got to tell you, I'm really excited to see this one come into play because they're taking really practical principles of ministry development and applying it into gaming and streaming spaces. So, what would it look like to discover your one digitally and to focus on that and to develop a ministry plan centered around the one?

Oh my gosh. Um, maybe one of the top three keynote speakers. Um, I'm not—this guy hasn't signed off yet for me. Uh, he hasn't signed off, period. But for me, one of the top three that I'm excited about is speaking at this conference. Um, and no, it's not me. You know, that's something I would joke about, but I wouldn't do that. Um, but man, like, I just—I—this one—this is crazy. This conference is going to be hosted in Discord. Uh, I've never seen an online conference in Discord. I'm—I'm a little—I'm not skeptical. That's not the right word. I'm curious. I'm curious. I've never seen an online event of size hosted on a Discord server. And uh, Andy tells me, "Oh, Jeff, don't worry about it. We do this all the time." And uh, so, okay, Andy, I trust you. And I do. I trust Andy. Uh, but I cannot wait to see it, to learn from it, because it's going to be great. And I just discovered—I just discovered they're doing a gaming afterparty. So, not only do you get to hang out and learn about how to do ministry in gaming spaces, but they're like doing a full-on gaming afterparty to grab the consoles, grab the controllers, and jam out playing some games with people from literally across the planet.

So, man, what an exciting digital missionary conference. Uh, you know, we had 1,100 people the first round—that was awesome. You know, 1,100 people came to the conference. We're hoping for 2,500 unique viewers across the four conferences, so anywhere from 500 to 600 people per conference. Um, and that's—I mean, that's an aggressive call. Uh, but at the same time, I mean, look at the nuances. Recovery—I mean, the average person that's interested in recovery is like a 40 to a 50-year-old female. Uh, which is interesting. And I don't—that was actually it was a woman who told me that's that, so don't call me sexist. Um, 40 to 50-year-old female is interested in recovery. Gaming is a 35—the average person interested in gaming is a 36, 37-year-old male. Uh, digital discipleship usually in their, you know, 50s, 40s, 50s, male. Um, Europe—I have no idea what the stats are there. I mean, it's a pretty broad spectrum. Uh, what I would say we're trying to get for this conference—and I've been convicted, you know, we still look a lot like this, right? Um, we're starting to get some other nationalities involved, and that's awesome. But we got to get away from the bald white man with a beard with facial hair. Sorry, Andy. Sorry, J-Mo. Sorry, everybody else that fits that bill. Um, white beard. Leighton's got hair. Leighton's got a little hair. So maybe that's it. Um, so yeah, really excited about the conferences at hand. They're all free. All you got to do is visit the website, missionary.digital, www.missionary.digital, and you can register for the conferences there online. Hit them all up in one fell swoop. Um, you register for one, you can go to all four. Check off the ones that you're interested in getting updates on. That's fine. Uh, but if you register one, um, we'll give you access to all four, no problem. It just would get really confusing if we didn't do that. But excited about that. Um, be praying. I got to start knocking on doors for sponsors uh tomorrow. So it's going to be good.

Uh, now I tell you what, I sat down yesterday. ChatGPT. ChatGPT and I are good friends. Now, you know, there was a time in my life that ChatGPT and I were not on speaking terms. Um, I tried to ignore its existence, and uh, and now I mean, I got to say I probably use it 30, 40 times a day. Um, all of my searches is ChatGPT now, by the way. Uh, Google is in search terms—Google's dead to me. Uh, and I love ChatGPT search. Like, oh my gosh, like, Google tells me what Google thinks I want to know. ChatGPT tells me exactly what I want to know and formats it exactly the way that I want it formatted. Uh, and so, you know, the Google SEO and the Google Adwords and the Google Ad Grant, all that's like up in the air. Uh, and I know AI is bringing on a new paradigm and a new set of issues. And I watched Matrix the other day, and there's a ton of Copper Top battery jokes I could probably insert here from that movie. But the reality is that ChatGPT is a force to be reckoned with.

Now, for me yesterday, and this is the thing that I found interesting—I believe this to me. I don't use ChatGPT for stuff I can do. This is going to sound weird. Like, I'm not—I don't use it to be lazy. I use it to multiply what I'm doing, to create more of it, to put it into different frameworks or different models or different formats or structures.

Like to me it's, it's, I would look at AI, ChatGPT, not as, um, do less work. I actually still would want to do the same amount of work. I just want to 10x the results. And so helping that AI take me into a new realm or a new community or a new context or allowing me to discover something that's going to help in the ministry that I'm doing. That's, that's what I'm interested in in AI for is the contextualization that allows for better multiplication.

And I used that yesterday. Oh my gosh, I had so much fun yesterday. Aside from watching, you know, How to Train Your Dragon, which I'll get to here in a little bit. I'll get to it now. It's a good break. How to Train Your Dragon. So I watched the live action. I watched the animation. I may have fallen asleep in it. My son gives me a hard time because I fell asleep in it. I watched two. I watched three. Um, I fell asleep in those movies too.

Like, I just, I really like the live action. Um, I felt like the live action made the action stronger. Uh, I felt like it made the story more real. And, and, and I got to tell you, I've really caught more of the historical context and some of the challenge between the, uh, the Vikings and the son who's, you know, bringing on innovation, who's bringing on design, who's bringing on really the industrial revolution, um, in the story because he's designing and crafting these things. Uh, and he's, I'm not gonna, I don't want to, no spoilers. Um, and so but it was interesting like, like I did not catch that paradigm, uh, the bifurcation of the two parties, uh, when I was watching the cartoon version of it, but I was watching the, you know, the human version, the real life, the live action version.

Oh my gosh, it was so rich. Was like jumping off the screen. It was painfully obvious. I was like, "Oh my, where was I? Did I really sleep that heavy?" But it was really good. Really, really, really good. I enjoyed it. Um, I would say, you know, anytime you watch a movie or a story, I kind of felt this way with Moana. Anytime you have, um, the old way and an individual that's championing the new way. To be honest, I, I, I see a little bit of myself in that story.

You know, um, the church digital, doing something different to reach someone different. Church doesn't work that way. Yes, it does. Let me show you pioneering and training and inviting people to become digital missionaries. Like we can have that conversation, but anytime there's a rebel story, it's very easy for me to be like, "Hey, I love this movie because I just, I resonate so much with the storyline." And so How to Train Your Dragon, the live action was that for me.

I didn't like so much some of the other kids that were in the movie. Like I felt like the animated dorky kids were better than the live action dorky kids. Um, but yeah, uh, Flat Cap says, "Uh, I don't even know the last, uh, movie I saw in theaters and maybe Chronicles of Narnia." Wow.

I couldn't live that life. We don't see a lot of movies, but if it's Marvel, we'll see it. If it's Star Wars, we'll see it. Uh, the new Wicked looked really good. Wicked part two. Um, Fantastic Four looked really good. Uh, Superman, my son's really excited about the new DC, so we'll give it a shot. I mean, and James Gunn we trust. So, I mean, we'll give it a fair shake. See what happens. I don't know. I don't know. I would see maybe six movies a year. We have a membership to the AMC, you know, like not the A-lister, but the Stubs, whatever, that gives us free upgrades and whatever. We make it to enough movies to make it worthwhile. But I get it, man. Like, you know, we bought five movie tickets yesterday for a matinee and it was still like almost a hundred bucks. It's just, it's just expensive. And, and then that's not including the popcorn. Uh, we had, um, coupons and it was still almost forty bucks with coupons.

Um, but we did get free refills because we had the bonus perks and like I said, we ate a lot of popcorn yesterday. Three buckets worth of popcorn. How do you say, how do you say buckets in Spanish? Hey Siri, how do you say buckets in Spanish?

There is not a prayer that Siri's going to get that. I don't know why I thought for one second Siri would be like ChatGPT-esque. Has anybody noticed that? You ever put like Siri and ChatGPT next to each other and you realize one's like, you know, college doctorate level and one is like barely, you know, out of diapers even though the other one's been around for like twenty years. It's kind of embarrassing.

Yeah. All right. So I use ChatGPT. Man, that was a tangent or two. I use ChatGPT to create some, um, proposals, some things we're working on in the future. And, um, you know me, I loose lip sync ships. So let's just talk about it and sing some ships while we're at it.

Um, you know, uh, what was it? Deanna, I used to have a girl that used to work with me, uh, Deanna Spalone, and she used to say that, um, oh my gosh, I can't think of it. Um, secrets leak, don't leak the secret. There was some, she would always get mad at me. She'd be mad at me all the time for years because anytime some secret came to me, I would like just blabber that all over the place. You know, it's insider Jeff. No one's supposed to know that. Yeah, screw it, tell everybody. It's all right.

Um, and so a couple things to know, and this is, shh, don't tell anybody, but if you know somebody wants to know this, let them tell. Tell them. I am starting a cohort in the fall aimed at physical churches. You know what? I've had a, this is confession hour of Jeff at the Church Digital. I've had a love affair, hate affair, probably not the right word to say it. Um, physical churches and I just have not seen eye to eye in the twenty-five years since I've been out of college.

Um, I really just have a strong desire for, uh, US-based physical churches to be something they're not. And, uh, physical churches want something from me that I have not been historically able to give it. And so like it just doesn't work well and, uh, as a result of that, um, I may be a little burned and this is, this is actually came to a realization for me. It came to a head a couple days ago, a couple weeks ago. I was like, "Hey, you know what? I may have some baggage. I may have some baggage with the physical church that we got to work out." And so since that realization, I'm starting to work it out. Starting to have some conversations, starting to flesh it.

I don't know if you know this, this is one of the things from recovery. When things are, when you're struggling with something, it is always better to talk about it. It is at no point in life is it a good idea to not talk about the thing that you're struggling with. Okay, maybe don't go up to your mother-in-law and confess your deepest, darkest sins, but find a way to have a conversation and put words to the thing that you're struggling with and watch what God does with those words. Watch what God does with your heart through that process.

And so it was funny like this is the honest God truth and I'll say it publicly. Couple weeks ago, I was walking in on a Monday, Tuesday, and I was like, "I think I'm a little depressed today. I think this week I'm a little depressed. What's, what's Jeff? What's going on? What's going on here with you?" And, um, I know it was Monday. It was Monday and, um, I didn't tell anybody. And you know what happened by me not telling anybody? I'll give you two choices. Number one, it got better. Number two, it got worse. What do you think? Number two, it got worse. I didn't give you time to think. It got worse. The feelings got worse.

And so Tuesday, I walked in, I woke up feeling in a worse state of depression twenty-four hours later. And, um, feeling that same pain. What did I do day two? I started to talk to people, told a couple of, uh, TCD leaders, told a board member, told my wife, and had just a really, um, had a really heartfelt, uh, honest, um, no hold back, I think is what I was trying to say, uh, conversation around what I was feeling.

I do, do we solve the problem? No. Is the problem still solved two weeks later? No. Uh, would I say that I'm depressed because of it anymore? I am not. And that's, that's the thing is that sometimes when we think, um, we're going through our darkest, we're going through our hardest times. That's where we isolate ourselves. And really in those moments, we can't isolate ourselves. We need to lean into it. But we need to be more open-handed. We need to be more transparent. We need to invite people into our lives to experience.

Especially as digital pastors, as digital pastors, as digital missionaries, it's very easy to isolate yourself in ministry, in relationships, physically. It's very easy to be, I mean like I am where I'm literally alone in my guest bedroom. Other than the two dogs and well, my son who's sick in the next room, there's nobody else in the house. And so it's easy to isolate and hide yourself from the world, but we shouldn't do that when we're struggling. We should be talking. We should be inviting others into that experience. We should be honestly showing some transparency, which allows others to engage with us.

The more transparency we show digitally, the more endearing it makes us, the easier it is for people to grasp on to who we are. And so this cohort that we're doing came out of this idea of man, I'm struggling right now. I'm struggling and I got to, I got to find ways to get through it. So I got to get on the same page as physical churches, um, together. Like we need to have a, you know, collectively physical churches and I need to have a come to Jesus moment.

And you know, I don't to this day, I don't think I can give what the majority of physical churches can do. What I don't, I don't, I don't think it's in me, but I can do something. And that's what this cohort's going to be. We're doing a physical church cohort, uh, where essentially I want to launch outposts inside physical churches.

I want to meet a handful of churches that are interested in developing as part of their discipleship strategy, they're interested in planting and starting, uh, a digital discipleship system in their church because I want to start to equip and mobilize people to be digital, uh, missionaries in physical churches. Crazy, I know, but I'm used to talking crazy. That's just one of the things we're doing.

Uh, just signed literally before I jumped on this call today, signed a contract with, uh, Noi GBE that's going to be our, uh, LMS learning management system solution. Uh, Noi is going to be our, um, our equipping library platform and so EDM, equipping digital missionaries, uh, the sharing Jesus online course, there's, honestly my hope is to have six or seven courses online by the end of the year.

You know, we've got the church digital. If we were to really look at it, you know, this is what, you know, we've done three hundred and forty some streams here, at least I have with the church digital podcast. You know, Tom has given us a lot of his stuff from, uh, Sidekick, and so he's got three or four hundred of those. Um, not including from Text to Testimony and some of those other shows that existed.

Man, I bet, I bet we've got, I don't think we've got a thousand, but we've got eight to nine hundred hours of content that exists digitally. What would it look like if we curated some of that into online courses that became a more tangible resource to equip people to be digital missionaries?

Like I've really longed to give missionaries the information they're looking for. Now, what the equipping digital missionaries is, it's, it's great theoretical, it's great head, it's great missional, uh, but it's not practical.

The outposts are practical. And we want to use these courses that we're developing to complement what's happening at the outpost level to help you all become better, more efficient digital missionaries here in America as well as globally.

You know, one of the other things we're working on right now, this one was fun for me because this was town hall. I'll go ahead and say this because there's parts of this that's like, "Yeah, this is a slam dunk." And there's parts of this that's like, "Yeah, Jeff, this ain't it's not ready for prime time." And so um I, we did the town hall meeting. I went back, you know, I talk about how, hey, the town hall meetings really help us shape what we do with the church digital.

Like we're not just waxing an apologetic here. Like it really does shape what we're doing. The digital missions, uh digital missionary conference was in fact influenced by the town hall meeting. It was mentioned on a town hall meeting that we needed to do a conference and so we did a conference.

We listen. And um one of the things that came out of the most recent town hall meeting was the idea of um, "Hey Jeff, I know you pivoted to digital missionary work and that's been awesome. But really since you pivoted to digital missionary, you don't talk much about digital churches or digital church planting at all. Like it's all missionaries. It's not it's not planting. How um, like can you, does that need to change? Can you help? Like what what what can you do towards that?"

I to this day I don't know who said that. I I don't think the commentary came at the name. Um but the person's not wrong. Like we did pivot and and I don't regret the pivot. The pivot was the right move. But it was it's interesting. The pivot left a void and the void was for um digital churches, digital church planting.

And to be honest, the void was also physical churches. I'm not talking void like you know the bad guy from Thunderbolts, but more of the absence. Um with the pivot, it left an absence for digital church planting and physical churches doing digital ministry cuz those were the people also that we were connected with. But with the pivot, they didn't have any place else to go and so they ended up unsubscribing and cutting bait and running away.

Well, we want to lean back. Like I said, we want to start to really embrace the idea of digital missions work at physical churches. Like that is the olive branch I'm bringing. If you're serious about uh digital evangelism and discipleship, come hang out with us. If you're a physical church, come hang out with us. There's an opportunity. Um, if you want me to help you figure out how to make your stream better, it's not really my jam. I mean, I can introduce you to Garrett. Garrett can take care of that for you. And so, the idea of re-engaging with digital churches, we need to do that. And it was funny right right about the time of the town hall meeting. We had a conversation to onboard uh and to create a digital microchurch outpost and and so we talked to Micah Bales who's leading a digital microchurch right now and it's actually in the process of planting one and said, "Hey, you know, why don't you create an outpost?" He loved EDM. He loves networking and connecting with people. And I was like, why don't you create an outpost and just for people that want to do the digital micro strategy?

Well, you know, as as he and I started talking, digital micro made less sense and digital churches overall made a lot of sense. And so we are going to be launching in fall right around the corner a digital church outpost. And so if you are doing anything in the digital or virtual space, we we want to hang out with you. We want to create an outpost. We want to connect you with others that are doing in the space to inspire, to cast vision, and to create learnings that can help the next generation of planters be successful.

As this generation is, so will the next. And so, what can we do for peer-to-peer support to help today's generation of planters be successful, so the next generation will as well? That is the way we roll with the church digital. You know, we we listen and when it makes sense, which more often than not it does, I surround myself with smart people. Thank you. Uh we we do what they tell us to do, you know, and this is really talking about 26. I think this is what the I think this is the future of where we're going.

You know, it's interesting. The church digital right now I I would say it's a top-down led ecosystem. I am the visionary. I'm the leader. I you know what what I say goes. I I don't I don't like that. But that's one of the things that I'm learning in a bifurcated, in a fractional leader role in a um you know a volunteer-led organization. It needs a strong vision to be successful. Um and that voice is coming from me right now. But I think there's another opportunity and this is something I've been I've been struggling with. Would love your your your take on it. And um yeah, Steve saying uh it's been almost an hour. I think it's nap time.

Dude, I'm telling you, I'm exhausted. Uh I didn't sleep well last night and um I I will I will hang up off this stream and I I'll go take a nap. But I do want to say this. Um I've been working on this. The church digital. My hope for the church digital is, you know, I say we learn a lot from the microchurch. Small and decentralized. Small and decentralized. Small and decentralized. That's what I wanted the church digital to become a series, a network of small and decentralized. But instead, we've got, you know, 1100 missionaries large and we're in a situation where it's leadership from the top down, which is not decentralized. It's actually centralized. You know, the board technically is above me, but me. And I tell leadership what to do, and they do it. And then that trickles down to the outpost leaders and and down in the next six months, in the next nine months, by this time next year, I'm I'm saying this on video to hold me to it. I want to flip the script where I'm not on top pushing vision down here. Here's what I here's what I I believe and this is a lesson that my friends over at Church Project taught me.

Jason Shepard told me this once um his most recent stream that he did with me. It was probably a year or two ago. In order to have a decentralized movement that's manageable, you have to have a centralized uh you have to have some aspects that are centralized. Now, what that is can depend, but a true decentralized movement would be like chickens running around with their heads cut off. It's not going to be sustainable and it's not going to be multiplicative.

Um and so in order to give everybody the ability to do what they want, they need to know the boundaries with which they can experiment and explore and do something different. And they and then we also need to figure out what is central, what is consistent, what are we we doing. Um and so that's why we did the framework connect community equip mobilize because that was a very basic framework that gave freedom to the EDM leaders to the outpost leaders to whoever to adapt and contextualize as they saw fit. But how Simon would adapt it is different than how Utop would adapt it. It was funny. Utop what's at me.

Utop, I'm gonna I'm gonna out you right here, man. Uh he what's that me this morning? He says, "Hey, I'm thinking about doing something." Um and and I think it may conflict with the church digital. And and I kind of I kind of chuckled and I was like, "Dude, there's nothing you're going to do that's going to like conflict with the church digital, but what what do you think? What are you thinking?" and um and he and he told me because he's he's getting ready to launch a framework on something that the church digital does not have a framework on and I'm like go for it.

I mean that doesn't you have freedom to explore and you have freedom even to change the framework that I'm I'm giving you like there's some level of of of open-handedness even on our side towards this but to say um you've got the freedom to do whatever you want well I mean if you want to do a physical church plant I don't know that that really makes sense with the church digital if you wanted to do a a dinner church. I don't know that really makes sense with the church digital. Like there's some things that that are inherently the the church digital. Um and and so we need to have a level of standardization, but with that standardization comes flexibility and with that standardization comes the opportunity to uh adapt, to contextualize, uh to see things differently. You see, we've been top down for the past year. Really, we've been digital missionary for a year. About this time last year was when Leighton would know.

Um, you know, we started talking crazy about moving to digital missionary. And for the past year, I have been I'll call myself out. I've been driving to build out the framework and to establish the departments, but in the very near future, it's going to flip and the outposts instead of me are going to be on top. The decentralized networks, the missionaries in the field, the EDM graduates, the uh the people that are on our network that we're equipping and empowering. These are the ones that are going to be in charge. It is not going to be the Jeff Reed show. It can't be. I'm a white bald man with a beard who lives in Miami, Florida. Like this is not the face of of what is represented globally or digitally. I mean the the average what was the the saying the average Christian in the globe is a is a forty-year-old African woman.

Um I think that was something that Lison told me recently like this is not the face of of the typical Christian or the typical missionary. Um, and so I think it's important for us to realize that where we're going with the church digital is to empower these individual networks up top. What Simon's doing, what Utop is doing, what um, what Micah Bales is launching with digital churches, what uh, Leighton's doing with gaming, what, you know, I can just rattle on what Steve's doing with Legacy. So funny. Leighton told me the other day, he says, because we were talking about whether the church digital was still was still innovative and and Leighton's like, "Are you kidding me? Steve Reed just launched a um a digital missionary outpost aimed at boomers." Like, that may be the most innovative idea, crazy idea I've ever heard of. A missionary na digital missionary network for boomers. Who would come up with that idea? Okay, that was technically me honestly cuz I was trying to figure out some way to resource my mother who wanted to be a digital missionary who's a boomer.

Hi, mom. Love you. The the fact is that 26 we want to give power to the Steves. We give power to the Simons, to the Atopes, uh to the Micas, to the Joshes, to the Leighton. Um, I myself, you know, I need to be in a position where I can resource and help them, which I'm already doing. These three or four these three or four uh projects that we're working on. I I only told you a couple of proposals. Couple of them I'm not ready to say yet. Um, I've already got the outpost leaders in place. Two of the four were from direct outpost leader conversation saying, "Jeff, why don't we do this?" And I said, "If I can get it built for you, would you run it?" And they said, "Yes, cool. I'm going to build it with you and you'll get the keys when we're done." And and I'm doing that for a season to get central teams and others ready to to manage it. But realize where we're going is going to be to empower the outpost leaders. What's the book? Uh actually I've not read the book, but leaders eat last.

You know, at the end of the day, there's a lot that humbly I don't know. And I would rather empower and listen to people who are in the field and help them do what God's calling them to do than to draw more attention to what I think is right or best. I love this stream. I'm even okay if this stream stops. Like, I'd rather empower somebody else. At 47, I'm kind of curious what's the next phase of the church digital? Who is it? Where are we going with this thing? And so, you know, what does 2026 look like? We're going to flip the script and the outposts are going to be positioned at top.

And so, I would welcome you if you want to really want to be a part of what the church digital is doing in the very near future.

Well, the best way to get into an outpost is to get connected into Equipping Digital Missionaries, EDM. So, go check out thechurch.digital/EDM. Equipping digital missionaries, EDM.

We're getting ready in August to launch a five-week course on our new LMS platform, NOI, where you'll get to learn how to be a digital missionary and get connected into an outpost, into a regional network, a peer-to-peer network where we can help people like you learn how to be more effective digital missionaries.

This is interesting. All right, let's see where this goes. According to AI, the largest share of Christians live in sub-Saharan South Africa, 31%. Yes. Latin Caribbean region, 24. I'm assuming they consider Catholics Christians, which works for me. In Europe, uh, 22. Uh, internet speed statistics, I don't know what that is, but yeah.

Um, I would buy that, Steve. Uh, that makes sense, which is where they get the average Christian today is African-American female, uh, sub-Saharan, uh, Africa.

It's interesting. Even the word sub-Saharan Africa, I don't think Africans understand the sub-Saharan Africa language. I ran into that the other day. But yeah, that's that's a thing.

Like I said, y'all, um, we are chill today. Down low, kind of relaxed a little bit, maybe more so. Leighton, Steve, it was great to hang out with you. Thanks for chatting this thing up. Those of you watching on demand, feel free to leave a comment, subscribe while you're on YouTube, and, uh, and questions, hit me up.

But, um, coming up, let me look real quick. I mean, shoot. If you stuck around this long, what's a little longer, right? Uh, let's see.

Next week, I can't read that. Oh, we're talking Justin, uh, Justin Sudter, uh, from Crew. We're talking with Crew again, uh, Justin Sudter, uh, who's head of God Tools and so excited to talk through the tools, the features, uh, that they've got.

I'll tell you, God Tools straight up, some really interesting, really powerful tools that can help people like you do ministry in digital space. And by the way, it's free.

And so, check out uh, the podcast Justin Sudter. Next week, we'll be doing some screen shares. You'll be seeing this, the conversations firsthand, and you're going to love it.

Uh, but uh, until then, this is uh Jeff with the Church Digital. Thanks for hanging out with us today on the stream and uh we'll see you next time on the show.

Y'all have a good one.