EP035: Brandon Catoe & Pop-Up Church

So episode 35 here of the Church Digital Podcast. You ever have one of those conversations where you're like, "I don't think anyone else in the country is doing this," or even a step further and say, "You know what, I think we're the only people in the world who are doing something like this"?

In 2019, where there's quite literally nothing new under the sun—thank you very much, Ecclesiastes 1—it's hard to realize, it's hard to imagine that there's something new, that there's a new concept that nobody's ever done before. Ironically, we stumbled into something like that here at the Church Digital, and in a side conversation about pop-up church. So I picked up the phone, called a friend of a friend, and eventually got connected with Brandon Tato, who is—get this—he is the pop-up pastor for Christ Fellowship Church in West Palm Beach.

So let me pause and I want to work through a couple things here. First off, this is Christ Fellowship West Palm Beach, which is completely separate from the Christ Fellowship Miami that I was formerly on staff at, and Raid the Armas, who is a guest host here, is currently the online pastor. So this is a completely separate organization, which yes, they're about 90 miles apart, and they always get confused on a regular basis. So plenty of side stories that we both can share about that.

But this idea of pop-up church has almost been something that's been a whisper, it's been an echo. "Well, what if we did pop-up? What is even pop-up mean?" And so like, I went into this conversation and we talked about it off air with Brandon. I didn't know what to expect. All I knew is someone told me, "Hey, they're doing some incredible stuff with pop-up," and to be honest, I really didn't even know what pop-up was. And so I get on the Zoom with Brandon, who's this pop-up pastor, and basically I start off the question with, "Dude, tell me about pop-up." And what followed was an incredible conversation centering around innovation, a church that's willing to do incredible things for an incredible growth opportunity to impact people with the gospel.

So I love this conversation. I'm sure you will too. I'm gonna present to you in this conversation Brandon Coto, who is the pop-up church pastor for Christ Fellowship West Palm Beach, and myself, Jeff, with the Church Digital, in a conversation surrounding pop-up church. But here you go.

So we started off a year ago kind of just dreaming up with this. How does this look? What are we gonna do? What is it? How do we even build a team for this? And so we really—that's what that looked like in June of last year. And then we finally got a team put together and figured out a process somewhere to start. And then we were like, "Well, what are some of the things that have been successful in the locations?" Because typically, the way we launch campuses here at Christ Fellowship is we would just take a team of probably let's say four to six people, we would plant them at most likely a high school, and just leave them there until church built.

So we thought, "What if we—" Our number 10 location was Jupiter, Florida, which is just not too far, probably like 15 miles away from here. The school was—they weren't as friendly when it came to storing our gear and keeping our stuff there, the things we needed to keep on-site to do church. So they made us put it in containers and trucks and all of this different portable stuff. And so we're like, "What if we took—we do so many things as a church in the community. What if we took this stuff and put it in a truck and made it portable, and we just popped up somewhere into church?" And so that's kind of where it started in June of last year.

We thought, "Well, let's get into some communities." And you know, we asked people—we have people that drive sometimes three hours to get to one of our locations. And so we said, "Well, why don't we just start, pick a few communities, and just go in their backyard, in the park or something, pop up, do a big barbecue, have a family fun day, and invite people out. Tell them what we're thinking about, what we're gonna try, and if they'd be interested in it."

That was really what we started with. The other thing here—Christ Fellowship, we take June and July kind of as our slower months of the year. We kind of vacation a little bit. Our senior leadership is usually traveling, speaking, and so during those months it was a lot of, "Let's get planning together. Let's start dreaming about what we could do when they get back and hit the ground running August 1st." We will come up with all of the plans and get the budgets approved and let's roll with it. So that's what happened. We kind of dreamed out a whole season. I did have my whole team for June and July. We just learned what—we didn't tell anybody. We were kind of meeting in secret rooms. And then so August first, leadership gets back and we lay out all of our big ideas and plans, and they're like, "Okay, go for it. Try it."

So in September, we did these huge what we call them backyard barbecues, and we went to the communities and we did these big barbecues. And we had about 350 people come out to the first one, we had about 400 people come out to the second one. And we were like, "And we could build church." The thought was, "If we could get this thing rolling and we could take this gear, make it roadworthy, portable, we could go to a different city each week. And so in a year's time we would build—we would plan and get a church to where hopefully it would start to be able to self-sustain, and then by the end of year two, contribute back to the mission and all the things we're doing as a church."

"Well, what if we did that through pop-up, but we were doing four at the same time instead of one?" And so that's kind of where it all birthed out of. And what we've been doing—so we didn't have our first church service until January of this year. So August of last year, we laid out all of our plans. September, we did the backyard barbecues. October, we did something called Relationship 101, which really—we learned, but it—we wouldn't do it again. And then November, we did something called serve days. There's a lot of churches here. We're part of Church United, and so we partnered with them to do something called Love South Florida. And so we did a bunch of serve projects in November in both of these cities. And then December, we invited them. We messaged. We went to the mall in one location and did like a Christmas concert in the mall, and did the same thing for Halloween. We went to the mall up there. They call it Malloween.

And so we did a—they gave us a sense—horrible. Yeah, I'm sorry. Malloween? Halloween? Yeah, all is that what the mall does? Let's just call them out publicly. That's the worst thing I've ever heard. That's Vero Beach. That's the Vero Beach mall. Yeah, Vero Beach mall, I expect more out of you. You've got this. You got Disney Vacation Club right there within your city. You got to come up with something better than Malloween.

Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm sorry to interrupt. Please go ahead.

No, that's good. We—I'll tell you what though, it wasn't—we were so underprepared for that. We had over 5,000 people come through our booth at that Malloween at Malloween. It blew us away. We took 500—we took 500 little, like, our Christ Fellowship, we don't see if Kade, so we took 500 see-if kids, little giveaway, just, "Hey, connected with us. Here we are. We're gonna come build church here." We gave those 500 in the first 15 minutes. We were out of those, and it was 45 minutes before the event even started. So we were in trouble. Wow. Though we were calling in resources and getting supplies delivered to us, and it was a crazy night.

So let's back up a little bit, because yeah, Christ Fellowship, you guys are Christ Fellowship West Palm Beach. Yeah, I used to—I too used to be on Christ Fellowship at the Miami. It's two completely separate churches. I want to make sure we're very clear on saying that because otherwise, like, people get confused. Side note: every Easter, Christ Fellowship Miami gets a bill from vendors that rent you guys AV gear, and it's happened for over a decade. Like, I can go that far back and tell you, they always send a bill down south, and we're always like, "Nope, wrong Christ Fellowship. Send it up."

Yeah. So but let's unpack this. You guys are eight campuses right now?

We are 11. Just kidding. You're 11 campuses. So that's within what, an hour, hour and a half from the main campus, kind of that surrounding?

Yeah, our original campus is Palm Beach Gardens. So from Palm Beach Gardens, we have campuses in our West, which is our Okeechobee location. We have Boynton South, which is about 35 minutes south. And then we have Port St. Lucie North, which is about 50 minutes north. And then right now we are working at Boca Raton, Vero Beach, Westlake, our western communities, and Riviera Beach downtown. Okay, and those are not including either the pop-up locations. So those locations are solid, fully existing campuses right now?

Yeah, so 10 physical locations and 11 is our online campus online. But now in addition to that, you're doing—you said you're rolling like four pop-up locations at the same time, just kind of like utilizing this pop-up model to kind of nurture, create community, get DNA in the area like that's the goal of what you're trying to do, build church?

Yeah, so we're now nine months in. We're in a position we could launch four campuses in 2020 with what we've done with pop-up in just nine months. So what—just walk us through nine months. That's a really interesting number. You're going from completely cold to, "Hey, we're ready to launch a campus." Yeah, that's a—I mean, it's relatively quick turnaround, especially if it's really a cold experience. Like, what's that timeline look like? How many services are you doing? What's that flow?

Well, and if I'm honest, we would—what we were—we're proposing right now to move the timeline up even quicker, to try to do this in six months. Some things we've learned along the way: we launched the very first two. We launched them at the same time, which we wouldn't do again because what happened is those two competed against each other all along the way. So through social media and different avenues that we're using to connect and drive attendance and connect with people, they're also watching one kind of outpace the other one a little bit, which isn't fair because they're in two completely—they're 100 and 150 miles apart. So completely different areas, completely different opportunities.

But so the backup: we spent a lot of time in 2018 building this ramp-up. We spent almost seven months building this ramp-up to get to launch services in January. And January, we launched in our first two locations, which was Boca and Vero. And we've had a lot of success. What we saw though is because we were only going once a month and we were doing on Sunday night, so not a prime time, and only giving them one service a month—so everything we did up until January were different connect events, barbecues, things like that, engagement events. In January, we gave them full-on church services. So what you would experience at one of our locations with a little extra connect time. So we provided like 45 minutes hang time afterwards: "Hey, meet me, meet our team. We want to get to know you. We want to find out more about the area and what you guys love here and how we can be a part of it," and all that kind of stuff.

So really what we did is we put those two first two campuses kind of on a competition with each other, which wasn't fair. So one of the things moving forward is we'll stagger. Like, we'll do one, let it get rolling, and then do another one, let it get rolling, and kind of use that as a model to see if it's a place. The first four locations—so these were a little bit unique because we kind of knew—we kind of—

Knew we already had people there from online church. We knew that people were watching. We knew that we had people engaged with Christ Fellowship in these four locations. One of them, which is our third one, was actually a home run from the get-go. We intentionally didn't go there first or second because it would have really messed us up with any other location because it was a home run right out the gate.

These Western communities are perfectly located between our two largest locations. We have a church there. We know that that would be a location, but let's let it start to organically grow. People hear about it, people get excited, but then kind of almost, man, hey, we want to bring pop-up here. We want pop-up. So in our first night out there we had 700 people. So we knew, we knew that, but that's kind of what we expected. We were kind of thinking that was gonna happen.

Walk me through six months, nine months. What's the timeline? How many trips are you going out to these areas? How are people connecting? Are there things other than just the pop-up church experience that you're using to create community? Like, what would walk me through a six to nine month time period from a campus is going to nothing to okay, we're ready, all this, the XYZ campus?

So in the second half of 2018, those were connected events that we're starting to get the things in the water saying we're coming. Once we launched church in January, we only went once a month to the first two locations and then we added the third location in there along the way. In between there, we have something we call the journey. So that's an opportunity for people to find out more about the church. It's a four-week class, one hour. So we started doing hosting journeys in those locations so people had another touch point with us.

After each service, we created a like a 45, 50 minute connect window. So each month we'd have the service, worship, everything we did, we dismiss, and then we dismiss. So basically, after party. The after-party was building and pointing people towards the next time we were coming back. Also an opportunity for us to connect with them. Our team was all out there, highly engaged. We had all of our ministries that we were offering in that location. So like our groups, where groups-based church, so we had all of our groups teams out there saying, hey, we have groups already being built. So we were getting people in groups right from day one, trying to build groups down in those two communities right off the bat. And then also starting up students and young adults and all of those things that we offer.

We don't offer every single ministry that, like, for instance, a garden or a bomb, because we just can't. Remember, when we don't have a building, we don't have a location, we can't be there seven days a week. So we had to pick and choose the best things to offer to build community in those locations. And that seemed to be journey, so they could find out who we even are. Like, is this a church I even want to be a part of? So journey was a huge resource. Groups were probably our biggest resource to be able to get people connected and start to match people up and say, hey, man, there's a whole bunch of young adults here. Hang out. These are your people. They've got a couple—oops—go and go check it out. We're not making you sign up for anything. We just want you to see what's available, and if you want to be a part of it.

So kind of driving those from the beginning. Then we added—so after, we didn't really have a timeline. We were like, let's figure this thing out. We don't know what it's gonna look like or how fast it's gonna build. We knew about the fourth month that they were getting anxious already. People want it faster, quicker. Now we want a church. Now we've seen the website, we've been on, we've seen everything that you guys offer. We want you like, give it to us. So that kind of changed our conversations around what do we do next? Where do we take him?

So we said, let's go twice a month. So we have a couple expressions, and all out of all of our locations, we have two evening expressions. One is called City Nights. Everyone's called a Ot Nights. And these are kind of more creative, a little more worship, live teaching. And so that was kind of what we modeled pop-up after for the first six months. Then we were, then we had to reevaluate, say, what do we do?

So in that six months, we're like, okay, they want more. Let's give them two services a month and let's go ahead and bring in video teaching that we use on the weekend and see how that worked. Our northernmost, the furthest north Bureau location, went crazy. People just loved it. They were all in. So we said, let's identify the campus pastor, would start looking for a building. We found a building fairly quickly. And so we told him, we said, hey, here's your campus pastor. This is your location. This is a building. And that place just took off. People are engaged, they're hungry, they're excited.

And then we, as a church, we started something brand new called Freedom. And it's a freedom study that our pastors wrote. And right now, as a church, we're taking almost 14,000 people through Freedom. And so we offered Freedom in Bureau, and the people went crazy there. They were overflowed with Freedom on Wednesday night. So now in Vero, they have a campus pastor, they have a building, they have Freedom every single week that they're part of, which are study groups that we will launch into groups. We have about probably 200 people in groups. And so that's been our, that'll be our first launch. That one's already in launch sequence right now. We're launching that in the beginning of 2020, as soon as we can get the building done. And that's kind of how that one ramped up.

You said you were utilizing Church Online. Yeah, it's kind of give you a heat map of some areas together, and some are stronger than others. You mentioned the West seems to be working better for you just because of proximity of cities. But like, do you guys when you go into the area, like, are you just looking at that heat map? Are you digging in and investigating leadership, or is leadership kind of arising out of it? What's your process to really get to the core team who's gonna be in any given area?

That's a little bit different. Those two conversations really aren't connected. The first conversation was, as a leadership team, which is a group of like five to seven of our senior leadership, start praying about, looking at heat maps. There's interest in there. So we're looking at, okay, we've got people watching online. Let's pray about it. Is this scenario that we feel like we're supposed to go into? And then as God starts to open doors and stir the waters up, we're like, okay, we're going now.

We've been working with something for multiple years called Leadership College here at Christ Fellowship. We have people in the pipeline that have been part of Leadership College. They're on team and other roles, but they've been identified, and we've been watching them to say, okay, this person could go here. This person could go there. They seem like a better fit for one location versus the other. So we start having those conversations with them, just kind of getting in the water to see how they're feeling.

And then our senior pastors did something really cool a few months ago, and they took a staff meeting. So every Wednesday, our entire staff comes together for a staff meeting. And Pastor Julie said, hey, God just kind of put it on my heart, and I want to throw it out there. If you are feeling stirred for one of these regions or one of these locations, or maybe you're at one and you feel like God's saying, hey, I want you to be a part of this one, I just want you to raise your hand and let's start the conversation. And so we just threw it out there to see who was interested, who was praying about what, what was God stirring people's heart, and how could we help them realize that sweet spot?

And it was pretty cool. We had multiple people raise their hand and say, hey, I'm really, really feeling stirred to be a part of this location, really filled stirred to be a part of that location. And then the position that's probably the hardest to fill is that campus pastor because there's so much weight, there's so much trust, there's so much culture, all the things that we really just pray about so hard. And we look for different opportunities and different leaders and to see it, man, do they look like a campus pastor? Are they starting to do things? Are they pastoring people without having the title? All these different things that we look for is leadership.

And so we have a secret list, I guess you can say, of 15 to 20 people that are on this list or like, man, this is, they could be campus pastors. And so there's a Michelle, I sit on the multi-site team. So we start to look at it first and say, hey, yeah, we're all in agreement. These could be, these would be great candidates for campus pastors. Let's pray about it. So and then we toss it out there to our direction of leadership team, which is our senior pastors and executive pastors, and say, hey, the super praying about, tell us what do you see? What don't you see? What do you like? What don't you like? Is there hangups? Is there things that we need to process and look into?

And then it takes a little while. So for instance, the Bureau campus pastor, he was on the list for probably a year and a half, and it took probably about seven months of stacking hands, praying, really just everyone flipping over every leaf, rock that we could to make sure. And ultimately, we all stacked hands and said, yeah, that's the. And what's cool is when we got to that point, God had already stirred their hearts. And even though they never raised their hand and said, hey, we want to be a part of Bureau, as soon as we asked, they were like, we're in. And so since then, we've just seen God already moved that before we ever even launched church. They're building church like crazy, and it's really cool to watch.

Very cool. So at this point, how many pop-up church services are you running a week you juggling in the four locations? Yeah, like, it's the, I'm just doing math in my head, and like, your road kits probably hitting like, it's more than one road kit, right?

Well, so what we had to do with two of them is kind of dual. So one of them is a location where we're doing, we're hosting Freedom right now. So Freedom is being hosted there midweek. We're not doing a weekend experience there, okay? In another location, we're doing off-night expressions of service there. So we can have Sunday nights specifically for Boca and Bureau. So right now, the first and the third week, our word Bureau, and the second and the fourth week, we're in Boca. And we communicated ahead of time to the other two like, hey, once we put these in launch sequence, we're gonna have to pull back. But don't worry, we're not going anywhere. We're coming back stronger than ever before. As soon as we launch one of them, you're up next for a two-week rotation until we can get you launched.

And really, we did that ourselves by launching them at the same time. It put us in a different, put us in a weird spot. So we just have to get through these first couple launches, and then we'll be okay.

Can you guys sustain like this amount of four campuses a year? Like, this does your multi-site process allow for launching four?

Well, I would say you don't ask that question. I would, no, no, we vacillate. We have tireless meetings about this. We are gonna have to pause at some point because we are, we've never launched you and one year before. The most we've done is like, we had...

Had to go within nine months of each other in two separate years, but we've never—we've never launched two in one year. We certainly never launched three in one year. And we're in position we could launch four in 2020 if we if we wanted to. So all everybody has been put on notice.

Because I think a lot of people were like, "Is this even gonna work? Like, should we really get riled up about this? Or should we really get put on notice and start building teams and people before we even know if this is a real deal?" So I think after the first quarter of 2019, people were like, "Okay, we need to have some meetings." So we've been meeting with all of our core directors and just saying, "Hey, who do you have up next?" And as a leadership team, we've said, "Okay, we probably need a pause on something so we can start to fill our benches back up," because right now we're depleting—we're depleting all of our roster spots. So we're okay right now and perfectly leadership college and some of the other things we're doing, we'll backfill these spots quicker. But we feel—we feel like this is what God's put us on. He's continuing to open doors that just blow our mind. So we're like, "We can't say no. We can't say no. We have to go if he's opening doors and providing this." And he—we're just trusting him that he's gonna have the right people step up at the right time. But we are very cautious about what we're doing to our teams, about the amount of pressure this is. But like, our worship and production teams are stretched to the max right now. But they've got some plans in place. They just shared them with us this morning as, "Hey, this is what we're doing. This is where we're headed." We're trying to fill all the gaps so that we can be ready to cover. And it's pretty cool.

Yeah, here in images put it in the context because obviously the podcast audience may not be familiar with Christ Fellowship West Palm. The production values at the Christ Fellowship West Palm campuses arguably are some of the highest in South Florida. You know, I mean, I can probably rattle off three or four that are in the same sentence, and you guys—forgive me for even like uttering the sentence—you guys just, you put on a great show. There's lots of production, so I don't mean that insulting. It's just there's a lot of effort and energy that goes into creating that worship experience. Now, does that port to like all these other places? Like, you're talking about putting together those rigs and traveling it around. Like, are you doing movers? Are you doing, you know, jib arms, camera? It's like all the high energy stuff. So like the pop-up church is like getting that same experience? Or is it like, what does it feel like?

Yeah, so if you went to our location that has like all the roving cameras and all of that stuff like that at our Gardens location and one of those—we're not doing the camera portion of it. But they still get all the movers. They get an LED wall. I mean, it's top, top notch. Our team—I was just bragging on our team this morning because, man, the production team has blown us away. All of our gear is roadworthy. They have built a system that is absolutely incredible. Everything stays in road cases and the platform is so clean. It's amazing. I wish I had some pictures I could share with you of what it looks like. I'll get something this weekend in case you want me to send them to you. But they have a full—you know, we'll have four frontline vocals. We have a full band. We have everything on platform that you would see at any of our other locations. The lights are incredible. We have a massive LED wall that sets up in like an hour. It's crazy how it all goes together.

We have six trucks on the road that hold all the gear. Six trucks. Oh my goodness. Yeah, this is a good wheel. Six trucks. So two of the locations we go to and potentially the third location we go to, they don't have the power. So first, we have to take a massive generator with us that powers the whole deal. We have two twenty-six-foot trucks that are just production gear—so the LED wall, all of our PA, everything that we need, lights. Fortunately, we're not putting up a platform anywhere. We've got venues that allow us to have a platform, so we don't have to set up a stage or anything. All the worship deities, drums, you name it—all in road cases, rolls out. And then we have a third twenty-six-foot truck that's all of our kids gear. So if you came to Plumage Gardens or any of our permanent locations, you would see pop-up walls. You would see full setups with kids environments, all of the awesome stuff on the walls and all of the pictures and all of the environments that are appropriate for those age groups. And we have made pop-up walls that have all that same stuff on there. So these pop-up walls come in cases and we pop them up. They're ten foot by ten foot, and those wall off all of the kids rooms. So there's five environments of those. And then we have our last truck, which is full of like all of our environment common areas—like our next steps area, journey tables, groups tables, all the ministries, students, young adults that we set up areas for them to connect. And then our environmental pieces—so high tops and stuff and four-year lights and banners and all of our core values, leadership principles, and things we put up all the place.

So you guys have invested a lot into this model. We have. Wow. Yeah, and that's generating your result of like up to potentially four campuses a year, assuming they've been mature and grow as planned. Yep. We could—we don't see any reason why we couldn't launch four campuses a year. And honestly, you nailed it. It's the people. We just have to be careful that we don't burn our people out and that we are caring for our people and our teams first, because we can only go so far. They're only in—we're only able to go as far as they allow us to go. So those are some of the things that we're working on right now. Because we could literally build another rig and become four more locations now that we've built it and we know what we know what it is. So yeah, we've worked really hard to make things super portable and easy to get in and out, up and down. So we set a whole campus up in about two to two and a half hours—everything from live productions, kids rooms, environments, everything.

You guys process six trucks in two to two and a half hours? Yes. Wow. Like, that's impressive. But that's—yeah, I'm just going back to like my other experience in live production, and I just can tell you how much I respect that. Yes, that's a lot of work and in a really short amount of time. Yeah. And so having the heavy demand power to pull that off is really impressive. And honestly, it's mostly volunteers. So we'll have—we'll have probably—so last night we popped up, we had twenty-eight volunteers and probably about eighteen staff. Okay.

So how do you—like, when you pick location five or one of these, that you already have—like, you just pull up to the corner, unload, and say, "You know, here we are"? Are you guys doing marketing or promotions in the area?

If I was picking number five right now, I've already picked it. It was—it actually came to us. Another God story. We had a coach reach out to us. We try to get into the community first. So what can we do to serve the community? How can we serve the schools? How can we serve what's already going on there? What can we—is there another church doing something that we can just come support and be a part of it? Because we know in South Florida in our region, there's 1.5 million people who don't know Jesus, never met him, never heard about him, don't care too because they don't know. And so we know there can—there's not enough churches. We can put them up all over the place. Pop up all over. And you have three hundred-person churches and never reach the 1.5 million. So we look for opportunities to serve a school, to serve a ministry, to serve something in community government. Get with the mayor. The one that number five right now—if this is what ends up being number five—was a coach that reached out. How to mean for—it's a low-income area, and the school didn't have enough food to feed the football team for their games. And so we got word that, "Hey, you guys could serve and help feed the football team." And so we're like, "Let's go. What do we got to do?" Which just opened up to another conversation and found out the principal's a believer. The coaches are believers. And they're like, "We don't have—we don't have no church that wants to support us. We don't have a church that loves on us. We don't have a church that sits in our school taking." And we're like, "Okay, well, here we go."

So the third location was kind of the same way. There was a smaller church meeting there and just sat and hadn't found their rhythm. And they just through conversation with them, they're like, "Man, we would love for you guys to just come in this community and blow it up. Like, tell us what we got to do to help." And they met with the assistant principal. Turns out he's a believer. And he's like, "Man, whatever I got to do to open the doors to get you guys in here, let us know."

So honestly, those have been the opportunities we've had right out of the gate. We'll probably get a little more strategic as we get further away. You know, we're praying about going to Orlando. Should we take the pop-up trucks to Orlando and go to land that we're praying? We originally were praying about our little region, and we felt like God was like, "Why are you just worried about that little spot? Like, that's so much more." And so we're like, "Okay, with it's inside Florida now, we feel like let's go." So we don't know what God's gonna do. We don't know what doors he's gonna continue to open. But right now, he's been amazing, supplying us with opportunities. And people have been so nice to us. We've had mayors reaching out. Some of the disaster relief that we've been able to be a part of—we saw opened doors. So like, Hurricane Dorian just came through the Bahamas, and getting local government people involved in that and really supporting the Bahamas has opened up even more doors. So the fourth location that we're working on right now, which will be a campus for sure, was a lot of the mayor and the vice mayor just coming to us saying, "Hey, can you guys come help?" And we're like, "Absolutely. How could—what can we do? You tell us what to do. We're doing it." And so it was so cool. Another God thing. They just said, "We need water and preparation for when the storm passes because we know we'll be the last ones to get water." And so within five minutes, someone called and said, "I have a semi truck load of water. I got nowhere to take it. Working you—where can we take it?" And we're like, "Take it here. Take it to the city." And so they rolled up with a semi truck full of water. And the mayor's like, "Whatever you guys need." So just cool. God keeps just giving us those awesome opportunities, and we're excited just to be able to be a part of it.

That is so awesome. Who over the—I mean, you just—you're new on this road where I—you started your say in 2018. Earlier, who's been your inspiration? Who have you looked at and said, "Hey, like, we want to maybe borrow a little bit from this?" Or what other churches have you been looking at that have been doing something similar?

Actually, buddy, no. We—this was really the heart of our lead pastors, Todd and Julie. They just—they are so burdened for the lost, the broken, the hopeless. And they're like, "What are we gonna do? How can we get to more people?" When we looked at what we had done as a church, and we launched—so when I stepped on in 2013, and we were getting ready to launch our number eight, we launched eight, nine, ten campuses. And when I was stepping in, the number was 1.3 million in our region who didn't know Jesus.

Was and after those three campuses which have been amazing success stories, they're just so much life as happening there. God has done so much at those three locations. The number goes to 1.5 million. So we're not gaining any ground. So how do we gain some ground? And so really the heart behind was our pastors was, let's build something we can give away. What if we could build this? What if we could give it away to all of the other churches that are ready to go after this? And I don't know if you've been to our conferences or any of that, but they really open the cupboards at our conference and say, "Take what you need. Here's your resources. If you can help, if you can help you build church, we want you to happen." And so that was really the heart behind pop-up is, let's build it. Let's be okay to fail or let's be okay to spend a few extra dollars to figure out how to do it right so that we can give it away. And then what if 15 churches across the state of Florida said, "Let's go pop-up," and then we had, you know, all of these churches, and then the whole 3.3 million in our state that don't know Jesus would have an opportunity to hear about it. So we don't know anybody's doing it. We've heard some opportunities where people are doing their version of it. It doesn't look like what we're doing. There they're doing it more. There's some of them that are doing it more of like an event. And we bought, we've helped some of them. There's three or four churches across the country that have tried it and they've launched locations or in the process of launching locations out of it, which is really cool that we were able to just walk on and say, "Hey, let's share what we got. Use it if you don't work." But yeah, and I know of a couple, maybe not at the size of what you're doing, some smaller to medium size churches that will like do several, you know, like an Easter, a couple Easter services or Christmas service, kind of that seasonal time, and trying to use it as a public forward-facing, easy to access church and then funnel them into a physical campus or funnel them into a like an online digital discipleship pathway to get them connected to the online campus or something like that. But I've to the level and the success that you guys have had of launching campuses or incubating is the word that I've been trying to come up with for the past hour, incubating these communities to the point where they can grow to become a campus. Yeah, like I don't know anybody that's had the success that sounds like you guys have had. And so man, what an incredible idea. Well done.

Yeah, you know, and I'll be honest, where there are our furthest south region, it's not at the level of the other ones. But we feel like that's kind of our fault because we took too long. One of the things we've seen in that, let's just society today, people want it faster, quicker, sooner. They don't want to wait. So we've taken a little bit too long on the southern location. So we're actually having some meetings all this week of, "Where do we go next with like, we have to move that campus forward or that location forward if it's gonna be a campus?" The northern one was just an opportunity where God opened so many doors so fast. We were like, "We have to go. Like, we have to take these chances," which again, this is where those two are competing with each other. And it kind of put the southern campus off. Like they're like, "You know what, we're watching all of this excitement up there, and we're trying to explain, 'Man, we haven't had those kind of doors open here.' We're like, 'We're it's harder ground. We're fighting harder.' Like, we're not giving up. Like, we're going after it with everything we've got, but it just thought it hasn't been." And then it's close enough to another location where we know that people are going to that other location. So we're just trying to figure that out in the southern one. But we fully believe we have over 500 people connected there. So we fully believe it's a campus that's gonna grow and could be a huge one down the road. But it's just been some delays that have been unfortunate. But we're gonna figure it out and we won't launch two at the same time again.

Hey, we normally talk a lot about church online in the podcast. This has been an exception. But I do know like this has been from an innovative idea. Like I was really looking forward to this conversation and it went phenomenal. But let me ask this, what is the role? How do you guys at Christ Fellowship West Palm Beach, yeah, what's the role of church online in this? I know you're looking at it upfront for that, for the heatmap, for potential areas for what's next. What other role does a church online, online campus play at Christ Fellowship?

So it actually plays a huge role. And so what we use in our earlier, the first like the very first time we pop up, we don't have anything really to connect them to except church online, which is a huge tool, huge resource, and a huge way for us to just continue that connection. So we start messaging church online right out of the gate, day one, just like, "Hey, the three weeks we're not here, we want you to go online. Go Christfellowship.com, log on, check us out. We got services every single week. We got pastors on there." And then we do something called "Bait for Monday." So every single Monday we go in church online and we do a lot of prayer. Just this opportunity to where they see my face or one of the pastors that they might recognize. We do live, maybe the longest would be 15 minutes. But we pray over people that are from the different areas. So we're like, "Hey, sending your prayer request live," and it just gives us another opportunity to connect. So if we didn't have that, if we didn't have church online, if we didn't have that opportunity, it would have made pop-up a whole lot harder because we wouldn't have that extra opportunity to connect. And now we're doing some, we got groups online. We've got the online chat hosts that are in there having conversations with them. Or I can't have all these conversations. My team can't have all these conversations. But we've got this massive resource of church online where they can get on there and say, "Man, I'm in, you know, I'm from Boca and I'm just I'm really going through something with my family right now. I could use some prayer." And they're getting prayed for. They're getting loved on. They're getting connected. They're having that opportunity. And then we tell them, "Hey, get together." One of the things we learn from Elevation, it's how they do. They launched church through like watch parties where they just have people come over to a house, three or four couples get together, maybe they're having coffee or whatever, and they turn on line on and they watch and they have a, you know, house party and a watch party. And so we started messaging that. We're like, "Hey, some of our churches that our friends are doing this. We want to encourage you guys. The three weeks we're not here, get some of the friends that you brought tonight, have them over for coffee and bagels, put church online at church together." And you know what, we might just show up. So me and my wife and some of our team, we would just find out, we'd go pop in their house and watch church online, just having a lot of fun with it and letting it build church, but not forcing anything. But really, online church has been, you know, priceless as far as the tool goes for us to be able to keep people connected. And then using our pastors, we've got a dozen pastors that pop on and you made for Mondays. And we try to shout out anybody or if I know somebody's going through something, I'll use their first name only and pray for them and say, "Hey, I know John's down in Boca. He's got a rough week. He's trying to find a job. So John, I just want you to know I'm praying for you. I'm believing God's got something for you. I can't wait to see you in a couple of weeks back down there. Our team's praying for you. Be blessed." You know, maybe share Scripture, some kind of scriptural thought that he could just take. And then I'll and then I'll tell him, I was like, "Man, did you see me? I was praying for you online." And so it's a huge resource. And our pastors are amazing, helping have those conversations and sending me feedback, let me know, "Hey, I just talked to this person. You might want to reach out to him." So very cool. Yeah, it's such a powerful to help connect the DNA of who you are even when you're not there, doing the long-distance. And we actually had Danny on from Elevation a while back. We did a blast talking about the watch parties and a lot of that. So if you didn't hear that episode, listen audience, go back in and catch that. It's a really, really good episode. And one of the things that I loved about Danny in that conversation, she did the entire time, she said, "Yeah, we're doing that now. We'll probably change it in two months. Yes, we're just experimenting. We don't know what we're doing." And says, "Great. Know what, what a great challenge for all of us out there that you know may be afraid to experiment or may be overly cautious, but getting out there trying and seeing what God can do with it." Which gets me to this, and we can wrap on this, okay? So there's a church out there that's interested in doing this. Yeah, what's the first thing? So obviously it's a very rich idea, getting from idea creation all the way to where you are. What's kind of the first thing that you would advise somebody, a church, an organization interested in doing this? What do they need to do?

Well, first I would just get with leadership and make sure that they're stacked hands on what it's going to cost and the kind of effort it's gonna take. And know that your leadership is behind you 100 percent because it's a front-loaded experience. There's a lot of expense on the front and there's a lot of effort, labor, man-hours, equipment, all that stuff that comes out front if you're gonna try. If you're gonna do it the way we're doing with, nah, I would also say if you want to try some of the things like Elevation Church and some of those where you're doing watch parties and things like that, very, very, very inexpensive and also really cool to be a part of because you get to go and just be right from the ground up. So I would just start with a conversation and say, "Hey, we're, what model do you really want to go after?" Because there's a few different ways you can approach it. And I'm not saying that we're gonna do this one every single time. We may go in and do some watch parties in some areas. Like if we decide to go to Orlando, I could see us around in the city with watch parties and let's see what happens and go up there and really go Elevation's in there right now. Then we've been watching closely and having a close conversation with them like, "Hey, how's Orlando going? What's it looking like?" Because we know there cannot be enough churches in Orlando. Like you could put all you want there and there's plenty. So that's the first thing I would just pray about it and really figure out what, which way God's leading you or what you guys really want to go after. Because some of the people we talked to and just shared some of the expenses and what it's been like, they're like, "Oh, I had no idea. Like, we had no idea it took that much effort." And like our pop-up days are 15 to 17 hours. Sundays, well, that's that's six trailers worth of gear though, right? And so that that's like the one thing that I've always loved about about you guys is you you're over the top. Like you don't, you go whole hog and everything that you do, which coming from a poor live production guy, I totally risk. Yes, but to your point, there are certainly ways to throttle, to adjust there in there's different ways to, you know, get to the finish line. Yeah, I would also just...

Say be okay to fail. Like, this is you gotta be okay to fail. Like, you can't, you can't look at this and go into it and say everything's gonna be a home run, everything's gonna be a win, because it, you're gonna be solely disappointed when you, when you have one that's struggling or not born. You got to figure out, but that the cool thing about that is lean on friends. I emailed a friend today who who's launched a lot more campuses that I have and I just said, "Hey, I kind of hit a little bit of a roadblock in this one city. What do you recommend? How do we, how do we, how do we get it over the hump where it's at?" And so waiting for them to respond back now and just give me some idea, maybe something I haven't seen on some television that I'm not, that I'm not seeing something that I should see. So I would just, I would just say be okay to fail. Know the cost, know what it's gonna take. And then, ah man, I love having conversation with people and just tell them what we learned. Where our, what we learned, our on-ramp was way too long. We took way too long to get to church. And then we, we've given them church not fast enough for too long. So we, we've had, we have the on that, you know, I'm requesting six weeks, six months. Watch that, that's what I'm proposing as we move forward. So six weeks to get in there and do a backyard barbecue, do a serve project, get in the community, give them a service, and six months later we have to decide if we're gonna launch or if we're gonna move on to a new location. So and see what model works for you. We live in a super populated, fast-paced area, so there's a lot of opportunity where we are. We've helped some churches out west that they can only concentrate on one location in time, and that's cool. Do that. Like, do what, and it was, it was cool to watch God open doors for them and then report back and say, "Me won't believe what happened." I'm like, "No, I'm gonna believe it. Tell me though." I would say that's, that's probably the two biggest things. Just make sure leadership is all on board and know, know exactly what they're in for, what they're up against, and and then you okay to not have a home run everywhere you go.

Awesome. Well, Brandon, man, listen, I do appreciate the time. Thanks for jumping on. I know life at Christ Fellowship West Palm Beach is hectic, and I do appreciate this, this time and this conversation. Any, any last thoughts while we're landing the plane?

I would just say go after it, man. If anybody has any questions, they can reach out to me. I can, I can, you have my information. You can share it if they want to get with you, and I'd love to have a conversation if anybody's interested in doing it. We're still learning. We do not have this thing figured out. We are, we're growing, we're learning, we're building, we're working hard, but we hope that we really hope to give something, be able to put something in churches, hey, and say, "Hey, this is what we've learned. This is where we're at. Here's a playbook. Use it if you can and run with it." Because I mean, our goal is to go, go after it, Great Commission. Love this. It's church. It's, it's rare when you come up with an idea that's like, "I don't know anybody else that's not you doing like a flavor, even, even something similar," and this is a completely innovative idea where I don't think anybody is doing it at this level. And so Brandon, man, thanks for, for being brave. I don't know if that's the right word. Thanks for taking initiative and running with this. And thank you leadership who, who backed in and ran with it. And we will be watching from afar in seeing how God's, God's blessing the ministry up there for me down there for very much. I'd also by anybody who wants to look no more about it to come to Conference 2020, because we are, we're gonna be having a ton of breakouts where you can have one-on-one conversations with me, with our multi-site director, people that have been hands-on the whole way through this, and ask different questions from everything from finance to logistics to team to staffing to structure, all of that, worship, year, worship, you know, we can show you the gear list of what we bought, but we're gonna be offering all that at breakouts at conference too. So I would highly encourage you come there. A lot of fun people ask questions in the room that open up great conversations, and I can't wait for conference to be here to share more of what, what we learned.

Yeah, so I did that conference 2018 at Bali, and phenomenal, really, really good stuff. I thoroughly enjoyed it. And you know, a lot of blood in the church online and production, which were the two circles I was involved in at the time. So but definitely, over the next week, I'll try to find some link or something for the show notes, or if you got something for the conference, we'll link to it and get it so at least you can mark it down in your calendars. But it's, it's well worth it.

Well, Brandon, man, thanks for the time. Listening audience, man, thanks for, thanks for being here and listening, and once again, hope it was worthwhile for you. We'll see you next time here on the Church Digital Podcast. You all have a good day.