EP038: Jay Kranda & The Natural Way to Build Microlocations @ Saddleback

I'll be honest, anytime I talk with this guest I feel smarter. I don't know about you, but I just have this natural inclination that I am smarter than I was when I started the conversation because I am always, always learning something from this guy, Jake Randa, online pastor from Saddleback Community Church, just a small church out in SoCal. You may have heard of it before. Ly Pastor Rick Warren, Purpose Driven Church, Purpose Driven Life, Purpose Driven whatever it is out there. Jay has been doing a great job with church online out there for years and it's really helping utilize Church Online as a platform to expand some of the mission and the vision of what Saddleback is trying to achieve. And as a result of that has really been paving the way for other churches to realize the importance of online small groups, even micro locations and home gatherings and some of the things they're working on now.

Now what I love about this interview and this conversation that we had with Jay is Jay's honest enough to tell you like some of the stuff that he was doing didn't work. Actually, if you go back to episode four of the Church Digital podcast, you'll hear Jay talking in detail about some of the things that he was trying, maybe six, nine months ago, is April 2019, and he observed in the end of time since then, "Hey, some of these aren't working," or "It is working, but it could work better if," and rather than sticking with the horse on the trail that it's on, he opted to change strides, change the model, shut the thing down and start over.

And so what this conversation here is is the home gathering model from Saddleback Church and what it looks like for a church online to create physical locations, to create biblical communities all over the country utilizing online technology. Now the amazing thing here is he was able to actually stop stride, ream, and then go again. And there's lots of things in that culture and there's lessons to be learned there. But this is a very rich, very informational, very heavy conversation that gets into the heart of the role of church online into not only impacting the online world but to actually impact the offline, to impact the physical world. A digital church that impacts the physical realm. It's good stuff here.

So here in the conversation are bringing, of course, Jake Randolph from Saddleback, bringing in Raid the Armas, guest host once again from Christ Fellowship Miami, online pastor there myself, Jeff, in the Church Digital with the conversation on the natural way to build micro locations at Saddleback. Everybody, here you go, man.

So how's life in California?

Very sunny, like Florida. I haven't even looked. Tells LeBron doing this year? I don't care about an amazing Noel in it.

Yeah, they're amazing. I'm impressed, man. Homeboy and his foot, man, in his forties is not gonna slow down. Here's what you're gonna be Tom Brady. I'm there on the court.

Yeah, he's. We got the Lakers got the best record right now. I will say though we have a very easy record, so we've played a lot of average teams. But that's what everybody's feeling, but we haven't had a ton of hard. I we've had some hard games. Our hardest game was game one, which against the Clippers. So right, but anyways, so yeah, LeBron is doing great. So where you at? Least the best team in Los Angeles or where the Clippers better than you?

I think technically the cool. I will. We are. We have the best record, but I will say that if you hold the whole team, the Clippers technically are a better team in the sense light like I think every like the whole team. But the one thing that does I think the Lakers have obviously we have the I would say the two top three players in the NBA. But the other thing is that we have a lot more vets and that's ultimately what's gonna matter come playoff time. So right.

Well, sir, are you prepared for the Lakers to fire Frank Vogel? Because you know that's coming. It's part of the LeBron package. The fire is of the head coach.

It is. You're like state it off at the heat because that's the whole culture. They were like we're not getting rid of. Oh, stop with the baby stuff. Yeah, Hartman, the LeBron package. Yeah, I don't really care her the coaches when it's LeBron. So I don't have any. I'm not any loyalty to Frank Vogel. You Woody's a great coach came for the Pacers and he's awesome. But you know, the topic that I really wanted to hit on today is to really focus on Jay, the stuff that you're developing and talking about with. I know you're doing some training with small groups. I know you guys push the poker chips in hard when it came to micro locations and starting to really develop that micro-church model. Love to spend a little time here just maybe picking your brain. Why does Saddleback learning? What are you observing? Kind of what does this trend look like as you've really focused on this within the past three or four months? I know Ray Asterisk really is excited about Disney Plus and wants to really dive into this. We've seen you talk about some stuff on social media and so he's got something he wants to get to or have not signed up?

I have not signed up.

So wait, what? The one guy in America?

I know. I know. I've I was watching. I'm watching the show in Netflix right now and I'm like I just finished it today and so I was like I don't have time to go sign up yet. So I think up I sign up today or tomorrow, but I have not signed up. I got a desiccant my confession.

So I was gonna ask you like how's the manual odeon? Like I don't even know. I you know, I know things because of the internet, but I don't really know how good it is or I don't even know when it gets. I thought it was Sunday night. It got released. It looks like it's nights tonight, Friday night. It's Friday.

Oh, it's Friday. So and we're three episodes?

Okay, we say I say I'm already I've jumped. I've jumped ahead. But wow. I'm just. Jake Karen de. I'm saying two words I've never said before in my life to you. I'm disappointed. I've really I'd expected more out of you. So cowboy out there soaking it in nine. This is this is you know this with being in a sunny area, you know, there's I'm not stuck inside. So you know, like I don't, you know, and it's and we I just I get into a show and then I don't have I don't I like to finish things. So that's so I'm I have some time and I do like Star Wars, but I'm not. I was waiting to kind of see how figure out. But yeah, microsites and let's dive into the microsites community because what some of the stuff you guys are doing in context with Saddleback, I mean, you're putting while the rest of the church is arguing whether or not they can do biblical community online, you guys have paved the freeway and are inviting as many people as possible to take advantage of it. So what are you guys doing currently? What's some of this new trends? What are you exploring in this idea of community online?

For anybody that I've talked to or if you kind of even probably talked about this when I was first on this show and the witch I think I'm one of the oh geez on this podcast, I had to be like the first five.

So I will call you out. You were part of the first four episodes. We launched with this podcast.

Well, the big thing for us at Saddleback has always been about kind of why are we doing what we're doing and in being conscious about where are we leading people. And so something that I found out, especially being at a larger church, very quickly is that we had people watching in all sorts of places. They didn't have a church down the street. And so trying to problem-solve that, I think, you know, maybe if you're just kind of getting this on, getting going and on the online space, for the most part you're gonna be very local focused. But as you that audience grows and more people share, you'll have these opportunities where people will be like, "I live in this remote area. What's going on?" And really they're starting to be this population of people. I would say an hour outside of a large town or a large city that wanted a church and it was really hard for them to drive into a city and engage. And so we started to really think about this and we've had all sorts of iterations. Even before I was in my role, Saddleback has done this. This is not something that's just limited to my space. It's limited to everybody's had test and we're always putting hooks in the water trying out stuff.

And so the most recent iteration has been something we're calling home gatherings. And the whole concept that was around, how do we make it so that anybody could start something in their home and do like a pop-up church service in their home? And part of the learnings was we did something that was a little bit larger and a little bit, I would say, get a crowd focus, and we call those extensions for a period of time. And some of the learnings out of that is that it does work, but it took a lot of staff time, even travel time, even resources, and there was high burnout because it was typically one leader focused. And so I think that model still really works, but it's not something we're not going to launch a hundred of those or ten of those. We only really could do maybe one of those every, you know, year. And I wanted something that was a little bit more lay driven. And I wanted something that we could, especially because we're very, I would just say like our team is kind of small. And so I'm trying to think, how do we do this that's sustainable?

The other thing is when you get a group of people in a room and you get fifty people, they start expecting more because they're growing properly and we didn't have some of the mechanisms in place at the time to kind of, I would say, figure that out. And so we started this home gathering concept, which is more have three small groups partner together. So there's a bunch of people that are in or have incentives to kind of pull off this pop-up service and then do a lot of evangelism training. And really it's about creating a corps of people that can execute this easily. So if one person leaves or is out, you can still go on and create a culture of sharing your faith. And our goal is to get these to very quickly get them to about twenty-five people and their meeting regularly and those long-term for the online campus directly, those become regional hubs. This is our plan, too, that we can go travel to. And so the idea is when somebody wants to get baptized or want some kind of training, instead of them doing that by themselves or training somebody there, which we would do, we would have a Saddleback home gathering, you know, within you know a day's drive essentially everywhere in the world.

And so part of that is we did a beta, you know, actually in your guys's backyard in Florida that we're testing out right now. It's been going and then we got, we just started to roll out on promotion of it like more heavily and we've got about twenty or so people interested in it and we're in phone calls with those people as we engage. And come Christmas, we're doing something that you know I first heard from Elevation Church like five, six years ago, but we've done this a couple different times, but we're kind of bringing it back. We're doing a Christmas watch parties where they're gonna watch together and the idea is that the watch parties will be kind of a crawl step to a home gathering. So maybe twice a year or three times a year you do a watch party and those become warm leads for permanent home gatherings.

And so yeah, so it really, it's about just empowering anybody to do something and then figuring out where we can do this and how can we really get out of the way? Because I found we set our church, and I'm not involved in this directly, but we don't have a plan of church, but it takes hundreds of thousands of dollars, takes people, it's all their stuff, and we're looking at something way more lean. And this model we're praying is is the model that can work for us, but we are just now in, I would say, this is the third.

Iteration of the online campus trying this and we could do it right. I don't like the scalability of our previous models, to be honest. So the first model was stack serving. Is that correct or what was going on there with that?

Yeah, essentially it was because it was taking about ten hours of my week to kind of manage an individual location, and that was up in the San Francisco area. We had one with a we had groups come together and do something, and I would go up once a month because it's San Francisco and I'm in Southern California. It's an easy flight, but it was, you know, it's taxing. It wasn't something right, and it was working.

The other thing is what's really hard, and my pastor says this all the time, is that it's really easy to turn a crowd into a core, but not a core into a crowd because there's like fulcrum and different things that kind of build up. And one of the things I found is we had built up a core of people that were really just showing up to a service every week, and they weren't really executing on it. So I had like five or six people that would do it, but what happens is, just to be honest, one of them we had about ninety people in this room up in the Bay Area. I rented this hotel room and we did a pop-up church all through my laptop, and this is about three and a half years ago, and it was amazing because it was all online campus driven. It was awesome. But, you know, every other person would come, my goes, "When is Saddleback coming here?" And there was this very clear—I, this is an overstatement of it, but there was this consumer type of model. I had it. We did not have like a loyal group of people that were willing to do whatever it took. We had about thirty people that were really in, but we had a larger crowd. And I realize is that had a peak, and those people, if you don't deliver a campus within a certain time frame, they're gonna leave.

And I think I figured out, I was figuring out just as a young leader, like how do you deliver vision with understanding what they are expecting and not disappointing them? And I think we that was one of those things that I learned a lot. And this is why the home gathering we're really focusing in on you building something with a group of people you want to do life with, and there's not an expectation of a campus coming there. It's you we want you to live out the vision of the church in your area with a group of people, and that group of people will be your home gathering that you meet regularly with, and then you have a small group during the week. And that's that's kind of the framework.

So a lot of our language we're trying to make it so it's not so weekend focused. I would just say, and we're trying to make it so it's more small group focused. And those small groups being small group focused allows us to care for people on an easier model, like on scale, and it also builds leaders that can help us execute because that's the other thing. We had a couple of times we had, you know, one person or one couple, and you know, anybody who's been had a friend who spun to the church or you've been part of a planting, you know, not every week you don't grow every week. And so once they experience, let's say six months, and maybe they had two really big months of it, dip down, there's discouragement. And this is why they say when you plant a church you do it with people, you do it with a team, you don't do it alone because you'll get discouraged.

And I think we're trying to build some of that in there. There's I think one of the quotes that kind of stood out to me recently from Ray Dalio's book Principles. He was talking about this idea of like, not everybody understands like if you have success in something, some people are part of some point of success, but they don't necessarily know the cause and effect of that success, and they can't replicate it. Some people, I would say, understand the cause and effect, but they can't replicate it. And some people can replicate this. And I think what's happened, especially with the online space, especially with the house church movement type of space all around, is there's a lot of people that have been in roles that stuff has happened that doesn't necessarily mean that you understood or understand what happens, and it doesn't even mean you know how to scale it for somebody else.

And I think as I've talked to people, I've seen that. I've seen people do it both in the online space and also reading books. It's sometimes like, well, churches are scaling in China or India, and it's like, so that might be true, but do we even know how to replicate some of that over here? Is it possible? I think these are the conversations. And I'm not as worried about, you know, we could hire somebody full-time and maybe go do something. I'm trying to figure out how do I get it where it's more lay-driven? And I think that's where we're really motivated to kind of dive in.

Yeah, so you I want to want to follow this rabbit trail for a second, see how far we go. So you had an idea a couple years ago, what wasn't working. It was too heavy. It wasn't ultimately, it sounds like it just wasn't scalable. And so you trashed it. So you trashed an idea, you went back to leadership, you developed a more scalable idea, and then you got them to execute that. So the question I want to ask is how, because oftentimes when you trash an idea, "Oh, that didn't work. Let's not revisit the concept and move on." It's that just didn't work. Let's try something else. Online is not gonna work. So what you've managed to do was somehow transition this was a bad execution for online. There's other ways to do online. Let's keep experimenting to find the right balance. Yeah, what is the culture? What is the environment? What does that look like? What did that conversation look like when you're talking with leadership? Were they like, "Yeah, you know what, this just broadcast services"? Was there any of that extent? Let's just abandon ship and move on, cut our losses, or were they into the point of wanting you to experiment more to come up with a workable model?

Yeah, so it's a great question. I would say first off I think most people understood what had happened, particularly in two locations that we were kind of focused in on at the time. It was a success in the sense that it worked. This idea, there's something here. So I don't think I really had to work. I did it work or not? The question was it worked, but it wasn't scalable, and we weren't really to kind of take it to the next level. We had to do it almost like a second round of investing had to happen. So it's like, hey, you know, you raise money and then you want to go to the next level, and it's you know, you either decide, is it worth the second round? And I thought it could be worth the second round, but I think we just as a church decided it probably wasn't the right time to invest in the second round of this.

And honestly, what's interesting, and I still remember I had this thought for about a month when I was going through some of this stuff, was I remember it was, I mean, this was three and a half years ago, so I remember being up in the Bay Area for one of these events, and I think there was some things our church was really excited about with online community and some stuff there was still some pushback. And I remember being in a hotel room meeting space with everybody, and you know, you have ninety people watching a service that's running from your laptop on rented gear, and I'm thinking I started to really think about at that time around like, what am I? How am I shepherding people? Because now I felt a sense of responsibility for all these people in this room, you know, like, and I'm either going to with this idea, I'm either going to, I'm gonna have to kill it real quick because it like we can't continue this on, or I need to do something else. And I'm actually felt I really stressed me out because it was like this online church thing is, you know, it's not online, it's people, and I'm funneling people to something.

And I think it made us ask some very serious questions. And I think if I remember him right, there was it was a little bit of an open question of, you know, Jay, you can continue this if you want, yeah, because I don't think it was impacting like there wasn't too much issue with what we were doing. I could continue it, but I thought some things needed to happen in order for it to go to the next level. And I felt like it would slowly die if we did it just kind of end it now because I was like, either we do this, and if we're not interested in this, that's okay. Like, I'm not, you know, I'm just iterating on this idea. I'm trying to think about it, but I don't want to continue down this line if we're not interested or if you can't deliver on certain things.

And I think it forced the question at our church at the moment to kind of, do we really want to do this? And our church is at the place our church is one of those places where people are given tons of freedom to iterate, and our pastor really challenges us to fail. And sometimes, you know, something can work, but maybe it's not for that season. Right, you know, one of the more famous ones that our church has, we had a Wednesday night program for, you know, fifteen years, and it was successful, and we killed it when we launched small groups and homes. And we did not kill Wednesday night because it was not successful. It was working, but in order for small groups to go to the next level, we didn't want people coming in on Sunday nights, Wednesday nights, and doing something in the home, that three days on top of serving and missions. Until we killed Wednesday nights, and that's what led to the explosion.

And I think we were having one of those moments of like, I don't think this is scalable. And you know, you I'm asking people to gather together and do church. Like, this is a huge thing, and we can't casually do it. And so we allowed it for a little bit, and I started, we started to get more interest in other areas. And I think we just, we had to pull back. And I think that's part of it was I just went to leadership and I said, I don't think this is going to work with the weight. I don't think we can scale this the way it's currently built. And so I think we should pull back, hit the reset, and just have a lot of conversations.

And what that looked like was it was about a year and a half of not doing anything really in that space. It was just kind of like really just letting it simmer, managing people, you know, I had a lot of people that were, you know, upset that we had to manage, and then go back to the drawing board. And I think this most current iteration, there's still a lot of questions to be answered. We just had, I just had somebody that came to me just this past week, and they have a church building, and they want to do something with us. And I'm in, and this is not the first time I've encountered that. But you know, something with something with a church as big as ours is we have tons of opportunities. And what I've learned from really wise people out of church is, you know, it's acting on those responsibilities because that's gonna be a tax on my time and tax on vision, and it's gonna hurt us in different ways if it's not part of our vision. And so I, it's answering some of this stuff. And so I'm, it's still something to be figured out.

I will say we dialed in during that time with our leadership the vision a little bit more clear, drawing the lines a little bit more clear, or where the lines don't exist. I just heard something recently. They talked about, you know, sometimes some jobs need to have clear definition, so like a marketing communication need to have clear lines, but if there are no lines for your job, don't draw the lines until you know where the lines are. And I think when we first did this, we didn't know where the lines are. I think now I know where the lines are. Childcare is a line, and then legality is a line.

In particular, what is actually, is it us doing it or is it somebody else? And is there any type of contract? And I think some of those, we are drawing the lines a little bit more clear. Doesn't mean we have all the answers, but I think I want to have a very defined sandbox to know what's successful just this time around. I admire that. Every, because it takes a tremendous amount of discipline to look at the 90 and say, well yeah, success here, but we're gonna go ahead and move beyond that because that's not about what we are as an organization.

They get a little bit more about that. Like what that meant for you guys to look at the perceived successes they know that not what we're gonna do? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I, you know, in one, and the biggest motivator too personally was I was at the time. I didn't have any other staff on my team and it was just me. And I was like seeing these churches pop up, these two locations that had 90 plus people, and the care that was gonna require. I didn't think I could really do it. Like I was like, we need something else. And so it was a motivator of just what was healthy, I think, for me and for our team and our church. And at that moment, it was I needed to tap into our team that plants churches and just go, hey, are you guys interested? And at the time they weren't at that moment. And that was, you know, there's part of it that was not fun. You know, I was like, well, what do I do? I gotta go back to these people and say like, we're not doing this. And trust me, I learned, you know, there's a bunch of stuff I could have done better. I could have been better on being very clear on the vision. I could, you know, I do think naively I thought if I got it, if our team got it up to about 90 people, I thought certain people would be more interested. And that's, and part of it was like, no. And because there are real reasons why you go to different areas. Like there's strategic reasons to go to different cities and areas. And one of the hard learnings I will say that I didn't, I was not aware of, just because I hadn't really had any experience outside of reading books and having friends at planted churches, was people will go to something once a month, but it doesn't mean they will go there weekly, right? And so just because I have 90 people doesn't mean that's a 90 person church. And particularly with the Bay Area, we had people coming in from all over the bay. Once a month, and that could be a 45 minute to an hour and 10 minute drive. And the learning for us was great. We have tons of people in the bay, and we have, you know, we could probably go anywhere and get 30 people. But we're not trying to reach those people. We're trying to reach their friends. They don't go to church yet. So their friends who don't go to church aren't going to drive 45 minutes or an hour and 10 every week, especially if they have kids. And so we, if we were gonna zero in on one area in Northern California, we would automatically be like X-ing out 90, you know, 70 people. And I think those are some of the learnings about being like focused in certain areas. It was a big deal. And something as I mapped out a lot of our small group data and online member data across the country, particularly did not just the world, that just looking at the United States, is we don't have a lot of high concentrations. It's very spread out. And so yes, we might have a bunch of people in the Phoenix area, but they're all around Phoenix. And Phoenix is huge, right? And so it's like, I think that's one of the pros and cons of the internet. You could just reach all sorts of people, but just, you know, from afar. And I mean, when I've used mapping software, I use Batch Geo a lot. It's a service you can use to map stuff pretty easily. And you know, we'll say, oh, you have 90 people, like let's say in Chicago. And then you zoom into an app and it's like, oh my goodness, like this is spread out. And I think a lot of people are like, use internet to plant churches, great. But it doesn't automatically mean that there's a focused area that makes a ton of sense. Because, and I think that learning of like, your friends are not gonna drive, you know, there's this ten minute radius thing. And so it's like, reaching, yeah, yeah. So I think some of those, yeah, so some of that stuff, it's just still stuff we're processing through.

And the most current iteration, I think, kind of that helps frame this conversation too, is we really leaned into our churches know how to plant, like almost like, I would think of it as like Starbucks locations, like franchise locations. And we wanted to write, and that's more like the Proudly Brew Starbucks model, where it's like it really popped up in a hotel. And those are two different types of experiences. You do expect less from, you know, if you see Proudly Brew, you like, this is probably not gonna be that great. And so we're trying not to hit that bad of a barrier. But, you know, like there's a reason why I'll go to a Starbucks that's outside of a Target versus an inside Target. Those are two different expectations. And I think we're trying to figure out what does the lower expectation look like. So anybody could almost anybody can do it. And really looking at our success with small groups, I think, is our ultimate deal. Successful small groups is very open-minded. We can't be as open with this, but it's something we're thinking about. Are you intentional at all about where these are being located at? Like I know previously you were very honed in on the Bay Area. You know, you're talking about maybe some things in Phoenix. Like are you putting any thought into, hey, maybe this area's Dallas, Texas, where there's like 1.2 million Baptist churches? I'm kidding. Yeah, but not really. Like, where maybe, you know, you don't focus on that area? Or is it really just more viral and organic, wherever God plants seeds, you know, they're starting to grow?

Yeah, I definitely am not as motivated in areas that already have established, you know, communities like that. You know, Dallas is one of those. But I will say that we are more focused on finding evangelists or gatherers. And I think that's actually the number one, like learning from doing this, is that there's a difference. I think I get too many emails and phone conversations with people that ask me the question, is there anybody in my area who also watches our online services? And they think that's the golden ticket to building community. But I don't think it's natural for a stranger to just come over to your home or meet you at a Starbucks and hang out. What's more natural is for you to invite friends over. And so yeah, we might have, you know, if you pick Portland, Oregon, we might have, you know, 50 people in the area. But if I email those 50 people and say come hang out with you, like they're gonna be like, who are you? And they think there's a brand. You know, and obviously our church being larger, that there's something there is that type of exposure. But you know, people hang out with you, do life with you, because of who you are. And I think we're trying to figure that piece out. I think a lot of it has to do with training. But I think ultimately we want to be, this needs to be more organic because my team, my team directly, is not responsible for planting churches. Like that's not what I do. So I don't think right now if a team came to me and said, hey, these are areas we're interested in, then there would be a partnership. But right now it's very much I'm just looking for the person or the team that is very motivating and can do it. Because if I find a gatherer, somebody that knows how to just build a good people together, I want to get behind that. That's yeah, I think that's a big thing for us in this model. Absolutely. And that person is very hard to identify, aren't they? Especially considering an online campus. I mean, a lot of folks who are watching church online typically aren't that kind of person or less than somebody who is in your community that you know, got because of training reasons, work reasons, maybe got moved to a different area, right?

Yeah, well, and this is why it's building on existing discipleship kind of, you know, pipeline here is that it's removing people from our services into our Class 101. And Class 101 is when they start to learn that out. I will say, right, there's a large percentage of people that watch regularly that aren't necessarily gatherers. But I do think I've noticed, especially in the last year and a half, I'm seeing a lot of almost like early adopters that are moving away and are in, you know, especially with a lot of people moving to more rural areas directly because of housing issues. They're wanting larger spaces and they're realizing they can do that now. That also brings a new dilemma. Is if you live in a more remote area, you're not gonna have the density that will allow you to reach people easily. So that, you know, again, every new opportunity has new problems. And so I think I personally am motivated by the strategy and the scalability of these things. And so I definitely lean into what, you know, kind of gets me excited. And I think the idea of allowing a person to kind of start a church with not having to think about the weekend content, but just building the community and using some of our church's paradigm stuff with small groups and classes, that's all pre-existing, and just focusing on building that group and expressing those purposes in your egg. I love that. And I do think it's scalable. I will say that we're gonna continue to see, and I've already seen it, people launch churches without as much resources. You know, just like, hey, the idea is, you know, if I want to, if I want to see if being in retail would be fun, I could go start an Etsy store and go do it. And I could spend very little money and have a very small failure. The same way I think planting a church should have a similar type of model experience. And I think this type of experience can see if you have it in you. And again, that's why there's so many church plants that fail because a lot of people just realized, you know, they're just not necessarily built for that. And I want, I think something like this, along with what other people are doing, I think we're gonna see this. It's, it's, yeah, and I, that gets me excited. I think there should be. Now the other part of this is training people in the digital space is a big, there is a gap there. There's a gap in training. But I, yeah, yeah, well, let's ask that question because that was actually on my list. So you've got somebody, and I don't know, Saskatchewan, doesn't matter, somewhere, Timbuktu USA. They want to do a, what would your term it was, a home gathering? So they want to do a home gathering. How are you equipping them, training them, empowering them? What does this process look like from identifying someone as, hey, I am a gatherer, I am a personable evangelist, I have relational equity with others, and turning that person into a, what do you call them, like a shepherd, a pastor, a leader? Like, which terminology for this home gathering leader?

Yeah, essentially we use the word leader at the moment. But the process right now is to take our training. So we have some training that we've created. It's about an hour long. There's some theology and very practical type elements. And we go through everything about leaning into, you know, the context of what the church is biblically. And then really to encourage them that this is church. And then you don't need to think less of it because it's smaller. And that's something that we really focus on in that training. And then looking at practically what does it look like to execute this every week? And so it looks like getting the leader. You need somebody to be more hospitality, who's caring for people. And then you have somebody.

That is logistics, that's you know, pulling down, loading, note printing them, sending us attendance every week. And so really out of that training, they fill a commitment card out and it's a kind of like a covenant where they commit to aligning with us. And part of what we give them is you could show our weekend services for free, you know, you can just go, but you are aligning with us theologically. And I mean, so they take the training, they sign that commitment, and then we set up a call. I mean, that call is really about tell us how you got here, why are you interested in this, where are you at? And then that first call is normally around, did you have any questions about the strategy or anything that we said? I have something about theology very directly. I go, is there anything about what we believe that you just wanted to clarify? And then we most of the time it's, do you have two other people to help you? And so then I say the first part is for you to get to other people. So if you ask people in your small group, if you're not doing a small group, you need to do that first, and then get to other people. And once you have there's two other people, have them go through the training. They don't need to fill out a commitment card. And then let's have a three-way conversation around, or you know, let's have a four-member conversation around the next steps. And normally that conversation is about doing some evangelism training. So I want them to kind of read our book that our pastor wrote, Purpose Driven Church, so you kind of understand how we frame things. And then I either encourage them to read through the Book of Acts together to kind of structurally understand some things, but really I'm trying to get them to—and this is something we're actually still deciding. I had a group that I'm just walking through this right now where I'm cooking some evangelism training that I think is better and kind of, you know, forcing them to really share their faith. And a lot of it's just answering that. And then we pick a start date, they start inviting people, we problem solve some things, you know, as simple as—one of the things is we had a group that was gathering together that was using Roku to watch the services, and the service once or twice bumped it, got a little choppy, and it's a little awkward with having fifteen people in the room is choppy. So as simple as I said, I would buy a very long ethernet cable and hardline that baby, you know, and those are just simple things that, you know, we're just we're talking through.

And then long-term, it's I set up a monthly meeting with their team, which is just an hour a month. And I'm trying to build it right now. We only have a couple of these, and so I'm trying to build it long-term. I'm probably going to—come February when we have, you know, about fifteen of these going—is I want to do two things. I want to build like probably a Facebook group where everyone's learning together, and then the other thing is probably have a large meeting, make that call not individual but a large call, because really I want to—I want a call where everyone's learning together. Because we did—I should mention this—one thing to the one outside of Orlando actually, where I bought—I had a banner made online and I just—it was like sixty bucks and I mailed them a banner through an online resource. And I really did not want to get in the business of mailing anything. And so they are—they're going. And so it's very motivated to try to get them to get going quickly. But the training, the call, and then get to people, have them go through the training, and then let's start setting the date and then talking regularly. And I'm in this process right now with a couple where I'm just—I mean, with monthly—and I met with one of them on Monday and we were problem solving that ethernet thing. I was like, okay, here's—and I'm now working on some digital rights stuff with our church. Can I give them something that's downloadable on Saturday nights? And you know, some of that's easy, some of it—we have some rights things that we have to navigate. And yeah, so all the fun stuff.

And part of this beta was to—as I have, I have about twenty people interested in doing this in all sorts of places. I've now I'm doing it really intently with one, and now I'm taking these learnings and I'm going back and going, hey, if we want to do this large-scale, we need to figure out this stuff. And so it's beta, beta, beta.

Awesome. And so, but a lot of what you're describing is centered around that one hour on Sunday, you know, and you alluded to earlier, yeah, you know, there's more than just the one hour. You killed this Wednesday thing to make the small groups pushing home homes happen. So like, when it comes to some of those next steps, when it comes to groups, when it comes to money, you know, we're we're tithing, where does that go? Like, how are you structuring some of that? How is Saddleback answering those?

Yeah, that's a good question. So the money one, particularly, we we don't have a clear answer. But my argument to my leadership right now—and I think this is a good learning for anybody doing this—is I pretty much said, can you give me some space to try this out? And instead of theoretically talking about it, let me bring an example. And that's where we're at right now.

I had this with the other locations where we started to have money. Where it's like, people were giving. Now, I wasn't coming to our team, it was going out to the world. But I was like, hey, we have money here. So something as simple as my budget, for example—I have a budget that's given to me once a year. These locations kind of started popping up. I was doing travel, I was doing some things, and I was draining my own online campus budget to execute this. And I was like, but I know there's resources coming in. It doesn't mean if those resources don't solve all the problems, but we needed something that was more helpful for them.

So for example, in these locations, we've said it very clear upfront that, you know, when you're under twenty-five, you're not gonna have a lot of financial needs. And so you guys, you guys treat your money, you know, give towards Saddleback. But if you guys have something that you need in your area, treat that as a tithe. Now, the only difference is there's not a tax incentive, you know, but like, you know, if you had a hundred dollars and you're gonna tithe that to Saddleback and twenty of it got used on food for an event, you know, technically you are tithing. You're tithing to God. Now, you can't give us a hundred and you can't give us eighty and we're gonna give you the hundred back because we have to flow that money back. But we're not going to be a pass-through, essentially, at this stage.

But I do think once you have one hundred, one hundred fifty people, you have to have very clear lines. And I think, you know, that's part of what a couple of these locations we're trying to figure out, because that—that in that staff time—those are some oversight that all takes that gets in the way of scalability. And I think we're trying to—I'm trying to build a case right now of like, why that's worth investment, because we are talking about it. But it's not like—it's like, is anybody really want to do this? And right now it's—I had this with Class 101 where when we launched membership online, I remember one of my leaders said, does anybody even want to take it? You're pushing it. And I was like, yeah. And I remember I built a waiting list. So instead of just theoretically thinking about it, it was like, look, I have one hundred people waiting to take it right at this moment. And I think that's why—try to have—try to define a sandbox where you can experiment, and then instead of theoretically talking about it, bring a user case. So my hope is in like six months I'll have this case in, you know, somewhere in Florida where I'll say, hey, we have twenty-five people and they're tithing every week to the main Saddleback website and it's tens of thousands of dollars. Should some of that flow back here? And shouldn't we figure, you know? And I think those are the things we have to figure out right now. A lot of it's just theoretical, to be honest, because if you're under twenty-five, you really don't—you don't need anything. It's very little, and it's very community-focused, which is part of our incentive. But I think as we get more, over a certain size, the only ones that are larger in our model are more prison-based, which are unique, and they're not going to—they don't have money and they're not going to turn into a church long-term, like how we would define that. So that's a different model altogether too.

There's an interesting opportunity, you know, even though even the eighteen, twenty, twenty-five, the money to come in, to pour it back into the community instead of supporting the mothership, or a portion supporting the community, some of their local mission opportunities, or you know, maybe to your point, maybe they're withholding the tithe to the church and tithing to the organization, you know, and that's that's an option, although it sounds kind of sticky even when you say it.

One hundred percent. It does. Yeah, and trust me, it's something that we've, you know, every group will ask that of me, of like, what do you—and I said pretty much I'm pushing the ball down the road. What I have found in each iteration of these things, you have tons of these questions that kind of start to pop up of, what do you do with kids? What do you do with money? What do you do with legality? And there's two things you could either wait to have all the answers, and I have found that you will be waiting a very long time. And it's not how I tend to work. And so for me, you can't—we've decided, at least in this very small, like, piece of the pie that we've carved up of what I can experiment with on the online campus team—as I said, let me just experiment over here. We're gonna lean into the gray a bit. We're not gonna scale it yet. We want to scale it, but we're gonna test it. And so that means typically, you know, just having a couple people. We haven't fully unleashed this model yet because I think some of these questions do need to be answered, or at least there needs to be some fog removed.

And so right now, the reason why I don't talk about it on the weekend much, in the sense that I'm not—I'm not calling these things churches—is because we're still figuring it out. And so I think you got to figure out what that looks like within the context of your church for sure. But I think having examples is way better than just saying theoretically, because, you know, I just had a conversation with one of our leaders a couple days ago about this, and he was asking me some stuff about our church, and, you know, well, J, you can do this, you can do this. And he was kind of upset, and I just remember going like, nobody has the answers for this. And so you are, you know, you're having this, you're asking me what to do, but if I wait for your answer, I'm gonna get old because I got high. And I get it, it's a good question, but if we don't have clarity, I think sometimes with no clarity, you have the opportunity to proceed forward. It's like the classic yes, no, or not yet. And I don't—you know, to me, I've heard neither no. I—it's a not yet. And I haven't heard it yet, right? Yet. And so I'm leaning forward on the not yet, and I'm just gonna say, okay, if I've told I can't—if I don't need to stop, then I'm just gonna keep pushing forward. And it doesn't mean I'm gonna find the answer, but I at least want to just continue to explore for sure.

How are you making sure that—because those are obviously like the big picture things—how are you making sure that...

Are you making sure the Saddleback DNA is still there like the five purposes, the whole nine, that those are kind of driving tractors there? Yeah, that badass, that's a big thing. That's something we heard from a lot of different people who had planted churches, particularly like that's something that's really important because our prime candidates are members that have moved away, members of our local church because they get it. Now it gets a little harder when you have people who have never been here physically that want to do this. And so for us what that looks like is it's obviously going through some of our training. The other thing is I think there's two elements of this long-term. One is we're gonna ideally ask each leader of a home gathering. Long, this is a long-term strategy as we've talked about this out loud, it's come to one of our yearly purpose-driven conferences once every three years. So as you know, let's say hypothetically we have a hundred of these down the road, I think they ask would be you come to one of one of these every three years. I'm not saying every year, every other year, I'm saying one every three years so that you understand our culture. You're here and I want you to kind of get us. The other thing that I think is really gonna be important long-term is us visiting these locations occasionally. Now I am motivated to for this solution because as somebody who has groups and members in you know 500 plus cities in every state and in like last time I check I think it was 40 different countries, it's really hard to map out a plan to visit people. So I am selfishly building this kind of web or at least I'm trying to work towards this web is that if I could have regional hubs that I could say hey by the way once a quarter we're gonna be here and I could tell everybody within 100 mile or 300-mile radius we're gonna be here on this state. I think it's a better way for us to scale our care geographically with the hard time as staff with staff presence. So instead of me driving, I mean I did this, I was, I think this was four years ago, did like a tour on the East Coast and over a course of like five or six days, I landed in Boston and I left from DC and I went to all these different places and we did like meetups. And I remember I drove from New York down to, was I forget anyways, I drove into Connecticut essentially and I said I was gonna be at this coffee shop at noon is the only time I could meet at this place. And I did have a couple small groups like in Connecticut area but it was a noon like on a Thursday so it's kind of a hard time for people to meet but I had two people show up and it couldn't have been a more random town in Connecticut where I was at because it was I was passing through essentially. But the idea is that that would have made more sense if I had something, you know, my geography is a little off in my head right now but if I had something in the largest city and they knew in advance once a quarter we kind of do this round right, I think that could be scalable. Hypothetically, one thing we don't want to do is we want to, we're not trying to, I don't naturally, I'm not there, might be unintended consequences here that I'm not thinking about with like denominational stuff because I don't want it to turn into a denomination thing where I'm like building some kind of infrastructure. But I think these are all the things. This is part of it. There's these pros and there's cons. But one of the cons of online ministry has not really been able to visit people and it's not just, I've done multiple trips where I hit five places and you know the problem is most of the time the best time to meet people are on the weekends and that means you only really can go one place typically. And so I can't really, because I've done it where I hit multiple cities, I did this in Texas where I and of course of a day I was in San Antonio, Dallas and Austin. I did different like a morning lunch dinner thing. You know when I'm hitting morning in Austin, you know only some people, the people that are working or typical jobs, you know they're not gonna vote me. And so this is hard. This is why if I go all the way to DC I probably need to be there on a Saturday night or a Sunday morning and be there and that means I could only be in DC. And so I think some of these regional hub things, I think we're trying to figure out maybe could this be a web for us to kind of connect with people. And I heard you mentioned earlier that you're even looking at like baptisms and maybe some of the utilizing some of the ordinances within these regional hub meetups right?

Yeah, so like we have a ton of people that want to get baptized and we train people to baptize each other and it happens but I don't think it's the, it's not as scalable as I want. I don't have it, I've people you know every other week that say like I want to get baptized and then I say hey give a small group member, they can baptize you and you know maybe one out of ten say yes to that. It's weird. And so it's like so I I know it's an option and people do it but it's most people want to be baptized by somebody who's a little, they want to be baptized by a pastor and maybe a leader. And I think these leaders of these home gatherings could potentially be that. And I think that's part of our hope is maybe these locations could be places where we hold you know things like that, we do trainings, we come in. I did this in the Bay Area, I went up one time and did a Membership class in person up there and it was very fruitful and we had more people engage on that then I think the previous three months. So we have you know and so yeah so I think some of this stuff, that's the hope. Again, this is all, I can't tell you how much of this is very, it's theoretical in the sense that you know we think a lot about it but and there's learnings out of past stuff but you know we're very being aggressive in iterating on top of these thoughts. So there's a lot of thoughts. So I think this is a perfect for this type of podcast just kind of, this we're going, this is what we're thinking, it's not, it might change next week.

Yeah, so what's the theoretical success? You don't know, you don't know where the finish line is?

Yeah, you're still trying to figure it out. We're still theoretical. What's the win? When are you gonna look back and say this worked or this didn't? Like what's the tipping point for you?

I think in, we put it down in six months. We want to have, well I would say in 2020 we want to have 20 of these locations. So by the end of 2020 I think we'll have 20 separate home gatherings. Yeah, yeah. And so I think by then we'll know very quickly because our church is moving into a big campaign place here in January where our trips gonna be going through this curriculum and I'm gonna have ton of people interested. Now the question is does the training work? Is it something people want to do? I think that's the one thing people really overlook is you know what are you actually asking people to do? Like I'm asking them to host church in their home. Do people want to do that? So like really do they really want to do that? And there's all sorts of reasons why they want to do that and it's definitely not that. So I think by the end of 2020 I'll be able to know if there's if a large percentage of this idea really works. And that's the part I think most people that have been doing anything with online church and that is that they've been able to do one or two times the success rate but I don't think they've been able to scale it to what if you look at how many people are attending every week and how many people are engaged in your home gathering or your extensions or your anywheres. I don't think that there's this correlation that is as tight. It's not the same. I mean I don't know it's gonna be the same type of retention but I think that's something I think a lot about. And I said this on the past podcast is I think the most glaring number for me in our strategies that we have tons of people attending every week, we have tons of small groups, we have tons of salvations and people in our Facebook group but we do not baptize that many people every year with our online community. And so I think we've baptized about 19 people or 20 people the past year which is a lot of people and that's God, God's honoring that but I think when we go from you know let's say I think we're at like 300 people have indicated some kind of salvation in the past 11 months or something and maybe regular attendance about 20,000, if I kind of looked down the road I go 19 people, that means the physical community stuff is still a problem for us but it's still there's still a gap there.

One of the things that I'm working on is this idea and I've talked to you about it I think in passing maybe not even this idea of planting a digital church, a church that lived fully in a virtual expression like I'm talking DJ Soto VR maybe as a pioneer in that area, does not have to be VR. There's Jade Earhart who's doing stuff with video games and Discord creating a discipleship movement. He's in the process of planting a church there. Yeah, and there's others that are that are doing that. What you've also been talking a little bit here is this idea of of needing that physical touch maybe to go alongside with a digital discipleship plan or a digital expression of worship. So what in your mind, just briefly, I know it's a big question in a short amount of time, but what is that tension between doing things digital, having it live out and in the physical realm, online to offline kind of thing, what does that look like?

Yeah, that's a that's an interesting question. I, it's funny, I'll get that question every once, well someone just asked it to me on Twitter a couple weeks ago where why don't you talk more about just a purely digital church? You're so focused on offline, offline related essentially. And I've talked to DJ about this to where you know he's all, he's all digital for very clear reasons. Now he also does physical stuff cause he meets up with people and that's part of his travel. I, I, I you know I'm not sure how to answer it because I feel like some of that stuff is still being figured out but I I know personally I find if I have people close to me things become easier and I do think the theology is a little bit simpler. And so I feel like sometimes and this is part of just the swings of these conversations is that politically this happens where you're like the country becomes too rigid or let's say like the patriarchy happens and then people are like oh this is way too controlling we need to swing this way we go to left and then we go right. And I think sometimes in the online conversation people swing too much into what is possible and they don't think about the unintended consequences. And I think I understand the exceptions of while and laine church is church like I totally understand that but I don't think that means I don't think you build a theology on the exceptions. And I think this is this is the example of kind of just seen how the world is dealing with this. It's like Facebook is is a great example of Facebook is hearing two things from the world right now. We want you to crack down. Oh no, we want you to be out of our personal conversations, stop listening to us. And they people want privacy and then they're hearing crack down on child pornography. These are mutually exclusive concepts like Facebook needs to listen to your conversations if they're gonna crack down on other people's private messaging. And so the conversation in most countries happening right now is is encryption good or bad? Well it's bad in a country where we have freedom.

Because essentially we don't want people engaged, but it's a good thing if you're in a suppressive country where the government is regulating religion, sexuality, and all these things. And so I think the word—I think theology is having some of these conversations that they'll say nothing is possible online. And of course, and obviously you're belittling the church, you're belittling God's power when you say that. On the flip side, it's, you know, it's we have to understand the value of face-to-face community. So like I think in planting a purely digital church, I don't—I don't feel like that's a true statement. Like I don't feel like, because the church is, but my most—one of my one of my early blog posts on this is the Internet, even though it's fully Internet, it's ultimately dependent on physical servers sitting on ground. Even the Internet itself is not fully digital. It's relied on physical devices on the ground. Now it's decentralized, so I think that's a model for us as a church. So I would always—I would always go, I would always come around somebody who's doing something. I go, I get it. Like DJ is an evangelist, so I understand the motive and I understand what he's doing. And I, I'm a fan boy. A good go do it because I also know he cares about physical too. Like I did not—that he doesn't care about it. So I, to me, I, I struggle with that tension. I struggle with that tension and I tend to default to physical because most of the people like that I hang out with are probably more digital than they need to be. And so I think that's why I go that way. Because if somebody's engaging in the church online, then I'm over, you know, typically there's a reason why they're engaging online and I need to remind them of why they can't abandon the physical areas. And I get excited about the vision of kind of turning on people in a city all around the world. That we have people from all around the world and I can kind of—I can't almost like it's almost like a good terrorist, you know? It's like a religion where you can't turn them on and they get to impact that area for it. For your churches, let's buy a better example, but you get, you get my point.

Yeah, I'm not—I'm not pretty good terrorist on the webpage like that's Google will flag me and it'll be all over. I'll be waiting for guys in suits to start busting down our door. We're gonna get the SWAT. That's the TWIT SWAT thing. We're going to come in and raid us.

Yeah, no, I was gonna say that that is a struggle, Jay, as far as maintaining that line. And we talked about it in the podcast of digital in terms of you know relationships between physical and digital church and how a lot of that supposed to work out. Why, what is in us that really wants to swing the pendulum sides on this? And why can't we seem to find like a good, good lines to walk in the middle on how a lot of these things can work together as opposed to separating them and taking them all these are two separate worlds?

I, I mean I think the obvious is because they're two different things. They may be linked and they may be, you know, motivated by each other, but you know, any type of fusion word or even like online offline—like essentially online and offline are two separate things. Now we may be expressing ourselves on both of them in similar ways, but I do think we have to—I think understanding bracing the differences is gonna be helpful. And I, that's why I always push back on words that kind of fuse them because I don't—I understand that I myself, just like my spirit, I'm expressing myself in multiple ways and you could do all sorts of interesting things, but with kind of the terminology and examples, it's honestly I just think it's a struggle of just the complexity of us. It's the same. I mean, you take something as simple as—I say simple, but you think it's something as defined—there's like the Trinity. There's why they say there's no illustration that is like not critical when you talk about the Trinity because it starts to overemphasize one over the other. And I think online and offline, it is true. Like we are, we are who we are and we are expressing ourselves in all those things. And I think that tension—I think once you start to, once you start creating new words and trying to fuse them, I think we're kind of missing. I, I think we've kind of over thought it and I think we just need to understand the differences. And part of it is I haven't seen something that like I love. That I will say I see a lot of stuff I don't like, which is the reverse of that, that it's helpful for defining. So I love when people attempt to define stuff because I think it allows me to go like, yeah, I didn't like that, you know? Oh, I love that. And it's again, it's always easier to criticize when you're not trying. And so, and I've said a lot of stuff. I've been writing about online church since 2013 and I've said a bunch of stuff that I've removed from the internet. At least I thought I have. And so I thought my thoughts are better. And I know, you know, you know, it took me forever for my pastor to get me on Facebook, let alone now I think about what I do now. It's like funny. And so because I am, at the end of the day, I know my personality. I'm super pragmatic. So you tell me it, you know, I don't care if it's big, powerful, how can I use it? Like something as simple as like a TikTok. Like TikTok's popular. I don't use TikTok. Like, and I'm not using TikTok not because I'm not trying to not do something. I just I don't use it in my daily life. And so, and I'm not motivated by a bunch of people. Now at one point, I know in two years if TikTok continues to evolve, I might do that because I've done that with other platforms. I've done that with Snapchat. I've done that with Instagram. I've changed my mind. And I think all this stuff is just confusing, but I tend to like the differences of online and, and you know, digital and physical or online and offline. I like the differences because I do think that they are different. So TikTok pastor, we're not—do you already have your account set up reserved for the side for for later on or what?

Do I do have an account? So there you go. So I do have an account. So it's there. But I, yes, so mainly I have account because of my kids because I'd like they've started to want to watch stuff and I'm like, what's happening here? And so, yeah, yeah, but the battle back online has the account yet to settle back online. Are you already laying the groundwork? Are we breaking news here on the—no, I don't think Saddleback has an account. That's a good question. I don't think we'd like—we're gonna end the podcast on forwards Rick Warren music video. We got to find a way to make that happen. Drop that on TikTok, blow up the internet.

Well, man, I tell you what, Jay, thank you for the time, man. I always, always love talking with you and having you in the podcast and learn. And there are lots of people that I'm doing church online for a long time. And, and you being one of these guys, but there also have the freedom with the leash to think ahead, to plan ahead, to really run, taking advantage of some of that, even just a pause, ask questions, evaluate, and say, hey, this isn't working like it should. Why don't we trash the model and rebuild? Like that's, that's phenomenal. And what you're learning is great. Thanks for sharing that with us, man. So just thanks for the time and being here.

Yeah, Rame, and just in closing thoughts, anything, Mr. Land in the plane? He didn't even get to talk about Disney Plus. So we'd nick next time. Next time there's another—you killed me when you were like, we're gonna need you. Don't even have an account. I'm like, not even. I know there, and I could transfer. I could trash YouTube, but I just wanted to applaud how disciplined you guys were, that you're not just gonna stare down success and say, well, this is this is reason enough to keep it around. And I think if more organizations had that kind of discipline, I think churches in general would be in a much better place if they learn what they centered on and what they define a success and continue to work the beta over and over and over again to not give up on something. Kudos to you guys, man. Well done.

Yeah, I, I don't know a lot of churches that have trashed one model and are still sticking around to go another, at least an online context. So I just, to me, that's the one takeaway of this.

Yeah, the models are what you built the first time, pluses and minuses, maybe had issues, but as you've learned from that and to ingest that into another model is great. J-man, any thoughts? Is Whirl and in the plane? I just say don't be like me and sign up for Disney Plus, okay? So I just, I think they know your users. That's how I'm going to end.

Yeah, a small upstart of a company. They need all the help they can. They need all the help to beat Netflix. So I say sign of a good Nicholas. They need the money. So we're gonna end up late on that Disney Plus. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you. Hey, this has been the Church Digital Podcast. For Ray, for Jay, for a forty-year-old LeBron James still playing the game at the top of his game, I am Jeff at the Church Digital. Thanks for being here. And can I say go Lakers? Is that appropriate?

Yes, yes. Alright, fine. Don't like I drop Ocoee. Alright, thanks everybody. All the good day.