EP044: Jate Earhart & Constructing a Digital Church

Hey everybody, episode 44 with the Church Digital podcast, and I got to tell you I am looking forward to this episode. I love this guy. We're bringing back in Jade Earhart. You may remember him way back from episode 13 here at the Church Digital podcast. He leads a video game ministry, a discipleship ministry. He disciples video gamers, millennials, generation Z. He disciples these guys towards leading others to Christ and evangelism, discipleship. He's creating disciple makers using an online platform called Discord, which is a video game. He's leading a video game discipleship ministry. How crazy is that? And he's been very effective. He's doing some really interesting things. But I tell you, the thing that to me, the thing that just happened, that that I heard he was doing, I was like I really gotta unpack this. He's actually in the process through his church. He does a lot of church planting. He's in the process of being part of a cohort for church planters. He's looking at turning his love clan, his online ministry, not into just a discipleship ministry, but into a fully functioning church. And if you've listened to the last podcast and what you'll hear in this podcast is Jade is overly concerned, overly, maybe not the right word, but he's very concerned when it comes to the ecclesiology of what a church is and the standard that he is holding into place for his potentially future digital church. And how he is exploring and holding himself and the others around him to the standard to allow for this love clan, this online ministry, to one day become a fully functioning digital church. And that's a crazy, that's an exciting thing. I love this conversation and I love where Jade's heart and his passion is. So here you go. I'm bringing in Jade Earhart into the conversation. Of course, Jade's with Love Clan and myself, Jeff, with the Church Digital, in a conversation that I'm calling planting a digital church. Everybody, here you go.

She just roll out of bed?

Oh yeah, awesome way to go. Maybe my kid was jumping on top of me at 6:30, but yeah, for you, man. Yeah, yeah, I stayed up a little later. We're I was playing um Beat Saber and stuff, so that's why my hair is all crazy because I was sweating like crazy before I went to bed. Uh, you know, I just got its Quest, right? Oculus Quest. I got that for Christmas. It's yeah, yeah. Come, I'm really enjoying kind of getting exposed to a little bit of this. I'll tell you the story. I was, I was alone in my house. My family had gone away for like after Christmas. They had gone up to the in-laws up in West Palm Beach just for a night. And so it's like midnight, 1:00 a.m., and I've got Oculus Quest on and I'm literally all by myself and I'm playing the Star Wars game. The Star Wars game came with it. And though, yeah, I'm in this thing where you know I'm showing my Star Wars naivete right here. I can't think of the name of the, I'm worse than a giant 50 foot thing. It starts with an R. Anyway, like I'm, I'm, I'm kind of chasing after this 50 foot monster to try to figure out, and it's like clawing and tearing apart all the environments, and I've got the headsets on where I can't see anything, but I'm supposedly walking around in the safe space. What I did realize is the dog was in the middle of the safe space. Had looked, my dog lays down, yeah, and so was literally right by my feet as this, as this Rancor is like tearing apart the thing. Yeah, and right when the Rancor trashes like right where I am with these big long thick nails, the dog stands up and jabs its nails into my feet. Exact timing. Scared the garbage out of me. My arms go flailing. You know, I did what I didn't realize was I was six inches away from the Christmas tree. With mom went flailing and ornaments are like scattered all over the place. And yeah, I haven't told my wife yet, who's not listening to this, but I broke a couple. She doesn't know about it. It was so funny. It's like, man, that's that's VR, man. It just, yeah, everybody have some kind of like that. Luckily you like spared your TV or whatever. The most people, it's like, you know, I forgot that my TV was in the space. And like, yeah, for me I was, I was you know using the, I was playing some, I think that's playing like a Pong game or something, and those straps that it came with were like not that great. And like I let go of it and it like snapped the strap and it like pounced like hit a wall and then it like smashed into a lamp and it just like shattered the bulb and there's like glass everywhere. There's like, there's like my roommates like, what? So I actually got to meet the guys that like made the Vive. This is on. I have, yeah, and I was like, what the heck happened with the strap? Like this thing sucks. It was like way broken. And and he was like, here, come with me. And then he like took it me to a guy and he was like, this is the guy whose fault is you tell him. It was good time. So what I did, I went to Best Buy or not, what's a GameStop? And I just bought, or actually just gave him to me. I just got Wii Remote straps and they were like way better, much better. Yeah, so that's what I've been using. Good. You know, thank you Nintendo for solving problems years ago that we didn't even know we had. Well, they knew they had it because the Wii Remote, everybody was smack throwing Wii remotes into their TV and they got so fed up with it that they like came up with a better strap and they sent him out. I remember having the very first Wii. They sent me like a thing that was an email that said if you give us your address, we'll send you free of charge four straps that are like newly improved. So please, please replace your current straps. So yeah, man, you are, I want to hear, and the reason I wanted to get with you is really to dig into this. What you're doing with Love Clan and and the hopes and desires doing in church planting program through through your church. And honestly, I just really wanted to catch up and learn more about what you're doing kind of as you're trying to progress and build a digital church here. So as we're backing up and some listeners may not remember, J was way back in the day, has already been on here early on talking through what Love Clan is, but maybe just give quick synopsis, meant minute or two. What is Love Clan? What are you guys doing?

Yeah, so Love Clan is essentially an online place for for people to chat and we have a Discord that's where we do most of our ministry type stuff. It's grown into into like starting to look into other stuff, but the basics of it is there's people out there that are looking for just something other than the cultural norm, which is I'm just trying to win in this game or I want to, I don't, I don't know, I'm trying to think what the exact is. I don't know if I could put my finger on what's out there, but I just wanted something else then then then that, then kind of toxic or whatever. That's kind of the, that's kind of the front face of it, I guess. The front door into it, the lobbying to the church is kind of something we've talked about at one point. And then obviously the the back end, the the real goal is discipleship. So in the core team, that's our focus is in discipleship. And we have a prayer channel that's really active. And we think about next steps. What does it mean for people to join for the first time just looking for something else? And then what does that mean if that person is willing to have a conversation with somebody who's a Christian? And if they're willing to have that conversation, then maybe they'd add something to the prayer channel. And if they did it for the prayer channel, would they be willing to have somebody reach out to them and and ask them if if they're okay? And if so, would they talk about maybe more in depth things like spirituality? And then even into gospel? And if so, then and we just kind of think through that that mindset from both directions. You know, both people that are in our core team who are Christians learning how to be disciples and then also how do we, how do we meet people where they're at already on the Internet? And then what does that look like to kind of join those two things? And that's a Love Clan. It's like in there somewhere, you know, it was like a gaming chat internet, you know, whatever.

Yeah, so how how long have you been doing Love Clan? I should just know this off the top of my head, but it really feels more fluid because it was, it there's that there's a whole story, you know, where you start with and we we said that one, but starting with another organization called Game Church and then breaking off in doing our own separate thing. Then from there, I think it's been, mmm, man, seven might be like three years? Three years, I think. I think three years as the name Love Clan. It may actually be way less than that. I don't, I honestly don't. It's uh, eighty-five years, I think, and running strong, you know.

Wow, they had the ad eighty-five years ago? Yeah, that's impressive.

Yeah, it's uh, you beat Al Gore to that. Well done.

Sure, yeah, we all, well, we had the whole tin can with the string thing going for a while, but we've upgraded.

So the thing I love about what you're doing is is that you you've taken a discipleship kind of process towards this of training others to go as opposed to you know creating a walled off community, virtual community in this context, where everybody comes in. And so the platform, a lot of it's funny is that as I talk about you and I say the word Discord, actually a lot of people don't know this. Discord, like if you're a lineal and you don't play video games, I think Discord's not on the radar. So just its pressure kind of like get some basics. What what do you, what is Discord look like? What is the digital context of what you're doing actually look like?

Thanks to this court. Yeah, that's a that's a good point. Yeah, Discord is I'd say most people probably that don't know Discord know Slack, which is kind of funny, but Discord looks a lot like Slack if you if you open the two side by side. But Discord has a much more, that there's a lot more you can do with bots and with channels and setting it up so that can run. If you don't know Slack, you probably know Skype. So there's a there's a Skype element to it. There's video chat, voice chat, text channels. A lot of it is grouping people together into a space where they can chat and then separating those chats into different chat channels and having some of those chat channels be voice chat only channels, text chat only channels, or the ability to do video. And then you can add bots, which the bots help sort through. Like if I if I was to say, yeah, I'm looking for this, that might trigger a keyword and then it'll it'll give a command that like lets people know, whoa, you it looks like you're looking for this. Here's here's where the channel you'd want to go to is for that. And so we can separate people into different games and and so on and so forth. So to kind of help help people find other people for what they're looking for.

Yeah, so over the past two or three years you've been utilizing Discord as a platform to create a discipleship movement called Love Clan. Why are you going through a church planting training cohort? Like what's what's going on in your head right now?

This for me is a calling. I don't know exactly where where that stops or like where that line is. I'm trying to understand what God's calling is. I I know that it's to reach, to reach gamers. That's like first and foremost, might might my calling first and foremost for everybody for a Christian should be to to make disciples and and be a disciple. But my personal calling is is doing that for for gamers. I had a a mole where I felt like God really opened it up for me and and said that this is it. And I've been praying for it for like six months with a group. And it was very short. I don't know if it was just a thought in my head to me it would sounded like a different voice than what I was used to. So but it was just what about a game Church? That that that for...

Me was just like, "Oh gosh, that that's so in line with with passions," but even knowing who to reach in and so on. And ever since then it's been trying to figure out what is that, what does that mean? And and it's fluctuated over the years. So I I would say honestly, it's sort of like, if it was something that was really already being done or something that I could just point at and say, "See how that person is doing it? I want to do it just like that," I would go and I would go to that person and I would ask him what they're doing and I would follow that person. And and then after, you know, six months, then I would kind of start to do some of the same things. But like we've said, that's just not it. It's just not there. Like we're kind of, I don't want to say we're writing that, but you know, we're figuring out what that looks like now.

You don't, when you're when you're doing something new, you don't just throw out what already exists, right? You want to you want to take that and use it. And I think it'd be really foolish at 27 years old for me to think that I'm gonna somehow be, you know, I'm so smart because the internet and so I can just forget anything else that's been that's already been done ahead of whatever work we're trying to do. And instead, it's the same, the same idea you would do with any culture where you would take what's working somewhere else and you just stop, you apply it to a different context. That's I mean, that the truth is different, or that the even the methods aren't aren't necessarily thoroughly applicable, but that there's a different spin to things or in some cases a different language or a different, you know, whatever. And and that's how it feels with gamers. Like, they have kind of a different language sometimes. They have kind of a different spin to how they see things. And so how do we how do we bring things to where people are and change the context, you know?

We're reading through Acts. We see that when they're in front of one group of people, maybe the way things are presented is is one way. And then if they're in this other context, a different culture that doesn't understand, when there's the, they, he walks through and he sees all the idols in the town and stuff, and then he goes to the Sanhedrin or whatever. But he's like, he goes in front of them and he's like, "Hey, there's a, here's how your town is, you know, and like, let's talk about it. Do you want and you want to know about the unknown God?" You know, and and in applying things that make sense in their context has been, it's been really big for for me, especially thinking towards gamers. So that's kind of just a little silly, the gun works of where my mind is at with with all of this.

You're breaking a lot of paradigms and norms here. Like, let's just you spell this out. So first off, you're not in the physical space. You're in a digital space. So when you say gamer church, just out of clarity, you're not gonna go rent a building over here and invite gamers in and do something. You're talking about doing this as on a virtual platform?

True. Not yet, not yet anyway. I mean, potentially maybe, but yeah, starting out in the digital realm first, maybe physical. So already, you know, that the average pastor or the average church member in America defines ekklesia as the gathering in physical space. And so there's a challenge, isn't the right word. There's a reinterpret to every reading of what that could be. Even the fact that that you are targeting an audience of gamers as opposed to what the average person would do is target a physical location or something like that. I'm gonna open a church in my community and I'm gonna call a community Christian Church and I'm gonna invite every within five or ten miles to that. You're more targeted towards a niche or an audience.

Is it niche? Your niche? I never, whatever I did, I feel awkward. I would say I believe it's, but I think honestly both both pronunciations. So we're gonna go with this. We're gonna go with niche today. Well, very good. Nish, no team is nish. So targeting the nish of video, that's just sounds so awkward now. It sounds weird. I don't know. That's nowhere does it. You're good to target that. You're gonna target the very tiny group of video gamers compared to the grand scheme of things. So you're getting people who are similar in characteristics. Their shared value isn't they know where the closest Burger King is within the community and they know we're out of time to stop lights there. Their shared community, their shared value is centered around video games or VR or you know the new thing that's come out. It's that that type of person that that you're kind of reaching out to.

What are the strengths of weaknesses? What are some things that you think that that that's better and what do you think some things that you tried that you've struggled to kind of overcome with maybe as you're reaching out with this different reading of how to do church?

This is something that I'm learning as we're going that's that's difficult. I struggle calling something a church or not. I even with with love clan, I don't want to. I don't, I don't want words to get in the way. I don't want it to with with anybody with with the big C church. I'm, I don't wanna, I'm not, I'm not purposely trying to start fights or anything like that, you know? It's not like, "Oh, I'll call this a church because I know it'll just really hit a chord with somebody," and then, you know, that whatever. And on the flip side, even in the group, the people that I'm discipling in or or that I'm ministering to, even they're like, a lot of them are turned off by the idea of church. Like, they feel like it hasn't listened to some of the things they're trying to say or it didn't answer the questions that they had, and they don't want it to be a church. Even the people in the core group, some of them are not there. They're not really, they're like, "Well, show me what what that means, because where I came from, I that wasn't that wasn't something that was that was good. I wasn't in a good, healthy church." And I have to kind of look at it from both angles. And and so that that for us has been figuring out how do we define, how do we define church? And I'm really saying that's not as easy as I thought it was. And I don't want to, I don't want to flippantly call something a church if it's if it's not. For the same reason that we talked about, yeah, well, we just say the word like, "Well, the church says this," and obviously there's a bunch of churches, you know, but it, when we say the church thinks this way, what we're saying is, you know, things that have called themselves churches have said this this way. And I don't want to do the same thing for ours if if it's not, if it's not what an actual church is.

Because who decides what a church is? It should be, it should be God, you know? He decides if something is is his church. He's gonna build it. Jesus builds the church. Rather than looking to what already exists and saying, "Are we that?" and then we can call ourselves a church, it's, let's look to the Bible and what does the Bible say a church is? And if it fits the criteria of of what I, you know, of, is this what Jesus is building? And it is, does it fit in these things? Is it doing these things? Then then we can call it a church. But if I talk to one person and they ask me, you know, "This is a church, you know, I'm not really interested church," I'm gonna have no problems telling that person like, "Well, I mean, what is your woody dizzier view of a church?" And it's, you know, "Well, it does this and this." And as an, "Okay, well, then maybe it is or it isn't based on the definition you've just given. But but here's what it is. You know, like, this is a place where we're going to, we're gonna love you and we're gonna respect you. And there's a a place that we would like you to get to where you can have a loving, respectful relationship with God. And and how do we, how do we work there? We can do that together as a group." These are things that like I would expect from a church, but maybe that's not the work, you know, the wording he wants to use. So there's just, there's power. There's power in the words that we use.

And I, the the best, the best list I've I've seen so far for what a healthy church is, speaking specifically about minimal ecclesiology, all that, it's there's a book Todd Wilson and exponential. I think it's called "Activating the Flywheel," and it's a free free online PDF thing that you can download and share. I think it's chapter six is where is all on minimal ecclesiology of like, this is the the very basics of what a church is. They go through Larry Walker Meyer worked for, well, when I first heard it, he had been working on it for a year, but I think he's worked on it longer since then. And and since the publishing of that, but there's I think seven, I think there's seven things that of this is what the minimum of church is and and what a healthy church is. And so I threw that, you take everything at face value at face value because one person might say one thing or one person might say another thing, but you should still, there's always some truth in in criticism, right? So you look through those seven things, not meant as a criticism, but just as somebody that's trying to prayerfully consider what it means to be a church and an ineffective church. And I don't want to just be the minimum a church can be, but what does it mean to be a really effective church? And and looking through those, how do I apply those into my context? And even if I don't call myself a church, I would still want to make sure I'm doing these these things.

Yeah, I'm sitting here on Google while you're talking. The mobilization flywheel by talking, yeah, yeah, yeah. Thought about, yeah, yeah. They said so we'll put a link to it in and are in the show notes. I believe it's chapter six, but it it may not be. And then, you know, it's just like misquoting some anything else, you'll find it. Minimal ecclesiology. It's a really good chapter. The whole book's good. But yeah, you you're right. The the church today, when people say the the church, it means so many different things. But really, it's it's different organizations' interpretation of scripture. And even that changes in context of locations within the country, locations within other countries, other continents. The church operates in Africa different than it does here in America, a bit based on their interpretation of Scripture. Because ultimately, and this is the one thing that I that I think is very easy to forget, we're all operating on different models of what we think church is. Great, like the the most popular model at this point is the more energy goes into the one hour on Sunday service than anything else. Sure, and honestly, whether you're a traditional service, a traditional church, or or a modern church, contemporary modern, Hispanic, there's a large Hispanic culture down here where I'm at in Miami, different cultures within that, one hour on Sunday, it's pretty much, you know, musical worship, some form of announcements, and some form of long-form teaching followed by more worship, possibly, and at the end of the day, everybody goes home. Like, that, yeah, that's what the average person in America would define church as, which is which has an event, you know? I would say, yeah, as far as an hour on Sunday, that you know, we need to have a bumper after this thing, and that this is where we give Communion, and like, right after we pray, then that's what people's hearts are the most tender, and that's when we want to do the offering, you know? Like, right, like that, the thought, the those kinds of thoughts. One thing I really appreciated about about that book was that it didn't, it didn't say like, "Well, you know, one of the seven isn't a, you you have a band with a three-piece band with with at least one drummer on notation," and you know, it's not, it's nothing like that. There, there, there looking at the wise before the what. And what we're really describing is, oh, is a what that might.

come from a good place in the same way. When we think about discipleship strategies, people could just copy what you're doing and have it be the—what if they're not focused on the why first? Of why am I doing this? Why am I disciplining people? Then the what's pretty useless.

And I think that's kind of one of the problems that's happened with local churches. Local churches have a tendency, yes, to kind of copy what's already happening and hoping that by doing the what really well, they'll find the why. That it kind of comes out of that. That's not a catch-all for sure, but if you don't know why we sing, you know, and thinking about worship in that context, and what does it look like? What does it look like to—for why am I worshipping? Or why is there spiritual authority in the church? Like, thinking through some of those things. And if you get to the core of it, that's what most of the New Testament is. Is here is what the Old Testament was, and now I want you to think about the why. Of why did I say these things are key? Why are these things laws? Why did I say not to do this? And people got so stuck on the what of it—that I'm gonna just follow these rules, I'm gonna follow it the right way, and I'm gonna do all these things—that, you know, I think of the example of, well, we're doing sacrifice, and he's like, it's become a stench to me, you know? Like, it's a stench to me now because you're just doing it. You're doing the what, but you've completely lost the why of why I told you to do in the first place.

And I'm not gonna say that local churches can have a tendency to become a stench. I think a lot of them have the right mindset. But if we're ever doing things just because it's the norm, or just because it's what we think is right, rather than prayerfully thinking about what our context is and is there something else that God would want us to do, then yeah, that's a problem. That's not expecting Jesus to build the church. That's just us following what other people have built, and we're just doing a 2.0, you know? And that's not good.

Yeah, I don't know. Well, I didn't really answer one of your questions from earlier, so I'll just pop out on it real quick. But yeah, thinking in context of specific people rather than in a local—like a localization of people—is, well, I made the joke earlier, but that I could, if I wanted to, find a group of people that were Christian emos to go figure out what worship looks like with that would be kind of difficult without the internet. And now with the internet, you can be more niche with the person that you're targeting.

And I would say that while the what—we kind of do that anyway because, like you said, Hispanic is really big in Florida. So how do we tailor the church service experience in that area? We're gonna make sure that we're having some type of Hispanic influence, you know? Maybe the worship, one of the songs is in, or most of the songs are in Spanish, you know? And the how there are events look like and what are our small group communities and what are the things we think through? Like, we do that just because it was local. We think about those things in the local context. But let's not forget that the church is not the local physical location, but the body of believers. And so we're already always doing this. Like, it's just rather than you being, I'm going to go to this location where this group of people are, now it's I'm gonna find these people from all over. They're already online, and this is my context, you know? And so it doesn't really feel too different. It's just people. But you have things that I can relate that make that are maybe more specific than something. If you, rather than giving a sports team analogy to a local sports team in the area or about a specific event that happened locally, then you'd give an event that happened in the game, or you'd give it about a specific game, you know? Something like that. So it really isn't too different. I think it's just possible now, whereas maybe it wasn't fully possible before the internet.

Hmm, yeah. I mean, the internet definitely brought about more—I keep saying the word niche. More of that. It's one of the reasons like, inside note, you'll never have a band like the Beatles again. There will never be a single musical band to have that much influence. You kind of saw a little bit of it with U2, Coldplay, maybe, but the musical genres are so sub-genre at this point thanks to the internet that you're never gonna be able to get that influence and power. And so instead of reaching the world, we're reaching these individual, these smaller groups of people that we're able to have a much stronger influence because you can fine-tune your message to that. The excuse me—message is the same. Christ. The method of communicating them, do that right, like you guys are doing with the Love Clan so well. Well, not fast. I'm just really fast on that. But like, yeah, you do tune things to the message. Like, that's, you know, why don't we copy and paste sermons from everybody else? Why aren't there just like the same one person writes the same sermon and we do it at every church? Because the sermon is specific to the heart of the people that you're speaking to. It's the same way that, you know, when he goes and he says to the unknown God, well, that sermon wouldn't have really flown in Jerusalem, you know? Because they would have been like, unknown god? Like, word? Yeah, we know who God is. So your sermons, they should change, you know? The message doesn't change, but like you're saying, there is a context of the people that you're speaking to, and your sermons should reflect that.

So yeah, we're—that's one of the things that's been really difficult for us lately is, okay, what does it look like for a Love Clan in the future? Because we currently don't have sermons. That's not our like primary thing. But there are some people that that's the thing that they're gonna want. And I do see a biblical precedent for some biblical teaching, at least, rather than right now we have a lot of biblical discussion and we have small groups, things like that where people can discuss. But I think as far as the specific spiritual authority, teaching the word, presenting the message in a way that makes sense in their context, the same way Jesus did, the same way Paul does, I think that's something that's gonna be a next step for us. That we need to move more into and get the why right first, you know? It's not just doing a sermon because that's what local churches do. We gotta be the local, you know? We gotta be just like every other church. But if there is a need for biblical teaching, and I believe there is, then how do we present biblical teaching in the context of gamers? And yet, when I say it that way, that is what a sermon is. Is presenting biblical context in the context of your congregation.

My small group is a—was the first one to start. We call it, you know, Alpha-1, and it was just went through Acts. So we Bible-based, scripture-based. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah. We so used the three-thirds there's a thing called three-thirds method. You can Google it and it will come up. Three-thirds. It's from a book called T40, Training for—yeah, and I think it's Training for Teachers, something like that. But it's training for trainers. But what was the trainer's? Yeah, this is all very good. Yeah, yeah, that's a very good resource. The whole thing in Chi Gang and Grey Sky, both awesome people, and I've gotta meet him in person there. I just, I'll just say T40 is an awesome resource. But three-thirds of that, the first half is kind of looking back at what God has done in the last week. So we'll use like pastoral care, worship, yeah, like thinking back, worshiping God for what he's done, worshiping, praying. It was so worship, right, in our context. Usually for the small group, rather than singing, because it got difficult. I have done this once where I press play on a YouTube video and we just listen through it. And this is so funny because I'm realizing the last time I was on this podcast was like, oh man, a long time ago, before we did our first small group. And I think I was saying we're gonna do a small group, or that we were thinking about doing one. Maybe you were just kicking the idea around, right? Okay, so cool. So this is kind of, you know, I look forward or whatever. But we ended up going with this model. And so we look back at worship. I will generally pull through a Psalm or verse that's just a praise of God. We'll read through that Psalm and then pray through that song. So like, if you haven't ever done this, it's actually a really cool extra thing I can throw in for another way for you to pray. But just read through a Psalm and then pray in the context of that Psalm. Like, yeah, God, like you are my rod and my staff and you protect me, and you want to, you make a way for me to move forward even when I feel like I'm in the presence of enemies. And you lead me by still waters, you know? That, and thinking through the verses the same way that David would have when he's writing them. It's like, I feel this way, God. I feel exactly how he feels. That the first half of this, but I believe the second half, you know? I believe that you can work through these things and that you do protect me.

So anyway, that worship in the first—the first half of that. And the second half is in most of them it will say lesson. And I think that's good. If you can write a lesson, we're actually figuring right now how to maybe do smaller groups because I'm smaller, meaning shorter periods of time, because we have tried the extended long period of time groups currently where it's just there's no end date. It's you just are in a small group, and that has worked for some of the people that started small groups in our group. I think there's also an easier in for some people to say, this is a seven-week series, like a seven-week small group, and at the end of seven weeks we'll disband. There's no, you know, beyond that, if you don't want to. But then at that same time, right after that, we will start another group, and we'll go from there.

What I like especially about that is that it gives us an opportunity for, well, for wanting to ask people very seriously to make this a priority. And that they have this many days. I want you to give me this day, this day, this day, to this day, this day. Yeah, and make that a priority for me. And at the same time, it gives us an opportunity at the end of that group to ask people that we feel like good leader group, hey, you've been in this group. Would you, you know, how are you feeling about this? Do you think you could lead one? And even if they say no, you've started that conversation. And maybe in the next group they can be thinking about that. And then now you're, you know, for in fourteen weeks, that person feels ready. Maybe even before that. Maybe even halfway through that group they're like, I feel like I could start leading this now, you know?

And it should never just be—so we were talking about starting a group. I think in the last one, and then I started one. We then had—if you Ralph more, I'm just gonna, you're just gonna point pointed everybody. The sound is great, Ralph more. Man, I don't know, Ash organization even to look up. But if you just look up Ralph More, you'll probably find him. Started tons of churches. You started—he's the only—

Five level five church planter we could find when looking through exponential. It's something, I'm not even gonna try that. I'll just misquote how many hundreds of thousands of people, but it's a lot. And how many tens of thousands, or if not hundred, if it's five hundreds of thousands churches at this point.

But I went to hit one of his churches, one of the churches that was like a church of a church of a church of his in Japan when I went, because they knew him because they knew this guy who knew this guy, and they were like, "Oh yeah, like, well, like Ralph." Like, "Yeah, we know Ralph." So it's crazy his impact there. But his method for even thinking about small groups and in church planting and so on, it a lot of it starts with this awesome method of one person starts a group, and then from that person identifies three people that are like the key leaders of that group. Usually that happens where you get some people that are just maybe a little bit more. They'll tend to do more of the work or they just study more. They have a tendency to memorize more verses or so on. And from looking at that, then saying, "Okay, I'm gonna take myself and maybe the third." If you think about like you're one, and then two, three, and four, yeah, like the one and the three will go together, stay together in the group that you're right now and continue leading this group, whereas like the two and the four will break off and start a group. And thinking through that, then it ends up becoming like the three is now the second in the group and the two becomes the one in the group and the four becomes the two in that group in the second group about. And so everybody is moving in a direction that's thinking higher up and like, "Oh, I'm now in a higher level of leadership and so I need to think about that moving forward and I need to make sure other people are doing the same." So when now there's another group that starts.

So yes, so that's a similar model of what you're trying to do through Duel of Clan.

Yeah, that's our sort of one model to find the two, three, fours. Yeah, when they break off, is that either a separate channel in Discord or is that where it gets into physical space?

So for these, for this model right now, this is kind of what I'm using for our small groups. So for our community, we come community groups, or life groups is probably a better, you know, term, a church-y term. But we do that. That happened in my group where I had ten people and identified some people from there, and we've split. You know, we not even split. We had a couple people who were like leaders in the group and said, "Okay, you two, go and start a group and we'll stay here and we're gonna rebuild some stuff." And so they did. They started a group, and there was still somebody in our group who is now second, you know, and everything kind of shifted again. And so when we started that, right after that, not too long after they, that person who was second, then started his group. So we have currently three community groups now, and they've all gone up and down depending on the week and whatever, but they're all sitting at like basically max. There's thirty people in small groups now online, and we're all going. We were all going through Acts. So I'm like in week twenty-three, I think we do one chapter a week, and they're there in like week thirteen or something like that of Acts because it's offset. It was like, "You're due for one more for another split here." It likes a little bit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we're gonna need. That's actually why we're trying to get to the end of in my group and the alpha group so that we can start trying the like seven-week thing. So our group will technically disband because we're gonna, and if anybody wants to rejoin they can, otherwise we're gonna then look for another group of people. And that gives people an off-ramp if they're like, "Axis, you know, too much. Did twenty-eight weeks or whatever is like, like, yeah, that's too many, too many weeks." So that's what that is. And that's the middle half I was saying. Like, lesson rather than right now we're not creating a lesson. It's a discussion. We're discussing through. If we're looking at three thirds, this is the second, the second side. But we're doing discussion instead of lesson, and they're discussing through Acts. And then the last half being practice and prayer and goal-setting, thinking the first half is looking back at what God's done. The middle half is looking up, what does God want to say through these verses? And then the last half looking forward, what does God want to do? Goal-setting for a group, practice for the future, making sure that people who are trained so that like the last week we did, "What's your story? Can you give a two-minute testimony?" You know, and as a leading the group, you know, people kind of give me blank stares of like, "I have to give it to? I have to like think about a two-minute testimony?" And so I have to lead by example. You know, if I don't have a two-minute testimony, then I can't expect them to. So right, that's it's just a thing that you. Well, that's all tied into T40.

All right, yeah, yeah. He forties to two-minute, and I think they even have a thirty-second version as well that's caught in to them.

Mm-hmm. But that's where from a biblical standpoint you're going through Acts. From a discipleship standpoint you're going through the T40 simultaneously. That gives you a foundation to allow for a discipleship system to be trained and taught, yeah, which is also biblical. You know, like it's all biblical, but it's a bit biblical is where I'm getting my why from, you know? And then how, you know, like how do you do these things in the current context is where a lot of that stuff like T4T and even like that activating the flywheel, thinking through and looking like, "Okay, what is it? What does this actually look like?" You know, the current existence of church today in America is a model, right? It's grounded on biblical truth, but it's a model. Five hundred years ago it looked different. Fifteen hundred years ago it looked different. At the time of Acts it looked different. And so a lot of times today where we're making adjustments to the model to do things in a church online component or with what you're doing a digital church holistically digital model, and it's been received negatively because, "Oh no, that's not what church is." When in fact, even the way that we do church today isn't really like the money. It's a model. It's an interpretation of what they see scripturally.

The biggest challenge is with church online is, "Hey, what are you gonna do with the kids ministry? How are you gonna do kids ministry online?" And my response is, "Where do I see kids ministry in the Bible?" Like, that's not a Bible mandate that we have a separate children's church over here. You can make a very good argument for, "Hey, it's our job as a church to disciple the parents. The disciple that, you know, why do people feel like there needs to be a children's ministry?" And if it's grounded biblically, if it's because we're looking at stuff that says, you know, that you bring them up in the way they should walk, and when they grow up then they won't turn from it, and so therefore how do I bring my kids up into this? And like you're saying, that could be that can mean a lot of things. That could mean that the church is helping, doing that thing, that they're helping raise the child, you know, and we, that's usually in the church what we'd say is we're gonna help you raise your child. And so those are good questions. But if it's not from, if it's not from that perspective, if people aren't thinking that way, if they're just thinking, "I want the same thing I had," they should think a little deeper, I think, is all. Like, think about why you want those things. That's all.

Yeah. So let me ask this, and we'll probably wrap with this. But we're at what point are you done? At what point will you look at, have you thought of this and say, "Love clan is the existence of a digital church"? When we, what is that?

Oh, right. Well, that is, okay, actually, this isn't unintentionally a great answer to a lot of the questions because, you know, you're asking even from the very beginning, "Why would I go through a church planning training thing?" And I know if we ever actually hit on that totally, we're bouncing around it. It's okay. It's great. Yeah. If I want to look at what currently exists, I'm not trying to go in blind. You know, I see so many dangers when you do things alone. So we want to look at what already has worked in the past with local, fully understand the context of what's out there. You know, if you're gonna write a good book, you should probably read some really good books first. So at that, that's what this is. And this is one of the things that they point through all of this, going through that. They'll talk about right now we're talking about budget. I don't want to talk about budget in my personal. I'm probably not thinking about budget. But they said, "Hey, I'm in church. This is what you need to think about." And they think about a budget. You need to think about your value statements. Need to think about mission statements. You need to, you know, and I, it wasn't for, if it wasn't for them basically telling me to think through those things, then I probably wouldn't. So I will stall and try to find my vision statement from, you know, that I wrote up in the cohort that I otherwise wouldn't have ever. It enough. So basically they made you vision statement. They make you write all that stuff, yeah, and you don't have a vision statement?

Well, I do because I am in the cohort one, yeah, you know? My vision statement, I want to hear it. So they also told about the difference between a mission, a mission statement and vision service. Or our mission statement is that, yeah, as it right there's a difference. So a mission statement is to help gamers find and follow Jesus, okay, you know? And our vision, the big long-term, only possible with God, right, would be to have one million disciple-making gamers.

So disciple-making, disciple-making gamers, yeah, that's good. It's a word, huh?

Yeah, great. So you've got this mission, vision. You've sat through the budget talk, although for pennies compared to what another church can do, your ding, you know, that is escorts free. That's a whole nother, that's a whole nother conversation. But we're trying, we're not that, we're, I don't even say that. I look, we're having a difficulty finding places to spend money. I mean, outside of like, you know, some salary or something that I would have more time for, especially as I'm moving into freelance, some stability to be able to write sermons would be nice. But yes, it is significantly cheaper. And no large-scale international church planting movements, they'll tell you money kills movement. We're eight hundred members and we haven't spent anything yet. We spent five dollars to buy a color on a fake website. So that's, I'll cut you the check. I'll be a bright, great. I took it out of my personal. I, you know, had. That's awesome. I love your heart, J, of how you're utilizing Discord to connect, meet, help create these disciples and then unleash them in their local or virtual communities. That's that's a huge thing. So man, thanks for jumping on the podcast with us and hang out today. Meaning any closing thoughts as we're landing the plane? I'll just, if I can track wick, I'll try to do this fast as possible. I'll just tell you a story of just something that just recently happened. Knew it. So in our group we had our core meeting on Saturday, and we were talking. I was explaining something that we do called step cuts, and it's the idea of like everybody has a next step, but that you cut that step in half.

And how do you make it an easier step for somebody? And then what does it look like to make it basically a ramp or just this is the logical step for somebody to take? And there's a guy in our group named Zilly, and so I wanted to, um, I asked his permission if I could share this, but he shared his story basically. And for him, he was moving towards being reclusive, towards never hanging out with anybody. He was inside his room. And so it was, yeah, and but he bought this game called Garry's Mod, and it was like ten dollars, and it was a multiplayer. He didn't realize, and so they was like, well, I guess I wasted ten dollars. But we did game nights, and so he joined a game night. A friend invited him to the group, and then he did the game night, and then he started coming to all the other game nights and buying the games we were playing. And so it was like consistently playing. Then that friend invited him to do D&D in this house, and he was like, I never would have done that if it wasn't for having some relationship with people. So we went into D&D at his house. Then his friend invited him to church, and he was like, okay, you know, like that's it. It's sure, why not? So he went to church. At the same time, you kind of started, you started coming to our community groups. Fast forward, you know, fast forward. It's been a while. He's at church, and he was in our community groups for a while, and all this stuff is going on. And so he's chatting, active in our group, love the guy to death. And he's in our core group explaining like, this is this is kind of my progression, you know? This is these are the next steps I've taken, and here's where I am today. And then he quickly had to go. He did like jet out of our group, and we were like, okay, cool, you know? Somebody else shared, and we moved on. That night at like 9:30, he sent us a photo, and it was of him being baptized. And he was like, I have wanted to make this decision for the last, you know, the last like two, three years, but it just never was the time. I was at my local church today when I had to leave. I had to go to my local church where I have like another group, and they were, it was talking about baptism. They said if anybody wants to make this decision now, let's not wait. And I just said it's time, you know? And so he got baptized them that night. And he has a fear of water. And it always be, always has. Where he's like, wading in water is actually really cool, but head under water, he said baptized might have doubled the number of times his head's been under water. Oh my gosh. So like, like actually, you know, like actual very little fear of that. So so he's really taking, he's taking a little lordship and it very seriously in his life. Like that, that is, I, that's what we, what we want to figure out. How do we, how do we have this where somebody who's in reclusive, people aren't going to be able to get to them? Where do we meet that person? And when we look in the Bible and they say where are the people at? Jesus goes to where the people are. If those people are online, then we go online. I'm not gonna be able to find that person if they're in a house they never leave. I got to go online to where that person is. And so so that's why, you know, that's what we're doing is really just meeting people where they're at, which everybody says that. And so we're, that's the reality is that they're online. So I appreciate Zilly. Let me share that, and I didn't want to leave without throwing it in there because it's just such a cool story.

Oh yeah, yeah. What, and I love your passion for, you know, for people like that. I love your passion for that millennial, that Gen Z crowd, and you're kind of stuck in the middle right there of that group. I mean, these are these are your people. And the idea of using, I still, whenever I talk me about the video game, so like, wait, you can you can disciple people through video games? What's that look like?

Yeah, and your people usually people say like, wait, we're still talking about online, right? That's you, that's yeah. I get that a lot. Yeah, and I've always been enthralled with what Love Clan and what you guys are doing, and I'm very much excited to see how God's gonna continue to do things there through Discord with it. So if anybody's interested in getting in touch with you, we'll include, we'll include the links in the show notes.

Yeah, but I remember there was like a, was a URL to get connected with Love Clan. It was, it, what was it?

Yes, loveclan.net. That's that's the easy, easy join.

Yep, cool. So check that out, loveclan.net. Check out and see what Jake's doing, how he's doing unconventional youth ministry. Definitely unconventional, but at the core of it, discipleship and growing, even to the point of you know, researching and training and growing into a fully functioning church. So hey, Jake, thanks for for jumping on this with me.

Hey, oh man, I love it. For Jake, my name is Jeff, and we'll see you next time. Thanks for coming by. See you.