EP045: Church In A Bar & Other Innovations

Episode 45 here of the Church in Digital podcast. If nothing else, I'm transparent, open, and honest because when I give bad advice to people, I at least admit it on public record so that everyone can hear it. So here's where we are. We're bringing in two people into this conversation here: Evan Connelly, who is IT director and could be coming online pastor there at Lighthouse Church, as well as Joey Santos from Christ Church. Now here's where we are. Both of these guys are doing some unique, innovative things involving video in worship at micro locations and even multi-site locations. And so about a year ago, Evan Connelly asked my advice on something. His first time I met him, and I gave him advice, and my advice was horribly, horribly wrong. And thankfully, Evan and his church didn't listen to me and instead did what they wanted to do anyway. And then God did something phenomenal with it. So there's fun stories, some awesome conversations centering around video worship, video teaching, and also a level of innovation here in the core of really what church online needs to be about. So check out this podcast. Here you go.

Yeah, so like I owe Evan an apology, which is weird to kind of open up with, but like, so a year ago, for Summit, man, or maybe it was fifteen months ago, I was talking with him. He's, you know, asking my advice on some things with church online, whatever. And yeah, and he says to me, he says, "Yeah, we're even, we're doing like looking to like launch some of our microsite, basically, you know, a smaller campus, smaller multi-site campus with with video worship and and just in the moment being non-innovative, non-creative, whatever. I'm like, I don't think I said this, but in my mind I was like, that's the stupidest idea I've ever heard." And and I can just, and I can remember, because and I'm pulling that from like, Granger up in Indiana tried this maybe a decade ago at one of their campuses. And I just remember the stories of where the video delivery system failed launch week. They'd literally had no pastor, they had no worship, and because it was all video-based, the streaming system failed. And they had a campus pastor on stage, I don't know, doing a song and a dance number trying to stall, and it never got up. And so like the first week was a giant flop. It's all I probably had that in my head, you know, not taking into consideration streaming has gotten so much more effective, video has gotten so much tighter. And so then like a year later, I see Evan, or you know, talking to him, and he's like, "Hey, that that video venue campus is going great." And I felt like a total, you know, jerk for telling, okay, that's the stupidest idea when it works. All of a sudden, I catch up with with Joey and hear from him like, "You're doing church in a bar with video," and I'm like, "Wait, so this whole thing of video worship is working?" And and I just, I want to have that conversation. I want to unpack a little bit here because we got two different churches, not connected in any way, who are being effective in creating micro locations, small locations, multi-site locations, maybe in context of a video. And so I wanted to hear some stories. What does it look like? How's it been? How receptive? Kind of what are you, what are you learning and experiencing by doing, you know, the musical form of worship be a video?

Evan, want you kick us off?

Sure. Yeah, so it's funny, image, and the tech issues because that is something we experienced very early on as we were still figuring out our system. So one of the things for us that seems to help is the fact that we have a Saturday service as well as our Baraka campus. So what we do is we actually have that get uploaded to a cloud storage area. We download that in the morning so that way we have a physical copy of a backup sermon. We have worship and all that. And I think it was our second week in, we actually had to go over to that backup. And there was a little bit, you know, where things would be referenced to this evening, that kind of thing. But if we hadn't had that, you know, second week into the campus, I don't know what that would have done as far as momentum and the feel at campus. So having a backup, it's been really huge. But as long as we've been able to get the signal there, everything's been great. We didn't know what to expect, and I remember that conversation we had, so that was in my head going into this too. I think what you told me was, "You want a beer? Like, you know, keep me updated on that because I haven't heard of that going well. I'm curious to hear how that goes." And so I've got that in the back of my head. Yeah, I'm down there for the first month, and so every week I'm just kind of looking around the audience during worship, thinking about that. I'm like, are they into this? How's this going? And I was blown away. You know, you see hands up during worship, and it just, you really feel like the audience is connected with what's going on. If the worship leader would pause and pray, they'd bow their heads. You know, they'd clap to respond to things. It really felt like there was a worship team on stage, and I was blown away. It wasn't what I expected. So awesome.

Hey, Joey, what does it look like? What's, because you're, you're in a, and I'd said that quickly, people may have thought I was joking. You're literally doing church in a bar?

Yeah, so let's unpack that a little bit and kind of kind of share what that, what that looks like.

Yeah, and we we started with the online campus idea with full engagement, like what's online church would look like by providing full engagement to people. And we we kind of developed this kind of four levels of engagement, and the fourth level lands on the one-on-one experience that is, you know, when you go from online to offline. And that for us lands on the house campuses. So the idea is for somebody like, "This is my church. This is where I want to worship. And if I want to do this, my house, I'm gonna bring friends. They're gonna bring my family, and we're gonna do this together." So that's what the idea of house campuses for us, kind of as a part of this engagement process. And then, you know, we, there's this bar like ten miles from our church, and the owners of the bar go to your church. And we talked about, you know, what would it look like to have a church at the bar? Well, let's take the house campus model and just take it to the bar. And that's what we did. It's usually on in our second service. We have two services on Sunday. Our second service is at the bar. And our opening day, we had sixty-five people show up to have a church at the bar. It took a little bit of adult you to kind of like introduce the community to the idea. Tell me, we did a couple of public events at the bar. Our church at reintroduce it. "Hey, we've got a meeting here. We're gonna worship here. It's about community." And that's one one of the focus of the church of the bar is not to try to replicate the environment that we have in a physical church. It's really true to be a place of community. People go to the bar to drink and talk, so we wanted the church at the bar should be a place where you go, learn the by way, and talk. So that's that's pretty much what we did, and it's it's going pretty well. It goes up and down, but we see people come in. And I was there last Sunday because I usually host online every Sunday, but I have a second that second host now, and so I had a chance to actually worship at the bar Sunday. And I met this young man who came to me and said, "Hey, I see you on the TV all the time, but I'm glad you're here with community person." And you said, "I've been coming for six weeks now, and I made a commitment should never step foot in the church ever again because my experience, but coming to the bar has been really good for me." And you know, he's a single father and brings his daughter with him to the bar, and they worship together at ten thirty on Sundays. So it's been pretty good. We, I mean, let's be to be very strategic. One of the things I do, we now add to worship singers should we schedule at the bar? They don't, they don't stand up front and lead. They stand up with everybody else and just lead with their voices, okay? So you're modeling the behavior. That's it. It's really exact. So instead of, I just like, they stand up, they're gonna be louder than anybody else. Oh, but they're on the schedule on Planning Center with the entire worship team. The only difference is that that's something they're gonna serve at the bar, okay? And that also helps that to develop their relationship. So the bottom line for us is the bar is a place for relationships. Like, that's what we created. That. And we're hoping that, you know, the combination between that and the online experience kind of brings that together.

Yeah, now so Joey, you've got the, so this is more of like, you mentioned like house church, and I've used micro, micro location. Like, so this is a more elaborate model of that. Like, you know, the average house church is probably twenty to thirty in an online context. Yes, sixty-five, right? So it's it's a house church at a bar, exactly. Like, I mean, that bar, if we get really crazy and hopefully we will, I can have up to four hundred people in it. So wow, I have a space to grow. But for example, like, here's a very interesting thing for our community. As I start to promote the church to the bar through social media, I discover one very interesting thing. I did this A/B test with the ads, and I launched an ad with the one content in the second ad or different content. And the first day I got no engagement at all, like, you know, likes, no shares. And the second one I got a lot of likes, shares, and actually messages in my inbox with "Tell me more about the church and bar." And you know what the difference was between the ads? The ads that I got more response did not have the church branding on it, okay? So it's very interesting to see that people are willing, it feels like people will itch and learn more about it, to hear more about it, but they really kind of this a perception about religion that people actually don't want to be associated with. Mm-hmm. And the church name kind of cares there a little bit. So I just removed all the church branding from church of the bar, and it's part of our season live, what we call our online church, and it's part of our, it's a house campus. And they one day walking, they're gonna watch a church service from Sunday from a physical church. But I think that a first approach is different. So and as here's here's what gets different though. One thing that we're doing now, we're partnering with the bar to do community events. So like this Saturday, we're doing a friendsgiving. So the church of the bar in the bar are gonna partner, and we're gonna offer turkey and ham all afternoon, and people are bringing side dish, and we're gonna have this big Thanksgiving meal available to the community. Anybody can come and have it. That's cool. And we talk about, you know, is the church of the bar, and during that day Saturday, we're gonna put up two Christmas trees, and people be able to buy Christmas ornaments with as the nation for to end the the nutrition crisis in local schools. So what are we trying to do is really using their opportunity at the church at the bar that's an online experience to partner with a bar and help have the community kind of go out and be part of something relevant. It has been a very, it's a very like new for us and organic things happening. You know, like we we're just testing the grounds and see where it goes.

Well, one more question, and I'm really anxious to hear kind of Evans angle on this too. But what's the, is the end game of the bar church? To bar church, is the end game more bar churches? Is the end game put all these people together into a brick and mortar campus? Like what's the strategy move on how you're utilizing the micro? The same strategy there is the strategy?

That the bar is the same strategy for any house campus this, but they can probably never step foot in the, you know, in a physical church as we know ever again, and we were okay with that. Wow.

See, in our model of online church, if my next-door neighbor that lives right by the church engages with us online and truly engages, he is on Bible studies, he gave us, he participates, he never walks into our building, we're okay with that. Mm-hmm. Because he's, that's his community, and we're gonna make sure to give him all the spiritual nutrition that he needs online, and we'll give him community the way that that fits him best. He working with that. So our hope is that the church at the bar gonna grow, and that's gonna be a community place of community, and we're looking at you possibilities right now in actually like a cigar bar where guys can get together, have Bible studies during the week, and you know, a here's deal, it is the cheapest satellite campus growth we can put together because I don't have to pay for anything. I tell you what, I may want to like join the cigar branch. That's actually not a bad idea. I'm gonna write that down. Anybody would open a cigar bar church? Totally. In my, my wife is not a fan of the idea. Well done.

How many, so how many right now, Joey, how many micro campuses we have? We have five in the US. We have been worrying gonna Africa. You know, we have one impacts them. Okay. Wow. Pakistan? Yes. Its hold on that. I want to come back. Okay, Evan sews interval, but you guys are groped, you used the micro model is kind of a preface and introduction to a multi-site that was kind of the strategy there, right? What does that look like?

Yes. So for us, it's trying to meet a different need. So we're not necessarily using it to reach people who normally would come to a normal church service, but for us, the reason that we started that to begin with was with our online broadcast on Facebook and YouTube. We were seeing week and week again comments from people who live in what's the Eastern Shore. If you're not familiar with Maryland, we have the Eastern and the Western shores, which are separated by the Chesapeake Bay, and then we have the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, which, especially during the summer, the traffic can be really rough. But we have people who are making that commute on a weekly basis to come to one of our campuses, mostly to our broadcast campus, but we also had a good number of people that we were seeing with online connect cards and in the comments who were saying we can tweak again, hey, we're watching from this area, we'd love to have even, and even specifically asking like, can you guys plan to campus ever here? Like, we love what you're doing, and we want to have this over here. But that was a challenge for us because we had never planted a campus that far away, and it was gonna separate us as far as resources and the personnel that we sent down with that kind of commute. We couldn't support it in the same way that we support our campuses, which are closer to our central broadcast campus.

And so we didn't think it'd start quite like it has. Meeting in a high school originally, we're thinking maybe a fire hall or a library. Even we thought we'd have, you know, if we needed to, we have two or three locations over maybe twenty to thirty people spread around the Western Eastern Shore, which is a pretty large area. But as we're going through and starting the scout out different locations, we held an interest meeting, and we had, I want to say, 120 people sign up to attend an interest meeting for this location. And so at that point, we realized it was gonna be a little bigger than we thought. And so we went from looking for a fire hall or a library or that kind of thing to a larger venue, more similar to what we're used to. But unlike our normal game plan, we can't rotate our worship team into this location in the same way that we could. So we had to decide, could we still do video worship even with a location that resembles a lot more of any one of our other locations? And we decided to give it a shot because it really was the only way we could facilitate what we felt like we were being called to do.

And wow, okay, over there, your Centreville campus has how many people attending? I'm on one point you told me it's not for like a hundred. I think were you at now? We're averaging around 15 Peter. I'm 200, but the average 150 people. And it's, it's at the location it's gonna grow into, or is there years the plan to move somewhere else? The plan for now is to stay where at. So we're at high school, which has a pretty good-sized auditorium. I think we could scale around 500 people for service. And so just definitely room for growth. It's a nice convenient location. It's easily accessible. And yeah, it's been working really well for us. Plenty for him to grow. So for the, my plan is to stay there.

So you guys, you literally have a hundred and fifty people. Is that two services of 75? Yes. Was that one of one service of 150 people sitting in a room being led musically in worship by watching a video screen, right? So the only time that someone's on stage is we have our host spot at the end of service where campus pastor all come out and greet the audience, you know, tell them what's going on specifically with their location, that kind of thing. But just about everything they're seeing is happening on that projector screen.

Wow. I, I just, you know, and, and I, we see it in church online. You see with watching the individual like a person watching, and I can totally see that. I've even like, but in the house churches where it's 18, the 25 people worshiping with the TV, you know, I just, I've even, I just mentally struggle. I'm like, wow, there's a hundred 50 people like the, the video technology scales out that, that large. That's, that's awesome. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. Is there been any like, has there been any negative feedback? Has there been any like people asking questions? What did your lead pastors say when somebody like pitched that idea to him? I bet you that was a fun conversation.

You know, he was all in on trying to remember, you know, a few of us involved in the initial conversations, but I can't remember who necessarily pitched it first. But he didn't have any pushback on that at all. You know, he was all in for that. He, he's all about new things and trying to break away from the traditional ways of doing things. And so on our executive pastor, who's more operational focused and how is this actually going to work, he had more concerns on that. Yeah. Our lead pastor was all for it. Yeah. It's great. And I think, you know, being there for the first month or so is when you launched it, it just occurred to me, you know, I'd sit in service and go out and see all the community happening in the foyer after neuroses. It's not about what happens on a stage, you know? You can have that community regardless of whether you're watching a stream service or whether you have live performers on the stage. And then you can argue, is there a better worship experience? You know, just like any of our worship element, you know, if you have better lights or if you're adding haze or this or that, like maybe you can create a better environment for worship. But you can absolutely do church in my opinion, you know, to a very good amount of quality with a stream service. It's the community that's happening. That's, that's the trigger. It's really just interesting to see how maybe some of our internal biasness away from, you know, it's, it's, it's an extension of I can't do video teaching. I have to have a live pastor in the room, you know, that next step is I really can't do video worship. I have to have have a live band. Well, maybe do you really?

It was funny. We had on just a couple weeks ago, we had on maybe a couple months ago, we had Jim Tom Berlin, who's a multi-site solutions. He's one of the one of the founders of the pioneers of the multi-site movement. And so we were actually talking a lot with him about this idea of video teaching, and even like what it looked like from him back in like the 90s when he was at Willow Creek trying to pioneer where he would literally put a VHS tape on a bus Saturday night and a Greyhound bus, and it would be delivered to the other bus stop, and somebody from the other campus would pick up that VHS tape. That's how they delivered video teaching week in and week out. VHS tape on a Greyhound bus. And a lot of the kickback he had back in it was a great quote. He's, he said, not everybody bought into it, and even with what you guys are doing, I don't think everybody's gonna buy into it. But enough people bought into it to make it worthwhile to make it effective.

And when we look at, and that's really has been kind of the the mantra for me for church online and micro locations and what you guys are doing, we're not everybody's gonna buy into this, and I'm I'm done with the days of thinking that I've got to convince everybody that church online, oh yeah, it never works. It's you're not gonna get there. But you gotta convince enough people to make it worthwhile and and gin show that it's going to impact enough people to make it worth the effort. And I, I think honest to god in my experience, that's not hard to show. You're not gonna get everybody, and there are theological questions and things like that. At least the perception is there's theological questions. But at the end of the day, like this is a really, this is a really awesome thing that you guys are doing.

Hey, so Evan, tell me this. Like with your strategy, do you have other kind of micro venues that are gonna grow up using this video, or is this kind of a one-time thing? How is that conversation gone with your with your church, your staff now seeing the success of what's happening at Centreville?

Yeah, sure. So we're starting to think and more and more about what that's gonna look like. We are definitely thinking about multi-site, probably starting a smaller scale than this one did. You just happen to have that big base of people who are watching online or making the commute here. So we're exploring the idea of maybe finding someone who wants to have something in their own house or a local venue and just giving them a few resources to help facilitate something of their own. That's not something we're currently doing yet, but we're working through that and reading a little bit about what Saddleback does. JQN that has a lot of information on what they're doing. Their approach is incredible. Just the scale they're able to pull that kind of thing off is just amazing. So it's our first one, and we've learned a lot from it. We're probably gonna try to do a similar thing on a smaller scale.

This one is rapidly becoming its own campus. I mean, it's already, it's been designated a campus. So it started as a watch party. Er terminology for a microsite. And then I want to say it was like eight or ten weeks. We decided, you know, we've got over a hundred people who are meeting here. This is a campus. So it went from the Eastern Shore watch party to Centreville in that short of a time. We don't think though that's gonna be the normal process. So we're still working through like how do you support a group of 20 people or 30 people or that kind of thing.

We did just find out maybe a month ago, just in the comments on our online feed, we had someone who was watching online over the summer. She had a friend who just kept inviting her. So she's like, you know, I'm gonna watch this. She started watching over the summer, and then just about a month ago, she works in a nursing home, and she began sharing the service with her residents. And so we're seeing pretty much every week now she checks in that she's got the service up for her residents. And so that wasn't anything we planned or anything that's official, but we've got in a way a multi-site microsite location right there. So we're seeing that kind of thing happen where like, you know, I mean, if people were even starting this on their own, even with Eastern Shore, we heard about, and this didn't come up until our interest meeting, that we found out about it.

But people in this area had gathered in a home and watched service together during a snowstorm that we didn't even know happened. Maybe 20 or so people just on their own, organically formed, you know, microsite location. So we're seeing that it's happening even if we don't do anything about it. Then we're trying to think through, how do we support that? How do we do that in a way that's organized? Where do you draw the line of support? Because you can't give the same resources to a microsite that you would give to a 200-person campus, that kind of thing.

Yeah, well, and hopefully the support's not as needed because the resources, the model is much simpler. Totally. How we see a small group, you know, our small groups you've got some content, any work through, whether that's our sermon study or never Booker's of kind of thing, and you're just really there to host people in your house. And so we're trying to see, like, as much as possible, can we just pull the same model that we use for small groups and kind of make that our microsite?

Well, that's awesome. Hey, Joey, how's the model kind of grown from you? From you, like you've got five America, you got a couple of international. Is it expats kind of down in that? Or I would love to just kind of maybe hear how the idea of micro grew out of online together and cholesterin to kind of where you are now.

Yeah, so we started with, you know, pushing for engagement and telling people, do you know, you got to be in community. So if you're watching at your house and you decide this is my church, we always say, hey, just become a house campus and invite people in and have community. So we kind of like extract the kind of idea from Acts chapter two of where you break bread together, you worship together, and you go out and serve your community.

And really, really start from that idea. So the virus did, we have a seasonal online Bible studies right now. So we had a fall Bible studies and all house campuses users, they join those Bible studies. They either like doing their own or some of them just decide to join other people online so they have a bigger community. But either way, the discipleship is a big factor into this. We really push for the discipleship piece. But I think for us, the expansion of that is really see it grow from what it is. We really don't have this big master plan. Okay, when you become a house campus, you have to reach this goal here so we can transition to the next phase. No, if the house is going to always have 15 people meeting there, but they've grown spiritually, they've grown as a community, they're serving the community, we wanted them to keep moving. We want to keep them moving forward direction. So we don't have this kind of master plan.

Well, then one thing that we kind of feel, yet, because everybody that has been baptized through the online church, they end up coming here. I mean, even from Canada, they want to fly all the way here. So they feel like they're at least they've been to the physical campus once. And that's one thing I think is interesting about the online church is that because the current model, they feel really attached to the physical campus. Yeah, do you know what I mean?

So one of the things that I've been looking at is, you and I have a chat a little bit about that before, is should the model of the online church really kind of change? And I know this might be for another conversation, but the way I see it, the future of the online church may not be necessarily just stream the streaming of your Sunday service. Because they are attachment to the physical campus can kind of like stop the online church from real growth because people feel too attached to the physical campus that they could not be. They cannot be in.

So I'm starting to look into that right now. I like, I start to have some conversations about, you know, even either even at the Church of the bar, should we modify the model so people not attached to the physical campus, they cannot be in? But we produce the content, actually drive the house campuses to create their own environments and their that fits them where they are, because culturally every place is going to be different. That's that's one of the challenges that I see for the online church is people can be watching Ghana, Africa, but there are some things, this goodies about Ghana, Africa, and I cannot, I cannot fulfill that, those aspects of with the online church.

So how I make their regional responses is I just met father pastor from Pakistan couple weeks ago. He was here in the US and we had a great conversation and he is telling me about the ways to reach out to their community and his thing about watch the TV, you know, then I'm thinking, why don't you go online? And the thing that hit me was like, well, why don't we give you the support for you to start the online church right there in Pakistan? Then not from me either, but you right there where you are and you can reach out to the entire country.

Yeah, and he never looked at that way. He no, we can we can extremely yours. I said, you know what, it's not the same. Yeah, but if you're on camera, you have the same infrastructure that I have, but it's there is you, and you're part of that culture. So that's what I'm saying. Like, my brain starts to really start to go to different places right now.

Well, what's next for the online church? Because I like Evans model, what he's doing, because he really fits a need that they have there and they grow from it and you see the results of it. And you just like you experienced that, it's made for to meet their needs in, in like every online church, it's not made the same as I created the same, right? It's not the same format. Your an effete of your body.

So I think for us, Jeff, is that is it's is looking ahead and see culturally how can we diversify? How can you make the online campus something that it's really effective, bringing in relevant content to people's lives, bring Jesus to people who don't know him yet? And at the same time, at the same time, allow people to build relevant, meaningful relationships through it?

The church, there's a perception that the church online today struggles to meet the perception of what today's church is. Yeah, so there's a lot of money that goes into creating the soundstages to allow you guys to produce the video that you do, the lighting, the key, as the encoding gear, there's a lot of expense that that's involved in that. There's a lot of technicality. It takes a lot to create the environment for the pastor to speak his message and to do all these things. And so it's like, yeah, church online struggles to do that. Not to mention that the way that both our worship and both our teaching are presented and broadcast, it's it's very easy to create a consumeristic identity, which is what we, the church, don't want. We don't want to create consumers. We want to create disciple makers who are capable of creating other disciples.

But honestly, what's interesting at the end of that is is we, it's not just the church online that has that issue, right? It's the church overall has that issue. Any of the things that the church online is faulted with and saying that, hey, you're responsible for this, so we don't want to do church online because we don't want lazy people sitting on couches. Cool, let's not do church online. You'll have lazy people sitting on pews at the end of the day. You're still, it's that still model, just being there produced. It's my podcast, I can say that. Yeah, just just saying.

But what, in fact, what church online is capable of, yeah, it may struggle with what the perception of what us a church is today, but I think it thrives when you look at the biblical model of what church is. Much of the things that that we perceive as a biblical standard of church, I'm reading the Bible and it's not in there. Like, when you look at the man standing on stage for 40 minutes preaching, there's value to that and I don't want to discredit many of the pastors who are out there who, as their job, are the spiritual leaders of these organizations. But lead pastor is not a biblical position. The auditors that stand on stage actually came more and closer to three or four hundred AD. And in fact, at the time, culturally, it was they were these celebrities like it was like the TV star who was on stage because they had so much value in the order capacity and those speakers. And so a lot of the things that it's like, yeah, church, our church online struggles with that, okay? Well, that's not really the core of what biblical is.

And you know, Joey, some of the conversations that we've had is maybe it's a whole other thing. Yeah, and I just, I think you, there's a there's a whole other model of church that is waiting to be revealed. And once again, I don't disparage the model that's here, the church growth model on the big building, because I think it's done a lot of good. It's in its reached people in a big way and it continue and it will continue to do so. But I think there's another way. I think there's another model.

It was interesting, just just today I had a had it had a doctorate student, doctoral student at a seminary, called to do a zoom thing with me, hit me up to the website. And honest to God, the conversation was so I googled how to plan a church digitally and and you came up. So can you talk to me about what planting churches digitally looks like? And I spent an hour educating, like, challenging the way his paradigm of how he views it. And it was funny, along the way, he too was like, yeah, that's that's completely, that's not biblical, that's not the way that it isn't. But it's the standard that we've been so used to over the yeah.

And you guys, just to bring it even home, even you guys just challenging a paradigm of I'm gonna do church in a bar, I'm gonna do church in a in a building, and we're not even gonna bring a band in, we're just gonna watch this via video. My gosh, if that type of model worked, and as we continue to see the success stories of how God's using these things, could you imagine the opportunities we have to expand the gospel and to literally put it in the communities that are reaching people that would not set foot in the church building? It's I mean, there's a phenomenal opportunity here, honestly, if we would just get over ourselves a little bit and realize that God's bigger and it's more capable than I think we sometimes give them credit.

Okay, so can I run risk to look sound like a real real jerk for some churches here? Okay, so I had a conversation with a friend of mine yesterday. He's a he's a big producer and he's I mean, he produced some big guys and he called me because I said, hey, I want to get your take on Kanye West and what's going on because he actually might be involved in some production that will involve Kanye. And and so he's like, ah, before I jump into these, I want to hear from you what do you think? And we talk about it because Kanye is doing his worship thing at his house. Yeah, and because my involvement the online church, he wants my opinion. I said, you know what, I sometimes feels like I hope I don't offend anybody, but just just hang in there for a second. Sometimes feels that the church today is more like a real estate business than what church really supposed to be. We built this big infrastructure in these big buildings and now the fight is we gotta get enough people in and have enough activities, enough stuff going on so people can see the value and give the money so we can pay the bills. And that's really, that's just a real estate business. So we got to build more, right? So let's build another building because the business is growing. And I know this is a very the black and white.

Way of looking at it, but Debbie, that becomes the priority. Yeah, well, and not to mention, sorry to cut you off, but there's a ticking time bomb, right? Because we keep buying more property, we keep building these buildings, and at this point we're tax exempt when it comes to property tax. Guess what? That's not gonna be that way forever. That's what happened north of Indianapolis. So the county came in and said, "We're done giving licenses to churches. We're better, right?" Because they want revenue. So what happened now? The churches are trying to buy other churches to grow their multi-sites. So they're looking at churches that are falling apart so they can try to preserve because they grandfather in so they can actually preserve that tax exemption again.

I'm not taking away the value of the physical church at all. I think the value is there, has to be there, exists, is real. They add value to the community. But I think the priorities shift a little bit. And again, you just read the book. If you read the book "Culture Trumps Strategy," you just get to a point where culture is doing that right now. Culture is done. The church, the way we do church, is not building value in my life, and I need to find someplace else. And the place where they find that is the internet. That's what they're finding. So I don't need to go to my church, sure, hear the message from my pastor every Sunday, because I can actually find that message on the internet somewhere. The same thing or probably better. And I have more options. So I think that the sense of value has changed for the culture.

So we got to look ourselves in the church and ask the question: What is the value of someone walking into my building? And the same thing for us doing online: What is the value of someone tuning in online and participating in your church service? That's the question that keeps coming back to me. That's why I've been questioning the model we were doing, just by streaming our services. That's a really good question, and it's trying to discover, you know, the answers. Like, what is it? What actually drives people? Why should they come? And that's it. Like, why should people come to my church? Because sometimes it feels like the back door is wide open and the front door is just this little thing that nobody can get in. And I think a lot of churches in America today are going through this. I think that they're asking that question. There's less people in the chairs. They don't know how to manage this. We don't know what to do, and yet we still have to pay the mortgage.

Mm-hmm. Now, do you know what I mean? And now it shifts the purpose of the church. Let's get people in so we can keep up with the mortgage. I mean, that's just a reality of it. I mean, if we could sit in a room with no microphones and cameras and have these conversations, I think a lot of pastors would say, "Man, I'm going through this right now."

Yeah, well, let's have conversations. Joe, Joey and I now, and then I'll get to you in one second. Joe and I, we were hanging out in Colorado. We would say we met each other maybe a couple months ago. And Joey, I didn't tell you the story, but after I left you guys, I hung around for a couple days for some other meetings, and I was always driving around in an Uber somewhere. I don't even know where I was, somewhere in the Denver area. There's a big church over here on the left, and I'm talking to the Uber driver, and I just make some comment: "Wow, that church is huge. This must have been like a four-thousand-person venue. This is a giant church." And I was like, "Man, that church is beautiful. What church is that?" This man starts F-bombing and copping an attitude at the mere idea of this church. I'm not gonna drop the name of the church. I don't even think I could remember it. But he was not happy about this church. And the perception at the end of this very diatribe that was coming out of his mouth was that church has all the money, and look at what they spend it on—this glorious, beautiful building—and they don't give a crap about me, Joey, Uber driver, whatever his name was. He's just done. They don't care.

But that's the perception of this guy. It's like we build these castles that go towards, yes, good is done in the building, and I don't want to demean that or speak ill of it because it is an effective model. But not for everybody. And there needs to be other models to get out there and help. Even you were one to say something earlier. You know, we talked about this. I just got this phrase. It keeps coming to mind: "Different content for different people." I feel you. Look at tech. Nowadays, especially, everything is personalized. You know, you go into Instagram and you're scrolling your feed. You're the only person who's gonna see that exact feed. You subscribed to certain things. Artificial intelligence is learning your preferences and what's best to show you. You know, no one is getting the same approach. Everyone gets a best experience. And I think in our context, that means, you know, we're not going to be able to do the exact same thing, replicate that at every location. The more we can personalize, I think that's with a microsite having a different approach for a different group of people, or online, even if we can find different ways to offer content differently for different people with where they're at and what they're going through. I think that's what the technology industry, probably just the world at large, is moving towards.

And yeah, that's where we did get. I tell you what, Joey, like I would be more interested in hearing about you reaching bar number two and finding that niche. Yeah, we're gonna be like the bar church. Yeah, and just, I remember what's-his-name. Oh my gosh, Mark Patterson. Out at, it's actually on your world, Evan. Out at it was at National. Yes, EC National. Yeah, like back a decade ago. Like he was the movie pastor. The movie church pastor. Like I think he actually had that. I think it was something. Yeah, yeah. But because it's like, okay, so we're gonna create our content. We're gonna reach people in this and that. When that was his stick. Well, you know, he's bought coffee houses and things have moved on past then. But yeah, so once you find out how to reach people in the bar, man, knock on every bar in town. Just try to replicate this model.

Well, see, the results we're starting to see is the impact that the church is having on the staff of the bar. Hmm, didn't even think of that. But you are right. You know, the owners, you start to point it out. So what they do, for example, the bar does opening to noon on Sunday. But he said they start seeing the staff coming early on Sunday now, and they start moving around. But they listen—the TVs are all on the service, so they start listening to it. Well, recently they discovered that one person who works at the bar for a long time just discovered has cancer. Hmm. And so, you know, the bar's close to her house. We go there. Wow, really? They have food trucks and it's a great place to hang out. It's by the river, beautiful location. So I'm there on Sunday night. She meets some friends, and I saw the guy, and listen, the bar's packed. We're in the middle of the patio, and I stop here and say, "Hey, I just heard what happened to you. How can I pray for you?" He just told me. I didn't ask him if he was Christian. I didn't ask anything. He knows me. He knows I'm doing like, he knows I'm the online pastor who runs the Church of the Bar, Bill. And so he turned to me and said, "Man, if you can pray for peace for me," he told me the things, and I just lay hands on him. We pray for him right in the middle of the bar. Hmm, what? People are like drinking and having conversations all around. Wow, we're just praying right there. And when I was done praying, he got tears in his eyes, and he's just like, "So we were just doing this like church thing out, you know, at the bar." And we're being gotten known in the area by it. You know, we have chili. It was kind of funny because it was not weird for the people around to see us praying for him right there in the middle of the bar. And the staff, it was a big thing for the staff to see that happening. So we've been asked about lately. July 8th, two of the employees are leaving. Would you guys come and pray for them before, like, things like that? Wow, would you guys come before they leave? This is the last day. I show up. They're having this thing. Oh, that's so cool. Let's pray for them. You've become the church of the bar, man.

Exactly, exactly. So it is a pretty kind of fun to watch that kind of development because, you know, something that for the model we have today, these people need to make a decision to staff to eat your church buildings. You receive that. And that's not the case anymore. That we're there, we're gonna pray for you, and he's no longer like, "YouTube your case. I pray for you," and then we don't ask the questions like, "How can I pray for you?" Hmm, we kind of skip that step because this is who I am. There are me. I'm a Christian. I'm a child of God, and I'm gonna pray for you regardless if you like it or not. I'm gonna pray for you. So I'm not gonna ask you if we, you want to meet your pray for you. I just wanna say, "How can I pray for you? Give me something so that I can help." That's exactly. And they, and they like, it's kind of hard to write for somebody to say, "Oh, no, no, I don't want to get you pray for me." People are usually not going to say that if they have the freedom to say it. Well, usually they won't say that. So I think that's one of the impacts for me is like, if we did all this, should get this entire bar staff in a direction and a path of becoming disciples of Christ, that's enough. That's sufficient for me for us to do all this. But I think God has a lot, a lot in store for us there.

Well, I tell you what, there's a lot of innovation in these conversations, and they're not, it's not big innovation like Joey. You got bars all over the city. Finding the relationship, networking with the one we've built her with, was it his idea? Was it your idea? Whose idea was it to go into them? That was my idea because we talk about house campuses, and I, yeah, keep going. You know, I go to the bar, and I was like, "Man, what would it look like to have a church at the bar?" And they got TVs everywhere. I mean, yeah, literally, he was like, "Do whatever you want." And they go to that bar to the church at the bar. Their owners now, so that's where they attend. You know, and here's what happened this last Sunday. They broadcast on their Facebook page, "Come to church." Yes, so they, oh my gosh, the bar promotes the church on their Facebook page, and they rebroadcast our services on their Facebook page. That is unbelievable. I don't, so, but I guess my point is like, this is such an innovative idea, but this is not an inexpensive idea. It's, and it's not, we're not building anything. Even Evans stuff with broadcasting worship, it's a video encoder and using the infrastructure. It's a hundred dollars expensive. It's an Apple TV box. Okay, Apple TVs are more like two twenty-nine in fairness, but still, you could do a forty-dollar Roku, I bet, if you're really good. But it's like, look, it's looking at what you have with fresh eyes, right? Yeah, and it's like, okay, there's a concept. There's an idea. There's something here that's unique that somebody's that nobody's ever thought of, and in a way that is completely new.

We recently did a podcast, and this is an elaborate story, but it gets there are simpler ways to do this. Did a podcast with the guys over at Christ Fellowship West Palm Beach, and we talked with their pop-up church pastor, which is a weird thing, but essentially they used to do like portable church, and one of their campuses shut down. So he still had all this like gear from the portable drawer. It didn't shut down. It became a permanent campus. But anyway, they had this like excess gear sitting around, and somebody came up with the idea, "Hey..."

What would it look like if we actually just drove around the different neighborhoods and did church, you know, different neighborhoods every week? Nobody in the country is doing pop-up church. Everybody talks about it. There's this rumor these people are doing it. Utilizing for the most part, yeah, they already had it.

Upgrading it. And yeah, Christ Fellowship was probably very over-the-top production value, but what they've developed as a result of that is in twenty twenty, next year they're gonna launch four campuses. They're scheduled to launch four campuses in one year because they are curating and cultivating and maturing this audience, this city, this community with the gospel right now. So like they're going so fast, they're having to say, "Hey, church, some of these areas, hey, we're gonna have to stop because we can't keep up. But we're gonna come back and we're gonna finish the job." Here's what we're doing. Here's how we can make it work.

See, what I like about this is Luke 11 is doing, look what we're doing here. And look at West Palm Beach Gardens. You can see that there are people looking out for the change. The innovation didn't you get the word out. That's what I like about this because there is this word that, you know, for a long time has been like a bad word in church. Innovation. And we finally, we're finally getting to a point where there's enough guys, enough people get involved. They're innovators. They're being innovators for God.

Yeah, and I think it was about time for the church. Who said that? Town massive. It's a great conversation. I did not think we were gonna land on innovation when I started this podcast, whatever, an hour ago. This has been really cool. I love this. This is great, man.

Hey, Joey Arlette, yeah, Joey, any thoughts as we're landing the plane and wrapping up here?

Well, man, I just thank you so much for the opportunity to hang out here. I mean, kind of missing from that meeting in Colorado, and we spent some time together. It was kind of funny how we reconnect there on Facebook, and all the sudden we're in Colorado for that meeting. But thank you so much. I really pray that God continues to use people like you, Evan, all the churches that are like just jumping into innovation and be open to what God's doing, to what God wants to do, to not be just locked down to what has been, but what could be.

Yeah, and it's not afraid to take risks. Sometimes you just, we gotta be okay just to say, "Hey, that did not work out." But you know what? We're not gonna sit around thinking what could have been. We're gonna just go ahead and try it out. So I'm saying, if I tell people, if I'm gonna write a book, I'm gonna write a book about the things that I tried, you know, workouts. There's a really thick book because that's the things that we usually don't talk about, right? The things that we try and do not work out. Or people don't know. People look at, even like, people might be listening to this podcast, man. You got it right. So that's church. The bar. You did everything right. Now you have no idea how many things we tried that didn't work. We change and we modify. We adjust and we move on. So that's the things I think would be great for people to kind of continue to explore, continue just pursue. But let God take the lead.

There's so much good. Like, I love having these conversations and meeting with guys like you. I was doing an online Bible study. I do an online Bible study with online pastors, some online pastors, and one of them cancelled out. And in long story short, he's like, "Yeah, I'm getting pulled into a budget conversation and you know, vision casting, and pray for me. And it's gonna be an ugly conversation." And I've been there. I understand. I've sat in that seat. I know anybody who deals with online ministry has had those conversations because leadership often doesn't see the vision, doesn't understand the purpose, doesn't align necessarily or loosely with what the church overall is doing. And so there's lots of questions in that and so on.

Joey, you alluded to a lot of it just there. Know that you're not alone. And that's the one thing. Just that when I was that guy, when I was in that seat, when I was the only person out of a large megachurch that thought the way that I did, I had nothing but alone in me. I thought I was weird. I thought I didn't belong. And honestly, I managed to get myself into this dark place because I just thought I was different and because these ideas were what I had, because nobody bought into them. It was, "I can't. There's I'm not valid. There's something strange about me." You know, fast forward a year or so, everywhere I go I meet the online pastor who thinks like that. And so the answer is you're not alone. You're not wrong. You may not be in the season where it's right yet, but that doesn't mean you stop. You keep having those conversations. You keep casting that vision. You keep fighting for what you can because, you know, and I cannot say this enough, the big C Church has shifted within the past year. Where it was 2018 versus 2019, from an outsider perspective I can totally see it. And in conversations out with others, they see it too. And so where we go in 2020 and how we continue to press forward, man, it's you people out there listening to this podcast that are gonna swing that pendulum. You've got more power than then you organizationally realize. It's just how to get the people, the church, the leadership to younger you.

So man, thanks for that, Joey.

Evan, landing the plane, any thoughts, man? Anything as we wrap up?

Yeah, so I mean, just going off of what you just said, you know, I think it's so important that we as a community, especially those who are trying to innovate within the church and the online space, we have to stay in contact and we need to share what we're doing because it's so easy to feel like you're alone. I remember a few years ago when we first started having the conversations about offering online expressions of church and broadcasting. First conversations about what would I, mic recital, I click it, it was much harder to get buy-in back then. And I did feel largely alone with it. But at the time I don't think there were many resources, but there was um, Jake Randa from Saddleback and his blog. And I pulled so much information from that blog that I realized, you know, here's at least one church doing this really well. Here's, you know, some of the frameworks they use. And that really, without those resources and being able to see if there's someone else doing this, I don't know that our church would be doing what it's doing right now.

So important, you know, your podcast, your blog, Jeff, that you've started, those resources are just so important. Constantly just be sharing whatever churches are doing so you can see they're not alone with this and just learn from whatever churches are doing.

Yeah, and on my side, we're ramping up. 2020's gonna be a great year, man. This has been an incredible podcast. Once again, I just want to thank you guys for taking the time to jump on this. We're gonna do this again. Evan, have loved engaging with you. And Enjoli, we're gonna have to find some topics and some more time. I want to, may there is, there's several layers of stuff we've yet to unravel that are still needing some attention. So yes, so we're gonna break for now.

For Evan, for Joey, my name is Jeff. Thanks everybody for being here. We'll see you next time here at the Church Digital podcast. You have a good day.