EP052: Coronavirus & Preparing for Emergencies

Well hey, welcome to the Church Digital podcast. This is episode 52 for those of you that are keeping track at home, and we're doing a special edition here for the episode. Normally we were supposed to have this awesome conversation about the biblical functions of a digital church. We're just not going to go there because I really felt like we needed to head in a different direction as we're looking more and more at coronavirus and what's happening with that.

And this is not meant to be an alarmist episode. I probably actually do lean a little bit more to the alarmist side, but honestly, the conversation of how church online can reinforce and help the church and maybe helping churches develop a strategy for how to handle situations when catastrophes are happening or when they're about to happen or after they happen, it's kind of important.

I myself, the church that I was at, First Baptist Church of Perrine, 1992, got hit by Hurricane Andrew. The roof fell within the church. I myself, in the house where I was at, I spent the majority of that hurricane that Sunday night to Monday morning huddled in the minivan in my garage as the rest of the house around me was exploding. And literally exploding because the pressure was more inside than out, and then it just kind of exploded. But what the fun part of it was, my entire family, my dog, and my 87-year-old great-aunt were all huddled in this van because that was the safest place. And then it took us 18 months to get our lives back together. It took the church probably 16 months to reopen.

And we know that tragedies like this happen. So whether Corona happens or if you're in, you know, the East Coast Southeast like I am, hurricanes, or if you're in the Midwest dealing with tornadoes like Nashville even this week, or if you're on the West Coast dealing with the earthquakes and everything that's there, I do think it's important for churches to have a strategy up front to try to figure out how to respond in those situations.

Oftentimes when you do it after the fact, especially when you're talking technology, you don't have that infrastructure in place. But even a couple conversations upfront can help you go a long way in the midst of the quote-unquote storms of life. So I wanted to bring together a panel of some guys and really just wanted to talk through some options about this.

So I've got four people jumping on here. Andrew Stastny from Well, Andrew, man, why don't you just take a minute and introduce yourself?

Yeah, I work with CDF Capital. I do a lot of online consulting work with churches. Worked at Life Church for nine years and have a small tech startup as well. So Andrew's a great guy working in the church online circles, and I've loved rubbing shoulders with him and had some of these conversations as well.

I'm bringing in Kevin Lee from Saddleback. Kevin's no stranger to the podcast. Kevin was on probably episode 8 or 9. It's been a while, talking about a lot of the perceived issues that people have with church online. But Kevin, why don't you just say a little bit about what you specifically do over there at Saddleback?

Yeah, Jeff, good to be back. Thanks for having me. And I'm the small groups pastor for the online campus at Saddleback. I've been doing that for two years, and I just want to thank you for having me because this episode was born out of my Facebook post kind of crying out for help. So thanks for doing that, Jeff.

Awesome. Yeah, Kevin posted on, well, we're going to get into that here in a little bit. Listen, introduce the rest. But I do want to spend time on that post. We've got Jason Day from Outreach Magazine, probably my newest friend. I met Jason over at Exponential Conference, and I've loved spending some time with them. So Jason, man, just tell us a little bit about what you do for Outreach to be on here with you guys.

Yeah, vice president of mobilization and outreach, so I oversee our major ministry initiatives. I also host the Church There's podcast. I serve as executive director of National Back to Church Sunday, and so do a lot of speaking and training and kind of strategizing with denominations, ministry organizations, church planting networks, local churches on how to be more effective in ensuring the gospel. And of course, to wrap up the panel, Ray the Armas, digital pastor from Christ Fellowship Miami, is in the midst of travel, so he's phoning in. Ray, you want to say hey?

Everyone, it's great to be here with you, and I'm glad to be joined by these great guys from all over the place. Pleasure to have you all on.

Yeah, the awesome thing is like we've got like Ray and I are here down in Miami, and Kevin and Andrew are in California, so we got the hurricanes and we've got the earthquakes covered. Jason's in Colorado, and I'm not actually sure what the natural disaster there is except for glorious snow and skiing, but I'm sure there's some bad, you know, does it get so bad in Colorado that you can't actually go to church? You get snowed in, right? That's a bit?

Yeah, yes, snowed in would be so nice. Might be the big thing that would keep people.

Kevin, you reached out. You wrote a post, maybe Sunday? I think it was Monday by the time that it had really hit me because you were talking about what? Kevin, want you to describe it?

Yeah, so just to share a little bit of background, I was born and raised in Korea and came to the States when I was 11. So you know, Korea is dear and near to my heart, and I have close connections, and all my extended family are in Korea. And when this outbreak of coronavirus happened, started in China, but very quickly some people in Korea had been infected. And just because of the nature of the virus being epidemic, it kind of shook the country as a whole.

So I started to see a lot of posts on my Facebook feed from pastors in Korea saying, "Hey, we are going to now turn to online service for their gatherings." And I saw that. I've seen a couple of online church services that they were doing. And Korea is a much, very much of a conservative culture, and that is reflected on Christian or any religion. So not a lot of churches have online ministries figured out. So I've seen a lot of churches, even the big churches, kind of struggling to do online ministry.

And I just wanted to, even though I'm at Saddleback and we've been doing online ministry for a while and I'm learning a lot of things, I just wanted to get more resources and information about how other churches do online services, small group ministry, and giving. So those things, I just wanted to gather my thoughts and post it. And then this group of people came together. So I'm here to learn from a lot of people here.

It's awesome. Well, let me ask this. Like, you know, here in America, I'm speculating, but the number of churches versus the number of churches that are probably doing something online, and I don't know, one of you may have better stats, but it feels like it's one or two percent of churches that are broadcasting something. You know, I'm looking at 350,000 evangelical churches. Maybe there's 25,000 at this point that I think are on Church Online Platform. So I mean, even if it's three percent, it's a very small percentage. And I think we can safely say that what is that, that are already doing church online, is it like that in Korea? Is there more or less? What does it look like? Do you know?

No, I don't know the exact stat, but I know there aren't that many. It's probably less than one percent.

Yeah, what I can see is I've seen over the last year, over the last six months, some bigger churches, and there are a lot of big churches in Korea, their churches turned to YouTube Live to do online services. But it was very limited. There was no chatting, no really ministry involved other than live streaming because all before that, even before live streaming, it was all just recorded and putting up on their website. And that was the extent of online ministry. So this is all new. A lot of churches are, and this is very like emergency for a lot of teachers.

Yeah, yeah. And I don't want, once again, I really don't want to be alarmist or anything like that, but like, what's the state of Korea in this, like quarantined inability to gather together in groups? Like, as you know, people who are over their friends and family, like, yeah, what are they reporting out to you?

Yeah, so all the, not all, but majority of churches, and I say this in a church perspective, majority of the churches are turning to online and not many meeting physically. And that's also some other, you know, political campaigns, their social kind of gatherings are all being canceled. And churches are probably the biggest because they meet regularly. So then, you know, as we look and learn some lessons from the Korea aspect where they're having to go to church online, how long have they been unable to meet in groups? And is there any, is there any like future? What are they expecting? Like, what's the government saying over there?

You know, actually it's been about two Sundays, I think it's two Sundays that churches have kind of replaced their physical gatherings with the online church. And it was just announced that they were just going to do it for two weeks and then they'll probably meet again. But all the churches that kind of embraced online ministry are extending that indefinitely until it gets better, which people are speculating it could be two more weeks, but it could be another two months. And what's really hurting the church over there is because online ministry and online churches are so new, online giving wasn't an option before. So you would imagine a lot of churches that are on loan and their that have borrowed money have no really way to do giving. So I've heard that a lot of churches are, if this continues to two months and three months, a lot of churches could close down. And that's sad news for Korea and for the body of Christ.

Yeah, it's crazy to think, you know, something operationally the city is fine. Like, it was funny, even my wife and I, we were dialoguing through like our house, like what do we need to go buy? Yeah, and I immediately went to like, okay, buy meat for the grill because I can cook with propane when the power's out. And she's like, but the power will be fine. He like, will be able to watch Netflix all day long if we were, you know, had to be locked in for some reason or something. So it's a completely different paradigm than even what I'm used to in context of this.

And so one of the things that I'd love to do just with the guys that are on here is just to start to dialogue through, you know, there are some things that I think, and Kevin brought up the thing about giving. And honestly, my knee-jerk reaction was, man, I really feel like a lot of churches here in America like understand the online giving component piece. But I also deal with churches that are primarily already doing church online and are probably more that tip of the spear when it comes to technological. And I so I don't really want to assume like adoption rates or some of that.

So one that just maybe talk through what are some options? What are some easy ways for giving? For broadcasting? For even trying to figure out how to help ramp it into groups and things like this? Because possibly speaking, the American church could be dealing with something like this secondarily, not that it's burning order, but Korean church could probably use some resources and directions for how to do this, especially if they're trying to figure out how to do this for, you know, a couple more months. And then thirdly, we're all going to need some guidance at some level because if it's not Corona, it'll be another disease or it'll be another, you know, earthquake or a tornado or hurricane or the zombie apocalypse could one day.

Fact come that you know everybody watching sci-fi network is fearing. I'm kidding, although a friend of mine actually is preparing, but that's for another podcast. So, but let's let's let's dive into this. Like, let's talk about giving. It's the thing that he said he said upfront. So like in visit once again stats, ideas, even even theories. I'm not looking for hard facts here as much as gut. Like, is there a large adoption right here in America when it comes towards online giving? Have we already solved this problem? And for this for the Korean people, like what would be, are there solutions at this point to help them on board? What what's involved?

Okay, I feel like online giving has become a thing in the United States for quite a bit, and I think some of the other folks that are on this pod would agree. And for churches, I mean for churches that would be in a rush now to adopt online giving, I think they I think they'd find themselves rich at this point because obviously the big thing is is helping walk your people through the process of actually logging on to the website, you know, tying your bank account to it, et cetera. So it's not that it's too late for some folks, but it's it's that it increases the difficulty of onboarding people if you've not already gone through some of that process. The tools are there. It's already laid out. There's a lot of competitors in that space. It's kiss the onboarding of people and the education of helping others along in terms of getting them on online giving that I think is is going to be tough if you're just starting out.

Yeah, just because, and one of the things that we're really encouraging churches to think through is if you do not have online giving set up already, two to one, get it going. But then make sure that over the next few weeks that you have, you know, you're communicating this in your church as you're able to. If you're able to publicly gather at this point, that you are communicating this, you are kind of onboarding people, you are making this something that you're talking about. You know, you don't want to wait until public gatherings, if that happens, you know, are no longer available to suddenly try to, as Ray said, onboard people. You want to go ahead and be proactive right now, and it's gonna be beneficial, you know, regardless if if it closes, you know, your gatherings are not so. But you want to be thinking of not just the online giving platform or what that looks like and thinking internally, but you want to definitely be thinking about that external communication piece to your people. What does it look like, you know, have it kind of sort of a help station in your foyer in your lobby, kind of talking with people already over the next few weeks to help them understand how it works and to it kind of get on.

And I'm following up on Jason as well. I would I would fine-tune my language when it comes to giving when you're receiving an offering or when you have a generosity moment. If you have your offering in the back or you don't, are you passing about, whatever it is, fine-tune the language now to just say, and obviously the easiest and simplest way to give, the safest way to give, is online, and have that on a screen, pop it up, make it super simple for people to understand. So many of the platforms have text to give, so that you can just simply send a text and get right into kind of their they're giving pipeline. I would even have, you know, I'll be looking at simple things in addition to my giving platform. I'd be looking at a Venmo account. I'd be looking at a PayPal account just to have it as a backup so that if there's people that are ease or that it's easier for them to do that and that's what they're comfortable with, man, make it available. But the language, language sets culture. We know that. So repeat it over and over and over again. And if you know three weeks from now, if you're a senior pastor or a campus pastor somewhere, you do stage time, you should almost see people mouthing the words with you. You know, the easiest and safest way to give is online. And then in addition to that, I would simply say for me, it it's super simple once you do this, that you can set up recurring giving. And for me, I I don't have a faithfulness problem. I have a forget from this problem, and I forget all the time. So we just automate the important things in our life. My wife and I, we automate our life insurance, our mortgage, car insurance, and we automate our tithe and our giving because it's just that important to us. I think doing that, Jeff, is significant. And the fact that if there is a disaster, the last thing on people's mind is going to be giving, you know, the even if we have a digital way to give, it the last thing is going to be, oh yeah. But if we automate it, it makes a whole lot, a whole lot simpler to say the least. And anyway, just a couple thoughts there.

Well, yeah, and as you're solving that automation process, as you're getting people that are tithing regularly through the system, I mean that just doesn't solve your hurricane issue. That solves your summer dip in attendance, summer dipped in giving as well. And like there's there's a number of things that that that helps with. You know, it was funny like I I was I was at a church. You mentioned the Venmo thing. I was at I was at a church and they put up a slide during the offering time and they literally they had like the Cash App, you know, whatever the hand of the log and whatever it was, because that was what they did for giving. And this is this is a while back. But I said to the person I was like, I was like, and there was like, would you think of our giving? I was like, that was great, but you didn't, you're not able to capitalize on the recurring giving because I don't think at the time like Cash App had to like, you know, suck it out of your account, withdrawal from your account every every couple weeks or so. And the person's like, you can do that. And I was like, well, not do Cash App, but there are platforms, you know, that can certainly help.

Now, one of the questions that I get, and I'm just curious, cuz some I know I'm sure we've all dealt with this type of password, this type of person, and I appreciate the hardness, but but the guy who says, yeah, we don't do we don't do online giving because online giving means that people can put it on their credit cards and we don't believe in the church incurring debt, so we're not we're not even gonna go there. I'm just curious, anybody have like a response? How do you guys handle situations like that? Or how would you handle situations like that if if a pastor said that?

You know, I think I just the the saucy side of me would just simply say you probably haven't done a great job teaching your people how to handle the money that God's entrusted them with, and maybe you need to go back and do a series and do a deep dive with Dave Ramsey or whatever. It just seems to me like that whole piece of it is, I can't I can't remember the last time somebody actually said to me outside of a pastor, can I, is it that if I give it my credit card, most of the time it smiles and it's paid off and and those kinds of things? They're doing it to get to get miles. I don't know. I just I'm a little bit, you know, obviously for me, we just go straight out of our checking account. It makes it full and easy for us. But I just think the best thing you can do is probably get on the front end of it, teach people how to handle and be responsible with what God's entrusted them with, more than anything else. I mean, you can't control other people's money, and nor should you try. I think once you start doing that, it's manipulation, and you got to be careful with that kind of stuff too.

Any other thoughts?

Yeah, honestly, God, I heard this two weeks ago and I judge literally it like it took me minutes kind of was like, okay, well, like, you have a website, but people can use the internet browser to go to porn, so you trust them to go to your website, but you you and that that was what I came to. And I said porn and in the worship center, and that was awkward. And maybe like I said, but earlier, like my filter sometimes doesn't, right?

Yeah, yeah, I thank you. I appreciate that comment from the side radio. Aramis, appreciate. Well done.

Hey, so but I mean it, and let's remember of this is that we have the opportunity to help the church, your church, the church is that that are possibly preparing for a situation ahead. You've got a prop also a situation to help the church long run. So moving the online giving will definitely help the, especially as recurring donations coming or making it easier for people to tithe. Like these are great steps to me in that right direction.

Alright, let's shift gears and let's head off ahead off of giving. Let's head over to broadcast. So we're looking at what the weekend service, when you're in this type of situation, you're unable to meet because of coronavirus or your worship worship center got blown away in a tornado or hurricane, for whatever reason, your broadcast center, your worship center, your church is not doing services on Sunday. What are some solutions? How do you handle that? What what could a church do? And we see this already in churches, and and this actually has happened in Colorado in church whenever there's a large snowstorm or something and people can't get out. There are times when pastors actually share the message from the front of the living room really and do either via Facebook Live or on YouTube kind of streaming it out.

I think one of the things that we need to to think through, and there are a couple a couple things that would recommend that that we consider, one is how how do we broadcast those, and and oftentimes it'll be something that's simple, and we need to think that to have a simple way to go about doing this. And so if it is Facebook Live or something like that or YouTube and kind of streaming it, you really want to have some sort of connection though to your website. Here at Outreach, our team is right now, we've we've been doing some kind of brainstorming and kind of a task force coming together to try to pull some resources together. We're trying to steward our our influence here to help churches, and we're providing some free streaming options that our team is building out right now so that, and specifically so that if a church is streaming like on Facebook, that it will also be appearing on their website because not everyone will know or understand to go to Facebook to see your message. And so that's that's one thing. Whenever it's it's not a, and when it's not imperative for you to be solely streaming Facebook is is a good place for it to also be right. It's it's a good extra place for it to be. But if we're in a situation where the only way someone is going to experience worship and you know hear a sermon and be able to kind of be praying kind of corporately virtually, it went when it's the only way that they can connect, then you want to make sure that it's not just on Facebook or not just you know on YouTube, but that it is also on your church's website because some people, again, that's the only only place they'll know to go. That's well, they'll likely turn is to your church's website.

So we're putting something together. I'll be, it'll be ready and probably about another week or so, streamed.outreach.com, which for free will just, it will just kind of connect in with your your church's website through a sub-domain and whatever your you're doing on Facebook Live or on YouTube, so it's gonna show up there. So you'll have a place if you don't have a place on your website now where people can see that it'll be available for you, and that's just something that we're trying to do to help churches they're wrestling through this. But I think that a couple things you want to think through as well, it's not only your sermons you want it, you want to kind of keep that worship experience going and connecting with people, but I would recommend you also have a a set time that you are communicating with your people outside of the worship gathering so a set time.

Where people know that you're gonna be live, you're gonna be sharing updates and you know, maybe more kind of family matters for the church itself, right? So really kind of connecting with people and having that that separate kind of communication channel. This is helpful for pastoral care as well. That's one of the things that we really want to think through is not just our worship gatherings, but how are we gonna handle pastoral care? You know, if we're not able to meet corporately, so just really being thoughtful through that.

One of the things that we even recommend is thinking through: you might even want to pre-record a few messages while you have your facilities and you know, pre-record a four-week sermon series or something. And you can even have your worship team come in, you can do it on a Thursday night or whatever, do it in your church facilities now, have you know a sermon series put together. Because if churches are closed, they might be closed for a short amount of time. It may be only, you know, three or four weeks. So if you already have these pre-recorded and you're kind of preparing that way, you've prayed about this and you're being very intentional, try to honor God in the midst of that, to have those ready to go might be just enough you need to bridge before you're able to gather physically again. So that's one thing that we're really encouraging churches to think through. It as well as what does that look like to put together a short sermon series, actually have your live worship team together, film them all, pre-record them, get them ready so you can just upload them and go. And then they don't personalize connection with people, right? There's a lot there, man. That that was rich. Everything from your, so you're throwing together real quick a software that's gonna create a sub-domain to move this. If people aren't smart enough to go to Facebook, and no mean no disrespect to the people, but having it on the website to link to, not to mention Facebook is is a huge, you know, distraction. Oh squirrel, you know, trying to do everything they can to get you off that content because they want you to process other content so that the stats go up, not not just yours. And so the ability to do that on your website, even YouTube on your website in a control environment, as Facebook and YouTube are trying to distract you and pull you away, your domain is going to allow you to control and for those people to engage it at a much longer level. And I love this idea, and but what I really want to park on is it's maybe like this: the controlled updates, what you're communicating. I can tell you it's just in the churches that I've worked in, different situations dealing with the tornadoes when I lived in Texas and in the hurricanes in Miami. Sometimes I feel like I'm talking sports a little bit, but um, what do you communicate? Like, what types of things would we regularly communicate out to people? What, like, what are some thoughts there? What are people looking for messaging-wise from their church in in seasons like this where, you know, you know, this, just doing church in Miami, especially in hurricane season? It was whether or not we were going to be open on a particular weekend. They're not, we were gonna gather, and that right there is is big for everybody. Just to know whether or not the doors are going to be open on a Sunday morning, it's a big deal. And how you communicate that, I strongly suggest for a lot of churches: if you don't have a texting strategy, texting for us, especially in recent times, for for live updates to the minute, has been such a big deal. And it's not something that we use for, and we're very careful about this. I'm the guardian of the gate on our texting strategy because you don't want to inundate people like you do with emails. I'm sure all of you that are listening out there, your church is probably innovating a lot of folks with a lot of emails, and therefore your email open rate is not that great. Text open rate is actually really good. People will check text messages, especially in emergency situations on this stuff. So whether or not you're going to be open, or even if you're ready to help people, it's another great way to communicate. The attack kind of think about these types of communication are obviously health updates. If if there are things going on in your community, in your state, or within your people themselves, you know, your congregants, then kind of health updates with them. But also be thinking about your missions connections around the world, what's going on in in different areas of the world at the time, and sharing updates in regard to, you know, if you have missionaries not from your church or serving in different areas, and just really helping people to feel like they're informed, but not just like what they're getting from the news, but from a kind of a church family perspective. Like we're part of the, you know, the church, and this is an opportunity. I think, I think something like this is a huge opportunity for the church. We see this whenever there are natural disasters, right? When the church steps up and it churches being a part of helping to bring healing and wholeness to the community, we can see this. And so if we are championing this idea of hope and opportunity, that that, you know, God is at work in the midst of crises like this, I think those are the additional things aside from the, you know, important things of just like, hey, are we gathering? What snacks? Where places where you can get support? Where you can get help? Whatever those types of things look like. But what are the things that the life of the church is doing in the midst of a crisis? Because we're not, we're not stopping church. Just if if we're not able to gather physically, that doesn't mean that church is stopping, right? So what right is the church? And how are we connected to the greater church across the country, around world? And what are some of those stories that we can be sharing with our people?

Yeah, just to add on that, I think if if a crisis is happening at a church, the chances are the whole city that the church is in is suffering. So ways to communicate and just empowering that the whole church member to to help the community would be a big thing in practical ways on how how the church can help the community. And maybe do a research on what the city is suffering with and what are some areas that that if there's any, maybe just like what waters or other research resources that are needed, it can be a place where churches can help the community and let the communities know that the church is helping. I think there's a huge opportunity for for the church. And I'm even resorting back to 1992, Hurricane Andrew. Ray, were you in Miami in '92? Ray, were you alive in '92? I'm not even sure you may be that young. I'm sorry, I'm trying to amuse you. Yeah, I was totally. 1992, I like Jeff was sitting in my house that was imploding around me and running at. We actually had to leave in the middle of storm, way to leave our house. And we were out of it after the storm for a year and a half. Yeah, you know, living with with my aunt and uncle. We actually lived at a hotel for a week post-storm. And all of that, and I'll tell you, I mean, and so many folks are dealing with this now over in East Nashville. And I think of all the different disasters that have struck both churches and people alike, finding ways to mobilize your people after the fact. Oh man, the church in action, when we've seen it, it is so powerful in our circles. In Genesis, we're so grateful for a Southern Baptist relief because typically they've been boots on the ground like the day the day after a storm hits. They've been there with food trucks. They've been there with everything ready to go to serve the community. And just collaborating with churches on how to get a community back on its feet. And we've been the beneficiaries of that. I mean, at least in my lifetime, I could think of five instances where Southern Baptist relief actually came through and served churches, churches and people in our community, both to give the gospel but also in practical ways to get boots on the ground immediately for volunteers. And it was often there. There's a huge opportunity for the church to be on mission in the midst of and after tragedies like those. Like I can remember, I was a high school freshman, literally high school freshman, and I skipped out of football practice for the first couple weeks. My football coach wasn't happy when I finally came back. But I literally was running like the Red Cross, the Baptist, you know, health, all of like the food distribution and clothes. I was was part of that because for me as a high school freshman, and yes, I got out of two-a-days, that was maybe part of it, but it was also this idea of let me be, let me be on mission, let me help people who are in greater need. And and the the opportunity for the church to have a presence in some of those situations and in the midst of it. But what's interesting is if you don't have that culture beforehand, it's a lot harder to fall back on that culture when you need it. You know, there are churches that are that I personally have attended at work that that have that huge serving culture, selfless serving, serving the community culture. And then there are others that probably struggle with that. And so like there's there's huge opportunities for the church to tap into that. You know, it's kind of ironic where and Ray, you may appreciate this, on the podcast we always talk about how church is more than the nickels and noses and the things that we've talked about at this point is what really, like giving and in broadcast, I didn't totally didn't mean to do that, but we accidentally like, you know, stumbled into that. But these are two big components. But there's more to church than just like those two components, right? At least I hope there is. What what is what it's like groups look like? What is gathering together in environments where you can't gather together? What what could that look like?

Yeah, for us at Saddleback, we have a lot of online groups that meet through Zoom, just like we're doing. And for us, how online group looks like is they would, you know, share a screen of of a teaching that's about fifteen to twenty minutes long, and we would have study guides with some questions that people can discuss. So it's something that we are doing already, and it's something that I believe will come in very much benefit when it, you know, in times of crisis and other churches can do it with on just a weekend messages. As pastors and preachers, we we are creative, it's right? We create content all the time, and we can put to a great use by just putting some questions in and having people come come together in a Zoom call or even just in chat functions and messengers, and people can discuss after watching the preaching. So that that might work for a lot of churches.

So the one thing that I've learned in recent days is there are a ton of free platforms or virtually virtually free platforms that allow for you know this Zoom functionality. Seems like most churches and even a lot of the businesses are falling back on Zoom. Like that's becoming more and more the preferred. But Skype's free. FaceTime, I'm obviously FaceTime requires everybody have an iPhone or an iOS device, that that's free, and they've now got groups up to like eight or ten, I think, that that can be on. And doing that, Google Hangouts, I know is another one that for me it's been a technological nightmare in the past, but more and more people are telling me that it's it's become more stable. I think Google Hangouts has a limit of like six or seven people that may have even have have grown past that. Talkie dot IO, actually, I think it was somebody at Life Church that connected me with that, that's a Zoom competitor that's a hundred percent free. Even things like Discord, I know has it has a free video chat that's built in. Slack, I don't use that one a lot, but at least a...

Video chat, but it's there Facebook. I got a Facebook audio call from a guy today. I was like, "Oh, okay, I'll talk to you now." I can't tell you the conversation went well, but it did. He at least tried to call me. What other platforms that are out there that would be an option for somebody, you know, free or nearly free, that a church could dive into to experiment with?

Yeah, if you're looking for synchronous activity, so talking together at the same time, you mentioned Facebook message. I know with Facebook Messenger you can have up to 50 people in a call, so that's a pretty significant size. So if you, you know, now you can visibly see, you can video, I think it's up to eight, but audio you can have up to 50 people. So a lot of people have Facebook at facebook.com. That might be a, you know, kind of a simpler one to jump on.

Have you had, you know, I'm literally asking this and I don't mean anything rude, have you had good luck with Facebook on audio and video?

I personally have had bad luck. I have more recently, I have more recently seem to be relatively stable. So I know they just came out with, at least good time of this recording, wherever we are, March, they came out with the new Facebook Messenger app. I don't know if there was like it was just superficial design or if there is anything under the hood, but hopefully they've changed some of this stuff. Ray's messaging me. He's having problems with his Zoom on his phone. So maybe there's some bugs in this that we're really excited about. But you know, he's saying what's happened. I can tell you like we've used WhatsApp, which really also brings in, you know, WhatsApp for audio with that, but that also brings in this idea of text-based groups and how, you know, and Ray and I, we've had conversations about this in other podcasts talking about how being in a text community or community of friends, people that we know, keeping in touch with each other via the text groups, everything from like the sarcastic jokes and the constant trolling of one another, even to the place of like, "How can I pray for you? What's going on in your life? When you read this scripture, what are the things that come out?" Becoming more pastoral as well as, you know, just more relaxed. Like, have you guys experienced? I'm just curious, even within the group, like text engaging relationship where maybe it's six, four, eight people in a WhatsApp group or a, you know, a GroupMe app or something like that. Anybody want to share a story from that?

Yeah, you know, I do quite a bit of work with groups of people and inevitably it takes one quick conversation like, "Here's the rules for our text," and that keeps you on the right track so somebody doesn't get in too many memes. Like, the king of memes, so I'm usually the one calling myself out. Some of those things are, you know, you just establish, "Here's how we're gonna communicate and here's the pathway that it goes." I would even encourage you, I'm following up on what Ray said earlier about a texting strategy. I think I would also begin trying to figure a way to. I'm always a proponent of taking what happens in the real world and making digital a piece of that. So if you're attending church this Sunday, how is your congregation going to act in a digital way and when they're in person? So it could be, "Hey, if you want the latest updates, the best way to do that is simply sign up for our texting service and you can do it right here. Just text this number and it's done." So you begin that kind of communication path that, "Here's how we're going to communicate, and when you need to know the latest of what's happening here at church, this is the fastest way for us to get it out." I would be trying to figure in a couple digital elements along the way too. So anyway, I love the idea of like the fidget approach where what you're doing in digital, you're doing in the physical world also matches the digital and utilizing that as a community piece. And even in the chase we'll get to in a second, but even the idea of doing your announcements in a way during a season and when it's healing where people need to know, do them in an area where they can respond and ask questions or ask poignant questions like, "How can we pray for you in the midst of this?" and give people an opportunity to voice. I mean, we talked about how engaging the word engagement is lost a lot of its meaning for me. Engagement means not talking but listening. It's better to ask a question than make a statement. And for a church, an organization to ask the question and allow the church body to respond, man, that, like at an upper, and allowed the church body to minister to itself through that group, man, that would be powerful in a situation like this where there would be a lot of pain and hurting.

I'm sorry, Jason, I took you a little off topic.

You were gonna say?

No, no, I was gonna say two platforms that I would really try to consider a focus in on. One is a platform that probably more likely for most churches will be new, so you can only do this if you're gonna spend, you know, a few weeks right now upfront getting people on board. But that's Slack. We use Slack here at Outreach all the time. And Slack, yeah, you know, for free you can have unlimited channels. It can be private channels, can be public channels. You can get channels for different groups, whether small groups to cycling groups, whatever it might be, general, you know, general groups. You can invite people in. It's very, very helpful there for it. So you can get notifications as people are sharing and you can have back-to-back conversations pretty, pretty easily. And it's a real simple system to use and has, you know, some different add-ons that you can integrate. And it's just, there's a lot of flexibility with Slack. So if you have time to help more people to Slack, then that's something. If you don't have time, or just another really good option, Facebook. Facebook groups. Almost everyone's on Facebook, whether you like it or not. I'm not a massive Facebook user myself except that I have to use Facebook because I run groups, some things, you know, I mean. So I have responsibilities with people there. But Facebook groups are one of those things that you can set up. Again, you can set public groups or private groups. You can invite people into the group. So you can really structure them. You can upload videos and different things. You can do live teaching in the group. So for your small groups, your life groups, you know, discipleship type things, really, really functional. Actually, so that's an idea. And like I said, a lot of people are on Facebook, so it's not whether you love Facebook or hate it, it happens to be where a lot of people are hanging out. So, or at least have an account, right? So if you have to go to something, at least a lot of people, if they don't spend a lot of time there, a lot of people have an account so they can. If you say, "Hey, log on to Facebook, there's gonna be an invite in your notifications for your small group or whatever."

So Slack is Slack is free up into, you know, X number of posts and it just cycles through. Like, it doesn't archive. It retires life on it. It's like, I've got through my business. I just use a free account and I've got a number of select people that I'm on it and it's awesome. And I think it's more powerful than Discord. Discord is like Slack for video gamers. I like it better than WhatsApp because WhatsApp just seems to be a lot of like noise, not as structured. But I'm also like, I don't want noise. I want structure. I'm like, like Andrew, except I don't do the memes. I yelled at people who do the memes. So like, I'll just have to. Andrew, I'm not giving him my cell phone number because I don't want the memes.

Um, that thing that I've always, it was funny like in my head, like Facebook Workplace, where it's like the separate version of it. I always thought that would be a great idea, like more churches should take advantage of that where they're the only ones that are in there. They're not worried about the algorithm. They can really control it. And in Stadia, I love Stadia. Stadia uses it. But I got to tell you, it's become another inbox. It wasn't like, "Oh, I'm already in this Facebook Workplace app all the time, so I'm naturally just getting this information." It's become, "Oh yeah, that's the app that's got like X number of notifications. I'm just gonna ignore that from now. I'll look at it later." And I only get to it once every, you know, once or twice a week, which is enough for how Stadia is using it. But if I was a church, I would want somebody to engage in it more than that. So that's one of those things. There's like, "Man, we should really do that," but would actually try it was like, "And not really." But this is good. So like, I'm just curious, like, what other areas of church? When we're looking at, "Okay, so we have to prepare for coronavirus or we have to, you know, prepare for a future natural disaster or emergency," what are some other tools or thoughts, some holes that we need to fill in for a church to function?

Can I just give two overarching like thoughts that I want to make sure that we communicate? The first thing is, is like Kevin and I are out here in California. I'm in San Diego. He's in LA. I'm back and forth to Palo Alto, so the Bay Area quite a bit. If you asked them two or three weeks ago, are they worried about this current crisis? Ben, not a bit. They're not at all. When your community has one or two infections that happen, our positive tests, all the sudden people start going, "Oh, this, we're gonna stop gathering." So if you're out there today, you're listening to us going, "Hey, this is great. These guys are, you know, doomsday prophets and that kind of stuff," just know that it would take one case, one positive case in your community before your church population starts going, "Oh, are we gonna go to church on Sunday?" because a lot of people are gonna be there, okay? So that's the first thing to just kind of keep that in mind. Not to panic over it, but to just plan for it. That if it does happen, you want to be prepared. And then the second thing, and Jeff and I offline had talked briefly about this the other day, as any responsible pastor and if you're in charge of content or development of content, I would be preparing for Easter as well. Like, what happens the biggest day of the year? Are Super Bowl? If two weeks before, a week before, you get a case in your area and we know there's gonna be more cases, don't know how many, but I would just prepare to develop all your content for Easter. You got plenty of time to do it if you start now going, "What's our plan when that happens?" So those kind of two overarching things that are things that I just, I want to make sure just philosophically people are thinking about. Not necessarily tools, but we really should be thinking that way.

Yeah, collectively you just made every creative director for a church in America's head explode. Like, clearly it's just all over the place. And I mean, you know, if they give me their cell phone number, I'll send them a meme as well. And just don't pull it up, okay? But I mean, there's there's some validity at least in the awareness of where we're not that far away. There could always be an issue, especially, you know, you guys live in literally on the edge of a, you know, the tectorial plates. I think it's called. I'm going back to like my elementary geology. Is that the tectorial? That's not our word. It's something. Our plates. What is it called? Dinosaur? What you just said? There's something. Is it what's the term? Katana? Tectonic? There you go. Thank you, Jason, saving the day, man. That's awesome. Seeing those tectonic right there on the edge of that. It's just, it's an awareness to this, right? And then, and it's flexibility.

No, okay, and in those situations we gotta figure it out, you know? I actually last year a friend of mine, and this is like the creative purpose, but they did their church did a Good Friday service and it was entirely shot off a single camera in somebody's living room. Like it was an acoustic unplugged set, and they had thousands of views, and it was centered around my man's living room with a single camera and eight people doing a musical slash worship stuff, and not overly produced, nothing, you know, crazy, just a single camera stream, but it was immensely powerful. And so it's, you know, and given especially where we are, at least let's take the time to ask the question, you know, what could we do? What's the plan? What would it be? Should we have to explore it? Don't don't write it in stone. Don't even write it in ink, but at least have in pencil, okay? Hey, this is the path that we're gonna go on. This is the gear that we have. This is how we can use it. We need to acquire this. And honestly, and this is unlikely, but I think have some of that gear in place. Like, know that, oh, I've got to buy a Mevo camera, and so it's a three hundred dollar purchase. Let's go and buy it because you're gonna get grenaded at some point. There, be prepared for these situations so that when you have to respond, you can respond quickly with the best foot forward for the kingdom as opposed to scrambling and regretting things along the way.

Specific coronavirus, which is, you know, this, you know, pandemics a little different than a natural disaster in that natural disasters may be knocking out our internet access or our power access. You know, that could be a whole different thing. But with this, I think the way people will react, like Andrew said, it doesn't have to be that our government says, okay, people can't gather publicly. I mean, if we look at our churches today, average attendees are showing up, you know, two times a month, maybe, you know, three times a month if you're, if you're really, really, you know, have a really engaged congregation. And so it's not going to take necessarily the government to say, hey, you know, you can't gather publicly. It's gonna take just a little bit of, you know, extra concern that, you know, a family does not want to have their kids out in a public space because, you know, there's, you know, been some virus has been, you know, reported in the area or even in the next city away or, you know, the next big city. And we're seeing this already in churches, like in Washington, you're already seeing this happening. So it really, it's one of the things that we want to think about, again, not to be alarmist, whoever, but just be prepared. What is this gonna look like if there are people who have some bigger fears and who are going to say, you know what, we're just gonna voluntarily stay at home and watch worship online, right? Because we just don't want to take that extra risk of exposure for whatever reason. And people have different levels of fear and anxiety over these things, you know? I mean, so so I think it's one of those things that, again, you know, we're not saying that the sky is falling, but we're saying let's just think through this because there are gonna be people who are not going to show up simply because of concern of being in public places gathering with people. So you want to keep that in mind, right?

We haven't even touched on there's a whole other group of people that aren't interested in coming into your building to be spiritually fed, but if you moved some of your resource, your discipleship online, you'd reach a whole lot more people. Like, all these conversations that we're tastefully having, centered around in the framework of coronavirus or, you know, impending other natural disasters, the reality is is that, and I believe this, maybe it's not the reality, but I believe the churches are going to get smaller, injuries are going to get bigger, and more and more that the church is going to be engaging with content online. And our ability to disciple, to help people grow deeper in their faith, to keep people on mission utilizing online tools, they're gonna be very effective, not for the church at post-Corona, not even for the church post-natural disasters. I think they were effective for the church today. You've got people in your audience, and I use the word digital earlier, like they are a mixture of physical and digital. There are a mixture of physical engagement and online engagement. And for the church to truly be effective, we need to start transitioning away from online-only discipleship, or excuse me, physical-only discipleship, physical-only small groups, and start to move into a world where people can engage more, ask more spiritual questions, grow deeper in their faith, and be on mission through some of these digital tools. I believe the church will look far different if it opens up and if it changes and embraces culture, not just in the physical front, but if it embraces it on the digital too.

But I got a little, like, I'm a little jaded there. If we look kind of like that's a thing, but hey, this has been a great podcast. I want to ask one more question. So dealing, and this is actually a Ray question, Ray had to trade the step out. He's got a thing tonight at that is at the church, but ministering to fear-driven culture. What do people need to hear spiritually after going through something like Corona? After going through something like a natural disaster? What are the elements pastorally? Has put on your pastor had here for a second. Like, what are they looking to hear? What do they need to hear in situations like this?

I think for me, I look at it. Number one, they need to know and understand here the assurance that God is still God and he's still in control. And then what they need to see from leaders is calmness and trust in God and not panic from a leader, but somebody that is steady in what they're in, how they're leading, and how they're connecting with people. Still, that, you know what, God's called us here, and until Christ comes back, we're gonna occupy and continue to move forward. And you know, yes, will we have times where things are up, down, questionable, not understanding everything? Absolutely. But we should be not only men and women of faith, which obviously is the opposite of fear, but also like that should chill a little bit, not in a cocky way, but just in an assurance way to go, we know God has this, and we want to let you see that we understand that.

I would say that we really help our people, and not just our people, with the world to see that God is present with us in the midst of tragedy. I think that's super key, that we know that there is hope within difficult times and challenging times, that we're not left alone, that we're not, God has not deserted people, but God is actually, you know, suffering through this alongside of us and walking with us through it. So I think that's key. I think one of the other things, especially for our people and even preparing moving into this, you know, like potentially, because we talked about some of the opportunities, but I remember I preached the Sunday after 9/11, and I'll never forget that Sunday as long as I live, right? And just with my people, and just there's a lot of brokenness, but it ended up being also not just a time of, you know, coming together and embracing one another and talking about hope in the midst of crisis, but also incredible opportunity. God is a God of redemption, and what the enemy means for evil, God redeems for his purposes and for good. And so whenever there are crises, right, like these, we have the opportunity to say there are people who are living broken lives and they're looking for wholeness. And in the midst of this, there's even more brokenness, you know? Your life's already broken, and yet then there's some sort of calamity or tragedy, and so we as the church have the opportunity to engage people in a way that oftentimes only come through these difficult, difficult circumstances, right? And we see this in individual people's lives, but where I think we're going to be seeing this in the lives of nations, around the in the lives of cities and communities, that there is this hunger for something true and something real. And we have the opportunity. So we want to encourage our people that as much as we're going through this and we want to be here for one another in the midst of this, this is also an incredible opportunity for the mission of God, for people to experience the hope of Jesus maybe for the first time in their lives. And we want to be a part of God's redemption in the midst of all this.

Hey, Kevin, as we're wrapping up, you know, I know part of this we wanted to create some resources for Korea. Do you have any messages or anything for the people there? Like, what would you say to the Korean audience right now?

Yeah, I just want to echo what Andrew and Jason said. Just encourage them, Dad. You know, the spirit that is in us is stronger than the spirit of the world. And you know, one thing that I know about Korea is it's a very enduring country. It has endured a lot, and I know it's gonna overcome it. So the resources, I think our conversation was very helpful because a lot of churches are only looking at how to stream services, but we are giving different dimensions of how we can express church online, and it's been incredibly beneficial just to hear it. And I can't wait to share it with some churches in Korea.

Hey, gentlemen, thank you very much. We're gonna land a plane here. There's been a great podcast, and I'm honored to be with you guys to touch on this very sensitive project. Just, and we didn't say it upfront, like health concerns. Listen, I'm the last person to want to give advice to somebody on how to do, like, you know, wash your hands, don't touch your face. Like, I was funny. I was watching Comedy Central, and they had lined up all these politicians who are making these announcements of do the smart thing, don't touch your face, and then like five seconds later they cut to a clip of them like rubbing their face. Over, I don't have to tell you that's my face, but I'm sitting here with my hands on my chin and doing everything I can not to do it. So don't listen to me on the physical stuff, and I'm not even going to talk to you about that. Listen to, like, you, whatever the news sources around that are that are hopefully giving wise, sage advice in that situation. But I do know this: there's more to the church than what happens for the one hour on Sunday, and there's more to the church than what happens when it hits the plate. So as you're looking at preparing a strategy for what church needs to be, how we need to care for and shepherd people who are going through tragic situations like this, don't just look at the one-hour Sunday replacement. Take a deeper dive. Look at really what the heart of ministry is, and then look at the heart of what churches are, and then figure out how to replicate that digitally. It's gonna help you plan for the emergency situations that will come, and chances are it's gonna help you with your day-to-day ministry today.

For Andrew, for Kevin, for Jason, for Ray, who had to step off, this is Jeff with the Church Digital. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time here on the podcast. Y'all have a good day.