EP055: Stadia & Virtual Officing

All right, you got episode 55 of the Church Digital Podcast, powered by Stadia Church Planting. I have loved working alongside Stadia Church Planting in the midst of this coronavirus season, helping churches out there figure out how to conquer this idea of church online. By the way, this past weekend, Sunday, March 22nd, was the day, in fact, that the church broke the internet. It's a far fascinating conversation. Typically, you know, you would think the internet would break the church. No, I'm pretty sure between issues with church online platform and Facebook having issues with all the Facebook living that was happening. In fact, the church did break the internet on Sunday, March 22nd, and hopefully the internet is going to shore up and be able to handle the next wave on the 29th.

Well, we've got a really interesting topic because we're not done with the Stadia side. Actually, this is going to be a deep dive in Stadia because there's one thing that Stadia does. Actually, there's a lot of things that Stadia does phenomenally well, and that's a later conversation in itself. But the thing that we wanted to hone in here on the podcast is this idea of virtual officing. Because if you're like me, I left the church office on Monday afternoon after a series of meetings, and then I put myself in lockdown. Now, where I am in Miami, like we don't have a government mandated lockdown like necessarily is happening in California or maybe somewhere out in the Pacific Northwest, at least at this point, at the point of this recording.

But I can tell you that chances are it's coming. And as a result of that, hey, church, maybe we need to get ready. Maybe we need to figure out what it looks like. How do we manage? How do we empower? What is even like volunteer management look like in this day and age? What does even virtual officing look like? How do you lead an employee when you're not in the same space? This is one thing that Stadia does phenomenally well. And just even in the couple months that I've been here, I'll be honest, my boss's name's Craig, and I'm in Miami, and he's in like Los Angeles, SoCal area. So we're what, three time zones away? And involvement with me is awesome, is phenomenal. And so somehow Stadia has figured out this formula for what it means.

How do we lead people, even though we're not breathing the same air molecules? And so to that end, I brought in a couple Stadia people into the conversation. We're bringing in Janie Mahaffey, as well as Heidi Tandy, to have a conversation to help us understand, okay, church, as we're going into lockdown, as we're, you know, really examining what this social distancing is, what does it actually mean? How can we lead people? How can we lead staff virtually? Some great conversations here. And I hope that this will help you in the season of coronavirus, and even maybe give you some ideas beyond. Hey, everybody. Here you go. Yeah. So I'm Janie Mahaffey. And I've had the honor of serving with Stadia for 10 years now.

It'll be 10 years in May. And I'm just honestly honored that God allows Stadia to serve the big C church by starting lots of local churches. Stadia's passion is to have a world where every single child has access to a local church and through the love of Jesus, to the love of Jesus through the local church. And so Stadia gets the honor of coming alongside a lot of existing churches and passionate leaders to multiply in all kinds of ways across the U.S. and around the world. The thing that I love about Stadia, and we'll get to Heidi in a second, but Stadia is 100% virtual company. Like, I'm sitting down here. I've worked with Stadia probably two months, so I'm still kind of the newbie on board.

They've hired other people since me, but I still feel like I don't know what's going on. And coronavirus through a blender and everything everywhere, of course. But with Stadia, I think the closest employee to me is maybe four or five hours away. Yeah, we have 57 employees in 24 different states, I think is what we're distributed to. Yeah, my boss is actually in California. He's in SoCal in L.A. And so it's like I have to mentally figure out the time zones because sometimes I blow them up on text at like 8 in the morning my time because I'm in the office. And that's 5 a.m. his time, which is really unfortunate because he's in a grumpy mood at around 5 a.m. He hasn't gotten that coffee kick. I think he's learned the art of do not disturb, so I think you're good.

And Heidi, you're with Stadia as well, so kind of like what's your role with Stadia? Yeah, so I have been on the Stadia team for a little over two years, and I get to serve on the planner development team working with Bloom, which is our ministry for women in church planting. And so I just get to help champion church planting opportunities for women, both next generation leaders in the church and women who are launched, pre-launch, and have been in church plants for years. And so we do some unique things trying to connect to women virtually, both in the Stadia team and through our Bloom community of church planting women, and I'm excited to get to talk about some of those things today. That's awesome.

So the heart of this episode is how to create community virtually, what it is to create community online, and sometimes that looks like online small groups or Bible studies and things like that. Or maybe it's even within the office place, what it is to create this community within the virtual office space. You know, I can tell you, the church that I'm working with down here in Miami, it's called Christ Journey, our office buildings are still open, there are still employees that are going into the office. I can honestly tell you, I haven't set foot in the building since the last meeting Monday, at which point I said, I'm not coming back during the office week, because I was opting to go 100% virtual.

And so utilizing Zoom and conversations, they use Basecamp for project management. So they, you know, a lot of that main communication with the leaders and teams and staff is already a lot of in this digital platform where they're engaging some of that. So they actually had probably an easier time than some. As restrictions get tighter and tighter, you know, I'm hearing reports in California that it's now a $1,000 fine if you're found outside your house. And as that sweeps across the West Coast to the East Coast, as coronavirus standards have been moving from the West Coast to the East Coast, it's, it's not, I'm not speaking out of turn to say I'm expecting some of this stuff to come over and impact the rest of the country, not just in the California on the West Coast area.

So as a church, we need to prepare for what it actually looks like to virtual office, to be able to keep our staff on mission, to be able to keep our people on mission, even during the season of coronavirus time. And that's really the heart of what I wanted to hone in here with, with Janie and Heidi, because somehow they figured out how to do this already as we've got 57 employees in 24 states who are fully functioning and able to operate 100% virtually. So I'm hoping tips and tricks, insider things, you know, some of the things will, will come up. But, you know, and Janie, you know, specifically with her role, and I love this, she's, I don't know if this is like your title. I don't even know if this is in your job description, but two months in, like you're the person who kind of is the rah-rah huddling and keeping everybody together.

The, hey, this is an awesome thing over here. This is an awesome, great thing over here. You really need to talk to this person. Like you're the trap, you're the virtual traffic cop. That's like keeping this organization running and you're using tools like, uh, like, like your phone and zoom in Facebook workplaces and some things to really like help keep the organizational aware of what it's doing itself. But also being that love and support and community, even though I'm five hours away from the closest employee who I don't even work with on a close basis. So like, tell me a little bit, Janie, just from you, like your perspective, what is, what does that look like? How do you, how do you do that?

Was it hard to get there? Like, tell me that story. Yeah, I love that Stadia has been already, um, heading in this direction for a really long time. And as a result, we're able to steward a lot of the things that we've learned about virtual teams and virtual communities. Um, to so many people are hungry for it right now because, uh, we've been, um, serving as a virtual organization for a long time and people are having to figure it out in two weeks, which is pretty daunting in, on top of everything else that's going on. But, um, I, I prefer air traffic controller to traffic. Okay. Um, but the idea is that, um, every church knows that culture is super important right now. And that's, um, whether you're physically in the same room or not.

And all the more, when you were spread out across the country, um, connecting people, helping them feel engaged to the mission, engaged to their work, that they're collaborating and feeling connected to one another. So we're on mission together. It's super important to be intentional about it when you're in virtual spaces. And so, um, it always surprises me, you know, all of, uh, Stadia's work when we're working together with our team, it's done in video environments. So everybody's learning the amazing things that formats like zoom bring to, uh, collaborative work environments virtually. And we have relied so much on zoom, you know, um, the overhead of Stadia has been low because we don't have physical offices to pay for our, our expenses have been in paying for high, uh, levels of zoom so that we can collaborate in this kind of video environment.

Doing, uh, work in a video format always surprises me of how much we can build connection and we can collaborate in this type of setting. Like I think about the fact that I have been in rooms where we have brainstormed, where we've problem solved, where we have, um, worked through intense details of a project. Um, I have prayed with team members. I have coached team members, been coached by team members. I have fought or as, uh, Brene Brown would say rumbled with team members over video. And, um, honestly, I've apologized to people over video. And so it always amazes me that you can accomplish, um, so much in this kind of setting. And then it really makes me laugh that when we do get the honor of being on the, on the ground with our teammates and meet them physically, sometimes I forget that I have never seen the bottom half of someone's body because I have only known them in the virtual sense and only known them from the waist up.

So it's kind of funny when I meet in person because we've connected so much that I feel like, no, I know people, but I don't really know them in person. Uh, even for, for myself and coming on board and meeting, meeting some of these people is to be like exponential conference and things that people come up and like, Hey, I know you. And it's like, Oh, well, let me, give me a second. Like coming up with the name, let me figure it. But it's, there's a lot of, um, there's a lot of excitement when you do meet in, in, in the physical environment, even though it's not necessarily all the time. And as a church, I, I can, I can feel some of that, that tension because we're not, we're not meeting physically and even it's like interacting in physical, um, you know, oftentimes feels distant, uh, technology itself.

And I've done this talk and we've talked a lot of it before. Actually just recently, we were on a Daniel M podcast. We've talked about this a lot where, where technology is cold and through, um, in situations where you utilize technology, where there's high technology, oftentimes there has to be an intentional high level of touch, a high level of personalization of, of friendliness of, of, of engagement to kind of overcome the coldness of it. So like with, and you guys at Stadia, you're so good at this where you're, you're able to, to rally the folks with excitement and show some of that. And so like, maybe, maybe just some, some thoughts around for, for both of you guys, how, how do you create that?

Because it's so good. I would say it starts with, um, our leadership. Um, our leadership, I think, um, you know, Greg, our president, for example, is really good at just, um, being vulnerable. He's very candid with our staff of calling, um, where we need to be intentional and what's awkward. Um, he is super, um, focused on our values of relationship and celebration, um, of impact and urgency and all of that being so that every child can have a church. So he is constantly reminding our team of our values and what our role is in making sure that we're working toward those values and, um, making sure that the conversations we're having keep focused on that. So that I'd say, you know, starts with leadership.

I think right now it's really important that, um, leaders are realizing that, um, there also needs to be a lot of grace in these environments. So, um, we need to convene people on video. We need to get the work done. We've got to figure out how to navigate, um, the, the technology and the dynamic of having all these people in your home office while still getting the work done. So, yeah, I have a friend who said she was on conference calls from nine to four the other day on video conference calls. And I thought, wow, that's great that your team is leaning into this, but holy cow, that's not realistic. Like you wouldn't be holding up your team in a conference room at your physical office. You would be balancing those meetings with going back and getting work done and taking a lunch break and having some breathers in there.

So I think I know that it's an intense season. There's tons we've got to do right now to prepare our churches and to figure out what all this means, but we need to be realistic. And I, that's what I appreciate about our, our leadership that we're talking about, you know, we know virtual work. And so we're used to this kind of environment. Um, but we're not used to having all these people home and all up in our faces, our kids home and spouses. And so, uh, Greg, even the other day, he said, you know what, let's do the work. Let's get it done. But savor this time, go in and spend time with your kids, take a walk with your family, make sure your physical health is staying strong. Make sure your soul health, your spiritual health is strong.

And so I think leaders need to lean into the resources and try to figure out how do we convene our teams and work together. But this is also an important time to give ourselves grace and our teams a little extra dose of grace in the chaos. Yeah. It benefits us in the longterm in that if we can have some grace with ourselves to navigate this process in the beginning and kind of find our rhythm in weeks one, two, and three, then our productivity will probably increase as we, as we go on, if this ends up being longer than anticipated. And so I think everybody wins if we take the time to figure out a rhythm here at the beginning, instead of trying to be so ambitious to figure everything out in week one.

That, that's a, that's a great observation. Let me ask this question. Cause you just opened the door. Um, Heidi, like tell me your rhythm. What, what is, so you've, you've got, uh, so you're married. How many kids, like, what does life look for you work look like for you? And in this coronavirus season, how do you balance that? Yeah. So, um, I have a five-year-old daughter named Clara, seven-year-old son named Isaac, kindergarten and second grade. Uh, my husband and I also planted movement church in Newport, Kentucky in March of 2014. So we have this one part of our world that is, we're doing digital church, church online and figuring that out with our teams and serving our community and reaching out to our neighbors and, uh, spreading the love of Jesus even through this crisis.

But then we're also navigating two kids that are on a pretty specific rhythm, particularly my seven-year-old, um, at school and how can we give them clear expectations each day. And so rhythm wise, um, I just gave my, my supervisor a realistic, like number of hours that I would be available during this first week and let him know that I will do a lot of kind of, uh, of my thinking work on the fringe hours. So those fringe hours, five to 7 AM. And then after bedtime, if I have lots of high thinking work, those are those windows that I'll have to be working in. Um, and then in terms of meetings, I am ready to go in that sort of 10 to two window is where I'm shooting for. And so that also lets us to have our morning routine at home with my kids.

Um, so from about seven to 10, we're doing our morning rhythms, getting a nice chunk of our non-traditional instruction work done. Not all of it, it's not going to be perfect. Um, and so, uh, but when, when my husband gets home, we can knock the rest of it out, but he, he is working at our building still. So we really do better when we're not all in the same place, um, than we put him down in the basement office. Um, because we just know about ourselves that we are humans who feel anxiety and stress and don't love the unknown. And so the more we can, uh, help each other thrive and know kind of what pushes the other person's buttons, um, the more we can kind of honor those rhythms that you asked.

Oh, that, that is so honest right there. Like I, and then I've, I am recording this podcast in my guest bedroom, which I've turned into a makeshift office. I'll just be honest. I don't, I don't have an office. I work at a virtual office and whatever church I happen to be, you know, like helping that day as I travel around often in Miami, I just kind of set up, well, I'm not traveling around. So I'm here. Um, my kids are out of school and they are virtual office. So my kids are here. My wife is a school teacher, uh, who is not teaching in a physical building anymore. She's figuring out how to do things through zoom, writing on a chalkboard, like as on an iPad with a, with an Apple pencil and uploading it to like Google, whatever Google classrooms platform is.

So like, we're all virtual office in this like nine to five era. And, um, and it was, was funny. I ran into this situation where normal, I do these podcasts all the time. You know, I tell the kids, I told my wife, Hey, I'm doing a recording. Like, just try not to let the dog like bark, you know, try to keep it quiet. So the conversation goes well and everybody seems to be okay. It's, it's great. Cause it's like that one to two thing inadvertently. I'm going to be honest, transparent because coronavirus church line, things were so crazy. Like the whole house was like, we just need to be quiet for Jeff 24 seven. And so like, nobody was talking, nobody was doing anything because they were trying to be respectful to let me like work and do the things.

But when I found this out, I was like, wait, guys, it's okay to make noise. I'm on a call. Like, it's not the end of the world. If somebody hears the dog bark, you're part of this house too. Like, don't, don't, you know, protect me so much that, that you're not a part of this. And it really started to become the boundaries of, okay, I'm okay. If somebody's barking in a, okay. Maybe I'm not okay. If my daughter is barking in a call, but I'm okay. If, if noise is happening in a, in a call, but at other times, maybe I need to, okay. Hey, let's protect this time instead. And so we've started to create some of those boundaries and learn to work together in the house that I think are at least week two, it made week one miserable, evidently, but week two seems to be better.

I love what you're saying about trying to figure out what that rhythm looks like, because that was something that I did not do well at all early on when I came on to virtual work. I came from a, a large church environment from Trader's Point, Indianapolis. And shifted to virtual world and took it way too casually at first. And I think all of us can learn really quickly from the mistakes of those of us who have done that, where I would kind of haphazardly approach my office and let work time bleed into home time and not have a dedicated space. And after a while of not being fruitful and productive, I learned quickly that I needed to get my act together. And so started a long time ago with some new rhythms that I think would be really good for people as they're trying to shift to this virtual space to take, to take in and intentionally put into action.

And I would say that's creating a space where you can work that's separate from the rest of your people. I think there are times when I want my boys in here and I want them to hear the work I'm doing, but there's times when I've just got to be focused. I love that our teammates, when my boys walk in, they'll say hi and have a quick chat. But my boys know when it's time to walk out because I got to get back to being on focus. Having set times is hugely important. I have to get up super early before the rest of the world gets up to spend time with God before I can be kind to anybody else. But after that, getting to work is important. But then having a stop time at 4:35 o'clock. I got to start wrapping things up and end or else it just starts bleeding.

And next thing I know it's eight o'clock and my family's had to figure out food for themselves and everything else because I've let too much work time. And that's especially hard right now because it does seem like there's so many urgent ministry needs and those are important. But goodness, our homes and our kids are our most important mission field. And so we've got to set those boundaries for those of us who have families. And honestly, for those who are single, probably need to be even more tenacious about that because you don't have other people who are vying for your attention and other needs. So just really encourage you to set office hours and stick with those. Also getting ready. It's really important for me to get dressed all the way to shoes.

On the days when I stay in my pajamas or stay in my casual clothes too long, it just does not feel legit and I am not as productive. Now that said, the benefits of virtual world is I can wear yoga pants and so I can be all business from the waist up and ready for physical workout from the waist down. But it's really nice because when I have a break, I can get up and take a walk and go be physical and have that be a brain break and then come back and get to work. So there's lots of benefits with virtual work, but you have to be intentional that it doesn't become too interwoven or you're not going to, like Heidi said, we're not going to be productive if we're not given the tools to really set ourselves up for a win for the long haul.

Eating is also important, sometimes like my friend who was in video calls all day, sometimes you can get to where, oh gosh, I've got to eat and is it weird that I'm going to eat here in front of you? Well, I love hanging out with you guys. I would totally grab my lunch and have lunch with you here over Zoom. It might be awkward at first, but we call the awkward and we move on. So just making sure you're being healthy and staying well rounded in the midst of all this is really important for all of us. Yeah, so if you're going to eat in front of someone, maybe the mic while you're chewing chewing out of respect. Yeah. It's funny. I've been seeing people post the worst case Zoom things that are happening.

Like somebody was in a Zoom meeting and the person's brushing their teeth in a Zoom meeting. Don't do that. No, like, you know, if you're not going to do it in real life, maybe don't do it in Zoom. Maybe there's a rule for that. That is a good rule of thumb. And this is what I think Stadia does so well with the virtual officing context, that there's this relational equity that happens virtually. I mean, almost, and jobs, and I'm just even with my boss, the two that have been here, he's speaking into my life and how I'm managing things. In previous jobs, to me, it would have taken longer for a person to get to the level that he is doing virtually. Now, coronavirus is a force magnifier, it explodes everything, so maybe that's part of it.

But at the end of it, at least it's proof in concept that you can do things virtually that you probably could do physically as well. Janie, I wanted to ask you a question, because you oversee people through Stadia, so like you're responsible for leading and oversight of an employee who's in another time zone. And even being the online guy that I am, I wrestle with, I don't even know what that looks like. I have a hard time managing employees that are in the same room as me, and you're doing it when they're on the other side of the country. What are some things, how do you manage an employee in that relationship digitally? Yeah, I think some of the things you've already talked about of what Craig does of investing in you is a really important part that we're going to first value relationships and value people.

So let people know that they're important and we care about them and their spiritual life and their souls before we start focusing on what did you accomplish today and the accountability that comes with work. One thing that we've found is really important is to make sure that we are keeping accessible to each other and involving the right people in the conversations. And so what that means, you know, for us, Zoom is so important. And one of my favorite features on Zoom is the green light. So we can look through, you know, I know there are different levels of Zoom, so you know, we'll lean on you, Jeff, with your technological smarts to make the recommendations of what churches should consider for their Zoom accounts.

But Stadia has a pretty robust one. And one feature that I love about it is that I can look at all of the contact lists on our team directory and see who is in a meeting, see who is offline, and see who has a green light. And to me, the green light is your office door is open and you're opening up, you're open and available for a drive-by. And so in the same way that in my old Trader's Point days, I would walk down the hallway and see if somebody's door is open to stop by and say, hey, I've got an idea about something. I want to run by you. Or, hey, I'm just checking in to see how you're doing. I use that green light for that same thing. And a lot of our managers do, too. In the same way, our managers keep their green light on so that they can be available and accessible to their teams for a stop-by for brainstorming or just, hey, I'm really struggling.

I just need to talk about this. So from an organic standpoint, that being able to stay connected and just reaching out proactively is really important. Our managers know that reaching out proactively to their team is important in a virtual environment because sometimes there's a sense of, oh, I don't want to bother them. They're busy. You know, is this question really worthy of me setting up a Zoom meeting? You know, because that almost seems too big of a deal. But I would say that makes it all the more important for managers to proactively to reach out to their team. Not just video, to send texts, to make phone calls, to do whatever they can, especially in this time right now to just say, hey, what's going on?

How you doing? Or do you just have something you want to run by me? So on the same or on the other end of things of being intentional is having a regular rhythm of meetings, having a one-on-one meeting with the people you work with, having team meetings. We have meetings for different purposes. So we have all stadium meetings where we come together and we talk about our vision and our values and celebrate what's going on. And then we have meetings. We had a meeting just yesterday where the whole team came together for prayer time together. And we had Jean Appel speaking to our lives, which was really incredible. And then we broke into small groups on Zoom and prayed together. And then we have just fun, personal development.

We talk about fitness tips and tricks or how to get your kids engaged in your work or in each other's lives. So there's types of meetings that you need to define. And when you get your teams together, you need to define what are we trying to accomplish and use a Zoom meeting in the same way that you would in an in-person meeting. One thing that we have to be really careful of that I think was one of the biggest ahas of a difference in virtual world from physical world from my perspective is making sure that you're involving the right people in conversations. It's really easy that Heidi and I can be talking and we can start working on something. The next thing you know, it's really something that should affect many people in planter development or marketing or our social media or events.

And we may, just because we're already there in the middle of the conversation, we may not grab somebody and bring them into the conversation who needs to be because you're not in that physical environment and can see them in their office and say, hey, Jeff, come here. We need to talk to you about this. So it's very important that you're intentional to stop conversations and say, wait a minute, who needs to be a part of this? And in video world, you can ring them up and bring them into the room in the same way you could in a physical environment. It's also important like in text chains and email chains, just you don't have that physical part where you're seeing people in a room and going, hey, I need to be in that meeting because I can see through that glass window that those people are talking and I need to be in that conversation.

You don't have the benefit of that. So it puts the onus on those of us who are in the conversations to invite the right people in. Yeah, I love that. I've been in a couple of those. I'll be sitting at my desk working on something and a little like pop-up comes on the screen. So-and-so wants to talk to you or you're invited at Zoom, you know, and I click a button. All of a sudden, there's like eight people staring at me and it's like, oh, hey, okay, I'm walking into this. Great. What can I do for you? How can I serve? It even with Zoom, like it even hit my phone. I remember one day I was walking in a parking lot and I got one of those that pinged my phone. And so, you know, I swiped on it to answer the Zoom call and ended up being one of these large things.

It was like, hey, we really wanted like just to unpack something on you. You got a couple minutes and that's awesome because you have accessibility. And that's one of the things that I wanted to ask on because it feels to me, Stadia, even the size that it is and the quantity of the, I mean, a thousand churches over 17 years, another thousand churches planted in the next three years, hockey sticking from that point to much more rapid growth, going to a lot, researching and developing a digital expression. You guys are very aggressive. And it feels to me that you turn on a dime probably more quickly than, than a normal or a physical organization would. I'm just wondering if you guys have noticed that because you're virtual instead of physical, if that makes you more malleable, if it's easier to shape, do you, do you feel that?

Is that something you've intentionally done? Just kind of like, what's, what's the thoughts on some of that? Yeah, I think the virtual environment contributes a lot to that. But we do have a stated value of urgency. We know that there are over 7 billion people on the planet and we, we know how urgent it is that we connect people to Jesus as soon as possible. We were talking the other day about how interesting it's going to be to see what people in, on church teams are not able to adapt to the virtual format and working in non-physical ways and which ones are going to accelerate super fast in those environments. And I guarantee that those are the people who are going to be the church planters of the future, because it takes scrappy, quick decision-making, full of energy, entrepreneurial type vision to act in environments that are this quick changing and you've got to be learning fast and making quick decisions and being nimble.

And the people that rise to the occasion here are going to be the ones that we're going to be looking at as saying, Hey, you guys need to be our next pioneers. You need to be going out and starting new churches. I think it's absolutely incredible that God gave us to you, Jeff, at such a time as this, you are such an Esther that I think we have been, Stadia has been positioned for virtual workplace, but we've also been talking and dabbling and exploring about digital church. And all of a sudden everybody has to go from, Oh, well, we might do this in the next two years to, Oh, we got to do this next week. And so, um, I think it's been amazing to see our team all of a sudden pivot and shift all our resources to saying, Okay, how do we start having conversations quickly about making sure we get our resources and our our knowledge and learning to as many people as possible.

So convening all kinds of, uh, groups of church leaders to figure out what do they need to know fast so that they can, um, pivot and start leading in this new way has been exciting. And I feel like Stadia has brought us people and wiring to be able to do that really fast. I love that, um, you know, we get to minister to ministers and I love that next week, Heidi's convening a group, um, that is going to serve, uh, church pastors and how they pastor and care for their families. Um, and the fact that we can serve both in how do our churches lead in their churches, but also how do we care for them and pastor them is pretty important in this crazy fast moving time to Being a pastor in the midst of the storm.

I mean, it's, it's difficult. Um, I I've looked at pastors faces, uh, here locally in Miami, uh, or on zoom, which I'm on all the time. We're all exhausted. We're all concerned. We're all, we don't know what tomorrow is and, and not different than any person. Really. We, we, none of us know what tomorrow is. What is it like? Well, tell me, tell me about what this, this ministry opportunity is. How, how are you guys helping? How are we evidently through stadia? I didn't know about this. How are we helping, uh, pastors? Yeah. So I'm like 97, I'll say we are like 97% energized and about 3% scared out of our minds. Um, but the, the majority of it is energizing. Um, it has been really fun in the last week to say, all right, how can we take this challenge And use it as an opportunity for the Monday through Saturday church to be the church.

And we have really gotten a chance to empower our leadership, to be reaching out to people, um, to making sure that their physical needs are cared for, to making sure that, um, the needs of our community for the, like the elementary school that our school partners with, um, to check in with them to make sure that they're doing okay. Um, and to help meet any needs that they have. So yesterday, um, we heard a need that there was a microwave that a family in the community did not have housing. They got some temporary housing, but the housing didn't have a kitchen, but all they wanted was a microwave. And so we were able, um, through our community's generosity to give this family microwave. So those little things that's the 97% that's the fun part.

Um, but yeah, all of this weighs on our hearts. Like we don't, we don't, um, we've never done this before. Right. I think that's the line that we keep saying. We've just never done this before. Uh, and we care so deeply for our people. Um, and for making sure that no one falls through the cracks. Um, making sure that we use technology in a way that is, um, accessible to people. Right. Like we are doing our face, our, our service on Facebook live, but then trying to figure out, you know, how do we make sure that people that don't have Facebook have The platforms to be able to be able to access our services. And so what's it like? Um, it's like new things every hour on the hour. Um, but I'm so grateful, um, for Sadie's value of relationships because my husband was on a call yesterday with a bunch of friends and friends, but I'm so grateful for Stadia's value of relationships because my husband was on a call yesterday with a bunch of friends and friends.

Pastors who were talking through what they were doing. I was on, uh, he was on the same, uh, another call about embracing generosity in this time. And then like Jamie said, we're going to be leading, um, several webinars in the upcoming days, but next week I'm leading a webinar on empowering families at home through the coronavirus outbreak. And so it's great if our churches are going well, but if their wheels are falling off at home, I could care less about what happens at my church. And so how can we empower families to not have some like standard of perfection? Like I feel like social media can sometimes be unhelpful in these times because we've got like 1000 things to do with your family during COVID-19 and 10 ways to make sure that your kids are geniuses when this is all over.

I would care less about that. Um, how are we going to get through the day? What are some ways we can set up families, families for success? So we've got two church planning families that are going to be on sharing just some of the things that their family does. They don't all have the answers, but they're going to be candid with us and tell us their stories. And I can't wait to hear from them next week, 11 Eastern on Wednesday. Awesome. So for more information, nice plug there. Uh, yeah, stadia church planning.org slash webinar, I think singular, maybe plural webinars. I'm pretty sure both will work. And if not, by the time the podcast publishes, we'll make sure they both work. That's right. Uh, but you, you can get more information on those, uh, the webinar there for that.

And it'll be available, uh, live as well as I'm sure we'll make it available on demand. So good stuff there. And stadia is actually doing a lot of webinars right now. You know, the thing that I love about stadia is they're ahead of the curve. Uh, a lot of the stuff with church online and the broadcast and things. We were talking about that last week. Uh, everybody else is talking about it this week. And now stadia is aggressively. Answering other questions, uh, trying to stay ahead of the curve on this because, well, it just, I love the organization because it does that. A lot of people have been asking, um, us about, which I think is so funny is we seem like super geniuses because we know how to use zoom.

I feel like I've become an expert in zoom just because I know how to use the breakout button because people are so interested in how do you break into small groups because I know how to use that button. I've become kind of an expert. Um, but I feel like there's things that we have, um, just learned over time that I am learning that is helpful for people to understand and how to use zoom and use it in a way, um, that creates a good communication and removes the barriers, some etiquette and tips and tools. And Heidi is super good at sharing some of those. Could we like tap into her for a quick tips for our friends who are listening? Let's call it best practices, uh, best practices for zoom. Ready?

Go. What, what do you got? So best practices for zoom. Um, both the number one thing is communication, right? We, we cannot assume that this is easy for everyone. And so we have had virtual small groups this past week with our community in the same, we go through the same spiel every time at the beginning of our small groups. And I learned how to do this through the wisdom of Becky Murphy, who wrote us guidelines, um, to do this at stadia. And so we tell people how to mute themselves. Um, there's nothing more annoying. Let's be honest, when you're on a call and you hear someone's potato chip bag wrestling, or, um, maybe, maybe it's a dog in the background or something, but we can't assume that people know how to mute themselves.

So we go through all the things like muting yourselves. I make a joke about in the top right-hand corner, there's three dots and that's how you change your name. Um, and then we make a joke about someone changes their name to something inappropriate. And then we have to deal with that. Right. So, um, just those little guidelines, we talk about wearing earbuds, if you're having trouble hearing, um, switching to gallery view versus speaker view, just a little bit of a kind of intro to zoom to, because you said it, Jeff, technology is cold. And for a lot of people that are hopping on for the first time, this can feel like a really big step. So we say at our church, it's a big step for you to step into somebody's living room for the first time in a small group environment.

Let's think of it the same way. It is a big deal for someone who may not have experience with a digital small group or a zoom program environment to step in for the first time. So how can we break down the barriers to help people feel comfortable in that zoom environment? What else, Janie? What, what else am I missing? You know, it's interesting. We've learned lately that the mute button is important when one person is speaking, um, unmuting is just as important in smaller group environments. Even if you don't have something to say when you have a small group of people by having the unmute button. By unmuting you are communicating they're engaged in the conversation. And so I would encourage facilitators to say, you know, now we're going to have some conversation time.

Everybody unmute. So if you have something to say, you can quickly add to the conversation. Also decide in advance what you want to do with chat. Some people really like chat for everyone because you can, um, have sidebar conversations. Some people get distracted by that. So I recommend you decide at the beginning, whether you want to use chat or not. And then also for people who are presenting, um, talk to the people who are helping you, um, especially when you're presenting to a really large group, um, of how you want to be communicated to. So, um, in our all staff meetings, we have 57 people. So we have like four pages of the zoom screens. And a lot of times Greg will be being the presenter and I'll know that there are things that I need to help him think through or something to add to his conversation.

And we've decided that using text for him is better than chat because he can have his phone and know that if I'm going to text him, it's something he needs to pay attention to for kind of a, a stage director tip as opposed to the chat. So, um, if you are a facilitator of zoom or a speaker, be thinking through what you need because it's a little different environment and you feel a little bit more on, especially if it's being recorded, you feel like it's going to go down in history. Heidi, your team does a really good job of assigning roles to people. Um, you go to your learning communities and stuff. So talk through kind of the roles you assign. Yeah. So we always have a host for the zoom room.

So if we're having a learning environment where there's a speaker, we will also have a separate host. And so that person runs PowerPoint, that person facilitates the chat window. She also opens and closes. And there is nothing more frustrating that if you are in an hour long meeting and it's an hour, you're at an hour and 10 and no one will land the plane. Um, it is our host responsibility to land the plane. Um, we have to be able to value people's time and let them know, let them know when the end is. Um, one of my favorite things, both presenting in the classroom or on a virtual environment is you want to tell people what you're going to say. You want to tell them, and then you want to tell them what you told them, and then you want to land the plane.

So it's zoom environments can be really, you have to be on your a game and press in presenting, or you will let sort of the, um, ambiguity run wild. And you really want to be clear with expectations and what you're doing in the virtual world, because you value your people and their time. Two other things we've learned, um, when you're going really long for several days, you, um, need, or several hours, you need to have long breaks. Um, we are getting ready to do our assessment for the first time virtually. So it's going to be really cool to have three, four days of assessing new church planters next week. Um, but we know that we have to take much longer breaks in between because your limited space in virtual world, uh, requires your body to move a little bit more.

And then we're really, um, diving more into fidgetal, P-H-Y-G-I-T-A-L, and trying to think what are the things that we can get into people's hands or that they can bring to the meeting, um, that have physical components that bring us all together. So having communion together and worship services for our retreats, we actually send packages in advance so that people have physical components like a journal to write in or snacks or a coffee mug, or, uh, we'd like to do confetti for celebrating church plants. So thinking through what are physical things you can set up in advance so that it is, um, all the senses are involved in the experience together. Yeah, so I loved everything you just said. And I want to apologize for the dogs barking and the kids just ran down the hallway.

It is reality. I saw both kids and they had a laundry basket on their head together, like cuddled up and just like walking down the halls and all the dogs barking. And so like, welcome to the new reality, right? This is everything that we just talked about literally happening here at the house during this recording. Hey, this is excellent. And, and, and I want to, cause you're talking about this fidgetal and you're talking about this three to four day retreat. This was actually scheduled to be in, in Asheville, North Carolina. I mean, somewhere in North Carolina, Raleigh, I'm sorry, Raleigh, North Carolina. And like, I was supposed to go to this thing and now I'm not going to the thing and the meeting is entirely three to four days virtual.

I know you guys have had track record with this. And honestly, I've not even heard the entire story. I've heard bits and pieces of it, but centered around the, the, the staff gatherings where we used to do retreats together. And then we looked like at the cost of it and maybe it's better to do it virtual. So, you know, I would love for, for actually, you know, Heidi, I think you were out for some of that. I would love for both of you maybe to just tell some of that story of the decision to go to a virtual all staff meeting. And then like the learnings that came out of what a virtual multiple day all staff retreat looks like. I love how emergencies create quick and creative thinking. And so last year, Stadia had made this crazy decision to give away all of our church planting services.

And so that was amazing because we could serve a lot more churches. But in that we had to do some quick shifting of some financial resources so that that could take place. And so one big place that we saw where we could save a significant amount of money was to shift our physical, all staff, 57 people together in person retreat to a virtual retreat. And we have some super creative minds in our, in our staff. And so we brainstormed on how can we pull that off. So we ended up having a two day retreat. It was all of us online in Zoom and it ended up being reviewed as our best retreat ever for a lot of different reasons. And I was really excited what our team pulled off. But what we did was we looked at the agenda and we said, what are the large group gatherings that we need to have?

And those were inspirational and informational teaching from Greg, from our president. What is celebration of our vision values and celebrating the number of church plants? And that's where the confetti took place and the party horns and all that stuff. And then what are things that we need to break down into small group environments? We know that in four screens of 20 something people per screen, you're going to lose people and people aren't going to pay attention after certain amounts of time. So we broke into small groups to where everybody's on the screen. Everybody's accountable to be looking and paying attention. And our global team did a Kahoot game show and had some great trivia questions on global learning.

Our U.S. church planters invited other, or our U.S. church planting team invited church planters in to interview and to talk about what is Stadia done to come alongside them. And then we had Mindy come in and do some soul care teaching with us and had some small group prayer time and just some really powerful connection with our team of being vulnerable and helping each other in some really tough stuff. So I loved the innovation of it. It required us to be very intentional, take long breaks, have a lot of variety. And what I really love about the fact that we did it virtual instead of physical was we could bring in people that we wouldn't have had access to in a physical environment. So Mindy probably wouldn't have been able to join us if we had done this physically or that many church planters couldn't have joined us.

But we were able to bring them in because it was so easy to just do it and give them a time and a Zoom room. And it happened great. Heidi, what was your experience as a participant that you would add to that? I just appreciated the level of care for every step of the retreat. So from the fidgetal packages that we got prior to, to just the communication leading up to the retreat about what was going to be needed from us during those retreat windows. And then the pieces of soul care and team connection just really were very, there's just a lot of care taken in the schedule. And, and I do a lot of travel for work and there is something nice about being able to do a digital retreat and not have to handle what's going to happen with my people at home in an overnight situation.

And so I think it does provide more accessibility for our folks that have needs at home. And so I love that we were able to provide a fantastic experience for those colleagues as well. I was surprised at how grateful everybody was to sleep in their own bed. Like I didn't even think about the benefit of that, but everybody get a really great night's sleep. And our second day was super, we did miss out on the social hangout time. So you have to think through that, like, what are the places that you need to add in, just hang out. You know, I've heard a lot of friends lately having coffee time together or happy hour or whatever is their appropriate thing in this time where we can't be together. So that is one thing that you miss, just the organic socializing that happens.

But beyond that, it ended up being a very successful gathering to where Greg is convening our advisory team in a few weeks. And he's going by the exact same model because it was such a success. So this will kind of become more of a norm for us than not. Yeah, I mean, that's a huge money saver. And in post-2020 coronavirus, or even in the midst of 2020 coronavirus, I could see more and more churches, you know, embracing this idea. Hey, why don't we do a marriage retreat? Why don't we do this? Why don't we work on these things? I mean, right now, the church is just trying to figure out how to broadcast a service. Well, there's more to church than just broadcasting a service. And yeah, once we get that figured out here, you know, this weekend or in the coming week, maybe at some point we got that figured out.

We got to do the next thing, you know, and the next thing and move small groups online, figure out how to discipleship online. And I think trying to create community via retreats or things like that, the way that you guys have done it here with Stadia, the way that we have done it here with Stadia would be phenomenal. So take some lessons from here. I think this is a definite place to get started in this conversation as you and your church start to explore that. For the life of me, I have been on Zoom trying to figure out what the Zoom's website, trying to figure out which level has that breakout. I can't find it. So I can tell you it's not the $15 version, but I'm pretty sure it's either the pro or the enterprise, which typically gets around $19 to $20 a month for that.

And there's pros and cons on it. I've used it. But, you know, I can even tell you with the church that I work at, Christ's Journey, we do a 9 a.m. huddle. It's just post-coronavirus in the season we are now, completely virtual. At 9 a.m. every morning, it's an all-staff meeting. We gather together. We meet. And then there is the option for us to break up by departments afterwards. So sometimes, as a church, we break up by campus. We're multi-site. So sometimes we break up and we meet by campuses. Sometimes we break up and we meet by, you know, departments. Worship meets together. Production. Weekend. You know, the different groups, operations, leadership. But the idea is we start the day together at 9 a.m.

You know, using the technology to engage, to lead people is awesome. And you guys with Stadia, we've been doing a great job of setting that standard, as I can tell. And I'm looking forward to being alongside as we're helping more churches here in this coronavirus season. And by the way, like we just, as we're landing the plane, stadiachurchplanning.org slash coronavirus resources, that's a lot. But that's where really we've been assimilating the breadth of knowledge of what's happening here in the coronavirus. Through the Church Digital, we're providing resources and the webinars are listed there and even more things that are coming in the weeks and months ahead. So feel free to, you know, check that resource out.

And as we are learning through Stadia, so we want you guys to learn at the church level and even at the individual level with that. Well, ladies, this has been an incredible podcast. Thank you for the time. I know it's coronavirus season and things are crazy. But just as we're landing the plane here, any closing thoughts? Heidi, you know, as we're landing, what are you thinking? Yeah, I think one thing that I haven't said is just because we're online doesn't give us permission to sacrifice professionalism. You can still be professional and get your work done and have it together and still be really great at your job. And you can still be professional and have a really great time. Like, I am a big fan of throwing some Easter eggs in PowerPoint just to make sure people are paying attention.

And I think in this season where things feel a little bit heavy, being professional but also adding fun into your virtual work environment can really lighten the load a little bit. So that's my last piece of encouragement to folks. As they're online, make sure you're adding a little fun into your day as well. We could definitely use some more fun. That's awesome. I could definitely use some more fun. All right, Janie, as we're landing the plane, any thoughts on your end? I would say that Stadia is absolutely passionate about serving the church. And that's not just as an organization. And so please reach out to us individually with any questions, any ways that we can come alongside and help you.

I have been so honored to help probably a dozen of my church leader friends in the past week of just coming on Zoom with them and showing them what the options are and talking through a lot of this stuff. And we are wanting to do this as much as possible. So reach out to us. Lean into the resources that Jeff talked about. Tell us what you're learning. Because one of the biggest things that Stadia has the opportunity to do is to have access to so many smart leaders. And we want to curate that knowledge and be able to share it as much as possible with other people. So if you've got something good to share, send it our way so we can share it with other people and help just reach more people with the hope of Jesus in this crazy time when hope is distant for those who don't know the truth of Jesus Christ.

Amen to that. So we'll include contact information in the show notes for both Heidi and Janie. And this has been a great podcast and something, church, as we're moving forward in coronavirus season. Be thinking about these things because the ability to manage and lead employees, people, the ability to keep people on mission is going to be so important as this coronavirus season stretches out into hopefully just weeks, but even potentially months. So learn some lessons from these and prayerfully we'll be considering, we'll be looking forward to what's ahead. So this has been great for Heidi, for Janie. This is Jeff with the Church Digital. Thanks for jumping on with us for this time. And we'll see you next time at the Church Digital Podcast.

You have a good day.