EP059: Ben Stapley & Church Communication During Coronavirus

Episode 59 of the Church Digital Podcast powered by Stadia Church Planning. I love that Stadia has got some awesome stuff coming out in the next several weeks that is going to help you church leader understand how to do church online better. Now I'm not talking about broadcast. Broadcast is the front door to something far greater, something far more interesting towards the future of the church. And so all I'm asking you to do, listening audience out there, is stay tuned. We got some awesome things that we're gonna be announcing here in the next week or so, and you are gonna want to be a part of it. So keep your ears open, be checking your mobile phones a lot, because we're gonna get the info coming to you real quick.

All right, so here with episode 59, we are talking with a good friend of mine, Ben Stapley. Now Ben is the weekend experience director at Christ Fellowship Miami. He oversees everything from worship to production to creative communications to online to guest services. Basically manages everything from the streets to the seats to the screens. You would think he would figure out a better way to have them all rhyme together, but you know, he sees really has been a busy guy.

So part of the conversation that we want to dive in here is, what are we as a church, what are we communicating in this season? How do we communicate in this season? And who are we really communicating to? You see, somewhere along the past couple weeks, in case you didn't notice, and I'm pretty sure you noticed, the rules changed on us. Everything, everything changed on us. And as a result of that, all the playbooks, all the strategy books, all the plans that we had worked so hard to develop got thrown out the window. It's kind of interesting. You want to make God laugh? Make plans. Well, you know, God brought this coronavirus in. I hate to tell you, he was aware of it, and nothing's surprising him in this season. And as a result of it, we the church are scrambling to try to figure out how to adjust and how to plan for what's next.

And really, that's what Ben addresses so well in this podcast, helping us, helping the church figure out a plan, how to strategize, how to revisit what's important in our communication process. So this isn't as much church online as maybe some other things, and we danced around some church online stuff, danced around some social media things, but all in all, it's a great conversation that I think is good for leadership to hear right now, wrestling with how to help the church strategize and plan for what's next.

So I'm bringing in obviously Ben Stapley, weekend experience director at Christ Fellowship Miami, the guest host, or co-host I should say, Ray the Armas from Christ Fellowship Miami, who actually works for Ben as the digital pastor, which is an interesting dynamic in this podcast, and myself, Jeff, at the Church Digital, in a conversation that I'm calling Church Communications During Coronavirus.

Okay, everybody, here you go.

Yeah, so I'll give a quick synopsis of what I do, what I did, and then how I've had to pivot since then. So I serve on the executive team at Christ Fellowship Miami, oversee the worship, production, online, and creative departments, guest services as well. Don't want to forget about them. And so that was my role beforehand, basically making sure that we got a great experience going from the streets to the seats to the screens. Since then, really quickly, we've eliminated that first right, from the first two things. From the streets, no guest services to the seats, we don't have auditoriums in which we're putting on experiences. To the screens, we now, it's now it's all just screens. So I'm basically taking like, you know, my whole workweek, a third, a third, a third of oversight, a third, a third, a third, and we've pushed everyone into that last third. How do we make this great experience exclusively online for our screens, disregarding the seats and the streets? So that's how things have radically changed in the last two weeks.

Yeah, and I know during this season, you know, I hear lots of times talking with churches about how, man, they don't even know what to communicate. Like, let's just even talk about, okay, so right now you have whole departments of church that were previously basing their success on getting people parked, getting them through guest services, getting them in the room, in the audience, on stage, and all of that is essentially gone. Like, that is completely ineffective. And the government is basically saying you're not allowed to gather. I just got a text from somebody telling me that there was some church somewhere where they were still meeting in Louisiana. They got shut down because they're not even allowed to do that, and 1,800 people were potentially exposed because there was an issue of blah, blah, blah. So like, there's a reason why we're not allowed to gather, why the government doesn't want us to gather, why we are not going to gather in this season. But now we're learning how to utilize the screen side of this better. And that's really what I kind of wanted to focus in here on the podcast with you, because when it comes to communication and how you communicate, you are so, so good at this. And you know, honestly, you know, I just even sit back from afar, just watching it, it's like, dang, Ben really knows what he's doing here. And so thanks for jumping on the podcast and with Ray, really just wanted to talk about what communication, what church communication looks like, how does the church find its voice in the midst of this coronavirus? Just initially, what thoughts do you have on that?

Two things. First of all, identify your audiences. So you have two main audiences, right now you have your congregation. Actually, we really have three. Man, once you start thinking about it, I'll start with concentric circles here. You have your staff, you have your congregation, and then you have your larger community. So those are the three circles that you need to think through. I'd say majority of churches are doing a great job on that middle one. They're thinking about how to communicate to their congregation. They're forgiving, but that inner one, how to communicate to their staff. We need to be super nimble during this time, and sometimes the staff is getting the last news and hearing about a new plan being executed. They're finding out on social media. They're not finding out through official communication channels. So don't forget about that inner circle of the staff. And then that outer circle of the community.

So in the past, we knew that there would be some non-believers and people who are far from Christ in our auditoriums listening to our message. That has radically changed. Now the whole world is outside looking at us. We've gone to the outside. We're no longer saying come to us. We've gone to them with our experiences. We are on all the platforms, and we're encouraging our people to share it. And because of that, your communication needs to look radically different because you have that much larger audience. We always had it. First of all, let's be honest, we're just more aware of it, and the impact is much larger, and there's ramifications top-down in terms of how we communicate and think of them, and dare I say even prioritize them higher than our congregation. The outsider before the insider. That reality was always with us. It's just being ramped up to eleven at this point. So that's the first thing: your audiences.

And then in terms of some basic communication best practices, three things: over-communicate, cluster communicate, and deadlines communicate. So over-communicate. We've kind of hit on this, right? Stat wall, I'll call it out here at Christ Fellowship Miami. We are still playing catch-up with staff. They're still saying, how do I get current news on a timely matter through what avenues? We are in such scramble mode that we haven't nailed that yet. Two weeks in, we haven't nailed that yet. So you need to over-communicate. You need to cluster your communication at this point. People are being bombarded, and not just from you as a church, but from their school, from the government, official. They're getting multiple communications from different forms. And so as best as you can do is cluster communicate. Just ramp it up to your people. You're gonna keep their attention because if you're giving them an update every hour on the hour, or even every day, that's probably a little too much, and they're gonna tune out. So maybe it's a, hey, you know what? Staff, every Sunday at noon and Wednesday at noon, we're gonna let you know what the plan looks like for this week. And then if you know, on Sunday, and then if it's modified, we're gonna tell you Wednesday. We're gonna cluster our communication so that it's not just, it's not a death by a thousand cuts.

And then the last thing for us is deadlines communicate. So you might not know what your decision is right now. That's fine. But let people know when you will know. A great question for this is, for us, where we are now, what is it, seventeen days before Easter? Yeah, I have an internal clock counting down, and give me a panic. Seventeen days before Easter. We haven't made the call yet. We made the public call yet. But whether or not that's going to be exclusively online, but we've told people that word is gonna go out this coming Monday. So we don't know now, but you will know by this deadline. Over-communicate, cluster, and deadline communication are essential during these new shifting times. That's awesome.

What, so what information, I'm just curious, because you said it like, what information, and today's Friday, March 27. Thank you for the reminder. I need those PSAs. I need that. Yeah, money. And just, well, you know, the podcast recording this will debut sometime later, but it's four days between now and the Monday when you make this declaration. And I'm just curious from a leadership standpoint, what information do you think is going to open up that could swing it one way or another on the Monday? Like, so you don't want to make it today. You're gonna make a deadline decision on Monday. Like, what do you expect to find out that's gonna influence that decision?

Force a couple things. We're trying to wait to the last minute to make that call because the last thing we want to do is, and I'd say we, things have probably changed pretty drastically in the past couple days, but we didn't want to make that call too early and then things clear up and then we have to recommit. And every time you have to recommit, you lose audience. And so for us, let's figure out where the farthest deadline is that we can make that call and still have, I think it's twelve days. Come Monday, twelve days to communicate that we feel is a decent amount of time to get the word out. And so we picked that date about two weeks ago. We're gonna wait till this day to publicly make the call because we still can get it done. But we don't want to make, you know, we're looking two weeks before when this all started to happen. You don't want to make the call now and this appear to be an over-panic. It's not an over-panic. Clear about that at this point. But that was some of the decision-making process. What's the least amount of time that we need? And then let's make the call, Ben.

Yeah, that, sorry, that makes a lot more sense. Just kind of piecing together and seeing the thought process where two weeks earlier you picked a strategic arbitrary day of saying, hey, we're gonna make that decision here, and then you're watching things kind of roll out within that. Well, and at least by picking the strategic day, you then now know, okay, this gives staff time to swing and do what they need to do to be able to still manage it with the execution for Easter.

There's also a fascinating thing here in terms of excitable communication. How do we communicate well as a larger church? So when we reopen the doors, and I love to paint, you know, ask you guys—you guys have talked to more people than I have—how do we do this well as a capital C Church? So in other words, some people are saying, well, you know, as a cynic, if I open my door sooner, I might get a bigger flock. If I'm the only person who's open, from a very cynical perspective, someone could say that. I don't have that perspective. I think that's unwise for a number of factors. And then on the flip side, if I stay close for too long, am I being over cautionary? I think we as a church have an opportunity to say gathering with people in your community who would be most locally affected and say, "Hey guys, let's try it as best as we can. Pick a Sunday, pick a weekend that works for the majority of us, and we can come out as a unified front and saying, 'Hey, church is open May 1st, April 15th,' whatever the date is." As we get closer towards, I think churches have an opportunity to work amongst themselves and to communicate on a unified front, which is fascinating too for us to be unified that way, which we usually don't do that well. Let's be honest.

Yeah, it'll be what church looks like post-coronavirus is gonna be fascinating, and cultures response to even gathering in large areas versus their desire to stay distant and afar and watch from the outside. Economically, what businesses are even functioning? You know, just even hypothesizing, restaurants aren't—I don't think restaurants are gonna be open to the place of having in-dining. I picture businesses like Uber Eats having far more popularity where restaurants basically become kitchens with two or three tables in them, and it's just now getting delivery into the homes and things like that. But I'm kind of an alarmist guy in general, so I know you're a prepper. Yeah, totally. But hey, so like, it's important in this season, and I don't want to digress too far off squirrel, but let's talk about how we're not only communicating, but what are we communicating in this season? Because, you know, like, I've talked to some churches honestly, and they're like, "Jeff, I don't know what to say." I've even had a couple—you know, it's more of a church plant or side—that's like, "Jeff, I don't even—I'm just gonna take two or three months off. We're gonna delay the launch of the church just because I don't know what I can contribute in this season." So for somebody who understands communication as well as you do, Ben Stapley, what do we communicate? What can we, the church, what should we, the church, communicate in this coronavirus season?

Yeah, that's unique to each local ministry, right? Obviously contextualize. What do you feel God's calling you towards? The thing that I feel he's calling me, and calling Christ Fellowship, and the one that, you know, I'm talking three talking points for other churches or words even, is hope, pivot, and merge. So hope—you need to get as much of that from Jesus as you can desperately, because each day has its own unique challenges, and your people, again, looking at those concentric circles—your staff, your community, your congregation in your community—desperately need that during this time. Call it Colin Powell. Well, he had a quote I used to love. I never—never underestimate the power of a positive attitude. And people desperately need that. So come in with hope.

The second thing is pivot. I'm picturing that scene from Friends with a couch. I think we all know it. Pivot, pivot. I think I've heard pivot a lot of times along with "out of an abundance of caution." Those are the two phrases I've heard a lot during this season—pivot. And so churches, make sure to pivot as much as you can. Whatever your game plan was, be willing to throw them out the window and to come back to the drawing board. We've been doing this with our community engagement, all of our programming, kids, students, et cetera. So, you know, we talked to some of our other staff about that, but basically saying, "Let's go back to the drawing board and let's completely pivot from what we've done to what we now need to do."

And then the last communication—like what we should be saying—is to put the identified elephant in the room and to call it out and to be mature about it—is to talk about the merger. The merger needs during this season. Not even during the season coming, see, season now. There are a lot of churches across this nation that are on the financial fence, and then we're on the financial bubble. And this shock to the economy and then the shock to their giving may make them no longer financially viable. Those churches in that circumstance, my encouragement, my counsel, as lovingly as I can say it, is to look around other churches in your area and to start looking for other ones that you admire, that you esteem, that you agree with theologically, and say, "If we had to close our doors—hopefully not, hopefully not—but if we had to, how can the work of God through another church continue to operate on our facilities, at our campus?" And those are conversations that need to be happening now for lead pastors across this nation. And those are conversations that needed to take place now. First of all, if nothing else, other than to reach out to another church and say, "Can you help me? We're really struggling here. You're doing something well. How can you help me?" And then worst case scenario, if doors had to be closed, you know what? I'd love to pass the baton off to you guys for this foreseeable future. These are conversations that are tough, but we need to be mature enough to have them now.

Talking and talking about resourcing, so those are the three words. I'll do a quick shout out for my church as well. We talked about having to potentially help churches down the road with merger opportunities before we even get there. Church, how can you help your local churches do ministry well in this new time? What can you uniquely offer towards them? For us, we have been blessed with a broadcast facility. We have our cameras, we got a stage, we have staff on hand. And so we've publicly put the word out to Miami pastors: "Hey, if you want to do a road trip, even beyond, to come on down to our facilities, use our stage. We have it. It's lots. I think that the Bitly link is 'record your message.' If you go to that, you could schedule a time with us now to record, and we will make our facilities and our staff available for you to get that content if you can't do it yourself." So that's how we have been uniquely blessed and how we are blessing other churches across the nation. You need to be thinking about this: how we can support each other and get us through this time.

That's awesome, and I love the fact that you guys are opening up and the production teams that you guys have are helping to produce messages for others. I've known churches locally here in Miami to have taken advantage of that kind of in this coronavirus season. I want to bounce an idea off you and the merger aspect. I love it. You know, and even just in some of the conversations, and this is all forecasting and hypothetical, and maybe it's this number, maybe it's worse, but you know, I've heard as much as twenty percent. I've heard higher numbers, but twenty percent seems to be the consistent number—twenty percent of churches aren't going to reopen their doors out of this season, especially if it extends on. And so the challenge there's a lot of church planters. I listen to this, and the challenge for church planters to fill in, you know, working with Stadia, the challenge for us to reinforce and to fill in some of those gaps, even at your level, what you're talking about of, "Hey, don't shut down. Consider a merger. Consider something else." Multi-site churches being able to absorb some of that weight as well. I think we're all gonna play different roles in that.

I was actually talking to a small church. I just would love your idea on this, your take on it. It's basically going back to the Life Church Network model where there was a network of churches where content was shared but not necessarily the full merger of that. And this may be a curveball from left field, but I was talking with a small church pastor out in the Midwest, okay? And it's a friend of mine, and he's like, "Jeff, you know what? I really think there's an opportunity for bigger churches to share content, to be able to resource some smaller churches even in this season. Maybe it's not the full discipleship. Maybe it's not the full 'congratulations, you're now a campus of this,' but even if it's just sharing some content to allow the smaller churches to gain a foothold until I can kind of recoup." I'm just curious, kind of your take on something like that. What would that look like? A network of churches connected out of a larger mega multi-site church, something like that?

It's already happening in relation to how Life Church has had, for years, the open resource. I wasn't even aware of this, but they have complete kids programming now available for you to download and plug and play, and you can take as much of it as you want or as little. And so maybe you don't have the bandwidth to create that yourself. Sorry, you just have your kids director appear on the iPhone and say, "Hey, welcome to our experience. We got a great teaching from you today. Let's jump in." And so you can do a mishmash of that. But that content is out there for churches who are looking for it, who say, "I can't do this myself."

And I would—I hear what you're saying, Jeff. I guess I would leave it to the kind of crudely put—I think there's gonna come out of this, and it already had been, some top content creators who are out there, stellar stuff, theologically down the middle, that majority of people feel comfortable using, production level high, plug and play. And so I think that content is there, and I think that will continue to go. I don't know if the vast majority of mid-size churches need to get in that game. I think it's—I think you got experts doing it at the top of their game, and we allow them to do that, and we figure out how we contextualize that in our local congregation. So like, to answer your question, I think there just needs to be like five players in that arena and then to knock it out of the park, and for the rest of us to borrow it as we need to.

Yeah, and there's a humility aspect to that too, right? Because that means that a lot of interests were used to creating their own stuff, it's like, "No, you know what? We're willing to outsource that for the sake of being good at what we're supposed to be good at."

Yeah, yeah. That's it. It's funny. I have friends up in the Meeting House up in Toronto, Ontario, and like, I've encouraged, you know, they've looked at that, and they ultimately had to do it for years—make their own kids content—just because the regional accent is so different. You know, if you're not getting out and about and you're not saying the A's, then hey, as a Canadian, I need to hear that. I need to hear my accent. So they're there. Our uniqueness is there that won't play regionally. Like, if you got a southern accent and that video is trying to play in the Midwest, we're on the west coast, it's not gonna play. So I think there are uniquenesses there that regional churches can play a role in, in terms of creating content.

Let's see, Ben, you do such a great job, and I think you're great at leading us through how to stay on message through multiple platforms, and to me the best way that you do that is...

By leveraging Google Docs with us as a team, to me it's just so practical. It's unique to you. I've never been led by a leader who's done this. So can you kind of break that down for a lot of folks? Because it's a freezing tool that can help. To me, it would just change the way that so many people operate if they would leverage this platform in the way that you have.

Yeah, I don't want to—maybe this is like a lot of your audience already knows this, so I apologize if they don't. But this is great advice, Ray. If there's like one thing on my tombstone, like I would like to see when I die, is like that people lovingly joked with me: if you can't pass it down until you write it down. So like, especially now, living on oral tradition and verbal communication is gonna get degradation very quickly as it gets through the chain of command. So that's why I write down literally everything so I can pass it down. I use Google Docs for this for a couple very basic reasons. If I'm using Word, if it's not an active living document and so people don't see the updates as I give them, kind of no-brainer there. It's cloud-based, so whatever platform you're on, it'll work for you. You don't need to have that piece of software. You just need to have access to the internet, and then you can access it. The other really nice feature about this is the commenting. So I can write out a document, give action steps, and then I can attach people to it in the comments section and assign tasks to them. And then when they're done, they can resolve the task, so we can all see who's doing what and where the progress is. It's a quick and easy project management tool. It's not the best, but there are great project management tools. But if you need to get the process started, it's a great starting point, especially if you haven't got your whole church up on Basecamp or Asana or Trello or whatever project management software you want to use. You can start with this before you get there.

That's super helpful for people moving along. But that's how I see it. But Ray, you're also a user. What have you found to be the benefits? Especially with keeping the message across the board the same, because there are so many different platforms through which to communicate for creatives, right? Whether it's text, or we're doing Instagram posts, or we're doing this—to me, this has been, and to make sure that we all stay on message and that there's not variances of the message—it's as simple as copy and paste. Even to the point where Ben's done such a good job of breaking it out: alright, so here's the main communication, and then we're gonna shrink that down to one hundred forty characters so that it fits within a text, so that it fits within a tweet. So for our communications director, she can come back to this and say, okay, so this is what the email copy looks like. Copy, paste. For our online guy, I can make sure that that's an append comment. Or that our chat hosts are armed with the same communication. For our social media directors, they now have access to that same document so that the same message—there's no variances in date, time, or even just suggestive comments. There's no variances there, because that's where communication, to me, really starts to break down. Everybody's operating in their own space, and then they're all just even a fraction off, and the next thing you know, people are asking questions, and the communication gets convoluted.

Yeah, the other thing helpful for us, right, and Jeff is, once this crisis started, we just created a virus response document, and it had literally, like, you know, the first day we're doing this, and then it was the next week underneath that, and we're now going week to week because the plan has changed so much. So what students was doing last week is not the same as this week. What community engagement is doing now this week is not gonna be the same as next week. And so for us, that's a hub where all of our core staff goes towards and says, what's happening this week? How do I get a quick synopsis? It's all here. We're all up to speed. So if you're in church and you haven't done that yet, write it down so you can pass it down. It's good. And especially for us, and this is me on the practical side, speaking as somebody who works with an underneath, those three concentric circles—I can say that it's helped develop that first one in terms of the staff, making sure that we're all on the same page. Because so often, once again, if we were back in our oral tradition, so much gets lost between, hey, we had a Tuesday meeting and now it's time for Thursday execution. So much gets lost in between there. That if it wasn't written down, you know, the translation would be completely different in terms of the message.

Yeah, so how upset are you gonna be when Christ Fellowship IT says, hey, we're abandoning Google and going to Microsoft?

Could you? Oh, Microsoft? Like, yeah, that would—can you? Yeah, yeah, so busy. Yeah, the cloud-based—oh, I'm gonna convert you. I'm gonna come for you, Jeff.

Oh no, listen, I'm a Google guy through and through. I've been doing it for decades. I actually brought Christ Fellowship to Google, like, in 2003, and like, Stadia being on board with them, they're like, hey, we use Microsoft Office, and I'm like, dear God, no, please. I don't know. Not Word. Now I don't know this stuff, and so I'm having to reprogram. I am so used to the Google stuff. It's crazy. So anyway, I don't think—then maybe I don't give anything. I think I personally might set a building on fire if we went to Office.

Three seconds to cloud, the file ends up getting corrupted, and I'm like, okay, I'm a smart guy. Like, I should be able not to have files automatically get corrupted anytime I try to save it into the cloud. But maybe that's just a Jeff problem, which is cool. It probably is. But let's kind of—I'm digressing. Oh, it's again, squirrel. Let's kind of stay on task here with the podcast and keep rolling, which ironically gets us to the next topic I wanted to hit on, which is this idea of keeping people on mission.

Yeah, and so this is a conversation question that I asked a lot these days: what is the purpose of church in this coronavirus season beyond just the service? It's great. We worked really hard to get the services online. We're doing that. That's awesome. There's got to be something else. Just like any church, any given Sunday, there's more to just a fizzy. Even the physical church ministry before coronavirus, it was more than just that one hour on Sunday. So like, how do we keep, as a church, how do we get, how do we keep our people on mission? And then arguably, even contextualize with that, what is our mission? What's the why? Why are we keeping people on mission? Why is the church on mission?

Yeah, I mean, I'll break it down to the two groups: internally and externally. Sorry, I didn't keep your staff on mission, and then how do you keep your congregation and community on mission? So first of all, again, low-hanging fruit, but if you haven't utilized some of the video-based communication tools out there—like we're using right now, Zoom, Google Hangouts is another great one. It's a free service already embedded in Google Calendar as a default for all of your meetings. Utilize those for a couple reasons. First of all, I can get a little nuance through a text or an email, through the written word. I can get a little more through hearing your voice. I can hear the tone and the emotion behind it. I get a lot more when I see your face, and I see you engaging with me, or I see you disengaging with me. So if you're a church staff and you haven't leveraged videoconferencing yet, do it ASAP, because your staff desperately needs to see the optimism that you, as a lead pastor or executive pastor, have—that we are gonna get through this, Christ is still on the throne. I believe in him. More importantly, not what I believe, he believes in us. He believes that he's empowered us to do this. Your staff need to see that desperately. So leverage these video tools to communicate that to them internally.

And then the next thing internally is keep some type of regular—it's gonna be a new normal, a new rhythm for you guys—but develop a new rhythm. Everybody needs parameters and consistency to flourish. So what is that consistency for your staff? So you may have, you know, five meetings in the course of your week, whatever it was. Maybe it's reduced down to two, or even just one. Stick to that. Stick to that regular pattern where your staff knows you're gonna meet with you, they're gonna hear from you. More importantly, they're gonna see you, and they're gonna know what the game plan is for the upcoming week. That's vital to keep your staff going on.

And then the next thing is, and I'll call this out, I've been bad at this. I've been running and gunning, and I have not given the pastoral support my staff needs. It's all being strategy, it's all being logistics, it's all being execution, and the relational, the spiritual, the pastoral component has fallen to the bottom of my priority list right now. And it's embarrassing to call myself out on it, because we desperately need that. I desperately need that. They desperately need that. So I'll challenge other leaders to give that to their people as well—not just marching orders, but give them the spiritual shepherding they need during this season as well. Myself included.

So that's internally. Then externally, how does the church still be the church? Don't just promote what you are doing. Don't just become an ad agency for the next foreseeable future. This is happening, this is happening, this is happening. Give people avenues in which they can jump in and participate. So don't just give them experiences. Hey, we have another live experience. That's great. I'm not diminishing that. Live experiences are awesome. They're looking for avenues to participate as well, that may be reduced because of the social distancing, but they are still out there. We still can text and call and FaceTime and meet via small groups. There's still plenty of opportunities, ones we have yet to even think of yet as to how to minister in this new reality. Don't just become an experience church at this point. Be an experimental church, that you're trying new things and be ones in which you're still engaging your community. Don't be an experience church. Be experimental.

Tweet that. Wow, no, I listen, I have a running joke on the podcast. If something is really impactful, your visitor, I would consider tattooing that quote in the person's name on my body. And Ben Stapley, you are now tattoo-worthy. Phenomenal. You can't pass it down if you don't write it down. It's on my back. And it's talons. And now that's gonna be tattooed on just my back so you're able to pass it down. As it's real, man, that's like on the cheek. I'm putting them right here on the right cheek. Are you named? Stay right by the teardrops. Good, good stuff. Their brain, any thoughts on that?

Yeah, then you know, and it's funny. I know Ben's being really hard on himself in terms of the pastoral side, but one of the things that he's been really good at in terms of the season, especially with me, is helping me understand how I can democratize some of the things that I'm doing so that I don't become a stopgap. I don't become a lid on the organization. So often, especially in creative communities or whatever else, especially when percentages shift as far as how much we're relying on certain platforms or whatever else, we think, well, if I can't do it, nobody else can. And so Ben has done a good job at helping me brainstorm, okay, so what can I hand off? Or even just—

Challenging me in a good way, not in a threatening way, not in a "hey, you know that we need this done like yesterday" kind of a thing way. But even just thinking through, how can I hand off some of those things so that the organization overall can benefit in this time? Because as a leader, like I can't die on the vine either. And Ben's did a good job of saying, "Well, what resources can we open up?" And even advocating for us in this moment and saying, "Hey, what resources can we open up because our team is working through some extra stuff?" And that's helped us both thrive in this time.

Because granted, every creative or every digital strategist that I've talked to this time, and if you're out there listening and you're probably with us, where it's like you're working 24/7 right now and you're thinking to yourself, like when you're not in front of a computer screen creating new graphics or thinking through stuff, you're probably dreaming about that at this point or thinking through, "Did I send that email? Did I send that text message in the middle of the night?" So right now, if in the least, if in your teams you can help challenge and help think through, "Okay, so some of our staff members aren't necessarily using as much of their time right now. How can I help hand off some of this stuff so that the staff overall can win?" That's benefited me personally. Ben, you've done a great job in championing that. How would you help other creatives to think through, "All right, so challenge your team's thinking through how you can democratize some of your areas as well right now?"

Yeah, I had a conversation with a staff member at Life Church a couple of years ago, and they were talking about how they had to hire graphic designers. They had, you know, kind of a B-level talent and then an A-level talent. And they told me, "Yeah, we're gonna put the B-level talent to work on graphics for the weekend, and then the A-level talent to work on graphics for the week." And my mind was puzzled. I said, "Wait, wait, wait. If the weekend is the most important thing—" False premise, by the way. The weekend is the most important thing. Why are you putting—? And they said, "No, no. Why leverage your best talent for one hour? You leverage them for the other 167."

And my mind was kind of blown. And since then I've been trying to figure out how to move staff from the weekend to the week in terms of those resource allocations during this season. To answer your question, from doing a roundabout here, Ray, to answer your question, we've been looking at as a whole organization, saying we've had some staff members, some campus pastors, we're saying, "I've done as much follow-up as I can with my people. I still have additional time. Well, guess what? I have graphic design in my toolbox. How can I help out?" Or, "I know how to shoot content. How can I help out?" And so we've been finding unique skill sets in our staff that were kind of hidden talents that have come to the surface, and we're reallocating those resources as a staff to make sure that we are getting as many people working towards our exclusively online content only at this point.

So if you haven't done that as a church, I very strongly encourage you to do that. That's one way to change in this new reality. That's really good, and that's not something that I'm hearing from anywhere else is how you're shifting leaders to make sure and allocate things properly for this time. And it's such a crucial time in church history where we don't want to lose that engagement, right? We don't want to lose that week-to-week conversation. And you're also saying right before this time—spoilers—I think this is gonna be the new reality. I don't think this is just for a season. We're gonna ultimately open our doors again, but one of the lessons we need to learn, church, is the resourcing we've put online cannot be a mass exodus of those resources back solely to our physical.

Yeah, I don't think it needs to go back. I don't think it needs to stay where it's at, but we need to find some sweet spot in the middle there because we've learned this lesson. We can create spiritual disciples through digital platforms. Let's not lose this tool in our toolbox as we march forward. Let's continue to use it in a very robust way.

So back then, just kind of thinking through that, what are some of the communication things that you think are gonna hang around from what we're dealing with right now? Because as a church, I feel that we've for sure ramped up the wave of communication. So what do you think is going to hang around right now in terms of even when we exit the season, when the doors open up and we can do, you know, Saturday night, morning services again in person? What do you think is gonna stay as far as what we termed the 167, like communicating during the week?

Yeah, it's a couple things. Simple, again, the video conferencing model. I just know from a work efficiency standpoint, I'm listening to podcasts about this, that like this is gonna be the new normal. One of the things most people hate about the job is their commute. Either they don't like their commute. People have now loved the fact that they've gained back an hour of their day because they don't have to commute. So that is not going away. That is a part of our new reality.

The other thing too, in terms of content, is the live content morsels of content that we provided people, and we've seen continued growth and engagement on that. And then also in terms of the style that we've been talking about, flow offline, right? The style of communication has moved from authority to authenticity because it's easy. When you are in an elevated platform to stand in front of people and to speak at them with an authoritative tone, "Thus saith the Lord," and again, that's not a bad thing, but if it's our only style of communication, it's a bad thing. We've supplemented that with authenticity where we've told people, "I'm struggling. I'm having a hard time during this crisis. I'm trying to manage a staff. I got kids that I'm homeschooling. I got parents that have their health threatened. I know somebody with the disease, or I anticipate someone will die with the disease, and I'm gonna have to bury them in a couple of weeks." I've now shown as a lead pastor a greater degree of authenticity and use. You see how God has worked in me, which will encourage the work of him in your life. That is a beautiful thing, and that is something we cannot give ground on as we reopen our doors, church.

We have yet to really figure it out. It's funny. We just recently published an article from soul care. Mindy Calaguara, she's an executive over at Glue, but she runs a counseling center, has been well published in terms of the psychology and therapy of what's involved. And she's really passionate about pastoral soul care and ministry soul care. And so she's talked a lot about, for us, writing some blogs about the condition of our people, the condition of our audience, our listeners, our members, our attenders, our community. Been using your word, the community around us. And church, we've yet to really even scratch the surface of where this is at.

I've got friends that are burying right now, not as a result of coronavirus, but just in general. They're burying people that have died in the past weeks in situations. How do you grieve in a situation like that? You can't gather together. You can't hug people. How do you grieve a loved one that's now dead? What is this? What is situations like this psychologically doing to us? And we don't know. And which is one of the reasons, you know, like what does it mean to be on mission? How are we as a church functioning here? And Ben, to what you just said, you know, I can guarantee you one thing. I don't know what the answer is, but I guarantee it's not, "Hey, let's just keep doing status quo." Yeah, because status quo took us pre-coronavirus. That's gonna completely be ineffective during and arguably afterwards because I think culture is gonna shift as a result of this in big ways. And the church addressing more of this, experimenting, asking questions, even in the posture of a head side. Somebody tell me this, and this wasn't even in context of coronavirus, but it's better to ask questions and make statements. And in this season, the more that we can engage, the more that we can listen to people, learn where people are at, that's really the power of the Internet.

It's not a one-way communication. Billy Graham did broadcast a message to a billion people back in the 90s. Down set up 37 satellites, translated to multiple languages. That's awesome. The power of the Internet gives us a two-way conversation with an individual. And so the ability for us to engage and listen to people as individuals and do ministry to them, that's the future of that. And what you're talking about and how we're connecting with the community, engaging and listening to them at that individual level, that is awesome.

So hey, man, Ben, right, man. Thanks for jumping on this podcast. I've said this many times. You know, Ben coming down at Christ Fellowship Miami, a church that's near and dear to my heart, watching how he's led and functions within that church and the world, the difference he's making within the staff and just the overall direction of the church. I don't know that I would want another person to have the job that he has. And watching him lead at the capacity that he does, it's been awesome. It's been invigorating. Let's call that out as well. This, we've had a chance. We've had a chance to take the rulebook and the playbook out and hopefully throw it out the window, right? You know, and it's exhausting. I'll call that out. It's exhausting. But this is exhilarating. This is exhilarating times to be a part of the church. I have not seen the opportunity for us where we've been forced to rethink how we do everything. Phenomenal time to be alive. I love it.

Awesome. You know, I, you know, it's exhilarating is a better word. I was saying, man, this is fun. But then like, people are dying. And then it's like, "Word? Because they're saying the fun word?" Exhilarating. I think it's a good word. I'm gonna copy that. Yes. Awesome. And so I'm gonna learn how to say it with a Canadian accent, maybe while eating some Canadian bacon, and that'll just give me the full Ben Stapley experience. So don't stereotype my people.

So hey, Ray, as we're landing the plane, any closing thoughts?

Yeah, you know, so much of what Ben said is right about having to throw out the playbook. And if you've got to rewrite a new playbook right now, I would encourage you to do the things that he said at the beginning: to make sure and over-communicate, to cluster communicate, and then what was the last one? But I wanted to make sure into the wording, right? Deadlines. Communicate deadlines. Communicate. That's been so important for us as an organization. But not just that. This isn't like a now thing. Like what Ben was saying, that's moving forward in terms of making sure that your congregation stays informed. You know, Christ Fellowship, you know, we're 7,000 some odd people in a service on the weekend, you know, before all this hit. And then we were reaching much more online, like many of your churches are right now. But the big thing is, do they understand? Do they know? And your staff members have a clear understanding. Your staff members, like the congregation, they're good. They're a wonderful litmus test. But if your staff can't articulate to you what your current communication is, if they can't repeat it back.

To you then something is wrong, something is missing. And those three things are key. They've been key for us, and I hope they're key for you moving forward. Awesome. Well, well said. There been any closing thoughts just relating the plane? One last question, Ray and Jeff. Is it four or five because I know it's not six? Is it four or five hours of sleep that you've been getting each night? Again, I know it's not six. Is it good hours or is it four hours or is it five hours? But as I know it's not six, how many hours of sleep have you been getting on average each night?

Four or five. Since I started watching Tiger King, my concerns have grown, so it's maybe about four. Knowing that there are people like that in Miami-Dade County in my backyard, it's maybe three and a half. That's awesome. You know what, I'm gonna give two. I'm gonna just give true testimony right here. I'm six. I have it. It was for a stretch it was three. Um, and I hit and just, you know, I'll call it out. I hit a wall. I don't know about a week ago today from the recording, so probably like somewhere around March 20th. And it was like, okay, I can't keep doing this. You know, my family's like, Jeff, you can't keep doing this. My dog's looking at me with "why don't you love me anymore" eyes, just because I was the guy stuck in front of a laptop or on a phone or staring at a web camera, right? You know, so much. And so I kind of paused enough to, and been, this is kind of giving some credence to your to your some of your earlier stuff, but I brought some Stadia team around me, some of the guys that work regionally, and was okay, this is this is what I do. These are the questions that you should be asking. This is some resources. Here's some online things. And they started on their own reading blogs, listening to podcasts, starting to understand more of the church online and what was phenomenal for me coming out of that was instead of me being the only guy within the entire organization that was passionate about church online, all of a sudden I had like very intelligent men kind of running around working with churches talking church online. They don't know that they understand all the philosophical stuff, but dude, they can throw down and get dirty and answer some of the basic questions at the level they are now. And that enabled me to kind of step back. I still get, even in the context of like random phone calls and things, and we'll talk about it later. I just got a text from a guy I haven't talked to in a decade. And he's like, Jeff, I'm desperate. I need to talk to you ASAP. And so like, some of that still coming, that's great. And there's plenty. There's always gonna be opportunities to do things. But I mean, here's so there's a season where you gotta burn it. Even in my own life and Christmas season, I mean, I'll call it out. There were years where I worked 96, 98, 100, 102 hours a week leading into like the Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday work as a production guy. Totally not healthy. Totally not the right thing. Sometimes you just gotta got to play it. But in seasons like this where you've got staff who may not, I think been, you use the word like job descriptions are out the window or they're destroyed or they're invalid because at this point nothing that we do is what it was when we created these things. Um, take the time. And this is this is my lesson. Take the time to have the conversation with the person who has no clue what they're doing and train them because oftentimes it's better that you at least have a compadre, a friend along the ride. At best, another representative. Now allows to multiply what you're doing across two and three. There's that old adage, right? You can have control or you can have growth, but you can't have both. And this is an opportunity, especially people who are overseeing creatives and digital assets, release control to have greater growth.

Yep. And even then, a helpful tool for me that's worked out well, that's once again, I mean, this was a lot of Ben's leadership, was writing manuals on Google Docs and then sharing them. It's something as simple as that. Even from everything from here's where to upload video, here's our style guide, you know, and handing a lot of that off, you know, lovingly, like walking people through the doc, but handing a lot of that off this way and then going back and refining the manuals in case anything wasn't clear. These are good things that if you've got all the knowledge over your ministry, then your lid, your a lid. Like there's no other way to say it. You're a lid on what else can happen. And especially in this era, and so it's important as much as possible to write it down so you can pass it again, right?

Done. Thank you. Tattoo that, Jeff. I know I'm more interested in the control grow. I say that all the time. Somebody else told it to me. Their name is a man. Crank it. It's like he's got like four or five credits on my back. Sober. So I might have to give it to somebody else. Someone else told me the quote, so I'm gonna give them credit. And it wasn't Ben Stapley, but I love the fact that Ben said it.

Hey, so we're gonna land a plane. This has been awesome. I mean, I love spending time with these guys, Ben. It's and I know Ben, you are using your online platforms as well to help communicate and help churches out there. So if somebody wanted to keep up with what you're doing, how do they find you?

Yeah, go to BenStapley.info. You can find information there about me or follow me on social media. I'm on all the platforms, I think, at this point.

Yep. Subscribe to my man's YouTube channel. Look, look for Ben Stapley on YouTube. Let's get him a thousand plus subscribers, you know? Let's get it going. You don't even give that endorsement for me. I'm gonna try and embrace this across the board. I'm trying to get this multi-platform thing down, and I want people to engage this podcast. That's the thing that I push the most. But when it, but but here's the big thing. And then is trying, like he's done a good job of moving his content over there. A lot of that content, it needs to be visual, specifically because of the hosting moments. I think that's where, especially for those of you who are listening to us to do a lot of church online and you're not production oriented like me, you will learn a lot from how to everything from engage the camera to how to make sure that there's enough distance between you and your co-host. There's so many practical nuggets in there that you need to unearth. And there's a lot of short videos in there that you can take. You can binge watch a bunch of them and then even send them to other people for instruction manuals. So make sure and leverage that.

I'm glad you said that. In 30 seconds, Ben, fastest question you've ever answered in your life. Stadia asked me to ask you this question, and I failed too. How long should a sermon be online?

18 minutes.

10 top 8, 18 minutes? A piano? That's what you're going with?

I'll say this also, this caveat. TED Talks are designed to hit the head. Our sermons are devotionals or teachings should hit the head, heart, and hands. Gave you something to think about, make you feel, and an action step. Head, heart, and hands. So I say 80. I'd say about 25 all in to accomplish those two things. But for me as being the sweet spot. And let me tell you, Jeff, our teaching team actually received the coaching and adapted to it. Or if our lead communicator, you know, our former lead communicator is now he's still a member of our teaching team, he went from typical 45-minute message. He went down to 24 and a half last week.

Wow.

I mean, he did it. He took the coaching. I'm telling you, pastors, you can do this. You can like there's there's like 40 years of training that you've undone, kind of retaught to it. So you know, if I was wearing a hat or verbally, if you're watching this on YouTube, you know, I'm not wearing one. Thank you, Ray. Hats off. Well done.

Thank you, everybody, for that. Hey, this has been a great podcast. If you were not following Ben, followed Ben. He's an awesome resource for you guys. For Ben, for Ray, this is Jeff with the Church Digital. Thanks for jumping on this podcast. We'll see you next time here at the Church Digital Podcast. You have a good day.