EP067: Tyler Sansom & the Relational Approach to Church Online

Episode 67 of the Church Digital Podcast, powered once again by Stadia Church Planting. We've got a great episode. My gosh, I've said "we've got a great episode" 67 times, but really, listen, I love this guy. I'm gonna love this episode and I'm hoping you will too. We're bringing back a good friend of the show, a regular, a frequent guest here on the podcast: Tyler Sansom from First Capital Christian Church up in Corydon, Indiana.

It's funny. Whenever people tell me—I may have said this in the podcast, I don't remember—but like when people ask me, "Hey Jeff, what church is really doing church online well?" You know, they normally expect me to say like the Elevations and the Saddlebacks, you know, some of these larger churches, and those guys are doing a great job. But pound for pound, dollar for dollar, the best church that I know of that's doing church online right now is First Capital Christian Church in Corydon, Indiana. It's crazy. There are under a thousand in attendance. The stuff that they're doing online—quality of production, discipleship process, evangelism, reaching out into the community, micro locations, even this online-to-offline philosophy where they're utilizing online to impact the real world all the way across the board—First Capital's incredible.

And it's funny. I didn't even realize, really, where the core of all of this came from until this podcast. Tyler Sansom said something today that I had never heard any online pastors say before, and now that I've heard it, I am going to tell as many people as possible what I heard in this podcast. So online pastor, digital pastor, church who's kind of thinking about "What should I do in this COVID season?"—what's the secret to all this? Tyler's gonna tell you the formula right here. It's not that it's not a silver bullet, but it's something that's gonna revolutionize the way that you look at online right here in this podcast.

So I'm gonna—we're gonna just get to it. I got myself, Jeff, from Church Digital. Tyler Sansom, First Capital Christian Church. Raid the Armas, who is the digital pastor, goes once again, digital pastor from Christ Fellowship Miami, with an episode that I'm calling "The Relational Approach to Online."

Okay, everybody, here you go. It's been a minute or two since Tyler's been on the podcast. The good boss man, too long. He was like all over the place, and of course, COVID season one week feels like, you know, a decade. So I'm not actually sure the last time he was on, but I think this is like episode five or six with him overall. Definitely love what's happening over at First Capital Church Anywhere. Maybe we—obviously we've got a lot of new podcast listeners since then—so baby, Tyler, just open up a little bit about yourself. Explain a little bit about what Church Anywhere is. Tyler, maybe just introduce yourself a little bit and talk a little bit about who you are and First Capital Church Anywhere.

Sure. My name is Tyler Sansom. I am the engagement pastor at First Capital Christian Church in Corydon, Indiana. We've been doing online ministry for about five years now with the online campus, full-fledged, that kind of deal, and I've been overseeing that for a while. It kind of morphed into more of an online-to-offline model called Church Anywhere. So last year we saw somewhere around seven hundred people per weekend physically gathering to be in microsite locations. I get to train up all the volunteer leaders and campus pastors and all that good stuff for them. I'm married to an awesome wife named Sarah, and we just finalized our adoption to our seventeen-year-old daughter, Leanne, at the end of February.

Congratulations. Yeah, just for kicks, because I know you're not old enough to have a seventeen-year-old daughter, are you? Even thirty? How old are you?

No, I didn't think so. Twenty-seven.

Twenty-seven, so you've adopted a seventeen-year-old. But tell, just thirty seconds, tell the story of that because this is an awesome story.

Yeah, so we actually met her through Church Anywhere. One of the microsite locations is at a youth shelter for kids in the foster care system, and so we met her, fell in love with her. She fostered for over a year, and then we adopted her at the end of February. You know, just talk about living the ministry where you're at. You guys set up a micro location at a youth shelter, built a relationship with a high school student, and ended up adopting her. So that's a great story of just like owning the ministry, you know, love you guys for doing that, and the church for being supportive and reaching out as much.

So you said seven hundred as of last year. It's funny. In the past I've just joked a lot that your micro locations—there always seems to be a new one. Last I heard they were like sixteen. Where do you guys up to then? Like thirty-five?

Kind of. What were you? No, we're eighteen now. Some okay. This is the last time. Awesome.

And so because what I love about First Capital with the Church Anywhere locations is that you put them in—it's not like a home reaching out to the neighbors, or it's not a micro location where somebody's just being lazy and doesn't want to come in and get off the couch in the morning. Not that there's anything wrong with that—that's another podcast—but there's very intentional placement towards these. So like, what type—so obviously we talked about this youth center. What are the places you typically put these micro locations into?

We have our typical like people meeting in homes gathering. That's just not the majority. We're very intentional about missional community and so empowering our people to go out and be the church, which is why we call it Church Anywhere. You can be the church comma anywhere. And so it's very passion-based. There's micro sites in jails and prisons because people are passionate about reaching those people. But there's also homeless micro sites where homeless people will gather and be led by one of our people. There's any—you name it, we have it pretty much. Elementary schools, youth shelters, all that stuff.

Awesome. The—what is it—the Huntington's disease rehab center? By far my favorite story. And go back and listen to the podcast stories from Church Anywhere. We talked to some of the volunteers there. By the way, everybody, I ever talk to you about church online and in satire, I'm going to compliment you this anyway. If somebody says, "Hey Jeff, who's doing church online right?" Usually they want me to say names like Saddleback, like Life Church, like Crossroads, some of these elevations, some of these mega, giga churches that are out there. I will always say First Capital Christian, and it's not necessarily the size of it as much as the fact that what you guys are doing in ministry and how you're enabling people to be on personal mission is so powerful. Like, the fact that you're developing a prison ministry not because you as a church want to develop a prison ministry, but your disciples understand the calling on their life and they're passionate about doing the prison ministry, and then you're resourcing and empowering them to go there—I could literally turn this podcast into a commercial for Church Anywhere. I don't want to do that. I've done that multiple times in the past. You can go back and listen to those podcasts. But it is powerful to see when we look at the church online as a distribution network of the gospel and how you've done that, where you're empowering people online to learn through discipleship, disciple-making, and then releasing them into communities to enact this gospel in the physical world, in the physical realm. It's a beautiful, beautiful thing.

I was actually planning on hanging out with you here in a couple weeks, man. I was supposed to be up in Kansas City like the first week in May, and so I actually had already bought to take a stopover, and I was gonna hang out on a Sunday and actually see it. Well, you know, coronavirus happened, which is a thing. And so yeah, life goes on.

Well, here's what I wanted to talk about. I really want to dive into this. Looking at COVID, looking at this season, talking with churches—obviously we escalated in a hurry. Getting from "Hey, we're not even sure we like this church online stuff"—the average church in America was saying—as opposed to "Oh, now we're all in. We've got to be." We look at Life Church at Church Online Platform. They went from five, six thousand churches to twenty-four thousand overnight. Lifeway's telling us that at this point, sixty-one percent of churches are doing something online or broadcasting some sort of services online, as opposed to pre-COVID it was probably closer to ten. So there's this radical shift of services being broadcast, and on top of just the services, there is all this content that's being generated. While pastors and creative departments are trying to do content regularly, daily, sometimes even multiple times a day. And I love this content, but we're really missing a lot of the community, a lot of the conversation. I wrote a blog earlier about how we were conversation-starved. And so there's this opportunity for us to actually like talk to people, talk to one another, and this is really missing, I think, in where we are today.

And I'm just curious, Tyler. Right, both you guys have been very good with church online, and you're seeing it. But to think that I love is you're also relational in this space. What does it mean to be to engage someone? What does it mean to be relational in context of church online? How do you do this? Something? No, anything?

Yeah, something that I've been challenged with by our leadership at First Capital—probably I think two years ago is when we started this—but they finally wrote me a job description, which anybody who does church online knows that there's no like job description for what we do. Nobody has any idea what we do. And so they wrote me this job description, and one of the things on there was they want me to know one hundred people online. So that really shifted the way that I thought about ministry. So instead of seeking large numbers who are watching, that kind of thing, I shifted more to how do I one, create relationships with people and actually feel like they're my friends, and two, how do I take those friends of mine and move them through next steps in engaging them? So instead of leaving them where they're at—like if I have a friend, I don't want them to stay a baby Christian their whole life. I want to help them become a full follower of Jesus. So if I start viewing these names on a computer as my friends and as people that I'm in a relationship with, I'm more apt to help them follow Jesus better.

I love that, Tyler. I've never heard it in that context of "Hey, know a hundred people and know them like they're my friends," because I mean, you nailed it right there. And that so many people are just focusing on kind of the glamour of church online right now, the sense of "Hey, we're getting IP addresses from different parts of the planet. We're getting all these, you know, views that we've never seen or this kind of stuff that we've never seen before." But actually putting it into the concept of relationships is really key. And it's funny because this whole time we've seen new behavior. We've seen other people talk through how engagement is the new attendance. How have you seen engagement take off at First Capital since you even jumped in the role?

Yeah, well, when we first started about five years ago when we were seeking these numbers, we could see that there were people watching, but it really didn't do anything, okay? It didn't affect our church really whatsoever except this is some cool shiny toy that we can put in the corner and we can talk about it. But it doesn't do anything. When we

Were able to start moving those people into people that gave because they became generous because they started following Jesus. And it was when life change started happening that specifically the part of our congregation and leadership that couldn't figure out why it was important to be online, that's when their mindset shifted. Is when people started becoming better followers of Jesus, when life changes started happening, when multiplication started happening discipleship-wise rather than just watch-our-wise.

Yeah, and that's so truth for us. It was kind of similar in that when I started encouraging people to, "Hey, come to a campus or I'll come to you to baptize you," that created a big shift in mind. When I was bringing back to leadership, "Hey, look, I baptized a couple people this weekend," all of a sudden it woke them up. They were like, "Oh, we thought they were just watching."

Yeah, yeah. You can argue with a lot of stuff. You cannot argue with changed lives.

Nope. That's so true. And it's funny because I kind of put that in the same context of, you know, youth pastors who kind of feel a little bit buried in the system or whatever. It's like, yeah, you feel buried in the system until it's the pastor's kid or until it's the deacon's kid that gets baptized and their life gets changed. All of a sudden that flips the script on everything in terms of the importance of kids, students, and now even church online, right?

Sure does. Now we're seeing a life change actually happen and it's personally affecting those in leadership. You know, Tyler, you've had some radical stories in this season, at least that I'm seeing on social media when it comes to life change in the baptism piece. You got a couple you want to share? Just maybe an overview. What does this look like? Even twenty-twenty, before COVID, during COVID, like what's going on? What's the life of your church look like right now?

Sure. This during this season, I've got one really good story, and it may be my all-time favorite story that's ever happened with the church anywhere. But on Easter, first of all, I got to preach Easter this year because it's online. So like, online people would relate to an online pastor better or something. I don't know, but it happened. And so good, man.

Yeah, so I got to bring this message, and the way that we have a response, we don't use the moments from Church Online platform. We literally have people—it's like an altar call. We have them comment me in the comment section, and our team will personal message them from there. It's a little bit gutsy, but so is walking up in front of somebody during a church service or however you do it. It takes a little bit of boldness to start to follow Jesus. I mean, I'm like, look at when you look at the disciples. He said, "Follow me," and they left their whole life. So that's good. That's a lot. It's a lot easier to comment me than to just up and leave your entire livelihood.

So anyways, we had seven people comment me during one of the services. But one of them, her name was Courtney, and one of our team members—if you're in the Church Online group, you'll see Ty Carter's name pop up quite a bit. He's our volunteer lead of our care team, and he jumped right in and personally messaged her from his account. They got to talking, and he calls me and he's like, "Hey, would you like to do a baptism here in an hour?" I was like, "Heck yeah, let's do this."

So we get to the church. It's just my wife and myself and Courtney. We tried our best to use social distancing with this baptism. She is about twenty minutes from our church where she lives. Had never heard the gospel ever before that morning. Her four-year-old daughter asked her that morning, which was Easter morning, "Who is Jesus?" because she heard about this Jesus guy because it was Easter. And her mom, Courtney, couldn't even tell her who Jesus was. The only church she knew of in the area was First Capitol, so she decided to search us, saw the gospel presented, and that's the power of the gospel right there. It transformed her life in that moment. We baptized her, but the best part of the story is she said, "Well, what's next?"

So we connected her with these next-step classes and things like that, but very simply I just told her, "Here's how it works. Jesus told us to go tell all of our friends about Jesus, about the hope that we found, and that's your job. So your job right now is to go tell your friends." And she said, "Okay, that's great."

Two hours later, I get a phone call from Ty again, and Courtney had led her friend Teresa to the hope that she found in Jesus. Two hours later. And so we're baptizing Teresa here in the next couple of weeks. But I just got best story on Jill's. So amazing. Never heard the gospel, got saved, and literally within two hours, still within the same Sunday, she's out in the physical world engaging, sharing the faith on the same day.

Yes, he called her friend and said, "Like, hey, this is what happened in my life," and the friend wanted a piece of that.

Hmm, so good. Yeah, you know, we talked about this online. The offline theory. The gospel that we hear in the online world has to affect our offline relationships. And in this story, Tyler, what were their names again?

Courtney and Teresa.

Courtney and Teresa are real-life examples of this where they've heard content, and it wasn't just a Netflix, "Hey, let me bend you this show." This is actually a life change that now Courtney is doing this in real life, having this conversation with her friend Teresa there. That is so awesome.

Wait, but you know, Jeff, and this is not necessarily a frustration, but here's what I noticed. So we talked about this, and we're so impressed with that online, and yet we're not so shocked. Why are we not surprised when that happens in a service as well? Because it's basically like the same kind of distribution, right? Like, just because it's not in person doesn't mean it's not the same content that's being heard and not the same life change that's happening. And so I think this is where a lot of us have to shift our perspective in terms of digital avenues for distribution of the same kind of content that's happening on a weekend, right?

I think with that, it's really, really important to remember in this whole conversation the power is not within the venue. The power is within the gospel, period.

It's good. Jesus changes lives, not online, not a building, not a pastor. Jesus changes lives, and the power is living and alive. And if we present it, it doesn't matter how or where they heard it, man.

Yeah, I got an amen right here for you, man. That's exactly right. You know what I'm saying? A cue. We can, you know, if we want to wrap this with an altar call, "Mo taught me in the blank," right now, okay?

That's so true, Tyler. And this is the thing that I'm still kind of in awe of in terms of as we talk about like what's next and what's the few sharing. I feel like folks are running back to gathering really, really quick. When the whole point—I mean, work soon, maybe not the whole point of like what we're learning in this, but a big thing in terms of what we're learning in the midst of the season as the church is that Jesus doesn't need our buildings to transform lives. He doesn't really need our lights and our sound as much as we think he does or as much emphasis as we put on that. And you know, I'm not trying to get anybody lose their job or get fired in terms of down the line. That's not necessarily the point. But I think in terms of having discipleship processes and pathways and having next steps for people is kind of the big thing, right? And so can you talk a little bit more about what's going on at First Capitol as far as that's concerned? Because you know, a lot of folks, I think what was it, Life Church, Jeff said that sixty-one thousand people, you know, made that click there, their next step. You know, that they wanted to receive Christ on Easter weekend. But not a lot of churches have necessarily thought through, "Okay, great, what now?" So how is that being affected over at First Capitol?

Sure. It's a dangerous game to play. It goes back to, are they watching or are they engaged? Even when it comes to salvations, and I don't mean that to sound bad, but if they just click a button that says, "I accepted Christ," I'm so thankful. I praise God that they did that. But on the other hand, what are we doing with them to help them actually follow Jesus? And if we don't have anything for that moment, while it means something, it doesn't mean as much as it could mean.

So for us, what we've been doing, we had a whole strategy laid out of next steps for in the building, but several years ago we had to make that for church anywhere as well. I can run you guys through really fast.

Yeah, go for it.

So I'll use Courtney for an example. So she comments me, gives her life to Christ. Ty is the care team member that contacted her. So Ty's job is to help her to size job is to help her one, schedule a baptism, and to figure out her next step. We have options for that online. We've been doing Rooted for a while. If you guys listen to some of the past podcasts, I go more into detail about that. But we direct people to Rooted or Andy Stanley's Starting Point material. He's got both of those online. A great place to start. Rooted really pushes people to find their purpose, which is what we're all about. We're about empowering people to follow their purpose to start these micro sites.

So those are the first two things. But then Ty is kind of tethered to Courtney now. So his job as a care team member is to contact her three to four times in the next two weeks following her decision to start building an actual relationship, learn about her, become involved in her life so she's not doing it alone at that point. And then after Rooted, we either push people into like a small group or into a microsite because that's how we use that Rooted material.

So that's pretty much our next steps process for someone who would have made that salvation moment.

Yeah, for us it's something similar over at CF. This year we empowered people to actually do baptisms in their homes. We actually provided an instructional video, and we even had some folks respond and upload a video back to us, which we provided a pathway and instructions for that as well. And we actually had some responses, which was awesome to see. And it's almost like Acts 2 is, you know, we've waited for years. The church had prayed for Acts 2, and yes, in the midst of COVID-19, through digital avenues, Acts 2 is kind of happening right? Like, we were hoping for a revival. We got it, just not in a way that we're expecting it to happen. And so we had people baptizing people, which was awesome. We're getting feedback on that. And then in the same way, we've got a foundation small group in which we help transition them to, and then from there we try to transition them into a regular group. And we've also got CF 101, which is our membership class, which has also been taken fully online during this season.

But those processes had to exist beforehand so that we could make them digital, which we had already been in process of doing anyways. And so it's not like we came up with anything new. It's that these things were always in existence. There was always a pathway for them. We were just taking them down that pathway through digital avenues. And so everything you're saying, Tyler, is huge for a lot of churches out there that I think their struggle with the next step is whatever you're doing in physical avenues for pathways, you should be doing it in digital. You should have been doing it already, but you should be doing it especially now.

Yeah, I want to want to pull on a thread a little bit here. Let's back up because even the story of what...

You're telling me I want to see if this is true. If you got a story, what you're telling me of the person who accepted Christ, they watch the service Easter Sunday, the daughter came in, got baptized, immediate action. It's still tied to the Sunday. I'm curious though, but because there's online, those situations do work online. Some of those hands raised when they click or the messages, they're the messages are legit. Some of the hand clicks, I'll be honest, aren't. My daughter has accepted Christ at least three times during this COVID season by accidental clicking, and I have to go tell my church, "Hey, you know those 11? Like two of them were my daughter's. Knock it down a couple." And it's okay, but there's this other part to this, this relational aspect, right? I'm fascinated by this. If it's in your job profile to know 100 people online, so talk to me about that. What does as a pastor knowing a hundred people in a virtual space, what does that even mean? What does that look like?

Yeah, I kind of feel like I'm in like sixth grade again on AOL chat because I mean I don't know how else to do it. I just strike up a conversation like, "Hey man, how you doing?" and then it goes from there. So like my friend Simon from London, he's been watching us for years and I genuinely feel like I'm his friend. We talk about not church stuff. I know that he likes sixties and seventies music and I know that he was watching I Dream of Jeannie and so things like that are how you do it. I don't have like a scientific proven method except be a human being like you would be in person, just use a digital medium to build those relationships. And that carries over to our care team as well, which it goes back to the fact that he's like Ty's gonna contact Courtney three or four times the next couple weeks and it's not all gonna be about, "Hey, did you just sign up for that class?" It's gonna be like, "Hey, tell me about how your kids are doing during this season," and that kind of thing.

We did a podcast recently, maybe probably a week or so ago at this point, with Patrick Holden, and he's a church planter. He has not launched a physical campus yet. Honestly, Patrick doesn't even live in the state where he's trying to plant. He currently lives, I think as I recall, in Michigan, and he's trying to plant in Columbus, Ohio. And so he's gone even more aggressive than what you're talking about where he's just going on Facebook groups of people that are based out of the Columbus, Ohio area and just like meeting people directly through Facebook Messenger where he will send a Facebook message to some random person who doesn't know him. He's got kind of things that he looks for in people that he's wanting to engage with, but utilizes that to filter down, reaches out. He's getting 30 to 40 percent response rate. Using Facebook Messenger as cold calling, 40 percent will at least engage in a conversation with him towards it, and he's building a core team even though he and the rest of his leadership are scattered around the country. And it's building relationships utilizing some of this technology where they're not even face to face with that.

Do you guys feel tension one way or another that you've got to utilize the service? Have you ever considered going with a more direct route with individuals, you know, sort of like the story that we told with Tracy, but having it be more just missionally connecting with people? What have you guys experimented or thought about that?

So I don't think there's an issue as far as like going out and seeking people out. You're right, like there's something very biblical about that. And Jeff, you and I talked about this after the podcast, just you know, one-on-one in terms of, "Hey, he's seeking out the man of peace like in different areas. He's just doing it differently," which if any of us were to go plant or if we were to go out through like the International Mission Board and plant a church in another city, we'd be doing the same thing. We'd be looking for the right people who have the right amount of influence to plug in with them intentionally for the purposes of planting a church locally. And so he's just doing this in a non-traditional route, which I actually admire and I think is awesome.

As far as seeking people out and doing that directly, I think it's great. I actually think that more of us can be a little bit more proactive, self included, in terms of seeking people out and seeking connections from some of the people that we follow on Facebook and some of the people that they're connected with, right? So we'll see a lot of our friends who are involved in, yeah, I'm just gonna go ahead and call this out, you know, as opposed to, you know, they're involved in MLMs and multi-level marketing schemes or in pyramid schemes, and they'll do that, right? They'll do that in order to build a solid contact base with people to go seek them out. But I'm not saying that the church is an MLM because it's not, but if it is about relationship building, if it is about actively doing that with them, we should be leveraging even cold calls on Facebook Messenger to go after it. I mean, shoot, to obtain data, we've got a Facebook group here at Christ Fellowship, and now you ask questions. As far as like in order to allow people to enter into that Facebook group, one of the questions that I added on is, "Would you like to be connected to a small group?" For yes, I get, I message them directly through Facebook Messenger along with a data card with our connection, our online connection card to get them plugged in because it's another lead, it's another opportunity to try and get somebody connected. And so the more opportunities that we can create, whether it's your cold calls or whether it's your ways like that, I'm in favor of. I love that. It's good. I'm gonna steal that idea.

Go for it. It's yours, man. Is that not the truth of church online? It's let's just steal everything we got, you know? Everybody's doing little bits and pieces, right? I don't think everybody really's got the holistic thing put together yet. And so yeah, man, that's part of this is like everybody, let's do that. Let me borrow that. Let me do that. It's awesome.

Well, hey, like, um, it's really interesting in this relational aspect because it's the biggest thing I think that's really missing in this church online piece. And I'm an introvert. I'll be honest, I struggle in the physical realm with some of this relational, and so for me, like my sweet spot is doing this stuff like talking into a webcam. COVID is actually been like a vacation for me. This has been the greatest thing ever. My wife and my kids, they struggle with some of that because they're more outward than I am. But I love seeing ministries that are engaging relationally and meeting people. And I'm gonna tell 50 churches that they need to meet a hundred people like that. That's the goal, to have a hundred friends through church online. That's an incredible standard.

So honestly, I would want to challenge our entire staff with a lot of that with what's going on right now. I mean, considering that we've got paid staff, I mean, if every one of us were accountable for a hundred people, our church would be huge, you know what I'm saying? So that right there already just kind of elevates the standard, which I think is amazing, then that you guys have done over at First Capital.

Let's take it one step further. So who's the name of your pastoral care relationship guy that you mentioned who is following up on the two girls? Ty. The thing that I love about you is there's so many names of people that are involved in these podcasts because these are actual people that you're working with, and it just shows the hugely relational aspect to that. What standard do you hold on Ty?

Ty Sabaki. No, let me understand. Volunteers, not paid, nothing. Like, what standard do you hold on Ty in your church on the relation? And I've mentioned this before in our podcasts previously, but we literally call our campus pastors of the microsites. We call them campus pastors even though they're volunteers. And so I mean, we take them through a training process, but I would hold him to an extremely high standard because we've built that trust together relationally over the years where I know that he loves Jesus and he loves people, so he's gonna do everything he can to love this person to love Jesus better from a relational aspect.

Are you not trying to quantify? I'm just trying to figure out the relationship. Are you putting a number on him? Are you checking in with him regularly on the follow-up? You said he has to connect to the people four times. Like, what is the one-on-one between you and him towards holding him accountable for these things that you're asking him to do?

Sure. So he's the lead over our care team, so I am in a lot of communication with him whereas he's communicating with the rest of the team under him. So I don't necessarily have as much communication with the people under him. I have some, but just not as much as I have with Ty. So I talk to him on a daily basis, and I've talked to every one of the church anywhere leaders on a daily basis, and then they communicate on a daily basis to their team beyond that for generations, including you, right? And in that equation, you, Ty, the team's bending under Ty, and then the teams underneath them all going out, it's at some level holding, building relationships, or do you put a hundred on them, or are these teams just more responsive at that point?

They're more responsive. The online team is in charge of our Facebook group, which is nine people or whatever, and then beyond that they're in charge of caring for any live events, so chatting with people in live events and then follow-up beyond that. Whereas the church anywhere leaders are responsible for the actual physical people that meet in their locations. So for Brad, who Jeff, you talked to once before, my brother, yeah, right? For him, he's responsible for 300 people. So he's built a team of 20 guys underneath them to help care for these 300 people. And so that kind of works like that. So Brad, a volunteer, built a team, recruited, developed, matured, grew a team, discipled a team of 20 people to do ministry to 300 people. 300 criminals, prisoners also. It's awesome. A judge, our areas really blue collar country. A lot of people don't have internet. We talked about that before. So Brad and one of his other leaders, Rodney, they organized a conference call yesterday just to stay in touch with their team, but not like a Zoom call, like a literally you call a number and insert like a pin and then you're in the conference call. So that's things they've done that every week since COVID-19 started. Nothing wrong with that, man. That's good stuff.

Yep. You use the method you got. I love this. And so there's things that I'm learning here in this relational camp: online pastor, through digital, through campus pastor, a hundred people, know people in this, not the usual suspects within the church, but reach outside and really engage relationally with people online. I love this idea of holding standards to volunteers, which, and there's also standards held on you even though the hundred-person aspect as a pastor, that's a hard thing to do even for myself as an online pastor. I'm in my mind thinking, "Can I? Did I know 100? I don't think I really knew 100. I mean, maybe there's more at 50," but that still is a hard thing. And that's aggressive towards it. And so as people are holding you to a standard, hold others towards it, and even at a volunteer level, challenge them because the in Tyler's equation, Tyler is the lid of the organization. If Tyler carried all the weight on his shoulders and didn't go out, I mean, try Tyler, it's not...

Like you got five, ten, twenty-five staff. It's just you historically, right? Like that hasn't changed, right?

Yeah, it's starting to change a little bit, but right now it's okay. Well, eighteen micro locations later and seven hundred people engaging regularly. Micro locations, not including like staff, not including the people who just watched the church online.

Yeah, maybe you need to like start to actually develop a team there. But you're holding standards to that and you're not releasing the volunteers who aren't doing it out of duty to you, Tyler. But they're doing it out of personal mission because they understand what God has called them to do in life. And that's doing what they're called to do: reach the prisoners, reach the Huntington's rehab center, reach out to the youth centers. Like follow the heart. We did a podcast with Larry Wall Kumari, talked about Kingdom mission. It's not to glorify the church. It's to glorify the kingdom. And the church's job is to empower people on Kingdom mission, whether it glorifies or benefits the church or not. And in some of these relationships that you guys are developing, my gut is they probably don't always glorify the church, but it sounds like they always glorify the kingdom. So I love what's happening here.

I will tell you, we've developed a really cool thing during this time period that's super relational. I think it will continue afterwards. But I want to share with you: recon and to gather groups. And it's based around common interests. So mine is we're gonna watch movies. I got there like I love movies. I studied film in college. And so we're gonna watch movies via a Netflix party. So we started signups for these on Sunday. I've got twenty families I'm gonna watch a movie with on Monday night. Somebody else is doing a book club. Somebody's doing a walking thing where they'll walk and hold us phone to zoom with people one of their walking. And so I think we have fourteen of these right now, and we're hoping to empower other people to continue to open up new ones. But that's that emotional piece that's really cool.

You know, it's funny. I just got off the phone a couple hours ago with one of our student guys who was helping oversee students online right now. And we talked about this, but with video games. We talked about having like a Fortnite guy, you know, to help people gather and to stream Twitch together. And having for that for Animal Crossing, we talked about having something for that as those games explode. We talked about, you know, 2K. And they even promoted it in the students broadcast this week like, "Hey, drop your name or tag in the chat. Like we'll add you." That kind of thing. And so I think that's huge that you guys are taking that even further in terms of men. Let's find your interest. Let's get you plugged into community. And let's get you in conversation, which is awesome. And how easy is it to just spend an hour or two watching a movie with twenty families and chatting with them? That's it. Doesn't take a ton of time or organizational skills. We could have done this with Tiger King from the beginning, and right, yeah, no, the world, all of them, all of them would have jumped on it. It would have been amazing. Watching Same Kind of Different as Me. There's like twenty Christian films total on Netflix, so yeah, we're gonna find that. You're just going one by one. I put a poll in our Facebook group and said, "Which one would you rather watch?" So that was number one. I want to be in the McGee and me one. That's what I'm waiting for.

Nobody, nobody listens to the podcast, knows unless you walked into Jeff's Christian bookstore at one point in your life. Nobody knows who McGee is.

Well, I mean, nobody bought McGee and Me from the Christian bookstore. That was probably part of the reason why I'm shut down again. McGee and me and Carmen Suppose. I would have been your sucker, Jeff. That's what would happen.

Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty sure Bezos and Steve Jobs were probably more responsible for my bookstore demise. But no, those were good times.

So we don't want a hundred per se, no? Or get awesome. So this is really, I just even the idea of the Netflix party is utilizing tools that are readily available to connect with people in unique ways, make relationships, have conversations, and then route those into, as appropriate, into a discipleship relationship. What? Like, so your movie people, you're going to connect them to, as appropriate, like what's the next step after the movie group? Where did they go after that?

Anybody that signs up is in a Facebook group with me. And so I mean, you guys have to know how Facebook groups work. I can literally, as the admin, post whatever I want. So I could say, "Hey, this week instead of watching the movie, why don't we just get on the Zoom call and talk about what God is doing in our life?" And if somebody's not a believer in that, then they get an opportunity to hear twenty other people talk about what God's doing in their life, which would hopefully inspire them to want to know more about this Jesus guy.

Yeah, that's very innovative with which is simple tools that we already have available. I mean, Jade Earhart's doing the video game stuff. Dude's got dudes playing video games on Twitch. You know, people are watching like crazy, and he's witnessing and he's training others to just witness and share the gospel while playing video games. And kids are coming to Christ and getting engrained back into his Discord community. And so like, there's things happening there. But I got to tell you, never once did I think, "Oh, that Netflix party feature, that's a great way to like connect with people and eventually share faith." Like that wasn't on my radar.

Was funny. I think Tyler, you actually texted me. This is a game-changer for something like that. And I was like, "Yeah, is it really?" I don't, I don't think it is.

No, I understand. Oh, it is. Because it's because it's this relational aspect. And especially in this world during this COVID season where we're conversation starved and we don't trust physical space, doing something like that in this COVID season is going to be ridiculously successful. A man, connect with it just as an individual person, not even a pastor. Connect with your coworkers in a unique way. Connect with your high school graduating class, the kids you knew from college, those ten people you haven't talked to in a decade. Reconnect with them. "Hey, let's just hang out." And I watched Star, I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation, the first episode last night. It was awful. It was cheesy. It was garbage. And I was live texting a friend of mine during the process to be able to spin that into something.

Yeah, I mean, there's validity to this if we just take advantage of it. My wife is a huge Olympics fan, so she's super bummed, but the Olympics aren't happening. But this Olympic Channel on NBC Sports has been playing these famous Olympic events over the last several weeks nonstop. And last night was her all-time favorite gymnastics event. And two of the gymnasts on the team were live on Instagram talking about it while it was happening. And I was like, "You guys totally stole my idea for this Netflix watch party thing."

Yeah, that's what they were doing. And people were watching it, but it felt like community with the people on the screen. He's really cool. But you know what's funny about that, Tyler? Is like, I've been on NBA Twitter like since 2010. And even with The Last Dance on Sunday, like with the new Jordan documentary, I jumped on Twitter to have a second screen open just for this experience. And I was not disappointed. And it's funny because here we are, we're interacting. We're all watching the same thing at the same time, which proves Michael Jordan's greatness that he's making us watch commercials in 2020 together. But at the same time, we're engaged in community through Twitter. Like we're in the same conversation as if we're in the same room, just over and over and over again. And so you're a hundred percent right. We can leverage these things for the sake of relationship, even with people that we've never met.

Yep, I love this. And there was so much other stuff I wanted to talk about in this podcast, but we hung out right here in this relational piece. And in it, it's not the podcast we need to hear tomorrow, but this is definitely the podcast we wanted to hear today, man. I wanted to get into digital church planning. I want to talk about micro locations. I wanted to talk about, you know, how to pivot in this season. And unfortunately, I'm, well, we're just out of time for this one.

Actually, I'm out of time. I've got something else I got to jump into. Ray, closing thoughts? Anything as we're landing the plane here?

Yeah, if you're struggling through, "Hey, we got a lot of views, but we don't have a whole lot of movement," part of the question that you have to ask yourself is, "What is the next step that you're pushing people towards? And is it easy? Is it accessible for them? And is it something that they're going to take?" You know, Tyler and his church, they've done such a great job of honing in on those next steps that they're reaping the benefits right now. Same things happen here at CF, and we're grateful for it. But a lot of it is just keeping it simple and keeping it clearly communicated. And so even as you're planning the service, like, hey, it's great to play in the worship. It's great to plan the message. It's awesome to have you say, "Oh, that's nice." But where are you taking people? And that should be true even when you go back into physical spaces.

Yeah, once you get that next steps process solidified, your discipleship process, whatever it is, I mean, that minimum what you're doing at the physical, do it online. Once that's set up, you'll find your church online service is far more effective at getting people routed into a relationship. You'll find, and some of the things that Tyler's talking about now of expanding into new communities and utilizing Netflix as it can as a digital community tool, like I never thought of it, but you have that opportunity too because you've got your discipleship process set. You can do crazy things like video games and Netflix and all of this stuff, and then just route those relationships into your digital discipleship process to get them to a place where they understand personal mission. And so that next steps process is so powerful. But all those things, I'm assuming Tyler, all those things correct, are funnels to get them back into that same process, right? So it's not like, you know, kind of bring it back to a sports analogy. It's all about the fundamentals, right? Like you got to bring it back to the fundamentals. Like, hey, it's great to do a three-sixty dunk, but if you can't do a layup, it's for what?

Yeah, yeah, it's all one pathway with a bunch of different arms that are leaning into this different pathway. Tyler, man, this has been awesome. Any thoughts from you as we land the plane, or just, this is something that everybody that's gonna be watching this knows already, but it's worth saying again. Jesus didn't tell us to go out and make the biggest church we could make or have the biggest amount of people watch us on Facebook. He said, "Go out and make disciples." And I think in this process of church online or just ministry in general, our competitive nature can take over and we get lost in what is the main thing. So if you're making disciples and you're going out and intentionally building these relationships to help people follow Jesus or find Jesus, then numbers will take care of themselves. The growth is driven from the life change, not the other way around. I love that about First Capital. And that's been something as we've talked with the elite pastors, we talked with the volunteers, you know, I've heard you say that multiple times. This has really been the thing.

Lifeblood of the church, the motivation. It's not a selfish where I'm trying to collect these people, I'm trying to keep these butts in the seats. It's a selfless of let us go out into the community, let us serve and minister, let's care for people, let's know their names. And as a result of that, God is glorified. And actually, it is the most attraction to end everything about it.

So man, this has been great. I just, Tyler, I just love hanging out with you, and we need to, you know, when all this like social distancing stuff is over, like we actually need to get together at some point. I'm working on some things, maybe October. Let's kind of follow it away. Maybe that's the day when we can be, you know, a physical space, face-to-face again, breathing each other's coronavirus, you know, germs and whatever. But we'll go on from there.

So hey, thank you very much, Tyler, for this time. Once again, Ray, it's great to have you on, digging into this conversation on relationships online. So for Tyler, for Ray, this is Chapter 2 Church Digital. Thanks for joining us today. We'll see you next time here on the podcast, y'all. Good day.