EP082: Stan Rodda, Tyler Sansom & the Different Flavors of Microsites

Episode 82 of the Church Digital Podcast, once again powered by Stadia Church Planting. Jeff here. We've got a really deep episode on this one. I gotta say, I like it. I'm excited about it. I will always say that I mean it needed to be done, but I'm excited about this. But it's we're getting into a deep level. We talk a lot on the show about micro locations, and it's been a very popular topic in recent weeks and months in this COVID season. Coming through, his churches are interested in these watch parties and these micro locations. It's part of the long-term strategy. And what's really fascinating is that even in the midst of this watch party of micro, we're starting to discover that micro in itself, there's different flavors. There's different extremes of how micro locations can work. And so anyway, as we're talking about it, I don't know that a lot of the churches are kind of understanding the complexities and the nuances of the micro. And so I wanted to really elaborate and try to explore more of what micro locations can look like. And so I brought in some people who are really familiar with the idea of micro. So we brought in Stain Roda, who's on staff with New Life Church in Washington DC. New Life is no stranger to the podcast. Tom Pounder has been on the podcast a bunch. Jay Tear Heart used to be on staff with the church. And so like New Life is definitely represented here. We brought in Tyler Sansom, who's with Church Anywhere program at First Capital Christian Church. And so also has a full history here at the Church Digital.

What we've really wanted to do with Raya and Toe, of course, is co-host. We really want to start to unpack what this idea of a micro location is and how you can grow them. There is a desire, there is a need for churches to launch them quickly, but there's also desire to want to do it long term. And so what is the tension towards launching something quickly for today because we need to endoscope it season, but developing it into something that will work for you long term? And so that's the show. That's the tension. That's the conversation. By the way, I've already had this multiple conversations already with other churches that are interested in doing this. So take note if you listen to this and you can identify. You're not alone, which is interesting. Which actually leads to the other part of this intro here. Through Stadia, we're doing a number of cohorts aimed at helping churches grow digitally, combining the physical church and the digital church together into one singular focused mission and vision. We're already taking 70 churches, 60 to 70 churches right now through this process, and it's going very well. We're spinning up another cohort that's starting in August. And so if you are interested in your church coming together and going through a cohort where we're learning from churches like Church Home, like Saddleback, like Crossroads in Cincinnati, and getting to dig in to not only content but being part of conversations with other churches and facilitators and huddles where we get to help guide through the steps and also help with some accountability to help your church figure out how to thrive, grow, and multiply. Yes, multiply digitally. A lot of the stuff that we talk here with the watch parties and in this idea of the micro location some help to actually get that executed at your church. We had Stadia want to do that. Go to stadiachurchplanting.org/digital and you can find more information there.

So for now, let's get into the conversation. We've got Raya, the Armas, of course, co-host. You've got Tyler Sansom, who is engagement pastor over at First Capital Christian. I believe lead pastor now at a digital only church called Church Anywhere. Think that just happens. And it's Stan Roda from New Life Community Church, myself Jeff, for the Church Digital and Stadia Church Planting, in a conversation that I'm calling "How to Grow a Micro Location."

Okay, everybody. Ego for you. I'm just curious. Houston, ego, COVID season, and then it was like race season and all that kind of stuff sent around. All these seasons have really just boiled down to 2020 is nuts. There's gonna be a ring of fire solstice eclipse. I like the 21st of July. I just saw that yesterday, like a big ring of fire in the sky. Because of course, I even know if you're kidding or serious. You're serious? Because like once in every 70 years or something. I was like Sauron immersions. That's awesome, man. I saw the asteroid that's coming to earth that's going to narrowly. Yeah, I mean at some point I'm waiting for the seventh angel to come out and pour his bowl out on the, you know, in time I guess. New Kobe died and then everything just hit the fan. That's where it started. Yeah, it started with Kobe and then just straight down the hill. That's right. Wow. And in the midst of all that, you have scientists out in Alaska. Nobody? No, I don't. The game I even caught this, but they were scientists out in Alaska like mid-April that said they found evidence of a parallel universe. And it just totally went completely unlike, you know, it didn't even hit a radar for people. I'm like, they want parallel universe. Yeah, those that's the universe for Thanos one and everybody's one. The world will go after that universe. That's pretty good. Right now I mean aliens hit the radar there for a while a few weeks back that became a big thing. So parallel universe, I could get on board with this point. That's it's awesome.

Hey, so you know, Stan, why don't you give us a little detail? Like what? So you said house search network kind of layout here. So we're talking a lot about the house church, micro locations, kind of like that universe talking about the alternate universe. We're talking about just that kind of idea here on the show. So what actually? What's the practicality behind what that looks like? I mean, really behind it all is just a simple read through the book of Acts and saying how did they do it? And it just every time I turn around when you read through the book of Acts, somebody's met at somebody else's house. Somebody was saved at a house. A household was saved. They're just over and over and over through the book of Acts there's something happening in somebody's house with the household. And so my take has started to become that, you know, maybe we're missing something in just focusing on a big Sunday morning gathering, although that may be part of the answer, but there's something we're missing. And so I've heard people and I've even said this for the longest time, man, what would it look like if the American Church could get back to Acts chapter two? Just that. If that could happen all over again, what would it look like? And I think, whoa, then maybe we should probably be doing things like they did in Acts chapter two and maybe we would experience that. So the practical side of it really is just reading through and saying try to do it as much like they did as possible. So you know, establishing, you know, certain rhythms that we see throughout the throughout the book of Acts in the New Testament, you know, that there is a gathering on Sunday. Acts 20, we know they gathered on the first day of the week and just trying to align ourselves with that.

Yeah, and it's awesome to me that you're using that Acts to is the foundation, the biblical going back to like the biblical functions of what the church is and even trying to map that out into some of the home environments with that. In this COVID season, obviously we're feeling a lot of those tensions. Obviously, because majority of the world at this point has been locked in their home and unable to get into the physical gatherings of gathering together. And so we're kind of been forced into a digital at church on online mindset. Now things are opening back up and people are slowly going back to the building, maybe possibly some of them are still hesitant to. And individual states, individual cities, counties, individual churches have different philosophies in there. And so that's even interesting. But hearing these ideas and what's been fascinating to me is really seeing the different applications for operating out of a home. Seeing them kind of pop up here now. Tyler is through Church Anywhere is no stranger to. Tyler's been, dude, how long you been doing Church Anywhere? Ten to two years? Eighteen months? How long has it been now? Yeah, three. A little over three. And a half. It's almost four. I didn't realize that was longer than I thought. Okay, so you've been doing it. You've been doing it three, three plus years. You know, and obviously we've talked a lot with Jake Randa about their home gatherings. We've elevated on the podcast with their watch parties. I'm trying to even think we've had Adrian on the show recently with Northeast Christian Church. She feels like so many conversations with so many different people with so many different approaches towards it. But the thing that I really kind of wanted to park on a little bit here is how much of it is. I feel like there's extremes to like the home gathering, right? Where you've got the hey, we're just gonna like press play on this Roku and watch this entire service type of thing. And then you've got the fuller extreme, which is more of the volunteer who's leading is not just being hospitality, but it's more like pastoring and shepherding the environments, right? You know, where it's hey, I'm spiritually responsible for the 20 people that are in this house. There's a big difference between hey, I can throw out some seven-layer bean dip and press play to I'm now spiritually responsible for that. So you know, I'd love to even just kind of pick seven-layer bean dip. That didn't I was hoping that we'd get a baby, but maybe the audience laughed at it. I thought it was funny. A smile. And ooh, so the audience would have caught it if they were watching on YouTube. So the what are the strengths and weaknesses in a model of that? Because there are some churches that the watch party is the perfect tool for their context. For a deeper model, I mean, there's another church for that at that extreme. Name what have been your learnings as we're going through things like this? What? Why why did you choose the path that you're on? What were the lessons with that? Tyler, why don't you start off a little bit here and tell us a little about Church Anywhere? Maybe where it fits on that continuum. Sure. The spectrum from what you will you just present it? We would fit like the far end of giving volunteers for you to become pastors essentially to shepherd the people there. So they're not the hit play, let's watch the service, that's it kind of people. I will say during this time period of trying to figure out how to gather during COVID season, it's been strange because we've tried watch parties and the buy-in has not been nearly as good as what it is for Church Anywhere. So we've just simply tried the let's gather people together to watch the service together. They can't come to the building and so let's go do it in homes. And that buy-in to just not been there. We've got a few of them off the ground that are successful. For the most part, people just weren't into that much for our context. But it's bizarre because our whole church is based around these like tons of micro sites that we have. So for us, the empowering part of how we do micro sites within Church Anywhere, like empowering people to become pastors, has led to more buy-in and a more successful long-term solution, whereas I think these watch parties for us have been like a band-aid before we can start meeting again in our building.

Hey, that's awesome, Tyler. Stan, how does that relate to you? Where do you kind of fit in a continuum, man? I actually not really sure where I fit in the continuum. I probably just to the inside in some ways of what Tyler.

is talking about it very much the same concept I guess in terms of shifting people from saying okay I'm just gonna put out the snacks and hit play and host and now I'm moving towards spiritual responsibility for people. The end result of what I'm trying to do, what we're trying to do, is wherever this fits, is really to get those house churches to view their primary responsibility as the disciple of their people and to move them forward. For those who are gifted and called and want to do it, to then move and multiply into new house churches.

And so right now, at least with COVID, we've started with hey, if we can even get eight people together, we can get ten people together, let's do it, which is part of where my question originally had on the Facebook post it sprung up was because when I saw the post I was thinking missional communities tend to run—they're kind of that mid-gathering like what most of them tend to run that like forty to fifty range or thirty to fifty range. It's so it's kind of like this high-end small group kind of a thing. And so somewhere around in there we've just said, or I've just said, hey, how do we actually do disciple-making in a house church, in a house—call it a church—and develop people to the point where they are also hearing the voice of God and they are obeying in the mission to make disciples that is now beginning to impact their neighborhood, their schools, their whatever.

And so I don't know where that lands on the continuum exactly, but yeah, maybe that's where some of this conversation will lead us, we'll get better clarity on that. But that's what we are trying to accomplish. When I say house church, I'm thinking disciple-making movement is what is in my as well. We're aiming at, yeah, and I would probably suggest that's—I think that's in the heart of a lot of churches where I think they're trying to figure it out. I know several that I've talked to, just in the past week, where they're seeing an opportunity and they're wanting to move to a neighborhood disciple-making, discipleship apprenticeship-centric model of empowering people to be on personal mission towards that.

There is there's a lot of, and been where I would love to maybe park out towards you into this is how does that actually happen, you know? There was a particular church I was talking with and it was there—you know, I may have said in the conversation—but it's like the lead pastor wanted to spin it up, wanted to do these, do the neighborhood stuff. We're not able to get into the building, there's a lot of delay. They were feeling we need to give the neighborhood as soon as possible, and the church was looking at the mindset of okay, how do we set up these discipleship centric and empower these and train these and get all these people going, and we need to do it in two and a half weeks. And that's not—I don't know that you can make disciple-making. I think it's more of a crockpot approach. And it was really interesting even helping the church kind of realize hey, you may need to be more on the watch party for the short term just to kind of get on-boarded, learn some lessons, and start to use the watch party, you know, with your bean dip as the beginning to kind of grow and develop deeper down that pathway.

Now some churches, they're only looking for the watch party because it's short term. So Tyler, like, women are both you guys when you started out, did you start at the disciple-making, that the heavy end of this spectrum, or did you start earlier and grow? Like, what was the growth process either you guys go for? For us, we started with somewhere in the middle. So it was a watch party with the idea of doing small groups attached to it. That's how we started, but we didn't have like a growth track or anything like that that we wanted to send people through next step. So we're really any plans for like multiplication earning. It wasn't until like probably a year and a half into it that we were like okay, this is starting to work a little bit. We've got to figure this out. And that's when we really sat down to start looking at like how can we continue to empower people that maybe have never even been through our church's work? How can we empower someone that's only been to a microsite, we're online, to become a fully functioning disciples price? So but that we didn't start that way. It was somewhere in the middle.

Well, I mean, look, us at New Life had started about four years ago or so. We'd wrestled with the idea of discipleship and making disciples for quite a while. Our theory or practice at the time: everybody needs to be in a life group. So the primary next step for, in many cases, out of Sunday morning was get into a group, get into a group, get into a group. And in Northern Virginia, for whatever that's worth, there seemed to be a lot of churches that struggle with life groups. In Northern Virginia, partly because there are a lot of super, super professional-type people, government-type people who are working sixty, seventy, eighty hours a week. You know, high-level FBI guys, DoD, other three-letter organization represented at our church, Secret Service, those kinds of people. And so they go to work for sixty, seventy, eighty hours a week protecting the president, protecting the country, protecting the vice president. And then you, they show up on Sunday, look them for a refresh, and all they hear is hey, you missed group. And now they feel guilty. And it just seemed like we're really struggling through trying to get people in groups.

And so we started on a journey of just kind of reading the New Testament and staff meeting and just asking the question: what do tell us about disciple-making? What do tell us about disciple-making? And about two and a half years ago, God introduced us to a couple of guys who had their hands in kind of disciple-making movement around the globe. And we started learning some things from them. And for us, really, where the whole thing for us changed was whenever we started getting our hands around reproducible, simple and reproducible tools that anybody could use. A Secret Service guy could use these tools while he's on a break with the buddy that he's been trying to reach. And we wanted to take those tools and get them into the hands of as many people as possible and start training as many people as possible.

And so really, that was kind of the process for us. It was just this reading and praying and asking and seeking. And then some of that led to trying to up our game in life groups. When we were at a point where we were like maybe we should just scrap life groups, but we don't see how they're working here. Like maybe we just shouldn't do them because we can't—we were a church at the time of fifteen hundred people and we had thirty life groups. Where we just, it was like man, where we can't get there working long hours than making a soccer game and now they feel guilty because they miss group. Just was this weird dynamic.

And so we started getting our hands on some tools and said okay, how do we train people to actually go out and share their story, what God is doing in their life, share the gospel? How do we train them? How to do that? Let's get some of these things going. For us, where we get toward life groups now or house church now or whatever, really is the end result of saying here's some really intentional tools we can give that anybody, no matter where they're at, they can reproduce with their neighbors, their friends, their coworkers, wherever they are. And that's kind of been the transformation for us, moving us in that direction.

Stan, that's really intriguing to me because, you know, obviously you guys are looking to break free of just kind of set church, right? Like not just Sunday morning and not just a small group because obviously people have crazy schedules and can't really comply with that kind of schedule that the church would set for them. So get a little more specific, dig in there for us. Like what are some of those tools that you're really arming them with so that they can kind of, I guess, take ownership of their own spiritual development, which I think is that right?

Yeah, so I will, I won't plug for gin too much here with some of the stuff I'm doing, but one of the things we say is we want—we desperately—well, here's where we started. We started with the definition of a disciple. After wrestling with it, we said okay, we believe a disciple is John 10:27, and somebody who hears the voice of the shepherd and follows. They hear the voice of God and obey. So if I can hear the voice of God through scripture, through prayer, through whatever things I am doing, I can take that and here's a couple of tools to now train somebody else to do the exact same thing.

So we talked a lot about something called the Master Plan of Surrender, where we talk about becoming a master swordsman, becoming very acquainted with Scripture, a master prayer warrior. We are training people to be to daily abide in Christ. We are pressing them for more than five minutes a day. We're getting away from you versions, verse of the day. Like how do we get into three chapters, five chapters, ten chapters, and just own Scripture? And there are people that will take that step with us, and there are some people that are back on that life group track of like I don't have time for that right now. But walking people through that, and then the last part of the Master Plan of Surrender is a master trainer, where we want not only them to be able to hear God's voice and obey, to read Scripture daily, to pray daily, but then actually be able to train somebody else how to do the exact same thing.

So then once they have the tools and they're doing it and they see God start to work in their life and they're taking steps of obedience and God's doing something with them, now we can hand them three more people or five more people, or they can go and find those other people—neighbors, friends, whoever—and they can replicate that. They can now share the tool, how they got to where they are, and make them pass that. They can pass it along to somebody else.

So simple tools along the way, but one of them is mastered by a Master Plan of Surrender, master prayer warrior, master swordsman, master trainer. We want every disciple to be able to do those three things: so by daily and tell somebody else how to do say if I can hear God's voice and obey, I can I can show somebody else how to hear God's voice and obey. And that's where we think that's where we think and believe movement in a disciple-making context will happen.

That's awesome. But what's interesting, even beyond your three pillars or your three steps, they're small groups was a lid. I mean, the way you're describing it, the one hour I've been parts of churches I've consulted, I've been on church staffs, and we've talked about, you know, Ed Stetzer talks about hey, we need a third thing. He's said that on the podcast like church, weekend services, small groups. Like we really can't get to being people being on mission without a third thing. I've been in church environments where leadership teams and navigation teams have said to me hey, you know what's more important: disciple-making or small groups? Because we can't expect our people to give another third hour. We can only expect two hours at the service hour and either a small group or disciple-making. What do you think's more important?

That no, I have an answer to that. I have answers to that that I probably can't say on the air. But it what's interesting to me is your spin at this is is abandoned, let go of the thing that possibly was working because you're really more interested in in getting to the this disciple-making angle as opposed to the the community of that made Stan. Do you want to like even just dive into that a little bit? Why why is small groups of—

There were definitely some small groups that what we would say they accomplished what we wanted them to accomplish, and there were many that absolutely became a lid. When we would do the hard work of saying, "Okay, which groups are actually thriving? Are they on mission? Are they doing the stuff we want?" I mean, the numbers would go down from 30. We could find five that we really thought had it going on. And out of a church of 1500 in Northern Virginia where there's 3.2 million lost people in our backyard, five groups to get it? It's not. It's not good enough. It's not going to cut it. That doesn't make a dent in our darkness out here.

And so we had to really wrestle with that part of it and say, "Okay, in many ways small groups are a lid. So we either need to figure out how to do groups better, or we need to do something differently."

I see potential for the house churches to become the place where all of this takes place. Not only are they finding their community within the study since—because I mean, within it there are studies and stuff that come along with it. There's DBS and there's all these things—but they get their community within it. But they're also living together on mission, specifically the mission to make disciples. So now they're not only engaging in, "Okay, how do we serve our school? How do we serve a local family? How do we, whatever?" But they're actually doing it from the perspective of, "Okay, where is God giving us an avenue in to share the gospel so that the gospel is the light, so that we can actually multiply and grow and disciple other people?"

And so I think maybe we have been trying to get our hands around some sort of a mix in the two of those. I'm not really sure exactly what that looks like yet, but as we develop them, we're trying to say the house church could—again, you go back to Acts 2 and you read through those, you know, Acts 2:42-47, or you can even start back up in verse 36—and you get those healthy functions of the church. And we'd say, "Okay, we don't want just somebody to, to your point earlier, put out the bean dip and hit play. We want somebody to take responsibility for that community. And how do we get them to look like an Acts 2 community in their living room so that there is, you know, worship happening, community happening, disciple-making happening, evangelism? Like, all the stuff. Like, how do I get that out of the living room?" is really for us the difference and moving away from just, "Okay, I know this is a hot-button issue. Here's your next Beth Moore book for the next study. Here's your next John Maxwell study. Here's your next—like, let's walk away from that. Let's train people how to make disciples out of their house."

Yeah, and I think the same training for a lot of churches—I think what a lot of churches kind of struggle with is how slow that is, alright? And so, kind of, and that's right. Like, just being real, that's where a lot of churches struggle. Like, they're like, "We want to grow. We want to grow deep, but we also want to grow wide, and we want to do it fast." So what does this process look like for you guys as far as time? Just realistically, just to say, "Hey, this is what we put in. This is the investment. This is what we're dealing with."

That realistically looks different for every single person we invest with. There are some people that we invest with—I've got a guy that I met in a Panera parking lot two years ago who was disconnected from God, raised Christian but disconnected from God. We started a conversation. He is now my student guy and is leading a house church that has multiplied into two more house churches and is about to make some trip to Indianapolis to baptize six people or something because of the connection that he's got through these house churches. That was—that's one guy, two years ago, that happened very quickly because of who he is, how he's wired, what God was doing with him, partly his personality. And then I've got other people who get it and they're doing exactly what we want them to do, but it's a slower process because of who they are. God wires everybody a little bit differently.

And so out of the house church, we don't say everybody should be able to do what Gerald can do. But when I get my hands on Gerald, I want to push him as far as I can as quickly as I can because he's what we call a super spreader. Like, that dude—that dude's gonna do a bunch, and it's gonna be awesome. But the reality is that even Paul writes in the book of Acts a lot about spending a lot of time with people, and sometimes it does just need to slow down.

We have a tool we use to help build their people out. We talk a lot about FATSOs—people who are faithful, available, teachable, sendable, and obedient. And when we find those people, we run with those people. Everybody else, we say, "Hey, keep coming. Keep serving. We'll pray for you. Like, be a part of what God is doing." But when I get my hands on a FATSO, I'm running with them because they're gonna be the ones that push the movement forward.

So I try to filter people through tools as well. It's got to be the first time I've ever heard someone say they're running with the FATSO stuff, right? Because even in the book of Acts, right, like there's seven chosen, there's one Stephen and there's one Philip, and we don't hear about the other five. It's not that the other five aren't faithful. It's not that they're not available, trustworthy, et cetera, you know? It's not that they're not those things. It's that these guys are some of those super spreaders that you're talking about. And yet whatever church is kind of want to launch these things, they want more super spreaders.

So as far as like the people who aren't the super spreaders, talk about that investment in that time too, because that's where it's like there's a lot more of those, and how do we onboard and even deal with some of the slower growth that we see there?

So for instance, some of my house church leaders or the people that are actually helping me run with some of this stuff, I tell them to go as deep as they can with those people as possible, as far as they will let you take them. You go deep. I want them to, again, go back up to the top of the thing. I want them to be master swordsmen. I want them to be master prayer warriors, and I want them to be master trainers. If the only thing they get out of it—if they, if someone comes into the process and they never start a house church, but they know their Bible backward and forward, they're memorizing Scripture, they can tell their story to anybody who will listen, they're abiding with Christ daily—that, you can do a lot with that foundation. So I will say just go as deep with them for as long as we'll walk with you.

Yeah, I have to remind them periodically that, you know, Jesus walked with twelve, and all twelve ultimately failed him completely when it counted and mattered the most. You know, if you are restored, eleven are restored, and they run later. But I mean, we have to understand that there's going to be some people—not to the extent of a Judas, but there are going to be some people that don't walk that path completely. I have to be prepared to walk in some cases for years with some of those people.

Now, do I invest time differently with that group versus the house church leaders that are running and going? Yes. As the campus pastor, as the leader of this thing, yes, I invest my time differently for those people. But the reality is that we have to run with those that are going to run and hope that we can train as many people as possible to share the gospel, share their story, and to train them to be that three-tier kind of person that I was talking about earlier.

So I would love to actually hear this from both of you: How do you find these people? How do you find somebody that's faithful, available, teachable, sendable, and obedient? Where do you find them? How do you grow them? How do you multiply them? Like, even start with define. I'm sure they're in your church, but how do you find them?

So this is—I don't know if it's a gift or what kind of gift this is, but my wife and I, we flip a lot of houses. That's like what we do in our ultra-spare time that we just have all the time. But I've, since I was a little kid, I've been able to look at like old things and broken-down things and see like potential in that. And I don't know why that's a gift that God has given me to be able to do, but I can do that with people as well.

We had Brad on this podcast before, and when I met Brad, he had no electricity in his house. He was a drug addict and was basically using what money he would have paid rent and electric bill to buy drugs. And I looked at him and realized, like, he's a people person. Eventually I'm like, "I want to do everything I can to lead this dude to Jesus because I can see potential." And now he's leading like a microsite that's 300 men, and he's helped multiply that and start other microsites out of it.

So I don't know how to develop that ability, but that's just something I've always had—is the ability to see that in people. Beyond that, though, it's been a lot of just casting the vision behind Church Anywhere for us, and a lot of people have just approached us. So I don't want to take credit beyond like one person, but most of our leaders out of like the nineteen have just caught on to the vision of what we're trying to do with this smaller multiplication and more of like an empowering kind of faith, and they just want to be a part of it. So once they approached us, then we can put them through our process of training.

Yeah, I'd say something similar. May we, we definitely as a part of the process with our training, we train people in really specific questions that they can utilize. Once somebody's been trained how to abide in Christ on a daily basis and how to share their story and how to share the gospel, we give them a safe place to practice and to get comfortable with those tools. And then we hand them a couple of key questions to kind of help them get started.

For instance, one that we give people is we say, "Hey, whenever you find yourself engaged in a conversation somewhere, you know, maybe this question will be useful to guide the conversation towards something spiritual." The question is, "If God could do a miracle in your life for you today, what would it be?" And that—what's really interesting about that question, why I like it so much, is because you immediately figure out who that person is and what they're looking for and what they want. And the answer that you have to provide—for instance, I asked that question at Panera one time, and I spend a lot of time at Panera. I'm finding in these stories. So I asked a girl at Panera one time, and she said, "If God could do a miracle in my life today, he would bring my mother back from the dead." She was murdered a year and a half ago. And she proceeded to tell me the story. And what I heard in that answer was she needs hope. She needs hope that there's more to this. And it gives me the stepping stone of the conversation, the spiritual conversation, to know how to direct it.

I also discovered very quickly if that person is a FATSO or not, whether or not they might be willing to walk with me. When I had the conversation with Gerald, it was obvious because I actually tried to scare him away. Yeah, we—I was on my motorcycle, and he approached me in the parking lot. So, "That's a nice bike, man." Yeah, we start talking, and he asked me what I did for a living. He told me, and I knew that when you ask that question, somebody's gonna ask you what you do. And everybody's always scared when you say, "Well, I'm a pastor." They all freak out and they run away like you're gonna catch them on fire or something. But instead, I told Gerald, I said, "Well, what I do is I walk with guys. I train them how to hear God's voice and obey. Basically, I disciple you. You interested?"

That and he went, "Yes, when can we meet?" Like, I mean, it was like that quick. I'm like, "Well, there I've got that." So now I know because I've asked just enough, I've told just enough that I know. So we help people identify that. We say, you know, pray for your neighbors, pray for God to go before you in the conversation. And the reality is you may bring it up, you may share your story, you may share the gospel, and they may go, "Nope, not for me. I don't want anything to do with it. Keep it to yourself." Now I know. I know that I can pray for them, but they may not be in that particular part of soil that Jesus talks about as being receptive just yet. They're not the good soil that's quite there. But if I cast that enough times, if I share with enough neighbors, if I talk to enough people that I bump into out in my world and my sphere of influence—enough soccer coaches and PTO members and teachers and whoever—eventually I'm gonna find somebody that says, "I want whatever that is. Whatever you've got, that's what I want." And now I have a fast one I could run with it.

It doesn't mean we give up on the other people. It actually means in our training we just tell people to keep a couple of lists. And one list I called the simmer list. And you're just praying for them. You're letting them simmer, and they just kind of simmer on in the pot waiting for you. You just keep praying and praying and praying. Hopefully something, someday they break down, something happens, and they want to know more. But then on the other side of the list are your fasts—those people that are running. They want to know more. They call you, they text you, they bug you. "What's next? What can I do next?" Now we did my homework. Now what? Now what? Those are the kinds of people. And those people are out there.

I think sometimes we—I think it goes back to my issue with kind of the "build it and they will come" mentality and people thinking they need to go find the pastor for the answer as opposed to, no, actually God is preparing our people to go out and do this—to be disciple makers in Tyler's language, to be the pastor of their community, their group. God's got a lot of people he wants to release to do that, and it's not just the Bible college educated seminarian at the top of the organizational food chain. So we've got to do a better job training and releasing people.

So let's dig in there, Tyler, and standing at a level of comfort. Like, how do you get to that level of comfort where you're ready to release? Because that seems to be scary because, you know, obviously, like, talking business, right? We're sending them out with the church brand. We're sending them out with "you represent us," and it's that kind of responsibility that I think tends to freak a lot of people out in terms of, "Okay, they're going to be an extension of us, but how comfortable are we with that? And how is that gonna come back to bite us on the rear end if things go wrong?" After our training process, the last thing that they do is sign a ninety-day commitment that was with us to be paired with a coach who has already been through this. So that's a little bit of a comfort thing for us too—one, that we have their full commitment to be all into doing this. They've already gone through our training process, and then we have a mentor that walks them through starting a microsite. And so that's helpful for us to think, like, "Okay, not only are they reporting back to our staff, but they also have a coach that's like the training wheels for them." So hopefully they won't do anything that is off-brand.

If you were trying to be—also, I don't have a Bible college education. I went to school for audio engineering and mostly just to play football. So they have just as much education as I do when it comes to that. Obviously, I try to better myself as much as possible within the scriptures and things, be discipled by my mentors, but I don't have that sheet of paper that says, like, "I'm holier than you" or whatever that stands for. So they're pretty much on the same playing field as me. So it's really that commitment, putting them with a coach, and then I just getting over myself and really interesting control.

You didn't, yeah. I mean, for us it's in many ways similar. It's recognizing that if every follower of Jesus Christ has the Holy Spirit, then the Holy Spirit wants to do something through that person uniquely, individually. I just need to help them have the tools to get there. So for us, I mean, the example of Jesus—it seems was to train a little bit and send them out and see what happens, and then bring them back in and coach them back up, and then send them back out and see what happens. Bring them back, get feedback, coach them up where they need it. And they did this all the time. They'd be walking with Jesus, they get ten feet away, and all of a sudden they want to know which one's the best in the kingdom. They come back and Jesus has to coach him right back up.

A lot of you know, when Jesus goes up with the Transfiguration, he comes back down. This awesome stuff has happened. Peter, James, and John are just like, "To Jesus, was like, 'You know, this, whoa, do you guys see that?' They're freaking out, and they come back down and the disciples are struggling to cast out a demon, and Jesus is like, 'Oh man, okay, well, you see, you guys have to pray. You know, if you're gonna cast out a demon, you gotta pray.' We got a start. Like, it just seemed like Jesus didn't have the same—I don't know what it is—but for me it's just something about the American version of church to control an institution so that it grows a certain way. Jesus didn't seem to have that. And so for me, if you were to step into a training for me, where, for instance, I walked through a tool on the Great Commission called the Eight Commands—we just walked through the Great Commission, we break it down into eight things that Jesus commands of us. The very first one you do the very first week, your first homework assignment is to share your story of how Jesus has changed your life no less than three times with someone in your life, a friend. And they just go do it and see what happens.

We are transformed, I believe, through our obedience. We're not transformed because we have more knowledge that comes our way. We're transformed when we obey. We hear God's voice and we just obey. We're not responsible for the result of that, but I am responsible for my obedience when God calls. So the very first week you're with me, you're going out and you're practicing in the field what Jesus does. And the Samaritan woman—she goes right into the harvest immediately after Jesus talks about all the stuff he does with her, and she goes immediately to the harvest and shares. And I think a lot of times we actually find Jesus in the harvest more than we find him in other places. We find Jesus in the harvest because we're walking in obedience to him, what he asks us to do. And so people, my people, come back with some pretty interesting stories. And there are some stories of failure, and that's okay. Guess they're gonna come right back into group the next week. They're gonna be picked right back up. They're gonna be discipled, they're gonna be trained, they're gonna be loved, they're gonna be cared for. Then we're gonna go right back and do it again the next week and we're gonna try it again. Then the next week out of that is, you know, is more.

Yeah, let's lean in there for a second. Would you get either of you mind sharing like one of those stories where things didn't go so well? And maybe what you would have done different? Because it's easy to point out like the success stories, you know what I'm saying? I think everybody wants to jump on board with that, but I think a lot of pastors want to hear it, man.

Alright, so realistically, man, we had some failures too. I mean, one of my failures, to be honest with you, was the lady I talked to at Panera who I tried. I took a tool that I was learning and I tried to have the conversation, but when she answered, it didn't hit me until later what she was really saying. So that conversation ended super awkwardly as I tried to walk away from a conversation with a woman who's talking about how her mother had been murdered a year and a half ago. And it honestly freaked me out. I was like, "Okay, God, I'm trying to do what you want me to do. That's the first person that's gonna respond that like? I don't know what to do with that." And then I had to go back to my guy and say, "Here was the answer I got. What do I do with that? How do I handle that?" You know, and that didn't go well. That conversation never went back to anything else. It never turned into, "Hey, would love for you to come and be a part of some of our community." Never turned into, "Hey, let's follow up." It just died right there. It was just like, "Oh my gosh, what do I do with this?" And it just fell apart. But I mean, what better place to learn than out there actually doing it? So I mean, that was at least one for me. It sounds good at the beginning with the question, but man, it died pretty quickly because I didn't know what to do with it.

But yeah, I'm familiar with the Enneagram. I'm an eight. So me to say I like to relinquish control in this is like the exact opposite of my actual personality. So early on when we started microsites, I had a really, really hard time with that specifically. And so I was talking this big game about how I can empower people to pass through these people, and then I ended up being the pastor in every location. So that was like an overall fail for like a whole year until I finally got over myself.

Says the first one. Second one is a dream, very much more specific. So we had—you guys are familiar with—we have an orphanage campus. We do microsite in an orphanage, and it's really awesome ministering now, but when it first started, we put together a team of people with a volunteer campus pastor. All of them were huge personalities. They're all really solid individual volunteers, but it would be like putting like every diva in the NBA in a starting lineup. And I don't mean that they're divas individually. They just all have really good—they're like five-talent kind of people. And so there was no leader. Like, I threw this leader to the wolves, and they were all parents who had already gone through parenting. So like almost all of them had at least like the youngest kid was like a senior in high school. And so they went into this orphanage with one, a bunch of alpha dogs in a group, and two, wanting to parent these orphans who have been in the foster care system their whole lives like they would parent their own kids. And I saw it. I saw it coming, and I didn't do anything about it. And it did not go well for like the first six months of launching this campus. It ended up like just taking kids off or taking off the leaders because they wanted to parent them and discipline them. And it came to the point where it made us really, really—if we're keeping the main thing the main thing—and so that made us change our philosophy a little bit on how we went into microsites in the first place with the idea of less being about like the structure of how things work and more being about making sure we present Jesus first above all else. And so I like a big fail on my part in sending them out and then them coming back and coaching the whole like Jesus philosophy just and was talking about.

Was when they came back, they felt beaten up. Like the kids hated them and they hated each other. And so I we had to shift the mindset to keep the main thing the main thing.

Yeah, I mean, that shift is so important with that because sometimes we get lost in other expectations, other ideas, other "this is what church is," even a minimal ecclesiology of what churches are. And are we okay with that? And even conversations, you know, just recently I've had with the church that it's like, you know, Jeff...

I don't know that our people are okay that a pastor is leading and that a non-pastor is leading communion. I don't think our people are going to be okay that a non-pastor is going to be baptizing. And so, you know, the priesthood of all believers is even some of that stuff there. There are still churches that are struggling with some of this. I can see it on Zoom, but it's there. There are some churches that are like, "Oh my gosh, we settled that like 30 years ago," and there are some churches that are like, "Dude, that is still an issue right here today." And it's really because of the expectations that we have walking into it.

Put it in a digital context too. Like, now that all of our micro sites aren't launched specifically out of our physical location, that's so much harder to manage. Whereas before, like, I could send somebody out, try something, they'd come back. Like, they literally are coming back. I'm sitting right across from them face to face. Now, like, take it to Rhode Island, which is where we just launched our latest micro site. Like, I can't drive to Rhode Island and talk to Rick, the guy that's leading it. So the best-case scenario is we Zoom call or text message. That's just, you guys know how it is. It's a lot harder to get a feel for and coach someone just over Zoom and just through protected message. So the digital side of that makes it even more challenging, but it's also a chance to be more creative. And you've got the opportunity to engage across long distances.

Let's do this. Because, let's turn the table here. Because there are churches right now. Let's figure this out. I make this practical. There are churches right now that are wanting to do something. Their lead pastor saying, "Hey, we got to figure this out. Yeah, we can do a short-term watch party for three months, six months, maybe the entire 2020 until we can get back into our mega buildings, our large venues, and get back to a normal expression of church. But that's not today." So yeah, we could do watch party short-term, but I gotta believe there are churches that are interested in forming a discipleship system coming out of this and having these micro locations, having these FATSOs running around in new ways that are wanting to empower and mobilize these people.

Tell me, how do they get started? Point them in the right direction. Give me some practical steps. How do we go from nothing to developing FATSOs? Well, walk me through some ways to get started.

My recommendation would be to take the low-hanging fruit. We know that as followers of Jesus Christ, we are supposed to abide with Christ, and yet the research over and over and over shows that most pastors and church leaders are not spending any time with Christ. And their time with Christ is primarily sermon prep. For instance, so for me, I guess if I'm gonna start moving the needle in that direction, I have to lead by example. I have to be able to do that myself. So I think, I don't know who all's listening to this right now, the prime audience here, but I have to spend time with Christ daily, not for my sermon prep, but I have to be in Scripture being fed by it, being transformed by it. I'm getting to know Christ, to know and walk with God, to hear his voice. Nobody, I have to do that. And then from there, depending upon your organization, my next thought, I guess, as a leader would be, you've got to influence your influencers. You've got to lead your staff. You've got to lead your leadership team in that direction. You've got to start putting the stuff out, lead that way, and then you can start working it down from there.

But I mean, at a super high level, I just think it's some of those little things that we've got to get right that I don't know that we have right now. And it's as simple as me spending time with God outside of my sermon prep, being transformed by him, and then sharing that with someone else and beginning to flow it down through the organization. That's where I would start initially.

Tyler, what do you recommend? I feel like I've asked you this question before, but if not, just tell me anyway.

Yeah, you guys have actually talked with Randy, our senior pastor. He's a former college basketball coach. He basically runs our church like a basketball team, so it's fun to watch him do that. And I can't imagine starting anything at all remotely close to like micro-communities or anything like that without actually having a vision for it. So I've been talking to lots of churches as well. With Jeff, I know you, they have during COVID season because everyone's like, "What do we do now?" And a lot of their solutions are like what you've been talking about. Let's start micro sites right now. Let's start watch parties right now. Let's do this, let's do this. But if you don't have any kind of vision for where you want to go, then you can't do anything.

So many churches are wanting to start these big projects that are trendy right now, but none of those are short-term projects. And so without any kind of vision, without any kind of clarity from the leadership, they're probably going to fail. And so the first thing that a church leader, especially a senior pastor, has to wrestle with is, "What is the vision of my church? And how does this big project we're gonna have somebody take on, how does that fit within that vision?" Because if it doesn't, like, don't do it or change the vision, because this just is not gonna go well.

That sounds probably really harsh. It's, I mean, it's grounded probably in a historical background. I mean, I can even tell you in my life that the times where we tried to implement something like this, it was very hard. And truthfully, and this isn't a criticism of the church, the church didn't have the vision for it. And so I was fighting tooth and nail for this, you know, your words, "big project," this idea, this vision. Leadership didn't back it. Leadership didn't understand it or wasn't in their vision. That's not a discredit to their discipleship process, the things that they were doing. Dave, we're doing it a different way. And so, yeah, you know, at the end of it, it was, "Okay, leadership doesn't see it, so we're gonna move on." And so it's kind of understanding, "Hey, we want to align." And we've always said this: church online needs to align to what's happening physical. Needs the complement is to work together. Mission and vision doesn't change whether physical or online. Strategy may adjust, especially in this season, but hopefully it's aligning towards working together towards it. Getting lead pastor, getting discipleship, getting your local missions, getting it. It's funny. What's in the organization when I was doing that, the micro location stuff, I was hanging out more with the global missions guy and the local missions guy than with anybody else because I was learning from them and getting them to help me in the projects more than I was anything in worship and production and even on the campus pastors, because it was just this completely different thing. So have conversations with those guys and start to wrestle with it. There's nothing wrong with the watch party in the short term, but grow and develop something, especially if you're wanting to do it long-term beyond this. Grow beyond that to have a higher expectation.

Ray, it looks like you got something. What do ya?

Keeping that in mind, what would you guys suggest would be like the bare minimum commitment that a church should be willing to be vested in this before they went for it, even in this post-COVID season? Like, so that it doesn't just become a side project because everybody's getting very anxious right now about how to reopen, about how to do what's next or whatever else. And so if you were to tell somebody, "Hey, don't do this unless you're in it for five years, ten years," what would be like the right timeframe? We would say, "Hey, don't be in on this unless you're willing to commit this long."

I just meant the clarity of that vision. I think it's fine to have a band-aid of watch parties right now. Make that clear that that's your band-aid, and don't make it to be like this huge launch that we're gonna launch these watch parties in three months from now. We're not gonna have them. But that wasn't clear upfront because that's when it becomes confusing. That's when it becomes hard to communicate to your people. So I'm not sure there needs to be a minimum commitment other than there has to be a set, clear vision for what you're about to start.

Because many churches have come and said, "We want to start watch parties," and I'll say, "Well, what happens when you come back in person?" They're like, "Oh, well, those probably go away on their own." But what happens if there becomes like a community of believers at that home site? Are we okay with them not coming back to the church because that's working? And that's where the vision becomes not clear, and then your people don't buy in and they're confused. And that's the part that's intriguing right now, right? Because a lot of people are fearful that many people will stay online, right, for the foreseeable future, that they're not going to come back no matter how hard they beg them back into their locations. And then if they have an in-between step and don't communicate that as just an in-between step, then odds are even more people feel that. That's right. The people feel comfortable there, right? Like, I would stick. I would be like, "Hey, this environment working for me, right?"

Yeah, so within this crisis became opportunity for us to cast vision. Except many of us went into like shutdown survival mode and just tried to get it going rather than like taking a breath and then regrouping and casting a vision throughout this time period. And we've run the danger of now having online plus microsite plus still trying to get everybody to come back to the building, and it's just this never-ending cycle of disappointment within every single realm.

Yeah, I was gonna say something similar to Tyler, especially on the watch party type approach and all that. I think you communicate, "This is an experiment. We're gonna try this. We don't know how long," but I think you have to communicate it the way Tyler said. If you come out like it is your church's lifeline for the next ten years and you get a bunch of people connected to it and then you cut it off in three months, like, you're going to have a serious problem on your hands.

We've had people say, "Hey, I love this church at home thing. I didn't realize how much I can get done on a Sunday morning." I mean, we know there are some people that no matter what amount of begging we do may not come back to an in-person gathering for the foreseeable future. So we have to try to prepare for that and understand that.

Worded maybe a little too harshly on some of this stuff. I love pastors with all my heart. I believe that some of my future is going to be training and equipping pastors. I love them. I really do. But yet sometimes I don't think we know what a disciple is, and then we run out and chase and throw a bunch of stuff at the wall, spaghetti noodles and darts, and throw whatever we can and hope something sticks. And we have no idea what we're aiming at. We don't even know when we've produced it, and yet we demand immediate results. We don't even know if we hit that. We don't even know if we've hit the result because we don't know what it looks like.

Most pastors, in most cases, have been trained up at a Bible college or seminary, and they've got a certain level of head knowledge, but they've not even been discipled themselves to the point where they can do some of this. And so from a discipleship and a disciple-making perspective, I think a lot of pastors need to slow down in this season and wrestle with, "What in the world is a disciple of Jesus? What's it look like?"

How do I even know if I've made one? I've got a lot of people coming to my church, but did I make a disciple? Like, I mean, that's a big one too. And the defining—I that goes back to Tyler's point about the vision. It's really hard to cast a clear, compelling vision for something you don't know what it looks like. And you don't know what it looks like. So there is even some more underlying work there to say, what am I trying to hit? And do I really think I can pull that off in three months? Because I throw this experiment at the wall. And even if I did, would I know I hit it or not? Like, there's a lot of foundational work I think that needs to be done. And some of it stems right from the question: what is the disciple of Jesus look like? Do I even know what this is supposed to look like coming out the other side? I don't know if we have a real good grasp on that.

Yeah, I mean, that's especially when we're evaluating pre-COVID. A successful church is the number of butts in seats. Nickels and noses—a joke that we make all the time. Hopefully we're learning something, you know, in this season. Maybe not. You know, I had a church here in South Florida tell me they had 500,000 viewers online for their Easter Sunday service—online and TV. I told them, "Wow, 500,000." Connection cards. They actually had to engage to follow up with people. They had eleven. And so, you know, the butts in seats, the viewing of your corporate worship service, and in physical or even digital, you know, the content's not changing the world. Content's not changing lives. Content needs to lead towards relational. I've had a Mark 98 church tell me the goal isn't physical. The goal isn't digital. The goal is face-to-face as soon as possible. And whether that's done virtually or physically, but it's through these relationships that we're beginning to see that. Which is why I love everything that we've been talking about here. Because at that, when we empower people and get them a disciple-making mindset and send them out, mobilize them, they are now like that front wave of faces. And they're reaching their ones, their circle of influence, either neighborhoods or affinities or whatever, towards it. I loved everything about this conversation. This has been something awesome. But unfortunately, we gotta wrap it real quick. Before we go, Tyler, thirty seconds. You're doing some interesting stuff in Church Anywhere. Tell me about the podcast. Tell me about what you're doing.

Yeah, man. So we started a podcast mostly just to compete with you. So the more the merrier. Listen, let's do this thing. No big world out there. Whoo! Yeah, we just launched a fully digital church. So a separate entity under the umbrella of First Capital ministry. So Church Anywhere is like a thing now. So I get to be the lead pastor. And you got three other staff as well—so an engagement pastor, Family Ministries pastor, and an administrator who's like been the bomb. She's helped so much with a bunch of stuff. But we're basically just documenting our journey to start a new digital church, which has been really, really fun to talk through some of the stuff that we're doing. We launched officially on the 21st of this month. So all of our content has been produced for a while. Over strategies and all that good stuff has been being worked on for a while. And I'm excited to really launch it.

That's awesome. So digital-only church from Church Anywhere. Super excited to see what he's doing. If you're not following Tyler on social and tracking with what Church Anywhere is, Church Anywhere—he's doing, you really should. Like, I think these guys are nailing it. Stand, of course, it's everything he's doing at NLCC. Which, by the way, you're the third staff person from NLCC to be on the show. We've had, of course, we've had Tom and Jake with the digital-only church. Been on here several times. And excited about what Jake's doing also is digital-only church by the Stadia. Like, we're doing a hard press on this digital-only church. We're starting cohorts in church planting processes. Our hope is to be launching digital churches by the end of the year. So if you're interested, if you're tracking with some of the stuff with Tyler, what he's doing with the house level, or J with video games, or DJ Soda or virtual reality, I mean, that's literally my job is to help people like you plant digital-only churches. That is my job title. So however I can help you, let's get together. Let's talk on social media. Put a link in the show notes, and we will go from there. But hey, we're gonna wrap the podcast for Tyler, first and Perret. This is Jeff at the Church Digital. Thanks for jumping on here, and we'll see you next time on the show. You all have a good day.