EP096: Churches That Want to be the Next Christian Netflix

Hey, episode 96 of the Church Digital Podcast powered by Stadia Church Planting. Once again, Jeff here. So in the conversations that I've had with churches in this COVID season, a lot of them are trying to figure out, "Hey, they got their weekend service, okay? We're doing it digitally. We got to figure out how to do it physically. We got to figure out how to do it at the same time." We're challenging them, "Hey, look at engagement. Don't just do reach. Look at engagement. Try to figure out how to create community, and in that community, try to connect people to Christ." Like, we're having those types of conversations. Disciplemaking, discipleship, really rich level conversations to help churches figure out how to do church not just in physical space, but we're going to be doing it in digital space, and then figure out how the two work together.

But what's interesting is there's a subsector that's really come out of this COVID season. Maybe there were a couple around, maybe there was an idea pre-COVID, but it's really kind of caught fire. Your church may be one of these. I can't tell you how many times in this COVID season I've heard a church tell me, "Hey, Jeff, yeah, we want to be the next Christian Netflix." Now, it's not like an organization or a company that's wanting to create this content. It's legitimately a church that wants to create content to reach people externally, outside of the weekend service, and to the point of like being the next Christian Netflix.

Now, there's Retinal Media and there's some of those that are doing that. Set those aside because while those are speakers who are creating content for the most part aimed at the ninety-nine, what's interesting with these churches is they're creating content not necessarily aimed at the ninety-nine, but they're aimed at ones. And all of a sudden now we've got churches that are creating content to connect with ones. And if it's coupled with getting those people connected into an engagement pathway and it's a discipleship process, all of a sudden now you've got a disciple-making machine that's happening.

And part of the hook, the lead-in, that shareable content becomes the exclusive, this original content that's been created by churches. And all of a sudden this crazy idea—hey, this church wants to become the next Christian Netflix—if it's coupled with a disciple-making process, man, we got a legitimate idea here that's going to help us. It's going to help our church thrive, grow, and even multiply here in this COVID season.

And so I reached out to one of these churches that's starting in this process that wants to be the next Christian Netflix. I just wanted to see how it's going. What are they learning? What are they striving for? What's the goal? What's the process? How are they connecting? And I connected with Bay Hope Church here in Florida. I'm in Florida. Bay Hope Church in the Tampa area. Andy Mage is a longtime friend. He's been on the podcast for a while now. Great guy. Online pastor, digital pastor there out of Behold Church. And started talking with him on this idea of some of this original content, and he's like, "Oh, we got to grab Andres Aquino, who is one of the worship leaders—actually, he's one of the video guys on staff at Bay Hope Church." And it was like, we got to bring these guys together and have this conversation.

And what came out of this was this really rich idea of what a church that is not just creating weekend content but creating shareable content, engaging content that's meant and that's reaching ones. How effective is it to connect with those people? And how effective is it to get them into a discipleship process? Phenomenal conversation. Do not sleep at the end of this where we get to this idea of racial reconciliation and some of the stuff that they've been creating as a church. There's plenty of links in the show notes, but they've been creating aggressively, bringing together the Blacks and the Whites, coming together, trying to figure out the racial reconciliation piece of this as content. We have an opportunity not just to create and talk, but through the content, listen and engage in some of that. So phenomenal, phenomenal stuff.

So like I said, we're bringing in Andy Mage, digital pastor, Behold Church, as well as Andres Aquino, who is one of the videographers with Bay Hope Church, and myself, Jeff, of the Church Digital and Stadia Church Planting, in a conversation that I'm calling "Churches That Want to Be the Next Christian Netflix." Okay, everybody, there you go.

So on that note, actually, in all of this, like as Behold TV has been beginning and coming about, we saw, you know, our average attendance—we're three to four thousand size church, so we're not super small, we're not super big. We're kind of right there in the larger churches. That's pre-COVID, I'm assuming?

Pre-COVID numbers, pre-COVID total numbers, yeah. That's the whole thing. But we doubled in size, obviously, like every single church in the world it seems like doubled in size, and that was a conservative estimate. We started—I'm a little bit of a pessimist by nature, and I—that, my wife will tell you, is not good. But when it comes to metrics and data and stuff like that, you know, I tend to take a very conservative approach. And so we doubled, conservatively, which was great. But the numbers didn't mean anything.

And so that's when we really started having the platform discussions of how can we utilize the platform to do exactly what Andre was just saying, to reach people for the kingdom that should be leading in this time. So we started, you know, we were able to do really creative things in, you know, just from interactive worship sessions. So we would go live every day at twelve o'clock with a worship set, and sometimes it was a full band, sometimes it's just two people. Sometimes, you know, we were able to get creative, obviously, with just the cinematography aspects—cameras and lighting and sound and all that. But we were also able to get creative with the actual interactive engagement responses that were happening from wherever we were. And that part was cool.

So all of this was kind of this little pebble snowball that was rolling downhill because as it started gaining speed, we started thinking, "Okay, wait. If those people are going to talk to us during this, then what if we can talk to them during this? And then what if we can grab them in this? And what if we can grab them in this?" And so we hit Easter. We started kind of rolling that ball downhill a little bit, and that's really when Behold TV discussions started advancing because the one main reason—so Andre said that Pastor Matthew, who is our lead pastor, he was completely on board with what was happening with the vision that we were casting in terms of this platform that was going to be running twenty-four seven all the time with Bay Hope TV or with Bay Hope content, with other content that was going to help guide and provide for people.

And he basically walked into his executive director team and said, "Hey, we need to build an actual television studio. I need a whole bunch of money to build an actual television studio." Now, mind you, this is in like May of 2020, and I don't know if you guys remember May of 2020. It seems like it was both three months ago and thirty years ago. But there was a lot of financial strain at that time, and for him to go and ask for a large outflow of cash was a big deal. And there was, you know, a lot of hand-wringing, a lot of teeth grinding and stuff, obviously. He's the lead pastor, so it got done. And we have this big, beautiful, brand new television studio—literally a television studio—that we now work out of. But he saw the merit of it. So to be valued and heard by your lead pastors—great.

Out of that studio, we were able to do amazing things. We ended up, just a couple of little samples, we ended up running a virtual VBS for five hundred kids. Again, conservative estimate for five hundred kids. This was July, end of June, beginning of July. We ran a live interactive worship night right then and there. Did it from the platform, kind of did, you know, just a whole bunch of creative things with worship and teaching and all that. We've been slowly started rolling out the Bay Hope TV network of things, meaning we're rolling podcasts and we're rolling, um, all sorts of, you know, in the Tampa Bay area where we are as of what is it, September, whatever of 2020, beginning of September 2020. Schools are opening slowly, churches are opening slowly, student ministries are opening slowly. And so we're still rolling virtual student ministries out of our Bay Hope TV studios. We're rolling our virtual—we have a college campus called the Harbor on the University of South Florida campus. The University of South Florida is not open, barring a couple of little things. We are doing virtual interactive times with the Harbor as well, all based around this idea that we can provide the content for groups of people to get together in smaller locations, kind of the age-old microsite approach, except we're now taking it into smaller ministry fields instead of just, "Hey, big church." Hey, we're now doing it in every little ministry. And the coolest thing is that people are connecting all over the place.

The stories and emails and testimonies that we get from people that are connecting in houses and in small groups and just even the little anecdotes we hear from the ministry leaders—um, as they say, "Wow, I never knew this could actually work." I mean, that's both a shot in my gut because I'm like, "Guys, I've been telling you this for like a year, even pre-COVID." But then we're, you know, it's also a shot to the heart of like, "Hey, this is a good thing. This is what we're doing well. It's good."

So when you guys talk about this as a platform, are you sending people just your website to an app? Like, how is a lot of this getting to the actual people? Is this a YouTube channel? What are we talking here as far as—

So it's an all approach right now, simply because we are in the process of creating something from scratch. We are creating an app built around algorithmic—I don't know, we'd have to get our executive director Zach on here to get the nerd nerd talk in there. I just give the guys the vision and they kind of go do the thing, and then it comes back and then it works.

So the app we're building is based around almost a quasi-social media with an algorithm-driven video approach. Then we are marrying that into a web portal, so everything is tied into the same database, but it just has different flavors whether you're on desktop or mobile, whether you're on an iPad, whether you're on Android, whatever you're on. We are going to have those different expressions for people to actually get involved with Behold TV. And then we're actually putting hooks into it to drive people back into the app so that people understand that they're actually—you know, the biggest thing that drives people back to the Facebook app is that little red number at the upper right-hand corner of the icon because they know that somebody liked their post or did anything. And one of the most infuriating things is when you click on that Facebook ad or that Facebook app and you go to your notifications and it's literally just, "Hey, it's so-and-so's birthday." Cool. But Facebook did what it wanted you to do. It got you to open the app to look at the thing. That's what we want. We're not going to be sending you junk.

Notifications like that, but we want people to know that there are other people in the church that they can connect with through this lens of the Bay Hope TV content. So the content is just sort of the vehicle, you know? We're just kind of providing something and then letting the actual connection and discipleship happen through that.

What kind of programming and content are you guys picturing for this? Maybe right now, like, so you said virtual VBS and student ministry online. That's pretty cool because right here Bay Hope TV, I automatically go to, "Oh man, they're going to make like their own version of Charleston Chews or something like that."

Yeah, well, it's funny. It's funny you say that, and this is—I don't think there's any—well, whatever. If you guys have ever seen, um, like Drunk History on, and I know we're not supposed to talk about Drunk History, but like the Drunk History stuff, we're actually gearing up some stuff to shoot for Christmas. Um, almost like kid Drunk History. So we're not gonna get kids drunk, so anybody listening, but we're gonna do, you know, retellings of that. And then we're gonna do like—so this is just Christmas 2020. Um, I think Andre had a really good idea of like doing a shot-for-shot remake of the Home Alone dance party. Um, and you know, doing just fun interactive things that are going to draw people in into the platform and into that. Um, so yes, there is a little bit of us generating content that is sitcomy in nature and acting and, you know, fictional in nature. But then there's also, you know, real life and teaching and the things that are, you know, driven by that are driven for church members.

That's fascinating. So tell me how—let's just be practical. By the way, I can probably tell you half a dozen churches right now that I've had conversations with that are thinking the same thing. Like they want to be the Christian version of Netflix. That's been a phrase that I've heard a lot.

Yeah, and so there are churches that are wrestling with this. And so like I'm hearing this kind of more aggressive stance. And then I'm hearing questions like, "Okay, so you want to create—you want to recreate the dance party from Home Alone. How is that going to help people grow closer to God? How is that going to create a disciple maker? How's that work into our discipleship pathway?" Like, kind of walk me through a little here, maybe on the practical side, like how some of this really fits into the overall plan of what the church is wanting to do.

Yeah, for us, it's those hooks. The fun hooks like that are—I say hooks, but it's this. It's the age-old tactic of let's make people smile, let's make people laugh, and let's get them using the app. Let's get them using the platform. Let's get them actually plugged into what—um, the behind, or not even what the next layer looks like, which is teaching, which is practical engagement things like groups, small groups, Alpha groups, things like that, things that are actually going to provide value to people. Um, and that's our—that's our hope and that's our kind of drive with that. Um, plus we just like to exercise our creative legs every once in a while. Andre likes to just run with something every once in a while, um, which is what he's been doing with Common Ground. I mean, that's been—uh, that was—that's been an Andre-led, Andre-driven thing from the start. And you know, we're trying to be—you're right, Jeff. There are, you know, a hundred churches out there that want to do the quote-unquote Netflix style, and we don't think we're unique in that. We do think we're unique, however, in our all-in-one, all-encompassing approach. Um, and you know, if we can help a church get better at what they're doing in terms of that, if we can all learn from one another—again, looping back to what Andre said—we're all in it for the kingdom. So let's do it, man. Let's all take a piece of it and get better at it and then help each other learn about it.

Yeah, the thing that intrigues me is, yeah, I can give you a lot of churches that are interested in that. In the middle of COVID, pre-COVID, like, not a lot of people—I don't—I can't tell you another church that was really tracking this way. You guys were like, this was part of your plan. We were talking off-air even before COVID. So like, where's that vision? Where's that kind of forward-thinking mindset come from for your church?

I mean, that honestly, Pastor Matthew, our lead pastor, probably five or six years—so Bay Hope has been streaming live for ten years. Um, they were one of the first in the Tampa Bay area to be streaming live services, hiring people like Andre. So Andre, I got there a while—a year and a half before me, maybe two years before me. I've been at Bay Hope just over—well, a year and a couple months now. Um, almost a year and a half. My goodness. Um, and you know, with Pastor Matthew and kind of his vision looking in the future and saying, "Hey, Gen Z is not coming to a building. Millennials are stopping coming to buildings. So how can we reach them? Well, we go to where they're at. We're doing the Matthew 28 thing." And so his forward thinking, he planted seeds ten years ago and then started hiring around that and then gave it to a couple of people here and then at the church and then they started running with it. And then eventually they end up hiring, you know, people like Andre and people like our creative director, David Alonso, and people like the people on our worship team that are forward thinking like that. Then they hire Andre and Andre is forward thinking like that. And so then they hired this bald guy here. Um, and you know, and just to kind of start tying up a little bit of the loose ends, and then COVID hits. And then we have a team that is just able to, in a day, build a studio and pivot to, "Okay, we're gonna start—we're a television studio now." Um, it's funny. I heard on a podcast right at the beginning. Um, my brother Mike Mage actually hosts a podcast called the Healthy Dirt—Healthy, uh, Healthy Church Leadership Podcast. Excuse me, I stumbled over that. Healthy Church Growth. And he had on there, um, I can't even remember his name. He was an incredible individual, and I'll have to—I'll have to look that up and get that to you later. But the guy basically said, "Hey, uh, churches in COVID need to start thinking like television studios. We need to start broadcasting like we're television studios, keeping people plugged into the church twenty-four seven as much as possible to let them know that we're still here and we're still doing good for the world." And that's that. That's where we are. That's that was the vision that kind of happened before me and that I've just been grabbing it and taking that ball, you know, ten yards down the field.

Does it move? At least, and how have you guys kind of tested how it moves from just content to community? Because obviously it's a lot of content creation, a lot of good stuff. But some people have like growing a fan base—cool. But with church, you're actually trying to move people in a specific direction. So how's that been for you?

Uh, so so far so good. I mean, we've been—um, running Andre, I cut you off, dude. Sorry. Um, uh, we've been—that's been my job is to really take people from just the video content, um, consuming consumption side and into more of the engagement side. And that's been going well. I mean, we have, uh, now granted, it doesn't seem like a whole lot of numbers. We have fifty-four people plugged into our groups as of, uh, last month. Um, now again, it doesn't seem like a whole lot, but when you consider that we're running a thing called Alpha—Alpha's amazing. Um, shout out to Nicky Gumbel and what they did at the very beginning of COVID. Their online Alpha stuff was not not bad, but it was not good. And all of a sudden they turned on a dime and just started offering everything. And we've been running Alpha groups, and so far we've run almost two hundred people through Alpha and through our small groups and things like that because of this dumping into people. When it comes to maybe like practical ministry, and I want to like feed this into the Common Ground, some of that, but what are some other examples of content that you're creating that's engaging? Virtual VBS, cool. Kids student ministry, cool. What do you got for the forty-three-year-old bald guy with a goatee? Like, what's what other types of things or programs are you creating content? Are you creating? And that's feeding into your disciplemaking process?

Yeah, so uh, there's one thing I don't know if we can share this yet, but I'm just gonna say it anyways. I'm gonna be putting my foot in my mouth, but this morning we had a quick meeting, just like, "Hey, off the cuff," with uh, our executive director Zach. And we used to do this conference where we would, uh, it was called the Real Ideas, where we'll bring in local churches and we'll invite them directly into the church and we'll train them on different things—on sound, on tech, on ministry, you know, all that stuff. I was unfortunately never able to be a part of that, but uh, he brought it up today and he, uh, said we should—we got to kind of like put in his heart and then his head to like bring that up, but bring it up digitally and expand it more and make it better, uh, for creatives. So for someone like you, Jeff, right? The guy who may not be tech savvy, maybe, you know, or doesn't know how to get it up and running. We have these certain points and how to, like, for example, for me, uh, one of the things that one of the workshops that I'm planning on doing is how to shoot a talking head, right? A lot of churches—it's so easy. A talking head is your pastor's message, right? A video announcement, you know, anything. It could be an email that you can communicate, you know? You don't—you want to clearly communicate the message without any distractions. So setting up something simple with like three-point lighting, you know, we start from location and then from lighting, from lighting to post-production, and from post-production to delivery, right? Whether that looks like being a YouTube video, you know, what codec to export, when you need to post things on Instagram, how to post things on Instagram, how to post long videos on Instagram, how to post story videos on Instagram. So like, these are tools and resources that are going to be available for free for any church or any business, anybody that can get their hands on. And I feel like that's something that it's just gonna—it just kind of like reinforces what you know, again, like what our leadership is all about. And that stuff starts with passive methodology, and it's like impacting our community in our church and as a capital city, you know? So yeah, so we've got that creative conference coming up, which is good for churches everywhere. Uh, partners in with, like I said, our Hope Network and kind of what we've been doing to help other churches come alongside them in this time. We've got a suite of podcasts. Uh, we've got—we're rolling, we're rolling out more and more all the time. We've got, um, every and everybody and their mother has a podcast, so uh, ours stand out a little bit in that it's—uh, we're hitting—it's true. I mean, you know, um, my mom, if she was—that's what we're doing here.

Yeah, there you go. There you go. Exactly. Listen, I'm all about promoting the mom on the podcast or getting the mom to promote the podcast. Let's hit every demo we can. Um, but you know, we have—we have we have we have podcasts that are, um, just you know, average guys like myself and my brother. We just get together and talk. It's called the Weekday. Um, we've got a, uh, something that one of our pastors came to. Um, her name is Pastor Julie. She does like a five-minute guided meditation every morning, and she's got the perfect, like, voice. And we put some ambient pads behind it, and it's it's great, man. It's like that first thing in the morning, you know? We release it every day at five a.m., and she—it's just, "Hey..."

It's Pastor Julie. I'm here to like, uh, I'm here to pray with you. Let's talk to God, that type of thing. And just go, um, we have, uh, we have one that we have a podcast called Figuring It Out with a couple of our young adult dudes that are helping, um, and actually one of the ones that we're rolling out ties in with Common Ground, and it's actually going to be led by, um, my sister Melissa, who is our, um, she's one of our producers here. She leads a, um, a young adult ministry, but she is going to be leading. She's part of Common Ground.

She was one of the voices in Common Ground, um, but she's going to be leading a further deep dive into the racial tension and racial reconciliation for lack of a better term. Uh, in it's almost like a, um, I like to think of it as like those podcasts that you always hear from HBO or from, uh, television or television networks that dive into the series after the series. That's what she, that's what she's doing. And the recent, I mean, she's bringing in professors, um, she's bringing in videographers, she's bringing in all sorts of people, and she's just going and doing it and just said, "Hey, I want to know more. Now that I have watched Common Ground, now that I have been through this experience, now that I have had these conversations about race with people that are not of the same color, that did not grow up like me, I have forever been changed, and I need other people to forever be changed like I have. So let's take this journey together." So we're trying to kind of span the gamut a little bit from, you know, uh, cradle to grave type thing, and everything that we're doing at Bay Hope TV.

I love that. Before we dig into that piece, because that piece definitely intrigues me, I mean, so many, I, I'm sure that you guys have done this to countless shows that I've gone back and listened to the podcast like Watchman comes to mind, like where I've gone and listened, yeah, deep dive into the podcast post the show because I was like, "Man, I need to find out like what those creators were doing." And then even in terms of the race conversations, much like many people, that was my first learning of the Tulsa Wall Street situation. So like my eyes were open to so many things that I was like, "Man, I need to hear from the creators." And so I definitely want to get into that, but let's talk about Common Ground because this is very intriguing for me on so many levels. Because like many churches, even my church, we did like a conversation on race, and first and foremost, like I was like, "This is needed. This is important." But I'm freaked out that we're going to step on some toes unintentionally, all sorts of fears and stuff popping to mind. So why don't you tell folks exactly what you did for Common Ground and how that conversation started? Was it pre-George Floyd? Was it a poster? Like, how did all this kind of come into play?

It's something that was in my, my heart and my wife's heart. And then when all this stuff with George Floyd happened, um, you know, I was just really, really upset. Um, I was, uh, was I was disappointed, um, and how some, uh, some churches weren't doing things about it or talking about it. Um, and I could see why, you know, um, and uh, it's, it's a really, uh, touchy subject. And um, I was like, "Well, we need to talk about this. Um, like we, we are the church. We are literally the representation of God's love." Like, so one day I'm thinking, I'm like, "Why is there such a thing as like, call like, you know, the Black Church or a White Church or a Spanish Church? Why, why is that like that, you know? Is that the church supposed to be a representation of, you know, what the kingdom of God is going to look like?" And I understand demographics and all that stuff, you know, where you live in the area, but that's not an excuse for anyone to diversify their church, right? Um, you know, and and talk about these topics that are pretty, pretty hard to talk about.

So, uh, I was talking one day to one of my good friends who's actually part of the Common Ground's name is John Wilds, um, good friend of mine. I've known him for like 15 plus years. And I was just venting to him, you know, um, and he said, "Listen, like I hear you." Um, he's, he's African-American, and uh, he, he said, uh, you know, "Take all this frustration that you have and turn it into something good. You know, you have these resources, uh, available to you. You have this great, uh, leadership team that's supportive. You have, you know, the capability and the resources to do something, um, so do something." And uh, he kind of shut me up, you know, and I started praying about it. And uh, you know, with a couple more conversations with him, we, uh, kind of landed it. It was funny because I told him the idea, you know, I kind of want to get different, uh, originally was just like, "I want worship leaders to come together, different ethnicities and backgrounds, Black, White, Spanish, Asian, whatever, and I want them to worship together, and then I want them to talk about their experiences from being a Black worship leader, from being a White worship leader, and et cetera, right? I want to see how their perspective is, what can they offer during these tough times of of racial injustice and you know these wrongdoings and you know everything that's going on today in society. Um, there's a big magnifying glass on it right now, and the solution in my opinion is God, you know? It's God's love and the church. That's literally the church's mission is to show that and spread that. And I feel like, um, Common Ground was, uh, what was, was something that could only be done with God, right? Through seeking God and praying about it.

And the coolest thing, and I had no idea like it would turn into this, is that it's a great tool. Let's say if someone like Jeff, right, or even Andy, who's White, and wants to talk about, even mention yourself, these things are awkward, you know? You got to be careful what you say and stuff like that. Like, this is a great tool and resource to get your leadership around or your team around, your church team, or you, even your personal team, you know, in your business, and sit down and hear this conversation. Let the ball roll, listen to these guys talking, you know, John and Jay, Ethan and Melissa and Mike, and see how they're personally affected and how God, how they've seen God's love and grace through these tough times. And from that moment, you open up the room, you know? Let them, like, it's so funny because I would watch, and like, I would see Mike, uh, Andy's brother, he was he was pretty much hosting the questions, and like, he would feel like so, like, uncomfortable in the beginning, and you can kind of see it like in the videos. Like, the later the videos get, the more loose you see him getting because it is hard to start off, but it's okay to talk about this stuff, man. Like, it's not something to shy away from, right? Um, it's something to be spearheaded. And if, if people would just, uh, you know, understand that, um, because it is like super sensitive to talk about, right? But if you are able to use this, you know, Common Ground as a resource or as a tool to start that conversation, I completely believe that this will bless your ministry, your personal life, your spiritual life. It, it's just gonna do all that because everybody that's on there, you know, they are, they've been leading worship for years. They've been seeking God and looking for God, and God has given them wisdom and discernment. These questions that were tough, I don't know if you got a chance to listen to the first one, but man, like, I, I wouldn't hate it to be up there. Even just, I felt like weird filming it behind the camera. I was like, "Oh man, I started sweating. I'm like, I feel sorry for Mike." But like, the stuff that God, you know, allowed to be said, um, in that moment, and you can see, you can see it. It's not just hearing it. You can see it, you know? You can see it in their face how, how, you know, maybe someone felt uncomfortable about that, but now as you, as the video gets longer or or towards the end, you see them being, uh, understanding and loving and caring and saying, "You know what? It is okay to talk about this stuff, and God wants me to take care of this problem, and I want God to be the one that guides me through this," you know? And it's, that's kind of like, kind of where it came from and like what it is turning into. Besides, you know, awesome worship leaders singing and all that good stuff, you know? And uh, but like, besides, you know, that, uh, just spiritually and and and feeding your heart, I think this, this is a great resource to, uh, get people talking in the church.

Love that. Love you. I mean, you're creating content outside of the weekend service, yeah? You're bringing people together to dialogue. You're, you're featuring a song as well as you know an open mic moment, it sounds like. And we'll include links to several of these in the show notes. We'll grab some of them and pass them along just to allow others while listening to the podcast to experience this. But it's all this is really done outside of the weekend service, and you're using it as a way to engage and connect with with people, uh, digitally. So like, this is, this is phenomenal. You've got the platform. You've got the voice. You're doing it outside of the service. You're allowing others to speak. You know, so often it's, and especially in this in this racial time, it's "Hey, church, let's, let's listen. Let's, let's learn. We don't, we don't have the answers." And even the way that you postured this, where it's, it's a learning experience where others are coming in and are given an opportunity to speak their voice, and through that we're discovering the common ground, like, this is, this is a beautiful, beautiful thing. Like, tell me how, tell me some stories. Tell me some, some practical, like, how did this affect your church? What, how did this kind of move some, even racial reconciliation among your church over at Bay Hope?

So I was, I was producing, which is just a fancy term for just making sure that nobody runs away and making sure that everybody was on time. Hey, whatever. And uh, the coolest thing for me was that I got to, as the producer, I got to take the 30,000 foot view and watch and kind of, uh, guide conversations and guide hosting and guide, not really shots. That was Andre's thing. But um, my sister, one of the reasons that she's starting her podcast, was the same reason that I started this by saying, "I'm the resident White guy." Because we, and my brother says it in one of the, one of the questions. So the way it was shot was we asked questions up front, and there was about four or five hours, yeah, it was about, well, about three and a half, four hours of just dialogue. And we came up with a bunch of questions and just started firing them off. And then we took a break for lunch, and then we started to worship. They started to worship together, and you could tell in the worship set that everyone was really close. But it was because of the fact that like we were saying, "I, as a middle class White American growing up in suburbia, I never had a lot of those, uh, things that, uh, Jay, one of the African-American worship leaders, or John, one of the African-American worship leaders, or Ethan, who is a White guy but grew up with a bunch of African-American worship leaders and just never really knew the difference, uh, I didn't have any of those experiences." And so listening to just these, these three guys just start talking, you could watch as myself and my brother and my sister we all just kind of went, "Wait, what? Like, what's going on here?" And the, the amount of barrier that broke in just us was fantastic. But the amount of barrier that has broke in the conversation that has happened around it in, uh, you know, even on YouTube and in Instagram and even just in our like chat hosting platforms when we're live somewhere has been phenomenal. And we've only put one, well, we've got another one coming out next week. We've only put maybe a fifth of the conversation out. We've only really, we've only scratched the surface. And I think one of the guiding...

Factors for all of it was we want to make sure that we're not just putting content out to put content out because anyone could make a cool video and put some good music out. Andre really helped spearhead the fact that at the end of this we were going to ask people how can you do something about this. And the very last question is what can we do? And that's kind of we need to get to that zenith. Like we're on the way there. Like we're taking this journey with our congregation, but at the end of it we want people to be asking and answering that question themselves. What can I do personally where I'm at?

How much of this is scripted in that sense? And I don't mean this to make it seem like any of it's inauthentic, and I'm glad that you threw up the big burger. But even like in terms of the action steps, like how much do you guys know ahead of time? All right, this is the direction we're headed and this is exactly what we're gonna give them at the end to move them in a specific direction? Or was it none of that? None of that at all?

That was a lot of planning. Yeah, so prior to the shoot, you know, we met one time with John and Andy and our executive team and our creative director to kind of just talk about the idea. And through that conversation there was a lot of questions. A lot of questions like, just for how is it gonna impact people? How's this, this and that? So like we just went in like the cool thing about working here is that there's a lot of different perspective. You're like, oh man, I don't even think about that. Like what is it? What really is this for? Like or like what, you know, like there's like these not processes, but there's this like these elements that just up the value of what your idea you think it is. Oh, I have this great idea and then this team takes it and just explodes it, makes it to something better.

So we had that initial idea kind of pitch the idea and show what it's kind of what's gonna be about, get the blessings, you know, all that good stuff. And then we had another meeting with all the worship leaders that were going to be involved. And we kind of were on the same page. This is what's going to be about. We're going to ask a couple questions. We hadn't come up with the questions yet at that time. We sent them later in another email. And we kind of said, okay, we're gonna do a worship moment. We kind of just laid out the schedule, got everybody's timeline. But besides that, it was literally we came in that morning, we had some coffee, you know, everybody got to introduce each other and say hi. And then we said, okay guys, we're rolling at ten.

And everybody just sat down in a chair and then Mike just started asking questions. And I'm telling you man, when you guys see this thing, you can see the mic in the first episode, the long, the long format one, the question one, and he is just like, uh, like dear in the headlights. Like I'm, he was like, he nothing was scripted. It was just like we're doing this. Just we're trusting in God. We've prayed about it. We had our prayer team pray about it. We had a leadership and our pastors pray over it. And God just showed up how he always does, man. And that was the biggest thing, you know, is at least for me, was having faith in God that he was going to provide. And he did.

It's funny, you know, as humans we get to this mode where we think we control everything and then everything goes wrong and then you hit these walls. You hit these walls and I'm gonna run through this wall. I'm gonna run through this wall. I can run through it. But that when you're at that wall, that's when you need to stop and ask God for help and ask and pray for God as you know, pray and ask for discernment and wisdom and have faith, man. God, I'm telling you, a hundred percent of the time when stuff like that has happened in my life, God has come through.

What's been, what's been the engagement maybe outside the physical circle of influence? Like have you seen engagement, traction, other cities, maybe even other churches outside of? Yeah, I hope with within kind of like, so tell me about the reach here. So right now we have our the Instagram videos have been like popping off. Like on our on our Bay Hope Instagram, I think it's close to at least a thousand views, maybe Andy, I'm not sure. But I know the YouTube channel, the worship portion, has about three thousand plus views. And we just got a comment today from Venezuela saying how this video has blessed their life, how the worship has impacted their life. And it's just so, so amazing. Like I mean Andy could speak more into that, maybe not towards Common Ground, but we have people from all over the world watching Bay Hope on a weekly basis. Every weekend someone from outside the state or sorry, outside our country is watching and viewing and engaging with us. And we directly impact their lives.

That's something that we kind of tell our video team here, our volunteers. It's like, hey, you're doing more than just pointing a camera, you know? Someone's salvation is in your hands, you know, in that focus, gear, you know, in that zoom gear, you know, in your composition, nailing the shot and making sure that there's no distractions when Matthew's preaching on where there's a worship movement. You know, and it's amazing. I'm hoping that obviously the goal is, you know, everybody loves this video and it gets millions of views and everybody impacts their lives. But like I just want it to be seen in as many places as can be, whether that be on Facebook or Instagram or YouTube. I want it to be a tool. Like I go back to that, you know, like where like my where I thought like, oh, this is such a grandiose idea, but it was so little on for what God really has for it, you know? Like I'm telling you, this is going to be something that is a tool to spark that conversation.

So it's Ray. I'm really intrigued about that. Like how many more chapters of this are there going to be? Because this is obviously an ongoing conversation as uncomfortable as it makes people, as political as people are making it out to be, which really it shouldn't be, but it's an ongoing conversation, isn't it? And so what are you guys thinking as far as what's the next step?

Yeah, so we have a total of five episodes right, long format. So we the way we did it was we split it up because the videos are very long and people's retention span, you know, it's not that good nowadays. So we hit them with two different videos. So there's a set of ten deliverables, right? So ten total deliverables, five being the long form, like twenty minute, fifteen minute conversations, uncut, straw of them talking about the question. Each question, so there's five questions. And then the second set of deliverables, which is another five, is the worship aspect.

So we start with the worship and then we go into a little small portion of the person who led that song. So for example, the first one is Jay. He leads Graves Into Gardens. And then immediately right after that, it fades in into Melissa hosting it, saying, hey, you're about to hear Jay, a small portion about what he thinks about, you know, how to mourn in the church during these times, right? That was the first question. And so we go into a segment of Jay. He has about two, four or five minutes talking about that. And then we fade it out and then we bring it back in to Melissa again, sharing a call to action to hit the link on the bottom of the YouTube channel to go watch the full conversation.

So the goal is to bring them in with this candy, the shiny toys. Hey, look at these cool worship leaders, you know, around the area. Look how cool this video looks. But like this is like the sprinkles, right? The real good stuff is that long form conversation. That's what we want them to go see and engage with. Because I've, you know, although I'm not trying to sell it short, but because they do talk about great things in the worship sessions, but it's not long. We cut it short. We did it for one person for whoever's leading that specific song. But like each question, it is like amazing. Like everybody answers the question. Everybody has their turn of answering the question. And everybody kind of groups and everybody starts talking about it. And there's so many things on there. Like whether you're white, you're black, Spanish, it doesn't matter. Like I'm trying to tell you, like there's so many like hard points that you're like, I don't know how to talk to my team about this. I feel like I need to, but I don't know how to. Just put on that video and let, and seriously, it's gonna happen. Like there's no way you're not gonna feel like you have that grace because that's what it is, you know?

Like one of the things that John was telling me about, like as Christians, is that we need to have grace when we talk about this, when we see other people. If a white pastor is talking about racial injustice and he says something out of term, maybe that he didn't mean, I'm not supposed to go and bash him about that, you know? I got to see that through grace, you know? I have to, you know, I have to show grace with that because then where's my heart, you know? Like what does that lead me to, you know? So that's something that, uh, it's really, um, you know, awesome about this project is it's that. And I keep going back to it, I'm sorry if I do, but it's just, it's just, it's just, uh, I just think that's where God is gonna move.

You know, besides the worship stuff and the worship moments, which it's literally there was these guys were just like, go. There's all they had was a click. And you, you know, the song, if you want to extend it, you want to make it longer, you want to go into a worship moment, you go into a worship moment. We're not holding anything back. This is a beautiful time for us to do whatever God has in this room in it.

When we were, and Andy, you know, speaking to this morning as well, when we were in that moment worshiping, there was times where I was just like, man, I feel like strongholds are being broken right now, you know? Like it was just such a movement of God and the Holy Spirit and just God's love. It was, it was all there, man. It was a crazy day, very exhausting. But you know what we got from that and how God is moving through these, you know, this project is going to be amazing.

And not only that, there's a continuation aspect to it too where we want to loop back after we get all this stuff out there. We want to loop back maybe six months from now with everybody and add on and continue to ask because, you know, even in the time that we've only published one of these, because, you know, it's a mountain of work to try to publish something that's very large, anybody listen to this probably knows that, but even in that, like we've had Jacob Blake and then we've had all of the Kenosha, Wisconsin stuff and then we've had all the Rochester stuff, you know? Every all of these topics on race keep popping up that we need to talk about because as the church, we are the ones that are called to heal. And we're not going to heal if we continually have this, um, my sister calls it an accent. We all have this accent as white America. We have an accent in our church and we were born into with this accent. And that's the accent we speak. And we just expect everybody else to understand it. And when people don't understand it, we call them weird. And that's unfortunately what's happening.

And so Common Ground is designed to, you know, yes, it's not the Waco, the Waco coffee house. It is us trying, really trying to bring common ground into the kingdom. And I think that's great for your community, for your specific community to hear them, to see their pastors, to see their church staff engaging in this kind of way because then it kind of takes down the walls of.

The politics, the celebrities, everybody else just kind of get into it because now, you know, the people who are engaging in these conversations, now it becomes really, really different when it's like, "Oh wait a minute, I know this person by name and this is how they feel or this is how it's causing them to feel, you know, the hurt and the pain that they've gone through in their life," et cetera. It kind of takes all that apart versus, "Man, I'm seeing this through a newscaster's eyes," versus, "I'm seeing this in terms of people I know," and I think that's just really helpful.

But before we kind of conclude, I also kind of wanted to hit on you guys talked about a deep dive into like post. You talked about like a deep dive podcast post all of that. Um, kind of go into it a little bit more in terms of who's being invited to talking to this thing. I have professors and that kind of intrigues me in some kind of way. Like, who else is being invited into this thing? Is it just Christians, non-Christians, who else is allowed?

Yeah, so the professor, she is, as far as we know, the one that my sister has talked to. So I keep talking my sister, my sister is Melissa Miner. She's the experience director here. She's one of our producers here. Um, right, she's amazing. Yeah, and she was, she's um, one of the people in the actual Common Ground video and she's, she's actually, I think, in the second one. But she, like I said, she was changed, like shook to the core by everything that was happening because she, like me, grew up in the same household as me and didn't have any of these experiences. And so she wanted to further that. And her deep dive is her literally seeking out people of a different, not even necessarily color, although color has a different, a very large part of it, but a different background than her. And she is literally knocking on doors, writing, I mean, not in COVID times, but not sending emails and DMs and Facebook messages and things, trying to get people that are not believers and that may be believers, but really to further the conversation.

She's kind of just, if you know anything about my sister, you would know that she is a one-woman army who can wreck face and will not stop until this thing is succeeded, until she has figured out how the church can actually help and in what context the church can actually help. Um, and she's doing that in through the lens of, "Hey, we did this Common Ground thing." Um, she, that's how she's really opening up the door to these conversations with people. She's sending him a link saying, "Hey, just want to want to get your advice on this. If I hear back from you, great. If I don't hear back from you, great." The people she has heard back from, she's all in.

Um, I do know, so like I said, professors, she's talking to. She's going to bring on all of the other worship leaders again just as like a recap, kind of a, "Hey, how's the last three or four months been for you?" Um, I do know that she's reaching out to churches. So she was in a band, um, a band called Belarv that toured all around the country, all around the world, really. But um, so she made a lot of contacts around the country in the music world. And um, as part of that, she's reaching out through those contacts. And so she's reaching out all through the country to people throughout the music world and the music industry, trying to just draw people in because the core of all this, like Andre said, this is a tool for people to really start to bring healing. Um, and that's that's exactly what they hope TV is trying to do is just be resources for people.

Yeah, I love this idea of of creating these resources, of facilitating these conversations, of taking the posture of a learner, of of listening in the season to um the the despair, the situation that that is his race here in America. It's sad to say, I I don't I don't think this is going to be over in any time soon. And so continuing that conversation, revisit it, changing an individual, a person at a time, is a phenomenal challenge. And so thankful for you guys uh through Bay Hope and now through this platform, Bay Hope TV, uh even just taking those steps uh towards doing that. It's that's an awesome, awesome thing.

And so one of the questions that I get from from churches that are are one interested in doing this whole like become the Christian Netflix type of thing is, "How do I staff this? How do I grow this? How do I test this to see if I even like the idea and then expand?" I mean, I would love maybe some feedback, maybe straight, maybe it's both of you, but just like, how did you start? What did like the first couple rounds of it look like? And then how are you growing it? Maybe where are you expecting to go? Staff, org chart, creative team, types of videos. Like, just kind of tell me that genesis story here a little bit of of uh Bay Hope TV.

Yeah, I think uh you know I can touch on it a little bit, but I think Andy has a better grip on this subject. I I can probably be a pretty good example. Uh when I first started working here, it was just pretty much me. Um, me and Zach. Zach at the time was the creative director. And uh we really kind of we kind of had a calm scene of communication teams and that creative team, but it really wasn't um as cohesive and uh in a door machine as it is today. But uh you know, I think something that uh you have to be is persistent. Um, I am very persistent when it comes to uh doing things good for God. Um, and and that's talking to leadership, uh planting seeds. And I think the most important thing is just prayer, seeking God for that. Um, you know, that's kind of like a 40,000-foot view. And since then, God has blessed us tremendously. We were able to bring in uh Andy, who has been a tremendous like blessing for us. Uh keeps us on top of things, you know. He comes up with great ideas, and uh and he's just a great pastor. So um anyways, since then we've kind of restructured um kind of how we work and as a unit, you know, kind of the whole org chart thing. Um, the cool thing is that we kind of don't focus on that too much here. Um, titles and positions and all that stuff. That that stuff, you you can get in the weeds with that stuff, you know. Uh you know, your pride gets in the way, or or or uh you know, people become ill will towards certain individuals. We don't see like we're a team. Um, and our goal is to you know expand the kingdom of God, you know, our pastor's vision and mission is 30 by 30, you know, 30,000 disciples by 2030. That is a huge like ask, and that's what God has given him, and that's with faith and and and determination, you know. Hopefully we're able to reach that goal and honor God in that way. Um, so I guess basically that's kind of where I stand on that subject or in that time. Andy can definitely speak more into other things about that.

So yeah, the uh the in terms of just org chart and things like that, I mean, you obviously need like understood support from your leadership, but really you need to have producer. And I never really, I never really realized that the necessity of a good producer until I kind of stepped stepped into that role just to keep the trains running on time. You obviously gonna need videographer at least one, if not two, um just to handle the editing load. Uh the thing that they don't tell you is that you can shoot until the cows come home, but if you can't do the hard work of editing and actually getting it, you know, getting your pipeline greased, you're out of it. And so again, that's where your producer comes in. So my role ends up being, as even as digital pastor, I've turned more to into digital producer whereby I am literally just kind of opening the pipeline, so letting Andre, I'm you know, I'm cutting and doing some editing, light editing and light cutting, um but letting Andre and kind of our our uh our other videographer take care of the actual heavy lifting of editing. I'm simply the guy that's just getting stuff out the door, getting it, because you know, it's not easy to get it onto YouTube and into your other platform. Somebody doing the SEO work, you need it. So that's my job, so get your producer, get kind of your creative lead as well, and then you can filter in with two to three other either videographers or communications people, something along those lines that will really, really help.

It would almost behoove any church that's trying to do this to have some somebody that is at least mostly skilled in um social media. Uh and by social media, I mean not just posting on Facebook, but how the nitty-gritty of all of it works. Um, just so you're not spinning your wheels. We kind of find we were spinning our wheels a little bit until we re-tasked like Andre said. We're kind of a well-oiled machine now. We re-tasked basically our creative director with, "Hey, you're the, you're now our social media guy." That's awesome. Love that for Andy, uh for Dre, for Ray. Hey, let that rhyme. That's cute.

This is Jeff with the Church Digital, otherwise known as Grumpy White Guy, evidently through the podcast. Thanks for being here on the show. We'll see you next time here at the pod. You have a good day.