BETA10: Making the Most of a Phygital Easter

Hey, welcome to The Beta Show, episode 10 here. Excited to join you guys on a Thursday. We typically do this Wednesday. Scheduling conflicts, hey, it happens. Be flexible with us. Thank you for that. So hey, we're bringing in The Beta Show where we answer online ministry questions. You can text them, 484-324-8724 to us. That's number four of the church if you speak telephone alphabet. And we'd love to hear from you. Hey, we brought Ray DeArmis, of course, a digital pastor at Christ Fellowship Miami, joining us once again here at The Beta Show episode. And we're bringing in Ray's boss, Ben Stapley, who's the weekend experience director at Christ Fellowship Miami. I, myself, Jeffrey, I used to work at Christ Fellowship Miami doing similar to what their jobs are now.

And so this is kind of a homecoming of sorts. And honestly, within the next time, we are gonna see how awkward we're gonna make it for Ray DeArmis because, you know, I mean, his boss is here, former. And so it's just, and we're gonna start off. Even before we get, oh, let me tease the topic here. We're gonna talk Easter. We're 80 days out till Easter. It's crazy. There's so much political unrest, so much turmoil, physical, digital, fidgetal, everything that's happening in the world today. We're 80 days out. And so we're gonna talk here with Beta 10 about how to plan Easter fidgetally, physically, and digitally. What does both of that look like? Ben Stapley, weekend experience director, is incredible in this area.

I cannot wait to learn from him on this. It's incredible stuff. So before we get there, hey, Ray, I got an issue, all right? What's up? So my mom, I'm gonna talk about my mom here on the broadcast. Ben, I want your feedback here. My mom, who is one of your online small group leaders, actually, I think she leads multiple small groups. Actually, I would say that she's probably one of the best online small group leaders, one of the best small group leaders in all of Christ Fellowship. Phenomenal, the heart that she pours into this, incredible stuff. Ray, she says she's tried to give you a Christmas gift multiple times, and you were not able and receptive to get it from her. Like, what's going on here, Ray?

I don't understand. My mom wants to give you something, and you weren't able to get it? For me, it's been about actually traveling to the office, and that's kind of the funny thing. I've been working from home more often than not that like the few times that I was headed in that I contacted Linda, I was like, hey, are you available? And she's magically out, which I'm like, oh, wow, at least she's out of the house and doing stuff. And it kills me because I'm like, I want to go over, I want to pick up this thing, and yet continually, every time, we keep missing each other. And so that's been a pain. It's been more on my part. But if nothing else, I got to tell you guys, this time, working from home has been fun, like getting to hang out with my kids and now a puppy and all this other stuff.

Jeff, do you have the said gift now? Is that what happened? I have said gift right here. Oh, you see, Linda, that's not going to work. I'll see you in person, Linda, before I see Jeff. Like that's, I never see Jeff in person. So for those of you guys who don't know, like this is Jeff and I's relationship. Like this is where it is, despite the fact that I am probably two miles from his house right now. But yeah, this is like the extent of like the time that we see each other. But yeah, Linda is the best, the top small group leader, not just in CF, but because she started underneath Jeff and she's been doing this since now. She's an innovator. She's done such incredible work. And so Linda, thank you so much.

You're incredible. You're awesome. I value you so much. And so thank you for continually being great. So since you don't care enough to even pick up this package from my mother, I'm going to go ahead and open it here live I am on the internet in this broadcast here and let's just show it off. I want to see it. So hey, Ray, you would have gotten an incredible, an incredible Mandalorian hat. I mean, this is literally like Mando on your head, bro. That's still mine. That's still mine. I'm coming to claim that. I'm not sure. I'm coming to claim that, Jeffrey. But listen, it doesn't stop there. The level of rejection on my mother here. Check this out. I'm not going to put it on. Maybe I'll put it on.

A Mandalorian mask. I'm coming to claim it. You don't buy this in a store, Ray. My mom personally made this. This stitching is from my mother to you. And you didn't take the time, bro. You didn't care enough. All right. I'm coming for it. Ben Stapley, Weekend Experience Director, Christ Fellowship Miami. What are your thoughts and Ray's boss thoughts? We're five minutes in. I just want to hear you keep on throwing Ray under the bus. This is great. I'm here for this content. I think the internet is here for this content. Man, you know, I'm feeling canceled right now. I'm feeling censored. This is a moment where I feel like, you know, where I feel like Jeff as a liberal is coming after me. Oh, I'm going to stop you there.

I'm going to stop you there. This is, you're either getting the viewership now, Jeff, or you're losing it. I'm not sure which way your audience is going. I'm not scared. Go ahead. I don't know. I was going to say it's great to be here. I was going to say with the three amigos. But at this point, it's kind of feeling more Three Musketeers. Either way, it's great to be here with you guys. Let's talk about Easter, right? 80 days left. 80 days left. And so, yeah, I'd love to talk about that and give some context, how to do that well in relationship to physically, but more importantly, your audience, right? How to do that digitally. I think there's some great next steps there to help. Be very practical with your audience to make sure that's a win.

Like we already, you know, call it out, right? 80 days left. So the first thing, just some overview things, would be start the planning now. You don't have much time. This hits us every year, right? We usually plan like six months to plan Christmas and then six weeks to plan Easter. But it's just because of where it falls on the calendar. So start now. You've been called out. You got 80 days. You can do this. Start your planning. The second, like two big overarching things I'd say in terms of the planning is make sure there's a strong action step. And so this is like for the people, the pastors who are leading or the people who are leading up to the pastors. What is the next step? What is the call to action?

What am I supposed to do with this message? So make sure that you have, you got everybody in the room, biggest service of the year. What are you wanting them to do? And if you're looking for a strong action step, baptism is always a great way to go. You see a lot of churches do this again and again. You could do baptism, spontaneous baptisms that day. Or for the people who have accepted Christ saying, hey, sign up for baptism. That's your next step. We're doing that next week or next month or whatever it is. Just make sure you call people to an action because our life of faith is continually moving forward. So what is that next step? And then the next, yeah, yeah. Let's unpack a little bit here.

Like spontane, first off, my mom just texted LOL. So Ray, I think you saw much love there. Literally, that did just happen. But unpack here, Ben. Talk to me a little bit about like a spontaneous baptism. What would that, I haven't, honestly, I've not done a lot of those in my life. What's a spontaneous baptism service look like? In context. Big words, prep. So you need to be prepped for that. So. Spontaneously prepping. Prepping spontaneously. You plan and then God provides. If you don't plan, you're going to, I don't know if he's going to miraculously bring a baptismal tank into your sanctuary, you know, just manifested it or nothing. Maybe you will. Maybe, you know. But I would say you plan so that God can provide.

So you have everything lined up for those who want to be baptized that day. So it's the tank's ready. The shirts are ready. The changing room is ready. You've given yourself time in the service or in between services to handle that as well. You have the people who are going to be vetting some of those stories. And probably vetting is not the right word. But hearing out those stories to affirm that, first of all, they understand the life choice that they're making and the step of faith and demonstration. And that if they don't, they kind of counsel those people through that and say, you know, I don't necessarily, I'm not sure you fully understand what this is. Can we keep talking? Instead of putting someone who gets the fever of the moment, taking a step that they don't actually believe in just because the momentum of the room took hold of them.

So that's, those are some basic ways to handle a spontaneous baptism moving forward. Yeah. I've got Eric Kidwell throwing a comment right here. Plantaneously, plantaneous equals planned and spontaneous. Make room for God to move. Love it. The great feedback, Eric. Hey, I've seen one, I want to tell the story real quick. I've seen one spontaneous baptism service at a church that I was at. They had like, I want to say 25 people get baptized. And I was floored at what happened. I went up to the executive pastor. I was like, this is incredible. All these people came forward to get baptized. Like, I've never seen this in a spontaneous environment. And he said, Jeff, here's the secret. And I'll tell this to you.

Maybe this is good. Maybe this is bad. You figure out if it's good for your church. He said, out of the three services, Jeff, we had a ringer in every service. We had one person that was already set that needed to get baptized. And we told him, hey, when it's time, when the pastor calls y'all forward to get baptized, go. But by going, by being that first person to start, you're setting the trend and others will follow suit. And so in every one of those services, multiple people ran forward to get baptized to publicly proclaim what God had done. And it was because somebody set the pace, set that standard for that. And it's always stuck with me, that story about how modeling and doing that in digital spaces is awesome.

Yeah, we used to do this at a church I was at before up in New Jersey, Liquid Church. And we would do it. And there was one Sunday. It was so powerful that we kept on having to take the time in between services to keep baptizing. And we had to tell people, we're full. Like, we actually need to start the next service. So we have to stop doing this. But you can get baptized at the end of the next service. We kept on doing that to the end of the third service. And it was like 20 minutes over. And we told all of our guests who weren't coming for a 90-minute experience or two-hour experience. We said, hey, you know what? We're going to officially end the service. We have more baptisms we're going to do.

You can feel free to leave. We know you've got lunch plans, et cetera, et cetera. Thanks so much. God bless. We'll see you next week. And everyone just sat there. And no, we're here for this. We're here for this. And so, again, God will take hold of it and do something powerful. But there is some ownership on our end in terms of being planned, like Eric said. Keeping that in mind, Ben, would you encourage people to have some of those facilities ready outside of the room because of that? Because I know that, like, the spontaneous baptisms in the room, it's very popular. It's very cool. But especially Easter Sunday, you've got to make sure you're on time. You've got those first-time guests that you're thinking of.

And so, there's not as much space to run over, even for a spiritual moment. And we're talking about, like, plantaneous kind of thing. And so, how would you encourage churches to navigate some of that stuff? Fidgetal, plantaneous. You guys love the hybrid words here. If space allows, yeah, do it and have it planned for somewhere else. The lobby space sometimes works nice because your service can still go on. But then that people in the lobby can see it and it can experience some energy. It's not tucked away in the nursery or even outside. If you have warmer weather like Miami, people are seeing that as they're coming in. Like, you're seeing people being baptized from the last service as you're entering into the new service.

Talk about priming the pump. Man, that's exciting. What was that all about? I want to participate. Yep. And then I would even encourage churches, as much as possible, if you can, set up a live stream of that that day. Because even if it's, like, right on the front page of your website or something along those lines, because if somebody's going to get baptized the day of, but they want a family member to be part of it, if you give them a place to go or a place to share it, just imagine how much more they'll appreciate that. So if it's right on the front of your website, you know, in our case, if it's CFMiami.org or if it's on your social media and you just tell them, hey, look, go to the YouTube account or go to their Instagram account and you can watch it happening live, that would be big because then it becomes a shareable experience that people can have real time, even if they're not in the building.

Yeah. I'm going to hit some of those digital assets as well. Ray, that's super helpful. I know that you guys are all about that here on the site in this show. So two quick things before I jump to that is, hey, plan that action step and then plan your callback series or what your next thing you want people to come back for. So you get everybody in the room and I've done this as a creative and we plan all of our energy on Easter and then the what's happening next is a want-want. Nobody knows. You didn't spend any effort on it. It isn't attractional for a first-time guest. They don't know what's in it for them and how it's going to hit a felt need of theirs. And it's like, oh, yeah, come back and we're studying Job.

Okay, I thought it was pronounced Job, but sure, I'll come back and hear more about Job. Sure. Don't do that. The economy is rough. We need to read more about jobs in the Bible. It's a financial series. I got it. Sure. I try to say plan 50-50, 50 for that holiday service and then 50% of your energy in terms of whatever that callback is because that's where you really see prolonged growth and not just a spike in attendance, right? But a sustained attendance because people are getting plugged in beyond that holiday service. And then some physical – I think the only physical suggestion I had was a photo booth, which then lends itself to digital, right? You have a physical photo booth. People are on site.

They take a photo themselves and they share it digitally. Beyond that, there's a lot of other great digital assets. I like to say if you have – for the boomers, for your parents, create a Facebook frame that has your Easter branding on it. Get it out there a month early. They can attach that to their profile photo and then people see who you are just based upon scrolling on their social media. So that's great for the boomer, for your parent. For the millennial or for your child, a GIF on Instagram would be a great way to do that as well. You can then upload that into your stories with whatever your Easter GIF may be. If you want to see some examples, go into Instagram and type in CFMiami and you'll see some of our Christmas ones are still up there, ways that we're trying to engage people digitally with that content during the series.

And then a big one for all social media platforms is the hashtag, right? What is the hashtag that you're going to use? And make sure it's not from another church. We started to use Easter at CF until we found out that our big brother, Christ Fellowship up in West Palm, who've got about five times the size of us, had already been on that handle for that hashtag for a long time. And so when you typed it in, they showed up, which is phenomenal. We're not going to compete with them. So we'll do Easter with Christ Fellowship is the hashtag that we landed on. So find a great hashtag that's going to work for you and your church and then promote that, promote that, promote that because it increases shareability.

And then another digital tool, I'm trying to be practical here, Jeff, and give you guys lots of them, is digital tools. Ray does this incredible at Christ Fellowship is helping empower people being digital evangelists. So what are the tools that they need and they can have to share what's going on? We actually have a whole website created for it, cfmiami.org slash share, that all those tools, all those digital invites are there for a series. We do it per series. But even if you don't do it per series, at least do it for Easter. Make a digital invite. People can download, they can text it to a friend, and or they can post it on social media. It's a great way to mobilize your people digitally during the season to spread the word and to get more people coming to church, more importantly, coming to Christ.

Yep. Shout out to Stuart Putnam over at CF West Palm. That's my search online dog up there. Real quick, Ben, because I know we're talking digital. I'm going to keep pumping into that. I'm going to let Jeff ask that in a second, but there's a saying that we use that really helps promote what we do and the safety measures here physically on campus. And you've crafted this thing. You've made sure that it's regularly part of our staff culture. Can you let everybody know about it and how they can do that? Because so many people are still dealing with the questions of, hey, I want to be a first-time guest at your church. I want to come physically. I've been watching you guys digitally, but I'm afraid of virus protocol.

I'm afraid with some of that stuff. And so how do we communicate that out here at CF, and how can that help others? Yeah, I'm a good Christian, so I love alliteration. And so for us, it's being safe, spacious, and sanitized is not only what we are saying to people, so it's memorable, but it's actually what we're doing, right? So we're making sure that it's safe, that we're trying to minimize all the contacts. No hugging, no high-fiving. Everyone in masks, it's spacious. Six feet apart when we're standing, three seats apart when you're sitting. And then sanitized. We're cleaning off every tie-touched area in between services. I know a lot of churches are probably doing this kind of 10 months into the pandemic now, or almost coming on a year into the pandemic.

But in terms of using that terminology is helpful because, so a first-time guest who's not come to your church before is, I have no idea their level of cleanliness. I have no idea of their level of interest over me. So you need to communicate during this season that it is going to be, for the lead pastor, it's going to be like they're going to be nauseous, right? I've been saying this forever. Yes, you need to reemphasize this during the season because you are trying to get people who have not heard this in the past year because they've not been tuned into your church. So re-upped that communication. Great point, Ray, on that one. Awesome. I want to back up to a couple things. By the way, Eric Kidwell, let's ask this question first because we're talking about spontaneous baptisms or even baptisms in digital.

It needs to be digital. Have you guys seen baptisms work in light of lots of people doing church online? Any tips on encouraging baptisms at home, watching the baptisms, making it like how do you do this spontaneous baptism? What would that look like? Digitally, mashing words together physically, we got digitally. How do we do that digitally? What do you guys do at CF? A couple things. First of all, I'll say I want to be gracious towards how people view this sacrament within Christendom. Different churches see this differently. Some are pretty lenient with how they execute it, and some are pretty tight-fisted. There's probably a better word than tight-fisted, but probably a little more strict on how they actually execute it.

For us at Christ Fellowship, I'd say we probably lean more on the lenient side on how we do this. And for us, this is a sacrament for believers, someone who's professed faith in Christ, to be executed by a believer. And outside of those parameters, we're going for it. And so it doesn't need to be the lead pastor. It doesn't need to be someone clergy or someone with a particular title. For safety protocols, we said that's best to do someone who's in your social sphere that you have contact with. Because we don't want to bring the lead pastor over to your place. We don't know if that person has had infection recently. So find a relative that is in your social circle who is a follower of Christ.

And if you are a follower of Christ and you've got a body of water, go for it. The nice thing in Miami, we can do that year-round. A lot of other churches can't do that, but I've seen churches do that with hot tubs in the home as well. And people have been opening up. We've found new creative opportunities here. The big thing I would encourage in relationship to this is just make sure you capture it. We all know that what gets rewarded gets repeated. And so take those stories, capture those stories, show them. And beyond rewarding it, it normalizes it, right? You might be the first one. Like, this is weird. I'm in my kiddie pool in the backyard. Yeah, that is really weird. But God sees it. He blesses it.

It brings him great joy. Share that. And then we'll normalize that with other people. And again, kind of be a vanguard in this and take this new step so other people see it and be bold and do this as well in a new way during this new season. Right. And also provide a place for them to upload the content. So if you want an example of how this played out in real time for us, because last year baptism was our next step, even though we did a full-blown online service like many of you during Easter. If you go to cfmiami.org slash baptism, you'll see how we laid out an instructional video of how somebody can do an at-home baptism. And then we gave them instructions on how to upload their cell phone-taken video.

We gave them a Dropbox file that they could easily upload to. So for us, it was Google Drive so that we could take that content. And then we can then show it in the following week's online service so that we could celebrate it as a whole with the rest of the congregation. And it was a great next step. And then we've just continued it so that if folks still want to do that from home, we still have baptism physically, but you can also do it at home and submit it digitally. Awesome. Yeah. Love that. Love that baptism, the uploading. I remember there was when I was digital pastor there, there was a guy that was baptizing someone. We were in Miami, it was online and it was in a small apartment in New York City.

Like I'm talking uber small apartment, like they're baptizing somebody in a bathtub and they baptized towards the nozzle instead of away from the nozzle. And I'm not saying it was like an inch away from like this guy's head getting clocked by the nozzle. Everybody's watching, it's freaking out, the tension provided. And it was awesome. Just even the response, people seeing that, half the people were like, you can't do that. They got to get baptized in a church. The other half of the people, that's the coolest thing I've ever seen. We're baptizing people in another city, in another state, you know, in a bathtub. This is incredible. So celebrate those stories because I'm sure it'll cause a lot of conversations even within your organization afterwards.

Hey, I want to pull another thread here, Ben. We're talking about these, and both you, Ray, we're talking about this website, you know, that you would share. It's cfmiami.org slash share. So here's the tension. Your multiple campuses, your multi-site church, 567, whatever the magic number is. I know it's changing because of COVID. So this is what you are, multi-site campuses and online. Do you communicate physical only? Do you visit all of the campuses? Do you communicate online times as well? Do you, like, what's the, where are even like digital invites that are created? Are you listing physical times with online times separate? How many online services are you doing this Easter compared to physical?

Like, just kind of maybe unpack a little bit what that looks like. Great question. We currently do that. We currently create the invites based upon our campuses with online attached to all that. So we're finding that, again, people have affinity to their campuses. And so we've made special ones for each of our campuses in particular. And then, but coupled with that is, hey, I don't know how, I don't know how you are attending at your campus. You may, you know, attend the Redland campus or you may attend online. So both of those are on there in particular. That also just really helps play up the fact that we are one church at many locations, just allowing those campuses to feel like their own thing.

And then, you know, call that out. Whenever you have a multi-site church, you have your, you usually have your broadcast campus. And then you have your other campuses, which can make the big brother, little brother syndrome feel real. And so for us to do, to help avoid that, we make particular invite cards, which is fairly easy. It's cut and paste. We change the title. But then it lets, really lets that campus feel like, hey, we are our own thing. We are acknowledged uniquely. And we're not just absorbed into the borg of the whole organization. We are still our particular campus. Yay. And that really gives a lot of ownership there. That's true. Yeah. And it's a big deal just to make sure and arm our people with the invites.

You know, so often our folks have to come to church to pick up an invite. When you think of physical invites, with digital invites, they can get them wherever they're at. They're accessible. And especially in a time where somebody is not necessarily going to want to pass a piece of paper to somebody else, especially somebody they don't know. But they will text something to them. And it has far greater reach digitally than it does physically. And then it helps save on cost, too. I mean, for those of you churches that you take a look at the cost of printing and you think about all that, really, your folks have a lot more capabilities by posting something in their Instagram stories that will guaranteed get viewed by hundreds of people as opposed to the limitations of one physical invite.

And so the reach that we can have by giving our folks the option to share things digitally, it's just in mass. It's huge. It's awesome. But the biggest thing is educating your people on how to be digital evangelists and making sure that they're aware that the tools exist and how to get there. So creating a simple tool like share just gives us that capability. And our job then is to make sure that it's fresh as much as possible. Yeah. And so just even to reiterate, you guys keep that share site, that share language, that page, landing page. That's 24-7, 365. You just refresh it with the current series. That's golden. Because now you're building that shareability culture within your church. Just go there, grab the resources, connect with it.

You know, and it's interesting. You know, even Barna was talking about how the ability for individuals to invite, to bring into services. If our services are going to have lasting impact to people who are called to Christ, it's going to be through people that are bringing them along into it. It's not, as a standalone, people called to Christ aren't interested in church services. They're not interested online or physical. But having a friend in that process, a relationship, bringing it along has far more better value towards it. And so creating that share culture, like what they're doing here, is golden long-term. So, hey, this has been a great conversation. And we can sit here and talk about how good Ray's Mandalorian hat looks on me at a later time.

But, hey, so maybe even just as we're landing the plane here, Ben, any closing thoughts? Yeah, two. I knew we wouldn't be able to get all the content we wanted into this short conversation. So I provided additional free resources at planeaster.com. If you guys visit that now, Plan Easter, it's not hidden behind a paywall or even an email sign-up. Just free. And I believe on that list of resources, there may even be a reference to the digital church. So visit that, planeaster.com. And then the last thing I like to say is try to – we've talked about planning and promoting Easter. Don't forget to pray over Easter. And I don't think this needs to be a third, a third, a third in terms of your times.

But I will say this. In terms of what gets kind of neglected in how I do Easter is usually that last one, the prayer. And so we can do all our cool online digital promoting and planning for a great digital experience. But are we praying over that digitally as well? And if not, we're not going to see the blessing that we want from God. And so that's my last challenge for all the incredible church leaders listening right now. That's good. Ben, can I – because you're so good about that every year. You tell us to pray, to plan. And I'm sorry, what was the last P? Like I'm slipping right now. It was pray, plan, promote, and pray. Yeah. For me, can we personalize Easter as well? Because I feel like as a church leader so often, I think about just sharing the invite on my social.

But personalizing in the sense of, man, who is that one individual in my family, in my life that I'm going to invite as well? I think so often as church staff, we think, man, let's resource the people and let them go. But not even think about personalizing it in the sense of, man, my neighbor, my friend, that person that's next to me that needs to know Jesus. Who am I bringing with me as well? Yeah. Awesome. So, hey, we're going to – I love that in real time. Plan, promote, personalize, and pray. So, hey, audience out there, thanks for joining in and jumping here on another beta show here with the Church Digital. By the way, hey, just in closing, Stadia is launching another set of digital learning communities here in 2021.

For more information on that, swing over. I'm totally making up words here. Once again, Stadia, which actually is the actual name of the organization, not a made-up word, stadiatchurchplanning.org. And, no, we're not the gaming organization of Google. I do get that a lot too. Stadiaplanning.org slash Fidgetal for more information on that there. So, hey, for Ben, for Ray, this is Jeff with the Church Digital and Stadia Church Planning. Thanks for joining us here on the show. And we'll see you next time here at the beta show. Y'all have a good day. Plantaneous. Plantaneous, y'all.