BETA21: The Future of Physical Church Services Starts Today (Clubhouse Edition)

Hey, we're going to get you to that podcast in one second, but before we get there, I, Jeff Reed, the Church Digital, Stadia Church Planning, I wanted to have a conversation with you, churches that are out there. One of the greatest things I arguably think that I've done in my life, other than married and kids, okay, that aside, one of the greatest ministry things I've ever done is this idea of the fidgetal learning communities that we are offering through Stadia Church Planning. We want to help you. We want to help your church learn to thrive, grow, and multiply digitally, physically, as well as digitally. We've seen about 200 churches go through this already, and it's been a phenomenal result of it.

Culture is changing within these churches. They're understanding what it is to thrive. They're understanding how to grow people, how to grow their church, even in the midst of this COVID, not COVID, wherever we are in the season, and they're even starting to understand what it means to multiply in fidgetal space. There's no secret sauce to doing a digital strategy. There's no secret sauce to doing a fidgetal strategy. There's no secret sauce to making your church thrive, grow, and multiply. It takes work. I'm not going to lie, but through the framework, through the questions, through the learning communities, we connect you with churches. We give you some content. We coach you along the way to help you make the decisions that you need to make so that your church's strategy can thrive, grow, and multiply your church along the way.

This is a great opportunity for your church. We would love to have you be a part of it. For more information, check out stadiacchurchplanning.org slash fidgetal. Stadiachurchplanning.org slash fidgetal. P-H-Y-G-I-T-A-L. All right. Hey, that's it. We're going to get you back to that episode right now. Hey, my name is Jeff Reed, and I'm excited about this conversation here. The goal of what we wanted to talk about with this clubhouse conversation is really getting to the heart of what the future of physical church services could look like, or maybe what should it look like today? Now, I don't know. Maybe this is crazy thinking, and I wanted to bring some other people into the conversation, because sometimes when I get crazy, it really comes down to this.

Can I get other people to agree with me to see the way that I'm thinking, or maybe even challenge me and take me in a whole different direction? But if we're saying that COVID was an accelerator, it was basically the fast-forward button on the virtual VCR player, and it sped culture up and escalated us maybe, and from a technological standpoint, I would suggest maybe a decade away from where we were even in 2020. Like, that 12 months was almost a decade worth of tech and culture shifting. Well, if that's where we are, and we're seeing more adoption in the digital space, not saying digital. Thank you, Ben. What are we looking at in the physical space? You know, some of the services that I've attended, you know, it's felt similar.

You know, it's felt like it did in 2020, and maybe that's the way that it should be. And when I talk with churches, you know, and I say, "Hey, what's changed physically?" I hear things like, "Oh, our masks." Like, we are definitely, like, there's a culture of masks, and so our physical services, let's definitely have to deal with the obstacle of the mask." Or social distancing is a problem. And so, yeah, okay, social distancing is an issue. It is an obstacle for us, the church, to deal with. Masks is an issue for us, the church, to deal with. But I'm wondering, like, what else is happening? What else do we need to maybe consider? Where do we need to grow to, maybe to take advantage or to recognize culture has escalated?

And if we're driven by the physical church model, which does have a place even in 2021 and beyond, what do we need to do there? What do we need to start considering to adjust? And so I brought in, I started asking others, like, this question, and I was able to get just a ridiculous panel to come in and be a part of this. So I'm really excited about this. In no particular order, we've got Craig Dockery, Creative Director from Crossroads Church. Now, Craig, as I remember, was creative with the emphasis on weekend services. Is that right? Craig Dockery: Yeah, that's correct. Awesome. Now, this is, Craig, this is literally your first time on Clubhouse. So welcome for that. Craig Dockery: Hey, thank you.

You guys all have, like, way better photos. Mine looks stupid. I'm going to fix that for next time. Awesome. Yeah, I mean, you look great in the hat. So feel free to keep the hat. Kid, get that. What does the hat even say? It's really tiny on my screen. Craig Dockery: It says, it says, can't please them all. It's the truest hat I am, especially the more kids I have, you know? Awesome. And as a creative director, I think that's actually a very fitting hat to wear. Can't please them all. Absolutely. So well done. And so Craig is with Crossroads up in Cincinnati and so has been doing, you know, incredible work. And I've actually seen more experience with it digitally. Even this past week, my family, we worshipped with Crossroads online.

I can honestly say I've never been to a physical service. So interesting to see where the conversation goes. Also coming in, there's another Craig here. We've got Craig Dobson. Now Craig is an architect with the Aspen Group. So we've got a creative director and we've got an architect. The Aspen Group literally designs physical church buildings pre-COVID and doing some of that construction work or design work for churches. So Craig, maybe just tell us a little bit about what you do on a regular basis, even mid-post-COVID. Yeah, we work with churches and just try to find how we can help them use their buildings as ministry tools. And so, you know, COVID, we went into a whole series of trying to do what ifs.

What if you could do this? What if you could do this? And now we're kind of trying to gather data of like what worked, what didn't work and just trying to see out there. I mean, there's a lot of it's churches have done the full gamut from not even meeting or still not meeting to almost meeting fully. And so it's an interesting kind of mix match of things. And I'm interested to see, too, how everybody how this discussion goes, because there's a lot of questions still, I think, out there. Love it. Yeah. And this is definitely going to be a learning experience. Next up, we've got Ben Stapley, Weekend Experience Director at Christ Fellowship Miami, a good friend jumping on here. And just as a guy whose literal responsibility, the worship, the production, the creative, the communications in the physical realm, as well as carrying over into the digital realm.

If I want to talk crazy and I want to have somebody coming along and dreaming crazy with me, Ben Stapley is always on that list. So Ben, maybe even just walking into this, have you guys at Christ Fellowship, have you wrestled with much of this or like what does some of this even look like for you from the get-go? Yes. So going back into our reopening phase, we were looking to that August postponed it because Florida got a second wave of COVID cases. And then going in October, we we were trying to just execute what we were doing in the past. But we said, let's not just do what we did, but let's get the plan off the runway. And then after we do, let's continue to re-envision what it looks like because we cannot go to business, cannot go back to business as normal.

We've learned a lot of lessons in these past 12 months, and they need to be integrated for the next 12 years and beyond. And so we're still in that journey of retooling what our physical services look like. But it is a journey for us and we know we're not done it yet. Love it, love it. And wrapping up the conversation here, at least the panel is going to be John Crabtree. John is with Subsplash, I think if not the top, one of the top mobile app makers in America. And if we're talking for churches, one of the top mobile app makers designed that churches. And so Subsplash has been creating quality product for a number of years. And if we're talking, you know, some of the questions I really want to dig into is what could second screen even look like, how can we engage in digital space when we're in physical, I'm not saying the word digital Ben Stapley, but something like that.

Yeah. And so, John, man, thanks for jumping into this conversation. John Crabtree: Yeah, I'm super excited, Jeff. I, you know, the future of physical church services, and now you got this guy who works at, you know, digital technology company, but I think there's going to be some really cool things that we've seen a lot of our church partners doing or other churches out there, you know, around just to, to help connect, you know, their, their full gathering. And so, whether you want to call that digital, Jeff, I'll use that term. I know Ben has kind of prevented you from using it, but whether it's that or, or anything else. Yeah. Excited to dive in. Awesome. Love, love every second of this. This is going to be a great, I don't know if you can tell, I'm excited.

None of you can see me. Thank you very much. Clubhouse for that. Hey, so let me say a couple things up front. We are going to, we are recording this conversation. We are broadcasting this conversation live on, on social. So if you're watching this on another platform other than Clubhouse and you want to be part of the conversation, come on over in the, in the Clubhouse, follow the URL link that's on the screen and you'll get here. We are recording in here. We'll turn this into a podcast later as well. I do, the reason I love Clubhouse so much really comes down to this dialoguing, the two-way conversations, not only just among the panelists, but also getting into the people and letting some of the audience speak into it.

So I'm a big proponent of the hand raised feature that is within Clubhouse. Feel free to smash that button, raise your hand. We'll bring you up into it and let you ask questions and speak your piece and dialogue into it. I was a former talk radio host. No, I'm kidding. I wasn't talk radio, but I was a radio DJ. And so like, I just, I love talking to audience. So let's feel free to engage with that as we get later into this. Now I want to maybe, I was really struggling with how to even start this conversation. And so Craig from Crossroads, Craig Dockery, I want to start with you, sir. Now I was watching this service this past week. And if you've never watched, if anyone has never watched a Crossroads service online, it is phenomenal.

Like the amount of creativity, the amount of effort they do to create that exclusive online piece. I think you guys are starting a new sermon series. Forgive me, I'm blanking on the name, but Unbreakable. Yeah. Yeah. Unbreakable this weekend. Yeah. They're literally, they're teaching teams out in the middle of nowhere. I'm watching the two of the three teachers that rotate in. They're trying to build a tent in the middle of this like wind thing. The lead pastor is preaching, Brian Tome. He's walking in the middle of a valley and you can barely hear him because of the wind, but that's intentionally by design because that's what he's trying to emphasize and talk about. It is this uberly creative visual, I don't want to use the word masterpiece, but it was a freaking incredible service.

Now I'm curious because I even, there was jokes about trying to cook a quail and it's like, there was lots of creativity in what I'm seeing. And that was in a digital environment. What, what do things look like physically? Like the quail joke that where I'm seeing two people try to like cook a quail that's live. Like does any of this carry over? Have, have you guys ported and brought anything from these creative online environments back into the digital, into the physical space? Well, some weeks we do and some weeks, some weeks we don't. And it, we're really trying to figure it out because we've spent this entire last year mostly focused on online because there were, you know, a good six months where that was the only expression of church that we, we could really do.

And so we've taken a lot of steps there, but for example, this weekend, I don't think, I mean, the message was the same. So it's a series called Unbreakable. It's basically telling the Exodus story. And, um, I think this week was, Brian was teaching about Moses and the burning bush and, um, Moses kind of calling, you know, and, and so this week, I don't think we used any of the same pieces from the online episode because we're realizing more and more the online stuff is truly a different audience than the people who are going to walk into a building. And if we're trying to, we're trying to get at the same thing, but we have so many different mechanisms to go about it, you know, so, so online, the teachers were dropped in the middle of the desert and had to do some survival tactics.

And that was kind of a fun thing. And that, and it reinforced the teaching of like how to get out of the desert, get to the promised land, which is what we're trying to teach. And I guess the thing that we did is, you know, we called it the series called Unbreakable. So we just went really literal at sites. And I think we have seven or eight sites open right now. We have some different ones that are in various states of reopening. And one of the things we had was just that we had the, the community pastor, like the main, main guy at each site, just see like what is breakable and tried dropping things from a different, you know, different ladder heights or whatever, you know, so just literally taking the Unbreakable series language and making, kind of having a fun moment in that.

And then Brian, our senior pastor, who, whoever gives the message online will also give it typically in the rooms. And we had him in the catwalk, just throwing stuff from the catwalk to see what would break. And it also ended up being like frosted flakes. We just kind of dumped them all over the audience to kind of tell the story of mana and all that. So really totally different executions that are still meant to try and surprise and delight or engage people or get them to ask questions or build some tension, but using really different mechanisms to do it right now. And we really honestly, we're just taking it a week at a time. David Vogelpohl: So like weekly and we're, is this a different level of creativity or more intentional?

Because I mean, you were a creative church, Crossroads was a creative church before COVID. So like, is there a more intentionality, more focus, like talk, talk to me, maybe some of that creative relationship pre versus where we are now? David Vogelpohl: Well, I think the focus, the issue is that we are trying to focus in both places. And a year ago to say we can make basically a TV show every week for an online audience and, you know, specifically, we said, No way can we do that. And then six months ago, when we were making one, we're like, Yeah, but we also need you to make the thing in the room for all these different sites. We're like, I don't know how we would do that. But we've, you know, you keep you keep finding a way and you keep asking and you have really tough process conversations as well as, as well as just assigning focus to people.

We fortunately have enough, enough folks on the team that we can have, a majority of folks are either assigned to online or live within kind of the central creative team. And there's still some places where we're, we're trying to leverage both like our video team is still getting pulled in both directions. And we're trying to solve for that. But the real, the real answer is we're trying to take, take ground in both places. And we, and I think focus is the answer for that. So, David Vogelpohl: So in context of the actual service flow, what's happening, have you guys at Crossroads, have you made any, any shifts, any adjustments to, to what the, the physical service looks like format, style change, anything like what, what does this look like?

Maybe in recent months, what are you experimenting with? David Vogelpohl: Um, well, I think it varies, it varies some week by week. Like we said, I think we'll, what we're coming back down to one of the things that Brian, our senior pastor has been pushing on. He says every, you know, he starts every year and, you know, has this little solitude time with God and says, okay, I started this church 25 years ago with a group of people. And if I were to David Vogelpohl: restart this church now with the resources that I have with seven or eight or 11 buildings and this 400 staff and this amount of resources and, you know, these people or whatever, would I start a church? Heck yeah, I would. I totally would.

And so he said that given COVID and everything when his big push to us this year was, um, we, it's not a rhetorical question. It's, we are restarting. Like we've had a lot of people leave and we've had new people come. And as rooms get filled back up again, I think it's some new folks coming in again, you know? And so, uh, the big thing that we're trying to do is really, uh, one, give a little bit more leeway to the sites and say, rather than just being like, do the exact plan, you know, trying to give freedom, get everyone to think more entrepreneurially. Um, that's the whole idea of like the restarting kind of this founders mentality type thing. And, uh, and I think it's also like, we're a little more open to like playing with the liturgy, so to speak.

You know, I mean, everyone likes to think of contemporary churches like, oh, no, we do it. Cool. But it's like, no, you do two songs, you do three songs, you do community life, and then you do a message like, no, let's just chop it up and let's play with it. And so it really, we, we do feel like we're way more in experimentation mode right now than we've been. It feels like there is as tight as it is resource wise. It feels like there's a new level of freedom that we're stepping into. Yeah. Now, Brian preached, um, I want to say three, eight to 10 minutes sermons. Uh, what I saw, like it was, it was kind of even broken up in the teaching in the digital space, um, in the physical space. Is that something that you guys do as well, or is, is, does he modify his message for, for the physical environment?

Now he, uh, typically we'll go like run the whole thing all the way through. Um, it's, uh, uh, you know, but like I said, it, it, it just depends. Like we're, we're talking about for Easter this coming, this coming week. Um, he's, I think he's got like three segments of teaching for the online version, but it might be two, or it might just be one. I mean, we're playing with it and it, you know, sometimes that ends up even becoming a game time decision. We're always moving. It's way easier to move stuff around in a live environment than, than in a, you know, an online environment, you know, as far as trying to build a 30 minute episode or something like that. So yeah, it's, it definitely, it definitely shifts.

Um, and, and let's even open up to Ben Stapley would love to talk in through Christ fellowship Miami as well, as well as crossroads with, uh, with Craig. Uh, I'm just curious with the two of you, like worship wise have, have things changed within the physical space? Um, song titles, song selection, uh, number of songs length, like what are you experimenting or testing in different things, uh, with both of you musically, uh, what is this looking, uh, like for you? Um, maybe Ben, let's start with you. Sure. For us, the worship has changed in terms of adding more of it. So for, I guess an overarching principle for us that we've learned going as we've reopened is that we're trying to make our physical experiences more transcendent.

And some of you might be listening. So yeah, like that, that was always a goal, but I guess my background is, uh, non-denominational, highly attractional churches. That's where I've done ministry for the past 15 years. So frankly speaking, like almost the goal for me was to make a seamless experience where the transitions are tight and there are no distractions. And that was, that was the bar. And if you did that, that was a great service, not distracting people and having production flawless. And as we're trying to re-engage people at our physical services, we're looking at it from an advantage point of saying, why would they bother? Why would they come? Why would they drive out? If they are, if they can experience it online, what is different?

What can we provide for them? And we're pushing into that word with transcendent. So, um, where, where is that moment where they encounter God in a very profound way? I'm not saying that doesn't happen from an intellectual standpoint in a 45 minute message, but I am saying there's something unique to that corporate worship experience, which unless you have a family member who's gifted, um, with an acoustic guitar, you're not getting that at home. Me singing off key in my home is, is not that moment for me, me coming along other people in a room where we're all lifting our voices. I'm now experiencing that. And like, and it gets, it gets really granular for us. We're even like, how do, how do, how does the worship leaders back off the mic more?

And we, we actually, yeah, we got that nice line array sound system up there, but how do we actually pull that back a little bit? And so that our voices ring out a little bit more and we feel that it's not a produced experience washing over me, but that I am joined in it with my voice. Again, this is my own experience. And that's where I'm coming from. A lot of churches, a lot of traditions do this phenomenally every weekend. That is not my case. And so I'm, I'm learning this aspect, um, of Christendom and trying to apply it in my context and pushing into that transcendence with more, more worship and more corporate worship by pulling back some of those production bells and whistles. Love it as, and with Christ fellowship by doing more worship, like at a time schedule.

Cause I remember you guys used to be pretty tight, 70 minutes has something given that allows that more musical worship to be part. Yes. Or believe, believe it or not, the teaching team is on the same page and they're saying, Hey, we're going to do, we're going to do that barter. I'm going to, I'm going to pass you five, five of my minutes from my message. I'm going to give you eight, I'm going to give you 10. So we're playing around with that. Uh, we've still, because there's so many new normals are, are hosting the amount of time in which we're vision casting, helping people get integrated into the next step. All those components that hasn't gone away. We, we, we actually kind of stepped up some of that communication just because we have new people or there are new normals.

We need to spend more time on that, but if there's anything we shaved off to give more time for worship, it is from the message. Yeah. Wow. Um, uh, being involved with Christ fellowship historically, I totally understand the impact, um, uh, and the, the power of like that move. That's, that's impressive that the teaching team's willing to, to release some of that. So, uh, that's, that's an awesome example. Uh, Craig, what, what is that like worship musical worship, at least walking into this, are you guys experimenting with doing anything different? Like what's, what does this look like? Well, you know, I think I totally agree with you, Ben, and it's good to meet you. We should hang out some other time, um, versus just the club, whatever clubhouses.

Uh, you totally should, by the way, that would be awesome. Yeah. Um, so yeah, I, I totally agree with what Ben is saying in the sense of the ability to have a transcendent moment just by the fact that they're, I don't know, there's just human souls in proximity to each other. There's such an opportunity there for us just to all connect on this spiritual level with something that's far beyond what we can see. And I, you know, I think we're, we're experimenting with it. Uh, it's, it's tough because we're just, we're just like short on volunteers sometimes, you know? So just, I know that like the core thing is you get a killer band who is there to worship. And, um, and that's, that is the thing beyond lighting or any of the other productions.

And so we're continuing to just try and push and have healthy worship cultures within kind of the volunteers that we have. I've also seen, you know, like to the point I was saying, uh, like the founder's mentality of giving, uh, given like the, the campus pastors a little bit more of a role in it. You know, I'm, I'm always looking at this from like, how can we make it great across all our sites, not just have one or two moments that, that, that felt special and the other ones were a little clunky or whatever, but given those guys a chance to kind of break the fourth wall in the midst of a song. And I don't know, it's, it's so basic, but I feel it's so meaningful when you're singing a song that's got great thought out words, but it just becomes wrote after a while, even if it's a new song, but to have a guy or a girl step out and say, you know what, here's, here's the story in 90 seconds of me.

Here's why my hair fell out when I was 18, because I, I just believed in anxiety more than I believed in anything else. And let me tell you that the journey I've taken now, let's get back to singing the song about how Jesus is greater than fear. It's really simple stuff like that, that I'm just like, dang it. Like, let's just have people tell their, you know, share their, share their stories. And then we all sing together as loud as we can. And it's funny, like let get production out of the way sometimes. And yeah, it totally is. It reaps fruit for sure. Beautiful. Talk to me a little bit and we're going to segue off, but by the way, if you've got questions, raise your hand. I've got eyes on the screen and we'd love to bring somebody up.

We'll talk about some of the other elements here in a second and then just go crazy. But talk, talk to me a little bit, maybe you're hinted a little bit right there, right? So somebody may be talking a personal testimony, a guy or a gal from, from the worship team, kind of speaking into that. What has been the role of, of non-musical worship in, in, in the physical environments, maybe, maybe spoken words. Have you seen, or have you experimented, done more of that testimony, story videos? What have you seen, kind of be effective in, in this new season? You're asking me or you're asking them? Either of you guys. Well, I think one of the issues that we've had is it's, some of it comes down to basic resources.

I hate to say like, man, it's like, it sounds so unspiritual, right? But it's like, the team that used to help make, you know, tell people's stories and craft things. And you know, the video team, a lot of the stuff they're doing is focused on online right now. So our in-room folks have been, had to be way more scrappy in terms of what they pull, what they pull in. And, you know, and so they've made some great experience, some more like performance song type things or, or yeah, there's been a couple of spoken word pieces. We have one for Easter that is unique to unique to the thing, but to in-room, but it's, yeah, it's been just kind of tough. And so in some ways that has actually yielded maybe a little bit more ingenuity, but I would, I would say it feels tough right now.

Sure. Before I go to Ben, I want to ask one follow-up, just curious. This is not even the point of the conversation, but you just brought this thought to my mind. Within context of creative resources, how much would you say is poured into physical weekend? How much of it's poured into digital weekend? And how much of it is poured into miscellaneous ministries or things outside of adult weekend services? Well, I would say a year ago, I would have said it's like 98% sites and live physical. And then it pretty instantly became all online. And right now we're starting to finally shift that needle to where we can get 50, 50 at least. And there's a lot of things we don't know about online. So it's really hard to say, well, even physical.

So it's really hard to say exactly what we're going to spend on each one. But I will say, as we get to 50, 50 and try and steer the team, the ship that way, it feels way more like 75, 75, you know, just because of the change and the difficulty of doing new things. So that's, that's as much the challenge as anything is just, how do we get all these great, great ideas done that we have? Beautiful. Ben, any thoughts? Yeah, we've, we've incorporated, you talk about additional elements outside of worship, we've incorporated more storytelling in our hosting. We felt the need, just in terms of when we went to the pandemic, that we are all experiencing this together. We, your, your pain is our pain, our pain is your pain.

And we tried to do that through storytelling, through a connection that, that storytelling dovetailed and worked its way into our messages as well. And that's where we've seen additional changes from the pandemic, how our message content has changed. I don't know if you want to push into that now or later, but I think, I think that's a big change for the physical environments, what we've learned from the digital environment this past year as well. How the message has changed as a result of that? Yeah. In major ways. Yes. Yeah. Give me a, give me a synopsis. The three quick ways I'd say is conversational, practical, and then, and then I think cultural as well. So conversational, we benefited, right?

I like this online thing. I can actually, I can give feedback and editorial comments and, and smash that like in that chair while the experience is going on, unless I'm in a very vocal and charismatic church and I'm allowed to say, "Amen," there's not much else I could do and making it conversational during the message. I think that our type of content has changed because of it now. It's less, I'm, I'm talking at you and I'm trying to talk with you because we've benefited from that model from the past year. So that's conversational, practical. Again, I think we all, after, after the Easter message series, we all did a fear or anxiety series, right? We all said, "Oh my goodness, everyone's at home.

What are they wrestling with? How do I connect to that person who's no longer sitting in my pew but sitting on their couch? What are they going through?" And every church did a anxiety series back in April 2020. And so we made it very practical. Well, now that doesn't end just because someone's in your pew and in front of you doesn't negate the need to create practical content. So we're taking that with us down the road as well. And then the last thing is cultural. So with recording last minute, seeing things happen, responding to political riots, racial marches, mass shootings, we, we did that very well this past year. And I think you're seeing that being, I've seen teaching pastors dovetail, shoehorn, craft moments to respond to what happened that past week in their physical environments as well.

And I, and I would love to personally see that continue instead of us planning out our preaching calendar a year in advance and being handcuffed to it regardless of what is happening cultural right outside our doors. Yeah, there definitely feels like there's a tension of, you know, needing to be reactionary. I remember there was a stretch there, I think summer, fall 2020, it felt like almost week to week, the world was recreating themselves. And so, whether it went from, you know, race issues to, to masks and back to race and other things, and even today, you know, we're seeing the, the mass shootings that have popped up multiple times. And so culturally needing to be flexible and having opportunities.

Hey, I need to speak into this. Hey, we need to address this. Uh, Asian issues in race now where maybe, uh, African-American was, was more of the, uh, the catch within the past, you know, three, six months. Uh, I, I definitely see where needing to be flexible is helpful even moving forward. Hey, let's, um, let's, let's shift gears because I want to hit some other things. We'll come back to some of the worship. I see some of those questions, but, but let me hit the other two briefly before we move on respectfully before we move on. Uh, so we've, we've got John. And so John Crabtree is with subsplash. Now I, for me, I see huge opportunities in, in the coming season to move, uh, more towards a second screen, utilizing the mobile phones within our physical buildings, even small things like, um, giving online.

So you don't have to pass the plate, uh, utilizing a connection card in, in different ways. And so, I mean, I would love to just hear, Hey John, um, what are you guys, what is subsplash thinking about? Uh, what are maybe some of the experiments? What, what are you seeing being successful, uh, with churches right now when it comes towards maybe assisting, complimenting, adding things that to make the physical environments, uh, better, new, or different? Oh yeah. I'm, excuse me. I'm so excited to talk about, about this, Jeff. And, um, I think theology is kind of big enough to encompass all of the smaller ologies technology included. So maybe kind of starting off with just a theology of technology and where we tend to approach it from at subsplash, just as a, as a company overall.

And of course we have almost 200 people working at, at subsplash. It might be over that by now. Um, we we've gone kind of remote distributed. So, um, it's not as easy to count that, uh, any longer. Um, but at the same time, uh, technology, the, the Greek kind of two base words are, um, techne, which is Greek for art and craft for skill, cunning of hand, uh, and then logia, which, you know, stems from logos, which, um, John uses, uh, you know, for, for Jesus is the word of God in John one, but also, uh, in the Greek, that's kind of the study over the explanation or branch of knowledge. And so what's really interesting is lately I have been influenced quite a bit by, um, the, the artist and theologian Makoto Fujimura.

He, he came out with a book recently called art and faith, a theology of making. And specifically he talks about how artists, uh, represent kind of the true artist of, you know, which is, uh, God, the father and, and God actually, uh, you know, creating the new creation post-resurrection artists join, uh, in that. And so there's this theology of making that, uh, Mr. Fujimura talks about that cultivates and creates culture and cares for it. And, and as technology begins with art and craft, even modern day digital technology, like what we're doing at SubSplash, I really like to think of technology from a net positive starting point. Um, and so how, how do we utilize that? So now let's talk about the power of technology, you know, two, two things that kind of stem, come to mind for me, especially digital technology, but this also applies to Craig, Craig, and Ben, because you know, there's building technology, there's kind of the technology of the theater and that sort of thing.

Um, in my case, in, in digital technology, it creates abundance at almost little to no cost in a way that physical can potentially never be able to. So think about Slack, you know, you have, or any of these other kind of, um, chat applications of just an abundance of communications that can be created that don't take up physical space. So it creates these massive amounts of connection points and knowledge without, without wasting space. Uh, and then on the other hand too, it allows someone to cut through time and space and gain kind of instant access to someone or a group of people or something, some, some community or content separated by, by large distance. Um, I was listening to Reed Hoffman.

He, he was the co-founder of LinkedIn. Uh, he's got a podcast called masters of scale and he had on the, um, the, the founder, her name's Katarina fake of, um, Flickr, uh, the kind of the original social media, pre-social media. And she talked about how she reached this community in, in Denmark in the eighties via the internet. She was a very early, um, adopter because they all loved this Argentine author and she couldn't find anyone in her little town in New Jersey that liked that. But here it is late eighties, early nineties. She finds this, this other group. And so I think from that standpoint, we approached it at subsplash, getting to kind of how, how we think about it, kind of going to first principles is that the best uses of digital within the physical gathering will really plug holes in what the, the physical can't provide alone.

So here's an example, probably the biggest one that I can think of is uniting the people who aren't present with you, uh, in person with those who are. And, um, so, so for instance, uh, one thing that subsplash has tried to do, and I think in a way, this is also what other platforms, um, from church online platform to, to any other one like YouTube, Facebook, you know, the chat experience, trying to unite, um, those people, uh, you know, who are not with you with those, with those who are. And, um, and so that second screen experience, whether you're, you're on your phone taking notes or, or chatting, let's say in subsplash messaging in person, well, that's, you know, there could be another person who's tuned in from the area who can't make it, or maybe they're, you know, uh, miles away, states away, countries away, potentially, and they're on their couch with their laptop in front of them or their tablet in their hand, and they're watching on TV.

Um, just that ability to cut through time and space, uh, makes this digital, uh, avenue, uh, really helpful. Um, I think it also can bring abundance, whether that's of connections or knowledge or, um, or anything where, where there might have been scarcity before. If you're just in a physical space, uh, you know, you, you don't necessarily have, um, uh, the ability, like, like I mentioned, to connect with those who aren't there. Um, and so, so it provides just an abundance of outreach opportunities where beforehand it would require people, uh, to, you know, to come to you. Um, and then probably the last one is just making multiple information sources and, and, you know, connection inputs available in super easy, uh, order.

So, you, you know, you think about, um, having a second screen in front of you that not only has your chat, but the Bible, um, and those sorts of things, uh, that are available. So those are some of the things, uh, that we've been thinking through at Subsplash that we've seen a lot of churches, uh, start to use, um, and, and in a way that allows them to connect with, like, a larger audience or just their own particular small group, uh, uh, as a result, you know, of, of the way it's, it's built out. That's awesome. I've, I've often thought, you know, talk, talking about complimenting, uh, what's, what's happening in the physical, like, um, you know, and it's a bad example, maybe VH1 pop-up video providing complimentary information while the sermon's going on, something like that.

Um, you know, like, Hey, here's, uh, here's a book, here's a resource, here's two points that got cut out of the message. Here's a link to a YouTube video where he tells the, the six-minute story instead of the 30-second story that he only had time for, or she had time for it. Like, just providing that kind of external extra information that provides more value for what's happening. And then even going back to your, your first point, I would love to see, um, a church or maybe even a vendor provide this, uh, a unified chat. And I know there's major technological hurdles. I would love to see a unified chat between physical and digital. Um, I, I just even some of the physical church services I'm in, I have a, I have a text thread open and I'm, and I'm texting other people in the room or friends and I'm not being overly social and ignoring the service.

I'm actually talking about a point that's in the service or a scripture point or something that is complimentary, a thought that goes with what I'm hearing. And, and so like, for me, it just, I process that way. And so even doing that in the physical space, it's not for everybody, but, but I think there's an opportunity to see some more of that expand as we're trying to connect that digital and the physical assets together. So, so that's, that's great. Hey, thanks John, uh, for sharing that. And so let's, let's get to Craig, uh, Craig Dobbins from Aspen, excited to hear, uh, what's, what's going on here. Now this is, this is radical like here. Hey, let's revisit the service. Hey, let's utilize technology and, and, and connect it together to create more of a fidgetal, sorry, Ben Stapley experience.

But, but what we're talking about with Craig is really back to this, this place of let's reimagine even the physical building and, and, and how we're designing and how we're utilizing this space. And so love the fact that Aspen's even, you know, thinking about re-imagining some of this stuff. So I'm excited to hear. Craig, what, what are you guys dreaming about? Well, we, you know, I think we, it's interesting, like everybody that's talked, you know, in my head, I'm kind of imagining how that would change the building. You know, I think we, um, even just now the talk of, of having, uh, you know, digital and physical together where you're texting somebody, you know, how does that, we, we looked at when, when everybody had to be social distance and looked at coming back, we started to look at, well, do we have to just have chairs in rows to watch a worship service, or can we have tables and chairs and can we have, maybe the church service can be in the round and, and what are other ways that you can kind of connect in different, you know, different seating arrangements, you know, go back to our theatrical kind of layouts, um, to kind of see how does that engage everybody around them in the, in the space.

Um, you know, we've also looked a lot at, at the size of the space. Um, before COVID happened, we started seeing that these worship spaces were, were getting smaller anyway. And I think COVID is probably going to increase that kind of move. And, and, and when I say smaller, it might not now be, um, smaller in, in size, but in comfort, you know, as, as we come back a 60% full service might not feel, might feel full compared to before COVID when it might need to be 80% or more to really feel full. Um, and then I think what Ben was talking about, you know, liturg, liturgical service and kind of bringing that out. And we've talked a lot about that too. And we've had some studies even before COVID about, you know, bringing certain groups into spaces that are, you know, very kind of, um, you know, might have a lot of glass, a lot of, you know, natural light, you know, soaring kind of spaces and, and their mood really changes and they, um, they come, become more quiet, more reverent.

And so how does that, how do we need to look at, we've, we've designed a lot of black box kind of spaces and how do we need to change that? How do we need to bring natural light into the space to really kind of bring that feel that, that, that reverence back into the space? You know, is it natural light? Is it, is it the positioning of things? Is it how you enter? Um, and we also have looked a lot too at, um, at just engagement, you know, not just the service, but what happens either before or after it, like, where, where do you have space to engage? You know, is it just inside or is it outside? Do you need to start creating these outdoor spaces that really connect, um, connect folks? Um, and to that end too, it's a friend of mine, they're, they're service, they're in a small town in South Carolina and they had to, they didn't really have the technology to kind of broadcast as much.

So they shifted totally outside. And what was neat about that is he said he had people coming to their service that would have never come inside and he wanted just to stay outside. He almost wanted, I don't, the cold forced him in to his building, but he wanted to stay. And, and so those are some of the things that kind of, you know, outdoor space and kind of the size of spaces and even this kind of bringing natural light into, into back into the worship space are things that we're looking at. That's, that's amazing. The production guy in me just cringed when you're, you're, you're talking about natural light. Uh, but what, what's interesting is, is that, you know, culturally people that, and this is what's interesting, people that are cold to Christ and cold to the church automatically have, uh, what I would say is maybe a distrust and mistrust of what's happening within those buildings.

I've had these conversations with people that are cold to church that are throwing spitfire towards the church building because they don't trust what's happening in there. And so maybe inadvertently these black boxes we're building are possibly working against us a little bit here. If we're trying to reach people that are cold to Christ within the building. Now there's even challenges, uh, with evangelism happening, uh, in these buildings. And maybe we're, Barna talks about how we're maybe coming into a season where people cold to Christ aren't as interested in these services as we would like them to be. And so maybe the building itself is losing that, uh, evangelical push. Uh, and so there's really this interesting thing with our physical of, of maybe, Hey, let's, let's re-imagine let's reanalyze psychologically what's happening within these buildings and even small things like, Hey, let that door, that external door be glass.

So at least people can see at that point what they're walking into and can at least build that level of trust, even for those first steps. And, and so that's, that's, go ahead. We talked about transparency too. And just that, like, if it's the front door, that's glass, but, but we have some wonderful, wonderful technology where you can, you can create a video of how you enter into worship and you can explain to somebody even before they get there, what is it, what they're going to experience. And so that reduces transparency, that provides transparency in what you're trying to do. And I think we have to remember too, that we're not only providing that for people that have never been there, but for, for the people that have not been back and are starting to come back because things might be different and it might be different than what they're expecting it to be.

Hey, Jeff, um, go for it. Craig, I think that I love how you're thinking through the actual, the actual environment and how it has, um, psychological or emotional or spiritual implications towards it. Even what you're using to design with for us, we've wrestled with which type of building do we go with? Do we go with permanent or portable? And again, to use that offline comparison for us, um, there's the old adage, right? Like be careful, which, um, be careful of using other people's online platforms because they may change the rules on you. And so in other words, Facebook is great. You don't know how the, it's not your platform and they may change the rules and they always are and have, and the church could be in the lurch because of that.

And you know, you have some social media platforms are trying to actually trying to engage churches particularly because of that. So for us, we took that to onsite with our portable. In the past, I used to love portable locations because they were a fraction of the cost and the investment in a, in a permanent location. But when COVID hit, um, obviously the school, the schools that we were in and the theaters that we were in had their own rules and their own safety precautions and were, uh, more strict with us coming back than we would have been at a permanent locations. And so because of that, we actually kind of reverse course and say, Hey, maybe we shouldn't over-invest in these portable locations that are not ours and the rules could change on us.

Should we, should we reconsider investing more in permanent locations down the road? That's one of the things that we've wrestled with coming out of COVID as well for our physical sites. Yeah. I would love to find a stat and there's probably somebody who knows, but the number of multi-site campuses and church plants that, that are, that are shut down and are only physical at this point because of, um, you know, leases that have been ripped up, you know, even, uh, there are multiple churches that I know in church plants that, that are homeless or, and I call it digital next for the next unknown season. Um, you know, there are churches that are having to only lean on digital because they've lost that, that physical footprint for, for whatever reason.

Hey, Grace, we've, we've got some questions and I'm going to go ahead and move Brian up in, in context of people that are listening. Hey, Brian, give me a second. In context of anybody who's listening on social, come on over to Clubhouse. Join the conversation. If there's anybody else in the room that has, uh, questions, uh, go and raise your hand and would love to bring you up at some point. Brian has been like the most patient person in, in the room waiting with his hand raised for a number of times. So, uh, Brian, what, what are you thinking? Hey, this is such a great conversation. I have a random hour and it just happened to be this one. And, uh, this is right up my lane. I'm here in Southern California at, uh, at a church in Rancho Cucamonga and have the privilege of leading our creative area at the church.

And so this is just such a, an amazing conversation because even as we think towards Easter, we are requiring an RSVP for Easter and we're seeing thousands of people letting us know they're coming back on Easter weekend. And so we're thinking through a whole bunch of these things. And so just like, I actually have notes open. I'm taking notes. Clubhouse is the new awesome. Um, so thanks for all of your input and insights on this. And, you know, I was, uh, as you guys were talking, thinking through a few things where, uh, I would, we're a large church, uh, pre COVID a little over 3000 on a weekend. Um, and so I, I think I probably resonate with a lot of what you all are talking about, but it was really challenged.

I don't know how many of you guys caught John Mark Comer's conversation with Kerry Newhoff on church pulse weekly a couple of weeks ago. And I've just been chewing on some of his thoughts, um, on, on what the future of physical looks like. And even as we were sitting here talking, I was, uh, thinking about some of the things you all were talking about, but also looking at the state of mental health in America in 2021, put out by the, by the mental health in America, um, organization. And one of the things they were talking about in this article that I was reading is that the number of people looking for, uh, looking for help with anxiety and depression is skyrocketed. Um, this article states that from January to September of 2020, um, a 93% increase over the 2019 numbers in total number of anxiety screens.

Um, on the depression side, it was a 62% increase from 2019. So I'm thinking a lot about this conversation. Uh, and then really challenged, challenged by John Mark's thoughts a couple of weeks ago, and then just challenged like 20 years in large church ministry and a chance to rebuild. And like, I think this is such an important time for us as church leaders, as we're moving into the future to look at, are we going to go back to what we did or what we've continued to do through COVID, uh, in our physical locations, or will there be new ways that we can create and think through how we meet culture where it's actually at? If those statistics are true in my community, like, man, I'm not sure the four songs to Craig's point earlier, um, like the four song, you know, the, the two songs announcements, a song, a message and a song.

Uh, I'm not sure it's meeting our culture where it's at. And so I'm just wondering where you guys are at, what you're thinking. Uh, one of the examples he used was, you know, just creating more space in our gatherings for solitude, silence, and stillness. It's like in mega church culture, you know, depending on where you're coming from, it may be more accustomed to your denominational style. But in my context, like, we're pretty, like, we're pretty programmed, like the TV show program vibe, you know? Um, so like, what's the production look like moving forward? Uh, is it less haze, moving lights, minute to minute cues with, with no space for reflection? Um, or is it more guided prayer, sitting in some quiet together, still having times for, for joyful celebration, for actual praise, but also times for worship and lament and recognizing like what we've just come through in 2020 has been so hard and there's been so much loss.

And are we creating spaces in our churches for people to do that while also trying to, you know, I think to your point, Jeff, um, figure out what is the, the way forward in evangelizing our culture? Um, but our programming, particularly in large churches has, has really, at least in my context, has been about the energy, excellence with tight transition and precision, precision, and a polished message that really connects with people that are looking for God. Um, and a really predictable arc, honestly, over the last couple decades. Um, so my question, all that to say, uh, set up in, in some response to kind of what you guys are all talking about, but you know, how, how does this, this kind of information challenge, repulse, or resonate with you all, uh, in the season of rebuilding our physical locations?

Well, I'll jump in and make it quick, but I would love to hear from the rest of the panelists as well. I think, I, I, Brian, I resonate with what you're saying. We've done a great job, um, as churches in the past with rejoicing with those who rejoice, but we don't do the best job of weeping with those who weep. I remember coming alongside the church pre-COVID and helping them plan the Memorial Day service, and we had a minute of silence, and the lead pastor said, "That kind of feels like a downer." And it's like, we are remembering the fallen soldiers. It is kind of a bit of a down moment. And, and can we not, can we not, our church calendar for one minute, have a down moment? And so that, and I just, you know, and I, I program these moments.

So I, that challenge comes back to me as well. I think meeting people where they're at in their full scope of their humanity, and not just the crash outs and the high moments and the hype, but saying we are struggling, and we can be honest, is, uh, uh, frankly speaking, it's something I need. I, I need that from my church because I am there as well. So I'm looking forward towards that change. Yeah. And, and Brian, I think, I think along those lines, um, from the vantage point of working at a company like SubSplash, I mean, we're, we're serving a ton of, of churches. I mean, in the tens of thousands, and, and that also gives us a deeper insight into trends amongst different denominations. And we've seen a pretty significant move at the millennial and Gen Z, um, uh, generations towards the Anglican church in North America, and some of these more, um, deeper liturgical, uh, uh, groups and denominations.

And I think there's many reasons for that, but I think a lot of it comes down to the intimacy of the litur, uh, of the liturgy, the, um, the, um, order of service. And if I could sum it up in one, it's more of like an intimate community, if I can think of it. And I think a lot of denominations and a lot of churches are, are trying to, um, I mean, every church has a liturgy. And so the question is, um, you know, how can you create that space? One way, when you look at the future, um, in a former life, I lived in Los Angeles and my, my former church down there was a small, very small church that ended up because, um, they expected people to, to come to them in the past. And in an area like Santa Monica, which is post post-Christian, um, you know, it's probably the least churched three or four square mile section in the United States.

Um, they had to develop a new strategy. And so Ben and Craig were just talking about what does space look like? Well, they, they bought this old, old building, um, made the bottom, uh, it's two, two stories. The bottom is a coffee house. The upstairs, they turned into a collaborative workspace, um, that helps kind of pay some of the bills, but downstairs they added a ton, a ton of windows so that people who are walking by could see what was going on inside. And so from Monday to Saturday, this is a coffee shop collaborative space. And, um, on Saturdays, they even have like kind of community discussions. And then on Sunday, what they've done is they've gone to, um, the needs of that particular area, which is, you know, everyone loves their coffee.

Everyone's now co-working and, um, they're connecting, you know, with, with people. Um, and then those people end up coming on Sunday. And so it's very intimate. It doesn't work for everyone. Uh, they're not a huge church, but in that particular neighborhood, they found out what the buzz was in culture and they invited people into that Monday through Saturday. And it made the Sunday invitation just an absolute knockout of the park. So that, that, uh, is, is an interesting model that I think as we continue to move forward in the future, you're going to see more and more and more of. Well, we've also talked about too, just how art intersects with, with the building and, and how we have performance art and, and, and all of this, but also to physical, you know, art, you know, how, you know, the church in the past, you know, has really been the supporter of that.

And, and should that happen again, you know, do you need to bring that up so that emotion of the time can be expressed through that art and people can experience it. And, and when you're in a space like that, when you're in an art museum, you're, you're a little more quiet, a little more contemplative. And, and so how can you incorporate that into your building, into your site? You know, I think the community we found is, has been at home and we're kind of questioning how many people are going to go back. And so how does your, also, how does your building and your site open up to the community after Sunday, you know, the rest of the week? So those are some questions too, of how you can reach out.

Hey, I'll go. I'm excited. I just keep listening to all these guys, but I'm so slow to hit my unmute button. Brian, it's a great question. The, you know, I think about a couple of things, one inside the room and one outside the room to your point about like a moment of silence or whatever. I was just talking with a friend who works at a church on the east coast. He was asking me like, do you have any, any ideas for a song to like open the Easter message? I was like, well, what's the theme? And he's like, it's a broken people. And I'm like, well, I can only give you like a thousand sad songs to think about, you know? And so I sent him some options. He's like, yeah, they want something kind of like peppy though.

And I'm like, then why did you pick broken people as your theme? You know? So I think there's a huge thing in there about being willing to just be sad, especially in this kind of modern, everything is awesome church environment that we've kind of gotten used to. Like one of you guys said it was, it's kind of become predictable. Absolutely. It has. And if we're really using creativity to reflect who God is and what he wants for people, creativity is meant to do that. The creative pieces we make are either two things. They're either meant to provoke somebody to the emotion that we want them to feel, to get in the right place, to hear what the good news is, or we want to empathize with the emotion they already have.

And we have to be willing for that emotion to be a pretty crappy, pretty sad, pretty devastating one. So I totally agree with you in terms of just what we can do in the room, be willing to like use the full breadth and the full contrast of darkness to also to bring out the light to make it shine even brighter. The other thing I'd say is for all the stuff that we've done last year at Crossroads, and we haven't done everything perfectly or even well, but we've worked hard and we and I think we've had a good heart for it. I think one of the most effective things we did is when the sites all close and we're trying to figure out what the heck are we going to do, and we're making a couple online things, we had everybody on staff call the community so that everybody who called Crossroads home got at least one phone call from a staff member just saying, "How are you?

Can I pray for you?" And I tell you, for all of these big ideas and these big productions and these big things, world-changing things that we want to do, just people feeling like they were cared for is maybe the most important thing we could have done, maybe some of the most effective ministry. So I think outside the room, especially the bigger church you are, the more you can just empathize with people and connect with them and remember that what we're doing is ministry, that maybe solves mostly everything, you know. Love that. Talking all the advances in digital technology and sometimes simply picking up the phone, calling someone and saying, "Hey, how are you? How can I pray for you? What's going on in your life?

Let's talk." Engaging, and yeah, I think you can use the word engaging in a two-way conversation, even on a cell phone call or a landline call, is so crucial and important in that. Edward, I see you, sir. I'm bringing you up in two. We'll get to your question here in a second. The heart of this, you know, really, Brian, I think is the importance for us. Hey, Johan, I think it's the importance us to recognize lament, maybe even giving space that's not overly programmed and as a guy who's produced tens of thousands of worship services in his lifetime, don't produce God out of the equation. And maybe, just maybe give God an opportunity to move in our physical services, as well as our digital services, as well as, you know, within our church overall.

So Brian, sir, I am very happy with this question. That was a great one. Johan. Thanks so much. I appreciate you hosting the call, too, and thanks for bringing me up. And great insight, guys. Really appreciate you all and gave you guys all a follow, too. So thanks so much. Awesome. Thank you, sir. Johan, you had a question. And so wanted to give you an opportunity. What are you thinking? Yeah, great to be here. First of all, I'm a Dutch church blender in Germany. And I'm very happy to be with you and to hear from you. We also in Germany, maybe it's a cultural thing here. But what I see is something very different in the range of children's and teens ministry. I want to hear your opinion about it because here in Germany, lots of people and special children are in at home and over Zoom educated.

And most of the children and teenagers are more now anti-digital. When we do something digital in the church now, in church service, when we show a little film, they say, oh, no, not again, digital. And we found in the basement some old children ministries, things like the flannel pictures. And we use that now. And they are very, very happy about it. So it's more back in the 80s, 70, 80s now with us. What do you think will this corona, COVID time, change also the children who are now in this age and also the teenagers, 17 now? Children don't want to communicate over digital media. They don't react on questions, but only when they are coming together with restrictions, of course, and do not digital things, they're only happy about it.

And the digital things, they are more like, oh, no, not again. So it's, it's, yeah, it's a little bit changing here. I want to hear your opinion about it in the future, maybe in your cultural context. Sure, love to open it up. Kids, students, zoom fatigue, digital fatigue, what are you guys thinking? Anybody have experience with the kids or the students? I mean, I can gladly go, but would love somebody else to speak into it first. Yeah, I think just overall digital trend, trend wise, I mean, you are starting to see oh, I forget what that, that phone is called, but I was just talking with someone who had it, but it basically only does calls and texts, you know, and so he, a flip phone kind of, well, yeah, right.

But there's a specific brand where it, it went back and it's literally just calls and texts, like the flip phone, but it's, it's experiencing a resurgence. I mean, I think you have, when the pendulum swings so much, you look at now and in the States, and this is very similar, pretty much world, you know, worldwide, in some places more so than the United States, you have hours upon hours upon hours of screen time. And when the pendulum swings that far in one direction, it's not a surprise to see in certain places that the pendulum is swinging back in the other. So, you know, that would be, that would be kind of my initial reaction. Yeah, I think that, that makes sense to me too. I would say for my kids who are seven, nine, and four, they're still super addicted to screens.

I wish they were sick of them, but I know that the, the strategy that we've been trying to employ with student ministry in particular, as we, we've trying to, we're trying to, you know, reboot it is realizing like, we just haven't figured it out how to make it great online. And a lot of the research I've seen about Gen Z is, is just how much they, how much live experiences resonate with them, where, you know, Gen, Gen Z is actually, there's a few adults in that generation, I guess now, as it comes of age, and they're more likely to want to spend their money on things like concerts versus millennials who stereotypically, they want to spend on experiences, but more like big mountaintop, you know, like a big trip to an exotic city or something versus I just want to hang out with people and see an experience.

And I, and we're, we're trying to steer that way for student ministry in particular, I would say we don't have a great answer for it. We're just, I think I resonate with the direction that you're seeing. Yeah. I think it's an opportunity to think different. My son, my son spends, well, honestly, right now it's six o'clock Eastern. And so he's probably on his laptop playing Roblox for probably the second hour straight, all of his homework's done. And he's probably has his iPad on zoom, hanging out with five or six friends playing in real time, talking, chatting, and goofing around in Roblox. So I think, I think they're still addicted to their screens. But, but I think the idea of doing church, at least a physical church form in digital space, I think that's a, that's an obstacle.

Even last night, I saw just real quick, sorry. Even last night, we had a stadia, we planted, we launched a digital only expression of church. It was called Lux, Lux digital church. It was a Twitch church aimed at video gamers. They had 160 people over the span of the first service, the hour service, they had a hundred some engaged the entire time, 110 chatters during the, during this Twitch service. And it's aimed at video gamers. It was immensely successful for a launch and looking forward to it. But what happened was this reinvention of what church was more towards that community. It wasn't necessarily what video game community, wasn't necessarily physical service done digitally. It's a re-imagination almost entirely from digital.

My daughter, and forgive me, Craig, this, this may have been you with Crossroads. It may have been somebody else. So I don't, I don't want to put this on you if it wasn't your, or your student guys. But my daughter the other day watched, I want to say, 90 minutes to two hours of student ministry people at a church playing Mario Kart. She's literally on YouTube chatting up with whoever it is on whatever chat board it is, but engaging with people in the church, building relationships while they're playing with Mario Kart, running around a, you know, a track, driving around a track in, uh, on Nintendo. And so I think, I think if you want to be effective in students and kids, it's not doing what you're doing in students and kids, uh, typically in the physical space.

I think it's more doing what students and kids do when they're on digital space and using that to build relationships. Things like Twitch, things like TikTok. Now you may not be native Twitch or TikTok. That's cool. Find people that are, uh, and start to equip them, disciple them to, to really start to engage in that space. I've seen churches be very successful with that unique approach when it comes towards reaching kids and students. I cut somebody off earlier. I'm sorry. Go ahead. That's all right. I was, I was almost cutting you off. So I'm sorry, but I was just, some of the, some of the things we've seen and I've even seen with my kids who were on, on the Xbox and their laptops way too much too.

Um, but it's just when they connect to intergenerationally, you know, and anytime you can create a space that, that allows for that to happen. I think, I see my kids kind of come alive when, when we kind of are finally out talking with other folks and they can kind of engage, not just kids, but adults too. And, and I think that might be an opportunity if, if there are ways where you have spaces where they can come together at certain times that, that might help kind of engage them in, in the church. Love it. Johan, I'm curious, just briefly, you're a church planner from Germany. How'd you end up in here? Do you, how'd you hear about this? Uh, I looked it up and in the list and I found it very interesting.

Oh, so just through Clubhouse. That's awesome. Yes. I, I, I, I appreciate that. I, I follow the hashtag, uh, digital Kirsch, which I think is digital church in Germany. Uh, I've, I follow that and connect on Twitter a lot with, with people that are doing digital. I have no idea if I pronounced that right. So I'm sorry if I offended your culture, but I do follow, um, you know, some of the the guys that, that are doing this in the German space translate on Twitter is awesome, by the way. I just want to say that publicly. Uh, but Hey, thanks for jumping on this. I, I hope I'm intrigued. Like the idea of the, oh man, I forget what you call it, but the felt board, like there was a whole industry around that in the seventies and eighties.

Um, and it's intriguing to me that maybe it's reverting back to that because of the simplicity sake. I do think there's going to be, here's the reality. It's, it's going to take different types of churches to reach different types of people. There are people that are going to engage with a physical church. There are going to be technological. Um, you know, um, I forget the word, but people who don't want the technology, they're going to revert back. Maybe not to the level of Quaker or something like that within American history, but they're going to be phobic where they just, Hey, you know what? Give me the felt board. Let's, let's just sit around a table and talk at Starbucks. There are going to be people that are going to be, Hey, yeah, let's go full on video game church.

I think this is really maybe one of the lessons of, of 2021 and beyond is that I don't think there's any one model that's going to be effective to reach everyone. Uh, I think if anything, the whole fast forwarding of, of COVID and the culture, the acceleration that's there, I think it's really breaking down to where, Hey, we need multiple models to really effectively reach people. Cause some people will work with this. Some people are going to connect better with this. Some people, honestly, there's probably models of church. We've not even figured out yet. They're going to be effective. So it's, I think really going to be interesting, uh, for the future. So, Hey, within the room, or if there's any other questions, go ahead and raise your hand.

Uh, would love to bring in, if you're out there in the social media interwebs, uh, would love to Matt Delp, sir, you asked, you wanted to ask a question earlier, and I guess you had to step away and we just kind of went on and on. So thank you for being patient as the system hopefully tries to bring you in and we see you come in at some point. I'm stalling once again here and there he is. So Matt, uh, Hey, thanks for, uh, your patience, uh, jumping in here. What are you thinking? No, not a problem. I'm sorry. I had to jump out for a minute. Um, one of the questions I was wondering is what are you, as far as the services, do you guys add any elements that add for the kids or for students and maybe what, what does that look like?

And does that expand to what are your creative elements? Do you have for their student ministry or kids ministry? Great question. I know Ben had to step out. He had a family thing. Craig. Yeah. Um, what are you thinking? We, we're not doing anything specifically for kids within our main weekends or really even for students. We're, we're focused way more on kind of a young, a young adult type guy, you know, um, who is, uh, open to open to God, but is, you know, not necessarily has a lot of church background or anything like that. It's enough just to focus on him. So we, we don't really make anything specifically for students or kids typically outside of maybe a Christmas or an Easter service where we know there's going to be more families in there.

We make a lot of stuff specifically for them separately, but, um, yeah, we, we don't do anything for, for students. I would say we are like, I, I kind of alluded to where we're launching a whole new approach to student ministry that is way more, um, big and invitational. You know, you, you kind of go back and forth between, is it evangelism or discipleship? What's the, what's the leader, you know, here? And, um, and I think we're, we're running down a more evangelism path with just like, let's just make stuff super sweet for kids and speak to them well. And, um, you just put more resources into that, like have our main weekend teams help execute it and everything with the leadership of kids, folks that are focused on students.

So we're launching that in March or relaunching it with everything with the pilot, but yeah, I'm excited for what it could be, but we don't, in our regular weekends, we don't typically do that. Hey, let me pull a thread on something. I'm just curious, organizational structure within Crossroads. So you're, as I recall, unless something's changed since last time we talked, you're more the weekend type creative lead where you're creating and resourcing those groups. Maybe talk a little bit about kids and students. How is that resourced within, uh, Crossroads? Yeah. Well, it's, it's interesting because it's been, it's changed a little bit over the last year, uh, for a long time, student ministry sat under the whole kids ministry.

And then that reported up through kind of a bigger structure. And just in the last six months or so, we said, I think we need to organize student ministry a little bit closer to the main creative engine and the main experience engine, which is my team. And we, we shifted student ministry to be under my team. And now we're shifting it kind of back to it's its own thing, but it's not, it's not under student or kids, uh, ministry anymore, because I think it just aligns more in terms of expectations and the scale of what you need to do with the way that we approach experiences versus the way they approach the educational stuff and experiences for kids. And so we're in progress on it because I would just say, honestly, like, I don't feel like anybody is doing student ministry all that well.

I mean, if you're freaking crushing it out there, then please email me and tell me what you're learning. Because I think in general, the American churches has struggled with it. And so that's why we're kind of rebooting it and trying to find a new way to approach it. And that goes all the way down to the org chart. Yeah. It's, I mean, I can tell you a radical story. And once again, this is a crazy think outside of the box thing. Uh, there's, there's a guy named Daniel Heron. Uh, he runs the Robloxian Christian, uh, church. He literally built a church on Roblox. Uh, he, he built it nine years ago when he was 11 years old. Actually, it was 10 years ago. Now he's 21. So literally 10 years ago, he started a church on Roblox as a, as an 11 year old.

Uh, he's reached, I don't know, maybe 40,000 people impacted 40,000 people. They do small groups. They do Bible studies. They're integrated between Twitch or I'm sorry, not Twitch, uh, Roblox and discord. Uh, yeah, discord. Yeah. They do most of their discipleship in the discord space. And once again, it's a radical concept. Uh, but I've, I've often wondered like, just as my kid, once again, is probably playing for the 10th hour today on this Thursday or at least 10th hour this week, man, what if we actually did church? What if churches would, would not like do their physical church thing, but what if, what if somebody built a Roblox church and, and just did a completely different approach towards that?

So I think that's fascinating. And, and it's the idea of just going to where people are. That's, I love it. And it's okay. If your kid has been on it for 10 hours today, you know, if there's no shame in that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's 20, 20, 21, what, what's he going to do? Like what is, yeah. What is time for, for what it's worth, I'm going to have to break here in a couple of minutes and take him to Taekwondo where he's going to try to kick some kid in the head. So it all, it all balances out at some level, I guess. Hey, um, Matt, just, man, thanks. Thanks for this question on, on kids and students. Interesting. It's been a couple of questions on that theme. Um, well, I'll tell you what, let's, let's take one more question, uh, either from the room.

If you've got a question, feel free to raise your hand. Um, if not, Matt, you got another question, uh, as, as we're wrapping up here. Matt's like, no, I think I'm done. No, yeah, yeah. No, um, uh, no, we're, yeah, we're just at the beginning stages of really trying to figure this out. And I know when at the beginning of the conversation, you all talked about trying to make the shift from, um, creative spaces and, and dividing them from, uh, attention of the, uh, technology side from the service to online and online back to the service. Um, what is one strategy that you all give to people that are probably doesn't have that many people that are running the technology side in the church to help actively make that shift.

Like for me, I'm a recovery pastor or recovery minister that's jumping into the online sphere. So I'm trying to figure out how to make that shift at our church. Yeah. So basically you don't have a culture, you're a small church, you're starting out, you're trying to create that culture. Um, I, I'm going to be honest with you. I've, I've had a church in this COVID season, pre COVID, they were 20,000 plus in attendance. So this is a, this is a giga church is a very large physical church pre-COVID. The digital pastor said to me, Jeff, I really wish I was at a small church. I really wish I was at a church plant right now, actually doing physical or tangible digital ministry, relational ministry. Uh, and so in, in many ways, and I'm a guy who has done ministry at the giga church level, at the multi-site level, uh, at the church plant level, uh, small churches have a major advantage, uh, because they know people's names.

Uh, and so I wouldn't be discouraged by being at a small church. Uh, what I would do is I would probably look at it more like it's going to look different. The ministry of Christ fellowship, Miami mega giga here in South Florida, the ministry of, of what Craig's doing, uh, up in Cincinnati is going to, and surrounding areas is going to look very different than what a small church is towards it. Uh, I would make it about individuals. Uh, I would make it about reaching friends, circle of influence. I'd make it about evangelism. I'd make it about disciple making. Uh, I would take the opportunity to, and actually I was just speaking at a webinar right before this call, cast vision. Chances are your church, like the majority of churches, you are, your volunteers are down.

You've got a percentage of people, maybe a large percentage of people that aren't re-engaging, even if they're willing to serve. I'm hearing where churches even willing to attend physically, people who are willing to attend physically, but they're not ready to engage by serving again. And even Craig mentioned that in passing about at some of the campuses, some of their locations, man, it's just about getting a, a basic service out because the numbers are low. I think this is an opportunity for even small churches to cast new vision and to maybe try to do something different. Now you may not know what that is. Uh, honestly, Matt, and that that's cool. You experiment, you try something, Hey, let's get 10 people.

Uh, let's get five people. Let's, let's get a couple of staff, people, a couple of elders and a couple of high-level volunteers and just do an experiment, try something, see if it works and iterate and try again. Uh, and, and through some of that learning experiences, you, you grow, you, you try something different, you bring in some other people into that. And, and slowly what you find yourself doing is, is creating that new culture. And the good news is by doing it slowly, by experimenting, by bringing others in, there are people that are buying into that culture at the beginning, instead of trying to force a new culture or a new idea from the outside. And so don't, don't try to compete. And, and I say this because once again, I used to be a giga church guy, don't compete with the giga.

Don't even look at the giga. You've got to do you and, and for a small church, for a potentially growing church, uh, man, there's plenty of opportunities for success at that level without trying to go toe to toe with whatever the Brian Tomes and, and, and, and the rest of the mega giga pastors are doing. It just, it looks different, but you have an incredible opportunity to succeed, uh, in the days and the weeks and the months ahead. So I just kind of monologue there. I'm sorry. Did anybody else have any thoughts on that? I keep hitting the wrong button. I totally agree with you. I would say, um, you find what your strengths are. And if your strengths are that, you know, everybody's name and you have their number and you can text them, then make, make use of that.

We, we talk about that at some of the smaller sites that we have, they're like, there are things you can do that the big sites cannot. And that's personal connection, which is one of the main things beyond any other thing anyway. So yeah, I just, I totally agree. Yeah. Yeah. That's personal connection is the thing that Matt, that you have that the, that the crossroads at the Christ fellowships at the elevations, they don't. Uh, and so play that to the advantage, know people, meet people, build those relationships that that's how, that's how the gospel wins. Um, in this, in a digital format for, for churches like yours, I would say, by the way, I would love to follow up on, on that. Uh, if you want to hit my, hit my bio, uh, if there's a meeting link, uh, and there's a bunch of resources through the church digital, where we're helping big churches, small churches, we're dialoguing through situations like that.

And so feel free to hit me up, follow up or check some of the resources out, uh, there with the church digital. And there's plenty of opportunities to, to help guys like you kind of figure out some of these next steps, um, to go digital. Hey, Ben's not even here. And I finally said the word. Okay. Um, Hey, so Matt, thanks for this. Hey guys, thank you for this panel. This was a great conversation. Um, let's go ahead and, and, and land the plane here. Uh, maybe closing thoughts. Uh, John, let's, let's start with you as, as we're wrapping up here in anything you'd like to add. Yeah, Jeff, I think, uh, something I've been itching to say since you, um, uh, since my original one, and you were like, I would love to see a, uh, the unified chat between like the physical and the non-physical, you know, the people that are tuning in digital, um, subsplash has something like that.

So I will show it to you at some point after this conversation and anyone else who's interested, um, check it out, you know, online and, um, we, we can help with that. But I, so far as I know, it's kind of the first, uh, kind of ability to do that more kind of chat inside your church's own kind of home, digital home, um, that's scalable and, and basically any church can use it. Uh, so in any case, just wanted to kind of land with that, um, not leave that, that, uh, unopened. Yeah. So you can't see me because this is clubhouse and, and not like zoom. I'm grinning ear to ear. I did not realize, I know we had this conversation about the unified chat. I can't, I didn't know you guys had, had rolled that out.

So yeah, let's, let's definitely talk, uh, off air towards that. Uh, awesome. Hey, uh, Craig, man, any closing thoughts for, for you? Which Craig? I'll do. Oh man, I'm sorry. Uh, Craig Dobbins. There's two Craigs. That was awkward. Yeah. Craig Dobbins. Let's go there, sir. I would just say, you know, look at how your, your facility is, is interacting with the community seven days a week. Um, and that might just open up a lot of doors, um, to, to future ministry and to just the way the community around is experiencing your church. That's, that's beautiful. Some, some of the insight I'm excited about what's happening with Aspen group and psychologically analyzing the, the room, uh, the buildings with that, like, this is a thing, a lot of churches I think are going to have to do, um, in the near future, even starting today and how we're utilizing the space and what it's saying about us.

So keep pulling that thread, sir. Thank you for that. Craig Dockery, the other one from, from Crossroads, sir. What are you thinking here to land the plane? Uh, my, my two main thoughts. Uh, the first one is, uh, no matter what we're doing, as we come out of COVID, you got to push forward. Don't ever try and think about what was it and how do we get back to where we were. What we're doing is a totally new thing. And then two that goes with that. Um, nobody knows what they're doing. We're all pretending. We're all trying to figure it out. We're all taking it a week at a time and ministry is just by its nature hard. And, um, and I, hopefully that's all encouraging because so, you know, you're not in it alone.

Everybody else is just trying to figure this out just like you. Awesome. Hey, yeah. So everybody, thanks for jumping on this. Uh, Craig, Craig, Ben, John, anybody else, the questions that came up, this has been a really fun conversation, but for these guys, I'm Jeff Reed with the Church Digital and Stadia Church Planning. Thanks for jumping on this clubhouse. We'll do it again next Thursday, 5:00 PM Eastern. I think we're talking about, uh, team building and, and how to be effectively recruiting, developing volunteers in the season. We touched on a little bit today. We're going to dig into it deep next Thursday, 5:00 PM Eastern. So, so for everybody else, thank you for being here and we'll see you next time.

Thank you.