EP121: Matt Anderson & Developing One Community’s Phygital Strategy

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 fidgetally, 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 stadiachurchplanning.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, so we're at the one-year anniversary of COVID, right? March, March 13th, 16th, 2020 was when the world came to an end, so to speak, and a year into this, it is incredible to see how much churches, some churches, have learned in this season. For example, and I want to present to you guys one community church in Plano, Texas, a mega, a giga church up in the northeast corner, I believe, of Dallas, Plano.

Multicultural church, phenomenal church pre-COVID. When COVID hit, let's be honest, and Matt talks about it a little bit here, they really did not have much of a digital strategy at one community church. But as a result of necessity, they had to learn a digital, they had to develop a digital strategy. And so Matt was the guy within the church. Pre-COVID, he was a campus pastor, but he was tasked with this role of helping to develop the digital strategy for the church. And Matt, along with the leadership there, Dr. Conway Edwards, his lead pastor there at One Community, leaned hard on Stadia's digital learning community. So we're going to talk about that, about how Stadia was part of that process of helping One Community Church develop what has ended up being an incredible digital process.

So for this, I mean, even like church's platform, prayer experiences online, we want to create moments, but we also want to create a movement digital. Like there's just a beautiful strategy that's coming out of this conversation. So I want to invite you to listen to this conversation with Matt Anderson and myself, Jeff Reed, with The Church Digital. As an asterisk, I'll put that in there. We'll get to Matt in a second. We had Dr. Conway Edwards and his wife, Jada, spoke recently at Stadia's Innovation Meetup. Lead pastors at One Community Church. Both of them spoke. Matt spoke as well at this Innovation Meetup. Phenomenal, like, OK, I use the word phenomenal too much in my life, but oh, my gosh, the material, that stuff that he covered, the points, the passion, the almost entertainment value of Dr.

Conway Edwards and his wife, Jada, speaking together is something you just you have to see to really appreciate. That video is still online. That it's available. You have to register to see it even on demand. Stadia is opening it up. There was so popular, like, we want others to kind of catch this. So head over to stadiachurchplanning.org slash innovation to get that talk with Dr. Conway Edwards and his wife, Jada, talking about leading digital for the long haul. So good, so relevant, so applicable to all of your churches. You must see it. So let's get into this conversation with Matt Anderson, One Community Church in Plano, Texas. I'm myself, Jeff, with The Church Digital. And Stadia Church Planning in a conversation that I'm simply calling Developing Your Church's Digital Strategy.

OK, everybody, here you go. Hey, Matt, just even to get us started here, tell us a little bit about yourself, your ministry story, how you kind of got yourself, found yourself there at One Community Church. Well, you know, it's a crazy story because it really started long before I got to One Community Church. One Community Church is about 12 years old. I'm still a relatively young church, but in today's world, that might be an old church. Pastor Conway Edwards started the church 12 years ago, but him and I go back about 20 years. We were both in seminary together, and he was my small group leader. So we've known each other for about 20 years as a small group leader, and I was a member of the small group he led in seminary.

And we've worked together in ministry in various churches and settings. And then when he started One Community Church about 12 years ago, just really just kept, I feel like every year he asked me, are you ready to come? Are you ready to come? And I was like, no, no, no. And then finally, when he said, we're thinking about going multisite, I said, that might be something that I'm willing to help figure out with you. And so that's kind of what drew me to One Community Church, besides the fact that our pastor is just hilarious and so authentically in the Bible. It's just, it's a great, fun, and yet challenging church. It's not going to be the kind of place that you come and just have your ears tickled.

You're going to be challenged with the truth. So that and just knowing my pastor for so long and his bent towards leadership. So I wanted a chance to grow and to grow in my leadership, and that's kind of how I got here about five and a half years ago. And try not to crash us starting multiple campuses, which I tried to do, but the Lord saved me. You know, I didn't realize you guys were just 12 years old. Like that's fascinating. And I would assume maybe it's easier to do some of these radical shifts like multisite, like even the digital shift that we're going to talk about soon, with a newer church, a church with just 12 years, maybe 11 or 12 years history, as opposed to, you know, a more legacy approach.

Do you find that to be true? 100%. We're much more agile. We don't have as much, no shade implied, but we don't have as much bureaucracy as some other older churches. We're a lot more nimble, a lot more agile. We can make decisions a lot quicker, and we don't have as much history. So at our church, everyone's a lot more open to new things and new methods. And really, even for our church, there's not many churches like ours, which our church is a predominantly African-American church. There's not many churches like ours that are even multisite right now. So even going multisite five and a half years ago was a very new thing at our church and in the culture of kind of where a lot of people from our church have come from.

That's fascinating. I actually would almost love to have a side conversation about like the multicultural approach. We may kind of tease some of that into this conversation, but we're recording this. And often I don't talk. Obviously, it's a podcast, video, YouTube. Like we're not doing this live. There's a recording component to this. And so today is Friday, March 12th. And so my wife this morning told me that it was 365 days ago today that basically the end of the world came about. COVID was a thing. The schools, her school, my wife's teacher shut down. Churches were like, dude, you're not meeting for the weekend. Figure something else out. Everybody was panicking towards streaming. And so like this is literally when we're doing this recording, it's the one year anniversary.

What did it look like for one community 365 days ago? What did that Friday the 13th, 2020, what was the state of one community at the time? That's good, Jeff. So we were on this day about a year ago. We were a church in the DFW area, more specifically in Plano, Texas, north of Dallas. And we were really trying to just knock it out of the ballpark and reach our area and our community for Jesus. We have a reach. We have four campuses at the time in Plano, Louisville, Prosper, and Dallas. So we kind of were spread out across DFW. And we were doing all we could to reach this area. Our digital reach was an afterthought. Did we have digital? Yes. We checked that box that, yes, we have a church online platform, iCampus.

We have that. We did not stream our services at any other time except on our iCampus platform. And we had that out there so that we could just say that we were doing what everybody else was doing. But we put very minimal effort into it. We were so focused on everything physical and everything right around where we were. So when this all hit, we just, we weren't ready. We did not have the digital reach. We were not very active on social media, on YouTube, on many different platforms. We were just kind of there just so we could say we were there. So, yeah, I totally, looking back, I have a file on my note sheet that shows the date and how many weeks it's been since the initial shutdown. And this is the 52 weeks right now.

And it just was a, it was a major shift in thinking for us. And since we're agile, we just started right that very week figuring out what is this going to mean for us. You know, and for us, the first thing was, was, oh, my goodness. And I'm not saying, Jeff, this was the right response, but it was the next response. Oh, my goodness. We've got to get church up online so everybody can see it. And we weren't thinking about what does it mean to be a digital church? What does it mean to be a fidgetal church? We weren't thinking about any of those. We were just thinking, how can we get church online so people can watch us? And, you know, that drove the first couple of weeks for us while this was going on.

How do we, how do we go digital? How can we have, how can we up our game in what we broadcast out? And at that time, we didn't even know if we were going to be able to get into the church building. So how do we set up many studios in different pastors' homes at our church? Because we were talking about, you're going to be locked in your house for the next 60 days, 90 days. So what do we do from here? So step one for us was, let's just get online. And we had a long ways to go. Yeah, and so many churches were just like you in those first weeks and maybe the first month or so. Let's get the service online. Let's focus on the service. One of the things that even surprised me, and we've talked about it on the show, is I was surprised the number of churches that actually pivoted beyond just the service.

That looked towards small groups, that recognized, you know, maybe getting the physical small groups moved into digital. The challenge in wrestling with the idea of creating digital community or utilizing digital community. You know, and I can even remember, I recorded an online conference, a session for American Bible Society. And I think I recorded it like right around this time. It was either the 12th or the 13th. And it was one of these, once again, another pre-recorded session, gave it to American Bible Society for one of their virtual conferences. Oh my gosh, if the world shut down for two weeks, what we could do with Bible engagement, with Bible reading, how you could disciple and now relationally connect with your kids.

What else are you going to do? If you watch Netflix, you've got two weeks of lockdown, you know, and here we are like 52 weeks. Well, Texas, you know, you guys are now back open and everything's normal. The rest of the country is maybe not quite as aggressive as you guys are in Texas, once again. But it's incredible to see how some churches have been very resilient in this season of trying to figure out how to master this digital thing. And you, with one community, did a great job in the season. Once again, not having that infrastructure beforehand, but agilely adjusting almost on the fly towards it. And so, what are some lessons, what are some tips, what are some mistakes maybe that you did in that first couple months where you didn't know what you were doing, you're trying to figure it out?

Like, what did that rough season look like for you? I'm assuming it was rough, but yeah. Very rough. And we, you know, we learned a lot and we said, you know, we've, basically our entire staff, there's nobody that held their position on staff tightly. So, at our church, everybody on staff became digital experts. We all started pouring into everything, your podcast, what Stadia does, what everybody digital we could find is doing. We all started pouring into it. The first thing we discovered is we need to start small, we need to start online groups. We already had a huge small group ministry, but we had nothing online. So, in a matter of about four weeks, we launched about 100 online groups on Zoom.

We went to all of our church leaders and we said, we need you. Our number one goal now is connection for everybody in this digital world. We've got to create an online place to do that. So, we're going to start Zoom groups and we trained everyone up or something of a training. And then we told everyone, hey, starting small groups, good. What we said next, not so good. We're going to be in this online small group thing for probably eight to ten weeks. So, we need you ready to go, online groups, on Zoom, the next eight to ten, maybe 12 weeks tops, we're going to do these online groups. Ready, set, let's go. And then we just started like crazy connecting people to groups. So, one of the things is we had this mindset of we're going to be back by Easter.

I know everybody remembers that. By Easter, we're going to be back and we'll be back in person and we'll be back in chairs in the church. And we were making decisions as if we knew when this was going to end. So, that was not so good. So, we started to shift throughout the process. We started a ton of small groups and we unified them. They were all either men's or women's groups on Zoom. And then we unified the curriculum. So, we said we're going to partner with Right Now Media and we're going to unify our curriculum. Everybody's going to go through the same thing initially and get these groups going. And then after we got the groups going and after we saw this wasn't going to be something that ends quick, we realized we needed to get our reach much greater in the digital world.

And we had next to nothing. So, we got our groups going great on the church. We got broadcasting the service going great. We got Facebook private groups for all of our campuses. And each of our campus pastor would do a daily devotion on Facebook on their campus group. So, we got that going good. And then we also started, again, us thinking we knew the answers. We started something that we've done in the past in our church where we would do a live morning prayer. And this is from our church sanctuary. We just turn on a camera and we go. It's not produced. It's just us sitting in a couple of chairs and a couch and somebody playing a keyboard, singing. We have a little worship. We said we're going to do our morning prayer at 6.30 a.m.

every day for the next two weeks. And then we'll be, we'll know where we're headed from this. So, we started this morning live prayer and it really just took off. Basically, what we'll do is sing a song and then we'll beg everyone, send us your prayer request. We want to pray for you live. And we'll have two or three different members of our staff there every morning. Send us your prayer request. We share about a three or four minute devotion. And then we just go through and just start praying for people and encouraging others to pray, encouraging everyone to share so that their friends can start their day off with prayer. And this thing just exploded and it became our highest engaging online event out of everything we do.

Something like 30 to 35 percent of the people on there were engaged in one way or another, either liking, sharing, commenting or being active. So, that was a huge thing was to have a morning prayer. We got people when they were at home, they weren't on the road. We hit them right where they're at and we were live every time. And it does something when people are sharing requests and live, you're praying for them, pastors that they know and others. We always encourage everybody when you're in the chat, pray for others in the chat as well. Drop a scripture, like, say hello. So, it wasn't just about us on stage praying, but we did our best to get everyone else involved. So, that live prayer event was huge for us.

And here we are, 52 weeks later, now we have a whole schedule. We have our staff all oriented around it. It's something that we're going to continue to do ongoing. It went from a two-week thing to a 52-week thing and our church just loves it. So, we've built a lot around morning prayer at our church, Monday through Friday. It's on Facebook and on our iCampus platform. So, it's been a great, great tool to keep people engaged in the digital world. I think the next big thing we hit was, and you've heard about these, we started a bunch of, every two or three weeks, we started an online party. And from prayer to party. From prayer to party. Right? Yeah, that's great. That's how we kind of roll. That's how you roll at one community.

We do whatever we can. That's right. From prayer to party. We're going to start using that, Jeff. Prayer to party. We needed to find a way to build our connection online. So, our first attempt at doing that was something, we were calling it back then, party, I'm sorry, shelter in place. So, we said, we're going to call this party in place. You're going to have a party that you can watch from home. So, our very first party in place was for our high school seniors who were going to miss graduation. So, we said, hey, you know what? We're going to have a huge party. We got local DJs from the radio stations around here. And we just want to have a huge giveaway to celebrate high school seniors that are going to miss graduation.

And our heart has always been who's hurting the most and how can we reach them where they're at. And we know that our teens and our next generation through this pandemic have been struggling as much as anyone. So, what we did was we said, we're going to have a huge online party on a Friday night from 8 to 9.30 p.m. We're going to have giveaways every five minutes, gift cards, you name it. And then at the end of the event, we're going to give away a car live on YouTube. We're going to give away a car. And all you got to do is go subscribe to our YouTube page, follow us on Facebook, and then you'll be eligible. And then be watching. You have to be live to win any of the prizes that we're going to give away.

So, that was the first big thing that helped us grow our YouTube followers in a big, big way so that we could begin to expand our reach. And it was just a blast of an event. Thousands of kids were on there. It wasn't just for our church. It was all across the country. As many people as possible. We encourage everybody to share, be a part of this. It was music. It was dancing. Every five, six, seven minutes, we would scroll names of people on the screen who were winning the different giveaways. It was a blast. And at the end, we gave away a car. And it was so awesome. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You gave away your church. Let's focus on that. Your church gave away a car, you're telling me, in a virtual party on YouTube.

Tell that story. Yeah, so we, it is really crazy how this all happened. We gave away a car on a virtual party. This is the, this is what we've learned is the blend between fidgetal. It's blending, going back and forth between physical and digital. We had thousands of kids sign up for this event and share their story. And why, why, what, what God's been doing in their life. And what we basically do was during that afternoon, the evening up to the event, we filtered through about five people that we thought, you know what, this kid needs to be blessed. And we went through and we had a team of people evaluating after we picked the top five. And then we figured out about an hour before the event who was going to actually win the car.

Now, all the other prizes were live on the spot. So I'm giving you the behind the scenes. We knew who was going to win the car about an hour before the event, because we had to call, make sure they were going to be home. We didn't tell them they were going to win a car, but call the parents. Hey, just making sure you're going to be watching the event tonight. It's going to be so much fun. Get the address. We had to show up and make sure we could find the house where the car was going to be given away. So we had to do all this pre-work. And I was actually involved in the pre-work of getting the car to the, it ended up being an apartment and live on TV. And we just knew we just had to, we needed to bless.

And the number of thousands of dollars we gave away was unbelievable. But the car was the highlight. And we connected FaceTime on one of our phones, one of our Mac computers. And we FaceTimed giving away the car. And we rolled up to the apartment. We had the keys, the car, camera crew knocked on the door and no one answered. We were at the wrong apartment. We vetted, we came and we figured everything out and we got to the wrong apartment. That was the funniest thing about the event. We were live and we were at the wrong, the buildings each had the same apartment numbers on them. And we were at the building next to the one we should have been. And it was just crazy that we, it just, it just showed that this was not a well-produced, this was just a, let's put this together.

We're going to be real and pull this off. And we were able to call and make sure where the correct apartment was, run over there. The police came because everybody was making so much noise. Neighbors were yelling. But here we are. We had this 18-year-old girl who got a brand new car, getting ready to go to college. It was a blast. I'll tell you, Jeff, the really cool thing is we did these for college kids. We did this for, every month we did one of these. And there was always some big giveaway. And on the registration page for every event we did, we never asked anybody for any money. But we said, if you're from our church or somewhere else and you want to, you want to donate toward making this a special event, here's a link where you can donate.

In every event we had, the donations covered the cost of every single giveaway we had. And we didn't plan it. We didn't, we didn't know that was going to happen. But the generosity of our church to bless others just completely overwhelmed us. Later on in the year, we did one for teachers as they got ready to go back to school in August. And the same kind of thing for teachers. But what we did is every minute of the event, a different teacher won an iPad. So we gave away 60 iPads in 60 minutes. And again, just our church showing up to bless others. And every one of these events would have some component of a giveaway. And it was just, it was overwhelming to see God's people show up to bless others.

And through a digital event, blessing people in person, blessing people online, it was amazing. Our church just really showed up. Hey, like you're really, I mean, even just with backing up even to the prayer, the prayer to the party, this is really thinking outside the box, at least in context of where you were May, June 2020, like celebrating in that graduation season when it started. Churches weren't thinking that way. You know, as a matter of fact, Barna on the prayer side has really confirmed a lot of the things that you've seen. And just even this year, February, I think 2021, Barna's released a digital prayer report working with Alpha, focusing on prayer and how there's this huge percentage of people, Christians and non-Christians, that are looking to digital as a place of prayer and are wanting the churches to create.

And when it comes to the percentage of churches out there that are doing it, I'm not talking about doing like a 30-second prayer thing in your service. I'm talking about like what you're doing, a daily expression of prayer, come get prayed for, come pray over others, share scripture and encourage others in that format. Like that, nobody was thinking like that in, maybe some churches were, but the majority weren't. And now talking about doing this party thing, like both of these are very outside of the box thinking. For your church, where did that come from? Do you have like some personnel that are very outside of the box? Was it just gun to your head? You had to do it? Like where did some of that creative process, energy, where is that stored?

How did that get released? Yeah, that's a great question, Jeff. I've got to just, there is one place this came from. Our pastor, Conway Edwards, is the most forward thinking for years. He's always been talking about leadership and looking around the corner. He's always talked about our leadership capacity, the umbrella of how big of a problem and how we can lead. And part of that trajectory is looking around the corner and what that's caused him to do. And for our entire staff is, is we are a church of learners. We have always been learning and not just from other churches, but from industry and not just industry in the U.S., but industry across the globe. So we've always been learning. And our pastor is the kind of guy that he never settles for the status quo.

So we're always trying to figure out how do we not become, and everybody said it, how do we not become a blockbuster? How do we not become what movie theaters have become now? And we're always trying to look around the corner and anticipate what that could be for our church. And we've got so many ideas coming up. But I would say our pastors always kept us on the edge. And one of the things he's challenged our executive staff and hold us accountable for is always having a peer or cohort that we're a part of. Always. And I love what Simon Sinek recently had a video called Be the Idiot or Be an Idiot. And he talks about being curious and just not always needing to be the smartest person in the room.

So our pastor says, you know what? Everybody on our executive team, you need to be a part of a cohort or building connections, either with somebody at a church the same size as ours or larger, or somebody at a church that's doing things that we can't even imagine doing. So ever since I've been at our church for the last five and a half years, I've always been challenged and done it. I've got other campus pastors from other larger churches and other digital church ministry people that I've connected with for the last five and a half years, about once a quarter. So we're always trying to grow and learn. And then that just fed in naturally over the summer. We heard, you know what? There's going to be this Stadia Fidgetal Church cohort.

And our pastor was like, that's for you, Matt. You need to go hop in this and you need to be a part of this. And we actually found a cohort for all of our executive team to be a part of in different areas of ministry. And really just being a part of connecting with other leaders who are headed in the same direction. And what we learned in our Fidgetal experience with Stadia just changed and shaped how we do church. Getting to hear from guys all across the country to guys with VR churches, to church at home in the Northwest, churches across the Midwest, just churches all across the country in different contexts. Some that aren't doing a whole lot digital. Some that are just sharing all kinds of things.

That really, it turned into a, for me and for our team, because everybody on our team was in a different cohort, every week coming back as a team and saying, what did you learn? What did you learn? What do you have to bring to the table? And for us as a leadership team at our church, we try to focus not on, one of the ways we battle being in our own silos is when we come together, all contributing to the greater organization of our church. So not what I just learned from my area, what did you learn? How are we all contributing to our church at large? And man, coming back, I think I won with the best ideas because I was coming from the Fidgetal cohort. But just learning, what does it mean to go from just an online church to, or just a church broadcasting a service to being an online church?

That shaped how we began to look at how do we do digital membership? What if somebody wants to get baptized who lives in Florida, which happened? And we began to have to process all of these things as I came back and shared every week what I was learning. And it just shaped, it shaped how we looked at being innovative. And the biggest thing we got is last September, we took our church in a series called Pivot. And it was, it was reimagining church, new, new methods, same mission. And we used the illustration of a lighthouse. And, you know, it was really just for too long, we've looked at the church building as a lighthouse. And really God's model has always been that every single believer in Jesus Christ is a lighthouse.

And the imagery we used is no longer is our church going to be the only lighthouse or our campuses, but every individual, every family, you are a lighthouse right where you're at. And we began to make the big shift on how we look at church and how we look at individuals in the church and how we can make a difference right where we're at. So, you know, I just went down a couple of different rabbit trails for you. No, I loved every second of it. First off, you know, Stadia, Stadia, Fidgetal, one of the things we talk about there, and I love the nice words towards that. But one of the things we talk about, we talk about how physical and digital ministries are different. Doing ministry in physical space, doing ministry in digital space, it's different.

Sometimes I feel like when I say it, you know, people shake their heads, yes, I agree. And then they go, they do their ministry the exact same way, physical and digital is combined together. And they're not taking advantage of that. What I know of you, you've been taking advantage of it. So, like, as a participant of a Stadia Fidgetal, of the coaching and of some of the training and the cohorts and learning and the content, all the stuff that we've done, this is a test. This is a quiz. I want to see how much of it actually stuck. What does it look like in your church right now? How is physical and digital ministry, physical church, digital church, how is it different? I would love your take of what you're seeing in real time.

Wow. You know, that's even evolving right now. How is the physical and the digital different? We're still primarily digital, I would say. We did have in-person services start last September, but there's no mistake. If you think about it, 80% of our audience is still watching online. So, our physical experience has turned into, we do have Sunday, Saturday, and Sunday worship services in person. But primarily, we've been digital in the fact of small groups, how we stay involved online and how we blend those together. I think the thing we're seeing in this is really how do we blend and create experiences. And I learned this was some people will never come to your church in person. They will only watch online.

Some people are dying to come back in person and some want the flexibility to go back and forth. So, for us, digital has become how do we give individuals at our church the opportunity to go back and forth between one platform and another. And we're figuring that out. For us, it has been huge on our online groups, huge on empowering people to, as I said before, be a lighthouse. And we did something called neighborhood champions. And a neighborhood champion just means you're a lighthouse, and you're going to be a lighthouse right where you're at. We're going to give you tools to disciple others, to start small groups, to put up a how can I pray for you sign in your front yard. And really figuring how do we empower people right in their neighborhoods to make a difference.

And then even as we have groups of people across the country start wanting to be a part of our church, we're starting to look now at small micro sites. And once we get 15 to 20 people that want to watch in a certain area doing that together. So, the major shift for us has been in mindset. And it's gone from attendance, from just attendance to two movements. Well, really, we focus on moments and movements. So, creating moments online and then giving individuals ways that they can take next steps from that moment. So, it's not just attendance. It's not just a physical environment. It's creating a moment and then giving people next steps. And that next step could be on a Sunday morning as they're watching.

That next step could be on a Tuesday if they're watching the service on a Tuesday, a recording of it on YouTube. But giving people opportunities to take steps throughout the week and not just view church as a Sunday morning experience. So, physical, you know, we just learned. Physical, it's hard to get that thing going physical. And the battle of keeping our team working on digital just as passionately they are as physical has been one of the tensions we've had to live in. And even what you're talking about, by the way, you're talking about doing probably at least what I just heard, three different types of church coming out of your one community church location. So, you've talked about the physical.

You've talked about this idea of broadcasting the services and doing the digital services, the YouTube. Like that, a digital church is a completely separate thing from the physical. You even hinted you're working on micro locations and starting to turn those watch parties, digital expressions exuding into like homes. That's a completely separate expression of church as well. And the thing that I love about you, and I'm going to tell you a word you probably don't even know yet, but it's the reason that I love your church. Your church, and I'm the guy who makes up words. So, we did physical and digital coming together. What you're talking about doing here really is you're becoming a multimodal church.

Multiple models, multimodal church. You are a physical church. You are a digital church. And you're wrestling and you're trying to figure out even how to get to that micro church level in the community. For you, innovation, thinking differently, maybe seeing where God is moving and joining him in that journey is not a hard thing. Now, maybe that's because you're like sub-12 years old and you're able to turn on a dime. I mean, your pastor is one of these creative guys who's thinking out of the box. Thank you very much, Dr. Conway Edwards. But you have this option of saying, hey, we're recognizing that people are, they disciple differently in different spaces. For me to disciple someone in a physical building versus discipling someone digitally versus discipling someone maybe even at a house.

First off, it looks different. But secondly, the type of person I'm going to reach in that space is different. The type of person that's going to come to a digital only versus a physical versus the type of person I can reach more in a missional community focused micro location. Those are each different types of people. Do you feel that? Do you see that? Like, is that the vision why you're looking at doing these different modals, multimodal approach? Definitely. So the goal is to just straight up reach people where they're at. And we've seen a huge culture shift. It's evident to us. Church will never be the same as we know it. We're not waiting. We're not looking at the stopwatch for when we go back to normal.

It's how do we reach people right where they're at and create moments where they can have experiences, whatever that looks like. And this was so far in left field for us. But now it's where we're at. And we are committed to providing resources and being, as it were, from what I learned in the cohort, being a platform. And what we want to do is we want to empower and let happen what's already going to happen. People are going to already build relationships. They're going to stay connected in their neighborhoods. So what we've decided we want to do is instead of coming to us, let us empower you so that what's going to happen can already happen. And that's been such a big shift because normally in, like, say, a small group ministry, it's somebody says, I want to be a small group leader.

And then we say, here's 10 people for you to lead in your group. Now, if somebody says, I want to be a neighborhood champion, I want to reach my community, we say, we're going to do a monthly call, we're going to give you resources, and then we're going to set you free to do that. Instead of us saying, we're going to make all these connections, we're going to empower you to make a difference right where you're at. And that's so much more biblical, as we've discovered, than anything else. We're going to give you the tools to be a disciple maker right where you're at. We're going to call it being a neighborhood champion. But really, you're being a disciple maker right where you're at. And it may not ever look the same for us, and that's okay.

And, you know, the crazy thing in Texas, Jeff, is every restaurant I drive by right now has reopened. There's only one restaurant in Texas that has not reopened their dining area, Chick-fil-A. It makes me wonder, will Chick-fil-A ever reopen their dining area? I have no idea, but they don't have to. They have pivoted and shifted, and they are the best drive-thru experience in the country. And I don't know if they ever need to reopen because they saw a need, and they improved what they already had. And now they're probably not going to go back. And I just think about us as a church is we don't have to go back to how it was. We can make improvements and stay in those improvements and just figure it out as we go.

We don't have to be perfect. We need to be real and authentic. And we're comfortable in that place. It's an awkward place to be in, but we're comfortable living in that learning and growing space. I love this. This is arguably, for me, one of my favorite podcasts I've recorded. I'm not even sure, 150 probably plus conversations at this point. And I just, and honestly, it's because a lot of this stuff with the fidgetal mindset and the coaching and church's platform and all of this stuff, I feel like I have these conversations with churches. And sometimes the churches are like, Jeff, you're completely wrong. Sometimes churches are like, Jeff, you are exactly right. We just can't do it. There's no way we can turn, change our culture and get there.

And I don't want to say it's few because there's more and more as we're doing these fidgetal learning communities. But to hear, hey, Jeff, we're doing this. We're seeing success with it so much so that we want to carry this into the long haul, into the future. Like, Texas is 100% open up. The governor's like, everybody open your doors, get rid of the masks, everything's back to normal. And you're telling me stories about how Chick-fil-A isn't open and maybe that's okay. And you guys as a church, you're looking at digital, not as a stopgap. Hey, we can go back physical now, but it's, hey, maybe this is a method for us, one of many methods for us to effectively reach people. What does this look like long term?

Like, where are you going with this thing? Wow, long term is continuing to do, we've always been a church that has a deep passion for community. So that's what's been driving everything we do. So long term for us, whether it's digital or physical, we have always wanted to create environments where people can be fully known and fully loved. And we will focus long term on groups. We'll continue to create great digital. I mean, we're in it for the long haul for our weekend services are all going to be live online. One of the things we did is where, and I'm not saying other churches were wrong, but it was different for us. Every one of our services we did on Sunday mornings during COVID. We did, we never prerecorded.

We just felt there was something special with having that experience live. And again, it's not right or wrong, it's different. And we had a live pre and post time before every service. And we just felt like there was something with being able to connect with the people watching live. And then when we would rebroadcast those, say on a Sunday evening, having our teams there to still make connections in the chat. So I think for us, it's continuing to build opportunities for people to have authentic community, continuing to create spaces for people to exercise their gifts. And the challenge we've had is, is how do you serve digitally? And that's where we've been reaching in the dark of creating ways.

If you're a digital member, you're an online member, here are the different ways you can volunteer. And we've thrown some out there and they were complete flops. We've thrown some out there and they worked phenomenal. But the area we have to grow on is how we can continually keep people engaged that are online. Because many of our church, if say you were a greeter and all of a sudden you showed up to greet every other Sunday and there's no longer an in-person service. Well, you've just lost your community and your connection. So for us, we're looking at ways to create community around groups that used to serve together and then new ways for them to serve. And it might be you're now a greeter in an online chat.

But always pushing the envelope on how you can be involved. And one of the things, I'll tell you this, the thing that we get most excited about for the long haul is one of the best, this doesn't sound very digital, I guess it's analog and digital, is one of the best things we've done at our church is call every member at our church. Not just every member, every person who's ever visited our campus that we have a phone number for. Over the last year, every quarter, we've called everyone. And when I say everyone, I mean everyone. I'm talking into the thousands upon thousands and all we've done is we take our whole staff and we divide it up, say, hey, you've got a thousand, you've got two thousand.

Here's what we're going to do over the next couple of weeks call and just call people and say, hey, this is Matt from One Community Church. Just want to see how we can pray for you today. And again, you talked about the need for prayer. These care calls have just unlocked so much in the life of our church. We discover needs we didn't know. We discover people who want to help out we didn't know about. We discover people who moved away and are still watching online. But that's been, I don't know where that fits in the physical and digital, but our calls have been relentless. And we've been making personal connections. And we're going to continue to do that. And it's this this blending of digital and physical is kind of where we're at.

I don't think we'll ever be one or the other, but we'll continue to create create moments and experiences that people can latch on to and then help connect them. Yeah, I think there's more of a omni channel approach, maybe where people can interweave between the physical and digital. You can have somebody attend a physical small physical church service, a digital small group. Digital church service physical. And like, it's beautiful when those two channels work together because, you know, and this is just a reference and an example. Susie's a single mom with three kids who literally lives across the street from your broadcast campus. She's probably better off attending a physical service if possible on Sunday because she could use time alone to worship God without having to deal with the three kids.

And the three kids are probably in a worship experience that's better suited for them specifically. And so being that type of person is great. Now, Susie, because she's a single mom with three kids, the, you know, the realistic nature of packing all three of those kids in the minivan, driving them halfway across Dallas for a physical small group on a school night probably is not the best option for Susie. And so even having her start to intermix digitally and seeing how those two can work together, love that. And as your church is even wrestling more and more with how do we honor the physical environments? How do we complement it with what the digital developed that strategy? How do we even look at more models, more modal approaches towards doing ministry with this church's platform?

It's interesting. You know, in the whole thing of not having places to serve, I had a guy, excuse me, a lead pastor tell me this with another church, another church that has gone through the stadia digital things. And for them, their small groups have shifted towards more of what they call impact groups, where instead of having like the, what's the word I'm looking for, the content really being the focus of the small group, it's been more of service opportunities. And just yesterday, they were telling me that one of these impact groups, essentially one of the small groups adopted the local fire station. They went into whatever the lead guy at the fire station was, had the conversation, forgive me, I just, I don't know what the ranks are, but had a conversation with the guy.

And he said, honestly, we could really use a chaplain and we would love just the opportunity to get prayer and support, maybe even do services here. And this small group is now, one of the volunteers, there's no staffing of this. There's no professional Christians that are a part of it. There's a volunteer chaplain who's now spiritually and shepherding and caring for the flock, the 25 employees here at this fire station. There are regular prayer meetings, there's regular services on the weekend, like the church's platform idea. The church has enabled these people and empowered them to go out and now be the church literally in a fire station. And this is just another opportunity to say, hey, maybe, maybe not being guest services, maybe there's something different.

Maybe there's another option. I don't know. Like that, that may seem radical. Maybe it is better to eventually get the 25 people to come to a physical expression, but they're not coming now. And so you got to do at least what you can in that environment to build those relationships and connect with people. So as you guys are reinventing and thinking outside the box, I think that would maybe be a great opportunity for you guys as you're looking more at serving, trying to empower people and release them out. That, and you know, that's, people want to make a difference. We've learned that our church and everybody connected with our church wants to make a difference. And they're struggling with how to do that in today's world.

And opportunities like that are phenomenal. Like you just said, that's any way that you can empower somebody to make a difference, whether it's a phone call or serving or going to a hospital or a fire station. Everything we can do as a church to provide those opportunities are just huge. And we've done, we've done quite a few of those too. And it's just finding as many opportunities and options as we can. I mean, that church's platform is huge. And I think that's the new world of where we're headed. And, and I'm excited about the challenge we have of what's in front of us. I'm not looking, I'm not, I don't want to go back to how it used to be. Our church, our pastor does, our team does not want to go back.

We want to continue to explore the new ways that, that God has for us to reach this world and our community. Love it. Hey, yeah. So if you want more information on church's platform, go to the church.digital slash platform. The idea of Fidgetal, the Fidgetal Learning Communities. And honestly, I think this is what separates some of the things that Stadia is doing with Fidgetal with some of the other offerings that are out there with other organizations. I really don't, as I've looked at them, and I don't want to disparage, like I've got friends that are doing this in other space. But we Stadia, because multiplication is so important to us, because planting and starting new things is so important.

This idea of Fidgetal really comes down to this idea of creating multimodal, creating new expressions in different areas and allowing your church to multiply physically, digitally, and whatever other method your church can come up with. So that's really the heart of this. And even hearing here, Matt, your story of how one community is doing this just, man, just warms the heart. I love this. I do want to, I'm up against time, so I just got a couple minutes for this question. I do want to touch on, because I want to deal with this later. Talk to me about some of the stresses, some of the challenges, some of the joys. Multicultural. Many of our churches, many of the digital churches, I don't know, and maybe this is even just education on my part.

I don't know that it's a multicultural church as much as a monocultural stage expression with a multicultural audience. You know, what I hear from you, and this is a later conversation. I just want you to tease it here. What I'm feeling from one community is it's really more of a multicultural, not just in the stage, or not just from the audience, not just from the attenders, but even with the stage. What does that look like for you, like, as a church, being that multicultural approach? Is there tensions? Is there winds? Even in Plano, Texas, like, what does that look like? Wow, that's a good question. I would say one of the things we always look, and our pastor has been so good at this, is if what we're preaching and teaching can only be applied in North America, then we've got more work to do.

So everything we talk about when we talk about money, when we talk about discipleship, when we talk about groups, if it only works in our country, then we've missed the mark. So we've always got to look at really what is the timeless biblical principle that we're trying to address. And once you do that, you begin to then hit all different cultures. And I would say this, too, for us, when last year, when the George Floyd situation happened, our church, being right where we're at, said, you know, we need to make a difference. And we had many other churches from us say, what are you guys going to do? And we held in the middle of COVID in June in Texas at the local courthouse. We said, we're going to do a unity rally.

And we got together and our pastor rallied about 10 or 15 African-American pastors, 10 or 15 white pastors, 10 or 15 pastors from other cultures. And we just got our churches together and had 3,000 or 4,000 people show up for a prayer rally. And anything we could do to bring cultures together and to have others see it going on in our church has just been a bonus. You know, Jesus did not say that the world will know we are his disciples because of how much we know, but it's because of the love we have for each other. So we say that and we live that. And even in the midst of other cultures, church is done differently in different cultures. There's different expressions. And we try to, the best we can, live in all as many different ones as we can.

And sometimes that gets messy. It doesn't always go just right. But we've fought to have a diverse staff, to have a diverse style, and to try to have principles that reach across different cultures. And we think it makes a big difference. So that's what we're trying to do. We got a long ways to go. That's beautiful. Yeah, we're going to bring you back on. We're going to unpack that. If it just works in one country, if it just works for one culture, we're missing it. Go back to the drawing board and keep going. That's beautiful. This has been a fun conversation. Like, I've loved hanging out with you and digging through this herein. I love what One Community Church is doing. And so we'll, Matt, we'll include some contact information for you in the show notes.

Some of our people may have questions. And so you might get bombarded by people on social media wanting to know how to get people to donate money to give a car so they can give it away on YouTube. There we go. But even like the multicultural things, we're going to revisit this. I don't know if it's Clubhouse. I don't know if it's another podcast. But like for me, that multicultural has been the thing that's tugging at my heartstrings. That's like, hey, this is one of the big hurdles that the church, the North American church, the Western Civilization Church, maybe we need. This is the next thing that we really need to tackle. So, hey, thanks for jumping on here. Maybe any last minute closing thoughts as we're landing the plane?

What are you thinking? Yeah, no, I just, it's an honor for me to be a part of this conversation. It's an honor to grow, to learn. And I'd love to hear from everybody else learning just what you're doing. I just love learning. And really, our pastor, if you haven't looked him up, you need to look up Dr. Conway Edwards and see what he's doing and what he's got out there going on. Because he's really on the edge of trying to create what's going to be new and what's going to be lasting for churches. So, just grateful to be on here and learn with everybody today. Awesome. Yeah, we'll include some links to some resources on Dr. Conway Edwards. I've been very impressed with him as well in recent months, just as he's gotten more on my radar here in COVID.

But, hey, for Matt, this is Jeff with the Church Digital and Stadia Church Planning. Thanks for joining us here on the pod. We'll see you next time here at the show. Y'all have a good day.