EP034: Jim Tomberlin, Trends of Multisite & Church Online

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Hey everybody, welcome to The Church Digital podcast. My name is Jeff. You've got episode 34, and I'm going to tell you right now, I have been waiting for you all to listen to this podcast for a long, long time. One of my favorite ministry-minded people right now is going to be on this podcast. We've got Jim Tomberlin here today joining us. Multi-site guy is his moniker in social media, online, and he's been inspiring people for decades in context, especially around mergers and multi-sites. He's been one of the early innovators of multi-site. Jim and his company, you may have known from multi-site solutions. He's got a track record with Willow Creek, and honestly, he's been inspiring me for quite a while.

Even before I met the guy, he's been an inspiration for me centering around this idea of church and multi-site, a decentralizing ministry and making it a scalable solution that can get out there. But you're probably asking this question, so what does a fanboy of church online, somebody like me, get obsessed with this idea of multi-site? Well, honestly, you're just going to have to listen to the podcast to really enjoy and appreciate the track of what's happening here. So join me, Jeff, with the Church Digital, along with Ray, online pastor at Christ Fellowship Miami, as well as Jim Torberlin, who is multi-site solutions, as well as chief of staff with Christ Fellowship Miami, in an episode discussing the similarities and the trends between multi-site and church online.

Everybody, here you go. So Jim, I know obviously you have a very rich history in the church, but a lot of it's tied to this idea of multi-site. So man, just tell me a little bit about your story of how you helped grow multi-site. Well, my journey with multi-site church began back in the mid-90s when I was a senior pastor in Colorado Springs at Woodman Valley Chapel. I wasn't the original pioneer, but I was one of the original pioneers of this idea. And it really was birthed out of a space restriction, which is how the multi-site movement began. I came to a church of 400 people, and over the first year, I grew it down to 200, while it grew to 1,000. Are you following me? Seven years later, several thousand people later, we were out of room and out of space.

And so how do we solve a problem where we have no more room to grow on this location? It's a great location. We don't want to relocate. I and a few others around the country, unknown to each other, began to experiment with this new idea of video that maybe we could be one church in two locations. That eventually got me invited to leave Colorado Springs and come to Chicago to Willow Creek to develop the multi-site model there in the year 2000. I was there for five years, and I launched the first four campuses of Willow Creek. Five years later, four campuses later, I was getting a lot of calls from churches around the country. Could you come talk to us about that? And at that point, I believed that I'd accomplished what God had brought me there to do.

My next chapter was to help, was to serve the church, the big C church, and this idea. Not thinking it'd last maybe three or four years, 15 years later, this model just kept growing and morphing, and more and more churches were doing this, and I was growing with it. That brought me here to Miami, where we're sitting here now, and working with what was started out to be my client, and now still is my client. I'm serving now in an interim chief of staff role here. And I've also recently merged my company, Multi-Site Solutions, with my long-term friend and strategic partner, Tony Morgan, and the Unstuck Group. And so that's been my journey with the multi-site movement. And it's been, as I watch now what's been happening, and I've been a big advocate for the online campus, it's a very similar journey.

New ideas, innovative ideas, like multi-site, like the online church concept, always started out as a radical idea that, and we saw this in the multi-site movement, and it's now with the online, it's gone from a radical idea to a cool idea, and to a cool idea becomes a mainstream idea. And so I see that pathway unfolding with the online campus as well. Where did the, listen, in the 90s, I was a high school kid. I was playing football somewhere. I wasn't keeping up with church trends. But where did this idea of multi-site come from? Like, where was the birth of it, and how did it kind of build from there? Nobody was all meeting together and saying, "Let's do a church a different way." It was really, the beginning of this movement really was a band-aid strategy for mega-churches who found themselves out of room or out of space.

That's what started me down this path in the mid-90s in Colorado Springs, when my church grew to several thousand people, and we'd built out everything we could on our property that we were on, and we were still growing and turning people away. And so what do you do in the mid-90s when you're out of room and out of space? You're in a great location, you don't want to relocate. And so at the same time in the mid-90s, early 90s, this new idea of video was emerging. And so came up with this kind of crazy idea. I wonder if we could be one church in two locations using a video recording. I think it's back in VHS or whatever it was. And I was thinking that way, and a handful of other pastors around the country, unknown to each other, were having similar ideas, ideas as well.

But what started out as a band-aid solution for mega-churches to solve a space problem, grew beyond that to becoming a growth strategy for healthy churches of all sizes. Started out as a radical idea in the 90s. It went from being a radical idea to the cool idea in the turn of the century, when new church starters like Elevation and New Spring and some of those were starting their churches with a multi-site model in mind. And they were the hip cool churches. It went from radical to cool to now in this decade to mainstream idea. And every idea goes through these stages where it becomes, in time, an old idea. And then at that point, an old idea either has two options. It either is rejected as an idea anymore or nobody's doing bus ministry anymore.

Or it becomes, there's a renewal of the idea. Hey, we're going to do it better and make it better. It's a renewal. Or it becomes a renaissance idea. That is, it becomes a new expression of the core idea. It's almost so fresh expression that you don't even recognize as the original idea, unless you were part of that. Wow. And so you see that in every idea that comes along. That's interesting. So back in the 90s, you're just starting multi-site. Very few are doing it. What were the, what were the challenges? What were the naysayers saying? What was the, you can't do multi-site because of blah, blah, blah. What were some of what they were saying? I think the biggest pushback, Jeff, was video sermons.

That was the initial reaction was video sermons. Okay. I remember when I went to my board and said, you know, let's, let's solve our space problem by renting a school, you know, in the next community and take a video capture of our Saturday night service and show it on Sunday morning, put a pastor in that school and let's start a second location of our church in that school. And they responded in the nineties or mid nineties, Jim, who would go to church and watch a video screen? And we had side screens, you know, for the PowerPoints at that point. Right. PowerPoint. Well done. I'm not even sure if it was a PowerPoint. We call it PowerPoints then. When I went to Colorado Springs in 1991 as a pastor, the hottest and greatest technology, the latest technology in the church across the country was overhead.

Overhead projectors. Right. And projectors. And so we suggested the idea and that was their response. Who would want to go to church like that? What was that first service like having, you know, video driven? When we look back in history and we look back, you know, all the way back in terms of Steve Jobs and the pirates of Silicon Valley and what they were doing, everybody said they were nuts and some of that was crazy. Can you take us back to that first service at Colorado Springs in terms of what that was like and how you guys from there saw the potential? Well, back in that day, it was a lumber cumbersome process to roll in this huge refrigerator like piece of machinery with video equipment, projection equipment and all that in there.

Big, you know, video discs that you had to pop into this machines and all that. What was amazing to everybody is that and this is what we said in the early days, not everyone's going to like video. Sure. Not everyone has to like it. Only enough have to like it. I remember especially when I, this got me invited to come to Willow Creek and develop this model at Willow Creek in the year 2000. I was casting the vision for this in Colorado. I have a video. It's on my website. I still have that video. You could tell it's 1990s because it's so different the quality wise. I mentioned here we are in 1997 in this video. Right. As we approach the 21st century, it's time to think about church in a different way.

One church in two locations. That was as big as my vision was at that point. Today, my church, by the way, in Colorado Springs has four locations and a couple more on the horizon. Awesome. And, um, one in a prison and the, um, and I tend that church when I'm there in town. That's my church. And so, um, I remember at Willow Creek when we were really rolling this out in a big way there, the older generation were saying, I don't know if I'm going to like the video, you know, that's for the young generation. Right. The younger generation are saying, it's too inauthentic. It's not real. When we started opening up our campuses, guess who showed up? All generations. Wow. And I, and we found that on the most part, it was the church crowd that had a, the traditional church going crowd.

And you know, Willow Creek was an innovative, progressive church in terms of that. But even that crowd was reluctant. As we opened up these campuses, people showed up. The learning was, is it's not about the medium. It's about the message and the messenger. Good content, video content, good messages, strong messages by capable communicators that's captured and delivered well works. It works in urban, suburban rural areas. So that was one of the first takeaways was, you know, it, it, it will work. Right. Um, and it did, it was working. I think a second criticism of the, the multi-sider challenge, uh, idea in that time was, oh, this is all about celebrity pastors building their kingdom. Right. Spreading their kingdom.

You know, I've worked with a lot of those pastors and, you know, there may be some that have a little bit of ego or get caught up with that. But I found that most pastors, bigger, you know, large churches or small, if anything, we're often reluctant to, they, to do that for that very reason. It's not about me. And, and I, and I, you know, I don't want this to be about me. And, you know, and I got to have my face on the screen everywhere. And I said, no, it's really, it isn't about you, but it's about the gifts that's, that's in you, the gift that's in you, and how do we best leverage that. That was an early criticism. Uh, we know today that, uh, when people think multi-site, they think mega church and video.

But the reality is that today about, about two thirds use video, either partially or fully. Uh-huh. A third now, our latest survey from Leadership Network shows about a third are, are live, you know, not just, that does not use video. So it can be either or. Right. And I'm an advocate for, for both. Um, I think I like to recommend to churches that they had to make, they had to build a live teaching team. Uh-huh. A teaching team, you know, of more than once a communicator, but make all campuses video capable, either to lead out with video or to complement or supplement with video. And that's where most churches are going. There was a season where it was three-fourths video and, you know, the early days.

Right. Because it was all mega churches that were doing it. Then it went about half and half. And now at our latest survey, it's about two thirds are using video, either partially or fully, and a third are not. It's, it's, it's interesting how some churches maybe saw the, the challenge or the non-perception where people would not receive the video screen well, and they figured out a way how to create like a decentralized model or where it's maybe a teaching team that travels or, uh, or a teaching team that shapes the message and then is preached at individual campuses. You know, here in Miami, I know there are, are multi-site churches that operate on both sides of that. That's, that's video or that's not.

Um, when, how difficult was the, some of those early times of multi-site where people are saying, no, you can't do this. No, you can't do this. Um, video screens bad, but there are solutions. It just takes time to work through it. Like what was that tension back then of you cannot do multi-site because we can't be across because there's ego because ecclesia isn't defined by one area. Like you overcame that. You were part of that. I don't think anybody was saying you can't do it. They're just saying it's not the church. It's not, it's not the church. Uh, it, it's not developing leaders. It's not, uh, developing teachers and preachers. How can a person on the screen preach to people and be a, you know, really be a shepherd or pastor to them?

Those are the kind of questions they were, they were being raised and those, those are, they're, they're legitimate questions. Innovators, uh, aren't stopped by criticisms. Uh, they want to, you know, they just keep, keep working at it. You know, a new idea is like a virus to a body, to the body. And the first response to a virus is to resist it. And the outcome of that virus, it'll either be eliminated or it will overcome or integrate with the body. Right. And then change the DNA. And that's what's happened with the multi-site movement. And really the multi-site movement began not with video in the nineties. It really started the beginning of the multi-site movement. My opinion was back in about the mid seventies, when we had this radical idea of going from one to two services.

It's good in the church until about 1975, you know, America went to church at Sunday school at nine 30 and worship at 11. Yeah. And that was pretty much the model, but some churches were outgrowing their 500 seat auditoriums and all. And some progressive, uh, heroic pastor said, you know, our worship center is sitting empty at nine and 30 while we're all in Sunday school. What if we opened up a second earlier service and have two services? That way we could accommodate more people. It wouldn't cost us any more money. There was probably more pushback on that because that was when I started kind of my, as a pastor about that than the whole multi-site concept. You know, we don't have enough volunteers for that now for one service, how you want to do two and all that kind of stuff for the children.

And anyway, so it happened and then it went to three services, you know, on Sunday morning. And then, and then, uh, some crazy pastors around the turn of the nineties, uh, said, what about a Saturday night service? Well, that's not even biblical. It's Saturday night. And so, uh, and then, and then as, as the technology started to evolve, uh, we have these overflow rooms, you know, a fellowship hall or student room or whatever. Right. And we have, well, hey, let's open that up and put a close circuit TV in there, which was really a bad experience for people. Sure. But, uh, I know in my church in Colorado, that's how we started. We had a basement and we did it just in a big screen, 30 inch screens was the, was just beginning to come on this, on the scene.

Right. She put a couple of little TVs in this big room and it was an awful experience, but it worked, you know, it, it, it, it solved a problem for a season. And then, so you have multiple, uh, services on multiple days, Saturday, Sunday, and now you have in multiple rooms. And then as the technology got better, it got a better experience in those rooms. And it was an inevitable step to go to multiple locations. It was a natural step. And so, so that's been a journey of, of an idea created out of, you know, solving a problem that the, the solution becomes not just a, um, fixing a problem, it becomes maybe a new tool in the toolbox for sure. And that's, that's what's happening here. That's what I see happening with the online campus.

Matter of fact, the online campus to me is an extension of the multi-site, multi-location concept that, uh, it's again, an inevitable next step coming out of this because the, uh, the online digital space or the digital space, the cloud is an, as another neighborhood. Absolutely. It's another neighborhood. And, uh, and it's how do we, my company name, multi-site solutions, uh, the tagline was taking church to the people. Well, where are people? Well, they're in the cloud, they're online. And they're, and so how do we get, bring the church there? The, the great irony is you told me, or what you just said was that a lot of churches saw some of these things as a lid for leadership development and everything else.

And yet what we're seeing, and, you know, maybe elaborate on this is how multi-site and even now church online has allowed us to develop more leaders than ever before, in my opinion. Well, it's a leadership intensive, uh, strategy because, uh, you opened up new locations, you need more people, but the, the challenge of growing big in one location, the big mega church, uh, is that you back and stack up a lot of people who have high capacity, want to play in the game, but there's not, there's the higher up the, the pyramid you go in terms of leadership and, and, and responsibility, there's, there's fewer seats there. Right. But when you, uh, start opening up more services or more campuses, uh, you open up more opportunities for people.

Yeah. We always, I like to say to my clients when, when they're thinking about multi-site, you know, that going multi-site will increase, uh, the good news is you'll have more volunteers. Right. The hard news is you need more volunteers, but you know, it's amazing how people, uh, step up when you give them an opportunity. It's kind of like being on a, on a, on a winning football team. You know, there's a quarterback and there's, and then there's usually a couple of really good quarterbacks sitting on the bench that never get to play. Yeah. And eventually what they're either going to quit or go somewhere else where they can play. Right. And that's what often happens in one church, big church in one location.

There's not a lot of opportunities for everybody to play, but so what we see, and it's clearly a, a, um, you're, you're developing, multiplying volunteers and more importantly, leaders, uh, because you're giving more people opportunity to develop and play. It's, it also, uh, it, it, in my mind, in my sense, it allows us to function more biblically where teachers teach, leaders lead, pastors, pastor, uh, you know, shepherd, shepherd, administrators, administrate, instead of one person trying to do all those things. We all have two or three strong gifts, maybe. Right. Um, spiritual gifts, but, um, this allows us to really play to the gifts and the strengths that each individuals have. Within that elaborate kind of what you see across the landscape moving forward, because I know you talked earlier about a teaching team.

It's still a relatively new concept. And obviously thanks to a lot of your leadership here, we've adopted that at Christ Fellowship where, where I'm at. But, and that's been helpful because it says more about the church as opposed to just on the personality. Kind of lay that out in terms of how that's changing what we're seeing moving forward. Uh, not just with the multi-cycle church online, everything, the whole shebang. Ray, I would say is the teaching team is not a new idea. It's, it's, it's as old as Acts 13, where you see, uh, five teaching leaders. One translation describes in that way, leading the church at Antioch. The church at Antioch in the first century was the healthiest church in the New Testament.

It was the, uh, the five teaching leaders was the apostle Paul, a Jewish rabbi. Right. It was Barnabas, a Jewish businessman who was Greek, you know, uh, in his, his, uh, orientation. Rufus, which was a Roman. Uh, there was Niger, which was a North African person. Uh, and, uh, and then there was a member of Aristopoulos who was a member of Herod's household. So we had the first multi-ethnic church. Multi-ethnic. All right. Uh, diverse. Uh, it was a sending church and, um, and the healthy church in the New Testament. And it was, they were, that was a team. Right. Uh, of teaching leaders. So what we're seeing today and what I think is so healthy to have a teaching team where there's a, there are different voices that a church is hearing, but it's a united voice.

And, uh, yes, we're doing that here at Christ fellowship. And we're really, and those who teach are those who have that, that gift of teaching. Right. And communicating. And then those others of us who maybe have other gifts, we're freed up to not, if I'm a pastor, if I, I, I, I was a pastor for many years, a senior pastor, but my leadership gift was more energizing to me than my, than preaching. And so I love lead leading more than I do preaching. Right. And so, uh, those who, who are campus pastors and who love the, who are thrilled to not have the burden of preaching if in a video teaching model, that's fantastic. They have 10 to 20 hours more a week to do the, all the other aspects of leading and shepherding the congregation.

But, um, so I just think it's a healthy model, whether you're multi-site or not to have a teaching team. Absolutely. Uh, because it, it, uh, gives some, allows some margin in, in, in the teachers. Uh, it also gives a more balanced, uh, I think to a congregation of, of, uh, spiritual teaching and food. You know, that's, it's, there's a lot of difficulty in launching a multi-site, especially if a church isn't familiar with that. Uh, I've got a client right now that we're, uh, we're launching a multi-site out in Miami beach and, uh, the church hasn't really had a, a lot of history of launching set up and tear down. And it's been a while since they've launched one and staff has cycled through. I remember I was, was at a meeting and there were like maybe six or seven of the ministry leads in there and just even working through how to do set up and tear down church, the leadership that was there, they, they just, they couldn't get past some of the, the concepts that they're used to being in a, you know, fully functioning larger building.

And I'll never forget this. The phrase, uh, was said in context of the multi-site. It was, well, that's, you got to realize if you're at a set up and tear down, there's, there's limitations on the model of church. Like there are things that as a, as a set up and tear down, you're not going to be able to do that. You could do in a, in a big building. Right. Um, you know, maybe it's in the con, honestly, in the context of this, it was like your staging, your staging is going to look completely different at a set up and tear down than, than at, than at a physical building. And that's, that's not a reason to stop the conversation. You don't walk away from the school as a multi-site because of the limitations of the model.

All right. Uh, you figure out how to work through that. I remember having a conversation with my senior pastor at the time, Bill Hybels, when we were at three locations and they were working well, but the, the home campus was struggling on getting the mindset of multi-site. And, uh, and so I remember going to Bill and say, Bill, you know, can you just make everybody, uh, start thinking and operate? I mean, you know, make the multi-site, uh, the priority for them so they can start thinking of it as our future and not just a, um, a side, you know, side of thing going on at the church. And his response was classic. It was like, Jim, just become a force that can't be denied. Just keep starting them.

Wow. That's a great quote. Yeah. I like that. Eight campuses later, we became a force, uh, that has turned the big ship. Just one other thought about the multi-site as we dive, dive into the online campus concept, because I see the similar pathway for an online campus that the multi-site movement traveled down, is that launching campuses was the easier part, even though there's a lot of hard work and challenges. That was the easier part of multi-siting. The more difficult part is, uh, managing the inter-campus relationships and the restructuring of the organization to support that. That's good. That's where most churches, multi-site churches get bogged down. Getting one or two locations up and running doesn't really require, force you to change your structure because basically everybody just does a little more work.

And most churches that do this have high capacity staff and players, and they can kind of juggle two or three locations, uh, wear multiple hats, but that's, that's as far as most can do. Right. And that's the big turning point is when you launch that fourth campus or you're trying to, and you realize, you know what, we're going to have to change our structure and how we do church if we're going to do church this way. Right. And that's, it's an interesting parallel where, you know, I've looked at the church online realm and a lot of people will say, oh, there's limitations on that model where, you know, the perception is, uh, church online is, is weak in, in an area. And honestly, I think a lot of it's strong.

Like, well, look at it like from a multi-site perspective, uh, multi-site. Oh, there's, uh, people aren't going to watch a video screen. Thousands of people do on a regular basis. Honestly, using your words, you don't, not everybody has to like it, but enough have to like it. And it's, and it's paid off. Similarly, you know, leadership, multi-site campuses. Oh, if it's going to be a video screen, you're not going to be developing leaders. That's, that's a fallacy as well. Multi-site churches have this awesome leadership pipeline to grow and develop volunteers, to be fully engaged in the gospel, to preach, to teach, to administer, to do all the different gifts that are available. So there's, there's opportunities to look beyond this weakness, uh, limitation of the model and say, okay, for a multi-site perspective, the limitation of the model, a lot of the perceived weaknesses actually became strengths.

Just organizationally, like causes me to look at church online and ask questions like, okay, what are the perceived weaknesses of church online? And then from there, are those weaknesses really, are they really weaknesses? Because a lot of times I think what we're guilty of, what church online is guilty of, I really don't think so. I've always been a big advocate, as you know, Jeff, about the, about the online campus. I remember at Willow Creek in the, oh, early 2000s, 2003 or so. I was advocating to it. I was on the senior leadership team. I was leading the multi-site model and I was on the teaching pastor team. But I was, uh, advocating that we put our services, our sermons live, uh, at the time.

And the whole leadership team pushed back initially saying, and these are the reasons that we're still here today. Well, if we do that, we'll, it'll hurt our church attendance. That's interesting. Did they do TV ministry at the time? No. Will never got into TV. No. Okay. There were, there was a concern that if we did that, then why would people come to church? And I said, uh, you know, our church tends to do that. And we hear, you hear that criticism. Absolutely. And somebody even said, you know, once we went online, we started seeing our attendance go down initially. I've heard, I've heard some people say that. And I said, no, our attendance won't go down. It'll go up because we will expose ourselves to more people.

Right. You know, through the internet who will, who come there first. And so, uh, and it will accommodate those who are, who are missing church, who are part of our church family. Absolutely. And so after a while, after I'm really arguing for this, the decision was made, okay, let's do this. Let's, let's make our services available online, but make it password protected to our members only. The solution helps no one, right? So we did that for a few months and it was not working. Yeah. All right. And then, so then we decided, all right, let's, let's do, let's do a test case. Let's do our next series and make it fully live and, uh, and see what happens. Okay. It was, I forget the number. It was an astronomical number.

It was over like, like a million people. Wow. Worldwide. Yeah. Wow. Wow. We're logging in and watching it. Oh, absolutely. I mean, you guys were the only game in town. And they realized, wow, what were, what were we thinking? How, you know, this is a huge opportunity. Yeah. Right. And, and also, but I think churches go, go through that, uh, as you know, today, uh, because, because of other things going on in our culture, the decline in church attendance, that's happening, that, that culture is no longer supporting. Uh, we, we've lost that or losing that cultural value that, that valued church attendance for 300 years in our country. That was always a value. It didn't mean everybody went to church, but there was a value that said, good people go to church.

You should go to church. And the culture pretty much believed that and affirmed that. That's why they thought it was a good to have churches in communities. We, you know, give them tax free status. So, cause a local church is, is an asset to a community. That value is fading in our culture. We're overwhelmingly unchurched in America today. And so the culture is no longer going to artificially support churches. Uh, and so, um, so that is going on. And then because there's so, uh, with even within those who are committed churchgoers, Sundays are no longer sacred. Right. You know, there's a lot of sports activities. There's recreation there. The stores are all open, uh, except Chick-fil-A. Yeah.

Except for Chick-fil-A because of the technology where now I don't have to wait till Thursday night to watch my favorite TV show. I can watch it anytime, any place from anywhere. Uh, and people now want that same and need that same access to their church. Right. So if you don't have an online campus, now you, there would be this decline in church attendance back in the nineties, last century when I was leading churches. Uh, if you are a church committed churchgoer, you're in church three out of four Sundays of the month. Yeah. And nobody, we didn't have to tell people that. They just did it. You know, it just, it was just kind of the internal expectation. Today, we know 1.7 people are in church 1.7 times in a month.

So less than two times a month. And it's not that many of them don't want to be. It's just, they have a lot of other, they're working, they're traveling, they're sick. That's always been a, you know, always something. But, um, uh, and there's other, there's other competition for the time, but if, uh, they want to stay committed, they want to stay in, uh, in touch. And the online campus allows us to allows them to stay engaged. And that's the new measurement. It's not just, not just attendance to a physical campus, but engagement. And so that's how the conversation is happening among church leaders today is how do we keep people engaged? Hey, the church, if anybody ought to realize is church people who know their Bible know that church is more than a building.

Right. And, uh, and so as a matter of fact, we know that churches, uh, for the first 300 years of the Christian faith, never owned or built a building because it was illegal to meet. Now, there's always a place where people be, but it's never been about a building. But we've made church in Western Christianity all about a building. The goal of it in the past, the goal of a new church start was to get into a building. And we've made the building an end game. And the bigger the building, the bigger the success in our minds. What I love about the multi-site movement and as well as now the online campus movement is that, um, buildings are just a means to the end. Technology is just a means to the end.

And so it's all about, you know, bringing the good news of the gospel to people and then about bringing people together in community. And we know that community can happen for online. Some people say, how can community happen online? You know, you say, well, for some people who are not wired that way, it wouldn't happen for them. But there are other people who that's a safer place for many people, as you know, initially to have community. Well, and that gets back to your line earlier of everyone doesn't have to buy into it, but enough have to, to make it worthwhile. And while a lot of the church today is going to define itself more comfortably in that building, there's by far enough people outside of it that are going to benefit from a, from an online experience of a church service with that content, an online small group community relationship that to make it worthwhile.

It's incredibly ironic. Like I, we were just before we started doing this podcast, I just wrapped up an online Bible study this morning with some online pastors. And we were reading through the book of Acts and when we hit Acts six, which is the, uh, Stephen's murder, killed, whatever the correct term there is. Sacrificed. Uh, and the whole murdered, that's the right word. Uh, Stephen's martyred. And, and the whole crux of it is centered around the destruction of the temple, the destruction of the building. Cause he said that Jesus, what Jesus said was going to destroy the temple and blah, blah, blah, whatever. But at the end of this, like Stephen's martyrdom was centered around the Sadducees, the Sanhedrin's loyalty, sacred view of what the temple was.

And this is even 2000 years ago, they were still stuck in this building and didn't see the potential of what could be done, what the Holy Spirit could do outside of that. So, you know, it's funny when, when the, the, the Mount of Transfiguration, when, when Peter. Yes. And, and James and John were with Jesus on the mountain, Mount there. And when they had that experience, you know, their first reaction was Peter was, let's build something. Yeah. Let's build a tab. Let's build a tab to, you know, to mark this place. Yep. Cause it's a sacred place. Yeah. Jesus was talking about the temple is, is you. Right. As, as human beings with the, with the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God living in them. The new temples.

But anyway. They missed it. Oh, well. Indeed they did. And it's, you know, the great irony, Jim, is you talked about earlier how an idea starts off as innovative and then it becomes cool. Where are we at right now in the online church deal? Is it still innovative? Is it cool? No, I think, cause you, I, I know I listened to your interview with some of the early pioneers of the online campus here last week. And they were talking about 10 years ago when they were, had been doing this for 10 years now. I think 10 years ago. I think 10 years ago it was innovative. I think we're moving now, or radical. It was radical. I think we're moving now into the cool stage. You know, as I mentioned, we just had the survey of multi-site churches.

The latest one that I've been involved with, about five of those over the last 20 years with Leadership Network. In 2014, five years ago, we asked multi-site churches, how many of you are doing an online campus? It was 28% indicated they were doing an online campus. Now, many of them at that point, what they described an online campus was we're putting our sermons online. And that's, that's the beginning. That's how it starts. I'd like to share what I think an online campus is, what it requires to be an online campus. It's more than just having a video sermon, a video online. But it's a good start. Five years ago, 28% of multi-site churches had an online campus. This year, that number has gone from 28% to 47%.

Almost doubled. Almost 50%. Now, here's the interesting thing. Five years ago, when we asked the question, do you see an online campus in the future, 62% said no. Five years ago. Okay. But since then, about 25% growth. Clearly, people are changing their minds and seeing this maybe is something that is our future and our future. So I think we're moving into the cool stage now, or in the cool stage. You had a question to me earlier. You were asking the question, what will the online campus look like in 2029, 10 years from now? I think it will be, it'll be very much mainstream among healthy, growing, outreach-oriented churches. It will become a standard part of their ministry. An online campus to me, what makes an online campus is an online campus pastor.

To me, that's the, there's a lot of other pieces, but when you have that, now you're really committing to making this another expression of your church in another, in a digital neighborhood. Yeah. Right. Where you are bringing the full impact of teaching, but also you're, in terms of the video, you're having a shepherd, a pastor that's leading people in online. You're, you're offering all kinds of opportunities to grow spiritually and to have spiritual experiences. You're building community. These are all the components, I think, of what makes an online campus. I think we'll see consolidated messages and worship as a capsule of the, of the full teaching and worship if they want it, but it'll be, it'll be shorter and it'll be, it'll be prominent.

And it'll be, I think what the best, the most effective use of online campuses or the, it's not just a, we're providing this for our church family or just to get our message out there. Although I think those are great benefits, but it'll, it'll become more of a tool that will help reach people, get people in community and small groups locally somewhere that will be a strategy for local, small groups that become house churches that become eventually a fully locally functioning congregation. And as you know, that's, we're in the embryonic stage of that here at Christ Fellowship. Absolutely. And I think, I think we will see a lot of churches doing that. And they've seen this as not just a getting our content out there, but as an evangelistic tool that will eventually, you know, land, start more congregations.

Right. Whether it's through church planning or multi-siting and, and, and continue to be a viable congregation in the cloud. That's good. For people. Yeah. For churches to get to that point though, where we start to utilize online groups to grow house churches, which goes to church planting like that, that pathway you just paved out. Did I miss anything? No, I think that is, there's a conversation, some of the conversations, honestly, that I'm having right now are, what would a digital only expression of church look like? In other words, what would a church look like that isn't based off of a brick and mortar building? You know, and I can give examples and I've talked about it in the past. There's, you know, church home is an example out in California.

We've, we've, we've had them on the podcast recently where they've created a discipleship strategy that they're, they're moving away from. They're five campuses, but they're moving away from physical growth. Bloomberg Church is another one where they're moving away and they actually restricted their, their multi-sites to go towards a more digital process. There's a, a very small church up in New England. It's a pastor that I've talked with and he's got, he's got a thousand person venue and he's got maybe a hundred people that attend church there any given Sunday. And it's in New England where it's a very liberal environment and they're not really excited about Christianity or going to a church as a general rule.

And so for him, he has to adjust his method of church away from come to the building, but to do what you're talking about. Starting creating and challenging his attenders to create this house church mentality, selling off his building and instead distributing out content and services and, and training people on discipleship. So that they can be the, the heroes, the, the disciples of the people. And so there's, there's many different, different spins on that. So I suggested to a pastor once, hey, pastor, you got to realize that the most effective place that Susie, some made up woman, most effective place that she could be is not sitting on a pew in your church service on Sunday. It's sitting over here on her couch at home with 15 or 20 of her friends and then her doing church in her neighborhood.

That's a far more effective way of evangelism than, than her just sitting in the pew. And that conversation didn't go well. It's just the, the pastor couldn't. And for whatever reason, I don't know if it's, you know, pride or if it's part of it, I think is we're so used to this metric of, of measuring butts and seats, where the successfulness of our churches is measured on what Sunday morning looks like. And how full that venue is, where for church online to be effective, you really can't measure that butts in seats count because for online to be effective, you're creating those house church environments. You're empowering these people outside of your church to, to create their own, own community.

How do you have conversations or what, what advice would you give to a pastor that's maybe feeling that tension of, okay, there is an opportunity for us to expand our horizons, to reach outside. To start new, but to start new, I've got to let go and I've got to change the way that I measure my success today. Well, you said one thing just then about this is something outside the church. And I think the mindset that this is the church. That's good. It's, it's an extension of the church. But I, I think that that's, it's a paradigm shift that has to happen in, in, in, and it is happening with a lot of pastors. Certainly the younger pastors that are coming on the board on the most part have less of an issue with this, but a lot of older pastors that clearly make, are making this change as well.

But it's that mind shift away that, and this is again, the multi-site movement started to shift this thinking. We've made church a very building-centric model, you know, for the last few hundred years, a thousand years maybe. And we realized, as I mentioned earlier, that buildings are just a means to the end, they're not the end game. And so when we began to move away, back in the 70s and 80s, when the megachurch movement really took off in America, it was a new phenomenon, you know. And so what do you do when you've got a gifted teacher, preacher that can draw a crowd, and then they can also mobilize that crowd and to become a very effective church? So we saw that happening. But what we realized is that there's, but the problem with megacampuses is that they're not sustainable over the long time.

You know, and right now we're approaching the retiring age of a lot of those baby boomer megachurch pastors who's led that movement. And there's going to be a lot of half-empty campuses in the next decade or so because the communities around them have leveled off in terms of their growth. And it's going to be hard to fill those pulpits with guys who want to come to a big shift that's declining. And so the multi-site movement now has said, you know, we don't have to have these big buildings to have a mega impact. You know, Life Church, I think of Life Church, has over 100,000 people attending on 31 locations across the country now because they're not limited by buildings. Right. Now we're not limited.

We're not even have to be limited to a building now with online campuses. We can go anywhere and everywhere in the world for a fraction of the cost. I think when people realize what's our goal, we're not – I have to tell pastors all the time, Jeff, we're not in the church building business team, pastors. We're in the disciple-making business. You know, and facilities, technology, these are just means to the end of making disciples. That's good. And who make disciples. That's the history of the church. And so I like to tell people, you know, every – the Apostle Paul and the disciples, the apostles, they all started churches. Guess what? Does anybody know where those churches' buildings are now that they met in?

No. They don't exist. Yeah. But the impact of those churches, that they started in their day, and they met in a place somewhere, we are feeling the benefit of that today. Right. But when you build something really big or small, but you're small, it gets very easy to get consumed with – if we don't have people coming in the door, we're not going to be able to keep the lights on. Right. The shift gets off of making disciples to, how do I keep all this going, you know, financially. So there's a lot of – there's a lot of church murders going on, which is the other movement that I'm very much involved with. And it's not all bad. A lot of churches do need to die and go out of business, but they can have a resurrection, a rebirth, by joining with another church that is growing and vibrant and is culturally relevant.

Absolutely. And so, again, every generation has to reinvent itself, the church, to accommodate not the message, but our methods. And that's always hard in churches, among church people, to make those changes. Yeah. That's good. Recently, you've mentioned before you're listening to the podcast with the panel, it was the Church IT Network, Redefining the Y, Church Online, that did a couple weeks ago. But in there, we talked a lot about moving away from just broadcasting the service. Like it wasn't enough just to broadcast that, you know, let's look at a fully functioning model of what church is. You know, you mentioned hiring the campus pastor, Ray, to shepherd, to develop, to empower people with the gospel, to send out.

And that's a huge part, I think, of reshaping what church online is. And this is for both of you guys. What are some other things that church online would need to do to reshape, to adjust? Like, okay, yeah, the perception of church online, people perceive, you know, things that aren't necessarily who we are. But at the same time, we need to evolve and change through that. So what are some things that we need to, that church online needs to change in order to be better received or more palatable for leadership? Let me say, before Ray answers that question, Ray became our campus pastor, our online campus pastor, two years ago. And of all of our campuses, the most growing campus of our church is the online campus.

Absolutely. Beyond anything, all the others. And so, and I think a lot of it, Ray is probably, Ray is more known than probably any other pastor at our church right now. Because he's seen by more people. Yeah. And, well, and I guess, you know, Pastor Rick and now Pastor Omar. Yeah, Pastor Omar and Carl. Because they're part of that online campus. Yeah. But I'm on the road a lot traveling on Sunday, as you know, and getting here to help lead the church during the week. So Ray is more my pastor online than, I feel affinity with him more than probably any other pastors here. Yeah. Because he's that shepherd to me online. And I love how he plays that role so well. Yep. Thank you. Setting up the message, talking us through the worship, you know, the little breaks along the way, helping me understand what's going on in the church.

You know, it's been an incredible experience. And so I think what Ray is doing, I think Ray is becoming one of the leading examples and models of how to do church online well. Thanks, Jim. Yeah. And, you know, because I had great people empowering me, like both you and Jeff, along the way, it's definitely helped, you know, carry a lot of that along. And it's funny because I think I'm more recognized now amongst our people as well. I get stopped a lot more often. And by the way, Jeff, you started this. Yeah. You got it going and now you're consulting. Absolutely. Yeah. And just did a phenomenal job. Jeff saw a lot of me early on for a lot of this role too, which was awesome. The big thing that I see that's happening is even I've had to lift my lid in terms of what community could look like online.

I've had to expand my thought process in terms of how online community could take place. And we see a lot of different churches experimenting with that. We have a lot of group leaders experimenting with online community in terms of starting small groups within WhatsApp chats, starting small groups within YouVersion Bible plans and leveraging that as a way of discipling people, praying for them, keeping up with them in the Word, encouraging them on a daily basis, doing things that we would even consider beyond small group community. Imagine if you could have small group on a daily basis. And that's what's happening for some of these folks. They are staying in the Word together daily. They are praying for each other daily.

They are carrying out a lot of what we saw in Acts 2 that we couldn't do just in a building. We couldn't do just in Sunday school. I grew up in that Sunday school model. I remember that. And, you know, there was Sunday morning contact, and then there was very little contact throughout the week. If you had a really engaging teacher, you know, as a kid, they might call your parents or they might just keep up with you, you know, wish you a happy birthday when that came around once a year. Now, thanks to online community, we see daily engagement. We see continual engagement along the way. And as a result, you get stronger Christians. You get people who are finding that their faith is applicable in real-world situations, whether they're at work amongst their employees, where it seems like a very tenuous atmosphere.

Oh, man, how am I going to get the gospel out here? Well, you've got people encouraging you on a regular basis, and they're staying connected with you through your devices. And so you've got that constant encouragement happening around that clock. You've got that constant community happening where growth continues to happen. And then the church becomes more than just about the brand of Christ Fellowship. Now it's, oh, I can be part of your community first, where they're even inviting people into those online digital platforms first. And then they're willing to come into a physical space and experience church life because now they've got community to go with them. The whole concept of I've got somebody to sit with now, that's expanding even further.

And so for church online in 2029, I just see continual expansion and thought process and lifting our lids on community in terms of what that could look like, what that could be. And it just does nothing, just excites me. I think it's going to be awesome. Very cool. What else does church online look like? You mentioned before what defines a church online and some things maybe to look at. So like just in your mind, I'm just curious, what does church online look like? As I mentioned before, I think church online, first of all, obviously, is a delivery through digital media of a message, of worship. It has a campus pastor that's dedicated to shepherding that flock online. It's offering all the components of a church.

You can give online. You can ask for prayer online. You can respond to an invitation online to follow Christ. And you can even lead people through communion online. You can even lead people through baptism online. Absolutely. You know, we've seen all that can happen. And we know that community happens online, of course, as well. And you can start small groups and you can start, that can become house churches, that can become campuses or church plants. All that's all possible through this medium. We're going to see more and more of that. Absolutely. And churches are doing that. One of the big questions, our online also can help start global campuses or churches by people who are watching you from around the world.

What's our global draw? That would be a question I'd like to ask you, Ray. What if the majority of people go online, how far out are they? Our strongest draw right now currently is within the United States. But what we are seeing as people shift around and move is we're seeing more and more countries pop up in terms of where their IPs are popping up from. You know, we're in Miami. And so as a result, we're a very transient city. But we've got a lot of people that are globally connected, which means that they are sharing the messages through digital mediums. And even the language factor isn't as much of a barrier anymore because younger generations in different countries are coming up in English.

They're watching some of our sitcoms and some different things in English. And so they're very much wanting to adapt to American culture and even absorb a lot of our content. And so internationally even, we're seeing a lot of people pop up and watching us from – in our church contests, we're seeing folks in Central America. We're seeing people in Brazil and South America. And then, of course, we have a lot of businessmen and international folks who are traveling. And so we're seeing things pop up in Asia. We're seeing stuff pop up in Europe and even in the Middle East. And it's an amazing thing. Well, because we're in Miami, it seems like everyone in Miami is either one or two generations away from South America country.

Right. Or Caribbean. And there's a strong family and relational connection that continues on. Absolutely. And so it's been a natural feeder out of Miami to the Caribbean and South America. Let me ask you this, though. You said most of it comes from the U.S. or our followers or our people logging in with us. Where's the majority of that? But in the past, it was my observation that for most online campuses, the biggest draw was about an hour. Sure. Is it an hour – one to three hours from the – The largest circle comes from within an hour away. But what we see is a growing circle even two to three, four hours north. So Miami is going through a cultural shift right now. And, Jeff, you can kind of attest to this in which housing prices and everything are causing everything to rise.

And young families are having a harder time to start down here. And so a lot of them are navigating to Central Florida. And so we see a large population popping up in Central Florida that are tuning back in online. They've not been able to find a church to connect to there because of their job. Their job is weekend-based. And when they don't know what to do, they do what they know. And so they're navigating over to cfmiami.org and they're logging into the service. So they're just popping open the church app. Or it just creates more content for them to navigate with their family that's still back here. And so there is a growing population in Central Florida, in Orlando, in Tampa of people who are becoming part of CF Online.

And then in the Carolinas, where our former elite pastor was from, a lot of folks wanted to watch him teach. And they wanted to stay engaged with that. And so we saw a lot of people in the Carolinas checking in on a regular basis and absorbing Rick's messages and tuning into the content. And so it's funny how pockets just kind of pick up and they take off. See, I can see where we still have some communities in Miami that we could have physical campuses on our strategy. But I can see the next round is where's a large pocket of people watching us from inside of our hour from the home campus here. We could start eventually a campus one day. Yeah. Starting with small groups online, small groups that meet in a house, watching us online together.

Yeah. Yeah, we've actually got a group of folks in a house in Orlando. Jeff, you remember you helped Albert get started there. And down some in the Keys is West as well. Exactly. And so that's some of the folks that have started. And they've kind of just been taking the content and building community around it. And it's a beautiful thing that we see happening in terms of the potential for movement. We've got another house church getting ready to start up in Orlando that wants to take the content and they want to do it where they're at. And so that's amazing and it's awesome just to see how God could use that. And, you know, we've talked to Danny Hicks from Elevation on the podcast, Jeff. We've seen how different churches are finding different ways to move this expression and to leverage it.

Maybe even not for the launch of a campus, even though in some cases like that happened with Elevation. They launched a Melbourne campus out of one of those. But over the long haul, it becomes a great opportunity for just great community and growth to be built. Costs are low because it's all volunteer driven. But discipleship is high because it's all volunteer driven. And as long as that discipleship level is high, I mean, I'm okay with it. You get the story of like a young adult family in Orlando, you know, just hypothetical somebody moves four hours up and they're still engaged with the Christ Fellowship Miami's feet. That's great. As long as we're giving them more than just the one hour on Sunday.

Oh, absolutely. As long as you're, you know, you're shepherding them, they're being discipled in a group there. We're not taking them away from a community up in Orlando. We're empowering them to create a community where they are in Orlando. Like to me, that's the win. If not, and just even to call church online out here, is if they never engage in some sort of a disciple making community where all they are is just consuming video broadcast. I mean, I give pause to that, right? Sure. Because the standard isn't watch a service. The standard isn't go to a building even. It's create that disciple. Right. Yeah. Content needs to drive towards community. We talked about the whole online to offline relationship.

You know, first option in a lot of cases out of town. For those of you who are thinking, oh, well, they're just trying to keep people online. First option is we try to get them connected to a local community. But if they're incapable of doing so because of time or work or anything else, the next best step is we connect them to online community so that they can be discipled, so that they can grow in their faith. We don't want just a connection card that says, hey, I received Christ. We want to take them to those next steps, which is very much what we've been about at Christ Fellowship and what we continue to be about as we move forward with church online. Awesome. It's been a great talk. You know, Jim, I want to thank you for your time.

I know you're busy running the world, at least the multi-site world, but glad to have you on here. And Ray, man, once again, thanks for jumping on the podcast. That was a pleasure. Yeah, this podcast is close to home to me. I'm literally at Christ Fellowship Miami, a place I used to work, and love seeing what Christ Fellowship is doing here in Miami and global campuses and around the world through online. Well, Jeff, your fingerprints are all over this church. Absolutely. And especially in this space, you were the early champion and advocate for this, and we're here today because you were that voice. So thank you. Awesome. And thanks to you, it's my job to be a force to be reckoned with. Put that on your job profile.

See all that goes. Awesome. Hey, thanks, everybody. May the force be with you. That's right. Very good. A force to be reckoned with. Yeah, we're going to break the podcast right there. Thank you, Jim, for the time. Ray, good luck with being that force to be reckoned with. I cannot wait to see what Christ Fellowship Miami does with that. Hey, I hope there's some takeaways here. As we see the multi-site model grow in the path that it's been on, we see a lot of similarities to how church online is trending maybe a decade behind it, but we're moving in that same direction. And what was a radical idea 10 years ago is now the cool idea of today, which will be the mainstream in 2029. So we're pressing forward, we're pushing, and we're realizing that church online needs people like you out on that edge, pushing this idea, having those conversations with leadership, and essentially, as Jim said, being a force to be reckoned with.

So may the force be with you as you go out, and you know what, I'm not going to do it. I'm a Star Wars fan, and we'll talk about that later. But right now, know that we, here at the Church Digital, we're praying for churches like you. We are praying for you and your ministry out there in the digital realm. And that's going to cover it for this week. So we'll see you next week here at the Church Digital Podcast. Y'all have a good day.