EP378 - TCD Fall Town Hall 2026

All right. I love it when technology works like it's supposed to. Hey, so this is becoming the church digital. Technically, this is episode 3778, but we're leaning in a little bit more today doing TCD's town hall. So we do these. It's been a minute.

Okay, look, I'm sick. It's been a rough year. Actually, it's been a rough year since the last one of these. But we are coming back strong here with 2026. This would be the fourth, the fall town hall. But you can't say fall because different seasons on the planet mean different things.

And so this is point four. I don't know if you keep up with such things. But, hey, I'm Jeff. founder of The Church Digital. We've been hanging out here with, who is this we were just listening to? Chill, chill, pop, chill.

Oh my gosh, I cleared the screen. I should have given credit right off the bat. Yeah, Chill Hop. My stream beats doesn't exist anymore. I'm very sad. Harris Heller was my hero.

He was literally on my top 10 unplugged. The guy was all over the place. I named my car Lo-Fi Lola because of Harris Heller and his Lo-Fi. But now we're checking out Lo-Fi Cat, kind of expending some different boundaries here. Hey, excited to jump on the stream. It's already been good.

We're doing this in... Now, I haven't been on Twitch much. And so doing this on YouTube. Hey, YouTube fam. Good to see you again. We're doing this on Twitch as well. FlatCap will be joining as well.

Need code to get on Switch. Really? Like this is not working on Twitch? No, we should be working on Twitch right now. I don't know what that's about. I'm worried about that, FlatCap.

Flat cap, say something in chat if I got a problem or if my Twitch friends aren't seeing me, but my Twitch friends have already been texting about that. I'm excited to say right off the bat, let me just say hey to some chat people. Mr. Pete is coming on as well. I haven't seen Mr. Pete in a long time. Good to catch up with you, sir. And he, of course, is doing what he's doing, taking this to big screen right now.

So in addition to Twitch and YouTube, doing this on big screen. So excited to see that happen. Some others stumbling in and, you know, some of you Twitchers, I never know if you're actually real or if you're bots or whatever, but hey, thanks for coming on here with this. And then my friend here who actually says it's Nightbot, he's got a... God settles in with a beverage.

I don't claim to be God, but I've got a discounted Coke Zero here. So I'll settle in with you as well. Enjoy what's going on. Also good to see coming in peacemaking communities, San Diego coming in here, Judy. Judy, it's good to see you. Actually, this Peacemaking Communities, that URL handle, I don't think I know that one for you, Judy, but thanks for coming on.

And then of course, oh my gosh, we've got the chaplain Stacey Knapp passively turning on now. Hopefully Stacey will be able to join us later on. Phantom Methos as well, almost like supposed to. I have reverb.

Do I still have reverb? Let's hope for the best on that. Great to have you back, Jeff. Thank you, thank you. I hope I don't have reverb. Forge, good to see you again.

Great to be on. Yeah, Phantom is just clarifying. Actually, I don't... I have had a physical conversation with you, not in person. And at this point, you know, I think AI is good enough to impersonate a person, especially in the metaverse. So I would actually question whether you are real or not.

Paul Strinebuck Bruick is real, so I can validate that. And listen, we're just going to go on and on. It's confusing. We've got different platforms happening at the same time. Hopefully you're seeing this and everything is good in the Twitch side. I'm gonna assume the best and that that was just an old text coming in from Leighton, not anything I should be panicking about right now.

But it's good. We're gonna move on and life's gonna be good. Hey, so we've got this survey. Some things have been happening in the TCD universe. I started to say multiverse. I'm a closet Dr. Doom at this moment.

Very excited, very, very excited about the road ahead with that. But let me push this button and let's do this. If you have not filled out the survey yet, the Church Digital's fall 2026 survey, let's do this. You can go and zap that QR code. It'll take you right to the webpage. If you got your thumbs in, it's easier to type the church.digital slash survey.

10 question survey, real quick, easy, simple. It'll take you two minutes to fill out. We had a lot of people and we're gonna go through the results here in a little bit. There are a lot of things I'm excited about coming off this survey. And so it's a mentee survey, we're gonna unpack it. Some things I'm hanging out with you all as much as I have in the past month.

Some things that I expected. A lot of things I didn't expect. And so happy with the results. Zap the QR code. It'll be up on the screen as well. But let's get into it.

So right off the bat... Where are you from? We had a whole bunch of people answer this question. All you have to do is click on the map where you're from in case you're a flat earther. This is a representation, not an accurate representation because it's flat, but it's actually like the globe on a flat surface. And if you are a flat earther, don't tell me about it.

Hey, looking at this, we still got some people filling it out right now, but it looks like 34, 35, 36, 37 of the 60-some people that have filled out the survey are from the North American area. We've roughly hypothesized just general conversations with people. About 50% of our audience is United States-based, and we're gonna talk more about that. What I love... What I love in this is all the nice dots that are not, not in the United States. We've got, of course, we've always been popular in Europe and so excited to see some friends in there.

We've been popular in South Africa and the Sub-Saharan South African area. So excited to see that. Oceania in Southern Asia. Southeast Asia, excited to see that. We got my friend over here. I actually don't know who this dot is, but I just wanna give a shout out to the lone person in, I guess that's Brazil, right?

At that point, I should know that. And so whoever you are in Brazil, feel free to make yourself known somehow. It drives me nuts that we don't get the traction in Latin and South America, just being in Miami, like that is, that's home. And so I would love, I'd love to be working with some of my Latin and South American friends through digital missions down there. So if you know anybody in the area, get the word out.

But we've got a pretty balanced mix here of United States and global representation here with the church digital. Let's move on. We've got 60 people responding to this. I am a, in a very simple question, 50% of the people with the survey, I am a digital missionary.

12% say I am a digital church staff. 7% say I am a hybrid church staff doing physical and digital. People like Judy would fit that bill. 32% say other.

One in three does not fit this. And so that's a much larger percentage than I was expecting. That tells me I didn't ask the question right. I wanna see in chat right now. Do me a favor, just get in chat and like type in, if you're other, what are you? Are you a physical missionary that just does digital?

Are you a volunteer? Are you a content creator that doesn't consider yourself a missionary? Like I just... When one out of three people select not listed above, it makes you wonder, what are they, the people that are engaging? And so I would love to see some chat engaging on that.

Yeah, Phantom comes up as well. You'll have to start speaking Portuguese to get Brazil. I do. My Espanol is much better than my Portuguese. And to be honest, I've been told my Spanish insults people. So I'm going to just say I'm not really good at either of it.

But we're going to move on from that. So 50% digital missionaries. You know, it's interesting. If you actually Google digital missionary, I looked the other day, we're like eight out of 10, really setting the bar on digital missionary work globally. The Pope, the Catholic side, I'm friends over there. We've had Jose on the stream before.

They are, Jose's not the name of the Pope, but the guy who's working with the Pope on digital missionaries. The Vatican's very interested. and exploring the idea of digital mission work. And so like, you know, the Pope's interested in it, some others are starting to explore it. But you, my friends, you are the trendsetters. And we're going to talk a lot about the trendsetting nature of what we're experiencing here.

My primary ministry is in what platform? My primary ministry is in what platform? Did a word cloud here. And of course, you know, some things jump out. YouTube, of course. God bless the YouTubers.

Discord, WhatsApp, Zoom, Twitch, Facebook. We see a lot of Facebook on this. I don't know if you know this. I'm just gonna go and say it. The Church Digital is on Facebook, facebook.com slash thechurchdigital. I'm gonna say that up front because there are a lot of people that say things like, hey, you should spend more time on Facebook.

And I'm like, I'm on Facebook all the time. Just nobody engages with us over there. So if you're a Facebooker and you're not engaging with The Church Digital, facebook.com slash, you know what? It's Be The Church Digital. Facebook.com slash Be The Church Digital. All our social media handles are at B-E, The Church Digital.

The surprise for me on this survey, and if your platform's not listed, or if you are a Facebooker and you want to claim that, go for it. I'm holding back jokes comparing Facebook to flat earthers. I would never do that publicly more than once. But the thing that surprises me on this is Substack.

Substack, I know, is a growing platform here in the United States. It's been around a long time. It was on my radar a decade ago. I know Life.Church here in America has invested a lot of their energy into that platform. Recently, I have seen some bloggers move into that space as their platform of choice.

I would really be interested, somebody that's in digital missions utilizing Substack because it doesn't have, at least in my understanding of it, maybe I need to look again, but it doesn't have the external reach. of, you know, some of the other things unless they've made changes to it. So if you are doing, I'd love a story. So feel free to reach out to me, find me in one of the communities and just tell me your story on that. We'll talk more about some of that later because there's a lesson to be learned there. And, you know, Squarespace, Kingdom Spaces, if you saw the conversation with Arno a couple weeks ago, Kingdom Spaces is this platform.

Rural, I love that. Somebody said rural. In-person, in-person getting a shout-out. IRL getting a shout-out. VRC getting a shout-out. I kind of like that.

You know what? I saw it before, but I don't see it now. Somebody said face-to-face. And I love that, even as digital ministry. But, you know, and really the heart of digital ministry is getting that face-to-face conversation, getting face-to-face as quickly as possible, as healthily as possible. Don't get lost in isolation.

We'll get more into isolation. But have that face-to-face conversation with people. All right, hey, we're going to keep clicking through here. Over the past three months, how has your mental health been? Good.

A lot of people feeling good. I have felt steady. Mostly okay. I've had a few hard weeks, but not that bad. 35% good, 37% mostly okay. 20%, 19% mixed.

4% hard, 4% very hard. I've been in a dark place. I've confessed that. That's me. I don't actually think I voted on the survey. That would be bad.

But if I did, I would have selected very hard. I'll openly say that. And 2%, I'd rather not say. And so it's a good mix. To be honest, I was actually very encouraged that the majority of the people were above the line with good, mostly okay, and mixed. I'm not discouraged because I don't think it's a discouraging thing.

I think it's just a fact of us as being digital missionaries that there is a bottom line and that there is isolation and that there is mental health issues that come in nature with what we're doing. And it's an interesting line when you do look at it here. I'm highlighting digital missionaries, which is the primary focus, not the only focus, but the primary focus of the community. You see there's a lot of orange. on mixed and below. There's a lot above, but because of the isolation nature of who we are, there is an opportunity to be isolated, to struggle and to not have a community around you to go back with.

A digital staff person, a digital church staff person has their community of coworkers to easily fall back on. A hybrid, a physical staff person has pretty much the same thing in place. Now, you could not trust the community strong enough to do that. There may be a stigma that you don't necessarily trust the people. And I... I understand that.

There's no judgment on that, but there are people in your ecosystem that you can fall back on. The challenge with digital missionaries, I would suggest, is that there oftentimes is not that co-working community. I don't mean co-working like Claude, although that was funny, but there's not that co-work community around there to fall back on. Let's keep going as we're rolling through some of these stats. By the way, if you have not voted, you can click the QR code right now that's on the screen. And that's going to take you to a thing where you can go through, do the survey with us real quick.

We're going to keep the survey open, the polls open till midnight Eastern tonight. That's the midnight Pacific, midnight Pacific tonight. And then we're going to shut it down and call it done.

In the last six months, this was encouraging for me. In the last six months, how many people have you discipled who did not already know Jesus? 33%, one of every three people surveyed, said that they did not disciple anyone in the past six months who did not know Jesus. And there's challenges with that, okay. But what I love from this is the flip side of the equation. 41% of one to two people over the past six months, 8%, three to five people, and six plus 18%.

In total, two of every three people taking the survey is currently discipling someone who does not know Jesus. Like, y'all, that's the win. That's the celebration point. It's easy, and I'll confess. Like, it was trying to find the perspective on this. At first look, it's like, man, three or four people are only discipling one or two people digitally.

And it's like, forget that. Like, we are discipling people digitally. Two of every three people right now is actively discipling. And that's something to be celebrating. You all are doing a great job getting out there and using these digital tools to connect with people, engage with them through the community, and invite them into the process of following Jesus. Are there opportunities to lean stronger into evangelism?

Of course. And you all know that we're following the Spirit as we're doing those things, even moving forward. So excited about this and what this is going to continue to mean for the church digital moving forward. This is the type of question I think we're going to ask every three months, six months. And I kind of want to see how these questions...

trend, like what that looks like for us as we continue to grow, be more sensitive to the spirit, as we continue to grow more confident, as we continue to develop more community and teamwork around us. All right, moving on to the next thing. This is a great question. Choose the top three options that would most move your ministry forward. Choose the top three options that would most move your ministry forward. Right off the bat, right off top, funding is 22%.

A team, a team, this surprised me, a team is 23%. The highest ranking was not money. I would have put money. It was money. I have no money. But if I had money, I would have bet it on money being the biggest issue.

A team is the biggest issue. This is you voting. We didn't rank the top three. We just said, give us three. And 23% of people said a team, whereas only 22% of you said funding. That's really encouraging, because guess what?

Digitally, you don't need a lot. Like, if you want to make it your full-time job, you need to pay for a salary. But I can just tell you, because we deal with the church digital, we pay pennies to get the global exposure that we're getting through the church digital. And so it's not money that's stopping it. However, there is something on the team. We'll come back to that here in a little bit.

23% a team, 22% funding. Tools is gonna be next with 17%. 13% is training, 12% is a mentor, 9% accountability. You know, accountability, it's funny, I struggle with the right word. Accountability is what I say, but it's not what I mean. And, you know, accountability hasn't registered much with the necessity.

And then 5% permission for leadership. I love the fact that we're not waiting for leaders. We're not waiting for our leadership to agree. And to be honest, most of you being digital missionaries are excluded for some of those leadership conversations because you do it yourself.

I love the missional crowd. This is so good. We're going to get much more into this later down the road. I'd be curious.

In the room here, and it's interesting, I will say this, as we're looking at the, this screen doesn't show it, some of the global implications, like the US, what they're looking for, versus global, international, what they're looking for, very different personas. Very different personas, and we're gonna stumble through this here in a little bit. All right, let's move on to what's next.

Has your church or organization's leadership ever limited what you can do digitally? I'll be honest, this question, I got a little chip on my shoulder over here. It's going that side. And so, yeah, this may be a little bit of the Jeff Reed card, but I'm happy with this. 14% said yes.

What is that? One in seven, one in eight, eight would be 12%. So somewhere in there, one in 7.5%, one in 7.5. Yeah, call it done. Not many of you have had that. So God bless.

Seriously, 20% kinda, 66% said no. And the strength towards digital missionary work, there's gonna be a lot more freedom to do things in digital. You don't necessarily have the safety and security like a staff would, but that's some of the price of that. There's a fun conversation around that as well. All right, let's move on.

This is a good one. Is what the church digital teaches shaped too much by American assumptions? Is the church digital shaped too much by American assumptions?

Our language, our vocabulary, our examples, our coaching, our methodology. Are we too much biased towards American viewpoints? 46% said not really, thank you. 54% said either sometimes or absolutely. And so that would be the majority. What's interesting is that the majority of people on this are actually US, they're not international.

So even the US people are saying, hey, you know what? Yeah, you're probably a little too US-based sometimes. And I was talking offline with somebody and they were like, well, that's a pretty large criticism. I don't think it that way, honestly. I've been the guy for years that's saying we need to get more multicultural, we need to get more national, we need to get more women involved. Between Leighton, myself, and J-Mo, and Andy, there's a bunch of white bald men with beards, facial hair, walking around the church digital, so to speak.

And we need to bring in a new season of different vantage points, of different perspectives, of different learnings. We were in one of our volunteer meetings this morning, and I was funny. Literally, there was a conversation that came up between somebody in Pakistan and somebody in South Africa about how to handle relationships in digital space. And both of them had their interesting context that they were bringing into the puzzle. And I don't know that either one was right or wrong as much as it was in their context and what they're trying to do. That was their opinion.

And the two opinions didn't necessarily see eye to eye. And there was a fine conversation, but that's the beauty of what we need to bring into this. As a global digital missions organization that's literally impacting people and empowering people and equipping people to do missions work globally.

If people in Pakistan, if people in Iran, if people in Nigeria and people in South Africa, people in Brazil do what I do, that's completely the wrong thing. Because it's not going to work. Because you're not America. And to be honest, even the stuff that I do in America, I don't want to do. But that's another thing. So it's a problem.

And we need to fix it. But we're gonna get to that here in a little bit. Who do you talk to when digital ministry is discouraging? Who do you talk to when digital ministry is discouraging? 31% says nobody. One in three is like, actually, you know what?

The percentages don't line up. It doesn't equal 100, so I don't wanna say that. But 31% says they don't talk to anybody. 31% says that they talk to a spouse, a peer. 43% will also talk to a peer. 14% have some sort of a mentor that they talk to.

And 16%, less than one in five, falls back on the TCD community to talk to when digital ministry is discouraging. So first off, if you are not discouraged doing digital ministry, God bless you. You need to come tell me how to do that.

For some reason, it's the entrepreneurial sine wave curve. You've heard me talk about this before. I can do this forever. I love what I'm doing. I hate every second of what I'm doing. I'm king of the world.

I'm not even worth the scum I scrape off my shoe. I love my job. I hate my job. I live in this. It's probably bipolar a little bit. Honestly, I think I would have been diagnosed bipolar years ago.

I'm not going to do any harm to myself. Relax. But it's the reality of who I am on this up and down sine wave that I live with on a regular basis. And so the idea of not connecting with people when it's discouraging, I, for one, I need that community around me. And especially, you know, even in digital context, to fall back on that community. With digital, you got to be intentional.

You got to go after it. You can't necessarily expect it to come to you. And that was some of the pain points that I learned even just over the past year as I spent so much time in the hospital. I knew the digital community, the TCD community was there for me. But to be honest, I walled myself off in depression and didn't make myself available for some of those conversations. Conversation for a different day.

But having those people, whether it's a spouse, a peer, or even a mentor to fall back on. There's gonna be a lot of conversations around mentorship, I think, here coming up in a little bit that we're gonna get into. Let's move on. What's the riskiest thing? in about your ministry context? What's the riskiest thing in your ministry context?

Not sure, unsure, don't know. This is a tricky question for a lot. Funding, being misunderstood, security, persecution. By the way, this is, because you also tagged this with those that said they were international. This is very much some of our friends in India who are like, yeah, I can go to jail. My family can get taken away.

I'm worried about livelihood. This is risk of personal health and well-being by some of the missional work they're doing, sharing Jesus and proclaiming the gospel in digital and physical spaces. That's the reality of some of the church digital, which is why, once again, I'm like, hey, listen, anytime I have a conversation with Joy Jitt and some of our friends from India, it's a learning session because there's a lot that I don't know.

And it's unbelievable in the persecuted church how they're even willing to continue on doing the missions work they're doing digitally and physically at the risk of some of what they're facing. Incredible stories right now. And we, at least the American church, we have a lot to learn from some of those situations, from all those situations.

I did that one. I did that one. I wish the church digital would. Okay, I wish the church digital would. And so I just applied some AI to it to group it together. But let's see what some of them are.

Prayer focus. I wish the church digital would establish a culture of prayer, offer cross-cultural training for global outreach, share outreach prayer requests, understand more about our ministry, support us and many more to take digital missions full-blown. I'm not so opinionated on what others should do. Keep following the Lord. Thank you. I wish the Church Digital started building and investing in leadership in Southern Asia.

Organize regular sessions for each member to explain their vision. Just keep on keeping on. Love that. It's a peaceful space, and I deeply appreciate this. I've had excellent advices through TCD Brothers and Sisters. Have more room for older saints that are tech savvy.

Yeah, I remember Steve telling me that. Oh man, that just got deep. I love you just the way you are. Who sings that song? Anyway, sorry, that was bad. Okay, digital tools.

List tools and services have available. Offer resources to locate the folks we are trying to reach digitally. Wish the church digital help me in digital tools, comprehensive, relevant training and support. I don't know, blank. Talk a bit more about digital wellbeing and online safeguarding. So that's good there.

Let's talk about social media. Use Facebook more for announcements. Facebook.com slash BeTheChurchDigital. Facebook.com slash BeTheChurchDigital. They said this last year. I don't remember much from a year ago, but a year ago, somebody told me, you need to use Facebook more.

Facebook.com slash BeTheChurchDigital. Share some specifics for how to use the platform for church leaders. Example, YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Insta. What is enough effort versus not enough effort? That's a hard question. I like that.

Keep challenging church leaders. Maybe engage in the irony to present in-person events with church leaders. Yeah, I know some of our team, I've done that a lot. Some of our team has picked up that in recent years. Leighton, Jason. Jason spoke the other day at Missio Nexus.

I'm not involved in digital church. I mainly use WhatsApp to share the gospel, among other ways. Yeah, I mean, that's, hey, welcome. You're a digital missionary right in the middle of it. Mentor support. Reach to everyone for mentorship.

to have mentors to help digital missionaries how to implement their online ministry, inform teams, be more intentional with emotional or mentoring support for outpost leaders, train and support our team financially to run a sustainable digital mission. We're growing a big vision and it's just outright help. I love that. It's just whatever, help, I'll take it. Great there. A couple more.

Collaborative opportunities. Provide connection to help find people to work together. Would collaborate with other Bible training ministries like CBS, not the TV network. Have more opportunities for us to meet and greet each other. Fellowship network, have fun, blah, blah, blah. Great there.

What else do I want to highlight? Community building. Have more community hangouts among leaders and also TCD fam. We have gotten away from some of the hangouts. We need a director of fun. I'll agree to that.

Training resources. Launch many resources. On what? Just launch them. I like the way you think. No, we'll get more into that here in a little bit.

Offer more training as part of EDM and be more consistent. Consistency has been hard over the past year. I'll be honest on that. Just a general response. It's okay like this. Reach more non-Christians.

Maybe you do, but provide state case studies, testimonies for church leaders to get on board with digital ministry. Be in chat, mine. Okay, great. I don't get to be in chat mine, but I'm sure that made sense in context. So this is, where are we in the presentation? Yeah, that's it.

So that's the survey. I'd love some, yeah, I'd love some initial results from you all. Like, what are you feeling? What's some thoughts on that? I'll be honest, my eyes are not working real well. Guys, I turned 40, my body fell apart.

I'm now 49 and it's like... What? What? How do you read that? And God bless this font. This font must be like two that's on the screen right now.

I literally would just be blind clicking if I did. So sorry, I'm not gonna put it up on the screen. I wish there was a way I could make this. Yep, nope, can't make it bigger. I tried. All right.

Hey, let's keep rolling through this. We got places to go and people to see. So here are some things that I took away from this.

22% of you chose a team as what would move your ministry forward more than any other option. Somebody said in the survey, provide connections and help find people to work together. It's a great idea. And so today, we, the Church Digital, we're launching Here I Am. Whom shall I send and who will go with us? Then I said, here I am, send me.

It's interesting. I keep battling with myself, whether it's here I am or here am I. It depends on the translation, whatever. Here I am is what we're calling it. The church.digital slash here, H-E-R-E, or you can zap the QR code. Here's what we're doing with here.

Here I am. It's a database. If you have a skill set and you want to volunteer, you can write what your skill set is in the database and people can query the database when they're looking for a graphic artist or a community builder or... a mod. And so you can say you want to do the work. You can say you want to mentor.

You can say you want to coach. You can say there's different levels. There's different time periods where you can do it short term and long term. You know, it's meant, Here I Am is meant to connect the people with knowledge. with the people who are on their own doing things. So you're burning it, doing all you can, and you really are horrible at graphics.

Well, the people who are good at graphics, man, I'd love to create something simple for somebody. Let's make that connection. Let's facilitate that conversation. And whether that's, once again, doing the work, or whether it's mentoring, or whether it's coaching, or maybe you just wanna flat out and join the ministry of what they're doing and be part of the team.

The Church Digital, we're just facilitating the conversation. And so if you go to thechurch.digital slash here, H-E-R-E, here's what you're gonna find. It's a database where you can enter information. It's a skills database. So if you have a skill, put it in the database, click on it, select it, 90 some fields you can select through, check off the ones that are relevant to you, you can post websites, you can post your LinkedIn, you can post your Instagram, you can post anything you want, all that information, your email address.

where you're located. If you're in a hyper-secure area where you don't want your nationality or even your name posted, there's ways that you can do first name, last initial. Your name can be private, or your location can be private where it's not public. Tried to make it secure in that situation for some of our international friends. We are at not, at this point, we are not receiving queries. So if you're like, man, I really want somebody to teach me, not yet, not yet.

Let's get the data, let's get data in. And so effective right now, as long as my AI did what it was supposed to, right now, the database is public and ready to go at the church.digital slash here. probably somewhere around November 1st. We'll open it up where people can query the database, but we've got to build reports and searches and all of that. And if you know database, you got to get data in to be able to do that. So right now, if you're interested in giving your talents to digital missionaries, to digital churches, to hybrid churches, to physical churches in America or internationally or whatever context, Here I am.

Go ahead and zap that QR code. Number one. Number two, here's what I heard. 13% talk to a mentor when digital ministry is discouraging. I'll be honest. That's me.

I fall back on the people who mentored me. David Parks, especially over the past year, is my youth pastor. Actually, no, he wasn't. He was my first boss. No, he wasn't. Yeah, I'll call him my first boss.

He was my first ministry boss. And he's one of my go-to guys. The guy doesn't understand much at all about digital. Dave, I love you if you're watching, but you know it's true.

That being said, he's always been one of these guys that I go to when I need somebody to talk through. And so secondly, we are launching one-to-one. I tell you, some of my open offices that I've done recently have been really good. Like I'll go into an open office and I'll have six, eight people in there from like three or four continents engaging and talking. And it's incredible. Some of the open offices, to be honest, like it's crickets.

Nobody shows up. And in my mind, I'm like, everybody I know should have one of these opportunities to sit. Once again, the goal of digital ministry is to sit down with somebody. one-to-one, face-to-face, and have a conversation. A, to be seen, B, to be heard, and C, to be known. And we, the Church Digital, we want to do that.

And so I'm asking all of the church leaders, the senior leadership team, the outpost leaders, the global volunteers, to make time available on the calendar. to sit down one-on-one with all of you individually through The Church Digital. And so what you can do right now is you can zap that QR code and it's at listen, L-I-S-T-E-N, listen.thechurch.digital. And so you can go there and you can select a time to sit down with one of us. I'm still doing meetings as well. I'm not gonna do town hall, excuse me.

I'm not gonna do open offices for the remainder of the year. And instead I wanna invest all my time into this. Why?

As we are currently designing, equipping a mobilization for this next season of The Church Digital, a lot of the questions that are coming up are, well, what do people really need? The survey was huge in helping give us the 40,000-foot level, but I really want to drill in with somebody and find out, okay, where's the weak point with your team? And then how can we... fine-tune some tools and assets so they can better reach those people like we have to be able to be able to ask some intimate questions that you're not just going to get from a from a survey or a poll we are recording these we're not blocking names we're not tracking that information but as we're trying to build out tools to effectively empower digital missions for the generations moving forward, we really want to sit down in a one-to-one conversation with many, if not all of you. And so this is our step towards doing that at thechurch.digital, actually listen.thechurch.digital, or the QR code.

Jason is really passionate about this. uh and nash especially as they're trying to equip uh and create some of those equipping tools i know he's got a video he wanted to share on that he is he's in africa right now on a missions trip what a look from jason but um but hopefully i'm going to click on this and it's going to play i just realized i didn't check the audio let me uh turn this up and let's see if this works Awesome. Thank you for that. And Jason is now looping over and over again. So thank you for that, J-Mo.

And we'll continue to be praying for him in Africa. He's in Africa for a stretch. Then he comes back here. Then he's in New Zealand. And so he's been kind of on a world tour over the past month. But we do want to listen, to pray, to know how we can pray, and listen to help.

Listen, I don't want to build it. In my life, I have built a lot of things. Many of them are very helpful. A lot of them were not helpful. And maybe it's because I'm 50. I don't want to build anything unless it's helpful.

So help me in this season. Figure out how I can help you. Help me help you. Help me help you. And so that's what I'm looking at here. All right, so 33%, one out of three of you don't talk to nobody.

33% talk to nobody when digital ministry is discouraging. One of you even said in the survey to establish a culture of prayer. And so we have built Scattered. This is the thing I may be the most excited about. So Scattered, as digital missionaries, as digital ministry leaders, as digital pastors, as digital church people, even as just a global audience of who I'm talking to, we're not alone. We're combined through the body of Christ.

We're just scattered around the planet. And this year, for the remaining October, November, and some of December, I want us to go through 1 Peter together. It's a daily devotional. It's an optional asynchronous Bible study. It is an optional real-time Bible study that's going to be hosted on Twitch as well. But the goal is every morning you're going to receive a passage of 1 Peter to read.

If you're in this study, it'll be sent to you in a myriad of ways to go through. It's the same passage, devotional passage, Monday through Saturday. Email, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, like every platform possible. I've been working very hard to get all the platforms to work. But at the end of the day, we're going to be sending all of this to read together and then to take notes via the platform or via the software or via the web browser. thechurch.digital slash scattered, and you can zap that QR code free, of course, but you can zap that QR code if you're interested.

Now, why scattered? Or excuse me, why 1 Peter? Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ to the elect who are exiles of the dispersion throughout Pontus, Galatia, Asia, Bithynia, Chosen. Here's what's interesting. And actually, we were going back and forth between acts. Leighton really wanted to do acts.

Actually, Leighton, you want to come on? Let's go ahead and get Leighton on. I'm going to push the magic button here and hopefully this is going to work. I should have brought you on earlier, my friend. I've been doing a lot of talking. Hey, Leighton, how's it going?

Hey, how we doing?

Doing well. Okay, I got you on. So we was telling them, Leighton wanted to do Acts, all 24 chapters of it or whatever it is. And Acts is a great story. Great in our context, especially. What is the early church?

What is the church? And how does that parallel in? But what I love about 1 Peter is it's the story of those Christians that after Saul was part of the murder, the Christians dispersed and they spread the gospel as they went. And some of those Christians landed in these house churches that were away from the established churches. And then Peter is now sending a note out to these people, not telling them as they're away, come back in to the fold.

Yep.

It's safe to come back. Like what you're doing is nice over there, but it's not the real thing. You need to be part of the real church back here where we are. What Peter actually says is, hey, you may be exiled, you may be scattered, but don't forget what you are is chosen.

who you are, you are still part of the body of Christ. You are still doing valid ministry in the context of what you're doing. And I'll tell you, from a guy who's doing 25 plus years of digital ministry, hearing that message biblically, that resonated with me in a big way. As we're doing ministry in these unique places that most established church doesn't even know how to spell. What we're doing is still valid. And God is not calling us to come back in to be part of the established church where it's safe.

God is calling us to stay out there, to stay scattered, to stay exiled into our spaces, and to be the light of Christ in those areas. I don't know. Leighton, does any of this resonate with you, or what are you excited about here as we look at Scattered?

Oh, absolutely. If you take a look at the whole history of the people of God, you have a temple where they gather together and the temple's destroyed. And then they come up with the synagogue model so that you don't have to go to the temple until the temple's rebuilt. Then you do. But then out of the synagogue model, because Paul's traveling to the synagogues. and preaching, well, then there aren't synagogues in the Greek areas.

Do you tell them you have to go to a town with enough Jews to go to the church? No, you start a church in the home. So Paul, Peter, all of them are doing it. The thing that I really love too is what we do not think about is that what they were doing was remote ministry they are writing a letter peter is not going around traveling to all of the locations he writes a letter for the letter to be traveling around and even when paul is writing letters to certain churches the expectation is those churches will pass a letter on to someone else he's doing remote discipleship

Hmm.

in the first century the church is doing remote discipleship all we are doing is modernizing the way that we do this to utilize the tools that we have of the day paul is using the romans road and letter carriers and scribes which were the tech of the day we've got the tech of the day which is twitch it's discord it's whatsapp it's zoom calls it's whatever is going to come next with ai who knows we just want to lean into the ways that we can disciple people. So that's really exciting. And I think as we do this, what I want to see happen with Scattered is a model that everybody can go and copy. Because I think that's one thing when you were asking the questions earlier, are people waiting for permission from their church? Well, sometimes it may not be permission from the church, but they might not know they can do it.

They need to see it. in order to be able to go and do it. So as we model scattered discipleship, a model for that, hopefully you can take this to your own church, your own community, duplicate it, start it there. We're not trying to make this big and fancy that you have to have a degree in order to do it. We want everyone to be able to show up. If you miss half of them, you still get something out of every single time you show up.

And if you can't show up, you get something out of the daily. So it's going to be a duplicatable thing, we hope.

Yeah, and that's our hope in that. We are leaning into the first one in Twitch. I'm trying to see. Yeah, that's the last slide. The first one is going to be Twitch. Really, it's not about Twitch.

We're using that Twitch gathering to really just have a conversation about the passage and start to... generate some ideas for the devotional and other things. But we're creating online leader guides if you want to take your team or a group of people through the study at the same time, if they want to sign up for the devotional as well. As we are creating the Bible study with Leighton and some of the Twitch friends, I would fully expect, especially in future seasons, to do other scattered versions. I know Leighton's talking about doing the Acts next after the new year, and there's other books that could come up.

And I jokingly made a joke at some point. I was like, man, wouldn't it be great if we did like the digital ministry study Bible, just kind of created off all these notes that we were generating, going through the Bible together and wrestling with the different context of digital based off of looking at Scripture. And so the hope is for us to lean into this context with Twitch. But at the same time, once again, it's not about the live on Twitch. It's much more about getting into the scripture and maybe even empowering you to do one of those other scatterings. Do we want to call... That just kind of fell off my tongue.

Is that what we want to call that? The Twitch scattering? I...

Well, I don't see anything wrong with calling it that.

Yeah, that's...

I mean, if scattered is what we're going to use to say, hey, we are scattered, we're scattered together in digital spaces to look at the Bible, then scattering is going to be what's happening as it spreads.

Yeah, we're gonna roll with it. And I honestly did not plan that in advance. So that's good. All right, hey, and so Layton's gonna be involved. I'm gonna be involved. Ian Kirk, a lot of you know Ian.

Ian's gonna be involved as well with this first round. If you wanna do a scattering, if you wanna do a group going through 1 Peter in a different context, see me. If you wanna dig into another book as well, see me. I'm more than happy to put something together for you. But we are building this in such a way that it's not a gathering, it's a scattering.

And with that, being able to adjust to the different things there as well.

Well, and I was going to add, we're doing it on Twitch because I'm on Twitch.

And so, yeah.

And so that's why it's there. We're not trying to confine this to Twitch. So if you're not live and you're not on Twitch and you're going to watch the VODs later and you like what this is and you want to duplicate it and you're in Discord, you're in WhatsApp, go do it in the community where you are.

Yep. Yep. Yep.

If you have a Facebook group for your church and you want to bring it to your church and help your physical church figure this out and become a hybrid model of discipleship, do that. So just because we're starting here, we're not hoping to have 100 Twitch groups. I would rather see we have 100 platform groups and they're scattered all over different platforms because then they can spread and infiltrate on all those different platforms. It was just, I'm already here. We already have this established. Let's start where we are.

Just like you start in Jerusalem and then you go to Judea and then you go to the rest of the world. So we're starting where we are in Twitch and then we'll go out from there.

Yeah, love that. Thank you. Thank you, Leighton, for that. Man, he's so much better at talking about this stuff than I am. All right, and then coming off of that, let's see, what else is left? You told us, oh, that's what's left.

Coupled with this, 38% roughly put tools in the top three for moving their ministry forward. One even said, list tools and services that the Church Digital has available. And so I'm happy to announce, you know, we said that the Daily Devotional is going to be delivered and listed off all the different channels, like the WhatsApp, Discord.

Facebook, Instagram, kind of Slack, ratted off a bunch of things there. And so the delivery mechanism that's actually going to be delivering the devotional is Karen. Karen!

I'm hopefully pronouncing that correctly. The scariest thing I've done over the past hour was pronouncing that word, and I'm hoping I did it right. Karen. Okay, so what's Karen? Karen is the Church Digital's artificial intelligence, or at least the public-facing part. you guys are seeing.

But let's back up. What is a cairn? Cairn, it's a Gaelic term, Scottish. It's a stack of stones that people who went first on a trail leave so that whoever comes next on the trail can find where they're going, can see the path. And so the idea is that we as explorers of digital missionary, our digital missions work, are contributing to this artificial intelligence, to this AI, Karen, who then has the knowledge base to make it available for you and the generations that's behind.

So a couple things that I just want to say on this. One, the Church Digital, we are an AI-friendly organization. And I don't necessarily want to apologize for that. I'm pro-AI. I know that in the church space, many people are pro-AI, many people are anti-AI. Even among leadership, there has been lots of conversations, pro and con, towards that.

But the thing that I utilize artificial intelligence is to multiply me. to take my knowledge and my thoughts into different contexts that they've never been before. And so we've specifically designed the AI in a way to contextualize this for you, digital missions work for you. And so you are in Pakistan, you're in India, you're in Brazil looking up how to do digital missions work. If you read a blog, you're going to have to contextualize that yourself because I'm not contextualizing it for you. The AI is built in a way that it will contextualize it for you.

And so it's very easy. To interface with the AI, you can go to the church.digital slash Cairn, C-A-I-R-N, and it'll do that. In addition to that, it'll also, Cairn is delivering all of the devotionals. of scattered and so whatever your vehicle is even email if you're receiving the it via email if you reply to the email if you reply to the whatsapp messages discord everything else you'll be able to interact with karen at real time And so that's what we're seeing here. Karen has full access to the Church Digital Library, 800-some blogs, full transcripts of 500, 600 shows between Leighton, myself, DeMarcus, Tom Pounder, Andy Mage, and whoever else was part of the Church Digital since, you know, over the past eight or nine years.

Honestly, it will tell you when it doesn't know. I actually love stumping it. And there are some things that it's weak on. It's got multiple scriptures and multiple languages that it can do. It's 50 plus languages, at least, in what it's set up for. And the thing is, is it points you to a real person.

This is not AI, and hear me, because this is what a lot of people get upset about. AI is not replacing community. AI, Karen, is not replacing us. As a matter of fact, this morning, I didn't even know it was public. This morning, somebody used Karen to book a meeting with me on Monday. My meeting link was already in there, but it was going to roll after this call.

But evidently, the software rolled out a little early, and I woke up this morning to a meeting with somebody somewhere in Africa that wants to talk with me Monday morning about something. And so we are accessible and more and more of our leadership will become accessible through Karen to engage and to interact with things. But this is a tool that we want to give to digital missionaries. And it's a foundation that we will, in the future, lean on building other things on top of. Andy?

Inesh, others are really excited. I mean, of course, I'm really excited about the road ahead with the church digital. And Karen's going to play. Karen is going to play a big part in that.

Where you are already, I think I said this, website, any, you can already see it on the Church Digital website, it's already embedded on there. WhatsApp, US number 510-824-8724, you can literally WhatsApp us right now on that number, it works. Discord, it's already in tcdfam, and so you can do that. Slack, you can add it at thechurch.digital slash slack, you gotta install it on your server and then it works fine. And then from October 19th, when Scattered launches on, it'll be part of Scattered. And so I'm sure that's going to be a thing.

I'm sure there's probably questions that are centered around that. Leighton, briefly, do you have any thoughts on... Oh, you know what? Yeah, real quick. Do you have any thoughts on this before we move on? I'm a little behind.

Yeah, I think just a little bit. It's we're asking for tools and we're asking for, you know, some training. And, you know, we are talking about this, the mass amount of podcast and blog posts and other things that are there. is just going to help it make it searchable so when you're looking for something you can find who's done it and connect with that person as well as get the content that's already produced out there so i really think it's going to be a utilizing tool to help people get introduced to things that they're curious about and also the people that are doing those things

Yeah, very, very good. Stacey, if you're on, I think I hung up on you accidentally when you did. So if you want to call back in, that'd be great. And I'm sorry if I did hang up on you. I don't think I replied quick enough and I think you were canceled. All right, you told us 57% of you said that TCD is shaped too much by American assumptions, sometimes or absolutely.

One of you even said, think beyond the United States. Guilty as charged, own it. which is why this is what we're doing. Serve with us. Public invitation to anybody that wants to help change that and help us step into the global side of the church digital. I tell you what, Stacey, I'm going to go ahead and bring you on.

Give me a second as I finish that thought. And I think I can push this button and it'll all work. All right. Hey, Stacey, can you hear us?

Love it.

oh hey can you hear me though maybe should i turn off my bluetooth from my car maybe it's better hold on okay yep

Yeah, yeah, I can hear you good. It's a little delayed, but... Yeah, I would go without the Bluetooth if you can. So here's what we're doing with serving. We're looking for two to three positions right now that are going to be very strongly influencing what we do internationally and the international footprint of the church digital. First off, we're looking for international content creators. People like what Leighton and I do.

Leighton does Control Alt Redeem. I do Becoming the Church Digital. Demarcus does, Stacey will be back hopefully, and Demarcus does Digital Pavement Podcast. And so create a content. Create a stream. We'll take the stream.

We'll do everything that we do on our side to make it be effective, to land. We'll do the hard work. We literally just want you guys to come along, some of our international content creators, and start to create that.

um it's helped create that

Stacey, can you mute for a little bit? Thanks. To help create that content for us.

Stacey, can you mute? Can you hear me? Yeah, mute just for a second so we'll get to you. Sorry, we need some content creators to come along and help us create international content to take these ideas and help map them out in the international space. Number two, and this is a big one, we're looking for a WhatsApp community director. Andy helped us get from, let's even back up, Andy helped us get onto Discord,

Thank you.

two years ago. Discord right now is scraping almost 1,000 people at this point.

Oh, it's longer than that.

Leighton's picked up the reins and has been doing a great job with Discord. And Leighton now serves as our community director overseeing both WhatsApp and Discord. But WhatsApp really is an international flair. And especially if you were to look at the surveys, we didn't get much into it in this, but the different surveys, the website will show you some of the differences if you look at the survey on the website when it publishes. The different flair between what the US is looking for in Discord and what international is looking for in WhatsApp, it's a different thing. And so we've been running WhatsApp and Discord really as one community just on two platforms.

The reality is, is it's two communities. And so we, the Church Digital, we need to separate it a little bit. And to do that, I need somebody to step up, somebody who understands international context, who isn't...

U.S. bald white with a beard who can step in and start to run that globally. And so if you're interested in either of those, reach out to me. You can zap the QR code, listen to church.digital.com. We're also looking for people on the equipping and mobilizing team. This is the stuff that Andy and Inesh is working on to start to create tools to complement what we're doing through Cairn. as well as other tools and resourcing that we're doing at the global level.

We need people that are with on-the-field experience globally to kind of step in and be part of that team. Once again, if we're not resourcing, if we're not helping people in the field, then why am I doing this? I would rather not. But what we're seeing through these surveys is we are doing this. And so we're going to keep leaning in and helping as best we can. And so very much thankful for that.

And y'all, that's gonna wrap up the stream. And so, but Ford, I wanna do, and I asked Stacey to jump on with us as we're wrapping up here. I want us to close in a time of prayer. Stacey, to be honest, I don't remember what we said we were gonna do to close. But hopefully you got that memo. But I'm just going to hand it over to you.

And let's say you've got five or 10 minutes, however best you feel led.

hey okay so no i don't i don't think i read that memo so that's on me though that's my bad um but um i think i what's really important here is for us to this is not just a one time for us to be together to pray as it is continuing to grow deeper in our prayer life and that it's praying as we go along in life. I think you mentioned, Jeff had mentioned something about, you know, pray scrolling or maybe it was...

flat cap maybe it was you Leighton but talking at that hey it's just every day and whatever you're doing I'm even at work here I have a desk job I be working human resources and so I'm just really encouraging everyone to kind of just whisper prayers as people say oh so-and-so is not coming in today they're sick okay I'm gonna pray for that person just for the next five seconds and so um my encouragement uh to all of us is be mindful of that and what i also do is seeing really recognizing the people that are in the community um sometimes i don't even know their names right because you guys it's we all have different display names for different things just use those um you know prayer support and care for one another um doesn't have to be um it doesn't have to have a name really a person doesn't have to have a name it's just what we recognize what they're what um with their, what you just see with your own eyes, see with your own eyes, what is their name? We're just going to declare blessing on them, wisdom and discernment, whatever it is. So though we're praying together today, let's, I encourage you, I invite you to ask the Lord, Lord, how?

what ways can i continue and have a posture of prayer um as as i go along so um hey jeff so uh on those notes jeff maybe i i maybe i could just follow those okay

Yeah, I love that. Why don't you lead us in a guided prayer? We've got some people watching, and we'll have a bunch watching this online, but lead us through a guided prayer session on those notes to wrap up, and then we'll dismiss.

yeah that's the thing i can't see them so yeah i i'm like i can't see i only see is a three of us so that's all okay sorry i i think i missed like five seconds there

Oh! Awesome. Give me the headlines one more time. I didn't know I was taking notes. And then FlatCap, why don't you and I tag team it?

Do you have those headlines again?

i don't i don't i can't see i can't see them no it's not it's not your fault he's owning it because that's because he's supposed to friends he's owning it because it's supposed to but let's just put that out there no i just didn't bring it with me because i'm on my my cell phone

You won that totally, and it looks so good. All right. Hey, you know what we're going to do? My fault. 100%. My fault.

And we just... Yeah, it's fine. Yeah. Yeah, that's good.

Leighton. Yeah. No problem. I tell you what, Leighton, can you pray for us, our digital missionaries, as we're wrapping up, and just that we go with boldness in sharing and following after what God has for us.

yeah absolutely god we uh we're called to uh follow you and uh we are called to uh share the good news wherever we go and so we are just thankful to be uh connected globally with other believers around the globe who are seeking to bring you wherever they go uh our platforms our places and we see people as they are and we build trust with them so that we can build relationships with them And wow, I was just blown away with the data of how many people are discipling more than five people in the last six months who are brand new in the faith. I've never been in a church where I probably could have looked around and saw that there were that many people discipling brand new people in the faith. And so it's exciting to hear about these missionaries.

Thank you.

who are doing that they are living it out they are earning trust with people sharing the gospel with people and bringing them to follow jesus so god whatever they are in need of we we went over a lot of things that they need they need finances they need teaching they need accountability they they need tools they need friends on mission So just help us with the Church Digital to make those connections, to fill the gaps where we can with teaching and tools, to help with networking and connection, to help with anything with mental health so that they can share and are ready to share any discouragements they have because they are not alone. We are the body, and we need to do this together. So God, we just ask your blessing upon them. And as we often pray around 1002, that the harvest is plentiful and the workers are few, we pray for you to save and raise up even more workers to go out beyond those we already know, because... I can't reach everyone.

Jeff can't reach everyone. Stacey can't reach everyone. All of us who are in TCD can't reach everyone. There needs to be more workers for the harvest. So God, raise them up. Send them out in every language, in every tongue, in every platform.

Just pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Amen. Awesome. All right. Hey, guys, we're going to wrap up. I've actually got a meeting in about 10 minutes I got to prep for. And so double book today with somebody new to the Church Digital.

And so it's like, hey, come to the town. Come to town hall. It's like, yeah, I booked you 10 minutes after the town hall. So I got to run. But hey, it's great to hang out with you. I stream every time on YouTube.

And Leighton, when's your next show coming up on Twitch? Do you have any idea what your schedule is right now?

It's tomorrow. I want to say 11 a.m. I will be streaming on Twitch with DJ Soto will be the guest.

Dude.

Oh.

Oh, man. I did not know that. That's great.

Yeah.

Yeah. Congratulations. What platform did you use to get DJ? What did he answer on? Discord?

Discord. Discord.

Wow.

Yeah.

Yeah. It was funny. I have Signal on my phone just for DJ because Signal is the only account I could ever get DJ to answer on.

Well, I did get, you know, Alina and Pastor Coco to also, you know, help, help, help.

Yeah, kind of some prodding helps.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. DJ, I love you. Nothing direct on that. But hey, we're going to wrap. We're going to call it. Check out the church.digital slash events for schedules in the weeks to come on that.

And hopefully the church.digital landing page as well as the church.digital slash town hall will show everything we just talked about so you can dig in more. Leighton, thanks for being here. Stacey, thanks for jumping on. Jamo, appreciate you jumping on via video and have a good one. See y'all later.

Thanks. Bye.

Later.