How One Church Planter Successfully Launched his Church During Covid

Today we're going to talk about how one church planter pivoted during COVID and launched his church anyways, even though his entire area was shut down. What did he do? Find out in a minute, because it's time.

You're listening to the Church Digital Sidekick Podcast, part of the TCD Podcast Network.

hey heroes my name is tom pounder and this is the church digital sidekick podcast this is the podcast where i bring on ministry leaders and we talk about how to do ministry more effectively in this very digital and online world and today i have jared nassif on and jared is a church planter who at the beginning of 2020 he was going to launch his church in person in real life in person and then COVID happened. Yeah, I know. We've heard that story a lot. You were going to do this and then COVID happened and it changed everything. Well, it did change everything, but Jared still launched his church and his church is still going on right now. And they have a digital component and an in-person component. And so today we get to discuss how he pivoted and how he used digital tools and online tools. to still launch his church and still minister to his community during COVID. So what did that look like? We're going to talk about that today. But before we get into that, I do want to highlight the Church Digital. At the Church Digital, we have a lot of different resources and help and support for people who are looking to do ministry more effectively. We have some online help. We have some mental help. We have digital stuff. We have coaching cohorts and also one-on-one coaching that we'd love for you to check out. And we have a number of different podcasts as well. So if you just go to thechurch.digital right now, you can find out all the different resources, all the different coaching and equipping that we help you do at The Church Digital. All right, everyone. Now let's get into our conversation with Jared, talk about how he launched his church in the midst of COVID with digital. right with me right now is jared massive jared how are you man i'm good tom how are you buddy thanks for having me on hey man it's it's great uh and again as we were talking before i hit record uh you and i met uh through passion for planting um and and we actually actually then got to meet we we met online but then we got to meet in person at exponential so that was really fun

Yeah, it's been a much of like what the church planning experience has been. It's really just meeting people online. And then maybe somewhere down the road, you might get to meet them in person. And for our situation was a little different, like using mine, because we met online. And then the plan was originally. to meet in person before we co-taught this workshop at exponential together and then again much like church planting my plans did not go that as i originally thought and uh ended up walking into the workshop we were teaching like 10 minutes late and so didn't even get to meet you until after we were done uh teaching together so whatever it all worked out though

It all worked out. It was great. And I again, I hope to have these conversations some more. But because your story is awesome and we're going to get into the story. But before we get into what you did and how you planted your church, give people a quick background about where you're at and how you went down this process of planting the church.

Oh, man. Yeah, we are in me, my wife and our three kids, Naomi, who is for Wrigley. She's two and Ezra is four. He's 14 months old. And so our kids are pretty are pretty young. And we live now in Des Moines, Iowa. Well, we actually live in Urbandale. which is like a suburb just on the other side of the Des Moines proper line. But yeah, we live in the Des Moines metro area. And we moved here. And we moved in kind of in the very beginning of 2020. and so moved to the beginning of 2020 eager excited had all these plans to plant the church passion for planting was helping us prepare and dream and pray over this church plan we came with this excitement that we're gonna plant a new church and bring a lot of people to christ and build community and have a relationship it's gonna be awesome and then a month later the world was like now we got other plans for you so yeah we're yeah we're in the des moines area we moved i was i've been in vocational ministry all of my career uh at established settings and um was actually at a church in indiana for about four or five years where um i was in in conversations with uh the eldership there about possibly someday um succeeding the current lead pastor as he was preparing to retire and so we were in this this year-long season of praying my wife and i over that decision do we stay where we are and succeed the lead pastor i think this is where god's leading and then over that year of praying in moments of fasting god made it real clear to us through i mean that's a whole nother story in of itself of how god called us into this but i've truly never felt more called to anything in my life than planting this church which side note is truly the only reason we are still planting this church today because of these last two years nothing else we have to lean back on except for this calling i would firmly believe god has placed before us to plant this church and at this time and in this location so yeah that's where we're at right now

Well, man, that's exciting. That's encouraging to hear the story, too, of, you know, just you praying and fasting. And on a side note of just the fact that all throughout history, it seems like when God does amazing things and when God's really moving, people are fasting and praying and they're able to hear the voice of the Lord and really go clearly in a direction, even in the midst of a pandemic. I mean, it would have been probably so easy for you to pack up and say, we're not doing this. We can't do this. But God's calling is in it. So you guys continue.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. There's been several moments where it's like, man, do we look for another job? Do we leave ministry altogether? Like, you know, other 40 some percent of other pastors have considered, you know, and so, but it always comes back to that. No, God, six different times made it very clear to us. This is where we need to be. This is where we need to go. So that's what we hang on.

okay so let's get into the process of you actually starting this church yeah when did you when did you go through the passion for planting program was that yeah 2019 into 2020 or what was that i was in the cohort i started in the fall of 2019

and went in uh through the spring of 2020 i believe and um alongside that i had left the church i was at in the fall of 2019 so i stepped away in september of 19 and then my wife and i and our family took the next four or five months to travel. And we were given this opportunity to, not through Passion River Planting, but we're given this opportunity to go and visit and see other church plants. And so every one to two weeks, we spent time with another church plant all over the nation. wow at different stages of the life of the church so we saw church in rhode island and in mesa arizona and in champaign illinois and rochester minnesota all like one that are just getting launched or pre-launched or 10 years old everywhere in between so we were given the season to like kind of be trained up and look at like these different examples and models and learn from experiences that are out there because we didn't know what the heck we were doing trying to plant the church So we're trying to figure out how other people are doing and what we can learn from them. And then in the very beginning, January, February of 2020, we became boots on the ground in the Des Moines area. And initially moved in with my parents live in Anken. They're in northern suburbs. So as we look for home, we thought our stuff's going to be in storage as we travel. When we're back in Des Moines, we'll move in with them for like a month, shoot to maybe like look for a house or something and really get to work on building community. And so that was very beginning of the year 2020, January 2020. And then a month and a half later, NBA shuts down, the rest of the world follows suit because of this COVID, this pandemic. And we truly did not know at all what to make of this. And at that time, we had... um three families that had or three households that had like transplanted with us really from indiana to help plant this church and so and they had moved to the des moines area at this time so we have these these like really 12 people with us and me and my family to try to launch this church pandemic hits and we go man what do we do You know, we really started panicking, started like, OK, is this how long is this going to last? You know, maybe we just write it out for a little bit, you know, do what is this going to look like? And so, yeah, as we began talking through what to do, as it became more real that like this isn't going away anytime soon, we really we really said like what we're planning on doing. isn't going to work and um but just because there is a pandemic doesn't mean we just stop trying to start a new church doesn't mean we just stop trying to tell people about jesus right and um because that's why we wanted to plant a church in the first place so let me ask you this question real quick before the pandemic hit did you have a a launch date that you were planning on launching Yeah. Yeah. Our original plan was October 11th, 2020. Okay. yep that was the original that was the original goal was to plant this church sunday morning services october 11 2020 um and we were you know working with professional planting to kind of do like um we had this vision of kind of doing this like hybrid small group and traditional service model kind of thing um where yeah we're going to gather on sunday mornings um but we're going to be heavily based on uh disciple making especially in our small groups you know and Um, and so that's what our, our kind of our, our plan, our plan was as a whole.

Okay. So you had a launch day and now that the pandemic has hit. So what starts to change as you're going through it, you're realizing it's not going to be just a week or two weeks. We're not going to be back by Easter as some were hoping that we'd be. So how did, how did your mind shift change and what did you guys do to adapt?

yeah so um we had not made any like rash decisions yet major decisions on let's push a launch date back let's um throw everything out what we did was um we we said hey we don't know truly what this when this is going to end if at all what's it going to look like all we know right now is everyone's terrified to be around other people or be in public everyone's just staying in their homes you know so we literally can't go anywhere like we're all even in the same city and area but we still wouldn't gather right right at the very beginning of covid no one went anywhere right you all stayed under house arrest and um for the most part and so we just started meeting through you know the upper zoom right and uh um started meeting through that and just talking about so what do we do so and then i posed so i posed the question to our team posed the question how do we do everything that a church or a church plant could or should be doing but do it digitally or online Right. And so I just posed that question, how everything a church could possibly do in person. How do you do that online from like take just your Sunday morning experience, for example, like parking lot coming into the front door, coffee, like welcome. You receive gifts and hugs and there's name tags and. people welcome you to find a seat and there's slides up on the screen ahead of time and there's music playing and then you know there's a band and announcements and and then teaching and community offer everything to go through so we just started going like well we could do that and then what about outside of sunday what about everything the church does from their discipleship training uh stuff to their kids ministry programming to the events that are built around building community to outreach and community service and trying to meet needs of our area like we just started going how do we everything the church should be doing could be doing how do we do that online and so we started filling in and we don't have all the answers even to today but we started filling in some of those things like what what are some of the things we could do right now to do the very thing And so we started talking about, well, we could really some like main categories is one, do some kind of worship experience online, do some kind of gathering digitally for people so they're not just completely isolated from everyone else. We could do some some small groups. figure out how to use uh zoom or google meet to do some small group stuff and um and then uh how do we meet the needs of others at this time and place how do we serve other people um when you're not really allowed to be around people you know and so we try to figure out what some of the answers to those kind of things would be so we took our launch that we kept it on october 20th or october 11th in person but then we said maybe rather than just kind of leading up to that maybe we just start doing some of this stuff right now in the digital space and then we get closer to october we add in sunday morning in person so we said let's try something online so we decided to set a launch date and we launched an online service in june uh beginning of june 2020 so like several months before our in-person launch date which was still yet to come later that fall and so we built that up we marketed it online um we started doing uh hosting uh in-home watch parties and uh so it kind of trained up our people the people we had to say hey your neighborhood where you guys are living get to know those people the ones closest to you start inviting them to your homes on sunday mornings or later in the week to watch this service that we pre-recorded posted online and um it's going to be designed for watch parties so that's kind of what we went through with our focus of our of our online service is the watch party in mind and told our people invite your neighbors and and then tell them like we're gonna the model we're gonna kind of follow the structure we're gonna follow is worship prayer together sharing a meal so like you guys are responsible for like let's do lunch together and pray together and watch your service and worship together so it's kind of the three things we put in front of our people and just say hey you're kind of just facilitating here you know allow the spirit to do the leading through our through your your community through your fellowship through the service online through all this kind of stuff and so it was a really unique season of the life of the church from june to well for a while of doing just online in person watch parties just kind of worshiping online together

okay so let's let's talk about this a little bit more because this is this is great and it's fascinating to me uh because what what i hear you talk about is the the word the digital word you know you got the physical you got the watch party you're meeting in person and you've got that online component so talk to me about a little bit about your online component um you pre-recorded it where did you post it and let's like let's talk about the experience like was it like an hour-long service was it 20 minutes 30 minutes like what what did that look like for your your watch parties

Yeah, no, we all great questions. When we talked about just the online service, we thought if we do it just how you do it in person, it would feel like it may not like garner as much effectiveness or momentum. And since everyone and their brother knows nobody's meeting in person, don't pretend that you're in person. while people are watching online so they just like like own own it and be like yeah hey we're all at home right now watching this together so that's kind of the mindset we went in is is kind of cater this to the like watching from your couch experience you know for a while so with that we thought man when i'm watching something on facebook it's rarely like like um i don't often watch like songs or or singing those kind of things like usually it's some kind of content that uh whether it's um uh a a ted talk or a sermon or someone's teaching me something or a podcast like it's usually something i'm trying like the reason i'm i'm streaming something is for the benefit that i might be able to gain some knowledge or something from that might challenge me, like it helped me grow in a certain area. So we thought this is what people if they're going to watch it, that's what they're looking for. And so we put we actually kind of reversed how most people would do a service. And we still included music and song and that kind of thing. But we usually put that toward the second half of the service. So the service itself usually started with a. a person that was kind of an online host that just very well was like hey so glad they're joining us here even from you know wherever you're watching the car the couch your shower whatever it is welcome you know just kind of being very friendly like someone normally would in person but talking directly to the camera right much like i'm talking directly to the camera right now you know and um and then would go straight into they would kind of set up the morning they would explain like again just like in the person service explain um where we're going to be in our study today some announcements that are helpful to keep in mind you grab some communion and offering just kind of help prepare people and then we go right into the teaching and so that would really be the start of that service would be the teaching and we we we would would not go past like 20 minutes i think i think uh there was a while back there was a book that came out about um how to talk like talk like ted or something like that and they said the average human like adult attention span for something like that is 18 minutes max so we tried keeping it around that ballpark especially when it's online the longer something is right we all know this the the the less shelf life is going to have or effectiveness is going to have and so um we kept those pretty short and then went into a few songs um or some other a video or whatever else might be included in that service and then usually conclude it with the outro host as well just thanking watch parties enjoy the meal together we'll see you next week or share this with your friends here's some other tidbits

so yeah it was pretty simple service but all really created with the mindset of the in-home watch parties did did you encourage all the watch parties to happen at the exact same time or according to what's best for that particular home

according to what's best for that particular home yeah what they could could do and so i think all of ours did do sundays but i believe one or two may have met in the evenings rather than in the morning or something so but we posted it live i can't remember it's either 10 or 11 a.m on a sunday and that way they can watch together and then do lunch together too in their homes so that's awesome and so how many watch parties did you kind of start with when you kicked it off yeah um i think very first we started with like three i mean we only had 12 people you know from the very beginning of just going yeah uh how about you guys this is what we're gonna do in our neighborhoods we're just gonna reach our neighborhoods that's where we are that's what we can do you know so i'll start there so that's kind of where it began so

and so okay so let's let's walk this through a little bit more now so you started with the watch parties and you do this service together what else did you do or what kind of training did you offer to help with this as well yeah yeah we did some we did core team trainings right um and we did i think i can't remember if we did

bi-weekly or every week. I feel like we did bi-weekly trainings all the way up through our in-person service and we do more once a month trainings at different seasons because our pre-launch phase was much longer than we expected it to be because of COVID, right? So we kind of changed gears sometimes, but we did these trainings all via Zoom or Google Meet until we could start meeting in person. So like later in the fall here in Iowa, we could start meeting in person.

Okay.

um yeah we were able to start actually doing some in-person stuff like um i think september okay maybe october might have been our very first like in-person kind of vision gathering thing but it really wasn't as long as a lot of the nation or most of the world had been locked down on and so um yeah we uh started the watch parties but then we did some team training stuff walk them through different discipleship tools that uh you know myself or another pastor another leader has been um challenged or encouraged by or has been helpful for us you know we We taught the three circles. We taught the blind man story from John. I once was blind, now I see. So what's your kind of cardboard testimony? We just taught a couple of different tools that Passion for Planting gave us. Ways to love your neighbors. We talked about how I gave them, I can't remember what it was, but I gave them the... how to go from curiosity to community during covid so like the three c's of the pandemic how to go from curiosity to community to uh during covid and we talked through what that can look like practically in their lives and so yeah used online as best we could to help train people up to do that

see that's awesome because again i think it could have been really easy for you to say okay well we just can't launch right now we're we're just in this period we just can't do anything but you said no we can do stuff and you use digital stuff you used online you were doing services watch parties These are things that like established churches were doing. You weren't even established yet utilizing this. And this is like so encouraging. So how did this help you then set the pace for meeting in person for your very first, were you able to launch in October when you wanted to, or did that get pushed back a little bit?

That's kind of a crazy story. Completely a God thing as well. We had been praying as a leadership team of this was end of July, 1st of August. We've been praying like, God, what do we do? Do we still shoot for October? Like that's coming up quick. We don't feel ready. Still, the world doesn't feel ready. So like, what do we do? and uh eventually like after talk after seeking wise counsel and talking with our management team and some even passion for planting people you know i remember um one guy from patrick from passion for planting told me we are the only church plant he knows that are that was still shooting to launch in person in 2020 and from there we're like okay Maybe there's something to looking at pushing back our launch date, right? And so we decided as a full leadership team to push our launch date back. And we just asked, we said, God, if this is the right decision, please confirm that. If it's not, change that drastically like you did with Paul from telling him not to go to a city, you know, and make that clear to us. And we'll continue to launch in person. That coming weekend, okay, several things happened. One was I got a call. from the president of the company we were renting space from. So we had a location, a physical location in 2020. This is how much Iowa didn't really care as much. Like we weren't as progressive as Texas and Florida and Missouri were with the pandemic, but Iowa was a close second, right? And so we had a physical location. We were meeting there doing some in-person gatherings in the fall. And then all of a sudden we get this call from this president out of nowhere, had a great relationship with him and goes, hey, I want to catch up on something. He goes, we've been locked in this court battle with our property owners. and they said that we can no longer allow anything in the space that isn't business related because it was inside of a business park and so they said we have to kick you out what What? So we just lost our space to meet just like that, right? An hour after that conversation, I get a call from what was expected to be our next worship pastor. We had been interviewing this person and that person had gone through all of the process. Everyone gave that person a green light. An hour later, that person calls me and says, hey, I have no idea why this is the case, but the spirit is telling me not to come. I was like, wow, the spirit was telling me you should be coming. So what's happening here? And but anyway, so that happened like that next hour. Later that night, I get a call from our associate pastor and he goes, hey, this is kind of crazy. But the the place that he was holding a men's small group on Thursday nights, they were starting to meet in person because that place they were meeting at was this large restaurant bar just burnt to the ground. it's not there today it's just a vacant lot today as we're speaking it literally burnt all the way the whole thing burnt to the ground i was like you gotta be kidding me i was like okay okay this has to be the lord we asked i we gotta trust he's answering i guess this was the right decision to move it back not how we expected something like positive to move it back that's right i was expecting you to share something positive yeah Yeah, no, no, no. That's not how it went. God confirmed it. Not how we expected, much like this whole church planning story for us from the get-go. But so we knew, yeah, we're going to push our lunch date back. And we chose the weekend before Easter of 2021. So Palm Sunday, March 28th, 2021. Actually, as you and I are doing this podcast right now, we're two Sundays away from that date for our one-year birthday of in-person services, which is kind of crazy.

Okay. So then, so I guess you just continue to do online, right? I mean, you're investing online.

Yep. We've continued to do online today. Never missed a Sunday.

That's awesome. And so how has your online impact changed as you have moved in? So because it's really natural for you to say, okay, we're in person now. Let's just bail on some of these things. What are you doing now and how has it changed your online component?

Yeah, very pragmatically. We used to pre record and then edit and post it. And now when we went in person, we continue to do that for a few months. And that was burning our people out. That was a ton of work with the minimum hands we had. If you have all the resources. Sure. Awesome. Go for it. But we knew this is not really sustainable for what we have right now. And so we decided to move toward, work toward an actual live service. Because as far as I can tell, there's not really much science out there, not too many stats out there, unless you can share some with me, Tom, that kind of shows like prerecorded is way better than live or live is way better than prerecorded. So kind of just lifted up to our decision to go, let's move toward live, stop prerecording. And so we took our time to actually get our live service to a place of, at least equal or better quality than what we could do by pre-recording because we didn't want to just drop the quality of what we were doing pre-recording in order to um like give like a little break but we knew we needed to work toward that yeah and so um yeah we and so now today where it stands is it's it's it's live live yeah right and uh but it's it's completely common for all of our people on stage to just simply address or talk to those online as if they're here in the room with us and so you'll see from our our host the front of the service to our worship people to myself or another pastor preaching like regularly we look straight at the camera just like we used to pre-record and just talk to the person watching who may never step foot here inside this uh inside this space or with these people but they've been watching every week you know and we want them to know hey we view you as a part of this community so that's awesome and are you still doing online groups i mean is that a part of your you know small group strategy well not right now i don't think there's any uh online groups that are meeting currently today um but it ha it was for a while it was it was ongoing we actually had um one a lady in our church who a girl in our church who hopped on this like des moines mom's group and uh the woman mom's facebook group and just posted hey anybody interested in community and studying the bible together and you know asking questions and studying those together and so and she got a good response of women that joined and so she had seven or eight ladies that were meeting via zoom for a long time uh studying the bible together from all over the des moines area and so which was which was super cool mix of people who go to church and those who don't mix of people who are just um really just needing and desire and relationship which if anything this pandemic has highlighted to the nth degree of how like how dire and necessary real authentic intimate relationships are yeah you know and so yeah i don't think as of today we have any online groups what we have for the vast majority of the life of this church

that's awesome well that's good i mean again you know it changes from time to time we had we were all online and then as we became in person more a lot of our online groups went back to in person but we still kept a good amount of online groups and there's still some online discipleship that's happening again to each their own you know I love hearing your story of how you were able to launch your church purely digital, and that really helped to feed into your ultimate launch that happened on Easter 2021.

Yeah, yeah, right. Exactly. And so and it created I mean, there are so many pros to it, but there will always be cons to it as well. Like one, not really a con, but something that we kind of have had to try to wade through and figure out is because we launched completely online and then moved to gathering in person. or like include that alongside what we're doing online. Because we started online, we started like gathering people, collecting people kind of all over the Des Moines Metro. And so when it came time to meet in person, it became a difficult question. Like, well, where do we meet? You know, we have we have families on the east side and the west side and downtown and north and south. Like, where do we meet? People are going to be driving like 20, 30 minutes wherever we meet. So like, what do we do? And so that became kind of a challenge, a thing to figure out. But it's also exciting because right now I feel like because of that. um god has like already started creating future core teams as we as we seek to be a church that's planting churches all over the morning area like actually we already have a family coming from there we already have a couple families coming from this side so yeah so i'm glad you said that because i want to hit on your 2020 vision tell me about your 2020 vision Yeah, we believe God has put in front of us what we've called the 2020 vision. And that stands for starting in 2020, which is where we started the church in the year 2020, to plant 20 churches in 20 years. 20 churches in 20 years. And that kind of vision took... took different shapes as we kind of went like, maybe it's something we're supposed to be shooting for like 20 churches starting in 2020. But then like once I felt like, and like there were nights I couldn't sleep wrestling with this. Like, can we do this? This seems too big. And you know, I've never done something like this. How do we even, I don't even know how to plant one church level in 20, you know? and uh but then when it came to this moment of like putting it like i feel like god just said like he put a time frame on it you're limiting me you know um if you don't put a time limit on it you're going to spend 20 years and you're not going to get a single church planted put a time limit on give yourself like this and so um we did and then um there was another pastor online that i remember um i was watching and he at the very same time we were just trying to iron this vision out He said, if the vision you feel like God has given you doesn't scare or overwhelm you, then it's probably not a vision from the Lord. And it was at that moment that I realized, okay, this is from God because I don't know how the heck you're supposed to do any of this.

Yeah. Wow, man. Well, that's exciting. I mean, seriously, I love your vision and I love it. And I love what you just said about how if it wasn't for that online, you're already hitting different parts of Des Moines that you probably wouldn't have been able to hit if it wasn't for starting and launching online. And God is planting seeds. And I think God's going to do some great things with you as you continue to nurture that. So this has been an awesome story to hear. So as we kind of wrap up here, how would you encourage a church planter, especially in regards to the digital component of it? You know, what would you encourage them to do based on your experience?

yeah i would say do your research um to figure out how to be online don't figure out if but figure out how because online is where everyone is um back in the day you could get a you know you to try to meet people you go to where they are um and that used to be in different spots and you could go to a church and meet people you could go to the gym and meet people you could go to the grocery store and meet people you could go downtown or to the park and meet people today everyone is online that's where they are so go to where the people are right jesus when jesus started his ministry he went to where the people were and um and so that's my encouragement is to do that and do it well Even if your personal preference is, I don't know, I'm all against online stuff. It's so fake. People don't have to be real. You can't really build real relationships with the community. You know what, man? We have seen this time and time again be a bridge to bring people into relationship with the church and ultimately, therefore, with Jesus. And so I think it's an incredible tool. And it's a tool, I think, that has and can and will be used for... for for for bad for evil but that I firmly believe the Lord can and wants to restore it to redeem it and so why not do that through you as a church planter to use the online space to be a voice to bring people into relationship with Christ to build relationships and get people into community when a lot of times the only sense of like belonging and worth is from their online profile So why not be a community that's going to find those people and go, hey, let's introduce you to others that can walk alongside you in the direction of Jesus. And so get online, do your research, do it well, figure out what kind of gear you might need as cheap as you can find it. Don't wait till it's perfect. If you wait till whatever you have and trying to do, you wait till it's perfect. You're never going to get up there. You can't really, you're not going to be able to start like. those mega churches that have incredible online experiences start do something and do it consistently because uh this is where people are and this is the only time in history that you can literally reach people all over the world from all different kinds of religions and cults and backgrounds and stories all from your basement and so it's pretty incredible opportunity

Yeah, I agree. I love what you just said to all of it. I love what you just said, but the one where you said it doesn't need to be polished. I think the one thing that we've discovered over the pandemic is, you know, you can start something with just a simple smartphone, you know, and you can just start doing that from your basement. Like you said, you can get cheap equipment on Amazon. It's easy to get started. People are more forgiving. It doesn't need to be polished, you know? And so they just want to see authenticity in real realness. So I've. i think polish it as you go yeah for sure hey jared how can someone connect with you if they got questions uh where can i connect with you social media or or anything

Yeah, I do Facebook and Instagram. Feel free to connect with me. Send me a friend request. Send me a DM, whatever. Let's connect and talk and celebrate what Christ is doing in your guys' stories as well. Just my name, Jared Nassif. My email is jared at directionchurch.com. J-A-R-E-D at directionchurch.com. It's also our church website, right? www.directionchurch.com. And so those are some easy ways to get connected with me too.

That's awesome. And in case people missed it, I will have all those links in the show notes. And so definitely check out his website and then connect with him online. That would be great. Jared, thanks, man.

Thank you, Tom, for letting me be part of this. I love looking back on our story as a church plant and being able to celebrate and glorify what God has done, because a lot of what we feel like we've tried. didn't work and the reason we're still here today is because of the work of the holy spirit and so thank you for allowing me to come and celebrate that boast in that um if you will yeah that's awesome jared i loved hearing your story at exponential and again loved hearing it today too so this is great we will talk some more a little bit later awesome appreciate it tom thanks man

All right, so it was awesome having Jared on there. It was great. We met on digital before Exponential, and then as we talked about, we met in person at digital with Passion for Planting. And if you want to learn more about Passion for Planting, they are great. church planting resource and support, and they help you launch your church more effectively. So if you're a church planter and you're looking for help, go to the church planting links that I have in the show notes today. But I want to hear from you. What encouraged you from listening to Jared and I talk? What challenged you? What made you think differently? How can this help you today? Again, we're kind of out of this COVID stuff right now. We're still in person, but we don't want to lose sight of the digital stuff. So how Did what Jared do encourage you? Let's share with it online. You can go to Twitter at TAPounder. That's where I'm at. Let's carry this conversation on. Or you can just simply email me at TAPounder at gmail.com. I would love to talk to you a little bit more about that. All right, heroes, well, thanks so much for being with me today. As always, you can go to YouTube and subscribe to this channel. We'd love for you to do that. Or you can go to iTunes and Spotify and subscribe to this as well. I've got new podcasts coming out every single week with ministry leaders as we're looking to do ministry more effectively in this very digital and online world. So I hope you're able to check that out and subscribe to it today. Again, as always, go to thechurch.digital for tons of different resources and help and encouragement. All right, heroes, I hope you have a great rest of your day, a great rest of your week, and until next time, have a great one.