One Way to Minister to Gamers

[Tom Pounder] What does it look like to have a gaming church for gamers? That's what we're going to talk about today. Are you ready? Because it's time. [SPEAKER_01] You're listening to the Church Digital Sidekick Podcast, part of the TCD Podcast Network. [Tom Pounder] Hello 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 you can do ministry more effectively in this very digital and online world. And today I have Nathan Webb on. He is the lead guy at Checkpoint Church and it is a gaming church. Now, it wouldn't be a church as in that you would see in an in-person church setting. It's not even a digital church that you would see probably from Lux Church that Mark Lutz is leading. But it is a church where people are being ministered to. See, Nathan and his team are using gaming as a mission field. And he's using apps like Twitch and Discord to minister to gamers. And so he and I get on the podcast today and we talk about what does that look like for him from where he started from Twitch. and moving them onto the Discord channel. And what does ministry look like to gamers? I'm really excited to have Nathan on. But before we get into the interview, I do want to just highlight The Church Digital. At The Church Digital, we have lots of different coaching cohorts, podcasts, blogs, all designed to help you in your ministry, especially in the online capacity. So if you've never checked out The Church Digital, go to thechurch.digital today and check it out. I'll have all those links in the show notes so you can check that out. All right. You ready to learn about a gaming church? Well, let's get into it with my conversation with Nathan Webb. All right. With me right now is Nathan Webb from Checkpoint Church. Nathan, how are you? [Nathan Webb] I am doing good. I'm doing good. I'm an early riser. My daughter is almost three years old, and so I'm up most mornings about six o'clock, so I'm good to go. I've had several cups of coffee at this point. [Tom Pounder] Yeah. Well, I was going to ask you, how many cups of coffee have you had today? [Nathan Webb] I mean, this is number three, number three right here. [Tom Pounder] Oh, that's great. That's great. How do you like your coffee? Is it black or do you put stuff in it? [Nathan Webb] I you know, it's weird. Before I had a child, I drank it black. But now I do a little cream, a little sugar just for a little extra pick me up in the morning. [Tom Pounder] That's great. That's awesome. Well, Nathan, I kind of discovered you again, I just found you from a from a friend of mine. And I started looking at your church. I was like, wow, I've got to have you on the podcast. And we've got to talk about what you're doing. in ministry. So as we get started, just give everyone a quick little introduction about who you are and what you do, and then we can kind of get into your ministry. [Nathan Webb] Sure, yeah, I'm a church planter and a provisional elder in the United Methodist Church out of the Western North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church, specifically the Catawba Valley District, for anybody that's in the Methodist structure and knows a little bit about all of that. But I am through the actual conference planning a church. We're almost in our second year. So we've almost finished our second year in July of 2022. uh and basically the way the story went is i have had a vision for a church for nerds geeks and gamers because i am all three of those things uh since i was really in like middle school in high school and it really it just kind of came and like clicked together in college where I was like, I realized more than ever that I had like these two cliques that I was a part of because I grew up on a PK. So I was always very involved with my youth group. I was super into church, but then I was also just a huge nerd. I love anime and manga and video games and all that stuff. I had this world over here of my anime and manga nerds, and then I had this world over here of my youth group. And I learned in high school that they didn't really often commingle, but I thought, well, that's just my quirky town. But then once I got to college, I learned, oh, no, that's just the case. The church just doesn't do a very good job of bridging these two things. And so in college and seminary, it just kind of continued to multiply and realize that this is a connection that needs to be made. And so I went to the conference and said, I'd like to make this connection. And it turned out that the church developer at the time was a big old nerd himself, played D&D on the weekends with his college buddies from way back. And so it just, it worked at the right time at the right place and was right at the beginning, not really the beginning, but a couple months in to COVID. And so they were already willing to kind of risk it on an online ministry so we started checkpoint church the church for nerds geeks and gamers right now we are 100 online uh and we go through three major platforms online with with maybe a future in like a comic-con-esque physical gathering but currently we're 100 digital [Tom Pounder] okay so talk to me a little bit about your launch process a little bit because you know i i have a little bit of familiar i'm not a church planter but i know a lot of church planters and so their launch process is a little bit different um were you ever thinking about launching an in-person church and then because of covid you said we just got to go all online at first [Nathan Webb] I was really fortunate to have a church developer who was very willing to answer questions, to hear ideas and concepts, but to also really let the reins loose and not force me into anything in particular. So I took the first, I really, we found out about the plant in March, probably ish. um and figured out that was something we wanted to do and so from march until july i just did as much research as i could possibly do in my final semester at seminary i took all the courses that i could that related to this thing i've met with professors i met with anybody that would listen and and hear me and talk to me and did all the research that i could and what i discovered was that if you wanted it to start a church, you really needed to go to the place where the people were. And so I started to ask myself the question, where are these nerds, geeks, and gamers? I know that they're at places, but I don't know where. And so one of the big places that I found that they were flocking was Comic-Cons, but that's once a year. And so I was like, well, that's weird. So what do I do? Do I need to just do church once a year? What does that look like? And then I discovered where they were really hanging out was online and mostly through these platforms that I've kind of discerned down into. And so I really worked with one of my coaches at the time, Jim Griffith, and honed in on like one particular platform known as Twitch. because that's where gamers really were hanging out and so i wanted to enter into this place of twitch kind of like a coffee shop like a church banner with a coffee shop and just get to know this community and then have a place to send them which we eventually discovered was going to be discord but that was my overall goal was was asking the question okay who do i want to reach and then once i know who i want to reach how can they be reached? In what way could they possibly be found? And the truth was that if I was going to go with the physical church plant, I probably just wouldn't have found many people. Even in the world of secular gaming communities, the only thing that we really have, at least in the small towns and the rural towns, you might have a game shop if you're lucky. And even then that game shop is probably a secondhand game shop and they're doing all they can to survive. So maybe some larger cities have some like real coffee shops that thrive and have D&D sessions and have tables set up. But the odds of that, unless you're doing a barcade and you've got your liquor license, then you might not find the audience that you're really looking for. And so we decided that online was just going to be the way that we were going to need to reach people at first and then figure out what God was discerning in a physical gathering after the fact. [Tom Pounder] Yeah, see, I love that because, again, I think a lot of people are really just beginning to discover that places like Twitch and places like the metaverse and VR are where people are hanging out. And so they view it as a mission field. And they go where they are. Like I grew up, I was a student minister and I worked with Young Life and the key phrase with Young Life a lot is you want to go where kids are, you know, go where they are. And so you're going into Twitch, you're talking about Discord. What does it look like for you to go into Twitch? Like when you say that, what are you doing? [Nathan Webb] Yeah, there's a couple of ways that I think that culture is really built. And the true culture of Twitch is not really found in the streaming or the streamer, but in the chat box. So at first, what we really wanted to do was to stream. and to figure out how can we be an attractional model of streaming. So we started out streaming a couple days a week. We streamed some of my favorite games that I just thought were really important to kind of a Christian conversation, games like Undertale and Life is Strange and that kind of thing. And so we worked through those games and we just kind of piddled for a little bit and tried to figure out what in the world we were doing, what was going on on Twitch. but the more that i've learned and the more that we've grown the more that i've discerned that this isn't really about the streaming but it's about the people that come to the stream that start conversations with the stream and so asking myself the question of like okay what can i offer that other streamers are not offering? Well, I'm offering conversation. Most streamers are so vast and so huge, and they have so many people at one time watching them that their chat may be able to have a conversation within itself. But for the most part, it's just kind of throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks. With our community, you're able to actually enter into this space and start conversations. And so that's the main way that I've discovered people are doing this ministry already is by being as conversational and building a community as intentionally as possible within the confines of the actual chat box, not so much the streamer. [Tom Pounder] Okay, so I'm thinking about this and I'm looking at myself and I'm like, yeah, I like to play some video games. I have a Switch. My kids have an Xbox, but I stink. I stink at video games. [Nathan Webb] Can I stink at video games and be effective with streaming? Yeah, I think my community will tell you that you absolutely can because I definitely do. There are some games that I'm good at and that I really enjoy and I play those for a passion. One of the things that I discovered at the very beginning, I love Pokemon. And so I was streaming three days a week and I was streaming three days of Pokemon. And I didn't want to become a niche streamer. So I didn't want to just be reaching the Pokemon community. I want to reach the Twitch community. And so what I had to start asking myself was, okay, I need to hone down exactly what I'm doing and make sure that I'm focusing on the right thing. So now we have Pokemon days where I play the game that I want to play. I'll play Pokemon. That'll be my day. But then the other two days are really up to the community. So on Tuesdays, we play a variety stream. We play whatever they want to. Most recently, we're playing through a game called... Elden Ring. Elden Ring is notoriously difficult, very challenging. The whole point of the game is to die as many times as you can to try and take down these giant bosses that are just larger than life, that are specifically designed to drive you crazy. And so I'm not good at those games, but I play them because they're fun and it's an enjoyable experience to play with. the community that's gathered there. I have a death counter set up on my stream so that every single time I die, I press a little button and my number above my head pops up. Now I've got 35 deaths or whatever it may be. And so then on Wednesday nights, we have a community stream where we just game together. The point of that stream is not to play necessarily a narrative game or... not necessarily just to continue progressing through a story but instead the whole point is that we're going to play mario kart in community you're invited to to come play with us you're invited to you know jump into a round of super smash or to go into this world of fortnite with us or to squad up together whatever it may be that's our whole purpose on wednesday night so really what we discovered as a streaming community is that until you get to the point that you're a partner and can actually welcome in other streamers and create a real streaming community, it's kind of grassroots what you create. And so we wanted to create a place where, okay, Mondays, I get to play what I want. Tuesdays, we play what the community wants. Wednesdays, we play together. And then we're reaching all three of those important places throughout the week. And the reality is, is that people want more. um if you had told me back in um my student pastor days whenever i was like preaching for an hour on sundays and just hoping i could hold people's attention for that long if you told me that you know hey you know in just a couple years um you're gonna be uh talking for nine hours and people are gonna want more uh that that's that's just baffling to me but that's the reality of the online community is that they're they're always present they're always wanting more and they're always interested in being a part of this thing together [Tom Pounder] Yeah, that's awesome. That's really encouraging to hear. And it's also encouraging because I always thought, again, in my limited knowledge of video game stuff is that the Switch and the Nintendo stuff was for kiddie people. The real gamers play on Xbox and PlayStation. So you're finding that people want to play Mario Kart and Super Smash. I know Super Smash is really popular, but you're finding real success in playing those Nintendo type games. games. [Nathan Webb] Oh, sure. I think that the reality is that the gaming world likes to try to divide itself. But the truth is that we all get excited whenever a new Pokemon game comes out. The truth is that we all get at least a little bit excited whenever Elden Ring drops. Even the Nintendo fans are like, wow, that's pretty cool. And there's been so much crossover and blend between the worlds. And I really think if I had to pin that on anybody, I'd probably pin it on Xbox. I think they've done a phenomenal job with their Game Pass of really merging a lot of different worlds. But while it is tempting, even with Nintendo, there are games that I like better than any Nintendo games. And there are games that I would never introduce to my group in particular that may be my favorite game, but they might just not make sense for us. I really like visual novels, which is just what it sounds like. It's a game that plays like a book. And so you really just do a lot of reading. And that's not a ton of fun on a stream. But I might recommend those games to people just because they're what I enjoy, even if they're not what the community necessarily enjoys. So everybody's got different tastes, but regardless of if it's Nintendo or Xbox or PlayStation, there's always going to be a new trending game that people are going to want to experience in community together. [Tom Pounder] That makes sense. That definitely makes sense. You know, it's kind of funny because I always encourage that as I'm, you know, I've been in student ministry a long time that playing video games is okay. That's really okay because that's what kids are playing. uh and um and so i i'm fascinated with the length of your streams uh and i've heard different things over the years it's important you say nine hours but like i mean the longer your stream the better is that correct [Nathan Webb] sort of it really depends on your goal and what you're what you're shooting for if i wanted to be up there with the biggest and the best streamers if i wanted to get famous if i wanted to have a huge following if i wanted to make brand deals then a lot of people will tell you that the best way to do that is to really market yourself to do as long streams as you can do there are streamers right now who are streaming you know i think if you if you sign a twitch partner deal uh you sign on to something like 60 hours a week um so there are there are big deals being made out there and there are big communities being formed but the reality is that i have no interest um in my quote unquote brand getting famous i have no interest in myself getting famous our big goal is to meet people then to point them towards our discord towards our community so if my goal on twitch were to get famous then yeah i'm not doing enough i would have to do a whole lot more and it would really have to change up our structure and our flow but that's just not our overall goal with our cinnamon as it is so we're we're kind of focusing on What can we do to first welcome people to make sure we're creating the most welcoming place? And then once they get there, we want to make sure they have things to do. And so I'm constantly working on developing our Discord to be a 24-7 interactive place where people are always engaging. And then three times a week, we have times where we're literally live, where we're synchronously engaging with one another on Twitch. And then we also have an asynchronous kind of spiritual method right now where we post a sermon on YouTube every single week. and that sermon isn't like your traditional sermon it doesn't have a worship service backing around it but instead it just takes kind of a trending game or anime or topic and it relates it to scripture or some kind of moral idea just so that we're kind of slowly introducing these concepts via a format being a game that we're familiar with [Tom Pounder] Yeah, I love your process. And let's dig into that a little bit more. But I do want to just encourage you. I see so many different people. And this is, you know, ministry people. This is online people. However you want to call it. People in ministry want to promote their brand and want to be about them. And to see that you're just one to introduce people to the kingdom of heaven. is uh refreshing so i i appreciate that okay so let's go into your process a little bit more you just highlighted it again you want to get them from twitch to discord and then you're posting sermons as well um or messages that are tailored around video games which i think is awesome um how do you get them to go from twitch to discord what what's the process there what's the thinking there do you have a team of people that help you as you guys are are making that transition from twitch to discord [Nathan Webb] Yeah, so it'll help if I kind of lay out the full discipleship pathway there as we've kind of drafted. Wonderful. We're still working on it. We're still drafting where it goes because, like I said, we're only just now wrapping up our second year. So we're still very new into this thing. We're not chartered in the United Methodist Church, so we don't technically have members, but we're kind of doing our own thing as we figure out what that looks like for the future as we kind of future-proof ourselves. But basically what we've discerned, we started at the very beginning by doing everything. We were everywhere all the time to all people. We were streaming to Facebook. We were streaming to YouTube. We were streaming to Twitch. We were posting on Instagram. We were posting on Twitter. We were posting everywhere. We're doing everything all at once. And I discovered that if you do everything all at once, none of it's going to stick. And so we kind of took a step back after the first couple of months. And we said, well, where are we having either the most success or where are we having, even if it's not numerical success, where are we having communication? Where are we building community? And we discovered that Twitch was the main platform. so we started out with twitch we wanted to reach people there via our streaming so we said this is where we're streaming we're not going to stream anywhere else this is our place we started streaming on twitch and that found a lot of success then we figured out we need a place to put them so uh we started out with a facebook group as as one kind of does and i'm not a big fan of facebook And we discovered pretty quickly that neither was the gaming community. Neither are the nerds. Where are they? They're in this place called Discord. And so I had to learn and discover this place called Discord for myself and kind of venture into this kind of new battlefield for me. I was totally unfamiliar. I built one from scratch. I've learned a lot. It has changed drastically in the year and a half since we launched our Discord, but it has gotten better and better every day. I think that there's kind of a freshness too of like bringing in a lot of naivete and ignorance into this thing because you're kind of exploring new possibilities and people that are familiar with the platform. So we push people towards our Discord. It's very easy to do via Twitch. They actually have exclamation point commands. So you literally type an exclamation point and then a word and it'll bring up a link. So we have exclamation point Discord. So at any time that we have somebody new join into our chat or they really start interacting with our Twitch or maybe they've been around a couple of times, we say, hey, if you want more of this, you should check out our discord because we're there all the time we're always interacting there we're always having a good time over there and so that's a literal just push method that we do via our chat sometimes it'll be me encouraging that sometimes it'll be members of the chat saying hey you seem like a really cool person why don't you join our discord and learn more about it people can also share that link we have that link on our website so That's the best way to get into our Discord is via an invite link. It's not super discoverable, which is kind of a win and kind of a loss all at once. On one hand, it's not super discoverable. And so we don't have a lot of trolls typically finding us. But on the other hand, it's definitely a loss in the sense that nobody can accidentally stumble upon our Discord. They can accidentally stumble upon our community via Twitch or a lot of other platforms, but not so much our Discord itself. Once we get people in the Discord, we really start to welcome them in. If you were to join the Discord right now, what would happen is you would click that link, it would pop you into our Discord community, it would send you to the welcome channel, and you will get a cavalcade of 10 to 15 gifts and emotes and welcomes, and we're so glad you're here, and just all this outpouring of love as soon as you get in there. Then you would probably go to introductions. You would introduce yourself and say a little bit about what your hobbies and interests are. And then depending on what you say, members of our community are going to step up and say, hey, you sound like somebody that would really want to check out our anime and manga section. Or hey, you sound like somebody that would really enjoy our tabletop role-playing section of the Discord. And they're going to point you directly to places to start getting plugged in. And if you come in and you don't give us anything to work with, even still, we're going to say, hey, we ask a question every single day. it's not a christian question it's not a broaching question or a question that's asking too much of you it's just a question like hey who is your favorite dc superhero something like that just to get you plugged in so even if you aren't comfortable getting totally plugged in i'm very introverted and so i wouldn't probably step up to that day one either but no matter what you've got an entry level of the question of the day where people can get you started in that way once we start to get people comfortable in this community we have a whole section called let's get spiritual where we post prayer requests where right now we're doing rethink churches lent photo of the day we are unafraid to post in that category and to remind people that yes we are checkpoint church we're not checkpoint community we're not checkpoint gamers we're checkpoint church at the end of the day and so we welcome people of all walks of faith people that aren't necessarily there with god people that don't believe in god whatever it may be we welcome them in but we're not going to be um ashamed uh to say that we are going to have a spiritual section and we hope that you'll consider using it um and typically we'll we'll have the same people posting in our prayer quest channel but every now and again we'll have just random people hop in and say i need a prayer and that's an awesome moment where we can kind of take that shift Then we point people towards our YouTube channel. And that's kind of a weird order, right? I mean, typically you would think of YouTube as being one of the more discoverables. But whether or not people discover our YouTube channel is never my priority. YouTube is really after you already joined the Discord. So if we're on a little like funnel of a discipleship pathway here, our biggest pool is Twitch. We get a little bit more concise with Discord. We get even more concise, ideally, with our YouTube channel, which I've already mentioned a little bit. We post those sermons related to anime or movies or whatever is trending at the time. And then our most recent step of our discipleship pathway has been a thing called level two. And that is a transition that I'm kind of considering as close to what we can call membership as possible. The basic gist is that you have to fill out a form and say that you're interested in joining level two. And all that form really asks of you is your address, but I can send you some swag. And then your second thing is that you are noticeably making a shift. from being served by this community which we're happy to do but you're making that shift from being served by this community to serving this community and so that's the big change that's the first step i would say of our actual discipleship we're starting spiritually by doing these sermons kind of welcoming you into the ideas of the christian faith but then with our level two we're saying all right now let's start practicing this let's start working towards stewardship and figuring out what it even means to give of yourself and of your time and of your time eventually right we'll figure out what finances look like in this community with our next step of something that we're currently approaching um which is not level three it's still level two but we're essentially taking those level two members and giving them an opportunity uh to step up to some form of leadership and responsibility our current uh only real initiative here is called the guardians um and basically that's our first step towards um i'm going to use an outdated term but it's safe sanctuary we're kind of wanting to figure out what safe sanctuary looks like in this community and so we're drafting a plan right now called our safe point packet And that's going to have kind of our best practices of safety online. We're getting that reviewed through the conference. We're going to have that available for people if they want it and want to use it. But that's a specified role of people who are saying, OK, I've already said that I want to be level two. I've already said I want to serve. And specifically, the way I want to serve is I want to keep this community safe. And so we already have four guardians right from the get go who are interested in taking these first baby steps with us and figuring out what it looks like to be safe in this community and not only to be safe, but to offer up safe opportunities. So they're going to be hosting events they hosted an Among Us event, a couple weeks ago, and it was so much fun, just getting to play that game with this community and getting to kind of practice a totally, I was not led by me at all, which is which just does my church plan or heart proud, because we had one of these people who started out with us in this community and are now stepping up and leading something for themselves in this guardian role. And so in the future, we have more hopes for this kind of specialized responsibility of what that means to either be a part of our stream team. I don't want to be the one streaming forever. My ultimate dream with this is that maybe I stream Pokemon days, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, we have somebody else streaming. That's my dream. That's my goal is that we can just continue to diversify this place and to make sure that we're equipping all of the saints in this community to do what they are feeling called to do. [Tom Pounder] I love how you're letting this church evolve and that you're adapting, you're adding, you're changing. I think this is really awesome to hear your pathway, to hear your passion behind it, and to see that people are stepping up to that. I love... uh to hear this whole process so let me ask you this question because this is the the elephant in the room that a lot of people ask like i i feel well at least i feel and again i have no opinion on this because i i think this is fascinating what you're doing do you ever envision doing a church service or is that not part of the plan [Nathan Webb] yeah it's really really tricky i would say that i'm less concerned with the you know quote unquote church service i'm less concerned with um what we would probably refer to at least in my my um colloquialism as worship i'm i'm less concerned with a worship service uh i think that we have elements of that that are really already happening i think that our sunday sermons that we post we're going to start transitioning into kind of a small group almost a john wesley style class if you will where we might host a time of watching these together and talking about them maybe that'll take an hour maybe it won't maybe we'll have music maybe we won't i have no idea but we're going to allow that to be a thing that we develop and we figure out as we move towards my ultimate goal for um Because I think that the question that my peers and my mentors would ask is less about worship and more about the sacrament. And so that's the bigger question for me is, is when do we transition into that? I'm so thankful for the opportunity right now to not feel pressured, to not feel rushed into that decision, because I feel like while it is an important question, it is such an important question that we shouldn't just jump to conclusion. And I want to take as much time as I can to explore it. My current goal with this community is hopefully next summer, just depending on our critical mass, depending on the size that we get to and the leadership that we have at that time, I would love to do our first ever step into what it looks like to do a yearly Comic-Con mecca. gathering where all the people from across because we are literally reaching across the world what if all the people from across the world flew into one city in the states uh and went to a hotel and we rented out that area and we hosted a weekend long or even a little bit longer event where we get together where we do have an opportunity to just play games together to to do that kind of you know everybody always wants to say that we're not embodied which i disagree with but Sure, to the haters, right? We'll do an embodied time together in this space. Maybe we'll host a worship service. But regardless of whether or not we host a worship service, I want to practice the sacrament during that time. I want to make sure that we are observing the Eucharist, observing communion. I want to make sure that we are taking that time for anybody that wants to be baptized or to reaffirm in this kind of bizarre form to do that. And does that mean that we'll never do those things digitally? Well, no, I don't know that. But I think that I want our very first time as a community to be in that Mecca-like form. But again, it's just like you said, it's a matter of exploration. It's a matter of discernment and figuring out what is right for this community and what do we feel led towards. And currently, at least in my leadership and in the current existing structure, we just aren't feeling pressed in any direction quite yet. [Tom Pounder] Well, that was a kind of a follow-up question I had is that, you know, when you launched your church, it was during the midst of COVID and everything was shut down. And I was wondering if you were getting pressure to be like, you need to be in person now. You need to be doing something in person where people are having community together. Not that you're not having community now, but so you're not feeling any pressure at all from the church to do something different now that people are meeting back together. [Nathan Webb] definitely not from the voices that uh i don't want to say matter that's cruel but definitely not from the voices that are um you know the most influential yeah i think that i think that i'm hearing it more from my peers uh than from the the mentors that are that are behind me and the coaches that i have really guiding me along the way The people that I'm actively seeking out their advice and actively seeking out their thoughts on the matter, they think that this is a real viable possibility. They see the good work that's being done. They see the community that we are building. And I think that it doesn't take long just looking at some of our demographic. Looking at some of our reach, I mean, just taking our level two members alone, we launched our level two back in November or October of last year. We already had 18 that have signed up for that kind of leadership role. And I think we have, I'm in North Carolina. I think we have three others in North Carolina. We have several in Arizona. We have some in Illinois. We have some in Michigan. You know, we are all over the states. Yeah. And so to even suggest, well, why don't we start gathering weekly or why don't we start gathering monthly? I mean, unless I'm going to be paying for those plane tickets, that's just not viable. It's just not going to happen. And so the reality of this digital church is that we are reaching people and that we are building community and that to try and to force some kind of physical location-based worship would be exactly that. It'd be forcing it. [Tom Pounder] it would be it would be trying to make something happen and trying to fit a square square uh peg into a round hole right it's just never going to work yeah i think there's a lot i think there's a lot to it yeah my biggest pet peeve is a lot of people who will say digital ministry is not real ministry or digital relationships are not real relationships and and again i've i've experienced quite differently and here in your experience you're experiencing quite different anybody who's in the midst of digital ministry knows that real relationships can happen online um all right so i i could probably talk to you for hours on this so but i i do want to keep it condensed a little bit uh just as we kind of wrap up a little bit can you share one thing that's encouraged you the most during this process and it could be through the past two years or it could be a recent thing and then one thing that's been a struggle or something that stressed you out um and that stresses you about this digital uh church that you're in [Nathan Webb] Yeah, one of the most encouraging things to me is just this piece of feedback that I get so very often of I've never felt welcomed before. We reach a lot of people that have a background in the church. We reach a lot of people as well that have no relationship with the church, but we reach so many that do have an intimate relationship with the church, even to the point we reach a lot of pastors. We reach a lot of people who are actively serving churches. that will enter into this community and will say, I've been in the ministry for five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years. My spouse has been in the ministry for five, 10, 15, 20 years. I've been in the church my entire life and I've never felt welcome. I've never felt really seen. And so being able to experience that is something so affirming because I am also experiencing it. Like I said, I'm a PK at the very beginning. And so I've been in the church my entire life. um and no i never wanted to play another round of horse right i wanted to talk about anime and i never felt like that part was really allowed it was never really welcomed in that space and so being able to do that fills a need in me and knowing that it fills a need in others is the most encouraging thing for me so i think that just just seeing how god is working in the lives of others and and using this calling to reach something within them is just the most encouraging thing to me and we get that we get that feedback a lot and that's just awesome every single time i take it i take a screenshot of it and i save it a little folder because i'm like this this is why i keep going on my down days this is where i'm going to keep pushing forward and i think the most discouraging thing is kind of what we just talked about uh is is the constant It is so difficult to make steps forward whenever you have to prove yourself so often. And I don't mean that in a negative way. I think we should constantly be proving and discerning and working through this process and making sure that we're staying on the right path. I do a thing that's the most boring sounding thing in the world called our virtue audit, where at the very, very beginning, whenever I started planning this church, I discerned a series of questions to make sure we were staying on the straight and narrow, to make sure that we were staying on the path we originally set forth. And I do that. I do that frequently. But I feel like every book that I read, I'm currently reading through Both And by Jason Moore and Virtual Reality Church by Daryl Bach. And both of these books are fantastic. They're excellent reads, but they are doing so, so many of the chapters I just skip because I'm like, I already know this stuff. Because they're trying to convince me that digital ministry is happening. And I'm so far past that, that I'm ready to start working towards the ethics. I'm ready to start working through the troubles of digital ministry instead of continuing to have to say digital ministry is happening. I think that's the most discouraging thing is I feel like we are so far ahead of so much of the kind of... facets of existing church structure, that it can be difficult to just continuously have to sell the initial thing that it is happening and get into the place of exciting and nuanced and really well discerned ministry. [Tom Pounder] Yeah. Dude, I feel your pain there, and I can completely understand that. Well, dude, this has been really encouraging for me to hear this because, again, I've been doing digital ministry for a while, but the gaming aspect is something that I'm not very good at, and so I've always been hesitant to do it. um but having conversations like that encourages me uh and uh the mission field is ripe there are lots of people playing games and doing stuff and you're ministering to these uh people uh and so i think it's it's fascinating um last question do you have a target audience do you have like a person a certain age group that you're trying to reach or are you pretty broad brushed right now [Nathan Webb] Whenever I, so I mentioned one of my coaches, Jim Griffith. And whenever I very first figured this out, he's, he, if you've never met him, he's a coach out of Florida, a very well-known church planner. And he sat me down at the very beginning and he asked that same question. He said, all right, Nathan, you know, what's your demographic? What's your target audience? Who are you trying to reach here? And I said, I'm trying to reach 25 to 35. um people that are that are in the internet you know digital native uh field people that are are online that are existing on the space online uh and he said nope he said that's not gonna work and i was like okay what do you mean he was like that's way too broad he said you don't even realize how broad of a breaststroke you just wrote he said pick two years pick two years and that is your that is your demographic if you reach people outside of those lines great pick two years uh and so i picked uh ages 29 and 30. those are my those are my age that real late 20s we reach a lot of people in that demographic but we also reach a lot of people that are down to the minimum age on discord allowed of 13 years old we also reach a lot of people up in their 40s 50s 60s even uh are in the you know the retro sphere or really not even so much retro sphere anymore of gaming and so we reach a lot of different people but my my target everything that i try to do is really reaching people exactly where i'm at like i said this came out of a desire within me and so the person that i can speak for the best is myself uh what would i want what would i want what i'd expect um out of this and then try and create something as true that while also remaining as true to the the gospel and the mission of the church to [Tom Pounder] make disciples for the transformation of the world as we possibly can well this has been encouraging man this has been great and again like i said it's been encouraging for me and it makes me want to dig a little bit more into this and get past my insecurities of i'm not good at gaming to do this kind of stuff um nathan as we kind of wrap up kid if someone wants to reach out to you how what's the best way to reach out to you and just connect with you or follow what you're doing [Nathan Webb] Yeah, we have a lot of different places. So the best place to start is probably with our website, CheckpointChurch.com. You can also reach out to me at CheckpointChurch at gmail.com. Or we have a link tree that has all of our links. So if you go to link tree slash Checkpoint Church, you're going to be able to find pretty much every link that we have, everything that we do. We have a lot of things going on at any given time. Like I mentioned, for in-house community, we have our Twitch, our Discord, our YouTube. But even for people outside of our community that are just curious. I produce a weekly newsletter called the To The Point newsletter. And that kind of is a succinct email-based newsletter that'll be sent out to you every week that just has, here's kind of what's going on. Here are the discoveries that I'm making in digital ministry and in gaming ministry. And I like to share those thoughts because I see that as a major part of this role that I've been given as a church planner. Not only am I creating a community, but I see it as my obligation to share what I've learned. And so I want to do that for as many people as I possibly can. And that's the method that I've found that's best to do that. [Tom Pounder] Yeah. Well, great. Well, I will include all those links in the show notes so people can just kind of click on that. Nathan, I'm going to have to have you back on the podcast because I've got more questions for you. Anytime. [Nathan Webb] I'm always happy to hear it. And I would love to catch your stream whenever you start your Twitch channel. You let me know. [Tom Pounder] There you go. So Nathan, well, thanks again so much for joining me today. All right. Thank you. All right, so what did you think? What stood out to you from what Nathan was doing? Again, it's not a traditional church. Again, it's not even the digital-only church that are happening around. This is a church that's really evolving and changing as they are ministering to more gamers. So what did you think of it? What encouraged you? What challenged you? What made you think? I would love to continue this conversation online, so definitely hit me up on Twitter. At TAPounder is my Twitter handle. I would love to talk to you a little bit more about that. All right, heroes, well, thanks so much for joining me. Again, as always, you can subscribe to this on YouTube. You can subscribe to it on iTunes or Spotify. You can also go to thechurch.digital and check it out there. Again, you can check out the cohorts, all the coaching, all the blogs, all the podcasts from a variety of different voices, not just my own, but a lot of different voices as well. So go to thechurch.digital today. All right, heroes, well, I hope you have a great rest of your day, a great rest of your week, and until next time, have a great one.