WEBVTT

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 thinking outside of the box, doing something different.

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 Well, everything I just described to you today is commonly referred to in 2024 as Christianity Today.

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 Movie reviews, music reviews, sermons online, community discussion board forums.

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 It's nothing new under the sun on that.

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 Welcome to the Church Digital Podcast.

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 Through this podcast, we'll talk about the technological innovations within the church.

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 But more than tech for tech itself, we'll address deeper questions.

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 Is disciple making possible digitally?

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 How should we approach the digital mission field?

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 Can a biblically grounded church operate in digital space?

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 Oh, and where does the metaverse and artificial intelligence fit into all of this?

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 Whether you're a big or small church, the Church Digital's goal is to help churches like yours

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 learn to be a multiplying church digitally and physically.

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 And now here's your host, Jeff Reed.

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 But hey, listen, it's great to be here with you today.

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 We're going to get into some celebrations here in a little bit.

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 I mentioned earlier the Church Digital Podcast, TCDP.

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 The podcast celebrates its five-year anniversary yesterday, April 15th.

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 Yeah, it's tax day.

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 And I decided to launch a podcast, the Church Digital Podcast, five years ago.

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 So that would have been 2019.

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 I had been doing the Church Digital less than a year when I decided to do the podcast.

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 And publicly talked about this.

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 I actually texted with Ray today and thanked Ray because Ray the Armist is the reason I'm doing the podcast.

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 Because Ray told me to basically shut up, stop talking about it, and actually just do it.

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 And that was the words that I needed to hear.

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 Ray, you know, I was a live producer for Church.

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 And so I had this ridiculous vision of what I wanted the podcast to be.

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 And I didn't want to do it until it was perfect.

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 And I'll never forget, Ray tells me version one is better than version none.

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 And, you know, I've heard that.

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 He stole it from a couple of other people.

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 But, you know, get out there, get going with it, get started, make it happen, and improve.

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 And we did.

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 And version one was nowhere near the quality of what I wanted at the beginning.

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 But it was still pretty dang good.

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 And so stop waiting for somebody.

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 Stop waiting for your best opportunity.

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 And just jump on it and go.

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 Get started.

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 At least that would be my advice.

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 And that's how I've lived.

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 As you can obviously tell through the Church Digital, we change so much stuff here on a regular basis.

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 We're always innovating and experimenting and implementing and iterating and all those really long, complicated words that you normally hear when you talk about goals.

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 There was an interesting conversation on Discord today.

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 I don't know if you guys saw that.

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 About, you know, goals and the usefulness of it.

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 And so, like, I always found that.

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 When I was in my 20s, I hated goals.

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 I felt that goals were restricting and limiting to where we were going.

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 Melanie, you were talking about that a little bit.

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 I always felt like goals were restricting for where I wanted, for where I thought we were going to go.

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 It's like, well, what happens when God pivots us?

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 And so, kind of negative on it, I guess, a little bit.

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 In my 30s, I discovered that, especially the more that I've worked with, this is Melanie, this is me.

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 Don't, I'm not saying anything.

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 But the more that I worked with teams, the more that it was more than just me, the more that it was like, okay, the goals are necessary.

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 It's just to keep everybody aligned, to make sure that everybody understands the purpose.

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 Because I'll never forget working on a staff, and it was a church staff, as a matter of fact.

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 And we asked the church, Eric Iger, who was executive pastor at this church, Eric Iger, author of Simple Church, if you're familiar with the book.

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 The church that I was at, Christ Fellowship Miami, actually was the first Simple Church.

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 It was the book that, the church that he wrote the book at.

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 And he said, okay, hey, so what do we expect people to do after they attend a week in service?

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 Like, what's next?

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 And I swear, six different people in the room came up with six different answers.

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 And it all had to do with, like, their area.

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 And it was not holistically aligned at all.

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 And it was like, okay, like, we don't, nobody in the room has a clue.

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 They're all just self-centered on their own thing and not seeing the big picture of what we as an organization are trying to do.

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 And so it was really interesting to see how goals, like, that season was really where goals made more of a clear understanding for me.

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 Well, we'll get into that here in a little bit.

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 Hey, a couple announcements.

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 I guess I have some things coming up.

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 So, you know, I work with The Church Digital, obviously founded that.

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 We've got a great team here with The Church Digital.

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 New website, by the way, check it out, thechurch.digital.

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 If you have not seen that yet, take an assessment.

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 Learn if you're wired, if you're gifted.

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 Well, you know, what is it?

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 What are you thinking about this idea of planting a church in digital or virtual space?

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 And are you equipped for that?

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 There's an assessment there on the website for that and other things and other Easter eggs you can dig into.

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 Check it out, thechurch.digital.

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 Very cool.

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 Hey, so one of my other gigs is as I work with a company called Resi.

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 Resi Pushpay, kind of work within their ecosystem.

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 And they have a webinar, a series of webinars that I'm leading for them called The Resilient Church.

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 Now, there's a lot of physical, there's a lot of digital church planters in here.

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 And so I'm going to be honest, guys, the webinar is really not for digital church planters.

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 It's much more towards physical churches doing digital ministry, physical churches, how they can utilize digital, like what's the why of that?

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 We're calling it The Resilient Church.

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 And so if we've got any of our physical church friends on here, we'd love to have you check out this webinar.

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 We've got, you know, a lot of, you know, Tyler Sansom, lead pastor of First Capital Christian in Cordon, Indiana, is coming on.

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 We've got another church, one Mosaic Church in Nashville, Tennessee, somewhere in Tennessee, is coming on as well.

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 But we're going to be talking about connection and community.

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 What does it look like to connect with people and what digitally, what does digital community look like?

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 You know, Resi does an incredible job with encoders and the technology aspect of it.

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 But what we're really trying to do is trying to coach their customers as well as others, use Resi almost every day, Whitebeard.

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 That's awesome.

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 Whitebeard, what?

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 Are you hardware or are you broadcasting out of Pro Video, Pro Presenter?

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 They, you know, they do a lot of the streaming.

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 But a lot of the customers, they really don't understand the technical or the ministerial points.

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 And so really spending some time with Resi and the customer base over there, starting to help them understand the base of it.

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 So the first webinar is going to be April 24th.

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 We're doing a series of six webinars, April, May, June, July, August, and September.

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 For more information, you can go to resi.io slash community dash connection.

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 That's a mouthful, I know.

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 They don't make it easy for streamers.

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 Well, Jeff, nobody ever says this.

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 We don't need a vanity URL.

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 Nobody ever says this out loud.

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 It's always on social media.

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 Yeah, but you got streamers.

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 I mean, it's resi.io slash community hyphen connection.

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 RSVP, come hang out with me at the webinar.

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 It's going to be April 24th.

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 I want to say 1 o'clock Eastern time, hopefully on the website.

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 Number two thing coming up here, right around the corner, DK Hammond.

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 You know, DK Hammond's a guy that's been doing digital ministry a long time as well.

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 And he is an African-American.

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 And he has been doing a lot of work for the African-American church in digital space.

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 And he started posting some stuff on Facebook the other day.

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 And I just immediately was like, hey, we need to hang out and have that conversation.

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 Because I know, and actually, Elmichelle, I did a podcast with her on that a year ago, year and a half ago.

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 I was starting to scratch the itch on African-American church, some of the challenges, some of the opportunities, some of the obstacles that's really in view of the African-American church and their struggle to adapt to technology.

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 And their struggle to, in the church context, I should say, at least it's interesting.

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 Like they, well, I don't want to get into it.

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 We'll let DK do that.

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 So, hey, we're going to do, it's going to work.

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 We're going to experiment again.

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 We're going to do it live here on Discord.

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 And so, my friends here on Mighty Networks, come over to Discord.

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 We're going to do a podcast live Friday at noon.

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 We're going to record it.

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 We're going to delay it on the, we'll delay it and play it back like a week later down the road.

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 We'll schedule at some point.

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 But a live podcast recording, DK Hammond, talking African-American church.

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 You know, we're going to be talking through this format and live podcasts and Andy's wanting to do some streaming in here.

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 I think FlatCap is actually streaming in here tomorrow.

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 I want to say FlatCap, if you're around, shout at me one way or the other so I can say it.

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 But, you know, we, we're a week into the Discord thing and I love it.

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 I love, I love the community.

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 I love the conversations.

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 I love the technology of it.

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 We still got to fine tune some things.

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 Okay, so FlatCap is going to try to do tomorrow.

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 Tomorrow, noon Eastern, I believe, right?

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 Confirm for me, FlatCap.

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 Tomorrow, he's going to try to stream on Discord and Mighty Networks together.

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 So, he's going to do the same thing I am.

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 It's really clunky in the first, like, 30 seconds because you got to, got to press go on one.

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 You can't press go on both at the same time.

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 And there's work you got to do once you press go.

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 And it's, yeah, it's, just be awkward for the first 30 seconds and then you'll be great.

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 So, very cool.

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 Yeah, so those are the announcements.

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 We've got the Resilient Church webinar series that Rezi's putting on with me.

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 Rezi.io slash community dash connection for more information on that.

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 And then DK Hammond coming right back here.

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 We're going to be in the live stream Discord, TCD Discord channel, noon Eastern, this coming Friday.

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 So, you don't want to miss that.

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 Okay, hey, so it's the five-year anniversary of the Church Digital Podcast.

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 And, you know, like I said, Radiarmus really was the impetus behind this.

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 Rezi, Ray, what, Rezi, that was funny.

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 For some reason, I just had this vision that I was going to name my dog Rezi because I've named my dog Ray.

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 But my dog, it's not Rezi.

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 It's not, it's Ray.

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 Medicine.

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 Woo!

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 So, you know, it was really funny.

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 Ray told me when he's like, hey, Jeff, do the podcast.

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 He's like, hey, you know, Jeff, so like get 10 podcasts, call it a limited series, get it done, and, you know, just be done with it.

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 Just get out there, do something with it.

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 And it was funny.

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 Like I told Ray, this was 2019, 2018.

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 This is early 2019.

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 And I told Ray, I was like, 10?

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 I'm going to do more than 10.

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 I mean, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to launch with five.

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 And he's like, you're going to do more than 10 podcasts on church online?

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 I was like, yeah, sure.

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 I mean, that's not going to be hard.

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 And so he didn't believe me.

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 And so we're doing 291 right now.

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 Literally recording 291 as I'm talking.

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 And so we've done a lot of conversations with a lot of really friendly people, a lot of really wise people,

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 a lot of pioneers, a lot of brave people, getting out there, trying new things, taking some heat for some things.

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 And so check that out.

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 It's thechurch.digital.

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 There's all sorts of information on there.

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 You know, it's interesting, even for myself.

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 I am like the worst entrepreneur, business person on the planet.

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 I just I want to, like, disclaim that about myself here.

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 When you.

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 Like when you grow a podcast.

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 Your goal is to make the podcast as big as possible.

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 And just like, you know, if it do two days, do three days, do five days.

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 Like you want your audience to be huge.

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 And and for whatever reason, I just always had the antithesis idea.

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 Like it's not about growing the podcast big.

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 It was about multiplying podcasts and creating a podcast network.

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 And in distributing the wealth among others.

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 And it was it was kind of like a more of a distributed model.

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 And to be honest, that's that's why we signed with.

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 Well, I mean, that's the distributed model is is what's the principle that you think the goal is.

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 That's interesting.

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 Whitebeard, it's a good comment.

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 You know, the idea of breaking up leadership and saying, hey, let's let's go with the distributed model of leadership like we are now.

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 Or or to be honest, even the idea of the movements that we're working with, you know, I mean, my job title was literally metaverse church next director.

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 And when I was in that season, we recruited and started developing Stunami Stu to to be the really the Stuart McPherson to be the voice of of the metaverse for the church digital.

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 Because it's like it's not it's not going to be me.

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 Let me let me get somebody else that it can be.

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 And it was, you know, I don't I don't know if that's.

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 That's probably not the wisest financial decision, but I've never been bright financially, but it became more of a of a ministerial play of a of a of a of a context, depending on what our goal is.

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 You know, our goal was not.

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 Our goal was not to create a million dollar company.

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 I had a I actually had one of my mentors.

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 Year was twenty.

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 Nineteen.

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 Twenty twenty.

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 Year was twenty twenty.

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 I'm sitting my one of my mentors is a lead pastor here in Miami and I'm sitting in his office.

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 I'm going to lean back.

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 I'm getting a little comfortable, guys.

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 Yeah.

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 But so Whitebeard says Patreon is the best way to make some money on a distributed podcast network.

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 I mean, you're not wrong, Whitebeard.

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 But when you've got.

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 You know, one, two hundred audience, five hundred audience spread across, you know, each podcast and you've got six, seven, eight podcasts on your network.

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 I mean, viewers are distributed across all of them, you know, as opposed to like.

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 You know, I'm just talking out loud like a Kerry Newhoff, who's got a million downloads and however many hundreds of thousands of viewers.

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 And and like we just.

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 You know, there was there was an option.

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 Let's go with a let's go with a popular idea or let's go with what Jeff's thinking about digital.

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 And.

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 You know, we went with this rare idea of movements in digital space and digital discipleship and digital church planting and and the thing that nobody was really talking about and really getting into.

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 And so that's what I think really made it unique.

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 You know, it's interesting.

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 This guy was telling you about one of my mentors.

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 He's a lead pastor in Miami and I'm sitting in his church and he's in front of a whiteboard.

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 He's he's helped me strategize some things out as we were looking to transition away.

00:16:51.820 --> 00:16:56.720
 This is 2020, mid 2020, late 2020, looking to transition away from Stadia.

00:16:57.300 --> 00:17:04.340
 At the time, I was director of digital church planting for Stadia and was looking to start what would be digital church network, which is now the church digital.

00:17:05.820 --> 00:17:07.020
 Part two of the church digital.

00:17:07.360 --> 00:17:10.000
 And so but I'm sitting there in this pastor.

00:17:10.220 --> 00:17:12.520
 I just he's like whiteboard everything that you're doing.

00:17:13.640 --> 00:17:21.420
 And I literally I just every every connection, every relationship, every side job, every opportunity, every conversation like it was.

00:17:21.580 --> 00:17:22.680
 It was it was it was mammoth.

00:17:24.800 --> 00:17:30.760
 And I'll never forget this pastor friend of mine looks at me and says, Jeff, you got a you got a billion dollar business here.

00:17:30.800 --> 00:17:32.020
 You just don't you don't know how to do it.

00:17:32.380 --> 00:17:33.360
 You don't know how to run it.

00:17:33.780 --> 00:17:35.020
 And he's not wrong.

00:17:35.180 --> 00:17:36.260
 I don't know how to run it.

00:17:36.420 --> 00:17:36.740
 I don't know.

00:17:36.800 --> 00:17:38.840
 It's a billion dollar business yet.

00:17:39.040 --> 00:17:45.080
 I think I think I think we're I think we're the pioneers paving the way so someone else gets rich.

00:17:46.200 --> 00:17:50.840
 But hey, you know, somebody should say that, you know, pioneers get shot, settlers get rich.

00:17:50.840 --> 00:17:56.220
 You know, we talk about on the podcast like I should get a tattoo anytime it's just tattoo where the conversation.

00:17:56.820 --> 00:18:00.780
 I think I've said that enough on the church digital podcast that it needs to get tattooed.

00:18:02.120 --> 00:18:02.600
 Cool.

00:18:02.960 --> 00:18:08.200
 So the podcast is five years and 300 episodes.

00:18:08.640 --> 00:18:10.740
 Got some really interesting conversations coming up.

00:18:10.780 --> 00:18:12.300
 DK Hammond talking African-American church.

00:18:12.380 --> 00:18:13.480
 Excited about that.

00:18:14.880 --> 00:18:18.600
 Peyton Jones trying to line up Peyton Jones.

00:18:18.740 --> 00:18:22.280
 Peyton Jones is the church ninja.

00:18:23.000 --> 00:18:23.680
 No, he's written.

00:18:23.800 --> 00:18:24.820
 He actually is the church ninja.

00:18:24.820 --> 00:18:27.140
 He's like obsessed with ninjas.

00:18:27.760 --> 00:18:29.600
 He's obsessed with G.I. Joe.

00:18:30.260 --> 00:18:36.020
 His din is more 80s pop culture than my than my backdrop here.

00:18:37.240 --> 00:18:46.420
 He's got a if you're G.I. Joe, he's got a snake eyes tattoo like the the the snake eyes kind of language that snake eyes got on his arm.

00:18:46.560 --> 00:18:48.180
 Peyton Jones has the exact same thing.

00:18:48.600 --> 00:18:52.800
 So that's why I'm going to do a podcast with him on the church digital podcast because he's likes G.I. Joe.

00:18:52.860 --> 00:18:53.220
 No, I'm kidding.

00:18:53.820 --> 00:18:56.540
 Peyton Jones probably wrote what's commonly referred to.

00:18:56.540 --> 00:19:01.880
 He wrote it with Ed Stetzer, but he commonly referred to as the textbook for church planting.

00:19:02.220 --> 00:19:03.640
 It's just called Church Plantology.

00:19:04.340 --> 00:19:07.220
 We did a podcast with Peyton Jones where he was talking about his book.

00:19:09.160 --> 00:19:17.460
 I did this maybe two, three years ago, and we were applying that book to digital church planting.

00:19:18.420 --> 00:19:20.700
 And so you can go back into the archives and check that out.

00:19:20.760 --> 00:19:23.700
 The Church Digital Podcast, Peyton Jones.

00:19:24.080 --> 00:19:25.400
 I'll look it up at some point.

00:19:25.640 --> 00:19:26.720
 But, you know, Google works.

00:19:26.880 --> 00:19:28.540
 Peyton Jones Church Digital Podcast.

00:19:28.720 --> 00:19:40.800
 But what was interesting coming about that was a couple of months, a couple of weeks ago, I guess, Stu started texting me out of the blue.

00:19:40.940 --> 00:19:45.140
 He and I, for some reason, we text each other to get each other's attention.

00:19:45.440 --> 00:19:49.560
 We don't Discord, which is weird because he's a Discord guy.

00:19:50.580 --> 00:19:53.260
 But, you know, my first inbox is always text.

00:19:54.300 --> 00:19:59.380
 And but Stu tells me, he says, he's like, Jeff, have you ever heard of Peyton Jones?

00:19:59.440 --> 00:20:01.340
 I was like, yes, he's a friend, mutual.

00:20:02.020 --> 00:20:04.280
 Actually, Chesley, I believe, now works for Peyton Jones.

00:20:05.400 --> 00:20:06.280
 There's a throwback.

00:20:06.860 --> 00:20:23.020
 But what so Stu started, like, really getting into plantology, getting into the book and really started getting excited about applying some of these ideologies into virtual reality church planting.

00:20:23.800 --> 00:20:26.640
 And so I was like, oh, Peyton, we got to we got to get the crowd together.

00:20:26.640 --> 00:20:34.100
 And so Peyton, Tsunami and I getting together for a conversation, talking about plantology, arguably the modern textbook.

00:20:34.980 --> 00:20:36.140
 Lee Stadia considered it.

00:20:36.380 --> 00:20:44.820
 Craig Whitney, who has planted more churches than I've attended in my life, credits plantology as the modern textbook.

00:20:45.240 --> 00:20:48.500
 So I'm looking forward to that conversation.

00:20:49.400 --> 00:20:51.400
 And then we talked a while back about Steve Addison.

00:20:51.400 --> 00:21:00.720
 And so I'm trying to Steve Addison is one of the current movement missiologists, you know, does a lot of work.

00:21:00.840 --> 00:21:01.660
 He's in Australia.

00:21:01.800 --> 00:21:02.560
 He lives in Australia.

00:21:03.000 --> 00:21:05.440
 Met him here in America, hung out with him at West Palm Beach.

00:21:06.060 --> 00:21:08.640
 Oddly enough, I just exchanged emails with Peyton last week.

00:21:08.700 --> 00:21:09.500
 Yeah, that's very cool.

00:21:09.580 --> 00:21:10.320
 Thanks for sharing that.

00:21:12.240 --> 00:21:15.040
 The so thanks.

00:21:15.140 --> 00:21:15.560
 Thanks, Paul.

00:21:16.180 --> 00:21:19.480
 The Steve Addison's another guy.

00:21:19.480 --> 00:21:24.080
 He just wrote a book on movements and act in the book of Acts, biblical movements.

00:21:24.940 --> 00:21:32.460
 And so I'm really excited about what's coming up there.

00:21:33.520 --> 00:21:34.860
 Looking forward to that conversation.

00:21:35.120 --> 00:21:35.540
 Like Steve.

00:21:36.600 --> 00:21:37.420
 It was interesting.

00:21:37.500 --> 00:21:40.320
 I hung out with Steve for like I'm totally going to get into that white beard.

00:21:40.920 --> 00:21:54.060
 So a CPLF hung out with Steve at a Starbucks in West Palm for a couple an hour or so, maybe 90 minutes, 90 minutes and two hours talking digital, talking movements.

00:21:55.660 --> 00:21:58.940
 You know, he's got a lot of insights biblically.

00:21:59.660 --> 00:22:02.540
 And he said, he's like, because I asked him on the podcast when we were hanging out.

00:22:03.220 --> 00:22:05.960
 And he's like, Jeff, I mean, I don't know digital.

00:22:06.100 --> 00:22:07.940
 I really am not comfortable speaking into that.

00:22:07.960 --> 00:22:09.460
 I was like, nobody knows digital.

00:22:09.580 --> 00:22:10.780
 I don't want you to talk digital.

00:22:10.860 --> 00:22:11.740
 I want you to talk movements.

00:22:11.980 --> 00:22:13.880
 Let me apply it to digital.

00:22:15.260 --> 00:22:17.880
 But, you know, let my audience figure out how to apply it to digital.

00:22:17.960 --> 00:22:18.620
 But you just come on.

00:22:18.660 --> 00:22:20.160
 I'll just be you and talk about that.

00:22:20.260 --> 00:22:22.120
 So looking forward to that conversation.

00:22:23.280 --> 00:22:23.940
 It's interesting.

00:22:24.060 --> 00:22:24.960
 I mentioned Whitebeard.

00:22:25.300 --> 00:22:27.540
 I mentioned Ed Stetzer in passing.

00:22:27.660 --> 00:22:28.260
 Ed's a friend.

00:22:29.900 --> 00:22:31.620
 You know, I haven't texted Ed in a while.

00:22:31.620 --> 00:22:41.160
 But Ed used to speak, was a guest speaker, a regular guest speaker at Christ Fellowship Miami, the church that I was the weekend producer for.

00:22:41.440 --> 00:22:42.900
 And so I did.

00:22:43.200 --> 00:22:47.000
 I worked very closely with Ed for a number of years over there.

00:22:47.420 --> 00:23:02.720
 And there is a CPLF, Exponential and Church Planter Leadership Forum, CPLF, have announced some sort of an agreement, which is interesting because CPLF is a very good organization.

00:23:03.100 --> 00:23:04.460
 And so, Whitebeard, I'm going to tell you a story.

00:23:05.460 --> 00:23:07.240
 And we'll eventually get into what I want to talk about.

00:23:07.780 --> 00:23:10.720
 But let me tell you a story about Ed Stetzer and CPLF.

00:23:13.340 --> 00:23:20.540
 So 2020, I literally January, January 26th, this is the year COVID hit.

00:23:20.920 --> 00:23:23.420
 January 26th, I started my job working for Stadia.

00:23:24.700 --> 00:23:27.460
 Now, pre-COVID, I had six weeks before COVID hit.

00:23:27.640 --> 00:23:28.740
 So they were onboarding me.

00:23:29.560 --> 00:23:48.220
 And then COVID hit, and my stock, you know, went up 1,000% in Stadia because, you know, they had a digital strategist that wasn't attached to a church that understands how to do digital ministry and streaming and the tech and the discipleship and all aspects of it.

00:23:48.340 --> 00:23:50.780
 And so, like, you know, Stadia was banking on it.

00:23:52.160 --> 00:23:55.040
 And so it was a, you know, mutually beneficial relationship.

00:23:58.700 --> 00:24:03.560
 Because of Stadia's exposure, a lot of, I mean, exponential.

00:24:04.020 --> 00:24:08.280
 I remember meeting Dave Ferguson, and Dave Ferguson was like, you know what?

00:24:08.340 --> 00:24:13.240
 Everybody knows your name, but no one has a, Jeff, but no one has a clue who you are.

00:24:13.620 --> 00:24:14.900
 Who are you?

00:24:15.180 --> 00:24:16.440
 Where did you come from?

00:24:16.440 --> 00:24:19.440
 Because you were nowhere, and now, thanks to COVID, you're everywhere.

00:24:20.360 --> 00:24:26.060
 And that was just the reality of being in the right place in the right time and being used by God.

00:24:26.160 --> 00:24:27.340
 I am a nobody.

00:24:27.580 --> 00:24:31.160
 I am not anything special.

00:24:31.540 --> 00:24:33.920
 I'm barely a guy that should be in front of a camera.

00:24:34.440 --> 00:24:35.700
 And that's not the meds talking.

00:24:36.000 --> 00:24:36.920
 That's genuine.

00:24:38.380 --> 00:24:44.900
 But God used me in that season, and God continues to use me to his pleasure and for his benefit.

00:24:45.900 --> 00:24:56.360
 And so one of those was a relationship that I developed with CPLF, where when I got hired

00:24:56.360 --> 00:25:01.220
 by Stadia, but before COVID, CPLF, Church Planner Leadership Forum.

00:25:01.320 --> 00:25:01.960
 No, let me back up.

00:25:02.020 --> 00:25:03.000
 Church Planner Leadership Forum.

00:25:04.340 --> 00:25:11.840
 This is a think tank of 40 of the top U.S. and or global-based church planting organizations

00:25:11.840 --> 00:25:13.900
 in the country or the planet.

00:25:14.040 --> 00:25:16.340
 I'm not sure if it's U.S.-based or if it's international.

00:25:17.020 --> 00:25:18.980
 But this is like invite-only crowd.

00:25:19.100 --> 00:25:21.060
 This is like super legit.

00:25:21.300 --> 00:25:25.700
 This is like, you know, you don't even really talk about how you're going there kind of thing.

00:25:25.760 --> 00:25:26.660
 It's like a secret.

00:25:27.500 --> 00:25:35.660
 And I got invited because I was director of digital church planting for Stadia.

00:25:36.560 --> 00:25:38.040
 What's a digital church, Jeff?

00:25:38.560 --> 00:25:41.140
 This is pre-COVID, before COVID hit.

00:25:41.600 --> 00:25:43.320
 I get invited to come speak at this thing.

00:25:44.340 --> 00:25:51.460
 And so the super secret, super elite, in front of the top 40, like, you know.

00:25:51.760 --> 00:26:00.220
 And so my friends at Stadia, I remember when Craig Whitney and Jeff Bennett, the two guys that I really worked for when I was at Stadia,

00:26:00.600 --> 00:26:06.920
 when they found out that I was invited to go speak at this thing, they were so jealous.

00:26:07.920 --> 00:26:12.880
 Jeff Bennett was like, Jeff, I've attended that thing for a decade, every year for a decade.

00:26:13.000 --> 00:26:14.900
 They've never asked me to speak at that thing once.

00:26:15.300 --> 00:26:17.260
 You don't even know what CPLF is.

00:26:17.320 --> 00:26:18.880
 And they asked you to speak at it.

00:26:19.020 --> 00:26:20.840
 And you're asking us if it's a good idea.

00:26:20.960 --> 00:26:21.880
 Yes, it's a good idea.

00:26:22.020 --> 00:26:23.200
 Get over there and speak.

00:26:24.300 --> 00:26:25.480
 And so I did.

00:26:25.620 --> 00:26:27.080
 I ended up speaking at this thing.

00:26:27.660 --> 00:26:33.180
 And so Daniel, oh my gosh, who did the Q&A for me?

00:26:35.760 --> 00:26:40.060
 There was, it was, the format was I had 30 minutes to speak.

00:26:41.500 --> 00:26:46.060
 I was allowed to speak for 20 minutes on a monologue, like go through slides.

00:26:47.320 --> 00:26:51.180
 And then I had 10 minutes of Q&A.

00:26:51.500 --> 00:26:54.420
 Now the Q&A was already established.

00:26:55.280 --> 00:26:59.840
 Like the person, I think it was Daniel Yang, forgive me, Daniel, if it wasn't you.

00:27:00.440 --> 00:27:05.880
 Daniel Yang went through the Q&A questions with me in advance so that I was on the same page with him.

00:27:06.020 --> 00:27:08.100
 He made sure that I had all the good questions.

00:27:08.260 --> 00:27:09.120
 Everything was resolved.

00:27:10.440 --> 00:27:13.160
 And so, you know, I come on this thing.

00:27:13.960 --> 00:27:18.240
 I am, this is early in COVID, so I hadn't done a lot of public speaking yet.

00:27:19.240 --> 00:27:20.320
 I am super nervous.

00:27:21.700 --> 00:27:27.980
 And for the first time, I have major tech issues with my slides where I can't get it to work.

00:27:27.980 --> 00:27:33.320
 And some pop-up keeps popping up on my screen on how I'm sharing my slides.

00:27:33.540 --> 00:27:35.540
 And so nobody can see the slides.

00:27:35.820 --> 00:27:38.640
 And people keep messaging me that there's a problem with the slides.

00:27:38.680 --> 00:27:40.280
 And my mic keeps cutting in and out.

00:27:41.040 --> 00:27:45.720
 Like, this is the worst presentation I have ever made.

00:27:46.060 --> 00:27:46.840
 I take that back.

00:27:47.220 --> 00:27:54.280
 This is probably the top three of the worst presentations that I've ever done in front of this super elite crowd.

00:27:56.060 --> 00:27:58.960
 And so I go 15, 18 minutes.

00:27:59.180 --> 00:28:05.080
 Daniel Yang, whoever it was, forgive me, you know, cuts me off like he said he would.

00:28:05.460 --> 00:28:06.740
 And it's like, okay, hey, you know what?

00:28:06.740 --> 00:28:08.460
 Let's get into some questions here.

00:28:09.940 --> 00:28:13.220
 And so he asks me the question.

00:28:14.460 --> 00:28:17.900
 Now, what you need to understand is this is in Zoom.

00:28:18.720 --> 00:28:21.740
 But this isn't like Zoom webinar where I can't see the crowd.

00:28:21.820 --> 00:28:24.780
 This is Zoom call.

00:28:25.180 --> 00:28:27.020
 So I can see every person.

00:28:27.280 --> 00:28:29.300
 I can see their squares on the grid.

00:28:30.400 --> 00:28:34.100
 And when the first question comes up, Ed Stetzer is in the room.

00:28:34.840 --> 00:28:37.580
 Ed Stetzer turns his camera off.

00:28:39.280 --> 00:28:43.040
 I noticed it because Ed Stetzer was on my screen, but I didn't think anything of it.

00:28:43.880 --> 00:28:45.580
 Ed Stetzer turns his camera on again.

00:28:46.300 --> 00:28:48.180
 Ed Stetzer turns his camera off again.

00:28:49.180 --> 00:28:50.360
 On again, off again.

00:28:51.900 --> 00:29:04.680
 And then finally, about 90 seconds into me answering the first question, Ed Stetzer turns his camera on and he unmutes and says,

00:29:04.760 --> 00:29:07.980
 Hey, Daniel, I'm going to go ahead and interrupt this here.

00:29:08.060 --> 00:29:10.420
 Hey, Jeff, good to see you again, my friend.

00:29:11.460 --> 00:29:15.480
 Hey, I really appreciate the conversation, Jeff.

00:29:15.480 --> 00:29:20.620
 And Jeff, I love how you're using Scripture to prove a digital ecclesiology.

00:29:20.860 --> 00:29:22.440
 We all kind of got a chuckle out of that.

00:29:22.920 --> 00:29:24.700
 Hey, Jeff, you know, we've had this conversation.

00:29:24.840 --> 00:29:29.740
 You and I have had this conversation for years about digital and the effectiveness of digital church.

00:29:30.440 --> 00:29:35.880
 Daniel, would it be okay if I just, like, ask Jeff some questions myself?

00:29:36.000 --> 00:29:38.660
 Because, you know, he and I know each other real well.

00:29:38.780 --> 00:29:44.000
 And so we want to, I would rather just, like, ask my questions than listen to yours.

00:29:45.560 --> 00:29:49.900
 And, you know, Daniel's like, okay.

00:29:51.200 --> 00:29:52.560
 Jeff, is that okay with you?

00:29:52.580 --> 00:29:56.860
 And I'm like, it's your show, man, if you're okay with it.

00:29:56.860 --> 00:30:02.020
 And so Ed Stetzer proceeds to drill me for 25 minutes.

00:30:03.360 --> 00:30:10.140
 Now, this is not like two friends sitting around Starbucks drinking a latte.

00:30:11.720 --> 00:30:13.700
 He's swinging haymakers at me.

00:30:14.320 --> 00:30:17.320
 He's, like, taking elbow shots to my chin.

00:30:17.820 --> 00:30:19.560
 He's, like, doing cup checks.

00:30:20.260 --> 00:30:26.140
 He is physically, verbally, physically attacking me.

00:30:26.360 --> 00:30:27.240
 And that's not possible.

00:30:27.240 --> 00:30:28.280
 But you understand what I'm saying.

00:30:28.980 --> 00:30:31.200
 Like, the idea of digital church.

00:30:32.300 --> 00:30:40.180
 And, you know, for the first 30 seconds, I thought, okay, I've got to respect this guy because it's Ed Stetzer.

00:30:40.960 --> 00:30:42.900
 I mean, it's Ed Stetzer.

00:30:43.040 --> 00:30:46.600
 I can't take shots of Ed Stetzer in his own house.

00:30:47.600 --> 00:30:50.380
 And then I was, like, screw that.

00:30:50.440 --> 00:30:51.740
 He's not going to stop.

00:30:51.940 --> 00:30:54.640
 He's going to keep taking shots at me and at digital doing this.

00:30:54.880 --> 00:31:04.980
 And so I started taking shots back at him and being very sarcastic, very, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:31:05.760 --> 00:31:06.640
 Did Jeff go out?

00:31:06.700 --> 00:31:07.420
 No, no, Jeff's still here.

00:31:07.520 --> 00:31:08.300
 Hopefully Jeff's still here.

00:31:09.600 --> 00:31:10.900
 Yeah, it looks like it's good for me.

00:31:11.900 --> 00:31:14.860
 It looks like Miss Dahl is having some problems with the internet.

00:31:15.680 --> 00:31:17.940
 So, man, I'm, like, taking shots back.

00:31:20.600 --> 00:31:26.800
 The chatter in the chat explodes.

00:31:27.820 --> 00:31:30.260
 People on both sides of the equation.

00:31:30.600 --> 00:31:31.840
 Ed Stetzer supporters.

00:31:32.060 --> 00:31:33.040
 Jeff Reed supporters.

00:31:33.540 --> 00:31:34.160
 Team Ed.

00:31:34.300 --> 00:31:35.020
 Team Jeff.

00:31:35.360 --> 00:31:36.840
 Taking shots at each other.

00:31:36.840 --> 00:31:43.300
 It's like the cage match affected the entire auditorium.

00:31:44.180 --> 00:31:47.720
 My phone starts getting texts from people.

00:31:48.040 --> 00:31:49.380
 Way to go, Jeff.

00:31:49.560 --> 00:31:55.680
 People that are in the room that want to make sure that I know that they saw me are encouraging me.

00:31:56.360 --> 00:32:03.080
 And it's just, like, it was this ridiculous kind of 30 minutes.

00:32:03.620 --> 00:32:04.640
 Like, it went long.

00:32:04.640 --> 00:32:07.380
 I apologized to the guy afterwards.

00:32:09.600 --> 00:32:10.980
 It just was so funny.

00:32:12.160 --> 00:32:13.440
 This whole thing went down.

00:32:15.360 --> 00:32:19.040
 I just apologize because it took so much longer than we were scheduled for.

00:32:20.300 --> 00:32:24.860
 But as soon as I hung up, as soon as I got off that call, this is honest to God truth.

00:32:25.600 --> 00:32:28.140
 As soon as I got off that call, Ed Stetzer texts me.

00:32:30.240 --> 00:32:31.600
 Jeff, that was great, man.

00:32:32.180 --> 00:32:33.160
 That was awesome.

00:32:33.340 --> 00:32:34.480
 I loved it.

00:32:34.480 --> 00:32:35.620
 That was so good, man.

00:32:35.680 --> 00:32:36.640
 Thanks for being a part of this.

00:32:36.700 --> 00:32:38.220
 Thanks for being a part of CPLF.

00:32:39.040 --> 00:32:41.100
 Would you want to do that on my podcast?

00:32:42.160 --> 00:32:43.540
 Why don't you come on my podcast?

00:32:43.720 --> 00:32:45.880
 Let's do it again on my podcast over there for everybody else.

00:32:48.640 --> 00:32:49.240
 Okay, Ed.

00:32:49.660 --> 00:32:53.300
 So I literally went on his podcast to get attacked.

00:32:54.620 --> 00:32:58.020
 To bulk up, to fight back, to argue, to prove points.

00:32:59.520 --> 00:33:00.180
 So funny.

00:33:01.240 --> 00:33:02.920
 I don't know what the moral of that story was.

00:33:03.020 --> 00:33:04.500
 But CPLF's a great organization.

00:33:04.640 --> 00:33:05.560
 Exponential as well.

00:33:05.780 --> 00:33:09.440
 And they'll do well together.

00:33:10.400 --> 00:33:12.220
 Excited to see how things develop there.

00:33:13.360 --> 00:33:13.760
 You know what?

00:33:13.800 --> 00:33:17.660
 Ed, actually, somewhere around this time, 2020, probably pre-COVID.

00:33:17.740 --> 00:33:17.940
 You know what?

00:33:17.940 --> 00:33:19.040
 It was probably late 2019.

00:33:20.260 --> 00:33:24.480
 New had a better chance of growing than old.

00:33:27.200 --> 00:33:38.360
 New churches had a better chance of growing at a faster rate, at a larger rate, than old churches.

00:33:40.360 --> 00:33:42.220
 I mean, you can take with that what you want.

00:33:43.000 --> 00:33:47.920
 It's one of the reasons why Stadia is such a proponent of planting churches.

00:33:48.120 --> 00:33:49.320
 It's why I love planting.

00:33:49.800 --> 00:33:53.740
 And I've spent time, you know, supporting the idea of multiplying churches.

00:33:53.940 --> 00:33:55.340
 And a lot of that's been multi-site, too.

00:33:55.480 --> 00:34:02.280
 But, you know, even multi-site is new at some context, which is why church plantology is huge now.

00:34:02.360 --> 00:34:02.960
 You're right, Whitebeard.

00:34:03.120 --> 00:34:04.000
 So true there.

00:34:05.500 --> 00:34:11.000
 And so I wonder what it would take to get Ed Stetzer back on the podcast.

00:34:11.260 --> 00:34:12.580
 I did a podcast with Ed.

00:34:15.400 --> 00:34:17.560
 Man, he was maybe episode 50 or 60.

00:34:18.420 --> 00:34:20.880
 I tell you what, if you can go to—actually, it's probably not there anymore.

00:34:20.960 --> 00:34:26.300
 It used to be thechurch.digital.ed, thechurch.digital.ed.

00:34:26.360 --> 00:34:30.020
 Ed said in his podcast, the podcast I did with—he did on my show,

00:34:32.160 --> 00:34:35.480
 whatever this Jeff Reed guy is talking about, you need to be doing it.

00:34:35.560 --> 00:34:38.080
 Like, it was the best endorsement I could ever,

00:34:38.700 --> 00:34:41.100
 which is so funny because that guy was, like, ripping me a year later.

00:34:42.700 --> 00:34:45.160
 So, very cool.

00:34:45.620 --> 00:34:48.880
 Hey, so we're celebrating the five-year of the podcast, which is awesome.

00:34:49.000 --> 00:34:49.740
 Excited about that.

00:34:50.140 --> 00:34:52.600
 There's some other celebrations that we've got coming up.

00:34:53.900 --> 00:35:02.600
 We have the—and this is more of a me thing, but the 24-year anniversary of the church of—excuse me,

00:35:02.640 --> 00:35:04.440
 of eBeliever.com, of my first business.

00:35:05.500 --> 00:35:10.300
 My first .com actually launched April 15th as well.

00:35:11.580 --> 00:35:19.140
 And so, you know, I've told a little bit of this story, but I've never—I haven't gone into great detail on it before.

00:35:19.240 --> 00:35:24.680
 And so I figured, hey, you know what, I'm going to—I'm going to take some time today since it's the 24-year anniversary

00:35:24.680 --> 00:35:27.580
 and actually talk about it here a little bit.

00:35:28.220 --> 00:35:31.140
 So, you know, I've told this story.

00:35:31.220 --> 00:35:37.220
 Usually when I public—when I speak publicly, I talk about how I graduated from college December 1999,

00:35:37.560 --> 00:35:39.800
 Texas Christian University, degree in radio, TV, film.

00:35:39.800 --> 00:35:46.680
 And, you know, in 1999, you know, 20 days before Y2K, I was stupid enough to think,

00:35:46.780 --> 00:35:48.500
 oh, I'm going to go get a job as a digital pastor.

00:35:49.300 --> 00:35:53.340
 Surely some church in America is smart enough to hire me, looking at what the Internet could be,

00:35:53.720 --> 00:35:57.300
 in the year 2000, to hire me to be a digital pastor.

00:35:57.420 --> 00:36:04.300
 And for some reason, no church would hire me in the year 2000 to be a digital pastor.

00:36:04.300 --> 00:36:08.100
 And so I set out to screw you all.

00:36:09.260 --> 00:36:13.660
 If you're not going to hire me, then let me give you a proof of concept and show you why you should hire me

00:36:13.660 --> 00:36:17.440
 and show you why the Internet—of what ministry can look like for the Internet.

00:36:18.640 --> 00:36:21.160
 Now, I was not smart enough to call this thing a church.

00:36:21.820 --> 00:36:23.340
 I don't even know if it was a church.

00:36:23.440 --> 00:36:26.660
 We can actually, you know, have that conversation later and actually drill into it,

00:36:26.820 --> 00:36:28.060
 if it was or was not.

00:36:33.040 --> 00:36:33.400
 Yeah.

00:36:34.540 --> 00:36:38.240
 Whitebeard, graduated from PBA with broadcast journalism, 1988.

00:36:38.760 --> 00:36:42.640
 Yeah, you're gramps compared to me.

00:36:43.240 --> 00:36:48.680
 We had a guy your age that was a college freshman when I was a college freshman, Whitebeard,

00:36:49.080 --> 00:36:52.560
 and we called him Pops because the dude was old.

00:36:53.480 --> 00:36:53.940
 Just saying.

00:36:54.260 --> 00:36:55.300
 All right, coming back.

00:36:55.380 --> 00:36:59.540
 And I'm older than him now, and I'm gray, and my body's falling apart.

00:37:00.140 --> 00:37:01.000
 Oh, so many things.

00:37:01.660 --> 00:37:03.280
 But we started this.

00:37:03.480 --> 00:37:05.080
 I built this eBeliever.com.

00:37:05.420 --> 00:37:08.820
 We started January, right after Y2K, literally January 2nd.

00:37:08.960 --> 00:37:10.280
 You know, the end of the world did not come.

00:37:10.940 --> 00:37:12.620
 The economic systems did not crash.

00:37:13.220 --> 00:37:14.280
 There was a little bit of a—

00:37:14.280 --> 00:37:17.160
 If you remember, if you're old enough for Y2K,

00:37:17.680 --> 00:37:20.060
 coming out of that, there was a little bit of a tech boom.

00:37:21.560 --> 00:37:28.200
 And companies like GeoCities and Hotmail, a lot of the early .coms had a lot of success

00:37:28.200 --> 00:37:31.280
 and found a lot of funding really quickly.

00:37:31.440 --> 00:37:32.540
 Now, all that exploded.

00:37:33.100 --> 00:37:36.520
 That exploded somewhere around April 1st, 2000, if you remember.

00:37:36.640 --> 00:37:37.420
 Yeah, thank you, Melanie.

00:37:37.680 --> 00:37:38.660
 They have a wise choice.

00:37:39.240 --> 00:37:43.180
 And so my company publicly launched April 15th after the crash.

00:37:43.520 --> 00:37:46.060
 So we weren't able to fully take advantage of it.

00:37:46.260 --> 00:37:49.160
 But we had—it was a Christian online community.

00:37:49.660 --> 00:37:50.740
 This was before Facebook.

00:37:51.040 --> 00:37:52.560
 Facebook was still, I think, in colleges.

00:37:52.720 --> 00:37:54.580
 It wasn't even at public level.

00:37:55.260 --> 00:37:56.520
 MySpace was kind of a thing.

00:37:56.680 --> 00:37:58.060
 You know, it was really more of Napster.

00:37:58.940 --> 00:37:59.980
 Netscape was around.

00:38:01.640 --> 00:38:03.140
 AOL was still a thing.

00:38:04.160 --> 00:38:06.880
 And so this is before the social media.

00:38:06.940 --> 00:38:07.820
 This is from Web 2.

00:38:08.380 --> 00:38:11.880
 So I started an online community way before Web 2.

00:38:13.340 --> 00:38:16.100
 We were doing our technology stack.

00:38:18.800 --> 00:38:23.040
 We were buying third-party applications, CGI applications,

00:38:23.460 --> 00:38:25.240
 and installing them on a Unix server.

00:38:25.820 --> 00:38:28.660
 So we were using Ultimate Bulletin Board for our discussion boards,

00:38:28.880 --> 00:38:31.400
 basically our Facebook walls, because Facebook walls didn't exist.

00:38:31.780 --> 00:38:34.780
 So we had to install Ultimate BB to be that for us.

00:38:35.260 --> 00:38:37.680
 And then we wanted to have—to give away email addresses.

00:38:37.800 --> 00:38:40.420
 We gave away eBeliever.com email addresses, web-based.

00:38:40.500 --> 00:38:41.400
 And so people would do that.

00:38:41.720 --> 00:38:43.640
 We actually let people design websites.

00:38:44.140 --> 00:38:48.880
 And so we installed like a GeoCities type of thing

00:38:48.880 --> 00:38:52.080
 where people could build their websites on eBeliever.com,

00:38:52.140 --> 00:38:55.780
 actually some of the earliest youth group websites were going to be what we did,

00:38:56.000 --> 00:38:57.320
 were based off of our system.

00:38:57.980 --> 00:39:03.620
 And so even then, we were really trying to be more of a distributed type model.

00:39:03.760 --> 00:39:04.840
 Online Bible studies.

00:39:05.700 --> 00:39:11.460
 The first Bible study I ever did online was we took 75 people through the book of James.

00:39:12.160 --> 00:39:19.200
 I did InterVarsity Press, the little paper-thin booklets, maybe like 20 pages,

00:39:19.560 --> 00:39:23.100
 that you can buy for like $7 at the Christian bookstore back then.

00:39:23.560 --> 00:39:28.140
 And so, yeah, we just—I would, you know, we would read a chapter, read a section,

00:39:28.140 --> 00:39:31.280
 and then I would ask some of the questions in the discussion boards, and people would answer.

00:39:32.680 --> 00:39:34.000
 Webcams, webcams weren't a thing.

00:39:34.900 --> 00:39:37.520
 And so it was all text-based, and it wasn't Discord.

00:39:37.780 --> 00:39:42.920
 It was more like, you know, more like Facebook wall type of stuff, and more of that.

00:39:43.280 --> 00:39:48.800
 Forums, which is really what that really is more of than some of the async tech that where we are today.

00:39:49.540 --> 00:39:52.580
 And so movie reviews, I would go.

00:39:52.720 --> 00:39:56.120
 I would watch—I would watch movies at either Thursday nights.

00:39:56.240 --> 00:40:01.180
 I would get permission from the movie theaters that were near me where we were in Fort Worth.

00:40:02.040 --> 00:40:03.920
 That—Life Guides, that's exactly what that was.

00:40:04.760 --> 00:40:05.560
 Life Guides.

00:40:05.640 --> 00:40:10.900
 We would show—I would go when the movies were being shown Thursday nights.

00:40:11.900 --> 00:40:14.420
 The employees would get me in.

00:40:14.720 --> 00:40:17.320
 Or I would go and watch them Friday at noon.

00:40:18.440 --> 00:40:21.200
 And I'd sit with the legal pad, and I would just make notes.

00:40:21.820 --> 00:40:24.000
 The world's worst handwriting.

00:40:24.200 --> 00:40:26.920
 But I have a degree in radio TV films, so I'm used to writing in the dark.

00:40:27.740 --> 00:40:31.040
 And so I would take notes on what it is, and then I would write vert reviews.

00:40:32.900 --> 00:40:45.360
 Movie reviews, music reviews, I would email some of the Christian music scene at the time and basically ask permission to, you know, do music reviews and post MP3 clips or even post entire songs online.

00:40:45.680 --> 00:40:47.160
 And some said yes, some said no.

00:40:47.220 --> 00:40:48.260
 Remember, this is the year 2000.

00:40:48.400 --> 00:40:53.620
 Like, this is way before any of this stuff was out there.

00:40:54.480 --> 00:40:57.100
 And, like, there was—everything was gray.

00:40:57.160 --> 00:40:57.860
 It was no black and white.

00:40:57.860 --> 00:40:59.920
 There were no laws and rules centered around this.

00:41:01.820 --> 00:41:02.500
 And it was funny.

00:41:02.580 --> 00:41:07.520
 Like, I remember Tooth and Nail.

00:41:08.700 --> 00:41:23.460
 Tooth and Nail said, thank you for being willing to review our music and sent me a giant box with every Tooth and Nail publication previous of the year 2000, like 2000 and back.

00:41:23.900 --> 00:41:25.800
 Literally, it was like 75, 100 CDs.

00:41:25.920 --> 00:41:26.520
 I still have them.

00:41:28.020 --> 00:41:31.700
 And so it was so cool to kind of see how they leaned into it.

00:41:31.700 --> 00:41:33.800
 Like, some leaned into it, like I said, some didn't.

00:41:35.660 --> 00:41:37.300
 You know, and at the beginning, I did all the work.

00:41:37.640 --> 00:41:47.080
 And there wasn't—like, this whole database systems and CRMs and Squarespace that have—or CMSs, I should say, not CRMs, like content management systems.

00:41:48.640 --> 00:41:49.740
 Like, that didn't exist.

00:41:49.740 --> 00:41:50.140
 Like, that didn't exist.

00:41:50.140 --> 00:41:50.140
 Like, that didn't exist.

00:41:50.140 --> 00:41:51.400
 I'm coding pure HTML.

00:41:53.080 --> 00:41:55.120
 You know, maybe I have Adobe PageMill.

00:41:56.480 --> 00:41:58.320
 But very, very, very little of it.

00:41:58.320 --> 00:42:12.960
 And, you know, heaven forbid, in using Adobe PageMill, I—which is before Adobe Cyber Studio, which was—go live Cyber Studio, which was—I mean, there's—this is so many layers of, like, archaic.

00:42:14.640 --> 00:42:22.900
 But heaven forbid I changed the template because if I changed the template, I have to change that—that make that change on, like, 100 pages because it didn't—it didn't sync up.

00:42:23.940 --> 00:42:25.560
 The precursor to Excel.

00:42:26.320 --> 00:42:27.100
 I don't.

00:42:27.300 --> 00:42:28.000
 I'm not that old.

00:42:28.140 --> 00:42:28.620
 Dreamweaver.

00:42:28.980 --> 00:42:30.020
 No, yeah, no, no, no.

00:42:30.420 --> 00:42:34.840
 Yeah, dude, Dreamweaver is new compared to some of the stuff that I'm talking about.

00:42:35.180 --> 00:42:39.940
 Macromedia Dreamweaver—Adobe bought Macromedia Dreamweaver.

00:42:40.300 --> 00:42:51.080
 Before that, Adobe bought Go Live Cyber Fusion, which was a crash and burn.

00:42:51.460 --> 00:42:57.580
 Before that, Adobe came out with their own product, which was called Adobe PageMill.

00:42:58.760 --> 00:43:00.200
 And that was what I coded this thing on.

00:43:02.320 --> 00:43:06.760
 Shuhata, man, you're—you are throwing me back here, my friend.

00:43:06.860 --> 00:43:07.580
 Thank you for that.

00:43:08.400 --> 00:43:09.960
 This is a great conversation.

00:43:10.380 --> 00:43:12.040
 Mistala is asking some good stuff, too.

00:43:13.640 --> 00:43:17.620
 But, yeah, it was—it was archaic.

00:43:19.140 --> 00:43:27.540
 And I found myself—well, I found myself digging big holes that I couldn't fulfill.

00:43:29.460 --> 00:43:37.800
 And, you know, just like I did with the Church Digital, I mean, to be honest, I kind of was like, all right, let's get some people to help.

00:43:38.860 --> 00:43:40.200
 I don't have any money.

00:43:41.380 --> 00:43:44.360
 I have—I can give you free CDs.

00:43:45.820 --> 00:43:46.920
 And so that's what I did.

00:43:47.280 --> 00:43:59.200
 Any college student at Texas Christian University—and I went to my friends—any college student that would review a CD for me, I would—I'd give them the CD.

00:44:00.260 --> 00:44:01.820
 And so it wasn't the Jeff Reed Show.

00:44:01.840 --> 00:44:03.160
 I started platforming some others.

00:44:04.160 --> 00:44:16.420
 Any pastors who wanted to put their—give me their video teaching file—or their VHS—their VHS tapes so I could encode them into real video.

00:44:16.600 --> 00:44:17.620
 You remember real video?

00:44:18.220 --> 00:44:22.460
 Well, from broadcast.com, before Windows Media, before QuickTime.

00:44:23.060 --> 00:44:24.100
 Yeah, real media.

00:44:24.300 --> 00:44:24.960
 There you go.

00:44:26.400 --> 00:44:29.980
 We were encoding VHS into real media and publishing that.

00:44:30.600 --> 00:44:33.960
 And that was—that was some of the first video teaching files.

00:44:34.000 --> 00:44:36.400
 That was from some of the first sermons online.

00:44:37.440 --> 00:44:39.140
 This is before YouTube, guys.

00:44:40.440 --> 00:44:42.120
 And so we were—we were out there.

00:44:42.160 --> 00:44:43.240
 We're talking about Bleeding Edge.

00:44:44.080 --> 00:44:46.620
 You know, talk about pioneers getting shot.

00:44:48.240 --> 00:44:49.360
 This is what we were doing.

00:44:50.920 --> 00:44:57.420
 My brother-in-law was a—was a Bible student.

00:44:57.520 --> 00:45:04.160
 I don't think he ever did seminary, but very, very educated, very trustworthy, very theologically stable.

00:45:05.520 --> 00:45:10.260
 And the idea of him—I asked him, hey, would you mind teaching some Bible studies online?

00:45:10.740 --> 00:45:17.260
 He loved it because he saw that he was impacting hundreds of people around the country, around the planet.

00:45:18.020 --> 00:45:19.760
 Like, there were dudes—it was fun.

00:45:19.780 --> 00:45:25.180
 I was hanging out with him Christmas, and he mentioned the guy's name.

00:45:25.220 --> 00:45:26.440
 I can't think of the guy's name right now.

00:45:27.040 --> 00:45:31.380
 But there was a guy in the United Arab Emirates that always did his Bible studies.

00:45:31.900 --> 00:45:35.820
 And he's like, oh, he's like, oh, yeah, man, I found what's-his-name on Facebook the other day.

00:45:36.700 --> 00:45:40.060
 And he started lamenting and reminiscing about that.

00:45:40.940 --> 00:45:48.040
 And 20 years later, 23 and a half years later, almost 24 years later, still going through that.

00:45:52.540 --> 00:45:53.940
 Thinking outside of the box.

00:45:56.100 --> 00:45:57.360
 Doing something different.

00:45:59.980 --> 00:46:06.400
 Well, everything I just described to you today is commonly referred to in 2024 as Christianity Today.

00:46:07.680 --> 00:46:13.400
 Movie reviews, music reviews, sermons online, community discussion board forums.

00:46:15.820 --> 00:46:17.460
 There's nothing new under the sun on that.

00:46:18.200 --> 00:46:19.040
 Biblical, by the way.

00:46:19.160 --> 00:46:20.140
 Nothing new under the sun.

00:46:25.260 --> 00:46:33.120
 You know, sometimes I think that a lot of the times, the way people get offended over the church and technology,

00:46:33.120 --> 00:46:38.580
 it's more grounded upon what their opinions are and what their preferences are,

00:46:38.660 --> 00:46:44.220
 not so much of what the ecclesiology and what the Bible actually is and what the Bible says.

00:46:45.180 --> 00:46:48.140
 And so I do think, we smuggled, oh, this is interesting,

00:46:49.240 --> 00:46:54.940
 Shuata, we smuggled King James Bibles on computer chips for hand-held electronic dictionaries into Saudi back in the day.

00:46:55.560 --> 00:46:57.140
 Yeah, that's cool.

00:46:57.880 --> 00:46:59.320
 That is really cool, man.

00:46:59.500 --> 00:47:00.420
 Thank you for sharing that.

00:47:00.660 --> 00:47:07.300
 I don't know if, I don't know if I want to ask who you are now, but that's a really interesting story.

00:47:08.140 --> 00:47:17.460
 My mother was smuggling Bibles into Romania in the 80s and 90s.

00:47:18.420 --> 00:47:28.000
 And she was actually in a horrific car accident in Romania as they were trying to kill,

00:47:29.280 --> 00:47:40.860
 as the Romanian secret police or whatever was trying to kill the leaders of the organization that was trying to smuggle Bibles in.

00:47:43.280 --> 00:47:48.860
 And I've got friends that are smuggling Bibles, digital Bibles into Cuba,

00:47:49.360 --> 00:47:56.360
 using Bluetooth and low-powered and some beacons and, oh my gosh, so much, so much fun.

00:47:59.500 --> 00:48:01.260
 Which really just reiterates the point.

00:48:03.720 --> 00:48:05.720
 God is doing so much around us.

00:48:07.080 --> 00:48:08.320
 I mean, look around.

00:48:09.840 --> 00:48:14.000
 The stories that are in here from old school web design.

00:48:14.000 --> 00:48:19.180
 I launched 100 websites before the year 2006.

00:48:20.080 --> 00:48:34.420
 98% of them easily were churches and non-profit and para-church organizations, church groups, college groups, denominations, organizations,

00:48:34.920 --> 00:48:35.840
 Christ-centered groups.

00:48:37.060 --> 00:48:45.140
 You know how much heat they got for having a website 25 years ago, 24 years ago?

00:48:49.720 --> 00:48:53.520
 You know how much lack of support I've gotten over the years?

00:48:54.660 --> 00:48:56.500
 I remember launching that community.

00:48:56.640 --> 00:48:58.160
 By the way, we had eBeliever.com.

00:48:58.220 --> 00:48:59.240
 We had 30 to 40,000.

00:48:59.240 --> 00:49:00.460
 I don't remember the actual number.

00:49:00.540 --> 00:49:01.620
 I don't have those records anymore.

00:49:02.180 --> 00:49:05.420
 But it was somewhere between 30,000 to 40,000 active users.

00:49:05.560 --> 00:49:06.120
 Not active.

00:49:06.280 --> 00:49:07.320
 Active is an interesting word.

00:49:07.380 --> 00:49:08.280
 I don't remember the stats.

00:49:08.400 --> 00:49:13.440
 But we had 30 to 40,000 users, registered users in the system.

00:49:15.800 --> 00:49:17.260
 Hits by the thousands per day.

00:49:17.940 --> 00:49:20.740
 Like, it was phenomenal.

00:49:21.880 --> 00:49:23.480
 Because there's nothing else out there.

00:49:24.380 --> 00:49:29.740
 And when people were looking, hey, what happens if I search for God in Alta Vista?

00:49:29.880 --> 00:49:33.220
 Oh, look, here's this site called eBeliever.com.

00:49:38.240 --> 00:49:40.700
 What yesterday was so controversial today.

00:49:43.660 --> 00:49:45.220
 Well, yeah, everybody's got a website.

00:49:48.960 --> 00:49:51.320
 Today, you want to do what in virtual reality?

00:49:54.260 --> 00:49:55.700
 You want to do church where?

00:49:59.140 --> 00:50:02.760
 I don't know that it's that controversial anymore.

00:50:05.480 --> 00:50:06.720
 You know, it's interesting.

00:50:09.940 --> 00:50:11.400
 Jim Tomerlin is the father.

00:50:11.400 --> 00:50:13.700
 I don't think I've ever told this story on the podcast.

00:50:14.640 --> 00:50:15.060
 Jim Tomerlin.

00:50:15.140 --> 00:50:18.140
 Oh, this was, he told me this story on the podcast.

00:50:18.240 --> 00:50:18.780
 Jim Tomerlin.

00:50:19.720 --> 00:50:22.260
 Somewhere around episode 101, as I recall.

00:50:24.100 --> 00:50:25.320
 Maybe, maybe before then.

00:50:25.820 --> 00:50:31.720
 Jim Tomerlin is arguably one of the early forefathers,

00:50:31.820 --> 00:50:34.460
 one of the founders of the multi-site movement here in America.

00:50:35.340 --> 00:50:39.420
 One church, multiple campuses, you know, either video teaching or team teaching.

00:50:41.400 --> 00:50:48.960
 But Jim, you know, he, he really founded this idea at a church in Colorado.

00:50:50.680 --> 00:50:59.320
 Implemented it at a very large scale for a small church you all have heard of probably here in America called Willow Creek in the 90s.

00:50:59.860 --> 00:51:05.120
 And then went on to create multi-site solutions, which is a company I used to work for.

00:51:05.520 --> 00:51:11.940
 And I worked for Jim when he was at Christ Fellowship Miami as chief of staff as well, where he was chief of staff and I was live production.

00:51:12.800 --> 00:51:14.780
 And so digital strategists and a bunch of other things.

00:51:15.600 --> 00:51:21.120
 But Jim would say that any time the church has and adopts, church struggles to adopt technology.

00:51:22.060 --> 00:51:24.480
 Church struggles to adopt any change.

00:51:25.380 --> 00:51:29.180
 You know, so often, you know, I want to say church hates technology.

00:51:29.260 --> 00:51:30.860
 And maybe it does, but it's not just technology.

00:51:31.000 --> 00:51:31.700
 Church hates change.

00:51:34.060 --> 00:51:41.560
 Case in point, no committee will ever decide to change that, the carpet color in the worship center.

00:51:41.880 --> 00:51:42.420
 Never going to happen.

00:51:44.420 --> 00:51:47.380
 But what Jim would say is that there's, there's three different stages.

00:51:48.020 --> 00:51:56.960
 One, two, three, three different stages for changing culture, for adopting and changing culture at a church.

00:51:57.760 --> 00:51:59.340
 It's one's the cool phase.

00:52:00.180 --> 00:52:02.220
 Oh my gosh, Whitebeard just found it.

00:52:02.500 --> 00:52:03.120
 You did, sir.

00:52:03.280 --> 00:52:03.880
 Very good.

00:52:04.320 --> 00:52:05.100
 That's it, man.

00:52:05.620 --> 00:52:06.700
 That was me.

00:52:07.680 --> 00:52:13.140
 Whitebeard just posted a photo of, yeah, archive.

00:52:13.300 --> 00:52:14.220
 I was going to do it.

00:52:14.320 --> 00:52:15.420
 I just didn't take the time.

00:52:16.220 --> 00:52:18.820
 Of eBeliever.com.

00:52:20.080 --> 00:52:22.160
 And so music reviews, movie reviews.

00:52:22.400 --> 00:52:25.500
 You can see there's a Netflix DVD.

00:52:26.000 --> 00:52:29.160
 That was how we were making money, was affiliate programs.

00:52:30.260 --> 00:52:38.580
 I had one sponsor that paid me $1,000 was worship.com or worshiptogether.com.

00:52:38.640 --> 00:52:39.300
 I forget which one.

00:52:39.820 --> 00:52:44.520
 But they paid me sponsorship to be on the homepage and we had them for a season.

00:52:45.480 --> 00:52:50.060
 The cross there in the upper left was DHTML and so dynamic HTML.

00:52:50.380 --> 00:52:53.180
 And so you would like mouse over and then it would pop up.

00:52:53.340 --> 00:52:57.220
 Like it was, I mean, HTML wise, it was, it was pretty impressive.

00:52:58.720 --> 00:53:01.020
 This is all pre-flash on the coding, of course.

00:53:01.760 --> 00:53:03.360
 But yeah, that's, that's what we did.

00:53:03.960 --> 00:53:05.780
 And I'm going to have so much fun.

00:53:06.780 --> 00:53:18.380
 But the three phases for adopting in technology is, is churches that are cutting edge are going

00:53:18.380 --> 00:53:24.480
 to adopt it when a cutting edge church adopts something.

00:53:24.640 --> 00:53:26.080
 Well, why is it called cutting edge?

00:53:26.840 --> 00:53:30.260
 Because you're going to get cut and there's going to be blood and you're going to bleed.

00:53:30.460 --> 00:53:31.880
 And so it's going to hurt.

00:53:32.160 --> 00:53:37.900
 And so a lot of times adopting beings, one of those first adopters, one of those early adopters,

00:53:38.120 --> 00:53:47.680
 you get shot, you get hurt, you go over budget, not planning on that, not necessarily going to have,

00:53:47.680 --> 00:53:50.260
 you know, smooth systems to implement on the backside.

00:53:50.440 --> 00:53:51.440
 And so it may be twice the word.

00:53:51.820 --> 00:53:56.300
 I mean, there's plenty of reasons why cutting edge hurts and bleeding edge bleeds.

00:53:56.900 --> 00:54:01.220
 And so bleeding edge, cutting edge, like cutting edge is, is that first, is that first wave.

00:54:02.300 --> 00:54:05.620
 And then he would talk about how beyond cutting edge, then it gets to cool.

00:54:06.580 --> 00:54:09.980
 Well, now all the cool churches are doing it because the cutting edge figures it out.

00:54:10.480 --> 00:54:12.040
 Now cool is an interesting word.

00:54:12.180 --> 00:54:13.880
 You know, life church is a cutting edge church.

00:54:13.960 --> 00:54:15.080
 Life church is a cool church.

00:54:15.080 --> 00:54:20.740
 And, you know, a lot of the larger churches, the churches people have heard of, they're perceived as cool.

00:54:21.120 --> 00:54:24.480
 They're, you know, and so I don't want to get like judgmental with the word cool,

00:54:24.700 --> 00:54:31.120
 but it's the idea that a second wave comes in that still has a lot of money, that still has a lot of patience.

00:54:31.340 --> 00:54:37.500
 It's probably churches that you've heard of, and they're doing it to try to stay in the forefront,

00:54:37.860 --> 00:54:41.080
 to try to, because they're in a position where they can experiment and do something.

00:54:42.820 --> 00:54:46.320
 And so you've got cutting edge, you've got cool, and then the third option is commonplace.

00:54:46.960 --> 00:54:50.160
 It's where the idea becomes saturated, and now everybody's doing it.

00:54:51.340 --> 00:54:54.600
 Broadcasting church services online has become a commonplace idea.

00:54:56.780 --> 00:55:01.280
 2018, when the church digital started, I would probably guesstimate there were maybe 200 churches in America

00:55:01.280 --> 00:55:02.980
 that were broadcasting their church services online.

00:55:03.660 --> 00:55:07.560
 Nah, maybe a couple thousand, but 200 were doing some sort of online Bible studies.

00:55:08.360 --> 00:55:09.900
 This is what I'm a comment was about broadcasting.

00:55:10.000 --> 00:55:13.460
 So maybe 2000 and 2018, when we first started TCD.

00:55:14.560 --> 00:55:19.740
 2020, obviously, or 2019, I would say, a lot more came on,

00:55:20.120 --> 00:55:22.600
 more and more as the idea was becoming more and more cool.

00:55:24.660 --> 00:55:33.440
 But the idea became commonplace, thank you, COVID, where now PushPay tells us 91% of churches in America

00:55:33.440 --> 00:55:36.800
 are broadcasting their church services online, live streaming at some level.

00:55:38.840 --> 00:55:45.420
 And so what you're being ridiculed, what you're being criticized on as, you know,

00:55:46.120 --> 00:55:49.600
 so cutting edge, so bleeding edge, so hurtful, so damaging, so,

00:55:50.760 --> 00:55:53.540
 it's just a matter of time for somebody else does.

00:55:54.660 --> 00:56:03.380
 Before somebody's, some guy named Whitebeard Punk Monk is pulling up a gif of you from archive.org

00:56:03.380 --> 00:56:07.020
 and showing it off to the people at the time, saying,

00:56:07.120 --> 00:56:08.920
 hey, look, this is what this guy was talking about.

00:56:15.720 --> 00:56:20.400
 You know, it's funny, when shots from the outside hit, shots from the outside hurt.

00:56:23.540 --> 00:56:24.540
 Even the Ed stuff.

00:56:24.900 --> 00:56:28.500
 Like, Ed was a friend, and I knew Ed had a purpose behind what he was doing,

00:56:28.620 --> 00:56:29.480
 but at the time, it hurt.

00:56:29.680 --> 00:56:30.560
 I'm not going to lie about that.

00:56:32.800 --> 00:56:36.640
 The flip side of it, though, is like, when the shots come from

00:56:36.640 --> 00:56:40.600
 your friends, your family,

00:56:42.260 --> 00:56:50.120
 when there's not understanding, even with your spouse.

00:56:51.240 --> 00:56:53.280
 I mean, I understand that.

00:56:53.360 --> 00:56:53.880
 I get that.

00:56:53.980 --> 00:56:56.420
 I've been part of that.

00:56:56.620 --> 00:57:05.260
 I remember my, it's not directly to my wife.

00:57:05.300 --> 00:57:09.700
 My wife actually has been really supportive, but it's funny.

00:57:09.800 --> 00:57:14.540
 I don't know that she understands everything that we're doing now,

00:57:14.700 --> 00:57:19.520
 but she's supportive in it, and she's supportive through it.

00:57:21.080 --> 00:57:22.680
 Some of my other family has not been.

00:57:23.980 --> 00:57:27.080
 You know, I can remember conversations and comments like,

00:57:27.200 --> 00:57:28.840
 hey, back when I was doing eBeliever,

00:57:29.940 --> 00:57:32.680
 and building out that online community for 30,000, 40,000 people.

00:57:33.060 --> 00:57:34.900
 Hey, so when are you going to quit this and get a real job?

00:57:38.620 --> 00:57:41.600
 When are you going to actually do something for God in the church?

00:57:44.520 --> 00:57:48.640
 I actually took a church job and ran eBeliever at the same time.

00:57:52.440 --> 00:57:56.800
 Because I felt like I was being judged harshly

00:57:56.800 --> 00:58:00.440
 for not working for a church by the people I was working with.

00:58:02.480 --> 00:58:03.680
 It's just my own hangup.

00:58:07.460 --> 00:58:07.860
 Interesting.

00:58:08.620 --> 00:58:10.880
 When you're going through hard times,

00:58:11.380 --> 00:58:14.000
 and you need somebody to reminisce through and talk through,

00:58:14.260 --> 00:58:15.020
 somebody who,

00:58:17.860 --> 00:58:19.100
 oh, what's the word I'm looking for?

00:58:19.380 --> 00:58:19.660
 Empathy?

00:58:20.040 --> 00:58:20.960
 It's not empathy, but empathy?

00:58:21.260 --> 00:58:22.280
 Yeah, I feel you.

00:58:22.660 --> 00:58:23.480
 Would love to catch up.

00:58:24.500 --> 00:58:25.780
 Yeah, you're not the real,

00:58:25.940 --> 00:58:26.760
 you're not really a missionary.

00:58:29.400 --> 00:58:31.420
 Oh, Whitebeard, you've been fun to listen to today.

00:58:34.280 --> 00:58:35.320
 You know what's funny?

00:58:37.460 --> 00:58:43.960
 E-Believer went down in a flaming ball.

00:58:45.840 --> 00:58:48.220
 Like, crashed and burned.

00:58:49.800 --> 00:58:51.880
 Oh my gosh, I haven't told this story in so long.

00:58:53.800 --> 00:58:54.980
 I got to do this and I got to go.

00:58:57.840 --> 00:59:03.380
 I was, it was 2003, Thanksgiving.

00:59:05.540 --> 00:59:12.020
 I had, for three and a half years, I built eBeliever from the ground up.

00:59:14.180 --> 00:59:15.860
 Launched 100 websites, like I said.

00:59:17.320 --> 00:59:19.240
 At the same time, that was how I made money,

00:59:19.320 --> 00:59:21.700
 was building websites for Christian organizations.

00:59:22.860 --> 00:59:28.760
 Hosting, CD-ROM, flash, graphic design, flash animations, video work.

00:59:30.080 --> 00:59:33.900
 We were more agency that just ran the community on the side.

00:59:35.720 --> 00:59:37.260
 And it was fine.

00:59:37.620 --> 00:59:38.440
 Nothing wrong with that.

00:59:40.180 --> 00:59:42.800
 We were heading back.

00:59:43.300 --> 00:59:47.560
 We were, my parents, we were, my wife and I, no kids.

00:59:47.720 --> 00:59:49.100
 We were living in Fort Worth, Texas.

00:59:49.760 --> 00:59:50.720
 My parents were in Miami.

00:59:51.780 --> 00:59:54.040
 And for Thanksgiving, they invited us to go up to their,

00:59:54.160 --> 00:59:56.180
 my parents had a place up in the mountains in North Carolina.

00:59:57.160 --> 00:59:59.440
 They, we hadn't been up to it in years,

00:59:59.540 --> 01:00:01.020
 because I was just focused on my work.

01:00:01.580 --> 01:00:03.420
 And she was doing graduate school.

01:00:03.560 --> 01:00:05.620
 And so, like, we just hadn't done a vacation with my family.

01:00:05.760 --> 01:00:09.600
 And so, you know, we were, quote unquote, pressured into going.

01:00:09.700 --> 01:00:10.380
 So we went on vacation.

01:00:11.380 --> 01:00:13.020
 And so for Thanksgiving, we went up into the mountains.

01:00:13.060 --> 01:00:15.100
 And when I say mountains, I mean freaking mountains.

01:00:15.640 --> 01:00:17.020
 Like, cell signal didn't work.

01:00:17.860 --> 01:00:19.340
 And Wi-Fi didn't exist.

01:00:19.420 --> 01:00:20.360
 And my parents didn't have internet.

01:00:20.500 --> 01:00:21.720
 Like, I am unplugged.

01:00:22.520 --> 01:00:27.480
 And by the way, these companies, when I say, like, we built, I built.

01:00:28.340 --> 01:00:29.420
 I mean, I had contractors.

01:00:29.640 --> 01:00:30.620
 I had freelance guys.

01:00:30.760 --> 01:00:33.120
 I had people I would sub jobs out to.

01:00:33.300 --> 01:00:38.860
 But at the end of the day, it's me for accountability on this work.

01:00:40.520 --> 01:00:48.720
 And so I, I go on vacation, arguably the first vacation I've had in at least four years.

01:00:48.940 --> 01:00:50.240
 And I was in college before then.

01:00:52.880 --> 01:00:53.760
 Up to the mountains.

01:00:55.160 --> 01:01:00.980
 And, and turn the phone off, disconnected, auto messenger on email.

01:01:00.980 --> 01:01:03.340
 If there's problems, I'll get back to you on Monday.

01:01:04.720 --> 01:01:06.180
 And after Thanksgiving.

01:01:07.220 --> 01:01:08.960
 And we're flying back Sunday.

01:01:09.280 --> 01:01:18.960
 And I remember we fly from, no, we drive from Carolinas to Atlanta.

01:01:18.960 --> 01:01:20.500
 And I'm at the ATL airport.

01:01:21.540 --> 01:01:24.620
 And I turn my phone on for the first time.

01:01:25.980 --> 01:01:28.560
 Not a smartphone, but I could check my email on my phone.

01:01:29.200 --> 01:01:35.200
 I turn on my phone for the first time Sunday afternoon in a week.

01:01:36.900 --> 01:01:43.220
 And, um, for some reason I don't, um, get my email.

01:01:45.140 --> 01:01:47.840
 Like one of, one of my domains, Jeff at ebeliever.com.

01:01:47.960 --> 01:01:49.280
 The email is not working for it.

01:01:50.380 --> 01:01:52.480
 Now this is before you hosted through like Gmail.

01:01:53.000 --> 01:01:56.820
 This is like, it's hosted on your pop three server, on your web server.

01:01:58.160 --> 01:01:59.620
 And I thought, huh, that's weird.

01:02:01.100 --> 01:02:04.280
 Um, but a lot of my other websites were up.

01:02:04.980 --> 01:02:06.840
 Um, and so I couldn't figure it out.

01:02:08.440 --> 01:02:12.500
 And then I started getting voicemails and voicemails and voicemails.

01:02:13.080 --> 01:02:14.460
 Hey, Jeff, my website's down.

01:02:14.560 --> 01:02:17.000
 Hey, Jeff, my, uh, my email's not working.

01:02:17.100 --> 01:02:17.460
 Hey, Jeff.

01:02:17.520 --> 01:02:17.860
 Hey, Jeff.

01:02:17.920 --> 01:02:18.260
 Hey, Jeff.

01:02:18.320 --> 01:02:18.740
 Hey, Jeff.

01:02:19.540 --> 01:02:19.900
 Dozens.

01:02:21.080 --> 01:02:22.000
 Blowing my phone up.

01:02:22.040 --> 01:02:22.880
 Hey, Jeff, where are you?

01:02:22.920 --> 01:02:23.740
 Why aren't you calling me back?

01:02:23.820 --> 01:02:25.480
 Hey, hey, Jeff, things are so great.

01:02:25.540 --> 01:02:26.280
 What's going on?

01:02:27.240 --> 01:02:32.540
 Um, I had, um, taken a vacation on a very bad weekend.

01:02:34.620 --> 01:02:39.800
 My primary server, I actually had two or three web servers at the time, but my primary server,

01:02:40.140 --> 01:02:49.580
 um, uh, ebeliever1.propagation.net, which housed 69 websites, ironically, um, crashed.

01:02:50.780 --> 01:02:51.980
 The hard drive crashed.

01:02:52.740 --> 01:02:53.760
 Hard drive failure.

01:02:57.240 --> 01:02:59.680
 Um, well, it's a good thing I paid this company.

01:02:59.760 --> 01:03:00.800
 I'm not gonna tell you the name of the company.

01:03:00.900 --> 01:03:08.740
 It's a good thing I paid this company tens of thousands of dollars to host my server, uh, to backup my server and to maintain it.

01:03:10.940 --> 01:03:13.860
 So I called up that company and I said, go ahead and install the backup.

01:03:16.620 --> 01:03:17.620
 Sir, what do you mean backup?

01:03:18.700 --> 01:03:20.900
 You know, the thing that I've been paying you for it to do.

01:03:21.880 --> 01:03:24.540
 You've 24-7, 365 maintenance and backup.

01:03:25.660 --> 01:03:27.660
 Um, sir, we don't have any backups.

01:03:28.440 --> 01:03:31.380
 What, what, what do you mean you don't have any backups?

01:03:32.040 --> 01:03:37.140
 You just lost 69 websites, not including the entirety of ebeliever.com.

01:03:37.700 --> 01:03:39.620
 My entire online community.

01:03:40.900 --> 01:03:42.300
 I'm talking email.

01:03:42.420 --> 01:03:44.000
 Like, I'm not even talking email addresses.

01:03:44.120 --> 01:03:45.120
 I'm talking emails.

01:03:45.560 --> 01:03:47.620
 Hey, your Gmail just shut down today.

01:03:47.900 --> 01:03:51.940
 Could you imagine your entire church saying that their Gmail just shut down today?

01:03:51.940 --> 01:03:57.060
 Can you imagine 69 churches worth of Gmails shutting down in one day?

01:04:02.060 --> 01:04:03.960
 You ever been F-bombed by a pastor?

01:04:05.120 --> 01:04:05.760
 I have.

01:04:07.900 --> 01:04:22.260
 I actually, my, my, um, I now understand what, um, lace check means, um, because several of my friends thought I was suicidal, um, because I lost 69 websites.

01:04:22.400 --> 01:04:25.280
 I lost the entirety of my online community.

01:04:25.280 --> 01:04:32.320
 I lost everything, uh, from a five-day vacation over Thanksgiving 2003.

01:04:34.560 --> 01:04:37.040
 I actually sold my business for pennies on the dollar.

01:04:38.520 --> 01:04:46.100
 I mean, literally, I, I, I gave it away six months later, practically speaking, um, just because I, I didn't want to do it anymore.

01:04:46.100 --> 01:04:48.320
 I was so, I was so sick of technology.

01:04:48.320 --> 01:04:53.820
 That was actually my, um, uh, what's the word?

01:04:54.160 --> 01:04:55.160
 Luddite phase.

01:04:55.700 --> 01:04:58.000
 There was, there was a, there was a phase of maybe a year or two.

01:04:58.040 --> 01:04:59.080
 That's when I owned a Christian bookstore.

01:04:59.500 --> 01:05:01.840
 It was, it was, you know, I'm, I'm sick of the technology.

01:05:01.840 --> 01:05:06.180
 I don't want anything to do with it and, uh, eBeliever in many ways kind of brought me to that point.

01:05:08.060 --> 01:05:13.300
 By the way, make sure you trust your partners, the people you partner with.

01:05:14.260 --> 01:05:17.320
 And, and I mean this to my partners, to my planters here.

01:05:18.380 --> 01:05:19.640
 Don't go in alone.

01:05:22.580 --> 01:05:26.200
 Find somebody else that can walk on the path with you.

01:05:26.200 --> 01:05:31.380
 If only for your own sanity, you don't need somebody to be high tech.

01:05:31.480 --> 01:05:34.000
 You need somebody, maybe you need somebody to be high tech.

01:05:34.000 --> 01:05:35.800
 I don't know what you need for me.

01:05:35.800 --> 01:05:37.260
 I didn't need somebody to be high tech.

01:05:37.260 --> 01:05:38.540
 I just needed a companion.

01:05:41.620 --> 01:05:46.000
 Like Ray, for me, when I started the podcast, the church digital, when I started the church

01:05:46.000 --> 01:05:47.720
 digital, Ray was the companion for me.

01:05:48.460 --> 01:05:52.520
 He, when I left Christ Fellowship Miami to, to, he became digital pastor.

01:05:52.520 --> 01:05:59.020
 He took over my job for me and, um, and really just became, you know, really enveloped in what the

01:05:59.020 --> 01:06:03.340
 church digital was and I'm super excited about what he's doing now.

01:06:03.340 --> 01:06:05.380
 I hung out with him a little bit on Sunday at church.

01:06:05.380 --> 01:06:08.440
 He and I go to the same church, reality church in Miami.

01:06:08.440 --> 01:06:13.900
 And, and he's actually getting his PhD and, and some really exciting things are in store for him.

01:06:14.380 --> 01:06:16.960
 Um, PhD and medical PhD.

01:06:18.820 --> 01:06:24.740
 I say all this to say is that it's very easy to be isolated and alone.

01:06:26.900 --> 01:06:32.760
 And I would challenge you that today you don't need to be alone, um, find somebody to go along these

01:06:32.760 --> 01:06:36.440
 paths with you that believes in what you're doing.

01:06:37.880 --> 01:06:44.480
 Um, if you can't find somebody, you know, you're going to be hard pressed to convince somebody you

01:06:44.480 --> 01:06:45.080
 don't know.

01:06:46.220 --> 01:06:50.540
 And so I would challenge you finds before you get going and really building out what you're doing.

01:06:50.540 --> 01:06:54.020
 Find somebody that can join you in your walk, in your journey, in your path.

01:06:55.220 --> 01:06:55.520
 Cool.

01:06:56.460 --> 01:06:59.020
 Hey, I keep going longer and longer.

01:06:59.060 --> 01:07:01.000
 I'm going to start turning into a two hour stream guy.

01:07:01.080 --> 01:07:04.920
 And I don't even really mean to, it's just telling stories.

01:07:05.840 --> 01:07:07.400
 Hope this has been fun for you.

01:07:07.760 --> 01:07:13.000
 Um, if there's, um, wrapping up here, if there's anything I can do for you,

01:07:14.080 --> 01:07:16.140
 let me know in that, let me look and see who's on here.

01:07:16.140 --> 01:07:19.720
 Uh, Guy Taylor, Hector, Thomas, Paul, Paul, good to see you again.

01:07:19.820 --> 01:07:21.760
 Chris Caputo, always good to see you, man.

01:07:22.320 --> 01:07:25.560
 Alexandra, thanks for hanging out, uh, with that as well.

01:07:25.840 --> 01:07:31.420
 And over on the discord side, um, white beard, uh, flat cap,

01:07:31.980 --> 01:07:37.540
 Chuhata, Chuhata, Chuhata and Melody, Chuhata, Chuhata.

01:07:37.860 --> 01:07:39.900
 Okay, man, appreciate you guys.

01:07:39.980 --> 01:07:42.240
 I hope, I hope this has been fun, entertaining for you.

01:07:42.920 --> 01:07:50.560
 um coming up on the podcast who knows oh friday i'm doing that interview with uh dk hammonds you

01:07:50.560 --> 01:07:57.220
 want to come back for that and then get more information on uh the resi um resilient church

01:07:57.220 --> 01:08:01.560
 webinar series all right thanks everybody cool to hang out with you talk to you later

01:08:12.920 --> 01:08:13.420
 you