EP270 - James Emery White Talks Hybrid Church

Welcome to the Church Digital Podcast. Through this podcast, we'll talk about the technological

innovations within the church. But more than tech for tech itself, we'll address deeper questions.

Is disciple-making possible digitally? How should we approach the digital mission field?

Can a biblically grounded church operate in digital space? Oh, and where does the metaverse

fit into all this? Whether you're a big or small church, an established church, or a startup church

plant. The Church Digital's goal is to help churches like yours learn to be a multiplying church,

digitally and physically. Our heart? That churches like yours will discover a newfound focus on

disciple-making that will revolutionize your church. And now, here's your host, Jeff Reed.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Church Digital Podcast. Jeff here, founder of the Church Digital

Church Network. And I'm excited about today's conversation. We're digging in a little bit

more on the physical side of church and what physical looks like in a hybrid environment.

And so, you know, we talk a lot about digital church planting, metaverse church planting,

virtual reality, you know, some of that bleeding edge stuff. And today's conversation, I think,

is going to be bleeding edge just in that it's a physical church that's doing something different

with their digital strategy. And I cannot wait to get into this conversation. Maybe a couple months

ago, a book was published, Hybrid Church, by James Emory White. And I'm very excited to get into this

conversation with James today. James is lead pastor at Mecklenburg Church. And I'm going to, James,

I want to have this conversation with you right now. Because you and I are linked at the hip. And I don't

even know if you realize this, but you and I may be the only two people in America who have used the

word digital and church in the same context, in the same conversation. Like, most people are afraid

of the word digital. But my first exposure to you was you were talking about digital pre-COVID and using

that physical and digital as that term. Well, I'm just curious, because I don't know if you've

experienced this, James, but I was mocked for using the word digital. People were like, that sounds like

a dirty word. That sounds like you're trying to kill somebody, digital. Like, there was definite

mocking centered around the word digital. Did you experience anything like that?

No, because the term certainly wasn't original with me. It comes from a marketing world and the

business world where it's very common and was well understood. I think that, and so in the business

world, it's a very, very common term. Yeah. So evidently, your friends respect you more than my

friends do, which is probably very evident for many reasons. But yeah, so, but you don't use

fidgetal anymore with your terms. You pivoted more towards hybrid church. And so I'm really interested

to get into hybrid, your book, and maybe some of the stuff you're doing with Mecklenburg. But let's

start there. So you're lead pastor with Mecklenburg. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Well, the most important thing is I've got a lovely wife I've been married to for 40 years,

and I've got four children and 15 grandchildren.

Wow.

And Meck is a, well, it's a church plant. I planted it, had the privilege of doing that

back in 1992. So we're a little over three decades into this. And the biggest headline probably about

Meck is that we really are very focused on the unchurched. And 70% of our growth throughout all 30

years has come from people who are previously unchurched. And so we're very, we're laser sharp

in that aspect of our mission. So yeah, you know, it's a young church, almost entirely constituted

of 20 and 30-somethings. I'm the resident old guy.

Yeah, I got to tell you, I was expecting somebody younger, not somebody with 15 grandkids in a

conversation, you know, talking about hybrid church. And so that's intriguing into itself. Well,

tell me a little bit about the book you wrote, Hybrid Church.

Yeah, it has a thesis that, if you'll give me a moment to explain, I think will be important for it.

I've always had a foot in the church world and a foot in academia, and as a professor of theology and

culture. And one of the things that intrigues me, it's always intrigued me, is the flow and the

interplay of church and culture. And this book is a genesis of something that I believe is we're

experiencing right now, which is only for the third time in Christian history, a shift in both our

mission field and how we communicate to it. Go back in time, there's only been three eras of the

Christian church, pre-Christian, Christian, and now post-Christian. In the pre-Christian era,

the mission field was obviously largely to Jews, Judaizing Gentiles and pagans. Form of communication

to that mission field was largely oral in nature. Even when Paul would write a letter to, for example,

the church of Corinth, it would be read to the church of Corinth as an oral event. And much of

history was kept alive orally before it was written. And so you had a pre-Christian world that was the

mission field and an oral form of communication. Well, fast forward, and you can largely point to

the time of the conversion of Constantine, but you had, certainly around that time, the shift from a

pre-Christian world to a Christian world. And that was the nature of the mission field.

And you also had a change in how communication took place. It went from oral to written and then

later to mechanized writing. And that dominated culture for over a thousand years. And then in

our day, what is happening right now is for only the third time, we have a new mission field and we

have a new way of communicating with it. The mission field has gone from pre-Christian to Christian to

post-Christian. And the way of communicating with it has gone from oral to written to now digital.

And this is a significant revolution. This is a significant shift. And I'm not convinced that the

average church or church leader is aware of just how significant this shift is, how deep of a paradigm

shift it is, even though that phrase is often misused. Here is a time where it is appropriate. This is a

paradigm shift. Change in our mission field and how we communicate with that mission field.

And so it calls for a different model church. I argue that the first era was church 1.0 and the

last thousand or so years been church 2.0. And now we have to have church 3.0. And I'm arguing that

that that is going to be a hybrid model. I think that's the best term. Not solely physical, not solely

digital, but a hybrid of the two going forward. And that is going to be everything. And the book explores

this model, it makes the case for the changes, and then explores what that would be like in a working model,

which we at MEC have been about now for at least, well, in one form or another, longer than this, but in

full effort for about five years.

Yeah, that's you first, MEC first came on my radar. It was pre-COVID. And so as you're talking about, and I

believe, I was funny, I was trying to remember if it was a secular posting or if it was churchleaders.com,

but I distinctly remember reading an article, pre-COVID, I'm sorry, I should say pre-COVID,

about how your church was abandoning the multi-site strategy and pivoting more towards digital. And this

is well before the pandemic. Yeah, it was. And we were a little surprised that it got the press that it

did, but we were, I guess, maybe the first or one of the first large churches that was multi-site and

been successful with multi-site that purposefully ended it. And the reason was fairly, it was a very

simple decision for us, really. And as I've explained it, I think it's resonated and more and

more churches are considering something similar. But here was our thinking. We got into the multi-site

approach purely for the mission, purely for evangelism and outreach. And it was never to

make MEC more convenient to attend for our existing attenders. It was always to make it easier to invite

our unchurched friends, to overcome the perceived geographic barrier. People used to talk about a 15-minute

barrier. And so you needed to have physical sites to invite people to throughout the city you were trying

to reach, because people psychologically wouldn't attend. So, but here's what we found. When the world

changed, and it changed, and I would argue, and I have argued in the book, and I'm not the first to do it,

that really, the digital revolution, though it began much sooner than that, really kicked in

culturally in 2007, from 2007 forward. When the world changed, then all of a sudden, everything

about the multi-site model, which actually is a fairly dated model, I mean, some of the earliest

books about it came out of the 1980s. So it's not like a cutting-edge thing. But when the digital

revolution took place, and yet you were dealing with this physical multi-site approach, what you had is

you had a physical approach in a digital world. Even worse, you had a physical response to a digital

demand. We were finding that when people invited their friends, it was intuitive for them to invite

them to check us out online or to attend an online campus. It wasn't to attend. And that was what people

naturally wanted to do anyway. They weren't going to just attend a physical campus. They were going to

explore things online. And so geography was just no longer the outreach issue. It wasn't the barrier to

remove. We had a digital barrier. We didn't have a geographic barrier. And it was a digital site,

if you will, that we needed to build, not a physical site that would facilitate this. And then

also, once someone's hooked to, say, a church or something of that nature, doing whatever it takes

to connect with it in a physical way, in an embodied way, if they felt so led, was no longer a barrier.

People will drive quite some distance if they want to attend, for example, a church service.

That's what the multi-site model is based on, quite frankly. You already had a core of people,

maybe two, three hundred people attending, 30, 40 minutes away. And so the multi-site model itself

was built on the reality that if people are a fan, geography isn't that big of an issue.

So we shut down our sites, which were doing well, but they were expensive. And we made the decision to

put all that money, I mean, physical sites, a multi-site model, people don't talk about this

very much. It's an extraordinarily expensive model, which is fine if it's missional. It's fine if it's

effective. But we were looking at what we could do with even half that money digitally, in terms of

reaching people and just made us want to go throw up in a corner. And so we closed down our sites very

strategically at a certain point in time and pivoted and put those resources in more into our online

campus and staffing that as a full campus and other digital marketing and so many other things that we

were doing, making our own main 80 acre campus much more of a digital model and much more easy to be

engaged digitally. And we made that shift. And I kid you not, almost overnight, the increase in our

size was dramatic. We increased in attendance both online and in person and never looked back. And so

when the pandemic hit, we looked a lot smarter than we were. But we were, you know, full going and we had

made that digital hybrid pivot. And so even though there were challenges that every church faced, us

included with the pandemic, we were outliers in that during that time, we thrived, quite frankly,

financially. We thrived numerically. We grew faster and larger than ever, reached more people than ever.

And when we did have, even during full shutdowns, select embodied events, they were the largest

embodied events we'd ever had and turned people away. I mean, we were capping events at 10,000 people

because we couldn't have more than 10,000 at a time. So it was, it was a, so yeah, so the decision

to move from multi-site to much more of an intentional hybrid model and, and realizing that the, what the

type with the multi-site model was trying to overcome was best overcome digitally. The, the, the challenge

was best met digitally for us is, has been, you know, a game changer. And I make the case in the book

that I really do think that this is, this is, this is the way for all churches. And I don't, I don't,

and I don't say that in an, in an arrogant way because there's all kinds of ways to be hybrid.

So it doesn't have to look like Mac, but I think hybrid is the way for all churches because

it is a reality that the digital revolution has taken place. It is the way we communicate. It is

the way you interact with our mission field. And so if you're not going to be hybrid, you're going to

be a painfully irrelevant removed from missional effectiveness.

Yeah. I mean, obviously, I mean, you're saying missional over and over again. It's interesting.

There's another church, um, uh, church home from the other coast over in California, Mark Mente, executive

pastor over there is a good friend. And he talks about how you can spend millions of dollars to reach

thousands of people in the building, or, or you can spend thousands of dollars online to reach

millions of people online. And they, they have had a different strategy. I would probably suggest

in what you're doing, but once again, it's tapping into the mission field that exists in, in digital

space. And so both of your churches are very missional with, with that, that view. Um, and

there's, there's a lot of churches that, that do have a missional view. And in 2023, it's so important

to utilize digital for that. Um, but I'm, I'm curious just to pull the thread here a little bit,

does digital, like aside from the missional getting into more of the, the discipleship, more of the,

uh, the relational helping people grow deeper once they are connected into the church. Does digital play a

role in that at, at Mecklenburg? What, what does that look like? Oh my gosh, it's everything. Yeah.

I mean, when a hybrid model is your hybrid through and through, and, and all the hybrid is, is that

you're both physical and digital. You're both embodied and online. And it's, it's kind of, and often

you're both. And in fact, the typical person at Mac is both they're, they're, they're engaging the

church in both ways and, and depending on any given week and on any given issue. And so that's what a

hybrid is, is bringing both together. It's not solely one or the other. And that's where a lot of

people I think make, um, uh, draw some erroneous conclusions because they just instantly hear

digital, digital, digital, and you can't do this digital, or if it's all digital, that isn't church.

And, and I keep saying, whoa, I chose my terms very carefully, hybrid, a combination, a blending of

the digital and the physical. And when it comes to something like community or discipleship, you hear

people say all the time, well, you can't do, can't do community online. You can't, you can't,

can't do church online. And I, and I really bristle at that. And I, and I hope that I explain that

carefully in the book of why that's, that's not a carefully worded or thought through statement.

You can. In fact, if you talk to someone, say you're talking to a 20 year old and you're fewer

to tell them you can't have community online, they would just simply say, well, I'm sorry,

you can, and I do. And, and studies have shown that there's some aspects of that community that

can even be deeper than what was experienced prior to that embodied. And so I think some of this is we,

we build theological fences around our personal taste. And so if you don't like to read a book

on Kindle, you all of a sudden are anti that being a legitimate way of reading. And, and, and that goes

throughout so many different areas of life when it comes to the digital. And so, and I don't think

that's a merely a generational thing. I've seen people in their thirties, just as resistant to some

things out of personal sensibilities as someone in their seventies. And so I, I just think we just

all have to be very careful with that at Mac discipleship is strategically served by, uh,

all things digital. I mean, because really the heart of, of what the digital revolution allows

is an entirely new approach to delivery and engagement. And so we have the bulk of our classes

and courses are online, if not on demand, uh, or a blend of live and online. For example,

we just did like a, I'll give you an example. Like, um, uh, we have this thing called the

MEC Institute, which is like a community college vibe dynamic to our church. And, um, I recently

did a systematic theology class. My, my PhD is in systematic theology. I was a professor of theology and

seminary president. And, and so I have that, that background. So anyway, I was teaching in my,

in a, in my wheelhouse of systematic theology and the way we did it was, was that I prerecorded

a dozen lectures that were edited and, and, and with, and then made, you know, with nice overlays and

other things. And so that it was, it was good consumable content that way production is produced

with post-production, uh, qualities, things. And then we had a, a large zoom class

and, uh, I think it was about 200, 250 students. And, uh, and so they, with a live host and they

were live coming in for this lunchtime lecture. And then there was that interaction and live element,

and then they showed my lecture. And then when that was over, I came on live for Q and A and

it was this wonderful blend and, you know, people gathering in Starbucks and other places all over

and, you know, for this class. And, and, and that was, um, we got more people through systematic

theology through an online course like that than we ever would have had if we would have had it,

you know, Thursday night at seven o'clock for 10 weeks. So it's delivery systems. Um,

and also the building of community is much the same way. I mean, we're, we were very intentional

about fostering online community, um, largely beginning through our online campus. And we can

talk about what an online campus is. It's very different than just a Facebook feed. So it's a real

campus. I mean, it's a, it's an actual staff campus with service times and everything else. So,

and, um, and we were, uh, we were, we've been told we're among the first to offer a full online

campus. We were doing that for years prior to even our digital switch. Let's, let's ask the question.

Let's, let's dig into that. So what makes, what makes a campus, a campus, uh, an online campus,

a campus at MEC? Yeah. I mean, what most churches do, which I, I, I applaud is some type of Facebook

feed, some type of live stream and, or they just tape it and, uh, whatever they did on the weekend

and slap it on YouTube for just people to just watch whenever they want. An online campus is

just that it's a campus, just like ours. We say, we, we kind of joke, we're still multi-site. We

just have one that's physical and one that's digital. The, the, the, a digital and online

campus is a time with select very clear service times, pastors hosting it and other guests and

guest services and greeters in the chat room and such. It's a, it's, um, it's designed for,

to be an event and, and, uh, uh, I'd encourage people to go check it out at mecklenburg.org

and they can see what an online campus looks like and feels like. It's very different. It's very

interactive, very engaging. You, you, you're, you're, you're showing up for an event, a service,

um, and people are building community through in the chat room. They can go offline and having

prayer time with pastors. They can, it's, it's a live interactive thing, um, involving thousands

and thousands of people. Um, and, um, it has its own kind of unique community environment. We have

people like, there's a group of 30 or 40 that gather around it at one office bank office building

here. There's another group of 17 that meet every Sunday at Starbucks. It started with,

and most of them still aren't Christians. Um, and, um, and, and on and on it goes. So it's creating

this own, their own groups from little gatherings around it. But obviously the average person is a

single, just an attender. We're a family, but it's, it's an actual campus and everything,

all the content is curated for online consumption. It's not something that's just a taped weekend

service. I have a separate taping of my talk for the online campus with that, that is presented

uh, for an online audience. And that does change how you present because you're not talking to

thousands. You're talking to one, maybe two. Um, what our arts team does in terms of worship and

other creative elements is completely filmed and created and curated and crafted separately from

anything we do on the weekend announcements. Every, everything about that, the online campus is

developed, curated for online consumption through the online campus. And, um, and, uh,

uh, and it's extraordinarily effective.

Is your, your staffing for it, for this, like, like producing, it's funny that you mentioned the

first thing you said, it's like, we've got pastors to gather together. Are those physical pastors

that are praying online? Are you staffing pastors?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all live. Yeah. I mean, these are, I mean, we have,

we have, um, pastors and staff populating the chat room present for every one of the online

campus services, uh, volunteers, tech, uh, folk, uh, people like when you go into the chat room

from our campus, you'll say, hi, somebody will be there, say, Hey, I'm pastor Robbie. If you want

to talk or pray, we can go over to a private area. And other people say, hi, I'm the, the,

the, the tech coordinator for this service. If you run into any problems, let me know. And you've got

a host and guest services team and everything else in there. And so we'll probably have at least,

I don't know, maybe half a dozen staff minimum, uh, uh, staffing every online campus service.

Forgive me. I, I, I didn't ask the right question. What I was trying to get into was,

are your staff exclusive for online or are you sharing responsibilities, physical and online

church? Some are. Can you, can you detail like some of, of who's exclusive for online,

what roles or what roles are shared? Do you know? Well, I mean, our, our, our, uh,

director of our online campus who heads it all up is fully exclusively for that. We have a producer,

a host, someone who, who is the main anchor for all that, who's totally dedicated to the online campus.

We have, um, now our production folk and our creative team and our graphic arts and, and

videographers and such work across the board, but there are some that are more, more dedicated to

online, uh, campus consumption than others. And so we're a large staff. So I, I probably wouldn't

be the right one to ask how exactly like, like MEC creative, how they've divided up all their

responsibilities or how, you know, the production team has done that. But, um, but I do, we do have,

you know, some staff completely devoted to the online campus and, and, uh, but everybody,

there isn't anyone, and this may be really where you were going. There isn't anyone on our, on our team

that isn't somehow engaged in serving, producing, facilitating, uh, the hybrid model, which means

not simply the physical, but the digital as well.

Does, does this trip down to kids and students, uh, Gen Z, Gen A, like, like...

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. We have full, our full MEC kids, MEC kids is fully online as well.

And, and so that you can engage on any given week, whether if you want to, if you come to a physical,

uh, campus, physical service for MEC kids, if not, you can engage it entirely online as well

with material there and content and, and a full program, if you will. That's one of our, one of our,

our real commitments is that everything that we offer, we're committed to a digital counterpart,

a digital reflection. And if there's something we're offering digitally, we try to think through

how can we offer that physically, but we're, we're more concerned about making sure that

what's physical gets digital because not everything that's digital can go physical. I mean, you have

much more opportunities and much more freedom, much more creativity when, with the digital. But, uh,

but they, they don't often, that doesn't often work that way. I mean, sometimes we just simply say,

okay, this is simply an embodied experience and, and it's, it's, we really can't have a digital

counterpart to it. And sometimes it's vice versa. So, um, we're very clear about that. And, and, and

even then we try to make it hybrid. Like for example, we have an 80 acre campus here and we have this

thing called the MEC trail, which is a one mile nature outdoor chapel kind of vibe with benches by a

running stream and, and select, you know, scriptures tastefully put is just a, it's a place of people

just come and walk and sit and think and reflect and get away from the world and immerse themselves.

And you feel like you're in the mountains away thousand miles from any city. So one of the things

that we did, and we've done several things on the MEC trail, but besides just leaving it open as a

chapel year round. But, uh, for example, on Good Friday, we had the 14 stations of the cross

throughout the one mile loop. And then you could download through the MEC app,

a program that would take you through it, like a museum guide and stop you at each one of the

stations. And you could pause, go further, do anything you wanted to do to the degree that you

wanted to with the content and, and create this very spiritual experience of walking through the 14

stations with the history, the biblical background stories. And, um, you know,

thousands of people went through that and just on their own, we just said, okay, I've done Friday,

just, it's going to be open from nine to five, you know, take, bring your app and your, your,

your, um, your ear pods and come, come go through it. And so you can, it's easy to blend those things too.

Is you, what you're describing is blended. It's a great word. You're blending the physical

and the digital you're, you're, you know, whether the, the, the, the fidgetal term,

it doesn't matter if I buy the rake at home Depot or homedepot.com, the rake is still the rake and I

use it the same way and I can intersperse. I can return it online if I bought physical and things like

that. Yeah. And, and, and, and, and again, uh, we probably, we use the word fidgetal and I use the

word fidgetal in the book and I explain it, but I, I, I use it in more of the, uh, uh, uh, you know,

for, for me, and it doesn't mean this is right. Hybrid for me is a large umbrella term for this model.

Fidgetal is what you do with your building and your campus. And that's kind of the way that it's,

it's, it's, it's used in many business circles, meaning there's a seamless integration between

technology when you interact with them physically. So when I, I can put, I can, I can put in my order

and go pick it up at the store or what I see online is what's going to be like it in the store. And what,

and if I go in the store, I can then just whip out my phone and I can do this, or I scan that QR code,

or I can, there's this, there's like the, the building itself, everything about it is,

it's very much like the way airports are. Um, before I get to the airport, I've already,

I've already, um, onboarded. I've already gotten my boarding pass. I've already let them know I'm

coming. I may have already secured my parking space all through my phone, all through my, you know,

an app. And then, um, I'm able to seamlessly walk through with my phone to physically get my,

my, you know, my boarding pass scan to get through security, which also gives them my TSA.

And so, so far as I'm doing this physical act, but it's completely integrated with technology.

And, and that's really what you're after with a fidgetal church building where you, you have

everything where I'm, I'm on my way to church and I've, I've ordered, I've got coffee waiting for me at

the bookstore that I've already pre-ordered and is there. And I've checked my kids into children's

ministry. And, and when I'm in the service, I'm, I'm, I'm looking at the notes on the app that go

along with the, with the talk, as well as where, where I can go further with it. And maybe a class

that I can register and go ahead and shoot that off. And maybe I'm shooting off a prayer request

as well. And there's this, there's a seamless integration between the physical and the digital

with that. And, and we've found that that's critical because we reach people first online,

largely through our online campus and digital marketing. And so if, and when they ever do

come to the physical campus, we want there to be an absolute seamless integration between what

they've already experienced and done and how they've engaged with us digitally. And so that's just

thinking it through.

Beautiful. I, you know what, to be honest, I may adapt. I like that digital approach in that,

that terminology. I may, I may, I may adapt that. I may, I may steal that. I'll give you credit

the first couple of times and you wrote it in the book. So you get credit for that publicly,

I'm sure. Do you have people at MEC or MEC online, MEC, the, the, the hybrid campus,

the online campus that aren't physical? Like, do you reach different states, time zones, countries,

continents? Like what's, what's the reach of this thing? And what does it look like pastoring and

shepherding people long distance?

Yeah. We, we, we really don't try to have it be beyond, uh, uh, a tool for us as a local church

to reach our immediate community. Um, it, we do have on any given weekend, our online campus is attracting

almost every state in the United States and probably an additional 15, 20 countries or more

on just any given service, but 70% or more of attenders at our online campus are in the Charlotte

area. And for us, that's a win. That's what we're after. Um, uh, cause I, I do think there are some

significant theological questions, uh, related to ecclesiology and, and the role of the pastor

for the digital, you know, church and, uh, a larger reach and, and, and how that begins to manifest

itself, which we can talk about if you want, but for us, it's very much, um, we have, we have a large

reach, but we're, but our mindset is, is local, very strongly local. And again, it's all designed for

outreach. And so we, but yes, we're reaching people all over. And, um, and like I said, 70% of our growth

comes from people who are previously unchurched that includes online. Uh, it's, I mean, we can,

you go into the chat room on any service and there's, you're going to throw a rock and you're

going to hit an unchurched person and somebody who's not a Christian and they'll tell you they're

not a Christian. They're much more open online. Well, let's, I mean, let's, let's go ahead and

poke the bear a little bit here and maybe be respectful for it. Cause there are a lot of

digital pastors and planters that are, that are on here. And by the way, you need to know that

my approach towards a digital church planting and what we, we promote through digital

church network and the church digital is far more, um, relational. Um, it's, it's much more like a,

probably like a micro church approach of utilizing digital. And so it's building on those relationships

and more discipleship centric and heavy. Uh, and, and, but you know, I've had plenty of people on here

that disagree with me and, and I've had some hard conversations and we, we wear big boy pants and so

it's okay. Um, so I like, I would love, what can you do? What, what would be the issue? What would

be the challenge? Where, what's the obstacle in, in reaching somebody and discipling somebody? I don't

know, uh, in California, in, um, in, uh, Eastern Europe, like somewhere that's not geographically

centric. What are you sensitive to, uh, theologically ecclesiology in, in, in that standpoint?

What I'm sensitive to is not so much, you know, you know, are there the challenges of reaching

someone digitally for Christ? I think that's how you're going to need to reach them or even

discipling them digitally. I think, I think discipleship is, is significantly going to be

increasingly be digital in nature. All education is, I mean, that's, that's just simply the, the,

the delivery system. And I make a strong, I hope I make a strong case for this. I mean, if, if

people who read hybrid church are the ones that are going to be, um, uh, made uncomfortable are the

ones who are not particularly open to digital things. So, but, but, but here's, here's the theologian

in me. Um, it's not so much problems with evangelism or discipleship digitally. The concern that I have is

being the church in the fullest biblical sense and theological sense. The doctrine of ecclesiology

is one that, uh, many Christians, certainly evangelical Christians, but Christians as a

whole have really dismissed and have not been careful with, and they've made of ecclesiology

just whatever they wanted to be in their own image. And, and there's much more in the scriptures

in a church history than that, I would say. And so I, I think it's more or less, how do you,

how do you pastor? How do you, how do you function as a biblical community? What does need to be

embodied? And when, and when there is a need for embodiment, um, then, um, how do you do that?

Like there was, um, um, the author's name is, is he wrote Homo Sapiens, a very famous book. Um,

the author's name is, is, or Sapiens, I'm sorry. But anyway, he was, he was saying that the challenge

for the online world is that he said, you know, if I'm sick in London and I've got a cold,

you know, you can express concern for me, you can check up on me, we can talk to each other,

but you can't bring me a bowl of soup. And so there's limits to sometimes embodiment and, and,

and, and, and when there is a need for embodiment and when there's a need for the practice of presence,

as Douglas Stewart would talk about the great Quaker writer, or, um, when, um, and, and we are

physical creatures. And so I do think that, that what we need to wrestle with, and it doesn't matter,

and however we come out, we'll come out with different answers. But what we need to wrestle

with as thoughtful thinking, biblical Christians, I would argue is what is optimal in terms of

embodied? What is just as fine, if not better digital? And when can it be both depending upon

someone's personal tastes and sensibilities? And so as a pastor, you do have to ask yourself, okay,

are all the one another's possible digitally? I would argue the vast majority, if not most are,

but it's a, it's a good question. You know, um, we do the Lord's Supper online. Uh, does that work

for baptism? Um, and, and, and, and, and if you're going to have somebody be baptized and not baptize

themselves, and if there's going to be public profession of faith, and how are you working those

things? There can be ways of solving this, but I mean, we have to wrestle with solving it in a way

that's biblical and theological. And so that's, that's what I mean. So what does it mean to be the

church? And how, and so I, I personally don't know that Mech could be the church fully for someone who

never could do anything of an embodied nature. Um, I, I'm not sure. At least I would, I would be

concerned about them because I, I would, I would, I would at least want them to try to get connected

with people in that area for embodied community when they need it. You know, um, even if it's something

as simple as someone who can stand with them by their side at a funeral and, and, and, you know,

you bring up a lot of great questions. Um, and, and there are people that are, and for the most of

the part, I, I want to just say, I, I agree with you. Like there are people that, um, that need the

physicality. And by the way, there are digital churches that meet physical periodically. Uh, there's,

uh, it's not necessarily weekly. Uh, I can tell you Cornerstone VR, Cornerstone Yuba City. Uh, they,

they fly in people from the virtual reality campus once a year and they do a family reunion in San

Francisco, Northern California area. And it's, it's, it's an incredible experience. They're actually

talking about doing the next family reunion in, um, London because they've got a lot of, uh, London

and England people that attend in the virtual reality church. And so, so physicality, there's options.

Um, you know, I've, I wrote, uh, this is your book that we're talking hybrid church, but the book that

I wrote sharing Jesus online, we talk a lot about serving people. And it's interesting. You're

nobody, you can't digital church can't serve a coffee or a serve, would you say chili soup? Uh,

and that's, that's, that's, it's funny. Cause when I had COVID actually had people sending me,

um, Gatorade and my favorite candy, uh, via, uh, Uber eats people I've never met were sending me

things to encourage me. As a matter of fact, a percentage of the bobbleheads that are

behind me, I actually have no idea where they came from. They just show up at my house

because people send me random things to encourage me. Like, and so it's, it's re-imagining some

things, whether that's, you know, it's, it's funny, uh, James, I, I literally, I, I, I tell

this to people all the time. I will stand before God one day. Uh, and, and my opening question

is what did I get right? And what did I get wrong? And I'm sorry for what I got wrong. Cause

I know that we're re-imagining some things in this.

Yeah. Well, I, and, and it's that season, Jeff, and, and I think we're, we're all doing

it. And I, I would rather, you know, it's, it's, it's, I'd rather the church kind of be

pulled back a little bit if it goes too far than always having to be pushed to try to get

going. And then, you know, if it's reaching people, my default mode is to like it. If, if

it's connecting people to Jesus, I, my default mode is to like it. And, um, and I think that,

uh, with all things hybrid and digital right now, um, it's, it's going to be a little theologically

messy at times because we're, we're thinking through things that we don't have historical

precedent for. You know, we can't go to origin or Melanchthon or Bart or Bruner to give us

insight into, you know, some of the questions that we're raising here. Um, but that's also what's

exciting about it and wonderful about it. We can go to Elon Musk, but how much do we really

trust Elon Musk to speak into this stuff? But, uh, but I, you know, but I, I, I mean, I love,

I love the, the, the challenge of this. And I, and, and I, I think that, uh, in, in concert

with you, I think that we need to be, um, aggressive in our embrace of all things digital.

What are you guys doing? Is metaverse, is virtual reality, is this on your radar? Like what,

what's your opinion and take on this? Well, it is obviously. Um,

um, I think, um, it's been interesting to see how, how that like one new cycle, it's, it's,

it's the next big thing. The next new cycle, it's, it's oddly absent. And, and it's like,

I think everybody's trying to figure out exactly, is this going to be the next just huge thing? Or is,

is it going to be something that people dabble with and say, I don't, I'm not sure that that's

my cup of tea. Um, the, um, I think everybody needs to have their eye on it. I think every

church should, if they can experiment with it and see, you know, look at it through a missional lens

and see if it has potential. Um, I, I do have some questions, um, about what, how much a virtual act

should replace an embodied act and, and what that means for spiritual formation as well as what God

actually is asking us to do. Um, I, I don't agree. I, I do have problems with virtual baptisms because I

don't think that really is a public profession of faith. Uh, you're, you're, you're, you're,

when you're, when it's your avatar doing it, but not you, I, I think that that's a, that's a,

that, that to me is that's tricky theological waters. And I think that we need to go very slowly

there. And so I do think there are some things that, that those are the kinds of questions we

need to be wrestling with. By the way, the people that are even doing the work in virtual reality

that are in that metaverse mission field, most of them would agree with you, or at least are asking

the same questions where I don't know that I'm comfortable with that. Probably the most

controversial thing I've ever said in my life is virtual reality baptism, at least according to

my YouTube comments and the negativity surrounding that. So, um, definitely understand the controversial

nature of that. Um, the, the opportunities for evangelism, the opportunities to have conversations

with people without getting, uh, F bombed because I mean, some of these worlds that literally is

technology is designed to connect people together in a virtual environment for a conversation. Like

that's what virtual reality is meant to do. And so the ability to represent Jesus, uh, to champion that

idea in, in these, in these mission fields is incredible. And, and, and, oh, I totally agree.

And, and in that sense, I don't think there's any, any barriers, any hindrances, anything that we need

to be pulling back from and using the metaverse for that or anything else. Again, it's, it's kind of

going back to what we talked about earlier. How far do we go with that? Like, do we create an entire

virtual church and virtual and have, and have many of the acts be simply virtual? Like even the Lord's

supper? Do you, is it, is it, do you simply have that taken virtually or is there something

biblically and theologically? No, you physically have to take that. That's, that's part of the body

and the blood of Christ. And so you have these things that were, that, um, where I think people

who are evangelistic animals, which it sounds like you are as much of one as I am, but if you're an

evangelistic animal, it's like, okay, I'm not, I, but I'm not going to let my evangelistic zeal blind

me to what happens maybe after someone has become a Christian and what is best in terms of, uh, for

that and, and next steps. And, um, and I would argue as, as you would imagine that whatever happens

after that is probably going to have some dynamic of a hybrid nature to it.

Yeah. And the, it's interesting. Like I can actually tell you stories of people that have

accepted Christ in virtual reality and the church that, um, that one person, these are two separate

stories. One person got baptized and, uh, the virtual, in virtual reality, the avatar went under the

water other people saw, but the virtual reality church said, Hey, why don't you go to a local church

and get baptized? And so this is a true story. I promise this girl went to a local church here in

America and, uh, and had a conversation with the pastor, but getting baptized, the pastor said, what

actually happened to you? Uh, and the girl described to the pastor, what the baptism process, the

conversations, everything. And literally this physical pastor at the small town church, I forget what

state, uh, said, we don't need to baptize you again. You already baptized, but you did count it. Now that

was his take. I get it. Um, there, there's another story of a girl, uh, another girl, this girl's in

England who accepted Christ and in the church encouraged her in virtual reality, the church encouraged

her, Hey, why don't you go to a physical church? And so this, this girl, 24 years old, um, went to four

different churches over the span of six weeks. And according to her, no physical person in the

physical church said one word to her. Now she's, she's a little bit of a wallflower. I honestly, I

can understand from the church context how this probably could have happened. It's not okay, but

it's, it's, it's almost understandable because she's so socially, um, awkward as, as an individual.

And so, you know, even at the physical churches, there's challenges with some of these things. And

so she feels pressure. I want to go back to my virtual reality friends because I wasn't able to

make physical friends in that space. And see, and see, and, and, and see, I would not like, for

example, just, just to be clear, if someone is attending Mac through their online campus, we don't

say, Hey, the goal is for you to get to a physical campus. We don't, we actually say no, no, no. We

say we're very content with you to be online. If that's how you choose to engage and attend, that's

fine. Um, but you know, that doesn't mean there aren't steps that you can take, uh, toward whether

it's membership or discipleship or community and much of which, if not all of that can be done online.

But what we were very content for someone to say, I attend online. That's, that's, that's Mac is my

church. I attend online that we're very comfortable with that. But see, here's, here's what's, here's

what's different about the hybrid model. The hybrid model is able to say to that person, Hey, when,

and if you ever have an embodied need, when, and if you need a physical touch, when we're here,

there's a community of people here that is not simply digital, but it's also can, is embodied.

And we found it really interesting. Um, uh, we have people that will attend online. They'll come

to a physical campus and say, Oh, I don't like that as much. I'm back online. And we're saying,

that's fine. We're not after that. What we want you to feel comfortable with is to take advantage of

everything we have to offer you as a church, both digital and physical. And, and, and it's,

and it's interesting that, that people love that, that hybrid nature where they, they, and most people

are largely physical or largely digital, but they love the freedom when they can swing to the other

side. And so, um, so that works. And, and so, yeah. For physical churches that are listening to this

conversation, what he just said is gold. Like I think having the hybrid approach where physical people

can connect digital, digital people can engage physical and get the embodiment access. Uh, and so

this is what you built hybrid church around. And so I would love for anybody listening, we'll put the

link in the show notes, download it, or buy it from amazon.com or churchandculture.org or.com.

Org. Dot.org. But I did want to bounce this idea off, off you. And, and, and I didn't know I was

going to have this conversation with you walking in. We're actually getting ready to launch season five

of the church digital podcast next week. So this is a teaser even for this. Um, but what we're talking

about doing there is taking digital ministry or, or, or metaverse ministry, even to the next level.

We're doing a, a learning community with leadership network in the fall, uh, leadership network

exponential. Are you familiar? Yeah. Okay. And so I work with leadership network as their digital and

metaverse next guy. And so the, but with this learning community, we're helping churches go on a metaverse

mission trip. We're helping churches get exposure to virtual reality, to the community and engaging in

that mission field. Uh, our hope is to get 250 people, uh, here through leadership network. We're also

working with GACX, uh, which is campus crusade globally, uh, for international mission partners,

but empowering 250 people through a number of churches to go on metaverse mission trips and

start to explore the idea of these communities and what church would look like in that space.

And so we'd love to invite MEC in, into this as forward facing as you are in digital,

giving you a space and an opportunity to explore that. We can talk off air on that, but it just,

as I, I was not expecting in you, um, and, and provide grace for this comment. I was not expecting in

you the, uh, the missional nature. Um, I believe pastors often are you're a former multi-site church,

so it makes sense, but like, this was a surprise how you're recognizing so much of the mission field

digitally, because oftentimes lead pastors of large churches transparently don't. And so I really

respect that. And I would love to take Mecklenburg through this journey, start to explore, and maybe

even help to see you start to wrestle with some of this stuff. Plus I would love to be proven wrong.

And so somebody like you to really come through and, and hammer this and make these ideas better

would be really exciting to me. If, if you were interested, we can, we can talk off air on that.

So, um, Hey, as, as we're landing the plane here, any, any closing thoughts?

No, I hope people will give the book, uh, uh, a read if they're interested in this. We, uh, you know,

I have sections on the, the metaverse and, and other things, but it's a, it's a cultural tour

as well as a, as a, as a practical tour. That's kind of, is, is what I tried to do is to,

you know, um, here are the signs of the times and here is how we should live. And so, uh, and,

and it has really two angles to it and it's not just the digital revolution, but the new post-Christian

world and the, the challenges is that brings to bear for the mission. And, uh, so it gives equal

treatment to that because it is the, the reason that the digital revolution is so important is

because it's the way to communicate to this new mission field, which is the post-Christian world

and understanding the nature of that post-Christian world is as important as being, um, adept at all

things digital. So it brings all that together. So I hope people will, um, give it a, give it a

glance. And if something that they feel would serve the wider church that they would, uh, share with

others. Beautiful. So check out hybrid church, the book, Amazon, our church and culture, church and

culture.org. Uh, more information there. We'll put the link in the show notes, uh, James Emery

Weitzer. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure to have you on the podcast and, uh, would love to do it

again sometime as the book expands or, or as, uh, more things expand in the life of Mecklenburg

church. But for James, this is Jeff with the church, digital, digital church network, leadership

network, and a whole bunch of other fun stuff. Thanks for jumping on the podcast here and y'all

have a good day. Talk to you later.