BETA38, Nashville: What Waffle House Taught Me About Digital Church

All right. Hey, welcome to The Beta Show, episode 38. Hey, it's Jeff with The Church Digital.

Once again, all of this is powered by Stadia Church Planning, and I am not in my office.

I'm not broadcasting from where I normally am. You literally see the word connection,

wrong hands, over here on the side. I'm in Nashville, Tennessee, in Brentwood Baptist

Church up here with an exponential thing. Man, it's hard, backwards, mirror, on an exponential

thing. The software I'm using is not reversing right now, and so it's convoluted. All right. Hey,

so we're doing a thing up here with Exponential, and I've been up here for about a week, which is

actually the heart of what I wanted to talk about here with This Beta Show, because I had a ridiculous

experience Monday that really shed some new light for me, and I want you, audience out there, to

gain some understanding here of what my Monday looked like. But before we get there, Stadia Church

Planning on Tuesday, August 17th, literally next week, literally, if you're listening in broad,

on podcast tomorrow, August 17th, Stadia is hosting an innovation meetup. Stadia churchplanning.org

slash innovation is for more information. But the heart of this meetup is really getting into

multimodal churches, churches that are running multiple strategies, how to be more effective by

running multiple strategies, doing multiple types, multiple models of church out of your

organization, future-proofing your church as a result of it. So literally, I'm leading a breakout

future church today. How to prepare your church for tomorrow today. The future is not tomorrow. The

future is bright now. What do we need to do to get started on that? There's plenty of multimodal stuff.

There's plenty of insourcing, leadership development. How do we develop a leadership pipeline? How do we

develop systems and structures that can, not where we have to bring people in from the outside, but we've

got the next best people already within the organization. Maybe even some of those people that are sitting in

those pews on Sunday morning. How do we activate them and grow and develop them? Some phenomenal stuff

coming out of Stadia Innovation Meetup Tuesday, August 17th, noon to 4 p.m., 100% free.

StadiaChurchPlanning.org slash innovation. All right. Let me tell you about Monday. Monday was crazy. I flew in.

I was in Miami, woke up, got on a plane, flew out here to Nashville, Tennessee, landed about 10 a.m.,

took out my phone. I wanted to be in like the Brentwood, Franklin kind of area because that's where the

church is going to be and where my hotel was. And so I just literally, I opened up Apple Maps

and I typed coffee house. Brentwood ended up at a place called The Well. Now, The Well as a coffee

house, it's not Starbucks. And let me tell you, when you go to an actual coffee house that's not

Starbucks, you realize how crappy Starbucks actually is. Sorry, Starbucks fans. I spent the

majority of my life at a Starbucks. I've been a Gold Club member at Starbucks for years, maybe even

decade plus. But it is subpar compared to a really good coffee house. And The Well was a really good

coffee house. Walked in, it was a great environment, lobby-like feel, wall-to-wall people. It was kind

of weird. Nobody was wearing a mask. It's the first time I've really been in a room with no masks. And I

know Delta variant's going crazy in Florida, especially Miami right now. And so it's kind of weird

feelings. But that aside, oh my gosh, the coffee, I had a hot chai latte. It was the best liquid I've

put in my body in years. The iced coffee, slow drip, just how I like it. Oh my gosh, it was an

incredible, incredible experience. But even when I'm looking around at these people that are in the,

like, all, every pastor that is in the Franklin Brentwood area is in this coffee house all at the

same time. Everybody is talking church, ministry, retiring from ministry. What's next? What are you

preaching this Sunday? Like it was freaking heaven in a coffee house that serves incredible chai latte.

And so, and it was completely random. I didn't want to go to a place like that. I literally let Apple

Maps define for me where to go. And that was the top billing that it sent me. And so I had a couple

meetings there, caught up with some friends that I've been doing ministry with over the years. And so

it was an awesome time hanging out there in that area. And a third meeting, and with this one, I went to

another location. I drove two miles, I think, or two hours, an hour and a half, I think east,

out to an area called Cookville. And so met with a third guy in Cookville, Tennessee. And this is not

far away from Nashville. These are still Tennessee people. There's not a radical shift of what's

happening here. But the type of person, the environment that we met in, in Cookville, we met

at a Waffle House. Now, I love Waffle House. I'm in IHOPs, like some of those places. This isn't like

me going critical on the environment. There's a homeless guy sitting at the bar. And at one point,

he was drunk. And at one point, he got up from the bar to go get in his car. And long story short,

dude, like, lost control of his car in the parking lot and jumped up curb and came within probably three

inches away from hitting the literal building. Like he almost ran the Chevy 1500 into this building. And

I'm like looking at this bumper in the booth where I'm sitting where I almost got like concreting in a

Waffle House. And other situations where there's a couple over here, a husband and wife with two kids,

mom and dad are just going at it the entire time, yelling, fighting, verbally abusing each other.

The kids, AirPods, a Switch, iPhone, or maybe it was an iPad. Completely, I don't, ignoring,

completely oblivious. I don't know what the thing is, but there's obvious tensions in there. We even

asked the waitress at one point, you know, how, how can we pray for you? And the waitress started

telling this, like the sob story of her daughter was the, was the cook, but her son lives somewhere

else. He has COVID very bad. She can't afford to go visit him and she can't get off. Like there's

lots of drama. I'm not painting this picture clear enough to the audience here. There's lots of drama

in this Waffle House in Cookville. By the way, coffee. I mean, let's, let's be honest. It was Waffle

House coffee. There's better, but it's, it's honestly, maybe it's better than Starbucks,

but let's really hone in here to what I wanted to hit on. Two different environments, two different

places. Oftentimes what the well looked like, Hey, there's people, there's Christians all over.

We're talking about all this stuff. There's no drama. It's all clean. It's all simple. It's all

pretty. Ironically, the well, this coffee house, the first place I went to is literally owned by a

church. The, there's an organization and they use it for like, um, was it, it's like coffee to clean

water. And so you, you drink coffee and then they, they invest the money and some of the profits into

clean water organizations globally. So, um, I literally went to a church without realizing I was

going to a church. Uh, but isn't that what our Sundays look like where we're, we're in our physical

buildings. And I don't want to be critical of the physical buildings. I'm literally sitting in one at

this moment, Brentwood Baptist, but we sit in these buildings and it's, everything's clean.

Everything's simple. Everything's pretty. Um, and we all put on the Christian faces, the Christian

conversations, Christian dialogue, and we just live in that, that Christian environment where everything's

simple. Now it's fascinating for some of us that are doing online ministry. We're realizing

it's not simple, anything but simple. And oftentimes online ministry and the messiness of what online can

look like just like the messiness of, of what call, uh, Cookville look like for me out, out in Tennessee.

It's, it's a, it's a, it's a turnoff to some people that, that are more interested in the clean.

It's a difficulty. It's an obstacle. It's something that we should not get into because it's so different

than what we typically see in the pretty simple price centered environments that we're in.

But what's funny is there's more, the waitress at Cookville at, she was open to prayer. When we asked

her how we could pray for you, she was very open with the things that were in her life. She didn't

stick around for the prayer. She just said, Hey, if you're a praying person, I need you to pray for

this. My son's got COVID. Uh, he's got it really bad. I don't, I can't afford to see him. I can't go

over. I'm a mom and I'm struggling with the emotions of, of what that means. And she was like,

uh, she was old on the older side of the equation. So I feel like it was a younger son. I just waving

to the altar live people, by the way, it's awesome. It's altar live.com. If you've not hooked up with

them yet, but there's this opportunity that we have to do ministry different, to connect with a

different type of person to get in the mud a little bit, to get in those situations. And yes,

you may put your life on the line. You may have to get dirty and almost get hit by a Chevy F1 or a

Chevy 1500 that's driven by some drunk guy that doesn't know where he's at. Um, and the proverbial

word war that happens as customers start to cuss this guy out because of the situation, like it was a

mess. But the point is that's what life is in 2021. That's what life is by doing digital ministry.

It's not all pretty lobbies. It's, it's not all mega giga buildings. It's not coffee that's served

literally at the church. Sometimes it's an opportunity for you to get messy. So the challenge

that I have for you today, audience out there, when you're doing digital ministry,

are you getting messy? Are you getting dirty? Are you getting so involved in people's lives

that they know you care that you're walking with them, even in those hard times, those difficult

times? Or for you, is your church more about, man, listen, I just want to broadcast. I don't want

to get dirty. I just want to get it out. Are you getting dirty digitally? Maybe I should buy that

dirtychurch.com slash dirtychurch.digital dirty, dirty, dirty.church. That just got weird. Somebody's

actually probably bought that just right now. Hey, so we're going to wrap your innovation meetup

Tuesday, August 17th. You guys have to be there. It's going to be an awesome session here with

Exponential. By the way, and I haven't said this publicly yet, Exponential is doing some regional

events and I'm going to be traveling around. I've got like five or six locations here in 2021, up until

Thanksgiving 21, where I'm going to be meeting up with people and talking digital church, digital

church, church planning, all that stuff. So if you know an Exponential regional event is coming to your

area, sign up. Look for information. Let me know. Let me get you connected with some of the pre-conference

stuff that we, Stadia, that we're doing. And we'd love to meet up with you at those regional

conferences. We'll be in Orlando too in, what is it, March something or other, 22. But definitely want

to connect up with you all. Hit me up on social media. Dear Feds, Jeffrey Backwood, you all know that

drill. But for Stadia Church planning, for Exponential, yay! For, man, I did it again. I pointed to the

wrong side. Yay! Dang it. Yay! This is harder than it looks. It's like shaving without like, anyway.

For everybody of these people, I'm totally going long. This is Jeff at the Church Digital

and Stadia Church planning. Thanks for jumping on the beta show here and we'll see you next time.

Y'all have a good day.