EP128: Jared Roth & Defining the Success of a Physical, Digital and/or Multimodal Church

butts in seats and nickels and noses we talk a lot about that right that's how we measure

the successfulness of our churches is is that the right stat how is is it even antithetical

is it wrong for us to measure the success of a church like is is that downgrading and degrading

the act of the holy spirit involved with what's happening within our communities hey it's jeff

here with the church digital podcast once again powered by stadia church planning this is one of

those conversations again i i just want to sit back and listen and learn because we're bringing

in a lot of brain power in here and the conversation as it goes was deep and very very impactful we're

bringing in jared roth into the conversation now now jared is is a co-lead pastor of evergreen

christian center in hillsborough oregon uh the guy's older and so he's getting ready to retire at some

point um crazy crazy bio like i'm looking here director of operations for dfw airport director

of human resources for bush international airport in in houston uh vp of of southeastern university in

lakeland florida this man's obviously very wise and he presents that way here in the podcast now what's

fascinating and how i've connected with him is that he's actually as he's you know normally lead pastors

are starting to like retire at this point he's gearing up and he actually started a a digital

research company called sprout digital because he is enthralled with this idea of a digital only church

and is doing research towards helping towards research resourcing digital only churches he and

his wife ann are phenomenal and and literally the wisdom that's coming out of this podcast i just had

to stop several times and tell him thank you like my brain's exploding just off of hearing some of the

stuff that he's talking about and so bringing jared onto the conversation bringing on craig whitney as well

once again vp planner development here with stadia church planting another wealth of wisdom craig planted

a church when he was 26 years old i wanted to say jared planted a church when he was 23 like the wisdom

and the experience coming out of this podcast is incredible and it's all centered around this one topic

how do we measure success in a multimodal church i mean it's one thing to try to figure out how

an individual church is successful but if we're really going to evaluate success within the big

c church well how do we get everybody to agree on something how do we find measurements that work

multimodal work with multiple models of church work with physical established churches mega giga work

with multi-site churches work with small churches work with digital churches work with digital churches

work with micro churches work with prison church i listen i can keep talking churches all day long

but how do you get all those people on the same page and what's the role of the spirit in any of this

anyway these are just some of the conversations this is just some of the threads that we start to pull

uh and i guarantee there's going to be a couple times in this podcast you're going to say

oh wow never thought of that so here we are bringing into conversation jared

roth from sprout digital craig whitney from stadia church planning and of course myself jeff with the

church digital and stadia church planning in a conversation that i'm simply calling well maybe

not so simply but measuring the ecclesiological success of a physical digital and or multimodal

church that's a mouthful but it's worth it here y'all go well sprout digital really is the um

the outcome of what has been a whole lot of life and i'm embarrassed to tell how many years because

that dates me but ann and i started a church when we were 23 six months after we were married and we

were launched out of a local church that started 60 churches in 12 years and we just thought that

kind of apostolic movement was just you know what a good church probably would do and of course we

were uh we discovered later that it was not unique but it was unusual so church planning is very much a

part of our formation and all across our life of uh of ministry roles and business we've always used

those platforms as opportunities to advance church planting in some form or another uh at this point

in our life we're asking ourselves the question what what project could we do for the next five years

that could make a significant difference that could be completed in five years uh that would be toward

the leading edge of what god is doing with church planting and could go away after five years and

still have left a major contribution in its wake and sprout digital is the uh is the answer to that

uh given our experience uh and our interests and our skills uh what space may there be in emerging church

planting that we could uh answer to uh in some small but helpful way and as we look at our life and our

skills we said you know it seems to be that this uh just wonderful emerging area that god is doing in

church planting is digital and uh could we contribute our experience and research skills into that emerging

environment and potentially make some research discoveries that people can take that data and

knowledge and use in a wise way to advance and accelerate church planting especially in digital spaces

it's it's it's fascinating for me right here and and i don't want to put an age on this but you're on this

you're on the back half of life and you and your wife and like you're you're talking you're saying the word

digital i i i'm always surprised when i meet people in that later generation and i really don't mean

this to be ageist but typically people of that age aren't interested in digital why are what was the

impetus really to get you thinking digital well i uh and i will just out ourselves we're 65 and so when

we think about a five-year project it's 65 to 70 and um and we kind of think this is the last big deal

we're going to do before we play a lot we have lots of plans for the next 30 years after 70 so

that's that's filled space with dreams and we're going to totally goof off you all have a good time

this is our this is our hurrah yeah so um a couple of things one uh we really like to think of ourselves

as lifelong learners and and we are both futurists and we're both strategists and we're both um maximizers

on the strengths finders um and as a result of that we like to live in the future and so uh we've kind of

been pulled along uh we also uh by calling and by practice um we like to develop leaders and so we

hire young with the intention of sending out young uh the 94 year old church that we're currently leading

sends out a pastor or a planter every year this year we're we're actually this summer we're planting

three churches we're having triplets this summer uh but we hire young so for example um just in the last

six months we've hired a 20 year old worship pastor a 20 year old social uh media influencer to come and

help us with various platforms uh our media um tech guy is 22 and he's a gamer and we hired him

substantially because of his hobby interests um all that to say is that we we have intentionally

surrounded ourselves with successive generations and now that we are aging boomers we're actually

down three generations so we learn and stay fresh and simultaneously we get to continue to invest in

the development of people in their late teens and early 20s and send them out often by their mid-20s

into their first significant ministry leadership roles god bless you i'm looking forward to seeing

triplet churches born of a 20 year old uh social media influencer i i honestly can't think of many

people at that retirement age that are thinking that way so love kind of this idea of passing that that

knowledge on but and by the way one of the reasons why i wanted craig in this conversation and

honestly the impetus really started with with craig this is like the type of conversation that i'm

going to like step back and and you guys are way smarter than me like there is a whole lot more

knowledge not going ageist here but there's a whole lot more knowledge there that i really want to soak

up and learn from as we're talking about this idea of um you know the the scoreboard what makes a

successful church and and craig's put a lot of of energy and and thought into this which we'll get into

and uh and jared i know some of the conversations that that that we've had sent around this have been

uh incredible as well so looking forward to digging into this um and and this is actually very similar

uh craig we just had a conversation with dave ferguson uh out of uh community community church

and exponential and new thing and just all sorts of different things that that dave does and that

was it was almost like the prerequisite to this conversation as we're talking about in that

conversation with dave ferguson just recently we'll put it into the show notes but it was this um the

idea of all these different models all these different modes of church and and jared's talking about his

triplets that he's working on here in 2021 dave out of communities got got four like i think it was a

physical uh or excuse me i think there was a physical there was a broadcast there was a there was a prison

and i think maybe a workplace was was the fourth well they're doing micro micro micro was the fourth not

workplace and so like that was that was their therefore their four multimodals uh approaches

towards church um and and kind of what the one of the challenges is is is how do we deem what is

successful if we're going multimodal as we're going multimodal as we're doing these different

models of churches you know i the the pre-covid and maybe it was a bad answer even before the

nickels and noses really kind of is no longer effective uh butts in seats is is a is a nice

thing to look at from the stage but is is a horrible metric for the successfulness of what's happening

with the church and and so craig you really started this conversation really spending some time working

on on this document um speaking towards the effectiveness and ineffectiveness of church

and we've got links to the show notes and that is as well but craig maybe you want to open up just

kind of talk about that maybe some of the things that you were wrestling through and and what that looks

like sure uh well the reality is for stadia you know through 2018 uh maybe the beginning of 2019

we were planting physical churches um primarily churches that would have you know sunday gatherings

you know what we sometimes call the typical or predominant model of church um in the united states and so

because we had really the single model of church that we were helping to start then we had really

adopted what have been the predominant metrics for those churches which were the nickels and noses and

you know which you know how are they doing and how are they progressing but we began then to

become multimodal ourselves in terms of the churches we were working with uh really around the same

time jeff you you came on board and we began moving in this arena of digital only uh we formed a

partnership with uh casey underground with rob wagner and what they were doing to be on helping people

start uh networks of micro churches and so all of a sudden these these metrics that we had been using

for our physical churches no longer applied in these two new modes and so as an organization how do we

evaluate the uh effectiveness of these models and so uh it just became really clear for us that we

needed to go back and rethink you know definition of church and we needed to go back and rethink

definition of uh disciple and really on top of all that really come to a conclusion of what were some

ways that we would measure the effectiveness of a new church that could then be um compared across

these models and i know that comparison is dangerous you know we tell church planters all

the time you know uh don't compare you know because then then you're always comparing yourself to

someone who is doing more and then you feel bad about yourself and about what god's doing in your

context but i think for an organization like stadia there's a a stewardship responsibility in that

comparison to say you know are we doing digital only just because it's new and novel are we doing digital

because we can demonstrate that it effectively makes disciples are we doing micro you know all of these

things or where should our energy and our resources be focused um stadia has a huge vision you know our

vision is that every child on the planet would have a church that's a lot of churches it's a lot of people a lot of

children um and so just the idea of effectiveness is um really critical to the accomplishing of our

mission and our vision that's why we're doing all these different models of church

but we haven't yet really figured out how to effectively measure the effectiveness of each and so what i've

created that you're going to share in the show notes um jeff is really more pointing out hey here's what

we've been doing and here's why it's broken here's some ideas of what we think is needed but we by no

means are at the place of having an answer certainly not the answer uh we're really just hoping to

begin to wrestle through with many of our partners and our planters uh with uh people like jared and

and and sprout digital what what are the answers to these questions and how do we identify them in a

really useful way uh in order to facilitate our own efforts but also in order to help others that

we're partnered with networked with and our church planters know hey are we being effective are we making

disciples as um it's so i gotta i would imagine like trying to get commonality in language even that

hey are we effective in making disciple you know there's a running joke here on on the show you line

up 10 pastors you're going to get 12 definitions of what a disciple is because at least two of them

aren't going to be sure they're going to give like how do we even start to maybe bring that together to

get that that common agreement because if we're trying to evaluate successfulness or do we even need

to evaluate successfulness for the big c church like how do we get agreement here on things like

what a church is i know we wrestled with that with um uh with dave just recently or even what

a disciple is how do we need to get the common ground uh well i you know i wrote in this paper and

kind of that the ideal of getting to common ground and and jared and i have we've exchanged back and

forth as kind of pointed out that my my hope is probably a little bit idealistic uh that the

reality is when we look at centuries of church history uh there are a lot of definitions um and

a lot of disagreements um a lot of divisions that have uh come over these things and it's probably uh

unrealistic for us in this time to think that somehow we're going to overcome all of the human

factors that have led to that in the past uh i do think though uh my hope would be that we

can really help people at the minimum to find their own definitions i think the reality is

you would be very very surprised if you went to churches in america whether you you know talk to

the pastor went to the church's board or elders or you know governing body and said hey what is the

definition your church uses of disciple to determine whether or not a person who is connected with your

congregation is or isn't a disciple of jesus and unfortunately in the vast majority of cases

people would simply look at you with a blank stare um they actually have no idea so it's not the fact

that a common definition is missing it's really much more the fact that there's no definition at all and so

we're not you know even an individual church is very rarely working towards a very specific definition

of hey we've made a disciple we were joking off air before probably you're probably all the stuff you're

going to cut out jeff um about coffee because i'm a coffee snuff well imagine if i'm going to start a

coffee shop right and i have no definition of what a good cup of coffee is

i'm serving one person water and another person grounds like it's just like it's all over the map

yet we have lots of churches whose you know mission is to make disciples but can't even define

when they've done that um and so common definition probably pretty idealistic um individually owned

definitions absolutely necessary um if we're going to accomplish the work that jesus gave us to do

jared you're launching twin by the way don't say starbucks to to craig like when he says coffee it's

it's not it's not starbucks i mean that's the only thing guaranteed to be endlessly harassed

yeah yeah that's that that's fine moving on jared like and i'm curious here because you're launching

triplets uh at at 65 that's that's that's way too old to have triplets but good for you um talk to me

here like what's the what's the common like are you evaluating with these triplets come commonality

like how are you finding common ground among these different models and in types of church oh it's

such a great question and i'll tell you we are in a royal mess and the answer is no we are just we

are messing or we're swimming in mud here and we love it um in fact let me complicate it

exponentially in addition to the triplets each of which are in a very different model i think i may

have may have mentioned their physical uh one is a hybrid micro and the third one is digital in

addition to that our 94 year old congregation is fidgetal so we don't even know how to measure

our results for the existing congregation that is dramatically morphing and now and as far as we

project will indefinitely into the future have far more people online than will in person

um none of the old creaky metrics uh worked well then and they certainly don't work now so honestly

you know as practitioners we're right in the middle of four simultaneous experiments one of them just

happens to be 94 years old as we are sorting our way through and what we're noticing is um just

preliminarily and by the way i wish i had answers i'm so far from that i'm just asking finding out some

better questions to ask right which i guess in some theories is 80 success if you have that question to find

so i'm feeling good about that uh but one of our questions is what do the what do the three daughter

churches have uh that are distinct in terms of metrics and then what do they have in common

and we think that if we can among those three malleable baby churches find out what they have in common

that that may be the most effective way to inform what the 94 year old digital church can use to define

itself moving forward it's much easier for us to think clean slate brand new baby we're forming this thing

we're architects and to come up with some metrics in this new environment than to look at 94 years of

history and and so bound to the old metrics to have to do the change management thinking to actually

get free to think about what are the new ways to measure this congregation going forward we're going

to benefit from the babies and pick up dna from them okay so my brain just exploded i'm i'm totally

expecting you know and and maybe it's you know just the the decade of multi-site you got to get it from

the mothership you got to create the good dna and then pass it from you know the the the middle

hub down to the spokes you know whatever your analogy is uh you just flip the script on it where where

you're finding healthy practices not with uh 94 years worth of established church you're finding healthy

practices with with the new plants with the with the the the the things that are are free to run and then

you're you're going to pass that up into the the established 94 year old church that that's incredible

yeah i mean i commend that jared and and it makes a ton of sense i realize jeff it's not what's common

uh but if you if you if you really pay attention to innovation you know read study innovation innovation

always happens at the edges um it it doesn't happen in the old established um you know you know

companies if they want to you know establish companies that they want to innovate they got

to create skunk works you know because innovation is just it gets squashed in this large thing and so

uh yeah i i mean that's super exciting and it actually it to me it makes a lot of sense a lot

of people just aren't willing to take the risk of of giving those you know those three babies and

in your case probably some you know leaders who in fact are much younger and much less experienced and

much less wise than you are i mean let's just call it what it is right you know i i love getting to

meet jaron and ed because you planted a church when you were 23 mandy and i my wife planted when we were

26 you're one of the few people i know who were younger than we are we were idiots when we planted a

church we we knew like we had no idea what we were doing uh but you know we learned a lot and and you

know your your three you know baby churches are going to learn a lot and and not just for their own

benefit but for the benefit of the larger whole and it's such a great uh perspective to not just allow

that to happen but to enable it and to be very intentional about it we're trying to adopt a

similar mindset at stadia in which we're recognizing more and more that innovation is being created by

our church planners um you know stadia is really sees ourselves as innovators but at the end of the

day we're we're accelerators of innovation not creators of innovation um we have this privilege

to work with hundreds of church planners who are creating new expressions of church and new ways of

making disciples uh and many of them are being innovative um are identifying new strategies new

methods new ideas um jared will realize this we and i can both date ourselves you know and in our early

ministry careers to find out about what some innovative pastor or church or organization did they had to do

it the church had to grow to be a mega or giga church the the pastor then had to write a book about

it they then had to get invited to speak at a conference and then jared and i would get to show

up and hear about it the problem was by the time that happened whatever the innovation was was no longer

innovative and really not had already lost its you know freshness and relativeness to what was needed

and so for us we're looking at it as the ability to say hey there's an innovative idea

and we can spread that through this ecosystem tomorrow not five years from now when the book is written

and you know the conference is hosted and all of those things and and so that's really just kind of

that role of accelerating innovation that that i think is a a critical piece again in an environment

that this that's just rapidly changing but that also comes back to kind of to bring it back to the

topic jeff that that's the need for better metrics right is when we look at that innovative idea that one

of our planners has are we like oh it's a great just because it you know whatever it just it's like hey

we've never it's new it's novel it's interesting or is it a is it really a not just a new idea is it

really a better idea because somehow it's contributing to disciple making in a more effective manner than

what others have been doing um instead of this new way i mean let's let's call it out for what it is

um nickels and noses um nickels and noses we're joking about it earlier but what's the where does

that fall short because i or does it like the the view of of how many people are attending a physical

service how many people are allegedly watching a service online online metrics can be squirrely

sometimes we've talked about that previously um the the amount of money that's coming in the amount of

of money for an organization people that are willing to contribute to uh they're bought in

at the level like some of these things i i think are are grounded in in in truth and instability but

but is it is that good is there other things like what's the struggle with this idea of the

nickels and noses being the the metric that we're evaluating well i uh um probably have a contrarian

point of view on those i actually applaud nickels and noses so i've decided i've decided to uh to

redeem that in this sense uh and this is a helpful model for us this is old language but it's it's

still helpful um cause community and corporation and to think about the local church as a cause as a

community as a community as a corporation and um in the venn diagram you want the sweet spot where all three

of those are equally contributing to create a core that is institutionally sound that is relationally

healthy and that is missional in its cause effectiveness so uh we're using that language with

with the babies and with uh with the mother fidgetal church to find areas of commonality and areas of

difference so as it relates to corporation um nickels and noses is a legitimate and helpful corporate

metric now when it comes to how many people and where are they and how much money should they generate for

what budget that is entirely model specific so the digital church will have a very different corporate

set of needs than the physical church plan and the mother fidgetal church has a distinct set of corporate

needs because of the model so the commonality is that we have a legal corporate organizational design that design

takes time effort and money and and being a good uh steward of those resources means that we are

going to measure things that look like time effort and money

but we also must measure the cause of course and by the way i think in these four little experiments

that we're doing the mother church and the three babies i think the cause is going to have the

the closest alignment disciple making but when it comes to community and how we measure community among

these four very different venues we're probably going to have different metrics that suggest as kpis or

key performance indicators uh at best approximate or they success suggest success i think that these four

four churches are going to have very different kpis for community health measurement because their venues

are so different yeah i i don't know that i'm in that much different place than you are jared i have

a little maybe a different twist or perspective but i think the problem with nickels and noses

isn't that we count nickels and noses i mean the problems with nickels and noses is that we assign the wrong

meaning to those measures uh in you know your description of corporation if you've built a

structure that requires dollars whatever other global context you're in marks for x pounds you know

whatever it is uh in order to function well then you probably need to count how many of those you have

right right but but they're not a measure of the success or the effectiveness of your church in making

disciples this help you understand what are the financial resources that you have and the

sustainability of various activities and so forth so how in the world could you not count nickels if

nickels you know are a part of your model of sustenance you have to and i would say the same thing about

attendance it's not um it's not that even you know a physical church that gathers should never count how

many people are there i always say if you don't know if you aren't counting how many people are there and you

don't have any idea how many people are going to be you know how do you know how big a room you need

how many seats it should have you know how many cups of coffee you should make how many children's

volunteers you should have like you have to count uh but from my perspective um i've tended to use kind

of um mission strategy tactics as layers of metrics and so you know tactical metrics are things like

hey how many cups of coffee did we you know in cups and napkins right because we need to make sure

that we have enough of those if we're in a physical space i don't know what exactly the comparison would

be that could be just bandwidth or seats or something in a digital environment right if we

run out of that well you know tactically right we haven't planned very well and so those are things

that should be counted for that reason um there are strategic measures you know in a gathered church

people coming on a sunday morning is a key part of the strategy and so i would want to count it because

it would inform you about hey what are you know is that piece of our strategy moving forward or going

backwards the problem is when that's even when that's part of our strategy the simple fact that

people are in a seat doesn't answer our mission question which are they which is are they becoming

a disciple and so it's not that we need to throw out nickels and noses it's that we need to apply

nickels and noses appropriately and really from my perspective the problem is that the mission metric

is missing and because it's missing we're relying on the strategic and tactical metrics to answer

questions they were never designed to answer i think that's so helpful craig and entirely and i i think

that uh in our experience uh the disruption of the pandemic and our our evolution or transformation toward

fidgetal uh with with great help from stadia and being a part of a fidget cohort our team just continues to

benefit so much from that that that in our experience uh it really did indicate to us that things that we used to

feel good about i don't know that we celebrated them that we felt good about them which were those

very corporate metrics uh it was the annual report it's what the annual video of the church so much of

it you know did have to do with that the denominational reporting that we do etc we were so comfortable

with these because all of them indicated that we tended to be growing right by the way if your metrics

aren't increasing change the metrics right you just change the basis every organization does it just

change the basis it's awesome you know this year we're yeah but having said that it really revealed

us that uh that those were inefficient uh ineffective one of the things that's uh of course uh this is

obvious but i just want to state it that we're so aware of when you read through the new testament

we do find numbers so there's there's quantitative data in the new testament it tends to be around how

many people showed up or it tends to be descriptive of the relational size of a particular group

so jesus had the multitudes he had the 70 he had the 12 he had the three he had the one well

those are social group descriptions that uh sociological study has indicated for us have very particular

dynamics and those social sizes are very good for certain kinds of experiences right but when it

comes to the metrics of discipleship in the new testament in my reading we have vague approximations

certainly we don't have quantifications so we have some qualifying statements these are qualities of an

one elder uh there's 100 references to one another's in the bible uh 59 specific applications for commands to

do or not to do so but those are behavioral they're not even qualitative they're actually process items

that apparently if you're in that kind of environment indicate the likelihood of growing maturing

discipleship but even the one another's are not directly connected to the outcome of discipleship

so i'm not arguing at all against i am all in on helping come up with metrics i think it's

critical for us but i'm just wanting to acknowledge that um that you know my preference and probably for

many of us our preference is to go to scripture and say we're we're measuring this because we have this

example and again in my reading of scripture it's process oriented qualitatively described

and almost never counted and so our our challenge is to how are we going to measure approximations

that may indicate that there is discipleship making success a metaphor that's helpful for me as uh is an fmri

an fmri actually measures blood vessels and increased blood flow in the brain it's believed that

those blood vessels are uh proximate to neural pathways so the fmri which says we're measuring

neural activity and taking images of that is actually measuring blood flow and inferring neural activity

and so it's that kind of approximation of health that i think uh will will want to discover and

probably have to be satisfied with measuring oh as i think one of the i agree with with what you're

saying and i think it's a super insightful chart but i think one of the challenges when we think about

those we think about one another's um there's a challenge for us in that um we can't create what

we could but if we create every one of those one another's is the standard definition of disciple

um a little self revelation here you know the fruits of the spirit love joy peace patience like i'm in

in trouble because i am a very impatient person um still does that mean that i am not a disciple of

jesus because that piece of my character is still being formed right does that prove that i'm not a

disciple and so there is this inclusionary exclusionary kind of thing as well that we look at and so it it

complicates it because even as we you know unwieldy as a hundred point checklist would be the reality is

probably all of us would agree that that can't be the standard because no one can check all 100 of the

boxes uh and so i think that's the i think that's part of why many people don't have that definition is

you know we we really in many ways need to make it as small and simple as possible like what are the

absolute essentials but whenever we begin to have that conversation everybody wants to add another

essential and by the time we're done we're back to the 100 point checklist that no one can live up to

and and so we kind of my observation so then we give up on the exercise um and and we just persist with

substituting inadequate measures rather than to really wrestle through and come to the kinds of

definition and understanding that would allow us to say hey there's a person who's a disciple of jesus who

last year you know five years ago whatever was not that is the accomplishment of our mission um and

somehow we have to be able to do that in a with some level of confidence well the futurist here uh

wants to go out and play in the future for a minute and so let me share my my preference

um and my expectation actually it's a prediction and then i'll come back as the practitioner and and

talk about how i help to contribute uh short term to this long-term issue by the way i think that we

are in a reformation of the church uh i think that this is wildly turbulent i think that church is going

to be dramatically changed on the other side so i'm exposing my own belief that this uh this season uh is the

dawn of a a reformation of the church that in many respects will be as um as dramatic as the reformation

uh in the 1500s so given that background and maybe i'm way overstating it but that's my frame of reference

given that background i i then look to other social groups and i'm asking the question how are they

dealing with this so i look to business um reading books for example work disrupted recently published

by jeff schwartz uh who is an esteemed leader in the field of work internationally learning from from

him how is work being reconstructed and how how is work being redefined and how is effective work being

remeasured so there's the business community that informs us secondly uh there's the educational

community and transformation and education is not uh as far advanced in my opinion yet as work is but it

will be because uh there be educators are forced to create metrics for a whole variety of reasons and i and

and i look to uh to business and to education primarily because those are the two social

institutions that the church is primarily modeled itself after so we're built on the small business

model that's how we do church especially in the west and we educate people in graduated systems

and groupings that are modeled after educational theory and philosophy and what i'm discovering uh in those two

environments uh is is that big data is

one of the if not the most helpful source of information and so uh here's the here's the little

fun about the future and then i'll come back to the present uh i noticed that and i've been playing

a bit with uh i think it's casey underground um participants there uh do a lot of their work on the app

and that app allows a person to self-report her experience and so she's reporting process and

engagement experience let's assume that she is also asked to report subjective experience

in this last year your goal has been to grow in patience give us three examples of how you intentionally

engaged in developing that christ-like virtue in your life subjective reporting so here's my here's my

dream in in 10 years most christians are engaged on apps they are self-reporting their experience

objective behavioral and subjective a sense and that that is rolling up into big data information for us to

manage and manipulate and learn from just as big data is in many helpful ways using this individually

generated piece into these billions of bits of information and so the the futurist in me says

individual self-reporting are going to be the primary source of information from which we gather data that we

develop knowledge and then apply with wisdom there's a lot there um thank you for all those words let me

let me ask because we're saying words that i don't typically hear in in context of of discipleship we're saying

big data we're saying small business model uh we're saying a hundred point checklist which i know was kind of tongue-in-cheek

that's strategic data informed what what's the role of the holy spirit in this like i mean out of context

i i i and and i've had conversations with some of my organic friends that that are allergic to a lot of

the things that we've just said and it's hey we need to be following the spirit and not everything we just said

um how do how do we respond to that like what's what's the role of the spirit in in context of of this conversation

i guess i'll i'll go first jared's probably gonna have a better answer than i do but uh from my

expect perspective i would say um cause and effect is critical um and so if we believe that um the user

of that app who you know is reporting her progress or you know the the work that she's doing around

growing in patients and you know all of those things if we think that it is the app or the reporting or

you know any of those things that is causing her transformation we're

i mean we are now over i mean we are no longer making disciples of jesus we we are now over here

in a humanistic driven um self-improvement model whatever title label you would want to give it the the

the premise of um discipleship the premise of you know human transformation in the new testament is

that it is only made possible um by the redemption that comes in jesus through jesus and the transformation

that is empowered by the holy spirit those things are causes what we're talking about is how do we

measure effect um and if the cause is exists then then it should be evidenced by the effect so it's

not a denial of the role of the holy spirit it's just recognizing that and again i go back to the

fruits of the spirit right you know the fruit of the spirit is not some ethereal awareness that the

spirit is there i'm not saying that doesn't exist so don't don't someone you know send me hate mail

you know but all i'm saying is you know what craig dot whitney at stadia church planning dot org but what

the holy spirit inspired paul to write was that the fruit of the spirit are these observable

characteristics in a person's life um fruit um and so you know in the same way that we can't really see

um you know the the biological mechanisms inside of a tree or a plant that causes the fruit to to exist

we see the fruit and we pick it and we taste it and it tastes good and like it's supposed to say well

that's a healthy tree right and so it's just i think sometimes i guess for me i would just say i understand

kind of the concern and i understand the danger in these measures of making going too far and making

them the cause but when i hear what jared's describing i don't hear a the holy spirit doesn't

have a role i hear there are these things that would allow us to and i think the self-report is important

to to to gather the evidence that a person is self-reporting about what the holy spirit is

accomplishing in their life and in the same way that we would taste the fruit and say it's good and the

tree is healthy we would observe the fruit and we would say it's good and thus you know the holy spirit

is present and the person is healthy i think that i think about um our uh my marriage with ann

um i think that um the substance of our years together has produced uh what is a wonderful relationship

to measure it uh to describe it by quality to even describe it by um effort that we make on working

on it to describe the context of life that we've put ourself in to talk about our personal budget

does nothing to take from the substance of the spirit of the relationship it simply

is an effort to describe it from different points of view

my and this is a theological conviction my conviction is that there's very little that we can do to thwart

the work of the spirit i do know paul writes in one place don't quench the spirit as he's talking

about some particular practices and apparently a local congregation in in corinth about uh behavior

that they excluded but um i think that um i think that good-hearted followers of jesus that are humble

and seeking his way probably are not going to be much of an obstacle for the work of the spirit

i just have great confidence in the power of the holy spirit to work among us and in spite of us

and so uh for me the danger to thwarting the work of the spirit is to sanctify

methods and models and things that end up competing with supremacy of the spirit

and for me measurements can become those they can become idols they can become worshiped they can

become focused on they can become the points of celebration they can become the ego drivers

and all of those supplant the leadership and the supremacy and the work of the spirit

but if we see these simply as measures to describe back to the metaphor jared nan's exciting and healthy

marriage then we're just finding ways to describe it that may in fact be encouraging for others to consider

choosing some of those patterns too for the purpose of coming to that kind of healthy relationship

so i trust the spirit wildly and i doubt that he is very much bothered with my smallness and

including my little small things that might be a little hindrance along the way that that's beautiful

so so we're talking uh fruits of the spirit you know craig love joy peace patience kindness

goodness goodness faithfulness gentleness self-control uh jared you're talking uh supremacy of of the spirit

and and letting him rule over all things these these are great attributes uh for how we're evaluating

not the butts in the seats but the but discipleship and maybe even just some of the characteristics

of of of what a disciple is within a church now how do we get from that the disciple

towards more of a multiplication angle someone that's sharing their faith uh priesthood of all believers

a church's platform approach more towards multiplication what what contextually does does

that look like how are we engaging that successfulness what is metrics need need to look like how do we get

somebody from that disciple making place from a discipleship from being a disciple to being a disciple maker

just briefly one of the things that's been very interesting for me to consider uh and by the way i

just want to again self-disclose uh i'm a fan of programs and products so um if i can buy a book that i

don't have to research and write i really like that uh if i can buy buy someone else's a system that is uh

written and proven i really like that so i i have no problems uh benefiting from from other resources

in light of that i'm really intrigued by the idea of different kinds of things that happen in different

spaces uh and i want to give a shout out and acknowledgement uh to uh to the recent book the

spider and the spirit uh and one of the things that uh that those three authors mentioned is that they

they focus on what they call uh content uh flavored and um and and they talk there about the the

different kinds of social spaces uh that that activity and work is done in and uh we're not there um i'm

not an expert i just am sharing an opinion but we want to be particularly thoughtful about how do we engage

people in spaces the one-on-one the three the 12 the 70 uh the masses and how how will we in these

various models find ways for people to engage in all of those spaces in a meaningful and helpful way both

for their benefit and for their contribution

and we think that if we can in these four little models that we're playing with here locally

think across those spaces resource those spaces and then major people's engagement and experience in

those spaces that we may have discovered some things about what effective discipleship pathway looks

like across those so we are going to be more um measuring than we are uh prescriptive

about what we expect the outcomes to to be but we think that the spaces have a lot to do with the

effect that we'll have our our concern about not concern my observation uh about experiments is

and by the way this is an affirmation and a critique uh experiments in innovation generally are very narrow

and so uh in that narrow experience for example uh if someone was going to do a micro church they might

think uh only about what does it look like for our small unit to be together to me ultimately those

people i would want to engage one-on-one in groups of three and in groups of 70 and large as well for

that's my own bias my hope is that in research we can find the best of what's happening in these various

venues and stitch it together in a comprehensive way that then suggests models that can be uh

can inform especially church plants to say you know here's what we have learned from others and you might

think strategically about covering all of these bases in the planning for this because it seems like the

holy spirit does different and good things for people in these different spaces just clarification uh you

didn't specifically say it but the the one-on-one the groups of three the groups of the the 12 the

group of 70 that was the um number of people that jesus interacted with at different points in his in

his journey in his ministry individually with people what was it peter james and john were the inner circle

the 12 disciples uh the group of 63 to 70 that was like the core component of what would eventually

become the church and then you know when he would uh preach and do things to to the masses uh jacranda

interestingly you know has a has a four pillars his isn't quite as biblically sound jacranda over at

saddleback i'm gonna i'm gonna message jay and say that jeffrey just just recorded a podcast that

your model's not biblically sound calling them out publicly his is his is more but it's it's uh it's

it's one-on-one self-directed uh it's uh it's uh one uh small groups uh social space 25 and then

um you know the full anyway it's it's more designed towards what the church typical model would be but

i love this idea of grounding it and i've heard others um jason morris has talked a lot about kind of

that that four or five groupings following christ's ministry i mean that that's that's a beautiful

approach to it um and what what i find interesting is you're even trying to scale that with within your

three daughter churches that that that you're you're starting here jared like you're you're creating a

model for a digital only church that can reach thousands um you know we were just you know talking

off air about the the hughes jared and angie hughes who have started a digital ministry in march of 2020

called hope city church uh no real experience with digital planning just did a podcast with them

recently and and within like 14 15 months have one of the largest churches uh digital only expression

of churches uh here in the western hemisphere uh and so how things scale how things grow in digital

digital space but that's mass isn't huge and you're also working on micro and so we've got all these

different kind of models of of church where disciple making discipleship is going to look different in

a mega giga physical environment in a in a fidgetal church in a 94 year old church in a digital

only expression of church and so how do we find and measure consistencies across all of these different

approaches we we stadia we're encouraging go multimodal try different approaches try different

things we need to figure out a commonality of language you need to figure out a commonality of

vision but as we're doing disciple making differently because of the different contexts like how do you even

start to to find that commonality specifically in this idea of getting people on mission on disciple

making i would say jeff one of the things that i think the the recognition and i think you know you

and i are working on what is this model of multimodal and we're kind of at least for now we're kind of

thinking about as this you know we've got this digital physical spectrum that's one axis and we've got

really this social spaces that's the other axis and the recognition that those exist in both digital and

physical space and so we end up with these quadrants but i think and i'll just say this from my own

experience i think the way being on mission um has been defined in my life and experience has been

pretty mono specific like it's been a very singular and so it's kind of this personal evangelism

share my faith with my co-workers or my neighbors kind of of thinking and i'm not by any means saying

that that's wrong i i've certainly done those things throughout my life and as a result of that i've

seen you know friends neighbors you know people come to faith i'm not very grateful for that

but i think the notion that that's what it looks like to be on mission for every single person as

who is a disciple of jesus it's probably not the best way of thinking and so

you know are you a one-on-one disciple maker are you a group of three disciple maker are you a micro

small group disciple maker like you know i i know i mean just kind of go to the other end you know

obviously my line of work we all you know the work we're on we know lots of pastors who are great

communicators i mean i've watched people that i personally know speak to large groups of people

and observe many many people in that group say yeah i want to follow jesus because of the you know the

large group teaching that same individual may be pretty lousy at leading their neighbor to faith

one-on-one like we don't like that's not something we really want to like we ever really talk about

but i think if we we recognize these these spaces or these relationships we've got to define being on

mission and being a disciple maker in in broader terms or in some way that makes it possible for a

person to be on mission and be a disciple maker without being a sing without exhibiting a singular kind of

behavior because not everyone is created for gifted for skilled in that singular model i think that's again

where the concept of multimodal is is is very beneficial as it may open up opportunities for

people to say hey i am being a disciple maker but i'm doing it this way which actually i love and all

my life i've thought to be a disciple maker i had to do it this way which always felt incredibly you

know awkward and uncomfortable to me i think that we will continue to learn from lots of different

approaches um i'll take a moment to share one of my biases as it relates to um a basis to describe

discipleship um and uh and while there are differences um uh in opinion uh uh and perspective i just i'll

mention alan hirsch's apest model and what he's really referring to is what does it look like for those

named gifts among us in scripture to influence how we are informed uh how we engage and the kind of uh

mature effectiveness on the other side one of the few places in the bible uh that i recall that the

idea of the word maturity is used is in uh philippians 4 11 and 12 in that passage that tells us that

there are gifts among us that are inherently spirit inspired uh phenomenally able to produce certain kinds

of results they teach the rest of us who do not have those inherent giftings and proclivities and

abilities how to do the things that approximate those results and if we take all let's say five five of

those general ideas and allow those gifts to inform us we can put together prototypes for how church can be

done in any of these various modal settings being informed by saying there needs to be evangelism

there needs to be the prophetic there needs to be the pastoral there needs to be the teaching

there needs to be the and so the model in my mind um designed around the apest giftings however that's

applied is a nice starting point to describe the kinds of engagement that we want people to experience

uh productivity and growth in their own life and potentially measuring measured outcomes on the other

side uh my experience with uh lots of local churches is that they tend to over time be a kind of local

church that primarily exudes the giftedness of their lead pastor or if it's a church with a long history

with an elder kind of board whatever the culture of that church is so it's really good at evangelism or the

or the prophetic or the teaching or the shepherding or whatever and and uh my interest as a person

engaged in church planting over the years has been to find church planting models or at least ways of

helping planters design a church across those various giftedness so that they were all addressed

and i think for me that is a fundamental way that informs however i think about a discipleship pathway

i think about where are we going to intentionally engage these kinds of emphases training teaching

and experience and then if we can measure some participation which is a very blunt but helpful

measure and output which is more subjective but more helpful we might be well on our way toward metrics

participation and output output yeah you're right that that gets subjective but having some sort of

qualitative qualitative data i guess would help to kind of complement what's happening in in the

quantitative side uh jared roth sir you have collectively blown my my mind for the second

quarter of 2021 uh you've you're i'm not going to start singing like chicago you're the meaning of my

life you're the inspiration but you really have some craig's really happy right now he's like an old

audiophile guy and the fact that i just threw a chicago reference in there i didn't even realize it but

he's grinning ear to ear right now um hey craig so let me let me go to unmute you just so you can i can

spin that but i can spin that vinyl for you if you'd like right behind me yeah i may i may have been

like you know two when that came out all right so but seriously i mean with with this idea of going to

the children um and letting the children establish the dna never um never been there you you connected

me with a book and and and i'll drop the reference here it's uh multi-church um i wrote the authors

down uh brad house greg allison we were kind of talking about that off air via email and that honestly

that book has all has also challenged some of my preconceived notions i thought i understood uh

multi-site i read that and it was like oh my gosh so like there are challenges and all those frustrations

that i've had there are other ways there are other models there are other other kind of ways to to do

that and it's even challenged some of the way that i'm looking at digital only church and so man you

i just want to thank you for the little amount of time that i've known you actually like kicking my

mental butt here a little bit and and and making me kind of rethink the way uh some things are done so

thank you very much for that i do want to also add that uh you mentioned uh the star and the the

spirit uh excuse me the spider and the spirit uh which is a rob wagner book and alan hirsch and and

who is the the third one lance ford lance ford yes of course um rob wagner i just while we're having

this podcast i got the email rob wagner confirmed we're set to do a recording for that uh talking about

this the the spider and the spirit uh and how that applies towards digital only expressions of

church um we've got some mutual friends that are excited about the digital only piece and so we're

going to be doing that podcast uh in in the in the coming month as well so get to kind of expand that

idea even of decentralized ministry of how that looks in in digital space but this has been an awesome

conversation appreciate the time but we're going to wrap up we're going to land a plane uh and so you

know i'll craig i'll throw it to you first man any any closing thoughts here as we're wrapping up uh the

podcast i i would just for you know for listeners who are you know listening and looking for something

practical to you know take away from this it would just be you know even you know we can't land on

hey here's your definition of disciple go go you know run with that but um hopefully out of this

you can you can take away some thoughts that maybe help you uh begin to wrestle with as jared said

earlier 80 of it's asking the right question to help you begin to wrestle with what are we measuring how

are we measuring it and is it telling us whether or not um we are being effective in helping people

become you know followers of jesus you may arrive at some conclusion some way of doing that that's

completely different than anything we have talked about today totally fine um having some conclusion some

mental determination on your part of that's what we're going to do will be infinitely better than

relying on nickels and noses alone without any any thought to uh how to actually measure that yeah well

from the from the sublime to the immediately practical uh i do think that we are in a reformation of the

the church i think that it is a societal upheaval that will have the same traumatic and wonderful

impact that the printing press had in the 1500s i think the digital age is going to similarly affect

the church not theologically but it's going to be a reformation of ecclesiology and organization

and communication and uh and models um one of the sayings that ann and i love is that beginnings are

necessarily messy and we should feel like we're in a mess and we should feel reasonably okay about that

we we don't even know the questions to ask let alone the right answers this is messy of course it's

transformational everything's on its head we don't even know what's going to transpire to anchor to in

the future where it's messy business and so let's enjoy this what if the lord tarries this is going to

be looked back to as a transformational and wonderful time in the church let's enjoy the mess and following

the spirit uh every day as we as he leads us through it so that's the sublime back to the back to the

practical i have found this that even pre-christians in my life know what god is doing if they have a

spiritual sensitivity uh to ask someone in this last year it seems like that you have become more

interested and acquainted with jesus tell me what that's like for you they will describe the work

of the spirit in them we call that pre-evangelism as church professionals i call pre-evangelism what

i do to people it's marketing it's engagement it's conversation it's content they don't know that

pre-evangelism is what the spirit is doing in them and they tell me what that's like well i've just

felt like and i've taken this step and i reached out here and i did an alpha thing and i've had this

conversation with a friend and my recommendation is interview the people in your life and if you're a

church person interview the people across the spectrum of your church and ask them what's the

holy spirit been doing in your life this past year and they will tell you what the discipleship

pathway looks like in their experience i think the practice the experience of people the testimony of

jesus in people will better inform me than anything else i can do about the discovery of fresh discipleship

pathways that are the work of the spirit and then we're going to figure out how we can measure those

things so that we can intentionalize them to create even better pathways for more people wow ask the

question and and and find new pathways don't take it on us to create them to manufacture but actually

ask the question and and listen and allow others uh to speak into it uh you know we we talk here on the

podcast the the the power is is not within the organization as much as it is within the individuals

and so listening gives you the opportunity to expand what you're doing to be more effective it's almost

that experiment you're crowdsourcing it down to the individual level and letting them tell you how the

holy spirit is is leading in that moment so i i love that but by the way the whole uh beginnings are

are are necessarily i almost said it wrong beginnings are necessarily messy uh that may be tattoo worthy my

wife won't let me get a tattoo but if i did that would be on the list of of quotes for that it's a long

list at this point with the podcast but that's that's definitely on the list well we're gonna we're gonna land

the plane um it's if sometimes it sounds like craig there actually is a plane landing in your in your

outside where you are the jackhammer came back on i apologize yeah no worries the great thing is we're

gonna edit a lot of that out and then filter it so the the the guys who produce this i'll give a shout

out to garrett garrett leave this in garrett silgy produces the the show for me he does a phenomenal

job him and and and the team uh christopher diaz is the audio guy they will make you sound incredible

so i'm not worried about it any digital enhancement makeup or yeah well i don't know i don't know that

anybody's that good but um well uh we'll see so uh for garrett and chris thanks for doing what you do for

jared for craig uh i'm jeff with the church digital and uh for stadium church planning thanks for joining

us here uh on the pod we'll see you next time on the show you have a good day