EP127: Dave Ferguson & The Ecclesiology of a Phygital, Digital-Only and/or Multimodal Church

Are you ever have one of those conversations where you realize, hey, you know what, I'm just going to sit back and listen and learn because I actually don't have anything to contribute here.

That is this podcast you're listening to right here.

Hey, it's Jeff with you once again with the Church Digital Podcast, powered by Stadia of Church Planning, of course.

And this conversation is one of those where you're just going to sit back and listen.

You're going to get out a piece of paper.

You're going to write down some notes.

You're going to check out the show notes.

You're going to buy some books because the knowledge that's dropped on this podcast, the different way of thinking is phenomenal.

We're bringing in Dave Ferguson onto the podcast here.

Dave is a lead pastor up at Community Christian Church in Chicago.

Awesome man.

Author, well-published, involved with the Exponential Network, leader of the New Thing Network.

He is so busy.

He is doing so much in the kingdom, for the kingdom.

And honestly, the thing that I respect about him the most is that he is constantly innovating.

He is constantly trying new things.

He's got to make a gig at church.

Shoot.

You sit back and relax.

No, don't do that.

Let's work on micro church.

Let's work on planting multiple models of church out of this existing church, Community Christian.

It's a beautiful thing that he's doing out of his church.

And so we wanted to talk about it.

We wanted to talk about the biblical ecclesiology.

How do you do multimodal church?

How do you have one church that has different modes, different models coming out of it?

What does that even look like?

This is what we start to scratch the surface with Dave here.

And to make the knowledge more complete, by the way, we're bringing in Craig Whitney.

Craig Whitney is with Stadia Church Planning, VP of Planner Development.

He planted his first church when he was, I think he said, 26 years old.

At one point, he told me.

And he has been involved in church planning since then.

And by the way, he's not anywhere near 26 anymore.

I'm not going to date the guy.

But he's on the old side.

And so there's lots of wisdom and experience in this podcast.

So when I tell you I'm just sitting back here to learn, honestly, that is the God honest truth.

And it's an incredible conversation here.

Once again, we've got Dave Ferguson, lead pastor, Community Christian Church, Exponential New Thing Network, authors all over the place.

We've got Craig Whitney from Stadia Church Planning, myself, Jeff with the Church Digital, and Stadia Church Planning in a conversation that I'm simply calling the biblical ecclesiological functions of a multimodal church.

Okay, everybody.

Here you go.

So, Dave, it's been a year.

Like, what are you, what's the lesson?

Any context, it would be crazy of me not to ask this.

What have you learned in this COVID season?

Personal, church, whatever the context.

I'm just curious.

What's, like, the big lesson in Dave Ferguson's life in this COVID season?

Two things come to mind, and I learned it from different people.

We had Wayne Cordero come and join us at a staff meeting.

I think you guys both know Wayne and probably a lot of your listeners do.

Brilliant, brilliant leader.

What was the book he wrote on Leading on Empty?

And one of the things he said about crisis, he says, during a crisis, you always want to focus on the 5%.

And then he said, and the 5% is doing only what you can do.

And he said, make sure you do those things.

And he went on, he said, even during a crisis, you could be a great husband.

Even during a crisis, you can be a good dad.

You're the only one that can do that.

And then he kind of broadened a little too.

He said, and, or maybe narrowed it.

He said, and during a crisis, you're the only one that can take care of your body.

And you're the only one during a crisis that can take care of your spirit and your soul.

And so, I mean, it was just, because in that time when everything feels like it's out of control,

to have a guy like that who's, you know, he's gone through some stuff to say,

hey, here's how you manage Christ.

That was super helpful.

That was super helpful to me.

And the other thing I'd say real quick was, I think you guys, you guys know Steve Stroop?

Steve's a brilliant, brilliant leader.

So early on, I think it was probably the first week, like early in March of 2020,

I'm talking to Steve on the phone and he kind of coaches me on some stuff.

And he used this phrase and we just adopted it as a slogan for our church, really, for a whole year.

And it's this, he says, where fear sees a crisis, faith sees opportunity.

Where fear sees a crisis, faith sees opportunity.

And just that mindset shift for me, it kind of shifted things, right?

And I just began to pray, I mean, literally every day, okay, God, give me wisdom not to miss the opportunities during this year.

And I think God was faithful to that prayer.

And I think we had a chance to talk about some of those things.

But those are the two things for me that I really kind of took away going, okay, how do you lead during this crisis?

It came from those two guys.

Yeah, where fear sees a crisis, faith sees an opportunity.

We will definitely be getting into that here in just a minute.

Craig, you know, once again, we'd love to hear your intake.

What's the big lesson?

What's the big takeaway for you for COVID?

Well, I would say that fear seeing crisis, faith seeing opportunity was one of the big lessons, both for me personally and in working with church planners.

I think there's a surprise for me.

I'm not trying to throw people under the bus, but I kind of think of church planners as these, you know, faith opportunists, kind of category of people.

And maybe more so, but it was interesting for me to observe that even amongst like that very, you know, forward-looking, risk-taking group, the faith and opportunism was not universal.

And so there were people who were feeling fearful and were seeing crisis and just how do we help navigate people through that?

I think for me, one of the lessons was, I would just say this, but innovation is not as easy or frequent as we sometimes think it is.

The, you know, just the pandemic and like the things that forced us into really required innovation, required us to think about how do we do something in a way that we've never done it before?

And finding those answers wasn't easy.

And what I realized is that we're, maybe just church world, maybe people's general, we're far better at iterating than we are innovating.

We take a good idea and we think, well, I could make it a little bit better.

I could personalize it, you know, to my world or my people, my church.

But to really come up with a new idea that's never been done before, that just doesn't happen very often.

Yet I think sometimes we talk like, oh, we're innovating all the time and we're not really.

And there's a, there's a cultural application to that too.

It's like, if you can come up with a new idea, but culture's got to buy into it.

It's got to be accepted.

It's got to be, you know, brought in so that they can, they can own that, that principle.

And that's also kind of pulls the thread a little bit on what, what I think we're going to, we're going to talk about here.

So long story short, this whole podcast came about, we were on a Twitter thread.

Somehow Dave Ferguson and Guy got tagged into this conversation with some people out of Transformation Church, I think up in North Carolina area.

And they were talking about microchurch and how it's similar to digital only church planting.

And both of these, by the way, the premises of their church, of church, not very accepted.

I think pre-COVID, now mid, post-COVID, wherever we are on this, maybe it's a little more accepted.

But both of these are still kind of, okay, microchurch, maybe a little bit like the house church of the 70s.

And there's still a negative tinge on that.

When it comes towards digital only churches, yeah, that's not on many or anybody's radar really in this.

But there's some similarities in context of how they work together.

I would love to maybe dialogue here and start to explore, okay, so we got these micro locations, like what micro churches, what, what is a micro church?

You know, Dave, through Exponential, we're doing a lot of these and you're great at Exponential of exploring these fringes and helping us figure out how to get more in those spaces.

So at Exponential, what does microchurch look like?

What does a microchurch expression look like?

Well, I'll tweak that, the question a little bit, if you'll allow me, because really, I mean, at Exponential, we just kind of affirm every kind of church.

And so probably my own laboratory for church planning ends up being either a new thing or community Christian.

In this case, it's community Christian church.

So I'll speak from that context.

I mean, for us at Community Christian, I mean, we see a digital, I mean, we see a microchurch is just a smaller but a full expression of church, often led by volunteers where you live, work, or play.

So that's probably a simple definition, we give it smaller, but full expression of church, often led by volunteers where you live, work, or play.

From a practical standpoint, I'm just curious, from either one of you guys, what does that look like, where I live, work, and play?

I'm a hiker, so I'm going to be church out on a mountain.

I run marathons, so I'm doing church on the road.

Like, what's the practicality of this?

I mean, I could jump in real quick, and then, Craig, you can probably give some examples, too, from some of the things that happened in Stadia.

One of the innovations for us, I think, and I think it would be fun for us to talk about that word innovation again, too, that came out of this last year for us at Community Christian, the church I had to lead in Chicago, is we started training and releasing these micro-sites or micro-churches.

And so our first cohort, we now have five that we're getting ready.

Literally, we're commissioning this coming Sunday, and three are in Spanish, two are in English, four in Chicago, and one's in Mexico City.

Most of them are actually going to be where people live, in their homes.

One of them, I know, is already going to be in a restaurant, but they're just finding their own places where their friends, neighbors, co-workers can gather, and they're using, and maybe this is part of our conversation, too, a lot of the digital technology or digital content that we're able to create from a larger church.

But we've completely empowered them to use it however they can to reach kind of their own kind of circle of influence.

Dave, would you say in that description of live, work, and play, is that about where a micro-church meets, or is that really more about who the focus, like the missional focus of the group is?

It's probably more the missional focus of where the group is, yeah.

I think, because it may be, hey, most of the people that are coming to this group are families from my kids' little league team.

Or it might be most of the people are actually people that I work out with.

It could be those kinds of things.

So they may not necessarily meet there, but that's where the affinity is.

Yes, that's a good distinction.

Right.

I was curious – we've been working closely with a good friend and partner in Rob Wegner, so all of us share kind of that common relationship and some of their stories.

And that's just been an observation on my part is, as they've talked about various micro-churches that have emerged in KC, the initial most common focus was a neighborhood focus.

But as they began to multiply, someone would become a part of a neighborhood group, then realized, hey, my affinity group is at my workplace.

And so that became that person's missional focus.

Or my affinity group is that soccer team or whatever that thing is that I do.

And so I think in this – and this is where this conversation is going to go in some ways.

Some of those groups may have resorted then to digital meeting spaces because of pandemic or even sometimes just convenience.

But the digital meeting space didn't necessarily drive the missional focus.

I was going to say because, like, for example, one of our new 3C communities really got birthed out of what was a watch party at a restaurant.

So, like, over the last year, they were consistently having the watch parties on Sundays at this restaurant.

And they were – I mean, lots of people were showing up, and they're sharing food, and they're – it's like, this totally works.

And then so when we offer this opportunity to be trained, they're like, yeah, let's do this, and let's keep going.

But exactly right.

Through the networks and the options that you have, community, Christian, new thing, have you guys explored much of this digital-only expression of church?

Has that been a thing for you?

Has it been more in the physical side?

Forgive me, I probably should have known that in advance, but I haven't kept up.

What are you guys doing and exploring in the digital-only space?

One of the things that's happened for us – again, I'll speak with Community Christian Church – is coming out on the other end of this, this last year, and kind of that idea of, like, hey, we're fierce, it's a crisis, faith, it's a opportunity.

We would say that we went from being one church with multiple locations to now we'd say one church with multiple expressions, and specifically four different expressions.

And so there are our physical locations that we have in the city and suburbs of Chicago.

That's one.

The second that we would say would be community online.

And, Jeff, this won't be any surprise to you, but I mean, like, the number of people that we've reached in this last year has just been, I mean, a ridiculous number.

And, I mean, all 50 states, 153 countries, all that kind of stuff.

Like everybody, we're also figuring out, okay, how do you actually then turn that into real engagement?

And we're having – in fact, I just came from a Barna cohort right before I jumped on here, the hybrid, the hybrid church stuff.

So that's the second expression.

And we do think – and it would be fun to talk about this.

We do think, no, that could be a full expression of church online.

Then thirdly is what we call community freedom.

We currently have three locations in prisons across Chicago.

And then the fourth one is what these micro expressions called 3C communities.

And so those are our four different expressions.

At locations, in person, you'd call it physical.

Online, you'd call it digital.

And then we have a community freedom in prisons and then also our micro sites.

So really it's quite a bit different than where we were 14 months ago.

Yeah, I think for me – and that's beautiful.

I love that.

I would love to even unpack what it is for you guys as you're trying to get engagement across 50 states, 150-some countries.

And I would love to get your coaching.

Well, we'll have that conversation off air.

We'll lock it in.

No, I don't know.

I might pick your brain before we're done.

When we talk digital only, it's an opportunity.

And I'm not here to convince you necessarily but to even start to draw this parallel.

The way that Rob Wagner would look at Kansas City or to look at different areas, communities around and say this is a community that's worthy of a church.

We at Stadia, we've got digital planners.

I've got a digital planner that just launched a church in Twitch.

It's a church, not for video gamers, but of video gamers.

And he's doing services and he's doing discipleship using platforms like Twitch and Discord.

And we've got mutual friends and there's all sorts of people that are doing Discord church, that are doing Twitch, that are doing Facebook, that are doing social media, virtual reality.

Like there's the conversation go on and on.

We talk about them all the time.

But what's interesting in some of these contexts is it's the same passion that a micro church planner would look at a community, at a neighborhood, at a church on the block type of approach.

We see that same thing in digital space, even to the point of, hey, it's my job in this church, in this micro church to have a conversation with someone to share faith, highly evangelical.

But then to get them on mission, to release them, to share with others, that multiplication piece.

Really, when we look in the digital context, we're seeing that same type of approach where it comes down to that disciple making, down to that multiplication.

As you know, and you alluded to it a little bit here, where the church, your broadcast of your services through, you know, what you're calling community online, you're reaching 153 nations.

There's a whole bunch of people in there.

Who are their names?

Like, I mean, I'm asking facetious.

You don't know.

It's so easy to have people kind of get lost in isolation.

And that's one of the reasons why you're feeling that pain point of, hey, I've got to engage with these people.

I've got to dialogue.

I've got to meet them.

I've got to take that first step to the disciple with it.

You know, arguably with the micro, that's far more relational towards that.

And you're not using technology to broadcast your message to millions or hundreds of thousands.

You're using it to kind of fine tune into a conversation with dozens or even individuals.

And having that one-on-one conversation where it gets more towards that disciple making and multiplication friendly.

So the similarities between these are huge.

How do you, and just some struggles kind of come up.

Well, let me ask, as you've done through community, Christian, what with the multi, with the micro site, with the micro church locations, what are some of the challenges?

And, like, where do you bang your head on?

What's the pain points that you kind of struggle with at that micro spot?

Well, I mean, let's keep it real here, too.

Because, I mean, like I said, we're getting ready to launch our first cohort.

So it's not like I'm an expert.

But I have some thoughts anyway.

All right.

I anticipate, because one of the things we, like, through New Thing and through Exponential, I've been able to see things, and community, I've seen things scale.

So, like, at this point, New Thing, we have 388 small networks around the world in 40 countries, close to 6,000 churches that are a part of those networks.

So I've seen that kind of go from, like, one church we planted in Denver to going, oh, my goodness.

I think one of the things that we're really trying to watch is, okay, how do we make this scalable?

Because we actually had the conversation with our lead team meeting this morning, going, like, okay, so we have five of these.

And actually, this kind of is a brass tax thing.

Okay, from a financial perspective, if this costs us anything, if it grows in time, we won't be able to afford it.

So the question is, okay, how do we make this thing actually be able to scalable?

And I think the financial part of that, how do we continue to, you know, provide great coaching?

How do we continue to provide great content?

Now, and we didn't know this was going to happen.

We didn't know we were going to, that three of the five were going to be in Spanish.

That's just like, I'm going, what?

Because we only have one location that really is really focused on a Spanish-speaking community, physical location.

So I think that's, I think that is, I think that's actually a significant issue.

I think what Rob is doing in KC and Underground is great.

I'm trying to figure out, though, how do I not have to raise money for this?

And if these are really going to, it's really going to be scalable.

I think that's one kind of question.

There's always, the other thing, I was listening to Tim Keller recently.

And Tim is not a huge fan of microsites.

And part of the reason he says that is because he says, well, we live in such a mobile society.

And that if these micro expressions aren't connected to an institution, they, people, you know,

if you have two or three families move away from one of these microsites pretty soon,

you've gutted the whole thing and you've got nothing.

And so you have to, he says, you have to multiply faster than people kind of transition.

And so I think, again, we're kind of going, okay, how do we keep,

how do we keep them close enough to the institution of community Christian church so we can help them,

okay, find apprentices?

How do we also make sure we embed this multiplication so they actually multiply faster than they,

because we don't like to think about this.

I'd like to think every one of them is going to give birth and then go on forever and going to be wildly successful.

But the truth is, there's going to be some, there's going to be some, some that aren't going to make it.

So how do we actually do that?

So I think those are some of the things that we're really kind of thinking through.

Dave, I'm curious.

I want to take you back a little bit.

You, in your definition of microchurch, you use the phrase full expression of church.

I'm curious how much, whether as leadership, just, you know, people who are part of community,

like how much of a wrestling match was there over full expression?

And there's got to be a reason that was included in the definition.

I think our, I think our understanding of the use of a more technical term, a minimal ecclesiology is pretty simple.

Because if you ask me what's a minimal ecclesiology, and for anybody, if that's a new term,

then it's just kind of like, what's, what's the least you have to have to have a church?

I mean, I would say if you have a community of people where Jesus is Lord and they're on mission, you have a church.

I know a lot of people want to attach, you know, some of the sacraments, they want to attach, you know, eldership,

they want to attach church, those kinds of things to it.

When I look, when I look at the New Testament, that's kind of what I see, you know,

a community of people where Jesus is Lord and they're on mission.

And so when you start with that kind of a minimal ecclesiology, and it's not hard to go like,

no, these could be a full expression, although smaller, that are often lay led by people where you live, work, and play.

So probably our understanding of minimal, our minimal ecclesiology allows us to get there pretty quickly.

No, that's great.

And I, I would, okay, Craig, I want to, I want to hear, I want to hear from you, Craig.

What's your thoughts on that as a minimum, as far as minimal ecclesiology?

I would agree with you.

We, we've been wrestling with that at Stadia.

And one of the challenges for us is we've been helping people plant churches globally.

And, you know, here in the US and ecclesiologically, they look very different.

You know, it, particularly some of the work that we're doing Southeast Asia, you know, a church is a leader who has, you know, a certain number of disciples.

And, you know, they are together on mission.

I mean, it fits your definition.

And so we've kind of said, hey, that, you know, there's a community.

There's Jesus is Lord.

I think we've added like a third leg of, you know, just like biblical, you know, foundation.

I'm not sure that, you know, Jesus is Lord, biblical foundation, you know, you kind of, is that redundant?

Right.

But then a lot of the stuff that would, you know, again, the, you know, how is the church governed?

How is the church, you know, funded?

Like those are not part of that minimum ecclesiology.

And so if we're going to call those works that we're doing over there churches, then we really have to have that minimum ecclesiology.

The stretch has been to then come back over on the U.S. side and say, okay, then we're going to call the same thing a church over here, where really historically that's not, at least at a pragmatic level.

We might have said from a definition level, well, that's still true.

But then we tended to add a whole bunch of things, you know, particularly in the realm of church planning to get to, okay, that is a, you know, a church and has to have certain things and look a certain way.

But for us, I think that minimum ecclesiology to kind of connect some of this conversation leads to digital.

So, right, the question, you know, can digital only be a church?

Well, with that kind of minimal ecclesiology, I think it's a lot easier to get to yes, right?

You know, is there a community of people?

Is Jesus Lord?

Are they on mission together?

So we take our digital only church on Twitch.

We can answer yes to those three questions really quick.

Check, check, check, check, it's a church.

We start adding other things, and that's where we start getting into, oh, digital only can't be a church.

And it's really because we've expanded the ecclesiology that creates the problem.

Yeah, I mean, two things come to mind.

One is, and I think what you hinted at there, and I want to go back to it, is really important for our listeners.

At Stata, you've had experienced interaction with global leaders from the East, just like new thing.

So, I mean, I'm immediately thinking of Albert Tennyson, who's in India, who last summer, under his leadership as not just a network leader, but a movement leader, helped plant 100 churches.

Okay, and so we bring him in, and we sit, and we listen to him, go, okay, tell us how you did it.

And this is a core part of it.

Or I'm thinking about a woman from Uganda named B3, same thing.

I mean, who's rapidly reproducing these expressions of church.

And as you begin to understand how they're doing that, and I think it does, we need a little more humility here in the West to go like, hey, we're not the center of Christianity anymore.

It's either in Africa or some places over there, and we need to learn from them, and I think as we learn from them, then I think we do begin to shift our minimal ecclesiology.

The second thing I'll throw at you, too, is I think one of the things for us at Community Christian, even as a church in the West, that was a launch, that originally was a launch large strategy.

The way we've always talked about the churches in terms of relationships, and we always talked about in terms of three relationships, your relationship with God, your relationship with the church, your relationship with the world.

And we call it celebrate, connect, and contribute, the three Cs.

That's why we call them three C communities.

Well, if you look at that middle ecclesiology, a community of people where Jesus is Lord that's on mission, what it does is it articulates all three of those relationships.

Your relationship with God, Jesus is Lord, your relationship with the church, okay, a community, and a relationship with the world that's on mission.

And I think those are the three primary relationships that grow a disciple and also grow a re-church and actually define a church.

But I think what you said earlier, too, about learning from some of our friends in other parts of the world is crucial, crucial.

And partly that's why we're doing this like five at a time, you know, we're doing this kind of slow to start with.

I mean, because every part of me like is go big, you know.

But I hopefully have enough sense at this point to go like, okay, I don't know what I'm doing yet.

But we're going to do this.

And I have had enough experience scaling things that once we get it right, or at least not even right, once we get it closer to right, then we can scale it.

I think, Jeff, as you continue to have this conversation with people, that more and more of that conversation has got to come back to minimum ecclesiology, which is particularly here in the West.

You know, the things that we think of as church, particularly culturally, but even I think within churches, that'd be interesting.

Maybe you've taught well enough, Dave, and I know you're a great teacher.

So that's like, you know, the people in the community are really buying that.

But my guess is you could go talk to, you know, some people just in the lobby on a Sunday morning and say, hey, tell me what church is.

And you'd probably hear a whole bunch of things that aren't a part of that, those three critical things.

And so changing that mindset to realize or to help people recognize those are the three things that make a church a church is some work that we've got to do because we've created churches that were so much more.

And so people have then naturally assumed that all of these things that we do must be essential rather than seeing them as is just optional or, you know, they serve a purpose.

But there's a difference between serving a purpose and being essential.

What's your thoughts on that, Jeff, as far as, I mean, as far as a minimal ecclesiology related to a digital church?

Yeah, I mean, three of the pillars that we look at, and it's been taken from lots of different places, but I know intentional churches has used it, is that large gathering is the groups and it's on mission.

It was funny, just this morning I was having breakfast with some guys from out of town, and they were, you know, more of the Rick Warren baseball diamond, you know, as that's like their ecclesiology.

And it's like, well, serving looks different in digital, which is one of the reasons why we don't necessarily emphasize that because it's, well, you're not serving, so it limits what you can do.

And even at a micro location, it looks different.

And so if, to say that serving's not important, but maybe it's not emphasized as much.

You know, the Acts 2, hey, they did communion.

You know, I've done some crazy things in my life as a digital pastor.

I stood on stage once and said, hey, you know, broadcasting and said, hey, you don't have grape juice and a cracker.

Go get a Coke and Snickers.

Bring this together and do it.

And the church, you know, probably wasn't very happy at the moment that I said, get a Coke and Snickers.

And they criticized me for, you know, being defaming to the Bible and that.

I'll have a conversation with God one day and apologize if I need to.

But at the end of the day, it looks different in digital space.

And so taking that freedom, recognizing the biblical mandates and the challenges of what we're doing, hey, hold to that standard.

Just let's figure out how to do it differently in digital because not everybody's going to have grape juice and a cracker.

So we've got to figure that out because we're not going to stop a movement of God because of not having a cracker, just in my opinion anyway.

I mean, like, for example, I'm community online. We still do community every week on community online.

And I mean, there are some of the 50 weeks when we weren't meeting, the truth be known, when we would get to that part of the service and I was actually participating at my home with my wife.

You know what? She might grab a piece of a scone and a hot tea and that, you know what?

And, you know, I think I think I think Jesus was glorified in that.

I think he was grateful that we that that we had that celebration that moment.

Yeah, there's there's all sorts of interesting stories.

Well, I we I was at a church once we're doing micro locations through the church online service.

And so we had guys were in Miami, Florida.

We had guys up in New York City that were creating a micro church network and they actually they recorded a baptism that was done in a New York City apartment.

Like a rundown, tiny New York City apartment where like they're in a bathtub and the bathtub is like a sink.

And so they they videotaped it.

And when they took the guy down, they didn't take them away from the nozzle.

They took them towards the nozzle and it was like this far away from banging his head.

And so like there's all sorts of drama centered around this.

The water splashes out like it's it's this beautiful.

But it's this really telling video of these guys who were on mission activated in New York City out there and were changing lives.

Were evangelizing and discipling people in unique ways.

And it was funny.

Like I took that video and I texted it to every person on staff and 50 percent of the people on staff at the church that I was at said, this is the coolest thing that I've ever seen.

We need to do more of this.

The other half of the people, we should never do this.

You can't do this.

Is that person authorized to baptize?

Are they have they been approved?

Are you sure that person accepted Christ?

And it was it was beautiful.

The bifurcation of a different movement where half the people were like, do it again.

And half the people were like, this is biblically wrong.

You should stop now.

So there's that tension of hate.

Like and that's one of the things, Dave, honestly, when I'm when I'm looking at some of the stuff that you're doing, your church has figured out.

And we had stated we use this term multimodal because there's four different or there's multiple different types of churches.

Different types of churches reach different types of people.

You know, you listed off.

You're doing physical.

You're doing church online through community online.

Kind of the broadcast small group type of model.

You're doing prison ministry.

Now you're developing this E3, which gets into that that that micro level.

I love that.

There's not a lot of churches that are able to separate the.

Hey, you know what?

It's OK for somebody to get baptized in a bathtub.

We we want that.

We want to encourage people to baptize other people.

It's not the the sacred where the professional Christian has to be the one to do it.

We want to activate people, empower people with this ability to lead people to Christ and to baptize.

It's it's beautiful.

But it's it's rare.

What's some of the mind space with with your organization, with with Community Christian?

How did you get to that place?

Like what were some of the some of the pain points?

Tell me the story of how you went from the church that that you were, maybe one mode to really starting to appreciate this idea of a multimodal approach.

I mean, again, there's there's plenty of things to list where we screwed it up.

OK, so we'll talk about a few of the things.

It's a podcast to help you where we got it right.

Um, I think, again, but I think a couple of things by God's grace.

Um, we've we've always had a history, I think, from day one, uh, where most of the people who became Christ followers and we're very evangelistic, very outreach oriented.

Our mission is to help people find their way back to God.

Yeah.

Um, when they would say yes, the people that would baptize them were the were the were the people in their small group.

I mean, so and that that was and we even talked about that's kind of like that's the thing.

And so, I mean, we the person who gets baptized, the person who does the baptizing, we always give them a T-shirt and they get to be there and they and they're the ones doing the baptizing, not not the staff.

So, and even I think this is kind of by God's grace to the last Sunday before we met, whatever that was, March, whatever that was, 7th, 5th, whatever that date was back in 2020, before we ended up closing up for our physical building, that expression for 50 weeks was actually our commissioning Sunday.

And we do this every year where we oftentimes will teach our blessed practices and I'll give a little plug.

That's the book that I just wrote that kind of explains these five missional practices that we teach our people.

But we taught on that and then we said, if you have a person or a place, if there's a people group or a place that you feel called to, we want you to know that we are behind you and we want this to be your commissioning or your or really your, we can get away with this because we're non-denominational, your ordination.

So you come forward and we want to, and we'll actually anoint people.

We anoint you and we want to pray over you and we're going to send you back out into the community, back to that, that, that people group.

Okay.

Or that particular place, maybe it's a neighborhood or wherever it is that you feel called to reach.

And I mean, it is an awesome Sunday because people come forward, our staff, we anoint them and then we pray for them and then we send them out.

We had no idea that that would be the, you know, the last Sunday we'd actually meet in person for the next 50 weeks.

And so one of the hurdles we don't have to overcome as much at community is there's already a mindset that every person is on, should be on mission.

And here are the missional practices that we use.

And that when you get to see someone find their way back to God, you're the one that gets to baptize them because you're the one who led them on that journey.

And then you get to apprentice them into leadership.

So some of those obstacles that you might find in other churches we don't have.

And I think that has made it easier for us moving towards these four expressions.

The simplifying the ecclesiology, like lend towards more acceptability.

It's not what we're defining church isn't this 47 step thing.

It's really this three core components and we can do things to it.

Like I would imagine that would be easier for lay people to get behind to understand and even get towards replicating and multiplying.

Like is that what you've seen out of Community Christian?

Yeah, I think you're on to it, Jeff.

And I think one of the things that happened too, so our key metric at Community is discipleship now.

And a lot of people say that, and that's good.

But the way we actually measure it is what we call those three C's of celebrate, connect, and contribute.

How many people are celebrating their relationship with God?

How many people are connecting, doing life and community together?

How many are contributing either inside our physical spaces or in their neighborhoods?

And so whatever that number is, is by far the – that's way more important than attendance.

That's way more important than offering.

That's more important than anything because we feel like if we get that one right, everything else will follow.

And I think – and I think maybe talking to you all has made me realize this.

I think because that's how we define discipleship, these three C's, these three relationships.

But it only – it's a very logical conclusion that when you bring a group of disciples together, that why would you define it any differently?

That's what a church is, a group of disciples doing what disciples do.

You know, Jesus is Lord, we're doing community together, and we're on mission.

Yeah, my observation was similar, but maybe just a different angle.

And I'm a, you know, a distant observer of community, right?

I've never – I've been there, but, you know, I've never been apart, never lived in Chicago.

But I've had the privilege of kind of following the story with occasional inside glimpses.

And I think one of the things that I would say as an observation is the clarity of mission is exceptional.

You know, I'm not a part of community.

I know your mission is to help people find their way back to God.

You know, how many people can name the mission of their church?

Okay, I'm in the business, but still, like, that's just – you've made that crystal clear.

But I think the other thing you've done is that's communicated in a way that that's not somehow community's mission.

That's our collective mission.

That's my mission and your mission and our mission, and we're all on it together.

And with the clarity –

Craig, I want to hug you right now.

Yes.

Yes.

But with the clarity of those two things, then to come and say, hey, we're going to do digital.

We're going to do micro.

We're going to go into – like, if I get those two things, what would my points of resistance be?

I mean, at worst, it's, okay, that's not for me, right?

But where would I find the foundation for we as a church or those people should not be doing that?

It doesn't – because of the clarity of those two things.

And I think probably for many churches that have kind of in this season kind of been pushed into some different forms, pushed into digital oppression, pushed into microexpressions by external circumstances,

in the absence of that as a core, then you get all kinds of chaos as you begin to move in that direction,

and it's easy to place the blame on micro doesn't work or digital doesn't work, right?

But at the end of the day, that's not where the root of the problem is.

The root of the problem is back at the core of mission and strategy.

And so if you're a gathered church and that's what you do and you want to go micro, you want to go digital,

you're going to have to spend some time resetting people to mission and strategy that encompasses those things.

It's just never going to work.

And which trying to do that in the middle of a pandemic is a really hard thing to do.

It's a hard thing to do anyway.

Let me throw this out too, Craig and Jeff, maybe just kind of as a leadership tip to some of, maybe some of the leaders are going like, oh my gosh, now I feel frustrated.

I don't, I'll never be able to do it.

Well, here's, here's one of the things that maybe you remember this name, Craig, remember Lyle Schaller?

Yep.

Okay.

So Lyle Schaller, he was a guy who wrote, wrote or authored probably a hundred books on church life in America.

He used to tell me this, he would say, count the yes votes, count the yes votes.

Or, or Bob Buford, Bob, Bob was a mentor of mine.

Bob would always say this too.

He'd say, work with the willing and with what wants to happen.

So now, cause your listeners might get the impression like, wow, everybody at community is for this.

This is, how does that happen?

Well, I'm sure everybody at community isn't for it, but guess what?

I didn't ask them.

All right.

And so what you do is count the yes votes.

Who wants to go start a micro church?

All right.

We're going to invest.

Cause we do, we'll do 10 weeks of training.

We do 10 weeks of training and we'll give you, then we'll give you great coaching.

And then we're going to also give you all our creative content.

And we're going to, we're going to do this thing together.

And so you count the yes votes or work with the willing.

And I do believe, and I think that's why we're having this conversation, Jeff, because I think

the digital, and I think the micro is something that is especially now more than ever wanting

to happen.

So, um, for any of your frustrated leaders out there, you don't have to get everybody on

board.

In fact, I mean, you remember the innovation curve.

I mean, look for that top, that, that two or 3% of the, you know, the innovators and find

those people in your church and just work with them to get this thing started and get

some momentum and then, then we'll scale it.

Kind of like what we're trying to do.

Yeah.

You probably remember my church playing mentor, Dean Pence.

Um, I'm sure somewhere along the line, you met Dean and, um, his phrase was go with

the goers.

Same thing.

Yes.

So it's, it's all these different expressions that communicate the same thing.

And, and I think back to where you started, you know, Steve Stroop's wisdom, another, you

know, another great leader, right?

That, you know, in fear sees crisis, faith sees opportunity.

And if you're spending your time focused on the people who are in fear, you're going to

be in perpetual crisis.

And so you really have to make this decision, uh, to operate in faith and to, you know,

go with the goers, work with the willing, uh, there is probably a place for pastoring and

caring for, you know, people who are in fear.

We don't, probably we'll get in trouble if we talk about, you know, completely ignoring

them, but I don't think you want those people to drive the agenda, right?

And a lot of them have prophetic gifts where, I mean, you know, pay attention to them because

they're going to, because they'll ask the tough questions like, well, how are you going to

pay for this?

You know, I heard a phrase this way.

We kind of like everybody to go, wow, but there's too many people that go, how?

And I, I think you can, you can listen to the how question.

You can listen to the how question and then go like, okay, that's good.

I need to think about that.

Cause I mean, I, I mean, I get an adrenaline rush every time we get a new idea.

I love it.

Okay.

And I think, you know, a younger version of me would have just, I would have said, okay,

we need to start a hundred of these right now.

But I think the first two seasons that we start five and then five and then 10 and then 10,

we'll get to a hundred within two or three years and it'll be freaking awesome.

But I think asking some of these questions is, you know, so I think those people can also

play an important part, but, but I would agree, uh, you know, the turning the ship, regardless

of the size of the ship is never easy.

Um, and you're recognizing that as a leader and, uh, you know, metaphorically, it's a lot

easier to take a few adventurous people and put them in, you know, a little boat to go on an

excursion, uh, and, you know, and support and encourage that, uh, without having to try

and turn the whole ship.

But then recognizing, you know, some of those, some of those are going to fail.

Some of those experiments, some of those risks, they aren't going to work.

That's okay.

Uh, but the ones that do, like those people come back, they get back on the ship and man,

they, they are so excited about what they've seen and what they've experienced that, you know,

when the excursion wants to go out on the next time, right, there's twice as many people in

line to go on that excursion, right?

And then they come back and celebrate and pretty soon the whole ship is going that way.

And I think sometimes we want to turn the ship

before anybody wants to go to that new destination.

And then we wonder why kind of the whole thing doesn't work.

And you're describing a strategy that just from a leadership perspective, it makes much more

sense.

You've got some willing people support them, encourage them.

I think the other thing too, we ought to do is, is also think of it, not just about your

church, but about the kingdom.

Like, so I've been doing this long enough.

I remember when we first went multi-site like 20 years ago.

And one of the first gatherings that Leadership Network ever had of multi-site leaders was

at our, in Chicago.

And so, you know, we're there, Life Church is there.

I mean, you know, so, I mean, I kind of feel like, yeah, we were one of the first ones in.

We didn't do it nearly as well as Life Church.

And guess what?

That's okay.

And even this micro church thing, you know what?

If we're one of the first large churches in the U.S. to give it a shot, and then everybody

else kind of goes like, oh, well, Ferguson tried it.

Let's try it, but make it better.

That's awesome.

That's freaking awesome.

Right?

So I think you have to have a little bit of that mindset too, going like, hey, we're all

in this together.

And if we screwed up the first time, then you make it better.

That's awesome.

That's great.

I would go back and I would say that my earlier comment on innovation, I think that's a difficult

mindset because one of the characteristics of true innovators at the end of the day is

a willingness to fail.

That they are okay with failure.

It doesn't mean that I want to paint the picture like that innovators like failure or get excited

about failure.

But there's something about an innovator.

But there's something about an innovator's mindset that recognizes that creating something

new is going to come at the end of multiple failed experiments.

And they're willing to endure the failures to get to the end.

And there's far more people who are innovator or who are iterators who watch what the innovator

does and say, oh, I could do that too.

So that's what you just described.

I mean, you have an innovator's mind, heart.

That's the way you, you know, you are the way you've led community.

And it's a great benefit to the kingdom.

And so it just, we need those people.

And in this season, we need even more of those people, whether on small scale or large scale

to just go try things.

A whole bunch of them aren't going to work.

It's okay.

You know, I mean, one of the things that has helped me on this, think about innovation.

This is an old book, but it's a classic by Peter Drucker.

And it's just basically, it's on innovation.

And I was reading through it again, because the season, because he was not thinking about

it.

And he defines innovation a little different way.

He says, innovation is the reallocation of resources from those things that are unproductive

to those things that are productive.

And all of a sudden, you're going, hold it.

So innovation is just moving my energy and money from things that aren't working to things

that you think might work.

And when you do that, all of a sudden, you go like, hold it, I might be able to innovate.

And he just, I mean, he wrote, again, a kind of a simplification of, oh, okay, so that's

what it looks like.

And so, I mean, we had a conversation, our lead team this meeting, because these 3C communities

were going to launch, and we got a way now, I think, financially to make it scale.

But it needs a little bit of cash to get it off the ground.

So the guy came with a proposal.

And so we're going, okay, we're going to take this money from here.

And now we're going to put it into our 3C communities.

And then you get on a podcast, and they call it innovation.

Are you comfortable?

I'm just curious, because we talk about pioneer, persevere, perish, you know, it's the same.

If you're going to pioneer in some area, you got to kill something off.

And so I can tell you, there's a number of churches that want to do this micro, this E3

thing that's similar to what you're doing, excuse me, 3C thing that you're doing.

What'd you kill?

Can you say?

Are you comfortable saying that?

What did you stop doing?

No, that's a great question, Jeff.

And if my lead team was here, they'd go like, yeah, yeah.

What did you stop doing, Dave?

And I think there haven't been enough of those.

But what you're saying is right.

Okay, so I mean, I think that's not a strength.

I kind of do like to hang on to some things, you know, because we thought of them.

But I think you're absolutely right.

So people are listening in.

Yeah, if you're going to start doing these things, I think it is, especially if you're

talking about reallocating resources, that means you're stopping doing some of these

things.

So you're still in the experimental phase.

I didn't mean to put you on the spot.

No, no, no, no.

No, I think you make a really good point for the leaders listening, that if you're going

to do this, it also means stopping some things.

And I would just admit, I don't think I've done a great job of that yet.

But that's, it's coming.

Yeah, that would be another lesson I would say we learned in this season is, and this is,

I think, Cotter, you know, that change is loss and thus change results in grief.

And one of the things we realized in the season is that there were things church planners were

losing, not by failure, not by, you know, poor planning, poor vision.

They were losing them because the entire, you know, circumstance of the world had turned

upside down and, um, the, to a certain extent, the better we could help them grieve what was

lost, the, the better they were going to be at moving, you know, at adopting new and different

and moving forward, uh, the worst thing to do is to get stuck in the grief of what was

lost, uh, because then you're not going anywhere.

And, and that, and, you know, anybody that's experienced grief in their life, nobody wants

to live in grief.

That's a terrible place to be.

Uh, and so that, that's hard to just embrace that grief of the thing that's being lost, but

that's part of what it takes to move forward.

Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right.

Hey, yeah, this has been a solid conversation.

I don't know.

There's like nine books that I've written down here.

We'll include all the links in the show notes.

I'm going to do, do some digging into Cotter a little bit there to find the exact book for

the quote, but we've got it all.

It's fine.

And nevermind all the name drops that have been happening in this podcast.

It's really been an interesting run.

Um, Hey, so Dave at with a community.

So you're obviously very forward facing.

You're very future.

You're thinking multimodal four different approaches.

Uh, I half wanted to ask you the question, Hey, if I wanted to plant a digital only expression

of church, that would give you five.

What would that process be?

We'll, we'll talk off air about that.

Maybe there's, let's do it.

Let's do it.

The answer is yes.

The answer is yes.

But let, let me ask this.

Um, so, you know, there's a pastor that wants to go back to February, 2020, because

February, 2020 was the golden age of church.

Uh, we could side hug.

You could hang out with people, shake hands, kiss babies, you know, that,

that was like next to like Jesus second coming.

That was the perfect time.

Um, what advice would you give them?

Um, I think, I think I'd probably hitchhike on what Craig said.

Um, pastorally, I, if, if, if, if social distancing was an issue, I'd give him a hug.

And then I'd say, you know, tomorrow is not going to be February of 2020.

Tomorrow is going to be, you know, June of 2021.

And here's what June of 2021 looks like.

And I mean, it's interesting.

I brought up Lyle Schaller.

He used to actually always say that because Lyle was a futurist and his joke would always

be this because he worked with lots of denominations.

He'd say, well, if tomorrow is, you know, 1995, everything should be just fine.

But it's not going to be, we, we can't go back.

And, um, in some ways I think we were already were behind.

And so I think it's forced all of us, especially what we're talking about digitally to catapult

forward to the current reality.

And, um, I mean, yeah, I think I help them work through that grieving process that Craig

taught because they're just, they're just, they're missing the past and it's not coming

back.

Not the way it was.

Awesome.

Well, well said, uh, work on the grieving and mourning portion of it.

You gotta, you gotta let go of, of models and realize maybe the end game is something

different and embrace some new ideas.

The, the idea of the innovation, um, going with the edge, you can't get everybody to buy

in, but go with what you can set that example, celebrate, tell those stories, uh, and then

let the others come along is, is, that's a beautiful picture.

Well, gentlemen, thank you for this conversation.

Uh, thank you for the time.

Uh, I, I know, uh, it's, it's hard, um, believe me, it's hard to get you two together at the

same time with schedules.

And so I'm very appreciative of the limited time that we had.

Dave Ferguson, sir.

Thank you for, for joining on Craig, uh, once again, uh, it's, it's always a pleasure.

Hey, thank you, Jeff, for what you're doing too.

Cause I feel like in many ways you are kind of leading the charge in this conversation for

the church here in North America.

So keep it up.

Dave, great to see you.

Appreciate your leadership.

Thanks, man.

You too, Craig.

See you, buddy.

For, for Craig, for Dave, this is Jeff at the church.

digital state insurance planning. Thanks for being here. We'll see you next time on the show.

Y'all have a good day.