EP081: Craig Whitney & Moving Beyond the Church Service Business

Episode 81 of the Church Digital Podcast, powered by Stadia Church Planning.

Jeff here.

I am really excited about this episode.

I've been waiting to roll it out for y'all, but we're going to get to that here in a little bit.

Here at Stadia, we are rolling out some cohorts to help churches like yours figure out how to do church digitally.

Remember, digitally is the combination between physical and digital.

And COVID's wrapping up.

Maybe we're starting to head back to the building.

Physical services are starting to happen.

And what's really fascinating is in this season, all that staff that's been so focused on online is now starting to focus back on the building.

And the online pastor is like, hey, what about me?

What about me?

What's happening?

Or maybe there's not even an online pastor.

The church is just abandoning all these lessons that we learned in this COVID season, going back to the old normal instead of what the next normal should be.

And this is what we, Stadia, here with our digital cohorts are wanting to talk to and help organizations, churches, just like yours, figure out how to do church digitally, physically, and digitally.

Ultimately, to the purpose of getting the churches to thrive, grow, and multiply.

Yes, even multiply in this post-COVID season.

So, man, we've been taking churches.

We already got about 70 churches rolling through this.

And in August, we're going to start this next batch of cohorts.

And we'd love for some of the church digital audience here to jump in on some of these cohorts.

To check it out, the link will be in the show notes, but it's stadiachurchplanting.org slash digital.

It's a three-month cohort.

Information is totally on the website.

We have some awesome speakers that are contributing information.

Mark Venti from Church Home.

Jay Cranda from Saddleback.

Ben Stapley from Christ Fellowship Miami.

Ray D'Armes is even contributing in and talking about being an online pastor from Christ Fellowship Miami.

Intentional Churches, Doug Parks.

Man, I could start rattling off names.

It's phenomenal.

Jason Morris from Westside Family.

You are going to love the content of this.

But more than just content, what I'm really excited about is the opportunity to help with coaching and accountability as stadia is walking alongside the churches.

Not just providing you content and leaving you on your own like a conference, but coming alongside with coaching and accountability to help you thrive, grow, and multiply in the months of the cohort and even beyond with that.

So check it out, stadiachurchplanting.org slash digital.

Okay, so hey, like I said, episode 81, phenomenal.

We're going to keep it in-house here, talking stadia.

We've got Craig Whitney.

Now, Craig's my boss.

We get into that a little bit on the show.

Craig's a great guy, and I've loved working for him.

He's the vice president of planter development for stadia.

Basically, he's responsible for planting churches here in the U.S.

and is doing a lot with developing the planters of it.

We talk a little bit about digital-only church planting.

We'll talk more about that later in the coming weeks.

But the core of what we wanted to talk about here is how to start a movement online, but even more than just setting aside the tech thing.

How do you start a movement?

You see, one of the things that, and I can tell you this, maybe you're feeling this, maybe you're not,

but the hardest thing for me and all of church online is discovering who these people are.

When I was an online pastor, I was getting tens of thousands of views a week and maybe a couple connection cards, maybe half a dozen connection cards a week.

Like a good week was maybe if I had a dozen.

And that still is like less than 1% or right around 1% of the people who are viewing.

And it's like, man, there's got to be a better way to do this.

And it was funny.

When I was actually on staff with Stadia and was talking with Craig after a meeting, I kind of voiced this concern.

And Craig's like, well, Jeff, you're doing it backwards.

And literally when he started explaining to me what he's going to explain in this podcast, my head exploded, like literally like brains.

Okay, so maybe it did look a little bit like the emoji, maybe not so much.

But at the end of the day, it was a phenomenal conversation.

And I wanted to share this with you, Church Digital podcast listening audience.

So here we are.

We've got Craig Whitney, VP of Planner Development for Stadia, also bringing in Emily Diaz, Stadia.

She's one of the project managers here.

And myself, Jeff, with the Church Digital.

In a conversation that I'm calling Starting a Movement Online.

Okay, everybody, here you go.

So I grew up in Northern California.

My dad was a Bible college professor and then went on staff at a local church.

As I got off, went off to Bible college.

The guy who had been the lead pastor of that church became the director of a church planning organization.

And when I was 26 years old, kind of as a mentor for me, having a conversation with him,

you know, kind of a lot of the frustrations a person of that age has.

He said, hey, have you ever thought about starting a church?

I was like, well, hmm, yeah, I could do that.

And so that started this church planning journey for us.

And I planted a church when I was 26, back in what I kind of refer to as the dark ages of church

planning, when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

And, you know, my training for church planning was a single book.

Not because that was all people wanted to offer you.

It's all that existed.

It was just crazy.

We just made it up as we went.

We had no idea what we were doing.

And, you know, great things happened.

It led people to faith.

Remember, you know, baptizing people.

People are friends today.

It's awesome to be kind of the cycle now as part of Stadia where there's people who are

part of that church that we started almost 30 years ago that now are generously supporting

the work of Stadia to plant more churches.

And so kind of there's just this kind of, you know, cool way that God brings kind of these

stories and all of these things around.

There's no great story to tell about this church.

It didn't become a megachurch.

It didn't, you know, it just, it was a pretty normal church.

You know, it led people to faith.

It, you know, helped people restore their marriages, you know, made a difference in our community.

But as a young leader, I was really ill prepared for kind of the onslaught and realities of

just day to day leading a church.

Hit a point where I just got burnt out and kind of stepped away, actually left ministry for

a while.

God was gracious and brought me back and got back in the local church and ministry.

And then about, oh, it's about 13, 14 years ago now, began, really had this church planting

bug and had an opportunity to re-engage in helping other people plant churches.

I worked for another church planting organization for about seven years.

But the organization I'd worked with in Northern California had eventually merged with others

and become Stadia.

So in some very strange, you know, grandfathered in whatever kind of way, I'm a Stadia church

planter.

And so when the invitation came to join the Stadia team, it was kind of this, you know,

it feels like going home.

That kind of, you know, feels like my people and my family.

And I'd love to be a part of that.

And so for the last five years, I've been working with Stadia, really focused on training, coaching

with our church planters.

Now have the opportunity to lead our planter development team, which is kind of a strange

name.

Maybe doesn't really explain to people what we do, but our team is the one that really

provides all of the services that Stadia has to offer to church planters in the United States.

We do plant churches around the world, different strategies, different locations.

But in the U.S., our planter development team is the primary team with Stadia that is doing

that.

And so it's a ton of fun.

Great team.

I love working with church planters.

It's a pretty good gig.

So directly, Craig is my boss.

So I work underneath him.

And indirectly, I guess, with Emily, it's like boss of boss or something in there.

So that's right, right, Emily?

Yeah.

Yep.

So we're walking on eggshells at this point.

I want to be very careful not to screw this up.

I'm such a scary boss.

Yes.

I'll tell you right there.

Well, the reason I wanted to do the podcast here is because I really wanted to unpack a

conversation that Craig and I had started maybe a couple months ago.

I think it was early in the COVID season where I was consulting with a church.

And we've talked about this before.

In my past history as online pastor, there's some things that I really struggled with where

we had tens of thousands of people who were watching church services online.

And we really would only have two, three, five, maybe a dozen connection cards to get action on.

I've got tens of thousands of people, but less than 1% are actually giving me anything

to do tangible ministry with.

And that just wasn't acceptable.

Like, we need to figure out ways to overcome this.

And recently, I had a church tell me the story.

Easter Sunday, they had half a million people watching their services online or on television,

but would only action, you know, 11 connection cards.

So it was more than just me as a church.

It was more than just that one church.

I think that's really an issue that lots of churches are struggling with today where we're

doing this broadcast, but we're not effectively moving people beyond just the one hour on Sunday

because they're watching in isolation.

We really don't know who they are.

And so this church that I was doing consulting with early in COVID season was struggling with

this as well.

And I was venting.

I had a meeting with Craig right after the consult, and I was venting to Craig on it.

Man, this just doesn't make sense.

Like, how do you solve this problem?

How do we do it?

And I just, I can never, and I never forget, it's Craig just looking at me and he's like,

well, Jeff, you're doing it backwards.

The goal isn't to start with the service to then get them into groups and get them serving

to get them on mission.

The goal, well, Craig, why don't you explain it?

Set this up a little bit.

What's the goal here?

Yeah.

I mean, you want to get people on mission and you want those people on mission to enter

into relationship with people who, you know, are in their lives, family, friends, coworkers.

You talked with Tim Selleck on our team about the idea of the one, you know, what's your

one thing and who are the people that you do that with?

And then, you know, those are the people that you're introducing to Jesus.

And at some point, you know, those people then begin to become a community and begin

to engage in things that a church is doing.

And we've just operated with kind of this, you know, that step one has to be invite people

to a Sunday experience for so long that it's hard for, you know, kind of the U.S. church

to really imagine any other way of doing it.

But when you're a church planner, there is no Sunday service.

And so the reality is you kind of get forced into doing it differently, kind of get forced

into following this different model.

And so there's a sense that we have, you know, really spent a lot of time trying to understand

and train and encourage planners to do this and learn a lot of things along the way about

what it's like when you start from a different place, when you don't start with a Sunday

service.

If you're not starting with a Sunday service, like this is the part of the show where my

head exploded.

And this is just me coming from like 15, 20 years of multi-site church, mega church, giga

church kind of background.

You know, I can remember there were seasons of my life where I would start to like wrestle

with this.

So I want to do maybe this thing individual and I want to do these house churches and micro

location.

We want to grow them.

But it's, it was a different process.

It was, I was trying to push away from starting with the service, but starting with the individuals.

And it was, it was funny because the church that I was at, they really, they struggled

to, to look at it differently because it was, no, that's not the way that we do it here.

They were locked into that, that central kind of model with that.

And so there's a lot of, a lot of tension and just even realizing, wait, when you're starting

a church plant, when you're starting a movement, yeah, you got to start with the individuals,

not, not with the mass.

Even as we're looking at birthing and doing things online and starting a movement, it was

a, uh, just, it was a, it was a, it was a light shed moment for me.

Like, it just was like, there's a literally a light bulb, you know, the emoji light bulb over

the head, like that was what I was feeling at that moment.

So, I mean, you're, you're coming from a church planner mindset.

Um, some of, some of our audiences, and what's funny is they're laughing at me right now because

it's so basic, uh, in the church planning world.

But it was one of those things that, that I just didn't, didn't capture.

Well, tell me this because there's some people out there.

And even as I have this conversation with churches now, you know, even, even just like

this week, a church is like, no, there's no way Jeff that we can do this because

it's so foreign to them because they've forgotten.

Uh, so I would suggest this, even just to kind of open up the conversation here.

How, how do you create a movement?

How, how would a church create a movement like this?

How would you start with an individual to then build off of that?

Paint that picture for me.

One of the things that we minimize or don't give enough emphasis in just the concept of

movement is the significance of culture.

You know, movements are built on culture.

They're not built on programs because in order to have a movement people, so I define culture

as to some extent, and particularly in this kind of like organization quotes, what tells

people what to do when no one's telling them what to do.

Um, you know, if you ever travel internationally and in cultures where there are just some very

obvious and different things.

I remember traveling to Japan, my daughter was living there, uh, going into a public building,

getting to the door and holding the door open for, you know, the woman with the three kids coming

into the store or the restaurant.

I thought I was being helpful, right?

That's that that's what you do in American culture.

All I was doing was creating a traffic jam because in Japanese culture, a woman's not going to enter

the building first, the man enters first and probably, you know, being a white man who was a foot

taller, you know, probably made that even more, uh, you know, of kind of a challenge.

And so, uh, I didn't know those rules, right?

Those, those, cause that wasn't my culture.

Uh, but in, um, in a church setting, you have culture.

There's, there's things that people have learned to do, even when no one's telling them what

to do.

And if what people have learned to do is to show up on Sunday, um, and to give and to

volunteer once a month, and then that's just kind of the things that they do, what they've

forgotten how to do.

What's not part of the culture is the things that can be done individually.

You know, how they live Monday through Friday, how they enter into their relationships.

And in order to create movement, you have to create a culture that causes people to, to

live that way on a daily basis, even when no one's telling them to do it, because inherently

by the nature of it, they're dispersed when they're doing it.

Um, and so, you know, if you kind of have to pull people together every time to tell them,

Hey, you should talk to your neighbor this week, or you should have lunch with your coworker

or, you know, whatever it might be that that's never going to work.

Somehow you have to instill that into a culture.

And so, um, that's really the challenge for church planners.

And it's the unique thing that church planners have an opportunity to do.

That's so different from an established church is church planners are creating a culture, um,

established churches in all kinds of dynamics, history, whatever, but, but they already have

a culture intentional, unintentional, uh, you know, in, in understanding culture, there's

always, almost always some in unintended consequences of culture, uh, but it's there.

And so it really can be a radical shift to try and get a group of people who have lived a

certain way that that's the culture they have to try and get them to live differently.

And so for church planners, it's about finding people, adventurous people.

I mean, church planners are entrepreneurs, but really the people who join the church, church

planning team and, uh, have to be a bit brave themselves, a bit adventurous.

And the ones who are most effective are the ones who are really willing to go on this new

journey, um, learn new ways of being, uh, new ways of doing church.

And out of that really grows movement.

I mean, Emily, I would say, you know, you probably have seen that in some of our church

plants that sometimes we look at programs and strategies, but I think in many ways, our

most effective church planners are the ones who create strong cultures.

Um, yeah, I mean, does that like, does anybody that comes to mind, do you, can you think of

example, like a church planner that's created a strong culture that's mobilized people?

Yeah, absolutely.

I think, uh, it's difficult because what you're talking about, even in church planting world,

when you are creating a culture, this culture that you're talking about, about being on mission,

in each individual is counterculture to even our, our current culture, right?

In the United States, we live individualistically.

And so this goes against the grain of just even our United States culture.

And so I think these are, these are people and pastors that are leading up upstream.

But yeah, I've seen church planters do this really effectively.

And it's the ones who lead out with vision constantly, right?

That are, that, that, that their people themselves can repeat what their church is about.

Ray Hudson, who we had a conversation with Jeff, you and I, a few weeks ago is leading out

in Berkeley, um, and he ended up launching his church online early, um, and his people are living

within the city.

Um, and they constantly are talking about their one.

So he has said that they are a church that is for the one.

There are four people who, that are not walking with Jesus, but their church is for that.

But each of their individuals are for that.

They have adopted that DNA into their own person and they're constantly gathering together as

a team.

And then saying this week, I interacted with my one at the coffee shop, or this week when

I was dropping my kids off at school, pre COVID, I, I interacted with the mom of, of our

one, or, you know, they're, they're having these interactions in these conversations and they're

life-giving and they're exciting.

And it furthers the team and the church even further down on their mission, because it's

not just the pastor that is the one who is having these interactions and seeing transformation

and people take steps towards Jesus, but it's all the people on their teams and their team.

That's what I have seen, what gets the momentum, right?

When you have this team of people and there's this buzz and this excitement in the air that

just naturally creates a movement forward.

Well, paint a picture for me, because I mean, what you're talking about is this idea of you're

creating this, this culture, you're creating this, this DNA.

How does, how does that vision get passed from, from a planter to the people down?

Because you're not talking, you know, and one of the things Tim talked about recently was

not the organizational one that's important, but also getting each individuals, the ones that

said that, and Emily, you referenced that, how do we get them to understand that one and the

importance of going out and building from there?

I think Tim talked in his conversation about, you know, the importance of personal example.

And I think that is probably the, the, the first and highest priority.

It's really hard to get people to do something that you aren't doing yourself, to live a way

that you aren't living yourself.

So I think that's clear.

It's kind of a first thing.

I think beyond that, there's a key to inviting people into experience, as opposed to kind of

inviting people into training.

You think about the way that Jesus trained the disciples.

The invitation was, come with me, go, go do the thing that I'm doing with me.

Now, along the way, yes, there was training and, and, and teaching, but most of those training

and teaching moments actually followed an experience, something that happened, that they experienced

together, but they didn't quite understand, didn't quite make sense, or, you know, kind of

like the light bulb, you blow it off.

And so then Jesus would bring some words of teaching in to explain that.

We have a tendency to want to do the opposite, right?

We want to teach people and then hope that they would do it.

There's a book, it's old, it's probably out of print.

I think I read it in college days, called Dedication and Leadership, and it's about how the Communist

Party trained people, kind of evangelists in their movement.

And when people said, hey, you know, I want to do this, and it was in the context of London

and I don't know, 40s, 50s, the first thing that they would do is give them communist tracks

and send them out on a street corner.

No training at all, just like, you know, and they would just, they would have a horrible

experience.

People would ask questions and they couldn't answer them and they didn't, like, they didn't

know what to do.

And then they would come back to training and they'd be like, like, like, tell us what

to do.

That was an awful experience.

And, and so, you know, they just kept pushing, kind of pushing people beyond their comfort

zone.

And then almost, you know, kind of backfilling that with training.

And kind of in our American or Western mindset, we just want to pump people full of information

and then somehow think that they're just going to go do the thing that we talked about.

Despite the evidence that tells us that that almost never happened.

I just Amazon, the book, dedication and leadership, Douglas Hyde.

It's selling on Amazon for $954.

So I'm going to go ahead.

I have a copy on my shelf.

I'm going on vacation.

You can make some serious jingle, man.

Pay for your next vacay.

So I'm going to throw the link on show notes and somebody feel free to go in and spend $954

on the book or pawn an office, Craig.

Maybe he'll give it to you for 800.

Yeah.

Okay.

We're going to put this guy out on the corner and he's going to hand out communist documents,

brochures, paraphernalia.

He's not prepared.

He's not trained.

He's, he's learning in the process.

Do we use, well, we need to train these people as an excuse to, to not unleash them.

Is it, we need to prove that they're worthy by getting the go through a longer process

before, you know, when I, when I talk with church planners, they're like, yeah,

somebody is more likely to witness, uh, and bring someone to Christ earlier in their faith

than, than, than later, because that later never actually comes.

What, what does that tension look like?

And how do you navigate that?

I don't know.

I think we have probably become kind of overly concerned about orthodoxy, you know, kind of

the correctness of way things are shared.

And so, um, we've kind of perpetuated the idea by our own concerns that, uh, you know,

people had to somehow say the right words to introduce someone to Jesus.

I'm incredibly grateful.

The, the church I grew up in youth ministry, you know, this was a culture that was there.

And we, and as I remember as a young person being empowered and trained to go and introduce

other people to Jesus.

And when students, other students would visit our youth group, the youth pastor didn't go

visit them.

My friends and I did.

And I can remember sitting in friends' living rooms, you know, and introducing them to Jesus

and have people say, yeah, I want to follow Jesus.

Like, would you, like, would you experience that?

Like, you want to go do that again.

Um, and I think the problem is, that's part of the problem is we haven't given people that

experience by the time somehow they've learned or acquired or gotten to a place where they

somehow now have the right or the privilege to go do that.

They've kind of lost the excitement and the enthusiasm for it.

And probably very few people ever get to jumping through enough hoops to get there.

Kind of look at what Jesus did, you know, and the, the sequence of time and training the

disciples and how early it was that he's saying, Hey, you got the spirit go, you know, and,

you know, tell people and, and heal people.

And it's, it's, it's crazy to our way of thinking, like who in their right mind would

send people out to do that.

Uh, but Jesus did.

I love that example of, you know, when you were talking about just giving, providing people

experiences, inviting them to come along, I, that scripture, right?

Where, where Jesus goes and he calls his disciples and he just says, drop your nets and follow

me.

And they just do it.

They just drop their nets and they just go.

And they didn't say, well, let me get out a list of 50 questions to check your doctrine

before, or let me, you know, they just went left and they followed him and they just lived

life with Jesus.

Right.

And ask questions along the way.

And we have the advantage in the church planting world to really live similarly to that, right?

Where the church planter is calling people and saying, come along, let's do this thing.

And people are coming along and they're doing life and having those shared experiences of

ministry together.

But Craig, what would you say when, with established churches who have hundreds or thousands of people,

people, that that shared experience or apprenticeship is a lot harder to achieve on that level or

on that, that scale?

How do you achieve that similar culture in that environment?

Sometimes we're not very wise in the way we approach change.

You know, if you've got, I would say, even if you have hundreds of people, you don't start

with hundreds of people.

You have a hundred people, you start with tens.

If you have thousands of people, maybe you start with a hundred.

You, it's unrealistic to think that you're going to turn the whole ship all at once.

And the much better strategy is to say, let's let the ship keep going in the same direction

it is.

And let's find a few people that are willing to get in a little boat and go have a different

kind of experience.

They're going to come back and they're going to talk about how great that was.

And the next time we take the little boats, maybe there'll be two of them instead of one

of them.

And eventually a whole bunch of people on the ship are going to look around and going,

Hey, all these people are going out in these little boats and they're having a way better

time than we are.

Like, what is going on?

Right.

And then you've got the momentum to kind of turn the ship and create organizational change,

but it's really a kind of a bottom-up strategy.

And it's really, it's almost adopting, I think, a lot of what church planners are doing.

You find a few very entrepreneurial people, catalytic, who want to do something different.

And you empower them and celebrate them until the thing that they're doing begins to catch

on.

Wholesale organizational change in the church, in any other human organizations, almost never

works.

Well, let me ask this question then.

If we're shifting away, if the idea of doing this backwards, if it's focusing on individuals

instead of the gathering, what is the role of the gathering?

So if, you know, instead of going the services, small groups on mission, if we start on mission,

does small groups have a purpose?

Does the big gathering have a purpose?

What is, what does this look like if we're going with this discipleship first, disciple

making first mentality?

I think definitely, Lee, that it does.

And I think when I've seen it done very well, a weekend experience is catalytic.

If you think of, you know, our, I have some good friends, Bart Rendell, Doug Parks wrote

a book called Intentional Churches.

They talk about the Great Commission engine.

It has three pistons.

It's, you know, the catalytic weekend or the catalytic experience, life-changing relationships

groups, trans-forward living, which is kind of the serving.

And you can connect that to what lots of churches use, kind of have these three things that they

say they're about.

And it's, it's biblical.

It's, there's some language nuances.

But when you talk about it as an engine, there's kind of this idea of flywheel comes into effect,

right?

That, you know, it takes a lot of energy to get it moving, but once it gets moving, it

kind of keeps itself moving and has a lot of momentum.

And I think that the weekend, when seen as a catalytic element that moves people in these

other areas, has the ability to really move and accelerate the flywheel.

For me, the, what I see is kind of where sometimes the problem starts is when Sunday or whatever

you want to call that experience becomes the end rather than a means.

When it becomes the thing, like it is the definition of what it means to be church and to do church

rather than a thing that we do as a part of our shared mission of making disciples.

And, and it just creates all kinds of problems.

You talk about consumerism and you just, all those things in the church, they all kind of

are rooted in that seeing Sunday as an end rather than a means.

We tell church, I tell church planners, Emily will have heard me say this so many times,

she's probably sick of it.

As a church planner, you are not going into the Sunday church service business.

You are going into the people movement business.

Your job as a church planner, the thing you are starting is all about moving people from

where they are to where God wants them to be.

And your success is defined not by how well you do Sundays, right?

If you're going into the Sunday church service business, then that would be the definition

of your success.

Your success is defined by how well and how many people you are able to move from where

they are to where God wants them to be.

And so if you really wrap your head around that, you could do Sunday and you could do it extremely

well.

And you could have hundreds, even thousands of people showing up online, in person, like

that piece becomes somewhat irrelevant, to be honest, in this context.

But you might not be moving anybody anywhere.

And so is that success, right?

If Sunday is the end, then it certainly looks like success.

But if making disciples is the end, then that's going to look like not very successful.

And so seeing Sunday as the means to accomplish what we're really about, what our mission really

is of making disciples, of helping people become who God intended them to be, doesn't take Sunday

out of the equation.

It just gives Sunday a different purpose, a different place in all of the activities that

we share as a church.

Craig, when you talk about those three different aspects, right, of the intentional churches,

they call it the great commission engine, right?

It's the up, in, and out of church, right?

A lot of times when we look at church plants or churches, there is an emphasis on one piston

or another, right?

It is the weekend experience and they grow to large numbers.

But maybe struggle in the fact of developing individual disciples that are actually living

on mission, or it's a more missional movement, but they don't have the numbers.

It seems like maybe that might be a little slower and numbers grow smaller because they're focused

on each individual.

So how do we, how do you overcome those challenges to where we, those three pistons look even and

you kind of overcome those, whether the lack of making disciples in a, in a mega church

scenario or the lack of growth in a more missional model?

The alternate, the kind of the alternatives you describe are really a reflection of something

other than Sunday becoming the end rather than a means.

community impact, issues of social justice, you know, become the end, then you can have a

group of believers who are very involved in that.

And, and those are good biblical things that Jesus people do, but, but they're not the whole

of the mission of the church, right?

So you've taken one piece and you've made it the end.

You can, you know, make community the end, like, Hey, it's all about, you know, being together

in close knit relationships.

And those are very transforming, can be super impactful for those people, but kind of all

sense of mission, all sense of transforming others.

And so the, the, the overemphasis of any one of kind of those pistons or that up and out kind

of, they lead to different consequences, but, but what all those consequences share in common

is a failure of mission.

If mission is defined as making more and better disciples.

And I think that's one of the challenges that we have to wrestle with.

Both of those things are part of the mission.

We can't say, well, we have a lot of people, so we're making more disciples.

We can't say, oh, you know, we only have a few people, but they're really following Jesus.

Those are false dichotomies.

Jesus called us to reach the whole world.

We have to hold more and better together intention.

And when we do that, then I think what you begin to realize is that these three things work

together, none of them is an end.

All of them are a means.

And if our primary metrics are how many more disciples, you know, good disciples are we making?

It's maybe a little bit over-optimist, but you kind of create a self-correcting system,

right?

Because the system's always going to come back to the core question.

And if you're really asking the hard questions at some point, you're going to realize, wow,

what we do on Sunday is just not adequate.

But, you know, maybe it was adequate for a different size or a different era in our growth.

It's not adequate anymore.

We need to put some energy into doing that better.

But you might also realize, wow, we put a lot of emphasis on making Sunday better.

Right now, what we realize is we aren't able to connect all of those people into community.

And that community is so vital for life transformation.

And so now we've got to give a bit of our energy there.

I think realistically, no church ever keeps all of those things in perfect balance all the time.

You're always going to give a little bit of emphasis to one or the other.

But if you have the right core mission and metric, again, I think you'll ask the question that causes you to give

emphasis to correcting the areas that are kind of holding back your mission.

I think it's when we become ideological about some of those other things.

We give all of our attention to them.

In essence, we kind of back ourselves into a corner of trying.

We have to prove that this is right because we've publicly declared that this thing is what's most important.

You know, we're arguing with our, you know, Christian friends about, you know, missional or incarnational or attractional.

And none of that is helpful.

It puts our eyes on the wrong thing.

And so if we could keep the focus there.

I would describe myself as kind of being model agnostic.

And again, you know, Emily, you know, we work with church planners who kind of take a lot of different approaches to the way that we do church.

Stadia is not a cookie cutter, you know, follow these 10 steps, do this exact program, and, you know, boom, you'll get a church.

Our churches don't all look alike.

Like, if you could visit Stadia churches across the country, sometimes I think you would be shocked.

You know, it's kind of like in a family where you sometimes you meet siblings and you're like, wait a minute, you guys are like, you can't believe that two people go together.

You would have that kind of reaction because people are living out these things in their own context with their own vision, their own ideas.

What I hope that we're trying to instill in them as common is this mission of making disciples.

And they're working out how to do that in their context.

And that's the definition of the win, not whether your model of church is missional, incarnational, attractional.

To me, like I said, I'm not against any of those, but I'm not for any of them either.

Or, you know, I'm for making more and better disciples, however God's equipped you to do that.

You know, it's interesting.

Sometimes I think that the physical churches, the already existing churches, let's say it that way, they revert back to their staff as the ones who are effectively doing this, right?

Like they're not necessarily taking advantage of or they're forgetting the power of the individuals, the attenders.

Somebody who's on the podcast recently called them the activators of the church.

Recently did a conversation with another church consulting thing, and it was suggesting this idea of this backwards approach.

You know, instead of starting with the services, starting with people on mission and then building influence and growing the church that way.

I think it was the executive pastor kind of paused and looked and said, Jeff, right now we've got over a thousand people who are regularly wanting, regularly attending a service online.

And you're, you're telling me that, that I should abandon that model.

And there were three of them on a zoom call and instead just focus on the three of us building that, that influence and, and growing the department that way.

Now I'm not, I wasn't saying, and I corrected, I wasn't saying abandon the service, but I also corrected this idea of, yeah, you're mistaking that it's, I'm just talking to the three staff people who are on this zoom.

There's maybe 50, 75, maybe a hundred others in your body who given the challenge could, could step up and see that.

So like if, in the world of existing churches, how do we get the individuals, you suggested earlier that throw them out on the street, let them go.

But how do we get those people going?

What, what's the, what's the catalytic thing to, to get them to do this?

Yeah, I, I would probably recommend a little softer approach than what Douglas Hyde describes in his book.

I don't know that we need to create that much failure.

But, but, um, I, I do think you've got to identify, I'd go back to that, you know, you create that change by identifying people who are willing to go do something different.

You've got to figure out how do we identify that?

What's, what's the invitation?

And I think, you know, again, we have this little bit of mindset that our invitations are all designed in such a way that everyone's going to say yes to them.

Like that, that's the objective.

And so we then make kind of the wrong invitations.

We're afraid to make an invitation that seems, you know, so audacious or so crazy that, you know, nine out of 10 people are just going to think we're nuts and ignore us.

Well, you know, maybe that's fine because the people we really want to say yes, you know, are the one out of 10 who are like, yeah, you know what?

I'm, I'm, I'm up for that.

Let's, let's go do something different.

I'm willing to go do something crazy.

And I think that plays, um, or that works, you know, physical, digital, you know, I think there's a human nature dynamic to that.

Work with those people, my church planning mentor had a phrase, if you've been around Stadia, you've heard it, um, you know, go with the goers.

We spend a lot of time trying to bring the laggards along, um, to try and figure out how to get the laggards to go where we want to go.

A little bit of human nature, you know, there's definitely some spiritual dynamics and Holy Spirit, we probably have to wrestle with inside of that.

But we have to be okay with some, a few people stepping out ahead of the whole, um, and teaching others how to do this.

Paul went, Paul didn't even want to go to Philippi, right?

Paul wanted to go into a, like, you know, Paul's trying to go plan a church, like, you know, the Holy Spirit's just telling them repeatedly, no, no, no, I won't let you go start a church over there.

And finally, in a vision says, cause I'm trying to get you to go to this place, you know, Macedonia over there, you know, and Paul shows up and they meet this woman, Lydia,

amongst all these women who are in this place of prayer, why was, like, she wasn't the only woman there.

She was, you know, one of the people there, but she was the goer.

She was the one that, that heard and that listened.

And, you know, there's, you maybe take a little bit of internalizing, but, you know, a church was birthed out of Lydia's home.

They could have spent 10 years down by the river trying to convince all of those people to join this thing.

They didn't, they found the one person that was ready to go and they went and they empowered her.

And, you know, we have kind of the story of this Philippian church that was birthed and has a significant place in the New Testament.

It's, it's really not any different.

I mean, you just, you know, sometimes we just need to go back and read the book of Acts and kind of do what they did.

Yeah, so much truth right there.

What, what other, what other challenges would, would a, would a church face, a church plant or a physical, or excuse me, either a church plant or an existing church?

What challenges would they face maybe thinking this way of, of swinging to a, a more balanced approach as opposed to featuring the, the service as the strong part?

I think the biggest challenge is simply letting go of what we know, of what's comfortable, what's familiar.

You know, I think, and I'm not, maybe I shouldn't say this.

I think for some of our church planters in this COVID season, one of the challenges is we've wondered, hey, are we ever going to be able to gather?

Are we ever even going to be able to do any things?

Is, at some level, there's this, part of the vision is a self-identity of me in front of a group of people teaching them about Jesus.

And that's an incredibly painful thing to lose when that's the way that you have seen yourself and, and been part of your dream and your vision for your life.

And so, I, Emily, you work day to day with church planters.

I, I, you know, I know there's this drive.

I mean, can you talk about that like this?

I've got to get to doing Sunday just because it's the thing I know.

Yeah, I think it's built so deep into the church culture that a lot of times it's, it is what the definition of myself as a pastor, as I do, I do a Sunday experience.

And one of the things that we talked about in this current season, right, of COVID is that the queen has been removed, right?

Our ability to gather on Sunday mornings to commune together, to preach, to worship has been removed.

But a lot of times from the very beginning for a church planter, that's gone anyways.

They don't have a Sunday experience until the end of where they're trying to get in this journey, right?

And so, I think it's a learning process for those church planters of all of a sudden, I, I don't have this rhythm in my life that I've lived for how many ever years of being in ministry.

Of every Sunday I wake up and I do church.

You don't also have the burden, right, of, and I think a lot of times pastors and, and church leaders that you just naturally get forced into the focus of a Sunday experience.

Because every seven, every seven days, right, it comes back and all of the time and the effort that goes into putting that on.

But as a church planter, before you've officially launched that Sunday experience, you don't have that pressure.

And so, I've seen church planters struggle of figuring out that new rhythm of life, but then really thrive, thrive in that of saying, really, I, what you said, Craig, is I'm, I'm in this business, right?

To, to, because we're about people and we're about making disciples.

And all of a sudden you have so much more time and energy to invest in those people that are, that are around you.

And there's like this newfound love, I think, for a lot of church planters of investing in relationships, investing in apprenticeship of people and walking with Jesus.

And then getting to see them walk towards and giving them roles to eventually get to a Sunday service that they, they launch in the end.

Yeah, there was a time where I, I think the, the hero of the church, if the church was successful, the hero of the church was the, was the lead pastor.

Get a dynamic person on stage, people traveling.

I can remember, even as a child, I knew people that were driving, you know, 60, 90 minutes to come be part of the church that I was at, because we just had a very dynamic pastor who was, who was preaching at that.

In 2020, there's always better content.

There's always a better preacher.

I mean, shoot, I can pull up a podcast and listen to some of the top guys in the country, just in my earbuds when I'm taking a walk.

And so having some of that be the draw in to, to a church, it's, it's not as effective today as it once was.

The relational aspect, the people aspect, the on mission aspect of, of getting people to understand their role for evangelism and seeing in disciple making and seeing that enacted throughout their circle of influence.

That's where, that's where, that's where people stay, I think tapped in and they, they stay in tune because they see their part in the plan.

And it's more than just, Craig, you mentioned earlier, it's more than just consuming content.

It's their part of God's story for the church and the church is enabling and empowering God's story in their own lives.

It's, you know, Larry Walkenmeyer, we did a podcast with him recently.

He's a lead pastor at a church in California as well.

And he mentioned this phrase of kingdom mission that a lot of times it's not some of the things that, that his church does when he's empowering these people.

It's, it's not necessarily as benefit for his church as much as it is for the kingdom.

And it's okay to do things for the kingdom, for the church to support people as they're on kingdom mission, even if it doesn't directly come back and help the church directly.

And so there's some fascinating nuances there.

It's episode 60.

If you want to go back and listen to that podcast, it was, it was a good one.

What's the role, you know, and I hear this phrase, the, the idea of a priesthood of all believers.

Where you're actually like doing a, maybe it's a minimal ecclesiology, but there's a, there's a smaller church that that's growing out of possibly something like this.

Even my own church, we're wrestling with this idea of, okay, we've got this, you know, maybe a smoother movement, more centralized movement that's happening here.

That's an equal balance of services of, of groups of, of communities.

And that's what's happening.

But we're also wrestling with this idea of maybe wrestling out and empowering some people to lead micro locations, to lead house churches, to do some unique things online where, where they're empowered and gifted to do things like communion, like baptism.

And, and, and, and basically given the authority to, to do more of the biblical weight of this, as opposed to maybe a, a pastor or someone who's more ordained doing that.

Craig, what, what, what are your tensions surrounding that?

What, what does that look like?

And how would that fit into maybe this idea of a, of a backwards approach, of a disciple making approach?

I think it's very important.

I think we have a, sometimes I wonder, and I realize that there's a certain sense in which that is a biblical phrase, but I think it's maybe not the, the best way for us to understand the concept.

Biblically, you know, in the Old Testament, a priest had a very unique role.

There were things a priest could do that no one else could do, access to God that a priest had that no one else had.

And so that gave the priest this unique place in the community, in the living out of their, their shared faith.

We come to the New Testament and on Pentecost, which we just celebrated, that the spirit is given equally to everyone.

This idea that there is one group of a person or one group of people who have an ability that nobody else has is shattered.

Everyone now has, is empowered by the same spirit to accomplish the same work.

And if we understand that, if we believe that, then our confidence in releasing people, and I think this is, it is not in how well we've trained them.

You know, it's not in how well they've, you know, memorized something or can, you know, repeat something or what our confidence in releasing and empower them should be based in the recognition that the Holy Spirit is working in and through them in the same way that the Holy Spirit is working in and through us.

And that if there is something that the Holy Spirit wants to accomplish through them, the Holy Spirit is going to accomplish that, even if they don't have a clue what they're doing.

And even if they get the words wrong, and even if they say something, now you'll have to edit this out of the podcast, you know, that, that is actually biblically incorrect.

It's just, I think we, we've become so concerned about controlling all of it, rather than recognizing the spirit, the presence of God in each person, and asking ourselves, how do we release that?

How do we empower that?

And there is not any one of us who is more capable of mission, more capable of disciple making than the other.

Now, again, biblically, there are different gifts.

Some of us have been gifted to play different roles, and not everyone should sit in the seat that I sit in, and I shouldn't sit in the seat that other, like, I get all that.

But that doesn't make me better or special or different.

It's just, it's just unique.

It's just the thing God's given me to do that I need to be faithful to in the same way that other people need to be faithful to what they've done.

But it's the same spirit.

That's what Paul teaches.

It's the same spirit that's working in all of us.

And when we hinder that, we hinder the work of the church.

And so that's what needs to be released in everyone.

You know, I think a lot of times when we think about disciple making, our natural American systematic minds might think, okay, well, we have to build out a structure of how disciples will go out and live on mission and make disciples.

And what you're talking about, Craig, is that might look different for all people, right?

Because we have the spirit.

But each one of us, each of the three of us are wired intrinsically different.

And our bents and our bents and our passions and our voices are different.

I have the advantage of getting to work with Kansas City Underground, Rob Wagner and Brian Johnson, over the last year and a half.

And this is where they are, like, they are right on point of really looking at individuals and helping them understand who exactly you are.

How were you built?

How were you wired?

What are the giftings that God has given you?

And how can we utilize those things in the spirit within you to release you on mission in your life?

And I think that is, that's when we get really dynamic disciples on mission, right?

Is that when we say you are empowered by the spirit, right?

The same that each of us have.

But you're also given all of these different giftings and passions that God is giving you for a purpose to be set on fire by the spirit to go out on mission.

How, as a church leader, do you go and take people on that process of understanding their giftings to be able to release them on mission?

That's so good.

That's a hard challenge, too, right?

Like, how do we get started?

How do we do this?

So, like, let me ask this question.

Church planning, culture is key to all of this.

I had a church, I had a friend tell me once, you can control or you can grow, but you can't do both.

I don't know that I agree with that to the full extent of it.

But I do think it's an interesting challenge.

And culture, as you mentioned, is really laid out throughout this, where it's important to have that culture in place so that you can run, so that you can trust, so that you can release these people who are driven, who understand the culture of what you're trying to do and how the spirit leads.

Church planner already is building the culture, I would suggest, it's easier for a church planner to go on this road than an existing church.

An existing church, there's somebody out there who's listening that's saying, okay, I'm interested in doing this, but my boss is going to think this is ridiculous.

The lead pastor, there's no way that he's going to buy into this.

We need to establish that culture for the church to be healthy in that.

Walk me through here.

Give me a couple application points, next steps, questions to ask.

How do you suggest someone who's interested in doing this in an existing church, how do they get started navigating this road?

I would suggest, and this might sound a bit like, be rebellious.

I mean, do your job, you're under authority, but just begin doing it.

There's probably nothing, if you're a staff person in a church, there's nothing that says you can't equip people to do the work of ministry.

You may have to continue to carry some things that are on your plate while you're doing that, but I would really say just go do it.

And I think it's the kind of thing that speaks for itself.

There will be some church somewhere, some kind of broken culture somewhere, but in the vast majority of churches, if you begin equipping people and you begin releasing them and they begin making disciples, somebody's going to notice.

And rather than tell you to stop, somebody's probably going to begin to ask the question, hey, wait a minute, what are you doing?

Like, what are you doing that's different than from the rest of us doing, and how could all the rest of us be doing that?

And again, I think we have this desire to kind of fix the organization first.

Now, if you're the leader of the organization, there's some different responsibilities and role there, but if you're not, don't try and fix the organization.

You know, fix yourself first.

Fix your own ministry first.

Just go do it.

Somebody will do that and lose their job probably.

I realize that that happens out there.

But in the vast majority of cases, someone will take notice and someone will begin to ask different questions, and you can influence the organization from the bottom up.

The question is, do you have the patience and the endurance to continue on that path and to really work hard at that until people notice, you know, until you can produce fruit and until people notice.

And that's not going to be a quick fix.

And I think that's part of the challenge of our culture is we want everything instantaneously.

You know, it took Jesus three years to equip his disciples.

We want to do it in three weeks.

And we only want to spend an hour together each week for a class.

That's not what was shown us about what this takes to accomplish.

Hey, Craig, thanks for jumping on this.

Definitely some things to think about as we're trying to wrestle.

The thing that's resonating with me the most, and it's just, it's this idea of massive, I forget how you said it, but the massive moments don't rarely work.

And so it's sometimes it's, it's starting small and allowing it to grow.

The flywheel of itself is going to take time to develop until it gets to that self-sustaining level.

Be patient with it in the run.

Church planners starting out, you know, you know, organizations like Stadia who are holding your hand and walking through those steps with you are awesome.

Existing tangible churches that are already out there who, you guys may not have that person who's giving you, you know, encouragement in that process.

I'll tell you, in my own life, I struggled with that where, you know, there were one or two people that I worked with who saw the vision of what I was doing, but the majority hadn't.

So, hey, churches that are out there who are, are doing this or wanting to do this, be patient.

You know, God will do something in his time.

And the awesome thing is it's going to be in his time.

Trust him to, to do that for you and for your organization as, as you're pivoting that way.

Well, well, Craig, as, as we're landing the plane here, any, any questions or any, any thoughts on your end?

I would go back to just emphasizing this thought, you know, if you wake up on Monday and you think you're in the Sunday church service business, write a resignation.

You don't have to give it to a boss, you know, right?

Just write a resignation for yourself that says, you know what, I'm, I, as of today, I quit being in the Sunday church service business.

And I'm going to go to work today on being in the disciple making business and the people movement business.

And even if I don't know how that works and I don't know how to do it, that's what I'm going to wake up tomorrow morning thinking about doing.

That mind shift more than anything else will affect everything you do in ministry.

Well, I tell you what, you've been doing a great job of getting people to resign and quit in this podcast.

So if they are, if, if, if, if that does accidentally or intentionally happen, this is awkward.

You can plant a church with Stadia.

I was about to say, you know, StadiaChurchPlanning.org and they'll be more than happy to help plant and get started on, on, on a physical or even a digital only church here coming very soon.

So, hey, this has been a great podcast.

Craig, man, you're an awesome boss.

Thanks for being that guy.

Thanks, Jeff.

Love, loved having you on here.

Emily, once again, thank you for, for joining us for Emily, for Craig.

This is Jeff at the Church Digital.

Thanks for jumping on the podcast with us and we'll see you next time.

Y'all have a good day.