EP023: Tom Pounder and Developing a Digital Missionary

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Church Digital Podcast. My name is Jeff, and we've got a great

episode lined up for you today. You are listening to episode 23. We're excited about this one. We've

got one of my great friends of Church Online coming in today, Tom Pounder. Tom is the online

pastor over at New Life Christian Church, NLCC, over in Washington, D.C., Virginia area.

By the way, this is not the first time we've talked about New Life. In an earlier episode,

we had on Jade Earhart, who is a graphic designer, actually, no, excuse me, video motion

graphics over at For New Life. And so Jade was talking about his discipleship ministry for video

gamers utilizing some different online platforms. So if you didn't listen to that episode, definitely

go back to it. But I'm definitely excited about what's coming up this episode with Tom as we're

digging into this idea of what exactly a digital missionary is, and more specifically, what

what it could be. This idea of, hey, we all have a digital presence at some level, and how

we communicate, how we share, how we can train people to be a disciple who's capable of creating

a disciple utilizing virtual methods, utilizing digital methods. It was a really interesting

conversation. Tom and I started on this path a couple weeks ago, and it ended up stopping the

conversation. It was like, hey, we really need to do this in podcast format. Because a lot of the

questions that we're asking right now, I'm sure others are listening, are asking, and out there in

listening audience, as with all our podcasts, we may not have all the answers. But we definitely have

questions that hopefully will help you dig in while you try to figure out the answers for yourself.

And so we've got Tom, we've got Ray D'Armas, a guest host coming back in again, online pastor

from Christ Fellowship Miami. And so love, love having Ray on, as always. A little confession,

it's been a rough week this week. In the news, time wise, we discovered that Marvel, Disney,

had a little breakup with Sony, and Spider-Man's no longer in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Not gonna lie, it was a little traumatic time for my kids. Not gonna lie, it was a traumatic time for

myself. And so, yeah, we talk about it a little bit at the beginning of this podcast. If you're one of

these people who are like, Jeff, get over it, it's a movie. Here's what I need you to do. I just need to

take the little scrub bar in the podcast, you know, shove it down maybe three or four minutes.

You'll be fine. If you're like, I totally hear you. This is bonkers. Spider-Man was a billion

dollar movie. How can they not do it again? Yeah, I don't know the answer to that. So you'll enjoy

the next two or three minutes while Ray, while Tom and I lament over the craziness that is that. But I

do promise you this, that all this talking about the Spider-Man stuff, it's going to tie into the

podcast because there's a current theme of superhero-ness in the podcast. But even above

and beyond that, there's this desire of how can we as Christians get connected into the subcultures

and the subgenres that exist. And even crazy stuff like talking about Spider-Man can be used as a way

to bring glory to God. So listen to the podcast, dig into it. And yeah, it's a great one. You'll enjoy.

Hey, everybody. Here you go. We're in the school year now. Yeah. So it's kind of crazy.

Oh, look. Oh, I'm sorry. How do you really feel, Ray? Just anything you want to like work out? Do we

need to set up therapy session before you look a little angry? Oh, yes, I am very angry. And let's

discuss this. Okay. We need to talk to Sony and Disney because I think I've worked all this out.

And here's my idea. And here's my plan, guys. And you can say I'm nuts. And I'm sure there's

more money that goes into it. But this is my over simplistic plan to bring Spider-Man back into the

MCU. We go back to the 5% deal. Okay. Disney gets 5%. Sony gets 95. But Disney gets exclusive streaming

rights of all Spider-Man movies for Disney+. That's not bad.

Yeah. I still live in this world where I think it's a marketing ploy.

Oh, I thought that, too. Because we're going to re-release it into theaters.

But this works into the story so great. Even if this does blow up, could you just imagine?

Spider-Man is on the run and disappears off the map for five years. Meanwhile, Sony screws up yet

another Spider-Man. Five years down the road in the MCU, Peter Parker comes back just in time to mentor the

Miles Morales figure once Disney actually gets rights to it. I could totally see this working.

Because the last thing we saw in Far From Home is everybody knows that he killed this guy,

which he may or may not have. But I could see him being on the run.

I think this could totally be a piece of the storyline. So stupid otherwise, I don't know what to do.

Well, and this is where the blame keeps getting shifted back and forth because I understand how

Sony would look at this and say, "Hey, look, you guys are getting 100% of the marketing or the

merchandising stuff. We're just getting 95% of the box office stuff."

I have hopes that this is just early on and it's just going to be worked out. But I mean,

Sony is just terrible. I got in a little discussion on Twitter last night with, I'm a big Batman fan,

and there's a guy that I follow all the time. He's called the Jet. And he was saying, "Screw Disney,

Sony had it right." And he was all angry. And I'm like, "Dude, just chill out. Disney got it right."

I mean, Sony screwed over Spider-Man so many times.

It's a miracle that we got Spider-Man in the MCU anyways. We still can't kind of forget about

that. Like this was kind of a make or break last moment in Civil War where they almost didn't put

the character in there. They were going to go with a completely different character if they didn't get

the rights. And so it was kind of "miraculous" that these two companies were able to work together for

this span of films. And yes, I do think that Sony has treated the character atrociously with the

exception of the first two "Maguire" movies and "Into the Spider-Verse."

This is my prediction. Marvel's going to release a new comic. It's going to be called "Arachnid Boy,"

starring Pieter Parker, who's going to be from Romania, coming in. And he's going to become

this web-slinging guy that's going to be awesome. No, I'm kidding. It's none of that's going to happen.

I'm here for Tom Holland, starring in his own movie called "Night Monkey."

And I'm fine with that.

Rebranded to "Night Monkey." Let's make that crap happen.

Yeah, now that Spider-Man's been thrown under the bus by Mysterio, "Night Monkey" can emerge as the

true hero. This was all Marvel's ploy the entire time. And it's all going to work out just fine.

Awesome. So we actually have a podcast we need to talk about, although the Spider-Man stuff is very

fresh on our minds. And so, by the way, listening audience, you can't see this. I literally have a

Spider-Man fidget cube on my desk. This is what I used to really stress. So we're all feeling this pain

at home. Peter Parker, Tom Holland, wherever you are, we do love you. But let's dive into the

Church Online piece, since that's what the listening audience really wants to hear. I wanted to dive into

something here. Okay, we've got this gathering of people. We've got all these people that are

watching. What's next? What do you do with them after they're watching?

Yeah, yeah. So I definitely think, you know, again, when you've got all your people watching

and streaming online, you want them to take a next step. You don't want them just to watch.

Just like what you said, you don't want them, if they're attending in person, you don't want them

just to come to church and then leave. So one of the things we did was we started a bunch of different

online life groups. And we've been doing that for a few years. But I've been challenged recently because

I do some different things on because I'm the online campus pastor. I do different things

online. Like I'll do a family devotional and I'll do a Monday motivational type of

thing that I post on YouTube and I'll post on Facebook from the online campus. And then I'll share it

on my on my Facebook page or my Twitter account. And I'll kind of share that as a way to reach out to a

broader base of people. And then so I was talking to someone who's starting to help me out a little

bit more with the church online stuff. And he said, well, a lot of people know you, Tom, because of what

you're doing and sharing and, and doing things, you know, but how, how can we maybe equip and train

people to, to do exactly what you're doing so that we can reach even more people? And that's when, again,

this term is not new to, it's not, it's not something I came up with, but it's something that I really

thought a lot about. Um, and I heard probably a few years ago, this idea of digital missionary,

like what would it look like maybe for someone to, to take that next step and say, Hey, listen,

I am a believer. I I've accepted Christ as my Lord and savior. Now, what does it look like for me to reach

my family or my friends or my coworkers online? How can I use digital tools to do that and be,

become a missionary online? So that's what, one of the things that I've really started exploring a lot

about, what would it look like for me to train people to be this digital missionary? What do I

have to do to equip them? And so that's what I've been really processing a lot lately.

What would a digital, cause you got first off, what's a digital missionary? And then secondly,

you know, the training, the duplication parts of it. So like, what's a digital missionary and Ray,

I feel like we've, we may have touched on this in a past episode, but like, what would a digital

missionary do? Yeah. Again, I, this is where I don't have all the answers, but here are these

thoughts that I've been kind of really processing through is I love social media and we all know

that social media is very toxic at times. You know, Facebook used to be that place where it was

extremely toxic. And then they kind of clamped down on things and people started leaving Facebook,

but I've always loved Twitter. Twitter is like my favorite social platform. Well, if you go on

Twitter, it doesn't take long to realize that Twitter is very toxic too. Anytime a politician will share

something, you should just read all the comments. There's negativity after negativity after negativity,

bashing each other. Anytime a celebrity shares something, it's negativity after negativity.

There's so much negativity. And then I thought, what would it look like for us to be communicators of

hope? You know, we have hope found in Jesus. So what would it look like then for me to say on my Twitter

platform, how can I share hope? How can I share the love of Christ to other people? And so it kind of

really starts off by picking a social platform that you're going to say, I'm going to use this to reach my

friends, whatever social platform you're at, whether you love Instagram or Facebook or Twitter, whether

heck even you love Snapchat. I know some people don't like that, but I mean, what are the social

platforms that you're really involved in and how can you look at that and say, I'm going to minister to

those friends and family members that I'm friends with there and minister to them today?

You know, I've been wrestling with a concept of this and it was centered around, it was funny. I even

tried to launch a small group that would do this. It was an online small group. And the goal was for

them to start to reach out and make connections with people on social media, like within hashtags,

even like on the, on the Twitter or the Instagram, because there's, you know, there's a very tight

community, um, that, that follows a lot of these hashtags. Like, um, I mean, I have, I have exposure

of this. I run, um, well, not as much as I used to, but, um, when I run, I run under, uh, using my,

my Nike app, Nike plus, and even just the community that, that is when they run, they utilize the Nike plus

and, uh, within Twitter and things, and then communicating and celebrating and praising and

encouraging. Um, it's a very kind of, um, um, welcoming community that's utilizing the Twitter

following under hashtags. And so it became, uh, really the, the, the question of how can we utilize

the hashtags and utilize the platform to build these relationships, even just to get them, at least my

view, to get them to the place of asking spiritual questions. Like, I don't, I don't know that you can

land a plane and lead somebody completely to Christ and disciple them completely in context of

social media, like just to, in that, but definitely to, I would suggest maybe to onboard to get them to

ask spiritual questions and then route them to someplace to, to get that, that next piece. Um,

yeah, yeah, I, I would agree with you. I love hashtags. Part of the reason why I love Twitter

is because hashtags are organic and it's free to kind of just roll around and find out who's talking

about what. Um, again, anytime there's a popular show or a sporting event or a, um, award ceremony,

there's always a hashtag that you can find out what people are talking about and be a part of that

conversation. And so I love that idea of using hashtags to engage people in conversations. I'll

say this, most of my Twitter following is because I used hashtags, um, strategically. I found the

hashtags that I wanted to look for, like with hashtag Stu Min for all my student ministry friends,

or hashtag church online for people with church online. I discovered so many people

through hashtags and we're able to start conversations with them because of that. And

in the same way you can use hashtags to have conversations with people about real life stuff.

Like, you know, I love looking up hashtag love and see what people are talking about with love.

And it's like, if someone says something really interesting, I'll reply to them and, you know,

share with them an encouragement, not necessarily a spiritual thing at first, but something encouraging

to encourage them throughout that day. If they're looking for love in all the wrong places.

So, you know, it's something that I think that's important about this. And, and this is,

this is such an important conversation, not just for the internet age, but even for folks inside,

inside a church who don't consider themselves digital representatives or this kind of thing is just

taking the general interest that you have and engaging in those conversations and being a solid

believer there, you know, so everybody here in this conversation, you know, or, or all part of a

subculture that Jeff alluded to earlier, that we're all part of the nerd subculture in the sense of,

man, we love comic books and we love, you know, comic book movies and we love having that discussion and,

and literally just even being a solid, encouraging voice in what can be a very toxic space.

Right. Can bring the gospel in such a great way to a bunch of folks who may never walk through the

doors of a church or may never engage. And that's just taking a specific interest group and really

engaging in what would be normal conversation, you know, be fantastic. And, but at the same time,

really just kind of bring a Christian's voice into it. And I'm not even saying,

and please, if you're out there and you're one of these advocates, don't engage in a subculture

that you're not normally part of, like, don't go into, into, you know, the Marvel universe

subculture on the internet and saying, Hey, we need to bring Bible man into the MCU.

Don't go doing that. But literally being an active voice and having great conversation, but at the same

time, being a loving believer, being a solid example, but learning when to interject Jesus

into the conversation once things start to turn personal and showing love to others.

Yeah. See, I, I love this. I mean, that's the thing. Like when you think about a missionary,

you know, we're all called to be missionaries. Christ calls us there, therefore go and make

disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. And

surely I'll be with you always at the end of the age. Christ calls us all to do that. So if he's

calling us all to do that, there's different ways. You don't have to go to the, to the African

forests or, or, or, or you don't have to go to another country to do that. You can do that all online,

using the online world because I love this. I say this all the time, but you know, I, I worked with

Young Life for many years and Young Life always said, go where students are. If you want to find

where students are at, go where they are and, and find out where they're hanging out with. Well, so many

people are hanging out in the digital world, in the mobile world right now. It's such a, it's a mission

field right there. If we learn how to actively share our faith and engage people in casual conversations

that lead to spiritual conversations. Yeah. And there's, and there's so many different

forums for Christians to take part in, you know, and so many different interest groups.

Uh, it's such a fascinating thing how folks can find each other and really become engaged in,

in a specific community real quick. Um, just last week, my, my garbage disposal was on the fritz.

And so I was like, okay, I can either pay somebody to fix it or I did. I did. I was like, no, I know how,

I know I have confidence that I can try something out. Went to YouTube. And the next thing you know,

I'm part of a community of people who are DIYing stuff at home, you know, and it becomes another

place for me to engage people, not with the secret intention of, Hey, I'm going to win these people to

the Christ, but I can be a Christian within this environment. I can cast a more positive view of

Jesus in the church and there and be a light. And at the same time, hopefully help to engage them in

some of my interests, a la church, a la God, a la Jesus, that, that would help bring them along into,

you know, what we believe, which would be great. Where, where does a volunteer, where does an individual

person engaging in the, in this culture, in a subculture and utilizing the hashtags,

where are they going to struggle? Like, where is the thing that they're going to fall short with?

Or can they, can they do that on their own? Like, where's the weakness in this model?

Well, I think we have to figure out how we can effectively prepare them. I think a lot of

people are not going to want to do this because they're like, I don't have, I don't have the tools.

I don't know what to do. I don't know how to, how to do this effectively. And then again,

I think we have a tendency to take things personally sometimes. So we have to take back,

take a step back and say, we're not, this is not personal. If someone attacks us, you know,

if there's a troll out there, because we all know that there's tons of online trolls, but

how can we really prepare them? I think we need to set them up and give them some training and

equipping them to really learn how to actively share their faith or engage people in conversations

in a digital world. I think, you know, again, yeah. So I think we, we've got to properly train them.

Yeah. I think there's an aspect of that, but some of that too. And this is what I, what I've

appreciated from the way that the teaching style has come from North point. It's, it's building in

those practical applications of living out their Christianity where they're at. Because once again,

the conversation takes place so naturally, like sometimes I worry when we say train them on this,

we're just thinking, Hey, inviting the church, you know, we're going to provide them tools and we're

going to do that. And all that's great. I'm not saying we shouldn't do that too,

but really there's a much larger conversation when it comes to evangelism about being relational

that I think even in forms of our Sunday teaching, as we're talking to our folks,

you know, like I said, I think Andy has done such a great job. And if you've not read Irresistible

yet, you need to, I think it's the answer to so many things that are happening right now with

different folks questioning their faith online and being public with that. I really wish it would

actually take a peek at this book because I feel like he addresses a lot of those issues.

But one of the great things about the book that I feel like he addresses is just the fact that

Christians need to learn how to be loving in these environments and loving those who aren't like

them, no matter what the situation, whether it's, Hey, look, it's 2020 and we're engaged again online in

political discussions. Okay. What does it look for me? What does it look like for me to love somebody

who is not the same political ideology? And how can I carry that out online so that I'm not being a toxic

voice, but so that I'm being a light so that it could bring them one step closer to Christ.

We'll include a link to Irresistible in the show notes. It is a great book that hits a lot on that.

Now, the core of discipleship, at least in Ray, how we've defined discipleship in here is the ability to

create another disciple. So it's a disciple who's duplicating themselves. In this context of this

conversation, a digital missionary is someone who is able to lead to Christ and disciple one in a

standalone environment, um, where we're not necessarily say, you know, just come, come to

church with me. Now I'm, I'm raising the standard maybe a little bit here. Um, a lot of church onlines

would, and it's easy to, Hey, you know, ask the spiritual questions and feed it into like a physical

service or something like that. But just for, you know, argument's sake, let's, let's kind of follow,

follow this through and say, what if the church isn't resourcing and we're not kind of taking the

easy way out here? Um, can a person lead another person to Christ on social media, on Twitter? Like,

is that, is that even possible? What, what would that look like?

Yeah. I would think you would have to take it. Yes. I think you can begin conversations and then

you have to go into direct messaging, you know, and DMing them back and forth and talk to them

about what that looks like. Uh, again, I don't think it would, could happen easily and I've never done

it myself. Um, so I think it would be something where you would have to really walk through them and

it would involve more than social media to, to, I think, help someone really discover who God is

and accept them as their Lord and savior.

That's good. I actually have a personal example of this. If, if, uh, if I may, um, this, this actually

happened to me about a month and a half ago, somebody had been engaging with us online.

They texted me, Hey pastor, things are going on the down and out in my life. I'm having a rough time.

We began a conversation via text. I asked them via text. Hey, listen,

have you given your life to Christ? The answer responded back. Boom. No, but I really want to.

Man, this is powerful. I can lead you right here over text or if you want, we can, we, we can have

a phone call. Ironically, that person was texting me from a classroom. They were, they were in a

college classroom. They were like, can I call you as soon as I get out of class? I said, absolutely.

You can 10, 15 PM. Boom. Phone call hits. I pick it up. Hey, Hey, are you ready to make this decision?

Yes. We pray right there together. They're over the phone. Now that person's integrated in the

community, but it was one of those things where it can happen. So I don't want to talk, you know,

I don't want folks to think, Hey, this is a dream world or, or new stuff, you know, where all this

is theory. No, no, no. All this stuff can happen. And there are steps that we can take to make it more

personal. If, you know, if the person we're engaging really wants to take it there.

So, you know, and then that story is great because it utilizes more, more platforms,

more method of communication than just, yeah, you probably could have texted somebody.

You probably could have done it in a DM direct message environment, Facebook messenger type of thing.

However, you know, a phone call, a zoom, a Google hangout, you know, there, there are methods that

can help that engagement probably go to a higher level. And so as, as a digital missionary, if,

if that's a thing, it, there has to be maybe comfortability with multiple platforms and multiple

ways of communication. Like you, you probably aren't necessarily going to land the plane,

even with like a hard conversation, um, via, via texting. Texting is an environment, you know,

text on a page and we know this from email. It's hard to convey emotions. You, sometimes you read

the wrong emotions in, um, in text, but when you can see the person or when you can hear the voice,

it's easier to convey and understand that. So, man, I'd suggest as I'm not saying as quick as

possible, but as a missionary, like I want to build relationships with these people. Ray, you had

a previous relationship. It sounds like with this, with your example.

No. And, and that's kind of the interesting person. Yeah. And, and, and I can say that

that's for sure. It's an anomaly. Like, I don't want to make it, make it sound like,

Hey guys, revival is happening here. And I'm getting nonstop text messages from people who

tell me that they need to meet Jesus. My phone's just blowing up right now. That's not happening.

Like this is an anomaly, but it's an anomaly that I could see taking place,

taking place more often than not, especially, and this is kind of going back in a few chapters of

this podcast. It's the discussion we have with DJ Soto in terms of the avatar situation where people,

people feel more comfortable just kind of unloading between a medium as opposed to in person,

you know? But this kind of stuff can take place a lot more frequently just because people feel that

comfort of, man, there's something between us. So I feel like I'm in a digital confession booth.

There's a wall between us. So I feel like I can be me a little bit more. I can unload some of these

personal issues. And I feel like I can take a spiritual step with you because there's that line. I mean,

Jesus said it himself, right? A prophet's not owning his own village, right? And so sometimes

folks need that wall up between them so that they don't feel like, well, this person knows me at this

level. Sometimes they need that person, that individual that's like, no, they don't know me

from scratch. So I feel a little more comfortable with unloading some of these issues to them and

taking that step with them. You know, it's interesting that, that DJ Soto, um, I got, I've,

I have personally received more flack over that episode than any other episode we've done. Um,

just out of the, the, the, I mean, uh, basically I opened the podcast in the opening line. I said,

uh, just write it down virtual back VR baptisms count that right there, um, just blew, blew people

up. Like not that doesn't, that doesn't count, you know, it's cause it's, it's a, it's a computer game.

They didn't, they didn't get real. And I was like, there were people there who saw a witness of

it. God doesn't look, man looks on the outward appearance. God looks at the heart. Uh, you know,

but, but like, it's, it's just, it rattles that right. Um, to my system of counting.

But it's interesting where I think there's, um, a digital missionary is going to kind of struggle

with this, this idea as well, or, or the concept of creating a digital missionary is, is going to be,

more difficult. Small group of maybe four or five people that were going through it and asked another

person to, to lead the small group. And, and, and honestly, like the idea of, I think where that

group ended up was the idea of creating a disciple was very much understood. The idea of converting that

discipleship mentality towards the, um, hashtag investing in community, reaching out that,

that, that, that was a struggle. It was funny. Even after months of, of those conversations and trying,

like, I just had side conversations with a couple of the people and they were like, we just,

we just really don't understand, you know, what you want us to, to do. Um, and it's funny,

like, I still think there's legitimacy and Tom, I love the fact that you're, you're bringing this,

this around, but it's, it takes, it takes the right person with the right understanding,

um, with, uh, the right mindset that I'm not going to Jesus juke every person I meet.

Um, so yeah. What, um, what other hurdles do you think that are out there that, that, uh,

that we struggle with on this?

Yeah. Well, that's a good question. I see. And that's the thing I think finding the right person

and finding the right group of people, I think is really important to do it. But I, I do. I mean,

if you just even think back from the most simplest terms, I think what we do in our online persona

can either lead people to Christ or distract people from Christ. Again, you, you, we've seen people,

we've seen our friends who are, um, who go off on rants and go crazy and, and spew stuff all over on,

on, uh, social media. It's like, are you using your digital platform, whatever it is to either

encourage people or discourage people? And so if you're encouraging people, it kind of goes along

with the same thing of people are going to wonder, okay, why is he like that? Or why is she like that?

What, what is, why, why are they like that? And it's going to start some conversations. So definitely,

again, while we don't have all the answers here, I think if you even just think about how can the,

you know, as Ray was talking about, just how can you be hopeful? How can you be light in this world?

Again, because the election is going to be coming up very soon. It's already been talking about

things. Anytime someone says something political, it's just tons of chaos that goes about under it.

How can you be hope? How can you be light to them? You don't have to have all the answers filled out,

but again, it could strike some conversations where you can help lead someone down the path to,

to grow in Christ or hear about Christ in some way using multiple platforms.

I love that. I just, I wrote it down here where I'm at. What we do with our online persona can either

lead to Christ or distract from Christ. It was interesting. And I'm going to confess something

right here. Um, uh, this weekend I got into a Twitter war or excuse me, it was on Facebook,

um, with three or four pastors, uh, local guys in town. Uh, we, we were having an argument over,

um, this is, this is going to be so stupid. Uh, it was Nolan's Batman trilogy versus Captain America and MCU trilogy.

Not, not the overall, not MCU, just the trilogy versus trilogy. And, um, being the guy who hates DC,

I obviously chose cap. Um, if, um, and my whole point, and they didn't want to bring in the MCU,

just the three movies. And I'm like, how can you go in two and three winter soldiers, civil war?

Those are like the two greatest movies ever. Um, anyway, and they, you know, side note,

DC screwed up the entire thing. They should have built their entire DCEU around Nolan's Batman and

everything would have been fine. They didn't. And, and there's, okay. So it's, this is way too much

comics for a church online thing. But what was interesting is, is, um, I got a little pat didn't,

I didn't feel like I lost my testimony. And as a side, we're all joking around. Like we all know each

other. It's fine. There wasn't no bloodshed lost over this, but we were, you know, passionately

arguing. Unfortunately, it was in a public format. And a couple other people kind of jumped in taking

shots that, and I was like, yeah, that might be a little too aggressive here. A little, little too

much. It was not the pastors like outside people. And suddenly like I'm getting Facebook message from

people on the outside. Hey, are you guys okay? Like, I'm, I'm surprised you're fighting with,

with so-and-so with, with one of these pastors. And I'm like, oh, I'm just joking around. Like I,

I backed off when it started to get ugly, but the thing was already rolling downhill. Right. It was,

it was like the boulder was already set. And what started off as, you know, just casually pulling

each other's chains because one's more of a DC fan and I'm more of a Marvel ended up becoming something

that, you know, was causing other people to, to, to question. And it's funny. So often we want to be

casual with our, with our digital persona and, and, um, relational and engaging and, and, and joking

around with some of this stuff. Right. But sometimes what, what we do is joking around, uh, can go far

more, uh, can be misinterpreted. You know, it's this whole thing of what we do in text is, is not

as clearly defined because we can misread emotions into it or somebody else, because it's public can

take it a whole different direction that we don't, we don't want to. And so if a digital missionary is

going to do their thing, like they just have to be wary of that, of somebody misreading.

Absolutely. And the other thing is, is that the digital missionary and all of us should be aware

that there's such a thing as, and I'm going to, I'm going to kill a lot of you internet trolls with

this one word, nuance, nuance. Okay. Like there's shades here. And I'm talking about this, not just

on fun conversations in terms of our comic book or sports hot takes or any of that stuff, but I'm also

talking about theological stuff as well that we don't have to, that we don't have to say, well,

take a side right now. And you know, you either love Jesus if you don't repost this or not. And so

there's a lot of stuff here that I think we need to be very, very careful in terms of how we interact

with each other and how, and making sure exactly you hit it right on the head there.

This whole thing of, well, I said it on the internet and everybody knows that doesn't count

really because a lot of companies will look you up on Facebook and Google and take a look at all

those hot takes and decide not to hire you based on the fact that you can be so controversial.

And so that's something to take a consideration in terms of, yes, your online persona matters.

And yes, people do remember your online persona in public. So don't forget that everything that

you were saying and representing out there on the internet will reflect on what happens to you offline as well.

Listen, I post these things all the time when I see them and I post them a lot. I mean, all these

college kids who had their scholarships rebuked because of something they said online.

Again, my daughter just went through the whole process. She's on the college dance team and there's

lists of criteria of all the things they can and cannot post on social media. And again, they kick

people off all the time based on what you post or don't post. And so, again, who you are,

you cannot be an online persona and a personal persona, just kind of like what Ray was talking

about. You are both. And so you have to reflect who you are. You can't have two different personas.

What's interesting out of this phrase, and it's not where we started, we're all digital missionaries,

if we like it or not.

That's right.

And so the idea of maybe selecting a few and training them on that, that's not where we're

saying now is that whether we're a physical persona or a digital persona, we are all

leaking things out of us that will either connect people to Christ or drive away from.

Absolutely correct.

Yeah. See, that's the thing. I think there are things that we can do to train people and equip them to be

digital missionaries. But at the heart of it is, really, it's your heart. Is your heart for Christ,

and are you really spreading out hope and light to people, or are you looking for opportunities?

Listen, I know believers who get on social media and just start arguments all the time. I'm like,

what are you doing? Why are you doing this kind of thing? And it just makes no sense to me, to be honest.

Right. And especially, and please, a word to all you pastors out there, please do not leverage your

online platform for your hot takes. Like it is the worst thing for your church, you know? And I know

you're thinking, well, I need to use my voice for this political thing or for this thing or whatever

else. And I'm telling you right now, it does more to drive people away than drive people towards,

on both sides, honestly, because it's either you're setting a bad example for your own people,

or you're basically shutting out a portion of the congregation that might be interested in visiting

your church. But all of a sudden, your hot take with little nuance is basically telling them,

I'm not welcome.

Yeah. Culture's changed on that. That may have worked 30, 40 years ago when Christian culture was more

unified. But the diversity, the outspokenness of where we are today, yeah, Ray, you're exactly

right there. So Tom, man, you said the word training four or five times.

Well, that's a good thing. I mean, again, I think part of it is when you can do training on,

hey, do you know your social platform very well? Like the kind of the basics and the gist of how

you can utilize whatever social platform, whether it's Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, that's some

digital stuff, how you can use digital tools, you know, like how do you share a YouVersion Bible

graphic to someone, you know? I mean, it's just, I mean, those are cheesy things that some people are

going to scoff at, like, oh, that's so easy. But some people don't know how to use that stuff.

And so you can do that. How do you, how do you make a video? How do you make a video on your phone

and share a Bible story? You know, various digital tools that you can use to do that. But then also

about, hey, how do you share your testimony? Like, do you even know how to share your testimony?

And kind of walk through that. You know, we've been going through this a lot at our church. You know,

we call it the three chairs or your elevator story or your two-minute story. Do you know how to

effectively communicate your story, your transformation in Christ in two minutes or less?

You know, so that's the kind of training you can do. Do you know how to

do the bridge illustration to someone if they're going to talk to you about that? Those are some kind

of trainings that you could kind of definitely cover. Those are things that I'm looking at right

now. I mean, two parts of that. There is a technical aspects to better use tools and platforms,

how to create the content to give people the voice. And so the technical aspects are very important.

But I love what you're talking about helping people discover spiritually, how to share their testimony,

doing the two-minute testimony. And there's tons of discipleship material out there. You know,

with First Capital Christian Church, a church anywhere program, back in episode 19, we talked about

rooted as a 10-week material that would help take people through their discipleship process so that

they would learn how to create a disciple. Now, with First Capital Christian, they were utilizing it

for their people to eventually start to launch their micro locations. These, you know,

basically volunteers were becoming campus pastors of like 15 or 20 people. I would challenge you guys,

you know, out there who are listening, like, have that same intentionality when you're creating these

digital disciples. Because what you're doing by doing that is giving them a voice for a much larger

thing. You're giving them not responsibility over a 15 to 20 person micro location, but you're giving them the

opportunity to reach their friends and maybe even more at a much larger scale by doing it online.

You know, and material like that, whether it's the rooted material or four fields or

Timothy initiative or blah, blah, blah. Ultimately, all these materials are going to help the person

figure out how to share their testimony, how to share their story, love, um, doing some of that

intentional discipleship to, to drive, uh, these people, uh, to the place where they can become a

more effective digital disciple because they already are one. They, they just need help becoming more

effective in what they're doing. So that's, that's awesome.

What I want to do is one of the things I've been kind of really processing and kind of

figuring out is who are my core people at my online campus right now? Who are the core

people that are, that would consider new life Christian church, our online campus,

their home church, and are they willing to learn and discover what it means to be a disciple?

If they're, if they have that desire, I want to work with them. Again, I don't have the answers,

all the answers, I'm kind of making it up as I go along and using these people as guinea pigs,

but I really do want to, if they've got a desire to, to use online as a way to, to be light and be hope

to people, then I want to be able to try to figure out, okay, I need to train and equip them so we can

reach more people for Christ, not for our campus numbers, but just so we can be light to other people.

A lot of the conversations that I have with churches today is what's the strategy of church online and

Church X wants to utilize church online to launch physical campuses. Church Y wants to utilize church

online for missional aspects broadcasting all over the place. I love this idea of what you're doing

because the purpose of church online for you, I don't know if this is the entirety, but a piece of it,

is to create these digital missionaries. And so you've got people that are watching, you want to

pull them into some sort of a discipleship process, start to engage them, start to meet them, learn more

about them. But the end game of that is to basically disciple them to this place where they're creating,

where they're capable of creating, disciples using social media. And so it gives you intentionality of,

hey, I need to meet this person, not because I just want to invite them into a nebulous online

group that doesn't have a purpose, but my purpose of engaging with these people drives that further

along. I mean, and that's, that's one of the things that we were talking about earlier, where

we've got this, and this is, this is church terms. And so maybe we need to come up with something

better, but you've got this community of people that, that are following you. And you need to,

by watching your services through NLCC, the goal would be to kind of meet them and start to pull them

into the congregation of the church, where they're attending on a more regular basis, where you know

their names, you know who they are. But the goal of that congregation terms also to disciple them and

train them to pull them further in until they become capable of this discipleship level, where they're

now part of your core group that you're sending out digitally to reach. Like, I love this strategy,

because, A, there's severe purpose to this. The end game is clear. The goal is clear what we want to

do. But honestly, B, it doesn't cost a lot of money. It's not like we're talking about launching

micro locations. It's not like we need a mic, a multi-site strategy that's going to launch physical

campuses. I'm connecting with people virtually who are watching my services, and the end game is to get

that person to be a disciple in the digital space. Like, that's clear cut, and that's powerful at a viral

level. I love it. And anybody can do it. Young people, old people, anybody can do it in that digital space.

Awesome. Last question, because I'm curious with this. How do we meet people? To me, that's the

hardest question. So you've got X number 100, X number 1000 people watching service. How do you

actually put names on them and get them driven from the community to where they're kind of isolated,

nebulous, not named, to more of the congregation where you know who they are?

Ray, Tom, what do you guys do for that? So for me, it's been engaging in conversations,

just kind of at a greater scale. So, you know, Tom mentioned Twitter earlier, big fan of Twitter,

and Twitter moves at the speed of light, in the sense of, you know, it's not yesterday's news. It's

like five minutes news is old news. It's a constant conversation throughout the day, and new topics to

be part of, and all sorts of things. And so what you do is you kind of first start with your serious

influencers. At least this has been a thing for me. You follow them, and then you begin to engage

in conversations that are happening in their threads. And then the next thing you know, you

start to become involved in much larger conversations, and folks start following you as they kind of agree

or disagree with you, but they see that you're involved in conversation. And it starts to become a much,

much larger conversation as you go along. In Facebook, man, groups has been such a big community

builder for me. And it's been so helpful for both for my individual learning, coming into the church

online space, and all this stuff. But then even then, just as a fan of different things, whether

it's sports, or whether it's comic stuff, or whether it's, you know, sneakers, or whatever else,

it doesn't matter. There's so many different subgroups for you to be part of. And I've even seen this

with my wife as well, where, you know, she'll all of a sudden find a teacher who's really funny,

who loves talking about teacher stuff online that only teachers get. And that's a subculture for

them. So the next thing you know, she's following, and now she's part of this conversation of teachers

across the United States and stuff that they do, you know. And sometimes she'll show me and she'll be

like, "Look at this meme that this person, you know, dropped. Man, that's so true in my classroom."

It's not relevant to me, but it's funny for her, and it engages her in conversation about something

that's unique to her, unique to where she's at in life, and she can be part of that conversation.

So it's a great way to just network across the United States. If you're trying to establish

a platform and grow a platform, it's a great way for that. But also, if you just want to meet people

and engage in conversation and share the love of God, it's great for that too.

That's interesting on the networking. I love that you used that word. And I don't think you meant it that way,

but just coming as a guy who owns his own business, a lot of it is networking, you know,

and figuring out how to meet those people. And I, you know, I just had that thought when you said the word.

It's like, within our churches, we know people that know how to network, how to do that.

Like, I would challenge y'all who are listening, find those people who know how to network,

who are those networker types, share with them the problem you're having, and let them take a stab at

it. Let them see. Like, they may have solutions of ways to tackle this with your specific use case.

One of the things that I do know, the biggest limitation that I see across the board when talking

with churches is this, I've got hundreds of people who watch my service every week, and I have no idea who they are.

And so that's the, and I'm going to use this phrase a lot. It's a limitation of the model.

The limitation of the model doesn't mean that you scrap the model. The limitation of the model means that

you work hard to overcome it and try to find the solution to that. So to raise point of using it for networking,

maybe talking with some other people who are attached or in leadership of the church who can help.

But there are ways to overcome that. You just need to wrestle with it, experiment it. Because in the

end game, the purpose isn't to meet who they are. The end game is to disciple them and become a digital

missionary. And that right there, the goal of the digital missionaries is worth whatever cost we have

to do to meet these people where they are right now virtually. Sure. Well, man, this has been a great

podcast. I love this time. It's always awesome hanging out with with Tom. And so, hey, Ray, any thoughts as

we're landing the plane? Go be a digital missionary. No excuses. Just try something. Try something. You know,

you're already doing it, whether you like it or not, like we established earlier. So why not do it on purpose?

Awesome. Tom, any thoughts from you before we wrap up?

Yeah. I mean, just again, be that light, be that hope to people, be that someone who uses social media

to draw people to Christ. I think the more you can do that, I've had some great conversations,

and I know other people can have them as well. It's all your mindset of when you get on social media,

what are you trying to do and how I can use that to share about the love of Christ in a non-threatening

way. So I think it's great. Church, our job is not to create attenders. Our job is to create

missionaries. I don't think attenders is actually written in the Bible. I could be wrong. You could find

it, but maybe. I'm pretty sure it's not. There's a dad joke about all of them being in one accord

somewhere in there. So it's fine. All right. That's awesome. So get out there and let's create

disciples physically as well as digitally. So questions? Of course, let us know. Tom,

just in wrapping, where can people find you on social media? Yeah, my favorite is Twitter. So you can just

look up at TAPounder, and I'm there all the time. Awesome. And Digital Bootcamp on Facebook and YM.

Man, this guy's literally all over the place. So hit him up on, he's so humble. He's like laughing it

off. But the guy creates content like nothing, and he's got several roles. And literally, I have no idea

how he does everything he does, but he does it so well. So Tom, thank you for being on here. Hit

him up on TAPounder, or hit me up, and I'll tell you everything that he does, and we'll get you

connected. For Ray, for Tom, this is Jeff with the Church Digital Podcast. Love having you on,

and we'll see you next time. Thanks, everybody.