 Greetings, my name is Owen Ross. I am the director for the Center for Church Development in the North Texas Conference and we are glad that you are here. We are having a webinar today with Pastor Nathan Webb and he's gonna be speaking with us a little bit more about how to build online community. When the pandemic hit, a bunch of us went to streaming our worship service. Others went to recording it, our Facebook presence and other social media stepped up quite a bit. But we are seeing that this online digital community is here to stay and Pastor Nathan Webb has been for the past two years building this entirely online faith community. And I had a chance to meet him when we were at a conference together and I became very impressed by the work that he's doing and the insights that he had to this work. And so I have invited him to come and share with us and I'm very grateful for his willingness to take time for us here in the North Texas Conference about building online community. I wanna recognize quickly, Jessica Vargas who is the mission coordinator for the North Texas Conference Center for Church Development and she has done the hard work in putting this together. From Pastor Nathan, he's a pastor, he's a father of one about to be a pastor father of his second child and in this busy time we thank you for being with us, Nathan. Yeah, I am happy to be here and I appreciate y'all having me and letting me talk about this and share a little bit about the things that I've learned. I'm gonna share my screen and we're gonna have a full slideshow here. The best way I think to do this is I'm gonna go through a little bit about checkpoint church, the church that I'm planting. I just kind of explain what it is and the foundation that we've discovered along the way and then I'm gonna move into kind of like how I think we might be able to apply it as church planners, as church developers or just as pastors in whatever space we may be or even even lady that might be able to listen to this anybody who wants to know more about how these things can apply and kind of roll over from how they're working in my very niche community but how they might be able to work for more digital communities as well. And then I'm gonna have a time at the end for just kind of all the remaining questions. So hopefully I'll hit on mostly everything. If I see anything that's super specific to what we're talking about at the time I can go ahead and tackle it then but just assume we're gonna go through some groundwork and that'll hopefully answer a lot of the basic questions that we're gonna do. So first I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen and get that up there. So hopefully we can all see checkpoint church. So checkpoint church is the church for nerds, geeks and gamers, whenever I presented to the Western North County Conference this concept and this idea they were excited about it and looking forward to what this might mean for us as a conference and just as people because I am a nerd, a geek and a gamer and wanted to share what I had had in my childhood with my nerds, geeks and gamers. So like I said, just some quick groundwork to go through at the very beginning. This is the basic gist of what we're gonna be talking about during this time. But first off, just introduce myself. Second off, talk a little bit about checkpoint. Then we're gonna talk about our three major platforms which are Twitch, Discord and then YouTube which has kind of morphed into our actual discipleship model. I'll talk a little bit about our pathway. And then we're gonna talk about the context and how we might be able to apply it to yours. And then at the very end we'll have a time for remaining questions. And I've also got a slide full of resources. I don't know if the conference has any intention of sending out this PowerPoint but I'd be happy to send it to you with links and that kind of things that I've included in that resource page. The very least that'll be helpful, I'm sure. So first and foremost, who is Nathan Webb? Who am I? These are a couple of things about me. I am in the Western North Carolina Conference of the UMC. I am a provisional elder. They picked me up straight out of Duke, straight out of seminary and put me in the church plan and really took a big risk on that. But hopefully saw the vision along the way. I am a nerdy geek and a gamer from that center picture. I've been playing video games my entire life. My like bread and butter is actually anime and manga. I love that kind of stuff but I certainly have been around video games forever and played plenty of them. And then the third one, I am a PK. So my dad is also a pastor. A second career pastor didn't start until I was around three or four years old and I'm the youngest. So my older siblings probably have a very different perception of themselves but I am a PK and I'm proud to be a PK. I enjoyed my experience as a pastor's kid. However, growing up, even an incredibly contemporary church plant around the Winston Salem area of North Carolina, even there I still never really felt like I was able to let my geek flag fly there. And so I always had this empty space, these two different communities where I had the nerds, the geeks and the gamers and then I had my church friends. And there was this weird boundary that the two were never allowed to meet. And so during this time of undergrad and seminary I discerned the calling to be the bridge between the nerds, the geeks and gamers and the church. And so along comes Checkpoint Church out of this vision and out of this hope for something a little bit greater to tie these two things together. Now Checkpoint started back in August of 2020. I was officially sent there in July of 2020 and we were originally given a parachute drop location of Denver, North Carolina just because it's this kind of really up and coming area where they're working on some interstate connections there and so they were excited about the possibility of Denver. But I think the understanding pretty much always was, oh, this is never gonna really be exactly what a traditional church model looks like. It's never gonna really look like your typical parachute drop or your typical church plant. We've had a couple of visions here and there that have entailed a physical space and obviously I am in a physical space right now but it did not take long in our discernment process at Checkpoint to realize that we were going to be a digital platform. Originally Checkpoint's vision kind of came out of the Comic-Con model. If you've ever been to a Comic-Con or if you are in a state or in a place where you might have a Comic-Con nearby, you likely see the absolute droves of people that will flock there. It's an incredibly exciting experience and it attracts more people than just about any church ever and somehow they are able to do it pretty consistently at least in North Carolina alone. I know we have several Comic-Cons not to put on by the official Comic-Con company but plenty of conventions for nerds, geese and gamers that people seem to have no problem flocking to. However, in discerning that, we really weren't sure not many of them are doing it every single week. There are some coffee shops that'll do things like that but the actual physical gathering of the nerds, the geese and the gamers is not taking place on a physical location. Rather, it typically tends to lean towards the online and so for the first probably year of Checkpoint's life we really just took our time with discerning, okay, we know that it's gonna be online. We know that we need to reach people online at the very least, so where are we going to reach them? So after a couple of years of trial and error and figuring out what might be best, we've managed to discern three major areas that we focus on. We certainly have different social media platforms. We have different areas that we branch into but we have three that are our main focus that we're gonna go into. So what is Checkpoint Church? First and foremost, we are a Twitch streaming channel. That's and the numbers underneath are our current running numbers of our followers or our subscribers on there. So on Twitch, we have 839 people that follow our channel. They don't actually subscribe. That's not the verbiage that they use on Twitch. We have 839 followers and I'm gonna go into more about what Twitch is but just kind of giving a general idea of what these numbers mean. That doesn't mean that we have 839 people watching every single time we stream. It does mean that 839 people have expressed interest in what we do. They've clicked the follow button and they receive a notification to their email or to their app that says when we go live. Now they can turn that off and we have some statistics here and there of people that do turn that off but for the most part we have 839 people that have at least expressed that first time interest and said, hey, this is an interesting thing. Our Discord is our community building application. If you've never heard of Discord, I'll talk plenty about it here in a little bit. It's very similar to a Facebook group, only a little bit better in my opinion. Certainly more customizable, that's objective. And we have 242 members that are currently existing in our Discord. Now Discord isn't just a follower thing. You can't just click and follow and learn more about it. Instead Discord is something that you join and you can join multiple. So you have a Discord account and you get sent a Discord invitation link to join a server. 242 people have clicked that invitation link and decided to join our community, our space, our server. YouTube, I feel like most of us know what YouTube is. It's a video sharing platform. Hopefully we all have at least some tangential experience with YouTube, but YouTube is not really one that we use how it's intended to be used based off of the algorithm. Our purpose with our YouTube channel is not to really reach new people. Although we do, that's not our goal. Instead, our goal with YouTube is to have a platform that is able to house our content that we create for spiritual development and discipleship. And we'll talk more about that soon. And we have 362 subscribers on there. Interesting thing about our YouTube channel is that we have a lot of celebrations happening there. We have some videos that we've posted that have got 5,000 views out of nowhere. And then we have other videos that have 12 views. And we don't really put too much weight on either one of those numbers because it's not our purpose for them. But that's just a basic idea. What is Checkpoint Church? It's these three major platforms that we're creating a community around. Twitch is where we reach people. Discord is where we send people. YouTube is where we disciple people. We'll talk more about that in the discipleship pathway whenever we get to it. But that's the basic kind of elevator pitch of what is actually happening at Checkpoint Church. So first, what is Twitch? What is Twitch all about? So Twitch looks a little bit like this. We've got my screen there. That is our Twitch channel. We're not live in this picture, so it's a little bit hard to see. But if you were to go out right now and create a Twitch account on your browser, this is what you would see. If you're on the app, it would look a little bit different. But this is on your browser. And where it says Checkpoint Church, streaming Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, typically there's a video feed live right there, just like Facebook Live, where you go live and your video feed is sent there. And then over to the right, we have our stream chat. Now, unlike Facebook, where it might be a little bit more difficult to see a stream chat, this is kind of the standard layout of Twitch. The stream chat is arguably the most important part of the stream whenever it comes to Twitch. It's something that already exists and really stays and something that you don't typically brush aside or ignore. The chat is an active living organism. So whenever we're streaming, it is typically myself streaming some kind of game. We stream three days a week on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. We stream Pokemon on Mondays. We stream something random on Tuesdays today. We actually have a little candy machine behind me. I don't know if you can see that. And one of the things that they can pull out of the candy machine has where I play retro games. And so we played Super Punch Out today for a couple of hours and it drove me absolutely crazy. So if I seem tired, that's because the energy is just sapped out of my body by Bob Charlie, if you know Bob Charlie in Super Punch Out. So sometimes we play that. And then on Wednesday nights, we play games together. Regardless, the video feed isn't really the important part. The video feed is just kind of an excuse to get together. We stream for three hours, like I said, three days a week. And what that really means is that we have three hours where our chat is open and people are engaging in that chat. So the reason that we're on Twitch is not necessarily because we like Twitch as a platform. It's not necessarily because I think that Twitch does it best. Instead, the reason that we have chosen Twitch as our mainstreaming platform is because we are touching into the Twitch culture. Twitch is the demographic that we're wanting to reach. It's the people that we're interested in meeting. It's the place that we think our church should be reaching out. The easiest way I can compare this to a more traditional parachute drop is this is the prime location coffee shop in the town that you've been dropped into. This is the coffee shop where you're gonna be going three or four days a week, if not more, every single morning, getting to know faces, meeting people, making a presence. It's not a place where you're going and standing on top of an Apple box and telling people about Jesus. It's not the place where you're going and preaching, but this is the place where you are present and meeting people. And so we're meeting people on this platform via evangelism three days a week. And hopefully whenever we're able to develop a stream team of other people that are willing to do this, it'll be even more than just three days a week, but it'll be every day a week that we're making connections on this platform. So that is the basic gist about Twitch. If you have more questions, I'll take all those at the end, but if you have questions specifically about Twitch, feel free to drop those in the chat. So now what is Discord? Discord looks like this. This is actually from today's conversation. And this is just the idea of what it looks like. So typically again, there's gonna be an app version. There's gonna be a browser version. This is what it would look like on your browser. So if you're actually pulling it up on your computer. Discord has a couple of different things going on. There's a lot that is happening in Discord, but the easiest way to get started with understanding what it is, is that it is a Facebook group, similar thing. The only thing that's different about it is it's kind of all the stuff at once and also very much more customizable. Whereas whenever you have a Facebook group, you're on Facebook's app, you have your group and you're kind of limited to their color scheme. They sometimes let you play a little bit about their color scheme, but they're still gonna be sending a lot of notifications. It's a different kind of experience. But Discord allows for voice, video and text-based conversations. So again, right? That's the same thing again, as what Facebook does. We definitely have all those capabilities. What I think sets Discord apart is over to the left. You see, there's this whole thing, this left bar with a bunch of plus signs. Each of those new here, stuff you should know, Twitch stream, events, chat point, all that stuff. All of those are categories. They're all folders that are housing a series of channels. So for instance, under new here, whenever you join our Discord, if you were to go out right now and join our Discord, then you will be sent right away to one of the channels underneath that folder that'll be called welcome. And it'll say, welcome to you. Welcome, Owen Ross, joining this channel. And when you enter in, you'll have a cavalcade of people from our community welcoming you with gifts and with waving hands and with emojis and with cheers and welcomes and we're glad you're here as soon as you enter in there. Then they'll probably point you over into another channel underneath new here where it'll say introductions. You'll tell people, hey, this is me. I'm really into anime and I really like video games. And so somebody will connect you and say, oh, I also like video games. You should check out our video games channel. And they'll link you to that under chat point. And eventually you'll get connected to each individual channel where you'll be able to find exactly what you want out of this community. So this is the page called QOTD, which stands for question of the day. Every single weekday I post a random question of the day. This past Sunday, our sermon was on Batman. And so this morning's question was, who is your favorite member of the rogues gallery? Who's your favorite villain in Batman? And so we have a series of people that'll post their answers and sometimes pictures. Sometimes they'll agree with each other. Sometimes they'll disagree with each other. But this is kind of the first foray into getting chatty with one another under chat point where they might be able to just engage in communication with one another. And so this is the first place where you'll start to make real relationships. So remember we have the coffee shop and that's where we actually get to meet new people. This is where we get to send those new people and they get to know one another. The way I like to think of this place is that our Discord is our digital church building. I think Discord is the best at this, but if you have another platform that you have used or are more familiar with or prefer, maybe some possible comparables would be Mighty Networks or Slack. I still wouldn't advise Facebook groups, but that's just because I have a vendetta against Facebook. But there are certainly things to each of them that they have pros and cons. But I think that this is a key element of if you're wanting to build a digital church, you have to ask yourself, where are we sending people? Where are they gathering and where are they being collected? And that is what Discord has been for us. And Discord is where all the good stuff happens. We end up sending people back there as well, but that's just a little explanation. If you have any other questions about Discord, feel free to drop those in the chat or save them for the end when we have a time of remaining questions. I have a series for UM-Com that works through how to actually build a Discord. So if you're curious about more of that stuff, I'll have to think it's not tagged in my resources, but I could try and find that a little later. But there are some ways that I've found to kind of build those. And it takes a long time to talk about building them. And so each of those seminars, I think they're like about an hour each or maybe even 30 minutes each. And so for an hour total of just building a Discord. It's an intricate thing. It's kind of a high barrier of entry, but once you learn how to get into Discord and learn how to use it, I really do think it's the best platform for doing this exact thing. Okay, so what is discipleship? Once we ask, what is Twitch? Why are we using Twitch? What is Discord? Why are we using Discord? Now, what is discipleship? This is our discipleship pathway as it stands right now. So first and foremost, like I mentioned earlier, our outreach, our evangelism is Twitch. This is our widest part of our funnel. This is where we're really reaching the most people or at the very least, is where we're meeting the most new people. Eventually those people on Twitch hopefully ask enough questions. They get interested enough. They feel welcomed enough in the chat that they all move into our Discord. That's our community element. After they start to get involved in the community, they start to talk about Batman and things like that. We hope that they get curious about maybe going a little bit further than just that surface level stuff. Now that's not to say that we're not talking about real things in our Batman discussion. I mean, talking about villains is pretty interesting. Why do you like villains that you like? That's an interesting conversation starter. But we hope that eventually people will be ready to take steps beyond just kind of the surface level coffee conversation and go into the next level of spirituality. We send people then to our YouTube where every single Sunday we put together these nerdy sermons. Like I mentioned, this past Sunday was on Batman. Sometimes we'll do anime. Sometimes we'll do video games. We tend to do whatever we can that is in the zeitgeist kind of trending so that we reach the new people with something that might interest them and engage them in something that they will likely be experiencing at that moment in time. And then our most recent step of our pathway is level two. This is kind of our first step of ownership. So we're asking people in level two up until this point, right? Twitch, Discord, YouTube. It requires levels of yes and some kind of buy-in, but it doesn't really require any kind of ownership or desire to serve this community. And so that's actually the word that I use with people that are interested in level two. I say, are you ready to go beyond just being served by this community and instead beginning to serve this community? Are you ready to serve this community and be good stewards of your time in this space? And so that is level two. We currently have 18 people. We launched that back in November. We have 18 people that have signed on board for that and have been a part of level two. Level two brings a lot of things with it and I'm happy to talk more about that if we want to. I think that there's an interesting way to go with discipleship. There's a lot to it, but basically level two in our church context, I would compare to membership, especially in the name of Methodist Church. We are not a chartered congregation. So we do not have members yet, but this is the closest thing that I could compare to members in our space. These are people who are going beyond just visiting and instead choosing to enter into a space of serving this community. We still have multiple steps down that we're developing in this pathway and things that we have for the future. I don't think we have any further platforms, but we will continue to use these platforms to the best of their ability as we see fit and as we kind of evolve. So with that, let's apply some context. So these are the things that I found, the places that have worked for Checkpoint. And now we need to talk about why have they worked and in what way have they worked and how might you be able to apply them in your setting? So again, we have our big three. We have Twitch, Discord and YouTube. There's a lot that I've learned about Twitch and there's a lot of things that I've picked up on along the way, but the most important thing that I think that I've learned about streaming and about creating something online in a digital space is that Twitch is a culture that we're entering into. And we chose this culture for a reason because it's not just a recipient culture. It's not a culture that is just receiving a stream, but instead Twitch is intentionally creating and has intentionally created for years, a place where the focus of the Twitch streamer is not so much on the streamer, but instead on the community being built. It's the interaction that's actually creating community, not just the presentation, not just the video or the streamer or the personality. So while there certainly is plenty of concern for parasocial relationships, there certainly is concern for being focused around a personality, Twitch in and of itself, in our opinion when we got started was the most pure place for allowing for interaction between the chat and the streamer. There are a couple of conscious decisions that we've made along the way. If you go follow us on Twitch, you will not follow nerdpastornate. That's kind of my nomer in this community, but instead you will go follow Checkpoint Church. So you're not following my personality. You're not following myself, but instead you're following the church that streams three days a week. Now currently I'm the only streamer we have, but somewhere down the line, we have a vision where we might have somebody different every night of the week. Maybe we'll have, I'll stream on Mondays and Wednesdays, but we'll have somebody who streams on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We have somebody else that'll stream on Fridays. So we'll have people all over the place doing different levels of interaction in that space. So it's not so much my thing, but instead it's going to be our thing. That's important on Twitch because I feel like that leads to, regardless of who might be streaming, it's the chat that really makes the time. Whenever we are actually streaming on Twitch, we're probably one of the best that I know as far as actually interacting with the chat as they happen. So instead of just kind of people coming in and there just being hundreds of people in the chat and the streamer doesn't really interact with them, we interact with every single person that enters in. We welcome them, we ask them questions, we learn about them, we encourage them to join our Discord, we talk about who we are, why we're doing this, we talk about what your favorite games are. If we're playing Pokemon, we might ask what's your favorite Pokemon, why do you like that Pokemon? We'll have all these different conversations happening in that place, but regardless we're constantly interacting with that chat rather than interacting with the game that we're playing. Sometimes I will pause the game that I'm playing just to interact better with the chat because I think that that's really the difference between these two things. And so applying it to some of your contexts, one of the most popular, I think church platforms out there is probably Facebook Live, I feel like that's what most people are using, maybe are using YouTube Live. Regardless, I think that the impetus becomes how are you interacting with the chat? Are you making sure that you're looking at the camera? Are you making sure that you're talking to the people as they enter onto your stream? Are you just hosting our long worship services or instead are you maybe having a time where you sit down at your desk with a camera and you just talk and you just are with your community? So many people in the traditional church context, we tend to forget how much FaceTime you get with your pastor. It's more than just an hour a week, but instead there's the time before and after service where you're able to sit down and talk or maybe you're able to meet your pastor in the morning whenever they're getting coffee or maybe you're able to have a fellowship hall time where you might have a covered dish after church and you're able to sit with your pastor and talk. People that are online don't get that experience unless we create that for them. And so whereas whenever I first got started with this, I was like, well, how are we gonna do our worship service for one hour? Now I've learned that we're streaming for nine hours a week and I think that people could put up with more. I think they could put up with drastically more than nine hours a week because it's not about the actual message being delivered or a content creation thing, but instead it's a relationship being built in community. And so I think that that's an interesting question of like interaction and that's why we chose Twitch. How are you interacting with your live stream? How are you interacting with your evangelistic aspect of your ministry? Discord, this is one of the things that I've learned the best about Discord. Again, you may have a Facebook group. If you are using your Facebook group or your Facebook page as a giant bulletin board, that's not the way it's intended to be used. Not by the algorithm and also not by your community. Discord is a community building app. There's very rare times that I ever spam anything at people or keep letting them know about, hey, we have this event coming up. We have this event coming up, but instead it's 24 seven being used as a place for conversations, as a place for prayer requests, as a place for deeper conversation in that place rather than just focusing so much on just letting information out there. It's more of a place of relationship building than just information sharing. And then YouTube, that was just a decision we made. You kind of have to decide between if you want to create intentional discipleship or if you want to do content creation because both are viable. There's another really good nerdy church out there called Love Thy Nerd. I don't know if they even define themselves as a church. But what they do is a lot of content creation. They put a lot of things out there, but they don't so much focus on actually intentionally building discipleship. So whenever we put out a nerdy sermon, we're fine if it gets seen by a lot of people. We're fine if there are a lot of views. We're fine if there are a lot of comments in that place. But our ultimate goal for our YouTube sermons is for them to be discussed in our Discord by the people that are active in our Discord. We want to know how they think. We want to understand more about them. We want to grow in that conversation together. Most recently we've started doing just some test trial runs of a nerdy sermon Bible study where we watched through that nerdy sermon together and then we sit down and answer questions and think about things and take prayer requests and we spend that time together beyond just the YouTube video. So those are a couple of main considerations with the three big areas that we have and just how we're applying them. Just some other discoveries and some things that we found along the way. I think that a lot of the times one of the big focuses that we can have is to have all of the platforms. So whenever I first got started with Checkpoint Church, I made us a Facebook, I made us a Twitter, I made us an Instagram, I made us a Snapchat, I made us a YouTube, I made us a Twitch, I made us a Discord. I created all of the accounts that I could. I posted to them all the time. We were doing things all the time. I had a daily post going out on each of these platforms. I had things that were specifically tied to each of these. My Canva was full of all of these social media posts that I had made. And what I discovered was that we weren't reaching anyone. We were on all of these platforms and none of them were reaching a single person. And so after some failure and some crashing and burning and realizing that this was not sustainable, we took a serious turn and we decided on these three major platforms. Do we still post to Facebook and to Twitter and to Instagram sometimes? But they're never gonna be our focus. Instead, all of my energy goes to our three platforms. How are we reaching people on Twitch? How are we reaching people on Discord? How are we reaching people on YouTube? And the more that I can do there, the better. So less is more. The more precise you can get around your demographics, the more precise that you can get around platforms, I think the better luck that you'll have in digital ministry. I think the reality of what a lot of us are finding is that we really need to hire an entire position for this job. We need a online pastor. And so if your church is in a setting where you can't afford to hire an online pastor and it's just you, then even more so, less is more. Figure out where do you actually wanna reach people? Where does it actually matter? And why do you wanna use each platform? So again, we had to ask ourselves the question, why do we wanna be on Twitch? If we could stream on YouTube, if we could stream on Facebook, why wouldn't we? Well, because that's not the people that we're wanting to reach. We have no interest in reaching the Facebook Live community. We have no interest in reaching the YouTube Live community. We wanted to reach the Twitch community. So we're intentionally on Twitch, whether it's the best or not. And if there becomes a better platform for reaching through streaming, then maybe we'll consider moving to it. But for now, Twitch is what it is. Why don't we have a Slack? Why don't we have a Mighty Networks? Well, Discord is where the nerds, geeks and gamers were. And so we had to ask ourselves that question. We could have a Slack and a Discord. There's no reason why I can't create both of those. But instead I'm choosing just Discord because it's where the people that I'm wanting to reach already are. It's where our community that's naturally building is already finding themselves. So that's something helpful. Another thing that I think I've discovered over the way is that there are these two words, synchronous and asynchronous, that we're a little bit afraid of. And I don't think we need to be afraid of either one or too hyper focused on either one. We don't need to worry about creating more asynchronous content or more synchronous streams. But instead we need to just see it as a tool. See it as a tool to be used. Kind of like what I just said about picking a platform, choose when a synchronicity is needed and choose when synchronicity is needed. We're only just now. We've been putting out nerdy sermons for over a year now and we're only just now working on developing our Bible study around them. We've spent the time really devoting, developing the craft of the video, hiring an editor, figuring out what our voice looks like, figuring out the flow and how to write them and how to create them and how to make sure that they're as good as they can be before we even started worrying about a Bible study. We were just fine with over a year of asynchronous content creation where we were putting out a sermon asynchronously every single week before we even worried about figuring out any kind of synchronous spiritual study into those things. And we have a lot of crutches to our benefit where we are a church plant, we're very new, we're very young, we're just figuring things out. And so we have a lot of time for experimentation like that where we can kind of make risks and take the time to learn and figure things out and maybe you don't have that in your context. But I still think it's important as you're making these decisions to think about why does this need to be synchronous? Why do we need to experience this all at the same time? Do we? And if you don't, consider using the tool of asynchronousity. Consider using the tool of content that is evergreen and stays around or that is multi-purpose. If you feel like you are being led to build digital church through the incredible reach of a platform like TikTok, figure out how you can cut your sermons up into 60-second chunks and post them onto TikTok. All right, that's asynchronous and it's a tool that will hopefully, if your goal is to bring people back to your sermons, you can find good enough chunks and link things well enough that people will go from your TikTok to watch your sermons. So that kind of thing gets them together. Yes, thank you for that definition. So yeah, synchronicity is happening at the same time. Asynchronousity means it can happen anytime. You can watch that. So a YouTube video is an asynchronous experience where whether you are there when it is posted, whether you're there 10 years after it's posted, you're experiencing the exact same video. And that is a tool, not a crutch, not necessarily a good thing, not necessarily a bad thing, but something to consider how you might use it. Another thing that I had to learn the hard way is to trust your natives. And by natives, I really mean for us digital natives, but it may be whoever the native people in the place that you're reaching. So assuming that this is a church plant that you're working in or assuming that you're wanting to reach a new people group, right? Say you want to reach people online, which is an important question if you're wanting to do digital church. The question is why do you want to do digital church? Are you wanting to reach new people? If that's the case, then whenever you reach those people, you need to trust the leaders that are formed that are native to that community. An example of this would be our Discord. I had never experienced Discord before August of 2020. I was a couple of months into checkpoint when we started to build a community on Twitch and some of the members of the community were like, we really need a Discord. And I was like, what about a Facebook group? And I was like, well, how about if we work on this? How about if we do it here instead? Or how about if we just try and do through Twitch? And I kept pushing away from that. And then as soon as I gave in and let the Discord become what it is now, Discord is one of our most vibrant parts of our community. I don't know where our community would be if we didn't take the leap and actually do what needed to be done to build the Discord community that the nerds, geeks and gaming natives pushed me towards. So you have to trust your natives, listen to the leaders that are being formed that exist in this space naturally and be willing to adapt whenever, be discerning but be willing to adapt whenever that discernment leads to a possible change in what you're doing and in the plan that you might have. So one of the things, again, I just had to be I had to be prepared to move and to shift and to make changes as needed. Another discovery is content versus community. Beware of the difference and which one is more important or more needed. Both are valid, like I said earlier but it's vital to differentiate between the two. Know if what you're creating is content. Know if what you're creating is a video to be experienced or for education or for spiritual growth or for development or for attention, right? I mean, that's something we don't talk about but like I just mentioned with putting your sermons on TikTok, right? That's taking something developed for spiritual growth. You're cutting it up into 60 second chunks and you're turning it into marketing. Whether we like that word or not the reason you might post your sermon on TikTok is not because you're hoping somebody in 60 seconds might get a more spiritual experience. You're hoping they might say, oh, I wanna learn more about that and then they'll join your spiritual experience but that connection from A to B, that's marketing. That's getting people from one place to the next so that you might be able to achieve your ultimate purpose of providing spiritual growth or of building a community. So knowing the difference between the two things and what you want from each of them is vital in figuring it out. We have to address that what we do on Twitch is community building. What we do on Discord is community building but a lot of the stuff that we do on YouTube ends up becoming content. A lot of it is what we kind of use to sell that which is Checkpoint Church. So we make these connections. And the final thing, the final key discovery is that collaboration is survival. The reality of the internet is that it is so incredibly huge. And whenever I first got started with this church plant I was warned from the get-go to be wary of those church planters, be wary of those other churches because they're very territorial. And I experienced some of that and my dad was the second pastor to church plant growing up and so I experienced some of that territorialism, of that tribalism, of those kind of laying down the stakes and the boundaries between churches and the kind of accusatorial you're stealing my people. On the internet, this could not be, I mean, it already isn't true but on the internet this couldn't be less true. The possibility that you might be stealing people on the internet is just so incredibly insane to me. Instead of that mindset that is so toxic, the truth of the internet is that odds are we are just naturally going to be reaching different people. And what we can do with this information is choose to use it for the better and to connect us better. So thank God for our Methodist connection. The best thing that we've done at Checkpoint Church as far as actually building the sense of collaboration is that there are two other Methodist organizations that are doing something not really similar to what we're doing, but in the same demographic. And so we have Crossfire Faith Plus Gaming out of Colorado. They are kind of hoping to build something very similar to United Methodist men and women, but for nerds, for gamers. So they want to create something that'll be able to be used by multiple churches, that'll kind of be adopted into a church, which is a fascinating idea, a fascinating concept and one that I'm excited for them to continue to discover. But they're very different from us. Then we have Methodist Gaming out of Virginia. Methodist Gaming is kind of an extension of their youth ministry and is really their church, hopefully reaching out to one another. So they're willing to reach new people, but that's not their purpose. They're on Twitch because they want to hang out with their youth group. They're willing to meet new people, but that's not their goal. So they're not really trying to build a church on there like Checkpoint is. These three communities partnered back up in January. We try to do things often or at least build off of one other or learn from one another. But in January, we built something called the Next Stream Charity Event where we streamed for 24 hours, which is such a long time. We each took eight-hour chunks and we raised money for UMCOR. And that was an incredible opportunity where we were able to collaborate with one another by mixing together our communities over 24 hours and by practicing good stewardship and generous extravagant generosity. We raised over $3,000 for UMCOR during that 24 hours of streaming, of playing games and of hanging out with one another. And we wound up in the long run making new connections across the streams. The reality of this platform and of the internet is that the church will likely never compete with the powerhouses of this market and of this industry and on Twitch. Maybe hopefully that would be wonderful if we're able to reach as many people as Ludwig over on YouTube or as Pokemon here on Twitch. We would love if that would be possible, but the odds are that that's not gonna happen. And so instead, what we need to be doing is focusing on the connection that we do have to the people that are already here. So one of my goals with Checkpoint is I would love to see just like how we have find a church where you're able to go to a website and see what churches are worshiping right now. I would love for us to have a site where you can find a streamer. You can find a pastor who is streaming right now and go watch them if you have some free time or if you wanna go watch somebody stream. I think that is what is key to what we're doing. This collaborative effort is gonna be the survival of what actually makes us stick on the internet because the reality is that this is such a massive place that we have 839 followers on Twitch and that feels like a lot, but it is so incredibly small. We are so incredibly humble, just a case in point where we have 242 people on our Discord. I'm incredibly proud of the people that are there. I'm incredibly proud of the community that has gathered. It could not be more fun. We are so excited to be getting to know one another. I'm making relationships and we're seeing friendships begin to really blossom. We're seeing something incredible happen there. We have 242 people. And do you know how many people we need to be considered a discoverable platform? So Discord is, they have a marketplace essentially where you can go and find other servers. You can't buy them but you can go find other servers to join. Do you know how many people we need just to be considered on that page? Not on the top of the list, not trending, but just to be considered as a runner, as a name worthy of being put in that marketplace, we need 6,000 people on our server. 6,000 is the boundary they've set just for us to even be considered. 6,000, that is an insane number. That is a wild number for me. Maybe we'll reach it someday, maybe we won't. I'm not sure what it looks like in the future for us or how we connect or how we reach. I'm incredibly proud of those 242, but 6,000 is a long, long, long way away. And so the reality is that we are very, very far from being so inundated on the internet that we're gonna start overlapping. There's no need for territory. There's no need for concern. There's no need for fear. Instead, collaboration is gonna be the key of helping us survive with the virality of the internet. So the next page is gonna be on my resources page, but I'm gonna go ahead and turn to Q&As and any questions that we might have in the chat. If you have anything else that you wanna drop in over there, feel free to do that. And then I'll go to my resources after answering these questions. The first question I saw that came up was from Colin. How long has checkpoint been streaming on Twitch? And were you streaming before checkpoint church was a thing? So the way that that kind of worked, I'll try and click answer live. I hope that this worked. Yes, so we started streaming on Twitch August of 2020. That was our very first thing that we did was we started out streaming. Originally we were streaming two days a week. No, maybe we did stream three days a week. Maybe we streamed Monday, Wednesday, Friday. But the first time we streamed, we were streaming for two hours at a time and we streamed one day where we were playing some random game and then on Wednesday nights, we tried something where we played a game as a Bible study. So we played a game called Undertale, which I would recommend to all of you. But Undertale as a means of Bible study. We played through two hours of it a week and then I asked people to join our Zoom call on Sundays where they would go from our Wednesday night stream playing this game and then we would talk about the game and the lessons we learned on Sundays. And it was a total flop, a complete failure. It did not work at all. Nobody came to our Zoom call. And there were a lot of reasons behind that. But since then we've really learned a lot and changed a lot. And our most recent change was in January whenever we moved to our three hours chunk. And that has really been a good chunk. We were working on two hours Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. We did Monday, Wednesday, Friday at some point. But our most recent iteration of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday for three hours each has been a really successful model that has been really good. And by success, I know I saw Matt, I might be jumping to his question a little bit here. But what I define as success in this community and in this place is a lot of different things. But ultimately it's that I see community being formed, that I see relationships being made, people getting to know each other. A win is whenever we get a new person that actually starts to contribute and doesn't just kind of lurk. I have no problem with lurkers. I think that they're an important part of the puzzle, especially online. But I still think that whenever we meet somebody new that's willing to contribute, that's an exciting win for me. And I was not streaming before Checkpoint Church, but I did have a project that I did for my youth group whenever I was a youth minister where I had a YouTube channel called Single Player. You can go back and watch it. It's not inherently Christian, but it was just an effort to the people that I was watching on YouTube, I didn't want my youth to watch. And so I created what I wanted my youth to watch and tried to have a place of intentional positive and encouraging gameplay there, not to steal from Caleb there, but to try and create that. I'm gonna move on to John's question. At some point this afternoon, please explain the origin of the name Checkpoint Church. My wife and I are my best friend. They were kind of my original confidants that helped me figure this thing out. We picked a lot of different names. And several of the names felt very hokey. Some of the names felt kind of cheesy. There's one in particular, this is not our name, but this is one of the cheesiest names I can think of. They're out of Virginia, but they're God Squad Church. And they're great, they're doing great things. They've got an incredible ministry going on, but man, God Squad Church. Some of the names that we came up with were just like that and they just, they made me laugh. I just can't, I just couldn't do that. I couldn't do anything quite so cheesy. So instead we came up with a checkpoint and it just felt right, it felt good. You can see our little logo down there in the bottom right corner that was designed by my best friend there who's also a graphic designer out of Georgia. And the idea of the checkpoint is that it is a checkpoint in a game. So if you're familiar with video games at all or maybe you played even Mario had checkpoints where you would have the beginning of the level and the end of the level and somewhere along the way there would be like a little flagpole. And whenever you'd hit that flagpole in Mario, a little flag would shoot up and you would, if you died, you would start at that flagpole instead of back at the beginning of the level. And so the idea of a checkpoint in a video game is that it is a place to kind of stop and rest. And so we're just trying to be a checkpoint along the way, a checkpoint for people to enter into as they journey through this thing called life. It's very along the idea of kind of the path of grace where this might be kind of the place where you're able to find a checkpoint in a place for a preview there. Matt asks, what does a win look like in your discipleship? How do you collect stories of transformation? Are the practices you're looking for them to develop that are distinctly digital? Okay, that's a couple of questions. I mentioned a little bit about what does a win look like? What a win looks like in discipleship. I think we're still really discerning exactly what we want that to be and how we want discipleship to happen. But we have this whole discipleship pathway that we're kind of developing. So I think that anytime we have somebody that goes down to the next level, that's a win. That's something that I consider, okay, we've met somebody new on Twitch, that's a win. Somebody from our Twitch has joined our Discord. That's a win. Somebody from our Discord has started checking out our sermons, that's a win. Somebody from our sermons has decided they're ready to join level two, that's a win. They're all kind of wins along the way and they all are really inherently digital. They're all happening through our digital platforms. We have yet to have a physical gathering. We have a couple of visions where maybe we might try and go back to our original vision of a Comic-Con-esque thing and doing like a yearly Mecca gathering where we might all gather together at like a convention center somewhere in some random state, because we are global and try to meet in one central location and have like a weekend where we might be able to actually get together and break bread together and have baptism during that time and let that be kind of our like, if Wesley says as often as you gather, then if that's as often as we gather, maybe that's when we do it. We don't know exactly what that looks like yet, but for the most part, I mean, we are 100% digital and figuring out what it looks like. Let's see. Looks like we had John maybe added his question and so did Matt. So we've answered both of those perfect. How does level two work? So level two, like I said, it's really a lot easier than it sounds. It's really just saying that they want to serve. So I have a form that is available on our Discord, on our website, on all these different places where somebody will fill out the form. They'll give us their address because I'm gonna send them some swag. They'll let us know a little bit more information about them. And then they will just say that they're willing to serve. And once they do that, they'll enter into a new section on the Discord. So we have some stuff on the Discord that is private from just the general people that enter in. It's not private out of a like, we're keeping it a secret, but instead it's a private because we just assume the general person doesn't want to be a part of that. So once you enter into level two, you get access to that part of the Discord. You also get an invite to what we call our reunion, RE colon union, where we get together and we just talk about the things that are going on. We talk about analytics. We talk about how checkpoint is looking, the future of checkpoint, some of the things that are going on in my head. And it's kind of like our first foray into leadership. We don't call it a leadership team necessarily. We don't put too much weight on any of level two. We don't ask them to bear a lot of responsibility, but instead it's just an opportunity to start beginning those conversations and move past just the interest of being served by, like we say, into serving checkpoint church. And we have more specifications on level two that are starting to happen now where we have a safe sanctuary policy that we've developed called Safe Point. And that's available to everybody. I'll talk more about that in the resource section, but it's very much an available thing. And yeah, level two is very interesting. I could talk about it for a long time. There's a lot that's kind of grown out of it and then we've developed in it, but it's basically just the first level of membership. David, do they have, or do they use the same gamer slash online tag so you can track people? If not, how do you track a person moving through the process? It's typically pretty easy. We've had some people that make it more challenging than others. For the most part, people tend to use the same username and we try as best as we can to just keep track of them as they give us information. So if we have somebody new joined the Discord, I keep track of all of that over on Planning Center. If I learned their real name, perfect. Then I'll put their real name in, but until I learn their real name, it'll just be their gamer tag. And typically people that find us on YouTube are using the same username. If they aren't, then I might discover it. So as I have these 15 minute coffee talks where I have an available Calendly slot for anybody that wants to just sit down with me and learn a little bit about checkpoint and sometimes I'll meet somebody and they will say, hey, I'm, you know, I'm whatever, John 316. And this is, you know, I'm like, oh, that's you. That's John. And then we'll make the connection there on the first time we meet on a Zoom call in a coffee talk. But it is, that's one of the challenging things, but I also don't know how much it necessarily matters. We really want to start tracking somebody once they join our Discord. You know, I don't know how many people you meet at the coffee shop necessarily that you like put a ping on. Maybe you might recognize their face or try and find them, but you don't find them on Facebook and friend them, right? If you just meet them at the coffee shop for the first time, you typically don't broach those lines until you get to know them a little bit better. You can message people on Twitch. So if somebody might join and follow you on Twitch, then you could message them and say thanks for tuning in to our stream. Some people do that. Some people don't, we don't do that just because we've kind of discerned that a lot of people that do that, we don't really like that very much. It tends to put kind of a sour taste in people's mouth. We can talk more about that. I think there's pros and cons there. There's pros and cons to things like Patreon. That's another thing that we're still really discerning and figuring out. Melissa asks, do you have a staff? Who are the people who streamed just you at this point? We do not have a staff. Currently we have one contracted person who is our video editor that edits our Sunday sermons. Just because I found that I was being burnt out by writing them and also editing them, it was taking too much time. And I wasn't putting all the energy into them that I had. We have a lot of people who are interested in streaming. I don't know if we'll hire them necessarily or if that'll be kind of a volunteer thing. But it's a matter of figuring it out as we go along. Certain other organizations that we look to, kind of for example, Love by Nerd, they have a stream Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday at seven o'clock. It's a different person from their community every night. That's a vision that I think would be great. I'm super excited about the possibility of it and we have people that are very interested in streaming. But I don't know if we'll end up hiring someone on for that position. I think if we were gonna hire anyone for this position, it would either have to be administrative or potentially more content creation or even a like a focus of one thing. So maybe I would be able to focus purely on Twitch and we'd hire somebody to focus purely on Discord and figuring out how those connections are made. I could see like specialization for hire, position or staff, but currently we are not even in the conversation about that. Kathy says financing and tithing, that is the million dollar question. I'd love to continue talking about it. We're actually having a finance team, our first ever finance kind of dream meeting tonight. So we'll see where that goes and how that goes. We have a lot of visions. We have a lot of hopes for what that looks like. Currently we have an open tie that we're on Planning Center where people are welcome to give, but we certainly don't have too many people giving in that way. We do receive a lot of funding through Twitch. So Twitch we reached pretty quickly our, not partnership, but the affiliate status on Twitch which means that you can start receiving some income through Twitch. And we have regular subscriptions. We never really have less than 20 subscriptions. So that's once a month. Each of those are worth $2.50. So we make about 50 bucks a month off of just Twitch subscriptions alone, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. We also get advertising from Twitch. We have the ability that people can, instead of rather than subscribe, they can just throw bits at us which are literally worth one bit is one penny. And we never get many of those. But when we do, you know, that's a little bit extra on the top that we're receiving there. We receive some funding through our podcasting app that we use Anchor that allows you to pretty much make, we don't put our sermons with advertising, but we do have a podcast that we have advertising line and things like that. Yeah, so let's go into resources. If there are any other questions we still have a little bit of time left to answer them but I'm gonna go through some resources real quickly and they might answer some last minute questions or things that are still on people's minds. These are just a couple of things. And again, I'll send this PowerPoint either to Jessica or Owen or both and we can make sure that this gets to the people that it needs to. I have a list. This is just three books that are on that list but I have a list of recommended reading that I've discovered so far for digital church ministry. I think if you haven't read from social media to social ministry, you gotta read it. You gotta read it. It's just, it is the, it's like the primer. I think that a lot of the information may already be dated, but it's a helpful start, especially if you feel like you are totally unaware of social ministry and the viability of using social media for ministry. This is a great place to get started. Jason Moore just put out the book, both and phenomenal resource in Jason. Jason has got a lot of clarity in figuring out what does it look like to do both and digital and physical ministry kind of merging in a digital church with your physical church. This is really touches on my heartstrings even though I don't have this exact scenario. I don't really have a both and I wouldn't consider checkpoint of both and experience. But it's something that's very important to me because I think so many of us pivoted and I pivoted in the church that I was serving at the time. So many of us, so many of us pivoted that there are so many people that have been reached online and there are people that are now saying, well, we're stopping our online worship and my heart breaks for the people that found you online and have just been left high and dry. And so I think both the end is an incredible thing there. Jason's been there twice, awesome. Jason's a great guy and I look forward to what he continues to develop through the both end program. And then not a religious book necessarily but a startup community way. That's just another good book. Those are three that are just recommended here but if you get this PowerPoint you can actually click on recommended reading that's hyperlink to the Amazon list that I've got probably 10 to 12 books on there already. I like reading and so that book is gonna continue or that list is gonna continue to expand. Just some things that you can do from Checkpoint Church. We have a podcast called the Nerds of Prey podcast. If you're interested about the viability of nerd ministry we're kind of on a weird hiatus but we have about five episodes. We've sat down with people that are in this field of nerd ministry and we have more on the way as soon as I can actually get behind the horn and start editing them. But that's a great thing to check out. We also put out a weekly newsletter at Checkpoint Church where I just kind of put out my findings of things that I'm finding in online ministry. Sometimes it's very specific to Checkpoint Church but other times it's just kind of advice of things that we're discovering things a lot a lot of the things that have been in this presentation we'll find their way over the newsletter. And then our safe point policy all those are hyperlinks by the way our safe point policy is something we just drafted and figured out and it is available to all you can find it on our website you can find it on the WNCC website but this is our digital safe sanctuary policy that we have drafted and developed. And it's really what I think sets it apart I think we've already got several other resources out there that are working with live streaming but the intention of our safe point policy was not just live streaming but instead digital community building. So we build a safe sanctuary policy specifically for the actual community aspect. We have some notes on live streaming in there for the most part it's how are we keeping our people safe in a digital space. The way we're doing that is with the Guardian which is basically our elevated like moderator who has the ability to moderate the digital space and that's the word that you're probably gonna come up with a lot if you start looking into safe sanctuary online and what it kind of parallels into different terms of service but that's gonna be an excellent resource that we've made available. Feel free to use that, steal that, take that, look at it adapt it if you wanna sit down with me and talk about it more my calendar is open you're welcome to sit down with me we can talk about what does safe point look like in your context. How much you take these ideas and apply them in your own setting and then like I just said our final thing steal our ideas so that's a link to our discord right there whenever you get the PowerPoint join our discord, you will not hurt my feelings if you join our discord for 48 hours poke around, learn, see what you think see if this is for you see what you will like, what you won't like take the way we've built ourselves take the things we've learned please a part of my what I see as my obligation as a employee of the West North County Conference is that I am a researcher discovering these things as well as a pastor planning this church and so I wanna let all my research out I don't wanna put anything behind a paywall I want you to have access to everything that we know so feel free to come in steal our ideas, learn from us we have plenty of people we have people on our level too that are also pastors that have the intention of someday down the road starting their own digital churches and they are they've been very forthright with me and they're like, Hey, Nathan, I am here and I am here to learn from you and then I'm gonna take these ideas and run and I tell them great like I said, I think the space is viable for that some things that I do if you wanna check them out I have a daily blog where I put some ideas a lot of the stuff has nothing to do with ministry some of the stuff does today I wrote about NFTs so if you care about NFTs you can know my thoughts there and check those things out and all that stuff is on nathanisbusy.com that's my website there Rethink church I write one article a month for them where I talk about some video game stuff like that so if you're interested in their ministry and then the digital ministry hive mind this is something I'd recommend to all of you if you're in this seminar you should find us on Facebook the digital ministry hive mind is a Facebook group of just people doing this work of thinking about this and working through these processes and learning what we might be able to do and how we might be able to do digital ministry better so check that out go join that group I'm an admin I'll let you in no problem we pretty much let everybody in unless they look super sketchy but we let pretty much everybody in we're having a book club literally tomorrow we're gonna talk about virtual reality church by Daryl Bach this is our book club book we're gonna talk about it tomorrow we're reading another book starting this month so that's a great resource for you and then just some quick recommended podcasts for you Kerry Newhoff just finished up a session on digital church ministry that I thought was really good really interesting stuff pastoring the digital parish is out of I don't think it is actually officially out of UM com but it's done by a UM com leader Rethink church leader Ryan Dunn and then Akimbo says Seth Godin's podcast I love Seth Godin more he's just become absolutely my guru so if you like Seth Godin I recommend his podcast and how I built this is just a helpful podcast for understanding how things that exist on the internet retain on the internet so if you're curious about things that have lasted and things that have existed they've got some great podcasts put out there with the leaders of these organizations and how they might have found their footing so with that I think we're past time so I don't know if I can have my remaining questions but my email is always open and I'm happy to answer questions as time is made available I would love to continue to contribute to your conversations here if you have things that you want to know or you're curious about, feel free like I said, join our Discord check out our website checkpointchurch.com you can find all of our information there we also have a link tree and my email is nweb at wnccumc.net you can email me and ask any questions that you might have but yeah, there's plenty going on I feel like even an hour, even an hour I tried to rush it and fit as much as I could into this presentation there's a lot of information that I just threw at you and I'm sure you have more questions but that's where I think we've got to wrap it