RX 24 - Digital Discipleship - Utilizing Digital Connections to Further Discipleship

Transcribed Content

Thanks again, Jimmy, for bringing us a great devotional this morning, and he's going to be presenting to us utilizing digital connections to further discipleship. So please join me in welcoming back to the stage, mister Jimmy Witcher. Thank you guys and it is so great to be with you. I thought I would just try to share from a senior pastor's perspective what we're trying to accomplish with Rock and with some of our technology and what we think is is so important and really about a mindset. How many of you are coming at this from the pastoral side versus the technical side? So how many are the pastoral side? Okay awesome. So I'm assuming the others are the technical side then those that never raise their hand. Okay, got it. It's a normal this is a normal congregation. It's glad to know that I can have have expectations there. Alright. So let me share my goal is to give us ten or fifteen minutes at the end to ask questions, so I'm gonna try to roll through some things relatively quickly. I do wanna just start with a little introduction about myself and John was so sweet this morning and the team here. And they were talking about me being a professional speaker. The irony of that is impossible for me to communicate to you. When I started my career, I was in business for twenty five years before I became a pastor. And for the beginning of that, I was a chemist and a part time programmer and my desire was to be in the lab left all alone and never talk to another. If I could have a whole day and never talk to somebody, that was a very successful day. And, but the Lord ended up having some other plans and took on a very interesting journey to get to this place. But I I come at ministry really more from a perspective of being in business and having a strategic perspective than probably coming from a traditional ministry perspective. Though Kim and I have been doing ministry ever since we were we were dating in times that were before most of y'all were ever born. So let's begin with what we're here about. This is Matthew twenty eight eighteen, a verse that is very common to all of us. Jesus came and told his disciples, I have been given all authority in heaven and on earth, therefore go and make disciples of all the nations baptizing them in the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit. Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you and be sure of this, I am with you always till the very end of the age. I think it's important that we recognize that the purpose of what we're called to do as the church hasn't changed in two thousand years, but the methods and the tools are shifting rapidly. And when we recognize that the tools and the methods are shifting, I I believe God is trying to open up for us opportunities like we've never had before. And I said this this morning, but I wanna start with this, as a quote. I've heard many people say it, so I did not give this credit to any specific person, but I do believe this. The greatest revival in human history is just around the corner. And I believe this with all of my heart and I see signs of it breaking out, Asbury and others that many of you I know are tracking. And so the greatest revival is coming and I believe this just as strongly, the digital platforms will form the net that catches, develops and connects the next generation of disciples. Now I will be expounding on this for just a minute but I believe this. I actually think one of the things we have to work on as the church is we actually think our churches are gonna be the net. And I think churches are incredibly important. My life is with the church. We have a association, a network of churches, about 84 churches we work with. I love the local church. The local church is gonna last forever until Jesus returns. However, I believe it's these digital platforms that will form the net, that will then funnel people into the church, but we need to have these digital platforms built and effective so that we can do those, can bring in that harvest. And here's the last kind of assumption. Most of our church efforts towards digital discipleship have been around have been to try to recreate an in person experience in a digital space. And I think we need to see this the other way around and ask this question, what can we accomplish digitally that we cannot do in person? And so instead of just trying to recreate what we've done for the last, really since the reformation, the last five hundred years, how can we do things differently and what does that look like? So I wanna start with some historical drivers of change. And this is a presentation that I actually gave to our staff when I was trying to encourage them, hey, this is where we're going as a church and this might be something that helpful for you. And when we go back in history and we think about the inflection points of modernization, the inflection points of invention and how they have transformed culture, these are things that have transformed society on an incredible way. Number one is the printing press, 1439. It's because most people couldn't read, was really about another hundred years before that really began to impact the world but obviously the printing press was incredible. The steam engine in 1781 totally changed transportation and became, you know, opening up the West Of The United States, all kinds of things happened. The invention of steel in 1850 allowed us to construct bridges and buildings like we've never done before. The Ford automobile that came out in nineteen o eight transformed the buggy. Airlines in 1914, people started traveling around the world in ways they never did. Penicillin in 1928. Refrigerators in the nineteen thirties. Now think about, I mean it doesn't sound like much but you think about something that transformed the world, refrigerators. Now all of a sudden you could store food. You didn't have to go to the store every day. Change the habits of people and how they operate. The TV of course in nineteen fifties. Apple computer in '7 '19 1776. No. In 1976. I didn't say this up front, usually do when I'm reading things in front of an audience, I am dyslexic so if I make it up just correct it in your own brain and it will all work out in the end. And then finally of course AOL, who remembers, now this is really gonna date me, who had an AOL account? Oh, feel so good. Think that was all the ministry people too that mentioned in a mirror. So AOL in 1983 when the internet came to pass, know my kids asked me, dad what kind of cell phone did you have in high school? And I was like, cell phones didn't exist when I was in high school. I used to travel the world internationally for business without a cell phone. But here's one that's a little closer to home. This is Martin Luther, something you probably are all familiar with, in the Protestant Reformation of fifteen seventeen. Now, Martin came with two main thoughts that he was trying to bring into Christendom. First of all was grace through faith and more specifically, he was going about the indulgence or going against the indulgences of the Catholic church. Now if you didn't know about that history, what the Catholic church was doing at the time and had been for many years is they were basically selling pre forgiveness. In other words, in the Catholic church, if you went to confess or confession, you would go and confess all your sins and the priest would absolve you, tell me how many Hail Mary's you had to do and all that sort of thing and you could be absolved. Well, some of the nobles and whatnot of Martin Luther's time, they were they were thinking, well you know what? I would like to go on a vacation with my girlfriend and not my wife, which I know is a sin, so what do I need to do? So they would go and the priest would say, oh well that that's a big one. But the church needs a new roof, so I think for and then it would sell an indulgence and this person would then be able to go forward. Well of course, Martin Luther was very upset about that so he was speaking against. That's where the whole grace through faith came in. And part of that though is he also said, but we need to get a bible in everybody's hands. Everybody needs a bible. And this was totally contrary to culture at the time. Bibles were only to be read in Latin by people who were specially trained but Martin said, no, we need to do something different. And so he created a discipleship model which is the same model we operate on today, gather people together and teach them the bible. But there was something fascinating about Martin Luther. And part of what was so fascinating was it wasn't his message. Lots of people have been speaking out about indulgences. Lots of people knew that was a cultural issue. Lots of people were thinking that regular folks like you and I ought to be able to have access to scripture and be able to read it in a language that we could comprehend. That wasn't new. But what Martin Luther did is he capitalized on the technology of the day. And I wanna read this quote. This comes out of history.com and it says this, the key ideas of the reformation, a call to purify the church and a belief that the bible, not tradition, should be the sole source of spiritual authority, were not themselves novel. However, Luther and the other reformers became the first to skillfully use the power of the printing press to give their ideas a wide audience. In other words, what We look at Martin Luther as the birthing point of the Protestant Reformation and I would be willing to bet most of us are probably a part of the Protestant Reformation. It all started because this guy woke up one day and said, hey, there's a technology out there that we can use to transform culture. And there's very few things. You look at all of our hospitals, our education system, everything that we have today in that vein was born out of Martin Luther in the reformation and utilizing the printing press. In fact, he became the first best selling author. In October of fifteen seventeen, Luther became Europe's First best selling author and first mass media celebrity. He was the first one to use that technology to begin to get the message out. And so I wanna ask us this question. Is there a modern invention with a similar ability to impact culture as the printing press? Is is there something that is happening in our time and in our day that is so significant? And when I ask this question, how many of you would say it's the internet? Okay. Internet is a possibility and I think the Internet is is definitely significant. I don't believe it's the most significant. I believe the smartphone is. I believe there has not been another disruptive technology that is more significant than the cell phone. Who in this room does not have your cell phone with you? I don't, but it's I can see it. It's not out of my sight. Well, that's I mean, that that's mind boggling. We we have in our pockets connected twenty four seven, we have a device that goes with us every single place that we go. This is as significant or more significant than the printing press. Here's just a little graph to put this in perspective and it's taken over several years going from different times that the Pew Research did this survey. Starting from April 2011 going all the way to May 2023. Alright. Now this was done in 2024, they just don't have 2024 data just yet, but this is the percentage of adults, these are 18 and older in The United States who own a smartphone. So you go back to 02/2011, just thirteen years ago. Now think about where were you thirteen years ago? I mean what was going on in your life? You can think back thirteen years. Thirteen years wasn't that far, that wasn't that long ago. Right at a third of people had a smartphone thirteen years ago. Today, everyone does or you're kind of weird. You're one of the 10% if you don't have a smartphone. Now we won't argue whether it's Apple or Android because everybody gets upset, but I do wish all you Android people would get your green bubble out of my blue clean screen. So when we think about moving and doing things with digital technology that can disciple So if if we're not just gonna try to take what we do in church, which what do we do in church? In church, most of us probably have a church service that looks like this. We come to church, your church is somewhere between an hour and an hour and ten to fifteen minutes long. Maybe you're you know really out there and you go for an hour and a half. You probably have somebody open up the service, we have two, three, or four songs of worship, then we have kind of a transition time, we have a nice message that a professional speaker like myself presents a message over thirty to forty minutes. I just turned in my sermon this weekend might be forty five if I don't do something different, but nonetheless. When we figure out then we have somebody come up and we pray and we close. Does that pretty much sum up everybody's service? Well, when we try to recreate that digitally, we run into all kinds of problems. First of all, worship services, unless you just have a really high quality team, the worship experience in the room and the worship experience that is captured are two totally different things. And so to try to translate that, it doesn't capture real To take a message, and I again, I'm a professional communicator, this is what I do for a living. And a forty a thirty or forty minute message, man it better be really, really, really good for the YouTube user to actually watch the whole thing. Now in in service, you're happy to do it because you're in community, there's other things to watch. Why is that lady getting up? Why is that baby crying? I mean there's lots of things to keep our attention while the pastor is speaking, but watching it online we're not we're not used to that. We're used to a twenty eight minute segment with commercials that are broken up and lots of things that hold our attention. So those things don't translate well digitally. So what is the core and the essence of discipleship? If our job is to make disciples, what does it look like? And I would say this, if we go to Acts chapter two, it can give us a hint of some things that are the core essence of discipleship, but maybe we can think about how we can accomplish some of these things in a digital connection. So here we go, Acts chapter two forty two. Of course, know this is after Peter had preached, it's kind of the summary after the church was born there in Jerusalem. All the believers devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching. So we can have apostles' teaching. We have teaching, that's something that we can translate digitally and fellowship. That's the word koinonia, doing life together. Now people would have argued if I put my map back up or my chart back up there prior to the cell phone or the smartphone really having preeminence and and or saturation is a better word in society, people would have said the only way to have fellowship is you gotta be together. Well, don't think that's true anymore. I watch our kids when we were raising our kids, they had a lot of fellowship that took place without ever being in the same room with their friends. And I'm not saying all that's healthy, but it is possible and something that we can capitalize on as disciple makers. Sharing meals including the Lord's Supper. Now there is even some things to think about how we could possibly do that digitally, but that is something that probably coming together. And to prayer, obviously, There are ways we could connect and do prayer in a digital context. A deep sense of awe came over them all and the apostles performed many miraculous signs and wonders. Now I recognize in a room like this, we probably have a vast differences of perspective in theology, so I'm gonna give an example that is based on trinity. You may have different theology. I'm not offended by your theology. Hopefully you're not on ours, but we believe in the gifts of the spirit including prophetic ministry. And so one of the things that we have been experimenting on and it's going exceptionally well is we have prophetic ministry that happens every Sunday and we have a group that works online with folks and connects with them over Zoom so that we can begin to minister prophetically across a digital platform. That would be the signs and wonders. And all the believers met together in one place, we can definitely do that, and they shared everything they had, something we need to work on. I don't have an answer for that one yet, but that's definitely something to consider. They sold their property and possessions and shared the money with those in need. They worshipped together at the temple each day, met in homes for the Lord's Supper and shared their meals with great joy and generosity, all the while praising God and enjoying the goodwill of all the people. And each day, the Lord added to their fellowship those who were being saved. Not just those who were joining their church, but those who were being saved. And I really do feel one of the things that God is doing in this season, in this moment, is he's moving us towards a place where our platforms are not just about recreating a weekend service for people who are traveling, but it's about creating a discipleship tool that helps people get saved. And that's a big aspect of what I believe we can focus on in the future. So I just wanna again, I'll give you a real high view of kind of our digital discipleship strategy. I realize you have one, I would love to hear your strategy. We are in no way saying we have this all figured out. It's just they gave me the microphone, so I thought I'd share what we were doing. So number one, use data to make personal connections as quickly as possible. So this is probably the first part of the strategy. Now many of you I know are already doing this, but this was something that was very important to us and so we created a lead process using Rock. One of the things that we wanted to do is figure out how quickly can we connect with somebody once they get in into the church. Once they're there, how quickly can we find them? And what do we need to do in a workflow way to be able to make this as efficient as possible? And so we created this dashboard and it's actually really the systems behind it and it's a way of tracking the first time that we connect with anybody. And so you can see here, this this is this little blue bar here is comparing the first six months of twenty three with the first six months of twenty four at our Hollywood Road campus. And so I think I have the numbers written down, I can't read those. Let me see here. I think we went up. We were basically at 1,100 leads in the first six months and I think we're at about fourteen, thirteen, 14 hundred so far this year, which for us, a key performance indicator is how many leads are we generating. And a lead for us is a first time connect with a person. And so we've tried to create our processes in such a way that was quickly as possible we can find leads. So I'll give you a quick example. Children's check-in is one of our main sources of leads. First time people check their children in. Well, our process that our church had for probably twenty years is the first time you check-in, it was a paper process. And then after you've checked in about five times, literally, our team would go to the effort of entering that into the system so that from that point forward you would now be a part. And so we didn't find that out until much later that you know we had this legacy workflow there. But what we were doing, we were missing a perfect opportunity to get to connect with somebody the first time they came to church. You would have to come for a month or two months before we would know that you were new. So we switched that up, obviously. And Brock of course made that super easy. When you first come, you have to check your kids in. Now that immediately sends alert. We get a report on Monday morning for all first time check ins, those who get assigned to a person, that's what all these names are over on the side. And so they then get to follow-up with that lead with a phone call or an email with every single lead that comes in. So whether it's a first time check-in, first time giver, every time we do an event there's always a sign up for the event. In fact, we'll give away a TV here or some sort of something to give away to encourage people to sign in. You can't get a free TV if you don't sign in, but if you sign in, now we have a lead, now we can follow-up and we can begin to track you. So just recognizing that we can find these people where they are and help them take their next step. Then the other thing we do is every week, we meet as a team to go over the leads. And so everybody is responsible for explaining to the other 30 people that are in the room and on the Zoom call with all of our campuses every single week. They get to look at that's why some of these are red and some of them are yellow and some of them are green. That's probably my leftover from my business days. I just find group accountability works great. When you got to explain why you're red in front of all your friends, it just makes my job easier. And so anyway, that's how we that's how we do that. So here's here's some sources for leads. First times check-in, first time giving, growth track sign up, baptisms, events sign up, any sort of ministry. And then of course, we're encouraging more and more now. We just launched our brand new app that won an award today. Didn't even know we were up for one, so that was incredible. And and so app logins of course are a new lead. Already talked about this. Every lead is assigned a leader. Leads are contacted within seventy two hours. If a message is left, the lead is set to reconnect in seventy two hours. The team meets weekly to review those and then an individual scorecard is reviewed. One thing that I would say that has been so powerful with this lead process is what we do in the meeting. The meeting's only thirty minutes every Wednesday at 11:30 right before lunch. So one way to know what meetings needs to end is you start it right before lunch. Everybody's motivated to make it in, is the testimonies. And it's unbelievable to hear because a lot of times people will will call somebody once or they'll call them twice or they'll call them three times and there's a process in Rock that tracks all of that. And then you get no answer. And then just they'll be prompted by the spirit and they'll just call somebody that was on their lead list six months ago and they will go, oh my gosh, I can't believe you just called me. And this is not an exaggeration. Every week, we have testimony after testimony after testimony. And all it is is using data as a net to connect with people and make that person to person connection. Just been really, really incredible. And then here is our additional data driven pastoring. One of our favorite things is a weekly lost ERA report. I'm just curious. This is just as a pastor. How many of you all track ERA? How many of you do a lost ERA report? Okay. A handful of us. Okay. So every single week, we automatically produce a lost ERA report. I'm assuming you know what I mean by lost ERA to this room here. So our campus pastors get a list of everybody that's fallen off and their expect our expectation is that they call everybody on that list. Now a lot of times as you know, lost ERA is because somebody stopped giving. And so it's an amazing opportunity. We have people all the time that when I share this with pastors, they're like, oh you can't call those people. I'm like, no, they love it. I can honestly tell you and pastor Daniel, one of our campus pastors for our largest campuses here, he would tell you if he was in the room. He I don't think he has had one negative encounter. He has not had one person that said, why are you calling me? I left your, you know, blankety blank church. Why are you calling you know. He's not had any of that, but he has had dozens and dozens of like, thank you for noticing. And it ranges everything from, oh my gosh, our credit card expired. We didn't know that the automatic draft wasn't taking place to, we're going through a really hard time. My husband lost his job. We're being transitioned. We're in the military. We've moved to Kansas. I mean, it just gives him a chance to minister and to pray and it's just been an incredible way to minister to the flock. So if if your church isn't doing that and ministering to people out, it's just a great way. It's not even about stopping people from going out the back door, it's about loving them in a point of need that they find themselves in and they're just you know letting us know by changing their behaviors. Alright. So the first thing we try to do is using data to help gather leads and to make that personal connection. Second part of our strategy is to use data to encourage taking your next step in being a disciple. And this I know has been talked about a lot. Many of you use steps. We also use steps inside of Rock. It's critical to help people take their next step. And so first key to this is defining what your steps are. And so these are the steps that we have defined at Trinity. We believe a disciple is someone who can hear, believe and obey God. And it kinda starts from the bottom and builds up. They're saved, water baptized, holy spirit filled, in community, contributing, self developing, and reproducing. And my third strategy will go into this a little bit more. What we felt like we were doing a pretty good job of as a church is one through five. We could track that, we could measure that. Where we were struggling is getting people to enter into self developing and reproducing. We were struggling with how do we get them there and we were also struggling with how do we measure that in the first place. And so part of what we've had to work on over this last year and actually help Triumph Tech help us with this is create some ways on that. More on that in just a minute, but I wanted you to see that in here. So we wanted to design what a a disciple is and then we wanna develop criteria for achieving each step and maintaining that step. You know, some steps In other words, I don't want you to think our theology is bad. Once you're saved, we're good. You don't have to maintain your salvation, right? But being in community is something you can slide in and out of, right? It's something that, yeah, you're in community now but what if you're not in community six, eight, twelve months from now? We would wanna know that so we could help get you back into community. So some things you can get in, some things to be maintained. And what do those mean? Defining them and then defining how using data are we gonna be able to track those. And what that allows us to do is then take your next step marketing. It allows us to center around, okay, instead of just giving a blanket to the whole congregation, we now have clear segmentation based upon where they are in their discipleship journey. So how do we help them take that next step? So if you haven't taken the growth track, we want you to take the growth track. If you haven't been water baptized, we're gonna encourage you on the water baptism weekend, which for us happens once every three the third weekend of every month. Any specific classes that make sense for you, we're we're able to do email and SMS campaigns to encourage people to take their next step. We have targeted marketing that can be focused to men's, women's, married couples, parents, etc. And then utilizing for you marketing in app and web. In other words, now we know who you are. In fact, had an interesting conversation during the break here a little bit ago about how some people want folks to log in to their website and other folks are like, no we want it to you know not log in. I know it's a raging debate and everybody has to decide what they want. For us, we want you to log in. In fact, you're not gonna have access to much data because all of strategy step two feeds back into strategy step one. First time somebody logs in, they become a new lead. Now it's somebody that we can have email campaigns for and we can target very specifically to them because we know something about them. And so we're always circling back and trying to, understand where people are in their discipleship journey and help them to take that next step. I would even say this, one of the things that we did, and this was actually my wife Kim's idea. Let me I think I can go back. We actually put this list, this was at a women's night, we did it again for a men's night. We put this list up and we used our text in number and said to a room of about 750 women I think, hey text what your next step is to this number. And we had over 85% participation. 85% of the people in the room self selected where their next step was. I think I was in the back of the room when it was happening. We had 12 people say their next step is to be saved. We had a bunch of people say their next step is to be water baptized. This whole room in less than five minutes self selected what their next step is. Now we can very easily have a very specific list. You just said the next thing you need to do is get in community. You said the next thing you need to is be baptized. Let me tell you how I can help you take that step. And just in doing this over the last year, our baptisms are up like, I don't know, 50%. I think we're over 600 so far this year. Baptisms that we've had which for us is about 50% or probably about 30% up from where we were this time last year. But it's just because we know where folks are and we can help them take that next step. So then the third strategy and we'll get to get to questions. Third strategy is this, produce and distribute content that encourage encourages daily consumption on smartphone smartphone platforms. One of the things that we really feel like is a key to the future is rather than trying to recreate the weekend experience, what we're trying to do is give smaller bite sized pieces to allow daily discipleship instead of weekly. If you think about the weekly context, it goes all the way back to the horse and buggy days. When you came into town on a Sunday, we don't have that anymore. We've got folks that are traveling going everywhere. So how can we do daily? So John mentioned this morning about the bible cast. That's what was born about four and a half years ago. So I started doing a bible cast. It's just a ten minute video shared live on Facebook, YouTube, podcasting platforms, and our app. I think we've done almost if not just over a thousand episodes so far. I've gone through the entire New Testament except for Philemon and Revelation and don't hold your breath, I'm not ready to dive into Revelation just yet. So, I'm actually going back through, the Bible now and and again the purpose is just some people we say you need to have a daily quiet time, they have no idea what that means. So what is it? How can we help them? Well, let's let's go. We're in the middle of Hebrews right now and we're line after line, ten minutes, little prayer, you're done. Let's keep going. But that's something they can do every day. We do interactive messages. So we have a podcast that we do between our services. So I'll preach one service, have an interactive message and preach the other. In the interactive message, people can ask questions. And so we'll just sit there on stage and people They used to text it in, now we're using the app and a feature that Rock has to allow them to text in questions anonymously. And, the reason we use the app is because if they wanna text in a question, have to download the app. To download the app, you have to log in. To log in gives us an opportunity to have a lead and it gives us a chance then to follow-up. And then things like prayer wall and all of those things. And then the last, strategy point that we did, and this is an attempt to go after what I was telling you before, how do we help people to be self developing, to to grow stronger on their own? And then how do we help them to reproduce? And it led us to a challenge that we felt like we had in the church and the challenge was this, if we want somebody to become an evangelist general or to to help advance the kingdom, generally speaking, there was three ways that people could do that. They could invite somebody to come to church, they could join the dream team and serve in some way and then hopefully begin to lead and mentor people, or they could be a small group leader. Well, the last two are very high cost things. It takes a special person to lead a small group and it takes a special person to go into the dream team and be able to serve. For a lot of our higher capacity leaders, they actually don't have the time to be able to do that in the church. So how can we create something for them? So we created Journeys and what we're encouraging folks, and this is all brand new for us, to be guides and travelers on short daily devotions. And so this is right out of our app. And so a journey is a devotional built to take travelers on a daily journey. The groups are led by guides who have to be a part of the dream team. So to be a guide, you've got to be on the dream team. So I, number one, know that we you know we can trust you. But also it encourages people to be a part of the dream team that maybe otherwise would not. And then it provides community interaction at the user's convenience. And so this is just a screenshot out of our app, I just picked some. So some of the things are there's like a humility following Jesus' example is a five day journey. Living in heaven on earth is a twelve day. Passion week, the journey to the cross, eight days and you know you can just see on down. The goal is to get people to commit to a very small interaction on a daily basis over a very fixed period of time. So that we can connect with them and then allow them to be able to engage in discipleship on a regular basis and to connect them to a guide so the guide can kinda help them in the discipleship process. Now I've been doing this as a test with four guys and we've now we're now on I think nineteen months of just constantly going through and it's incredible to see. And and the other thing is is you don't have to gather together. It's daily, but everybody does it on their own time. And so all throughout the day, people go in, they read the devotion, they read the scripture, they type in their comments, they comment back and forth to each other. It's just a great way of keeping that process and the journey's flowing. And so we believing this is gonna be good. The Triumph Tech team is working on our website. It will allow people to also not have to have the app, but you can join a journey on the website, but you have to log in. If you log in, we got you. You've now become a lead and now you're a part of our service and so part of our process. So anyway, there you go. That is what we're trying to do in our strategy. And I'm sorry, I only left us eight minutes for questions but there you go. Any questions?