00:00:05 | David Maples: Hello and welcome back to Episode 3 of Ministry Maximizer.

00:00:09 | David Maples: Today’s episode is called The Virtual Church: Beyond Live Streaming. And for those of you listening today, this is going to be a little bit of a different episode. It’s probably our most controversial episode. But before we get into this, I’m going to introduce ourselves. I’m one of your hosts, my name is David Maples, and I’m joined here by my co-host.

00:00:26 | Carla Green: I’m Carla Green.

00:00:28 | David Maples: And just to give everyone who is new to the show a little bit of background, I’ll go first. My name is David Maples. I’m a business consultant, I run a digital marketing agency. I’m the host of several different podcasts, but I’m also involved heavily in technology. I have an AI consultancy and we’re building actual artificial intelligence tools, one of which is a sponsor of this podcast called Ministry Maximizer.

00:00:54 | David Maples: And Carla, if you’d introduce yourself to the audience.

00:00:56 | Carla Green: I’m Carla Green and I have several hats like my co-host as well. I am the founder and president of Activate the Church Ministries. I currently also work as at a law firm as a Chaplain and COO. And I’m getting about a year out from getting my doctorate in Chaplain Ministry, which will officially make me the doctor of the church, which I love that kind of concept because there’s lots of things that need to be happening in a church and I love the church and I think that this is kind of an unexpected surprise. As David and I met each other and just technology and the church and how it can help, and so I have really enjoyed partnering with him and so I think you guys are going to benefit.

01:40 | David Maples: So today, to tee this up, we already said that this might be our most controversial episode, certainly thus far. And we’re talking about the virtual church.

01:51 | David Maples: So if we were to take a step back and say, before the pandemic—there was that thing, that period of time for five years where none of us left our homes and we washed all our groceries by hand. And for those of you, if this survives online several dozen years beyond this, you won’t have any idea what we’re talking about, and that’s okay.

02:11 | David Maples: But the point about it is, is that at that point in time, what churches were basically doing online was live streaming, if you were lucky. It was a shaky camera, kind of in the back of the room, they just threw something on a tripod and let it go there. And it was kind of a—I want to say for a lot of churches, it was just really an afterthought. It was like, you know, we need to be on the interwebs, the internet’s a thing, we need to have something up there, we could put it on the YouTube. I’m intentionally being obtuse with this. So that’s kind of what it was.

02:43 | David Maples: And then the pandemic happened and 97% of churches at the height, I think, had some kind of online component to their weekly service. And the thing we wanted to talk about today is we really wanted to discuss, putting your service online is very kind of… that’s where you could start it. It’s not all the things you could do with it.

03:05 | David Maples: And we wanted to discuss a little bit—when I say it’s controversial—is there’s a lot of beliefs that either every Christian tradition comes at this from a different angle. Some think you have to be in the church, you have to have butts in pews, you got to do that thing. Some have this idea of spiritual communion on the other end of things, where you don’t necessarily have to be there. Carla, what are your thoughts on this?

03:28 | Carla Green: I think the purpose of all of this has changed too, if I could back up a little bit. So I was part of a church in the 2010s that we were on, we were online, but we were a multi-sited church. So we already had that going. And there were several that did. And so when this pandemic thing hit, they were already ready to to move it more at home. But for the others, because you just couldn’t meet in in your buildings.

03:59 | Carla Green: So if you were kind of ahead of the curve and were doing it for for multiplying your church—that’s kind of what was happening in, you know, 2010 to 2020, or maybe a little earlier for people—and then it became necessity to even keep your doors open and keep people connected for, you know, a year or two, however, depending on where you were and how populated and what the overall belief was. I think I live in an area right now where nobody was at home, but they didn’t care.

04:24 | Carla Green: But anyway, and now I think we’re to the point where we have to redefine what does online church mean? Because for some people, they’re not coming back to church. They’re choosing to stay at home because it’s easier, they’ve gotten used to it, or maybe they they’re listening to somebody that’s not, like maybe they found another church in another city that they liked the the preaching better. And so now they’re not coming back to their local church. So that that is somewhat of a problem for the people who are at the local churches trying to trying to survive.

04:58 | Carla Green: But I think going forward, we have to say, what is this online presence? What does it mean to have that? Because it’s no longer just the multi-siting, pandemic really isn’t an issue. I mean, we also had it for if people were on vacation, our family members could still stay connected to us if they were away. And so, I think I think it’s good to step back and go, “Okay, so now, now what? Now that we’re here, now that we know that we have it, is it still a good idea? And is it for the same purpose that we had it before?” Because I think personally, it’s changed and could be used differently.

05:31 | David Maples: To your point, it definitely has changed. And we can spend a few minutes talking about the definition of it. I wanted to say, before we really get into it, as I see this—and I could be completely wrong—my great-grandmother, late in her life, would probably have told you the church that she belonged to was one of these online televangelist churches. Because I don’t think she had been back to the physical church in her hometown—and she was in South Georgia—and I don’t think she’d been back to the church in her hometown in years. And she was very involved. She gave to that online, not online, it was on television church.

06:07 | David Maples: Televangelist. And she would actually probably have said that was her church. Maybe I’m wrong in that. And if anybody in the family watches this and wants to correct me, you got my number, please call me. But that being said, she really did, and she felt she got great fulfillment from that. And it’s actually the first thing that’s made me think about because I think for a lot of people, televangelism, if you weren’t involved with that, had a bad connotation. And for her, it was a very necessary part of her life. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

06:40 | David Maples: So, I look at this kind of the same way. I do realize that people coming from different faiths may have different ideas. For example, online communion. What is that? We talked about this briefly before the the podcast, a little bit, this idea of ecclesia, which it sounds like there’s a little bit of a definitional problem. That comes from the Greek in the New Testament, and you said it’s from what book is it from?

[For Newcomers: “Ecclesia” is the Greek word used in the New Testament that is often translated as “church.” It literally means “an assembly” or “a called-out gathering.” The discussion revolves around whether “church” must be a physical assembly or if it can be a virtual one.]

07:00 | Carla Green: I think Matthew, it’s right after he asked the disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” And that’s when Peter totally rocked it out and said, literally, totally rocked it out and said, “You are the Christ, the son of the living God.” And he said, you know, “You couldn’t have possibly come up with that on your own.” So it was the Holy Spirit. And but on this, and so that’s also controversial because it’s, you know, “upon this fact, I’m going to build my church.” But in the Greek, it’s ecclesia. Some people thought Peter that he’s building, I mean, the Catholic church goes after that, which that’s fine. But anyway, the word ecclesia comes from from that place. And actually, if you look it up in the Greek, it means he’s basically building not just a temple, like what we would think of church or, you know, a place to meet, but it’s it’s in order for the kingdom of God to be legislated here on earth and for the church, people who call Jesus their savior, it’s for the sons and daughters to help, you know, administer the kingdom of God here on earth. So it has a much bigger meaning than what we have limited it to, as well. It’s actually quite exciting.

08:06 | David Maples: It’s interesting. What I’ve—and I I did some research before this episode—and I found a lot of different takes on this. And it’s the idea of that this is like your church is this gathering, wherever you gather, that could be the church. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the physical church, etc.

08:23 | David Maples: But I was really thinking about this this online piece as kind of distance ministry in a way. It’s it’s kind of something I was thinking about in this particular case. I was thinking about what does that look like? And and so one of the things that we could talk about is even Paul’s letters in the New Testament. You know, he, if you read those letters, almost always Paul says something such as, “I wish I could be there and I’m not, but here’s the stuff I want to tell you.” And very, very different than, you know, than actually being physically in those churches. And now obviously geographically travel, all these other things are part of it. What are your thoughts on that?

09:03 | Carla Green: On the fact that he was in these different places or just geography or what specifically?

09:07 | David Maples: Well, I’m just kind of trying to think about the the letters themselves. Like the letters, you know, it was it was definitely, there was a there was definitely a longing that came across in his letters of being face-to-face would be great, but can’t be there.

09:21 | Carla Green: Yes. And so a lot of times, I mean, a lot of them he wrote from prison. So it’s not like he was lazy and didn’t want to travel.

09:27 | David Maples: “I would be there, but the guard won’t let me out.”

09:32 | Carla Green: The guard is saying no today.

09:34 | David Maples: Totally.

09:34 | Carla Green: So but I’ve sent someone else, you know, in my stead. Here’s Timothy, here’s, you know, whomever, and, you know, listen to them. And so, but those were very effective. I mean, look how effective they are. We’re still reading them, you know, 2,000 years later. So that’s that’s definitely across the miles. And I think there’s a benefit to that, too. I mean, personally, we are, we have a local church, but we have an online church that we’re a part of too that is in, I mean, I’m in Illinois, it’s in California. And we consider ourselves part of the California church, probably more than we consider ourselves part of the local church.

10:08 | Carla Green: And so I think there’s there’s so many, there’s really lots of aspects to this because I think you almost have to have an online presence. It doesn’t matter your size because people want to try you before they come in. You know, it’s it’s very hard to go to go to different churches. Having just moved to a new area three years ago, and we church shopped, it’s probably one of the most painful things ever. And I think I wanted to offer that—that’s an overstatement, it’s not the most painful thing ever—but when it comes to church, it’s a painful thing.

10:37 | Carla Green: I actually want to offer the service that if you want me to come shop your church, I’d be happy to have like, I actually want to be a church critic. I want to go in and say, you know, was I greeted? Did, you know, did I understand what was next? Or did you just assume that I would know? Did anybody say hi to me? Was I invited to something else? Like, was I pressured? Was it was it weird? Like because we’ve been to a lot of strange churches. And so I would love to like give that to somebody and go, “Here’s here’s your scorecard. Thank you for the experience.”

11:06 | Carla Green: And and we actually hired mystery shoppers to come to our church and it was very interesting because what we thought everybody knew and understood, they were, they had no idea what we were even doing. And so it’s it’s very beneficial if you can get somebody to do that because because you don’t know how it’s perceived. You’ve been doing it for years and you just are expecting the people to walk through the door to kind of pick up on your pace. And as people become more de-churched or don’t even know what church is like, they have no expectation of it either. I mean, I’ve been to a church where they never explained the next thing they were doing ever, and it was highly uncomfortable. And then, you know, I went to a church where they were training as they went. Everything that seemed a little weird, they would explain it and why and why they were doing it. And that was very beneficial because they reminded the people in the church what they were doing and also the new people as well.

11:59 | David Maples: And and to apply kind of business methodology to this a little bit, I’ve been involved with building some different organizations lately. And the number one thing that people have said when they come visit like a networking group or an organization thing is first of all, how organized is it and how welcome did you make them feel? Those are the two complaints that keep people from coming back.

12:21 | David Maples: And I think we mentioned it in a previous episode because I think there’s a lot that can be kind of borrowed from the business world, etc. Because there’s a lot of evidence of that. But your your point is right on point there. If you don’t know what the experience of it is, if you don’t know anyone at church, if you don’t know who they are, how do people welcome you? And they’re they’re really, probably, in the Christian faith, there’s probably no place you should feel less welcome than walking in a church.

12:48 | Carla Green: That’s right.

12:49 | David Maples: I mean, that’s kind of front and center, I would think. And the idea that that’s that’s not there.

12:56 | David Maples: So I was thinking about this from the context of, because I I think we need to kind of bypass, because we could talk about the physical versus virtual presence debate. And I think that we might lose the audience just because I think that we just need to say there’s a lot of options out there and you probably, if we’re going to—I hate shoulding people, because shoulding people is like a terrible thing. It’s like, “You should do the following.”

13:18 | Carla Green: Don’t should all over people. It’s bad.

13:19 | David Maples: Yeah, we can’t should all over people.

13:21 | Carla Green: No oughts, no shoulds.

13:23 | David Maples: No shoulds. But, I’m going to go ahead and, can I use my one should for this episode?

13:26 | Carla Green: You can have one should. Go ahead.

13:27 | David Maples: You should do some of these things. You should look at them and recognize that you need to meet people where they are. For example, if you have an aging congregation or sick people in your congregation who can’t be at church, it would be probably very beneficial at the very minimum to have a live streaming option.

13:47 | David Maples: But the thing I have seen lately, because I started doing some research on this because there’s some different things out there. There’s some different technologies and I think we need to put some of those in the show notes. And I don’t want to recommend any particular one because I really haven’t used any of them yet. But there’s a lot of options for one of the things that people want is a live chat feature in the thing. I don’t know how that works because I’ve never used it. So I think maybe we need to go undercover and then try one of these churches with a live chat.

14:14 | Carla Green: Well, they usually have some online pastors or online people that are paying attention to the chat. And so they’ll either comment on what’s going on or if somebody needs prayer, they might, you know, move them over to, I guess there’s a place to move them probably over into a breakout room to where they could pray for them. Like I went on last yesterday, I guess Sunday was yesterday because I had it, I was going to another town and I wanted to be part of an event that was going on and I had a question. So during their service time, I just popped it in the chat, said, “Hey, is this the same as what this used to be?” And yeah, they’re like, “Yes, it is. We just renamed it.” So, so I got a live chat during service. But I think it we kind of have to meet where people are at, like you said, and part of that is the chat because you want them to be interactive, not just zoning out or whatever during it and if they can make some sort of connection through the online piece, that’s that’s very…

15:06 | David Maples: I just hadn’t really thought about it. And they even said that doing polls, you could do polls. So I was thinking about, again, taking it from something else, I was thinking about university settings. So one of the challenges, and I’m going to go ahead and bring this up, they say one of the challenges with people in college is that a lot of the people—and I don’t know that they’re doing this in high schools right now or not—but they say a lot of the college students are really not engaged. And there’s a lot of different things. And I think there’s a lot in common with the church there.

15:35 | David Maples: They’ll have these massive classes, in some cases where they have 500 or even a thousand students in these introductory classes. And they’ve, there’s no interaction, there’s no, the professor doesn’t call on you, but you’re expected to buzz in on these polls or answer a question with like a clicker in class. And for me, that just seemed really, I mean, it seems a little alien and definitely, I don’t know that it means I’m involved. It seems more like it’s a way to check a box.

16:03 | David Maples: But I thought about it, are there ways that the church could do that? And I don’t really know all the details on that, but I think that definitely a church should think about what it looks like there. And I think you also are going to have to think about how, because you’re going to have some conservative elements in your church too as you move some of this stuff online who are probably going to push back on it. So to your point, Carla, it’s like mystery shop. You probably need to explain why you’re doing these things. It’s not just, “I know best because I prayed about this.” Probably should be, “We’re doing this because there are some younger people online or there’s people who are”—because I’ll tell you, no matter what you do in your church, if I say, “I’m doing this because we have some people who can’t be with us today because they’re in the hospital or they’re sick or they’re convalescing,” I guarantee you it’ll probably those people would not complain so much if they know you’re doing that as part of the outreach or ministry to those people in the church who can’t be there.

16:55 | Carla Green: Right, and I think I think it’s important when you start communicating that is, you know, we have people in our church that are convalescing and it’s like, “Oh, so when I’m sick, I know this is available to me.” Because you have to make those connections for people, because you can make it available, but if you don’t connect like, or when you’re on vacation, like listen to us or, you know, and I think what’s beautiful too is that people can be listening, I listen to sermons all week long and not from the same church. You know, when I’m listening, you know, people podcast, well, a sermon can be a podcast. So I’m listening to lots of different people. And I had one friend who would listen to three different people and she’d kind of take the intersection of what they were all saying, just because if you think somebody’s kind of way out there, well, what else is somebody saying? So how, so it’s really beneficial. It’s you have to get outside of just Sunday morning and what it can do for somebody because there are lots of people looking for good content and the church should have the best content. And also, I think your your online church presence needs to mirror or closely mirror what your in-church presence is like. So if you have a really fun chat person that you’re having a great time online, and then you get them inside the church and it is dry as a bone, that doesn’t really represent your church. And so people, so you I think we need to, you need to think about that as well.

18:20 | Carla Green: So, do you see how I said “you need to” instead of “should”?

18:24 | David Maples: So we’re just, what we’re going to do is we’re going to reframe the terms and then pitch them the way that our audience…

18:29 | Carla Green: Totally.

18:30 | David Maples: So, okay. So I will say that some of the data shows, so we we pulled some data on this before the show, and one of the things showed that a substantial portion since the pandemic of people still are engaging online, about 46% either attend primarily online or a mix of online and in person. If it’s maybe 40 to 50% of your church, if you’re, I I think woe be to you to abandon that part of your flock. You know, I don’t need to worry about those those other sheep. It’s just the ones right here who I’m real comfortable with.

19:06 | David Maples: So I think that that could really, and and when you start looking at churches shedding parishioners, I I think you you meet people where they’re at. That’s my thought. Again, am I shoulding people? I don’t know. But the thing about it is, is that there’s a noticeable percentage of people, about three-quarters of people, even when they can attend online, most prefer to do it in person. And I don’t know if that’s because we as humans have been social animals for a long time.

19:32 | David Maples: But you know as well as I do that even though I’m getting to see you virtually right now, when I see you in person, it’s a very different experience. And I think part of it, and I’m going to go ahead and pontificate on this for one second, if you’ll go. Part of it is because first of all, it’s a 2D thing. It’s flat. We could talk about VR and AR stuff later or whatever that is. But I think it’s not a three-dimensional thing. You don’t get the full experience of the other person to really being there as well. You can’t read my body language as well, and it’s a very different thing to be in the environment with other people.

20:06 | David Maples: And not to compare church to to theater going, but going to see a movie on opening night for a whole bunch of people who are kind of engaged in the same thing—maybe I shouldn’t use this at all—but do you follow me? It’s very different going there with other people. If you go to other people who are engaged in the church and want to do things, that kind of energy is kind of contagious. It’s definitely, you definitely you get a lot out of that. And there’s a lot of these serendipitous kind of things that can happen in the event because I’m not just interacting with the other people online, etc. And to your point, I think you’re right. I think the in, if you’ve got a really dynamic online presence, then you should not go to church and it’s very, very different.

20:48 | Carla Green: Right. And you’re not, I mean, like for our church, I’m not getting the, when I stay at home and watch our local church, I’m not getting, you know, the hug from Debbie that I get every week when I go in, or the big smile and “how are you doing,” or or just the ability for me to reach out to somebody and encourage them as well. And so, um, but there are so many benefits. Like, so also, so if I’m in a remote area or I’m new, but I have a group of people and I want to to come together and do a small group, why not make the church, the online church service your small group? You don’t have to come up with content. You could listen to the sermon together, you could do worship together, and then you could have the after-part conversation that you want. And so you can create your own your own church life that you’d want to create as well. And so there’s lots of advantages. Um, or there’s different advantages of if you don’t feel comfortable going into that church or it’s too far away, then get a group of friends and do it together.

21:52 | David Maples: That’s very interesting. That feels like a much stronger way to do that. And if churches have not started engaging that, it definitely sounds like small groups or even, I even think you could extend it to like a Sunday school type thing or a Bible study thing. And I’m not sure exactly where the the defining line on small group is, but if you’re doing a study of Matthew, since we brought up that book earlier, um, I feel, and maybe I’m wrong on this, but I feel like that could be a lot stronger if you get rid of a lot of the barriers. Everybody’s, we’ve talked about in a previous episode, everybody’s got a lot going on in their lives. You can prioritize this in a different way where you can, or maybe you can put more time into it because you’re not spending the time traveling or what have you. There’s, I think there’s some pretty strong reasons to do this.

22:41 | David Maples: But I think one of the big things I wanted to look at is how do we make sure that you’re not—and this is the one thing I want to make very clear on this—is that nothing I and Carla are suggesting is about segregating the two things. It’s about integration. It’s about bringing these two things together. It’s yes and, not yes but.

23:01 | David Maples: And when we start talking about the church and how to do these other things, I’m sure some people are going to very—okay, so for example, let’s use communion as an example. If you’re a Catholic and you believe in transubstantiation and that is part of your faith and part of your doctrine, you don’t try to do the online communion piece. You just don’t do that. That’s understandable. You can’t do it because you’re not physically there, the priest can’t bless the the the Eucharist, etc. And you don’t do that. Don’t make it a point of contention. But what can we add into our service that could be useful to our parishioners?

23:36 | David Maples: I think the small group or the breakout is a total thing. How many people in your service really something resonates with them and if they had someone else to pray for them right then and there might be the time to do it. I don’t, I’m not trying to speak out of turn here.

23:50 | Carla Green: I think breakout rooms, I think how to do breakout rooms with prayer would be an ideal thing of because I think a lot of times people are searching for something when they’re not going into a building. And if they have somebody that can meet them in prayer and you and you introduce them, I mean, um, you know, and it’s part of our job as Christians is to talk to man about God and to talk to God about man. And so if you can pray with them and actually usher them into the throne room together and realize, I’m not just going to leave you in your pain, I’m not just going to leave you in your question, I’m actually going to to introduce you to the one who knows the answers and we’re going to pray together and I’m going to show you how to do it. And you do it in the moment, that never comes back void. Never, ever has that come back void in my life, in my experience, it’s always “I want more, I want more of that.” And so don’t miss the opportunity to pray with people because you can take them out of an online presence that’s going on and pray for them and not be disruptive. Like we could, we couldn’t do that at a church building of like, “Oh, hold on, I I need prayer about that little comment that you said.” and you get up and and somebody takes you out to pray. That would be very disruptive. But in an online setting, that’s not disruptive. And so I would take advantage of that as well. And yes.

25:08 | David Maples: I think the next thing I’d like to move into, because we’re moving into like the last third of this episode, is okay, so let’s talk about beyond passive viewing. You mentioned about the real-time interaction tools a little bit. And there are things, there are some different tools out there, Altar Live, there’s Live.Church, there’s Stream.Church.tv. And by the way, I have not tried or tested these tools. So we can put them in the show notes, and maybe we can do a deep dive in another episode or maybe in future episodes we can invite some people online to come talk to us in their episodes about their tool, because these are not something, like we have Ministry Maximizer, we have the AI piece that we’ve we’ve built, but I don’t know that, I mean, these things would be great. I’d love to hear more about them.

25:50 | David Maples: But at the same time, I’m not actually running a church myself, so it would be nice to see kind of what that would look like. Some other things we were talking about is, and you mentioned a little bit where some kind of the the things you could do, like this this idea of like a virtual coffee hour, because I feel like one of the biggest things that happens at church is the socialization that happens after. We used to do like a luncheon a lot of times after church, and there was a lot of great discussion that would happen in that that in the line for the luncheon, you know what I mean? There was a lot that happened there and I think you could really do a lot of that and kind of create some of those pieces there. You know, creating a, a post-service discussion or or a way to maybe take it to your small group later that week. Maybe there’s a, you could take whatever was in the sermon. Like, how powerful would it be to take the sermon that week and then have it in your online, you know, small group or what have you? Or you could you could literally take that live stream sermon and you could show that part of it again in your small group and just discuss it in real time.

26:50 | Carla Green: So there’s a chat usually going with online. So can ministry max, can we like download that chat, put it into Ministry Maximizer and come up with what were the the highlights of the comments, what were the next questions, like make sure that, you know, sign up for a newsletter or something that might answer some of these questions that are coming out of it. Kind of synthesize all the comments at once so it’s not anecdotal necessarily, but…

27:16 | David Maples: Absolutely. Absolutely, we absolutely can do that. So at least like every episode, we’re going to have like here are two new features we’re going to add into it. So last week we’re building out the parable generator based on our last episode. And this one is, yeah, totally. You could absolutely do that. And we could have it turn into those. So I’ve got to make notes. I’ve got to go back through all of our episodes…

27:35 | Carla Green: I’ll make notes. And I think the other two things too that I wanted to make sure that we hit was what’s your, make sure you have an online giving piece because if people get like, I this is my biggest, like one of the things that I love talking about is money and the church because I think I don’t think we do it well. And we’re going to have at least one episode of just all about money. But people want to give to things that they believe in, to things where you’ve shown them value and mission and vision, if they can be part of something, don’t miss the opportunity to invite them into that process. No matter how, like even if they’re first-time visitors, you can say, “You might be a first-time visitor and this isn’t necessarily for you, but if you want to give, you can.” Like, like make sure there’s a call like something that they can give to you because you don’t want to miss out. Some of your biggest givers might be just sitting at home and you don’t even you don’t even realize it. Don’t assume it’s it’s the person that doesn’t have anything that just doesn’t want to come into church. It might not be that at all.

28:33 | David Maples: Do you want to talk a little bit? And I think you’re right. I think that online giving piece is—this is another, I’ve already used my should for this episode, but…

28:41 | Carla Green: I’ll I’ll use it then. Should. You should put an online giving piece. If you don’t do anything else.

28:47 | David Maples: It’s your one should for the episode.

28:48 | Carla Green: I’m going to use my one should. And I will, that will always be my should. Giving.

28:54 | David Maples: Don’t don’t do that every single time. You you could spread around, you could spread it out. So, I was thinking about the other social media platforms because I think a lot of churches really look at social media and they really look at it through the marketing function. And I think that’s not malpractice, but I feel like you’re missing, there’s a lot more you can do with that.

29:16 | David Maples: And I was thinking about, um, you know, like your Facebook page, okay? Let’s just let’s just take a few of these out. So your Facebook page, that is your public facing part of the church. But at the same time, you could have a private group, etc., where people could join that. You could build a private group where you actually put some things in there. Now, there are some privacy questions about that. And I think that, and I’m going to go ahead and say this, any of these things you use, you need to have someone who’s responsible at the church as your moderator, who’s in control of it. You need to make sure from a control and ownership piece that the church has the master controls of it. And then you have other people like the chat option. If you’re doing a live stream sermon, you need to make sure those are by people, vetted disciples of the church or people who are trusted in the church, whatever that structure looks like, who are managing those things.

30:04 | David Maples: As far as like, you know, X is one of the online—X and Blue Sky are kind of these online—X is formerly Twitter, I have trouble calling it X—but you could share quick updates, you can do that to get stuff out about things the church is doing. Now that could be a marketing function or it could just be a way to spread the things you’re doing or post something you’ve done that’s positive about the church. It is time consuming and a lot of your posts have a very small shelf life, but you can you can put your content out there.

30:31 | David Maples: Reddit offers a lot of, you know, niche communities. That might be useful for one of the small groups to kind of dig into, etc., because you might be able to expand the reach beyond that. And there’s a lot of other options, you know, Blue Sky is kind of a an open source version of Twitter. I think it’s open source, but it’s a different kind of version of Twitter. And then there’s a lot of different things you can use out there, you know, Instagram, TikTok, if you want to be there, and LinkedIn.

30:57 | David Maples: So what do you think about, so to your point, I think you can definitely use AI for this, but I think this is one of those things that we’re still figuring out kind of the right ways to do that. So for example, providing an online chatbot, an AI chatbot that can provide—so people may have questions during your online sermon, etc. “Oh, when do y’all meet?” or “When do we get together?” A lot of these things, if they’re already there, putting a an AI chatbot that’s been given the basic information about the church—when we meet, what things are upcoming, etc.—and you could pull that from the information on your website and link to it. I think that could be useful because you don’t want to take away from the prayer request people. You could use AI for those things. And by the way, we haven’t done this in Ministry Maximizer, but we we actually have a chatbot, an AI powered chatbot that we can use if churches want that to be like an add-on under the package, etc. So there’s definitely an option we can build out there for them.

31:52 | David Maples: But creating follow up, and I think one of the big things about it is, is that any of these things where you can get your data from it, just like we could throw this information to the Easy Prompter, you could as a church do the same thing and use it to get some data analytics. So just like you are using those kind of mystery shoppers to come view the church, you could do the same thing by, you could mine all the data in your sermon live stream and find out, you could probably find out, if you had enough people doing it, you could find out what, I could see a big church doing this very easily, because you probably have, you know, not a ton of people, let’s say 50 people on, if you got a big church, there’s probably 50 people on your live stream every week at least. And you could find out what’s resonating with those people. And I think there’s a lot of data in there that we we talked about a little bit that we could do with that.

32:40 | Carla Green: I wouldn’t mind people putting that in the chat too or the messaging us of how how big is your church in person, how big is your online presence? I’d like to see some of those numbers. And I think you need to also, sorry, this is a need to should have thing, but recognize your online church. Like when the pastor gets up and says, you know, we’re glad that you’re here, recognize that you have an online church and say, we’re glad our online family is here as well, because you want to draw them in as much as you can. And that’s a real simple, free thing to do is to welcome people that way.

33:16 | Carla Green: And then I also wanted to just talk about the kind of—and I don’t mean this to sound, you know, inappropriate as far as thinking of things as like church is business, but church is business too—is that part of the online opportunity that you have to having an online church is kind of thinking of it as marketing. You’re expanding that filter to reach out to more people. And how do you get them connected? So what is your call to action? What do you want them to do after they watch a service? Do you want them to give? Do you want them to sign up for the newsletter so they know what’s going on next? How do you, how are you warming up those people who are just kind of tuning in? How are you keeping them connected to you? So what are you asking them to do next? It might be a little strategy session that your leadership team needs to do. Like, are you just doing it because every church is doing it? Or is there a purpose of what you’re, of how you’re going to put them through a filter and get them more engaged and feel like they belong to your church, even if they never step foot in the door?

34:20 | David Maples: I think one of the things I was thinking about is making sure whatever the platforms you’re using are kind of ADA compliant as much as possible online, especially if you have an elderly…

34:31 | Carla Green: Can you explain that? Can you explain that from an online perspective? Because I think like my mind goes ADA compliant, like is the bathroom big enough or the door…

34:39 | David Maples: No, it’s very much like that. The idea, and I’ll put on my legal hat for just a second, although this is not my expertise area in the law. I didn’t say this earlier, I am an intellectual property attorney and I I dabble in some of these other areas, or at least I talk about them like I know about them. But the Americans with Disabilities Act, it’s the reason you have a a ramp in front of your sidewalk at your church. There are requirements under the law, and without going into details on them right now, that are important.

35:06 | David Maples: Here’s the thing. If you are a place of public accommodation, which all churches are—that means it would apply to any restaurant, anything like that, any place that people go—you it’s considered, since about 2018, that your website and your online materials are an extension of the physical brick and mortar. So you want to make sure that your website and all the other things that you have are available for people to to look at and and view. Now, the question is, does that mean you need to have a sign language interpreter at the church? That’s beyond the scope of what I could talk about today.

35:40 | David Maples: But the idea with it is at the very least, you need to make sure you have subtitles up on your on your sermons after you post them, certainly. They’re working on some stuff where we can do things in real time. That’s that would be ideal. But at the same time, you want to have an option for people to do those things. If they are on your website or the other materials, you want to make sure. Now, a lot of these platforms, you know, Facebook, they have already, they’ve got some of these things figured out, but you want to make sure those things are at least available to those people.

36:07 | David Maples: Because I think it’s like anything else. If you’ve got a large Latino population who’s joining your church who speak Spanish or Portuguese, etc., you probably want to make sure that your sermons have subtitles in Spanish and Portuguese. And that stuff is, I hate to say easy to do now, but it’s easy to do now. It’s very low cost, if no cost. You can put your things on YouTube and it’ll automatically translate. And they’re not 100% accurate, but they’re 99% accurate. And so the idea with it is is that’s one of those things that at the very least, you are opening and broadening those doors metaphysically and and and literally, you are making it to where if someone is in a wheelchair, “Come on in, we’ve got room for you, you can get through the doors.” And that’s what you want to be doing with these online things. And I think that’s critically important also, not just for ADA compliance, but if you have people who are infirm, if they if they if they have trouble seeing or hearing, they need these other things. As we age—I mean, I’ll be case number one about this—my my hearing is not the best right now. It will probably only get worse as I age. So I will be the guy yelling at the TV if there’s no subtitles.

37:14 | David Maples: So, that being said, I think it’s very important that we go ahead and provide those things. And I think that’s as important as as welcoming somebody when they come to visit your church, making them feel welcome. And there’s nothing that’ll make you feel less welcome than someone literally having no way for you to get through the doors. So I, so that’s kind of in-rant on that. But I think that’s important. Let’s just for a minute as we wrap this up, what what ethical considerations would you say we should look at on this?

37:44 | Carla Green: Well, how do you handle chat that’s inappropriate would be one thing. Do you block, I don’t even know what the what you could could do. I guess you could block users or whatever, but, um, that’s that’s one. I guess anything that could happen in a church. Although I think it’d be easier to do it online. That’s one…

38:03 | David Maples: How do you, uh, privacy and security. If some people say stuff in the chat, they talk about like something they’re facing, whatever these platforms you’re using probably need to be locked down on some level. I think that’s important.

38:14 | Carla Green: And watch the gossip. Like I think about, I mean, if you’re not, I guess I don’t really think about it, but that’s what another thing that just came to my mind is like if you can say, “Oh, you know, did you hear about Susie and Joe, you know, and what happened to them?” You know, using it for gossip on the side and just like, what are what are the rules of engagement for, like I feel like you need rules of engagement for how the pastor or the online person that’s moderating it needs to engage, what mechanisms are available to them to shut people down, you know, what do even the people who are coming in know that this isn’t going to be tolerated or whatever that looks like. And you know, there’s spiritual bullying that happens as well. So we don’t want that to happen online. We want people to feel safe.

38:59 | David Maples: I was thinking about the rules of engagement kind of right at the beginning. We do this for business all the time. There should be a list of rules you have to agree to the terms and conditions to be in the chat. That does not necessarily, it’s not about having them sign a contract. Is that now you have grounds if someone violates them? And I think establishing the rules up front helps. This is a place for to be present in the church because you can’t be here in person and that’s why we do it.

39:26 | Carla Green: Well, and you just think about how many people aren’t, like some people who are victims of whatever circumstance and don’t feel comfortable or have society or societal social issues, and then they come into a chat room and see it happening as well. So we have to realize that these are these might be some very hurt people that you’re dealing with. And so what is the training that needs to happen as well to be sensitive to that and not just realize it’s just a good old time online, but actually, what’s the words behind the words and what needs a special attention? So I don’t think you can just get anybody to run your online chat and to monitor it. I think you need a couple of people, um, I I think you need to throw good resources at it.

40:10 | Carla Green: I think that’s one thing that, and this probably opens another worms, but I will just say it just because it was on my mind earlier too, is that the people that we put outward facing, um, be careful you’re not just filling a job and filling a warm body position. Put your best people forward. Put your people that are the authentic Christians that you are trying to get your congregation to be forward. Or partner them up with people. Don’t always put the new people that are more gung ho. Encourage the more mature people that “we need your wisdom, we need your discernment, we need you on the front lines because you are our best face forward.” And I don’t think that necessarily gets said very much, but I’m encouraging you to try to find those people.

40:54 | David Maples: Something that I’d like to kind of wrap this episode up on is something that you and I talked about before the recording today.

41:01 | Carla Green: Mhm.

41:01 | David Maples: And you talked about how really doctrinally, you should be figuring out kind of what the mission of your church is or your core value. And the one thing I want to talk about is make sure that whatever technology you’re using is the servant, it’s not in charge of you. It’s you want to ensure that the technological adoption that you’re following serves the core mission of the church and your theological commitments, rather than letting the technology—and I’ve seen this happen a lot with business, that all of a sudden you’ll get a new technology, new shiny toy and before you know it, you’re chasing that instead of what your mission was. And so I’d like you, if you would just for a minute, talk about figuring out what the core mission and vision of the church is. I mean, you said that you maybe should line that up first.

41:43 | Carla Green: I think so. I think everybody needs a good mission and vision of in anything they do. Why are you doing what you’re doing? And then who are you? Who, what is your culture? Because you’re not going to look like every other church. And so how is, you know, how is your church going to distinguish it from somebody else? And, you know, it’s like, oh, don’t we all do the same thing? We really don’t. And we all have different personalities. There might be one that’s values values worship, you know, songs and music, one values, you know, biblical teaching more. And not to the detriment of the other or to negate the other, but it might be the thing that comes forward. And that’s okay, because people are at different seasons in their life and are looking at different things. And so you need to put that foot forward. And if you look like you’re chasing technology or if you’re chasing technology, you’ll look like you’re chasing technology. If you look like you’re wanting the next best thing, then you won’t grow with the thing that you’re learning. You’ll be like, “Oh, wait a minute, shiny penny, we got to go over there and do that.” And then you’ll move all these people and they’ll get confused.

42:44 | Carla Green: So stick with, you know, there’s I think there’s nothing more beautiful than the church and the that the church that all the people who all the attendants, all the congregation knows exactly what they’re about and that they can say it. We actually did a a really cool exercise one time with a consultant at our church and they had us, there was about 30 of us in a room and half of them were staff and half of them weren’t and they asked us to draw a picture of what the church, our church looked like or meant. Like, we all basically drew the same picture. It was phenomenal because our mission and vision was so clear and tight that everybody knew that that’s why they were there. And that’s what you want because the bigger that’s a bigger voice that you give to your mission and vision and it makes it very clear and comes out in everything that you do.

43:29 | David Maples: I think that’s probably a good place to end this episode. I feel like there’s a lot of stuff we couldn’t have time to get to today and maybe we can talk about that in a future episode. And as our our listeners listen to things, we’d love to hear from you either on our back channel on Slack or you can just comment on YouTube. We’d love to love to respond to you there as well. Or you can sign up for the newsletter or reach out to us on the website MinistryMaximizerPodcast.com.

43:57 | David Maples: Again, the next episode is going to be AI and Pastoral Care. It’s about how to extend your reach without losing that human touch that’s so important to what you do. So as Carla said a few minutes ago, every season there’s a time for every purpose under heaven. I think that’s Ecclesiastes.

44:16 | Carla Green: It is. Good job.

44:18 | David Maples: And there’s like a…

44:19 | Carla Green: You’re marking these up.

44:20 | David Maples: Well, there’s an old, there was a song by uh uh Turn, Turn, Turn. Um, it’s uh, is it Peter, Paul and Mary?

[Note: The song “Turn! Turn! Turn! (to Everything There Is a Season)” was written by Pete Seeger in the late 1950s, with lyrics almost entirely from the Book of Ecclesiastes. It was famously covered and made a number one hit by the band The Byrds in 1965.]

44:27 | Carla Green: I don’t know.

44:28 | David Maples: “To everything there is a season, turn, turn, turn…” Anyway, I don’t know.

44:30 | Carla Green: You might be a little bit older than me, and I know it’s older than you.

44:32 | David Maples: Oh, come on. I’m sure I heard my parents playing that years ago.

44:36 | Carla Green: Oh my gosh, now I’m really old.

44:37 | David Maples: No, no, they’re older than you. They’re much older than you. They’re like, but I mean, come on, man. Okay, anyway. So with that, uh, thanks for spending your time with us. Uh, so for this podcast, I’m David.

44:50 | Carla Green: And I’m Carla.

44:51 | David Maples: And we’ve enjoyed having you today. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, the most important thing you could do for us is to recommend it to your family, friends, other people in the church who could benefit from this. If you’re in a if you’re a congregant in the congregation and you feel that your ministers need a wake-up call, be sure to send them this podcast. Or even just to share the information. This is about about growing the church using technology in very powerful ways to help grow the church, big C, and to help you overall achieve the goals of your organization. And if you if you like this episode, you can find us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, please give us a review and a thumbs up or five stars. We’d definitely appreciate that. So with that, we’ll see you on the next episode, AI and Pastoral Care. Thank you for listening.

45:40 | Carla Green: Thank you for listening.

45:40 | David Maples: We’ll see you all later.

45:42 | Producer: Hey everyone, this is the producer here. Thanks for listening. If you’ve made it this far, be sure to check out MinistryMaximizer.com. Transform your ministry with AI tools that help you craft your sermons, increase outreach, and spread the good news of the kingdom. Sign up today at MinistryMaximizer.com. That’s MinistryMaximizer.com.