How to Start a Digital Church on Twitch

[Tom Pounder] Are you looking to start a digital-only church? If so, then this podcast episode is exactly for you. Get ready because it's time. [Announcer/Intro Voice] You're listening to the Church Digital Sidekick Podcast, part of the TCD Podcast Network. [Tom Pounder] Hey heroes, my name is Tom Pounder and this is the Church Digital Sidekick Podcast. This is a podcast where I bring on ministry leaders and we talk about how you can do ministry more effectively in this very digital and online world. And today I'm bringing in Mark and he is the lead pastor at Lux Digital Church and he started this just a few years ago and it is awesome because it's a church specifically on Twitch. They're on no other platform other than Twitch and they're using Twitch and Discord to reach people in the gaming community. And in the Twitch community, because as we discussed in the podcast, Twitch is more than just a gaming community. There's much more than that. And so we talk about that and what he's doing on Twitch to really minister and reach a new generation of people. So what is he doing and how is he doing it? That's what we talk about right now. But before we do that, I want to highlight the church digital. At the church.digital, we have different voices and different blogs, podcasts, coaching, and cohorts that are happening to help you in your digital and online ministry, whether it's a digital ministry, digital and in-person, whether it's a metaverse ministry, or whether it's just strictly online ministry. We have coaching and cohorts specifically for that, and we have encouragement all throughout the week as well on our blog and podcast. So I want to encourage you to go to the church.digital today. and learn more and grow in your online ministry. All right, so now we're ready to begin our conversation with Mark and talk about how he's using Twitch to minister to people today. All right, with me right now is Mark from Lux Digital Church. [Mark Lutz] Mark, how are you? I'm good, Tom. I'm good. It's good to be here with you. Tom and I got to hang out at Exponential in Florida a couple of months back. And Tom's certainly been around the circle and conversation around digital churches. And so is New Life and the church that you guys are at. I know there's like an extension on New Life, but yeah. [Tom Pounder] no dude this is good because but this i'm glad this is why we're talking because i've been a lot part of digital church in the online churches for a while but what you are doing i feel like is the next step for what i think a lot of churches can be doing including our church So this is a very personal conversation that we're going to have today. But Mark is right. We met at Exponential this past year. You spoke a few different times. And we actually got to have dinner together that one time. And it was just fascinating to hear your journey. So I want people to hear how you started your church and why you chose to do that. And then we'll kind of dig into some deeper questions. So talk to me how you started your church. [Mark Lutz] yeah sure so the long and short of it is um i was pastoring at a small not a small it was a large church in in western pennsylvania north of pittsburgh in a small town and i had pastored there for 10 years whenever god began to move our hearts more towards the online gaming communities and My heart moves towards them because I'm a gamer. I've been a gamer my whole life. You know, you name it. I've played it. Everything from, you know, Call to Duty, which is probably the least nerdy of gaming through live action role playing, which is running around in the woods, pretending to be an orc and smacking people with a foam sword. You know, you name it, I've done it. I've been a LARPer, a D&D player, a tabletop gamer, a video gamer, nerd through and through. Everything but Star Trek, which is trash because Star Wars is better, but that's beside the point. Just a little bit of fire. And so, you know, for me, my heart was moved towards the online gaming community, and I spent a tremendous amount of time... in a very specific part of that which is the twitch community so if you don't know what twitch is twitch.tv originally was justin.tv um it was a live stream a guy named justin live streaming his life on the internet um and that developed into other people wanting to live stream elements of their lives on the internet i believe that developed into video game play and actually some of the people who sort of run in the church digital were there like jade was there at justin.tv i believe and so uh it swapped to twitch.tv and then it got bought out by amazon and amazon has consistently invested in it and helped it to grow they had about 70 some percent of the live streaming space And prior to COVID, about 100 million unique viewers a month, about three and a half to four million different broadcasters on the platform. You know, at any given time, there's 450,000 people from around the world watching people not even play video games. They're just watching people talk in one singular category of the hundreds of categories that are on Twitch. So huge community. I spent a lot of time there. I was probably lurking in streams, commenting and meeting people there for four or five years before this even became a dream. Started a podcast, started praying for people through it, using it as sort of a lot of people, honestly, in this space have done the same thing, right? They just saw sort of like the evangelism opportunity. that was in it because of the influence that these streamers and content creators were having over the next generation and the way they were shaping people's worldviews and uh i you know my heart was similar and god really began to line things up for us and honestly it was it was just like well how do i in some ways was like how do i combine my love for this community and for gaming and also my love for ministry and if this community can support multi-million dollars billions of dollars in esports in journalism in programmers in you know every profession that you can think of in some capacity certainly they need people who can also offer them spiritual guidance and they had like one or two pastors on the internet that was investing in them out of the hundreds of millions of people who called it home and so for me it was like let's what does it look like to actually practically start a fully digital implementation of the church that seeks to reach, you know, minimal ecclesiology plus in exclusively digital space. And so that has been in and of itself just a wild adventure. And we formally launched Lux in March of 2021. So we're a little over a year old now. And God has just been, you know, we can get into any other details you might want to know, but that's the long and short of how we got started. [Tom Pounder] That's awesome. Okay, so let me let's let the questions begin right here. So I think there's a big misconception I'm glad you said this, that Twitch is just all about gamers so you're saying there's just people just live streaming on there. [Mark Lutz] Oh, yeah, it actually predominantly is not about gamers. Now, it would depend on the day that you logged on. But, you know, I'm sitting here right now and I'm pulling up the categories on Twitch, which are various games from high to low of like how many people are watching live streams in that category. And in the in the top five is a game called Valorant Diablo Immortal. which is only there because it was released about an hour and 10 minutes ago. Grand Theft Auto V, League of Legends, which is always one of the top ones. But the number one category in Twitch right now, there's 542,000 people watching just chatting streams. And there is nobody who's playing video games. In a just chatting stream, they're just sitting there talking to their Twitch chat, kind of like you and I are sitting here and talking right now. They're not over video. They're reading what their chat is typing. But that, I mean, that's just a very, a very real thing. And it's a major part of Twitch culture. You know, there's a guy here who's, you know, at the top of the category, 26.6 thousand people are watching him just talk. um you know the next person 24.8 000 then 23.3 000 then 22 000. those are just the top four streamers in that category alone so yeah the misconception is it's an exclusively video game platform and the reality is the vast like the biggest category on twitch isn't video games [Tom Pounder] That's awesome. OK, so as you started venturing into Twitch, you said you were kind of observing your you're hanging on different watching different people. When did you decide that you wanted to start streaming yourself? And then what did you do to do? Did you do like a Bible study or what? What did you do? [Mark Lutz] you know, I think everybody who watches Twitch at one time or another asks themselves, can they do that? Right. So you're watching a guy who stream into a thousand or 2000 or 25,000 people. And, you know, some of them are getting crazy rich doing it and you're, and you're seeing the influence they have. And basically you're asking yourself, am I capable of that? um could i draw an audience and you know for me um communication is is about the only spiritual gift that god has given me and and luckily it happens to be the swiss army knife of ministry in church so i use it for a lot of different things um And so, you know, for me, live streaming really wasn't super appealing, but content creation was. It was a creative outlet. So I was in a position at my work where I transitioned from youth ministry to discipleship ministry. And there was not as much creative outlet discipling or creating programs in small groups to disciple adults. as there was building a youth group. And as the guy who built a youth group, I had consistent creative outlets and I just didn't have that. And so I would just get passionate about games that I was enjoying and I would want to create a podcast about it or whatever. I didn't really get into streaming until, oh, some point in 2020, I finally built a computer that was capable of handling some streaming. And I honestly started live streaming myself. in during covet and it was like leading up to covet i started streaming i really went in when covet hit to be able to hit affiliate and stuff on twitch and i'm not a big streamer i don't stream to many people um but i do stream a couple days a week most of that i am playing video games i never led bible studies i still don't need bible studies um there's nothing that's inherently necessarily christian about what i do other than if somebody wants prayer i will pray for them live on the stream most of what we're doing is just spending time with the community answering questions about the game that i'm playing teaching people helping people in that game um and so it's mostly video game content my goal is not to go find a bunch of christians on the internet my goal is to find people who don't know jesus on the internet the only people who want to come to a bible study on the internet are typically people who are already christians [Tom Pounder] um so i'm just trying to go play video games with people who aren't christians that's awesome okay so then why did you choose twitch then rather than something like youtube or even like instagram could you do this on instagram live or could you do it on facebook live i mean i don't know if you want to really do it on facebook live but why did you choose twitch then [Mark Lutz] What is interesting is Facebook actually probably has the second best, well, second or third best live streaming platform for video games out there. Actually, they've put a decent amount of effort into creating that space and increasing discoverability because discoverability, like the ability for someone random to find you is abysmal on Twitch. It's just... if you're new it's virtually impossible to grow the only way to grow on twitch is to create content off of twitch that people can find more easily um and will search for more readily and then bring them to your twitch stream typically um but i chose twitch because that may a they they literally own like 70 or 80 percent of live streaming on the internet when it comes to video games like almost all of it is over here b these are my tribe right this is my people Um, see, I hate Facebook. And so, uh, and, and there isn't a lot of people who like it. We just use it because it's like inevitable. It's like this weird force of nature. It's like, no, nobody likes to get their house flooded, but we all let it happen on a regular basis on Facebook. I don't know why, but it's just like, yeah, we welcome it. Um, so I don't like using Facebook. This is the platform that I like. I love the culture of Twitch. It's so unique. It really is. If you are not someone who watches video games and you're not on Twitch, you're going to go on there and you're like, I do not understand why anybody does this. It makes no sense to me. Why are there millions of people doing this right now? And you won't understand the language. You're not going to understand what's going on in the chat. You're not going to understand the emotes. The streaming language, like it's all foreign. It is like learning a new country in so many ways. But like one of the biggest countries on the planet, right? [Tom Pounder] Yeah, that's interesting. I never realized that about Facebook, that it had a really good platform like that. Okay, so if you're not talking about Jesus at all on Twitch, where did the digital church thing come from and what do you do with that? How did you go from just streaming to then start a digital church? [Mark Lutz] Yeah, sure. Well, you know, I think for us, the origination of Lux was I looked at guys like Tim the Tatman and Ninja and, you know, Dr. Lupo and the only one of those left on the platform at this point who haven't been bought out or is Ninja. But I was watching them stream to 20, 40, 60, a ninja at his height, 80, 120,000 people at any given moment live, millions of people a day. And I'm saying the influence that this person has over the next generation is bigger than any pastor in the country right now. And his worldview is being broadcasted live 40 to 50 hours a week. And so he has so much more opportunity. I mean, he's just preaching, right? He's living it and he's preaching it and they're seeing his worldview through his thoughts, his actions, his words, but he's doing it live 40 hours plus a week. And so I was like, okay, there's something that's happening. And people were throwing money at it like crazy. It was nothing to watch one of these streamers get on in the first hour just to have a comment read live on the chat for somebody to see thousands of dollars come in in the first hour. hour of their stream and so i was like okay there's this many people here like there's got to be people searching for biblical truth and one of the number one rules in twitch streams is no politics no religion like almost no stream out of the millions that are out there very few of them will tolerate any conversation about politics or religion wow i didn't know that yeah it's it's against both of those things very strongly mostly because twitch streamers are looking to be encouraging by and large they they are not looking any most successful ones anyway um they're volatile like a chat that's volatile or angry or truly like they're not really interested in being in that environment and so i was like well there are lots of people here who are looking for something spiritual right they're going through a hard time they're looking for advice they're looking for help they're searching for enlightenment or a guru or whatever have you but there's no church that's in this space that actually understands them and is trying to tailor themselves to them um so i was like you know i i just really feel like that is it's really important that that exists right that you know we're not just throwing a camera that you know it's like one thing if you're just throwing a camera up in the back of your sanctuary even if you're on 10 cameras up the back of your sanctuary and it's really well produced there's no one on twitch that cares they know you're not from their tribe you know you can see some big churches push their streams to this platform and no one will watch them why because every person who watches twitch can identify almost immediately you're not using the mics that they use you're not using the camera angles that they use you're not actually talking to us you're just you're just promoting your own message somewhere and you know i just thought there's something very unique about the fact that this platform's biggest category is just chatting streams and there's millions of people looking for truth here and for for spiritual direction and we're not we're literally not doing that at all and so you know i think that that was a big part of of the reason why and of course like in our church like our church is unapologetically christian it's unapologetically talking about spiritual things we have a service every single week so that stuff looks completely different than the live streams that i do on my personal twitch page my personal twitch page as mark [Tom Pounder] looks completely different than what we do on the church's twitch page which is separate from mine so do you ever use your personal twitch page to invite someone over to the church or do you just kind of do they just know oh you're you're a pastor too [Mark Lutz] No, absolutely. I invite them over every single stream. So every person who comes in, who follows, who likes, who says hello for the first time, they typically learn, Hey, in addition to being a content creator here on Twitch, I am also a streamer, um, and, uh, are also a pastor. And so I'm, you know, giving guidance and praying for people, but I'm also inviting them to come to church. And so like, you know, just this week, um, You know, we had Cyril come into our community. She's, you know, an atheist from Germany, just really loved the community, enjoyed the encouragement that we received there, and, you know, wanted to become part of the community in that way, which was really cool, like really powerful and really cool. She just came in. She even messaged me. I don't know if this is a good place for me because I, you know, I'm not a Christian. Is it okay for me to be here? [Tom Pounder] okay so that's awesome but then how do you then okay you just talked a minute ago about how uh you don't want your if anybody on twitch can identify a live stream that's being live streamed from a you know high production value church or whatever so how do you then do your church what what what do you do do you do it in a room at your house like how do you have it set up do you do worship what what does your church service look like [Mark Lutz] Yeah, so our church service is going to look similar to a lot of other churches, but the emphasis is very different. So A, I do not have an in-person audience. So it's me and my team who are in the studio, but our entire focus is on our church family, which is entirely online. So that means everywhere I am, we have two sets in the studio. In both of those sets, there's a TV setup where I am looking live at chat and I am actively participating. in the chat so i am consistently and continually engaged while i preach i'm talking to chat i'm asking them to post things i'm asking them questions i weave their comments into what i'm teaching on but the biggest difference is like the first 15 minutes of stream it's literally just me and my wife on a couch making jokes laughing hanging out with our church just talking to our chat that's a huge chunk of what we do is just sitting there and talking to our people we then go to a worship we only do one worship song because we found it's a time for people to raise prayer concerns and reflect before we get into the word then we do a a time of prayer where we pray for every prayer concern that comes in live right on the internet so you post your prayer concern we're going to pray for it and then i teach and you know historically the first year i taught for about 30 35 minutes Right now we're cutting those back to shorter Ted style talks. We're trying to cut those back to like 17 ish minutes. I preached the first one last night. I was at like 22. So we're trying to change up how we're doing that. And then we go to post service where I go and hang out on the couch. And we're just chatting with the chat again. I'm just hanging out with them, talking to them, sharing a giving moment. It's very laid back. It's more relaxed. And then afterwards, we're inviting everybody over to our Discord server to hang out with us where they can actually, in voice chats and video chats, not just typing, can actually talk to one another, meet people, come and meet me. They can go to our prayer rooms. We have prayer team members who serve at our church who just pray for people. We have a welcome center where you can pop in into a video chat in the welcome center with a click of a button. stop in and say hi to the person who's working the welcome center. So, you know, our church service on a Wednesday night looks similar, but our emphasis and our focus is very different than what you might experience in the typical physical church. [Tom Pounder] So your church is on a Wednesday, you don't do a Sunday service. So that's a difference within itself. And then I love how you're engaging with people as they're chatting, because like, again, me being an online pastor, as we're doing our live stream, I'm in the chat room chatting with people, but the people on stage are definitely not engaging with people on the thing. I love how you do that. And so I would assume based on my chat experience that you're having people chat and really give you questions and talk to you for a little bit. [Mark Lutz] Oh yeah. I mean, we, our engagement rate is like 80%. Wow. I mean, it's in comparison to what the average physical church is doing with a broadcast. It's a staggering difference. You know, like if we have, you know, if we had 55 people who were pretty consistent throughout our stream last night, which is about average for us in the summer, people use the internet less in the summer. So people come to a digital church less in the summer as well. They just have stuff going on because it's lighter out later. And so... i'll go back to the wednesday thing as well but yeah like the our church is hyper hyper engaged i have a team that's just doing that of you know 12 or 15 people who are engaged in the chat and then you know and my wife and i are practically saying hello i will stop my sermon in the middle of teaching to say hello to somebody, welcome them to our church and explain who I am. Because if they just pop in and they say, hey, what is this? Is this a church? Like, I'll stop in the middle of my sermon and just talk to them for a moment. And so, yeah, it's deeply engaging. Um, it's really interesting. We had a guy who, um, I met with a part of our church, uh, just a couple of weeks ago lives, I don't know, four or five hours away from me. I think I'll never meet him in person probably. Um, but he came and he messaged me afterwards and said, Hey, you know, I'm, I have been an atheist for years. I'm coming back to the faith. I'm coming back to the church. I'm joining my physical church here in June locally. And I'm excited for that, but I wanted to say thank you for what you're doing. Um, your church online has been far more. interactive and personal than my physical church has been and this is somebody saying get to somebody saying their online church experience is more personal and more interactive than going to their physical church on sunday morning now that might say more about the physical church than it does us i'm not sure but that was a huge win for us because the typical problem with the digital church and the the digital implementation that we see happening in broadcast ministry is that it's not interactive and it's completely impersonal it's super cold you know you're just consuming content that's absolutely not what is happening in our context our context is extremely personal very individual we have relationships with these people we know their names we know their stories we know their hurts their dreams And I'm actually interacting with virtually every single person who comes into our church on a weekly basis. And so in that way, what we're doing is very, very different than what you see in a typical broadcast. [Tom Pounder] Yeah, I got to say, I mean, again, my experience with online church stuff, even from a traditional online kind of model, what we're doing, you know, I feel like there are people that show up at my 8 o'clock a.m. service, which one is the one I chat host with, that I actually know, and I know a lot about them because they share, they're open, and I feel like I know them better than I know some of the people in the in-person church. I mean, so it is amazing how much community can be developed online. And I love to see how you're doing that and engaging with people while they're chatting online. It's awesome. Okay, so let me ask you this. You mentioned that you have a team. What does it look like to start this? Do I need a big team to do this? Or how did you start this? Was it just you and your wife? Or what happened? [Mark Lutz] So we did not have a big team. We did have a team that we recruited from. So basically at the time I was doing a podcast that was covering a video game. And at the end of the podcast, we would do something called closing thoughts. It was our final segment. And I was doing a video game podcast, but I was sharing biblical wisdom at the end of it without using the Bible. So I was basically just chunking pieces of Proverbs out and was rewording it. And that's what we were talking about for three to five minutes. at the end thing is people who listen to the show who were christians knew that's what was happening and they would reach out and join the community and so when we went to start the church i literally just said at the end of a couple of our episodes hey my wife and i are starting an online church you guys know i'm a pastor because at the end of the show i would very often say hey i'm a pastor in addition to being a podcaster here if you would like to talk to someone or you need someone to talk to because you're going through a hard time please feel free to reach out to me here's my email and i was counseling and discipling people from all across the world because of that so that was already established so when we made the call and said hey who would like to help us start a church we had about 15 or so people who immediately reached out and said hey i'm interested can i can i be involved And so we actually built our team from there. Now, my physical team, the physical team that's here in Western PA with me, I have two people who are here every week. And then I have my stream director and my video director. Video director's hired, stream director's a volunteer. And then I have... couple of worship leaders that are volunteers so i have three different worship leaders that rotate on a monthly basis to lead the song um those were people that i pulled from my existing network of relationships having been doing ministry in the same small community for a decade so i had some existing relationships that i brought with me but the vast majority of my relationships and my team all came from an online world where i already had a platform so having an established platform helped us a little bit And it wasn't a big one. Six or 700 people listening to your podcast is not a lot of people. [Tom Pounder] That's awesome. Okay, so say I look at this and I think about what you're doing on Twitch and how you're using Discord. And I think this is awesome. I don't think I could do this by myself. I need a team of people. Who should I be looking for? Or what type of people should I be looking for to help me start this at my church? [Mark Lutz] Well, you know, it's hard. Literally, it's a hard question to answer. because they're like i think people hear about what is going on and by the way we're not the only one doing this like there's other people there's another church that's in the space uh checkpoint church just got started i think not long ago they're new and there's some streamers and content creators the problem is like if you do not know this community the community will know that you don't know them and So like, if you want to get started, like put twitch.tv as one of your favorites and go start hanging out there. Like participate in the community. If you want to live stream, begin live streaming. Like there's a pastor from New England who's recently, you know, I've been connected with him. His name's Flat Cap Dapper Pastor on Twitch. He streams the Bible in one year every day. There's about 15 people who show up for it. And he's establishing a base that he's training and taking through the entire Bible right now. And it's, you know, it's taken him an hour of his day, pretty much five, six, seven days a week, but he's developing those relationships. He's discipling those people. And now he's pulled in a bunch of us who are pastors, either in physical churches or in digital churches. And he's bringing us into sort of like community groups and he's beginning to disciple us. And that's really powerful and super, super cool. Um, so you just, you need to get yourself in the community. If you want to get started, you're right. You can't, it's not a one man show. Just like any church is not a one man show. You can one man go live. Sure. You can click the go live button, but if you want to be a church, then you have to disciple people and you can't make disciples alone. Not on a, not on a scale that the platform needs or the world needs anyway. Yeah. And so [Tom Pounder] dude that that's awesome that's encouraging okay so uh i could probably talk to you for hours but i know you and i both have stuff going on let me just ask you this question and maybe we can talk about this on another time so being on twitch was was great but you're also utilizing discord you kind of already talked to me a little bit about the different channels you have with discord how have you seen that kind of so i'm assuming that maybe twitch is the top of your funnel and then discord is where you have some really more in-depth conversations and you're able to disciple people a little bit more is that is that how it works [Mark Lutz] Yeah, so I would say if you're thinking in terms of physical church-mindedness, right? And this is a conversation for another day because walking through understanding Discord is a whole different thing. We are using Discord not because it's the best platform for everybody. We are using Discord because it is native to our people. So people will hear this and they'll say, oh, my church needs a Discord server. maybe it doesn't like, and that's not to be offensive. It's just use what like the biggest obstacle for people is jumping platforms. People will not jump platforms. They don't want to. And so if your people are already on Facebook, go use the tools that Facebook gives you. You know, if you're people are on alter live, go use the tools that that platform gives you. We're using discord because it was native. to the gaming community already. If you're a hardcore gamer, you're already actively on Discord every day of your life. So that's where we started. But when you think about the physical church mentality, think about Twitch as our sanctuary and think about Discord as everything else. So if you would walk into your church and you walk into the sanctuary, you've walked into our Twitch page, right? And if you would walk out of your sanctuary into the Narthex, into the coffee station, into the Sunday school rooms, into the small group area, into any other place... that is what discord is for us and we do all of the other aspects of what it means to be a church a community to hang out to disciple do bible studies devotionals prayer everything else happens over in discord and so yeah twitch is really the tip of the iceberg it's really just where we hang out to worship together [Tom Pounder] that's awesome that is awesome well dude this has been really encouraging for me um again this is something i'm really exploring for our church and trying to get a few people on board with us and and how to do this how would you encourage churches right now because i i feel like honestly like a lot of churches are pretty good at doing well the ones that are doing online church are pretty good about live streaming their church doing some online groups and and reaching a specific audience i feel like at least for my church this is the next hill to climb this is the next mission field to climb i i know the metaverse is out there but i mean i wanna i wanna really i wanna really dig in something about twitch something about discord really gets me interested and so how would you encourage online ministers or digital pastors about using twitch [Mark Lutz] You know, I think that it isn't so much about using Twitch as it is a mentality shift when you move to the platform. You know, and I think this mentality shift can happen on any of the platforms. So for me, what we've done, I've done a lot of just talking with churches about what they're doing digitally to sort of help them sort through what that might mean for them. And so I've kind of said, listen, there's really three types of online ministry out there as I see it right now. There's goods and services. This is saying I'm creating an online live stream so that the people who can't make it here physically can still attend it digitally. Most of the cases, this doesn't need to be super polished. It's relatively cheap and easy to produce. People actually want to feel like they're in the room, so they don't want to be shot video outside the room that's seen differently than what's inside the sanctuary. They want to actually see the same thing that everyone else is seeing. [Announcer/Intro Voice] Mm-hmm. [Mark Lutz] Then you have a broadcast ministry. And this is where most churches went to during COVID. And you're immediately looping yourself in with, you know, life church and elevation, right? This is, we're going to produce the absolute best thing that we possibly can. but we're not really trying to disciple people in this space. So it's kind of like saying, hey, come, we're going to create an amazing experience. Now, if you've come to Jesus, go find a local physical church and find discipleship, right? This is the most expensive approach. It requires the most intentionality financially with cameras, equipment, streaming equipment. It's super expensive, but if you can do it really well, it could be effective. And the third one is the digital church, which is saying we're not really trying to just create a broadcast and we're not doing the goods and services. We're trying to create a digital church. And I think what people need to understand is that that church is not actually appealing to any of the people that are watching your broadcast right now. they're watching your broadcast because they just want to consume your stuff they don't actually want to participate and invest more of their lives in the digital space probably or at least the majority of them don't so i think what a lot of people are saying is like how do i take my thousand people that are watching my service online every week and i transition them to this digital church where we can engage with the disciple them And my answer is the people that you're trying to reach with the digital church are a completely different group of people or very likely are a different group of people. And so knowing what your approach is and then tailoring yourself towards that, because once you say we're not just creating a broadcast and for us, the mentality shift as well has been more of it's it's not about what is the best tools the Internet offers to tell our story. It's saying what are the best tools the Internet offers to allow us to hear their story? And everything that we do at Lux is just trying to move people into digital relational spaces. Like, how do I move you into a place where I can meet with you, see your face, learn your name? I want you to be more than a screen name, more than a profile picture. I want to know your story. I want to know where you are on spiritual journey. I want to be able to help you with those things. We want to walk through it with you. And I can't do that if you're just consuming a broadcast. So everything we do is an attempt to move people into relational spaces and hear their stories rather than what's the best tool available to us to broadcast our story or to reproduce what we're doing in person. People aren't looking for that. If they wanted a reproduction of what you were doing in person, they would come in person. And so I think that for us, it's been a lot of like, how do we help people and churches grasp that and understand that and then see that if you're going the digital church route, great. i love it we need more of you like the the ground is hard but it's insanely fertile where we're at like it's hard to plow but super fertile and we need more workers we need more churches at the same time like you have to understand that you're probably not going to take an enormous amount of your established online base [Tom Pounder] to this type of church it's just not what they're looking for um so i i don't know maybe that's helpful maybe it's not no it's great and that's why that's why i've been thinking again it's like i think again like you said a lot of churches are really good about streaming and broadcasting and all that Again, but there's so many more people that aren't interested in coming to your live stream and will never be interested in coming to your live stream. But they're on this platform and they're really engaged. And it's like, okay, that's a mission field. Again, it's a mission field that people need to hear about Jesus. uh and so i i love it i'm completely fascinated and i'm not a gamer like i i play video games but i i'm terrible at them you know i mean i'll play mario and that kind of stuff and if you ask me to play call of duty i'll get killed within like two minutes like it's just like whatever but i i think this is fascinating so well mark i i really appreciate you taking time to talk with me today um if someone wants to connect with you and ask you more questions how would they do that what where would you connect them to [Mark Lutz] Yeah, if you just want help talking through what you're doing, I give my time to that. My heart is to help the church, the Big C Church, reach the post-millennial generations. That's the calling that I think God has placed on my life. Lux is part of that, but it's not all of that. And so if you'd like to meet and just talk about what your church is doing online or what God has placed in your heart, luxdigitalchurch.com slash meet, M-E-E-T, up. meetup, luxdigitalchurch.com slash meetup. You can actually just schedule a time to Zoom call with me, and you can do that. You can also come and find us, twitch.tv slash luxdigitalchurch, discord.gg slash luxdigitalchurch. The good thing about starting a digital church is nobody has your stuff. So we're Instagram at luxdigitalchurch. We're TikTok at luxdigitalchurch. It's not super hard to find us. And if you literally look up gamer church or digital church, we're probably going to come up right next to God Squad. So [Tom Pounder] and feel free to reach out to me more than willing to meet with you would would love to hang out dude thanks so much dude this has been awesome and i really appreciate you taking time to talk to me yeah no problem thanks tom thanks for having me on the show all right so what did you think what stood out to you from that conversation with mark he was great again i met him at exponential i heard him share we had dinner together he's just a great voice he's a great mind actually as he's using technology and he's using twitch to reach people for christ so what stood out to you what encouraged you what challenged you what made you have some questions definitely put it in the comment section below or you can hit me up on twitter at tia pander i would love to continue this conversation online all right heroes well that wraps it up for another episode of the church digital sidekick podcast thanks so much for being with me as always you can subscribe this on itunes on youtube on spotify you can also go to the church.digital to find this We'd love for you to connect with us as we have these podcasts throughout the year and also our regular blog as well. So go to thechurch.digital today. All right, here's where I hope you have a great rest of your day. And until next time, have a great one.