EP353 - Jeff & Aaron Thomson talk Discipleship, Innovation and What's Next

Jeff Reed: Hey, everybody. Episode three. Oh, my gosh. There's so many. I can't. I normally check. I was funny. I just unmuted the guests. And the guests, they go and talk in the background. If you guys want to plan, it's fine. It's episode 354. I want to say episode 354 of the Church Digital Podcast. You know what? Once you get past, I don't know, 12, you tend to lose track of things. And so, honestly, it's just a giant number at this point. And there are... There are some exciting things that we have planned with the podcast in the stream ahead. 2026, if you know me, 2026, you know, there's always bigger things ahead. And so we started to think a little crazy about where we were going with the podcast and the stream and all this stuff. And so... Stay tuned. It'll be great stuff. You know, there's a lot of things to stay tuned to because we've just got so much going on with the Church Digital. It's fun to see Steve Reed jumping in, Andre Smith, Michael Jamison. Michael Jamison, I don't think I know you, but I'm glad to see you on the stream. Mr. Pete Host. This broadcast can be seen live in VR big screen now. Look for Mr. Pete 3D Room. I love Mr. Pete. If for no other reason than, no, I loved Mr. Pete for many reasons. One of which is the fact that the dude's constantly broadcasting. what we're doing through VR. And so love that. Mr. Pete, thank you for that. We've got Michael Jamison saying, hello, everyone. Hey, Michael. Michael, that's not an electric guitar. It's not a ukulele. What actually is that guitar? That's interesting. Andre Smith is speaking the international language of... I have no idea. For the life of me, I don't know why the software can't convert that down. We have the same problem with FlatCap. FlatCap does that. El Michelle is saying, good afternoon. Romans... coming in as well. Good afternoon. Steve Reed is correcting me that we use this episode 353. I don't know that that's true. I really do feel like today's 354. I'm not calling you on that publicly, but I really thought that next week was going to be... No, you're right. This is 353. Because next week, the town hall meeting is going to be 354. I am wrong. Steve, you're right in that situation. By the way, Steve is not related to me. Those of you who are thinking that Steve's... You know what I was about to say, Steve, you're old enough to be my father. I don't know that that's true. I may want to like calculate that out, but it's actually very close if he's not. Steve, there's a lot of subtopics I'm bringing up here in this conversation right now. You know, I've already talked about town hall. I've already talked about my birthday. I might as well throw the conferences out there. We just, you know, call it a whole shebang. So like this is my birthday week. And so today is actually my birthday podcast. I make a make a big deal about this historically or over the years. I'm 48. I think when I started the podcast, I was 40. And so we've been doing this a long time. A lot more gray has come into the podcast, into the beard as a result of the podcast and many, many other things more likely to be related to, I don't know, the two teenagers I have running around my house right now. So here's what I want to say coming into this. Hey, it's my birthday. Instead of buying me coffee, which is hard to do, since we're all scattered around the planet, maybe consider giving $4.80 to The Church Digital. Check out the website, thechurch.digital.com. Thechurch.digital.com. It's interesting. We've had people give $4.80. We've had people give $48.00. We had a high school graduate, a kid that graduated high school last year. He is literally he's working. His job post-graduation is janitorial services. And that guy gave one hundred dollars yesterday to the church digital. And like, I'm literally mind blown. at this whole thing and so honored and blessed that people contribute to the non-profit organization of the church digital and everything that's involved in that so check out more information at the church.digital slash give towards that hey we mentioned that the town hall is next week and so really excited uh about the town hall the town halls we do three or four times a year maybe once a quarter and and the idea is is really to listen to you to listen to the the people alongside and resourcing and to try to learn what your needs are what your struggles are and also to to cast vision about some of the things that we the church digital are moving uh towards and some of the projects that we're working on to address some of the the concerns that that you guys have to be honest the the conferences that the things that we've moved towards the digital missionary conference came out of the town hall historically one of the things that we actually heard in the last town hall uh pre-summer was that we really had lost a lot of that voice centered around uh digital church planting it was like to plant a church in digital or virtual spaces and so we're and knowing that that was actually really good feedback uh we're actually making some changes we'll probably talk more about that at this upcoming town hall but look for more information on the town hall right around the corner. It'll be Tuesday, 1 p.m. Eastern, uh, next week, Tuesday, 1 p.m. Eastern. What is today? Today's the 19th. So it'll be Tuesday, the 26th, 1 p.m. Eastern. That's UTC negative four for our international friends. Uh, We got Jules on saying hello as well. I love me the Apple stickers. The Apple Memojis, I think, is what they call them, right? Apple's artwork looks so much better than Meta's artwork and all the other artwork that's involved in it. Kind of like the Apple artwork. I don't know. It just works. WhatsApp does not. I'm sorry. I love WhatsApp for many things, but their stickers just don't do anything for me. And of course, we got to talk about the Digital Missionary Conference. Let me just say this, and then we're going to get into this conversation about talking next steps and some of these powerful tools that are available for digital missionaries like you. But And actually, Next Steps, Jesus Film, these people have been long supporters of the Digital Missionary Conference, the first one we did back in April and the ones that are coming up right around the corner. As you probably know, we are doing four conferences coming up within the next month. Actually, the first conference starts four weeks later. from tomorrow and tomorrow. And so excited about this. September 17th is the beginning of conference season for the church digital. Instead of doing a massive conference that's designed to connect to everybody, we wanted to get more nuanced and more specific to really go after particular people that are doing ministry in digital and virtual spaces. And so September 17th, It's the first conference, and that's our digital neighborhoods. If you're looking at digital church planting or digital discipleship, really, this first conference of September 17th is for you. It's where we're really talking about platforms as places, recognizing the different social media platforms and digital communities. Well, they have different... cultures that are built into that. And so what does it look like to share Jesus within those different cultures, to disciple within those different cultures, and even to plant churches in those different cultures? And so recognizing that, that first conference, September 17th, Digital Neighborhoods is going to be great. september 24th is christ-centered recovery with our control all recover conference where we're going to be digging into a lot of some of the mental health implications centered around and also how to do how to equip people to be stable in ministry in these addictive platform spaces What is it like to do to recovery? It's interesting. We've got Elle Michelle, who's, you know, really interested in doing trauma healing, even in digital and virtual spaces. Melanie says hi, of course. And so, like, these are the things with those first two conferences. October 1st is going to be the European. uh digital missionary conference all things europe how europe is utilizing digital and missional environments and then of course october 8th we're going to wrap up conference season with the gaming Digital Missionary Summit, where we're talking about doing discipleship in Twitch, in video games, in streaming environments, in Discord. What does it look like to be a digital missionary using gaming tools or even inside Discord? gaming uh environments and so really excited really excited i don't consider myself a gamer i have started playing uh an ios game called last war uh i i love it uh more i've played that game more than i've played any other game in the past decade and and i got to tell you one of my favorite things is is interacting with people in in my in my alliance and uh hundreds so people some of them are americans and the majority are global but the the life issues that people have come up with and are completely comfortable talking about to other people that are playing this game with them. Somebody's going through a divorce. Somebody's lost their job. Somebody's homeless. Somebody doesn't know how to resolve a conflict. Somebody fell off the wagon and is now three weeks sober. There's just incredible opportunities. in digital and virtual spaces to lean in and have conversations with people relationally and be the light of Christ to some people who maybe don't even know they need it. And you, of course, are digital missionaries. I mean, that's the heart of the conferences. That's the heart of the church digital. And that's the heart of why we're here. So, hey, you know what? I spent way too much time. way too much time talking in that stream and so i want to lean in a little bit here and it's actually time to to get into the conversation i apologize up front i knew i had like too many announcements i i told him before and i was like i got too many announcements i got there's no way but hey i want to introduce uh aaron and kelly into this and these are the nice people uh well i'm assuming they're nice i've known aaron for a while kelly seems nice she does the thumbs up but uh they're from uh jesus film slash crew slash so many things like that the ecosystem that's that's surrounding uh some of this is is beautiful but um you know i've i've met aaron years ago Worked with him casually on some projects. And now with Jesus Film and crew leaning in more with the Church Digital, working alongside us towards these ideas, digital missionaries and creating tools and resources to help people like you create, do ministry in this space is beautiful. And so Aaron, officially for the first time here with episode 353. Thanks for jumping on the stream.

Aaron Thomson: Hey, well, thanks for having us, Jeff. It's fun to be back on something with you. So thanks for having me and Callie.

Jeff Reed: Yeah, maybe to kick us off here, Aaron, just tell us a 30-second minute. Tell us your story, how you ended up working with Crew.

Aaron Thomson: Yeah, I guess I grew up in New Zealand. Yeah, my parents got divorced when I was like one. And I guess I ruined my life between there and arriving at a university campus, you know, especially the prior sort of three or four years before hitting university. And it was at that point that... I went to an outreach that was put on. I knew it was a Christian thing on my campus. And it was called How to Get Better Grades and Have More Fun. I didn't really need help with the more fun. I needed help with the grades. So I turned up and the gospel was preached. And the guy said, it's something more important than better grades. And it's going to take five minutes to explain how you can have a relationship with Jesus. And so there's about 250 people in the room. I sat around and heard what he had to say. I was about 31% sure that it was the right thing to do. But there was something inside of me that made me make a commitment to Christ that day. And that's sort of the beginning of following Jesus. So that was all the way back in Auckland, New Zealand as an 18-year-old.

Jeff Reed: That was, so 18 years. I'm not going to do the math on you. I thought you were younger than me, but with the bow tie, it's giving me a different picture.

Aaron Thomson: I got two on you, so it's time for someone to pick.

Jeff Reed: Okay, sorry. Sorry, sir. I didn't mean it, sir. I apologize, sir. That's great. And so Kelly's coming on as well. Kelly, maybe tell us a little bit about yourself.

SPEAKER_00: yep so my name is kelly thompson i am currently in texas and so very proud texan i was living in orlando for a while with aaron and the others but um i have been working with jesus film for gosh nine years now and so for I also kind of like Aaron, you know, came to know the Lord through someone coming and sharing the gospel with me on campus. And so literally, you know, was not raised up in a particular Christian home or anything like that. Also like Aaron had, you know, lots of things going on in my story and in my life. But after someone shared the gospel with me, it was so impactful that someone met me where I was at, because I don't think I would have actually gone to church. And I kind of had the mentality that Christians were really good. And that's not me. That's not how I was living. And so I can't go to this church unless I get my life right and unless I'm better. And so for someone to come and meet me where I was at. and then continue to walk with me, disciple me, was so impactful that then led me to start ministry. And so I've been with Jesus Film for nine years, you know, did the mission trip side for five of those, got to lead short-term mission trips, helping equip people to go and share their faith and all over. and now working on the digital side for the last four years. So it's been an adventure that I could have never predicted, had a very different plan for my life. And so it's truly a privilege to even be here today.

Jeff Reed: Yeah, I love this. By the way, you've got two people on the screen right now that found Christ through their stories back in the college days, so to speak, and why it's so important for us to figure out how to reach and connect with Gen A and Gen Z. You're discovering this in real time. I found my calling probably in the high school era. And for me, really, I was one of these guys that was doing college ministry while they were in school, kind of aggressively working with reaching. And that's really where I didn't necessarily find Christ in college, but I discovered the ministry tie-in of how to do things in that college space and being that light. And oh my gosh, it's so cool to be able to get together and have this conversation. Kelly, where do you live in Texas?

SPEAKER_00: San Antonio.

Jeff Reed: San Antonio. Okay. So I spent, I spent about five years in Dallas and four years in Austin. And so we know, uh, my, my wife and I, we know Austin, we know Texas very well. Oh, so, so beautiful. So the, uh, oh my gosh, what's the pollen literally almost killed me.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. Like I just had about it. That's the only bad thing I'll ever say.

Jeff Reed: I had such a bad allergic reaction one day. My wife had to come pick me up from work and drive me home because I looked like my face had exploded and puffed up and I couldn't see out of my eyes. It was a bad thing. Yeah, we've all been there. all right hey so so let's get into this so we're talking specifically today about um next steps uh with the the platform maybe some other other tools and options and so i love the fact that you know jesus film as an organization creates the story of of jesus the movie like i've done mission trips and russia and ukraine where we show this film and people are watching the story of jesus i know there's some new versions and some new uh tools that are that are coming out but The connection between a movie about the life of Jesus and digital tools that can help digital missionaries, like that's a jump. So maybe how did Jesus Film get from, hey, we're creating this movie so that people can learn about Jesus to software development, cloud services, platforms, like all this stuff that you're in now. What does that process even look like? What does that look like?

SPEAKER_00: Aaron, do you want to take a stab at it or do you want me to?

Aaron Thomson: I'll take a stab. Yeah, I mean, Jeff, look, the world we live in, the world we transact in, it's a digital world. People submit their assignments via their email address. No one turns in an assignment on a piece of paper anymore. People turn up at university and they join clubs. They go and look at what clubs are available. They look at their page and they DM people. And that's just the world that we're in. And so, you know, when we think about how do we build tools that help people connect today, you know, we've got to do uphold it. You know, you go where people are. And you contextualize your approach. And I think, you know, even like the medium is the message, right? And so I think for us, we have to be in that place. And so we as Jesus Film, we're a media ministry. I'll take a name as film and look at the advent of YouTube and how many cotillion films are uploaded to YouTube every hour. It's a media-centric world. People love content and they want to watch stuff. But how do we take stuff that people are watching in perhaps a passive way and How do we move that into a space where people can actually react to something and comment on something that's called engagement? And so how do we get into that engagement space? Because as we share the love of Jesus, we need to bring that to a hurting world. And, you know, there's people who you pointed out in the games that you're playing, they're just going through. food challenges and while they're not talking to you on the game they're obviously they're often perusing youtube scrolling you know they're looking different platforms and they just come across content they type in like why am i sad you know like um help help me find hope and they land on one of the videos that jesus film has and and so for us We've got to move beyond just the visual media. I think that's a great place to start, content creation. But we've got to move beyond content creation into a place where we can create connection and software. And then from connection, we want to move people into community. biblical outcome to all of that and so for jesus film like hey this is our best foot forward as an organization we we need to come uh hand in hand not just with content but ways to help our partners and and the honest truth is like yes there are platforms like Meta, Facebook, there's a lot of places. Someone's like, well, we have WhatsApp. Why do we need Jesus Films help? And by God's grace, go take one of our films, put it in WhatsApp, and yeah, you can knock yourself out. There's a great many things you can do with that. But I think we've also just got to help people with moving into engaging with people well and Meta and other platforms, they don't provide all the pieces. For example, I'll tell you this, the extreme majority of Christians are not using those platforms for sharing their testimony or sharing about Christ. And so that's quite a personal thing for many people. And so that's something we could press into if you wanted. But we need to build tools and pathways for people to be effective where they live.

Jeff Reed: Yeah. And so Jesus Film is building new platforms that are exclusive for Jesus Film. They're building tools that are engaging with other platforms to make it more useful. What's kind of the strategy, so to speak, overall?

Aaron Thomson: Yeah, I think, like you say, we're building things at exclusive. We wouldn't like that word exclusive. We'd say, look, we just build things for anybody to use for free. That's where we're coming from. And I'd say integration is really important. It's great we can do ministry on WhatsApp, but maybe you live in a country where WhatsApp doesn't work. So maybe you're using Telegram or Signal or another platform. And so the moment that we lock into like one platform, we end up kind of hurting a different part of the body of Christ in an audience. And so with this, we want something that's platform agnostic and that's where we can ship value to people where they can use media and move to engagement. Kelly, what do you think?

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I was just going to say that, I mean, once again, worked at Jesus Film for nine years, right? And especially going and like, you know, my first job was literally taking our media and helping people to share a video in person with someone to get into a spiritual conversation to then get to the gospel, right? And so through that time, everything was always trying to be contextualized. You think of like the source of Jesus Film in general, you know, why it's gotten to where it is, is because they have taken this film and seen and understood the power of making something contextualized so that way it can reach so many more people than just the western world right and so that's in the same heart of you know this platform that we're going to be talking about today where it's we want to create something that is contextualized it's free it's open to anyone who's wanting to use it to share and engage with people for a ministry purpose and that's just honestly the heartbeat of jesus film like we've always wanted to make sure that we're creating either content or our products where it can be for our users. And that's, that's just, that's GZLM's heartbeat in general. So yeah, I feel like what, what they've been creating with next steps just really models the, the posture of open-handedness and understanding the globe, to be really honest.

Jeff Reed: No, I love it. So let's go ahead and dive in. So, you know, Jesus Films built this software suite, these tools, Next Steps. What exactly is Next Steps? Let's dig in.

Aaron Thomson: Yeah, I think a really good place to start here is one of the, when you get into global missions and, you know, that's a big area and it's a big world we live in and One of the challenges I think for folks who are indigenous folks is that so often certain countries in the world, which can remain nameless, tend to ship things from that country to that place in the field and say, use this. And one of the challenges with that is that things built in the Western world and then shipped to Togo or benin or to you know ethiopia or out of africa we can pick the middle east iran something that's built in the western world and shown to an iranian on a screen within point one of a second smells like it came from somewhere else and you know the look and smell of things on a screen is just an instant thing like straight away people just like this is not made here and that's one of the challenges with you know typically because the money's been in the west the tools are built in the west and they're shipped to people and they're told to people in the different part of the world it's like okay here you go kelly use this to reach the people where you live And Kelly's looking at this thing going, this just is not going to work. And I learned this the hard way. I built something for Ukrainians. I built it in New Zealand. It had a beautiful sunset and a beach and a bicycle. And we use flip-flops. We call them jandals. And we shipped this on a cover to go to a campus in Kiev or in other cities in Ukraine at the time. And when we shipped it, these guys just... they just were blank. What came back is they said, well, we couldn't use any of this. We said, why? They said, because the colors are wrong. We don't use bright colors like this. I can't sit at home, even with Google, and try and figure that out. You're better to get someone in Kiev to sit down and say, hey, this is the journey that I want to build and this is what looks like my culture and this is what's going to work. And so our starting place with building next steps was like, how do we empower people in the field to build things that are going to work in their locale and let them do it on their terms and in the ways that they know because they're the experts. And so that was our starting point.

Jeff Reed: Yeah, I love that, listening from the field and passing it up. And I would imagine something in Australia wouldn't connect real well in Ukraine. I've spent a lot of years in Ukraine, and that is a unique environment to be in. So from a practical standpoint, you're creating these... open framework tools? What does this actually look like? What's an example of next steps and some of these tools that are available to be adapted and contextualized?

SPEAKER_00: yeah so essentially next steps is a tool for creating and sharing customized and interactive digital experiences that we call journeys um that help people to take their next steps towards jesus so think canva meets tick tock meets like you know just it's like a whole spiel of an interactive experience and so I would love to actually show you guys. I think it's sometimes really hard to try and explain Next Steps without actually sharing and showing someone. But essentially, here is our website. So this is the, if you are wanting to come and learn more about Next Steps, you would go on to nextstep.is and you essentially would come and find this page. We tried to help it make it interactive for someone so you can kind of see We have four different pages that you could go on to learn more about how this could work for the ministry that you're trying to do. But this is kind of even a good page to see. This is what someone would be seeing on their phone. And then this is the back end. So if you want, we can go into that right now.

Jeff Reed: Or do you want to kind of... Yeah, let's keep drilling in. Let me see what this would look like.

SPEAKER_00: Awesome. So you would then go up to try it out, right? And then this would pull up the back end of next steps. And before I kind of go any further, Aaron, would you take a stab at sharing about kind of how team works and security? Because I know that people are really security conscious, sharing data, et cetera. And so I just wanted to take a moment so that we can kind of clear that up as well.

Aaron Thomson: Sure. So where Kelly's at right now is this page that she's in. She said, try this out. And obviously, she's a Next Steps user. So she has an account. And you can see on the top of her page, there's like four or five little faces up there. Those are people that are in her team. Now, if you're starting today, you're not going to have a team. You just you can create one pretty quickly. But these are just some of the she's labeled her team, the dream team, as you can see. And she's part of like a range of teams there that you saw come up on the screen. These are all teams that Kelly's also part of, like other people's teams. so i think what kelly just would like me to share because people start to ask questions about like how does this even work like you you can do this as an individual and you can just kick this off and just call your team jeff reed rocks that's your team and uh you can add people in a site like a google doc you could you can invite me now you can invite someone to a whole drive like so i you share entire contents of your drive with me jeff or you can just invite me to one file okay so what you see on the screen there are different journeys that cali has built and she could invite you to one of those journey and you could edit it but you would not get any of her data and you would not you would not be able to edit anything else that's in the rest of her essentially team or drive okay but she could also add you as a team member and but if she did that you would then have access to all that data and so you'd only add someone to your team if you trusted them And so nobody else can see your data. So all of this data, it doesn't belong to Jesus Film. One of the major problems that we had to solve with other missionaries and missions organizations is that they want to own their own data. And they don't want Jesus Film doing anything with their data. And so we create a structure where every person who comes in here owns their own data. and so you can export your data you can do what you want with it the privacy all fits with that and we extend a license to you that's how we've kind of structured this whole thing so So I'll let Kelly show you a couple of journeys, get back into some technical questions. But that's a lot of work to enable people to go and do the kinds of things that they want to do. And Data Matters will show you how these journeys look and the data that rolls up. So go for it, Kelly. Beautiful.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. So I'm going to show you a journey that one of our partners actually uses for sharing with the diaspora. This is, if you're on Next Steps, this is what you would be seeing for the back end. If you're creating a journey or if you're taking a template and editing a journey, but literally you would be able to come on here and you can see kind of all of these crazy spaghetti lines and all these different, what we call it, cards. But this is what you would see on the back end. And then let me show you kind of what it would look like On the front. So if someone is going to view this journey, they would come onto this welcome page. And so for this journey specifically, this ministry, they will share this as a Facebook ad. And so they share it with specifically the diaspora and they allow them to come on if they click it, they're able to pick their own language. And so each one of these languages would actually go to its own journey that's in that specific language. We're on the English one currently. But then it just asks the simple questions like, what are you looking for? What are you wanting to do? You could come on and say, I need prayer. Well, then it opens up the space for them to actually input their own prayer. They can submit it. And then it would take them further through the journey to then asking if they would want to be chat with or have an email. They could go back to the home page. think about okay well what is reading the bible um and it just is it's literally an interactive experience and so one thing that's incredible about this is that kind of you know you're able to essentially give someone if we go back to this this page um the opportunity to kind of choose their own adventure if you've ever done a choose their own adventure book You as the creator are able to think through, okay, what am I wanting this person to experience and go through? And so it allows really for you as someone who's going to be sharing, the opportunity to really engage your audience, to give your audience options to be able to click and to explore their faith. And there's just a number of ways of being able to even do that. So I'm gonna pause now. Do you have any big burning questions, Jeff?

Jeff Reed: yeah i mean i i love this so essentially you're creating a i mean a a a journey a decision tree process where you're collecting information from people based on the feedback and so i'm seeing uh just get into the weeds on the technology it looks like it's responsive because i'm seeing a desktop version i'm seeing a mobile version and and so um

SPEAKER_00: i saw there was a reference to chat like is that a third party chat is there chat that's built into your into this tech stack like how does that some stuff like that work how this works so if we're going to go on to here for a chat you would go on and you can click onto the button and what we have is where you can have a url for the button you're kind of able to do a couple of different things, but then you're able to put whatever chat that you're wanting. So For me, if I'm wanting to come on here and put my WhatsApp number, I'm gonna delete this now so no one uses my number.

Jeff Reed: Awkward.

SPEAKER_00: But if you're able to go on there and then all of a sudden have your WhatsApp number for your URL, and that can be what it all of a sudden links to. So if someone clicks that button, then it's all of a sudden opening up WhatsApp and all of a sudden you're direct messaging me. Or direct messaging on Instagram for an Instagram DM URL or whatever it would be. And so it allows you to be able to really make this very customizable, very interactive. Everything can be linked. Everything can have a URL with it. And everything, too, can also be changed. I mean, even just for... for you to see for the images you're able um i love about this is that we have an unsplash gallery but you're also able to upload your own images on here you can use an ai feature to write a prompt and make an ai image and then same with the videos if i wanted to put a video on here instead I can then go on and we have the full Jesus film library. So over 5,000 videos are on here with over 2,200 languages. But you can also put a link for like a YouTube URL. or you're able to upload your own videos as well. And so once again, this just makes it extremely customizable. One of my friends, they're using this right now for inviting freshmen to their college campus, right? And so one of the first videos that they have is a film of one of their student leaders saying like, here, come with me, come with me. And they're walking to the classroom that they have their weekly meetings in because it changes every week. And so they're able to upload their own video on there, make it feel like theirs. So it's not just Jesus Film content. It is whatever the user is wanting it to be. So kind of going back to, hey, this is contextualized for the people. and that was the heart behind creating all of this.

Jeff Reed: Sure. I know oftentimes with tools like this, there's contextualizing the graphics or things in the different languages, but oftentimes the UI built-in language is limited to English or a smaller subset. How does languages work for tools like this?

SPEAKER_00: Let me show you. Do you want to explain it as I'm sharing?

Aaron Thomson: Yeah, it's just what Kelly's jumping to there. I mean, there's two layers to this. So first up, the journey Kelly was showing you, the front end, the front end supports a whole slew of languages. And so that makes sense, right? And it also supports what's called RTL, right to lift languages. So Hebrew, Arabic. Farsi, Urdu, their characters go from the right side of the screen to the left. They read from the right to the left. So the actual cards, when you swipe through, go the opposite way. So we've developed the front end to go the way that those people would expect along with the text. So we have RTL support in those languages. The interface that... Kelly's in right now. What she's actually doing in front of me here is she's just took a journey in English and she just is converting it into a whole new language. So while we're here talking, it's translating these four cards for her. It's completed. So I don't know what I wasn't watching. She turned it into Arabic. So it's Farsi, is it?

SPEAKER_00: Western Farsi.

Aaron Thomson: So this is incredible language support that Jesus Film is providing. Like, you could come along and get a template that was in English, and you could say, I like most of what this template does, but I need this in Arabic, or I need it in Farsi, or I need it in Russian, and then I want to change it. So you start with that template, you can convert it into your target language, and then from there you could go in and edit it and change some of the text, change the links out, et cetera, et cetera. So...

Jeff Reed: So there's freedom to build something completely from scratch. There's freedom to multiple languages when you're creating, but there's also a template that can be easily adapted into... different languages and and and things like that what what is the scope in and of the templates how many do you have like what are some examples of maybe some work it was interesting mr mr pete's giving some information hey it sounds complicated and it is a little complicated but templates i'm sure really simplify a lot of that and so maybe walk through a little bit of that if you can

SPEAKER_00: yeah you can create um we have a bunch of different templates but you also can do this on your own as well for the translation so i just want to make that clear too like this translation can be for anything um we do have template a template library available and so you could go on here we're currently working on this so it's it's being edited as we're speaking um but there's ways that you can kind of take something and like this one or this and make it your own um so that's really exciting and we we're really trying to kind of focus on making more templates so that way it can be kind of grab and go content But then also too, it is, it seems very complex to start kind of making a journey, but as you go, it actually gets a lot more simplified. Like it's, it's just like anything. If you start playing on Canva or something like that, or, you know, understanding how to make a reel for the first time, like you just start doing it and you're clicking buttons and you're playing with things. And then all of a sudden it's really fun and enjoyable. Like I'm working with people who are even, you know, And I don't want to say older, but, you know, who are not the young ones. Right. And they're loving this. Like, it's really, really fun to see their creative ideas and the ways that they're wanting. They're thinking about the ministry that they're doing and thinking through, oh, how can I create a journey that would be that would be able to meet these people that I'm wanting to share with? And so it really changes. It really is simple whenever you start working on it. But I understand that some people it's like, oh, this could be a little bit intimidating. Sure.

Aaron Thomson: Yeah. So I think part of the challenge is like you let's say you dumb these templates super, you know, you dumb it down and like and we've started from that space like this is a very one card. You know, you can add additional cards here. Kelly's adding a step. And but the challenge that we've had is like. missionaries digital missionaries globally have come to us and said hey you know aaron i need the ability to do this in in arabic okay i need the ability to have support for this particular type of font i need to be able to put an image behind i need to put text over an image i need to get the text out of the way i need to have the video playing while there's text i need and so once you start to get into all those complexities like You start to say, well, oh, yeah, it is. I guess it's complicated. And we didn't have to show you all that. You would have just gone and started making something. And then you'd say to yourself, gosh, how do I add chat in here? How do I add a button? How do I decide where this goes? And so even these whips, like what Kelly's showing you there, that you have to choose, like, how do you select where you go? This whole thing was linear before. But what we realized is people don't go through a linear journey. people jump around. And so when we made a journey that could only go A goes to B and B only goes to C, like users don't want to do that. It's very boring for them. So people want to jump from A to F and they want to get over there and have a look and then come back to A and then go somewhere else. And so we actually started to realize that people go in lots of different places and then we want to look at the analytics of that. So if we actually show you how the analytics works, then you'll realize like, huh, And we don't want to put the complexity on the user who's building the journey. But at the end of the day, when you want to manipulate things down to a pixel level, like where people have asked for, then that level of granularity is there. I will close on this topic with this, that we're very successful in producing digital invites. and what users want to do is they just want to say here's here's the date of you know here's the address for our easter service this is the date and this is our church name and they just want the invite they don't want to do what kelly's doing where they like pushing pixels changing the images they just want something fast and ready and so you realize that we have to bring that to market and that's that's a piece that you'll see roll out here pretty soon with next steps where we'll just like this invite that kelly's showing you right here we'll just make that whole thing for you And we'll even change the label of your church. We'll change the time of the event. We'll just do all this from a few prompts. So you don't have to move pixels. But then whatever happens with most of the people, it's like, well, I just want to change something, right? So you have to give an interface for people to change things too.

Jeff Reed: So on this screen I'm looking at right now, there's a form to collect information. Where does that go to? Does that like an email? Does it store in some sort of backend database? Where's information collected?

Aaron Thomson: It goes into your group. It goes into your team bucket.

Jeff Reed: Team, okay.

Aaron Thomson: So your team bucket has your analytics, has your data, has your responses that Kelly's pointing to there. And that's how you would access them. And so, Kelly, do you want to show them like that?

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, unfortunately, this one doesn't have any responses. And the journeys that I do have some responses for don't have permission to share with them on here, but essentially you would go on here and you would click that button and then it would pull up all of the responses and it would be individualized and they would be able to go on and see each one of these things. and that would be either for you know information that you're maybe trying to collect like this one's for the college campus like i was bringing up before um we've been able to have you know a lot of different campuses um right now this week actually using this journey and they've made it their own um and so this was you know the information that they're usually trying to acquire anyways from some incoming freshmen so that they could be able to reach out to them to share And this card right here, this was direct input from one of our staff who share with on campus where they just wanted to know and understand, okay, we're mostly wanting to interact with these two people groups right here. And if they're not wanting to share any more information with us, then that's great. But how do we then get these people's information and not theirs? And so you can see, know if this one person chooses that they then just say okay well that's great like here's some more information but they're not then having to then go and fill out some contact information and so like i said it's really cool to be able to kind of give people direct paths and you know this is for inviting people to um you know be able to engage more and hear more about their faith but you know we can do this with any any sort of event um whether that is you know trying to invite them to an easter event for church or you know getting someone to a bible study or just yeah the the kind of the options are endless really um but this information like i said goes up to the responses um and then i would love to kind of share some analytics this is this is a journey oh Oh, no, it went away.

Jeff Reed: That's okay. We can go ahead and try to share again, and hopefully it'll come back on real quick. I'll do that while we're resharing and getting things tied up. Okay, hopefully it should be there. Boom! And we're back. Go ahead. No worries.

SPEAKER_00: So this was just a straight-up gospel presentation that we shared on our YouTube channel during Easter. And so this one was awesome. If you see right here, it gives the opportunity to do Arabic, English, Spanish, and then Mandarin. and so each one of these if you see the link it goes to their own journey that is in that language which is really great um but i just want to show some the analytics overlay so that you can kind of see with some some bigger numbers how this works so essentially you can then see on here that we had almost 2 000 people click the english version And then from there, you can start kind of seeing, okay, you know, this person, they clicked continue. Yes, I want 952 people said, yes, I want to know more about just Jesus. And then, you know, each one had kind of its own responses for, you know, even no thanks. This is it for me.

Aaron Thomson: so this is where you see the power of data analytics and and we're actually giving this to the person who owns the bucket so for you Jeff maybe you build you want to know whether it's gonna work go and publish it and come back find out yourself so you don't have to phone me know we can uh you can figure it out for yourself and it will actually you can show the bar charts all the way through and you can see where users are going and so you can make intelligent decisions you can learn about your users and like what people are interested why does everybody go through the red door but not the green door like why do people click anxiety but they don't click you know Why do they click pray for me, but they're not clicking this other thing? So you get to find that out pretty quickly, and then you can structure your journeys as a result. I think a couple of other things that would be good to get into, Kelly, is just showing the share. So if you turn off the analytics overlay and then just show another way to share this. If you go to share, this is a URL that you'd have, but you can change this URL. Now, this is already published, so I'm not going to change it, but you could edit this URL. You could change this to Jeff likes ice creams or whatever. It's true. Next steps forward slash Jeff likes ice creams. We can cancel that because it's in production, but or you can hit this QR code. And so if you hit that QR code thing there, what we're going to do is generate a QR code for you for your new website or your new journey. You made Jeff likes ice creams and you can come find out about, you know, or or, you know, how does Jesus change lives? And that QR code, you can put it up. And this is what a team in Serbia. have been doing they they made a journey to like does god truly love you and they put them up in bus stops and they found that people stand in bus stops for like 10 to 15 minutes before they catch their bus and they stuck them in a range of different bus stops and through the city around the local church and those qr codes drove passive traffic into a journey and they ended up actually i think in one week they had about 70 plus people go through a journey in a particular bus stop and ended up meeting with three of those people in the church as a result of just like using it. So it's instead of paying money, For advertising in a space, they're putting a poster in a bus stop, which is free. And maybe it cost them, I don't know, a dollar to make the poster or something. But they're just driving traffic. And then they're just picking up the fruit, right? They're filtering through that journey. We want to meet with them. And then they're just interacting with them over telegram or whatever, and then meeting up with them. And so they're finding this to be a great means to surface interested folks.

Jeff Reed: Yeah, I mean, I can totally see how, you know, using software like this post-Jesus film to engage would be helpful. I can totally see how a physical church, like you were saying, is doing a poster in a bus stop to try to engage with people. and to get to a conversation digitally where people feel safe utilizing that smartphone to engage with. I can see where that would be worthwhile. All of these on the screen, I'm seeing a mobile phone, but there's a desktop version of that as well that adapts. And so sitting at a Starbucks with a friend, you can take out your phone, you can break out your laptop. But also all this is web-based and so the ability to to share the url through a zoom call a google meet share it on discord and walk through with somebody in real time like there there's an opportunity to have this even scale across digital communities and asynchronous and and things as well right

Aaron Thomson: Yeah, so we've built gospel things that, you know, you can create your own journey and just swipe through a gospel presentation that you'd want to share with somebody if you're in person with them. So you can use it in that in-person sense. But, you know, the portability of this, in digital, so another thing that you can do is discipleship with this. And so what we find is that people are bringing people into... small groups that are you know coming from a place where they're seekers they're asking a lot of similar questions and so how do you answer like you know is god going to make me rich you know like how do i get a job this is some of the common challenges that people have and so how do you provide an apologetic for that now you can know type it out over and over and over again or you can build a journey that talks about um you know work and trusting god to find your job and so building that little journey in in the chat when someone's chatting and saying well will god help me get a job you can drop that journey and they can watch that journey they watch a little clip out of lumo or the jesus film and then share some scripture with them and they come back out of that and what's really cool at the end of the journey you put a link that says back to chat When they click that, it kicks them straight back into Messenger or into Telegram or into WhatsApp, into the group that you're in. So you're allowed, essentially, I'm in line with you in a chat. By dropping in a link, the end of that journey is going to bring them straight back into this conversation. You say to me, I say, Jeff, but how do I pray? Now, you can go and type that out to every single person over and over again. Or you can have a pre-prepared journey that explains about prayer. It's like, okay, Aaron, here's prayer. You drop the link in. I go over there. I go through it. Or if I'm in a small group with you, so the whole small group is going through how do we pray. And then we click back to chat. It kicks us back straight into the group. And then we're like, Jeff, this is excellent. I love this verse where Jesus said this. And we're chatting back in WhatsApp again. So the flexibility of Next Steps here is super helpful for even discipleship use case.

Jeff Reed: I love it. When did Next Steps actually launch? Like what year? Obviously, it's versioned up over the years. But when did this become a thing?

Aaron Thomson: Yeah, we were building some simple journeys that were uneditable probably about three and a half years ago. The challenge with that was people wanted to change them and we needed an engineer to change them. And so that's why we flipped the system to allow people in the field to make their own changes because engineers couldn't even read the changes that people were sending through. They didn't understand them in different languages and then it was wrong and we spent a whole life fixing these things. And we're like, you know what? Why don't we just ship the whole kitchen

Jeff Reed: to somebody who lives in cairo egypt and let him in arabic do it himself it's funny because the reason i asked was probably about four years ago we were really trying to figure out how to to do this and the answer was like develop your own mobile app And even with that, like the, the difficulties in developing the app, like you said, the engineer, it's not listening to the field or having to, it's so hard to contextualize this out, but there was no real easy solution to. to do something like this. And this complexity or not, to be able to build out, to utilize the templates, modify the cards out, to get the information that you want, the analytics that we're seeing here, this is a really rich product. uh that's going to give a lot of information um up you know towards uh to the people that are in the fields that that want to know what's going on and then to make a modification via the web interface like this is this is re this is really cool and and and i'm so funny i'm seeing it in chat i just want to firm up like all this is completely free right you don't charge for next steps

Aaron Thomson: We don't charge anybody anything. Yeah, it's our model here at Jesus Film.

Jeff Reed: That is that's incredible. There was a I'm not going to name the name of the tech company, but there was a tech Christian tech company who had a much higher price tag on this than free. I'll just leave it at that. And so love that. And I don't in my opinion, I don't think it worked nearly as well. And so love the fact that this is out there. How many people like I know. it's um how many people work on something like next steps between the the devs the you know marketing like what what does building something like this in for jesus film what is what does this look like

Aaron Thomson: Yeah, we have a UX team who does a lot of research and interviewing people. So we probably have a couple of UX people on this. We have a set of engineers. We have different lanes in our engineering team. So at the moment, we have between one to two of our lanes, which would be two engineers working. So two to four engineers working on this. And we work in six-week cycles. So then we would put a product person a UX person and an engineer, which is called a triad. And then you take what's called a design partner, which is someone in the field who knows what they want, and you put them together. And then across that six weeks, they would deliver features of benefits that those people are looking for. So successive cycles that we would work through. So, you know, we have a lot of things going on at Jesus Film, but I'd say there's somewhere in the vicinity of like six to eight people working on this, if you even the doubt across other periods. So we've had we've had a lot. We've had as many as, you know, six or eight engineers working on this at once to to bust certain things out. But the cadence right now with our design partners is is around two to three engineers, a couple of UX people, a couple of product people.

Jeff Reed: That's phenomenal. Are you at a point where you can talk about roadmap or where you're going or what's next with this?

Aaron Thomson: Yeah, I think we've got to make the journey creation simpler. I mean, the real challenge is people don't know what a journey is. And so they understand an Instagram story to move through that. But, you know, from a chat prompt like, hey, I want a journey that helps me explain the gospel in Urdu to 20 to 25 year old males. know to get that journey out um there's a lot of nuance and context there and so we want to speed that up for people but at the same time we've also realized that it it's a bit a bridge too far just to the sense of just straight prompting like writing out and like vibe coding something like this it's like most of our missionaries in the field they don't they don't have those ability right now. And so we've got to find the happy medium between speeding this up, not moving pixels. So that's the next piece that we need to really push into.

Jeff Reed: I'm not looking for a political... motivations here like and i don't want to get you in any trouble but are just like ai using ai to build the interface to simplify is that something that you're you're open to or is that is ai a bad two-letter word in your organization

Aaron Thomson: AI is not a political issue for crew or for Jesusfilm. I think, you know, it's what you do with it. And we're doing good things with it. You know, Kelly showed you how we can generate it. We've had users, in fact, one of our female... uh missionary people who third-party organization contacted us and said this is the first time in my life i've been able to publish things with photos of people because i can't use real people so like the images that i'm generating of females sitting down struggling whatever you know she's showing to lead people into faith in Christ. She's like, I just love your product because I'm able to generate the images I need without creating problems for myself. So AI is creating the images, but also AI can help stitch these things together. So we're actually feeding, we can feed a Bible study or a PDF or even a video. two next steps and generate out of it a journey so that's part of a working prototype that we have right now and so that's part of that roadmap it sort of comes back to like look ai is going to do that faster than you're going to do it jeff and you don't want to take 30 minutes to push things around and like if you can get 80 of the way there first with a bit of ai and a bit of help in like two minutes and that sounds like a good thing so that's where we don't need to go

Jeff Reed: I know. I love that. That's beautiful. AI is the research assistant you want. And so let it do the hard work and then you massage it into place. That's great. Hey, so next steps. So it's free. Where do I get it? How do I download it, access, create an account, get my team on it? What's the action step from here?

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. So go ahead, Darren.

Aaron Thomson: Are you wanting to go?

SPEAKER_00: Um, so you would go onto next stop, next step dot I S like I saw on the chat. Um, you can go and click that link and then once again, go up to the right hand side, click, try it out. Create your account. It'll prompt you to make a team. You can just simply put your name if you're wanting it. It doesn't have to be that complex. And then after that, I suggest start playing with it. You know, if you're, if you are wanting to engage more if you know you have a ministry team that you're you're wanting to maybe um even get them equipped you can always reach out to us as well and we are more than happy to to help get you guys set up and to kind of give you some some frameworks that we think through and that's my role with with next steps is actually helping to implement next steps and to equip people with next steps and so um we love being able to equip new people to be able to use our tool and so feel free to reach out to us and we are excited to see what you guys create. Yeah.

Jeff Reed: Awesome. Man, this has been a lot of fun. Every time I see Next Steps, I just am blown away. We're talking about maybe it's complicated, but compared to the other things out there, this is so simple. And so I love the idea of getting these tools in the hands of digital missionaries like you. to to to better help and equip you to to have some of these conversations whether they're physically whether they're digitally whether it's remote and like it's just it's so simple to to build out these cards and and the journey that that's involved and so aaron kelly thanks for uh coming on here um as as we're wrapping up maybe any closing thoughts kelly do you want to maybe go first

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, I think that it's so it's so incredible to see God always working and meeting people where they're at. And I think that that is the heart of this product. But this is the heart of everyone who's listening is knowing and seeing, OK, this generation is online. This generation feels really comfortable scanning something and engaging with it or clicking something and kind of following the rabbit hole. And so I just really excited to be a part of this work and really excited to see how the Lord will continue to use digital to be able to impact people right where they're at.

Jeff Reed: Awesome. Yeah. Thank you for that, Erin.

Aaron Thomson: Yeah, just as we close, Jeff, thanks for having us. And to your users and digital missionaries out there, I'd say, look, if you want to use these for discipleship, then you've got a captive audience and they trust you and they're going to go through things. So you can tend to have a bit longer journeys. And the pace of that is a little different because I'm genuinely here to learn about prayer. But if you're doing something at the top of funnel and you're dealing with what we call randos or randoms, they don't have much attention span at all. And your 15-card journey is just going to die. Like it will not work. So you have to keep things very short for people, audiences that you don't know, and you can direct them. You can learn from that. And so the last thing I'd say is if people get very motivated about what they want to tell people, they kind of don't think really about what the person is dealing with in terms of a felt need. And so if your felt needs loneliness, then that person is going to be interested. But if you want to just tell them about John 3, 16, it doesn't make any sense to them. And so people start their journeys on the wrong foot. They start the journey with John 3.16 and let me explain it all to you. And the person doesn't have any context. Like, why are you doing this to me? But if you start with, are you lonely? Come to me, all you who are worried and burdened and start with a felt need and then bring scripture into that and find out what people are interested in. Then that's a journey people are interested in. So we just got to think through the mindsets of visitors, not through the mindset of, you know, 20 years of your church experience that you want to pack into three, you know, 50 cards. that someone's not going to go through.

Jeff Reed: So the idea would not to be create the ultimate 50 card journey, but instead create very niched and targeted journey specific towards an individual in what they would specifically be looking for.

Aaron Thomson: And we've had people put 20 cards in there with 40-minute videos, and they wonder on the analytics why people aren't going through after this point. And it's like, you have a 40-minute video. Like, this doesn't really make sense. Even a four-minute video is brutal for a user who's scrolling TikTok. So let's be sensible here.

Jeff Reed: That's awesome. That's great feedback in general. That's good. And that's why I'm no good on TikTok. And this is not the face of somebody you want to look at on TikTok. So we're going to land the plane on that, why I am not the face of the church digital on TikTok. Thank you. Thank you, the man with the bow tie. got me to that point. So, no, I appreciate that. We're going to land the plane for Aaron, for Kelly. This is Jeff with The Church Digital. Thanks for jumping on the stream. Learn more about Next Steps at nextstep.is and we'll see them at the conference as well. But, hey, we're done. Thanks, everybody. Have a great one and have a good day.