Turning on the Camera: The Intimacy of Digital Ministry

Nate: I've noticed that there is this like tangible moment where you know that you've made a connection and it happens in a discord voice call. You can have somebody join your discord. That's a big move. Like somebody joining your discord is a big thing. They are, they are saying, yes, they are saying, yes, I will join this. You can even have somebody send some messages. You can have people drop some texts into discord. you can have people do a lot of different things pick up roles all that kind of stuff but there is this one moment where you know that this is something actually happening that you've actually connected with somebody on a real basis and it's the moment during a voice call that they turn on their camera if people are willing to like show you their latest funko pop and they turn on their camera to show it to you you've made a connection that is that is intimacy like that is a level of relationship of somebody saying i'm willing to just for a second lets you into my world beyond the internet. And that is like huge in connecting with folks.

Announcer/Intro Voice: Control-Alt-Redeem is for anyone called to ministry in the digital frontier, gamers, streamers, and everyday believers navigating life online. Each episode equips you to live on mission and the real stories of lives being changed. Reset your expectations, reframe your mission, and redeem the space you're already in. This is where digital ministry gets practical, creative, grounded, and hopeful.

Leighton Seys: All right, everybody. Welcome in to Control-Alt-Redeem. We are resetting the culture and redeeming the space. And so you know the deal if you've been here before. We've got a podcast. We've got a guest. Today we have nerd pastor Nate from Checkpoint Church. Welcome in. Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here. Yeah, it's so fun to actually have people on that I've met in person a couple of times. And we've had a couple of conversations. But when we're at a conference, there's lots of other people that you're connecting with. And with leading a church, you have a chance for some of your... people from your church to be able to hang out and meet you. So we were just both at Nerd Culture Ministry Summit. Were you there? I'm trying to remember. I know you were there in Colorado Springs the first time it was there. And this time, were you there in Texas or not when it was in Marble Falls?

Nate: I was.

Leighton Seys: Okay.

Nate: I was in Marble Falls. And then technically my first like LTN live event would have been the LTN con the year before Marble Falls. So that was my, that was my OG days. And then I was at the virtual like COVID era LTN con online, but definitely, you know, a different vibe for that one.

Leighton Seys: Oh, yeah. Well, I never made it to LTN Con. I have gone with LTN to help do a board gaming con. So I've gone to Grand Con and helped out with LTN. But I did do LTN Con. That would have been a fun thing to do. Well, I love that interconnectedness because we get a chance to catch up, to see what God is up to, to understand. So if we back up, I like to always start with how did you first hear about Twitch? How did you get on to Twitch? And it's not always, hey, I was going to be a streamer when I got on. But talk about yourself first, and then how did Checkpoint Church come about? So we got two different pieces there, if you can give us kind of a story. And I'll stop you if I want to get more details or we can come back to it later.

Nate: Sure. So I would say they're very interconnected. I am like the perfect age for newgrounds.com and YouTube. And so like those were my bread and butter internet days. I was hanging out there all day long, every day, just loving that part of the internet. And so that's very much my like origin story. And then Twitch was always this like other thing. Like I was never on Justin TV. I never really had a desire to watch any of the OG Twitch streamers. I still really don't know them very well. I know their names and maybe I've caught some of their clips, but I've never just been a lurker in Ninja's stream. That's never been my vibe. But... i always felt a sort of kindred spirit a sort of connection with the internet i am a digital native like through and through that is a part of my identity the other part of my identity is i'm a pastor's kid that wanted to or didn't want to but felt the call i got i got a tap on my shoulder to pursue ministry actually wanted to do like anything else being a pk and seeing the life that a pastor lives And so I was like, maybe I could maybe I could be an actor or a comedian or a chef or a ninja. I think those are my options growing up in elementary school.

Leighton Seys: I like that combination, a chef or a ninja. Like they both. Yeah. So there either is either is a good option there.

Nate: yeah well anything that had an anime about it because i'm also a major weeb and so the uh the anime life is also very much a part of it but yeah so i i grew up digital native through and through pastor's kid got a call to seek out ministry to pursue whatever god might be doing in my life to be whether that's a pastor or a elder a deacon or a leader in the church just a whatever and wound up discerning that i was being called to be an elder in the united methodist church And so I pursued that. I went to Duke Seminary. And while I was in seminary, I had this like moment that I realized had sort of been prepared for me where there was this severed connection between Internet culture and the church. And for some reason, the nerds, the Internet people did not feel a real like. connectedness there was a there was a bridge that was needed and so i felt like maybe that's what this call is all about maybe i'm called to serve the nerds the geeks and the gamers and went to my conference that's kind of our direct oversight in the united methodist church and i went to them and i went to specifically the person who was tasked with developing new church And I went to them and said, I had this vision for a church for nerds, geeks, and gamers. I said, we're going to go to Comic-Con. It's going to be incredible. We're going to go get to know people. We're going to tour the country at Comic-Cons. We're going to connect them maybe via like a digital hub, or maybe here in North Carolina, we'll do like a comic book shop or a used video game shop. And then in the midst of all of that, we'll connect the people that we meet at cons. the the church developer at the time huge nerd totally got it dnd nerd through and through like still played with his college buddies and got the vision caught the vibe knew what was going on february 2020. march 2020 happens and everything pivots comic-con ministry i don't think so that was not going to be happening then and so the the vision had to change i knew that i was i'd been given the thumbs up for this church plant for nerds i knew that the the conference had blessed it approved it set aside funds for it all the stuff was ready to go but kovid changed all of it and so come july 1 we hit the ground brainstorming and trying to say like well what do we do then what is the what is the plan and what made the most sense was well youtube's pretty hard it's something that uh didn't really have very i mean it had some live streaming in 2020 but it definitely was not up to up to snuff with where everybody was going and where everybody was going was twitch so the concept was hey this is a place that exists like a comic-con that we can tap into from an evangelism aspect like this is a mission field that we can tap into and build communication and community and so we said let's do twitch Let's figure it out. And so August 1st, 2020, we launched our Twitch channel for checkpoint church. I think maybe like three weeks later we were affiliates and it was off to the races. Like it was just a huge boost. We clicked with folks, made a ton of sense. Everything worked and it's a, you know, memories ever since.

Leighton Seys: Yeah, that that's really cool. I love the. willingness and readiness to pivot you're you're in the process of planning for the church and like not everyone pivoted really well in the middle of covet some some people did not react or respond well you know and i can understand that but you were in the process of moving forward to start it would have been really easy for that to be well It was a good idea, but now it's not going to work. Sorry, you can't do anything. So I love the, wait a minute, this is still a vision that God has given. So how does it happen? How do we pivot? How do we shift? Where can we do that? So did you do some research into Twitch before deciding, yes, this is absolutely it? And what were some of those things that you saw that would have made it make sense that, yeah, this is exactly where we should be?

Nate: yeah we so july 1 is when appointment season starts in the in the methodist church so i technically got appointed july 1 and we didn't launch on twitch until august 1. and so i spent that entire month just researching fleshing out doing kind of ground work seeing what i could build not so much as a foundation but almost just like tilling the land seeing what would what would make sense and It was during that time I discovered God Squad at the time, now XP Church. I discovered Love Thy Nerd and started to ask good questions of them, try to see what I could discern from their ministry. And those were really the two that were like doing nerd ministry at the time that I found right away. Like they were the... top of the seo on google search so whoever was doing their seo at the time kudos to you because you you made it easy to find you and then in the midst of all that as a part of being a church planner and especially in a denomination they were also sending me constant resources of like what it means to plant a church how do you plant a church how do you do this work and so i was working my way through all of those research notes i had a coach at the time that was helping me work through all of the hard questions of how do we get this thing started and once i felt like we had done a sufficient amount of like groundwork in july august was like okay now we're gonna learn by doing and now we just need to figure out hey nobody's really done exactly what i'm doing in exactly the way that i was doing it i knew that i didn't want to just like focus in on one game i knew that i wanted to create some kind of true like church online and so aside again from like god squad church at the time there really was so few folks doing this beyond just churches outside of churches churches through churches like a life church that might be doing an online presence from their existing ministry and so it became a the research field was being in it and experiencing it and failing a lot messing up a lot trying to do bible studies and realizing that like hey you know what a first time chatter probably isn't ready for a bible study they probably don't want to engage with your bible study day one they aren't interested in hopping over from a twitch chat to a zoom call for like a you know face face-to-face debrief that was too big of a jump so Yeah, it came down to the learning curve, playing games that I knew that I loved and wanted to play and seeing what kind of viewers the algorithm would send our way.

Leighton Seys: Yeah, well, just piggybacking off of the learning and experimenting and trying things, what are some of the obstacles that you've had to overcome with helping to get Check Point up? So yeah, you can get going, you can get affiliate, but that's just one piece of the going forward. It's like, how do you maintain? How do you keep going? How do all of those things? No doubt there have been some obstacles over the years, some difficulties that either happened online or with your denomination or in your personal life. Are there any of those things that you've worked really hard and now you're on the other side of those?

Nate: Yeah, I mean, I think that boundaries were pretty crucial for me from the ground up. So I mentioned, right, like I'm a PK, pastor's kid, grew up with a dad in ministry. And so saw the like burden that bad boundaries can put upon a family. They can put upon, I got two kids and I want to be there for them. And so I knew and was very well aware of that. And then it didn't take long before I met people like a jade. I don't know if you've ever had jade on the show, but like. jay streams a bonkers amount of hours so it was like i'm not i'm not gonna do that i know that's a boundary like hard and fast so that was something that was like an initial thing that i had to overcome was like how much am i actually putting into this how much am i actually going to be doing in the streaming side of this so that was crucial and another thing was that i was a parachute drop so i was a true blue church plant i did not have a lead team i did not have leaders from another church joining me it was me and i had you know my family And I had some dear close friends that were like, yeah, we'll, we'll give you a chance here for a couple of months and give you some support and likes and that kind of thing. But beyond that, it really was reaching a totally unreached community, a totally untapped space for me. There were no, there were no existing relationships or resources or connections to tap in on, which I think was a bit of a challenge. Yeah, that might've been the initial stuff. And then the question became like, okay, so if I know I'm not gonna stream like jade, if I'm not gonna be doing the, uh, the three week subathon as supersonic says there, I'm not gonna be doing that. So what, what do we do? And the answer for me in that initial year became I'll stream for like nine hours a week, three hours at a time, three days a week. And then the question became, well, what about the people that want to do more than that? And the answer that the. answer came in the best way in my opinion and it came from within the people that were forming fantastic they were the ones that said hey you need to know about this thing called discord and that was where the magic really happened i think that was that was the that was our first real pivot into something that

Leighton Seys: was just the most meaningful part of what it means to be a church online oh that's fantastic before we dive in and look at the idea of discord i i really think that there is there's there's two levels of one being prepared which you had church training that would help you figure out how to be a church planter so you had that already so that was definitely going to help set you up to be able to go into twitch with the idea of of being a church but the let's study for a little bit and now let's just start i think i think people get stuck in one of two things they either say let's just start we don't know what we're doing we're going to make a whole bunch of mistakes and and you run rough shot over some people because you're not learning the culture you're not spending time but there's also the you could have said well let's study this for six months let's make sure we've got it all diagrammed out of exactly what we're going to do let's get our whole schedule together and then launch there there is something between those two spaces that people go into of the let's prepare nothing and go and let's wait until we have every answer answered that could ever come up and and then we'll go forward so we i love the the variety within there and the learning along the way i'll tell you what twitch is one of the best things for learning from the community So yeah, so you shifted over to Discord. What were the things that you began doing in Discord so that it was more than, hey, I'm just a streamer and you come and you can be in my community as I stream whatever I'm doing. You're welcome. You're a part of it. How did you... Do that. And what were the learning things that you learned as you went into Discord? Because I'm really fascinated with how other people develop their Discord community. What are the pluses? What are the things they've learned? Because I'm still trying to grow and learn in my Discord community.

Nate: Yeah. So discord was something that I had only heard about. I had never really known much about how it actually works or what it actually does. And so it was something very similar to Twitch. It was like always on the outskirts. And I started to poke around and explore and ask questions about the folks that wanted us to have a discord server. Like why, what does it do? What does it mean? What, why, why would you be there? What would make you want to show up there? And what I tried was a practice that. i've recommended to folks since then and i saw that a discord server was super modular and so i thought okay well this is something that i can build channels if i can build voice channels text channels all these things what does that mean for a church context And so I went back to my dad was not only a pastor, but also a church planter. And so in the midst of his planting, I grew up in a church plant church and learned to love it and be really a part of that experience. So I had things to learn from that church. And so I took a blueprint of that church and I. like paid attention to the rooms and i was like what's the purpose of this room it was it's a pretty modern looking church and so it's got like the coffee hall it's got the sections um you know for very specific purposes like that but then there's the classic of like the sanctuary uh there's the bible study rooms there's the children's room there's the nursery there's all these kind of spaces what's the purpose of these spaces And so I started to build the Discord server like I was building a blueprint. And so I did each folder. I tried to create that like a different section of a church building. And then I would build out section rooms within that space. So what is the space that purely just serves as like fellowship? What is the equivalent of a fellowship hall? And then what is the space where more spiritual matters might be undertaken or prayers might be undertaken? All those kind of things. And so we would just play around with what does it look like to recreate the church experience using discord as if it was a series of rooms. And that worked really well for us because it turned this space into something that was all at once familiar while also you know, utilizing the assets that we had in this new discord space. so since then we've kind of pivoted and changed things around a little bit but that was the energy that we went into this thing with and what it revealed to us is that discord could be our church building so that became kind of the the nomer that we would offer to this space is like discord twitch is our evangelism twitch is our outreach twitch is our place where we're getting to know people but then we want them to come and join our church building and really up until that point at least from a united methodist perspective all of my church leaders were like how are you going to count members how are you going to know who's a part of your church they were they were so confused but then discord was able to give us more grounded language to like this is what this is our church building this is our gathering space this is what's If everywhere else we're in other people's spaces, this is the thing that is truly like you're joining our building. You're walking through our doors and entering into something with us. And so that was a mindset shift that was absolutely crucial for figuring out what differentiated our, the work of the pastor, the work of the initial launch team, the work of the initial church to go and reach people versus the community building. What's actually happening within the church walls that's forming that initial culture.

Leighton Seys: Yeah, that's really – I love that approach of thinking of, like, if you were building a building, what's the function of this room? If you're building a Discord, what's the function of this channel? That's a really good image. I've heard other people talk about that in different ways of what you – create like a home and what's a living room for. So you want to have that space. But I like that idea of thinking through the, oh yeah, you would know what a Bible study room is. You would know what that is. You would know what the fellowship hall is. You would understand those things. So yeah, building those into it so that you can think through. I've got all of the things we need. The other beautiful thing with digital, you can go build whatever room you need for whatever capacity. You don't have to have a budget to go do it. You could just... add a new room to the community at any time that you are welcoming people in so i like i like that image that you're giving there i did see in the chat that there was trombone was saying that you did a discord reset and a value audit what was that all about

Nate: Yeah. So we've done, I think we're on our third or fourth discord reset at this point. And essentially what we would do is we would go through the sidebar and just sort of evaluate. I would turn to some of our leaders in the space of which Trombone is one. And I would ask, you know, what, what are the, what are the things that are working here? What are the things that are absolutely not working? What needs to move somewhere else? What needs to kind of just hit refresh? And so that's actually turned into our most recent iteration, which I'm sort of seeing. I'll use, I'll use a term that I haven't yet that I'll try to explain, which is a discipleship pathway. And so you've undoubtedly heard that term before, but for anybody in the, in the audience that has not, this is how do you get someone from just hearing about Jesus, just hearing about whatever ministry or outreach you're doing down to truly being like baptized and then towards the process of sanctification. So what are we doing as we're getting somebody from A to Z? That's the discipleship pathway. so from a church planting angle the question became like okay well what what space then is our evangelistic space what space is our community building space what space is our discipling space what space is our leadership space and so on and so forth and so for a while there it was platform specific and so twitch would be our outreach discord would be our community building and then we would have youtube eventually come along that would turn into our disciple building space and then we would build up leaders that we call level two within our space and those are people that are opt-in that's the closest thing that we have even today to members and so we would do that and then we would engage those members in a more deeper capacity so that was our pathway now our discord sidebar is the pathway So it's no longer we no longer really see the pathway as being outside of that platform. Of course, there's still elements of reaching people on YouTube of doing things like that, but we wanted people to join our discord server and right away be able to like with their eye track the sidebar and get more involved. and so you start out with like the usual stuff on the sidebar of here's announcements here's where you're at let us know about you in introductions that kind of stuff and then as you get a little bit deeper it's like okay well maybe talk to us about whatever's going on like shoot the breeze let's just hang out uh we'll engage you with like a question of the day that kind of stuff as you get a little bit deeper we want to know about you now tell us more about your your niche interests what do you geek out about what are you a nerd for once we get a little bit deeper okay we want to get spiritual with you what's your spiritual background are you interested in this conversation here's prayer requests and then you get a little bit deeper and it's like we want you to join some people we want you to join a small group i want you to be a part of our our book club or our anime club or our video game club or so on and so forth and then once you do that we're like we want you to lead come join level two so on and so forth so the the pathway left platform specific and became something more intentional that people could walk down as they walk the sidewalk

Leighton Seys: Yeah, so literally it is from top to bottom. The deeper you go, the more involved and invested you are. I like that thinking. Some of the time, the way I've done it as I've set things up are, what are the things that are most active and I want people to find? And I migrate those to the top. so that they're always right there, easy to be accessible. But I like that idea of progressing further down because if you are more active, well, you're more inclined to scroll down to the bottom to get to those things that you are participating in. So, you know, one of the things that I love about the Twitch space is being able to make global friends and stay connected. And some of them, we do get over to the Discord. Not all of them, you know, end up in Discord and fully involved in that space. But Samarella has been in and out of the hospital. So we just got an update from Samarella. We've been praying for her. She had a heart transplant. She was just sharing that. The doctors are giving her a thumbs up on everything that was going on. Let me go back to that if I can find it. Where was that? Okay, there it is. So the doctors have officially cleared her of the tumors, the heart issue, and the cancer, and you don't have to worry about it as your body is starting to accept the new heart. So that is really good news. Praise God for that. And I love how you were saying you're starting to learn that all praise really does go to God when we celebrate what God is up to and doing things. So even when we're thanking others, we are praising God. Uh, supersonic saying maybe a different source there. I don't know. I'm not seeing it. Mel said no on her end. And I've I've lost your image a little bit. You've gone all grainy on me, Nate.

Nate: Yeah. I tried to drop my, uh, drop my performance to see if that would help at all.

Leighton Seys: Uh, yeah, that's another, I'm down to seven 20. Okay. Well, that didn't see if that makes. Something in there doesn't like us today. This must be a really important conversation somebody needs to hear. I don't always like to give Satan that much credit, but there is a level at which sometimes it just feels like, wow, there's something really good going on, and tech will get in the way. All right, you're looking a little better there now.

Nate: I turned it back up. I can always try and select a different camera, see if this setting might actually be better.

Leighton Seys: Give it a try while we're playing with this. Maybe 30 bats. Good to see you, Nate, is returning to the tater can. Ah, you just got one earbud, so you're not able to help there. See if this camera looks any better. Sure doesn't look like it, no.

Nate: I'm back up to my two.

Leighton Seys: Got to rue the Vaseline from the lens there, buddy.

Announcer/Intro Voice: Undoubtedly.

Nate: Well, I could always try and not record on my end if that would work, but it's for some reason locked me down to the like incredibly low EP, even though I've got it set to.

Leighton Seys: Oh, wow. 900. 180 would not, not be doing anything. No wonder it looks so bad.

Nate: Yeah. And they still are upset. I guess let's try and not let them optimize.

Leighton Seys: Hey, there we go. That looks better already.

Nate: All right, so I'm going to tell them they're not allowed to optimize, and we'll see how that looks.

Leighton Seys: Okay, that looks much better. That looks much better.

Nate: Okay, cool. I'll have to stand for the rest of it, but that'll be fine. It's better for me anyway.

Leighton Seys: Samarella, is it just me, or does it feel like Nate looks like a Ph.D. professor in medicine?

Nate: Well, that's very kind. I am not. I am not a Ph.D. in anything, but, you know, maybe someday.

Leighton Seys: And before we jump back in, Supersonic, do you want a spot of tea for me? Spot of tea. Drinking Earl Grey today, buddy. Earl Grey all day. All right. So let's jump back in. We've got a couple of little things there, some tech issues. This will all get edited out in post-production because we've got a great crew. Well, it's just me. But I am learning. I'm getting better. So I'm glad we got the cam. That looks really nice there, Nate. Sorry you're going to have to stand. Now we froze. I spoke too soon.

Nate: Yeah. Well, at the very least, I can try and bump it down to 480 instead of 180.

Leighton Seys: Oh, 180 was just miserable. Well, we'll just keep going. If we need to change, we'll pause and make that change there. So what just kind of shifting here. So we've talked about Discord, the audit, getting that set up, getting started. Yes.

Nate: So we didn't talk about the audit. We talked about the pathway.

Leighton Seys: Oh, okay.

Nate: So the values audit, I call it a virtue audit that Tramon was talking about. Okay. The gist of that concept is whenever we very first started, we kind of set out some goals of what do we want our virtue to be in this space? What are we doing here? What is the goal? What is the mission? What are our... values in this space and so for us in the umc it's to make disciples of jesus christ for the transformation of the world it's our mission and our discipline and so we struck out with like hey that's an important thing are we making disciples uh and so we would check in every single month and just kind of ask ourselves that value question of like are we making headway on forming disciples are we making headway on transforming the world are we still talking about jesus like what is it that we're doing here And we would just make sure that we never really had like a value drift and instead allowed our values to be the thing that drive our adjustments rather than adjusting away from them. And that was, that was a helpful bit of structure that we did in our first couple of years.

Leighton Seys: Yeah, that is really helpful because it's easy to have mission drift where you start with one thing and then you add something to it. You add a third thing and suddenly you're no longer doing the thing that you were called to do to begin with. So making sure you don't have mission drift because also I think it's probably when you're really in an innovative frontier kind of ministry that you have those things in place so that you can show supporters and denominations and overseers whoever they may be that yes we are doing the ministry we're not just hanging out playing games because without them being present their image is going to be different than the reality on the ground they're not going to necessarily see and understand what it is that god is doing in the space unless you're able to share with them here's our mission and here's how we're fulfilling it

Nate: Totally.

Leighton Seys: So that's really good. I love those thoughts. I'm trying to think of what's one of the ones that we've done. I can't think of the name of it. Well, if it comes to me, but it's an audit that you do that's got four different categories and I can't remember what it's called, but... Anyway, we've done those before with the Church Digital, trying to think through, what are we doing well? Are we meeting our mission? Are we meeting our vision? Are we doing those things? Are we shifting? Do we need to move in a different direction? The constant evaluation, I think, really helps us stay focused on the people we're trying to reach. Not to put it in business language, but the customer that we're trying to reach needs to be at the forefront. And for us, it's in ministry, the people that we're evangelizing to, the people that we are discipling. That is our customer, so to speak, that we want to be doing everything we need to for them.

Nate: I think it's crucial. I mean, whenever whenever we name it, that we're a church for nerds, geeks and gamers, we're all at once being inclusive without trying to be exclusive. So we're trying to name exactly what what is what are the profiles of people that we want to make sure we're focused on without it becoming like a catering thing. and so that was the structure was like we wanted to make sure that we can be a church that nerds geeks and gamers feel welcome rather than making sure that we're a church that nerds geeks and gamers feel like they've been like catered to or maybe even like you know infantilized we didn't want to ever do that so that was crucial to figuring out that mission and how do we reach that specific demographic in a meaningful way

Leighton Seys: Yeah, and that's where the knowing the culture, being part of the culture makes it easier to reach the culture because you're not condescending to them and saying like, and I'm not picking on any church that does this, but hey, let's have a game night at our church. Let's set up all of the Xboxes and let's set up everything else that we can and then invite people in to do that. And then we're gonna hit them with a gospel message before they get to start. Like, you know, it's learning and building the relationships and allowing for those things to happen naturally instead of bait and switch people.

Nate: Totally. Crucial.

Leighton Seys: Well, then, as we are thinking about what you've been doing, what have been some really blessed experiences that you've had, either with people in the community, on Twitch, or just as you've been building this church? What are two or three stories of where God has just showed up in some pretty good ways to be able to say, wow, this absolutely was God in this person's life or in our community?

Nate: Yeah, I've written about a couple of these moments. One that has always stood out to me is just realizing the capacity of the Spirit to move in mundane moments, in the unexciting moments. That's nothing new. That's always been the case in any kind of form of ministry. You always find that there are things that happen in the quiet. the reason that i think that we like um casual tasks like fishing so much or going camping like we just enjoy these things because we find the spirit and the stillness and still small voice right um but i didn't realize that still small voice included like cozy games and so i'll never forget there was a moment and i think our first or second year streaming whenever we were playing pokemon um was the re-releases of diamond and pearl for the switch okay and we were playing through those games and i was i don't know i was catching like a gia dude or something in the grass and um one of the one of the members that was there at that time just like out of nowhere we made some kind of comment i think it was about like what's a cocktail that you like that randomly came up i don't know why that happened in the church stream but you know sometimes those conversations just happen and so we were like randomly talking about that and then somebody shared they were like i don't drink and i was like hey totally cool i'm completely reasonable thing to not do and then they shared why And that there was this connection with their sister and this story that was evocative within them that tied to this very personal, very meaningful part of their life that they were willing to share with us across a chapter. and so it's like in the midst of this moment in the midst of this like literally catching a gia dude somebody was willing to pour their heart out was willing to share a part of themselves and we were we were able to connect in a really meaningful way um so that's one that i will always think back on um another pretty pivotal moment we were playing a game called one shot which the second time i'm name dropping jade here was a game that jay recommended to me because he knows the kind of games that i play and one shot is way up my alley we were playing one shot there was a guy that i don't know if you know this game the the concept is you're this little like cat like or you're controlling this cat-like creature named nico who's this little fella who has been tasked with delivering the light of the world a little on the nose to replace the light of the world that has gone out and so you are like it's constantly self referencing like the player as as like god and nico as the messiah like it uses this language very explicitly and this game has a cult following like i had never even heard of it but it has a deep cult following and whenever we streamed it we had people hop on that just like are on twitch with this game tagged so that anytime somebody goes live with this game they are in the chat And so we had, we had Sky who was a member of the, this community that just always loved to tune in to one shot streams. And they tuned into ours just to be our cheerleader, to be our encourager. to be somebody that was there for hints if we needed them and that kind of thing. And what struck me about that whenever I was reflecting upon like, Hey, that's a really cool thing to do first off. But the second cool thing about it was like, they didn't expect a church to probably be doing this, but they were, they were a part of our little church community for those couple of streams while we played through that game. They were being told whether they ever show up again in our discord server, whether they ever hung out or, or became a, you know, a member of our church, whether any of that ever happened. We still got to welcome them into our community and it's integral to what we do at Check Point. We've done this ever since we very first started, since our very first stream. We end everything with the same sign off so that even if somebody only tunes in for that one stream, I guess, presuming that they make it to the end, they get to hear that we believe three things to be true about them, no matter who they are, where they've been. what they've done whether they believe in god don't believe in god go to church don't go to church hey god hate church no matter what we still believe these three things to be true say that god loves you really love you we love you we want community with you you matter you're a person of sacred worth the world's better place why because you are in it so we say those three things and so sky for four streams whether they have ever heard anybody say those things to them before or not in a one-shot stream got to hear those things and like that is the power of video games and the things that connect us and these stories that are meaningful to us that lead us to checking to see whenever somebody streams them and then tuning in and hanging out with them like that that's just powerful that's just cool stuff that's that's things that are totally out of our hands that are nobody that i grew up with in the church has any idea those kind of things are even happening right but the capacity to reach people in that way um And then the third one I think is less of a story in particular and more of like a moment that happens pretty often. You know, I mentioned a little bit earlier, kind of my, my snide comment about we, we launched with Bible studies. I love the game undertale. And so I wanted to do a Bible study on undertale. so whenever we very first started we would do a twitch stream on wednesday nights and we'd play through an hour hour and a half of a game and then i would send them off with a invite link to a zoom call and i would say come join us on sundays to talk about what we've learned tonight it didn't work first of all wednesday to sunday is way too long second off nobody wanted to join a zoom call after just hanging out and talking about undertale and so we had to pivot pretty quickly and learn that but once we built out our discord i realized that maybe zoom was just not right for these these folks in general maybe discord was a different place because we did have a ton of people that would join us on voice calls on discord so we started to do that we started to offer more times to hang out we have lunch together we hang out on sunday nights all that kind of stuff and i've noticed that there is this like tangible moment where you know that you've made a connection and it happens in a discord voice call you can have somebody join your discord that's a big move like somebody joining your discord is a big thing they are they are saying yes they are saying yes i will join this you can even have somebody send some messages you can have people drop some texts into discord you can have people do a lot of different things pick up roles all that kind of stuff but there is this one moment where you know that this is something actually happening that you've actually connected with somebody on a real basis and it's the moment during a voice call that they turn on their camera it doesn't have to be their face yep it doesn't have to be their face we're nerds we like to just show our geeky stuff but if people are willing to like show you their latest funko pop and they turn on their camera to show it to you you've made a connection that is that is intimacy like that is a level of relationship of somebody saying i'm willing to just for a second let you into my world beyond the internet and that is like huge in connecting with folks and so that was that was a big moment that i always look for i still am looking for it seven years in is like anybody that i know that i've seen around the discord for a while or that's hung out with us for a while in the twitch chat or on youtube if they join a voice call and they turn on their camera okay something's happening here like the spirit is moving something good is going on in this life and in this relationship this is one to pay attention to

Leighton Seys: Oh, absolutely. I love that. I've been having conversations recently about how do we change the matrix of what do we measure to know that we are actually doing ministry? Because measuring membership really doesn't show that anything is happening. It's only showing you a static picture of the people that show up at a certain place in a certain time or attendance, you know, whatever you're doing. Like those are static things that are follow measures, not lead measures. You know, like you're leading someone to Christ. You need to have measurements that are further ahead. I love this idea of what if you were to track that? We had how many people turn their camera on for the first time in a Discord convo. You could track that over time and be able to get these lead measures to say, hey, we're building community. We had this many people join the server, which means they're coming to check us out. We had this many people turn their cam or this many people join. Those kinds of things that you can measure point to relationship building, point to that aspect that's going to allow you to get deeper in relationship and draw them further down your pathway towards being in relationship with God and with Christ and fully following. So I love that. That's a great thing I had not thought about measuring. But it's one of those things you could report to people and think about. We've got to step closer towards Jesus. And then you might say, this doesn't feel like a step towards Jesus. It is because we're followers of Christ. And if they're in relationship with us, Jesus is going to rub off on them.

Announcer/Intro Voice: Yeah.

Nate: It's funny that you mentioned metrics. We care a lot about metrics in a denominational system. And it always cracks me up because every January we are required to turn in all of our metrics into the big capital UMC. And I get a message every year. every single year they reach out to me and they're like your numbers are not correct i'm like my numbers are correct you're not asking the right questions like we we look like we're one of the biggest churches in the world i'm like we're not you're just not asking the right things the the obsession with views and that kind of stuff it's like those are so easy to get those are not the thing that you should be tracking like actual people i'm so much more proud of like every person that joins our discord server over somebody that watches a youtube video i love our youtube audience i love folks that find us but like they're these are not the same thing and for some reason the metrics that have been tracked for the online church since covid have been views and then a multiplier on top of that because what if two people are sitting in the same room watching right i'm like i'm like you're you're missing it you're completely missing it so yeah it is it is definitely something that grinds my gears

Leighton Seys: Yeah, yeah, like I said, I'm trying to have those, my denomination's going through restructuring our whole system of how we, so we have two, we have four levels of assembly, you know, your local church, your regional group, your larger group, and then the national, and we're combining the two middle ones into one and going... How do we change all of this? What are we doing? How does it work? What's our new path forward? So we've been having those conversations of what do we measure? And I'm trying to push them as much as I can around quit measuring butts in the seat and quit measuring the offering that's given. because neither one of those show life change, and neither one of those show us people as being disciples. So the Church Digital, we often talk about intentional spiritual conversations. We use spiritual, not gospel conversations, because a spiritual conversation can meet somebody where they are and might be a pre-evangelism, but it's an intentional conversation that we're going to meet them and have a spiritual conversation, not a conversation about the weather or sports or gaming. We're going to be talking about... What's going on in life? What are they struggling with? What is God or the Bible or Christ or my experience help inform them of what they could be doing? So that's a harder measure to track because you can't just show up on a Sunday and see it happen. It happened Monday through Friday, and if you don't record it Monday through Friday, you might have had five of them, but by the end of the month, you don't know how many you had because you've forgotten. so right those those are some of the things that we're trying to figure out so i love that like you just were given one and i'm like my brain was like spot on like oh there's a thing that could point to actual gospel taking place by a small step and i'm really trying to dig into the how do we put more steps in place than the big thing that we're going to i i was just trying to think of an example of this like for instance if you've done laundry before You could come over to my house and you could do the laundry, but you still might need some instructions to tell you where the laundry baskets are. You might need some instructions to tell you how many bathrooms and how many towels are hanging up and to take the towels off the floor and leave the ones hanging or whatever system I use. You might need to know what detergent I have, but... I could also lay out all of those steps in a smaller capacity than just say, hey, come over and do my laundry. I might need to say, well, when you show up, do this, do this, do this. So how do I keep breaking it down? Not me on the other hand of my life. I just want the task of laundry. I'll figure it all out. But I'm realizing other people need all of those things. Collect all the laundry, sort all the laundry, do one load of laundry, put it in the dryer, take it out and hang it, take it out and fold it. To me, that's way too much information. But if all I'm doing is giving you the one next step, hey, go collect all the dirty towels. Great, I can go do that. It's not overwhelming for people to take one more step closer so that whatever we're inviting them to participate in, they're more inclined to say yes to it.

Nate: Yeah. absolutely i yeah i'm i'm currently like i said i'm always wrestling with metrics and what matters and what's worth keeping track of and i'm also now throwing another kink into the system i'm reading the score by ct wang right now and it is all about so this is the same guy that wrote the games as agency book a couple years ago and his whole argument in this book is hey i'm noticing that in games metrics scorekeeping are really helpful and in life metrics and scorekeeping are really bad what's going on there like what's the deal why are these two things so dissonant why why in gaming are these things that inspire and create and lift up whereas in real life these are things that divide and are either untrackable or are harsh And so I'm wrestling with it all over again, trying to figure out how do we differentiate between scorekeeping, gatekeeping, kind of like goal defending versus a real celebratory measure or things that are trackable in a way that inspire. This is a big part of like narrative budgets too. And that kind of thing of like, instead of just telling people about where your budget is at, tell them about who you're impacting. Like those are so integral to the church world. it's hard to do. So it's a fascinating thing for sure.

Leighton Seys: Yeah, I'm constantly trying to think through those aspects of it. I like some of those thoughts there of the narrative budget. Here's what the money is going to. Nobody gets excited about giving to turn the lights on. Nobody is going, well, I've got to give to Checkpoint Church to make sure the internet is up and running. How many gigs are you running? Well, let's up that. I want to give so you can give more gigs. That's not the natural thing that people are thinking about. But when you have stories of impact, that this person's life was impacted. We were able to do this with the funding. People are more inclined to give when there is some emotion that's connected with it. Turning the lights on, there's no emotion that I'm excited about when I, oh yeah, the electricity's here. If it's the electricity's out, we're helping somebody who doesn't have any, now I might get emotionally invested in helping them get it turned back on. But the maintaining is not always the exciting thing.

Nate: Yeah, for sure.

Leighton Seys: I think I'm going to shift and go a little bit different direction than we kind of do here on the podcast, because I've just recently did the first podcast with a book author and interviewed Peyton Jones, who has Discipleology. So this podcast will come out after that. That one came out actually yesterday. So this one will come out in a couple of weeks. But thinking through writing, you just had a book out and you're, you know, Focus is on, yeah, there we go. God and the machine, navigating faith in the age of AI, which I think is incredibly timely. Like, I think I first got introduced to some of the stuff with AI about four or five years ago. And I was like, well, this is fascinating. But I was really skeptical to jump on board because I'm not a pioneer in space. I'm usually an early adopter, and it felt too early to adopt because things were going to change so often that it was like, I'm not ready to jump on the bandwagon of being on a constant... you know, revolving learning curve of things. But in the last six months, probably the last 12 months, I have been ramping up my AI and where I'm at and what I'm doing. So I love that you're on that cutting edge because I think it helps us think through things. So what exactly are you trying to address with your book so that if we're going to go say, oh, yeah, that's totally what I'm wrestling with right now with AI. that we can say, here's a great recommendation for you if you want to dive into exploring what AI is, what it's not, and what we should as a church do.

Nate: Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts and it sounds like we probably started in similar places. I do consider myself more of a pioneer than early adopter. I think that I, especially when it comes to technology, like I'm a, I'm a big proponent of it. I like to explore it. And whenever we first had that GPT launch that, that went live to the public, I recall jumping in with both feet first and really experimenting and exploring and creating a lot of really awful looking images, just stuff that was absolute like garbage to look at. But really trying exploring everything. I remember in our early stream days, I would do a lot of the AI like voices. And so, uh, with our, one of our podcasts that we did every time we would introduce it with a different, like Hannah Barbera cartoon character saying, welcome to the checkpoint church podcast. So like. I was, I was on board. Um, I was super curious and then I felt like, uh, I really got a pretty unexpected rug pull because I was exploring it. I was curious about it. And then the community that I serve, these, these people that are nerds, geeks, and gamers are often very creative. They're often people that work in the industry, in the games industry in particular, and that kind of thing. And, um, they, they hate AI. They really, really strongly hate it. And, uh, they would. notice if i would use it and they would they would be upset and so i wanted to wrap my mind around that because i'm always less of a proponent of ai than i am of people i'm always more interested in what's going on with the with the humans behind this thing in the uh in the umc we have this kind of general rule that we've adopted from john wesley to do no harm to do good attend upon the ordinances of god which we changed the third one in our community to strive to grow because that's maybe a little bit more modern english but like do no harm it seems to me like the people that i was seeing the people i was connecting with the pastors that were going uh two feet first like i had been into ai were maybe going too far and they were not really considering the harm that was being done and so i was asked to write this book by our publishing house because i had written a lot on ai and i'd written a lot in on my substack pixel and pulpit i'd written a lot of negative things not necessarily coming after it as if i was like a hater as if i was like telling you that for even pursuing the technology you should feel bad about yourself but instead i felt like i was the only voice that was drawing out like the people that were being harmed by this thing um everybody was like oh yeah you're just not a real artist if you create uh you know ai art there was always this kind of like judgmental abrasiveness and i was like maybe they're right maybe they're wrong but i'm more concerned about the pastor i'm more concerned about the person that the pastor is serving and so like what are we doing if we're so enamored by this thing Um, that we're making AI Jesus on Twitch. What are we doing that we're so obsessed with this thing that, um, that we're we're no longer caring about our work to serve a community and we're more interested in how we can be more productive. Um, that we're giving into those kinds of things. And so for me, I approached this book with that angle. I don't think. ai is the boogeyman i don't think that ai has the capacity to be the boogeyman it's a tool on the other hand i don't think ai is the second coming of christ i don't think that ai is going to be some miraculous game changer that is going to bring about some kind of perfection through it and so i wanted to present the book that says i just want to present you with an honest theology of ai that is neither going to glamorize it i'm not going to tell you to incorporate it into your life nor am i going to demonize it and tell you that it's the satanic panic 3.0 i'm not going to do either one of those things instead i'm going to approach this with a pastoral lens of how can we address this thing and so that's the that's the angle that i write this book from it's less of a practical guide and more of a theological exploration and so i it's it's designed as a bible study it's a six-week bible study it has a accompanying bible study if your church ever wants to pursue it anybody out there listening that's that's the purpose of it is it was written with church leaders church members people who care in mind to be able to incorporate it into their bible studies go through it and just talk about it to address the concerns, address the questions. And so I'm going to talk about the history of technology in general, how the church has used it historically. Kind of like Bats has named in the chat. Probably the biggest swing I think that I really make is I am staunchly anti anthropomorphizing AI. I think that that is our biggest, like the church has got to be a clear leader on this and acknowledge that like AI cannot, will not, is incapable of bearing the Imago Dei. It cannot be an image bearer. It is not a human being. It is a tool. It is a technology. It would be as ridiculous as saying that the gold that was on the Ark of the Covenant is what was important instead of the hands that were blessed to form it, right? Like there is something happening in humanity that is different than what is happening in AI. And so that was a pretty thing that I pretty staunchly put down there. And then a major through line of this one is going to be on the like anti AI side. Are we considering the people behind that? Or are we just like looking at their arguments and their rage bait and the stuff that they post online? Or are we actually seeing, no, this is a hurting person. We need to care about the hurting person here. And then on the other end of that spectrum, the people that are so pro AI, are we, are we, are we losing even more trust that we have in one another? And so the, the rooted nature here is I bring back to like this concern over AI in schools. Um, and in particular the like post primary post-secondary education kind of stuff. And I felt like I've seen so, so much of an instant reaction of like you used AI instead of again, like a natural trust. Are they like, if you did, would you tell me? Will you agree to not? Will we set up a relationship of trust instead of this really weird reactionary thing that is happening? I think we are, we are just further eroding trust on this end of the spectrum. and so again that's that's really what i was approaching this book with was i'm not really trying to be a source of catastrophizing i'm not really trying to be a source of utilizing i'm trying to be a source of providing hope and kind of pastoral guidance into whatever ai and technology looks like in this era

Leighton Seys: Well, I will say, I hope this is a blessing to churches that choose to do this because one of the things that I am hearing for the most part, because I'm not serving in a local church, but I'm hearing people talking about the AI conversation just is not happening. There's no doubt that people in the pews are using AI. There's no doubt that people on staff are using AI. So if your church is not addressing it, how do you know that you're within bounds of a set policy that you would want to follow if you haven't had conversations around it so kenny chang who was at ncms he was talking about some of this as well and one of the things he said is if you want to spur conversation start with do we have an ai policy and you'll find out who's using ai so start would say let's have a policy it doesn't mean you have to resolve everything but start with something to bring it together and make decisions around it. The thing I've been doing since I've been using it is treating AI as like an intern. I give it a task. It goes and does it. I check the work. I ask it to do more. I check the work. I'm constantly the supervisor of the AI. And I've got to, I think, maintain that because I don't have enough trust in it that it's always going to get everything right. So I want to be that bookend bookkeeper for it. But I also know that if I'm using something in the church, if I'm using something to create, I want to let people know, yes, I used AI in this. I think like you're saying is I don't want people to find out later and be upset about it because they felt I was being dishonest, putting something off as my own work. So I do think that's an important piece to be able to bring into that conversation and have that.

Nate: Well, and I think that the policy statement about Kenny, I included that in my book as well, because I think that's a crucial step is building out a policy. Just asking the questions, just having the conversation is a huge deal. And I imagine you would probably be surprised, or at least I've been surprised in churches that I've heard using it so far, the people that show up that do know about it. That are just like, I just thought we weren't ever going to talk about it in this space. Like there, there are people that are really hungry to have a spiritual exploration of this thing because they're hearing about it. They're seeing it in work. Some of them are being forced to use it in work. And so I think that just being answer, like being there to answer questions, being there to bounce ideas off of, and just to hear out is crucial. And you noted, you noted something that I really want to highlight, which is one of my like. policy recommendations that is an unquestionable one for me that is like a shoe in, you must have this, is transparency. If you are not being transparent about using AI, if there is guilt there, hey, that might be a spiritual gut check. You know, I'm not going to go so far as to like say what isn't is not sinful in regards to AI, but if the spirit is a knocking, like there might be something going on there. If you're feeling some guilt for using something and you don't want to be transparent about it, that's a concern. That's not a good sign. As a pastor, if a parishioner came up to me and expressed that to me, I'd be like, we need to talk about why. We need to express what's going on. And so one of my things, I am very transparent about this. I have used AI to generate images and video. I will never do that again. I have set a line in the sand for myself. I'm not doing that anymore. i think that it is for my own purposes from my own research for the work that i've done for the people that i care for it would do too much harm for them to say like for them to see that i used an image that would cause too much harm to them as a person so i'm not going to do it i'm just going to lay that line in the sand not forcing anybody to lay that line but i do think that you need to at least be transparent if you did or did not And then also doing the due diligence to research, like what is, is being done? What are people talking about? You should probably at least like know the name, Sam Altman. You should have an idea of the things that he is saying. You should know some of the stuff that is going on by like the biggest companies out there. But again, the troublesome part is one of the big retorts from people that are very pro AI is like, well, look. We've all, we've all been using technology. Do you make it act like Facebook is some kind of guilt-free system, but I'm still on there. I'm still using my phone. I'm still buying stuff that was made, uh, inequitably. And so there's always these like underlying realities and we can choose to like be reactionary to those, or we can choose to hear those and to say like, yes, we should be talking about that. There's that doesn't, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't instead. It's just another thing that maybe we should be bringing up more often.

Leighton Seys: Well, yeah, and it was it was typed in the chat. I think Trombone had had put it in there in regards to data centers and water usage and electricity usage and those kinds of things. And I happen to live in a state where that has been the news for the last six months is Microsoft owns this property and they're they're considering an application to be able to make a data center. The town down the road, someone else is considering making a data center and like we really are concerned about our water we really are concerned about our environment like we like i live in michigan so if i mention the name flint everybody knows the water problem of flint like it's it's not hidden it's a horrible mistake uh that happened with and you go look it up if you don't know but also the town that i live in they had a chemical company in the town out by the by the lake so outside the city limits and everybody who lives outside the city limits after the the chemical plant uh closed down and did everything that they did in there they had to pay in order to have city water run to all of these residents outside the city because they contaminated the ground water source so bad that nobody can use their own water that's underneath the ground there and it's like We're really concerned about those things. And I think we should have those conversations. I think we need to be naive. And I think we just need to have wisdom around how they're doing things and make sure like there's too often we just let people go ahead without saying, hey. How are you going to guarantee you're not going to ruin the environment? If we don't have the conversations, we let just people go forward. I mean, I could go even further back, you know, where I live. I live by where National Forest is. There was lots of tree harvesting that took place. So lumber mills were the predecessor of the problems in the area before we had chemical plants that were the predecessor. Now we're wondering about if data centers are going to be. So... I'm not an alarmist, but I certainly care about my neighbors, and I certainly care about the animals and the creation that God has given us. So I want those conversations. I'm not necessarily the one smart enough to answer those questions, but I want to be honest enough to say we should have conversations around those things. There's a bigger picture planet-wise, community-wise thing, but we also... boil that down to what is AI? Like I liked you brought in the aspect of school because I don't have kids in school. I'm not thinking about what is AI doing to elementary kids or middle school kids. I'm not thinking about that. I mean, maybe the most I'm thinking about is people using chat GPT to write their test answers or papers and not actually doing the work. I've heard that, but I don't know what other concerns there are for younger people dealing with AI.

Nate: Yeah, I think it comes down to, for me again, it's, it's rooted in trust. And so I think that we're just seeing this utter deterioration. It's I have my own high horse that I could get on about Jonathan Heights research with phones in schools, but there is like this, there is this boogeyman nature that we want to attribute to technology and to the people that use it and to the kids now that are using it. Uh, we're attributing them with a boogeyman nature. We're saying that they. too incapable of controlling themselves or something along those lines and instead of either building that trust building that respect creating those relationships those boundaries i don't know it's just it seems to me like we're trying to legalize away what is a justice issue what is a relationship issue what is a community issue where we're so much more interested in like putting the ban hammer on things rather than like engaging honestly with them and that's just that concerns me i think that there are things that can be done on the legalistic side i know bats mentioned one there for moratoria on like data centers like that's that's something that on the legal side can be done to slow down to halt to figure out but on our end like on our human to human end i am so much more interested in us offering grace upon grace to other people rather than allowing ourselves to become captive to this mindset of negativity around this thing rather than just entering into an honest conversation about it and so that's that's what i was hoping to offer in there and a word that i i will i will offer up to anybody that is considering this if if ai is a tool a tool that is based out of knowledge for me is technology the definition that i have for technology is knowledge put into practice So if that is what we're doing here, this is a tool. What is the relationship between humanity and tools? In my theological comprehension, we are stewards of tools. What does that mean? What does it mean for the church to steward AI well? It doesn't necessarily mean for us to say you can never use it on anything ever, but it also doesn't mean that you should be using it on everything ever. It means that we should be directing it. We should be guiding it. We should be in the conversation. We should be lifting up voices like a Kenny Jang, who is very much somebody pro AI. And we should be lifting up the voices that are more cynical that are, that are also saying, maybe this isn't the way we need to be lifting up both voices. So especially in Christian spaces, so that we can pursue what is a theological justice view of what's going on here. What is an ethical stewardship of these things? What can we lay? What can't we lay? How can we figure this out and move forward in effective relational means, which is what we're best at. That's what we're supposed to do.

Leighton Seys: i love that you brought in relationship with that because that's one of the things that like school boards and governments have for years done this well we can't actually figure out how to do this so let's put zero tolerance policies in place so the kid that brings a butter knife to school in kindergarten for his peanut butter sandwich forgot it was in there gets kicked out of school for having a knife I mean, because you set such harsh standard rules because you can't use grace and relationship to say, hey, probably not the best idea to bring that to school. We know you meant no harm, but please don't do it again. Like, you can have intentional conversations with that, but it's like... We at some point have gotten in society too confrontational and parents justifying their kids that we have to set harsher rules and penalties in order to actually be able to implement discipline sometimes within a system because we're not treating people as people. We're treating people as numbers at times. I'll just go on a... a pet peeve of mine for for a minute here when you go to a restaurant and i don't mean like you know a waiter coming to your table asking your name i mean when you're ordering fast food and they ask you for your name they have just turned your name into a number Okay? They are not treating you with that name. You're not building relationship. They are just calling out your name, at least for me. They're mispronouncing my name. I don't know that they've called me because they said my name so poorly. They didn't build any relationship with me. I know the intent is to do that, but you've given the task to someone who's not building relationship. They're a task person. They aren't building relationship. The only way to build relationship is to repeatedly see me in the space and then be curious about my name, then ask me about my name and then invest in me. But I saw this happening to me and it bugged me so much. I give a number. I don't give my name. I give a number. And what's so cool about this is actually giving a number has developed relationship with people because they're like, oh, whoa, okay, that's it. Now they're curious. Now they actually want to engage me. I give a name. They don't care. I give a number. Now they're curious. Now I've opened up a place for conversation. And actually a couple of places, they got so excited when I, like 22 is the number I use. My son started using it too. I go out and they go, hey, 22, how you doing? Like it became who I was and relationship with them because I built it with them. But if they just had my name and they mispronounced it and they go on to the next person, there's no relationship. So I love that aspect that we too often are abandoning relationship for the sake of ease, for the sake of comfort, for the sake of order, for the sake of whatever it is. So if we don't have relationship with people and AI is replacing it, there's a negative thing. If we can't have relationship with people and talk about AI, there's also another issue going on there. So I love to bring in the relationship aspect there, man.

Nate: that was something that i named directly in the book at the time of writing there was this real conundrum of uh people there was like a study done i don't remember where it was from if i remembered i would link it but there was some kind of study that was done revealing that ai was shown to come across as more empathetic than real people in like digital chats back and forth and so people were done like they did a blind test where they were messaging either a bot or a real person an ai dramatically was seen as being more empathetic and uh the the you know article was trying to reveal you know like isn't that isn't that interesting ai is so empathetic but for me i was like no no we failed like we dropped the ball right uh we we shouldn't be blaming ai here and saying like they're making it too nice we are the ones that need to be more empathetic like this is this is a sign upon us of what we're doing of how we're forming relationships of how we're connecting We're putting way too much of the guilt and also the success of AI on something that doesn't actually exist. That is simply a tool. And instead we need to be so much more concerned with like the things that are being revealed. How can we steward them into a, into a.

Leighton Seys: Yeah, and I think that's a good place to kind of maybe land this in being stewards of what we have. Like whatever tool we have, we want to be stewards of it. God has created us. We talked about being in the image of God. Well, we being in the image of God, God created everything. So we are also little creators. We are using what God has given us as the tools we have to grow, create. and make our lives hopefully easier at times and also like the things that get me excited where ai is going is in the medical field with the assessment of data that it's going to be able to spot and i've seen a few examples of it like you're putting in a screening and it can see way far in advance that something because it's looked at thousands upon thousands about thousands of similar scans hey that little dot right there this is this may be already showing up way earlier than we've ever been able to be detected Or it can look at your, and I know this is a little creepy, but it can look at all the things you were ordering on Amazon and predict that you're pregnant before you even know you're pregnant.

Nate: Right.

Leighton Seys: You know, there's a little bit that that's scary, but there's a little bit that's like, wow, when it can help us figure out health concerns. and things that are going to go undiagnosed because of human frailty. But we can use a tool to help us, which is what all of the scanning is. It's trying to help us. So if we've got something else that can read it better, have more experience and more input to be able to do it, I get excited about things like that, that hopefully we can help people who are struggling, suffering, and have diseases be healed.

Nate: yeah i hope i didn't come down too harshly i think that that's always the the like dangerous tilt back and forth is depending on my mood that day or the articles that i might have read most recently in the new york or whatever like i may come down harsher on ai than i mean to um but i do want to say like the the core thesis of the book as i mentioned is neither a positive nor negative right trying to present a theological framework And I hope that that would be beneficial to whether you consider yourself to be somebody that is like totally staunchly against it or totally staunchly for it. See this as a tool itself, like the book, the ideas themselves are tools for you to engage with, agree with, disagree with, but regardless, just take seriously so that you can take steps towards stewarding better.

Leighton Seys: Oh, yeah, and just the same way a tool can be used for good, a tool can be used for harm. So in the same way, there are probably, you know, I don't want to give ideas out there, but there are probably companies trying to figure out how they can exploit all of those things of, hey, we know this is what you're going through, and we can point you and push you towards a product that maybe helps, maybe doesn't help, as opposed to being in relationship and saying, I want to come alongside of you. So, no, I felt like... In this conversation, it sounds like you are walking that middle ground. You are trying to be intentional about, let's not just rush into it and say everything's good. Let's also not bury our heads in the sand and say the world is coming apart. It's just the newest thing that we're living through, and how do we do this well? How do we represent Christ well in the middle of finding those steps? And instead of... being a silent voice the church has a voice so let's speak about the things that hey how do we theologically wrestle with this hey how do we keep relationship with people and not degrade one another with something that's new as far as technology goes so having not read the book but just hearing the conversation and quickly looking at and seeing some of the posts that you put out before i appreciate where you're coming from

Nate: Oh, good. I'm glad that that comes across. And if anybody does decide to check it out, do let me know because I'm always looking for thoughts and willing to engage the conversation with you and your church if that's something that's interesting to you. And if you want to keep the conversation going further, there is always Substack and Pixel and Pulpit. Glad to do those.

Leighton Seys: Yeah. Well, that was just kind of fun, timely that your book coming out and highlighting that. Do you have any other innovative things that you are looking to be doing within the church or yourself in this next year?

Nate: Oh, always. We are innovative through and through. I know whenever we started the conversation, you talked about the adaptability piece of going from a Comic-Con church to a Twitch church overnight. And that is something that I consider myself to be one of my strengths. I'm an ideator. I'm an adapter. I like thinking through new things and trying out new things. our most recent experiment that i'm pretty proud of is this concept called the pixel pilgrimage so we're we're probably about a year in to trying out this experiment we've done i think five of them at this point you know i've streamed for years i've played a lot of games i mentioned a little bit earlier about the games that i really like um I'm a big fan of very narrative, like strong story games, often sometimes twisted, maybe a little bit. I like psychological horror type games. I like games that maybe surprise you or do something unexpected. And so often our streams in the OG days would take that turn where I would, you know, have a couple of streams where I play something like a Mario Kart or something with a group. And then we would take a series of streams and we would just play through a game entirely from beginning to end on stream, just to experience it together, experience the story. um and that was always my favorite like i liked those streams the most and so we took a hiatus from streaming back in 2024 and we're trying to figure out okay what are we going to do next how do we want to experiment next and i was listening to a podcast at the time called radical sacred and they were doing a season where their theme for that season was on pilgrimages and i was learning about like all of these you know historic and classical and new and innovative forms of pilgrimage and in which people would go typically on a spiritual journey to a holy place and so they might go to some specific ancient monument or church or structure or something and they would start at one place and then they would walk or they would travel in some way shape or form to the end destination and with a journey along the way that was so impactful to get them to that eventual destination to experience the divine from beginning to end and i i kind of reflected on one of the podcasts in particular that struck me where they had provided a framework of how they would send people on modern pilgrimages to various places uh and so during the pilgrimage they would ask people to reflect in their journals uh periodically throughout the journey um what are you noticing what are you avoiding what's missing from this place and what's delighting you i was like those are great questions yeah they are and also those questions can be answered about a game i was like interesting i wonder can somebody take a pilgrimage into a video game and i was like we need to try it like let's let's at least give it uh the old college try let's see what happens can we explore those four questions as we are experiencing a video game together if you consider a video game to be like an artistic experience that you start and then you reach a destination which is the credits which is the end of the the pinnacle of the moment of the experience the point has been the journey along the way so like can we do that and so we picked a game called neva which is a sequel to a game called greece or not not a sequel but the second game from the the developers of greece which i already knew was a particularly evocative game about mental health And so I was like, okay, never seems interesting. Let's give it a try. I was nervous. I was anxious. I was like, boy, like what, what am I going to do with this? Is this going to go well? Is this going to be a complete flop? Am I going to be eating crow? But along the way. uh we we pushed forward we're like we're gonna answer these questions do these questions feel right yes they feel right how else can we structure what else can we do when can we do it what's a short enough game neva's a short enough game seems to be strong in its narrative let's do it so we started this experience and We entered into it together with, I had a journal on my desk and I would open up the journal and I would encourage the people that were in the chat to start with me by bringing expectations, which is also a pretty common pilgrimage practice. I was like, bring with, what are you expecting to get on this journey? And I encouraged them to like write down apprehension. Like this is weird. What we're doing is weird. So like acknowledge that this may not work. I think if we acknowledge that, then maybe it'll make it more likely to work if we just get that out of the way. And so I encouraged that kind of feedback. And then we went into the game, we played this game and at about 30 minutes into the game, I planned to pause every 30 minutes anyway, but at about 30 minutes into the game, we reach our first save point. And the save point in the game Neva is a stack of stones called a cairn. not familiar with pilgrimages on a pilgrimage typically one of the stopping places or the kind of milestones that you'll set is symbolized by a cairn so i was like okay i got it i got the image thank you thank you thank you like i understand the holy spirit is in this there is something happening i don't know where this idea came from but clearly it is it is doing something There is something deeper than just my desire to play video games in this moment. Like there's a connection with the divine. There's a connection with the story being told through this art. Let's, let's keep going. And we went through it and it was just this exceptional experience. We had one of our folks that tuned along with us express in the chat that they were working through loss that they hadn't had a chance to process from a year or so prior that the game like invited them into because we were playing it so slowly because we were allowing it to have like. time to process within us so they were able to work through something and when it ended the folks that had tuned in were like all right when's the next one like this was fantastic when's the next pilgrimage and so since then we've walked through several games together so we played neva we've played everhood we've played the beginner's guide we have played many nights a whisper which was a wild experience that was one that was absolutely bonkers you are a person who has been tasked with shooting this like ethereal arrow made of stars into a chalice across the ocean and it is made up of everyone in your village's wishes if you make it into the chalice wishes come true if you miss then none of the wishes come true and so it's like okay so the journey is hearing all of these wishes preparing to make the shot and then the final night happens and you either make it or you don't And I won't spoil it for anybody that wants to go watch our pilgrimage.

Leighton Seys: But wow. On some level, that sounds like a horrific game to me of do all of this, all of this work. And I'm just going to say it this way. It's a coin flip on whether you win or you lose. And I know it's not that exactly, but it's like, oh, that would just keep me from not wanting to ever start that game. yeah it's it's a lot it's quite an experience so yeah it's things like this but we've we've made this into something that i think is really unique and poignant for oh yeah i've not heard of at least our our doing that that that is really really cool and i love taking those questions and thinking about it as a journey what it reminds me of this this may may not resonate with anybody if you've never done this is what's called outdoor adventure therapy so you go to high ropes courses you do obstacle courses and i did this when i was a teacher so i had training in it we went out to certain places and you're climbing a rock wall and what you're doing is naming something that you're really fearful naming a struggle in your life and that next rock when you like you let them go and then when they get to a struggle You give them an actual struggle in their life and you watch them overcome physically the struggle right in front of them and overcoming that struggle physically opens them up to really facing the struggle that they're facing in life. It's really powerful. So this reminds me kind of of that way when you're saying is, hey, these people were journeying through us. Hey, we're struggling with grief. Hey, we're going slow. We're intentionally asking these questions and using the video game as a thing to inform us about what's happening in our own lives. And as kind of that same kind of idea. I love that, dude. That is super cool idea there. um how does it resonate with people that hey you're coming along in the journey we've been playing for 12 15 20 hours already in the game and now i come in and i find out you're doing it how do they feel and how do you welcome those people in

Nate: yeah that's been one of the interesting things so the games i mentioned never we were able to complete in two playthroughs so it's like a six hour game and so it was relatively like the same crew throughout okay everhood i think was longer like a 10 to 12 hour game and that was one that was pretty tough Um, it was one that like we had some folks that maybe they jump in for a second and pretty quickly bounce off. Um, but for the most part, what I've tried to do is to limit the games to as close to one stream as possible.

Leighton Seys: Okay. Okay.

Nate: I want to make sure that it is a thing that is super accessible to the one time that it happens live. But then I'm, I'm working on a model that will make it accessible after the fact in like 30 minute chunks. so instead of having to tune into us live and tune in for a full like six hour stream being able to consume it 30 minutes at a time answer some questions you still have another 30 minutes watch the next part then answer some questions but like essentially doing like a self-guided pilgrimage through the pilgrimages that we've already done the experience is way different live like there is i think it's it's maybe for some folks going to be more evocative but i want to just still create some level of accessibilities for folks that just can't fit that into their schedule or just are unable to join us for that. And I think there's still something to, just being a part of an experience like that and taking a game that slowly. That's really, I think been the crucial thing is like, regardless if you're there for six hours or if you're there for 30 minutes at a time, pausing every 30 minutes in a game is not, I mean, I am a gamer, so I might not be the best person to ask, but like, that's not my norm. I do not play a game for 30 minutes and stop. I normally play for like an hour, hour and a half. And so intentionally stopping a game after a short period of time, is something that required my muscle memory to break apart and to build something new and to be welcomed into a new experience, which I think is what makes it work.

Leighton Seys: yeah i'm just fascinated by that it really sounds like you've hit on something and even to the point where potentially if someone else wanted to do this you could just like take anybody's game play through if they've done the speed run so to speak you know to shorten a game that's longer do a speed run but split it up every so often half hour 20 minutes whatever a natural break in their playthrough could be put those questions in and use that with a group of people journeying together like you could modify this and not have to do all the playthrough yourself if you aren't the playthrough person you could still be an observer and ask those questions of somebody else's playthrough

Nate: Yeah. And we've, we've invited people to, to use the 30 minute resources that we're building in their own groups. Like take the pilgrimage that we've already done and invite a group to go on it with you. And like you be essentially like the guide, but the guide has already kind of done the work. So it, it allows for that to enter. And then we've had some people that have done a live one. So we had one of our, our level two members who was like, I'm doing a retreat. Can I do a pixel pilgrimage? I was like, of course, like, yes, yes, certainly you can do one. And so they, they led one in their community and. It was an impactful experience. I thought about leading it at like a conference. I've wondered if that would be something that those outside of the gaming sphere would get something out of. Like maybe it would be a way to invite people into what gamers get out of games without having to go and like download Fortnite and figure it out.

Leighton Seys: Well, yeah, and then different genres of games may or may not really work well with trying to do a pilgrimage within. Right. I like to play RPGs, turn-based, as many as I can get, that are like, if I have 80 hours in, I may not even be halfway through the game. So, you know, I like a whole year-long game, and I'm just waiting for the next one to come out because I'll finish this game. There's so many games I've never finished because I've got 80 hours in and I'm not even halfway.

Nate: That might be a pilgrimage up Everest. Yeah, that's a, that's a bit of a next level. That's that's only for the diehards. I have thought about shortening a game and doing just like intentional sections of it. There's a streamer that I follow. I don't know if you've heard of him called Prof Noctis. He's an interesting fella. He is a pastor at university of Alabama who was doing like know campus ministry and developed a relationship with one of the professors who was like hey you have a dissertation in you on final fantasy you should write it and so he did and wrote a dissertation on final fantasy 15 and is now like a doctor of final fantasy at university of alabama talking about religion and final fantasy And so now he does streams where he plays through mostly Squeenix games. So it's going to be like a lot of final fantasies. It's going to be a lot of like, he just did the, um, chronicles of Ivalice final fantasy tactics. Like that's his, that's very much his like bread and butter, but he did an experience at one point because his, his games are so long that he essentially did like hard saves. And, uh, chronicles of Ivalice and was like, I will just load up the scene for you. We won't, we won't play through the entire game because a tactics game takes forever. But I will show you the important moments in the story so that we can like do a theological breakdown of what's going on in this scene. So I've thought about that with like, I love Final Fantasy X. I would love to explore that. So maybe that would be a fun pilgrimage, but it would have to be. like I just said, very much the highlights rather than the whole thing.

Leighton Seys: Well, you could possibly just do all the cut scenes because the cut scenes are telling the story. So you don't have to do the playthrough part necessarily. Maybe you just do the boss battles, not the individual ones, you know, or quests, like you have to go do a quest. You could do a quest for certain items, those kinds of things. But yeah, there's some of those games like... There are people that just play Final Fantasy XIV or XV, and that's it. They don't play anything else. That's their world. They're deeply in there. There is, by the way, if you don't know, there is a church inside of Final Fantasy XIV. So I love that aspect of things that, like... wait a minute, you can have a church inside a video game? Well, why not? You can have a church in a bar. You can have a church in a business. You can have a church in the mall. Why can't you have a church inside a video game? It's pretty fantastic to reach people that are not going to walk through the doors of the church, so why not be the church and go there? Well, I'm glad you shared about the pilgrimages thing. We run in circles that overlap, but I don't spend all that time in your Discord, in your community over there. One of the things that I'm always a little cautious of with being a pastor is showing up at other people's churches with the name pastor in the name and people thinking, hey, you're a person, tell me what's going on. And I'm like, no. um this is not my church i'm just a friend of this church uh i'm a supporter of what you're doing because i believe god has called you he's blessed you i see the fruit uh of what you're doing and so i there's there's levels too it's like i i love seeing what other people are doing so i never stay put i'm always not searched for the next new person that's doing something else and figuring out what they're doing so i can learn and share from from what they're doing so i hope some people i'm going to just say steal that idea from you yes 100 do some pixel pilgrimage

Nate: let us know we will support it i mean i think that's i think it's an awesome concept and i think it's it's what i want out of video games like i am like i said i'm a narrative gamer through and through and so you probably won't catch me on the latest like uh fps game but i will be playing that indie game that has the powerful story like that's my that's my thing and i found that those work really well for pilgrimages but i support this idea this concept of being the church for nerds geeks and gamers in whatever way that means and i love to see it and love to explore it i think that uh often i get kind of shoehorned in with um being a digital church and so a lot of times especially in like umc gatherings they're like here's uh you know nathan and he's a part of a digital church and i'm like you got to say the whole thing the digital church is really just the avenue like i'm a i'm a pastor of a church for nerds yes that is what we are through through and through and we we believe in that and that call and that's that's how we do our work it's so much less important how we get there and so much more important the actual like people group that i feel called to and that's the marginalized nerds geeks and gamers who just haven't been welcomed historically

Leighton Seys: Yeah, that definitely is true. Well, with that, we mentioned it earlier, but we didn't dive into it in any depth. We've both been to Nerd Culture Ministry Summit for the gatherings that they've had. What is it that you are walking away from? Because just last month, or actually it was earlier this month, a couple of weeks ago, what are you walking away from there, either having something new revealed to you or something confirmed that you already knew?

Nate: I've got my notes that I took during the session. I'll see if I have a highlighted section just for you. Okay. So the thing that I liked the most was something that Kenny Jang said. So I went to the conference. I went to his session in particular on AI because I've written about AI. I care about AI. I wanted to see what Kenny had to say. Never had the opportunity to sit with him before. Known him for a long time, but never had the chance. So one of the quotes that I wrote down, I think this might actually be the only like word for word quote that I wrote. is in this concept of AI taking jobs, in this concept of like the church dying, of the church losing members, of the church shrinking. That's something we wouldn't know at all about in the denominational system. In this world of all of these various things going on, Kenny said this like note. So we are not in the church in the knowledge transfer business. we are in the relationship business and i wrote down this if churches are being interrupted by ai this is why it is because churches have become knowledge transfer engines rather than relationship building engines and like that fired me up i was all about it i was like yes I am, I am one that likes information. I am one that like the internet is so demanding of like, what content are you putting out there? That's feeding knowledge to another person. What are we doing? We have these things that we put out every other week called nerdy sermons. How good can I make our nerdy sermons to deliver knowledge into somebody's brain? What questions can I answer theologically? Not saying those things aren't important. But in an era where somebody can go to an AI and get bad answers potentially, but good answers potentially about their biggest theological concern, what is my purpose anymore? What is the call of the pastor in the midst of that? I never was called to knowledge transfer. I missed that in my calling. That was something that I took on that was not a yoke put upon me. Instead, my yoke is relationship. My yoke is the life of the church, is the order of the church. That is the crucial work. And so, like, you got me preaching.

Leighton Seys: Oh, no, that's so good. I must have probably heard that from Kenny. And it didn't, like, it's like, oh, yeah, I agree. I already am on board with that. Because, like, you were talking about the change with COVID. I was early, like, I'm an early adopter within the church. I'm not an early adopter outside the church for tech. So, you know, business is using website for years. Church is not doing it, but I'm an early one in the church doing websites. You know, church is not, well, 10 years before COVID, I was already doing live worship online. So. the world was already doing live stuff. I was just an early adopter in the church to say, hey, I've got shut-ins an hour away in four different directions, and I'm not making that up. Honestly, where I was living, hour away, four different nursing homes in four different directions. It's like, I can't go be with these people on a monthly basis. It is just too much driving time to build relationship with them. So we can build relationship by them feeling like they're a part of church if it's happening live versus just watch it on tape. And so early adopter in that. But then when COVID happened, I'm sitting there and I'm going, why does it matter anymore when everybody else is online? if you're sitting home why are you going to watch me instead of go watch craig groeschel instead of going watch andy stanley instead of going watch fill in the latest greatest biggest up-and-coming influencer in the church and it was my answer was because relationship so so when so like that was like that's what my that's what i was always using tech to solve was relationship that's still why i'm using tech is is for that relationship aspect because if now i'm competing for views and likes i'm in the wrong business i i've shifted because like that's what my thinking went to when i'm competing with everybody else because everyone's online now i'm competing for likes and views I need to go back to it's all about the relationship with people and developing that and fostering that in the space, which then after that I found Twitch. It was like, oh, my goodness, this is where you can foster that as opposed to a YouTube video where you can't foster relationship very easily. Some people can do it, but the audience isn't expecting that either. So they're not looking for it there. Within Twitch, they are and they expect it and they want it, which I think is amazing and beautiful.

Nate: yes yeah it was it was the the gospel that i realized i've been preaching in my coaching sessions and in helping people plant digital churches is one of my like key ideas that i try to offer up is who is our competition in doing online church and i've said like the the church has long been uh guilty of making other churches our competition of seeing like stealing flock like i grew up in the church plant world so that was always the sentiment was like oh that new church plan is going to steal my flock right right and that's so unhealthy And so instead, what I said is, you know, we were going to, we're going to have that temptation online to feel the same way of like, oh, I'll never get as many viewers as X, Y, Z. I'll never do it as well as X, Y, Z. When instead my actual competition. is Instagram. The company is like meta. Um, my, my biggest concern is how can I get somebody to doom scroll for five minutes less and instead to be in meaningful community on my discord server or in their own communities or whatever it means to them to be in community? How can I get them off of an algorithm and into relationship? That's our competition. And so that's what I see. It's like, that was words to what I've been trying to get across is like, we are not in knowledge transfer we are not just trying to be another algorithm for people to subscribe to we are trying to be something that is replacing that algorithm and that's that's the that if we're going to take any kind of aggressive language towards it like that should be who we are aggressive against as these algorithmic sources that are vying for attention yeah

Leighton Seys: and Supersonic asking, how do you undo something ingrained into society? And well, it's by teaching and coaching and guiding people. You know, what's funny is you bring this up. So I often, when I go to conferences, end up chatting with whoever the sponsors are, the tables, the booths. I spend tons of time talking with those people and building relationships there. And I can't remember his name. He was there from one child. Do you remember who was there with one child? Okay, maybe Mel knows. Anyway, we had a fantastic conversation where he posed this idea of retraining the algorithm, and I actually just wrote earlier this week a blog post addressing this very thing of how do you – and I have – I think it's – I can't remember if it's five or seven. It might be seven different ways in which you can retrain the algorithm and you can teach young people how to do this. So one is scrolling through and spending five minutes not commenting on, not touching anything, and then evaluate. Hey, which one of those things were a plus in your life? Which one of those things were a negative in your life? Any of those things that you're following go unlike the things that were negative. So it's retraining it by unliking it. And then there's several different suggestions like that of how to do things or even have a sharing of here's some positive ones that I want you to go and follow that I've found that you might enjoy. So it's taking and intentionally retraining the algorithm. And then also... inviting people who are on there to create their own way of doing it once you teach them the thoughts of what is good like what were your questions again what was uh what were you avoiding what was good avoiding missing delighting noticing delighting and the lighting was yeah so what are you delighting in like hey If you're delighting in this and you're delighting in the Lord, you should be sharing this. If you're avoiding, is this doom scrolling helping you to avoid something? You could address. So you could take those same questions that you're asking and apply that to your algorithm to retrain it. You know, go dislike or intentionally take the time to go and say, I don't like this content. Do that repeatedly. Or when you find something you like, go open them up and go find three more things by that same person and like them also. It will teach the algorithm. You like that content.

Nate: Yeah. And I would say one of the things that we've taken with us in that vein going forward was I want to build the community, to build our Discord community in a way that we are, if you're going to have to live a life where your phone is right next to you, if you're going to be like unlocking it before you even get out of bed, what can I do to make sure that we're the first place you go and that you don't have too much to do? Like I think about like Animal Crossing, this is a tangent. Animal Crossing is this game that like... has a net amount of things that you can do in a day you can find other things to do but animal crossing has like a tangible end every day and then you'd pick up the next day and so i was like okay so if we're addicted to algorithms we're addicted to systems what can i do to be the first thing that somebody picks up and i have a tangible end to invite them back into their day and so we have a question of the day that i post every morning i try to ask it before people wake up and that way they can check our discord first thing they can know that there's questions to to be answered and then that's all they can keep poking around the discord if they want to but like there is one thing that doesn't take much time that can ideally be a replacement in their life And so that's, that's what I try to offer up. I also would offer up the work of Dan Pink. If you've never read any of his books or watched any of his YouTube videos, he's an exceptional speaker, has some great Ted talks, but it's somebody very much on this line of thought, a thinker that is working into healthier ways of being online. So that would be something. And then one of the things that we discovered about our discord server is a word that I put to it. imagine everybody in here has been a part of a discord before if you have there's a sidebar on the right side that has everyone who's in the server at a time and i've grown up in the church my whole life the church has hours there are there are times where people are in the church there are times where people are not in the church discord server is not that way there are always people in the discord server there are always people hanging out and so i call it a monastic society this is like a monastery these are monks who are living in the space where they're diving in with scripture where they're diving into the divine so like that is a part of your everyday life so if you have that kind of It's not a captive audience, but it is an audience that is present 24-7. What are you doing to provide meaningful life in those places? What are you doing to create a space that is life-giving in the midst of that? And so study the desert fathers. Study those that are monastic and see, like, what was it that, aside from their vows, kept them entertained, kept them attached to those days and times together? What is it about that life that draws people together? that we know we know we have a better way how can we show them that we have a better way

Leighton Seys: Yeah, that's really a good thing of like, you just go here every morning. Here's a simple thing. Here's a small thing. Here's a way to start. I like that concept of doing that. It's one of those things like we go back to Discord. I've wanted to develop that and do that, but that's not the way my brain works and is wired. I need a volunteer to do that because I don't have a question of the day. I just want to know how your day's going. That's where my brain's going, not I want to bring this to you on a daily basis. I need... to be listening like this was not my idea to to say hey we should reset the algorithm it was i was listening in conversation and that's what i'm trying to do right now what i want to write about and what i want to go investigate is when someone says here's a gap that the church is missing and i'm gonna go look it up so i just put the link to the like this is not even published like i literally wrote this like two days ago so like is nobody's seen this like i'm sharing it if you want to anybody that wants that and in there i also listed three or four other resources of go here if you want other assistance and help like this here are ministries trying to address this or they are public entities. They're not necessarily all ministries trying to do this. They're just people saying, there's a problem. How do we reshape? How do we change? How do we help impact people who get caught in doom scrolling, get caught in the echo chamber, and get more and more of negative things in their life? How do we help them out? So that's... like for me the the one of the reasons why i don't stay put in one place like i want to know what you're doing and hearing and so i can hear any gaps in what you're doing that might help someone else fill in so i'm gonna i'm gonna share the idea of pixel a game and and do a pilgrimage that way and bring people on a journey intentionally don't just let the game do it come alongside the game and do that so it's like I'm always learning. I'm always growing. And I want to help everyone in the ministry they're doing get better at what God's called them to do. Yeah, just clarification there. Trying to ask the noticing, avoiding, missing, and delighting.

Nate: So it's asking, what are you noticing? Like being aware of your surroundings. What's missing? What's something that feels like it should be there? What are you taking delight in? And then what are you purposely avoiding? So it's not avoiding the distraction. It's what is something that you are finding yourself with? So that's more of an avoidance like psychological issue.

Leighton Seys: I love that question because honestly, like going through certain games, I can tell you I'm going to avoid this. I'm going to avoid that. Why? I find it tedious or I find it pointless to have to get to like I play a lot of Assassin's Creed and. The thing that I really, really don't like is you have to do this speed run and accomplish these things. I avoid those. The only time I ever do those is when the game requires it for something to go forward. That's the only time I do it, and I'm always frustrated by it. I also avoid guns and weapons that you have to fire, not because I don't like those, but because there's no actual aiming mechanism when my hands are side by side. So I can't aim with two hands over here. My brain cannot line things up. You give me an actual sight of a bow and arrow or any kind of real weapon in the real world. I know how to cite things. I don't know how to do in the game. There's probably something more going on there that I'm avoiding too. It's the, this is going to be frustrating. I don't want to be frustrated. I just want to rule this world that I'm in because the real world is frustrating. So I probably, you know, that's probably part of those things. Like I tried to go, like the latest one I tried to do was where winds meet. And I got part way in. I heard some good recommendations. And then there was this task where I had to shoot things with a bow and arrow. And I'm like, this game was cool. Story was good. You forced me to do this. I don't know if I want to keep playing it.

Nate: You need them all to be the we with Twilight Princess. The crossbow training.

Leighton Seys: Anything else from the Nerd Culture Ministry Summit? Just what does it do for you overall to make it worth your while to go and be in that space?

Nate: I mean, look, there's, there's really nothing out there that has the word nerd culture ministry and summit together. Like, I mean, it was the thing that is a space that I have to be. My username is nerd pastor Nate. Like I am, I am in this. And so I need to be at the place where the conversation is happening. I think that the existing relationship that has already formed, like, I think somebody said this year that this always feels like a big family reunion. Yeah. And I think there's something to that. Like there, this is a place that. I've been a part of, I've invested years of my life into these are people I've invested years of my life into. So it's an important gathering in a lot of different ways. And then I just really appreciate being able to hear from a myriad of people that are doing this work. I think that sometimes it's, it's really hard to find the stories. It's really hard to find the successes, to find the people that are doing this, that keep doing it. And I've been in this long enough now, and I'm sure you can empathize that. i've been in this to the point that i've seen a lot of people stop yeah um like i've seen a lot of things come to an end and those are relationships that i try to try to keep up with but like a lot of them have fallen away and i don't know those people anymore and that makes me sad and so having a space that i can see some of the vibrancy in the midst of some of the harshness of the realities of church planting or community building

Leighton Seys: it's just nice it's just a good place to be in community and seeing exciting things and learning things that are important and impactful for your own work yeah well and some of those things would be true as well in church planting where you have people that come along very early on and then their vision for what you're going to do is slightly different than what you actually do and then it's no longer new and shiny and and they they're going to move on and i you know that is like it's both the thing that i get most excited about is going somewhere new and meeting new people and the thing that is most frustrating is i have met more people than i will ever stay in relationship with because i don't have capacity to and i don't expect to either so i don't like i'm fretting over that but there's some that's like man i really wish i still had that relationship with that person i do mourn those relationships that have gone by the wayside. So whether you're in digital ministry or just in ministry, it is an aspect of what happens when you are trying to meet people where they are and life is messy and they move on or you move on to new locations and you're trying to just live life. Not sure who you were asking that supersonic. If that was me, how about you just DM me that question later on? That might be a deeper conversation there with algorithms and that kind of a thing. But anyway, yeah, I love how you were talking about there is a family aspect, especially those who have been there, you know, this being the third time, those of us who are planning to be there next year, just tell me when it is. I'll book my ticket and I'll be ready to go. I'm actually hoping on some level. I don't know if... this will happen or not but with it being in orlando perhaps you know maybe there's a way to get my wife to actually come to this conference most every other thing she's not going to come to but there's well and part of it too is she doesn't want to be doxxed you know she does not want to be walking around and everyone coming up to her talking about me She does not want that. She wants to hide and fade in there. And one of the things I love at NCMS is that there are people that you wave across the room, and then it's not until, like, the end of the conference where they finally get courage to come up and talk to you. Because there's not the, you know, everybody is a little bit nerdy there and a little bit of shyness. Like, I, however, like, feel really comfortable there. Like, this is my people. And, you know. I'm more known by people that are showing up there than I even know. I don't know if you noticed this. So we had the Conference for the Church Digital for gaming in the fall and met a guy from Germany who came in. We had great conversations. He was talking about going to go do evangelism in Discord servers and helped him strategize and think through being a missionary going into that space. He didn't know I was at the conference until Lux Digital Church is holding their worship service and everybody who's part of the church community come up here. And he mentions my name. He's like, what? You're here? So I was like, didn't even notice that I was there. And then we got talking and chatting. And I was like, man, how cool is the world to be able to meet somebody from Germany, go to a conference, and then hang out together. And they know all the other people from Germany that you know, too. It's like, that's just fun. I will say for me, and I don't know if you felt this or not at the conference, there was this overwhelming sense of those that had been there at previous years. Like we had started on a journey together and we were continuing on the journey. Like this was still worthwhile. The things that we had... in our minds that god had brought to us two years ago two and a half years ago in marble falls whatever that was three years ago i don't remember exactly it was it's still worth it you're still on the journey you're still following after it and by seeing other friends who i knew were in that same place it was like We're all still going together. That was the thing that felt really good to me was the, hey, I'm still seeing these people. Hey, I don't touch base monthly. We're doing our own ministries. But to see you here and to sit down with you for a lunch or a dinner or whatever it was and get to chat and hear what God's doing, it's all worth it to continue where I am because you're continuing where you are.

Nate: Absolutely.

Leighton Seys: Anything that we haven't talked about yet that you would really like to bring up and share with anybody?

Nate: yeah there's so much going on all the time i didn't really get a chance um to talk about nerdy sermons and that's kind of our our week-to-week work that we do we've got over 170 of these things at this point if you're a video essay fan and you want to go back and watch through those that's what they're inspired by is some of the video essay writers that have inspired me over the while um so we've got over 150 170 pieces of media that we've essentially broken into these exegetical works of i try and break down the media i try to present a scripture that has a parallel moral or a dissonant moral one that does not work together so that i can exemplify why the scripture matters um and then i put them together i say it's not interesting and then i end it with a so what of a like here's what that actually means for how you can implement it into your life And so we have so many of those that we have to offer. Again, I try to think of churches in the work that we do, not assuming that people are going to come be a part of Checkpoint. And so we have a Bible study curriculum that we've built out for those as well. So if you want to ever like present the nerdy sermons as your Bible study video, and then. I have discussion questions, games, that kind of stuff. If you're a youth director, we have all that stuff built and baked into the system. So that all exists. I didn't get to talk about the checkbox, which is a cool thing that we do. We do a communion online, which some people are comfortable with and some are not, but we do it really intentionally. We wanted to make it something that we took sacramentally seriously. And so we send out the communion elements in a subscription box that is free, but also has a bunch of other goodies. So it reminds me of those good old days of Loot Crate. And then we bring people together for a live communion liturgy. And then we developed an app to go along with it that reminds us of our tactile tangibility in the moment where we all feel like we're one in the midst of that moment. We're reminded of the oneness of the body and the oneness of the cup. in the midst of that experience so that's really important how often are you doing that how often do you send the boxes out and and gather for communion we are sending the boxes out quarterly now so you get 12 and we do it every week so every sunday night at 9 pm uh eastern time we hang out in the discord and we observe the sacrament um you know we're fine with folks finding their own elements if they have to but we would so much rather have people sign up and get them from us um there's nothing uh you know uh liturgical about just praying over them before but that's something important to me and so i like sending out the elements from a unified space rather than just telling people to find something bread like and juice like so yeah we've we've taken it very seriously to try to figure out what does it mean to be a sacramental church not just a community but a true like digital first practicing church We haven't figured out baptism, so that's something that will be another day solved. I see what XP Church is doing and see what a lot of other folks out there are doing and try to take that seriously as well, but we've not crossed that bridge at this point.

Leighton Seys: I think that's one of those elements of sacraments and each denomination, each what your tradition is, having to wrestle through those on your own. There is no one-size-fits-all. The same way that, for instance, I absolutely love the fact that there's three modes of baptism. Not a lot of people know that there's sprinkling, there's immersing, and there's pouring. Pouring be the one that's less likely for people to have ever experienced. But I think there's beauty within that. And I often try to rotate which direction I would do to be able to enhance and bring out, hey, this isn't just rote. We're not just going through the motions. This is something valuable. and important in our community. I also love that you're doing weekly communion. That is always, well, I shouldn't say always, since I've experienced it in some places, that has always been my preference, but it has not been my practice. We sometimes go in the direction of efficiency and ease. rather than in our practices of doing some of those things. So rather than fight to try to get that all the time, I would say, hey, let's do it for Lent. Let's do communion every week through the season of Lent. And people go, well, that was great. And I go, well, how about we do it all the time? Nah, I don't know that we need to do it all the time. And it's like, but you know how good it was. Yeah, we know how good it was. It's just not trusting that we can maintain that level. on a constant basis when you have that. So I understand the struggle, but I would much rather have the experience of having it weekly. So I love that you're doing that.

Nate: It's been fun. It's been a transformative thing for the community. I think they've clicked with it really well. That is one of the helpful things about, I think, planting a church is that you can build in those cultural ground stones rather than coming in and changing the color of the carpet, you know, 50 years in.

Leighton Seys: Oh, yeah. Well, and yeah, baking in the communion being a piece is like, our focus is always going to be on what Christ did for us that way. There is no chance of, well, we didn't mention, you know, we're studying Old Testament, so we didn't get to Christ today. Or we just got busy singing some hymns and we didn't, like, because you can do the activities of the church without focusing on Christ. But I don't know that you can do communion, at least in my opinion, without having focus on Christ. I don't know how you do it. The only way that I felt like I would have was I mentioned the church I was in, you know, with shut-ins an hour away in four directions. They traditionally, whenever communion happened, got in the car after service and spent the next eight hours driving around bringing communion to all of them. And I'm like, so you're going to give me drive-by communion? I'm going to show up. Here's the bread. Here's the cup. Drink it. I got to go because that's all I could, like, no. There's no relationship in that. And I think that the table is one of the best things to build relationship with people.

Nate: Yeah, totally agree. Totally agree. And that has been, like I said, one of the most transformative steps we've taken, I think, as a church.

Announcer/Intro Voice: And I always encourage my leaders.

Nate: I'm like, look, this is if you become a leader at Checkpoint, you really need to be there. This is the most formative thing that we do. Like, if I could ask you to come to one thing every at all, like only one thing for the rest of Checkpoint's life. Come on Sunday nights at 9 o'clock for communion. This is what we're doing. This is the work.

Leighton Seys: That's fantastic. Any other things that you wanted to mention?

Nate: Side projects like the book and Pixel and Pulpit are always worth checking out. Pixel and Pulpit is written particularly from the learnings of a digital and nerd pastor. So if you're more interested in just kind of like the praxis stuff that I'm offering, you're welcome to check that out. yeah i'm on social media spaces anywhere that you can find checkpoint church or nerd pastor nate those are going to be the places that you know i'll encourage you to check out but i'm i'm always doing something i'm always active somewhere we got a lot of a lot of irons and a lot of fire so it's it's a good work but it's a lot of work and pretty much anywhere you can find us is going to be exciting we had a lot around the corner a lot of cool things coming up some new podcasts in the work from a peer of mine. And then, yeah, just, just growing the church community as we always are.

Leighton Seys: That's fantastic. Such a privilege to have you on and be able to be in this space. I love highlighting what other people are doing. Several ideas, like one of the hopes is that somebody listened to this is ready to go. Doesn't know if what God is calling them to is legitimate or not. And maybe it's a church planter out there that just needed to have encouragement to say, yeah, you weren't planning on doing digital, but now maybe you are. You weren't planning on going gaming, but God can bless that if you answer the call, and that's the call he's given to you. So thank you for being on here. Thanks, everyone, for hanging out with us today. It's such a privilege to be able to be here and to chat with you.

Nate: I appreciate you hosting the time and inviting me on. I'm always happy to come back and talk anytime.

Leighton Seys: Yeah. I do like to have the guest give us a recommendation so we can do a double rate out to somebody and bless them unless you're going to stay on, which you already said you're not. So do you have a suggestion of who we can go and rate out?

Nate: Do I have anybody streaming right now is the bigger question. Is Jate still live? I know 17 hours. Is that still going on? I don't see him, so he might not be. He might have taken a break.

Leighton Seys: No, I don't see him on. Let's see. Yep, we could absolutely go over there if you want to.

Nate: They're, they're on my, on my sidebar. So truth be told y'all I'm not streaming. I'm about to probably come back. So don't tell anybody that I told you that. But we are, we're working on a return to Twitch, a potential return to streaming on a more consistent basis, but I have not been on it so long. So I don't, I don't know anyone anymore. I only know the people that I used to know. So if there's any new folks, let me know.

Leighton Seys: Oh, well, there's always a growing list. Well, I hit the donk a couple of years ago of how many people you can actually follow. So I had to go unfollow people that actually weren't streamers because I hit the max amount.

Nate: All right. If you unfollowed Checkpoint at the time, go follow him back because we are officially probably going back.

Leighton Seys: Don't know when, but... No, no, no. I have not unfollowed Checkpoint. I unfollowed people that did not have a logo and had less than 100 followers because it's like, you never actually set something up. Like early on, I'd go into a Christian stream and people would be... Or I'd go into a stream and find Christians. I'd start following every Christian that was around because there weren't that many to begin with. And so now it's like, oh, no, no. Now I don't need to do that. We could find each other. There's tags and all of that stuff. So...

Announcer/Intro Voice: All right. I'll get this started and we will rate out.

Leighton Seys: So thank you. Thank you. Thank you again, everyone. Appreciate you being here, hanging out with me. I did. I'll show the credits in a minute. The podcast that is scheduled for Tuesday, I believe I'm going to have to reschedule, but I will be on next Thursday. So other than that, come and check out the Church Digital. Go and check out Checkpoint Church and just keep doing what God's calling you to do in the space.

Announcer/Intro Voice: Love it.

Nate: All right. Thanks again. And I hope to catch some of you around.