Why Toxic Gaming Communities Need This Right Now

Narrator/Announcer: 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. One episode at a time.

Leighton Seys: welcome welcome welcome in everybody to control alt redeem we are working to reset the culture and reading the space specifically in twitch so that we can make it a place less toxic and a place where the light of jesus shines so we have today the born again gamer welcome in hi thank you how's it going It's going good. I'm just checking sound levels here. Supersonic is in the house. How's it sound at Supersonic?

Born Again Gamer: Hi, FC. Hi, Scott. Hi, Koi Pond. Did the Koi Pond ever respond?

Leighton Seys: Well, the Koi pond has its own channel. So if it's responding, it will be me turning over to the computer over here where it is live and typing over there. So that would be how that would work for the Koi pond to respond.

Born Again Gamer: Yeah, that's a whole other story. In their tank that they can push their faces up against that send sound alerts and stuff.

Leighton Seys: Oh my goodness. Don't give me ideas. I, I probably could, could rig something up like that, that they would be able to push it and send a signal and, or it would do something or put some kind of sensor in there when they swim in front of it would make motion sensor that would set off something and, and do that. Yeah. It's well. I did.

Born Again Gamer: We're going to talk about for the next couple of hours.

Leighton Seys: Yeah, we're going to talk about this for the next couple of hours. It's the fun thing, though. It's like the creativeness and putting things in to draw people in, to get engagement, to connect with people where they're at. Not everyone's going to connect with my fish. There's other people that have their cats on stream and people connect with their cat, their dog, whatever it is. Streamers will have a redeem to look at your pet. And I even have that on my stream, not the fish stream, on my stream, where if you want to look at the guppies or the koi for a minute, you can redeem that and look at them. So when the koi spawn and I have babies, I get a lot of people wanting to see the baby fish. Once they're big, nobody cares anymore. It's just fish. But baby fish, that's more an interesting thing for people, I guess.

Born Again Gamer: Yeah, I've seen where people have a whole separate camera under their desk that points at their dog's bed or their cat's bed under the desk.

Leighton Seys: Yeah, yeah. I only have fish, so I don't have dogs. I don't have cats. My wife and I decided a while ago, we travel too much to afford to leave pets with people, to watch them, or to burden family with them. So... Fish aren't as hard to ask people to take care of on some level. You don't have to take them outside. You don't have to do much cleanup afterwards. I have to do it all when I get home. And then I've got electronic feeders, so that makes it even easier.

Born Again Gamer: Oh, nice.

Leighton Seys: I just need the emergency person to stop in and check, which... I'm trying to think if it was reach. It might've been when I got home from reach. It was either reach or I went on vacation after reach. I came home and my pond had all sprung a leak and I lost a lot of water in the pond. And since it's turned winter, I haven't been able to fix it yet. So I don't know what I'm gonna be facing come spring. flex seal that you see the guy slap.

Born Again Gamer: Oh, well commercials.

Leighton Seys: Yeah. I, if I could find where the hole is, it's probably a whole lot easier just to buy another new liner and put a new liner in there. Although I already have two liners in there. So that'd be a third one on top. I'm not going to pull the old one out. I'll just put a new one on top, you know, secondary level of precaution underneath there. So. Yeah.

Born Again Gamer: I love the memes that people do with that Flex Seal commercial. It's like when I'm having a life traumatic experience and then it's like the guy slaps it on and then when he moves his hand, it says hot dog. There's just a whole bunch of different things. They keep slapping hot dogs on it to fix the problem.

Leighton Seys: That is funny. Mel was saying that, yeah, the plus of having adult kids at home is you can travel and they can take care of the cat and the dog. And that was true during COVID. My kids were home. They moved back in. during covid and then were unemployed living in my basement so after covid they were still living in my basement for a couple of years and we could just leave and say you need to feed the fish and take care of them so i know what she's talking about here that's a that's a nice deal to have over lining yeah yeah Well, one of the things, and we'll get to the other podcasts that you do, but one of the things I do on my podcast is I like to start with like, how did you get started on Twitch? What brought you to Twitch initially? And it doesn't have to be, oh, I wanted to go on and be a Christian streamer and I knew that's what I wanted. However you started, what brought you to Twitch? When did you decide you were going to be a streamer? They can be the same time or they can be separate. And then when did you make a decision of you're going to intentionally be a light in a dark space and intentionally make your stream and your content Christian-centered? It doesn't mean everything you do is, you know, reading the Bible, but Christian-centered so anybody coming in knows that you're a Christian streamer.

Born Again Gamer: yeah well uh to jump i guess way back not not necessarily as far back as as my birth but jump back to like when i first became aware of streaming we'll say uh so like early on like justin tv was like twitch before twitch it was justin tv and some people were like making youtube videos and mixer was just a couple years out from from starting up at that time i think and i saw it and i thought I don't know that I could even ever watch a stream, let alone be a streamer because I wanted to play a game. So I was like, I want to play. I don't think I want to stream because I don't think I have that like crazy, like jumping out of my chair and screaming and yelling all the time personality that, that anybody would want to watch. So right off the bat, I was like, this isn't a world for me. It's not my world. It exists. I see it. I see that people like it, but I'm just going to ignore it. And you know, it can be for other people. similar to how i am with country music there's some good country music that's just a little jab but so fast forward a couple of years my kids were watching uh youtube videos of people playing minecraft one of the ones they really used to like was preston plays and uh i watched i was watching it with them and sometimes some things he would say would just rub me the wrong way not that he was swearing or doing anything like terrible But, like, one thing that he said one time at the start of a video was, hey, this video, we're going to make, like, ultra diamond pickaxe out of whatever, a $10 million pickaxe. And he's, like, talking about stuff that doesn't even exist in the game in Minecraft, right? But then he goes, and the only way that I can do that is if you subscribe to my channel. And I was like, that felt a little, like, icky to me, getting kids to click subscribe on their channel to help them with this thing. Whatever works for him. But I was like, I don't know if I want that to be my kid's experience with... with gaming and youtube and stuff like that so i said well i'll just make videos i wasn't going to stream at that time i just would record them and i was actually playing on my phone and then capturing my phone's screen right on my phone so just recording my actual like record your screen on your phone with android and then i would export the video off my phone put it on my computer put a couple overlays and a title at the start and a title at the end and i was just uploading them to youtube and my kids were just watching them i don't know how many other people ever really watched them but i did that for a little while and then i was like i could probably stream these between the time that i said i'd never be a streamer and i don't think i could ever watch a stream i started watching a guy called true vanguard on facebook gaming and youtube and he was an ex-pastor turned streamer and he was doing full-time streaming making a living off of it not ex-christian just ex-pastor so he left his job as a pastor and became a streamer and i was like okay like this guy's a little bit more chill and like i kind of like the vibe of the channel and the community is nice and So then I was like, well, maybe not everybody has to be the like crazy jump out of your chair and break your keyboard when you lose kind of streamer. So that kind of like started this seed in my head of like, okay, maybe it's not such a crazy idea that I could stream. And then I could do that. And my kids could watch the stream or watch the VODs of my stream. And then I felt like God said to me at some point, there was like this, like, I don't have the date marked on my calendar or anything like that. But I do know that there was a time where I heard not an audible voice, but just a kind of urging from God, from Holy Spirit saying, if you're going to do this, this can be like a ministry. This can be like a place where people can come and feel seen and welcomed and heard and loved. You know, not necessarily at that time was I thinking like, oh, we'll do Bible studies and we'll do worship music and stuff like that. Just be a family friendly place for people to come and gather and see some gaming and talk about life together and stuff like that. So that is how I got started. And I started on Facebook gaming. Okay. It took me a couple of years to make the jump over. Cause that's where true Vanguard was at the time. He had signed a deal with Facebook gaming to, to be exclusive to them. And I was like, well, if that's working for him, why don't I just sign up for that and do that?

Leighton Seys: It makes sense. Yeah.

Born Again Gamer: I actually had signed up for mixer and then they shut down like the next day. Okay.

Leighton Seys: Poor timing. Yeah.

Born Again Gamer: Ninja had just signed there and I was like, okay, I don't really know who this Ninja guy is, but he seems pretty popular. So maybe I'll try Mixer. And then I was like, well, I can do that straight from my Xbox. So I don't have to buy a gaming PC or a streaming PC to do that. So I was like, this is going to be easy. I'll just sign up for Mixer and stream straight from my Xbox. And then they shut it down. So I ordered a computer and got started on Facebook gaming and then made the jump after like a year and a half or two years over to Twitch.

Leighton Seys: I've not been on Facebook Gaming, so are there a lot of people that watch you live on Facebook that are over there, or is Facebook more of people watching the VODs later on?

Born Again Gamer: We had a decent amount watching live. I would say... I never had the, my highest numbers that I've had on Twitch. I never hit that on Facebook gaming. That could have just been a timing thing where my community was new, but I did have consistent, a consistent community forming there of people watching live two or three or four people, sometimes five to 10 people watching live. And yeah, it was, it was pretty decent and they could chat there and there was, I felt like. At that time, I felt like there was something about having like a Facebook profile that you had to have to chat and stuff like that made it a little bit more personal, a little bit more connected and real where I don't feel like there's that difference maybe now on Twitch now that I've been on here and you get to know people by their usernames and stuff like that. will say though my first i did try jumping for a stream or two over to twitch and my first um my first experience with twitch was a huge turn off because like my very first stream i was streaming with my wife and my daughter at the time my daughter was like I don't know, six or seven. And we were playing Monopoly on the Xbox live on stream. And somebody jumped in and said something super horrible. And it didn't go through into chat. It just went to my auto auto moderator flagged it. But it was enough to turn my stomach. And I was like, OK, no Twitch for now. Let's go back to Facebook. So I went back to Facebook for a year or so. And then finally somebody was like, no, Twitch isn't all that bad. It's not, not everybody's like that. And I was like, okay, fine. We'll make the jump over there. And I finally bit the bullet and went full time over onto Twitch. It's been, I think it's been about three years now on Twitch. Okay.

Leighton Seys: Yeah. I guess say there's so interesting. Like, I just love the development of the story because some people like it is the urgent call and they immediately go headlong into, I'm going to be of content creator. I'm going to be a Christian content creator. I'm jumping in the space and others. It's. something's missing and God moves us one step towards something. And then it's, well, there's still more you can do. And then there's another place where you might do this better. And then there's seeing other people doing some things who are further along the road than you and inspiring and encouraging you or validating that, yeah, this is where God is leading. This is what I should be doing. And then taking those steps forward. I love the way that those stories all unfold. So thinking about, your kids, uh, your, your kids are all still under the age of streaming on Twitch themselves.

Born Again Gamer: Yeah. Yeah. My oldest is 13. Okay. My oldest daughter's 13. My youngest is, uh, five years old in January and, uh, Yeah, it has been an interesting journey. I think it's really interesting that I found when I started, I thought that it was novel. The idea of being a Christian and streaming Family Friendly was this novel idea that nobody else or not very many people were doing. And it almost kind of was, except for a few, like you got Susie and stuff like that, that have been doing it for almost 15 years, maybe, or 12 years or something. But apart from that, when I talk to a lot of people, Christian Ninja and others, we all started like almost at the same time, like just before COVID. Some people started just after or during COVID. But I started like a month before COVID hit. And I remember it very clearly because I bought all this stuff. I learned how to set up a stream. And then right after that, COVID hit, church had to shut down. And I was like, okay, actually, I know how to do this now. They were like, we want to live stream. Does anybody know how to do it? I was like, yeah, I just learned how to do it. Thanks to God for providing that.

Leighton Seys: Yeah, the timing on those things are fun. And we've talked about this on a few of the podcasts. There have been a couple of ways. There are the pioneers who were out there first, who saw the need and were doing it. And it was not easy to network on Twitch initially and find people. The networking was based around the game that you played. And so if you're crossing games and you're trying to find, you know... family-friendly, you have to have a game first that's family-friendly and then create an environment around that. So Minecraft could be one of those if the people in the stream in the community are family-friendly. So those, I think, were some of those things that God was opening doors, bringing people in there to start laying the foundation, to start establishing a beachhead, so to speak, and then inviting more people in the next wave and the next. And I think there's still more waves of people coming in and Yeah, that's fantastic of hearing where did you start, what's the next step, those kinds of things. I know that there's a few streamers out there who also started because they wanted to have a place that was family friendly. Are you thinking, and I'm just jumping ahead here, are you thinking down the road of having your kids be a part of your stream or streaming alongside of them, of making it

Born Again Gamer: continue to be hey i've created this initially for my to reach my kids for my kids to have content to watch are you going to invite them to participate in the streaming going forward or at some point in the future i should say so they do now uh they don't have their own channels but they will pop in and play with me sometimes people will see them pop in behind me here and they'll say hi they love saying hi to supersonic and he loves saying hi to them and now i expect to see hi to each individual child in the chat probably over the next couple seconds um but uh it yeah it's definitely something i look up to kind of look i think look up to is the right term but like aki and his family how they are so connected and use it as a point of connection and a place of kind of getting together and hanging out together and spending time with their kids and i think that's really cool maybe they could have their own i i want to leave it kind of up to them if they feel like that that's something that they want to do or not but uh yeah i'm not i'm not opposed to that one thing that i have been wrestling with is the idea of it's hard because i do want to stay true to that original vision of being family friendly but then there are times where i'm like okay could i reach out to more people if i'm playing something that's more popular so like You've got your cards and your creators and stuff like that where there's proximity chat and you never know what somebody might say. Right. You have no way to know. Right. And it's like, I want to be able to jump into those games and into those spaces and play with people and be a family friendly presence in there. But at the same time, now do I need to put a little thing in the corner of my screen that says, like, caution, proximity chat is on. People might swear or something like that. Right. And so that's always been a battle in my own mind of like, should I stick where I'm at and just stick with the Minecrafts and the Mario carts and the whatevers? Or should I, you know, take the jump? I am going to stream arc Raiders tonight. I don't know if I can just turn off voice chat altogether and block it out so that the stream can't hear.

Leighton Seys: That's what I was going to wonder is if there probably is a way to set that up so that it wouldn't go into, you know, the video for everybody to see. You certainly could probably do that. But also, if they don't even hear it at all and you only hear it, I would think there's probably a way to do that. I don't know that I've tried to do that. Depends on how you're playing it and where you're playing it from.

Born Again Gamer: there there is like in-game like uh pre-selected messages that you can send so you can hit a button and get a wheel a toggle wheel of like don't shoot me or hello or goodbye or yes no like a few different things so i'm thinking that if that's there then probably there's an option to turn off the voice chat so i got to look into that before 8 p.m but you know we'll sort it out but um Yeah. A few people have been like, Oh, you should jump in our graders. It's really cool. And I'm like, okay, I want to, but I'm worried about certain things. And so it's, uh, that's my, that's one of my struggles at the moment and apart from other things.

Leighton Seys: Yeah. Well, and I guess the other side of that could be not necessarily streaming it, but going and playing those games to connect with people, bring them into community. and then introducing the fact that you do have other things that you stream. So there could be more ways to do it, to not stream those games, but to play those games, to build community there with people who are in that game who do need someone in the space, and then keeping it family-friendly on what you stream, or perhaps make a second account that is going to be, I would say, not family-friendly.

Born Again Gamer: Somebody said, like, born-again gamer after dark or something like that.

Leighton Seys: yeah yeah well after dark is is a nice way of saying it but uh hey night saver welcome in yeah bag after dark yes so hear the voice when you go up close to them in game yeah yeah he was asking what proximity chat was and so i was i was replying to his question yeah So, yeah, I was just wondering on the kids there because, yeah, if your kids were young and you were trying to create content for them, they're still navigating through all of those things of what do I want them to have free reign over? And I don't mean free reign of you're not supervising, but... yeah hey this is this is safe here's where you have access here's where it's not safe you need no access and and then where is it that well i'll be around while you're watching it i'll be around while you're engaging it and also yeah the i could totally understand the chat and then like being brand new and not knowing that hey you have bots you can put in the chat you have other limitations that you can set up so that you can have control of the community like we just had someone that had a message and it got blocked and deleted and i didn't even see it because we got a mod in the chat that took care of that so that nobody else got to see what it was and resurrection thank you yeah and uh so uh supersonic i assume just took care of that i believe he's a mod in here if not i'll have to make him one he's always he's always hanging around all over the place so but there's those elements where you want to be family friendly and you want to you want to engage in people are there limitations on the other side of that of no this is just so far away from things this wouldn't be detrimental to me going into that space for myself for streaming or in terms of my kids and my family or both for yourself for yourself i mean there's it's easier to say where it is for your kids that that one's pretty easy i'm just saying for you as a streamer as a content creator or someone trying to reach out is like no here's where i have limitations for my own personal self to to stay away from those kinds of things

Born Again Gamer: yeah i think that i kind of try to pay attention to how i feel about something and and see if is that just a personal thing or is that like maybe a holy spirit thing talking to me about it like i don't i don't really care for like the grand theft autos i don't care for horror games i don't i feel like i don't need to walk up my basement stairs up to my bedroom looking behind me every three seconds to make sure that nothing's following me out of the basement as i go to bed yeah and so yeah that's always just been a places that i have never really gone and not that you know there's people who enjoy those and you know i try to think of as like paul said like Each person's got their own things that they're going to be sensitive to and that they need to decide, like, is this right for me or not right for me? Is this affecting my walk with God or not? Like I said, I'm liking that Ark Raiders game. And if I was playing it offline and I came across somebody in proximity chat and they were swearing, I probably wouldn't bat an eye. doesn't bother me to the right where i'm gonna be like hey i can't talk to you you're swearing i just don't want i don't want like the idea of it being on the stream in case somebody's watching and their kids are in the room or something like that now it's eight o'clock at night so most people's kids are probably in bed mine tend to push the limit and not go to bed and wander into my my space and sneak up on me a lot of times so I'm trying to think of situations like that where someone might be watching and you know their kid sneaks in behind them or is playing in the in the connected room or something and looks over at the screen it's like oh what's that on the screen that's you know something inappropriate so I always try to be mindful of that kind of thing when I'm thinking about what I'm going to play and what I'm going to stream

Leighton Seys: Yeah. And I think there's some wisdom in the I personally, this is my aversion to it is either my conscience, my gut about it, the way that my physiology responds to it or my mind, you know, obsesses that like you're talking about. I don't want to be looking over my shoulder when I go up the bedrooms, you know, the steps to the bedroom. I don't want to keep peeking behind me. Yeah, and that can be a thing if you're exposing yourself to those things. And other people, they go and play horror games, and for them it's fun and games, and they don't have those kind of reactions to it. And then there's some that it's like, I think this just is not my style of game. i do not go first person shooter at all like i was actually just yesterday when i was playing for the first time where wins meet and this guy's trying to introduce me to this fantastic way of using archery great wonderful So then I have to play a contest with him, which I have no interest in playing a contest with him, but I have to. And then I lose, which I knew I would lose because I just knew it. And then, well, I didn't win, so I have to play it again. I'm like, are you kidding me? No, I don't want to play this. I don't want to aim. Like, I cannot aim. I'm taking and the person's moving and I'm doing all of this stuff. It's because I'm using a controller. Now, you give me a... shotgun, a rifle for hunting. I can aim with it because it's a long thing and I can move. But you give me a controller, my thumb, there's no actual physical action that's helping me aim. This is like, no, I cannot line it up whatsoever. It was like, and I was so thankful the second time. The first time I got one shot and we're shooting birds. The second time I got two and I'm like, oh, great. But he was just being distracted. By the person with me. So he only shot one so that I could win. So she helped me win by distracting him. I didn't even know that was happening. I was so focused on trying to shoot a bird, which, you know, you got like two minutes and I shot two birds. That's how bad I am, you know, but. You know, there's the preference, the enjoyment aspects of it. There's the, this is not good for my soul. There's the, hey, here's things that are going to cause me to go and stumble in a different direction to avoid and stay away. So I think there's wisdom in that. And then also knowing if people are in my community with that, I'm not going to rate out and go to some of those things if they're not things that I'm going to support. Now, on the other hand... You know, if somebody redeems it and they'll have the warning that says, hey, it's over 18 content. I just let people know ahead of time, hey, someone redeemed this. This isn't where we normally go. This is what they're doing. So if you don't want to go along with us, then, you know, don't come and join the party. Just feel free to leave now and nobody's going to, you know, be upset with you. Please take care of yourself and do those things you need to.

Narrator/Announcer: That's a good idea.

Born Again Gamer: Yeah, I haven't introduced a raid redeem yet, but people have asked me. Usually, we have such a tight-knit community that it's the same people that are in my stream. By the time I end a stream, there's three or four of our usuals there, and they usually ask us to raid a lot of the same people anyway, so... It's never really been a big thing.

Leighton Seys: Yeah, I introduced it early on for a couple of reasons. One, I wanted to get exposure to new people. So it was, hey, redeem a raid. I'll find somebody new I don't know. And then two, I didn't want to get in the rut of, well, here's the same three people we raid every time. i wanted to be able to expand you know to have more people now the problem on some level i look and it's like when there is no redeem it's like all right i got 30 people we could raid that i know who are we going to who haven't we seen in a while and and be able to go that way it's funny that you mentioned that because i've i actually had an idea pop into my head a few days ago

Born Again Gamer: and i've been thinking about like suggesting it to somewhere whether that's you know reach or something to romans or safe streamers or something but the idea of having kind of a team of like okay here's five to ten streamers you're all fairly similar we stream similar types of games we're all family friendly at times we all will do something bible related maybe on our streams and different things like that this is our team and at the end of stream we always or 90 of the time raid somebody from this group to to create a sense of like a community another community outside of our community we've got ours and then we've got a certain amount of people because i find sometimes what we do is we i have been doing what you said i've got a list of 30 40 100 people and when i go to street to raid at the end i go okay who's the least recent person that we've raided and let's find them and raid them But then it's almost like, oh, we haven't seen you in a while. Who's this person and who's that person? And like, do I remember talking to you the last time I actually talked to you or was it almost a year ago? It's like, which there's sometimes where that's nice to like be like, hey, I haven't seen you in a while. Nice to catch up with you. And I almost wonder if there's another aspect, though, where we could be building like tight bonds where it's like, OK, maybe at the end of every stream, I raid like Aki or catch a W or... somebody else and now they know to expect us more often and the people in our communities will connect with each other more often and maybe get like a tighter knit thing going on i don't know if there's anything to that i'm a wanderer and an inventor yeah well i definitely i definitely think you could do it that way and

Leighton Seys: you know on twitch you do have like i'm in several communities but i currently am not selected to say streamers one or dc4c i've got the reach one so it will automatically anybody on the team put recommendations when you go to my twitch stream and then when we were going leading up to reach conference my thought thought was i'm rating a reach person so for the two months leading up to reach that was what i did so i've gone through cycles of that and and you know there's well the other thing i'll do is if you know knowing that i'm going to have someone on the podcast in the next month i'll start trying to raid that person that i'm going to have on the podcast if they happen to be streaming at the same time but it doesn't always work because If you're an evening streamer and I'm a morning streamer, we're far away from being able to have me raid you. So I think there's some beauty in that. I think other people have made this suggestion, which I think would be great. So I think it might have been Taco that talked about this. if we were to have a person who went live and then we had the next person so we only had one person in the community that was live but we had it so it was 24 7 so you always knew where the next raid was going and we just went to the next person and the next person and the next person in line you would be able to keep that community as one community altogether going on i don't know if anybody's actually successfully done that more than maybe a once a month kind of activity where you set it up and schedule it out here's the people that you'll do raids for and i know we've done that within reach as well and some others have done that too of you do a raid party that's a 12 hour or 24 hour party and you raid or even i think i've seen a weekend is probably the most i've seen it Start on Friday, end on Sunday. I believe one reason, and some of his community has done that for a charity event or things over the weekend going on.

Born Again Gamer: Yeah. That's a good way to have like a long, you know, you could do like a long fundraiser thing, but not have it all on one person's shoulders where they're having to do a 24-hour stream and killing themselves.

Leighton Seys: I have no inclination to do a 24-hour stream. I know some people will do the, I'm just sleeping. That terrifies me. I do. Like the stories I hear from my wife and other people or stories I have from when I was a kid where I would walk in my sleep and get up and go. I don't want that on film. I'm just saying. I do not want anything happening while I'm in bed, sleeping or otherwise, you know, getting up and sleepwalking. I've been accused of howling in my dreams. And I don't need this on film. I'm just saying.

Born Again Gamer: I've seen where people do the sleep thing and then they'll leave their speakers on and let people play sound alerts to try and wake them up. That doesn't sound good either. It sounds very not restful. I want my sleep to be somewhat restful. As little of it as I get sometimes.

Leighton Seys: No, I think the most I did was trying like a week-long streamiversary where you can add time, but there was a hard stop. And then that time would continue the next day. And then there was a hard stop. So you could make me stream longer than normal. But it was not going to be an indefinite I will stay on as long as you give me bits, tips, and subs and all of that stuff.

Born Again Gamer: I saw, uh, I think Sonic said, uh, rating, um, it must be family friendly and Christian. And I don't know if that, if he was saying that just about his community, but I, I try to do that most times, but I also do have a streamer who is also Canadian. Uh, he's out West and I'm, I'm East, uh, Eastern end of Canada, but, um, his community is very chill. He's not a Christian as far as I know. And he's not explicitly family friendly, but I've never seen him say anything more than, you know, maybe damn or something like that. I don't know. So, you know, those words that some people consider to be lighter, lighter swears. But it's never been anything that's been a problem. And I try to rate him every once in a while just to kind of keep a connection because I have chatted with him during his stream and started to build like a relationship that I feel is like. kind of beneficial to like, I found out recently, one of his stream titles said that he's struggling with some health issues. And so when I was after I rated him and said, I had to go to bed, I was like, I'll pray for you and just kind of let that sit. And he said, thank you. And. You know, I, I'm trying to do that and, and build those kind of connections. Like you said before, like branch out and, and reach out to people in the community that are not within that fixed. So that's where I think, like I was saying, like if you had a team and it was like, okay, everybody in the team raids each other four out of five times. And then on the fifth time raid out to some random person that you've never met. have those those bridges being built but yeah i think there's i think there's benefits to both and it's like you know that could work for some people and that might not work for others and that's like the body of christ right each different parts of the body and different parts of the body do different things certain things are better for different parts of the body than others

Leighton Seys: Yeah. Yeah. And we certainly bring different gifts as we come into, you know, being content creators, being streamers, doing those things. So as you have been doing this and this can be stream related or it can be personal, you know, real life in person, you know, whatever your job is, whatever all of your family's life is, what have been some obstacles that you have gotten in the way? of you being a streamer and being able to create content? What have been some of those obstacles that you've had to face?

Born Again Gamer: That's every day in my head. It's always in my head. So I would say almost a year ago, if not a year ago, I said to my wife, I think that... I want to do ministry full-time, gaming ministry of some sort, whether it's a mixture of the streaming and the in-person events, because we do in-person events as well. I've coined it Gathering Game Conference. And so we'll get together people from around our town for like a Mario Kart tournament. and we'll have uh brett who's one of the hosts of our other podcast chaplain he's come a few times and done like a talk for parents about gaming and the world of of gaming and digital habits and things like that and i want to just do more and more and more of that my current full-time job is in i.t i work for the municipality that i live in and so i'm there uh 35 hours a week and got four kids and drug bills and things like that dental and i'm diabetic so i get my all my diabetic stuff is paid for through my work benefits and all that sort of stuff and my wife just kind of i i do too but my wife a little bit more than me struggles with the idea of leaving something that's safe and secure like that job oh yeah go into something that is not always guaranteed and not always safe and secure and so we're we've been talking a lot about that even more so the last couple of weeks and months and just trying to see like what is wise what what parts of it do you take a leap and step out and say god's gonna do this and what parts of it does god kind of also expect us to use our common sense and plan ahead and and be wise with our our finances and things like that so that has been a huge struggle is is the like family security aspect of it we are i i did form a board about a year ago So I have five people, including myself, where we meet monthly and we talk about the business of the ministry and finances and things like that and plans for future events and all this sort of stuff. And we have decided that we want to actively step into the next step of forming a charity, registering as a charity or a nonprofit. And so we're walking into that and we're hoping that that will open doors for us to connect with other organizations and be able to take more donations and things like that because then we can offer tax receipts to our donors and all that sort of stuff. And so, you know, those those things have been slow and been hurdles because I'm not a business minded person. I'm right. I like to come up with ideas and. and start the ball rolling. And then I'm not necessarily a finisher of ideas. And so it's nice to have a group of people around me helping to support me in that too. But yeah, those have been kind of the hurdles at the moment of like, why haven't I gone full time with like content creation?

Leighton Seys: And they don't have to be all related to going full-time. And I know that there's both a push and a desire at times to be full-time in this because when you engage people and you make impact and then you can't be there all the time. you're missing some of it and you would like to be there more. So I get all of that. And oh, then there's, if I'm able to spend 30, like if I could take those 35 hours of work and put them into streaming, I would be able to reach more people and I could do more ministry. There's all of those kinds of thoughts that I know we all have, whether it's from the side of I could do more ministry or I could be full-time streaming and I could have that support. I would have to have a second thing, but... I almost, and this is some of the thinking we have at The Church Digital, is thinking that the model for missions going forward is mostly going to be bivocational, co-vocational. You're doing two things. You're not just solely one thing. We see that going that way for most of church ministry in North America, which it hasn't been for a long time, but the bulk of the rest of the world has been that way. where the pastor also has a full-time job because they have to provide for their family and then they don't do it through raising funds for the church. What you raise funds for the church goes to the needy and goes to the mission. It doesn't go to the pastor. And then also, you know, outside of North America and Europe, you don't have all this insurance that you're paying for and, you know, all of the benefits and those kinds of things, because they don't have those. The people just don't. So there's... There's all of those things. And so, yeah, there is that wrestling back and forth of I can't do more because I have to work 35 hours a week. And then you have a wife and you have four kids. So making sure that all of those are priorities where they need to be in your life.

Born Again Gamer: Yeah, and that's another one too. Yeah, it's definitely the job and then making sure that it's not like come home from the job and then jump right on the computer and start streaming and take time and set aside. So we've rejigged our schedule now twice in the last six months, my wife and I and my streaming schedule. to try and make sure that we're setting aside nights for date nights. We're setting aside nights for family game nights and things like that. And then trying to integrate some of that with the stream. So it's like sometimes family game night could be the kids playing on the stream with me, different things like that. But yeah, it's, I hear the, the idea of like having like a, and I wouldn't be opposed probably to, to when I do try and make that jump to having like a part-time job instead of a full-time job or or whatever but i just feel like so much of my time could be put into making connections in the community and doing those in-person events and instead of doing because right now we're doing like one or two in-person events a year be awesome to do one a month somewhere, like find a community center with an open room or something and do it once a month or once a week or two times a month or whatever it happens to be. But having that extra time where it's like, oh, somebody wants to meet with me about this and I don't have to miss family dinner time, you know. Right. on some random night of the week to go and meet with this person. I could do it in the middle of the day because I've set aside a day for the ministry for meetings and things like that. Just having that a little bit more freedom, I guess, to be able to meet with people and collaborate and push forward.

Leighton Seys: And everybody's journey's a little bit different on where they're at and how those things. I feel pretty fortunate my wife has the full-time income and has all the benefits as I'm not currently working in a church and God has me doing all kinds of who knows what the next thing I'm gonna be doing is. And I'm not gonna share that right now, but I've shared it in online communities because it'll be outdated by the time this one gets posted, so it doesn't matter. know opportunities that are there it's like well do you say yes do you say no what does this change about things is this coming from a standpoint of god opening the door and urging me to go in like you see with Philip and Philip suddenly is a deacon and the next chapter that Philip's mentioned and he's not passing out bread which is what his job is supposed to be in the church is taking care of the widows and orphans and making sure they got bread and he's out preaching the gospel and he's you know going to the Ethiopian eunuch and explaining things and then he's baptizing people like wait a minute I thought I thought God called you to be a deacon and and it's those kind of things like you have to wrestle through is this Oh, I want more than what God gave me to do. Or did God open the door and now he's giving me so many more things that I'm supposed to go do and I'm not sure if I should. Is it me being resilient or resistant to it? Or is it me being overzealous to go do something I'm not supposed to? That is such a hard thing to be able to manage and think through.

Born Again Gamer: yeah i i asked a lot when i first had that idea in my head and that that thought of like god's calling me i think to do this full-time or whatever it happens to be it was like okay how do i actually know that so i was doing a lot of like research and i was asking people like how do you know when god's called you to something and when it's just a passion of your own and some people said well it being a passion and it being a burden on your heart can be part of how you know and it's like okay so then how much of that is just me wanting to do it? And how much of it is, is, is God calling me to it? And like, when I told my wife, she was scared after I told her and I was like wrestling with it. I had some times where I was praying and I was crying and I was like, why does this have to be hard? If I'm supposed to do this, why does it have to be such a, such a painful thing and a wrestling with people and ideas? Cause I tell some people and like, I told one person and they were like, well, like, know ministry is not for everybody and like i know somebody who went into ministry and now they're not in ministry anymore and they loved ministry but they're they're not doing it so how do you know that it's right for you and i was like but how do i know that my journey is the same as that person's journey and it's like who do you listen to you take good and you take bad and you take everything in between and try and weigh it and and see where you land, I guess, and just do your best for God and look to him in the middle of all of it, right, Tom?

Leighton Seys: Well, and it does depend on your background and your denominational background and how do you see calling and how do you see ministry and what is, you know, but it all goes back to what we were talking about earlier, being part of the body. And so what is it that you are supposed to do in the body? What is it you're gifted to do? And how do you find... access to be able to do that. I mean, if we stick with the body analogy, the hands are the ones who are going to do the writing, the typing and or defend you or attack others like that's that's what they have some skill levels to be able to do. Well, the eye is going to spot things and the brain is going to analyze things. And so like they all have different roles. So I think we all are going to have those two. So. I'm not looking to, like, you know, we mentioned some other people, and whether they're Christian streamers or not, it's like, oh, they're kind of big, and you might want to pursue what they're doing or copy them. But there's a level at which, like, yeah, that's not what I'm supposed to be doing. That's not the role God has for me. So that being that aspect of the body wouldn't be my right place. And, boy, it's sometimes hard to figure out where your right place is.

Born Again Gamer: Yep. Yeah. That's where I'm at now. So I'm just trying to be patient as much as I can, but also not sit on my hands and not do anything. And that's another, another challenge of like, how, how much do I wait? And when do I step out and go? Right. It's like, I've heard people say before the saying, like, when you pray to God, his answer is going to be like one of four or five things is like, no, go wait or whatever, you know? So it's like, which one am I, where am I at right now with them?

Leighton Seys: Yeah, the thing I can say, and the thing is, is it doesn't happen until the decision has been made, and then I'll have peace about it. But I can wrestle with it, either it's yes or no, for a long time. And as soon as I go, it's yes or it's no, and then I'll suddenly have peace and go, oh, I know this is right. The problem is I can't just go yes. And then go, well, I didn't get peace. So now I got to change. It's like, it doesn't, it doesn't seem to work that way. It's like, I have to fully be committed to the answer. And then I get that piece of confirmation afterwards that yes, this was indeed the right way to go, but you still have to do the wrestling with it. I've never had somebody else had the experience of like, I made the decision. It had no peace. So I changed my mind and had peace. I've not had that experience, but I imagine somebody could.

Born Again Gamer: Right. Yeah.

Leighton Seys: Well, let's flip this around. What have been some unexpected blessings that you've experienced being a streamer, whether it was for you personally that you had something happen, whether it's something that happened while you were streaming in your community, that it happened for someone else but you got to be a witness to it? What have been some things like two, three events that are just like, this was a really fantastic thing to be a part of?

Born Again Gamer: yeah i'll start with kind of like the i don't know not not selfish i guess but the the things that have been a blessing to me was like well for actually right now being on this podcast so in 20 at the end of each year i usually i'm not just saying that just to just to uh lift you up but uh i hope it does but anyway um i in at the end of 2023 at the end of each year i try to say like okay here's one thing or two things i want to do this year i want to see if i can cross these off my list and 2023 i said i'd really love to be a guest on a podcast oh i think it would be nice to be recognized as part of the community and and making enough of a contribution that somebody wants to hear about what I'm doing. And so it didn't quite happen. I scratched it off my list kind of like pencil instead of with a marker because I started a podcast. So I was like, okay, we did a podcast. Great. But this is the first time I've been a guest on another podcast. So this is really cool to me. It's officially scratching it off my 2023 checklist.

Leighton Seys: Well, that's really funny on another level because you invited me to come and participate in your podcast even before I had this podcast. So I didn't even have my podcast going at all when I was already coming on and being one of the people to be a contributor on your podcast. I'd been a guest on several podcasts before I felt like God was saying, hey, there's something you could do in podcasting. I kept going the other direction and saying, what do I have to contribute? I mean, I can come on and talk about stuff and I can contribute to your conversation, but what do I have to contribute? And it's kind of like, it took a while for God to show me that. So that's cool. I love, well, on some level, what you said is exactly what I want to do on this podcast is elevate and bring people on that I see God is using and God is doing stuff in the space to both, validate god's calling in you and to say i man i love seeing what you're doing and i want you to continue to do it but the other side too is for people who are watching this later on or here live to say i feel god is calling me to do this i didn't know it was possible but now i have encouragement to be able to pursue what god's put in front of me so that that's that's cool and i i I've not done it that way of kind of like a year bucket list kind of a here's what I'd like to do. I usually set more tangible goals that I have control over.

Born Again Gamer: Yeah. Like shorter term. Yeah. Smart goals, right? Yeah. Smart goals. Exactly. It's not really measurable. It's like waiting for someone to invite me on a podcast.

Leighton Seys: Right, right. How do you imagine? Well, you'll immediately know when it happens. Yeah. Unless you're dropping hints. Hey, you got a podcast. I'd love to come on sometime. Hey, you know. Which you did not do, by the way. You did not do at all.

Born Again Gamer: Um, and going to reach was a really cool, has been a cool blessing to, to be able to, cause you know, you see all these other conventions and things that people like, I follow some of the stuff LTN does where they go to big conventions and board game conventions and gaming stuff and connect with people. But being able to go to reach where it was like a Christian centered content creator conference and connecting and networking with people in person was a huge blessing. But on the flip side, less of the like about me stuff, but we've actually had two people. Maybe three kind of where we've had people announce during our streams that they made a decision to follow Christ. And the one guy we so we did Alpha a couple of years. Oh, that's right. On our stream. And during the first one, a guy joined us. He said, hey, I found you on the Alpha website because I registered on the Alpha website and said we were doing Alpha. So he found the link to our channel and he joined us. And he joined us for like the third video or something like that and finished it out with us. But he had never really gone to church. His wife was a Christian and growing up, grew up as a Christian and told him around the time of their wedding. Like they, he had recently just got married when he joined us. He said his wife had wanted to kind of like make a rededication of her life to Christ and get back closer relationship with him. And he didn't know what that meant. So he wanted to find out. So he joined us for alpha. And by the time Easter came around, he came on to one of our alpha streams and he said, Hey guys, I just wanted to let you know that at our Easter service, I went up to the front and gave my heart to God. And I was like, yes, like that's so cool. And there've been a couple, there's another guy recently that posted and said that. in our chat. And I don't know if we were a part of it. He was with us for a few streams before he mentioned that. So it'd be cool if we were part of the seed planting or watering for that process. Then we had another woman from Canada, actually, who, you know, made a decision to to rededicate her life to the Lord and get baptized in that. So she went to her church and got baptized and shared that with us and just watching people. who have been a part of our community grow and, um, and see their journey and see them just walk closer with God and, and some of them ultimately make a decision to walk with God. And it's been super, super awesome. Yeah. It's been, yeah, it's been really awesome.

Leighton Seys: yeah and like like you're pointing out sometimes you don't know how much you are the one that's firmly planting the seed or watering it when you're doing alpha and they're engaged in your community and they're not in other communities it's a little bit easier to be able to say oh it was this and we were doing that and for those that do not know alpha is an introductory course to the christian faith So if you listen to other podcasts around here, you probably heard us talking about that a couple of years ago. Reach, those who are going to be partners. We all committed to doing a mini version of it about eight weeks, either in our Discord or in our online stream that we were going to do those. And so, yeah, that's pretty cool. And it is impactful. what i what i really appreciate about it and i had training in alpha back in 2006 so i had done alpha for a long time what i appreciate is it's not sitting there answering questions it's sitting there and helping people wrestle with the questions that they have and it's really then opening up the space so that the holy spirit dwells within them they wrestle with the holy spirit the holy spirit brings them to and and sometimes you just got to create the open space and not be the answer person which a lot of christians want to have the be the answer person give all the answers and so i by the time i was coming to streaming i already knew i didn't want to be the answer person and i often don't want to be the answer person around whatever's going on and and to do that so just wanted to uh identify that so i see that we had a redeem for for hydrate so you got a hydrate over there i'm gonna take a spot of tea over here

Born Again Gamer: to get another water bottle out.

Leighton Seys: Which is English, no, no, no, sorry, Earl Grey today. It is Earl Grey, and I will be switching to Herba Mate here soon, because this is my morning brew that's almost done. And I'll just show you, there's your sticker right there, right there above gate zero.

Born Again Gamer: I was looking when you were showing your luggage, one of your pictures that you posted your luggage on one time, I was like, oh, is my sticker on there? I was trying to zoom in on it.

Leighton Seys: Yeah, I filled up my mugs. I actually just recently took my own one off that wore out. I bought a cheap sticker to begin with, and when it got wet, it wore out. So I now buy better quality stickers. I just spilled water on myself.

Born Again Gamer: You just spilled water on yourself. Napkins or something. I'll just be wet for the rest of the stream.

Leighton Seys: What's really kind of fascinating on some level, like some people do need to have the hydrates to be able to say, hey, you've been on here for a while. You need to take a drink. You need to go do, you need to take care of yourself and stay healthy and those things.

Born Again Gamer: I'll find there's times where I'm talking for long periods of time on stream and I don't know if they just hear my voice starting to get croaky and froggy and then I'll see a hydrate and I'm like, oh, thank you. I actually am very thirsty.

Leighton Seys: And see, I will just be taking a sip like every other sentence here. So like nobody really ever tells me that I need to hydrate. So I make a little more production of it because mine's a spot of tea. So a spot of tea. We're going to have a spot of tea. And now we're going to have. the herbamate which you don't know herbamate it's south america uh is where it comes from and i am not drinking it properly there's a special cup that you're supposed to drink it in and filter and like i just brew it like the i brew the rest of my tea and it tastes like grass and you just drink it and it's fine it's fine

Born Again Gamer: I've been thinking about changing up my hydrate redeems on stream so that I have a an entry level hydrate. It's like the regular a hundred channel points that people can use, but there's more of a cool down on it. Maybe like a three to five minute cool down and then having one that's like a thousand or 10,000 points or something like that. that might because there's people called chug chug chug chug chug i'm sure sonic is sitting there just clicking the hydrate button but there's a one minute cool down yeah so every one minute for like five minutes he'll send a hydrate and i might be in the middle of talking and i'm like okay another hydrate so i drink and then i start talking again and it's like oh another hydrate so i start drinking i'm like i need to slow them down a little bit

Leighton Seys: well it's and that's the i think part of the ongoing thing we're talking about it being community when you're in these spaces and there's the community engagement around those things that sometimes it is initiated by the community to create things sometimes it's in response to the community to create things So I think it probably was like three years in to streaming where I have on my channel, not on this one, you can make me change hats. Like you can redeem, I'll change a hat. I got a few options back here and you can pick another one cause you haven't seen it and I haven't worn it in a while. So I'll let you pick a hat and we'll switch that. And it's kind of fun. But then I had a person on my stream that all the time got excited every time I took my hat off between changing and going, the good hair, the good hair. And I'm like, whatever. And so for Streamiversary, I did a redeem of, well, you can make me take my hat off for five minutes. and oh my goodness the no cap redeem is so ridiculous and gets all excited and it's like it's it's a once i'm not doing it all stream okay it's it's once and it's expensive and you're gonna get excited and you frustrate like but it was like i couldn't undo it after i did it for stream adversity it's like it's just gonna be for this only And there was so much pressure is like, OK, I got to just leave it. I can't I can't get rid of it. It's got it. And Lucy's who's here is often spends her points so that other people can get excited about me not having a hat on.

Born Again Gamer: You know, so I have the oven mitts, so I'll play with oven mitts on for five minutes. Oh. started out as 10 minutes and there was not a cool down on it so they would do 10 minutes and then i'd be like oh great i can take these off and then someone else would redeem it and it was only like 5 000 points or something like that so i think i bumped it up to being like know 15 000 points and i only wear it for five minutes and there's a 20 minute cool down in between so they can't do it for my whole stream and make me play with oven mitts on because sometimes i don't care but when i'm playing fortnite i i get a little competitive and i want to win and i don't want to play

Leighton Seys: I'm not good enough to have that kind of a barrier in between.

Born Again Gamer: I'm not either really. I get victories once in a while. I might've actually got a victory with oven mitts on one time, which was incredible.

Leighton Seys: I had to clip that one.

Born Again Gamer: Yeah. I think I might have one. I have to check on it, but yeah. Yeah. It's pretty, it's pretty silly. Cause I'll hit the random buttons by accident. Cause the oven mitts are so big. did it to me the other night was playing minecraft and i couldn't stop mining because my mitts kept pulling on the trigger that mines so i'm walking around just breaking things on my screen and i'm like stop breaking stuff well in minecraft that's probably not as much of a barrier as somebody's shooting at you and you're trying to giving yourself away yeah yeah that would not be good

Leighton Seys: You did talk a little bit. I just wanted to give you a chance if you want to talk more. So you did say that you have in-person gatherings. Where did that initiate from? Was it after doing stuff online? You mentioned Love Thy Nerd. I know them. And what they're trying to do is help churches be able to reach their nerdy neighbors. So Christians in the church reach the nerdy neighbors in the church and surrounding. So where did the... uh impetus for i want to do in-person gatherings and gaming and then how do you operate those i know you mentioned doing like you know uh mario kart night but what's the full aspect of what you're doing there yeah so it started our first one if i'm being honest i don't remember what my

Born Again Gamer: what kind of kicked off the thought in my head. I know that I have some influence on it and inspiration from guys like Save... I almost said Saved Games. Satellite Gaming. Right, Jamie Harris, yes. And Seven Admirals, Cheechip, Adam Curtis, and them at Seven Admirals, where they do their in-person tournaments and things like that. And I just thought that there's nothing like that really going on here. Canada, for whatever reason, may have one or two big events a year, but they're in the super big cities and far away. And I just thought it would be really cool to be able to have something that is local. So we've done it once a year. Actually, we did it twice this year. But once the first year, twice this year. I think I might go back to once a year because it was a bit of a it was a bit of a time crunch on me to try and do two events in one year. And I kind of ran them, uh, I don't want to say I ran them by myself because I had volunteers there the day of the events helping me and helping me organize the event on the day of. But a lot of the lead up, a lot of the like getting sponsors, making posters and advertisements and things like that kind of fell to me. I tried with our second event to pull a couple more people on board. They, some of them said no, some of them said yes and then no because they found that it was a bit of a bigger commitment than they thought. And so again, this most recent event, I ended up running around town for a day. I took a day off a vacation day from my regular job and took flyers and letters around to the businesses around town, asking for sponsorships and donations for the event. But it's really to, to get people in person and see like the, I really love the trailer that a satellite game has for their somebody's printing. why they decided to do that now. And I don't know why I have the printer right beside my desk. That could probably be in a different spot. But I was like, what is this noise? What was I saying? So yeah, the trailer that Jamie and Satellite Games have that just talks about... the power of like when people are together. There is something awesome about our online community where we get to gather together multiple times a week and hang out and see each other and catch up with each other. And it's, you know, it's not less than the gathering in person. It's just different. But I think there is something different and special about getting people together. And it's really cool to hear from the parents afterwards where they go. wow, like my kid who sometimes like, I wonder if they're ever going to be social with anybody. I see them in their room playing games all the time and they don't want to go out and they don't want to do this. And they sat and they talked to the person next to them while they were playing Mario Kart. And they were just like talking like they were best friends and they just met today. And I'm like, yes, this is awesome. Let's do this every day.

Leighton Seys: Yeah.

Born Again Gamer: You know, so I just want to do more and more of that. But that was kind of the start of that was wanting to. just see people get together see parents learn and see their kids and see that gaming isn't in and of itself evil or inherently evil it's not you know on its own it's not going to ruin your child's life if it's the only thing in their life and you're not involved and you're not watching them and you're not making time to connect with them and meet with them and uh be part of let me just hand over this print job thank you if you know if they're left to their own devices a lord of the flies kind of a situation then yeah then things could go horribly wrong in in the world of gaming and your kids so that was kind of the idea was just to educate parents to make them take more of an interest in their kids gaming habits but also to understand that it can have a really cool power to connect people and build relationships and build friends and stuff like that and what i'd really like to do is almost do like a tour of like the different churches because we have within within a 15 to 20 minute driving time we have like 10 churches and so what i think would be really super cool would be someday to have you know a smaller event at each church maybe once a month we do an event at each church and it's a mario kart tournament or whatever and the top player or the top two players from that are invited to our big year end oh oh i like that setup for church against church kind of a thing you know what i mean like an invitational kind of a thing And so I got ideas floating around in my head whether I ever get to execute them or not is another.

Leighton Seys: Yeah, just thinking either the number of shirts you have to sometimes buy in order to take and make it worthwhile. But if you had two from each church and each church was a different color, you'd instantly know which church your color was and you could be rooting and you could have all the teams that way. That'd be kind of a cool system and way to set that up.

UNKNOWN: Yeah.

Born Again Gamer: Yeah, for sure.

Leighton Seys: I have not done a lot of in-person gaming events. So I do know satellite gaming, and I've tried to connect with a few people in churches not too far away who are trying to do things or are asking questions and connecting with other people. Excuse me.

UNKNOWN: Yeah.

Leighton Seys: So I do understand that whole, like, you've got to plan it all out. You've got to coordinate all of the things. You've got to do the advertising for it. You have to have the expense of having all of the controllers and the games and those kinds of things. But what you might be able to do, if you don't have all the games to go to all the churches or all of the setups, the consoles. There probably is. So I'm just thinking this out loud for anybody who's watching this thing. Hey, I'd love to do that. There might be enough gaming systems in a given congregation that the kids could bring their own and identify it as their own. And then you make sure you have the game you're going to play and the systems and be able to do it. The harder thing, which might not be hard, is having enough TVs. But frankly, there's probably people like me that don't throw their old TVs out. I've got in my other room a 40-inch TV and a 42-inch TV that I know one of those from 2005 or 2006 because I remember getting that. And so they're thicker flat screens. You know, they're about that thick. And they've got a little black line or two through them. So they'd be perfect for you. You're not going to look at it all the time. Oh, it's going to be a little annoying. But if somebody needs it for an event, there it is. I've got it. I just won't throw it out. I've thought about, you know, my daughter has a barn. If she wanted to set up a TV in her barn and have it on and listen to her watch something while you're out in the barn, it'd be perfect. So, yeah, vintage rustic look. There you go. Exactly. You're asking about old TV, old box TV? Not that, but I thought you were saying, do I have the boxes for the TV? Yes, I have the boxes for every TV and every console, every monitor in my house. I still have the box. I don't throw them out. I've moved too many times. You keep the box to everything that you can damage a screen.

Born Again Gamer: My wife hates that, that I have boxes for so many things. I've come around to the idea of throwing them out too, because it's just, at some point you get a room full of boxes.

Leighton Seys: Well, I, I have an attic space that all of the boxes are up in the attic space for every TV and monitor in the house, as well as every artwork that's of any value. All those boxes are up there. Plus I keep shoe boxes. So I have tons of shoe boxes up there and I, My wife is like, why don't you throw these out? When are you going to use them? I go, I don't know, but I have them available. I will.

Born Again Gamer: I might. Yeah. No. Well, actually, when you mentioned having enough consoles to do the events and stuff like that, that's been another random blessing that I didn't foresee because in talking with some other people about their ideas for how they would like to do events like these or smaller events, they're saying like, well, you know, getting hold of a number of consoles is kind of a difficult thing. It can be expensive. And so I personally have... two consoles had two switch consoles and then i was getting rid of an electric guitar that i had that i was playing on stream because it was kind of a piece of junk if i'm being honest i bought it for like 60 bucks a couple years back and it was just good enough to kind of get me by and let me do worship time on stream but it was not staying in tune and it had all these issues so i decided to upgrade and buy a new one so i sold that one and actually when i was selling it a person reached out to me and said hey would you take a trade and initially i said So I'd really like to get the cash for it because I kind of want to put the cash towards my my fund for my streaming account and stuff like that. And I said he said, oh, I said, well, what were you thinking of trading? He was like, well, a Nintendo Switch and a bunch of games. And I was like, oh, OK, well, that's that's a whole different story because, yes, I will take. So I got a switch and I got like one in the Pokemon. I think I had Mario cart and a couple of like, I got a decent set of games and a full Nintendo switch for, I was asking for 60 bucks for the guitar, 80 bucks for the guitar.

Leighton Seys: Yeah.

Born Again Gamer: So like for the amount. And so then after our last event, our youth pastor at our church was like, you know what? I don't play my Nintendo switch. If you want to buy it. and pay me some money to take it and use it for events, then you can have it. And so I'm in the midst of figuring out how to pay him for that, but it's not going to be the cost of going out and buying one for $400 at Walmart for sure. So yeah, God has been blessing us in that way too, where we've got four Nintendo switches and. So far, that's been more than enough than we've needed for doing our in-person events. My workplace that I have been grumbling about having in my way of doing full-time ministry actually has some spare TVs sitting in a storage room. And I said to my boss, hey, I'm doing an event and I need some TVs. Can I borrow these? And he said, yeah. So like, yeah, there's little blessings here and there where you're like, I'm like, okay, God.

Leighton Seys: Well, I've got two if you want to come get them, you know. Let's drive down. Let's drive on over. I'll bring him to reach. You'll have to bring him home. I've got the boxes for him, so that won't be a problem. I'll get an extra seat for them. Or maybe you'll just drive all the way next year to reach. That would be a fun drive. I actually had someone who lives in my state that was just asking, hey, are you going to reach next year? Hey, did you fly or are you going to drive? I'm like, I'm flying. Oh, well, it's not that far of a drive. I'm like, it is that far of a drive.

Born Again Gamer: We've driven to Orlando twice in my life from here, and it's a 24-hour drive.

Leighton Seys: It's about the same from here. And I've done it multiple times in my life. I lost count a long time ago at how many times I've done it. Let me see. The last time I did was... I want to say 2021. That was the last time I drove to Florida was 2021.

Born Again Gamer: That might be the same for me around Christmas time. There was a huge blizzard and we got stuck. We had to stop in Watertown, New York and stay in a hotel because my windshield wiper snapped off my van just outside of Watertown. So we had to stop and get off the highway and hunker down for the night in the hotel and got a new wiper blade on the next day and got back on the road.

Leighton Seys: I got a lot of stories. We'll get sidetracked if I start telling stories of driving back and forth to Florida. I got too many of those stories. And it's also some of those stories are the reason why I don't drive anymore to Florida. So Supersonic asking about flying direct or connecting. I used to prefer flying direct and the cost often is just too expensive to fly direct. And I also have now lounge access. And so I like the layover in the lounge. So I just figure it's part of the trip too. It makes it more enjoyable and go and hang out in the lounge, which, you know, that makes me feel like I'm important and I'm not, but it makes me feel that way.

Born Again Gamer: I just – I'm such a – I don't know. In a lot of things in life, I'm patient. Some things I'm not, but – when it comes to having to sit around, if I have to go to the airport and I had a layover and it was an hour, if it was four hours, if it was six hours, I just crack open the Nintendo switch and sit there and play games for six hours. I'm like, I am not phased at all. Like last year, my flight was delayed by about four hours from the time it was supposed to leave to the time that we actually took off. And they'd come over the speaker. Sorry, the flight of all the laws delayed by. And I'm like, Okay, I hear a bunch of people around me going, uh, and I'm like, oh, I'll just charge up my Switch and play another game. There you go.

Leighton Seys: Yeah, and sometimes the attitude you bring into something determines the outcome that you're going to have about it. And whether you're driving or flying, it's the same. If you're expecting it to be awful, it's going to meet your expectations. And if you're like, ah, it'll be fine. It'll be fine. You'll be able to manage. You'll be able to make it through.

Born Again Gamer: It's like, exactly. So if you're looking around your life and you're thinking of all the negative things, you're not going to be able to list all the positive things because you're so focused on the negative. Yeah, my kids are like that.

Leighton Seys: What's really funny, you say that, and you picked red and brown. I had to look over here to find something that was brown. So this is going to sound really weird. I have a grill spatula. sitting over here but i use it in my fish tank to set up the the little items that get knocked over so i'd have to reach in so that's an old spatula i don't use so that's got a brown handle and then all of my water bottles are sitting over there on on brown uh bamboo And that's all I saw. However, I've got red on this mug. I've got red on this mug. My stream deck has red. My earbuds are red. I saw all that red, and then I've got a bottle that's red over there and a red cap. So I saw all the red, but I know what your point is, which is just funny. Yeah, if you focus on it, that's what you'll see.

Born Again Gamer: Melania says, couldn't you just get to the airport early and hang out in the lounge before your direct flight?

Leighton Seys: I can't because my local airport does not have a lounge I can hang out in. You got to fly to a bigger airport. I have to fly to another city to have a lounge to hang out in, Mel. Or, yes, that would be amazing. And I do take advantage of, like, when we were leaving Orlando. I go to the lounge before the flight, so that's nice. But my local airport does not have a lounge. They're building one, but I don't think I'll have access. I'll have to find out what card I need to get to get access there. And then Supersonic, thanks for saying hi to YWAS. So we were talking earlier about my fish. that's one of the fish he's not on this screen he's over here that is an albino placostomus that my stream named they all got to give donations and if they gave a donation they could put a name in to name the fish and we spun the wheel and the name of the fish is wywis so those that don't know that's when you wish upon a star okay nice so hey egg wife welcome in it's not egg wife That's awesome.

Born Again Gamer: I don't know if you actually know or not. I don't want to mansplain it. I don't even know if I used that term correctly, mansplain.

Leighton Seys: Oh, yeah.

Born Again Gamer: No, EG wife. EG wife. Because her husband is enigmatic Gwich'in.

Leighton Seys: Okay. So EG. Okay. Since it was not an uppercase, that's why I didn't say both E and G. Gotcha.

Born Again Gamer: Yeah, that makes sense. That's fair. That's totally fair. But I'm going to start calling her egg wife.

Leighton Seys: My mistake. I like to try to have fun when I mess up the names because my brain has a certain way of reading things. And it doesn't mean that, like, five looses, five lights. The five just look like, yeah, just a cute way to put an S in there. So I called her Sluces for I don't know how long until somebody finally corrected me.

Born Again Gamer: Well, that's confusing to me. It was confusing to me the first time I saw looses, five looses, because there's a band, I think, that's called Sluces. Oh, okay. And I think they put the first year. Which you just followed.

Leighton Seys: I don't remember if I'm remembering that wrong.

Born Again Gamer: But anyway, yeah. No, there's a guy that came into my stream quite a while back, and his username is Solomon Hungry. I thought it said Salmon. I was calling him Salmon Hungry.

Leighton Seys: Oh. Yeah, there's those things where you try to be cute and spell it a certain way, and it messes everybody up. Yeah. and then there's there's those of us who you know people can't say their name because there's too many sounds and they're supersonic saved by grace you know that people stumble over tongue twisters but it's it's all good and thanks for the follow i butcher i butcher the name and all of that and then you come in and give me a follow so thank you I know we were talking about some blessings you've had. We talked about what you're doing in person, but you also did, we did mention you have a podcast. So why don't you talk about what your podcast is, why you started it and what you're hoping that that one will do?

Born Again Gamer: Yeah. So our first iteration was just me wanting to interview people like this. It was a one-on-one thing. My first episode, I actually interviewed my wife and said like, Hey, how does, how does your, Like, what's your background? What's your background in gaming? What's your faith background? And how do you see those kind of intersecting? And we just talked about that and I interviewed her about that. And then I had a couple of other people on and did that. And then I thought, you know, this might be nice if it was me and another person talking about things a little bit more regularly instead of having to find a... guest to have on the podcast every week or month what if it was me and my friend so my the youth pastor actually that i was talking about earlier with the switch joined me and we did a podcast and we called it the bearded believers podcast because we both had beards and so we transitioned from the born again gamer podcast to the bearded believers and we would just do episodes where we just talked about kind of like what's going on in the gaming world how does that like how do we react to that with our faith like what does that you know bring up in us why does that make us feel and stuff like that and talk about new games that were out and i think we did a couple interviews on that podcast as well and then at some point it just seemed to be getting hard for us to make time to schedule with each other between his schedule and mine and it was like we wanted to do it once a month and then it was turning into once every three months and then we'd do two months in a row and then it'd be six months before we recorded the next one and it was just all over the place with our schedules because we tried to do it we tried to get together in person every single day yeah that would make it much more difficult if you're trying to do that because i set up not in this house but my previous house i had a little space and i i put up black curtains all the way around i had a couch and a table and microphones and we did this little podcast studio and uh i was like this is awesome so we got to be in person because it looks way better so we did that and uh i liked it but it was yeah this is a scheduling thing and so um at one point i said to him hey what would you think like you know we could have him on and he still wants to come on the save games podcast with us but i said what do you think of like us kind of going and having instead of just two of us have like three or four of us as like a round table. And we want to focus on actually before I mentioned it to all you guys he and i decided that we wanted to transition the name of it to the saved games podcast and start talking more about christian gaming so trying to get in contact with christian developers or just highlighting christian games that are out there which is kind of what we do now so that's that's just kind of a step up from where he and i were at so we're doing the same thing that he and i were doing but now with a panel and i think that really is nice because it helps us to get more voices and see points of view that we might not think of immediately there have been i know there have been multiple times where i've said something and somebody like sammy or nightsaber or yourself has said well actually this is how i see it and i'm like okay i never thought about it like that you know so it's really cool to see multiple perspectives on a topic when we dive into that. And I just think it's really cool to highlight people who are out there who are creating games like Soma with the red wall stuff. We highlighted that on one stream and we recently did the robot with a Ram cannon. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We did robot with a Ram cannon. That was really cool. And then we're going to have Christian Ninja on to talk to him about his community and how he got started and stuff like that.

Leighton Seys: So.

Born Again Gamer: Yeah, it's just kind of an idea that came into my head one day, and I can't help but when I have an idea to try and start it and get the ball rolling, and then I just need a little bit of help to keep it rolling, which I've gotten from all you guys. So that's been nice. But yeah, just the idea of highlighting what other people are doing, kind of like you said here with this.

Leighton Seys: Yeah, and just those that know, so it kind of got fleshed out, started last year. I think you were talking about it last year at REACH and then wanting to move into it and connected with some of us that connected with you at REACH to get that rolling. But as we went into REACH this year, and then you're talking about some of those game developers, Romans and I went to the Christian Game Developers Conference in July last year and made several connections with game developers there. and then invited them to come to reach they were at reach you got introduced to several at reach and then that led us into some of those guests on the podcast have come from that so a couple of different connections with people and bringing them on and so now that podcast we're moving into uh is it twice a month we're doing every other week i'm trying to remember the frequency we talked about we're doing twice a month twice a month so second second week and fourth week of each month for at least january and february just to see how it

Born Again Gamer: plays out and how it fleshes out. I have had it suggested to me that we possibly switch from Monday nights to Sunday nights because Monday nights are Minecraft Mondays and my Minecraft friends are a little jealous that we cut into our Minecraft time with the podcast. So that's something I haven't floated to the rest of the community there yet, but maybe I will at some point. But for now, we're going to stick with the usual Monday nights twice a month. Sorry, I keep saying every other... Twice a month, but I was going to say something. Oh, with the game, it's nice to meet people in person. Kind of gives it a little bit of a different feeling, different vibe, because I was in the Christian Game Developers Conference Discord server for like two years before... we started even doing this podcast and i chat with people about gaming and see the projects that they're working on but i forget to go into it all the time i forget to log into i'm in like 50 different discord servers and i go into my usual i go into online i go into reach i go into our youth group at our church has one and those are the ones that i check on a regular basis and then every once in a while i'll check the other ones but wish i had more time i think that's something that christian ninja does well because i think he has a time on his schedule he showed us his schedule during the taco training and there's a time on his schedule that is specifically set aside for login to discord and check messages and chat with people and you know checking your messages and things like that and i just don't have a I don't have such a schedule that I have a time set aside for that. So it's more like I'm at work and I am bored. So I open up my phone and I scan Discord for a second and I'll see a couple messages, but I don't, I'm not as intentional maybe about that as I should be.

Leighton Seys: Well, like I said, there's different ways to be intentional. One is to set time aside. The other is to what you do when you do open it up. So depending on the server, I have different expectations of how I approach things in different servers. So if it's the church digital, I need to engage in conversation when there's conversation going on. I need to... plan to initiate conversation in that one because of my role there so that is part of how i approach that one i'm in the taco discord server i will read content i might give a thumbs up that's the extent of what i do there then i've got others that are in between that it's hey i i saw something i'm going to engage around it there's some others that i'm in where i'm i'm not fully a mod in the community so my expectation isn't to be fully a mod in the community but i assist the community leadership so at times they will ask me to step in as a mod in the community can you go talk with this person because i come with a different authority but i also don't want to wave that authority around in the community So it's kind of one of those things where I have different roles and different servers that I step in. And so I will open, like, I can see over here on the side, cause I have discord up. I've got two direct messages over there that I, that are like those I'll go and make sure I'm responding to and doing, and then, and then I scroll down and I order mine for the most part of priority of, of engagement that I want. you'll i could show it to you but save games podcast is second on the list currently it's it's on the list it's number two not that there's gonna be a lot of activity i don't want to lose it in conversation so that's why that one's where it's at on the list you know mine's actually above my server on my list which is interesting but it's the same sort of thing i don't want to lose it i don't if i'm in it so infrequently right that if i moved it down the list and somebody did message in it i might not see it That's why that one's at the top position because those are really important messages I don't want to miss. Others, they're on the first page, so to speak. Everything on the first page is important. I'll look at it. Everything below that, you should direct message me because I won't be making it around unless I need to reach out to you.

Born Again Gamer: I have a love hate relationship with the little red notification number because it's like, sometimes it's somebody directly messaging me or responding to me. And other times it's just somebody typing at everyone.

Leighton Seys: And I'm like, well, just, just so you know, I just, I just, since we messaged you, this would drive some people nuts. It bothers me. Not at all. I have 9,000 unopened messages.

Born Again Gamer: Okay, so we're in a competition. We're the competition, baby. My daughter will come down here and yell at me and read me out because of my number of unread messages in Discord. I am currently at 13,155.

Leighton Seys: Well, I also did in some of the servers eliminate channels that probably had some messages that I wouldn't look at because at one point I started going through and saying, well, I won't read this channel. I'll just eliminate it. And then I decided that was too much work. I'll just not go read it anyway. Yeah, just put it in a folder. I don't like folders. You don't? Oh, no. No, I don't like folders.

Born Again Gamer: I hide them, and then I never look in them.

Leighton Seys: See, that's what would happen with a folder. I probably could take half of them down the page and put them in a folder, but no, I don't. Here's where I would use a folder. If all the people in Taco, if I was in their communities, I would make a Taco folder, put Taco in there, put everybody from Taco in there, and then I would have them all in one place. That would be where I'd use a folder, but yeah. Yeah, we got way off on a sidetrack. That was fun.

Born Again Gamer: Sonic said Alpha 3. I think he means like our third because we've done two Alpha classes. I really am. I love doing the Alpha. I think it's beneficial. I question whether I should be doing it live on stream or whether I should make it a separate Discord call. So do the whole thing. Because what we were doing the first year, we did it half and half. I would do the video on Twitch. I would put the video on replay on Twitch with an overlay that said, hey, this is a replay. We just watched this about half an hour ago. We're over in Discord right now talking about it. And we'll be back by the time the video is over to finish our stream and play some games or whatever and hang out. That seemed to work okay. ish then i thought okay the second time we did it it was actually going to be in partnership with a church near toronto this church said the guy that was working as their digital pastor reached out to me said hey you did alpha online how did it go what can we learn from you can we team up and do it together we're doing it in person from this date to this date could you do it online from that date to that date and anybody from our community who wants to do it online or can't make it for a week or something like that can tune into your stream the next night we never had anybody from their community show up and it was like kind of a bit of a bummer feeling it was like oh it didn't didn't work out yeah yeah but we did have people join us who found out about alpha for the first time and met our community and joined our community during that and still a blessing and god you know god used it for whatever purpose and plan he has for it but we did it that time i did it all on stream i didn't do discord i let people respond and chat through chat on the screen and didn't do the the live chatting with people and the small group vibe thing over in discord now i'm thinking about going the opposite direction and just doing it all on discord and not doing any part of it on on twitch so I don't know. Well, you always try to like tweak things and see what's the best trial and error.

Leighton Seys: You could do another another direction with that, too, where and I did it the same way that you did was show it on stream, engage the chat while it was going and then go over to discord to go hang out afterwards. i never got more than four people to show up in discord from my stream i might have had 20 people watching it but only four would ever make it over to discord so it's the leaving here and going over there so i had the thought of what if i opened up the voice channel and had people in a voice channel either doing that with the collab which you can do you know on stream like we're doing now but only open up voice for people to join or go over to a voice channel in discord and have that on my stream so you can join me in in voice channel over there and stream that while we're having the conversation but then i would take the approach of play the video and pause and engage play the video and pause and engage rather than just play it straight through it would but yeah i don't know if i'm going to do that or not it's a different approach

Born Again Gamer: The different alpha videos do it slightly differently, right? The adult one does the video as like a whole thing. It just goes straight, start to finish. And it does pause and show the questions, but then it shows people on screen answering it. And it doesn't really give you a break. Whereas the youth alpha stops and it says, okay, now pause your video and discuss in person. And then resume the video after you've discussed this question, which I kind of like, I've, I've thought about doing the youth one instead of the adult one, even though the majority of the people.

Leighton Seys: Do you, do you need access to the youth one? Oh no, I can get it through.

Born Again Gamer: It's free to pull from the alpha website.

Leighton Seys: Well, I probably have older versions of it too. So, okay.

Born Again Gamer: I was going to do the, I was going to, I was thinking about the second alpha that we did doing the youth one. And then we partnered with that church and they were doing the full adult one. And so we were like, well, we'll do the adult one to match up with them. But if that's not going to work out for our next one, then I might do the youth one because. I don't think it's that much lower.

Leighton Seys: It's not lower in content. It is more culturally appropriate for a person of a younger age. So they're going to connect with it better than, and some of it is just setting. If you're showing a speaker who's standing up in front of a church and that's the video, that's a whole different setting than somebody standing outside of a stadium who's doing the talk. So even just the setting, even if the script is exactly the same, it's slightly different approach in the way they do things. So it's trying to intentionally change it because an adult might need to see the person up in front who's the authority speaker. That might be what they want to have. I want the authority to tell me about this. And a younger person might think, I'm not going to believe the authority. They don't really have authority. They don't know anything. So why would I listen to them? I want a relationship. I want a relationship type of which to me, that's what I want anyway.

Born Again Gamer: Well, and I think that vibe, even if it's mostly adults watching my stream, they're here in this space, this digital space, and it's a little bit more modern, a little bit more, you know, probably along with the youth vibe. So we might try that next time.

Leighton Seys: I would definitely encourage you to look at doing the youth ones. I like them better. We did it with our youth group.

Born Again Gamer: I watched it almost at the same time as I did my last one when I was doing the adult one, the same set of weeks we were doing it at youth. So I watched Alpha twice last year at the same time, the adult and the youth.

Leighton Seys: I've done that before, have two groups going at the same time and watching the same content. It happens.

Born Again Gamer: I find every time I watch it, it's still just as good as the first time. I'm like, wow, yeah, this is so good. The stuff they're saying is so good.

Leighton Seys: Part of it, for those that don't know, just in philosophy and approach, if you're doing this in person, you have a meal, and then you have a talk, and then you have a conversation. So that talk can be in the form of a person actually giving the talk live, or it can be a video. I like the use of video because it's duplicatable. And then when I invite people to do it, they say, well, I can't get up in front and talk. You're a pastor. You can do it. I couldn't do it. So especially if you are a pastor or a church leader doing this, get the videos because it'll be duplicatable. You're not going to have to teach people how to talk. They don't have to learn the memorize or read the script. You push play. People can duplicate push play really easily. So I love the push play aspect of it. So yeah. Now to do that online, what do you replace eating with? Maybe this is a part of what I didn't do well. Yeah, I didn't do gaming first. And then let's go over and let's do alpha and then let's do conversation. I think that might be a good, I don't know if other people did it that way and did gaming with it or not, but I think that'd be a good approach.

Born Again Gamer: I did alpha first, then did the gaming afterwards, but it could probably work either way. But I think some of the others that did it before reach last year did like a stream with alpha and with gaming. Some of them, maybe they didn't, you know, actually I'm not a hundred percent sure they might've just done the alpha and then ended their stream. And I guess you could see the benefit to both.

Leighton Seys: Yeah. And, and for me, I did not do alpha at the time my normal stream was, so I didn't get all of my same community because I get a lot of lurkers who might be at work. So they weren't going to be able to engage if I went over to discord. So it was, Hey, let's do it at another time when you're not at work. Well, then they had other conflicts that came up.

Born Again Gamer: Yeah. we did i think during our first one we did eg wife was just saying i liked alpha first and then gaming and uh or waking up sonic's just waking up he says um we were playing pal world i think when we did we did alpha and then we played pal world afterwards for a little bit and then

Leighton Seys: i thought they were going to get shut down i think you could probably do both like if you if you played for an hour a half an hour just engaging the chat welcoming in talking about stuff and then all right now we're going to go do alpha and then you engage in conversation and i think you'd have to do it through either collab or discord and stay on there and then play games or go to discord and conversation and then game on discord afterwards so i think man the different ways you could continuously do things to reach people where they are and if you do it one way you're going to reach people if i do it a different way i'll reach a different group of people that's what i was just going to say yeah it can work differently for each each community is going to be slightly different right yeah Sure. Trying to think of what we haven't covered. So we talked about you getting started. We've talked about, you know, some obstacles you've overcome and we've talked about how you, you know, we didn't talk about reach much and I know we've had other people on here. We've talked about reach. What, and you did talk about some validation that reach gave you around things. What are some other things that maybe you would want somebody who's heard reach mentioned? We haven't talked much about it. What would you think they need to know? about reach and any other of the ministry conferences like we mentioned love thy nerd and what they do or nerd culture ministry summit there's a couple other things out there what would you want people to know about any of those that you've participated in

Born Again Gamer: What I really love – sorry, I'm just pumping some insulin into me here. I'm starting to feel a little high. I'm all right. Just if I looked distracted. So with any of those conferences, I loved the first conference that I – participated in was NCMS. I watched the first one live on YouTube during work hours. And like, it was just so cool to have put into words what I thought I knew in my head, but didn't know how to say.

Leighton Seys: So Jacqueline Parrish's talk. Oh my goodness, she's fantastic.

Born Again Gamer: NCMS was just like, I was like, I had exploded with like, just hearing somebody say like what i knew that like gaming wasn't bad gaming is it can be good being a creator is good where we're created in the image of our creator and so we are going to create and we're going to be imaginative and we're going to want to play and and connect through play and gaming and stuff like that and just i just i just can't hear that enough times you know what i mean like some people might be like oh i've heard that talk before it's you know fine i heard it i don't need to hear it again i'm like no i want to hear it again and again and again again but maybe in different ways so that's why i love like going to reach and hearing from you know the first year we heard from susie and pre pony and mark whitaker and cameron arnett and if i forget somebody catherine lidstone and all of them about their journey through a creative process and how their faith you know carried them through it or how they came to faith during it or various things like that and how we shouldn't feel i loved so cameron arnett if you guys don't know he's in that movie the forge and and a few other uh christian films and he was in kind of this i guess you would call it the secular acting world for years before that but he made a leap into doing i think he primarily does christian movies and things now But he was in the forge and he was telling us at the start of his talk, I'm going to try and paraphrase it to shorten it up. But he started to say, OK, guys, I need your help. You're all gamers. Yes. And I have an idea for a game. He's like, this game is about a group of people.

Leighton Seys: It was fantastic.

Born Again Gamer: Almost as soon as he started talking, I was like, I know what he's doing right now, and this is incredible. It's so cool. He's like, there's this group of people, and they come to Earth, and they are trapped inside these human bodies, and these human bodies make them believe that they can't do amazing things, but they have this power inside of them that they need to learn to harness. And I was like, dude, this is so cool. And then he finally, he was like, okay, some of you know what I'm doing. I'm not really working on a game. I'm talking about us. We are spiritual beings. We live in fleshly bodies and we live in this world, but we're not from this world. We're spiritual beings and we have the power of God with us, as it mentions in the Bible, the same power that raised Christ from the dead, right? So I just love hearing stuff like that. I know that you can watch videos like that online, like I did the first year with NCMS. You can watch them and you can listen to podcasts. And I love listening to those things too. I love listening to the NCMS podcast and Church Digital and ours and various different things. and getting that but getting together in person with people being in a room when people cheer for something that somebody says or something that somebody does getting to the first year when we did our worship time and i was like you know somebody chichi was doing worship and he's like if you need prayer for something if you're feeling like you know you need prayer just like raise your hand and i raised my hand and i think it was uh, underrated Zane and B Gilbert came over and put their hands on my shoulder and prayed with me. And at the last one, I got to pray with somebody else at, at the recent reach conference during the worship time. And, uh, it's just really cool to be in a place where you're connecting with other people who are of this, of a similar mindset. There's there's times in our world where we need to get out there and connect with people who are not of a similar mindset, but it's nice to, to recharge and connect and be with your community and. and just be there and laugh and cry together and do all those things together.

Leighton Seys: Yeah. I was a little bit distracted when you were mentioning Jacqueline Parrish. I was just looking up her book, which is really weird because I pull it up and it says August 20, 2030. So the book isn't out yet, apparently, but it is out. It's like weird. Anyway, it's all in good fun. a theology of fun and why christians should have more of it so yeah i have not got it yet either i thought it was supposed to be coming out this past fall so it should should be out like i'll have to go look this up later but that's the title of it you should be able to find it so yeah writing a theology of fun and the fact that god created us to enjoy creation and to enjoy things that's part like God saw everything that was created and it was good. And, you know, so there's those aspects of it that we sometimes are told that things that are just fun are not of value. You have to have, and we were having a little bit of this conversation earlier of, well, what are the numbers and what does growth actually mean? Why do we need to think growth always means more numbers? Sometimes growth doesn't mean more numbers. If I want a forest, it doesn't mean I need more trees. It means I need more mature trees. That's how I have a healthy forest is to have a mixture of mature trees and young saplings. Just having more saplings isn't a forest. And half of those are going to, you know, like it's just not going to be good. And if it's all dead trees, it's no good either. So you need to have, you know, a whole variety of things when you're doing stuff. Yeah.

Born Again Gamer: I'm actually clipping it.

Leighton Seys: I need to get better with clipping. That's the thing I'm not good at is somebody. Well, I actually, I just put it on my stream deck so I can just push a button and get a clip. So I need to just remember it's there more often and push the button.

Born Again Gamer: Well, I like in the so I'm I'm watching your stream just on the viewer side. On the streamer side, there's a button that just says clip and it just take it instantly takes a second clip. And so I do hit that quite regularly. But on the watcher side, you have to hit it. Oh, I know. Give it a name. Yeah, I know.

Leighton Seys: It's it's it's more it's more annoying on the on the watcher side. Well, the other thing, too, is, yeah, I could. But that's not another. screen over here i'd have to leave the conversation to go get a clip with uh with with all of that stuff but so you mentioned a couple of different people and their talks and the impact and the resonating and the learning and all of those but yeah there is there is something beautiful of bringing us together because while i might know of 200 christian streamers it's totally different to have 200 christian streamers in the same room together Uh, and, and yeah, I, and this is for me, most of the time, the, the person that who's on stage, the speaker, I can get that content later. And I usually do, cause I've just gone to, I am going to have conversations with people that are here. Anything that's recorded. I can, I can get later on. I can do that. What I can't necessarily reproduce. is a spontaneous conversation that i start with one person somebody else joins who overhears us or comes in to talk with me or the other person i'm talking with i think we had a couple of those when we gathered together with those of us who's been on the podcast and then somebody jumped in and suddenly our conversation was in a different direction of what was going on Those of us who are on the podcast hadn't been together in the same space before to have us do a photo of people who've been on the Save Games podcast. We didn't have everybody, but it was a collection of us who, well, we hadn't been together before all in the same space and got to be able to do that was a lot of fun.

UNKNOWN: Yeah.

Born Again Gamer: Yeah, it was really cool. One of the other things I've been working on was, and actually I need to hunker down. Like I said, I love to start projects. Finishing projects is a completely other story. But Christian Ninja has a book, The Art of Digital.

Narrator/Announcer: What is it?

Born Again Gamer: Art of Digital. Influencer. Influencer, yeah. I started recording the audio book version of that for him. I just reached out to him one day. He shared, he shared a chapter of it with the go game group, uh, that is like partly run by seven admirals and, and satellite gaming it is another organization but jamie and adam oversee the the gaming side of it for them so i kind of i always connect satellite gaming with go game for some reason even though they're not necessarily right right Anyway, off on a tangent, he shared a chapter of the book with that group, I believe it was. And so I downloaded it and I read it and I was like, oh, this is really cool. And then one of the conversations that we had on there was about the way that people absorb information. So some people absorb information better watching YouTube videos. Some people would rather read an article. Some people would rather have an audio book. And I heard that and I went, oh, audio book. I was like, okay. So I sat down, I recorded the audio of me reading that chapter. I sent it to him and just said, Hey, would you like me to do this? I'm not asking to do it for money. I'm not, I just, I think it would be a cool thing to try for me. I think it would be cool for you to have it, to share with people and you know, what do you think? And he was like, yeah, that's awesome. So I started it. I'm about halfway through. it's been almost a year and i really if i actually had time to sit down and hunker down i could finish it in a couple of days but i just find i get so distracted i have to have the house quiet yeah i can't sit here and try and do it with four kids screaming in the next room so it's it's sometimes it's hard but yeah it's been a really cool thing too

Leighton Seys: Not the most ideal way to do this, but I just had the thought of what if you just did it during stream? Like you took one day a month or one day every other week in your normal streaming and say, hey, we're going to do this. I'm not going to engage chat. I'm going to do this reading so that I've got it done. I'm going to do a chapter and then we'll move on to whatever else we're doing. But I want to get this done. And then your community would also be able to benefit from the content that you're giving them.

Born Again Gamer: I did that actually with the podcast. So at the same time as we were doing the audio book, I was helping him with the taco talks podcast. So what he would do is he would do his stream on Tuesdays and record about a half an hour, a little talk. Then he would highlight it. I would go and download the highlight clip from him, put it into audacity for audio editing. Then I would listen to it. I would think about it, kind of think about my response to it and what I think about it. I would do a little opening. three minute four minute thing i would do a little closing three minute four minute thing attach it upload it send it back to him with an audio intro and stuff like that that we worked on and then there was times where i was getting behind on those so i was like oh i gotta do this on stream so i'd be like hey tonight's stream we're working on the taco talks podcast no sound alerts nothing so that nothing interferes with the recording right Yeah, I would do that. So I guess, I guess I could do that. It's just that it takes me to record a full chapter. It takes a little over an hour trying to stream and talk with people. It would take two or three hours and then that would be the, it would be the whole night and it might just feel, I might feel really tired afterwards. I don't know. It's a lot of talking too. I'm constantly drinking water. Like I should be during a regular stream. when I'm recording the audio book, I'm like taking a drink, like every other sentence.

Leighton Seys: Yeah. Yeah. I get that. I was just, you know, and I'm not that I hadn't thought you'd thought about that or, or, or looked into it, but I was more a matter of how to work it into what you're already doing.

Born Again Gamer: I'm already doing. Yeah. So I'm not taking other days away from family. Right.

Leighton Seys: So you're not taking more time away, but you are gift. And like I said, in some ways it would be giving to your community so that what you could do is pick a length of time. I'm going to read for 15 minutes. and then we'll engage this if you did that once a week you'd still get a lot further and closer to being done i am right now than you are right now so uh that's the thing i've been trying to to figure out for a while is how do i intentionally use my stream for creating shorts and reels and like there's times like i can i've had several times i actually was doing shorts and reels before it was a thing i was doing shorts and reels when covet started to encourage my congregation and do those so i'm doing one minute to three minute to five minute things they weren't even out yet and i was just posting those on youtube and Facebook so people could go and watch those and doing two or three of those a week. And I've had other times after that that I did do shorts and reels and I'll be fine. I can do one every week or twice a week for six months. Suddenly I stop and I have no inspiration and I can't do it again. And it's like. how do I turn that back on? How do I do the things I'm already doing and intentionally use those? And I've done those for other organizations beside my own stuff. And I'll go for a while. All of a sudden it's like, nope, I ran out of ideas. I ran out of things to say. I'm dry. I got nothing. I got nothing. My tank is empty.

Born Again Gamer: hear you there's a guy uh texas t he likes to play apex and some other shooter games and he would stream for like two hours and then the last hour of his stream he'd work on clips from that stream and i was like that's a that's a great idea i just don't know if i if i would get distracted enough that i would not even finish the clips i might just end up talking for the last hour and not get them done and i don't know it's tough

Leighton Seys: That's an interesting thought that you say that I have not thought about that because it wouldn't work for me every day, but some days it would to be able to just go, well, like today I got done with my stream and the next thing I did was working on clips because I'm starting to try to take reading in the Bible. I changed my format of how I'm doing it so that I can intentionally this coming year. do clips of reading the entire bible normally i read and i interrupt myself and we go sidetrack we get a verse or a word in and we're we're doing side things like no i'm going to read a whole chapter and then we can have our conversation afterwards so it's totally shifting format to make it so i can highlight make clips publish those and do those but then it makes it i have to do it daily I could do that. Well, no, I couldn't because I have to, well, I guess I'd have to start this, stop the stream and start it. Cause I have to go have it accessible.

Born Again Gamer: So I could do the, I think you can go back. Somebody told me, I think you can go back and do clips. If you pull up the stream on a second screen. uh okay well otherwise i could do it a day late you know would be a way to do yeah that's what i was i i had this list that my pastor my youth pastor made up and gave out to the youth group and it was like the 40 attributes of god i might have it here on the shelf beside me and i got about 10 into it and then i got distracted and never finished it yeah it was uh who am i in christ and so it was like you know just read a couple of them quick just to give you an idea but it was like created in god's image promised rest. I am chosen and not rejected. It goes on and on and on. Forgiven and redeemed and all this stuff. And each one of them had a couple Bible verses beside it. So I said, okay, we're going to do a series where on stream for our halfway time Bible study type thing, I'm going to read those verses and I'll do a really quick chat because I needed it to be under a minute and a half because you can only clip a minute and a half on... on twitch because i wanted to upload it straight from twitch to tick tock instagram yeah and youtube um and it was such a challenge to sometimes condense that down into a minute and a half and talk really fast and be like that's who you are in god and then upload it you know it's like now i guess i could just highlight four minutes and and grab that and upload that to youtube or twitch or The different sites now, they all support longer video things than you can quit.

Leighton Seys: Well, supporting it and promoting it are not the same.

Born Again Gamer: Yes, yeah.

Leighton Seys: So just because you can do a three-minute, I can never get correct who's reels and who's shorts, but if you do a three-minute video on YouTube... It's not going to get fed by the algorithm the same way a 60 second one is where people watch the whole thing. As soon as you make it longer and people don't stay to the end. So it still may not be the most advantageous thing for trying to compete there. But if you're going to the long end of it, five minutes. of good content that's teaching something versus 10 or 20 minutes, you might get more views and more.

Born Again Gamer: Yeah, if it's not a short, if it's not a real or short, if it's a landscape mode video on your Facebook or YouTube or whatever channel, yeah. Yeah, that's true. I might have to finish that list someday.

Leighton Seys: Yeah, well, we are and this will come out in the new year on the podcast and we're relaunching. So this is the new iteration control at redeem before that generic name that was just the the the gaming outpost podcast from the church digital. Like it was it didn't say who we were trying to reach. It didn't do any of those things. But as we're going to the new year, are there some hopes and dreams? Cause we've talked about some of those things that you had in the past. Are there some hopes and dreams for what you will be able to do or how God might use you in the next year, the year ahead as you're looking forward?

Born Again Gamer: Yeah, I would just love to make more connections with like the churches and the congregations in our town. Cause I, I find, I don't know if I'm being too, uh, you know, comparing myself too much with, with what they say about like Jesus in the Bible, where he wasn't accepted in his own hometown. I find it hard to reach out to my own home church about this gaming stuff, because I still have that a little bit of that imposter syndrome. And somebody else told me that that never really goes away. You've always kind of got it. And so I wrestle with that sometimes, but like reaching out and being like, Hey, we're doing these events and we would really love to have your support. I almost wonder if I would find it easier reaching out to other churches and their congregations. And we have so many of them. And I just feel like there must be gamers within those congregations. There's most certainly children, and most children nowadays are gamers in some capacity. So my hope for next year would be that... you know, on the side of like registering as charity or nonprofit or whatever, and incorporating and all that stuff that, that gives us more opportunities to, to reach out and just do more in-person events and things, to reach more people, to, you know, just, just build more relationships and, and keep pushing this thing forward and, and make a bigger impact.

Leighton Seys: Yeah. For families and stuff. And there might be something around forming your own nonprofit that gives legitimacy to churches to say, hey, you're legitimate in what you're doing. But there also could be a way of partnering with others. I'm just thinking for anybody who's listening, because the answer is not always to go start a nonprofit. Sometimes it is a correct answer. So, you know, you had to weigh all of those things. But it's also a bit of effort and time consuming. And then. ongoing responsibilities and those kinds of things. But that also is good from the standpoint of accountability and the standpoint of being able to solicit funding. So there's the both end of doing those things and being able to move forwards.

Born Again Gamer: My wife has a few times, my wife has said, why do you want to start your own? Why don't you just go and find one that exists? and go under their umbrella and i i say like i kind of wrestle back and forth with like yeah we probably could but at the same time I know that if I build this thing, if I start this thing, that the heart of it is going to be for what we're doing and not just a side thing that people might not care about. Because I have heard from some others where they took their ideas and they went and they joined another nonprofit or charity and kind of fell by the wayside and didn't get all the support they thought they might get. to sometimes that's just maybe that person's perception of what happened or right who knows but well and there's a i just always wonder like will we get get more traction or more of the heart of the idea, staying with it if we start our own. I don't know.

Leighton Seys: Well, yeah, and then you've got autonomy to do what you want that you're kind of addressing there, or, no, this doesn't quite fit our vision. You thought you could come in and do that, but now you're getting pulled away from your vision that God's given you. So I totally understand all of those things. Plus, if you're trying to have a vision and a heart for the local community and the local churches, then having a local ministry is going to be more advantageous. And if you also start your own nonprofit, it is probably true as much in Canada as in the U.S., it's going to be easier to go to a school if you're a nonprofit than if you're a church. I mean, there's some places where being a church, going to schools is fine in the U.S. It's not every place. It doesn't open doors and sometimes it shuts doors for you. In fact, I know within an hour drive of myself that the school district there will not allow any religious affiliation to use their building for any purposes whatsoever. They are that anti towards it. And we actually, it was a church I was working with, they were actually interested in buying the church building. They were going to use the church building. And they were going to allow a church plant to be in that former church building. This should be in the school district. And I thought this is an amazing opportunity that God has opened the doors to get into this school district that is this anti-religion and anti-Christ. And the people who were voting yes or no on selling the property were like, we can't allow the school to have property. We've got to have this property. It's got to stay in the kingdom. And I'm like... God's opening a door to go into a place that's hostile to the gospel, that we could go in and we could prove that we are worthwhile and we could open the door. Well, they're only guaranteeing we'll be able to be there for three to five years, and then they'll reassess it. so we have three to five years to prove that we're responsible reliable and that we are the body of christ that's going to love on them why would we say no to that but my voice wasn't heard loudly enough that uh the vote went my way it went the other way and i was i'm still disappointed by that yeah yeah i hear you i've got similar things where i was on a church board and

Born Again Gamer: you know, put forth an idea or an idea was put forth to us. And I was like, guys, this is an opportunity. And it's like, yeah, but it's kind of a risk. And it's like, yeah, that's what opportunities are sometimes. It was like, okay, well, I'm the youngest person here and my vote wasn't as weighty as the rest. But at the same time, they're also the same church board who I floated my first couple of in-person events by and used the church building and they were very supportive of it. So, you know, you win some, you lose some. Yeah.

Leighton Seys: Oh, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I still hope that, you know, some good comes out of that. But it wasn't what the opportunity that I thought would never come along and was there. And then it was like, no, we're not interested in that. Like, yeah. So you're more interested in the kingdom of God owning property than in the kingdom of God influencing young young people. Well, you know, we're not going to solve all of the problems. We're just going to work on the gaming problems and try to solve that and help, you know, reset people's thinking around it. You know, we've mentioned a few different people that are doing it, organizations that are doing it. I love being connected. And then I love, too, like, I don't think a lot of people think about this entirely, but the global aspects of it. We don't always, as Americans, think about Canada being global because, well... frankly for me i've been to canada so many times and it's right across the border from my state that that like i would say before covet i was probably every year uh you know going across the border and hanging out after covet not as many times but that used to be a part of what we did we would go across the border we would go and do those things so we don't always think of you as far away but there are cultural differences and there are global impact of having people who are in canada help us as americans in the space think about things because you bring a different perspective you bring a more international flavor to to what's going on thinking about things so are there any things that you can think about on the global aspect of doing ministry because we've been focused a little bit on the local community for you are there some other global things that you are thinking about maybe having some impact or hope to have impact i do love the the aspect that we aren't you know

Born Again Gamer: we aren't stopped by physical borders when we're doing the online stream. So at the same time as I want to do more in-person events, I don't want to, I've, I've been asked before, like, okay, so when you go into ministry, you're just going to do the in-person stuff and you won't stream. And I'm like, no, I still want to stream may not be the, you know, it's not going to be necessarily the source of income and it's not going to be the, the main thing, but at the same time, it still gives us this connected community. Like we saw like EG wife and enigmatic witch and, they're they're up in alaska and they tune in to almost every stream of mine and they've been a part of our community for a couple years now and it's just so cool that like they're so far away and they're able to join in as your penguin is on a different a much different time zone oh yeah as your penguin yeah he came into our stream quite a few years ago and and was watching quite a few streams and he bought me the dlc for the zelda breath of the wild because i was like he's like have you played it and i was like no and i was like i don't know if it's worth the money i don't know if i can afford to buy it he's like well if i buy it for you will you play it i was like of course i will so he bought it and i was like wow this is really cool like just the the aspect that there's so many of us and then with go game you see so many of them too there's people doing ministry in egypt and brazil and in different places like that and just being able to connect with all of them through these through discord through streams through podcasts and all of the different uh all the different things that we have the opportunity to do it's just such a cool blessing that god has given us to be a part of this scene this um trying to think of the right word, this movement of online ministry and digital ministry.

Leighton Seys: Yeah, I definitely see it as a movement. I definitely see it as pioneering. There's a level at which looking at the... church church planting world and the language they use which i think is applicable in this space as well is getting to a saturation point of having 16 so in order to actually make a movement in the church we would need 16 of all churches to be planting a new church every year that's when we would get to the point of doing that i think on some level we could probably take a similar number of saying when we get to the point that there are 16 of the streamers who are on twitch are christians and intentionally christian on their channel doesn't mean their content is oh i'm going to preach the gospel but it is it is family friendly christian community christian relationships that are being developed on stream and in discord we're going to see a massive impact. And we're all in the phase of the Holy Spirit moving so many people into that space, trying to experiment in ways to do it right, learning from one another, sharing. It's just so fascinating to be a part of it. And then, like, we're talking about we've got people on this call, not outing anybody, but we've got people from New York State who are here, people from Alaska who are here, a person from Colorado who was here earlier, some people that are probably popping in globally as well. Oh, that's one of my favorite stats to look at is how many people in my stream were overseas and what countries were they in. And then... i don't even know some of those people that show up in my stream because they've never said anything in chat because they're in closed countries or maybe english is a second language so i will get people from the middle east that those countries will show up every once in a while for a while they'll be at like two or three percent which means they're set more than one person watching from those countries and uh they'll be regulars and i have no idea who they are because i think they just watch and they don't chat I think they're either unable to easily engage in the conversation because English second language, or they don't want to out themselves from where they are watching.

Born Again Gamer: Yeah. Restrict, like Supersonic says, what do you mean closed countries? Like we would. We would call them ran countries, I've heard of, restricted access nations, where the Bible, the country as a general rule or as an official rule is officially opposed to Christianity. And so if you were to make it known that you were a Christian or you were preaching the gospel, you could be...

Leighton Seys: you know jailed or punished or deported or sent home or whatever right yeah where where as a missionary those countries don't allow you to come into the country openly as a missionary or they have strict rules against converting to another faith so there's there's different ways to identify closed and different levels of closed but some some would even go the extent of outright persecution that happens in some too we're not even considering that it's just the social ostracization the governmental enforcement of things that family you know family turns you away and you're you're kind of left on your own things like that yeah yeah and the ability to watch a guy on a streaming platform talk about Jesus and the government is not worried about it because it's a streaming platform for taking and watching gaming content

Born Again Gamer: Yeah, it's really cool that we've all found this space and that it's been doing what it's been doing, and it's really cool to see where it's going to go and how it's going to... Yeah.

Leighton Seys: EG Wife saying, I prayed for a community to grow closer to Jesus, and that night I found Born on YouTube, and he told me of Twitch and other Christian streamers.

Born Again Gamer: That's so fantastic.

Leighton Seys: Yeah.

Born Again Gamer: One of my other, there's a lot of stories like that. And when I was earlier, I was like, how many of these stories can I tell?

Leighton Seys: If you've got another story, go ahead and drop the story. I love stories. I love those things because I think people need to know the impact that we are having, either for people lost and lonely, seeking God, who have church issues and why they can't go there, or people who are lost and lonely, have never found God or Christ, and we can reach them. And hey, Katie Bug, welcome in.

Born Again Gamer: Yeah, well, yeah, AGYF, Dougie, who I was talking about with Alpha, who joined us and gave his life to the Lord, and Kendra is another one who found us and watches with us and struggles with... you know, sometimes feeling alone and not having her own community has, they have spaces where they can come and be with us and talk about life and say, Hey, I'm struggling with this and we can pray with them. And it's really cool to pray with people and then hear like a couple of days later, Hey, you prayed with me about this thing. Yeah.

Leighton Seys: Yeah.

Born Again Gamer: You know, God actually did something and it's like, yes. Awesome. Great. Let's, you know, let's keep going.

Leighton Seys: You know what, that is a really great point to make there, because I think sometimes we don't really value, like if you're in the church, you get so used to prayer and praying and hearing answers to prayer, and sometimes you pray for a long time and those kinds of things. But I think one of the things I've noticed over the years is we're not really good at celebrating answers to prayer. Like we will pray for someone for months and months and months. Their prayer is answered and we say it one time and we're done thanking God for it and we're no longer sharing it publicly. On stream... We get the person that comes back and is excited about it. And then when someone else shares a prayer request, they will share, hey, God answered my prayer when he did this. And they'll share again when God did this. And so we get to keep, I don't want to say recycling, but we get to keep retelling. that God has been faithful and God has been good. So when someone comes in and that day they answer a prayer, which I've seen on stream, or the next day or the next week, and yeah, there's still those ones that, like Paul, I prayed three times and the answer was it didn't happen. No, I kept bringing it to God and it was a no answer. It wasn't a moving forward or we're... like like the one i love to tell um is um about and this is not a stream one but just an overall how do we sometimes persist in prayer is ralph and beulah got married and they wanted someone to be a missionary or a pastor in the family so they prayed to god every night that they were married for someone in the family to grow up and be a pastor or a missionary and their kids were born, and none of them were, and their grandkids were born, and none of them were, and their great-grandkids were born, and I married one of them. And when I said, I'm going to go to seminary, I had met Ralph. He'd already passed away. Beulah had never told anyone in the family this. and as soon as she heard i was going to seminary she said god has answered our prayer and that's when we knew the story that they had been praying every night when they went to bed for someone in the family and she claimed it to be me which boy there's a there's a whole bunch of wow that that explains that explains a whole bunch of why i didn't end up in really bad spaces when i could have made a wrong turn and then she got really ill while i was in seminary And she passed away within a month of me graduating. So she didn't actually get to hear, you know, I had a church, but she got to hear my completion of graduation and celebrate that fullness of the answer. Not only just they saw the promised land and I know who it was, but I equate it to kind of Anna who gets the promise that I get to see. that this is the one who will be fulfilling it. She got that promise. She got to live all the way through it. She didn't get to ever hear me preach, but she got to be a part of it. So that's another example of it, but it's just like, that's the power that happens so often in streams of people asking for prayer, of people getting answers to prayer, that you don't have to wait to Sunday to pray with people. You don't have to send an email and not hear a person pray. You get to hear a person pray. You get to see the people in the chat do that. We do that in the Discord community, too. Some pretty cool prayers I've seen happen in Discord community.

Born Again Gamer: Yeah. It's like we've got people that we've been praying for for, like, we're going on five years now. We've been praying for this person. They're on the list. We've been praying for them. And I don't know, you know, always I don't get a chance to ask them about it because maybe they're not Christian and I'm just praying for them on the side and they don't know. And there's some that I have told, but I don't want to like keep throwing it in their face, I guess. And so it's like, God, I hope you're doing something, you know, whether that person gets healed or whether just the influence of the prayer in their life leads them to meet Christ. and uh one day make a decision to follow him i don't know but just keep praying and just try to be faithful and trust him with it and uh you know not get not get tired and not give up and get discouraged oh yeah yeah do not do not grow weary in doing good and

Leighton Seys: There's a lot of aspects of which what do you focus on can cause you to feel weary about things, as opposed to, that's why I was saying, I think at times we don't do enough to celebrate what God has already done and repeatedly celebrate what God has already done, while at times it feels like maybe nothing is happening.

UNKNOWN: Yeah.

Born Again Gamer: It's funny you mentioned the celebration thing, because I've always wanted to like, when somebody comes in and says, hey, I recently made a decision to follow Christ. I'm like, let's door dash them a cake. Like, let's have a party. There's a party going on up in heaven. Why don't we have a party down here?

Leighton Seys: It's a cool idea. Door dash them something to just kind of like, hey, that's awesome. Now you say that, and this year, we're still this year, but those will come out next year for those watching or listening to the VOD. I had a Muslim in Spain that I got to be an influence to who hung around for, I want to say about four to five weeks and then disappeared and then came back like two to three months later and said, Hey, I got baptized on Sunday. So that was like, I don't know how I would have door dashed them in Spain, but you know, I would have figured it would have been a find a way to do that. It would have been, it would have been really cool.

Born Again Gamer: Another story that I, so we had somebody join our community two or three years ago and they mentioned that they were struggling with, they decided that they weren't born to the right gender body, right? To put that lightly, I guess. And so they were identifying, you know, I don't know, I'm going to use random names because I can't even remember the real name, unfortunately. Steve, we were born in Steve and currently is identifying as Rachel or something like that, right? we're like okay welcome to our community we love you god loves you and they're like well can i can i do this and still be a christian can i and so like we talked about it a little bit and they were there for a few streams and then they disappeared like you said they're just i know i didn't see them again and then like two years later fairly recently last six months to a year one of my moderators said hey by the way i saw rachel in somebody else's stream and they're now re-identifying as steve again decided to make a commitment to follow the lord and and you know give up that that previous lifestyle it's just like that's so cool to hear because we were praying for that person they're they're still on my prayer request list that as they're journeying in their walk with christ that wise people would come alongside them and encourage them and point them towards the words of christ in the bible and um It's just really cool when you see that happen, like you get to be there and watch it.

Leighton Seys: And I think there's an important piece to add in there, regardless of what your view is on how to interpret Scripture around all of that stuff. And I'm not telling you how to, but our first response should be to love that person right where they are and allow the work of the Holy Spirit to be what is going to bring about the life that they are going to have in Christ. And I think we get to some hot-button issues like that, and we forget that people are created in the image of God. And because they're created in the image of God, if they never come to Christ and if they never change, they are still worthy of my love because they're already been a recipient of God's love. And so no matter what the issue is, I just want to take the opportunity to kind of say that. And whether people agree or disagree with where you are and what you did, to me that doesn't matter. What matters is... That person has created the image of God and every gamer has created the image of God. And we want to reach as many of them as we can, that God will give us a blessing of being at salt and light to them in a place that sometimes you can get really talking.

Born Again Gamer: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It can be so easy to get distracted with, you know, am I going to offend somebody? Am I going to offend this person? Am I going to offend somebody in my own community if I respond the wrong way to this conversation? get so focused on that and worried about that that we forget the main thing of just love them and show them jesus right yeah

Leighton Seys: Yeah, that's one of those things where, yeah, people can choose to not associate with me and not hang out on my channel because I said something that they disagreed with, and that's okay. And sometimes God will change their mind on it. Sometimes He'll change my mind on it, depending on what it is. But as long as we take the approach to love one another and to keep that at the heart of what we're doing, I think that is how we're going to change the world, not by proving that Jesus was the Son of God. That's not what some people need. They need to...

UNKNOWN: Yeah.

Leighton Seys: The church. Yeah. Anything that we haven't talked about that you'd like to say before we wrap everything up?

Born Again Gamer: Oh man. Like, I feel like we've covered everything, but guaranteed we'll hang up and then we'll go, Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Of course.

Leighton Seys: Always.

Born Again Gamer: I don't know if we'd have enough to fill a part. We'll just mention it on the save game podcast when we get around to our next episode. But no, I can't, I can't really think of anything. major that we haven't covered um like you you would ask like what are some of the things i'd love to have happen in the next years just like it would be really cool to see more people in our community be discipled into stepping into almost leadership roles, moderators, or helping with organizing podcasts or helping with, you know, doing clips or streams or events and things like that. Getting more people actually in person too to help with our in-person events and getting people on board who are passionate about it, who see the value in those things. And just, yeah, if anybody's out there praying for us, that you could pray for that stuff that we just... find like-minded people who are passionate and want to see people reached for god and see families strengthen that's like one of the main things i try to push when i talk about our in-person events is that i want to see families come out of it feeling encouraged and hopeful and strengthened rather than feeling like oh man i'm doing a terrible job or there's no hope in this and it's you know all gloom and doom we just want to see people feeling joyful and feeling encouraged and

Leighton Seys: Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I think that's that's it is we want to strengthen relationships that people have. We nobody should feel lost and lonely. I mean, nobody should. And I am not the person that's going to reach everybody that's lost and lonely. Like my approach to things, my personality. Like some people need a more low key person than me to be the person to hang out with. I'm quite boisterous. I'm opinionated. I'll tell you a whole bunch of stuff and I'll poke fun of myself and all of those things. It's like, that's not how to reach everybody. But there's somebody out there that you reach that I don't. And there's somebody out there that Supersonic is going to reach that we don't. And there's relationships that can build off a stream as well. And I'm just so excited to be a part of this. And I love seeing what you're doing. Yeah, definitely be praying that God will bring along those like-minded people who give you guidance around the nonprofit and moving forward with that. And I know being in Canada, that's a whole different thing than being in the U.S. So any thoughts and opinions I would give you may not be fully what you need to know, but I've gone through that work and I know it can be hard and it can be sometimes expensive to do that too.

Born Again Gamer: Yeah, I appreciate that. Absolutely.

Leighton Seys: So I normally, you know, if we're both streaming, we'll do a double raid over to somebody. But I do like asking whoever the streamer is, do they have somebody to suggest that we could go and raid out to? So if you want to pull up and look if there's somebody that we can go and bless with a raid.

Born Again Gamer: Christian Ninja looks like he's streaming right now. That's my things out of.

Leighton Seys: Let me scroll down and see if he's, yep, he is. He's got about eight viewers that says, how will you celebrate the New Year's Eve? Expedition 33, which I had been playing recently. So let's go over and let's rate him for sure. Nice. Well, thank you. Thank you for being on the podcast. I know you posted some questions there. I wasn't sure the context starting with that supersonic. So it's a lot of questions. There's a lot of questions. So we're not going to, we're not going to get, we're not going to get to that today. You'll have to DM us if you've got more questions on that. But thank you for hanging out here, everybody. Those of you who are listening to this and you made it all the way to the end. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Congratulations. You never know where the conversation is going to end up, where the twists and turns are going to take us, but we're just trusting that God is doing something in and through you who are listening it, or you need to hear this to share with someone else, or you got encouraged by knowing that God is in this space, and maybe you care about the people in the space, and you don't know how to reach them. or maybe you're a person that wants to be participating in this so just be praying that we can absolutely reset the culture and we can redeem the space and uh if you join us in that that would be awesome uh i will be putting the credits up here which has the next podcast that are coming up and the next podcast i believe is actually katie bug let me just scroll here a second Yes, Katie Bug will be on Thursday, January 8th at 7 p.m. EST. So if you're listening to this in the bod later, you probably missed the live, but that'll be coming down after this podcast. And then Elaine Light will be on January 14th. Chemisphere is on January 21st. And Red Fire X Trevor, January 28th. I have guys. Yeah, the name. I love the change thing, and I play that game a little bit, too. So this is the current iteration of the Twitch stream, but the Discord server handles change a little bit easier. Yeah, you might find me in one channel or two as Cosplay Dapper Pastor instead of Flat Cap Dapper Pastor. All right. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Let me throw the credits on the screen so you can see all of those, and we will see you next time.

Born Again Gamer: See you on the other side of the road.