Judah Smith Podcast Free Download

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Stream #282 Is Pastor Judah Smith Gay Affirming? Is BadChristian Podcast? By The BadChristian Podcast from desktop or your mobile device. Messages from Judah Smith, Lead Pastor at Churchome. For more information, visit us online at churchome.org. Start typing and press Enter to search ­ February 23, 2019 202-380-9605 hello@christianpodcastnetwork.com. Nov 22, 2013 - Podcasts are amazing and FREE! Todd Cook – Sagebrush Community Church in New Mexico; Judah Smith – The City. FREE DOWNLOAD. Listen to Churchome with Judah Smith podcast by Churchome. More than 1 million top podcasts for free on mytuner-radio.com.

What's in this session?

  • The DM (0:45)
  • About Churchome (1:26)
  • #1: A church app?? (2:19)
  • #2: Judah got ratio'd (2:58)
  • #3: Community is a core goal (5:04)
  • #4: This can be good for the disenfranchised (5:34)
  • #5: Oversimplified two camps of church (7:34)
  • #6: I'm okay with trying different things (9:37)

Show notes and resources

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The Transcript

Brady Shearer: Churchome, the popular Seattle-based church founded by Judah Smith, has launched a brand new campus, not in Nashville, not in Toronto, and not in Boston. So where? The palm of your hand. That’s right. Instead of launching a physical campus, Churchome launched a digital campus. And to put it lightly, a lot of people think it’s a bad idea. So in this podcast, we’ll explain what exactly Churchome Global is, its flaws and triumphs, and what it all means for the future of how we do church.

Alex Mills: Well hey there and welcome to Pro Church Tools, the show where in ten minutes or less you’re gonna get a dose of tips and tactics to help your church share the message of Jesus while we navigate the biggest communication shift in 500 years. I’m your host, Alex Mills, joined as ever by the boss man, Brady Shearer.

Brady Shearer: Alex, not too long ago, I received a DM on Instagram from a person in Pro Church Nation, and they had a curious question. They were asking me, “Do you know Judah Smith and Churchome?” And I said yes. And this person said, “What’s interesting is that Churchome has literally never posted on their Instagram account.” And I thought it was kind of bizarre because this is a very influential and resource backed church. They are young. Why aren’t they engaging on social? So what I said to this person is, I said, “There’s something probably to this. Pay attention. I wouldn’t be surprised. They’re coming up on their one year anniversary pretty soon, that something’s coming.” And just this past week, it was revealed what that thing that’s coming is.

Brady Shearer: So if you’re unfamiliar, Judah Smith, he’s a lead pastor of formerly the city church, became lead pastor in 2009, they recently rebranded as Churchome, and they have released last week what they are calling Churchome Global. It’s church in the palm of your hand. It’s an app that comes with daily content, a prayer board, cause related groups that you can get connected to locally, interest based groups that you can connect to locally. You can start your own group. There’s a big push to use the app to connect people where you already are, wherever you are, in the world, and that’s kind of what Judah said when he released it. He’s like, “Look, instead of planting a campus in Genoa, the city of our choice, why don’t we connect people to the city church or rather Churchome globally everywhere?” And that’s what they released.

Brady Shearer: So we wanted to talk in this episode of Pro Church Tools about some of the things that we like about this, some of the things that we’re concerned about, and explain exactly what it is as well.

Alex Mills: Well, a church creating a custom map, I’m sure we all know how you feel about that, right?

Smith

Brady Shearer: Right. So we should make a disclaimer about this is a downloadable mobile app. It’s not a template based app they’re paying $100 a month for. This is a church with a global presence, hundreds of thousands of followers, and they spent considerable numbers of moneys, I’m not quite sure, on this app. We talk a lot about church apps and how they’re a bad idea. Yes, if you’re a church of 350 or fewer paying 250 bucks, 100 bucks a month for a template based app is not smart. You have a website. We’ll link to the full explanation about that in the show notes. This is different. So that’s the first disclaimer to me.

Brady Shearer: The second disclaimer is that when Judah announced this on Twitter, he got what’s known in the Twitter verse as ratioed. What that means is that there are three different metrics on a tweet. There are the replies, the retweets, and the likes. Getting ratioed means that you’re getting just as many replies to the likes and the retweets. They’re not happy replies. So we were looking through the replies, I was looking this morning and I was pretty surprised.

Alex Mills: It’s not good. Yeah, it’s not good.

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Brady Shearer: I’ll read a couple of them because I took screen shots, because I have the Twitter receipts. First, this is from Pro Church Nation. They said, “This makes sense if the church is just about information transfer, but it’s not. Good content, sweet app, bad church idea.” The most popular reply when we recorded this says this: “Disappointed to see this from our former pastor. People are not a commodity. A phone is not church. Initiatives like this encourage isolation and the promotion of a preacher over the body of Christ. Why not promote churches already in Nashville, Texas, et cetera, instead of promoting you?” And then the final tweet that I have here, “This discourages fellowship, which is the primary purpose of our meeting together. This is cult of celebrity.” Frown face.

Alex Mills: Well, and it seems like most of these thousands of replies kind of follow this same thread, which like you said, was a little bit surprising, because when Judah first announced this on the weekend, we talked about it here in the office on Monday meeting. We’re like, wow, this is an incredible idea and use of resources. This could be truly groundbreaking. And then we had a look at Twitter. It’s like, oh, the global church is not really happy about this and is pretty divided on this. So actually today we had a very length conversation in the office about what we believe church to be and how that kind of fits into this context of the mega church, the celebrity pastor, you know. But I think there are a lot of things worth talking about here and I think it’s worth giving Judah and the team at Churchome the time to give this a shot and see what it can turn into.

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Brady Shearer: We know the church attendance is declining. We know that young people are more disenfranchised with the church than any other prior generation that we have on record. And so we need to find new expressions of church. So let’s talk about some of the things that we like about this and some of the things that we don’t like.

Brady Shearer: The first is that while this is an app that’s downloadable that delivers content, information transfer, it does have a very big emphasis on using the geolocation of your phone, recognizing where you are, and allowing you to connect to people near you, in a physical location, or starting a group where other people can connect to you. The reason that this is important is because we know, according to Barnum, that 59% of millennials that were once connected to church are no longer connected to church. Not that they’re less religious. Not that they’re not following God. They’re just not finding a home in church. And so the idea behind this app is, okay, maybe we can get people connected that were previously disenfranchised, and that’s a good thing. The other side of that coin, though, is just because you’re part of a small group or just because you’re connecting with other believers, that doesn’t necessarily constitute church. There’s no formal leadership. That’s not part of a local work. And so while I think we’re both proponents of getting people connected that are not connected to a church at all, this isn’t quite as good as maybe getting connected to an existing church already in your local region.

Alex Mills: Right. And Brady, you and I have both downloaded this app. We’ve both played around with it and used it. It’s truly impressive. And on the bottom bar there there’s five tabs, and three of them have to do with community, have to do with getting you plugged into a local community, so it seems like the design and the function of this app is pushing its users towards getting engaged in local community, which is a great thing. But one of the qualms I had with the way that this app was framed and announced as a new church campus and a new way of doing church, and I can’t personally prescribe to that, and I think you hit the nail on the head. You can get involved in community through this app, whether it’s online digital community, or even starting a physical group like if you download the app, you’ll see in there that option. But you can’t be deceived that that makes you a part of a church.

Alex Mills: One of the responses I saw on Twitter from one of my favorite pastors says, “What is the church without the Eucharist?” And so the church gathers around these sacraments and around each other and around people, and I think most of us will agree that that’s what church is. And so this app can be helpful and useful and I’m willing to give it the time to … I’m willing to be proved wrong here, that real community can be fostered and curated and created through this app. I hope that that’s what happens here.

Brady Shearer: A couple more things we wanted to hit on. This is part of a larger discussion that we can’t really completely talk through in this ten minutes or less episode. But most of the replies to this tweet, most of the unhappiness and the discontent within the replies, I think, has to do with people who just do not ascribe whatsoever to the attractional mega church model at all. This does feel like the natural next step evolution of the attractional mega church model that’s based around a charismatic celebrity, and we can’t overlook the truth that humans desire to be led and that we are naturally drawn to leaders and that that’s why we see in the Scriptures, Israel demanding a king. Somebody lead us. And that can be problematic because we all, as humans, suck, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We have seen that there is no shortage of records of mega church pastors and their failures, frankly, a lot to do with the fact that they just had a lot more power than they probably should have.

Brady Shearer: With that being said, there are a couple things that I especially like about this. Let’s put aside the conversation of mega church attractional good or not. One of the biggest issues we have with churches right now is that the vast amount of resources dedicated to physical buildings and meeting spaces. And that usually 50% or more of a church’s budget is completely dedicated right off the bat to facility, the mortgage, and the salaries of the people at work there.

Alex Mills: Yes, Sunday operations.

Brady Shearer: What’s nice about this is that Judah, instead of building a colossal church in the suburbs of Nashville, has decided to take advantage of the mold advice. And sure, that might have cost $100,000 to build.

Alex Mills: Didn’t build $100,000 million dollars to build a campus in Toronto.

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Brady Shearer: Exactly. It pales in comparison to the facility and the upkeep over the years. So I think that’s good. And then finally, we’ve seen this with social media. And churches, anything that is ten or 20 years behind social, taking advantage of the digital platforms that we have, we know how much attention we’re paying to these. We saw how much people were angry about a new digital platform and responded using a digital platform. That irony isn’t lost on any of us. There’s good that can be done through the attention we’re paying to these platforms. And we don’t know if Churchome is going to be the Facebook of social media. Maybe it’ll be what came before that. The MySpace of social media. Maybe it’ll be what came before that, the Friendster of social media. It doesn’t mean that this is the answer, but I am open to experiment with new things, because the existing model we have is not perfect. This model is also not perfect, but there are some redeeming qualities, and the more that we experiment, perhaps the closer we can get to the best expression of church that’s available to us.

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Alex Mills: I think, like I said, not only am I willing to be proved wrong, I hope here that I’m going to be proved wrong, that this app can facilitate real community and maybe start to look like church. And I think it’s respectable that Judah and the team at Churchome, like you said, are stewarding their resources well and not trying to build these brick and mortar campuses in all these different cities, but trying to reach the global Churchome community in a way that stewards their resources well, and I think it’s worth giving them the time, the grace, the space to run with this, and maybe break some ground for us, blaze that trail and see what comes of this. I think there could be exciting things ahead in this kind of digital space for churches.

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Pastor Judah Smith Podcast

Brady Shearer: So much of what we do as churches is often misled because we can’t really quantify the goal. What’s success? What are we trying to accomplish? Because too many of our churches consider butts in seats to be the ultimate and paramount metric that we care about. We’ve put together something called the Ultimate Guide to Measuring Church Growth, where we don’t just track butts in seats, but we track engagement. How many people are being baptized? How many people are volunteering? How many people are giving up their time, talents, and treasures beyond just showing up? So that’s going to be linked in the show notes for this episode. It’s the featured resource. That’ll do it for this episode of Pro Church Tools. We’ll see you next time.