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Jay Kranda, Online Pastor at Saddleback Church, has led their online campus for over 10 years and saw the creation of 1,007 new online small groups in 2020.
In each episode you will discover effective ways to recruit more leaders, form better groups, and make more disciples. Guests to this monthly podcast will include small group and discipleship experts like Carl George, Dr. Warren Bird, Steve Gladen, Mark Howell, Dr. Bill Donahue, Bill Willits, Chris Surratt, as well as some pastors you've never heard of who are doing some amazing things with small groups and discipleship.
Exponential Groups Podcast Episode 2 with Jay Kranda on Online Ministry and Small Groups
Host: Allen White
Aired: 2/22/2021
Jay Kranda:
We had volunteers and staff, a large online group meeting every day of the week for the first couple months of COVID. But we started, we just had a meeting. We were looking at some of our data and I looked at 2020. Our ministry launched a 1007 online groups.
Allen White:
Welcome to the Exponential Groups Podcast. I'm your host, Allen White. This podcast is designed to help you take the guesswork out of groups. In each episode, you will discover effective ways to recruit more leaders, form better groups, and make more disciples. Please subscribe to this monthly podcast on iTunes, Google play, or wherever you get your podcast to access the show notes, go to allenwhite.org/episode2. Welcome to episode two of the Exponential Groups Podcast.
My guest today is Jay Kranda. Jay is the online pastor at Saddleback Church in Lake forest, California, where he oversees an online community with online small groups and home groups around the world. He is the co-author of the free eBooks state of the church online and going beyond online streaming. Jay is addicted to NBA basketball and cold brew coffee. He has a BA in Christian Education and an MA in Theology, both from Biola University, Jay, his wife, Jody have two boys and a girl.
I want to welcome today's guest. Jay Kranda. Did I say your name, right?
Jay Kranda:
Yes. You said it right? You nailed it.
Allen White:
All right. I don't know how else you would say it, but Kranda like Panda, right?
Jay Kranda:
Yeah, exactly. I've heard that one many times.
Allen White:
Oh, well, I just thought of it. So I'm thinking I'm original, but no, you have been in online ministry for a long time. And the rest of us just got into online ministry, 10 months ago you've been a part of Saddleback. And how long have you been on staff doing online ministry there?
Jay Kranda:
I just celebrated 10 years on staff and I started off as part-time online. They had a thing at the time called the internet campus and nobody was really doing anything with it. We're always trying out things and then staff or people change and then you kind of forget, but I was really intrigued on it. When I first started, I came from a church about 500 and at Saddleback there were about 500 people watching every week. I was just kind of amazed by that scope of impact. I started to invest on it. My leader at the time introduced me to like Life.church and a couple other churches to show me what was going on.
Jay Kranda:
You had Westside family, Life.church, Elevation, a couple others that were just doing cool things, you know? And, and we went on this journey of figuring out what did it look like for our church to have a digital kind of online ministry? The first thing I did is I petitioned to change it from internet campus to online campus. That was the first thing. I felt like internet was like putting “i” in front of everything to match the app. And so, but yeah, so I've been there 10 years now. It's been a journey and it's looked very different over the seasons of ministry, especially now in COVID, I feel like we're in another butterfly moment where like, what is the next version of this?
Allen White:
Almost like, you had that office down the hall and you were minding your own business and then COVID happened and suddenly 400 people are knocking on your door and everybody's ringing your phone off the hook.
Jay Kranda:
Right. I, I would tell any like online pastor or somebody who's getting started, you want to have all this, you want to just get all this stuff done, but I think there's value in getting your foot, you feet grounded and just figuring out what do you want to do? Because once you get above the fold, the tallest blade of grass gets cut first. And I think there's something around like needing to know what you actually want to do. And I think I was really grateful that I, I had some years where I was kind of in the bunker, just tinkering and figuring out, writing things, sharing things. I'm a verbal audible learner. So that's why I have a blog and so forth that I just kind of share what I'm doing. And I do that for other churches the scale of my time. But I honestly do that for myself. It helps me figure out, what do I actually think and, and believe here. And, and so I think by the time COVID came around way before COVID, but I think we knew, how's this going to function? there are still things around, where, how it should exactly work. But I think conception, at least we understand what do we want and what we don't want.
Allen White:
I need you to settle the debate because we've been, we watched Saddleback quite a bit. We, a 30, some weeks of Rick in the book of James and I'm like, dude, it's only five chapters long. So here's the debate because I told my wife, the worship team is not really singing. They recorded it in advance and they're lip-syncing, and she swears that they're singing on-camera. Which one is it?
Jay Kranda:
Well, I think I'm pretty positive. it's recorded separately.
Allen White:
I knew it.
Jay Kranda:
Yeah. I gotta be honest. I'm not, I've never been part of their recordings directly, but I, I would, I would be shocked if it was because the PR the professional quality of it. And the other thing is, is, Rick series is not that long when you compare it to John Piper's Romans. Okay. Okay. Okay.
Allen White:
Okay. Well, we'll give him that. And the thing is he keeps it interesting. And the great thing is watching Rick out at the farm. Because every once in a while we have to back it up, if there's a rabbit or something that runs behind him.
Jay Kranda:
I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but like most years Rick speaks like 70% of the time or something. And last year he spoke like a good 90%. And it was because of COVID because of the global pandemic and all that. The James series was long.
Allen White:
It was an awesome series. It really was. And we're going to get to small groups in a minute since that's what the podcast is about. But a lot of pastors have had conversations around online engagement, obviously non COVID times, we're looking at attendance in the auditorium and we're looking at giving and things like that. And so some people have even tried to put, take their streams online and put a multiplier to it. How do we know we're being effective and what's really happening out there?
Jay Kranda:
There are all sorts of ways to measure things. What's key is to figure out the metrics that are important to your church -- whatever those things are, a top funnel to deep engagement type of scale. There are things you measure weekly and things you measure monthly. The other thing is you just gotta be consistent on how you measure it so that you can notice trends. Are you going up or going down? And that only happens if you're consistent. If you're constantly tweaking your measurements, then the numbers are irrelevant. You could tell me you had a million people this week, but if the next week you had 2 million or you had a hundred thousand, what does that mean? Where are you going? We've been measuring our attendance one way for about 10 years. I could tell you weeks that we're going to be low. I can tell you we're high. I can tell you why we were high because I was looking at the same numbers every week for about 10 years. And so I think it's really important.
I would always start with the weekend. How many people viewed it on your website, Facebook, YouTube, or whatever, and then have like a retention number. How many people watch or listen for, 10, 15, 30 minutes? And so compare those. Viewership isn't the same as watching or reach numbers or impressions. I think that's why you need both. You have viewership and then you have a deep engagement. What’s hard is in building a worship attendance. You're not counting how many cars you drive by in front of your church, or you're not counting how many people peek their heads in. You are counting how many people attended church. And so that number is more than the retention number, but you also can measure all sorts of things and look at correlation between viewership and retention. Like what happens if you start streaming on platforms like YouTube, you can look at the drop rates. How many people skip forward? We were just looking at our data recently and one of the learnings is that a lot of people were skipping the front part just to go to the message. The suggestion came out like maybe we should experiment with not front-loading the music, so people get to the sermon quicker. If people are more likely to hang around afterwards, maybe we put more music on the back end. If you're looking at the right things regularly, you can make the right dashboard.
Allen White:
Yeah. That's helpful. And I like the idea of not counting the cars passing by on the road. I think those would be if anybody needs interpretation, those are your one-second views. They don't count. And maybe even your ten second views and they turned their head and then they went on.
Jay Kranda:
It's not a bad number to look at it. You just don't count it as attendance. I think people are just overwhelmed. What does this look like? In the professional world, this would be creating like a customer journey and looking at return of investment, ROI type of things. Most companies know if I spend a hundred dollars, I'm going to get this out of you. Or there are high purchases. If I spend a thousand dollars, I'll get 10,000 and that's, that's the thought, you know? And then you just scale it. And so churches, they don't think about this and they don't know how to place these numbers, but that's why I keep it simple. Look at viewership, look at retention, look at how many people respond on the weekend. And then monthly look at deeper stuff. Like how many people are active in a, like a zoom, group, or maybe take one of your classes on your LMS.
Jay Kranda:
Maybe how many people are active in ministry. And then you'll get a more perfect view, a more holistic view of, how your church is healthy online, because a lot of churches are just streaming their services and they're not offering too much more else, but if you're looking at everything else, then you can kind of go, Hey, wow. We talked about groups this month and our group engagement went up 20%. You'll go. Maybe we need to do that again. those are the things that you start to notice and you kind of implement real changes into your kind of your workflow.
Allen White:
That's good. Cause I think if we need numbers to make ourselves feel good. That may be a whole other issue. So we won’t go there. Let's talk about, because this is a small group podcast -- let's talk about online groups in, in your world in doing online groups, how are you recruiting leaders to do online groups? How are you getting members connected into groups? What does that look like?
Jay Kranda:
We’re unique in the sense that we definitely have an online community, a true community, that I'm a shepherd over, and we have people who congregate. I would see us as a real church that's online. And so we want to create, the phrase that gets used a lot, is creating a fourth space for people to connect that's digital. That's not a time specific. It's 24/7. So because of that, we stream our services, but we actually have a community like a Facebook group and different things where people can connect with each other and meet people. I spend a lot of time in those public spaces. And out of that, we're constantly encouraging people to take our classes and join a group or start a group. We definitely rely yearly on a campaign strategy to get almost of our groups going. Our church aligns on one thing. I would say a good 70% of our group growth in a year comes from a campaign push from our entire church.
We constantly have new groups going. One of our biggest things we use to get new groups going is a large group model where the small group pastor on my team will host quarterly large groups on zoom, where there might be 30 to 50 people on a zoom call. And he'll use the breakout feature for six to eight weeks. At the end of it, if you had 30 or 50 people, we'll say, “Hey, you've been experimenting and been part of an online group the last six to eight weeks. We're done with our large group. What if you continue on after this as a small group? We start five to eight groups. That's a big thing coming out of COVID that we've relied on, mainly because as started COVID, we had such a boom of interest in online groups that we didn't have enough groups open to new people. We spent a lot of time early on refining what we actually launched. We had volunteers and staff, a large online group meeting every day of the week for the first couple months of COVID. When we started, we just had a meeting. We were looking at some of our data. In 2020, our ministry launched 1,007 online groups. We had the infrastructure and we were ready.
…and it's just crazy to think that's how many we actually launched while people were shutting down. We like, we really scaled up in a cool way. So a lot of our groups come through our campaign and then those large group mate meetings after, six to eight weeks. And then, and then just core volunteers, as they move through our discipleship pathway, they hear group language constantly. Why that's important, when you fill out our membership application for online, we ask you to commit to be partying in a group. And so it's kind of very, it's kinda like death by a thousand cuts kind of in another way.
Allen White:
Obviously it's a top value at Saddleback and has been for a long time. I've quoted Rick for years about the church needing grow larger and smaller at the same time. But I think also the number of groups that you've launched, then relatively speaking with other churches I've worked with, it shows a need for connection and conversation, in addition to all of the great content that churches are putting out.
Jay Kranda
And it's, I mean, at the end of the day, we start groups like crazy because yeah, our pastor believes in it, he's in a group, he teaches it. I mean, that's the real thing. When, when I talk to any other church, I I've had many conversations with churches are similar sizes and you're like, how do you have so many groups? And I'm like, Hey, our pastor talks about it. And so you'll have, churches that are, are very dependent on a weekend strategy. And you'll find they found out at the start of the COVID when they couldn't meet, Hey, this is hard. Like we need to have other strategy. And I think group churches that already had group strategy in place, I think COVID was not fun to go through, but I think that they were ready to navigate it because they can lean into those smaller groups to kind of gather or meet or continue to meet.
Jay Kranda:
And so it was more like for our people to continue to get the care they needed during COVID, wasn't that big of an issue because we did have a group infrastructure. The only issue was we had this mass education of how online gives work. and that's what my team did a lot of early on just training our fellow small group pastors, how online groups work and then trying to offer as much training up as possible. So everybody else can learn members. And so once our pastors knew how to do it, our extended staff knew how to do it. And then most of the groups figured out, then they could educate the rest of the group members. And so it kind of like, kind of like a ripple effect, but yeah, it's it's, we have groups because it it's, it's part of our DNA
Allen White:
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Allen White:
Let’s talk about what works with online groups. What are some best practices? And, we’re also going to to go what hasn’t worked as well.
Jay Kranda:
It has been a struggle is continuing to figure out how to make accessing small group material easier. We definitely have an infrastructure where we have it, but I think we just want people both to access it and then also get their other group members to access it seamlessly. So it isn't so host dependent. So like a big gap for us right now is that most of our small group material isn't really accessible on a TV. Like our TV apps don't talk to our database because we have some custom stuff. So that's something that we've been working on. How do we integrate that? We don't use an off the shelf, paid service, like, many other churches do. And so I just know like Apple TV, Roku, Amazon fire stuff are so important.
So that's a big priority. And then also just to be able to present in a digital way, a pathway with the curriculum I think is really important because it's overwhelming, especially, when you have high percentage of your groups that are veteran groups, new groups, it's really simple. You can recommend for years stuff to go through, but I think you also have, I've been the online pastor for full time for like eight years, and, I have people that have been with me since the beginning. And so they've been through all of our stuff, all of our campaigns. And so I think continuing to provide infrastructure where, they can ask that seamlessly, you want to get to a place where technology doesn't get in the way of what you need to do. And, we, we all deal with this.
Every company deals with this there's times that Apple who spent billions of dollars on this and Apple products confuse me. even though most of the time they're pretty simple, but I still get confused. I was just setting up family screen time stuff for my kids on iPads. And it just, it was a little funky, I was trying to figure it out and my wife's was a parent, but for some reason her password is different. And it's just because when you have a lot of, if then not type of infrastructure, it just gets confusing. So we want to continue to make that more seamless. And then I think also just getting better at making training, integrated, I think that there are an, if you know anything about how Saddleback does groups, any of Steve Gladen books, like we have a, we have a process of how our parents are healthy.
So we might have, over 2000 groups right now, but that doesn't mean they're all at a hundred percent tier, we're trying to make sure they're all responsive. So I might have a couple hundred that are, that are red tag where they're not responsible. I have some that I'm trying to get them to become members. They signed up and they're not members yet. And then I have some that I'm trying to get to be, to take our leadership training course. And so the question is, why aren't more people taking their leadership training course. Some of it has to do with access to the course. Some of it has to do availability. maybe that needs to be a small group curriculum. Maybe we need to rethink the naming of it. So I'm, I, I feel like on the group level where we're constantly trying to rethink and reposition is, how to get more of our groups, trained.
And so we have a really great way to get groups going. But every strength has a weakness and that's the weakness of ours is it's so simple to start a group with us. But I think at the end, it's really hard on us as staff and our volunteer team to make sure that they are healthy. We're constantly pruning our groups, working on how to get stuff for that. I think just going through our training is something I'm always like, why isn't this easier? Why can't we just do this? Or why have only this many percentage of our groups done that? and the other thing is just with online ministry, generally, I think a lot of members and people attending churches online are still really confused at they'll start a group and start serving.
But they're like, is this really my church? And I deal with that a lot where, people start engaging. I find out they're at another church and I'm like, I don't want you. So I think making that more seamless, but it's going to be, it's going to be, we never want to pull somebody away from a church. So number one reason why we delete groups is because of that, like I find out they're going to a church down the street or something else, and I'm like, Hey, don't do the group with us, do it with your church. And so we, I call it, we have like a leaky funnel where we're constantly losing people to very healthy things. They're not bad things, we're not competitive on it, but so our groups are constantly going up and down because, because of that reason right there. Yeah.
Allen White:
I love your heart for other churches and you don't need, you got numbers. You already got big numbers. You don't need more numbers, but I also like your heart for experimentation. I don't know if I told you this. I did my very first online group in 1994 on CompuServe. Oh my goodness. And we actually had a member of a group that came to Christ as a result of that group. And we've been great friends now for, for 27 years. So Jay, I may be the grandfather of online, small groups. I don't know. But,
Jay Kranda:
CompuServe is something that I know of, but I don't know what that means, like constantly talked about, but yes,
Allen White:
It's when you were back when you were a number and not a name, but over a dial up modem it at that. But, but speaking of that, cause copy serve. We had a chat room and we had a message board and that was the extent there was no video, no audio, anything like that. And I know a lot of people have gone churches, schools, everybody has gone to zoom. Are most of your groups, primarily a video based, or do you have groups that are meeting on conference calls or do you have asynchronous groups that are meeting in, Facebook groups and things? Or what does that look like?
Jay Kranda:
Yeah, so we try our hardest to synchronize our groups. We were okay with the asynchronized model, for sure, but our prime ways that at least once a week you are, you're meeting real time either in a text thread, an audio or a video. And then, we try to move our groups long-term to video, that's the thought and, but we allow them to start. However, they, like, I will say the dominant amount of our groups are using zoom because it's the easiest platform to use and, and to join. but we also have a lot of groups using all sorts of variable platforms. We're pretty agnostic when it comes to platforms generally, just because we find people are very particular on their, on their tool. And yeah, there's all sorts of conference tools that, somebody like I'm, I could just it's you and your friends.
Jay Kranda:
So it's the same thing that, especially as you start moving internationally, they start using more obscure platforms. I was just doing, a couple months into COVID. I did a, I did a conference with a bunch of Russian pastors and I was talking about this conversation and they recommended this platform that I guess is super popular in Russia. And I had never heard of it. And I was just like, yeah, I go use what people want. like we chat is one of the most popular Poppins in the world and most Americans know nothing about it. and so I'm not going to say don't, use we-chat, I'm just use it. Now, what we do is we tend to model zoom. I have some stuff on zoom, like training stuff. And then I say, but use whatever you feel comfortable with.
Jay Kranda:
I have groups that do group phone calls, and I'm like, fine. It doesn't matter. Just meet. And then part of it, the coaching on the back end is, Hey, you've been doing this, audio thing, like let's figure out video because video is better the same thing as we ultimately want to move them to face-to-face longterm. And so that might take a year and a half or two years, but have them start, where they're at, there's all sorts of groups. I have groups, not as many, but I have groups using discord and all sorts of like Twitch, like platforms where they're playing games and doing stuff, does it, I might not get it, but like I watch my kids, I have a 10, seven, four year old and my 10 year old, he watches a lot of those types of people, you know?
Jay Kranda:
And it's funny, it's funny to watch and I think there's going to be more disruption now. I'm curious, what that's going to turn into because it's a little different than a peer group, but I think this is tears where you have a super focused, you have like, I would say traditional small group or Bible study, and then you have like hobby based groups. And then, and that's more of a hobby based. Cause if you're playing a game or doing something and doing, it's a little distracting, but maybe that's a crawl step to a more focused type of experience. I've had questions for people that do guilds on different games and they want to do it. And I'm like, yeah, do it. You know? but I ultimately, we want to move them into a group where they're just meeting for an hour or so to talk about some content, but a lot of them start all sorts of ways, but yeah,
Allen White:
They're just not gonna, throw in a scripture quote in the middle of a mission in Fortnite or something. Right.
Jay Kranda:
it's weird. Cause that's how people meet now. especially if you're under a certain age, I miss that. Like even, I'm in my mid thirties and I remember I played online, with Xbox different things, but I, it wasn't till I was in college where you could actually like game and have conversations with people. and I wasn't really big into video games at that season of my life. And so I watched my kids how they play with their friends and they do, they hang out. And so I think, I think that's why you got to see it as, and this goes back to like group, methodology and I don't know if playing a basketball game and you're just hanging out for fellowship is really a group. It's a hobby. I know, I understand that it can be something, but I would distinguish between like a premium group time where it's focused discussion versus we're doing something on together and maybe talking occasionally. So I might put it into like fellowship group category where I'm like, yeah, but I wouldn't Saddleback when it called that a small group, we would call that something else. But everybody's a little different,
Allen White:
Well, it could be just like any other group that's built around a hobby. Like we had a group here in Greenville, South Carolina called the Holy Smokers and they made barbecue and they spent a lot of time doing their cook, but they also every Tuesday night gathered into the Bible study. yeah. In addition to that, but yeah,
Jay Kranda:
I think that's, that's the, that, that's the model there where, it's not just hanging out and do that, but you're doing two things together, you know? So exactly like to me, that's doubling the time, but that's a really good outreach type of, you can do both of those, but yeah. So I think the gaming thing is going to is going to be a big thing moving forward. Cause it's just, it's so normal now, I've spent, we were talking before we started recording. I've spent a lot of time in the last couple of weeks on Twitch because I've been playing chess and I follow people on Twitch that stream and play chess and there's a community around it. I was texting with a good friend of mine. Who's like one of my defacto, Facebook addicts, but friends. And he's like, have you done any training or videos on Twitch and stuff?
Jay Kranda:
Because he's like the community there is so deep and it is like these streamers on Twitch, they're playing whatever game and they just, they talk and there's this active chat. And it's like the, I forget his name [inaudible] is this guy who plays chess on, on Twitch. He has 25,000 people watching him play chess. Real-time he's just playing chess. 25,000 people pay him. The chat is nuts. And you're like, this is, this is a community. Like they rally around him and they know him. And, and the thought is like, for sure, Twitch, there's a place to be had like, like there's something there now. I think what's hard is this is where Twitch is inherently. You are doing something else while you're doing it. And so like, that's why I think churches have a hard time because you're like, I don't want to be playing Fortnite and then having a group, like, what does that mean? so I think that's why it's gotta be, it can't be either, or it's gotta be separate. It's got be a separate thing.
Allen White:
You can't meld Fortnite with something on the, the whole armor of God. I don't know.
Jay Kranda:
Probably could, but I'm not a youth pastor anymore. So I couldn't think of that name. I don't, I don't play enough games. I literally watch, I watch my kids do it and they, I, I don't play any, I'm like such a weird person now. Like I don't, I'm just, my, my teenage self would be so disappointed in how I spend my time.
Allen White:
Yeah. Well, and it's, and it's interesting too. And one of the things I've talked to pastors about whether they be online platforms to communicate or other platforms is what you hit on is where community is gathering. And so where can we take those places where community is gathering and then maybe turn it into some kind of a group experience. But I do caution pastors that, they don't have to be experts on all of these different platforms, but your people do, they're already there. So if you give them the idea of, Hey, could you do a small group in that environment or in that community that you're interacting with online, give people permission and opportunity and then just turn them loose and you don't have to understand any of it if you don't know about it. Right.
Jay Kranda:
Exactly. And I think that's the key is I think if you have down your, your theory, your methodology, your, your approach, then you, you allow people to iterate. I mean, that's what the internet is, is allow it's iteration upon iteration of things. if you're part of any meme culture, you look at the weirdest memes, get the week, like it's so obscure because they're iterating on this random internet moment and you look at it and you're like, what, why is that funny? And it's because they're just empowering people to create things, you know? And I think with a lot of these things online, I think you have at the core, like what is a group to your church? And then you have categories and then if it doesn't that category, just call it something else. Don't worry about. if, if it can't be, like this is a big thing in our church early on, where I wanted to test membership years ago, five, five years ago at our church.
Jay Kranda:
And it was a really hard thing for us to test because membership Mets something very specifically. And I just remember going, like, can I just call it something else? Then if I just call it something else I need, I, and this is the thing, the step of membership was essential to like a lot of unlocking of other things in our paradigm of how we did church. So if I can't have membership, let me call it, first steps or something, let me do the teeth, let me reduce the content down to 30 minutes and just let me do something else. Cause it'll lose. At least lets me do something now. And I think the same thing with online groups, like, yeah, if you've got somebody, if you've got some young person that wants to do something on Twitch, like let them try it out and don't call it a group, call it something else and just say, Hey, can we just talk about it and learn together?
Jay Kranda:
And I think you need to allow that, that experimenting culture ethos into what you're doing online, because there's so much happening. groups are meeting all sorts of ways. I, I recently, put up this tool in our community where I allowed people to put themselves on a map to meet people in their area. And it was a con it was an idea that I had seen, I had tested out recently. Some other churches have messed around with it, but I constantly get asked, are there anybody in our area? And, I had a hard time doing that in a very safe in privacy, respect the manner. So I said, I found that there's a tool called batch geo.com that you could pay monthly and you can upload data points and you can host it. and I just embedded it on like a click form, a click funnel website.
Jay Kranda:
And, you can go, you can go to Saddleback online.com and you click on the map. And, I just got a message from somebody a couple of days ago on Facebook, one of my community members, they said, Hey, Jay, I just wanna let you know. I found two people in my part of Canada and we started a group and I was just like, how crazy is that? Like I put this map up. It was an idea. I was able to start it very quickly. Without a lot of time, it took some money like batch to you. It's not the cheapest platform to use, but it allowed me to have a map that I can upload. I can update via an Excel. And then I can embed that map on a webpage with data. And it was just like, how cool is this? Like this worked?
Jay Kranda:
You know? And, and I think that that comes with trying and my church gave me the freedom to try. Now, obviously we're large enough where they have, they can do that. But that's why I tell most churches with a lot of this stuff online, not just with groups is, appoint somebody to be your digital point person. It doesn't have to be, staff could be part-time could be volunteer, but allow them to represent the community, to you because you're going to automatically drift as we start to meet in person. You're gonna, you're gonna drift away from digital being important. Now I know we're forever changed, but I think you just need to understand that, like just let people try empower some people to kind of do some weird things, you know?
Allen White:
Well it's, and it's almost like if you had, well, and you do have, this are, would be members of your congregation that were in other language groups that you wouldn't necessarily endeavor to learn every single one of those languages, but you would find somebody in the language group that was able to start a small group and gather community. So almost thinking of the digital world as another language, or certainly another culture, if you will, and then appoint somebody that's going to lead your ministry. And yeah.
Jay Kranda:
Yeah. That's a big thing. that's a good way of saying it because I do think it is a totally different culture. and yeah, you see it, like we were discussing briefly, like right before, like the whole game stop Robin hood debacle, and it's, it just showed, it just shows that wall street does not understand the internet or the power of it. And that's wall street, some of the smartest people in the world are working there and to think some sub Reddit thread called, wall street bets or whatever the world, it was like, could just move the market. I'm watching it right now. Like I, I bought some dog Dogecoin and they're doing it with Dogecoin and it's crazy to think like you just get this influx of things and, and it just shows like the power of the internet is it's just such a different place.
Jay Kranda:
And trust me, I don't get it at all. Like, it's weird, and to think you can get the internet, it's just naive it's so if you feel overwhelmed, that's okay, but this is why it's important. Like, I think of it, like when you're planting a church or you're building your teammate, your church, you have different key players that help you. You might have somebody, if you're planning a church, you might have somebody in real estate helping you figure out, where to go. You might have music director, you might have kids, people, a kid person. I think you need to have a digital savvy person that's in your team. Again, it doesn't have to be staff. It could just be somebody who maybe owns a business or who's, a digital ad person or a communication background at a different place that just thinks about this stuff. And you gotta, you gotta lean into that person ask questions. the same way, as you're just thinking about your website and all this. So I think that's why it's, I think churches are understanding that, but I think, where we're going, it's, it's going to be interesting, especially as we start to gather in person again, how does this stay a priority?
Allen White:
And it certainly sped things up in a lot of ways. And I think it'll be interesting too, to just to see how quickly people get back into the habit of attending church, or is it kind of like when you stop going to the gym, it takes a little bit of effort to kind of get back into the regular routine, right?
Jay Kranda:
Yes. Yeah.
Allen White:
So let's talk a little more about online groups, cause obviously you have, a good number of online groups. How do you supervise all of those groups or what kind of coaching do you provide for them? Or what does that look like?
Jay Kranda:
Yeah, so we do a couple high-level things. Obviously we do monthly type of emails and updates and we check in with the group. So we have blast type of strategy that are just like updates that happen monthly. and then we have, infrastructure stuff where we have, volunteers over anywhere between 10 to 30 groups that they check in personally with each group host. And they're the lifeline for that group. and then the personal update is more, the personal connection is more identifying, whatever their next step is. Either take our leadership course become a member or whatever. and so that, that's how we take care of it. And then our, my small groups person on my team, Kevin, he he's, he has a core team of, 40 volunteers that their job is to do that, you know? and then typically the more healthy groups they're under a volunteer, usually, internally we would say like red tag groups, groups that aren't responsive. Kevin is over those groups and he's a little bit more proactive. And so those groups, if you don't respond in a certain amount of time, you get removed. And so you become like high care where you're a little bit, it's kind of like a, like a, urgent care, like a
Allen White:
Kind of triage them a little bit. Yeah.
Jay Kranda:
Yeah. You're checking. Instead of checking on the person a couple of times a day, you're checking every 30 minutes type of model. and so, that, that's what we do. And then usually once a year, we do have a big campaign where that brings up, that brings in a lot of life. And then we have some, we have a couple of moments throughout the year where we'll typically do a smaller campaign, but it's more internal. and so at a high level, that's what we do. We try to gather them once a year for a big event, something around honoring them. yeah. So those are some of the high-level things we did.
Allen White:
That's good. That's good. I know last year you came out with a course on online, small groups. Tell us a little bit about the course.
Jay Kranda:
Yeah. So I have two courses. One was a free course. That's on the small group network website. How online groups work? it's just on YouTube. and it just kind of talks about, what does the typical online group look like? we talk through examples, and strategy of growth strategy, a lot of stuff. We've kind of hinted on. I get into more detail, it's above an hour long. that's on YouTube for free. and then I recently a couple months into COVID. I did a new align course with the small group network where it's a little bit more intensive and it's updated because of COVID. and so we, we got a little bit more specific, my original course was a little bit more educational, like how to meet online, well, going into COVID.
Jay Kranda:
A lot of people figured out how to do that. and so I no longer think I have to do a lot of coaching on lighting and different things that people have, have equipment and have setups, even me like I've upgraded my setup since I got started. And, because we're just using it so much more. So both of those, I think that other course is 59 bucks or something, but it's a, it's a, it's a little bit more intensive. It's shot a little bit better, but it's really the intention there is to kind of talk about the COVID learnings, how to do that. You can find both on the small group network.
Allen White:
Very good. Very good. Well, Jay, thank you so much for joining us today. And I expect everybody who listens to this will have Twitch small groups before we know it. I love it. I love it. All right. Thank you.