This is Ben, and this is Keith.

And this is Main Street Lutherans. We're using today's episode to talk about how congregations may or may not be using online resources, making their presence known on the Internet. And how are those methods being received?

Our guest, Reverend Keats, Miles Wallace from Texas. They are in charge of a congregation called Technicolor ministries that is entirely online. I think that may be the only one I know of that is entirely online. And there's some caveats to that, and we'll get into that in our interview. Most congregations are somewhere less than that. How is your church using the Internet, Keith?

So, since the pandemic, like lots of people, we are live streaming our worship services, both of them on a weekly basis. Interestingly, though, St. Matt's is, you know, somewhat unique in that we've actually had a radio broadcast since the 1930s. As far as we know. As far as the radio station can tell us, we are the longest standing continuous protestant radio broadcast in the country. We don't have anything to prove that, but we don't have anything to prove against it either. But it's. And that's what it says on the radio station's website. They are proud to host us, even though they're mostly. They are a sports based programming station. They're owned by our local baseball team in York, the minor league team, the York Revolution. They have both an AM and FM broadcasting platforms, and, of course, now they have online apps as well. And so that came on about 2015. So even before the pandemic, we had people that were listening to the radio broadcast all over the world, and that's kind of cool. And the other piece about that, of course, is that it's not an archive. So you're listening to it live. No matter where you are. You've got it turned on. That's actually happening in the room. So there's that. Apart from the radio and the live streams, everybody has a website. We have a Facebook page that gets some traffic. I can't say that we use it in a very concerted way, though. We've got a number of people who post routinely to it, mostly on staff and a couple of key volunteers. And they do a good job of putting things out there. But it's not an organized effort, I guess, is what I want to say. And then we do have feeds on X and on Instagram. I don't think we use x very much at all anymore. Instagram, our youth worker uses it for sharing pictures of youth events. What about you guys at union?

Well, we certainly don't have a show on Woyk Am and FM 1350 on your am dial. But we actually don't use the Internet quite enough. We don't broadcast our services. We have enough trouble just making sure that our service runs smoothly with all the technology we've got there in the first place. So we do record the sermons ahead of time, and they get put out on Facebook as YouTube videos, and they get tolerably watched. There may be one or two on an average week, sometimes more, when people are traveling or something, but I don't think they're very effective. Yeah, the example from that, we wouldn't be able to run a service like that. We have a projector screen up overhead, and a lot of our services is liturgy that shows up on that screen. And so at the end of our service, and you've been to one, we say our. I don't know that it's officially our mission or vision statement, but it's read out in a call and response thing. And the guy operating the board was in the restroom. And so it started and it didn't continue. And so we had to pretend that we memorized it and try to make it up. And then suddenly the woman that's reading off a piece of paper, she turns around and goes, Paul's not there. And so we just don't have enough people that we can reliably have somebody operate a video stream that people would depend on. So that's unfortunate. I have preached at a church in our conference that has just upgraded all their stuff, and they broadcast their Saturday afternoon service, and then they have that online because it's live, it's recorded on YouTube and Facebook. So they're able to show that continuously forever, essentially. But their problem is they do that Saturday service because people wanted that Saturday service, but they have so few people, they don't have any sound of the congregation singing along, and they don't have a choir mic or somebody specifically set out for that. It feels very empty where their Sunday service is a little different, but that's neither here nor there, really. They're trying. So that was interesting. Yeah, I think it's very difficult for us to operate in the online space as church. I think I was listening to a podcast today. I mean, it's no surprise to anybody at this point, but it was mentioned that our cathedrals were built the way they are because it provided people a context to gather together, to worship, and that the experience of being together and seeing the majesty of these giant cathedrals was something that humans need and that part of it is that this was in specific mention relating to the sphere in Las Vegas, that they can create a virtual reality simulation that gives you the entire experience of the sphere in Las Vegas, because it's, in essence, a virtual reality simulator itself. But in that case, you're sitting there with hundreds or a thousand people. I don't know what the capacity of that place is. It's huge, I think. But that in spite of being able to maybe download that to a virtual reality goggle set and be able to experience you two playing in that space, and you wouldn't have much difference in the experience of the technology. The difference is that people want to gather together to experience it together. It's not an aversion to the headset, it's the aversion to doing it on your own, maybe, that it makes us feel particularly lonely. And so I think online church expressions have to overcome a lot of that. That as a people, we want to be with other people. I think our denomination particular struggles with how the sacraments work in a virtual space. And we've talked about that when we talked about communion and our denomination not quite as much as others, but definitely more than most protestant denominations. So there are a lot of challenges there.

Yeah, I attended a seminar online, interestingly, several months ago, actually almost a year ago at this point, I realize. Anyway, it was about effective online presence for congregations, and it was marketed to a lutheran body, so it was mostly lutheran participants. And the guy giving the presentation who used to work for very, very, very large, very well known tech company that I won't name because I don't have his permission, but also was a lutheran minister. He shared, you know, some kind of best practices, sorts of things. Anyway, sorry for that long intro, but where I'm going with this is that, you know, he did say that if you were live streaming all of your worship services, he might ask the question, why? What are you getting from that? Would you be, would it be a better use of resources, especially financial resources, if you're paying staff, people, to maybe be judicious in the things that you broadcast? I didn't have any specifics about that, but it did get me to wondering, like, I can see a congregation that might choose to live stream Thanksgiving Day or Christmas Eve or Easter Sunday, maybe Pentecost, you know, some of the big festivals or maybe some particular occasions. Like, you know, if you're a congregation that only does baptisms on particular Sundays of the year, and not just kind of whenever it's convenient for families, you know, maybe those are live stream. It's just, it's a thought about. Yeah. The effectiveness of that particular resource.

But maybe the goal is to get it to the point where it is so effective, so, so easy that it's like your church doing the radio broadcast. I'm sure you don't think twice about it when you're setting up your service.

Right. Right.

You don't, you don't say things differently. You don't even, I'm sure, get nervous that maybe more people are listening than are in the congregation in the sanctuary.

So, and it's partly because it's a small radio station and we don't get Nielsen ratings, and so we don't know how many people are listening. You know, the only evidence we have that it's quote unquote effective is, is anecdotal. But we do get feedback from people. You know, we know lots of members that listen routinely, either because they just missed a Sunday and they're home sick or they just chose to stay home, they turned on the radio station to listen to it. Or, you know, people that become homebound at some point in their lives tend to become pretty faithful with it, too. But in terms of, especially strangers that just know that it exists, listen, we don't know.

Well, let's move on to talking about technicolor ministry with Reverend Keats Miles Wallace. It was so wonderful to get to talk with them.

So when we talk about how congregations operate online, we usually talk about websites, and we talk about email and distribution lists and that sort of thing. But there is this next step of that beyond even Zoom, and Technicolor ministries is one of those things that fits into that. And we have Reverend Keats Miles Wallace with us today, and they are part of Technicolor ministries down in Texas. Welcome to. Welcome to the show.

Thanks, Ben. Glad to be here.

Technicolor ministries operates somewhat as a virtual congregation or a virtual expression of church. What's the best way to describe how technicolor ministries operates?

We say that it's church without walls. So it operates both online and in person, sometimes at the same time and sometimes completely separately.

Say more about how that works.

Sure. So sometimes we have hybrid events that occur online and in person at the same time, much like many churches do these days with worship services. But we also have events that are completely separate, online only events that exist exclusively online, usually in our discord server or sometimes on Zoom, and then some in person events that are exclusively in person.

Wow. And you were in southwest Texas? Well, sort of central Texas and then everything southwest of there. Right?

Right. Yep.

Quite a big synod. So is technical ministries restricted to that geographic zone, or is that where most folks come from?

That's where most of our people come from. We are supervised by the southwestern Texas synod, and so that's kind of our home base is the entire synod territory, which is two thirds of the state of Texas. But because of its online presence, it kind of spills into the broader church as well.

Now, what sort of folks are attracted to this kind of community?

We've got a little bit of everyone. The surprising piece was the amount of clergy that popped up right away. I was not expecting that, but it's become a really neat space where clergy can come who are queer or not and find a welcoming environment and an open environment to explore their own religiosity and spirituality. But we've also got teenagers and parents of trans kids and grandparents and doctors and lawyers and dei experts and teachers and nurses. I mean, it is a wild abundance of a little bit of everyone.

Wow. And it seems like there's a lot of expertise in issues and people who want to be helpful.

Absolutely. We're doing some slight expansion right now, and I've been really excited that I put out the feelers, and there's immediately someone who's like, oh, I know how to do that, or I know someone who does. It's amazing to have that much talent in a small community.

That's remarkable. A lot of the function happens on Discord. I'm familiar with Discord because my kids play D and D on it occasionally, or at least they did more until more recently. I think maybe Discord sort of coasted down a little bit from its heydays in early Covid.

Yeah, absolutely. It's kind of a combination of forum and zoom. So there are text based channels that you can use and then video and audio channels, and you just kind of hop to the space you want so you can create almost physical locations even though they're online. Right. So as you're thinking about it, the advice that I heard was to think about planning out as though it were physical locations. So you've got your. Your gathering space, your worship space, your office space, and to make channels for each of those things. So we've got channels for everything, which are sometimes unused, but that's okay, that we try to make space for everyone and every incidence.

Yeah. I remember when Second Life hosted, what was it? NPR science Friday. You would have to log on to second Life to participate and then get your character to the forum. There was some sort of virtual, like, auditorium, and you'd have to find a space in there and do all that. It was. That's been a. That's been a really long time. My kids haven't ever experienced second life, but they sort of sort of worked out that same way. But you could build your own house and stuff like that. So you mentioned partnerships with congregations or working with congregations and doing that. How do. How do congregations participate?

Yeah, that's been our primary function. As we've gotten started. We understood pretty quickly that the hurt that the church has done to the queer community was going to make those relationships initially a bit tense and difficult. And so that was going to be a longer trust building process, but that the easy way to step in was to partner with our local congregations and congregations across the country to help them learn how to do better. And so part of that looks like on Sundays, I'm an itinerant preacher. I hop from congregation to congregation pretty much every Sunday. I'm somewhere different, and I preach, and I'm invited into these spaces to be a queer person in the pulpit, which for some of these congregations is the first time that's ever happened. And so it's. My presence is radical enough. Others, my presence is not so radical. But the message then can be more radical. Right? And so leaning into messages about God's abundant love for all people and this sort of thing, and then teaching as well, sometimes they'll say, hey, will you do an adult Bible study or will you talk to our confirmation kids? And so I get to do a little teaching about the basics of what LGBTQ is, right? We've got this big acronym, and it's ever growing, which is beautiful, but it also means that a lot of people don't know what a lot of those letters mean anymore. And so even just being able to say, hey, here's what these things all mean, here are words that are nice to use and words that are not nice to use. I'm a firm believer that a lot of the discomfort and kind of not quite hate, but that sort of level of anger that comes out of that discomfort is because people don't understand the language or the etiquette that they need to have a meaningful and kind conversation with someone, which means we never get to a point of understanding. And so if I can provide the tools and technicolor can provide the tools to congregations to learn these basic pieces of etiquette and language, then we can have meaningful conversations with one another and learn and grow and come to places of acceptance so that's a lot of the work that we do with congregations. Some of that looks like monetary partnership. Some of it is just, I show up and give from what I have, but it's, it's a really very cool thing. We're doing a unique thing this year because we do a pop culture theme every year. And so because the release of the new Bridgerton season was a big deal, we decided to do a Bridgerton themed year for Technicolor, which means we're doing the diamond of pride season ball. And so pride season lasts from June all the way into October in Texas. There festivals that go for a long time. And so in November, we're holding this Bridgerton Ball and crowning the diamond of Pride season, the congregation that is the most inclusive during this time. And it's going to be really fun, I think.

Oh, that's funny. So it sounds like congregations that get involved aren't necessarily Ric congregations reconciling in Christ. We've talked about reconciling works in the past here, and it isn't Technicolor ministries goal to make RAC congregations is also what I'm picking up there.

Correct. So for us, we love RIc congregations. Reconciling works is an amazing organization, but we recognize that not every congregation is in a position where they can make that sort of commitment upfront there. You know, maybe that that's going to cause a split in the congregation because some people disagree and other people feel more comfortable. And it's a contentious enough issue that having a vote on a welcome statement is too much. And so we're trying to fill in the gap on both sides of that to say, cool, if this is too much for you, we can still do the education and you can still learn and then be in partnership with us so that if you ever want to be RiC, great. We'll help you get there. If you don't want to be. We continue to help you learn and grow as information changes or as new things come up. And on the flip side, with the RIC congregations, to have an entity which they can have a continuing relationship with. So as things change, reconciling works is a small organization. They can't keep up with every congregation. Right. But I can keep up with a.

Lot of when it is the ones in your area.

Right, exactly. And so trying to keep up with the ones in our area and say, cool, great, you just voted to become IriC or you've been RIC for 25 years. What's next?

Let's party.

Yeah, let's celebrate and let's figure out what's next and how we can take this even further. Maybe not in a scary way for some people. Right. But at least in a continually meaningful way, not just the stamp of approval. And now we're done.

Sure. Let's talk about some of the challenges. I'd imagine, particularly in your synod. Geography is always an issue. I can't imagine how you. Well, maybe, maybe synod assemblies are probably always in the San Antonio area. Or does that go back and forth?

It moves. Actually, we've got kind of a roving synod assembly. It usually is either in the San Antonio area, porpoise Christie to the south along the coast, or we used to more frequently go to McAllen along the border. So it hops. But yeah, geography is a huge challenge.

Right. And then add the online issue where you might have folks in California or the UK or Africa.

Absolutely.

Having in person things is certainly a challenge.

Right. And I always feel bad when we do in person things and there are people who can't participate because of geography. I mean, it's an enormous geography to try to cover, even just in the physical sense, in Texas and to try to create space for people across the country and across the world is insane, frankly. But I'm doing my best. So to kind of work around the geography in Texas, we do have online things that covers other parts of the world as well. But we're working on some local pop up communities, not just in Texas, but also across the country. So that there is a point, pastor, that knows the Technicolor brand. Right. And knows the mission and work that we're trying to do in other places. So that way I've got a guy who's about to move to the upper peninsula of Michigan. You can talk to him if that's your Technicolor person, and he can host things up there. I've got somebody out in Virginia Senate, and so trying to spread Technicolor out a little bit and share it with other clergy who also are really passionate about this work, maybe who can't make it their full time work, but who are willing to volunteer or take up a piece of it.

Sure. Now, one of the big challenges, I would imagine, and we have this with all Internet culture, is behavior. People take on a Persona that is not their normal person because they don't see real repercussions from their actions, I think, is a lot of it. And so we see that on Facebook, on Reddit, in twitch and all these other things. What has Technicolor done to sort of rein that in and make sure that it's a safe space.

Sure. So on our discord, we've got auto moderation, which basically you can set it up where discord will automatically remove posts that include certain words or remove things. If, say, one person posts a certain number of things within a short amount of time, you can kind of limit. So if someone posts five things within 30 seconds, well, great. Like they, they can get banned or blocked pretty quickly by the system and then I can follow up and check with those things. But otherwise, we just have a pretty stiff delete and block policy on our social media. If you say something dumb, I don't care. I'm not here to argue. I'm not going to convince you. If you're coming at me on social media or at Technicolor or anyone else on social media, this isn't a good faith argument. This is just someone who's spouting off, and I don't have time for that. So it is a broad block and delete policy. If you ever see anything on the Technicolor socials that looks like it shouldn't be there, please let me know because I don't want it there.

Yeah. And I would encourage everybody to go to the Technicolor website. We'll have it in the episode notes. But it's technicolorministries.com. and if you look for under about or get involved, I think it is, it's the ground rules, which specifies a lot of these things. When we're talking before about this, before we started recording, some of these rules, I think work really well if we would adopt those in regular operations as the church at coffee hour and such. And we talked a little bit. Sometimes we go to these rules. We have rules when we know that conversation could be harmful to folks or hurtful. But I think it wouldn't hurt for us to adopt these rules and have these covenants. We talk about covenants with each other for normal activities where we don't expect anyone to be harmful. We don't anticipate that kind of thing to be present. And so I highly recommend everybody take a look at that. I might even include a separate link just to this because it's really, really good.

We really appreciate having ground rules because it also gives people language when something goes wrong so that you can say, hey, you know what, actually, I feel like you were really running over me here and I would really appreciate some time to step in and take space for myself. And if you wouldn't mind stepping back or something along those lines. It gives you the language to express what you're feeling that way. It's common language instead of hateful language or angry language, there is a common, calm language to express whatever has occurred. And that seems, and it doesn't have.

To be something that's actually. That causes harm. It could simply be someone needs space because they don't want to be around a lot of people at the time. You know, if I'm thinking at church, people go to church for some. Some sense of quietness sometimes.

Absolutely.

And other people don't.

It doesn't. You're right, it doesn't have to be a harm causing thing. But having a document that gives you the language to say, I can't do this right now is also really helpful. So I'm a big proponent right there with you, Ben, of having ground rules for everything.

Yeah, yeah. The other thing, when I think about this, Technicolor ministries is oriented toward queer folks, and queer folks have a need for support, especially in a place where maybe there aren't a large number of congregations available. So there's a diverse choice of what congregations to join. Even if we look beyond Lutheran, I'd imagine that Episcopalians and UCC and the other mainline Protestants, there just may not be many options. And so this is a good option for that. What other communities would benefit or what other types of communities could benefit from this approach?

Oh, gosh, I. That's a really good question.

That's what I'm here for.

Yeah. I mean, I think most types of communities probably could. Right. I relate this a lot to the healthcare system pretty frequently of like, you have your general practitioner, which I think most congregations kind of fit in that sort of space. But to have specialists in particular areas is also really important in healthcare. It's just as important in spiritual care to have people who understand your lived experience. Maybe not exactly right, but at least have a more informed approach about that type of lived experience.

Yeah. One of the topics I've been on lately is deconstruction folks. Right. Which certainly crosses over with queer folks, too. But those folks tend to get unmoored, if you will. They detach themselves from a congregation. Maybe you're still looking for goddess, but maybe a community in this form would be helpful to sort of help them connect and then maybe find people of like minds near them eventually. Right?

Absolutely. And there are, like I said, being surprised about the number of clergy that popped into this group really quickly. That tells me that clergy are not getting their spiritual care somewhere else. And so wondering who preaches to the preachers, right? Yeah, I think there are a lot of unmoored categories out there that really could use something like this, that can kind of broadly reach to a very specific group of people.

Do you see congregations being able to use this sort of format, sort of in a hybrid method so that they operate both ways?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's definitely possible.

Is that a lot of effort?

Well, I think that's the question. Right. This is a lot of work. Absolutely, Frank. It is. It is a lot of work. Exhausting in the best way. It's. I don't. I don't know if you're a Marvel fan at all, but captain civil war, where Bucky's in the helicopter and Captain America is holding onto the helipad and the helicopter at the same time and like stretched in these two directions, that's what this type of ministry feels like a lot because you are trying to hold together things that are very far apart and that takes more energy.

Yeah.

And so I think there are some congregations, if you have someone who's dedicated to doing that, great. I think it would absolutely work. I don't think this is the work for your small town pastor who's just doing it all by themselves.

So Synod's doing it would make a little bit of sense having common, you know, at least supporting. Supporting that with a. Either. It could be a deacon who operates, you know, sort of independently or. Or a pastor with, you know, an ordained minister that they can devote themselves to that kind of call, like yourself.

Yeah, absolutely. And we've talked about before how this ministry and this type of model crosses all realms of the church. Right? You've got the congregational interaction, you've got the synodical interaction and the church wide interaction because it goes so far. And so I think having, having those synodical kind of things going on makes it easy to reach in both directions. I think it's kind of the happy place for this sort of thing.

Absolutely. So what are your aspirations for technicolor? What is an ideal, you know, we'll say five year plan or something, but what looks happy for the next period for technicolor?

Sure. This is a great question because we're in this first steps of expansion on some things. So this is, we're living into our dreams right now.

Awesome.

I have been working on the synod staff and I'm leaving that position, which means I'm also losing my Technicolor office. And so we're moving into more of a mobile office sort of model, hoping to pick up some vans that we can turn into office space for a couple people.

Ban life.

Yeah, it's wild. I never knew I wanted to do that, and here we are. But then the idea is to let us travel more and try and get out more. Part of the experience of speaking at the youth gathering was realizing that there's a need for this everywhere and that there are many congregations that need this work done in their space, or pastors and other individuals who are like, hey, I just really need help figuring out this particular situation. And so we're working on shifting more into kind of a consulting space on a national level and making space for churches or individuals to say, hey, I really need help with this thing, and I would love to have you all be the ones who help me. And so we're trying to expand that way, but also expand that reach with our little local hubs and trying to get more pastors in different places that can serve as a touch point for Technicolor in their own location. So in five years, I hope to have someone in every state that can be a hub person, and I hope to be working in a lot more places and helping to kind of begin these kind of more polite conversations. These kind conversations in a lot more places.

Wow, that sounds exhausting to me. But I'm a bit older than you, so it's exhausting.

But it's one of those things where when you love the work you do, even if you're exhausted, you feel satisfied about it.

Must be a calling, that's for sure.

Absolutely.

Excellent. Well, thank you. I love talking about that. We're going to shift into our catechism questions here, and you've so graciously offered one. But we'll go over the last episode's question. Our last episode, we talked about deacons, and so the question that went with it was, what is the origin of the word deacon? Was it taken from a NFL player who coined the phrase quarterback? Sack is a reference to the rodent poison decon? Was it derived from a greek word which means servant, waiter, or administrator? Or was it a much appreciated abbreviation for something that Keith made entirely up? Obviously, it's not that. So it is derived from the greek word diokonus, which means servant, waiter, or administrator. For this week's episode, Reverend Keats has offered us a question. What do you have for us today?

What book of the Bible speaks positively about gender diverse people?

All right, you're just gonna let us pick from all of them?

I'll give some options. Let's do ecclesiastes. Jonah, Matthew or revelation.

All right, and if you want to give us an answer to that, you can reach us by [email protected]. on the socials as mainstreet Lutherans on Facebook, Instagram threads and YouTube our website is mainstreetwom, which is a great way to share this episode out with all your friends and even your enemies. Main Street Lutheran is hosted by Keith Fair and Ben Fogt. If you want to complain to us, you can call us to leave a message at 734-25-0954 that the number and all of our links are in the episode. Notes the show is produced by folk media productions. Until next time, go in peace.

Serve the Lord and we will.

You should say thanks be to God.

And thanks be to God.

Thank you.