Join us in this episode as we talk to Pastor Wes Via, a man who has taken his evangelism efforts to the digital world. Through his journey from traditional methods to creating digital content, he has found new success in spreading his message to a wider audience. You'll hear about the challenges he faced, the strategies he used, and the impact that digital evangelism has had on his ministry. Get ready to be inspired by a fresh approach to sharing the Word of God in the digital age!
Wes Via is the Communications director for Oklahoma Conference and the Pastor of Hope Adventist Fellowship
Wes's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wes.via/
to get the free training, send me an email at hello@digitalmissionspodcast.com
[00:00:00] There is a growing movement of leaders in the church who recognize the power of the internet in spreading the gospel. The question for this podcast, how can you get started? My name is Justin Khoe and you're listening to the Digital Missions podcast. Yo Justin here, and you are listening to the Digital Missions Podcast, where our goal is to equip pastors like you with the skills needed to reach your first million people with the gospel.
[00:00:26] And we're not just talking about any people, we're talking about the people that traditional church seems [00:00:30] to leave by the wayside. The kinds of people who have never and likely never will step foot in your church. Why? Because the gospel changes people's lives. Whether they hear it spoken from a pulpit, they read it from a piece of literature through the radio, the television, and yes, you guessed it through social media as well.
[00:00:48] My guest for today's episode is Wes Via, A man often described as a pastor, evangelist, content creator, and perhaps given where our story starts from today, A man of vision.
[00:00:58] I think that was in fourth grade. We were [00:01:00] on our way to church and I had a vision. It's the craziest thing that I've ever experienced in my life.
[00:01:06] I'm like 10 years old and I have this vision and I don't remember everything but the final scene and it, I remember it being very long, but at the end I saw myself at the end of time preaching to people like as an evangelist, and then it ended and we had, when I came out of it, it felt like it had been like a really long time and then it was like a split second, right?
[00:01:26] We hadn't even moved on the highway going 70 miles an hour. So that kind of [00:01:30] set my trajectory in the church. Everything growing up, like I I, I didn't understand what that meant. I didn't know what that was, and then I took my time away from God and away from the church and spent been about a decade outside of the church.
[00:01:43] And when I came back and really started to feel a call towards ministry, like that was always in the back of my head. And so I felt this like compulsion towards evangelism. And of course, when you are on fire, everyone's telling you. You should be an evangelist. You need to preach, you need to give Bible [00:02:00] studies.
[00:02:00] And so that's the direction that I went. I went to one of our four month bible worker training schools and I started doing Bible work and I was gonna be an evangelist. And turns out I'm not really a very good evangelist. . I was not a great Bible worker, . What were you bad at? I think.
[00:02:16] I would say now I don't feel like I would be a good evangelist. At the time I was zealous, but now I feel like there's a lot more nuance to the presentation of the gospel than to just hammer home like 28 points over a month. I think it takes a lot longer [00:02:30] time period. Smaller steps, slower process. For Bible working man,
[00:02:34] I was I was terrified of going to the doors. Like I personally am terrified, but then I also think because I'm like six three, I'm a big guy. I have a deep voice. I talk loud. I'm not the guy that you see outside your door and let him in. And , I really struggled, connecting with people door to door and actually in the year and a half that I bible work doing door-to-door work, I never once I got one study... consistent [00:03:00] from door to door in 18 months of Bible work.
[00:03:01] Every other study that I got, I'd take that back, two. Every other study I got was, someone sent in a card wanting bible studies, a friend of a friend, like it was weird connections. It wasn't like door to door work that I got those Bible studies. And so that, that was always a struggle for me.
[00:03:18] And then the last time where I, like Bible worked, I was in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I don't know if any of you're familiar with Scottsdale, Arizona. .
[00:03:26] Yeah. It's a wealthy place from what I'm it. Yeah, exactly.
[00:03:29] [00:03:30] Is Yes, so around the corner from Thunderbird Academy is a Lamborghini dealership, and so here we are trying to go door to door in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I'm the coordinator and site coordinator at this point.
[00:03:41] And. We're failing. I had four or five Bible workers working under me and we were just struggling. My Bible workers could not get Bible studies to save their life. I was pouring over the book of Evangelism like all day for like four to six weeks straight, just all day, every day. Just studying the book, trying to figure out.
[00:03:59] How [00:04:00] we were gonna be successful. Just praying because we just could not figure out the secret sauce to get, anything going on in this very upper end area. And then one of our very prominent evangelists came to do a wedding in the summer there. And I thought, man, this is God answering my prayer.
[00:04:17] And I go introduce myself, I say, look, I'm here working in the Scottsdale area, this church and I've got, a team of bi workers and we just cannot figure this. And we're having so much trouble, what do we have to do to be [00:04:30] successful? And he did not miss a beat. He did not even think for a second, he just said, you cannot be successful here.
[00:04:37] You don't have enough money. And I was like, , talk about like completely being defeated. Oh no. And eventually, like none of my Bible workers were able to get anyone to even the meeting. , but that was the nail in the coffin for me, for feeling like the old way of doing things was the best way to still be doing things.
[00:04:59] And so I really [00:05:00] started thinking about, how do we go about doing evangelism in the 21st century. And so I started having this change in how I saw the approach into evangelism from that point.
[00:05:12] Now, real quick, I want to jump to the defense of Wes' mentor, the famous evangelist who shall not be named because there's a decent chance that you'd recognize the name if you heard it.
[00:05:20] Here's the thing, while it might not have been the most encouraging thing in the world to hear, when your boots are on the ground and you're already committed to a project, but when the world's premier [00:05:30] evangelist says that you can't be successful here because of lack of money, chances are that he's actually right.
[00:05:35] And this is actually why social media ministry is so profound, because on the old way, you spend $30,000 on handbills and baptize three people, two of whom are the grandkids of your head and elder, and the third person simply got lost on the way to the bathroom. Unfortunately, in order to reach a million people with the gospel, you're gonna need a budget of millions of dollars, which is fine, if you win the lottery or have a rich [00:06:00] uncle.
[00:06:00] But for the rest of us, mere mortals, we're gonna have to work a little bit smarter. This is one of the values of social media ministry because when you understand social media wealth, you can reach anyone in the world with a push up, a button, even if you have a $0.
[00:06:15] I went through a period of deconstruction.
[00:06:17] I got to a place where I really felt like I had found my calling, like I had found what God wanted me to do with my life. I just really felt fulfilled, and then it all was taken away and it just crumbled [00:06:30] out from under me. And I started going through this period of questioning everything, like my devotional life had gotten dry because I had.
[00:06:38] through, as I came back into the church in those early years, it was all about, a set of doctrines that this is what the Bible teaches. And so it got to the place where it's like, why even read the Bible? Because yeah, I know all the verses that prove all the things, and I'm reading the Bible. I'm like, yep, that's that doctrine.
[00:06:51] That's that doctrine. And there was no relationship. And so I went through a period of deconstruction where I said, you know what? I'm just take everything off the table, wipe it [00:07:00] away, and I'm gonna start, I'm gonna say I'm gonna trust scripture. And I'm gonna start from there. And that became very freeing to me, and it restored my faith and it's put me on a trajectory now where for the last almost 10 years, every day is a deeper, greater, more energizing experience with Jesus.
[00:07:20] There's no dryness, there's no dead space now that I've taken that. And so I know, we know the statistic that there's people that are struggling with that, that their cultural experience [00:07:30] and their churches, Or however their interactions were, whether they were abused or whatever, they didn't have a good experience, but they're still interested.
[00:07:38] There's still a spiritual interest there, but they don't feel like anyone else can relate to what they're going through. And I needed that in that time. Those times, those moments where there was like someone who got what I was going through and there were few and far between. That someone like that, I would feel like, okay, I'm not alone on this journey.
[00:07:57] Like I'm not just out here going crazy, [00:08:00] apostatizing turning my back on Jesus and convincing myself of a lie. Like other people have gone this way before and so that has been a big part of my ministry now is to. Help people be comfortable asking the hard questions and finding that Jesus is still the answer.
[00:08:17] That's awesome. In my experience, it is so important for churches to have these kind of people, these spaces where it's okay to have questions and it's okay for those questions to not necessarily always find resolution [00:08:30] immediately. I think a lot of churches are like yeah, questions are great, but we're gonna give you the answer today and you know you're gonna receive the answer right now.
[00:08:35] Cool. If that happens, fantastic. Praise the Lord. But I think that for a lot of people, you, Wes, and maybe the kinds of people that you represent in the deconstruction phase, there's a certain. Utility, a certain value in, not necessarily knowing the answer right now, but still being able to cling to faith.
[00:08:51] And I think that's a really beautiful thing, something that's super important. At some point in your journey, you decide that online communication is something that you wanna lean into. You're, you were [00:09:00] doing the evangelism thing, you're doing the ministry thing at some point. You lean into the online communication.
[00:09:05] I think you and I were talking in the background about one of those stories where you're in a kind of a rural area and there was this moment of aha that you're like, oh wow, people are actually on the internet. Can you talk to me
[00:09:14] through that story? Yeah. No. A few years ago I was out in western Oklahoma in a little town called Elk City, Oak City as a population about 15,000 people, and it's just a little town in an island in the prairie.
[00:09:25] And I was talking to a guy that that runs a [00:09:30] marketing company out there in Portland, and he pulled a digital census. We were just talking about, marketing and evangelistic marketing. Pulled a digital census on Elk City, and he found that there was 14,000 people within the city limits who were online.
[00:09:43] These are online users in a town of 15,000, so that means that most of the people in that town were online. And outside of Elk City there's nothing. It's just prairie. It seems like there's nothing even out there. But he pulled a 15 mile radius [00:10:00] around Elk City. and there were two times as many people outside the city limits within 15 miles as in, so the census went from 15 to 45,000.
[00:10:08] Oh, wow. And that really got me thinking like, okay, how would we even ever reach those people? Yeah, you can mail them something, but how would we substantively reach those people? And so it was that moment where I was like it got in there and started percolating that, okay. , all these people are online.
[00:10:24] These are online users. This isn't just population. So these are people who are online and we have [00:10:30] this kind of, we've convinced ourself with this mindset that, rural people aren't online. You name it, they're not online. One of the things people tell me is, I'm casting the vision here in Oklahoma is our members aren't online.
[00:10:40] Which to a certain degree, I don't care cause I'm not trying to reach our members in this capacity, but that's not true. We know that from Covid, but also even if they're not, everyone else is, and if we reach those people who are online and bring them into our community of faith, and that fundamentally changes our community of faith [00:11:00] to where we are, people who are digitally native and interested and connected, and are online.
[00:11:06] It's like, why would we not be here in this place where now we have a reach that is far in excess of being able to knock on the doors? I equate it to like, if you go door to door, if you're on like a good day, Bible working, maybe you hit a hundred doors, 150 doors, you're hoping in a neighborhood to find two or three people that are maybe interested, that are home at the right.
[00:11:27] That you aren't the big, [00:11:30] giant scary man standing outside their door and then hoping that they'll be in the right frame of mind, in the right mood to say yes. Even if they are in, there's so many variables and for me, I've just started seeing the digital space and social in particular, like walking into the middle of the neighborhood.
[00:11:45] Holding up a sign that says Free Bible studies. Who wants one? And the interested people just come out because it, it's, it really makes that same kind of connection where you're just standing in the midst of your community saying, Hey, I want to talk about Jesus. And then [00:12:00] the algorithm goes and finds the people that want to hear you talk about Jesus.
[00:12:03] And so there's no more spending all these days sweating or freezing knocking on doors, going to follow up a Bible study that they're not home for. Cuz they forgot. Cuz they were just saying yes cuz they were being. Like you're just there. You're in the space, you're available. They engage, and then as you connect with them and build that relationship and do it with intention, you can grow that relationship to the point that it becomes, transformative.
[00:12:26] I love the analogy. I'm there with you. I've knocked on enough, on enough [00:12:30] doors to know that you're lucky if a third of the people are even home. And so you're spending a whole lot of time doing nothing at all. And so the idea of being able to reach people online has always been very intriguing.
[00:12:40] And as I walk around and as I get to enter into the spaces where there's pastors and there's leaders, people who have been around for much longer and had much more experience than tonight, one of the kind of pushbacks of the questions are is like does it actually work? Does it actually
[00:12:52] make a difference, and I know that you exist in these spaces. I'm really curious when you have these people pushing back okay, cool, like you could do something online, but they're [00:13:00] just views, they're not real. They're not really that interested. How do you help give the perspective like no. Like these are real people.
[00:13:06] These are real stories. These are real opportunities for the spirit to do something
[00:13:11] amazing. Yeah, so there's a couple things that I've been thinking about in regards to this question. I'll give you the more antagonistic response first. What is more likely to be effective? A one minute video or a 14 hour long read of a book that gets mailed to someone.
[00:13:28] We don't question whether or [00:13:30] not mailing a book out in mass. Is going to be some of us do. Some of us do . I but not the people that are asking whether this is effective. Fair enough. Fair enough. There's no question that in, in our collective mind, in, in the hive mind within our tradition that mailing books is gonna be effective.
[00:13:49] It has adapted. Now, it didn't used to be any question of whether a hand bill was gonna be effective. But the less antagonistic version is vertical videos, carousels are the digital glow track. That's what [00:14:00] this is. I, if we're comfortable distributing a million glow tracks in a city, why would we not have the same level of comfort creating content that can reach equally as far and cost less?
[00:14:14] It's better for the environment. If you want to, if you want to go down that, line of thinking. That has a deeper connection point because now rather than having to take something, read it, flip over to the last page, see that there's a website or a phone number, go on that website and that phone number, call them to [00:14:30] request more information that maybe or maybe will not get followed up by a local church or conference.
[00:14:35] I see your video and then like tomorrow I see another one because the algorithm's gonna go, Hey, they watched that video. I'm gonna show 'em another one. And then eventually it's just there's just no way in, in the world that we live in today, that in my mind that you can question the efficacy of digital missions anymore.
[00:14:51] You can't, in one, one side of your mouth say it's effective to be sending paper. Copies of things to people handing out paper things, [00:15:00] but then say, oh, a one minute video is not effective. It's
[00:15:02] this underlying belief that digital missions is powerful that led Wes to take action. Over the past six months, Wes and a team of pastors from Oklahoma have enrolled in the Digital Missionary Academy to get in-depth training on how to be more effective at reaching people online.
[00:15:18] Here's what he's learned so far.
[00:15:20] But just the process of thinking through how I would create content, if the process, the thinking has impacted my entire ministry, not just my social ministry. I [00:15:30] think it's made my preaching better. It's helped me become more aware of what it takes to be heard through the noise of this life, not just online, but in real life.
[00:15:39] One of the target points that when I'm talking about this is that so far I've had 199,000 views. Give or take, cross my content. 97% of that is non followers, so that's all algorithmic reach, but it's not that 97% that's really been meaningful for me it's the 3% that has been the most meaningful, where it's actually people that I [00:16:00] know.
[00:16:00] Who relationships in the past have been broken. They have had a bad experience in church. I can maybe in some cases, contributed to that experience in the past that are interacting with my content in a way that I never really expected to happen. And particularly a number of my friends that are L G B T Q are really connecting and commenting and DMing me on my posts and sharing my.
[00:16:26] Telling me that they miss being in church and that they wish [00:16:30] that things were different. And we're very far away. But it's like having these people, like reaching out in that content, connecting in a way where like some of these people, like I'll think about them and my heart will break for them in the past.
[00:16:42] And I didn't know, like, how do I even go about going in and say like Colin up Hey, can I talk to you about Jesus? Because the relationship was fractured. It's like, how are you gonna do that? And this has opened up an opportunity for that, as a young girl that was in my youth group many years ago when I was leading the youth group in my church.
[00:16:58] She's since left [00:17:00] the church, lot of, issues in and out of the church. And she has married a transgendered partner now She is making, yeah, pornographic.
[00:17:08] So categorically. This is the kind of person that in our minds is unreachable, uninterested. There's no hope for this kind of person, and yet this is someone that you know, that you care about, has been a part of your ministry and your journey.
[00:17:20] All of a sudden you're putting out content and then what happens
[00:17:22] next? Yeah, so she started interacting very early on and just reaching out and just telling me how much she misses [00:17:30] listening to me preach, misses being in church. She shared a few of my post stories, just reaching out and just saying I missed this.
[00:17:37] I missed this part of my. . And that to me is like the biggest thing that I think needs to be considered. On a macro level, right? Not just here in the social sense, but what kind of environment are we creating? And then we can signal through social to these disenfranchised and traumatized groups of people who have had bad experience.
[00:17:58] We can signal [00:18:00] through our presence online that God loves. The church is safe for them, or at least I'm safe for them, in the context of the church, so that they can begin to believe again that the church is somewhere they can come and find community, that they can come and find connection.
[00:18:15] There's hope for them because, While they may not feel like they can come to church and find connection and have that spiritual encounter with God in that way, that's happening wherever they're at through their feed. And the spirit can step [00:18:30] in and work. And I don't think, I don't think we consider enough the power of that.
[00:18:33] I was scrolling through Instagram once and a, a post just flick through my feet. I didn't even stop. The Holy Spirit just spoke to me and just opened my mind to a whole series of sermons that I preached on that just because I saw that post and it just was like the connective tissue that brought everything together.
[00:18:52] And so the capacity for, even if something doesn't hit what God can do with that, as it just scrolls through someone's feed. [00:19:00] Why do marketers pay for billboards? Why do they pay someone to go around in New York and slap posters on walls? Because there's power in even the fleeting image. To speak and to have an impact in a person's consciousness.
[00:19:17] And you can take that however you want to take it. But if that is the case, then why would we not put ourselves in a position where maybe even if a post doesn't perform, everyone just scrolls through it. There's no [00:19:30] way to quantify what the spirit of God is doing as it flicks through people's feeds and it's worth it.
[00:19:36] Amen. You have this young girl who was a part of your program, part of your church in the past, all of a sudden is reaching out, engaging with you, as well as sharing your content. I'm curious if you had a sense of. Maybe she even articulated to you what was connecting with her. Why was what you were sharing so impactful?
[00:19:53] When
[00:19:53] I consider the particular pieces of content that she was interacting with, it gave space for her experience. We [00:20:00] didn't really go into it more than that. And she's streaky in her online presence. And so there were, there was a couple weeks there where she was in the likes in the.
[00:20:10] and then she's been gone and it doesn't look great. She's posted very much until just the other day I saw that she had posted again. But that's the thing, right? So when we think about what are we trying to accomplish here, my goal is not to get her back into church. My goal with my content is just to try to help her take a half a step closer back to God, but to create [00:20:30] an environment where in some small.
[00:20:32] she can feel as though God still loves her. God is with her. That, that she can come to Him, in a moment that that she's had a connection point with him. And so it doesn't matter to me whether the opportunity arose to have deeper conversations. Yeah. And absolutely love it, but I don't feel the need to go chase those down either.
[00:20:50] And that's something that, I think that there's that cliche that we say people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. And beyond that, like until someone asks for your opinion, they don't care about your opinion. [00:21:00] And so that's the beauty of social media is that we can share
[00:21:03] the gospel and people can choose to listen to it or not. So they have agency in this decision. And that's one of the biggest struggles that I think people have in, in the way, like when you talk about street preachers and that sort of stuff now, and how it affects people's understanding of God is that they don't have a choice like you get in their space and you're just trying to force that on them.
[00:21:21] And social media naturally takes that barrier away. They have a choice of whether or not they're gonna engage with that content. If they don't engage with it, the algorithm is not gonna keep forcing it on them , [00:21:30] right? So if they just skip you, and maybe it shows it to 'em a couple times cuz it thinks they would like it, but they don't.
[00:21:35] It goes away, right? And so there's a lot of agency there. So when people have a choice, which I think is fundamental to the gospel as a whole, I think that creates a better environment for people to have a transformation encounter.
[00:21:48] One of the main reasons why I wanted to feature Wes' story was for the simple fact that he doesn't have a massive audience.
[00:21:55] All too often we believe the lie that in order to have impact, you need to [00:22:00] have millions of followers. For what it's worth at the time of this recording, Wes has maybe 1400 followers on TikTok, another 500 on Instagram, and a grand total of three subscribers on YouTube, and yet Wes is able to connect with the very people that the traditional church system seems inept to serve.
[00:22:18] Wes is able to rekindle lost friendships and to get to a place where they may be open to the idea that God still loves them. So with all of that in mind, I asked Wes how he would encourage other [00:22:30] passers who don't yet have a million followers.
[00:22:32] I think it's just everything that we just talked about, right?
[00:22:36] That it's really just. The one, it's about being available to have an impact with the person that you can have an impact with. It's very easy to get caught up in thinking like, oh, I need 90,000 followers, or, I need a million followers, or whatever. But it really is, I life exists in one-to-one connections.
[00:22:53] I At the core of it, of the thrust of it, obviously there's marketing and you try to, get as many people connected, but even in that sense [00:23:00] it's one to one the change happens, the impact happens when there's a connection one to one. It's not in the mass. And so just having that piece that, just keeping it in my mind I'm gonna show up to share this because I feel.
[00:23:14] God is leading me to do it. And that was really, that was the biggest thing for me when I started the 30 Day Challenge. Like I had been in the class and I, of course hadn't really been doing anything. And then the 30 Day Challenge was ramping up and I haven't been paying attention to it.
[00:23:25] I was behind on the classes and then 30 Day Challenge started and I was just like, I'm going for it. [00:23:30] And so I just jumped in. Like I, I, on the 30th of April, I was like, I'm Or May, whenever it was, I'm not doing. . And then on the 1st of June, I was like, all right, fine. I'm doing it. And so I just went for it, and I just, I did the best that I could. It was ugly. The video wasn't great. The content wasn't great, but it worked, right? I drove myself crazy trying to figure out what time to post and I posted it. Three 30, it worked. I posted 3 35. It didn't work. You know. All that stuff. But at the end of the day, it's some of those smaller videos that had the impact with the [00:24:00] people, the impact and the shares and the comments and the interactions are on the smaller videos anyway that ultimately matter the most to me.
[00:24:06] So that's really it, I think is just, I'm doing this because I feel like going back to that moment when I was 10 years old on I 20, heading to church in Texas, I knew that God had a plan for my life, whatever that is. At this juncture, whenever I have listened to him and I've responded to his voice and I've done the thing that he's asking me to do, even if it's uncomfortable or cumbersome or problematic.
[00:24:29] [00:24:30] For me, it's always been worth it. And so when I feel the compulsion to share I just share and I just leave the rest of it up to him,
[00:24:40] at the end of the day, digital missions is really this simple. You hear his voice. You recognize the Spirit's invitation and then you move forward with faithfulness.
[00:24:49] I'm not sure where you're being called to serve. Maybe online, maybe not, but no matter where you're going, I'd love to encourage you to put your hand to the plow or iPhone in this case, [00:25:00] and trust that God knows what He's doing. Earlier in this episode, we mentioned the Digital Missionary Academy, the training school where West and dozens of other pastors around the world are going for in-depth training
[00:25:11] and if you feel like digital Missions is for you I'd love to extend an invitation for you to join. Send me an email letting me know that you're ready to get started over at hello@digitalmissionspodcast.com. I look forward to helping you reach your first million people with the gospel. As always, my name is Justin Khoe and you've been listening to the Digital [00:25:30] Missions podcast.