EuDMS #3: Andy Fronius - Equipping content creators and Gen Z for digital mission

00:00:01: Good morning from Romania.

00:00:03: It's so good to be here with you.

00:00:06: My name is Andy Fronius and I have been a missionary as long as I can remember.

00:00:11: My mom is a missionary and she started a women's shelter in Romania.

00:00:15: My wife and I, we adopted four children and we're living in Romania because of that.

00:00:20: After seminary, we joined Young Life, a mission organization and we did youth ministry for seven years.

00:00:26: We developed new works for young life work with international school students and with local students.

00:00:34: And that whole package of being passionate for missions, but also very interested in technology has led me to be fascinated with the entire world of YouTube.

00:00:45: And halfway through my youth ministry journey, a young person approached me and said, Andy, you need to check out this YouTuber from New York, Casey Neistat.

00:00:54: He's a vlogger.

00:00:56: A vlogging was.

00:00:57: very on vogue at the time.

00:00:59: And he was inspiring by video six that I watched of this creator from New York.

00:01:05: I knew I had to buy a camera and I had to become a YouTuber myself.

00:01:10: So this kicked off this entire journey of acquiring gear, you know, gas, gear acquisition syndrome.

00:01:16: I'm sure many of you guys here in the call are familiar with it.

00:01:20: And and then I learned I had to niche down and I picked a niche, which is Christian parenting and youth ministry and started creating resources there.

00:01:30: And God has blessed that over the last seven years to the point where today we are partnering with a Czech youth organization called Josiah Venture.

00:01:42: And we're taking everything that we've built over the last seven years with a team and scale it to all of Europe.

00:01:49: Here's a little backstory.

00:01:53: I started making videos, started doing youth ministry and combined those two things.

00:01:59: that has grown.

00:02:00: We also had presentations on Gen Z, on how to reach them better.

00:02:05: So my main focus is actually training adults, training youth workers, parents and pastors.

00:02:11: And we do that with a platform.

00:02:14: And this platform you can see over here is called Mr.

00:02:17: Jugendarbeit, Mr.

00:02:18: Youth Ministry in German.

00:02:20: What makes this platform so... Special is partnerships.

00:02:25: Over the last seven years, we have invited and partnered with two hundred individual Christian creators and mission organizations that let us translate their stuff.

00:02:36: So the content mix on our platform is eighty percent translated, twenty percent original content, which has allowed us to grow to one of the leading platforms on parenting and youth ministry in the German language sphere.

00:02:50: And with a friend of mine, Dave Paddy, you can see him over here.

00:02:54: He's the leader of Josiah Venture.

00:02:56: We have decided that we'll merge and we will build an entire digital missions track for all of Central and Eastern Europe by taking this platform and scaling it to multiple languages and multiple countries.

00:03:10: But on top of that, we see the need to train Christian creators.

00:03:14: So we established an in-house event, an invite-only event.

00:03:19: We called it the Digital Mission Summit.

00:03:20: We have done a few of those and you can see our first schedule.

00:03:26: Take a screenshot if you want of how we did it.

00:03:29: So we invited Christian creators from all around Europe that present the Gospel via their Avenue, for example, there's Alex.

00:03:41: Alex is a fourteen-year-old, was a fourteen-year-old young man from Bulgaria and he had an old broken phone and he used an orange, I kid you not, and a little orange as a tripod.

00:03:54: So he leaned the phone to the orange and he started doing Bible studies because his grandpa, who happens to be the pastor of his church, wouldn't allow him to preach saying he's too young.

00:04:08: So he did Bible studies on TikTok.

00:04:10: And if you're familiar with Eastern Europe, TikTok has a very high saturation of that market.

00:04:16: And today, when he uploads a video, does a Bible study, he has usually like five hundred people being there with him in the live streams.

00:04:24: And many people give their lives to Christ as a result.

00:04:27: So we're gathering these people from all across Europe and putting them together to train them.

00:04:33: And I'm sure that we will do more of these in the future to train Christian creators and then give them also the platform to grow.

00:04:41: Here's another example of what I'm doing.

00:04:44: I am part of a creator community by Aprilina Alter.

00:04:49: If you don't know her, she's on YouTube.

00:04:51: She's really good.

00:04:52: I have learned a lot from her.

00:04:53: And as creators, we're hanging out in a creator crew for six months at a time daily.

00:05:01: We have thumbnail clinics.

00:05:03: We have title clinics.

00:05:05: We have masterminds.

00:05:08: My time is spent mostly focusing on how can we have a stronger presence as Christian creators on YouTube.

00:05:17: And with these things in the background, I would like to focus on the task.

00:05:24: How can we encourage small churches with resources?

00:05:29: And how can we walk alongside them to help them introduce adolescents to Christ and help them grow in their faith?

00:05:37: And for me, it is clear that young people are spending a majority of their time on digital platforms.

00:05:44: There is this fascinating talk on YouTube by a young man.

00:05:49: Stop that here real quick by a young man.

00:05:51: And he says, if you look at our entire life and put a dot for every month that is available, and if you subtract the time that you will sleep and work and groom, yourself have hygiene and all those things, you have about a third of your time remaining.

00:06:10: And at the current course of action, ninety two percent of that free time will be spent looking at a screen by any person, not just by Gen Alpha or Gen Z, but the majority of people will spend ninety two percent of their free time looking at a screen.

00:06:26: And that is why we have to be present in their world.

00:06:34: What I've noticed in Eastern Europe especially, but also in Switzerland, is that TikTok and other social media avenues are usually the first point of contact for young people to hear about Christ.

00:06:49: And specifically, it is worship videos, the entire genre.

00:06:55: For example, there was this girl in Winter Tour in Switzerland, and she showed her mother One of these videos, Yeshua, the worship song that goes for eighteen minutes or so, said, Mom, I want to go where they do this.

00:07:09: And the mother didn't know what this was.

00:07:11: So she took this piece of information to her hairdresser and asked her hairdresser if she knows where they do this worship.

00:07:21: And she says, Yes, I'm going to a church.

00:07:23: You can come with us.

00:07:24: And that happened two years ago.

00:07:25: And they have been faithful.

00:07:27: members found home in that church.

00:07:30: So worship.

00:07:30: Music is very powerful.

00:07:33: And then a young police officer in our church, he joined about half a year ago.

00:07:37: He saw, again, coming from a non-faith background, a TikTok video on somebody just explaining a Bible verse.

00:07:45: So the Word of God, there was no hype video, no trending video, no click-baity video.

00:07:51: It was just the Bible.

00:07:53: explained one verse at a time and that spoke to him so that he started looking and he joined a digital community.

00:07:59: and the digital community said you have to find a local church.

00:08:02: so he googled our church and joined and we baptized him a few months ago.

00:08:07: All of this shows me two things.

00:08:10: The Holy Spirit is already alive and active and working on those digital platforms.

00:08:16: And the second thing, it does not depend on me.

00:08:18: I just get to water to put nutrients there and to disciple as things grow along.

00:08:28: But we have to be present in these digital platforms.

00:08:32: The way I achieve it personally is I have built this Ghost publication.

00:08:38: This is the German version of it and Ghost is similar to WordPress.

00:08:42: It's a free open source project.

00:08:46: You can download it and self-host it.

00:08:48: if you want to, or you can go with their hosting, which is more expensive.

00:08:52: But what's so beautiful about Ghost, if I log in in the back end here, I have everything in one place.

00:08:58: I can create articles.

00:09:00: I can see my database of members.

00:09:03: I can see the tracking of visitors and numbers.

00:09:06: So I no longer need Google Analytics or plausible.

00:09:09: I no longer need ConvertKit or similar email service providers, because it's all in here, all in one piece of software.

00:09:17: And what we'll do going forward is we'll take this, put it on one German server, and then have clones for each language version, and then have an API connection, and then have an AI pre-translate content.

00:09:33: So let's say the ministry leader in Romania wants a specific series of articles on Easter.

00:09:40: He just says, full request, it gets pre-translated article, and then can push it out.

00:09:46: which is super easy and fascinating and lean and simple.

00:09:50: So I'm very, very passionate about this, as you can tell.

00:09:53: But the future is not this because I see at the same time a very risky thing going on.

00:10:00: If you look at the traffic that Google provides, that has dropped since Easter this year so significantly that we had to correct our calculations.

00:10:11: We thought that By the end of this year, we will have a million individual visitors spending about two minutes on the platform, which we won't.

00:10:20: We won't even have half a million anymore as we used to in the past, but we'll have less visitors.

00:10:25: And I assume that the day will come where we will have probably ten thousand visitors a year, as people are moving towards AI solutions and getting the answers directly from their LLM.

00:10:39: This leads me to push for email newsletters.

00:10:42: We have to own the community and my high recommendation, like if you're in digital ministry, build your newsletter and build it fast and partner.

00:10:51: So that's it from my side.

00:10:52: I hope it was a little inspiring and showing you what's happening around Eastern and Central Europe.