Bubba Stallcup was awestruck when he realized he could combine his passion for video games with his love for Jesus.
Today, Bubba and his team run “Love Thy Nerd,” an outreach for gamers of all kinds.
In Part 3 of the five-part series “Creating for the Creator,” hear how Bubba is reaching out to fellow nerds online and in real life.
Found out more about Love Thy Nerd at their website, or watch them stream live on their Twitch.tv channel.
Connect with us through email at gps@billygraham.org or on Billy Graham Radio on Facebook.
Bubba Stallcup was awestruck when he realized he could combine his passion for video games with his love for Jesus.
Today, Bubba and his team run “Love Thy Nerd,” an outreach for gamers of all kinds.
In Part 3 of the five-part series “Creating for the Creator,” hear how Bubba is reaching out to fellow nerds online and in real life.
Found out more about Love Thy Nerd at their website, or watch them stream live on their Twitch.tv channel.
Connect with us through email at gps@billygraham.org or on Billy Graham Radio on Facebook.
Bubba Stallcup:
00:00:00 I have not known a life without Super Mario or without The Legend of Zelda. And so, I have really vivid memories of playing Nintendo, Atari, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis.
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Phil Fleischman: Bubba Stallcup says he had an epiphany the day he realized he could combine his love of video games with his love for Jesus. Today, the ministry he co-founded, Love Thy Nerd, is doing just that.
Bubba:
00:00:24 We exist to be the love of Jesus to nerds and nerd culture, and we do that by helping people love and serve their nerdy neighbors right where they are.
Phil: With 3 billion people around the world playing video games, the nerd mission field is vast … and growing. I’m Phil Fleischman.
Jim Kirkland: And I’m Jim Kirkland. Today, we’re taking a trip into nerdom to get a closer look at this unique ministry. You’re listening to the third episode of our “Creating for the Creator” series of GPS: God. People. Stories., an outreach of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
One thing that Billy Graham was passionate about is the importance of sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ with others. As a matter of fact, the mission of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association is, in essence, to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to make Him known through every means available.
Billy Graham:
00:01:16 “This Gospel shall be preached throughout the … world,” said Jesus in Mark 14. Go ye therefore and teach all nations, said Jesus.
Jim: More from Billy Graham in a few minutes. First, a quick reminder to subscribe to this podcast on whichever app you like to use for podcasts, that way you’ll never miss an episode.
Phil: We also want to let you know about FindPeaceWithGod.net. It’s a great starting point if you have questions about the Christian faith—or if you know someone who’s looking for hope. That, again, is: FindPeaceWithGod.net.
Intro: GPS: God. People. Stories.
Bubba:
00:01:59 Hey there, my name's Bubba Stallcup. I'm CEO, founder, and president of Love Thy Nerd, which is a ministry that exists to be the love of Jesus to nerds and nerd culture.
Phil: Bubba Stallcup is a missionary to nerds. His mission field can be anywhere from an online-streaming platform like Twitch to a Star Wars convention. If nerds are there, it’s fair game.
Jim: And let’s talk about the term “nerd.” It hasn’t always been a positive term. These days, a nerd can be anyone who’s enthusiastic about a particular subject—but the word is often associated with people who play video games. And that includes a lot of people.
Phil: It sure does. In fact, a report last year on the video game industry revealed that two-thirds of Americans play video games, from kids to senior citizens. So, whether you’re talking about Candy Crush or Call of Duty; Wordle or World of Warcraft, gamers are everywhere.
Jim: Bubba, of course, is one of them. And as a millennial, he cannot remember a time when video games were not part of his life.
Bubba:
00:03:03 I was born in 1986. That was the year that Nintendo landed on North American shores. And so, I have not known a life without Super Mario or without The Legend of Zelda. And so I have really vivid memories of playing Nintendo, Atari, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis. The first console I actually fell in love with was the Super Nintendo.
Jim: Bubba has fond memories of picking out video games at the local Blockbuster and playing until he beat them—but his childhood wasn’t all fun and games.
Bubba:
00:03:34 When I was about six or seven—probably five to seven, the timeline is super fuzzy for me—my parents got divorced and my mom had a Catholic background, and at the time we were going to a Southern Baptist church with my dad, but I cannot remember a single time where my parents went to church together.
Phil: Life at home was often difficult, but church wasn’t.
Bubba:
00:03:59 That was a place that I got a lot of stability, was at church. And I like to tell people a lot that I kind of tripped into church. I got tricked really, is what happened, into going to a Newsboys concert. And, I saw ’em go up on the—it was the Step Up to the Microphone Tour—and I saw the drums go up and rotate, and I've been a Christian ever since. And so, you know, it's just one of those deals that, you know, I really enjoyed my time there. I liked the people; I liked the vibe.
Phil: Bubba was about 12 years old when he first saw the Newsboys onstage. That was a turning point in his faith. He started frequenting church and youth events. Before long, he was leading Bible studies as a middle schooler and high schooler, and he got involved with Fellowship of Christian Athletes—even though he wasn’t an athlete.
Bubba:
00:04:43 I just knew that this was a place that I needed to be. I knew it was something that God was calling me to; I didn't know exactly why. I didn't know how I was gonna do any of the things, but I knew that being in those places were things that I loved, and I knew that that reading Scripture was something that I cared about, fiercely. And I loved, at that point, you know, learning about God because in some way, shape, or form, it was getting me closer to Him just learning things about Him. I hadn't learned how to have a relationship with Him just yet. But being in the presence of other people who did have really great relationships with Him made me want to read Scripture. It made me want to study. It made me want to hang out in places where there was going to be true fellowship, even if I didn't fully understand all of these things.
Jim: One step at a time, Bubba grew as a Christian; then, later, a youth pastor.
Phil: He also got married, and as quite a few newlyweds have discovered, video games and marital bliss don’t always go hand in hand.
Bubba:
00:05:46 This had to have been about 2011 maybe, and I was heavy into video games and it, you know, was detrimental to my marriage because I'm some snot-nosed kid, freshly married, just, you know, thinks that I can take everything on. I've got all the time in the world, all 35 hours of the day, I can do anything I want to. My wife helped me [understand] that I can't do that, and so we, ended up kind of stepping back from video games—by “we,” I mean, I stepped back from video games.
Phil: One problem Bubba ran into during his video game hiatus was that it was harder to relate to the kids he worked with as a youth pastor. He wasn’t able to speak their language anymore.
Bubba:
00:06:26 And so it got to the point where as, as a youth pastor, like this was the thing that the kids were into. Skyrim was big at that time, you know, Fallout stuff was happening, [Super] Smash Bros, Wii, Mario Kart, all sorts of things were like really big. And so for me not to have my toe in that, it just didn't make sense. And so we talked a little bit about what it would look like, and I kind of had this epiphany, right?
Jim: Bubba was struck with the idea that he could combine his love of Jesus with his love of video games.
Bubba:
00:06:57 I had this epiphany where God kind of got a hold of me and He said, Hey, you can do nothing while you're doing nothing. You can just play games and just veg out or you can do something while you're doing nothing. Because at the end of the day, I don't have anything to show for my actual video game play. It's all just ones and zeros, bits and bobs. So I decided to do something. I said, All right, I'm gonna do this. And then it took a while for me to convince my wife, that that was what God was calling me to do, cuz she said, Sure, sure He is. Absolutely. Yeah, right. Heavy sarcasm. And I was like, no, no, no, hear me out, hear me out. So we started talking about what it would look like.
Jim: With his wife, Anna, warming up to the idea, Bubba began brainstorming ways he could create a Christian outreach to the gaming community.
Bubba:
00:07:40 And my first thought was, man, I'll just do like a—I was playing World of Warcraft at the time—and I was like, man, I'll do like a Bible study in this area of the game. So naturally I've got a graphic arts background and you know, I'm real markety and branding and stuff like that. So I'm like, what would I call it, before I even did anything else, what would I call it? And I was like, well, I’d call it Game Church because that's what it is. It’s church in a game. I Googled it and my heart sunk because the URL was taken, and so I had to go to the website. Well, I go and I see GameChurch is there and it looks really great, it's fantastic, and they talk about these video game mission trips and I'm like, man, I wanna do that.
Phil: GameChurch was just getting off the ground when Bubba stumbled across the site. It wasn’t long before he was part of the team.
Bubba:
00:08:30 It just was awesome. Loved it. And that is where Love Thy Nerd was born, was inside of GameChurch. All of the founders, we all met in GameChurch.
Phil: Eventually, Bubba and several others from GameChurch decided to leave the ministry and go their separate ways.
Jim: But Bubba couldn’t shake the idea that it wasn’t yet “game over” for his ministry to nerds.
Bubba:
00:08:52 Like, not by a long shot. God is not done with me here yet, so we have to do something. And so what ended up happening was through a series of conversations between myself and others and all sorts of stuff, we got together—and I'm talking between like January, probably 20th of 2018 and Feb. 8 maybe, between that time frame—we all flew out to California, to Ventura, and hung out. I mean, knockdown, drag out conversations and arguments, and all sorts of stuff to kind of get this thing off the ground, and by the end of that weekend, Love Thy Nerd was born.
Jim: Love Thy Nerd just celebrated its fifth anniversary.
Bubba:
00:09:33 We exist to be the love of Jesus to nerds and nerd culture, and we do that by helping people love and serve their nerdy neighbors right where they are. So we try as best as we can to keep everything Biblically grounded.
Phil: If you’re not quite sure what outreach to nerds might look like, think about the role of missionaries who go overseas. They have to become fluent in the language and culture of the people they’re trying to reach.
Bubba:
00:09:56 At the core of who we are and what we're trying to do, we are trying to change any preconceived notions that nerds have with church culture and that the church may have with nerd culture. We do that by creating safe spaces in between, in the middle, where people can get together and talk about their favorite new Marvel movie, or you know, Ghostbusters or [Teenage Mutant] Ninja Turtles, or whatever it is that, video games, that they're into. It doesn't matter. There is common ground. There is some affinity that we share. We just have to be given a space to see each other as human people.
Phil: The word Bubba uses most in describing the Love Thy Nerd mission is “relationships.”
Bubba:
00:10:35 Like if Jesus is the cornerstone, the very next stone is relationships for us—which Jesus absolutely is the cornerstone. We build the relationships, we have the discussions, we do the things that we do because we wanna be that love of Jesus. We just think that the next important step is relationship.
Jim: A lot of times, relationships are built online, through social media and gamer-friendly streaming platforms like Twitch. Other times, those relationships happen in real life.
Bubba:
00:11:02 You might know them as like a comic-con or, you know, anything with con at the end of it is absolutely 100% probably a nerd-culture event. And so we go to a lot of those places and we actually do ministry there—and it is ministry.
Jim: Ministry as in Love Thy Nerd sends teams of volunteer missionaries out to the various booths to volunteer.
Bubba:
00:11:25 Maybe you've been to a trade show before, you kind of understand this a little bit. They all kind of work the same. They're there to sell you something. At these shows, they want to sell you their game or their products or their system or whatever it is, and they need people to do that. And so what we do is we come in and we say, Hey, I will give you the best, most passionate and competent volunteers that you've ever had. I want you to know that when you do business with Love Thy Nerd, we're gonna tell you upfront that we're all about Jesus, and this is what it means to be the hands and feet of Jesus. And so, we'll do that, and then after their shift is over, we’ll kind of send our people out to the places where they are the best.
Phil: For every game or hobby you can think of, as well as the ones you can’t think of, there’s a Love Thy Nerd volunteer who’s into it. And they fan out across the convention to meet people who share their interests.
Bubba:
00:12:14 So if somebody's really into comic books, they go to the comic book area, somebody's really into, you know, video games, they go there. If they really like this board game, they'll go here, and they really just stay in their lane. And so we can create these nerd-culture mission trips without having to send somebody to Nicaragua to build a house that should never be in Nicaragua building a house.
Phil: Like most mission-oriented groups, Love Thy Nerd provides training for its volunteers.
Bubba:
00:12:43 We train them in this method, and then we send them out into the wild to go love and serve their nerdy neighbors in real life, on the internet, through Discord or Facebook or Twitch or wherever it is. The medium is the variable, right? Like it's almost superfluous at a certain degree because the relationship is the thing that's gonna give you the equity, right? To be able to speak into people's lives and for them to listen when you're talking to them, rather than things just being a lecture.
Jim: As our country becomes increasingly secular and church attendance dwindles, Love Thy Nerd is venturing out into the places where people are congregating, both online and in real life—and gamers are taking notice.
Bubba:
00:13:27 We've heard things like that time and time and time again. They're like, Hey, thank you so much for being here, streaming some goofball game. And then that just gives way to conversation. It gives way to relationships. It lets people feel seen and heard and appreciated because as they're typing in the chat, they're engaging with some person on the internet who is reading the chat and talking to them. They feel seen, they feel heard, they feel appreciated. It's more than representation, it's inclusion.
Jim: More and more people—of all ages and from all over the world—are getting into gaming and other areas of nerdom. As a result, Bubba sees endless opportunities for reaching people with the Gospel.
Bubba:
00:14:08 What do we see is like people coming together and using these things, DOOM, Diablo, Call of Duty, Fallout, Fortnite, all these different games, Minecraft, doesn't matter what it is. All these things are mediums just so that we can get in the same space as people, meet them exactly where they are, instead of shouting at them from our place to come over to us. We go and meet them right where they are, and it's genuine because we love games, we love comics, we love Marvel movies, we love nerd culture, all this stuff.
Phil: And they’re starting to see more churches embrace this kind of outreach.
Bubba:
00:14:42 What we've found is there are a ton of Christian streamers and a lot of them—this is crazy to me—a lot of them are pastors, like youth pastors, senior pastors, children's pastors, worship pastors, it doesn't matter. Like their backdrop, it’s the office at church, and I get that because if you go back and look at some of our old videos, my backdrop is also my office at the church. And so, the good thing for that is that it builds this organic relationship between nerd-culture ministry and the physical actual ministry that normal day-to-day Christians understand. My church gets it, because they've had to live with it for, you know, the better part of a decade now. They just know, Hey, Bubba, that's the nerd.
Phil: Bubba is also a dad, by the way. He and Anna have four children, ages two through 10—P.J., Levi, Naomi, and Caleb.
Jim: When he isn’t chasing kids around or running Love Thy Nerd, Bubba is building relationships with other nerds. It’s exciting when he gets to pray for someone who’s struggling—and be the light of Christ to them.
Bubba:
00:15:47 And then we get to have those conversations where like, honestly, like it's 100% success rate. It's just 100% if you're willing to put the work in. Because what we've seen is people will come to us after long—hey, they've been playing tabletop role-playing games together for five years—and now we're starting to see people go, Hey, you know, I'm not really the praying type, but I know that you are, and so, you know, My wife is in the hospital. Can you pray for her?
Jim: These opportunities are a privilege—the result of an authentic relationship that’s grown to the point of trust. And when these conversations arise, Bubba isn’t afraid to share about where he finds his hope.
Bubba:
00:16:28 What that person is actually saying in that moment is massive. It's huge. They're saying different words than are coming out of their mouth. They're saying that they don't believe in prayer, but they do because they've seen it work in your life and they've seen God move in your life. And so, what's happening is they're asking the person that they believe to be the closest to God in their sphere to be the intercessor. And we know that those things exist. We know that that's what saints can do and what we should do. And so, in those moments, we say, Absolutely. Do you mind if I pray right now with you? And personally when that door is cracked open, man, I kick it real hard. I've never had that backfire yet. I've never had a backfire. But, we wait until the moment is right.
MUSIC TRANSITION
Phil: Love Thy Nerd is a community of nerds and gamers who share the love of Jesus—often times online. And we want to let you know about our online outreach, FindPeaceWithGod.net. It’s a safe space to ask spiritual questions and find answers through videos and other media.
Jim: There’s also a live chat feature you can use around the clock. We hope you’ll check it out. That’s FindPeaceWithGod.net.
Phil: We’re about to hear a word from Billy Graham. And then a preview of next week’s episode.
Voice-over: You’re listening to GPS: God. People. Stories., a podcast production of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
Billy Graham:
00:17:54 We see evangelism as the whole Gospel for the whole man taken to the whole world by the whole church.
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Voice-over: Billy Graham …
Billy Graham:
00:18:04 This Gospel shall be preached throughout the world, said Jesus in Mark 14. Go ye therefore and teach all nations, said Jesus. Not only to the whole world, but an evangelism that mobilizes the whole church, that uses the whole range of possible methods. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 9, “To the weak became I [as] weak, that I might gain the weak. [I am] made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.” Jesus Christ is going to return. That's the hope of the world—and you know this world today is dying for a little bit of hope. “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done [in] earth, as it is in heaven.” That prayer will be answered. The kingdom of God will prevail.
Jim: If you want to know more about the hope of the world Billy Graham just shared, we encourage you to go to FindPeaceWithGod.net. Or, if you’d rather talk to someone on the phone, call our 24-hour prayer line at 855-255-PRAY. That’s 855-255-7729.
Phil: We’ve been hearing from Bubba Stallcup of Love Thy Nerd on this episode of GPS: God. People. Stories. It’s episode number three of our “Creating for the Creator” series. Next week, children’s book author Alyssa Cathers tells us about how her books teach Biblical truths to kids dealing with anxiety.
Alyssa Cathers:
00:19:33 When I started the Anxious Abby book, there was really nothing much out there on counseling topics such as anxiety or anger. I was making up my own resources. And I thought, Well, if I'm having to make up these resources, I'm sure there's other counselors out there and parents out there that are searching for resources with God's Word as the answer for their problems.
Phil: Be sure to subscribe to GPS: God. People. Stories., in order to make sure you don’t miss any of the episodes. And if you know someone who you think would enjoy the episode you just heard, we hope you’ll send them the link or post it on your favorite social media platform. I’m Phil Fleischman.
Jim: And I’m Jim Kirkland. This is GPS. God. People. Stories. It’s an outreach of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association—Always Good News.
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