Digital Transformation and the Church
Disruption and Disorientation
2020 has been an extraordinary year, as we already know.
COVID-19 in particular has profoundly upset our normal social rules, and while education and the corporate workplace might like to have words, nowhere have those fundamental rules been more disrupted than in the church.
The church, by its nature, is intrinsically oriented around local, embodied presence in physical community. All of its rhythms and instincts, for the most part, are about “gathering,” and the “scattering” is still primarily seen as the dispersion of embodied people in embodied places.
What’s more, the primary obligations of a church, for the most part, are geographically-bound by default. The parish, the block, the neighborhood, the borough, the city. These are the implicit lines of imagination and responsibility for most churches.
And so, while the emerging ways of technologically-mediated engagement and communication have been increasingly present in the church this century, they have rarely been central, and have rarely been intrinsic to the vision, goals, or means of how a church fulfills its purpose. Technology is usually an “add-on” to the real work of worship, prayer, and discipleship-in-community. (There are outliers, of course).
It could be argued, then that COVID-19 represents one of the biggest disruptions of fundamentals for churches that has ever happened in history. Immediately, overnight, the organizing principle of churches was taken off the table, and hundreds of thousands of congregations (just in America!) had to immediately transition to online services.
Listen to what Barna reports:
Currently, Barna’s weekly national surveys of pastors (as well as responses from those participating in the ChurchPulse Weekly check-ins) have pointed to the reality that this forced transition away from physical worship spaces was not one many ministries were completely ready for: a quarter of U.S. pastors (26%) surveyed during March 20-23, shortly after social distancing began, said their greatest priority for their church was putting in place technology solutions for streaming services and / or online giving. In data collected April 7-13, we found that nearly half of pastors (47%) don’t expect to be back in their buildings until May, with another 35 percent holding out hope for June—though 43 percent assume the circumstances surrounding the pandemic could still worsen (9% much worse, 34% a little worse), a harsh reality that adds even more unease to the current mental and emotional health of both pastors and their congregants.
This is a massive shift, and church leaders have had varying levels of readiness and willingness to adjust. We’ve seen a new cottage industry of leadership conversations about how to navigate COVID-19 for pastors spring up overnight.
For those who have been quick to respond, the user-friendly platforms for “keeping the doors open” were obvious - Facebook and YouTube primarily, while LifeChurch opened up their Church Online platform for churches for free (an amazing piece of infrastructure that I’m glad was ready to go).
Going on this journey of adaptation has revealed a number of immediate, big shifts in the fundamentals of how churches operate, on a few fronts, which I think have at times created real disorientation.
Here are a few shifts, that at least in our context in New York City have been really important to highlight:
From event-competencies to media-competencies. Churches, built for gathering, typically have “event” competencies. They know how to do hospitality, how to set up a stage, how to run a sound board. The pastor knows how to give a live sermon, and people know how the Sunday gathering time is the way to get to know faces, names, and stories. After the shift, however, it was the media team, the camera people, and the communications people that felt the burden. Churches had to make decisions about cameras, servers, recording rooms, and more, overnight.
Digital marketing is the new pastoral care. Digital tools of audience engagement, like social media, comments sections, instagram inboxes, facebook messenger, GroupMe, email newsletters, and the like have typically been seen as thin or incidental to the real work of community groups, coffees, and pastoral counseling. However, in a world where physical gatherings aren’t available, the strength of a community digitally becomes the measure to which it can continue to thrive. The database, the group chat, the email list, and the instagram audience become the new currency of relational engagement, and so churches have had to immediately learn how to “thicken” their digital relationships.
A confused, boundary-less ecclesiology. It’s easy to answer “who is my church” when you know on average who will walk through the door on a Sunday. It’s extremely difficult to know who your church is when they represent a number on an analytics page, and they’re calling in from the other side of the city, or the country, or even the world. Churches have had to radically adjust to the questions of spiritual responsibility in a digital age. What if that person from another city starts attending your digital small group? The invitation to change the operating imagination from “geographic center” to “distributed movement” is a new feature.
Small groups - from geography to affinity. Similarly, the organizing principle of small groups or community groups has radically changed. In New York, groups typically organize around geography (Upper West Side, say), or life stage (early professionals). They often function best as a way to find “your people,” especially when you’re new to the church or the city. But in a digital reality, the value of geographic proximity disappears, and people over time seem to revert back to affinity relationships. Why be in a digital group with strangers from your neighborhood, when you can be in a group with all of your friends from college spread out across the country? The nature of group bonding and cohesion is changing.
Missional incarnation and presence - Mission, in a digital age, has its fundamentals radically upset. What does it mean when you can’t travel? What does it mean when you can’t serve the homeless with the relief team in person, because of the transmission risk? Digital mission seems to naturally revert back to content-driven evangelism, seeker-oriented digital groups (like Alpha), or justice-oriented social media activism (which, when disembodied, can become performative). “Mission” needs new definition.
Giving - When your physical congregation disappears overnight, the opportunity to call people to sacrificial giving in the moment also disappears overnight. If nonprofit organizations can’t hold their galas, the revenue suffers. If churches can’t gather in person, their call to generosity suffers. Especially with the economic dimension of the pandemic, many churches have faced steep declines in giving, especially if they didn’t have a robust giving platform in place to get people to automate their weekly or monthly gifts.
Now - like I said, many churches and ministries have been disoriented by this, but at the same time, pastoral necessity has been the mother of invention, and on the whole, the pace of adaptation has been remarkable - we’ve seen thousands of churches pushed into embracing new platforms (just like many companies dabbling in remote work have been forced into its acceptance).
All of this is tenuous. We don’t know how long COVID-19 and its after-effects will last - a rapidly developed vaccine might revert us mostly back to the mean, relatively quickly. After all, the pent-up energy for physical gathering among churches at this stage of the pandemic is massive - zoom worship is just not the same, and we all know it.
However, the longer this lasts, the more churches will be forced to face, fail, and then adjust and grow in their competencies around technology. To do this willingly and to do it well is essentially a “digital transformation” challenge, which I’ll talk about in the next section.
I think, in the end, even if there is a reversion back to the mean, that 2020 will be a major inflection point in how the church interacts with technology for its core mission, and I think it will catalyze new models and hybrids of how we gather and disciple, that can reach the world in new ways.
Digital Transformation
In 2019, the United States spent $1.3 trillion on digital transformation - updating the business infrastructure, systems, processes, human capital, and products of the modern economy to capture the efficiencies and gains of growing technology.
I think, whether intentionally or haphazardly, churches and ministries will be forced to go on the digital transformation journey over the next decade as well. They lag in this not because they can’t do it (COVID shows that they can if forced to) but simply because like I mentioned earlier, the incentives for churches are different than in the business world. Churches have simply not needed significant digital transformation to do their core work of discipling their congregations.
But, nevertheless, I think it’s coming. So, I wanted to outline my thinking around a few key dimensions of DT for churches that I think will be most relevant (Nonprofits will have overlapping use-cases, but their outcomes are significantly less geographically-oriented than local churches, so they’ll adapt more quickly).
Content and Digital Marketing
The easiest step for digital transformation in churches typically revolves around social communications - which makes sense, as churches do a lot of social communicating. So, developing skills around audience building, content channels, content strategy, audience engagement, and analytics feedback will be important in the years ahead.
One of the essential leadership steps is to begin really focusing on “who your audiences are, and how to serve them.”
Segmenting is key here - in my experience, we’ve had to do significant work as a team to parse out the differences between “our church,” and “seekers and skeptics,” and “other Christians who engage from a distance,” etc. And even within those large segments are other segments - say, parents, the prayer team, the local mission team, leaders vs general congregants, and more.
Reflection on audiences will drive new insights about what content to create (teaching, social content, webinars, etc) to engage them well on their discipleship journey, and data insights will help fine-tune what is resonating and being shared and amplified.
Digital content marketing skills will require new imagination and infrastructure (both in terms of technology and leadership), but communicating with digital audiences in a way that engages them effectively is an essential of digital transformation.
Discipleship as a “user journey”
On that note, the digital transformation process radically reshapes the discipleship journey. I can think of a few dimensions of this.
In the “physical” age, the constraints on discipleship were typically space (where to gather), time (calendar cycles and seasons) and leadership (who can run the groups and courses). In a digital moment, however, these constraints change.
This runs similarly to the disruptions in education - a group or class or course that might have needed more teachers or bigger rooms can now scale more effectively. One or two people can run a discipleship group of hundreds (we recently did this with the Arrabon course on Race, Class and the Kingdom for 300 people, as well as with the Missional Life Course). Beyond that, with fewer constraints on leaders, you can schedule courses more asynchronously, and are less dependent on seasonal cycles (like starting them all in the fall, say).
Finally, when discipleship experiences are digital, it’s easier to track the data. It’s not hard to imagine a world where a pastor could know pretty easily which people have been through which courses and groups over multiple years, from early discipleship all the way to specialized leadership courses.
And from the congregant perspective, we’ve found that equipping courses can counteract the group fatigue mentioned earlier. It’s easier to stay in a zoom group with strangers when the point isn’t simply sharing about your life, but it’s about accomplishing a particular curriculum objective, and gaining discipleship skills for your life.
Team, people, and culture
A big piece of digital transformation in churches will begin to orient around the skill sets they look for in the future.
Churches tend to struggle with what to do with specialists. Leadership in a church context often tends back toward the essential shepherding skill - the ability to engage, win, manage, and care for individuals for whom the church isn’t necessarily a missional enterprise, but is primarily their place of care and belonging and family support. This is as it should be, but it means that without clear intention, there will always be a gap between the “shepherd-teacher” instinct, and the “apostolic-evangelist” instinct (this is an idea I learned from Alan Hirsch).
This means that churches will need to think about how to make space for digital competencies - who understands media production, marketing strategy, content development, data and analytics, and more?
If the church is reaching and discipling people, and this process is now digitally mediated, then we’ll need the people that know not just how to shepherd and lead, but how to communicate, how to innovate, how to write, how to tell stories, and how to drive relationships digitally.
Storytelling and Vision
Churches at their best are storytelling organizations - demonstrating what God has done in the lives of people.
A key opportunity of digital transformation is the decentralization of the means of story production. We live in the age where everyone has a smartphone in their pocket. The means of production for content have never been more distributed, and the the ability for people in the community to create content themselves is a massive opportunity for churches.
One person, with a phone and 60 seconds of their time, can create content that can go to thousands instantly, through social media channels. This is an amazing opportunity for culture building, narrative building, and “highlighting” what God is doing among specific people in a community - which is more important than ever when people are spread out and disconnected.
Moving forward
This is a very basic overview, and there are many more - we could talk about infrastructure, data management, content strategy, marketing automations, software and apps, etc. Digital transformation is a massive topic.
But the goal here was to just lay out a basic sketch of the Digital Transformation process I see unfolding before my eyes here in New York, and around the world.
This isn’t just a western issue - it’s happening in China, it’s happening in the Middle East, it’s happening in the emerging world. Technology is changing the fundamentals of how we gather, how we disciple, and how we communicate. There are big risks, big opportunities, and a big frontier of possibility.
Of course, the nature of the church - worship, the word, evangelism, prayer, discipleship, care, and mercy - won’t change. The church is established by Jesus and his Spirit, and we must always receive it before we co-labor in building it.
But, for pastors and ministry leaders that are willing to dive in, the opportunity to “use new means” to reach a changing world has never been greater.