How can your congregation more effectively engage people in the digital sphere? Jim Keat, Digital Minister at The Riverside Church in New York City, shares tips and strategies that can help any church approach digital ministry with more intentionality and focus.
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Ann Michel: How have you seen digital ministry change and evolve as we’ve moved beyond a time shaped almost entirely by the constraints of the pandemic?
Jim Keat. There are faith leaders and congregants who just want to “get back to normal,” back to the way things used to be. That’s a difficult impulse because you can never go back. You have to be where you are and where you’re going and make the future as great as it can be. I think the “get back to normal” tendency is most common among people who saw the peak pandemic reality as a Band-Aid. Digital options were a temporary fix for the inability to be together in physical spaces. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t continue to get together in person and physically. There’s obviously a great richness to that. But some people just wanted to rip off the Band-Aid. I would say those years when we were forced online only were not as much putting on a Band-Aid as they were cultivating and stretching new muscles. So now the challenge is, how do we continue to flex, stretch, and use those muscles, because we learned some new things about ministry? We saw not only the church shift and evolve, but culture shift and evolve. Remote work and having a hybrid schedule are no longer weird things. They are normal. Why should congregants have to leave their homes on a Monday night at 7 p.m. and drive to the church and be away from their family just to attend a two-hour church meeting? Put that thing on Zoom! The culture has radically shifted. The world has shifted. So hopefully the church will see this as an opportunity to be present with people, and to engage and reach new people instead of just asking if we go back to the way things used to be.
Ann Michel: On The Riverside Church website, it says the goal of your work is to have every ministry area explore ways of using digital platforms to share content and create community. Could you say a bit about what that looks like across different ministry areas in your context?
Jim Keat: At Riverside, we organize ourselves into four areas: worship, education, membership care and parish life, and mission and social justice. We have clergy and lay leaders in each of these areas. The two areas where we are most engaged with digital competencies are worship and education just because they’ve lent themselves to the greatest quantity of people interacting and the easiest translation. We’re constantly working on how social justice work and parish care work can have consistent digital aspects. But it’s hard to attend a protest on Zoom. Sometimes you’ve got to just go to the street for those things. So, a lot of my attention has been focused on worship and education to start to model what things could be.
We’ve been livestreaming worship for over a decade. So, the pandemic was not the beginning for us. But our goal is to improve constantly and to recognize that we’re not just trying to put on a broadcast or be the best TV show. We don’t want our online congregants to just be peaking in through the windows and watching church happen. How do we actually engage, integrate, and center the person who’s not in the room to the experience that’s largely being facilitated within the room? So, this is the aspect that is always evolving.
On the first Sunday, we have communion. That was always a tricky one. How does an online worshipper celebrate communion alone in their apartment? So, during the time of communion we invite people online to join a separate Zoom space. I’m there and there’s other ministers there. Usually, a few dozen will leave the livestream and come over to Zoom. We get to have that communal sense of communion together.
With education, a lot of our classes have online versions or online only versions. We lead Zoom Bible studies. We’ve launched a new ongoing project called “Bible in a Minute.” It’s going through the entire Bible, one chapter, one minute, one day at a time. But there is a constant balancing act. It’s one thing to replicate the in-person experience for these online spaces. That’s necessary to some extent to give people something they’re comfortable and familiar with. But we never want to stop with just replicating the physical experience in a digital space. We want to reimagine it. How do we reimagine what we’ve done previously for this unique context. For the phone in your pocket, or the video you’re watching, or the podcast you’re listening to.
Ann Michel: Focusing on the creating community part of your goal, what are some first steps a church can take to move people toward interactive engagement as opposed to just viewership?
Jim Keat: Some of that depends on the platform and your goals. But I think the biggest thing is that digital ministry has to be integrated as a central part of what the community is doing. It can’t just be this secret thing. It has to be central and present, celebrated and integrated. It’s like the worst youth ministry is the one where the youth pastor is the only one who knows the kid’s names. A good youth pastor should help everybody care for intergenerational capacities in a church. I think the same is true for someone who’s assigned the specialty of digital ministry. My job isn’t to do all the digital ministry, but it’s to advocate for the need for all of us to do digital ministry, to model it, to lead it, to consult. So, making sure it’s a shared responsibility and experience.
We had an on-site Sunday morning Bible study for years. The pandemic moved it completely online. Eventually we tried to make it a hybrid thing, which ended up not really being the best experience for anybody. So now we’ve separated the onsite and the online into two different experiences to make them both really robust. Our senior minister sent probably 30 or 40 personal e-mails inviting people who aren’t in the area to join. So, the person in the highest pulpit of our church was sending out invitations. It wasn’t left to just anyone else to manage. So, making sure everyone is aware of it and centralizing it.
Who are you working with and what are their needs? Are you trying to reach people from far, far away and hoping to find a new congregation? Or are you trying to meet the needs of the people you already have? One isn’t necessarily better than the other, but they’re different approaches. If it’s meeting the needs of the people you already have, what are their needs? What time and day and experience are they looking for? Try something in a limited capacity. Learn from it. Fail fast. Be flexible and let it evolve. Don’t be offended if people turn their cameras off on Zoom. That’s the space they need. That’s okay. Just be adaptive to those moments and spaces however people want to engage.
Ann Michel: You spoke of the need to integrate digital ministry and to really advocate for it. How can church leaders create a vision that gets their congregation excited about the digital mission field?
Jim Keat: I think part of it starts with what you’re already doing and asking how you can have an extended reach and impact. Most churches have someone standing up every Sunday to talk for 15 to 20 minutes. They put a lot of effort into those words. What else could that become? Is that sermon available after the fact? So, simple things like publishing that sermon on YouTube. Don’t call it “Sermon July 21.” Give it a compelling title that might be the kind of thing people would search for. Give it an intentional thumbnail. Just those little tweaks on YouTube can give your video an extended reach. Then, empower your congregants to be digital evangelists. “Did you enjoy today’s sermon? Here’s where you can listen to it. We would love for you to share it with somebody.”
My other favorite thing is for the pastor who’s preaching and another person to have a conversation on Zoom or a podcast midweek before the service, letting the congregation engage with the sermon before it’s offered. At Riverside we call this “That’ll Preach.” The senior minister and I typically talk about the upcoming lectionary passage. The congregants love it because they come to church with an idea of what to expect and they feel connected leading into the service.
Ann Michel: Going forward, do you think online ministry is going to be an essential calling of every church, regardless of their size and location? Or do you think we’re headed toward a digital divide where larger, high-visibility churches are the ones with viable digital ministries?
Jim Keat: There are a couple ways I look at that. It always starts with reflecting on who you currently serve. Who are you called to pastor? Who are you called to serve? Does every church have a full-time youth pastor or children’s ministry leader? No. Does every church even have a youth group or Sunday school? Well, not if there aren’t any kids or children. So, there’s no “We have to.” But a church with no youth group is a church with no youth. At some point you’re probably going to ask, how can we be the kind of place that teenagers and families would want to be a part of? So, it’s a two-part question. Who do we already have and serve? And, who do we feel called to serve, and how do we build an infrastructure to reach out and engage that population?
If someone’s the pastor of a small rural church and there’s little-to-no internet access and your congregants show up in person because they don’t have good internet access, great. The goal is not to turn everyone into digital ministers. The goal is to turn people into contextual ministers to serve the people they’re called to serve. For a lot of us, probably for most of us, that will include some digital component because we live in a digital world. We think of digital ministry being the multicamera livestream or slick TikTok’s. That’s great if you have an audience, a congregation, a constituency who’s in those spaces or you feel called or compelled to reach that demographic or group. But if you send email, you’re already a digital minister.
Ann Michel: Looking to the experience in some other sectors, such as print journalism, we can see how the transition to the internet totally disrupted their economic model. I worry that the same fate could befall the church as ministry moves increasingly into an online context where people are used to dabbling and surfing and enjoying content for free. How do you think online ministry is going to impact stewardship and giving and how the church sustains itself financially?
Jim Keat: There’s a lot to that. Generally speaking, I think that people who show up in a physical space are probably more likely to give. Why? Because we’ve built an infrastructure that literally puts a plate in front of them and asks them to put money in it. So, it’s just built in. Every seven days, we’re doing a direct ask. Then we ask why people on the Sunday morning livestream aren’t giving. It’s because we’re doing a thing that was designed for an in-the-room experience, and we assume it’s going to be the same online. So, we need to ask: how we are inviting people online to give? We need that same intentionality about how giving is framed, invited, and implemented. Some of that’s just mechanics. How can giving be done digitally as easily as possible? Can I do it from my phone? Is there something I can scan? By the way, that benefits the people in the room as well when they can just give from their phone.
The reality is that the internet has told us that online content is free or maybe 99 cents. But sometimes you need to experience that free content with the intentional invitation to give, or to sign up, or to donate, or to do something, and then you actually do. That’s just true of how we exist online. We don’t charge at the door to come hear the sermon. But when you feel compelled and connected, you want to give to support the ministry.
Ann Michel: I am really impressed with the many resources you make available to help other people do digital ministry well. Could you share how people can access some of your resources?
Jim Keat. You can find a lot on The Riverside Church website. We have a whole section with our digital ministry stuff that is pretty easy to find and use. I’m also the director of online innovation for a group called Convergence, where I get to help other churches, and we often have webinars. There’s also my website, which is a good starting place to find all these things. I’m convinced that churches can use the internet for good and we can even use the internet well. I hope that we can do both and I’m committed to helping us all do the best we can along the way.
Related Resources
- 10 Ways to Engage People Who Worship Online by Jim Keat
- 4 Steps for Developing a Digital Community Strategy by Denna Bartalini and Claudia McIvor
- 6 Traits People Value in Online Faith Communities by Heidi A. Campbell
Photo by Ben White on Lightstock
