How can your congregation more effectively engage people in the digital sphere? Jim Keat, Digital Minister at 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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Announcer: Leading Ideas Talks is brought to you by the Lewis Center for Leadership of Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC. Subscribe free to our weekly e-newsletter, Leading Ideas, at churchleadership.com/leadingideas.
Leading Ideas Talks is also brought to you by the video Hybrid Evangelism: The New Reality for Congregations. Even before the pandemic, reaching new people has long been a struggle for many congregations. And now we must forge meaningful connections both in-person and online. This timely and important video share ways to maximize your congregation’s potential for engaging hybrid evangelism. Watch now at churchleadership.com/hybridevangelism.How can Christians faithfully engage public policy? In this episode we speak with Miranda Zapor Cruz, professor of historical theology at Indiana Wesleyan University and author of Faithful Politics: 10 Approaches to Christian Citizenship and Why It Matters. She shares with us how Christians can engage public policy in faithful, yet nonpartisan ways.
Ann Michel: I’m Ann Michel. I’m a senior consultant with the Lewis Center for Church Leadership of Wesley Theological Seminary. I’m one of the editors of our e-newsletter, Leading Ideas. And I am so pleased to be the host of this episode of Leading Ideas Talks. My guest today is Reverend Jim Keat, who is the digital minister at Riverside Church in New York City. And he’s really one of the leaders in shaping the conversation and providing resources to the broader church community on digital ministry. So, welcome, Jim. It’s great to have you with us today.
Jim Keat. Thanks, Ann. Really, really great to be with you and all your fantastic listeners.
Ann Michel: So just that our listeners can know a bit more about you and your work, I wondered if you could just briefly share the story of how digital ministry became what seems to be your primary calling now.
Jim Keat. Yeah, that’s great. Well, I like to think it goes way, way back to the very first cell phone call that ever happened. It just so happens that the first cell phone call came from Chicago, Illinois – the first commercial cell phone call, I should say. And it happened to be the exact same day that I was born. So, me and the cell phone have literally grown up together. I haven’t – I’m one of the “geriatric millennials,” the “elder millennials,” whatever they’re calling us now. I’ve grown up with this thing. I didn’t grow up with an iPhone in my hand, but I saw all that technology evolve. I saw the internet in the mid-90s become a thing. I found my way as an emerging adult, as the internet was emerging through its own adolescence, (probably in perpetual adolescence).
So, all this to say, I’ve just found myself swimming in these waters since they were poured upon us. And then simultaneously, I’ve always felt myself drawn to various aspects of ministry and what God might continue to be up to in us and in spite of us, in the world around us. And so, the way those two things overlap has just always been a natural space to play. When I was in seminary, they made me learn Greek and Hebrew. Good languages to learn. I also taught myself HTML and CSS. I thought those might be helpful languages for the future of the church. Now, I probably know all four of those somewhat equally now, just enough to be dangerous. And I know where to find my resources if I need to really look up a root stem or, you know, update the backend of a WordPress website. But it kind of just immersed me in this space of asking how do these ancient traditions and texts and rituals of our faith and spirituality intersect with where the world is now, and where the world might be going.
I’ve always thought the image of a sail is better than that of an anchor. I don’t want to be rooted in the past. I want to be moving forward—forward where God might be leading us. And I just think that’s these digital waters. Technically, I think all pastors are digital pastors—digital ministers. Any pastor who uses email is a digital minister. You’re already doing it. Now, the question is, how do we just continually identify the context and culture we’re in, and the ways we need to nuance, and best practices for all these things as they emerge around us.
But then the biggest pivot came in the summer of 2019, which is a fun time to put in our minds, 2019. That’s when my role shifted dramatically. My wife and I left New York City. We began traveling full time. And my role at Riverside shifted to digital minister. Where rather than being in the physical space on site, I would be traveling. I would connect with our members and congregants who weren’t in the physical area. I would prioritize creating content and cultivating community for our online congregation. And in the summer of 2019, you pitched this idea, and you get the thumbs up to do it. But a lot of colleagues and congregants said, “What the hell is a digital minister?” Fast forward summer of 2020 and it’s a much different story. “Oh, thank God we have a digital minister!”
So now we all have been thrown into the deep end of these digital waters and the culture has fast forwarded at least 10 to 20 years in our digital literacies. Just the awareness that Zoom is not some secondary thing, but it can be an actual relationship and connection. So, my role at Riverside, really since 2020, has really just gone into hyperspace. Our whole congregation is now engaged in these online spaces. Most of our worshiping congregation on Sunday is not in the building. So just what do we do to intentionally prioritize and cultivate that community and that experience and engagement? So that, I think, in as small of a nutshell as I can make for us, is how I got into these waters and what I’m doing.
Ann Michel: I’m glad you took us back to 2019, 2021 because I think that at that time, digital ministry was at the forefront of almost every church leader’s mind—probably for many people for the first time. I wanted to ask, as we’ve moved beyond that time that was almost entirely shaped by the constraints of the pandemic, how have you seen digital ministry change and evolve as we’re into this, now, post-pandemic period?
Jim Keat. There are probably a couple angles at that. One is both faith leaders and congregants who just want to, quote, “get back to normal—the way things used to be.” And that’s a difficult impulse, because you never can go back. You can’t go back to where you were. You just have to be where you are and where you’re going and make the future as great as it can be. So, I think that tendency is among people who saw the experience of that peak pandemic reality as a Band-Aid. We had a temporary fix for the inability to be together in physical spaces. And 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. My caution is to say, “No, no, no, 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 those and stretch those and use those, because we learned some things about ministry. And we saw not only the church shift and evolve, but culture shifted and evolved. Working remote is no longer this weird thing, it’s this normal thing—having a hybrid schedule and ways to interact. 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 be at a church meeting for two hours? Put that thing on Zoom! So, some of the things about culture have just shifted. My hope is that more and more people realize we didn’t just have Band-Aids, we had new muscles and now we’re continuing to use them.
And the other would be just how culture has radically shifted because of those years when we were forced to change how we just existed in the world—the world shifted. And so hopefully the church doesn’t just say, “Can we go back to the thing we were really good at?” as opposed to “How do we now see this as an opportunity both to be present with people, and to engage and reach new people?”
Hybrid Evangelism: The New Reality for Congregations
Leading Ideas Talks is also brought to you by the video Hybrid Evangelism: The New Reality for Congregations. Even before the pandemic, reaching new people has long been a struggle for many congregations. And now we must forge meaningful connections both in-person and online. This timely and important video share ways to maximize your congregation’s potential for engaging hybrid evangelism. Watch now at churchleadership.com/hybridevangelism.
Ann Michel: Thank you for that. That’s really, I think a really compelling way to think about it. So, on the Riverside Church website, it says the goal of your work is to have every ministry area in your church explore ways of using digital platforms to share content and create community. I think that’s such an important goal. I wonder if you could say a little bit about what that looks like across different ministry areas in your context.
Jim Keat: Yeah, absolutely. So, at Riverside, we kind-of organize ourselves into four areas, four commissions. There’s the Worship Commission, education, the Membership, Care, and Parish Life, and then the Mission and Social Justice, as kind of four categories. So, we have clergy in those areas, we have lay leaders. The two that we are most engaged with digital competencies in those spaces are worship and education just because they’ve lent themselves to the greatest quantity of people interacting and the easiest translation. And we’re constantly working on how social justice work and parish care work can constantly be having digital aspects. It’s hard to attend a protest on Zoom, though. Sometimes you’ve got to just go to the street for those things. But particularly in worship and education is where a lot of my attention has been fixed, to start to model what things could be, and that’s been things like Sunday morning worship.
We’ve been livestreaming for over a decade. So, the pandemic was not the beginning of that for us. Some of our congregants thought it was. Some of them said, “Wow, it’s amazing that we started this livestream thing.” Yet, we’d been doing that for seven years. But the point is, how do we improve that, and constantly recognize we’re not trying to just put on a broadcast, the best TV show. We don’t want our online congregants to just be peeking in through the windows and watching church happen. How do we actually engage and integrate and center the person who’s not in the room to the experience that’s largely being facilitated in the room? So that’s been things that are always evolving.
And then on the first Sunday, we have communion. And that was always a tricky one. How do you do communion when I’m just by myself in my apartment? So, during that moment we invite people online to join a separate Zoom space. I’m there and there’s other ministers there. And there’s usually, a few dozen of us who will leave the livestream and come over to Zoom. And it’s my favorite way to say, even when we might be by ourselves, moments like this remind us that we are not alone, and we get to have that communal sense of communion together.
So little things like that. With education, a lot of our classes have online versions or online only versions. We lead Zoom Bible studies. We’ve launched a new kind of ongoing project called “Bible in a Minute.” It’s going through the entire Bible, one chapter, one minute, one day at a time. So those exist as kind of preaching and education moments.
Largely, we’re—the thing we’re constantly balancing is it’s one thing to replicate what we’re used to doing for these online spaces. And that’s necessary to some extent to give people a handle, something they’re comfortable with, that they’re familiar with. But we never want to stop with just replicating the experience we’re used to physically in a digital space: we want to reimagine it. So how do we reimagine what we’ve done previously for this unique context called, your phone in your pocket or the video you’re watching or the podcast you’re listening to. So those are kind of some of the ways that we think about it and that it lands particularly in worship and education.
Ann Michel: Focusing on the “creating community” part of that goal, in the church that I attend, I think this has been the most challenging for us. We’re doing pretty well in attracting online worship participation, but our efforts to draw online worshipers then into digital fellowship, or Bible study, or some of the opportunities that we’re trying to create for people in the digital sphere—I’m leading some of these groups myself. And what I find is that our digital worshipers are extremely shy. So, I wondered what would be some first steps that a church can take to move people toward interactive engagement as opposed to just viewership as you mentioned a minute ago?
Jim Keat: Yeah, some of that depends on the platform, the goals of it all. But I think the biggest thing is that the digital things can’t just be, “Oh yeah. Someone’s going to take care of that.” It 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 and celebrated and integrated. It can’t just be left. It’s like the worst youth ministry is the one where the youth pastor is the only one who knows the kid’s names. The point of a youth pastor is to help everybody care for intergenerational capacities in a church. And 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 kind of advocate for the need for all of us to do digital ministry, to model it, to lead it, to consult. And so, I think in some sense, making sure it’s a shared responsibility and experience. So, when we relaunched, we had a Bible study for years on Sunday morning that had been on site. And then the pandemic moved it completely online. And then 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 it into an onsite and an online—two different experiences. And so, we wanted to launch that well, to make them both really robust experiences. And so, our senior minister sent like probably 30 or 40 personal emails inviting people. “Hey, would you join? I know you’re not in the area. Would you join this online one?” So just, from the highest pulpit of our church, we had that person sending out invitations. It wasn’t left to just, anyone else to manage. So, making sure everyone is aware of it and centralizing it.
I think just recognizing, what are the needs of the people you’re working with? Are you trying to reach people from far, far away and hoping to find new congregation? Are you trying to meet the needs of the people you already have? Not saying that one is better than the other, but they’re different approaches. And so, if it’s meeting the needs of the people you already have, what are their needs? They can’t make it in for whatever reason, so what do they want and need? What’s the best time and day and experience they’re looking for? Surveys. Focus groups. And I always think trying something in a limited capacity, so you don’t feel the need to just do it forever. Churches are great at starting something and then we never stop doing it and are like, “Oh, how do we get out of this?” Try a thing. Learn from it. Fail fast. You can learn even faster and try it again.
But particularly in digital spaces, it’s centralizing it so it’s not an afterthought, and it’s giving yourself permission to evolve and shift, to go in knowing this is largely a new space for all of us. So, what I think it’s going to be at the beginning might shift at the end. And that’s okay. Being flexible and letting it evolve, you know. Don’t be offended if people turn their cameras off on Zoom. That’s the space they need. That’s okay. However, people want to engage just be adaptive to those moments and spaces.
Ann Michel: You know, I want to go back to something you said just a minute ago when you were talking about, sort of, an integrated approach to digital ministry and the need to really advocate for it. Because I think, at least what I’m finding in my church, is that there are a lot of people sitting in the pews on Sunday morning who frankly don’t place a tremendous priority on trying to connect with people who they imagined to be a faceless, anonymous, vague group of people who are somewhere “out there.” And so, I think there really is a task for creating a vision that gets congregants and congregations excited about the digital mission field and being able to share a compelling vision for why a congregation, you know, needs to invest in this. What ideas might you have to help a church leader who wanted to see their congregation get more engaged? To build a consensus for it within their own congregation?
Jim Keat: I think part of it would be starting with what you’re already doing and then how can that just be, you know, nuanced to just have an extended reach and impact. Like my favorite thing is to just tell people, “I’m guessing your church is having someone standing up every Sunday to talk for 15 to 20 minutes and they put a lot of effort into those words. What else could that become?” So that’s something that’s designed largely for being offered in the physical space, and it’s probably broadcast and live streamed and whatnot. But simple things are like, is that sermon available by its own experience after the fact? Not that we’re just glorifying worship as a sermon-centric experience, but it becomes a formative moment, a vision casting moment, a community engaging moment. So simple things like. Publish that sermon on YouTube and don’t call it “Sermon July 21.” Call it something compelling so the title might be the kind of thing people would search for. And give it a, an intentional thumbnail. Whether you have the capacity to design something. But just those are little tweaks on YouTube to let your video have an extended reach. And then let your congregants know. Hey, did you enjoy today’s sermon? Here’s where you can listen to it. We would love for you to share it with somebody. Empower them to be digital evangelists.
But then beyond just the sermon that was preached, my other favorite thing to do is to say, “All right. What if before the sermon, before Sunday, midweek, could the pastor who’s preaching and another person on staff or a congregant have a conversation on Zoom, a podcast, whatever kind of a thing, a sermon prep experience, showing some of the cards. Letting the congregation even be engaged in the sermon before it’s offered. We do this at Riverside. We call it “That’ll Preach.” Myself and the senior minister typically talk about the upcoming lectionary passage, and congregants love it because they come to church with an idea of what to expect, and they feel connected leading into the service, not just “Oh hum, where’s Sunday?”
Ann Michel: So, as I have read on this subject and had conversations with other church leaders about it, I think one of the questions in the back of my mind always is, you know, whether online ministry is going to be an essential calling of every church, regardless of their size and location? My denomination is United Methodist. The median worship attendance in United Methodist churches across the country is 38. And so, I’m kind of wondering whether, do you think we’re headed toward sort of a “digital divide,” (to use that term that’s been used in other settings), where larger, higher visibility churches are going to be the ones with viable digital ministries? Or do you think this is something that any church can be using as part of their ministry?
Jim Keat: Yeah, I think in my mind there are a couple ways I look at that. One is it always starts with just reflecting on who you are currently serving and who is currently—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.” And that’s a reflection on that community. A church with no youth group is a church with no youth. But once there are teenagers, you’re probably going to say, “Oh, we should do something with this.” Or you might say, “How do we reorganize ourselves so we might be the kind of place that teenagers and families would want to be a part of.” So, there’s two ways of looking at it. Who do we already have and serve, and then how do we respond accordingly? And who do we feel called to serve, and how do we build an infrastructure appropriately to be able to even reach out and engage that population?
I think the same is true of digital. If someone’s a pastor in 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 of this 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. Many of our pastors are on the internet. Like I said, if you send an email, you’re already a digital minister. If it’s—we just don’t think of it in that capacity. We think of digital ministry being the multicamera livestream or the doing the slick TikTok’s, or all these things. And that’s great if you have an audience, a congregation, a constituency who’s in those spaces to serve. Or you feel called or compelled to reach that particular demographic or group.
Ann Michel: I want to shift gears a bit. I’ll let you know that one of my areas of expertise is stewardship ministry. I’m not a digital minister, but I am a stewardship minister. And, you know, we need only look to the experience in some other sectors, such as print journalism, to understand how the transition to the Internet totally disrupted their economic model. And I have to say as someone who works in stewardship ministry, that one of the things that kind of keeps me up at night these days is the fear that the same fate could befall the church as ministry moves increasingly online. You know, we have assumed in the church world, I think, a situation in which people feel so deeply rooted and connected to a particular local church, they’re going to be willing to give sacrificially to support it. And I’ve really kind of tried to think about, “How does that translate in an online context where people are used to kind of dabbling and surfing and enjoying content for free?” In my church, I often hear people at one end of the spectrum saying “Oh, you know, the online people are kind of freeloaders.” And at the other end of the spectrum, I hear people thinking, “Oh my goodness, these online participants are going to provide so much giving.” And I know neither of those things are true. But I also don’t—I’m not sure I really—I don’t think we yet really know how online ministry is going to impact what stewardship and giving look like, and how the church sustains itself financially.
Jim Keat: There’s a lot to that. I think part of it is just humans in general and the church in particular is always looking for a good scapegoat. “Oh, see! That’s the real reason we’re not getting giving, it’s all the internet stuff!” Giving has largely been down for all of us, whether we’re online or in person or whatever the capacity. I do think that, you know, generally speaking, yes. 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 you to put money in it. So, it’s just built in. Every seven days, we’re doing a direct ask. “Give us money!” Now, granted, we don’t just make it a hard sell like that. It’s intentionally and appropriately wrapped theologically. We give out of gratitude, not out of guilt. But I wonder, what are the ways then that we’re not just repurposing? “Hey, we do it on Sunday morning livestream, why aren’t they giving?” No, we’re doing a thing that was designed for an in the room experience, and we’re assuming it’s gonna be the same online. What is the way we’re even inviting people online to give? Some of that’s just mechanics, like, can I do it from my phone? Because I can’t drop a check into the plate anymore. So, is there a thing I can scan? How can giving be done digitally as easily as possible? Which, by the way, benefits the people in the room as well, when they can just give from their phone, because let’s be honest, I don’t even—do I know where my checkbook is? Maybe. So if I can’t give electronically, it’s going to be a barrier to giving already. But then I’m thinking we build a lot of the stewardship of churches around the ask on Sundays, the invitation to give an offering. And it typically comes after a sermon. So, there’s a whole thing. I was connected to the music moved me, the sermon, and then this. What are the things that we’re designing for these online spaces? And how are we just as intentional about having that invitation to give built in?
Yeah. The reality is 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. I watch a lot of stuff on YouTube for free. Oh wait, you have a whole subscription thing over here? You know, I am gonna give you 10 bucks a month and have access to something else. What are the ways we’re even giving? We don’t charge at the door to come hear the sermon, but the point is when you feel compelled and connected you, out of your gratitude, you want to give to support this ministry.
How are we even framing it for these online things? So that’s where you have to be intentional about, “What is the pathway that even empowers that person to give?” And, how do we do more than just make it about money? How can we say, “You sharing this resource is a way of giving. You offering to volunteer and serve in these online spaces is a way of giving.” Which again, is true for churches when it just becomes about putting checks in the, you know, in the offering plate, we’ve missed the point theologically of giving. But I think we need that same intentionality about how it’s framed, how it’s invited, and how it’s implemented.
Ann Michel: Yeah, thank you for that. I mean, one of the, of course, the growth in online giving in recent years has been one of the tremendous benefits, the silver lining of the pandemic. But I do think churches need a new playbook. I think we’re so used to appealing to people who are sitting in front of us and with fewer and fewer people in the pews on Sunday mornings, I think we need to learn how to extend the ministry of generosity beyond the walls of the church. That’s exciting to me. And I think allows us to think about ways in which we can teach people about generosity beyond the walls of our church.
Yeah. Thank you. So, I am really impressed with the amount of resources that you’re making available to—to help other people do this well. I wondered if you could to, as we conclude, if you could share a little bit of information on how people can access some of the other resources that you’re making available.
Jim Keat. Yeah, my space is fun because I get to do this in a church at Riverside. So trcnyc.org is Riverside’s website where you can find a lot of what we’re up to. We have a whole space with our digital ministry stuff. There’s pretty easy to find on there, I hope. So that’s one place to see the sandbox I’m playing in. But then I also do work with a group called Convergence, where I’m the director of online innovation, where I get to then help other churches do exactly that. I make the toys and I get to play with them. So, I’m also helping other churches with the toys too. So ConvergenceUS.org is the website there. My website jimkeat.com probably is a good starting place to find all these things, but through Convergence, I’m often having different webinars.
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.
Ann Michel. Yeah well, thank you for your dedication to that. Thank you for the help that you’ve given us this morning. It’s been a pleasure to talk with you.
Jim Keat: Likewise. Thanks, Ann. Appreciate it.
Announcer:Thank you for joining us for Leading Ideas Talks.
Don’t forget to subscribe to our free weekly e-newsletter, Leading Ideas, to be notified when new episodes are published. Visit churchleadership.com/leadingideas.
More information and resources can before found on the Riverside Church’s website, Convergence Consulting, and Jim Keat’s personal website.
Related Resources
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- 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
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Photo by Ben White on Lightstock
