Online Worship: What Is Your Church Doing to Reach the Digital Church Hopper?

Has the "Netflix" era of worship arrived?

In other words, have we entered a new era of church, where Christians choose from multiple different worship experiences, often streaming services from more than one congregation? YouTube seems to think so. Each Sunday, I see a dozen or more churches on my YouTube home feed, each beckoning me to click their live stream. Rather than immediately connecting me to my local church, YouTube freely provides me with a carousel of congregational choice.

The congregational carousel reflects a broader trend of ministry multi-tasking. In a trend that has shown remarkable durability in the post-pandemic church, Americans continue to stream the worship services of more than one congregation. Pew Research Data from 2023 finds that nearly 40% of US adults who attend worship services online report watching services from more than one congregation. Participating in the worshipping life of multiple faith communities would have been unusual before 2020. Among American Christians who regularly worship online, the Netflix experience has now become typical.

Digital church-hopping is here to stay. Evangelicals, Catholics, and Mainline Protestants who worship online are tuning into more than one church service. They're tuning in to local and non-local churches, those in their neighborhood and those who seek a global audience. While the reasons for online church-hopping are varied, the online church-hopper has become a fixture of the church in a tech-shaped culture. Today, just 26% of online viewers watch services only from their home church.

There are two important caveats to this data. First, the number of online viewers is a relatively small slice of the American Christians. As of 2022, just 12% of Americans attended church exclusively online. 22% of Protestants attended services both online and offline. So while the online church-hopper is an important trend, it's impact is confined to those who regularly attend services on the web. The second caveat of this data is that the church-hopper represents a highly-engaged segment of America's Christian population. Religious "Nones," about whom much has been written, likely aren't church hoppers.

With these caveats in mind, we might view church-hopping as more of a challenging trend than an opportunity for growth. As Christians increase the quantity of churches they attend, it will likely decrease the quality of their engagement. This trend reflects a pivot from depth of participation to breadth of consumption.

Church-hopping invites Christians to be more selective, empowering the church-goer to constantly evaluate which churches match their theological convictions, denominational preferences, and increasingly their political leanings. It also invites the church-goer to find a community with preaching, liturgy, and music that is attuned to their personal preferences. This inevitably places competitive pressures on clergy and church leaders.

Given these challenges, today's church leader might experience pressure to constantly recalibrate the direction of their ministry to the needs and preferences of an ever-changing set of worship attendees. It's well documented that clergy and church leaders already resource-constrained and under duress. The Hartford Institute for Religion Research found in Fall of 2023 that 53% of clergy had seriously considered leaving the ministry.

Digital church-hopping may not prove to be the major stressor for all faith leaders, but we can already conclude that this trend won't alleviate the stressors facing today's priests and pastors. Digital ministry has done a great deal of good for the church. The Christian message is more accessible and inclusive than it was before the pandemic. However, any account of the impact of digital ministry must reckon with the lasting reality of "Netflix for Church."

So what can a congregation do to reach the online church-hopper? For starters, continue to acknowledge the presence of online attendees through language and liturgy. A simple word of welcome at the start of the service, or during the announcements, affirms the presence of the digital attendee.

Then, consider what makes your congregation's online experience unique. What might inspire someone to tune-in? A stellar sermon? An impressive organist or rock band vocalist? An inclusive expression of liturgy? Whatever it is, highlight this uniqueness in your digital messaging. Clarify why a church-hopper might want to select your congregation from the carousel of options available to them.

Finally, remember the importance of online worship in your congregation's pathway to involvement. 50-60% of in-person church visitors first connect online, through digital worship, a website, or social media. While digital ministry requires considerable effort to sustain, it is an essential first step in connecting with visitors and potential new members - even those who are actively church-hopping.

The Great Aw(AI)kening: Could the Drive Towards Digital Efficiency Generate a Rekindling of Religiosity?

America’s thoroughly documented decline in religiosity appears to have hit a plateau. What does this mean for churches?

After nearly two decades of continuous decline, the percentage of Americans identifying as Christian appears to have stabilized. According to the 2023-2024 Religious Landscape Study, 63% of American adults now identify as Christian. While this is down from 78% in 2008, it’s actually a tick more than the 62% who identified as Christian in 2022. After a long period of growth, the percentage of Americans identifying as “nones” also appears to have stabilized. And while people aren’t going to church more than they were in years past, they at least aren’t going less. 33% of Americans say they go to church at least once a month. 

This trend has been thoroughly analyzed across religious and secular media, including both right-leaning and left-leaning outlets. The New York Times, for example, is running a new series of editorials exploring belief in America. Among pundits and commentators, some have pointed to this stabilization as evidence that Americans are moving away from secularism. A few evangelical commentators have celebrated that the New Atheist movement of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens seems to be losing momentum. Other commentators have suggested that the stabilization has less to do with stalled secularism and more to do with the limitations of authenticity. Not finding durable fulfillment and through Soul Cycle, Instagram, or the workplace, it seems that some are turning to more conventional forms of religion as a source of spiritual identity. It’s also entirely possible that slowing rates of secularization don’t have a grand cause, and are simply the natural floor of the downward trend. 

We won’t be able to definitely explain the root causes and top contributors behind these results from the Religious Landscape Study until further research is completed. But in this time of permissible speculation, allow me to posit another potential contributor to slowing rates of secularization. 

The post-pandemic economy has pivoted towards efficiency as an intrinsic good. When rising interest rates rattled markets, notable business leaders (Mark Zuckerberg included) trumpeted a “year of efficiency,” a prolonged period of cutting costs and cranking up outputs. Elon Musk instilled a similar ethos in his “more hardcore” version of Twitter. Investors bought into companies that loudly leaned into efficiency through layoffs, hyper-growth forecasts, and commitments to use generative artificial intelligence across their business. 

As efficiency became virtuous, artificial intelligence equipped us with tools for completing mundane tasks at greater speed. Google Gemini can now summarize the contents of my entire inbox. Microsoft Co-Pilot can build my presentation for next week’s team meeting. ChatGPT can plan my family’s weekly meals and shopping lists, and Anthropic’s Claude can write this blog post. Taken together, we are witnessing the elevation of efficiency as a value, as we are gaining access to tools that (at least in theory) can make us meaningfully more productive. 

But where does that leave us spiritually? 

Some of us may come to recognize that efficiency is a rather unfulfilling objective.I have suggested that working alongside AI in some ways dims the creative spark. When working alongside a chatbot, I can be more efficient, completing more tasks per hour, but I don’t feel as strong a sense of satisfaction when I outsource considerable amounts of work to ChatGPT. 

In a spiritual sense, we may come to recognize that productivity lacks power. Individual efficiency doesn’t leave us feeling more curious, connected, or creative. It doesn’t show us how we are part of a story larger than ourselves, or why our work has meaning. Efficiency doesn’t leave us comforted in times of crisis, nor does it console us in our grief. So while some have looked to social media, technology, and work to provide a sense of rootedness, it’s unsurprising that we might look elsewhere when these domains become over-indexed on getting stuff done. 

We might call this pivot the Great Aw(AI)kening - not because AI awakens some dormant religious impulse, but because our preference for production proves to be somewhat hollow and unfulfilling. If I am efficient, I might rate higher on a performance review or receive a higher grade. But in adeptly wielding these digital tools, I’ll miss out on a connection to a larger whole. I’ll miss out on where I fit within a bigger story. And I’ll lack the connections and community that carry me through times of crisis. 

I believe there is merit to using AI and digital tools for the sake of productivity and efficiency, particularly if these tools offload the monotony and drudgery that are part of digital age work. But I’m also cognizant that these tools cannot be fulfilling ends in and of themselves. In that sense, I’m not surprised that America has slowed in its rate of secularization. Efficiency can be important, but not all that fulfilling. To find fulfillment, perhaps I ought to look to more ancient sources. To find connection, perhaps I ought to seek more traditional forms of community. As the digital age pushes us towards individual productivity, the church, its teachings, sacred texts and sacraments, offer me a necessary counter-weight. 

AI and Accomplishment: Will ChatGPT Take My Job (Satisfaction)?

Why bother with writing?

It's not a particularly lucrative activity, nor does it magnify my "influence." If I wanted steady income or cultural clout I would make reaction videos on TikTok. I don't write because my work makes the world a better place or because society so desperately needs my voice. If I wanted either I would look towards organizations or movements with wider followings than I have (though I am grateful for each and every one of the 13 followers I amassed while still on Twitter).

Truthfully, I write for selfish reasons. I write because doing so gives me a clear sense of satisfaction. Completing a thoughtful paragraph or a clever phrase provides a sense of "job well done" that is difficult to attain elsewhere. Typical of an Enneagram "3," I have a bias for achievement. Writing, blogging, occasionally publishing, are activities that feed my bias and nourish my ego. Putting pen to paper or words to the screen helps me to feel an objective sense of impact and rectitude, scarce sentiments in a culture of speed, and subjectivity. Even the writing projects that ostensibly achieve nothing --- few views, zero re-tweets, certainly no monetization --- have a way of convincing my egotistical self that my work is satisfactory.

Over the last two years, I've added more technology into the creative process. I've increasingly started to work and to write alongside AI. I started slowly at first, apps like Grammarly and ChatGPT serving as high-tech spell-checkers. And then I learned what else LLMs could provide: post titles and content outlines, suggestions for the next paragraph and prompts for the next post, tables of contents, images, translations, and recommendations for further reading. I learned that AI could subtly adjust the tone of voice of an entire essay, reformat a course for a different set of learners, and polish scraps of notation in a message fit for a chief executive.

I've certainly become more efficient after hiring AI as my editor and co-creator. Projects that once took me days are now requiring hours. Tasks that were once tedious are now easy to complete. While I've stopped short of generating entire works from LLMs, I wonder how coherent my words would be if I were to start a project without the support and love of my preferred large language models. I should note that as I type these words, Wix, my site hosting platform, is nudging me to use its own AI to "generate a full-length blog post with a title and images." Do I dare click the magic button and end today's writing session?

Even with this artificially-generated efficiency, I've observed a change in how I feel—in writing, content creation, project development, even in emailing people with important job titles. Something seems off. And I think I know what's missing.

Thanks to AI, thee smug, self-centered satisfaction I used to feel in my writing isn't as strong as it used to be. The sense of accomplishment from a witty phrase or a creative expression isn't as evident since I started using OpenAI.

Our cultural dialogue around AI emphasizes efficiency gains and existential threats, environmental impact and essential regulation. It's a dialogue that is ever-sensitive to career displacement. But lost in this conversation is the topic of AI and achievement. AI might very well take my job. Must it also take my sense of job satisfaction?

We're all on a learning curve with artificial intelligence, but that curve is more complex than we imagine. It's not that we must learn to master ChatGPT or to work alongside these magical technologies. It's that we must also learn to do so in a way that preserves what makes the creative process worthwhile. The real learning curve for AI is to discover how to use these resources in a way that preserves that spark of accomplishment, that glimmer of a job well done, that visceral feeling that comes when I have envisioned, written, or brought to life something both original and useful.

I'm not particularly worried that AI is going to take jobs - mine or yours. But I'm becoming increasingly concerned that AI is going to remove some of the agency and autonomy that fuels so many of us in our creative pursuits.

Will AI make us more productive? Most certainly. Will it diminish the delight we take in our efforts? Perhaps. Will it make the creative process a slog? It remains to be seen. What's at stake is more important than a temporary occupation. What's at stake is our intangible yet foundational sense of purpose and meaning. As AI development accelerates, the very human challenge in front of us is to retain the joy of creativity as AI makes us increasingly productive.