The Transition to Hybrid Ministry is Here, Will Your Church Be Ready?

When I started writing "Grace and Gigabytes" in 2018, my goal was to convince church leaders to thoughtfully integrate digital technology with worship, formation, and faith practice.

Fast-forward to January 2021 (happy new year, by the way!), circumstance has made us all into digital experts, whether we feel like it or not! Ironically, the challenge for 2021 won't be to use more technology. Rather, we'll be tasked with staying connected to the best of digital ministry even as our church doors eventually reopen.

Now, I've repeatedly said that I am done making predictions about the COVID-19 pandemic. From my early April guess that we'd all be eating hotdogs at full baseball stadiums by August, to my recent conjecture that vaccine distribution would be rapid and efficient, I've proven to be a rather worthless prognosticator of late.

Still, if we work with the assumptions presented by Dr. Fauci and others on the COVID-taskforce, it's a safe bet that 2021 won't be an exclusively digital endeavor. At some point, we'll be able to welcome our communities back to our buildings, in a yet-to-be-determined format.

And as our doors slowly creak open, we can safely predict one constant: our faith communities will be thrilled to be back together. I imagine we'll see an outpouring of appreciation for in-person church assembly, the likes of which have not been seen since the invention of Sunday brunch and pre-NFL game Target runs.

Whenever "it" happens, and our eventual new normal will happen, our faith communities will exuberantly leave their Zoom calls and slam the lid of their laptops, running back to our church buildings faster than you can yell "coffee hour is back!"

With masks off and the coffee on, those in our churches will talk about how glad they are to have returned to "normal." We're back together - certainly, that means we can cut it out with all that online church business, right?

It is in these inevitable sentiments that we can identify the great change management predicament for today's church leader: how to retain all we've learned about digitally-integrated ministry, even as we enthusiastically look towards a return to in-person community.

Hybrid Church: A Bridge Between the Online and Offline

It's clear that the digital ministry toolkits we've constructed these past ten months can be a significant asset in service to our mission. Digital tools allow us to connect with those who cannot physically gather in a sanctuary, they facilitate more consistent collaboration with the neighbor, they help us to expand our perspectives beyond insular-feeling conference rooms. Their real-time collaborative features promote agility and continuous optimization, preventing us from becoming stuck or frozen.

It's also clear that we've all expended considerable effort in assembling these toolkits. Pastors who told me they aren't "web people" have become highly capable producers of digital video. Church administrators who joked that they didn't know how to spell "iPad" have become masterful at capturing, recording, editing, and sharing audio and visual content. And we've all seen faith community members who have become more confident sharing their perspectives, articulating their stories, and asking the biggest questions of our shared faith journey.

The question then is how we might take the best of the experience of deep digital ministry and bring it with us into an eventual new normal when we can be together at last. This year on the "Grace and Gigabytes Blog," we'll explore this question together, providing a roadmap towards the church's hybrid future.

Generally speaking, hybrid Christian community is an expression of church that balances offline and online connection. More specifically, a hybrid Christian community remains rooted in Word & Sacrament as it pivots to fully embrace the digital age value of collaboration.

If we work together to strike the right balance between offline and online connection, our churches will be more collaborative, but they will also be more empathetic, diverse, and adaptive. If we don't find the right balance, two scenarios are likely. We might work too hard at retaining digital ministry, exhausting resources and ultimately burning ourselves out. Alternatively, we might give up on digital ministry altogether, forfeiting the missional opportunities that come with it.

Striking this balance won't be easy. It'll require constant attunement, refinement, and reprioritization in all aspects of church leadership. At times, this balance will demand difficult engagement with those who are ambivalent or outright hostile towards digital forms of ministry. Not only is this a process of technological experimentation. It is also an exercise in careful change management.

As I write this post, it is January 4th. Snow is falling. Cases are climbing. But a vaccine is here, allowing us to catch a glimpse of an inevitable yet unpredictable future. That glimpse is our first peak at the church's hybrid future. Let's work together to turn that glimpse into a vista, from which we can set our course. And let us greet this promising moment with creativity and hope.

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@ryanpanzer is the author of "Grace and Gigabytes: Being Church In a Tech-Shaped Culture," available now wherever books are sold.

Design Thinking and Church Community: Step Five - Test!

This post is the sixth and final post in a series on building Digital Church Community with Design Thinking, a series responding to the challenges of building Christian community in a pandemic. Be sure to check out the intro, as well as our guide to Empathizing, Defining, Ideating, and Prototyping!

As we continue through our process of re-inventing church community through design thinking, we make a decisive pivot from the theoretical to the concrete. In the "Testing" phase of design thinking, we test and measure the effectiveness of our prototypes.

According to interaction-design.org, step five of design thinking puts our prototype into a pilot test:

Evaluators rigorously test the prototypes. Although this is the final phase, design thinking is iterative: Teams often use the results to redefine one or more further problems. So, you can return to previous stages to make further iterations, alterations and refinements...

Once we start our test, it's all downhill from here.

With enough intentionality, our prototypes should lend themselves to an easy testing format. If we created visual storyboards, we should have a clear idea of who will be involved with the test, what the test might look like, and how success might appear. But to run an effective test, it's helpful to clarify a few parameters:

First, what is the medium of the test? In this time of social distancing, we are likely executing our test virtually. We need to ensure all parties have access to the right tools, at the right level of permissions. What software do we need? How do we ensure everyone involved in running the test has administrative access to these tools? How do we ensure everyone participating in the test has end-user access?

Second, how do we get the word out? We can't run a test if nobody shows up (though nobody showing up might indicate that we need to go back to the Ideate phase!). If we're testing something new with virtual worship, we need to make sure to communicate the change ahead of time, describing any new expectations for involvement. Simplicity is key. If someone needs to click a link to participate in the test, make sure that the link is easy to access, that it is communicated through multiple channels.

Third, what are we going to measure? Testing is not a subjective process. It involves the rigorous collection of data. Before the test starts, we need to understand what we will measure, and how we will find the metrics. Are we testing page views or web interactions? Participation or attendance? With YouTube views or Google Analytics? Be specific about the numbers you will collect, how you will collect them, and over what duration.

Finally, how long do we allow the test to run? This is typically the most ambiguous question related to design thinking and church community. Do we run a test for one Sunday, or do we run it for a month? Do we run it for one worship service, or for our entire church community? To determine these answers, it's helpful to consider what constitutes a valid test - not a rejection/acceptance of our design, but enough data to reevaluate our problem statement and begin the design thinking process anew.

To that extent, we should run our test for as long as it takes to initiate a new round of design thinking, to truly make our process iterative. In most situations, this means allowing a test to run for a month or more, so that it runs through a full communications cycle in the life of the congregation, so that it engages all regular worship attendees. With four weeks or more of data, we can gather enough perspectives so as to begin a new phase of empathizing and defining.

Iteration is always the key to testing, testing is never about reaching a finish line. Design thinking, particularly in the context of building Christian community, is never about delivering a finished product or a silver-bullet solution.

A wise pastor recently shared with me how the use of the word "solution" can be problematic in the church. We're not in the business of solutions. We're seeking to live more fully into our new normal, harnessing the gifts that God has given to us and to our community so that we can bring God's healing and redeeming word to a hurting world. In the context of building Christian community, a test can never "fail" if it leads us to further conversation and discovery, if it helps us to move more decisively into this new normal.

So when is your test done? It's done when you're ready to start over, taking all that you have learned, and committing once again to the work of empathy and listening. It's done when you acknowledge that our designs our never complete, that our community is always changing, that our call as the church is ever-evolving. As church leaders, we design. The spirit dances. And on we go.

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@ryanpanzer is the author of Grace and Gigabytes, now available wherever books are sold.

Design Thinking and Church Community: Step Three - Ideate!

This post is the fourth in a six-part series on building Digital Church Community with Design Thinking, a series responding to the challenges of building Christian community in a pandemic. Be sure to check out the intro, as well as our guides to Step One and Step Two!

As we continue through our process of re-inventing church community through design thinking, we transition from listening to and defining problems to identifying bold new solutions. In the "Ideate" phase of design thinking, we seek to generate many ideas by throwing out the constraints and limitations that might inhibit our creativity.

According to interaction-design.org, step three of design thinking involves with "challenging assumptions and creating ideas":

Now, you’re ready to generate ideas. The solid background of knowledge from the first two phases means you can start to “think outside the box”, look for alternative ways to view the problem and identify innovative solutions to the problem statement you’ve created. Brainstorming is particularly useful here.

There are many ways to brainstorm. In the context of church leadership, there are three considerations that are especially important to consider.

First, every church leader can likely attest to how quickly some are at pointing out limitations! "We can't do this, we don't have the resource, we can't do that, we don't have the budget, we can't try it, it's in conflict with our mission" - sound familiar?

I've never understood how an institution supposedly anchored in God's abundance can be so adept at pointing out resource constraints! Don't let the limitations get in the way of your brainstorm. During the "Ideate" phase of design thinking, resource constraints are officially off the table. Remind your group of this. Out of the box solutions require out of the box thinking. But we can't think outside the box if a pile of limitations is weighing down the metaphorical lid. The goal of ideation is to generate as many ideas as possible. Quantity here matters far more than feasibility. Rest assured, we'll have plenty of time to revisit constraints during the next phase of the process.

Second, many church leaders have seen conversations de-railed by ideas flying in from "left-field." Talking about the mission? Let's go on a budget tangent. Discussing the Bible? Let's digress into church politics. Running through the council agenda? Let's throw out a few "bonus" topics for discussion. The key to an effective brainstorm is not just to generate many ideas, but to generate ideas that align to our problem statement and research question.

For this reason, I recommend using mind-mapping techniques and mind-mapping tools to keep your ideation structured! My favorite mind-mapping software is Coggle. It's cloud-based, it's interactive, it's free (up to a certain number of mind-maps). Put your problem statement in the middle of the mind-map, and let the ideas branch out quickly and abundantly!

Basic mind-map created on Coggle, a free Ideation tool

Finally, to keep your group brainstorm positive, remember to keep your own thoughts and opinions positive as well. As a Christian education mentor once encouraged me to do, affirm every thoughtful idea! Affirming thoughtful ideas is about more than positivity and exuberance. It is about refereeing the conversation, defending thoughtful ideas from put-downs and fending off "analysis paralysis." As the convener of the brainstorm, your role is to celebrate ideas - and to convince others on the team to do the same.

Having created an extensive list of new ideas in response to our problem statements, we now must seek to prioritize, and ultimately, to protoype. We pick up our proverbial pruning sheers to trim our list of ideas into a workable action plan. We look towards prototyping, the subject of our next post.

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@ryanpanzer is the author of Grace and Gigabytes.