Hybrid Ministry: The Technologies Your Congregation Cannot Do Without

"So, what technology should we continue using? You know, after we get back to normal?"

It's a question I regularly hear while talking digital age ministry with church leaders, one that ministry professionals are asking with increasing frequency. Implicit in the question is a desire to jettison some, if not most, of the tools and digital resources that allow us to continue being church during a time of digital distribution. I can empathize with the sentiment. For many pastors, priests, and deacons, it's difficult enough to film, edit, and broadcast a single worship service. It's unfathomable for them to think about managing all of this technology while also proclaiming the Word and administering the Sacraments at an in-person service.

Also buried in the question is an assumption that faith communities inevitably will return to where they were in February 2020, that 18 months of virtual-first faith practice will somehow not change what it means to be a Christian in a post-pandemic reality. Surely we can all empathize with this mindset. Who among us doesn't long for a return to vibrant in-person community, to seeing our friends and neighbors, to communion, to coffee hours, to what we once knew as Christian fellowship?

One possible answer to this question would be to continue using all of the same technology we're using to bring church to those staying safer at home. Keep the Zoom licenses, continue the platform subscriptions, and stay the course. As an alternative, we could stop using technology altogether, recognizing that the future of Christianity is not exclusively digital, and therefore we ought to put our focus on in-person connection.

Yet the best answer to the question of what technology we should continue using is nuanced.

Faith communities should continue using some, but not all, technology. Churches should celebrate a return to in-person connection, when available, but not think of face-to-face as the only authentic expression of church.

In fact, the best way to answer this question is not with a categorical list or blanket rejection of technology, but with two subsequent questions:

• What are the technologies that can equip our communities for lives of faithful service?

• And what technologies facilitate collaboration in our life together?

These questions should be top of mind because they remind us to focus on digital minimalism, to only deploy those technologies that align with our mission and values.

There is little purpose in a church continuing to use a specific piece of technology if it doesn't equip our faith community for acts of Christian love and service to a hurting world. If a technology isn't actively used for teaching, preaching, praying, proclaiming, encouraging, or empowering, it functions as little more than an online bulletin board. If a digital tool doesn't facilitate discipleship, disconnect.

But when we think about this question, we might realize how our usage of Zoom has brought together diverse cross-sections of our community to engage issues of justice and learning, how our posts to Instagram Stories have introduced moments of sacred pause and prayer into the frenzied world of social media. It's likely that we can identify which technology is equipping our faith communities in the here and now. These represent the first set of technologies we must keep.

Name the technologies that equip, find the technologies that form faith. Keep them, grow them, invest in them.

The second question, of which technologies facilitate collaboration, reminds of us of the inherent risks with unplugging completely, namely, the lost opportunity to be the hands and feet of Christ wherever there are hands and feet to be found.

If a piece of technology allows us to broadcast but not to work together, to sermonize but not to serve as a community, then it's of little value to a missional faith community. When thinking about how technology facilitates collaboration, we might recognize how much of collaboration is tied up with listening. We might see how texting has allowed us to listen more intently, how Tweeting has enabled us to widen the circle of voices that we're listening to, how podcasting has enabled us to hear the most thoughtful voices on the future of Christianity.

As with technologies that equip, know what technologies that help us to collaborate in being the church together. Throw out the technologies that allow us merely to "watch" church so that we might prioritize the tools that convene our community for mutual acts of service.

Which technologies equip? Which help to collaborate?

The way we answer these questions represents our path to hybrid ministry, an expression of church that is simultaneously online and offline, that is equally inclusive of the virtual and the on-site experience. If we engage these questions thoughtfully, we may even find that we need less technology than we anticipated. We may even find that new IT staff and budget commitments are unnecessary.

Tools that equip. Tools that collaborate. In a digital age ministry, these are the tools that we cannot do without.

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

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.

Google Docs and the Great Church Leadership Revolution

Our most widely-used digital technologies are built upon a collaborative foundation. This likely does not surprise you. We share docs, we comment on slides, we send direct messages and post to group channels, and all of this is part of a typical, digital age day-in-the-life.

Yet implicit in the adoption of real-time collaborative technologies like Google Docs, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and others is an accelerating commitment to egalitarian participation, to the flattening of hierarchy. While the impact of digital technology on our culture is broad and diverse, the impacts on leadership is pointed and decisive: we expect opportunities to meaningfully contribute, we insist on opportunities to frequently participate, we demand collaboration. The story of the digital age is a rapidly unfolding march towards more collaborative forms of leadership in organizations, in government, and particularly in the church.

Some institutions have been more adept at pivoting towards more collaborative and shared forms of leadership. The technology industry in particular has made a commitment to busting bureaucracy, leveling hierarchy, and creating collaborative feedback loops throughout its teams.

As a former Googler employee, I recall filling out countless surveys asking me if various processes at the company were becoming too hierarchical and thus having a negative effect on my productivity. At every tech company I’ve worked for, bureaucracy and hierarchy have been viewed with more hostility than any possible external competition!

Churches, often seen by those on the outside of organized religion as excessively hierarchical, have been slower to adapt to the new cultural norm of shared leadership. Even the most technologically sophisticated congregations operate from a “sit and get” model, where members of the church are relegated to consumers or viewers with checking accounts.

While many have predicted that the mass adoption of digital tech in religious institutions will be the next big wave of reform in Christian practice, I would argue differently. To truly connect to a tech-shaped culture, our churches don’t actually need to use more technology. Instead, we need to think deeply about how this technology changes what it means to lead in this digital age. That’s the real revolution about to take place in the church.

2021 affords churches innumerable opportunities to test new approaches. Let the coming year be a time of change and innovation in leadership. This process of innovation can be simple. Invite more communal feedback and input, from inside and outside the congregation. Be intentional about establishing pathways to involvement, for guests and members alike. Most pressingly, reevaluate your mission and vision in light of the significant challenges this year has wrought, and let the reevaluation take place in community.

Google Docs and other forms of collaborative technology have indeed initiated a great leadership revolution. Shared leadership is an idea whose time has come. May it’s implementation be atop our church’s New Year’s Resolutions for 2021.

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@ryanpanzer is the author of “Grace and Gigabytes: Being Church in a Tech-Shaped Culture,” a book that explores how our digital culture continues to reshape the practices of Christian Leadership. For more on the book, check out the full-length trailer!