Slack for Ministry: A new way for churches to collaborate virtually and asynchronously

Less than half of Americans want to work full-time from an office when the pandemic subsides, according to the New York Times. These sentiments follow a recent McKinsey analysis suggesting that most organizations can rely predominantly on remote work without any drop in effectiveness or impact. According to McKinsey, even location-based services like healthcare may one day see over one-third of employees coming to work virtually. We are in an economy where the number of available jobs is misaligned to the number of active job seekers. As a result, organizations that are unable or unwilling to collaborate virtually and asynchronously will soon encounter a severe shortage of job applicants.

This trend matters a great deal to churches, which are just as active in the labor market as any organization. While church leaders may prefer to think of congregations as localized units shaped in response to the needs of a geographic neighborhood, the church of the future will be less of a bounded entity. In this digital age, congregations will take up a both/and position, serving the needs of the physical and virtual neighbor in response to God's call, with acts of discipleship taking place down the street and throughout cyberspace.

Church leaders, then, need to find a way to collaborate virtually and asynchronously, with rostered leaders, lay leaders, members, and virtual/physical neighbors. Whether a congregation has a large office with dozens of staffers or a small office with a pastor and an administrator, today's church leader is tasked with extending the collaborative reach of the community.

Slack for Mac OS

This is why Slack is such a compelling platform for ministry. Originally designed as a chat application, Slack sought to reduce dependence on email. By convening chat conversations and hosting direct messages between collaborators, Slack reduces dependence on the inbox and facilitates collaboration between those who are neither located in the same place nor working at the same times. While churches are ineligible for Slack's nonprofit discount program, an account starts at just $8/person per month.

Slack invites anyone connected with an organization to join "channels," or chat rooms, created around shared projects. Companies might have channels for sales, marketing, product development, or human resources. Churches might create channels for worship planning, faith formation, Sunday school, and administration.

Once organized into channels, Slack provides the infrastructure for meaningful collaboration. This includes apps that support teleconferencing platforms like Zoom, as well as integrations that support work on shared documents like Google Docs. Slack also provides threaded conversations, facilitating the possibility of a lively back and forth.

How can today's church leader get the most from Slack?

First, identify what areas require collaboration, and accordingly, meeting times. Does your church have a weekly worship planning session? A bi-weekly finance check-in with the treasury committee? Each of these represents a possible Slack channel, where ideas can be exchanged and questions answered outside of scheduled meeting time.

Second, find specific opportunities to utilize Slack to exchange ideas. Adopting a new technology requires an awareness of uses cases. The most common way churches might start to utilize Slack is to bring together the worship planning team, who can use the platform to integrate music, preaching themes, prayers, and other aspects of Sunday morning. Communicate how and when collaborators should turn to Slack - and remember to communicate the benefits of reduced meeting time, and greater community input.

Next, think about Slack as a platform for more than staff collaboration. While most organizations initially adopt Slack for internal use, congregations don't have a clean demarcation of internal/external stakeholders. All members of the church, and to some extent, all members of a neighborhood, are valued collaborators. Most church and neighborhood members won't want to engage via Slack initially - they likely tend to prefer to engage through social media like Facebook Groups. So, start with the church's lay leaders, or those who serve on standing boards or committees. Board and council members may be the most eager to reduce unnecessary meetings, holding conversations and even votes when it best suits their availability. Your church council Slack channel may be far more valuable in fostering collaboration than channels for pastors and church staff.

Finally, remember to have fun with Slack. From an endless trove of animated GIFs to seemingly every emoji (and the ability to create your own), Slack makes digital collaboration far more fun than any email exchange. The extent to which a congregation actually enjoys using Slack determines the sustainability of the platform in a ministry context.

While Slack is an excellent collaboration tool for congregations, it's important to remember that all technologies have a potential cost to our attention and energy. Cal Newport, author of "Digital Minimalism," recently published a book critiquing the rapid adoption of Slack. In fact, Slack can prove to be distracting, particularly when its usage is not goal-directed. In a ministry setting, Slack requires a specific purpose. It also requires some documented usage practices. It's best to encourage Slack users to carefully monitor their notification settings, potentially deactivating mobile notifications so as to avoid interruption outside of working hours.

Throughout this time of extended digital distribution, we've seen and experienced the redefinition of the workplace. That redefinition is coming to our churches, beckoning us to find new ways of collaborating in mission. Slack is a compelling tool for purposeful ministry, an invaluable resource for the digital age church leader.

---

@ryanpanzer is the author of "Grace and Gigabytes."

---

When Rally Day is canceled: Confronting the ongoing church attendance dilemma

Half of all churches experienced an increase in worship attendance in spring 2020. At least, that's what surveys from the Barna Group suggest. Most church leaders can attest to a similar trend in their congregation. As lockdowns tightened during the early pandemic, church-goers with little else to do flocked to online worship, peaking on Easter Sunday and Christmas Eve 2020.

And then the Zoom fatigue began. As the reality of a long pandemic set in, online attendance began to wane. Even as churches reopened their sanctuaries on a limited basis, cumulative attendance continued its decline.

One congregation in my town had over 700 households join for worship online on Christmas Eve. Today, attendance is down to a few dozen worshipping online, with in-person attendance less than half of its pre-pandemic levels. With widespread concerns over unvaccinated children and the delta variant, as well as the reintroduction of mask mandates, some local congregations have opted to cancel rally day festivities in September. Some church leaders have shelved plans for grand re-opening celebrations targeted for the first Sunday after Labor Day, a day that was once thought to be the harbinger of a brighter and mask-free future.

These challenges can, at times, seem unbeatable. In a time like this, today's church leader might try desperately to reverse the slide in attendance. But the headwinds of this pandemic moment may prove to be too strong.

This may not be the time for a well-conceived marketing campaign or a revamped outreach strategy. Instead, this may simply be a time for lament, introspection, and presence.

First, grieve the losses. Many congregations have acknowledged the grief and pain associated with the widespread loss of life during the pandemic. Some have acknowledged the hardship associated with not being able to gather at the altar for communion or to gather in large groups outside of worship. Each of these merits a word of lament from a Christian community, from scriptures, through preaching, and in prayer. As congregations look towards an uncertain fall season, some are planning for a service of lament on All Saint's Day, looking to culminate the longings and losses of the pandemic in the mode of the psalmist. But in a sense, grieving the losses of the past has its limits. Our news cycle, and our day-to-day lives, are so imbued with loss that individual lament has become habitual. We might, therefore, require something more than collectively grieving what has been lost. What we really need now is an expression of the specific type of loss that comes from unrealized hope.

So we acknowledge the pain that comes with unmet aspirations. Now more than ever, our churches are communities with an uncertain future. When 2021 began, we saw a glimmer of hopeful expectation on the horizon, a tantalizing promise that the fall could bring a restoration of what had been lost. In January, I saw an opportunity for churches to innovate, to come up with a new way of doing ministry, and being church community that could be fully implemented come September. The delta variant has tamped down these opportunities. The growth we had anticipated in September may be far less than what we had hoped for. While some churches are moving ahead with their plans, others are expressing dismay in that these predictions have proven unreliable. At best, our grand reopenings in September will be cautious and tenous. Through scripture, preaching, and prayer, we are called not just to lift up the losses of the past, but to confront the unrealized hope that so many of us carried into the new year. Just as the psalmist lifted up the laments of a people in captivity without a clear future, so to must we lift up the concerns of those whose plans and aspirations have crumbled in a second pandemic summer.

Finally, we must reflect on why we feel so pressed to grow. In this season, many church leaders may find grief and frustration from declining attendance in a season where we had once anticipated growth. In this environment, it is appropriate to wonder why we had put so much emphasis on "post-pandemic" growth. This is a time for all of us to revisit our relationship with growth, why we see increased numbers as our key performance indicator for the healthy congregation. As churches without a clear future, growth is not up to us. This is the time to reflect on the mission and purpose of a congregation. In our capitalist cultural context, growth is often viewed as the end or purpose of all organizations. This season of unrealized hope offers us the opportunity to break that cycle, to reflect on God's call, and to orient our communities accordingly.

Attendance may be down, and Rally Day may be canceled. But God remains at work in our communities. The call of the church, which is seldom synonymous with growth, remains in place. Though the future may be uncertain, it is a future that belongs to God. For that, we give thanks amidst our lamentation.

---

@ryanpanzer is the author of "Grace and Gigabytes." An advocate of innovation in the church, he is a skeptic of growth for the sake of growth.

---

Facebook for Faith: Should we pray on Facebook?

Facebook started with present-tense status updates (Ryan is...). Then there were pictures. Soon, users could post videos. The newest thing to post to Facebook?

Prayers.

Facebook continues its investment in digital tools for faith communities. Alongside resources listed on their new portal, faith.facebook.com, Facebook has begun testing on a prayer feature. The new feature remains in limited beta testing for faith and spirituality Facebook Groups.

Once launched more broadly, individuals who are part of a church Facebook Group will be able to set a status of "asking for prayers," before listing their specific prayer concerns:

The feature rippled through the news media this weekend, just two weeks after the highly-publicized launch of the Faith for Facebook portal. Reactions in the religious media were somewhat mixed.

Some faith leaders were skeptical, arguing that prayer always requires synchronous, embodied presence. Others were intrigued, expressing gratitude for new opportunities to connect with God and one another. Many interviewed in various news outlets expressed continued skepticism over Facebook's privacy practices, and how the company might use personal information shared through a prayer request. Some openly wondered if the company might serve ads based on one's prayer request. Might Facebook someday follow up on prayers to resolve alcoholism with advertisements for rehab centers?

Indeed, Facebook has an ethical responsibility to show that they are capable of handling this data in a way that elicits communal trust. As a corporation, they clearly have a long way to go. Still, prayer on social media is nothing new. Prayer requests are already commonplace on social media feeds. "Prayers up" is a frequent way to start a tweet or post whenever a friend or connection is facing adversity. Injured professional athletes are frequently the beneficiary of such requests, often from concerned fantasy football owners.

So regardless of whether Facebook's "pray" feature takes off like the like and love buttons, today's faith leaders might consider how such requests intersect with the spiritual needs and inclinations of their own communities. Such discernment exists at the level of liturgy, technology, and administration.

At the level of liturgy, communities should discern how individual prayers shared on social media and other digital platforms might engage the broader church community. This is the single most important liturgical and theological question about prayer online - not whether it "works," not whether it is a valid expression of prayer, but how the posts of the individual might influence the shared work of the community. It would be near-sighted to suggest that prayer and technology are incompatible. Individuals have long found tremendous spiritual support in prayerful online communities.

The question isn't so much whether online prayer works, but how the communal body of Christ that is the church might gather as one to support the celebrations and the concerns lifted up in digital prayer. If we believe that the church is a public body that is formed through communal prayer, then it is our calling to take individual prayer requests and convert them into concrete expressions of communal prayer. Today's church leader might seek to incorporate prayer posts into the worship liturgy, or into small group prayer sessions.

How do we faciltiate communal prayer from an individual prayer request post?

At the level of technology, faith communities should work to implement the technologies most conducive to the communal act that is prayer. This might happen on or off of Facebook. To collect and lift up prayer requests on Facebook, a faith community ought to have a well-established Facebook Group, a feature that churches utilize far less frequently than a Facebook Page (for more on the differences between Groups and Pages, see this post). Groups allow community members to share posts specifically with other group members. Perhaps this confidentiality will add a layer of trust to those who would not prayer requests read by all of one's Facebook contacts.

But Facebook is not the only platform that can or should be used for digital prayer. Group messaging apps like Group Me, Remind, or WhatsApp can exchange prayer requests throughout the week. Presentation software like Mentimeter and chat applications like Slack can curate requests for upcoming worship services. Simple tools like Google Forms can encourage community members to anonymously submit prayer requests for inclusion in public worship services. Whatever the technology one uses, it is essential to develop a process for lifting up and responding to concerns as the shared body of Christ.

And at the level of administration, church leaders should be vigilant. Sharing a prayer request can be an act of deep vulnerability. Anytime a prayer request is shared, communal reactions must be monitored. Respectful and prayerful responses must be insisted upon. And occasionally, a prayer request might violate the confidentiality of another church member ("...please watch over Robert as he works through his latest DUI charge..."). The privacy of other community members must be maintained. While prayer requests will not be particularly burdensome, the task of administering digital prayer requests demands consistent engagement and attunement.

Should we pray on Facebook? Many of us already are. God is showing up in response. It is time for faith communities to do the same.

---

@ryanpanzer is the author of "Grace and Gigabytes."

---