Digital Church Hospitality: Getting to Know Your Online Neighbor

How do you build relationships with those you never see?

It's a question that's key to navigating the Digital Reformation. With worship becoming a hybrid event, pastors and church leaders see and hear those attending in person. But unless the congregation gathers for online worship via Zoom (perhaps the ideal platform for small churches), the names, faces, and even the needs of those online remain unheard. This creates two tiers of church attendance: those who leaders and members know and recognize, and those who are yet unknown.

If we are to get to know our online neighbors, it's helpful to consider some broader worship attendance trends.

Christianity Today notes that regular church attendance in the United States has dropped from 34% of Americans to 28% of Americans. This decline in worship attendance paralleled a drop in religious affiliation. For the first time in our nation's history, the percentage of Christians has fallen below 50%.

There are far fewer church members and worship attendees today than there were at the start of the pandemic. In a related finding, Pew Research data tells us that just 10% of active church-goers plan to continue regular online church attendance. Thus, many of the faces we were accustomed to seeing before March 2020 haven't shifted to worshipping online, as some would expect. Rather, they've stopped attending altogether.

Amidst this decline in worship attendance, active members have started "church-hopping" online. According to a 2020 Pew Research Study, 59% of church-goers have attended worship at a congregation other than the one they attend most often. These figures suggest a continuation of a pre-pandemic trend first noted by the Barna Group: that many practicing Christians regularly attend two or more different congregations. Since the start of the pandemic, attendance at second or third congregations has typically been virtual.

These data suggest that many of those attending worship are not active or regular members of that congregation. They are church-hopping neighbors and guests, new faces whose identities are obscured behind the anonymity of YouTube, Vimeo, and Facebook Live.

This may surprise some who imagined that online worship attendees are usually active church members. This may even frustrate those who imagined that lower in-person worship is explained by more frequent online attendance. The stark reality is that fewer people are coming to church. Those who are coming to church are less committed to a single congregation. And those who are resolutely committed to a single congregation are seldom worshipping online.

This reality calls us to consider how we might get to know our online neighbor. While there are few easy answers in digital spaces where we cannot see names and faces, there are a few hospitality practices that merit further experimentation. Specifically, we might:

• Create accessibility across platforms. Everything a church does online should be seamless to access, easy to connect to, and consistently inclusive. For starters, church leaders should work to help guests access worship on the platform of their choice. Plug-ins and integrations (such as the Zoom Livestream for Facebook feature) make it easy to broadcast the same service or event on YouTube, Facebook, Zoom as well as your app and website. But it's not just about the platforms. It's also about inclusivity. Content should be accessible within one click of the church home page. Perhaps more importantly, live events should be captioned.

• Strengthen words of welcome. Liturgy begins with a gathering, often in the form of words of welcome. Most congregations use these words of welcome specifically to greet guests in attendance. But too many congregations fail to greet guests who are gathered online. As the guest experience moves online, it is critical to specifically name, greet, and welcome online guests, those who are encountering the congregation for the first time.

• Extend a specific invitation to connect. At some point in the welcome or the announcements, guests should be invited to connect with a pastor or church leader. Too often, this invitation is ambiguous, as in if you are new, fill out this form."Getting to know the online neighbor involves greater specificity. Why should visitors fill out the form? For prayer requests? To schedule a call with a pastor or join a mailing list? To request a new visitor kit? Having provided some specific reason to submit a visitor form, we must work to ensure the forms are easy to find. Utilize QR codes, link shorteners, or video overlays to connect visitors to a contact form as easily as possible.

The church visitor experience has gone online. We must now learn to welcome our online neighbors, recognizing that digital hospitality is now synonymous with hospitality itself. We will turn to these ideas, and more, in subsequent posts.

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Ryan Panzer is the author of "The Holy and the Hybrid," available now for pre-order wherever books are sold.

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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.

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.