Moving Beyond the Stream of Church Online with Jay Kranda

Thanks for joining us for this episode of the unSeminary podcast. We’re talking with Jay Kranda, the online pastor of Saddleback Church in California.

Digital ministry is here to stay and churches need to think about how to move beyond just managing their weekend stream to actually connecting people online to the church and each other. Listen in as Jay Kranda shares how to focus on closing the back door of your church online experience rather than focusing on having a huge front door with a lot of subscribers.

* Define your wins. // Saddleback has moved away from the term online campus to embrace online community instead. This is an important shift because of how they define their wins when it comes to digital ministry. Digital ministry can look very different from one church to another based on a church’s objectives and strategy. The main objective for the online community team at Saddleback is to provide church for people that live thirty miles away from one of their physical locations. * More than streaming services. // Jay is commonly asked how there are so many people who engage with the church from far away. Aside from the fact that Saddleback is a well known church around the world, Jay has been developing systems and teams for ten years now and so he has built the online community to be more than just watching streams of the service. Just as physical church is more than a building, don’t limit church online to merely watching a service on YouTube. Take time to begin developing more robust systems, people, and teams to support an online community.* Meeting spaces online. // Create a Facebook group where you can interact with each other like a community of churchgoers would in a physical space. You might not see each other in person because you live in different states or countries, but you can still be a community online and create connection. Work on developing and investing in a community here week after week and you will begin to see a return over time.* Focus on smaller events and connections. // Don’t worry about the big streaming numbers when creating a place for online viewers to interact. Focus on small events and one-on-one Zooms that allow you to offer pastoral care and develop people. Offer online classes for things such as membership. Host some kind of monthly or quarterly 45 minute Zoom where you talk to new people about how to engage with the church and answer their questions. Many people are not walking through a church’s doors anymore, and they want to figure out who you are before they visit in person.* How far you reach. // When deciding how to staff for church online, first take a look at your online audience. How many people watch services on each platform? Run a report on how many people are within an hour drive of your church and how many are outside that. Over the last two years, how many have given to your church that live an hour away? That will help you determine how to invest in your strategy and if this is a local outreach, a farther away, or a hybrid. Jay recommends that most churches think locally.* Hire a team. // Too much of the online pastor or director’s time has been focused on just project managing the weekend stream. Have a media team that can help with this part to allow the online pastor to be a pastor and connect with the online audience. Make sure to cast vision for the online pastor and define the win. An example of a win for a local audience would be to connect the digital to the physical and be thinking about how to move people from online to an actual physical location. Connect your win to your church’s strategy.* Keep the online groups healthy. // One of the big game-changers for Saddleback’s online team was to move people into online groups and begin connecting them with each other. To keep groups healthy, Saddleback has certain requirements that have to...