How do you move people from being passive viewers of online content to active members of a faith community?

Steven Adair shares the story of Glendale United Methodist Church in Nashville, Tennessee–a small church that created a big digital footprint. This dwindling congregation used their digital presence to fuel a season of growth that continues today. Steven shares their learnings and practices.

Steven Adair is a lay member of Glendale United Methodist Church and the Director of Local Church Services for United Methodist Communications. In this latter role, he helps local churches communicate the good news to their communities.

Glendale’s social links are

Facebook.com/GlendaleUMC

Twitter.com/GlendaleUMC

Instagram.com/GlendaleUMC

YouTube.com/GlendaleUMC

We’re going to work on adapting our world-changing message regarding God’s grace for a digital-first culture. Let’s explore living the good word in digital space.

This episode itself is an adaptation. It’s repurposed content from a training Ryan Dunn did. It answers questions about how we repurpose content for sharing across multiple platforms and how we position our own digital representations as ambassadors for our ministries.

For more: www.resourceumc.org/digital-parish

Joseph Yoo is a church planter whose plans were upset by the pandemic. Instead of planting a church in a traditional model, he found himself building influence through TikTok. Several of his videos have garnered hundreds of thousands of views.

In this session, Joseph talks about the influence of TikTok: the good, the bad, the in-between. The lessons the platform has taught Joseph about influence. And how this kind of medium has impacted his experience in planting a new church during a pandemic.

Happy International Podcast Day!

In this bonus episode of Pastoring in the Digital Parish, we’re going to explore getting people to listen to and talk about our podcasts. If you’re looking for tips about growing an audience and getting people to engage with your podcast, then this bonus episode is for you!

Rosario Picardo and Michael Beck are co-authors of Fresh Expressions in Digital Space and are our adjunct professors for this session of Pastoring in the Digital Parish.

Pastoring in the Digital Parish seeks to provide resourcing and community for those engaged in some form of digital ministry–whether as a solo pastor in a church who is trying to keep connected with a congregation who has scattered into to digital space or as a digital pioneer seeking to build new community spaces in a virtual sense.  Michael and Roz speak into both of those contexts. They’re both pastors at small or mid-sized churches with limited resources. And they’re also both passionate about empowering the church to find news of expressing itself as a discipling community.

They’re sharing with us how digital expressions of faith communities can both empower an existing congregation and reach new people with good news.

Sammy Kelly from Digivangelism joins us for this session of Pastoring in the Digital Parish. Sammy is going to share a vision for batching work so we can build upon some of the things we’re already doing in order to thrive in digital ministry–because you don’t need more work to do, do you? She also offers great tips for starting out on new platforms and more.

Digivangelism studies trends daily so that they can offer resources with the hope and prayer it will help you more effectively share your message of hope, healing and light online.

Jason Moore brings insights for maximizing engagement both in-person and online during worship.

Jason has “secret shopped” hundreds of digital worship experiences. He shares his observations for what works and what doesn’t. We’ll get ideas for keeping our congregations engaged during hybrid worship experiences. We’ll also get some ideas for streamlining our workflow in creating an online and in-person worship experience.

Jason Moore has presented his Both/And worship training for just about every United Methodist conference in the US.  Jason runs Midnight Oil Productions and previously worked as a graphic and animation artist at the Ginghamsburg United Methodist Church in Ohio.

He’s co-authored several books, including From Franchise to Local Dive: Multiplying Your Church by Discovering Your Contextual Flavor, Digital Storytellers: The Art of Communicating the Gospel in Worship (Abingdon, 2002) and The Wired Church: Making Media Ministry (Abingdon, 1999). 

Community, not content, is the key. Ryan Dunn reviews his biggest revelations from season 1 of Pastoring in the Digital Parish.

 The ways in which we’ve been trained to create content–especially when it comes to the written word–do not always translate well into digital space. So in this episode of Pastoring in the Digital Parish, we’re going to brush up on writing skills for the web.

Our adjunct professor for this episode is Joe Iovino, the director of Member Communications for United Methodist Communications. Joe writes for edits the denominational website: UMC.org.

Nathan Webb of Checkpoint Church reveals how a platform like Discord provides a pathway to digital discipleship.

Pastor Nate found that a chat platform like Discord is invaluable to building relationships with the members of his all-digital church. Could Discord help you build community, too? Nate makes a compelling case. We’re going to hear it. We’re also going to hear about the history of Checkpoint Church and the community life of this all-digital congregation.