How have the emergence of digital-first culture and the cultural developments related to COVID-19 affected youth ministry? Are there ways we can utilize digital environments to safely and responsibly connect with young people? Chris Wilterdink joins Pastoring in the Digital Parish to share some ideas about youth ministry in digital space.

Chris Wilterdink is Director of Young People’s Ministries Development at UMC Discipleship Ministries. He has over 15 years of local-church youth ministry experience. Chris and Jeremy Steele co-host the Youth Worker Collective podcast.

We’re going to explore creating digital content that engages our online audiences WHILE we engage in a spiritual practice that hopefully gives us, personally, a bit of a power up in the midst of our busy digital ministry lives.

This episode takes an older piece of content that is a great example of content that engages our digital community and reworks it into something useful for the audience of this podcast. This meditative prayer is going to help us refresh for the work of the busy digital minister.

Is it safe to do ministry digitally? A lot of people have foreseen some possible scenario where our digital ministries enable someone with nefarious motivations to do harm to a member of the community. 

Churches and youth organizations have long utilized guidelines to help protect both vulnerable populations of people and the caring people who work with them. But how do we translate those guidelines for digital ministry?

In this session of Pastoring in the Digital Parish, our adjunct professor is an old friend, Pastor Nathan Webb. Nathan shares with us the procedures his all-digital ministry, called Checkpoint Church, is putting in place. By sharing their system, you should be able to discern some necessary procedures you can put into place in order to keep your online ministry space a safe place for all people.

Rev. Bradley Laurvick shares the story of a unique TikTok ministry, The You Matter Zone. Through the story, we learn how TikTok can be utilized not just for sharing information, but also for forming relationship. Pastor Brad also shares who this ministry, which has over 2 million engagements, relates the to the ministry of his local church.

Rev. Bradley Laurvick currently serves with Highlands United Methodist Church in Denver, Colorado. His Masters of Divinity is from the Iliff School of Theology. Brad ministers to TikTok through the BradAndThePuppets channel, which has over 170,000 followers.

“I’m being called to minister in a digital space, but seminary didn’t train me for this.” Some seminaries and divinity schools have heard the need and are responding. Dr. Emily Peck-McClain will be teaching classes on digital ministry for Wesley Seminary. She joins Pastoring in the Digital Parish to reveal how her classes might help train digital ministers in a challenging area: faith formation.

Rev. Dr. Emily A. Peck-McClain teaches in Christian Formation and works as the theological educator for the Wesley Innovation Hub, part of a Lilly Endowment Initiative for young adult ministry. She is a United Methodist elder from the New York Annual Conference. Her ministry background is concentrated on ministry with young people and urban ministry. She is teaching a class at Wesley Theological Seminary on Faith Formation in Digital Contexts.

The machines are taking over! In this session of Pastoring in the Digital Parish, we set aside fears of a future dominated by robot overlords and look at several ways we can utilize artificial intelligence right now for digital ministry success.

Much of this episode was generated by AI. It provided new content ideas and streamlined the content generation process. Looking at this process and the processes used in publicizing this episode help us creatively apply AI to our digital ministry settings.

Our culture and our relationship with technology are changing. Jeffrey Mahan points out that these changes have noteworthy implications for the future of ministry and leadership. What will a ministerial job look like in 10 years? What skills should pastors begin to implement and refine?

Jeffrey Mahan is ordained in the Rocky Mountain Conference of the United Methodist Church, currently serving as Professor of Religion & Communication with Iliff School of Theology and on faculty of the University of Colorado. He’s written many books, including, most recently Church as Network, a helpful diagnosis for where the church stands in the midst of Western culture right now as well as an inspiring look at where both the church and the professional ministry is headed.

Dr. Mahan challenges us to think creatively about what a successful, outward-facing ministry will look like in the near future.

Pastor Mark Lutz shares the story of Lux Digital Church–a fully digital church.

Lux Digital Church is a church committed to the belief that a digital church can successfully achieve all of the core functions that mark any effective, healthy church. Mark Lutz is one of the founders of Lux Digital. Mark has been a youth pastor, a discipleship pastor in a traditional church setting. And Mark is an avid gamer who wanted to grow a spiritual community for like-minded people. That community started with a podcast. We’ll get into that story and how it led to a digital community of faith.

Mitchell Atencio discusses the implications of Web 3.0, NFTs and blockchains for digital ministry on Pastoring in the Digital Parish.

Mitchell Atencio is the assistant news editor with Sojourners–a magazine that is likely familiar to many of us. As such, the bulk of Mitchell’s work and writing centers on the magazine’s focus on social justice issues. But back in November of 2021, Mitchell wrote a really helpful article on Web 3.0 and its implications for the church. The article addressed ideas like cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens and their implications for faith communities in digital space.

Have you heard of Lent Madness? It’s 32 saints placed into a tournament-like single elimination bracket. An online community votes to determine the victor of each matchup… of course with lots of discussion in the process. Lent Madness is over a decade old and continues to grow and inform. It succeeds in an area many of us in digital ministry feel a bit short: it succeeds in online spiritual formation.

So let’s get the story of Lent Madness with the Supreme Executive Committee: Reverends Scott Gunn and Tim Schenck.

See more about Lent Madness at www.lentmadness.org

And find more sessions of Pastoring in the Digital Parish at resourceumc.org/digital-parish