July 11, 2024

By Rev. Rick King

At Falcon Heights Church, we can trace many of our recent experiments and innovations back to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lately, I find myself talking about “Before Pandemic” and “After Pandemic.” One of the areas we didn’t think we’d be so involved in a few years ago is something called “digital ministry.”

But the need to stay connected during the pandemic thrust us quickly into digital ministry—even when we didn’t really know what that was!

Churches that never thought much about it now devote staffing and budget to digital ministry. Rev. Jim Keat is digital minister of Riverside Church in New York City, which is affiliated with the UCC and the American Baptist Churches. It’s a big church with a big budget, and they’re staffing for digital ministry.

One of my spiritual directees, Rev. Natalie Owens-Pike, is UCC and is Minister to the Digital Community at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York, a newly created position that reaches hundreds of members almost exclusively online. When Natalie was ordained at Mayflower UCC in Minneapolis last summer, Fifth Avenue Church sent two representatives—and they drove over from Hudson, Wisconsin, where they live, to be part of her ordination service.

Thanks to Jon Zimmer and others, our church livestreams our service every Sunday, including when we’re outdoors on the patio—and Jon also livestreamed the North Star Chorus’ barbershop concert from our parking lot on Tuesday night.

Digital ministry is more than just livestreaming and social media. It’s a way of thinking about the church not just as an in-person, flesh-and-blood reality, but as a community that exists in multiple spheres and on more than one platform: the sanctuary or patio, and the virtual platforms online.

The rationale for this is that we live so much of our lives online, or with an awareness of the online realm, it makes sense to use these tools and platforms to extend the reach of Christ into the places people live every day.

Jim Keat is doing a series of webinars this year on digital ministry, and it all starts with a theology of digital ministry. In this and the next two columns, I’m going to lift up three aspects of digital ministry theology because they can guide us to be good stewards of these resources as we move through merger toward a more effective mission in the wider community.

The first is mobility and flexibility. Jim’s good at memorable images, and the one he uses is his little Airstream trailer, which he and his growing family use to camp in the state of Michigan, where they live. (Yes, Jim does digital ministry for a church in New York City from Michigan!)
He says mobility has been important to ministry for centuries, starting with the tabernacle of Israel which housed the Ark of the Covenant, which was portable long before it became permanently housed in the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem Temple.

The tabernacle was a visual reminder that the presence of God went with them wherever they wandered in the Sinai wilderness. And it seems that Israel’s problems as a community of God’s people started when the tabernacle stopped being carried around with them and was placed in a fixed location.

One of the basic theological building blocks of digital ministry is, “Be where people ARE.” Digital ministry is not bound to a static location; it can go with people wherever they go, whenever they go.

How is God showing up in YOUR life? Where could you use reminders that God is with you always?