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Reimagining Church: The Gifts and Challenges of Online Ministry

Erina Kim-Eubanks

Erina Kim-Eubanks (she/her) is a Korean-American pastor, writer, and justice seeker who loves reimagining church alongside her husband, Michael, daughters Amara and Jarena, and diverse faith family at Bethel Community in San Leandro, California.

This culture of increased participation also kick-started new rhythms of co-creation in our community. Having services online meant we could share our pulpit with guest preachers from anywhere, and we began hosting prophetic voices from communities all across the country and even across the world, greatly diversifying our platform for preaching.

Additionally, the expansion of digital ministry in our church coincided with psychological and theological shifts, moving us away from seeing our church building as existing purely for Sunday worship services, to seeing our church as a center of community resourcing and resilience.

A ninety-year-old church elder reads a Sunday Call to Worship while her cat appears from offscreen and walks across her Zoom box, landing contentedly in her lap.

A cacophony of voices—young and old—unmute to sing the doxology together with a glorious, slightly off-key, digital delay.

A Zoom chatbox is filled to the brim with stories of both deep grief and delightful joys as people share their lives with one another during the prayers of the people.

Echoes of the words “the peace of Christ be with you” pass back and forth across the airwaves between voices from Zoom and dozens gathered in a church building.

A sanctuary swells with the sound of percussion—children shaking tambourines, adults hitting claves, elders clanging triangles—while a television screen on stage shows people on Zoom shaking tambourines and banging drums from home.

In May 2019, when my husband and I began a church revitalization process at Bethel Community Presbyterian Church in San Leandro, these were scenes of church worship I could never have imagined. Scenes I didn’t even know could exist.

We arrived, as most eager church planters and revitalizers do, to an aging, fatigued community nearing closure—vaguely optimistic, cautiously hopeful, and completely uncertain of what the future would hold. Yet not even a year later, we saw our world and our church ministry turned upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic. With the enactment of shelter-in-place orders and the fears and uncertainties surrounding a virus that literally filled the air, we had no choice but to move our ministry online, a move that was certainly not part of our church revitalization strategy.

Like thousands of other churches across the country, we learned the Zoom platform and how it could serve our community in our spaces of worship. We hosted phone call tutorials with elderly members on how to use new technologies. We held prayer meetings and Bible studies and midweek groups online. We organized trivia nights, game nights, and movie nights on Zoom. We figured out how to share in the Lord’s Supper, to celebrate Christmas and Easter and Pentecost, all through a newly formed digital worship space.

And miraculously, we began to see the Spirit’s work.

Through our intentional and strategic curation of Zoom spaces, we saw our ministry begin to thrive and quickly realized the potential of digital ministry. Experiencing church online together was not just a way to temporarily survive the pandemic, but an invitation to lead our church into the future. Here are just a few of the significant gifts that online ministry offered.

The Gift of Increased Accessibility

Online church offered us the gift of increased accessibility amidst traditional church structures that have often been marked by ableism and exclusivity. Digital church spaces helped us grant health and safety for the immunocompromised, giving those unable to risk exposure to viruses the ability to worship in community with others. Technological platforms also enabled accommodations like closed captioning and visual image descriptions to those with disabilities, those who would not normally have such options on a Sunday morning. It granted parents with neurodivergent children the flexibility of being at church while still tending to their kids’ unique needs. It even provided those with physical or geographic barriers, such as being in a wheelchair, having difficulties driving, or having moved to a new city, immediate access to a church space that they couldn’t enter otherwise.

Experiencing church together online meant that our gatherings often included people in San Leandro, alongside people in Los Angeles, Denver, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn, and even in Spain, Hong Kong, and Taiwan! And we were not alone in this reality. Even today, with the height of the pandemic several years behind us, a Pew Research survey found that because of their access to online ministry, 34 percent of people attend church services they would otherwise be unable to attend.1 The vast increase in digital ministry spaces over the past few years has coincided with a greater inclusion and accessibility of worship spaces for those whose needs previously may have been minimized or unattended. 

Reshaped Participation

In addition to increased accessibility, digital services also offered us the potential for reshaping participation in church gatherings, especially Sunday worship services. The usual hierarchy of Sunday gatherings, reinforced by people at podiums elevated above the congregation, quickly became flattened in the digital plane. While a typical in-person service would involve everyone facing the stage, looking up at the speaker, Zoom gave us a window to see each other’s faces on one shared screen together. 

The urgent need for human connection in an isolating time was also partnered with the permission to be creative about Sunday gatherings, and we saw existing rituals and Sunday traditions become more participatory. Kitchen tables and pantry elements were transfigured into sites of grace during communion as we shared our diverse “bread” and “wine” items like pandan mochi waffle and sake, or tortilla chips and agua fresca, or coco bread and sorrel, or naan and chai. Each week, all participants were able to use the chat after the Passing of the Peace to introduce themselves and where they were joining in from in ways that wouldn’t be possible in person. The chat also became a sacred space to hold each other during Prayers of the People, as it made sharing burdens and blessings easier for those more anxious about public speaking. Music times were no longer dominated by choirs and professional musicians but became accessible to all, as participants from young to old were invited to sing, to drum, and to play along, and the lack of pressure toward high production in music allowed us to be more experimental and introduce new songs. Sermons became much more interactive, as both the chat and breakout rooms allowed people to reflect, respond, and engage on a deeper level with the sermon. 

This culture of increased participation also kick-started new rhythms of co-creation in our community. Having services online meant we could share our pulpit with guest preachers from anywhere, and we began hosting prophetic voices from communities all across the country and even across the world, greatly diversifying our platform for preaching. Moving online is also what engendered community rituals like our church’s Gifts of the People testimonies during cultural heritage months, through which people shared important ancestors, historic figures, and artists from different cultures. It allowed for greater intergenerational community building, as we held Godly Play sessions for all members, young and old, and Jokes of the Little People segments on Holy Humor Sunday, during which our kids presented jokes to the community. It even initiated a Passions of the People series in the summer, where members of our community shared their vocational dreams and passions with us in TED-talk-like Sunday testimonies. 

Ultimately, expanding our church’s ministry to the digital space allowed us to let go of stale wineskins, on the brink of rupture, and inspired us to adopt new wineskins that were able to stretch and hold new kinds of ministry that the Spirit was birthing. The newness of worshiping together on digital platforms became key to inspiring newness in other parts of our church revitalization.

The Gift of Redistributing Resources

Experiencing church in the digital space also offered us the gift of increased physical and financial resources, as decreased economic strains of constant building usage, material supplies for in-person gatherings, and hiring for Sunday morning staffing helped us accumulate a large financial surplus between 2020 and 2022. These resources, coupled with a new imagination around what church truly is and what the church building is for, allowed us to redistribute these resources toward a new vision for our material assets. For example, some of these surplus funds began to be redistributed toward community resourcing and neighborhood outreach, such as mutual aid funds, the construction of a micro housing village on our church site, and the development of our church as a hub for neighborhood resilience.

Additionally, the expansion of digital ministry in our church coincided with psychological and theological shifts, moving us away from seeing our church building as existing purely for Sunday worship services, to seeing our church as a center of community resourcing and resilience. With this shift, we were able to think creatively about how to serve and bless our neighbors and began expanding our capacity to do so. In the height of the pandemic, we saw our community food pantry feeding three hundred people on a weekly basis. We partnered with a local climate justice nonprofit to not only build a community garden that feeds and greens our community, but also host community education and listening projects around climate resilience.

Thus, moving our ministry from a purely in-person church to a hybrid community that included both online and in-person ministry allowed us to expand our imagination for church being more than just a physical building. The alternative uses of our physical campus, allowed by hosting more of our community gatherings online, helped us to de-center in-person Sunday worship services in the life of our community, and helped expand both our imagination and capacity to not just “host” church but to “be” the church in our neighborhood and beyond.

(Un)expected Growth 

The surprise blessings of online ministry not only helped us to survive during the pandemic, but also helped us to reimagine church through it. Through God’s grace and the Spirit’s creativity, our church revitalization happened hand in hand with the transformation of our church into a hybrid community. 

As we intentionally created an online Sunday gathering that built human connection and addressed the problems of our world, we began attracting many new people, especially young adults and young families. As we used our social media platform to speak out about injustice, police violence, racial uprisings, and Asian hate crimes, we saw many queer and BIPOC individuals find refuge in our community. As our pastors were invited to speak on several different podcasts, we reached a new wave of people from a range of geographic locations, most of whom we had no previous connection with. As we held discussion groups, Bible studies, and book groups online, we were able to dive into conversation more deeply, with greater room to acknowledge the diversity of temperaments, communication styles, and speed of processing through Zoom. 

Through it all, we saw our church grow more than sevenfold—from a community of about ten to fifteen people when we first arrived, to over a hundred adults and more than thirty children now a regular part of the community. We added thirty-six new members to our church member rolls and have seen dozens more attend our gatherings on a regular basis. And we were amazed that up to 20 percent of those who joined our community were people who didn’t live within fifteen miles of our church building but were people who lived farther away, even in other parts of the state and country.

While many churches were struggling and in decline due to the pandemic, we saw online ministry as a tremendous gift that not only helped contribute to church growth but also helped us reimagine what church is and can be. This discovery corresponds with a Pew Research study that found that “32 percent of those worshiping in hybrid fashion were growing by at least five percent since 2019, whereas only six percent of those only in-person . . . had grown.”2 Moving our church into a hybrid reality has changed both the makeup and the trajectory of our community. There’s no turning back from it.

Challenges Ahead: Embracing Hybrid Church 

The need to shift to online ministry during the pandemic was in many ways a blessing in disguise. And rather than quickly “going back to normal” and returning to the same forms and structures of church that we had before the pandemic, our community has thoughtfully considered both the invitations and the questions that online ministry during the pandemic presented to us:

  • How do we continue to be a community that is accessible for all our members, inviting participation and co-creation? 
  • How do we continue to shape structures that serve us rather than the other way around? 
  • How do we continue to think of church as more than just a building that hosts church gatherings but a community asset?
  • How do we also balance digital and embodied presence as we try to actually build community in this new season of church life? 

With these questions in mind, we opened up in-person gatherings again in the spring of 2021, yet we tried to be intentional about the choices we made. While many churches jumped back quickly into weekly, in-person Sunday services, abandoning their online spaces entirely or opting for a livestream which led to a second class of people who simply “viewed” a service, we instead sought to embrace a truly hybrid church structure. By considering both the needs of our community and our unique capacity, we intentionally chose to meet twice a month in a fully hybrid form, with people having access to worship together in the building on Sundays, as well as people on Zoom who were still given access to full participation and engagement in our service rather than spectating. The other Sunday gatherings in the month remained fully on Zoom, for all the ways it continued to serve our community.

Beyond our Sunday gatherings, we also began to host more in-person gatherings for connection and formation, such as community hikes, game nights, parent meetups, seasonal celebrations, and more. We launched a number of monthly regional gatherings in people’s homes, allowing people to meet regularly by geographic region for in-person connection. Yet we also kept most of our midweek formation groups online, for greater accessibility and convenience, along with our monthly committee meetings, session meetings, and other regular gatherings. 

All of these intentional choices in pursuing a hybrid model of church have not been without challenges.

There are some clear limitations to both worship services and community gatherings that are exclusively online. As a study by COVID Religion Research found, the increased accessibility of online spaces sometimes also results in decreased levels of connection and engagement. For example, a 2022 study found that only 28 percent of people experiencing church online feel a strong connection with those attending in person. And the same study found that 61 percent of those watching a worship service on a screen do not do the things they would normally do when attending in person, such as praying out loud, singing, or kneeling.3 

Moreover, a continued challenge of our church community—particularly one with mostly people who have been at the church for two years or less—has been trying to foster relationships and build community when our in-person gatherings are not as frequent. Many of our in-person attendees have noted that missing a hybrid church service or even a monthly regional gathering means they don’t get to see other church members for an entire month. They continue to express a desire for deeper connection, friendship, and relationship, while struggling in their busy lives to find time and space for gathering. In the last year, there’s also been some attrition of our faraway people, as people who love our community have finally made the hard choice to try and find a church in which they can have some local and embodied relationships. The craving for in-person connection is often unsatisfied in a hybrid community, and important questions remain about both the theological and anthropological significance of embodiment in a digital age. 

However, as we hold these tensions and continue to move forward into uncharted territory, I am hopeful for the ways that online ministry will help guide our church and other churches into the continued reimagining of church. Just as the unexpected emergence of online ministry through the pandemic helped catalyze both new imagination and new structures for our community, I am hopeful that our ongoing transition to hybrid ministry will continue to stretch us to receive more new wineskins, expanding our vision of what’s possible for church. I am hopeful for movements toward greater accessibility and inclusion in all of our church structures. And I am hopeful for the church at large to continue to stay alive through innovation and adaptation rather than grasping on to conventions that are approaching their death. 

May we continue to keep our hearts soft and our spirits malleable to be stretched together in the act of reimagining church, for the story of God’s people is always unfolding, no matter what forms and structures it takes. 

Notes

  1. Michelle Faverio, Justin Nortey, Jeff Diamant and Gregory A. Smith, “Online Religious Services Appeal to Many Americans, but Going in Person Remains More Popular,” Pew Research Center, June 2, 2023, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2023/06/02/online-religious-services-appeal-to-many-americans-but-going-in-person-remains-more-popular/.
  2. Scott Thuma, “The Pandemic Church: Adapting to a Digital Culture and On Demand Context,” Covid Religion Research, August 21, 2024, https://www.covidreligionresearch.org/the-pandemic-church-adapting-to-a-digital-culture-and-on-demand-context/.
  3. https://www.covidreligionresearch.org/the-pandemic-church-adapting-to-a-digital-culture-and-on-demand-context/Faverio, et al, “Online Religious Services Appeal to Many Americans.”

 

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