Your church’s leadership wants to know people watching online will be cared for correctly. Those seat warmers on big boards monitoring all the vitals of the bride do care about everyone attending locally and possibly tuning in online. The barrier of embracing an online ministry usually comes down to trusting you, the online pastor or potential online pastor.

Your online church will either amplify an existing well-executed strategy or highlight widespread issues. It won’t magically fix your church’s problems. If your church knows how to attract younger people than your online ministry will attract younger people. If your church is good at small groups than your online small group strategy will work. If your church is great at getting people to fill out response cards than your weekly digital respond card submissions will be high. If your online ministry doesn’t grow most likely your church is lacking in evangelistic outreach.

I wrote thirty-eight posts about online ministry in 2018. I write what I’m passionate about or ideas kicking around in my head that I need to flush out. I plan to continue to write better quality posts that I pray is helpful to you the reader or at the least, a way for my future adult kids, or grandkids, to understand who I was like in any given year.

All I can think about is the fallacy of equivocation when someone says an online church isn’t church. A great example of this argument is in a recent NY Times opinion piece where the headline was "Internet Church Isn’t Really Church.”

Mental health for me often feels like a rabbit hole of a topic. How mental health is medically classified confuses me, how people get diagnosed is not clear, and treatment can be messy. I believe online ministries can offer hope not only through Jesus, but through relational restoration by inviting them to join the community of a church’s online experience.

Getting started as an online pastor can be overwhelming. What is my first step? Do I switch to entirely Facebook streaming? How do you become a tech expert overnight? So many questions. I would suggest first reading over my Start Here page and digest what other churches do on my Funnel page. After getting caught up check out this podcast from the Social Media Church podcast on “Started as an Online Campus Pastor with Aaron Magnuson.”