How Do You Build a Digital Strategy for Your Church?

Short answer: Start with the objective, not the tool. Ask what you are trying to accomplish, whether it aligns with your church's objectives, and whether digital can enhance it. Then know your three audiences, pick an approach, integrate digital at every level of the organization rather than just the stream, add friction on purpose, and measure the back door instead of the views.

Most churches skipped this step. Facebook Live became free in 2016, so most churches started streaming with very little critical thinking about the broader strategy. When I surveyed churches for The State of Online Church, 77 percent were using Facebook for online ministry. Then the numbers fell off a cliff: 58 percent offered pastoral care, 52 percent online groups, 28 percent baptism, 25 percent membership classes, 10 percent benevolence, 4 percent counseling. Do you see the gap? Online church, for most churches, is a broadcast with nothing behind it. Strategy is how you close that gap.

Where do you start?

Three questions, in this order. What are we trying to accomplish? Does it align with our church's objectives? Can digital enhance that objective? If the answer to the third is no, do not do the digital thing, no matter how cool it looks or how many other churches are doing it. It is never about being relevant. It is about being effective.

Digital should be used the way you use digital in a marriage. It enhances some things and transforms a few, and it never replaces the relationship. Get your leadership to have the honest conversation about what you are open to doing digitally and what should always happen in person. And invite God into it. Saddleback's leadership was prayerful about how to handle church online, and your church's should be too.

Who are you building for?

Three audiences, and they need different things.

The new local person, within about thirty miles. The objective is connecting digital to physical: they discover you online and you move them into the room. Your website, your stream, and your outro are all built for this person.

The local member. They attend already and want digital to serve their week: the podcast while traveling, the group thread, the app if you have one, the class on Zoom when the schedule does not work. Do not starve this person out of fear that digital will keep them home. It will not.

The far-away person, outside thirty miles, sometimes overseas. You are their church. They need the fuller online experience: groups, classes, membership, and eventually a pathway to start a home group or connect with a network church where they live.

Which approach fits your church?

Every church lands in one of four approaches, and the honest move is to pick one on purpose rather than drift into one by accident.

• Amish. Minimal digital by conviction. Bridgetown Church cancelling their stream is the clearest example: a mission-driven choice to embrace ancient rhythms and keep digital small. Legitimate, if it is chosen.
• Broadcast. Stream the service and stop. This is where most churches are, usually by default. It reaches people and disciples almost none of them.
• Front Door. Digital exists to move local people into the room. Everything online points to Sunday, groups, and next steps in person. This is the right default for most churches.
• Alpha Omega. Digital is integrated into every area of ministry, beginning to end, with a full pathway for far-away people too. This is what Saddleback does, and it requires a team.

The exercise that reveals your approach: draw your church's model for making disciples, from "come and see" to "come and die," on a whiteboard. Then decide what has to happen in the room and what digital can do better. Your answers place you.

What does a complete digital strategy include?

The Four S's. Streaming is your reach. Social is your conversation. Systems are how you know people: your website, giving, texting, and people system. Strengthening is how you grow them: groups, classes, volunteer teams, and discipleship online. Most churches do the first S, maybe half of the third, and call it online church. Do all four and it starts to feel like biblical church, because you have a way to reach people, talk with them, know them, and grow them.

How do you get the whole church thinking digitally?

Use the Alpha Omega Tool with your staff and volunteer teams. Draw an x-axis with your six key areas of ministry and a y-axis from 1 to 100 percent healthy digital integration. Healthy integration does not mean everything is online; you can be at 100 percent with very little digital happening, as long as digital was considered and correctly integrated. Now, without lifting your pen, trace a line from A to O and honestly rate each area. Does it look like an EKG? Do you flatline? Whichever area is lowest is where you start. Then ask every team to commit to one digital integration over the next six to twelve months and track it. The goal is to get past the weekend stream and social posts and into the deeper parts of the organization.

Where should you add friction on purpose?

Friction is a good thing when it serves your mission. The internet removed almost all of it, which is why churches drifted into streaming everything for free to everyone. Some friction needs to come back, deliberately.

Draw your assimilation and discipleship strategy on a whiteboard. Take a red marker and draw the line where friction should be for the sake of your larger objectives. Maybe the special Bibles are only for people in the room. Maybe membership requires a live class. Maybe your best content sits behind a real commitment. Figure out your red line for when a commitment is required, or you will keep giving everything away forever.

Just be honest about the motive. Adding friction because it serves your objectives is strategy. Adding friction because you are afraid a stream will empty your building is fear, and fear will empty it faster than any livestream.

What should you measure?

Not the crowd. The core. A thousand viewers and a hundred loyal members are not the same thing, and only one of them is a church. Track weekly views, retention, and trends as a leading indicator, then measure what matters: how many people took a class, joined a group, filled out a response card, gave, served, or showed up in person. At Saddleback about forty people a month move from watching into a class, out of roughly fifty thousand weekly viewers. That forty is the number I report.

Start by growing your core, not your crowd. One monthly "How to Connect with Our Church Online" Zoom with three people each time is thirty-six a year and 180 in five years, and those 180 will double your online audience organically by sharing their faith.

What will your online strategy actually produce?

An amplified version of your church. Your online ministry will either amplify a well-executed strategy or highlight widespread problems. It will not magically fix anything. If your church is good at small groups, your online groups will work. If your church is great at response cards, your digital submissions will be high. If your online ministry does not grow, the issue is almost always evangelistic outreach in the church itself. Focus on getting the local church healthier and the online ministry will follow.

Where do I go deeper?

• Alpha Omega Digital Tool to Help Your Church
• Amish, Broadcast, Front Door, or Alpha Omega? (video)
• The Gap with Online Church
• Visualizing Turning an Online Watcher into In-Person Attendance
• 2X Your Church's Online Audience
• Church Online Amplifies What You're Already Doing
• A Guide to Digital Goal Setting and Online Ministry Planning Guide (the team workbook)
• Take the Online Ministry Assessment