Digital Discipleship: Can Churches Grow People Who May Never Attend In Person?

SPECIAL REPORT

If your church is like most, you’re asking how much effort to put into your online presence going forward. The pandemic pressed you to beef up your digital ministry, and even today you’ve still got people watching online, giving online and maybe participating in digital Bible reading or online small groups. Now you’re wondering what to do with that following.

Here’s the million-dollar question: What are the best practices for moving online attendees into greater discipleship, including in-person church engagement whenever possible?

Through my work with ECFA (Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability), I had the opportunity to sit down with almost 100 people who are finding answers to that question. I started with numerous interviews and small focus groups, followed by a survey of carefully selected churches. The participants—primarily drawn from recent Outreach 100 lists—represent churches at the forefront of innovation in emerging digital frontiers. My primary collaborator in this process was Nathan Artt, founder of Ministry Solutions Group.

Churches in our survey were a unique breed. For example, more than two-thirds agreed with this statement: “Our online attendance (however you define it) is currently growing faster than our in-person attendance.” And more than two-thirds agreed with this statement: “Our online attendance (however you define it) is larger than our in-person attendance.”

What is a group like this discovering? Here are five fascinating observations based on what survey takers said about turning online attendees into active and identified disciples and givers:

1. Online ministry can be spiritually fruitful for any church. It’s common in churches from small to large to send a team to invest a week in an overseas mission project. During my research, I heard about a church in New Jersey where the pastor’s sermon mentioned the church’s upcoming mission trip to Africa, noting there was still room for more people to sign up and raise their funding. Next thing they knew, a father and teenage son from Oregon, both followers of Jesus and members of an in-person house church, discovered the online sign-up forms, completed them, and affirmed that their house church had committed to raising the money needed for the trip.

Church leaders arranged an online video call to meet and interview the father and son, and agreed for them to participate in the trip. Their involvement proved to be fruitful for everyone involved.

Connections like that could happen with any church that has a camera and an active website. In our survey, more than 4 out of 5 churches agreed that “a church doesn’t need to be large in order to have a large online impact.” Further, almost 4 in 5 affirmed, “We’re working to increase our online engagement with people who have no prior connection to our church.” 

Granted, our survey group is far from representing every size and type of church, but it does highlight important trends that could help every church. Large churches often have the resources and scale to innovate, uncovering valuable insights. Fast-growing churches, akin to start-ups, are willing to experiment with fresh, unconventional digital approaches to evangelism, discipleship and ministry giving. Both perspectives are gifts that can inspire and guide churches of all sizes in their own journeys.

2. One of the hardest nuts to crack is connecting online participants into relationships. For in-person worship services, pastors have long struggled with how to help people sitting in the pews move into taking a next step of discipleship, such as joining a ministry or small group—building or deepening relationships in the process. As the saying goes, “People come to church for many reasons, but they stay only if they make a friend.” That same challenge exists with online audiences, but it’s intensified because you can’t see their anonymous faces or try to catch them at the door to get to know them.

This challenge is especially real for churches that have developed hundreds, thousands, and in some cases tens of thousands, of online followers—some of whom give financially to the church, even though they don’t (or sometimes can’t) attend in person. How are today’s most innovative churches discipling that group?

Nearly 100% of those surveyed agreed with the statement, “One of our goals for online is for it to serve as an on-ramp to in-person relationships and community wherever possible.”

Yet for too many churches, these high aspirations don’t match reality at this point. Just over half affirmed, “We struggle to help people develop relational connections through our online ministries.”

Anticipating that this would be an area of challenge, our survey listed check-all-that-apply boxes for 18 different options offered online. We asked respondents to indicate which actions their online videos or streams, at least once a month, invited viewers to take. These eight scored above 50%, but note that most of them are primarily individual:

• Submit prayer requests.

• Give financially.

• Become a Christian.

• Invite others to participate in the church.

• Talk directly with a pastor.

• Join an email list.

• Get baptized.

Options that more directly connect people into community, such as attending an after-service Zoom group or joining a small group, were rated much lower. Clearly much needs to happen to create a sense of belonging for those who attend church solely online—and perhaps even give to the church.

Further, churches in the survey don’t feel they have the staff and structures needed to help create these relational connections. Less than half agreed, “We have the right number of staff to handle the number of people who connect digitally with our church.” Likewise, less than half agreed, “We have the right staffing configuration (organization) for our church’s digital outreach and discipleship.” 

3. Churches aren’t clear about their discipleship pathway, especially online. One of the theories I wanted to test in the survey involved whether struggles with online are the same as with on-site, such as increasing engagement through a discipleship pathway. For defining engagement in the survey, I used the characteristics listed by Eric Swanson and Matt Engel in the appendix of their book Fourteen Fridays: People who lead small groups or initiatives, give financially, serve internally or externally, invite others into the life of the church, disciple others in following Jesus, and advocate for the church. “We call these congregants ‘engaged’ because they are engaged in multiplying the mission of the church,” they write.

In short, we found that our survey takers don’t feel they have a clear and effective discipleship pathway for their in-person attenders, and even less so for their online followers. They did feel, however, that they’re somewhat effective at bringing people to Jesus online. Two-thirds agreed with the statement: “Our church’s digital platforms are stronger in opening the ‘front door’ of initial connections to Jesus than in our support of ongoing spiritual formation.” And 3 in 4 affirmed, “We know of specific people who say they have become Christians through our church’s online strategies.”

Yet they gave a lower rating to what happens next. Fewer than 1 in 4 agreed that “Our church is trying to create better pathways of digital discipleship.” And only 1 in 5 agreed that “We put similar staff energies into discipling our online audience, beyond their tuning in to watch, as we do our in-person audience.”

4. Churches want their online attenders to connect with in-person church whenever possible. As an incentive to participate in the survey, we offered an invitational webinar where Nathan Artt interviewed Frank Blake, who led Home Depot’s digital transformation, driving it to become the nation’s fourth-largest retailer. Blake, a Christian, explained how their expanded online presence had resulted in huge increases of in-store traffic, and speculated how those same principles might work for churches.

“We asked, ‘What is the most effective way of communicating with customers?’” he said. “We decided the customers will tell us how.”

They did. Internet and app searches showed Home Depot what their customers wanted. Then, where appropriate, the stores made those products and services available. This caused more people to come to the stores. “We learned that by not having the right store inventories, we’ve been upsetting customers that we didn’t previously realize,” he said.

His conclusion for the retail world? “Having an effective online presence enhances the physical space and allows you to do things you otherwise would not be able to do.”

His challenge to churches was to do more than replicate online what they do in their buildings. If people’s lives today weave back and forth between digital and in-person, then couldn’t their spiritual lives do likewise, with in-person church as an essential part of that rhythm?

Indeed, in our survey more than 3 in 4 agreed that “Part of our church’s online strategy is to get people to physically show up at a local church.” By contrast, less than 1 in 10 said, “As we’ve provided more digital options, it’s resulted in less consistent in-person attendance.”

Translation: An online emphasis does not cannibalize in-person attendance, according to our surveyed churches. Rather, digital outreach can fuel local church engagement. Online church can become an on-ramp to in-person discipleship.

Further, it seems like the new front door for the church is exposure online before an in-person visit—at least that’s what half the survey takers say.

Yet there’s also a both-and desire for reaching people locally as well as everywhere else. Of survey takers, 4 in 5 agree: “We’re working to increase our online engagement with people who have no prior connection to our church.” Is that local or everywhere? The answer seems to be both: Roughly 6 in 10 say, “Our church’s primary target online is people within our geographic community.” But almost 9 in 10 say, “Our church wants to create enough discipleship connections so that people can fully engage with our church no matter where they live.”

5. Churches project a big rise in online giving, beyond those who attend in person. Deante Lavender pastors a church in Akron, Ohio. For people who attend locally, it’s known as Remedy Church. For those who attend online, it’s called Remedy Nation.

One day a staff member came running up to Lavender: “Pastor, this couple just sent us a big check—but they live in California and have never attended our church.” Reaching out to the couple, the pastor learned that they were trying to find a local church home, but until that happened, they considered Remedy Nation their spiritual home. They had learned about the church from a relative who attends in person.

Almost all churches have set up online giving for their in-person attendees, and each passing month and year sees an increased percentage of a church’s budget funded by online giving. Many in-person worship service prayers include statements like, “Lord, thank you for the many people who gave online, even before they came to church this morning.”

However, churches are also discovering that a certain percentage of their giving comes from people who never attend in person. In our survey, almost 9 in 10 said, “We regularly invite online attendees to financially support the church.” In fact, almost 9 in 10 predict that three years from now “the percentage of our church’s total giving from our ‘online campus’ will be higher.” Just over half agreed that “Our ‘online campus’ could eventually sustain itself financially (i.e., cover costs for staff, online marketing, technology and equipment.)”

One church in our survey commented that half of their first-time gifts come from people who have watched but not attended in person. Nathan Artt offers this explanation: “These shifts are creating a new model for giving. In the old model, people attended in-person as the first step of their discipleship. Then they added other discipleship steps such as financial giving. Thus, in-person attendance was the lead measure relative to giving as a lag measure. However, in the new model, discipleship is first taking place digitally, and likewise giving is happening online. These may or may not lead to in-person attendance, increasingly positioning in-person attendance as a lag measure. The challenge is thus to create digital discipleship that leads people to want to be part of the in-person weekend service.” 

A New Frontier

As we developed the survey, I listened carefully for why people were afraid to emphasize their digital presence. Four issues surfaced:

• Fear that physical attendance will decline

• Fear that fewer personal connections will result

• Fear that family ministry will suffer, since there’s such a direct correlation between in-person attendance and ministry to children and teens

• Fear that churches won’t be able to measure spiritual “success”

The reality is that people are living more and more of their spiritual lives online, from using a Bible app for daily Scripture reading to financial giving online to listening to faith-building podcasts. The same is happening with church attendance on a huge scale. As just one public example, McLean Bible Church in Vienna, Virginia, “draws 5,500 in person and around 30,000 online each week,” according to a 2023 Christianity Today article.

In response, churches are pressing forward in trying to create online equivalents of what they’re so good at in person (e.g., hugs, face-to-face fellowship, baptism, Holy Communion, etc.). This transition also has huge implications for the roles and priorities of church staff.

“It’s the Wild West out there,” says Brian Tome, founding pastor of Cincinnati’s Crossroads Church, which has experimented for years in developing a “Crossroads Anywhere” approach. “No one has wasted more money than we have. But just like Amazon doesn’t limit its office hours for people to access its resources, we’re trying to deliver a transformative digital community where the model of Acts 2:42–47—gathering in the temple courts—can happen anywhere and anytime. For us, digital is more of an organizational strategy than a product.”

Less Broadcast, More Engagement

My biggest take on our findings is that churches are only at the beginning stage of the outreach, evangelism, discipleship and even generosity development that’s possible with digital technologies. There’s no consensus on terminology to use, models to follow, or leaders to dialog with. But even so, this desire and trend is clear: Simply broadcasting the in-person worship service isn’t enough to move people into the relationships and community that’s essential for discipleship.

In short, the future will see less broadcast and more engagement as churches use digital strategies less as a billboard and more as a discipleship tool. We’ll see less spectating and more participating. We’ll see less focus on counting clicks and more focus on measuring engagement. We’ll see more creativity in approach and more variety of platforms used. We might even see a discipling of people’s generosity online such that a church’s digital initiatives become self-sustaining, enabling more churches to take the gospel literally anywhere. They can reach people across the street both with a knock on the door and through their smartphone or computer, and they can also reach the entire world as their online parish.

The gospel will always be relevant, but our facilities, staffing structures, systems, processes and word choices continually run the risk of irrelevance. As church consultant Jim Tomberlin, one of the advisors for this research, observed, “Churches today, as never before, must be willing to take risks to meet people where they are. Churches in this survey seem unafraid to think outside the box to reach more people, becoming innovation centers for both evangelism and discipleship. They haven’t arrived or solved their digital strategy yet, but they are not giving up on it either.”

Read more from Warren Bird »

To download a report with these and other findings, see ECFA.org/surveys. The survey was sponsored by ECFA (Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability) in collaboration with Nathan Artt, founder of Ministry Solutions Group, Matt Engel, who leads the largest ministry innovation network in the U.S. at Gloo, and others. It was conducted by email in June and July 2024, mostly targeting the Outreach 100 lists from 2016 to present, and involved 60 true-false statements and 18 multiple-choice questions.