A Theology of Digital Ministry with Jim Keat | Episode 200

🎧Looking at the theological foundations of digital ministry.

It’s the 200th episode of Church and Main! In this milestone episode, I sat down with Jim Keat, digital minister at the Riverside Church in New York City, about the theological foundations of digital ministry. We explore how technology enables authentic connections and engagement within congregations, especially during the shifts driven by the COVID-19 pandemic.

With all this concern about social media and technology is there still a place for digital ministry? My next two guests say yes. An upcoming interview is with Jim Keat of Riverside Church in New York City and in this interview, I’m talking with Ryan Dunn, a minister for online engagement with the United Methodist Church.  Ryan is an ordained Methodist minister and was the host of Pastoring in the Digital Parish podcast which recently ended its run and is the host of a brand new podcast called MyCom.  We will be talking about digital ministry in the aftermath of COVID. You can listen to a clip of the interview by clicking on the audio link above where Ryan talks about digital ministry in small churches.

Jim highlights the importance of a theology rooted in love, grace, and justice, advocating for a reconceptualization of the church as a portable community. Our discussion challenges traditional views and emphasizes the role of digital ministers in fostering meaningful relationships and navigating the complexities of online ministry.

In the interview, we talked about how the difference between in-person and online worship is a myth:

The final episode of MASH was a shared experience but it wasn't and necessarily an “embodied experience” is that kind of what you're kind of getting at when and and how do you deal with that that kind of criticism that you know of the importance of embodied versus virtual but a different kind of shared mutuality, Yeah, well, I would say it's still embodied. I still have a body on my side of the screen. So the thing I'm watching might be, you know, pixels and ones and zeros and my whatever I'm watching it on, but I still get to encounter it as a person. You know, I firmly believe that there's no such thing as in-person versus online dichotomy because we're all persons. If I'm watching online, I'm still in person. I'm just in a different location.

To say in-person versus online seems seem to disvalidate the personhood of the person who's not in the room. We all have an embodied experience. It might not be as controlled to be the same embodied experience. And I think that's a thing you just have to have in mind when you're creating it. So when we do communion, we invite people to bring whatever they have in their home. And then we have people hold it up on screen or put it in the chat. What is the potluck buffet table of communion we're sharing today.

You can check this episode out on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube or the Church and Main website.

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