Navigating Digital Ministry with Ryan Dunn | Episode 199

🎧 What does digital ministry look like beyond live streaming Sunday worship?

I’ve worked as a communication specialist in religious contexts for almost 20 years and love doing it. When I’m not in the pulpit at the congregation where I serve, I work as a communications manager at a Lutheran church north of Minneapolis. So I am interested in digital ministry.

But people are more skeptical of anything digital these days, blaming social media and smartphones for higher depression rates among teens to election interference. Fifteen years ago, it seemed cool to be on social media. But now we aren’t so sure.

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.

During the interview, we talked about how to best use Facebook. Some churches tend to use it as a billboard, but there Ryan shares other ways it can be used:

So in the early days of Facebook, you didn't sign into your Facebook profile. You signed into your Facebook wall, and I think that was a really well-chosen point of verbiage, because it makes us think about the kinds of things that we have within our home. As I walk into your home and I look at your walls, I'm probably going to start to get a sense for the kinds of things that are important to you. So, walking into my home, you might see pictures of family, so that suggests a value. You're going to see some pictures of events that my spouse and I have attended in the past, and so here we are. A lot of them are concert posters, so you get a sense of some of the things that we like to do together and some of the things that I'm interested in.

Walking through anybody's house, you can get the same feel, and so when we are thinking about our social media spaces, it might make sense to think about them as places where we can hang things for people to get a sense of who we are as a community, the kinds of things that we like to do together and that can be events in some cases, but also the kinds of things that we value, the things that are important to our community, and so in some cases that means just showcasing our people in action. I like to think of a real simple invitation to discipleship as being putting people alongside disciples and inviting them to do what disciples do, so we can showcase our people doing that which they do in community, and oftentimes that means just snapping some pictures of the event that we already had.

It also means mentioning some of the things that are important to us as a community, and I find that the churches that are really engaging people well online and, by extension of that, churches that are growing in this age are able to articulate very well what their key values are. And that comes as kind of a wake-up call to those of us who sit in kind of the mainstream or middle spaces or the purple spaces, even because we do speak to people who have a range of beliefs or theologies or even political thoughts, beliefs or theologies or even political thoughts. However, those who are able to really communicate well in the digital spaces are those who are articulating their beliefs about certain topics or even offering a grace-filled response to some topics, and that just offers then people an opportunity to get a sense of who this community is. It establishes a sense of comfort before they enter into that, and I find more and more that's what people are looking for as they look towards faith institutions. They want to encounter a sense of comfort and be invited within to that space.

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