Home Outreach Leaders Articles for Outreach & Missions Online Church Events Are Here to Stay — 3 Keys to Success

Online Church Events Are Here to Stay — 3 Keys to Success

2. Evolving Tech Platforms for Church Uses

50.3% of the businesses surveyed said that Zoom was their primary tool for running an online event. Likewise, many churches across the country have used Zoom as a tool for small groups or training, or maybe even for the weekend service itself. However, a fascinating aspect of this study is that beyond Zoom, there is an incredibly diverse array of software technology platforms used for online events.

Each one of these platforms, whether it be YouTube, Microsoft Teams, Facebook Live, Instagram Live, GoToWebinar, On24, or WebEx (and the list goes on), represents opportunities for your church to reach new audiences and to engage people in fresh ways.

One of our new realities, as we continue to deal with the online space, will be the need to consistently explore the latest platforms as they evolve so that we can expand our message to further locations. Like a tech startup, we should be consistently looking to the horizon, capturing those emerging platforms that might present opportunities for us to reach new people.

I have been particularly impressed with the work at Sandals Church, where they have taken an omni-channel approach to church online. They use a multiplicity of online platforms for posting their church experiences, and either build channel-specific content or customize the content to resonate with each platform. Whether it is Roku, Facebook, YouTube, or a panacea of other solutions, Sandals is finding a way to connect on multiple platforms.

The future of our church online experiences will not be locked into a single environment but will reflect an omni-channel future. Sandals is already pointing the way towards this future.

3. Online Is Here to Stay

One of the strongest findings to come from this study of 100 companies is that 85.3% of the company leaders surveyed believe that online events are here to stay. [ref]

Rather than being a blip that arose during the pandemic and that will later be dropped, these marketers, communicators, and leaders believe that online events will remain and become a part of their future.

This is astonishing when you consider that a year ago, half of these leaders were not running online church events at all. This reflects the experience of many churches across the country. However, I still run into church leaders who are thinking about dropping their church online experiences as fast as they possibly can. Please don’t do that.

The future of your church and mine is a hybrid model where some people will engage with us only online and have a full-orbed experience that will help them step closer to Jesus, while others will also continue to attend our in-person experiences, much as they did prior to the pandemic.

How can we take the best of one to improve the other?

What can we do to make our in-person experiences leverage some of the great benefits of our online experiences? What have we learned from our community about our online church events that can make our in-person experiences even better? And vice versa, how do we continue to push towards an online experience that incorporates some of that human touch that comes more easily and naturally from an in-person experience?

Online experiences are here to stay, and we must continue to find ways to leverage them as we look to the future.

 

This article appeared here.